bitten by the frost - Raayide (2024)

For the first time in thirty years, Astarion watches the sun rise.

It's not his choice. He just can't move with a slit throat.

The gold creeps over rooftops first, casting a halo around cold bricks and littered stone. It's been hours since he set out, hours watching the black turn to purple to grey to blue, feeling a rat's blood try to weave together regeneration in a body that has never been allowed it, and the sun is rising.

Astarion twitches his fingers. The blade is embedded in his spine, sunk into the bone to pour fire in the gap left behind; the pitiful nobody he'd been trying to entrap home sprinted away the second no blood sprayed free from the wound. f*cking fitting. A murderer that panics at any failure.

But a murderer that slits his throat and leaves him here, croaking around a body that cannot die from mortal means, and the sun is rising.

There's birds, chirping in the distance; rook doves and carrier pigeons. They cluster in the air alongside the rumble of opening shutters and clatter of horses on cobbled streets; sweet songs of morning and dawn and waking up to greet the world. Baldur's Gate, the city undying, alive.

He gets to see it.

Thirty years—gravedirt under his nails—cedar splinters—red eyes—and the sun is rising.

Astarion exhales something garbled and flecked with bone. Air rattles in his chest like crows. Excitement and terror weave together.

The sunlight lances through the first gap in the tiled roof; it strikes his elbow, a perfect arrow notch erupting into ash. Astarion groans, shuddering—thirty years past and death comes to him again, more than flayed rolls of skin to sleep on and bones he must pull from his own hand and arrange in order of length; the gold sinks into his arm and chars past the bone, agony like a hurricane between his teeth–

"Boy!"

Astarion flinches.

In the shadow of the flophouse, amidst the grime, tucked in like all the times Astarion has knelt in alleys to cajole bastards into wanting him, appears Cazador. Far from Szarr Palace. Tall and cold and iron and dead and angry.

His master extends a hand, still within the darkness. Red eyes burn. "Come to me."

The thrall hooks deep around his ribcage—his limbs shake and twitch as instincts claw him forward, try to slither over the ground to reach his master, but–

Astarion can't. It's not a question of will but merely physical ability; his spine is cracked and shattered. His eyelids flutter, fingers spasming against the ground—the sunlight crawls higher until his hand tumbles to the dirt and dissolves. Bone-dust, ash.

He is not allowed to rebel. He must do as Cazador wants.

Except now.

Cazador bellows another command over the wreck, over the harpy's call of sunlight, ripping his flesh into puffs of grey and grime. His arm sloughs off at the shoulder, fire catching on his collarbones—down to the unbeaten heart and cavity a person once filled—the thrall, roaring–

He can't move. He can't obey. He can't go to Cazador.

There, Astarion thinks, and smiles. You can't have me.

And then, quietly, without much fuss, head tilted back, eyes glowing gold, Astarion bursts into flame.

-

Astarion wakes to the stench of smoke.

Agony finds a home in him, curls up in his ribs and makes itself comfortable. It opens the door to let misery in alongside, phantom fire broiling over skin and head and arms and– arms. Multiple.

He remembers losing one; remembers sunlight scouring it off to dissolve.

Something happened. He's dead but he died again and he didn't obey and now he's here, unmoving, and something has changed. He needs to know what. Cazador will not give him a chance unless he discovers what to apologize for—but it doesn't matter, he burnt under the sun, why is he not dead, Cazador cannot save him from a vampire spawn's weakness, why he is here, why is he alive–

Astarion sinks his nails into the pain, pulls it apart like tangled guts in a divination ritual. There are ghosts in his bones, gorging themselves around his joints and behind his eyes. Twin throbs around his feet; cut ankles, so he can't run. Lines of fire, deep and scorched through, over his back. A perfect circle, sprawling up the caps of his shoulders and wrapping around ribs, stale air whispering over bare skin. Encircling the poem, not written over the delicacy he's borne without knowing the words. A second verse? Why add to it? Why is he alive?

Pain is what he knows. But pain is countered by apathy, by hollow dissolvement, and he will not be consumed.

Astarion grits his teeth. Can he twitch his fingers? He can. It's not that bad. His eyes open, slowly, like mud in a deep river valley. There's the long break that a heartbeat would fill before he's able to see what's before him, grey, smeared in soot and viscera.

He inhales, exhales. Stone. Cut ankles. Rancid air. The kennel.

Something happened. If no one is here, then maybe he can get up, can try to figure out the mystery before he's told to gut himself on it. Everything hurts but he bites on strength, lurching up to press his hands into the ground–

"Stay."

The command burns through him, Astarion whimpering off into dead silence as the other presence reveals itself—jagged fingernails digging into his shoulders, between valleys of diligent poetry, slick with gore.

"You pathetic scheming worm," Cazador hisses.

He's back. He's back and he's alive and he's here and Cazador is angry. He's done something wrong. He's upset his master.

"Will you not face me?" Cazador snarls. "Will you not look upon the one who has saved you?"

The compulsion strains and wars within him—stay still, look, please, obey, do not move, please, command, please, please– "Master," Astarion sobs into the stone, rigor mortis and desperate to break it. "Please, I'm trying–"

Claws puncture his flesh. "Now you try," comes the response, sibilant as carrion. "How curious, for you to choose when and where."

He couldn't; his spine was shattered, nothing to move, throat slit, the sun, dying. "Please," he croaks.

A scoff. Derisive scorn.

"Face me."

The command to stay breaks and Astarion staggers upright, palms splaying over the stone as he wrenches himself around, splashing into viscera and curls of flesh. Dressed only in soot, like he's still burning, like the sun is still teething into his skin and making ash from death. Astarion fumbles to turn, every new line in his back lighting up with raw nerves and inflammation. In the kennel, the world is grey darkvision and reflected bars, steel, silver. His master, standing over him, hunched and robes pulled up to his elbows, burnt fabric.

Cazador stops.

Astarion stares at him, shuddering, sensation crawling back with a lemure's grace. Time is inconsequential and nothing. What happened, please, why am I here, why am I alive, why did I not die again–

"Stay," Cazador says again, and the command scours through him before he can bawl desperate apologies—Astarion's wail dies between frozen teeth as he goes doll-still and poised, sitting, poetry wrought.

His master crouches, a shadow in the dark, and grabs his chin—tilts it up, staring at him. Red eyes lit with an inner fire, with cold contempt, but there's almost– almost wariness there, seeing something he's unsure of.

"He changed you," Cazador says, quiet, to himself. Then again, vicious– "He changed you."

Astarion cannot move, cannot think through muddied thoughts; the phrase sinks into marrow. He. Someone else.

"A reminder," Cazador murmurs, reaching out to press a finger, feather-soft, into his eyes—Astarion trembles, though Cazador doesn't dig his nail into the eye proper. He rolls it around like a marble.

Death has numbed him, made him ice and unfeeling, but– there's a warmth in his eyes. Something like liquid fire, caged and stoked.

Cazador pulls back. On the tip of his finger, soot.

Fury sparks in a face that has never held life.

"You are not his," Cazador hisses, and leans in; fills Astarion's gaze like the breadth of the moon, pale and indomitable.

"You are mine."

-

When Astarion has wept through the last of his confusion and just shivers beneath it instead, Aurelia finds him.

The door to the kennel creaks, illusion drifting down in motes of grey, as she slips inside. The only light is the crimson glow from her eyes, half-burned embers, and the terror that is not allowed to exist when they are sent to the kennel. What relief she must feel, to see him bloody and broken instead of her.

She crouches. He doesn't react, sitting perfectly rigid, command sunk into his bones.

"Brother," she whispers, timidity and subservience tucked under a tiefling's garb, hidden away like the beast she must not become. "Brother, you are summoned. You must go."

Astarion garbles around something; words, perhaps, if onlookers were in a pitiable mood. There's a ring of perfect agony throbbing against the malodorous air, weeping pus and gore. But summons are commands and disobedience is death–

Twice has he died. What does that mean?

He's been summoned. The compulsion to stay still snaps and fractures as it's replaced, thrall gorging itself on rising fear, rabid dog. Astarion lurches back to motion, muscles splintering. No blood but scraps of flesh flutter off his shoulders, marbled through and ragged. Pounds of it. His gaze shudders up to meet hers.

Aurelia goes very still. Her tail, normally so composed, unwinds from around her ankles to lash at the ground. Clawed fingers dig into the front of her dress.

"Your eyes," she murmurs.

Alien warmth. Soot.

Cazador's fingers, pressed to open nerves, rolling his eyes around in his skull like toys.

He changed you.

"Sister," Astarion chokes out, through a throat unwilling and a command of stillness lurking in his bones. "Sister, what do you mean?"

She rises back to her feet, pale, hands knotting into cat's cradles. "You are summoned," she repeats, always so f*cking scared. Takes a step back, away from him, away from the kennel and all it stands for.

He changed you.

A reminder.

"Sister." Astarion struggles upright, always to obey, always to listen, always to claw himself over the ground with ruptured tendons and beg for mercy—looks at her, watches her shrink away from his gaze, the faint glow lighting up her face. "Aurelia. Please."

Damned by the same master. They learn to die the same deaths.

"Your eyes are blue," she whispers, like the admittance will kill her. "Hellfire."

-

A year passes in microcosm.

There are no mirrors, not for vampire spawn. Aurelia shuts up like the craven she is, like the one he would hate her for if he wasn't one himself, if she was anything but small and scared and terrified and him. She tells him nothing, and Astarion is never brave enough to ask.

But he figures it out, slowly.

His eyes are no longer red, no longer glowing under Cazador's influence. Instead they're black, poured through like pitch and tar, swallowing what had once been white—beyond two spokes of pale blue hellfire in the center, twin wicks of infernal flame.

A tiefling's eyes. A devil's eyes.

What did Cazador do, to bring him back to undeath? What happened?

Why is he not gone?

Cazador hates him with a fury now. Astarion is his favourite and his slave and his loathed and his everything. Aurelia hardly gets a second look and there is no mention of any further spawn; just Astarion, just his blue-black eyes.

They mark him as something unknown. His gaze pins people in taverns, lights them in pale glow, exotic as his delicate features and white hair. No longer does he have to lie about a drow's ancestry; now he spins delicate stories of a wretched evil father who made a deal with a devil, and the poor son who paid his price. Won't you offer comfort to such a woebegotten soul? Won't you follow me home?

It works, and it works, and it works, and Astarion learns to lock eyes or look away as he crawls on his back again and again and again. Some want to see him; some want to ignore the infernal bite. The wrongness of a tiefling's eyes in an elf's body.

More bodies to gather. If he returns too late, even well before dawn, he splays himself prettily as Cazador skins all but the poem from his flesh. A history of tailoring, of repairing his clothes in the quiet of his bed, means he gets the honour of stitching a collar of his own alabaster skin to wear.

It took a week to disintegrate. His neck chafes under the memory.

So now he leaves right as the sun sets, working as fast as possible. He slips into the tavern with his shirt tugged laviciously low, lips pressed to his teeth, arms curled in.

The room is full of souls; the baudy raucous of blinded inebriation and the confidence that comes with it. Bartenders, lapsed in passion, mugs sloshing over sides and splattering new lacquer on the floor. A picturesque haven for rot. He knows these people, these types, though their faces blur together in apathy; all those he attracts.

And, in the far back, tucked at a table none dare steal with the longsword she's set on the wood, sits a woman. Half-elven, tall, with umber skin and flashing cat eyes; even in the din he can hear the thump of a steady heart, the blood-scent of pine forests and oiled traps. Certainty seeps through her skin in a palpable aura.

She's a hunter.

A hunter.

Not the first he's seen. Astarion lurks in the Lower City, far from nobility, from those that will be remembered—hunters migrate to cheap ale and rooms with more bedbugs than comforts. Dozens has he slipped past, avoiding their watchful gazes as he searches for layered stupidity and rakish glut.

But today, he stands in the tavern with the memory of familiar skin against his throat and dusk tracing purple shapes in the wood, and he wonders.

He's died before—died twice, in blood and in fire.

Most mortal things die only once, and they don't remain walking afterward. Cazador carved new scars into his back and called his eyes a reminder; said he didn't belong to anyone else.

In the impossible isolation that only calls crowded taverns home, Astarion reaches up like Cazador of a year past and presses his finger to his eye, to the hollow throb from touching sensitive tissue. He rolls it around in its socket, alien warmth beneath numb skin.

Cazador called it a reminder. Said he changed you.

Like there's someone else in this equation, someone more powerful than Cazador; whoever brought him back to life and left a mark in their wake to tell Cazador that he is not the tyrant here.

Astarion doesn't know who they are.

But he likes the idea of them very much.

And now there's a hunter before him, one steeped in apathy of a world she perceives as normal and unthreatening, but with bounties under her belt and a legacy of murder to maintain. Vampires are wretchedly dangerous beasts, feral things clawing for blood; he knows if he flashes his fangs at her, all he'll earn is something between his ribs. For thirty years has he feared that, death like a cage around him. The one holdover from his last life—not his family, his occupation, his existence. Just the desperate mortality. Just the fear.

Cazador doesn't want him to die.

Cazador hasn't commanded it.

Astarion walks over to her, a saunter in his steps, eyes half-lidded and shirt pulled low. He has no mirror but he's run fingers over his neck before, felt the two pockmarks on the side of his jugular, the damning scars never allowed to heal. Recognizable.

Another set of scars, too. Faint rippling lines around the corners of his face, hidden by his hair, like lines left in the sand after a wave. He only heals back to the state he was upon dying; the sun leaves its mark over his head from his newest death. How kind, for those to be tucked away beneath snowy curls. Shying away from the world.

But she's a hunter. The only reason she'd follow him is if she thinks she has something to hunt.

"Why, hello," he purrs, sliding into the seat across from her in the height of assumption, elbows braced on the table and embroidered shirt pulled loose so it hangs off his collarbones. His neck, bared. "I can't say I've ever seen your face around here."

She stares at him—her hand, braced on her longsword, shoulders tense—and raises a brow, near impressed with his audacity. "I don't make a habit of being seen," she says, around a gruff tongue and faint accent. There's a lingering surprise when she sees his eyes, blue-black so stark against pale skin, but she doesn't say anything. Baldur's Gate is often a collector of waylaid misfits and freaks.

"And what a shame is that," he agrees blithely, spreading his fingers. "A diamond in a coal mine, love. Canaries would flock for miserable deaths just to see your face."

Her gaze flicks around the room. "If you're looking for pretty responses, you won't find them here."

"I have plenty for the both of us," he says. "No one else has caught my eye like you."

"Hm." She looks dreadfully bored. "Maybe you need to look harder."

He leans in like a confidant. Shifts so his neck is all the more visible; so twin scars can peek through. "Oh, I wouldn't say so. Those hidden are those lit by the hottest fires."

"Fire," she says blandly. "Of forges or loins?"

Astarion's laughter drifts through the tavern, high and light and practiced. He smiles like she's the funniest thing he's ever encountered, like he's quite taken with her tactiturn nature.

It's nice, in a way, to play his hand so openly. There's no subtlety here. He's trying to get her to come with him, without any care or precision at all.

And he's succeeding, if the way her gaze lands on his neck means anything.

She stiffens.

"Of delight and passion," he purrs. "A tumble in the sheets from one as lovely as yourself."

She's watching him, calculating, drawn up tense and taut. The story lays before them, flicking through the pages of a fairytale told time and time again to frightened children tucked under covers. "You want me to come with you?"

"Rather, in your bed, if you've half a mind to allow me," Astarion says, clicking bitten nails on the table. "I'd hate to intrude."

Something sharp enters her eyes. "Why would not yours?"

He flinches—it's only half faked. Claws, spidering down his spine. "Oh, my father," he says, flippant, but all the lies in the world can't hide the shudder of a rabbit with hawks wheeling overhead. "Dastardly nosy man, I'm afraid. Unless you want the details of our escapade asked about over morning tea, I'd suggest we avoid him."

There.

A vampire spawn inviting her; mentions of a father.

A sire, in other words.

She smiles—tries, maybe, but the wilderness has shredded it and given her a grimace instead—and stands, slipping her longsword into a sheath over her shoulder. Her pointed ears flick to face him, braced. "I accept."

Astarion dips into a bow and slithers off the chair, dragging his palms over the wood and leaving lovely rumples around his hips. Two copper pieces clatter next to her empty mug as she pulls her bag on, preparing, tense and never removing her gaze.

While leaving, she kicks the chair with a muffled curse—crouches, as if that was a mistake and she needs to adjust her boot. There's a flash of metal, the clunk of something heavy almost hidden under the din of the busy tavern, and when she stands up, the chair wobbles on one less leg than normal.

Clever. She knows what she's up against, then.

Astarion smiles like he saw nothing and follows.

He walks up the stairs, letting her lead him through familiar halls with simpering sweetness. But it's the halls of a tavern, of a flophouse; not the guest room, with silken sheets and the stench of dried blood that decades of cleaning have never managed to remove from his sensitive nose. It's not Szarr Palace. It's not where Cazador is, waiting for Astarion to demean himself to a satisfactory level, flat on his back in a bed that has never been used for trancing, not lit with tallow candles and tucked under heavy velvet curtains.

There's a festering excitement in his chest; either he dies and is free, breaks away from this hell, or he dies and wakes and once more Cazador sees he is not the only master. There is someone stronger.

Then, as she slides a bronze key into a lock, Astarion pauses.

The motions flow to him—go inside, lay down, give her just enough she's gasping and then cajole her into trotting at his heels. This is what he knows, what he has always done.

But there's no reason now.

He doesn't have to debase himself; doesn't have to crawl on his back and purr filth. There is no part of the script he has to follow, when he is here to mess up and fail, to unlearn thirty years of fear and let it wash away.

The commands are simple. He has been told to gather souls, to drag them up pretty for the plucking. He has never been told not to die in the process.

She leads him into her room, an identical prison barracks, cold wood and impersonal affects. A bed barely larger enough for sleeping with moth-eaten trappings. Familiar.

The door clicks closed and he lunges at her.

Astarion will give her credit; there's no hesitation, once she's made up her mind. She sees him move and slams a dagger through the meat of his shoulder.

He's taller but weak with it, brittle bones—she shoves her weight against and kicks him back, roaring, until he hits the wall with a dry crunch. Her boot lands in his gut with a hoarse shout as she rears up, hands meeting the hilt until her blade cracks through his arm and into the wall behind. Astarion writhes, a pinned butterfly, lashing weakly with unsharpened nails. Saliva froths to his lips.

Monster he is and monster he plays—snarling without words and hurling himself against the dagger, scraping on bone. Wordless barks and slavering rage, an animal caged. What she has sworn to kill.

She staggers upright, coiled. From her boot, she pulls a shaft of wood: the chair leg, edge broken and jagged.

"Vampire," she snaps, and rears back.

He inhales.

Behind her, stirring in the shadows, teeth come into view. Pale and bared. Astarion goes stiff and she sees it—considers him trapped well enough to throw her awareness over her shoulder, to turn towards the beast surfacing in the grey. Her grip on the stake doesn't falter.

Desperation, for a moment—maybe she'll kill him—maybe he'll be free–

Cazador sharpens, mist coalescing, and snaps her neck.

Astarion screams before he understands it—watches her fall to the ground, eyes wide and startled, face flat to her shoulder and neck bulging around bone. Cazador reaches down and tears the stake from her grasp with the crack of shredding ligaments. He screams louder.

The monster reaches and grabs him—sinks claws into his shoulder—and they disappear in a burst of mist. Transportation howls around him, planar diffusion, and the wall leaves as he slams into the ground, limbs popping and clenching around nothing. Astarion scrambles back, panting, eyes wide and wild in the dark–

A hand wraps around his face. His screams die.

"You insolent brat," Cazador hisses; his nails dig into Astarion's jaw, lurching him up until he's suspended by it, dangling with a hoarse bark of pain. "I imagine you think yourself clever."

"I don't," Astarion babbles, wrenching forward to prostrate himself even in the air, blade rasping against his collarbone. It reverberates down his spine. "I'm sorry, master, please, I didn't–"

"Do not move," Cazador snaps, and Astarion wails before his throat latches up, every muscle locking in place, back to rigor mortis. Failure crescendos like magma in his veins, the hunter's corpse, the plan splintering away.

Cazador throws him into the wall. His skull cracks against cold stone and he clatters to the ground, unmoving, the blade twisting through flesh. The kennel echos in damnation to swallow his silent pleas, the things he cannot force to frozen lips. Just laying there, tears pouring down his face, rats in his throat.

He failed. He failed.

Cazador stalks over, bristling like hells incarnate. Still the stake looms in his hand. His eyes are the sparks of a dying star.

"Pathetic," he snarls, venomous, no eloquence past the rage. "Do you think death will free you? Do you think there is somewhere to run that I will not find you?"

She was supposed to kill him. She was supposed to save him.

Please, please, please, Astarion pleads, always pleads, but Cazador reaches down and grabs his hair, tugging him away from the wall. The dagger bounces and drags against the stone as he's hauled to the center of the kennel, to the stained stone and agony embedded there. He cannot scream.

Cazador doesn't bother taking him to the table, to the raised bed—just kneels beside him, robes spilling over. He wrenches out the dagger, and there isn't enough blood to spray from the wound; just a crackle of lightning pain and burrowed holes. Astarion thrashes without moving. Air pants through clasped lips in muffled terror.

He's never made his master this angry before. He's never seen this fury.

"I suppose," Cazador hisses, and holds up the dagger—well-sharpened, well-kept, by a hunter who was supposed to kill him. "You have forgotten your place, boy. You have forgotten who you are."

He is Astarion Ancunín—magistrate, high elf, survivor, free, living, himself–

The monster moves him. Splays his limbs like feast on display, sliding the knife through his clothes and shredding them away, little nicks over bloodless skin. Astarion stares up with unblinking eyes as he's bared and spread out.

A dagger, pressed to his forearm, to the shivering skin beneath.

"First," Cazador says, vicious, and the blade bites; sinks through meat and bone, grinding against the ligament. "Thou shalt not drink the blood of thinking creatures."

Astarion's hand rips off. His mind ratchets and contorts itself in silence.

"Second, thou shalt obey me in all things." He dives in to his other wrist tip-first, prying the blade between bone to segment the joint, immobile and shivering. It cracks against the stone as he plunges through.

A ragged stretch of skin keeps his second hand attached. Cazador forsakes the dagger and tears it free himself, hurling the meat to slam into the far wall with the crack of shattering bones. Flesh pours through the gap.

"Third," Cazador grunts, shifting down to his legs—the dagger saws through his calf until his foot tumbles off, trapped under him. Hamstrung, crippled, trapped– "Thou shalt not leave my side unless directed."

He doesn't he knows this he can't he wouldn't he has no choice he will never he doesn't–

"Fourth." Cazador snaps his knee to bring his other leg closer, starting from the underside, using his own weight to press into the blade. It drags on to infinity until his shin bone jabs through to open air. "Thou shalt know that thou art mine."

The compulsion pulls back—his throat, opening, air poured into writhing lungs.

"Master," Astarion bawls, unable to even twitch as his words wisp away like old autumn leaves. "Master, please, please–"

"And fifth," Cazador intones. He leans in, to empty victory, to wounds oozing pus and gore without blood. To eyes, blue-black, hells-touched, the only part he hasn't dared touch.

There is someone stronger. Astarion clings to the knowledge, desperate, drowning without a raft—his eyes are a reminder from a being he doesn't know and that says there is someone else. Cazador is not all. There is someone stronger.

Cazador leans down and grabs his chin; grabs the sinew left beneath the missing skin and bones that clatter against each other. Readies his hand around the jagged bar of wood.

"Thou shalt not die," he hisses. "Becuase you are mine to kill."

And then he smiles, and then he stabs the stake into Astarion's heart.

-

Astarion comes back this time with blue-tinted skin. It takes him a year to notice, however, because there is no light in the tomb he's sealed in.

He is not allowed to die.

-

The next time Astarion sees the sun is without any fire at all.

One hundred and seventy years of fruitless fantasies: the fences outside, perfect stake-rows with jagged edges; the blades Godey sharpens each evening, poised to cut free his head; the sun, rising, endless, indomitable. The fifth command howls a ferver pitch whenever he lingers near looming parapets. Cazador hasn't killed him again, not with blue eyes and blue skin and reminders of a separate owner, of a corpse bound between two tethers.

A tiefling's traits. A devil's traits, beaten into a vampiric body like they belong.

He doesn't know. Scars on his back and hellfire in his eyes and nothing but questions.

Then he wakes on a beach under the sun with a githyanki woman holding a longsword to his throat, and Astarion finds he knows even less.

Her name is Lae'zel, and he has two beats of a missing heart to convince her not to kill him. Eloquence is his to command but only when familiar, when he knows the script, and this time words die like wriggling fish.

Only for the fish to wriggle back, squirming alongside the tadpole in his skull. Lae'zel's own presence erupts in mirrored agony. She removes her blade as they both collapse back.

Mindflayers. Parasites. Ceremorphosis.

The rules are changing—commands gained and lost and thrown away. Still a vampire spawn, still clutching for hunger all-consuming and fear blinding, but beneath the sun and running water and far from his master's side.

Blue eyes and blue skin and the teeth of something death cannot hold. He calls himself elf and walks alongside, lips closed, words purred, watching more souls join her. A hunter—a wizard—a cleric. He fits in and guts himself in the process.

Lae'zel is a brilliant strategist when the problem is enemies, and even better when the problem is more enemies, which Faerûn seems eager to supply. Goblins boil from the undercarriage of every abandoned town and rockface when they're not hooting down the road proper, and despite Lae'zel's undying determination to scour the world in efforts to reach her beloved crèche, she finds habitual destruction of passing monsters to be a worthy distraction.

The rest of the party calls it heroism, of course.

Murder to murder. Blood to blood. Monsters slain and saviors enthroned; an absurd hubris to believe themselves capable of taking on the world and deciding where the lines fall.

They're pitifully scared of death.

What a sad existence that must be.

-

"Astarion," Wyll calls, crouched over the fire and balancing three bowls on one steady arm. "You haven't eaten."

Gods. This again.

Astarion's not so much a fool as to say he prefers an existence in the kennel, but at least there he didn't have to do anything but endure. Here, he has to play pretty pretend of being an elven magistrate, a hitherto unknown Baldurian kidnapped alongside the rest. The first two days they were all wonderfully prickly with each other, weakness bound up in barbed wire, but with the new additions of Wyll and Gale, they're overfond of talking.

At least their fearless leader Lae'zel hones the kind of brutal efficiency he needs to get through the day.

Astarion sighs, leaning back against the log stumps they've stacked around the camp, a facsimile of comfort in face of a journey without. "And ruin my tongue? Love, you know Gale made that with nothing but stale potatoes and jerky." He waves a blue-tinged hand at the vaguely offended wizard. "I'll take my chances elsewhere."

Lae'zel scowls at him. It might just be her face. "A warrior does not neglect herself for petty taste," she tells him. "If you are to fight, you must eat."

He has eaten. He's eaten more in the past three days than he has in two hundred years; there's an exsanguinated boar and crushed rabbits and pried-open voles left in their wake like scattered stars. The hunger hums between his ribcage and his grip leaves cracks in wood. He's powerful.

"Why," Astarion purrs, charm pouring over his tongue. "If you're offering, I'd be happy to feast on sweeter things."

Wyll chokes, hand thumping into his chest.

Lae'zel stands, one fist on her hilt—about to remove a few toes for the insult, perhaps, or rip out his tongue, or any of the other githyanki standards she holds them to. There's a bestial kind of understanding she has of others, their worth decided by battle, a culling of those deemed useless. What mercy, that he knows his way around daggers.

"I am your leader," she says, because she rather is, ever since she marched over the beach and scooped up all these snarling little souls to fight for her. "And I will not be weakened by your inability. I command you to eat."

Command.

He knows that word.

Astarion picks his fight and comes up swinging.

"And I command you to pluck the stick from your ass, but see where that gets us," he drawls, all loose derision, but he's coiling and fisting for stability as his weight shifts to the balls of his feet. Death does not haunt his shadow but revelation will, for her to slit his throat and wonder why that doesn't kill him, why he splutters and chokes around putrid blood. He will not let them strike to find where his weakness lies.

Her brows furrow—gods, nothing gets past the Astral Plane logic she wields like incompetence—and the air changes, goes fierce and simmering. She doesn't have to understand his words to know it was an insult.

"Tsk'va," she spits, and draws her longsword. "If you did not have even a faint potential, I would cut you down where you stand."

Astarion smiles thin to hide his fangs.

Shadowheart barks a mocking laugh. "Oh, yes," she says, all acrimony. "Kill him just for saying the truth, won't you?"

"Hold," Wyll demands, setting down the food to move near Lae'zel—not in front of her, because he's not quite that stupid, but enough to be in her periphery. "We're on the same side. Meaningless slaughter will only hurt us."

Even Gale, who tends to prefer meandering around the topic in lanquidity instead of reaching the damn thing, stands, palms raised. "Now," he says, words bobbing in his throat. "There's no need to let one ill-tempered joke break us. Logic urges us to sit down and discuss with words instead of barbs, I believe."

Lae'zel hisses. Her eyes go slitted and cold.

Astarion stands, vicious, enough the glow from his hellfire eyes splashes over his nose and onto her face. The mark of rebirth—the wrongness of a devil. What he will not reveal.

He fists his dagger. There is no fight against her he will win, not by strength, by shadows, by even words as her ignorance floods all battlefronts he could use, but she commands and demeans him. He's heard this before.

"Love," he says, all ice. "Sink your teeth into something worth biting. You'll poison yourself trying and I will laugh all the louder." The growl builds in his throat, rattling against his fangs. "I eat as I please."

Not rats. Not memories. His nails are digging into his wrists. "You will not command me."

Wyll stares at him, brows drawn low. "Astarion," he says.

To the hells with the lot of them. To the hells and damnation there.

Astarion spins on his heel and stalks into the forest.

Trees rush past him as he shoulders through, crunching over brush and brambles, sound dying away behind. Gods, this is f*cking stupid. He's stared at the sun and ran free over plains and fed on blood like never before and been fine; he's dreamt of Cazador and hid his fangs and scoured himself down to a hero and been fine.

But one little snip with idiots and now he's seething, prowling through the forest like that will hide the fear snaring through his heart. Distant conversation, before he covers enough ground to hide them, but them regrouping and pondering over his words like a mystery; like he's something to uncover and display in a museum. How dare he insult Lae'zel, who was just offering food? How dare he leave before making amends?

What a collection of imbeciles. Soft, fettering little things who poke their unwanted noses into his life like they have any say in it—like they can command him.

He's had enough of commands.

Astarion snarls, spins, and slams his fist into the trunk of a hapless tree; blood-filled strength flows through him and the bark cracks, splintering away, falling to the forest floor in shattered chunks. He breathes useless ragged breaths, bristling, shoulders up and fangs bared.

He wants to kill them.

He wants to kill something.

The forest is alive with prey but it's not enough—the velvet fur of a deer or boar's bristles are now banal. He knows them, knows the animal ichor that fills him like it has before, even untainted with garlic oil and drank from pumping veins instead of desiccated corpses. It is what he already knows. He wants more.

Astarion is free. It's f*cking time he felt like it.

The first thought is that which always haunts him; the hunger. Animals and beasts and scuttling things in the dark, bigger than rats but just as worthless, stuffing the hollow in his chest without ever filling it. But thinking creatures, maybe; there has to be a reason he was kept from it. Has to be something worth the thousands of souls he's brought to death and ruin.

There are four thinking creatures, no matter their efforts to appear otherwise, back at camp.

Astarion thinks of them, for a second. Of sinking his fangs into Lae'zel's throat to drain her warrior's spirit; arcane potential from Gale sparking through a dead heart; healing and regeneration entwined with Shadowheart beneath him; Wyll, sweet and spiced as muled wine–

No.

Fear makes people stupid. Anger makes people stupid and justified. Waking up to fangs in their neck will prompt nothing but a hunter's response—and they'll fail just as the one in the tavern, so long ago. An empty death. There's no point. A taste of a thinking creature's blood that will be wasted, splashed from a slit throat, and then a quick decapitation or stake to the heart once they slide the puzzle pieces together.

A reveal of the one secret he will not risk, when he comes spluttering back to life with a new infernal feature.

No. That is not the command he will break.

But there is another.

Astarion runs his fingers over broken bark, over trees untouched for decades, grown fat and comfortable in their lazy forest. Plenty of branches around, sharp and sturdy, thinner than a chair's leg and without jagged splinters he has to pry out in the cramped confines of a marble tomb.

He can—oh, what's the moronic human phrase—cut out the middleman, so to speak.

Five commands, each written across the marrow of his bones; but only one that has ever granted revenge, even if only for a second.

Astarion doesn't particularly want to die. It has never been his wish, when he has so few of them; the only death he wants is for another.

But even with no memory of his eyes or family or job or city or life, stolen by the tomb and damned by it, Astarion can still remember the look in Cazador's face as the sunlight reached him. The fury—the panic—the fear. Then afterward, with hellfire reminders there was someone more powerful than him, someone with control over his precious spawn.

Cazador commands him not to die.

He's free. He doesn't have to listen.

It's easy, almost, to pluck a fallen branch and divest it of bark, to strip away the gnarled edges until greenwood shines through. He peels feathery needles off—oh. Cedar, the wood most often used for coffins. Fitting.

He pulls off his shirt; folds it neatly, sets it to the side. Sits down, brush and clutter kicked away until an empty bed of dried needles rests beneath him. Hair waterfalls around his head as he lays back, revealing rippled sun-scars, the first mark of his cursed deaths.

And then, over his chest, the second. A knot of scar tissue, small, pockmarked. It settles over his deep thrum of resentment like a heartbeat.

He sets the tip of his makeshift stake over it; to scour away Cazador's mark until only his own is left. Proof he is not commanded; proof he will not freeze as his limbs are cut away and body torn and personhood shredded until he obeys, because he doesn't have to obey, because he gets to choose. Because there is someone stronger. Because there is someone who brings him back.

"Cazador," Astarion whispers, all teeth and bones, because he cannot make himself be louder—just a murmur, in the depths of a forest far from Baldur's Gate, far from the kennel. "I am not yours to kill."

And then he stakes himself.

-

Astarion wakes up.

It isn't like the first time, agony taking ownership and the cold of the kennel all around. There's fire instead, liquid heat poured into the scars of his back without burning. Just ignition, pulsing and impossible, wisping away. Alive. Feeling.

He opens his eyes and sees the forest—sees the green. No stone.

Smoke floods the air, thick and choking; all the needles beneath him are charred away, lit up in fire hot enough they haven't burnt but instead combusted, ash in a perfect circle arching out from his wound. He remembers the soot on Cazador's robes, the black air inside the tomb; whatever brings him back to life does it with flames, with the depths made incarnate.

Hellfire in his eyes and hellfire in his chest.

Astarion sits up, shaking himself free, charcoal crunching under his fingers. Lingering pains he can barely remember the origin of fade away, little breaks in his fingers from brittle bones unused to combat and torn skin smoothed over. Back to perfection.

Beyond his chest, bared to the sky.

A mangled mess of a scar, covering up the one beneath.

His mark. Not Cazador's.

He's free.

Astarion leans back, staring at it. Such a small, stupid thing, but it has been one hundred and seventy years of having only one scar he can see, enough he knows every twist and angle of it; the one on his neck needs a mirror and he can no better peer at his own scalp than his eyes, so it only been Cazador's murder on his chest. A mutilation from a chair leg, so long ago.

But now it's gone. A new scar of his own making. One to forget and one to learn.

His hands brush unconsciously over the mark—and then sink into his skin with sparks of pain.

Astarion blinks. Looks down.

Where once were bitten nails are now ink-black claws.

He hums, tilting his hands back and forth; they're not particularly long, useless for anything but irritations and annoyance, but they're here. Much like Aurelia's, whenever Cazador didn't tear them from her fingers, watching her wheeze and tremble over bloody hands. True vampires have claws, but they're white.

These are not those of a spawn.

These are his.

But they're new, hands clasping as he figures out how to move without catching on the additions, and to anyone who has seen him, they weren't there before. Hells-touched is he, tucked under the façade of a high elf, and with claws now to fit the eyes.

There should be concern, a tidal unease that he will be noticed and categorized, but he just sits, dragging them against his skin to test their edge. Something like grim satisfaction settles in his chest. Grudges are eternal if you feed them, and he has two hundred years of bloated corpses—but this is his first success. His first victory.

The party won't see it like that, if they notice. If they look closer.

His plan is very simple—ignore it.

They'll simmer down now that he's away; will forget the insult and focus on their budding terror over the parasites until he can slip back into their ranks. And perhaps he'll murmur and purr a little more than usual, drag their attention to his face, and let his claws become a part of him until they quite forget he didn't have them before.

Three days has he traveled with them, two standoffish but the last with a despicable chumminess like they're determined to use their parasites as some kind of innate pairing. Lae'zel has stayed tyrannical, Shadowheart vicious, Wyll banal, Gale hungry—but they act like they're already bound together. Like they might as well get along. Spilled wretchedly sappy stories about heroism and towers and crèches like they matter.

He talks about Baldur's Gate and lawmaking. The most they've asked him directly is whether he has darkvision for delving caves.

Astarion has eyes that would call a devil's face home and pale skin that gleams cerulean in the light. In comparison, claws are hardly anything to notice, and even less to care about. Just a jagged commodity on an elf's fingers.

Not quite an elf, anymore. Not with hellfire eyes and blue skin and now claws.

It's fine, really.

Astarion is well aware he shouldn't exist.

-

He's almost grateful when Karlach joins the party, because at least next to her, his changes are far less obvious. His skin is only blue- tinged, where hers is full red; and while she has the white sclera of mortal eyes, she's also got a f*cking engine for a heart, so the black of his tends to fall under the radar. It's delightful, really.

She is less so. Oh, plenty kind, but only in the most damning way—a chipper sack of smokepowder that spreads cheer like a plague. There's a ragged past buried under ports belching smoke, a soldier's wariness beyond booming laughs, but she drowns it in terrible jokes and worse encouragement. One groused conversation is enough for Wyll to cast down his rapier and swear to parlay with all those he's ever wronged, which is adorable, and then she shoulders her way into camp with enough volume to spook the birds from their nests.

Lae'zel seems inordinately pleased to have someone else who fights with strength of arms and military efficiency. Bully for her. Astarion sheathes his dagger in the throat of Tyr's false paladins from the shadows as he prefers.

Wyll doesn't handle himself as well as he normally does, though. He near becomes a nuisance in the shambled ruins of the trading outpost, eyes hazed elsewhere, only battlehoned instincts keeping him up. In a stunning show of hypocrisy, Lae'zel doesn't declare him a liability and strike him down—just covers while barking instructions.

They win the fight, if barely. Those hired to strike Karlach at her prime are only taken down by the combined might of six mercenaries who have never shied from bloodshed, and even after, they're panting curses and shuffling back to their ramshackle haven. Karlach crows the whole way, eyes gleaming in reflected sunlight. She digs her hands into the dirt like she's afraid she'll never feel it again.

And there's a devil in the camp, and there's a contract established to be broken, and there's a death unslain, and then–

And then Wyll, lovely little saccharine Wyll, burns with the fire of the hells.

He doesn't die, but only because Mizora doesn't want him to. In the circle of charred grass, his skin sloughs off, a serpent writhing in its own rebirth. Horns crack through his skull like chasms. There are only screams for a moment—goes rasping and dead after, vocal cords torn. The air billows with smoke.

Mizora leaves with a throaty, mocking cackle—leaves Wyll heaving on the ground, trembling with arms that can't lift him and blood soaking through his armour. His parasite shrieks through theirs, though his mouth only croaks.

In the grass before him, a brown eye flakes away into ash.

It's impossible to know how to care for someone after that, but they can try—healing potions poured down his gullet and every comfort from the camp stacked into his tent. Each hour, they try to get some water in him, anything to quench the embers that smoldered through his throat as he screamed. Even getting him into the tent had scorched Lae'zel's hands, scrubbing charcoal into her flesh. He rasped and choked apologies through bleary delirium. She snapped at him to shut up and rest.

And now, much later, twilight snaking its reaching hands through their shadows, an hour has passed, and there's a carafe of water to be delivered.

Shadowheart is sleeping off exhaustion from healing, Karlach slamming down entire trees for firewood with wretched guilt seeping through her parasite, Gale making a meal in somber contemplation, Lae'zel stalking their borders with a fury that demands targets to sheath her longsword in, and–

Well.

That leaves him.

Astarion glares, even as he picks it up. He won't give them any reason to hate him. He stalks off to the tent with impassion, head held high. The air is cold all around, still choked off. Wyll's tent crackles.

He hesitates, for a second. Quiet breathing echoes through the canvas, a muffled thing that rasps and hiccups every other from a chest reshaped. He can hear the man's heart thumping with instability, rabbit-fast beats and lurching slowness. Even his blood-scent, once spiced and rich, dragged down in hellfire.

It's too close. The circle of ash, grass scorched so hot it combusted instead of burned, the lingering stench of brimstone and sulphur. A hellfire rebirth; a soul dragged through the nine layers to wrench itself back, changed. Mizora isn't his mysterious benefactor, he knows that—she lingered on his eyes with muted curiosity but not recognition, far too much attention layered on her pet. The leash to tug. The beast she commands and controls; the one some part of Astarion doesn't want to see. Doesn't want to compare.

But freezing is for those under commands—those forced into stillness—and so Astarion shoulders past the canvas and steps into the tent.

It's impossibly warm in there, reflected heat from a sun locked in a gibbet cage, smoke flitting through Wyll's lips as he curls on his bedroll. Every part of him is taut, sweat pooling under his gasping mouth, fabric shredding between his tangled fingers. Obsidian horns curl back from his skull, weeping blood over his face he's given up trying to rub away, trailing over one stone eye and the other lit with infernal red. Ridges cross over his skin like chasmed valleys.

He's not quite human. Not quite tiefling. Something caught in the middle, with hellfire eyes and ridged skin and twisting horns.

Why do this?

The why is simple enough; the same reason Astarion bled in the kennels and choked on rats. It is always power: power over people, power over bodies, power over souls. Puppets on strings—the harm done upon you and the harm you do in face of it.

Bodies warped from their original forms; changed until there was nothing familiar, until mirrors and touch would reveal only pain and memories. Not of their own choice; just brutalized.

They could be similar.

But Astarion has hells-touched eyes and blue-tinged skin and iron-black nails as a reminder; transformation from something more powerful than Cazador. Changing him away from the spawn, from the corpse he died as. For him, it's revenge.

Mizora transformed Wyll as punishment.

They are not the same.

Wyll looks up at him, dragging his head off the mat. One horn catches on a pillow and he hisses, blood bubbling up around the base to drip like magma over his ears. Ash trickles between his teeth.

"You're quiet," he rasps, through a throat shredded and torn. "Is something wrong?"

Astarion hums, letting the tent close behind him. Nothing here is spaced for two and he barely has to move to set the carafe down by Wyll's side, water beading on its surface just from being in the heated space.

Is something wrong? How magnanimous. Ignoring everything about himself like he's just looking out for the party.

"Other than the delay this will cause us? Nothing, love." Astarion crouches lower to pick up the previous carafe; barely an ounce drained, and likely none of it by Wyll, considering the steam hanging near the roof. He looks like he can hardly move. "You're supposed to be drinking, you know."

Wyll looks down. He's always been a few lions short of a pride, even when posturing as a chivalrous bastard who followed Lae'zel like a lost pup, but there's no Blade of Frontiers, here. Just a man, bleeding out, body reconstructed.

He looks young.

"I will," he manages, fisting at the blankets. His gaze slips around the tent; no mirror, no puddle, nothing to see his own reflection. There's blood on his horns, smeared in fingerprints, like he felt up their length to figure out out what they were; more on his ridges and remade skin. Trying to discover himself when he knows he's been replaced.

But that's not his only change. And there is one other person in camp who seems like they would understand; who has eyes that peer out from a face that shouldn't hold them.

Wyll is not a confident man. But despair will breed urgency from ice.

"My eye," he says, hesitant like a newborn foal, all shaking inconsequence and unease. "Is it anything like yours?"

Oh.

Astarion cannot remember his eyes. He's lost them twice now. All he has is Aurelia's words, a lifetime ago: hellfire. Black with blue flame within.

Wyll's eye, red like sunset, flickering with a mirage's heat.

"Yes," he finds himself saying, and doesn't know why. "Yes, they're rather similar."

Wyll smiles something sad and insecure. "That's a relief," he says, with levity injected into his voice like a lifeline. "I'll take it as a compliment."

"Don't flatter yourself," Astarion sniffs. "I'm still far out of your league."

"Then I suppose I will have to go running into more devils for a chance to reach you."

Despite himself, Astarion smiles. The mental picture is amusing. "Perhaps Karlach can pay you back with locations."

"Karlach doesn't–" Wyll hacks off into a cough, curling around himself in miserable agony, blood oozing from the base of his new horns. Every breath is ragged and pained. "She doesn't owe me anything."

Mizora, calling her heartless. Mizora, calling him pet.

"You saved her life," Astarion says, like he has to remind the man. "I rather think most would want appreciation."

Wyll shakes his head—hisses, horns making him sway. "It was the right thing to do," he says, with the conviction of someone who needs it to be true. "She doesn't owe me anything. I would do it again."

He doesn't want his transformation; not like Astarion does. But he says he would keep it, live through the agony again, just to spare a woman who he will not ask for payment.

Is this what it means to be a hero? Is this what it means to be a savior?

It seems exhausting.

Astarion shifts—sets the carafe a touch closer, splashing in the puddle of dried blood and ash. Undeath makes him cold but Wyll's presence is achingly warm, enough it burns through numb flesh and whispers like fire.

Life, almost.

"Will you stay?" Wyll asks, quiet. There's something terribly wane in his face; that of a monster hunter granted visage of who he'd kill. A walking contradiction, dichotomy; would he look in the mirror and stab himself? Would he find himself across the river where he found Karlach and take his own head?

Astarion has a devil's eyes and skin and claws. Underneath, a vampire spawn snarls at the bit.

He shouldn't.

"I suppose," Astarion sighs, and flounces down into a sprawl that takes up half the tent. "If only because I know you would mourn the loss of my voice."

Wyll huffs a distant relation to a laugh, dry and cracked through. A dreadful ease pulses through him, relaxing at the thought of someone else being there, a companion to his torment. He's happier for Astarion's presence than he would be without.

A hunter in a tavern, so long ago, failing to kill either aberration.

Astarion sits and spins stories—paws through Wyll's deplorable reading selection just for something to fill his tongue—and does not think of the many hunters in his life who have never killed him more than he has killed himself.

-

Lae'zel roars like the gnolls have insulted her, her race, her queen, and possibly her longsword. Whatever it is, it's quite personal.

The Zhentarim bastard fled without so much as a by-your-leave the moment the gnolls got peckish enough to reach the cave, leaving them defending his bloody shipment. Astarion is going to loot these chests down to the bolts holding them together.

Combat is combat and he's grown unfortunately prepared for it, slinking in the shadows where he prefers, where the death he doesn't fear but the reveal he does can stay far from his heels. They'd kept a decent position, guarding the mouth as gnolls battered themselves against the defenses, but Astarion had stayed back and Lae'zel had come just to shake off a brutish curse and then the ceiling had opened up with a delightful f*ck-you and dropped a boulder on their heads.

Now they're separated. He's going to murder something.

Astarion pants useless breath, leaning against the cavern wall—the sounds of battle die to distant moans and crackles of alchemic fire, minimized due to being surrounded on three sides by stone. Hells, he's had enough of this. Two lucky blows from a bastard who stuck to the shadows and everything in his chest feels shaken loose, bones quaking in snarled disapproval. Pain paces through him like a caged beast.

Beside him, Lae'zel picks herself up, shaking dust from her braided hair. A githyanki's training is stronger than shock and she's at the boulder the next second, placing wrapped hands to its surface—immobile and immovable, with the other four members of the party on the other side or crushed beneath it. Wonderful.

"Injuries!" Lae'zel barks, stomping one boot into the turf hard enough to crack through some poor bastard's ribcage. Her ears are pricked and shoulders drawn like iron, tense as a mountain herself. "Report!"

In lieu of tyrant, she's picked up caretaker as a new side hobby. It's just as enjoyable as when she nearly stabbed him over a single bleeding insult.

"Darling," Astarion bites out through gritted teeth, "I rather think we can let Gale spin the soliloquies at a later date. Would you be a dear and help me find a f*cking way out?"

She glares and doesn't move.

Gods, whatever he did to deserve this group of morons, it wasn't enough.

Shadowheart's voice echoes through the cave to them, muffled, which makes sense because they're separated by a bloody boulder. "Knocked down," she calls, and there's a tightness to her words like she's holding her breath. "Karlach caught it before it could crush us but it's bad."

Lae'zel is moving before Shadowheart finishes, and Astarion scrambles to follow—the boulder's near twice the height of him and heavy enough it cracked a chasm into the ground when it fell. Karlach's been a god incarnate ever since they found her, deserving her title and all the brutal accolades alongside, but this is quite a few steps above that. Above anything.

The cave's long and twisting, but black marketers as paranoid as the Zhentarim are not those to trap themselves in dead ends, and past a wall of wooden boards nailed together, fresh air streams through the gaps. Lae'zel doesn't bother drawing her longsword—just charges straight through the flimsy defenses and shakes the splinters from her hair. Astarion picks his way through with a touch more delicacy and trots after, swallowing a grimace to press a hand to his side. Definitely broken. No need to breathe, but there's a wet tightness when he does that makes him think something's punctured.

Damnable mortal concerns. It must be terrible to have to worry about so many delicate things.

The others are easy to find—Lae'zel follows the distant smoke from Gale's preferred method of problem solving, her longsword braced and steps thundering. Around the corner, the boulder greets them; lodged against the side wall, two handprints slammed into its face and melted through.

Hells. That's terrifying.

Karlach's flat on her back, chest rising in enormous, heaving pants. The grass bubbles and sizzles under her, boiling down to slag and pockets of magma. Her eyes are squeezed shut, fists kneading at her chest, molten stone splattered over her front.

Lae'zel learns some spontaneous haste spell and appears before Karlach, kneeling down and ignoring the heat to press her fingers into the tiefling's neck, brows drawing low. Karlach just keeps breathing, shoving at her chest like she can push her engine back to the hells it came from. "Injured," the githyanki says grimly. "And badly. She pushed herself too far."

Astarion keeps staring at the boulder, braced feet away from the rest of the party scattered in its path like peasants before warhorses. A second later, a different positioning, and they'd all be dead.

Dead, and without anything to bring them back.

Slowly, wrenching themselves up, the party stirs. Shadowheart is crouched, palms pressed to the sides of her head, eyes pale and scared—seeing more than the boulder. Some ancient memory her beloved religion has erased but can't remove the tied emotions. Gale stays down, one leg twisted out of alignment. Wyll groans, hauling himself upright. His head bobs for a moment—he's still getting used to his horns, to the twin weights that butcher balance and pull his brow into fearsome scowls if he doesn't make the effort to smile—but then he's up and moving, shaking the dust free from his hair. Lae'zel's grimace doesn't leave.

Gale, collapsed over a broken leg, Shadowheart clutching shattered fingers, and Karlach, battered, wincing, even her battle-frenzy unable to smother the pain scrawled over her face.

Astarion's ribs throb in his chest.

They're loathe to use healing potions when they're preciously hard to find, and Shadowheart will likely give her limited energy to Karlach, who just held back a f*cking boulder and hasn't even mustered the energy to laugh about it. All of their mortal lives, held like water in a sieve, trying to catch it before it slips through the holes. Inconsequential deaths, a smuggler's trap, no revenge or punishment or anything gained from it. They have nothing but a void before them.

But he has something they don't.

Or, at least he thinks he does—it's hard to know when the memories of his second death are crowded out by the solitary year in a tomb, but he has vague images of pulling splinters out of his chest in the cramped marble prison. But pulling, when Cazador had so lovingly removed his hands before.

Dying heals him, brings him back with only a scar to remember the passing.

The others almost died. They might still, if they try to divide up their potions and energy equally. Better to guarantee them crawling their way out of this pit than waste all their mercy on lesser beasts.

They won't pick him to heal anyway. At least here he can fool them into thinking he is kind.

Nausea croons in the back of his skull.

"Back to camp," Lae'zel says, features tight and ears flat against her skull. "We are not safe here. Gale, on my back—Wyll, support Karlach—Shadowheart, go with Ast–"

"I'll scout the area," Astarion says.

Lae'zel furrows her brow. The others look at him.

"While I'm quite hopeful we slaughtered all those lovely bastards, I'd rather not rely on hope," he says, extending it into a drawl, curling his letters to lilt at the end. "And since I'm uninjured, let me wander about and make sure we won't have any unwelcome surprises before we're ready." He sweetens his smile. "I do promise to bring back anything shiny."

There. Perfectly respectable. Perfectly heroic, even, to guard them while they heal.

"Thank you," Wyll says, exhaustion blanketing his voice. He crouches next to Karlach, who gasps with a terrible whispering sound, smoke blooming from every infernal port. Only a few days in the party and she risks her life to protect them; holds herself against an impossible task in hopes they'll survive behind her.

Blood flecks on the back of his teeth when he breathes.

Lae'zel nods, kneeling beside Gale so the wizard can sling his arms over her shoulders, dragging him up with a muffled groan. "Do not go too far," she says. "And stay safe."

"Oh, darling," Astarion purrs. "I plan on it."

And then he's striding off into the forest, head held high and unbothered.

Movement comes fast now he doesn't have to fake breathing, letting the punctured lung squirm and settle in his chest without forcing it to function. The cave is surrounded by ancient trees and he disappears into them, tucked amidst the shadows and looming canopy. Insects click and chitter all around.

The situation keeps revolving around his head. Handprints scorched through the boulder and bodies littered in its path. Death certain.

Mizora wanted Karlach dead. Wyll would have slain her, if they hadn't taken the time to talk beforehand—but she knows that, and she lives, and she nearly kills herself to keep Wyll safe.

A protector.

Someone who chooses, at their own expense, to help.

Cazador was always cruel, because it takes cruelty to be who he is. A hell is a hell is a hell—it was his choice to make spawn, and his choice to keep them how he did.

But now there's someone else out there who chooses to do otherwise; who brings him back and heals his wounds and changes his body far from the pale-skinned monster in the alley. Someone who knows him—someone who chooses him.

There's a giddy delirium as he finds a clearing, larger than the last because he knows about the hellfire explosion, and settles himself in it. Another change—another mark scoured into skin or nails or eyes until Cazador will no longer look on him with recognition. Until the body that died in the alley dies and stays there—until he doesn't have to come back.

Karlach protects the party. Astarion has his own savior, far below, and a death he doesn't flee but welcomes instead.

It's even easier this time to find a serviceable stake—no needles, stripped bare, cedar, coffin-wood—and lay back, splayed over the dirt like a pious sacrifice, and kill himself.

-

Astarion comes to in a circle of burnt grass, sulphur and brimstone boiling in his nose. He hacks around it, a shudder racing through his throat, clawing upright as biting awareness burns in his skull. Hells, it never gets easier—his second ring of scars lights up like fire-cold rivers, dying to snarling embers as his mind shudders back under his control.

Alive, again. The fourth time.

Fifth, if he includes his first death, grey against red eyes, but he doesn't. That wasn't his choice, wasn't anything other than power, than ownership. Those changes were a slave's shackles, binding him to the shadows and monster that lurks there.

These deaths are different. These are his, with choice woven up in scar tissue and scorched earth.

Someone keeps bringing him back. Someone wants him free.

Astarion presses his palm to his forehead, brushing away the soot there. He'll find a river tonight, but for now he can hide the worst of the evidence under his clothing and blame anything else on Gale's penchant for fireballs. It isn't like they have any reason to believe otherwise.

He flexes his claws, licks his lips—and cuts his tongue on fangs, a perfect row, lining what had once been flat teeth. Blood drips through his lips.

It could be gravedirt, clawing himself through cedar wood to reach his master, but it feels different.

Still no mirror so Astarion reaches up to his mouth, running his finger carefully over each point. They're all sharpened to jagged edges, dog's teeth, his original two still the longest but the others dangerous enough to match. The jaws of a tiefling, caked with soot and dried blood.

Ah.

This will be… slightly more difficult to ignore.

Even less for him, when so far all he has done is open his mouth to purr sweet miseries to the party.

He's never been one for plans. Far too easy to get caught up in the details with endless points to follow; Cazador could pluck deceit from his mind if he thought about it, force him to open his mouth and spill forth planning until it laid mangled and rotten between them, and it was him that bore the punishment for something that hadn't even happened.

No. It's never worth it. A masterpiece he could weave for the party and still never predict their responses. He knows what will make Petras growl vengeance and lunge for him, how to scare Aurelia into pained obedience, what distracts Dalyria away from his weakness, but not these heroes. Better, then, to stalk forward and claw lies from whatever they ask.

Astarion brushes himself off—runs his hands over the scar on his chest, knotted, old, death after death after death—and slips his coat on, prettying himself back up. No treasure to explain his delay but he's not willing to take more time, so he leaves behind the hellfire-scorched clearing and makes for the others.

He travels in silence. It's easier.

When he gets back, they've set up entirely. They're staged for recovery, huddled up and around each other like frightened widows with sea-lost husbands. A fire crackles in their midst, tossing long shadows around, skewers sizzling with prepared meat. Some half dozen potion bottles still stinking of herbs clutter up a corner.

Astarion pads into the light, head thrown back and eyebrows raised. "Darlings," he croons, to play up anything they know of him, to distract and cajole away. "It seems I was wrong to worry about further gnolls. We're as well-adept at murder as normal."

Lae'zel hurls herself to her feet, some ferocious diatribe about scouting too far and report where you're going when Wyll makes a soft, startled sound. Her ears flick in his direction.

"Your mouth," Wyll says, cautiously.

Astarion lets himself go rigid, surprise flashing over his eyes; it's easy to fake being startled, when the knowledge is still new and untested, when two hundred years have conditioned a terror of anyone mentioning his teeth.

"Ah," he manages, like tar dripping over his tongue. "I… see."

The rest of the party stirs—not Karlach, curled around herself and rumbling in unconsciousness, not Shadowheart, sprawled back through murmured prayers—and stands, curiosity scrawled over their face. Gale in particular marches right forward, broken leg no longer a concern, and peers at him; shifts as if he wants to stick his fingers in Astarion's gob. He'll regret that quickly if he does so.

The wizard hums, head tilted to the side. "Fascinating," he says, pressing a hand to his chin. "Not that I've made a habit of marveling over your more curious features, but I can say with certainty those weren't there before." His eyes flick up. "A glamour?"

Well. Trust the fool to feed him an answer.

"An innate one," Astarion agrees blindly, like that was the truth he had planned all along. "I suppose the tadpole must have weakened it, and now it's starting to break." He looks down at his claws to draw attention to them, another piece of the lovely puzzle. It's far easier to believe a disguise than it is seemingly unprompted transformation, of course.

Wyll frowns. "Why were you glamoured?"

"A gift from my father," Astarion says, and smiles sweet as sugar; lets the carnivore he now resembles come forth. "He made a dreadful deal with someone he shouldn't, and I paid the price. He was just ever so kind as to let me hide it."

To tuck it away, to shelter beneath the mystery. Nothing to worry or think about.

Gale hums louder, fingers twitching like he wants to transcribe the whole experience. "I'm not so crass as to ask, but that does answer the many questions I have," he says. "Eyes like yours aren't typically found on elves."

Astarion's smile thins. "No, they aren't."

Black instead of white. Blue instead of—he thinks red. Yes. His eyes were red. He doesn't know what they were before.

Behind the wizard, Wyll exhales, rubbing a hand around the base of his horns as if in mirrored sympathy. "That does explain things," he admits, a touch chagrined. "I thought you were a vampire."

Astarion stops.

The first days, when Lae'zel held a longsword to his throat and demanded to know why he was aboard the nautiloid; meeting the others, telling them elf, telling them magistrate. A million things of the past two hundred years. His only defense against the creature ensnared through his bones.

But they stopped asking if he would eat with them. They stared at his neck. They chose him to hunt alone.

Astarion smiles to swallow the scream. "What a foolish notion."

Wyll huffs a laugh, like it's funny.

The scar over his dead heart burns.

"In any case, it's nothing to worry about," Astarion says, flippant as stars, waving one hand as if any other problem will saunter up to distract them. "Just a nasty history to peek through my dashing good looks. I'm well-equipped to handle it."

Lae'zel pinches her nose—of all the Material Plane mannerisms, she had to pick the one that looks worst on a githyanki face—and sighs, something deep and rumbling through her chest. "Do not be made of secrets," she gruffs, but without any of the bite of tendays ago. "Tell us before you break beneath them."

Oh, these are not the kind of secrets that will break him. It's their reveal he's scared of.

Astarion sighs, tapping his claws on the hilt of his dagger. "I'm afraid I'm fresh out of world-shattering mysteries," he says lightly. "But if I stumble across one, you'll be the first I inform."

Lae'zel takes that as answer enough—he couldn't be lying more if he swore fealty to her queen—and marches back to Karlach's side, shifting a new carafe of water closer to the panting tiefling. Gale drifts over to Shadowheart, interrupting her prayers with a murmured question. The camp settles again, reverie and sleep brimming on the edges.

Astarion exhales. The fear that thrums in his chest like a heartbeat calms, pulls back—a glamour. That's a simple lie to maintain, excusing himself more than polite curiosity. If anything, this is a victory. A win.

So he pads over to the others, stripping off his armour in practiced motions, looser now he doesn't have to worry about drawing attention to his claws. An existence normalized, made easy to slide in amidst the others.

Beside him, Wyll sits back down, crossing his legs by the fire. Horns back, hellfire eyes.

In another world, they would be the same.

Astarion settles, stretching out with a hum. The Blade of Frontiers, armour removed, weapons stowed, just a man, looks at him.

"For what it's worth," Wyll says, then hesitates, draws up on himself like it's a speech that's been building in his chest for a millenia. "I like seeing the real you."

Astarion raises an eyebrow. "The real me, love? Careful, or I could think you're looking to break whatever vow of celibacy the Sword Coast made you take."

A lovely dark tone settles on Wyll's cheeks; he splutters around defenses, and falls into a laugh—something deep and rich and brimming with life.

His chest is quite warm. He despairs.

-

They're skirting their way around the goblin camp, not yet willing to break themselves upon its barricades, when they stumble across a different kind of danger.

A man, tanned and well-dressed, with teeth too sharp to be mortal and eyes darker than blood.

He's standing on the bridge like he's waiting for them, palms braced on the embankments, atop scattered tiefling corpses. Astarion twitches—there's brimstone in the air, the pulsating stench of separate planes and what darkness lurks between. Karlach clenched her fists five minutes ago and hardly seems to notice.

Two hundred years has he learned to fear Cazador, and now something simmers in the air reeking of familiarity.

Lae'zel marches forward, ears pinned, because there is nothing she is not willing to bluster her fist in if it is between her and the crèche. The man raises a delicate eyebrow at her approach, tilting his head to the side. His vest shifts like something is moving behind him.

"No harm will befall you, and none shall be answered upon your call," he hums, voice coiling like a serpent. Magic, thick and uncut, around his eyes. "Is violence the language of beasts, or a defense for new faces? Should blades be drawn and barbs wielded, or geniality proffered like mercy?"

Karlach sets her teeth. "I don't like this asshole," she mutters.

"While I am delighted to meet your acquaintance," he answers, striding forward to meet them, spread in a half circle. Lae'zel has her hand on her longsword. "I am Raphael—and I have more than geniality to give. Instead, answers, and a saving grace."

Astarion grimaces, ears pressed flat to his skull. "Saving grace from what, exactly?"

The man looks at him. His stageplay performance creases like old paper, shadows underneath.

"Ah," Raphael says. There's something cold and dead in his eyes, the scales of a deep-sea fish. "You."

Ice. Astarion steps back.

And then there's smoke, the crack of teleportation, and a lavish feast like glory—fire and a disguise melting away for a cambion's smile, wings spread wide.

Raphael is here for a deal, and he knows secrets buried in skulls and behind eyes. Their illithid passengers, ceremorphoris three days past and still unmet. A pauper's price for their souls, come to them at the wrong time—if they had still been holding onto fear of patterned transformation, perhaps they would be tempted, but they already know their parasites are unique. No one accepts. Lae'zel makes to cut off his head at the insult to her crèche.

Diplomacy chiseled from iron. The lack of death makes this a success.

But once Raphael weaves their future desperation, languishing in the idea of them stricken by failure, he settles back, palms splayed and beckoning.

"Think on my deal," Raphael says, smile crooked. "I assure you, it's the only of its kind you'll receive."

Karlach barks a macabre corpse of a laugh. "Oh, we'll think about it," she snarls, smoke crackling around the leather grip of her greataxe. "Think real f*cking hard about whether to sell our souls to a devil."

Raphael sighs, threats little more than an annoyance, and flicks his hand. Fire boils out from the underside of his wings, lashing forward to consume them—Karlach bellows wordless rage—and they disappear.

All except Astarion.

The flames lap at his heels before slithering away, disappearing down to the floorboards and stone beneath. He stumbles once, surprise gnawing through balance. Where five bodies had once been is now smoke.

Alone in a cambion's feast. Fear snakes into his lungs like acid.

Raphael stretches his wings out, crowning against the torches like a reaper. The ghosts return to his eyes, tucked around the flames and black there, infernal life and death intertwined. A tyrant, here in the kingdom of his making.

Astarion will not cower before him, because he doesn't have to, because there is no command, but he goes stiff and coiled with fanged caution. "Raphael," he says, not drawing his daggers but lacing them through his words. "What is this?"

"Yes, you," Raphael says, with an expression akin to a pitying sneer. "My, he's left quite the mark, hasn't he?"

Astarion frowns. He's a stitched-together corpse and it's unsurprising a devil sees that without difficulty, but that's an odd way to phrase it. What does it–

The scars unhealed prickle over his back, poetry spidering up his shoulders and around his ribs. But marks—eyes, skin, claws, teeth. Changes. Transformation.

Hellfire rebirth.

He.

"You know."

"I do," Raphael says, amused. "And you don't."

Astarion bares his fangs. "I do know," he hisses. "Hard to miss resurrection."

"Oh, that isn't knowing," he says, clicking his tongue in disappointment. "Bestial suicide is the knowledge of a suckling infant. No, you think you know. And you're wrong about it all."

He's wrong? It's not like it's f*cking incomprehensible—he kills himself and hellfire brings him back changed. The only mystery is who's doing it, who offers their open hand to pluck him up from the ground. A benefactor from far below.

"And yet," Raphael pauses, savouring the moment. "True resurrection, beckoned and bargained for. And not by your inexperienced hands, I'm afraid. What a shame. I'd be most fascinated to see the mess you'd make."

Astarion bristles, hackling like a struck cat. Claws bite into his palms. "If you're going to tell me," he growls, "just do it."

"Ever so impatient, aren't you?" Raphael tuts. "I've already given quite enough information for free. Devils are rarely so generous, and you're still seeking to push me?"

He's going to slit this cambion's throat wide enough to shove the Blood of Lathander through his spine.

"What do you want, then?" Astarion bites, sinking his teeth into what he knows is a terrible decision and does anyway. Wyll has horns and Karlach lost her heart but this is different; just information, rather than power or servitude. He needs to know. "A deal?"

Something like delight—something like pleasure— flashes over Raphael's face.

"You're welcome to offer," he says, smiling, "but you haven't a soul to make one."

There's no heart in his chest to beat, but it goes cold regardless.

He knew. Some part of him always knew, but– it's different, to hear it. To know, without doubt, that Cazador stole his soul. That life and freedom and personhood weren't enough. That a mere spawn wasn't broken enough.

Why is he surprised? After two hundred years, there's nothing left to take. The rotten monster had to scrape through the marrow and ruin just to find one last thing to pluck from dead hands. It's f*cking fitting.

Astarion doesn't have a heart and he doesn't have a death and he doesn't have a soul. He failed and died and that was it. The scar over his chest is all he has of something ever being beneath it—can he remember what it was like before, when he had one? Are there any memories in the tatters of his mind that know the warmth? That remember being?

His soul.

"Where is it?"

Raphael hums. "Now, that's the question, isn't it? Souls don't go wandering about on their own—no, they have to be given. Offered as the finest presents, if you will." He waves a hand. "A tricky debate on offering when slaves are brought to the table, however. Perhaps a command sufficed."

"I am not commanded," Astarion hisses.

Raphael smiles like tar. "You are a spawn. It is all you know."

It was. Until someone lifted him from death and gave him eyes that his master didn't own.

He needs to know.

"You said he," Astarion says, dragging the words between his fangs. "You know who resurrects me."

"I have an idea," Raphael says lightly. "You're woven throughout with infernal energy—twice contracted, twice sworn. Difficult even for one of my caliber to savour the differences."

What pretty words. What pretty deflections.

"But I could be persuaded to discover more about your little… condition," Raphael muses, pressing a finger to his ember-hot chin. "Not that it holds a candle to the threat of your parasite, of course, but I always appreciate mortal desperation for answers. Why, I'm so interested that I'll even begin to piece apart its origins without striking a deal first."

Astarion growls, knuckles blue-white around his daggers. He's been a good corpse; laid flat and poised and delivered himself to the morgue so Cazador didn't have to see anything unsightly when he didn't want to. He knows what it feels like when his leash is jerked. "From the generosity of your heart?"

A smile. "I'm glad you agree."

The feast, luxurious, impossible. It'd be easy to kick the table over.

"Of course, I would need to study you," Raphael says, light, casual, wings flaring around his shoulders like a preening dove. "Just the once."

There is a threat, laced under those words. Not one of vitriol or contempt, but just– power.

"Study," Astarion says flatly. "How?"

Raphael stares at him, smile crooked, eyes half-lidded. "Kill yourself."

He goes very still.

Around them, torches flicker. Distant wails of punishment whisper through the cracks.

"Kill yourself," Raphael repeats, "and upon my honour, no harm will come to you from the moment of your passing and that of your reawakening."

Astarion bares his fangs. Shakes himself free, moving, not frozen. "And after that?"

Raphael rolls his eyes, mocking amusem*nt. He flicks his fingers; a gold-embossed stake appears in his grasp, perfectly pointed, a ceremonial death more than anything useful.

"I could kill you this moment," he says, damn near jovially. "There's nothing protecting you but my kind nature. I'm merely allowing you safety while you are… indisposed."

Indisposed. Slaughtered in a cambion's lair.

But it means getting closer to whoever is stronger, to the one that lifts him up and takes him from Cazador's control. It means two hundred years of a mystery, of thinking himself alone, can finally stop.

He doesn't want this.

He wants to know more.

Astarion unstraps his armour, lets it slip over his shoulders—doesn't take it off fully, he's not that stupid—and tugs his shirt open, just enough the second ring of scars can be seen over the hollows of his shoulder. Raphael watches him, eyes gleaming.

Laying down is an idiocy even above this idea, so he braces himself instead, squaring his stance and digging his boots into the carpet. Hellfire lurks under his skin, brimstone diatribe.

He extends his hand.

Raphael flicks his finger and the proffered stake drifts through the air, perching gently on his palm as if a hummingbird. It's warm, but not like the sun, not like the rippled scars beneath his hairline or day-old embers of a campfire. It's warm in a way with acrimony; it's warm in the way of potential.

His fifth death.

I am not yours, Astarion thinks, to a red-eyed vampire lord who thought death was his alone to command and control. I am not yours to kill.

Fitting, perhaps, that Raphael's stake burns like fire as he impales himself.

-

Infernal resurrection burns more when it happens in the hells.

Astarion hacks his way awake, ash dripping between his fangs. Warmth bleeds through him, down his marrow and white-veined flesh, overflowing from a poured chalice until he's simmering with it; a pantomime of life from resurrection. Blue flames wisp off his flesh.

Before him, Raphael is scowling, shaking his hands and adjusting his robes. There's soot gathered around his ankles, splattered over his walls—caramelized sugar fills the air from food roasted past its prime. The whole room hisses with smoke.

Astarion takes a miserable amount of pleasure that the hellfire of his rebirth is apparently strong enough to scorch Raphael's lovely table runner.

"What a mess you've made," Raphael admonishes, flicking his tail twice—infernal energy creeps into the room, cleaning up the pockmarked tapestries and carpet to smooth them back to perfection. A meaningless show of power, but also a show of repair—proof that whoever brings him back is stronger.

Astarion doesn't know who the mysterious devil is. But oh, this is twice they have bested those that command him.

He is not Cazador's, and with each death, he carves the vampire from his skin and replaces it with something else.

Astarion clambers upright, bones settling back into place and his scar thrumming. Raphael's stake is wider than those he's used before and now it's like a star has settled on his chest, wide and jagged, not a chair leg, not a murder.

Standing is uncomfortable. His clothing sits oddly on him—lines, pressing against the fabric, sensitive and raw—but Astarion doesn't look, keeping his eyes fixed forward. The stake, bloody, on the ground. "Forgive me," he says viciously, pushing his shoulders back and fluttering eyes he knows are sparking with leftover hellfire. There's a terrible victory thrumming through him, even in face of a damnable devil who holds lies over his head—he's even further from Cazador.

Thou shalt not die.

If Astarion wants to die, then he does.

It is a wonderful freedom.

There's a begrudging respect in Raphael's eyes, before it burns away in cold contempt. "That's quite the deal," he says lightly, mocking. "Your master is protecting you well. Aren't you thankful?"

"Protection?" Astarion bites out, saliva and soot spilling black down his chin. Cazador might have invited the deal but didn't get what he wanted—there wouldn't have been the fury then, the forge-hot rage boiling through you are mine. Reminders left.

Cazador gave him life.

It wasn't the only thing.

"Protection," Raphael repeats, wings flaring. "Why, the amount of desperate mortals who come pleading to my house for but a fraction of your condition would almost number the victims you've left in your wake."

Callous barbs, thrown like they will ever imaple him. Astarion has said harsher things to himself every day of his undeath.

The answer is all that matters. "Who is it?"

"Still a mystery," Raphael hums, which is a lie so rotten it reeks. "But I imagine that they must be dredging through their connection to raise you; what energy, fettered off in the Material Plane. Wasted, some would say."

There's a victory in his eyes. Not against Astarion, but against the one beyond them both. Raphael has his own reasons for helping.

"Worry not, however. Rest assured you've given me the first puzzle piece of a very complicated picture. Quite the little conundrum you are; undead and undying. Or, rather, dying again and again—what a story you'll make one day!"

Astarion cinches his shirt closed and imagines it's a garotte around the cambion's neck.

The House of Hope rumbles and awakens from some unseen cue, a rippling expanse of infernal energy teething into the carpet and lavious feast spread out for no one who would ever dare eat it. The toll of a far-off bell; the signal of distant approach.

"Prepare for my arrival," Raphael says. "Our deal will be redefining."

Astarion bares his fangs.

Raphael laughs, long and hard, and banishes him.

Another explosion of smoke, choked in grey and black, as stable ground disappears and the world erupts into distant shrieks of torment and scorching heat of the hells. He lashes out at nothing, blind, claws up and snapping on air—stone coalesces under his feet with the crack of interplanar teleportation—movement, dust, people–

"Astarion!"

He hacks out sulphur and regret.

Hands, steady, wrapping around his arms—Astarion wrenches his eyes open with titanic effort, blood-scents rattling through his skull. Wyll's standing before him, fluttering forward in support, eyes wide. New nerves rasp under the man's calloused palms, intersecting lines of heightened sensitivity like scars. "Gods, Astarion, are you–"

"I'm fine," he grouses, prickly in face of all this… warmth. "Let me breathe."

Wyll lets go, stepping back for all he's still hovering like an anxious hen. Astarion shakes himself, soot fluttering from his hair, smearing the inside of his shirt. His mind runs and trips over itself, leading to conclusions and failures and everything in-between—he doesn't have a soul, where is it, who is it–

"Arms up," Lae'zel barks, marching forward. She's all bared teeth and fury, one of her beloved little war-group gone from her grasp, but hells, he's back and unharmed, isn't it? She can remove the f*cking daggers from her eyes.

Astarion groans. "Loves, I'm fine, truly–"

"Arms. Up."

Let it be known that five miserable deaths does not reduce his self-preservation. Astarion raises his arms and lets Lae'zel inspect him with a field medic's biting eye, to the hastily-reattached armour and the lingering clots of sulphuric blood on his shirt.

To the ridges, scattered over his skin like volcanic mountain ranges.

Ah. His newest change—a tiefling's mark, still without horns or tail. He has no idea how much time it takes for him to be reborn but it doesn't feel long, considering Raphael hadn't moved—so to them, he disappeared for but a minute and came back changed.

There's no time to stitch together lies, not now. Astarion exhales an ash-smeared breath and prepares.

Lae'zel notices first, because she's wound like a winch and entirely unwilling to let anything slip by when it could be a threat. Her eyes narrow. "Your curse?"

Wyll blinks, and then looks at him—actually looks, rather than searching for injuries. His eyes lock onto Astarion's face, drifting over his cheeks and forehead. A furrow spreads between his brows. "Astarion?"

He swallows fouled saliva and pulls up his arms, staring at them. Only his hands peek out from his armour but there are lines there, wrapping around the back of his wrists and pressing to his knuckles. Fish scales, scar tissue.

Ridges.

"That isn't a glamour," Gale says, like the self-assured bastard he is. "I'm afraid we would have felt those while touching you; or, at least, when Shadowheart heals you." A frown takes over his face, one hand coming up to rest on his chin. "Unless Raphael did something?"

Well. He hates Raphael but if the party wants him dead, that will decidedly limit his ability to make a proper deal with the bastard. He needs to smooth this over.

How does he explain himself? How can he possibly describe why?

"Raphael recognized my… situation," Astarion manages, shaking his head as more soot dusts in front of his eyes. "He wanted to talk."

"And he had to f*cking send us away for that?" Karlach bites out, knuckles white over her axe.

Astarion smiles, thin around jagged teeth. "It's not a particularly kind condition," he says, reaching up in half a daze to run his fingers over the ridge on his cheek. It's not large, nor as scaled as Wyll's—more crystalline, like glaciers crossing a tundra. "Maybe he was allowing me privacy."

Her eyes narrow. "He's a f*cking cambion, mate. Doesn't have a decent bone to his name."

Astarion huffs a strangled kind of laugh. "On that we can agree, love. My dreams will be full of cutting off those hideous horns of his." He takes the moment to pull his armour closed around his chest, tucking the new scar deeper under fabric, hiding away the soot on the inside and the damning clues of what really happened. "He's drenched in all the charisma of a blood fiend and appeal of the undead. Little wonder he had to spread out a feast just to try and persuade us."

The jokes are light—his voice stays lilting. Like this is rote and expected.

But Wyll goes very still, all of a sudden. His horns gleam black in the evening light; the mirrored ridges on his face cast stark shadows.

"Astarion," he starts, then pauses. Draws himself up. "Did Raphael try to make a deal with you?"

Ah. The warlock worries for someone else, as if Mizora isn't a walking deterrent to the idea. Astarion's not quite so much a fool as to proffer a soul he doesn't have.

Well.

He did make a deal, but it's already completed, and it was the smallest, most inconsequential of things—Raphael got to fulfil his fetish of watching pretty little nothings stab themselves for his pleasure, and Astarion got to further separate himself from Cazador and take the first successful step towards figuring out who is helping him.

"Not yet," Astarion settles on, because he doubts the party would believe anything other than a variant of yes. "He said he would start looking into my condition, and then come back to me."

Lae'zel's eyes narrow. "Condition?"

Astarion smiles at her, teeth on full display. "Curse, love. How else do you think I picked up these delightful marks?"

It's not a curse. But they won't understand that—won't know what freedom a devil's changes bring to a vampire spawn who has never owned his own body until it was twisted away from him.

"You said it was a glamour," Wyll says, almost hesitantly, "from a deal your father made?"

It was by the man who calls himself father; who made a family from filicide and calls it obedience, who carved contracts and sold souls and calls for immortality. That isn't a deal. It was never a deal.

He thinks about it, sometimes. If he had just died in the alley like he was supposed to, he would be a martyr. Slaughtered over a law he can't remember, nothing more than a corpse to mourn. Instead, he's a monster.

Instead, he's lost his soul.

Astarion has said many things. Most of them are lies.

"Not quite, I'm afraid," he says, leaning back to kick his legs out in a wondrous picture of elegance, as if that will distract from the soot dusting the inside of his shirt and the fouled blood dried over his hands. "He didn't exactly leave me with the contract. All I know is that it will continue… transforming me."

Wyll raises an unconscious hand to rub at the base of his horns, hellfire eye soft. Astarion looks away.

Well. His changes—false though his explanation is—lay between them, and there's at least someone here with some experience; if Raphael is content to wait until the skies burn out before talking, he'll have to find other ways. Astarion turns to the only true tiefling, extending one hand delicately.

"Darling Karlach," he says, purring. "I don't suppose you can recognize which breed of devilspawn I am?"

She squints at him, one hand still braced on her greataxe like Raphael will teleport back so she can remove his head. "Infernal for sure," she settles on, frowning. "Planar tieflings are more… weird."

Hilarious. "I'll take that as a compliment," he says dryly.

"Blue makes me think Stygia, Cania; maybe Dis?" Karlach steps forward, ghosting one hand over his arm; close enough to feel her heat without touching. Her eyes narrow. "But they're cold as death down there. You're a bit chilly, yeah, but not near enough."

Genuine regret crosses her face. "Sorry. Could be anyone—depends how fresh the blood and what strength they were. Hells are complicated like that."

He expected that. He did. It hurts regardless.

Astarion sighs, waving a flippant hand. "Not a concern, love. It'd be far too easy if you had all the answers."

Wyll licks his lips. He steps forward as Karlach steps back, hesitation scrawled over his face. "Astarion, Raphael isn't here to help you. He won't break your condition."

Oh, he's very much not interested in breaking it. He only wants to know who's behind the power, who raises him up with gentle ministrations—and whatever dark hole Cazador has chucked his soul down. Just answers.

Astarion raises an eyebrow. "Darling, it's given me fangs and claws," he says, sweetening each word before release. "Rather the opposite of a problem."

Wyll frowns. "It's a curse."

It's freedom. It's revenge. It's proof there's someone stronger than Cazador.

Astarion smiles wider. "It's nothing to worry about."

And it isn't.

-

There is a part of Astarion, the miserable hopeful part never dying like it should, that is disappointed when Raphael doesn't emerge from the smoke of their campfire the next day, nor the next, nor the next.

Two hundred years has he existed without his soul, and only now it's f*cking with him? Pathetic.

Distractions come in easy form, as they finally cross the bridge that held them up and descend like death on feathered wings. Goblins are squalling beasts who stamp about in brutish inelegance; it can hardly be called a rescue more than a massacre.

Lae'zel is their leader but not quite diplomat, so perfect Wyll is the one standing in the corner with Halsin, speaking of shadows and mysteries and dead drow. Everyone else recovers.

The goblins lay slaughtered, as monsters always are. His choice of corpses, tossed around like debris, left alone as he picks his way through for salvageable treasures—bodies to crunch beneath his boots and writhe through death throes as he strides by unhindered. Victorious.

He killed them. Struck them down, with his knives and daggers and arrows, until it was him that won and it was them that died and he ground their useless existence into their skulls as the last thing they were made aware of before they dissolved.

Astarion's fingers twitch.

He wants to keep killing.

He wants to kill himself.

He's barely injured; Godey would have done this just to test the sharpness of his blades. The pain is a low simmer in the coiled snakes of his intestines, bones not quite aligned but neither broken. Simple suffering. He's well adept.

But gods, he wants to do something—wants to choose something, to go against two hundred years without fear of consequence or retribution. The goblins died and they were nothing and he wrung victory from their corpses but it's useless heroic slaughter. Killing those who were already going to die. The most he wins is putrid blood to sneak in the shadows from corpses; festering boils and weapons worth less than the broken hands he plucks them from. Cazador is unchanged by this. Cazador doesn't lose anymore than he wins.

Astarion stands in a ruin surrounded by death and bites his lips; feels serrated fangs sink into the flesh for black ice to pour between. The changes. The only things that protected him from Cazador experimenting with perfect immortality. If he hadn't woken up with hellfire eyes, he knows what would have happened; every death would be his to sample, to taste how sweet agony could be wrought when Cazador no longer had to concern himself with losing precious spawn.

How many lives would Cazador have taken from him?

But he didn't. Because there is someone stronger, and they changed him, and they are on his side.

This is his victory. Not meaningless slaughter for a hero's cause and death that comes without transformation or purpose or revenge.

Wyll is still talking with Halsin—the others are gathering to head back to the Grove. He can disappear and blame prizes, can bring back precious little trinkets to excuse his crow's eyes for all things shiny.

The sheath on his back, dagger tossed aside, cedar-wood replacing.

Astarion stalks through the ruins until he finds a stone room, one to contain the hellfire, littered in debris and the smoking corpses of those who have never meant enough to have anything change upon their death. His shirt is set far outside the radius, baring hollow pockets of pain with purple bruises, lingering sparks of agony that will not hold him for long. Cazador would call him healed as he is; Astarion will be more. He will be free.

Laying back is easy. Grabbing the stake is even easier.

"Look at me," Astarion hisses at the cold air, digging his claws into grout. "Look at me, master. You don't want me to die?" He places the stake right over his heart, the twisted mess of scar tissue from death after death after death of his choosing, of his choice.

"Come stop me."

Astarion imagines Cazador in the shadows, reaching out, the sun a dead man's land between them, and dies laughing.

-

His newest change flicks through his lips as if testing the air.

A forked tongue.

It's thin and flat, lashing out at air like something possessed. The most fitting of all his transformations, in a way. A serpent he has always been.

Cazador said he couldn't lie. The devil who protects him says otherwise.

It writhes in his mouth, words choked and garbled, but he forces it down until honey slips out instead. Another thing to adjust to, another change to bring upon himself. This is what he wants. This is who he becomes.

Wyll looks concerned, when he comes back to camp—but Astarion dumps half a bag's worth of looted weapons in his lap and lets that count as explanation enough. He listens to Halsin's apparent uselessness for removing their parasites and tries to fake surprise.

Heroism never pays, not with success. They can batter themselves against an army of goblins—rid Faerûn of the decrepit species—and still come out no better than if they'd just used their tadpoles to command them. It isn't like the Grove deserved to be saved.

The tieflings are wearily thankful; their fate is temporarily waylaid into something they're construing as victory. Them, with their horns and tails and magic; them who see him as kin, and wonder why he doesn't look on them fondly in return. Why he doesn't bow to their farcical stories and encourage them up for their own slaughter.

Astarion knows he's not an elf, not anymore. He could cling to that when his only changes were vampiric fangs and eyes that he's mostly sure were red; but not anymore. The elf is gone, buried, a gravestone without a body underneath.

But being a tiefling wouldn't save him—Aurelia was one, and Cazador still killed her, still tore her down to marrow and dressed her up as a corpse. No. Astarion is hells-touched, a harbinger of some infernal power. He is more.

That doesn't stop the tieflings from butting stupid optimism into their camp, popping open barrels and plucking insipid songs on stitched-together instruments.

They want a party.

What a collection of children.

He holds for longer than he expected, simpering around with purred delights and mind-shattering idiocy, before aggravation grabs him by the lungs and the moronic bard's throat starts to look appetizing for murder more than blood. Astarion grabs his glass, a delicate thing of bubbled glass, and stalks away from the party before it can crescendo into a nightmare.

He's wandering, casting about for anything else, when sand scuffs beneath his boots and a blood-scent drowned in fire reaches him.

Wyll.

The hero, the savior, alone on the beach.

It's enough of a commodity that Astarion pauses, glass pressed to his lips. The Blade of Frontiers has shucked his armour off and lost his rapier along the way, standing in just his undershirt and dark trousers, looking over the water. He's clutching his own wine like a lifeline.

A silhouette against the sunset. His horns carve scars over the horizon.

Astarion meanders over, clicking his heels loud enough to announce his presence, humming something tuneless under his breath. It's easy, to set up position against the half-broken dock, posts protruding through sand like mangled teeth.

Wyll sighs, resting his palm on the wood. With his sleeves cut away and glass of wine in his hand, he cuts for a figure of unpainted myth; the man before the legend. What exists when the fairytale finishes.

Astarion looks away. Stares over the water beside them, away from the celebration behind, the hoots for the bard's baudy song and Karlach's shouted encouragement.

"You're braver than I am," Wyll says.

Entirely untrue. Astarion co*cks an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Hells-touched, but not tieflings," he says, shrugging. "I'm a devil and you're cursed, we should be the same; but it's me that's hiding away on the beach, trying not to bring the mood down." He chuckles something morose into his glass, red splashing over the rim. There's a barely perceptible shake to his hand. "Gods, it's stupid."

"Don't call yourself stupid," Astarion sniffs. "It would reflect poorly if it got out I was choosing to spend my time with idiots."

Wyll laughs. It is a dreadfully wonderful sound. "I'm not sure why you're here," he says, inclining his glass towards the party beyond them, the echoing calls of voices and opened barrels. "There's far more interesting company to enjoy."

There is. Zevlor, might and loyalty bound up in a guilt so thick Astarion can taste it from here; Halsin, broad and open and only moderately more willing to talk about sexual exploits than dive right into the dust and perform them; Rolan, head held high and cantrips sparking like self-immolation alongside pretty words. All of them could grant him power; one simpered conversation and he claws home something to cradle. But–

But–

The wine is ash in his mouth. His scars burn. Thoughts roil like thunderstorms.

Does he know how to talk to people, beyond coaxing them to bed? Did he ever have anyone he could laugh and play with, content in knowing that they would be there day after day, loving him for little more than who he was?

Was he alone, before Cazador took him?

Astarion makes a point of avoiding those thoughts, because then he has to confront the fact that he can't remember very much at all.

"They're boring," he settles on, because insults have always come easier than honesty. "At least you can stumble into being entertaining."

"I do?" Wyll says, and the morose thump of his heart bleeds away; replaces with something quick and warm. He's smiling. "And what serves as entertainment for you, majesty?"

There's something warm in the air. Light, almost.

Astarion rolls his eyes. "You're dreadful," he says. "Even Sharess' Caress wouldn't read all the romance you do, and you still find a way to get excited about truly horrific butcherings of characters getting together. I've seen you feed Scratch enough sausages he nearly throws up. Even Gale would struggle to make all the hardtack you cook each time it's your camp duty. I've rarely laughed more than when watching you train with Lae'zel."

The words keep coming. "And don't get me started on how ridiculous it is, to offer help to Karlach when she could snap you over her knee—or sliding every trinket of Shar you find into Shadowheart's pack, like we all can't see it. And the less said about how stupidly diligent you are about maintaining everyone's armour, the better."

Ah. Those didn't sound like insults. sh*t.

"When you put it like that," Wyll says, and the ridges on his cheeks soften as his smile pulls them up, eyes bright with life behind the hellfire. "I don't sound half bad."

Astarion cannot look away. "I suppose you aren't."

-

It's weeks before he kills himself again.

That's not really his choice, either. But in the shadows-cursed lands, moments to sneak away from the party are few and far between. They tuck themselves under firelight, the flicker of torches and sluggish-burning logs from trees rotten and pucked. All of them are grimly steadfast, because there is no other option—they either push on or lose themselves to the curse. That's all there is.

Astarion stands beside them and hollows. Hunger takes a residence in his skull and the ink has not dried on its acceptance before it consumes him; before his trances break in shuddering awareness before he can truly rest. Claws pluck at his tendons like a harp.

The party doesn't know he's a vampire. They think he's just cursed.

Wyll stays by his side more than before—seeks out his company like it's wanted, like there's enjoyment in barbed words and biting comments. Astarion distracts himself with lackadaisy musings; plucking through Wyll's mind for his more deplorable readings and mocking fairytale heroes. They keep all their tents open to let the light in, far from corruption, and it means that Astarion is free to sprawl over bedrolls and bat at Wyll's leg like a displeased cat. The Blade of Frontiers endures; seems to enjoy it, laughing, blushing fiercely bright whenever Astarion finds a particularly lavicious phrase to read aloud.

It's almost– comfortable, in a way. Putting blinders to the world around to focus on the moment, nothing more than the circle of firelight and the people within.

But rich laughter and romance novels do not make blood.

Astarion retches on ash, excuses himself, and walks into the darkness.

He carries a torch, smoke curling around his chin to drift away. The sounds of camp die behind him, swallowed in the curse indomitable, and very quickly he's alone—just Astarion, padding over broken pavers and stone, a ghost in the graveyard.

There is nothing inside him. Maybe there never was.

The cold leeches, sinking through flesh like the parasites that brought him here. Death coalesces into memories, towns shackled under a curse that consumes them, each corpse a reflection of what was. How Cazador would delight in these lands; how he would string up his spawn like party favours to vomit out their failures.

Astarion stops walking. He's shaking. He's shaking.

"No," he hisses to empty air, an animal gutting itself in his chest. No, Cazador is not here, and Cazador is not winning—Astarion is free. He's free.

But he's starving.

Astarion crouches, free hand pressed to his chest like he can shove everything down, like he can swallow it—a year in the tomb is famine. A tenday in empty lands is not.

But he's starving.

He fingers the stake in his sheath, thin cedar with blood encrusted and dried foul. Around him lives a land of death—a snarled mass of gravestones and battlefronts. The bodies dies and the maggots eat them. That's how it has always been.

But dying heals him. Brings him back to how he was before, a new scar plastered over blue skin. Someone more powerful that Cazador takes him from these shadows and changes him.

Will dying reset the hunger?

Dying brings him to the edge of oblivion; a trance that hunger cannot break and peace that torture cannot disrupt. It smooths his thoughts and settles his mind. It frees him.

Astarion fumbles; jams the torch between two rocks and lays back, cold skin against cold stone. His shirt flutters open to bones protruding through the blue, lines like chains over his chest. His stomach is a hollow they throw loose shadows in. There's bile between his teeth.

Please, he whispers in his own mind, a prayer, hands clasped around the base of the stake. The edge digs into his chest, bloodless flesh squelching and ribs splintering apart; his thoughts, ricochetting back and forth, desperate. Please, please, help me–

-

Astarion ratchets upright, smoke trickling through his fangs.

Fire crawls down his spine, blanketing his scars like wings; slithers away with the pulse of ice. The chill of the lands cannot reach him, at least for this moment, hellfire consumption crackling over his tongue and reflecting off his eyes. A mark apart.

Deep inside, thrumming between the cage of his ribs, the hunger murmurs away. No longer screaming. No longer consuming. Infernal energy, just a whisper, ghosts over his fingers.

It seems someone was listening.

Astarion leans back and laughs.

Oh, if only he'd known about this before—strike himself down each time he starved in the kennel, coming back healed with hunger reset and a new damning feature to spit in Cazador's face, to brand him away from the spawn. Freedom, from the mysterious force on his side; the only one who actually helps.

Rats and commands and desolation.

Cazador has nothing to threaten him with, now that he knows.

Astarion runs his hand over the scar; just layered tissue, knotted in on itself. Raphael's is still the largest, four-pronged and nearly reaching his collarbone, but a patch of blue incongruous with all he's ever been allowed sits on his chest. His. Hellfire eyes and claws and fangs.

And… something else. Astarion hums, inspecting himself; ridges over blue skin, forked tongue, body crippled under its making. Nothing seems different this time, nothing leaping to him like it would for Cazador, to see what has left his control. Just himself.

Where's the change? Where's his freedom?

He stands, dusting the soot from his chest before putting his shirt on, setting the stained stake back in his sheath. There's fire, flickering on the edges, but light doesn't last long here and it'll disappear well before anyone can find it. Just another mystery in a land drenched with them.

But he's been away for enough time that Lae'zel will spur the others into a search party, so he will find it later. He goes to grab the torch and–

Pauses.

Astarion waves his hand. The torchlight splutters and crackles around him, still wrought with brimstone, but–

But on the ground below, no shape joins the light.

No reflection, no shadow.

Nothing for the shadows-cursed lands to latch onto, no twisting reverse that stalks beneath his feet. Astarion's heard of this before, in stories of fresh-blood tieflings who sold their soul and are ripe with infernal power; it's not unheard of, not quite, but, well.

He doesn't have horns or a tail, the most common of tiefling traits.

Astarion picks up the torch, holding it overhead; in the grey, it looks like there's something there, but nothing originates beneath his feet and stretches out in a silhouette. Lifting his boots leaves empty stone.

Instead, he's lost his shadow.

It's fine. He didn't much care for his shadow anyway; an amorphous mass that hid his face, his eyes. He learned nothing from it but another shape to run from. Cazador didn't do anything to his shadow, didn't control it, but it's another change—anything to separate himself from who he used to be.

He likes it better gone, actually. This is right. A worthy price for freedom; lose something indubitably useless to take the bite off his hunger.

Whoever is there is helping him—cutting away dead flesh to reveal independence beneath it. They're resurrecting him. They're healing him.

Are you listening? Astarion thinks, as loud as he can. Are you listening?

Only the torch crackles in response.

-

He's almost late enough Lae'zel was going to drag him back by his shorthairs, so Astarion takes his time to smile very prettily at her as he sweeps into camp. A flick of his torch extinguishes it and he sets it back in their neat pile, their only defense while they scour through lands unending in search of the haven mentioned by corpses.

She glares at him. "Stop disappearing," she says gruffly, like this wasn't his first time. "I cannot protect you if you get hurt."

Astarion rolls his eyes in dramatic fashion, since she's finally picked up what that gesture means. She mimics it back in a way that looks like a seizure.

The rest of the camp is a sleepy thing, wearied from long travel and harsh conditions. Shadowheart is praying, right on the edge of the firelight, Karlach sharpening her greataxe, Gale scowling over a sluggishly-boiling pot. They've set up their meager belongings, ready for another night carving hospitality from a land entirely devoid.

Wyll is sitting by his tent, thumbing through a book—he blinks, looking up as Astarion pads over. A smile warms his face.

"Hello, darling," Astarion purrs, and doesn't have to focus on biting his tongue to keep from shuddering through hunger as he lays down, sprawling on his stomach over the bedroll. There's a wonderful serenity to it all, to thinking again, to being.

Wyll laughs, setting his novel down. "Are you–"

He goes very still.

Astarion, halfway through stealing the book, flicks his gaze over. The man is sitting there, eyes wide, and blood drains away from his face—leaves his heat beating faster, nervous and rabbit-quick. Something like fear sours his blood-scent.

"Love?" He asks, cautious. "What's wrong?"

Wyll inhales, stiff as nails. "Don't do it, Astarion."

"What?"

"Whoever you were talking to, they don't want to help," he says, faster, like a dam is splintering apart in his throat. "Anything they offer is a lie. It's only for their own gain."

Astarion sits up, brows furrowed. "Wyll, what in the hells are you talking about?"

"I can sense infernal energy," he says grimly, which rather belays any defense Astarion could tuck beneath mockery. "You don't want to make a deal, I swear it. You don't."

Astarion stares at him, pulling back. Behind them, the campfire flickers, and no shadow smears over the ground. And apparently, infernal energy lurks in the air. Enough that the warlock can sense it, and warn him.

Warn him of something stupid, like he isn't achingly aware what a terrible decision that would be. Making a deal? He wasn't–

…well.

Kill himself, lose another piece of the corpse, of the existence, in return for a damper on his hunger. Pay the price of his body for prolonged numbness. It's nothing that he hasn't done before, when the payment was sex instead of shadows, but that was to useless mortals in flophouses who hadn't the literacy to write a contract, much less the magic to enact one.

Whoever is raising him does have the power.

But would it be so terrible, to strike a pact with them? The one who brings him back from death, who marks him in direct taunts to Cazador's fury, is more understanding than any he's faced before; is the only one who has been there through two hundred years to understand.

All he pays is himself—just deaths.

How many more does he have to lose?

"I didn't," Astarion says, shaking his head. "I– reached out, yes, but there wasn't a response and we didn't talk. Nothing happened." Nothing more than normal.

Wyll sighs. One hand raises unconsciously to rub at his horns, to what Astarion knows pains him to this day—Mizora didn't remake his body to carry the weight, his neck a knotted mass of tension. "Okay," he says. "I believe you, Astarion. But you–" something cracks in his eyes. "Please don't."

It's the please that does it, maybe, because the scoffed acceptance dies in his throat.

"I do not regret what I did," Wyll says, soft, eyes distant. "But I will always regret that it happened due to a deal. I wish I could have done it any other way." His hand tightens around his horn. "Servitude is not a worthy cost."

Astarion knows his claws. They are the perfect width to match the scars in Wyll's face, the one that tore out his eye and replaced it with a seeing stone.

Mizora has her own infernal set.

Are you trying to slip your leash, pet?

He swallows.

"We can do it together," Wyll says, painfully earnest. "You don't need a deal. I'm here for you."

The novel they're halfway through. Long nights and inside jokes. Comfort.

"Okay," Astarion says, and wonders if he's lying—wonders if he's just saying this to free himself from suspicion. "I won't."

Wyll exhales, hand falling from his horn. "Thank you," he says, like Astarion cracked the world in half instead of– agreeing not to do something. "Thank you. I don't want to see you become someone you're not."

There's no shadow between them.

"Why?" Astarion asks, before he can stop himself.

Wyll looks at him. A terrible concern and worry and something gentle sits in his gaze, tucked beneath the hellfire, beneath the ridges—to the person at the core. "I care about you," he says.

"Oh," Astarion says, and wrangles control back; grinds the emotions beneath his heel. "Well, far be it for me to correct your mistake."

The man shakes his head. "I don't think it's a mistake."

They're surrounded by the party, and in a moment, it all fades away. Just the campfire, gold like sunlight, spilling over Wyll's face. It splashes over an ember-bright eye and warmth. Damned by Mizora—hiding from the tiefling party—staying by his side. Protecting. Choosing.

"Oh," Astarion says, and Wyll kisses him.

-

They move through the shadows-cursed land with cold intention.

The haven, found; their mission, continued. Jaheira plucks a promise from Lae'zel's fingers and then Ketheric Thorm is their target, a way to free these lands and end the suffering. Something to end one hundred years of nothing more than shadows.

But there is a suited man playing lanceboard in the Last Light Inn with eyes like blood.

Raphael gives him a deal. Surrounded by his party, they all hiss and rage against it, but the cambion is patient—lays out all the elements until even Wyll and Karlach are begrudgingly cautious. No servitude, no soul, not that he has one. Just one death for information. Slaughter for slaughter's sake.

There is an orthon at the Gauntlet, and he is going to die.

(Break him, Raphael says. His eyes are deep pits of flame. And I'll tell you where your soul is.)

The shadow-cursed lands have no night but they set up early, getting rest before the fight brimming on the horizon. Everyone tucks away, leaves only watch, trying to collect themselves. Astarion's claws bite into his wrists.

It's old habit, to light a torch and stalk off into the surroundings before anyone can pull him back.

He walks blindly, eyes fixed forward on nothing. Two questions—where is his soul? Who is helping him? Scars called poetry, woven through flesh unhealing; a hollow filled with an unbeaten heart and the memory of personhood. Two questions for two hundred years.

Tomorrow. It's tomorrow.

His hands are shaking, bones clattering against each other under blue skin.

How pathetic. It's not like he's going against Cazador tomorrow, not even returning to Baldur's Gate. Just killing an orthon with the promise of information for its head, little more than understanding a deal that has doomed him. It's nothing to be this f*cking– scared over.

The fear is like a knife in his gut. He knows it's there, is writhing and twisting around the blade, but removing it means bleeding out. Means vomiting up all the rot and maggots within.

He knows what to do.

It'll make all of this go away. It'll prepare him, smooth over his latent injuries, refresh his hunger. Crush all this useless fear down to the hells they belong to; until he's not a sniveling wreck pleading for saviors. Until he's better.

Damn him, but he wasn't lying to Wyll—a deal isn't worth it, not until he knows more. He won't reach out to the power past the resurrection, won't tempt a pact; just a reset, back to pretty perfection. That's it. Nothing more. This is the right choice.

Astarion fumbles for his sheath; grabs the stake, tucked under his armour, still stained scarlet and clogged with blood-scent. Removes his shirt. Lays down.

This is the right choice.

This is the right choice.

-

Astarion saunters back into camp, flicking his hair over his ears and adjusting the curl of his shirt. There's a pile of soot and ash far away, what will look like little more than a misstossed fireball, and now his hunger merely simmers beneath his ribcage. Little more than a whimper.

Alive, again. Ready. Prepared.

He presses a chaste kiss to Wyll's cheek; listens to the man laugh with something worryingly close to endearment in his chest.

They're moving slow with… whatever they are. Wyll's a courtly bastard who did a frivolous little dance around the campfire, but that means Astarion is the fool who appreciated it, and they're both making each other a good deal more childish before Astarion can sink self-preservation back into his core.

But.

It's not bad, whatever this is. New, unfamiliar, strange—but not bad.

He could even call it welcome.

So yes, he's doing this; soft little kisses and purred encouragement instead of climbing onto his back, instead of offering himself up like free goods. Reading terrible romance novels to mock their inaccuracies instead of recreating them.

Living, instead of surviving.

Wyll pulls back, frowning. "Hells, you're freezing."

Astarion frowns in turn, pressing a hand to his face. Nothing more than the shallow numbness of dead flesh. "What do you–"

Waking up. Pulling the stake from his chest. Finding no changes. Wondering. Moving on.

Karlach said some tieflings were cold as death—a mark of their infernal bloodline. But he's long lost the ability to tell his own temperature. He wouldn't notice that chance, not by himself.

Astarion swallows.

"I've always been cold, love."

Wyll's frown deepens. He reaches out and takes Astarion's hand, clasps it between two of his own. And, ah, well; now that there's a contrast, Astarion can feel the warmth, stronger than anything he's encountered before, thrumming against his fingers.

This is not good.

"Is it the shadow-curse?" Wyll asks, peering deep into his eyes. "Do I need to grab Shadowheart? Or get Gale to teleport us back to Isobel?"

A curse, yes, but not that one—the other, with its teeth set in marrow to grind his corpse up like gnomish machinery. The curse that, presumably, Wyll has thought tamed; because Astarion hasn't mentioned the tongue or the shadow or the cold. He's done his best to hide them.

To the party, he hasn't changed.

"It's nothing, I assure you," Astarion tries. "Another transformation, that's all—it has been quite some time since the last. Just willful thinking that it would leave me alone forever."

Wyll inhales.

Astarion remembers, a little too late, that he can apparently detect infernal energy.

The warrior—the warlock—freezes. His shoulders draw up, tense, like he's preparing for a fight to crack open at any given moment; like a cackling archdevil with carrion wings will lunge from the shadows to slit throats by the wayside. "Did you make a deal?"

"I didn't," Astarion drawls, rolling his eyes, lounging, anything to pull focus. "Love, I just made one to kill Raphael's escaped little beastie for information—terribly difficult to figure out if I pick up a second before solving the first. I'm not nearly so stupid as to risk it all."

Wyll doesn't relax. "What did you do?"

"I didn't make a deal," he stresses again, fluttering his hands as if to show how no eldritch energy crackles to life. "Nothing but a bit of healing. I wanted to be prepared for tomorrow."

"Devils don't offer things freely," Wyll says, grim. "What did you pay?"

Astarion reverses his grip to wrap his hand around Wyll's wrist—feels blood pump under his numb fingers, warmth, scarlet, life. Living. Blood-scent. The hunger murmurs, dulled, in his gut. "What feels like a rather sudden drop in an ice bath, I believe."

Pain flashes over Wyll's face. He stares down at their shared contact, the warmth fleeing from his skin to simmer against Astarion, never enough to fill. "Healing," he repeats, quiet. "You changed yourself forever just for healing?"

Wyll's eyes are flat and scared—the same eyes curled on the ground of his tent, blood oozing from the base of new horns, throat rasped from screaming.

Astarion hackles under it. "It's just temperature," he says, tugging his hand away. A new difference, a new unfamiliarity, another leap from Cazador's tyranny; a f*cking victory, all things considered. They should be happy. He is happy.

Then, because there is no underbelly he won't strike for, he draws himself up stiff and betrayed, eyes flashing. "Don't you trust me?"

Wyll just looks at him.

"I do," he says, soft. "I do, Astarion. But sometimes I worry you don't trust yourself."

Astarion scowls—claws through a million miserable arguments that all boil down to defensive fury—and stalks away.

Wyll doesn't follow. Just watches him go, campfire splashing gold over his face, eyes worn. It's worse than if the man had spat vitriol and contempt. Worse than pleading apologies.

Because then it's just him, fleeing, never the one brave enough to stay.

He gets to his tent and hurls the flap open, shouldering inside. Only fineries and necessities here; all of his books have migrated over to Wyll's side so they can share, gnaw through terrible plots and characters like enjoyment.

Fury seethes in his throat. It cannot drown the regret fast enough.

Astarion curls up on his bedroll, sinking claws into the fabric to shred it apart. He's reduced one to ribbons by the time movement shifts outside his tent, the flap sliding open for slitted eyes to peer through.

Ah. He turns to face her.

Lae'zel crosses her arms, halfway into the tent and constructed from stoicism. Her serrated ears are pricked and raised, eyebrows brushing her hairline.

"Wyll," she says simply, because she's always been damnably perceptive. "You are fighting."

Astarion bites his lip hard enough to draw blood, spilling foul and tainted down his throat. “Nothing happened.”

Lae'zel stares at him. He does a remarkably terrible job of staring back.

"He cares about you," she says. "And you care about him."

What saccharine statements. What merryweather idiocy.

"Well," Astarion snarls, "maybe he should stop."

It's Wyll that got too comfortable with a man who has no history. It's Wyll that saw the hells in blue eyes and thought to get closer.

Biting your thumb at survival means death will come knocking. It waits with a hunger for fools; for those that damn it. Astarion has spent two hundred years in its bed, poised for its return. He knows the taste of oblivion like ambrosia.

He doesn't trust himself?

Astarion has survived—died, lived, died again—with no one on his side. He is the only one he can trust.

Lae'zel leaves. He doesn't follow her, either.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow his two questions are answered—tomorrow, all of this is solved. Nothing else matters.

This is the right choice.

-

Perhaps there's a reason Raphael sent them to clean up his problems.

Yurgir makes for a predator, and the party cannot call themselves anything but prey.

Spells and fire and crossbolts howl through air with a fury, everything going wrong like a competition. An invisible ambush from overhead, twin displacer beasts rampaging between brutish merregon forces, infernal fire choking the borders. Disaster and misery made incarnate.

Astarion snarls, throwing himself forward like a tarrasque—death wants him in the shadows but desperation keeps him hunting, keeps him clawing through the light to slit throats before startled eyes. Demons are demons but they die like mortal beings, die like they haven't earned their hellfire eyes, and he roars victory over their corpses.

He's bold. He's brash.

He's visible, as he spins away from a merregon and sees Yurgir looking at him.

(Break him, Raphael says. His eyes are deep pits of flame. And I'll tell you where your soul is.)

Astarion grips his dagger. The orthon is on the ridge, crossbow braced to his shoulder and fire crackling in his eyes. Karlach is charging her way up to him, tearing through his army like wet paper, but she's not there yet. The others are distracted with the displacer beast and grunt soldiers. If he gets there, if he carves a second smile into the demon's throat and brings his head back, answers–

Yurgir's crossbolt slams into his thigh.

Time slows. Astarion stumbles, but a tree has rooted in his leg, sprouting underneath to impale him to the ground. The shaft of wood shatters bone like brittle twigs and roots deep into the stone, a chain, a cage.

A knife through his shoulder. Pinned.

Yurgir laughs, loud enough it bellows through the cavern. He reloads a new crossbolt with the crunch of rusted machinery, a sharpened piece of wood—a stake, in other words. And from this distance, he won't try for the precision of heads; the chest is a far easier target.

The heart. Where a heart should be.

Astarion screams.

The battlefield rages on, infernal armies pouring through in banshee wails. Yurgir lifts his crossbow and sets him in the sights, leering down with a broken jaw and red eyes. Astarion, still, frozen, unmoving. Death looming overhead.

His ninth. Lucky number.

In the distance, Wyll shouts, the thunder of approaching footsteps. The world is indistinct and hazy in the corners, writhing like shadows, only the monster overhead.

Astarion lists back. He can't fall, pinned in place, but he paws fruitlessly at the wood like he can wrench it out. Moving tears deep at muscles and bone, familiar pain, and if he had time he could rip his own leg off to escape—but Yurgir is overhead, aiming at him, enforcing stillness. Astarion can't leave. Can't run.

Perhaps the most damning part is that he did all he could and still failed.

Then the crossbolt splits his chest open, and Astarion thinks of nothing at all.

-

Astarion wakes in a rippling cloud of hellfire.

He lurches, retching brimstone and soot; heat spills through his teeth like lava to pool in the cracks. Fire-ice rivers carve canyons over his back. Sounds of battle, muffled through ears clogged with ash; he scrubs furiously with clenched fists, eyes wrenching open.

Crouched over him, eyes wide and wet, Wyll drops a scroll of resurrection. Unused.

Hells, that's terrible timing.

Astarion elects to ignore it and claw upright, sinking his nails into stone. Resurrection shudders through his bones but movement spills to his demand and muscles obey. His leg is unpinned and uninjured—ash where was wood, melting away from unmarked skin. Only scraps of his shirt left, armour torn and twisted, chest bared.

Exposed.

An orthon's crossbolt is far larger than a stake and now there's a twisted mess of scar tissue over his heart, tree roots embedded into skin pale and stark against the shadows. Cerulean over blue.

And blood, pouring over his chest, scorching lines into his armour. Thick and foul, reeking of brimstone, burning.

Blue skin and frigid temperature and he's bleeding fire.

"Astarion," Wyll says, chokes, and tears are flooding down his face—actual tears, genuine terror. "What?"

There's a contract, snaring his thoughts and gorging itself on fear. An orthon overhead who needs to die.

"Healing," he manages through gritted teeth, scouring at shattered pavers for stability.

"You were dead," Wyll argues breathlessly, working himself into a right state. "Healing doesn't–"

Far behind him, Lae'zel howls some githyanki war cry, and promptly gets swarmed by merregons. Distracting them off Gale's wheezing form, because she is kind in her own calculated way, but threatening herself—even more than she knows, as Yurgir levels his crossbow in her direction.

Astarion could kiss that orthon on his fat f*cking face.

"Later, love," he grunts, pushing himself up on twisting arms, strength and weakness and rebirth flowing through him. "Lae'zel–"

Ever the warrior, Wyll spins without hesitation and hurls an eldritch blast at Yurgir, knocking the demon back with a bellow. The crossbolt slams into the stone wall with enough force to crack. More blood drips from the ceiling.

Astarion stands, fumbling once but getting his grip back on his dagger. Karlach's made it to the top level and Shadowheart has incinerated the displacer clone, but the battle is far from over and far from won. They'll need to f*cking focus if they want the death count to stay at one.

Heroes are heroes. They know this. Wyll reaches out to steady his shoulder—fire against ice, infernal warmth against infernal winter—and stares at him, assessing, still terribly drawn and panicked. But smoothing over. Readying himself.

"Later," Wyll promises, and sprints off to fight.

Astarion shakes himself, fully healed, fangs bared and eyes crackling with hellfire.

Later. He loves later.

It never has to come.

-

Astarion is right. He always is.

Later doesn't come and, truthfully, never gets the chance to, even after they've lain Yurgir and his precious army to corpses. Because as they leave the Gauntlet, Raphael is waiting for them, and then all of Wyll's foolish concerns mean nothing.

The party, panting, exhausted—they've drank their measly supply of healing potions and drained Shadowheart further to make sure they're all capable of getting to camp, but no one exactly came out unscathed. Even Astarion, who had the dubious honour of fighting twice from full, clutches at throbbing ribs and twisted ankles.

Pain is inconsequential. The contract is completed. Answers hum in the air like the curse itself.

Raphael smiles at him, teeth just sharp enough not to fit into his mortal disguise. A circle of sulphur curls beneath his feet.

"Ah," he says, luxuriating in the sound of his own voice, bouncing over the shattered stone of the shadows-cursed lands. "I must thank you for the state in which you returned my runaway guest—he made for a most enticing prize without his head. Far easier to reeducate when he's not in a position to ignore."

Astarion tightens his fists, dragging up to his full height and prowling forward. The rest of the party shuffles in his wake. "A deal's a deal," he says. "Tell me."

The cambion tuts, shaking his head. "Still so impatient," he admonishes, but sighs with picturesque resignation. "Very well. I suppose it has been two hundred years; you can only teeth your way through so many distractions before you bite."

Astarion stiffens.

Just cursed. Just hells-touched. Two hundred years is an elven lifespan but not for his young face, and there is only so many times Raphael can mention fangs before the pieces connect. The party still doesn't know he's a vampire.

Astarion coils in on himself like smoke. "Not your House of Hope?" He sneers. "You made your last deal in a far more acceptable setting."

It's a weak defense. The cambion sees through it immediately.

"You want to hear this alone?" Raphael blinks, hand pressing to his chest as if in shock—his eyes gleam with delight. "Far be from me to deprive you of support, Astarion. Secrets like this are not easy to stomach."

He grits his teeth. f*cking fine. He'll deal with it later. "Just tell me."

Raphael smiles. Leans back against the crumbling wall, one hand waving before. "Now, you asked me two questions," he hums. "In any normal world, you should have killed twice for them, but rather, there's only one question, because they have the same answer." His gaze flashes. "That lovely scar on your back."

Movement, from behind. There's a reason he removes his shirt when he dies, when hellfire scorches through his surroundings and melts slag from stone, but this time he couldn't. His armour has weathered it in places, tatters clinging to his arms, but his back is open to the air. The scars, two rings, spidering over his shoulders and ribs.

They're seeing him. They're seeing everything.

Astarion doesn't look back. Just glares into Raphael's eyes.

"Then what is it?" He hisses.

The cambion laughs, low and mocking. "It's a contract," he says. "Between Cazador Szarr, and the archdevil Mephistopheles."

Mephistopheles.

The name shivers something deep within—pulls ice to rest inside his eyes. Astarion holds it, testing the weight between his teeth.

"A contract," he says, flat. "For what?"

Raphael hums. "Let us start from the beginning, shall we?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "When one is weak, they desire ways to become strong; I've quite lost track of those who come pleading to my doorstep for but a taste of my power. Their stories are tragic, their offerings pitiful. And I am merely a humble cambion; imagine the potential of an archdevil!"

A flash of genuine resentment in his eyes. Not quite fear. Not quite hatred. Something older.

"Cazador Szarr is powerful," he says, lightly, like Astarion doesn't flinch under the name. "But oh, never enough. How he burns beneath mortal concerns; how he starves for choice. An unenviable fate."

Astarion's hackles raise. He's waving around vampire like a red f*cking flag. "Get on with it."

Raphael rolls his eyes. "Yes, yes. So little time in your mortal life; it isn't like you'll use it for anything else. But when he wanted power, he knew where to search for it—far below, to a fellow practitioner of arcane potential. An master of magic. And together, they devised a marvelous creation the likes of which the Planes have never seen."

He flicks his fingers like directing a stageplay. "The Rite of Profane Ascension. Granting strength while snipping away those unsightly vulnerabilities; all blood and no bite, you might say. Something to elevate him about basal concerns into immortal potency."

"But," Raphael says, drawing it out and relishing in the moment. "There's the regrettable cost of souls, all to be sacrificed at the same time to bring about ascension."

Oh.

The circles, never-healing, prickle over Astarion's back. Poetry, carved until perfect, the only scars that have ever stayed despite two centuries of torture.

Cazador would never pay a devil with his own soul. Why would he, when he had seven perfect slaves to take from instead?

Raphael smiles, splaying his hands. "Now, picture this, if you will—you are Cazador Szarr. Years upon years have you spent planning this, drafting your magnum opus—and then one of those lost little souls you've gathered has the gall to die before your planned date. And you're rather attached to this one, having already cast him as your shining star, so you're loathe to leave him behind."

Rather attached. Cazador, crouched over him in the kennel, pushing a stake through a frozen heart. You are mine.

"So you make a second contract. And you carve it into his back alongside the first."

Two contracts. Two concentric rings of scars, spilling over his shoulders and ribs, letters he's never been able to read.

"Death is not allowed to hold him," Raphael intones. "In return for his soul, promised early, Mephistopheles will bring him back each time he dies."

Astarion isn't breathing. He can't remember when he stopped and he can't fake it now; can't force himself to move. No command of stillness but something else, mountains grounding his feet and choking him.

Raphael's smile is filled with fangs. "Now unfortunately, Cazador wasn't quite intelligent enough to put a clause on what condition you had to be brought back as."

Yes. Yes, his changes, his freedom—his soul–

"A terrible shame, isn't it?" He sets one hand on his chin. It's not enough to break his illusion, but the shadows behind him swirl as if kicked up by invisible wings. "All those changes to mark each rebirth, so neither of you can forget your debt."

Nine deaths. Nine changes.

(They are a reminder, Cazador says, rolling his eye around in its socket)

Astarion stands there, shaking. Iron bands wrap around his chest, his lungs, a gibbet cage for the crows to swarm; some operatic choir screams fury and terror in the distant background.

"So I can't die."

"Oh, but you can," Raphael corrects. "And you already know that. No, I'm afraid that you cannot stay dead." He pauses. "At least, not until the ritual is complete."

Until Cazador achieves immortality.

Until he kills Astarion again.

Until Mephistopheles is no longer contracted to bring him back.

"I'll give you some time to think that over, shall I?" Rapael says, near a purr. "Why, perhaps you can find something to offer me so break that deal of yours. Rather than running into the arms of disaster and courting mistery, you could be free." He smiles. "After all, I am the only one who can help."

He's smiling. There are two contracts carved into unhealing skin and a chest empty of heart or soul and hellfire eyes that were once a different colour and he's smiling.

"You bastard," Astarion whispers.

With a deep, echoing laugh, Raphael disappears.

Astarion staggers back, arms stuck, a tremble quaking down his spine. The party spooks like startled birds and surrounds him, hands and eyes and faces, concern drenched over their expressions like mud. Lae'zel, longsword drawn, Karlach shoving through where Raphael had been as if to convince herself he's really gone, Gale throwing up protection auras–

Wyll, in front of him, face drawn, scared.

"Astarion," Wyll says, hesitantly, like he'll invoke some higher power if the sound is any louder. "Are you okay?"

Is he okay? Who would be okay after that?

His soul is gone and he's damned to the hells and Cazador is going to kill him and this time he won't be coming back.

Ink-black nails bite into blue-ridged skin beneath hellfire eyes.

He's going to die and it's going to mean nothing and Cazador is going to win.

"I need to think," Astarion manages. The words crack and fall from his lips like coal. "Just– go back to camp. I'll meet you there."

Wyll stiffens like that's a terrible idea but Astarion is already turning, stumbling off as his legs pop and crack under rigor mortis before they smooth out. He leaves the Gauntlet behind, the desolation wrought there in triumphant glory, Ketheric Thorm's invulnerability and Shadowheart's quest and the Absolute and all the other things he should be fighting for but that don't matter because even if they win, he's going to die.

Astarion walks through the shattered courtyard as if in a dream.

He's going to die.

He knew—he's always known, perhaps—that his soul was gone. You can't live for two hundred years of agony and expect to still have something tangible flitting about in your chest; but he'd– he'd thought–

He'd thought he was free, for at least this moment.

The shadows-cursed lands ripple and lurch around him, stumbling through until he ends up in the rotten remains of a graveyard, piled high with cracked tombs and fallen marble. Corpses, littered above and below, tossed aside and forgotten as the winds erode away their names. The only changes they have are to melt away to bone and dust.

How many more times can he die until there's nothing left to die again?

How many more times will it take until the body that Cazador ruined—the body that Cazador owns—is gone?

Maybe his master will show up—maybe another Gur will capture him—maybe he'll go back himself—maybe Cazador will see this miserable body that's been reshaped for him and feel even a drop of the pain Astarion does–

It won't kill him. He knows this now—knows that the more powerful being he's had the f*cking delusion to think was on his side is just waiting for Cazador's ritual to truly end him, to drag him screaming down to the hells.

Mephistopheles, bringing him back in hellfire rebirth, pushing the hunger from his throat and healing his injuries, taking his eyes, stealing his shadow, changing him, warping him, damning him.

He's not winning. He isn't free. He's just the battlefield they're fighting on—proof of ownership carved into a canvas to mock the other. The archdevil, taking revenge against being used for petty resurrection—the vampire, scouring possession in forced obedience.

Astarion will not die when they want him to.

The graveyard, around him.

He tears off his shirt, threads popping loose and careful embroidery split; throws it aside, hands shaking. It's tucked in his sheath because he wanted to keep it with him, wanted the option, wanted the choice—he pulls out the stake, gleaming scarlet, cedar. Coffin-wood.

Of all the deaths by his hand, he's only ever staked himself. Cutting off his head would leave too obvious a scar, divine power is far from his grasp, and the daylight no longer hurts. It has only ever been this.

Except when it wasn't.

That day, caught in the sun, stretching for shadows—if he hadn't gotten his throat slit—if he had tried harder to reach Cazador—if he hadn't had this second contract–

He could be dead by now. He could be free. He could be safe.

But he isn't, because he is useless even at killing himself, because there is a hole where his soul used to be and he can't remember what it feels like to have one.

Astarion's knuckles gleam blue around the wood.

He doesn't bother with laying down, with arranging himself. Just presses it to his chest, trembling, the scar spread like a constellation beneath his hands.

"f*ck you," Astarion snarls at the starless sky, fangs bared and tears in his eyes. "You don't get to decide when I die. I'm not yours to kill." A sob, crouched in his throat. "I'm not."

He closes his eyes, steadies the stake–

Wyll tackles him.

They both tumble over, the stake flying away to crash into a broken gravestone; Astarion's back slams into the dirt hard enough to spark behind his eyes, a strangled cry rattling through his lips. Limbs rise and clamber over, eyes flying open—movement. Hero.

"Wyll!" He shrieks. "What are you–"

The man fumbles, one hand clasped around Astarion's wrist to keep it stuck to the ground. Ragged panic blooms over his face. "I'm not letting you hurt yourself!"

This f*cking idiot– "I'm not!" Astarion yelps, tring to twist away like a hooked fish.

Wyll lunges for some bullish strength and manages to clamber on top of him, straddling his waist with knees pressed into Astarion's sides, pinning him flat. He's breathing hard, eyes wide and wild. "You weren't?" He pants, incredulous. "Astarion, you were about to stab yourself!"

"Which won't kill me!" Astarion snarls, bucking up to land a solid knee in the small of Wyll's back. "Gods, were you even f*cking listening to Raphael?"

"I was!" He leans down to shove at Astarion's shoulders, embedded in the dirt. "And he said you could still die!"

Tactic switch. "It's healing," Astarion barks. "I come back unharmed– I'm just preparing for another fight–"

For some bloody reason, Wyll doesn't listen to logic and let him go. He stays grappling, weathering Astarion's half-drowned blows and crouching lower to spread his hands over Astarion's wrists, flattening them as to not strain his elbows. How bloody kind.

"Stabbing yourself is not healing," Wyll says, a shrill mixture of delirium and incredulity.

It is if you're damned to the hells, which the man should know, considering the lecture Raphael paraded before them like victory. Astarion bares his teeth and wrenches up, tries to dig his claws into Wyll's arm—he just shifts his grip, holding both of them stable. He scrabbles for nothing.

"Okay," Wyll manages, shaking his head. "Let's– calm down, okay? Just breathe."

Lovely. f*cking lovely. Astarion doesn't need to breathe, and he certainly doesn't need to calm down, considering he's the one pinned by a monster hunter. "f*ck you," he hisses, and writhes more.

Wyll huffs something like a mystified laugh. With his knees braced and hands raised, he's built quite the secure prison, and there's nothing Astarion can do but spit. His heels dig into the dirt. "Get off me."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he doesn't. Astarion kicks him again.

"It's okay," Wyll says, like soothing a startled horse. "You don't have to do this, Astarion. You're okay."

"f*ck you," Astarion snarls.

"You said that already," Wyll notes.

He did. He's going to continue to say it, too. As many times as it takes to get this idiot off him and back to the revenge he's being deprived.

He's pinned to the ground—all he has are low blows. "What, are you here to kill me yourself?" Astarion hisses, saliva frothing to the corners of his mouth. "Does Mizora's contract extend to those without souls? Which part of my transformation is enough to damn me?"

"None of it," Wyll says firmly. "You're not a monster. Not your fangs, not your soul—it doesn't matter."

He stops breathing. That's… a very particular change to point out in isolation.

Confusion flashes over Wyll's face—then understanding. Then chagrin. His grip doesn't loosen but he does sag, exhaling an ember-hot breath and looking away.

"I know you're a vampire," Wyll admits. "Astarion, I'm the Blade of Frontiers—I knew from the moment I met you."

Astarion freezes.

"What?"

"The scars, not eating, how you reacted to mundane things," Wyll ticks off in terrifying self-assuredness. "The curse tripped me for a second but, well– I know vampires. You're as obvious as any I've encountered."

What the f*ck.

Astarion stares at him like any moment he'll pull back, reveal that it was actually Raphael who dropped enough hints for him to finally put it together, that he truly thought he was traveling with a hells-touched magistrate all this time.

He doesn't.

Gods above, he knew.

"Why didn't you say anything?"

Something flashes across Wyll's face—a lie, built and prepared—before it slips away. "At first, I was testing you," he says, grim honesty. "By the time I joined, Lae'zel had already brought you along, and I didn't know if githyanki knew vampires were threats or if she would just see me attacking one of her party members. And you were walking in sunlight and over rivers—something was wrong. I was content to just observe."

Astarion swallows. Flat on his back, looking up at a hunter, and something other than fear sinks in his gut. "Then what?"

Wyll doesn't sugarcoat it. "I've killed vampires before," he says. "I kept a stake in my pack and waited for you to bite one of us. And then I was defenseless in my tent, everyone else gone, injured badly enough you could have killed me and blamed it on Mizora. Or even drank my blood with no one to know." Something like a smile crosses his face, a wretched softness in his eyes. "But you didn't."

He looks away, lost in thought. Looks back. "Karlach showed me I let Mizora give me targets I should have known better than to believe were monsters. In another world, I would have… killed you. I won't lie. But not here. I trust you, Astarion."

Oh.

A hunter wouldn't say that.

But Wyll might.

Astarion sags back, head thunking into the dirt. He exhales a stale breath.

They stare at each other, hellfire against hellfire, shadows whispering all around. Wyll's eyes are huge in the dark, armour spilling around his shoulders, lips open as he pants. There's no moon to frame behind his head but Isobel's blessing does the part, silver motes drifting off his hair in a halo—not the gold of sunlight over Baldur's Gate, but something still to be revered.

Astarion looks down. Focuses on anything else. Rolls his shoulders against Wyll's calloused palms, a dull ache surfacing in the back of his skull, the adrenaline of the tussle bleeding away. "Get off me."

Wyll hesitates. "Are you going to stab yourself?"

"You'd just stop me again," Astarion mutters, bitter as a disgruntled child. Wyll stares at him. "Gods, no, I won't. Let me up."

Slowly, he moves back, knees releasing Astarion's sides and giving him his arms back. Cluttered for a second as they untangle, limbs around limbs, until they're both sprawled over stone apart from each other.

Astarion slithers upright, shoulders hunched. Yurgir's murder dulled his hunger to mere pleading but he still doesn't have enough blood to swell, so all he can do it rub fruitlessly at his wrists and glare at injuries no one else can see.

Wyll winces. His own bruises bloom, purple-blue, over his arms. "I'm sorry."

"Apology not accepted."

The damnable man just laughs, tilting his head back. "I suppose I deserve that."

He does. He does and he doesn't and the world keeps spinning on.

In the darkness, the shadow-cursed lands ripple around them, distant baying of spectres. This clearing lingers with Selûne's light, a glimmer of silver, nothing more than a pocket of warmth in a tundra. A fitting place to die, if he'd been allowed.

Tossed away, leaning against a gravestone, sits the stake. Dried blood, encrusted over the bottom; scorched wood from hellfire rebirth. Evidence this has happened before.

Evidence he's been successful before.

There's a cacophony of voices in Astarion's head, howling for him to run, to flee, to take up the stake and kill Wyll just to cover himself, just to shelter under the miserable idea that if he goes back maybe he'll be safe–

Astarion swallows bile and soot. He doesn't move.

Wyll is quiet, for a moment.

"You don't want this," he says.

Astarion bares his fangs. "Of course I don't," he bites out, hands curling into rictus claws in the grout. "You think I want to be damned to the hells? It's not a destination vacation, love."

Wyll's eyes are soft and terribly understanding. "Not like that," he says. "You don't want to kill yourself."

There are layered scars on his chest that say otherwise. Choosing a hunter, laying on his back, making a deal with Raphael—his hands are more familiar wrapped around lengths of wood than they are daggers. In an undeath deprived of choices, there is at least one that he can make, one he will remember more than torture that never leaves scars or memories that never last beyond the tomb.

Something brims on Wyll's face; familiarity. One hand reaches up to wrap around his horn, to the weight that bucks and pulls at his head like an oxen's yoke.

"You're punishing yourself in hopes it hurts someone else."

Nine deaths. Nine changes.

(They are a reminder, Cazador says, rolling his eye around in its socket)

(There is someone stronger. Clinging to the knowledge, desperate, frantic. Someone is bringing me back)

"It's not like that," Astarion mutters. He can't say it louder; can't lie to any convincing level. "It's– he said I wasn't allowed to die. So I did. That's it."

That's the truth, and it's true, and he aches around it. Nothing more. Dying not for death but for spite. Dying in his own cosmic misfortune like laurels.

"Okay," Wyll says. He seems to steady himself, rising up to his feet and adjusting his stance. Isobel's blessing settles on his shoulders in pale refraction, ghosts over water. "Okay."

He extends a hand.

Astarion stares at him—thinks about it—and lets the hero pull him up.

It wasn't entirely a life; after the fight, he does need healing, and his ankle lights up with cold awareness as he puts his weight on it. Astarion hisses, drawing back, and Wyll wraps an arm around his shoulders. Doesn't pull away at the ice there, his own skin pulsating warm. Like fire.

He can't remember the directions—can hardly remember how he got here—but Wyll is quick to steer them towards the right angle, past broken cobbles and a piece of cedar, laying against the ground. Scarlet and soot.

A reminder. His own, rather than the ones given to him.

Then—like the dramatic fool he is—Wyll rears back and punts the stake deeper into the shadows-cursed land. It cracks off a gravestone and spins deeper into the darkness, disappearing to lost grey. Recoverable, maybe, the fouled blood-scent of his own veins leaving a stark trail in the air, but–

Astarion watches it go.

Walks away with Wyll.

They move through the graveyard in somber silence, careful steps over uneven pavers and thorned roots. Not back to the Gauntlet, to the myriad corpses left scattered there, but instead farther away, to where smoke trickles into the air. Camp.

It's a slow journey, stumbling under exhaustion that death would have taken from him but he must still carry, but they go. Wyll takes more and more of his weight, guiding with weary precision through the war-torn world, until sound murmurs through the shadows and light flickers in the distance.

The fire, a beacon through the grey.

Approaching it takes forever. It takes no time at all.

Lae'zel is there—everyone is. They're standing around the light with this horrible drawn worry on their face, raw concern; heart-bleeding fools, all of them. A collection of perfect, star-wrought simpletons who laugh and cry and fight and care.

"He's okay," Wyll says, which feels like an aggressive overembellishment of the truth, but everyone relaxes. Still fretting, Karlach bouncing weight between her feet and Lae'zel actively twitching as she holds herself back from demanding a full report, but relief pours over their faces.

Astarion looks away.

Someone's set his tent up, bolted it next to the fire so the warmth can reach it, unfolded his cover and spread out all his blankets the way he prefers.

He looks away from that, too.

Everyone hesitates, not quite tension thick in the air, but Lae'zel is their leader and always the first to break it. She strides over, boots clicking over loose stone, ears pricked and mouth set in a firm line. "Injured?"

Wyll waits a moment, but when Astarion doesn't answer, he nods, tilting his free hand back and forth. "A little," he says. "I'll take care of him."

She nods. Gale exhales, brushing a hand through his hair.

Lae'zel steps forward again to stand before him, crossing her arms. She waits until he looks at her, until their eyes lock and he can see past her slitted pupils, to the power and care there.

"Stay alive," she tells him. "Or I will venture to the hells to drag you up myself."

Astarion sniffs, pressing a hand to his chest like he's at the peak of his poise and not a soot-smeared wreck with a bared chest. Darling, he goes to say, dry and sardonic. I'm rather insulted you think I won't be luxuriating in the heavens.

It doesn't come out.

She nods, like she expected that, and steps back. The rest of the party bleeds away, giving them space, a perfect path through the light to his tent. Wyll nudges his back until Astarion steps forward, padding along. Warmth, spilling golden over his skin.

Wyll pulls back his tent flap, nudging an escaping pillow inside, and waves him in—becuase he hasn't much a mind to think for himself, Astarion obeys, ducking past the entrance and heading to the far back. Everything's set up, his weapons polished and sharpened, clothing set out—how long were they gone? What happened?

Astarion sits. Tucks his limbs in like there's an invisible circle he has to fit in, pressed against the pillows, back ramrod straight.

Sliding the flap closed, Wyll mirrors him, legs crossed and arms relaxed. His eyes are soft.

Silence, light as rain, hangs in the air. Astarion isn't brave enough to break it.

"I think I understand," Wyll eventually starts, licking his lips. "Your… sire sold your soul for immortality, but each time you die, the archdevil changes you?"

It sounds so simple, laid out like that. Hardly the kind of mystery that should have consumed him for two hundred years.

Raphael was right. There were never two questions; it was only ever one. Why had he wondered where his soul was and who was helping him? Why hadn't he made the easy connection? Why had he been so f*cking determined to think that resurrection back to a life of torture was ever for his own benefit?

Astarion looks away. Nods.

"Okay," Wyll says, on repeat. He's trying to be soothing but there's something raw in his face, anguish over the truth dripping like bile through his hands. His brow furrows as he thinks something over, weighing all possible responses. "Do you know how to care for those changes?"

Astarion blinks.

"Darling," he drawls, "if your chosen response to everything that's happened is if I'm keeping up on my hygiene, I'm going to elevate my disappointment to remarkable new levels."

Wyll flushes a lovely dark tone. "Not like that," he defends, but there's a smile settling on his lips, laughter staining his words. "Just that they're… different. I didn't know what to do with mine."

Do with them? Perhaps for horns, cutting larger holes in his shirts to fit them around his head, but that's it. Nothing more than a body.

Maybe the confusion is stark on Astarion's face when he isn't so focused on staying poised, because Wyll nods, raising one of his arms and tapping at the ridges there, scaled and intertwining. "Mine can get tight," he explains. "Not enough skin to move freely, or pulling taut when I stretch—Karlach gave me some tips when that happens. Can I try them on you?"

Delightfully unsubtle. As garish as a waving red flag. It's welcome nonetheless.

"If you need a test subject," Astarion sniffs, "I suppose I can provide."

Wyll nods, reaching out—then hesitates, caution scrawling over his face. "Is there anything I should worry about?"

A tenday's worth, yes. Astarion co*cks his head to the side. "Hm?"

"Any of your changes," Wyll clarifies, rubbing his hands together. "I… when I first changed, every part of it hurt. Is there anything you want me to avoid?"

Pain is around more often than it's away. If he could scar normally, he would be a spider's web, a shattered porcelain vase—something broken and unmendable. Pain is what he is, what he knows.

The idea that it could just be cause, rather than punishment, is unfamiliar.

"I don't know," Astarion admits. "I haven't thought about it."

Something sad flicks over Wyll's face before it's gone. "Okay," he says. "Do you want me to try on your arm?"

Astarion shrugs—can't seem to force words out—and extends his left arm over, claws curled in and palm up. His tent is cramped enough there's hardly a bubble of room for space and it's easy to settle it in the air, halfway between them both. Waiting.

Wyll bridges the gap and reaches for him.

His hands come palm first, an infernal warmth brushing against numb flesh. One under his forearm, the other on top, reverberating points of comfort drawn up and smoothed over.

Wyll's hands, calloused, rough, brush against his ridges; not on the peaks but right below them, rubbing the crystalline growths with careful, deliberate circles. Massaging away tension so old it's grown roots.

Astarion sinks.

A dreadfully indulgent hum slips from his lips. Then, before he can regret it, Astarion leans back into the pillows, breaks the circle he'd trapped himself in, and hums again; stretches like a luxuriating cat. Still aware, still hearing every thump of Wyll's heart, still there, but– allowing this.

Enjoying it, almost. Like it's something he's allowed.

Wyll pauses.

Astarion looks over, but Wyll isn't looking at him; or, rather, he is, but above his eyes. To his hairline, curls pushed back by his stretch, the skin underneath.

The sun-scars, rippled lines like ocean currents.

Ah.

Wyll doesn't say anything—he doesn't have to. Astarion grimaces and looks away, but makes no effort to hide them; there's no point. Any hunter worth their salt knows vampires don't scar beyond killing injuries, and Raphael's already laid the bloody truth between them. The puzzle is two simple pieces already halfway pushed together. He might as well finish it.

"Burned to death," Astarion mutters. "That was the first one."

Wyll exhales. Reaches around and switches to a different ridge, this one on the back of Astarion's wrist, alongside a roiling knot of tension that's been there so long he can't imagine its absence. "Okay," he says, rote as the weather. "What change was that?"

"My eyes," Astarion says, and marvels at how easily the words come out—a confession, a weakness, spilled to this sentimental fool with kindness carved over his heart. He can't remember the law. He can't remember his eyes. All he has is the death.

Wyll's gaze flicks up to meet his—ember-warm fire and grey stone, mirrored.

Neither are his original eyes. Has he forgotten what colour they are?

"Cazador killed me the second time," Astarion says, staring at the canvas overhead. Reaches with his free hand to tap at his chest without looking—even covered with scars of his choosing he knows where the original sits, one hundred and seventy years of its presence alone, beneath the hollow of his collarbone. "Staked me. That's when my skin turned blue."

A year to notice. A year before he understood.

"He didn't like the changes," Astarion says, because there's a hesitancy in his chest that pushes him to explain why he liked them—why he wanted his body warped when he had already experienced that from the alley. "He– saw them as Mephisopheles reminding him I belonged to another. For me, it was revenge."

He exhales. "He didn't kill me again."

Wyll pauses for a moment.

Because if Cazador didn't kill him, but he's still changed, then he must have died elsewhere.

Died again and again and again.

The story has already started and Astarion continues, curling in. "It was a few days into traveling," he says. "When you pushed me on eating. I didn't want to be– ah. You were testing to see if I maintained my cover as an elf?"

Wyll winces. "Yes."

"Bully for you," Astarion mutters. "It worked like a delight, then. I went off into the woods to get away from you all and–"

He hesitates. Swallows the words.

It was nothing. There wasn't a reason, not in any of the myriad ways he tried to convince himself—proving a point, breaking the command, feeling free. Just him, laying back in a forest, far from Baldur's Gate, far from commands, and still– still listening to them, still letting them rule his life.

He didn't want to die.

He just knew that Cazador didn't want it, either.

"I… killed myself," he says, very quietly. "Just to know if I could."

What reason is that? Why had he thought that was being free?

"My claws came in," Astarion says, like he can just bluster past it all, tossing in a shrug to smooth over the rot in his throat. "And I focused on distracting you until it seemed like I'd always had them."

No answer. Wyll just shifts his grip up his hand to work around his fingers; no ridges there but he presses gentle circles into the base of his claws, where the nailbed turns ink-black and curves upward. Heat pulses through the ice, an ache he didn't know was there until it's mitigated—hands unadapted to hold claws but given them.

He didn't want these changes. He convinced himself he loved them anyway.

"Fourth was after the boulder," Astarion says, leaning back. "We didn't have enough healing, so I thought I would… test if dying healed me." He shrugs again, the only motion he feels capable of. "It does. But you noticed my fangs."

Noticed them again, apparently. How confused Wyll must have been, to hear glamour as the excuse and not vampire.

"Then was Raphael," he says, and his free hand curls up; claws in the blankets, shredding pinpricks into the worn fabric. "He wanted to study me. So he had me kill myself."

And Astarion said yes. Obedient as ever.

"The ridges?" Wyll fills it, reaching for one around his elbow. He's painstakingly careful with it, never massaging too hard, stripping away old discomfort like birch bark.

Astarion nods. "Hard to hide after that," he says, grimacing. "No point in calling it a glamour when that would strain even infernal credulity, and I couldn't have you blaming Raphael. I still needed him to make a deal."

Back when he needed to know. Back when he thought there were two questions.

Wyll exhales. Makes a quiet, encouraging note in the back of his throat.

"Before the tiefling celebration, I killed myself," Astarion says, and he's said the words so often they're starting to fall apart in his throat, loose like clouds. "I was– angry. I don't know. Earned myself a forked tongue."

Wyll's eyes flick up—Astarion opens his mouth dutifully, flicking a serpent's tongue out at the man. Longer than normal, thin, flat, twin pronged; far from a normal tiefling's trait. He's likely not prepared for the next one.

"Then here," Astarion hums, looking around—through the tent's flap, the campfire casts a lavender glow over their faces, like a pale imitation of the moon. "I was starving, and dying reset that. It took my shadow."

He holds his free hand up, wriggling his fingers. Nothing appears on the ground. No reflection, no shadow.

"Hells," Wyll breathes, eyebrows to his hairline. "I can't say I've seen that before." Guilt flashes over his face. "When I accused– you weren't making a deal, were you?"

Astarion licks his lips. "I think I was," he says. It's less than a whisper. "Not officially, not binding, but– I was pleading with the power bringing me back. I wanted it to be on my side. To be saving me."

Two hundred years learning he's alone and he still reaches out like an abandoned pup for any proffered hand.

Where is my soul? Who is helping me?

Astarion grimaces, leaning back. "Yesterday," he says, soft. "I was scared. Panicking. I wanted to calm down."

It's stupid. It sounds even stupider out loud. The idea that death is so rote to him it's soothing—beneficial—all to prepare for a fight. That he'd willingly mutilate himself just for quiet.

"Then, Yurgir," Astarion says, flicking a hand up to tap at the mangled mess of his chest. At his shirt with burns on the inside, not the soot of hellfire rebirth but instead dredged lines from liquid flame.

He huffs around a frustrated laugh. "I'm cold as ice and bleed fire. What a f*cking mess."

Across from him, Wyll presses his hand over Astarion's—lets his own infernal warmth sink through the winter. A tremor, under his skin.

He's scared, Astarion realizes. Listening to his descriptions of death and void and pale and peace. Heroes die, that's a part of adventuring, but it's something to cower from in dark corners and hoard scrolls of resurrection for. It's not something to experience, to dine on until it becomes known.

He doesn't want to die.

People who don't want to die don't kill themselves.

"Nine?" Wyll asks.

Nine.

He's always counted it that way, as the scars built on his body and the years trickled by. But– if it were nine, he wouldn't be here, wouldn't have damned himself in a deal he can't remember. Because there's another, the first, in the dead alley surrounded by corpses with red eyes above, but that wasn't– why didn't he count that? Why did he not believe his first was a true death, or the others were in a separate category?

They're all deaths. They're all murders, by his hand or others.

Astarion raises a hand to brush at his neck; the two divots there, pockmarked little circles over skin where a pulse should hum. "Ten," he corrects quietly, in fact of memories dulled by centuries but not the emotions behind them, the terror, the fear, the relief that someone was here to help.

Someone more powerful than him. Then someone more powerful then Cazador.

How long has he been believing they're on his side?

Cazador killed him. Mephistopheles is waiting for him to die. Nothing they did was for anything but their own sake.

Wyll swallows, licking his lips. "Ten," he agrees, like it's afternoon tea.

Death made and bought and bargained for. The only scars he has that could kill a mortal being; the only scars from a time before.

The silence stretches, but not drowning, not collapsing in on him with marble dust. Like he's reading, searching for the next line to read aloud and make Wyll laugh.

Astarion stretches over his other arm, setting it lightly in the man's grip. "Your skills are acceptable," he says imperiously. "Continue."

Wyll smiles, wry, and continues massaging around his ridges, soothing skin pulled taut and cracked. His callouses brush against Astarion's cold skin in damningly lovely warmth, not hellfire, but the embers of a well-worn campfire. As if in response, what little blood he has stirs under the surface, magma currents. Fire and ice.

Helping him. Choosing him.

The Blade of Frontiers, pinning a vampire to the ground, knocking the stake from his hand. Trying to keep him alive.

"And–" Astarion pauses, rolling the words around his mouth. He's never said them before, not while meaning it, not with truth.

But it feels right, now.

"Thank you."

"Thank you," Wyll corrects. "For not going through with it."

Astarion exhales. The air warms between them, lingering puffs of infernal heat and frost, softening the suffering to serenity. Like they're together. Like they're safe.

"And, for what it's worth," Wyll murmurs, head bowed. "I'm glad you're alive. The world is better for your existence."

Oh.

Astarion presses his free hand to his chest, to the knotted mass of cerulean scar tissue there. A chair leg, a stake, a crossbolt; a legacy of death he's carved into himself in hopes it upsets the canvas' owner. Claws and fangs and skin and shadow and eyes—erasing himself like revenge. Killing himself like that will ricocchet back to his master.

I'm glad you're alive.

He isn't. He hasn't been for two hundred years.

"Cazador is going to kill me," he says. "And Mephistopheles will drag me to the hells."

Wyll shrugs. "Mizora will command me to kill someone soon," he says. "I'll refuse. So we'll survive down there together."

This fool.

This lovely, wonderful fool.

"It's a date, then," Astarion says, and listens to Wyll laugh.