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While there certainly had been far worse nights Astarion had endured in the past two hundred years, there certainly had been better ones.
Pre-dawn threatened the horizon, the deep black of the sky catching into deep bruising of blues and purples at the edges, with just a hint of red framing the eastern buildings. Astarion hadn’t found dinner for Cazador, and being late normally meant his nails all got removed with pliers when he showed up again, at least if Cazador’s mood hadn’t soured through the misdeeds of the various siblings.
And Astarion would be late. There wasn’t time to reach the sewer system from here that got him close enough to the alleys next to Cazador where he could lurk around in the shadows and go through the side spawn door.
Better to accept the punishment than try to run, though. Astarion had only needed that lesson one time. Fingernails were nothing as long as he could go to the dormitory afterward. You only had ten of them, which sort of put a hard limit on how long the affair could be drawn out. You could metaphorically lick your wounds in peace, shiver on the inch-thin mattress and hold your hands to your chest.
…normally. Cazador had been in a mood of late, sending the spawn out to find victims far more often than he used to. Astarion was ‘on duty’ more nights than he wasn’t, which felt like some sort of late stage vampire insanity descending upon Cazador. His Master had always been beyond reasonably paranoid on avoiding getting caught: who they were allowed to hunt, where they were allowed to prowl, how often they hunted in general, and how often they were to change their hunting grounds.
There still lingered traces of that, but things had changed of late. Cazador’s weathervane moods flipped from raging frustration to something akin to a religious fervor.
It terrified Astarion.
He hoped it would only be the fingernails, but he could not out-run the dawn. So, Astarion scuttled through the streets to that beautiful area between the Docks and the seedier part of the Lower City. Astarion could not, of course, enter private property. But if a house was abandoned, then it didn’t belong to anyone at all, and Astarion could huddle inside and wait for time to pass.
There was a collapsed stone building he favored. The wooden flooring had half-rotted out, exposing the cellar underneath the house, which was dark enough that it was safe for Astarions during the day. He slipped inside before the sunlight could catch him, nose wrinkling at the smell of mildew and black mold. And other molds: white fuzzy ones, some weird pinkish molds that clung to the perimeter of the building but no further, as if warded off by some other, greater mold presence in the building.
That would be the black mold of course. The floor was thick with it.
Astarion had nothing to fear from them of course. The molds were Astarion’s friends. Astarion liked to water them to make them sprout, because mortals would go oh no. A mold. I breathe that in, and I become a fungus person. Which probably was how it worked for them, but Astarion didn’t need to breathe, and he’d long since learned that while some mortal poisons could effect him, molds didn’t. Something about him being undead meant they couldn’t take root inside of him.
The smell made Astarion want to gag, but it was safe. Mortals steered clear of his fallen shitheap, allowing him only some relative discomfort during the daylight hours while he waited to get all his fingernails ripped out.
So, Astarion slipped on in, enjoying the silver lining of at least having a day where he didn’t have to interact with his siblings.
And then he stopped.
There was a man in his building.
“For fuck’s sake,” Astarion said, neverminding all the spores in the air.
The man was plastered in the corner, shivering. He didn’t look that old; just stumbling over the bar into adulthood, likely. His skin, glistening with sweat, was a rich brown that sang of the sun to Astarion, causing a flicker of envy to stir inside of him despite the man’s sorry condition. His hair looked like it had been braided, but the braids were messy and tacky with blood.
He smelled sick with fever and infection alike, and Astarion could see why. His face had been ripped open at some point, semi-recently. The wounds were not healing correctly; the skin was puffy and swollen around them, angry and purple-black in a bad way.
And not just on his face. There were further wounds underneath the clothing; Astarion could smell it. His shirt was a mess, seemingly half-glued to his body with congealed blood, but Astarion could make out deep gouges that tore into the man’s torso, with more signs of infection around the wounds. And that ankle had definitely been at least badly sprained if not broken for how swollen and angry it was.
There wasn’t pus. That was bad. That meant all the infection was on the inside, and it would kill him. He was not long for the world.
“Could you not?” Astarion asked. “Can you die elsewhere?”
The man didn’t respond. He didn’t even so much as look Astarion’s way. Underneath the filth, his clothing almost looked fancy. Good colors, good embroidery, decent shoes on the man. Better than the quality Astarion had. Maybe he could steal the man’s shoes? Cazador didn’t allow them new clothes often, and bad boots made the whole business far worse. Astarion tried to peer over the man, trying to get a feeling for size of the boots. If they didn’t fit him, they might fit Leon, and the spawn tended to swap shoes they found or stole. Cazador never let them have the clothing off of the victims they brought in.
Then again. Maybe Astarion shouldn’t steal the shoes. Come nightfall, if the man survived long enough, maybe Astarion could escort him back as a meal? Cazador would not be pleased with the quality of said meal, but showing up with someone was usually better than showing up with no one at all.
“If your wounds don’t kill you, the mold definitely will,” Astarion said.
No response. Probably wouldn’t survive the day. Astarion would get his boots after all.
But the bastard was in the cellar area. Which, to be fair, had the least amount of molds for some strange architectural reason Astarion couldn’t understand; sure cellars were normally where it was dampest, and thus a breeding ground for fungi. But the area had decent drainage, and it was not overly damp down here. Astarion sat back against the opposite wall and watched the man shiver.
Maybe Astarion could rifle through his pockets for loose change? Time oozed on by, with nothing to do, and Astarion did not want to slip into his normal trance with a stranger in front of him.
Well, fine then.
Astarion decided to go for the coinage after all.
Three steps away from the man’s body, the man suddenly locked eyes with Astarion, and flung fire in his face.
Astarion startled backwards, nearly tripping and falling over himself, scrambling back to his wall. The man stared at Astarion now. The clawmarks had gouged out one of his eyes—deep infection there—but the other was decidedly not human. The sclera looked like polished obsidian, catching the sunlight just so, with nothing but a ring of devil red around it.
No horns. No tail. Nothing else. But that was not a human eye. And that had not been a simple easy breezy flame cantrip, because Astarion knew that cantrip, and that had not been normal fire flung at him. It had missed Astarion, but he could still feel a secondary burn on his face where the fire had gotten close, a flame beyond normal fire.
The man stared at him, still shivering, still clearly weakened from whatever was going on with him, and apparently ready to kill Astarion if he got too close.
“Oh you’re a devil,” Astarion said.
He could feel it now. He’d thought through the action earlier, of carrying this man back to Cazador, as a reflex. But it didn’t have the threaded tinge of compulsion behind it. Astarion was commanded not to drink thinking blood. But after he’d once tried to bring back some wizard’s lost imp to Cazador, his Master had changed the hunting parameters to only mortals. And this man didn’t qualify.
Astarion slowly sat back down with a frown, staring at the man quizzically, who glared at him back.
It didn’t look like true infernal malice. It looked like the expression Violet got after having spent too many days in the Kennels, the terrified bluster of someone desperate to keep themselves from getting hurt again.
…Okay, perhaps bluster was not the right word, because the devil had fire at his fingertips.
Astarion didn’t know that devils could get infected wounds. Could he die from this? Or would the fever just run its course? He clearly wasn’t in position to be doing much of anything.
Astarion felt something he hadn’t in a long while: a strange stirring of curiosity.
“Have a name?” Astarion asked.
The man didn’t answer. Why would they make devils look so young? He didn’t look threatening like that. How was he supposed to tempt people to give them his soul or something? Astarion vaguely remembered something about hierarchy among devils, a very strong stomping order of who had to obey whom. This man couldn’t be even middle management. He didn’t look particularly cruel. He looked as young as you could possibly be while still technically being legal. That didn’t feel monstrous to Astarion.
Though, that could all be rubbish. People said so much about vampires after all, certain they knew that vampires looked like cruel bastards, and confident in their knowledge of how vampires worked. So many prayed to the gods right before Cazador killed them, and it did nothing.
But eventually the man collapsed back into a half-sleep. The sun slowly slipped over the horizon, and Astarion returned to get his fingernails removed.
—
Cazador had been furious of course.
And something truly had changed, because Astarion was sent right back out the following night.
Now that was unusual. Not unheard of, but unusual; Cazador thought it amusing to watch his slaves try to catch prey while deeply injured, but he rarely did so outside of a particularly strong sadist fit or true impatience. Yousen had also failed to capture anyone, and he too had been subject to fingernail removal, and he, too, was being sent back out.
That felt dangerous. Astarion could do nothing but hope whatever mood Cazador was in would pass soon enough.
“You cannot survive on your sloth,” Cazador had said. “Do the one thing you are good for.”
If Astarion failed again, it would be far, far worse, as he didn’t have any fingernails left. He’d had to put his hands in gloves to hide them, and he’d need a contrived excuse for mostly clothed sex.
…well, it wasn’t like Astarion had any soul left. He’d go for someone extremely drunk and ‘escort them home’. He’d swallow his self-loathing down one more time. It was always one more time. Though it was a stupid reflexive thing; what did it matter on the specifics of how they died? They ended up dead either way. A drunk man still ended up just as dead as some nubile blushing virgin who had themselves a very good time before Astarion betrayed their infatuation by getting their throat ripped out mid-coitus.
(Sometimes Cazador would command Astarion to finish anyway.)
Astarion hesitated in the streets. It’d be wiser to hit one of the dock taverns then; they weren’t as diligent about protecting their clients as the Elfsong Tavern was. And you had to shake up your hunting grounds even if Cazador wasn’t doing it for you, or else people would start putting two and two about you having been seen with that missing person. Hence the normal strategy of hunting people who no one cared if they went missing.
But, if he was going that way…
On a strange passing fancy, he stole a few rolls from one of those night time vendor food carts. The temple was closed, but Astarion had long since mastered the ability to steal everything Cazador wouldn’t provide. And Astarion had gone to great lengths to figure out how to make his mage hand invisible. It took a little reconnaissance to find out where in the bloody Hells they kept their good potions from the outside of the building, but he eventually found where the study was. He summoned his mage hand on the inside of the building, where it could unlatch the window, pick up a couple of needed items, and then float on back down to him.
And then, on impulse, because hunger and thirst were different, he stole a couple of flasks and filled one with water.
His safe house wasn’t that far from the dock taverns, and Astarion slipped inside.
Now, to make things utterly clear, it had been about five hours since he’d last seen the man. Five hours was not a long length of time, all things considered. Astarion was half-expecting the man to be missing or perhaps just dead. Did devils turn into goo when they died? Would Astarion know?
So, the scene. Man was curled up on himself in the fetal position. Check. Normal. All things considered, to be expected.
What was not expected was the horns that had ripped their way out from the man’s head, with dangling flaps of skin still attached to them, and blood coating the man’s face.
“Oh you poor thing,” Astarion said, and for once, it wasn’t even that sarcastic.
The man was shivering even harder. The skin looked too-glossy, and his eye was clouded.
Astarion stood there for a moment, considering his options. He’d half been tempted to just throw the bread and the water flask at the man and let him scurry off with it like one of the pigeons, but the man—the devil—clearly wasn’t well enough for it. And it really did look like some sort of devil puberty thing was going on. Which, that was weird. Depending on where in the coast you were, standard human age of adulthood could range from 15 to 21, completely disconnected from the normal age people went through puberty, which depending on how rural versus urban someone was and also depending on their nutrition, could be anywhere from 10 to 18 years. With devils, what, was it actual the moment you became an adult, devil puberty started? What a terrible way to go about things.
Okay, he didn’t even know if devil puberty was a thing, but the man was clearly slowly turning to a devil.
Or, more accurately, he was already a devil, and now his body was catching up to him.
Astarion recognized it. He’d turned into a vampire oh so long ago. The bards, the authors, the arcanists, they always glossed over how long some of those transformations could take. He vaguely recalled from a father? a mother? someone’s words once ages ago, that sometimes elven kin would spawn a strange changeling child—a true changeling, not those amorphous quasi-doppelganger shapeshifters—who would at adulthood shed their mortal form and become a true fairy, before slipping through into the Feywilds.
It was a not a pleasant process. Sometimes it was a more literal spinning of a flesh chrysalis than you would like.
Astarion eased closer. The devil had enough awareness to hiss slightly, trying to back against the wall, but there was nowhere to go. His claws lanced out, sluggishly, finding nothing in the air, and a too-bright flame once again came to the devil’s fingertips.
Astarion should have felt fear. Fire wasn’t good for vampires.
“Now stop that,” Astarion said. He felt strange, a flickering of bemusement and affection at this. For all his dangers, the man right now resembled nothing more than one of those half-dead feral cats that got territorial about who was allowed in the sewer tunnel and who wasn’t. “I stole two very good potions for you, and I could be using them instead to sell for money to fill a safety cache with.”
Astarion faked going to the left, and the devil flung fire in a clearly panicked move. Which meant now Astarion could go to the right with some relative degree of safety, depending on how quickly the devil could summon flame.
The devil did not listen to reason. He squirmed and fought Astarion as Astarion got the potion bottle in the mouth, and then rubbed downward on his throat to encourage him to swallow. Not all of either potion got inside of him, but most did. The healing potion got to work immediately, knitting the claw wounds closed, leaving behind unfortunate thick scarification. The potion for curing disease would take longer to work its magic through the man’s system.
Astarion waggled the loaves and the flask at him. “I’m leaving these here. Don’t be here again. I need this place.”
And then Astarion left to find someone for Cazador to drink dry.
—
Once, hunting for Cazador had been a once a tenday thing, or even sometimes once every two tenday when Cazador had been more cautious and wanting to lay low to avoid attention. During such times, you kept hunting until you found him something, and then you got days off to miserably lie in your bed, staring at the slats in the wooden wall and wondering if you inhaled enough mold spores if you could kill yourself slowly enough for Cazador to not notice.
Cazador cycled through weathervane moods. Sometimes Astarion spent most of his time in his dormitory, and he was not to be seen or heard unless reporting in for a hunt. Sometimes Cazador expected Astarion in his chambers during the day, with Astarion to sleep curled up at the foot of Cazador’s bed, like a literal dog, commanded not to move. Sometimes Cazador went through periods of caution, punishing anyone who took anyone with more status than a scrivener.
And sometimes he ordered them out again and again and again.
The Master had been doing that more of late. He’d even sired another spawn a few years ago, a sorcerer Leon, who seemed to thoroughly believe that the reason all of them were in sorry states was because of a skill issue, and he would actually be able to hunt enough to keep his daughter safe.
It had been three years of that, and Astarion’s skin itched. He wanted Cazador to hurt Leon and Victoria in whatever fashion he was planning already instead of the pain looming in the distance. The quicker Leon realized he was just as powerless as the rest of them, the better.
None of them were anything more than rats.
And all the rats were on duty. Astarion probably had a few days of leeway before he would need to find someone again; at least Cazador did not expect 100% accuracy. Not after two hundred years of it being Aurelia and Astarion and Petras. He did always expect them home on time, and the compulsion meant Astarion had to try.
But that didn’t mean he had to try the entire time he was granted meager scraps of freedom from the manor.
Normally during these times, Astarion would go to a tavern or brothel or one of the ‘not actually a bathhouses’. He’d pay with coin (stolen from others) and put in good alibis as someone who does not normally abduct people. Sometimes he’d flirt around, see who seemed tempted, sow the seeds for future people to ensnare. Not everyone put out on the first jug of ale. Sometimes he would simply catch up with the latest cultural events: any bardic tales or bits of popular theater, or any other moving trends. He listened to people complain and squirreled away bits of information to use on others later. If there were dock worker strikes again, perhaps one of them could use some stress relief, and that was easier if Astarion knew enough to be appropriately sympathetic. Astarion’s opinions were whatever someone wanted to hear, and Astarion had mastered ferreting out what someone felt strong opinions on before voicing his own support without it seeming obvious like he was fishing.
So naturally Astarion went back to the safe house.
For a moment, entering down into the basement, Astarion felt a flicker of disappointment. He couldn’t see his devil—not a friend, they weren’t friends, Astarion barely knew whoever this sorry soul was—acquaintance anywhere, and Astarion had stolen more bread and some sausages from a tavern on the way in here.
And then a flicker of movement in the back, half-hidden behind a fallen pile of stone.
The devil stared at him.
He looked far more hale. The wounds had closed up nicely, and he no longer had that fever sheen to his body, for all that in a day’s time, the devil had grown a tail, and his feet seemed to be in the process of fusing themselves down into hooves.
Horrid to look at. Bad. Bad visuals.
“Well you seem alert!” Astarion said. “What’s your name?”
The devil didn’t respond. His one eye only stared at Astarion, clearly trying to gauge how much of a threat Astarion would be to him. Fire flickered in his hand, and Astarion felt a pulse of fear.
“Well that’s not very polite,” Astarion said.
For a moment, he considered dangling the food in front of the devil for information. And then Astarion’s intestines revolted, crawling up through his stomach and into the throat, at the thought of playing the Cazador at this. So Astarion, like an absolute moron, instead just walked slowly over—okay yes, it was no sudden movements with cats, but surely that applied to half-feral devils as well—and put the food down in front of the devil.
“Here anyway, you horrid man,” Astarion said. “Stop costing me things. I could have gotten caught you know. Now, here, I have water in this flask, and I will trade you for the empty one, hm?”
Nothing.
Well, if he wanted to play it that way.
Astarion had had two centuries to perfect his own craft. He knew how to avoid being seen when guards had gotten suspicious, and how to escape unnoticed if a surprise spouse arrived. He knew how to lift gold and handkerchiefs and anything else from pockets and then spin them into tools to use to get people to come home with him. Cazador’s tastes were the unmissed but still decidedly beautiful, and that could be hard to juggle.
And with all that had come a strong knowledge of magic.
Oh Astarion was no wizard, but he had a handful of precious spells at his fingertips: the invisible mage hand, an invisibility spell to hide sometimes from Cazador angrily storming through the manor ready to hurt the first spawn he found, a light charming effect to make a target more pliable to coming home with Astarion for all that he felt the worst sort of sewer scum to use it. And among those spells was the ability to wriggle his way into a person’s mind. If it was only surface thoughts he looked at, no one would notice, and he could gauge how a conversation was going, how to better appease himself to someone.
Astarion, probably, could pull double the amount of people than he normally did. Not enough to perhaps earn the Good Spawn room, but a considerable more.
But Leon and Violet had set themselves up for failure. If you performed at 100%, that’s what Cazador would always expect of you, and he would only raise the bar higher. By usually getting prey on Cazador’s deadlines but being slow about it, Astarion had earned himself the most valuable resource a spawn could have: wiggle room.
Besides, actively catching more prey at this point would infuriate both Leon (who desired the room so greatly for his daughter) and also Violet. Having siblings furious at you for consecutive years did not make the unlife situation more pleasant, and Astarion would rather sleep in the shitty room and not have his siblings trying to sabotage his every move. Which wasn’t base paranoia; Violet did actively try to sabotage Leon’s hunts.
Astarion’s path gave him precious hours he could use in moments like these.
So, with a small whisper and a twirl of a copper in his pocket, Astarion reached out for the devil’s mind.
Pain.
Not a current pain. Or, maybe a current pain—the body felt disconnected from the mind, a strange blurred afterthought; whatever fever the man had endured he hadn’t even noticed in comparison to the blinding light inward. He was stuck in the aftermath of a pain so complete you crawled out the other end a devil. There was an intelligence in there, a sharp one, in the dim recesses. Still a mind, terrified, but shutdown from overload reflexively. The pain seared Astarion, threatened to consume him, for all that it was the afterimages of staring at a sun until he’d nearly been blinded.
Astarion let the connection fade, and with it, went the rest of his fears and reservations.
“Oh so you aren’t a threat,” Astarion said. “You barely understand what I’m saying at all. You’re—oh my fucking gods, you’re actually more scared of me than I am of you? Is that it? I don’t understand though. Who made you into a devil? Is that actually just devil puberty? Are you a cambion? That would explain the sort of type of devil you seem to be turning into. It doesn’t really seem like a fun transformation though? Tsk. None of them are.”
Astarion sighed, exaggerated with a shrug. “Well you’re no help to me.”
And then he left.
—
Astarion managed two whole days before he furiously returned to the safehouse. He stepped over the stonework deeply, horrendously annoyed.
Of course the devil was still there. Astarion tried not to feel relief seeing him.
The devil was, of course, sick again, with fever, and this time also what seemed to be dehydration. Of course he was. He was in no state to fetch water on his own, and Astarion hadn’t been doing it for him. And by ‘no state’, Astarion did not solely mean whatever torture had befallen the man and rendered him a puppet in his own body.
This time there were fleshy mounds straining underneath the skin on his back, what looked like the slow growth of wings from the inside out. He hissed, actually hissed, as Astarion approached, but weakly.
“Stop that,” Astarion said crossly.
The devil half-scrambled away, further into the corner. His one eye was fixated on Astarion, but there was greater coherence there. That was something. Not a lot, but something. He wasn’t even sweating. Probably because he didn’t have a plan for water other than manipulating vampire spawn into giving it to him.
Astarion felt a wave of self-humiliation, an unkind mirror at how Astarion himself had been after a year in the tomb. Language had been overwhelming. Thoughts had been overwhelming. People had talked at him, and he’d loathed it the entire time, because he couldn’t match the words with information, or follow where the words went. And he’d been aware of how far he’d degraded, into a wormlike state.
Astarion did not like the sensation of it now.
He could just bodily drag the devil out into the streets. The Flaming Fist would probably finish him off for Astarion. Or just scare him out. Something.
Astarion sighed.
“I brought more sausages, okay? Did you understand that? Can you understand I’m feeding you and not your enemy? Ugh. It might not be the worst thing in the world. If you’re here, other squatters won’t try to steal my spot.”
Astarion, carefully, handed over the sausages and the spare water flask. They were snatched near out of his hand, and then the devil plastered against the wall. Mold was smeared across his back. Clearly devils had an immunity to molds or else this devil would have died and become a fungus person thrice over.
…maybe he had been somewhere else. Somewhere nicer. Maybe his instincts had let him to an actual house with a bed, and he’d been chased out, with knives and a pitchfork or two. Astarion didn’t know where all those wounds had come from, but he had been near-ruined when Astarion had first seen him.
An invisible mage hand slid the old flask from where he could see it stored against a wall, carefully. The devil didn’t notice its absence.
Astarion sat down across from the devil and pulled out a book he’d stolen. Astarion had heard the title floated around in a few taverns, which meant there was a new popular book that Astarion had to have opinions on or he wouldn’t get to lure people back to Murder Manor.
Perhaps it was simply this: Astarion hadn’t been around long enough before. Because after a few hours, the devil had shifted closer. He stared at Astarion, half-afraid, half-curious. His eyes were locked onto the book.
“Ah, this?” Astarion asked, holding the book up. “This is riveting historical fantasy about Balduran, apparently, the illustrious founder of this city, and his whirlwind romance with Ansur. Very star-crossed lovers, and not in an interesting way. I’m reading it, and I’m deciding I don’t like it. It’s not nearly steamy enough to be interesting, and the romance is tepid at best. A collection of tropes tacked on together. Both of them are filled with lust for the other’s body but convinced that the other would be disgusted by their own lustful ways. I wonder if the author had a prude kink. Don’t worry if you didn’t get any of that. It’s not interesting. Actually, you know what, if I have to suffer, you should too. Here. Let’s read a passage together, shall we?”
—
Astarion could only manage about an hour most days, when he could show up at all; he’d stolen a proper waterskin, because dying of thirst seemed the worst way to go (Astarion’s veins always screamed for more blood). He’d come in, pockets full of food, and apparently the devil wasn’t getting food any other way. If he ever left the house, there were no markings on it. Astarion almost wondered if he was bound into the building somehow, but he couldn’t detect any magic on the building or on the devil himself, other than—and really Astarion was fucking moronic for not casting this earlier—lingering transmutation magic.
After three more days, wings erupted from the devil’s back, and Astarion had to steal a couple of emergency healing potions for that. The smell had Astarion’s mouth slavering like one of those overly trained dogs.
But each day, the devil sat a little closer to Astarion. He hissed less. His eye stared at Astarion more when he talked, fixating on Astarion’s mouth. Sometimes his fingers trailed into the air, not to Astarion’s mouth, but to his throat. Never actually touching, and never in a gripping or clawing gesture.
Exactly once, when Astarion was reading aloud, he realized the devil had put his head in Astarion’s lap, face twisted in pain and fear and pain and shame and pain.
“Definitely got the pitchfork treatment, hm?” Astarion asked aloud.
There was no answer.
Well Astarion couldn’t do anything about whatever was going on with this devil, so instead, he tolerated the occasional head in the lap.
Or at least, he thought couldn’t solve it. After several more days, he got an idea.
One did not steal from Sorcerous Sundries. The proprietor had so many defenses to kill any thieves, and if they didn’t kill you, the Flaming Fist would. But, if you stole the money from elsewhere and then purchased goods with your illegal funds, well then no one cared about that.
Astarion returned with a full water flask, a small cottage loaf of bread, and a potion of mind reading.
The devil stared at him attentively when Astarion slid into the basement. It had been raining lately, and the reek of mold was strong enough that Astarion almost wanted to gag. It couldn’t be good for those with living lungs to be here, but for all that the devil clearly suffered from the banes of starvation and dehydration, he seemed resistant to mold spores.
That did seem strangely right. It felt like old, dusty knowledge in Astarion’s withered brain. Devils were deeply resistant to poison as well as fire. Half the layers of the Hells were various kinds of fetid swamps, right? And sometimes flaming fetid swamps?
A little bit of lethal black mold had nothing on what was meant to survive there.
But that wasn’t important, probably. For the now, Astarion shook the potion in front of the devil.
“Now this is probably the stupidest idea I’ve had of late,” Astarion said, handing over the potion. “But if you drink that?” He mimed drinking it for lack of a better idea. “That might help us communicate a little bit. I’ll read your mind, and you’ll read my mind, and maybe between the two, we can get somewhere. You really need to learn or relearn how to talk. I can’t take care of you forever.”
The thought, for some reason, caught in his throat and lodged there. What a stupid thought, taking care of a devil for forever. But for all the fire mishaps aside, the devil had been far more relaxing to be around than any of his siblings, and gods above, Astarion was lonely for anyone who wasn’t a threat to him or someone he would be a threat to.
The devil did not drink the potion. He stared at it with a considerable amount of distrust.
Astarion sighed. “Please? Look.”
Astarion took the potion back, and he took a single sip, and then he passed it back to the devil. “It’s fine! It’s not poison. Would poison even work on something like you? Don’t be silly, Mister Devil Man. You’re perfectly safe from vagrant spawns, and hopefully vagrant spawns are safe from you, for the time being. But we need to fix your lack of speech. I can’t keep carrying the conversations on my own.”
The devil stared at the potion for a while. Astarion could almost see the intelligence flickering in there, straining against whatever had happened.
And then he drank the potion.
“Yes! Alright. Just a second.”
Astarion nearly fumbled through the spell, but his mind expanded, and he reached for the devil there.
Pain.
It still echoed, still burned, still blinded too bright to see most things by. Astarion nearly dropped the connection as it reverberated through the tomb, through the gnawing dark that had devoured anything left of who Astarion had been and left the worm behind. Astarion felt the mind nearly drag him back into the tomb, and for a half second, Astarion considered recoiling, whatever thing he was trying to do with this devil be damned.
And then, there was the smallest, faltering presence. A sensation of a question with no words behind it. Astarion could feel, sloppily, obviously, the devil reach for his mind.
Astarion didn’t know what he expected from this.
But the devil’s one eye suddenly locked onto Astarion. It focused, in and out, like it was trying to see him. Which was stupid, because of course the devil saw Astarion; that’s how he knew how to hiss and claw and grab food and scurry back. And yet the devil stood in the sunlight of his mind, burning, trying to see through it into Astarion.
Astarion focused his attention on the devil. This bloody well better work. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me now?
The devil paused, and then, slowly, faltering, he reached out a hand. When Astarion didn’t bite it off or anything like that, he placed it on Astarion’s lips.
“What, are you deaf?” Astarion asked.
He could feel vast workings of a mind strain against something, trying to claw their way to the surface. Frustration and impatience bubbled through Astarion, bleeding over to the devil, and then back again.
Throughout all of it, Astarion felt like he was wading through flame. His thoughts wanted to shrivel up and curl into ash, one by one.
I’m not going to keep this up forever. I won’t let you damn me.
The devil paused, and then he looked down at his own hands, as if seeing them for the first time. Astarion realized with a lurch of chest pain he did not want to examine that it might be, in fact, the first time the devil realized what had happened to his body.
“Shit,” the devil said.
Astarion’s eyebrows raised, as part of Astarion’s mind began to screech and crow in delicious victory. He tried not to focus on winning over all the accusations of how empty-headed he was, how he was only good for the one thing, and how dare Astarion believe he was useful for thinking? People thought, and Astarion wasn’t a people but an object Cazador found useful.
Except, no, Astarion was winning right now.
Astarion grinned at the devil. “Words! Alright this is progress. You are talking and acknowledging the situation at last.”
Talking sounded strange to Astarion, hearing it from his own body, and then an echo overlapping, voice pitched higher than Astarion ever hoped would be associated with himself.
“This isn’t real,” was the second thing the devil said.
Frustration rippled through them both, but the source was definitely Astarion. How many siblings denied the inevitable? At the same time, the sensation washed out with a sense of excitement? The devil was talking. And a strange mixture of hope/relief/seizing the moment with teeth, because he could talk.
Or the devil could talk. Astarion wasn’t enjoying the mental feedback, but damn if it hadn’t snapped the devil into some sense of coherency.
Astarion tried to focus on that, and not the sensation of hellfire slowly roasting him. Seasoned with agony and sex, trussed up and slow cooked in a pot until the soul was tender.
“No, you are very much some sort of devil now,” Astarion said, trying to press the words into the devil’s mind. “And you are here, in the shittiest basement you could find.”
Memories bled through, nonsensical. Baldur’s Gate, surely, but some warped hellish version, all ruined, all destroyed, with shambling monsters and devils lurching out of the shadows. And, actually, was still around him. Astarion saw through the devil’s own eye red heat radiate out of the hole to the upper floor, saw a sky of endless ash and dust streaked with red lightning. He could smell nothing but rot and death, corpses so foul that they held no appeal for even a wretch like Astarion.
And then the sensation wavered, rippling. Astarion became keenly aware the devil was looking out of Astarion’s own eyes, at the normal night sky, at the devil’s body.
The disconnect caught at the devil, pinned him and tore into his psyche.
“Is that an illusion?” Astarion asked. “Someone hex you? Curse you? Is that normal for recent devils?”
“It’s fine? It’s safe?”
Astarion blinked. “What’s safe?”
“The city. Baldur’s Gate?” the devil asked, desperate, voice thick.
“Of course it’s not fine,” Astarion said. “It’s a cesspit of corruption both legal and metaphysical. Anyone sane would have fled to another city by now. But if you are asking if it’s not that, then yes. Baldur’s Gate unfortunately still stands.”
The devil shuddered. Tears, nonsensically, gathered at his eyes, or his eye and the other eye socket. “That bastard cambion. I thought— I trust your senses over mine. I think— I might be able to break through this? But if you know it’s an illusion, you see through it. I still see everything in ruins. I don’t understand.”
Astarion tried to keep the frustration from bubbling through again. He hadn’t signed up for handholding this devil. Okay, well, he did sort of sign up for mutual mental mindreading, but this felt like a lot.
“You can leave,” the devil said, voice low. “I did not ask you to take care of me.”
“But you have recognized I’ve been taking care of you,” Astarion said quickly. “Look—can you stop whatever is going on in your mind from leaking over?—look. I don’t have a lot of people to talk to, and I’d eat a pet. You are the closest thing to a conversational partner I’ve had in a while. Work with me here, devil man.”
“My name is Wyll.”
Astarion could feel the important spelling in his brain. It felt like it was being branded in there with red hot iron to whatever was left of his brain matter. The world wanted to dissolve around him, was burning up into nothing but a strange orange glow and the sensation of his flesh rotting from light itself.
Astarion snarled, and this time the frustration wasn’t at the devil—at Wyll. He didn’t know where it was directed. Or he did, but he didn’t want to admit it. “I’m going to try something. Don’t resist.”
There were, of course, far more powerful magics than invisibility and mind-reading. Astarion was struggling to learn them. But he held onto the mind reading spell, and he pushed more magic into it, enough to where the sensation felt like the Weave itself was burrowing through him like a million tapeworms.
There, in the mind, was of course the blinding aftermath, and here, Astarion could taste the sensation of it. Of what happened when a soul fell to the Hells, but sideways. The process of devilification with the same soul bound in its living body. A vague sense of laughter and amusement.
Stupid boy. It was never about you.
The words were in Wyll’s memory, but Astarion could feel the voice link through memory and time and spear Astarion through the soul. There was a strong growing panic, in perhaps having bitten off more than he could chew. The Hells bled through his fingers, through the tapeworms, into weakpoints in Astarion’s own mind. Countless memories of Cazador bled through. Humiliation, resignation, forced obedience. Beyond that, beyond Wyll, a sensation like delight.
Would Astarion like to find out what it was like to be truly, completely obedient?
Terror seized Astarion, at whatever he tapped into. He grabbed the magic with everything he had, and he tore through it with a Dispel Magic.
The Weave dispersed, oozing out of them both, and with it, the lingering magic from the devil transformation off of Wyll.
Wyll shuddered, claws scraping against stone, tail wrapping around a leg, but he breathed, and he breathed a second time, and his eye remained the right kind of sharp. Astarion could still feel, faintly, as his own magic was dispersing, that there was still that brilliant fire afterimage in Wyll’s mind, but it for once was the normal kind of intense reaction to pain, rather than a continued magical source of it, a constant sear that chased away all higher thought and sentience.
Wyll shivered. For a moment, neither of them talked. The only sound was Wyll’s strangled breathing, the slight whisper of wings shivering in the air.
“Thank you,” Wyll finally said.
Astarion scrunched up his face. “Don’t say that. Shut up. I didn’t do all that for you so you could be weepy at me. I didn’t mean to take care of you at all.”
At the same time, there was a strange flicker in him.
Astarion didn’t get thanked, not really. People said all sorts of things in the throes of sexual ecstasy, but those didn’t count, because they ended up dead shortly after. His siblings didn’t thank him. Cazador surely didn’t thank him. It felt again like an acknowledgment, soothing just a little over all those years of being told he was little more than a half-sentient undead dildo.
He could do more. He’d done more. He was skilled at what he could do, but also dear gods Astarion never wanted to try that again, what was he thinking trying to cheat the Hells out of suffering? That could have gone badly. That could have gone more than badly for Astarion, and he felt like a massive seamonster in the ocean had just passed him on by.
Wyll gave Astarion a deeply skeptical look. “I remember you’ve been tending to me over these past… days? You can’t simply feed a man for a tenday and then claim you didn’t mean to do it.”
Astarion hissed a little, fangs flashing in the dark. “You were no fun as a conversational companion; that is all there is to it.”
Wyll did not seem to believe Astarion. “And that’s worth all of this for?”
Astarion sneered. “Yes. Obviously. But don’t get weepy.”
Wyll looked around, one devil eye tracking the environment around him. He looked to the molding, festering, shit heap they were in, through the slight holes leading out and the night sky beyond.
Astarion couldn’t keep holding onto these emotional knives. He felt, in the most embarrassing cringe-inducing way possible, the need to fret.
“Are you still seeing things as if they are the Hells?”
“Yes. And no. I’m having double vision, somehow, despite the one eye. I think I can learn to focus it. Gods. Gods I thought that had been the end of this city.”
Astarion waved a hand. “Yes yes, whatever. But what in the blazes happened to you? The least you owe me is answers.”
Wyll shivered, wings folding around him in the parody of a blanket. He looked a right mess; he hadn’t cleaned himself off this entire time, and he was smeared with dirt and bits of fungi and his own blood. There were still bits of back skin glued onto him through encrusted blood. The man was in dire need of a bath, but Astarion couldn’t help him there.
Though… nothing was stopping Wyll from leaving now. Astarion realized he might have sabotaged himself here, ruined the tiny shreds of companionship he could glean from this devil. That was good deeds for you.
“I don’t know,” Wyll said. “The details don’t make sense.”
Astarion scoffed. “Well to you, maybe. I felt your mind. I’m surprised you are even talking right now and not just drooling with a vacant stare. What do you remember?”
“I was summoned to Dusthawk Hill a fortnight ago. There were dragon cultists trying to summon Tiamat through into this plane.”
“Dragon cultists again?”
Wyll laughed once, looking almost surprised he had. It was a good laugh, rich and handsome, if a bit hoarse. Astarion rather liked hearing it. “Maybe? I’m not sure they were real now.”
Astarion tilted his head. “Illusionary dragon cultists? Takes a damn good spellcaster to make an illusion that large. Trust me, I’ve tried, and it’s not easy. So what happened next?”
Wyll stared at the floor, eye narrowed in recollection. “They had a portal, and dead bodies. Sacrifices I presumed? The air reeked of iron, and one of Tiamat’s heads had erupted through the earth. And a devil appeared to me, a cambion. She called herself Mizora. She promised me she could cause the ritual to fail, if only I pledged my soul to her.”
This did feel difficult to believe. Not in the grandness of it all, but in that Tiamat hadn’t razed the city to ruins.
“This sounds like a trap,” Astarion said.
“A trap I couldn’t see out of,” Wyll said. “I was terrified. There was so much heat. I remember the heat. Maybe there was heat? Maybe that happened afterward? What else could I do? I signed the damn pact. There were clauses; I could not harm her, I could not speak openly of the pact, if I failed in any mission given, I would be cast through Avernus as a lemure.”
“And she turned you into a devil?”
Wyll looked dead. Dead and empty. “It all crumpled. There was no Tiamat. And then she bade me to kill her.”
Unwanted sympathy blossomed inside of Astarion, so strongly his heart felt like it would burst from the pressure.
“Bastard,” Astarion hissed.
He’d never meant it so strongly for someone who wasn’t Cazador before.
“I don’t understand,” Wyll said. “I thought I was in Avernus. I saw the Hells, saw Baldur’s Gate ruined by Tiamat’s devastation. Damnit, I’m still seeing that, but you no longer look like a devil to me. I should be a lemure; I harmed Mizora, and I failed in the mission to kill her.”
Wyll stared down at his hands. “Nothing made sense, and thoughts slid off of my mind. But I hadn’t died, and so I’m still here.”
There was something strange going on.
“Maybe you did lemure,” Astarion said.
Wyll looked up at him with a quizzical expression, so Astarion continued, “If you’re seeing into the Hells, maybe you’re sort of… half a foot in each plane? Is that possible? Perhaps she altered the procedure on purpose to make sure you would be a devil here.”
Wyll shrugged.
“She said it wasn’t about you? I, ah, heard that in your mind, I think.”
Wyll laughed, self-depreciating in a way that pressed along all of those bruises. “Oh she made that very clear. It was all to get at my father, apparently, to destroy his heir. I don’t— I don’t think he saw me.”
Astarion very much doubted that. If some devil had gone to such great lengths to make sure Wyll became a devil on this side of the planar system, no, whoever Wyll’s father was had definitely seen Wyll as a devil.
“I didn’t know where safety was. Devils tried to kill me? I remember that.”
“Wait, but you are speaking of it. So, the pact’s no longer in effect?”
Wyll nodded, but he looked uncertain. No, he looked terrified and yet clearly trying to hide how scared he was. “I presume so. I failed when I couldn’t kill her, and I failed again for harming her. Twice-broken. I… gods, I’m not sure I’m thankful for that or not, that at least it’s over with. As much as it can be. I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know where to go. I— look at me. This isn’t the body of a person.”
Astarion at least had that; no one saw him and screamed monster. His own devilry was far better hid. Though if people could, maybe someone could have killed Astarion by now, and he wouldn’t be in this mess.
Jealousy warred with sympathy. Oh Wyll got turned into a monster, but now he was just free? How so convenient for him. How lucky. Why did he get free, and Astarion was still stuck as Cazador’s slave? The fury caught at the inside of his ribs, twisted in his gut like a flaying knife. Astarion could feel every shackle of compulsion still, the heavy chains of slavery still on him, and yet here was Wyll who had gotten away so easily. Who had bound himself in theoretically one of the hardest things to get out of, and yet he’d escaped more or less scot-free aside from a single transformation.
And then it receded, slowly, bit by bit. It was still there, acid-etched into his mind, but he simply didn’t have the energy to hate Wyll for very long. He wouldn’t even have a mind to hate this Mizora with if not for Astarion. It would have been cleaner for a devil to just kill Wyll and be done with it, but there were a thousand cleaner ways for Cazador to do anything at all. The misery was the point. That’s how people like them worked.
Wyll probably was meant to die here, and, what, reconstitute in the Hells? He was pretty sure that’s how it worked, or at least, Astarion dimly remembered Cazador saying something along that effect.
And then he really would have been in the Hells. Defenseless, which meant he either wouldn’t last long or would need to truly swear in. Probably to that Mizora again.
Astarion remembered again a presence of someone else in Wyll’s mind, in the background, watching, mocking, tearing.
No. Wyll was only theoretically free, but there was no way this Mizora was actually done playing with Wyll yet. She’d show up again at some point. Wyll wasn’t free. This was just the devil equivalent of playing with your food. Astarion would be the most naive fool to think otherwise.
Astarion had to ‘earn’ the right to hunt for Cazador after all. And he had to prove it to him that he’d meant it, on his knees.
Astarion was so tired of being on his knees.
“Well that’s your lesson for you,” Astarion said. His voice wasn’t choked. That’d be stupid. That’d be inane, so it simply wasn’t. “Don’t fall for it again. Never play into their hands.”
“I feel like the world’s greatest fool,” Wyll said, voice breaking. “I did this to myself. I had the thought even, that it couldn’t possibly be real, and yet— I could feel the vibrations through the earth of Tiamat raising up through the portal. I—”
“Good enough illusions can fool all the senses,” Astarion said. “That sort of magic isn’t even too particularly advanced. Alright, well, to make an illusion of an entire dragon, that’s difficult. That’s deeply advanced magic, but any wizard or sorcerer worth their salt has the potential to craft a moving, breathing, all senses engaged illusion. It’s only the cheap shit that only fools the eyes and nothing more. I suppose that’s not terribly important, other than magic is very, very good at making you believe what people want you to believe. And true monsters—and trust me that I do not say that lightly—they love nothing more than making their victims choose their torment. They think it’s funny. Now you know. Be wiser next time.”
Wyll’s eye was staring at Astarion’s own red ones, and then they caught the shape of Astarion’s fangs.
Astarion swallowed, and he remembered to tuck his teeth behind his lips again. Sloppy of him.
“I cannot talk about it,” Astarion hissed, fury and shame and humiliation flashing in his chest like a sudden housefire. “Consider yourself quite lucky how easily you escaped a devil’s compulsion.”
He expected Wyll to fight back. Wyll, instead, looked shamed, like the food had been snatched out of his hand, and Wyll only agreed that it was right he shouldn’t eat.
Astarion didn’t want to feel like a monster. He didn’t delight in cruelty, or he didn’t think he did.
Astarion had died, legally, an adult. In the dim echoes of a memory of a memory, he could almost make out moving to Baldur’s Gate specifically because of the legal laws of human civilization. Humans and elves matured at the same rate, you see. There wasn’t a difference in physical or mental maturity between the two. But in predominantly elven countries, you aren’t legally an adult until you hit your first century. It was profoundly, stupidly unfair, and it gave shitty family all the more time to dig claws and anchors into someone until they would be exactly what their parents wanted them to be. You weren’t considered truly wise enough or truly smart enough or truly an adult enough to make your own decisions.
In Baldur’s Gate, he’d been an adult. He’d gotten a magistrate job. He’d been respected, or so he assumed. You had to be some level of respected to get a grave in the nicer parts of Baldur’s Gate, and Astarion knew he’d gotten a grave in one of the nicer cemeteries, because Cazador had forbade him from ever returning to it.
And yet when he died, Astarion could only think that he was still a child. Caught in that limbo state.
Would Wyll ever age now? Would he always look this young and terrified?
Astarion sighed, looking at the shitty safehouse he was in. Only the desperate tried their luck here, which fit them both.
“I know I’m lucky,” Wyll said after a minute, like he was afraid he’d be made to leave if he didn’t agree with Astarion.
Astarion didn’t like the taste of being agreed with in this fashion.
“Comparatively lucky,” Astarion said, despite the fact that he was half-way arguing with his past self from a minute ago. “You’re enough of a miserable wretch I will still let you room here, but you must start finding ways of getting your own food and water. And no, don’t clean the house up. We don’t want any more squatters, and I don’t want you trying to frighten people off, because the last thing we need is the Flaming Fist poking in their noses and killing us both.”
Wyll nodded, and something in Astarion relaxed.
Okay. Okay he wouldn’t be losing his conversational partner this fast. His soul felt like one massive pit of hunger. He wanted to shove Wyll inside, just so there would be anyone for him at all except for his abuser and siblings. Gods, it had been only a short period of time, but Astarion needed this man, felt like he could only cling on like a useless barnacle on a ship. Astarion wasn’t even sure if he liked Wyll, just that he needed him.
“I don’t suppose your devil harlot left you with any interesting devil magic or tricks? Mine didn’t leave any with me.”
Wyll looked down at his hooves and made a face. He shivered once, and then he looked away from the mess of his body. “I don’t think so. If I have any magic, I don’t know how to use it.”
“Well that’s just typical,” Astarion said. “It took me a few years to figure out how to stick to walls, and that’s supposed to be instinctive or something for— albino elves.”
It had to be his imagination. Wyll couldn’t have smiled at that.
Wyll looked around the room, and his nose wrinkled, as if he was only, just now, just right fucking now, realizing he was in a mold’s idea of paradise. “We could clean up this room and leave the rest of it rotting. How am I not dead from poisoning?”
“Devil,” Astarion pointed out. “And fine. Only this room though. But be careful; cleaning out the molds might cause the entire building to come crumbling down upon us.”
“Should we even be in here?”
“Absolutely not, but it’s the only place we have.”
—
Okay so Astarion had a clear problem.
He hadn’t been this distracted since the darling boy of near two centuries ago. Astarion had been worn down by a millstone until there’d been nothing left of himself, just whatever bits he parroted around other people to get them to rape his body.
But Wyll was safe to like. Even safe to talk to.
Cazador had commanded them not to reveal a single thing to any person they met, but everyone knew devils weren’t really people, which meant Astarion could talk to Wyll as much as he wanted. He hadn’t yet, but he had the possibility of it. He teased out bits over time. That yes, Astarion was compelled quite thoroughly, and yes, he was a slave, and how hilarious, did Wyll really believe the lies that there weren’t slaves in Baldur’s Gate?
Rubbing his naivety in his face never felt satisfying though, for all that Astarion kept instinctively reaching for it like a bad habit. Wyll was having more of a wake up call on how the world worked than millions ever would. That was something.
“Of course I can’t run,” Astarion had said once. “Would your devil have let you run? No. Don’t be absurd. I must remain.”
“But you helped me,” Wyll said, mulishly, like that meant anything.
Astarion shrieked, because it was the funniest thing in the world. “No I didn’t. I helped myself. I wanted to talk to you. That’s it. And even if you got some help from this, there isn’t a way for you to reciprocate. You cannot save me, and it’s a little galling that you think you can after two hundred years of not being able to save myself.”
Wyll frowned. And for once he didn’t look slapped; he looked stubborn. “You pulled me out of my mind. Sometimes someone just needs a helping hand.”
“Unless you can turn into Tiamat and eat vampire lords, then no, you can’t help. What you can do is be interesting, and you’re not doing a great job at that right now.”
Wyll’s one eye narrowed. “If you keep acting like an ass to me, I won’t talk to you today.”
Astarion hissed. “Well fine! Sulk if you want!”
But then a few days later, Astarion would be back in the safehouse with a fish pie he’d stolen, feeling bad for the time apart, knowing Wyll only starved without Astarion, because a devil could not openly walk the streets without getting murdered, and then Wyll really would be damned to walk a hellish landscape for the rest of time.
Today though, he carried new clothing, stolen off of someone’s laundry line and carefully altered so Wyll could wear them around all the new limbs. Because Astarion couldn’t quit this. He couldn’t stop visiting this devil. He was working extra hard after the visit to make sure he caught enough people for Cazador to not get suspicious. His thefts of late were things to make Wyll’s life at least a little less miserable, purely because then he was more fun to talk to when Astarion did visit, and he needed it. It was beyond the call of blood now. He barely looked at pigeons on the way to the safehouse; he only relaxed when he saw Wyll there again.
Astarion remembered the darling boy. Gods above, of course he remembered. Cazador had been all the more furious for how the man had gotten away. He’d fled in time, and Astarion had been left alone. With Cazador, in the dark, and then so, so alone in the tomb that he’d sobbed with relief when his Master had finally opened it, clinging to Cazador like a pathetic worm of a thing.
Astarion had to relearn so many things after the tomb: how to walk, how to talk. How to keep track of conversations. How to not just start screaming. All of the person had been bled out of him, leaving some feral, mindless thing, not too dissimilar from how Wyll had been.
He could never risk that again.
But… he wasn’t risking that. Wyll was safe because Astarion wasn’t visiting a person. Cazador couldn’t compel it out of him this time. Astarion never visited any person or talked about Cazador to other people, because Wyll wasn’t people. Devils weren’t people, which meant devils were safe.
And the need had grown jagged and hooked in Astarion’s chest. It yanked him towards the safehouse like a fish on a line, with probably a similarly grisly end at some point. But he couldn’t help it. He just couldn’t.
“Now you can change how these look when you learn Disguise Self,” Astarion said, wrinkling his nose at Wyll. “But I’m not giving them to you until you bathe.”
“Where?” Wyll asked sardonically, just a bit of a shit, enough that it had Astarion’s neck shivering in a fun way that he by all the absent gods tried not to know what that meant. “I’m not allowed in the bathhouses, and there’s no beach around this area, just docks. I don’t want to get shot at.”
“Then learn Disguise Self faster,” Astarion chided. “Really Wyllbert, it’s a first level spell. Urchins learn Disguise Self. Once you learn it, you’re free to wander the city for an hour, though do make sure you include a cape or something in your outfit; it’s a purely visual illusion, so if someone touches your wings, you’re fucked. And be careful to not enter the Upper City; they have wards against basic illusions specifically to keep the riffraff from mingling among their betters.”
Wyll looked down at his hooves. “You really think I can learn?”
Astarion groaned. “Yes! Obviously! Or I wouldn’t bother with the energy of teaching you. Now come on. I know it takes practice being able to hold onto so many threads of the Weave at once, but you can and will learn.”
“I thought you would rather me learn how to turn into a demon prince,” Wyll said.
“I think the one transformation is enough for now. Ugh. You really need a wash. Okay. Just a moment. I have a new plan. Don’t make a lot of noise, and come quickly, because we’ll only have an hour.”
Invisibility didn’t have to be cast on Astarion, after all, and he could rent a tub in a bathhouse with a warning that he would need multiple tubs for heavy duty purposes. And this was just for Astarion, of course. A clean Wyll would be nicer to talk to. That was all, and not how low and base you felt when covered in filth.
Most people didn’t realize that was another condition, a privilege they had and did not comprehend as being one. That being clean required an area to clean yourself, required water and a tub and soap. Cazador thought it amusing to leave his spawn filthy and matted in their own blood for a tenday after.
Strange, how something that small could erase the feeling of personhood from your brain. Not even being allowed the luxury of bathing.
Wyll bathed. They had to cut the shirt off of him, and this caused some pain, because the shirt had healed into Wyll’s wounds, reopening them when it was peeled off of his body. Wyll got incredibly shy about removing his trousers, and Astarion had to promise whatever Wyll had was something Astarion had seen before, which also turned out to be completely untrue.
But the blood and dried skin bits were scrubbed off of Wyll. He even managed to get his hair clean, and when Wyll seemed despondent over his hair and not having any oils to work into it, Astarion sighed and stole some hair oils from the next door establishment, returning so Wyll could clean his hair properly.
(Astarion felt too guilty seeing already the signs of hunger and slow starvation creeping over Wyll; Astarion had not been feeding Wyll enough.)
Wyll, the entire time, seemed almost as fascinated by Astarion’s magic as he did getting clean. After he grimly put himself to trying to learn Disguise Self with the determination of a law student facing midterms.
Astarion felt… good?
Was that actually a thing people felt and not some big con or lie? But Wyll would show his progress eagerly when Astarion would next see him, tail not drooping quite as much, wings fluttering and resettling. For all that Wyll would snipe back, he didn’t look at Astarion like he was some worm beneath his boot, or just some hot body to fuck into.
He looked at Astarion, still, like Astarion had saved Wyll from his own mind.
And well, yes, Astarion had, but it hadn’t been out of some misplaced sense of Altruism, capital letter intended. He’d done it on impulse, because he was bored, because why not, because the night would pass anyway, and he didn’t want to skip to the end bit where he choked down a cock and tried to act like it was sexy.
The mismatch jarred along Astarion’s perceptions.
What also jarred was truly how becoming Wyll was after a bath and clean clothes, fresh hair put into so many braids, probably because Wyll didn’t have anything else to do with his time. Wyll had cleaned the mold off of the floor at least, created a few cleaner zones to keep in. But the mold stench permeated all anyway. And Wyll still relied on Astarion’s generosity. Wyll still couldn’t leave the house himself under his own power. Astarion had tried to give him a small backlog of supplies and at least a couple of pillows and blankets—his shitty siblings couldn’t rip them to shreds if they weren’t in the dormitories—but if Cazador didn’t send Astarion out semi-regularly, Wyll withered.
One particularly long stretch had Astarion near hyperventilating back in the manor, worried Wyll would die of dehydration without Astarion to help. After five agonizingly long days where Astarion had been confined to Cazador’s room for stress relief, Astarion finally had gotten the ‘luxury’ to hunt again.
It turned out on day two, Wyll had gotten desperate enough to hide himself with a cloak during the night. He’d managed to refill his supplies, but barely.
Wyll, still, struggled with seeing the right layer of reality.
Relief cut through Astarion that Wyll had enough preservation he could do that much. He didn’t want his conversational partner to die. Astarion wanted to keep this tiny slice of time. It wasn’t awful, for all how Astarion could see the warning lights in the sky. Maybe it had been too long since the last major punishment. Maybe Astarion was becoming stupid again in complacence, thinking he could outmaneuver one little bit of his unlife under his Master. Astarion had no delusions this was forever. The devil would eventually learn the magic and leave. There was no other option. Wyll couldn’t summon fireballs or anything useful, and he’d even been trying.
(Astarion fretted through trance. His mind would replay that voice he’d heard in Wyll’s mind, overlapped with Astarion’s time in the tomb. He would struggle through memories of the city to see a safehouse with no Wyll in it, and just the mocking sound of devil laughter in his ears. Or he would at other times see Cazador with a planar binding circle, talking casually about how easy it was to work around devils, and all Astarion would be able to remember was that it was him, that he had led Wyll back to Cazador like thousands of others.)
To say Wyll was lonely missed the mark entirely; Astarion was all Wyll had. The hunger grew on Wyll’s face every day, desperation drawing more lines on Wyll whenever Astarion said he had to leave for the day, not knowing when he would return. Wyll had no one else he could go to; he still struggled to master disguise self. Even if he succeeded, he would only be able to live as an illusion; only Astarion knew the truth of Wyll, and Astarion also doubted Wyll would ever find a friendly enough fellow monster to understand what they had been through.
Wyll needed Astarion, and that felt like a heady kind of power. The power, in turn, made Astarion sickened in a way no dead rat ever could, and Astarion would have to swallow down bile whenever Wyll was a little too eager when Astarion showed.
Astarion had once thought he’d wanted the kind of power Cazador wielded effortlessly, how safe it would feel. To have a shadow of that power over Wyll felt awful.
So, Astarion tried to leave behind little books. Wyll asked for a sword, to practice fencing, and Astarion almost didn’t give it to him, because despite their conversation earlier, Wyll still seemed to have some strange notions of fighting Cazador. The thought terrified Astarion. Enough to where Astarion had to have a talk of the darling boy, and how Astarion would never be foolish enough again.
(Astarion had tried to keep his composure through the conversation, tried to wield the past like a knife, but he’d only cut himself with it, and not cleanly. He’d ended up in miserable tears, eyes hot and angry, tucked up under one of Wyll’s wings.)
Wyll didn’t say anything more of that for the next fortnight.
But he kept practicing with the sword.
—
This could have gone for quite some time, or perhaps Astarion would have been found out in a couple of tenday. The possibilities spilled out ahead of Astarion like so much blood.
But how it went ended up Astarion’s fault. That was always the thing to take away from the lesson: it was, somehow, your fault. They made it your fault on purpose, like Cazador did, reveling in your lack of knowledge.
In this case, Astarion knew monsters so well that he forgot the shape of other monsters. He could spot a Cazador from a thousand paces.
They weren’t all Cazadors.
Astarion hadn’t had time to get to Wyll tonight. Astarion had only been let out of the manor with a handful of hours before dawn rose, and with the late hours, Astarion was hard-pressed to find prey for Cazador. He went to the Blushing Mermaid, because the people there were more the types to follow someone home, and he got chatting.
The person most charmed by him seemed to be an old grandmother. Well, old was subjective. She was human, and therefore by far a blushing youth in comparison to Astarion, but she looked old, with hard lines on her face and white hair pulled back into a bun.
Elderly people could be another source of easy prey. People forgot that old people didn’t suddenly stop being people; they still yearned for companionship, and yes, sometimes carnal delights. Frequently carnal delights, especially if they were retired, and they oft had more time on their hands. Few wanted to acknowledge the reality of it, but it did mean that older people were easier to draw back to Cazador. And, in some ways, it felt… well, nothing felt bad anymore, outside of the rare sweet soul that made Astarion feel like filth who maybe, on some level, deserved what was happening to him. But elderly people had had their full life. They were already close to death, right? So, if Astarion had to pick someone to die, probably best the grandmother.
She was charming with a sharp, mean wit, well-aged like fine wine or cheese. She spoke fondly of her adoptive sisters, and talked a lot on how most people had no manners these days, and quite a bit on how hard it was to find a successor to her work.
“And what work is that?” Astarion asked, leaning forward as if he was intrigued.
She waved a hand. “Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that. A lot of potions for various ailments. Things to put a spring in your step and a joy in your heart, whether or not you had one to start with.”
She laughed then, and Astarion laughed with her. “I see, I see. And I imagine these potions are far cheaper than whatever the temple sells?”
She clucked her tongue. “Well of course, dearie. You expect the average worker to be able to shell over half a year’s wages for a healing potion? Temples set their costs to the murderous and the rich. Why, most of my clients can’t afford that. And there are some afflictions that the temple can’t cure. A broken heart, lost memories, nostalgia over things you would rather loathe. I’ve got a bottle for any ailment that has you.”
“Now that’s good business practice,” Astarion said, flashing teeth.
He liked her sharpness. That should have been a warning sign. Cazador had seemed luminous in the night, every bit the savior Astarion had been hoping to find. His presence had drowned out all the fears in Astarion’s mind, an impossibility sent from some kindly god Astarion had left a prayer to at one point, now repaid with salvation.
“You’ve kept a nice old woman company for the evening,” she said with an easy smile. “Let me talk your ear off for a few hours! And time’s precious. I should repay the favor. So what’ll you have? A potion for anything that’ll ail you. I brought my work with me to the tavern.”
She gestured to a side satchel, filled with a number of bottles. Most of them were ceramic, but a few were thick opaque glass, of greens and browns. They had labels on them all, waxed paper plastered on the sides. Mother’s Loathing. Broken Promises. Lost Time. Lover’s Avarice. Missing Pets.
Why would Astarion’s mind jump to something truly nefarious? He saw the labels, and he thought he knew the shape of it. People who peddled in charlatan wares didn’t stop dying at the ripe age of 35. They continued on, to keep selling what was little more than alcohol with a bizarre extract added in, possibly with a laxative as well if they didn’t like you that much. She might even be one of the rare true believers that honestly thought, what, essence of chamomile could bring peace to someone’s heart?
Alcohol would do nothing for Astarion, except maybe show he was willing to play along with her games, which increased the chances she might decide on a more cougar lifestyle and follow him into the dark. And a laxative would be uncomfortable, but he couldn’t shit anything out because he didn’t eat. It would be nowhere near as bad as showing up without dinner for Cazador again.
If Astarion was put into the Kennels, if he was trapped there for days… what if Wyll got desperate for water without Astarion to mind him, and he got caught and killed? What if Astarion became doomed once more to true isolation?
“What do you have?” Astarion asked.
“Oh never you mind that. I assure you, a potion for any ailment. I’m a master craftsman at my work, you know. Put in decades and decades at working at my craft. Highly esteemed for those in the know. Take some commissions even for those with a special desire in their heart, but again, I prefer to peddle amongst those that need it. And if you don’t mind me saying, you do look like you need something. You’re rather peaky looking, you know. Running anemic, are we?”
Astarion smiled, hiding his fangs. “I can’t have red meat. It makes me terribly nauseous when I try.”
Not a lie, in that trying human blood made him vomit. And Astarion liked to lie close to the truth, on impulse. It felt like a game of how closely could he ride the line of compulsion.
Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I have something for nausea, if you want, but I doubt that’s what you are really looking for.”
Well why not play the game along?
“Do you have anything that would make me feel alive?” Astarion asked, having a private laugh at the lies of it all. “Put some vitality in me.”
She grinned. “Oh, I think I have just the bottle for you. I think you want to feel strong, right? Something big and powerful that can’t be pushed around easily. Feel like a man-eater for a change, rather than the eaten.”
Astarion froze, not liking the feeling of having been read so easily.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a small vial of faded golden glass, with some sort of clear liquid inside. “One shot of this, and in no time at all, you’ll feel a new man. Trust me. All the vitality you could ever want.”
Astarion took the bottle, a touch cautious.
It was ridiculous. He knew it was ridiculous. He knew charlatans, and how they worked. She’d probably been reading him all night as he’d been reading her. Once you learned your craft, you could peel people apart like books. Still, something naggled at him in the back of his brain, but he couldn’t figure out what.
She gestured, grinning widely. “Well go on dearie. Drink up! Consider it a boon for the nice company you’ve given an old lady this night.”
Was it possible she slipped something else into the drink? It shouldn’t be able to affect Astarion even if she did; there were the unfortunate perks of being a vampire, and any magical or alchemical substances couldn’t cause Astarion to fall into a stupor as he was an elf. Perhaps an aphrodisiac? Or something else that dulled the senses. It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to daterape Astarion, or even the twentieth time. Astarion had lost count long ago.
“The night doesn’t have to be over yet,” Astarion said flirtatiously.
He sniffed the drink. It smelled like alcohol and mint extract. A classic combo of charlatans everywhere. Even if there were laxatives, it wouldn’t do anything to Astarion, hollowed out as he was.
He downed it in one drink. It tasted like most of alcohol: vinegar, with a tinge of rot flavor that lingered and coated on his tongue. That would be a mint. Food and herbs still all smelled divine, but the taste always morphed on the inside. He then set the bottle next to her with a flourish.
“So when does the vitality hit?” Astarion asked.
She laughed, making a little pushing gesture with her hands. “Easy there. Give it an hour. You’ll see.”
“An hour is conveniently about how long it would take me to return home, if you’re interested.”
She gave him a considering glance, a look-over Astarion was familiar and yet unfamiliar with at the same time. “You’ve been angling all evening, havenchya. Well. Color me interested. I think I will take the walk home with you.”
Finally. Success. Astarion wouldn’t be locked into the Kennels come the morning, and he felt a shiver of relief.
—
For the first fifteen minutes, Astarion felt fine.
Half an hour in, he began to feel strange. He felt like he was… sweating? He didn’t sweat. Vampires didn’t sweat. But he felt flushed, like after Cazador had given him a particularly large rat. He hadn’t noticed when the mint rot in his mouth had began to congeal into something else, but it had slowly morphed into the most tantalizing blood-copper. He looked down at his hands, and they looked almost pinkened, flushed with blood and life. He breathed, and breathed again, and his mind almost wanted to believe his heart was beating in his chest. Adrenaline kicked in, like fear, like power, like running, like hunting.
“Oh. Good potion,” Astarion said, winding his way through the parks. All the shadows were dark gray-green, but the rest of the world was illuminated in soft grays.
For some reason, the old woman seemed more resonant, shadows sliding deeper into true green around her. He blinked, and it was gone.
She cackled. “Oh dearie, how awful have you been feeling?”
Terrible, Astarion didn’t say.
“Does anyone actually feel hale in this city?” Astarion asked, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “Everyone’s overworked, and no one can afford medical care, as we’ve discussed.”
“You think you feel alive now, just wait,” she said, with just enough of a leer that Astarion, like a trained dog, felt reassured.
“This seems like quite a boon for a simple night of company,” Astarion said, trailing a hand down her arm.
“What can I say? I take pride in my work.”
The nerves hit harder. It was Cazador’s face, impassive, after Astarion had broken his hands digging his way out of his grave. It was the inherent naturalisitic sense of transgression and errring, of action and consequence, of being lost in the misted woods at night, stumbling through a too-dark realm, before finding a single hovering ball of light.
Cazador had been so furious of late.
Keep focused. Half an hour more, and Astarion could fall to pieces in the spawn dormitory. She might have spiked him with some sort of lust draft that worked on vampires. There were potent enough aphrodisiacs that could bypass undeath, but the sensations weren’t succubi extract; Astarion would be more distinctly horny than feeling the distillation of anticipation.
He kept with it.
Fifteen minutes away, and the sensation began to constrict, like iron on his lungs forcing them into a shape. Forcing them to breathe. In, and out. In, and out. In, and out. Astarion couldn’t stop breathing. He was trying to, to keep the anxiety from overwhelming him, but his lungs kept slipping out of his grasp.
She couldn’t…
She couldn’t actually have spiked him with life, right?
That was nonsense. That was impossible. His lungs kept breathing. There was a rhythmic thumping in his ears like war drums. He couldn’t keep track of what he was saying to her, just that he was talking through this, like a trained wind up gnome toy to entertain children, or in this case elderly cougars who liked to poison their dates.
He didn’t want to see Cazador like this.
The compulsion though still tugged him home, winding him in like a fishing line. He could not resist the pull, not with prey at his fingertips.
Ten minutes away, and Astarion couldn’t stop sweating. He could see it now, the perspiration leaking in through his shirt sleeves. He could see, in the distance, Szarr manor carving through the skyline, a lightning rod for all stray spawn.
“You know that’s some potion you gave me,” Astarion found himself rambling. “Damn good stuff.”
She nodded, eyes wicked. “Oh I know. I know. Like I said, you want to be a man-eater more than the eaten. It’s never been a true metaphor for you, has it? Never gotten the taste of man flesh in your teeth before, but you’d have given just about anything to try.”
Astarion whined, like a dog struck.
“We won’t make it, by the way,” she said, leaning in close to whisper into his ear. “It hits you a stone’s throw away from the steps. I’m not sure you want an audience in five minutes. If I were you, I’d fight that compulsion, boy, find somewhere safe. There’s a park nearby. That’ll buy you some time. I’ll even make it easy. What if we went to the park? Can’t lure me back if I don’t follow, hmm?”
Astarion stared at her, eyes wide and desperate, chest heaving.
She laughed again. “Well I didn’t lie! You were delightful company. A thrill to talk to. It’s why you’re not dead, dear. I would have killed any of your spawn siblings for daring to try to hunt me, but you were at least amusing enough by it that I am forgiving your slight. Grin harder, boy, while you still have the cheeks for it.”
She patted him on the shoulder, and he flinched back. “You were good company, and now I’ve given you a very small wish. That’s more than most people can say. Maybe this time the lesson will sink into that thick skull of yours, hmm?”
The old woman turned, and she walked into the park. The moment her foot hit grass, she warped, flesh bulging grotesquely, but only for a moment. And then in a burst of fairy lights, she was gone.
Astarion’s mind connected the dots.
Hag.
He drank a potion from a hag.
Everything in him screamed to find safety, to run before Cazador would throw him into a box again for being a useless spawn, but the compulsion had him garroted and pinned there. He struggled uselessly in the streets, fingers clawing at the air.
He wasted his minutes. He never learned.
His fingers began to shorten, flesh peeling backwards even as the bones didn’t, growing longer and sharper, forming into hard claws. His mouth began to unravel and gape, jaw bones cracking in half before regrowing longer and longer. His spine writhed like a snake before exploding out of his pelvis, lengthening whiplike behind him, even as his feet contorted, ankle bones lengthening and forcing him to the ground. Draconic wings burst out of his back far faster than Wyll’s had, but still leaving skin flapping off him.
He screamed and screamed and scrambled, sideways, finally towards the park, falling over himself as his legs rebelled and forced him to all fours, as his hands shattered and slowly remade themselves into something between hand and paw, and white fur burst out from his skin.
More teeth burst through his mouth, concentrically like a shark, as a split mane grew out of his neck—not lionlike but definitely feline in nature— and long thin poisoned spines erupted out of his tail.
Oh.
Man-eater.
Manticore.
There were onlookers now. He’d been screaming. He screamed again, stupid and reflexive, trying to tear his way out of the binds of old clothing. His wings were pinned in what remained of his shirt. He tried to bite them free, and his teeth tore into his wing. He sobbed and tore anyway, with a burst of fresh living glorious blood in his mouth. Panic consumed his mind.
He had all the air in the world, and it was not enough. Life mocked him, and he couldn’t breathe.
Astarion ran.
—
He was caught, of course. Of course he was. You can’t have a manticore running loose in town. Not a true monster. If he’d had any time at all to learn how to move in this new damned body, maybe things could have gone another way, but he was tackled by a number of the Flaming Fist, pinned down with spears through his wings. He screamed and thrashed, and they only stabbed him again for it.
They were going to kill him.
She made him alive, and he was going to immediately die because of it.
He still didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to be this, didn’t want to be some hideous monstrosity, even less of a person than a spawn, but always he didn’t want to die.
“I’ll take it from here, gentleman,” came a rich voice. Astarion thrashed and snarled and tried reflexively to bite someone, twisting and tearing his own body on the spears. Blood ran down his heavy chest, down his flanks, but he couldn’t stop trying to tear himself free.
Useless. Empty-headed. He knew monsters. He knew Cazadors. He should have known better.
This was his fault. He would die knowing it.
Approaching Astarion was another member of the Flaming Fist. She was a dark-skinned elf, thin and imposing looking, with the clear uniform of a mage Fist.
“Orders from the Grand Marshall,” the Flaming Fist said. “You’re to find me a cart for transportation.”
“We should kill it here and now,” one of the Flaming Fist said.
The mage’s face hardened, and the Fist took a step back. “I have been in the Fist before you were even conceived, and I will be here when you are nothing but dust. I am above you, and you will follow orders. Standard protocol is to capture and secure. We need to know if this is a monster that got loose, or if someone set it loose, and if so, we track the magic back.”
The Fist flinched.
“Your name,” the mage said.
The Fist flinched again. “…Hans, Lady Florrick. We’ll get him restrained, and we’ll get the cart for you.”
“Move quickly,” she said. “I don’t want to risk it escaping.”
They shackled him together, tied his wings and tail down with rope. He snapped at one, in a stupid reflexive gesture, and then they muzzled him.
Time grew sticky into a strange blur. He couldn’t stop fighting. He couldn’t stop trying to tear himself free. He should. He knew he should. Astarion was a master at lying down and waiting for the inevitable, but his heart beat too loudly, too strongly, and he screamed through the muzzle and nearly killed himself on the spears.
He had a tail. He had spines. He didn’t know how to use them, how to make that his escape. He didn’t know this body. It wasn’t his body. He tried to keep his wits about him, but he couldn’t hear his thoughts over his own lungs.
The Fist returned with a cart. They unpinned him from the ground and threw him inside. Astarion tried to do something, but blood loss meant something as a living thing, and he couldn’t get his head off of the ground.
Of course being alive would be a curse. What else could Astarion expect?
“The keys,” Florrick said, extending a single hand. They handed her the keys and then gave her a salute. She saluted back, got into the driver’s part, and bid the horses to move.
And Astarion was taken away.
He strained again, snarling. If he could position his tail, maybe he could still kill this person if he could find a damn way to launch the spines. Find a way to chew his way out of the restraints and run. He could—
“Easy,” came Wyll’s voice.
Astarion startled, eyes wide, and they locked onto Florrick, looking back at him.
“Wyll?”
Wyll-as-Florrick nodded once, a finger to his lips. “You were right outside the safe house. I— I’m sorry. The illusion kept spilling out of my fingers, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t think—”
The words dissolved into a haze.
Wyll was here. His devil.
Okay then.
Astarion fell to pieces.
—
Time became an indistinct blur. He screamed. He sobbed. He cursed out that hag.
It had been over an hour. Polymorph didn’t last over an hour. Which meant it was permanent. Astarion’s body was gone. His new one lived but monstrously. He was no longer bound to Cazador, but only because he’d been bound to greater monstrosity. No one would see him and think anything other than to kill him now. He didn’t even have the false face of vampirism.
The sobbing receded into sort of a numb, shaky shock. Wyll left the cart a few times. Astarion could faintly hear the tone of his voice if not the words, changing to this other cadence, exact and commanding. Wyll returned with coin and supplies. Outside of the Gate, Wyll carefully unshackled Astarion, mindful of the poisonous spines, and fed him a few healing potions. Astarion wanted to bite the man. His head felt dizzy with it all. He hadn’t been kind to Wyll for anything other than wanting a conversational partner, out of boredom, out of the novelty of a devil in his safehouse breathing in the mold spores that gave most people permanent lung disease.
And yet Astarion leaned into the affection, reflexively. One part the instinct from two hundred years, of how if Cazador was in a rare mood to show affection after ‘correction’, then you leaned into it. Astarion could not stop the instincts, as much as he loathed them. But even if he could, he’d be just as helpless, just as overtly a miserable worm, because he’d always been more starved for this: for the kind hand and soft words than he’d ever been for blood.
He screamed, and Wyll simply said, “I know. I know. Gods above, I know.”
And he did know. He did. Not as well, not as acutely, not as long, but the monstrous angle he did.
What did he need to perform for? His body was gone. His appearance, his looks, his vanity—one of the only things he’d clung to in all these years, gone. He’d become untouchable, for all that Wyll didn’t seem to realize that. Cart parked outside Baldur’s Gate somewhere, Astarion plastered himself to Wyll, shivered and shuddered as Wyll ran soothing hands down Astarion’s body and cleaned dried blood and old flesh off him.
“I can’t live like this,” Astarion said.
A lie. He’d always live. Astarion was too cowardly to do anything else but survive.
“You can,” Wyll said, echoing his thoughts. “We’ll find a way. You taught me how to disguise my appearance. We can find something for you. You’re far better at magic than I am.”
“With these mangled hands?” Astarion hissed, something in his chest thrumming at it. His voice sounded different, not quite his. Even that had been taken from him.
“Even with,” Wyll promised.
Astarion could feel the unspoken words. He didn’t dare believe them. His throat swallowed around them reflexively, shied away.
“This isn’t freedom,” Astarion then said. “You can’t think— Cazador will be beyond furious. This is an insult to him. He’ll drag me back. He’ll put me in the tomb again for ever escaping his grasp. He’ll hunt me down to the ends of the world. Wyll. Wyll this isn’t fucking freedom. This will make it worse. Oh gods, you don’t understand, nothing makes him more angry than if you defy him. I got a year in the tomb for sparing a single person. Do you think he’ll believe I didn’t mean to do this? I—”
“Then we’ll go farther. There’s nothing for me here, except to ruin the lives of those I care about. I should run, so Mizora’s plan fails.”
Astarion looked back at the city.
He could return. If he returned, it could spare him the worst of what was to befall him eventually. If he returned, perhaps it wouldn’t be an eternity in the tomb.
No.
No that was a foolish thought. When had throwing himself on Cazador’s mercy ever worked?
Wyll slid a hand over Astarion’s thin, membranous wing. His touch felt so warm, even to Astarion’s now-living body, even to this body that the hag had promised was vitality incarnate. Still Astarion wanted to bask at Wyll’s side. “You know, we both have these now, and neither of us know how to use them. Maybe we can learn to fly together?”
“I’m hideous,” Astarion said. A nonsense argument that refuted nothing Wyll said.
Wyll kissed Astarion on the forehead, a faint brushing of lips that had Astarion shuddering again. “Never. You’re striking. You’re powerful. And you’re too clever to let this ruin you. I’ve seen your magic. You’ve got invisible hands. You’ve got invisibility, period. We’ll learn more magic yet. You already taught me the greatest boon. I’ll be your face you need for towns, until you find a way on your own to return to an elven form—and you can learn.”
“I can’t.”
“You dispelled the magic on me keeping my soul burning in hellfire. If you can do that, you can do anything. I won’t leave you alone, okay?”
“I didn’t do it for your sympathy,” Astarion said, self-defeating as always. “Stop treating me like something precious. She cursed me. Y-you didn’t hear her, Wyll. It was all true. Everything she said. This is me. This is what I’ve been this entire time. She laughed and said this was a gift for me to finally taste man-flesh like I’d dreamed of. I’m—”
His throat closed off of the words reflexively, and his eyes burned with tears.
“No you’re not,” Wyll said. “She saw only one version of you. I don’t care if you did it to gather friends or not, you still cared for me for… a month? Two months? You had no reason, but you still returned my mind to me, and I will not abandon you now.”
“I liked that you needed me,” Astarion hissed. “I wanted you to only need me.”
“And I wanted you to need me in turn,” Wyll said. “Gods, the thought of you not needing me made me want to burn my mind away. I wasn’t stupid, Astarion. You made yourself clear enough. I don’t mind why you were visiting me, just that you were visiting at all. You still helped me more than anyone else I ran into.”
What else could Astarion do? He wept. He shoved his monstrous head against Wyll and screamed himself hoarse. He made a mess of Wyll’s new clothing with his own tears.
Wyll held him the entire time, making soothing noises, and stroking down Astarion’s back. He said all sorts of impossible things, like it would be okay, and that Wyll understood, and that Wyll was here for him, and that Wyll wouldn’t let him suffer alone.
It only made Astarion weep all the harder.
After a long moment, Wyll spoke again. “I cannot say I understand the extent of your loneliness, but it was enough you saw a feral devil as a companion, and I have had a fair taste of it of late. I do not fault you. Stop injuring yourself further, Astarion. I’m going to take care of you. I know right now it all seems overwhelming, but I’ve seen you. You can master this.”
Astarion would later attribute it to Wyll’s growing knowledge of bardic magic, but it suddenly felt not impossible. Hideously improbable, but Astarion’s mind could make shape of the steps. Polymorph could probably get him to assume elven form for an hour at least, and that wasn’t that much more complex than dispelling magic.
Only an hour, but still an hour.
His heart beat in his chest, and he felt no compulsions on him to return to Cazador’s side. The hag had torn Astarion bloody from his chains and flung him to the ground, and there were too many freedoms. Too much possibility. He needed a grounding line.
“Promise you’ll stay,” Astarion begged.
“I promise,” Wyll said.
Astarion shivered again, in this wrong monstrous body. He looked back once more to Baldur’s Gate and then out into the vast unknown.
He’d never been outside of the Gate in his memory.
“Alright. Alright. Fuck. We’ll need to be smart. We’ll need to be smarter than smart. We need to outrun Cazador, but… His influence wanes the further away from Baldur’s Gate you get. Where’s as far away from here as we can get?”
“Let’s find out.”