Chapter Text

Astarion stays back on the road as he sees the party approach – he’d seen them passing on the strange vessel, still trapped in that awful tank and unable to break himself free, unable even to move. From one state of paralysis to another – is that to be his life forevermore?

No.

He feels the sun on his cheeks, feels the warmth of it kissing the top of his hair. He’s known he missed it, known the whole while, for centuries, and yet it’s been so agonisingly long – he had forgotten entirely what it felt like, had recalled it only in the abstract. It’s so… gentle.

He had forgotten what gentleness felt like, and he doesn’t know that he’d like it, could trust it, coming from another person – Cazador’s gentleness had only ever been a ploy, a feint to make his muscles relax that the knife would sink in all the deeper, and he could never truly appreciate the gentleness from the hands that touched him in one seduction or another.

This is different.

It’s so mild that he doesn’t even know that he would have the words in him to describe it, the ghost of a real touch, and yet… how marvellous it is. He doesn’t know what was done to him on that awful ship, what happened to him in that tank in which he was stuck, in stasis, but for it to give him this, freedom…?

The leader of the party is an older man, another High Elf – he has thick curls of steel grey hair that are tied in a tail at the nape of his neck, and the style is curiously familiar to him. He remembers other men styling their hair like that, when he was still his own man, distantly – he remembers clerks in the legal offices, secretaries, some of the judicial assistants and magistrates’ seconds. He hasn’t thought about that in decades, he doesn’t think, the everyday minutiae of the work, of the ordinary people milling back and forth.

He’s handsome, for an older man. He has a strong jaw and while his nose is perhaps a little over strong, he has well-carved, defined lips, has a few sparrows tattooed in ink across one of his cheekbones, and while there’s a rough scar through his mouth, cutting diagonally from the left corner of his upper lip down through the plumper, right corner of his lower lip, it only adds to his appeal rather than taking away from it.

He's decently dressed, Astarion supposes – he’s in light armour, and it belongs to some order Astarion isn’t familiar with. It’s dyed black and grey with small trimmings of gold on the hems and around the symbol on the breast – the symbol that Astarion can’t read or recognise, because the strap of a satchel is settled over the middle of it.

The women with him, he only recognises one – the green and impressively muscular girl, she’d been walking alongside him on the vessel, and the other, a pretty little thing with dark hair and a rather moody style to her, she must have joined him later on.

Who in the Hells are these people?

“Here,” Astarion says, gesturing off the path, into the grass, “I’ve got one of those brain things cornered.”

The party come to a stop, and the other elf looks at him impassively from his place in the middle of the path, the young women standing at each of his shoulders – he’s of a height with Astarion, perhaps slightly taller, although that might just be the puff of his hair.

“You’ve killed others, I’ve seen you,” Astarion says. “You can kill this one too.”

After a few moments of the two of them staring at each other – and these young women either must not know this man very well, or simply haven’t worked with him before, because they’re both peering up at his face as though to study him as Astarion is doing – Astarion prompts, somewhat impatiently, “Well? Aren’t you going to help me?”

“You seem to be an impressive young man,” says the other elf, and he has a cool, collected voice, speaks a little on the quieter side. “You mean to tell me you can’t help yourself?”

It makes him abruptly angry, and he loses his composure, drawing his dagger – he wishes he had another weapon on him, something more threatening, something with a less intimate range, something other than his teeth, which he doesn’t exactly want to go about advertising.

The other elf doesn’t even react, barely even glances down at the blade, and keeps his blank gaze on Astarion’s face instead. His eyes don’t even widen slightly.

“I saw you on that ship,” Astarion says, “scuttling about. What, you work for those tentacled things? What—” He cuts himself off with a grunt of pain as it feels like his brain is suddenly cleaved in two, and he feels himself looking out of someone else’s eyes – standing in a temple library and feeling overwhelmed with the cosmic awe of it, the weight of knowledge spreading out in all directions, the rows and rows and rows of books—

Astarion blinks a few times, trying to force out the foreign images, and when he looks up, he sees the other man is touching his own temple, wincing slightly – the women, too, have their eyes screwed shut, and Astarion feels a painful sense of connection between the four of them, a sort of invisible, psychic link.

“What is this?” he demands.

“The ship we were imprisoned on, the nautiloid, was a mindflayer vessel,” the man says, rubbing at his temples with very neatly painted nails, black. “We were each of us kidnapped by those mindflayers, and they inserted these tadpoles into our heads – into our brains. It’s created a bond of sorts between us.”

“I see,” Astarion says lowly. “And what, the lot of you are now banding together?”

“These tadpoles, they don’t just create a connection between us,” the other elf says. “Our gith companion informs us – and we observed on the vessel proper – that they are the beginning of a mindflayer transformation. They will grow inside us, better insinuate themselves in our brains, before the transformation takes us over.”

“Takes us over?” Astarion repeats faintly, and he feels his stomach give a painful lurch – he remembers his first transformation, remembers the pain as his body died and came back just a little less alive than before, remembers the pain in his teeth as they were forced out of place by his new incisors growing in, remembers the gnawing, agonising hunger inside him, so much worse than anything he’d experienced before.

He thinks of the tentacled things on the vessel, these mindflayers – their tentacles, their huge, bulging heads fattened with enlarged brains, their clawed hands, their sunken, glowing eyes.

“You mean to say,” he says, thinking of the warmth on his skin from the sun, wondering how it will feel when his flesh is slick with snot-like mucous, wet and swarming with tentacles, “that if we keep these things inside us, we’ll become like them?”

“We don’t know,” the man says, glancing back to the gith. “We should feel symptoms already – should be impacted in some way other than this, at least. You’re welcome to journey with us, if you’d like.”

“He just pulled a knife on us,” says the pale girl, her dark eyes almost cartoonishly wide.

“He is right not to trust too freely,” retorts the green one. “Would you have had him welcome us with open arms, that we might strike with our blades, and catch him unawares?”

“What, so we should trust him?”

“He needn’t trust us, or us him,” says the elf, and he seems approving as Astarion sheaths his dagger. “He can come with us, and learn what we learn, or go alone – and have no forewarning if and when the tadpole consumes him. What would you two choose – what did you?”

Astarion stares at the other man, at his unchanging gaze, at his overwhelming, genuinely frighteningly calm – stepping closer, he sees that the other elf’s eyes aren’t as dark as he had first thought. Where the sun hits them, the dark brown of them show flecks of green within them, glittering flecks, much like ore or gems do shine amongst dark rock.

“My name is Lillen Anmactíre,” says the older man. “My companions are Lae’zel,” he gestures to the gith, “and Shadowheart.”

“Shadowheart?” Astarion repeats, not bothering to keep the mocking tone out of his voice, and Shadowheart gives him a somewhat vicious, equally sarcastic smile. “You can call me Astarion, if it suits you,” he says. “Forgive me for pointing it out, but you seem to conduct yourself with a particular authority. What makes you the daddy of this little party, with you leading the way?”

Is he doomed to go from one madman and a crew of constructed siblings to another so-called family forever more, pending the next transformation? Will it go on forever?

He doesn’t feel ill, doesn’t feel any sickness or any looming evolution burning under his skin – surely, if these tadpoles haven’t begun their work yet, they might be staved off further. Surely, he might retain the benefit of this thing in his head, this new power, this ability to walk in the sun and tread over running water, and not become one of those… things?

“By all means, Astarion,” says Lillen, bowing in a mocking way that makes him feel as though he’s standing in the legal halls once again, “feel free to lead us. I don’t carry the fore by patria potestas – take my stead, if it suits you better.”

“I’m not really meant for the spotlight, thank you,” Astarion says, and takes a sliding step behind the three of them. Patria potestas. Is this man a magistrate, or was he? Is that what makes him so…? “I don’t mind standing at the back.”

“Better placed for the backstab, I bet,” says Shadowheart, and Astarion looks at her mock-offended, resting his hand on his chest.

“Darling, please. With that pretty face, those big wet eyes? I’d never want to stab you from behind.”

Shadowheart’s tut barely disguises her almost-snigger – Lae’zel’s huff of approving laughter is a low growl.

Lillen doesn’t laugh, but he does smile faintly. It makes the scars across his mouth shine as they shift in the light.

“Where are we headed?” asks Astarion.

“Good question,” says Lillen, and starts walking forward again. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

Chapter Text

They make camp that evening with another member added to their little party – a handsome, albeit rather stupid wizard named Gale, who has lovely tresses of chestnut hair and makes terrible choices in evening attire. They spread along the side of a river, and they arrange tents for themselves in what they’ve managed to scavenge from along the coast, and from the packs of the dead they’ve been stepping over on their way up the hill.

A dozen times, Astarion crosses a stream just to assure himself that he can, jumping across the heavy stones to the other side and then skipping back. He remembers playing this sort of game when he was a child, he thinks, skipping over stones and avoiding falling into the shallow water, avoiding getting his trousers wet or dousing his shoes.

He hasn’t been able to do this for two centuries, hasn’t been able to so much as cross over a bridge over water, feeling a strange power preventing him from doing so, trapping him in place, the instinct rooting him to the spot – he’s seen it happen to Yousen before, seen him step into running water and cry out in pain.

It’s glorious, curiously, bizarrely. How unimportant this little liberty is, and yet what an effect is has on him, embraced in the moment.

When he finally steps back into the camp proper, the others are sitting around the fire, and Astarion inhales and takes in the scent of garlic as Gale continues to chop it on a board, strong, but not overpowering, not painful. He smiles faintly, and sinks into his seat on one of the logs they’ve pulled over to surround the fire.

Shadowheart is sitting on the floor on a mat in the mud, and to Astarion’s curiosity, she’s sitting obediently as Lillen draws a comb through her long, thick hair – it’s so long that he’s draping it over his knees to keep it from brushing against the floor. Astarion watches in silence for a while as Lae’zel and Gale continue preparing their evening meal, her piecing apart a rabbit (Gods, how the scent of its blood on the air makes his mouth feel dry and oh-so-thirsty) and him chopping vegetables.

Lillen is evidently well-practised at this sort of task, combs through Shadowheart’s long hair quickly but slowing whenever he finds a tangle, seeming to shift his wrist in such a way as to relieve the pressure on her scalp as he tugs free a tangle or a knot.

“You’ve done this before,” Shadowheart says when he starts to gather her hair into braids, braiding her hair quickly and dexterously – Astarion has seen him pick locks today, has seen him work them with swiftness and practice, never so much as bending a tool, let alone occasionally snapping a pick.

“Of course, I wouldn’t have offered if I hadn’t,” Lillen says mildly. “I’ve two daughters, strong young women like yourself – Ava, my youngest, she used to have her hair long, but sheared it short when she became a field medic. Braiding it took too much time out of her day, she said, and she was always getting it muddied or stained with blood or something else. But Marta, hers rivals yours for length – it’s a little thicker, has a gentle curl, doesn’t have this sort of sleekness. Did your father used to braid your hair?”

Shadowheart is quiet for a moment, and Astarion studies her face as she stares into the fire, her brow furrowed, her lips pressing together – she’s considering the question, her head tilting to one side.

“I don’t know,” she says. It’s an honest answer.

Astarion’s gaze flicks up to Lillen’s face, which is smiling, but in a blankly understanding way – he talks to her about what he’s doing, explains that these are just protective braids for her to sleep in, that he can style it her usual way tomorrow, or show her something new.

Astarion thinks of Cazador’s hands in Leon’s or Violet’s hair, pulling free clumps of the stuff whenever it suited him, laughing at how they cried out or tried to hold back their noises of pain, how they stiffened, shuddered, sobbed, gritted their teeth.

“How old are your daughters?” Astarion asks.

“Oh, they’re young women, still,” Lillen says dismissively. “Marta is sixty-four, and Ava is just coming into her fifties now.”

“Your people are long-lived,” remarks Lae’zel, and she looks between Astarion, Lillen, and Shadowheart, studying the three of them. “You, you are not a full-blooded elf?”

“No,” says Shadowheart.

“Are your children?” Lae’zel asks.

“They are,” Lillen says, inclining his head. “An elf like Astarion or I, we can live for as long as nine centuries, longer than that, even, at times.”

“Your wife is an elf too, then?” Astarion asks, and he’s aware of the way it makes Gale and Lae’zel’s eyes whip his way, how Shadowheart turns and reaches up to touch her hair, but looks up at his face.

“I have no wife,” Lillen says. “My tastes have very rarely run in that direction. I am separated from my husband some twenty years, but it was rather amicable – I wanted to travel, he wished to remain in Neverwinter, and remain there he has. We see one another whenever I pass through. And yourself, Astarion?”

“No wife, nor husband,” Astarion says, sitting back on the log and resting his palms on the wood, spreading his thighs. “Why, my friend, trying to ascertain my availability?”

Lillen actually laughs, the bastard, huffs out a sound as though Astarion’s said something genuinely ridiculous, and Gods, but how it sticks at him, how it cuts him. How dare he?

“You’re a very sweet young man, Astarion, and a handsome one,” Lillen says, patting Shadowheart’s hair before he gets to his feet and moves across the camp, beginning to set pans over the fire to braise the meat that Lae’zel has parcelled and awaiting it. “But I have more pressing matters on my mind – not to mention the toothy little worm in there – than robbing anyone’s cradle.”

He feels the urge burning in the back of his mouth, his tongue near to twitching – he wants to retort he’s not quite so young as Lillen is assuming he is, that on the contrary—

He presses his tongue against the upper part of his teeth, stilling it in their cage.

Gods, he’s hungry, and while the scent of the rabbit cooking is fine, is enticing, even, it’s nothing compared to the gnawing one deeper within him, the craving for the coppery taste of blood on his tongue, the rich thickness of it.

The scent of it cooking is nothing compared to the scent of the rabbit drained of its blood – Lae’zel had tossed the bucket of blood into the river before he could so much as get a sip of it.

* * *

Astarion is rather inspired, watching Lillen at work, leading the party of the rest of them – Astarion and Shadowheart at his shoulders, Gale leading the rear. The old man, perhaps appropriately, appears to be quite at home in crypts – with the living, his tongue is quick and able, and he rather deftly manoeuvres the graverobbers already attempting to gain access to the dusty old tomb out of their way, sending them scurrying off.

Gale and Shadowheart remain behind as he and Astarion move into the crypt ahead of them, and the two of them each remain cloaked in shadow as they pick their way through and silently slit the throats of the rest of them, piling up their corpses so they can explore the tomb themselves.

His vision isn’t the best, Lillen’s.

It’s perhaps failing him in his age, or perhaps he’s always had problematic eyes – he seems to have endless ability to study tiny marks of text on whatever page or slate or tablet he finds them etched on, although he always casts a cantrip of Light to do so, and without a good light, he doesn’t see the signs of traps, either.

Even with light, it’s not always guaranteed – frequently, he or Gale or Shadowheart will point out the barely visible wires or pressure plates, and it will be clear in the shift of his expression that he hadn’t noticed it just yet.

Yet once he knows it’s there, he seems to disarm every trap automatically, sightlessly, thoughtlessly, easily, just as he picks every lock – he could probably do it all whilst blinded, so long as he was warned what was ahead of him. This is the wisdom of experience, Astarion supposes, of age, being so old as he is.

He’s some centuries years old himself, and yet he’s somewhat robbed of the experience of those years – what has he done for himself in these two centuries past, under Cazador’s yoke, puppeted on his strings, more marionette than man? How to seduce, how to love, how to charm, so convincingly, and mean none of it?

How to fuck and be fucked, and know his body is a tool to be used, to disarm tracks or pick locks like these, and not a tool of his own?

He doesn’t even seem fucking surprised when the crypt they push into opens up and that dead mage hovers out, skeletal and so dead and so alive and yet speaking, yet peaceful. It makes Astarion feel sick to his stomach, just looking at him – perhaps it’s the growing hunger that’s chewing through his insides, feels as strong and heavy as a bloating tumour, but if it were only that, he might be able to handle it, he thinks. Astarion’s been hungry before.

That was him. That is him, without the tadpole slithering through his brain, swimming through the grey matter inside his skull and doing Gods know what – undead. A parasite on this Earth, a dead man walking.

It takes them two days working through the crypt, in large part because Lillen comes out with a large pile of fucking books – he’s quick about it, but every row of books, every stack of them, he scans through their pages, their indices or their cover plates before picking some out of the pile and setting them aside.

Astarion and Shadowheart and Gale, being somewhat more sensible, they collect the pieces of treasure, the gold and silver and gemstones, the enchanted tools and objects – for all he seems to have little interest in picking them up, Lillen seems to have a good knowledge of what they are once he examines everything back at camp.

He, Gale, and their new necrotic companion, Withers, sort through each enchanted piece once they’re back at camp together, having transported everything with an abandoned cart left at the side of one of the paths – they sort what’s to be sold, and which pieces are to be shared out between them, which they’ll use and equip, or keep on hand at camp.

And then—

“What on Earth are you doing?”

“If we’re to function as one party, young man, we will keep proper records,” Lillen tells him sternly. His tent has been spread out over the veritable library they’ve gathered so far – he’s been keeping and collating maps whenever they find them of their area, and they’re pinned up against the canvas with various locations marked, new adjustments penned overtop, and on a pilfered desk, he has opened an empty journal and separated it into columns filled with notes and numbers.

“Can you really do all that maths in your head?” Astarion asks sceptically as he watches Lillen’s pen and quill on the parchment page, estimating object values, adding them up, separating out the gold between the five of them and keeping a portion for the party’s coffers – for supplies, he says, for travel, for shared costs.

“These are provisional estimates,” Lillen says mildly. “Once we reach civilisation, we can sell off what we can.”

“And your little library, is that being sold off?” Astarion asks, and Lillen raises his eyebrows.

“You have picked up every pillow, sheet, and blanket you’ve laid eyes on in the past two days, I might point out, and you spent a good deal of yesterday evening laundering them in the river before demanding Gale magically dry them for you. Are you going to be selling all of that bedding, or is it vital that you sleep six feet elevated from the floor, comfortably ensconced in your colourful nest?”

Astarion scowls down at him, crossing his arms over his chest. “No one really finds that sort of hyperbole funny, you know.”

“Is it hyperbole?” Lillen retorts flatly, and Astarion huffs out a breath, stepping into the bounds of Lillen’s tent and stroking his fingertips down the line of book spines, looking at the varied fonts inscribed on each of them – a few varied alphabets as well.

“Were you a librarian in a past life?” Astarion asks. “Is it troubling you horribly, this wandering through dungeons and digging through the irritating treasure keeping those precious books out of your reaching grasp?”

“I can’t be hyperbolic, but you can?”

“Oh, I’m genuinely not being hyperbolic, darling,” Astarion says disapprovingly. “It’s as if you see the glitter of a gemstone and the light leaves your eyes, until you see some sodden old parchment underneath it.”

Lillen laughs, and Astarion thinks of the glimpse he’d gotten inside the other man’s head, of the sense of peace and content in the midst of that library. Lillen is looking up at him, and as if knowing what he’s thinking of, he opens his mind, broadens the connection between them – Astarion breathes in as he recalls the other man’s memories, recalls how his footsteps had echoed in the hall as he’d moved further into the library, books all around him, extending on his every side, into the ether, into near infinitum.

“The Hall of Knowledge in Neverwinter,” Lillen says as the connection gently breaks off. “When first I stepped inside, I felt joy unimaginable – I had never really understood faith up to that point. It hadn’t really made sense to me – there was something lacking in solidity to it, something ephemeral, incomprehensible, indigestible. But books, knowledge, all that knowledge, that was solid. That was real. It seemed to be that the road to the gods was some manner of stairwell built of books and scrolls like those.”

“How… charming,” says Astarion, not bothering to inject too much false enthusiasm into his voice, and Lillen stands to his feet.

He is taller than Astarion.

Taller and broader too, not unusually so for an elf, but more than him in comparison – he radiates warmth, and stood this close to him, Astarion can smell him better. Smell the scent of ink and old parchment on his hands, smell the plants he’s been picking together, and underneath all that, can smell the scent of his flesh, of his meat, can feel the pulse of his blood through his veins, his heart.

He glances down to Lillen’s throat, watches the muscles tense and shift in his neck, and he wonders if he would feel them under his tongue, if he bit down into it. How would it feel, sinking his teeth into flesh like this, into a man’s, so much bigger than a rat, and filled with so much more blood, and much nicer blood, well-fed, not… Not vermin’s?

“Let me work now, Astarion,” Lillen says in a lower voice, and he turns Astarion bodily with a neat grip on each of his shoulders, pushing him forward, and when Astarion resists him, he pats him.

On the arse, he pats Astarion, and shoves him forward like that!

“You bastard,” Astarion hisses at him.

“Off you go,” says Lillen, and pulls his tent flap shut.

Across camp, Shadowheart is trying to stifle her laughter, and Astarion makes a rude gesture in retort.

“I can’t believe he just did that,” she whispers when he walks closer. “Sent you out of his tent like a teacher ushering a naughty student out of his office!”

“Well, you let our new daddy braid your hair, so we’re the both of us naughty children, if you want to see it that way,” Astarion points out, and Shadowheart wrinkles her nose at him.

She looks back toward Lillen’s tent, then. “That symbol on his chest,” she says, and Astarion thinks of it, the gold inscribed on his breast, a blank, open scroll. “The armour he wears – he may not be a cleric like me, but he’s a devotee of Oghma. A priest, I’d guess, based on the way he handles books and music. Oghmians try to make copies of all the texts they can find, to preserve all the knowledge they can.”

“Ugh,” Astarion groans softly, and looks to the carts they’ve gathered to move their encampment on the road to Baldur’s Gate, when next they move on. “You mean he’s going to be doing this the whole time?”

“Until we find an Oghmian enclave, I suppose,” Shadowheart says, and Astarion sighs, putting his head in his hands.

He’s been picking up books here and there, absolutely, but once he reads them, he plans to leave them behind! He doesn’t need to build a fort wall of texts on his every side to travel with!

“I’m bored,” Astarion says.

“Want to spar?” asks Shadowheart.

“Darling,” Astarion says, putting his hand on her spiky little shoulder. “I thought you’d never ask. Let’s get out of sight, hm? Avoid Lae’zel inviting herself into our training again?”

“Why, so you can try to fuck me the moment we’re out of earshot?” Shadowheart retorts, raising her pretty little eyebrows – bless her. Sex with Shadowheart is quite the enticing prospect, but not nearly so enticing as the beat of her heart under her armour. “We can spar here, where everyone can see us.”

“Fine,” Astarion says, although he makes sure she can see him pout, and goes to get his blades.

Chapter Text

His thoughts of biting Shadowheart had distracted him from his hunger as the day had lengthened into the evening, but once the sun is down, the need settles once again into his bones, burns in the base of his gut. He’d eaten some of the rabbit, and it really had been very nice – he hadn’t even realised he’d missed garlic – but it hadn’t been the same as…

Gods, as food.

Blood.

He sits up from where he’d been trying and failing miserably to meditate beside the fire, and he tilts his head, listening out for the sounds in the woods about them – he can hear a few birds, hear small beasts skittering about on the forest floor. The rabbit had smelled so good, its blood, and he wonders what it might be like to catch one and bite into it – their fur is so much softer and denser than a rat’s, although when he’d commented on it, Gale had said mildly that in the winter time, their fur would thicken even further.

But the others beside him, they smell even better.

Shadowheart is curled on her side in her sleep, her braids wrapped in a piece of silk that Lillen had tied them up into, the way he’s been caring for her hair every night as though she really is his own daughter. Her throat seems to glow bright white in the moonlight, a contrast to the Sharran black of the rest of her – perhaps it’s some sort of call of Selûne, making him hunger for her particularly.

After decades of every god there is ignoring him, his calls and prayers going unanswered, it would be rather funny, for her to make contact with him now, even if to use him as a beast to prey upon her enemies.

Gale is sleeping soundly, his hat covering his face and neck where he lies on his back under a blanket, but his arm is outstretched, and with the sleeve of his silly little pyjama shirt riding up, one of his wrists is quite gloriously exposed, and as he looks at it, he almost feels he can see the vein jumping before his eyes.

He looks behind him, to where Lae’zel is sleeping in her tent – he can hear her snoring softly, and he wonders what a githyanki warrior tastes like, but…

Well.

These are all youthful people, full to the brim with energy, more likely to wake from their respective slumbers – the old prick is hopefully deep in the throes of his meditation, his focus unlikely to be broken even by the prick of Astarion’s teeth against his throat.

And if Gale or Shadowheart or Lae’zel wake, each of them would be like as not to call for help, to sic the others on him – if any of the people in this strange little party would take mercy on him, take pity on him, let him get away with it, it would be Lillen Anmactíre.

He very carefully walks around the fire and past the two of them sleeping, approaching Lillen’s tent – his cantrip is still active, lighting the lantern hung from the central crossover of his tent poles, so he can’t have been meditating for too long. He’s resting on his back, his expression blank in repose as he rests back on the mat, and there are books all around him.

Astarion looks in the ledgers on the desk – the one he’d seen before with profit estimates, but the other is a list of every book, their publishers, authors, even notes on their materials.

His armour is hanging up on a training dummy, and Astarion touches his fingers to the symbol of Oghma in the centre of his breast – funny, he doesn’t particularly remember praying to Oghma, but he must have at some point.

He creeps forward, bending his knees and beginning to crawl. He doesn’t know what noise he makes, or if it’s perhaps the old prick just feels some disturbance on the air or around him – as soon as Astarion is over him, looking down at his face, his eyes open, and Astarion has no other warning before he finds himself flipped onto his back with the other man’s bulk pinning him down, the flat of a blade pressed against his throat.

He manages not to let out some pathetic noise, a whimper or some whine of surprise, but he can’t keep his face controlled, knows his eyes are wide.

“Young man,” rumbles Lillen, and Gods, but the command in his voice goes straight down to his cock, makes his skin thrill, and yet he’s so dizzy with hunger he almost regrets the less useful reroute of his blood flow, “I have already told you no.”

“I’m not trying to fuck you, you disgusting old man,” Astarion hisses at him, and Lillen looks down at him suspiciously, but then his expression focuses further down, and Astarion does let out a noise this time as Lillen shoves up one of his upper lips to examine his canine teeth. Lillen actually drops the knife aside, straddling Astarion’s belly more entirely as he presses on the sides of Astarion’s jaw, forcing him to open wider so that he can peer into his mouth, at his teeth, his tongue, the roof of his mouth.

He actually has the audacity to tilt Astarion’s head back so that he can examine him more carefully, and—

“I see,” Lillen murmurs, his expression serious. “It was an entirely different hunger you found yourself intent on sating, hm?”

“I—”

“Hush,” Lillen orders him, and Astarion’s mouth, humiliatingly, drops shut of his own accord. “You’re a vampire, hm? You kept that close to your chest.”

“Was I meant to go shouting it from the rooftops?” Astarion asks faintly. “Tell you all I’m a hellspawn liable to suck each of you dry, and have you drive a stake through my heart?”

He smells so good. The parchment and ink, the floral scent, it’s all overwhelmed now by the scent of flesh, of Lillen’s sweat on his skin, of the pump in his blood beneath, and Astarion craves, he craves, he craves!

“You don’t understand, darling,” Astarion says, walking a few of his fingers up Lillen’s chest, which is softer than he’d expected – his armour had been hiding a slight paunch, and he’s got rather a generous chest, although that’s not wholly undesirable. “That tadpole of mine, it’s doing such odd things to me… For years, for centuries, I have been bound by my curse, I’ve not been able to so much as stand in sunlight, and now? Now, I can. I do! Almost every aspect of my vampiric thralldom have been reversed.”

“Except your hunger for blood, it seems,”

“I haven’t drunk a drop of blood since that mindflayer vessel drew me aboard,” Astarion says. His hand moves lower, settles on the older man’s waist, and he squeezes gently, presses his thumb into the meat he finds there – soft on top, but not so much beneath. He’s a good climber, Gods know that Astarion’s been aware of that, these past few days – he’ll grip at vines and move rather quickly up them, with speed and strength. That armour he wears is actually rather deceptive. “I’m desperately hungry, Lillen. If you’re to be our little group’s patriarch, to arrange and instruct us, comb my dear new sister’s hair, regale us all with tales of your youth at the fireside… Would you have me go hungry?”

He lisps slightly on the words, pouts out his lips and widens his eyes as best he can, looks desirously and wantingly and desperately up at the older man’s face.

“And why feed on me, boy?”

“Dearest Daddy, was I meant to feed on one of my new sibli— Ow, Lillen!” Astarion cries out as Lillen grips far harder, tighter, across the jaw this time, digging his nails slightly into the flesh – Cazador had done that before, albeit with claws rather than neatly trimmed nails like Lillen, and the thought, the position, makes his head feel like it’s going to explode.

“I don’t know where you learned this faux-familial patter, young man, but it does bore me – if you want to obfuscate your desires, learn a better strategy. Or simply don’t obfuscate them at all.”

“What’s life without a little obfuscation, darling?”

“Who says you are to go on living, when your intent was to drain me dry while I slept?”

The blade is not at his throat, this time – it’s poised over his heart, and Astarion holds his breath as he looks up at the other man’s face, at the blank, unreadable expression there.

“You’d kill me, over a little thing like this?” Astarion asks, wounded. “I thought we had something between us. Lillen—”

“You have my permission, Astarion – my encouragement, even – to feed on every bandit we find, every living beast it suits you to sup on. Speak about their tastes with me, even, compare the vintages of one blood and another – this secrecy, it will cease. We’ll tell the others when they wake tomorrow, of your nature, of what you are.”

“You don’t think our friends will want me dead for what I am?”

“These alliances aren’t so weakly forged as you seem to imagine,” Lillen tells him, “and in any case, your vampirism is held back by our shared infection. That counts for more than you know.”

“I’m to wait ‘til morn, then, before I can feed.”

“No,” Lillen says. “You came here to drink – I’ll let you.”

Astarion stares at the older man’s face, at how bluntly he says it, how easily. “Really?” he hears himself ask, disbelieving, and Lillen slowly clambers from on top of him, reclining back on his mat again.

“Come, young man,” Lillen says softly. “Or would you have me accused of letting my children starve?”

Astarion has to concentrate to control himself as he crawls over the other man once more, his hands either side of Lillen’s body, his knee between Lillen’s thighs. He feels even smaller than before, somehow, his shadow over Lillen’s, compared to when Lillen was towering over him earlier that night.

“This feels like something of a trick, you know,” Astarion says softly.

“You’re rather at home with those, I’d wager,” murmurs Lillen, and Astarion sinks one of his hands into the thick curls on his head – oh, but they’re soft, much softer than the rabbit, even, soft and thick. He hadn’t wrapped them in silk, like he had Shadowheart’s, but his head does recline on a silk pillow, Astarion notices.

“I’ve never supped on another man before, on an elf,” Astarion whispers. He doesn’t know why he confesses it, why he tells the other man – this business of honesty, of avoiding obfuscation, that’s nonsense and silliness, but a little honesty here and there, he can use it to spice up an evening. “When I was a thrall, I was pinned in, trapped. I wasn’t permitted that sort of luxury – I fed on rats and spiders, on vermin, for two hundred years. And you call me boy, as though I’m still a child.”

“Oh, bless your undead heart,” says Lillen softly. “Don’t you know, my boy, that that’s precisely what you are?”

Astarion bites down more angrily than he had intended on Lillen’s neck, wrenching his head to the side by his hair to give himself access, and Lillen’s soft noise of pain makes something warm twist and turn on itself in the base of Astarion’s gut, thrumming with want and possession and superiority—

And that little pleasure is naught compared to the sweet and perfect wash of Lillen’s blood over his tongue.

Oh, but it’s so rich and sweet, and so thick, and so, so plentiful – he needs only to drive his teeth into the corpse of a rat or a spider to run its juices dry, to leave it emptied of anything nourishing in his hand, but as he slurps and sucks at the marks he’s made in Lillen’s throat, it seems to just go on and on and on.

Fuck, but it’s divine.

No wonder Cazador was what he was, no wonder he denied Astarion and his siblings so much as a taste of any of his victims, if this was the ecstasy contained within them, pumping in their veins.

Lillen moans quietly, and Astarion stiffens, waiting to fight him if he tries to push Astarion off, but Lillen just slides his hand up Astarion’s back (his touch is warm and strong and tender, gentle, gentle like the sunlight) and tugs him closer, and Astarion keeps drinking.

He’s greedy about it. It’s been such a long, long time since he could be greedy – once, he thinks, he was a gentleman with perfect table manners, refined and gentle, cool and careful and perfectly tailored, but times have changed. Slavery does something to a man, it seems – in his case, it does all but everything.

Lillen’s making whining little noises from the back of his throat as Astarion suckles from the front, feeling the heat of Lillen’s blood as it rushes over his tongue and teeth, as it slides down his greedily swallowing throat and fills his stomach up and over. He wouldn’t wonder if he had a gut from all the blood in him after this – he can feel it thick and slick on his chin, down his own neck, on the front of his shirt—

Lillen has gone quiet.

And his blood has run dry.

Astarion sits back, looking down at the older man beneath him, looking at his green-flecked eyes – the pupils are blown terribly wide, but there’s a glassiness to them, now unseeing. When Astarion touches his wrist, he finds it slightly chill, and he doesn’t feel Lillen’s pulse under his thumb.

“Oops,” he murmurs to himself, distantly feeling a little embarrassment under the bloodstained, well-stuffed glee, and he rather hurriedly retracts himself to make himself clean before the rest of camp can wake.  

* * *

The next morning, Astarion waits rather impatiently, somewhat nervously, for one of their companions to check on Lillen in his tent, to realise that he’s looking rather paler than he had done, and rather more, ah, dead.

He feels a thrill of fear run through him when he looks up and sees it’s the man himself approaching him, their undead friend hovering ominously at his shoulder.

Withers is looking disapprovingly down at Astarion – Lillen looks only slightly less so, his hand on his waist.

“My dear friend,” Astarion says coaxingly, leaning forward and doing his best to at the very least look abashed, “I hope you won’t hold last night against me, I only meant to—”

“Our friend Astarion here has been keeping a secret from us,” Lillen barks loudly, and Astarion nearly falls back off the log at the sheer volume of it. He’d no idea the old man could project so much, and he glances to the side as Gale, Lae’zel, and Shadowheart look their way. “Why don’t you share your confession with the group, young man?”

If Astarion still could, he thinks he would blush.

“I really don’t think—”

“Now,” Lillen growls, and Astarion stands to his feet.

“You can’t just order me about, you know, like I’m some sort of child,” Astarion hisses, disgustingly humiliated. “I’ve suffered more than enough in my life without—”

“Our new friend is a vampire,” Lillen announces, without fanfare, and everyone is arguing over one another before Astarion has a chance to better defend himself.

Lillen does still defend him, he finds – or at the least, he doesn’t throw him to the wolves and let them devour him. Insists they want him alive, insists they want him at all.

He doesn’t tell them about Astarion’s little… indiscretion.

“Thou wouldst do better to instil in thyself better self-mastery over thy needs and desires,” Withers tells him when Lillen sets out for the day with Lae’zel, Gale, and Shadowheart in tow – as punishment for his evening’s sins, Astarion is abandoned with their strange, dead friend, to look after and oversee their camp.

“I really didn’t mean to,” Astarion says. “You believe me, don’t you, Withers?”

Withers releases a doubtful sound, and floats off in the other direction.

Chapter Text

A few days later found their encampment not where it previously had been, so near to the fallen corpse of the nautiloid vessel, but behind the boundary walls off to the right of not only of what amounted to a tiefling refugee camp, and not only that, but a dryad encampment.

They had cleared out the harpies plaguing this part of the shore to make sure they could settle in their camp unmolested – and, Astarion supposes, because several of the do-gooders in their little party had insisted on saving the life of a stupid young child evidently desperate to be devoured – and now Astarion shrugs off his bedclothes to replace them with armoured robes, instead.

They’re enchanted, will channel a little extra to his magic and have some enchantment in the weave of them to protect him from some blows, but he really would rather be in armour.

Unfortunately, they’re meant to be playing the part of some manner of apostles into the goblin encampment up the hill, pretending to believe in Absolutes, whatever they might be, and going armoured apparently makes them seem too much like the violent adventurers they are.

When he walks up the hill alongside Shadowheart, he sees the figure of one of their new companions waiting for them on the hill – one Wyll Ravenguard. He’s a very handsome man, but unfortunately, he has quite the preponderance of personality, and Astarion doesn’t know that he can manage another night by the fireside, listening to some splendid tale of the tremendous Blade of the Frontiers triumphing over evil and doing good to all man, or some other such absolute bollocks.

Lillen is walking down from further up the hill, and Astarion notes with a raised eyebrow that one of the young tieflings – Cal, a muscular man with a particularly annoying elder brother and sister, if Astarion recalls correctly. He’s chattering excitedly with small movements of his hands, and is actually smiling – Astarion doesn’t know that he’s seen him smile before, and it’s quite the handsome look on the boy, striking.

“When Lillen gets him into bed,” says Shadowheart, “which one of them do you think is going to…?”

“Roll over?” Astarion suggests quietly, and sniggers when Shadowheart does, the two of them nudging one another’s shoulders. His hunger may be sated for now, but the thought of doing other things with Shadowheart isn’t at all unpleasant – she’s so lovely, what with how pale she is, and Astarion can’t help but wonder the colours he could make her go.

Not by blushing, of course – the girl is the colour of marble and might as well have stone for flesh too, with how immovable she seems to be in the face of guts, gore, or gallantry, but a few bites here and there, perhaps a few bruises.

Astarion can’t help but wonder what it’s like, sex like… this. Sex free, sex easy, sex not because he has to use it to pay his way or to lure in some handsome, stupid noble or pass the time or distract someone, sex with one of the thousand unsatisfying and bland partners he’s had in his life, painful sex, bad sex, but—

Sex.

Real, real sex, the sort he used to have an eon ago, before he was a dead man walking.

“Lady preserve us,” Shadowheart mutters under her breath, but Astarion paints on a vividly false smile as Wyll ambles over, evidently curious as to their shared amusement and desperate to make it about himself. It’s so easy to forget his false eye, when he’s further away – it rather mars the view up close, particularly with his personality brought into consideration.

“Our friend seems to be getting on rather well with the locals,” Wyll says amiably.

“Well, you’ve been taking an interest in educating the youth in battle and defence, hm? Lillen is apparently interested in teaching them something different, ha!”

Shadowheart stifles her smile beside him, but Astarion is fascinated to see not amusement on Wyll’s face at the evidence of the dirty old man at play behind him, but an expression of consternation, his head turning and his handsome brow furrowing, his lips twisting into a frown.

“Well,” he falters slightly, “it’s obvious that Cal has a bit of a crush on him, but it’s not as though Lillen would act on it.”

Astarion and Shadowheart share a look – she is, Astarion expects, as amused and surprised by Wyll’s immediate and quite ridiculous faith in their new leader’s moral purity as he is.

“Would he?” Wyll asks, seeming not only troubled, now, but damn near to scandalised. His voice is quieter as he says, “But he’s so… old.”

“Venerable,” Astarion suggests as an alternative.

“Well-aged,” Shadowheart agrees, voice dripping with irony. “Tested by time.”

“Potent,” Astarion pronounces, and Shadowheart has to hide her face in her hands to keep from laughing – oh, she’s not like this in general, seems to generally carry a sour puss to match the sour nature of the goddess she’s devoted to, but she really does seem tickled by their shared mockery of their new counterpart, father figure as he might be to the girl.

“Ugh,” Wyll groans, shaking his head, and they all three of them look to Lillen as he leaves Cal behind him and comes down to hill. “Hello, Lillen. Ready to set off?”

“I am indeed. Are you three?”

“Wyll was just wondering aloud to us, Lillen,” says Astarion, ignoring the slight frostiness in the older elf’s eyes – he’s not quite forgiven for his misstep earlier in the week, but Lillen is softening – “as to your intentions toward that innocent young tiefling boy you just had on your arm.”

Wyll’s remaining eye widens, and although he doesn’t bluster or fluster as Lillen turns a questioning gaze to him, he does raise his chin and his shoulders slightly, clearing his throat.

“I said nothing of the sort,” he says immediately. “I was just… He seems quite smitten with you.”

“His sister and brother keep arguing over his head,” Lillen says absently, adjusting his gloves. “I should think he’s smitten with anything that will distract him from their arguing for a moment. He was speaking to me about catching bugs in the village he and his sister grew up in, before they were run out of town, seems he has a budding interest in amateur entomology. Neither of them are willing to talk about anything but their current crisis at the moment. It was nice to see the young man relax a tad.”

“How more relaxed would you like to see him get?” Astarion asks, and Lillen looks at him flatly.

“Mind in the gutter again, Astarion?” Lillen asks him.

“If only there were gutters in this wretched place,” Astarion says, although at least their toileting habits by the shoreline feel a bit better than just digging a big hole and— Urgh. “How much longer are we going to stay here in this grove, picking flowers and dancing through the tulips with these druids?”

“We’ll see after today,” Lillen says. “We’ll approach the goblin encampment, see what information we can find as to this cult activity and proceed from there. This Halsin might be able to help us.”

“He also might not, and we’re wasting time on these refugees for no reason. They’re all doomed no matter what we do.”

“By all means, mind camp today and swap places with someone else,” Lillen suggests immediately, calling what Astarion would not call his bluff. “Gale, I’m sure, is desperate to—”

“Oh, don’t be cruel, Lillen, I’ve been cooped up with that skeleton and the dog for days now,” Astarion pouts, leaning into the older man and putting his hand on his chest, looking up at him with his eyes as wide as they can go. “Take pity, won’t you?”

“You’re not a particularly pitiable thing, Astarion,” Lillen tells him dryly, but he gives him the nod to go ahead of them toward the gate, and Astarion jumps to lead the way.

As they walk up the hill, Astarion asks, “Will they really just let us through? The goblins at this village?”

“They did before,” says Wyll. “Some of the goblins carry these tadpoles in their heads, call themselves followers of this goddess, the Absolute. The ones that don’t have goblins are mere acolytes, would-be worshipers, but the others… It’s strange, to see a god have so immediate a hold on even such simple beings as these.”

“They wouldn’t be the first goblins to turn their backs on Maglubiyet,” says Lillen, and Astarion tilts his head slightly as he glances at the older man’s face. He pronounces the goblin name without hesitation or the slightest difficulty, although it’s not one Astarion is familiar with.

“Do goblins ordinarily have much religion about them?”

“Some, although you might call the goblinoid pantheon more lacking in nuance than others,” Lillen says. “Maglubiyet is a god of war, and an exarch of Bane – and he is known to have destroyed nearly all of the other members of the pantheon. For these goblins to have transferred their loyalty to another god would imply to me that she is, in their eyes, an even greater conqueror than he.” He seems to consider the idea as they keep walking up the hill. “The non-goblin devotees we spoke to on their way to the goblin village, they were themselves very devoted, but the goblins in the village, they were unusually regimented in their belief, their ideas. I don’t find it helpful to think of goblins as inherently unorganised or militaristic – with the right motivation, small groups of them can be focused, intent. But this sort of army, acting so strategically and incisively in their attacks on the druid encampment?”

“You think it’s unlikely that the leaders of this Absolute are other goblins,” Shadowheart says, and Lillen inclines his head.

“There are evidently much larger forces at play here,” he says. “We’ve each of us, and Lae’zel and Gale, been infected with these illithid parasites, and we now know that it marks us in the eyes of these devotees as chosen of their god – but we were kidnapped from Baldur’s Gate in no small number. The nautiloid vessel seemed random in its selections, but that isn’t to say the mindflayers were indiscriminate – what is the cult of a new god in its beginning stages, but a contagious belief, one that spreads and infects new individuals, new groups, as it mutates and evolves? This contagion, of course, is not merely an ideology or a mantra: it’s power, real power.”

“You think faith,” Shadowheart repeats slowly, “is a contagion of belief?”

Lillen looks back at Shadowheart and smiles, nearly laughs, before he says, “Belief is contagious, infectious. Is it not?”

“Is it?” Astarion asks doubtfully.

“You, young man, have an indomitable immune system, I’m sure, when it comes to faith in anyone or anything,” says Lillen, and Wyll laughs as Astarion wrinkles his nose.

“And what is that supposed to mean, hm?” he demands.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” Lillen dismisses him. “Simply that you are… Shall we say, hard-headed?”

“Pah,” Astarion mutters, and walks ahead of the others, toward the village gates. The two goblin guards stationed at the entrance initially stiffen, raising their weapons, but when they see Lillen and the others following after him, they let Astarion past without so much as a second glance, let alone a word.

He wanders through the village, looking one way and the next, at the different burnt down buildings, the broken windows, the abandoned well. It’s strange, stupid, even, but walking through even places like this, destroyed and plundered, feels like a strange and wondrous relief, a wholly unexpected adventure – as a boy, growing up in Baldur’s Gate, it had been inconceivable to him that the city could ever feel small, could ever feel anything but utterly limitless.

Centuries of captivity within the city’s walls, lurking in its alleyways and wandering its narrow and wider streets, it had felt like little more than a cage with a labyrinth inside – perhaps it will be different, returning and being able to move under the sun again, no longer being contained to nights alone, but still.

It feels new, fresh, being in a village like this, even raided and plundered – and plundered twice over, judging by how many books Lillen had brought home yesterday.

He glances over his shoulder, toward Lillen and Wyll, who are talking to one another, Wyll gesturing as he no doubt tells some other tale of his wondrous exploits – Shadowheart is looking back at him, and when Astarion meets her gaze, she walks toward him.

“Find anything interesting yesterday?” he asks, and she shrugs.

“I thought we were going to die at one point,” Shadowheart mutters. “Down that well over there, there’s a maze of interconnecting tunnels, some of which connect with the cellar under that larger building in the centre. There was this phase spider, the thing was huge – Wyll managed to get it and blast it back and off its web, and it must have fallen far enough that it wasn’t able to crawl back up.”

“No particularly interesting treasure from all that?”

“A big amethyst,” Shadowheart says. “A few enchanted objects – there was a set of smith’s plans that Lillen and Gale were working on, but none of it really interested me. Why, hoping for something particular?”

“Not particular,” Astarion says. “Just— I don’t know, interesting? I’m no especial fan of arachnids, but at least your misadventures yesterday sound a little more riveting than drinking a bandit dry and then falling asleep with my nose in a book of poetry.”

“Your life is positively miserable,” Shadowheart says without sympathy, and Astarion pouts at her.

“I know,” he says, and she rolls her eyes, shaking her head as they step through the ruins of what was once apparently an alchemist’s – and in a village like this, an alchemist-cum-vintner, or so it appears from the mismatched and varied bottles on the shelves, some of them of a passably acceptable vintage. “Honestly, darling, I know the rest of you are keen to rid yourselves of the little invaders we have in our heads, but you wouldn’t be quite so keen if you were coming at it from my life rather than yours. I’ve been on a tight leash for quite a few centuries. For all the danger it may or may not come with later on, for now, this little worm of mine is providing freedom, not fear.”

“Maybe you do have faith after all,” says Shadowheart. “That, or stupidity.”

“For those of us not devoted to a Lady of Loss, dear,” Astarion says, “avoiding a life of torture and captivity is the opposite of stupidity, not its definition.”

Astarion stops with a bottle of Esmeltar Red held down by his hip, looking down at the floor.

“Lost an earring?” asks Shadowheart.

“Found a hatch,” says Astarion, and grins at her, showing off his sharp teeth, he supposes, by the way her gaze flickers down to his mouth. “Go flag down Daddy and Dummy, will you? Let’s go find another spider to play with.”

* * *

Lillen is focused and serious as they move through the dead necromancer’s secreted lair – Astarion has seen him serious already, but at this moment he’s positively grave, leading the way carefully through and disarming traps at the same time Astarion does.

“Had much experience with Thay necromancers?” Astarion asks.

“A little,” says Lillen.

He’s uncharacteristically quiet, no lecture to follow, and Astarion keeps working before pulling back to survey the field about them – Wyll and Shadowheart had stayed back and out of the way to make sure neither of them could trip any wires or plates.

“Like necromancy?” Astarion asks.

“Does anybody?” retorts Lillen.

“Are you really still angry at me?”

“Young man,” Lillen says, “you killed me.”

“You got better,” Astarion points out, and Lillen looks at him scowlingly, which Astarion responds to with his prettiest, most winning smile. “Besides,” he says in slyer tones, “you liked it.”

“I liked you killing me, did I?”

“You liked my teeth on your neck,” Astarion says softly, crawling forward on the stone floor, feeling the cool of it under his knees. “You liked the sharp pinpricks of my teeth on your throat, liked the sweet lap of my tongue against you, the rush of your blood into me, sustaining me – you, dearest captain of mine, liked the pain. I felt your little tadpole harmonising with mine.”

“Is that the euphemism children are using these days?” Lillen asks, and he raises his head just in time for Astarion to lean in closer, their noses nearly brushing against each other’s, Astarion’s finely pointed one against Lillen’s larger, squarer one. Up close like this, Astarion can smell Lillen’s breath, can smell the traditional elven dental chew he’s been making every morning, funny old man that he is.

“Is that why you’re carrying on with that handsome young tiefling, intent on robbing the cradle of him, hm?” Astarion asks in scarcely more than a whisper, and Lillen’s gaze is rooted directly to Astarion’s own. “What does he have that I don’t, other than my pretty pearly whites, hm? Excited for him to top you, are you, sit you down on his cock and keep you there with his strong young hands?”

“Hungry for something, are you, Astarion?” Lillen asks, and he tips forward: Astarion automatically closes his eyes, anticipating the brush of Lillen’s mouth against his in a kiss, but it’s little more than a feint – the bastard leans past him to grab his disarming kit, and then gets to his feet.

“Oh, you prick,” Astarion mutters.

“Up you get,” Lillen says. “No need for you to keep sprawling on the floor like that.”

Shadowheart and Wyll come in at Lillen’s indication that it’s safe, and Astarion looks at what he’s picked up from the table – as is typical for Lillen, it’s a book, but as is atypical, it’s a very… creepy book.

Astarion stares at it, fascinated at the sight of it – a skeletal face is twisted on the front cover of the skin-like leather, seeming as though it’s trying to lurch right out from the pages, and set in the recesses of its eyes are two small amethysts, glowing purple in the flickering light of the torches.

“Oh, you know, Lillen, you must be so tired after all this work we’ve been doing with these traps, hm? Why don’t you let me carry that for you?”

Lillen turns his gaze and looks at Astarion in apparent surprise, and immediately Astarion feels like crawling under a rock at something in his face. There’s curiosity there, intrigue – Cazador no longer looks at him like that, but he’d used to, when Astarion was still fresh to him, still new. Every time he’d found a new weakness to exploit, a new sore spot to press on, he’d gotten that look, a sort of hunger for more, a hunger to dig deeper into Astarion and chew on whatever tender parts he found inside him.

“You want this?” Lillen asks.

Astarion stares back at him, feeling like he’s caught in a spider’s web after all, even though there are no spiders whatsoever – or at least, not unusually sized or shaped beasties than the regular spiders in any cellar like this one. He glances at Shadowheart and Wyll, almost expecting to see mocking smiles on their faces, the same his siblings might have made in the face of Cazador posing a question like this, a trap.

Their expressions are only curious, looking between him and Lillen.

“Is that some sort of trick question?” Astarion asks, and lets out an airy laugh, putting a hand on his hip. “Lillen, it’s a rather frightening, rather powerful looking book. Of course I want it.”

“Alright,” says Lillen, and holds it out to him.

Astarion’s feet feel rooted to the spot, his hands frozen at his sides. He wants to snatch the thing out of Lillen’s hands, feel how heavy the thing is, with its thick parchment pages and its probably human leather and its big gemstone eyes, he wants to hold it, wants to feel more of the magic pulsing through it and in it – even from here, he can feel the wisps of energy clinging to it, channelled through it, trapped inside it.

It's a trap, he hears himself say, in his own voice, inside his own head. You’re going to reach out to take it, and he’s going to pull it back from you, and he’s going to laugh at you. He’s going to laugh at you.

“Astarion,” Lillen says, softer now, and he looks slightly concerned, but he steps forward and tugs forward one of Astarion’s gloved hands, settles the book into the centre of his palm and pushing it against his chest.

“That’s very obviously a book of powerful necromancy, secreted away by a Necromancer of Thay – even kept by a traitor to their cause, don’t you think it might be dangerous?” Wyll asks, and Astarion feels the heavy weight of the tome against his chest, still looking silently back at Lillen.

“Astarion will conduct himself with all due care, I would expect,” Lillen says.

“Is that why you’re giving it to me?” Astarion asks. “Because you think it’s dangerous?”

“I thought that was why you wanted it,” Lillen says, “or at least, part of the appeal of the text. Wyll’s right – this is evidently a powerful tome, and I would expect many secrets are kept within it.”

“So you’re letting me have it?”

“You asked for it,” Lillen says. “Indirectly, I grant you, but… Astarion, have you noticed you don’t ask for much? You wheedle and complain, you whine, you stamp your foot and voice your disapproval when someone acts in a way you wouldn’t have, you mutter sarcastic little things under your breath… But you don’t ask for anything at all. You don’t say, may I have that, would you give me that, can I take that one? Let alone so rapidly as you did for this book. Ordinarily you wait for everyone to take their pick, and then filter through for whatever might be left and still of interest to you. What do you think, that as soon as you so much as bring a morsel to your mouth, someone is going to snatch it away?”

Astarion actually feels quite sick for a moment as he stands there, clutching the book to his chest and feeling the magicks trapped within its pages, feeling them gently surge and swirl within the parchment cage, reaching out to touch Astarion’s own banks of magic.

“The book requires a keystone,” says Lillen. “Judging by the size and the colour of the eyestones, I’d think it’s a match for the large amethyst we picked up yesterday in the cave network – you can have it tonight, when we get back to camp.”

“You’ll watch me,” Astarion says. “Won’t you? You’ll watch me, when I open it?”

Lillen looks at him, and Astarion wishes he could make sense of his face, of the lines on it, of his face. The next time they find a potion of Detect Thoughts, he might just swig the thing and hide the evidence as soon as the bottle is empty – from what he’s heard in camp, Lillen is learning to channel his tadpole, to reach in and look into people’s minds as much as he’s able to accept other people’s communications, and he itches to practise himself.

Itches to be able to reach into Lillen’s mind, to understand what the fuck the old man is thinking, what his intentions are.

“Do you want me to?” he asks. “To watch you?”

“You like to watch, don’t you?” Astarion asks, and Lillen’s smiles faintly, but there’s a severity to it, to that smile.

“Do you want me to?” he asks again, in precisely the same tone, and Astarion looks away.

“Yes,” he says, slightly tightly. “Alright, yes, fine, if you must, if you’d be so good, if it won’t cause you too much trouble, then please, thank you, yes. Keep an eye on me as I— Yes.”

“Alright,” Lillen says, and squeezes Astarion’s arm before moving into the broader part of the necromancer’s lair, giving one last scan about for artefacts or other texts.

He can hear Lillen talking to Shadowheart, hear them speaking to one another about gods of death, it seems – the two of them are always so cheery, after all, why shouldn’t their conversation match suit?

Wyll is looking at Astarion seriously. “Are you alright?” he asks, tilting his head slightly. “It seems to weigh on you, trusting him, trusting us. You must be… frightened, under all that sharp bluster of yours, all that monster’s skin and teeth. Is there anything I might do, to soothe your anxieties?”

It’s earnest and genuine and very, very real, and Astarion curls his lip.

“Oh, fuck off, Wyll,” says Astarion, and walks away from him.

Chapter Text

“True Soul Lillen, isn’t it?” asks the human as they step into the cell – Astarion had thought it was another simple torturer’s room, but it doesn’t seem quite so straightforward as that.

There’s an itch under his skin, a warmth, his fingers twitching at his sides – all day, he’s been wanting to ask Lillen questions, wanting to all but interrogate him about his fucking intentions, but Gods know it doesn’t feel as though it’s going to be a helpful interrogation at all. He’s got no idea what questions to ask, what commentary to make, what to say, what to think, what to feel – is it a trap? Is it a manipulation?

It must be, but why? Why does he need to be manipulated, what is Lillen’s outright intention, what does he want, what does he need?

He knows, logically, that Lillen isn’t Cazador. He’s seen him fuss about with all manner of orphans and weak or misguided idiots in these past few weeks, so it’s silly, Astarion supposes, to worry about whatever plot Lillen might have against him, and yet…

It’s not as though he’s perfectly kind and easy. It’s not as though he’s not manipulative – as infuriatingly charitable as he tends to be, the man lies as easily as he tells the truth, and that’s even without considering whatever it is he seems to be doing with the young tiefling refugee, Cal, leading him along on a fine and pretty string.

Why give him the book?

Why let him…?

The man only cares about books, collects dozens of them, hundreds, spends an age cataloguing each and every one of them – granted, the man never seems to have any trouble letting Astarion poke or page through the ones he keeps in his tent, doesn’t seem all that possessive of them, but still.

And now—

He’d been standing right behind Lillen as they’d walked into the old temple, taken over by the goblins, the mercenaries, the different agents of the Absolute on every side – Shadowheart and Wyll had been further back, toward the bottom of the stairs. As Lillen had approached High Priestess Glut, Astarion had been right behind him.

He didn’t know if the goblin priestess had felt it, didn’t think so, but so close to Lillen as he’d been Astarion had had.

When that mad woman had held up the branding iron, still red hot and smoking with burnt flesh and hair from her last victim, had said so easily that Lillen should take the brand, that he should take the Absolute’s Mark on his face—

Lillen had refused, graciously and politely and oh-so-charismatically, but Astarion had felt it through the shared connection of their tadpoles. He’d felt it, felt the surge of curious, focused want, the craving on the back of Lillen’s tongue, for the sensation of it.

For the fucking burn of a brand into his skin – not just into some secreted part of his flesh, but onto his fucking face.

He doesn’t understand the man, that much is clear.

“Hello, Abdirak,” Lillen says, and he smiles faintly, looking the other man up and down. “Haven’t you grown up big and strong?”

“Bigger than you, apparently, sir,” says this Abdirak, moving closer and looking down at Lillen, and Lillen sucks the tip of his thumb and reaches out, polishing a stained droplet of blood from the metal framing over the top of his breast, and Astarion watches, fascinated, as he sees Abdirak’s pale cheeks burn red.

“Pledging yourself to our Lady Absolute, are you?” asks Lillen.

“No,” says Abdirak, shaking his head. “But my mistress’ cause coincides with hers, I think – I am devoted to Loviatar, the Maiden of Pain. I have known you always, Master Anmactíre, to seek the peace and serenity that comes in the embrace of our lady – if not the lesser embrace of the clasped hands of Ilmater.”

“Ha,” Lillen says, huffing out the soft laugh, and he glances back at the three of them watching, as if recollecting they’re there, all of a sudden. Astarion knows full well he isn’t controlling his own expression – Wyll and Shadowheart’s mirror what he knows his own looks like, surprise and glee and humour barely suppressed, and still wholly visible on their features. “Ah. Abdirak, this is—”

“Oh, please don’t waste time introducing us,” Astarion interrupts him, putting his hand over Wyll’s chest to stop him from bowing or shaking this insane man’s hand or whatever dashing, princely bullshit he’s considering interrupting the show with. “This handsome fellow is about to give you peace and serenity, Master Anmactíre. Aren’t you going to let us watch?”

Lillen’s smile is a cooler, more dangerous thing now, and he looks sidelong at Abdirak before his hands go for the clasp of his robes.

“Oh, please,” says Abdirak. “May I?”

“By all means, young man,” says Lillen, and stands there as a High Priest of Loviatar rushes to unclasp his robe front for him, making no effort or attempt to even hide his pleasure or satisfaction.

“Should we turn our heads?” Wyll asks.

“No,” Shadowheart and Astarion say at the same time, and smiling indulgently, Lillen says, “You should turn your head if it would make you feel more comfortable, Wyll, but I’m not shy myself.”

Astarion stares at Lillen’s body as Abdirak eases his under tunic and his outer robe off at the same time, leaving him in just his leggings, which are rather tight and leave little to the imagination – it’s not an especial surprise to see that Lillen is generously endowed, what with his unreasonable confidence in anything and everything, but it’s still a pleasant confirmation of what Astarion feels is certain to follow.

It's not hugely surprising, either, given the implications he’s gotten of Lillen in the past few days, to see the scars on his body – crisscrossing cuts dance over the tops of each of his forearms, and there are some old lash scars on his lower back, a savage bite mark scarred over his side, something from a dog or a cat, or something like that, Astarion thinks.

On the back of his neck, at the underside, is another tattoo – the sparrows dancing on his cheek are quite pretty, but this is a more complex design.

“I always wondered what this tattoo was, peeking out from the top of your collar whenever you passed through the temple,” Abdirak murmurs. “We used to go up to the balcony to see if we could peek down your shirt from up high.”

“And it was my neck tattoo you were interested in, was it?” Lillen asks, grasping his own set of generous tits and squeezing them, and it’s not as though Astarion could mock Abdirak for his distracted glance downward – Astarion’s, Wyll’s, and Shadowheart’s all do much the same, although Astarion doesn’t know they all share the same intention, or any intention at all.

Abdirak, he probably wants to cut them off or torture them with wax or needles or whatever might occur to him – Astarion would hope that Wyll and Shadowheart’s, if intentions they may have, are more in line with his own, involving suckling and bouncing, and perhaps even a little biting. How much blood flow is in the swell of his chest on each side?

“You’re the first one to strip down today,” Abdirak says. “A true penitent.”

“I’m a penitent of no one’s, young man,” says Lillen, “but as far as I know, your mistress loves no one else as she does a masochist.”

“How true that is,” says Abdirak. “Against the wall, sir, please and thank you.” He purrs on the last two words, and Astarion looks at the tattoo on the back of Lillen’s neck as he walks forward, resting his palms against the wall. “Shall I manacle you in place?”

“If you want me to put you over my knee once you’re done with your ministrations,” says Lillen, and to Astarion’s fascination, Abdirak actually shivers.

“Tempting,” Abdirak says. “What tool would you like, Lillen?”

“Which is your favourite?” Lillen asks.

Astarion can’t help his soft, “Oh fuck,” as Abdirak picks up a mace from his rack, and he shares a delighted look with Shadowheart. Between them, spoilsport that he is, Wyll looks quietly horrified.

The tattoo on the back of Lillen’s neck is the symbol not of Oghma, the one he wears on his armour front and on various of his jewellery and personal effects, but that of Deneir – a candle lit over an eye. On one of his wrists, Astarion is aware, he has another tattoo, a harp, which belongs to another of the bardic gods – and on the opposite wrist, an ibis, the symbol of Thoth.

Deneir’s candle spatters with blood with the first blow Abdirak brings down against one of Lillen’s shoulders, and Lillen groans in pain, but not just pain. His back bows forward slightly, his fingertips pressing into the stone, and with the older man’s head turned to the side, Astarion can see his eyes close shut, his lips part.

The next blow comes down, and Lillen moans again – more blood, but not too much, although Gods, but there are ragged cuts down his shoulders from the bristled sharpness of the mace, and then Abdirak brings the mace down a third time.

“Young man,” bristles Lillen immediately. “Are you flagging with the fatigue of the day already?”

“My apologies,” Abdirak says. “I lost my grip.”

The fourth blow seems to be the hardest yet, and Lillen’s moan is loud as he falls forward against the stone, his back bowed, blood dripping down the marks on his back, and he takes a few moments to catch back his breath, evenly, slowly.

“Thank you,” Abdirak says. “You’ve been an inspiration of mine, Master Anmactíre, since I saw you displayed on the candle rack in Arabel all those years ago – I had just entered my fifteenth year. I touched myself to thoughts of the wax as it fell over your body, the way you writhed and cried out in pain, for years before I found my mistress’ embrace, and ascended to greater heights of pain and its administration. You brought me to her.”

“That is gratifying indeed to hear,” Lillen murmurs, and reaches up to pat Abdirak’s cheek. “You were always such a devoted boy, Abdirak. What a privilege it is to see you find the root of that devotion and encourage its growth. I’ll put my robe into my pack for now – I’ll clean up these wounds, and then let them heal a while.”

“You mean I’ll get to see them bruise, these coming days? See those changing colours?”

“Oh, Abdirak, you should pack your things and move on,” Lillen suggests briskly as he folds up his robe. “This encampment will not be joining that of the Absolute’s broader retinue.”

“Won’t they?” Abdirak asks.

“No,” says Lillen, and meets his gaze. Astarion feels the flare of his tadpole, feels the pleasurable thrum of his insincerity – he’s going to kill them all for his own purposes, to help those druids and tieflings and all the sweet and lovely beasts of the forest, Astarion supposes. “The Absolute has judged this encampment, Abdirak, and found it wanting. We will eliminate the cultists here, and better purify our mistress’ following.”

“I might linger to watch the bloodbath,” says Abdirak softly, “if I can. Thank you again, Ma—”

“Lillen, Abdirak, please,” the older man says, and Abdirak smiles at him.

“Thank you again,” Abdirak says breathlessly. “I feel I’ve elevated my worship of my mistress ever further today – it’s been quite a pleasure to work with you today.”

“And an agony to work with you, young man,” says Lillen. “Unless any of the three of you would like to feel Loviatar’s blessing today?”

“Um, no,” says Wyll.

“Kind of you to ask,” Astarion says.

“I’m not wearing the right bra,” says Shadowheart.

Lillen is smiling like a madman as they move out from Abdirak’s cell, and with the three of them trailing behind him, they’re forced to watch the wounds on his shoulders, once disinfected, knit shut and scab over the next few hours. Around the breaks in the flesh from the mace’s sharpest edges, the flesh blooms a dozen colours as it starts to bruise.  

“Still disappointed, Master Anmactíre,” Astarion asks as they walk back toward camp later that evening, trailing the druid Halsin – a rather handsome but frankly ridiculously large elf – back to camp, “that you didn’t let that odd little priestess brand your face this morning?”

“Do you want that keystone for the book tonight, Astarion, or do you want to wait until morning?”

“I want it tonight,” says Astarion immediately.

“Then I suggest you don’t prompt me to tire of your company so quickly tonight,” Lillen advises him with an insincere smile, and Astarion has a laugh shocked out of him as he indignantly shakes his head.

Chapter Text

That night, after they were through watching Halsin scold this Kagha woman, after they were done discussing with the tieflings how they would wait for the goblins to march on them and kill them all—

Astarion feels the weight of the dark amethyst in his palm, nearly fist-sized, feels how cool it is, and he looks to Lillen, who is sitting cross-legged across from him on the mat outside of Astarion’s tent. It slots easier than he could have ever have imagined into the gaping maw of the skeletal face on the front of the book, and he closes his eyes as he listens to the quiet click of a lock opening, a familiar, joyful, easy sound.

“What will you do if opening this thing kills me, I wonder?” Astarion asks, glancing across at Lillen as he keeps the book resting in his lap, and Lillen smiles at him.

He looks very, very tired, his eyes darkly lidded, shadows underneath them.

“You’ve died before,” he points out. “It doesn’t seem to hold you back overmuch.”

Astarion cracks open the book, and stares into the swirling, swarming text that runs and shifts and sprawls on the pages in front of him, text that is so alive with dark power that the paper and binding cannot even hope to contain it. He steels himself as he looks within, feeling as though the text is reaching out for him – it’s not wholly unlike the reach of other people’s tadpoles toward him, although the flavour, for lack of a better word, is different, has a different weight.

He can feel the text making its home in his mind, forbidden, dangerous knowledge – knowledge of the world around them, knowledge of the body, of magic, of arcana, of the very soul, if a soul he still has in this undead form.

Steeling himself, he keeps the weight of the book cradled in one of his arm, and turns the page.

The text on this spread is even more powerful, and he blinks a few times to weather the pulse of energy that bursts out from the book rested against his chest, feeling dark magic smoke out and curl about his limbs, about his middle, seeming to sink under his skin and curl about his ribs, his heart, up to his throat, around his tongue. It tastes faintly sulfuric under the dominant bloody flavour, and there’s something oddly familiar about the combination.

The text seems to grow before his very eyes, and he feels as though it’s being inscribed on the inside of his skull – it feels good. It feels rich, powerful, and he exhales and feels the breath move out from his lungs, feels as though he’s aware of every breath in potentia around him, the breaths he’s exhaled, the breaths he might inhale.

He feels the magic spiced through each and every one of them, and turns the page.

He grunts in pain – or no, not pain, but just sensation – as the parchment seems to struggle against his hold, seems to rebel against his thumb and forefinger, but he forces it to turn across, and then feels the wave of magical energy reach out to embrace him, kiss him, wrap him up in its dark embrace.

Oh, but this is spectacular.

This is what Cazador always craves for, Astarion knows, this sort of secret, dangerous knowledge, knowledge that you don’t simply study for or read or work for, but knowledge that reads you in turn, knowledge of magic that has magic reaching for you whenever you reach for it.

It’s the secret to true power, it’s a fraction of the power that gods have, and he almost wants to whine as he reaches for the next page and finds that the book is closed to him, that wrestle as he might with it, it won’t be wrestled any further.

He doesn’t know how long it is that he grips the book in his hands and tries to force it, his will against the book’s, to allow him to press further into its secreted knowledge, to delve into its dark depths, but at every forge forward it refutes him.

Finally, he huffs out a groan of frustration and snaps the book shut – immediately, he feels a little cold as the magic tendrils draw back and return to the heart of the book from whence they’d come, but moments after he feels warm again. There’s new knowledge in his head, and that is satisfying – it’s merely frustrating, he supposes, that there’s an edge to that satisfaction.

It's not unlike when you finish a fine meal, and then find you have no suitable desert, or when you finish a lovely session in bed, and find that you can’t quite reach that final, last peak. He’s semi-satisfied, eighty or ninety percent of the way here, and yet that last increment of fulfilment eluding him, why, it stings.

Lillen is laid on his back on the mat, his eyes closed and his hands at his sides, lost in meditation – the camp is very quiet, and the only other soul awake (Withers, hovering ominously as ever, hardly counts) is Scratch, who is sitting beside Lillen and looking up at Astarion curiously.

“What do you want, you foul little unwashed beast?”

Scratch nudges his ball, which had been on the floor in front of his surprisingly neat little paws, toward Astarion, and Astarion huffs out a laugh. He’d hide it, usually, or try to hide it more, but he feels strangely free with everyone asleep.

“I’m not touching that, dog,” he says. “I can see it shining with your slobber.”

Scratch looks up at him pitifully, tilting his head to the side, and Astarion sighs, holding the book under his arm, and he kicks the ball with the tip of his slippered foot, sending it sailing across the camp. Scratch gives chase immediately, and Astarion sighs as he sets the book into his trunk and moves to Lillen.

Lillen stirs as Astarion straddles him, feeling the weight of Astarion over his middle, and his eyes slowly open. He looks up at Astarion’s face, studying his features. In the dark, only a few candles left scattered around the camp, the green flecks in their deep brown shine all the more.

“You’ve handsome eyes,” Astarion says quietly, feeling the muscled warmth of the older man beneath him. “I won’t insult the centuries under your belt by wondering aloud if anyone’s ever told you that before.”

“Perhaps no one ever has,” says Lillen mildly.

“What happened to watching over me, exactly?” Astarion asks. “I trusted you with my life, and here I wake up to you resting your eyes.”

“I’d have stirred if you’d shown any sign of distress,” Lillen says. “You’re a capable young man, Astarion, and once you’d gotten as far into that book as it was going to let you, I kept a weather eye a little longer before I left you to it.”

Astarion frowns slightly as he takes that in. He doesn’t know how it feels, exactly – it’s not as though Lillen has access to knowledge that he doesn’t himself, in this scenario, but it grates, that Astarion had hit that wall within the text and attempted again and again to break it down, whilst Lillen had given up on him immediately.

“Learn much?” Lillen asks.

“A little,” Astarion says. “You want to give it a go?”

“Oh, it won’t open for me, not now,” Lillen murmurs, shaking his head. His hands come to rest on Astarion’s upper thighs, gripping loosely at him through his leggings before they slide up to touch his arse, to squeeze and play with it. It feels nice, the strength of Lillen’s touch, the warmth of his hands. “Not until you’ve dominated it, consumed wholly what it has to offer.”

“And how do I do that?” Astarion asks, and Lillen laughs.

“I don’t know everything, Astarion, and this is a gap in my knowledge,” he says. “But we can keep an eye out as we move forward. Gale will have more of an idea than I do.”

“I don’t want to ask Gale,” Astarion groans. “The man’s insufferable.”

“He’s a wizard – a scholar. You don’t have to hold hands with him and frolic with him through the Weave. Just ask him a question.”

Astarion bounces in his place, letting out a low, frustrated whine – he feigns not to notice the faint pleasure on Lillen’s face with the grind down against his cock, which Astarion can feel through his evening clothes. Astarion wants to feel it in him, wants to feel the sink of that satisfying thickness inside himself – he’d ordinarily insist on topping with a new partner, always finds it so much easier to retain control that way.

Lillen, though, is rather attached to his dominant position, his idea of himself as some paternal figure. His social power is not something he reaches for out of insecurity or a desire to prove himself as alpha male – he’s earned it, has wielded it for years.

Astarion feels a faint flutter in himself, the desire to be on the receiving end of that power, a flutter he doesn’t think he’s felt in centuries, not since he was still alive. Most of the nobles he’s seduced, men and women, in his slavery under Cazador have been handsome young things – older people, more genuinely powerful ones in personality and stature, his siblings had gone for those.

Astarion, he’d concentrated on titles and money and bloodlines, not so much on the individuals themselves. It had felt better, in a way, to focus on the less attractive to himself, to his own particular desires.

It didn’t sting so much when they disappointed him, nor when he let them die.

“He knew you, that man today,” Astarion says quietly. Through the corner of his eye, he sees Scratch glance their way, but thankfully, the animal doesn’t draw closer to watch the elves at play – he goes to Halsin’s bedroll, and lays down beside him, dwarfed by the other elf’s huge figure. “Abdirak.”

“He did,” Lillen allows. His thumbs are massaging the meat of Astarion’s arse, rubbing from the more pillowy flesh up to his lower back and finding the abused and tired muscle there, pressing on it, palpating it, making the knots relieve themselves. It feels good. It feels… nice. “I used to pass through Arabel regularly, and I would do some work at the table in Ilmater, would spread certain gospels of other gods whilst there. Ilmatari priests aren’t wholly in favour of individual empowerment – such things rather undercut their paradoxical desire for oppression – but books can contain all manner of tales of untold suffering. Are you familiar with Ilmatari displays of penitence and suffering?”

“Their charming little logo isn’t enough of an example, those ghastly bound hands, all bloodied and bruised?” Astarion asks, raising his eyebrows, and Lillen chuckles, his head tipping back onto the mat. His tie has come undone, and Astarion reaches out and acts on the urge, touches the fine, thick curls and feels how soft they are under his fingertips, feels them shift as he gently tugs on them, twists them gently around his fingers. “I’ve seen bound sufferants before, rows of people on their knees with their hands tied up – and I believe I’ve read of public self-flagellation before, of one priest or other. What Abdirak described was something different.”

“A reenactment of Galbaldi’s execution some centuries before my birth – an uncommonly gory festival day, not precious to every Ilmatari devotee, but rather an interesting one. Galbaldi served Ilmater, but was pressed upon by those about him, it matters not the specifics of the conflict, but he died by wax. Drowned in a vat of it, and then they burned down the candle they made of his corpse before a crowd – this was in homage to that. They laid me out on a rack, my wrists and ankles bound, and candles dripped on me from every side, from over my head. Different colours, so that the wax fell on me in rippling rainbows – the pain, it was… exquisite.”

Astarion looks down at Lillen’s face, at the flutter close of his eyelids as he pronounces the last word, the evident bliss and desire even in his recollection of the pain.

“You really like it, don’t you?” Astarion asks quietly. “Pain.”

“Pain and pleasure aren’t as discrete for me as I suspect they are for you,” Lillen says.

“I can appreciate a little salt with my sugar,” Astarion disagrees, and Lillen’s smile is a distant thing. “Wanting to be branded by a mad goblin priestess with a dirty iron, that’s a little far for me.”

“You keep saying it as though I let her.”

“The fact that you wanted it was bonkers enough, dear,” Astarion says, and he settles his hands over Lillen’s chest, feels the wonderful meat of his chest under his hands, how warm the flesh is. “Perhaps you should be borrowing one of Shadowheart’s brassieres, you know. These things must be terribly heavy on your back.”

“Not going to offer to hold them for me?”

“Could I?” Astarion asks, widening his eyes as he injects eagerness into his voice, and Lillen softly laughs, delivering a rather gentle smack to one of Astarion’s arse cheeks, and it makes him laugh. “You could hit me harder than that, you know.”

“I don’t think I have time to be administering punishment spankings whenever you misbehave, Astarion,” says Lillen, and the thought makes something burn hot inside him, hot and eager and wanting in the most ridiculous way.

After all he’s been through, it’s absurd that pain should be so desirable – but it’s plain in Lillen’s gaze that the idea appeals to him on some level. There’s a distance in his gaze, a want that Astarion can read in the shape of his mouth, the draw of his features. A want he knows very easily how to satisfy.

“What about reward spankings?” Astarion asks. “It’s much rarer I behave than misbehave, isn’t it?”

“There was me thinking devilish tomes and enchanted objects were enough of a reward for you.”

“Darling, nothing’s ever enough of a reward for me,” Astarion says, and grinds himself deliberately down against Lillen’s cock this time, making his eyes flutter shut, making a soft moan filter out from between his legs. “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it, Lillen. There’s such a delicious tension between the two of us – you ache to put me in my place. Is it so hard to believe I want to let you?”

Lillen looks up at his face, and although his expression doesn’t change, Astarion immediately knows that he’s misstepped, miscalculated.

“And where exactly, Astarion,” asks Lillen in an infuriatingly soft, gentle tone, one that makes Astarion want to vomit and scream and savagely bite in the face of how infuriatingly insincere it simply must be, “do you think your place is?”

“Where do you want it to be?” Astarion asks, and Lillen slowly shakes his head.

“I don’t want to make that choice for you, young man,” Lillen says quietly. “I don’t think I know you well enough to make decisions on your behalf – as much as it seems to weigh on you to consider the idea, I have little desire to hurt you, and even less to restrain you.”

“Now, you’re lying outright,” Astarion says, pushing himself up on one knee and standing up from his place in Lillen’s lap. “Of course you want to hurt me – perhaps not as much as you want me to hurt you.”

“Sit back down on my face, young man,” Lillen challenges him, tapping his own chin. “See precisely how much I want to hurt you.”

Astarion is quite incapable of blushing, but for a moment, it’s like his brain short circuits, staring down at the older man. Gods, this tadpole is making him weak after all.

Lillen, seeming amused at having won a point against him, pats the mat beside him. “Meditate,” he advises. “We can advance on the camp tomorrow, take out their generals before the army proper advances.”

“It’s going to take fucking ages to kill all those goblins,” says Astarion spitefully, but he does lie down on his back beside the other man.

“All the better to get an early start, then,” says Lillen, and closes his eyes.

Chapter Text

It’s been a long, hard day.

Astarion sits aside, slightly out of sight, and listens to Wyll and Lillen as they bathe in the sea, washing the blood off their bodies, out of their hair. He had hung back as they’d begun stripping off their armour to go in – Lillen is naked, but Wyll isn’t, still has his underwear on.

They’re facing away from one another.

“I wish I knew what to say to him,” Wyll is saying. “How to… He seems to think I’m feigning any care or investment in him.”

“He thinks that about everybody,” Lillen replies. “I know little about his life, or unlife, up to now, but I would estimate it’s been made up of one wound after the next. It’s difficult to trust that anyone before him should want anything other than to wound him again.”

“He trusts you,” says Wyll, and Astarion listens for the slight sensitivity in his tone, the mildest sense of pain, or want, or jealousy. The thought actually makes something stir strangely in his chest, turning in the base of his belly – Wyll, jealous of Lillen? For what, having Astarion’s ear? Having his hands on Astarion’s body, touching him?

“He trusts me more than the rest of camp,” Lillen allows. “Me, and then Shadowheart, I think – the two of them have really grown quite close, these past few weeks, it seems to me. But his façade is in part that, Wyll. In much the same way you wield this Blade of Frontiers persona, the better to disguise the troubled and shadowed past behind it, he presents his apparent confidence, his ease, his purring nobility, his charm – and the sexuality beneath all that. What are you mistaking for trust, when in actuality, what you’re seeing is his habits?”

“Habits?” Wyll repeats. “Wait a moment – what exactly about me speaks to my troubled and shadowed past?”

“His habits,” confirms Lillen. “This Cazador who held him captive, who enslaved him all these years – he, too, was an older man, more powerful than he, and for centuries, he has had Astarion on a tight leash. I may not be a powerful vampire, but I am the leader – patriarch, even - of what he is so keen to refer to as our odd little family. Is it that he trusts me, that he particularly likes me, even, or is it merely that I’m familiar to him, my position over him, over all of you?

“Astarion has gone from centuries of enslavement, of the same night played out over and over and over again, puppetted on a mad man’s strings, and here he is thrust into freedom, into sunlight, into life anew, with no tether, no direction, no certainty… But at least I’m familiar, hm?”

“And I’m not?” asks Wyll, and Lillen chuckles. “What dark and shadowed past do you expect, exactly?”

“Young man, one might expect the famous Blade of Frontiers to be some knight or paladin, simple, sincere… But you’re a warlock out here in the middle of nowhere, protecting tieflings, joining our silly little band. Where is your father? Where is your retinue? You haven’t so much as penned a letter back home – why wouldn’t you, unless you knew it wouldn’t be read?”

There’s quiet for a moment, and Astarion listens keenly, hears them scrubbing at themselves, hears the splash of the water as they continue to bathe in silence.

“I didn’t know I was so transparent,” says Wyll quietly.

“Oh, you’re not,” Lillen tells him, warmth in his voice – he’s smiling. Astarion knows it even though he can’t see. “I’m just old, and insufferably well-travelled. I’ve heard every story there is a few dozen times.”

Wyll laughs at that, and Astarion hears the shift in the water as they come closer to the shore, reaching for towels to dry themselves off.

“I’m not in the mood for the party tonight, I confess,” Wyll says. “Do you mind if I make myself scarce?”

“You’re your own man, Wyll, if you’re in no mood for revelry, I wouldn’t press it on you.”

“You haven’t asked,” Wyll says.

“Hm?”

“About my— My past. You haven’t asked.”

“Do you want me to?”

“No. Yes. I mean— I… I would like to talk about it. But I can’t.”

“I understand,” says Lillen. “Or— maybe I don’t. But I’m here, if you have want of me, need of me.”

“Thank you,” says Wyll, and Astarion watches through a gap in the bushes as Wyll moves forward, toward his own tent, where he steps inside and draws the flap closed.

When Astarion looks up, Lillen is standing over him, a towel loosely held around his waist, moisture glistening on his belly and his tits, clinging to the light hair dusted on his body.

“You’re very hairy,” Astarion complains. “For an elf.”

“You’re not particularly stealthy,” Lillen retorts, “for a vampire.”

“Wyll didn’t see me,” Astarion mutters.

“Nor did I,” says Lillen, holding out his hand for Astarion to take, to lift him off the ground. “But Scratch ran over earlier and seemed to be snuffling in this bush for far longer than any rodent or other pest would necessitate.”

“I hate that fucking dog,” Astarion says, glaring across camp to where Scratch is now sprawled on his back with Gale rubbing his belly, and Lillen laughs, shaking his head.

“You should bathe,” he says quietly. “The tieflings will join us soon.”

“Not going to say anything?” Astarion asks, tilting his head as he looks across at the other man, wrinkling his nose. “About what I overheard?”

“I knew you were there,” Lillen points out. “Would you rather I not encourage him in his apparent desire to befriend you?”

“I don’t need friends,” Astarion says, to disguise the fact that he has no intention of bathing here, where everyone can see him, look at him. Stare at the scrawling all over his back. “And according to you, I don’t need sex, either, just a replacement for my captor, because I remember what his hands feel like around my throat.”

“Mine aren’t tipped with claws, you’ll notice,” says Lillen, holding out his hands demonstratively, and Astarion doesn’t laugh, looking out over the shoreline, at the water lapping against the beach edge. “I wasn’t saying you were insensible or incapable of making your own decisions. But he seems to think you trust me immediately, and you don’t. Wyll is a noble with a noble folk hero’s sensibilities – he wants to be a hero, wants to be trusted.”

“He’s an idiot,” says Astarion. “He’s almost as stupid as Gale.”

“At least you laugh at Wyll’s jokes,” says Lillen.

“Because he makes jokes. Gale just makes mistakes.”

Lillen laughs, and pats Astarion’s bloodied chest. “Try to enjoy yourself tonight, Astarion. I know you hate saving the lives of the innocent, but they’re saved now, so you might as well enjoy the ensuing celebration.”

“Drink cheap wine, listen to bad musical performance, not have sex, in case I’m doing it for silly and naïve reasons?”

“Oh, you should certainly have sex, it’s a party,” Lillen says. “Unless you’d rather have a heart-to-heart with Mr Ravenguard?”

“A ha ha,” laughs Astarion sarcastically, and as Lillen goes back to his tent, Astarion picks his way along the rocky shoreline, around the cliff so that he’s out of sight and out of earshot.

He still waits until the sun has finished setting before he strips off his shirt and sinks into the water.

* * *

Wine doesn’t go to his head as he feels it used to, but after drinking enough of the stuff he’s got a healthy buzz suffusing his head. He and Shadowheart have spent the last few hours sharing a few bottles and laughing as they discuss the finer points of those dancing around them – who’s most attractive, who looks as though they might be surprisingly good in bed.

“We’re proving him right, you know,” Shadowheart slurs at one point, her head back on the pillow beneath her.

“Your tits look marvellous in that new blouse. Did you get it from that awful cellar?”

“Yes, and I picked it up because I knew my breasts,” she emphasises the word rather aggressively at him, pointing at him drunkenly, “would look very nice in it. I don’t care what necromancer wore it first. Anyway, we’re proving him right.”

“Who’s him? Lillen?”

“Lillen!”

“Because we’re sprawling about, drinking wine, having nice breasts together?”

“Don’t compare your pecs to my breasts, mine are perfect,” Shadowheart says, and Astarion gasps, mock-offended. “Your lips are nicer than mine,” she allows, and Astarion smiles at her.

“You’re a gorgeous liar, darling,” he says. “What’s he right about?”

“We’re young and horny and a little bit stupid,” says Shadowheart.

“Oh, that,” says Astarion. “Probably, yes. What about it?”

“You,” says Shadowheart drunkenly, beaming with her lovely lips and white teeth and bright, bright eyes, poking him with a very pretty foot, clad in a very pretty stocking – although Astarion hates to consider what dead person she might have pilfered that from, “want to fuck him.”

“Don’t you?”

“No!”  Shadowheart groans immediately, looking horrified. “He combs my hair, Astarion, he’s like… he’s like a dad.”

“More like a daddy,” Astarion says, putting emphasis on the word, and Shadowheart makes a gagging sound, falling limp on the mat. “Is there really no one here you’d like to try your hand at?”

“Gale seems like he’d be grateful,” Shadowheart muses aloud.

“For good reason,” Astarion mutters. “Wyll?”

“He’s such a goody two-shoes,” Shadowheart mutters.

“Lae’zel?”

“Lae’zel,” Shadowheart sighs faintly. “I bet she’s… rough.”

“What about our new friend Halsin?” Astarion suggests. “He’s very… large.”

Shadowheart sighs. “Mm,” she says. “Lae’zel and Halsin…”

“Both of them? You’re very ambitious.”

“You could come too,” Shadowheart suggests – she says it with half-closed eyes, and Astarion smiles as he squeezes her hand, then gently lays it down on her belly and leaves her be.

She starts to snore as he works the remainder of their bottle of red out of Shadowheart’s hand, and he chuckles as he gets to his feet, tossing one of her blankets loosely over her body and stepping across the camp.

Lillen’s tent flap is closed. The party is winding down for the evening, and Astarion moves closer to the tent and doesn’t knock on the flap or make any sort of loud noise, but carefully peels it back, and his breath catches in his throat as he peeks through the gap.

Cal the tiefling is sprawled on his back on Lillen’s blanketed tent floor, his thighs spread wide, his tail curled around and around the meat of Lillen’s naked thigh. Astarion stares at the tableau they make, Cal’s head pressing back onto the floor, his hands fisted tightly in the blankets beneath them. There’s desperate tension in his face, his eyes squeezed shut, and he is whining.

“I can’t, I can’t, please, sir, please stop, please, I can’t take it, I can’t, I’ll die, I’m gonna die—”

He looks like he’s in agony, and Astarion is hit with a wave of mingled terror and arousal so strong he almost doesn’t know how to cope with it, his jaw tightening, his head spinning. Lillen is torturing him, he’s torturing him, he’s there on his belly with one arm wrapped around his thigh and his tongue buried in Cal’s arse or at the base of his cock, more fingers buried in his arse.

Cal suddenly cries out, arching off the floor, his cock pumping powerfully but coming dry, and Astarion wonders how many orgasms Lillen has wrung out of him in the course of the evening for him to—

Cal suddenly lets out a sharp, gasping sound, and begins to sob.

“That’s it,” says Lillen, sounding satisfied, “I knew the fifth would be the charm, that’s it, that’s it, good boy, you did so well for me—”

Cal is sobbing inconsolably, and Astarion stares through the gap as Lillen puts his hands underneath the other man and bundles him up into his lap, coaxing Cal’s face against his shoulder, stroking the leathery red skin of his muscled back, stroking his hair.

“You did so well, you were so well-behaved, so good for me, that’s it, that’s it, let it out.”

“It was—” Cal gasps out, “it was so hard, it was so hard—”

“I know, I know, darling, it was very hard indeed, but look how well you’ve done,” Lillen says softly, kissing the side of his brow, just under the sprout of his horns, “you were so good for me, so handsome, now just let it out. The tears are the point, young man, let it out, let yourself have it.”

It’s an ugly noise, Cal’s muffled, sniffling sobs against Lillen’s neck, and Astarion can’t for the life of him understand why Lillen would want this, why he should choose this devil boy’s disgusting tears over Astarion, Astarion beautiful and perfect, pretty, charming. Even crying, Astarion’s fairly certain he’d look prettier than this.

Why should he feel jealous, over this?

It makes him feel almost as insane as the scattered moments, these past few centuries, when he’s been jealous over Cazador torturing one of his siblings instead of torturing Astarion himself.

Because they were getting attention he wasn’t – even agonising, horrifying attention. Even torture.

“That’s my boy,” Lillen says, rocking Cal in his arms, and Astarion wonders what that feels like, being held like that. People have said that in bed, here and there, called him “my boy” or something similar in bed, but not people he’s really known – it’s been reflexive, the work of a partner who’s called a great many partners that before.

Lillen means it. Knows him. Knows Cal – does he want to know Astarion like that? Will he hold Astarion like that, when they finally fuck? He should be disgusted by the idea, and he is, a bit, but there's also a sense of intrigue, too. Cazador's never held him as he sobbed, even in a parody of comfort. He'd say how revolting Astarion looked whenever he broke and finally showed his tears, whenever his emotion broke through and he made himself ugly with it, with the tears on his cheeks, the racking sobs that cut through his body. His siblings would laugh at him - they'd all laugh at one another, as they should have, whenever one began to cry.

Cal’s tears have slowed to a trickle, and Lillen says softly, “All that feeling, young man, all that frustration, at your brother and sister, at your situation, at the fear and pain and desperation of it all – doesn’t it feel good to get it out?”

“Uh huh,” mumbles Cal, nodding in a tiny movement, and Lillen kisses the side of his brow.

“Good man,” Lillen says. “That’s it, I’ve got you.”

Astarion lets the tent flap drop closed, and he swigs from his wine as he walks slowly back to his own tent, where Wyll Ravenguard is waiting for him, sitting cross-legged outside of it, a lanceboard laid out in front of him.

“Do you play?” Wyll asks.

“Gale does,” Astarion says.

“I know, but he’s too good at it,” Wyll says. “He’s beaten me five times in a row tonight – I wanted a change in partner.”

“Why, so you can be beaten six times in a row?” Astarion asks, and Wyll grins up at him, the scars shifting on his face as he does it.

“You’re feeling very confident,” he says, and Astarion chuckles, sitting across from him.

“I’m feeling very drunk,” Astarion says. “Want to partake?”

“And lose what you seem to think is my only edge?” asks Wyll, raising his eyebrows.

“It’s cheap wine,” Astarion says. “You’re missing out.”

Wyll takes the bottle, sipping from it, and makes the first move on the board.

Chapter Text

Astarion had never known Lillen could be… quite like this.

They’d been separated from the rest of the party in the face of an entire tribe of gnolls, savage as ever but also pledged to the Absolute, it would seem. Held captive by the slavering beasts and the caravan of traders that were bypassing them, it had taken them a while to extricate themselves – and they’d managed it just as the rest of the party had joined them.

Astarion’s never seen Lillen look as he does now, tired and drawn, with a snarl on his lips.

Half of the gnolls are left – them and their leader.

“Feast on your tribe,” he orders her, and Astarion is barely interested in watching Flind as she tears apart the other members of her tribe, overwhelmed by the illithid command that Lillen had forced on her – he mostly watches Lillen, standing there, stone-faced, and watching as she tears her family to shreds.

It doesn’t take long.

They all watch in stony, exhausted silence as she defeats each and every one of them – and then turns on her heel and sees them as if anew again, her head tilting to the side. She advances, one step forward, and then another.

She’s hungry.

She’s ravenous, even.

“Feast on yourself,” Lillen orders her, and Astarion feels his lips part as the gnoll leader recoils as if punched, and then slowly looks down at herself, uncomprehending, thoughtful. Hungry.

She bites savagely into the meat of her own arm, ripping it clean off, and he hears Shadowheart make a low sound of disgust as she turns her face away, trying not to vomit – the others are making various noises, and even he can’t stop himself from letting out a low, “Ugh,” when she manages to bite into her own shoulder.

Lillen keeps watching, unblinking, until Flind lies bleeding and near to death on the floor – he keeps watching until the breathing stops, until her eyes go glassy and still, and then wordlessly turns to raiding the shipments secreted around the cave.

“We’re sorry,” Wyll says, hovering behind Lillen as he sorts through the shipment cases, taking out the valuable potions, the enchanted armours and weapons, the good wine, the books. “We were separated from you – I saw signs of Karlach, my quarry, and we ran ahead—”

“I know what happened,” Lillen says crisply. “Did you find her?”

“No, but—”

“And you’re wasting my time with what, exactly? Excuses?”

Astarion feels anxiety curl around some part of him, around some of his insides, maybe, but it’s not so strong or as intense as the intrigue he feels, the sharp bark of Lillen’s voice. He sounds less like the wise and even priest he ordinarily does, and more like some sort of fucking commander.

He’s blood-stained and exhausted, and Astarion would guess by the way one of his eyes are twitching, the way he shies away from the brighter lights, that he’s carrying a world-ending headache in that skull of his, his tadpole merrily swimming through it, no doubt.

“We’ve been having,” Wyll starts, “dreams—”

“Not now, Mr Ravengard,” Lillen snaps at him, and Wyll steps back from him, looks horrified, upset. He looks like he thinks Lillen is going to slap him, and that’s an interesting thought, slapping that handsome face of his—

They’d played lanceboard the other night, he and Wyll, although it’s never been Astarion’s game, even without his being rusted with a few hundred years’ absence from the game. They’d… chatted. It had been somewhat inane, in parts, and where it wasn’t, oddly hostile – Wyll had kept making quips as to Astarion’s vampiric nature, talked idly about being the monster hunter he is.

He doesn’t know what to do with Astarion, it seems, and now, rejected so summarily by their new pater, it seems he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

“Is he okay?” he asks Astarion.

“The torture was very mild,” says Astarion, shrugging his shoulders. “Nothing I haven’t experienced before, and nothing he hasn’t enjoyed before, I would be willing to bet. Gnolls aren’t exactly known for their intelligence when it comes to this sort of thing, are they?”

It hasn’t been pleasant.

The smugglers had been the ones to keep the two of them locked up together, and the gnolls had mostly growled at them and poked them through the bars of their makeshift cage. The smugglers had been… Not so pleasant.

“What’s this, father and son?”

“You’re Zhentarim, I take it,” Lillen had said pleasantly, on the first day. “We’re little more than hapless priests, my friend and I – I a priest, anyway. My companion here is merely an assistant pressed temporarily into Oghmian service. What manner of threat do you think we might present you?”

“You’re fucking spies,” one of them had said – Zarys. “And you’ve got one of those things in your head, like the gnoll chief. Tell us about it, why don’t you?”

They’d talked, at first.

Asked questions – questions that Lillen had answered. They’d suggested separating Astarion and Lillen, and had even entered into their cage to grab hold of him – Lillen had caught the young man by the hair and set a sharpened fragment of bone right at the base of his throat, and growled, “He stays with me.”

He hasn’t meditated in the several days they’ve been captive, Astarion is fairly certain – he’d insisted on taking shifts, on Astarion lying down and taking time to meditate with Lillen watching over him, but turnabout in those positions had never come.

“We need to go back to camp,” says Gale.

“Oh, no, by all means,” says Lillen harshly. “You were on the trail of Mr Ravengard’s quarry before you doubled back to find us, were you not? Let’s not let the trail run cold.”

His tone is so harsh that none of them dares argue.

* * *

In camp that night, Lillen sits by the fire and stares into the quiet flame of it, Scratch on his one side, and the owlbear Gale had apparently tamed in their absence on his other. He looks positively haggard, a little green, and when Astarion reaches out with their shared illithid connection, not enough to put pressure on the bond, merely enough to taste it, he feels the agony of Lillen’s migraine. It pulses out of him in waves.

“And how are we feeling?” asks Astarion as he sits down beside him near the fire, and he looks uncertainly at the owlbear cub, who coos and shoulders against Lillen’s side before it wanders off, and Scratch runs to give chase.

“Do I look in the mood for your preening, Astarion?” Lillen asks. There’s a hoarse and dangerous quality to his tone, and it doesn’t remind him particularly of Cazador, but the feeling of danger that courses through him is quite familiar indeed, and oddly exciting, arousing.

He remembers first being in Cazador’s thrall, the first few decades – he’d been frightened at the out, and then had grown… Not confident, no, confident was never the word, but a little more comfortable, perhaps, in his bonds. Comfortable enough to play with the edges of it. He’d talk back, act out, make quips and little jokes – with his siblings and at their expense, mostly, occasionally with their victims. He’d make a mess or two.

He remembers one night when Cazador was choosing his bedmate for the evening, and he’d been jealous, insanely, ridiculously – he’d been jealous, that it wasn’t him. He’d made a… demand.

A demand that at the time had made Cazador laugh. He’d called Astarion his favourite caged bird, had brought him into his bed instead, had fucked him mercilessly, and it had been wonderful – painful, yes, but not so painful as to be…

The next day, he’d dropped Astarion into a box, and locked the lid down.

He’d been in there a long, long, long time. In the dark, in the silence, in the loneliness. Untouched. Alive, but not…

He’d never disobeyed again, after that. Never dared talk back to Cazador, never… He’d never so much as dared.

“I want to ask your opinion on our new companion,” Astarion says pleasantly, and he watches the tension in Lillen’s face, watches the curl of his lip that he can’t control, not when he’s as exhausted as he is now. From their shared connection, he feels a little disgust. “Why not just let Wyll kill her?”

Lillen looks sidelong across the camp to Wyll, who is sitting just inside his tent and staring into the darkness. His new tiefling-like horns are catching on the tent flap over him, all of a sudden too low for his full height.

“She hardly deserves to die just because she’s an idiot,” Lillen mutters.

“Otherwise,” agrees Astarion charitably, “we’d have killed Gale already.”

“Gale isn’t a liability, not like Karlach is,” Lillen mutters. “I won’t have her in any party I’m leading, and she shouldn’t be anywhere she can cause damage like she did today. She can’t control herself: she’s too much of a liability. A barbarian raging is bad enough – a berserker literally bursting into flames she can’t keep to herself is impermissible, intolerable.”

He doesn’t even have to work to feel it, the thoughts off the top of Lillen’s head, and he wonders if it’s his headache that makes it so easy – he sees snapshots of one battle or another, Lillen in battle, on one field or another, a barbarian felling the wrong man, raging and making some tactical error.

It’s no great surprise that Lillen, control freak as he is, should have such disdain for someone like Karlach – the girl is absolutely gorgeous, a marvellous meatshield rivalling Halsin for her size and strength, all that lovely hair, all that muscle, and she really does seem to be sweet as a kitten, if a little… Well, thick. Good-natured and really quite darling, from what he’s been able to glean so far, but stupid.

Far from the cunning demon Wyll had seemed to expect – he rather seems destroyed with the guilt of the thing, even without the lovely Mizora appearing before them in camp and talking about their deal. This, Astarion supposes, is the dark and shadowed past Lillen had suspected of him – there’s no such thing as a warlock without a pact to sustain his powers.

“Dammon can probably manage her infernal engine,” Lillen says. “We need only to catch the tieflings up again at Baldur’s Gate.”

“You need to meditate,” Astarion says. “That, or drink a bottle of one of those sleep potions, Angelic Slumber or whatever it’s called. Perhaps we’ll meet this evening visitor the others were talking about, this strange illithid guardian of dreams.”

“Selûne take pity on me,” Lillen whispers, putting his head in his hands, and Astarion feels his eyebrows rise.

“Good Gods, man, don’t let our darling Shadowheart hear you saying things like that. You’re a Selûnite?”

“I’m an Oghmian.”

“What, and Oghma has no pity to spare you?”

He thinks of Lillen sitting over him in that cage, these past few days. Thinks of the gnolls slavering over them, tossing rocks at them through the bars, thinks of them wanting to poke them with stick. Thinks of those Zhents wanting to interrogate them, ask them questions, wanting to get Astarion on his own for…

Well.

He’d say “for Gods know what”, but that knowledge isn’t exactly only for the gods, and has something to do with how savage Lillen had been in protecting him, Astarion thinks, how insistent. Shouldn’t a noble hero have a noble hero’s reward?

“What do you think you’re doing?” Lillen asks, his voice sharp and full of angles, as Astarion settles on the log beside him, his knee sliding against the older man’s.

“You’re tired,” Astarion purrs softly, walking his fingers up Lillen’s upper arm. “Overwrought. I could give you some attention, hm? Massage those tired shoulders of yours… massage something else?”

Lillen turns his head to face him, and suddenly the two of them are nose to nose, Lillen’s eyes boring directly into Astarion’s, brown meeting red. Astarion can’t remember what colour his eyes used to be, before they turned to blood. Were they pretty? They must have been. He swears he used to remember people saying he had nice eyes.

“Do you know why I bring you so often into the field with me, Astarion?” Lillen asks softly.

“Is that a trick question?” Astarion asks, raising his eyebrows, and he leans into the seat, putting one hand on his other hip. “Darling, it’s obvious to all of us that I’m your favourite.”

“And why do you think that is?” Lillen asks. “I can pick any lock better than you can, young man – faster, more dexterously. I could do the same for any trap. You’re not particularly charismatic, not compared to Wyll or Halsin or even Gale, and whilst you’re a very adept liar, I don’t need you when I have me. So what do you think I need you for?”

Astarion stares into Lillen’s face, uncomprehending. This really doesn’t feel like a game, and it’s uniquely destabilising, baffling.

Hurtful, he realises. Hurtful.

“You can’t disarm traps you can’t see, Lillen.”

“Is that all you have to offer, boy?” Lillen challenges him immediately. “Your eyes? I’m an old man, my eyes are failing me, true, true – in this encampment, capable men and women on your every side, is all you have to offer that makes you uniquely useful your eyes?”

Astarion stands to his feet, feeling himself on the verge of gibbering uselessly, unable to make his mouth work, to make his brain work, feeling so derailed, so confused, so—

“I bring you with me, Astarion, because you’re very pretty to look at, and ordinarily, I love to hear you talk away with your stupid, incessant, self-involved chatter. You’re a handsome young man, clever, witty – I enjoy hearing you prattle on about yourself and how lovely you are and how much better you are than everybody else in the world. It’s nonsense, but it’s lovely nonsense, and you know that. You know what a pretty prize you make, how desirable you are.”

Astarion’s stomach is a roiling mess, and he feels as though he’s about to vomit. If blood still ran in his veins in the way it used to, perhaps it would have drained out of his face, although he’s not sure anymore – his heart feels like he’s fluttering. Insanely, absurdly, he feels like he might well burst into tears.

Has little more than a month in this man’s company, exposed to sunlight, rendered him so weak?

“Take your hand off my shoulder,” Lillen orders him, and Astarion retracts it wordlessly. “Now leave me be, boy, and entertain yourself.”

Astarion stands limply in his place as Lillen strides across camp and into his tent, swiping the flap across. Astarion sees the flare of magic within a moment later, something to help him meditate, perhaps, or even sleep after all. Probably.

“Are you alright?” Gale asks as he comes over, and Astarion looks up at his face, at the concern writ on it. “That seemed… tense.”

“You were chattering on about the Weave the other day,” says Astarion, and to disguise the fact that his hands are shaking a little, he lays them on Gale’s breast, feels the warmth under his robes. Reflexively, one of Gale’s hands settles on top of Astarion’s, and it feels very warm indeed. “Wanting to show someone how to manipulate it, play with it. Is that offer still open?”

“Astarion,” Gale says gently, all his usual pomp and arrogance set aside for the moment, which just makes Astarion feel worse, looking up at the handsome lines on his face, the stubble on his cheeks, the grey streaking through his hair, “why don’t you just have a lie down?”

“What, you think I need you to fucking nursemaid me?”

“Lie down,” Gale repeats, smiling at him – his eyes crinkle when his lips curve – “and I’ll put on a show for you, how does that sound? Let you see what I see.”

“Going to put on a light show for me, are you? As if I’m some sort of child? Or are you going to do a strip show and make me laugh?”

“I can talk to you about arcana, if you like. You were saying the other day that me talking is enough to put an elf like you to sleep.”

Astarion feels his lips twitch, and he looks at Gale’s face, at the curve of his lips. “You’ve better hearing than I thought.”

“Astarion, I have never heard you lower your voice in all the days I’ve known you,” Gale says, and Astarion retracts his hand from Gale’s chest, feeling strangely vulnerable. Is everyone in this camp so intent on being insufferably, ridiculously nice? Can no one just be normal?

Except Lillen, he supposes.

“Have you got, um, one of those potions,” starts Astarion, “the sleeping ones, with the wings on the bottle?”

“Angelic Slumber? Yes, I have some. Come and lie down,” says Gale again, and Astarion lets Gale lead him by the wrist not to Gale’s tent, but to Astarion’s own, where Scratch is laid down with his tail wagging, awaiting him.

Astarion doesn’t have it in him to shove the mutt away.

Chapter Text

The following morning, Astarion wakes bleary and slightly confused, blinking a few times to try to get the sleep out of his eyes – sleep! Out of his eyes! Imagine that! Scratch the dog is still curled up against his side, and when Astarion looks at him, Scratch drops back on his hindlegs to lean his back up against Astarion’s chest.

“You’re so needy,” Astarion tells the animal. “Don’t you know how pathetic it is?”

Scratch whines faintly, lifting one of his paws, and Astarion rolls his eyes before he gently lays his hand on the ruff of the dog’s chest and rubs at it. Scratch lays his head up against Astarion’s shoulder, and Astarion rests his chin on top of the animal’s head, feeling how soft his fur is.

He was never permitted to drink from dogs and cats, in Baldur’s Gate – he can no longer remember the reasoning for it, merely that Cazador has said they were to eat from the lowest vermin, from rats and bugs.

Nothing with a name, he’d said once. You creatures aren’t important enough to feast on anything with a name.

“I think Scratch is a stupid name,” he tells the dog. “But I suppose all our names are stupid, viewed through one lens or other.”

Scratch goes limp against Astarion’s chest, so that it’s just Astarion holding him up, and Astarion can’t help the laugh it shocks out of him. He supposes this is something of a step down even for him – he might not be feeding on rats tonight, but he’s been literally been sleeping on the floor with a dog, and he knows the creature’s scent is clinging to him.

Nudging off the blankets that he doesn’t remember pulling over him – who had that been? Gale? Shadowheart returning the favour? – he looks around camp, and he sees that Wyll, Lillen, Shadowheart, and Lae’zel have already set out for the day. Gale and Withers have set out a new tent, and from what Astarion can gather, rising from his bedroll and wiping at his tired eyes, they’re looking over the newest stack of texts that Lillen had gathered from the toll collector’s building, those that Karlach hadn’t managed to incidentally burn up or destroy upon touching.

Astarion looks over at Halsin, who is sitting with the owlbear cub in front of him, apparently engaged in deep conversation with the creature, and then drags himself to his meet, rolling back his shoulders.

“How does sleep compare to reverie, then?” Gale asks as Astarion makes his way over, wrapping himself up in a thick cardigan that’s absolutely hideous, but it’s very soft and warm, and it smells faintly of Lillen, because Astarion had pilfered it out of his tent the night before last.

“I feel… groggy,” Astarion admits, sinking his hands into the pockets of the cardigan and standing over the table, watching Withers sort through book after book, setting them aside and sorting them whilst making small notations in one of Lillen’s books. “No wonder you people are so slow to wake up in the morning.”

“Never before hast thou felt the effects of true sleep?” Withers asks, seeming curious, and then he tilts his head to the side. “Little had I considered the effects of thine youthful age.”

“Withers, I’m hundreds of years old,” says Astarion.

“Ah, but what of those were years lived, in contrast to those that came before?” Withers replies, and Astarion huffs out a breath, shaking his head.

“Were you an elf or a human, when you were alive?” Astarion asks, and Withers looks down at him impassively, making no move to answer the question whatsoever. A glance in Gale’s direction reveals as little as he might have expected.

“Astarion, why don’t you join me?” Halsin asks, and Astarion looks back to him. Halsin is standing to the edge of the empty tent, wearing nothing more than his leggings, and Astarion isn’t alone, he doesn’t think, in being momentarily stunned into silence, staring at his superlatively large pecs and the tattoos and scars on his body, his belly, not as soft as Lillen’s.  

When he finally remembers himself, he asks half-heartedly, “Join you where, exactly?”

“The owlbear cub has seen signs of horses on the road, probably came untethered from their cart when caught by bandits or goblins. With Karlach in the party, it will be easier than before to manage the cart, but with a horse or two, we might manage more.”

“Oh, good,” says Astarion faintly. “From magistrate to vampire to adventurer and now… horse tamer?”

“You don’t have to touch the horses,” Halsin assures him, with a warm and handsome smile. Gods, but he’s so big, and Astarion looks at him helplessly for a moment before looking back to Gale and Withers and their dull-as-ditchwater library project.

“What’s the plan for all of these?” he asks, gesturing to set of texts.

“When we reach Baldur’s Gate, Lillen is going to coordinate with the temple of Oghma, get these copied and distributed,” Gale says.

“Is there some sort of reward for that?” Astarion asks.

“Isn’t knowledge its own reward?” asks Gale insincerely, and Astarion gives the other man a very cool, flat look, and Gale beams at him. Incessantly. Stupidly.

“You’re very handsome, you know, Gale,” says Astarion, and Gale’s face lights up until Astarion adds, “It might suit you better to emphasise that fact, rather than the unfortunate truth of your personality.”

Gale closes his smiling mouth. “Ow,” he says, seeming genuinely wounded.

“We’re really not going to get any money for all this? We’re carting about hundreds of fucking books and scraps of notepaper.”

“He’s a priest, Astarion,” Gale says. “Do you think I’ve been paying him for all the spell scrolls he brings to me to learn?”

“If he had any sense, he’d make you,” says Astarion, and walks back toward his tent, although he stops right in front of Halsin, smelling the other man – freshly bathed, the other elf smells of bergamot tea.

“Hello,” rumbles Halsin, the two of them chest to chest, and Astarion looks from Halsin’s marvellous, hairy tits up to his face, which is smiling slightly, his eyebrows raised as he looks down at Astarion.

“Is Karlach joining us?” Astarion asks.

“Would you rather the two of us were alone?” asks Halsin, and Astarion considers that for a moment. He doesn’t let his expression change as he thinks about it, about how much he craves it, sex, good sex – Lillen is an annoyingly large older elf with more hair than he ought have, smug and handsome and terribly wise. Isn’t Halsin just a better model, wiser, more flexible, bigger?

It's strange, stupid, even – he’s horny enough of late that he really thinks he might enjoy having sex with anybody and everyone in camp, with Shadowheart, with Wyll or Gale, with Lae’zel, with Halsin, with Karlach, if only she weren’t too hot to touch.

He’s had sex with hundreds of people in his life, with thousands, and yet somehow, all of a sudden, it all feels like too much. It really does feel like a choice of those in camp – he doesn’t want to sleep with everybody. He doesn’t even like the idea of all these people seeing his back, hasn’t dared to remove his shirt where people can see, let alone the idea of them each being inside him, touching him, seeing him so vulnerable.

It feels like a choice of one out of everyone – one, only one.

He doesn’t think he could handle more. Absurdly, after all his sexual practice, he doesn’t feel he’s ready.

“Alone, but with the owlbear cub watching?” Astarion asks, arching his own eyebrow, and Halsin’s laugh is… really, really something.

“I’ll tell her we’re setting out soon,” says Halsin, and squeezes Astarion’s shoulder with one of his big, warm hands before Astarion plods back to his tent and puts on a change of clothes for the day.

* * *

“Gods, I can’t believe she’s just… behaving,” Karlach says, and Astarion laughs as he shifts the reins on the mare’s head, leaning back in his makeshift saddle, little more than a blanket under his arse so that he doesn’t slip right off her shoulders in the leggings he’s wearing.

“She likes to pick her own way, a woman after my own heart,” says Astarion, stroking down the hair of the mare’s mane. The braid is fraying, has a few brambles caught through it, but it’s a fine braid – she was evidently well taken care of by whatever poor and unfortunate people had owned her up to now. There are a few bloodstains down her thigh, but they’re not from any injury of her own – the gelding, which Halsin is leading by the bridle, had had a nasty injury to one of his hooves, probably from stepping on something, but Halsin had healed it easily enough. “I expect she’ll be alright once she’s haltered to the cart, as well – she just doesn’t like to be led on a string. Who does?”

He'd been surprised that she’d let him clamber on her back so immediately, so easily – she’d kept rearing whenever he or Halsin had tried to coax her along, but it had come back to him, bit by bit, the recollection of the differences between a horse fearful, a horse in distress, and a horse distrusting – or a horse just stubborn.

She’d melted like butter once he was on top of her shoulders, and it had only occurred to him then how odd it was that she should allow him to, a vampire. Shouldn’t she know what he is, shouldn’t she be disgusted, horrified with him?

But, no.

No.

He wonders if it’s the tadpole in his head, or if she’d like him even without it.

“How long since you’ve been on horseback?” Halsin asks as they make their way back toward camp, Karlach walking ahead of the two of them – the four of them, now.

The horses don’t like her, and he’d seen the hurt on her face as they’d looked at her fearfully, but they’d relaxed a bit once she’d stepped back, widened her palms, held up her hands. They’ll get used to her, Astarion thinks, even if her hands do run too hot to touch them.

There are faint burns on some of her weapon grips. He can’t help but feel some compassion for that, honestly. He knows precisely what it is, to know that touching something – something beautiful, something lovely, something you ache to touch - will be to condemn it to death.

“Oh, a long time,” Astarion says. “Not since I’ve been alive.”

“How does it feel?” Halsin asks, and Astarion glances down at him, then looks forward again.

“Good,” he says. “Good, I think. You’ve got good ears, haven’t you?”

“Don’t you like them?”

“I’m asking in a roundabout way what you heard last night.”

“What do you want me to have heard?” Halsin asks, and Astarion groans.

“I was already musing on how disgustingly similar the two of you are to one another,” Astarion mutters. “Don’t go about proving me right.”

“Is this him and the old guy?” Karlach asks, looking back at them whilst keeping forward on the path. “Lilith?”

“Lillen,” Halsin corrects her. “Lillen is the defacto leader of this band, I’m given to understand. I don’t know that I’m that similar to him – why, because we’re both big and old?”

“Something like that,” Astarion murmurs. “But yes, Lillen is our pater familias, so to speak, Karlach.”

“Patter what?”

“Halsin’s right,” Astarion says. “He’s our leader. Don’t pretend you didn’t hear, Halsin – you wouldn’t be this soft and gooey if you hadn’t.”

“I heard,” Halsin allows, shrugging his big shoulders, and his expression is more serious now as he keeps picking their way forward, keeping pace with Astarion and the mare, all of them trailing after Karlach. “He was watching you sleep, once Gale had given you that potion, you know. Said he didn’t dare sleep a wink the past few days.”

“He said that? Are you bullshitting me?”

Halsin looks up at Astarion, and his smile this time is even softer, warmer. There’s something more fragile in it. “I was held captive when I was a young man, you know,” he says. “Older than you were, when you were turned – I was seventy or eighty, I think, thereabouts. A noble drow kept me captive in her home – I was treated well, in my time there, with her, her family, their servants, their friends. I was fed and watered, taught and danced with, sung to. Kissed, touched, fucked. Their guest – their consort, too. Their prisoner, as well, that as well.”

Karlach looks back at the two of them, but something about the look on Halsin’s face or on Astarion’s makes her shut her mouth before whatever silly or stupid question she was about to ask can fall off her tongue.

“That’s… shit,” says Astarion. Not at all reflexively – he sort of has to force the words out, because they feel too quaint, somehow, too obvious, expected – he adds, “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t as bad for me as it could have been,” says Halsin. “I was there three years – that’s barely a blink of an eye, when one lives as long as we do. As I have.”

Astarion thinks of being in his trance in the gnoll cage, thinks of being aware of everything around him through the film of his reverie – of Lillen above him, Lillen behind him, of everyone moving back and forth. Lillen, refusing to settle into a trance, refusing to so much as close his eyes.

“He watched me while I slept after a few days of panicking about me getting raped – as if it’s anything I’ve not handled before. For Gods’ sake, Halsin, it was a ridiculous thing for him to be worried about – it would have been better if he’d let me just get out and get between them, take them out while they were distracted.

“Forgive me if I don’t coo and fall over backwards at his chivalry, when he finished up telling me I’m little more than a piece of arse for him to wank over, and that I do shit-all for the group.”

“He said that to you?” Karlach asks. “Gods. What an arsehole.”

“You’re right,” Astarion says loudly before Halsin can say anything. “He is an arsehole.”

Halsin closes his mouth, and then inclines his head, and they walk in silence for a little while.

“If your time captive came up in that little heart to heart you had last night,” says Astarion, “I suppose he said something to you. How many times has our fearless leader had a cock in him that he didn’t want there?”

Halsin sighs, and when he doesn’t answer, Karlach asks, “Um, are you lot always this… cheerful? In conversation?”

“A bit too rape-heavy this morning, isn’t it, my dear?”

“A little, not that I’m judging.”

“Let’s change the subject, then,” Astarion says. “You’re a Baldurian yourself, aren’t you? Whereabouts?”

“Oh, in the outer city, near to the Cliffgate. You?”

“The upper city, when I was a young man. I worked as a magistrate then – the courts I worked in have been revamped and turned into shops and apartments, now; what was once my family home is a clothier’s.”

“You’re really old, huh?” asks Karlach, and Astarion looks back at her, momentarily baffled.

“What exactly did Wyll tell you about all of us last night?”

“Not much,” Karlach says, shrugging her shoulders. “I just kind of stayed out of the way – everyone seemed pretty pissed, even before Mizora showed up. Especially Lillen. Um— Does he, um, does he hate me? After the… He seemed really angry. Last night. At me.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” says Astarion, and he doesn’t know why it comes out of his mouth so quickly, when it would be funnier, really, to tell her something a bit closer to the truth, or barely tell her anything at all, and let her fumble, let her stumble, into asking Lillen himself. “He’s not best pleased about the impact you made in the toll office – he likes to collect books, that’s what the wizards are doing back at camp, logging the books, noting them. He’s a devotee of Oghma, although it seems to be he’s slutting about all manner of gods – Oghma and Thoth and Deneir and, um—"

“Milil is who the harp belongs to,” says Halsin.

“Milil, who the fuck is Milil?”

“He’s a god of music,” says Halsin, chuckling. “Lord of Song.”

“And Selûne, too. Doesn’t seem as though he’s all that discriminating, for a priest,” says Astarion.

“I can get him more books,” says Karlach earnestly. “I’ll keep an eye out!”

Astarion strokes his fingers down the mare’s neck, and they ride on.

* * *

He keeps his distance from the campfire last night, sitting underneath his tent flap and watching as Lillen sits very straight-backed on a turned up log and plays a lyre. From his position on the floor, Astarion has a good view of the tattoo on the inside of his wrist – as he plays and his fingers move, the tendons shifting in his wrist make the harp strings tattooed on his flesh look as though they’re rippling in parallel song.

“Isn’t he going to apologise?” Astarion hears Gale ask Halsin, just within Astarion’s earshot, and Astarion lets out a sharp, barking laugh.

Lillen stops playing, only for a second, only enough to meet Astarion’s gaze, and then he goes back to playing as though he didn’t hear it either, and Astarion, rolling his eyes, strides out of the centre of camp, and goes to sit with the horses instead.

Chapter Text

Two weeks later sees them trailing through the mountain pass, and Astarion settles lower in the cart beside Halsin as they survey the state of the valley beneath them.

“Gods above,” whispers Gale as they all stand to look, and Astarion looks ahead to Lillen, who’s standing still with a lit lantern in his hand, his face strangely illuminated by it in this foul plane, where light doesn’t stretch as far as it ought.

The lantern plays oddly on Lillen’s face – Astarion still isn’t used to it, yet, the change in his face. One of his eyes is still brown with shining green flecks, but the other is an uncomfortably bright blue, a false eye set in his skull in place of the one he’d lost a week back.

They’d intervened in a house fire, and a falling beam had swung down still half-attached to the ceiling it was collapsing out of. The thing had whistled down and whacked Lillen so hard across the face it had sent him careening out of the opposite window, and Astarion had been arrested at the sight of the old man sprawled on the floor, blood pooling under his head, one eye burst. It had made him feel quite sick, seeing Lillen on the floor the way he was, until Shadowheart and Halsin had shoved him out of the way to commence to healing him, to making sure there was no permanent damage beyond the obvious.

Volo, resting with the Flaming Fists there, had offered the eye as a replacement – payment, he’d said, for freeing him from the goblin encampment.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Shadowheart asks as Lillen passes her the lantern, and Lillen is quiet as he pulls the lyre off his back – back at the Temple of Lathander, from what Astarion had heard, a passing devotee of the Absolute had said they could use it to summon a guide for themselves through the Shadow-Cursed Lands.

“No,” says Lillen, and begins to play.

He’s been playing a lot in the evenings recently. Astarion hasn’t spoken a word to him since Lillen’s little outburst, has barely made himself stand next to the old man, to look at him, but he’s still heard him every night.

He’d been incensed to hear that none of them play instruments – Astarion had wanted to laugh, hearing him mutter and groan about youths these days, people’s mistaken priorities, and then he’d been insisting on it, a little. Shadowheart hasn’t partaken, but the others have – Gale has been learning to play his flute a little better, Wyll working on the violin he apparently neglected to devote much time to as a child.

Lae’zel keeps good rhythm on a drum, and she enjoys it, Astarion thinks, although it’s naturally hard to tell.

His fingers are beautiful as they move over the spider’s lyre, and the sound of it is haunting, has a silken, dangerous quality that still manages to cut through the dense, thick blackness of the shadowed sprawl about them.

“What was it like, before this?” Astarion asks, and Halsin sighs, adjusting his hands on Cherry and Pit’s reins – Cherry is the strawberry mare, and Pit the darker gelding. In their cart are all of the books they’ve gathered thus far, and the majority of their camping things, and most of the time, it’s been Astarion in the cart’s bench, because except for Halsin, the horses like him best.

“I played here, as a child, grew up here,” says Halsin quietly, and he sighs. “It was beautiful, very green – the moonlight was always so bright as soon as the moon was anything more than a sliver. You could walk through deep woods as though you were walking by sunlight. Right, Lillen?”

All of them suddenly go quiet, and the only sound is Lillen’s lyre as he keeps plucking the strings, his face a blank mask.

“You’re… you’re from here?” Shadowheart asks.

“Everyone has to be from somewhere, young lady,” says Lillen very quietly, and he looks severely up at Halsin, whose expression is almost as blank. Astarion wonders how long he’s been holding that revelation back. “I didn’t know you recognised me. You would still have been a boy when I left.”

“I thought of you, when I got these scars on my face,” Halsin says quietly. “Made me remember the man with the cut face, the clerk in the temple.”

Lillen grunts, turning his face away, and Astarion feels Halsin’s gaze on his own face.

Astarion hears the skitter of strange feet up the path before he sees the figure cut through the black mists, and he feels his breath catch in his throat as the drider comes wholly into view, his party trailing behind him. They’re all ensconced in a white, pearlescent light, and it casts his half-scaled, naked chest in shadow and light.

He looks across their party with suspicion, his lip curled, before his gaze lands on Lillen, his lip curled back in a snarl.

“You seek passage to Moonrise Towers?” he asks. “All of you?”

“Is the size of my party a concern to you?” Lillen asks, and Astarion shivers as he feels his will supersede the drider’s with ease, making him lean back from him. Lillen stands up straight, the lyre rested on his hip.

“No, True Soul,” Kar’niss says after a moment’s pause, although even he seems confused as to why he should so easily give in to Lillen’s will. “Merely… more complicated, on these narrow paths.”

“By all means,” says Lillen, “go ahead without us – simply give the lantern to me.”

He’s been consuming tadpoles.

Astarion knows he has, had known it even before Lillen, Lae’zel, Gale, and Wyll had entered the githyanki encampment beneath Lathander’s Temple, and come out the worse for wear, Lae’zel with a githyanki egg in her pack, but her head wrecked, nearly fucking killed by one of her people’s very own supposed healers.

No one else in camp will do it, but Astarion itches to, wants to.

He can feel the twitch of the tadpole in Kar’niss’ head, and part of him hungers, not just for the tainted blood that runs through his veins, but there’s a deeper hunger in him, one that he’s not sure the origin of, if it comes from himself or the tadpole already within him.

“What?” he hears Kar’niss ask, the drider’s tone faltering, but already under the force of Lillen’s illithid-aided command, his hand is coming down, and Lillen’s fingers brush his as he takes the swinging lantern from his hand.

“Hey!” says one of the drider’s retinue, an angry, baffled goblin. “Kar’niss, what the fuck? We need—”

“Hush,” Lillen orders her: one cold syllable, cool, whispered.

Astarion has climbed down from the cart, and when Lillen turns to look at him, Astarion almost recoils, because suddenly Lillen really is like Cazador, and Astarion feels as though he’s scarce more than two inches tall, looking up at him. Under the light of the tool in his hand – the Moonlantern, their shared connection supplies him – Volo’s eye shimmers even bluer, brighter.

“What’s wrong?” Lillen asks him – the first two words he’s spoken to Astarion in two weeks, and he looks at Astarion’s face as though the drider and his party aren’t even there, as though they’ve ceased to exist, as though they’ve already disappeared into the shadowlands around them.

Astarion’s breath is stuck in his throat, his lungs not filling – he’s aware of everyone staring at the two of them, aware of Halsin’s gaze on his back, of Wyll and Gale and Shadowheart looking at him confusedly, wonderingly; behind them, he knows that Lae’zel and Karlach must be doing the same, Hells, that Scratch and the owlbear cub in the back of the cart might well be peering their direction as well.

“I,” he starts, and feels humiliated, all of a sudden, humiliated, disgusted with himself, when for two weeks he’s been strong and sharp and cool and dignified, has turned his head whenever Lillen has approached him or looked his way, has silently made himself scarce whenever Lillen has wondered aloud who is going to join his party today, has busied himself in camp, with the horses, with chores, with making fucking dinner, even.

Gods, has that been what has passed for dignity, in the face of his little spat with their would-be father figure? Being a housewife in their camp?

“Astarion,” Lillen says, and with the Moonlantern held in one hand, he reaches out with the other – Astarion flinches, expecting the tender, cutting touch to the face that Cazador might have gone for, brushing his cheek with the backs of his knuckles or worse, the sharp tips of his claws. Lillen’s hand grips Astarion’s upper arm instead, and his expression is serious. “Tell me,” he says – it’s less like an order, and more like Lillen is entreating him, imploring him, begging him, even.

Perhaps that’s why it comes out so easily, as childish as it sounds once the words come out: “I want his tadpole.”

“What do you mean?” Gale asks, leaning forward. “Astarion—"

Lillen doesn’t need to ask – he looks from Astarion to Kar’niss, and then past him to the rest of his party. Kar’niss remains in something of a daze, his eye-covered, deformed head nodding and lolling as though he’s gripped by some sleep or other, and Lillen inclines his head.

“Of course,” he says, “it’s yours.”

“Lillen,” Gale protests, but tossing the Moonlantern up to Halsin on the top of the cart, he sweeps forward with the enchanted mace they’d pilfered from the Temple of Lathander. He gives Astarion a telepathic warning of what he’s about to do just before he does it, so that Astarion has time to shield his eyes from the godly beam of light that streaks forward and burns each of Kar’niss’ creepy little friends with radiant light – Kar’niss himself falls screaming to the floor, several of his legs burned away on one side.

* * *

“A little bit of warning would have been nice,” says Gale, but Lillen is barely looking at him as he slices deftly into the drow’s skull, and Astarion looks between the other elf’s expression of concentration and the quick movements of his dagger through Kar’niss’ dead head, prying the skull apart.

He catches the tadpole before it can delve deeper into the brain matter of its once-host, and gripping it gently by its wriggling tail, he holds it up for Astarion to take.

“Are you sure about this, Astarion?” Shadowheart asks at his shoulder, and Astarion stares at the eyeless maw of the tadpole’s face, watches it squirm one way and then the other in Lillen’s grip.

“I haven’t watched you do it,” Astarion says as he looks across at Lillen. “How do you?”

“Open your mind to it,” says Lillen quietly. “It’s already dying, without a host – your tadpole will consume its knowledge, render it dead.”

“It’s disgusting,” Astarion says.

“You don’t have to,” Lillen says immediately, gently but Astarion sees the slight crumple in his expression, the disappointment in it, and he surges with a sense of triumph, of pleasure, of delight. Is this the apology he’d wanted for, for Lillen to hunt down a tadpole for him?

Has Lillen really felt that bad, these past weeks? Would he have brought Astarion another apology on a platter, if Astarion had asked for it, demanded it of him – brought him a pretty young virgin to drink from?

Astarion stops procrastinating, and opens his mind to the tadpole – it’s as though he can feel it squirming whilst its knowledge is consumed by the one already buried in his brains, and he groans aloud as he’s suddenly seeped in Kar’niss’ knowledge of the region around them, as he takes in his knowledge of the way down to Moonrise, of his orders as Light of the Absolute, of all of it all at once—

And then he’s back to himself, the tadpole dead as Lillen drops it on the floor and stamps on it, flattening it into the earth.

“Well done,” Lillen says Astarion, and this time, his hand does touch Astarion’s cheek – his palm cradles Astarion’s jaw, so much more gentle than anything Cazador had ever done, his nails untipped.

“Is this where we kiss and make up?” Astarion asks acidly, but Lillen doesn’t flinch away as he leans in to look at him seriously, as though six other people aren’t right there, watching them, listening. “Lillen—”

“Thank you,” Lillen whispers.

“I don’t know exactly what you’re thanking me for,” Astarion says, and raises his chin. “Not for forgiving you, I hope, because that, old man, I haven’t done.”

Lillen flashes him a smile, and Astarion scowls.

“Lillen!” he growls, but Lillen has already swept past him, looking up to Halsin, who is holding the Moonlantern in his hands.

“We should let her free,” Lillen says, and Halsin nods her head.

“Let who free, exactly?” Astarion asks. “The pixie in the lantern? Why, because we all want to die by shadow tendril?”

“It would be foolish to release her,” Lae’zel grizzles. “If you must let her free, do so when we reach Moonrise, but not before. We have need of her protection – this land is poisoned.”

“You need to have more trust in the world,” Halsin tells her, and opens the lantern – the pixie that flies out moves so quickly that Astarion almost can’t bear to look at her, circling Halsin and Lillen’s heads in sharp, sudden movements. “Would you please give us your blessing, Dolly Dolly Dolly?”

Her voice is sharp and high and squeaky, and he can’t make out what she says as she drops a bell into Lillen’s hand, one almost the same size as her head – where was she holding that, he wonders?

When she casts her spell over all of them – even the dog – Astarion feels a shiver run through him, feeling the strange lightness of it, rather like the effects of a Light cantrip clinging to one’s skin but suffused deeper, somehow.

“Don’t be smug,” Astarion says at Lillen and Halsin both as they look around at the rest of them. “None of us actually likes you two anyway.”

Halsin laughs at that, laughs from low in his belly, and Astarion joins the barrier about the cart as they begin to walk through the shadowed lands, slowly picking their way over the most solid paths and avoiding those that seem like they might crumble or give way under the weight of the cart and what lies within.

Shadowheart hops up onto the bench alongside Halsin, and she casts radiating magic whenever they see some shadowed fiend in the distance – in the meantime, Astarion walks alongside Lillen, keeping a weather eye out for demons and beasties in the dark.

“Your vision is better with that new eye, isn’t it?” he asks.

“A little,” says Lillen.

“You’re from here? From this area?”

“I was born in Reithwin Town, you can see the ruins of it there,” Lillen says, pointing forward. “I was a clerk in Moonrise Tower, when it was more a temple than a military fortress. The High Heralds were based there – and Ketheric Thorm’s grandfather was high priest, then.”

“You were a Selûnite,” Astarion says accusatively.

“I was a record-keeper,” Lillen says, putting his hands up in a sign of peace when Shadowheart shoots him a foul look from her position beside Halsin, comfortably nestled against his big, warm arm, Astarion notices. “A clerk – I served the Heralds more than I did the temple proper.”

“You left?” Gale asks. “What, for adventure?”

“Adventure?” Lillen repeats, and laughs softly, shaking his head. “No. No, as a favour to a friend, I served at that toll office there, you see that smaller tower at the town wall? They had a shortage of competent clerks that summer, with a lot of them rushing off to find new posts in Baldur’s Gate, so I took a position there.

“The Heralds asked for proofs of people’s pedigree, for samples of different coats of arms, copies of certain texts – it was natural that some of their dedicants should be pledged to gods of knowledge other than the Moonmaiden herself. I was a young man, then, barely more than a boy, by elven standards – younger than you were, when you died. Twenty, twenty-five.

“In the toll office, they used to work sometimes with trapped or carefully locked trunks and chests, various safes – everything had to be searched before they went on to Moonrise, lest they planned damage to the temple, or the Heralds’ offices. How were they to know that the threat would eventually come from within?” There’s bitterness in his voice as he trails off, and he runs a hand through his hair before he goes on. “That’s how I got this scar across my face – they were teaching me to disarm traps, to pick locks, and I was overeager, took one on without a superior to supervise me. I was lucky to come out of that with most of my face intact. Even with that silliness taken into account, the Oghmians I worked with, they were impressed with my work – invited me to travel on with them, when they went back to Neverwinter.”

“Where you first stepped into the Hall of Knowledge,” says Astarion, and Lillen nods his head.

“I’d never known faith up to that moment,” he says. “I told you that before, but it… I don’t know if it means more, knowing I worked in temples the whole of my life, until I went into that library, none of it…” He exhales.

A sudden set of shadows flare out from the path, and they make short work of them and their thorny battlements, although Lillen takes a moment aside to climb up into some mostly-broken tower and returns with, of all things, yet another fucking book – as well as a spell scroll, of course, which he tosses to Gale.

“I’m sorry,” he says in an undertone when he falls into step with Astarion once more – the two of them are leading up the rear now, and ahead of them and the cart, he can hear Wyll, Gale, and Karlach carrying on some argument about sport in Baldur’s Gate. “For how I spoke to you, Astarion, it was… beyond uncalled for. It was cruel, unnecessary.”

“I don’t accept your apology,” says Astarion, and Lillen inhales, but then sighs.

“Of course,” he says.

“Ah ah, I’m not done,” says Astarion coolly, and Lillen looks across at him, meets his gaze with his own, half-finished one. “I don’t accept your apology because you haven’t explained why, exactly. I’ve never known you to speak like that to anybody, and I fancy I know you decently well, after all this time we’ve spent together. What in the Hells possessed you?”

Lillen is quiet, pensive.

“It’s some stupid, noble reason, isn’t it?” Astarion presses, raising his eyebrows.

“I didn’t want you to seduce me out of some thought of gratitude,” Lillen says.

“That’s a very stupid, disgustingly noble reason,” Astarion says. “Are you determined to make yourself unfuckable?”

“It would seem,” says Lillen.

There’s something that’s not coming free, that’s not coming across, and Astarion studies Lillen’s distant expression, the way he’s lost in thought. Experimentally, still feeling something of a rush from the one he’d consumed earlier, he reaches out for the very edge of Lillen’s thoughts, tasting them – he’s thinking about Astarion, thinking about Astarion asleep with that potion inside him, Astarion’s arm loosely banded around Scratch’s side, his lips parted, his expression peaceful.

Astarion looks tremendously vulnerable sprawled out like that, utterly insensible to anyone who might touch him, and it would be easier than anything to just—

Astarion chokes as Lillen grips him suddenly by the jaw, shoving him out of his mind and shoving him back from Lillen’s body in one movement, and then releases him, making Astarion stumble on the ground. He rubs at his throat, feeling a hot flush under his skin, a delicious thrill – a horrified, terrified, and yet delicious thrill.

“Is that how you like them, Master Anmactíre?” Astarion asks, clearing his throat. “Unconscious, biddable, utterly helpless in the face of whatever you might like to do to them?”

Lillen’s expression is stony, and Astarion laughs.

“Oh, poor pater,” he murmurs, and he leans in, kisses Lillen’s cheek, grazes his teeth over the side of the other man’s ear, listens for the quiet, so-so-quiet inhale of breath. “I’ll leave you to your brooding, shall I, darling? Let you muse on thoughts of me helpless and unconscious beneath you while I—”

The giggle is shocked out of him as Lillen suddenly raises his hand, as if to deliver a slap to Astarion’s behind, and Astarion is so surprised by it that he runs ahead before he can linger to see if Lillen will actually do it.

Before he can muse more on what exactly he’s feeling, if the arousal or the honest-to-Gods fear of whatever Lillen wants to do to him is more of a priority swirling in his chest, the Harpers interrupt them, and they’re dispatched with haste to the Last Light Tavern.

Chapter Text

Some of the Harpers are already familiar with Lillen and Halsin respectively – Halsin is known to them as the once-leader of the druid encampment, but others seem to recognise him from further back, Jaheira, particularly.

She doesn’t seem to recognise Lillen, though she speaks with him seriously and with a good deal of focus, the two of them in deep conversation as the rest of them settle into the tavern, spread around.

Halsin and Shadowheart set their cart and the horses in the stable, and they and Karlach speak with Dammon about what to do with her engine, how to better stabilise it. Lae’zel and Wyll go to the quartermaster to see what equipment might help them; as Lillen keeps speaking with Jaheira, looking over the map spread out before them, Astarion steps away, Gale at his shoulder.

A lanceboard is spread on the table, set up for play, and sitting in one of the chairs is a man Astarion has never seen before.

“Look at you, the star-crossed white rabbit,” he says as Astarion steps closer, and Astarion takes in his face, his slicked-back hair, his square jaw, aristocratic features. His clothes are very fine, and perfectly tailored.

“I’m sorry,” says Astarion softly, “do I already have the misfortune of knowing you?”

The man laughs, and Gale, at Astarion’s shoulder, says, “Raphael. What are you doing here, of all places?”

“Oh, you know, making friends, passing the time,” purrs Raphael, and his gaze flickers to Astarion’s, locking eyes with him. “Why not join me for a game?”

“He’s not just a man,” Gale says when Astarion looks at him askance. “This man is a devil, he caught us on the path when you and Lillen were held by the gnolls a few weeks ago. Desperate to offer deals and come out of it with your soul into the bargain.”

“If you have a soul left to bargain with,” says Raphael warmly. “I’ve been keeping an eye on your little band – funny, this little business of yours now. I offered your companions assistance in removing the illithid worms swarming through their brains, but I suppose it’s only appropriate that you and your wolfish friend weren’t there to join us. He’s been devouring the things at every opportunity, and as of today, it seems you’re joining him in tow.”

“What have I got to lose?” Astarion asks, tilting his head as he looks down at him, taking him in.

He remembers being a young man in bars and taverns like this one, remembers talking to powerful men like this – he remembers feeling pretty, clever, desirable. He remembers not the particularities of the politics of it all, but what it felt like, knowing that men were wooing him because of his position, knowing they wanted a pet magistrate, and being oh-so-willing to let them pay for it, try for it, even if he had no intention of bandying about the favours they wanted to ply him for.

He used to have so much power at his fingertips, such potential – what has he now, beyond this tadpole in his head?

“The better question to ask, young man, might be what you could stand to gain,” says Raphael, and gestures once more to the seat across from him. “Come, sit. Play. Have a conversation. Don’t you want to remember what it’s like?”

“What what’s like?” Gale asks, and Astarion doesn’t bother to answer as he slowly steps forward, but then there’s a shift behind him, a warmth as Lillen comes to Astarion’s other shoulder and lays a tightly gripping hand on the back of Astarion’s neck, making him inhale sharply.

“You,” Lillen growls in his ear, his breath hot against the skin, “upstairs. Now.”

“So sorry, Raphael,” Astarion says, a little breathlessly, feeling warm with fear and anticipation and he’s so, so flush with blood it feels like his whole midsection is throbbing. “Seems as if my dance card is full.”

Lillen doesn’t even glance at Raphael as he crowds behind Astarion, following him up the stairs.

“I’ll just… entertain myself, then,” Gale calls up after them.

“You’re a grown man, Gale, you’re more than capable,” Lillen barks back. “This won’t take long.”

For some reason, that last bit sends a shock through Astarion, and he stumbles a bit on the stairs in his hurry to climb them. Lillen’s hand settles on the lower part of his back as they move forward, and Lillen shoulders open the door.

“Oh, hello, Mr Anmactíre!”

“Hello, Mirkon, lovely to see you, go downstairs for an hour or so, will you?”

Mirkon, a curly-haired little tiefling, looks between the two of them with wide eyes, and Astarion swallows, because he can’t make his tongue move in his mouth – with a little giggle, Mirkon nods and runs out from the room, and Lillen shoves the door shut and locks it with a click.

“Let me make something clear to you,” says Lillen lowly, and Astarion turns to look at him as he slowly steps back from the older man, shrugging off the outer robe he’d been wearing, so he’s just in his shirt and leggings and boots. “I will give you any tadpole you wish, Astarion. If you can make yourself ask for it, if you can steel yourself with that will to ask when it is so hard for you, if it is within my power, I will give it to you. Anything you wish.”

Astarion looks back at the other man, at Lillen’s dark and stormy expression as he strips off his gauntlets and tosses them aside, as he unbuckles his breastplate and drops that onto the floor, too, kicks off his boots, his armoured chaps.

“But if you have a question,” Lillen goes on, “you will ask me that, too. You will not try to strongarm your way into my mind, to steal what is not freely given you. Am I understood?”

“What next?” Astarion asks, putting his hands on his hips and pressing his fingers into his upper thighs to hide the fact that his fingers are trembling. He can feel the thunderous thump of his heart in his chest, feels slightly dizzy, feels horny and frightened and full of something, full of— anticipation? Want? “Going to tell me to call you sir?”

“You don’t have to call me sir,” Lillen says, standing there in just his own leather trousers and shirt, now, and Astarion is aware of their size difference in a unique way in this moment, as Lillen advances on him, crowds him back toward the big, dusty bed that dominates the room. “Bend over.”

Astarion stares at him, and he thinks of the frightened giggle that had fallen out of his mouth an hour ago, skipping out of the way of Lillen’s threatening hand, but he’s not fucking giggling now.

“Beg pardon?” he asks, his own voice coming out as though through a film of water, and he can’t hear it properly. It sounds odd and distant to his own ears. “You can’t be serious.”

“What part of my expression implies I’m not being serious?” Lillen asks, still advancing, and Astarion tries to shove him back, but Lillen grabs hold of his wrist and twists it. Astarion kicks him in the shin, but Lillen is so painfully solid that he scarcely even flinches, and Astarion tries to twist his wrist around, making it impossible for Lillen to keep hold of him.

Lillen doesn’t even try: he releases Astarion’s wrist and grabs him hard by the scruff of his neck instead, forcing Astarion over his lap at the same time as he sits down on the edge of the bed. Astarion kicks, struggles, hisses, “Let me go, you fucking ridiculous—”

Lillen brings his hand down so hard that the clap of it rings through the room, cuts through the blur in Astarion’s head and right down to the bone, punches the breath out of his lungs and leaves him dizzied. Then the pain hits him, a moment later, a sudden, searing heat – no one’s ever hit him this hard before. Partners have spanked him in bed, or given him a playful spanking before or after a tumble between the sheets, but never has a blow come down so ringingly hard, made his backside bloom with so much heat.

He heaves in a gasp to protest, and before he’s even finished filling up his lungs again, Lillen brings his hand down again in another powerful slap, and then another, and then another.

“Ow,” Astarion manages to cry out between desperate, fervent gasps for air, feeling the pain radiating up his spine, feeling the heat of the friction on his arse cheeks as Lillen hits each of them again and again and again, and he’s kicking his legs, he’s trying to elbow Lillen’s thighs, trying to shove himself up, but Lillen is just too strong for him to muscle against. “Ow, ow, Lillen, it hurts, stop, Lillen, Lillen, you’re hurting me, it hurts—"

The flurry of blows down against his arse are too much for him to handle, too searingly hot and too strong, and Astarion doesn’t know that he’s ever been so humiliated in his life.

Cazador had never done this. Cut his back open, cut open his thighs, his wrists, sipped and drank from every vein in Astarion’s body, burned him, cut him open, splayed apart his ribs, carved his poetry into Astarion’s back, forced toys inside him, not just toys, but objects, big objects, his fist, his open hand with his sharp claw-tipped nails, a mace, once, just to make him take it, but never this, never this.

There are tears on his cheeks, he realises. He can’t remember when last he cried.

“It hurts,” he wails into Lillen’s thigh, and now he really does sound like a child, like a small, pathetic child, like the child Lillen always thinks he is, always acts like he is, and still he keeps hitting him. He spanks Astarion’s arse cheeks, both of them, the upper parts of his thighs, just under the edge of his buttocks where the flesh is painfully soft and sensitive, and his arse feels like the whole thing is on fire, his cock throbbing where it’s rubbed against Lillen’s lap through both their leggings, by the position. “It hurts, Lillen, I—” He gasps wetly. “It hurts, you said I could ask, you said I could ask, I’m asking, I’m asking, please, stop it—”

Lillen delivers an open-handed blow between Astarion’s buttocks, slaps right against his cunt through his leggings, and Astarion’s howl of pain is harsh and rips right out of his throat, and suddenly he can’t string two words together – he’s sobbing insensibly, tears streaking ugly down his cheeks, snot dripping out of his nose and over his lips, his whole body shaking, trembling, quivering. His cunt is twitching hotly under his leggings, his cock so hard it feels it might burst like a ripe cherry, and he’s still sobbing.

He's saying one thing, he realises, faintly, distantly. It’s coming out of him like a litany, like a prayer to one of the gods that’s never bothered helping him before, unconscious and reflexive and helpless and hopeless: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

“Shh, shh, I have you, that’s it,” Lillen says in warm, soft tones, and it makes Astarion sob even harder as Lillen manhandles Astarion in his lap and pulls him up to straddle him, clutches Astarion against his chest as though Astarion is something small and tender and fragile. “I have you, just cry it out, that’s it, Astarion, you’re completely safe, you’re safe, I have you—”

Astarion wails disgustingly into Lillen’s shoulder, hiccoughing wetly, and he’s just like that stupid tiefling boy Lillen fucked at the druid encampment, stupid and small and pathetic in Lillen’s arms, brought to tears by a fucking spanking, of all fucking things, and Lillen’s not even fucked him yet.

“I have you, you’re completely safe, I’ve got you,” Lillen murmurs against his cheek, his breath warm on Astarion’s ear, his hand stroking a soothing circle on Astarion’s lower back, just below the poetry Cazador tore onto his shoulders, that he used Astarion as a canvas for. “You’re safe, Astarion, I have you. No one’s ever going to hurt you again but me.”

The promise cuts through him like a blade, but there’s something as purifying in it as it feels punitive, and with quavering hands, Astarion reaches for Lillen’s body, clutches at him, feels how warm he is, how strong.

“You wanted to fuck me,” Astarion whispers into Lillen’s ear, wrapped around him like a limpet. He should feel disgusted with himself – he is disgusted with himself – at how small and pathetic and miniscule he’s become, desperate for this man’s, what, his protection? His touch? His affection?

His punishment?

“That’s no secret,” says Lillen.

“No, you wanted to fuck me when I was sleeping,” Astarion says. “You saw me laid out there, unconscious, and you thought… Oh, how would it feel, to fuck him like this? Helpless? How would it feel to come inside him, to open him up hard and rough, and let him wake up sore and dripping with me?”

Lillen grips his jaw again, but doesn’t push Astarion away – he turns Astarion’s face toward his, and he kisses Astarion hard and rough, all clashing teeth, apparently uncaring of the snot and tears all over him, uncaring of how disgusting he looks, how pathetic he is.

He pulls back.

“Is that what you were thinking of in the gnoll camp too, hm?” Astarion asks, looking into the other man’s mismatched eyes, at their different colours. “What stopped you, the temptation of it? Meditating and pretending not to stir as they hauled me out, so that you could watch them overpower me, watch those Zhents fuck every hole I had as you enjoyed me begging you to wake up and just help me, Lillen, please?”

Lillen stares stonily into his eyes.

“I wouldn’t have begged,” Astarion tells him coolly, with all the limited dignity he can muster, his cunt dripping, his arse aflame with hot pain, covered in fluids, disgusting. “I wouldn’t have called your name. I would have just taken it until I had an opportunity to kill them dead.”

“I know,” Lillen says lowly, his gaze hard. “Why do you think I didn’t let them?”

It hits Astarion like a punch to the gut, but at the same time his stomach flips over, at the same time the nausea coils around his organs and twists and tugs on his insides, his cock gives a powerful twitch, and he shifts forward slightly, grinds subtly against Lillen’s cock, which is half-hard under his leather leggings. The friction feels good.

It feels good.

“Are you going to fuck me now, Lillen?” Astarion asks as his palm slides up Lillen’s neck and up to his cheek, his thumb playing against the lobe of his ear, underneath him. “Going to feel how hot I am inside, how good I feel around you?”

“No,” says Lillen, and he smiles, smirks, even. “You’re going to roll down your leggings, you’re going to bend back over my knees, and I’m going to finish administering your punishment. Then, we’ll go back to work.”

“You’re fucking joking,” Astarion says.

“No,” says Lillen. “No, I’m not. Chop chop, Astarion. We’ve not got all the time in the day for me to waste on you.”

Astarion slowly gets to his feet, tender with the pain already on his arse cheeks – when his fingers tremble too much for him to undo the buckle on the front of his leggings, Lillen reaches out and does it for him. Astarion feels, somewhat curiously, as if he’s drowning, and it’s a nicer feeling than he would have thought.

“Say it again,” he says. “Please. Say it again.”

Lillen looks up at him as he pushes Astarion’s leggings down his thighs and to his knees, and he licks his thumb, sliding it very gently over Astarion’s hard prick, not crooking his fingers to sink into his cunt, not even teasing, not even promising, but Astarion wants it, craves it.

He knows what Astarion means without asking.

“No one is ever going to hurt you again,” Lillen says softly, flicking Astarion’s cock under his thumb and making him whine quietly, his knees quaking, “but me.”

“Let’s make that mutual, shall we?” Astarion asks, and Lillen chuckles.

He doesn’t say yes.

“Assume the position,” Lillen instructs him, and Astarion moves to obey.

Chapter Text

Astarion’s arse is sore as they move in and through Reithwin Town, picking through the remains of what was once the stonemason’s, in search of the infernal metal that Dammon had informed them might be there, the better to stabilise Karlach’s internal engine.

Maybe let her touch others, even, and that’s a nice thought for her, Astarion supposes – at the very least, for all this time, he’s been able to touch people. Granted, they’ve been able to touch him too, but…

“Are your parents buried here?” asks Gale quietly, and Lillen turns to look at him, smiles faintly.

“This graveyard, the one around the House of Healing, it used to spread further in that direction. See how the ground crumbles here? This chasm never used to be so deep – water ran through this river, and then…” He exhales. “They were buried over there, they shared a graveplot.”

“What did they do?” Shadowheart asks. She’s peering at Lillen thoughtfully, focusedly – she isn’t, as Gale is, studying Astarion, watching the way he walks, the way he moves, no doubt holding back his commentary only while he thinks of the most effective way to string his words together.

“My father was a clerk in the toll office. My mother was an accountant until she was into her eighties, but she had what I suppose we’d now call a mental breakdown – or perhaps you’d call it something even more modern than that. She painted, after that. She was really quite good – if any old reliefs of hers stand out in these ruins around us, I’ll point them out.

“Reithwin always had a lot of mixed heritage,” he goes on. “They stood out for being so old, each of them pure-blooded elves – I think they always struck people as rather slow-moving, almost stationary. All the young families about them sprang up, bore children, grew old, died, whilst my parents stayed in place in their positions, my father in his office in the toll house, my mother in the background of their lives on a ladder, painting and carving artistry into the walls.

“It wasn’t that they were invisible, you understand – it was that their presence was as assured as the stone walls of the temples people prayed and worshiped in, the roads they walked on, the bridges they crossed – the same temples, roads, bridges their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents had known.”

“Were they particularly good parents?” Astarion asks, and Lillen looks to him, meets his gaze. “I only ask because my father was a terrible bore – a judge, and not just by his nature. Always lecturing.”

“Your mother?”

“A slut, but rather a fun one,” Astarion says with a grin, and Lillen smiles back at him, his eyes sparkling in different shades of one another. “I never understood quite why she’d let my father tie her down – she was excellent fun, and we were close, the two of us.”

“Your mother was a slut?” Gale repeats.

“Like mother, like son,” says Shadowheart, and Astarion blows her an exaggerated kiss, which makes her laugh, even as Gale seems rather horrified at Astarion’s affection for his own dear departed mater. “No wonder you were close.”

“Well, exactly, we had all sorts in common – apart, I suppose, from our tastes in men.”

“Let’s not get into my potential similarities to Astarion’s father, thank you,” rumbles Lillen before Gale can open his mouth, and Astarion chuckles as he sidles forward, walking his fingers up the breast of Lillen’s chest.

“Oh, please, pater, let’s,” Astarion murmurs. “Do you think I might convince you to put on reading glasses and call me your second-favourite son?”

Lillen laughs, and when Astarion leans in, Lillen surprises him by letting Astarion kiss him – he kisses Astarion back, even, touches his tongue against Astarion’s lower lip and tickles it before he pulls back.

“Glad you two have made up,” gripes Gale insincerely. “You didn’t answer his question, Lillen.”

“Oh, no, my parents weren’t particularly good at parenting me,” Lillen says. “I was their only son, and I only recall my mother as being very ill, for most of my childhood – she got a lot better, once she left her accountancy practice, but she was always distant, always rather anxious, brittle. And my father was…” He sighs faintly, and, his hand rested on Astarion’s shoulder, absently strokes his thumb down Astarion’s throat in a way that makes him shiver. “He was a very nice man. Not— not particularly intelligent, or heroic, or impressive. He was nice. He was very kind and patient, with my mother, with me, with anyone who had a question in the tollhouse. He was the sort of man that people trod on almost without realising – and it wasn’t as though he’d point it out, because he was so used to it he’d not even realise himself.

“They weren’t good parents, particularly, but I rather liked them as people, I thought it was sad when they died. I suppose that except for the accident of my birth, I never felt especially connected to them. We were ever on acquaintances’ terms, and not much more than that.”

“That’s sad,” says Shadowheart.

“Is it?” Lillen asks her, his smile kind – his eyes crinkle, when they smile. Lillen informs Astarion his own do the same when he laughs, but he’s not about to put up with lies like that. “Do you think you might have been close with your parents, before your Mother Superior took you in?”

Shar bites her lip, seeming uncertain. When Lillen had braided her hair last night, he’d said he was doing it in a style that was popular in this area when he was a young man, separating it into complex braids and twisting it into a sort of infinity symbol – it looks pretty, and she likes it, Astarion thinks, when he does more complicated braids.

They talk longer. The whole process takes longer, her sitting before him and Lillen patiently braiding her hair, twisting it and styling it, affecting it to look one way or the other.

“I don’t know,” she says. “What do your daughters think of you?”

“Ava is more similar to me, which has its benefits and its negatives,” Lillen muses – he takes his hand away from Astarion’s neck now, and they walk further into town, in the vague direction of the tollhouse. “She’s patient and focused, stays resolutely calm in a crisis, but like her father, she can be— controlling. Harsh. She has a temper that isn’t always kept in check. And naturally, we both want to control the same things, when we cross over with one another, and thus, we argue, we bicker. I think she finds me a much easier man to love, now that she has a career so separate to her other father’s or mine – she’s well-respected in her field, doesn’t have to grapple with us in ours.

“And Marta, she’s a good girl. Nervous, not just of me or Ezio, but the world at large – she had quite strong magic from a young age, and she fell into being able to dream, to sleep, very young as well, which was a bit traumatic for her, in a way it’s not, or shouldn’t be, for either of you two. She’s rather like my mother, now I think about it – plagued by similar demons, I suppose I might say.

“She wanted to be in service to Oghma herself, and Ezio rather approved of the idea – wanted her to stay close to home, in Neverwinter – but I never liked the idea, that she should ever be in her fathers’ shadows. When she was a young woman, I worried, but once she went to the Musical College of Milil for a summer, she returned a different girl entirely. Confident, loud, where she’d before been so unsure of making too much noise – music paved the way for her. I love her very dearly, and she has patience enough with me, I think, for being the cold old bastard I am.”

“Do they know about your preference for younger men?” asks Gale, arching an eyebrow.

“I should think they have an idea,” says Lillen. “Ezio is not yet halfway through his second century.”

“Ah,” says Gale.

“It’s rather different for elves than some,” says Lillen. “Not that you have much to say to me, young man, where age gaps might come into play.”

Gale clears his throat as Astarion laughs, but Lillen’s expression is suddenly serious, and he holds up a hand for quiet as they walk through the open doors of the toll office.

Above them, loud and ominous, is a strange clank as something heavy and metallic moves back and forth over the boards, occasionally accompanied by merry little clinks against the wood.

Silently, they creep into the tollhouse proper, and Lillen grips at a piece of vine, testing its weight, before he slowly climbs up it as easily as though it were a ladder, barely daring to lift his head up and through the gap in the wood. Astarion doesn’t know what to make of his face as he sees it, sees the slackening of his jaw, the widening of his eyes, sees how quickly he pulls himself up and through.

“Gerringothe,” Astarion hears him say, and a moment later, climbing up himself, he catches a glimpse of the creature Lillen is addressing, a wretched thing that he supposes was once a woman, glutted on gold and shining with it, rippling with it, gold pieces dropping to the floor around her. “Miss Thorm, do you remember me?”

“WHAT DO YOU BRING?” the thing rasps, and her voice echoes within the golden confines of the… What, the armour she’s wearing? But no, he can barely see any joints on the thing – it encases her entirely like a metallic skin, allotted just enough life to allow fast movement. “YOU MUST PAY THE TOLL.”

“Gerringothe,” Lillen repeats, and he holds up his lantern so that the thing might see him better, as though she might see at all through her empty, golden eyes. “Gerringothe, do you remember me? Anmactíre is my name, I would visit this office from time to time. I used to work here, once – my father was a few times removed your predecessor.”

“ANMACTÍRE,” she repeats. “DO YOU BRING A WOLF?”

“I am the wolf, I suppose,” says Lillen. Astarion thinks of what Raphael had said, if that was why – if Lillen is an mactíre, does that make him an coinín? The thought would make him blush, if he could draw on any feeling in the moment but horror and disgust and… Ugh.

Pity.

“NO,” she says, her fingers moving on the air, as though counting. “NO, I MUST HAVE GOLD. YOU MUST PAY.”

“To whom must I pay?”

“THE TOLL,” she says. “YOU MUST PAY IN GOLD, OR JEWELS, OR—”

“Yes, yes, my dear,” Lillen says, and his voice is softly placating, gentle. He speaks to her as someone might speak to the dying – or, Astarion supposes, more accurately, as one might speak to the dead. Undead. Undying. “To whom will my toll go?”

“TO THE TOLL HOUSE,” says Gerringothe, and spreads her hands wide, gesturing to the ruins about them, the shadows that encapsulate them, the ghost of what was once a large building, now crumbled to almost nothing.

“And for what is the toll?”

“PASSAGE.”

“To pay for what? What services, Gerringothe – why do we pay the toll? Who do we sustain with it? What town lives on its lifeblood – what roads are built with it, what walls shored, what temple services paid for, what custom wrought?”

She stands there, frozen, and Astarion doesn’t know why, but there’s something so much more pathetic about her than the wraiths they’ve fought so far within these shadowed lands. Some of them have talked a little, true, or when their last essences are touched, evoke some feeling of what they were before being drowned in the nothingness of their undead, but Gerringothe, standing before them, seems almost to tremble, and not only with the weight of the gilding on her every part.

Lillen moves forward and he touches her, and Astarion has to close his mouth to hold back the sudden gag that threatens to overwhelm him – he’s not normally the squeamish sort, but there’s something really rather wrong about the way he sees the living gold move under Lillen’s touch.

“Gerringothe,” Lillen says gently, “do you remember when you were a young lady in this office, you and the other children, and I told you what the toll office was for? Do you remember that? You were knee high to a grasshopper, and you wore a lavender dress that your mother had made for you. The first dress you’d ever owned that had petticoats – when you twirled, all the skirts flared out like flower petals. Do you remember that?”

Gerringothe’s head tilts, and Astarion’s revulsion fades as he sees some of the gold begin to trickle off her, seems to melt away as drops of water melt away from a block of ice, beginning to fall on the floor with more clinks, as coins and shards of gold.

“I took you and your cousins, and all of the children around the toll office, and I told you what we did here and why we did it. What all that money was for – and you said, “But Mr Anmactíre, isn’t it like stealing? Aren’t you taking from people that which isn’t yours?”

“And I told you, “No, this is a tax, just a small one, enough to nourish the economy about. Because so many travellers come through, I said, so many of them, with a lot of money, and not always the inclination to spend it, and that the money they spend goes to maintenance, and paying guards, and putting money in the coffers of the House of Healing, that people can come through and be healed here. Do you remember what you said?”

Gold is falling away from the thing now in showers, so that they can see the twisted wraith beneath, her red eyes, her gnarled and desiccated body. He recognises the braid in her dry and aged hair, he realises, still pinned and twisted in the infinity symbol that Shadowheart is wearing today, and judging by the way one of her hands reaches up to touch the back of it, she recognises it too.

“No,” she says, in a very small voice, devoid of the echo now. She’s tilting slightly on her feet, and her gnarled, half-mummified hand seems about ready to crumble in Lillen’s – all the gold around her ankles seems like a parody of someone’s clothes, dropped at their feet at the end of a hard day. “No,” she says, softly, with a hitch in her voice. “No, I don’t remember.”

“That’s alright,” Lillen assures her, “that’s alright, I remember. You said, Mr Anmactíre, I think I’d like to do that. I think I’d like to do that, I’d like to see all this money, all those fine things that aren’t alive, I’d like to see them turned to life. To healing, and to roads people walk on, and food, and clean water, and all the rest.

“You were so small, then, Gerringothe – not the tall young lady you’ve grown into. I showed you the tables and percentages, and you marvelled at how piles of treasure might be rendered into neat tables just like that – you had lovely handwriting, even then. I complimented you on it.”

She’s swaying, and he’s rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb, Astarion notices, a small, comforting motion, but it’s making dead flakes of skin come off on his thumb, staining it black with ashes and dust.

“Yes,” she whispers.

“So look around, my dear,” Lillen tells her again, and Gerringothe looks, and really looks, seems to see. Astarion’s lungs hurt from holding his breath, almost not daring to breathe as she looks around more frantically, desperately. “What is the money going to?”

“I’ll give it back,” she says. “I’ll give it all back, all of it, I didn’t need it, I didn’t need it, I don’t want it—”

“Gerringothe—”

She drops to the floor in a heap, the spirit gone from her, and Lillen opens his hand, and leaves black dust fluttering to the ground from his palm, little black patches on his fingertips and the back of his thumb.

When Astarion steps around and looks properly at Lillen’s face, he sees the old man has tears in the corners of his eyes, and his expression is very, very distant.

“Are you alright, Lillen?” Gale asks quietly, and puts his hand on the older man’s shoulder.

Lillen seems to come to himself, raises his head, wipes at one of his eyes with his clean hand while he stares down at the dirty one.

“I haven’t been back here,” he says, “since the battle. Wouldn’t even pass nearby – if I had to come through Elturel at all, I’d take side roads, or…” He clears his throat, wipes off his hands, although some of the dark smut clings to his fingertips. “The benefit of my previous employ here is that I should know where all the secrets are. You three enjoy raiding somewhere like this for its treasures, don’t you?”

“Do you need a moment?” asks Gale.

“No, no,” says Lillen quietly. “It’s already been over a century, if you recall. Best we put all the poor souls bound here out of their misery as quick as we can.”

Astarion catches his wrist before Lillen can bustle away, and Lillen opens his mouth to protest, looks frustrated, his face still a little wet, but Astarion silently wipes his hand over with a rag from his pocket, cleans off the remnants of Gerringothe Thorm until Lillen’s hand is clean.

“Thank you,” the old man whispers, not meeting Astarion’s gaze, and then pulls away.

Chapter Text

“We’re not carrying any books back with us to the Last Light Tavern?” Astarion asks.

Lillen shakes his head – he’d been standing for some time over the finally unmoving corpse of Malus Thorm, staring down at his body, outstretched on his own table, his sisters bustling off and away from him, drenched in his blood and the blood of all the patients he’s managed to victimise, those unfortunates who’ve wandered into his territory.

“We’re taking Arabella’s parents back,” Lillen says, and Shadowheart and Astarion both turn to look at him.

Astarion opens his mouth to protest, but Lillen has already walked outside, and Astarion watches after him as he takes up one of the corpse carts and two empty coffins, laying them on the cart. Through one of he shattered windows, Astarion watches him come back through into the children’s ward.

He wonders distantly how many times Lillen has done this before, taken corpses and placed them on a cart, set them in a coffin, transported them, buried them, cremated them.

Astarion’s killed a lot of people, led to the deaths of just as many, fucked as many as those two together, and yet when he looks back on his unlife these past centuries, so much of it seems curiously blank, painfully so. There are a great many dense, black spots in his memory, dark shadows even this new Moonlantern of theirs couldn’t hope to penetrate. He’s been trying to remember a little of it, these past weeks, has been trying to think of all that’s happened in his life step by step, piece by piece, event by event.

A lot of it is missing, gone. He thinks of being a young boy in Baldur’s Gate, remembers going to the tailor’s and waiting aside as his mother gets her dresses fitted, listening to her commentary and the comments of her friends, remembers their laughter once he was old enough to join in, to make commentary of her own; he remembers being a little older, learning his letters, reading, remembers his father lecturing him, remembers the slam his office door would make whenever he locked himself inside it, away from the “incessant chatter” of women and slatterns in his house; he remembers…

He doesn’t remember his first kiss, the first time he had sex, doesn’t really remember his teenage partners, his adult ones, his partners as a magistrate – they’ve blended together with all the sex that came after, because he’s had sex all over Baldur’s Gate by now. Every time he thinks he knows one sexual encounter was whilst he yet lived, because it was in sunlight, the memory changes, alters, and he can no longer be sure.

He scarcely remembers any of their names, their bodies, who they were, individual to each other – everything blurs, mingles, crosses over. He doesn’t remember what colour his mother’s eyes were, nor what her natural hair colour was; he doesn’t remember which office in the courthouse was his father’s, nor which courtroom he liked to preside over best; he doesn’t remember the names of the horses he rode as a young man, nor the colours of their coats.

Rather like this world around them, presided over by shadow so that everything is the same colour, dead and half turned to ash, his life before Cazador’s bite is similarly ruined, burned and damaged.

“We’ll have to come back through here on our way to Baldur’s Gate anyway,” Gale says. “No sense carrying books back over there just to travel this way with them again in a few days.”

“Assuming we’re able to make it to Baldur’s Gate,” Astarion says. “How do you suggest we move that little army out of the way? Oh, sorry, did I say little? I meant—”

“We’ve made it this far,” says Gale, and Astarion huffs out a breath.

Gale has picked up a few scrolls from the library – one of the dead sisters had rushed to put a satchel in his hands when he’d come down with a few of them under his arm, and now he has that slung over his shoulder, resting down on his hip.

They’d raided Malus’ office whilst Lillen had stayed there, staring down at Thorm – he’d been speaking with the sisters, although Astarion isn’t quite sure what about, all of them using quiet voices, hushed voices, even. They don’t seem cognizant that their boss is dead, let alone that they’ve killed him, keep talking about when he’ll be available again.

“I should stay with them,” the dead nurse is saying, trailing beside Lillen as he pushes the corpse cart through the primary hall of the building.

“We’re trained in healing, Sister Lidwin,” Lillen says tonelessly. “I assure you, we’re more than capable of caring for them.”

“But I should walk alongside you—”

“Best you stay here. Who else will care for any emergency cases that come through?”

Lidwin closes her mouth and nods her habited head, then wanders like the ghost she is back into the children’s ward.

“Did you know him?” Astarion asks as they start moving again. “Thorm?”

Lillen and Shadowheart had been waylaid by some sort of Sharrite shrine, apparently – Gale and Astarion had entered the House of Healing themselves, and they’d managed to convince Thorm to put himself down on his own table rather than one of them taking the plot. Gale had told him it was the essence of good teaching, to prove a good example, to offer a canvas for them to learn on, practice on.

“I know all of them,” Lillen whispers. “Gerringothe, Malus – I know each of these…” he hesitates, trailing off for a moment, opens his mouth, closes it. “These sisters, I knew some of them – Anna Lidwin, I’d met her a few times. Heather, Ezio grew up with her. Geanne Lenna, I worked with her mother, who was a dedicant of Ilmater. I saw her delivered – I was the third person to ever hold the girl.” There’s a thickness in Lillen’s voice, a weight, and Astarion doesn’t say anything as they keep walking on the path, as Lillen pushes the cart.

Twice, Gale offers to take over, and each time, Lillen waves him off – by the time they’ve walked the two hours back to the Last Light, the older man is sweating, his hair drenched with it, and as he goes off to find wherever it is that those dead people’s little girl had gone to hide with Withers, Astarion sinks down across from Gale at their camp just outside of the tavern’s bounds.

“What were your parents like?” Astarion asks, looking across at him, and Gale looks at him over the fire, one of his new scrolls open in his lap. “We never asked you.”

“My mother was a wizard as well,” Gale says, his fingers playing back and forth over the parchment rested on his knees. “She was a really respected arcanist – well-studied. Lillen reminds me a little of her, actually, she kept a very robust library, and I recall she did have an agreement with the Oghmian Temple. I don’t know if your family did that, but a lot of families who keep extensive libraries, they have exchanges in place, to get access to certain texts and tome.”

“I’m vaguely familiar with the practice,” Astarion says, searching back through his mind – he doesn’t remember, but it strikes him as unlikely. His father had never been a particular adherent to premises that resulted in mutual benefit. “I don’t know that our library would have been much use to the Oghmians – I seem to recall my father’s collection as comprising mostly of dusty law books, the sort that would have had copies in numerous offices just like his across the city.”

Gale nods. “Well, I showed a lot of natural talent with magic, and it made her nervous, I think, my perspective on the Weave as a canvas and paint to play with, to create art with – she’d needed to study a lot more to do what I did, and I think she worried about my being… undisciplined.”

“Were you?”

Gale laughs, rubbing the back of his neck, and Astarion chuckles as he leans back in his seat, letting his thighs fall apart. His arse is aflame on the wooden surface beneath him, rough and rubbing at the flesh, the pain prickling up his spine and making his heart sing. He doesn’t miss the way Gale’s gaze flickers downward, between Astarion’s legs.

“No,” he admits. “No, I, um… I wasn’t.”

“Your father?”

“They separated when I was very young,” Gale says, shrugging his shoulders. “He died before I was twelve – I didn’t know the man well. I was never really comfortable with other men, not until I grew older.”

“You had sisters, I take it?” Astarion asks, resting his chin on his hands as he looks over at him. “Two of them, three?”

“Two,” Gale says.

“Both of them older.”

“Yes,” Gale says, and his eyes go from wide to narrow, his brow furrowing as he looks across at Astarion, as he takes him in. “What, you can just tell that from looking at me, knowing me the past few weeks? I’ve never mentioned them.”

Astarion laughs. “Darling, surely you’ve been watching me as closely as I’ve been watching you – I’m a charlatan, a well-to-do con artist. All that time with your divine paramour, and you learned nothing of how to read someone?”

“What, this is mentalism?” Gale demands, seeming somewhere between indignant and amused, as though Astarion’s read something so much more revealing in him, so much more important than this. “Is this like those cold reads fortune tellers do when they can’t afford the ingredients for a Detect Thoughts potion?”

“No, darling, cold reading is a little different. With that, one makes a broad guess or a sweeping statement – I might have guessed your father was dead, for example. I might have said, “Heart trouble?””

Gale blinks, and Astarion exhales.

“Most people die of heart trouble, one way or another, dear.”

“I suppose,” Gale mutters, shaking his head. “So my sisters, that wasn’t about…?”

“You’re more comfortable with women than men, that’s all,” Astarion says mildly, shrugging his shoulders. “You care more about women than men – but you don’t condescend to women. It’s not merely a scholar’s chauvinism on your part, you’re rather comfortable letting women lead you, command you. You trust them more implicitly than you do men – I know about your relations with Mystra, but these habits, these notions, they’re more ingrained in you than that. You had them before her, long before – and found such ease in her company as a result, I would wager.”

Gale says quietly, “You think I’m a chauvinist?”

“I believe I just said I don’t, darling. I think you’re a romantic – I think you crave to impress. A random person or passerby, they hardly matter, and even your friends here, we’re not terribly important, vital. You impress us rather easily. Objects of your affection, however, or particularly women in authority, those you’re much more desperate to impress. Was your mother very physically affectionate with you, or rather withholding? More affectionate with your sisters than you, perhaps, or more easily?”

Gale stares at him, and Astarion spreads his hands.

“How the Hells can you—”

“Most people can’t, dearest, do calm down,” Astarion tells him, looking across at him with more affection than he expects to feel for the man in this moment. Gods, this shit is making him soft. “Good salesmen and conmen, this is work for the likes of us, this sort of, mmm… profiling. Well.” His voice goes quieter without his permission as he adds, “Salesmen, conmen, and prostitutes.”

“And what, you learned this as a magistrate?”

“Lawmen are conmen, my friend,” Astarion says. “Didn’t you know?”

* * *

“You know him well, Malus Thorm?” Gale asks. They’re sitting on the floor near the fire, a bottle of wine open between them, and Astarion is sipping at it – they’d pilfered it from the deeper cellars here at the Last Light, had tugged out the fancier, more expensive vintages.

“He was a little younger than me,” Lillen says. “He was a healer in the temple I clerked at, Selûne’s Temple. He was an adherent of Shar long before his nephew was, I think, albeit in secret, he was always… off.”

“Did you fuck him?” Astarion asks, and Lillen doesn’t even flinch, doesn’t look away from the depths of the glass he’s staring into.

Gale, beside them, blanches, opens his mouth, closes it.

“Did he fuck you, maybe?” Astarion presses when Lillen doesn’t say anything. “Use his scalpels on you, burn you? Practice his stitches on you, and leave it just a little too long before he healed them away?”

Lillen smiles and sets his glass down. “I’d rather not speak any more about it, if it’s all the same to you, Astarion.”

“It’s all the same,” Astarion says, setting his own glass beside Lillen’s, and Gale looks up at their faces, glances between the both of them.

“If you two are about to go and have really loud sex,” Gale says, “I don’t suppose you can be convinced to go and do it in the tavern, and not in that tent over there?”

“I don’t suppose we can, no,” says Astarion, and Lillen laughs as he leads the way into his tent, and begins to strip off his clothes.

Astarion sees Gale sigh long-sufferingly, but he stoppers their bottle to go back to the tavern with it, where everyone else is – he looks back at Astarion, standing in the tent doorway.

“You alright?”

“I’m about to be,” Astarion mouths back, and Gale makes a show of rolling his eyes before he walks off – Astarion slips into the tent behind Lillen, and smiles as Lillen’s hands come to Astarion’s robe front, beginning to unbuckle it and strip it off for him. “It’s ever so nice to be attended to,” he says softly.

“You’re in luck, then,” says Lillen, brushing their lips together before he eases Astarion’s robe from his shoulders and lays it aside, goes then for his leggings and eases them off too.

Lillen drops to his knees once Astarion’s stepped out of them, and Astarion stands there, naked, and sighs as Lillen’s mouth comes against his cock, suckles at him and plays his tongue over Astarion’s cockhead, flicks it one way and the other before he dips his head further and slides his tongue fully into Astarion’s wet and open cunt.

Astarion groans, his thighs spreading apart and his knees bending slightly as he bears down more on Lillen’s face, feeling the drag and play of Lillen’s tongue inside him, circling his insides before he nibbles gently on one of Astarion’s poor, abused cunt lips – once he’d gotten Astarion’s arse bare the other night he’d spanked him for just as long, and rendered as many of the blows against his cunt and his thighs as he had his arse, so that the whole of his lower half seems to him to be a constellation of blooming bruises.

Now, Lillen’s hands slide up, palms rubbing against the mottled flesh of the back of Astarion’s thighs, and he grabs two handfuls of Astarion’s admittedly ungenerous backside and squeezes, makes him let out a keening, breathless noise at the pain of his palpation on the bruises. This pain is duller and rawer, somehow, than the original falls of Lillen’s hand down against his backside, the bruises throbbing at the way they’re pressed on and massaged, and the pain thrums within him in concert with the pleasure Lillen’s laying against him, tongue delving deep into Astarion’s cunt like he’s trying to get the last drip of honey from the pot, laving against his cock.

He nips at the side of Astarion’s cock and the sudden threat, the sudden lightning flash of pleasure, cuts through him like an actual shock – his knees go weak, and before he can hit the floor Lillen has him by the arse and half-supports him, half-wrestles him to the floor – the floor made up of Lillen’s own bedroll and Astarion’s layered blankets alongside one another.

Astarion gasps in a breath as Lillen shoves up his knees.

“Hold these for me, young man,” he orders, and Astarion hooks his hands under his knees and pulls them up toward his shoulders, presses his head down hard against the pillows as Lillen mouths and suckles at his cunt, tongues over the sides of his prick and then sucks hard on his cock as he sinks two of his fingers into Astarion’s wet cunt and the other two, wet but not quite wet enough, into his arse at once, and Astarion wails.

He’s going to have new bruises behind his knees, now, he knows, bruises in the shape of his own fingertips as well as Lillen’s palms where he’s gripping at them so hard, and Lillen sucks his cock not just roughly, not just eagerly, but greedily, as if he’s been dreaming of doing this for months.

Astarion wonders, faintly, if he has, and he groans as Lillen sinks his fingers deep into him and then pulls them back, begins to thrust them in rhythm with the play of his tongue against his cock, his other hand knuckling over one of his bruised buttocks, rubbing over the hot, painful flesh.

“How many instruments do you play?” Astarion asks breathlessly.

“Including you?” Lillen asks before sliding his tongue into Astarion’s cunt alongside his fingers, and Astarion is laughing as he comes, stars bursting behind his eyes.

Lillen doesn’t stop until he’s wrung two more out of him, and Astarion is sprawled exhausted beneath him.

Chapter Text

“These brews are nothing compared to those of Githyanki make,” Lae’zel remarks as they look through the remainders of Thisobald’s cellar.

“I cannot believe you’re still standing,” Wyll says, looking at Lae’zel wonderingly, although the two of them stop short when Astarion raises his hand for them to freeze, leaning forward to unwire the trap mechanism ahead of them. “Did you actually drink all that? You didn’t fake it?”

“There was no need to perform,” Lae’zel says scathingly, with a little sniff. “As I said, these brews are nothing.”

“A whiff of that— I don’t think we can even call it beer,” Wyll says, “would be enough to knock many a man over.”

“I am not a man,” says Lae’zel, and raises her narrow chin. “I am superior.”

Astarion laughs, shaking his head, and unlocks the cage door, stepping inside and surveying the space before he gives them the thumbs up to come forward. “No enchanted objects, sorry to inform you, Gale,” Astarion says as he rummages through one of the chests, making the bottles clink. “But delicious poisons and potions for the better of us to guzzle.”

“The poisons too?” Wyll asks. “You promise?”

“Admitting I’m your better, darling?”

It’s hours later that the four of them take a break outside what seems to be, after a cursory peer down the subtle passageway, an ancient shrine to Shar, and a huge, sprawling temple at that. They’re each of them exhausted and spattered with blood, including that of a githyanki party that had appeared from nowhere to try to eliminate them.

Lae’zel is standing pensively and looking out over the water, holding the egg they’d taken from the monastery against her skinny breast.

“Doing alright there, Lae’zel?” Wyll asks.

“It… pulses,” Lae’zel muses aloud, her head tilting to the side as she slides her palms against the mottled surface of the githyanki egg, and Astarion looks down at it, sees the slight shift of it inside.

“The way the gith in the monastery were discussing it, they seemed to think it wasn’t viable,” Wyll says, and Lae’zel slowly shakes her head.

“I do not pretend to know all about the raising and rearing of gith young,” Lae’zel says firmly, “but what I do know is that some eggs are slower to hatch than others. “Varsh Ko’kuu said he was the last of his own brood to hatch – other great warriors have been slow to hatch. In this egg, within this shell, brews infinite potential.”

“Feeling the maternal urge, are we?” Astarion asks in faux sympathetic terms, and Lae’zel looks at him scathingly – not that that says a great deal, as it seems to him her gazes are almost always scathing, one way or another.

“You satisfy your filial urges with our leader, do you not?” Lae’zel retorts, and Astarion feels his jaw drop as Gale and Wyll both laugh, and Astarion tries to laugh it off, but can’t quite help the creeping embarrassment that curls up his spine, burns under his skin.

“I don’t know how much you understand this, given that your people don’t exactly have the idea of Mummies and Daddies to make games of on the playground—”

“What is a playground?” Lae’zel asks. “Is this how you refer to an arena?”

“… I can’t actually tell if you’re joking, and as usual, I feel like that’s on purpose. In any case, dear, it is not a filial urge I am satisfying, but a sexual one. What I do with Lillen, I did not ever consider with my own father. I can’t believe that needs to be said.”

“He is easily old enough to be your father, is a fellow High Elf, commands you on the battlefield, disciplines you as an elf father does a child, refers to you by such diminutives as “young man” and “boy”, even. I do not deny the sexuality of your relationship, but it is motivated by more than a simple physical or reproductive urge – there is plainly some flawed or broken element of your psychology that compels you.”

Astarion looks at her very flatly, his lips thinned as hard as they will go, and he takes in a few slow breaths through his nose to keep from losing his temper or just blurting out a retort.

Infuriatingly, he gets the impression that Lae’zel is not insulting him, but merely stating what she sees to be the plain and simple truth of the matter as she sinks down to sit beside Wyll, returning her egg to the padded satchel she’s been keeping it in.

“You don’t see the attraction at all?” Astarion says, and his patience sounds very false to his own ears, but if Lae’zel notices it, it’s plain she doesn’t care.

“Anmactíre is a tried and tested warrior,” Lae’zel allows. “His age has evidently afforded him a great virility – he showed great stamina not only in his dominance over the tiefling boy, but over you.”

“You were listening last night, were you?”

“No, but we could hear you from the tavern balcony,” she says. “He beat you for quite some time before tiring. And his sweat…” She grunts approvingly. “His is a desirable scent, indicative of his power, his command. I do not fail to see the attraction – merely that any desire I might feel for the man is motivated by his skill and potency. From what I have learned of your peoples’ ways, dwelling here on this plane, your motivations are more complex than that. And depraved.”

“And you disapprove of that?” Gale asks experimentally, and Lae’zel actually seems surprised, her eyebrowless browbones rising slightly, then looks from Gale to Astarion.

“No,” she says plainly. “He seems a more than satisfactory lover.”

“That’s about where I’d rate him, yes,” Astarion says with a half-laugh, and he passes her a plate for her to eat from as he unstoppers a skein and takes a long drink from the water inside. “You really don’t have mothers or fathers? You just hatch from the egg and go straight into fighting?”

“The githyanki must be ruthless,” Lae’zel says. “This is how we escaped our bonds of slavery – this is how we will and must survive.

“Never change, Lae’zel,” Astarion says.

“I will not,” Lae’zel tells him firmly, and seems mildly suspicious as to why he laughs.

* * *

When they return to the Last Light Inn that night, it’s to the sight of their camp having been moved away from the water, now nearer to the tavern in the centre of things.

Halsin has set up a bedframe in his tent, and is nursing what seems to be an unconscious child – Lillen, Shadowheart, and Karlach are nowhere to be seen, apparently in search of the other half of this child, who isn’t a child, but is a spirit, or something like that.

When Lillen comes back, the other child walking beside him, Astarion has very little interest in the whole debacle – what he’s interested in is the fact that Lillen has a black eye. The socket around his new false eye is darkly bruised – apparently, he hadn’t taken a moment to heal it.

“What happened here?” he asks, putting his hand on his hip and indicating to the new bruise. “That undead child give you a run for your money?”

“Oh, no,” says Karlach helpfully, “the tiefling mage did that to him. Rolan?”

“Defending his brother’s honour a little too late, isn’t he?”

“Cal and Lia are at Moonrise Towers,” Lillen says quietly. “Kept prisoner there. We’ll go there tomorrow and— and see about getting them out.”

Astarion looks at Lillen’s face, examining it, his frown, the distance in his eyes, and as he takes out a potion and daubs a little of it onto Lillen’s face, watching the bruise heal up, he asks, “Are you actually feeling responsible for them? You aren’t the one that let them get kidnapped – Rolan is. They are.”

“Astarion—” Lillen says, catching his wrist, and Astarion clucks his tongue at him.

“Don’t you Astarion me, as if I’m being all cold and callous. I’m not about to tell you we can’t go and rescue them, because I know you far too well to know you won’t waste all of our time with sentimental nonsense like that regardless of whether we know the prisoners involved or not. But don’t with this guilt thing, it’s ridiculous. And embarrassing. And more than that, it’s self-indulgent.”

“Self-indulgent, is it?” Lillen repeats, but at the very least, his lips curve into the slightest of smiles, and one of his big hands comes to rest on Astarion’s waist, his thumb pressing into the flesh over his hip. “You think I’m self-indulgent?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I don’t recall being particularly self-indulgent last night.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“You weren’t exactly wrestling to stop me.”

“Why should I do something like that? If you want to act like you were put on this earth to please me, I’m hardly going to disabuse you of the notion. For all I know, you were.”

“You are an arrogant and revoltingly decadent creature,” Lillen tells him, and Astarion gasps, putting his hand on his chest, and he allows himself to enjoy the way Lillen looks at Astarion’s fingers, looks at his neck, looks at Astarion’s mouth – looks at him hungrily, wantingly.

There’s something intoxicating about it, about being wanted, hungered for, with the knowledge that Lillen is just as comfortable being hungered for in return, if anything, is eager for it.

“You forgot to mention I’m pretty, too,” Astarion complains, and then leans into Lillen’s hand as he feels Lillen’s thumb press and slide against him, stroking him through the fabric of his shirt. “In any case, given what I witnessed of you and Cal, and each time you and I have played together so far…” He walks his fingers up Lillen’s chest, up to his neck, and then he slides his hand against Lillen’s throat. He’s strong, and he’s got long, pretty fingers, the sort of fingers his mother always used to complain he didn’t put to playing music – he wonders if she’d like it, now, the fact that Lillen keeps making him practice at night in camp, making him move his hands on the strings of a lyre or a harp. “One might begin to think you’re attempting to distract from something.”

“And what am I distracting you from, exactly?” Lillen asks.

“Perhaps you’re not the potent and virile elf you seem,” Astarion murmurs, gripping Lillen by the wrist and nudging his hand lower down, so that Lillen is grabbing his arse, now healed, instead of holding his waist. Lillen can easily hold what seems like his whole buttock in one hand – Astarion’s rather disappointed he can’t grip the other man by his throat with one hand.

Two, though, with both of his hands, he could probably make it work.

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Lillen asks, raising his eyebrows, and he laughs quietly, touching his thumb to Astarion’s chin, touching the tip of it to Astarion’s lower lip. “That I won’t be able to keep it up long enough to fuck you – that I’ll slip inside and immediately lose myself in you?”

“I was rather thinking of losing myself in you, instead,” Astarion says, and he studies Lillen’s face every carefully for signs of hesitation, of challenge, of anger, of indignation – it’s the sort of thing he’s learned to look for, over the years, of taking a risky move on a mark, of making a gamble on something they might really love, or really, really hate.

Lillen’s expression communicates far more of the former – his remaining pupil dilates, his lips parting, his cheeks darkening, and his voice is deeper, lower, as he asks, “Is that what you’d like, young man?”

“I’m supposed to say something about fucking you so hard I have you calling me Daddy,” Astarion muses aloud, delighting in the infinitesimal further widening of Lillen’s pupil, the momentary quiver of his lower lip. “But I rather like the idea of cleaving you open while you beg for more and still being your young man anyway.”

“Planning on using a cock for that, or a knife?”

The hot thrill that runs through him reminds him of the first time he ever bit into a living thing and tasted blood – he doesn’t remember what it was, a rat or some other vermin, but he remembers the hot burst of it on his tongue, his first taste of lifeblood as part of his new unlife. He remembers the thrill and the coppery taste on his tongue, and this tastes the same.

“Dealer’s choice, darling,” Astarion murmurs, and draws Lillen down into a kiss.

* * *

“Not going to prep me first?” Lillen asks, and Astarion holds back his laughter at the relish in his voice, the want, the hunger.

Hunger.

“As if you don’t love the burn,” Astarion murmurs against Lillen’s mouth, and begins to sink inside. He groans at the pressure against his cock as the strap presses forward and meets the resistance of Lillen’s arse, tight, and with his hands braced on the pillows either side of Lillen’s head, he watches the older man’s face, watches the contortion of his features, the strain, as Astarion sinks further and further in.

He does it as slowly as he knows how, as he possibly can with the muscles in his waist – he’d picked out the largest toy he could, had had to readjust the belts on the strap to make it fit, and it takes time to do it, for him to move forward quarter-inch by quarter-inch as beneath him, Lillen writhes.

He kicks out his legs, his thighs spread, his toes curling, his hands grabbing helplessly at the sheets beneath him – he’d writhed like this underneath Astarion before, when Astarion had been penetrating his neck instead of his arse, and Astarion thrills with the memory of it, feels his dead heart beat faster, feels his cunt clench around nothing, feels his own cock twitch against the pressure of the strap’s base against it.

Lillen is gasping, is letting out these delicious little keening noises from low in his throat, and he isn’t saying anything. For once, the old bastard is rendered utterly speechless.

“Ah ah ah, no no no,” Astarion says when Lillen tries to reach for his hips, when his fingertips touch against Astarion’s thighs to probably try to pull him deeper. Astarion pins them down under where his palms had been braced before, keeping them in their place. “I’m enjoying myself, pater dear, you’re not about to rush me, are you?”

Lillen looks up at him, his eyes flashing in their different colours, and he laughs, actually laughs, and tries to push Astarion’s hands up off of his wrists—

And then falters. The laugh dies on his mouth, his eyelids lowering slightly before his brows furrow, and he looks up at Astarion questioningly, searchingly.

“Yes, I know, I know, you’re so much stronger than I am,” Astarion whispers. “But I didn’t want you forgetting who’s in charge this time around, now did I? We found all sorts of special potions in Reithwin today.”

Lillen’s cock jerks between them, twitching powerfully and spurting a little pre between their bellies, and Astarion doesn’t even bother to hold back his laughter as he leans in closer, sinks in that last inch with a shove and feels like he could drink the breathless whimper it shoves out of Lillen’s lungs, the little wheezing whine.

“I’m going to bite you, now,” Astarion murmurs.

“Astarion,” Lillen growls – he really doesn’t sound particularly stern like this, with other factors drawing on his self-control.

“Daddy, darling, whatever are you worried about? Don’t you want your best boy to grow up big and strong?”

Lillen grunts, gasps – his cheeks are dark, and Astarion can’t help the fluttered laughter that falls out of his mouth, the sheer deliciousness of this moment, the way it thrums through him, the way it electrifies him. It’s everything about it, everything, he feels like his brain is on fire, and not just like it was when he consumed that mindflayer, tasted its reach out of and into his mind – this is just as good, this is better, this is…

It's everything about the moment. It’s everything. It’s Lillen’s arse opening up around Astarion’s thrusts inside him as he pulls back and starts to really fuck him, feeling the resistance give way as his muscles relax, as his arse invites Astarion’s cock to cleave him open; it’s Lillen’s wrists straining so hard against Astarion’s and Astarion finding it easy to keep them down; it’s Lillen’s warm skin, the taste of it, his sweat salty and full of a heady musk that fills his nostrils (alright, she might be demented, but Lae’zel has a point there); it’s Lillen’s breathless noises and the fact that like this, his expressions are utterly uncontrolled, unmasked, open, obvious; it’s that Astarion is cracking him open like an oyster and getting to all that tender, vulnerable meat inside, and Lillen is letting him, and Lillen loves it, and as soon as they’re out of bed, he’ll go right back to giving Astarion orders.

Next time, even in bed, perhaps it will be Lillen ordering Astarion again – and won’t that be nice?

He laughs faintly, and thrusts harder – Lillen howls, tries to muffle the sound against one of his pinned arms, and Astarion lets him go for long enough to slap him hard across the face, the sound ringing in the room.

“Let me hear you,” he complains, whines, almost, and it should make him feel weak or silly or stupid, but it just makes him feel even more powerful, seeing how Lillen looks up at him in response. “I want to hear you. Would you deny me?”

“Not something you want,” Lillen says in his hoarse, throaty voice, and then tips back his head to bare his throat.

Astarion means to hold himself back, to bite just at the moment he’s certain Lillen’s going to come, certain it will bring him over the edge, wait until the right moment, something, something—

He forgets it all watching Lillen’s pulse point jump before his eyes, and he drives his teeth into the flesh at the same time he abandons Lillen’s wrists to grab him around the waist instead, to fuck into him deeper, harder, and Lillen’s blood washes over his tongue at the same time he hears Lillen actually, honestly, yell, grip the back of Astarion’s neck to pull him in deeper—

“Perfect boy,” he whispers a second later, and Astarion is a little embarrassed at the noise that comes out of him, then, greedy and desperate as he slurps at the last of Lillen’s blood, and then he kisses Lillen’s ear, his cheek, his mouth with his lips still stained with Lillen.

Astarion comes first, comes with the wonderful rub and drag of the textured base against his cock, his skin hot all over, and he wants to get one of those proper toys once they’re in Baldur’s Gate, if they ever make it there – one that fucks him at the same time, one that fills him at the same time he fills the other man.

“That’s it,” Lillen murmurs. “You’re so good, aren’t you? You are just… sublime.”

“Praising me for a job well done?” Astarion asks, raising his eyebrows as he keeps fucking him, slower now, a little shallower, as he wraps a hand around Lillen’s cock and grips at it tightly, twists his wrist on the upstroke and laughs when it makes Lillen’s lips quiver. “The job’s not quite done just yet.”

“Praising you for stopping before you killed me this time,” Lillen says, and laughs until Astarion stops him short with a backhand across the face this time, and then laughs some more until Astarion silences him with a kiss.

Chapter Text

It’s raining when they finally make it to Moonrise Towers, and when they step inside, Astarion looks carefully about, dislikes very much the fact that they’re amongst so many potential enemies, dislikes everything about the situation as they walk forward.

This isn’t like most places, where Lillen idly leads them one way and the other, chatting to different people, musing with merchants – this is what Astarion is learning to think of as his True Soul persona. This, this is the epitome of confidence, or at the very least, the epitome of its appearance – Lillen strides forward with them trailing behind him and people move out of the way, and there’s something delicious about it, something that Astarion wants to savour.

Cazador doesn’t command this sort of power, not really – Cazador might be a vampire, but he’s ever and always a noble amongst other nobles, even with his vampiric infection taken into account. Nobles don’t part like a sea for other nobles, not like all these people part for Lillen now, for his confident gait.

Even Astarion and his siblings, well, they’re loyal dogs, aren’t they? Dogs don’t part about their master: they cling close to him, follow at his heels…

Much like the three of them are following now, he supposes, and the thought rankles. Why should he be in such a poor mood when just last night he was sinking into Lillen’s arse, splitting the older man apart, making him moan, making him open up just for Astarion?

Cazador would never.

The crowd even parts before Ketheric Thorm’s throne, until the four of them – he, Lillen, Shadowheart, and Lae’zel – stand poised before the group. A dark elf woman is kneeling on the floor, bruised, begging for mercy, for her life, or something like it – Astarion doesn’t really care to know.

Thorm himself is a good deal more handsome than Malus Thorm or Thisobald, although admittedly the bar is low – he’s old and weathered, of course, but he doesn’t look nearly as undead as Astarion had expected, and while his beard is grey and there are wrinkles on his face, he looks distinguished.

“You, True Soul, striding in – what do you think ought become of Minthara’s fate, to punish her failure?”

“I hardly see the point in wasting time on her,” says Lillen in that authoritative tone he so loves to break out in times like these, not so much as glancing at the drow, and Astarion watches the change in Thorm’s body language as he sits up, leans forward, focuses on Lillen, his hands resting on the arms of his chair. “Haven’t you got more important things to be concentrating your valuable time and energy upon, General Thorm?”

Thorm stands to his feet, and as the various guards stationed around the room stand to attention, readying their weapons, Thorm walks down from his place on the dais, staring.

His head tilts slightly to the side as he looks Lillen up and down, and Lillen stands there confident and unflinching, his back straight. Thorm has some fascinating armour on, and Astarion studies it for its symbols – the sign of the Absolute, the skull with the finger slashes overtop it, resting in the centre of a triangle, is carved on his breast and on the circlet around his head, and there are other skulls all over his breastplate.

“I recognise you,” he says quietly as he steps closer. “Anmactíre, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Lillen says, and once the two of them are in front of one another, Astarion can see that Thorm is very tall as well – Lillen only has an inch or two on him. What in the Hells did they use to feed elves and half-elves in this valley, do make them all so bloody big?

“You’ve aged,” Thorm remarks, raising his grey eyebrows, and Lillen huffs out a quiet laugh.

“So have you,” he replies.

“You serve the Absolute now, do you?”

“I have a tadpole in my head and a certain sense of faith.”

“Lost hope in Oghma?” Thorm presses, although there’s something sly in the shift of his smile, and at the same time, something cold in it. Astarion hadn’t expected this, and he glances sideways at Shadowheart to see if he can see anything in the mask of her own expression. He doesn’t dare reach out with their shared connection, not with Thorm so close to them.

Lillen’s tone is mild and easy as he says, “As you did in Selûne – and then Shar, apparently.”

“I didn’t think you so easily swayed. Always coming back to Reithwin with your precious scrolls and books, pushing your reading programs. Ever rewarded for your work.”

There’s something Astarion can’t quite identify, something tighter now, as Lillen replies, “I’m flattered you hold such an opinion of me.”

“I had forgotten you entirely until this moment.”

Lillen responds immediately, “Then my flattery is retracted.”

It’s… cold, the talk between them, cool and biting, professional and yet distant – Astarion is once more, as he so often is, reminded of his time in the magistrates’ courts, hearing conversations between clerks, of the conversations he held himself with his fellows, with judges. There’s a biting tone to this talk, and the snappishness that exudes from both men as they look one another in the face is rather removed from the naked aggression of two warriors about to come to blows – this sort of talk would be just as vicious, if not more so, carried out on parchment as it is face to face.

This is a masculinity to which he’s always been attached, a manhood that belongs between parchment pages and smelling of ink and paper, lettered and educated but not bolstered by the magic of a wizard’s college – he wonders, with the centuries each of these men has behind their belts, how many hours, days, weeks, each of the has spent sitting at a desk, handling paperwork.

How many lives has Thorm ended with an order, a letter, a memorandum?

How many lives has Lillen created, bolstered, educated, started from scratch over again, with the books he’s ferried, the work he’s done for the Oghmian temple, and any of the other teaching gods he’s so attached to?

“You have faith in the Absolute?” Thorm asks, and Astarion blinks as he feels the pulse of his mind meeting Lillen’s, feels Lillen’s mind pulse to meet Thorm’s – he feels the echo of it, the rush of power as Lillen consumes tadpoles, the craving for knowledge, the understanding of the network of minds at play.

Is this what passes for devotion?

It mustn’t displease Thorm too much, because when he stops plundering Lillen’s mind, he says, “Come. You and I will discuss matters further.”

“Very well,” Lillen says, stepping forward – the three of them step forward too, and Thorm holds up his hand.

“Let the men talk,” he says darkly, and Astarion clenches his jaw as his gaze flits from Shadowheart and Lae’zel to Astarion, and at no point adjusts his words or his tone. “I do not need the minds of your three assistants in tow, Anmactíre. I want only yours.”

“Flattery again, I see.”

“An order,” says Thorm crisply, already walking away, ascending the stairs. “Come when you’re ready.”

“You’re not actually going to go up there alone with him?” Shadowheart asks.

“I am,” says Lillen. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“He would have killed you here, before everyone, if this was his intention,” says Lae’zel. “But do you not worry as to his motives?”

“Worry is too strong a word,” Lillen murmurs. “I’m surprised he remembers me, to be entirely honest – I was never a military man, and never of much interest to him, nor him to me. I would guess he’s struck by the same sentiment as I am: that as old as he is, a familiar face is a balm, no matter how cold or distant.”

“You hardly spoke to one another as if you weren’t mutually acquainted,” Astarion says immediately, and he sees the flash of Lillen’s eyes as he looks back at Astarion, because Astarion has read that quite right, evidently.

“I was never important in his life, nor him in mine,” Lillen amends, his face remaining cold. “There’s no reason he should remember me so keenly.”

“What do you think he wants from you?” Astarion presses, thinking he might untangle this matter a bit later, and Lillen exhales.

“What any of us wants from anybody, I would expect,” the older man answers. “An angle. Power. Influence. Whatever it is, apparently he doesn’t want or need an audience for it.”

“And if he twists that tadpole in your brain, and you come back no longer to be trusted?” Shadowheart asks.

“Use your best judgement, young lady,” Lillen replies as he starts to walk way. “I have faith in you to do what must be necessary.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Shadowheart asks as they watch Lillen ascend the stairs, his cape moving behind him, and Astarion hums as she shares a significant look with Lae’zel.

“I think it means,” Astarion says, buffing his nails against his breast before looking at them and their shine, “that Daddy Mactíre wants you to lead us in his stead, if he should perish.”

Shadowheart’s brow furrows, and she looks consternated as they move through the merchants and their wares – Lae’zel bullies the bugbear quartermaster into submission, and they find the entrance down to the prison cells.

Astarion is rather surprised to find they’re permitted to just walk on through, and they don’t go too close, but he sees the tieflings in one cell, and vaguely recognises a gnome from some weeks ago. Some sort of stupid name, like all gnomes have – grumble or womble or bumble or something absurd like that.

As Shadowheart and Lae’zel speak with an apothecary, Astarion steps outside and stands with his elbows rested on the wall, looking out over the thick, fog-covered waters. He can see a bright white light in the distance – that of the Last Light Inn, a beacon in the darkness.

“Here’s the little rabbit, once again,” says a voice behind him, and Astarion turns to look with interest upon the figure of the mysterious Raphael.

“I’ll begin to take it as some sort of overture, if you keep referring to me as a prey animal, you know,” Astarion says, not without flirtation, and Raphael chuckles from low in his chest as he comes to stand beside him, mirroring Astarion’s position, also leaning against the wall. “Don’t tell me you too are a follower of our darling Absolute?”

“I don’t consider myself a follower of anyone or anything,” Raphael answers him. “Except perhaps my own desires.”

“A man after my own heart,” Astarion says.

“Or your soul, more accurately.”

Astarion laughs, and he turns and hoists himself up onto the wall, sitting with his back to the beacon of light in his distance, and he focuses on Raphael’s handsome face.

“You really are a demon, aren’t you?” he asks, and then suddenly he’s sitting not on a crumbling old tower wall but sitting back on a red padded bench, and before him extends a beautiful, steaming hot spring, flowers and lilypads scattered over its crystalline surface. They’re in a beautiful, pillared room, and sun streams in through the windows, and he feels the warmth of it kissing his skin at the same time as he feels the heat radiating from the hot water’s surface. “Oh,” Astarion says softly, and he laughs again. “Oh, yes, you are.”

He should feel some fear, but he really doesn’t – all he feels is a sudden urge to truly take advantage of the situation, and he’s honestly frustrated he was do distracted the other night, so—

He watches as Raphael strips off his handsomely jewelled and decorated jacket, down to the shirt beneath, and then tugs that over his head as well. He’s got a rather nice chest, finely muscled – not so plush as Lillen is.

“Is there a reason I’m watching as you get naked?” Astarion asks.

“I’m a believer in giving rewards,” Raphael says, and Astarion chuckles.

“Are you indeed? And what good behaviour, precisely, are you rewarding?”

“Your interest – your… openness.”

Raphael strips off his trousers, leaving himself only in his black smalls, and then he walks backward into the steaming waters, letting them bubble around his waist before he steps further back into the spring and lets the waters lap at his chest, at his neck. Astarion stands up and begins to strip off his own clothes, kicking off his boots to follow him in.

“I suppose I am a rather open and flexible young man,” Astarion says, and Raphael’s laugh is low and syrupy. “Depending on the terms of the proposal, of course.”

“You know what reward I’m going to offer you already, of course,” Raphael says. “The only reward you could want, dream of – you want power over your former master. You wish to reverse Cazador’s hold over you – would you like to have the power over him, the mastery over that man’s corpse, as he has for so long had over you?”

Astarion’s mouth feels dry at the very idea, and he looks at Raphael carefully as he treads water, and oh, but it’s lovely, it’s so pleasant, the hot water surrounding him, heating him on every side – he’s not so much as had a hot bath in the past few months, and this, this is better.

“And how might you do that?”

“Have you discussed with Anmactíre what your former master carved upon your back, little rabbit?”

No. They haven’t.

Astarion had flinched the first time he’d been properly naked before the other man, when he’d realised that Anmactíre was examining the scars on him. He’d said, “A relic of Cazador’s imprisonment – poetry, he said. Every time I flinched or moved, he would go back over his work, rewrite it. A sonnet.”

“A sonnet,” Anmactíre had repeated.

It’s been weeks since then – Astarion suddenly remembers the sudden emotion he’d felt, how quickly he’d moved to look at Lillen’s face, at his expression, searching it for information. “Can you read it?” he’d demanded, because there’d been something about Lillen’s pause, something—

He’d pushed on the connection between them, delved into Lillen’s mind, and for all his protests before, Lillen had allowed it: through Lillen’s eyes, for the first time he’d been able to see the marks carved into his own back, and at the same time, feel Lillen’s blank incomprehension at the sight of them, feel his horror at the pain receiving them must have inflicted.

“The marks on your back are not, in fact, a poem,” Raphael says, kicking gently in the water. “They make up one part of an infernal contract – with each of the seven parts of this contract and the sacrifice of seven thousand other souls, Cazador would be able to become a new sort of vampire, more powerful. A vampire ascendant: a vampire who feeds, a vampire who is undying, and yet… a vampire who can walk in the sun. Cross over running water. A vampire with all the freedoms and protections your tadpole permits you without having to sacrifice part of your brain to it – and more power than that, besides.”

“Let’s not discuss terms as though no sacrifice is being made here, my handsome new friend,” Astarion says.

“Those seven thousand souls are the sacrifice, my dear,” Raphael says.

“Ah, I see,” Astarion murmurs. “I have one of those seven parts of the contract on my back, don’t I? Without that seventh part, Cazador can’t complete his ritual – is that why you’re telling me, hm? Giving me sufficient incentive to return to my former master, because without that promise of power, I might just flee him forever?”

“You might just,” Raphael says, and Astarion thinks of Cazador, thinks of the fear that runs down his spine as he considers it, at times, belong alone in a room with the man – being dispatched down to his kennels again, being bitten at, beaten, being abused in so many countless ways—

Bile is rising in his throat, and he closes his eyes, dipping his head beneath the spring’s surface and feeling his hair move in the water before he kicks up and out again, pushing back his hair from his face.

Raphael is closer now, and the two of them are face to face, nose to nose.

“Do you need a different incentive to go back?” Raphael asks softly. “Something more? Would it not be enough for you to crush your captor beneath your heel, take his empire for your own, and all his power with it?”

Astarion’s heart is beating faster, and his body thrums with want, with need, with desperate craving.

“What other incentives have you to offer, exactly?” Astarion asks, raising his eyebrows, and Raphael laughs, and taps his thumb against Astarion’s chin. Astarion’s cunt throbs, and he wonders if it’s the hot water or the situation, the attractive demonic man before him, or the thought of all that power, the thought of Cazador dead and crumbling beneath him.

“You’re not the prey animal you’re named for, are you?” Raphael asks, raising his eyebrows. “Choose your own terms, young man: if you want to deal for them, deal.”

And then there’s—

And then there’s a flash, and Astarion is fully clothed again, his elbows rested on the wall, still looking out at the Last Light Inn on the other side of the water.

“There you are,” says Lillen, and Astarion turns his head to look at the other man. If Thorm’s done anything awful or unusual to him, it doesn’t show in his face or his body, and he doesn’t feel any different. “Are you alright?”

Astarion doesn’t respond immediately, and Lillen reaches for him, cups Astarion’s cheek in his palm and looks down at him, focused, intent. Astarion looks at his face, so close to his – so different to Raphael’s. He thinks, deliriously, about telling Lillen for a moment – is this what they mean, when people say about love making you mad, or stupid, or just short-sighted and desperate to make yourself helpless in the eyes of any handsome man who lets you put your cock inside him?

“Astarion?” he asks.

“Did they tell you, Shadowheart and Lae’zel?” Astarion asks. “They’re performing some manner of sacrifice in the bowels of this accursed tower – if you want to save your precious tieflings, we ought get them out tonight.”

Lillen smiles at him, and strokes his thumb against Astarion’s cheek. “You’re right,” he says quietly. “Let’s get to it, shall we?”

Chapter Text

Astarion, Shadowheart, and Lae’zel accompany the tieflings and the gnomes (ugh) back to the Last Light Inn, and they wait impatiently for Lillen to return back as Jaheira’s man walks down the line of each of them, tieflings and gnomes both, and tests them for infection.

Astarion had hung back in the shadows and observed as Lillen had used the power of his tadpole over the gaoler in the centre of the dungeons, watched as she’d disabled the mage eyes patrolling the place and made a break for what seemed to be her own freedom, armed with treasures confiscated from one prisoner or another.

“Go,” Lillen had murmured in Astarion’s ear, and Astarion had hopped the stone wall and rushed further into the bowels of the labyrinthine jail, helping their escapees ready the hidden boats in the old smugglers’ cove.

It feels wrong, on one level or other, being here before the tavern whilst Lillen has been left behind still in Moonrise Towers, still abandoned there in enemy territory, even whilst undercover.

Astarion walks aside from the party and sits with Cherry and Pit, resting back on a fence post with his toes hooked in one of the through-posts to keep himself from falling down when the horses nudge him harder, and he laughs as Pit keeps on nibbling and biting at his knees, rubbing his teeth against Astarion’s trousers whenever he solicits rubs against his nose.

He thinks on Raphael’s offer, turns it over and over again in his mind as he considers watching Lillen work. Time after time, now, he’s seen Lillen bend people so easily to his will, making use of the tadpole buried within him, and Astarion hasn’t tried it yet. He’s used it to read people’s minds – to read Lillen’s, at least – but he’s never pressed on people, never pressured or manipulated them as Lillen does, as he has so many times…

And to do it so expertly, too.

The chaos in the jail earlier that day had been tremendous to watch, and it had seemed so utterly organic, the way the gaoler had suddenly apparently taken insult at what one of her guards had said to her, seen the fight emerge – seen her throw one of the guards so hard as to break down one of the back walls and permit the tieflings their escape.

Lillen had run into the midst of it to fight her, and been thrown back in the process, even – talk about deniability.

He’s tried to take what pleasure he’s been able to do in his horrible work for Cazador, bloody, awful, and miserable though it has been all these years – while the sex has very occasionally been good, has sometimes been passable, mostly it’s been downright unpleasant, dull; the manipulation, the chase, the hunt for one noble or other… That’s been more interesting, more exciting. He’s been allowed freedom enough to thieve and pickpocket where it’s suited him, to have a little bit of play, but there’s been no real power in it.

This, this is real power.

Lillen commands power over life and death, power over people’s feelings, their personalities, their appearances, and it’s so much more insidious, less obvious and blatant, than vampiric glamours and hypnosis. He craves it, is jealous of it, and he absurdly wishes there were more people around for him to practice on, for him to reach for…

Lillen would let him, if he asked.

Not in front of Thorm, obviously, not in the midst of Moonrise Towers, but if Astarion went up to him and tugged on his sleeve and begged “Please, Daddy, may I…?”

The thought tastes like bile on the back of his tongue, and he leans his forehead forward and rests his brow against Cherry’s, feeling her hot breath against him as he strokes his fingers through her mane. Wyll’s been using that new Speak to Animals spell of his – apparently Cherry and Pit like Astarion better than the merchant who’d owned them before. They think he smells nice, even though he’s obviously some manner of predator, and they like the bounce to his “mane”.

He sits up as he sees Lillen coming across the bridge, looking a little bloodied and worse for wear, and Astarion kisses Cherry on the nose and pats Pit’s side as he hops down and walks across the tavern’s grounds.

“What happened, Master Anmactíre? Are you alright?” asks one of the Harpers, and Lillen pats the young man’s cheek – it makes the dwarf immediately flush and breathlessly laugh, touching his own cheek even before Lillen dismisses him with a, “I’m quite alright, young man, but your concern is more than flattering.”

He smiles as he meets Astarion’s gaze, giving him a wink, and Astarion cocks his hip as he looks back at the old bastard, smirking right back. “Darling Daddy, I—”

“Lillen!” shouts a voice coming out from the tavern, and Lillen and Astarion both turn to look as Cal, dressed in fresh clothes from the stock present in the tavern, sprints out.

“Oh, Cal,” says Lillen, smiling in that distantly paternal way he has, “I’m glad you’re— oof!” He catches Cal as the younger man leaps into his arms, wrapping all four limbs and his tail around Lillen bodily, and Astarion leans back on his heels and watches as Lillen catches him under the arse, holding him up to keep him from falling.

“You saved us, thank you, thank you, thank you,” Cal says, blurting out the words clumsily and eagerly, oh so emotional, and he catches Lillen by the cheeks and kisses him, kisses him deeply on the mouth and then kisses his cheek, then buries his face in Lillen’s neck.

Astarion looks at Lillen’s face, and he reaches out and feels the flash of irritation Lillen feels at the scene of it all, the embarrassment he feels at having this boy climb all over him when Lillen’s finished with him weeks ago – and yet at the same time, there’s a surge of power and pleasure, too, the idea that one night of lust has left this boy so desperate to be close to him, so grateful, to worship Lillen as he so clearly does now.

“Come inside with me,” Cal says, tugging on Lillen’s hands as his feet touch against the ground. “Come—”

“Young man,” Lillen interrupts him, catching his wrists, “I’m afraid I came here to gather my party and return to work.”

Cal looks up at him with his eyes wide, his lips parted, clutches at him so desperately, and Gods, he’s pathetic, and Astarion thinks of every man and woman, every one in between, that he’s had on the hook like this, the better to lead into the bowels of Cazador’s den to be fed upon.

“You heartbreaker, you,” Astarion murmurs in his ear when Cal finally breaks apart from him and goes miserably over to his sister and brother, and Lillen clucks his tongue, smacking Astarion on the arse. “What did you and Thorm discuss, if I might ask? We’ve all been on tenterhooks.”

“The follies of our respective youths,” Lillen answers. “What else do two old bastards like ourselves discuss, when left alone?”

“I love it when you don’t answer questions,” Astarion says insincerely, and Lillen laughs, reaching a hand around and squeezing the back of Astarion’s neck before he pulls Astarion into a kiss. Astarion chuckles against the other man’s tongue, and he leans shoves Lillen back into a pillar, kissing him deeper, plundering his mouth.

“Exhibitionist,” Lillen murmurs into his mind, and Astarion nips at his lip hard enough to draw blood, swallows Lillen’s quiet moan as he swallows the sweet taste of blood that rushes onto his tongue.

“Please, pater dear. If you’re going to kiss me just to teach that boy you’re spoken for, I’m going to put on a show.”

“I have work to do.”

“I’m work now?”

Lillen draws back, laughing, and he delivers a hard smack to Astarion’s arse – the sound rings in the room, making him breathlessly let out a noise as he feels the prickle of people’s gazes on him, including poor young Cal’s dejected look as Lillen walks toward Jaheira, speaking to her seriously.

There’s a young lady Astarion hadn’t seen before, a Selûnite, judging by all the ephemera she’s wearing alongside her robes, and Lillen catches her arm.

The recognition that flashes across her face is unmistakeable.

“If you’d like to accompany us,” Lillen is saying. “We’re soon to make our way to the Nightsong imprisoned in Shar’s Gauntlet – would you aid us in recovering her?”

“She’s— She’s there?”

“So your father informs me.”

“You’ve spoken to my father?”

“I have.”

“He’s… What do you make of him?”

“He loves you – all that he has wrought has been motivated by love for you. That’s hardly what you want or need to hear at this juncture, I would wager – he loves you, and time and time again, he has failed you, your values, what you would want of him, of life, of love.”

“Were you here? When he… when he did it?”

“No. I was quite far away, in fact.”

“With the Leirans,” she says, spitting out the word, and Lillen seems ashamed, for a moment.

Astarion feels his brow furrow as he steps closer, and he sees Lillen’s gaze flicker back to him as he draws closer. In the noise of the tavern, no one else has heard this young woman speak, but that doesn’t make Lillen nervous so much as the awareness, it seems, that Astarion has heard her.

He studies her, the features of her pretty face – her stark white hair, her dark eyes, her prominent cheekbones, plump lips.

“She resembles her mother more than her father,” Lillen tells him. “Isobel, this is Astarion. Astarion, this young woman is the daughter of General Thorm.”

Astarion feels his eyebrows rise, and he looks at her, this woman, at her eyes widening. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you famously rather dead?”

“I was,” Isobel murmurs, turning her head away from him, looking, of all things, ashamed.

“Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, young man,” Lillen says. “Do you want to join us, Isobel, or not?”

“I do,” she says. “But— Can you be trusted, Master Anmactíre?”

“Why wouldn’t you trust me?”

“You’re a liar,” Isobel says.

“A liar I may be, my dear – but a Sharran? Come now. You know me better than that.”

“Do I?” Isobel retorts, and Lillen looks at her seriously.

“One needs light to cast shadows,” says Lillen quietly. “One needs truth to tell lies. Do you believe your lady love already dead?”

“I believe that were you loyal to my father, you would lead me where he demanded.”

“Your father is in Moonrise Towers – I am leading you the opposite direction.”

“So you claim.”

“Stay here, then,” says Lillen, and Isobel catches him by the sleeve, grips at it before she grips at his breastplate. Astarion doesn’t know what to make of the way she stares at the symbol in the centre of his breast, the symbol of Oghma.

“Swear to me,” Isobel says quietly. “Swear to me on the life of this man beside you that Aylin lives, and that you will take me to her.”

“I swear to you,” says Lillen, resting his hand once more on the back of Astarion’s neck. “On Astarion’s life, I swear it – I seek only to reunite the two of you. And just so that you know I’m telling you the truth, young lady, I’ll swear it on Astarion’s death, as well, as he’s as undead as your father is – albeit prettier for it.”

Astarion flashes the woman a smile, as she seems caught on the backfoot, but he studies Lillen’s face, presses forward with his tadpole and meets nothing but a blank of mist and darkness.

“I’ve told you once, Astarion,” Lillen warns him without moving his lips.

“The Leirans, indeed?” Astarion retorts.

“Fetch Shadowheart and Wyll,” Lillen instructs him aloud. “And we’ll start out immediately.”

Astarion pulls back and thinks of Cazador, thinks of the contract burned in his back and being told it’s little more than a sonnet, and he tastes the remnants of Lillen’s blood in his mouth as he goes to do as he’s told.

The sweetness has turned bitter on his tongue.  

Chapter Text

Two days later, they make camp before readying themselves to return to Moonrise Towers. Dame Aylin, daughter of Selûne herself, had taken to the skies with Isobel in her arms, the two of them near to weeping for joy, and they’d trudged out from Shar’s domain.

It’s been a busy few days – they’d freed an orthon, hunted down a Dark Justiciar secreted in the form of dozens of rats, killed Balthazar, who was Thorm’s servant, his second in command. There’s been no time at all to… settle. They’ve been going a mile a minute, each of them, and it’s—

Shadowheart is standing on the side of the cliff, staring out at the ocean with her hands at her sides, and Lillen is standing just behind her as he unpins her hair and lets out her braids. He’s talking to her in quiet, gentle tones – Lillen had held Isobel back as Shadowheart had spoken, made her decision, made her choices.

Turned her back on her own Lady Shar.

They’ve not exactly been able to speak frankly with Isobel with them – she and Shadowheart have been snapping at one another, biting at each other here and there, but Isobel’s badgering, her commentary, even her questioning again and again – “You’re sure you don’t remember?” “Tell me about a street, a path. Envision it. Describe it as best you can.” “Why would they do this to you, do you think?” – in ways that had made her doubt.

It had been curious indeed to observe.

Isobel had been fascinated with Shadowheart immediately, had focused on her throughout their movements through the Gauntlet, and Astarion had taken note of how fixated Isobel had been on her – and Shadowheart on Isobel.

“I hardly need to be lectured on my priorities by an errand girl of Selûne.”

“Your Lady of Loss,” Isobel had retorted, “would rob you of one thing or another – your memories, here, your family, your knowledge of what she truly wants of you, and how you might accomplish what she would want of you. When you would stumble blindly in the dark, not even guided by her voice, how could you trust her?”

“You don’t understand faith, it seems.”

“Oh, I do – you have faith in Shar, but does she have faith in you?”

“If I complete the Gauntlet—”

“Yet it wasn’t your Lady Shar who led you here – it was, of all people, Master Anmactíre.”

There’s a certain scorn in the way Isobel pronounces Lillen’s voice, in how she speaks to him, with him, and Astarion’s been turning that over and over in his mind. He had gotten no opportunity to find out Balthazar’s opinion on the man – Lillen had crept up on him and slit the necromancer’s throat before he could say a word to any of them.

That night, Astarion sets his bedroll beside Lillen’s, and Lillen takes his comb, having finished combing out and fixing Shadowheart’s hair, and gently combs out Astarion’s. He’s been curiously jealous of it in a way he hadn’t fully let himself realise, and he exhales as he leans back against Lillen’s spread thighs, feeling Lillen’s hands on the back of his neck, touching his hair, as the comb separates the white strands of his own.

“Did you often change your hair, when you were yet living?” Lillen asks quietly.

“A little,” Astarion says. “Year on year, I might grow it out a bit longer – I never went in for complicated braids or buns. Such things were not thought of as wholly appropriate for a man in my position – to change my hair too often, people would think of me as unserious.”

“Were you a good magistrate?”

“I put a lot of hours into the work,” Astarion says. “I took bribes, naturally, although not as many as some – I…” He trails off, and he thinks about it for a moment. He feels his stomach turn over, his belly giving a twist.

“What?” Lillen prompts him, his voice warm and gentle, and his thumb slides down the centre of Astarion’s neck, tracing down to the top of his spine and making him sigh quietly.

“I tried to be fair,” Astarion says, hearing his voice come out flat, dry. “I’ve been thinking about it more and more, these past weeks, hadn’t much considered what cases I heard, how I presided over them – I tried to be fair. Just. I tried to do good.” The words come out bitter and they taste like iron in his mouth. Yes, he’d lied, he’d cheated, but back then, he really had…

They’re quiet for several minutes together, Lillen finishing with Astarion’s hair before setting the comb aside.

“Do you miss it? Your hair growing longer than this?” Lillen’s hand grips loosely at the back of his hair, and Astarion thinks on it, wonders, and he isn’t sure. They’d sheared off his hair a few times in the kennels, to humiliate him, to mock him, as punishment – it had grown back so fast every time, and it grows as long as this, and never longer.

“I don’t really know,” Astarion says, and he turns and nudges Lillen onto his back, coming to straddle him, his arse coming to settle on Lillen’s middle and his palms resting on the older man’s breast.

Lillen looks up at him with his mismatched eyes and his scarred face, and Astarion traces the line of it that cuts diagonally through his closed lips, feeling the smooth surface of it, thin, surprisingly straight. He imagines it, a young Lillen – unscarred, unwrinkled and unlined, with both eyes and dark glossy hair, being caught by surprise as he tries to disarm a trap and changed forever.

“Tell me about the Leirans,” Astarion says, and immediately Lillen’s mismatched eyes flit across the campfire to where Shadowheart is staring into the fire and Wyll is paging through a book and pretending he isn’t keeping an eye on her. “Is that why you lie so well, old man? Are not a devotee of Oghma at all, but a devotee of the Lady of the Mists?”

“I’m not a Leiran,” Lillen says.

“You were,” Astarion challenges him, and Lillen’s nostrils flair as he lays his head back on the bedroll, slowly inhaling. “I thought so, the way she said it – spat it like a curse. Is that what you and Thorm were talking about?”

“Something like that.”

“Are you—”

“Not here,” says Lillen, and Astarion stands to his feet to let Lillen get up as well. They’re camped outside of the cave entrance, and Astarion follows Lillen down the path and toward the old fishermen’s village – they’d already killed the gogglers there, infesting the cove, and Astarion doesn’t protest as Lillen strips off his clothes and walks into the water.

It's a curious parody of his conversation a few days ago with Raphael, Astarion can’t help but think, as he strips off his own clothes and trails after him into the lapping water, feels how cold it is against his ankles, his knees.

“It feels different,” Astarion says. The waters before had felt darker, deeper, more dangerous – even rinsing his hands in the water by their camp at the Last Light, he’d felt as though the water itself were liable to reach up and drag him in; riding the boat back the other night, it had felt precarious in a way nothing else ever had.

“Aylin is a daughter of Selûne,” Lillen says, neck deep in black water and treading through it, keeping his place. The tail of his Q floats over the back of his neck. “Isobel was creating the protective dome about the Last Light Tavern – Aylin is capable of dissuading Shar’s shadow curse entirely, and quickly, with Isobel alongside her.”

“Leira,” Astarion says.

“I got lost in the mist,” Lillen says. “I was a young man, and I had found faith, found solace, in the never ending labyrinths of Oghma’s Hall of Knowledge – I felt a security, a comfort, a warmth, I never had before. I felt what it occurred to me, for the first time, that many people felt from their parents, their families. I was considering joining the monastery in Merryweather.”

“That’s beyond pathetic,” Astarion says. “You felt an ounce of happiness and thought immediately to become a monk?”

“I had felt happiness before,” says Lillen, laughing, his tone gently scolding, and then his expression becomes more serious again, quietly so. “But— Yes, something like that.”

“And then?”

“And then…” Lillen exhales, his lips forming an o: it looks like a letter, the scar through his mouth when it takes that shape. “I was dispatched to collect a few rare tomes – I was separated from my party. Got lost in the mist.”

“She appeared to you? Leira?”

“No, no,” Lillen says, shaking his head. “Not anything so direct as that. But I got lost – we were close to old temples, haunted by one thing or another. This was before the Time of Troubles – it was long before… I was young. Naïve, as yet. I had been nobody, growing up in Reithwin – a son of ghosts, half-forgotten, I was something of a ghost myself until the Oghmians took an interest in me.”

“Malus Thorm had taken an interest in you before that, surely?”

“And I in him,” Lillen murmurs, “but having him cut me, cutting him back – that only made me feel closer to having died already, not farther away.”

“Voices in the mist, I heard them – overlapping. An argument between shades, one I was overhearing unexpectedly, and my head was spinning.”

“What were they arguing about?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Oh, isn’t it? Well, please, do enlighten me – what is the point?”

“The point,” Lillen says, his eyes half-lidded in recollection as his head tips back in the water, and his voice is soft – Astarion has to strain slightly to hear it over the lapping water against the shore. “They were arguing about me, a little – arguing about the temple’s internal policies. Every voice that argued had a point. There was no absence of truth there, is my point – each voice that spoke was correct, was truthful. And it disagreed with another.”

“So?”

“So Oghma is a God of Truth. I was a dedicant of knowledge, of its bounds, and yet in that moment, it was as though my new faith faltered. Was unmoored. Knowledge was truth, not merely power – and yet truth is not as simple as knowledge. All knowledge comes from a perspective: there is no such thing as neutrality.”

“You were tempted,” Astarion says, swimming closer. “Ensorcelled.”

“Not merely tempted,” Lillen says. “Tainted. I was drawn in, further— Over time, I continued my work for the temple, but I made other contacts, contacts whom at the time I did not know were pledged to Leira.”

“They didn’t wear masks?”

“I didn’t recognise them as such. For some seventy years, over time, I worked without knowing it against my own faith, against Oghma himself – and finally, I was… I was called. Sent a message, invited, and I accepted the invitation, followed their directions to Leira’s temple.” He looks up the cliff to where they can see the light and smoke from the campfire. “I worried that Shadowheart would falter here, that she wouldn’t know which way to turn – toward her goddess or against her. It’s why I brought Isobel, that I wouldn’t have to tread these waters myself.”

“You truly find her plight so relatable?”

“Not precisely. But I teetered on an edge for some time in the Leirans’ presence. They brought me through a court of sorts – I don’t know how familiar you are with Leirans’ religious practices, but the faithful only spoke the truth to one another, and they spoke only truth to me. I was treated as one of their own although I had never meant to become so – and that was an agonising truth all its own. Within their court of justice, they cited every benefit and boon I had rendered for their Lady’s benefit, and those too to her father, Cyric, Lord of Lies – every corrupted or biased or simply untruthful piece of text I had copied or ferried or saved from destruction, every lie I’d told, every manipulation…

“I crawled on my knees through the next Temple of Oghma I reached – the one at Candlekeep, I believe. I starved myself before his altar, refused food or treatment to my injuries by the monks or priests present. Finally, in some fever dream, He— perhaps He appeared before me; perhaps I merely hallucinated His presence.”

Astarion studies Lillen’s face as he swims closer to the beach again, steps out from the water, and Astarion looks his body up and down, looks at the hair all over him, traces his tattoos. Astarion notices when Lillen turns his head ink that he’d never noticed before over the nape of Lillen’s neck, and he steps out from the water and picks up Lillen’s sodden ponytail, pushing it up.

The symbols of Milil and Thoth rest on each of his wrists, sparrows dance across one of his cheeks, and on the back of his neck, just above the centre of his shoulders, is a symbol of Deneir – further up, hidden beneath the back of his hair, is a small triangle, no larger than the flame on Deneir’s neatly inked candle.

A triangle with a swirling circle inside – Leira’s icon.

“Is that why you did all this volunteer work with Ilmater?” Astarion asks. “Punishing yourself, self-flagellating, to redeem yourself?”

“The books in our camp, that is my work for my redemption,” Lillen tells him. “I always liked pain – I always craved knowledge of pain, understanding of every sensation I could reach for, understand. Part of me surged to know I had found myself enucleated – how else would I know what it felt like?”

“You’re one sick man, pater dear,” Astarion says. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

Lillen smiles at him faintly.

“What did Thorm say?”

“He turned his back on his goddess – and turning to Shar wasn’t enough. They’d heard word at the time of my shame, that I had been brought aboard by the Leirans, that I had faltered in my faith.”

“How did they find out?” Astarion asks as they pick up their clothes to make their way back up the hill. The air is cold, but Lillen stays undressed.

“I told my temple,” Lillen tells him. “I told everyone.”

“… Why?”

“Because it was knowledge,” Lillen says simply. “Because to lie about it would have been… I have a more nuanced view now of knowledge, of truth, of lies and deception, of their natures – but then, I had no sense of that nuance, that balance. I needed to stand in the light, and starve myself of shadows for a time, excoriating though it was.”

“But now you lie with the best of them?”

“Yes.”

“What changed?”

“Leira’s death made an impact,” Lillen admits. “But mostly it was that I grew, evolved. I made more involved decisions about the greater body of knowledge – I know fellow Oghmians at all who never lie at all; I know others who never tell the truth, both extreme in one way or the other. I lie somewhere in the middle.”

“You lied to us.”

“Is it lying that I haven’t told each and every one of you my life story, backwards and forwards, young man? Am I to believe you’ve told me every fact and morsel of your biography, that you haven’t left certain details out, left some pages blank, some corners of your past dark and shadowed, as you prefer them?”

Astarion clucks his tongue, turning away from the other man, and he feels Lillen’s gaze on his back.

“Will you help me kill Cazador, when we make our way to Baldur’s Gate?” Astarion asks.

“If you wish, of course,” says Lillen.

“And if I wished to steal from him, sap from him?”

“Anything you can take from him, you should.”

“You won’t pawn my potential wavering off on someone else, the way you did Shadowheart with Isobel?”

He looks back and sees Lillen’s eyebrows are raised, his expression quietly concerned, intrigued. “Why should you falter?” he asks as he steps closer, and Astarion stands there still until Lillen’s nose brushes against his and Astarion can kiss him, brush their lips against one another too.

“I kill Cazador,” Astarion murmurs, “and I go from being his possession to being yours, it seems to me.”

“And what does that mean, precisely?” Lillen asks. “That you’d like for me to kill Cazador for you, be the blade in your hand?”

Astarion feels a shiver run down his spine, and he laughs to hide the thrum of pleasure that runs through him, the sense of satisfaction and pleasure, the sense of power, that grapples with the misery within him, wrestles with his desperate and infuriating sense of distrust, inescapable.

When will he ever feel secure, precisely? In Lillen’s arms or otherwise?

“Let’s deal with your old friend Thorm before you seduce me into bed, hm?”

“If seduction is on your mind…” rumbles Lillen, and Astarion laughs and runs as the older man gives chase behind him.

Chapter Text

“No, don’t!” Isobel cries, kneeling over the body of Thorm, sprawled in her lap. He’s still and silent, and Astarion stares down at him, looks at the shine of the tears on Isobel’s cheeks as she holds up one hand to hold Aylin back.

“He—” she roars, advancing, the golden lines cut through her face and her body shimmering with light from within, and Isobel cries again, “No!”

The scent of necromantic magic is thick on the air still, sickly sweet and overwhelming even with Myrkul’s form having disappeared back into the depths it had risen from, filling out what remained of Thorm’s undead form. Astarion’s body aches, his bones feeling like they’re throbbing from every potion he’s drank the past hour or so, from all the healing magic that’s shuddered through him – he doesn’t know that it’s the same for him, precisely, undead himself, but he’s heard people speak about the impact it has on you, over time, this sort of life.

Bones breaking and healing when magic burns through you; cuts knitting shut again, blood being sucked back into your own opened veins.

“Selûne,” Isobel says, and Astarion stares uncomprehending down at the body of her father limp and decrepit in her arms, over her lap, and he sees the white magic begin to curl around her, sees the moon pieces on her jewellery, her bracelets and necklaces, the circlet banding her head, flare silver with light, “Selûne, take mercy on this man, Your betrayer—”

“Isobel!” hisses Aylin, her eyes widening and bulging white with rage, and Astarion feels his lips part, curl.

He’d rather liked Ketheric Thorm, from what he’d seen of him – apparently he just has a penchant for patriarchs with power under their belts – but for her to beg for this man’s life after all he’s done, even that of her own father—

“Selûne, hear me,” Isobel cries, her voice cracking with emotion, and she ignores Aylin’s protests as the demigoddess says, “This creature is bereft of soul and we have triumphed over him – you would ask mercy on this dark cancer, mercy of my mother?”, keeps praying, “Hear me, Your most devoted servant, and know that it is this soul who revived me, who begged my return to serve You. He, who turned his back on You, but would return on his knees and beg repentance, if You would only permit it—"

Lillen is wiping the black blood off his face – he’d been grappling hand-to-hand with the Mindflayer to keep the bastard from casting or striking out with any psychic blast, and had bitten two of the tentacles directly off its face, sending them to floor in a shower of dark wetness. He’s swaying a bit on his feet, needs more healing himself, and Astarion catches Shadowheart’s arm, nodding toward him—

But by the time he’s indicated toward the old man, Lillen has stumbled forward and dropped to his knees beside Isobel.

“Selûne,” he says, and for all his exhaustion, from all the hoarseness that cracks his voice after shouting orders across this cavern-like hall in the course of this battle, Astarion would know in this moment he was a priest even if he’d never suspected before. There’s power through his voice, power and resonance and devotion, and Astarion’s hand comes away from Shadowheart’s wrist and hangs limp at his side. “Hear me, Lady of Silver, o Moonmaiden – hear me, a son devoted most of all to the path of another – I, another led astray by the promises of a false God. I, a man to be redeemed, a man in want of repentance – won’t You take pity on another, comparing his example to mine? Show mercy as I have been shown mercy?”

Isobel is looking sidelong at Lillen, her palms resting on her father’s shoulders, and her breath hitches as she pulls it into her lungs before she returns to her prayer.

“Selûne, Mother, take pity on me, Your daughter, and my father who made me—”

“Selûne, shine Your light once more upon this shadowed man, seduced by Loss, and light his way—”

“—and raised me where your enemy, Shar, conspired to strike me down—”

“—and allow him once more to feel the joy of Your light, and follow its way—”

“—and thus corrupted him—”

“—as shown by Your devoted servant, Isobel Thorm—"

Their voices overlap with one another, and Astarion feels stunned and stunted, witnessing it. There’s a dryness in his mouth, a sort of nausea threatening at the back of his throat, hearing their prayers overlap with one another and become some shared litany despite being made up of different words, different rhythms.

How many prayers of his were cast up to the gods – to Selûne, to Shar, to any name he could think of, any god living or dead, any god he could imagine? Dozens of them, hundreds, as the centuries had passed him by?

How many priests and clerics had he laid hands on, asked mercy of, asked prayers of, seduced or otherwise? How many temples had he slipped inside, on those nights where he had led himself astray – how many temples had he hidden himself in, on those unfortunate weeks where he’d thought to escape Cazador’s clutches, only to lead his siblings’ slaughter to whatever priests were inside?

“Shadowheart?” he hears his voice echo in his own ears, the sound dull, as she too stumbles forward, and drops to her knees on Isobel’s other side.

“Selûne,” she says in a faltering voice. “Night White Lady, She Who Guides, twin sister of she who was once my Lady of Loss—”

Astarion turns his back on the three of them, can’t fucking bear the sound of it, even before he hears Aylin say, exhausted and frustrated and sounding strangely powerless for one with the power she commands at her fingertips, “Mother…”

“Come here,” Gale says, his hands laying on Astarion’s shoulders, pulling him aside. “You need more healing.”

He feels astonishingly, astoundingly numb as he feels the flare of magic behind him, feels the bright, white light of Selûne’s grace fill the wet, nasty cavern they’re each ensconced in, buried in – two clerics, a priest, and a demigoddess behind him, and because they’re praying, a killer of thousands, hundreds of thousands, is being brought back to life across their laps.

Had he been a priest, instead of a magistrate, would some fucking god have taken pity on him?

“Oop,” says Gale, catching him around the waist to keep him from hitting the floor, and Astarion groans as he’s nudged back to sit on a stone, so that Gale doesn’t have to lower him all the way to the ground. “There you go, stay right there, okay?”

Astarion says nothing, but grunts when Gale’s healing magic, rather less subtle (and a damn sight less pleasant) than Shadowheart’s ripples under his skin and forces his body back to its proper state.

* * *

“You told me she was dead,” says Thorm that night, his voice full of quiet betrayal, and Lillen shrugs his shoulders.

“You had turned your back on Selûne at the loss of your daughter,” Lillen says. “I knew to think you had lost her again would make turning your back on Myrkul no issue at all.”

Thorm is staring down at his own hands, less grey than they’d been before, as they’re lit by the fire. Astarion wonders what he’s thinking as he looks down at them – thinking of all the blood that stains them, perhaps?

“I grieved anew for her,” Thorm whispers. “When you dispatched yourself to fetch Aylin from her prison, Gods, I thought, why am I continuing on? I put myself to this vile affair to renew her life and hers alone, what is the point of any of it without her?”

“I hoped you might kill yourself,” Lillen says with astonishing frankness, his voice conversational, and Astarion watches Thorm’s face as he doesn’t flinch or change his expression whatsoever. He really does know Lillen, Astarion supposes, or knows his type.

“I couldn’t,” Thorm says. “After Myrkul had made use of my body, though, sapped the last of the power he’d left in me—”

“Yes,” Lillen says.

“Isobel says you prayed with her,” Thorm whispers. “Alongside her – begging mercy for me.”

“A daughter should not be abandoned by her father, if she doesn’t wish it,” Lillen says. “And in any case – why should she hear every curse laid at your feet, General, have it laid on her shoulders in your stead? Why should you not weather every foul word yourself, whilst she might take some small solace in not being made an orphan?”

“You should have let me pass,” Thorm says.

“No,” says Lillen. “Isobel wanted you – your whims, your desires, have dictated too much suffering for far too long. You would do well to submit yourself to her desires from here onward, and follow your daughter’s wisdom, rather than your folly.”

Thorm looks across at Lillen, and then seems to realise that Astarion watches them too, glances his way before looking back to Lillen, furrowing his brow, focusing on him.

Across camp, Shadowheart is washing her hair in the river. For hours, earlier, as Isobel and her father had talked and talked and talked, in between Aylin’s dragging her into their mercifully sound-dampened tent, Lillen had sat behind her and helped her work the dye into her hair, helped her bleach it and colour it, comb through the long, straight locks.

Thorm’s gaze rests on her before it turns back to Lillen’s face.

“You have daughters,” he says.

“Two of them,” Lillen agrees.

“Priestesses.”

“No, Marta is a musician, a performer – but she performs in service of Milil, and serves his temple.”

“The other?”

“A healer.”

“Devoted to Milil?”

“No.”

“Selûne? Oghma? One of your other gods – Thoth, Deneir?”

“None of those, no.”

Thorm laughs, and the sound is rich and dark. “Leira,” he says. “She serves the Lady of the Mists – after all you did, all you tried to turn your back on, and your own daughter serves her, wears one of her masks?” He laughs again, and then looks terribly, profoundly sad. “No wonder you were so keen to have me live for my daughter’s sake,” he mutters. “You’ve failed your own, is that it?”

Lillen smiles, his eyes crinkling at their corners, mismatched.

“Orin and Gortash will know I yet live,” says Thorm. “They will come for me.”

“Our repentance is earned, when begged from the gods,” Lillen tells the other man quietly. “Do you think it freely bestowed on us, General Thorm? Do you forget the path that lies ahead of you, strewn with glass and splinters as it is?”

“Do you have Ilmater’s mark on your body yet?” Thorm asks.

“I never need a permanent mark of Ilmater, General,” Lillen says. “He makes Himself known on my skin oft enough – there’s no chance of His being forgotten.”

“Hate to break up this charming little chat,” Astarion says, “but we should go to bed at some point tonight, shouldn’t we?”

Lillen lies on his side on the floor of his tent, and Astarion lies there beside him, paralleling his position, looking into his eyes.

“You lied to that girl,” Astarion says. “You told her you spoke to her father – you didn’t tell her you’d told him she was dead. You feigned realising she was even alive for the first time right there, in the Last Light Tavern.”

“Yes,” says Lillen.

“You lied to him.”

“Yes.”

“You lie a lot.”

“Yes.”

“What have you lied to me about?”

“If there are lies of mine you’ve not figured out for yourself, young man, I fail to see why I ought point them out for you,” Lillen says quietly, his voice dull with exhaustion and a need for sleep. “How else are you to learn for yourself?”

“You turned away from Leira?” Astarion asks, and Lillen nods his head.

“I never joined her on purpose,” he murmurs. “I don’t know that it’s right to say I turned away from her – I never intended to turn to her.”

“And your daughter? Ava?”

Lillen says nothing, lying there, his fingers pressing into the bedroll, and Astarion reaches out and takes his hand, holds it in both of his own and presses his thumbs over the backs of Lillen’s knuckles, plays over them.

“You’re working for Oghma’s repentance?” Astarion asks. “Working to earn his forgiveness?”

“Yes,” says Lillen. “Something like that.”

“How many books do you have to bring him before you work that debt off?”

Lillen laughs softly, and brings Astarion’s hands to his mouth, kisses the backs of each of them. “Forgiveness of the gods is not, as far as I know, young man, something one achieves by counting his good acts or his bad ones. Times have changed for me since I kept tables of numbers in a temple office – my goals are loftier and rather more ephemeral, as a priest disgraced rather than a humble clerk.”

His lips had been warm, on the backs of each of Astarion’s hands.

“Why should you be trying to earn his forgiveness, Oghma’s?” Astarion asks.

“Because I acted against Him, betrayed Him,” says Lillen. “He who I love most of all.”

“Don’t the gods betray us?” Astarion asks.

“Do you feel betrayed?”

“I prayed to every god there was,” Astarion whispers. “Every god I could imagine. Gale’s been fucking one, Shadowheart and Lae’zel have been betrayed and turned their backs on their goddesses, you have this, our new friends have this complicated thing going on with Selûne, and of course, there’s this swaying figure of what was the Absolute, and now turns out to be the Dead Three behind the Elder Brain… It’s rather easy, you know, to think to oneself, well. Gods have no interest in the affairs of mortals, and even less interest in those of some pathetic vampire in the thrall of some bastard at Baldur’s Gate. I’ve met more gods in the past two months than near anyone else meets face to face in their lifetime – none of them helped me.”

It sounds petulant, pathetic, even, the way the words come out of him, half-whined.

“I’m sorry,” Lillen murmurs, and it sounds real, genuine. It sounds really rather loving, and the thought makes Astarion want to vomit or burst into tears or both, or something else entirely.

He turns out the light, and for a few moments, the two of them are in the dark together – they can still see one another, of course.

“What did you do to your daughter?” Astarion asks.

Lillen’s face tightens slightly, then slackens, relaxed. “I always told her the truth,” he says. “As best I could.”

“So she turned to the Mother of Lies?”

Lillen’s lip twitches in the dark, his nose almost wrinkling. “Yes,” he says at length.

“Fucked that up, didn’t you, pater dear?”

Lillen doesn’t contradict him, taking Astarion by the waist and tugging Astarion to lie on top of him – he makes no solicitous overture, doesn’t try to fuck him. He just wants Astarion’s weight on top of him, and Astarion allows it, buries his face against the older man’s neck and takes in the scent of him, the warmth of him, feels his arms banded about Astarion’s body. His hands are stroking Astarion’s back, palm sliding over the scars of the contract writ on his body.

“What do you want, Astarion? What do you want most, I mean – your goal, of all this?”

“I never want to be in Cazador’s clutches again,” Astarion says. “I never want to be under anybody’s power again, not ever.”

“Alright.”

“What’s yours?”

“Your goal is mine, young man – why do you think I was asking?”

“Don’t fuck me about, Lillen, not after the day we’ve had,” Astarion snaps, and Lillen sighs.

“I don’t really know what I want,” he admits. “I want to repent, have done my best – but in the event I earned Oghma’s forgiveness, His grace, I’ve no idea what I should want for in the aftermath.”

“Other than making me happy.”

Lillen’s laugh is full of affection, and something bubbles pleasantly – uncomfortably – in the base of Astarion’s belly. “Yes,” he allows. “Other than that.”

Astarion thinks on Raphael’s offer, thinks on the handsome man before him – Lillen’s body is so warm beneath him, and Astarion presses his cheek against Lillen’s muscular shoulder.

“Did you always want to be a father?” Astarion asks.

“I stumbled into it by accident,” says Lillen.

“But you like it, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Lillen whispers, and it sounds like a new realisation on his part. Funny, foolish old bastard. “Yes, I do.”

“Thought so,” Astarion says, and goes quiet.

“How about you?” Lillen breaks that quiet. “Do you like being the favoured son?”

“Oh, being the favoured son is very new to me,” Astarion murmurs, the sound coming out bitterly. “I might have been Cazador’s favourite from time to time, but never favoured – and I was never my real father’s favourite. But so far? Yes, yes, I like it very much. You feed me, praise me, teach me, fuck me. What’s not to like?”

“What indeed,” says Lillen.

“And you tell me the truth,” Astarion adds softly, sweetly, seductively. “Don’t you?”

“Don’t I,” Lillen echoes, and then groans in pain and pleasure as Astarion punishes the lie with his teeth at Lillen’s throat – it’s no sound of complaint: his legs spread under Astarion’s weight, and Astarion drinks his fill before he wipes his mouth and settles atop him to go to sleep.

Chapter Text

Lillen doesn’t seem as surprised as Astarion would hope, discovering their strange dream visitor has been a Mindflayer all this time – if anything, he strikes Astarion as curiously unmoved. There is no revulsion, no refusal, no hesitation, even, when he states that they will continue assisting this man, this thing, this mad Emperor, as they’ve assisted him so far.

“Did you know?” Astarion asks as they dress for the day, and Lillen’s face doesn’t alter at all, doesn’t change, doesn’t so much as twitch.

“Know what?” he asks, looking at Astarion, and with his eyebrows raising, his lips parting, his head tilting slightly to one side, he looks perfectly and utterly inquisitive, surprised.

“Did you know?” Astarion repeats. Meeting the other man’s gaze, and when Lillen still doesn’t falter, he drops his gaze to Lillen’s breastplate, which has been polished to a shine, the golden scroll of Oghma catching the light. “That our astral friend was a Mindflayer, did you know?”

“He reads minds, has read all our minds, constantly, continuously,” Lillen tells him instead of answering. “If I knew, if I even suspected, do you not think he might have mentioned it, called me up on it?”

“You knew,” Astarion says, and it’s accusative, now, as he follows the older man out of his tent and toward the central shed where a few bunks have been set up – Thorm has been sleeping here, and Gale has set up his things inside so that he’s closest to the fire and all their cooking equipment. “You knew.”

“What did you know?” Lae’zel asks, tilting her head as she stands up straight, her hand nudging her sword.

“That our strange visitor was a Mindflayer,” Astarion says, and he watches Lae’zel’s eyes flash as she advances on Lillen, glaring up and into his face.

“You knew?” she demands, her voice rumbling from deep in her chest, her lip curling back in a snarl.

“I did not know,” Lillen tells her calmly. “I did not even suspect. Astarion is, as he so often is, attributing my lack of obvious surprise to foreknowledge – I had as little idea as you did, Lae’zel.”

She lets out a low growl of anger and frustration, leaning back on her heels.

“Are you going to consume this new tadpole?” she asks, studying Lillen’s face. Gale is sitting up and looking toward them, and Wyll and Shadowheart are leaning against one wall, also keeping an eye on the three of them. “This Astral-touched thing, will you invite it into you as you have these others so far? Let this thing reach more tendrils into your mind, until you, two, are threatened with slavery?”

“Changed your mind about betraying Vlaakith so soon, Lae’zel?”

“Pagh,” she says, and spits. “I want for freedom, want to be more than chattel – thus why I have turned my loyalty from Vlaakith. You would have me walk neck first into chains?”

“I would have you do no such thing,” Lillen says, spreading his hands. “Do you see a chain, Lae’zel? Have you any word as to my apparent betrayal of you, but for Astarion sowing the seeds of discord for his own entertainment of a morning, as he is wont to do?”

Lae’zel suddenly glares at Astarion as Wyll and Gale laugh, and he feels himself puff up, affronted, but Lillen’s expression is only amused as he looks to Astarion, his lips twitching.

“I am not,” Astarion says, only scarcely able to restrain himself from stamping his foot like a petulant child.

“You stole Shadowheart’s expensive shampoo a few weeks ago and put it in with Gale’s things,” Wyll points out.

“You took the last plate of that pigeon stew when Karlach hadn’t eaten yet and blamed Lae’zel,” Shadowheart agrees.

“All in good fun,” Astarion maintains. “What benefit would I have in lying about this, precisely? The old man knew – he knew and he did it from us, hid it from the Emperor himself, I wouldn’t wager.”

“You think I hid my thoughts from a Mindflayer?” Lillen presses.

“You carry Leira’s mark,” says the voice of Ketheric Thorm, and they all turn to look at him, dressed down to a shirt and trousers, a leather vest worn open over his clothes. He’s trimmed his beard very short and pulled his hair up into a high bun rather than wearing it loose – wearing light clothes instead of armour, his hair immediately so different, he looks a new man entirely. “These children might be taken away by your petty deceptions, but it’s plain the young man sees through some of them at least.”

“A tattoo hardly renders me—”

“You knew,” Thorm says, louder now, and Astarion steps back as Thorm comes forward, standing before Lillen with his hands at his sides, his shoulders squared. The two of them are big for elves, each of them larger than life in different ways, and Astarion watches Lillen’s head tilt back. The two of them mirror one another, paralleling the other’s stance, each stepping slightly to one side, turning. “Tell them when – tell them how.”

“Repeating it again will not make it true, even if I am caught between mad king and magistrate,” Lillen says. “Of recent – since our foray into the bowels of the nether brain’s fetid coils – I began to have the ghost of a suspicion as to whom our anonymous helper might be, their distrust of the githyanki, their telepathic ability, their familiarity with Mindflayer ideas and strategies. I had no further estimation than this – I promise you.”

He doesn’t promise Thorm, but Astarion, turning to look at him with his mismatched eyes and the scar across his mouth shining slightly in the light; he looks, then, to the rest of them, his palms raising.

“If you doubt me still—”

“No,” Astarion mutters. “I suppose you’ve answered now. Why didn’t you voice the idea as soon as you had it?”

“We were somewhat busy at the time,” Lillen says. “Are we ready to go, hm? Astarion, Wyll, Shadowheart, if you’d like for the four of us to move out together – Jaheira, Gale, Lae’zel, Karlach, did the four of you wish to move as a party?”

They fall into chatter and strategy – Halsin and Isobel are moving around the camp together, setting up various wards and protections, and Aylin is sitting on top of a wall, speaking at length of one exploit or other as Withers listens to her, refining ingredients in their apothecary laboratory as he does so.

Some orphan girl that Isobel had brought back from the city outskirts early this morning, Yenna, and her cat are sitting with them, and Yenna is doing as Withers tells her, occasionally working to chop up a certain ingredient or set into jars particular salts or powders.

He’s surprisingly good with children, their Bone Man, as Arabella had called him – Yenna had gravitated immediately toward him, and she seems as if she’s going to be flitting between helping Withers with brewing potions and helping Gale with cooking dinner.

Astarion sits down and looks down into the eyes of the owlbear cub when it comes over to him, resting its soft chin on his knees, and then he gently scratches the top of its head.

“Fools surround us all, do you know that?” Astarion asks.

The owlbear coos at him, and shoves its head into his hand.

* * *

The other four approach the entrance to Baldur’s Gate ahead of Wyrm’s Rock Fortress, but the rest of them ride the few miles around the outskirts of the city outskirts to enter via another of the gates – much of the city is closed off ahead of Gortash’s coronation, but Lillen produces a pass so old and ornate that the guards actually falter when they take it from him.

There are great steel automatons moving one way and the other, but they step aside at the instruction of the guards, and Astarion clicks his tongue for Cherry and Stone to move onward.

Astarion settles back in the bench of the cart beside Lillen, as Wyll and Shadowheart stride ahead of them down the hill and into the outskirts of the Lower City.

“You knew from the beginning,” Astarion says in an undertone, ensuring that neither Shadowheart nor Wyll can hear him over the hoofbeats of the horses and the turn of the cart wheels, ensuring they can’t realise he was feigning giving up on this particular argument. “Or very close to the beginning – you’ve known all along, and you’re a liar, Lillen Anmactíre. Just because you can convince Thorm doesn’t mean you can convince me.”

“That suspicious instinct of yours will serve you well, young man,” says Lillen pleasantly. “This right ahead, if you would, and then drive onwards, follow the wall until we reach the next bridge into the Upper City.”

The Temple of Oghma in Baldur’s Gate is a rather modest affair, resembles one of the smaller tabernacles scattered about the broader city more than it does the other great temples here in the Temples District. There are priests and clerics galore, hundreds of them, and a great many penitents and faithful as well.

The controls between the Lower and Upper City have trapped some impoverished faithful here, but most of those Astarion can see are in fine clothes, paid for by their temples or by their deep coffers.

He remembers a hundred thousand admonishments by Cazador about hunting in the temple district – so often, in the beginning, they’d be scolded for taking posher, fancier victims rather than easier prey. If they wanted to taste of an aristocrat’s company (as if they were ever to be permitted a taste of their blood), they were to only take one or two at a time, do nothing to provoke suspicion or curiosity, do nothing to draw the focus of the city’s guards or various investigators; similar rules were applied to certain wizards or academics, priests, clerics.

Adventurers, they were good, they were nice, easy prey – impressive and interesting enough to draw Cazador’s interest, his sense of satisfaction in someone worth collecting, worth keeping, not that he ever did.

“Do you mind if I…?” Shadowheart asks, gesturing to the great temple to Selûne, and Astarion shakes his head.

“No, not at all,” he says, hopping down from the cab. “Wyll, will you accompany her? Try not to split up if it can be managed.”

Rather gallantly, Lillen offers his hand to Astarion to climb down from the cart, helping him hop over a puddle so that he doesn’t stain the skirt of his robe, and then he whistles sharply.

Godey had used to whistle at times, although how he’d managed it through his fucking skinless, lipless face is ever a wonder – it had been just as loud and sharp as this is, and as they ascend the steps into the Oghmian temple, a handful of postulants rush out to meet them.

“Master Anmactíre!” says one of them, her eyes wide. “Are th… Oh, wow. Are these all books?”

“Did I advise you to take small talk, postulant?” calls a quiet, sharp voice, and the girl blanches and rushes down the steps, beginning to take the crates of books and carry them inside.

Standing on the steps is a very severe little man with freckles spattered across his nose and cheeks, his hands behind his back, wearing similar armour to Lillen’s own, Oghma’s symbol defined in gold on his breast.

“Hello, Mr Highfield,” said Lillen, smiling faintly. “I thought you were home in Merryweather.”

“Master Anmactíre,” says Highfield, giving a neat bow of his head, looking down at them scowlingly. “We thought you were likely dead.”

“Disappointed, young man?”

“Deeply,” says Highfield, and turns on his head and walks back up the hill, leaving Lillen laughing quietly at Astarion’s side.

“Friend of yours?” Astarion asks, and Lillen exhales, shaking his head.

“Buran is a passionate devotee of our Lord Oghma,” Lillen mutters. “He does not lie – he’s capable, theoretically, but he will not, and he dislikes those that do.”

“I begin to see where his philosophy might conflict with yours,” Astarion murmurs. “He really wants you dead?”

“Not enough to kill me,” Lillen says, as if that’s the only thing that might worry either of them, and the two of them ascend the stairs and into the temple proper.

Astarion instructs one of the more handsome postulants, a strapping half-orc in robes that don’t quite fit him, in the preferences of their horses as Lillen speaks with another priest, handing over stacked records of each book they’d collected and where they’d gotten it.

He keeps glancing sideways at him, keeps watching him, looking at him – this bastard of a man, this constant liar, this fucking Mindflayer-sympathiser, here he is in his element, giving orders and instructions, and by the Gods, the way all these people look at him.

One might be forgiven for thinking Lillen Anmactíre was the god here and not their lord Oghma, the way various of the postulants and novitiates look his way, look at him worshipfully and admiringly.

And he’d thought Cal was silly, mooning over the bastard the way he had.

“Won’t you take lunch with us, Master Anmactíre?” begs one of the novitiates, gripping hold of Lillen’s hand and looking up at him eagerly.

“A rest will do us no harm, I suppose,” he says, looking at Astarion, and they leave word for Shadowheart and Wyll with the central priest before they walk deeper into the modest bowels of Oghma’s domain to take a meal.