Chapter Text
The strung together group of adventures sat around a burning campfire. They didn’t yet realise the gravity of their situation, but reality was starting to set in. They had to get this parasite out of their heads. Nervous eyes glanced amongst themselves.
“We can’t just sit here…” Shadowheart solemnly declared, “there must be someone who can help”. The cleric looked up at the moon as it burned a hole in the night sky. How she usually revelled in darkness, much like her goddess. Tonight was different. The air of somber worship was ruined by her racing thoughts. On that nautiloid, she remembered, there was a woman. Their eyes had met momentarily. Shadowheart’s were pleading. This woman’s were like that of a captured animal, feral and wild, almost free. Even in her panic, the woman freed Shadowheart. They stood face to face for a mere moment, before she was gone. Like an apparition, she had disappeared in the blink of an eye.
Astarion peered down his nose, seemingly disgusted at Shadowheart’s desperation. He said little, concentrating on the fleeting memory of that person on the ship. She stood in front of him, staring up, her body bundled in robes and splattered with blood. He did not grovel, or beg, yet she freed him regardless. Astarion had climbed from the pod, and they stood face to face. He merely stared at her, sensing some kind of emotion in her eyes. She looked back at him, almost like she was expecting him to speak. He could see it, then, in her face. An all-consuming sadness.
The wizard stood still, the fire casting shadows across his face. “There was someone else on that ship” he spoke with a furrow in his brow. The memory of her was there, just slightly out of reach. Fruit on a tree, ripe for the picking, but a branch too high. “But when I try to remember, it grows all the foggier”. Gale was adept in the art of mind-bending, but this was something unlike anything he had experienced before. This being that had freed him on that ship existed to him as only a cloud. A plume of black fog. “I believe if anyone was to know anything, it would be them”.
“That look in her eyes…” Shadowheart muttered.
“Well, where is our saviour now?” Astarion piped up. He almost scoffed at the cleric and the wizard. Then, he drew his mind back to that ship, and how he reached his hand towards her. Perhaps he wasn’t sure what he wanted to achieve by touching her, but part of him thought she was an illusion. His fingers had only just intertwined with the heavy darkness of her robe, when she had flinched away. She stepped back and raised her hand, and in an instant she had disappeared. “She clearly doesn’t want to be remembered”.
The trio sat in silence for a minute or two, each of them deep in a universal thought. After they had found each other, they fought their way through a crypt. Multiple undead, all guarding a single skeleton. He raised from the tomb in which he lay, and now he lingered in camp. He spoke in riddles, and rarely. “Thy companion is correct.” His voice floated through the camp. “The woman of which you speak is not far from here”. Withers almost ruminated on every word he spoke. It came as a frustration to the less patient of the group. “But getting her to join your cause will not be easy”
“If she’s as desperate as us, what choice will she have?” Astarion asked with a laugh, “how hard could it possibly be?”
Ayfer Eveningstar. That was her name. Presumably. She sat in that room, with the same stone walls she had seen each morning and night since her capture. Through a crack in the wall, she could see it was daytime. It was always daytime. The days dripped by as slow as half-melted wax. Like tar. She had lost count of the days spent there, with no way to tell.
There was something different about this day in particular. It felt like a swell in her stomach. A certain unease. For a moment there, she thought she had escaped. On that nautiloid she either had the sweet release of death, or a crack at freedom. Neither came to fruition, and how she tormented herself for it. Back to these shackles, iron and indestructible, she was bound. How powerless she was without her hands. She wanted to scream, but it would do her no use. Any person that has dared enter the tower had seen Ayfer for one second, wrapped in chains and eyes full of bitter resentment, and decided not to take their chances. Since that thing was implanted in her head, she knew it was only a matter of time before she became something else. Something new. Plus, she had already wailed herself raw when she woke up, after falling from that ship, and found herself back where she started.
There were vague voices from outside the battered wood of the door. A group of people, she could tell, and at the very least three. Eveningstar stayed silent, hoping they would pass by. After all, she couldn’t defend herself without her hands, and it would only wreak the same heartbreak on her when they left all the same.
“We have been walking for hours”, Astarion puffed, “I think this woman is a lost cause.”
Gale and Shadowheart continued on ahead. In a clearing through the trees ahead, they could see the tip of some kind of tower. Clouds clung to each brick, as if to conceal it. They made the air heavy, sickly almost. “A lone tower in the woods, how inviting” Shadowheart smirked.
“This must be the place” Gale remarked, “I reckon we just go straight in there and rescue whatever poor damsel needs our help”. His heart was made of solid gold. Often times, in this realm, kindness would be a mere charade. Hiding something much darker. Gale’s, however, was as genuine as it came.
As they inched nearer to this ominous tower, all signs of life became dull. No birds called, no frogs croaked, and the sky became hauntingly dark. “Dark magic is protecting this tower” said Gale. “Whoever this woman is, she certainly doesn’t want to be rescued”. The wood of the trees contorted and bent to the howl of the wind. Only the creaking of the forest could be heard. “I think we get inside and out of this place as soon as possible”
“There.” Shadowheart pointed to a battered wooden door at the side of the tower. It looked unassuming, and about inviting as doors got in this forest. “A door”
They quickened their pace to avoid the moss that bit their ankles. Something drew them to this door, some sort of feeling. When they got there, however, it was locked. As they stood at the bottom of this tower, a whisper began to break through the trees.
Help.
Help me.
The trio looked amongst each other, uneasy glances, trying to figure out where this voice was coming from. And then, a scream. Wrangled by the shrubbery, but still nerve-shattering. “Perhaps a lock pick would get us through this door” Gale motioned towards Astarion, who stood in revelry.
The door clicked, and into the room they piled. They faced the door now, relieved to be out of whatever spell lingered in that forest. Shadowheart was the first to turn around to face whatever stood in that stone basement. “It’s you…” she trailed off.
Astarion and Gale turned in no more than a beat to be faced with a woman. That woman. The one who freed them all. She sat on her own legs, surrounded by chains and shackles. Pieces of fabric hung limply off her body, torn but impossibly clean. Her wrists were bound together, a dark chain connecting her to the stone wall. Her legs were independently secured. Gale examined her closely, the look of fear in her eyes, the chains around her limbs. That is when he noticed the iron collar around her neck. “Who are you?” He asked. As if looking at her face had somehow unlocked some hidden memories, he could see her in his mind’s eye now. Gale had fell to his knees after jumping from the pod and as he tried to muster up some kind of strength, a hand bent down to meet his view. A gentle hand, pristine and smooth, had reached out for him.
A loose curl fell over her face as she peered down towards her hand. A good question, she thought. When she tried to muster the words, none came out. She could not tell the world who she was, much less these three people in front of her. They looked expectantly at her, shocked by her inability to present herself like she did on the nautiloid.
“You were on that ship too” Shadowheart said. Eveningstar met the cleric’s gaze with her very own. “You freed us all” she continued. There was a slow drip of pity in her stomach, looking upon this captive. “How did you get here?”
Ayfer remembered all of the times that someone would stumble upon her tower in the woods, and how their eyes glistened with opportunity. They could free this woman and become a hero, or kill her just for fun; really they could have done anything. Yet each of them decided to do nothing at all. They watched her sneer with frustration, the unbound look in her eye, and decided that she was not worth it. “I…” she croaked. Her throat burned as she spoke, having not spoken to another soul in months.
“Time really is of the essence here” Gale motioned her to hurry up, “I get a feeling there is some very serious danger in these woods”. He looked upon the hostage himself. There were rivers and streams of long dark hair, curls scattered haphazardly amongst it. The wizard leaned ever-so-slightly closer, and could see the tips of her locks stand on end. Almost, floating. He furrowed his brow at her, inspecting the woman closely. She shied away from his stare, retreating into herself under the weight of his eyes. “You know of the magic in this tower” he muttered, “you are the source of it”.
She unravelled by his word. He was, of course, correct. Eveningstar cleared her throat loudly, “You should not have followed me to these woods”. Her voice was unmistakably clear, much to the trio’s surprise. “You risk your life with each second you stand here”
Astarion scoffed, “Perhaps we should just put the poor thing out of her misery”. He cocked his head at her, watching as his words stoked some dimly light fire. It roared within Eveningstar’s stomach.
“What you do is your prerogative,” she begun. Her legs may have been tired from kneeling, but eventually she mustered herself to her feet. “And you have no reason to trust me.” The bite in the back of her throat told her that this was her shot. All of a sudden, she was overcome by a trite desperation. “But if you free me from this tower, I will owe you my life”. The woman took a step towards them, holding her hands out. “Please”.
“Anyone can see that this is a trap” Astarion sneered at her.
The beating came at the door. The wind of her captors. They were here. “I have been in this tower half of my life, do you truly think I care so much about what happens to me that I would entrap you all?” She spat. There was a rasp in her voice. This was the most she had spoken in years. Perhaps, since she got here.
“If you care so little,” Shadowheart began, “then why would we free you?”
“Because without me, you will not make it back out of these woods alive.”
Gale took a step towards her, making her jump back in hesitation. He pulled the chain and watched as she followed its metallic lead. Something grew in his brain. Not the tadpole, but a different swelling. He knew that they did not have much time. He began to move his arms, sparks of blue shooting from his robe.
“What in the hells are you doing?!” Astarion shouted over the sound of pure magic.
Gale continued with his spell, carefully carving out the shapes to free her from her binds. “She freed us from that ship. We would not be alive if it was not for her. We cannot leave her here to rot”. A burst of magic turned the locks in each of the chains.
Ayfer stood, letting this wizard inflict his magic on to her. How wonderful it felt, to have this energy again. And then, decades overdue, the shackles fell to the ground in a heavy thump. They cracked the rotten wooden floors of the tower basement. She glared so deep into his eyes that she swore his soul was right there in the surface. Years of damnation were gone, in one singular spell. A lump began to form in her throat, of fear or relief she could not tell.
Eveningstar felt the ruin that was on its way to them. It hurled through the woods in screams and shouts. Many a man have wandered through these woods, slowly going insane, never to be free themselves.
“What now?” Asked Shadowheart.
“We run”