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Astarion, currently, was lounging in the camp, enjoying the sunlight on his face. It was a pleasantly warm day, and he currently was on break.
Several of the motley band he’d fallen in with weren’t on break. They had wandered into a swamp to chase after a hag, and Astarion had remained behind, wanting to keep his precious blood inside of his body rather than stolen by every hells-claimed insect.
It was pleasant lounging, with a belly full of boar blood, with enough warmth from the sun to warm his body. And afternoon shift, he would probably switch out with whoever was most fucked up on the team, and then maybe he could see if he could find a spare chicken or something.
Tav returned alone midday.
This was not necessarily unusual. Tav frequently would hike back to whatever place the group had staked out to trade out valuables he’d found for scrolls and potions.
Tav ignored the equipment chest.
“Hey, Astarion, we need you,” Tav said. “There’s this entire underchamber at Auntie Ethel’s filled with locked doors and chests and the like, and we aren’t trusting Shadowheart with the thieves tools, not again.”
Astarion tsked. “And none of you can manage on your own?” He put a hand over his chest. “Where would you be without me?”
It was a little sloppy of a manipulation attempt, to be sure, but all of his attempts had been sloppy. Even with blood in his system, it was hard to think straight through the constant blinding fear and also the worm friend in his brain.
Tav just gestured for him to follow, so Astarion did, and he trailed after Tav into ferns and thickets. It was a pleasant enough place at least, with reeds and fruits and chirping birds.
Astarion couldn’t help but feel a little something as he crossed through running water, fear and something heady. It didn’t stop him. It didn’t even hurt him. He was deliciously safe.
It was all an illusion of course.
Stupid to be shocked at the stake in chest, piercing his heart. A blinding burst of pain, sharp enough that the cattails turned into sharp reeds, and the birds into scuttling rats.
His hands fumbled at it, even as the paralysis set it, even as the word began to go swimmy and gray. He gasped, precious blood burbling out of his mouth from a punctured lung, and he couldn’t work it well enough to ask anything.
Tav grabbed his head and shoved him into the water, and then another sharp burst of pain pinned his shoulder into the riverbed.
It didn’t take long after that.
—
When Astarion awoke, it was someplace dull. There were no stars in the sky, nor buildings around. It was featureless flat expanses of gray, with only a single city in the horizon, like a beacon.
Astarion thought about it for a moment.
“That fucker killed me,” Astarion said.
There was a shock of betrayal, of indignity, and then the creeping realization of naturally he did. Astarion had been grossly sloppy, in hindsight. Tav even found the boar Astarion had drank from. He’d stared at Astarion, like he’d been halfway to figuring it out then and there. Had something happened for Tav to figure it out? Maybe the hag had said something?
He pressed his hands to his chest, and then his eyes went wide. There was a heartbeat in there, slow and steady, a rhythm he’d been missing for so long he’d forgotten it.
Apparently you had that in death.
He sat there for a while, and then the giddiest thought overtook him.
He was dead.
He was dead and beyond the realms of Cazador.
How long had he prayed to the gods for such a thing? Anything, he said, anything if you would at least kill me and let my suffering end. No Cazador to compel him, and no mindflayer worm to make him into another kind of monster.
…so what happened now?
—
With little else to do, Astarion began to walk towards the city. It was hard to tell how far off it was, as he walked and it didn’t seem to get much closer, but there was also no way to mark the passage of time.
Very faintly out in the distance, blending into the featureless escape, were other people so far off into the distance they might have passed for stars themselves.
There wasn’t a lot of hope. He’d been quite vocally anti-god for a while, but he’d put in two or three decades for some of them. Maybe he wouldn’t get claimed by a good god, but maybe he could settle for some mildly shitty afterlife. A Medium Place, if you will. Even the most banal afterlife would be paradise compared to Cazador, and the thought left him feeling strangely happy.
That said, if he could kill Tav, he would in one of his new heartbeats.
Without lights in the sky to mark the passage of time, or any ache in his limbs at exertion, it was hard to tell how long it took to actually finally reach there. By the time he was close enough to see gates, the city filled the entire horizon line.
There were guards escorting people inside, and that was strange. Because, again, everyone was dead.
Why were there guards in death? What, could you die a second time?
The thought might not be stupid, actually. He didn’t know how any of this worked. But all he had to do was walk up, and the guard, some kind of weird winged skeleton being wearing a cross between a guard’s outfit and an administration uniform, simply peered into his eyes, and then waved him in without so much as a word.
The inside of the walls looked like a city, as far as Astarion could tell. There were roads and buildings, mostly inns and strange shops. People walked on the streets, and they didn’t seem to look terrified. No one was running around with an axe trying to murder everyone, so it was already a better city than Baldur’s Gate.
Astarion felt at his teeth, and they were flat.
Right he was just dead, and not undead.
Well.
This wasn’t the worst in the world.
There was another entry into the city around the same time as him, a very excited looking white dragonborn man.
“Do you know anything about what’s going on?” he asked.
The dragonborn gave him a look, all pale eyes, and sidled closer. “Usually it’s about ten days for a god to send for you, sometimes longer, sometimes a lot longer. If a god doesn’t send for you, the judge will eventually see you sorted into whatever afterlife awaits. If a god sends for you and you don’t like that god, petition for the judge to sort you, but his decision is final. You don’t have to go with anyone even if they say you do. Devils might try to kidnap you that way.”
Astarion blinked.
“You know a lot about this,” Astarion said.
The dragonborn smiled. “Buddy I’ve been waiting to die all my life to get rid of one really shitty god. You bet I’m going to get my case petitioned. Bhaal ain’t getting me.”
Astarion laughed. “From Baldur’s Gate then?”
“From Baldur’s Gate.”
—
The ‘inns’ didn’t actually take payment. They were simply a resting place for souls, more like Flago’s Flophouse than anything else. There were restaurants and art galleries and theatres. Apparently some in the city felt no need to move on and were content enough to make this their place, and if they didn’t cause that much trouble, the Judge wouldn’t force them to leave. Too much trouble and, apparently, the Judge would either make you leave, or assign you to a different sector of the city where the rest of the trouble-makers were.
There was a lovely person who brewed ghost alcohol for ghosts, and Astarion tasted something that wasn’t rot or putrid blood for the first time in two centuries. He tried not to break into sobs because he was in public.
Okay.
Astarion decided to pour one out for the Judge, the first god to actually do something for him at all, but just one because it had taken him this long.
“I tried before you know,” Astarion said into the air. “You didn’t answer a single prayer then. A single drink is all I will give to you.”
There was no answer, and Astarion didn’t mind.
Astarion talked to people, not luring a single one back to their deaths, and, with his own lips, said he’d been a vampire spawn forced to serve a vampire for two hundred years before he died. He got a lot of sympathy for that, and a lot of reassuring words that that was the benefit of death.
It felt strange. It felt like a bizarre fever dream, from eating a rat that had gone too rancid and bloated.
It almost felt like he was a proper person again. Nobody minded that he used to be a vampire spawn because he wasn’t actively a vampire spawn. And while Astarion still didn’t fully trust that ‘don’t cause much trouble’ would be fair or just, because it never was, it was still a level of safety Astarion had never had before.
Worse came to worst, Astarion now had outs. If Cazador died and showed up and still had magic or something, Astarion could have his case be heard, or do what the dragonborn had told him not to do, and go sign up to be a devil.
And there were devils. Some of them were easier to find than others. There were sign-in bonuses, something of what they called a ‘quick promotion without spending too long in the lower ranks’, and that sounded nice, which was why Astarion didn’t trust it, but it would still be better than whatever Cazador would do.
And if some quasi-shitty god offered a different afterlife, Astarion would jump at that, simply to put as much distance between him and Cazador as possible.
But for the first time in two centuries, Astarion, bizarrely, felt safe.
He felt free.
—
So it couldn’t last.
—
He was at the inn when it happened. He was drinking wine and eating little scones and ignoring everyone else when they said the taste was somewhat off, somewhat distant, because he could still taste it all.
He felt a tug. It was sharp and hooked, and he winced at the sensation.
And then dread washed over him all at once. Dread and fear and a sick realization, the thing he’d been ignoring.
Cazador had made Godey. He’d pulled Godey from an afterlife.
Cazador had necromancy.
“No, no, no,” Astarion said. No please. Not now. He was dead. He was fucking dead. Why couldn’t Cazador let him have just this in death? Terror gripped his lungs, wrapped around his heart. He stood up, half-knocking over the table in his haste, and he darted to the door.
Maybe if he could get to whatever Judge? Or some administration building? A cleric? A devil. He knew where the devils were. Why hadn’t he already gone to them? Stupid, selfish, greedy bastard. He’d known better, and he’d bought in to the illusion all over again.
He was truly as empty-headed as Cazador said.
And in a second, there was a sharp yank, and the world around him dissolved into so much blackness.
He tried to scream, to thrash, but his limbs had become stiff and heavy, and no matter how much he tried, they wouldn’t move an inch. He tried to sob, and his chest was a dead hollow thing, dragging him down, full of water. He thrashed against the walls of his prison, but it was some paralysis so strong, he wasn’t even left with the puppetry of breathing.
He couldn’t even open his eyes.
“Got you,” a voice came.
And he knew that voice, even if it wasn’t one he heard often. Godey wasn’t the only skeleton Cazador had made. He had a second one, a necromancer, to deal with all the mundanities he didn’t want to deal with.
He’d forgotten in his idiocy that Cazador could do that.
Not even in death was he free.
Cazador, in this way, was greater than any god.
Astarion couldn’t even scream. He felt something in his brain seize, the instinct to scream, the subconscious command of it, but the body wasn’t reacting.
This was worse than any prison. He didn’t even have control of his limbs. He didn’t have control of his fingers, or even so much as his own eyes. He was a dead thing, and he couldn’t see, and this was worse than the tomb, because in at least the tomb, there had been that slight distance between him and the walls.
His body had been made into the tomb now.
Astarion tried screaming again, tried to beg or plead, tried to roll away, twitch his fingers, anything at all. But his body never belonged to him, though. It did nothing without Cazador’s command. He was just a flesh puppet with no one pulling on his strings.
He was hauled up and thrown into something. His head cracked against something hard. It felt like wood. A cart?
Of course it was a cart. How else was Chatterteeth going to haul his corpse back to his master?
The cart lurched, and then it began to move slowly forward, each moment getting that much closer back to Baldur’s Gate.
Astarion lost track of time.
He screamed and screamed and screamed it felt like, even if no sound came out, even if his lungs didn’t so much as twitch once. He begged to the gods, to the devils, to the demons in the Abyss. He was sorry. He was a fool, he understood that now, but he’d sign over his soul to anyone at all, just as long as they weren’t Cazador.
The darkness swirled and twisted around him, and he could hear Cazador’s laughter, cruel and mocking.
He should have just gone back immediately. He should have known better and just gone back. It’d been a year in a tomb for once, once, just trying to escape. Astarion was going to have to beg to be allowed back to be even a spawn, to have the privilege of using his body for Cazador, and if he was very, very lucky, Cazador would even restore him first.
More time lost to pleas, to jibbering, to sobbing on the inside.
His body remained motionless the entire time.
The cart never stopped, and he didn’t have a way of knowing how time was passing. Chatterteeth was a skeleton. He didn’t need to stop and rest, and whatever was pulling the cart was likely long dead as well.
The hallucinations started slowly, and then they consumed him.
He could hear shrieking and wailing, could feel whispers of hands touching him all over. The darkness bent into faces, staring at him, some impassive, some mocking. He tried to reach out towards them uselessly. He smelled rot and ale and bile, could hear the chittering of rats long dead, and always always Cazador saying something Astarion couldn’t quite make out.
His skin crawled and crawled and crawled.
And then he realized it wasn’t a hallucination, not all of it.
His skin was crawling. There were things in his skin, slowly burrowing inside. He could feel the tiniest of teeth, hundreds of them, slowly wriggling their way inside his flesh. The pain started slowly, and then felt like a gradual fire, hundreds or thousands of needles all at once piercing him over and over again.
Maggots.
Again, failed movement, as he tried to bat them off of him, tried to do anything, but he was less than a puppet now. He was a dead thing, and he was being eaten for all the times he had to eat them. He tried to call out to Chatterteeth, surely Cazador didn’t want Astarion in such a state, and his voice remained locked away.
The maggots burrowed deeper, nibbling at his intestines now, at other soft organs ripe with decay. The fire was consuming inside of him now, catching his bloated flesh like so much kindling.
It had to be a hallucination.
Please gods let it be a hallucination. It was his mind. He knew this. He’d been in the tomb long enough he’d thought all sorts of things had happened. He’d been convinced he’d been arguing with several entities for freedom, and it had just been the echo of his own voice. He’d been convinced sunlight had broken through and incinerated him and had pinned his soul in place, and yet when Cazador finally released him, his flesh was fine.
It was madness.
It was just madness.
He realized his face was covered with mud, and that was why he couldn’t see anything. Chatterteeth hadn’t bothered cleaning his face off. He realized this because it rained later, and the rain washed all the mud off.
And he could see them now from this angle. His body was slightly bent, laying on its side, head towards where he’d been stabbed. And he could see his belly writhe with tens of thousands of little white grubs. There were sections where the flesh and muscles had been eaten away just enough for a few small loops of intestine to be dangling out, being jostled by the movement of the cart.
And Astarion did not even have the luxury of looking away.
—
At some point, the maggots began to be attracted to the soft flesh of his face. The lips, the nose, the cheeks were all very soft flesh, near first to start to decay beyond what bloat the water had given him.
By far though the softest flesh there was his eyes, clouded and jellied, and easy prey.
He couldn’t blink. His eyes were as fixed as the rest of him.
The grubs first started to eat his lips, and then his nose. As those areas were consumed, more arrived and moved farther up on his face.
One kept getting closer and closer to his eye.
Astarion, before, had been a master of not being there when torture happened. There were two skills he’d developed in his two centuries as slave to Cazador. The first was seduction, and the second was displacement. Displacement was imperfect, but it was still key, because Astarion was Cazador’s favorite to torture.
The flesh would hurt, but it would hurt in a detached way. Astarion would wander away from his body. There’d be pain, near senseless and random and unending, but when it was happening to just some body and not Astarion, it was more bearable.
The magic was pinning Astarion in place.
At this point, Astarion gave up on begging to gods or demons or devils.
Astarion began to beg Cazador. Please. He’d learned, he did, he was sorry, he would come straight home next time, it was just- he’d been infected with a mindflayer tadpole, see-
At first the grub vanished from sight.
And then it bit into his lower eyeball, a vicious sting, and his body screamed on instinct to blink, to do anything at all. There was another, and another, chewing through his lips, his nose, more in his eyes, watching the little mouths take bite by bite of Astarion away, could feel burning agony until that too subsided.
And then he didn’t see anything at all.
—
He alternated between praying and screaming and lying there like a broken vase when the skeleton finally, apparently, looked over at him.
And cursed.
“The Master won’t be happy about this,” Chatterteeth said, which was the worst thing to say, because oh gods it was real.
A boney hand touched his face gently, and he could feel the flesh give.
He’d vomit if he could, but perhaps it was better that he couldn’t, because all that would come out would be maggots.
And then lightning coursed through him, such a charge that for a moment he thought he was dead and free again, but he could feel thousands of dead bodies inside of him, could feel the holes they had made in his corpse.
“He said to make sure there was something of you left,” Chatterteeth said in such a cruelly bland voice. “He didn’t say how much though.”
—
The maggots came back. Flies were, of course, attracted to the smell of rotting flesh.
There were already open entries for them now, holes to lay eggs in, entrances into his abdomen. Some found the original stab wound Tav had left and claimed his heart and lungs. All of his internal organs for the taking.
More on his face this time, eating through what was left of his nose and lips and eyes. Soft flesh. Good for flies.
He felt one drop into his mouth, and then another. His tongue was next, and the inside of his cheeks.
He could feel air inside of his mouth, so, they’d burrowed a hole in.
It felt like his intestines were wriggling and writhing at this point. They were bloated with enough flyspawn for it. His body moved now, not because he willed it to, but because there was that much mass of larva inside of him.
Worse, he could feel a liquid inside of his skull seeping out through his eyesockets. He was pretty sure that was his brain that had liquefied. He didn’t know if they ate enough of him if his soul would be able to slip free.
Probably not.
That’s not how things worked for him. He’d just be trapped in a half-rotting skeleton.
At some point Chatterteeth noticed again, and he made an angry hissing sound.
He grabbed at one of Astarion’s arms-
And something tore, tendons and muscles just so much flymeat. There was a slight tension at the elbow, and then it gave way, and the rest of his arm thumped back down to the cart.
“You were always more trouble than you were worth,” Chatterteeth said.
The lightning was stronger this time, leaving the smell of scorched flesh and wood.
—
Chatterteeth would shock him repeatedly now, but the damage had been done, and Astarion’s body continued to decay.
Flies swarmed regularly. A bird more than once tried its luck to peck further at Astarion’s cheek and stomach.
If those weren’t hallucinations.
The jibbering had returned, as had the hands stroking him all over. So maybe the flies were hallucinations as well? Were the rats? Reality had blurred into a nightmare delirium.
The despair was more consuming than the darkness, the maggots. It left him hollow and vacant, just a throbbing vein of misery and pain and char.
It didn’t matter though. The master would make it worse. He could always make it worse. It didn’t matter how badly things got, how much he suffered, the master could make it so much worse, while sneering and saying it was nothing, he was a soft hand, if Astarion didn’t constantly need correction he wouldn’t have to do it now would he?
Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered even if he had become a demon or devil. Those could be summoned and bound into service as well. Astarion was the fool here. Two centuries, and he’d never learned better, had he?
There wasn’t escape. There wasn’t a way out.
Time swam. It got faster and slower and twisted around on itself. Astarion was almost certain he’d been laughing for some reason, except the body still wouldn’t move.
The cart stopped, again, for lightning, again.
Except the lightning didn’t come.
Instead there was an explosion of noise. He could hear Chatterteeth shriek and cast spells. Combat then. Someone was attacking him.
Please.
He was clearly some kind of undead zombie. He could be killed. He would be faster this time. He’d find-
But there was nowhere to go Cazador couldn’t get him, was there? Unless his body was destroyed, right? No, there were ghosts still.
This wasn’t an escape. Nothing was.
The sounds died down. He could hear heavy breathing. So, not Chatterteeth then? It didn’t matter. Cazador would resummon the skeleton in a few weeks when he didn’t return.
Heavy bootsteps came over to the cart and then paused.
“Guys, he’s long since dead.”
Karlach. And she sounded so sad.
Why was Karlach here?
More bootsteps, and then the sound of someone retching. It sounded like Gale?
Astarion didn’t understand.
“That’s where the compass is pointing,” came Wyll’s voice. “His soul is in there.”
“Is he conscious? ” Karlach asked, horrified.
“With the kind of magic that reanimated him, he should be,” Gale said uneasily. “Mind you, necromancy isn’t always a field that’s abused. True resurrection magic is in the same domain as necromancy. There’s plenty of basic necromantic magic that should have prevented this. This was deliberate and purposefully cruel.”
Astarion couldn’t tell if anyone was touching him. He was still feeling hundreds of hands.
“Can you move at all?” asked Shadowheart.
Nothing but silence, and he still didn’t understand.
Lae’zel now, making a huffing sound. “Ugh. I’ll carry him. But then we are getting back to Moonrise Towers. We have left this situation alone long enough. I do not trust this dream guardian to protect us from becoming ghaik forever.”
“Don’t worry Fangs,” Karlach said. “Withers is with us. He’ll patch you up.”
Lae’zel huffed again, but he felt arms so, so carefully pick him up, like he was precious and not rotting, and he didn’t understand.
“You will not have to worry about Tav,” Wyll said, out of the blue. “He is no longer with us.”
“Yeah we found out what he did,” Karlach said. “I’m sorry it took so long, but we came for you Fangs. We aren’t going to let anyone hurt you like that again, we swear, okay?”
Was this hallucinations as well? They felt more real than hallucinations normally were.
But hallucinations would make more sense.
The maggots were kinder, at least. The maggots weren’t his brain conjuring false hope to destroy him all over again.
“At least it wasn’t too much of a detour,” Shadowheart said. “Whoever that was, they were on the path to Baldur’s Gate as well. Three days off course and nothing more.”
And it had to be a hallucination, because they were so chatty now, keeping up a stream of conversation, of things he missed. There’d been a hag, and goblin leaders, and mushroom people in the Underdark, and the creche was a bust apparently, as the evil tyrannical slavers from space apparently, shockingly, didn’t have a cure for mindflayer tadpoles, unless ‘death’ was the cure you were looking for.
It was all information they would have already known, a recount just for him to keep the darkness at bay.
He was eventually laid down on something soft, even though he knew he was leaking fluids and larval carcasses, and a short moment later, another person approached.
“Can you fix him?” Wyll asked.
“I can return him to his previous state,” an old voice said. “He will simply be a different form of undead, but his flesh will be returned to him. There is a matter of coin, extra for how long he has been in this state.
“I’ll pay it,” Wyll said, as if it wasn’t even a thought.
There was a clattering of coin.
“Very well. It will only take a moment.”
And then everything went black and silent and dead. Flesh gone, bones gone, just a little nothing.
And then Astarion opened his eyes.
He gasped, scrambling upright, and his limbs moved. His chest heaved, lungs working as if they weren’t just meat. He blinked, and he saw the world, saw shadowed twisted woods and the rest of Tav’s little merry band, all clustered around him like he was important. He gasped, and gasped again, and no maggots fell out.
He realized with rapid horror, that he was seconds away from breaking down, and there were people watching.
And then that didn’t matter anymore, as he started to sob and wail like he had in that first decade with Cazador. He screamed, all the horror coming out all at once, and then he screamed again just to hear his voice do so, just to have any fucking say over what his body did.
Wyll was the closest and had been kneeling down next to him.
So Astarion clung to Wyll like a lifeline. Wyll was kind enough to hold his body that was shaking so hard Astarion was worried about cracking his teeth.
Wyll murmured soothing nonsense, two warms around Astarion, like if he was a particularly beaten dog.
It was near dark when Astarion finally returned to his senses.
The group had settled down around, in a half-circle close enough to Astarion to be present without being obtrusive. It was mortifying to have been witnessed, and Astarion nearly started crying all over again because they were still there.
He still, completely, could not understand why they’d come for him.
It was hard not to pick at his skin, to check for anything else had burrowed in there. He kept rubbing at his eyes, and his breath was still coming quickly.
“I’m sorry,” Wyll simply said after a moment. “Tav said you fled. We didn’t know to look for you.”
But they did.
“Why?” Astarion asked, voice coming out a croak.
“I saw it in Tav’s mind,” Wyll said. “Half of us did, during an argument over- It wasn’t even because you were a threat. He thought he could get away with it because you were a spawn.”
“He’s not exactly with us anymore,” Gale said.
And Astarion saw it, in Wyll’s mind. Wyll sheathing his blade in Tav’s chest with a strange detachment, a whisper of emotion, how the worst monsters always ended up being people, weren’t they? There’d been other memories in there that Wyll had gleaned, other victims Tav had killed purely on the rationale that they were socially acceptable to.
Astarion processed that.
And then he groaned. “I’m still infected? After all of this shit?”
“Withers did say he would return you to the state you’d been in,” Shadowheart said.
“I’m so sorry mate,” Wyll said.
Astarion, realized, he hadn’t let go of clinging to Wyll, like Astarion would fall forever if he let go. Wyll wasn’t saying anything, so, maybe Astarion would wait until Wyll pointed it out.
What, were they doing to make fun of him for this? After he bawled like a small child? He didn’t have any dignity left to ruin. No humiliation could touch him now.
“How did you even find me?” Astarion asked. “The tadpole was dead when I was.”
Wyll inclined his head. “There are the very rare perks of having a patron. I did a small favor for her, and then she let me be able to track your location.”
He didn’t understand it in the slightest. He just couldn’t. He had numbers and none of them added up. It was all sand slipping through his fingers. It was staring beyond the Astral Sea and trying to make sense of what lurked there.
Astarion did not in any way, could simply not fathom this group.
“Thank you,” Astarion said. “Whatever it was, I’ll pay you back for it.”
Wyll inclined his head. “It’s fine, Astarion.” And if there had been the slightest twitch, Astarion wasn’t going to say anything.
“We have the rest of night to rest,” Lae’zel said, all brisk military efficiency. “You may decompress then, but we must get back on track.”
“Right,” Astarion said. Absolutely reasonable. They were on a quest to stop themselves from turning into mindflayers, and they’d risked the time to save him.
Lae’zel put a single hand on Astarion’s shoulder. “After, when we get to Baldur’s Gate, we will strike down Cazador. You do not need fear this again.”
Astarion snorted. “I’ve seen many people try and fail to kill him.”
Lae’zel didn’t even flinch. “They weren’t us.”
“Yeah, we’re gonna keep you safe now Fangs,” Karlach said. “I’ve killed greater demons than him.”
—
Astarion didn’t rest. He couldn’t rest, even though he’d spent the past few tendays in a state of not resting, apparently. Instead he sat next to Lae’zel on watch, saying he was going to pull his weight around camp and join her.
And Lae’zel made polite conversation for the watch, filling him in the details that hadn’t been covered before.
Gale and Shadowheart were next, and so Astarion sat with them. Gale and Shadowheart had a lively debate on the magical properties of the Shadowlands they were going to head into, and when Astarion kept picking at his skin, Gale offered to check for bugs with his magic.
And then it was Karlach and Wyll, who vowed, again, needlessly, that they would help him kill Cazador, and then offered him a bottle of wine and a bottle of blood the camp had collected.
Astarion could spend a century not understanding them.
But they were the first people who ever came for him. And by the gods above and the devils below, he was not going to squander this.