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caffeinatedmunchkin · 19 days ago

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aeterna nostalgia

chapter six: leftovers

Pairing: Ascended Astarion x Vampire Bride Tav

🩸Chapter Five |🩸 Chapter Seven (Coming Soon)

🩸Full Chapter List |🩸BG3 Fic Masterlist

Series Summary:

Astarion’s carefully crafted empire is thrown into upheaval when his bride falls victim to a modify memory spell. Without any memory of her lover or her own vampirism, his dark consort is a threat to both herself and her sire.

Astarion must win back her trust and affections, all while hunting down whoever sought to break the most powerful bond in Faerûn.

Chapter Summary: Naomi recalls what brought her to Baldur's Gate

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“No one will remember the dead queen in a few short generations, but a great lament might be sung a thousand years hence.”

-Libris Mortis

Wake up.

The mantra in Naomi's mind works as well as Astarion’s compulsion to remember. No matter how many times she repeats it, she can’t shed the raised-hair awareness tingling through her every inch. She can’t shake the realization settling stony in her stomach.

This isn’t a nightmare at all. All her life before must’ve been a slumber. This is as awake as she’s ever been.

The very air of the room feathers over her arms, cool like the marble pressing against her back. She never realized, before, even having grown up in the Underdark, how many soft-crushed hues the shadows have. In the moonlight slanting in from the tall arched windows, Naomi sees at least a dozen glittering colors she doesn’t have names for.

She licks her wet lips, the lush taste of life bursting succulent on her tongue. Even her unbeating heart seems bathed in this sudden flood of feeling. She could run for miles without tiring, such is the vitality throbbing through her limbs.

But instead, she cowers, tucking her knees tightly to her chest, too aware of the sticky coating on her skin. Of the sweat, tears, and blood painted there. She blinks feverishly, but the room is still scintillating in its saturation. There’s still vivid, crimson stains in the plush ivory rug blanketing the vestibule. And the pitcher is still painfully empty. It rolls to stillness nearby, not one drop left to leak from it.

Despite the dizzy state of her senses, cutting beneath the heady nature of them all is an ache. Longing. It’s not what she should feel, staring at the bloody mess she made, void of her husband’s company for the first time since this nightmare started. And yet, her gums pang with it.

Will it always hurt? she wonders, grazing her new fangs with trembling fingers. The answer comes from an instinct within, but it feels entirely foreign to her -- like the snarl that slipped from her lips when Astarion tried to take the pitcher away.

No, it won’t. It didn’t hurt when she drank. For those few spellbound seconds, she didn’t feel anything but divine.

Now, she feels nothing but nauseous. With a sigh, Naomi peers down the narrow hall shrouded in steam. Astarion said there was a bath.

Her senses tell her she could reach her destination in an instant -- power throbs within her bones. But the idea of moving at more than a snail’s pace makes her stomach lurch. So instead, she crawls down the corridor.

It feels like hours before she finally reaches the chamber at the hall’s other end. A vast monster of a tub awaits her there. The golden claws propping the tub above the floor belong to an ornately carved dragon clinging to the underside. At one end of the tub, a hissing plume of magic steams from the dragon’s maw, billowing against the porcelain. Naomi catches her own reflection in the pearly white sheen as she heaves herself upwards.

Experimentally she dips a toe. Heat prickles pleasantly across her skin. Hot, but not scalding. She casts a wary glance back at the empty vestibule and the bedroom beyond, then sheds her robe and the sheer nightgown beneath it. The bulky amethyst on her left ring finger won’t budge one bit. Resigned, she slips below the surface with it stuck stubbornly in place.

For mere seconds, the water clouds red. She frowns as it clears again. No trace of blood is left behind. It’s only her, stewing in the steam, peppered in freckles she recognizes, but a few stray, decidedly aged scars she doesn’t. If that wasn’t disconcerting enough, her head swirls with a semi-sweet, familiar scent cloying in the air. Astarion’s cologne mills in it, but it’s softened with floral notes -- lavender -- that inexplicably soothe her.

Once she’s scrubbed clean, she lets her head loll back against the tub’s edge. Gods above, the whole ceiling’s a mirror. For a vampire, Astarion’s awfully fond of them. But then, Astarion doesn’t seem bound by the same rules as the vampires she’s heard tales of before. And by association, it seems, neither does she. A familiar stranger with cherry-red eyes scowls down at her.

It’s then that she hears it: the faintest echo of a song, played on some far-away piano, close and far all at once like a teasing breeze. She can nearly taste the lyrics dancing, bittersweet, on the tip of her tongue.

The song carries her mind away to a world where her eyes were still violet, down the path of the scar that curls across her nose. Her fingertips find it now, skimming its thin trail as if she could so easily retrace the path that led her here. Her mind tries to, like following faded pencil marks on aged paper. Memories that should have been recent, but now wear the dust of three years she can’t account for.

A hairline slice of sunlight used to cut across the hot springs near her Underdark home for no more than a few minutes each day. What a mighty blade the sun must be, to delve to such depths. Someday, Naomi would think, each time she saw that searing razor appear and then vanish again. Someday, she would see the surface.

Someday, the waterfalls by the temple seem to whisper.

There was no lightning strike moment marking the day where ‘someday’ became ‘now, or never’. It wasn’t the twentieth funeral she sang for or some other macabre milestone. It wasn’t the first or last time the temple would lose members to the Lolth-sworn. They weren’t the closest friends she had lost. The color of their blood on the stone wasn’t what sent her away from the Eilistraeean temple that raised her.

It felt cumulative; every drop of blood her kin shed at the hands of Lolth-sworn, the duergar, and all the Underdark’s other dangers weighed down the scales over time. Nearing her one hundred and twentieth year, Naomi began to see her life from the bottom side of the hour glass.

Drow can live just as long as any other elves, in theory. Down in the Underdark, they hardly ever do. She didn’t want to die for something righteous, like her parents and their cult did, like her brother would have wanted her to. Like so many of the temple’s residents had and would.

And in a way, wouldn’t ascending like the birds tattooed on her cheek be honoring her parents, after all? Sure, she didn’t manage to ‘pray the drow away’ like they’d hoped. But wouldn’t seeing the surface they made such a fuss about be the next best thing?

Naomi wanted to live, out in the light, singing songs bathed in it. So, she left while she still could.

The surface greeted her with the glare of the sun setting her skin alight, branding it with a shade she’d never seen herself in. And so many freckles, she was sure it had to be death pox. Sure her adventure to the surface had ended before it had truly begun. Sure she would die in the bed of the first inn she could find, shivering in scratchy, flea-bitten blankets with only the sound of her own retching for company.

Except, the inn she happened upon happened to have a bard. On the day when Naomi’s fever reached its apex, that bard played the flute.

The tune crept beneath her door, curious and lilting. The song caressed Naomi gently, like a hand stroking her back and wicking the sweat from her forehead. Soothing, in its sweetness. She can’t remember for the life of her how that song goes, only that it saved her from certain death.

The sun sickness burned fiercely, and then faded. When, finally, her legs could bear to wobble from the room, she learned her bardic savior was another drow. Her name was Melle. She’d never seen the Underdark before. Naomi had never seen anyone half as pretty in her entire life.

“I’ve never known anyone who plays like that,” Melle told her, after their first performance together.

“Like what?” Naomi asked.

“Like you’re trying to haunt everyone here. It’s a tavern, love, not a fucking funeral.”

So Naomi practiced her fingering. Her vocals. She refined all of her arts with precision and care until even her harshest critic would cry for her.

Please, please.

And when she stroked her fiddle, night after night, the coin fell into her cups and Melle fell into her bed.

“How about now?” Naomi asked when they’d finished one evening, and sent the last barfly staggering home. “Am I still haunting you?”

Melle shrugged with a coy smile. “I think you’d fare fine with one of those acting troupes in the Gate.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’re great at playing a part.”

“You think I’m faking?” Naomi laughed. “I know you didn’t, love.”

“I think,” Melle said, twining her wrists behind Naomi’s neck, “you should play something that’s really you.”

Naomi doesn’t remember what song they played their last night together. But she knows the melody that patters through the palace by heart. It came from hers, after all.

And Astarion knows it, too. She sinks deeper into the tub with a growing unease. If he knows that song… Perhaps he had something to do with what happened next.

Naomi was always shit at the lute, but it’s easier to sing with than a fiddle. So she strummed a few quiet chords, and let her lips pour with the song she wrote for her summertime lover.

And when her song was over, it was all over. The look Melle gave her wasn’t just unaffected. It was unfeeling. Cold. Callous. Indifferent. She left that way, without so much as a word.

For a tenday, Naomi was the inn’s sole player. The proprietor was furious at first, but came around when they saw the coin that came in droves for Naomi on her own. More than she and Melle ever made together.

Naomi danced. She played. She drank. She laughed. She was over it, of course. Melle was just the first pretty person she saw on the surface. She’d seen precious little of it, even after all her plans and anticipation. There would be prettier people. Better sights and songs. Come summer’s end, she'd set out to see it all herself.

Maybe she’d fare fine with one of those theater troupes in Baldur’s Gate.

But then--

Melle’s face in the late night crowd.

“You came back!” Naomi gasped. Melle’s arms were rigid as swords, but she swooned into them anyway. She didn’t see her lover’s eyes glinting with steel while hers were blurred.

She didn’t feel the chill until Melle spoke, her words flat. Lifeless.

“You stole from me.”

The dagger flashed across Naomi’s face. Her scream tore from her throat like a page ripped from its binding. All the color, the laughter, the light of the tavern sloughed away with that sound. Torn off like a mask.

Gone were the inn’s patrons, its hearth, its warmth. In an instant, all of it was snuffed to gray, permeating silence. Naomi stood at the heart of the husk that remained in its stead. Thick dust coated the vacant tables, as if no one had stood there in a century.

But it was real. Naomi staggered to the cracked mirror nailed to the wall, swiping it clean with her sleeve. The new scar on her nose still glistened, red and raw. Fresh from Melle’s dagger, lying discarded with her flute among the other leftovers. Here and there, such trinkets rested, faded or rusted like ill-tended antiques. Yet she couldn’t find a single body. Not one other soul.

Her eyes dropped to her quivering hands. There wasn’t one speck of blood on them, but still they were stained. Black marks crawled from her fingertips to her wrists, like ink filling her veins.

When she stumbled out into the night, the crickets still hummed. Little flickers of candlelight still quivered in the windows of the nearby village. She whirled around, and the dark windows of the empty inn glared back at her like empty sockets in a skull. In that numb moment of disbelief, Naomi thought of Calaerys, of the way her brother’s very skin seemed to dissolve in the wake of her shriek, of the moment he became nothing but bone before her.

She fled back beneath the ground, back to the Underdark, where she never meant to leave again. Except when she arrived, she found her temple buried. A rockfall. All that was left of her home was rocks, bones, and…her.

She’s not sure how many eulogies she’s given. How many friends she buried. But she remembers her last lament keenly. It was the last song she ever sang. She laid her kin to rest, and surfaced again with a solemn swear: no soul left alive had ever heard her sing, and she’d never sing for another. Not again. Not ever.

She set off for the Gate. To play a different part. To start a different story. One she’s apparently missing many chapters of. Naomi swirls a finger in the water as the last notes of her song slip fluidly into some moody melody she doesn’t recognize.

Did she sing for Astarion? Did she break her promise for him? For her…husband? Does she haunt him, too?

Does the devil she met along the way to the Gate have anything to do with her broken recollection? His name is scalded in the back of her mind: Raphael.

She can’t be sure how much time passes, soaking and dwelling. Maybe it’s the nature of eternity, to lose track of hours as if only minutes have passed. The water never cools, and her skin never seems to prune, either.

The distant music from elsewhere in the palace is a welcome sort of company. Less so is the second sussur bloom humming in the far corner. She briefly contemplates ripping it out, root and stem, but she isn’t certain the sudden flow of the weave back into the room won’t cause Astarion to be immediately alerted. Instead, she lets the music lull her, even if her connection to it feels muted.

Birdsong breaks through her fogged mind. Sunrise bleeds scarlet over the marble floor. She jerks up abruptly, water sloshing over the sides as she stands and clenches the edge of the tub. Astarion said he’d return in the morning. She’d rather he not find her waiting naked. Not in a bath clearly big enough for two.

Her stomach flips as she looks up. Nothing and no one stares back at her from the mirror overhead. Even her reflection has left her. Naomi’s legs wobble, slipping on the slick marble. She flops from the bath like an overcooked noodle.

Grimacing, she pulls herself upright with limbs like jelly. All the strength surging through her before seems entirely sapped from her body. A strange, gnawing feeling wakes in her stomach, a familiar dryness prickling at the back of her throat.

It wasn’t enough; Astarion will bid her to drink blood again when he returns. Something more fitting for her palate, he said. He was hardly keen on bargaining to begin with. He’s even less likely to entertain the idea, this time.

And she’s not keen on fighting him anymore -- on that matter, at least. She can pretend it’s wine. Be civilized.

Once it’s in her mouth, it puts anything else to shame, anyway. If it means being strong enough, or sharp enough, to seize an opportunity to slip from the room, or the palace altogether, then it’s necessary.

Still, her stomach twists as the sight of the bloody handprints, drying dark in the vestibule’s fur rug. She finds her robe, and a plush black towel, and surveys the macabre scene she left behind.

Nobody died. Here. Either Astarion keeps his supply captive, or, someone did die. In a different room.

She’s not precious about death. Or a stranger to it. No child of the Underdark is. But she’s not exactly keen on slaughter or slavery, either. Those are the hobbies of the Lolth-sworn, not Eilistraee’s followers. She eyes the empty pitcher warily. That…couldn’t have been a whole person, could it?

It’s not an answer she’s likely to find staring at it. She turns her attention to finding clothes instead. There’s a shut door on either side of the short hallway leading from the vestibule to the bathing chamber. Experimentally, she pushes one. It opens readily. Warily, she steps inside.

She’s not sure what she expected to find, exactly, but it wasn’t a sewing closet. Well, ‘closet’ is a significant understatement. Studio would be more apt. Naomi paces the bolts of fabric that line the wall on one side of the room, her fingertips periodically grazing over silk and satin. The opposite wall is comprised entirely of dark polished drawers. She peers inside of one to find dozens of glinting needles. Another is filled with nothing but spools of black thread. Others hold more thread, along with ribbons and pins, in all manner of colors.

There’s a heavy, ornate desk at the heart of the room with a mess of sketches strewn across it. A mannequin poses in front of the desk, a half-finished skirt of midnight velvet clinging to its waist. Hesitantly, she drifts closer, picking up the parchment at the top of the stack.

The nausea rears its head again. The back of her throat burns. She drops the pages, as if burnt by them, and leaves the room briskly. She shoves into the door on the other side of the hall.

Well, she won’t be spoiled for choice. Inside the closet -- which is the same size as the vestibule itself -- hang dozens upon dozens of glittering gowns, slinky shifts, and low-cut garments of every shade and sheen. Those that resemble anything modest are adorned in swirling, shimmering embellishments. Her fingers graze several gowns as she passes, sure all that lace has to itch something awful. But everything she touches practically melts into her fingers.

She frowns, her mind racing. Surely he doesn’t…make all these himself? He hardly seems the sort to be bothered with labor.

The hairs on the back of her neck prickle with unease. A figure lurks in her periphery. She spins about to face the intruder, stomach lurching.

It’s…only another mannequin. The groan of relief she lets out sounds more like a growl. Her glare gradually softens as she studies the rather imposing figure poised at the center of the room. The wood is painted -- she recognizes the shade of bluish lilac. The mannequin wears a pristine set of scale mail and leather armor. She recognizes the colors of the dyed leather, too: deep burgundy, and bright turquoise. Just like the bedding in the other chamber. There’s even an ivory wig atop its head, braided back into a bun. Sheepishly, she tucks her own damp hair behind her ears.

This is supposed to be her. Unless it isn’t, and her vampire just has a fetish for a particular look of drow. Vaguely, she recalls stories of another vampire -- Strahd -- with a similar obsession. That might explain all the sketches of her in his sewing room.

But then, Astarion hasn’t called her by any other name. And those colors happen to be her favorite. They remind her of home. Of simmering hot springs, colorful stalactites, and bright mushrooms. They’re the most frequent colors among the many garments surrounding her.

There’s a second mannequin, clad in decorative leathers. They’re not as ostentatious as what Astarion, apparently, wears on most days. Practical, but still pretty, with a ruffled collar and sleeves. The other side of the room seems to house Astarion’s clothes. It’s hard to say which side has more.

She finds smallclothes in a polished dresser near the mannequins. Though, there seem to be sparingly few to choose from. And what choices she has leave sparingly little to be desired. Strangely, in her search for underwear, she encountered drawer after drawer filled with evening gloves. The vampire has strange priorities.

Sighing, she shifts through several selections on the racks, relieved to see they’re not all ball gowns. There’s a few outfits that seem suited for travel -- fine black leathers and fanned lace collars. All very vampiric. There’s a spattering of doublets and trousers, too. Similar to what Astarion wore before, but tailored for a different figure.

The rather simple dress shirt hanging between two backless numbers sticks out like a sore thumb. She pulls it from the hanger, rubbing the cream-colored fabric between her fingertips. There's a storied nature to it, written in the subtle stitches outside the seams. It must’ve been mended a time or two. The ruffled collar isn’t out of fashion per se, but seeing it among such pristine, ostentatious ensembles, it looks to be from another life entirely.

Someone else’s. Not a vampire lord, ruling from his castle. Naomi can empathize. She doesn't belong here, either. Or, maybe it's simply her bardic nature drawing her to the only garment here that seems to have any history besides hanging in wait.

The once-fine shirt is big on her, but she finds a strange sense of solidarity, of comfort, in tucking it into a pair of too-long, belted leather trousers, and tightening the criss-crossing strings across the breast for some semblance of modesty.

And not a moment too soon. She feels the quiet knock on the door like it's pounding against her own ribs. Naomi staggers hastily into the narrow hall, a sudden flurry of nerves leaving her lightheaded.

Astarion surveys her from the open archway into the bedroom, her own bloody handprints paving a path across the rug between them. It shouldn’t surprise her that he’s already entered the room soundlessly. That he’s already there, awaiting her. Still, her stomach flips as their eyes meet. His wide ones match the carmine color of the stains she left.

And, somehow, he looks to be the one startled by the sight of her.

“You--”

His eyes scan her up and down, his jaw slack for a moment before he collects it from the floor.

“You sweet, sweet thing.”

His smirk blooms into a full, sharp-toothed smile. Naomi blinks feverishly. It’s like the clothes she chose dissolve altogether beneath his hooded gaze. She crosses her arms over her chest, abruptly uncrossing them as she realizes the motion only offered him better view of her breasts and why did she pick this thing to wear anyways, it doesn’t even fit, it--

She freezes. His stomach quivers with a chuckle she can only surmise is at her expense.

Oh no.

A/N: So, more backstory. But maybe more questions than answers for now. 👀

I am so sorry this one took me so long! I switched gears for a while to work on another fic, Dhampir Dreams (go check it out if you need a fix of breeding smut!), and then life got hectic. This chapter ended up splitting in half on me so the good news is, I already have a bit of the next one written!

More time with Astarion coming next chapter. And then an Astarion POV chapter after that. 👀 HUGE thank you to my beloved @amoremagnificentbastard for doing a final read-through, being just a fountain of support, and an overall stellar human who I am blessed to call friend.

Thanks for reading, I hope life is being kind to you!

#fic recs #NEW CHAPTER NEW CHAPTER NEW CHAPTER

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