#Astar'dra

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Astar'dra:

Astarion: Right, now to maintain this seduction and manipulate her feelings so she'll never betray me.

Triel, like day three:

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Screaming, crying, throwing up, etc, etc ;w; aaHHHHHH

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Such a handsome couple <3

Triel's got her game face on and Astarion is like "Shit, we're helping people again, aren't we?"

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Astarion: Hello, beautiful~

cuts to my Tav:

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Got to THAT scene. She's so happy look at her face ahHHH (she loves him so much. Completely smitten)

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Six Sentence Sunday 4/28

Acting, subterfuge, these things didn’t come naturally to Triel, but with a bit of encouragement she’d tried. The goblins were none too swift, not sharp enough to catch the way she winced every time one called her mistress, the hard swallow before she issued a command, the bile she bit back whenever she played in to their view of her as some depraved torturer and pointed her straight to their prisoners, too stupid to notice the loathing in her eyes was for them.  Deception may not be her forte, but stealth was. She was content to breeze past them, let them go about their horrible business— the roasted dwarf had given her pause, but she’d controlled herself, let them be, and kept on her way. She’d been perfectly content to lure the goblin priestess away to dispatch her quietly.  Which is why it should probably have struck Astarion as odd when she’d reacted as she did to the halfling. 

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Corpses on Ice

Read on AO3 Can't Help Where I Come From (2/2) Words: 3,537 Summary: Try as he might, Astarion just can't get away from his family. Triel'dra does what she can to help. A restless night at the Last Light Inn, an unwelcome reunion at the Elfsong Tavern (Astarion x Tav, Acts 2 & 3)

<- Chapter 1: Shakes in the Night

It’s just as the last wisp of black smoke dissipates that Karlach thunders in, sizzling mad, with nothing but her smallclothes and a battleaxe raised over her head. 

“Wha’s happening? Where are they?” She’s still blinking sleep from her wild eyes as she takes in the Elfsong’s overturned furniture and splatters of blood, ready to cleave whatever threat’s roused her in two. 

“They’re gone, Karlach,” Shadowheart yawns. The cleric is spent, woken abruptly after a long day of searching for Jaheira’s friend, hunting for clown chunks, and fighting (doppelgangers, redcaps… crabs. So many crabs). They’re all exhausted, the party that had ventured away from the inn’s magic all but run dry when the fight had begun.  “Astarion’s siblings just paid us a visit.” 

“Oh,” the tiefling relaxes, a visible cloud of steam sighing off her vented shoulders as she lowers her weapon, seeming at once concerned for a friend and disappointed to have missed a fight as she looks Astarion over from across the room. “You ok, Fangs?” 

He isn’t. Or, at least, he doesn’t seem to be, not from where Triel’dra is standing. He hums something affirmative, distracted, but her surface-elf’s brow is creased, mouth tight as he watches a dim glow sputter at her fingertips where the last dregs of her magic fail to close the ragged punctures torn into her shoulder. That seems to be when Karlach notices them, too. 

“Oh, fuck, Soldier!” 

“I am fine. It is nothing a rest won’t fix.” The carpets are another story. She hopes Gale has some means to magic all this blood away, or the proprietors of the Elfsong are going to be very unhappy.

Triel abandons her failing reserves of magic in favour of clamping down on the injury with her good hand. It’s not the injury— she’d barely felt it, and Astarion seems unimpaired, despite the ring that protects her. It’s the wounds themselves. They won’t stop bleeding, and her arm is numb from the shoulder down.  They’re familiar feelings, but… more so. The same properties, weaponized rather than carefully mitigated. 

Jaheira is stretching out stiff muscles, returning her attention to the supplies she’d overturned in her haste to grab her scimitars and leap into the fray. Her own natural magic was spent as well, though her blades were more than enough to fend off the intruding vampire spawn. 

“Shit, you sure, Soldier?” Karlach’s molten eyes dart between the depleted spellcasters as she inventories their assets. “Hells, I’ll wake up the big guy, gimme a sec, yeah?” 

If the wood-elf hasn’t already woken, he’s dreaming, and if he’s dreaming he’s visiting with Thaniel and Oliver. 

“It’s fine, Karlach, let Halsin rest. A potion will take care of this; I have plenty.”  She smiles at her friend, grateful, trying to appreciate the concern for what it is. Her usual course of action would be to sleep off anything less than life-threatening, but…. As Triel looks around the room, it’s all tired faces and worry over the blood seeping from between her fingers. She’s learning. Taking care of herself isn’t selfish; it’s for them. 

She would expect Astarion to be pleased with her concession, but when she looks up to search his eyes they’re unreadable. He’s smiling, his voice too high and bright as he ever so carefully sets a hand on her waist and shepherds her towards the washtub in the corner. 

It’s not just her arm, now. Her head’s gone foggy. 

He’s making a joke, the performative kind he doesn’t mean. She can tell from the cadence even if the Common is slipping by her, something lascivious between him and Shadowheart as she hands him a corked bottle, something about clothes and privacy.  

Oh. Yes, privacy. 

The tub is empty, but there’s a wooden folding screen, a stool, a basin of fresh water. Somewhere they can be away from prying eyes, and she can’t stop bleeding. She’d offered him a feeding that evening, and he hadn’t gotten to it yet when his siblings had arrived. 

“What a mess,” Astarion says, his smile a bit too tight, voice clipped, as he sits her on the stool. “Well, at least you’ve met my family, now.” He pulls the folding screen across the floor to hide them from the others. She can hear movement down the hall, creaking floorboards and muffled voices. She can just make out Karlach trying to get everyone up to speed. 

Yeah, it’s over, but uh, shit, we’ve had company.

“May I?” Astarion draws back her hazy focus, looking at her meaningfully and she nods, go ahead. He takes careful hold of the fabric of her shirt and sets to gingerly peeling the blood-soaked fabric from her skin. 

This should hurt. It just feels cold, like the first time Astarion had fed on her. 

Her shirt falls to the ground with a damp thud. 

“I can fix that,” he assures her, that too-bright edge still in his voice. “Would you believe I’m remarkably good at getting out bloodstains? That it looks like you’ve been chewed on by a rabid animal will take a bit more work, but nothing a little darning won’t solve.” 

It’s not the first time Astarion’s deft fingers have helped her out of her clothes. This is different. The whole situation is different, but still a part of her worries that he minds, searches for any hint of discomfort. If he cares that her top is off he makes no sign of it, singularly focused on the two tears still seeping blood down her arm. 

Perhaps it’s just whatever it is in a vampire’s bite that makes her go numb and untethered, but Triel’dra just feels… comfortable. The cold is spreading, from a leaded pins-and-needles feeling to a deeper chill, the feverish kind left by potent necromancy. It should be unnerving; she feels wrong, but Astarion has her, and so everything is alright. She lets her head fall back against the wall and waits, arm proffered, for him to drink his fill. 

He’s been talking all the while, she realises as her mind drifts, like slipping into a sickly reverie. He’s switched to Elvish for her, easier to follow than Common, at least slightly more private as long as neither Halsin or Shadowheart is eavesdropping. 

“—and honestly, darling, for all I know he just had a sewer rat in his mouth, let alone all these torn threads shoved in. You’re mortal, you have to worry about this sort of thing if you can’t just burn it all away with holy whatever—” 

He’s not feeding yet. 

Astarion has taken off his jacket and set it, folded neatly, to one side. He rolls up his sleeves— all splattered with her blood, she notes with a pang, that looks like nice fabric and she can just hear her brother lamenting it— Gods, she misses Rhyl’fein, she misses all of them— 

Astarion kneels beside the stool, and Triel’dra nudges her shoulder at him, prompting. Careful hands take the injured limb, but it’s not the press of his lips she feels but the cool damp of a wet cloth.  

Oh. 

“You are not hungry?” 

Astarion raises his eyebrows as he wrings out the bloodied cloth in the basin. “Loathed as I am to turn you down, my sweet, I think you’ve had enough for one night.” 

She tries to smile at him. Her teeth are chattering. “I am already going to be woozy in the morning. You might as well.”

“Darling, if I take any more you won’t get up in the morning.” 

That crease is back between his eyebrows as he works at her wounds, carefully fishing bits of her sleeve from the torn flesh. Astarion is troubled. Of course he is. 

“I know they are not your siblings as mine are, and I am not overfond of people who steal into camp at night to take you away.” A flicker of red eyes, a muscle works in his jaw.  “But still… They are also victims of Cazador’s. if you complete this ritual, they will all die.”  

She doesn’t know them, can’t pretend to understand any of his life before the nautiloid. An uneasy feeling stirs in her chest whenever he mentions this rite, at the wicked gleam it puts into his eyes. She’s made her feelings known.  It isn’t her place to interfere, and she had kept quiet as he misled the other doomed spawn, but it seems worthy of a deeper discussion, now. 

His mouth twitches, a momentary grimace of displeasure, but Astarion sighs. It seems he was anticipating this, and not looking forward to it. 

“Trust me, darling. What they have isn’t living, and Cazador will never free them, whatever he says. I’m the only one with a chance, and I mean to take it.” He wrings the cloth out again. “And besides, there’s only six of them…. Hardly a drop in the bloodbath of our body count—” a humourless little smirk tugs at his lips, close to a snarl. “And I have to kill Leon now anyway, so really it’s only five.” 

“Which one is Leon?”  

Astarion looks up from his work, from so carefully tending her wounds: two semicircles of torn flesh between her clavicle and shoulder, the  flow of blood from the two deepest punctures finally beginning to ebb. “The one who bit you.” 

Ah. The one with the long dark hair. He’d lunged for her neck, his eyes black and vacant, and though she’d managed to twist away in time to save her throat, he’d latched on to her so tightly even his blunt human teeth had broken skin. She hadn’t been able to shake him free, not until Astarion had come at him with a sword in each hand and he’d been forced to retreat. Or evaporate. Been summoned? However it was they had fled back to Cazador. 

“I don’t relish the thought that one of my siblings is still out there with a taste for you. If he thinks he can come back for seconds— shit! Shit, sorry, darling,” Astarion’s brow is furrowed, fury seeping into his voice, but it vanishes abruptly when he finally gets a hold on a deeply embedded scrap of her shirt and she winces as he lifts it free. He dabs gently at the last of the blood seeping from the now clear wound, an apology. Triel is so tired, and she leans into the care of his touch. His hands are careful but his jaw is tight.  “He won’t have had blood like yours before, and who knows if he’ll be able to control himself. They are only vampire spawn.”

She frowns at that, fights heavy eyelids to meet his ruby gaze. “I happen to…” Triel’dra takes a breath, the word dies on her lips. She’s dizzy. Gently, Triel. Slowly. He needs to take things slowly. “I happen to care very deeply for a vampire spawn, thank you very much.” His face is unreadable, her heart does a nervous  flip. “Astarion,  we could help them—”

“Why?” he snaps, with an audible click of sharp teeth. “No one ever looked out for me. No one ever had a kind thing to say to me.” 

She startles at how quickly the response comes. A thought, a rumination, fully formed, sitting and stewing and long desperate to leap free. 

Triel was born in The Year of Shadows; she is one hundred and thirty-four. 

Two hundred years. Her entire lifetime and then some, suffering. She feels her stomach churn whenever she thinks of it, imagining every second of her life in torment, drawing on the things he's told her and the depths of Menzoberranzan cruelty passed down in stories by her elders. Imagining Astarion, alone and afraid, battered and used, his mind and body someone else’s plaything. 

Triel’dra swallows the lump in her throat. They’re his tears, his pain. She has no right to them. 

The rage in Astarion’s eyes fades as quickly as it came. He blinks it away, his expression softening as he looks down at her, then seems to remember what he was doing. “You’re the only one,” he admits, softly, before taking the potion bottle and uncorking it with his teeth, presses it into her good hand, encourages it to her lips.  “Other people don’t have a heart like you. You’re— drink up, Moonflower, there you are— you’re… you.”  He gestures helplessly and looks at her with a familiar kind of desperation as words fail him, not quite managing to convey whatever it is in his mind. He takes another breath, just to steady himself. “No one is like that,” he insists. 

Blessed Elistraee, how she wants to take him home with her. To take his hand and introduce him to her people, to her family. Her parents, who she’s sure would welcome him as one of their own once they know he’s safe, once they know what this lost child of the Seldarine has endured. Ardulune who is kinder and gentler than she could ever be will love him at once. Her little nieces, who will love his wit and flair for troublemaking…. her brothers, who will come around in time, she’s sure. 

She won’t bring it up again. It’s not what he wants. He wants the surface, this city, the sun— but her heart aches to bring him to her enclave where he would be safe. “I am not special, Astarion,” she says instead, laying her head on his shoulder. “There are so many good people in the world. Look how many we’ve brought with us. They all care for you.” She looks towards the folding screen, to the rest of the suite hidden beyond it. “I am sorry you have been alone for so long. I know it does not undo the past, but we are all here for you, now. One way or another, however things end….” She cranes her neck to look up as best she can resting against him like this. “If there is still a world when this is through, you will have a home in it. I swear to you.” 

Astarion is quiet for a worrying moment. His jaw works at words that don’t come, his throat bobs. Finally he shakes his head, and gently extricates himself from her embrace. She’s only dimly aware of the pathetic little sound she makes in complaint. “Right, then, darling. Let’s get you back to bed.” 

Triel looks down at herself. The blood has been cleaned away, the wounds closed and fading. They’ll be little more than a memory by daybreak. 

“Can’t put you back in that.” He’s folding his jacket over his arm, businesslike, as he gracefully slips past the wooden partition. “Which do you want?” 

He’s gone by the time she realises what he’s asking. 

“The grey one—?” 

“Got it.” She hears in reply from the other side. He knows where her pack is, where she keeps things, and returns a moment later with a clean shirt. 

She pulls it on. The linen is warm against her skin, but does nothing for the chill inside. She’s dizzy as she stands, but finds a solid body ready when she instinctively reaches out. Astarion is at her side, steady. He keeps his arm around her long after she needs it. 

There’s a quiet cheer from her companions at the other side of the room when she emerges, and she smiles at them. Jaheira nods at her from her perch, cross legged on her bed.  Shadowheart is already fast asleep. 

“Ah, Darling?” Astarion stops her when she pulls away towards her own bunk. “Stay with me tonight, won’t you?” 

She nods, all too happy to be led to his corner of the room. 

They haven’t shared a bed since making their camp in this inn. The tent was cozy, private. It wasn’t exactly a secret that he was feeding on her at night, that they spent their rest curled up together, but it was another thing to do out in  the open for the rest of the party to see. 

There’ll be wolf whistles and wry jokes in the morning. 

He doesn’t want to be alone. 

“In case they come back?” She asks, and Astarion nods, his grip on her waist a bit tighter. 

“Yes, my sweet. Precisely.” 

Astarion sits her on the edge of his bed, draping a pile of sheets over her shoulders as he goes about gathering his weapons from where they’re abandoned across the floor, stops before retrieving the Phalar Aluve for her. 

“This thing isn’t going to…. Oh, I don’t know, smite me if I pick it up, is it?” 

She shakes her head fondly and he slides it across the floor with a careful tap of his foot until it’s within a comfortable distance. She knows how he feels about the gods, probably doesn’t want to hear again how Elistraee would love him, drow or not. 

“Asta?” 

“Hm?” He’s arranged his armaments to his satisfaction and has moved to his clothing. He doesn’t look up as he rifles through his pack for a shirt not covered in blood. 

Shadowheart is asleep, as is Jaheira, seemingly, though it’s difficult to tell with the spymaster. She keeps her voice low just the same. 

“He is wrong about you, you know. Leon.” 

Astarion freezes, impossibly still, as only one who doesn’t need to breathe can be. Through the feverish haze Triel is afraid she’s made a mistake, but he needs to hear it. She can’t bear to let him think she agreed. 

“Petras complained about eating dogs; you were given rats.” Nothing but a flicker of glowing red eyes. “He starved you, kept your siblings better fed.” 

Finally a movement, his shoulders heaving as he draws in a breath to sigh. “Yes, darling, thank you for reminding me. We’ve established that I was Cazador’s favourite chew toy.” 

Triel shakes her head. “He kept you weaker. You were harder to control.” 

“That—” he bites off whatever he was about to say with an audible snap of his teeth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I—” he turns to her fully, and the agony in his eyes makes her heart drop into the icy pit of her stomach. 

“Don’t make me out to be something I’m not. I disobeyed Cazador once,” he says, voice trembling until it breaks and comes out as less than a whisper, the shape of a word. “Once.”  

Once, Triel would bet her life, was more than any of the others. More, from her understanding, than should have been possible. 

She hadn’t meant to hurt him like this. She’d been trying to bolster his resolve, not dredge up the things that haunted him at night. “I am sorry,” she says, shrugging the blankets off her shoulders, and trying to get back to wobbly feet to slink back to her own bed. 

Astarion instead forgets his search for a new shirt and simply tosses the bloodied one aside, stopping her with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Stay.”

It’s a question, not an order, a fragile plea. 

“Always, if you will have me.” 

She likes the beds at the Elfsong, likes the walls she can curl up against to feel secure and hidden as she rests. She waits for him to get in first, snug against the bed’s sides, and she slips beneath the sheets after, placing herself between Astarion and anything that may come for him in the night. 

Triel’dra feels herself sinking the moment she lays down, her eyelids heavy. She could fight like this, if she had to, she’s certain. She tries to stand again just to prove she can, but instead lets out a muffled groan in complaint as Astarion bundles her in a blanket to protect her from the chill of his body, and pulls her into his arms. 

No! She wants to say something, but all she can manage is a petulant wiggle. She can’t get up like this, not quickly. 

Oh, but it’s warm. It’s warm, and soft, and he’s holding her. 

Triel is so cold, and so tired. This is a losing battle and she’s already drifting. She can’t open her eyes, can’t speak, but she can pray as she slips away, as she feels him settle behind her. 

Lady of dreams, watch over us as I sleep. 

Dark Maiden, protect him from those who would enslave him again. 

She’s long past the point of no return when he whispers against her ear, so deep she can’t pull herself back, but just awake enough to hear him. 

“I’m not selling my soul for calamari and sunshine. I’m doing this for you too, you know. To make sure we’re both safe.”

She won’t remember this in the morning, and she can’t answer. Can’t tell him that she wants him safe, but more than that she wants him himself. That she’ll protect him to her dying breath, just as he is. 

That she loves him, just as he is. 

“Forever,”  he says against the shell of her ear. His breath hitches, again, but still his voice is set with grim determination. “For good.” 

Triel’dra can’t remember her dreams that night, but she wakes with an ache she can’t explain in her heart and tears staining her pillow.

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S O F T

Welp, time to meet the in-laws.

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Shakes in the Night

Read on AO3 Can't Help Where I Come From (1/2) Words: 2,923 Summary: Try as he might, Astarion just can't get away from his family. Triel'dra does what she can to help. A restless night at the Last Light Inn, an unwelcome reunion at the Elfsong Tavern (Astarion x Tav, Acts 2 & 3) Chapter 2: Corpses on Ice ->

No, no not again. 

Astarion grits his teeth against the pain, somehow just as real as the night it had happened. 

He knows, beneath the memory playing out behind his eyelids, that this is not real. He is in a bed at the Last Light Inn, his travelling companions around him for one last night in relative comfort before setting out on the road for Baldur’s Gate. 

They killed a demigod today, he’d say they deserve it. 

But no, he can never rest, can he? The shadows are always calling, Cazador always waiting in the recesses of his mind, needle in hand. He feels each cut,  can hear the condescending tuts whenever a spasm of pain overcame him, and Cazador had to begin an alleged stanza anew. 

He knows better now, knows what it is. The infernal runes fill him with a sense of revulsion and hope all at once.  It’s valuable, something Cazador needs, and that’s leverage— but he remembers what the devil had said about hope, and that his master’s claim on him goes as deep as his soul makes his skin crawl. 

A groan slips free as the echo of Cazador’s knife carves another shape he was never going to be able to read into his shoulder. 

A sound catches him, something real, and drags him from his poisoned reverie. He can feel it waiting for him, as it always does. The moment he lets himself drift, Cazador will pick up where he left off, ready with more patronising chastisements for failing to keep still. 

There it is again. A floorboard creaks, once, then again. Someone trying not to sneak up on him, and he knows even before he hears her voice that it’s Triel’dra. 

“Astarion?” she creeps up carefully, mindful of stabbing distance lest she startle him. 

He mumbles something to acknowledge her. 

“You were… thrashing, again.” 

He rolls over and is greeted by her mismatched eyes, the one she was born with gleaming in the dark, bright as a cat’s. 

“It was…?” She cocks her head, gestures over her shoulder. 

He mumbles an assenting sound. “No helping it, I’m afraid. I could get up, read, sew, doesn’t matter. As soon as I go back to my trance, it will continue. Best to just let it play out and be done with it.” 

The bright-eyed shadow sways, almost playfully. “Are you hungry?”

Astarion raises an eyebrow. “A pity feeding? Really?”

There’s a breathy sound as she laughs, and sits down where he shifts to make room for her. “Kethric’s revenants were inedible. You must be starving.” 

“We’re going to be on the road all day tomorrow.” 

“Exactly. I am very good at travelling long distances. You have been very vocal about your opinions on walking.” 

“Cheeky little—”  Astarion can’t keep the grin from his face as he pounces. It’s a well practised movement that sweeps her into bed, pinned beneath him, but it feels different. 

She’s beautiful in the darkness, this being of shadow and moonlight smiling up at him in a way he still can’t believe is real. 

He kisses her. 

Triel’dra’s arms drape over his shoulders as she returns the kiss. She enjoys this, and it’s… sweet. Gentle and unhurried and never more than what it is, never leading anywhere. Never a prelude to more. 

She kisses him on the cheek almost absently as they sit together, pulls him aside to drink the blood splattered across her face after a battle. Frantic, desperate kisses as she heals him when he’s downed. She always pauses a moment— a question, a chance to refuse. 

He’s still waiting for her to come to her senses. 

She offers him her throat, instead. 

This is its own kind of seduction, he supposes, but it never stirs up those same feelings, the revulsion and shame, losing himself as he slips into habit. He doesn’t have a script for this, never did this with any of his victims. 

This is new; this is theirs.  

Astarion kisses his way down her jaw, along her neck as she lays her head back to offer it to him, sighing, breath hitching at his attention. He has this down to an art: where to bite and as gently as possible, how much he can take, when to stop so the wound will close well. They have to be quiet not to wake the others, so she swallows a gasp as he breaks the skin, her fingers through his hair. 

It truly is a gift. Something she gives freely, because she cares for him, impossible as it seems. She shares her strength, her warmth, her life, and he endeavours to make it as sweet as he can, in return. Something intimate they share, not just to spite the phantom Cazador that lives inside him, to prove that he can.  

Astarion breaks away, careful of the wounds on her neck, careful to let them stabilise before he laps up the drops left behind. “My sweet, sweet little love,” he whispers, breathless, feeling practically alive, pulling back to look at her, to stroke her silver hair. She looks up at him fondly, heavy eyelids fluttering. He takes just enough to sate himself,  but that’s still enough to exhaust her. “Thank you.” 

Triel rolls over to make room for him beside her, and curled up on his chest they just fit together in the single bed. That’s the other way feeding is like sex: she likes to be held afterwards, clinging like a little bat, and he’s happy enough to let her. It’s the least he can do. 

She’ll go back to her own bed, soon enough, before the others wake. But for now, Triel’dra’s head rests where his still heart must be, the slow rise and fall of her chest lulling him back to his reverie. 

Where Cazador and his needle are waiting. 

He wants to scream. Wants to scream, and gnash his teeth, and spit curses, but he can’t because he didn’t. He trembled, and sobbed and whimpered, and he’d be lying if he said it was just the memory of the fear he’s feeling. It’s still there, same as it ever was. 

“Asta!”

Triel’dra is calling him, her voice hushed but urgent. He’s aware of her in his reverie, of both the past and the present, of Cazador’s disdain in one ear and Triel’s concern in the other. She’s shaking him, gently. 

Loathed as he is, he focuses on Cazador, fights to grit his teeth and get the ordeal over with. He’s congratulating himself on his prose now, the lying bastard. 

“Astarion, wake up!” 

There’s nothing else in the room, no rushed panic as people clamber for arms, no screaming. He thinks he can dimly hear Karlach snoring in the distance; nothing is amiss.  Still, Triel’dra is so persistent, he opens his eyes. He groans, the phantom pain receding. “Hmm. Yes, darling?” 

“It just keeps going?” She hovers above him, propped on her elbow, precariously close to the edge of the bed. “I have had an idea. May I see your back?”

“No!” He startles himself with that. It comes out reflexively, before thought, and something within him recoils, centuries of hardwon lessons telling him: yes, always yes. 

But Triel’dra’s expression doesn’t change, save perhaps an apologetic dip of her eyebrows. “Of course,” she whispers, no less warmth in her voice than before.  “I am sorry to have woken you.” And with that, she carefully shimmies back down into the sheets, adjusts herself to snuggle back around him. 

That instinctual knot in his chest loosens. Of course, he knows Triel’dra would never force him to do anything. But knowing and believing are different, and it’s only after realising he truly can say no that he begins to contemplate a maybe. 

“Why?”

“The marks on your back. They are essentially a wheel and spoke pattern. I think, perhaps… Could I show you? May I touch?”

Hesitantly, Astarion shifts aside, turns over so his scars are towards her. He trusts her, but he’s taught as a bowstring, the word stop ready on his lips. 

Warm hands rutch his shirt up towards his shoulders, and ever so gently, she traces a line, feather light, across a long line from one side of the pattern to the other. 

“She lays a bridge thread, first…” Triel’dra’s voice is soft and melodic. “Then she puts down anchor lines…” Triel traces what must be long lines of scar tissue, he remembers three that stretch towards the small of his back. Astarion shivers, and she pauses. 

“Go on.” He says. He’s reminding himself to breathe, something fearful flutters in his ribcage, but he doesn’t want her to stop. 

It’s when she begins to spiral between the spokes, laying traces of her fingers over the runes, that he realises what she’s drawing. 

“What is it with you and spiders?” He manages a weak laugh, hoping it hides the tremor. 

“The Spider Queen,” Triel begins, and he can just imagine the look of distaste she makes. “Is a tyrant who demands cruelty and betrayal of her followers and the antithesis of all that is good and holy. Spiders are fascinating creatures. Actual spiders, mind you, not Lolth’s monstrosities.” 

She’s mentioned the distinction before. Astarion isn’t sure where that line is, only that she has strong feelings about it and he isn’t going to argue with a drow about Spiders. 

She begins to trace the same pattern, back again the way she came. It tickles, gently, and as she goes his breath comes easier beneath her hands, though he’s trying to ignore the hot sensation prickingling at the corners of his eyes. 

He’s intimately familiar with pain and humiliation. Tenderness is still overwhelming. 

“This is what I imagine when I trance,” she continues, dreamily, lulling herself along with him. “A spider building her web, strand by strand. And then she eats it and starts again. Over, and over… Dextrous and beautiful and clever, with their thread,” she trails off almost shyly, and then, so softly he nearly misses it, she says, “like you.”  

Astarion’s heart is purely ornamental, but something in his chest swells and catches in his throat and it shows in his voice. “Why are you doing this?” 

“I thought it might help? To have something tangible to focus on.” 

That’s not what he was asking. 

What are you getting from this? 

“It does,” he says instead, and pleased, she continues, encouraging him back into his reverie. 

Fear and helplessness still turn his stomach. It still burns as Cazador slices the shapes into his flesh, the panicked instinct is still there, to run, to get away, maddening as he’s held in place by terror and compulsion. But the pain is tempered. Beneath it, alongside the agony, he feels Triel’s fingertips, warm and gentle, and realer than the knife. As his master hacks ugly deals with the hells into his skin, he imagines instead the delicate orbweaver lace. 

Along with the horror there’s another feeling that’s hard to name. 

Cazador’s pretentious diatribe continues, but Astarion isn’t listening. Triel is humming under her breath, that same hymn she likes, the one to her drow goddess of freedom, and moonlight, and love. 

There’s a lump in his throat and tears on his cheeks, but he’s not sure if it’s in spite of her help or because of it, not sure which is harder to endure. Suffering is at least familiar. Either way, it’s… it’s different. Evidence that things can be changed, that the lurking ghost of Cazador in his mind is not all-powerful. 

Astarion isn’t sure how long it goes on, how long she sits with him, but at some point, the memory must fade or conclude because there is, at last, sweet restful nothing.  ***

Something is wrong. 

Astarion rolls over, reaching for where Triel should be, curled beside him in the nest of blankets and pillows they’ve made on the tent floor. She sleeps more soundly than he trances; it’s near-impossible for her to leave without him knowing. 

The camp is quiet, the tent dark, the rush of the Chionthar soft in the distance. 

The vampire furrows his brow, rubs at his eyes, and gets to his feet, pushing aside the flap of his tent to peer out into the campsite. 

Astarion freezes. Icy cold floods his veins as the warmth of Triel’s blood drains away, his stomach plummeting. 

Cazador Szarr stands between him and the dying campfire. Astarion doesn’t need to count to know that there are six pairs of red eyes gleaming in the darkness behind him. 

Triel’dra’s body hangs limply where Cazador clutches her neck, eyes dull, blood long since still where it’s poured from her open throat. 

The dagger she keeps under her pillow is stuck where it fell in the blood-soaked dirt. 

“There you are, my lost son.” He smiles in a way that promises retribution. “All is set right. The under-elf won’t keep you from your family any longer.” With that, he tosses Triel’dra’s lifeless form aside, easily as a child’s toy, and his siblings descend upon it like a pack of starving wolves. 

Astarion wants to scream, wants to run. Wants to lunge at Cazador or wrest what’s left of Triel from his siblings’ jaws, but he’s rooted to the spot, eyes wide, voice gone, even as Cazador strides closer. 

Revulsion fills him but he can’t flinch away as his master reaches forward to lay a claiming hand upon his cheek, to fist his hand in Astarion’s hair and drag his face up to look at him, red eyes sharp as his teeth and filled with indignant rage. “Come along, boy. Time to go home.” 

*** 

Astarion awakes with a jolt, eyes wide, sheets plastered to his cooling body with cold sweat when he moves. He reaches frantically to the other side of the bed, and feels his stomach turn when they find nothing but empty mattress beside him. 

Finally, panting for air he doesn’t need, he wakes fully, and takes in his surroundings. The Last Light Inn is still dark and quiet, moonlight pooled across the dingey floors where windows and holes in the ceiling let it through. 

The bed beside him is empty, but there’s a lump at his feet that stretches and pads towards him. Evidently, Triel had left her familiar on biscuit duty, because Erelae slinks over once he’s stopped flailing and climbs on to his lap to purr and knead at his stomach with her paws. 

Triel is safe. Triel must be safe, because if something had happened to her, the cat wouldn’t be here. Also, because of course she’s fine, it was a stupid dream. He’s not even supposed to have those. All of a sudden he sleeps, like a child who hasn’t learned how to quiet their mind yet. 

Too much time connected to non-elves, he concludes. Or to Triel’dra. That she does this to herself voluntarily on a nightly basis is insane, and her useless Lady of Dreams has never once made it worth her while. 

He slumps back into bed with an irritable sigh, trying to ignore the persistent little fey creature nuzzling at him and purring. He raises a hand, absently, and the cat rams her little head against it, demanding scratches. 

This is ridiculous. He just needs to go back to his reverie. Triel is fine. It was nothing but a figment of his imagination. The room is undisturbed, everyone still asleep. He doesn’t need to check on her. 

He doesn’t. 

Astarion gets up, which pushes the cat aside with an indignant chirp, and gets to his feet, Erelae silent behind him as he sneaks over to the other beds. 

He finds her safe and sound asleep in a puddle of moonlight, surprisingly on top of her bed rather than under it. It had taken them a long time to convince her that she would be more comfortable that way, even if it did leave her out in the open. Her breaths are deep and slow, on her side beneath her cloak and one of the inn’s threadbare sheets.

The hilt of a dagger is poking out between the mattress and headboard, where she could grab it in a flash if need be. 

He smiles, despite the residual adrenalin flooding his system, a potent mix of fondness and terror that he’s beginning to find familiar. He wants to reach out, like he needs to make sure she’s real, but doesn't want to wake her. 

Her familiar has no such compunctions and the silver tabby leaps onto the bed.

Triel’dra stared down an avatar of Death today without flinching. Now, she opens her arms just enough for the cat to wriggle into her embrace, mumbling contentedly in her sleep as she snuggles her purring familiar close. 

Gods, this is what it is to care for someone, isn’t it? This tender agony, this fear. 

Still he sees two things, at once, the real and the phantasmal. Triel’dra sleeping peacefully in a warm bed, Triel’dra’s blood pooled in the dirt at Cazador’s feet while he can do nothing but watch. 

As lovely as it was to pretend, the thing slashed into his skin is not a spider’s web. They are, as they always were, the jagged mess of infernal runes. A piece of a contract with an archfiend, eternal and binding. 

He is going to make Cazador regret giving him something so powerful, and assuming he’d be too meek, to stupid to use it. 

Astarion has the means now, and he will never be helpless again. 

[Next]

[strawbattyshortcake]

WIP Wednesday

“The marks on your back. They are essentially a wheel and spoke pattern. I think, perhaps… Could I show you? May I touch?”

Hesitantly, Astarion shifts aside, turns over so his scars are towards her. He trusts her, but he’s taught as a bowstring, the word stop ready on his lips. 

Warm hands rutch his shirt up towards his shoulders, and ever so gently, she traces a line, feather light, between his shoulder blades. 

“She puts down a bridge thread, first…” Triel’dra’s voice is soft and melodic. “Then she lays anchor lines…” Triel traces what must be long lines of scar tissue, he remembers three that stretch towards the small of his back. Astarion shivers, and she pauses. 

“Go on,” he says. He’s reminding himself to breathe, something fearful flutters in his ribcage, but he doesn’t want her to stop. 

It’s when she begins to spiral between the spokes, laying traces of her fingers over the runes, that he realises what she’s drawing. 

“What is it with you and spiders?” He manages a weak laugh, hoping it hides the tremor.

[strawbattyshortcake]

Six Sentence Sunday 4/21

“He is wrong about you, you know. Leon.”  Astarion freezes. Impossibly still, as only one who doesn’t need to breathe can be, and through the feverish haze she’s afraid she’s made a mistake, but he needs to hear it. She can’t bear to let him think she agreed.  “Petras complained about eating dogs; you were given rats.” Nothing but a flicker of glowing red eyes. “He starved you, kept your siblings better fed.”

[strawbattyshortcake]

WIP Wednesday

“No one is like that,” Astarion insists.  Blessed Elistraee, how she wants to take him home with her. To take his hand and introduce him to her people, to her family. Her parents, who she’s sure would welcome him as one of their own once they know he’s safe, once they know what this lost child of the Seldarine has endured. Ardulune, who is kinder and gentler than she could ever be, will love him at once. Her little nieces who will adore his wit and flair for troublemaking…. her brothers who will come around in time, she’s sure.  She won’t bring it up again. It’s not what he wants. He wants the surface, this city, the sun— but her heart aches to bring him to her enclave where he would be safe. “I am not special, Astarion,” she says instead, laying her head on his shoulder. “There are so many good people in the world. Look how many we’ve brought with us."

[strawbattyshortcake]

Six Sentence Sunday 04/14

Triel is small— average, or tall, even, for a drow, from what he’s heard, but she’s the smallest of the party by half a head and the pool of questionable cave water comes up to her mid-back. Even at this distance, Astatrion can see it’s as scarred and freckled as the rest of her. She pauses, wringing out her hair— wet and unbound it falls over her collarbones— and turns just enough to check over her shoulder, as if she’s felt his gaze on her.  Their eyes meet.  Astarion gives her a wink, and quick as a startled duck she vanishes beneath the surface.  He can’t help but chuckle to himself; he’d have taken that as standoffish, yesterday, before he’d felt her heart race beneath his teeth.

[strawbattyshortcake]

Six Sentence Sunday 04/07

Her shirt falls to the ground with a damp thud.  “I can fix that,” he assures her, that too-bright edge still in his voice. “Would you believe I’m remarkably good at getting out bloodstains? That it looks like you’ve been chewed on by a rabid animal will take a bit more work, but nothing a little darning won’t solve.”  It’s not the first time Astarion’s deft fingers have helped her out of her clothes. This is different; The whole situation is different, but still a part of her worries that he minds, searches for any hint of discomfort. If he cares that her top is off he makes no sign of it, singularly focused on the two tears still seeping blood down her arm. 

[strawbattyshortcake]

Breathing Down my Neck

Read on AO3 Awful Glad We Met Chapter 2/3

Words: 8330

Chapter 1 | Chapter 3

Harken close and beware the Vampyr. Beware its cold beauty. Beware its charm. Beware its curse. Above all, beware the pale noble, for the Vampyr cannot bear to be of the common folk….

Let no stranger into your home. If it be a friend, look upon them. Do you find them pallid and wan? See you any mark upon their neck?

Astarion cares for the gods exactly as much as they’ve ever cared for him— which is to say not at all— but evidently they have a sick sense of humour, and it figures. He snaps the book shut with as much disdain as he can muster for an inanimate object.

First chance he gets, it’s going in the fucking Chionthar. 

As of right now, it lives in disgrace, shoved beneath a stack of worthier volumes, lest the drow catch him trying to drown it, or burn it, or whatever suitably ignoble fate he can devise for the damned thing. 

If his heart beat, it would have stopped when she showed it to him, some sick game before she produced a stake— but no. No, her big silver eyes were guileless, trusting, and if it was a cruel joke as he suspects, it was being done through her. 

Astarion had kept his composure, more or less, and with quick thinking, he had at once gotten the book away from her before it could describe him any more perfectly, and won points with Triel’dra in the process. She was certainly the person whose favour he most needed, and even with a bit of a hiccup initially— mind flayers are creatures of the underdark, there was a drow skulking around on the ship, he’d made some assumptions— he’d say he was doing rather well for himself on that front. 

It’s a brilliant stroke of luck that Astarion had full day to ingratiate himself to their fearless leader (“I do not understand how that happened,” she’d admitted when he’d first called her that to her face) before they’d stumbled across Gale and then Wyll. With only Shadowheart and Lae’zel around, winning her over had been child’s play. But these two… 

He sees the way the wizard looks at her.

Fortunately for Astarion, Triel’dra does not. 

Gale had been much, much too friendly from the moment Triel had dragged him from his own faulty portal, and all too happy to launch into a nauseating list of his many, many self-reported accomplishments; however, to Gale’s disappointment and Astarion’s immense satisfaction, Triel’dra’s only follow up questions were about the cat. 

“Would you like to be a housecat, Erelae?” she’d asked the raven on her shoulder. Evidently it did, because the familiar was now trotting after her as a sleek silver tabby.

The warlock, though… Wyll Ravengard had swashbuckled his way across their path mid-battle, leaping in to defend a gaggle of cowering idiots who had led a pack of goblins right to the gates of their settlement. Astarion hadn’t worried, not at first, about this newcomer getting between him and his quarry but that was before they’d gotten inside the tiefling encampment and it had immediately become apparent that Triel’dra was also exactly the kind of incorrigible do-gooder who would stop and risk her neck for anyone with a sob story. 

When he had decided to charm a drow woman for protection, too compassionate was not a problem he had anticipated. 

The day before had been all hiking and looting and the odd reanimated skeleton, so he supposes he hadn’t had the chance to really observe her. She was difficult to read, in a way he’d taken to calling ‘resting murder face,’ a quiet stoicism and soft voice that gave little away, save perhaps a twitchy kind of wariness— when the worm in her head wasn’t interfering, anyway— and when beset by goblins and bugbears, had dispatched them with a promising, ruthless efficiency. 

And then they’d walked into a settlement full of frightened little tiefling children and she’d melted on the spot. 

She’d been visibly unsettled as soon as they’d crossed the gate, murmuring something about her conversation with what he presumed to be the tiefling leader, and had only become more distressed as they took in the chaos, white brows knit, those eerie pale eyes wide and troubled. 

Triel’dra was hesitant with people, but she’d make time for anyone who asked— and her greatest weakness was for the little ones.  

The first time Astarion had actually seen her lose her calm was after stepping away from the particularly unpleasant group of children with their miniature thieves’ guild. 

“I do not understand,” she’d said, horrified as soon as she was sure there weren’t any more tiny little devils lurking around to hear. “Why is no one watching them? Where are their parents?” 

Shadowheart had raised an incredulous eyebrow. “They’re orphans, obviously. They don’t have parents.” 

Triel had floundered for a moment, the way she does when she gets stuck translating whatever is in her head from Drow to Elvish to Common and just gestured in helpless outrage to the adults milling about, panicking and arguing and running about like headless chickens. “No one’s child is everyone’s child.”

She had looked about ready to flatten the druids who tried to keep her out of the grove, once she heard they were keeping a girl captive, and he’d had little choice but to follow after her, ready to bolt if she was suddenly beset by angry bears. 

It had been a rather impressive bit of hostage negotiation, if he’s being honest. Especially considering how much of it she had spent talking to a snake. 

But now she was fully preoccupied with the druid’s predicament and could not be diverted. 

Thus, the argument. 

“We do not have time for any of this!” Lae’zel hisses. “The gaith tadpole in your skull grows by the hour. We do not have the luxury of running errands for every being we encounter!” 

They’d returned to spend one more night at their campsite before moving on, either forward as Lae’zel wants towards wherever she thinks her Creche might be, or after these goblin cultists who have, more likely than not, already killed this Halsin person. Here they could rest, and argue without the subjects of the argument weighing in or making puppy-dog eyes. 

“I understand,” Triel’dra was considerably calmer than Lae’zel. It’s the measured response of someone who already knows what they’re going to do, arguments be damned. “But I cannot leave them. If we find the Archdruid, the circle will cease their ritual, the tieflings will be safe. Otherwise, they die.” 

“She’lak! Their fate is not our concern.” 

Astarion is inclined to agree with her. Triel’dra is an adult elf, at least one hundred, more than old enough to know the world is cruel, let alone nature, and her behaviour is in stark contrast to the whispers he’s heard about drow societies. He’s wondering if he shouldn’t look elsewhere for protection…but he’d also seen her shoot down a bugbear in the time it took the rest of them to draw weapons. 

Not to mention that one, brief glimpse of bloody murder he’d seen in her head. 

Just for an instant, between flashes of her capture and her home, he’d seen, through streaming eyes and too-bright light, another drow woman pinned beneath her as she drove a dagger down with all the vicious force her small frame belied. 

So for now, he’s retreated to his tent, thumbing through a book, keeping his thoughts to himself— and weighing his options. 

Shadowheart is allied with Lae’zel, to everyone’s amazement, though she’s after a typical healer and not whatever in the hells a githyanki decontamination involves. She’s watching the confrontation warily, keeping her distance. 

Gale is bent over a stewpot, hoping that if he stays very quiet and very, very still, he won’t be dragged into this. 

“It’s fine, Lae’zel,” Triel asserts. “I do understand our situation; I will not ask you to delay, but I am staying. I will find Halsin myself and rejoin you afterwards, if I am able.” 

“And me,” Wyll adds. He steps forward and gives the drow an approving nod. Triel smiles at him, gratefully. “The Blade of Frontiers does not abandon souls in need.” 

Oh, for fuck’s sake. 

When they’d first met, he’d been surprised to see so much of the surface in those brief glimpses into her mind. There’d been her capture, running through grey dawn forest as the nautiloid pursued, somehow tracking her beneath the canopy of the trees ahead, her only thoughts of leading it away from home. An ancient drow’s gnarled hands, revelry and prayer beneath a full moon, two figures wreathed in starfire. He knows enough to recognize worship. 

Far fewer spiders and less ritual sacrifice than he had anticipated. 

Astarion wouldn’t say he’s well-versed in drow customs or the politics of the underdark (enough to know that they’re brutal and depraved), just the bits and pieces he’s picked up in two centuries. Something something the Seldarine drove out the Spider Queen and she took her cursed followers with her into the darkness. 

Triel’dra, it seems, is among those drow who came crawling back. 

Judging by the way she shies from sunlight, they haven’t been forgiven. 

But the gods had deigned to grant her something. It may be a mere taste of the kind of sacred power Shadowheart wields, but  the silvery white fire Triel gathers in her hands had made the hair at the back of his undead neck stand up in terror all the same.  

It’s a precarious position, a vampire hiding from vampires. The drow strikes the perfect balance of holy and grounded— able to protect him but without the kind of zealotry that might target him as well, on principle. 

Astarion sighs, sets the book down carelessly, and steps from the safety of his tent awning and into the fray. “I’ll come along. The druids did say they would be very grateful if we found their missing leader…” The last thing he needs is Triel’dra going off on some heroic adventure with a fellow bleeding heart like Wyll. Where would that leave him? 

Besides, she likes him already, and charming as he may be, winning over Shadowheart promises a challenge. She narrows her eyes at him now as he declares his allegiances. 

“I am certain they would be willing to aid us if we return their leader. Perhaps in the form of healing?” Triel offers hopefully, and Shadowheart lets out a noisy breath, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Master Halsin has been studying these tadpoles for a long time, it seems.”

“You really should have led with that,” the cleric says, defeated. “Fine. Maybe the druids can help. Besides, you’ll all get killed without me.”

“Thank you,” the drow breathes as a relieved sigh, even as Lae’zel curses in Gith. “This is… this is important to me.” She falters, expectant eyes on her, and looks to Astarion. Not the way he’s used to being looked at. It’s never desire, never lingering or hungry, but if she’s looking to him for reassurance, that’s at least something. He looks curious, encouraging her to go on. “I… They are me? The Emerald Grove is…. It is very much like my home. If this happened to us, if our leader—”  her voice fails her, and she shakes her head. 

The place in her thoughts. The worshippers under the stars. 

She’s reluctant to share more, but between the three of them they’re able to get a few details out of her en route to this goblin stronghold. 

She calls their leader something that would translate like ‘Moonreader,’ a title passed from mother to daughter for generations: druids of great power who divine the will of Sehanine Moonbow through the stars. 

“Drow druids,” Astarion remarks, eyebrows raised. “Drowids?” 

“But you’re not a druid,” Shadowheart prompts, to which Triel nods and says nothing more. 

The day is strange and eventful. Something about Triel just cows everyone they come across from this Cult of the Absolute, and one look at the drow is enough to convince most that she’s with them already. It’s remarkably easy to creep through their territory, looking through the ruins of an abandoned village for anywhere they might be holding the druid captive.

Triel’dra is forever preoccupied with fresh water, and can’t pass a source without checking on it. She wanders off to investigate a well, and calls them over urgently a moment later. By the time they reach her, she’s already disappeared over the edge. 

Astarion darts to the well and peers down. It’s dry, the bottom seemingly dark stone, and Triel is looking up at him, her eyes gleaming in the darkness. “There is much down here,” she calls to him. Her voice is soft but it carries up the empty stone chute of the well. She’s used to this sort of setting. 

Astarion smiles lazily at her from above. “Well, well, well… What do we have here?” 

Triel smiles; Shadowheart threatens to shove him in. 

The well opens into a dark cavern, festooned with massive cobwebs— studded with silk-swathed figures, distinctly person-shaped. 

“Hopefully not our druid,” Astarion notes dryly. 

“No,” Triel treads forward carefully, placing each step with deliberate care as she studies the webs across the floor. “No, these are old. Some of these webs are new, so it is difficult to say if it’s been disturbed recently, but the bodies have been here for a while.”

“Phase spiders,” Wyll assesses, and the drow nods her assent. “And lots of them. Watch your steps down here.” He takes a moment to obliterate a clutch of hideous eggs with a blast from his palm. “This doesn’t seem to be part of the goblin camp.”

“We’re already down here,” Astarion sighs, glancing to the others for their assent. “Might as well take a look. Someone hid an entrance to this place; there must be something worthwhile.” 

There are, unsurprisingly, spiders. Many, many, massive, fuckoff huge spiders, and little else. He’s not sure which of them it was who stepped into the webbing and sent the things pouring in (he’s inclined to blame Wyll. Even with his expertise, and  though Triel conjured some softly glowing wisps to light his way, he’s still a human with one eye) but in an instant they’re overrun. 

Fire and distance both seem like worthwhile friends in this fight, and he sends a firebolt sizzling into a chittering beast. 

Triel’dra is nearest to him, and after getting off a few shots, she tries to hide her cat. She shoos her familiar away, but the movement catches the nearest creature’s attention and it lashes out, the cat disappearing with an indignant chirp in a wisp of grey smoke. 

Triel cries out. It’s in drow, but the distress and intonation are clearly cursing. The offending spider is too close to shoot, and she darts after it, short sword drawn, a dagger at the ready in her other hand. She’s deft with them, darting in close to slash and then out of its reach. But then it lunges forward, blinking out of existence to close an unnatural distance, and she isn’t quick enough as she throws herself out of the way. 

The spider lets out a shrill wail as its fangs graze her skin. It’s trying to sink in, pump venom into her flesh, but only manages to graze at her with the sharp points as she retreats. The fang slashes through her sleeve as she jerks back, a spray of blood sent through the air by the sharp movement. 

Astarion is caught in its path and the world stops. 

Droplets of drow blood, hot and sweet, are splattered across his face, in his hair, and there is nothing else. He can smell it. He can taste it and all at once he knows why Cazador kept this all to himself.

He’s stunned long enough for the others to notice. A flash of that bright, hateful light that makes his cursed skin crawl snaps him out of his daze as Triel blasts the spider in its horrid face with a handful of holy fire, scrambling out from beneath it. He’s not sure how she got there. 

“Astarion! Are you alright?” Triel’dra rushes over to him, close enough to feel the warmth of a healing spell already forming in her hand as she does a quick battlefield once-over. Close enough to hear her heart pounding, to smell the blood coursing through her veins just beneath her skin, still soaking the torn fabric of her tunic. 

Astarion’s mouth is watering. He swallows hard and drags his attention, kicking and screaming, from the lavender skin of her throat not protected by her leather armour. He does what he does best and forces a smile, raises his hand, and a firebolt strikesd the spider coming up behind. It collapses with a shriek, oozing venomous ichor. “Of course, darling, never better. But do watch your back, won't you?” 

Clearing out the phase spiders is a long, exhausting slog. Shadowheart gets too tangled in webs to move and has to be cut free… twice.  

“Let's see you do this in heavy plate, Astarion!” 

Finally, the creatures stop coming, the cavern free of echoing chitters and the clack of chitinous legs, nothing but the cold empty nothing and the rush of flowing water somewhere deeper inside. And Triel, being a drow dowsing rod— drowsing rod— of course, has to go find it.

A stream trickles over an outcropping to form a deep pool of dark water, and Triel kneels to examine it, then cups her hands and brings it to her lips. “It’s good,” she tells them and sets to refilling waterskins and scrubbing the dirt and blood from her face. 

“I’m not sure I trust dank cave water.” Shadowheart notes as she lowers herself to sit beside the pool, and starts the slow process of removing her armour. 

“I wouldn’t mind the rest, location aside,” Wyll adds with a weary sigh, worrying at a spider bite. He smiles at the drow, who is gleefully shaking off the cold water like a pigeon in a bird bath. “Though, perhaps ‘welcoming’ is a matter of perspective.”     

“This is the most at home I have felt in days,” Triel admits, standing, stretching, still battered and bruised despite the refreshing interlude. 

No one wants to delay, but it’s been a long day of hiking and spiders and they decide to make camp for the night. Shadowheart’s magic is exhausted, as is the ranger’s. 

“No, wait,” she says, and with a word of incantation, calls back her familiar. To everyone’s dismay, she’s chosen its form as a spider the size of a small dog. She beams at it, lovingly. “Now I am out of magic.” 

Astarion takes his time, keeps his distance, as the others wash and settle, making a fire, passing around the satchel with their food, taking turns washing up in the pool. 

He’s been holding his breath. He doesn’t need to breathe, it’s just a habit, just something he needs to speak— and to smell. If he doesn’t breathe he can pretend there aren’t still droplets of Triel’dra’s blood across his face. That he’s thought of anything else since it happened. 

Finally, once he’s sure no one will disturb him, he makes his way to the water. It’s icy and dark, that telltale nothing looking up at him from its surface, and after a moment of hesitation he works up the will to scrub it away. There are eyes on him. 

The evening wears on. It's impossible to keep track of time in the cavern, but his companions sit and chat and eat and he tries to do as much as needed to keep up appearances. Astarion excuses himself to his tent, picks up a book, and stares at it, unable to take in the words. 

Gods, one whiff of drow blood and he’s become the world’s most obnoxious sommelier. Full-bodied red, rich and sweet with notes of mountain spring water, night air, and blackberry. 

He needs to hunt, deluding himself that he can sate this hunger with quantity. Does anything in this damnable cavern even have blood? He can get back out into the night, into the forest, he has to find something, something with… with more thin, useless animal blood. 

There are goblins outside— that’s something— and now he’s fixated on how to be sure he gets one on its own, not be swarmed by a pack of the little bastards. And after all this, he knows, it still won’t hold a candle to Triel’s. 

There are two other living bodies here, of course, but he’s like a bloodhound and he’s picked up her scent. Transfixed, single minded. 

He tries to divert himself, but there is nothing but the hunger, nothing but the pulse pounding in Triel’dra’s throat and the gnawing weakness, the need. 

But Astarion has been starving for two hundred years. He can last another night. 

He can. 

He has to. Triel is sitting with the others, trying to shield her eyes from the fire and nibbling on a hunk of bread as Wyll regales them with tales of monsters he’s slain. Even relaxed, there’s a dagger at her side, not to mention that sacred fire she conjures. She may barely know what a vampire is, but she certainly knows how to kill one. 

Above all else, she’s an elf. She trances; Triel’s guard is never down. Even if he wanted to, it would be suicide, and he takes great comfort in the knowledge that no matter how hungry he gets, he’d never be stupid enough to try. 

But as the fire is dying down and the others begin to drag themselves to their beds, Triel’dra approaches his tent, cautiously, like she would knock on the canvas if she could. “Astarion?” 

He smiles, bites down the screaming in his head. “Ah, hello. What can I do for you?”

The look she gives him in return is nervous, hopeful. “I think… I think that I will try to sleep tonight.”  

His cold, still heart plummets. 

The other two have noted this exchange, but they can’t understand what it means, not really. How vulnerable Triel’dra is choosing to make herself. 

He laughs, before he can stop himself. A nervous giggle, just for an instant, near hysterics. The gods all hate him. “Really? Sleep, here? Are you…. Are you certain that’s wise?” 

She pulls something from her shirt, a round set of stacked pieces on a silver chain he’s seen her fiddle with. “The Lady of Dreams sometimes blesses her followers with visions, in their sleep.” She shrugs, weakly. “I… I do not think it will amount to anything, but it seems the time to try. We say: when the tunnel collapses, pray as you dig.”

A genuine smile twitches at the corner of his mouth. “So,  have the same outcome either way, but if it’s good it’s because of  them and if it’s poor it’s on you?” 

He regrets it, the slip, but she’s not offended. She laughs a little, the scar across her face twitching as her nose crinkles. “I see it as: do all you can for yourself, but it does not hurt to ask.” 

Oh, but it does. It aches, to plead and beg and pray with no answer. 

His smile tightens.

“Anyway… wake me when it is my turn to keep watch.” 

This is their habit. It’s what they’ve done each night. He has no reason to do differently now. “Of course.” 

With a grateful smile, she bids him a good night, and turns back towards her tent. 

The others lay down to sleep, and Astarion is left alone with dying embers and his hunger. 

He should leave now, find something to eat, but… Triel isn't trancing tonight. There’s no elf aware enough to rouse if something were to disturb the camp while he’s stepped away. He can’t— or is that just the excuse he’s made? 

He creeps closer without meaning to, from his tent to the fireside to the edge of the pool and oh, that’s taken him right to Triel’dra’s tent, hasn’t it? How funny. 

Triel’s is the smallest of the shelters they’ve thrown together, made of dark fabric and suffocatingly small. She’s sacrificed surface area for coverage, devoting as much of the canvas as she can to blocking out the light. She’s tiny, a stunted little thing hiding surprising strength, and even she has to curl to fit comfortably, her bedroll poking out from beneath the flap. 

Astarion silently pulls it aside. 

Triel’dra is sound asleep. He can tell by the way her breath falls, the way she flinches and mumbles to herself into her pillow, murmurs in Drow, but no sounds enough like Elvish. It’s an unpleasant dream. 

As he moves closer he catches his foot on something— a less dexterous man would have face planted right into the pile of blankets stirring gently in the middle of the tent— but he rights himself and Triel’dra doesn’t wake. 

She’s left her pack and all its provisions out for him again. 

His mouth twitches, and he has to bite down hard on the bleak bubble of laughter threatening to slip free. 

She’s always so worried about him going hungry. 

With no sign of her familiar, he presses on. The fabric of the flap falls, sealing the tent behind him and at once he regrets it. Her scent is overwhelming in this close space, so tight he’s all but crouched over her, filled with her and her things— her blood, but more along with it. It’s woodsmoke and pine sap and the bar of soap she had from wherever she’d come from— night blooming jasmine and lilac, he knows his fragrances— and his mouth is watering. 

The little drow is fast asleep, safe in the knowledge that her trusted ally is watching over the camp. 

He can’t pretend anymore. He already knows what he’s going to do, knows why he’s in here, drawn irresistibly, a moth smart enough to realise what’s happening but too weak to stop itself as it’s drawn to the flame. 

Astarion may be free of Cazador but he’s still a slave to his hunger. 

He tells himself he won’t hurt her. He’ll be quick, take only what he needs, and she’s sound asleep. Just a taste, she’ll never know. Try as he might, the litany of excuses never completely drowns out the doubts. 

What makes him think he can stop? 

He’s breathing, desperate to draw in more of that delectable scent and it comes as ragged panting. 

His teeth are so sharp. She won’t feel a thing. 

He could so easily tear her throat out with his fangs. 

She’s so strong. 

She’s so small. 

He’s been so hungry for so long and to have it here— fresh, living blood, helpless beneath him… 

It’s as if someone else tugs gently on the blanket pulled over her head. She sleeps in a heap of them, curled into her pillow, as if even down here she’s afraid of sunlight sneaking in. 

He swallows hard, holds his breath, tries to clear the haze of ravenous need driving him to lean in closer, closer…. 

He tenses, ready to spring back as she shifts beneath him. Triel’dra mumbles in her sleep and rolls over, brow furrowed and lips parted as whatever nightmare she’s having plays behind her eyelids. 

She falls onto her back, her head dips to her far shoulder, baring her neck to him. 

He could sob. When this is over, however it ends, Astarion is going to find a quiet place and laugh until he cries. He has no doubt now that the gods are looking on at their unhappy cosmic punchline. 

Miserable of them, he thinks as he considers the sleeping drow, to use one of their own faithful as the set-up. 

The last of his restraint gives way. 

Astarion drops to his hands and knees as he inches closer, all too aware of the creeping, crawling thing he’s been reduced to. He doesn’t care. He’s too hungry for dignity, as if Cazador had left him with any to lose. 

He can hear the frantic beating of her heart, sees, with some gruesome instinct, the place along her neck that would be best to sink his teeth. He lines himself up, fangs bared, shuts his eyes and—

A jolt passes through the figure beneath him as she wakes. 

Oh, shit. 

Astarion’s eyes fly open in time to meet hers, wide with panic and unfocused with sleep as in a a reflexive movement she draws a knife he’d been too distracted to see from beneath her pillow and a forceful kick to his midsection sends him sprawling backwards out of the tent. 

This may well be the stupidest way he could die. 

He manages to land on his feet, standing just in time to see her stop dead in the doorway, an attack abandoned as she wakes fully and takes in what she’s seeing. Triel’dra lowers the knife, blinking sleep from her eyes. “Astarion?” 

He straightens against the ache promising a bruise in the shape of her foot, brushes himself off and tries to look as innocent as possible. “I can explain,” he says, and it sounds as weak as it feels. 

At least no one else seems to have woken.

There’s a moment where he considers lying. That he was overcome by a different kind of hunger and meant to wake her to suggest a midnight tryst. But no. Triel has been unmoved by his flirtations and she’d woken with a face full of fangs. It’s too late. 

She’s quick but if he turns and bolts he may be able to make it to the rope out of the well before she does. Maybe. 

Triel’dra hasn't moved from before her tent, just lets the flap fall behind her, tucks her knife away, then raises her hand. He hadn’t noticed her familiar creeping from the top of the tent ready to lunge, but the spider halts at her instruction. Triel is eyeing him cautiously, that appraising stare he’s felt before. “You do not eat with us,” she says softly. 

“No,” he says, his smile chagrined, defeated. “No, I don’t.” 

“Blood-thief,” she breathes. “You…?” 

He tries for casual, but the laugh that slips out is high and near-deranged, his eyes darting  between the drow and the spider, trying to place the campfire behind him by the warmth against his back. Just how and when to bolt without tripping into it. 

As much as Astarion loves a sharp knife, his wits have always been his first line of defence, but he finds himself disarmed beneath her steady gaze. Words bubble and spill, clumsy and panicked. “I wasn’t going to hurt you, I swear it— I’ve never actually killed anyone— to feed, I mean, I’ve killed people; you’ve seen me kill people— but I’ve always fed off of animals. I’ve been hunting deer, boars, kobolds—” 

She had, until this moment, been observing him silently, her expression unreadable. Triel’dra’s eyes widen and she starts towards him, a bewildered outrage on her face. “You!” She hisses, a sharp whisper that makes him reflexively look to the other tents for movement. She crosses the distance and gently prods an accusing finger into his chest. “You are the one who has been killing the boars!” 

“Shh, shhh!” he shushes, pleading. “Yes. Yes, that’s been me; please keep it down.” There’s no sound or movement from the others, and for his initial concern, her voice has never raised above a hush, drowned out by the steady trickle of water from the stream. She pulls back her hand to rest her face in it, exasperated. This is… not the reaction he had been expecting. 

She mutters something under her breath. Language doesn’t matter, Astarion can always tell when someone is cursing. “Such a waste of meat. A carcass that size attracts wolves, owlbears, scares off all the small game…” 

That’s the part she cares about? “I couldn’t exactly bring it back to camp, could I? Here’s a dead boar I hunted, don’t mind it being fully exsanguinated!” 

“That is why you bring it to me. Or better yet, bring me with you. I field dress the boar, no one can tell how it died.“

It takes a moment for the exchange to fully process. Astarion stares at her, baffled, as he finally convinces himself that he’d heard her properly.  His surprise turns to suspicion. “You would do that?” 

“Of course. I am doing all I can to keep everyone fed, and that boar would have helped immensely. You get the blood, we eat the meat, everyone is full and happy.” 

Astarion studies the drow, looking for anything like disgust or anger and finds none. He motions away from the group, and to his further surprise she’s happy enough to follow him closer to the pool, where the rushing water can better obscure their conversation. Someone should probably warn her that it’s inadvisable to wander off with someone like him. But for now, he’s impossibly grateful she does. “You… you don’t mind that I’m a vampire.” He shouldn’t really be so shocked. She barely knew what one was, and besides, he supposes it may be rather difficult to rattle someone from the land of things-that-go-bump-in-the-forever-night. 

It does give her pause. Triel is quiet a moment, and he can feel her gaze on him, his red eyes, his fangs, observing the things he tries to keep below anyone’s notice. It sends an uneasy prickle down his spine. 

“I wish you had told me.” She says, finally. 

“Yes, well.” Astarion’s mouth twitches into a nervous smile. He clears his throat uncomfortably. “The response is typically less… this, and more…” He sighs, mimes the stabbing motion she had made the day before. 

“Oh.” Her brows knit. He shouldn’t be giving her ideas. “Thus, the secrecy?” She thinks for a moment, the freckles across her nose shifting as her mouth works at something she can’t figure out how to word. “If you have been drinking boar blood, and it is plentiful, why were you…?” 

He’d rather hoped she’d somehow forgotten about that. 

Astarion sighs. He feels pitiful, but maybe it’s best to lean into it. “Animal blood is… fine. It will keep me going, but I’m… I’m so weak. The blood of a thinking creature is far more potent, just a sip and I’d be so much sharper, stronger…” He doesn’t expect much, but looks at her hopefully all the same. She’ll refuse, he’ll be cheeky about it, smooth things over with his charms and they can both go back to their reverie and pretend this never happened. 

Instead her face is deadly serious, her voice soft with pity that would turn his stomach if it weren’t so empty. 

“You are hungry,” Triel’dra says.  

The laugh slips out before he can stop it, bitter. “For two hundred years.”   

Her unbroken stare doesn’t waver, studying him. “How much do you need?” 

He has no idea, but if it’s as powerful as it smells, it shouldn’t take much.  “A sip. Just a taste, really, I swear that was all I wanted.” 

“Alright.” 

“Pardon?”

“My blood. You may have some.” 

Astarion blinks at her. The words make sense, he understands them all individually, but cannot believe what he’s hearing when he strings them together. “I…. you’re certain?” She nods again, resolute. “Well then,” he forces his most reassuring smile, trying to hide the glance he takes around the campsite to ensure no one else is listening, to capitalise on this offer before she comes to her senses. “Shall we make ourselves comfortable, darling? Somewhere away from prying eyes.” 

She leads the way when he gestures to her tent. He has to wonder if she isn’t agreeing so she might lure him back to where she has a stake, but he’s too hungry to let that stop him. 

She grabs her pack on the way past, pulling it into the tent behind her as she disappears behind the canvas flap. He has to stoop as he nudges his own way into the cramped space just as Triel sinks cross legged to her bedroll and indicates the space she’s left beside her. 

He laughs to himself as he gets to his knees beside the bed instead. “You should lay down for this.” 

“Why?”  It comes out in a hurry and for the first time she seems nervous, well after he would have expected it. 

“Blood pressure, my dear,” he eases. He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing but it makes sense. “Better to keep you from fainting on me.”  

Triel considers this and hesitantly seems to concede. She’s uneasy as she lowers herself to the bedroll and settles back against the pillow, hands balled into fists and her eyes fixed on the dark canvas above her. 

Slipping into place over top of her is familiar enough, a well-practised movement from so many other nights,  and Astarion lays a hand to either side of her to rest his weight. Triel’dra squeezes her eyes shut tight as he draws closer and gives him a side, turning her head— away from him— to offer the crook of her neck and left shoulder. 

Astarion pauses, studying her beneath him. Her whole body is clenched as tight as her eyes, breath stuttering, heart pounding… cheeks flushed. 

Well, well. And here he had thought she wasn’t interested. Will wonders never cease? His vicious little gloomstalker is shy. An unusual surge of feelings pulse through him at the realisation. Relief and no small amount of amusement. He can work with this. 

The aftertaste is disappointment. 

He had thought she was different, but in the end, he knows exactly what he has to offer. All he’s ever had. 

 “Go on.” Triel swallows hard, he can hear it from where he’s paused, a whisper away from the heat of her skin. 

“Relax, darling. You’re so tense I’d break my fangs if I bit you now. Deep breaths for me… There you are….” His smirk nearly brushes the hammering thud of her pulse as Triel doesn’t calm so much as force herself to go slack about the shoulder. She’s still gritting her teeth, breath hissed between them. 

Her nerves have been an amusing diversion but his empty stomach clenches painfully. He has to breathe to speak and inhales a lungful of her scent, overpowering this close to her skin, to the veins calling to him beneath it. He’s salivating as he finally bares his fangs and surges forward. 

Triel swallows a gasp and Astarion’s first taste of thinking blood hits his tongue. 

He can’t really remember what it was to need air, but in that moment he thinks it must have been like this. How it was to gasp for something so desperately as he slips a hand beneath to cradle Triel’s head, holding her closer as he drinks, and drinks, and drinks, losing himself in it. 

Astarion moans. It slips free on it’s own, not a pretty sound, not the pitch-perfect playacted panting he’s perfected over the centuries, but something deep and animal and real that would be mortifying if he had the wherewithal to care, but his mind is empty of anything but taste and sensation and blessed relief. 

He feels it. The strength that was always just out of his reach, the heat of her blood spreading through his body, her pulse against his tongue—

“Astarion—” 

Her voice is so small, so far away when it finally reaches through the drunken haze of his thirst. How long had she been calling? Her hand is fisted in his shirt, the grip going slack.

No. No, it’s only been a moment, only a few seconds, he can’t have—

The heartbeat beneath his lips is slow, the skin cool against the unfamiliar stolen heat of his own.

She’s still breathing when he pulls back, but the lavender of her skin has gone grey. She blinks at him through heavy eyelids as he swallows curses under his breath and fumbles through his pockets for— ah, here it is. He hurries to press the handkerchief to the still bleeding wounds at her throat, dragging her to sit up. She sways, slumping against him. 

The rats were too small to tell but feeding on the boars he had been sure: there’s something in his bite that keeps the blood flowing. 

“There you are, darling, that’s it. Just… Hold this here, would you? It just needs a second…”  

Triel’dra steadies, the weight slumped against him lessened as she props herself up to sit under her own power, numb fingers grasping at the thin square of cloth. She mumbles something, slurred Drow that stumbles into Elvish, something like ‘I’m fine.’ Her movements are slow and clumsy, and when she looks at him she’s reeling, silver eyes are unfocused, but she’s keeping upright under her own power and the handkerchief clutched to the wound well enough, so finally he’s free to retreat. 

“Well,” Astarion sits back on his heels, getting what distance he can in the cramped tent. She’s fine. It’s fine. A little rest, and she’ll be good as new, he’s certain. “That…” He feels breathless, giddy. He licks his lips, catches a stray trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. “That was… amazing.” An ache so deep he’d forgotten how it was to be without it is gone. “My mind is finally clear. I feel strong, I feel…” It takes him a moment to find the word, so long since he’s needed it. Content. Satisfied. How had she put it? Full and… happy.  

Astarion hears the need in his own voice, the heady desperation, and clears his throat. He smiles, polite, brisk, aiming for just the perfect combination of nonchalance and gratitude. What’s a pint between friends? Everything is fine. No need to panic, or call the cleric, or contemplate just how valuable this is to him. Not appreciative enough that it might be leveraged against him, but enough that she might agree to this again. 

Gods, he can still taste her and already he’s angling for his next fix. 

Triel just smiles a little, weakly, unsteady. Something about it makes him uneasy, a feeling that only intensifies as an eerie chittering sound from behind sends a shudder down his back. The flap stirs and her familiar creeps back into the tent, crawling along the ceiling and watching him warily with far too many eyes. Time to make an exit. 

Astarion excuses himself to find something more filling he can feed on without restraint. “No boars,” he adds, forcing his most charming smile despite the disquiet still needling at him, “I promise.” 

He can never just enjoy anything. A belly full of drow blood is more than he dared to dream of through his years of draining vermin, but the high is souring and he can’t put his finger on why. A mix of things, a potent cocktail of roiling troubles and he needs to leave before his facade slips. 

“This is a gift, you know. I won’t forget it.”  

Astarion can’t bring himself to look at her as he hesitates at the doorway, the image of her haunting him anyway: pale and trembling, big horrid spider curled in her lap like a housecat as the red staining the handkerchief clutched to her neck deepens and spreads. 

A gift. As if there were such a thing. 

That’s part of the disgust he feels. That she has something he needs, that she knows it, and that for all his talk of his improved usefulness, it’s something he owes her with no way to repay. A debt, just another thing weighing against him in the balance of his worth. 

Well, at least Astarion knows what she wants from him, something he is all too able to provide, and the sooner he can tip the scales back in his favour, the better. 

It’s as he stalks through the web-strewn cave that the other aspect makes itself clearer. It’is knowing, now, just what was being kept from him. Not just the taste, but the strength, the clarity, the relief. It’s not possible to hate Cazador more than he does already, but it brings the feeling back up to the surface, acrid and persistent. 

Unfortunately, sharp as he is, the first thing he finds to stalk is an ettercap. It’s going to be one kind of spider or another down here, so he resigns himself to the thing with fewer legs, at least. He remembers from the earlier encounter to keep his distance, to hit it with fire. 

Its blood is vile but abundant. 

It doesn’t douse the heady craving for the drow’s blood as he had hoped. If anything it’s all the sweeter in his memory by comparison, the taste still lingering on his tongue. 

He stalks back to camp, belly full, chest hollow. 

Wyll and Shadowheart are asleep and he makes it back to his tent without waking them. It’s just as he’s about to turn in and try and get a decent stretch of reverie that a sound from the furthest tent catches his sensitive ears. The scent of blood is still heavy in the air and a stuttered, rasping sound just barely reaches him over the sound of the waterfall. Her familiar is meant to be keeping watch, but there’s no sign of the spider. 

Astarion grits his teeth, the flap of his tent clenched in his hand, and with a roll of his eyes he lets it fall and creeps back to Triel’dra’s tent. 

He’d left her sitting up. She’d been alert, mostly. She’d been fine. 

When Astarion pokes his head into the tent, the drow is sprawled across her bedroll in a dead faint, the handkerchief loosely grasped in her hand drenched in blood. There’s a splatter of it across her pillow. She’s deathly pale, grey lips tinged blue, breath shallow and strained, and soon to stop. 

Fuck. 

He should leave. He should go back to his tent and trance, and be as shocked as everyone else in the morning. This cave is full of horrors, it’s no surprise someone died. 

But no. Shit. Shit, they’ll find her with two perfect little punctures in her throat. All they need to do is look at his fucking teeth and he’s finished— and even if he gets away with it, he’s lost his best protection from Cazador. 

Cursing under his breath, he darts inside, drawing the flap closed behind him. Turning he starts, finds himself face to face with the fey spider perched on the dying drow woman’s chest. It shouldn’t be possible, but he swears those many eyes are all glaring accusations. 

The thing lunges for him when he moves towards her. 

“Piss off; I’m trying to help!” he hisses through clenched fangs. 

The spider only sort of…. Wiggles defensively in response, its first set of arms raised in a sad attempt at a threat display. It’s difficult to be intimidated by anything that fits under his boot but he still reflexively draws back. 

“What do you care, anyway? You’re bound to her, aren’t you? If she dies, you’re free.” The fey spirit waggles its arms more emphatically. 

Astarion sighs, surprised as he watches the creature by a sudden pang of pity. It probably can’t let her die even if it wants to, some clause in whatever fey pact familiars are bound by.  

“Look,” Astarion raises his hands, placating, and it— Erelae, that’s what Triel’dra calls it at least— lowers its arms in turn. “I’m trying to help, alright? Here, see?” He reaches behind himself and feels for her pack, dragging it over to rifle through. There’s no way he’s explaining this to Shadowheart and no way she’s lasting until morning, which leaves him few options. His fingers close around the familiar shape of a potion bottle and he shows it to the spider for its approval. 

Because that’s the kind of ridiculous his life has become. 

Erelae relents. The spider backs up, crawling off of its mistress, all eight eyes still fixed carefully on Astarion as he uncorks the bottle with his teeth and gathers the limp form of the bloodless drow in his arms. Her head tips back against his shoulder, and he carefully drips the sweet-smelling liquid, an unnatural bright red, into her mouth. “There we are,” he says, more to reassure himself than anyone else. “All better… No harm done. Good as new.” 

She’s still unconscious as the last of the potion trickles down her throat, but Triel’dra lets out a deep sigh, and her breathing seems to steady, the wounds on her neck fading. She’ll still feel like shit in the morning, but— in his amateur opinion, at least— she’ll live.  

Astarion lays her back against her bloodied bedroll. He’s certainly had worse targets. Pleasant enough to spend time with, and she’s beautiful— if in a severe, rugged sort of way. This close, and without having to worry about being caught, he’s able to really study her. There’s the obvious, the freckles, the jagged scar that stretches across the bridge of her nose from her jaw to her forehead. There are more. Older, fainter scars. One across her eye, tendrils of lethal scar tissue that stretch across her throat, the other side than she’d offered to him. A lifetime of fighting, and more than one brush with death by the looks of her body— let alone what he’d seen in her memory. 

Exactly what he needs, if he can just keep her attention. 

Astarion reaches down, her skin warm beneath his undead fingertips as he brushes silver hair, matted with blood, from her face, acknowledges the spider creeping back into its place on her chest, rising and falling with each slow breath, and skulks back to his tent to try and salvage what he can of this rest. 

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[strawbattyshortcake]

Growing Season

Words: 3685

Triel’dra sighs, contented, she and Astarion curled up on the soft, springy mat of tough toadstool caps carpeting the rocky alcove she’d deemed a safe place to... Well, to let their guards down.

She’s a contented kind of exhausted: a day of travel and fighting, the lightheaded numbness of his feeding, the afterglow of their intimacy. The gentle luminescence of the underdark below is a welcome reminder of home, and she could so easily drift off here in his arms like she did in the forest— but, the underdark is the underdark. If they don’t return to camp soon, someone’s bound to come looking. 

Reluctantly, Triel’dra stretches and forces herself up, sets to retrieving the clothing they’d scattered about the clearing in their haste. She finds her trousers, a sock… Astarion’s briefs are draped over a rock, impossible to miss. They’re a bright blue that had seemed funny to her at first, as a choice for him, but blue suits him, and it’s the colour of the sky he loves so dearly. He must miss it down here. 

She’s trying to be helpful when she grabs the briefs but stops before handing them over. She turns them over in her hands, looking for the inexplicable ridges she’d felt. Text. Elegant, embroidered Thorass script in gold thread, beneath the waistband and scrolled across his backside. 

“Astarion?” She was already grinning and has to stifle an outright laugh at the look of mortified panic on his face when he looks up to find her reading his pants. “What is this?” 

“Oh, that’s just… nevermind that. Just give those here, would you?” 

She should. She thinks about it. But the flustered expression isn’t actual distress, and instead she turns her attention back to the unfamiliar script. Astarion tosses his shirt aside and tries to snatch the underpants from her hands. He’s quick, but so is she, even a bit woozy. 

“If you… you’re, that’s… if you are, yes?“ She manages to duck out of the way and dances just out of his reach. “If you are reading this—” 

She takes another hop back but now he has her cornered against the rocky cliffside of the ledge and she has to stifle a giddy shriek when he grabs her around the waist. She’s not sure she’s ever made a noise like that in her life, and gods, there’s no time for this. He makes her like a besotted adolescent. She wasn’t even like this as an adolescent, Elistraee help her. Triel can’t stop laughing as he pulls her close against him, the cool press of his bare skin against her own, and she tries to keep reading. “You’ve managed to bed or b… be ha….” 

She feels a rumble of laughter through his chest, exhaled against the crook of her neck. “Behead,” he prompts, then repeats the word in Elvish for her. “Bed or behead me. Either way, you got lucky.” 

“You put that there?” She feels him nod, feels the sweep of silver curls against her cheek. She knows already that he’s talented with a needle and thread. Everyone in camp trades favours to get him to do their mending, but this is new. “Why?” She’s still laughing, her heart fond and full, as his lips tickle against the column of her neck, up along the edge of her pointed ear. 

“It’s a play on words. You’d have to be lucky to get the better of me in a fight—”

“—of course.”

“—and in Common, idiomatically, ‘to get lucky’  means…. Well, why don’t I demonstrate again?” 

“You are silly.” She lets the stolen underwear fall to the ground as she turns in Astarion’s embrace, draping her arms over his neck and kissing him, her hunt for her scattered clothing abandoned. 

It seems it will be a while longer before she needs them. 

***** 

The Last Light Inn is a welcome respite after the slow, eerie trek through the Shadow-Curse. A safe place to regroup, to rest and eat, to bathe. Triel and Astarion have both decided to capitalise on this opportunity to clean the blood and sweat and dirt from their clothes, wearing outfits scraped together from bits abandoned around the inn.  

She searches for a good place to secure a clothesline as Astarion fills a basin from whichever body of water it is they’re on. Triel has no idea where on the surface they actually are. 

It’s safe within the barrier, but it seems better to be safe than sorry this close to the hungry shadows and everything lurking within them. 

That’s what she’d said, anyway. If she’s being honest, she just looks for reasons to spend time with him. 

Astarion sighs theatrically, looking up at her from the soapy basin with his best puppy-dog pout. “I don’t suppose I could convince you to do this for me, could I? I’ll steal you something very nice in return; you had your eye on something at the Quartermaster’s, I think?” 

“We are not stealing from the Harpers.” 

Astarion bats pale eyelashes. “What if I’m also very beautiful and good in bed, though?” 

“Both are true.” Triel smiles, pressing a kiss to his temple as she kneels to join him at the washbasin. She does it casually, without thinking, and he seems startled by the gesture. He doesn’t stop her though, doesn’t seem displeased, just… surprised. They’ve got their socks in the same load of laundry, somehow that seems more intimate to her than a peck on the cheek. “If you are certain you would like to entrust your washing to someone accustomed to drow spidersilk… it is so very, very resilient. I cannot guarantee that surface clothing will survive my handling…”

A weariness lurks beneath the banter as they attack their heap of bloodied garments in tandem. There’s still a buzz of disquiet from the Harpers and tiefling refugees milling about, even if Isobel is safe and sound and the intruders repelled. Triel’s stomach drops whenever she thinks of the little tiefling girl, of her heartbroken friends left inside. 

For now, rest, recover. Bath and wash and sharpen weapons and fix fletching, and in the morning— or whatever time it will be, this land’s perpetual grey dusk makes it immaterial— they set out on the hunt. 

Triel throws her grey tunic over the line as Astarion, beside her, carefully arranges that linen shirt with the frills she finds so endearing, and something catches her eye. More script. 

It’s in a deep purple, scrawled upside down so it’s visible to the wearer, but far beneath where it would be tucked, in the same graceful hand. She pauses, stops between handfuls of wrung-out clothes, tilts her head farther and farther until she’s nearly upside down as she tries to read it. She hears a breathy chuckle above her (little bat, he says under his breath), but Astarion doesn’t try to stop her as she studies the hem of his shirt. 

“Lamentable is the autumn picker content with plums.” 

“Your Common’s improving, darling.” 

She’s not sure that it has. She’s been able to make sense of the letters, shape them into sounds, into words, but the words don’t make sense. “What does it mean?” 

Astarion laughs again. It’s a lovely sound, rare and genuine. “It’s poetry, my sweet. I can’t just tell you.” He looks at her sidelong, sly. A fox eyeing a rabbit hutch. “What do you think it means?” 

She has absolutely no idea, just the certainty, in the careful stitching, and the intensity in his eyes, that it absolutely means something to him. She can’t put it into words, but it feels… wistful. A yearning. Plums taste like the warmest nights of  summer…. Is it his longing for the sun? There’s something there, but it slips through her fingers. 

“It is hidden,” she says instead. “Your embroidery is so lovely; why is it only where no one can see it?” 

He reminds her of the gold filigree on his padded armour. He’s been repairing that himself for over a century. All of his things are old and held together with careful care and dedication. “Cazador didn’t let me have much.” He always spits that name, like the sound itself is bitter. “It made me want to…. Make what I did have my own. So some things I would decorate, and sometimes I’d stitch these little secrets, jokes…. Just for me. And now,” he pauses, this seems to have just occurred to him, “you.”  

“Have I ruined them for you? These little secrets.” 

He considers this. 

Astarion studies her, those dangerous red eyes so intent on her own, the wry curl of his mouth when he smiles. “No,” he says finally, amused, the impish little crinkles at the corner of his eyes making her stomach flip. “I think I quite like it this way.” 

Triel’dra is so glad he does. She’s not sure when they’ll have time for another wash day— or even if they’ll live long enough to need one— but she makes a note to herself to be on the lookout for more hidden gems when they do. 

*** 

As it happens, the surprises find her. 

She doesn’t think much of it when her tunic goes missing. There’s a pang of loss— it’s the one she was wearing when the illithids took her, one of the last things she has from home, made from her brother’s prized spidersilk in her standard stealthy grey— but in the end, it is just a shirt. She’s found others. 

It must have slipped out of her pack somewhere in Reithwin, or the gods only know what else. She asks the owlbear cub just in case he’d taken it to nest in, but no such luck. 

And then it’s back. When Triel awakes the following morning, her tunic is right there, neatly folded on top of everything else in her pack like it had never left and for a moment she thinks she must be losing her mind. Is the tadpole eating a hole in her brain? Just this drow tunic shaped blindspot? Some bizarre manifestation of the shadow curse that’s taking bits of home? 

She finds Astarion’s handiwork when she goes to put it on. There, between the buttons where they’ll be hidden, are rows of paw prints. Cat’s paws, dog’s, a row of crow prints, and even a stretch of thick owlbear tracks. A little secret, just for her, over her heart. 

He’s already up when she peeks out of her tent, pouring over a book they’d taken from the House of Healing. Seldarine save her, she suppresses a shudder just remembering the day before.

Astarion looks up from his reading and gives her a conspiratorial wink, hidden from the others, before putting on a more suggestive tone for their benefit. 

“Oh, it’s turned up, has it? Such a shame. I was so enjoying that corset top you found.” 

All through breakfast Triel finds her hands straying to the clasps of her tunic, and even once she’s dressed, beneath her armour she thinks of those rows of careful stitches. He keeps catching the furtive glances she sends in his direction, and he smiles at her, clearly pleased with himself. 

A pair of her underwear goes missing next. They return the next morning, little black bats hanging along the waistband, a few in flight towards her hip. She struggles to keep a straight face when she joins her companions at the campfire, especially given Astarion watching gleefully from his pile of pillows as she tries to stifle a laugh into her porridge. “Silly,” is all she says to him under his breath as they set off to look for the Sharran temple. 

Baldur’s gate is visible on the horizon when he next strikes, and Triel has to go back to bed, half-dressed, face buried in her pillow, because she can’t imagine how she would explain the high pitched noises she’s making. She finally calms herself, wrangling her breathing under control with an immense exertion of will, her eyes running and sides aching. It’s been a bleak few days, the stench of death and gore and the Shadowfell still fresh in her mind, and it’s a welcome feeling, laughing again. To forget the weight of everything, if only for a moment.

Triel sighs, swallows another hiccup, and goes back to put on her newly-vandalised bra: Twinkle in immaculate elvish script across the right cup, Icingdeath across the left. That he got the sides right is the thing that nearly does her in. 

Astarion says nothing, but he can tell that it got her, and he’s visibly pleased with himself. 

Around the campfire one evening she catches him carefully embroidering purple beebalm flowers into the corner of a handkerchief, and her heart catches in her throat, the fruits of her misguided courtship gifts laid out in thread and delicate knots. 

“Oh, these? I seem to have developed a sudden fondness for them.” 

He says it so casually, but his smile reaches his eyes and her heart. 

He’s just showing off the morning she wakes to find her trousers draped over the edge of her bed at the Elfsong, vines of familiar round, white blossoms sweeping from the  hem up the calves, where they would be hidden beneath her boots. 

He seems to know why when she greets him that morning by wrapping her arms around his waist and burying her face in the cool fabric of his shirt, 

“Funny thing about the surface, Moonflower,” he says, and she can feel his smile pressed against the crown of her head. “Traditionally, it would be me courting you, up here. Gifts to prove my devotion and means, et cetera, et cetera. Now, either one of us assimilates— or, and I like this better— we both just keep acting as the suitor and spoiling each other forever, hm?” 

Triel has surprises of her own. Astarion collapses beside her on the couch in the inn room’s little foyer, bruised and exhausted after a vicious fight, desperate for a rest and a meal. But for now, he contents himself by the fire, the rest of the weary travelling party following suit. Shadowheart is sprawled on the floor, Scratch’s head in her lap and his tail thumping against the ground, and Halsin has squeezed himself into an armchair, trying to focus on the wooden duck taking shape beneath his knife. 

“Asta?” He hums in response. There’s something about the scene, the ache in her bones, the warm glow of the fire and the friends around her. Somewhere out there in the city, Cazador is waiting, and there’s such a fierceness in her heart for the man resting against her that she can scarcely breathe.

Killing a vampire lord doesn’t scare her half as much as what may come after. 

 “Uodss valm zhah alurlssrin.”  The words come easily, despite their weight. She means it as she says it. It feels right. 

“Hmm,” Astarion mumbles against her shoulder. Her sweet, witty Astarion whose future is so uncertain. “That’s nice, dear.” 

He doesn’t speak drow… but Halsin does. 

He stops mid stroke, his knife paused mid curl of soft yielding wood, and his surprise quickly gives way to a wide, approving grin. 

Triel can only smile back, silently hold a finger to her lips. Shh. 

A secret. For Astarion to share in, but not yet. Triel knows what she feels, has never been so certain of this love she’d only ever guessed at before. And it feels good, to say it, to speak the words and hear them out loud, but Astarion’s heart is scarred and fragile, and she doesn’t want to rush anything.

He has asked her for time. For patience. 

For now, she’s content to stroke his hair and bask in the firelight and whisper words of love he can’t understand, sweet nothings that mean so much. 

*** 

She hasn’t been seeing as much of Astarion as she would like, but it’s frantic, trying to get everything in place. Their haven is well-defended, well-organised, but the thought of leaving it unattended still terrifies her, even if only for a few days. 

Despite her trepidation, she was determined to go. Even if she weren’t longing to see her friends, which she is, declining an invitation from “Withers” seems… unwise. 

So, to help prepare for their absence, Triel had a handful of her most trusted…. She’s never really sure what to call them. They’ve vampire spawn, certainly, but that feels demeaning and possessive. Her citizens? Her charges. A handful of her most disciplined charges had helped her roll the carcass of a Bulette she’d hunted onto a wheeled trolley and together they’d hauled it back to their stronghold. 

Now, with the help of a chain and pulley system they’d managed to hang it upside down for bleeding. Drow had been keeping deep bats since time immemorial, and she’d tested the methods their keepers used for feeding on smaller prey. It seemed to have worked— the taste was stale, Astarion had told her, but it seemed to keep him going just the same. 

She stands back and watches with some satisfaction as one of her helpers tries to get through the tough skin between the thick plates covering the creature’s throat, to get at the veins beneath. The bulette will provide ample blood to keep their stores full while they’re away and the hide will be extremely durable. She’s sure she’ll find some use for it. 

Triel tries to suppress a sigh. As one of the only people in their haven who eats, she and Scratch are going to be  having smoked bulette for a very, very long time. But if her people can make do, so can she. 

Astarion hasn’t fed on her in a while. It’s strange to miss it, how intimate it was— but he’s trying to lead by example, and that means animal blood with the rest of them. Gods, but she’s proud of him, her heart swells to bursting at how far he’s come. 

No one was there for him in his darkest hours, and here he is, making sure that the vampire spawn they’ve managed to track down have a place where they’re safe, where they’re understood. A community all struggling along together. 

She thinks of the early days of her enclave, the ragged huddle of escaped slaves who followed the first Moonreader to the surface. What an honour it is to attempt the same by his side. 

“Darling?” 

Triel startles. She’s not usually one to be caught unawares, but she’d been so lost in thought, and if anyone can sneak up on her it’s her love. 

She turns to find Astarion watching the bulette with an eyebrow raised. “Stocking up, my sweet? Perhaps a little excessive?” but he’s smiling at her. “I know, I know. Safe and fed, that’s your mandate. Can I borrow you for a moment?” 

Triel looks to her team of helpers, who assure her they have things under control and encourage her off, so she happily follows Astarion inside. He leads her towards their bedroom, and though she’s probably too busy for a diversion she does find herself rather hoping he may have the same in mind. It’s no doubt something logistical. He’s been trying to lay out a set of… bylaws? Something? (Which seems silly for such a small community, but if they manage to track down all seven-thousand…. Well, that’s a city.) 

He’s taught with nervous excitement by the time their bedroom door closes behind them, which does nothing to quell Triel’s amorous fancies. 

Astarion spins on his heel, grin wide, eyes creased mischievously. “In anticipation of this reunion, I’ve been working on something,” he confesses and instead of producing some papers or schedules or ledgers, she notices he’s physically putting himself between her and the bed, blocking her view. “Close your eyes, darling.” She’s confused, but does as he asks. 

His feet are quiet across the floor. She hears a soft swish of fabric, a gentle rustling of their bedclothes. 

A moment later, Astarion takes her hand, and guides it to fine, draped spidersilk. Her fingers trace the smooth fabric —Rhyl’fein’s work, no doubt—  and find shapes. His work. Embroidery, forms she can’t quite make out though she feels the flow of it along the collar and hem. Her eyes flutter open in surprise and she takes in what he has held out for her. 

“I thought, perhaps, you might want something new to wear.” 

It’s breathtaking. 

Triel’dra is a ranger. She knows leather and dust and scuffed boots, and he holds the garment up to her before she can protest— she’ll ruin this, she’s sure. It’s too beautiful to wear, she’s not graceful like he is, rough and calloused and scarred— but those ruby eyes are soft, his expression that naked adoration that always makes her heart skip. 

He’s picked up enough Drow to know what alurlssrin means. Enough to use it. 

It’s a tunic, a perfect marriage of surface and drowish influence. The silk is dyed a deep, warm purple, and it’s trimmed with gorgeous embroidery. It’s a harvest, small enough not to be loud, laid out along the edges of the garment like the last bushels brought in before the frost. Small pumpkins and their vines lay out the path and between them is a bounty of produce and flowers. Apples, green and red and gold; scattered cranberries; parsnips; pears; a pomegranate spilling seeds along the trail of loving stitches. Asters, and chrysanthemums, and violets. 

“Astarion, this is…” There’s something else, something she can’t quite grasp about it. Something beyond just bringing the season to the standstill of the underdark. “No plums.” She says after studying his work for a long moment, as the thought finally clicks into place. 

“No. No plums. Not the dregs left over from summer,” Astarion confirms, careful to lift the garment out of the way before she can crush it in her haste to throw her arms around him. He sets it aside carefully before pulling her in close, her head tucked so perfectly under his chin. “The things worth waiting for. ”