Chapter Text
Chapter 1
Beneath the Light of Selune
The Underdark
Two Months After the Netherbrain’s Fall
Day 1—Midday
For two hundred years Astarion hadn’t felt the warm caress of sunlight on his skin, yet he had craved it almost as much as he did blood. He often lingered at night on the silvered streets of the city until just before dawn broke, drawn to the promise of the sun’s half-remembered radiance despite its deadly touch. Amidst the haze of horror-filled days and nights that had blurred together into his new existence, almost everything of who he had been and the things that he had loved had been stripped away from him and forgotten. And yet the irrational hope that he might one day feel the sun on his skin again remained with him through all the long years since his master’s fangs had torn through his neck to bestow upon him the gift—though it was in truth no gift at all—of immortality.
His life as he’d known it had ended the night he lay bleeding out on a darkened street, so afraid of dying that he had accepted Cazador’s offer without giving a single thought to what it might cost him or to the fact that the timing had been so suspiciously convenient. It had been so fucking naive of him, and he had frequently cursed himself for having done it. In retrospect, it almost certainly would have been better to have died than to have become Cazador’s spawn—his slave. Once he had realized that he was to forever be nothing more than a pretty plaything meant to lure victims in for his master and to function as an outlet for his rage and cruelty, he had fallen into despair.
To survive the tortures intended to break him in body and spirit, Astarion had tried to keep his pain buried down deep over the decades—and then centuries. The key word was tried of course, since unbidden and unwanted memories of his suffering were never all that far from the surface. The night that Cazador had spent carving Astarion’s damnation into his back was one such memory that haunted him. As the blade repeatedly tore its way through layers of skin and muscle, it had composed a symphony of burning and bleeding agony, its notes drawn from his raw and aching throat as he screamed and its score etched into his flesh and his mind forevermore. Of course, he hadn’t the first fucking clue back then about the true purpose of the scars and had simply thought them another of master’s obscene whims. He certainly knew better now, but he hadn’t at the time.
Coupled with the physical suffering, there was the morass of sexual and psychological trauma that had swallowed him whole. The self-loathing that he had felt when he’d had to lure victims in using his body was immeasurable. He hated it—and hated himself for doing it—but he was also naturally gifted at it and it was all too easy for him to find people who were captivated by his looks and his charms. It often took only a smile or a few heated glances and the whispering of sweet words into a target’s ear, his voice like poisoned honey as he set their blood on fire with the dark and sinful tone that he reserved for his seductions.
Just a single promise that they would experience pleasures like none they’d ever known before and they’d willingly follow him back to the palace like rabbits racing headlong into the very snares that would break their little necks. And whenever words alone weren’t enough, he would take the most expedient course of action and fuck them so senseless that they would have flung themselves directly into a fire if he’d asked it of them. How many times had he let his fingers delicately trace a path down their bodies as he kissed their necks and then licked his way lower and lower still until he had his tongue buried in their cunts or had his mouth around their cocks, all while feeling defiled and ashamed because he was being forced to degrade himself just to survive? He’d lost track of all the victims that he had served up to Cazador across the centuries, even the ones like Sebastian that he could have loved in another life if given half a chance. It had been both blessing and a curse when he’d met Sebastian again down in Cazador’s prison. He remembered instantly feeling the pain of an old wound freshly opened and a deep sense of guilt after seeing the ruins of the young man whose only sin had been to trust him, but the encounter had helped keep Astarion grounded and had reminded him of the person that he didn’t want to be going forward.
Ultimately, no matter how well he had performed at his ... duties ... and no matter how many victims he’d brought to Cazador, it had never been good enough. Astarion had never been allowed to forget for a single minute that he was worthless, particularly when he’d failed to meet his fucking quotas. Failure inevitably resulted in punishment, and honestly, the very idea that Cazador could ever be pleased was delusional fucking nonsense—but it was a lie that he and the other spawn had needed to tell themselves to keep the madness that would have destroyed them at bay.
Hells, it had been truly impossible to make Cazador happy. The man was mercurial and malicious, and his sadism had known no bounds. In fact, it had been his practice to deliberately set his spawn up for failure so that he would always have at least one of them on hand to torture as he pleased. Astarion and the others had spent every waking moment in a constant state of fear, although that fear was occasionally punctuated by feelings of guilty relief whenever Cazador turned his attentions to one of their other siblings instead of them. Things seemingly as innocuous as an order to look him in the eye had terrified all of them.
Why so terrifying? Because Cazador’s general policy had been that the servants and his lessers should avert their gazes from him. Whenever he’d suddenly demanded that they look him in the eye, it was absolutely intended as a trap for the spawn. Take too long to do as ordered? You were punished for being slow and stupid. Allow him to gaze into your soul through your eyes and thereby see into the depths of your heart? You were punished if he saw anything other than terror and obedience there. Astarion could personally attest to it being a lose-lose proposition either way, especially since the tactic had been so often aimed at him.
There were times when his master had searched his eyes and caught glimpses of the hatred and rage that Astarion had tried so hard to keep hidden, for which he was then severely punished. But there were also instances where he’d defied Cazador and had received even worse punishments—like the time he had let a target go and tried to run, all because he’d felt some transient moment of empathy, some stirring of love and a melancholic longing for the kind of innocence that he no longer possessed. Cazador had been determined to make Astarion suffer for it and had left him sealed in a tomb for the span of an entire year—and it had nearly driven him mad. Stupidly, he had persisted and defied Cazador even after the year of hell, in a handful of moments when whatever was left of his soul simply couldn’t fucking take it anymore. Whenever he’d shown even a hint of having a spine or any kind of emotions thereafter, he had been made to pay especially dearly for it. Eventually though, when the lessons of pain had at last taken hold, his heart and the ability to feel much of anything other than hatred and anger had been almost entirely eroded away.
Well, if nothing else, constantly trying to avoid Cazador’s wrath had certainly made Astarion a master of keeping up a charming facade and never letting anyone else see how broken he was inside, at least until Asanna had entered his life. She had been a ... revelation ... and while he would never willingly utter stupidly florid romantic nonsense about how she had made the centuries of suffering worth it or anything similarly cloying—because even love wasn’t worth the amount of suffering he’d been through—he did love her. She probably could drag some sort of ridiculous confession out of him if she ever had half a mind to try it of course, but to date, she’d never attempted it and had left his dignity mercifully intact—thank the gods.
Asanna seemed to understand how the shattered pieces of his heart fit together better than he did himself sometimes, and she was also the first one—the only one really—to have seen him as a person in such a long time. He still deeply appreciated how she had stood up for him with that objectionable drow alchemist, insisting that he was his own person when that foul-blooded Araj woman had treated him like chattel. It had honestly felt almost obscenely good to say no to that bitch, and as he’d tried navigating through the confusing tangle of emotions he’d experienced in the aftermath of the incident, he had finally come to the uncomfortable realization that he’d started to have genuine feelings for the woman who was only supposed to be another of his marks.
Asanna’s hand lightly touching his arm made Astarion return to the present where he was the one still standing and Cazador was rotting in the depths of the hell that he’d created beneath his palace, right where the bastard belonged. He reached over to her and brushed her cheek, marveling again at the contrast between his flesh and hers, for her dark complexion was as the night sky just before dawn and his luminously pale skin like the moon floating in its embrace. A surge of desire suddenly seared its way through his body at the thought, but he immediately reminded himself that they were trekking through the Underdark with seven thousand spawn skulking in the darkness, not all of whom would have managed to master their hunger as yet and might never achieve the kind of control that he had. It was hardly a safe place to tear each other’s clothes off and indulge in passion, so he tried to put it out of his mind. Playful banter, on the other hand, was far less likely to get them both killed, so ....
“You know, darling,” Astarion suddenly said, a smile playing about his lips, “if you want to keep me all to yourself, we could just go back to the Elfsong instead of heading to that dusty old mage’s tower—so long as you remember to mind the drapes in the daytime. Honestly, a free room in perpetuity is the least that the city owes us when they should be giving us the entire inn.” He took her hand gently and turned it over to kiss it, his fangs lightly grazing her skin.
“My bright and beautiful star,” the wizard said with a sigh, withdrawing her hand to brush her long silvery hair back, “you had that look again just now—the one where you’re a million miles away. What is it? And have you truly suddenly decided that life as an innkeeper is for you?”
“I most certainly did not have that look!” he said with a huff, making his tone as indignant as possible while hoping that he could distract her into dropping the question. “And owning an inn wouldn’t be the same as running it. That’s what hiring management is for, my dear. We would reap all of the benefits—the benefits being money of course—without any of the headaches—the headaches being actual work,” he said as if explaining the concept to an extremely slow child, knowing full well that it would rile her up.
The ball of flame that appeared in Asanna’s right hand out of nowhere told him that he had, perhaps, gone a bit too far with his teasing. The problem was that she made it so enjoyable to tease her. She let the fiery orb double in size and then snuffed it out with a wave of her hand, although he could still feel the now extinguished fireball’s heat radiating from her.
She arched an eyebrow at him, clearly not buying it. “As entertaining as your display of business acumen was, you can tell me what you’re thinking without putting on a show. You should know that by now.”
“Where would the fun in that be? I can’t have you thinking that I’m that easy and that you can just snap your fingers and draw all of my secrets out of me,” he said, a smirk on his face as he fell back on old habits. When he’d buried his old life and started a new one with her that night in the cemetery at his grave, he had also vowed to himself that he’d never lie to her again—the sole exception being if it were necessary to save her life—but deflecting would always come more easily to him than being open. He’d spent two hundred years lying to others and to himself, and it was hard to change old patterns of behavior. While he’d certainly kept that internal promise, he was admittedly still occasionally evasive when he didn’t feel like unloading his emotional baggage.
Asanna pinned him in place with her gaze, one eye a pale amethyst and the other a beautiful but jarringly mismatched prosthetic thanks to her mishap with Volo. The false eye’s iris was the color of spring leaves intertwined with a clear blue sky, a nimbus of gold around its pupil. It was as if it had granted her the power not only to see invisible creatures but to see right through him as well. At the time of her surgery—although barbaric near-lobotomy was probably a far more accurate description—he recalled thinking how utterly insane she must have been to go through with it, even for a wizard saddled with the seemingly irrepressible and insatiable intellectual curiosity typical of her fellow mages. He’d been desperate to avoid ceremorphosis, but not that desperate. She seemed to see something with that piercing blue eye of hers as he shifted uncomfortably on his feet, and then she did the one thing that inevitably disarmed him every time he put his defenses up: She hugged him.
It had been over two months since their tadpoles had been ordered to destroy themselves, leaving Astarion unable to walk freely beneath the sun. With them had also gone the ability to read each other’s minds, but even so, having her arms wrapped around him like this made him feel as if she could sense what was in his heart through touch alone. His arms closed around her slowly, hesitantly. No matter how many times she hugged him—and she actually did it with alarming frequency for a drow—he often found himself reacting the same way.
Even now he could scarcely believe that he had someone who cared about him and didn’t think of him as a means to their own ends, whose only real request of him was to be the better person that she believed he was capable of being. Burying his face against her neck, he squeezed her so tightly that she squeaked until he remembered that she actually needed to breathe, unlike him. Easing up on his hold but not letting her go, he let his fangs drift across the most sensitive part of her neck, which made her gasp.
She swatted his back, and he retracted his fangs. “If you must know”—he nuzzled her neck before laughing bitterly—“I was lost in the past again. I can’t seem to completely escape it even with Cazador dead, even when we’re as far from his fucking palace as we can get. Funny, isn’t it?”
Asanna nodded and kept her arms around him as she rested her head against his chest, letting him speak and just offering the comfort of her silent contact and acceptance. The bioluminescent glow from the mushrooms made her silver armlets glint with flashes of orange and blue light.
“I love you,” he whispered, his eyes closing and his voice growing rough as the emotions that he’d had to keep bottled for so long suddenly flooded through him again. She tightened her embrace and made sure that he felt her arms around him. After clearing his throat in embarrassment, he kissed the tip of her ear and felt her shiver in response. He was still vulnerable when it came to emotional honesty and experienced some trepidation whenever he felt as if he were potentially putting himself in a position to be hurt, but he liked to think he was getting better at it at moments like these.
Nodding, she placidly said, “I know.” It was a simple statement of fact to her at this point, like someone stating that gravity held them to the earth or that Toril revolved around the sun. It just was.
“Aaaaaand?” he asked, his intonation rising at the end. He was impatient for her to respond in kind, a part of him still insecure despite the fact that she had given up her entire life on the surface to be with him. His rational mind knew that she wouldn’t abandon him, especially after he’d given her the chance to back out and she hadn’t taken it ... and yet he couldn’t keep the doubts from creeping in from time to time.
It was just so damned hard to ignore the echoes of the past. Two months of freedom wasn’t enough to completely undo two centuries of damage, although he was certainly in a much better place these days and heard Cazador’s whispers in head less and less frequently. And even though he hadn’t fully resolved all the negative associations he had with sex, he found himself able to be present when he was with Asanna and to take genuine pleasure in his own body and hers, finally finding something approaching joy in the act ever since they’d lain together by his grave. He wasn’t being used, wasn’t being forced into it with her—and because of that, he didn’t feel the deep-seated shame and disgust that used to be his constant companions. He was ... happy ... in a way that he hadn’t been since the day he was turned.
Asanna turned her face up to look at him and smiled sweetly. “Sorry, were you expecting something else? Some flattery perhaps?” she asked teasingly as he reluctantly released her and they separated. Gripping her chin with her thumb and forefinger, she gave it some thought and then began imitating him by making a sudden flourish. With a sweeping gesture, she said, “Your hair is so radiant that it must have been spun from the purest threads of silver, your locks truly a gift from the Moonmaiden herself.”
His lips twitched upward into an involuntary smile. Asanna could certainly give him a run for his money when she wanted to in the flattery department.
Openly grinning at him, she cheekily added, “And your eyes are more dazzling than the most flawless of rubies, their beauty so hypnotic that I could easily drown in those crimson pools forever.”
Astarion tsked in annoyance that she still wasn’t willing to give him what he really wanted, although he preened just a bit and touched his hair. “Fine, I suppose I deserve this as payback, but—”
Asanna wasn’t done and moved her hand as if she were tracing his body. “Why ... it’s almost as if the gods made you just to ruin me.”
He waved his hands at her placatingly. “Yes, yes, you’ve had your fun—there’s no need to throw all my lines back in my face, darling. You can definitely stop now!” He almost shouted the words out but managed to keep relatively quiet so as to not attract any nearby wildlife. While he had wanted to hear her say that she loved him, this wasn’t exactly going as he’d hoped.
“Ah, but how about if I said these little words? Everyone’s favorite ...” She paused a good minute to keep him hanging. “I love you,” she said at last, sounding devastatingly sincere and honest—unlike when he’d said those words to her for the very first time, long before he genuinely meant them as he did now.
Astarion winced inwardly as he remembered that day, but he noticed that she’d crossed her arms and seemed quite pleased with herself, a smug look plastered on her face. Since Asanna was clearly having a bit of fun with things, he decided that teasing her back was eminently fair play. It was certainly far better than allowing the dark shadows that ebbed and flowed at the edges of his mind to make their way in again to ruin the rest of the day at any rate.
“You know, I’m almost proud of how patiently you waited to get your revenge—it’s exactly what I would have done. However, your timing and choice of location could not possibly have been any worse, my love,” he said, pointing a thumb at their surroundings. “If we’re accosted by any homicidal deep gnomes, I will be blaming you for it. That Wulbren fellow was very intent on getting his revenge after you helped depose him, if you’ll recall.”
Asanna rolled her eyes at him and said, “And if one of the seven thousand newly freed spawn comes after us while we’re here, weeeeell ....”
“Touché, my sweet! I knew I started liking you for a reason—we’re more alike than you want to admit. In the humor department at least,” Astarion said with a smirk. He then cocked his head to the side like he did whenever he was puzzled over what to do about feelings that still seemed completely foreign to him at times. “But those words hold true for me now—I need you to believe that, if nothing else,” he said, his voice dropping lower as he caressed her check tenderly. “By the way, this is me obliquely apologizing in case that isn’t clear. Just ... try not to turn me into a simpering puddle of mush too often. It’s really not my style.“
Asanna closed her eyes and relaxed into his touch before taking his hand into her own and kissing the cool flesh of his palm. He inhaled briefly at the contact, his eyes seeming to deepen in color as her lips pressed against his skin—and just because he didn’t have to breathe didn’t mean that he couldn’t under the right conditions. She smiled at his reaction but seemed subdued as she recalled their conversation from that day. “I knew you were lying when you first said it—your tells have been more obvious than you think,” she said softly, “but a part of me wanted to believe the lie.”
“I have tells? Perish the thought!” He snorted dismissively at the idea, but then his curiosity got the better of him. “What tells?”
“The way your eyes narrow and crinkle at the edges ... the way your eyebrow arches ... the oh-so-insincere smile when you lie ...” Asanna ticked off a short but detailed list with her fingers as she spoke.
“All right, I ... concede on those points,” he said, sounding a tad sulky about it.
“I’m not sure that I should let you off quite so easily, though.” Asanna looked him up and down and said, “Maybe you should put a little more effort into earning my forgiveness.”
“My, my. Now whatever could I possibly do to make it up to you?” He tilted her head to the side and brushed his lips across her neck before whispering into her ear, “I do like a challenge ... hmm ... I personally have some deliciously debauched ideas, but they’ll have to wait until we get to that dreadful mage’s tower of yours.”
Asanna rolled her eyes and tried to punch him in the shoulder, but he dodged with the grace of a dancer. She gave up on what she knew to be a losing battle and said, “It’s not a mage’s tower. Technically speaking ...”
“... the last resident was a cleric,” Astarion said, mimicking her voice and finishing her sentence before she could since he’d heard it enough times by now. “Well, it was clearly built by a mage, and you’re a mage intent on taking possession of it. Honestly, I think Gale’s pedantry has rubbed off on you just a bit too much, my sweet.”
Astarion sniffed disdainfully when mentioning Gale, but he actually rather missed the wizard and his lectures—not to mention the possibility that he might hypothetically be able to help with Astarion’s vulnerability to the sun now that the tadpoles were gone. Gale had promised to stay in touch, and maybe once things settled down, the two wizards could put their heads together and work on his problem ....
Asanna directed an irritated look at him. “I am not pedantic. There’s just being fully accurate and ... and ... not being fully accurate!” she exclaimed indignantly.
“You’re being a little too Gale about this again. Please don’t,” Astarion said. “What are you even going to do with it? It’s practically falling down, and there are holes bigger than the Netherbrain in that thing!”
“Barcus and the rest of the Ironhands can help with the rebuilding effort—and you’re exaggerating about how bad it is,” Asanna replied, apparently not a care in the world about how monumental a task renovating such a severely damaged structure might be.
“Oh?” Astarion asked. “Well then, my love, if you’re so intent on doing impossible things today, maybe you could demolish Cazador’s palace for me while you’re at it. I honestly can’t believe that it was left completely untouched in the attack,” he said, managing to sound like reality itself had offended him. Then he clapped his hands together suddenly and brightly asked, “Do you think that Duke Ravengard would be willing to lend us a few trebuchets if we ask him nicely when we go back for a visit? Just a few! And only until I’ve turned Cazador’s palace into rubble. Please?”
Suppressing a sigh as he pouted at her to try to get his way—something that had worked on her far too often—she said, “That is both unlikely and impractical.” Tapping her chin thoughtfully, she added, “Unless you don’t mind asking Barcus for help.”
Astarion wrinkled his nose and disparagingly said, “That gnome? Darling, you can’t possibly be serious.”
She coolly shot back, “If you really want to destroy the palace, then getting the leader of a clan with expertise in explosives to lend a hand is at least slightly more realistic than your apparent belief that Wyll’s father can somehow magically materialize enough trebuchets to get the job done.”
“But you’re a wizard. Using magic to materialize things is literally what you do!” he exclaimed, ignoring the fact that Wyll’s father was very definitely not a wizard.
“Don’t look a gift gnome in the mouth, especially not one who owes us several favors. Didn’t you learn that saying in one of your surface schools?” she asked sweetly—too sweetly.
When she used that tone, he knew that he was in trouble. Just how much trouble could range from Asanna raking her nails across his back in bed—a definite plus—to potentially incinerating him with a glare or a fireball. Fortunately, he did like living just a bit dangerously when it came to her—those appalling hook horrors they’d encountered on their previous sojourn to the Underdark not so much.
She motioned that they needed to get moving, and he graciously offered his arm to her as they resumed walking. Looking up at the ceiling and seeing soft blue lights twinkling every so often high above them made Astarion feel like they were walking beneath a star-filled sky. It left him with a strange feeling of nostalgia for the surface world at night.
Noticing where he was looking, Asanna said, “Ah, the glowworms. I used to look up at them when I was a child, wishing that I was on the surface and that it were the real thing instead of the illusion of it. Still, the place has its charms.”
“And you’re one of them,” Astarion said smoothly, bringing her hand up to his lips and kissing it. “You’ll forgive me for asking something unromantic, but ... why did you leave the Underdark? You’ve never really told me anything beyond the fact that you’re Seldarine and that it made you an outcast.”
“Maybe it was entirely so that I could meet an inordinately handsome vampire spawn or a winged cat,” she joked, referring to Gale’s tressym.
His ears almost visibly perked up at that. “Handsome, you say? What marvelous taste you have! I can’t help but to agree with you on that point,” he said, unable to resist responding even though he knew he should really be shutting up.
Asanna’s expression then grew serious and she was silent for a few minutes, almost as lost in thought as he had been earlier. “I suppose you want a serious answer. Understand that to live in Menzoberranzan is to live in a constant state of fear for those who don’t worship the Spider Queen. The atmosphere was ... oppressive,” she finally said. “I didn’t want to spend every day choking on paranoia and terror while wondering if it would finally be the day that my family would be unlucky enough to end up enslaved or sacrificed or turned into actual spiders. We lived double lives, going through enough of the motions of being obedient Lolth worshippers to keep those who might be spying on us fooled.”
Astarion nodded, understanding all too well how she felt. ”It feels like you’ll drown beneath the waves. Yes ... I know what that’s like,” he murmured quietly, giving her hand a comforting squeeze as he himself relived his own past for a moment.
She nodded and her voice was subdued as she said, “The surface world held the promise of freedom from fear.”
“And you gave that up for ... me,” Astarion said, turning this new piece of information over in his mind. “I ....”
Asanna shook her head to silence him and nearly tripped over a rock but managed to catch herself in time. “You gave up just as much for me—more, even. You chose being true to yourself over all the power that was at your fingertips, and ... I suppose you chose me as well. Could I have done any less for you?”
They wordlessly started climbing a cliff to get to a vantage point and check their progress. When they finally got to the top, he pulled her away from the edge, a tad nervous about her—to put it as nicely as he was capable of—lack of both dexterity and a sense of self-preservation. “In all seriousness, we can go back if you want. I don’t want to deprive you of your sense of security after earning my freedom just because you think that this is the safest place for me. I did get by for two centuries without incinerating myself in the daylight, you know. I was just caught unawares at the docks—it won’t happen again.”
He quickly leaned in and kissed her hungrily, only pulling away with a fair amount of effort. “Look, what I’m about to suggest isn’t my first choice ... or my second ... or my third ... or my fourth really. However, the palace is an option since it’s, ugh, still standing,” he said, although his reluctance bled through in each word that he managed to grind out.
Asanna recognized his discomfort and asked, “You don’t really want to live there with the ghosts of the past, do you?”
“Well ... I don’t know. Maybe I need to confront them ... or something like that. And we could make new memories, right? I mean, that seems like the sort of nauseatingly positive and optimistic thing that you’d say about it,” Astarion said, looking to see how far away that damned tower of hers was.
From where they were, it seemed to be reasonably close. The tower projected upwards from the rock that it was rooted in, the blue flames of its braziers still visible, meaning that its arcane engine—not that he knew if it was the proper description for the device—was still operating. This meant that its defenses would still be shut down and the cannons wouldn’t be trying to murder them again, which was a relief.
“No,” Asanna said. Judging by her calculations and a quick check of their map, it wouldn’t take much longer, assuming that she didn’t somehow get them turned around. Navigation wasn’t one of her strong suits, and with the ridiculously tall rock formations, it did happen on occasion ....
Astarion looked at her, his mouth wordlessly opening and closing a few times due to his shock over the rapidity of her response. “No? Just like that? You’re not even considering the idea?” he asked in surprise.
She poked him in the chest. “You don’t want to do it. I can hear it in your voice, and I don’t want you to do something that you clearly hate. Anyway, the decor was awfully tacky if you ask me,” she said with a disdainful snort as she recalled the ridiculous amount of frippery in the palace. Every inch of the building was constructed from the finest materials and the place had undeniably dripped with opulence, but it was all very overdone—a heavy touch where lightness was required. And all the red was such a cliché in her opinion. Asanna thought about it for a while before speaking. “I won’t lie and say that I don’t miss seeing the sun, but if I may wax poetic for a moment—”
Astarion interrupted her with a dramatic groan. “Gods above, isn’t one wizard with poetic aspirations quite enough?”
She tried to smack him in the shoulder again, but this time he let her get away with it to give her a small victory. “It’s that, or you don’t get to sleep in bed tonight,” Asanna said, crossing her arms.
“We don’t even have a bedroom, much less a bed for you to kick me out of, my sweet,” Astarion quickly fired back.
She closed her eyes and began chanting, her hands seeming to pluck the invisible Weave like a loom. It was a trick that she had, in fact, picked up from Gale. Astarion arched an eyebrow at her, not sure if he was more bemused than amused or if it was the other way around as she began casting her mystery spell. As the outline of an honest-to-gods bed with actual pillows began to appear, he watched with astonishment. His disappointment was legion when it disappeared as Asanna cut the spell short.
Astarion made a tsking sound and looked at her with a mixture of reproach and smoldering intensity. “Darling, you kept this delightful talent of yours hidden away this whole time when we’ve been forced to sleep on the cold, hard ground? I’m so hurt that you haven’t shared this with me until now.”
She grinned at him slyly. “If you’d like me to complete that spell when we get to the tower, then ....”
He pointed his finger at her and waggled it. “Oh, no, no, no. What was that you just said about not wanting me to do things I hate?”
“Well, it’s your loss—I suppose you’ll just have to sleep alone for the night and go without dinner. How very sad for you,” Asanna said diffidently as she purposely moved her hair to the side to show off the scarring left on her neck by his bite.
“Oh ... fine. You’re just not letting this go, are you?” Astarion asked irritably, rolling his eyes and tilting his head up and away in annoyance.
“Weren’t you working on being nicer? Didn’t you say that just yesterday?” Crossing her arms, she shot him a glare that dared him to say no.
Astarion looked down his nose at her. “I said ‘nicer,’ not ‘masochistic enough to listen to wizards who think they’re poets.’” Motioning as if he were shooing her to go on and get it over with, he sighed and said, “Go ahead—even though I’m sure that I’ll regret this.”
“All I wanted was to tell you that I don’t see it as a loss, I see it as ... a kind of balance. As much as I might miss the sunlight, it’s only when the sun falls from the sky that the moon can rise to take its place and bathe the land in Selune’s light,” she said, stopping to cast a minor cantrip that summoned three dancing orbs. With the illumination from them outlining Astarion’s hair, it seemed to glow like a halo around his face as she ran her fingers through his soft, white curls. She then quietly said, “And without the darkness in ascendance, the stars could never shine as brightly as they do to light the way forward—as you do for me, my beloved star.”
Astarion cleared his throat and tried to say something, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. He tried again and finally managed to find his words. “It’s ... a good thing we’re not out in broad daylight, or you might have seen me blush just now,” he said with an embarrassed little laugh. He pulled Asanna tightly to him and rested his forehead against hers. Closing his eyes, he exhaled and said, “I suppose it’s my turn to come up with something that’s the equal to your words, but ... I can’t. I can only say that without you, I think I would have been lost to the darkness forever. And ... maybe your poetic moment wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be—maybe.”
Asanna lingered for a minute before pulling away to give him a quick peck on the cheek, although she had to stretch up to do it since she was almost a head shorter than he was. Grinning at him, she said, “I’ll have you praising Gale’s actual poetry before too long at this rate.”
“No, never. That will absolutely never happen,” he protested, pointing his finger at her after releasing her. Sighing and tossing his head back dramatically, Astarion looked down at Asanna and said, “Fine, have it your way then. But the fact that you’re right—again—is so dreadfully and infuriatingly annoying ... so much so that it makes me want to take a bite out of your delicious self—several bites in fact.”
“Only if you catch me first. I’ll be taking a shortcut, but do feel free to follow!” Casting the incantation for enhanced leap with a mischievous look in her eye and a feather fall spell, bounding across the rock formations. It was only in moments like these aided by magic that she felt unfettered and could move with something approaching the grace that Astarion possessed. A few quick gestures and she turned invisible as well. Let’s see if you can follow me now, she thought, smug about her head start.
Astarion watched her path, running his tongue along the points of his fangs when she vanished. “So, a chase is what you want? Oh, this is going to be so much fun,” he said under his breath as he followed after her.
He flitted along the same path she did at an almost inhuman speed, aided in part by his own magic. He might not be able to cast a fireball, but his arcane knowledge extended to minor cantrips and a handful of spells like misty step that came in handy for the ignoble art of thievery. As for her disappearing act, the scent that was so uniquely her was in the air, and he could track it anywhere. The faint notes of vanilla and citrus left in her wake were unmistakable.
It didn’t matter how far away she was or how long it would take, he would always find her.