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It takes a very long time for Astarion’s sight to return, after his year in the crypt.
A consequence of months, desperately straining in the dark. Months of maniacal rolling in sockets slicked with unwitting tears. More months of stagnant tomb air relentlessly sapping all moisture from his wretched body, leaving any exposed skin looking cloaked in a shroud of clean ash. Eventually, months of sightless staring, straight ahead into grey-black stone.
He doesn’t even remember his actual release. Who it was that lifted him from the ossuary, who had carried him back into the castle proper; he will never know. On the other hand, he has a fair idea of the state in which he’d been recovered.
His Master so delights in telling him.
As the granite slab had been slid away, Cazador had initially thought him dead. Astarion was silent and unmoving, his skin so pale it swallowed the surrounding shadows. Instead of the servile dogling he’d expected, humbled and slavish, he’d gotten an absent ghost.
He’ll describe how all the dust accumulated from a year of neglect had filtered down onto Astarion’s motionless face as he was unveiled. His eyes, open and unseeing, still further dulled by the silt as it settled over them. He recounts cradling Astarion’s sunken, milk white cheek, and how delicate he’d been when brushing the debris away. Recalls the crimson glow of his domination still luminous beneath the dirt.
He’ll sigh at how Astarion hadn’t blinked, not even then. Hadn’t flinched or cringed or pulled away. How he’d rolled his vacant eye around with his thumb like one would a glass marble, or the ceramic eye of a doll. Cold, and smooth, and fallow as a sterile field.
A child’s toy. A plaything.
A year of lonely agony, of begging for anyone, in any capacity at all. To be with him, to see him, even to touch him if they wanted, as long as they were there. He cannot complain that his wish had been granted.
It’s the day after his return to the surface that Astarion’s mind returns to him, well before his sight. His first coherent thought in many months is that he’d have been perfectly content to keep floating high above the world and dreaming. What good does coming back to false life for a second time do him? What of this is worth coming back for?
His second thought is of blood.
It’s blood that reawakens him, of course. That takes the choice out of his useless hands. The scent of it, the taste of it, its proximity after so very, very long. It yanks his wandering soul back into its proper place with a thirst that feels impossible. A hunger that can’t feasibly exist, the way the boundary of his body is so completely overlapped by its nearest edge.
The blood is that of a dog. A street mutt, its life drained into a steel cup and dribbled past his lips by his sibling, his lonely sister. Violet, Cazador’s first spawn.
“Come back,” Astarion remembers her murmuring. “I cannot do this alone.”
He would shudder back into himself at the first touch of still-hot blood on his tongue. Too weak to lift his own head, Violet had supported his neck with her cool, clawed hand, so that he wouldn’t aspirate as he frantically drank. Graceless and blind, knowing nothing of the world around him beyond his awful hunger, he drank until the cup was empty and licked clean as far into it as he could reach.
Violet would later tell him that caring for him then, in his abject, pathetic helplessness, she had come to understand why the Master found so much joy in his debasement. Like this, he really was little more than a needful puppy.
And what could be more powerless?
-
A month after his rescue sees him in the kennel again. On his knees, prostrate before his Master.
An uncanny stillness leaves him more marble than man; Cazador had quickly tired of his trembling and quaking and ordered him motionless. He assumed that the shaking was born of fear; Astarion can see the simultaneous pleasure and contempt play across his face when he chances a quick look. Truthfully, a part of it is.
But not all.
More pressing than the fear is the thirst. Mostly, what he shakes with is need.
Cazador has hardly taken a full step into the kennel before the smell of rancid blood suffuses Astarion’s entire body, setting every inch of him alight. Light-starved pupils expand, blood-starved muscles tighten, colorless lips peel off dry gums like curling clay under a baking sun. The sharp-edged chasm of his belly contracts and jerks in frightful spasms. He hasn’t been fed since the pittance his sister pilfered for him, the scant few mouthfuls it was. Left to wither once more in the rotten dark, crushed by the weight of the emptiness that hollows him out clean to the skin.
But Cazador is here now. And with a rat’s bloated carcass in his hand.
“The vampiric body has a rather unique reaction to starvation, have you noticed? Where a mortal wretch fades into a disfigured, unsightly husk, a vampire will blossom as a bud into a rose.” His voice is coolly detached as he walks a leisurely circle around Astarion’s spot on the floor. “Your eyes will brighten. Your skin will soften and flush, mimicking life, and the stench of undeath is notably diminished. All further temptation for our prey.”
A cold hand flirts across Astarion’s cheek.
“Did you know that, pet? That right now, much as you ache, you might just be the loveliest you’ve ever been?”
Astarion has no answer. He hasn’t heard a word. His entire world consists of the limp rodent in his Master’s fist; its blood, so terribly close.
“Of course you don’t. There’s so little that you do. An empty skull behind that pretty face, isn’t it so, my needy little pup? Nod.”
Astarion nods.
“And all the better for it, much as it vexes. The bitch does not love her pup for its wit, nor the sire his spawn for the same.” The claret fog of Astarion’s thirst deepens when Cazador sighs, and the sanguine scent of his breath washes over him. “However. Like this, you’re useless to me. You’d have your suitors rutting into a vacant corpse, lying about as you are. No, I need you hale enough to hunt. Glut yourself now, and be grateful for your Master’s generosity.”
The vampire holds up his hand like a cleric channeling a blessing before crushing the rat into pulp.
Astarion falls apart in the cage of his frozen body to the chorus of splintering bones and rupturing offal. He watches as the rodent’s thin, watery blood streams onto the floor, peppered with quivering burgundy clots. Saliva floods his mouth. The order of utter stillness rejects his attempt to swallow, so it drools past his lips and down his chin. Inside himself he roars, thrashes and cries out like a wild animal, mind rent with desperate, loathsome hunger. Externally, he’s just a body on its knees, eyes reflecting the sky of someplace far away.
And then his thrall is released.
Astarion falls upon the blood with single-minded fervor. He slurps and sucks and laps at the meager puddle, gulping it down as soon as it meets his withered tongue. It’s sour, tepid, and slippery. It’s ambrosia. The stone floor scrapes his lips until they blush raw beneath their carmine blanket. Grit and dirt gather along his gums and between his teeth. Bits of tissue, half-melted with decay and wetly clinging to greasy fur, get chewed and swallowed without a second thought or moment’s hesitation. Anything to get the blood down faster. Anything to fill the hole that is all of him.
His awareness returns only once the blood finally starts a sluggish trickle through his gasping veins. He blinks and finds himself crouched, laving the grout clean like a mangy stray stripping every last scrap of meat from a bone. Humiliation, more familiar to him now than his own face, becomes a leaden weight in his belly.
He ignores it in favor of gathering the smeared remnants of his meal from his face with quick fingers, and cleaning them as he had the stone.
A wet thump draws his stare back to his Master.
He’s dropped the mangled rat off to his side, and Astarion is enthralled once more. There’s probably still a sip left in it. Astarion can see florid droplets still clinging to its crumpled whiskers, he would only have to crawl a few feet and he’d get to experience the ecstasy that comes from his fangs piercing hide and flesh, drawing the very marrow from weak little matchstick bones.
It takes willpower he isn’t sure the source of to wrench back control from his thirst, meagerly slaked as it is. His eyes return to Cazador’s.
The elder vampire grins with something like a father’s pride, only his is warped. Wrong. He lifts the hand in which he’d held the rat.
“Come.” His smile is poison.
Astarion takes hold of his Master’s hand. A muted sort of surprise registers in the back of his mind; he’s never noticed how much smaller Cazador’s were than his own.
He cradles it like something precious, supports it with a parishioner’s fearful reverence. Bows his head over it. Swallows.
“Good dog.”
Floats.
He draws the flat of his tongue across an icy palm. Fetid, corrupted, festering, blooming like a fungal spore. Taste, action, being. It’s so easy to sink into himself now, to choose to fade away. It’s not Astarion taking the Szarr heraldic ring into his mouth, polishing it free of gore until it gleams. It’s not the son of House Ancunín brushing his lips over a row of bony knuckles, the peaks and valleys of which his body could recreate blind.
He embraces the silken numbness as he suckles and licks along each stained finger. Feeling wholly separate from the unfortunate creature he is, sucking clotted rot from beneath the claws of the man who has ruined him.
“Any will can be broken, my boy. Just as any slavering cur can be tamed.”
How curious, Astarion muses. He watches, unfeeling, from far away. To be spoken to, when he’s not even there.
-
All that Astarion knows in this second life, he knows with absolute certainty. There is no space in him left for doubt, or questions, or even thoughts beyond survival.
For instance, he has no questions about his existence as a slave.
He knows that his body and his mind are no longer his own. He knows that every second he spends out of the kennel or crypts is a second he must earn. And he knows that as long as he has any control of his silver tongue and his golden words, then he can continue to earn those precious, uncaged seconds. The closest thing he has to freedom.
His is a command of language that hints at a life he no longer remembers. He is articulate and poetic, eloquent and charming. Quick to compliment, learned in flattery. His words are his sword, his shield, and his armor. His words are all he has of his own.
It’s unfortunate for him, really, that they are so terribly easy to take away.
The device had been tailored to his specific measurements, constructed of iron and leather with shiny bronze buckles. It’s kept in the Master's personal chambers, on a jewelry stand on his vanity table, beside a glass case displaying a collection of silver jewelry. Once a month, it’s Astarion’s responsibility to buff the iron, oil the leather, and polish the silver and bronze. He’s made to put it on when he’s spoken out of turn, or been caught prattling to himself, or found wasting anyone's time with idle talk. A reasonable punishment for a yapping dog. Excuses, excuses. Made up rules meant to shift blame.
In reality, the simple truth is that his Master finds him beautiful in it. Stilling his tongue, stripping him of his only means of protection. He wears it when Cazador wishes to hurt him in a way neither Godey and his primitive tortures nor his marks and their lingering touches ever could.
It always starts in the same way, this little ritual, with him being summoned to Cazador’s personal bedchambers sometime after the creeping spread of dawn. Astarion finds him seated on his modest bed, the shape of him swallowed by his dark, flowing sleeping clothes. A wicked claw points at a small cushioned chair in an alcove near the door.
“Your clothes, if you please,” Cazador says. His eyes betray his anticipation.
Astarion strips. He folds his clothes, places them on the cushioned chair, and turns back to the bed. His hands ache to tremble, but he wills them to remain steady at his sides.
“Fetch your muzzle. And one of the plain bands, I think.”
Astarion starts pleading about now. Silent, as always. A tired internal litany, as sincere as he’s capable. Please, gods, any and all of you. I know you’re listening. Save me, I’m not strong enough. Please, send someone to save me from this.
Meanwhile, his body moves itself toward the vanity. It lifts the muzzle from its stand, and gingerly plucks a plain, silver ring from the glass case.
Pulling him from his prayers as a leash pulls a beaten whelp back to its master, uncomfortable heat starts to build around the silver. His monstrous flesh, rejecting the metal’s purity. He’s forcibly returned to a dance his body could easily perform without him around to lead it.
He carries the items to Cazador and kneels down before him, resting his weight on his heels. He makes sure to do it close enough to be touched without Cazador needing to reach. Always easy, never any fuss.
His lower lip quivers; he pierces it with a fang to keep it still.
Cazador takes the muzzle from Astarion’s lax grip and swipes a finger across the mouthpiece, inspecting it for dust. Pinches the leather to feel for cracking, thumbs the buckles to check for a shine.
“It’s a prudent child that properly maintains their things. Gifts, doubly so.” His smile oozes condescension. “I can find no fault in your keeping. You should take pride in it.”
“Thank you.” Astarion’s mouth says. He can’t remember what it feels like to be proud of himself. A vision of Cazador’s sundered corpse flits past his mind's eye; an image of his own hands stained to the wrist with the vampire's blood. An impossible dream. The only image he has of a chance to feel pride is nothing more than a child’s fantasy.
Cazador hums thoughtfully. He reaches into his voluminous robe, into some hidden inner pocket, and pulls out a shiny little trinket. A small, golden bell. It sings out in a gentle chime while he threads it onto the muzzle's chin strap, and Astarion blinks and blinks and blinks, until his sudden tears are swept away.
Fool, He seethes inside. You blathering weakling! Crying over what, such a miniscule new cruelty? Are you so eager to see him satisfied?
Cazador’s eyes, appearing black in the candlelit room, swim with pleasure at whatever expression shows on Astarion’s face. His free hand moves, glacially slow, to push aside the bit of robe covering his lap. He’s bare beneath, and thoroughly hard.
“Open up, pet. Ring in, quickly now.”
Every time, the same.
Astarion’s mouth opens, and his tongue slides out. He places the spotless silver band onto it with fingers now faintly smoking, and slides his tongue back in. He focuses on its tingling warmth. Measures it as it intensifies. Concentrates his attention on the exact circumference of it, the perfect scorched circle it will leave.
He’s managed a modicum of separation before his lips are prodded by the muzzle’s bit, so it’s from a distance that he prompts them to part further. It presses in. Weight on the ring sharpens its hurt. The mouthpiece presses flush to his face, and his teeth clench around it. The hinged iron cheek straps are closed. The leather that holds his jaw shut is slipped on. In a fog, he tilts his head forward for the final piece to be placed. A forked leather strap that anchors to the corners of the mouthpiece, framing his nose to come together at its bridge, then stretching over to the back of his head. A moment’s pause sees it buckled, a grip in his hair brings his gaze back to level.
Dimly, Astarion registers the melodic twinkling of the bell.
Cazador’s voice, when it comes, is nearly inflectionless. He strokes himself perfunctorily, with one hand still fisted around a handful of silver hair. “Already without a bite, little pup, and now without a bark. What else does one keep a dog for?”
The pain in Astarion’s mouth is already too pressing to ignore. The ring sizzles and chars him like a coal plucked straight from a fire, frothing up the saliva that pools around it into a bitter foam. His jaw clenches uselessly around the bit; he only succeeds in pressing the ring harder into his tongue. Spittle bubbles out around the mouthpiece to scald his chin and bared chest. He fights the instinct to swallow, fear of accidentally ingesting the broiling band tightening his throat such that each breath is forced out as a desperate wheeze.
Cazador hums again, watching Astarion twitch and jerk like a puppet on spider silk strings. He makes no move to quicken his pace as he touches himself. He briefly pauses to swipe his palm across the mess of boiling spit on Astarion’s chest, purring in gruesome satisfaction when he uses it to slick along his straining length. His skin is wintery cold even there, Astarion knows. His ears just catch a hiss as the two extremes react, faint past the hiccuping whines that are escaping his throat.
The haze that agony casts over his brain is thick enough that any notion of consequence may as well no longer exist. Learned instincts, any well-beaten rules are totally forgotten as an animal’s innate self-preservation takes control. Mindless in his desire to escape the molten pain, he reaches for the muzzle.
“Hands down, boy.”
His hands return to his lap.
Astarion won’t be able to say how long he was knelt there, after it’s over. Muzzled, and burning. Long enough that pink-tinged steam pours from his mouth with the removal of the bit, and drifts off the ring when it’s clumsily spat out onto the floor. Thin, pale blood follows, and gilds it in the candlelight, like it’s fresh from a jeweler’s forge. Soggy black clots fall too, dissolving into a pungent powder when they hit the stone.
He realizes while scraping it up that it’s ash. The remnants of his tongue, from where it had burned away.
When he’s dismissed, he wanders until he finds one of the dark, mirrorless bathing rooms. He sponges his Master's cold spend off of his burn-marred chest, and peels ruined flesh out of his scorched mouth.
Words will be impossible for a while. His sword, his shield, and his armor smear across the washbasin and congeal into an acrid, blackish-brown mass at its base. He forces himself to look away.
His tongue will grow back. In anywhere from a few days to a month, from his experience, depending on how much he gets to feed. It will heal. But… will it be the same? Will it still be his own to command, still weave words together like the one that now lies outside of him as a gore-soaked ruin?
With so much of him already torn away and made new, does it even really matter?
His thoughts drift to his earlier prayer. One he’s repeated so many times over so many damned years. He feels the need to add something, after this, a plea he hasn’t voiced for fear of it being the one that finally gets answered.
Somebody, please. Tell me I’m still worth saving.
-
Time passes. Years span an afternoon, decades limp along like a long winter refusing to cede its rule to the spring. Some things dress up as change, only to be revealed as more of the same when the pretense is stripped away.
There are seven of them now: seven spawn, seven siblings. A happy little family.
They exist in each other's lives as ghosts, for the most part. Silently moving in each other’s peripheries, only knowing one another as the vestiges they leave behind. When they must speak, they refer to each other as ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘dear’. The consequences of being caught using a sibling’s given name are never worth the attempt to maintain distance.
Astarion used to wonder about some of them, about what they were like when they were still people. How much the sniveling, browbeaten creatures he sees differ from who they’d once been. He knows that Dalyria was a doctor, before, the attendant physician to the Baldurian Parliament no less. He only ever found out because he’d stolen her diary once, on a rare evening where all the spawn had been sent out to hunt but him. She’d left it on her bunk, just sitting out on top of her duvet. Where anyone could have snatched it. Astarion had graciously tucked it beneath the loose sheet on her mattress for safe keeping as soon as he’d read it from cover to cover.
Inside he’d found the methodical notes of a meticulous, distrusting, and ferociously angry woman, whose primary goal was to stay alive long enough to figure out how to run, and never look back. She’s been his favorite ever since.
He knows similarly shallow information about the others, even less in some cases, and he works hard to keep it that way. He never opens up, never allows for anything more stirring than idle small talk, or salacious jibes. Nearly all of them have written him off as insipid and vain, callous and careless. Even his kinder siblings avoid him when they can help it. Just as he prefers.
It helps no one to know intimate facts about the person that will torture you, and that you will torture in kind. Knowing them as friends, as family, does not dull the sting of a blade in their hand. Nor does it muffle their screams when you’re made to turn it on them.
Of Cazador’s many, many lessons, this is one that sticks with Astarion the most; caring for anyone other than yourself is pointless self-flagellation, expecting others to care for you is naught but a selfish delusion.
It’s a constant mantra running through his mind whenever they’re pit against each other. Astarion has warmed the beds of plenty of neglected noble sons and daughters, has leant a sympathetic ear to many grievances, petty squabbles over inheritance, titles, land. In the Upper City alone, Baldur’s Gate must be home to hundreds of siblings ready to tear each other apart.
When Godey makes them fight over rats in the kennels, Astarion imagines the scene at a patriar’s dinner table looks much the same.
When Petras is using his bulk to force him to the floor, one hand in his hair and the other raking bloody furrows across his stomach, Astarion can almost hear the voice of their Master, commanding he repeat his lesson aloud. Petras’s growling, bestial as their Master’s wolves, pinning him on his back with a fear so primal he barely recognizes it as his own.
And when he yields, baring his tender throat, he knows that the only thing keeping his brother from tearing it out with his teeth is the geas against tasting thinking blood.
Godey’s shuffling gait stalking toward him is an almost welcome distraction from watching as Petras bleeds his half-rotted prize dry.
“Poor little doggie,” the skeleton cackles. He braces a boot against Astarion’s heaving chest, grinding filth from the floor into the tracks left by his brother’s claws. “Last to the teat, just like always. You’ll never be more than an upstart little runt if you keep showing out like this.”
The sounds of Petras’s feeding have faded. Astarion’s stomach gurgles. Godey’s eyes, bright with malice, don’t leave Astarion’s while he addresses the other spawn.
“Scurry back to your room, dog, and send any spawn lazing about back here to Godey. This one hasn’t yet learned its lesson.”
-
And then.
And then.
All of a sudden, and without any warning at all.
Everything changes.