Chapter Text
**Portal - Astarion’s POV**
Astarion was very much alone. The Netherbrain was defeated and Baldurs Gate was saved. And everything had gone back to the way it was before.
Well almost everything, Cazador was now gone and the spawn were released into the Underdark, and now Astarion was alone. More alone than he had ever been. His friends had all gone back to their lives, Gale back to Waterdeep taking his wife Tav with him, setting up his own school was keeping him very occupied, Wyll and Karlach were having fun hunting demons in the Hells, Shadowheart was with her parents taking Scratch and the Owlbear with her (they never did name him), and Lae’zel had also gone back home with Prince Orpheus to overthrow the Githyanki Queen. And Halsin, well he was establishing a new grove where the Shadowfell used to be along with quite a few of the refuges that had flooded Baldurs Gate for a while.
And Astarion, well he was left rattling around Cazador’s Palace all on his own. Sure, he could go annoy one of his friends, and wouldn’t that be fun, but no, they all seemed so content from what he had gotten from their letters, and they all sent a copious amount of letters (well apart from Lae’zel, the stubborn githyanki was unsurprising and blessedly silent), that he didn’t have the heart to disturb their lives just so he could feel less empty.
While they were fighting the Netherbrain and the Dead Three, he had had purpose and friends by his side. His life was now his own and he could do anything he wanted, but it felt like fate and destiny were done with him and had cast him adrift to listlessly float on the waves of the coming centuries.
The loneliness felt paralyzing and the weight of that loneliness was crushing him, drowning him until he couldn’t breathe.
The days had bled into each other, one very much the same of the next, apart from feeding which he now found he didn’t need or want to do that much, he barely left the palace, opting to wander the halls and rooms like a pale but handsome ghost, he was dressed somewhat casually in his customary silk ruffled shirt and leather britches, with his daggers, Rhapsody and Bloodthirst, strapped to his hips, (because a rogue should always be prepared of course).
He drifted into one of the libraries in the palace and realised he hadn’t been in this one before. This place was such a maze though that even in his two centuries living here he hadn’t seen the whole place, he didn’t even know that the dungeon, that the 7000 spawn had been kept in, existed until Astarion and his friends came here to kill Cazador, so it wasn’t that much of a surprise that there was other places he hadn’t found in the year he had been here alone.
This library though was different. Illuminated motes seem to hung in the air as if some magically explosion had just occurred, the light streamed in through the high arched windows in all the colours of the rainbow, giving the entire space an ethereal, otherworldly feel. The book shelves rose some twenty feet to the vaulted ceiling, filled to the brim by all kinds of books and objects that he couldn’t look at any one thing, garnet eyes instead darting about trying to take it all in at once. He had the distinct impression of an intensely arcane collection, he could feel the magic prickling along his skin like goose flesh.
Astarion hesitated to move into the light fully expecting to get singed. Since the tadpole had left him he had had to live in the dark and twilight hours again, although he could now move around normally during the day as long as he kept out of direct sunlight, which was a new development and certainly an improvement on his life before. But oh how he missed the sunlight kissing his cold skin and warming him if only fleetingly.
He gradually moved into the large vaulted space, trying to avoid the direct beams of light but found his progress slow as there was so many, he held out his hand gingerly barely touching one of the shafts of light, it didn’t hurt, but instead welcomed him further into the room, caressing his silvery locks as he fully moved into the light like a lover.
As he walked further into the room he could hear a faint susurration emanate from something to his right, his excellent vampiric hearing guiding him to the tome that was causing the sound. He took the tome from the shelf and placed in on a nearby table and pulled up a plump chair. Cazador had been collecting magical books and arcane trinkets for centuries, even before Astarion was enslaved to him, and he could only assume that this was one of the books Cazador had hoarded and then just set aside if it wasn’t what he was looking for. The cover seemed ancient but also unmarked and fairly plain, considering the power he could feel coming off it in waves.
Astarionn sat back in his chair, he had two options, as he saw it. He could ignore the calling from the book, because it was very much calling out to him, or he could ignore it and continue to be so terribly bored. And there was nothing worse to Astarion’s mind than to be bored. In fact the utter boredom and loneliness of his life was killing him.
Decision made then.
Opening the book gingerly, several things happened at once, an unnatural wind sprang forth from the pages, an eerie purple light accompanied the wind and a single black feather materialised in a red haze and hovered over the opened book. Astarion stared at the feather, fascinated, and not a little excited, because he suddenly felt destiny holding out its hand to him again.
His long delicate fingers slowly went to touch the feather. As soon as he reached it he felt a tug and the world tumbled away. He was being buffeted in a purple vortex and lost track of all time and reality, it felt as though he were travelling at a thousand miles an hour and also being held perfectly still, his hair was whipping around his face and neck but his clothes were not shifting in the wind as he would have expected. It was unnatural and yet felt entirely right at the same time. This was meant to be. He could faintly hear voices with his exceptional hearing, but he couldn’t make out anything they were saying, strain as he might.
Suddenly the vortex ejected him out and he fell to his hands and knees on a smooth tiled floor. He stayed there letting his stomach settle and trying to get his bearings. From his left he heard a soft female voice.
“What the fuck?”
His head snapped to the sound, he saw a pale, slight woman in strange clothing (for a woman anyway, tight pants, white shirt and a leather black and red corset with arm and shoulder straps, and some sort of holster belted around her slim hips which he could only imagine held some weapons), her hair was a dark chestnut piled on top of her head and she wore makeup that accentuated her stunning blue eyes and ivory skin.
His hand flew to his daggers and he sprang into a couch, moving quicker than the eye could track comfortably. Stunning she may be, and by the gods she was stunning, but she was also a stranger and armed and gods only knew where he was. Red mist suddenly coalesced into a tall male figure in front of the woman, protectively shielding her, Astarion did manage to see some frustration and slight annoyance before she was hidden by the mans body. Astarions eyes flicked over this new threat, assessing him and taking everything in. He was taller than Astarion and had an artfully messy mop of silver hair and red eyes, the right one seemed to be glowing. He was dressed in a dark outfit with a black jacket with red embroidery draped over his shoulders, a dark black and red shirt (Astarion briefly lusted after the shirt ‘I simply must see your tailor, Darling’) and dark pants with a beautifully tooled belt. No weapons that Astarion could see but he could feel the menace and threat radiating from him. Dammed if it didn’t feel good, to be seen as a threat, though he suddenly didn’t want to be, he felt a strange pull from this gorgeous specimen and the stunning woman being protected behind him.
Deeming him to be the more dangerous of the pair though, Astarion kept his focus on him whilst scanning the rest of his surrounds using his peripheral vision and heightened senses.
They seemed to be in some kind of arena, with tall, crumbling and ruined columns surrounding the space. There only seemed to be one entry point and they were the only ones here if you didn’t count the large corpse of what looked like some kind of extremely large stag sprawled grotesquely near a broken archway, its body’s unnatural glow slowly fading. What the hell was going on?