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By the time a third squirrel slipped his grasp, Astarion was forced to admit defeat. He wasn't going to catch anything; the night was deepening, and the things skittering about the woods were only going to get smaller and more elusive from here. He might as well return to camp and— and—
Try to rest. Tend his bow. Beat his fists ragged against the dirt and scream into his wadded-up bedroll.
The hunger had been his constant companion for two centuries. He didn't remember how it compared to a mortal appetite in anything other than its endlessness. It could change shape, go dull and throbbing rather than sharp and stabbing, round and suffusing rather than edged and pinpoint. He could feel it in his stomach or chest or mouth, hands or eyes or legs, sometimes all of them at once. Maybe mortal hunger was like that, too. He didn't know anymore. But it never ended, and he was sure mortal hunger did.
And yet, during those very first wide-eyed, sunlit days, he'd been stunned by the sheer abundance he found himself enjoying. He could drain multiple animals in a night if he wanted—large, vital, warm-blooded things, invigorated further by the chase. Compared to anything that had come before, it was decadence. He was never full, but he was at least free to pursue satisfaction. Occasionally, he even caught a glimpse of it.
On the other hand, he'd also never before been under this amount of strain.
The healing magic of the cleric and sorcerer worked on him—another of the tadpole’s gifts, he assumed—but it didn't seem to restore whatever sustenance his body drew from blood. Even if a wound was quickly patched up, the mere state of having bled drained him. The fighting was brutal and frequent and when they weren't fighting, they were always on the move, from sunrise to sunset.
Before all this, he'd scrapped with the other spawn, sure—ended up in an ill-advised mugging on occasion. Those times, he'd had hardly enough blood in him to grease his joints. And yet, it was nothing compared to this. The exertion was constant.
It seemed ridiculous he'd taken down a grown boar all by himself just a few days ago. Now, he couldn't even catch a damn squirrel.
The thing chattered at him from the treetops. He made a rude gesture at it and trudged away through the underbrush.
If any of his fellows in tadpoledom had taken note of his habit of slipping into the woods at night, they hadn't mentioned it. Still, he took a moment in the treeline to touch himself up—brush away any stray twigs and leaves, adjust his hair, straighten his doublet and smooth his trousers, all by feel and habit rather than sight—before emerging into the clearing where they'd set up camp.
It was the cleric's watch. She sat by the banked fire at the centre of the tents, staring in the opposite direction. Astarion had been hoping for the wizard or warlock, whose dull human eyes wouldn't be able to spot him in the gloom, but it hardly mattered. She'd assume he'd gone to take a piss or some other mundane, disgusting thing he'd forgotten mortals got up to.
He made sure to snap a twig underfoot as he approached, as to not startle her. As soon as she spotted him, he looked away, jutting out his chin. She let him pass in silence.
The tent was rather coarse, but sturdy, too; they'd been able to purchase proper canvas off the druids a few days back. There was just enough space lengthwise for Astarion to lie down flat, and just barely not enough for him to stand up straight. It stunk of whatever primitive dye the druids had used to stain it, so acrid it stung his nose.
They'd all picked different colours. His was red, in a shade that—prior to getting mud all over it—had been rather a close match for fresh venous blood.
Astarion ducked inside, tying the flap shut behind him with a pretty bow, and bent to take off his boots. It was nothing more than an illusion of privacy, but … The other day, when the wizard had tried to invite him to breakfast, he'd actually knocked. Or, rather, said the words, “Knock, knock,” out loud. When Astarion hadn't replied, he'd gone away.
Astarion chucked the pieces of his ensemble that were too stiff to trance in into a corner. With a sigh, he curled up with a stolen pillow and pilfered blanket, that already had holes and ragged edges. He didn't literally have to sleep in the dirt, but through the thin flooring, he could feel the contours and points of each pebble. Much like the princess in the tale, he thought he would even through layers of goosedown bedding and silk sheets. He would've liked to at least try, though. It was the least he deserved.
Through the galloping herd of unsynchronised heartbeats surrounding him, barely muffled by the canvas of the tent, he somehow managed to find reverie.
He wakes up, and he cannot breathe. He thinks he remembers pain, writhing in agony. But now, he cannot breathe, and it is dark, and everything pales in comparison to that.
He needs to get out. He needs to get up.
His palms hit wood, barely an inch away from his face. The sound of it is odd—too muffled. He kicks his feet, and finds a dull thunk of wood there, too. He’s in a box scarcely large enough for him—the sides press in—the darkness is thick as tar and he cannot breathe—
“Help,” he croaks. That is all his voice can bear; his throat is scratched raw. “Help me.”
His palms hit the lid again. He scrabbles across it, looking for—and there it is, a dip, the groove between one plank and the next. He needs to get out. He needs to get up. Up and out. Out and up.
His nails dig into the wood, and it’s wrong somehow, but he can’t think too much about that because when he pulls with all his strength, the planks begin to separate.
“Help,” he says, pulling, “please help,” and a tidal wave of soil floods his mouth and eyes and ears.
He tries to scream—can’t for the material rammed down his throat—thrashes and squirms, limbs hitting the sides of the box again and again. Dirt pours down his shirt, his trousers. He claws at his face, desperately shovelling soil by the handful away toward his feet, but it never stops coming. Each movement provokes another rush, but he can’t persuade himself to still. He wriggles like a fish on a hook and screams and screams and screams.
Eventually, the box is full and the weight of the earth is holding him down. Like that, he calms, somehow. Again, the need to go up grips him, but gentler this time. He is too exhausted for terror.
He figures out how to curl and wriggle to move dirt from in front of his face to below his feet, like a worm. It’s slow and nudges soil into every crack and crevice of his body, but the movement soothes. He must go up. Following that urge is the only thing that still makes sense.
He emerges into the night, coughing and choking. He vomits blood and dirt, again and again, the taste somehow even worse on the way out. The tips of his fingers dig into the ground. He pulls himself out of the earth onto all fours, still sputtering.
Someone steps in front of him, into his limited field of vision. The pointed tips of two shiny, elegant shoes.
“First,” says Cazador Szarr, though Astarion doesn’t know that name yet, “thou shalt not drink of the blood of thinking creatures.”
Every word thrums through his very being, as if plucking at some fundamental string inside. He gasps for breath. He is hollow, aching, empty. Air isn’t soothing it. His throat still burns. There’s something wrong with his chest. Is it his heart?
“Second, thou shalt obey me in all things. Third, thou shalt not leave my side unless directed.”
Something smooth and hard—the metal-tipped butt of a staff—lifts Astarion’s chin. Crimson, glowing eyes stare coldly down at him. He can’t look away, even though all he wants to do is cower and cringe.
“Fourth, thou shalt know that thou art mine.” A hideous grin spreads the thin lips below the horrible eyes, baring a set of fangs. “You are mine. Forever.”
Astarion retches bile onto Cazador’s shoes.
The memory ended, and Astarion opened his eyes, staring up at the canvas above him. A gust of wind tugged at it.
Distantly, he recalled some nursery story about the reverie being Corellon Larethian's gift to his people, that the tel'quessir wouldn't be overwhelmed by their long lives but know the fullness of them. Each experience kept fresh by being relived every now and then during the nightly rest.
It'd been a long time since he'd revisited this event. That far back, despite the reverie, his memory had more gaps than contents. What was there smeared together. But not this one. Never this one. He suspected he recalled it with greater clarity than he’d lived it.
The gods must truly revel in his suffering, mustn't they?
Hunger wrenched his stomach into a knot, and he twisted around to bury his face in his pillow, baring his fangs in a silent snarl. All around, a choir of beating hearts sang their agonising harmony. He tensed and writhed, ratty blanket wrapped around him, contorting as the pang worked its way through him.
Thou shalt not drink of the blood of thinking creatures.
The canvas walls of the tent pressed in on him. There was more space here than there'd been in his coffin, but just barely.
Thou shalt obey me in all things.
Nothing pleasant was lurking in the depths of reverie—least of all rest. Not ever, but especially not when he was this hungry. He might as well go out into the woods again.
Thou shalt not leave my side unless directed.
Half there and half not, Astarion got dressed. Not bothering to check whether it was still the cleric's watch or if she noticed him leave, he strode away from camp. He picked the opposite direction compared to his first attempt. Perhaps the prey would be more cooperative in that part of the forest.
Thou shalt know that thou art mine.
The throbbing heartbeat of a thinking creature echoed between the trees.
Everything in him screamed to a halt and reoriented, so abruptly it hurt. Prey. Worthy prey nearby and isolated. Vulnerable. His mouth watered; the ache in his teeth shot into his cheekbones and jaw.
He knew this heart. Zanarai, the mad tiefling sorcerer that liked to watch far too intently as her touch rotted goblins from the inside out. She was his favourite of the bunch he was stuck with, if he had to pick one: the least tiresome, and at times even entertaining.
On reflection, the traces of her scent back at camp had been stale. What was she doing out in the woods this late?
Almost without his permission, Astarion's feet began moving in her direction. By the tempo and timbre of her pulse, she was at rest. A shallow sleep, or on the verge of it. He slunk through the underbrush. The ground began to rise under his feet, the trees thinning, and he emerged into a little hillside meadow.
The sorcerer sat slumped at the foot of a broad pine tree. A crude flute she must have looted off a goblin lay in her lap, loosely cradled in slack hands. In the dark, the gnarled arc of fleshy, pink scar tissue shone like a beacon through her shoddily close-cropped hair.
Whatever had left that on her skull had scrambled her mind even worse than he'd thought—a new height of idiocy, to fall asleep like this out here.
Astarion lifted his face to the breeze, eyes falling closed as he scented her. Salty-sour, dried sweat; the bitter acidity of the unscented soap they all washed with; pungent traces of her dinner on her breath. All the undignified smells of the living. But beneath that—spice and smoke, warmth and weight. Like incense, or a storm front. Something richer than anything he'd ever known.
He ground his jaw and stalked closer, until he stood over her unconscious form. She didn't stir.
There was something about this one. All thinking creatures smelled ambrosial, of course, but the few times the sorcerer's veins had been opened, it had almost bowled him over. Sweet like honey with a burn like liquor. As far from rotting vermin one could come, surely. The sort of thing Cazador had feasted on each and every night. What he'd made Astarion whore himself out to fetch and forbidden him to so much as taste.
Astarion knelt beside the sorcerer, sneering. Her head had tipped backward in sleep, the points of her horns boring into the rough bark behind her. It lay the arch of her neck entirely, beautifully bare. That upside down triangle framed by the tendons, the little hollow between the collarbones at the base, the subtle pulsating of the soft skin at the underside of the jaw …
Cazador's compulsion hadn't dragged him back to the Gate yet—if that had failed, then surely the command not to feed on thinking creatures was also null. He could sneak a taste. He could drink his fill!
He had to know. Could he truly disobey?
In theory, he was of course aware she was a terrible sleeper. No one in camp could have escaped that, more often than not, she woke up screaming. But there wasn't much theory in his head at the time, and a lot more raw, trembling desire. He was so hungry. He was so afraid, and so sick of it.
With his bared fangs mere inches from her throbbing neck, her eyes snapped open. He scrambled backward on all fours and from his mouth erupted a panicked, “Shit.”
“Astarion?” she mumbled, starting to sit up, and then froze, processing. The Weave thickened around her, sending a prickle up his spine. She jumped to her feet with a lash of her tail. Her eyes were blazing.
“No, no,” he said, wide-eyed, falling down on his arse in the damp grass as he held up his palms toward her, “it’s not what it looks like, I swear!”
Her eyebrows pinched, nostrils flaring; her arms were rigid by her sides and she was almost resting on her toes, ready to spring forward. The blade of her dagger glinted in the grass—she hadn't picked it up when she rose—but honestly, she'd be less dangerous if she tried to use that.
Her heart was racing. Each frantic throb was a stab to the gut, a pitiless yank of the leash that was his hunger.
“I,” he said, and realised he was gasping for breath, wild-eyed, “I wasn’t going to hurt you! I just needed—well.” He swallowed, the spit burning like sunlight on the way down. His eyes darted helplessly between her face and her neck, over and over. Even at this distance, he swore he could see the thin skin pulsing—feel it. “Blood.”
She blinked; her posture softened a little. Astarion picked himself up off the ground, each movement slow and telegraphed. The Weave was still bunched up around her thickly enough to chew.
“It's not what you think!” he babbled. “I’m not some monster. I feed on animals. Boars, deer, kobolds, whatever I can get.” For each word, he polished the edge off his voice a little more. He couldn't clear the desperation from his face, but he shifted it into something less jagged. More supplicatory. He hoped that worked for her. “I’m just too slow right now. Too weak.”
She stared at him. A muscle in her cheek ticked.
The tadpole wriggled, and wriggled again, and pain lanced through his eye socket. He clapped his hand to his forehead. “What—?”
She pierced his mind like an arrow shooting clean through a tournament target. His worm flopped belly-side up, pliantly granting her entry into the sensations bubbling in the pits of his mind—
Cazador's voice thrums through him, the command bearing down. The rat in his hands is slippery with filth, undulating desperately as its tiny heart flutters in terror. His mouth lands on its neck—the fur is rank against his tongue, in his nostrils—and yet the sheer relief as his fangs come down, that precious, fleeting moment of release as the skin gives—as something in him is fulfilled, despite everything. The thin, acrid blood spills on his tongue, barely enough to taste even if he tore the thing to shreds and licked each one clean of all its disgusting fluids—not enough, never enough, but it’s all he has, all he’s permitted. Resentment and humiliation and perverse gratitude mingle and roil until he doesn't know up from down.
—and her gasp seemed to echo as he shoved her out.
Astarion blinked away the afterimages and, with the weariness of habit, dragged his awareness back into the present. The sorcerer had one leg behind her now, in a position that would let her bolt into the forest as easily as lunge for him.
Do it, something in him sang with a jolt of glee, run, make it a hunt, let me chase you down. He was faster. Not stronger anymore, thanks to the worm, but much, much faster. His gums and jaw ached.
“You feed on animals,” she said, breathless now too, but voice creaky with sleep, “because you were forced to. Not because it is your preference.”
“I— Yes.” He swallowed and forced his muscles to relax, his posture to open. He'd suffered through countless nights of sweaty skin pressed as close as it could come, excited heartbeats throbbing beneath. He could tolerate someone standing several feet away. “Yes, but I—I'm telling the truth. I wasn't going to hurt you.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You had your teeth at my neck.”
He tried to give her a lopsided grin. “Nothing to be concerned about, I assure you. You were going to sleep through the whole thing!”
Her eyes narrowed and her head tilted to the side.
He swallowed again. She was so godsdamned close. It would be so easy to leap at her, push her up against the tree. His strength had been sapped, but she was a starved little thing and he was taller, and mass was mass. He could wrench her head to the side by one of her horns—what excellent hand holds!—and sink his teeth into her tender neck …
“We have been camping together for almost a tenday,” she said. “You have had ample prior opportunities to drain me, or any of the others.”
“And, you'll notice, I have not,” he snapped.
Her pulse was just north of its resting tempo. “Until now. Why?”
“Animal blood isn't enough for … my current lifestyle, if you will. I'm slower than I could be—weaker.” He stood a little straighter. “We need to work together to save ourselves from these worms. I trust you. You can trust me.”
She regarded him, as still as a living thing could be. The smell of stew on her breath was revolting, and yet each exhalation was unbearably sweet, beckoning him closer. Sweat and breath meant alive, meant feast.
“I need you alive. You need me strong. If I just had a little blood, I could think clearer. Fight better!” He went low, silken-soft. “Please.”
Her body went rigid, her eyes flashed, and Astarion's dead heart sank like a stone. This was it. “You have the temerity to—“
But then she cut herself off. Visibly forced herself to take a breath. Then another. From being raised and ready to balance a lunge, her tail lowered back into the grass, where it coiled and undulated like a snake.
“I felt it,” she said tersely. “Your thirst. In the memory.”
“It would only be a taste, I swear,” he purred. If his heart still beat, it would be pounding. He was pushing it, overplaying his hand more badly than he ever had in his life.
No one in the group would have any compunctions about killing him if they found out what he was, but especially not the sorcerer. That was what he liked about her: how little she deluded herself. The others wrapped their hunger in these grand stories about themselves—altruism, devotion. Hers was naked and unabashed. Desire for the sake of it. Taking what one wanted because one could. The kind of honesty he could respect.
“I'll be well,” he continued, “you'll be fine, and everything can go back to normal.”
The decision flowed through her from top to bottom: her shoulders fell, her spine softened, her heels lowered. But her eyes were bright and her voice hard. “Not a drop more than you need.”
“Really? I—“ He almost choked on his own spit. His knees wobbled. He could absolutely not let her hear that in his voice. “Of course. Not one drop more.”
“You get my wrist,” she decreed. Her heart was picking up speed again, but it wasn’t showing on her face. “If you sever a tendon and render my hand useless, I will do it back. You favour your right, do you not?”
He swallowed, his throat burning. He hoped how thick his tongue felt wasn't audible. “Eminently reasonable.”
The standoff lasted another moment.
Eyes narrowing, she took a step toward him. “Well?”
He closed on her. She didn't move a muscle—didn't look away from his eyes, though she had to tilt her head back now. Trying his damndest to hide how he was trembling, he grasped her forearm with both hands, a mere suggestion of the pads of his fingers against the warm-soft-pulsing skin. “Why don't we make ourselves comfortable, my dear?”
“I am perfectly comfortable where I am,” she said serenely. The desperate patter of her pulse betrayed her.
“Suit yourself.” He lifted her forearm—or tried to. She did not cooperate. When he looked up, she was staring him down. A jittery sound trying to be a chuckle stuttered out of his lungs. “Erm, if you—“
“I am comfortable,” she repeated, “where I am.”
Resentment-humiliation-gratitude-hunger-hunger-hunger raked through him. He swallowed down spit and nausea and all his useless, ceaseless prattle. He considered baulking. He considered walking away, finding himself a squirrel or deer or boar. Sheer spite would surely give him the boost he needed to catch anything he liked, after this.
A thinking creature. A willing, warm thinking creature. He'd debased himself worse for less, hadn't he?
With a huff, Astarion sank to his knees. The sorcerer regarded him. At the shift of his fingers around her forearm, she angled the inside of it toward him. The shallow veins at the wrist drew his eye, but something in him knew they weren’t his true desire.
Lub-dub, lub-dub went her pulse, in his ears and underneath his hand and before his eyes.
He clutched her forearm to his face and, before he really had any idea what was happening, he bit.
His fangs made little divots in the skin—he broke through with a pop that reverberated through his skull—above, a wordless exclamation rang out and the warmth in his hands tried to withdraw, but he held on harder—his teeth were sinking through flesh as if it were butter and the ache in them wasn't gone but being enveloped lessened it somehow, the pressure from without balancing the one within. His upper lip met skin and naively led by his urges, he lifted his teeth up and out and then pressed back in with his tongue.
It was a riptide, an earthquake—like supping on a storm.
Astarion was not a creature of language anymore. Of thought or logic or time. Just raw hunger, sated. Just the needs of his body, finally attended to after being held at bay for two torturous centuries.
The blood gushed into the emptiness that howled at the heart of him. He'd thought it bottomless, infinite, gnawing ceaselessly at his stomach with needle-teeth of ice. At times, it ate the whole of his interior until there was only void inside his skin. On bad days, it expanded even further, became larger than his body, larger than the world it sought to devour.
It shrank. For each swallow now, it shrank.
Noises were spilling out of him, the kind he was used to making on purpose, for his partner and not to express any feeling of his own. The wet smacking of his mouth was obscene. He didn’t care. He needed more. He’d spend the rest of his life on his knees like this, gladly. He’d let her fuck him a thousand times over, however she pleased. He’d do anything.
Vaguely, he felt a palm brush the curls at the top of his head. If she petted his hair like a dog right now—well. He’d hate it. He’d hate himself. He’d also let her. His grip was surely bruising. The world would end if he let her go.
But she didn't pet him. The hand landed on his shoulder. With a rush of displaced air, she fell to her knees, matching his pose. Her wrist pressed more firmly into his mouth to compensate for the change of angle.
Astarion lunged for her neck. His hands cupped the back of her skull, her cropped hair like static under his palms, the scar rough and fleshy, and his mouth landed on the hard knob of her larynx. An inarticulate noise buzzed underneath his lips, but she didn’t flinch. Desperate, he mouthed up the column of skin—the joy of it, the joy of skin!—until he felt her pulse, and he pulled away just enough to lift his lip from his fangs, get the angle right. His teeth sank in and drew back and the blood spilling across his tongue when he sucked was even sweeter here.
She leaned into him. He drank. He drank and he drank. No one told him no. She wasn’t taken away.
This was true abundance.
The body slumped against his was going cold. The blood that at the beginning had practically leapt into his mouth, he now had to coax out drop by drop with his tongue. And there was no longer the tantalising rhythm of a heartbeat thrumming against his chest and underneath his lips and in his ears.
Oh. Oh, shit.
Astarion lifted his mouth from the sorcerer's neck. The trees were a dark blur over her shoulder. She fell further into him, limp.
His skin buzzed. Heat rushed through him from head to toe in waves; tongues of flame lapped at his face in the sweetest, gentlest way—like sunlight, like the caress of a lover who didn't know him yet. His thoughts dragged and stretched, catching on one another, sweet and soft and slow like taffy. Everything was all right. He was warm and safe.
The sorcerer was not. She was dead as a doornail, still and silent and rapidly cooling. This was a problem, wasn’t it? Something he had to handle? Yes?
Astarion blinked and fell back on his palms. The sorcerer slumped face-down onto the ground between his legs; he nudged her away with his foot.
Above, the vaulted ceiling of the night sky spun pleasantly, the stars twirling about one another as if in the midst of a ballroom dance. They were so bright out here. The sky was so dark and soft. Like chips of diamond strewn over velvet.
The grass was cold and damp with dew, but he didn’t mind. He could lie down in it. Look at the stars. He was warm and safe. Everything was all right.
It wasn’t. It wasn’t. The sorcerer was dead, the others would notice her absence—they’d stake him. Not because of her in particular, of course—well, perhaps the green-eyed cleric, who thought herself obligated for whatever reason—but because of him. What he was. He wasn't safe, he was in danger.
Focus, he admonished himself. He fumbled for urgency, and over and over again it slipped through his fingers like smoke. The sky was so beautiful.
A wheeze. A cough. A heartbeat kicking furiously to life. And then—
It started breathy, weak. But it bubbled and bubbled until it was full-throated, delighted cackling.
Vision swimming, Astarion propped himself up on his elbow and looked over to the corpse-that-wasn’t-anymore. She had half-sat up, mirroring his own pose. Clutching her stomach and sobbing with laughter.
What could he do but stare?
“That was fun,” she said, once she'd quieted. She wiped at her eyes and studied the way the tears clung to her fingers before they dripped into the grass, as if it were utterly fascinating.
Astarion's throat worked around nothing. Alarm so mild it was hardly more than curiosity thumbed at the edges of his unbeating heart. No—not unbeating. There was something there. Something tightened in his chest, kicked against his ribs, for the first time in centuries.
His hand rose to his sternum. The muscle of his heart squeezed and spasmed. Irregularly, several seconds apart, more like a cough or cramp than a beat. It gurgled and burned. But where there had only been stillness for so long, there was sensation.
Oh, he loved it right away. He wanted to curl up around it and feel nothing else for a while. And why shouldn't he?
The wet grass made an excellent pillow under his cheek. He closed his eyes and tucked his knees to his chest, helpless to do anything but float. The trembling thing in his chest. A gentle, suffusing warmth rolling through him. Spidering trails of more intense heat reaching deep into parts of his body he’d forgotten could feel.
A tingle at his fingertips, in his toes, the points of his ears. The conspicuous lack of an ache in his bones.
The heartbeat a few feet away. The still somewhat laboured, scraping breathing. Interesting, but not urgent. Nice to just listen to. The same for the scent of sweat and breath and blood spiralling through the night air. Pleasant, but not driving.
He wet his lips. The hunger still gnawed at him, but it was tolerable. Not in the sense of just no longer being utterly desperate—not in the sense of just the edge having been taken off. Honestly, genuinely tolerable. A minor discomfort at most.
He’d never heard her laugh before.
“Gods, you’re a freak,” he managed.
“Have I pretended otherwise?” Her voice was lazy, lilting a little with mirth still. As if she felt as calm and satisfied as he did. “Unlike some, I do not obfuscate my nature. I fail to see the point.”
“The point is the point of a stake. Or avoiding it, rather.”
“Oh, stop fussing,” said Zanarai with a wave of her hand. “This is your secret to divulge—tell the others when you are ready. But do tell them. My vote, for whatever that is worth, would be to keep you around.”
He killed her. Didn’t he?
“I may not know much, but I think I have a decent head on my shoulders. A well-fed vampire seems just the sort of thing we want on our side.” Her pulse thudded harder for a moment, cloth shifting. She was getting to her feet. “And, on a personal note, I would love to see you turn those teeth on someone else. If it felt this splendid, I cannot wait to see how it looks.”
Well. Was that not what he appreciated about her? The nakedness of her hunger?
Of course she was no different.
“My dear, I always look fabulous,” he drawled. “Especially when I know I've an admiring eye to entertain.”
Footsteps approached. Astarion rolled over on his back, blinking open his eyes, and found her standing over him. She had the moon at her back, casting her scarred face in inscrutable shadow, except for the glow of her eyes. In the darkness, her slit pupils had expanded to fully round; it softened her face into something almost kind.
“At the moment,” Zanarai said wryly, “you simply look fabulously strung-out, poor thing. Enjoy yourself, did you?”
What an easy opening for another line; he'd had this conversation a thousand times before. But her tone was gentler than he expected, and he was still so warm …
“I feel strong,” he said wondrously, lying on his back in the grass. “I feel … happy! Like my mind is finally clear.”
There was an intake of air, off-rhythm. Her weight shifted from foot to foot. After a moment, softly, she said, “I'm glad.”
She sounded surprised. A little wondrous herself.
And then she stretched out a hand. “Let's return to camp. I think we can still get a few hours' rest somewhere dry.”
He blinked at her. Slowly, he took her hand—the press of palm to palm shot up his spine like a bolt of electricity and he gasped, a violent shiver racking through him. She seemed not to notice. She pulled, and while she couldn't drag him to his feet single-handedly, he supposed it was a little easier to rise with support.
Zanarai raised a hand to her mouth and chin, tapping her philtrum with a fingertip. “You’ve a little …”
Astarion touched his face. From the nose down, he was covered in a sticky crust of half-clotted blood; it pulled at the skin when he moved his mouth, he realised, and was cooling rapidly. He wiped at it with the back of his hand and then again. It only seemed to smear worse. The sheer amount of red on his hand was striking.
Gods. What had he done? He was covered in the evidence. Cazador was going to—
“It suits you, but I suggest a rinse. A bath, even.” She looked and looked at him. His skin crawled.
Water and soap wouldn’t help. Nothing short of magic would keep Cazador from scenting him out, and he had none. He had nothing, he was nothing, Cazador was going to—
“I think I …” He wet his lips and edged out of her space. Cleared his throat. She clasped her hands behind her back, head tipping to the side. “You’ll have to excuse me, darling. You’re invigorating, but I need something more filling.”
A moment passed. Zanarai inclined her head, and turned to leave.
Astarion stood rooted to the spot until she’d almost disappeared among the trees. Then—
“This is a gift, you know,” he called after her. She paused mid-step, but didn't turn. “I won't forget it.”
Before he could see her reaction, he fled into the woods.
The moment Astarion reckoned he made it out of earshot, he collapsed to the ground against a tree. His chest heaved for air he didn't need; his heart was still gurgling in his chest, his stomach heavy and warm. Suddenly, it disgusted him.
Thou shalt not drink of the blood of thinking creatures. Thou shalt not drink of the blood of thinking creatures. Thou shalt not—
He would not throw this blood up. He would not. It was his to keep and a mere memory of his fucking master wasn't going to take it from him.
Astarion clenched his jaw and stopped breathing. If he held very still, perhaps his stomach would settle. He'd kept many a dead rat down that way.
The spawn could physically not contradict Cazador's command, and it burned like the fires of the Nine Hells to try. Attempted infractions were still punished. Once, when Astarion had still been very new, Cazador had walked in on him in the guest room, poised to bite into a mark's neck. It hadn’t been planned; the man’s pulse at coitus had simply overwhelmed him.
Godey had slit both Astarion’s wrists and hung him upside down on the back wall of the kennels, like a slaughtered pig. Over the course of days, he’d watched every hard-won drop of blood in his body drip out. When he'd been almost empty and immobile, past the madness, flirting with dormancy, master had come. He’d raised his cupped palms to Astarion’s face and fed him a squirming rat—and then, when Astarion was just sane enough to feel it, lovingly broken every bone in his body.
He'd learned, after that. He'd put in all the effort he could muster to master his impulses, to not be so weak. But it had failed tonight, hadn't it? He'd simply done as he pleased and displeased the master and now—
Astarion bit clean through his lip. The flood of blood surprised him and the taste of it even moreso—not chalky and thick, but still mostly Zanarai. He swallowed it down and forced himself to take a deep breath.
The master was not—Cazador was not here. His belly was full and his mouth tasted like nectar and he was warm because Cazador couldn't control him anymore. He hadn't just tried to disobey, he had egregiously broken one of the fundamental rules. It hadn't hurt. He’d drunk until completion. He was alone in the forest now, miles away from the Gate. Miles away from the palace and the kennels.
He could do as he wished. Whatever he wished. He was free!
Guilt wound itself round his throat like a thorned vine, like a noose. It squeezed.
Astarion tried to focus on the outside world. There was little to listen to, here in the dead of night, but he could dig his hands into the mat of old pine needles beneath him and marvel at how it felt cold; he could press more firmly into the bark behind his back and catalogue the way the ridges caught on his scars. The air was cool, tasting of greenery and moist earth. There was something warm-blooded upwind, but he was too sated for it to pique his interest.
Zanarai's scent lingered in his nose. He recalled the peal of her laughter.
It was more rule than exception for tieflings to look rather striking—in both the positive and negative sense. Zanarai wasn’t an exception. Storm blue skin, purple-in-black eyes with a slight glow to them, and a face more scarring than skin. Her whole body seemed the same from the glimpses he’d caught, so littered with old wounds that only a few stuck in his memory.
There was the one on her skull, of course, where someone had given her brains a good stir. Once upon a time, she had survived a slit throat. A peculiar cut, the freshest one by his estimation, ran the full length of her torso, from just below her belly button to the hollow of her throat, where it split into two and came all the way up on her shoulders.
Whoever she had been before all this, she had been just as violent then as now, and taken as good as she gave.
On reflection, the sorcerer had given in to him rather quickly tonight. Taken it all rather well. There was potential in that, wasn't there? A lot more than in any of the others at camp, certainly. And she was powerful: her magic killed painfully and thoroughly, and when she elected to speak, the others often listened. She had no real outside loyalties, thanks to her amnesia.
She wasn’t hard on the eyes, either. Handsome enough. And conversing with her wasn't too tiresome.
The events of tonight were a foot in the door, he was sure of it. He just had to figure out a plan. A nice, simple plan.
