separate fire from the smoke

Mizora leads him through the outpost.

It's small, on the scattered edges of Baldur's Gate, one of the last respites before the wilderness chokes out the shores. In a dozen years, perhaps it will be swallowed by the city, consumed to hold its ever-growing population, but for now it survives. He's been here once before, preparing a hunting trip when he was fourteen, astride a destrier and learning how to protect the streets he would one day inherit.

Now a cambion walks through the crowded room, and no one sees her. No one but him.

Wyll tucks his arms in, wrapping around leather armour and a sheath with a rapier his hands shake around. He is seventeen years old and the world is terrifyingly large, spread before him, and the one corner he contented himself in knowing is gone. Is taken.

Mizora looks back. She's smiling, soft, gentle, picking her way through the crowd of murmuring travelers. Her wings spread high above their heads, horns almost scraping the ceiling, tail curled by her ankles. No one sees her. No one sees her.

"Where are we going?" Wyll asks.

She shakes her head, pressing a finger to her lips. "Shush," she purrs. "You'll look rather odd talking to yourself, hm?"

Wyll curls his shoulders in. Yes. The new rules.

Mizora grants him power, protects him, guides him—but only him. The shadow she is cannot be seen by others, only broken for a moment as she appeared for his father, to smile at him with fangs and painted lips, before disappearing back to a ghost at his side. Something to lead him through a world that damns him.

His new eye itches.

"We're gathering supplies," she hums, peering over the room. Cold wind snakes through the shuttered windows, the chill of ice heavy on the tip of his tongue. "It's a long journey to the Sword Coast, pup. You'll need to be prepared."

The Sword Coast. He's never been there before.

He's never been much of anywhere, before.

"This way," Mizora soothes, stepping between two burly men and leading him to the back. He follows at her heels, shoulders hunched and wary. "Thyril, the supplier of this lovely little joint. The two silver in your pocket will pay for a daypack. Tell him you're planning to travel far."

Wyll goes where she bades him. Up to the counter, tucked in the back of the outpost, stacked high with meaningless bits of travel and other necessities. Coats, scarfs, gloves. Weapons. A man, behind the wood.

Thyril—how did she know his name, how much does she know, will he ever be able to figure it out?—squints down at him. He's tall and broad with it, umber skin, hair twisted over his shoulders and running down his back. "Hrm," he gruffs, raising a peppered eyebrow. "Whassit?"

"Hello," Wyll says, steadier than he feels. Old training pours through his bones, settles over his tongue—there's a lilt to his voice Thyril doesn't have. Aristocracy bleeds from him. Too weak. Too unprepared. He's not ready. "I'm looking to buy a daypack."

Is that good? His gaze shifts to the left, where Mizora perches, wings spread wide against the boarded walls. She's enormous in the tobacco smoke and throaty voices like an eldrin creature of old, towering with horns back and teeth bared. No one sees her.

She's real. She has to be.

"Don't look at me, pet," Mizora croons, soft and sibilant. Her claws ghost over Thyril's shoulders, dancing above his lapels and ragged collar. "Eyes on him. That's it. You're doing so well."

Wyll looks at the man. He doesn't look anywhere else.

Thyril grunts, scratching at the stubble under his chin. "Like every bloody tyke wit' a sword, yeah. How far?"

"I'm going to the Sword Coast."

Mizora clicks her tongue, disproving. "Don't say where," she admonishes. "Otherwise they can track you."

Right. Stupid. Wyll curls his shoulders in.

"Sword Coast," Thyril says, dubious. "'Bout'ta get cold as sh*t, kid. You really looking to make it all the way there?"

He has to. There's no other option. Wyll nods.

"Gonna need a bigger f*cking spine to survive," Thyril mutters, but reaches under the counter—pulls out a leather bag, shoulder-straps and a bedroll laced to the top. "Here. Two silver."

Wyll reaches into his pocket and tugs out the coins, emblazoned with a pelican—all the money he has, all that was in his pockets when his father came back and found him, when eldritch energy crackled over his missing eye and the words of his pact stuck to his tongue like tar. When he was told he was no longer a Ravengard. When he was told to go.

The last of the Grand Duke's son.

He sets them on the counter and watches Thyril sweep them away.

The daypack becomes his and he slips it on, securing the straps on either side of his neck. It sits high on his shoulders, tugging down muscles that have only been used for training and hunting. Not weak, not foppish, but—he's not a warrior. Saved the city but he isn't a hero, isn't anyone to be remembered for the pages. To be mourned.

Three hours ago he had a father.

Three hours ago he had a home.

"Good luck," Thyril says, but his attention is already elsewhere, bored eyes flicking off to the next potential customer. He doesn't see Mizora. No one does.

Wyll Ravengard, no longer Ravengard, barely even Wyll, walks out of the outpost on a cambion's heels and faces the world outside.

It's enormous. The wilderness, stretching to the horizon and past it, game trails crunched through its underbrush and one maintained road to Elturgard—but he's not going there. He's going south, down to the Sword Coast, to a world even bigger than the one before him, than the one he's ever known.

Wyll is seventeen years old and haunted and exiled. His father's face, cold, impassive, soot-stained from the battle he'd won by himself, no deals or pacts or devils.

Go.

Wyll is seventeen years old and desperately alone.

"What will happen to me?" He says, shaking, as the autumn wind steals his breath and threads ice through his lungs. Winter is coming, and there is no roaring fireplace to curl in front of, to train with the Duke again and again until his arms ache, until he can settle down for a hearty meal and talk strategies. There is no one to go home to. There is no home. "I don't know what to do."

"Oh, pet," Mizora whispers. She steps closer and presses her hand to his face—warmth, like ember-bright fire. Her claws settle over inflamed scars. "You don't have to worry. I'll always be here."

And Wyll understands, and he hates himself, and he leans into her touch regardless.

It goes wrong. It goes horribly wrong. Wyll is young and brash and stupid, and there is not one drider but four, and his rapier falters, and his hands fail, and he is scrabbling through the Underdark and he is not fast enough and they are coming and he is too slow–

There is a monster in the Grove.

Most damningly of all, it isn't Wyll that notices.

He's inside now, shaking off the worst of fetid blood from his rapier and buffing his armour until the creases disappear. The skirmish had been quick and violent, a way for warmth to crash through his chest as he did little more than save lives, than butcher those that deserved it and he knew deserved it. Zevlor helped, shouting encouragement and raining arrows, and a batch of newcomers as well—more seeking the Grove's healing. But none of them are red-skinned and one-horned, so Wyll turns away, and strides back inside.

He's allowed one night in civilization, enough to remind himself what talking feels like and the different cadences voices can have, and he's going to spend it being good. Training the tiefling children, showing them how to defend themselves, trying to prepare them for the dangers of the road ahead. They're too young. They will have to learn regardless.

Mizora is here. She always is. Right now she's lounging behind him, resting her weight on the half-broken fence, wings spread out and crowning the distant sun. No one sees her. No one has ever seen her.

She's watching him closer, now that there's a parasite wriggling behind his eye. A nautiloid she warned him of but then he was captured, helpless as psionic magic held him in place and shoved a death sentence behind his eye, before he crashed out of the sky into a place of druids and tieflings and had no time to talk to her before he had to stand and be the hero and be right and move and not falter.

Night is approaching. Then he will leave, and Mizora will tell him what damage has been wrought over his fate.

But for now, this time is his, and he trains the tiefling children like that will make up for the blood he always trails in his wake.

Movement, behind him—he doesn't react, because there is a pair of eyes no thief or assassin can hide from, and she protects him. Even now she stirs, wings fluttering up as she fixes a lazy stare past his shoulders. Her eyebrows raise.

"My," Mizora says, pressing a clawed finger to her chin. "A vampire."

Wyll goes very still. He turns.

Because there, beside the githyanki woman who stalks through the Grove like the field of a massacre, hand on her longsword and teeth bared, stands a man. Wyll had noticed him before, delicate elven features intermixed with skin that gleamed blue under the light and eyes like a forge's flames. Handsome, in a biting way, like a noble prettied for long strolls through protected alleys. He walks stiffly, several paces behind the githyanki woman, but they'd fought the goblins and defended the Grove. If not heroes, then mercenaries, or at least those that know to combat evil.

Hells-touched, aristocratic, sharp-eyed; but an elf. That's all he sees.

"What?" Wyll says, before he can stop himself.

The sound echoes—out loud. Open. Exposed.

Umi looks up at him, brows furrowed beneath his twisting horns. The other tiefling children blink at his unexpected outburst.

"Control yourself," Mizora admonishes. "Come on, pet, you're better than this."

He is. He is.

Wyll shakes his head and kneels, resting one hand on Umi's shoulder. "My apologies," he says, injecting warmth into his voice. "I'll return in a minute—let me talk to these newcomers."

"Okay," Umi says, soft and unsure. He holds the wooden blade like it scares him.

If a vampire is here, he cannot defend himself.

He is the Blade of Frontiers. He will protect them.

So Wyll stands, throwing unease to the rocks far below. The raised training platform is easy to vault over, landing lightly on the ground, sliding his rapier back into its sheath. No need to present a nervous front.

And if the vampire attacks him—goes for his throat—then Wyll calls upon Mizora's power. The Grove will see it, and he will be once more banished to the wilderness, but they'll be safe. That's all that matters.

Nerves settle like chains in his gut. This is not the first time he has chased monsters into crowded areas, into a circle of potential victims, but it is the first time since he has felt so weak. The parasite saps his strength, plucks and shreds his connection with Mizora, makes his hand shake where it was once steady. He will need to be ready. The Blade of Frontiers does not falter.

The githyanki woman. The man at her side.

Mizora pads forward to follow him, tail unwrapping from her ankle to swish at the ground. The grass compresses beneath her bare feet. No one else reacts. "Look at its mouth," she says, splaying a hand. "All my training—can't you see it? You'll make for a poor hero if you must rely on me to tell you of every monster that walks in your midst."

Wyll nods, searching. An elf he sees, but she isn't wrong, she's never wrong, and–

Fangs. Peeking out behind pale lips, incisors, sharpened and drawn. And there, on his—its—neck, two scars, right on the side of its jugular.

But it's here, walking through the camp. The blue of its skin gleams under the sunlight, pale otherwise, and he can't remember if anyone invited it in. He doesn't think so.

Wyll has hunted vampires before. Watched them snarl and claw for his throat, feral barking fury, and he knows the myriad ways to stop their slaughter.

This one is breaking every law of the universe.

He can't talk to her, not with others around—but it has been seven years of this, of a haunting by someone he knows is real but no one else can see. So he flicks his gaze up, to the sun gleaming yellow through the boughs, and back down. A vampire's death, or should-be-death, considering this one is walking around unhindered.

She laughs, deep and throaty. "Can you answer nothing for yourself?"

There's no point in trying, not really. It's always better to trust her.

Mizora hums. Her wings sweep back not to block his vision as she leans in, peering at the vampire's eyes, black with hollow blue centers. Hellfire. "It's made an infernal deal," she croons. "Perhaps a pact so it could better disguise itself, as well as to shed free of its weaknesses." Her smile is lined with fangs. "How lucky are you, then, to have me to notice."

He is. The entire fight he thought it was an elf—a person.

Wyll swallows and keeps walking.

The githyanki woman watches him approach, hand on her longsword. At her side stands a monster.

But she isn't killing it, nor is she dragging it into the Grove for allies to aid in putting it down. He doubts she would need it, considering how she handled herself against the goblins—a slaughter more than a struggle. It had seemed servicably adept, staying to the shadows with daggers and a crossbow held with unsure hands, but not biting. Maybe she doesn't know it's a vampire?

Maybe she thinks it is on her side.

If Wyll steps forward, rapier drawn—if he cuts its throat open for black blood to spill free—she will kill him before he can explain himself.

But there is a monster in the Grove.

Mizora flares her wings behind the vampire's back, framing it in lavender. She smiles with saccharine sweetness. "Are you going to stay here, pup? Or allow it to hunt?"

One night in the Grove. One day to walk amongst these faces, to leave his legacy and become himself past the shadows, and then he has to leave. The tiefling children behind him are holding wooden blades and staring in terror at goblin corpses. If Zevlor is forced to try and brave the road to Baldur's Gate, they will die.

The vampire, watching him with infernal eyes. Fangs behind pale lips.

Wyll steps forward.

"Hello," he says, light, open, amicable. "I am–"

Deep behind his eyes, behind the ancient scars and fire that has never quite healed, something burns.

Wyll is distantly aware of shouting, hoarse and ragged in someone's throat, and there's stone against his knees and grass brushing his face. Collapsed, flat, hands pressed to his head. His mind is not his and something joins it—something thrashes in and pushes his thought to feed on and replace them—to consume him–

There's magic and moonlight, something cast far and above this mortal plane, the grasp of steel in his palms and a harsh tongue echoing through his ears, a spectre with hollow eyes looming over him and demanding obedience to a queen he doesn't know–

There's stone, cold grey, and agony lit like ice through his veins. It spiders deep, plunging teeth in his neck, and a howling, pleading desperation as he bangs on marble, fingers splintering and shattering away as a hunger inside his chest screams–

Fire sinks into his shoulders.

Mizora, pressed against his side, wings wrapping around—her eyes, smoke, inches from his. "Come back," she hisses, gripping his face and slotting her claws into the scars there. "Come back to me, pet. Do not fall."

Wyll gasps, mind pulsing, and wrenches his mind back under his control. The visions fade. The feelings, foreign, familiar, not his, twisted, wrong, drip from his skull like ichor. Memories. Thoughts. Souls.

"Damnation," he manages, stumbling back. There's a murmur from the tiefling children and he grapples for control, locking his knees to push upright, shaking his head free. Strength, borrowed and stolen, coils through him. The Blade of Frontiers does not falter.

Across from him, neither newcomer has fared much better—fallen to their knees, faces taut and pale, lingering psionic energy snapping at the air like lightning.

Something wriggles behind his eye.

The githyanki woman snarls, pressing a hand to her scarred forehead as she stands. Fury flickers through her gaze.

"Kaincha," she hisses, eyes narrowing to slits. She watches him with a wary kind of disgust. "Then we are both infected by the ghaik."

Ghaik?

Infected.

The illithid parasite he is trying so hard to ignore—the death sentence Mizora has only soothed from his mind with promises of later before they were surrounded by too much company to talk. The thing of fangs and fate writhing through his skull.

He'd hoped, in the shivering part of his bones that raises palms to flickering campfires and tries to remember what a roaring marble fireplace felt like, that perhaps it was just him—that the nautiloid had crashed through the hells and plucked only his soul to consume. That maybe it had even taken the advocatus diaboli, completing his mission for him, letting there be one good thing before his death. One final victory he can carry to the afterlife and try to pretend was enough.

But the githyanki woman clutches her head with teeth bared, and the vampire winces around pain, and he knows he is not the only one.

Wyll stands and does not shake.

She fixes him with a commander's eye, enough his back straightens without intention. "I am Lae'zel of Crèche K'liir," she says, alien words pouring from her mouth smoother than Common. "You are a warrior?"

Mizora's eyebrows raise. "Careful, pet," she hums, tail flicking. "You don't know what she wants."

He doesn't. But there is a monster in the Grove.

"I am Wyll," he says, and instinct taps his fist against his chest. "The Blade of Frontiers. Defender of the Sword Coast."

The tadpole, squirming inside his mind. The haven, held on a knife's edge.

Lae'zel nods. "Acceptable. I have seen you fight. The ghaik are not to multiply—I seek healing in this realm's crèche. I will allow you to accompany me."

Behind Lae'zel, the vampire watches, eyes lit up with pale blue flame. Ice, in the viridian of the Grove's protection—death in the sanctuary. If he turns his back, if he lets it leave with the githyanki woman who doesn't know the threat, it will kill them. It will kill them all.

One night in the Grove. One night to be good.

Wyll nods. "I would be honoured to travel with you."

Travel as a warrior only. Hero, perhaps, once she understands what creature she's traveling with, what has already entrapped her with its pretty face and soulless eyes. His infernal pact stays beneath the surface, his rapier wielded.

Nothing more. The disguise protects him like shadows.

Mizora laughs. He turns to follow her gaze, to the monster that threatens it all, standing in the back, watching him. Its eyes are blue-black and wrong.

"Astarion," it says, and its voice purrs like honey, dripping through the words in manipulation made incarnate. "A pleasure to meet you."

Wyll smiles back. "The pleasure is all mine."

I'm going to kill you.

They leave the Grove before he has a chance to apologize—it's barely enough to grab what meager supplies he'd bartered for before Lae'zel is marching back into the forest, teeth set. Seven days, she tells him, grim and furious. Seven days until we are broken.

Cheery.

There are more people in the camp, small and ramshackle though it is. More who should see the vampire before them but don't. Who look at its hellfire eyes and not the fangs beneath.

A cleric, who Lae'zel tolerates in the way of feral street dogs impossible to eradicate.

A wizard, verbose and drenched with an exultant charm.

The vampire, in lieu of honesty, has gone for a dizzying contradiction of personas. It is insulting and cruel and subservient and quiet and simpering and soft. It bemoans work and flicks its hands mockingly while doing what it is told to. It watches them all, shoulders taut.

Wyll watches it, too. Always watches it, even as Mizora laughs at him, tells him she can keep track of its lies better than him. She's not wrong but he does it anyway, hands never far from his rapier, ready for a single lunged movement or bared fangs. Anything to save them.

Even if he's no longer the single bulwark against the world, not for this group. Here, his role isn't hero, savior, savant—just another infected for Lae'zel to wield like a blade. She calls herself sarth, doesn't explain what that means, and commands them with quick, confident directions. Shadowheart—walking tragedies, Mizora sighs, like critiquing a play at the Oasis. She's a follower of Shar. Have you noticed that yet, pet?—seethes and fights every instruction. Gale blusters through obedience and stains it with soliloquies.

The vampire answers her call like a heeled dog.

Wyll makes himself useful, as best he can; which is frustratingly little in comparison to what he actually gives. Instead, Mizora scouts for him, guiding, feeding him tricks and tips about the surrounding land. He parrots them out for the others to hear.

They listen to him. They respect him. They turn to him like he's one who notices these things of his own ability.

Inadequacy breeds like bile in his gut. It is, as it always is, familiar.

Night rolls over like a thunderstorm, drowning out the yellow sun. The shadows hide the vampire's skin until it looks pale instead of blue, until it looks more like what it is—but the others just see its hellfire eyes, and they do not ready themselves for a fight.

Lae'zel allows it by her side. If he kills it, she will strike first and ask questions second.

Wyll grits his teeth and helps set up camp. What supplies they've scavenged from the crashed nautiloid and from the Grove's traders is put up quickly, little more than scattered tents and a central campfire, large enough to cast flickering shadows to the distant surrounding trees. An old forest, ringed in by druidic magic.

His tent is small, but it is enough. Mizora pads in after him.

Their first time alone since the parasite. Wyll stares at her, even as he strips off his armour and pulls his shirt over his head. Scars, lining his arms, twisted like a mangrove's roots. She arranges herself across from him, wings spread against the canvas, smile crooked.

"Quite the mess you've landed yourself in," she hums, tapping her tail against his leg. "And here I thought we were past these problems."

Wyll raises a hand, pressing it into his forehead—it's buried beneath his skull but he imagines he can feel it twitch, can feel its long tendrils hook behind his eye. Seven days. A death sentence.

Fear must show on his face because Mizora sighs, clicking her tongue. "I will not let an illithid parasite take you, pet. Don't worry. You can leave, and I will protect you."

And he shouldn't, he shouldn't, it makes him a gormless toddler looking up to his mother, but he–

"Do I have to?" Wyll whispers.

"Oh, pup," she murmurs, pressing her hand to his chin. The warmth suffuses through him like fire. "They won't trust you, not if they know. Haven't you been chased from enough towns? Wouldn't you like to leave by your own choice, rather than being forced?"

Her power, surging through his skin. A warlock with a ghost at his heels.

"Maybe they wouldn't," Wyll tries, soft and meaningless. "Shadowheart follows Shar, and Lae'zel doesn't know the customs of the Material Plane. Maybe they wouldn't care."

"They won't love you," she says. "They will fear you, and what do people do to those they fear?"

Wyll looks away, just for a second. Before the nautiloid—before the advocatus diaboli, actually—his last mission had dragged him into a border town, awash with suspicion. Hedgewitches were barely tolerated, clerics watched with wary eyes, sorcerers purged. A stink of some ancient destruction in the soil.

They'd ran him out with pitchforks, even after he'd slain the balgura masquerading as a banderhobb in the bordering forest. A microcosm of the past seven years. Heroes are only welcomed with open arms in stories.

Mizora smiles at him, sad, like she can see what he's thinking. "Do you want to stay with them," she says, and heat pulses beneath her hand. "Or do you want to protect your people?"

Wyll closes his eyes.

It's not a question, not really. Just him, seventeen, standing on a hill as the spectre of Tiamat swirls overhead, claws biting into his face. "I serve the Sword Coast."

"You do," Mizora purrs, eyes bright. "And you do it so well, pup."

There was a monster in the Grove, and he only noticed when she told him. He still hasn't killed it.

"Just until you stop the vampire," she says, and pulls her wings in; wraps them around the canvas of his tent, keeping the heat trapped within. "Then you must go."

He knows. He knows.

"Okay."

Wyll lays down, staring up at the canvas overhead, at the lavender wings like twilight laced together. Voices outside, the murmur of quiet breathing, other people beyond his own beating heart.

Kill the vampire. Go back to the wilderness.

"You don't have to worry about being alone, pet," Mizora murmurs. She surrounds him like fire. "I will never leave you."

The next day, they're far from comfortable, although Lae'zel hardly seems to notice. Perhaps she doesn't care. It's easy for her, so why shouldn't it be easy for them?

Wyll is familiar, at least. Old habit, to break down his tent before the sun rises and haul out food while Gale peers bleary eyes through the rising dawn and bemoans poor sleeping conditions. Shadowheart glares at the sun and glares harder at Lae'zel.

But then they're up and packed, and Lae'zel continues driving them off to distant horizons in search of any guide to her mythical crèche and the healing there. Forming ranks is rote tradition, guarding their weaker members in the middle, so Wyll takes up the back—Mizora pads alongside him, commenting idly on anything that catches her fancy. She's enjoying this, the wariness that plagues his bones.

The vampire–

It watches them. It's always watching them with those hellfire eyes, blue-black, so wrong in its pale face.

It could be beautiful. It likely was, before its death. There's an elegance to its delicate features, to the hair so perfectly curled and purse of its lips. Even its words, little more than polished daggers, have a dry wit and cunning to them, though only used at others' expense. More biting than seductive. An odd kind of entrapment.

And then, as it walks at the front of the group, not beside Lae'zel but a few steps behind, she growls something under her breath and–

It laughs.

The sound is high and arching—blanketing over the road like something real. Flowing warmth, pooling in the breaks between trees, carrying over distant winds. Nothing more than humour.

It laughs like a person.

Did it keep that, from who it was before it died?

Wyll grits his teeth and continues walking.

"Come here, pet."

Mizora, from the shadows.

The yawn springs to his lips easily, hundreds littered in his past of the familiar motion. Wyll stands, shaking out his arms from invisible dust, flicking ash off his shoulder. "I'll be back," he says, and Lae'zel nods—continues turning the spit over the fire, a deer haunch sizzling away. Better to establish his habit of disappearing now, with only two days together, so they question it less as it extends into the future.

It's odd, to plan these things. He's spent so long with Mizora as his only companion he doesn't know what it's like to have others.

They're not permanent. He's leaving soon. He needs to remember that.

The cambion smiles, walking through a break in the trees. Wyll adjusts the leather straps of his armour and follows. The sounds of camp flutter and fade away like they never were—until all that's there is the click of rustling insects and far-off nightbirds.

Mizora leads him into the forest, over game tracks worn by heavy boots and with a confidence he can never hope to replicate. It feels like the world is hers, sometimes—she knows everything, or at least much closer to it than he will ever be. Seven years of learning it's for the best if he just listens to what she says. She guides him. She helps him.

Wyll, seventeen, alone. She took his hand and pulled him through exile.

Mizora stops in front of a tall tree, one dwarfing the half-crescent clearing and choking out anything underneath. An oak, pronged leaves littered around its trunk, bark falling off to mulch its surroundings.

Right before him, a fallen branch peeks through the brush. One jagged piece of wood, wide as a blade, sharpened on the edge.

"Here you go," she says, flicking hair over her shoulder. "Plenty to finish the job, hm?"

Oh.

Wyll stares at it.

He's been ready, that tense-taut wariness lurking in his shadow, but with his rapier and Mizora's powers alone. Most monsters are, when you boil them down, only so innovative—the vast majority are slain by strength of steel just as well as they are other weaknesses.

Not vampires, though. And if the sun doesn't burn and running water doesn't dissolve, then it must be decapitation or a stake. Pinning it to the ground as it struggles and barks until he can send it to its second death, free it from the misery of a twisted existence in the corpse of someone who had once been alive and was now lost to a blood-hunger.

Kill the vampire. Go back to the wilderness.

Wyll licks his lips. "Not yet," he says. It echoes in his throat like a lie. "It's not safe. The others haven't figured it out, and they'll attack me if I just try to kill one of their members without explaining."

"You're waiting an awfully long time, pet," she says, lips pursed. "Do you think it will become less vampiric if you let it continue its lies? You're just allowing it closer and closer to your little friends."

Lae'zel lets it walk beside her. The others listen to it. They look at it like a person.

"It's not safe," he repeats. "I need more time to tell them—and to figure out what sort of infernal pact it made."

"That's your choice," Mizora says. "I'm sure they'll forgive your caution when they're dead."

Wyll grits his teeth. Reaches out and snaps the branch off—the stake fits in his hand, balanced, long enough to puncture through ribs and short enough to hide in his pack. She'd picked well.

He stares at it, cold in his hand.

"You've never hesitated before," she notes, a lingering curiosity. "What's the problem now?"

It isn't a problem. It isn't. Wyll has slaughtered his way through the Sword Coast's monster population, culling down those who seek to do harm, and he will continue to protect its people from beneath his disguise as he always does, but–

The vampire, laughing. A bright, brisk sound.

"Oh, pet," she sighs, and the disappointment prickles down his spine like ice. "It's already dead. It's always been dead." Her wings spread, one claw tapping over her chest where a heart pulses with fire. "You are only killing a corpse."

She's right. He knows that. She's right.

"This is why you don't stay, pet," Mizora says, soft, apologetic. "Why you can't let them fool you with their empty smiles. Monsters are always cruel—they will always try to kill you. So you must kill them first."

Tiamat, swirling overhead.

Wyll looks down, and shame bubbles in his chest as his vision simmers—as tears, small and callous, curl over his eyes. He blinks them away before they fall but they're there, and Mizora sees them, and air catches between his teeth like poison.

He's not weak. He's not going to break. The Blade of Frontiers does not falter.

"I know you'll do the right thing," she says, soft, and leans forward—rests her palm on his face, the thrum of infernal warmth pulsing through his scars and the uncompromising stone of his eye. "You've never failed me."

Mizora hasn't made a vampire her target—the advocatus diaboli is still who he is here to kill. This is just her, worried for him, worried for the Sword Coast, helping to protect what he swore. She's looking out for him. Trying to protect him from a monster.

"I will," he whispers. Mizora laughs and wraps him in her wings.

"Oh, my darling pup." Her eyes are liquid black. "What did I ever do to deserve you?"

The arrow punctures his calf, scouring through marrow, hamstringing him–

He's falling– he's too slow–

Wyll wraps his hand around the stake as the vampire lurches to its feet.

They're sitting around the fire, lingering exhaustion from a long day hunting for any healer that could save them before the end of the week breaks tentacles from their jaws and slavering obedience from their mind, no matter how Mizora promises to protect him. They're tired, worn, and a little snappish—judging by how the vampire cannot maintain its mortal façade as it rejects food for the last time.

Lae'zel does not take it well.

The vampire takes it even less so.

"And I command you to pluck the stick from your ass, but see where that gets us," it says, cold and collected, purring like it always does but– fiercer, now. Its shoulders are bristling around its ears, eyes flashing with frozen flames.

Not lunging, not yet, but Wyll's fingers find a home around sharpened wood, and he readies.

Lae'zel unfurls confusion into affrontion. Her longsword rasps as she draws it from its stealth, tip at the ground but arm tense. The entire camp sharpens, orbiting twin colliding stars, violence breeding like rats in the peripheries.

"Tsk'va," Lae'zel spits. "If you did not have even a faint potential, I would cut you down where you stand."

Behind her, Shadowheart laughs, a narrow, barking sound that surges through her teeth like all of Shar's teachings. "Oh, yes. Kill him just for saying the truth, won't you?"

sh*t. This is bad.

"Hold," Wyll says, climbing to his feet. Lae'zel flicks her gaze over but doesn't release her longsword, every muscle pulled taut and ears pinned flat. "We're all on the same side. Meaningless slaughter will only hurt us."

At least it will now, when the others have been fooled by hellfire eyes and not the teeth underneath.

Gale coughs, hands rising, palms up. "Now, there's no need to let one ill-tempered joke break us. Logic urges us to sit down and discuss with words instead of barbs, I believe."

It's polite, well-meaning, and utterly useless. Neither anger relaxes.

Things are getting dangerous. Around them, the air crackles, picking up and thrumming like distant thunder. The vampire is normally good at playing pretend but it's slipping now, lips peeling back to flash twin fangs. Rage, maybe, but– something else– something brittle–

"Love," it hisses, jagged as blades. "Sink your teeth into something worth biting. You'll poison yourself trying and I will laugh all the louder. I eat as I please."

It's coiling, fists tightening, shaking with it—hunching over, like something is flying overhead, circling to hunt for weakness–

"You will not command me."

Vampire. Monster.

It's terrified.

"Astarion," Wyll says, before he can stop himself.

The vampire hisses, eyes slits, and runs away.

Not at them. Not sinking its fangs into their necks. It's running, trying to pretend like it isn't, disappearing into the shadows with the hackled dread of prey. Fury bubbling in its wake, but more—more that it shouldn't have. More that he knows it shouldn't feel.

Scared.

Why?

Around him, the rest of the party stirs, staring at the trail the vampire carved through their camp and abandoned. Even Shadowheart, acrimony and vindiction incarnate, has puzzles spinning through her eyes.

"Ah," Gale says, blinking. "Hm. I did not– was that an insult? To offer food?"

Lae'zel frowns. The retribution has bled away and confusion replaces it, sheathing her longsword and staring at the trees. She doesn't understand. No one does.

Behind them all, wings splayed and tail drifting over the grass, Mizora smiles.

"Here's your chance," she hums, watching the branches drift back to cover its desperate retreat. "It's alone, and you'll have plenty of time to explain yourself if you bring back its fangs." She sighs. "Not that I think you couldn't have convinced them to help you fight it, but you've always been the cautious type, haven't you?"

Wyll doesn't move.

"Oh, pet," Mizora sighs, wings flaring. The forest whispers all around, distant croaks of nightbirds and pond-water frogs. "Don't get consumed by basal compassion. I thought I trained you better than this."

He stares at the trees, at the shadows there. Astarion is out there, bristling with fury. Maybe planning to come back under the cover of night, to kill them all, to slit their throat and feast on the blood pouring free. A vampire. A monster.

"Not too terribly difficult, if you actually try for once," she hums, tapping claws on the deep dip of her dress. "Is that stake of yours nearby? It will put up a fight."

Air is stale in his chest. The anger—the fear—in hellfire eyes.

"He," Wyll corrects.

Mizora tilts her head to the side, face sharp. "Hm?"

"He," Wyll repeats. "Not it."

The others glance over, confused, as he talks out loud to no one. He doesn't look back. Just stares into the forest.

"He," Mizora says, tasting the word. Her forked tongue flickers through painted lips. "Dear, you're not growing soft, are you?"

There is a stake in his hand and a monster who runs away, terrified.

Mizora steps closer, tail flicking up to rest on his knees. "It isn't a person," she murmurs, right against his ear. "Not anymore, pet. It died, long ago. Don't let it lie to you."

Wyll doesn't move.

Astarion slinks back into camp well after the moon settles in its peak.

Wyll is up taking guard, since Mizora keeps talking and he wouldn't be able to sleep anyway. She gave up trying to convince him to hunt as the others fell asleep and just watches him now, eyes slitted, claws clicking on wood. He'll give her his arm later, try to explain himself, but not now.

Because now, her wings twitch and her gaze slides behind him, and Wyll turns to see Astarion emerge from the tree cover.

He's standing taller, a confidence borne anew as he pads over dried leaves and grass. His shirt, laced tighter than before, hands tucked behind his back. Soot, dusted on the underside of his chin. He's smiling.

They stare at each other.

What was he scared of? What was it about Lae'zel's phrasing that made him risk his mortal disguise, to go stumbling into the forest just to escape it? What made that terror spark in his eyes?

Why would a monster not supposed to think past its hunger be afraid?

"I hope I didn't spoil the warm welcome," Astarion drawls, flicking his head as if to settle his hair. "Is the lovely Lae'zel around? Or best I make myself scarce from her sight?"

The bait lies between them. Wyll doesn't bite.

"Are you feeling better?"

Astarion blinks. His hand almost drifts to his chest before he tucks it behind his back again. Poise trickles over his face. "Leagues and worlds above, darling. A touch of midnight foraging will serve me far better than whatever slop Gale can pry from goblin corpses, I assure you."

Foraging. Hunting, then—will tomorrow they find a town that speaks in hushed whispers about one of their number going missing, an exsanguinated corpse found curled and rotten in the alleys? Will Mizora laugh as Wyll's failure leads to more death?

There is no blood on Astarion's face. Just soot.

Wyll nods. "I'm glad."

Astarion watches him. His hellfire eyes reflect the moonlight like frozen winter ponds.

"Are you, now," he says, flat. Cautious.

Mizora tilts her head to the side, tail lashing at the ground. "Careful, pup," she murmurs, eyes narrowed. "Some monsters take proffered care as opportunity."

There is no blood on Astarion's face.

"I am."

He's clawing forward, nails sinking into the dirt. One rips off as he drags his dead weight behind it. Drider venom pulses through his bones.

They're coming– they're coming–

"This way, pet."

They're midway through choosing shifts, another day of travel beneath their belts—a day where Lae'zel didn't mention last night and Astarion absolutely didn't, so it becomes smoothed over like mud beneath a river—when Mizora crooks her fingers, wings spread in the forest's shadow.

Astarion is out foraging, as he calls it.

They haven't passed a settlement yet. There are no corpses to be found.

Wyll pulls a well-fitting yawn over his face, standing up to slip his rapier back into its sheath, only half-sharpened. "Just a moment," he says, nodding to Lae'zel. "I'll take up guard when I get back."

She hums under her breath, stoking the fire. Trusting him to do as he says.

Mizora flicks her tail as he walks by his tent, resting her hand on the canvas. His bag, sitting by the entrance—she leans over, tapping the bulge tucked in one side. There's a smile, cold around jagged teeth. "You're going to want that."

Wyll exhales.

Takes the stake, slips it into his sheath, and follows her.

Mizora leads him through the forest, older than the last, caught up in the rippling energy expelled off the Emerald Grove and druidic magic found there. Everything is thick brambles and hanging vines, choked throughout with an eldritch awareness, like the trees are watching him back—midnight is paler here, lit by fireflies and gleaming-carapaced bugs. Seven years have given him an expertise and her a guiding hand and they work well together, him following in her footsteps, avoiding any misplaced steps or brittle twigs. Two ghosts, moving through the underbrush.

She moves with a purpose until pausing before a low shrub, tangled through with sapling aspens and a burrow underneath. "Here," she says, and brushes her clawed finger over a greenwood branch, supple enough to move without cracking.

Wyll shifts it aside and sees what she brought him to see.

Astarion, crouched in a moonlit clearing, over the still-twitching corpse of a rabbit.

His hands are splattered in scarlet, sharp against his blue skin, kneeling in the dirt, brown smeared over his embroidered clothing. He's hunched and feral, only the soft sounds of drinking in the air, framing his pale lips.

A vampire.

"Do you see?" Mizora murmurs, as if she's trying to keep her voice down so Astarion won't hear, as if anyone has ever seen her but him. "I'm only trying to protect you, pet. This is what he'll do if you let him."

Fangs, sinking into writhing flesh, crimson pooling around the punctures. Death.

Then why a rabbit, instead of a person?

Astarion keens, something miserable and desperate, and pulls back—there's fur, stuck in the blood splattered over his face. In the hollow of midnight, the hellfire of his eyes shrinks until it's just black, voids peering through a taut face. Terror and relief and pain woven together.

He doesn't look like a monster.

"I know," Wyll whispers back, barely more than an exhale. A proper vampire, alert and savage, would hear him—he's seen how their ears flick up and faces go cold as they sense further prey, something else to drain down to marrow.

Astarion doesn't. Just paws at the corpse, searching for any more blood in its veins. There's a wretched wheeze in his throat, breathing like he needs to, like he isn't dead.

Mizora clicks her tongue. "Do you?"

Wyll has known about vampires, long before he hunted them, when fairytales cast them as vile temptresses and things made for the slaughter. Not that the stories needed much to embellish—mortal things are rather attached to their blood, being that it necessitates life. In the existence of theft, vampires are monsters.

But what would it be like, to need blood?

Vampires are immortal. There are stories of those who cross entire seas locked in boxes of gravedirt, waking hollow and vicious on the other side, but still there. Still alive. Or undead.

Why drink, then? If they can live without it?

What does it mean to starve, and the only thing to slake your hunger will make you a monster?

Astarion abandons the corpse, wrung loose and crackling under desiccation. He doesn't walk but instead crawls over to the burrow beneath the bush—Wyll drifts back like a ghost, Mizora guiding his feet so he doesn't step on any branches. His scent should give him away to a vampire's enhanced senses.

But it doesn't. Just Astarion, reaching his hand down into the hole to claw for another, eyes squeezed shut. There's blood over his cheeks. He laps at it with a shuddering hum.

Mizora tilts her head to the side, watching him.

"He's a threat," she says. "Infernal energy, pup—like knows like. He will recognize what you are. So long as he is here, you are not safe; whether he exposes our pact or rips your pretty throat out with his fangs."

Wyll nods. He knows that, he does, but–

Astarion, clutching for another rabbit in a den, small enough the blood wouldn't fill but a fraction of his stomach. Astarion, returning to camp with eyes alive past the hellfire. Astarion, avoiding their necks, calling himself elf.

Mizora leans down, filling his vision with lavender wings. "He's going to kill you, pet," she whispers. "He's going to kill you."

Will he?

Past the Grove is a river, long and twisting through a canyon, and it reeks of brimstone.

Wyll told Lae'zel, even as he joined the party to protect her from a monster he thought would slit her throat the moment he turned away, about the advocatus diaboli. The target Mizora actually gave him, the one she's granted him surprising leniency in hunting as he tears through the underbrush with a parasite worming through his skull. A devil from the hells—a monster free amongst unknowing prey.

Sitting at the riverside, running crackling fingers over a bloodied greataxe and wearing leather he can recognize as being flayed from lesser imps, one horn shattered off at the skull and metal twisted over flesh to belch smoke, is her. His mission.

And then Karlach is not a devil–

And then Karlach is not a horror–

And then Karlach is not a monster–

And Wyll does not kill her.

His rapier shakes even as he slides it back into his sheath, as Karlach looks at him with huge eyes and a tension like gritted teeth melting from her shoulders. Fear, stark, but also resignation—like she was prepared to fight him for her freedom, and she pitied either outcome.

"Ah, hells," she breathes, when Wyll steps back. Her grip loosens on the greataxe. "Warn a f*cking girl before you go spouting about her death, yeah?" She laughs, wild, incredulous. Smoke crackles from her chest. "f*ck."

Around them, the rest of the party spreads out, bleeding caution. He'd forgotten, for one damning moment, that it wasn't just him trekking through the wilderness after targets that burned with infernal fire—and he'd drawn his sword and moved and the rest lurched forward in confusion and argued against and then Karlach opened her mouth and he listened and she isn't a monster–

"I'm sorry," Wyll says, and the words ache in his throat. He's trembling, beneath his armour. The memory of steel kisses his palm. "I'm sorry."

Karlach laughs again, like she can't imagine anything other than that sound, booming from her lungs. "Yeah. Yeah. Pretty f*cking happy you stopped, soldier, I–"

She steps back herself, putting more room between them, for all she's relaxed her grip and softened the battle stance brimming under her skin. The laugh, bubbling through her teeth. It's manic and desperate and free.

"Just got the sun back," she says, squinting up at it, raw longing writ over her eyes. "Gods, the sun, mate. Ten long years without it. I didn't remember how bright it is."

She's a person.

She's more a person than him.

Behind, Mizora spreads lavender wings. The smile on her face is like ice.

Karlach shifts her weight back and forth, arms tucking in close. He's known her for less than ten minutes but it's still easy to read the hesitancy scrawled over her face, the stiff way she holds her shoulders like she's not sure how to fill the space she does. Tallest of them all, strongest too, and she stands like she's scared every movement will crack the earth beneath her feet.

What have the hells done to her? What has Zariel carved into her chest?

"Don't really wanna think about why in the first place," she says, bright, shoving past anything else. "Talk for a later time, yeah? When we're all cozy and chummy. But– thanks. For not killing me."

He was going to kill her. He was going to kill her.

Wyll smiles. It fits oddly on his face, stretched thin.

"I was wrong," he says, and pushes earnestness through it—tries, tries, tries to tell her that he doesn't regret this. That it's the right choice. "You're innocent, Karlach. I'll protect you."

Mizora laughs, tail flicking. "How generous," she hums. She's smiling. "Is there nothing you won't do to fake being a hero?"

Wyll doesn't look at her. Can't, with the fear rotting sour in his chest.

"I could use it," she says, like she couldn't cleave through the party without breaking a sweat. "Gods, we've got bloody f*cking bastards from the hells and now tadpoles in the mix. Least we're not alone."

Mizora, smiling.

Something flashes over Karlach's face. "And, if you're really willing–" hesitation, like she doesn't want to push, like she doesn't want to inconvenience her near-murderer "–there's a pack of false paladins snapping at my toes, right over that ridge. I think Zariel sent them."

More hunters. Would they talk to Karlach, figure out what person laid beneath a monster's legacy? Would they spare her?

Would they try?

"Lae'zel is the one to talk to," Wyll says, forced levity. "She's our leader—she'll have a plan. But we'll help, I swear it. They won't hurt you."

Karlach smiles—a little sad, like she can see what's warring in his eyes, despite all the warmth he's trying to drown it under—and nods. "Thanks," she says, one last time, like it matters, like it absolves him, and goes to Lae'zel.

And then it's just Wyll, standing alone, the rest of the party stepping forward to talk as he looks at what no one else can see.

Mizora, smiling.

She pads over, delicate, and her tail coils around his waist; settles like soot, bleeding past his armour. Smoke, trickling through her teeth to wrap around her horns.

"Oh, pet," she says, so soft, so apologetic. "You've done a rather foolish thing, haven't you?"

Wyll grits his teeth. "Whatever you're going to do, do it," he manages, through a tongue thick and unwilling. There's a fear he's never known before shaking in his bones, lines of fire carved over the scars on his face that have only healed on the outside. They still burn like the day he got them. "I won't kill her."

"Always willing to play the chivalrous hero, aren't you?" She purrs. "No, I won't do it now. Better to wait until your little friends can see, hm?"

He looks away. She laughs and steps in, wrapping her wings around, plunging the sunlight out until lavender darkness swallows him like a beast. Her claws settle on his arms, leaning down until she's inches from his face.

"You disobeyed me," she whispers, air hot on his skin. "But every pup thinks itself master now and then. I won't kill you, nor take your powers—there's still a world out there for us to work on." She smiles. "But oh, you'll think twice about saying no again, won't you?"

Saying no. He is her bloodhound, her pactbound—but he is also the Blade of Frontiers, who protects the Sword Coast, who does not falter. Who would he be, if he lost that just to blindly follow her? To slaughter those he swore to serve?

"Karlach is innocent," Wyll pleads. "I only kill monsters."

"If you did," Mizora says, "then the vampire would be dead."

The stake, in his bag. The rapier, trembling in his hands.

She steps back, wings flaring to frame the setting sun. Karlach is gathering her meager supplies, the party setting up around her, talking with the hesitation of new faces.

"Best set up camp soon, pet," Mizora says, and smiles. "I'd hate to keep you waiting."

Zariel did send them, and they are mercenaries instead—those blinded by blood and mindless chatter. Lae'zel listens with apathetic impassion as they try to smear Karlach's name before she plunges her longsword through Anders' chest.

Wyll fights like a newborn, rapier rumbling and energy lurching from his fingers. Lae'zel has to cover for him, has to put herself in danger just to keep his back protected. He fumbles to keep up.

They leave the corpses of the false paladins behind. Karlach screams at the sky and tears the house down to its foundation.

Setting up camp is a torrid affair, scrounging through supplies that have grown but not yet bloomed as they fit a new soul into the mix. Karlach takes anything they give her with wide eyes and breathless thanks—kindness seems foreign, though she's so willing to give it herself. A sun that has never experienced the light it shines on others.

Wyll is shaking. He can't stop.

The night wears on until they're all sitting around the fire, nursing wounds and lingering exhaustion. Food, roasting over the spit, a ready-made claim to go foraging later on Astarion's tongue, the lingering curiosity as they all try to figure out where their sixth member fits in amidst the others.

Made easier by how Karlach slaps her thighs, leaning over with teeth bright in her smile.

"Didn't get the chance to ask earlier, with all the murder and whatnot," she says, then winces, like she catches the social faux pas. Casual conversation probably has a far lower threshold in the hells. "But. Names, pretty please. You don't want the nicknames I've been thinking."

Wyll snorts. Gale puffs his own brand of symphonic laughter.

"I am Lae'zel," the githyanki woman says, brows furrowed. "Did we not already meet?"

"Yeah, we did." Karlach bobs her head. "But I'm real sh*t at picking up names in the middle of battle, and only caught half." She jabs a finger at Astarion. "Who're you?"

"Me?" He says artfully, setting a hand on his chest. Hellfire eyes crease into little crescents as he smiles. "Astarion, love. Most delighted to meet you."

Something flushes over Karlach's face, deepening the red already there. "Right back at you, soldier."

Gale flicks up a finger. "Gale," he says, and likely has a whole speech prepared before Shadowheart shifts, tapping at her chest in a Sharran bow that likely looks normal enough the others don't catch it.

"Shadowheart," she says. Nothing more. Less biting than she was at the beginning, but certainly not kinder.

Karlach takes it well in stride, nodding. She glances over at him, eyebrows raised. "And Wyll, right?"

There. All slotted together, woven in by the parasites behind their eyes and the dreams that speak identical words and tell them to stay safe. Wyll nods, smiling back. "I'm–"

The campfire lurches, black and oil-slick. Everyone reels back, Wyll included, a throaty laugh only he can hear echoing behind him. Smoke billows upward like an eruption, choking out the sky in the stench of sulphur and brimstone, drowning it.

From the grey, a second Mizora rises.

Wyll goes very still.

At his side, examining the points of her nails, the Mizora that has always been there stands, head tilted to the side. But the others aren't looking at her, only at the one crowned in fire, the one with her wings spread wide and horns thrown back.

There's two.

There's two.

The original smiles at him, teeth dagger-sharp. "I told you I wanted the others to see," she purrs. "Are you so surprised?"

He blunders back, eyes wide, but she digs her claws in and holds him there—keeps him standing before the flames, before the other, before the second.

"f*cking hells," Karlach snarls, smoke billowing around her hands from the leather grip of her greataxe. She has mortal eyes but they're currently doing their best to melt a hole through the fire-wrought Mizora's skull. "What's the bitch doing here?"

Mizora laughs, high and arching around the shadows. "Lovely to know you haven't lost your spark, dear Karlach, after all the effort Zariel went through to give you one."

She growls like a tiger. "Zariel didn't give me sh*t."

"Oh, but she did," Mizora corrects, leaning down. This version of her—the real one? Why are there two? Are they both real?—has a richness to her, like oil over water. Iridescence gleams from her eyes. "Gave you a fire to stoke all that rage you're so desperate to hide. Hard to have anything else without a heart, hm?" She tilts her head to the side and looks at him, the first one laughing in his ears. "Did you hear that, Wyll?"

The Blade of Frontiers doesn't falter. Wyll grits his teeth and stands there, hand off his hilt but tense at his sides. "She's not a devil," he says, because there's no point in fighting but he can try to encourage Karlach with the time he's got before it's taken from him, to show forgiveness before it's wrenched away from his control. Until Mizora calls him on another mission far from the party, deep into the wilderness with nothing but her voice crooning at his side. "She's not a part of our deal."

"Oh, pet," she says, mock apology. "I know you've a dastardly time keeping your ignorance in check but I just told you she doesn't have a heart—and clause g, section nine fits that, doesn't it?"

Targets shall be limited to the infernal, the demonic, the heartless, and the soulless.

Karlach, fire blooming from metallic ports over her chest.

Wyll goes cold. He's never been smart enough to outwit her.

But he is a hero, and heroes are not mindless—heroes are here to protect the world and make it better. Seven years and hundreds of bodies but not this one; not someone good. Not someone who hasn't seen the sun in ten years and is only now remembering what it looks like.

Not her.

Wyll stands there, shaking. He can't stop. "She's not a monster."

"Maybe she isn't," Mizora says, and smiles. "But oh, you're about to become one."

And then she raises her hand, and then he falls.

Fire consumes him.

Wyll screams, hollow and frantic—it catches his skin and his hands and his face and there's a blinding bolt of white-hot agony that drowns him, covers his eyes, covers his sight. The world disappears beneath and he can feel it scouring at his skull, digging in, reaching into the hole where there was something, there was something, there was something–

He can't see. He can only burn.

"This way, pup," comes the voice, soft and gentle. He clutches for it blindly, fumbling through the darkness, crying blood. "Just a little further. You're doing so well."

Movement– fire cascading over his face–

Wyll reaches her. His hands fumble on warmth, on infernal skin that thrums beneath his palms and he can't help but sag into her arms, weeping, clawing at his head and bones and face and skin and everything.

She holds him, wings wrapping around with the crackle of pulsating heat. Agony nests in his skull, molten steel pouring through the breaks.

"You did it," she soothes, drawing him closer. "You did it, pet. You're terribly brave."

He heaves in her arms, deep, ragged breaths that scour at soft tissue like smoke, pouring between his teeth. The darkness swallows him. All he can feel is Mizora's wings, pressing to his bare back, infernal fire.

"Oh," she hums, soft over his rasping cries. "Your eye. I'm so sorry, pet. That must feel awful. Here."

She leans down, brushing careful fingers over the pain. He can't see her but he can feel her breath, lingering over his face—she took his eye, he knows that, she punished him, he knows that, he knows that, he knows that—and he can feel as she presses her lips, feather-soft, to the empty socket weeping blood.

A spark of fire—agonizing heat—and sight returns to him.

Mizora, smiling.

"There you go," she murmurs, eyes soft. Fire drips over his face, from twin weights like an oxen's yoke, from immolation splitting apart his awareness in acidic terror. "It was just a mistake, pet, that's it. You won't do it again, will you?"

He chokes on an answer. Yes or no or please.

Mizora laughs, wraps her wings around, and carries him back to the surface.

Wyll lands on the dirt and breaks.

There's screams all around, eruption of noise and panic, howling like distant wolves—he can't concentrate. Can just claw himself upright, shuddering, bones crunching and snapping in his arms. Blood covers his face, gleaming scarlet over his vision, over anything he can see–

In the grass, his eye flakes away to ash. It disappears like it was never there.

Things are hazy, afterward. Hands, wrapping around him, flinching back as the heat burns—the world, twisting, until grey skies are replaced with the canvas of his tent, until he feels the ground become blankets and the air becomes blistering.

Alive. Changed.

The tent is cramped so Mizora perches by his legs, wings tucked to her back and tail flicking idly. She whispers encouragement when they bring him water, when they hover overhead as he rasps around apologies and soothing statements, anything to convince them he's still here, it's still him. A yoke on his head and fire in his eye and it's still him. He's still here. He's real.

She touches him and doesn't pull back from the heat. Rubs little circles over ridges on his skin, over a body warped by fire and hells.

I'm sorry, she murmurs, so quiet, so warm. It's for your own good, pet. This is the kindest thing I could have done.

It is– it has to be–

The tent flap pulls open. Wyll shifts, twitching, eye shuddering in and out of focus in a red-tinged world and senses no longer familiar. The face in the entrance swims into focus, blue skin, white hair, hellfire eyes.

Astarion. He's holding a carafe of water and looking incredibly uncomfortable.

Mizora clicks her tongue. "Him," she says, disapprovingly. "Why, is he here to kill you, now you can't fight back?"

Astarion doesn't see her. He comes in and doesn't react to the irritated noises she makes as she moves, giving him room as she draws her excess limbs in tight. The canvas shifts underneath her. She's real. Astarion doesn't see her.

Wyll shakes on the ground. He tries to do what she's taught him, to block it out, to not think, to just breathe. His lungs shudder and twist around a ribcage reshaped.

The vampire stares at him. There's something drawn in his blue face, in his hellfire eyes.

Mizora hums, leaning back, wings raising to block out the distant campfire. "You reek of blood, pet," she says. "Do you want to know what's going on in that mind of his? What hunger he's stoking like a forge?"

Maybe. Maybe she is right and Astarion is here to kill him and this will all be over.

"You're quiet," Wyll rasps. "Is something wrong?"

Astarion blinks, comes back to himself. "Other than the delay this will cause us?" He flicks an uncaring hand at the air. Mizora twitches her wing out of the way. "Nothing, love."

Nothing is wrong. Everyone else is safe. She punished only him.

Astarion crouches, picking up the other carafe of water, forcing Mizora to move again. He picks it up, hefts the weight; a sigh rumbles through his chest. "You're supposed to be drinking, you know."

Wyll looks down. "I will."

It's behind Mizora. He can't muster the energy to reach around her, and he's not willing to ask her to move it.

Would she help him? She's always helped him. She hurt him. She wants him to be better.

She took his eye. Again.

The replacement simmers like a fire, something cold and ember-bright, in his skull. He's felt up his horns, traced their curving edges and blood weeping around the bases, the ridges crossing his skin like clawed scars. A devil, wrought over a man's body.

A devil, in a body that it doesn't belong.

Astarion, looking down at him with hellfire eyes and cerulean skin.

Wyll is not a confident man. But he is desperate.

"My eye," he says, and chokes on it, the ash covering his tongue. "Is it anything like yours?"

Silence, for a moment.

Astarion stares at him, fixed on his eye, on the one changed and burned from his skull and disintegrated over the grass. Wyll knows, deep in his bones, that Mizora wouldn't give him back his original—something else instead. Something infernal, because she no longer fears the world knowing about his warlock pact, now that it's been revealed the party needs to stay together to keep from transforming.

Now that he is hers, body and mind.

Hellfire.

"Yes," Astarion says, stilted. "Yes, they're rather similar."

Wyll exhales. "That's a relief," he says, and doesn't look at Mizora—can't face the laugh that crackles up her throat like smoke. "I'll take it as a compliment."

Astarion sniffs, flicking his hair back. "Don't flatter yourself. I'm still far out of your league."

"How deplorable," Mizora scoffs, tail coiling around his scorched ankles. "Has he a single thought in his head beyond himself?"

Wyll licks his lips. "Then I suppose I will have to go running into more devils for a chance to reach you."

Astarion smiles, then looks surprised that he did—like he wasn't planning on showing anything other than mocking disdain. The smile stays regardless. "Perhaps Karlach can pay you back with locations."

Oh.

She's probably outside, far away from him, from the guilt that pours from his shattered body like a storm. He tried to tell her, through the fire sticking his teeth together, that he didn't blame her—that Mizora was just punishing him—but, well. She's a kind soul, in the halfday he's gotten to know her. She won't believe him. She'll blame herself.

But he saved her.

Look, father—I sold my soul and damned your son but did something good. I tried.

"Karlach doesn't–" Mizora's tail curls around his ankle and the jolt of it is enough to force a cough from his throat, rattling through his teeth. Fresh blood squeezes around the base of his horns, pouring like tar over his face. He curls in miserable agony. "She doesn't owe me anything."

Astarion frowns. "You saved her life. I rather think most would want appreciation."

He shakes his head and uses the motion to glance back at Mizora—she's watching him, pupils slitted, wings tense against the tent's canvas. Something sharp in her coal-black eyes. "It was the right thing to do," he says, and looks away. "She doesn't owe me anything. I would do it again."

He would. The Blade of Frontiers would. He is here to save people, and Karlach is not a monster.

Neither is Astarion.

Wyll shifts back. Frees up a little more room in the tent not meant to hold the three people it is. An offering, almost, maybe, if he can become desperate enough to try.

Mizora clicks her tongue, watching him. "This is a dangerous game you're playing, pet," she says, eyes sharp. "Rather defenseless now, aren't you? It's only your own fault if he kills you."

A monster would. A feral vampire running about the countryside with snarling hunger insatiable would. A beast more than person with fangs made to tear open throats would.

But gods, Wyll needs to believe in anything other than monsters right now.

"Will you stay?" He asks, croaking around a tongue unwilling.

Astarion stares at him. His eyes are twin flames backlit by ice.

"I suppose," he drawls, loose and unbothered. There's a deliberate ease in how he sits down, in how he takes up half the room and forces Mizora back, to tuck against the canvas with her eyes bleeding smoke. "If only because I know you would mourn the loss of my voice."

Wyll smiles a little. It hurts, skin cracking around his lips, but there is no silence and there are words that come from someone without painted lips. A voice more than the last seven years.

I would.

Harsh laughter, bouncing over the stones, over the purple-grey sky with no sun or stars or memory. Clawing forward, tearing himself to the bone to reach the ladder out. Laughter.

It's a game– they're make it a game– they're going to catch him–

The Blade of Frontiers does not falter. Wyll writhes in bed for a day as his skin stretches taut over a body not meant to hold it and scabs bleed through his forehead, but then he rises, and then he clambers to his feet and strides out to face the world.

The party clusters around him like ghosts. Karlach heaves apologies with steam trickling from her eyes, enormous breaths that rattle in her throat like self-immolation. She didn't want to die but she didn't want to damn him, and he's watching her claw her mind to ruin trying to make a world in which neither happen.

It's okay, he says, soft. It's okay.

She doesn't believe him.

He wouldn't believe himself, either.

But beyond horns that cut through his clothing and ridges that pull his skin taut and a world that shades itself in pale red, Wyll is still alive and still real, so on they push, striding forward to figure out the mystery deep at the core of the parasites in their skulls. It's nothing more. It's all he is.

Then a boulder falls from the sky, and Karlach catches it. Saves his sorry ass from becoming a permanent element of the ground.

There, he says, and laughs, keeps it light. You saved me. We're even, okay?

They're already even. She owes him nothing. But now she laughs back, and something like relief bleeds through her eyes.

Back to camp they go, healing or their best approximation, and a scouting mission runs longer and longer until their sixth member stumbles back into camp, smeared with soot and a warmth like life.

And fangs, jagged over all of his teeth, rather than just his incisors.

Astarion, wearing a tiefling's jaws—a new element of his disguise, blending with hellfire eyes. Now there's no chance the party will believe he's a vampire, not even as Wyll brings up the possibility like something to laugh over—an infernal glamour, that's all. It's not even a lie, considering what Mizora told him. The vampire, the monster, tucked beneath the surface.

Astarion laughs. The real me, he croons, twisting the words around like lace between his fingers.

The real him.

The vampire, or the infernal?

He laughs like a person and fills the camp with noise.

By Wyll's side, as Astarion leaves to go foraging, Mizora watches. Her wings are still but there's a tension stretched between the lavender membrane, and it bleeds through her eyes as she looks back at him.

"You're becoming rather comfortable, pet," Mizora hums, tapping her claws on his leg. "Don't tell me you're getting attached."

(There is a ghost in Wyll's dreams with his father's stern jaw and warm eyes. It tells him it protects him. It tells him not to go.)

"You'll be leaving them soon," she says, and there's something sharp in her eyes. "Or have you forgotten what happens when they know who you are?"

Wyll looks away.

She already told them. Already tore horns from his skull and burned out his eye for fire to peer through the gap. A warlock, bound and contracted, sleeping in their camp and walking by their side—and they accepted him. Mourned him, almost, as he struggled to push past her injuries.

But they don't know everything. They don't know the ghost that haunts their shadows.

"They're different," he tries, always tries, because he has to believe. "Maybe they're different, this time."

"Oh, pup," Mizora says, pitying. "How many times have you believed that?" Her tail wraps around his wrist. "How many times have you been wrong?"

A second cambion. Of f*cking course.

It was suspicious from the first moment and didn't exactly calm down as they're ripped from the bridge and dropped into a lavish feast, suckling piglets with apples between their jaws and pastry sweetness stacked to the ceilings. Raphael laughs and spreads his hands—spreads his wings, as the disguise melts away.

Karlach bares her teeth.

Even Mizora has her hackles up, brimstone flooding through her teeth and smoke pulsing from her eyes. "Do not listen to him, pet," she snarls, louder than Raphael until his voice drowns beneath her. "I will protect you. Anything he offers is only lies."

He nods, and only she knows why, because even Raphael's eyes do not land on her bristling form. But she's real. She's real.

Then Raphael laughs, wings flaring, and banishes them back to the Material Plane.

Karlach lands with a bellowing roar, greataxe cleaving through the air like the cambion is still there. She's panting, enormous ragged things that crackle like a wildfire in her chest, heat erupting from her ports. "That motherf*cking bastard," she snarls, slamming her boot into the ground hard enough it cracks. "Trying to get us to make a f*cking deal just 'case he asks. I'm going to wring his sh*tty neck–"

Wyll staggers back to his feet, wincing, hand pressed to his forehead. Mizora has stopped shouting but she's seething instead, smoke crowning her horns. "I agree," he manages, because for all his infernal pact is laid bare before them, he won't let anyone else fall down the same path. "Don't trust him."

Karlach clenches her fists. "Wasn't planning on it."

Wyll coughs, shaking his head, ducking and weaving under the horns. The others are rising, interplanar teleportation the opposite of gentle, all looking around with wild eyes.

And for once, he doesn't need Mizora to tell him, doesn't need her to point out something before him—because Wyll looks, and it is him that cannot see the one other face that understands infernal contracts.

Astarion isn't here.

"Astarion?" Wyll asks, and his heart picks up—goes frantic in his chest, energy crackling on his fingers. "Where is he?"

Lae'zel tenses. A fury, deep and terrible, ignites in her eyes. "Shka'keth," she snarls, brimming with hoarfrost. "Raphael has taken one of us."

Karlach chokes on something, rage and despair and desperation. The others spin, search the dirt, search the bridge—but no one shows. No one but the dust and soot swirling away in the evening wind.

There is a moment of damning silence.

And then Astarion comes back with ridged skin, and nothing makes sense.

Astarion doesn't tell them everything. He barely says anything. Just that Raphael knew his condition, what he calls with deliberate lightness, and there was a promise of a future deal.

Not a disguise. Not a glamour.

Instead, transformation.

He laughs like it's not a worry. He laughs like he wants it.

Vampires have glowing red eyes. Hellfire sits in Astarion's face.

Wyll sits by the campfire, breathing deep and aching with it. Mizora perches at his side, examining her nails, wings spread wide. She's the one who saw he was a vampire, who saw the infernal pact in his eyes, but she–

Why did she call it a disguise?

Wyll shifts, the deliberate twitch of his leg he always does when they're in a room loud enough for him to speak under his breath. The camp isn't fully crowded, others drifting off to their own corners, half asleep. It will be enough.

"Did you know?" He murmurs, barely moving his lips.

Mizora rolls her eyes, tail lashing out to flick his thigh in admonishment. "Of course I did," she sighs, a pitying tone woven through her voice. "I told you, didn't I? Back when you were so confused on how he was walking under the sun. All the better to fool everyone into thinking him toothless."

Wyll looks across the campfire at the vampire, lounging back, hellfire eyes and blue skin and claws and fangs and ridged skin.

Only two he wore at the beginning.

"If he was trying to disguise himself," Wyll says, "why wouldn't he be fully transformed?"

Mizora scoffs. "I never called him intelligent."

That isn't an answer.

"But why now?" Wyll pushes. "The party trusts him—he's as secure as he could be. Why progress the transformation? Why keep changing himself, when all that does is make them more suspicious?"

"Stop that," she snaps, eyes narrowed. "You're trying to puzzle this out like one of your beloved chapbooks. The world doesn't work like that. He's a monster who is lying so sweetly to get you to look away." Her claws gleam. "And it's working, isn't it? When have you last checked on your stake?"

Wyll can't look away from Astarion, breathing in steady, regulated exhales timed too perfect to be real. Fights and injuries have they all earned, but he doesn't scar—heals back to blue skin that's cold every time they touch. Never has he eaten anything but wine.

A vampire. Mizora showed him Astarion's fangs and he found the others by himself, but if Astarion had been in the body he is now, without red eyes or only two fangs or pale skin, would they have noticed? Would he have a stake in his pack at all?

"What if he isn't?" Wyll asks. "What if he really is cursed, and it has nothing to do with being a vampire?"

Mizora's expression goes cold. "You aren't feeling pity for a monster, are you?"

Maybe—seven years of slaughtering them but Astarion laughs like a person and Karlach stares at the sun. They aren't monsters, or they aren't what he thought were monsters—maybe there's another definition. Maybe it means something else.

Wyll doesn't say anything. It's written on his face regardless.

Mizora's tail lashes. "Arm out, pet."

He freezes. "We're surrounded," he hisses under his breath, keenly aware of Astarion's sensitive ears and Lae'zel's advanced training. "They'll see."

"Then go back to your tent, dear." She smiles around gritted teeth. "If you don't want them to."

Wyll isn't wrong about this, he knows that, he knows that—but pity is death in the wilderness, and she helped him get over it, to learn how to defend himself and protect others and not mourn the corpses in his wake. But surely this is different—doesn't she understand that–

Mizora spreads her wings.

He is a coward. He goes to his tent.

Even lifts the canvas so she can follow him inside, always so polite, mind retreating away.

Wyll sits in the corner, flicking open his pack. The stake, there at the bottom, sharpened wood—he sifts past it to a strip of leather, old armour worn and beaten, creases in perfect crescents over its flat surface. It fits between his teeth like it belongs there.

Mizora takes his arm, running fingers up it with a curious hum in the back of her throat.

"I'm not doing this to hurt you, pet," she murmurs, soft and warm. "I'm doing this to teach you. You need to be smarter."

Seven years—hasn't he learned enough–

Mizora's claws sink into his skin. Wyll bites on leather and does not scream.

"You're bleeding," Astarion says, when Wyll emerges from his tent with a bandage wrapped around his arm. His hellfire eyes are narrowed.

"Cut myself," Wyll says, and shrugs. Behind him, Mizora chuckles something deep and pleased. "Accident."

The goblins are dead. Halsin is rescued. They're still no closer to being saved.

But the tieflings are.

The Grove, once a haven, now boiling with hostility that the return of the Archdruid cannot alleviate and tensions struck like flint over coals, has been abandoned—tomorrow, the tieflings set out to Baldur's Gate, to complete the journey started a lifetime ago. Elturel fell, became a corpse in the hells, and only now are they finding their way to safety.

And here Wyll stands in the center of a throng of bodies, all laughing and giggling and sloshing wine over glasses, and he's smiling, not-quite hero and not-quite savior but something close, something like victory, something more than Tiamat disappearing and a city no one remembers being saved–

Behind him, claws sink into his elbows, ridges raised stark against skin.

Wyll flinches.

Mizora laughs, deep and echoing. "Oh, pet," she croons, so soft. "Don't react. You'll just make them more scared of you."

Then stop grabbing me, he wants to hiss, but that would be talking—would be talking to himself, from what everyone else sees. Seven years has he learned to murmur, to tuck up his glances until she only exists in his periphery, until no one knows what ghost walks among them. She's real. She's real.

"That's it," she purrs, and curls her tail around his waist, the sharpened tip flicking his arm. "Eyes up, won't you? Face them. Show them what you are."

Wyll looks.

The laughter has stopped.

His flinch was large and biting; there's wine over his fingers, spreading in a scarlet puddle at his feet like blood. They're watching him, cautious—his gaze keeps flicking back, to the cambion with her wings spread wide, to the lurking shadow no others can see. He's scaring them. He should be a protector and a warrior and a defender and he's scaring them.

They saw him as a human, and then he came back with a devil's horns and eyes, and now he watches something they can't see.

Wyll bobs his head in a smile made grimace, murmurs an apology without words, and leaves. Mizora follows, laughing.

The party fades in his wake, disappearing to muffled sounds and shouted laughter. There's still wine in his glass and he clutches onto it, boots padding through the stone and grass until they hit sand. Until he reaches the beach, waves lapping at the edge, blue and black and brown.

It's not the Chionthar, not the river he knows like the back of his own hand, but the water stretches before him glassy and smooth, and it could almost be enough. He drinks it in, grasping onto memories, trying to strengthen a composure so fragile it's fracturing around him. The Blade of Frontiers does not falter.

But Wyll does.

His father was right to banish him. What destruction would he have wielded, if he brought a cambion into Baldur's Gate and let her run free? If he became Grand Duke and flinched each time Mizora set her claws on his arm, laughing in his ear? If she called him to the Underdark to hunt escaped devils instead of fighting a war threatening his borders?

This is better. This is for the best.

Tears are just crawling up his eyes by the time footsteps echo in the sand behind him.

Astarion.

Tall, bored, looking entirely uninterested in how the world keeps spinning on. He's speaking a touch oddly, words garbled in his throat and lips pressed together, but his eyes are bright and there's a warmth in him that isn't normally.

He almost looks alive.

Wyll is soft and fragile now, his many disguises stripped away, shattered down to the fear in the tiefling eyes as he flinched at things they couldn't see. He shouldn't be talking, shouldn't be interacting—should wait, until he can rebuild his walls and lie back up to a satisfactory level, until the secrets stay in his bones where they belong.

He doesn't.

He talks, instead.

Astarion laughs—insults him. Then continues talking, and it doesn't sound like insults, and it doesn't sound like mockery.

"Careful," Mizora says, wings flaring. "Dancing too close to the sun, pup. You wouldn't want to get burned."

She's right. She's always right. He knows that.

But for the first time in seven years, for the first time since he was seventeen and the world he knew closed its doors to him, Wyll does not listen, and continues talking to Astarion.

The next morning, everyone else nurses regrettable hangovers and the kind of delirium only exhaustion can breed. Astarion drained enough wine bottles to create a passable art sculpture and hardly seems to notice, rising at dawn with his habitual insults.

Can vampires get hungover? Can vampires get drunk?

Wyll presses a hand to his forehead and tries to battle an odd beast between sympathy and envy.

Traveling is not an option with the state they're in, so for the first morning in tendays, they don't immediately break down camp upon waking up. Just stumble out in search of food and drink and gods-Gale-do-you-know-a-cure-for-this.

He doesn't. His answering soliloquy on which healing salve could work doesn't help, either.

Astarion drifts over to Wyll's tent, planting himself on the spread blanket and kicking his legs out with a pleasant hum. There are no bags under his eyes, no fumbling inelegance to match the others—no doubt he's thought up a reasoning, planned an excuse. Wyll is too tired to push him.

Doesn't really want to push him. Doesn't want to force more lies out when he squeezes.

So instead he sighs, leaning back. Mizora is there, leaning against his tent, adjusting the curl of her golden jewelry as it catches the rising sun. Wyll glances over—staring at him, eyes narrowed, not pleased with last night—before shifting back to Astarion.

Conversation. Distraction. He opens his mouth and lets anything pour out.

"I miss Baldur's Gate," is what he ends up saying. "Temples around every corner where you could plead for a lesser restoration when your headache was bad enough."

As if in mockery, the pulsating jaggedness behind his eyes thrashes a little harder. It could be the wine or the parasite. He winces regardless.

Astarion raises a lazy eyebrow. "Love, that's what you're missing? Is a healed hangover truly worth braving that regrettable cesspool?"

Wyll frowns. "It's not a cesspool."

"And I'm sure the traveling salesman who offered you the tour told you very sweet things," Astarion says, patronizing. He stretches out a hand to frame the sun. "For those of us with distinguished palates, I've never encountered a more dizzying dichotomy of existences than there."

"How is it doing?" Wyll asks, before he can help himself.

Astarion blinks, looking over. Behind him, Mizora sighs, stretching her wings out like a displeased cat. "Honestly," she says, rolling her painted eyes. "I thought I was the one to tell you about Baldur's Gate. Am I not enough?"

"Aren't you from there?" Astarion asks, curious, and he cannot hear Mizora so he starts talking before she's finished her sentence. She glares at him, resting her chin on her clawed hand. "Your accent is hardly subtle, darling."

"I am," Wyll admits, and doesn't look at the cambion lurking by, tail curling to a dagger's point. "I just haven't been back in a while."

Astarion hums. "How long?"

"Seven years."

His father's face, soot-stained, cold. Go.

Seven years. Each of them stolen.

"Hm," Astarion says, and there's something more than curiosity in his eyes before he disguises it. "Quite the stretching timeframe, that. I'd be happy to fill it, if you'll content yourself with midnight tales."

Wyll blinks. Frowns.

"The life of a magistrate, love," Astarion says, waving a dismissive hand. The words twist oddly in his mouth and he clicks his jaw closed before they can spill, frustration warring over his face. "Seeing the sunlight was a fleeting fantasy when faced with laws and ne'er-do-wells. The nightlife is where I found myself."

A pause.

"Perhaps we can facilitate a trade," he says, and it's deceptively light—there's something hungry in his eyes, more than life, more than blood. "I tell you of the nights and you tell me of the morns, hm?"

Oh. He's a vampire—sunlight burns him like the gallows. Wyll doesn't know how old he is, what age death has frozen in his youthful face, but he remembers his own trips to the Underdark and hells beneath. Even days away from the sky was enough to make him wretched with it. Karlach, staring at the sky like she was afraid she'd lose it again.

How long has it been, since Astarion was alive?

How long since he experienced a morning?

Waking up with the clatter of a cantrip and striding to his windows, throwing the shutters open and staring over the rippling expanse of the undying city, its patrons rumbling and bustling to start their day. His father's voice, booming through mortared stone, sending out commands and dealing with diplomats and all the other tedious necessities of being Grand Duke.

Mizora tells him, when he begs. She'll close her eyes and he can feel her energy drift, reach out to the city so far away, and then she smiles and speaks of how his father is doing. Says what battles he's won, what legacies he's creating.

But mornings.

Those are simpler things. Things he can remember.

"The birds," Wyll says, and leans back—stares overhead at the twisting blue sky and feels a seventeen-year-old boy peek through his bones. "Every morning, they sing so brightly you feel small among them, and when they take flight you can hear them for leagues—and see them overhead, whole clouds of starlings and chipper-jays."

He closes his eyes. "The air smells like golden hour. You can always tell when the market will be full like a storm coming, everyone preparing to strike for deals and bargains, the murmur of distant merchants whispering through the stone." He laughs a little. "They're like fey, sometimes. Laws say they cannot lie, so they contour it with polite words and lovely gibberish. They're either very kind or not at all. Every language is different and every face unique and they blend together like nothing else in the world."

"Each temple has its own bell," Wyll says. "They'll peel over the city, each in their own minute, and it's like they're competing to be more beautiful than the last—great enormous bursts of song, caged in their time, before the next picks up to drown it out. You can't do anything when they're going on, prayers filling the street, every crash enough to make you jump out of your skin. It echoes in your bones, if you'll let it."

Memories, wisping by, bright and sparking. "And the mist! It doesn't always happen, but when the weather is just cool enough and the river behaves, the grey will settle over Baldur's Gate like a cloud. It's the only time the city ever sleeps, or at least appears to—like walking through a dream, only the gleam of ceramic tiles peeking through and the murmur of voices from people you can't see. You can get lost there, wandering for leagues, only to end up back on your doorstep. A magic you can't find anywhere else."

Something like longing claws in his chest. Wyll exhales.

"It's alive," he says, quietly. "It's home."

It is. It is until it wasn't but it still is. It always will be, in the part of Wyll's bones that are still seventeen years old and watching the horizon change from towering buildings to a forest so deep it drowns.

There is a hopeless reverence in Astarion's eyes.

"I see," he murmurs. Seems to shake himself, to peel back this exposed yearning until he's poised again, smile perched on his face like a courtesan. "You're quite the wordsmith, aren't you? I know the Oasis would pay well for your talents."

Astarion, smiling, open, loose—taking away the love. Trying to pretend like he doesn't want to see the city. Like he doesn't want to see the sun.

"When we go back," Wyll says, fast, not quite composed, "I'll show you all my favourite spots, give you the daytime tour." His words stick to his teeth. "If you want."

"When," Mizora repeats, eyes flashing. "Awfully bold, pet. You're still exiled, aren't you?"

Wyll doesn't look at her. Just at Astarion, whose face has cracked again to show mourning tucked under survival, tucked under the magistrate and all the lies that come with the persona. With pretending to be someone else to protect himself. To protect an existence that does not deserve what he gives it.

"I–" Astarion swallows. Looks away. "I would like that," he says.

Wyll nods. "Then I will."

The ladder. It's close, he knows that, it has to be, it has to be, because he thought there was one drider and there are four and he has to go, he has to escape, he has to leave and flee and survive and they're going to catch him–

Fire—regular fire, orange and bright, from the mortal and material world—burns down Waukeen's Rest.

The party helps, because Lae'zel has lost the wretched cruelty she carried and has become begrudgingly helpful instead, even as she lambasts the victims for not protecting themselves—Karlach bullrushes the door down without a scrap of care for fire and plucks the rubble from the room, kicking off fallen beams and exploding kegs, and Wyll helps carry the people out.

The people familiar, with Baldurian accents and faces he has not seen since his shadow was his own.

Counsellor Florrick stares at him, at his horns, at his eye—fear, and mourning, for the sixteen-year-old boy who had dogged at her heels and begged for training and watched her fight with nothing but wonder. Whoever stands before her is not the same.

Wyll knows this. He has always known this. So he claps his fist to his chest, bows the bow that has earned him a legacy in tatters, and asks what happened.

She tells him.

And the Blade of Frontiers does not falter, does not ever falter, so it is Wyll, instead, that stumbles back and feels the earth fall away beneath his feet.

His father is gone.

His father. Is gone.

The party surges forward to stomp out the last of the fires and clear the path and Wyll is free to crumble—to nearly fall, legs locking and twisting as the ground rushes up. Movement, wings spread wide, as Mizora comes to him; as she wraps her hands around his shoulders and guides him down, sitting on the stone, soot over his face and thick on his palms. He's shaking. He's shaking.

"Why?" Wyll whispers, throat ragged. "Why didn't you tell me– why didn't we save him–"

She sets a thumb on his lips, wrapping her fingers around his jaw. He shakes, eyes brimming.

"Pet," Mizora says, so soft, so gentle. "You didn't ask. Otherwise, I would have told you. I've always told you. Don't you remember that?"

She does. She always has. From where to go when Baldur's Gate closed to him, when his father with his soot-stained face told him to go, when his father exiled him and his father who is now gone is gone and gone and dead and dying–

Her claws dig into his face. "Calm down," she murmurs, narrow and focused. "You need to block it out, pet. You must calm down."

He is. He is, he swears, but there are iron bands wrapping around his chest and a terror so deep it's swallowing him, staring up at smoke-filled eyes and his father's corpse hovering above–

Not that corpse. A different one, with snowy hair and hellfire eyes. Astarion.

He's drawn up, limbs tucked in and unease scrawled plain over his face. The rest of the party lingers in the background, but in some twist of fate that the Wyll of tendays ago would laugh at, Astarion has been chosen as the sacrifice to talk. Him, the vampire; him, the monster hunter. What a pair of binary stars they make. Always twisting around each other until they eventually collide and explode.

Air wheezes in his chest like a bear trap. His father is gone. His father is gone.

Mizora grits her teeth but pulls back as to not block him from the world, untangling her wings until he's just sitting there, crouched on the ground, shoulders hunched and eyes wet and horns pulling at his skull. He needs– something. Something.

A voice.

"What?" Wyll rasps.

Astarion is watching him, eyes cautious. "When you said you were from Baldur's Gate," he says, with deliberate lightness, "you didn't specify you were its heir."

Oh. He remembered. It's only been a few days, hardly more than a blink in the insane journey they're taking, but– remembered. Someone who stays by him long enough to retain things, who doesn't leave him or he leaves them until it's just him and Mizora, out in the stretching wilderness.

That fact curls around the shock, wraps its scaled length over his throat until the fear suffocates beneath it. Mizora taught him this, to drown out the horror and realization until he can act again, until Wyll can cower while the Blade of Frontiers draws his rapier.

There is no salvation in panic, in sniveling cowardice instead of confronting the truth.

So Wyll hums, brisk in his throat. Shakes his hands like he can push all the tension out of them, rubbing out a jabbing line of taut skin over his wrist. Simple things, like adjusting his armour and sharpening his blade. The wilderness was not kind, and monsters less so. There was no time to be consumed with fear or fury or farcical mourning. Just fighting.

Mizora smiles, eyes soft, one wing wrapping around his back.

"That's it," she soothes, pressing fire-warm palms to his shoulders. "Don't think. Just breathe. You're doing so well."

He leans into her touch. Flames, billowing without burning, pulse through him.

Okay. His father is gone. Captured and taken. Not dead, and commanded not to be injured, but taken. Wyll has handled kidnappings, from sea-hags or ankhegs, and to take someone alive is often to have another plan for them. His father is not dead, and is likely not going to be killed soon. There's time enough to save him.

He just has to act. To push forward, to set two pelican coins on Thyril's counter and head to the Sword Coast.

Wyll stands, rolling his shoulders, hands on his sides. There's soot from helping fight the fire and he rubs it off, familiar motions, little rituals as Mizora leans against his side and warms the despair until it laps like bathwater at his nerves. Nothing to focus on, nothing to fear.

Something flashes over Astarion's eyes before it's hidden. "You don't have to do that."

Wyll hums again—lets the sound bounce down his throat, grounding him, sinking into his bones and the despair there. Tucks it away, deep in his chest. Looks up. "Do what?"

Astarion flicks a hand at him, loose and derisive. "All this… posturing. Hells, love, can you stop being a hero for even a moment?"

It's said like an insult, and it certainly sounds like one, but something in Astarion's face makes it seem otherwise. Wyll frowns regardless. "I am a hero."

"Yes, love, of course," Astarion says, soothing, brows raised. "But–"

He draws off, looking to the side. Flicks his gaze around to the Flaming Fists setting up supplies packs and searching deeper in the burning inn, shoulders back.

Wyll's frown deepens. "But what?"

Astarion sighs, leaning back. He's wire-tense, despite the attempt to appear dismissive—his eyes are elsewhere but his attention is rooted on Wyll, ears pricked, every nerve on end. He's only breathing when he needs air to speak. His façade, cracking away in face of caution.

"Heroes are dreadfully boring creatures," he says, wary and trying to be flippant. "Oh, so chivalrous, so burnished. You could be forgiven for thinking they'd just hopped from some fairytale with ink for blood and parchment for skin, the way they act. Not a scrap of soul behind those chipper eyes."

Wyll pauses.

Astarion, talking about heroes. Wary.

Astarion, watching him shut down, watching him stop thinking, watching him ground himself away from the world and become a creature of action.

(Why would a monster not supposed to think past its hunger be afraid?)

"Hard," Astarion says, "for heroes to be people, sometimes."

The words echo through his skull.

"He's got a rather inflated sense of self, doesn't he?" Mizora purrs, but it's lacking her normal charm—her eyes are slits and her teeth click over each word, tail coiling around his ankles like a chain. His arm prickles around healing clawmarks. "Must everything in the world revolve around what he thinks?"

It doesn't. Astarion isn't right, not always, Wyll knows that, but– the action still simmers in him, the drive to kill the panic until his rapier flies straight and true once more. Until he isn't the boy he was, shaking, as his father tells him to go and he is instead the man, carving through the wilderness.

But–

Heroes don't hesitate. Heroes would have taken up the stake in his pack and planted it between brittle ribs until a forest bloomed over a corpse and asked Volo to make it a song—would have carved Karlach's head from her shoulders and shaken the false paladin's hands on the way out. Heroes fight and rush and act and do not think.

The world needs to be saved. The Absolute needs to be stopped.

If he doesn't think about this now, will he ever have the chance again?

The truth uncoils from his throat. Leaves skin rubbed raw and broken. "My father," Wyll says, and cannot say anything else—cannot drown it beneath the objectivity once again. His father is taken and his father is captured and his father is gone–

Something unfurls in Astarion's face.

Something like relief.

"Yes," he murmurs, soft. "But I'm afraid you're traveling with Faerûn's most deplorable set of adventurers, and we're well-adept at tracking lost souls. Hardly much of a detour to pick him up along the way of saving the world, no?"

It's stupid. It's stupid and maybe that's why Wyll laughs, barely anything, just a rough exhale that rasps at his chest and squeezes his eyes closed. Tears, brimming in the corners—a hiccup, weak and useless and rusting, deep in his throat.

Astarion steps forward—looks like he regrets everything—and wraps his arms around him.

Wyll hugs him back like his life depends on it. He's too hot and Astarion is too cold and the air wavers around them, twisting like a feywild dance, and he's crying. How long has it been since he's cried? Since he's allowed himself to?

He's crying and he's weak and in just this moment, he doesn't act.

Behind them both, a cambion spreads her wings and frowns.

Mizora didn't tell him. And he didn't ask, didn't beg for knowledge of Baldur's Gate like he normally does, so distracted with this journey—but it's his father. Surely she would understand he wanted to know, wanted to content himself in the one truth that his exile is for the best.

She didn't tell him.

What else is she hiding?

From sunlight and stars come shadows—down beneath the crèche, the Underdark, beneath it all to a land where birds die and monsters lurch from corpses.

There are parasites in their minds, and they are no longer the greatest threat. Something larger lurks in the darkness, and it wants them dead.

They will not let it.

Lae'zel has stopped calling herself their sarth, now that the betrayal of her queen lies rotten and scoured over her marrow, but they follow her regardless, and there's a relief in her eyes at it. Gale walks with a new trigger under his skin and the damnation that he is to save them at the cost of himself. Karlach thrums under a half-repaired engine and understanding that the hells are baying her name. Shadowheart sinks her fingers into the surrounding darkness like a cloak and doesn't smile like she used to.

None of them are the same.

Astarion hollows. He tries to hide it, to simper louder and purr biting distractions, but his face goes gaunt and thin until he's akin to the corpses they're fighting. One of the many undead. A vampiric hunger burns in his eyes, this flickering terror whenever he pushes past it, keeping his lips pressed to his teeth and wrapping his claws around his wrist. Holding back.

Hiding to protect himself.

Gale has a Netherese rapture waiting in his chest—Lae'zel has earned the wrath of her entire species to hunt their footsteps—Shadowheart worships the Dark Lady and speaks of a past she has not been allowed to keep—Karlach is dying from the inside out with the hells as her only freedom—Wyll brings a devil to haunt the camp–

But still Astarion calls himself magistrate, calls himself elf, and does not ask for blood.

There are no rabbits, here. No deer, no boars, nothing but shadows. Nothing to drink.

Wyll tries. Gods, how he tries—presses himself against Astarion's side, talks of everything and nothing, pushes books into ink-black claws and talks himself hoarse over stories he's already read. Astarion welcomes it, eyes pulling back from the haze until he's there again, until his words simper free and laughter comes bubbling up his throat. But he thins, and he stops trancing, and he curls into miserable balls whenever Wyll is away, and–

He's starving.

Wyll remembers, a lifetime ago, wondering what it would be like to be a vampire. To not need to drink blood to survive but to wither without, and to satiate it you would become a monster. Become what the Blade of Frontiers hunts.

To be free is to starve. To survive, you must cut yourself away and denounce living.

Wyll stands, stiff and coiled, and pads to the other side of the fire. Mizora looks up at him, brows raised, drumming clawed fingers over loose stone. She's lounging as if in a palace temple, wings kicked up and tail curled over her ankles. "Hm?"

She says it like nothing is wrong. She says it like this is all normal.

They're within camp. It takes all of his power to keep his voice down.

"He's starving, Mizora," Wyll snaps, bristling like a struck cat. "I won't keep the secret any longer. I'm going to feed him."

"With what creatures, pet?" She says, pressing a finger to her chin. "One of those shadow-touched ravens, or the desiccated bull we passed? You're so kind."

"With myself." He jerks at his wrist, pulling back his bracer to the skin underneath. Ridged, yes, but there's a clear section right over his vein, pulsing underneath. He doesn't particularly want to be bitten, but Astarion doesn't want to starve, and one of those is discomfort and the other is hell. Shadowheart can heal him up afterward.

Mizora's eyes go flat and cold. "Oh, I don't think so, pup."

Wyll stops.

He hasn't seen her like this in a very, very long time.

"You have a mission here," she says, wings flaring. "One I will not have you distracted or weakened for. It's far more important than some peckish monster."

"What mission?" Wyll bites out, unable to help himself. "You haven't given me anything."

"You're working towards it," she says. There's nothing but black in her eyes. "Don't go tugging on your leash now, dear Wyll. I think you should remember the last time you tried."

Mizora reaches up and sets her hand on his horns—it's barely any weight but the skin splits around the base regardless, the skull not made to hold them weeping blood. He grits his teeth and doesn't look away from her, scarlet slipping over his stone eye.

"You will not feed him."

The words ring all the way down to his bones. To the despair he tries to keep trapped in their marrow.

Wyll steps back—she watches him. Her fingers curl and he feels the leash, feels the contract woven from runes into rings around his neck; air hisses through his lips, throat shuddering. He cannot leave her side.

Behind him, Astarion coughs, dry and ragged. Something black flecks through his teeth. "Apologies," he bites out, standing—swags on his feet, shaking his head, grinding control back into eyes fever-bright and glistening. "I'll be right back."

Lae'zel stares at him, ears pinned. "For what?"

"Scouting, love," he says, smiling. Scouting. Walking into the forest with no one at his side, a boulder melted through. "Nothing to worry about."

Her expression says otherwise. "Do not be gone long."

"Why, thank you." His smile sweetens. It doesn't reach his eyes. "I wouldn't dream of it."

He's going to do something. He's going to do something and it's bad enough he waited until starvation pulled his face gaunt and pale. He's going to do something and it's going to hurt.

"Astarion," Wyll says, and Mizora tugs again at his leash. Not choking. But a reminder of it.

The man doesn't look at him. "Just a moment, love," he says, distant. His eyes are already fixed on the shadows. "I'll be back before you know it."

Mizora's claws prick into his arms. "And if he doesn't," she hisses, a serpent in his ears. "Then that's the problem solved, isn't it? No need to slow yourself with dead weight. He still doesn't trust you enough to tell you he's a vampire. Why would he ever trust you?"

Astarion walks into the darkness, torch held high.

Wyll watches him go with something thrashing in his gut. It could be anger, fear, frustration.

It feels like guilt.

Astarion comes back, and he's smiling.

He extinguishes his torch with a dramatic flick of his wrist, a showman's grace, and sets it neatly in a pile with the others—pads forward, uncaring, as the campfire catches him in its golden glow. There's a warmth to his face that wasn't there before, something bright and peppered throughout.

Gone longer than a moment, but not by much. Gone, and coming back smiling.

Astarion saunters over to him, eyes curled into little crescents. "Hello, darling," he says, playful. Wyll can't help but laugh in face with it, relief pouring through him like lava, scorching away the shame setting roots through his gut. Maybe he's okay. Maybe he found prey.

"Are you–"

Across from him, Mizora tilts her head to the side, wings flaring. "Hm," she says, light. "He just tried to make a deal with a devil."

Wyll freezes.

Midway through laying down, through sprawling on the bedroll with his legs kicked back and hair falling over his shoulders, Astarion catches the silence, glancing up. Whatever is on Wyll's face must be horrendous because the relaxation cuts from him like a knife, pale in its wake.

"Love," Astarion says, and there's caution there, bleeding over the serenity. "What's wrong?"

Air burns in his throat. All he can see is the soot, flecked over Astarion's jaw. "Don't do it, Astarion."

He blinks, eyes wide. "What?"

Wyll is shaking, though it's buried under the frozen terror of a rabbit with predators in the grass. "Whoever you were talking to, they don't want to help. Anything they offer is a lie. It's only for their own gain."

Seven years– seven stolen years–

Astarion sits up, face bewildered. "Wyll, what in the hells are you talking about?"

Still lying. Always lying. Protecting himself, protecting Mizora, protecting the lie at the cost he's never been allowed not to pay. It bubbles easily past the smoke. "I can sense infernal energy," Wyll says, petrified.

Behind him, Mizora laughs, throwing her wings wide. "Oh, I love that," she croons. "Like it's you sensing anything. How useless you'd be without me."

Not Astarion. Not him.

"You don't want to make a deal, I swear it. You don't."

Astarion hackles, bleeding defensive fear. "I didn't–"

And then something cold shifts over his eyes, drowning out the blue for the black around. Realization, unwelcome and unwanted, fills his face. His claws sink into his own skin, pull back the blue for marbled bloodless flesh.

Mizora leans in, smiling. "Oh, he's starting to understand," she purrs. "How clever he must have thought himself, to think he wasn't making a deal. I wonder what payment he offered?"

He offered a payment. He tried to make a deal. He tried.

"I–" Astarion swallows, "–reached out, yes, but there wasn't a response and we didn't talk. Nothing happened."

We didn't talk. He already knows who it is, who he wants to sell himself to. Already knows how to reach out.

How close is he, to making a deal? How much has Wyll missed?

But he hasn't. Not yet.

Wyll is shaking. "Okay," he says, because he has to, because he must be the voice of reason here where his seventeen-year-old self had none. "I believe you, Astarion. But you–"

His father's face, soot-stained. Go. Mizora, laughing, leading him through the outpost. Seven years, only wandering in civilization long enough to leave a legacy, back to the forests the next day. Her voice, simpering at his sides. He's never known anything else. He's never been allowed.

"Please don't."

Astarion isn't breathing.

Wyll reaches up, setting a hand on his horn. The skin crackles and threatens to break, blood thrumming beneath his face.

"I do not regret what I did," Wyll says, because he doesn't. He can't. The memory of Tiamat, swirling over the clouds. "But I will always regret that it happened due to a deal. I wish I could have done it any other way."

Mizora smiles. There's something dangerous in her eyes. "Do you, pet? How curious."

He doesn't look at her. Can't, maybe.

"Servitude is not a worthy cost." It isn't. It never has been. "We can do it together," Wyll says, and raw honesty pours through the words. "You don't need a deal. I'm here for you."

Astarion looks at him. The black bleeds away for blue to come through again, hellfire once more, eyes that aren't vampiric red and aren't whatever once belonged to a corpse. Who clawed them out of his face? Who took them from him?

Understanding.

"Okay," Astarion says, damningly soft. "I won't."

Mizora rises to her feet, wings spread wide. "He's lying," she says, pointed. "Can't you see it, pet? He's saying what you want to hear. Anything to protect himself."

Maybe. But they're both liars. They've always been liars.

"Thank you," Wyll says, suddenly exhausted. "Thank you. I don't want to see you become someone you're not."

Astarion licks his lips. There's something fragile in his eyes. "Why?"

Why?

There's a stake in his pack. He hasn't touched it for weeks, but it's there, and it's sharp, and there's just one reason he would have it with a steel rapier at his side. Only an effective weapon against one type of target.

Astarion, lying. Astarion, fumbling through a rabbit's burrow for even a taste of blood. Astarion, hearing of Baldur's Gate in the daylight.

Why?

Only the truth.

"I care about you."

Mizora's claws dig into his arms. Her eyes are wildfires choking the horizon.

"Oh," Astarion says, blinking, and seems to realize it—pulls himself back under, smiling, eyes half-lidded and coquettish. "Well, far be it for me to correct your mistake."

It was just a mistake, pet, that's it. You won't do it again, will you?

Wyll shakes his head. He didn't kill Astarion. He didn't kill Karlach. A lifetime of scorched earth and corpses lie behind him and only now is he starting to realize why.

"I don't think it's a mistake."

Astarion stops breathing. That fragile composure cracks away. "Oh."

There is courtly romance. There is reading lone-bound novels. There is time spent and flowers given and epistolary hidden.

And then there is Wyll, leaning forward, kissing Astarion like there is nothing else in the world.

Hours later, exhausting conversation Wyll didn't know he had, he goes back to his tent and finds Mizora, perched over his bedroll with her teeth jagged.

"You're being stupid, pet," she says, tail lashing at the canvas. "Very stupid indeed."

Maybe he is. There's a chill like ice, spreading over his lips.

Mizora uncurls, wings flaring. "Does he know? That you called him it and wanted to kill him?"

"No," Wyll says, because he can't lie to her. That truth, festering in his bones. "But he hasn't told me he's a vampire, either."

She laughs, cold and cruel. "Oh, what equal weight those carry! How innocent you'll seem in comparison. A secret and murder are practically interchangeable in your bright little mind."

He grits his teeth. Doesn't look away.

"He will not love you," Mizora hisses. "He will leave you."

"Maybe," Wyll admits, because it's true. Astarion is wild and beaten and untamable and vicious and terrified. As likely to set his teeth into a problem as he is to flee. Wyll can't control that.

There is something he can, though.

"But I won't leave him."

Hands, digging into rotten wood. Tugging him up as drider venom sparks through his veins and pours black through his lips, weakening him, stone eye sparking with heat– laughter, far below– they're going to catch him– he has to run–

Traveling is limited here, where the darkness lurks and grows stronger the more they wander. Forcing themselves past exhaustion means risking mistakes, and those are fatal in the shadow-cursed lands.

So they move in quick bursts, anything when all their eyes are sharp, and set up camp in all the moments between. Food is scrounged and saved, and he averts his eyes as Astarion gently sets his cut in Wyll's tent after faking eating. Wyll pretends not to know who gives it to him.

The guilt, like an ocean between his ribs.

Setting in early makes for nervous pacing, for checking and rechecking weapons and gears. It means that Wyll finds himself at camp with energy to burn and nothing to do with it.

It means that Wyll remembers an old indulgence, long after he's supposed to be falling asleep.

It means that Wyll gets up and clears a space around the campfire.

He flicks his wrist. One arm out, the other rounded—the dance comes easily to him, the one other training his father allowed amidst fencing and hunting. Fancies of Baldur's Gate, of a life seven years past and the role he used to flee from. Son of the Grand Duke. Legacy to uphold.

Why is he practicing? He doesn't know. There's the echo of a kiss still pressed to his lips and a damnable warmth in his chest that doesn't crackle through his veins like smoke. Movement is easy, in the face of thinking. Something to do when his hands twitch and his mind threatens to consume itself in confusion.

"My," Mizora purrs. She stands, wings flaring to frame her horns. "I haven't seen this one in quite a while. Rather frivolous, isn't it, pet? I don't suppose there's anything of even a shred more importance to be doing?"

There is. There is so much he should be doing. Dancing is stupid, at the end of day. Halfway through the twist, his arms falter.

Then there's a laugh, from across the campfire.

Emerging from his tent, curls pinned back and shirt tucked high to his throat, is Astarion. Both eyebrows raised, hands on his hips, a lightness sparking through his eyes alongside the hellfire blue.

"An Grand Duke's son," Astarion says, fangs peeking through. "Here I thought the farandole would be too lowly for you."

Wyll blinks. Drops his arms to look over. "You know it?"

Astarion rolls his eyes. "Darling, I've already told you a magistrate's schedule kept me from the sun. The nightlife had its plethora of dances for me to sample."

Oh.

He's fifteen, kicking up his heels like his instructor taught him not to do, because it makes him leap higher and the man across the room laughs when he does. He's short with kind eyes, and they sparkle as Wyll dances closer, closer—they're both smiling–

Wyll shifts into a half-bow and extends his hand to Astarion, who has so far been doing a terrible job of pretending there isn't a smile crooking his lips. "Would you join me?"

"Gods, you're a fool," Astarion grouses. He rolls his eyes.

And then he stands up, and then he joins Wyll, and they circle around the campfire like a ballroom.

Astarion stalks away, bristling, hackles up, eyes like spotlights in the dark. There's a ragged fear in him that the anger cannot drown.

He's cold as ice. He wasn't before.

Not a deal, not yet. But close. Offering scraps of himself like trophies, all to earn healing that Shadowheart could have provided. Preparing for the fight tomorrow, the answer to his infernal curse, like he isn't calling out for another. Like someone isn't tempting him back down to the depths before he's had a taste of freedom.

"Do you realize you've made a mistake yet, pup?" Mizora says, lounging back. Her eyes are black as the starless sky overhead. "He's not going to love you. He doesn't know how."

"You don't know that," Wyll whispers.

Her tail curls around his wrist, gentle. "And do you?" She murmurs. "I told you already—he's dead. He died, long ago." They watch as Lae'zel walks over, as their fearless leader tries to detangle whatever nightmare is brewing in the corners. "Dead things cannot love. And they would not love you."

"Someone will," Wyll says, quiet. The truth he clutched to, when the world was dark and the nights long and he hissed around injuries no one would ever thank him for. "Someone will love me. Why not him?"

Mizora's eyes flash. "Someone already does, pet," she purrs. "I will never leave you."

He doesn't look at her.

Sometimes I wish you would.

And then Yurgir impales Astarion through the chest—and then he explodes in hellfire to come rasping back to life—then Raphael speaks of Mephistopheles and twin infernal contracts—then Astarion stands in a graveyard—then he raises a stake to his heart–

(It's already dead. It's always been dead. You are only killing a corpse.)

(I'm only trying to protect you, pet. This is what he'll do if you let him.)

(I'm going to kill you.)

Wyll tackles Astarion to the ground.

They go flying, crashing over shattered pavers, slamming against the earth—air snaps from his lungs as they tear apart, elbows cracking into stone and armour shredding.

"Wyll!" Astarion shrieks, lurching up to scrabble at the ground, eyes wide. "What are you–"

His hand, going for the stake.

Wyll lunges. Gets a palm around Astarion's and pins it to the ground, wrist embedded in the dirt. He's breathing hard and fast and terrified. "I'm not letting you hurt yourself!"

Raw frustration burns through Astarion's eyes. "I'm not," he snarls, twisting—tries to dig his heels into the stone for leverage, bucking like a bull. Wyll clambers on top of him, every muscle screaming, and sinks his knees around the man's waist; pins him like a cage, hands on hands.

"You weren't?" He manages, choking on it. "Astarion, you were about to stab yourself!"

"Which won't kill me!" Astarion barks, bitter and biting. "Gods, were you even f*cking listening to Raphael?"

He writhes again, lunging for any potential freedom. This is the first time he's actually looked like a monster, chest bared, cerulean scars, burning, fangs, words snarled and tangled.

But there's fear, in his eyes. A lifetime ago, telling Lae'zel not to command him, not to force him. Fleeing into the forest rather than face what he left in his wake.

What monster tries to kill themself?

Wyll grits his teeth and batters him back down. "I was," he says, digging his nails into Astarion's wrists like that will help ground him. "And he said you could still die!"

Fury, cold and frantic, in his eyes. "It's healing," Astarion snaps. "I come back unharmed– I'm just preparing for another fight–"

Maybe it's true—maybe it's true to him, maybe he sees it as nothing but transactional, cost and reward—but they're both liars. They always have been.

Wyll keeps him pinned. "Stabbing yourself is not healing."

Astarion bares his fangs and fights. Struggles like a hooked fish, blind in desperation and unable to summon any of the strength Wyll has seen him have—has seen him have before, when he was fed and full. Not now. The scratches over his chest do not bleed. There is nothing in his veins.

Noise, behind. Mizora—she's been speaking, actually, he can hear echoes, but this is the first time he can concentrate on the words. "Stop it, pup," she's snapping, wings flaring wide to crown the shadows. "This is stupid. He won't die, you know that—don't injure yourself for a corpse."

Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe—but Wyll said he would not leave, and he wasn't lying, for the first time. For the first time ever, perhaps.

Wyll holds him until Astarion's eyes go soft and confused—until Wyll breaks his secrets as Mizora hisses furious retribution in his ears and reveals he knew what the vampire was, reveals he has a stake, reveals the planned death. Not all of it, still lying, always lying, the guilt festering in his gut—but enough. Enough to shock Astarion from frantic desperation and push his mind from the death.

Until Astarion asks to be let up, and Wyll does.

They sit there, Astarion tucking his arms around his sides and curling in on himself, fitting himself into a coffin like he's scared the world will crush any part that sticks out. They sit there, until Wyll says you don't want this and Astarion laughs and Wyll says you're punishing yourself in hopes it hurts someone else and Astarion lies, and it has never been any different.

Until Wyll stands, stretching out a hand, and Astarion lets himself be pulled up.

His legs shake under him, adrenaline pulsing like a second heart, Astarion's hand like ice. Everything keeps thundering in his head like racehorses, pawing at the gates, and he knows deep in his bones that this is different—that they've both bared too much of themselves to leave it behind. Wyll, knowledge and secrets; Astarion, infernal rebirth.

The stake, gleaming in the graveyard. Blood crusted over its surface.

It looks like his. It looks like what his could have been, if he had been even a fraction more obedient, if he hadn't seen the fear in hellfire eyes and wondered why.

Not even that. He was still willing to kill Astarion. No, it had only been the knowledge that slaughtering the monster meant Mizora would send him back to the wilderness, to deprive him of living company once again.

He didn't kill Astarion for little more than lies.

Wyll rears back and kicks the stake deep into the shadows.

Astarion watches it go.

And then they're back at camp, everyone waiting in this awful wretched silence, and Wyll guides Astarion back into the firelight and the warmth there, into his tent, Karlach's hands leaving faint imprints of soot after she hammered the spokes in. Into the comfort of familiarity, false as it is, into the world that they've tried to make their own after having nothing.

Astarion sits, and stares at him; stays tense and drawn and unsure.

Mizora crouches behind him like a gargoyle. Her wings flare out, brushing at the ceiling, rippling over the canvas. She's real. She's real, but no one sees her, and Wyll is able to look away.

Just at Astarion, with hellfire eyes.

"I think I understand," Wyll says, soft, because he does, because he doesn't want to but the knowledge sinks through him like an anchor regardless. "Your–" master, lord, creator, what? "...sire sold your soul for immortality, but each time you die, the archdevil changes you?"

Astarion looks away. Nods.

Infernal rebirth.

Clawing blindly through the dark, burning, fires ripping him down to the marrow, Mizora pressing a kiss to a bleeding socket that had once held his only eye–

Wyll swallows. "Okay," he says, soft, terror smothered, because Astarion is scared and he will not be scared so they do not bounce off each other and become shriveled things without. Because this room is not the wilderness but it could be, and there are two pelican coins leaving his pocket and a horizon filled with emerald green, and he wants more than anything to be home, but he can't, and there is nothing he has.

What did he need?

Voices.

So Wyll opens his mouth and talks.

Words pour free, meaningless questions about changes and caring for them and rituals, things to fill the silence and make it so Mizora cannot drown him out, until she must wait in glaring silence so as to not distract him and reveal her presence. Until some part of Astarion peeks from the sheltered cage he has chained himself to, until his answers do not simper, until he leans back with a hum as Wyll knuckles out frustration built like armour beneath his skin, until scars shine through his snowy hair.

Vampires do not scar, beyond twin marks on their neck.

But there, hidden on Astarion's scalp, are rippled lines like currents in the sand.

Astarion notices, grits his teeth, and talks.

Infernal rebirth. Waking up, dead again and again and again but never allowed to keep, never held down in the darkness he eventually yearned for. He doesn't say how long. Doesn't give a time. He speaks like each event was yesterday, memory seared into his mind, but his face is frozen in elven youth and he cannot summon any specificities about magistrate lives and he asks about Baldurian mornings.

My eyes—my skin—my claws—my teeth—my tongue—my body—my shadow—my heat—my blood.

Ten deaths. I killed myself.

Wyll keeps rubbing circles into his skin, keeps pulling apart tension like tangled guts as Astarion's shoulders slip from the caged-dog wariness he always wears. Karlach gave me some tips, Wyll said, so soft.

It's a lie. Karlach didn't. She would have, probably, if he asked, but instead it was Mizora, soothing him as he wept around blood bubbling from his horns, pressing fire-hot hands to his skin and showing him how to guide the pain away, but–

But she was the one that gave him this pain. She was the one that hurt him.

Astarion was hurt by a devil who wouldn't even give him their name.

They're both liars.

Who are they protecting?

Stories come and go until it's just them, sitting there, truth raw and bloody between, and Astarion looks up at him, and there is blue fire in his eyes.

"Cazador is going to kill me," Astarion says, soft. "And Mephistopheles will drag me to the hells."

Down to the fire, down to a master who barters for souls and delights in their torment. Someone who changes his bound—his pets, perhaps—until they fit the form he wants with no thoughts to the mind behind it.

Someone like Mizora.

She's talking. She's always talking. Sometimes, she's all he can hear.

Wyll shrugs. "Mizora will command me to kill someone soon," he says, and knows in his bones it's true. Just as much as the next part. "I'll refuse. So we'll survive down there together."

Mizora bristles, rising to drown out the light. "Watch your tongue, pup," she hisses. "That isn't the kind of promise you want."

How many promises has he made? How many of them have ever mattered?

She wanted him to kill Astarion. She would have made him. She would have succeeded, if he had been anything but small and afraid. If, for the first time, he hadn't stayed with people for more than one day and heard voices other than hers crooning in his ears.

Astarion is staring at him. Still frozen, still trembling, but–

Something like hope, in his hellfire eyes.

"It's a date, then," he says, and Wyll laughs.

Wyll is regrettably unfamiliar with elven habits, but he knows Astarion trances far longer than normal. After the knots of tension had unwoven around his neck and wrists, there was a serene kind of peace in his eyes, surfacing under the fire, and then he had gotten quieter and quieter as Wyll filled the silence until eventually his eyes closed and didn't reopen.

That isn't how an elf trances. It's far more similar to mortal sleep.

Wyll notices, thinks on it, and pushes the matter back for a later day.

But now Astarion is resting, seemingly too exhausted for the paranoid half-unconsciousness he normally does, and it would be the perfect time to talk without fear of discovery, but– Wyll is drained down to the marrow, mind clawing along like carrion. Mizora keeps talking, keeps berating him, wings spread.

But soon she sees her words aren't landing, just slithering against his skin, and she falls silent. Glares instead, smoke trickling through her teeth. He blinks at her, at the shadow he casts and Astarion doesn't, and cannot make his thoughts connect.

There's noise, outside. The rest of the party, shuffling around as the eruption in their midst loses its fire and becomes rubble instead, something to shift and peel through as they try for understanding. A vampire, hells-cursed, twin contracts and death infernal. Deaths plural, considering all he's changed beneath their unknowing eyes.

Wyll knows, now. But—and there is a part in his bones that mourns this but knows it to be true—he is the only one who will be told. Astarion will let the others know the generalities, flick a dismissive hand as he bitches about how much trouble his claws gave him and the dreadful shame of having to wear clothes that hide his scars, and that will be it. He will not let them know. He will not expose himself.

Only Wyll knows, because he was there.

They're both liars. They always have been.

And there, in the silence, in the exhaustion, Wyll holds that in his hands and wonders why.

Astarion wakes, slow and unsteady. A moment of distracted bleariness before the fear that is as much a part of him as his eyes bucks its head and he rises, gaze sharpening, shoulders tense. Looking around.

Recognizing his surroundings—recognizing Wyll.

He relaxes.

"Why, hello," he purrs, though his throat rasps around sleep before honey recovers it. "My watchful guardian, hm?"

Wyll smiles, and feels remorse settle on the edge. Astarion will never be one to sit and pour out a soul he doesn't own to other ears, not even with the guarantee of safety. However old he is has been plenty to wrap his secrets in iron, to bury them deep in the gravedirt until sunlight cannot burn them away. Last night was one break in the cage, one fallen star over a walled city.

It will not happen again. Wyll knows this. He can wheedle and parse truth from Astarion's lies piece by piece, slowly discover what past has turned to history, but that's it. They will become a game to each other, both liars, ever lying.

Maybe it's not right. Maybe it's not good.

But it is who they are.

"At your service," Wyll says, and tucks into a half bow. "How was your rest, majesty?"

Astarion smiles. "Lovely," he says, and sits up—something raw flashes in his eyes as his head sways, a hiss through gritted teeth. "Hells–"

He slams one hand into the ground, stability clawed from weakness. Frustration, boiling over his parasite, lashing at the air—fingers, wrapping around his own wrist.

They fit over the narrow joint, skin stretched taut across bones with no flesh beneath. Bleeding fire, his newest change, but only in bare drops that scorch his armour more in their absence than their presence.

The guilt, a tsunami.

"I'm sorry," Wyll says, fractured on the edges. "I didn't notice– I would have helped if I had–"

"You're lying," Astarion says.

Wyll goes very still. Mizora's wings snap outward.

Astarion hums, unbothered, eyes drifting lazily around the tent. Not lazily. Searching for something. Ears pricked, sharper than any mortal senses, built to hear the thrum of blood through arteries and the scent of living prey.

Of prey that should be there, but seemingly isn't.

Wyll's gaze flicks over.

"Don't look at me, pet," Mizora hisses, tail lashing. "You're getting rather close to the edge, now. Whatever your idiotic mind is conjuring is worth far less than my ire."

Her ire. The scars she leaves on his arm and teaches him to care for. The horns she pulls from his head and eyes she plucks from his face and the help she guides him through the wilderness with. The pact she divulged but the ghost she keeps secret.

She doesn't want him to risk her cover. Doesn't want him to reveal how he knew.

And what would a Wyll Ravengard who lived a free life with only his own shadow at his heels do?

Wyll shifts, reaching up to his shirt—he pulls down his collar, unthreading the lace below his neck. "Not anymore," he says, firm. "You're not going to starve, Astarion."

At once, the man stops.

There have been times when he forgets to breathe, when the façade cracks for undeath beneath, but this is the first Wyll has seen him ever stop.

Not breathing. Not moving. There's a stiffness to his shoulders like corpses and a hollow pulse over his throat, over the fangs that peer past his lips. Rigor mortis. The impossible silence of a predator, eyes bright. Of a prey, perhaps, with something larger stalking through the grass.

Rabbits, clawing through their burrows. Killing himself to reset the hunger.

Has he ever drank human blood before?

Deep in his bones, Wyll knows the answer.

"It's okay," he says, soft, and forgoes his shirt entirely—tugs it off his arms, setting it to the side. Scars, twisting over his chest, some from monsters and some from ghosts, but Astarion's eyes are locked on his neck. He can't look away. "It's okay, Astarion."

"Is it, pet?" Mizora says, cold. She's uncoiling, wings flexing to fill the space. Her eyes are grey smoke. "Think very carefully about what you do next."

Astarion shifts—his skin cracks—and breathes again, shoulders tucking in.

"I… don't know what to do," he says, very soft.

Wyll nods. The tent is cramped with three souls but he finds a way to lay back, to arrange himself so bloodloss won't make him fall or force Astarion to support him. The man shrinks back, lets him work, and he's frozen—stopped the pantomime, stopped the disguise. Just himself, eyes bright, wariness scrawled like scars over his face.

"It's okay," Wyll says. "I trust you."

Something flashing over Astarion's eyes, bleeding past the blue-black. It's gone before he can understand.

Wyll tilts his head to the side, bares his neck, and waits. Digs his nails into the blanket in false stability and doesn't look at Mizora, doesn't look at her snarled disapproval, and just breathes.

Astarion leans in. Hesitates, the chill from his skin bleeding through the air, and then–

Bites. Twin points of ice, through Wyll's neck—he hisses from surprise but doesn't move, staying flat, and Astarion hunches. The blood pours through him, fed by a thumping heart, warm and rich and leaving.

Right against his ear, Astarion keens.

There is an animal desperation in the sound, more than exultance, more than relief. He keens like he's never known anything else, like his world has shrunk to this moment—his hands paw at Wyll's sides, bracing himself, lurching closer. Something warm trickles down his neck.

Mizora's wings flash, rising up to block the outer light. "He's taking too much," she hisses. "If you dare die on me to a pathetic little leech–"

Wyll exhales and sinks into it—reaches up to wrap his palms around Astarion's shoulders, not to push, but only to stabilize. There's an aching drag in his throat, the bob of his breath against another, ice where they touch; but there's also Astarion, panting, shivering under his hands like he's scared the world will fall out from under him.

It hurts. But pain is just pain. It comes and goes and fills a void that always plunges back down when he pushes it from his mind.

The tent starts to waver in his eyes, corners losing their distinction. Mizora is standing, cramped, looming overhead and snarling, wings flared– an ache in his mind–

Wyll shifts, setting his palms on Astarion's chest. Pushes.

Astarion immediately ratchets back, tearing his fangs free and pressing his back against the tent. Blood splatters over his face, red and wet, smearing down his lips. He's shaking, not from fear or tension but energy, sallowness peeling from his cheeks and lesser wounds stretching closed and smooth. Healing. Recovering.

His eyes are wide and blue, fire swallowing up the coal. "Oh," he murmurs faintly, pressing a hand to his lips like he can hardly believe it. Reverence like stars, like worship, in his face.

Wyll winces, pressing a hand to his forehead. Too much, most definitely, enough his thoughts trip and stumble over each other, but–

But a warmth in Astarion's face.

He's never seen it before.

"Are you feeling better?" Wyll asks, which is stupid, because what is he supposed to answer but yes. Weeks of starving.

Years, maybe.

Astarion stares at him. Scarlet, dripping like ichor over his cheeks, down the points of his distended fangs. Hands curling and uncurling in his lap, fingers fluttering, movement like lightning trapped under his skin. A flush beneath blue skin.

"You are a regrettably wonderful man," Astarion says, and though the words could be his particular flavour of mocking, they come out soft instead. "The world does not deserve you."

Oh.

No one has ever said that to him before.

"Thank you," Wyll says, "for letting me help."

Shadows, all around. Mizora, looming in the far corner. Silence and curses and hellfire.

"Thank you," Astarion says, "for helping."

The next morning, or whatever counts for that in the shadow-cursed lands, Astarion emerges from his tent with his head held high and practiced explanations spilling from his tongue. Raphael revealed the worst of it, the twin contracts carved into a back unwilling and infernal rebirth, and that is where the tale would die, if Astarion thought they would accept it. A raw acceptance burns in his eyes as he thinks without saying about which scraps he will feed them to keep the full breadth of the story tucked beneath his ribs.

Wyll sees this. Recognizes it, and wonders at the hurt on his tongue.

But this is who they are. Who they have always been, perhaps, or they have been shaped to become; who they are when lies take the place of bones and disguises see the sun more than faces. Astarion is a vampire, yes, and cursed, and immortal—and the glacier shows only the caps instead of the depths far below.

It's just a touch waylaid when no one is surprised.

"Excuse me," Astarion says, prettily. "What?"

Lae'zel frowns. "I already know."

He stares at her.

The githyanki flicks her ears back, brows raised. "Your heart does not beat," she says simply. "Vampire was a kind I am not aware of, but undead are common throughout the planes. It did not matter." A flash of tamed annoyance. "Difficult to research, when you were not comfortable enough to tell me, but I learned."

Silence. Across the camp, Wyll is finding it difficult to breathe.

"Vampires are creatures of night," Shadowheart says, shrugging. "We are taught to recognize them, to see what fellow shadow-walkers move alongside us. If you had bit me, I would have ended you, but you didn't."

There is a tension in Astarion's shoulders that says he was considering it, that the starvation had gripped him deep in its thrall and pulled his eyes to her neck. Incredulity warring with raw astonishment makes a home on his face.

"It took me a moment longer," Gale admits, chagrined, like he's embarrassed he wasn't first. Like he should have been able to see past the infernal traits and well-worn lies with ease. "And by the time I knew, you had proven yourself a worthy ally. Ignoring that, blood is a price much less gaudy than magical artefacts, and you paid handsomely when I came hungering. No, a vampire is as good a friend as an elf."

Astarion stares at him.

"Excuse me?" He says, much less prettily.

"Um." Karlach raises a hesitant hand. "I didn't, if that helps? Thought you were just hells-touched, is all." She shrugs. "But it doesn't matter to me. I've made bedfellows of monsters much worse."

Wyll chokes around a half-strangled laugh.

Others noticed. Others who weren't Mizora. He didn't, because he relied on her, because he let her lead him to conclusion after conclusion—but others saw, and others noticed.

Astarion isn't breathing. He's gone stiff and focused, narrowed in like a cat seeking prey, but there's nothing predatory in how wide his eyes are. He takes one step back, fitting all of them in his gaze, prickling up like a wardog for the slaughter.

"Are you meaning to say," Astarion says, slowly, "that I have been conjuring up despicable lies and pretending to ignore how lovely the sun is, for nothing?"

Karlach winces. "Seems like it."

They all knew, or at least don't care. Astarion has sat before them and lied and starved and killed himself and it didn't matter.

Or maybe it did—maybe the lies were what convinced them—maybe Astarion playing coy and lively and sticking to the shadows out of fear of retribution was what made them decide he was an acceptable vampire—maybe if he had bitten them or bitten someone else they would have declared him monster and staked him through—and then he came screaming back to life and they killed him again and again and again–

But they won't know. Because Astarion lied, and now they don't care.

"Gods," Astarion mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I hate you all."

Starvation and scars and secrets.

"Rather fair," Wyll admits.

Astarion turns to him, brows raised. "And don't think I've forgotten you, dear Wyll. What abouts did you notice? What lovely little sign was I apparently waving with a fervour?"

Mizora flexes her wings, watching with smoke-black eyes. "Be very careful, pet," she hisses.

"Your eyes," Wyll says. It's true, in what he's allowed to say past the lie. "Vampires have red eyes, so for yours to be hellfire, I thought it was a disguise. The only thing that made sense with your fangs and scars."

Something longing flashes over Astarion's face. "Red," he repeats, like the word is foreign. "Yes. They would be red, yes?"

Oh.

Why wouldn't he know that? Why would that be the one thing he's surprised to hear, the secret that isn't a secret because vampires are known beasts? His eyes thrum with hellfire but those are changes, an archdevil's manipulations tucked in alongside resurrection. How can you not remember your eyes?

The costs and payments he laid out– the unending deaths–

"Astarion," Wyll says, and almost chokes on it. "When was your first change?"

He smiles. It cannot hide the pain underneath.

"A very long time ago, love," Astarion says. He reaches up and presses a finger to his eye, doesn't flinch at the contact—just rolls it around like a toy to be played with. When he pulls back, there's soot on his hand. "But thank you. It's nice to know they were red."

Wyll licks his lips. "What were they before?"

Astarion doesn't answer.

Mizora lets the conversation die down to sheltered murmurs before she speaks.

"My, you're enjoying yourself, aren't you?" She sneers, eyes grey-black and empty. "Have any more secrets you'd like to puzzle apart, or any more tearful confessions to try? It's quite the performance piece. If I didn't know any better, I'd believe it."

The defensiveness surges to his tongue—he's not lying, not now, he means this, he does, he does—before it dies away. Before rationalization soothes the tension back to a simmering pit in his gut.

"He trusts me," Wyll says, soft. A smile, flashing over his face as he marvels on it. "He trusts me."

Mizora's tail strikes the ground like a whip.

"Arm out, pet," she snaps.

Wyll freezes. Feels the scars prickle over his arms, the ones hidden around his ridges, the ones that are only allowed to heal just enough before new ones join the twisted latticework.

Thinks, for a moment.

"He'll know."

Her eyes narrow. "What was that?"

"He'll know," Wyll repeats. "Astarion. He can smell blood. He'll know what's happening."

Mizora unfurls, wings snapping out and tail looming overhead, blade on its tip angled down. "Now, pet," she says, growling, like a predator stalking prey. "That almost sounds like a no. Was it?"

He can't lie to her. He's never been able to.

"I think," he says, slowly, softly, "that you've taught me some lessons I didn't want to learn."

Her eyes are flickering patches of smoke. "How interesting," she murmurs, forked tongue flashing, "for the student to instruct the master."

Astarion has a master. All he has done is run.

"He's a monster, pet," she hisses. "What does he love you for but the blood you give him?"

What is a monster?

Wyll knows. He's been told this, since he was young, since he was seventeen, since the wilderness set a path and told him to walk it. Monsters are those who cannot be reasoned with, who stalk through the lands with feral intention. Those who cannot function but to kill. Those who cannot listen but to murderous urge. Those who see all before them as something to slaughter.

The stake, cold, in his pack.

"I don't think he's a monster," Wyll says quietly.

I think I might be.

The last of the ladder collapses away but he's gone, he's here, sunlight kissing his skin. Back on land. Out of the Underdark. Away from the driders.

It isn't enough– they're coming– they're coming–

They're avoiding the Shadowfell for the moment—Shadowheart is desperate to enter and also throwing herself at any other distraction like a lifeline—and it leads them across shattered lands, searching for the root of the curse and all the misery it breeds. The smell of lavenders and flowers blooming in a world that doesn't allow them.

And this is when Wyll, striving for freedom, digging his nails into companionship that almost feels permanent if he allows himself to believe it, if he keeps looking around to see the same faces instead of empty trees and hateful villages, sees something rising in the distance.

A tower.

Not the Moonrise Towers, thankfully, because Disciple Z'rell would likely kill them if they came back without Balthazar or the precious Nightsong, but a tower. Old, crumbling. The stone would be falling apart if twisted vines weren't holding it together, weaving it into an imperfect macabre mockery of architecture, a memorium more to the curse than the town that was once here.

And Wyll is eleven again, young and immortal with it, no fear of life or death or consequence, and the temple of Lathander has a tower that stretches to the sky to view the sunrise every morning, and it looms before him, so tall, and he knows in his bones he is going to climb it.

What was it like, to be so free?

Wyll stands there, staring at the distant spike, and feels his hands twitch.

"Oh, pet," Mizora tuts, clicking her tongue. "Don't be stupid."

He is. He shouldn't be. He knows this.

Wyll turns, marching back into camp. He picks his way over Karlach's sprawled form and Lae'zel bitching about portion sizes to an equally-irritated Gale, all the way to Astarion, tucked up on a bedroll with a book braced on three pillows. The man shifts to look at him, eyebrow raised. "Hm?"

"There's a tower," Wyll says, and points. Astarion follows his hand with a wary curiosity. "Can we climb it?"

He blinks. "What?"

"Tower," Wyll repeats. Points again. It surges from the horizon like a gnarled fang, stabbing up at the starless sky. "Can we climb it?"

Astarion stares like he's lost his mind. "...climb it?"

Wyll is eleven and eternal. Fate spins as he commands it. He is the Grand Duke's son and has a rapier of actual steel and is allowed to sit in on some real diplomacy meetings, so long as he doesn't open his mouth. There is a tower in the temple of Lathander, and it begs to be climbed.

Wyll nods.

"That is a horrible idea," Astarion mutters.

He's not wrong. It's stupid. There's nothing to it, no advantage, nothing but a risk they'll both carry and potentially damn themselves under, even with the pixie's blessing and this area culled of monsters. He's just grasping for any memory of the past, before his father's soot-stained face and the wilderness that never had levity.

A thousand excuses rise to his tongue—get the lay of the land, search for monsters, make sure no army is marching through the darkness.

But all of them are lies.

The truth is because I want to remember who I was.

Seven years, all of them stolen.

"It is," Wyll admits. Truth, as often as he is allowed to give it.

Behind them, Mizora lurks, wings spread wide and eyes narrowed. "What are you trying for, pet?" She murmurs, claws braced on his shoulders. "You know a fall from that height won't kill him. The stake does the job."

She's trying to get a rise out of him. He sees that now. Sees the hollow threats she's trying to shove into his actions like they fit.

But they don't.

"A tower," Astarion says, dubious. He squints over the horizon, silver motes falling around his snowy curls. "Is there anything at the top?"

Wyll shrugs. "Maybe. I don't know." Memories, stone rubbing his palms raw and his heart thundering in his chest as he looked down, never stopping, going until he could press his hands to the enormous bell at its precipice.

Astarion looks at him. His eyes are blue. They were red, once.

He doesn't know what they were before.

Are there any towers he can climb, to try and find memories torn from him? Anything waiting back at Baldur's Gate that speaks to the magistrate's life before it became his disguise? A world where he was Astarion and that name only meant himself?

"Do you want to go?" Wyll asks.

Are you going to run? Are you going to leave me?

Astarion sighs, sounding terribly put-upon. "Contrary to all my better judgment, I do trust you," he says, and sets his hand in Wyll's. "Lead the way."

They make it to the top, laughing, Astarion bitching the whole way about grime on his clothes and Wyll discovering he does not have the flexibility of his much-younger self—they clamber up vines and rocks and bricks until Wyll reaches the top and hauls Astarion up beside him.

The world spreads before him—impossibly vast, like the first time he saw the ocean instead of a city's tamed variety, waves stretching to the horizon and beyond. Infernal sight burns through him, carving the world into shades of red and grey, outlines and movement, but it's there and it's real and it's his.

Not Lathander—not the sun and rebirth. Darkness and curses instead, wretched in the shadows, but big. It's so big it's impossible.

Mizora is here, he can hear her wings beating as she flies up alongside them, but in this moment, staring over the world, Wyll can look away.

Seventeen years old, leaving the walled comfort of Baldur's Gate, and the world is still so big.

Beside him, Astarion's eyes are wide, looking over the miracle. They're higher than even Isobel's moon shield, gleaming silver in the far distance, the ground nothing but a blur beneath. Just a fraction of Faerûn—of all the planes beyond that.

"What are you going to do," Wyll asks, "after we save the world?"

Astarion looks out, then at him. The blue in his eyes has swallowed the black.

"Live," he says. "I'm going to live."

The smell of lavender floods the camp, shattering past the rot and iron there. One breath away from the shadow-curse, and it creates a haven Wyll has almost forgotten. Proof that they're fighting for something more than removing the parasites in their skulls. Proof of a world that wants to heal.

Halsin is resting with Thaniel now, nursing the feywild boy back to himself. Or as close as he can get, when an undead tyrant still tethers a curse with his existence. He stares with green eyes and an unnerving wisdom.

Tomorrow, they go back to the Thorm Mausoleum, and they break this mystery down to the bones it's sought to protect.

Tonight, they prepare.

Astarion sprawls over Wyll's bedroll, kicking his feet up and drawing patterns in the dirt with idle boredom. He's pulled his shirt open, wearing something loose as the last chance before he drowns himself in armour, and hints of his cerulean scar peek through the fabric. The twisted knot of seven deaths.

I'm going to live.

Undead, no soul, no death—but he's choosing to live. Choosing to be more than the curse that shaped him, than the commands poured into his eyes like chains.

Mizora lashes her tail.

She's close to him, sitting by his side, golden jewelry gleaming in the campfire and fangs on full display. The camp murmurs with quiet conversations and he wants to latch onto them, instead of the words she simpers right against his ear. "You're so close," she purrs, eyes grey. "Just a little further. You do remember how to keep going, don't you? Or are you going to continue distracting yourself with all these pretty inconveniences?"

They're saving the world. That's the most important part. He swore to protect them all.

"Are you listening, pet?" She asks, which is a fallacy of itself, because he is the only one who can listen to her, and she has never let him avoid it. Except now, as he busies himself watching what Astarion is drawing in the dirt instead.

"Do not ignore me," Mizora hisses, and Wyll doesn't look over, doesn't try–

The campfire explodes in tar.

Everyone reels back, barking surprise, as cambion wings emerge through the shadows and a face painted in a damning smile casts its shadow over the camp. Mizora—a second one—gleaming iridescence—coal-black eyes—looms over him, wings thrown back and horns held high.

The original pricks her claws into his shoulders, sharp enough to draw blood. "Pay very close attention," she murmurs, hot breath flickering over skin. "I am not fond of being ignored."

The Mizora in the fire stretches, looking around at them all, smile crooked. "Why, hello," she purrs, adjusting her dress with a scatter of sparks. "How lovely to see you all again. Your little smiling faces, here in these cursed lands. It's enough to delight in."

Karlach snarls. She doesn't need armour or weapons or teeth to look like she's about to rip the cambion's head off.

"Mizora," Astarion says, cold. He rises to his feet, shoulders bristling, scar glaring through the gap in his shirt. "Why are you here?"

There's an animal panic in Wyll's chest as he stands, the original Mizora shifting with him, never removing her claws from his arms. The last time she appeared to them all was when she tossed him to the hells and burnt out his eye—when she punished him–

"To speak to darling Wyll, of course," she says, smiling, like she doesn't speak to him every moment he's awake. "While I'm sure you're quite busy traipsing about the wilderness, I do have a mission."

The mission. The one she wouldn't tell him, the one so important he couldn't feed Astarion but wasn't allowed to know.

Wyll sets his teeth. "What mission?"

She purses her lips. "Now, that's almost an unhappy tone," she says, mock apologetic. "Nothing so dire, pup. One of Zariel's assets got captured, and I need you to rescue them."

What?

Their contract is enormous and sprawling and so much longer than what she showed him on the hill of Baldur's Gate, Tiamat billowing overhead. He knows it, because she laughed and called him stupid and ignorant and idiotic and he tried so hard not to be.

She has only commanded him to kill before.

"Rescue?"

"Yes," she croons. "Oh, I know you're hungry for another target—another death to add your tally, spread over the lands. But you've been so well-behaved I think you deserve a treat this time, hm?" She laughs like a vulture. "Next time will be a proper soulless being to kill, I promise."

The party is looking at him. The Mizora in the fire spreads her wings—the one behind him leans in, tail lashing around his ankles.

"Just a rescue," she purrs. "Then we can get back to the murder you do so well."

Wyll can't answer. Something sticks his throat together like tar.

Mizora laughs, bright and victorious, and disappears back into the fire. The original retracts her claws from his shoulder, wings flaring forward to wrap around him, to block out Astarion's wide eyes.

"Do you see now, pet?" She croons, pressed against him. Her face is angular in the shadows, rouge painted on and golden jewelry framing her eyes. "I can't have you distracted. Terribly hard to be a hero when you're sticking your tongue down a monster's throat." Blood, trickling from the base of his horns. "Drift far enough away, and this might become a mission you complete by yourself, hm?"

Back to the wilderness. Back to the solitude, only a cambion's voice to surround him.

A smile, jagged as glass. "Because he will leave you. You've done such a wonderful job of only showing the Blade of Frontiers, the glorious, the savior—not the one with a devil's pact and all the weight alongside. Do you think he will love you, pup? Do you think he will look at you with anything but damnation when he knows what you are? When he knows what you were going to do to him?"

She leans in, inches away, lips ghosting over his skin. "I am the only one who will never leave you," she murmurs. "I am the only one who will stay."

He knows. He knows.

But then why, he wonders, is she trying so hard to chase Astarion away?

"Wyll?"

Astarion's voice, muffled through Mizora's wings—she pulls back, tail wrapping around his ankle, until he's free to see hellfire eyes peering at him. To the others, he must have just gone stiff, looking at something they can't see. Because they can't see Mizora. They never have. But she's real.

"I'm okay," he says, shaking his head. The blood is already dried, crusted against the base of his horns. "Sorry. I didn't know she was coming."

But Astarion isn't looking at him. Not directly.

His gaze is fixed down, to Wyll's shoulders—to where Mizora's claws have slipped past his armour, blood trickling through the gap. Scarlet, stark against his skin.

There is a dreadful understanding in hellfire eyes as he looks up.

Oh.

That night, as Wyll peels through Mizora's mission like tangled guts, Astarion slips into his tent. It's quiet outside, the murmur of voices and nothing but shadows to fill the gap, and the rustle of the canvas pulling back is deafening.

Astarion sits, stretching, filling the limited space like a throne. Mizora's tail curls like a scorpion's sting. Smoke, billowing invisible from her mouth.

"Did you know," he says, airy, but his hellfire eyes are fever-bright. "That Cazador once commanded me to serve as his partner for a ball?"

Wyll blinks. They've… talked, in a very generous definition of the word, of Astarion's past—of the vampire lord that haunts his every moment, of the man who carved twin contracts into a back unwilling. But never this openly. Never as the beginning of a conversation. "He did?"

"Yes," Astarion says, and kicks out his legs, enough Mizora curls her wings in to avoid them. "At night, of course, so I wouldn't burn. But I was bade to hang on his arm and smile prettily at the other nobles." His eyes fade—lose the blue, so they're just black, enormous in his face. "Dozens. Hundreds. All of them, spinning around us. Do you know how badly I wanted to tell them? To let them know what kind of monster they'd allowed in their midst, what torture he had planned for me that night?"

Across from them, Mizora goes very still. Her eyes sharpen to obsidian.

Wyll licks his lips. "I can't imagine."

Astarion stares at him. Doesn't say anything.

He knows. Not the full story. But enough of it. He's guessed what no one else has ever managed to piece apart.

Wyll holds the fractured pieces of his disguise—of the lies that have become him, because he let them, because he said and believed and convinced himself they were necessary—and sees, for the first time, how much the broken edges are cutting his hands.

"Now," Astarion says imperiously, flicking an arm out. "Obtain me something to read. I'm dreadfully bored."

The words come out before he can stop them. "You're not leaving?"

Astarion stares at him. "Not unless you want me to."

There's something like fire in his eyes, more than the infernal blue—fire of determination, of strength. Choosing to do something because of the protection it provides. Choosing him, over the lies burning between them like smoke.

I'll stay, so that the ghost haunting your shadow cannot force you to respond.

"Yes," Wyll whispers. "I'd like you here."

Astarion shakes his hand again. "Then I shall remain. Fetch me a book."

In half a daze, Wyll reaches back, thumbing through his open pack to pluck out whatever his fingers brush first. They've already read this one, a rather deplorable thing with gratuitous sex scenes that lend nothing but bodice-rippers to an overly farcical romance, but he likes it, because it reminds him of love, because it filled the void that Mizora's voice couldn't hollow out in the wilderness, and he gives it to Astarion, and he looks, and the man looks back, and he begins to read.

His voice fills the tent, brisk and mocking and there.

In the corner of his tent, Mizora seethes. Each time she talks Wyll looks at her, more obvious than the last, until Astarion starts waving a hand near her face like there's a bug—and then she stays quiet and just glares at him. Her claws sink into his ankles, scour blood to leak through his clothes.

Astarion must smell it, because he pauses, forked tongue flashing between his lips. And then he turns the page, and continues to read.

He stays, filling the room with noise, and doesn't leave.

"You're being very stupid," Mizora hisses, once Astarion has settled into unconsciousness and she can wake Wyll from sleep. She's looming over him in the dark, carrion wings spread wide to swallow the light, just an infernal gleam behind the points of her teeth. "Very stupid indeed, pet. Have you forgotten the last time you were stupid?"

Wyll stares at her.

If she forces him to abandon the group, to strike off into the wilderness alone like so many times before, he will lose the Astral Prism's protection, and it's already been proven to return to Shadowheart's side if he tries to steal it. If she changes him again, it will trap him in wretched weakness, and then he cannot do her mission. If she punishes him, claws his arm and shreds his face, then his party will heal him and keep a guard so she cannot force him to respond.

If she tells him to kill Astarion, using his lack of soul as their pact's requirement, he will refuse. He's done it once before.

Seven years has she commanded him. Seven years has she helped him.

Seven years has he left her.

"Maybe," Wyll says, and doesn't muffle his voice—lets it ring through his tent. Astarion immediately twitches awake, trance breaking as he opens bleary eyes, tense as a rabbit.

His gaze softens, when he sees just Wyll.

Mizora bares her fangs.

"Hm," Astarion says, sleepy and drawn. "Back to sleep, love."

Wyll doesn't remove his eyes from Mizora. "Okay," he says, quiet, and lays back down. Astarion shifts to set an arm over his shoulders, cold as ice, infernal winter against Wyll's own thrumming heat.

They fall asleep. Mizora stays silent.

Ketheric's invulnerability is from a woman chained and caged, porcelain face drawn in unending fury and the kind of wrath that topples kingdoms. She flings herself through the air in divine intervention that comes not with murmured prayers or farcical charms but instead the desolation that reminds people of fear.

The party follows, chasing her shadow as they plunge through Moonrise Towers with blades drawn. Up and up they go, past empty-eyed sycophants and howling devotees, little more than bodies with a false god puppeteer, and they emerge bloody and panting on the top floor. Ketheric rages there, pronounces his loyalty, his power, and cages Dame Aylin once again—drags her down, to rotten flesh and reaching tendrils.

They follow this, too.

And there, down through the darkness, Mizora prowls at his footsteps like a struck tiger. She doesn't look at him, eyes fixed forward, wings bristling. They're getting close.

Astarion lingers back, pressing at his hand. He doesn't look over, too tense for that, but there's a billowing awareness in his eyes like he can sense her. Like even if his gaze glances over her flared wings and lashing tail, he knows she's here.

She's real. She's real.

And then they round the corner and find an illithid pod, twisted and clouded over. Steam trickles from its base, mucus smeared in architectural ribbons around its sides, unknown liquid bubbling through. One familiar enough his tadpole writhes at the memory.

But behind it, through the pane of alien technology, looms a face he knows. A face that looks at him from two places, within the pod and stiff by his side.

Zariel's captured asset.

Mizora.

Wyll stares up at her, at the devil, at the ghost, and sees what has haunted his shadow for the past seven stolen years.

"How wonderful to show yourself," she says, voice echoing and bouncing through the pod. "Took your sweet time, did you, pet?"

Wyll doesn't move. He should, he knows that, he knows that, but there are mountains encasing his feet and the vastness of the world on his shoulders. She's here. This version of her is real. She's so real that she's trapped, held by physical bonds, and the others can see her. Everyone can see her.

Can see her rear back, horns scraping against the walls.

"You're not normally this slow," Mizora says, and a snarl echoes in her throat. "Be a dear and free me."

Free her. Like she's trapped, like there isn't a ghost that wears her face standing right beside him, wings spread wide. There's two of them. Why are there two? Why has there always been a shadow that hides from the world but haunts him?

"Oh, I don't know," Astarion drawls, eyes scorched through. He pads forward, almost through the original Mizora before she stalks out of his path, and sets his hand on the control panel by the side. Two buttons, thrumming with psionic potential.

Release. Transform.

He stares up at her, teeth bared. "I rather think we have more options than freeing you."

Mizora smiles, acid through her eyes. "I'm well aware you're damned to the hells," she purrs. It's too sharp to be charming. "Is your plan to damn Wyll alongside you? He'd be far less fetching as a lemure."

Astarion freezes.

They don't know what the pact says.

"My death is his death," Mizora says. "Kill the contractor, and all my contractees tumble down to Avernus and join the Blood War." She smiles at Karlach, trapped wings rippling behind her. "And I think you know just how wonderful that would be."

Astarion whips his hand off the button. Panic flares through his eyes.

Then it's just Wyll, air burning through his lungs, choking him. Smoke, instead of fire. Instead of warmth.

There's no room in the pod to move but she tries, twisting to face him, eyes lit up like icy pools. "I know Mephistopheles," she says, and victory burns through her face as Astarion flinches. "Centuries have I served as Zariel's advocate—you will find no one who knows contracts better, unless you want to trust that snake Raphael, and he's already asked Astarion to kill himself. If you want a chance to free your little vampire, you need me."

Astarion goes cold and stiff—he wants it, wants to be free, but cannot ask. Cannot bring the words to his tongue, for all they flood through his eyes. Eyes that are blue, that were red, that were a colour he can't remember. There's a stake, back in his pack, and the promise to kill a monster—casting Astarion to the hells without freedom is another kind of destruction. A worse one.

Wyll hesitates.

Mizora lunges for that, for the weakness. "Seven years with no one by your side," she hisses. "You need me."

And–

Wyll makes it out of the Underdark. It isn't enough. The driders follow him back and they're racing for him, mutilated and terrible, blades raised and baying, hunger and death in their eyes. They're going to kill him. They're going to kill him, and he knows this, and he's dragging himself over the hill on paralyzed legs and trying desperately to live for just a moment longer.

Mizora walks beside him. Her feet crease the grass but the driders don't react, don't turn to her, don't switch focus or attention or targets—but she's real. She's real. She has to be real.

Wyll lurches upright, gasping, weeping, black venom pouring from his mouth. "Please," he croaks, desperate. "Please, please, help me–"

She kneels. Her clawed hands hold his face like a flower.

"Oh, pet," she whispers. "That's all you had to say."

Wyll opens his eyes.

Neither are his. She's taken both of them. Clawed one from his face and burned out the other. Laughed as she watched him fumble blind through the hells, tugging horns from his skull like puppet strings and scarring ridges over his skin.

Seven years. Every target one he cut himself to pieces to slay while she stood by his side, no one else allowed to see her. Seven years where a single night in a village was enough for her to command him to flee, to leave civilization and society and people in his wake like tossed bones. Seven years isolating him from anyone else until her voice was the only one he knew.

Seven years as a pet, instead of himself.

"You will leave me alone," Wyll says.

The mottled surface of the pod is thick and near opaque, trapping visibility like fish in a net—he sees her expression sharpen regardless. "Excuse me?"

"You will leave me alone," Wyll repeats. "The pact stays, I serve you—but you're going to go away. You will not stay by my side any longer."

You will not be my ghost.

Behind him, the other Mizora prowls closer, eyes like soot, digging her claws into his shoulders. He feels her, feels the pain, feels blood weep through his armour as his skin cracks apart like old leaves, but–

But she's not pulling him. Not moving him. Not reaching around for the button to free herself.

She's there, he knows that, because you cannot be as she is without being real—but is she here? How real is she?

How real has she ever been?

"I will not be haunted by you," Wyll says. He sets his hand on the release, then shifts so his fingers wrap around the other, the transform mechanism, the one to damn her. "Or you will die here."

Mizora bares her teeth. There is nothing like the painted charmer of seven years past. "You're useless without me," she hisses. "I lead you through danger, tell you of all your companions, give you the mysteries of the world on a silver platter, and you want me to leave? Do you want to go back to the miserable wretch who couldn't save Baldur's Gate, who couldn't do anything without my power?"

He saved Baldur's Gate. He lost a father who didn't trust him and a city that damned his shadow. It stole seven years and gave him misery in its stead. It dug its teeth into his mind and made him rely on the one who hurt him. It made him a monster.

Please, please, help me–

"I don't need you," Wyll says, and stands taller—lets the bloodhound and the Blade of Frontiers melt away for just Wyll, just himself, with a name that means nothing more than who he is. "And if you want to live, you will leave me alone."

Mizora stares at him like she's never seen him before. He can feel her arguments bubbling to the surface, slotting alongside her forked tongue, but he's heard them before. He's rationalized each one, told himself she was helping, she was guiding, she was good—why else would she be there, helping him leave Baldur's Gate after his exile, teaching him how to survive in the wilderness?

Why was he exiled in the first place?

Because she didn't let him tell his father why.

Wyll stares at her. His hand doesn't leave the button.

Mizora bares her teeth, shifts, and clicks her fingers.

Heat crackles over his face. There's a low, viscous popping sound, like a fire snuffed out, and pain like lightning burning through his socket. Wyll hisses, pressing his hand up, nerves twitching and shrieking under it all.

Until there's a click like the snapping of brittle bones, and the fake eye falls into his palm.

Wyll stares.

It's innate stone now, no magic, just cold. A fake iris peers back at him, empty, infernal heat simmering against skin. Bloodstone, he called it, but it isn't. Grey, marbled throughout with runes and etchings. The base for a ritual spell.

For a summoning.

In the shadow of the pod, face bared in furious rage, the original—the real—the fake—Mizora dissolves into smoke. No one reacts. No one sees her.

Wyll doesn't see her either, because she isn't there.

She's gone.

In a daze, he clicks the release.

The pod belches steam and slime, slithering out to pool over the ground with the stench of concentrated infernal air. Mizora wriggles free, wings snapping out with a pulsating frenzy, claws jagged against the edges as she hauls herself forward. There's a fumbling inelegance to her movements that make her seem human, seem tangible.

He has to lean back to look at her, to fit her spread wings in his vision. To see the smoke writhing between her teeth and billowing from her eyes.

"Well," Mizora says, looming over him. "Made your choice, have you, pet? Do you think yourself capable of surviving alone?"

Seven years, all of them stolen.

"No," Wyll says, because he doesn't have to lie, not anymore. "But I'm not."

By his side, shoulders tense, fangs bared, Astarion is there. He isn't leaving.

Wyll isn't alone.

Mizora stares at him. Frustration builds over her painted face, and–

And she disappears in a flash of smoke, leaving nothing behind.

In the dark of the forgotten illithid colony, there are six people, and they are haunted by no ghosts. Movement, lurking on the corners, everyone stepping forward with panicked faces and confusion so thick it cuts, but–

But then there's Astarion, before him.

"Wyll," he says, hesitant. There's worry in his face, in hellfire eyes, in blue-black that has never meant monster, that has only meant him. "Are you okay?"

No. He isn't. There's smoke behind his teeth and fire in his head and scars over his eyes. There is a seventeen-year-old boy who sees his father with a soot-stained face say go, and the boy knows, deep in his bones, that he will never return to Baldur's Gate.

He isn't that boy anymore. He isn't Wyll, eleven, climbing the tower in the temple of Lathander—isn't Wyll, fifteen, jumping high in a dance to impress a kind-eyed observer—isn't Wyll, sixteen, ready at his father's heels for a chance to prove himself.

Isn't Wyll, seventeen, staring up at the spectre of Tiamat far overhead.

But maybe he is Wyll, tucked beneath the lies and disguises that have become what he was.

"Are you going to leave me?"

Astarion stares at him.

They're both liars. To themselves, to each other. It would be easy for the vampire to shake his head and say no, to say of course I'll be with you, to say never. To purr at him with the same dashing charm that got them into this disaster, into the first look at freedom he's ever been allowed to see.

They're both liars. It's how they protect themselves. It's how they protect secrets that are never worth keeping.

But it isn't the liar that steps forward, grabbing his hands. Cold and fire. Infernal winter against infernal warmth.

"You didn't leave me," Astarion says, simply. "I won't leave you."

That's it.

No contract. No claws. Nothing but making the choice to stay.

"I love you," Wyll says, and kisses him like the world is ending.

separate fire from the smoke - Raayide (2024)