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blackjackkent · 5 days ago

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Astarion doesn't hesitate once the fight is complete. Still covered in the blood of the werewolf he just finished killing, bare-chested and battered, he hurls himself at the stone coffin into which Cazador retreated.

"No, no!" he roars. "No healing sleep for you! WAKE UP!"

Grabbing Cazador by the collar, he hurls him out onto the stone floor.

Cazador scrabbles backwards across the bloodstained platform, struggling to retain his disdainful expression around the fear suddenly in his eyes. "Get your hands off me, worm!" he spits.

Astarion towers over him, the master he has hated for so long finally brought low. "I'm not the one in the dirt," he snarls, like a kicked dog finally showing its teeth.

He reaches down, picks up a dagger that has fallen to the floor as Cazador was thrown across it. It's a strange blade, not like one Rakha has ever seen.

At its center, held within curving strips of polished metal, is a stake of wood. Wyll has told her of how vampires die; she can see the purpose of such a blade. That is not a weapon made for mortal men.

Astarion looks at it, then lifts it to point the tip at Cazador. It trembles almost imperceptibly in his grip. "One last thrust," he hisses - and his voice is trembling too. "And I'll be free of you. I'll never have to fear you again."

He swallows, then flicks his eyes to the staff on the ground at Cazador's side. "But if I finish the ritual you started... I'll never have to fear anyone. Ever." His eyes glow with manic, desperate hunger - and fear.

Cazador laughs hollowly. "You think me a fool?" he cries. "That I would allow anyone to usurp me, speak the words, and ascend in my place?!" He leans forward a little, headless of the sharp tip of the dagger pointing at him. "The runes I carved into your flesh bind you and all seven thousand souls to the ritual! Complete it, and those bearing the scars will be sacrificed - you included."

He pushes himself up on his knees, even now striking out against Astarion with word after word. "You are simply a means to an end! I made you to be consumed!"

Astarion's fingers tighten on the dagger's hilt. A muscle works violently in his jaw as he stares down at his unrepentant tormentor.

"I am so much more," he whispers, "than what you made me."

There's a long, strained pause. Then he looks up abruptly, fixing his eyes on Rakha. "Get over here," he snaps brusquely. "We can do this."

Rakha doesn't move, doesn't say anything for a long time.

She knows what Astarion wants her to do. She even, on some level, knows why he wants it. This ritual, whatever it fully entails, is the ultimate throwing off of the shackles that have held him for centuries. He wants to be free. He wants not to be afraid anymore.

He wants peace, just as Rakha wants it. But he wants to obtain it by accepting the darkest version of the monster that he has become.

The idea makes her skin crawl. She has stood on the same precipice as him, offered a gift that came with the selling of her soul. She wants to grab him by the shoulders, pull him away, out of reach, before it can swallow him.

"Didn't you hear him?" she asks hoarsely. "If you complete the ritual, you'll be consumed..."

Astarion barks a sharp laugh. "Trust me. I know what I'm doing."

Perhaps he does. So many times before, her friends have faced choices of this magnitude, and she has trusted to their judgment rather than her own. Shadowheart with her spear, and Lae'zel's stand against Vlaakith, and Wyll's choice of his future, and Gale with the Crown of Karsus. She has never believed that she might know better than them, and this hardly seems the time to start.

This is Astarion's choice, not hers.

Isn't it?

"All right," she mutters haltingly, one hand rapidly flexing into a fist at her side. "What... do you need?"

"I need your eyes," he says. His voice sounds hollow and exhausted - but brittle with determination. "In a manner of speaking."

"What do you think you are doing?" Cazador hisses.

"Unmaking what you made me," Astarion growls, his eyes not leaving Rakha. "Use the parasite," he tells her. "Link your mind to mine. Through your eyes, I can see the scars on my back and copy them onto his."

Cazador's eyes widen, showing the whites at their edges. "You... would not dare."

"I would," Astarion murmurs. "And I will. You will be consumed. And all the power you've lusted after will be mine!"

"And what then, Astarion?" Jaheira asks flatly at Rakha's side. "You would use this power born of so much death for *good*, I suppose?"

Astarion ignores her. His eyes have not left Rakha's, not even to blink. "Help me do this. Please."

Rakha hesitates. She can feel Jaheira's sardonic disapproval, and Wyll's gaze digging into the back of her neck. She senses Minsc vibrating with barely-restrained anger. Even Lae'zel seems somewhat disquieted, her fingers tapping restlessly against the hilt of her sword.

But it is... Astarion's choice. Not hers. Not anyone's....

Mechanically she takes a step forward, and then another.

Enter Astarion's mind so he can proceed with the ritual.

Narrator: Your minds join and your two selves become one. You can feel the knife in your hand, see the scars on his back, and taste his hunger for power.

The bitter, brutal emotion pours through her like a waterfall, like a burning flame. Rakha grunts with sudden pain, clutching at her temple, but Astarion's eyes go wide with exhilaration.

"Yes. Yes - I see it!" he hisses.

In a quick, smooth, harsh set of motions, he steps behind Cazador and rips the robe off of him, baring his back and shoving him to the floor.

And Cazador screams as Astarion, over and over and over, sinks the knife into his flesh and begins to carve.

(A/N: This is a truly unpleasant little sequence and goes on for quite some time before eventually fading to black to indicate that it goes on even longer.)

All sense of time fades out. For a while Rakha is conscious only of the screaming, and the blood, and the overwhelming sense of delighted rage flowing into her from Astarion's mind. She doesn't know how long she's been standing there when the connection finally breaks.

She comes back to herself standing at Astarion's side. He and Cazador are both soaked in blood. The others look on with expressions ranging from appalled to enraged.

"There," Astarion hisses. "Perfect."

"Ungrateful child," Cazador chokes out. Tears are streaming down his face, cutting lines through the red painting his cheeks. "Wretched child!"

Astarion just smiles. "Time to take your place!"

He lifts the staff from the ground, and it glows with blood-red power in his hands. With a jerk, he lifts Cazador from the ground and hurls him into the socket where Astarion himself was held only minutes earlier.

Everything begins to happen at once. Astarion slams the staff into the sigil at the center of the platform, and around Rakha the Weave seems to explode with that same red, writhing light. All around them, the suspended spawn begin to scream, their voices echoing and rebounding on each other and mixing with other screams from below and behind, from the seven thousand other souls prepared to burn for this ascension.

Rakha staggers with the intensity of it, the overwhelming wall of sound and light and pain.

Behind her, barely audible through the chaos, she can hear her companions begin to shout, unable any longer to hold themselves back.

"No!" Wyll cries. "What are you doing?"

"Enough!" shouts Minsc. "We can still stop the nonsense words in his mouth!"

"This isn't the way!" shouts Lae'zel. The three of them break into a run towards Astarion - but the wall of power around him rises to meet them, slaps them back like a physical blow.(*)

At Rakha's side, Jaheira reaches out and seizes her forearm with a sudden fierce grip. "Are we truly to be party to this?" she asks, her voice low enough to cut underneath the screaming around them.

Rakha has gone completely still. The magic is pounding at her like a creature with fists and claws, and the screams echo in her mind, resonating with the memories of a thousand other deaths at her hands in a life she does not remember.

It is Astarion's choice. She is a broken thing, with no right to believe she knows better on this or anything else.

And yet...

I am so much more than what you made me, Astarion said.

An image flashes through her mind, painful as the edge of a knife, of the last moments before her death in the Temple of Bhaal, another moment soaked in red light and blood. Her father's rage as she rejected his 'gift'.

You refuse me? You are my spawn! Your veins course with my unholy blood. Your life is mine!

You were made to conquer! To devour! You reject my blood, and so I will reclaim it!

I will make another who is worthy...

She opens her eyes and stares at Astarion's body, writhing in the grip of the gift he has stolen from his own monstrous 'father,' on the precipice of the oblivion she rejected. And she knows, suddenly, that wrong or right, she cannot let this go on.

This ends here, I said. It ends... here...

We are more than what they made us.

Stop Astarion.

With more instinct than thought, she hurls herself across the platform, lifting the knife with the stake at its core from the place where Astarion discarded it.

Astarion's head swivels to face her, and for a single instant his eyes widen as he recognizes what she is trying to do.

"What are you doing?" he cries over the screams around them. "No - stop!"

She does not stop.

She hurls the knife like a javelin into Cazador's chest.

Silence, abrupt and complete. The swirling power fades. The screaming stops. Cazador, pouring blood from the wound in his heart, slithers to the floor and lays still.

Astarion staggers, then collapses to his knees, letting the staff clatter onto the stone beside him. "It's... it's gone... All that power..." he whispers.

Rakha releases a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. She is trembling all over, her eyes fixed not on Astarion but on Cazador's bloodsoaked body. In the moment of her attack, she was striking not just at him but at Bhaal as well - but Bhaal is not here, just the vampire who dies along with Astarion's hope for ascension.

"You don't need it," she mutters. "You're more than strong enough as you are."

We... are so much more than what they made us. Come with me. We will live, and be damned to them all.

But Astarion's head lifts and he stands and rounds on her, and there is no gratitude in his eyes, no hope. They are like burning coals set in the paleness of his face.

"Don't you tell me what I needed!" he snarls. He looks hollowed out, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. "I was so close - I could have had it all," he says with desperate, furious grief, stepping closer to her. "But you took everything from me!"

His voice lifts to a sudden scream of violent despair, and he grabs her by the collar of her robes, jerking her forward.(*)

The rage in his eyes shows no understanding of why she did what she did, or the similarity she sees between them, or the terrible things that have been done to them both. He needs an enemy, and he no longer has Cazador, and she is the only target that remains.

"Cazador won after all," he says - and his voice is suddenly soft again, hollow and mournful. "I'll never escape the hell he built."

And then his face goes hard for the last time, until it is nothing but steel and rage. "And if I can't escape... then no one can. Not them--"

He drops suddenly, lifts the staff, and without hesitation snaps it across his knee. The power still within it - the power that would have released the seven thousand trapped spawn - bursts in a sudden supernova around his hands... and then fades to nothing.

Through the fading, dying ripples of the Weave, he stares into Rakha's eyes, and if there was ever friendship between them, it's gone now, gone forever to the same place as all that power.

"And certainly not you," he growls. The pieces of the broken staff clatter to the ground, and his fingers close around Rakha's throat.

-----

(*) Artistic license in this whole bit. Only one companion actually speaks up here (in-game it was Minsc), and none of them actually do anything but watch. But I wanted to give everyone a little more activity, so I dug all four characters' lines out of the dialogue files.

(*) Also artistic license obviously.

#bjk plays bg3 durge #rakha the dark urge #WELLP #wellp wellp wellp #welllp #i hate every bit of this #but also kind of love every bit of this story-wise #this was just the most interesting way i saw for this to play out and every bit of it was rationalizable with where rakha's head's at atm #honestly thinking about it particularly in terms of my decision recently that rakha's ending has to do with her learning to stand on her ow #and not just mirror everyone around her #and she finally had an opinion here for herself that she couldn't ignore #and she waited just a little too long to believe it was worth listening to #(and astarion was unfortunately beyond listening to reason or sympathy or comradeship at that point)#:(#this is deeply upsetting #i'm so sorry bud; i promise my next char is gonna be friends with you

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blackjackkent · 6 months ago

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Pressing onward through the illithid colony...

Rakha shoves her shoulder through another of the terrible flesh-sphincter doors and finds herself in some kind of barracks area, just as slimy as the rest.

Small alcoves branch off of a central room. Amid the slime and flesh are beds, desks, chests of belongings.

"Some who worked here were not thralls or undead," Minthara points out grimly. "They were loyal to Ketheric - and his grim cause."

And indeed, some of those people are still here. A group of some five Absolutists are standing at the far end of the barracks. One of them, a tall woman with heavy facial tattoos and dramatic headgear, seems to be leading them in some sort of rousing speech.

"Bring death! Embrace death! Become death!" she cries. "You are the sacred hand that reaches from the grave. You are the lasher of skulls, the carver of crypts, the dancer of bones. Walk in dusk and shadow; walk the path of bones in our Lord's name! This is his blessing, his consecration, and you are his scythe. Go forth and reap! Gather yourselves! Soon we march to victory!"

Rakha grabs Wyll's arm, shoves him before her towards one of the room's alcoves, trying to push out of sight - but it's too late. The group is moving into the main atrium, and the woman spots her at once.

"Ugh," she groans, irritated. "Lashers, Balthazar let one of his walking carcasses lapse from his control. Let's ferry them back--"

She breaks off abruptly and does a visible double-take. Her eyes widen and her jaw drops.

"Wait," she says softly. "By the Bone Lord... it's you!"

Rakha goes very still. Her heart begins to thump painfully in her chest, in her temple, behind her eye. She realizes, suddenly, that she knows that voice - that it resonates with a memory just beyond reach, a memory saturated with visceral terror. Every muscle in her body seems to lock up and she stands there, dumb and staring, unable to move, unable to speak.

The woman moves closer, peering at her; astonishingly, incongruously, her expression is one of... joyful recognition. Her lips struggle for a smile that seems ill-suited to the tight-drawn muscles of her face.

"I thought I'd never see you again," she says eagerly. "I wanted to keep you for myself, but they shipped you away!"

Rakha is dimly aware of Wyll moving up next to her. His rapier is out in one hand - he is waiting for her cue to strike. But she is frozen, her fists clenched at her side. For the first time, rather than fight, she wants to flee this place, and she does not know why.

This is the second person who has recognized her with pleasure. The first was that presence, the Absolute itself. And now this woman...

I wanted to keep you for myself.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she manages to rasp out. "But you're going to tell me *everything.*"

The woman's head snaps back and her eyes widen even further. "You talk? How is this possible? Something must have gone wrong..."

Then her gaze softens and the smile takes over again, spreading from ear to ear, giving her face a sharply skeletal look. "But oh... what an arresting voice you have."

She lifts a hand and dusts it with a tender gentleness along Rakha's cheekbone, over the scar on her eye. Rakha's breath quickens - not with pleasure but with panic. Often she is not even comfortable with Wyll touching her, much as she loves him; this woman's fingers make her feel like a rat caught in a trap. She wants to lash out, to jerk away... but she can't move. (*)

"You're not supposed to be here, special one," the woman croons. She sounds as if she's talking to a lost child, or a disobedient pet. "That's not right. But I don't want to damage you." She laughs softly. "You were my very first, after all. I learnt everything about the parasites from you."

She tips her head to the side with an air of reverent nostalgia, her smile softening and her eyes drifting a little out of focus. "I remember finding you close to death," she murmurs. "Beaten black and blue on the floor of this sanctum. It must have been a few hours after the tadpole was placed in your skull. How you got here was a total mystery, but I stitched you up just enough to keep you alive, then placed you within your crib..."

Her hand shifts, now cupping Rakha's cheek. She looks up into Rakha's eyes with great affection; Rakha has nearly six inches on her and yet she seems utterly unafraid, merely fascinated that she has returned.

That her pet has returned.

"I kept you as mine until you were needed by our superiors," she says gently. "We had such a close bond... I opened you up endlessly with my scalpels and got lost in your insides..."

Flashes of sudden memory, brutal as lightning strikes. A horrible parallel of the noblestalk memories, and of Malus Thorm's profane experiments in Reithwin, but this time it is Rakha on the table. This woman stands over her and lifts a knife and stabs downward and cuts--

Pain. Blood. Rakha looks down and sees her own liver, glistening, pulsing, and she screams and thrashes against the bonds holding her down--

She staggers, swallows a noise of panic that she has never made before. Focus. She has to focus, to think-- these are the answers she has looked for all this time. She can't let them slip out of her grasp.

"This is... where I was left?" she asks. Her voice sounds foreign to her own ears, strained. "After someone infected me?"

The woman shrugs. "I was not behind it. I do not know." She shakes away the moment of uncertainty and smiles beatifically. "But whoever did it, I'm so glad they left you here for me."

She draws her fingers slowly down Rakha's cheek, over her neck. "Truthfully," she says, "I'm not surprised to see you found your way back here all by yourself. I always knew you were clever." She drops her hand, spreads her arms wide with a woebegone sort of expression. "It has never been the same with another! All the other victims who come here just meekly obey. You thrashed! You fought! You were indomitable!"

Yes. She remembers fighting. She remembers terror, wanting to run, wanting to hide, find safety, strike back, kill. Nothing of her, only the beast, furious and in pain. Did she still remember anything then? Or were her memories already gone?

She lets out a long, reverential sigh, then clicks her tongue, suddenly all business. "But... as special as you are, you shouldn't be swanning around here, acting as if free will is yours again," she says brightly. "We're going to kill you, sweet one. But I promise... I will stay with you afterwards."

Her voice lifts in a sudden, commanding shout. "Lashers! Bring this one back to my table!" Her eyes narrow and her affectionate smile takes on a brittle sharpness. "And prepare my knives for a long night of experiments!"

-----

It is not Rakha but Wyll who strikes first. Almost before the Absolutist is finished speaking, his fist - heavy with the hilt of his rapier - crashes into her jaw, knocking her almost off her feet.

"Like hells you will!" he snarls.

Rakha doesn't remember the battle that follows. She's dimly aware that Wyll's attack galvanizes all of them into action, herself included - that she manages to break free of the strange rigor-mortis panic that seems to have overtaken her.

But her first clear perception is of sitting on the floor next to the woman's body, watching the blood slowly drip out of a hole in her gut, left by Lae'zel's greatsword amidst flesh charred by Rakha's spells.

Narrator: She is but the hack doctor who half-pieced you together, after whatever caused your head to get in this mess. Someone else must have attacked you, in the midst of whatever you were doing down here. This necromancer was a grunt in the scheme of the horrors enacted against you. That attacker is the source.

Try to remember the attack.

Narrator: In the heart of all these membranes, there was a dagger awaiting you all along. But from who?

The panic is fading, her conscious thought reasserting itself. This is still not answers, not really... but more images, small puzzle-piece fragments that fit into a distant sense of understanding.

Yes - she was here, once. Ketheric did not like her - but she had power nevertheless. She walked the halls freely, both above and here in this flesh-pit. And she was betrayed. Someone attacked her. Tadpoled her. Left her here to die. Except she did not die; instead she was taken by this worm of a woman, cut apart and put back together over and over and over and over--

Calm. She swallows the rising bile in her throat.

She can see Wyll watching her. He looks as ill and frightened as she feels. Lae'zel is vibrating with rage that has no outlet now that all around them are dead. Even Minthara, usually unflappable, seems disquieted, her eyebrows knitted together firmly as she looks over Rakha and the dead body next to her.

"They treat us like animals," the Nightwarden says coldly. "Beasts of burden. Pets. Laboratory rats. Our vengeance will be swift and we shall leave none standing."

Rakha doesn't answer. Yes. Vengeance. It is all she has sought - but before, her only target was Ketheric. Now there are others. The one who attacked her, who betrayed her.

Did that person put the beast in her head? Or - this thought gnaws at the back of her skull, inescapable - was it there before, and were they right to try to put her down like a dog?

-----

(*) Artistic license. Kressa doesn't touch her in-game but it seemed apropos for the way she was talking about Rakha.

#bjk plays bg3 durge #rakha the dark urge #WELLP #WELLP WELLP WELLP #Rakha's day is getting SO much worse #cw torture #i guess #well implied torture at least #i always feel like i should tag the particularly dark elements of this story but never sure how

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