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residentdormouse · 9 months ago

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Find the Words...

... (and the theme)!

Dangerous game you're playing @mrsmungus, tagging me in this. I can hear the train whistles in the distance, and feel the vibration in the tracks... Gotta get my ticket ready, I suppose.

The rules are simple - find a sentence, or excerpt, that includes the words you're given and paste it in, and include a link to the finished story of you want. But honestly, guidelines at best - do what you want.

My words to find: honey, calm, trust, shimmer, darkness, fall, crime, portable, stain, crisp.

(It's not a slam, but I heard honey crisp apples shimmering in the darkness of a calm fall night, and I'm stubbornly sticking with the Autumn theme.)

No Pressure Tags: @imagine-you @cxttlefishcxller @asirensrage @athenswrites (don't feel the need to join in if you don't want, but saw your writblr post, and figured I'd send you one) And of course, sending this right back at you, @mrsmungus. Tag, you're it.

As always - OPEN TAG - if you'd like to join in!

Your words are: White, Cold, Snow, Frost, Ice, Gloves, Hat, Cocoa (or Tea), Blanket, Snuggle/cuddle (or any variation of this)

Excerpts below the cut...

I only have a small amount written ahead for my original story WIP 'Close to the Vale', so most of this will probably still be from the 'Wonderland' fanfiction series ('Something Like a Spiral' and 'Just Keep Diving Down'. I'll give Close first priority though.

Honey: (I was worried about this, but apparently my 'Diving' OC Lauffey has a proclivity for using this word. That said, I also found it in a section that allows me to post 'Fuck off, Flagg' and I can't resist.)

While outwardly charming, maliciousness shown through in the minute details on his face. She should have known this was going to be a big game to him. Cat and mouse, it was his favorite. Fortunately, it seemed like the typical roles were reversed at the moment. "Fuck off, Flagg." "Always so rude. You catch more bees with honey, you know…" If she could have kept all her other memories and just erased him, took away everything about this nightmare of a man, well it would have been a tempting offer. The bubbling anger building up inside her was now a known response to interactions with him. Fear was somewhere close behind, though she wasn’t looking to give him that satisfaction anymore.

Calm: (Two chapters down in 'Close' - Not used in connection with who I thought it would be though...)

"You know him?" The reply was calm and level headed. The same could not be said of the more visible distressed man to his right. "Please. If– If you know anything that could, I mean, anything that help us find—" The picture of another younger man was thrust at her. Same raven hair, same chocolate eyes. Slight differences, but clear relation. Brother most like. He had a striking smile, and she would have been charmed if not for the small tattoo on the inside of his left wrist. Plain as day, just as Paul had said. She may not know this particular man, but she knew where he’d be.

Trust: (found in a short section I wrote for farther ahead in 'Close'. This could potentially change a fair deal. First drafts and all.)

“And you were just going to politely ask me to leave everything. My life? My home?! We were only there to look for you, you know.” “Yeah, I know. Trust me, I fucking know.”

Shimmer: (wow... it's a Flagg day I suppose - pulled this from 'Spiral')

He moved close enough that only inches remained between them, and a chill emanated from his presence. Conflicting to the nature of their conversation, he gently brushed a stray lock of her hair back behind her ear. "I don't need to be your enemy." Despite the chill, his breath was hot against her face, and she braced herself for any attack that followed. But it never came. In a shimmer of smoke, he was gone. Nothing. Emptiness. She let out the breath she didn't realize she was holding. "But I have no problem filling the role if that's how you want to play the game."

Darkness: (Might as well let him run with it... Another Flagg burst from 'Diving')

She didn't know where it came from, certainly didn't call for it, but sympathy for the man in front of her shook her resolve momentarily. For somebody with a positive nature, lighter memories are going to pull first. Bright memories to shine through. And there was most likely a larger abundance of them. It's what makes them who they are. Flagg was an embodiment of darkness. What must have happened to turn somebody into this? How does one make a monster such as him? What memories haunted him most? This paired with Rayna’s lack of delicacy. Ruthlessness. "I'm sorry."

Fall: (Not the fall I was imagining, but its all 'Close' has so far.)

Once outside the stuffy office, she found herself easily falling in step next to him. Silence dominated the first few feet. To say she didn’t know where to begin was an understatement. When she came here, she hoped to be leaving with these papers, but not under these circumstances. Not through this exact chain of events. That said, she certainly wasn’t complaining about the change in course. Damsel in distress was not her M.O., but if it led her here, it couldn’t be all bad.

Crime: (Not going to lie - very first draft and not even a completed chapter of 'Close' - has the potential to change a LOT. But I did say I was giving this first crack.)

Why wasn't the general public angry? The security cameras picked up a tattoo on the man leaving the building at the estimated time of the crime. A tattoo known to be a mark of the downtown gangbanger shitheads that were a thorn in many sides. A menace in their own backyard. Shouldn't they want a resolution? A safer community?

Portable: (From 'Spiral' again. Flagg is really showing up today...)

Food, drink, frivolity. Everything was planned out thoroughly. The pavilion was decked out with small lights. A portable generator Glen had found was fired up. But her mind was on her task: Ad Hoc Committee welcome and rundown on the darker agenda. Find out what Larry knew about Flagg, and fill in what blanks she could.

Stain: (Yup, just letting him take it over I suppose... From later in 'Diving' Also snagged a bonus 'shimmer'.)

“It's over now. Do you think anybody here cares about…" her hands waved quickly about him, highlighting his new appearance. "Nobody cares here. Not about that. But that?" Another movement to indicate at her wounds. To the new red stains on her clothing. "That behavior we do care about, and will not be tolerating, do you understand? This is a place of acceptance. All kinds. And we do not fight our own here." A shimmer of bright red flashed over his eyes before it fell to the duller shade. The rigidity in his stance faded away. All outward appearances were reverting back to the carefree persona he usually adopted, as if he were unaffected by the actions surrounding him. Actions from those he surely considered beneath him. But he had shown his cards. He cared. And he hurt.

Crisp: (Well now it just feels weird not having Flagg. Pulled from the last section of 'Diving'.)

Her duster was hanging on the coat rack, and she grabbed it before heading back out. So much for taking a breather from it all, not that she had breath to take. The show must go on; best get back to it before somebody started ad-libbing something she wouldn’t be prepared to say yes to. The night air was crisp on her skin, and she welcomed the cold for a moment. Feeling it on her face was a welcome change from the mornings. Layers upon layers to protect from the hazards of being her. Daytime hours were meant to be her reprieve; she wasn’t built for this nonstop push, but there was little option. Protection was what mattered now. Moving people away, stopping the internal fighting, trying to find what weakness that could be exploited. The thoughts swirled in her head as she walked the dirt path towards the outskirts, but they didn’t have long to sink in. Rumination ended with an explosion, and a burst of light.

#you started this #and I will take no responsibility #for running off the tracks #or on if we're keeping the analogy #alitteration station is just down the tracks #from these theme schemes #mouse is back on her nonsense #mouse's tag games and reblogs #Close to the Vale #Jumping to Wonderland #Something like a Spiral #Just Keep Diving Down

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storm-and-starlight · 7 months ago

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Break the Surface

tw for (very brief) suicidal ideation and implied torture (it's pre-canon Astarion fic, what were you expecting?)

There's not much left from the days before he died, but still Astarion remembers the river.

It might have been the Chionthar, in its sunny eastern reaches before it flows into Baldur's gate and a population of several hundred thousand starts using it as an all-purpose garbage dump -- it might not have been. He can't tell. There are willows on the bank, and river-weeds, and the small bright darting shapes of kingfishers flicking about in the corners of his vision, with the sunlight glinting as it skips off the water. It's a river painted in a storybook, the kind with swooning fair maidens and princes charming with blesséd stakes and vampire lords that monologue dramatically about how they'll never be deafeated before the noble paladin sticks a two-foot bar of yew through their chest and they explode into ash and mist and everyone else lives happily ever after, so of course his only memory of the place is that time he almost drowned.

He'd been young and clumsy, walking on the narrow edge of a log sprawled out into the deeper current, and like any worried parent could have warned him he'd slipped and fallen and tumbled straight down into the churn. He remembers the blaze of the sunlight, the blue flash of a kingfisher diving, and then the water swallowed him whole.

It was silent, in the river. So cold the water ran silver instead of blue and so fast that it dragged the air from his lungs, and silent. Enough to hear his heart as it slowed, and slowed, and stopped.

This is, of course, when Astarion always wakes up.

He must have survived somehow -- pulled out by his parents or a poor-but-virtuous fisherman or even just flung up on the bank like so much flotsam -- but no matter how hard he tries to find what happened after, that's where it ends. There's a vague blurry haze of being in bed with hot soup and warming stones and a chill hand on his cheek, but that might as easily have been a common childhood fever as the aftermath of drowning, and beyond that it all fades into the same greyish blur as the rest of his life before Cazador.

It's not the kind of memory he'd choose to recall, if he had the choice -- what color his damn eyes used to be would be nice -- but for some reason it keeps showing up anyways, welling up to the surface when he trances and jolting him awake when his heart stops.

Two hundred years and he still hasn't gotten used to the silence in his chest.

Honestly, he could have done without having any memory at all. Thirty seconds of remembered sunlight isn't worth the bother when it can't possibly be a replacement for the real thing, and the drowning is really just excessive. One traumatic death is more than enough for a lifetime, thank you.

Astarion breathes, a sharp flush of air through useless lungs, and it's so loud in the confines of the spawn dormitory that it might as well echo. All seven spawn are here, sleeping away the hours when the sun is highest, and it is, quite literally, quiet as the grave. The loudest sound -- the only sound -- is the tick of the clock in the private bedroom, muffled through the walls.

He leans his head back against the pile of ex-blanket that serves for his pillow and listens to the beat like it's a replacement for a heart.

---

Baldur's Gate isn't the kind of city where peace is easy to find. The harbor is full of gulls, the river is full of geese, the high streets home to flocks of starlings and the alleys mobbed with crows, and every last bird in the city just so happens to hate you personally and has elected to be extremely loud about it. There's always someone singing or shouting or fucking or doing all three at the same time, and someone else hollering for them to put a sock in it from the next house over, and on top of that both of them are trying to out-yell the bells of three dozen temples. The taverns are packed, the streets equally so, and right around the time that the drunkards are staggering home the bakers are starting up their ovens for the morning market rush. You could be standing in the middle of the street at midnight in a blizzard and someone would yell at you to get out of the bloody road, arsewipe, and stop holding up traffic. The only places with some semblance of peace -- and peace is rather an overstatement, because walking through a magically-induced wall of silence feels quite a bit like falling into the Chionthar from the full height of the cliffs might -- are the temple graveyards, that the dead might not be disturbed by the follies of the living.

Cazador's house, for all its inhabitants are unburied, is the same.

Nothing breaks the silence within those walls. Nothing. Astarion has watched the full force of Dalyria's voice break and crumble against the uncaring marble; has seen a thousand sobbing innocents falter and go silent as Cazador confirms their fate; has heard his own screams soar and shatter on the vaulted ceilings and fade away into nothingness, unheard. The palace is as much a dead thing as any vampire, and, as everyone knows, the dead cannot speak.

---

It's a tenday past midwinter, just long enough for most of the remaining Deadwinter decorations to have fallen down and been frozen into the mud puddles, in the middle of a truly brutal cold snap, and Astarion is out on the hunt.

Cazador's orders, of course: a vampire's thirst can never be slaked, and his master's grown accustomed to feasting every night -- though clearly not this night, because right now it's cold enough that the bloody Chionthar's started to freeze, a thin skin of ice and... various other things lying slick and black along the banks, and if the Chionthar's frozen then it's cold enough that anyone on the streets who isn't already undead is, well... dead. Even Ilmater's lot haven't been out to offer succor to the shivering -- or perhaps he's simply bad at picking their bodies apart from the beggars. At this point, they're all just a lot of lumps of ice.

Right now, anyone with a lick of sense is tucked away at home, buried underneath every quilt they've got and most likely with every last member of their household tucked away with them, and anyone without that much died two nights ago in the squall that whipped up off the harbor and coated half the city in a finger's-width of ice. Every tavern is locked and shuttered, every flophouse sealed tight with rags. He could certainly charm his way into them, but back out onto the streets? With someone else? No chance in any of the hells he's bringing someone back to Cazador this night.

It's left him leaning alone on the cliffside rail, watching the river flow sluggishly on.

He's got all night, if he wants -- my apologies, Master, I looked until dawn but there was nothing to find -- and he's already doomed to the kennels the moment he returns home empty-handed, so what's a few more hours spent lingering in the rest of the city, watching the river run? He's been cold for a century; a winter's night won't make much difference. Even if it is cold enough to freeze a frost giant's balls off.

He sighs, idly noting the way his breath refuses to cloud, and looks up at the sky. The stars are clearer than usual in the razor-sharp air, a wandering river of light, and so impossibly bright the void between them is blue instead of black. The moon is winter-brilliant, no smoke in the air to tinge it red or golden, and the edges are so sharp it almost seems he could reach up and cut himself on the radiant inner curve. Even Selune's Tears are visible in their entirety, a massive halo caught in a neverending dance. The moonlight runs sparkling off the surface of the river like a road leading off to nowhere, fading away around the bend into the darkness beyond the hills and the wilder reaches of the Chionthar where the willows grow and the kingfishers flirt and flicker in the sunlight, beckoning him. Like he could follow it all the way to freedom.

A certain kind of freedom, anyways. For all that it can only dubiously be called either flowing or water, the Chionthar is still a river running, and thus deadly to all creatures of his... particular persuasion. He couldn't cross it if he tried, much less follow the reflection of the moon out anywhere at all; he'd turn to ash and be swept away in an instant.

He almost considers it.

He does consider it, for what would be a heartbeat if he still had one, and the thrall sinks bloody claws into the gaps in his spine and drags him gasping away from the rail.

Thou shalt know that thou art mine.

He retches around an empty stomach, the stink of the kennels rising in his nose, the pain already slicing through him. Cazador has made it very clear what he thinks of that avenue of escape, to all his spawn but, of course, to Astarion in particular. I'll not see you waste the gift I've given you so... carelessly. He'd been pinioned for that one, left to linger in the kennels under Godey's watch while the thrall sank sickly-sweet and heavy into his bones and told him that he could not die.

Astarion hisses through his teeth, sharp and striking in the utter flat silence of the winter city, and heaves himself back up to his feet. The ice coating on the rail cracks under his grip, powdering off like diamond dust, and he smacks it off on his doublet in a glittering spray. The rime on the cobblestones crunches underneath his heel as he stalks away from the river and deeper into the city, with the cold gleam of moonlight catching the spires of Cazador's palace as they strike above the horizon.

---

Astarion is silent.

Astarion is-- Astarion-- He is--

He is silent.

He can hear Godey sharpening his tools at his workbench, the flat scrape of whetstone over silver and tuneless humming that buzzes between skeletal teeth, and he can hear the steady hissing gasp of his own breath -- pathetic, boy, a century and more and you still can't control yourself -- but he is silent. There's no point in being otherwise: Godey doesn't care for his screams like Cazador does, and the house will swallow the rest of the sound. No one knows what goes on inside these walls, not even the gods.

Not that the gods would care, if they knew.

Godey's humming stops, and the whetstone is set down with a click. Astarion forces his chest to stillness, presses flat palms and bare skin against the floor -- the marble is cold and stained and sticky -- curls in on himself in instinctive, uncontrollable fear. Godey tsks. The knife glints in the greenish witchlight.

The clank of the cage door opening does not echo, even though it should. The rattle of the chains does not fill the room, though by rights he would expect it to. And when Astarion finally breaks under the edge of the knife, his voice goes unheard.

---

He half-thinks he's dreaming, when the sunlight breaks over him -- freedom from the shadows? From Cazador? It can't possibly be real -- except Astarion's dreams have never once been this kind.

The river runs steady and silver in front of him, whispering to itself as it passes between the stones of the ford in smooth braided ripples. It's a storybook sort of river, weeds and willows and the wing-bright flicker of flighted things in the branches and reeds. The ford is druid-made, heavy boulders set in the middle of the flow that make a dry place to step, and there's no slippery log, no water flooding his lungs, no icy silence throbbing up through his chest -- there's the sun on his back and the water laughing over gravel a step away from him and a small blue bird staring down at him as though it, too, can't quite believe he's real.

Astarion stops a pace from the bank -- he'd rather not test the tadpole's limits by actually getting disintegrated, thank you-- and just stares back at it, biting back the-- the bitterness that's swelling in the back of his throat. Two hundred years, and the only reason he's not still in the kennels is a damn mind flayer--

"Is that a kingfisher?" Karlach says, right behind him, and both he and the bird in question jump. Astarion turns the movement into a smooth step forward to give her space, but the bird shrieks and flashes away, disappearing into the trees. "Aww, I scared it off."

"I'm sure it'll be back," Wyll says, stepping up on Astarion's opposite side and forcing him another step closer to the river's edge. "There's likely a nest nearby -- these banks are perfect for it."

"Perfect for what?" Gale asks, stepping into the gap between Wyll and Karlach and effectively cutting off Astarion's last escape route. "Though if you're simply stating that this river is perfect in its own right, I find I cannot disagree."

"Kingfishers!" Karlach says, splashing out into the water in her enthusiasm and making it seethe and boil around her feet. Astarion flinches back from the splash, wincing at the sticky seep of mud around his boots -- he's getting too close to the water.There are too many people pressing in around him, and he's too close to the water.

"Ah, Accedo atthis," Gale says, fully in wizarding prodigy mode, "the common kingfisher. Perfect conditions for them here, Wyll, you're certainly right."

"I wonder if we'll see more," Wyll says, already squinting at the trees across the river like he's about to stop and birdwatch. Some monster hunter he makes, if he hasn't noticed the vampire sleeping across the fire from him every night and he'll let his hunt go cold because he saw a pretty bird.

Astarion, at least, is saved from having to intervene himself by Lae'zel bulling straight through their little group like an armored green battering ram (and giving him a perfect opening to stumble past Gale out onto the safety -- and space -- of the path and pretend that she shoved him). "We do not have time to look at birds."

Shadowheart, hanging back from the river as though even the thought of kingfishers is beneath her, gives Astarion her customary dismissive look. He returns an empty, lovely smile and flicks imaginary mud off his breeches, and she turns away with a scoff -- let her think him the fine Baldurian dandy afraid of ruining his clothes, and maybe she won't think too much on how he refuses to touch running water and start wondering.

"If you are so insistent on finding this Halsin," Lae'zel continues, leaping up onto the ford with that frankly enviable Githyanki ease of hers, "then we cannot delay. The goblins are unlikely to let him live for long."

The group is extremely quiet after that.

"Well!" Astarion says, just to break the silence, "far be it from me to argue with the murderous Gith," and gestures, quite gallantly, for Shadowheart to precede him across the ford. "After you, my dear."

She glares at him, suspicious as ever, but goes.

Wyll and Gale follow her, Wyll with a graceful flourish and Gale with a grunt of effort to get up on the rock in the first place and then with his arms held out for balance like he's worried about falling in. The cloud of steam that Karlach has turned into sets out across the river with a collection of splashing noises and one truly nasty curse in Infernal that Astarion quietly tucks away for later. He lets the lot of them clear the first stone before stepping carefully up -- the water runs barely a hand's-width below the level of the stone, and he has no idea how far the tadpole's protection extends. There's no force holding him back, true, but-- better not to risk it. He has no intention of dying before he gets his revenge, and running water is a nasty way to go.

Still, he crosses the first stepping-stone with ease and hops neatly across the first gap, landing on the worn surface of the next rock and watching the water run deep and clear and cold just past his feet. Him, Astarion, standing in the middle of a river. He might as well not even be a vampire at all! -- if not for the deafening silence in his chest.

"What was that about not arguing with the Githyanki?" Shadowheart calls, and he looks over to see that the rest of their little party has already made it safely to the other side and are lolling about waiting for him. "Have you never forded a river before?"

No, actually, or at least not one that he can remember, but he can't very well tell her that, now can he? Either they figure out his little secret and he gets staked in his trance the next night, or they leave him behind as a useless city fop, and either one would be. Well. Lets just say he needs their little group at his back, because bitter as it is to admit it he cannot kill Cazador alone.

"Come on, mate, you can do it!" Karlach calls, still gently steaming, and he turns back to say... something, offer up some kind of apology, excuse -- when something flashes fast and dark and deadly past his cheek.

Arrow.

He twists, looking for the archer, for any signs of a goblin ambush further upstream, and steps back. His heel comes down on empty air instead of stone, the world tips backwards around him in a single outstretched moment of oh shit, and down to the river he goes.

The sun's reflection flares mirror-bright as he crashes through the surface, and then the world goes cold and silver and silent.

Running water. The true and final death to vampires. He can feel it, sliding up through his ribs and fingers and throat, the cold creeping down in through his skin, the shimmer of the current over his skin as it starts to strip him apart.

Will it linger, this death? Will the river shred him slowly, moment by moment, or will he simply scatter into ash and be carried out to sea? Will his companions know? Will they care?

Will he feel it, when he dies?

It tugs at him, the surface a silver mirror above him, wings backlit against the light before it fades. The air leaves his lungs, cold water flooding in, silence spilling out of that dead place in his chest until there's nothing but the river pulling him apart, the current slipping between his fingers even as he tries and fails to cling to it -- gods, a week of freedom after two hundred years and that's it, he didn't even get to so much as spit in Cazador's face, but-- but he saw the sunrise again before he died and that at least was--

was--

Hold on.

He still has fingers.

Is he... not dead?

Running water, to hear Cazador tell it, kills as quickly as the current runs, stripping away everything that makes a vampire a vampire until only dust remains. By all rights, Astarion should have disintegrated by now, gone to wherever it is his soul is bound when he finally shuffles off this mortal coil.

Astarion opens his eyes to light.

It slants through the water in long impossible beams, dusty gold in the clear upper reaches and faded to a soft and murky jade in the depths where the river-weed grows, catching on the bright-scales backs of little darting fish, and washes over him. Sun and shadow, the bright points where ripples collide and the long lingering trails where willow branches drift on the water and the sweep of darkness as wings pass by, and the river sets him gently on its bed.

He's not dead.

Astarion breathes, and it comes out as a stream of bubbles, swirling up towards the surface -- he catches one, watches it break apart around his fingers. Even here, the river isn't quiet, murmuring to itself in a chorus of whispers that swirl around him, like they can fill up the silence inside. The riverbed is sure and steady beneath his feet when he pushes himself back up and the mirrored surface shatters into light and sound and life, wind and voices and a kingfisher's screech and he has come up from the river and lived--

--and his lungs abruptly remind him that undead or not they are not supposed to be filled with river water, and it all comes back up in a single lurching heave.

Astarion hacks, chokes, doubles over, and vomits up what feels like fully half his body weight in water, and then a little more as his sinuses -- how much went in? -- start to drain by any available pathway. It tastes disgusting -- well, anything other than blood tastes disgusting, but this is really something special -- and his stomach decides to join in on the fun too with a clench that threatens to bring up whatever remains of that fox from last night.

It takes forever to get it all out, and even when the coughing eases he can still feel the liquid sloshing around inside his chest -- but eventually he can straighten without dry heaving, throat burning, and he drags himself up to his full height against the pressure of the current and pulls in as much clear air as he can. The water laps cheerfully at the bottom of his ribs, barely more than waist-deep.

"-starion!"

Shit, right, ambush; he scrambles to find the rest of his party, see how badly they're overwhelmed and what might be coming for him -- except they're all just standing flat-footed on the bank of the river staring at him. Wyll has his boots off, for some godforsaken reason.

"Yes?" he says, wincing at the rasp in his voice.

Karlach drops her head back and lets out an enormous smoky sigh, shoulders sagging. "Fuck me, mate, when you didn't come back up..."

"...what?" Do they know? Were they just... waiting for him to get killed by his own incompetence, rather than have their precious consciousnesses stained by just up and staking him without warning -- but if so, why do they all look so-- relieved he's not yet dead?

"You were down for nearly two minutes," Wyll says, looking heroically concerned -- godsdamned gallant Blade of Frontiers that he is. "We were worried you'd drowned."

"After a display like that, I'm not so sure he didn't," Gale says, and leans forward, speaking louder than strictly necessary. "Astarion, are you having any pain in the lungs? Trouble breathing?"

"...no?" Astarion says, blinking, and swallows back another cough. The river chuckles at him, tugging at the buckles of his new armor, splashing around the edges of the ford-stones and holding a lilting conversation with the wind in the willows, which rustles back at it companionably before sighing off to make the pinetops bend and creak. In the branches, the kingfishers squeak and shrill at one another before clattering away in a flurry of wings and furious little heartbeats, while the softer, steadier double-drums of his companions keep counterpoint on the bank, and all around him the river runs, crystal-clear and shining in the incredible, impossible sunlight. He could go anywhere, if he wanted, cross any threshold, any stream -- brave the brightest, most relentless reaches of the sunlit world the way that no other vampire living can -- the river cannot touch him, and neither can Cazador.

"No, I'm-- perfectly alright," Astarion says, and laughs for the sheer shocking delight of it, for being free.

It goes soaring up away from him, not stifled in his throat or swallowed by the stone but filling the air until it rings -- all the silence, broken.

#baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #baldur's gate astarion #astarion #bg3 fic #storm's fic #storytelling #fic #storm's writing #writing #the rest of the party ABSOLUTELY thinks he hit his head down there and is now just incredibly fucking concussed #also because I just couldn't find a way to work it in to the fic itself and still keep the tone I wanted:#the thing that scared him wasn't an arrow it was a kingfisher that decided to take a dive right past him

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