#oh man imagine her trying to talk down astarion and failing

[moltensmusings]

Concept: elf tav who is just under 300, all of her children died as adventurers or guards. Her husband and her became vastly different people in the wake of all the grief. They havent spoken in years, incapable of existing around each other before breaking down. The journey after the crash she keeps seeing shadows her kids in the various party members and as such she desperately wants to help them. Save them in ways she couldn't for her own children. A pillar of love and guidance because her children may be gone, but she will always be a mother.

[elisende]

Dark Gift

Characters: Halsin/OMC, Halsin/Ketheric, Wyll, Shadowheart, Volo  Rating: E Words: 3404

After a night of passion, Halsin and Langoth return to camp to find their companions have also made the most of the night's revelry.

But something is bothering the ranger and finally, he asks his lover Halsin about his past with the enigmatic Ketheric Thorm. There is always more to the story...

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”

Mary Oliver, The Uses of Sorrow

They did not sleep that night, the night that forever afterward Halsin would call their wedding night, only half-joking.  In silence as deep as the sky’s blackness, they watched the stars wheel and fade.  Held each other tightly on the stone table as the celebration in camp raged and then dwindled.  Listened to the small sounds of rustling animals and the first sweet notes of dawn’s chorus.  

“My favorite time of day,” he told Langoth.  “There’s no match for the dawnsong of high summer.  The finest symphony ever composed.”  

The ranger smiled, distantly.  “It reminds me of the first time,” he said, his voice so soft it was nearly below hearing.  “I had never experienced anything like it--like you.”

The morning light caught Langoth’s long, chestnut hair, gilding it, bathing his face in a warm golden glow.  Halsin’s breath caught in his throat.  He had been awestruck by the youth’s beauty that first night in the High Forest.  Just as he was now.

“Nor I you,” he said.  He took Langoth’s face in his hands and whispered roughly, uncouthly, “I want you again.”

The elf leaned into his embrace, breath hot on Halsin’s neck.  “Then take me.”

Halsin growled and straddled him, looming above the slighter man, his broad shoulders blocking the rising sun.  They were both still bare from the waist up and he raked his fingers down the ranger’s chest as he bent to kiss him ravenously.  Langoth gasped at the mingled sensation of Halsin’s rough hands and plunging kiss; his hips rose to brush the front of the druid’s pants, finding him already hard.  He ground up against him in slow, firm strokes, provoking a groan from deep in Halsin’s throat.

“You don’t realize what you do to me,” Halsin gasped.  “Gods.”

The youth just smiled as though he knew precisely his effect on the druid and pulled Halsin’s muscled ass closer to him and thrusting faster, harder.    

The feeling of Langoth’s own desire pressing and stroking against his own was nearly enough to finish him.  But before that could happen, Halsin grabbed him around the waist and flipped him onto his belly, jerking down his leather breeches as the elf moaned beneath him.  The birdsong around them was in full throated climax as he plunged into him, feeling the elf’s sublime tightness barely giving way to his thick cock.  Langoth exclaimed, in both pain and pleasure, as Halsin thrust mercilessly, driven by blind need.

“Langoth,” he murmured; he knew how his lover enjoyed hearing his own name on Halsin’s lips.  The ranger cried out in response and Halsin pulled him closer, wrapping his muscled arm around his chest.  In contrast to last night, his peak was building slowly, inexorably, like a wall rising stone by stone.  

The rising sun struck the table, bathing them both in an orange glow.  His lover was beautiful beneath him, his strong back rippling in the soft dawning light.  Halsin tracked the muscles with his hand and then slid it down below to stroke his member.  The ranger gasped, thrusting eagerly against his touch, and they moved as one.  

Langoth’s breath quickened, shoulders faltered.  As he felt his lover come, Halsin himself lost control; with one thrust, and then another, he finished, gasping, on the elf’s back.

The chorus had abated and the sun’s rays had mellowed.  Langoth sat up beside him, leaning close.  “We should get back before the others wake,” he said.

“I do hope Astarion hasn’t waited up for you,” Halsin said.  He didn’t even try to suppress his laughter, though he knew it was unkind.  

Langoth was more circumspect but a ghost of a smile played on his lips as he said, “I’m certain he had no shortage of other entertainments last night.”

No one stirred at the camp when they returned--no one, except--

“The hero returns!  Ah, and the wise and mighty king of druids, Master Halsin!  I’ve a new stanza to celebrate your victory, good sirs, only I struggle to find a word that rhymes with ‘muscular,’ and I feel I would be derelict in my sacred commission as bard and poet if I failed to mention Master Halsin’s particular, ah, physical qualities… and allusion simply doesn’t suffice, I don’t think, when it comes to his spectacular form!”

He thought he heard Langoth mutter, “It’s far too early for this.”  But it might have only been his imagination.

“Druids do not have kings,” Halsin explained to Volo, for at least the third time since they had met last week.  “And you needn’t talk about my, er, form.  Though I am flattered.”  

“Of course you and I know druids don’t have kings,” Volo said, as though Halsin were being quite stupid.  “But we need to remember our audience doesn’t have the sophistication required to understand the ‘first amongst equals’ principle espoused by the druids, et cetera.  Oh!  It’s so obvious.  ‘Muscle,’ singular--rhymes with ‘tussle.’  Perfection!”  Volo strummed a chord on his lute with a fervor that was frankly alarming and Halsin instinctively looked around for an exit.

“Right, I need to wash,” he said, heading for the river.  “Goodbye.”

“I also need to see to a--personal matter.  Gods keep you, Volo,” Langoth called behind his shoulder.  “I will remember how you left me out in the cold just now,” he added under his breath, even as the corner of his lips twitched.  Halsin’s heart lurched pleasantly and he turned his gaze back toward the rushing water of the Chionthar, already slipping out of his tunic.  

“I would aid you against any enemy in the deepest dungeon of the Underdark,” Halsin said.  “But you’re on your own with the bard.”

They bathed together in the rushing stream, Langoth capering on the rocks and diving into the deep pool under a cataract as Halsin watched.  The water was cold and bracing and Halsin couldn’t resist enjoying it in his bear form; there was simply no comparison to experiencing the icy rush of the river running through his thick fur.  He changed back once he emerged, dripping, onto the shore, Langoth close behind in his smallclothes.

“Someone was up late,” a smooth voice teased.  The Blade of the Frontiers emerged from his tent, wearing a lopsided grin and little else.  He had a bowl of streaky, grayish gruel that looked distinctly unappetizing.  But then, a human would eat nearly anything.

“Ah.  Did you... enjoy the celebration?” Langoth asked, color rising to his cheeks.  But then, from behind Wyll, the haughty cleric called Shadowheart emerged from the tent, cheeks even redder than Langoth’s, if it were possible.  Her lips were still stained purple from last night’s cheap wine.  Halsin’s head nearly throbbed in sympathy. 

“Evidently so,” Halsin remarked.  The young people were so obviously uncomfortable that he almost laughed.  But then he remembered his own tenderness and shame in his youth and his heart softened for them.  “Gods, but we’ve earned some respite, have we not?  And much still lies ahead.”

The others eagerly seized on this line of discussion and a profusion of enthusiastic, if stilted, comments followed about battles fought, foes defeated, and speculation of those still to come.  Halsin enjoyed seeing Langoth with his companions, his earnest expressions, the innocence of his words.  Finally, the young people extricated themselves from their rhetorical bondage and all sauntered off in different directions, Langoth grabbing his elbow as they went.  

The youth didn’t want to let him out of his sight and this, too, was touching.  He had all the hours of the day for his lover, whose face was a song of which he could never tire.  In contrast to Volo’s forced rhymes.

They laid their clothes to dry in a sunny spot by the river and Halsin rested beneath a friendly looking ash tree and closed his eyes.  He asked its name with a minute scratch of his thumb against the bark and it answered; a name that sounded like the rustling of acorns against one another in the mellowness of autumn.  A lovely name, one he committed to memory.  Halsin sighed, the sun warming his chest, grateful to be alive on such a day.  

“Are you just going to meditate now?”  Langoth’s voice came from leagues away.  Halsin opened his eyes.  “Only… I had a question.”

He regarded Langoth, ready for nearly anything.  

“You said before that you had defeated Ketheric but it seemed as though perhaps you knew him, once.  Do you--is there...?”  

“‘Is there more to the story?’ you mean?”

Langoth bit the inside of his cheek, mustering his nerve.  “Well, is there?”

Halsin leaned back against the ash who was named after a sound of acorns rustling, feeling every year of his five centuries.  “There is always more to the story,” he said.

“Tell me,” Langoth said softly, looking at his hands.  He sensed the story was troubling, and he was not wrong.  Halsin thought Langoth was probably rarely wrong when it came to troubling things.  They whispered to the secret wound he carried in his breast, like calling to like.  Halsin sighed.

“Of course I shall tell you if you wish to know,” he said.  And yet, even as he spoke the words, he was unsure if he should.  “It all began in Waterdeep,” he began.

*

Have you been?  Magic runs through that city, and I feel it in my marrow whenever I cross into its wards.  The city was built on a mountain of mithral, on the ashes of a forgotten citadel of Illefarn.  Ancient seams of blood and magic run beneath it.  You can hear it, like a ringing in your ears.

There was some reason for me to be there, but I barely recall it.  All I now remember is him.  And what came after, of course.

I spurned the inn, as I always do.  Too much comfort has always seemed suspicious to me, as have affections exchanged for coin.  Yet there is precious little nature left in Waterdeep, so I took my repose in a graveyard, under the open sky.  The only place in the city where one could find a tree.  

They were sad and lonely, those trees: a weeping willow, a scrawny, leafless box, and a twisted old yew.  The yew had gone mad from loneliness--yews are prone to madness in any case, but this one was particularly ill.  Perhaps that is why the priests of Shar claimed this particular graveyard for their rituals.  The yew had seeped its poison into the very ground and it was a dark and morbid place.  Full of shadows.  Now I wonder if the sick yew wasn’t in some indirect way the genesis of all that’s happened since.  

I watched them under the cover of a glamour so that I seemed to their eyes like a stone gargoyle warding a tomb.  They were initiating a half-elf and his terror carried on the wind.  I could smell it.  He was barely grown, undernourished.  His voice was strong though, and surprisingly deep, like the low roll of the tide coming in from the sea’s depths.  

I’ve been alive long enough to learn not to cast easy judgments.  Shar and her dark worship--what were such things to me?  Was it so different to swear oneself to the Dark One as it was to the Lady of Pain?  Or the Lord of the Dead?  But something in this ritual chilled me.  

It felt as though… this dark ritual had meaning beyond its meaning.  My mother had the gift of foresight and some little of it passed to me.  I cannot see the future as though I were watching a play, as she did.  But I can often sense danger, or tidings of happiness to come.  It’s kept me alive, more times than I can count, this gift.  And now, it filled me with dread.  The dread of a hundred kingdoms falling.  A dread worse than mere death or danger.  The dread of a coming apocalypse.

The half-elf turned and even in the gloom of the moonless night, I recognized his face.  For my mother had shown me this face when I was a boy, in the final moments of her life.  She met a violent end--but that, I will speak of another time.  I had believed she showed his face to me because he was my destiny.  But perhaps she showed me because he would be my doom. 

In my shock, the glamour slipped.  Only the half-elf saw me.  And I recovered so that when he turned back I was once again disguised as senseless stone.  

Perhaps that would have been the end of all if I had left it alone.  But destiny carves a path before itself, one we mortals are incapable of altering.  Such I have come to believe, though perhaps only as means to absolve myself.  

They completed their ritual by draining the youth of his blood, to the point of death.  And many do die.  But the half-elf did not, and Shar claimed another acolyte to her worship.  How peaceful he looked in that moment, on the precipice between life and death.  They bore him off on their shoulders into the night, leaving me with mad yew and my own dark thoughts.

The very next day I sought the Temple of Shar.  It’s no simple place to find, even in permissive Waterdeep.  Her worship is outlawed and her followers jailed when discovered.

You may well ask why I troubled myself.  Why I could not leave well enough alone, as the humans are wont to say.  I was compelled by both curiosity and dread.  

It is a strange thing to say aloud, but the image of the half-elf’s face was all I had left of my mother and even as it repelled me, I also felt closer again to her somehow in finding him.  I had to know the meaning behind it, to recover even this small remnant of her memory.  If you have lost someone, perhaps you understand my meaning.  

It took some days and many false turns but in the end, I located their temple.  Simple chance finally led me to the right direction--or destiny carving its path before me, take your pick.  

If I was worried about what I might say to the half-elf when I met him, I needn’t have, for he recognized me immediately.

“The gargoyle of a druid I saw,” he said, by way of greeting.  “So you weren’t a vision from my Dark Lady, after all.”

He always spoke like that.

I answered that I had seen the ritual, and feared for his life.  I asked how he had come into the service of the Dark Goddess and he told me his story.  It was a brutal, tragic tale, and he told it without remorse or sentimentality.  When again I pressed him--why did he devote himself to Shar?  He answered that none other had claimed him, only the Lady of Loss.  As though his life were simply a ripe apple falling senseless from a tree.

In my pride, I thought that by removing this youth from Shar’s faithful would heal him, that I could restore the balance to his soul.  That I could heal him.

I took him to the Emerald Grove.  The power of that place is ancient, its healing magic is more powerful than you ken.  Not just Silvanus’s power, though that resides there too.  I believed the grove would restore him and would avert the darkness that lay ahead.  

In how many legends to mortals hasten along the very events they sought to prevent?  Well, here is another.

For a time, I believed that Ketheric was healed.  The light returned to his eyes, the blood to his flesh.  By day, he walked the forest with me and I taught him such that I know: more than most will learn, but still precious little compared with the forest’s immensity.  Every tree is a world unto itself.

And I loved him.  Desired him.  Claimed him.  It blinded me to the truth.  For Shar would not be so easily forsaken.  She was jealous of her supplicants and for Ketheric she had great designs.  

I believed he had left Shar behind in distant Waterdeep.  In Ketheric, I thought I saw my destiny to bring him back into the light.  

Only arrogance and perhaps lovesickness can explain why it took me so long to realize why the forest grew darker over those seasons.  Parasites thrived and the trees fought silent battles within the buried paths beneath the earth.  Plants that once were allies became bitterest enemies and starved each other out, poisoning one another’s roots.  Pestilential insects devoured the warring plants.  Even the water was tainted, sickening creatures and the druids in my grove.

Kagha saw the truth first.  And if perhaps you wondered why I allowed her to stay, here is the reason.  Because Kagha’s heart may be as hard as ironwood, but she is unflinching in the face of the truth and I--well, now I know that I cannot always trust my own judgment.

She unmasked Ketheric, finally made me see, but by then it was too late.  He had seen the power of the grove, and he desired it for himself.  For his Dark Lady.  Ketheric escaped my judgment and Kagha’s wrath but I knew he would return.

Three years passed and in that time, Ketheric became a force.  More than a mere man.  He was a legend and followers flocked to him, drawn to his power.  More than power; his absence of fear.  For since that night that Shar had taken him, I had never once witnessed him frightened of anything.  That was the source of his terrible charisma, I believe, why people followed him into madness and marched to their deaths on his order, with happy hearts.  That they, too, could be so fearless.  

He took the Temple of Selune first.  The priests there fought hard and long but Ketheric would not be thwarted and his forces seemed limitless.  The stories are still told of the terrible butchery committed in the Shattered Sanctum, and I will not repeat them.  

They rode out from the Shattered Sanctum to terrorize the country.  That is when we first spoke of the Rite of Thorns, for there was no question of protecting the surrounding land from Ketheric’s army.  Then the Harpers came.

I could tell you all manner of stories about the long history of the Harpers and the Emerald Grove, but those romances only imply the true foundation of that ancient alliance: one born of dire necessity against unassailable darkness.   Which is all to say, the Harpers and the Druids have joined when all seemed lost.

So it seemed to us then.  With the power of the Shattered Sanctum and an army of faithful, Ketheric completed a dark ritual, one that required a fountain of blood sacrifice.   The Shadow Curse.  A plague on the land and all that lived there, committing their souls into bondage to Shar.

He completed the ritual and cast the land into darkness before I could finally end him.  I held him as he died, and he looked just as he did on the night in the Waterdeep graveyard.  At peace, finally, in the arms of his Goddess.  The only one he ever truly loved, I still believe.  

That fight nearly took my life.  As for the others, I marched them to their graves.  Of all the druids and Harpers who fought on that day none survived.  A handful of Ketheric’s dark justiciars escaped, scattered.  Of those, all have fallen to madness or early deaths.  

Only I now remain witness to the horrors of that long night.  

*

Halsin found it hard to hold his lover’s gaze for shame.  Now he knew of his failure, his blindness.  He would scorn him, as Kagha had: weak, arrogant, feckless.

Instead, Langoth took his hand in his own, kissing his rough knuckles.  Forgiveness so sublime, so unexpected that his eyes pricked with unshed tears.  

“You did what you could.  And we will end the curse when we reach Moonrise Towers.  That I promise you.”

Halsin closed his eyes.  “Thank you.”  In the wood a thrush sang, as though to remind him of something he had long forgotten.  Something like hope.