Chapter I: Crowned in Its Shadows, Hung on Its Bough
The nightly roast of the campsite is auspiciously quiet.
Fire crackles against Elyra's ear as she rips down another side from a squirrel mottled with smoke-gray.
She hunches over the creature, skinning away the rest of its fur and revealing a soft, rose-colored layer swelling beneath. The flesh there is viscid, already as slippery as mucus, and she longs for the days where blood was simply blood. Where she needn't fret over a silver-tongued trickster and a warlock whose ambition had soared beyond him and laced an unknown evil to his call.
Where life itself was simpler.
Samaer would have screamed in humor if he saw her now, buckled over and doing men's work for a party of unappreciative fools. She considers leaving the meal preparations at that, knowing what good it would do her when the fools expect a cornucopia of unrivaled delights set before them. As though she's a fiend ready to divvy up a contract between the first course of garlic-roasted mutton and wine as red as one's tongue. She would think they've had enough of those.
No, she persuades herself. One squirrel would be ample, for it doesn't seem as though the others will join her in this sumptuous feast she's prepared.
A feast of squirrel and cloves. Goodly.
She wonders how well Samaer and the rest of the wood elves are faring without her talent. Elyra had been one of few who'd enjoyed searching for game, rooting it out, killing, quick, and one fewer still who was exceptionally proficient in it all. Enough for a woman, they would say, but she remembers how they'd hedged their coins when the wagers called her name. How they laughed. Nervous in the gullet.
Then they'd say, oh, Elyra, don't you know? Women can't bet—it'd jinx the fuckin' hunt.
"I see you've done well for yourself again. Call me impressed," Wyll's agreeable voice takes some edge off her mind.
She'd missed his advent, his ham-fisted manner of treading the greenwood, disturbing any living being from one acre over until she'd be assured of his noble, noble blood. Can't do much for practice on that one, she thinks. And if there was any supper at all to be had in the blasted, infernal fires of this perdition they're collectively sharing, she'd—oh.
His dead eye, a sending stone, he calls it, rolls over the blood streaked across her arms with something she can't quite seem to place. There was a moment between them, one would think vanquished, where Wyll had wiped the blood and mire off her cheeks after a particularly harrowing encounter with an ogre—much to the chagrin of Astarion.
Wyll had played the part of blue-blood, cooed in her ear like an injured dove, gave comfort where it was not afforded, and casted the rest aside to reveal to her the first crack of his story as savior.
Mizora, he said as he'd touched her, half-asleep and moved by her chokes.
She wants to weep once more, to crumple into a cocoon and hatch in Midsummer's way and never, ever see him again. It's all so pitiful. How she's just a trifling, little girl who could do better to scurry off and die alone. Leave them to sort themselves—abandon them in these woods that remind her of how much she longs for home.
For it's as the cambion had told her, steady in her pulse, offering surrender when she'd only known to struggle.
They've already amassed their weight in sin. Do you truly want to add to the due, or would I have you unbridled from your fetters, my dear? To perish dignified in your doings when it is your time—with the knowledge that you've never owed a debt—well, not a bottomless gorge that seeks to swallow you no matter your most prudent intentions.
No, what I ask of you is uninvolved.
She remembers the juice from the fat-clustered grapes at hand slavering off his chin.
She remembers his red-hot skin, his serrated teeth that scantly caged riddle after riddle, how he'd nearly completed his grail, then and there.
The reality sets back, and she's by the fire again, this time, without much in the way of banquets.
Elyra cracks another squirrel's tailbone, stripping the skin off in a single, immediate motion she's repeated well over a dozen amount of times. Wyll has one of those damning smiles that can lull anyone into doing just about whatever he pleases. Another symptom of nobility.
She snorts. He reminds her too much of Samaer, twins, even. And, perhaps, what he voices next adds even further corroboration to that.
"There's a stream not too far down the mountain. I'll catch supper for tomorrow if you work on a squirrel for me?"
Another pop of bone melts into the hiss of the starved fire. Elyra turns her attention towards him, the warmth that comes to placidly lick against her flesh lingers for a moment longer before fading into the black. His expression softens like a crease on a pond as though water striders whisk the surface to and fro' with spindly legs.
They're reliant on her, she must remind herself, and she's not any more keen for it.
Well, she thinks, falling in on her hesitance, the morrow is not promised. Not as it was with him.
She smiles, lashes serving as a bulwark for her eyes. "I'll see what I can do."
Wyll beams appreciatively, reaching out to tug back a bundle of unfastened curls falling between the simmering slurps of flame. Her copper-red catches in the light, portrait-like, found in a watery bed of half-rolled paint between carmine and lemon-yellow. It's a familiar color, and the warlock can't help if only to rasp out a sigh of apprehension curved taut in his chest. One stored for what feels like ages where they stand.
In the shadows that surround them, fires dancing and frisking softly under an orris-silver moon, Elyra looks gentler than Mizora tonight.
"Good girl," he says.
The touch is unexpected. Unpredictable. She feels a burn chewing the inside of her cheeks, and it's gone again—just as abrupt.
It's a fleeting emotion, one of nothing more than misplaced affection founded upon a lapse of company—of meaningful company, but Elyra can't know this for certain. She's all but experienced when it comes to the thralls of love. That's why falling into lust is kinder on the psyche.
Still, a flush of guilt tenderly creeps upon her skin, replacing that sickly-sweet churning in her stomach with something all the more sinister and unnamed. It bores down on her chest with lethal exactitude—the precision of a championed archer on the battlements of Dragonspear. Too cocksure in his abilities. Too high-handed. She knows the presence watching them, manifesting, begging her to do her absolute worst. Ignoring it comes with its own set of challenges when it's so skull-deafening.
Spit on me if you have to, if you have the temerity, after all, she feels the voice crinkle.
Her eyes snap towards the other end of the camp, dark green meeting her favored crimson. Astarion's lingering gaze between Gale and herself promptly brings her back to her more human senses—much more artistic, ones that suit Astarion's penchant for seeing her grieve with sensitivity. How the tips of her ears redden. How she becomes meek in his being there. Hanging fire on the what-ifs, and what may happen as he draws contiguous to her unmarked borders.
It's sensitivity that makes her distracted above all. He hadn't helped her with the ogre, not where it mattered, and she swears that it was all part of his scheming to have her cleaved open like a pomegranate—flooding right onto his insatiable tongue.
Entrenched in a second wave of anger when she recalls the near lethal experience, Elyra sends Astarion a message of her own. She makes contact with his eyes once again, visibly shoots up her brows, and mouths two very clear-to-comprehend words.
Sod. Off.
The rogue blinks in the breakaway, unaffected, seemingly, until she notices the swell in his throat bob like an apple hurled underwater. He's listening to their verbose companion all the while, cleaning the salt off his lips, absent, dazed.
If this is any indication of what's to come, Elyra can rest well in the realization that she may be closer than she anticipates to a death pre-transformation. She needn't a devil for that, thank the gods.
"I'll make good on my promise," Wyll reassures her.
He gives a slick fondle to her shoulder before disappearing, presumably to wander off and mull about their mutual effort to rid themselves of this heat festering between the pair, or at least that's how she understands it. Any sort of kindling affection invites problems that she would do well not to throw onto the already amassing pile of exactly those. Problems.
She's only ever felt one category of desire, and it's left her where she is. Parasite dug into her brain and fiend-met. She grasps life as effortlessly as that.
What Elyra can't seem to fathom; however, is how anyone could come to ignore the night skies.
Stars bathe her in white spars of light, undying, illuminating the foliage's natural-carved paintings.
The forest smells raw—that's the most suitable word. Branches pirouette in the distance, inviting the half-elf to explore the wilderness free of constraint. Free of duty from her burgeoning impulses, too.
She wipes what's left of the fresh blood on a cloth, and thinks it wouldn't be too much of an offense to seek some repose away from the others when their sparse moments of privacy remain sacred. Approaching her makeshift den, swathed in flaccid dreams of textiles gifted to her by Halsin, Elyra begins to harrow through her belongings with purpose.
Fletching more arrows would be the clever thing to do, wouldn't it?
She brings what she needs to the light of the fire. There, she begins, the cut of her teeth acting as dagger for string.
She's rummaging a quarter of the way through her quiver when Astarion's fleet-footed steps arrive, too muffled to hear until he's nearly sprung on her head. His doublet is carelessly fastened, the crimped collar of his undershirt visible against a chalk-white throat so unusual that she'd journaled him as the Pale Elf.
Wood elves are coppery, green-veined, earth-made in their colors. She'd ventured into the cities before, but had she met en elf like him—well, she'd remember.
"Hello, Astarion," she hums.
Astarion's gaze locks onto her, ashen-colored hair framing his face handsomely enough to stop her mid-arrangement. Mismatched arrows nearly crumple in her hands, she feels, and her fingertips stay, stranded, the arrows' ends decorated with feathers delicate and now becoming damp with sweat that seems to flood from her pores. He smells her like one would a rich lather of rose-scented froth, lemongrass, and muddied water following suit.
And her blood, sour, sweet, and sharp—like pears one would pluck from a neighboring orchard. That half-ripe taste becomes so addictive when one must steal in order to experience the pleasure, again and again.
"You look hungry," she says, the corner of her eye stock-still as his fangs prod just above his lower lip. He chuckles.
"Yes, I am a bit ... famished as of late. It must be—the carrion you've trapped," he gestures towards the pile of skinned squirrels and scrunches up his nose. The clue of disgust tattled in his voice is as inconspicuous as he is. He manages to make his displeasure perfectly obvious, provoking almost.
"How appetizing," he says.
Elyra continues to wind a cord of string across the arrow between her strangled fingers. She should feel immensely perturbed with how much she wants to wring his neck, and rightfully so for going through the trouble of wasting her energy on small game when they've a half-dozen; but here she is, grinning from ear to ear.
Astarion turns her amiable whenever she thinks of his banter and how it can make even their piously acrimonious Shadowheart clam up like a mollusk.
She turns to the fire, dimples flush against the corners of her mouth.
"Would you have me trod off into the woods at this hour, Astarion?" her tone betrays her truest feelings, and her irrational, delectable, screaming blood strikes faster in the pulse. Astarion likes when she's impudent, savors it, really.
"My darling, please. What could be more ferocious than you?"
"Anything. A mind flayer, a devil—"
"Well, we've not come across either of those in some time—"
"A bear."
"Hm," he clicks his tongue in short-sighted withdrawal. She doesn't relish the silence, she knows how he sups and sums on the discomfort it brings her.
Astarion cambers his head to one side. "I suppose that's true. You're not invincible. Tut, it would seem I'm no less unflinching in the face of—well—yours."
It's a whisper that makes her skin prick, gooseflesh spreading across her arms like the tattering of thread, rip after rip.
Despite her efforts to conjure up an excuse, Elyra quietly stands up, meeting the invitation with some paltry amount of resistance she's forged in a wooden crucible.
He's emboldened by her reciprocity, nearly taking it upon himself to reach out for that alluring neck of hers. Well, fuck, she'd essentially offered herself up to him on a platter that night when he sidled towards her like a weasel. How can she expect any less of him going forward? He sees her as his collateral if he fails to get what he actually wants.
Gods know what that could be.
"If you'd like, I can fetch something, but I can't offer much in terms of variety," she says.
Elk would nearly be impossible to find in this darkness. Then there's the problem of capturing one alive. "And you've no right to be selective," she adds, pausing to push another shaft in the clutches of her teeth. Astarion rarely drinks from a corpse, the princess, so she has to rule out dragging a fifteen-stone stag back to the campsite.
He dismissively waves his wrist.
"That's quite all right. I have a preference for something a touch more spirited tonight. Say, a half-elf," he purrs. He's edging closer now, fingers scouring for the heat of her blood. Elyra links the last segment of the arrow together before she spits out the other's shaft.
Disconnected from her eyes, she gives him a nettled smile as prickly as the chestnuts that make shambles of the forest's floor.
"Shadowheart is with Lae'zel," she taps the finished arrow's point onto his shoulder, a thinly veiled threat that says, go on then. "I'm afraid you'll have to wait for a taste of her—if she's even privy to it," a trace of tartness bleeds into her words, and she's back to concentrating on her feathers.
Shadowheart can be intolerable sometimes. Not because she's particularly unpleasant, not really, but because of her more decided advances towards Astarion when the group is broached with a rift. Gale, Wyll, Lae'zel—sometimes herself—and she hears the two. Their thoughts. Another device of torture from the foul tadpole meant to bring only her worst fears to existence on this plane, no doubt.
Elyra can't ferret out why it bothers her to this degree, but it does—she's never one to repudiate her emotions once she's acknowledged them—and she'd rather not be in the company of Astarion when he seeks her out as a result. Mind-reading and all.
She'll stay away from him, she will.
Simple.
She slots an arrow back into its sleeve.
Effective.
It punctures the leather casing with a snap. The shaft fragments in accordance, splintering off with the strength of her plunge.
"Oh, darling. Your little quips are so endearing, you know," Astarion laughs, teeth now in startling eyeshot as he leans into her side.
"So I've been told," she says dryly, throwing the broken arrow into the bonfire as unnecessary kindling. The pit'll be useless when they're all asleep, anyway.
Elyra begins to move away when Astarion takes the opportunity to spring in front of her. He closes the space between them until they're skin-to-skin, gingerly brushing back a flyaway behind her ear. He admires the curve there. It doesn't have a sharp edge to it, rounded, slight, but not human—the result of a rare coupling.
As Gale would put it, she's a paragon of chaos. The wood elves are sheltered from the rest of the world—they've a special ordering in their genes. Magic twists inside Elyra's veins, gnarled like an ancient, whispering oak because it doesn't know where it belongs. Her blood is mostly diluted of its magical properties, but the potential is there, and her fey ancestry passively makes charms like hypnosis ineffective. She can't say she's found much benefit in being a half-elf, otherwise.
You're the best of both, Samaer's voice throbs inside her skull.
"Unluckily for you, I wasn't referring to Shadowheart," Astarion says, sardonic, fingers curling beneath her chin so that she looks into those wet, claret-colored jewels without the possibility of evading him. "Your misfortune, kit."
Elyra furrows her brows into a hardened likeness. With the intimacy she's had the unfortunate privilege to listen to between the couple, Elyra had been confidently grounded in the idea that he would venture into the brunette's graces.
Surely, he'd already—well, wouldn't he?
"What's the matter? You look quite lost," he thumbs her bottom lip ajar, delighting in the sponge-like texture before he's made impatient for a taste of it.
He brings his mouth floating against hers like a leaf, the hotness of their breath sweltering and swelling Elyra's lungs as she eagerly swallows it all back down, Astarion's mingled with her own. He's more than fervid to drink from her again.
It was true enough that he'd nearly killed her on the second night, generously partaking in every bead of blood he could force from her shocked, pendulous body. He couldn't place a bridle on his emotions, but she'd been all too ready to absolve him of his faux guilt, so it needn't matter, anyway.
It'd been enough. More than enough for her to reason that whatever occurred on the night of the tiefling party was a single-use token.
"Forgive me. You've been working on her for the past two days. It's only natural to assume that you've no interest in me."
Beyond the obvious.
"Would you like me to be interested in you?"
Gently, Astarion rubs his fingers across her fluttering throat, on the center of its pulse, holding her cheek in the palm of his then unoccupied hand.
"Hm? Would you want that?" He's beginning to become entranced by the way her eyes shift with indecision, like she's plagued with mortality and all its never-ending choices, and so, she must refute the way he's curling those needy fingers around her neck.
How she wants to feel them explore a tad below the partition of her belt. How they might whisk her wetness apart.
How warm, she thinks, and how dastardly cruel it is.
"Do I want your attention? Not particularly, not anymore than our lovely wizard's, truly," she sneers, "I've had my fill of attention ever since the nautiloid made its way with me."
He's penetrating her, for all intents and purposes, eyes boring through her face with a vicious rung of passion.
"Such a wit," he mock sings. "I'll have you know that I enjoyed you. Ardently so," Astarion tries to keep from driveling at the memory, she's sure.
He continues with a newfound wave of bravado aiding his words. "True, I was hoping that the cleric would be the, hm, cooperative individual that you were decidedly not on our encounter in the brush. I suspected that you were—invulnerable to all my wonderful charms. Clearly, I misjudged you, and her for that matter," he says with a disparaging smile, tongue dragging on his words.
"You were appalled when I turned around—you had a dagger on your belt and somehow survived the crash. Capable enough," she says.
"Oh, I can't say I wouldn't have done the same, darling, and I'm rather delighted about the way we've become united. You looked ravishing with a knife at your throat, squirming in my arms, those emerald-touched eyes pleading with me. It was rather such a palatable sight that I now see the appeal for brigands, and wouldn't dare to discourage them holding you down for me," Astarion gives a muffled groan, markedly pleasured by the morbidness of his words. "But I believe I wouldn't find too much opposition with the way we've progressed. Such an obedient, little girl capitulating to the fearsome vampire's demands."
"And if I wholly capitulated? What would those demands entail?"
"Well," he's full of mirth when he says, "returning with me. If we were in Baldur's Gate, I'd take you captive, throw away the keys, and indulge myself until there'd be nothing tenable—not even a word—that could have me persuaded otherwise."
"Then?"
"Then?" he asks, almost incredulous.
"Yes, then? Are you to be my keeper until I've wrinkled with old age? That doesn't sound like one of the tactics I've known you to favor. Honesty. You usually have some degree of ambition to your imaginings. You've said as much in Druids' Grove. Be open, please."
"Open," he snorts. "Yes, an open heart is what I may be due in unfamiliar company if I were as you command. O' innocent."
"Have things not changed since then?"
She gives a reassuring squeeze to his hand. "Since you've met us."
"Hm. What's the saying—your human half should know—ah, yes. You're only useful until you're not. I wouldn't keep you entrapped, darling. That doesn't seem to be within your nature. And if your conduct with the Blade tells me anything, it seems we'd both agree that just one at a time, well, that's no fun!"
"The Bl—there's nothing going on between Wyll and I."
"Really," he doesn't believe it from way of tone. "More's the pity for him. But then, don't feel bad," he mutters, pouting, finally reaching out for a taste of whatever will keep him most sedated. "He's not the one in need of a blood pouch, is he?"
Wait.
"Is this what you did? With Caza—" Elyra stops herself before she makes a mess of it, pushing back on Astarion's chest so as to see his reddening face. Upset, humiliated, she doesn't care to discern his feelings. He doesn't deserve to take advantage of her kindness any more than he already has. "Is this what you did?" she repeats. Her voice now shrivels into a scored whisper, and she's back on the offense, the slight noted in one of her mental entries. Saved to be transferred to parchment.
"Whatever do you mean, kit?"
"I mean, do you think of me as just another potential thrall—hah, no. Better, a lamb to be sacrificed. Just one you can lure away with your sweet words?"
"N—No, I—"
"Then why must you—" she doesn't have the words, or thinks them to be a waste. She steps away in a heated rush, too choleric to even consider a plea if he were to offer one. "Flattery will get you nowhere, Astarion. Please make yourself tolerable, and leave me alone," Elyra slides the quiver behind her shoulder, ignoring the rest of the bastard's advances with a decided fwip. "I'm sure you can very well find someone else to trifle with, preferably someone not in our party."
She begins to start her trek towards the edge of the forest, Astarion calling out to her with another exuberant remark—his effort to save face.
"Are all wood elves so reclusive?" he asks. She rolls her eyes, twisting back to see his moon-touched features cloud over with doubt.
"Just the one. Keep watch."
‡
Tendrils of moonlight slip through the thick leafage as she treads the undergrowth, careful of any missteps. Elyra returns to the campgrounds empty-handed. She can't blame anyone but herself; however, fingers squeezed onto the grooves of her bow until they're made unfamiliarly anew. Her throat throbs with cravings for water, a pulse beating the desire into her brain, urging her to slump against a tree and pray to Rillifane for rainfall. The tadpole becomes restless.
It wants to eat her alive. Innards, liver, heart, carve her to rare cuts.
She's half-expectant for Astarion to greet her with open arms and open teeth, but he's nowhere to be found as she passes his accommodation and Shadowheart's silhouette breathing in cavernous slumber, chest heaved, then falling like a frond. As Elyra sneaks into the light, candles still sparsely decorating the ground in their wax, ivory-like puddles, she manages to swallow what's left of her pride and call out into the dark.
Is she forfeit an answer? Shall she worry herself if she isn't to receive one?
"As—Astarion," she says, cautious not to disturb the others—if they're not feigning sleep, that is—as she wobbles around in the midst of half-shadows and contours. "Of course he's disappeared," she mutters. Somewhat disappointed by his absence, somewhat relieved, Elyra wipes the superficial film of muck and forest soot from her cheeks.
She returns to her hovel of a tent—as much as she's tried to dress it up, there's something lacking, something unfulfilled. A strongbox carved from cherrywood packs her smallclothes in the arc of the overhead penumbra. A scarce amount of many-colored ribbons for her accents, a plethora of arrow tools rusted on her bunk, red, and a water pail are all she's managed to trade. Deftly, her fingers sluice down her grub-stained skin, sponge in hand.
The latches on her boots come fast, and with half the mind to vanquish the flittering life of the candles, Elyra just about settles into decent repose. Puffs of smoke evaporate into the air, sharpness from the cold sweeping across her skin, nostrils flaring ... as she takes it into her breast.
It can be quiet here, unescorted through this preamble of hopelessness when her mind only knows to bring itself comfort through nightmares. She doesn't want to stop moving, always one of the last to tuck in and shut her eyes, preparing herself for how the illithid spades into her memories.
Reoccurring just as when she thinks it's loosened its grip on her, those lavender-clad robes dropping around her face in the grass, it stares at her. It confronts her. The abyss. She recalls how its mighty fingers did wonders on her insides, her drenched folds, how he—it had spoken of armies taking the coast, the cities, and just for her to fall into another kiss.
Astarion had called it her wet dream, but that's his malady to cure. He always finds competition in everyone's pain. Only he would see such abomination happily take his tongue.
It's quiet. So, so very quiet. Before she can linger on it, drive herself to madness, the curtains of her tent billow out suddenly. Elyra feels something lurch in front of her before it forms into a rough-ended silhouette.
She's moments from screaming for Wyll, pleading for him to burn the campsite down, ashes to ashes, before a pair of hands clasp at her wrists like prison-grade shackles. Elyra hesitates to attack her assailant, vulnerable, shrinking back for a bullishly painless and prompt demise. When, instead, she hears a voice drawl out a coo, she's no less taken aback.
"You've kept me waiting long enough. Did you think I'd let your rudeness go without penalty tonight, hm?" Astarion breathes wetness into her ear, tongue slithering over the sharp edge of his teeth.
Reduced to instinct, she grabs onto him by his shoulders, closing the gap between their bodies until a needle could have cradled in between without plunging. Astarion uncharacteristically jolts at the sensation, ears and hair perked up like a cat, and there he goes.
"Eager, are we?" his throat pitches a pining whisper, consent lost to him—if it were ever found.
Blood rushes towards her face like a sturgeon up-torrent as her shyness, the same kind that Halsin teases out of her, that Gale does dutifully to avoid for her sake, becomes the center of Astarion's persecution. She knows he loathes her at the heart of it all—that wood elven way about her, level-minded, priggish, predictable. She's under the impression that he can see in this pitch-black, and she's close to being nude.
"Such a pity that you hide that exquisite body from me. Toned. Full," he muses, twining one of her curls with a finger. "Mm, well-proportioned."
His laughter arouses an itch that she doesn't fare will disappear. Not quite yet.
"I wouldn't want you catching yourself sick, my darling. Unless you wish to light a candle or two—"
"Absolutely not."
He sighs, dramatically pushing his fingers against her puckered-off, supple mouth once he's readjusted his footing. He squishes it into the shape of a fish's—dumbly agape.
"Must I always get you into the mood?" his voice carries a smile, all too sincere, an impish gleam crowding his eyes. His fingertips trace circles into the curves of her body, tingle-inducing, unimaginably filling the hole of her most unspoken desire.
And all too soon, he stops. An edging bit of comfort wells into her brain. It must be the tadpole's doing again, wretched thing.
"Women like yourself are so—so—adorable," he places his tongue on the right word, lapsing over an addictive croon that has Elyra wanting, keeling over from his laurels.
The feeling his hands construct does the impossible, rubbing out a pleasure that has Elyra jubilant, giggling, sore from it. Astarion laps up her good spirits, moving to bring tender, chaste kisses to her throat until she's tumbling over her feet. Receptively, attuned to the vague outline of his features, she smothers her mouth against his until Astarion whimpers.
Whiplash casts his head aside, but he returns the assault on her lips, seduced all the same, enthusiastically snaking a hand behind her head. She can sense his restraint by the way of his tongue, how it dips, ravenously deep, and she breaks the spittle cording them together with another laugh.
Astarion forces a rough hand under her chin.
"Tilt up, darling. You're much too short without your boots."
He needn't elaborate. There's no pretense in the obscene tremble of his voice. She considers thrusting him away to bide her hours—that's what her companions would advise her to do in any case. She can't rightly imagine any of them approving of this tryst.
Then the tadpole squirms inside her head. It's enough to be nearly unbearable considering how much she's acclimated towards it, and she's made all the more aware of the hours in question. There is no time, none whatsoever if their shared condition evolves into something more ungodly. She thinks back to her bed-sharing in the cities, how her love for Samaer turned to rubble on her tongue, and the others—how they spurned her. Word-of-mouth rules Faerûn, especially when it comes to their cloistered ways.
Astarion's piercing, charm-laced eyes sparkle under the moon, she thinks. He's mischievous, a first-rate decadent, and always, always more trouble than he's worth in the middle of negotiations. In this moment, she wonders why she's never ventured as far as to see Baldur's Gate and all its poetic grandeur, its tavern songs, how it flushes out the stars with its bustling throngs of people and their need for lanternlight. Envy rattles in her for having not met Astarion centuries ago—mourning the magistrate he was.
He pours feverish air against the base of her neck. As she understands it with more clarity, there's nothing she really has to lose in this affair. Convince yourself otherwise, she thinks. It's a paradox to persuade herself out of something she's unyielding in, something she needs returned—love. Or the makings of it, at least.
They melt together in another exhilaratingly warm kiss. It becomes sweetness on their tongues. A part of her aches with this desire she's quelled behind his back, the part of her that induces an assorted degree of flattering assent when her pragmatism comes to view. How she'd not been swayed by Shadowheart's devotion to Shar, how she, mostly, deals with Lae'zel and her uncompromising demands. Astarion; however, reveres when she just lets go, no posturing to be had, no forswearing her need for pleasure.
He's gradually leaning into her, making a spectacle of her once demure refusal.
"You're delectable," he says in between another kiss. She hums, approving, her fingers dug into the ringlets of silver-thread hair. They catch together, and she tugs him down for another kiss, and another.
"I must admit, I'd be rather cross with you if you intended to stop," she says.
It feels like rapture, something only Rillifane Rallathil or Silvanus could give her. But she'll pray that the gods can't see her like this—lost in another so dearly, so akin to worship.
A rattle against one of the other bunks nearly frightens the couple apart. Astarion holds steadfast to his prize, however. Rustling feathers and a wobbling gait moves towards them, a shingly, small screech resounding in the vampire's ears. Elyra hears a voice instead, owing it to her abilities as a ranger in the practice of animal-speech. Beady, flaxen-colored eyes emerge behind the hanging folds of the curtain.
"Food. Hungry."
The owlbear cub brushes against Elyra's legs. She chortles out a scream, close to being thrown out of Astarion's arms.
"Do tell me you're planning on getting rid of it soon. What's the point of having it along if I can't feed on the beast?"
Possessively, Astarion tugs on Elyra's half-sleeves until he turns to see her propose an insubordinate smile. "Oh, you're joking."
Elyra swaddles the cub in her arms, the creature delightedly nestling into her breasts like an infant.
"Soft. Warm."
If Astarion's Dark Desires arouse any illicit feelings, warranted or otherwise, jealousy would take the unsightly head of a viper at the cub's scruff. Elyra knows that he'd merely stirred up his appetites before the main event, relishing, as he would put it. He'd relish an end to this, surely.
"I want a turn as well," he mimics a theatrical purse of his lips, huffing, and his fingers delicately shadow old scars on her arm. He's memorized them by now, had sketched them into the dirt, bored, one evening. "Shall I ask for more than a peck on the lips?"
Astarion's honeyed voice drips artlessly into ear, patent in what he wants, and Elyra's face becomes as florid as a gardenia.
"You'll have to wait until the morrow, Astarion. I assume your appetite won't be gone?"
"Quite," he grumbles, "well, if it's all the same to you, I'll be over there. Licking my wounds."
Elyra shakes her head as she labors to withdraw entirely. She doesn't need to see him to know a piss-poor attempt in manipulation—uncommon for him, but not unknown.
"Then sleep well, kit," he clicks his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
"I'll make sure there are no further intruders disturbing you—wanted or otherwise."
