From then on the pale elf can feel the dark elf's eyes linger on him, particularly in battle. He aims to please and shows off when he can. Her blood makes him feel more powerful, and he doesn't want her to stop offering him her neck. He craves it. He is a vampire after all, slave to a sanguine hunger, if nothing else. Despite himself, he finds himself waiting up after the others are asleep to see if she will slink into his tent.

She doesn't always come, nor do they always sleep together. She understands how to use the word "no", unlike Astarion. That word was bred out of him long ago. Every so often, she asks him questions about vampires and their spawn. General questions, nothing personal about him or his master, but it reveals her naivety to the whole thing. She craves his teeth without truly understanding it, or understanding him for that matter. Not that he made that part easy.

She has the courage to ask about his scars the morning after the tiefling party. He tells her the truth, despite having made up countless lies to his past lovers. It was different then. His tongue was tied against his will by Cazador, and now he speaks the truth simply because he can, not because he wants her to understand his past.

Just as she makes promises to her other companions, she promises to help him in his quest to kill his master when they reach Baldur's Gate. It's a nice gesture, but the drow doesn't truly understand Cazador's power. If she did, she and the rest of the party would surely abandon him. Astarion thanks her anyway, but he can't help but imagine Cazador tearing her apart limb by limb or raising her as his own spawn just to torture him.

Astarion tells himself he's only traveling with them to find a way to control the tadpole so he doesn't lose his newfound power to disobey Cazador, but he has a nagging feeling they would all join him on his personal quest if he asked for their help, or if Syre asked. And, for some reason, that bothers him.

The companions certainly have their differences, but they had been bound by fate, destined to travel together. The others attach themselves to Syre quickly, becoming a merry little band of misfits. It's almost cute the way they are so quick to be enraptured by her. Did they follow her because they actually believed in her or was she simply the bossiest of the group? Perhaps a bit of both.

She is an unusual little thing, he thinks. She tells him she enjoys it, being on the brink of death. Being neither in heaven nor the hells. It feels like transcending this plane of existence, she says. He jokes that he could kill her and have Shadowheart bring her back, but she declines. She insists that is not the same thing.

Astarion comes to realize how young she is, captivity was all she knew. A deadly, but naive little drow, only knowing what the House taught her, and they certainly didn't teach her much about the world beyond the underdark. She reads every single book they come across in their travels, and when she runs out of room she's quick to ask someone to carry them for her.

A former slave just released from her bonds, only to find herself beholden to the alien in her brain. He would feel sorry for her, if he knew how to feel those kinds of feelings anymore.

In any case, it makes it all the easier to wrap her around his finger, or so he thinks. His own narcissism allows him to believe she's enthralled by him. If he can reduce her to putty in his hand, mold her into whatever shape he craves, she would be his to manipulate.

Still though, she keeps herself guarded as they travel together. One night, out of curiosity, he pokes at the edges of her mind with his tadpole and is quickly met with an impenetrable wall of blue scales.

She surges forward into his mind in impish retaliation. Astarion tries to put up a wall just as quickly, but it materializes as red and black curtains allowing her to easily slip through, dancing at the edge of his subconscious. She doesn't cross into his thoughts, though she could, only teases from the outer edge.

"If you want to know something you need to ask like a normal person, Astarion." He thinks hard about what he should say next, so as not to come off like a lost little pup following the first kind soul they come across.

"What's true freedom like?" He asks lightly, sure she has experienced exactly what he craves. He was quasi-free but his master was still out there somewhere, looking to place him back in shackles.

She purses her lips, thinking. "I am not free." She brings her index finger to her temple, tapping a few times. Astarion feels his own swim in his brain, knowing it's being talked about. She sighs. "If you are referring to the precious few days before the tadpole and after I escaped the Underdark I..." she trails off. "It's hard to explain."

A blatant sadness envelopes her face. Astarion feels a desire to reach out to her in the moment, but refrains. It must be the tadpole feeling sorry for one of its own, he tells himself.

"True freedom is much more than getting revenge on your tormentor, if that is what you want to know."

That was definitely not the answer he wanted, but it was the truth all the same. He lets her words linger. They both ponder their past and present bondage separately for a time, losing themselves in their thoughts.

As he battles with his inner turmoil, he feels her warm presence appear in his mind, still on the outer edge of his thoughts. Her apparition reaches out, inviting him into her mind. The scale wall of her brain's entrance glimmers. The illusions of the two elves walk through it as she leads him into a memory she means to share with him.

Her memories come to him in fragments at first. For weeks, she stumbled blindly through the Underdark, not a clue where she was going, surviving on nothing but raw mushrooms. Sheer terror had its claws in her throat and wouldn't let go. She had escaped The House, escaped Menzoberranzan, but was utterly clueless as to how to find the surface.

She stumbled upon a small caravan of three slavers eventually and secured safe passage to the surface. How exactly she did this was redacted in the memory, a silver tongue and… The memory becomes blurry, but Astarion feels a shame that was all too familiar to him. These particular feelings of hers were locked away from his reach, but despite her best efforts the desperation, the humiliation, still crept up on him. He tries his best to push it away.

Her freedom manifested after several weeks of travel in the form of a rickety elevator that would take them to the surface. The drow was still frightened, but her freedom was so close she could truly see it for the first time. She killed the slavers quickly once they got the elevator running, stuffing what she could in her rucksack to sell later.

Her heart swelled as the elevator lifted her closer and closer to the surface, to freedom. When they were still juveniles, Szdaer always told her she would perish in the sun, but her dragons told her that was ridiculous. Syre was forged in lightning and the boy wanted her to believe the sun could stop her? Stupid child, they told her. And you are stupid to believe him.

The elevator came to a jolting halt in a rundown shed. It is empty save for a few boxes with some rope and a small stash of rotting rations. Her ears perked up to an unfamiliar drumming sound on the roof. Adrenaline pumped through her, her hands hovering over her dagger. She listened closer for sounds of footsteps but heard nothing except the drumming. It didn't sound like any musical instrument she had heard before, but whatever it was had a comforting rhythm she was drawn to.

She pried open the door slowly. Not a soul or another building was in sight. Water fell from above, and something in her bones told her it was a gift from her ancestors. They were crying for her from the heavens. She carefully reached a hand out, feeling the cold drops caress her skin. It felt rejuvenating, inviting even. She stepped out fully into the open air, taking a few shaky steps as she was reborn underneath the same sky her ancestors once ruled.

Her legs gave out beneath her and she fell to her knees, mud splattering against her dark robe, against her blue skin, in her matted hair. She threw her head back, staring at the endless gray sky above her. She had never seen anything like it in her decades in the dark, and the vastness took her breath away. A slow smile passed her lips, or perhaps more of a grimace. Her eyebrows knitted together and a guttural cry escaped her, a noise she had never heard herself make before.

Her lungs filled with the fresh air, and her skin glistened as the rain fell onto her. She imagined this must be what a fish felt like reentering the ocean after being suffocated by oxygen. Relief washed over her like the rain. It was over. She made it. She started to cry, body slumped in the mud. She clutched at the ghost of her shackles on her neck. A bluish glow appears around her as she cries out again. Her scream turns into a loud thunder resonating through her veins and, soon after, a fierce aura of pure archaic energy shoots from her body, scorching the ground beneath her. Her lightning shoots into the sky, disappearing into the clouds.

Astarion feels her every emotion as if they were his own. Her lightning dances on his skin as he watches, blanketing him in a warmth he has never known before. He sees the rain through the drow's eyes, as a miracle and a thing of utter beauty. Her moment of freedom swells in his dead heart and a sadness the feeling was stolen almost as quick as it came by the Illithids.

The memory fades and they are brought back to the campfire in front of them.

"Since you asked," she said simply, giving him a small smile. The drow wears her heart on her sleeve, seemingly asking him to sink his teeth in.

He smiles back. "Thank you for sharing. Truly."

She nods. "Goodnight, Astarion."

"Goodnight."

As he watches her walk away, he knows his plan is in jeopardy.