A/N: This fight kicked our asses to the moon and back, but all told I think everyone felt pretty good about it! This quest was literally only beneficial to Astarion and his personal arc, and yet everyone seemed so willing, not one qualm over the deviation from the grand scheme from the bunch. I took it as their collective, resounding; "we're Astarion's ride or die" and this fight proved it man
Sabine spotted Karlach upended over a mound of broken masonry, the sight spiking her heart rate with such ferocity it drowned out Shadowheart completely. She scrambled the rest of the way up the terrace, and vaulted over rubble with fatigued gracelessness. Rebuffing their otherwise revered cleric, while she yelled about strenuous activity, and the obstinate sorceress's less than favorable condition. Her demands failing to be heeded, the elder half-elf and the others trailed after her as best as their collective lethargy would allow.
"Karlach-," Sabine skid to a halt and dropped to her knees, frantic in her attempts to rouse her. The response was a groggy moan, more befitting to being woken too early in the morning, than it was of agony. All the air rushed from Sabine's lungs in powerful relief. She recalled the fear that pierced through her like a shard of ice, the chill lumping in her throat with fast spreading numbness with every swallow against it, upon seeing her strewn backward in mangled armor. She then doubled down with firmer insistence. "Karlach!"
Karlach stirred, begrudging the consciousness that punished even her slightest movements with a rippling snarl. Every part of her body ached. Tenderness blossoming at the points of impact where her breastplate had dented in, as if to bite her. The gnarled metal clamped down against her resistance like the jaws of a beast. She labored to right herself against the pressure, her breaths choppy and rasping.
"That's the very last time I try to juggle an orthonic handbomb, I'll tell you what." Slurred with drowsiness, she grimaced around a cough, acidic with her blood. Though it fast morphed to a crooked grin at Sabine's offered hand. Thrilled beyond thrilled she was able to accept it.
The seasoned Tiefling had been the one that felled Yurgir in the end, coming as a surprise to none.
Taunting the Orthon as she bounced back and forth, she lit up the bomb between his feet with a single crossbow bolt, and ruinous precision. The detonation triggered an explosive chain in a spherical perimeter, enveloping he and a fellow Merregon in crackling flames that lapped around their writhing bodies like brittle logs in a hearth. Their curdling screeches fizzling as they disintegrated to heaps of ash where they once stood.
Adrenaline flooded through her, burning molten at the heart of her chest. Blinding her from the realization that despite the breadth of the discharge, a Merregon from his entourage had been spared. Crippled on his side, singed by the fringes of the radius as opposed to the full brunt like his leader, he swiped at the sole surviving handbomb, and lobbed it her way. Hurtling towards her face as he choked on a final, spluttering breath.
One moment she was on her feet. The next she was gone. After the blast had deafened, and the smoke cleared, Sabine called to her from below the terrace where she and the others were fighting to survive the remaining three. Dreaded silence the only reply. Needless to say, she was downed for the rest of the fight.
"I'm just relieved you're alright." The little half-elf uttered with a huff as she helped hoist the sluggish soldier to her feet. "I'm relieved we're all alright."
"Agreed. That was certainly one of our more precarious encounters." Gale's smirk contorted into a wince as Shadowheart pinched and prodded his face, wrinkling her nose at the blood that continued to trickle fresh from his. Splotched a brilliant pink, the bridge that now looked to be a little crooked, pinched his tone nasal. "I'm quite pleased to have come out the other end of this story intact enough to tell it."
Sabine nodded with a deep sigh, able to only just catch her breath that moment. In turn, it allowed the full extent of her own injuries to be felt. Her back and hip now screamed.
The Orthon's prized beast had twisted a tentacle around her waist, only to snatch her from her toes and whip her horizontally over a pillar. Thudding to the ground limp and windless, it seemed to dip beneath her once her eyes finally peeled back open. She laid still against her chest's shallow heaving for breath. Astarion's shouts at her to get up reached through her tinnitus, muffled and distant, as if heard from underwater.
The little sorceress tried to blink away the tilting of the room in vain. At the other end, she caught sight of both he and his hallucinated duplicate, back to to back with Wyll, each wielding their blades in impressive flurries of steel.
Bronze then glinted in her peripheral. Following it, she found Karlach's hammer discarded by its lonesome not far from where they stood. Sabine approached and bent at the waist to slip a hand around the handle, still warm from her contact. Moving to straighten back up so as to reunite the two, the weight of it retaliated with a pop of her unequipped shoulder, yanking her back down with it. Frowning, the little sorceress readjusted her estimation of strength. Grabbing a hold with both hands, and straining with all her might to lift it, she only got as far as prying up the handle. The head didn't budge from the ground.
"That was adorable." Hardy as she was, Karlach was back on her feet proper, if not a hair slower than usual. Boasting a one-handed grasp with nonchalance, she lifted it from Sabine with ease, slotting it in it's place behind her back. "Thanks anyway, doll."
Sabine palmed the back of her neck with a shrug, and sheepish grin. Shadowheart had since given up on addressing her damage, focusing instead her efforts on Wyll.
His stubbornness equaled to Sabine's, the battle left him infinitely less mobile. The Sharran knelt beside his outstretched leg, brows furrowed and palms hovered above his swollen knee.
His arms raised in an overheard strike against the Merregon before him, he was rushed by a third, while the second monopolized both Astarion's full time and attention. Wyll was afforded the opportunity to land his fatal blow, only to then be dropped to the ground himself. An ornate war hammer connected with the anterior side of his knee. By the guttural holler that ripped from deep in his chest, every inch of his patella was surely splintered beyond reconstruction.
The severity of his injury wasn't enough to subdue him, it never was. Answering in kind while still laid on his side, with a few deliberate flicks with his blade, the Merregon then joined him on the ground, meeting his end by a final, expert slash. Wyll's head then dropped back with a grunt, his body count still surpassing everyone else's, despite his newfound disadvantage.
Speak of the devil, she sought out Astarion. Still standing tall, he occupied by studying his nails.
Clasping her hands behind her, she sidled up to him. Apart from a bruise or two marring his high-cheek bones, and the delicate, almost purposefully placed cut striping over his lower lip, he remained untouched. An observation that saw her most grateful.
"It's impolite to gawp, darling." He sniffed, not yet meeting her gaze as he cleaned his blades. His bored expression did little in the way of masking the playful lilt to his tone. "Not to mention unsightly."
Her lips pulled in a sly quirk at the corner. "Astarion."
He kept her waiting a beat, before flicking his hooded gaze up from his dagger, now thoroughly glinting. "Hm?"
She stared at him with patience as grating as her expectant silence. He merely blinked at her, raising one manicured brow in defiance. She didn't bend. The tiny smile starting at the corner of her mouth persisted, one he assumed she meant to be ingratiating, both of her brows lifted in wait.
A curt exhale shot through his nose. "What, do I have a stye, or?" He gestured with his hands to get her to come out with it. "What is it you want?"
She simpered. "A little appreciation would be lovely."
"I kept you all alive, did I not?" He was echoed by Shadowheart's scoff, bristling with fervor. "What more could you possibly want?"
"A simple 'thank you' will do."
His eyes rolled so far back nothing but his whites were visible.
"And next you'll remind me to wash behind my ears, no doubt." He mocked with his signature degree of theatrics. "I'm not a child."
"How lucky for you, then, that gratitude is not a virtue exclusive to children." Her inflection was nothing short of patronizing. "Repeat after me; thank you, everyone, for your help. I appreciate your unquestioning kindness."
A stare-down ensued, with only one party seemingly clueless to the fact that the victor was obvious from the start. Everyone's attention was focused on their display, the good-natured friction as readily noticeable as the height disparity between them. Even Shadowheart paused in her tending of Wyll long enough to watch the match unfold. Coming as a shock to none of them, Astarion conceded, with a deep sigh of vexation hissing through his grit teeth like steam from a simmered pot.
Shutting his eyes as a means to draw strength, so that he didn't have to witness the pleasure the little sorceress would most assuredly derive from his surrender, he then recited her script.
"Thank you all for your... help." His usual velvet timbre was stripped, his words mottled and unrehearsed. "I appreciate your... unquestioning... kindness."
The words clawed their way out of a throat that fought to keep them caged. His body stiffened through his awkward articulation, forming the words with the disjointed cadence of one straining through a new language. Devoid of both sincerity and humility.
His delivery met by a peer review of five, all regarded the elf with varying degrees of amusement. Sabine's doe-eyes sparkled with gentle encouragement. Shadowheart's lips pursed with a lift of her brows, as she shouldered Wyll upright against her.
"Well, the execution could do with some refinement." Her snicker dry. "Though overall I found it satisfactory."
"Your gratitude has made it all worth it in the end, my friend." The warlock bared his teeth in a wide, gradual grin. "Not to mention the honor and privilege of once more fighting at your side."
Gale now held a cloth to the side of his skull to stamp the bleeding. A gaping wound won from the very start of the battle, the beast ricocheted off his chest in a pounce, and laid him out flat. Ears still ringing on the verge of a concussion, he eyed the glowering vampire with wryness.
"Gods, you're not very good at this at all, are you?" He then paused, pondering an internal, solo debate. "Though credit due where credit earned, far be it from me to fault one's utmost. You're most welcome, Astarion."
That just left Karlach, whose golden eyes shimmered with pride above a lopsided grin. Courtesy of the shrapnel, it pulled the cracks splintering throughout her ruby visage in a way that made his own face ache as he looked at her.
"Aw, Fangs." Bounding toward him, she clapped him on the shoulder, lurching him forward with a soft grunt. "I'd do it again in a heartbeat."
He brushed his coat for dust that wasn't there. "Yes, well, how fortunate for you, my dear, that you do not have one."
Karlach deigned his loving underhand with a cackle, ducking to fish Wyll's arm from Shadowheart's shoulders to instead drape over her own, slipping her arm around his waist. Not even being rendered immobile as he was could dampen his high spirits, the sense of accomplishment from having conquered such an adversary insurmountable. She clicked her tongue at him.
"You're a mess, you!"
"Ah, speak for yourself," the cerise glow of his good eye burning ever brighter with resolute mirth, he hobbled along, "I'm ready for the next twelve!"
"Hah!"
Astarion sighed, his eye-lids heavy. He didn't look at Sabine when he addressed her, he didn't need to. His skin prickled under her persisting gaze, and wretched self-satisfaction.
"Was that sufficiently appreciative?"
Her pout wriggled in a small smile of sickly sweet pacification. "Yes."
The little half-elfs mismatched eyes flitted across him as she stole another step closer, well within his range to grasp at her and pull her in. The lines of his handsome face deepened as he looked her over with thinly veiled remorse; twin gashes streaked her soft, youthful face. An angry seam split her left brow down the middle, while another opened her cheek in a considerable width under the opposite eye. Both succumbed to thick coagulation, dark and horrific against her sun-kissed freckles.
It couldn't be said that he delighted in seeing any of them maimed, least of all from such a selfish errand. Though having to be faced with her physical battery, however minor, knotted his stomach in a yet unfamiliar, and most unwelcome remorse. Whether he liked it or not, these moments confronted him with the reality of their bond, the depth of which he hadn't anticipated.
"I must... apologize to you, as well." The admittance pressed down against her chest with it's candid weight. Her brows bowed as she listened, noting how beautifully tragic guilt sounded on his too-lovely voice. "In truth, I gave very little thought to what this might entail."
"Don't." The petite half-elf regarded him with such warm affection, it stoked within him a deep-seated greed. "This was of great importance to you, which in turn makes it so for us all."
"Oh please," tittering with cynical exaggeration, he was able to rely on self-deprecation once more to stay his course. "I'll not pretend this undertaking was for any reason other than to appease you, you sweet thing. Seeing as how your... overt attachment to me extends the benefit of prioritization."
A single brow arched in challenge above crystalline amber eyes, they narrowed up at him in disappointment. Her bracelets jingled as she planted her tiny fists on her hips. "You don't truly believe that... everyone did all of this just to make me happy?" Her inflection just shy of furious, it attracted more than a few prying ears.
Before he got the chance at rebuttal, Shadowheart once more was first to volunteer her input. "Under different circumstances, I'd advise against doing a devils bidding. But if there is an edge to be gained against your pursuer, I'd have to agree that's a worthwhile endeavor, whatever shape it may take."
Gale second her, chuckling, "What doesn't kill us only brings us closer together."
Wyll was next to chime in, detaching from Karlach's shoulder to lean an elbow against Gale. "What's a bum knee for an ally in need, eh? Perhaps it'll make me a tad more endearing." He tossed his chin, eye flicking upward. "You know, in conjunction with the horns."
With a beaming smile, Sabine silently reinstated her challenge to his prior assertion. They all waited while he ingested their fawning. His expression blank, after a moment he simply exhaled, the micro adjustments twitching his lips and brow hinting of distaste.
"Oh dear, as if the lot of you weren't mawkish enough already." His tone flat, the proceeding scowl was abruptly wiped clean from his haughty face in exchange for horror, as he was snatched from his feet, and locked from behind in a bruising hug from Karlach.
Her biceps locked in a vice grip around his shoulders, squishing him with the same indelicate handling a small child might employ with a pet. Fierce with her protectiveness, she then pledged aloud;
"I swear on all things good and lovely across Faerûn, that if Cazador ever so much as LOOKS in your general direction I will snap him over my knee like a twig!"
His signature velvet purring was strangled to a screeching yowl, as if he had a tail that Karlach just stepped down on with her full weight. He now struggled to speak for a different reason entirely. "I commend your... enthusiasm, darling, but if... you don't unhand me... the only vampire in risk of getting snapped is... me."