Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Here’s a question for you,” Astarion says, fletching arrows by firelight. “Or rather, for your employer. Ilmater’s hung up on compassion. One might even call it his entire artistic medium.”

“Which part of that was the question?” Lash murmurs. 

She squats before a row of little corpses: a mouse, a vole, the remains of a rabbit. Each of them had been turned half to goo by the shadow curse, their bones glinting like stolen jewels.

Astarion reaches down to finger a lock of Lash’s thick hair. She’ll give up on trying to dispel Reithwin’s plague from the bodies soon enough, just as she has every night for a tenday. A quiet cuss will slip out beneath her breath, and then she’ll wander off to flay dried fish for dinner. 

Cooking seems to soothe her more than prayer ever did.

“The question is obvious, darling. Suffering is everywhere; the world rather spins on it. Is your god falling down on the job?”

With a sigh, Lash falls back onto her ass. She cranes her neck back to watch him: he’s perched on a tree stump behind her. “Feeling philosophical, are you?”

“Not like there’s anything else to occupy us in this wretched place.”

Every dark hour wasted here seems more miserable than the last. Astarion’s gone soft for sunlight; craves it in its absence like a safe place to sleep. 

Belatedly, he remembers himself. “Actually, I can think of one thing I’d rather be doing.”

He props an ankle on her shoulder, making a show of it: leaning back on his stump to stretch out the lines of his body. His skin is beautiful, he knows, in half-light. Ethereal.

He’s so tired of it. Of skin.

Lash gives the quiet chuckle he’s come to expect from her, patting at his boot. “Later, if you want.”

A sly grin settles around her tusks. As though the two of them know something, together, that’s hidden from the world. He feels a pinch of annoyance: it’s a rather one-sided secret, isn’t it, if the reason he beds her is to feel safe at night?

She’d ridden him last time. When she came, she didn’t make a show—didn’t ride tall, her muscled back arching, praise spilling from her lips. Instead she’d curled up over him: taken her weight on her forearms, breathing blissful noises into his ear. They’d moved slowly. Her hair stuck to his lips.

He drops his fletching, arrows rolling on black earth. “My question stands. Clearly, Ilmater helps only a very few. Smacks of corruption, doesn’t it? Favoritism?”

Lash’s brow pinches. She lifts his ankle from her shoulder—scoots around to face him and sets it in her lap. “You ask somebody in the Open Hand Temple, they’ll tell you that…since suffering and patience are sacred, things can’t change until they’re meant to. ‘S a balance.”

“How convenient for a lazy god. You believe that rot?”

“Not really.”

He gives her a sharp look.

She casts a wry glance at her row of little corpses. “He can’t save everyone. Doesn’t have the power for it. Has to…pick and choose, I guess, and send us out to work on the rest. You’re right it’s not fair.”

He looks down at her—warm gray skin; hair loosed from its tie—and lets the annoyed pinch grow into a pit at the base of his stomach. Into a choking rage he chokes down for his own good.

“Then why?” he scowls. “Why…give false hope to a horde of filthy faithful?”

Why spread the legend far enough that a spawn spends years praying, wishing, imagining the Crying God blowing down the kennel door? He’d heard the stories: Ilmater manifesting to lead prisoners home. 

A god who picks and chooses.

“Any good you could possibly do”—the word twists without his meaning it to, you like an accusation—“is a drop in the fucking ocean. Why humor such a helpless god?”

Lash shrugs. She runs a finger down the toe of his boot, thoughtful. “Better than being helpless alone.”

***

Astarion remembers the Waning Moon rather differently: warm firelight instead of a ghastly green glow, with fewer zombies wearing grooves in the floorboards. He certainly would have remembered the bartender. Thisobald’s rotten belly jiggles when he bellows from across the tavern: “Come and drink!”

“Ugh, no thank you,” Astarion mutters to Lash. “Not my vintage.”

He moves to thumb his blade from its sheath. She stops him with a tap to his hand: wait.

Lash watches Thisobald with strange intensity, and Astarion’s arm hair prickles. He remembers her turning the undead.

“I could use a drink,” she says—low, calm as ever. 

Astarion gapes at her for a moment. Then he grins, delighted, and follows her to the bar.

The rest of the party’s still combing the House of Healing. They hadn’t expected the tavern to be more than a potential resupply point—optimistic, given the curse, but scarcity makes scavengers of even the most arrogant. Astarion should know.

How convenient, to find another moldering Thorm begging a killing blow.

“Evening, barkeep,” Lash says levelly, propping an elbow on the bar. “What’s on tap?”

Astarion barely stifles a laugh. It’s good for a laugh, all of this—but Lash isn’t laughing. 

“Special brew,” Thisobald slurs, filling a tankard from the barrel on his back. “Tell me a story. Delight me.”

He pushes the tankard towards her. She cradles it thoughtfully in her big hands.

Lash isn’t much of a talker. But the truth of it is, she looks like she belongs here.

Not in a zombie-infested wasteland, specifically. But in a quiet tavern: leaning in to make small talk with the keeper after a long day’s work. He pictures her in a laborer’s tunic, or carting around a basket of sweet meats to sell at market. Nothing…holy, or hallowed, or righteous. Nobody belonging behind closed temple doors.

Just a woman with faint lines spiderwebbing out from the corners of her eyes.

“Got a few stories, I suppose,” she murmurs. “Saved a druid’s grove. Fought a hag.”

“Then drink!” Thisobald groans. “Drink, drank, be drunk!”

Lash hesitates. He can’t blame her: the glop in her tankard looks halfway to sentient. 

“I can tell you a story,” she says slowly, “but if you don’t mind, I’d like to know more about you first. About how you…got this way.”

“Boring!” the corpse bellows, slamming a fist on the bar. “Drink!”

“Bottoms up, darling,” Astarion says cheerfully, sliding onto the seat beside her. “Wouldn’t do to insult our host.”

Lash shoots him a long-suffering look. 

Thisobald doesn’t look at him at all: his filmy white eyes stay stuck on Lash. A fly crawls out from a fold in his neck. Something wriggles beneath the skin of his palm.

“A toast! Make a toast, damn you! Drink with me, or drink in the hells!”

“To life,” Lash says suddenly, lifting her tankard.

Thisobald goes rather still.

“To—to life,” she repeats stubbornly, “and all its ups and downs. May they all be between the sheets.”

Thisobald’s big head tilts sideways. Silence for a beat, then two—then he howls with laughter. Roars with it; sends spittle flying. He clanks Lash’s tankard so hard the muck splashes down her armor. 

Astarion wrinkles his nose. Lash sneaks him a grin over her rim anyway, small and pleased. 

Thisobald drinks, his belly straining. Lash drinks, and stays somehow upright.

“That’s it, tusker, hold your drink. Now tell me a story! A saga!”

Lash shakes her head to clear it. “I—when I was a novice at the Open Hand, I went with Father Lorgan to search the bluffs over Rivington. A young bloke had gone missing, a wax carver, and the blacksmith swore up and down there was a wight in the hills. I’d never seen an undead before.”

Not the kind of story Astarion would have picked for a moldering barkeep who’d damn near lost his mind over a basic double-entendre, but she’s surprised him before. Lash’s stories often wrap around to subtle punchlines where you expect to find a moral. She seems allergic to putting her deepest convictions into words.

But instead of regaling Thisobald with a wry story halfway to heresy, she plays it rather straight: Father Lorgan teaches her how to track the wight to its barrow. He shows her how to pull the unlife from it softly, by daylight, so it never even screams.

Astarion shifts in his seat. Hooks an ankle, hard, around the leg of his stool. 

“There’s more than one way to lay a disintegrating soul to rest,” Lash says. “Mostly, you have to do it with violence. But sometimes…”

Her eyes rove the mound of flesh that is Thisobald. The places where his skin peels back. 

He rumbles dangerously: “I said a story. That wasn’t a story.”

Foreboding prickles down Astarion’s spine. “Darling—”

“There are different methods.” Lash speaks faster now, and stiffly, as though falling back on some remembered text. “Sometimes, rarely, the subject is willing. Its power can be dispelled without pain.”

Gone is the storyteller’s cadence. Thisobald looms over them, and Astarion unsheathes his knife beneath the bar.

“I—I can help,” Lash says unconvincingly. “Untwist things—make it easier to rest.”

“No story!” Thisobald roars. A sweep of his arm sends their tankards flying. Lash scrambles to her feet. “No story, no rest, no nothing!” 

Astarion springs from the floor to his barstool to the top of the bar—he buries a blade in Thisobald’s shapeless neck. 

No time for a holy fool’s mercy. The undead converge.

***

Later, after Gale and Karlach have saved their sorry hides, after they’ve used up Lash’s curative powers and then downed three precious potions besides, he finds her gathering firewood at the edge of camp: at the very edge of safety, where firelight still tepidly wraps her skin.

“You should save the sweet-talking for the experts, darling. I’ve told you this before.”

“Wasn’t sweet-talking him,” she mutters, refusing to meet his eyes. “Thought I could help.”

The angry pinch returns. “Well, we both know you’re rather shit at the soft touch. Next time, play to your strengths, hmm? Burn the bastard to cinders instead.”

Her gaze snaps onto his, furious. “That’s all I’m good for, is it? Holy fire; a good smiting?”

He’s never seen her this angry. He flinches. On his body, this means a sudden stillness. Almost nothing; undetectable. Cliffs rise, shadowed, at the edges of his sight. 

Then Lash makes a soft, wounded noise in the back of her throat, and he can relax again. 

Her meager pile of kindling clatters to the ground. “I’m sorry. I just—I never know the right thing to say. To do it right.”

“And what’s so wrong with that?”

“I’m meant to minister. To ease pain.”

“I’m honestly not seeing the problem. You were a soldier, once. That clearly makes you a better asset to your cringing superiors than a hundred acolytes wielding bandages and…banal little blessings ever were. They can use you as a shield, a wall, and get on with their business behind you.”

It’s something he and Ilmater have in common: using Lash. 

The thought wedges like a splinter. He swallows, mouth gone dry. “Maybe stick to the bawdy toasts next time. You’re not half-bad with those.” 

Lash gives an exhale halfway to a laugh. Her gaze is drifting again: out to the ever-pressing darkness. Her broad back draws inward. The sight of it—of her shoulders slumped—is unfamiliar, and sends a restless prickle down his spine.

He should bed her tonight; offer a much-needed release. But when she doesn’t turn back to look at him, the prickle turns into a crack at his core. He decides, instead, to make his excuses and beat a hasty retreat: to huddle up under blankets until the unfamiliar feeling loosens its grip on his joints.

Still, he can't resist lobbing a parting shot. “Fuck saying the right thing, truly. Sympathy’s nothing but acid in the wound.”

“You’ve told me that before.”

“And I meant it. If I’m suffering, keep your bleeding-heart verses away from me.”

It had been worse, centuries ago, to know the verses. To know which prayers to say.

“Noted.” She musters up some tired wryness. “I’ll be sure to wallop the sick and suffering over the head next time.”

“For your lot, I think the cat o’nine tails is more traditional.”

Lash turns toward him, dry-eyed, and something in his stomach untwists. She runs a hand through her hair. “What about actual aid? Someone who shuts up and helps?”

“Strange fantasy,” Astarion says.

*** 

Touch your chest four times to draw the rack Ilmater suffers on.

It was a young father, redheaded, passing through with a caravan to Scorubel. He’d worn Ilmater’s talisman around his wrist: a pair of bound hands. Astarion had eased him onto the guest room bed, and bit bruises down his neck, and palmed the talisman for himself.

But before that, in the tavern: Touch your chest four times, the man had explained, to draw the rack—

Astarion drew the rack. For four years after, he drew the rack—even allotted Ilmater extra time when no one came to save him. More time than he gave Helm, at least, and Selûne. Dramatic rescues of dramatic wretches were in his wheelhouse, weren’t they?

But no one came. Cazador killed the redheaded man, and his redheaded daughter. Astarion went blind into the night again, again, again—

—to draw the rack Ilmater suffers on, and Astarion’s stretched out on the frame, ankles and wrists fastened down. Godey cranks the lever, and pain cracks through his shoulders—his hips, his legs, his every inch splitting, muscles ripping like a fucking leg of ham thrown to a dog under the table. Pieces bitten off. 

Cazador dangles the talisman above his face, mouth curling wide. “What devotion, boy. Draw the rack—”

Astarion jolts awake.

He can’t, for a moment, think. The roof of his tent spins; the ground falls out below. Invisible weight presses air from his rotting lungs, and he thinks: I can’t do this, I can’t be this anymore—

A hand moves gently through his hair.

Fingertips come to rest, with each stroke, against his forehead. Then they drag carefully back through the strands, tugging only slightly. Only as a reminder that the world exists.

The hand moves rhythmically. It moves like it’s been there a long time.

His vision settles. Above him: Lash’s jutting jaw, her thoughtful brow. She sits up beside him, staring out into nothing—her colors soft in the dark.

“You can sleep,” she says quietly. “‘M sorry I woke you.”

You didn’t, he means to say, but his throat closes up before he can get the words out. The hand passes through again, his scalp tingling.

Lash sighs. “Can go back to my own tent, if you want. Just…wanted some company.”

She doesn’t say it coyly, like a flirtation. She never does. It’s a relief, perhaps, that she’s always told him bluntly what she wants: there is no art to her seduction. If she wanted sex, he would know.

So—so perhaps he doesn’t need to bed her now. Doesn’t need to drag himself upright. Her palm moves over his curls, and his eyes squeeze closed.

He’s cold under the blankets. Her thigh is warm by his cheek. 

Her voice is level, and calm. “It looked like maybe you were having a bad dream.”

That damned hand keeps moving, soft and wide and unbound—no red cord to bind it. Nothing devotional, save how the feeling slips between his ribs and hurts him there. 

He wants, quite suddenly, to cry. But that won’t do—that will never do—so he forces his breaths to even out and die off into nothing. Straightens his limbs, and lets his lashes flutter as though deep in reverie, or sleep.

Chapter Text

He wakes the next day in a directionless rage.

Karlach helps disassemble his tent and receives only biting sarcasm in return. Wyll offers blood for breakfast and is met with a scathing critique of his gavotte—devastating, surely, since it’s his favorite after the sarabande. 

He doesn’t say a word to Lash. 

On the road back to Last Light, bare branches form gnarled rib cages in the dark. Sometimes—rarely—their party passes Harpers headed the other way. Sent to scout, or spy, or die on Jaheira’s orders. Their faces look drawn in the lamplight. 

“It’s a wonder they haven’t all deserted yet,” Astarion mutters. “Though perhaps we’re just seeing the dregs: heroic dimwits without the sense to run.”

Shadowheart sniffs beside him. “I haven’t been overly impressed with the Harpers, true. But you don’t seem to know much about zealots with a cause.”

“By all means, darling, throw some stones. I thought your glass house was tacky anyway.”

Shadowheart doesn’t dignify that with a response. Jaheira’s agents brighten when they recognize Lash, stopping to beg a blessing before darkness swallows them whole. 

They’re going to die, of course. Lash doesn’t tell them this. She nods seriously at whatever they ask her, saying little in return. 

She’s taken to looping a red cord through her belt. The sight clots Astarion’s rage into a heavy ball in his chest. When they reach Last Light’s glow—when she finds a corner table and opens a bottle of wine for the both of them—it’s easier to see all the muck and monsters’ blood that stains it. 

“Not much of a holy symbol,” Astarion sneers, hoping to upset her. “I’d offer to wash it, but my touch might contaminate.”

Lash just frowns, paging through the ledger they’d found at the Waning Moon. There’d been no reason to keep it, except Lash had called it a knot of pain. One of her inane, cryptic little comments that compare all the world’s evils to a bit of tangled yarn. Something you could, in theory, unsnarl.

Or slice through with a blade.

She reads slowly, finger moving over the words.

“Alright, love,” he snaps. “Let’s entertain one another. Philosophy again: you said your god has to pick and choose. Stands to reason he prizes efficiency, yes? The most impactful rescues, maybe, or the ones that form a sort of…heroic daisy chain. You slaughter my slaver, I start an orphanage. That sort of thing.”

That gets her attention. She looks up at him, brow furrowing further. “That’s—you’re making a lot of assumptions.”

“It just stands to reason, doesn’t it? He can’t help everyone. So why not make it count?”

“Don’t really think he’s the chessmaster type.” Her eyes flick to Astarion’s clenched fist on the table; its stark tendons. “What’s this about?”

“Ah, so it’s random, then? How delightful! A spin of the wheel, dividing the saved from the damned.”

“I don’t—Astarion, I never said I had all the answers.”

“Clearly. So tell me this, darling.” He leans over the table, snarling—relishing the way she leans back from him. “Why wouldn’t the Crying God choose the tactical option? Leave a spawn to stew in pure shit for centuries, knowing he’ll do something important upon release? Something like, oh, help an Ilmatari cleric save the Coast from a mindflayer army?”

Wind creaks in the rafters, halfway a moan. The lanterns aren’t bright enough to chase shadows from each corner. 

Lash’s mouth opens, then closes again.

Satisfaction tears through him like a sharp hook. “The kennels were an excellent holding pen. Maybe Ilmater kept me in reserve.”

Lash slams the ledger shut, and he jumps. Her chair scrapes the hardwood as she stands; pins him with a glare.

“Then fuck Ilmater,” she says very clearly. Her eyes are a hard blue.

Astarion’s chest constricts. He stares up at her, struggling to form a coherent thought. Around them, Harpers drink and plan and make quiet conversation in the face of the inevitable: of death, certain and slow.

“If he did that to you,” Lash says deliberately, drivingly, “fuck him. I don’t think he would, but if he did—”

“You don’t know?” he sputters, the floor suddenly falling out beneath him: he’s missed a step, somewhere, and it’s all he can do to find familiar ground. “You don’t have diamond-hard faith that he means well? You swore your life to this bullshit!”

“Hells, I can’t read his mind! He’s never spoken to me, he’s never—but it wouldn’t matter.” Her eyes flash. “I’d find a way to live like this, with or without him. I’d try to be the same.”

Astarion is surprised to find himself breathing: cautious, whistling breaths. “You—you can’t mean you’d abandon your vows.”

“I don’t intend to.” Lash swings her pack onto her shoulder. She tips the rest of the wine bottle into Astarion’s glass, spattering droplets on the table. “I believe in what Ilmater does. But if I were wrong about him—if he were capable of leaving you like that, on purpose, in pain and in misery—”

Words seem to fail her. She looks at him like grieving. Like even the thought hurts.

Panic skitters down his spine, followed by a wash of something warmer. Something clean and close and yielding. His useless pulse jumps to life in his throat, a sick man struggling awake.

“He wouldn’t be the god I thought he was,” she says finally, “and my vows wouldn’t mean a thing.”

She leaves him there. The red cord swings at her hip, filthy. It’s impractical, really: a farcical symbol of a priesthood best left safe behind temple doors. It has very little to do with Lash and her killing hands. 

“Vows don’t work like that!” Astarion calls after her, voice hoarse.

When she doesn’t turn, he grabs his wine glass with shaking fingers. Downs it.

Ilmater uses Lash. That much is hardly in question. And she’s stupid for letting him, but—

I’d find a way to live like this anyway. Like swearing your godsdamn life away is only a means to an end: a way to amplify your own guilt-ridden efforts, swimming always upstream against the sewage of the world. 

Ilmater uses Lash. But maybe, Astarion thinks as he lurches from the inn, as he finds a quiet corner to sprawl and listen to Dammon’s ceaseless banging instead of his own pointless pulse—maybe Lash uses Ilmater right back. 

If Lash fights Cazador, it’s better her mace glows. But more than that—

If she’d take on the world regardless, quietly save every kitten, run half-suicidal into every dark place the minute he's not looking, isn’t it better she’s powerful? Isn’t it better she live, and keep living, and stay alive to attempt hopeless things? 

To sit safe in his tent at night?

The anger drains from his chest. Something sprouts in its place: a strange, stubborn weed in a dying land. 

Tender.

***

“There exists a record of Madeline’s guilt,” He-Who-Was says. “A ledger from the Waning Moon. With it, we can force her to face trial.”

The dwarf’s body lies splayed on the ritual circle. Nephmos’ gaze traces the runes; Gale cranes his neck to see the spellbook He-Who-Was reads from. 

“But I don’t need to tell you that,” the Shadar-kai says, turning blackened eyes on Lash. “You’ve brought the ledger to me, cleric, without being told. You sensed a great injustice.”

Lash’s jaw hardens. “Injustice and pain aren’t always the same.”

Still: she reaches for her pack.

He-Who-Was tilts his head, examining her. “This…coward has caused great suffering. You will judge her. Isn’t that what you are? A mechanism, bringing suffering to those who’ve caused it?”

Lash’s hands go horribly still at that.

Astarion draws his blade. Two steps put him in front of Lash, weight forward. “I’m sorry, who are you to demand all this? What do we care about some rotting barkeep who might’ve squealed to the Justiciars a hundred years ago?”

He’ll remove the threat if she lets him. Shred every shadow with his teeth.

“Perhaps a compromise,” Nephmos says quickly, always ready to negotiate. “We’ll turn over the ledger. Then you can—”

“I’ll do it,” Lash says quietly.

Astarion swears. He whips around to face her. “You can’t be serious. I swear this tattooed freak is just playing out a fetish. And if he’s not—”

The words catch in his throat: If he’s not, he could hurt you.

He hasn’t apologized. He doesn’t plan to. He wasn’t wrong: there’s no way to know how Ilmater chooses which wretches to save. 

But Lash isn’t Ilmater. She’s foul-mouthed and fumbling; painfully mortal. She doesn’t circle the world as a god.

(What a world it would be if she did.)

Strange red grasses sway without wind. Lash looks at him with thawing blue eyes, and a pit opens up in his stomach.

“This is not the time,” he hisses, “for your tepid cleric bullshit.”

Lash lays a hand on his shoulder, squeezing briefly: a steady weight. Then she nudges him out of the way. She toes the edge of the ritual circle, expression inscrutable, and tosses the ledger onto Madeline’s chest.

He-Who-Was grins wide. 

Strange dustmotes swirl and coalesce. The night thickens: death everywhere, inviolable. Pain.

He-Who-Was twitches, seizes, glows. He hunches in on himself, eyes twin pits of burning oil.

He becomes someone else.

“You!” Madeline warbles in his voice. “He said I was gonna be punished; that you’d be the judge. But I didn’t mean to hurt anyone!”

Lash holds up her hands, placating. “It’s alright. Madeline, you’re okay. I just want to hear what happened.”

Lash’s voice thrums with nerves, just like it had with Thisobald. Her hair’s done up in a plain bun, and Astarion wants quite suddenly to touch the skin along her hairline—the nape of her neck.

Instead he murmurs, “Fine. Fine. Judge her quickly, then. It’s cut-and-dry.”

Lash swallows, the wide lines of her throat flexing in the dark. “Alright if I ask you some questions, Madeline?”

The ghost takes sniveling breaths with the Shadar-kai’s lungs. A rhythmic keening: aah, aah, aah. 

Lash hesitates, her eyes flicking to Astarion’s. Then to Nephmos, who gives her a subtle nod. 

“Just a talk,” Lash says. It could have been a threat, with her soldier’s arms and her glowing mace. Instead, she sits down at the circle’s edge. Crosses her legs.

Madeline blinks down at her. “What—I don’t understand.”

“Sit with me. You were a barkeep, weren’t you? Pretend I’m your favorite regular.”

Gale makes a considering noise behind them. The red grass stirs harder, caught in a ghostly current nothing else can feel.

Slowly, Madeline lowers herself to the ground. She's clumsy in a bigger body: like a child learning its limbs.

In a wet voice she asks, “Want your usual?”

Lash rewards her with the ghost of a grin. “After the day I've had? Keep 'em coming."

And it’s like with Thisobald, except where it isn’t. In the Waning Moon, Lash had plowed clumsily into the heart of the issue: Thisobald’s undeath, and the offer to help him rest. She’d fallen back on dogma when her own ideas ran out.

Now, she offers up no ideas at all. She asks Madeline about her tavern, her favorite ciders, her family. What Thisobald had been like in life. 

It takes a long time. Astarion leans back against the rockface, watching her calloused hands.

“Unusual approach,” Gale whispers to Nephmos. “She hasn’t asked a single relevant question.”

Nephmos’ analytical black eyes dart to Astarion, tail curling around her ankle. “That's clerics for you. Won't even take notes for replicability.”

It’s damned strange. Lash doesn’t ask about the ledger at all. Instead, when she asks Madeline who her best friends were, the ghost starts to sob again: a great, heaving horror. A suffering her death failed to stop.

Astarion thinks of a cage in a kennel. Of the redheaded man’s young daughter, Cazador’s hand closing around her throat.

“Ben and Marc were just drunk and whining,” Madeline chokes out. “The Dark Justiciar promised she was gonna chat with ‘em. She promised.”

“So you gave her their names.”

“I’d do anything to take it back! Anything, anything—oh forgive me, please forgive me—”

“I can’t,” Lash says.

Astarion startles. The weed in his chest shrivels.

Madeline folds over herself, wailing—for an instant, he sees long black tresses spilling over her lap. Then he blinks, and it’s just He-Who-Was’ white hair gleaming in the dark.

“I can’t,” Lash repeats steadily. “Can’t forgive you, or condemn you, or—really do anything for you. I’m sorry.”

“What—what are you saying?”

Lash hesitates, her chapped lips parted. “I’ve tried asking forgiveness from other people before. Doesn’t much feel like anything, does it?”

Her eyes move to Astarion. The line of her brow softens. “Nobody can give it to you. It’s more of a thing you work at yourself. Wish it weren’t, but there you go.”

Madeline’s sobs peter out into sniffles. 

Lash sighs. She doesn’t look away from Astarion—doesn’t release him from the weight of her gaze. “Can I be honest, though? I don’t much care about forgiveness. I care more you’re not in pain.”

The red grasses still.

Something in his chest lurches. Cracks.

Madeline sits up straight. She watches Lash with wonder—then she laughs, a sound of pure relief. The dustmotes pulse and glow.

Her borrowed body jolts. The ghost-light fades from He-Who-Was’ skin, his beatific expression collapsing into a snarl. He crawls toward Lash like an injured dog.

“Agh! You were supposed to make her suffer! Not…forgive her!”

“I didn’t.”

She stumbles when she tries to stand. Astarion darts forward to support her, pure instinct, an arm looped around her back. She’s heavy. She’s shaking.

“Easy now, darling,” he murmurs. “Easy.”

Lash doesn’t quite meet his eyes, staring into the middle distance, but he knows her well enough to understand this as a sign of comfort rather than distress. She smiles: small and private, meant for the two of them.

Together they turn away from the ritual circle. 

He-Who-Was lunges to his feet, glaive suddenly in hand. With a shout of incoherent rage, he thrusts between Lash’s shoulder blades.

The glaive never makes contact. Astarion slides his foot behind the bastard’s ankle and pulls it forward, unbalancing them both. As they fall together, he plunges one blade into He-Who-Was’ stomach and slides the other across his throat.

Lash will take on the world regardless: run reckless into dark places, talking quietly to ghosts. She'll claim not to care about forgiveness even as she craves it. It’s pointless, absurd, and he can’t stop her.

But it’s better if she lives.

Chapter Text

Reverie is a tool: a way to process memory. It can even be a comfort, if you’re one of those baffling elves who haven’t had all of their tendons torn out thrice yearly for as long as they can remember. 

For the less fortunate—or perhaps just for Astarion—meditation is a trial. He can’t control the memories the way he should. Instead, Cazador surges from his darkest recesses and gobbles him up: flays him or compels him or puts him on the rack. 

The only mercy is variety. He’s formed different memories, of late.

Like: Lash turning the undead. Lash turning him.

He’d been ravenous, pursuing a pair of foxes beneath the Moonhaven apothecary. Skeletons had burst forth and pinned him down behind a casket.

Lash had saved him with a power designed to kill him. For an instant she’d let Ilmater overflow her, erase her, burn Lash-the-person straight out of her brain. She’d become a tower terrible and holy: consuming his undeath until even his tadpole’s protection nearly shuddered and gave out. 

She hadn’t known any better. Hadn’t guessed, yet, that to turn the skeletons would be to turn Astarion as well.

In the memory, terror shoots through him. He pleads: “Stop.”

And for a wonder—for once—the memory obeys him. It stops.

Sunbeams slant through the cavern. The foxes are frozen mid-leap. So long as he doesn’t look at Lash, doesn’t see her, the divine fear is gone.

He slumps against the casket, fingering the wound in his gut. He remembers the pain of it, and how it had felt to be healed. The rest of the night hadn’t gone half-badly: he’d expected a stake and was instead offered warm blood.

“Turning is a rather violent power, isn’t it?” he calls out conversationally. “For the Crying God to show his wrath, he must hate the cadaverous very much indeed.” 

The memory of Lash doesn’t answer. Too busy becoming a fucking apocalyptic emissary, presumably.  

He swallows. “You’re good at violence, love. It’s why I ensnared you: protection, power, the wrath of a god to smite my enemies.”

Bitterness floods his throat. He nearly twists around to look at her, some urgent impulse, but logic stops him just in time.

He won’t find Lash back there. Just the wrath of a god wearing her skin.

Be careful what you wish for.

Bright mosses cling to cavern walls. He tries to remember more about this day: the scent of foxes. The strange herbs in the apothecary. The way Lash had supported his weight with strong arms. The way she’d healed his wounds: a quiet word of power, grounded in the lowest registers of her voice. 

Tender.

“It’s just,” he says, voice cracking, “I don’t like remembering how you disappeared from yourself, here. How Ilmater ate you whole.”

Maybe he should look after all—weather the horror of it. It’s only a memory. 

Turn around. Just look, damn you.

“I’d just thought...” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Does it always have to be this way? Will I always see a god riding your coattails when I look at you?” 

He turns quickly, before he can stop himself. “Or can we just—can the two of us just—”

He stills.

Lash stands in the cavern’s center, humor in her eyes. Tumbling brown hair and a secret smile. Made up of nerves and warm skin and the dust of the earth, just like everyone else.

No holy hallucinations. As though Ilmater’s power, all the impersonal cruel mercy of it, were nothing but a bit of rice paper, easily torn through. Hiding a woman who drinks bad beer and worries about the right thing to say.

“I care more you’re not in pain,” she says, and Astarion wakes up.

His tent flutters in a high wind. Lash sits in the far corner, her shoulders relaxed. Her colors soft in the dark. 

He sits up.

“Shit,” she murmurs. “Sune’s tits. Did I wake you again?”

She holds a black orb: one of the memory vestiges dropped by the Shadows they’d slaughtered. 

She’d wanted to learn from the orbs. To untwist the wraiths more peacefully. She’ll fail, of course, but she’s a bloody-minded fool who plunges her bare hands into this dung heap of a world in service of—of wretches who don’t deserve it. 

Of scoundrels who give her nothing in return.

“Astarion?” she says.

He walks to her on his knees. Her eyes widen, and grow only wider when he lunges to kiss her, fingers scrabbling at her shoulders as he presses her to the ground. The orb rolls away. 

Lash makes a soft, surprised noise beneath him. A tusk presses against his lip and he shivers.

Her arms come up around him, protective. 

Then she spreads his legs with her broad thigh, and his kiss becomes frantic: open-mouthed and urgent and devoid of all art. He pulls his hand through her hair, mindless, spreading the curls out over the floor of his tent. 

He does this again and again, curl by curl, until she grips his hand to stop him. “You’re shaking.”

“Don’t talk about that,” he babbles against her neck. “Pretend you don’t see.”

This is, apparently, not a reassuring thing to say. Lash presses her palm to the back of his head, gently increasing the pressure until he gives up on kissing her jawline. He goes limp against her, obedient. He listens to her ragged breaths. 

Her voice comes out uncertain beneath him. “You’re…upset? I can’t always—what happened?”

The rich smell of her blood curls around him. He shakes his head without meaning to—keeps shaking it. Presses his face harder into her shoulder. 

“Astarion,” she says softly. “I can’t tell what you’re thinking. Help me understand.”

“I don’t want you to understand,” he says thickly. The words tumble out of him. “Trust me, love, it’s better this way.”

What would she say if he told her? If he admitted to using her; to seeing her power before he bothered to see her face?

Lash considers his new reticence quietly. She runs a thumb across the back of his neck, repetitive, and he shudders.

“Let me make you feel good,” he says. Half a minute ago he would have meant it, hungry for something he didn’t understand. Now the words come up like a mechanism: an instinct to distract.

Lash settles an arm around his waist; hooks his ankle with her own. Like he’s a love note, folded up and tucked into her hands.

“Alright,” she says. “Make me feel good. Tell me a story. Something racy and a little stupid, maybe. Or something with bite.”

He gives a wobbling laugh, startled. The wind dies down. 

The strange weed winds around his ribcage, climbing. 

***

Wraiths scream through the sky, sending the remains of Reithwin crumbling. Astarion darts between stone columns, his arrowtip aflame. Nephmos shouts words that could be spells or could be erudite profanity. Halsin shakes the ground when he moves, and Lash—

“Oliver!” Lash shouts to the boy on the dais. “Oliver, it’s time to come home!”

Astarion curses the Triad both by name and as a collective, dashing low to the ground toward her. The last time Lash had tried talking down this wretched little forest imp, the situation had devolved from hide and seek to a fight for their lives.

A wraith phases in right behind her, shadowed claws extended. Astarion shouts a warning, but she doesn’t need it. On instinct, she tears her mace through its side. A brutal, arcing swing, with a pulse of holy power as a chaser. The wraith dissolves.

“I don’t want to go home!” Oliver shrieks. “I’m not leaving—you can’t make me!”

And it’s easy to see, when you’re looking for it: the moment Lash gives up on the soft touch. When she sees the wraiths crowding them in, and Oliver’s protective dome glowing stronger, and the deep gashes down Halsin’s owlbear chest. When Nephmos takes a blow to the head and falls.

A thrill of anticipation runs through him. He reaches her side just as her eyes go hard and flat—the mechanism, she’d call it. Bringing pain to end it. The hammer coming down, finally, finally—what she was meant to do all along.

But Lash drops her mace. The Blood of Lathander, holy relic, clatters to the ground. Instead, she grabs Astarion and holds him tight to her chest.

He panics, hearing the wraiths all around them, diving, cutting off every escape. He struggles in her grip until he feels the positioning of her wrists behind him.

They’re crossed against his back—as though her hands were tied together. Manacled. A holy symbol.

“Fuck,” he says eloquently, shutting his eyes just in time. There’s a rushing in his ears like a falling tower, like a consuming fire, like a god passing close enough to stand his hairs on end. 

Lash turns the undead, embracing him. Like this, the terror never takes him. Instead her heartbeat pounds loud and steady and mortal in his ears.

It drums. It keeps drumming, on and on and world without end.

***

“Why couldn’t you just leave me alone?” Oliver wails. “I just wanted to play!”

“I’m sorry,” Lash says carefully. “I’m really sorry. It’s just, Thaniel misses you.”

“He’s nothing to me. He left me here, all this time!”

Lash looks down at him, at a loss. Shadows eat away at the boy’s face, a strange wound. Black ooze seeps over his collarbone, and Astarion does his best not to wrinkle his nose.

Halsin looms over them in owlbear form. The sky is blackest here in Reithwin town proper: a punishing darkness that strangles hope before it finds its wings. Nothing could grow here. Nothing could heal: not a wayward little forest waif, and certainly not the shadow of him. Hurt and changed.

“Thaniel didn’t abandon you,” Lash says finally. She crouches in front of the boy, her fingers twining together. “He was trapped, far away from here. Oliver? I promise he didn’t mean to leave you.”

Oliver’s face scrunches up like he’s going to scream at her again. Without quite meaning to, Astarion flops down on the dirty stone beside her. He faces half away from Oliver, lounging with his legs spilling down the dais stairs.

“He did do it, though,” he says to the black sky. “Leave you.”

Lash shoots him a look of consternation. Oliver makes a strange sound under his breath.

“I mean, alright,” Astarion continues, “I agree he didn’t mean to leave you. I can attest to pulling the brat from the Shadowfell myself. Or rather, watching an exceedingly large druid do it while petulant plants tried to strangle me alive, but the point is, he probably meant to stay with you. Friends ‘til the end, and all that.”

Something thoughtful comes into Lash’s expression. She tilts her head, watching him, and he hears the warm-strong-lovely pulse in her throat. He’ll probably hear it forever, now. It’s not a sound he knows how to drown out.

He swallows. “But his intentions didn’t matter in the end, did they? You got left here, same as if he’d done it to be cruel.” He wrinkles his nose at a barren copse of trees. “The lodgings leave something to be desired.”

Oliver’s stare sends a prickle down his spine. The eerie little shit is watching him open-mouthed.

“Suppose that’s fair,” Lash says quietly. “It’s fair to be hurt by it.”

“Of course it’s fair,” he scowls. “But that should hardly stop you from seizing the opportunity for something better.” 

He angles his chin, a proud picture. “You shouldn’t rot away in whatever miserable conditions you were abandoned to.” He hesitates. “Spite is—well, I’ll be honest, spite is delicious, but it has its drawbacks. You should take what’s offered. Even if it’s too little, too late.”

Halsin hoots gently behind them, a warm mass against the sky.

To his horror, Oliver sniffles. “But can—can I even go back anymore? I’ve changed. A lot.”

“So be changed,” Astarion says, irritated by the way Lash is smiling at the back of his neck.

Just like that, the boy brightens. “If I’m someone else—if I’m not Thaniel anymore—does that mean I can play with him? We can be friends?”

“You want to—ugh. So much for a grudge.” He leans toward Lash as though telling her a secret. She plays along, closing the distance until her breath warms his skin. “Children are awful,” he whispers loud enough for Oliver to hear.

Oliver, for some mad reason, giggles. He dissolves into green magic, oak leaves like feathers falling in his wake. 

The shadows do not lighten. Reithwin stays as dark and doomed as it’s ever been. But a green shoot grows through the cobblestones where Oliver had once stood.

Tender.

***

So he loves her. So what?

He seduced her with a lie. Whatever affection she feels for him is a house built on sand. To tell her would be the right thing, the brave thing, and Astarion is a consummate coward.

Not even the drow woman drives him to confess. The blood merchant makes him feel like a raw nerve, true, exposed and ever-bleeding. She makes him feel small. And Lash—

If the drow’s offer is a dream of the rack, Lash’s refusal is a warm hand in his hair on waking. Later, he won’t even be able to think on the memory directly, coming to it instead by pieces: the drow’s pursed lips. Karlach’s eyes catching his, a question or a reassurance. Lash’s fist closing on the shaft of her mace. The anger in her level voice.

So he loves her. So what? 

So he wants her to stay alive. So he wants to nag her while they pick herbs for her evening stew. So he wants to tease her until she hides her laugh behind her hand—until she reddens and watches him like someone worth loving. So what?

So he wants to live inside her, in her chest, even though a god will be a terrible roommate. So what?

So he watches Lash free the gnolls in the kitchens—watches her tear through their psychic chains. Watches them kill their master as Lash looks on with hardened eyes, as though even monsters deserve a god’s mercy. 

That idea merits a second opinion. He slips out of camp that night, pacing Moonrise’s moat. 

“This is not a prayer,” he warns, taking care to draw the rack on his chest in a distinctly sarcastic manner. “I’ve given you enough chances to answer those.”

The Absolute’s forces are a cluster of torches in the distance. Lanterns line his path at even intervals, new lights slotted into ancient stonework. There is no moon.

“Do you know, she doesn’t mind when I disparage you? Even thinks it’s funny, most of the time, though she won’t admit it. She’s the worst cleric I’ve ever heard of.” 

He looks up at the formless sky. Navigation would be easier if he had a star or two to guide him. But that’s never been his luck.

“Two hundred years is—is a long time. If sending her is your idea of an apology…” He licks his lips. Looks out onto black water. “Well, I’m not giving her back. That doesn’t mean I forgive you.”

So he loves her, and she fell asleep in his tent not an hour ago. So he loves her, and she doesn’t read well enough to borrow his adventure stories, so he reads for her instead. So he loves her, and they’ll share the third watch of the night together, and even that banal promise brings an anticipation easy to mistake for joy.

He swallows. “I’m glad she’s a shit cleric, honestly. I’m beginning to think that’s the only way a cleric can be any good.”

The embarrassing part is, he’s not sure Ilmater would disagree.

He listens to the moat lap halfheartedly against the retaining wall. No reply comes—no sign from above. Typical.

“Drop her a line when you have the chance,” he says, turning. “She deserves more than what you’ve given her.”

Camp is quiet when he gets back. Wyll nods to him from the firepit, working on the clumsy woodcarving Halsin had started him on. Astarion slips back into his tent.

He touches Lash’s shoulder, and she stirs with a muzzy hum. She blinks one eye open, smiling at the sight of him. Her hair is spread wild and tangling on his pillows, and he loves her. And so.

“Get under here,” she mumbles. “‘S cold. Want to keep you warm.”

She’d left a candle burning for him. She must have woken to light it, then slipped back into sleep. Neither of them need it, but there’s color this way.

Astarion's voice catches, overcome. “In…in a moment. I think we need to talk.”

“Mmmbout what?”

He takes her hand, and leaves god outside, and makes confession to her instead.