Astarion liked the house. It felt hopeless and sad. It reminded him, in his more self-deprecating moments, of himself. The time-stained brick, the turquoise paint flaking from the front door, the dead vines clinging to the facade like it could revive them—abandonment haunted the place. Regret settled over it like a wail.
He’d decided on the grimy old cottage mostly because it was cheap. Way too cheap for the area, a formerly middle-class Waterdeep neighborhood that was starting to sprout juice shops. The woman from the rental company had warned him per her legal obligation about a sordid past: residents had been attacked by a dark presence of unclear planar origin. Astarion had looked at her when she said this and stated very simply, “Darling, I am a vampire.” She looked away awkwardly and spent the rest of the viewing speaking through a tight, uncomfortable smile. Astarion didn’t know if vampirism actually made one immune to demonic attacks, but he thought it much more likely that the culprit was mold, and anyways living here couldn’t possibly be worse than the situation he was leaving.
150 years. Gods damn it all, a century and a f*cking half in Cazador’s hell over in an instant, thanks to the Union for Spawn Advocacy and Defense—yes, great acronym. The organization popped up fifty years or so ago and had risen to prominence thanks to the tireless work of passionate spawn activists. Now they had a significant presence in major cities. One dreary night idling against the wall of a dive bar in the LC, a man in a plain T-shirt and paint-stained jeans walked up to him very calmly and offered him an out. “I know what you’re doing here,” he’d said. “I know you don’t want to be doing it. I can help.”
Astarion had played dumb, laughed in his face. If this idiot actually thought he could secret Astarion away under Cazador’s nose, well, let him try and let him end up dead. People had tried before. Astarion shooed the man away and used the phone Cazador had given him a few years back to chat up a man who was apparently 800 feet away and willing to meet in a public park. He didn’t realize the man was tailing him, didn’t realize when he lured his mark back to the Lower City palace entrance that he was leading Cazador’s enemies straight to his door, unassuming as they were. He would learn five months later, when the Flaming Fist raided the palace and killed Cazador for good, that USAD already had a running file on the vampire lord. They just needed more hard evidence to compel the Fist to act.
So USAD had snatched him up then, thankfully, instead of leaving him to the authorities. Apparently the newly-instated SPAWN Act granted him legal immunity for his actions provided he sign an official denouncement of Cazador, which he was more than willing to do. The org had placed him in a halfway house of sorts for three years—he and his siblings wandering aimlessly through the real world, screaming when they slept, fumbling through life-skills training and job applications—and now they’d set him up with a small fund taken from Cazador’s coffers, which he would be using to rent this sh*tty house until he made enough money to not.
Now he was stuck in a house with possibly a demon in it. Just his luck. Whatever. Haunted house stuff happened at night according to movies—a form of media Astarion had only discovered in the past year—and he would be gone at his bartending job. Therefore, safe. Astarion sighed and unlocked the door.
He had moved in with the help of Karlach, the sturdiest volunteer from the halfway house. More accurately, he had given her directions leaning against a doorframe while she had moved all of the boxes. She seemed to enjoy it, so he didn’t feel bad. After they had finally wrangled his bed into the basem*nt—and that was new and wonderful, wasn’t it? Having a bed as an accepted default—she had left. He had spent a while decorating and then sealed himself away in his room as the sun started to rise.
The night had been long and free of demonic interference. Astarion had the day to rest before his first night at the bar, which he was excited for, all things considered. He was sure, too, that the day would pass uneventfully in regards to the entity allegedly haunting the house. As a certified member of the Undead Community, he could allege with reasonable certainty that the Demon or Thing or Whatever wouldn’t try anything when the sun was out. It just worked like that because it did. In the halfway house he had worked with a therapist to unlock memories of his previous life; now Astarion could remember hiding from ghosts under the covers as a child, and he hoped that strategy worked for adults too, if he ever needed to use it.
Regardless, it also helped that he lived out of the basem*nt. The basem*nt was the most haunt-able part of a house, Astarion thought, and now Astarion was haunting it with antiques and tasteful kitsch. No room for a demon. The basem*nt was fully-finished and could have been an apartment on its own—he had his own bathroom and kitchenette, which he had sectioned off with a bead curtain. He’d filled the space with weird lamps, vases, tapestries, a couple of old oil paintings of women who were either dead or asleep. He had incense, too. He lit a stick and placed it in his brazier. Bergamot.
Astarion washed himself in the mirrorless bathroom, changed into a set of matching black pajamas and settled in for the day. He pulled out his laptop and found that his favorite reality TV dating show, The Hellion’s Heart, had added a new episode. Twelve contestants competed for the affection of Orys, a battle-scarred tiefling adventurer who was ready to set down his sword and start a family. Astarion didn’t care about the tiefling much. Two of the women contestants had fallen in love with each other, and even the show’s editors seemed to acknowledge that this was the more interesting plotline.
“I want to stay here so I can be with you, Lyria,” Velsani was saying, tearful. “I love you. I don’t want to get voted off. But if Orys finds out, then—”
Something heavy crashed upstairs.
f*ck, Astarion thought. One of the boxes must have fallen over, or maybe one of his lamps. Whatever it was he couldn’t deal with it until nighttime. He shrugged and returned to Velsani’s tearful confession. It was a little embarrassing how into this he was, mostly because everyone on the show was so stupid, but he was still on the edge of his seat, heart pounding with anticipation. He found himself talking to the screen. “Lyria, you idiot, you know Orys is going to choose Kreeva over you, there’s literally no reason to stay on the show— ”
SCHRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Astarion paused the show. The long, slow scratch had come from what sounded like the wall facing his bed, by the stairs. Was he hearing things? He moved his hand to the spacebar, ready to ignore the sound.
SSSCCCCHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
That had been real. Heart still racing, Astarion slipped slowly from his bed onto the shag-carpeted floor, stuffing his feet into the embarrassing duckie slippers his caseworker had giving him as a going-away present. A third scratch rang out, Astarion thought, from behind the wall itself, within the house’s innards.
He crept across the floor and put his ear to the wall. It felt solid and cold. He smelled an old, dusty smell, like rotting books cracked open. As an experiment, he tapped the sections of wall to his left and right—sturdy—and then the section in front of him. Hollow.
Ah.
Astarion was not an idiot. He knew rats and mice did not make the kinds of noises currently coming from inside of his walls. Something was in there, something with long nails or large claws, and it was trying to get his attention.
That would be the demon, then. Damn day-walking bastard. “You’re supposed to be asleep,” Astarion grumbled. “Those are the rules. See, I’m going to bed too.” Another slow scratch.
Astarion weighed his options. He couldn’t leave. He couldn’t rip a hole in the wall to go after the demon, because he was renting. Maybe he could kill it, but he damn sure did not know how to patch the wall up afterwards. That left the strategy his caseworker had told him to use whenever Violet threw a tantrum at the halfway house: ignore it. Giving the demon attention, he reckoned, would be giving it what it wanted.
Equal parts nervous and annoyed, Astarion returned to bed. Passing the TV stand where his incense was still burning, he plucked up the stick and gave it a few erratic, irritated waves in the direction of the wall. This would do nothing except make the demon smell nice. He wriggled again under the sheets and pulled the covers up as far as he could, childlike. He unpaused his show. Lyria and Velsani would not let anything happen to him, and the background noise would soothe him. He left all of the lamps on. Since escaping Cazador, he had not once slept in the dark.
Astarion’s first shift at the bar was going well. He was good at mixing drinks, having picked it up at the halfway house, and he was very, very good at flirting with people to get tips. He liked the bar itself, too. It wasn’t a gay bar on paper, but everyone that ordered from him seemed to be queer. And a good many were vampires. They had blood drinks. You could order a Bloody Mary with actual blood. More and more freed spawn were moving to Waterdeep, and for some reason they had decided to frequent this bar in particular. His manager and fellow bartender, Minthara, had told him as much when she hired him, that they needed a vampire on staff.
Two women slid up to the bar, giggling and tipsy. A white-haired half-elf and a gith, obviously a couple, both dressed in leather and sweaty from dancing.
“I won’t do it,” the half-elf laughed.
Her girlfriend protested. “But you have promised me! I want to—” she hiccuped, cutting herself off— “I want you to experience this taste with me.”
Astarion turned to them. “And what taste would that be, hm? ”
The half-elf answered him. “She wants us to split one of the Really Bloody Marys. But we’re—we’re not vampires, so it would taste just awful! ”
“I have offered you five gold already, Shadowheart! How much more must you have from me?”
“Tell you what,” Astarion said. “I’ll mix you one. If you don’t like it, it’s on me, and I’ll drink the rest. How does that sound?”
Both women nodded. Shadowheart giggled nervously and pressed a hand to her flushed face.
Astarion went to the fridge to pull out a bottle of blood. When he returned, he heard Shadowheart saying: “...when I’m literally a cleric of Selûne, Lae’zel.”
Huh. I guess Selûne is more fun than I thought. He shook the drink up and poured it into the glass, sliding it towards the couple. As he had expected, they both gagged when they tried it. Funnily enough, Shadowheart was able to stomach a little more than Lae’zel was. True to his word, Astarion slid their coins back to them and downed the rest himself. It tasted great. Ox, with a dash of gamey boar for flavor. He licked his lips, feeling the vodka settle into his stomach with a buzz. He’d need some more straight blood or else he’d be too drunk on the job. He took the rest of the blood from the bottle from the fridge as a chaser.
“You’re a cleric of Selûne, then?” Astarion asked, leaning his elbow on the table. Maybe if he kept the couple at the bar for a while they would order something else.
“There’s nothing keeping us from a night out,” Shadowheart answered easily. Her face was light and smiling.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to imply there was. Actually, I wanted to ask you about something.” He grabbed a clean rag and started rubbing circles around the inside of the empty glass. “Do you deal with hauntings at all?”
Shadowheart straightened up a little. “Hauntings of what nature?”
“Well, I’ve started renting a new place and there’s something scratching my walls. Before you try to tell me it’s a rat, the previous residents have allegedly been attacked.”
“Have you experienced anything else?” Shadowheart asked, her tone more serious now.
“Well I’ve only been there a day, so. No. But I don’t like that it seems to have started up so soon. I’d be rather inconvenienced if I had to fight for dominance of my own house. I’d rather have only one creature of the night, you see.”
Shadowheart nodded. “Here,” she said, pulling a business card from her purse. “If you experience anything else, text me, okay? I may be able to help.” Lae’zel gave her a playful jab in the side. “ Lae,” she protested, “it’s literally a business offer…”
When Astarion got home that morning, the word LEAVE was written on his basem*nt wall in blood. He sighed deeply. “You’re kidding me,” he muttered. “This is the most immature possible haunting strategy I can imagine, you know. If you’re listening.”
An idea occurred. He pulled a bottle of chilled blood from the minifridge next to his bed. He undid the stopper and dipped his finger in it. Crossing back to the writing on the wall, he added his own message under it, daubing the blood on the plaster in his neatest cursive.
NO ♥️
He licked his finger clean. He should’ve cleaned the blood off the wall immediately, but he had to admit that he liked playing games.
Astarion took a picture of the wall and sent it to the number on Shadowheart’s card. He didn’t know enough about Selûne to know if her clerics did exorcisms, but it made him feel good to be proactive.
He woke up at—he checked his phone—3 PM. Shadowheart had texted him back a few hours earlier.
I’m assuming you wrote NO?
Obviously.
Funny.
Astarion stared at three dots for a while until Shadowheart finally finished her second message.
I can come take a look tomorrow evening.
That fast?
If you’re really being threatened by a demonic presence, it’s obviously best not to wait.
He couldn’t argue with that. He sent Shadowheart his address. She’d come in tomorrow at 8:30, far enough after sundown that he wouldn’t feel nervous about opening the door. He had the day off, so they could spend a while trying to pinpoint the source of the demonic energy, which was probably behind the wall.
That night before going to work, Astarion went to a 24-hour Balmart and picked up a sledgehammer, some anti-dust goggles and a container of salt. He thought he might throw it at the demon if things went south. It occurred to him that the salt thing might be a myth, in the same way that garlic didn’t do sh*t against vampires. Then it occurred to him that he didn’t care about offending the demon living in his basem*nt. He stashed his purchases behind the bar until close. Most of that shift he spent trying to figure out if an elven woman who had come in with a bachelorette group was Dryleth Deadleaf, a contestant who had been eliminated on the third episode of The Hellion’s Heart .
No funny business occurred in the basem*nt that morning. Actually, the word LEAVE was totally gone, leaving only Astarion’s bloody reply. It must have been an illusion of some kind. He thought about cleaning the wall for Shadowheart’s sake, but fell asleep before he could make himself do it. He woke in the late afternoon and decided once again to avoid cleaning the wall in favor of reading a book about mushrooms.
The doorbell rang at 8:30 PM on the dot, startling Astarion. He’d lost track of time. When he opened the door, he found Shadowheart standing there in much plainer and more serious garb than the last thing he’d seen her in. She had a leather satchel over her shoulder and a heavy duffel bag in her left hand. In her right she was holding a can of WEAVE Energy.
Astarion nodded at her. “You’re certainly extremely punctual.”
Shadowheart just said “Yes.” She motioned at the basem*nt door next to the upstairs kitchen. “The basem*nt’s down there, I imagine.”
When Astarion confirmed it for her, she slid past him with a collected urgency and made her way downstairs. Astarion followed. There, Shadowheart placed her hands against the wall, bent her forehead to it. She turned to him with a grim, serious expression.
“I hope this doesn’t sound contrived, Astarion, but there is a great evil lurking in this place.”
“Ah.”
“I can sense it. I imagine you could too, if you were…”
“Alive?” Astarion supplied.
“Yes. That. It wasn’t so bad upstairs, but I could still feel it even just waiting on your front porch. Down here, though, it’s overwhelming. I can’t tell if it’s devilish or demonic or fey or…something else, but it’s powerful and it’s hungry. The hunger I’m sensing is so powerful it’s all-encompassing,” Shadowheart explained. “By the gods, Astarion, I was expecting a cut-and-dry vengeful spirit, but this is horrible. ”
Astarion picked up the container of salt he had left sitting on the TV stand. “Will this help?”
“No.”
Shadowheart began unpacking her things—a variety of candles, sensors of various types, a camera. As she did, she started talking again. “I did manage to look into the history of the address a bit. It’s a very, very old house, you know. It’s anyone’s guess how much of the original structure remains, but there’s been a house at this address for hundreds of years. Anyways, there’s been nothing especially morbid for the past century or so, but around 200 years ago there was a disappearance.”
“What happened?”
“There was a very powerful wizard. Gale Dekarios. Some sources implied he was a Chosen of Mystra, but it’s unclear. Anyways, something happened to him. He grew very sick. Locked himself in his tower. People suspected he was going mad.” Shadowheart flipped a switch on a small handheld device, and three green lights lit up at the top. She stood up and held the device to the wall, moving it slowly around. “Eventually he moved in here, with his mother Morena. That was the last anyone ever heard of him. It was rumored he had summoned something, or attempted to access some kind of ultimate power, that wound up slowly killing him. Either that, or his mother spent a few years gradually poisoning him to death.”
The device was beeping loudly now. It seemed to respond most strongly to the specific section of the wall where the writing had been. “As I thought,” Shadowheart said. “There’s a strong current of dark magic emanating from right—”she jabbed her finger into the wall—“here.”
“That’s a lot of research,” Astarion remarked, moving closer to the wall. “Slow day at the Selûne office?”
“This sort of thing is in my job description, Astarion.” She started tapping at the wall, as he had done a few nights before. “It seems to be hollow here. I wonder if there’s something behind it.”
“We can break in. I’ve got a sledgehammer.”
“It might be better to wait until I can bring some backup. We don’t want to unleash anything upon ourselves.”
“So far, all this thing has done is scratch the wall, write the word LEAVE, and possibly break one of my lamps upstairs, although that could’ve been a coincidence. I doubt it’s powerful enough to kill us outright.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Shadowheart countered, her voice dark. Astarion noticed that the smell of old books, the same thing he’d smelled during the scratching, had returned.
“And, counterpoint: It’s my apartment.” Astarion said. “I’d rather get this thing out than wait around.”
“I don’t think— oh, f*ck!” She moaned suddenly and leaned against the wall, as if overcome by nausea. “Oh, f*ck, it’s—I have to get upstairs.”
Astarion held her up and helped her out of the basem*nt. She stumbled out the front door, clearly desperate for fresh air, and sank to her knees in the grass. She took a moment to collect her breath.
Silence. Crickets chirped. The night was warm; summer was coming. Finally Shadowheart spoke again. “I felt it feeding on me.”
“What?”
“All of a sudden, this presence, it—it was draining me. Sapping the energy from my very soul. My life force. It felt like a cold hand wrapped around my heart.”
“That’s why I can’t feel the…aura, or whatever sensation you were describing earlier. It wants living things.”
“I think it does.”
Astarion considered this. “So what you’re saying is that I’m fine?”
Shadowheart looked up at him incredulously.
“I mean, I don’t have a life force to drain. I’m immune to its attack. Really, it’s only a problem if I want to have company over,” he continued.
“It’s evil, Astarion. Based on the message it left you, I imagine it wants you gone since you’re not a suitable victim. And it will stop at nothing to make that happen. Either you leave or it kills you.”
“What’s it going to do, write me an eviction notice in blood?”
“I think it already has.”
“Point taken.” He sighed. “Listen. I’m here because I can afford it and because I can walk to work from here. There aren’t many places I can work. I’m a vampire spawn, for f*ck’s sake. And every second I add to my commute is another second I risk burning in the sun. If a bus were late, if a train stopped—that could kill me. I don’t have a lot of money, either. This is the best option I have.” He looked down the street, at the quiet blue night and the shuttered shops. “And I’ve lived through worse. I really have.”
“At least stay somewhere else until we can get this sorted!”
“And how long will that take? I’ve only just moved in. I’m not going to let some demon bully me out of my own basem*nt.”
“Your stubbornness is going to get you killed.”
“Darling, it already has. And look at me now! Still kicking.”
Shadowheart had finally realized he wasn’t going to budge, so she’d left him with a protective amulet and a sigil of radiant energy in front of the basem*nt wall. The issue here was that stepping on the sigil would also kill him, as a vampire, so he resolved to cover it with a rug unless he was asleep.
In bed that morning, he ruminated on what Shadowheart had told him. He remembered the wizard she’d mentioned. Gale Dekarios. Could he be haunting the basem*nt? Shadowheart had implied that this was something more than—what had she said? A “cut-and-dry vengeful spirit.” So it was likely that this wizard had become corrupted by the powers he’d summoned, had been turned into a soul-sucking basem*nt entity against his will. If all it took was a few minutes of standing down here for a living person to be attacked, the entity must be starving. Unable to control itself.
That thought stuck with him. Starving.
Suddenly, Astarion’s five lamps began to flicker and dim. He sat up straight and grabbed at the lamp on his bedside table. Shaking it did nothing. Before he could get out of bed to find the overhead switch, all the lamps went out and he was plunged into darkness.
Power outage. All he had to do was get up and find the breaker. Easy. Where were the duckie slippers? This was fine. Astarion started breathing, which he only did as a nervous habit. It wasn’t like he couldn’t see. Everything was dim and gray, but he was still able to perceive the outlines of shapes just fine. He was in his own room, in his own house, in his own bed, and not in the kennels, not in a tomb—
and Cazador appeared in front of his bed.
Astarion froze. The shadow loomed over him—long, ragged hair, glowing purple eyes. There was a knife under his pillow. He could reach it so easily. All he had to do was move his hand.
Cazador leaned in slowly. Astarion closed his eyes, sweat pouring from his forehead, too terrified to think.
“ Leave,” came the horrible, whispery rasp, in a voice that was not Cazador’s.
No. No, Cazador wasn’t—Cazador had red eyes. Of course. Not purple. This was…
“Gale Dekarios,” Astarion murmured, eyes still squeezed tight.
The figure did not reply.
Slowly, Astarion opened his eyes. Leaning over his bed was a walking corpse, a hollow facsimile of a formerly human wizard. Gale’s skin was horribly pale and mottled and dirty, webbed with dark purple veins and split in places with bloodless gashes. His long hair was greasy and matted, his beard a scrubby bird’s-nest tangle. His lips shrunk away from his dry, dead gums. The hunger of undeath had carved canyons into his cheeks.
“ Leave,” Gale repeated.
“You can’t make me, can you?”
Again nothing. Astarion continued, regaining his composure. He had seen so much worse than this. “You can scratch at the wall and, what, cast prestidigitation? Now you can teleport out here, so what? You can’t drain life from me. I’m not alive.”
With the seal of fear broken, he found his fingers crawling towards the dagger under his pillow. Gale lifted a skeletal hand and drew it slowly ever closer to Astarion’s neck. He was feinting, Astarion was sure of it—he doubted the monster had the strength to choke him. His fingers found the handle. As Gale’s hand came within a foot of him, Astarion whipped out with the dagger suddenly. He dove towards Gale’s chest and slashed—and he nearly fell forward off the bed. There was nothing there. The illusion, or projection or whatever it had been, had dissipated as soon as Astarion struck it.
The lights flickered back on, flooding the room with soft shades of orange. Everything was just as he’d left it. The wall was intact, the sigil guarding it unbroken. This meant, Astarion thought, that Gale did not even have the power to leave the space behind the wall. All the monster could do was scare him with illusions.
I suppose it’s more or less settled, then, Astarion thought. He hoped that Gale, realizing he wouldn’t scare Astarion off, would simply give up and die. Starve to death behind that wall.
Two hundred years in the dark, hungry and cold.
Astarion pulled his covers up to his chin.
Over the next tenday, Astarion couldn’t force the image of Gale’s face from his head. He looked like a spawn. The skin, the sunken, hollow face. The dead, empty sadness that came from total loss of hope. Two months before Astarion left the halfway house, they had welcomed a spawn who had been locked in a dog cage in her sire’s bedroom for fifty years. She had looked similar—skin slack, cheeks sharp. Astarion imagined that he must have been the same after his year in the tomb, when he had finally been allowed to crawl out.
He shook his head. No use dwelling on that memory. It wouldn’t do anything good for him.
He had texted Shadowheart about the encounter:
so yeah, I don’t think he can do anything to me
You’re playing roulette with your life.
Literally do not have a life to play roulette with~
*Unlife holy sh*t.
he hasn’t done anything for a second but I’m worried he’ll start annoying me again
and what if I want guests over
…what do you think would happen if I fed him?
WHAT THE f*ck ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT ASTARION
Hear me out. those feeder rats they sell at pet stores for snakes
I buy an entire tank of them and leave them in front of that wall
and we see what happens
If I could start feeding him he might leave me alone?
And he might also grow more powerful and use that power to kill you.
He wouldn’t kill me if I made myself useful now would he?
Shadowheart had not responded after that.
Astarion had found a pet store that closed late. He wasn’t sure if the employees would allow him to purchase an entire tank of feeder rats. He’d been in the habit of buying two or three at a time in the halfway house—despite the irony, they did make good late-night snacks when you really wanted to kill something—but never more than that. He approached the counter, where a beleaguered college-age dragonborn was playing dully with the end of her tail, and turned his charm on.
“Hello there, ah—” he read the nametag— ” Nyaxik. Listen. I know this is an unorthodox request, but I’m wondering if I could take an entire tank of rats?”
Nyaxik abandoned her tail to stare at him curiously.
He came up with an easy lie to smooth the silence over. “I’m having a party, you see, and we’re all vampire spawn. I wanted charcuterie.” A risky thing to say under certain circ*mstances, given that many Waterdhavians looked warily on the rapid increase of vampire spawn in their midst, but a dragonborn was unlikely to care.
“Uh. Um. I, ah… I can call my manager for you?”
Astarion was getting somewhere. The manager ended up as a Tabaxi, who was very understanding of Astarion’s desire for rats, but who regretfully informed him that half a tank was the most they could let him away with. That was fine by him. He walked out with ten living rats and a small cage.
Back in the basem*nt, Astarion set the cage down flush against the wall. Then he sat back on the bed and waited. Minutes passed and the rats continued living, although they seemed agitated. Determined to wait at least a little longer, Astarion pulled up the new episode of The Hellion’s Heart. Things were coming to a head as Orys chose both Lyria and Velsani for the final four. Lyria wanted both Orys and Velsani, but Velsani was still lying about her affections for Orys to stay with Lyria. Now the four contestants and the tiefling were having a stupid party on a stupid boat. Astarion felt thoroughly scandalized.
A chorus of loud sharp squeaks interrupted his viewing. Astarion snapped the lid of his laptop closed. All the rats lay twitching on the cage floor. One by one, each eventually fell still. Gale had eaten.
Cautiously, Astarion got up to retrieve the cage. As he did, he heard another grating scratch from inside the wall. He pressed his ear to the plaster. His heart seized with shock. Just behind the wall, muffled but audible, he could hear something breathing, ragged and slow.
Unsure how to respond, Astarion scratched his own long nails down the wall.
Gale scratched back.
Inspired, Astarion scratched again in a short rhythmic pattern. He waited a second. Then Gale repeated the rhythm.
“Are you back there, Gale?” Astarion asked. “Are you full? I’ll bring you more if you stop bothering me.” Now he tapped his knuckles on the hollow part of the wall, but Gale did nothing in return. “I’ve been hungry before too, you know. I’m a vampire. I spent a century and a half starving because my sire wouldn’t give me blood. I thought it would be like that forever. But it doesn’t have to be. I’ve been… People have helped me. I’m not hungry anymore. If there’s anything of you left in there, you don’t have to be hungry either.”
Astarion had surprised himself. He barely knew what he was saying as each word left his mouth. Once upon a time he would’ve never tried to extend an olive branch to a monster like the one living in his wall. He knew Gale was dangerous, and he knew that feeding him might only increase the danger. But a group of very good, very passionate people had given Astarion a chance, even when Astarion thought himself an irredeemable monster, and now here he was working at a bar and watching trash TV and making friends , as though there was nothing abnormal about him at all.
Suddenly a new sequence of bloody red letters began to drip down the wall. He could tell it was only an illusion now—if the blood were real he’d be able to smell it, which hadn’t occurred to him the first time.
When the letters had finished forming, they read: PLEASE.
“Please what? Please more rats? Please…get you out of here? Connect you to the relevant social services?”
No response.
Astarion had left the sledgehammer leaning against the wall by the hollow place. On impulse, he picked it up and gripped it tight. He tapped around the wall with his left hand to make sure his aim was true. The hollow place didn’t extend all the way to the floor—it was a rectangle at eye level, about a foot tall and three feet wide. Telling himself that he could probably take Gale in a fight, if it came to that, Astarion took two steps back and launched the head of the sledgehammer at the plaster.
With a loud THUD, the sledgehammer tore through the wall. The plaster crumbled away like chalk. He wrenched the head out and swung it again and again, over and over until all the plaster had been knocked away, exposing what lay behind.
Astarion saw that behind the finished plaster walls lay the original brick of the old house. The hollow place was an opening in the brick, ringed by ancient wooden beams. Through the opening Astarion caught a whiff of cold, dusty air. Behind it, darkness—and Gale.
He had seen Gale before, but that had only been an illusion. Seeing the real thing made Astarion’s useless breath catch in his throat. His hands pulsed with sweat. He let the sledgehammer drop. Gale looked exactly the same—the dead face, the purple veins, the tangled hair—but in person, and with the sound of ragged breathing to accompany him, he was infinitely more horrible to look at. And the scent—a thousand dusty books, their scent diluted into a concentrated essence of dusty book and diffused…
Astarion steeled himself against the horror. Someone easily could have felt the same way looking at him, once upon a time.
“Hello there,” he said. He gave the monster an awkward little wave.
Gale turned and disappeared into the dark.
Two nights later, Astarion met a very nice young man at work.
His name was Un-su. He was a human (formerly) and a vampire spawn (currently). He caught Astarion’s attention by ordering a blood-based drink nobody else had ever heard of.
“You’re the first bartender I’ve met who’s known how to make one of these,” he told Astarion as he took a tentative sip.
“Did I do a good job?”
“Oh, perfectly, ” he purred.
Un-su was an aspiring mixologist, an avid reader, a poet and a huge fan of The Hellion’s Heart. He had a part-time job as a guide at an underground botanical garden, and he made the rest of his living from an online indie perfume business. He had close-cropped black hair, thick lips and beautiful strong thighs. He was the most normal vampire spawn Astarion had ever met—totally inoffensive and safe in every way—and, more importantly, he wouldn’t notice the powerful aura of evil emanating from the hole in the basem*nt wall.
When he led Un-su down to his basem*nt, he was worried the other man would say something about the hole, but luckily Un-su was too busy kissing him and ripping his clothes off to notice. Astarion let Un-su push him back on the black silk sheets, raise Astarion’s knees to his chest. He told himself nothing bad was happening. He had tried to have sex several times living in the halfway house, and it hadn’t quite worked. He wanted it to work. He wanted himself to work. But he couldn’t now, couldn’t yet. He turned his head on the pillow and considered the arrangement of art prints on the wall, recreations of century-old burlesque posters. Nothing hurt. Un-su’s thrusting inside him felt fine. He was just somewhere else.
Un-su started to moan louder. Astarion arched his back and faked an org*sm to make sure the other man would leave him alone after finishing. When Un-su got off, Astarion rolled over, feigning exhaustion, and held his duckie slippers to his chest like they were stuffed animals. He thought about good things—his okay job and his okay house and the way mushrooms, reliable as time, grew up from death. He reminded himself that he had wanted it just now. Nothing bad had happened. He slept.
He woke up to the sound of scratching. Twin pinpricks of purple light bored out from the darkness of the hole in the wall.
“Are you f*cking kidding me? ” Astarion grumbled.
How long had Gale been there? The possibility of the basem*nt monster watching him have sex had not occurred to Astarion previously, but he supposed this was his life now. Whatever. He had promised Gale more rats. Maybe he was hungry.
He’d picked up some more feeders from another pet store yesterday, and he’d stored them in a large cage in the kitchenette. He slipped out of bed and into his slippers, still fully naked, and made to portion out some of the new rats into the smaller cage he’d gotten the first time. This cage he slid up against the wall. He felt Gale watching him. Those purple eyes felt cold on his bare chest.
“Hey, Star?” asked a tired voice from the bed. “What the f*ck is that?”
Gods f*cking dammit. Gods f*cking dammit. Gods f*cking dammit. Gods f*cking damn everything.
“Well, darling,” Astarion started.
Un-su was climbing out of bed. Astarion turned to him and saw his hands raised, and the beginnings of a firebolt spell sizzling at his fingertips.
“...I’m afraid that’s the, ah… well, the basem*nt demon.”
“The basem*nt demon,” Un-su repeated flatly.
Astarion cursed himself for not thinking of a lie, but what could he even have said?
“Yes. Well. When I moved into this house, I was told it might be haunted. As it turns out, this fine individual has been draining the life force of the previous residents. But given that you and I do not have a life force to drain, we’re totally safe!” Astarion explained, mustering forced calm. “I can’t really leave. Rising rent, and all. Haha. You know how it is. But anyways, I’ve been feeding him rats, as you see. I think if I can stop him from starving, I might be able to break through on…an interpersonal…level…” He faltered, aware that what he was saying sounded ridiculous.
Un-su simply stared for a second. Then he said: “Star, are you seriously trying to ‘ I can fix him’ the demon living in a secret passageway in your basem*nt?”
“He’s hungry,” Astarion said.
“ He is a monster , and kind of a pervert to boot—”
“ And so are we!” Astarion countered, cutting Un-su off. “Monsters.” He paused. “Not perverts, unless you’re also hiding something of significance.”
Un-su pursed his lips and sighed slightly, seeming to give up. “...Alright. I’m going back to sleep. I’ll leave when it’s dark out.”
True to his word, Un-su woke up and left silently as soon as the sun set that evening. Astarion sat staring miserably at Gale’s hole, now vacant. “You are a f*cking pervert, you know,” he told the empty passageway. “I bet you loved watching that. I bet you’re jealous now, aren’t you? Wish you could be the one out here f*cking me to sleep?” Aggravated, Astarion put his face through the hole and yelled down into it. “ f*ckING CREEP WIZARD!”
The words echoed. It occurred to Astarion that he’d never wondered at where the hole led. He’d assumed it was a passageway of some kind… but to where? It was clear that the space behind the wall went far deeper than he’d imagined.
Intrigued, Astarion pulled a flashlight from his dresser and stuck it through the hole. He clicked it on. The beam illuminated an ancient stone passageway about five feet long, which ended in—he tilted the light down—a spiral staircase. His eyes grew wide. Gale wasn’t just lurking in the walls. He had a whole lair down there. How?
Astarion took a picture to send to Shadowheart. Then, still annoyed by Gale’s voyeurism, he tacked a large art print over the hole and got dressed for work.
Astarion nestled the next cage of rats snug against the hole and took the print down. It had been quiet for a while, but he imagined Gale was hungry. And Astarion was ready to forgive. Un-su had come into the bar again, this time with the tiefling boyfriend he hadn’t previously mentioned, and tried to avoid talking to or looking at Astarion as much as possible. The tiefling ordered the same niche blood co*cktail as Un-su had once. Astarion batted his lashes innocently and pretended he didn’t know how to make it.
Now he called into the hole. “I’ve got dinner for you! Or maybe breakfast!” No movement. “Gale! Darling demon of my basem*nt! Rats!”
He peered into the passageway, straining his ears for Gale’s shuffling footsteps up the ancient spiral stairs. He heard nothing.
“Suit yourself, then,” he grumbled.
He had the night off again. He was planning to use the time to start seeing to the rest of the house. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with the space. A reading room might be nice, or a room full of plants. Since he didn’t need either of the bedrooms or the kitchen or the bathroom or any of the other space, actually, he had a lot of leeway.
He needed to measure all of the windows and exterior doorways for sunshields. Fitted perfectly, a sunshield would totally block out the daylight and allow him access to the upstairs 24/7. It would be nice not to be stuck in his basem*nt all the time, although he liked the basem*nt. He had found that he liked small and cozy. He didn’t like open doorways and halls and rooms. He didn’t like corners he couldn’t see around.
Astarion held his tape measure up to the frosted glass window in the shower when his phone buzzed. Who would be calling him? He fished it out—Shadowheart.
“Hello?”
“ You unblocked the wall? ” she hissed, angry and terrified.
“I’ve been feeding him, as I said. He hasn’t tried to harm me yet. I…wanted him to know that…”
“That you’re willing to turn yourself into a target?”
“That I…care.”
Well, he’d said it. Astarion cared. About Gale, who very possibly wanted to kill him.
“He’s doing something to your head, Astarion.”
“I feel—connected to him, somehow. He’s been trapped in that basem*nt starving for years and years and—and I was trapped in a cage living off bugs and dead rats for a century and a half, and—and I just—I’ve seen him, Shadowheart, and he reminds me of—he looks like—”
His voice faltered. He felt his face heating. He bit his lip, regaining his composure. “Someone bricked him in there, you know. They must’ve done. There’s only that little slot in the wall, and then it’s brick all the way down. I imagine they passed food through there, if he needed it. If he…” and it occurred to him right then that maybe he could try offering Gale something real to eat, in addition to the rats, just to see if he wanted it.
“ Astarion ,” Shadowheart said sternly. “I don’t know your history, but it’s obvious that whatever you experienced did not cause you to lose your fundamental personhood. You still have your conscience. We know that this is how it is for vampire spawn. But we don’t know that about Gale, Astarion. We have no idea what in the Hells he is! For all we know he’s a walking corpse hosting an unfathomable monster from the Far Realms.”
“He was standing at the wall, after the first time I fed him, and I told him he didn’t have to be hungry. I said if you’re still in there, I can help you or something to that effect. And he wrote PLEASE on the wall in blood. All-caps. He understands when I talk to him. He asked me to help.”
“Listen,” Shadowheart sighed. “You’re not going to like what I have to say next, but I called to tell you that—a colleague of mine, Isobel, is prepared to help me…exterminate him.”
“ No, ” Astarion pleaded. “You can’t. At the very least take him somewhere else and find out if he’s truly dangerous. Can’t you cast a spell to read his mind, or something?”
“I don’t ever want to be near that thing again unless it’s dead, honestly.”
“ Gale is not a thing!” Astarion spat. He ended the call abruptly and sat down on the ledge of the tub. He rubbed his temples, trying to soothe himself.
Shadowheart’s right, he thought. I have no way of knowing if there’s anything of the original man still in there. He isn’t like me. He’s something…worse.
But he could know! He could! Just a minute earlier, he’d asked Shadowheart to detect Gale’s thoughts—but they had scrolls for that if she wouldn’t. He had a little cash left over from his first paycheck. If he could find a wizarding supply store that closed late enough, he could swing a Scroll of Detect Thoughts easily.
Astarion abandoned the bathroom and hopped on Bongle to work out the logistics. It turned out that no, there weren’t any places he could safely visit in time. Maybe someone would go for him? He texted Minthara:
I’ll buy you dinner if you can get me a scroll of detect thoughts from any wizard store
Obviously I will also pay for the scroll
Why
Because I want one
Why
reasons
Sure
Astarion rather liked her. She would’ve hid a body for him if they could find space in the bar, he imagined.
Something else occurred to him—he wanted more reliable, long-lasting sources of life energy for Gale. He was sure from experience that Gale didn’t enjoy feeding on rats; they died so quickly, and likely had very little in the way of souls.
Also wondering if you have any dogs you don’t need?
Astarion what does this mean
Or cats, chickens, goats
Or a way of supplying large quantities of live animals. They need to be alive
Are you going to kill them
Can I watch
“So obviously I can’t kill people,” Astarion explained. “We’re looking for the next best thing. Anything that probably thinks. ”
Minthara nodded. She’d taken I am trying to feed the soul-devouring demon lurking behind the wall in my basem*nt in stride, as though her peers did this type of thing often. “You know, if this doesn’t work out, you could find out where the pet stores get the rats. I’m sure there’s a rat cultivation operation somewhere. Have them deliver to you.”
“I suppose I could pass myself off as a reptile breeder…but the question would then be whether they would deliver at night.”
“Of course.” She paused. “And I must admit that the current strategy is more fun.”
They were in Minthara’s truck. It was 10PM and the bar was closed for a gas leak. Minthara was…rather excited about the prospect of helping Astarion feed Gale, and had suggested they spend the night together snatching animals off the streets, provided she could watch what happened to them afterwards. Also, she’d brought the scroll. Astarion loved her.
The rules: no vermin, nothing too big for the truck, and no obvious pets. If it had a collar on, it was a pet. If it didn’t, maybe the owners should’ve thought about that.
A darker and more miserable piece of his fractured self, the side of him that still believed he was trapped, had suggested, for a brief moment, that he could find people. Clearly Gale would drain anything that came near his hole. But then Astarion had beaten that thought back. He’d felt a little sick. He didn’t want death in his life anymore, didn’t want his days bracketed by blood and suffering, his or others’.
Animals were fair game, though, and he reckoned the bigger and smarter, the better.
Minthara had brought heavy-duty gloves, a pole with a catching loop on it and a box of large garbage bags. Astarion had brought himself. He proved a valuable asset—with his natural stealth he was able to bag several raccoons, a medium-sized snake and, along the side of the road bordering a small nature preserve, a doe deer, which Astarion first subdued by biting it and bleeding it to unconsciousness. Now they had the two raccoons in a cage, which they periodically flung themselves against the sides of, and the snake in a garbage back. The deer was out cold under a tarp in the truck bed. If stopped, they planned to say they’d hit it.
Turning into a small suburb, they saw a white dog padding down the sidewalk. No collar. They stopped the truck. When Astarion got out to retrieve it, the dog came bounding up to him and tried to lick his face. He hoisted it into the backseat with the raccoons. As they drove away, it shoved its head up between the seats for Astarion to pet idly. He wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to send the dog to the basem*nt.
As promised Astarion bought Minthara whatever the kind of meal you ate between midnight and 6 AM was called. They picked up two burgers from the drive-thru at McDribbles’. Minthara didn’t ask who the other one was for. It was obvious.
Finally they arrived at Astarion’s house. “Oh, it feels awful here,” Minthara remarked. “I love it.” She still wanted to watch Gale eat. He told her she could watch from the top of the stairs. He asked her why.
“I like death,” she said honestly. “It comes for all of us.”
“Can I say something that is majorly inappropriate if one considers that you are my manager?”
“Give me your worst.”
“You are so deranged that it makes me feel normal. That’s hard for a person to achieve. I genuinely do not know how you are employed.”
“Thank you,” Minthara beamed.
He decided to start with the deer, since it would be harder to store and keep alive. With Minthara’s help he was able to swing it over his back and carry it uneasily down the stairs. She watched from the stairs as he slid the deer up against the wall. It raised its head warily, blinking away unconsciousness. Astarion banged on the wall to summon Gale. He heard a slow dead shuffle, the loud ragged breaths rising up the stairs. It relieved him; he was worried Gale wouldn’t show after Astarion had yelled at him, but then again Gale wasn’t in a position to care about such insults, as a demon living behind the wall in someone’s basem*nt.
Gale’s decrepit head rose up from the stairwell, and he lurched up to his hole. As he did the deer began to twitch. Gale opened his mouth slightly, shuddering. Astarion saw a glowing place on his chest, the light burning through his faded rags. The light pulsed and crested. The deer breathed out a death rattle, spasmed once and fell still. It seemed almost involuntary on Gale’s part.
“My gods,” Minthara said, awestruck.
Astarion examined Gale. His black eyes had rolled back into his head for a second. When the light died down, Astarion thought he could see the veins under Gale’s skin fading ever so slightly, the hollows of his cheeks filling. Maybe his condition would improve with more.
“Do you want more?” Astarion asked. “Can you nod yes?”
Astarion felt a rush of adrenaline as slowly, Gale’s skeletal head tilted up and down. He’s still in there, Astarion thought. He has to be. He thinks. “I have real food too. I got you a cheeseburger and fries. I don’t suppose they had invented those when you were…living outside of this basem*nt—” and this was something Astarion knew because he remembered, vaguely, the onset of cheeseburgers— “but they’re very good. So I hear.”
He thought he saw Gale’s eyes widen slightly.
He rushed back up the stairs, pushing past Minthara. He reached the truck and considered briefly. He looked at the white dog, which tilted its head.
“Ah, hells, you’re going to be mine now, aren’t you?”
The dog wagged its tail, either because Astarion had spoken to it or because it understood what he had said. Astarion left it in the truck and took the raccoon cage. The creatures inside hissed and scrabbled around the cage, the force of their motion making it hard to hold on. He grabbed the McDribbles bag too and ran back inside.
Gale drained the two raccoons just as quickly as he had drained the deer. Astarion unwrapped the Big Dribble and tore off a chunk, held it out to Gale through the hole. He expected Gale to reach out for it. Instead, he moved his face up to Astarion’s hand and licked at the burger with his black tongue. Then he plucked the entire thing away with his teeth. Astarion drew his hand back and shivered, thinking of how close the monster’s tongue had gotten to his fingertips.
Gale chewed slowly, as though relearning, and swallowed with effort. Astarion uncapped the bottle of water he’d gotten and held that to Gale too. He tipped it a little and poured it into Gale’s waiting mouth. Gale drank it all in under a minute. When he was done his lips rested open, thin eyebrows tilted just so slightly up, eyes crinkled. His chin, Astarion saw, trembled. He looked like he could cry.
The scroll. Astarion picked it up, read the incantation and ran his hands clumsily through the motions. A bolt of understanding seared through his mind. He heard Gale inside of him, words galloping like a pack of scared horses—
Hungry hungry helping me this man oh gods water cold sick too much out let me please finally hope can I please hungry finally helping me oh gods this man full free cold inside hungry please I am evil I am good please let me die let me out I am alive
He imagined a hand pulling his mind away from Gale’s. He closed the spout of Gale’s thoughts, rest his hand on the wall next to the hole to steady himself.
Alive. Alive. Alive. He had assumed, reasonably so, that Gale was undead, but… Astarion strained his ears and listened in. Under Gale’s loud breathing he could hear the faintest trace of an irregular heartbeat. Under the scent of must and time he smelled blood—tainted and bad, like it had been left out, but blood nonetheless.
“Oh, Gale,” he whispered.
“What is it?”
He’d forgotten Minthara was here.
“I need to get him out. I have a sledgehammer, but I—I don’t think you can help with this. You should leave me here, I think.
“What about the snake and the dog?”
“Do what you will with the snake. I don’t want to try and keep it. The dog…let him out back. It’s fenced.” He heard Minthara leaving, leading the dog through the house and driving off.
He picked up the sledgehammer. “I’m getting you out of there, Gale. Stand back.”
Astarion had put on a bit of muscle in the past year with regular feeding. He found it easier than expected to swing the sledgehammer in a clean arc over his head and slam it into the brick. It took longer than it had to clear the whole, but eventually he had knocked all the bricks loose. He yanked his shirt off over his head, not wanting to dirty it with dust, and pulled the loose bricks away with his hands. He would figure out how to patch the wall later.
Gale had moved back into the passageway. Now he stepped cautiously forward. Astarion beckoned him closer. Gale’s legs shook. His face still trembled. He was crying, Astarion realized. Crying without tears, which his body could no longer produce. Without thinking, Astarion held out his arms. Gale stepped over the threshold of the ruined wall and collapsed into Astarion’s hug, and Astarion pulled him in.
He was making noise. A low, rattling moan that vibrated Astarion’s chest. Clawed hands grasped weakly at Astarion’s sides. Gale felt cold and dead, but of course Astarion did too.
Gale pulled himself up using Astarion’s shoulders. He mouthed something Astarion couldn’t hear. He leaned in closer—
“ Thank you. Thank you.” The barest whisper, a tortured sound from a throat that had not worked in centuries.
The smell of wet dirt was overwhelming now. f*ck. Disgusting.
“Nod if you want a bath,” Astarion said. “I would highly prefer if you did. You smell dead, and that’s coming from me. ”
Gale nodded. The white pinpricks of his eyes stared at an unclear point on the far wall.
Astarion maneuvered Gale to the bed and drew a bath in the small tub. Suddenly he needed to care , an instinct so powerful it seemed to overcome rational thought. He had to get Gale in the bath, fill it with bubbles, light all the scented candles he had, put on an old jazz record. He felt overwhelmed. When had anybody ever done this for him? Why the f*ck did he care? The image of himself dirty and weak and desperate—fresh from the tomb—flooded his mind. He would’ve loved a damn bubble bath. He would’ve done anything for himself then, if he could’ve.
With Gale undressed in the tub, a linen-scented candle burning on the top of the toilet, Astarion lathered his hands with his bougie salon-quality shampoo. He hadn’t had trouble leading Gale into the bath. Now the decrepit wizard sat staring blankly ahead, as he had been since walking out from behind the wall. Astarion had wet Gale’s hair with cupped hands and combed it out—it wasn’t as matted as he’d thought, probably because Gale hadn’t been moving around much, but he’d still had to cut a few inches off the bottom to make it workable. Now he slid his hands over Gale’s scalp, sudsing the hair up and washing it thoroughly.
He rinsed with water from the sink. Gale had turned the tub an ugly brackish color. Then he combed conditioner through the strands, fingertips brushing along Gale’s neck and shoulders. The wizard shivered whenever Astarion touched him.
Astarion drained the tub and filled it again. Clear fresh hot water rose over Gale’s shins. “Nod if I can wash you?” Astarion asked, and Gale did.
He wet a cloth and covered it with bath gel. He moved his hand to Gale’s arm, touched it lightly to make sure Gale was okay with it. Slowly he lifted the arm and rubbed the cloth over it. Then he moved over Gale’s chest, over the weird orb he had found there when he’d gotten the wizard’s shirt off, and to the other arm. He had to lean over. He felt Gale’s breath on his neck. He rubbed him down gently, carefully, with near reverence. Both of us have survived, Astarion thought. I don’t know how this happened to you, but you survived it.
Each time the water grew dirty Astarion refilled the tub. Eventually the water was lukewarm, but after an hour or so Gale was clean—all of him, even the parts Astarion had felt awkward about cleaning. The gashes on his face Astarion stitched, hands practiced from over a century’s worth of experience, and Gale sat calmly for it, not even flinching. He’d put a set of pajamas in the dryer, like some kind of lovelorn idiot, and these he helped Gale change into, tossing the musty rags in the trash.
He led Gale finally to the bed. Astarion wasn’t about to sleep on the floor, but he certainly wasn’t going to have the wizard slink back down those awful spiral stairs to wherever it was he was living either, so Gale would have to be okay with sharing. Astarion flushed when Gale’s arms, slowly strengthening from the deer, wrapped around his chest. How long since he had touched anyone? Gale was shuddering. He had started to cry again, soundlessly, and now Astarion could feel tears wetting his sheets. He lay his hand on Gale’s back and made gentle circles. He surprised himself when he realized that it didn’t feel threatening or scary or strange at all, this contact. Gale needed, and he had decided to provide, that was all.
The finale of The Hellion’s Heart had released at midnight. Without consulting Gale, because he wasn’t going to miss this sh*t for the world, Astarion pulled his laptop out and clicked on the bookmarked page.
“It’s like a play, but they’ve recorded it with magic,” Astarion told Gale. At some point someone (Karlach? His therapist?) had explained to him that computers and cameras and all of that sh*t did not actually run on magic, but they were definitely joking, he had realized. Unconsciously he drew Gale closer. The wizard had warmed a bit. Astarion enjoyed the quiet heat of this man who wanted nothing from him, who would not ask him to perform.
He didn’t think Gale was watching the show, but as the episode went on Astarion talked to him as though he was equally interested. “Are you f*cking kidding me— how can he not tell that—is she really going to—oh my Gods, are they really going to— Gale I cannot believe this!?” Instead of choosing between Orys and Velsani, Lyria had chosen both. At the final rose ceremony Orys had torn the rose in half, given it to both women and declared his intention to start a life with all three of them living together as a throuple.
Astarion rolled over instinctively to face Gale, wanting to see his facial expression, before forgetting that Gale did not care and had no idea what was going on and had been trapped in his basem*nt for 200 years and had gotten out two hours ago. Gale, for his part, immediately buried his face in Astarion’s neck and squeezed tighter. The proximity slipped Astarion’s grip on the still-active Detect Thoughts spell—
Thank you thank you warm first time years dreaming here thank you warm full thank you thank you relief please thank you cold man vampire beautiful incredible thank you touch hold what is a throuple oh no cheeseburger—
Then he shuddered, trembled and spat and threw up everything he had eaten over Astarion’s silk shirt.
“He’s alive, Shadowheart.”
“Yes, as you said on the phone. You’re sure?”
They were sitting in a booth at the bar over Astarion’s break. He had told her everything. He still wanted her help if he could get it, if the Selûnites could find a way to cure Gale without killing him.
“Positive. I’ve used Detect Thoughts on him a few times. His thoughts are scattered, but they’re hopeful. All he wanted was to get out of that basem*nt. I think the draining effect is involuntary; it seems to happen whenever a living creature comes within range.”
“You’ve been feeding him still?”
“I got him a deer and a couple raccoons. Over the past tenday it’s been back to rats. He can take regular food in small doses and he seems to want it, along with water, but he’ll throw both up eventually. I think that might be improving as well, though.” He paused. “He’s very…I suppose clingy is an appropriate word. Needs to be touching me constantly. It’s getting to me.”
It wasn’t. He had taken to holding Gale at night. They were still sleeping in the same bed. Astarion didn’t know what he was doing.
Shadowheart rested her chin in her hand. “I’ll talk to Isobel. In light of this new information, we may be able to take him off your hands—”
“ No. ”
“You’re very protective of him, it seems,” she said knowingly.
“If you want to help him, you can help him from my basem*nt. If you want to kill him, we’re done.”
She considered. “I’ll see what I can do, Astarion. I’m not sure, but I can try.”
He had the last of the blackout boxes installed over the frosted glass in the upstairs bathroom. Now the whole house was his, sun be damned. And Gale’s, he supposed, at least for now.
Gale had started talking yesterday, as in speaking above a pained whisper. Astarion attributed this to the water. He’d been saying only a few words at a time— thanks, help, hungry, and Astarion, which he still struggled with. It made Astarion melt. Yesterday as they lay in bed Gale had murmured his name just before they fell asleep, in this low gorgeous rasp, and Astarion had felt like he was falling off a cliff.
Astarion stepped out of the shower to leave, noticing his reflection in the mirror as he—hold on a second. He turned.
An old woman stood in the mirror. She had a strong clean jaw and kind wrinkled-pea eyes, hair in a loose bun. She was blue and white and very very obviously a ghost. He jumped. Then he composed himself. As paranormal entities went, he reminded himself, he was more formidable.
She spoke to him in a clear, serious voice that seemed to pierce directly into his mind.
You freed my son. You’ve been feeding him.
Astarion leaned into the mirror and wiped away some of the streaks with his sleeve. “You’re Gale’s mother?”
I am. Morena Dekarios. My son has been trapped for centuries. He did that to himself, you know. Bricked himself in. I begged him not to. I told him there had to be another way, but he said Mystra had told him to do it. By then we were communicating in letters. I couldn’t stop him directly or I’d be drained.
“He really can’t control it?”
No. My son was a very powerful wizard, once. I suppose in a way he still is, cheating death all these years. I’m not sure what exactly he did or why he did it. He was very cagey with me about his work. But one day he was at the height of his power, and the next there was an insatiable…magical orb lodged in his chest, and it drained the soul out of any living being that got close.
He locked himself in his tower for a while. I begged him to come here so I could care for him. Feed him. The orb was making him sick, and he could barely feed himself. He stayed in the basem*nt, of course…I thought he was trying to cure himself. He had moved a good chunk of his library down there. But eventually I realized he had no such intent. He was trying to die. When I figured it out, that’s when he bricked himself off. I never stopped feeding him—never gave up hope—but eventually he stopped eating, and I had a stroke or an aneurysm of some kind; I can’t remember all too well what it was. Now I’m stuck here. Unfinished business, I suppose. That’s how I know he’s still alive.
Morena laughed sadly.
I can’t see him, you see. I’m still a spirit. He’d drain me too. And although I know my time has long passed, I can’t help but feel I’m the only one he has left.
“I’m…so sorry,” Astarion whispered.
Oh, it’s been years. I’ve long since accepted it. I wanted to thank you. You’re the first person who’s ever tried to help. You’’re a vampire, aren’t you? That’’s how you’re immune to the effect? I didn’t know your lot could be this charitable. No offense, of course.
“None taken. I wouldn’t have expected this from myself either. I suppose I rather wanted to get him out of my walls.”
But thank you. If there is a way to help him—a way to do anything at all…please do. Otherwise I might have to haunt this bathroom forever.
She dissolved then. Astarion stared at the space she had left behind.
Gale had bricked himself in. All this agony had been self-inflicted. He’d thought it the only way, must have. Must have thought he deserved it.
Astarion went downstairs to find Gale standing in the kitchenette watching the water flow from the sink, as though it were fascinating and new. He walked up behind the wizard and wrapped him in a hug. Gale tensed and relaxed, leaned into it, his heartbeat thrumming, alive.
Tendays passed. Astarion worked at the bar and sometimes he didn’t. He found a boutique service that made nighttime live rat deliveries. He wasn’t sure who the other customers were and he didn’t want to know. Gale didn’t cling to him as much, but sometimes he would brush his hand up Astarion’s arm or against his cheek. Astarion always let him.
In time Shadowheart and her colleague, Isobel, began making regular visits. They’d retooled their standard protection amulets to immunize them to the life-drain effect, and now they were able to work on neutralizing the orb in Gale’s chest. It was some form of horribly corrupted magic. Descending the spiral stairs in the passageway, they’d found a small stone room lined with bookshelves, the most important texts from Gale’s old library. Other than the shelves the room held a rotted bed and a dresser and a small pile of animal bones. Nothing else. It made Astarion feel ill.
Among the books they’d found Gale’s journals, detailing his own efforts to rid himself of the affliction. Gale still couldn’t speak more than a few words at a time, so he was little help at explaining other than flipping to specific pages, but they managed to scrape together a decent enough base of information to work with.
In the end they couldn’t cure it—not yet—but they could put it on pause. Thanks to the valiant sacrifice of many many rats, they discovered that when the orb was fully sated it didn’t drain. And Shadowheart had thought of an ingenious way to sate it.
“You’re familiar with Spirit Guardians?” she asked, holding up a silver bracelet with a black gem inset into it. Astarion nodded. “This bracelet summons them continually whenever the orb is hungry. Gale kills them instantly, and he avoids draining anyone who matters.”
“You’re sacrificing your own ancestral guardians?”
“They’re Gale’s ancestral guardians. I imagine they’re happy to do it.”
Gale held out his hand. He had grown stronger, his arm now thin instead of skeletal. Shadowheart slipped the bracelet onto it.
Gale whispered something.
Shadowheart visibly startled. He’d never spoken in front of her. “I’m… I’m sorry?”
“Thank you,” he repeated, just loud enough to hear. “Thank you. All of you. I’m alive.”
They had named the dog Scratch. With Gale stable, they had been able to move him from the yard to the house, where he had quickly decided he was allowed to sleep in the bed. Three of them made for a crowded sleeping experience, but Astarion liked the warmth.
Gale had begun to venture tentatively outside. Even seeing the sky had driven him nearly to faint, the first time, and Astarion had been ready to catch him, but now he was able to stay outside for hours at a time. He liked to watch the stars. He knew the constellations, Astarion found, and now that he could talk more he loved to point out every one he saw.
“The Sleepless Knights,” he said as they walked. Scratch padded alongside them happily, slobbering over a stick. “Standing vigil over the northern sky.”
Suddenly a figure turned onto the street. A jogging woman, they saw as she approached. Astarion heard Gale’s heartbeat speed and his breathing hitch. He had been around living beings since getting the bracelet, sure, but not a person. He turned his head across the street, considering. They stopped a moment.
Gale took a deep breath and walked forward. The woman continued on. When she reached them she nodded politely and passed. Nothing happened. She felt no aura of evil, apparently. She jogged away with her soul intact.
“You see?” Astarion reassured him. “It’s alright. You don’t have to hurt anyone anymore.” Maybe he was talking to himself too, if only a little.
Gale stopped again. They had reached an area where overhanging trees shaded the road from the moon. Astarion stopped too, turned around. He moved closer. Gale brushed a hand over his cheek.
When their lips met Astarion could hear Gale’s blood pulsing through his veins, just under the skin. They kissed under a bright low-hanging moon, two free, breathing creatures.
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