Summary: Halsin's past finally catches up with him when the party stumbles across a ruined settlement on the Ebon Lake.
He dwelt in himself
like a rook in an unroofed tower
-Seamus Heaney
Most of all, he missed the sun’s warmth. There was no substitute for it, or for the sweet plainsong of the birds, the wind’s touch. The air below was stale, redolent of fungal colonies and rotting bodies. Nature had found its way even here but not without its own struggle against the void, the unending dark.
It changed you. Halsin knew that, thought he’d accepted it, even moved past it. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to speak of it to Langoth, despite all they’d endured.
It had been days since they’d arrived in the Underdark; after their return from the fugue plane they’d managed to survive hook horrors, duergar, and an encounter with a bulette.
“Everything down here wants to kill us,” Astarion grumbled. “It’s all getting rather repetitive.”
“So not much of a change from the surface! Although, I’ll allow--somewhat less cheerful. At least the goblins had a sense of humor. A terrible sense of humor but it’s more than one can say for duergar.” Gale was in remarkably good spirits despite the near-disemboweling he’d suffered that morning in their fight against the hook horrors. The party wore the mantle of cheerfulness in turns, lifting each other up when it was needed, sharing the warmth of one another’s souls like prisoners sharing meagre scraps of bread.
“Have you ever heard a goblin joke, mate? Not funny.” Wyll said. He was walking point beside Halsin, his eye scanning the darkness ahead for threats as he spoke.
“But at least they make--”
“For instance. Why did the kobold cross the road?”
Gale sighed, nearly extinguishing the flame that danced on the tip of his staff. “I can’t even begin to guess. Enlighten us, Wyll.”
“He didn’t. A goblin hit him over the head and roasted him alive on a spit while his family watched.”
Langoth wrinkled his nose. Halsin was certain he’d heard a version of this ‘joke’ with a gnome in the place of the kobold. Goblins were known for their originality even less than their sense of humor.
Gale was silent for a long while. “Alright, I take your point. In some cases, no sense of humor is better.”
“What is that?” Langoth said, pushing ahead of Wyll and Halsin to look over the edge of a deep precipice. Halsin crouched beside him, squinting into the gloom. It was the Ebon Lake; he remembered it well.
“Moonrise Towers is on the other side of the lake,” he said in a low voice. The Underdark and its deadly monsters forced the habit of whispering onto you.
“How do we get there?” Langoth asked.
Halsin pointed to the outline of a jetty. “Perhaps fortune will be on our side, for once.”
“Wouldn’t that be refreshing,” Astarion muttered.
Langoth smiled faintly. “Let’s go, then.”
“Wait,” Halsin said. He’d caught sight of a ruined settlement along the edge of the shore. It had been a prosperous mine, when last he was here. Gnomish; they had aided him--meanly, it had to be said--but they’d aided him, nonetheless. A wave of nausea accompanied the memory of his escape. The burning chains, the dark, the despair. He shut his eyes a moment.
“Are you alright?” Langoth said, taking his arm in his steady, strong hand.
Halsin opened his eyes, the memory already fading. “I’m fine,” he said. “Look, there was once a settlement of some kind here. We should be cautious.”
They picked along the edges of the settlement but the gnomes who might have recognized him were gone--dead, or enslaved.
“Let’s not linger,” Halsin said. He could feel Astarion’s gaze but didn’t engage him. He didn’t want to confirm any of the vampire spawn’s suspicions.
Langoth pointed ahead to the jetty. “It’s a vessel of some kind.”
“Keep to cover,” he said. “We can’t yet guess if they’re friend or foe.”
They listened to him, thank the gods, hugging the low, ramshackle buildings around the jetty to get a closer look. A clammy sweat had broken out on his palms and forehead as memories threatened to overwhelm him again. He shouldn’t have come back.
“Are those drow?” Astarion said, his voice barely a whisper.
They were hunters and wore the weeping red eye of House Canavar; at the sight of that evil sigil, Halsin froze. Langoth’s voice seemed very distant as he said, “Do you think they’re hostile?”
“We should turn back,” Halsin said, his throat nearly closing around the words. “I know that mark.”
Astarion raised an eyebrow, watching him closely, even avidly as he asked, “How, exactly? I can’t imagine they venture to the surface often.”
“It does not matter how,” he growled. “They are no friends to us, believe me.”
“Certainly don’t look friendly,” Wyll said. The hunters paced the pitched planks of the skiff. Slavers, looking for prey. Like them.
Langoth’s piercing gaze was nearly unbearable. Finally, he said, “Very well. We’ll follow the shore west and look for another way.”
Halsin released the breath he’d been holding. “Thank you,” he whispered. Langoth touched his gauntlet, a question in his eyes. Later, he would tell him everything. After they were out of this godsforsaken place.
They retraced their steps, one by one, Halsin at the rear. Just as he was nearly around the corner of the last building, a piece of broken glass crunched under his foot. He paused midstride. The drow slavers stopped too, listening.
He didn’t dare to breathe; his position was exposed, they had only to descend onto the jetty to see him. His heart pounded as the smaller hunter strode down the edge of the skiff.
The slaver leapt onto the jetty with a thud that shook the timbers and Halsin dove back behind the building.
“Ehi! Stop!”
Too slow. The hunter drew his bow as Halsin scrambled to his feet, reaching for his club in the same motion.
Langoth appeared at his side, bow already nocked. “Don’t move,” he commanded the hunter, his voice unwavering as his arrow.
Astarion, Gale, and Wyll emerged from the shadows behind them, weapons drawn. He could weep with gratitude. He wasn’t alone, this time. Halsin drew his club.
“Golzar,” the hunter shouted to his partner. He simultaneously lowered his bow. The other drow jumped down from the skiff, his hands raised.
“We wish no quarrel with you,” the larger hunter, this Golzar, said. His skin was the violent purple of a gentian’s flower and seemed to glow in the gloom. “And you wish no quarrel with our master.”
“And who is your mistress?” Langoth said, his arrow still aimed at the hunter’s heart.
Golzar bared his teeth; they were filed to points and his wide smile was like a gleaming white saw. “Perhaps you misheard me, boy. I serve a lord. His name is Valas and his house is the most illustrious House Canavar. And he shall make bread from the dust of your bones.”
“Typical,” Astarion muttered, though despite his bravado the vampire spawn blanched.
“He will do nothing of the kind,” Langoth said. His fingers tightened on the bowstring. “We’re not easy prey, as you may have gathered.”
“Aren’t you?”
A company of drow appeared from the shadows, weapons drawn, all wearing the same sigil. Canavar. His blood chilled, even as Langoth muttered an oath under his breath. They were outnumbered, badly.
“I recognize this one,” said a huntress who had emerged from behind the burnt husk of a mill. She walked over to Halsin, her daggers trained on him. "I recognize him very well." Her face was puckered by a terrible silver scar that traversed the length of her face, chin to brow, hitching up her lips in an ugly sneer. He would not soon forget her face, though he’d never learned her name. “The master will be pleased to see you,” she said, leaning so close that Halsin could smell the spiced meat on her breath. He shuddered.
“Begone,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “We’ll have no dealings with your master.”
“Oh, but I think you will,” the huntress said. She strolled over to stand beside Golzar, wrapping him in a casual embrace and whispering into his ear.
Langoth glanced at him again, questioning. Halsin couldn’t hold his gaze. He had to protect him from this--from his own past, which seemed determined to force itself into the present.
“You will come with us,” Golzar said. “As our esteemed guests.”
Astarion snorted. “One’s hair curls to imagine what drow hospitality entails.”
“Take me,” Halsin said, stepping forward and throwing his club to the ground in front of him. It landed with a hollow clatter that rose a small cloud of grey dust at his feet. “I’m the one your master wants.”
The drow called Golzar smiled as though he were indulging a naughty child. “Oh, no, Master Druid. That would be most unbecoming. Lord Valas will want to host all of your companions.”
Finally, he met Langoth’s eye. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, though Langoth still couldn’t know for what. He would learn all too soon.
Langoth took his hand. “We’ll face this together, too.”
Halsin shut his eyes. “There’s so much I wish I had--”
“Onto the skiff, now, grandfather. You’ll want to arrive in time for dinner--you must remember the generosity of Lord Valas’s table well.”
The other companions looked at him but he remained silent. Fury was building in him, born from an old hatred and wounds he’d wanted to believe had been healed over, like bark over the exposed pith of a tree. But something foul had flourished there, waiting.
The scarred drow watched him and smiled. When they passed to board the skiff, she stopped him and gripped his arm. Once more, she leaned close. “It’s good to have you back, Master Halsin.”
Characters: Halsin/OMC
Rating: E
Words: 1747
Summary: After escaping the Fugue Plane, Halsin shares an ancient but effective method for binding the soul back to the body. Langoth tries to reclaim his lover from the dark memories that imprison him... and to find the courage to express his true feelings for the druid.
Night and day were interchangeable in the Underdark; all the same, they assembled a makeshift camp in the ruined fort to get what rest they could before pushing on.
The soup had almost fully revived Langoth. He still felt a chill in his chest and fingers, remnants of the hour his body had lain dead, severed from his soul. Gods, he might be standing before Kelmvor’s throne right now, receiving his judgment, if not for Halsin. He looked over at the druid, who was himself watching the embers as the others settled in for their rest.
“You’ve been here before,” Langoth said. It was not a question.
“It’s been nearly a century. Yet it feels like no time has passed.” Halsin’s gaze didn’t move from the dying fire as he spoke. Langoth wished to know what thoughts swam through the dark waters of his mind, even as he feared the answer. Halsin had told him some of his past with Ketheric and yet he sensed there was more--much more--to the story than what he’d shared.
“Perhaps we’ll find the answers we seek,” Langoth said. “All of them.”
At that, Halsin turned to face him. Pain and the dim glow of the fire had made his face into a mask. “About the mindflayer tadpole, too, perhaps. This affliction has a cure, I am certain.”
Langoth could only grimace. “I’m beginning to think there is no cure but death. True death. Did you notice anything strange about--about when I died?”
Halsin didn’t meet his gaze. “It wasn’t like with the drow. The tadpole...”
“It never left me. Even after its host died. Why?”
The druid’s brow furrowed. He looked even more troubled than before. “A disturbing question with only disturbing answers.”
Langoth nodded, rubbing his cold hands together. “It was the same before, when Gale fell. Even as his body shed waves of necrotic energy, the tadpole didn’t abandon his corpse. It knew we would revive him.”
Halsin took his hands, expression softening. The heat of the coals had flushed his cheeks. “Think no more of such things. You’re alive--we’re both alive. And we still need to fully reacquaint our souls with our bodies.”
Shaking off thoughts of the tadpole, Langoth smiled. “You’re the healer. What do you advise?”
“There is an old remedy,” he murmured, drawing close to Langoth to whisper in his ear, “But it requires some privacy.”
“Does it?” Langoth said. He took Halsin’s warm face in his hands and kissed him on the mouth, gentle as a brush of summer wind. “There was a storeroom--” The druid cut him off with a kiss of his own, deeper and more insistent.
They slipped away from the warm refectory, Langoth avoiding Astarion’s knowing smirk. They didn’t need to explain themselves, he told himself. They had come back from the dead, for gods’ sakes. In his head, his voice sounded suspiciously like his brother’s. Never apologize; those might as well have been their family words, as far as Cadamir was concerned.
The storeroom was cool, close, and lightless. Little more, in truth, than a closet. Halsin opened his mouth to say something but Langoth held a finger to the druid’s lips. He wanted to give him a show. He unlaced his jerkin, slowly, the laces purring through their grommets. When finally he slipped off his shirt the air was cold and for a sickening moment, he was back in the land of the dead, looking up at an empty grey sky.
Halsin brought him back with a touch. “You’re beautiful,” he sighed. “So beautiful.” Langoth allowed himself to be kissed, to drink in the druid’s warmth and to be kindled by his soft touch.
Then he pulled away again and resumed his striptease, sliding his sword belt off his hips, turning around and bending over to pull off his boots. The druid put his hands on his hips then and pressed himself to Langoth’s backside. He was already hard. The contact sent a heady wave of desire surging through the ranger and he grabbed on to a stone shelf to keep his balance.
“Soft,” Langoth gasped, standing upright again. It was as much a reminder to himself as an admonition to Halsin. He perceived his lover’s smile in the dim. And slowly, he continued, sliding his breeches low on hips, showing the top of his pelvis, the curves of his hip bones. The druid’s warm fingers brushed his own away and tugged, ripping away the laces entirely and tearing the front of his breeches. He pushed Langoth against the shelves and slid his hand beneath the breeches, taking hold of his cock. The ranger sucked in his breath, losing his balance again and leaning against Halsin for support.
Halsin pressed his advantage, taking a handful of Langoth’s hair and yanking back his head to reveal his throat. He moaned as the druid kissed him. He could taste the sweetness of wine on his tongue before his hungry mouth trailed down Langoth’s neck. Halsin pressed his body firmly to him, grinding his hips against his exposed pelvis. Langoth began to slide his breeches down from his hips. Heat pounded in his veins and for the first time since he’d begun breathing again, he felt fully alive. Halsin pressed against him all the more insistently, his grinding rhythmic.
And then he stopped. The sound of their breathing filled the dark cavity, Halsin’s ragged as a wounded animal’s, his weight still pressed against the ranger’s semi-nude body. Langoth touched his arm, thinking it was perhaps the ugly gash on the druid’s leg.
“I thought that I had lost you,” Halsin said, his voice no more than a broken whisper. His face was bowed in shadow; he covered it with one hand. “I don’t know what I would do, if I truly lost you.”
“I’m here,” Langoth said. He took Halsin’s face in his own hands and looked up at him. His eyes were still shadowed. “Nothing could part us. Not even death.”
Halsin exhaled a long, low sigh. “I have lived much longer than you,” he finally said.
“If we have just this moment then let us make the most of it,” Langoth said, drawing him down for another kiss. Something seemed to waken within the druid and he returned it forcefully, with a passion possessive and fierce. Breathless, Langoth could only steady himself against the lichen crusted shelves as Halsin ground his body against him once more, hand finding the torn front of his breeches and jerking them down to reveal Langoth’s hardness. He winced as the druid ungently stroked him and then pushed him to bend him over an old crate, tugging his torn breeches down to his knees. Langoth’s breath hitched when Halsin’s fingers found his ass, then quickened with anticipation as he heard the older elf spit onto his hand, untie his cloth belt and then brace himself behind him, one hand wound in Langoth’s hair.
Halsin’s first thrust was brutal and Langoth couldn’t hold back a cry. The druid made no concessions for his size but plowed deeply into him, as though trying to reach Langoth’s center. Another broken cry escaped Langoth’s lips, a shuddering gasp. It had never been like this before. But Halsin did not forbear; if anything his hips pounded deeper and faster. Just as Langoth was on the edge of telling him to stop, pleasure overtook pain and he lost himself in the sensation of Halsin’s deep, sustained thrusts.
With his other hand, the druid reached around to grip Langoth’s cock, stroking it gently now, his fingers sliding delicately down the shaft even as he pumped relentlessly from behind. The counterpoint of the sensations made Langoth lightheaded, his senses overwhelmed. He sank onto the crate, feeling the rasp of the wood against his cheek as Halsin continued caressing his shaft. The druid pushed his legs further apart to take him even deeper and his grasp firmed around Langoth’s cock. A shudder overtook him as Halsin groaned into his ear. Gods, he was close. A whimper escaped his lips and the druid’s hips slowed so that Langoth could feel every inch of him, filling him.
The ecstasy overtook Langoth and he came with a sigh, taut muscle softening as he melted over the crate. Halsin sighed with him, in appreciation; the druid brushed the hair from his cheek to better see his face as he continued to pump, deeper and deeper.
The druid cried out, bending over Langoth’s back; he could feel the weight of his muscled body, the heat of his jagged breath in his ear as the rhythm of hips became chaotic, frenzied. His force had lifted Langoth nearly off of his feet and he struggled to keep his balance on the top of the crate. Halsin gasped Langoth’s name and it was like a supplication to the divine. Langoth shivered in renewed pleasure as Halsin came inside him with a tremor that he felt to his core.
For a few breaths, they stayed there in silence, Halsin still resting on Langoth’s outstretched body. Then, finally, he rose, pulling out and Langoth felt the sharp chill of the room on his naked back. He quivered and turned back to Halsin, perhaps for some comfort. But the druid was far, far away from him.
“Come back to me,” he whispered. He cradled Halsin’s scarred face in his hands.
The druid at last regarded him, a faint smile on his lips. “I want to believe we’ll survive this,” he said.
“Then believe it,” Langoth said. “We will. We are.”
Halsin nodded but his face told another tale. “You were going to say something. In the fugue plane.”
Now it was Langoth’s turn to look away. He collected his discarded armor from the floor, hiding his expression. He’d wanted Halsin to know before they died--yet now he wasn’t so certain he could say it. Why did facing an ancient eldritch dragon of the hells feel less terrifying than speaking the truth of his heart?
He compromised and looked at the crumbling stone flagging. “I wanted you to know. How I felt about you. Feel about you.” He felt the weight of Halsin’s stare but couldn’t bear to look up as he whispered, “I love you.”
And then he was enveloped in the bonfire warmth of the druid’s embrace, his heady scent of cedar and mulberry wine and autumn sunlight in his nose, the velvet strength of his muscled arms around him. And he wept.
Summary: Halsin and Langoth fight for their lives--and souls--on the fugue plane while in the Underdark Gale struggles to complete the ritual to bring them back to life.
They had only to persevere long enough for revival. To clasp hands at the precise moment the last words were spoken on the material plane.
But in the shadow of the dragon’s enormous form, blasted by the heat that radiated from its black sides as though from a blazing furnace, that seemed nigh impossible.
“Behind me,” Halsin said to the ranger, grimacing against the dragon’s roar. Instead, Langoth stood beside him, drawing his bow. Although his longsword and dagger had not survived the fatal journey between planes, his ironwood bow was imbued with deep magic and a brother’s love and had traveled with the soul of its owner to this purgatory. Seeing it in his hands gave him heart.
Langoth loosed an arrow at the ancient styx dragon’s neck; it merely plinked off its armored scales.
The dragon seemed to chuckle, exhaling plumes of flame with its laughter. Your spirits will make a meager meal but there is rich entertainment in watching you struggle, at least, said the dragon. It raised one clawed foot, blotting out the grey sky and Halsin dove, a line of white hot fire screaming across the back of his leg where the dragon’s spur caught his flesh. He yelled as its poison sank into muscle--his soul, in fact, for in this plane, body and soul were one.
The pain was vivid. Halsin opened himself to it, allowed it to sharpen his focus and turned back to the dragon. There was no weakness he could perceive, no gap in the undulant ranks of its black scales. But every dragon was tender around the muzzle and this one had foolishly lowered his, the better to watch him suffer. Halsin screamed again for effect, clutching his leg and the dragon sank even lower, its face in striking range. Marshaling all of his strength, Halsin drew the club from his back and threw it like a javelin into the dragon’s nose. It struck true, showering him a waterfall of hot, black blood, like tar.
The creature’s tortured shriek was terrible as it echoed across their minds. Halsin staggered over to Langoth, both his wound and his head on fire.
“When the time comes--whatever else should happen,” Halsin said, “You must take my hand.”
Before Langoth could reply, the dragon was upon them again. It was no longer toying with them: now it was out for blood. Only luck saved Halsin from being cut in two as he dove away--this time the dragon’s claws sliced through empty air.
How much longer? Langoth asked. He wove and tumbled around the dragon’s legs, avoiding its swiping claws with limber grace that might be a dance but for the raging dragon above them.
The monster busy with Langoth, Halsin ignored the throbbing pain in his leg and closed his eyes for a moment to test the link he’d left to the plane where their bodies lay, lifeless.
...was a mad idea, what if they don’t come back at all? Across the planes, Astarion’s voice was watery and hollow, as though he were speaking from the other end of a very long sea cave.
Master Halsin’s nearly past the point of no return, looks like, Wyll said. Hells, what’s that on his leg?
Gale’s voice echoed more forcefully in Halsin’s mind. Less commentary, if you please, this does require a bit of focus, you know--Halsin, is that you? Is it time?
Almost, he thought, Be ready. He felt the wizard’s assent and turned back to the fray. Langoth had sunk an ice arrow into the dragon’s nostril and it was trying to scratch it away, howling from its sting.
Halsin dashed over to the ranger, avoiding the sweep of the dragon’s tail as it staggered and bellowed in blind rage. They would just have to hope the distraction lasted long enough to complete the ritual. Langoth looked shaken but unhurt, his keen eyes watchful. Even as the dragon roared above them, Halsin felt a surge of love, of humility in the face of its enormity: greater than any ancient guardian of the Fugue Plane, greater even than death. “It’s time,” he said. Their hands joined and he reached across the void again, to Gale.
What if it’s too late? Langoth said. He sensed the ranger’s despair.
“Just don’t let go. No matter what happens.”
In answer, Langoth interlaced his fingers and squeezed them tight. The druid shut his eyes and perceived, worlds away, Gale whispering the incantations that would bring their souls back.
Halsin, Langoth’s voice rang in his mind, sharp with fear.
He opened his eyes to see the dragon bearing down on them, its mouth open, throat welling with blue fire.
“Don’t let go,” Halsin said, even as every instinct screamed at him to break away, to dive to safety. Langoth gripped his hand so hard he feared his bones would bruise.
The styx dragon bore down on them, a gout of flame shooting from its maw. Halsin closed his eyes again. The ritual was nearly complete--a few words away, if Gale did not stumble.
I need to tell you something, Langoth said. While there’s time. I--
But before he could finish, darkness took them both.
*
“...breathing, that has to be a good sign, surely?”
Dim, green light danced around him. Langoth moaned and shut his eyes again. Cold, he was so cold. Everything from his waist up was agony: pain that throbbed, ached, stung, burned, and stabbed. From the waist down, all was numb.
“Langoth,” Wyll said. He heard the warlock approach but couldn’t bear to open his eyes again. His voice sounded distant. “Hells, he’s properly torn up. Here, give us that potion.”
A hand cradled his head, tipped it back, and another held a phial of healing potion to his bloodied lips. It slid down his throat and he sighed as it took effect, restoring life to his stiff limbs. A sickening crunch as his spine reknit itself and sensation rushed back to his legs. He shivered. It felt as though he’d never be warm again.
“Halsin,” he said, remembering. The fugue plane, the dragon, the blue flames--he struggled to his hands and knees and collapsed with a groan.
“It’s alright, mate. Halsin is just there, look.” Wyll pointed to the other corner of the courtyard, where the druid was staggering to his feet, shaking his thick mane of hair and rubbing his face. Langoth sank back down in relief. They had made it, somehow.
“I’m fine too,” Astarion said. “If you were wondering. I also nearly died, on your behalf. Again.”
“Thank the gods,” Langoth rasped with a smile. He shut his eyes and breathed deeply--real air, again. Even though it was centuries stale and stank of fungus and dead minotaur, there was no sweeter smell.
“Actually, thank Gale,” the wizard said, approaching with Halsin by his side. “It was a very near thing, indeed. Suppose I owed you for all the times you’ve pulled me back from death’s door.”
The druid leaned over him and took Langoth’s icy hands between his own. “Thank you,” Langoth whispered.
Halsin laid a hand on his chest. “Don’t speak. You need food. Your soul has been too long in Kelemvor’s kingdom and needs to be fully restored.”
“And nothing better for that than a nice warming mug of soup,” Gale said. “I would know. I shall see to it.”
An arm around Halsin’s waist, Langoth limped past the minotaur corpses laid out on blood slick flagstones to sit in the fort’s cozy refectory by the fire that Gale had set roaring with a cantrip.
“Rest here,” Halsin said, helping into a dusty leather chair which was surprisingly comfortable, considering its age. “But don’t sleep yet. Your soul’s connection to your body is still too tenuous.”
“Stay with me?” he asked. Their eyes met and warmth spread through him; heat not just from the roaring fire. Gale busied himself nearby with the cooking, humming tunefully as he banged pots and spoons and asking Astarion if he might use his dagger to mince the garlic.
Halsin eased down beside Langoth on a rickety bench, favoring one leg.
“The dragon?” It still hurt to speak.
Halsin nodded, wincing as he settled onto the bench. “It will mend, in time.”
“Did I hear the word dragon?” Wyll said. “I think that might be next on my list, having taken down a minotaur single handedly.”
Astarion shot him an acid look from across the room.
“Well, almost single handedly. Alright, you lot all helped.”
“Your magnanimity, Wyll, is as ever, inspirational,” Gale said, magicking a stream of hot water into the cookpot.
Langoth laughed, and felt a little warmer still. It was good, he reflected, to be alive. The heady scent of garlic and onions sizzling over the fire reached his nose and his stomach growled.
“Well, our foray into the Underdark is off to a wonderful start,” Astarion said from the shadows. “I just can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings. Perhaps decapitation?” He met Langoth’s eye.
“Stop sulking in the corner, Astarion,” Langoth said. “We survived, didn’t we?”
The vampire spawn scoffed but he approached and even sat on the bench with Halsin. At the opposite end, but it was a start.
“Mad idea, coming down here,” Astarion said, looking moodily into the fire. He turned to Langoth and with unexpected emotion said, “We almost lost you.”
“Well, you didn’t,” Langoth said. “And we will make it to Moonrise Towers.”
He did not fail to observe the expression of foreboding on Halsin’s weathered features. He’d never seen the druid look so tired. Again, he perceived there was something he was holding back, some unspoken burden he carried. Langoth took his hand but he only patted it absently, staring into the dark.
Characters: Halsin/OMC, Gale, Astarion, Wyll
Rating: T (will change in later chapters)
Words: 1508
Summary: Halsin attempts a dangerous ritual to save his beloved from purgatory while in the Fugue Plane Langoth is confronted by an old enemy and a terrible choice.
Desires are the flowers of the living
They do not bloom in the realm of death.
Giovacchino Forzano, Suor Angelica
In the grey silence of the Fugue Plane, all Langoth had was memory.
He remembered the terror of dying, the acrid stench of the minotaur as it snarled above his wrecked body. The shattering force of the killing blow and the numbness that followed when his spine snapped, as though he had been submerged in glacial water. Further back: the peculiar gem at the fort, the apprehension of their descent. The tenderness of Halsin’s touch at dawn, the heat that the druid kindled in him. The birdsong as their bodies joined. Joy perhaps never to be experienced again.
He swiped a tear from his cheek and lifted his eyes to the empty sky like a supplicant awaiting a sign from the gods. Perhaps his love would speak again across the gulf of the planes.
You won’t be getting any help from up there.
The voice, so familiar, was not on the air but resounded his head. He spun around by instinct and saw him. Derenth. He was the same wild-haired, barefoot boy he’d been when Langoth had run away from the Cloakwood, decades ago. But that’s impossible, he thought. The boy had simply appeared from thin air.
When you are dead, coz, the boy who was possibly Derenth said, The impossible becomes probable. If it was not Derenth, it was a perfect double: he had the same impish grin, the one his aunt seemed to find adorable but which filled Langoth with instinctive dread.
My companions will revive me, Langoth said. Even in his own head his words sounded uncertain.
Unlikely. You’ve been dead a while, or I wouldn’t’ve been summoned. Time is different in this place. That’s a lesson for free and here’s another: you need to go to the tower. Derenth pointed toward the horizon that had been empty only moments ago. Langoth followed his cousin’s finger to the city that had appeared there.
Know what it is? Derenth said. If there were air, he’d be breathless.
The City of the Dead, Langoth answered in his mind. He shut his eyes as though banishing it from sight would make it disappear. His cousin’s laughter--that he remembered well--echoed in his head.
Can’t wish it away, coz, Derenth said, You’re dead.
*
Halsin’s fight was all the more fierce for his desperation. But not fast enough.
They felled the last minotaur inch by blood-drenched inch, grinding it down until one final slash of Wyll’s rapier ended it. Before the beast hit the ground, Halsin was back at Langoth’s side.
It was too late: he was too long dead, lost to Kelemvor’s kingdom.
Gale spoke first, pacing vigorously. “We can fix this, I am certain we can fix this. Let’s take him back to camp, get the talkative skeleton fellow to summon him back. He can bring anyone back.”
“It would take half the day to ascend and reach the camp,” Halsin said. “By then, he’d be far beyond the reach of any necromancer.” He touched Langoth’s cheek, the only part of him that wasn’t spattered with blood. It was already cold.
How could fate be so cruel as to rend them apart so soon after they’d found one another? To steal away a life that had only just begun? He wished he could trade all his wasted centuries for the boy’s life. He would do it with gladness in his heart. He suddenly remembered. An ancient ritual. A bleak night, shadows on the wall. A time he wished to forget--but perhaps that memory would be what saved Langoth.
“There is one rite,” Halsin said slowly. He glanced at Gale; he’d need to be careful how much he revealed. If they knew everything the rite entailed, they’d never agree to help him and he couldn’t do it alone.
Astarion limped over, his bloodred eyes fixed on the ranger’s body. “If it will bring him back, then let’s try,” he said softly.
“Agreed,” Wyll said. “Let’s revive him however we can. Except not, you know. As an undead. Then we’d just have to kill him again.” Astarion shot him a venomous look. “Too soon?”
“What is this rite, precisely?” Gale said, more circumspect. He was wise indeed, Halsin thought, to be wary of meddling with the divine.
“You still have the wyvern poison that Nettie gave you? Good. I’ll drink to just beyond the point of death. Long enough to find him in the Fugue Plane and bring him back with me. You must revive me before my soul loses its connection to this plane.” He did not add that if they delayed there was a good chance that both their souls would be forfeit. Kelemvor did not take kindly to interlopers or those who would cheat him of his due.
“That is risky,” Gale said, considering. Finally he sighed. “But I don’t see that we have much other choice.”
Halsin wasted no time. He found the wyvern poison in Langoth’s pack and decanted it, measuring just enough to stop his heart. It was more than the average elf would require, but Nettie, in an abundance of caution, had given Langoth enough to take down a troll.
Wyll frowned as he watched him work. “Master Halsin, are you certain you want to--?”
But he tipped back the fell poison before he could finish and began to mutter the invocation. It was old magic, old as the bones of the immortal city itself; a dead tongue that felt as strange and evil in his throat as the wyvern poison. The words built as he felt his lifeforce ebbing, his heart seizing and the feeling of ice water running through his veins as he said the final incantation and distantly, he heard Gale’s voice saying, This was a mistake....
His mouth grew numb and he spoke Langoth’s name three times before the darkness took him.
*
The city exuded a pull that was irresistible. Langoth’s eyes kept wandering to it, even as his cousin peppered his mind with jeers and taunts.
It looked very real, at least at this distance. Towers and turrets and gates. Streets where one could imagine people went about the quotidian business of living. If one didn’t know better.
Kelemvor sat at the central tower, meting out judgment on the dead. Consigning them to their gods, to the hells, or to planes beyond. He still couldn’t quite accept that he was one of their number. Dead. A soul without a body.
If I go, he thought, glancing at Derenth, Will you leave me be?
Finally, he gets it. Derenth threw his hands in the air. That’s the whole point of me, coz. To chivvy you the hells along.
And yet still he felt torn. He looked up at the milky sky. As though the chariots of the gods or perhaps the Absolute itself--whatever or whoever it was--would descend from it and free him from this purgatory.
Eh, who the hells are you? Get your own soul to torment, I’m busy with this one, his cousin’s mind fairly squawked in indignation.
Langoth turned and though his body was only an illusory projection, he felt relief to his marrow. He was here, looking as solid as an oak tree amongst the dust and ruin.
Tears again pricked his eyes and he embraced the druid as though he were a piece of driftwood far out at sea. You came, Langoth said, only now realizing that Halsin was the intervention he’d been waiting for.
“I told you I’d never leave you,” he said, with his voice. The sound of it was the only music Langoth wished to hear for the rest of his days. He pressed his forehead to the druid’s. Even in this immortal plane, he could smell his smoky, cedar scent. It made him want to weep with happiness.
Derenth narrowed his eyes. How is it you can speak in Kelemvor’s kingdom, grandsire? Are you some sort of necromancer?
“I’m a druid sworn to Silvanus,” Halsin said. “And I’ve come to claim Langoth back to the prime material plane.” He had never looked so fierce, his eyes burning bright as a tiger’s as he glared down at Derenth. “You will not stop me. Kelemvor himself could not stop me.” Langoth felt a chill of both fear and desire as the druid stared down his nemesis.
Derenth smiled as though pretending to be amused by some weak jest. You’ve made a grave error, druid. The last you shall make on this plane or any other.
And then Derenth was no longer Derenth, his elven form stretching and warping, scales springing from his skin, teeth as long as greatswords shooting from his maw, until he towered above them, a gargantuan black dragon.
“A styx dragon,” Halsin said, spitting out an oath as they beheld the beast’s terrible roar. Langoth fell to his knees at the sound that roiled through both his mind and ears.
When it was over, he rose and took his lover’s hand. Together, he thought.
Halsin nodded, a grim smile hitching the scar that curled under his lower lip. “Always,” he said.
Summary: Only the desperate would choose to descend to the Underdark. But Halsin, Langoth, and his companions are desperate--and out of alternatives. For Halsin, the Underdark contains memories more dangerous than any monster. Revenants of a dark past waiting to reclaim him from his lover's arms. The danger is no less for Langoth and his comrades, who will confront their own nightmares in the depths beneath.
Author’s Note: Well met! Here's the thing: as I write this, we're at the end of BG 3 Early Access and can only make an informed guess about what comes next - so this is a kinda hybrid post-canon, eventually canon-divergent series. That being said, some upcoming plot points will be informed by datamined information about Ketheric Thorm and the Nightsong. Proceed with caution if you want to remain unspoiled. I'll add another A/N to the chapters with spoiler-y content, likely not until the latter part of the series.
This will be a multichapter adventure (huzzah!) becoming darker/angsty around the middle (gulp!) and ending on a positive note (yay!).
While though the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
And though the darkness ‘round me close,
Songs in the night it giveth.
Traditional
Halsin experienced a familiar dread as they descended from the ruined temple into the Underdark. Born of the stale air, the way the bare rock hollowed the echoes of their footsteps and hushed words. Memories rose like revenants, unbidden. He steadied himself with a glance at his beloved.
Astarion, ever sensitive to the undercurrents, said, “Has someone died? Are we going to be grim and silent the whole way down?”
Wyll snorted. “No, mate, we’ll be stopping in a bit to have another party. We invited the tieflings back for another round, didn’t you hear?”
The ranger was outwardly composed; only his eyes betrayed any disquiet.
“Well, we all know Langoth isn’t much one for parties,” Astarion said, baring his fangs in a sort of hybrid of smile and snarl. The vampire spawn was stubborn with his grudges, Halsin had noted. Eager to cling to past slights. He was certain there was reason for that beyond mere jealousy but the chances of getting close enough to him to learn those reasons were slim.
“Children, children,” Gale said, raising his hands in placation. “Don’t argue, you’ll wake the duergar.”
“What no one tells you about adventuring is that it’s ninety percent boredom and ten percent raining entrails,” Astarion grumbled with a woeful sigh that said you can’t even make a joke around here.
“Gale is right,” Halsin said. “Things long dormant reside in the Underdark. Best not to disturb them.”
Astarion’s eye roll was so dramatic it couldn’t be missed even in the gloom of the dank stair. But he said no more and each was left alone with his own thoughts. Halsin ran through his regrets like a long-remembered prayer, unable to escape their compelling call. It was enough to make him wish Astarion would start prattling again.
The stair spilled onto ruins thick with desiccated corpses at least a century old. Skulls riven by ax blades, chests bristling with black arrows. The silence beyond was somehow watchful.
“What is this place?” Langoth’s soft voice seemed to be absorbed into the unending darkness around them. Halsin suppressed a shudder.
“The dwarf said something of an ancient fort,” he said. “These are Selune’s faithful, if I had to guess.”
Wyll held his torch aloft to inspect one of the skeletons, illuminating a silver emblem that bore the goddess’s mark. “Think you might be onto something, Halsin.”
“So--sorry, are we talking now?” Astarion said with an ironic smile. “Let’s just look around for anything useful and move on. This place is… creepy, whatever it is. And not in a good way.”
“For once, I find myself in agreement with the vampire spawn,” Gale said. “There is some dark magic here. Let’s get whatever we need and go forth.”
Langoth squinted into the distance, where a shaft of light beamed down from some unseen source. “Very well. A quick sweep.”
There was little to be found; a few decaying log books that confirmed their suspicions about the fort’s defenders, some rusty weapons and moldering provisions. The center courtyard was warded by a magnificent statue of Selune holding aloft a magicked gem; they all stared at it, transfixed by its power. “Strange,” Langoth said, his voice tight with apprehension.
They turned as one at the sound of quiet snorting outside the black iron gate. Halsin’s blood chilled in his veins. He had never seen a minotaur so close--few who did ever lived to tell of it.
It stamped and brayed, enraged by their mere presence.
Langoth’s face went bloodless with terror. He drew his sword and held it aloft as he started spitting out commands. “Gale, above the gate. Wyll, stand back on the rear stair--”
But his next orders were cut off as the minotaur charged the gate, throwing it down as though it were made of willow branches rather than wrought iron. It howled again, knocking them back with the force of its assault.
What followed could only be described as carnage.
Gale went down in the first attack, his chest partly caved in by the minotaur’s horn, darkening the front of his robes with blood. Halsin ran to his side, whispering healing words to restore some life to the wizard’s broken body. He held his breath as the spells did their work and Gale staggered to his feet with a moan.
He turned back to the fight to see Astarion sinking his dagger deep into the minotaur’s side; its bellow resounded in the dark like a thunderclap in the night. Wyll blasted it with an infernal cantrip. Halsin felt a ripple of hope, a lightness in his heart--perhaps they would survive this encounter.
Then a second minotaur came screaming from the darkness beyond the fort and his hope curdled into dread.
The flagged floor was painted red with their blood within minutes. Time lost meaning as Halsin ran from one man to the next, healing gashes and broken bones and bleeding organs and landing a blow on the minotaurs where he could. But he might have been swinging his club at the stone pillars for all the good it did.
Astarion’s scream shook the timbers of the ancient fort as he was caught between the two minotaurs, unable to escape. They had succeeded in pinning him down. Overwhelmed by battle rage and fear, Halsin felt the bear claim him.
His fury was easier in this form: less complex, more satisfying to wield. He loped over to the minotaurs, parting them with a vicious attack that finally drew blood. The bear savored its taste, barely noticing that the vampire spawn took the opening to slip away. One minotaur followed and the bear cornered the other, standing on his hind legs to roar before launching another furious onslaught against the monster.
The bear did not hear the exclamations behind him, the companions shouting his name, begging the druid’s aid. It wasn’t the first time his rage had rendered him deaf and blind with tragic consequences. He finally turned away from the corpse of the first minotaur to see Langoth lying face down in a pool of blood, his body broken beneath the triumphant howl of the second beast.
The shock was enough to call him back, gasping, to his druid form. The monster leapt away to harry Gale again and Halsin staggered over to Langoth’s ruined body, senselessly shouting his name.
But his lover was far beyond hearing: he was dead.
*
When Langoth opened his eyes, he thought he’d awoken in one of the strange illithid dreams that had tormented him, where a being with the druid’s face tried to tempt him with empty promises. It had the same peculiar light, the same airless quality.
But there was no dim facsimile of Halsin here. There was nothing at all, other than colorless earth beneath his feet and the grey smudge of a horizon.
Where am I? he asked aloud. But there was no noise when he spoke. Nor was there a smell to the soil, to the air. Desperation rising, he tried to scream. But once again, there was no sound.
As if in answer to Langoth’s silent cry, Halsin’s voice rang out, distant but clear. He was calling Langoth’s name, despair inscribed in each syllable.
That was when Langoth realized he was dead. He was in the Fugue Plane now, the waypoint between the mortal world and what lay beyond. He fell to his knees.
Characters: Halsin/OFC
Rating: M
Warnings: Attempted rape/noncon
Words: 3330
Halsin knew so little it often shocked her.
She recognized, when she took him on, that he was unfledged. But his ignorance was vast and hungry.
Gods knew the boy had appetites. For knowledge, for every last scrap of food. For her body. She was not flattered: she knew she could be just about anyone, man or woman, elf or human--even a dwarf, he was indiscriminate.
Most of all, he was hungry for connection. She did not ask what had become of his people but trusted he would tell her in his own time.
He was not shy of speaking. Nor of asking, endlessly, about all subjects. What is the name of that bird, why is it called so, does it remain in the forest through winter or seek warmer climes? Why?
In desperation, she wrote to her Circle and a month later a moose trotted into the clearing laden with bulging packs of scrolls and a few codexes.
Provender for your mind, she explained. Halsin was dubious at first but his natural curiosity got the better of him and now he spent most afternoons curled up in the branches of a downy birch reading scroll after scroll, as insatiable a reader as he was a lover.
He wanted her every night, every dawn. He wanted her when she bent over the cookpot preparing their lunch and when they walked the woods. She refused him four times out of five and still they lay together twice a day. Dalia was exhausted but not displeased; he was an apt student in all things and by nature generous.
Her pupil’s progress in the six months under her tutelage was impressive even by her high standards. And true to his word, he’d given her no cause to regret her decision to teach him.
Yet he was still unformed. Still unconscious to the grace and nuance of nature’s dance. And still angry.
“Teach me how to take a wild shape,” he demanded one sun-washed afternoon in the clearing. Dalia, never idle, was picking through some useful herbs they had collected that morning in the woods, sorting them according to which she would dry, which she would distill, and which she would pack into oil.
“You are not ready,” she said, not looking up from the herbs in her lap. “You have the ability”--and he did have magic, wild magic, in him--“but without the proper discipline you could be overcome by the animal’s mind. More than a few novices lose themselves entirely in the transformation.”
He scoffed. “You still underestimate me. You’re not my mother or my nursemaid, so stop trying to protect me.”
She glanced up at him. He sat rigidly against an oak’s trunk, beetle-browed, ready for a fight. Hungry for one. Any number of retorts leapt to her mind but she allowed herself only a neutral hmm before going back to her herbs, bearing the quiet fury of his stare without further comment. The silence, when he stalked off into the wood, was sour with unspent anger.
He returned at nightfall with a roe buck slung over his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Halsin said, and though his words were plain, she could see his self-recrimination in the taut line of his shoulders, the set of his jaw. He’d simply turned his anger inward on himself. It was pitiful to see, like a falcon hanging from its jesses.
She nodded. “Your anger will be your downfall one day, left uncontrolled. But I accept your apology, any road.”
They made a stew with rosemary and juniper berries and a bit of wine that had lain unopened for decades at the bottom of Dalia’s trunk and miraculously had aged into a lovely vintage.
“Where is it from?” Halsin asked, looking wondrously at the dusty bottle. “I’ve never tasted such wine.”
And it was special, among the finest she’d had in her six centuries. Smooth and sculpted, full on the tongue, bursting with ripe black fruit. She hesitated before saying, “It’s an Evermeet vintage.”
He looked up at her, curious, but Silvanus be praised, he didn’t ask the question he’d asked so many times before.
Dalia gratefully changed the subject. “Hakka did whelp this year, after all.” She took another sip to savor the exquisite wine, then continued. “Four pups. She’s hidden them up on the ridge, in the little bluebell hollow.”
His eyes lit as they always did when discussing the forest’s wolves. He liked big predators, the great bear Sage notwithstanding--he still held a grudge for the scars that scored his brow. “That’s wonderful. Are they Thorn’s pups? She’s hiding them from Hatha?”
The wolves’ amorous entanglements were even more complicated than that of a wood elven village. Hakka and Hatha were sisters and bitter rivals for the affections of Thorn, one of the leading males in the pack. He was a young, brash hunter, uncommonly large. Dalia couldn’t help but see the resemblance and noted Halsin’s affection for the wolf with some amusement.
“Mm,” she agreed. Her head was already a little light from the alcohol. With wine this good, it was easy to overdo it. She set her cup on the table and turned back to the stew, scraping the bottom of the pot. “You’ve been most helpful with my work in this wood.” She smiled to see him glow with silent pride at her rare praise. But it was not empty: despite his ignorance, he was observant when he wished to be and had discovered much that she had missed.
“Your work won’t ever be finished, will it?” he asked softly. The firelight flickered in his eyes and with his wide, sensuous mouth ever so slightly open, she felt a heady wave that had little to do with the wine.
“No,” she admitted. “It won’t be. It’s an indefinite posting.” And one of her choosing, though she didn’t say so. She knew he could sense it.
“Why?” he asked, yet again. Always why. She sighed in frustration.
“For once, do not concern yourself with why,” she said, more sharply than she intended. She softened her tone with a gentle look, a touch of her hand. He didn’t push further.
They ate, finished the bottle between them, and lay together in the quiet of the glade through a gauzy haze of alcohol, beneath the spreading branches of a grandfather oak and the dim light of the stars. As Dalia slipped into her trance of sleep, she warned herself that such things couldn’t--wouldn’t--last. And ruthlessly quashed the feeling of sadness that followed.
*
Halsin rose early and once he was gone, Dalia lay on the grass with her eyes open, feeling a rare malaise. The birds sang as sweetly ever, but somehow there was less music in their voices.
Later, she would look back and wonder if it was an omen.
She was bathing in the stream when a bellow echoed across the glade. It came from the heights of the ridge above, distant but unmistakable. Halsin’s booming voice, roughened with rage.
Without thought, she pulled her robe on and grabbed the ax from the wood chopping block outside the hut. Its grip was comforting in her hand as she sprinted barefoot into the brush and up the side of the long, wooded hill.
She slipped through the brambles, eschewing the winding deer path to cut straight through the forest to the sound of her lover’s cry.
Other voices joined in. Human voices. More screams and the sounds of battle chilled Dalia’s blood. A wolf bayed. Fear made her fly the last hundred yards, heedless of the tearing thorns or lashes of tree branches. She emerged into the wolf’s territory brandishing the ax above her head, ready for any foe, human or beast.
But the fight was already finished. Two hunters lay dead on earth soaked red with gore, eviscerated, and beside them, panting, were Halsin and Thorn, his lupine counterpart. Both with death in their eyes and blood on their faces. It dripped from Thorn’s muzzle and Halsin’s strong hands.
“What have you done?” she cried. Halsin’s wide eyes met her gaze; he was still in the grip of his blood frenzy.
Then she saw the den: the wolf Hakka and all of her pups, throats slit. For their fur, perhaps; or maybe simply for sport. Humans needed no greater justification to kill a wild thing. Bereft of life, the pups looked thin and insubstantial, little more than furry rags. Hakka’s sightless eyes rested on them even in death, the young she’d given her life protecting.
She whispered a quick prayer to Silvanus, to absorb their bodies back into the earth to seed new lives in this forest. But even as she spoke them, the words rang hollow.
“They were laughing, when I came upon them,” Halsin said. His voice was thick with hatred as he stared down at the two humans. These, too, Dalia commended to the Oakfather, though silently.
“You have done a truly stupid thing,” she said, not even trying to mollify her tone. She felt a fury rising in her to match the boy’s. Beside them, Thorn growled; she stilled him with an outstretched hand and he whimpered, sniffed the corpses of his mate and pups.
“Two fewer miserable poachers in the wood? Silvanus himself would praise me. I’ve eliminated a threat to nature.” And infuriatingly, the wood elf truly looked pleased with himself.
“And what happens now?” she asked, her voice dangerously low.
“Now the wood is peaceful once more.” A blackbird cautiously resumed its song in a nearby tree and Halsin raised his hand as though his point had been proven.
“And when these men’s village mount a search? Will they see justice in this scene? Or will they see an outrage that demands revenge?”
Halsin opened his mouth but she pushed on, “Who suffers then? Not you or I but Thorn and his pack. At best, they will be driven off from their home. And at worst every one of them will be hunted down.”
“I didn’t--”
But her anger was still building. She threw her ax into the earth beside her. “It will not end there. Without any wolves in this territory, the deer will proliferate. They will strain the resources of the forest to its breaking point and many more will needlessly die. It will take a century for nature to right itself, all for a moment of satisfaction, of righteous anger.”
She looked directly into his eyes. There was no remorse in them, though some doubt. “You’re a traitor to nature, not its defender. You are not one of us. I was wrong, to think I could teach you.”
Halsin’s hands became fists. He might well have broken and tried to hit her. But instead, he screamed a wordless howl of rage and despair that rang across the hillside, stilling the birdsong.
Dalia turned her back on him, her failed pupil, and on the pathos of the young wolf mourning, and walked slowly, stiffly back down to the glade.
She did not expect she would see him again in this life.
*
Time could mend any wound; Dalia had lived long enough to know the truth of that.
She went about her days in rote, knowing through wisdom hard-won that she would once again appreciate the sun’s warmth on her skin, the taste of a wholesome meal, the sound of the stream’s unending flow. But even as she tried to take heart in the inevitability of healing, a small voice insisted that she had lost everything. Again. That life was little more than an exercise in losing all that mattered, concluding with her own mortal end.
Those thoughts mostly came in the dusky evenings when she sat alone at the hearth (she could not bear to sit at the table where they had shared their meals) and the fire died to back ashes for lack of motivation to rekindle its flames.
If she had dreaded his coming to her door, begging her forgiveness, she need not have worried. For he did not come.
But a moon after the killings, she returned from a walk deep into the forest where she’d helped a colony of bees find a new home--the most mundane tasks gave the most pleasure, these days--and found other visitors in her glade.
Instead of striding over to greet them, she watched from behind the grandfather oak. They were five: all strong human men, well-armed. Though that didn’t necessarily mean trouble. The humans often went armed into the wood, fearful as they were of its denizens. Of nature’s power outstripping their own.
Her hut door was open and it was apparent they were waiting for someone inside. Heat rose in her at the thought of unseen hands rifling through her things.
Against her better judgment, Dalia stepped out from behind the tree, drawing herself to her full height.
“Why have you come to my glade? And why do you trespass in my abode?” She glared between them, doing her best to look intimidating but not an immediate threat. Their beards hid their faces and made them all look the same. Or perhaps they were related--all humans looked alike, to her, particularly the men.
“Two of our own went missing in this wood,” said the taller one with the grey beard. She pegged him as the leader; humans usually organized their social and political structures around seniority.
“They’re not in my hut,” she said coolly. The men glanced between one another, doubtful. “I’ve not cooked them for breakfast if that is your worry.”
“She has a witchy look about her,” said one of the younger, yellow-bearded ones, as though she were not present.
“I reckon she’s a hag in a fair disguise,” said another of the young men, looking her dead in the eye as he spoke. He made some gesture of religious protection.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. But she was already evaluating her combat options, weighing her chances. They were just looking for an excuse to attack, she could sense. But she had little chance against five of them--and more, perhaps, inside. They were skilled hunters with good weapons: spiked greatclubs, crossbows, a city-forged longsword.
The greybeard smiled a smile that didn’t reach his chilly blue eyes. Death was in them, and grievous violence. “Have you seen them, lass, or nay? We would like to know.”
Dalia struck first, for the slim advantage that surprise might grant her. Vines leapt from the earth to ensnare the two young hunters closest to her as she ducked behind a fallen tree for cover from the volley of arrows that followed.
They shouted to the men inside and her heart sank when three emerged from the hut. She would not survive a fight against eight, even with all her magic, even with the wood itself to aid her.
But nor would she surrender.
She took the shape of the wolf, fire burning in her marrow as her bones snapped and bent to the canine form. Her thoughts became simpler yet more exigent. The wolf mind was made for bloodshed.
Emboldened by their numbers, one of the young hunters was already sneaking around the edge of the fallen tree. She tore his throat away in a thrilling rip, the wolf relishing the sensation of hot blood gushing from the severed flesh in her mouth. Another she took with a swipe across the gut. A third managed to slash her hip with his sword before she downed him. And then an arrow caught her between the ribs and she collapsed into the grass, reverting to her elven form.
The pain was not so acute now and that was a mercy. But her horror--the horror born of a sentient imagination--was far worse as the remaining humans loomed over her.
It was not difficult to imagine what was on their minds. Torture, rape, death. Perhaps in that order.
As they argued with each other over some triviality, she struggled to crawl away but the greybeard hunter stopped her with a kick to the arrow sticking out of her side. She cried out as pain radiated through her body, nearly stealing her consciousness away from her.
The greybeard’s hateful face loomed over her again. “Tell me,” it said. “Where are they, witch?”
So they had decided she was a witch. The druid took a shuddering breath that sent shards of icy pain through her chest.
“Dead,” she said. Her words were watery from the blood that had begun to fill her lungs. “Not by my hand.” The greybeard snorted; he didn’t believe her.
“Where? I’ll give you a quick death.” His blue eyes looked earnest; so earnest, it could almost be true.
She told him about the bluebell hollow on the ridge, the sheltering briars. He nodded, satisfied. Then motioned to the other men. So it was to be rape first.
Dalia closed her eyes, searching for any final measure of fortitude or magic. But she was drained of everything, even resolve. The sky seemed to be growing dimmer, though she knew it to be only midday. She was dying, she recognized distantly. Along with her sorrow and dread of what was to come, she felt something like relief.
Then the bear entered the glade. It was no bear she recognized, not Sage or one of his kin that ranged the unpeopled southern reaches. It was a great bear, though, and towering more still for its rage; it blotted out the sun when it stood on its hind legs and let out a roar of fury. It swiped the skin from the face of the man on her back, tearing him from neck to navel, showering her in the warmth of his blood.
Weapons were useless against him. Gasping beneath the weighty corpse of the hunter, she watched as the bear gored and slashed his way through the remaining five hunters. The greybeard, last to die, foolishly begged the beast before succumbing to its snarling teeth, red-tipped as bloodied daggers.
There was something familiar in the set of the bear’s shoulders and when it turned to her, she could see it in his eyes.
“Halsin,” she said. Even speaking his name filled her body with relief. Peace.
The name summoned him back to himself. Her apprentice shifted back to his shape and ran over to her. “I can heal you,” he said, even though they both knew he couldn’t.
“One day,” she said, grasping the foresight that came to her, unbidden. “You will be a great healer. But not yet.”
His features twisted in grief. “I’ve failed you again, then.”
“Never,” she sighed. She was powerless to resist the shuddering cough that sent a rictus of pain through her dying body. “Nature claims us all back, eventually. Today is my day. I am ready.”
Halsin bent over her and wept. He made her as comfortable as he could and settled her on his lap next to the stream so she could listen to it as she faded away, still looking up at his face as she departed the mortal realm for one of spirit and air.
*
Her amber eyes became sightless and Halsin closed them for the last time with the brush of his hand. He felt an emptiness that seemed to be shared by the whole wood, which had gone silent save for the senselessly burbling stream.
He would bury her, in the coming days, beneath the grandfather oak that had so often sheltered them, to feed its roots with her blood and bone and magic.
And when he arrived in the Circle at Dancing Falls, some months later, no one would question his haunted eyes, his quiet fury, his knowledge and skill in the ways of the druids.
Halsin would be just another novice, albeit a precocious one who could already take a wild shape. A bear, whose rage returned with every transformation, bringing him back to the glade, to the locus of his greatest regret.
Characters: Halsin/FOC
Rating: M
Words: 2655
Long before becoming the first druid of the Emerald Grove, Halsin is a hotheaded, aimless youth struggling to control his anger and alienation. When a mysterious druid saves him from a great bear, he sees a path to another life.
Even the High Forest was a lonely place for a wood elf with no kinfolk to speak of--none still living. Most of his kind had left for Evermeet or for the teeming cities of the east. Neither appealed to Halsin.
He roamed the great forest that was his birthright, scavenging what scraps could be found on the edges of the human settlements that encroached, year by year, like some choking vine.
And he grew from adolescent to adult over the twenty winters of his wandering, broadening across the shoulders, shooting up to a height that others seemed to find incredible. The humans around the villages he haunted took to calling him the Tailhleach, “the tall walker,” in their strange tongue. They feared him as some sort of half-man, half-beast, a spirit protector of the forest. The myth was a useful one: it meant he went mostly undisturbed, except when the occasional foolhardy youth took it upon himself to hunt down the beast. But Halsin had his own ways of staying the sword arms and bows of overeager hunters.
These conquests, too, became part of his legend.
Now fully grown, he had become, in a word, complacent. There was nothing in the forest, man or beast, that could challenge him. So he thought, with all the arrogance of the young.
Halsin’s appetites often led him from one part of the forest to the other in search of delicacies: truffles, chestnut honey, blackberries. Today he was foraging for mushrooms: the orange rilled ones so good they could be eaten raw, as soon as they were dusted off. The mushrooms preferred this part of the wood, the wet brambly hillside that was often choked in fog.
Nothing seemed amiss as he scanned the forest floor for their distinctive convex caps.
He was deaf to the crackling of dead leaves, the faint but audible snap of a twig, the rustle of disturbed undergrowth and even the snort of the curious bear as it approached his crouching back.
It was only when the beast’s breath disturbed the hair on Halsin’s head that he whirled around, startling the great bear. For one moment that felt like a century, they stared, nose to nose and eye to eye: elf and bear, locked in the fatal glance of prey and hunter.
Then the bear roared, its fear exploding to rage like dry tinder under lightning’s forked tongue. Halsin was so close that he could see the ridges on the bear’s bright canine teeth, taste its meaty breath. A young bear, he thought stupidly. He began backing away, all the while watching the beast.
The great bear stood on its hind feet and flattened its ears. It made as though to charge but it was only a feint, a test of Halsin’s resolve. He stopped. Anger building alongside his terror, he bellowed at it, swung the slim oaken branch he always carried with him.
But the bear wouldn’t be intimidated. It had no inkling of his fearsome reputation. His rage was only fuel for its own.
It swiped, claws scraping Halsin’s flesh from his hairline down to his left eyebrow. His vision went red and by instinct he swung his club. He only hit the bear by luck, the same luck that had saved his left eye.
It backed away and lowered its head, ears flattened. This would be a true charge and he stood little chance of surviving it, given the bear’s size.
He stood, waiting, in a defensive crouch, holding out his makeshift club, blood pouring down his face. But just as the bear started to charge, a warning growl sounded from the chestnut grove beyond.
Almost comically, the bear quirked its head. The growls continued and the bear moaned in reply, as though in conversation with it.
The rage melted from the beast’s eyes and it pawed the air as an elven woman appeared in the gloom. She lowed at the bear once more and the bear, incredibly, seemed almost to chuckle.
“What are you--”
“He says you’re after his mushrooms again. Whenever you come here, you leave nothing for the others who reside in this wood. He thinks it's rather rude,” the elf said. As she came closer, he saw the crest of Silvanus on her broach. A druid, then.
He laughed incredulously, wiping the blood from his face. “I’m rude? That bear--”
“His name is Sage.”
Halsin paused, collecting his thoughts. The druid was very lovely, as a moonrise over a pine forest is lovely, or a bird of prey on the wing, or the river’s rush after first thaw. Hers was a stark, unadorned beauty. “That bear-- alright, Sage--was about to kill me,” he finally said, failing to keep his voice level. He was still trembling with his fear and anger. The two never could be parted, for him; they were like smoke and flame.
“His kind have been killed for far less,” she said. Her tone was neutral but he could see a warning glint in her amber eyes.
“Who are you?” he asked, his curiosity overtaking his consternation. “There is no Circle for twenty leagues.”
“No indeed,” the druid said. He could tell she did not enjoy speaking of herself; her words took a rote quality. “I’m posted here for a task that has taken me some years, and will take more still to complete.” She tilted her head, looking inquiringly at him. “Like Sage, I’ve also noticed that you claim more than your share from this wood.”
“You’ve been watching me.”
“You are hard to avoid. You trample through the wood like it's your bedchamber.”
He colored ever so slightly when she said the word bedchamber. The bear, Sage, groaned as if in agreement. The druid walked over and patted him on the head, whispering something in his rounded ears. Halsin felt absurdly jealous at the intimacy, even as his wounds began to throb.
As was often the case, he found himself speaking before he knew precisely what he was going to say. He knew only that he was drawn to the druid. “I can help you with your task, whatever it is, if you teach me in exchange. I would like to learn the ways of the druids.”
She didn’t laugh outright, at least. The druid seemed even to consider it. But then, finally, she said: “No, I haven’t the inclination for such an arrangement. I live alone by choice as much as by necessity.”
And without so much as a fare thee well, she vanished back into the wood. Sparing a quick backwards glance at the now mellow bear sniffing the orange mushrooms, Halsin followed.
*
He trekked for more than half the day until evening fell. The druid doubled back three times and almost lost him half a dozen more but every time he’d managed to find her trail and catch up with her.
Perhaps, he reflected later, she wanted to be found.
He was not so foolhardy as to barge into the tiny hut where the druid lived; he had little doubt the elf could magick him into a fine paste and butter her toast with him, if she so desired. He rested on a fallen log on the patch of green and looked around the darkening glade as he waited for her to emerge.
It was virtually untouched, despite her habitation. In contrast to the human villagers who seemed intent on clearing every tree within the radius of their settlements, the druid’s hut seemed to have emerged spontaneously from the ground, disturbing none of the surrounding environs.
A brook murmured nearby and made sweet music with the evening song of the crepuscular birds. His mind wandered back to the druid and he resumed the game he’d been playing all afternoon as he trailed her, trying to guess her name. She looked to be a high elf of some maturity--perhaps five or even six centuries, old enough for the first lines to appear at the corners of her lovely, fierce eyes. What was she doing here, after all?
It had been long since he’d met such an interesting person--since he’d met anyone he cared to know. The irony that she didn’t wish to know him was bitter, stinging. He dabbed gingerly at the gashes on his brow. They throbbed still but had stopped bleeding, at least.
Smoke rose from her hut and Halsin’s belly cramped with hunger. He had not eaten all day and was out of the deer jerky he usually kept in his hip pouch. And, too, there was hunger of another sort, equally desperate for satisfaction.
Her door finally opened to him, a rectangle of golden light in the gathering dark.
He felt every inch of his six and a half feet when he entered the hut; he was eye level with the rafters and had to crouch to move around the single room. Without comment, the druid pulled a chair from the table--there was only one chair--and extended her arm in invitation.
Halsin sat, inhaling the exquisite scent of the rabbit stew bubbling on the hearth. She did not offer to bind his wounds but bent over him to take a cursory look to ensure there was nothing amiss.
He held his breath as she touched his face with her cool fingers, probing the furrows the Sage’s claws had left in his flesh. He gasped, and not just from the pain. How long had it been since he’d felt a woman’s touch, even an indifferent one? “Those will scar,” she said simply, then moved back to the hearth.
“Tell me,” he said, watching intently as she ladled the stew into an earthenware bowl. “What is your name?”
The druid glanced up from the hearth. Her amber gaze was intense; he felt his blood heating just from that look. He wanted her so badly that even the distant possibility his desire might be fulfilled quickened his pulse.
“Dalia,” she said. He could never have guessed it.
“‘The edge of dawn,’” he translated from the high elven. A poetic name but one that seemed to suit her. “Pretty. I’m called Halsin.”
She smiled at that. It was not a common name, he imagined, among her folk.
“‘Hazelnut,’” she said, meeting his eyes again as she passed him the bowl. Their fingers brushed and his intake of breath was audible.
“Just ‘hazel,’ in our tongue,” he said, still watching her. She was as captivating as a hawk at prey, even serving soup from a cookpot. He noticed a fading tattoo running along her hairline. Too ornate for druid work. He longed to trace it with his finger. “Where are your people?”
“My Circle resides at the Dancing Falls, on the edge of the Dessarin.” She settled on the hearth to eat her soup. She had a slim figure, neat and athletic and not tall, imposing though she was in presence.
His curiosity warred with his hunger and since he had already been marked as rude, he split the difference and spoke over a mouthful of the glorious stew: rich and silky, it was, tasting of herbs and wild onions and savory meat. It burned his mouth but he did not care. “I meant, your people. Your kith and kin.”
“The druids are my kin now. The creatures and trees of this wood my kith.” She blew carefully on her stew before taking a bite.
Halsin considered this and found the idea not unappealing. The last two decades had been lonely ones and he found himself now relishing even the most adversarial contacts with people. “What do you druids do? Besides live in nature?”
Dalia snorted. “‘Besides live in nature,’ as though it’s some rare sport.”
“Well, isn’t it? Not many choose such a life.”
“You did.”
He stopped eating and looked down at his bowl of half-finished stew, uncertain of how much to reveal. He wanted to tell all, unburden all the secrets of his heart for the sake of sharing them. But even his corroded social skills warned him against that approach. The last thing he wanted was for her to feel sorry for him. “This life chose me,” he said vehemently, anger rising unbidden. “Not the other way around. My people are dead and gone.”
Dalia’s curved eyebrow registered her skepticism and he felt another flash of annoyance. How dare she imagine she knew his heart better than he?
“You might have traveled to a city, or made a life in one of the villages here. No doubt they would be happy to have your shield and many maidens happy to take you to their beds.”
Halsin choked on his stew and from the corner of his eye caught her faint smile, the glimmer in her keen eyes. She was teasing him for the callow youth that he knew he was, damn her.
When he regained some dignity after his fit of coughing subsided, he said, “You presume, druid. I’m not interested in maidens.” She did not squirm under his stare but merely returned his challenging gaze with her own. He wanted desperately to know what was going on behind those golden eyes. Almost as much as he wanted to throw her onto the straw pallet in the corner and divest her of her robes, to explore her lean body with eyes, hands, and tongue.
“Teach me,” he demanded. He leaned forward in the creaky chair, using his imposing size to loom over her. Like the bear, she wasn’t the least bit intimidated.
“You are impetuous and full of anger. And truly, no better than the humans you scorn; for though you live in nature you do not cherish its harmony, only what you can plunder from it."
He opened his mouth to respond in fury--what he would say, he did not know, but certainly something regrettable--but the druid held up her hand, cutting him off with the force of that gesture.
"If you want to become a druid, you will first need to master your own feelings. But nature, much as we druids endeavor to heal it, also has the power to heal us in turn.” She heaved a sigh, as though already regretting her next words. “I can teach you. Perhaps it was meant to be so.”
Halsin’s anger melted into relief so deep the corners of his eyes pricked with tears. His voice was rough when he replied with a terse “Thank you.” Even he had not realized how much he wanted this--needed it. Halsin’s eyes finally rose again to meet Dalia’s. “I swear that your trust in me will not be misplaced.”
She nodded briskly as though they’d concluded a trade. “Well and good. About the other thing….”
“The other thing?” he said densely.
“Of maidens and bedchambers.” She rolled her eyes and he felt a blush creep up his neck.
“Oh. Yes. What about them?” he asked warily.
“I’m not so foolish as to offer my heart to a wood elf but we both have… needs.” Her face was still composed but behind her stiff words he could sense her vulnerability. She, too, was lonely. The idea of her dwelling here alone in the hut for years on end filled him with tenderness in equal measure to his desire for her.
His chair scraped away from the table and he narrowly avoided a collision with the rafter as he sat down beside her to take her face in his hands.
She had an angular jaw to match her aquiline features. Her eyes had little softness in them, even now. She told him what to do next. As their bodies joined by the fire he experienced pleasures he didn’t know existed. Compared to his crude, perfunctory couplings in the wood, they were divine, revelations written in flesh and sighs.
After, they lay together in silence as the fire dwindled and his heart threatened to over-brim with happiness. Rare happiness from the promise of things to come.
A plucky young bard and her licentious companion are stranded in a terrible blizzard on Midwinter day. When a master druid comes to their aid, the tiefling tumbler takes full advantage of the situation.
The Risen Road was treacherous in winter. They would never have taken the risk if not for the promise of rich rewards in Baldur’s Gate; a duke’s commission was not to be lightly refused. And the prospect of a Midwinter feast at a Baldurian noble’s table was impossible to resist after the lean months that followed harvest.
Lanna did not travel alone, though the invitation, she noted with pride, was addressed to her. Lanna, Bard of Elturel. Heavily creased from repeated folding and unfolding, it rested against her hip in the pockets tied under the waist of her skirts, like a charm or a love letter. Thick wool skirts, of fine quality and brightly dyed, edged in copper thread. It had been a good year.
It seemed as though they would reach Baldur’s Gate without incident; indeed, they might have pushed on last evening and reached the city by midnight. But they had tempted the gods, camped, and made merry celebration in anticipation of a triumphant arrival the following morning. Or early afternoon--none who plied their trade in a tavern was an early riser.
Instead, fortune pissed on them.
While they slept away the ale and sour wine, the heavens opened and buried them under no less than three feet of claggy snow. It rose past the wheel wells of the wagon, up to the mule’s chest. The shock of it hitting her bare legs beneath her skirt stole Lanna’s breath from her body.
“By the nine hells, we’re well and truly fucked this time,” said her companion Dusk, a tiefling tumbler, frantically trying to dig out the buried provisions they’d left by the fire. But there was little use, for they’d eaten (and drunk) nearly everything last night.
“Properly,” Lanna agreed. She didn’t fancy eating mule but it seemed likely to come to that. The snow was still falling in thick sheets and even once it ceased, it would take several days’ thaw to melt enough to move again. “Is the er, ranger awake?” She blushed as she said it and not because of any attraction to the grizzled ex-paladin who was their protection on the road. But because she’d lain awake much of the small hours, listening to the mercenary make the tiefling acrobat moan. Cheap wine and the dangers of the highway made stranger bedfellows, perhaps, but certainly not more vociferous ones.
“Doubt it. I kept him up rather late last night,” the tiefling said, a smirk playing over her lips. Dusk was her stage name, and Lanna felt silly calling her by it, yet she refused to share her true name.
Lanna looked back to the buried wagon; a chill ran through her that had little to do with the snow settling onto her shoulders. “We’re going to die out here if we don’t move.”
Ebbo Lovewell, a halfling strummer who was both her accompanist and the intermission act, was completely submerged by the snow but doughtily attempted to construct an ice cave, insisting that somehow it would be warmer inside. He was frisking around, tossing clods of snow in the air, when a trio of figures approached from the woods that abutted the road.
“On your guard,” Lanna said to Dusk, though none of them carried weapons and their protection was apparently still unconscious in his half-buried tent. “Ebbo, be still!”
The figures seemed massive from a distance, like frost giants. She fought the urge to panic.
“Should we hide?” whispered Dusk, clutching her arm. The tiefling had a strong grip and her black lacquered nails dug into Lanna’s wool jacket.
“No use,” Lanna said. Her bard training kept her voice steady even as terror gripped her. The stories she’d heard of murdered travellers on this road were numberless as they were grisly. “We’ll have to hope they’re friendly. And if not, try to talk our way out of it.”
“We may need to offer our bodies in exchange for safe passage,” Dusk said, looking rather excited by the prospect. “Or perhaps they’re slavers who will sell us into the servitude of a great drow lord of the Underdark whose cruelty is only matched by his beauty.”
Lanna rolled her eyes. “Not the time,” she hissed.
“Oh, but that is clever,” Ebbo said, squinting into the blizzard’s gust. “They’re walking on the surface of the snow.” It was true: they were wearing broad, paddle-like shoes to stride across the surface of the packed snow, which accounted for their stature. “I’ll have to commit the design to memory. Assuming we survive this encounter.”
Dusk half-laughed, beginning to look truly nervous. Lanna’s heart gave a sickening lurch as they approached. She wasn’t ready to die: the thought arose as pure as the snow all around them.
“Well met!” a baritone voice boomed from the largest figure. Even without the advantage of three feet of snow he would have towered over them. Lanna blinked against the falling flakes, trying to see beneath the figure’s furs, but he was completely obscured.
“Merry Midwinter to you, good sir!” Dusk said, with a jaunty little bow. Or as close to one as could be managed, hip deep in snow.
The figure laughed, a deep booming laugh with all the warmth of a bonfire. “Stranded, are you? You’ll not dig out of this anytime soon. You’re welcome in our grove, if you’re in need of refuge.”
“That is most generous,” Lanna said. She wished she could see into his face; she was a good read of people and would have liked to take the measure of his intentions before she accepted. But what choice did they have? She looked back to the shivering mule, the wagon vanishing into the snow, and poor Ebbo, buried up to his cap. “We humbly accept.”
“Excellent! How many are you? We’ll need to carry you, somehow. I do not see any other way, in this blizzard.”
“Oh, you can carry me, I’m quite light,” Dusk said. “And limber.” She held out her arms, both as invitation and display. Lanna tutted under her breath. But their rescuer, whoever--and whatever--he was just laughed again.
“Not another step. Back, villains! Back, I say!” The fallen paladin had emerged from the tent in his small clothes wearing his heavy helmet. She supposed it was the only armor he had in the tent with him.
The giant figure lifted his hands but she could hear amusement in his voice as he said, “Ho, friend. I’m here to rescue, not to raid.”
“A likely story,” their guard said, his voice slightly muffled through his helm. Lanna mashed her palm to her face.
“Oh, come off it Dunfric,” Dusk said, in an altogether different tone than she’d used with their towering rescuer.
“Stand back, my lady Dusk! I shall compel this… this… malefactor with the might of my sword in your defense.”
“Truly, there’s no need for that, friend,” the figure said. “I am Halsin, Master Druid of the Emerald Grove.” Lanna tucked away this information for future contemplation. She knew many songs about druids but had never had the opportunity to meet one. “It would be our honor to host you, Sir...? Dunfric, was it?”
Dunfric straightened and mustered his dignity, such that it was. “How do you do, Master Druid? But we have no need for your assistance--”
“I’ve already accepted the druid’s invitation,” Lanna cut in. “Thank you very much. We’re four. Plus the mule, and sadly few provisions.”
She felt her color rising as the druid Halsin regarded her. “A tiefling woman, a human male, a halfling… and a human woman.” He looked to his companions. “Inwe and Kagha may carry Dunfric and your halfling companion. But we’ll be too heavy to walk on the snow if I carry both of you. We’ll need to wait here and take a second trip.”
Dusk and Dunfric spoke at the same time; the tiefling readily agreeing and the ex-paladin protesting in the strongest terms.
“There is no other way,” Lanna said, frustration threatening to boil over. “We’ll waste no more time arguing.”
Dusk smiled and tossed her hair fetchingly as the other druids hefted the halfling, who was already peppering them with questions, and the sulking Dunfric.
Once they’d vanished over the brow of the hill, Dusk turned to their mysterious rescuer. “Whatever shall we do while we wait?” she asked. Her eyes wide and innocent. Lanna shook her head. The masked druid could be a minotaur and Dusk would still try to seduce it.
“Let’s get out of this weather and wait in the wagon,” Lanna said. “All of us.”
Dusk smirked and wiggled an eyebrow and Lanna shook her head vehemently when the druid wasn’t looking. But the tiefling just nodded back, slowly. Lanna raised her hands skyward and shook them silently at the gods. None could say she didn’t have a penchant for drama; she was a bard, after all.
“Here we are, master druid,” Dusk said once they had settled in the wagon, shoulder to shoulder. It was a tight squeeze, for the druid was fantastically tall and broad about the shoulders. Dusk handed him a little cup of brandy, left over from last night’s debauchery. When the druid lowered his furred hood, Lanna couldn’t suppress a sharp intake of breath. He was ruggedly handsome, an elf but like no elf she had met (not that she had known many.) Even in the dim, wintery light of the wagon she could see the scars that lanced across his jaw, his brow, only enhancing his feral beauty. Her mouth grew dry and she realized it was hanging open.
Dusk outright grinned at her reaction and Lanna quickly looked around for something to busy herself with. Did her lute need tuning? It did not but Master Halsin didn’t know that. She repeated his name silently to herself as she fussed with the pegs of her rosewood lute, her most prized possession.
“You are a bard, then?” Halsin said. His voice resounded in the timbers of the wagon, rich and full as good red wine.
Lanna was clumsy in her speech, a rare experience. “I am. I didn’t--how rude, that I didn’t introduce myself. Earlier, I mean. When we met.”
Behind the druid’s back, Dusk doubled over with silent laughter. Gods strike her down, Lanna thought. Or me, either one would be just fine.
Halsin’s lips curved in a gentle smile and she feared she audibly gulped. She realized he was waiting for her to speak. Her name. Introduction, she reminded herself.
“I’m Lanna, Bard of Elturel.” Somehow the styling felt less grand when saying it to a master druid. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Master Halsin.” By rote, she offered her hand.
He surprised her by taking it and kissing it, meeting her eyes as he did. Her throat tightened; the chilly wagon suddenly seemed to be blazing hot as his lips left a burning brand where they touched her hand.
“The pleasure is mine, I’m sure,” he said. “It’s been long and long since we’ve heard from a bard. I can tell you must have a beautiful singing voice.”
Lanna smiled dumbly.
“Oh, she does,” Dusk jumped in. “She’s utterly... captivating. Don’t you think, master druid?”
She could stab the tiefling right through the eyes. But Halsin did not laugh, or deflect. He held Lanna’s gaze and said, “Utterly.”
Dusk smirked at her. “Does it feel warm to you? It must be our body heat. Let me take your furs, Master Halsin.” The tiefling fairly tore his fur poncho from his shoulders. His smell, of the woods and of smoke, along with a whiff of something wild and musky filled the wagon. Lanna looked around at the humble wagon, the hand stitched quilt still mussed from her sleep. Anywhere but the druid’s face, his wide shoulders, his tumble of brown hair.
Dusk plucked her sleeve. “Perhaps you could sing us a song now, sweet Lanna? To while away the hour? Only, how long will it be before your companions return, Master Halsin?”
“My grove is not far, but in this blizzard it could be quite some time,” Halsin said. “Hours, even.” She felt his gaze and lifted her eyes to meet his again. Divested of his furs, he seemed somehow even bigger. His arms were as thick as young oak trunks and the tattoo that twined down his cheek vanished down his throat into his chest guard.
“Ah, I see,” Dusk said, her voice light and casual. “We’ll need to find some way to entertain ourselves, won’t we? Lanna, sing us ‘The Sweet Sighs of Corellon’? You know it’s my very favorite.”
She blanched. That song was near blasphemy--was blasphemy, if your audience was eladrin.
But Halsin smiled. “I think I know that one. Rather a lusty tune, isn’t it? And a good finish.”
“That’s the one. Everyone loves a good finish, no?” Dusk said, shrugging her jacket off and snuggling close to the druid, who stared at Lanna in a way that was as much unnerving as it was thrilling.
She turned her attention down to her lute even as her heart pounded. But the song came to her spontaneously, as it always did; sweet and pure as the gods’ grace. She had only to hear a song once to remember it forever, words and melody. Lanna softened her voice when she reached the eponymous sighs of the elven god as he was overtaken by his ecstasy with the mortal woman and she was gratified to see the druid’s eyes close, a smile on his lips, as she lilted the song’s climax.
After she thrummed the final note, the wagon had a new kind of stillness. The hush of possibility.
“You are very beautiful,” Halsin finally said, claiming her with his eyes. Not the song, or her voice. Her. Her heart beat so that she heard her own pulse in her ears. She didn’t move or speak as he leaned forward to take her face in his hands and gently kiss her, stopping her breath with his touch.
He looked into her eyes when he pulled away to judge her expression. Lanna was distantly aware of Dusk’s presence on the druid’s other side and of her own reservations. But all was eclipsed by her desire. She dipped forward for another kiss, this one deeper, more dangerous. The druid took her lip between his teeth and she gasped, then opened her mouth to allow him in, her body becoming limp in his arms. He was so much bigger than she that she felt almost childlike in his embrace.
Finally, their kiss broke and he whispered roughly in her ear, “so sweet.” And then Dusk’s hand found the collar of his breastplate, his chin. She turned his face to hers and claimed her own kiss from the druid as Lanna sat upon his lap. Beneath her thigh, she felt him stiffen.
“What shall I do with you two?” he said, looking between them. Lanna’s face was ablaze but she would not back down now. She glanced to Dusk, allowing the tiefling to speak for them both.
“Whatever you like, Master Halsin,” Dusk said. Her smile was positively demonic.
“I warn you,” he said, addressing Lanna. His eyes were golden and green and blue all at once, a shade impossible to describe in song or verse. “I’m not known to be gentle.” It seemed he could sense her lack of experience and her blush deepened.
In answer, she shifted to straddle him, to rub against the hardness between his legs. He grunted, his hands finding her hips and pressing her more firmly onto his cock. She gasped, at the sensation itself and those it provoked in her.
“Be kind to her,” Dusk said, laughter in her voice. “She’s quite the innocent.”
“Unlike you?” Halsin said, raising a hand to cup the tiefling’s breast over her bodice. He kissed Dusk again, even as he began grinding against Lanna. His hand found the bottom of her wool skirt and her bare legs beneath, warming them with a touch. She was not entirely the innocent but Lanna had never been made to feel such things before. Never had the clumsy embraces of her youthful dalliances drawn such gasps from her body. Never had she felt her body thrumming with desire as her lute thrummed with song when plucked.
His hand reached her silk drawers--it had been a good year--and pushed them aside. He sighed when his fingers found what he was looking for. “So wet already,” he murmured, and she hoped that was a good thing. Dusk laughed and she felt an absurd twinge of embarrassment. She’d never be able to look the tumbler in the eye after this. But then she was lost in the sensation of the druid’s deft strokes. His thumb found the little nub at the top of her sex and she melted against his chest, distantly heard her own cries.
“She’s not going to last much longer if you keep that up,” Dusk said. Lanna looked up to see that somehow the tiefling’s bodice was off, that the druid was pleasuring her full breasts with his other hand.
“And where would be the fun in that?” Halsin addressed Lanna but she could only blush, for she was far beyond words. She leaned against Halsin’s strong shoulder for support as his thumb swept down her lips for one final stroke before he withdrew his hand, leaving her panting.
“Watch us,” Dusk said. “And be instructed.” She pushed Lanna aside to slide the druid’s pants down his hips, revealing a cock that was breathtakingly large, even considering his size. Nearly as large as her forearm. As large as-- “Staring is rude, Lanna,” Dusk whispered with a cheeky smile. She knelt before the druid to take him into her mouth, deeper than it seemed possible. Heat swept through Lanna as her eyes connected with Halsin’s while the tiefling pleasured him; he seemed to penetrate her with her eyes as Dusk moaned against his cock.
Drawn inexorably to him, Lanna leaned forward into a deep and lingering kiss that tasted of mulled wine. She could taste his groan as Dusk brought him closer to the edge. And then his finger was inside her again, his touch altogether rougher, less adroit. He jammed another finger into her, his kiss becoming almost punishingly fierce. She gasped and he only forced her harder, fingers scissoring inside her.
And then all the fight seemed to melt from his body with a groan. Satisfaction. He sighed and Dusk rose, licking her lips. Lanna sat back; she assumed it was over.
But they were far from finished. The druid’s grim smile told her as much as he wrenched her bodice from her breast. “I have enough for both of you,” he whispered roughly into her ear as the boning snapped under his hands. Anticipation and desire made her head swim; dimly, she perceived Dusk watching them from the corner of the wagon, skirts around her knees and fingers to her cunt.
He took her breasts in his hand, fingers skimming her nipples as he trailed her neck in wet, rough kisses. She felt a softening, an inflorescence as her body opened to him. “Gods,” she moaned involuntarily. He pressed himself against her and she delighted in the weight of him. The roaring wind outside the wagon picked up again, rocking them slightly, and the additional pressure only enhanced the sensation. She wrapped herself around him, both surrendering and claiming him at once, tasting the hot of his breath, his woody scent.
“Girl,” he growled, lifting her skirts. She felt him hard again already against her belly and rose up against him, savoring his gasp.
From miles away, Dusk’s voice: “Better to take her from atop, I think--you’ll break her, elsewise.” She could barely parse the tiefling’s meaning, for she existed in a realm of pure sensation. She had lost herself entirely in him.
A circle of sweet fire as he entered her, pain and pleasure in even measure. She heard herself cry out, felt hands digging down into the flesh of her hips, saw, over the druid’s muscled shoulder, Dusk’s watchful, hungry gaze. But the feeling soon consumed all other perception, and her with it. Her hips jerked involuntarily and she felt herself release. He held her tightly through it, lips pressed to her brow, still thrusting relentlessly into her.
She grasped his shoulders, damp with sweat, pressing her face into his muscled chest to stifle her moan. His hands now wrapped in her hair, tugging it, a dull pain in counterpoint to the sweet sting below where he thrust into her, achingly slowly. Lanna whimpered, her senses overwhelmed. Into her ear, soft enough for only her to hear, he whispered, “Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” she breathed. Another climax consumed her and she cried out against him. This time he lost control, his thrusts increasing in tempo and force. Even in her ecstasy, she felt a twinge of animal fear at the size and strength of him as he rose above her with the power of a tidal wave. He pulled back her hair to reveal her throat and kissed it as he came; she felt the molten surge of his release and sank into his arms, utterly spent.
Dusk regarded Lanna with a wicked smile from the other side of the wagon as she caught her breath, the druid still inside her. The tiefling crawled over to them on her hands and knees to embrace him from the other side, turning his head to kiss him deeply, catching his moan in her open mouth.
With a gentle stroke down Lanna’s front and a soft kiss, Halsin slid out of her and Lanna sighed, lying back onto the quilt. She watched as he knelt over Dusk, who parted her knees for him as he began to pleasure her with his mouth. Now the wagon filled with the tiefling’s moans and sighs, her fragrance. Lanna closed her eyes, listening to her gasp.
When she looked back, Dusk’s hands were wound in the druid’s hair, her leg wrapped around his strong back, while the tiefling’s own was arched in rapture, her hips rising from the wagon floor. The wind moaned against the wagon as though in sympathy, and Lanna found her hand wandering to the sopping wetness between her legs, which throbbed in the aftermath of her own pleasure. Even through the haze of her rapture, Dusk saw her and smiled as she watched Lanna touch herself.
“Oh, hells, I’m coming,” Dusk gasped, hips bucking as her sweet scent filled the air, her nails raking over the druid’s back and drawing thin seams of blood. Halsin growled and perhaps he bit Dusk in return, because she yelped and her climax deepened. It was enough to send Lanna over the edge a third time and she closed her eyes, lost again to her senses.
Finally, panting, she opened them again to find Dusk sprawled out, her long legs loosely wrapped around Halsin’s torso, one arm thrown over her face in a gesture of total surrender. The druid gently extricated himself and pulled Lanna over to him, cradling her and Dusk both against his chest.
“That’s one way to keep from freezing to death,” Dusk murmured. She sounded half asleep or perhaps drugged.
Halsin chuckled, little more than a chuff of breath as he idly stroked down Lanna’s side with one finger. The sensation sent shivers down her body. “This has been quite the Midwinter feast,” he said. “One I’ll never forget.”
She never knew it could be like this, that such pleasures were available to her. Would she know such joy again? The bard rested her head against the druid’s warmth and locked eyes with Dusk, whose knowing smile responded with an unambiguous answer.
Langoth tells Halsin the story of his escape from Cloakwood and the discovery of his lost kin in Baldur's Gate. Before sunrise and the descent to the Underdark, Halsin and Langoth take comfort in one another's arms one last time.
How to tell you the story I’ve told myself a thousand times, and in as many different ways? Perhaps I should present it as a cautionary fable, like Wyll’s book of fairy tales. Or one of the dark confessional tomes that Astarion reads when he thinks no one is watching.
I had to piece together what little I knew of my parents; no one told me. When I asked my aunt questions about my mother and father, I was apt to get a swat across the cheek and so I learned not to ask questions. There were hints, insinuations, even jokes. Adults talked and their eyes slid over to me, the living, breathing punchline. And there was the word, of course, bastard. For some time, my cousin Derenth had me convinced that was my name.
By my thirtieth year, I understood, osmotically, that my mother had been forced by some noble eladrin visiting Cloakwood and that I was the result of that unhappy union. My mother had died birthing me, or perhaps had killed herself from shame--it wasn’t clear which but it was certain that I was to blame. And that was why my aunt allowed her children to heap misery upon me without admonishment, why she couldn’t find it in her to share any of the warmth or affection she showed my cousins or even their friends.
All of that to say, I was a lonely boy. I spent most of my time in the wood. The beasts and fey folk there were safer and altogether more interesting than any of the people I knew.
I was ignorant and didn’t know the name of a single tree but I knew all of their faces and loved them. I dreamed that a kind old wizard would come and sweep me away into a life of magic, like in a story. Or that I was an impervious paladin, pure and powerful. Or that my mother was still alive and waiting for me to rescue her from an enchanted sleep.
As we grew older, Derenth’s teasing developed into something altogether darker. He had a gang of other boys that worshipped him. I think for his cruelty as much as his charisma. Their favorite game was hunting me. Bastard baiting, Derenth called it. The wood was no longer my refuge but an arena. They rarely caught me but when they did their tortures were humiliating, inventive as only the minds of children can devise.
My aunt knew nothing about it but I don’t think she would have done anything if she had. As I grew older, she had less patience for me. Her strikes became more frequent and less restrained. And she complained often of the expense of keeping me, of how she anticipated the blessed day when I would finally leave them and she’d be free of her obligation.
The day came sooner than she could have hoped. My cousins’ game went too far. They--they nearly killed me. They took my innocence and my honor. And most of all, they burned away my illusions. If I had stayed, it would only have been a matter of time before they were successful. I escaped, I ran, and I did not stop running.
I ended up in Baldur’s Gate, where all manner of flotsam and sea-drift seem to wash up. As I said, I was an ignorant boy. But I appeared, to human eyes, to be a full grown elf, or near enough one to work.
Ah, Halsin--those were happy days, my joy all the brighter for being unexpected. I worked at the docks, lading cargo from the boats on the river, my shoulders sizzling in the sun, muscles aching after a day of honest work. And by evenings, I walked the streets of Baldur’s Gate just to relish my freedom and the scent of sweet frying dough in the evening air, the laughter of glamorous girls going to their parties. If I was flush, I stopped in a pub and watched the people go about the business of living as though watching a play. It was free, at least, and to my mind far more entertaining. I might be there still, if my brother had not found me.
He is tall for one of our kind--though not as tall at you--and slender as a willow. You need only to look at him to see that he’s of noble birth. What did you call it? Noble bearing. I’m not certain I will ever truly possess it, but I think that Cadamir was born with it. The confidence, the attitude--some would say, the arrogance. But he simply knew his place in the order and that was quite near the top. He is a prince, albeit without a kingdom.
I felt a shock of recognition and he didn’t need to speak for me to know that we were related. He looked so like me... if I were dressed in a rich velvet doublet of midnight blue. His hair was darker, his face perhaps a little thinner. But otherwise, it was like one of the magical reflections Gale toys with some evenings.
He was equally taken aback and we must have made an amusing sight that night at the Candlekeep, the dock boy and the lordling elf with the same face and matching shocked expressions.
But Cadamir was only surprised at our resemblance: for you see, he had sought me out in Baldur’s Gate. He knew my name and claimed to be my half brother.
I was wary at first. Absurdly, my first thought was that it was another elaborate trick of Derenth’s, that he had somehow found me here and was intent on ruining the humble life I’d carved out for myself.
Then Cadamir spoke of my mother. Her name was Aerlaine. He had known her. A beautiful lady with an unfettered spirit, he said, free with her laughter. He was sorry she was gone.
The unadorned kindness of those words--little more than courtesy, truly--unleashed something within me and I could not hold back my tears, much though I tried.
Cadamir took me in and was more like a father than an elder brother. Our father had died some years before, killed in a terrible battle back in their lands in the High Forest. The old kingdom was lost and the survivors scattered across Faerun, so he was lord of naught.
He told me the truth of my parents, as well: they were in love but my mother had a wild heart and did not wish to be bound to a husband, especially not a nobleman of the High Forest. Cadamir did not know how she died but was certain it was not of shame. When our father had come to find us we were gone, as were all of our kin. Cloakwood is a dangerous place and they believed the worst had come to pass. Cadamir only discovered the truth when in that wood again decades later and recognized my aunt from before. They told him I’d gone and Baldur’s Gate was his first thought. As I said, it’s where such cast-offs usually end up, in this part of the world.
It was strange to go from a shared room in a decrepit inn to Cadamir’s mansion, to trade my salt-stained shirt for a slashed velvet doublet. He was horrified to learn that my education consisted almost entirely of what one can learn from pixies and satyrs, which is to say very little in the way of reading or writing and perhaps more than needful about pranks and the distillation of alcohol. So he was my tutor in all things, as well.
Truly, it was an education. Cadamir moved in sophisticated circles, people who lived by different rules than the simple folk at the docks and in the taverns. He turned me into a gentleman... of a sort. I’ve never quite lost the pine pitch between my fingers. Nor can I move with Cadamir’s effortless grace through a party--you’d be more likely to find me skulking around the edges. It’s funny to imagine meeting you there, in another life.
Most of all, Cadamir taught me that I must rely only on myself, look to myself first. That I have nothing to prove to anyone. To see myself as someone worth... someone worth…
*
“Someone worth fighting for?” Halsin suggested. He sipped his wine and Langoth’s thoughts irretrievably muddled.
“Yes,” he said. “Or no--well, any road, he taught me to look after myself first.”
“Ah,” Halsin said. “I think I understand.” His eyes gleamed in the mellow light of the orbs. The sky was at its darkest but soon would tinge with the purple of the coming dawn. They reclined side by side, Halsin idly stroking his arm in a way that was at once immensely relaxing and distractingly arousing.
Langoth took the cup of wine from the druid’s hand and drank. It was a full-bodied red, punishingly tannic, tasting of strawberries and ripe red fruit.
“Arron’s best,” Halsin said with a half-smile and shrug of apology.
“It’s delicious--from Amn?” He took another swallow before handing the goblet back. Their fingers brushed and electricity ran up Langoth’s arm, filling him with a heat that had nothing to do with the alcohol.
Halsin laughed. “From Githmir, for all I know.” He held Langoth’s gaze for a long moment and once again he felt as though he was losing himself in the druid’s eyes. “You were very brave. You have survived much that others would not.”
Langoth dropped his eyes. “Thank you,” he finally said, when he was certain his voice was steady enough.
“And I would like to meet this brother of yours,” Halsin said. “Cadamir. If our travels take us to Baldur’s Gate.”
He tried to imagine what his brother would make of the druid. What they would possibly talk about. “Perhaps they will. I hope so.”
“Do you know, I would do anything for you?” Halsin said. His eyes sparkled with mischief. “Even go to one of those fancy parties, if you’d have me.”
“Nothing could give me greater pleasure,” he said, overcome by laughter at the thought of Halsin standing above the crowd of well-fed patricians like a statue of some wild and ancient god. Of him being offered a dainty petit four on a silver platter. “They wouldn’t be able to get enough of you.”
“A common enough sentiment,” Halsin said, stretching his great arms over his head to show his muscles to their best advantage. His hair fell just over one eye and desire overtook Langoth as swiftly as his laughter had.
“Ah, and so humble.” He dipped over the reclining druid to kiss his face, as gentle as the rain still pattering outside. Halsin sighed and pulled him close for a deeper kiss, full on the mouth; he tasted of sun-ripened strawberries.
“It will be dawn soon,” Langoth breathed. “The others--”
“They’ve already heard it all. Gods, but I want you again.” The druid’s words brought forth an answering shiver from his flesh, a tightening in the crotch of his breeches.
“Quickly then,” he said. “Before sunrise.” He was never able to resist Halsin but then, he never really wanted to resist him, either.
The inky sky was already fading to blue at the horizon. Halsin took him at his word and reached for the hardness at the front of Langoth’s breeches, making him gasp with the strength of his grip. He swore an oath as the druid pawed him through the leather, the roughness of his touch edging his pleasure with pain. Involuntarily, his hips rose to meet Halsin’s hand.
Then the druid reached inside his pants, sliding up and down his cock in swift strokes. Certain that at least someone in their camp was already up and about, he bit Halsin’s shoulder to keep from crying out. The druid hissed in pain but his hand didn’t pause. Langoth leaned against his scarred chest and gasped as his body shuddered. He wouldn’t last another minute, if the older elf kept going. But before the critical moment, Halsin lowered his head to take him into his mouth.
He was skilled with his mouth and relentless, ravenous. He took all of Langoth, up to his throat, flicking his tongue down his length and then ferociously taking him in again. And again. The sensation was unbearably, exquisitely good. “Gods, Halsin. Please.” He looked down to see the druid’s hazel eyes watching him lose control.
His climax shuddered through his hips and dazedly he looked down to see his lover wiping the side of his mouth. Langoth panted, his entire body aflame with residual lust.
Halsin smirked. “You said quickly, did you not?”
Langoth threw himself back onto the furs, drained. All he could do was groan.
Now the dawn was painting the sky in hectic shades of pink and orange; their time was almost gone.
Halsin rose to his knees, stretching his magnificent torso. “Let’s regain some goodwill and bring fish to the camp for breakfast,” he suggested. But Langoth sat up and pushed Halsin firmly onto his ass, straddling him.
“I think not,” he said, running a hand through the druid’s sweat-tangled hair and softly biting the tattoo on his jaw. He relished the swift intake of Halsin’s breath.
“Someone really will hear us now,” the older elf warned. “Are you certain--”
Langoth hushed him with a kiss, then broke away to say, “If you’re worried about making noise, you can bite my arm, this time.”
Halsin’s chuckle turned to a gasp as Langoth’s hand found his balls, cupping them even as his other hand stroked his bare chest with his short nails. Langoth found the bowl of oil and slowly began to spread it onto the druid’s cock, giving himself ample opportunity to admire it once more. In the daylight, he was always shocked anew at its size. Senseless under his oiled hands, Halsin arched his back, his breath ragged.
The sun broke the line of the horizon, bathing them both in a red glow. The light seemed to awaken an urgency in Halsin and he pushed Langoth onto his hands and knees, positioning him, sending another welcome shiver through Langoth’s body as his member brushed against his ass. Then their bodies joined to one and again Langoth felt full, whole, and pure.
The druid’s thrusts did not speed or slow but held the same steady rhythm, like a heartbeat, bearing them inexorably toward climax. Halsin’s breath was hot on Langoth’s neck and his moans resonant in his ear as he plunged into him, growing more desperate with every thrust. And then the druid wrapped one strong arm around his chest, bracing against him to go even deeper and Langoth felt ecstasy overcome him a second time, crying out and breaking the sacred silence of the dawn.
It was enough to finish Halsin; his hips bucked as he came inside Langoth in a gout of liquid pearl, the force of which Langoth felt from inside. They collapsed together onto the ground, Halsin still holding Langoth in one arm.
“I think we’ll need to catch a lot of fish to make up for that reveille,” Langoth said, still catching his breath. The aftermath of his bliss rippled through his body.
“And a honeycomb,” Halsin said. “Perhaps some blackberries.”
Langoth nestled his face against Halsin’s shoulder and whispered, “It was worth it.”
“So it was,” the druid agreed, sitting up and kissing Langoth’s head. He looked to the horizon. The clouds of last night’s storm had moved south and the sun had ascended.
“Take me with you tomorrow, to the Underdark,” Halsin said. “I have no doubt you could face it alone. But you don’t have to.”
In his bones, he knew he wanted the druid by his side in the darkness, as much as he had ever wanted anything. “It would be a great comfort,” he said. “Alright, then. Into the darkness, together.”
And once he spoke the words, both his heart and the glorious dawn were brighter.
Characters: Halsin/OMC, Astarion, Gale, Shadowheart
Rating: E
Warnings: Rape/noncon flashback
Words: 3614
The Underdark lies ahead and discontent ripples through the camp. Before they descend into the darkness Halsin has prepared something special, sweet, and very Halsin for Langoth. But their deepening connection threatens to dredge up painful memories of a past Langoth wishes to forget.
“I still don’t understand why the druid has to camp with us now.” Astarion folded his arms in front of him. Langoth mirrored him unconsciously, noticed himself doing so, and put his hands on his hips instead, even more annoyed.
“Useful, having a master druid on one’s side,” Gale said, steepling his long fingers. Langoth thanked him silently. “Especially one that can change into a great snarling bear at a moment’s notice.”
Astarion fairly snarled himself. “Why not invite a few wild boar to share in our adventures, then? Or perhaps that cambion who was so eager to strike a deal with us? We already have a walking corpse, an imbecilic bard, and now a dried up old druid.”
“Ooh, would we call him dried up?” Gale said, flashing an impish smile. The wizard crouched by the fire, dipping his hands into the flames which swirled around his wrists in a pretty show of magic. “Master Halsin seems altogether... robust, to me.” Astarion shot him a look of pure venom, which Gale blithely ignored.
Langoth started to reply before Shadowheart cut in. “I agree with Astarion. Why should we open our company to more followers?”
Finally, Langoth spoke. “Because we need all the help we can get. Or would you prefer to navigate the Underdark alone? Halsin has fought Ketheric and knows more about the Shadow Curse than anyone.”
“I wonder why that is?” Astarion muttered. His petulant glance made Langoth’s blood heat up as it flushed his cheeks.
They had tarried as long as they could. The truth was that they all feared the dark path that descended beneath the depths of the Shattered Sanctum. And the longer they delayed, the more his companions filled with dread. Langoth could sense it through their shared connection, in their strained conversations, the silent breakfasts. This waiting had to end.
“We go tomorrow,” he said softly, looking into the orange flames as though they could divine the future. He sensed Gale’s apprehension, Shadowheart’s determination, and Astarion’s abject fear--which mirrored his own. The thought of dying down in the darkness, all that earth above him, was terrifying.
“Well, best to get an early night, then,” Gale said, rising and brushing off his robes. He departed for his bedroll with a wink and Shadowheart followed not long after, slipping discreetly into Wyll’s tent again. Langoth raised an eyebrow but said nothing. It was surprising, the bedfellows made by their peculiar circumstances.
“I suppose we all know how you’ll be spending the night,” Astarion said, showing his fangs.
“I could say the same for you.” He regarded Astarion from across the leaping flames. He didn’t need to probe their strange bond to perceive the wound to the vampire spawn’s pride. “Off to drain some more rats, then?”
Astarion brushed past him on his way to the dark edge of the woods, where he always went on his evening prowls. “It’s a little pathetic, darling,” the pale elf whispered. “How you carry on with him. Everyone thinks so.”
Langoth watched him slink away, angry enough to spit. And he did, spat after Astarion’s retreating back. He felt a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“He’s only jealous,” Halsin said. “He wanted you for himself. You know that.”
Looking up into the druid’s eyes, Langoth felt his fury abate like a doused fire.
“I do not belong to anyone, least of all him,” he said, trying to cling to the righteous anger he no longer felt.
“And that is why I love you,” Halsin said. “Well, one of the many reasons.” The word love struck Langoth like a bolt of lightning and he looked into the druid’s eyes for the trick, for the joke that must surely lie beneath his words. But there was none, only his usual warmth. “And so tomorrow you journey into the Underdark?”
Langoth nodded, still turning over the word love in his mind. “We can delay no longer.”
Halsin leaned close and he could smell his scent, cedar and blackcurrants and smoke. He breathed it in as the druid whispered, “Then let us claim tonight as ours alone.”
He sank into the druid’s kiss, the soft lips that tasted sweet and spicy like some rare liquor. And he did not protest when Halsin led him by the hand back to the secluded edge of the camp where they lay together, pretending as though they were the only two in the encampment, or in the world.
Rain began to patter on the leaves and streak their cheeks, lacing Halsin’s long hair with fine droplets. “We’re going to get soaked,” Langoth said.
But Halsin just smiled. “I saw the storm on the horizon this afternoon. Don’t worry, I’ve prepared something.”
And so he had: a makeshift tent of oiled canvas was suspended over four tall staves, beneath which the druid had spread soft furs and even a pillow. There was a brass bowl full of some unguent and beside it on a tray--a tray, where could have the druid procured it?--two silver cups and a bottle of wine or perhaps some spirit. A spray of wild roses lay upon the pillow and warm light glowed from a translucent bubble suspended in the air: a light cantrip.
“Such luxury,” Langoth said in wonder. It felt as though it had been an age since his head had rested upon a pillow, since he’d drunk from a goblet rather than his cupped hand.
“I enjoy rough living, as you know,” Halsin said, a gleam of mischief in his eyes, “But I thought you deserved a bit of spoiling. Or if not spoiling, at least some comfort.”
Langoth kept staring at the pile of the lovely furs, the silk stitched pillow, the roses, and he knew he ought to say something but couldn’t trust himself with words. He was mindful of Halsin’s patient regard as he stood there, dumbly, in the rain looking at the tent and its furnishings. Finally, he said, “All this for me?”
“Yes, it is. Now, take off your clothes.”
Langoth raised an eyebrow. “Even for you, Halsin, that is rather abrupt.”
The druid laughed. “I’m going to try to properly spoil you and give you a massage. Every time I touch your back it’s as knotted as a walnut tree.”
“I’ve had some cause to be tense, these past weeks,” Langoth noted drily.
“Even more reason, then. Go on, strip.”
Langoth did as commanded but took his time, allowing Halsin to admire his form as he slowly unlaced his gauntlets, his jerkin, and finally his boots and breeches until he stood in his smallclothes, shivering slightly as the cool mist of rain struck his skin.
“Gods but you’re beautiful,” Halsin said, the words catching in his throat. When he said so, Langoth felt it. Somehow, reflected through the older elf’s eyes he saw himself as he never had before. As someone worthy of desire.
“Do you want me here?” he said, stepping into the tent and lying on the furs. They were well tanned and felt as soft as a whisper on his bare skin. He shivered with pleasure.
Halsin assented with a terse monosyllable and he glanced over his shoulder to see the druid focused on the bowl of oil.
“I’m not really one for massages anyway--” Langoth began, then gasped as Halsin’s strong, warm hands, slick with oil, found his shoulders. “Oh, Corellon’s sweet sighs, that feels wonderful.” Distantly, he perceived Halsin’s chuckle as he melted beneath his skilled hands.
The druid ran his the edge of his palm up his spine in a long, fluid motion before both of his hands settled on Langoth’s shoulders and rested for a moment, long enough for him to appreciate their warm weight and to anticipate the next strokes, which delved deep into the knots around his shoulders. Another involuntary moan escaped his lips. There seemed to be some sort of healing magic in Halsin’s fingers, some energy that loosened his muscles and revivified even as it relaxed him.
The magic in the druid’s hands and the steady pelting of rain on the tent put him into a kind of daze and joyfully he surrendered to pure sensation, letting go of the foreboding that had taken hold after the elation of defeating the goblins had subsided. For the first time in weeks he didn’t think of brain-devouring tadpoles, hags, cambions, marauding goblins, fractious druids, or the horrors of the Underdark. He was simply clay beneath Halsin’s skilled fingers. They skimmed down his back in a scintillating tingle and he sighed, falling still deeper into the trance. The thin coating of oil on his skin held in the warmth of the druid’s touch, the heat of his own blood. It smelled of an almond grove in flower.
“I’ve never felt so relaxed,” he murmured, “Not in the presence of another.”
“Shh,” Halsin chided. He drew circles down to the waistband of Langoth’s smallclothes and said, “Surely we can dispense with these.” Langoth sighed in agreement, a shiver of pleasure accompanying the druid’s touch as he slid his drawers off his hips and his fingers dug into the base of his spine and then the large muscles of his gluteus. Halsin sighed faintly as he kneaded the muscles of his buttocks and a smile pricked the corner of Langoth’s lips; he could hear the desire pent back in that exhalation. For a tease, he wriggled slightly and raised his hips, which earned him a playful swat.
“Just relax,” Halsin said, mock exasperated. His breath quickened again as the druid’s hands found his inner thighs, moving over the muscle in one long sweep that reached right to his crotch. His arousal was immediate and spontaneous, as it always was with Halsin. Even as he moved down to the backs of Langoth’s legs, he felt heat building inside him. Halsin’s hair brushed the bare skin on his back and he gasped at the sensation.
“Did I hurt you?” the druid asked, pausing. Langoth shook his head. Even the note of concern in his voice, the particular pitch and timbre that was so Halsin, was turning him on. He tried to focus again on the exquisite massage but his desire stubbornly refused to be ignored.
“Now, on your back,” Halsin commanded. Langoth swallowed, knowing his arousal would be impossible to hide but did as he was bidden, keeping his eyes closed as he rolled onto his back. The briefest pause--he imagined the druid smiling at the effect he was having on him--and then he resumed stroking his legs, from Langoth’s knees to the tops of his thighs. Langoth sucked in his breath as Halsin’s hands moved up to his pelvis, pressing down on the muscles around his cock, sending ripples of pleasure through his body.
He opened his eyes to see Halsin straddled above, his long hair falling to one side of his rugged face, a crooked smile playing on his lips and one eyebrow quirked in amusement--or was it a question?
Langoth began to prop himself on his elbows but Halsin pushed him back.
It was an innocent gesture. His rational mind recognized that, later. But in the moment, the feeling of being pushed back, by arms stronger than his own, provoked a sense memory so powerful it overwhelmed him.
His body reacted. He shoved back from the furs, away from Halsin as though burned. He would never forget the surprise and hurt in his lover’s eyes at that moment. His own shame and fear.
But Halsin didn’t admonish him, or pull away. He didn’t accuse. Instead the druid waited, still and calm.
“I’m sorry,” Langoth said, feeling the word in every part of his body.
“It’s alright. You know you’re safe, with me.” He searched Halsin’s eyes and found only his customary gentleness, tinged with some concern.
That word, safe. As big as the other one Halsin had used early, love. As impossible.
“I know,” he said. He wanted to add a thousand other things. To tell him what a waste of time he was, that he wasn’t worth it, that they should give up this impossible thing, to recognize it was just a dalliance born of dire circumstance. But looking into the druid’s implacable gaze, he knew that he wouldn’t hear any of that. Absurdly, he cared for Langoth. Loved, he reminded himself. He couldn’t trust himself to say it back.
Hesitantly at first, he leaned forward, onto his knees, to kiss the druid. He could say it this way. Their lips brushed and alchemist’s fire roiled within him, burning through his veins. Halsin pulled away to murmur his name into his ear, and as his tongue struck his teeth for the terminal syllable he countered with another kiss, deep and hungry, forcing the druid’s lips to his, parting them with his tongue even as he raised his hips to press firmly against him. To feel the strong length of his body, thick and solid as an oak trunk.
They both gasped for air when finally their lips parted. He frantically pulled aside Halsin’s tunic to reveal the scarred chest beneath. How proudly his lover wore his wounds, a map of his past laid bare for any to see. Langoth embraced him, relishing the warm solidity of his big, deep torso. Then the electric current as he felt the druid’s arousal press against his hip. He began to unlace Halsin’s breeches, swearing at his ineptitude as he managed to only tighten the knot.
“Are you certain?” Halsin said.
In reply, Langoth pulled the breeches down over the druid’s hips and took him fully into his mouth. Halsin groaned as his mouth closed around the druid’s cock, tongue tracing its underside as he slowly began to move up and down its length. He was enormous and it was impossible to take all of him at once, so Langoth used his hands on the base of his shaft. He savored his flavor, the way the druid’s hands clenched and unclenched his hair as he thrust. He moaned against his cock, provoking a gasp from the druid. The thrusts became more insistent, deeper.
And then Halsin withdrew, panting. “I want all of you,” he said. Langoth leaned back into the furs and Halsin braced himself over him so they were face to face.
Langoth was nearly shaking with his need. “Please,” he whispered, pressing close enough to the druid to feel his breath on his neck.
Slowly, painfully slowly, Halsin spread some of the almond oil onto his cock, all the while pinning him with his bright hazel eyes. Probing him, questioning. Langoth spread his knees, lifted his hips from the furs. And groaned as Halsin pressed into him with slow, gentle thrusts.
Halsin filled him more completely with every stroke but not nearly fast enough for Langoth. He panted with his need, pulling the druid closer, deeper. He had to have him completely, to abandon himself to the druid. To regain the sense of wholeness he could only feel when in his possession.
“Slowly,” Halsin whispered, running a hand through Langoth’s hair. But he could offer only a strangled cry in response, raising his hips insistently to take him deeper. The druid sighed in pleasure, spurring him on only more. He rocked his hips to meet Halsin’s thrusts, gritting his teeth against the exquisite pain that met every push deeper. He was a cup that yearned both to be filled and to be broken, and in the opposition of those two desires lay his passion, his great need.
Halsin moaned his name as he took him fully, up to the hilt. Cried it again as his thrusts grew harsher. Hearing his own name on the druid’s lips brought him to his precipice. Both cried out as one when they finished together, Halsin gasping above Langoth, sweat pasting his hair to his cheek, twining over the vine tattoo.
It took him longer than usual to recover, for as deep as they had gone together before, in the High Forest and in the forgotten shrine, tonight Langoth felt they’d gone further, much further. All the way to the black fountain welling at his center.
Even as Halsin held him in his arms, he covered his face with one hand, brushing away tears as they came. Halsin only kissed his head and went on holding him as the rain drummed away on the makeshift roof of this refuge in the darkness.
*
Langoth, like others of his kind, didn’t dream except when he wished, of such things he wished. The peculiar tadpole dream had been one exception. And his nightmares, terrifying as they were infrequent, were another.
It wasn’t uncommon, his brother had told him, of elves who had experienced some horror. Those whose souls had briefly been parted from their bodies. Those who had been tortured. Those who had been raped. Except he hadn’t used that word, Langoth remembered--he had said misused. But both brothers had known what he meant. Such allusions were understood.
A nightmare hadn’t overwhelmed him since before he left for Baldur’s Gate and he’d hoped they were behind him, now.
So when he found himself, that night, back in the shadowed wood of his darkest memory, he faced it with a familiar dread. He knew he was dreaming but he also knew there was no escape. He would have to live this moment again, once more. At least once more.
They approached from the south, as always. He turned away from the sound of their baying.
He climbed a tree. Other times, he had tried to double back. To outrun them. To hide in a ditch.
They always discovered him in the end.
He wasn’t yet fully grown in the dream and didn’t have the strength to throw them off when they got hold of his arms and legs. There were so many of them, and only one of him. They had painted their faces with mud, like goblins.
What came after was horrific but in many ways the worst part was when he appealed to his eldest cousin, Derenth.
Why had he done so? Derenth had ever been the chieftain of this miserable tribe of tormentors. His nemesis at home. The first and loudest to glory in Langoth’s misfortunes and petty misdeeds. It was the spark of his hatred for Langoth that had lit the bonfire that they all warmed themselves around, for their amusement. And yet he was powerless not to beg him again now.
“Please, don’t let them hurt me, cousin.”
For a moment, his cousin seemed sympathetic--even remorseful. Conciliatory. Then the mask dropped. The twisted look on his cousin’s face as he shoved Langoth onto his back, into the black mud of a boar’s wallow. The screams of laughter from the other elves, their rapture as the biggest and boldest youth, Derenth’s best mate, jumped onto his chest, flipping him onto his belly to press his face into the mud. And the answering lurch of his fear that today they would go too far, today they would kill him.
The youth sitting on his back now had his cousin’s knife against his throat and commanded him to eat the mud, forcing his face into the puddle before he could comply. He tasted the rancid grit of it again, for perhaps the hundredth time. The sickening press of the elf’s erection against his back. He vomited into the filth and the gang jeered and shouted. He felt the sizzling pain as the youth cut away his shirt, also opening the skin beneath. As he made a halting attempt at carving his initials into Langoth’s back, at Derenth’s suggestion. The gaiety in his cousin Garlan’s handsome face when he looked up from the mud. And the terror as the din quieted and he heard Derenth suggest, in perfect clarity, that they strip him naked.
The rape that followed was inexpert and halting, excruciating. For much of it, Langoth’s face was submerged partly or fully in the muck and he was certain that he would die drowning in the mud, his cousin’s knife to his throat. That they would bury him in this wood, and the last thing he would hear would be his cousin’s mate whispering, “bastard,” again and again under his breath as he penetrated him.
But he didn’t die, then or now.
There was the briefest window of opportunity and he took it. A sharp twist of his torso, an upthrust elbow in his rapist’s eye and he slipped in the mud. He didn’t look back as he staggered out of the mire, blood trickling from the wounds on his back and his neck. A quarter of an inch higher and his artery would have been nicked. But it wasn’t, and he ran hard.
This time, they didn’t chase him.
*
He awoke gasping, as he always did from the nightmares. Like he’d been running for his life. Or drowning.
But this time, Halsin was with him. He was by his side in an instant and in another, his powerful arms were around him.
“Easy, love,” the druid said. Langoth, his face pressed against Halsin’s heart, heard his voice as a deep rumble, like distant thunder. “Was it the tadpole?”
He exhaled jaggedly before he spoke. “Not this time.”
“Tell me,” Halsin said. His voice was gentle, eyes searching.
Langoth’s throat closed until he forced himself to breathe. He took in the soft light of the floating bulbs, the feel of the furs beneath him, the strength of his lover’s arms. He was safe, he reminded himself.
Characters: Halsin/OMC, Halsin/Ketheric, Wyll, Shadowheart, Volo
Rating: E
Words: 3404
After a night of passion, Halsin and Langoth return to camp to find their companions have also made the most of the night's revelry.
But something is bothering the ranger and finally, he asks his lover Halsin about his past with the enigmatic Ketheric Thorm. There is always more to the story...
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
Mary Oliver, The Uses of Sorrow
They did not sleep that night, the night that forever afterward Halsin would call their wedding night, only half-joking. In silence as deep as the sky’s blackness, they watched the stars wheel and fade. Held each other tightly on the stone table as the celebration in camp raged and then dwindled. Listened to the small sounds of rustling animals and the first sweet notes of dawn’s chorus.
“My favorite time of day,” he told Langoth. “There’s no match for the dawnsong of high summer. The finest symphony ever composed.”
The ranger smiled, distantly. “It reminds me of the first time,” he said, his voice so soft it was nearly below hearing. “I had never experienced anything like it--like you.”
The morning light caught Langoth’s long, chestnut hair, gilding it, bathing his face in a warm golden glow. Halsin’s breath caught in his throat. He had been awestruck by the youth’s beauty that first night in the High Forest. Just as he was now.
“Nor I you,” he said. He took Langoth’s face in his hands and whispered roughly, uncouthly, “I want you again.”
The elf leaned into his embrace, breath hot on Halsin’s neck. “Then take me.”
Halsin growled and straddled him, looming above the slighter man, his broad shoulders blocking the rising sun. They were both still bare from the waist up and he raked his fingers down the ranger’s chest as he bent to kiss him ravenously. Langoth gasped at the mingled sensation of Halsin’s rough hands and plunging kiss; his hips rose to brush the front of the druid’s pants, finding him already hard. He ground up against him in slow, firm strokes, provoking a groan from deep in Halsin’s throat.
“You don’t realize what you do to me,” Halsin gasped. “Gods.”
The youth just smiled as though he knew precisely his effect on the druid and pulled Halsin’s muscled ass closer to him and thrusting faster, harder.
The feeling of Langoth’s own desire pressing and stroking against his own was nearly enough to finish him. But before that could happen, Halsin grabbed him around the waist and flipped him onto his belly, jerking down his leather breeches as the elf moaned beneath him. The birdsong around them was in full throated climax as he plunged into him, feeling the elf’s sublime tightness barely giving way to his thick cock. Langoth exclaimed, in both pain and pleasure, as Halsin thrust mercilessly, driven by blind need.
“Langoth,” he murmured; he knew how his lover enjoyed hearing his own name on Halsin’s lips. The ranger cried out in response and Halsin pulled him closer, wrapping his muscled arm around his chest. In contrast to last night, his peak was building slowly, inexorably, like a wall rising stone by stone.
The rising sun struck the table, bathing them both in an orange glow. His lover was beautiful beneath him, his strong back rippling in the soft dawning light. Halsin tracked the muscles with his hand and then slid it down below to stroke his member. The ranger gasped, thrusting eagerly against his touch, and they moved as one.
Langoth’s breath quickened, shoulders faltered. As he felt his lover come, Halsin himself lost control; with one thrust, and then another, he finished, gasping, on the elf’s back.
The chorus had abated and the sun’s rays had mellowed. Langoth sat up beside him, leaning close. “We should get back before the others wake,” he said.
“I do hope Astarion hasn’t waited up for you,” Halsin said. He didn’t even try to suppress his laughter, though he knew it was unkind.
Langoth was more circumspect but a ghost of a smile played on his lips as he said, “I’m certain he had no shortage of other entertainments last night.”
No one stirred at the camp when they returned--no one, except--
“The hero returns! Ah, and the wise and mighty king of druids, Master Halsin! I’ve a new stanza to celebrate your victory, good sirs, only I struggle to find a word that rhymes with ‘muscular,’ and I feel I would be derelict in my sacred commission as bard and poet if I failed to mention Master Halsin’s particular, ah, physical qualities… and allusion simply doesn’t suffice, I don’t think, when it comes to his spectacular form!”
He thought he heard Langoth mutter, “It’s far too early for this.” But it might have only been his imagination.
“Druids do not have kings,” Halsin explained to Volo, for at least the third time since they had met last week. “And you needn’t talk about my, er, form. Though I am flattered.”
“Of course you and I know druids don’t have kings,” Volo said, as though Halsin were being quite stupid. “But we need to remember our audience doesn’t have the sophistication required to understand the ‘first amongst equals’ principle espoused by the druids, et cetera. Oh! It’s so obvious. ‘Muscle,’ singular--rhymes with ‘tussle.’ Perfection!” Volo strummed a chord on his lute with a fervor that was frankly alarming and Halsin instinctively looked around for an exit.
“Right, I need to wash,” he said, heading for the river. “Goodbye.”
“I also need to see to a--personal matter. Gods keep you, Volo,” Langoth called behind his shoulder. “I will remember how you left me out in the cold just now,” he added under his breath, even as the corner of his lips twitched. Halsin’s heart lurched pleasantly and he turned his gaze back toward the rushing water of the Chionthar, already slipping out of his tunic.
“I would aid you against any enemy in the deepest dungeon of the Underdark,” Halsin said. “But you’re on your own with the bard.”
They bathed together in the rushing stream, Langoth capering on the rocks and diving into the deep pool under a cataract as Halsin watched. The water was cold and bracing and Halsin couldn’t resist enjoying it in his bear form; there was simply no comparison to experiencing the icy rush of the river running through his thick fur. He changed back once he emerged, dripping, onto the shore, Langoth close behind in his smallclothes.
“Someone was up late,” a smooth voice teased. The Blade of the Frontiers emerged from his tent, wearing a lopsided grin and little else. He had a bowl of streaky, grayish gruel that looked distinctly unappetizing. But then, a human would eat nearly anything.
“Ah. Did you... enjoy the celebration?” Langoth asked, color rising to his cheeks. But then, from behind Wyll, the haughty cleric called Shadowheart emerged from the tent, cheeks even redder than Langoth’s, if it were possible. Her lips were still stained purple from last night’s cheap wine. Halsin’s head nearly throbbed in sympathy.
“Evidently so,” Halsin remarked. The young people were so obviously uncomfortable that he almost laughed. But then he remembered his own tenderness and shame in his youth and his heart softened for them. “Gods, but we’ve earned some respite, have we not? And much still lies ahead.”
The others eagerly seized on this line of discussion and a profusion of enthusiastic, if stilted, comments followed about battles fought, foes defeated, and speculation of those still to come. Halsin enjoyed seeing Langoth with his companions, his earnest expressions, the innocence of his words. Finally, the young people extricated themselves from their rhetorical bondage and all sauntered off in different directions, Langoth grabbing his elbow as they went.
The youth didn’t want to let him out of his sight and this, too, was touching. He had all the hours of the day for his lover, whose face was a song of which he could never tire. In contrast to Volo’s forced rhymes.
They laid their clothes to dry in a sunny spot by the river and Halsin rested beneath a friendly looking ash tree and closed his eyes. He asked its name with a minute scratch of his thumb against the bark and it answered; a name that sounded like the rustling of acorns against one another in the mellowness of autumn. A lovely name, one he committed to memory. Halsin sighed, the sun warming his chest, grateful to be alive on such a day.
“Are you just going to meditate now?” Langoth’s voice came from leagues away. Halsin opened his eyes. “Only… I had a question.”
He regarded Langoth, ready for nearly anything.
“You said before that you had defeated Ketheric but it seemed as though perhaps you knew him, once. Do you--is there...?”
“‘Is there more to the story?’ you mean?”
Langoth bit the inside of his cheek, mustering his nerve. “Well, is there?”
Halsin leaned back against the ash who was named after a sound of acorns rustling, feeling every year of his five centuries. “There is always more to the story,” he said.
“Tell me,” Langoth said softly, looking at his hands. He sensed the story was troubling, and he was not wrong. Halsin thought Langoth was probably rarely wrong when it came to troubling things. They whispered to the secret wound he carried in his breast, like calling to like. Halsin sighed.
“Of course I shall tell you if you wish to know,” he said. And yet, even as he spoke the words, he was unsure if he should. “It all began in Waterdeep,” he began.
*
Have you been? Magic runs through that city, and I feel it in my marrow whenever I cross into its wards. The city was built on a mountain of mithral, on the ashes of a forgotten citadel of Illefarn. Ancient seams of blood and magic run beneath it. You can hear it, like a ringing in your ears.
There was some reason for me to be there, but I barely recall it. All I now remember is him. And what came after, of course.
I spurned the inn, as I always do. Too much comfort has always seemed suspicious to me, as have affections exchanged for coin. Yet there is precious little nature left in Waterdeep, so I took my repose in a graveyard, under the open sky. The only place in the city where one could find a tree.
They were sad and lonely, those trees: a weeping willow, a scrawny, leafless box, and a twisted old yew. The yew had gone mad from loneliness--yews are prone to madness in any case, but this one was particularly ill. Perhaps that is why the priests of Shar claimed this particular graveyard for their rituals. The yew had seeped its poison into the very ground and it was a dark and morbid place. Full of shadows. Now I wonder if the sick yew wasn’t in some indirect way the genesis of all that’s happened since.
I watched them under the cover of a glamour so that I seemed to their eyes like a stone gargoyle warding a tomb. They were initiating a half-elf and his terror carried on the wind. I could smell it. He was barely grown, undernourished. His voice was strong though, and surprisingly deep, like the low roll of the tide coming in from the sea’s depths.
I’ve been alive long enough to learn not to cast easy judgments. Shar and her dark worship--what were such things to me? Was it so different to swear oneself to the Dark One as it was to the Lady of Pain? Or the Lord of the Dead? But something in this ritual chilled me.
It felt as though… this dark ritual had meaning beyond its meaning. My mother had the gift of foresight and some little of it passed to me. I cannot see the future as though I were watching a play, as she did. But I can often sense danger, or tidings of happiness to come. It’s kept me alive, more times than I can count, this gift. And now, it filled me with dread. The dread of a hundred kingdoms falling. A dread worse than mere death or danger. The dread of a coming apocalypse.
The half-elf turned and even in the gloom of the moonless night, I recognized his face. For my mother had shown me this face when I was a boy, in the final moments of her life. She met a violent end--but that, I will speak of another time. I had believed she showed his face to me because he was my destiny. But perhaps she showed me because he would be my doom.
In my shock, the glamour slipped. Only the half-elf saw me. And I recovered so that when he turned back I was once again disguised as senseless stone.
Perhaps that would have been the end of all if I had left it alone. But destiny carves a path before itself, one we mortals are incapable of altering. Such I have come to believe, though perhaps only as means to absolve myself.
They completed their ritual by draining the youth of his blood, to the point of death. And many do die. But the half-elf did not, and Shar claimed another acolyte to her worship. How peaceful he looked in that moment, on the precipice between life and death. They bore him off on their shoulders into the night, leaving me with mad yew and my own dark thoughts.
The very next day I sought the Temple of Shar. It’s no simple place to find, even in permissive Waterdeep. Her worship is outlawed and her followers jailed when discovered.
You may well ask why I troubled myself. Why I could not leave well enough alone, as the humans are wont to say. I was compelled by both curiosity and dread.
It is a strange thing to say aloud, but the image of the half-elf’s face was all I had left of my mother and even as it repelled me, I also felt closer again to her somehow in finding him. I had to know the meaning behind it, to recover even this small remnant of her memory. If you have lost someone, perhaps you understand my meaning.
It took some days and many false turns but in the end, I located their temple. Simple chance finally led me to the right direction--or destiny carving its path before me, take your pick.
If I was worried about what I might say to the half-elf when I met him, I needn’t have, for he recognized me immediately.
“The gargoyle of a druid I saw,” he said, by way of greeting. “So you weren’t a vision from my Dark Lady, after all.”
He always spoke like that.
I answered that I had seen the ritual, and feared for his life. I asked how he had come into the service of the Dark Goddess and he told me his story. It was a brutal, tragic tale, and he told it without remorse or sentimentality. When again I pressed him--why did he devote himself to Shar? He answered that none other had claimed him, only the Lady of Loss. As though his life were simply a ripe apple falling senseless from a tree.
In my pride, I thought that by removing this youth from Shar’s faithful would heal him, that I could restore the balance to his soul. That I could heal him.
I took him to the Emerald Grove. The power of that place is ancient, its healing magic is more powerful than you ken. Not just Silvanus’s power, though that resides there too. I believed the grove would restore him and would avert the darkness that lay ahead.
In how many legends to mortals hasten along the very events they sought to prevent? Well, here is another.
For a time, I believed that Ketheric was healed. The light returned to his eyes, the blood to his flesh. By day, he walked the forest with me and I taught him such that I know: more than most will learn, but still precious little compared with the forest’s immensity. Every tree is a world unto itself.
And I loved him. Desired him. Claimed him. It blinded me to the truth. For Shar would not be so easily forsaken. She was jealous of her supplicants and for Ketheric she had great designs.
I believed he had left Shar behind in distant Waterdeep. In Ketheric, I thought I saw my destiny to bring him back into the light.
Only arrogance and perhaps lovesickness can explain why it took me so long to realize why the forest grew darker over those seasons. Parasites thrived and the trees fought silent battles within the buried paths beneath the earth. Plants that once were allies became bitterest enemies and starved each other out, poisoning one another’s roots. Pestilential insects devoured the warring plants. Even the water was tainted, sickening creatures and the druids in my grove.
Kagha saw the truth first. And if perhaps you wondered why I allowed her to stay, here is the reason. Because Kagha’s heart may be as hard as ironwood, but she is unflinching in the face of the truth and I--well, now I know that I cannot always trust my own judgment.
She unmasked Ketheric, finally made me see, but by then it was too late. He had seen the power of the grove, and he desired it for himself. For his Dark Lady. Ketheric escaped my judgment and Kagha’s wrath but I knew he would return.
Three years passed and in that time, Ketheric became a force. More than a mere man. He was a legend and followers flocked to him, drawn to his power. More than power; his absence of fear. For since that night that Shar had taken him, I had never once witnessed him frightened of anything. That was the source of his terrible charisma, I believe, why people followed him into madness and marched to their deaths on his order, with happy hearts. That they, too, could be so fearless.
He took the Temple of Selune first. The priests there fought hard and long but Ketheric would not be thwarted and his forces seemed limitless. The stories are still told of the terrible butchery committed in the Shattered Sanctum, and I will not repeat them.
They rode out from the Shattered Sanctum to terrorize the country. That is when we first spoke of the Rite of Thorns, for there was no question of protecting the surrounding land from Ketheric’s army. Then the Harpers came.
I could tell you all manner of stories about the long history of the Harpers and the Emerald Grove, but those romances only imply the true foundation of that ancient alliance: one born of dire necessity against unassailable darkness. Which is all to say, the Harpers and the Druids have joined when all seemed lost.
So it seemed to us then. With the power of the Shattered Sanctum and an army of faithful, Ketheric completed a dark ritual, one that required a fountain of blood sacrifice. The Shadow Curse. A plague on the land and all that lived there, committing their souls into bondage to Shar.
He completed the ritual and cast the land into darkness before I could finally end him. I held him as he died, and he looked just as he did on the night in the Waterdeep graveyard. At peace, finally, in the arms of his Goddess. The only one he ever truly loved, I still believe.
That fight nearly took my life. As for the others, I marched them to their graves. Of all the druids and Harpers who fought on that day none survived. A handful of Ketheric’s dark justiciars escaped, scattered. Of those, all have fallen to madness or early deaths.
Only I now remain witness to the horrors of that long night.
*
Halsin found it hard to hold his lover’s gaze for shame. Now he knew of his failure, his blindness. He would scorn him, as Kagha had: weak, arrogant, feckless.
Instead, Langoth took his hand in his own, kissing his rough knuckles. Forgiveness so sublime, so unexpected that his eyes pricked with unshed tears.
“You did what you could. And we will end the curse when we reach Moonrise Towers. That I promise you.”
Halsin closed his eyes. “Thank you.” In the wood a thrush sang, as though to remind him of something he had long forgotten. Something like hope.
