Unfading Star
The first four chapters are already on Ao3!
Rating: Explicit
Pairings: Astarion/Tav, The Dark Urge/Sebastian
Summary: The Absolute is gone. The masters are dead. The gods are silent. Astarion is free, yet condemned to never see the day. The Dark Urge is free, yet hollowed out, stripped of both his bloody purpose and his past. Tav is free, yet cursed with a mortal life that seems to slip through her fingers like sand. On the ruins of a broken world, their paths tangle and fray. Amidst the bitter chill of their new day, they seek something to cling to. Astarion will bleed to protect his first and only light. The Dark Urge will follow the phantom of the one who caught his eye in the dark. And Tav will defy the night itself to bring the sun back to her vampire.
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Chapter 1. Illusen. The Dark Urge
Word count: 5k
In all possible realms, there exists but one person he craves to have. He wants to watch them fall asleep and wake, to hold them in the unyielding lock of his arms every free moment, pressing his ear to their chest to listen to the blood coursing through veins, the viscera shifting and working beneath the thinnest shell of flesh. He aches to leave teeth marks on the pale skin of their thighs and stomach, bruises from his fingers, rope burns on calves and wrists. He aches to lick sweat from the hollow of their back, to see how crimson smears of someone else's blood look against that body. And above all – he wants to be with this person forever, every moment, in every life. To occupy every corner of their thoughts and heart, and never let another soul so much as touch them with a finger.
He doesn't know if he has ever truly loved, for memory stretches back only to a distant life in the Shadowfell. He can trace the chain of his existence back only to his twenty-first year, yet now he is ninety-three. Illusen, as it turns out, is already ninety-three. Astarion once mocked him, saying he was still seven years shy of elven adulthood, but that isn't true. Age flows differently for the shadar-kai than for other elves. Reborn from one life to the next, wandering between new bodily vessels, they live through countless incarnations – remembering entire lifetimes as one, or forgetting them almost entirely. For the shadar-kai, age has no boundaries of birth and death – only thresholds from life to life. But that isn't even the point. He cares nothing for age; he just wants to know something, anything, about those stolen years of his existence. Years only others can tell him about, as if he were nothing more than a bystander listening to his own tale.
Perhaps he did love, once, in all that time. But not before.
Shadar-kai do not form lasting bonds, nor do they cultivate a culture of love or friendship – only service. The concept of closeness in his homeland narrows to mutual respect and brotherhood. The shadow fey-elves have no need for it, for they barely feel any emotion, and if they do, it is only sorrow, grief, and melancholy. They find salvation in pain and murder, desperate to wring a single fragile drop from their mute souls. If, now and then, something bright seeps into the elves, it becomes the faintest echo in the depths of a bleak, undying soul. So faint and brittle, so secret, that it's always kept silent. Perhaps – also secretly – cherished.
Illusen was never like that. He felt.
Felt everything, felt far too much – so much so that very soon, feeling itself became an addiction.
Yet, every time the seed of infatuation took root inside him, the feeling shattered the moment it met the emptiness in the eyes across from him. He remembers the relieved exhale of the girl he first laid with. Not a cry, nor even a moan, but a sharp exhale at her release. For a shadar-kai, that was all it ever was: relief. The release of an endlessly prolonged tension. A faint physical sensation. He also remembers that when he came, the sensation was so blindingly bright that he screamed, and snarled, and moaned – all at once. His mind, body, and soul were flooded with such a violent torrent of euphoria that, for a time, he believed this was how gods must feel. Then he laughed. Then the girl, emotionless and polite, merely asked him never to speak to her again. "You're truly sick, Illusen. Please, stay away from me," she said.
And then he wept.
Next time, he tried with a boy who made him shiver all over. He had rich eyes, a deep semblance of laughter, and strong arms. Illusen longed to be with him beyond training, beyond lessons, ritual dances, and chants. Wanted to share every secret, to learn his depths, and simply be near. Stay together afterward. Hold him. Spend the night with that face pressed against his own chest. It was then he understood: loving another shadar-kai was impossible. He realized they were all like this not because being different was forbidden, but because they truly could not feel. But he felt. And he had no idea what to do with it, what it was, or what to name it.
After that, he never tried to love again. And afterward came nothing but absolute darkness.
What was he like when he served Bhaal? Could he love then? He doesn't know. But he knows he can now. He can love the one he saw but once, spoke to for a few stolen seconds, and in whom he saw *everything*. Yet he doesn't have that person, and the fact that this affects him so deeply irks him enough that, out of habit, he wants to feel a heart stop beneath his fingers. Only out of habit, because the hissing screech of madness in his head has finally quieted. The unbearable itch deep within his very bones has dulled – the itch that sears veins, pouring pure agony into blood thick with urges and boiling fury. His head no longer splits with a pain so blinding he wants to claw a hole in his skull just to shake his brains out. For the first time since the day he woke upon a sun-drenched shore, he can breathe without the overwhelming urge to pulp someone's eyeballs between his fingers. Because Father no longer commands. Father is silent. Father is dead. Truly, now.
Father.
The word makes Illusen's whole body shake with soundless laughter, brittle as shifting gravel. He shuts his white eyes for the hundredth time that night, then pries them open again, as if startled from a nightmare. He was no true son of Bhaal – not the way Orin was his daughter. He learned that from Orin herself, before she dissolved into nothingness. He had expected that being his Chosen meant being a son – everyone expected it to be so – but he *was not*. All that remains to him of Father is a vile scar, cleaving his entire sternum in two. A scar, and the silence of emotions muted to numbness.
Mother.
He was no true son of the Raven Queen either, he learned that from her own lips, shortly after she reminded him of his name. His divine mother, who restored every memory of childhood and youth, of the Shadowfell and the service within it. Of herself – beautiful, incorporeal, cruelly kind. She had returned everything pertaining to her own realm, yet concealed all traces of Bhaal and that long, mysterious life on the Material Plane. A mother so insistent on reclaiming her child that she flooded his fractured mind with visions before he could even memorize the names of those he journeyed with to Baldur's Gate. A mother who was not truly his, even if her shadow coiled within the veins of every shadar-kai. Everyone in the Shadowfell knew he was her son, but he was not.
Progeny of two gods, yet in truth, merely an orphan.
Did he even need parents? Perhaps his mind and body would have remained untouched if neither of them had reached out with greedy claws, tearing away chunks of flesh and soul for themselves, devouring him, stuffing him with their own divine curse. As if, on his own, he's merely a shell. Empty. Insignificant. Worthless. A weapon in their hands, and without them – nothing.
"Orphan," Illusen's lips shape the single, soundless word, tasting its ruinous weight. His hand, colder even than his chest, comes to rest over the scar, fingertips tracing its jagged ridges, beneath which a wronged, unnatural heart barely beats.
"You are no orphan."
An uninvited voice forces Illusen to reluctantly part his eyelids. No light is needed to recognize the familiar shape in the darkness, no sight to know: it is his own shadow. There, in the corner of the shared tavern room, where his companions lie asleep in the dead of night, just beneath the high ceiling, he sees it. A black, formless clot – limbless, faceless, even eyeless. It writhes chaotically, yet seems to cling motionless to its spot, while around it, in fluid, ragged tatters, translucent tendrils of lesser shadows lick at its form. Illusen hates this shape it takes. It is as though the creature lacks a visage of its own, ready at any moment to plunge inside his body, merge with flesh, and become him.
"You have a mother. The woman who bore you," the shadow whispers. Its voice coming from nowhere and everywhere at once, rumbles within the elf's skull, in his mind, in the very fissures of consciousness.
An overwhelming urge to laugh scrapes at his throat like a nauseating spasm, but finally breaks free as a contemptuous snort.
"Just because Livet pushed me out of her filthy gash doesn't make her my mother."
"But she is your mother. Livet gave you life, looked after you. Even loved you, in the way she knew how."
Of course. Loved him so much she fled her own son in terror, only to return a stranger to him. Her long-forgotten face, warped by time, surfaces before his eyes, stirring a weak trace of true fury like bile in the stomach. A burning, white-hot hatred had always consumed him, but now that rage has frozen into sharp shards of ice, cutting him from within.
"She betrayed me! Gave me away to the Queen like I was some thing," Illusen snaps in a hiss, sitting up in bed. Eyes scan the room briefly, checking whether his whisper has woken anyone. The spacious chamber remains wrapped in silence and darkness, disturbed only by his ragged breathing and a sudden flash of spectral blue.
The blackening shadow has already elongated into a grotesque form, stretching its faceless head toward its master. It hangs from the ceiling lower and lower, consuming the space between them even as it reshapes itself. Folds and hollows ripple across its dense surface, coalescing into features around luminous blue eyes – until Illusen finds himself staring at his own spectral double. The same scars, the same wrinkles, the same curve of full lips, and the sharp angles of nose, cheekbones, and jaw. They could be more than twins, were it not for the fact that this counterfeit face is woven from translucent black shadow, and its eyes are merely clots of light in the slits of false eyelids. Their noses almost touch. Illusen's sharp exhale stirs the shadow's surface as if it were nothing more than a cloud or a coil of steam.
This likeness of his shadow companion the elf hates even more. It's always summoned only to reflect the worthlessness of his existence – an unnatural mirror showing pieces of himself he would rather never see again. Would rather forget.
"Oh, poor, wronged Illusen," the shadow breathes into his mind, mimicking his own voice and expression as vilely as possible. "Abandoned by all three parents, betrayed by the world itself. So unfairly rejected by everyone for whom you've never felt a thing. You're blind and ungrateful, Illusen. Even for the fact I filled your dying heart with a piece of myself."
"Fuck. Off," the shadar-kai spits through clenched teeth, leaning even even closer. "I hate that you did it. Hate feeling you there. Hate you."
It's true. He hates that Illusion has become an inseparable part of him in flesh as well, that he now owes Luce his own life far more than ever before. It's a lie, because Illusen also loves him. He always has. From the very first moment he laid eyes on him – he couldn't not love him.
For Luce isn't just a shadow, of course. Not just ordinary darkness, inert and will-less. Not even one of those shadows that prowl the Shadowfell, devouring mortal lives. He was the first who had been a friend to the shadar-kai since childhood. The first to speak to him in an empty room. The first to throw the ball back and make him not alone. He is a part of him. The first part the Raven Queen noticed.
Illusen's chest rises and falls far faster than the rhythm of his too-slow heart as he stares at the shadow and sees them both as children. For a moment, he mourns that things between them have become so complicated, so sharp and bitter. They weren't always like this. And that, almost certainly, is Bhaal's fault.
"I had no choice," Luce whispers almost sympathetically. "You were dying."
Illusen is hurled from childhood memories straight into recent ones. Oh yes, he was dying. His heart failed, rotting in his chest, pouring cursed decay into his veins and muscles. The pain was so unbearable he wanted to die. Yet Luce saved him.
The man wrenches himself from the agony of memory, and his gaze softens at once into apathy. He sinks limply onto the pillows, gladly embracing melancholy. Numbness. He no longer feels as brightly, and he has already come to terms with it.
So he tells himself.
"I still feel like I'm dying. Nothing's changed. I am a corpse." Even his whisper sounds corpselike. A voice from the depths of a sodden grave. Words of someone long dead.
He was never truly alive, was he? A partially mortal creature cannot be alive.
Illusion sheds the likeness of his master like a hound shaking water from its fur and once again hangs over the elf as a black cloud.
"This isn't about your parents at all, is it?" The shadow twists his spineless neck until his shapeless head juts almost upside down. He studies Illusen's emotionless face, suspicion flickering in spectral eyes, drinking it in.
"I don't want to talk abou–"
The shadar-kai doesn't get to finish before Luce forces his way inside him with an uninvited thrust of phantom body. It's a familiar sensation, yet no less shocking. The shadow fills every crevice, every crack and fissure, every tattered scrap of his soul. Even his heart – he fills that too, though he was already there. The man remembers the first time this happened, how ticklish it was, but now he just wants to vomit, for the bastard turns his entrails inside out, winding his guts around a fist, rattling bones as if wanting to swap each one's place, to shuffle them like a fucking deck of cards. A convulsive shudder shakes the mattress as Illusen thrashes beneath the suffocating pressure. Through a wave of nausea, he notices the fury clawing its way to the surface with renewed force. He strains for a breath that freezes halfway. It's torture, when Luce rummages through him like this. The shadow doesn't amplify his emotions, as he'd thought as a child, but adds his own. Right now, they don't align, and torment him. Usually, he barely notices the foreign presence in his body, but only when he's ready for it, when consent has been given. But for this barbaric invasion of his innards, it is impossible to be prepared. He wants his body back. Wants to stop feeling the intruder slithering through his limbs and licking his ribs with a cold tongue. Wants it to stop.
Illusion retreats, and a sudden rush of air fills Illusen's lungs with a wheezing whistle. The man shoots out of bed like an arrow and seizes the shadow by his spectral throat. Not so spectral in his hand, since Illusen is the only one for whom the shadow cannot become intangible at will. Anyone else's fingers would close around mere air, unless Luce himself desired the touch. But these fingers, oh no – they close around shadow-flesh and squeeze, craving to wrench a rasp from the filth.
"What the fuck did I tell you about barging in uninvited?!" Fury pitches his tone to a thunderous roar. Rage tears itself free, punching a tiny hole into a terrifyingly vast chasm in the coffin of his apathy.
Oh, this feels so good – so much better than the perpetual stagnation of his meager emotions. Boiling wrath in thick veins, the burning kiss of outrage. Spite. The acid mixture speeds his heart, forcing it to truly beat, tensing every muscle, kindling heat in the gut.
Alive – so damn alive.
Illusion only cackles, baring sharp teeth, not even trying to twist free from his grip. "Oh? Ohhh... so it isn't mommy-daddy issues after all, is it? This," the satisfied shadow licks a row of razor-edged teeth, even mimicking drool, "is your new obsession. How delicious."
From the other end of the room, a pillow flies at them along with Gale's irritated, sleepy voice, "Shut your mouths, both of you! Some people are actually trying to sleep here."
"Fuck off," Illusen and his shadow reply in unison. Neither hears Gale muttering curses, for they're focused on each other once again. On what they feel.
"Not an obsession," the elf spits hotly, his fingers clenching tighter, knuckles whitening, veins bulging on his tattooed forearm. "Fucking love."
The bastard's sinister grin doesn't even flinch – on the contrary, it widens. Luce feels pain, but not as humanoids do, not as a distinct sensation, but as a distant echo, mocking the real thing. He doesn't breathe, doesn't eat, doesn't shit, doesn't live. Cannot die. His existence is bound to the shadar-kai's life, that's why he saved him. That's why now he is unafraid. Can allow himself everything.
"How sweet. A saccharine lie. What could you possibly know of love?"
Cruel words scratch Illusen deep in the chest. It feels as if a long-healed scar has split open into a new festering wound. In all the world, in this moment, no one exists but the two of them. The living and the non-existent. The truthful and the liar. The victim and the monster.
But which of them is which?
"Definitely more than you." Breathing hard, the man shoves the shadow away, breaking the hold of his fingers. He is furious, and he adores it.
After weeks of silence, of maddeningly quiet anguish, he feels something so vivid it consumes him entirely. Everything inside thrums with impulsive urgency and panic, for he knows these precious moments won't last forever. Won't even last long. In a few hours, or even minutes, every last drop will drain out, like from a faulty tap, and he will be nothing but a thin, barely breathing shell once more. As good as dead.
He knows he must keep this, preserve it like a newborn child, hold it within himself. Find something that will awaken it again. And there is an absolute knowledge of what can bring salvation – only his love can become that wellspring of feeling.
The mind is empty of everything but this unseen goal; limbs are already moving. The bed creaks beneath him as he hurriedly finds and pulls on leather breeches, not even bothering to tie the laces properly. The cloth of a dirty shirt soaks through with cold sweat, clinging to his back and chest; the collar sits askew, further tangling the too-long strands of hair. Illusen doesn't reach for the cloak – it was a gift from Sceleritas, a useful trinket there's no wish to touch. He wants nothing that isn't truly his, so stepping barefoot across the smooth floor, he snatches up only his own, half-empty bag. Stumbling, he steps into the heavy boots and, on the move, coils his only weapon around himself – a spiked chain, stained with dried blood. It settles in heavy loops around his waist and hips, reminding the shadar-kai what he's truly capable of, and who he truly is.
A deadly dancer in shadows.
A mindless killer and a jester.
A traitor.
The clank of metal through the silence screams louder than heavy, rapid steps: he's fleeing. From everything that was ever kind to him. Shamefully running from the people he's grown to love. His conscience stretches only enough to force a falter at the threshold. A final glance into the darkness reveals only his own frantic breaths and Illusion, darting from one cluster of shadows to the next. The whole world doesn't exist – only what he craves most.
Good.
Dim light in the tavern corridor barely tethers him to the here and now. A door left ajar further ahead brings a fraction of sobriety. A memory of those behind it. His dearest friends. The ones who have held him together, accepted and loved him. Isn't that what he always wanted? Illusen shakes his head violently, but his steps now fall far softer as he creeps toward that other room. Muffled sounds and voices seep through the gap, halting his stride. If they notice him, escape will be impossible.
He expects to hear them fucking – it is what he would have done the moment victory was won, if he had that one person. But when he edges closer, he hears weeping. And when he peers through the thinnest crack – sees those tears.
Yara, the leader of their forced little band, a ranger with a heart of gold, who pulled the tadpoles from their heads, accepted and shielded him, who was his friend and sister – weeps like a child. No, this human woman who forgave him everything is bleeding a deep grief that borders on the maternal.
She was the first he saw on the nautiloid. The first to laugh at his foul jokes. She never judged him for the blood-hunger, seeing him as something more than just his urges. She defended him when he butchered Alfira and left her corpse amidst the camp – a mutilated heap like an animal carcass. Defended him to the others with such ferocity that he almost fell in love. In the end, though, things settled as they should, and the two of them wound up bound by a deep-rooted friendship that ran through their very bones. She was his first in this – in care and trust. In closeness without sex. In all that is human.
That woman never betrayed him. Not even when she should have.
The elf holds his breath, clenching his fists, thinking how her heart is nothing like cold, precious metal; it is alive, kind, and unbearably incomprehensible to him. He sees death as a snuffed candle, while she sees it as a soul lost forever. She believes she failed, having lost so many people under her leadership, but in truth… He burns to burst into the room and tell her how proud he is of her. In name, Illusen was a leader too, but next to her he's done fuck-all. He ought to be ashamed for it. He could have helped her save those people. Instead, he is the one who let her down.
The shadar-kai clenches his jaw and shifts his gaze to Astarion. The burned, yet calm, elf quietly strokes her hair. Seeing them like this, the two of them – it hurts, and this is the moment he hesitates for the first time, truly feeling like a traitor and a runaway. They'll both hate him if he just leaves. Well, maybe Astarion will hate him less and not for very long, but she… They have each other, Illusen convinces himself, I am not needed.
But does he need them?
They will be better off without him. He ought to have his own life – they already have theirs. They aren't his family, even if this is the first true family he's ever had. Bards will write a heap of mawkish ballads about Yara, about her heroism and humanity, and leave him out. That's how it should be. She will be happy in her hard-earned glory and love, and he can only find that thing beside the one who steals into his meditations every night. Only this way… Only this way… – his heart hammers wildly.
He cannot stay. None of the three of them deserves this curse.
"I'm sorry," Illusen mouths, and it feels as though his heart's been dropped into a thorn shrub. Yet he's still feeling, and that fuels his resolve.
The rest of the corridor and the stairs, the man crosses soundlessly and fast. Not looking back. The skin upon his nape prickles as if from a stare, but he knows – it's only Luce. And in a moment, he's already forgotten everything – the hesitation and the phantom of regret. For Illusen has long had neither true conscience nor long memory. The noise and laughter of lingering drunks storm his ears, his nostrils flood with the rancid stench of ale, tobacco, and sweaty, filthy bodies. Even with the city in ruins, strewn with the decay of recently living flesh, they will still drink and bellow. Celebrate their own lives over the death of their loved ones. Not that he judges them.
Elbowing through the crowd by the bar, the shadar-kai spots familiar faces. He'd thought everyone was already asleep, but Jaheira and Shadowheart are sharing a bottle of wine by the counter, both faces stained with fatigue and pain. Their whole company ought to be rejoicing tonight. Drinking that damn wine differently: spilling laughter, roaring songs and jests, loving their lives. Being heroes. Instead, they all look as if they've met their own end with no new beginning. It's especially plain on Jaheira – the half-elf has met such ends more than once.
The older woman's gaze skims his face, and the man flawlessly dons what he believes to be a charming smile.
"Where in the hells are you off to?" The cleric pushes her hip off the high stool she was leaning on and arches a brow.
He knows he'll lie, and they will not believe him. Lies anyway.
"Back in a few hours."
"Illusen," Shadowheart's delicate hand on his forearm halts his stride, and the flare of concern in her eyes nearly makes him feel an even greater wretch than he did at the door upstairs. "Hearing voices again? Or is the Queen calling?"
By the frozen sorrow…
He'll miss her. Will regret for an age never having dragged her into bed, and will grieve like hells, remembering her once a year. The troubled gaze of those eyes pierces demandingly into his profile, forcing him to freeze. The smile upon his dark lips twitches but doesn't vanish. The simmer of fresh emotions, still seething inside him, tugs at fine threads, turning his body into a willing puppet. Emotion – his eternal engine – and he obeys them. In one sharp motion, he pulls her by the arm, draws her body close, and presses dry lips to her tightly shut mouth. This not-the-first kiss of theirs is meant to be a charming distraction, but it's spoiled by the bitter tang of deceit. He holds her arm another moment, then pulls back from her mouth.
Repeats, "Back in a few hours."
And then he walks away, leaving them behind as well.
Unsilenced voices lash at his back like a whip.
"He's not coming back, is he?"
"Of course not," Jaheira lets out a sharp, bitter scoff, incinerating the man with one last look.
The fey-elf rolls his shoulders proudly, smothering the feeble urge to turn around. To turn around and stay. To turn around and finally belong among them. Or just to drink that wine he tasted on the former Sharran's lips. They have every right to hate him, but he won't hate himself for simply wanting to live. They won't make him.
The heavy wooden door shuts, severing him from the clamor. Just as decisively, he severs his own mind from everything left behind – the torn wound weeps blood, and over still-warm ash invisibly stains the cobblestones. The elf pays no mind to the tender pain of this self-maiming, though he knows that cauterizing the torn edges of his soul will only be possible once he reaches that person.
The likelihood that by then he'll have bled out, dying an apathetic death while remaining alive, isn't zero.
Illusen snorts, feeling the heady adrenaline paint a fresh smile onto his face.
The city air is thick and stifling, still tinged by the nearby fire the locals cannot manage to extinguish. Though by now the blaze looks more like a slow smolder, as if it grew too lazy to burn over the course of the day. Its yawn releases a column of sparks, scattering halfway into the sky's darkness. The city, of course, isn't a complete ruin, but neither is it what he saw when he first stepped through the gate many weeks ago. Not truly the first time, of course, but that was the only time left in his battered memory. This street has already been cleared, but he knows that the further his path leads, the more scattered coffins, dead bodies, and gravediggers he'll meet. His friends will also have plenty of work in the city, and the man almost feels guilty for fleeing like this. Almost.
Taking wide strides through the streets, he notices Luce's presence once again breaching the barrier of his personal boundaries. But this time, his shadow merely clings to his boots and clothes like a dark shroud, not daring to break into flesh.
"Stay out of my sight until I call for you," the shadar-kai hisses into the night, and hears the vile little laugh of the wretched thing, reverberating like an echo between the walls of tall buildings.
Illusion has things to occupy himself with. Baldur's Gate breathes sorrow and pain that the shadow can devour, diving between the ribs of mortals and filling the void in their chests with viscous nausea. Illusen doesn't mind. In truth, he doesn't give a shit. For his cravings already turn to pale skin beneath his fingers, a hoarse, trembling voice, and long, ashen hair. His mouth waters at the thought of all the things he wants to do to that person's body. To their soul.
But then, in a fit of morbid revelation, he recalls that his beloved is actually long dead.
Undead, to be precise. A vampire.
As if that changes a single thing.
He still wants to watch him as he falls asleep and wakes, to hold him in the unyielding lock of his arms every free moment. In the cage of his broad ribs, there will be no heartbeat, and no blood will course through veins. His viscera stilled more than a century ago. So what? He'll still leave marks from his teeth on the pale skin of those thighs and stomach, bruises from his fingers, and rope burns on calves and wrists. He'll still lick sweat from the hollow of his back – and if dead skin cannot sweat, Illusen will kindle a heat so fierce that moisture will bead upon that marble flesh, like condensation on a chilled glass. And then he'll paint that body himself with crimson smears of someone else's blood.
Into the dust of the wounded streets weaves a quiet, maniacal laugh, as with no small pleasure the shadar-kai realizes that this blood will most certainly be his own.
