Saturday/Sunday Snippets WIPits…Whatever
I don’t have a non linear relationship with time, I swear….My weekend was just a bit full! I peaked into a con to see Tim Downie on Saturday, and Sunday is DnD day…so I am late. Apologies.
Thank you for the tags @optimisticgrey @gortashsrighthand @missfortunetherogue @archduchessgortash
I play with a lot of extra content mods, and sometimes they interact with each other in weird ways. In particular, two “extra fight and boss” type mods dumped an extra fight with 40 plus enemies in the mountain pass in the way to the Shadow Cursed lands. (It’s a great fight with a Gith Patrol fighting an Absolute contingent and for a moment you fight with the Gith..very fun..any way)
So this passage was born of Lily and Astarion, fighting alone, when I was in no way prepared. It was also the first time I heard Astarion’s scream when he dies of radiant damage (which is horrific. Neil did such an incredible job)
From Song of the Forgotten Star ~
Lily sprinted toward the sound. The cry cut through the battlefield. She leapt over bodies still smoldering from spells and arrows of fire. “Astarion!” she screamed, unable to see clearly through the haze of blood and ash.
The air tasted of iron and burned pitch. Somewhere to her left, something collapsed in a shower of sparks. The ground beneath her boots was slick, churned to mud and gore by the struggle. She barely felt it. Her pulse roared in her ears. Every shape in the smoke looked wrong. Every fallen body threatened, for one monstrous instant, to be his.
Then she saw his bloodied curls and his body bent and silent on the ground.
“No, no, no, no, no….” She fell to her knees, cradling his head in her lap.
She wiped blood and soot from his face with trembling fingers, smearing more than she cleared. She screamed for help—once, twice, a third time, until her throat burned raw—but the battlefield swallowed the sound. Gale was gone with Lae’zel and Shadowheart, scouting ahead toward the crèche. There had been no time to regroup when the Absolute’s scouting party descended on them out of the trees.
The paladin had come through the smoke like judgment itself—helm bright with reflected fire, blade humming with divine wrath. Lily had seen the strike a heartbeat too late. Astarion had turned to meet it, quick as hunger, but not quick enough. Radiance tore through him with a sickening crack, and he had gone down so suddenly it seemed impossible.
Now he lay in her lap, limp and frighteningly still, his pale curls clotted dark with blood at the temples. His lashes made white crescents against skin gone grey beneath the soot. There was too much blood. Gods, too much. On his throat, across his chest, soaking into the black of his doublet where the smite had bitten deepest.
Lily had killed the paladin for it. She knew she had. She had driven Lachlinnë through the join beneath his gorget with both hands and all the force in her body. Her moonblade had sung as it pierced him, bright and merciless. She had burned the necromancer where he stood and cut down the last ghoul before it could touch her.
Lily bent lower, pressing her brow to his for one desperate instant. He was cold. Not corpse-cold, not yet, but the chill of blood loss had already begun to claim him.
“No,” she whispered again, quieter now, fiercer. “I have not come this far for you to leave me in a ditch because some sanctimonious bastard with a glowing sword got lucky.”
She pulled the scroll from her pouch. How long did she have? Was it three minutes? In that brief, desperate moment, she wished she had listened when her mother entreated her to learn battlefield healing spells.
She read the scroll silently first, forcing herself to focus on the components. A diamond? Who carries diamonds into battle?
Wait… that necklace in the bag of holding.
She seized Lachlinnë by the hilt and smashed the stones out of their setting. Holding them in her hand, she carefully recited the incantation on the scroll.
The words nearly failed her the first time.
Not because she did not know how to read them. Lily’s voice had never once faltered over a spell for want of intellect. But this was not a lesson at a polished table in Evereska, nor a patient exercise beneath her mother’s watchful eye. This was blood in the dirt. Smoke in her lungs. Astarion’s head in her lap and the terrible stillness of him.
Her fingers were slick as she gathered the shattered diamonds into her palm. Tiny, brilliant fragments bit into her skin. She did not care. She bent over the scroll, forcing herself to focus on each sigil, each cadence, each precise inflection the magic demanded.
“Come on,” she whispered, whether to herself or to the Weave she did not know. “Come on.”
The incantation rose from her in a voice gone raw from screaming. The diamonds flared in her hand—cold white at first, then silver-bright, like starlight caught and ground to dust. Power moved through the words, ancient and exacting. Not healing, not truly, more a command laid against the threshold.
Lachlinnë, still bloodied and slung across her back, gave a sudden clear hum, radiating an argent glow.
Lily pressed the diamonds to the wound.
Light burst between her fingers.
It ran through the torn black fabric, through scorched flesh, through the awful place where divine radiance had nearly severed soul from body. The brilliance did not soothe. It reached into the dark where Astarion had begun to slip and seized him with all the tenderness of a hand refusing to let go.
For one heartbeat there was nothing else in the world. Not the smoke. Not the dead. Not the blood soaking through her cloak. Only his face.
Then Astarion dragged in a breath.
It was sharp and ragged and painful as breaking water after drowning, but it was breath. Color did not return to him all at once, but the grey cast of death loosened its grip. His chest rose again, shallow and uneven. The wound beneath her hand ceased its terrible pouring and began, little by little, to knit.
Lily let out a sound that was half sob, half laugh, wholly undignified.
“Oh, thank the gods,” she choked. Then, because gratitude was not nearly enough for what she felt, she bent over him and cupped his face in both hands. “Astarion. Astarion, look at me.”
For a dreadful instant she thought that was all it would be—then his mouth twitched faintly, as if even dragged back from the brink he could not resist.
“Well,” he murmured, voice a torn whisper, “you look terrible.”
Lily laughed outright then, tears spilling hot over cheeks already streaked with soot and blood. “You vicious, impossible bastard.”
“Well,” he breathed, eyes still closed. “I’ve been called sweeter things.”
His voice was weak. So weak. He tried to chuckle, and choked instead.
She bowed over him, shoulders shaking once with the force of her relief. One trembling hand slid into his hair, pushing blood-matted curls back from his brow. “I thought—” she began, and could not finish.
Astarion’s eyes opened at last, only a sliver. Ruby glinted through pale lashes. He looked dazed, pained, and very far from steady, but unmistakably alive. His gaze found her face as though it had to travel a great distance to get there.
“Shhh,” he said. He raised a hand to her cheek.
Lily gave a watery, incredulous sound. “I just dragged you back from death.”
“And you did it beautifully,” he whispered. “Still. Very smudged.”
Despite herself, she huffed a laugh and wiped at her face with the back of one wrist, only managing to smear the soot further. “There. Better?”
“Much worse.” His mouth curved faintly, then tightened with pain. “Tragic, really.”
Her hand went at once to his shoulder. “Don’t move.”
“Wasn’t planning to.” He swallowed, eyes narrowing as memory returned in fragments. “Paladin?”
Lily should have answered lightly — should have let him steer them back toward the familiar safety of banter.
Instead she touched his cheek with bloodstained fingertips and said, very quietly, “You scared me.”
That arrested him more thoroughly than the pain had.
Astarion went still beneath her hand. The jest faded from his face, leaving something rarer in its place—something undefended, almost boyishly startled. He looked up at her as though the words had landed somewhere in him he did not know how to conceal.
“Oh,” he said. It was the softest sound she had ever heard him make.
His gaze drifted past her shoulder to the carnage around them, then back to her face. “No one’s ever cared before.”
She raised a brow, and he continued, “that I died.”
The wind shifted. Smoke trailed past in thin black ribbons. Somewhere behind the trees a carrion bird cried out. Sunlight broke through the haze in one fierce beam and struck the diamonds still scattered in the blood beside them, making them glitter like dropped stars.
Lily became abruptly aware that she was kneeling in gore, clutching him to her as though the world had ended. Her heart was still hammering. Her throat still burned. Lachlinnë’s glow dimmed.
She should move. Find water. Potions. Make camp. Signal for Gale. Do any one of the sensible things survival required.
Instead she bent and pressed her forehead to his.
Astarion inhaled sharply, not from pain this time.
You are not allowed,” she whispered, “to do that to me again.”
His eyes closed. For once he did not turn the moment aside. “Darling,” he murmured, “I’ll do my best to remain merely undead.”
Lily let out a wet, helpless laugh against his skin. “I am serious.”
“I know.” One of his hands twitched upward, weakly, until his fingers caught in the fabric at her sleeve. “And, thank you, for taking such violent exception to my demise.”
She drew back just enough to look at him, and there it was again: that unbearable crookedness at the corner of his mouth, that insistence on wit even while death still lingered on him like a shadow. “There are swifter remedies available to me, if you are feeling generous. Just a taste…”
Lily rolled her eyes fondly. “Well, I suppose you’re in no state to go chasing bears.” She pulled him to his feet. “Let’s get back to camp and clean up.”
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