#xzeira

[shadowy-dumbo-octopus]

Xzar: I don't trust birds. Horrid little creatures with their hollow bones. What are they hiding in there?

Neira: love :)

Neira: and also more bones.

[shadowy-dumbo-octopus]

A BG1 ficlet because I missed my spooky bird daughter

Although Gorion had insisted, they did not go to Friendly Arm. Neira did not trust whomever he had appointed as her new overseers. No, she had spent years aching to break out of the suffocating walls of Candlekeep and, now that she was finally free, she had no plans of associating herself with any friend of Gorion's.

She didn't know what to make of Xzar and Montaron yet - she understood people about as well as penguins understood sandstorms and aerodynamics - and the only guarantee she had that Monty wouldn't stab them in their sleep was that they didn't have anything worth robbing as far as he knew, but so far both of them have made Imoen laugh and Xzar was apparently a necromancer (she always wanted to meet one), so they already appeared ten times better than whoever Kalid and the other one were. Neira wasn't good with names.

They made camp a little off the Lion's Trail, needing to prepare for the road ahead and allow Imoen, who was still recovering from a wolf bite to the leg, to rest. The beast had bitten deep, all the way to the bone. Neira could still see the bits of white peeking through all the meat and blood. If it hadn't been her best friend, she would've liked to take the bone all for herself - she didn't have many human bones just yet...

Which was precisely why she was doing what she was currently doing. Namely, sneaking into Xzar's tent.

The necromancer was asleep, all his intensity muted so that he looked almost peaceful in rest. He was younger than his tattoos made him look at first, too, and Neira realised with some surprise that he was about her age.

She reached out to gently shake him awake but immediately remembered how their first attempt at a handshake had gone. No, no touching.

"Psst, Xzar," she hissed. "Wake up."

He didn't even stir, lying as stiffly as a corpse. He even looked like one, lying on his back with his hands folded over his chest in the same way the monks usually prepared bodies for burial. That, combined with his paleness and the way his chest seemed to barely rise when he breathed, would have unsettled anyone else, but Neira merely nodded with a whispered "fair enough" and resumed her efforts to wake the necromancer.

"Come on."

"Wake up, fleshbag."

"I dont want to leave Imoen alone for long."

"Monty seems like a cool guy, but I don't know how many knives he carries on him."

"Sixteen," came the reply, and Xzar's eyes snapped open, their green so bright and vivid that they seemed to glow in the darkness. Neira found herself unable to look away, transfixed by their colour. They were beautiful, she thought, and she seldom thought things to be beautiful. "Why do you disturb my rest? If you wish to kill me, be a nice shadow and wait until morning."

Because I want to pluck out your eyes and put them in a jar so I could stare at them for hours without making it weird. "Uh, it's me, Blackbird. I need you to do something for me."

He yawned, stretching with a crack of joints, which he had a lot of judging by the sounds. "At this hour? What nefarious deeds haunt your mind, dear Neira?"

"Blackbird," she corrected him reflexively, "and you know how some stranger in spiked armour killed the man I was travelling with?"

"I believe that you've mentioned that, yes."

"His body is still there."

Xzar straightened up, suddenly interested. He was so bloody tall that the top of his head brushed against the tent's ceiling. Neira got a sudden and almost irresistible need to extract and examine his skeleton.

Later, though. She needed him alive enough to cast, for the time being.

"I would assume that it would still be there, yes," he scratched his head, and a piece of tiny animal vertebra fell out. Looked like a mouse's, though in the dark it was difficult to tell. "Unless gibberlings or some other rabbits have already picked it clean and sucked the marrow from the bones. What does that have to do with me, pray tell?"

The gems in Neira's necklace flashed an angry red at the thought of some vermin destroying Gorion's bones. "You know Larloch's Minor Drain, right?"

Xzar huffed indignantly. "Of course I do! Who do you take me for, you tar-soaked chicken?"

She held up her hands in mock surrender, unable to resist a smile at the rather creative insult. It was one of the nicest she has received from her peers over the years. Oh, that rhymed.

"Just making sure," she soothed before he made a fuss and woke everyone up. "Look, Gorion may be dead but most of his bones should still be intact, maybe except for some ribs. I don't think that he received any head injuries, so his skull should definitely be okay. Larloch's Minor Drain rots away the target's body tissue as it drains their life force and I need-"

"You want me to clean your foster father's corpse and gain access to his bones." Those green, green eyes drilled into her very core. "Why would you want that, I wonder? Some twisted memento mori? A burial practice? Do you wish for him to watch over you even in death?"

She shook her head, shuddering at the mere thought of having to put up with more of Gorion's suffocating care.

"Nope, nope and nope," she replied. "And he wasn't my father, but a caretaker. I just want his bones, especially the skull, because I don't have a whole set from a human. Granted," she rubbed the back of her neck, "he was pretty old so they wouldn't be top quality, but beggars can't be choosers, eh?"

Xzar blinked at her rather owlishly. He didn't seem to have expected such an answer.

"You collect bones?" he asked eventually.

She nodded, not reaching for the bag of holding tied to her belt, knowing that it would give it away. "Ever since I was a child."

"May I see?"

"No."

He raised his eyebrows, an amused smirk playing on his lips. "Interesting, very interesting indeed. I agree, but only if I get to keep the broken ones."

She frowned. "What the hells do you want them for?" She didn't like damaged bones, preferring perfect specimens and ever wary of cracks and fractures, though the ones that were broken once but healed fascinated her.

"Spell components."

That lit up her curiosity, a mix of gold and orange, like fire or Perdita's eyes before her, ah, accident. Neira still had the left one somewhere, carefully preserved. She was still bitter that the right one didn't survive extraction.

"What spells?"

"Why would I tell you?"

"Can you show me?"

"No."

She shrugged. "Fair. Shall we go?"

He grinned. "At once."

[shadowy-dumbo-octopus]

Tfw you were hurt by some bandits with a deathwish so you ignore the party's healer and run directly to your goth demigod gf so that you can watch her make it rain with their guts.

Xzar/Neira continues to be one of my favourite things about my evil Baldur's Gate AU. I should revisit them sometime.

[shadowy-dumbo-octopus]

Neira: Goth gf this, goth gf that, where were you when I was getting bullied in middle school?

Xzar: also getting bullied in middle school.

[shadowy-dumbo-octopus]

20 years.

3 games.

A sweet tragic avariel mage/cleric, a complex drow cleric, a mature traumatised half elf druid, a frankly boring cleric dude, a far more interesting orc paladin. A hunky druid, a nerdy wizard, a badass gith, an amnesiac priestess, a charming folk hero fighter, a buff sweetheart tiefling, and a vampire concocted in a lab to make everyone fall in love with him immediately,

And yet I'm here STILL FUCKING INSANE about my horrible bird daughter Charname/Bhaalspawn and, out of ALL THE CHARACTERS across ALL 3 BALDUR'S GATE GAMES,

Fucking

XZAR.

[shadowy-dumbo-octopus]

YOUR BONES BY OF MONSTERS AND MEN IS A NEIRA/XZAR SONG FOR SO MANY REASONS OH MY GOD