Chapter Text
Heat prickled across his skin, sharp and unfamiliar, like a thousand needles stitching him back into the world. For a few fragile seconds, he let himself feel it. The warmth. The daylight.
The sky was a blue so deep it felt like falling. His chest ached, as if he’d been holding his breath for centuries and only now remembered how to exhale.
Damp clung to his cheeks. Tears? What was more impossible? That he stood beneath the open sky, whole and unburnt? Or that his body still remembered how to cry? Both were miracles, but miracles didn’t exist. Not for him.
It had to be a trick. An illusion. An exquisite, cruel mirage. And any second now, Cazador would tear it away.
You pathetic, disgusting thing, wallowing in weakness. This is why you’re nothing, and will always be nothing.
His master’s voice slithered through his mind, more real than the heat on his skin. Watching, waiting. Ready to rip the sky open and drag him back to the dark.
Despair struck like a blade to the ribs. Shocking, even though he knew pain intimately. Its weight, its shape. Every shade of agony ever carved into a body. He knew how joints shattered, how screams died in your throat long before you ran out of bones to break. He knew what it meant to watch people die because of him, while he sat or stood or knelt, begging.
No, please no. I’ll do anything. Please—let them go. Don’t make me do this again. I won’t.
(He would. He had.)
I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.
His master had a thousand ways to break a body, but they always started with blood. Afterward, their faces blurred. They became background noise in the blue-grey dark that had been his world since Cazador Szarr stole the sun from him.
Guilt settled deep. Shame. Hunger. Until his bones ached with it. Until his master’s voice buzzed beneath his skin, driving him back out into the world to find a new face—another beautiful soul. Oh yes, he knew pain better than anyone. It was the rhythm by which he measured time—each second, each minute, each day.
But this? This moment of softness—of warmth—he didn’t know. It made his throat close, his hands shake. It was a dream wrapped in a nightmare wrapped in a dream. A looping song of wanting and not trusting.
Suddenly, everything was too bright, too hot, too vast. He stumbled away, scrambling into the shade, but it wasn’t enough. Eyes squeezed shut, he counted backward, trying to pull the blue-grey veil back over his mind.
The seconds stretched, each one an eternity.
When he finally opened his eyes, there was only the crackle of fire. The wind whispering through the trees. No laughter. No orders. No Cazador.
Ash and dust coated his tunic, clogging his nose. His clothes—scorched, stained with brown muck. His master would never have allowed such mundane filth into his palace.
He held himself unnaturally still, waiting. A knot in his chest started to uncoil. Cazador would have spoken by now. But there was nothing. Just him. The only voice in his head was his own.
Cazador wasn’t here.
Wherever here was, it wasn’t Baldur’s Gate.
Then—
Memory crashed over him like a cresting wave. The ship. The worm. The sky, screaming. The fall.
Shit.
The worm.
His hand trembled as he pressed his fingers to his temple. Every story he’d heard about these parasites ended the same way—tentacles bursting through skulls, minds twisted into something alien. But none of them had ever mentioned anything about letting vampire spawn walk in the sun. How long before it changed him? Hours? Days?
Dizziness gripped him. He swore he could feel it—the worm, shifting. Growing. In his mind’s eye, it burst through his skin, cracked his jaws, punctured his eyes. He itched where he imagined his face remade into one with too many tentacles and not enough nose.
He scowled, knowing it was petty and that he had bigger problems. But… he hadn’t seen his face in two hundred years. To change, to become something else, without even knowing what he looked like now—
To gain the sun and lose his mind.
It was just so goddamn unfair, it had to be real.
“Fuck,” he whispered, and the sound of his own voice in daylight was strange enough to make him laugh.