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The Lay of Larethian
The Szarr Palace
“Here Corellon is not shown as a beautiful golden haired elven God, but as a dark haired elven Goddess, the body mirrored and contorted with a delicious grace and embedded upon maroon muslin.”
Astarion
“Remarkable, is it not, boy?” Cazador purrs indulgently with the smug satisfaction as she runs her hand over the curve of her swollen belly. Astarion flinches, not at the words, but at the tiny, traitorous nod of his own head. He wants to snarl, spit out in vitriol, but the curse of his slavery chokes them in his throat. For one thing, Astarion does not understand why Cazador wants yet more children. For she has birthed so very many. Five-score, in less than a century. A duty, Mistress calls it. Sometimes, he wonders why, before he realises spitefully that he does not care.
“Ungracious little whelp,” she chides. She shifts on the bed awkwardly with the weight of her pregnant stomach. “This is not about your petty wants. There is no greater duty, no higher honour, than to further the Szarr line. Do you not remember where you came from? What you were? If your Grandmaster were still alive, you would still be rotting beneath this palace with your other siblings. Instead I grant you grace, allow you to be at my side, sire my children. Come,” she barks impatiently, “Attend me.”
It is true, he supposes. Astarion had spent so very long crammed into Grandmaster’s cells alongside so many other siblings, when Cazador had come to him, slumped, empty and rotted against the wall with the jangling of keys, it had been the most disorientingly wonderful moment of his life.
So Astarion does. Settles beside her on the bed, runs a brush through her hair, cropped awkwardly just along the line of his where her collar would sit, just the same as always. Cazador sighs as the soft bristles massage her skull.
“Mistress?” he starts.
There’s a pause. Cazador seems to be weighing whether to ridicule his question, or humour him, but today, Astarion is in luck.
“What is it, boy?”
Astarion chooses his words carefully, not that his delivery is likely to impact whatever unpredictable outcome the question might yield.
“Why do you wear your hair like this?”
Cazador frowns. For a moment he wonders whether she will lash out, but she doesn’t.
“This is the optimum length. It has balance like this.” Astarion raises his eyebrows, but knows better than to try his luck. Instead, he lets Cazador lower himself into his linens, letting her breasts spill out onto the bed. Knows the drill. Lowers his mouth to the soft rise of flesh, blue veins laced like webs under the skin.
“Very good, my child,” she sighs as he closes his mouth around the bud of her nipple. “We must ensure our supply is ready for our babe. Must we not?”
Astarion nods his head slightly, wobbling the soft flesh of her breast with his chin as her milk begins to flow in earnest. Yes, Mistress.
Vellioth
eighty-two years and one-hundred children earlier
There are so many.
As Vellioth paces languidly down the row of pikes forming a path through the ballroom of the Szarr palace, he watches the limp entourage of freshly-made corpses drip pretty pools of crimson onto the floor.
Dozens upon dozens. Servants. Spawn. The remnants of Mistresses’ bloated household. This woman, with her long locks of strange auburn hair, was Mistresses’ maid. Vellioth had not quite perfected her impalement, the wicked point driven inelegantly through her eye socket. This one is Ravexis Szarr. Some cousin, once removed, adopted into the family at three, now but five, and forever young. Caldria Szarr, Mistresses’ born daughter, who was granted the gift. Amanvyr Szarr, a refugee from the troubles in Tethyr. Blithera Szarr, an elven beauty from Baldur’s Gate. Vellioth had enjoyed her corpse very much. Szarr, Szarr, Szarr. Dead, dead, dead.
All but one.
How she weeps. How her frail frame cowers, hopeless and deliciously vulnerable, how heavy the chains weighing her to the floor by her ankles and wrists. Vellioth slides his hand between his own legs as he walks, adjusting the angry erection in his breeches. As he approaches the place where his Mistress still lies, naked and mutilated, his seed still spilling from the swollen mound between her legs, the girl whimpers.
Gods bear witness, raping Mistresses’ freshly-made corpse had been one of the greatest joys of his existence. The greatest of them all, perhaps. She had been so pliant, too. Bent just the way he liked. He had thought a cadaver would go stiff, but it seems that vampires do not change quite as much as they pass from undeath to death.
They do look so alike. Don’t they? Donnela Szarr and her favoured son. That is what she had called herself, anyway. A son. A lie.
Donnela had been so pleased when she arrived, fresh from the horrors that had driven her from her home, some islands so far to the East that the journey alone had taken the best part of a year. And he had been pleased, too. More pleased, still, when she insisted she grow out that unsightly short hair. Cazador had objected, made some silly little protest about that not being him, though little good it did her. Feasting his eyes upon her had made him more determined than ever to turn his Mistress into a carcass and make her girl his.
And Vellioth is not a slave any more.
No.
Vellioth of House Szarr is a vampire lord.
Now, he will build his own legacy. His own house. Make his own army of precious Szarr children.
He crouches down, bares his fangs to the last of the Szarrs in Baldur’s Gate in a splitting grin.
“Sweet child,” he hisses as he caresses the bones of her cheek with the tip of his thumb. “My most precious”. You have always wanted the gift, have you not?” Cazador raises her head bitterly, looking at him through bloodshot, fear-stricken eyes as his words soak into his skin. “Have you not hidden under your aunt’s skirts, licking between her legs in the hope of becoming an heir to the Szarr Palace?” Vellioth does not give her time to speak before he answers in her place. “Of course you have. Sweet girl. And now you should have your desire. For we must further our dynasty, must we not? I have spared you, my delight, my very first daughter. And tonight, you shall be reborn.”
Cazador
Cazador Szarr wakes up dead.
Being dead, it turns out, is agony. It feels as though an ungodly furnace has been lit within his bowels, speeding the putrid rotting of his flesh which hangs a little looser from his body.
But there’s something else. A rhythm. A metronomic beat. A stretch in his calves, his inner thighs; a hot burn in that uneasy place between his legs.
When he understands, his mouth floods hot with bitter saliva. Not because he doesn’t want him. Gods, he has never wanted anyone more. But because he doesn’t want this, in that place he cannot bear, cannot touch, cannot bear to have touched. He screws up his eyes, trying to let the quiet torture of his fresh mortification drown the sensation from his loins, the bitter thoughts from his head.
“My daughter,” he coos, brimming with quiet triumph, leaning over his body and kissing him from cheek to chin as Cazador’s stomach curdles quietly inside him. “It hurts. Yes. But that isn’t what is troubling you.” His grip tightens, just slightly. “You feel it, don’t you? How good this is. And I feel how much you want it.”
Does it? Does it feel good?
He buries the thought. Clings to the pain, instead.
“You can pretend otherwise, if you want to. It matters not. For you will further our line.”
Cazador shakes his head. Opens his eyes. Revulsed though he is, he cannot resist examining his predicament. His mind goes blank and rotten as he surveys the contents of his field of vision. This cold thing he is chained onto is a gurney, back tilted downwards slightly towards the floor, hips raised in line with Vellioth’s thrusts. The deep ache in his thighs, his calves, suddenly make sense. Yanked apart with sharply-angled stirrups, his thighs are splayed wide, forced back until his knees nearly bracket his ears, calves stretched long. In this obscene display, there is no defence. The exposed plane of his hips exposes his mound, Vellioth punching so deep that a spear of fire lances up his spine from his cervix with every cruel thrust.
It is not that he did not know what Vellioth was. Hells, he had watched, jaw-slacked and horrified as he had ripped open Auntie’s chest and smashed her slackened pelvis until it snapped clean in two.
At last, he forces his eyes to focus on him. When he does, it smacks him low and hard. The room seems to draw itself around him, narrowing to the gleam of his eyes framed by those long, silver locks.
Cazador's eyes twinge with heat as his salty waters rise inside them. Just like the miserably familiar rise of the wetness inside him, that he seems powerless to stop; that cruel sensation that reminds him what he is. What he has. What he doesn’t. The dead come too, so many faces, consigned to the grave for the final time. Closes his eyes once more, rolling his hips like a helpless whore, and sinks into the hurt of himself. The one place left inside him that still feels like his own.
x x x
It seems vampires do trance, after all. Perhaps it is because he is fresh-made and exhausted.
Every time Cazador trances, Vellioth rapes him in his dreams.
He moans as Vellioth presses himself into him from behind, circling the tight muscle hiding in the dip between his cheeks with the heavy weight of his head before he inches himself inside. “My precious boy,” murmurs Vellioth, and gods, the sensation, as though years of tension slip loose all at once, the sudden bubble of dizzy joy blooming in his belly.
And it feels so good. So right – so much so, he cannot resist taking himself in his hand, stroking up his own shaft, so hard and solid and convincing. No, he didn’t want this, no, he didn’t ask for this, but gods, the sensation of being filled from the back, stretched open so wide is enough to drive him wild. And even more than that, the feeling of Vellioth running his fingers over the lines of his muscle, telling him how he likes the narrow line of his hips, the strong set of his shoulders, is the perfect, quiet bliss against the violence.
Shudders as he rolls his palm over the tip of his–
x x x
It feels so real he wakes with the phantom sensation of blood pulsing in the empty space inside his fist.
And then, in a way, his dreams come true.
Every day, again and again and again. Just not in the way he wanted. Never like that. And as he takes it, he grieves. Grieves for his body. Grieves for the bustling halls, the echoes of Szarr children, for the blood they wept onto the palace floor as they died. Sweet babe, he calls him. My darling daughter. Tells him he will make a mother of him. So soon – already, perhaps – quickening inside him, praising him as his hair grows out, inch by inch, passing down the span of his shoulders and edging towards his waist.
Today is no different. Vellioth sits him down and brushes his long tresses, rolling the bristles through the endless length. The strands whisper as they shift, the soft susurration crawling over his skin. “Please–” The word slips out before he can stop it. “Let me bind it. Tie it back–” The brush stills. Then, perhaps predictably, Vellioth’s hand closes in his hair, tilting his head back just enough to bare his throat.
“No.”
He draws the brush through the strands once more, arranging them so that they spills down his back, then gathers the frontmost strands forward, letting the dark length fall loose around his face, veiling the line of his jaw. Tells him how much he loves the way his hair flows, thick and strong, stroking behind his pointed ears as he daubs a gentle colour onto his lips and cheeks.
Legs, stirrups, back and open.
“Don't you know how beautiful this is?” Vellioth goads as he slides a finger over his slit. Hums as he nudges a fingertip into him, dragging out his reluctant wetness, smearing it gently over his glans.
If he closes his eyes, he can almost feel that tensing in the space between his legs, the hammering pulse of blood filling him out, imagine that the torturously gentle finger is brushing against something much larger and gods it feels so fucking good, clutching white-knucled at the sheets, the way he rubs him up and down, running his fingers across the ridges–
“Oh, my child,” he croons, “your cunt yearns for my seed. Do you feel it? Dilating and squeezing for me.”
The illusion collapses in his mind. Feels that squirming sensation in the pit of his stomach as though recoiling from his own flesh.
“Thou shalt carry the seed to harvest.”
Slips inside, one finger, then two. Vellioth makes him feel it. Force-feeds the pleasure into his helpless body. He bends his fingers, massaging deeply into the place that makes his back arch, his limbs shake, his mind go fuzzy and dumb.
“Thou shalt be as I have fashioned thee.”
He doesn't want to want it, but he fucking does.
“Thou shalt honour and obey me in all things.”
Cazador looks up at Vellioth. Braindead and under the spell of his fingers, the memory of old fantasies surface unbidden. How even as a fresh-eyed Szarr, when his eyes had first fallen upon the white-haired beauty, his jaw had fallen agape; how that same night, he has retired to his chambers and buried his fingers inside himself, bucking his hips up into his own hand, crying out as the knuckles of his hand snapped past his sphincter, all while thinking of this man smashing him into the ground. Now he holds onto the thought. Grips it tight. Begins to moan as he imagines the root of Vellioth’s cock buried inside the tight ring of his arse.
“Tell me what you are,” he demands. So he grits his teeth and tells Vellioth he's a good girl, begs him to fuck his pussy, breed him and give him meaning; just as he is commanded.
Every time he says the words, he hates himself a little more.
Comes so hard he can't tell what he has between his legs anyway. Knows only that the waves are so intoxicating that if he'd asked his name, he couldn't have answered.
“Good girl,” purrs Vellioth. “So fertile. So ready for my seed to be sown inside you.”
Then, as always, Vellioth draws his vicious girth from his breeches, teasing the hem down over his tip, so large that it takes some effort to stretch the material far enough to free himself. When it does it bounces, once, twice and then just like that, it's inside him. Presses so hard into his cervix as he floods him with seed that he wonders if he's breached it.
“It hurts. Good. You must be prepared for pain. You will birth so many times, my child. More than you can imagine.”
And as he lies there, strapped open and filled with that thick white syrup, Vellioth sinks his fingers into his hipbones. Gyrates them slowly, this way, then that, pushing his palms upwards into his stomach to loosen his spend inside him and guide it deeper.
“There is nowhere to hide,” he croons, so softly he could be singing a lullaby to an unborn child.
x x x
Eight months later
The thin white gown clings in all the wrong places, damp at his spine, stretched taut over the immense curve of his abdomen. Barefoot, he feels everything. The chill of the stone against swollen feet, the fine grit, the way his weight shifts awkwardly forward, his centre of gravity stranded somewhere in the empty void between his thighs. For a moment, he tries grasping for the shape of himself that he has lost. The straight set of his shoulders, the narrow, angular frame that had once made him feel so good. But even that slips from him, utterly warped beneath the strain.
It’s not just the weight. No. It’s the pressure; the constant grinding into his hips and the creeping threat at the base of his spine as though it might splinter open at any moment. Cazador clasps at his back as though trying to physically hold himself together.
Because, of course, his body is not his own. Not since Vellioth had slaughtered every last Szarr, all bar him, and drained away his life. And especially not now.
He bulges grotesquely with the unborn parasite, its presence warping him from within.
Each day repeats itself. Spends hours upon hours sealed inside this chamber. In the morning, Vellioth dresses him. Flings open the wardrobe doors and picks out some horrifying number that makes him want to tear off his skin, since he is forbidden from tearing off the hideous clothes. Today, he wears red satin. Low-cut silks that tuck neatly under his belly, a balconette brassière that lift the sickening bulges on his chest. He isn’t stupid, knows that these once belonged to Aunt Donnela. Once, Vellioth had even called him Mistress in a slip of his usually-smooth tongue, and had beaten him so severely afterwards that he did not see for a fortnight.
The only respite he has are the paints Vellioth leaves for him. Calms the mind, he tells him. It turns out that Cazador is good at painting. He lets the sprawl of his thoughts hang out on the tip of his brush. Distorted, mangled bodies fallen from severed strings. Masked figures strangled with ropes of white lace. Sometimes, he even tries to paint himself – though he ends up scraping back paint furiously, layering again and again. It hurts, absurdly. As though the paint is not coming from the brush at all, but from somewhere deep under his ribs. This one he hides, burying it beneath others when he hears the pounding of shoes against the corridor floor outside.
As he draws his brush across the canvas, he strains for the sound of footsteps to break the monotonous silence, occasionally running his fingers under the cutting straps of his Aunt’s underclothes to ease their bite. And then, when those footsteps finally do arrive, he desperately pleads for them to recede once again as the torment becomes too great to bear.
Just as any other day, he eventually hears them. The thud of heavy boots down eerie, silent hallways, and then the indifferent clunk of the lock.
Vellioth enters wordlessly as Cazador hurriedly stows his brush, rising awkwardly to his feet, careful not to part his knees or strain his back, head bowed in submission. Vellioth pulls him back into a firm, unyielding embrace from behind, pressing kisses oh-so-gently into the crook of his neck. Fingers thread into his long black hair, combing through it and smoothing it over his jaw, and a quiet hum of approval rumbles into the shell of his ear. “This suits you,” he murmurs, gathering a length of his hair, winding it around his fist. “I want you like this.”
His grip tightens at the nape, pulling him back into him tightly, and then Vellioth’s thick arms are groping under the swell of his belly, running under the overhang, lifting it. His fingers creep over the taut flesh, searching for the hard lumps belying the growing bones and cartilage hiding within. “I am so pleased with your progress, my child,” he drawls as those hands ghost over the protruding curve and drift over his swollen chest. Breasts, Vellioth insists. And, really he’s right. They have grown heavy yet pliant, the kind of softness that invites a head to rest upon them, the delicate trace of dark veins feeding the thirsty ducts beneath the surface. Vellioth cups them neatly through the satin in his violet palms through his white nightdress, weighing them, humming quietly with satisfaction.
Two fingers run up his thigh, drawing the hem of his dress up over his pregnant swell and then over his engorged chest, his head. Fingers pinch at his nipples through the soft fabric, pulling him towards the bed, encouraging him into the sheets, he lifts his leg to raise himself up when–
“Agh–!”
Cazador grimaces as he tries to part his legs to raise himself onto the mattress, a white-hot pain lancing through him at the reluctant hinge of his hips, like a wedge driven into the sorry, slight growth nestled in the furrow between his legs. It has been like this for two months, now, the looseness in the joints torturing him every time he twists too fast in his chair or tries to climb up onto the bed.
“I can’t–” he panics, smashing his knees together, clutching at his groin as though his hands could somehow cage the violent pulses bucking through him.
But Vellioth is already there. Folds him up into those impossibly strong arms, lifting him tenderly into the sheets on his side, and fixing him in place with cushions bracing the small of his back; under the base of his belly.
“Thank you, Father, thank you…”
Vellioth says nothing. Lies down next to him, face level with his chest, unhooking the fastenings of his brassière. His eyes water, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. “Let us exercise your supply. Come. Relax.” He tries. Tries to let his mind go blissfully blank, but Vellioth drags his lower lip up from the bottom of the mound on his chest, opening wide to draw the flesh and nipple inside. His firm tongue dances over the bud, teasing it to hardness, and then there’s that pulling, surging feeling and a deep, throaty swallow as his first milk floods into his warm mouth. His fangs graze painfully, but he is accustomed to it, the flesh covered with sharp incisions in various states of healing. The other nipple spurts slightly, leaving wet trails of pearly milk gliding down his chest and over Vellioth’s angular face.
Sometimes as he lies here, letting Vellioth drain him, he wishes those fangs would dig deeper, slicing through his pale skin and carving out the lumps of flesh and his misery with them, tries to drown out the gnawing words of mocking praise, but somehow finds he can’t.
As the flow begins to subside, just as he has done every day since he had been found with child, Vellioth whispers into his chest. Those three lessons he knows better now than his own name.
Thou shalt carry the seed to harvest. Thou shalt be as I have fashioned thee. Thou shalt honour and obey me in all things.
Like clockwork, Cazador answers, reading from the script already branded into his mind.
I exist to bear your children, I shall be a dutiful wife, I shall honour and obey you in all things.
“My daughter,” he purrs against his ribs. Tells him how delicious he is, what a good girl.
Vellioth rolls the softening mound with his flattened fingers, starting high in the crook of his armpit, his sternum, distorting the base of his rounded chest and kneading at the tender flesh until the supply is utterly spent.
Cazador lies there, still, weeping silently into his pillow. Just as steady, just as unyielding, Vellioth empties his second lump of flesh into the warmth of his mouth.
Knows what comes next.
Lets himself be rolled onto his back. Legs hooked into the stirrups. Up, open. He sobs as his joints burn from the sudden opening, but this time, Vellioth doesn’t care.
Wishes he could be anywhere else. Be anyone else.
Instead, he lets it happen, just like he always does. It starts with the knuckles of his index and middle fingers, working this way and that at his entrance, teasing him open. He shivers as the knuckles slip inside, one by one, crying out as the bone at the base of his thumb forces its way past – he dissolves into an incoherent babble, words slurring and tangling as panic strips them of sense, “please,” he begs, “Can’t take this… Hurts– Master… Let me suckle on your… your cock, anything– Father–”
“Sweet girl,” he whispers, sweet and cloying, “your birthing will be so much more difficult if you are not adequately prepared. You must be weathered for pain. Prepared to open far beyond your limit. Do you not wish me to care for you?”
He whimpers inaudibly in response.
He does not want this – neither the so-called care nor the parasite – but the recreant weakness in his heart would still have him devour his own loins for a moment of Vellioth’s attention.
Groaning and writhing against his restraints, he feels every bit of it, his mind stubbornly refusing to empty itself so that he might drift away. Every cruel twist of the wrist, rubbing the ridges of his fingers over the knot inside him, the one that makes his body respond in ways that make him want to slice himself apart at the waist, traitor.
Tight, resentful exhales press through his teeth, drawn groans coming out ugly and high as he involuntarily clamps down on the invading hand.
“Come.”
Cazador does.
His own voice humiliates him, cracking and screeching as though rising from a throat that is not his, and he feels a wet gush travel along the top of the thick wrist rammed inside him. Then another. And another, betraying himself to his own pleasure.
“Lovely,” says Vellioth, hand withdrawing, and Cazador watches bitterly as he regards the vampire lord’s crimson eyes boring into the space between his legs where his hand slips out, examining the gape he has created. “You see, my love? You were born for this.”
x x x
Hells.
Cazador crumples in on himself, wrapped into his own humiliation.
He places a hand on the hateful swell of his belly with the sharp rise of bile scratching past his lungs. Feels the parasite wriggle irritably inside him, as though it has already decided it hates him just as much as he hates it.
At least, he thinks, the lump hides the barren plane of his pubis. If he closes his eyes, he can almost pretend that he is still that short-haired, sharp-featured boy. The devil in his mind replays the orgasm Vellioth had just wrenched from him. If he focusses hard enough, with a twist of memory, perhaps he can pretend those deep spurts were shooting up through a shaft rather than clenching uselessly inside him.
His humiliation surges downwards, as it always does, thickening into miserable arousal. Disgusted, he reluctantly accepts his fate, sliding his hand between his legs, finding the tiny, desperate nub with the pincer of his thumb and forefinger, and tugs with pathetic, desperate little twitches, hot tears streaming down his face until he sobs through his release once more.
Vellioth
Forty days later
Such utter lack of self-control.
Cazador’s wails are loud and deep, so much so, he is sure she will wake every patriar in the Upper City. Her breasts flow freely, egregiously, wasting the precious milk as her body lazily anticipates the ejection of his child.
The ball gag slips in readily enough, parting her pretty pink-tinged lips, nestling itself over her flapping tongue, trapping it behind her teeth, and brushes her ink-black hair over the taut buckle at the back of her head. She screeches her objection as he pinches her swollen nipples through rings of string, pulling them as tight as they need to be to stifle the insistent rush of milk.
Vellioth presses his palm into her cunt, still wetted from the torrent of her waters, running his fingers through her folds, soothing her. From her reactions, anyone would think the contractions were catastrophic. Her red eyes cross deeply as though the optic nerve is being dragged from within, and as Vellioth rubs his thumb in deep, soothing circles over her clitoris, the stifled sounds wither from desperate moans to exhausted, shaky whimpers.
How long have they been here?
Six hours? Twelve?
Vellioth slips a hand back into the wet cavern. He can feel the child, the thick mat of hair pressed deep into the softness of the dilated cervix as though passing through soft parted lips, held back only by the staunch rebellion of bone.
Perhaps…
“Cazador,” he coaxes, gripping her pathetic face with his fingers with one hand, squashing the gag deeper into her mouth, “you must birth. Now.”
Rivulets of sweat drip from her furrowed brows, skin glistening, but the only response she gives are the uneven squabbles of muffled, hoarse cries. The compulsion does not seem to work, despite the labour of his fingers over her flesh, urging her to pleasure.
He wrings a flannel in the basin of hot water next to the birthing bed, dabbing it over the sweaty sheen of her brow.
Time, then, to bring matters into his own hands.
She is so soft. So brittle as he slides his hands inside her, feeling for the jutting bones at the base of her pelvis.
Vellioth is strong, but even he must exert himself, he finds, to break the resistance inside her. She yowls into her gag like a pig for slaughter. And when her pelvis ruptures apart, the deep crack of the violence echoes around the chamber. There’s a filthy gargle from behind the gag, bile shooting from her distended nostrils as involuntary jerks wrack her body, nerves crossed and severed, but it does not matter.
Fumbling inside the dark cavity, his fingers brush the curve of the babe’s skull, slick with vernix.
Grips its nape.
Pulls.
Tissues stretch and snap, severed bones crunching past each other like shards of slate, and the child slides part way out before catching at the shoulders. So close. Readjusting his grip, he yanks again, and with a raw, bloody tear the babe finally emerges in a rush of clotted blood and rich-smelling fragments of tissue; a trophy torn from its feeble sanctuary.
The laughter that tremors in his chest is uncontrollable. Frenzied. It bubbles up past his throat, tearing loose in a jagged cascade of pure triumph, transfixed upon the squirming, blood-slicked thing in his arms and the tiny little growth between its legs, no bigger than his nail.
An heir, his thoughts sing, echoed by the delightful cries of the infant.
Flesh of my flesh.
He lifts the babe closer, fingers gently parting the matted, sticky strands of hair plastered to its scalp. And there it is. The proof.
A shock of startlingly pale, silver-white hair, just like his own.
Perfect.
He pulls the dagger from his belt and presses the cold steel to the pulsating rope tethering the child to its ruined origin. It severs cleanly. The stump oozes a final, sluggish pulse of blood before he wraps it in a length of string, a tourniquet around the offal.
He cradles the newborn against his tunic, listening to the babe’s tiny, panicked cries, watching it turn its cheek, seeking the comfort of skin, the soft rise of a mother’s breast. It need not worry. He looks up at her bloated breasts, blotched with red and angry purple veins, fit to burst with the reservoir of succulent, thick milk he has forced her to keep inside herself.
My firstborn, he thinks, his manic laughter subsiding into a feverish reverence. He looks down into the infant’s scrunched, reddened face, its eyes squeezed tight.
A name forms on his lips like an omen.
“Astarion,” he whispers.
Cazador
Eighty-one years and ninety-nine children later
Cazador thought she would feel more than this.
Not two weeks since the birth of what must be their hundredth child, she watches as Father's body sways gently from the rafters above the gurney, throat cinched in the braided strands of hair that Cazador had sheared from her length, knotted tight into a necklace of death.
She lifts a hand to what remains of it now – the crop sitting at her collar, the ragged ends uncomfortably soft beneath her fingers. Shorter than Father ever permitted, never short enough – and thinks, almost calmly, of the duty she has performed. The boy she was. The wife she became. And now, a dutiful mother.
Around her, the canvases lean in heaps against the walls. Dozens. Scores. Years of them, where she has poured herself out via the tip of a brush, turning her grief into colour and her shame into shape, trapping him in the tight weave of ivory canvas behind sewn mouths, shredded bodies and a thousand other tortured figures. One canvas has been worked almost to ruin. A pale figure, returned to again and again over the years. Somewhere inside her, something old and half-buried screams. Some small relic of the self she had been before Vellioth, before she had been remade with a new purpose, but the sounds seem to come from the canvases now, rather from inside her. Its cries rise thinly as though from the bottom of a well, and by the time they reach her, they are almost indistinguishable from silence.
Her firstborn, no longer a babe but an arrogant boy just shy of some forty years before Grandmaster gave him the gift – handsome, though he is – kneels at his feet, abhorred yet desired above all others. Cazador sees him, in the gloom. Vellioth's pale hair. Vellioth's jawline, Vellioth's defiant eyes staring back at her. Can almost feel her pelvis cracking apart, remembering how he was brought into this world in an anguish like no other.
And then Cazador lies down on the gurney. The same gurney where she had been laid to be bred thousands upon thousands of times. Settles her legs into the worn stirrups as blood patters down from the eviscerated body hanging above her
“Come boy,” she snarls. “To further the Szarr line is the greatest privilege. One that you do not deserve, but you will do your duty, hm?”
Just as I shall do mine.
As Astarion rises to his feet, she forces the image of pale skin and silver hair to warp in her mind. Can almost see those flowing white tresses, violet skin. Just as Cazador commands, the boy fills her, plugged with flesh and heat and the promise of new life, to make her full and whole once more.
Astarion
Two-hundred-and-eight years later
Astarion has never paid much heed to the details of the palace. But now, standing alone in the ballroom, he casts his eyes over the artwork adorning the walls.
Some, he thinks dimly, he has noticed before. It is hard not to notice some of the most gruesome – pairs of bodies severed at the waist and crudely stitched into obscene shapes; contorted figures speared with half a dozen pikes, bleeding onto the floor. Others look as though they could have existed in a gallery. Young children. This one, dead, shrouded in a pretty white dress. Another cowering in a corner, flayed like a carcass at the abattoir, pale skin shed like a snake on the floor beside him.
One catches his eye, if only for how inconspicuous it seems. It is quieter than the rest. A pale figure reclining on a sweep of maroon cloth, limbs arranged gracefully. The Lay of Larethian, states the brass plaque beneath. Corellon Larethian, he assumes. The androgynous deity of elves, who freely assumes every form of elvenkind. Abhorred by the drow folk. Or so he remembers from his histories. Astarion had thought the leader of the elven pantheon had golden hair, but perhaps he is wrong, because here, the hair is black.
Beautiful, he supposes. If one likes that sort of thing. Wonders briefly who painted them all.
Astarion sighs, and turns away, thinking nothing more of it. By the time he reaches the stairs, he has already forgotten, pacing mindlessly past forgotten paintings that sink back into the walls, and locked doors, the neglected secrets behind them forever lost.
Fin
