The Family Business

BINGO!! @badthingshappenbingo

Slot: Carved Mark Fandom: Baldur's Gate Three Characters: Astarion Warnings: referenced torture, starvation

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All that Astarion could feel was pain.

Pain by itself was nothing new to him, of course – after having spent so much of his unlife in Cazador Szarr’s clutches, he was almost used to torture. He was accustomed to being bitten or beaten by his master, used to having his legs forced apart against his will as someone else took him on a given night, quite used to the gnawing pain of hunger that the rats could never satiate. But this…

He shakily sat up on his narrow cot in the slave pen, feeling his back burning incessantly. He knew, from Cazador’s gloating, that his wounds had been caused by a silver knife. That, he knew, meant they would never heal properly. With trembling fingers, he reached over his shoulder, and hissed at the raised ridges of once-flawless porcelain skin on his back. They should have been dripping with blood, but after a tenday of displeasing his master, and almost as long being an undead canvas, Astarion didn’t have enough blood in him to bleed from his wounds.

“Fuck,” he whispered to himself as he gingerly reached around himself to feel the bumps and ridges of scar tissue in his back. It hurt – gods, it hurt so badly. He could almost feel the silver knife cutting into his skin still, carving up his back to whatever Cazador wanted to see as he’d desperately held back his pained screams. Was there even a pattern or a meaning to his wounds? He couldn’t tell. For all he knew, Cazador had carved the portrait of a gnome or a god’s symbol or a mind flayer into his back.

For a second, he entertained the thought of asking one of the other spawn to draw his scars for him to see. But no – he didn’t dare show any weakness to his siblings. Cazador had done far too good a job in fostering a sense of distrust between his spawn slaves. No, Astarion would have to suffer in silence… as he usually did.

He looked up as the door to his cell opened, and a dead rat was carelessly thrown in. His stomach churned, half from hunger and half from repulsion of the festering rodent. But, after so many years, he knew that this rat was all he would be given – if he was lucky, he would be given another tomorrow, instead of being left to starve again. With a hiss of pain, he got off his cot and made his way to the rat corpse, wrinkling his nose against the stench of rotting flesh. His fangs bit into the rat’s stomach, and he drank down the vile blood, without throwing it up. He had made that critical error once, and Cazador had punished him for a month for it.