#astarion.

And then there is the mural room; trapped absurdly, one single casket laid in polished stone on its altar, lonely in a way those crowded torn-open rooms could not even imagine, and its lid is shifted to the side, and it is empty. Which, Elias is given to understand, is not the expected state of these things in a mausoleum. The walls are inlaid with a series of paintings; splendour, tragedy, infamy, though rather outdated, ending on the velvet black of Shar instead of the meat-warm familiarity of the Absolute. Horrendously vainglorious; horrendously self-pitying. The brushstrokes are expert. He must have paid someone to make him this; he must have paid for it so he could sit in this room and sulk, with its single sarcophagus and its tripwires, which Elias’ feet step over without her noticing. The plaque on the open coffin mourns an Isobel Thorm. The implications of this are enormous. Elias does not join in the discussion about them.

It is lucky, she thinks, that Shadowheart and Gale go to look again in the other rooms, as Astarion begins to puzzle at how best to make this one safe to move through; the snarling stone gargoyles, the plinths, the vents set neatly into the side of the stair. She moves past the triggers without much thought. She looks at the shadow and shape of Moonrise, luminous and gleaming; she looks at the worn strokes of the candle-flames and the face shielded a little by its pall; she looks at the jagged army’s weaponry. She looks at Ketheric in all his dull, pied glory, his armour black and skin shining pale. And she thinks –

(Moonrise; its broken shade, its hollow halls, the grasping of its stone and the stagnant breath trapped within its walls. She knows it – she knows it – the sight unrecognisable but the bones the same; her feet know it, her hands, where she does not. She has been there before. Something happened there. And Ketheric – he knew her – he said that he knew her; her face, her methods, the sharpness she carries in her – the blood and the meat. He called her a mad dog. Called her to heel. He can’t have tried this before, because she cannot believe that she wouldn’t have torn him to pieces. Maybe she did. Maybe he reconstituted. Maybe she tried again and again and again –)

(He called her a mad dog. She has spent time between the derelict walls of his palace before. She has spoken to him before, at least a little. Something happened there – it’s his palace – even if she killed him he would not die. No matter what he would not die; cannot, now. Has not been able to for a very long time.)

(In the painting, army arrayed behind him like a flowing train, his face is pale, angular, lips unsmiling under the shadow of his silver beard, hair pushed back behind his coronet, eyes red; Elias looks at him, and looks, and looks, until the careful smears of pigment blur and she can see him in his throne in her mind’s eye, the lolling of him, lined and tired and mortal, and she does not know how he knows her but he knows her; and she does not know how she knows him, but she knows him, because she hates him more than she’s ever hated anyone who wasn’t in her dreams.)

(He did something to her; she’s so suddenly, viciously sure of it. He took something from her. She will cut him open to get it back, and if it doesn’t work she will try again, try again, try again; lash him to the shifted lid of his disinterred daughter’s burial place, and cut, and cut, and cut. Peel out the long loops of his intestine and hold him open to watch it grow back, until he screams and screams and his voice gives out, until she says tell me what you did and she says tell me who you are and he cannot answer, until his mind is a stranger to his body, until he does not know his own name –)

“Admiring the artwork?” drawls Astarion from where he crouches on the floor, peering into the mouth of a snarling gargoyle, and Elias shivers, a taut, furious tremble running down the length of her spine like electricity.

Her fingernails are sharp, overgrown, curling in the way that they do when they are overgrown; she presses her hands into careful fists, and she tucks the fists against her thighs, next to the smooth-stiffened leather of her scabbards, and she opens her mouth, which is red and dark, with square white teeth rooted in the meat of the gums, with old ridged scars on the insides of the cheeks, and she tells him, “If we go back to the inn, I’m going to kill her.”

A pause. Astarion worms his bloodless fingers into the beautifully carved stone maw. “Quite the non-sequitur.”

“Look,” Elias says, impatient. She spreads a hand over the room – the chipped paint and delicate shapes of the murals – the melted-down candles, coated in old, thick dust, and the casket, polished marble, lying empty. She says, “Look – don’t you see why I have to? I understand now why I wanted it so.”

There is a metallic clunk from somewhere in the gargoyle’s jaw. “You wanted it because you are a bloodthirsty maniac.”

“You’re bloodthirsty,” Elias corrects, “and I am mostly rational. Look.”

Astarion neatly extricates his hand from the sculpture and throws a cursory glance over his shoulder at the hollow box on the bier. He quirks a blanche-white brow, says, “What, you have to kill her because she’s already died once?”

“No.” Elias almost goes to turn his head up to face the wall, but if she put her fingers in his hair she thinks she might decide to pull until something interesting happens, so she keeps them at her sides. “Because he did so much to undo it.” Selûne, Shar; now the worm-ridden Absolute and the bone shrines to Myrkul, however they fit together. Ketheric Thorm made grief his god and then when he still couldn’t live with it he – found a brand new one, she supposes; raised long-stilled bones from their place of rest, all for a young woman who fled from him, in the end. She says, “If I did it, I would do it properly. It wouldn’t be so easy to call her home. A perfect tragedy – can’t you see?” She can nearly make out the lifeless, stylised flesh of Isobel’s face under the painted pall.

“Ah.” Astarion sounds very pleased with her; he stretches his neck, pale and lithe as a swan’s, and he stands up straight, rolling one shoulder back so that the leathery sheen of his doublet catches the light. “It’s a spite thing – I should have guessed.”

He’s smiling. His teeth, as ever, are very white. “He knew me,” Elias tells him, and her voice comes out very flat. “Before. He knows what happened to me. He knows what was taken from me. He’s letting it stay gone.” He looms over her, all metal and misery in his portrait. Astarion’s lips slide closed.

“He did know you,” he concedes. “The gnolls knew you… Z’rell seemed like she might have, but not well.”

“He knew.” Elias’ knuckles are digging into her hips, past the cutoff point of her cuirass. “He knew. They pulped me and blooded me and sieved me empty, Astarion, and now it’s all missing, and he knows, and he wouldn’t tell me.”

Astarion squints at her. His undereyes are dark, in this light, the slope of his cheekbones bone-white. “Who are they?”

“I don’t know,” Elias says irritably. “Don’t ask. He helped hollow me out, Astarion, and if we go back to the inn I will string her eyes and all of her finger-bones together and I will gift them to him, and then I will crack his skull open and strain his brain through cheesecloth and I will make him eat it.”

“Charming.”

Elias replies, “I thought so.”

It’s terribly stagnant in the mausoleum. Astarion slips past her to begin fiddling with the next little gargoyle bust. Elias turns to look, again, at the sarcophagus. There is less dust within it than without. The stone, carefully engraved, looks clean, untouched.

She says, distantly, “Do you think she was rotted, when he pulled her out of the casket?”

“Eugh,” Astarion says helpfully. He puts his hand in the stone monster’s mouth.

“Do you think she was nothing but bone?” Elias’ hands are gravitating towards the hilts of her blades. It’s the only way to stand that ever feels comfortable. She asks, “Do you think he did it all himself – collected her skeleton, all dried-out, dregs still stuck to the epiphysis, and laid her out nice and neat, all pinned in place, wired together – hamate, carpus, lunate?” She is looking at the sarcophagus but she is not seeing it. She asks, “Do you think he had to build the meat around her? Threaded a needle with nerves and stitched the muscle around the bone, the fascia, the fat – tucked the organs away where they were safe – do you think he sculpted her with his own exalted hands?”

Another metallic clack-thunk; Astarion says, “Elias, how in the hells would I know?”

“Do you think,” she bites out, resenting the interruption, “that he made her a red tongue – square teeth – such very capable arms? Planted the hair in her head – bound her in softest doeskin – pressed in the prettiest glass for her eyes? Everything in her body, he put there – there is no part of her that wasn’t his first.” (She can see Isobel under the pall; raw marble; unmade.) Elias’ fingers curl themselves around the grips of her blades. Astarion is looking up at her. His eyes are the dull, sunken colour of old, strange blood; her blood, from her veins, beaten by the unceasing animal of her heart. If she touched his head, she’d pull his hair until something interesting happened. She holds tight to her weapons instead. She says, “If I go back there I will kill her – I will not stop,” and she says, “I have to, don’t you see? I have to – I need to – no matter how far she runs she will never escape him.” His eyes are like dull blood. She says, without the usual heat the words carry, “Stop looking at me.”

(They keep the usual desperation, though.)