#but learning

When it’s over, when the last, few pieces so inclined unstick themselves from the ceiling to crash down, smashing tankards and bottles, slamming and overturning tables not held steady by y’all. When it’s done, you peer out.

The others emerge from their own hiding spots. Shadowheart and Lae’zel look no worse for wear, though Gale twists around to try to peer at the sludge running down his back. Karlach shucks off the table she’s been holding up like a damn umbrella, and grimaces at the couple of pieces currently grilling on her shoulder vents.

She shudders and flicks them away (Lae’zel eyeballs them pieces speculatively; Shadowheart swats her arm).

“All clear, Wyll,” Karlach says. Turns to offer a hand up.

To Wyll, on the ground under her. Wyll, who heaves once, twice, and gags up a belly full of antifreeze.

“Shit,” you say.

He lifts himself, panting. Wipes the sick from his chin. Says, “I think it’s passed—”

It has not passed. He doubles over again. Worse, this time. Karlach hovers over him, alternating between holding his arm and rubbing his back.

She looks to you.

Thisobald forced him to drink at the end. You let him do that. Didn’t override him even though you knew Astarion probably could’a…

Shadowheart’s hands light up. She runs them over his hunched form. Shakes her head.

“It’s a poison,” she says. “He needs an antidote. Does anyone have any?”

Between all the fucked up horrors y’all’ve dealt with, you don’t think poison has really been one of them? At least not involving you.

“Guys,” Karlach says, a tremor to her voice.

Wyll tries to squeeze her hand. But by now he sways, and it’s only Karlach’s lovely lumberjack arms that keep him up when his knees give out.

“Gale, can you get him back to the inn?” you say.

“I can. But I’m less sure I’ll be able to return to you all unless you make your way back to the ‘stone at the tower.”

Y’all are under a time crunch. You think it’s still mid-morning. Ish. And if y’all get back now with nothing to show…

Karlach sweeps Wyll up into her arms. Full-on princess-carry.

The man’s face is etched in pain, but he manages a, “Can’t s-say I’ve ever been s-swept up like this. U-usually the one doing the s-sweeping.”

The big, red unit of a woman smiles at him. “Then it seems time the hero gets to be hero’ed, eh?”

Shadowheart gives a little sigh, and you guess she’s imagining herself in Wyll’s place (honestly, same).

Lae’zel…seems to be sizing Shadowheart up. Making some calculations in her head. Nodding all smug to herself.

You hope to god you’re around whenever she makes the move she’s just decided on.

The portal opens with a crackle. Karlach pauses. Looks over y’all.

She’s against splitting up. As she should be. It was a bad idea last time, even before that fucking bitch Swell…it was bad. Even your White ancestors is feeling a certain way just now.

But y’all slunk out before anybody could ask about their friends and loved ones once. You don’t think y’all will get away with that again. And the longer y’all fuck around, the longer them people stay with the fucked up murder cult.

“I’ll open the Tower Waypoint ever hour,” Gale says.

A way out. An alamo.

You got to stop calling it that.

“Go. Be safe,” you say.

Thank you Wyll, I’m sorry.

Then they’re gone and you’re surrounded by murderhobos and pieces of a very, very dead man.

“Anybody spot a graveyard out there?” you say.

***

There’s a path that runs through the city to the graveyard. Y’all do not take it. You're tired of running into things, getting ambushed, seeing fucking horrors.

“You know,” Astarion says all casual as y’all climb up a redwood trunk of a dead vine. “That’s the second Thorm that’s blown up. Do you think they all do that?”

You assume the group silently contemplates the thought of Pawpaw exploding in a spray of immortal guts.

“Could it be part of them becoming…whatever they are, do you think?” Shadowheart says.

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Could make a case that part of it’s the gas build-up of whatever decomposition was going on in there, it increases the chances,” you muse. “That happened to a famous king from my world. Was trying to divorce his first wife—he ended up killing the second though, and, like, the fourth? Fifth? There’s a kid’s rhyme about it.”

Lae’zel reaches the top and slides off. Surveys the patch of higher ground and then nods to y’all.

“But divorce was a big-ass no-no back then. Real illegal. But he was going for it anyway. So one of the priests said that when he died, dogs would lick his blood. And then when he exploded in that casket, it leaked out overnight. And dogs really did lick up the goo.”

You clamber a few more steps and look up to find the party staring back at you.

Astarion titters. “Oh darling, a delight as usual.”

“Why was the body lying around to fester,” Lae’zel says. “Surely a respected leader would have been set adrift by his warriors.”

You’re kinda outta breath by this point, and don’t got the energy to explain parading around royal carcasses for a couple of weeks. You settle for, “It was the custom.”

Then you’re at the top, and it’s Shadowheart who holds out a hand to help you down.

“I thought perhaps you were a touch mad,” she says. “No offense. But I begin to wonder if it’s a simple cultural trait.”

Probably both.

“Eh,” you say.

Y’all find a spiky, iron fence surrounding a fucking graveyard. You decide to focus on how interesting it is that Faerun has both the same, general concept of burying their dead in an official place, and placing marked grave stones over them. Not only that, but there’s a couple’a mausoleums, too.

Gale’d be tickled pink. You’ll have to bring this up when you get back, the similarities. More cultural diffusion? But when? And from where? Because the fossil record and archaeological evidence real firmly places humans on Earth for tens of thousands of years. Yet there’s something classically Roman wafting off that nearby tomb and its pillars. Yet the writing carved into it is still crisp. It ain’t all that old.

Yet the clothing. It don’t seem to be from one actual era of anything, so much as a mish-mash of “vaguely medieval and renaissance Europe” with a dash of Hot Topic thrown in.

Your not-a-coping-mechanism crumbles when Astarion’s head snaps around. He peers out for a second, before shaking his head a giving you a tiny smile.

That looks fake.

“What was that?” you say.

“Oh, nothing,” he says.

Right as Lae’zel says, “It sounds like one of your weaklings wailing.”

Which could be fucking werewolves. Or ghouls. Or even a goddamned horned serpent spewing poison breath because why in the fuck not.

“What?” you say.

Shadowheart seems to consider it. Then folds. “I think it might be a child.”

“But we really don’t have the time to—” Astarion starts.

Because y’all are out here in a horror show. And there’s maybe a kid out there. And he knows by now you can’t (except you did just this morning, didn’t you) just leave a kid out here.

“It is likely a trap,” Lae’zel says. An unspoken “for fools” trailing after like goldfish poop.

“What if it ain’t?” you say.

Astarion’s head falls back. He pinches the bridge of his nose.

“And if it is a trap?” Shadowheart says.

You got Astarion killed. Wyll poisoned. They’re still asking you questions and taking that into consideration for now. You been doing your best to drag all of them, these three in particular, by the fucking nose hairs into something resembling the faintest fucking blush of decency. How long before they done had enough? Before they ignore you? Or even break off on their own? You gotta get another one’a them killed?

The air shifts. You catch the faintest edge of the sound and it lifts all the hairs on your body.

“We got a githyanki of Creche Kli’ir, a devotee of Shar, and an immortal vampire spawn,” you say. “Y’all don’t think you could take it?”