#kaykewrites

“Rolan, for the last time, Spectres & Spectral Weave Incantations belongs in the Evocation section, not in the Necromancy section,” you chide, plucking the tome from the dusty shelf in Ramazith’s library to pass off to one of several mage hands that float animatedly around the room. The noonday sun streams in the stained-glass windows, and sorting books would be a wonderful, relaxing way to spend an afternoon up here, if it weren’t for the insufferably prickly tiefling wizard insistent on mucking up your carefully-curated organization strategy.

Rolan whips his head around from where he was rifling through books on a different shelf, letting out an irritated huff through his nose. “By Vivri Arevi? The necromancer?” he says, the emphasis on the last word reminding you much of how one would speak to a small child. The tone has your hackles raising already, but more than annoyance is the overwhelming desire to put this pompous arse in his place.

“Just because the author was a necromancer doesn’t mean all of her writings are classified as Necromancy,” you say, directing the mage hand to shelve the book in its proper place across the way, watching as Rolan’s honey-gold eyes follow the hand with annoyance. “Honestly, have you even read the thing? You’d know within the first few pages it’s clearly an Evocation text.”

“I don’t know what kind of time you think I have these days,” Rolan says with a scoff. “But between running the shop and re-organizing this disaster Lorroakan left, there’s little time left in the day to pour over obscure texts.”

“Obscure?” You snort, stepping down from the ladder you’ve been perched on to place your feet on the floor. “That’s a second-year text for students at Blackstaff. I think I could recite the prologue forwards and backwards. Honestly, Rolan, as talented as you are you’re remarkably under-read.”

It’s a cheap shot, sure, and Rolan’s tail thrashes as he glares at you. But after everything you’ve been through together, this kind of bantering is normal for the two of you, and you flash him a teasing grin, even if the gleam in your eyes is a little mean.

“Is that any way to speak to your master, Tav?” he shoots back at you, all sharp teeth and smug satisfaction. Oh. You’re playing ball today, alright.

As the de-facto ‘master’ of the tower, that makes you his apprentice. Although it’s more of an in-joke between the two of you rather than a true master-apprentice relationship. You taught at Blackstaff Academy before you were forcibly abducted by mindflayers and infected with a tadpole. Your abilities zapped, you were forced to save Faerun with little more than a first-year’s spell knowledge, and unfortunately, the full scope of your talents haven’t returned in the wake of the netherbrain’s defeat. You couldn’t very well go back to your old life as an instructor at your level, so you stayed in Baldur’s Gate, Rolan graciously offering you a place to stay at the tower in return for saving his and his siblings’ hides multiple times over.

 And so, on paper, you’re technically his apprentice, but it’s in name only. While your spellcasting abilities took a hit thanks to the tadpole, your knowledge certainly didn’t. Considering Rolan is entirely self-taught, you find yourself often teaching him things, when he’s not getting on your nerves or you’re not riling him up, that is. In fact, you’ve both grown as wizards in the last two months of working together, you in power and him in knowledge. It’s been an enjoyable working relationship, to say the least, and his company isn’t bad, either. You almost rather like living at the tower with him and his siblings; it’s less lonely than your solitary teacher’s dormitory back at Blackstaff, that’s for sure.

You eat dinner with him most nights, talking about all things arcane until your food’s gone cold and you’ve both sunk nearly a full bottle of wine. When Rolan isn’t trying to posture, isn’t trying to be the ‘best wizard in the realms’, he’s almost rather charming. You could even consider the two of you close friends.

But that doesn’t mean that Rolan, the bastard, won’t rub in your face that he’s your ‘master’ at any chance he gets.

Which is why it’s now become your hobby to knock this young brat down a few pegs each day.

He took his wine with a small nod of thanks and paid in cash—Cazador never trusted them with credit cards, no matter how much money his company made—and then turned around in his stool to look out over the dance floor once again. There were so many people it was hard to make out where one person ended and another began, and he was quite certain there were at least a few couples plainly fucking on the dance floor in the middle of the chaos. How scandalous.

Astarion snorted to himself and took a sip of the wine, surprised to find that it actually tasted more like wine than swill. This place did seem upscale, even if the crowd wasn’t, so it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination that they had some pricey suppliers. The glass had cost him a pretty penny, but he had enough money for one or two drinks before he needed to really get to work and find someone to lure away.

He watched the smiling, laughing faces of the dancers and scowled. Unfortunately for one of them, their night of fun would end in being sucked dry by a vampire lord. And none of them were any the wiser.

A pity, really.

A pity that he hadn’t been drained two hundred years ago, instead.

Suddenly, the lights dimmed and the music abruptly shifted to a low hum. Confused, Astarion shifted his gaze to the stage, where it appeared that the DJ in the corner had suddenly disappeared from the booth. In a blink, the center of the stage was awash in pink and purple lights, and an incredibly breathtaking tiefling was standing at the edge, infernal purple eyes glowing under the light as they held their arms up in an elegant pose.

“Do you dare to dance with devils?” the performer purred into their headset microphone in a delightfully masculine voice, the gold charms on their curled, white horns clinking in the background. They wore little more than black, skin-tight leggings with a strappy harness across their ridged chest, gold rings and cuffs circling their clawed fingers and wrists catching the light where they stood. The crowd went nuts at the sound of their voice, screams echoing through the bar area in a deafening roar that had the performer smirking, showing off a mouthful of sharpened, pearly white fangs.

Then they began to sing.

Now, Astarion had heard many a bard in his two hundred years of frequenting seedy bars, clubs, and even a hotel lounge or two. Many could carry a tune, many could even bring a tear to his eye, but no bard had ever sounded like this one. It felt like all the air was sucked out of the room as they crooned into the microphone, the music swelling to accompany them as pale blue magic coiled around their wrists. They started to move around the stage as they sang, their lithe body rolling with ease as they teased the clubgoers closest to the stage with little swishes of their hips and flicks of their tail, also adorned in gold jewelry.

Admittedly mesmerized, Astarion sat with his back against the bar, wine nearly forgotten in his hand, as he watched the performance with rapt attention. The tiefling swirled and danced around the stage, their movements salacious and skilled, rolling their hips with each dirty phrase purred from their lips in a voice that reminded Astarion of a siren’s song. Could they be a siren? It surely seemed plausible—

And then a strange thing happened. The performer did a twirl and then dropped into a split, and their body changed before Astarion’s very eyes. They still held the same white hair, coiffed into a series of braids over their right ear and hanging in loose waves over their left shoulder; the same infernal purple eyes, seemingly staring into Astarion’s soul; and the same upturned nose with what appeared to be a light dusting of freckles, framed with vine tattoos up and down their pale blue skin…

But where the hard planes of a man’s chest had been were now soft curves of breasts, the dip of a narrow waist and wide hips. Their voice, too, changed to a feminine lilt, their pouting lips sparkling with purple lipstick as they crooned and rolled around on the floor of the stage.

Another blink, and the tiefling lifted their hips into the air before they vaulted themselves upright, suddenly bearing a more muscular, masculine form with a chiseled jaw and deeper, booming voice.

“That’s that, then,” Kansif said, seemingly unbothered by Phaere’s cold demeanor. “Simply pluck a tune, and our guide to Moonrise will come scuttling.”

Scuttling? Astarion raised an eyebrow, but was distracted when Phaere lifted the lyre and started to play. She turned towards the vast darkness behind the camp as her fingers plucked the strings in a haunting melody, her eyes drifting shut as she played. Astarion wanted to close his eyes and listen, truly listen, but he was transfixed on her form as she played. He could feel Karlach tapping her foot next to him, sense how Shadowheart wanted to sway to the music even as she stood rigidly rooted to her spot. Even the goblins and the half-orc seemed transfixed on Phaere’s performance.

But then, Astarion heard it. Scuttling, right on cue. He snapped his eyes to the darkness ahead of them, just as a growling, guttural voice broke through the final notes of Phaere’s song.

“Ah yes, I hear them, your majesty. Calling us. Their god and their guide, together.”

Out from behind a twisted tree trunk stepped a hideous creature. Eight spindly legs on a giant thorax, topped with the upper half of a man coated in an armor-like chitin. His face was pale, with two regular eyes colored a deep blood-red, practically glowing in the light of the moonlantern he carried. His other eyes scattered across his forehead and cheek were black as pitch, blinking in a syncopated rhythm as he stepped closer, regarding Phaere with a curious tilt of his head.

Astarion might not be well-versed on Drow, but he knew a drider when he saw one.

“By the Gods. One of Lolth’s abominations,” he breathed. Karlach gave a low whistle, and Shadowheart made a noise of disgust somewhere in her throat. 

Phaere simply stood stock-still next to Astarion, her eyes now transfixed on the drider as he approached. He looked as if he’d been in the wilderness for ages—his skin and chitin coated in a layer of dirt and grime. His hair was unkempt, snow white falling over his shoulder in messy waves, similar to Phaere’s at first glance, especially after a particularly bad fight. However, Phaere’s locks held more of a bluish tint, and were a whole lot softer to the touch than this creature’s hair looked—

Now was not the time.

“Greetings, in the Absolute’s name,” said Kansif, earning a sneer from the drider. “You have been charged with—guiding us…” Kansif looked down and away, the drider’s visage likely uncomfortable to look at for too long. Astarion couldn’t blame the poor sod, honestly.

“New flesh for you, my queen,” the drider hissed. “But, who are they?” He was looking over his shoulder as if speaking to an invisible presence, the look on his face flashing between stone-cold clarity and a haze, as if he were going somewhere else for the briefest of moments.

“Looks like he’s madder than a hatter,” Astarion murmured. “Absolutely lovely.” He wheezed a bit as Phaere elbowed him in the ribs, although there was a slight twitch of her lip. So she had found that funny. She wasn’t looking at him, though, her eyes still trained on the drider, her ears twitching as if she was listening to him hard. Astarion couldn’t quite read the look on her face, which was… unnerving, to say the least.

The last time he couldn’t read her easily was when they’d “rescued” and then promptly murdered the True Soul Nere, another Drow that Phaere had toyed with for a few minutes before giving into her rare flashes of anger.

Come to think of it, any time another Drow was involved—and the drider had definitely been a Drow once upon a time—Phaere simply… shut down.

"Is this seat taken?" a voice near Rolan's ear brought him out of his musings. He turned over his shoulder to see nothing but blue in his periphery, which could only belong to one person in this entire camp:

Karvir. The so-called ‘leader’ of the odd group of adventurers who had ‘saved the day’. The one who had convinced Rolan to stay at the stupid grove in the first place, instead of abandoning ship and making his way to Baldur’s Gate on his own, goblins be dammed. In hindsight, it might have been a better decision to stay, but the sorcerer would never hear Rolan admit it. Never in a million years.

Mostly because Rolan didn’t know what to think of Karvir in the first place. And thus, he didn’t know how Karvir would handle such an admission.

Karvir was… certainly something, that was for sure. The blue tiefling with the telltale scales of draconic lineage made an imposing picture from a distance—all flowing robes, perfectly coiffed hair, and piercing blue eyes that glowed whenever he cast one of his signature lightning spells. But that distant visage was where the image of the cocksure, confident sorcerer ended. The second Karvir opened his mouth, the intimidation factor fell away, leaving in its wake a… well…