#welllp

Astarion towers over him, the master he has hated for so long finally brought low. "I'm not the one in the dirt," he snarls, like a kicked dog finally showing its teeth.

He reaches down, picks up a dagger that has fallen to the floor as Cazador was thrown across it. It's a strange blade, not like one Rakha has ever seen.

At its center, held within curving strips of polished metal, is a stake of wood. Wyll has told her of how vampires die; she can see the purpose of such a blade. That is not a weapon made for mortal men.

Astarion looks at it, then lifts it to point the tip at Cazador. It trembles almost imperceptibly in his grip. "One last thrust," he hisses - and his voice is trembling too. "And I'll be free of you. I'll never have to fear you again."

He swallows, then flicks his eyes to the staff on the ground at Cazador's side. "But if I finish the ritual you started... I'll never have to fear anyone. Ever." His eyes glow with manic, desperate hunger - and fear.

Cazador laughs hollowly. "You think me a fool?" he cries. "That I would allow anyone to usurp me, speak the words, and ascend in my place?!" He leans forward a little, headless of the sharp tip of the dagger pointing at him. "The runes I carved into your flesh bind you and all seven thousand souls to the ritual! Complete it, and those bearing the scars will be sacrificed - you included."

He pushes himself up on his knees, even now striking out against Astarion with word after word. "You are simply a means to an end! I made you to be consumed!"

Astarion's fingers tighten on the dagger's hilt. A muscle works violently in his jaw as he stares down at his unrepentant tormentor.

"I am so much more," he whispers, "than what you made me."

There's a long, strained pause. Then he looks up abruptly, fixing his eyes on Rakha. "Get over here," he snaps brusquely. "We can do this."

Rakha doesn't move, doesn't say anything for a long time.

She knows what Astarion wants her to do. She even, on some level, knows why he wants it. This ritual, whatever it fully entails, is the ultimate throwing off of the shackles that have held him for centuries. He wants to be free. He wants not to be afraid anymore.

He wants peace, just as Rakha wants it. But he wants to obtain it by accepting the darkest version of the monster that he has become.

The idea makes her skin crawl. She has stood on the same precipice as him, offered a gift that came with the selling of her soul. She wants to grab him by the shoulders, pull him away, out of reach, before it can swallow him.

"Didn't you hear him?" she asks hoarsely. "If you complete the ritual, you'll be consumed..."

Astarion barks a sharp laugh. "Trust me. I know what I'm doing."

Perhaps he does. So many times before, her friends have faced choices of this magnitude, and she has trusted to their judgment rather than her own. Shadowheart with her spear, and Lae'zel's stand against Vlaakith, and Wyll's choice of his future, and Gale with the Crown of Karsus. She has never believed that she might know better than them, and this hardly seems the time to start.

This is Astarion's choice, not hers.

Isn't it?

"All right," she mutters haltingly, one hand rapidly flexing into a fist at her side. "What... do you need?"

"I need your eyes," he says. His voice sounds hollow and exhausted - but brittle with determination. "In a manner of speaking."

"What do you think you are doing?" Cazador hisses.

"Unmaking what you made me," Astarion growls, his eyes not leaving Rakha. "Use the parasite," he tells her. "Link your mind to mine. Through your eyes, I can see the scars on my back and copy them onto his."

Cazador's eyes widen, showing the whites at their edges. "You... would not dare."

"I would," Astarion murmurs. "And I will. You will be consumed. And all the power you've lusted after will be mine!"

"And what then, Astarion?" Jaheira asks flatly at Rakha's side. "You would use this power born of so much death for *good*, I suppose?"

Astarion ignores her. His eyes have not left Rakha's, not even to blink. "Help me do this. Please."

Rakha hesitates. She can feel Jaheira's sardonic disapproval, and Wyll's gaze digging into the back of her neck. She senses Minsc vibrating with barely-restrained anger. Even Lae'zel seems somewhat disquieted, her fingers tapping restlessly against the hilt of her sword.

But it is... Astarion's choice. Not hers. Not anyone's....

Mechanically she takes a step forward, and then another.

Enter Astarion's mind so he can proceed with the ritual.

Narrator: Your minds join and your two selves become one. You can feel the knife in your hand, see the scars on his back, and taste his hunger for power.

The bitter, brutal emotion pours through her like a waterfall, like a burning flame. Rakha grunts with sudden pain, clutching at her temple, but Astarion's eyes go wide with exhilaration.

"Yes. Yes - I see it!" he hisses.

In a quick, smooth, harsh set of motions, he steps behind Cazador and rips the robe off of him, baring his back and shoving him to the floor.

And Cazador screams as Astarion, over and over and over, sinks the knife into his flesh and begins to carve.

(A/N: This is a truly unpleasant little sequence and goes on for quite some time before eventually fading to black to indicate that it goes on even longer.)

All sense of time fades out. For a while Rakha is conscious only of the screaming, and the blood, and the overwhelming sense of delighted rage flowing into her from Astarion's mind. She doesn't know how long she's been standing there when the connection finally breaks.

She comes back to herself standing at Astarion's side. He and Cazador are both soaked in blood. The others look on with expressions ranging from appalled to enraged.

"There," Astarion hisses. "Perfect."

"Ungrateful child," Cazador chokes out. Tears are streaming down his face, cutting lines through the red painting his cheeks. "Wretched child!"

Astarion just smiles. "Time to take your place!"

He lifts the staff from the ground, and it glows with blood-red power in his hands. With a jerk, he lifts Cazador from the ground and hurls him into the socket where Astarion himself was held only minutes earlier.

Everything begins to happen at once. Astarion slams the staff into the sigil at the center of the platform, and around Rakha the Weave seems to explode with that same red, writhing light. All around them, the suspended spawn begin to scream, their voices echoing and rebounding on each other and mixing with other screams from below and behind, from the seven thousand other souls prepared to burn for this ascension.

Rakha staggers with the intensity of it, the overwhelming wall of sound and light and pain.

Behind her, barely audible through the chaos, she can hear her companions begin to shout, unable any longer to hold themselves back.

"No!" Wyll cries. "What are you doing?"

"Enough!" shouts Minsc. "We can still stop the nonsense words in his mouth!"

"This isn't the way!" shouts Lae'zel. The three of them break into a run towards Astarion - but the wall of power around him rises to meet them, slaps them back like a physical blow.(*)

At Rakha's side, Jaheira reaches out and seizes her forearm with a sudden fierce grip. "Are we truly to be party to this?" she asks, her voice low enough to cut underneath the screaming around them.

Rakha has gone completely still. The magic is pounding at her like a creature with fists and claws, and the screams echo in her mind, resonating with the memories of a thousand other deaths at her hands in a life she does not remember.

It is Astarion's choice. She is a broken thing, with no right to believe she knows better on this or anything else.

And yet...

I am so much more than what you made me, Astarion said.

An image flashes through her mind, painful as the edge of a knife, of the last moments before her death in the Temple of Bhaal, another moment soaked in red light and blood. Her father's rage as she rejected his 'gift'.

You refuse me? You are my spawn! Your veins course with my unholy blood. Your life is mine!

You were made to conquer! To devour! You reject my blood, and so I will reclaim it!

I will make another who is worthy...

She opens her eyes and stares at Astarion's body, writhing in the grip of the gift he has stolen from his own monstrous 'father,' on the precipice of the oblivion she rejected. And she knows, suddenly, that wrong or right, she cannot let this go on.

This ends here, I said. It ends... here...

We are more than what they made us.

Stop Astarion.

With more instinct than thought, she hurls herself across the platform, lifting the knife with the stake at its core from the place where Astarion discarded it.

Astarion's head swivels to face her, and for a single instant his eyes widen as he recognizes what she is trying to do.

"What are you doing?" he cries over the screams around them. "No - stop!"

She does not stop.

She hurls the knife like a javelin into Cazador's chest.

Silence, abrupt and complete. The swirling power fades. The screaming stops. Cazador, pouring blood from the wound in his heart, slithers to the floor and lays still.

Astarion staggers, then collapses to his knees, letting the staff clatter onto the stone beside him. "It's... it's gone... All that power..." he whispers.

Rakha releases a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. She is trembling all over, her eyes fixed not on Astarion but on Cazador's bloodsoaked body. In the moment of her attack, she was striking not just at him but at Bhaal as well - but Bhaal is not here, just the vampire who dies along with Astarion's hope for ascension.

"You don't need it," she mutters. "You're more than strong enough as you are."

We... are so much more than what they made us. Come with me. We will live, and be damned to them all.

But Astarion's head lifts and he stands and rounds on her, and there is no gratitude in his eyes, no hope. They are like burning coals set in the paleness of his face.

"Don't you tell me what I needed!" he snarls. He looks hollowed out, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. "I was so close - I could have had it all," he says with desperate, furious grief, stepping closer to her. "But you took everything from me!"

His voice lifts to a sudden scream of violent despair, and he grabs her by the collar of her robes, jerking her forward.(*)

The rage in his eyes shows no understanding of why she did what she did, or the similarity she sees between them, or the terrible things that have been done to them both. He needs an enemy, and he no longer has Cazador, and she is the only target that remains.

"Cazador won after all," he says - and his voice is suddenly soft again, hollow and mournful. "I'll never escape the hell he built."

And then his face goes hard for the last time, until it is nothing but steel and rage. "And if I can't escape... then no one can. Not them--"

He drops suddenly, lifts the staff, and without hesitation snaps it across his knee. The power still within it - the power that would have released the seven thousand trapped spawn - bursts in a sudden supernova around his hands... and then fades to nothing.

Through the fading, dying ripples of the Weave, he stares into Rakha's eyes, and if there was ever friendship between them, it's gone now, gone forever to the same place as all that power.

"And certainly not you," he growls. The pieces of the broken staff clatter to the ground, and his fingers close around Rakha's throat.

-----

(*) Artistic license in this whole bit. Only one companion actually speaks up here (in-game it was Minsc), and none of them actually do anything but watch. But I wanted to give everyone a little more activity, so I dug all four characters' lines out of the dialogue files.