Chapter Text
She is his salvation, and he is her damnation.
LIKE THE MOON REMEMBERS THE SUN, Astarion remembers her, wholly celestial and utterly harmonious. The winter that cannot survive without the summer. A fate understood by none but the Gods themselves, unmatched and otherworldly. A love that surpasses the ages.
He remembers gliding a finger across her soft skin, the warmth sending tingles down his arm. She was the embodiment of etherealness—as though the Gods had handpicked and forged her themselves—completely sun-kissed and drenched in vibrant pinks and oranges. Lyra was summertime itself; laughter and dances and home in one. She was the feeling of sprinting down wild paths, surrounded by the orange haze of sunset where fireflies twinkled in high grasses; the feeling of eating sweets in front of the kitchen fireplace, the flames casting warm shadows. He would trace the freckles that webbed like constellations across her cheeks, gazing into eyes that softened like honey. Her hair blazed a gorgeous ginger under a midsummer sun, always styled in colorful flowers or intricate designs. Astarion would relish in her radiance, every touch lingering like a soft-spoken whisper. Tingles and pulses that ached with the life of a thousand stars.
The image dissipates into the cold embrace of nighttime—an echo that dies too quick, a fire that sizzles too fast—another ghost of his cruel past come to haunt him. The embers are all that's left as the tendrils of dreams that crush under reality. The moon lost the sun, just as the winter lost the summer. Wraiths of hope dance around him—the malediction of the Gods—no doubt.
Generosity. Justice. Life.
Murder. Tyranny. Death.
The Gods play vicious jokes, and Astarion knows they taunt him most: His past is soiled in trauma and violence, hands bloodied with deception and shame. He knows who he is; he knows the sins he's committed. And he knows finding Lyra after two hundred years, staring into her unknowing eyes, is their next disgusting jape. A stabbing jab at the life he could've had and a grim omen of the tragedies to come. Forever lost in the dreams of midsummer dances; the ruination of a vampire who loved and lost because the Gods never answered desperate pleas.
A lifetime of torment; for the sun may not remember the moon, but the moon is cursed to remember every sin that lead to losing everything.