Chapter Text
The person that saved Shadowheart on the Nautiloid could not have been older than sixteen. The girl had a violin in her hands and fear in her eyes as she looked at Shadowheart begging for help and hitting her hand against the glass of the pod. Then the teen had offered to help. Even though the Gith that had for some reason been with her had loudly complained about it. Maybe it was because the girl was too young to agree that saving her would have been wasting precious time. But Shadowheart was saved, released from the pod, and fell to the floor. Her young savoir apparently also had a parasite, which wasn’t a surprise. Them connecting on the other hand could prove to be a problem in the future.
Shadowheart was able to grab the artifact without anyone asking what it was or what she was doing. Then they were on their way to the helm because escape was impossible if the ship crashed, and they died. Surviving was also the first step in finishing her mission and their chances of escape started looking better once they arrived at the helm. The Mindflayer thought them thralls and the first few imps were easily killed with a fire bolt, a sword and an insult hurled. Someone, she wasn’t sure who afterwards had managed to get to the transponder and then she was falling out of the sky.
Shadowheart awoke with someone nudging her with the tip of their shoe. It was the girl from the Nautiloid. Wide-eyed and too young to be here.
“You’re alive,” Shadowheart said, “I am alive”
The fall should have killed them, they should be nothing more than specks of blood and gore on the ground. The girl watched her quietly as Shadowheart hid the artifact again, once more asking no questions. They had to find a healer and Shadowheart had to get to Baldur’s Gate as soon as the parasite was taken care of. She had to bring the artifact to the city, Shar demanded it. Travelling together was safer for now, she would drop the girl off as soon as they had found a cure.
The teen was young enough that were might very well be someone looking for her and Shadowheart didn’t think she could compensate for the issues teens usually caused. Her memories were gone, but teenagers not being the most reliable people sounded right. She also would like to avoid being blamed for the death of someone’s child. The crash site was covered in corpses, she found some useful things on a few of them. The crates that had been left behind were filled with trash and luckily some food.
“I found a hat,” the girl said after rummaging through a crate. It was made of green fabric and there were a few feathers attached to the side. Something cheap, but suiting a bard.
“You can keep it if you want,” Shadowheart shrugged.
She was old enough to not need a minder anyway. The girl rewarded the cleric with a grin and loosened the hair braided to the sides of her head, revealing slightly pointy ears. Another half elf then, though what kind she could not make out. There were no grey, green, or gold undertones in her skin and her hair and eyes were simply dark brown. Shadowheart let it be for now, it wasn’t as if anyone could tell she was half-high elf by looking at her either. There was some more food on the beach, and a few plants that they might be able to use to brew potions and there also was a large sturdy locked door.
“You don’t know how to pick a lock, do you?” she asked.
Some bards knew how to do it, probably.
“No, sorry. But if we find a window I can climb in. It’s almost always easier to open things from the inside,” the girl answered.
“There is probably another way in,” Shadowheart said.
Finding help was more important than investigation some ruins anyway. The parasites were a death sentence and ticking time bomb. The wreckage of the Nautiloid had blocked off most of the beach, the only way to the other side was through it. Shadowheart saw three intellect devourers scatter away as they got closer, they attacked as soon as she stepped into the wreckage. She managed to take out one with a guiding bolt before it was able to do anything. The girl whispered something and another one stumbled back as if it was scared off a teen with violin. The third managed to hit her with its claws, ripping flesh and breaking through her armor. Shadowheart brought her mace down on it when it turned around to attack the kid and the brain splattered on the ground. The last one wasn’t much trouble on its own.
Shadowheart healed herself before they continued on, the wound still ached. She knew why she was weaker than she likely had been once, surrendering her memories had been her choice and she wasn’t wavering in her faith, but a bit more power would not be turned down at the moment.
The girl tried to pick the lock of a crate with the tools they had found, she failed and the lock-pick broke apart in her hands. They broke the crate and found an ugly leather helmet and some gold. Useful for when they finally found a settlement. The path continued up a hill, a crashed illithid pod in a grass patch and someone waving at them to come closer awaiting them. The elf asked them to kill an intellect devourer for them. He looked capable enough to do it on his own, with a dagger strapped to his side. They should just leave him to it. But before she could speak a word the girl stepped in front of her.
“Of course we can,” she said and then looked at Shadowheart expectantly, “you should do it, I don’t think I can cast anymore spells today and you have a mace”
She should have just sent the girl to set up camp at the first chance. Against her better judgement Shadowheart tried to help and was rewarded with a knife to the throat for it. She managed to fight the elf off her the exact moment a violin hit the back of his head. Maybe the girl was useful to have around, if just for her guts.
Apparently, the elf also had a parasite and now the three of them were travelling together, because she had as it turned out lost her self-preservation skills along with her memories. She chuckled a bit when the girl didn’t tell him her name either. Shadowheart should ask her about that at some point, but not right now. Danger could still lurk behind every corner.
“Can you pick locks?” the teen asked after they had killed an injured Mindflayer and hopefully left the crashed ship forever.
“Of course I can pick locks,” Astarion said as he rubbed the back of his head.
Shadowheart didn’t have the energy left to cast anything until they got some rest, and even if she had she likely wouldn’t have healed that wound. He had brought that upon himself.
They found a waypoint after looting some goblins, its magic out of control. The girl touched it because this kid had zero impulse control and then a hand came out of it. A few seconds later and Shadowheart pulled a wizard out of the stone after the teen had calmed the magic by humming something. Likely a bard thing. The wizard had a parasite as well and Gale of Waterdeep joined the party.
Apparently, one could get a wizard from a stone.
“You seem awfully young for such an adventure, shouldn’t you still be in school?” he asked almost immediately, eyes focused on the teen in their group.
“I was on my way to pick up a book, I didn’t expect to get kidnapped,” the girl answered.
They made camp not long after that. Some rest would do them all good, as much as one could rest with a parasite in their head. Gale was surprisingly good at cooking, which meant they didn’t have to life off of dry rations alone. But he was a wizard, and wizards were usually power hungry to some degree. It would be best for everyone if they got the parasites out of their heads as quickly as possible and then went their separate ways.
“Does anyone else feel weaker than before, like they lost most of their skills?” then teen asked after they had finished eating.
Except Astarion who had claimed to not be hungry after today’s ordeal. Which made some sense, but she was going to keep an eye on him anyway. There was something wrong with the man who had claimed to be a magistrate back in Baldur’s Gate. But she needed more information to be sure.
“Kind of,” Gale answered, and he was a terrible liar.
Astarion simply ignored the question and Shadowheart nodded. It might not have been a complete lie, she didn’t know what powers she had lost with her memories and which ones might have been left for the parasite to consume.
“I feel like I am back at the start of my training, I forget the tunes that create my magic,” the teen confessed.
“It will likely come back to you in no time, that knowledge is in most cases never really gone,” the wizard said.
They went to sleep soon after. Astarion had offered to take first watch and even though Gale and her had both accepted, Shadowheart was going to sleep with one eye open. Not that finding sleep was easy after what she had lived through today.
In another life Gale might have become a teacher or professor. This was not that life.
In this life he had been stuck in a portal thanks to a magical mishap and was now travelling with a cleric that hadn’t told them anything about her except her name, a magistrate that was weirdly good with knives, and maybe a vampire if the scars and fangs were anything to go off of and a bard child. That girl should be in school, they shouldn’t be dragging her around with them. There were things out here trying to kill them. She should just stay at camp. No one had listened to him when he had brought it up.
The ruins were filled with bandits and Gale somehow managed to talk their way out of that one, with the help from Shadowheart’s prayer and a thumbs up from the child, which had somehow made him feel more confident. The bandits fled because there were supposedly monsters in that ship.
“Would someone else please do the talking next time. I fear this was far too close,” he said.
“I can do the talking,” the child said.
“Astarion will do it. He’s a magistrate, they are really good at twisting words,” Shadowheart shrugged.
“We could have just killed them, would have been less work,” the elf muttered.
The next fight could not have been avoided but Astarion managed to take the man behind the door out in less than 6 seconds, so it really hadn’t taken much time. There were more bandits behind the next door, and Gale would really like to be back in his tower about now. An arrow hit him right in the chest, which was bad but not enough to kill him immediately. One of the bandits was standing very close to a barrel of fire wine. A well placed firebolt and one less bandit to worry about.
Shadowheart shot a guiding bolt at the bandit with a club and missed. She in turn managed to dodge an arrow fired at her but not the fire bolt that came after it. She ran forwards into the room, dodging the fire left by the fire wine and positioned herself closer to their enemies.
After a bit of back and forth, a few arrows and spells fired. Gale nearly dying because a club cracked his skull open, Astarion getting pushed into the fire and Shadowheart managing to take out the spellcaster. They got the upper hand. His elven friend had no problem taking a bandit down after he had started laughing like someone had just told the best joke he had ever heard and the last two were taken care of with another guiding bolt and some magic missiles.
Gale collapsed once the fight was over, he was so weak now, it was embarrassing. He had been an archmage, now he was nearly taken out by a rag tag group of bandits. They took some time to rest, mostly out of pity for him, the others were barely scratched. Astarion looted the corpses and everything that wasn’t tied down, Shadowheart went back to the first room because she was sure she had seen some camp supplies there and Gale was being healed by a child.
All look at Gale of Waterdeep, Archmage, Mystra’s former chosen, reduced to this.
“Not the first time I am healing a wizard,” the girl said after she had stopped humming and the blue glow had vanished, “My brother’s one too. He used to be first one to go down in a fight I heard”
Gale moved his shoulders a bit, the pain was not as bad as it had been. But the girl was far from a practiced healer.
“Your brother’s a wizard?” Gale asked.
“Well one of them is. I have a lot of siblings. He’s always reading some ancient tomb or practicing spells. Or talking our ear off about some ancient magic he wants to figure out. The book I went to Baldur’s Gate for was for him,” she answered.
“A book. Did you by any chance go to Sorcerous Sundries for it?” it was the best place to go for anything magical in Baldur’s Gate.
“I was on my way there, never saw the inside thanks to some Mindflayers. The first time I go to Baldur’s Gate, and it goes terribly wrong. My mother will not be happy about this if I ever see her again”
“You will see her again. We just have to find a healer and then we can get you back to-“ he stopped, she never had told them where she was from.
“Neverwinter, it’s the Jewel of the North,” she said.
That was a really long way from Baldur’s Gate, they’d pass through Waterdeep if they brought her back home.
The door next to Gale, the one that according to Astarion had no lock to pick, swung open. The elf stepped out of the room at the end of the hallway. “That’s what the button was for. Looks like the temple goes even further down” After a few more minutes of rest and Shadowheart coming back with camp supplies and a portrait she found somewhere, it looked expensive so maybe it was worth selling. They continued further down into the temple.
There were two large doors, only one of them locked. The other led to a room with a large sarcophagus in the middle and smaller ones at the sides. He walked towards it.
“Be careful, there are traps about,” Astarion hissed as he pulled him back by the shoulder and knelt to disarm what was likely a pressure plate.
Most of the room was trapped, but after some careful maneuvers they had found a spear and a key. The key unlocked the other door which led to a chapel and a lot of armed scribes that had been dead for a very long time. Shadowheart was saying something, but Gale was looking at the statue in front of them. Was that Jergal? He didn’t think anyone still worshipped the scribe of the dead.
“There’s another button here,” the girl called out to them from the steps leading up from the left of the statue.
The button woke up skeletons and unlocked the door to another room. They were still tired from the last fight, and it didn’t help when the skeletons started to cast silence on them and bombard them with rays of frost. Shadowheart broke one’s concentration on the spell, Gale took it out with an ice knife. The cleric then jumped over the railing to distract the skeletal warrior so that Astarion could get a hit with his bow and arrow in. As long as they didn’t stay too close together survival was not unlikely. The last scribe finally crumbled to bone dust when Gale’s hands were shacking so much from exhaustion that he could barely focus on the somatic components of his spells anymore. But he felt like a small part of his prowess had returned to him.
Astarion immediately tried to loot the sarcophagus that had been in the hidden room and a skeleton crawled out of it. A very polite one, that asked a question and then left them standing there. He saw the girl pull something out of a vase and put it into her bag. Some sort of amulet, a magic item. The orb in his chest was for now able to be ignored but it would not stay like this for long. Gale barely knew these people at all, he couldn’t tell them of his condition yet. But he might have to sooner or later.
He managed to make some food with what they had. Astarion didn’t eat anything tonight once again even though he looked a bit hungry. Gale wasn’t going to voice his suspicion as long as no one in camp woke up with fangs in their necks. The child was trying to use a rapier they had found somewhere and Shadowheart had already retired to pray.
“That’s not how you use that, brat,” Astarion said as he turned the page of his book.
“I am not doing this for the first time, it’s supposed to look like a dance,” she made another slashing motion with the weapon, “and don’t call me brat, I have a name”
Gale stopped focusing on the somatic components of the spell he had been practicing. “You haven’t told us your name yet”
The child let the weapon down and looked at them. “I don’t really know any of you. But you can call me Melody.”
Gale could practically hear Astarion rolling his eyes. Which if he was right, was just hypocrisy. Someone hiding that they were a vampire was so much worse than telling a fake name because one didn’t trust a group of strangers after spending two days with them. Two days where they all came close to death more than once.
“Any divination wizards in your family?” Gale asked. Because nothing good came from Astarion antagonizing a teenager. She raised an eyebrow at him before she understood what he meant.
“No, my father was a bard. He taught me how to play” she grinned at him.
The brat was a liar. At best she had told them some half-truths, but Astarion knew when someone was hiding things and she might have been better at it than Gale but not good enough to fool him. Her presence alone threw a wrench in his plans. He knew how to handle children, give them sweets, and hope they leave you alone. But teenagers were another can of worms. He had tried to just ignore her at first. Which had worked up until after they had rescued a Gith from two Tieflings, Lae’zel was a delight to have around, and saved a druid grove from some goblins.
There was now a monster hunter in their camp too, the Blade of Frontiers, because apparently everyone had a tadpole in their head now. He had to be more careful the next time he snuck out of camp to sink his teeth into something. The brat also complicated his very nice and simple plan. Because Gale was against all logic the only viable option. Lae’zel did not care if any of them died, and he didn’t think he’d be able to change that. Shadowheart was a zealot of some likely evil deity, otherwise she would have spouted some nonsense about how great her god was already, it was too risky. On top of that their newest addition was a monster hunter, Astarion would prefer if this didn’t end with a stake between his ribs.
So, it had to be the wizard. He had worked with worse in the past, the man was by no means ugly. But his target had decided that the evenings would be best spent in an attempt to teach a bard wizard spells. It had worked to Astarion’s irritation. The brat was now able to summon a little bat at will, the gods truly had nothing, but hatred left for him. Thankfully the wizard was now not being crowded by a teen anymore as soon as they stepped into camp. He had also nearly managed to get poisoned because those druids were homicidal and now, they had to find their leader.
The next step of his plan was successful, the wizard believed every word that left his lips beneath the stars. Not so smart then.
There was a lot of blood in a boar, and it was fresh and so full of life. He would never go back to anything else. Cazador could rage as much back in Baldur’s Gate as he wanted, the only reason Astarion would ever come back was to end him. He was truly sated for the first time in his unlife. Everyone was still asleep when he returned to camp or so he had thought.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
The brat turned her head towards him and then looked back towards the side of the ruins she had just fallen off.
“I tried to climb up,” she said and gestured at the wall.
“I saw that, I am asking why you did in the middle of the night,” he sighed, “and some advice that just looked like a very bad attempt at running up a wall”
“I know. I could do it before the tadpole without a problem. I thought it would have come back to me by now,” the brat told him.
“I don’t care. I am going back to bed.”
Astarion hoped no one else had noticed that he was gone, maybe the brat herself hadn’t either. There were no questions of where he had been or what he had been doing. The next day they were finally going to leave her behind at camp with some unlucky soul.
“You can’t leave me behind, what if there’s a lock to pick or you get blown up by a trap because I wasn’t there to notice and disarm it,” Astarion crossed his arms in front of his chest.
Gale couldn’t be serious.
“This will likely be an open fight, Astarion. We need someone on the offense,” Wyll told him, “we can come back to get you later to see if there is anything worth looting”
“Or we could simply break the crates, the yield will be the same,” Lae’zel said.
“Or that,” the warlock acknowledged, “we're likely going to fight a devil today, if we can find her.”
Astarion groaned, he could fight a devil. A knife slipped between ribs slowed everyone down.
“You’re going to stay in camp today or you can go to the grove, just keep out of danger,” Wyll continued.
“The brat’s basically an adult. I don’t understand why anyone has to stay behind.”
“Our camp could be attacked while we are away, it is a purely tactical decision, I agree that the youth should be able to defend herself though. Otherwise, she is only a burden,” Lae’zel stated.
“Can we just go?” Shadowheart asked.
“We’ll be back before nightfall,” Wyll said.
Then they were gone. If they wanted fighters, they should have left Gale behind. Who had tried to hide his giggles behind his hand before they had left, like he was happy his suggestion had been accepted. It didn’t matter, he had some books to read.
“Does this look like Shadowheart?” the brat asked around noon.
Astarion closed the book he had stopped reading some time ago and raised an eyebrow at her. She was standing in front of his tent, a stack of papers in her hands. She grabbed the page on top of it and turned it around to show him. It was a charcoal sketch of the resident cleric. It looked surprisingly accurate.
“Kind of, I think you got the eyes and nose wrong though,” he lied and opened the book again.
The brat huffed. “Maybe, I think that’s not the problem. I didn’t get Gale’s nose wrong when I drew him. There’s something not right with the hair.” She glared at her sketch.
“Are you drawing everyone in camp or what?” Astarion asked.
“Kind of, I sketch when I am bored, and I can’t tune my violin twenty times a day. I already drew Gale and Wyll. I hope drawing Lae’zel won’t be too much trouble, never did a Githyanki portrait before,” the brat answered. She rocked back on her feet and closed her hand around the sketch, crumpling the paper.
Where had she gotten drawing supplies from in the first place? Probably the thieving children in the grove.
“Gale said we should brew some potions,” she said, stopping him from rereading the last paragraph twenty more times.
“I don’t care. If you want to play alchemist, feel free to do so, brat,” he waved her off.
She finally gave him some peace of mind. He was going to laugh at the next person they left in camp, openly. Astarion did not like children, but an actual child would be easier to deal with than this. He was sure of it, even if the last children he had interacted with were the Gur he had kidnapped for Cazador, and Leon’s brat. He had spoken to Victoria maybe two times, but she didn’t cause him headaches.
“Do you have siblings?” the brat asked when the sun started to set.
The others still weren’t back. He did not provide her with an answer, that would require asking what exactly she meant with that and him thinking about it. Which wasn’t going to happen. The bat familiar was perched on her shoulder and cuddled itself into her hair. It was just some spirit in the form of a bat with black fur and dark eyes, it should not remind him of Cazador’s bat from. But it looked eerily similar.
“I have twelve, six brothers and six sisters,” she said after a few minutes.
The rest of their ragtag group returned before he could ask her who in their right mind would have thirteen children.
Karlach as it turned out was no devil, just a Tiefling that had fallen victim to Zariel. Wyll looked skittish through dinner and Gale had talked about some sort of wizard thing. Astarion hadn’t listened to him, had tried to desperately not look at the brat’s familiar. That problem moved to the back of his head when an actual devil showed up in the middle of their camp.