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Violet digs her claws into his scalp.
Astarion isn't expecting it—isn't expecting anything—and all he can do is shout as she hooks his curls and starts pulling, dragging him to the side of the cot. He writhes. She pulls harder.
"Brother," she hisses, eyes glittering. There isn't quite enough behind the red. Structureless. But she grabs his hair and she yanks down, old blood heavy in the air. He tries to grapple back. He fails. She's always been stronger. She hauls him to the very edge, wavering on the precipice.
"Brother," she repeats, a croon, a murmur.
Then she burns.
-
Astarion learns about Violet's death on a day with a blizzard.
Karlach isn't the one to find the body, but she's the one to tell him. She doesn't look right at him when she does so; gaze a little south, a little helpless. She's normally better at it. Maybe that's why he knows what she's going to say—not the words, not the meaning, but what—before he hears it.
Body at the docks. One of the spawn in the ritual. Woman. High elf.
He waits for it to break. For the joke to be washed, sent out, removed. Poor taste. Move on.
Karlach looks at him fully. Shakes her head.
Just like that, Astarion has done what he thought impossible: he outlives one of his siblings.
-
Karlach tells him right when she gets home, so there are hours in which Astarion walks through the house and interacts and speaks and drags his thoughts into avoiding the inevitable. It creeps up anyway. He has never been adept at silence.
Violet is dead. Everyone else died far or near or too early, little Victoria all sprawled on sodden carpet and seven thousand territorial fights beneath darkness, but Violet is dead and it happened in the same city. The same night, maybe. He went to bed and she died.
Who is he mourning? They didn't know each other. There isn't anyone to mourn. Just a hyena-laugh and matted white hair; a silhouette from a history too full of them. If it was Aurelia or Dalyria, perhaps. They were still shaped enough like people for him to think on with something alongside contempt. But not Violet. She hadn't been anything but a collection of teeth.
Now she's dead. There's no more to fear from her cutting her way through the dormitory from an upset none of them can figure out, provoking Cazador with nonsensical fervour, tearing pounds of flesh she hadn't earned from their backs. She's gone. The story ends. He's free of what she was.
Somewhere in Baldur's Gate, by the docks and the ice filling the harbours, Astarion's sister died and he wasn't there.
-
Violet got freedom twenty years into her new life. Twenty years until Cazador trusted her tongue to be unleashed upon the Lower City, a hurricane where others were mere clouds. It wasn't freedom in any meaning of the word, but it was the closest they got, and she had already learned not to dream. Scraps for scraps.
She didn't come back reeking of sex. She came back with blood under her nails and she came back hungry. She is made to scrub the carpet of the foyer for hours until it's clean, eyes burning all the while.
A hunter instead of the hunted. It makes her different in more ways than she already was. Astarion remembers being bitter. Wishing he would do it her way but too scared he would start failing. Too scared of the consequences. He always is.
She goes to the kennels. She gets out of the kennels. She climbs the heavy stairs to the top of the palace and talks back and laughs and screams. She is punished. She continues on.
(It takes centuries to understand the pressure in Astarion's chest, the missing time. The way he watched her roving eyes, waiting to see if she'd look back.
She acts like worse things have happened to her than Cazador.
She acts like he can't change her.
The feeling is jealousy.)
-
Shards of melting ice leave little lines down his temples, tracing the edges of his brow. Karlach continues carding her hands through his hair, each touch hesitant. Waiting for him to pull back—to run away, his closing statement for every act. She'd found him in the abandoned building, blood steaming over the snow, curled up and snarling and insensate. Picked him up. Led him home.
Back at the walls, back before the fire.
Karlach gets the last of the ice out of his hair, chasing the chill away before it can take too deep a root. You want anything? she asks, all quiet. A gesture to their kitchen.
Astarion wants to say, did you know she liked the library? Did you know she liked reading stories that never had as much horror as our existence? Did you know I thought she used to be a singer because there were days she couldn't remember her name but still sang? Did you know that a woman died in her grave except she didn't die she was taken?
Astarion says, no, thank you, I'm fine.
-
He never actually learns how Violet was first killed.
There's no learning about her in the way that word means for other people. She is dragged to the foyer, corpse-stiff and eyes clouded. Aurelia and Astarion are given the role of sibling, and she is their charge. Petras isn't included in that number. He's still too raw, too fresh, coming home with bruises under his eyes and hunched shoulders. He still thinks this is fine. He still wants it.
Violet came screaming. Violet dug herself out of her grave and never stopped screaming, even if she sometimes closed her mouth. It was still in her eyes, that scream; every silence was just a cover. The scream was uninterrupted. It had a desperation to it; something worse than memory.
No injuries beyond the twin bites on her neck. No recognizable clothing beyond ratty fineries from dragging herself through the cemetery. No history, no past, no name. Cazador named her instead. Did it mockingly, but Violet hadn't recognized whatever slight it was supposed to be, and neither did the others, because there was nothing to recognize. Just a shrieking mess of a spawn that was to be their sibling.
All things are adaptable. Astarion adjusted. She became not a ghost but another shadow; another in the crowd of those deathless. He learned her patterns. He moved around them.
She never stopped screaming. It still frightened him at times, but it frightened others more. Let her drag home new targets who were too scared of what she might do to notice what she was doing. It's what kept her alive. Kept her useful.
One mad woman and six spawn. The pitiful, the terrifying. He never understood what happened to her; why she was allowed to escape into madness while the rest of them were tethered to sanity.
He never asked. She never answered.
-
(In the end, she had laughed in the only laugh she had anymore and pulled on his hair—pulled him off the cot in a clatter of limbs, sprawled as though thrown from a greater height. She laughed again as he struggled, picking himself up, trying to understand why.
There hadn't been a why. There hadn't been a reason. It didn't hurt much and it didn't destroy anything and it wasn't revenge. There was no lesson nor command. She had just pulled him to the ground and stepped back.
Three weeks later, she did it again. Astarion hooked his claws into the wooden frame and didn't fall.
She never tries again.)
-
There isn't going to be a funeral. He doesn't want her corpse. He already knows what he'd see—the same he saw back in the dormitory, when the world was cold wind and something outside the door neither of them wanted to open. Smaller, maybe. Eaten until she withered. Until she went hunting in a blizzard and never emerged out the other side.
The last time he'd seen her had been deep beneath the palace, bound by red and terror. Then Cazador had died and Astarion had sobbed and when he looked up, all of them were gone. To the Underdark, someone told him later, but there were seven thousand and all starving. There isn't enough ground in Faerûn for all those dead to get a grave. To earn one.
Violet hadn't been a good person. Neither had Astarion. That's half of how they survived; no morals for immoral creatures. They don't deserve a funeral. They don't deserve to return to gravedirt; to be buried again, like they'll claw their way back out, like they'd make the same choice for eternity after learning the cost.
He asks Karlach to put Violet out in the morning; to let the sun carry her away.
No more graves.
-
Astarion stays out when the blizzard rolls through again, filling the sky with powder so gentle it seems as though it would never make corpses. He stretches out a hand to let the flakes layer over his palm. They don't melt; he has no body heat to do so. They just gather there, crystalline and impossible.
It was a stake to her heart. This is known. Karlach kept the story short but he knows there was a stake and she had fallen and one of her legs was dissolving in the river but it was the stake that had done it, nothing more, nothing less.
But she had been out in the blizzard. Out in the snow. Out in Baldur's Gate, far from the Underdark, from darkness.
The snow piles up on his hand. Softens itself into something tamed.
He wonders if Violet was freezing when she died.
-
Scars make for stories, so Astarion has to remember them himself, most of the time. Regeneration blurs all the lines, smears it into a singular hue. Stitches one year into the next. Easier to know two centuries than it is to know one month in the midst of all that agony. But parts of it escape the grinding to prod at his subconscious.
There should be something over his face, taking most of his lower jaw and part his nose with it. Violet's claws. It was easy, sometimes, to see her laughing and screaming and singing and think her harmless—predictable in her unpredictability.
Then he'd taken a step too close and she'd ripped half his face off.
She would have her own constellations by his hands, though he can't remember anything after so long. Just the hazy knowledge that they should be there, and they aren't. They never will. The past is erased upon red rivers and only the patchwork of their shared memories preserve it, if it is even something that ought to be remembered.
He hurt her. She hurt him. He's not sure which came first.
He's not sure it matters.
-
(She had torn him apart; she had devoured him, spitting out blood all the while, wordless as she screamed, as the scream picked right up where it had never stopped.
The next day, she had slunk into his bed, curled up like she was a thing half her size, limbs shaky where Cazador had removed her tendons for the offense. It forced her to crawl. It made her pale hair streak through with grime and soot.
She'd turned away from him, still on his bed, her eyes half-lidded. Waiting.
He combed through her hair. Picked the worst from it; pinned it in a loose braid so it would stay clean until she could look after it herself.
It wasn't an apology.
But neither of them were really deserving of apologies.)
-
Karlach shows him the spot, much later, when the blizzard is gone and the snow is gone and spring has started her hesitant rise over the horizon.
It's nondescript. It's nothing. It's the river's edge behind a dockyard storage where, if someone was cold and starving and desperate, they could stand in the cavity behind the door and jump at anyone that came out of it.
This is where Karlach leads him, but her eyes drift further—go down to the banks of the river, to the roots of a gnarled tree, halfway between water and land. Where someone could have fallen, if they had tried to jump but been stopped before they could do anything.
Astarion crouches by the river. Doesn't touch it, keenly aware of the water running by, but searches through the dirt and mud like Violet would have left something behind. Like the weeks haven't wiped away the last of the traces. Like the sun hasn't burnt away her story.
She died here. She was alone and she was starving and someone put a stake through her heart when she came to kill them.
He wonders if it would have been better, if she had died in one of those endless moments where he was so, so sure that Cazador had found their limits, that they were being pushed beyond the brink, that none of them would ever be free.
Instead, they did. They all made it back to the world.
And then she died anyway.
-
They didn't have Dalyria yet when Violet stumbled back one day, no mark at her side nor dragged behind her, as she was wont to do. It was near morning and Aurelia hadn't laid down yet, too nervous, and then the door swung open and Violet collapsed over the threshold.
More flesh than spawn. Riddled holes with bone visible underneath, dry and bloodless, because she snarls instead of simpers and doesn't get rats. A cut over her throat to see where her words rattle before they come out. A hunt gone wrong. Terribly wrong.
Hers were hunts more than theirs were. She didn't sleep with her marks. She goaded them, baited them, found those angry and made them angrier—got them to follow her by promising a fight, and a fight she gave. Bloody brawls in back alleys with the half-dead dragged home.
It worked. It worked well. She was consistent and she was powerful. None of the other spawn could challenge her, not when their skills were pretty and plain and basic, and so they didn't. She raged on, winding tighter and tighter until she could go hunt and beat her fury onto someone she knew she was stronger than.
The day she stumbled home was the first time Astarion had seen her lose. Where she laid there, wheezing and spasming and trying to claw her way further into the room, and he had thought, oh.
-
("Brother," she says, soft and a little unsure, the way she sometimes is in the early morning, when the fervour of the night has ended and left the shape of her in its wake, when the curtain doesn't peel back but there is something present in her eyes, "I don't want to die."
You aren't my sister, Astarion says when he can remember that this dream is nothing more than the hope of what could have been. Because she hadn't said that. She had never said anything, it seems.
Instead, his lips complete the script: "Then you shouldn't have said yes, sister dear.")
-
The thought is unprompted when it comes to him, watching Karlach fill the feeding vial for Petras in the fox-hole—the others don't know. Seven siblings, now six. They don't know, but they should.
Then he wonders what he could even say. Sorry our sister is dead. Sorry I didn't help her. Sorry I didn't help you. Sorry I killed our master and thought it was enough. Sorry we're still monsters. Sorry we can survive hell just to die.
He thought she was in the Underdark. Then she was dead by the river, and she had died alone, and he's realizing now he doesn't know where the rest of his siblings are so they might be dead, too. They might be ghosts and he won't know because Karlach only saw Violet's corpse instead of theirs.
The idea digs roots. Fills all the empty space of his mind with corpses and their shadows.
He used to wake from trance when Violet would garble too violently in the nest she made of her bedding, mouthing on sheets to chase the feeling of ripping flesh because she would bring her victims back half-dead and still got more than the others. She laughed at them all whenever they stunk of sex and bite marks that didn't have blood to bruise. Late mornings were divided around whatever songs she'd gathered and dusted off for use.
In his memories, she isn't dead yet. None of them are.
-
Spring comes fully. The snow all melts away. There is nothing left of the cold that might have pushed her to do what she did. It is only longer mornings and pale leaves and a river rushing by in endless waves, heedless of the corpse that once laid upon its shore with a fate she did and didn't deserve.
Astarion goes there under darkness, ears pricked and dressed in mute tones. He has no momentos so he plants violets instead, seeds spread over the riverbank where they will grow atop a place that had killed. Green and purple instead of white. Green and purple instead of red.
There is no stake. There is no trail for the person that killed her; no way to find out who. There is only the spot alongside the river where she had died, and the story she had been.
-
(She was the first. She was the fourth spawn but she was the first. Aurelia was broken and Astarion was made to break and Petras came wanting but she was the first and only to be something outside of the paracosm. Her madness was not Cazador's doing. He wanted it gone and it would not go.
Violet was the fourth.
She was the first to bring hope.)
-
(Perhaps it is fitting, then, that she left quietly; that her story ended before it could repeat.)
-
(I promise to remember you, Violet.)