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She wasn’t the first survivor Astarion had come across after the Nautiloid crash-landed onto a small stretch of beach south of the Sword Coast’s infamous Risen Road — but she was the first without tentacles, and that alone made her a tempting mark.
It didn’t hurt that she was such a small, pretty morsel, either. She wasn’t his type, not exactly — but she was Cazador’s, and that meant he was primed to notice her. He hated himself for it, but two centuries of compulsion had taught him to seek out the kind of fragile beauty his master lived to destroy... so when he glimpsed a lithe wood elf with storm‑gray eyes and blood‑wine hair, moving through the sand like a wounded thing, something dark and predatory inside him sat up and said "this one."
He studied her from afar, marking her progress with his eyes as she followed a trail of bodies, some ilithid, most human — or at least humanoid — up the coast. At first glance, she looked as unmoored as he felt: as unsteady on her feet as a newborn fawn, swaying in time to a melody only she could hear, her arms outstretched and hands splayed wide as she half-stumbled, half-staggered along the rocky shore.
As she drew nearer, his sharp eyes picked out additional details: the rapier on her hip and violin case on her back, a showy doublet — well-tailored and oft-mended, much like his own clothes — and eventually, when she was practically on top of him, the collection of fine line tattoos curling up her neck and throat in sinuous vines of dark green ink.
Much to his surprise, he found that he wanted to touch them — to trace the delicate lines with his fingers as they curved across the pulse fluttering in her throat. His hunger rose, unbidden, and he tamped it down with long-suffering ease. This was not the time to wonder if Cazador’s prohibition against feeding on thinking creatures still held.
When she finally noticed him, her expression was bright and unguarded. He beckoned to her, and she came willingly — even eagerly. Under other circumstances, he might have been tempted to use seduction rather than violence. But he was already half-drunk on sunlight and freedom, and he had found an old dagger on a fresh corpse that fit his palm as if it had been made for him.
It had been easy — too easy — to manufacture an opening. The moment she turned her back, he struck: sweeping her legs out from under her, pressing a naked blade against the hollow of her throat and riding her supple body down into the dirt. She hadn’t even tried to fight him; she had been warm and pliant in his arms, at least until the moment their eyes met for the first time and their tadpoles connected mind-to-mind.
He had no idea what flash of memory or glimpse of insight she stole from him in that instant, but as his vision washed red, he saw his own face through a stranger’s eyes — too fleeting for him to make out details or commit the image to memory, although he was left with the strangest impression of himself as a perfect pretty corpse…
Then the vision shattered into pain and he rolled away from her, gasping for breath he didn’t need.
They stared at each other warily, and for the first time he wondered if perhaps she wasn’t quite as fragile — or as innocent — as she seemed.