Chapter Text
Astarion Ancunín knew the shape of every room before he entered it.
That was not magic. He would have preferred magic, naturally. Magic had flair. Magic had drama. Magic had the decency to announce itself with a bit of light and sound and perhaps a handsome breeze through one’s hair.
No, this was merely survival dressed up as talent.
A room had rules. Every room did. The parlors of petty nobles, the smoky gambling dens beneath the wine shops, the market halls with their shouting fishmongers and sticky-fingered children, the back chambers of counting houses, the polished municipal offices where men with soft hands pretended the Lower City was a problem they were very nearly ready to solve.
Every room had doors.
Every door had a lock.
Every lock had a person who thought it belonged to them.
And every person, if watched carefully enough, could be opened.
Astarion had learned that young.
Before the robes. Before the rings. Before the powdered magistrates who sighed his name with irritation and envy in equal measure. Before people began calling him Your Honor in that careful tone that suggested they had expected someone older, uglier, and significantly less well dressed.
Before all that, there had been a room beneath a bakery that always smelled faintly of flour, damp brick, and cabbage soup.
There had been his mother, who could stretch a loaf of bread across three days and still somehow pretend she had already eaten.
There had been Astarion, all elbows and hunger and bright, furious eyes, slipping through the Lower City like a rumor.
He had not been an orphan.
That would have been tidier.
Orphans were tragic in a way people understood. People knew what to do with orphans. They gave them stale buns, or holy lectures, or kicked them away from shop windows depending on the weather and the state of their conscience.
Astarion had a mother, which was worse.
It meant there was someone to disappoint.
It meant there was someone whose face he had to avoid looking at when he came home with silver buttons in his pocket and a split lip he insisted was nothing.
It meant every theft had a witness, even if she never saw him do it.
“You cannot keep bringing home things that do not belong to you,” she had told him once, holding up a gentleman’s purse between two fingers as if it were a dead rat.
Astarion, who had been perhaps eleven and already far too aware of the power of looking wounded, widened his eyes.
“It was abandoned.”
“It was in your boot.”
“Yes. Abandoned there.”
“Astarion.”
He remembered her saying his name like that. Not angrily, not really. Tiredly. As though she had carried it farther than he had.
He had hated that.
Loved her for it, naturally, in the private furious way children loved the people who could still make them feel small. But hated it too.
“I’m helping,” he had snapped.
“You are stealing.”
“I am reallocating resources.”
“You are eleven.”
“Then imagine what I’ll accomplish by twelve.”
“Little star,” she murmured, not quite fondly enough to let him win and not sternly enough to wound him.
He scowled. “I am not little.”
“No,” she said, folding the stolen purse closed. “You are very large trouble in a very small coat.”
He should have hated the name. He was eleven, after all, and already in possession of a dignity that required constant defense. But the words settled somewhere warm in him all the same. Little star. A foolish name. A mother’s name. Something private enough that the city could not get its filthy hands on it.
She had turned away so he would not see her smile.
He had seen it anyway.
That was another thing he learned early: people were most honest in the half-second after they thought they had hidden themselves.
By fifteen, he could lift a coin purse without breaking stride, pick a simple lock with a hairpin, and talk his way out of consequences with such dazzling nerve that half the time people apologized to him afterward.
By seventeen, he had decided petty crime was beneath him.
Not morally. Morality had always seemed like something people with full stomachs invented to feel superior.
No, petty crime was beneath him aesthetically.
It lacked ambition.
The city was full of men who stole by the handful and called it law. Landlords who raised rents on buildings they never repaired. Merchants who cut flour with chalk. Patriars who paid children pennies to crawl into pipes too narrow for grown men, then expressed theatrical grief when the children failed to crawl back out.
And above them all sat the courts, the clerks, the ledgers, the seals, the polished benches and solemn oaths.
Astarion looked at them and thought, with breathtaking arrogance and absolute clarity:
I can do that better.
So he did.
It was not easy, though he later made a hobby of implying it had been.
He worked. Obsessively, secretly, violently hard.
He copied legal arguments by candlelight until his fingers cramped. He charmed retired clerks into explaining procedures they were certain he was too pretty to understand. He learned which magistrates could be flattered, which could be bribed, and which had to be made afraid of looking foolish in public.
He polished his speech until the rougher edges of the Lower City only appeared when he was tired, drunk, or trying to make someone underestimate him.
He chose his words.
He chose his heels.
That part, admittedly, was vanity.
The first time he wore proper court shoes, black leather with a modest but undeniable lift, he stood in front of the tarnished mirror in his mother’s rooms and turned one ankle, then the other.
“Well?” he demanded.
His mother looked up from mending one of his shirts. Her hair had gone silver at the temples earlier than it should have. He pretended not to notice. She pretended not to notice him noticing.
“You look taller,” she said.
“I am taller.”
“The shoes are taller.”
“A distinction without legal significance.”
“Is that what they teach you?”
“They teach me many things. Some of them intentionally.”
She shook her head, but her mouth softened.
Astarion adjusted his cuffs, studying himself.
He was not yet what he would become. His face was still a little too young for the severity he tried to arrange upon it. His mouth betrayed amusement too readily. His hair, pale and curling, refused discipline unless threatened with expensive oils he could not yet afford.
But he could see the outline.
A man people would have to make room for.
A man who would never again be shooed from a doorway.
A man whose name would be spoken before he entered.
“Astarion,” his mother said quietly.
He did not turn. “Mm?”
“Be careful who you make jealous.”
“Little star,” she added, softer this time.
Astarion’s mouth tightened. “You cannot call me that while I’m wearing court shoes.”
“Especially then.”
He looked back at the mirror before she could see what it did to him. The name belonged to low ceilings, thin soup, candlelight, and her hand smoothing his hair when fever made him small enough to allow it. It had no place beside polished leather and legal ambition.
Which was precisely why it hurt.
He smiled at his reflection.
“My dear mother, everyone is jealous. It’s one of my more reliable qualities.”
“That is not what I mean.”
“I know.”
And he had known.
He had simply not cared enough.
Not then.
Not while the city still felt like a promise.
The Lower City adored spectacle, and Astarion had never denied the Lower City anything it adored.
On the evening his appointment became official, he walked beneath golden lamps with his robes open at the throat just enough to irritate traditionalists and interest everyone else. The streets shone from recent rain. The stones caught fire in the lamplight. Music spilled from taverns, a violin here, a drumbeat there, voices rising in bright drunken argument.
The night moved around him like it knew him.
He liked that.
He liked the noise, the heat, the press of bodies, the sense that everyone wanted something and most of them were willing to lie for it. He liked the city best after dark, when it stopped pretending to be respectable.
“A magistrate,” said Ilvara, falling into step beside him with a laugh. “Gods preserve us.”
Astarion glanced down at her. “Too late. The gods saw my face and lost all objectivity.”
Ilvara was a halfling barrister with a laugh like broken glass and a talent for making witnesses confess just to escape her questions. She had known him before he had the robes, which made her dangerous.
“You’ll be insufferable now,” she said.
“Now?”
“More insufferable.”
“I accept your congratulations.”
“I did not offer any.”
“You thought them very loudly.”
She snorted and took his arm without asking. He allowed it because she was useful, and because he liked her, and because she had once stabbed a man in the thigh with a letter opener for calling him gutter-bred during a clerkship hearing.
He had been perfectly capable of defending himself.
Still, one appreciated loyalty.
They passed a group of young nobles clustered outside a wine house. One of them recognized him and lifted a hand.
“Ancunín! Is it true? They’ve given you a bench?”
Astarion stopped just long enough to smile.
“They have. Do try to commit your crimes elegantly. I’d hate to be bored.”
The nobles laughed. One of them blushed. Another looked annoyed, which pleased him more.
Ilvara tugged him onward. “You enjoy that far too much.”
“Being admired? Yes. I’ve decided humility is a poor use of good bone structure.”
“You know they don’t admire you.”
“Of course they do.”
“They’re entertained by you.”
“My dear, in this city that is a sturdier currency.”
She looked at him from the corner of her eye. “And what are you going to do with it?”
“Everything.”
The word came out lightly. Too lightly. A pretty word tossed into the air.
But Ilvara heard him.
She always heard too much.
“Careful,” she said.
“You and my mother should form a chorus.”
“I mean it.”
“How alarming.”
“Astarion.”
He sighed. “What would you have me say? That I’ll be meek? That I’ll sit behind a desk and stamp papers until my spine fuses? That I’ll let men who can barely read precedent tell me when to speak?”
“No. I’d have you remember that people hate being outplayed by someone they believe should have stayed beneath them.”
His smile sharpened.
“Then they should learn to play better.”
Ilvara studied him for a moment, and in her face he saw the thing he disliked most from people who knew him well: concern.
Not pity. He would have cut pity down where it stood.
Concern was worse. It suggested he was not merely impressive, but vulnerable.
“I know what I’m doing,” he said.
“No, you don’t.”
He laughed, because it was easier than hearing her.
“Darling, I have built an entire career on knowing exactly what I’m doing.”
“Yes,” she said. “And one day someone is going to look at you and decide they want to own whatever makes you so certain.”
Something cold moved over his skin.
Only for a moment.
Then a carriage passed, splashing muddy water near his shoes, and he leapt back with a scandalized noise.
“Oh, absolutely not,” he snapped after it. “Those are new.”
Ilvara laughed despite herself.
The cold passed.
The night was golden again.
His first months as magistrate made him famous in all the wrong ways.
The Upper City called him theatrical.
The Lower City called him useful.
Astarion preferred the second, though he accepted the first as evidence of successful branding.
He was not kind.
He disliked sentimental rulings. He had no patience for fools who mistook desperation for virtue. He could be cutting, vain, impatient, and so pleased with his own cleverness that even those who liked him sometimes wanted to slap him.
But he was real.
That was the part people missed later, when the stories softened or sharpened depending on who told them.
He was not cruel for pleasure.
Not then.
When a fishmonger’s boy was brought before him for theft, shivering in a coat too thin for the season, Astarion leaned back in his chair and watched the merchant rant about moral decay.
The boy stared at the floor.
“How much?” Astarion asked.
The merchant blinked. “Your Honor?”
“How much did he steal?”
“Three smoked eels and a heel of cheese.”
“Devastating. I assume your empire will recover in time.”
The courtroom tittered.
The merchant flushed. “It is the principle.”
“Principles are very expensive. One must be careful not to spend them on cheese.”
“Your Honor, this boy is a menace. His sort—”
“His sort?”
The temperature in the room changed.
Astarion’s voice remained pleasant. That was usually when people began to worry.
The merchant swallowed. “Thieves, I mean.”
“Ah. Thieves.” Astarion looked at the boy. “Did you steal the eels?”
The boy’s jaw trembled. “Yes, Your Honor.”
“And the cheese?”
“Yes.”
“For profit?”
“No.”
“For sport?”
The boy looked confused. “No.”
“To impress someone?”
“No.”
“Then I am forced to conclude you stole food because you were hungry. A reckless and unprecedented motive. Clerk, do we have any statute against being hungry?”
The clerk, who had learned quickly when to play along, adjusted his spectacles. “Not directly, Your Honor.”
“Tragic oversight.”
The merchant sputtered. “He admitted it!”
“Yes, and with more honesty than I’ve heard from most petitioners this week, yourself included.”
The room went silent.
Astarion leaned forward.
“The boy will return the value of what was taken through work appropriate to his age and safety. Not in your shop. You will not have him under your thumb simply because you were inconvenienced by his stomach. The court will assign the matter.”
The merchant opened his mouth.
Astarion smiled.
The merchant closed it.
The boy looked up then.
Only once.
There was no gratitude in his eyes. Gratitude took energy hungry children did not have.
But there was recognition.
Astarion disliked how much it affected him.
So he ruined the moment.
“And for the love of every god with ears,” he told the boy, “next time steal something worth the trouble.”
The courtroom laughed.
The boy almost smiled.
Later, Ilvara cornered him in the records hall.
“That was kind.”
“It was efficient.”
“It was kind.”
“It was legally sound.”
“It was kind, and now you’re sulking because someone noticed.”
“I do not sulk.”
“You absolutely sulk.”
“I brood attractively.”
“You sulk with cheekbones.”
He gave her a look of profound injury.
She grinned.
He should have been happy.
Perhaps he was.
It is difficult, afterward, to remember happiness without distrusting it.
But there had been evenings then when he walked home beneath the lamps with his own name still echoing in his ears, and the future seemed not guaranteed exactly, but available.
There had been mornings when his mother fussed at his collar and pretended not to be proud.
There had been laughter traded easily as coin.
There had been flirtations he entered because he wanted to, not because hunger sharpened behind them. Hands he allowed at his waist because they pleased him. Kisses stolen in alleys, on balconies, behind courthouse pillars after dreadful civic banquets.
He knew how to lean in close.
He knew when to back away.
Choice seemed ordinary then.
So ordinary he never thought to guard it.
Cazador Szarr first saw him in court.
Astarion did not notice.
That would trouble him later in the dark years, during the rare moments when he could think clearly enough to hate himself with precision.
He noticed everyone.
He had built his life on noticing.
But he did not notice Cazador.
Not at first.
The case involved land rights, unpaid debts, and three separate forged signatures, none of them particularly convincing. Astarion was bored within minutes and offended shortly thereafter.
The petitioner, Lord Edrin Hallowmere, had arrived dressed in grief-black velvet, as though mourning the tragic death of his own credibility.
“My family has held claim to that property for generations,” Hallowmere declared.
“Then one wonders why your paperwork appears to have been written last Tuesday,” Astarion said.
Hallowmere stiffened. “Your Honor, I must protest your tone.”
“By all means. Protest it in writing. Use one of your authentic signatures, if any remain.”
There was laughter.
Not much. Enough.
Hallowmere’s face darkened.
Astarion felt the old pleasure bloom in him, bright and dangerous. The pleasure of finding the weak seam. The pleasure of pressing.
He should have stopped.
He did not.
“You have attempted,” Astarion continued, “to dispossess twelve families from a building your grandfather sold before you were born, using documents so poorly forged I am personally wounded by the lack of craftsmanship. Had you hired any of the children picking pockets outside this courthouse, you might have achieved a more respectable fraud.”
More laughter.
Hallowmere’s hands curled.
“And you,” Astarion said, voice silk-soft now, “would do well to remember that poverty does not make people invisible. It only makes men like you assume no one will count them.”
The room went very still.
At the back of the court, a pale nobleman with dark hair watched from beneath the shadow of the gallery.
His expression did not change.
But something in his gaze sharpened.
Astarion dismissed the claim. Hallowmere left humiliated. The families kept their homes. The clerks whispered. Ilvara told him he was going to get himself murdered before forty.
Astarion bowed.
“Then I shall die young and stunning.”
“You joke too much.”
“And yet I remain charming. A public service.”
That evening, a bottle of wine arrived at his office.
No card.
Expensive. Impeccable vintage.
Poisoned, possibly. Flirtatious, certainly.
Astarion held it to the light.
“Who sent this?”
The clerk shrugged. “Courier didn’t say.”
“How mysterious.”
“Should I dispose of it?”
“Gods, no. It’s worth more than your desk.”
“Your Honor.”
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m not going to drink anonymous wine. I’m vain, not suicidal.”
He kept it anyway.
He told himself it was because it looked attractive on the shelf.
After that, small things began to happen.
A door held open before he reached it.
An invitation to a private salon he had certainly not been respectable enough to attend the year before.
A tailor quietly informing him that his account had been settled by “a patron of civic excellence.”
That one irritated him.
He paid the tailor himself and sent the patron’s money back in a sealed envelope with a note.
My excellence is not available by subscription.
Ilvara laughed so hard she had to sit down.
His mother did not laugh.
“Who is giving you things?” she asked.
“No one. Someone tried. I was devastatingly rude about it.”
“That may not be enough.”
“It usually is.”
She looked at him across the little table.
He had bought her better rooms by then. Not grand ones — she refused grand ones with a stubbornness he found deeply inconvenient — but dry rooms, bright rooms, rooms with windows that looked toward a courtyard where herbs grew in clay pots.
She still mended things that did not need mending.
He suspected she did it to keep her hands busy when she was worried.
“You think because you survived hungry men, you understand dangerous ones,” she said.
“I understand plenty.”
“No. You understand men who want your purse, your place, your embarrassment. You understand men who want to beat you and call it justice.”
Astarion’s smile faded.
His mother’s voice lowered.
“You do not understand men who want to keep you.”
He looked away first.
He hated that too.
“I am not a stray cat.”
“No,” she said. “You are much harder to catch.”
Then, almost too quietly: “But even stars can be put behind glass.”
“That is dreadful imagery.”
“It is practical imagery.”
“It is maternal melodrama.”
“It is love,” she said. “Unfortunately for you, mine has always been terribly inconvenient.”
He rolled his eyes, but he kissed her cheek before he left.
That should have comforted him.
It did, a little.
Too much.
The ruling that ruined him — or began the ruin, depending on where one places the knife — was not one he remembered as remarkable.
That was the absurdity.
Lives rarely announce their final free moments.
No bell rang. No raven struck the window. No god leaned down to whisper, Choose carefully, little fool. This is the last page before the ink changes.
It was another dispute. Another lordling. Another attempt to crush people with less money beneath paperwork and old names.
The Gur were mentioned only at the edges.
A caravan accused. A theft. A killing. Witnesses who contradicted one another. A noble house eager for blame to settle somewhere convenient and foreign.
Astarion did what he always did.
He listened.
He mocked where mocking was deserved.
He cut through testimony like lace.
And in the end, he ruled against power.
Not perfectly. Not purely. He was not some shining champion of the downtrodden, no matter what later ballads might have made of a prettier corpse. He had ambition tangled through every principle. He liked applause. He liked winning. He liked proving men with inherited authority were less clever than a boy who had once slept with a knife under his pillow and stolen apples from dock carts.
But he ruled fairly.
Fairly enough to anger the wrong people.
Fairly enough to be noticed.
That night, Ilvara found him at a tavern near Bloomridge Park, boots hooked over the rung of a chair, cup in hand, head tipped back in laughter.
“You’re drunk,” she said.
“I’m celebrating.”
“You won a procedural argument.”
“I won three procedural arguments and made Lord Hallowmere’s nephew say ‘forgery’ out loud. Try to respect art.”
She sat opposite him. “You need to stop walking home alone.”
“Good evening to you too.”
“I mean it.”
“You often do. It’s exhausting.”
“Astarion.”
He rolled his eyes, but fondly. “What is it now?”
“I heard something.”
“How thrillingly vague.”
“Men asking after you.”
“Men often ask after me.”
“Not like that.”
His smile held.
Barely.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Not city watch. Not Hallowmere’s people either, I don’t think. Someone is stirring anger around the ruling. Saying you humiliated the Gur. Saying you let murderers walk.”
“That is not what happened.”
“Since when has that mattered?”
He looked into his cup.
Around them, the tavern roared. Someone sang badly near the hearth. Dice clattered. A serving girl shouted for someone to get their hand off her skirt before she removed it at the wrist.
Life, vulgar and warm and immediate, pressed around him.
Astarion lifted his cup.
“Well,” he said, “if people insist on misunderstanding me, I can hardly be held responsible for their lack of imagination.”
Ilvara did not smile.
“You think everything is a room you can read.”
“It usually is.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Then I shall improvise.”
She reached across the table and grabbed his wrist.
That startled him more than he allowed to show.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Just tonight. Let me walk you home.”
Something in him recoiled.
Not from her. From the idea of needing it.
He had needed too much, once.
Food. Heat. Mercy. His mother’s hands. A locked door between himself and the men who prowled alleys looking for children nobody would miss.
He had built a life where he did not need.
Where he chose.
He gently removed his wrist from Ilvara’s hand.
“My dear,” he said, softer now, “I adore you. Truly. But I will not be escorted through my own city like a frightened debutante.”
“Proud idiot.”
“Accurate, but rude.”
“Astarion—”
“I’ll take the main roads. Golden lamps, witnesses, all terribly safe and dull.”
She stared at him.
He leaned forward, kissed her cheek, and stood.
“Besides,” he said, flashing the smile that had opened doors since he was small enough to slip through them unnoticed, “nothing bad happens to beautiful people in stories. It ruins the escapism.”
Ilvara’s face changed.
He should have stayed.
That was the worst of it.
He should have stayed because she looked afraid.
Instead, he mistook fear for insult.
And walked out laughing into the night.
The city was beautiful.
That was another cruelty.
The last night of his life was beautiful.
Rain had washed the smoke from the air. The lamps burned gold in their iron cages. Windows glowed above the street, each one a little square of someone else’s life. Somewhere nearby, a woman was singing as she closed her shop. Somewhere farther off, bells marked the hour.
Astarion walked without a script to follow.
No courtroom. No performance. No petitioner waiting to be skewered. No mother fussing over whether he had eaten. No Ilvara telling him he was reckless because she had inconveniently decided to care whether he lived.
Just night unfolding.
Just his own steps.
Just the future, waiting somewhere.
He did not know when he first heard the second set of footsteps.
Perhaps because there were always footsteps in the Lower City.
Perhaps because he was tired.
Perhaps because some part of him knew and refused to know.
He turned down a narrower street to avoid a drunken cluster outside a gaming hall. Foolish. Irritatingly foolish. He could admit that later, when admission no longer mattered.
The lamps were fewer there.
The shadows had room to breathe.
Astarion slowed.
“Gentlemen,” he called, not turning yet. “If this is a robbery, I should warn you I’m in a foul mood and these shoes cost more than your collective dental work.”
No answer.
He turned.
There were four of them.
Gur, he thought first, because that was what he was meant to think. Because someone had dressed the trap in a story already prepared for witnesses. Because later people would say it with confidence.
The Gur attacked him.
Tragic, of course.
He had made enemies.
Their faces were hard to see. Hoods, scarves, the dull glint of blades.
One carried a club.
Astarion lifted both hands.
“Ah. Not conversationalists, then.”
The first blow caught him in the ribs.
Pain cracked white through him.
He staggered, shocked less by the hurt than by the indignity of it. A second blow drove him against the wall. He reached for the knife in his sleeve — old habit, old life, never fully discarded — and slashed blindly.
Someone cursed.
Good.
Good, he had drawn blood.
He was not helpless.
He was not—
A fist struck his face.
The world flashed.
He hit the ground hard enough to taste stone.
Boots surrounded him.
He tried to speak. To bargain. To charm. To threaten.
Words had always opened doors.
Now his mouth filled with blood.
A kick landed in his stomach. Then another. Hands grabbed his hair, slammed his head back against the street. Pain burst behind his eyes.
Some distant, absurd part of him thought of his mother scolding him for staining his collar.
Another part thought, with almost academic interest:
So this is how fragile choice is.
He had not given them this.
He had not offered it.
He had not agreed.
And still they took.
The beating blurred.
At some point, he stopped fighting well and began fighting like an animal, which is to say honestly. Nails, teeth, elbows, breath tearing in and out of him. He heard himself make a sound he would have mocked in anyone else.
Then the men were gone.
Not fled.
Gone.
The street emptied too quickly.
Astarion lay on the stones beneath the golden lamps and tried to understand the shape of the room.
There were walls. There was sky. There was blood in his eye. There was pain so large it seemed to have weather.
He could not move.
His name existed somewhere, but he could not reach it.
Then a voice said, “Oh dear.”
Astarion opened one eye.
A man stood above him.
Pale. Elegant. Dark-haired. Dressed as though violence were weather that happened to other people.
Cazador Szarr looked down at him with an expression almost like pity.
Almost.
“You poor thing,” Cazador said.
Astarion tried to laugh. It came out wet.
“If you’ve come to rob me,” he managed, “you’ll have to queue.”
Cazador smiled.
Not kindly.
But with interest.
There it was, at last.
The gaze Astarion should have noticed in court. The gaze that did not admire him, did not desire him in any ordinary sense, did not envy or resent or underestimate.
It assessed.
Like a collector finding a rare piece damaged in transit, but salvageable.
“You are still making jokes,” Cazador said.
“Bad habit.”
“No. A useful one.”
Astarion did not understand that.
He understood very little by then.
Cazador crouched beside him, careful not to let his fine clothing touch the blood.
“Do you want to live?”
The question was absurd.
Vulgar, almost.
Tomorrow had always been a thing Astarion expected to see. Not because he was brave, not because he was good, not because the world owed him anything, but because he had clawed his way too far to stop in an alley like a dog.
His mother would be waiting.
Ilvara would be furious.
His court shoes were ruined.
His mother would call him reckless. Then Little Star, if she was frightened enough to forget he hated it.
He had cases in the morning.
He had not finished becoming himself.
“Yes,” he whispered.
Cazador’s smile deepened.
“Then let me save you.”
Astarion should have heard the lie.
Perhaps some part of him did.
But dying people are not philosophers. They are not cautionary tales. They are not symbols arranged for later understanding.
They are bodies in pain, reaching for the hand extended to them.
Cazador lifted him with impossible gentleness.
Astarion’s head fell against the man’s shoulder. He smelled cold perfume. Old velvet. Something underneath like earth after rain, except wrong.
The city lamps blurred above him.
Golden.
Beautiful.
Indifferent.
He thought, suddenly and with terrible clarity, of being very young beneath the bakery, listening to his mother breathe in the dark and promising himself that one day everyone would know his name.
He had done it.
For a little while, he had done it.
He had walked where the lights were golden.
He had let them see his face.
He had not been pure.
He had not been holy.
But he had been alive in his own skin.
His own.
That mattered, though he did not yet know how much.
That would matter later, when his body became a house someone else held the key to. When his charm became a leash. When laughter became bait. When beauty became a cost counted in blood and obedience and shame.
Later, he would forget pieces of himself to survive.
Later, he would perform so well that even he would lose track of where the mask ended.
Later, people would meet him and think the cruelty came first.
But it had not.
First there had been a boy with quick hands and a quicker tongue, stealing apples because hunger made morality ridiculous.
First there had been a mother who knew exactly what he was and loved him anyway.
First there had been ambition, vanity, humor, pride.
First there had been a magistrate who was not kind, not exactly, but who remembered the shape of poverty well enough to recognize when the law was being used as a boot.
First there had been a man who laughed because he wanted to.
Who flirted because it pleased him.
Who chose his words.
Who chose his heels.
Who walked through the Lower City as if the night belonged to him.
Cazador bent over him, and the city narrowed to the cold press of a mouth at his throat.
Pain bloomed again — sharp, intimate, wrong — and then even pain became distant.
Astarion’s last mortal thought was not regret.
It was proof.
I existed first.
By morning, Baldur’s Gate had made a story of him.
Magistrate Astarion Ancunín, murdered in the Lower City by Gur assailants after a controversial ruling. A tragedy, certainly. A warning, perhaps. A useful piece of gossip before breakfast.
Ilvara heard it from a clerk who could not meet her eyes.
For one impossible moment, she thought he meant some other Astarion. Some lesser, quieter man with the bad luck to wear his name. Her Astarion could not be dead. Her Astarion would come sweeping through the records hall late, bruised and furious, complaining about blood on expensive leather and making the whole thing sound like an inconvenience arranged specifically to offend him.
Then she saw the clerk’s face.
His mother did not cry when they brought her to identify him.
That was what Ilvara remembered later.
The little woman stood beside the covered table with her hands folded so tightly her knuckles had gone white. Someone had tried to be kind. Someone had cleaned the blood from his face. Someone had combed his pale curls back from his brow as if presentation mattered to the dead.
It did not look like kindness.
It looked like theft.
His mother touched two fingers to his cheek.
“Oh, my little star,” she said.
Not loudly. Not theatrically. There were no grand maternal wails, no collapse into Ilvara’s arms, no pretty grief suitable for ballads. Only those four words, spoken as if she had found him sleeping somewhere cold and could not wake him.
Ilvara turned away too late to hide her own face.
The funeral was small.
That was another insult.
Astarion would have hated it. He would have called it under-attended, poorly lit, and unforgivably dull. He would have made some vicious remark about the flowers. He would have demanded better music.
His mother brought no flowers.
She brought a needle and a length of pale thread.
Before they closed the coffin, she bent over him and mended a tear in his collar with hands that did not shake until the final stitch was done.
“He hated looking unfinished,” she said.
Ilvara laughed once, horribly.
Then the earth took him.
Not gently. Earth was never gentle. It fell in dull, heavy strikes against the lid, each one too final and not final enough. His mother stood through all of it. Ilvara stood beside her, because Astarion had refused an escort in life and gods damn him, he would have one now.
When it was done, when the grave was filled and the mourners had gone and the city had already begun turning him into rumor, his mother remained.
“He was mine first,” she said.
Ilvara did not know whether she was speaking to the grave, the gods, or whoever had taken him.
Perhaps all three.
Below them, beneath dirt and congealing blood, something that had been buried as a corpse waited to wake hungry.
Lyrics
I knew the shape of every room
Before I crossed the floor
Knew which smiles opened doors
And which ones asked for more
I wasn’t kind
But I was real
I chose my words
I chose my heels
The night felt like a promise
Not a debt to pay
Tomorrow was a thing
I’d live to see
I walked where the lights were golden
Let them see my face
I wasn’t brave
But I was breathing
I wasn’t owned
I had a name
Laughter traded easy
Like coin I didn’t count
I knew how to lean in close
And when to back away
I liked the way the city moved
Like it knew me too
Every step was mine alone
Every want was new
I didn’t think the dark could take
What I hadn’t given
I didn’t know how fragile
Choice could be
I walked where the lights were golden
Let them see my face
I wasn’t pure
I wasn’t holy
But I was alive
In my own skin
If I linger there
It’s not regret
It’s proof
I existed first
I walked without a script to follow
No blood in the air
Just night unfolding
And a future
Waiting somewhere
I didn’t know the cost of beauty
Or how fast it burns
But I was real
Before the dark
Before the turn