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One by one, Lyric was winning them back.
They’d kept their distance after Alfira. Not accusing her, not openly — but watching her with the same wary politeness they reserved for the vampire in their midst (which he found mildly insulting). Gale had confronted her, exactly once, and she had lied through her pretty little teeth. After that, no one had dared another word, but the tension had lingered like smoke.
Since then, she’d been on her best behavior. No disemboweled bodies in camp. No inexplicable carnage on the road. And when things did go sideways — as they inevitably did — the bloodshed always seemed to belong to someone else’s mistake, someone else’s temper, someone else’s blade.
She was charming again. Helpful. Controlled. Almost trustworthy.
And absolutely none of it changed the fact that there was something deeply wrong with her.
The others either didn’t see it, or didn’t want to see it. Astarion saw it all too well. In her stillness. In her silences. In the moments she thought no one was watching or she forgot to perform and her mask fractured into something real.
Karlach and Wyll — naive idiots that they were — were well and truly charmed. They believed the lies she spun with every breath: the idyllic childhood in Evereska (a place she had clearly never been), the perilous adventures of a traveling bard, the ever-evolving cast of characters — each larger than life — that he would have bet gold had never existed outside of obscure folklore and her own imagination.
Shadowheart didn’t believe a word, of course — but she never called her on it, either. Their friendship was based on silence. Neither looked too long or too hard at the other’s secrets, and they drowned any doubts that emerged on either side of their unlikely bond with ridiculous amounts of wine.
The wizard was the worst of them all. One magic “lesson” and Gale was half in love with her already — and utterly oblivious to the fact that she spent most of her nights in the githyanki’s tent. The women slipped away together in the early hours and returned covered in fresh bruises; he could smell the blood pooling beneath their skin. It wasn’t love. He wasn’t sure they even liked each other, truth be told. But whatever it was between them, Lae’zel was clearly too preoccupied with her lover to see her for what she was — or wasn’t.
“Have you figured me out yet?” Lyric asked him one night, as he was sipping delicately from her throat, doing his best not to touch her any more than the unbearable intimacy of the act demanded. Her pulse fluttered beneath his fangs like a trapped bird.
He thought of the forest — of the taste of ash on his tongue, of the way she had walked through blood as if sleepwalking. And before that, the beach, where she had opened her mind to his — or her tadpole had — and he had beheld his own face through a patina of crimson and murder.
There had been so many nights — and so many bodies — since then, each one a hint, a warning, a puzzle piece he couldn’t quite place.
He finished, licked the small wounds closed — copper, not ash — and retreated a safe distance. Not far. Just… not touching.
He didn’t bother to lie, or to pretend he didn’t know exactly what she was asking. “Not yet.”
Not yet. But soon, he thought. He was closer now. He could see all her jagged edges — the ones she polished smooth, and the ones sharp enough to cut.
The ones that might fit his, if he were foolish enough to try.
(He suspected he might be.)
“Let me know when you do,” she said simply.
And that was the secret she hadn’t shared with anyone else — the confession she only ever whispered in the dark, when his fangs were so deep in her throat that he couldn’t have responded if he wanted to.
She didn’t know who she was, either. Her memory was hopelessly fractured; her past an imperfect blank slate. The mystery of who she was before the Nautiloid both terrified and intrigued her.
Terrified — because she recognized the wrongness, too.
And intrigued — because it didn’t scare her half as much as it should have.
“I will,” he promised her.
And much to his own astonishment, he meant it.