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The Tadfools had met with Isobel and secured her blessing of Selune against said Shadow Curse. They’d met with Jaheira and accepted her mission of infiltration of Moonrise Towers. Karlach’s heart was refortified, and she could touch again, and she’d wept when she hugged Wyll, and then she wept even harder when Astarion, prickly bastard he was, joined in for the hug as well.
What they had was new and hard to put into words. Wyll was afraid to speak of it too openly, afraid the bond was too fragile for words yet. Karlach and Wyll loved each other, but Mizora would whisper into Wyll’s ear that surely Karlach felt that her love was owed and did not come from her heart. Astarion had tried to sleep with Wyll and had grown vicious and mocking when Wyll wanted to wait. And then Astarion had spurned Karlach as well for being ‘broken’.
And yet.
Astarion drank from Wyll on a regular basis, and the edges of him would soften, until he was limp against Wyll. He would be so sweet, sometimes even blood drunk enough to giggle, and then he would, for some reason, scold Wyll for taking so long to be born.
Wyll didn’t understand, but the concept of being someone Astarion— Astarion —would become softer around was sweeter than any wine. Every time another edge dulled slightly, a barb softened into something more of a joke, metaphorical teeth grazing the skin without biting, each time was a victory.
Karlach had snapped at Astarion, and in turn, they’d reached something of an accord, mutually not touching each other but themselves. Astarion seemed pleasantly surprised, enjoying it more than he thought, and it was some kind of shared touch for Karlach. Astarion would, occasionally, find ‘creative uses for a mage hand’, which could at least caress Karlach.
It wasn’t just sexual though, which seemed to throw Astarion off guard. He would sit close to Karlach, as if he could bask in her warmth.
And Wyll tried to ignore Mizora. He tried to be his best self, live up to the ideals of the Blade (even if Astarion seemed to, for some bizarre reason, like Wyll more than the Blade). Wyll learned enough magic to take Karlach dancing, and Karlach had cried into his shirt. They’d clung to each other before the magic started to fade, and they had to separate.
But the way she looked at him was intoxicating. Mizora was wrong. It was more than some sense of obligation, of debts owed.
Wyll refused to doubt her love for him.
They were traveling through the darkness, torches mere sputtering embers against the omnipresent black. They kept to the riverbank, ground crunching underneath their boots unpleasantly. It would eventually lead them to a bridge, and from there, they could find the town of Reithwin and the Moonrise Towers shortly outside of that. The mission loomed large ahead of them: trying to figure out how to defeat an invulnerable man, figure out the current aims of the cult, rescue the captured tieflings.
Rescue Wyll’s father.
Despite all the distractions, Wyll noticed, not too far ahead but just barely coming into view by the flickering light, a homestead. He pointed it out to his cohorts, and all of them listened, but they didn’t hear anything, any breathing, any footsteps. They all shrugged and deemed it yet another casualty of the curse, more ruins housing naught but skeletons. So they continued creeping forward.
They were not expecting the ambush.
Wyll was walking, and then suddenly he was on his knees, a wire tight around his throat. It sliced into his flesh, deep, and he could feel blood well up against his skin and began to spill, to coat his skin, his clothing. On instinct, in desperation, he tried to cast a spell, Misty Step, to teleport him away from the enemy, but the only thing that came out of his mouth was a gargle of blood, and the spell failed on him.
There was a series of shouts from behind him, and a few cut off gargles as well.
Wyll tried to scramble. His friends needed him. With one hand, he dug into the wire on the side, and then he yanked forward, ignoring the slicing through his fingers. With his other hand, he pulled out his rapier and stabbed blindly behind him, behind and up, driving into the shoulder.
He’d been hoping it would let go.
Instead it screamed, and it only yanked backward, cutting deeper into Wyll’s throat-
And then it teleported them into the river.
It was beyond ‘cold’. He was plunged into an ice so intense, that the shock felt like his muscles were burning. It cut into him, down to the bone, and further still. And it hurt. It was a hurt that was too familiar, too recent, and something in his soul wanted to stop at the sensation. To curl up until it went away, but he was here, he wasn’t dead.
He struggled, flailing, but the thing held on and shook him vigorously before that weight was gone, teleporting and leaving him behind to drown.
The river was too dark to see anything, even with his eye open. He couldn’t even see his blood leaching out into the water, could only feel a pressure pushing him further and further away.
Swim upwards. He had to swim upwards.
His limbs were already aching from the effort. He swam, but his hands only ever found more water. He was too spun around. Was this up? Was this down? And the blood spilled and spilled and spilled all of the heat left in his body.
And then he flailed the wrong way, and his throat ripped open, and the water rushed in.
Not for the first time, Wyll died.
—
Wyll awoke slowly, in a strange stupor of confusion. The past few hours were a haze that didn’t make sense, memories that slid past each other. He couldn’t remember if he’d left the river or not.
It didn’t feel like it. The cold was burning him alive, like Cania.
Was this Mizora? Was this another transformation? How long would he be hurt in Cania again? It had felt like forever last time. Each layer a new forever until another piece of Wyll melted away, made ‘Wyll’ thin enough to fall through to the next one.
Again and again and again, until he reached Nessus, and he realized there was nothing of Wyll left to lose. He was just gone. There was only the Hells left in a parody shape of a soul.
He tried to wheeze for air, and his throat whistled. Maybe that was good though. Maybe he could die faster this time.
“No no, don’t talk. Throat’s still slit,” came Shadowheart’s voice. Calm. Clinical. Reassuring. And entirely confusing the matter further. Shadowhearts weren’t normally found in Cania. He’d been alone. There hadn’t even been devils to mock him. It would have been easier if there’d been devils jeering at him.
Strange, how after seven years of Mizora watching every last moment, how he wished for even an enemy, even if they did nothing but hurt him further.
A hand touched Wyll’s forehead, and it felt like fire. It burned as much as the river had burned him, and he tried to flinch back, but his body wasn’t moving.
“Gale. I’m out of healing magic. Potions of healing. Now.”
He wanted to open his eyes, but they wouldn’t move. His body wasn’t responding. It felt dead. Shadowheart had to hold a hand over Wyll’s throat to close the laceration, and then coax the potion as best as she could into him.
And it exhausted him. Utterly and entirely. He wanted to go back to drifting.
“Stay,” Shadowheart said, not sharp but firm, and it was a singular word of commandment, holding his soul still for a moment longer. “I don’t have any more resurrection magic today, Wyll, so you have to keep conscious right now. I don’t have access to more powerful resurrection magic. If you die, you’re dead.”
“For some weird reason,” Gale said, and his lack of panic was actually reassuring to hear, “intense cold keeps the soul closer to the body and easier to resurrect. So I suppose if he did die, we would need to quickly stash him back into the river and hope for the best with revivification in the morrow. Considering revivification only has a minute in which it normally works, there might have been some small miracle he ended up in the river. If he’d been somewhere else we couldn’t have found in time-”
“Is he okay?” came Astarion’s voice, so small that Wyll barely heard him.
It was a nonsensical question, and Astarion didn’t ask nonsensical questions. Well, he did, but not about matters of life or death. It was weird.
Shadowheart ignored him, apparently. “Karlach, get back into that house and start a nice fire in whatever passes for a firepit. Gale, help her, and make a pot of a warmed broth of- anything. Let’s carefully get him out of these clothes and wrapped up in dry blankets.”
“I could cuddle him,” Karlach offered. “Bring his temperature up?”
“No,” Shadowheart said, though there was reluctance in her voice. “You’re still too warm, Karlach. We need to bring his temperature up gradually. Though it’s not a bad thought. You’re on standby, for when he’s warm enough to touch you without it risking damaging his tissues or sending him further into shock.”
Wyll didn’t want to deal with any of this. He was exhausted. All this sounded like so much effort.
He felt himself start to drift away, and then there was a slight jolt against his fingers. A moan escaped him.
“I told you, you have to stay awake,” Shadowheart said. “I know it’s hard. You aren’t done yet. You can sleep later. Astarion, can you help me get him out of his clothing?”
Hands touched him, and he wanted to ignore them. That’s how he’d gotten through the Hells the first time, with the first transformation. He just kind of drifted away from all of it, until it felt as surreal as his own past did before he’d gotten stuck there.
Devils are born from the purest form of suffering, Mizora’s voice had floated through his head at the start, and then not a moment longer, even when he screamed for her. You will stay here until you understand.
The hands though were so warm against his skin, but it wasn’t the overt heat when Shadowheart had touched him. It was a more tolerable warmth, just at the right level, and that was something like a fairy tale right? Warmth that was just right. A river too cold and a Karlach too hot.
He wasn’t aware he was leaning into it until Astarion hissed.
“No no, don’t pull away,” Astarion said quickly. Wyll’s eyelids fluttered but stayed shut. “Gods you’re cold though. But ah, I suppose it makes sense, doesn’t it? I’m not too hot for you right now. Come on, dear. Lae’zel’s just going to carry you a few steps, and we can get you warmed up again.”
Astarion was being weirdly soft again. Had he gotten some blood in him from the attackers? That was a nice thought. It was weird to be concerned about blood being wasted now.
It felt like forever, but then Wyll was getting to relax against something soft.
“Found a bed,” Karlach announced cheerfully. Wyll actually opened his eyes at that. And there it was, a bed, though the mattress had been tossed in favor of what looked like everyone’s various bedrolls piled up on top of some fresh straw. Not dried. Fresh.
Wyll stared at the straw suspiciously.
“That’s me,” Halsin said kindly. “Soft grasses make a good bed.”
They did. It was a far better bed than Wyll usually had out in the Frontiers, and he let himself be laid down on it, knees pressed up against his chest. That was the remainder of his energy, and he desperately wanted to go back to sleep. Astarion curled up next to him though, chest against his back, and then threw several blankets over them.
It was a pleasant warmth, like being slowly roused by the creeping dawn. The fire was crackling a nice distance away, and Wyll could smell a warm soup of some kind being prepared.
How utterly novel. He didn’t even have to make the soup himself. That was the real kind of soup magic that one dreamed about on frozen days.
Wyll tried to ask a question, but his throat just wheezed again, and Astarion held him through a coughing fit, but at least Wyll didn’t start bleeding again.
“Tadpoles, darling,” Astarion said. “You’ve still got one! Maybe try using that? Your throat is- Well, that’s probably going to give you another scar, but I’m sure you’ll spin this into some dashing story afterward.”
Astarion kept rambling, kept talking, complaining in great length about the inaccuracies of Wyll’s stories in the past, because he’d heard a lot of them, and Wyll conveniently never mentioned getting injured, did he?
The first sign that some level of awareness was fully returning was when Wyll realized he was still naked under the blankets, but it was too late to get in clothes now, and all the clothes he had would have been soaked in his pack. He was starting to shiver now, violently, to the point where it hurt. His entire body was hurting again, nerves waking up one by one to realize that damage had been done, and they were all trying to tell his brain about it, lined up in a row despite all the other nerves reporting the same thing.
Exhaustion still had him in a stranglehold (haha) but not as much as before.
“Ow,” Wyll said after a bit, voice rasping.
“What did I tell you about talking?” Astarion fussed. It reminded Wyll of an old granny, and he snickered a little, and then regretted it immediately when his lungs complained, loudly, on this action.
“I hate to say this,” Karlach said. “But you might need to switch out, Fangs. I’m not sure you’re warming him up any.”
Wyll made a noise of wordless protest into a pillow and tried feebly to push his body further into Astarion. It was a gesture that he might have felt shame over on another day. It was a gesture he normally simply would not attempt, too much revealed vulnerability. But his brain was still so cold and was mostly distracted by all the nerves talking about the cold, and he didn’t have the energy to not.
Astarion laughed, though it sounded a little wet. “Well I can still stay here love.”
“Oh!” Karlach said. “I have an idea.”
The bed was not really big enough for all three of them, but Karlach pressed her chest against Astarion’s back, and even at the distance, Wyll could feel her warmth, the thrumming of her engine filled with hellfire. Hellfire shouldn’t be a comforting thing. He’d burned in it too, until there’d been nothing left to burn and his soul was shunted to the next plane. But Karlach’s fire wasn’t the Hells, but hers. It was a friend now, because of Dammon.
Wyll tried to keep himself grounded in the moment, but it was hard. He still wanted to drift, but the warmth was just on the edges of painful, keeping him locked into the present.
“You’ve got this Wyll,” Karlach said, voice low and encouraging. “Hang in there, soldier.”
He knew it would hurt, but he didn’t care. One of his hands fumbled backwards until it found hers, and then he squeezed her hand. The warmth hurt, felt like it was searing to his bones, but he didn’t care one whit.
She was there. She was holding him. He wasn’t alone.
At least around this time, warm delicious soup was ready. Gale had decided to add a number of herbs to the broth, and it was unnecessary and Wyll loved him for it. His hands were shaking too badly to really hold a spoon, so he carefully sipped from the bowl. It was overly hot, and it burned on the way down, and Wyll tried not to whine at it.
“Don’t force it,” Shadowheart said.
“I want to get warmer,” Wyll croaked.
“And if you get warm too quickly, it will hurt your body,” Shadowheart said bluntly. “Which, I know you know that, and I explained it earlier too, but the fact that you can’t think through that right now is a sign that your body is still recovering.”
Right yes he remembered now.
The world was solidifying though. He couldn’t quite see the Hells from here, and Cania was naught but a distant memory.
It hadn’t fully settled into the real world though. Wyll wasn’t used to this part of traveling with people, because Wyll wasn’t used to traveling with people, period, end of story. If something had happened to him, that would have been it. He would have died, and his soul cosigned to the Hells.
Each scar was a story. Astarion was correct; Wyll didn’t tell the stories behind the worst scars, and the lighter ones, he simply neglected to mention the damage his body incurred. He had no cleric to aid him, and for the first four, five years, he hadn’t the coin for advanced healing supplies. The most basic healing potion was worth over two months of food alone, and while he’d gotten proficient to living off of the land, it was always an uncertain, insecure, especially during the winter months. It was hard to judge a single potion to heal from an injury over eating for two months. Hard not to just hold onto it if he needed it for something more serious.
And what, was he going to demand payment from villagers with often very little coin to their names themselves?
So he’d managed with thread and needle, and bandages, and other remedies, and he tried to only use the healing potions when absolutely necessary.
Getting injured was a terrifying thing, each time. And if a wound infected, it could linger for months, and Mizora didn’t care if he was in recovery; her list of enemies was ever long and her appetites ever hungry.
This time, when a scar was left upon his body, the story wouldn’t be of Wyll trembling over his own fire, trying to sew up the wound on his own. The story would be one of friends that saved him, that pulled him from death and then tried so hard to drag him into life again.
Tears pricked at the edges of his eyes, and he tried to blink them away.
He just wasn’t used to this.
So he sipped his soup slowly, and by the time he finished it, the shivering had abated somewhat.
“You feeling up for a cuddle now?” Karlach asked, tone hopeful but still hesitant.
Wyll wasn’t the only one who had been drowned in loneliness. And he suspected that despite the number of people Astarion had been in contact with, they hadn’t counted either, and he’d been just as starved for positive attention.
He placed a hand to her forearm, and it was still hot, but not that fire-like sensation as before.
So they repositioned on the bed, but for some reason, Astarion lingered, even though he didn’t have to stay here any longer. Wyll could have sworn he hated touch. Wyll should have said something, but the physical contact was a constant reminder of which world Wyll was in, and he was too weak to turn it down.
And then Wyll wasn’t thinking much of all, because Karlach had put his face squarely between her breasts.
“Your nose is cold!” Karlach said. “No, you ain’t moving. That’s not a reason to move. You had a real tough day. It’s tiddy time.”
Astarion laughed, delighted. “Well that’s another way to warm him up I suppose.”
“Tried and true method,” Karlach said proudly, while Wyll was dying inwardly. But they were very nice breasts. He didn’t know if that was the sort of thing he should say, but it was true. They were lovely and soft and made Wyll feel a certain way.
He was simply too exhausted to not relax into her breasts, and then her wonderful arms were around him, and then Astarion was against his back again. It felt wonderful, dreamlike, surreal. So much pleasant touch. So much company.
“Should we go elsewhere?” Gale asked after a moment, and Wyll’s face burned.
“Shut up!” Karlach yelled, tail now curling around all three of them. “He needs to get warm! It’s for medical reasons. See Wyll? You can keep your face there guilt-free. Mama K’s tits are a medical necessity.”
Astarion screeched, and Wyll’s ears flushed, but he also didn’t move his face away.
Because, she wasn’t wrong. It was helping, right? So it was okay.
The only reason to move his face was to lean up, to press his lips against hers. She made such a happy, delighted noise, and they sank into each other, and he could feel her breath against his skin.
Astarion claimed the next kiss, far more sensual, but unusually without his normal habit of nipping playfully at his lips.
And then, because Karlach had said it was okay , he rested his face against her breasts.
This time when Wyll drifted off, no one woke him up, because it wasn’t dangerous. This time Wyll simply fell into an easy rest, feeling warm and comforted and weirdly loved.
This time Wyll wasn’t alone.
When he awoke, his body actually felt warm, and Astarion, a miracle, felt cool against him. His mind felt clear, though his throat was still tender. Someone had also been kind enough to have put his clothes next to the fire. They’d smell of woodsmoke, but they’d be warm otherwise. Said fire had died down to warm embers, and it looked like the rest of the party had simply picked out various resting points to slumber, though Lae’zel was on watch.
Wyll carefully extracted himself from the cuddle pile, a blanket wrapped around him for modesty. And then he slowly redressed in his clothing.
“Mmmmmrgh?” came a voice from behind him.
Astarion had somewhat raised his head, and was technically staring in the general direction of Wyll, though his line of sight was off by over a meter.
“Coming back to bed,” Wyll promised, slipping into the covers again. Astarion made a happy noise at this, and he put his arms around Wyll’s middle.
“Don’t do that again,” Astarion lectured.
“I had to get dressed!” Wyll protested. “I don’t like having my tender bits so exposed.”
“Not that,” Astarion said, burying his cool pointy nose against Wyll’s neck. “The dying thing. It was distressing. Karlach cried, Wyll. Karlach! She broke down sobbing when we realized your body wasn’t anywhere we could find it. We didn’t know where you were, at first. You were just gone. And you were lucky that your body got caught on some rock, or you would have been whisked further downstream and-”
Astarion’s breath hitched. “Don’t do that again. It was very rude of you. Inconsiderate. My entire day wasted trying to warm you up. I’m meant to be the stiff corpse, dear. You don’t wear deathly pallor as well as I.”
He really had softened, hadn’t he? Just teeth grazing the skin and nothing more.
Wyll’s lips twitched into a smile. “Alright. I know it’s hard for me, but I’ll try to keep the dying down from now on.”
“Good,” Astarion said, snuggling back into Wyll. Pressing more touch into him, even though Wyll knew Astarion hated it, kept saying over and over again to anyone ‘don’t touch me’.
“You don’t have to do that anymore,” Wyll said softly. “I’m out of hypothermia. It’s safe for me now-”
“Shut up,” Astarion snarled, and he didn’t let go.
Wyll’s smile widened, and he decided there was no harm in going back to sleep again.