The Blushing Mermaid was not the sort of place I would typically find myself. I'm a bit too, well honestly, uptight to even try to "cut loose" or relax. But today had been only the last in a very long string of awful, hot, miserable days. We were barely scraping by at the farm. I knew my parents were more than worried about the upcoming winter. It feels like no matter how hard we work, we end up farther behind each year. After today's incident with a broken plow and an injured ox, something just broke inside of me. And so here I sit at a bar staring into a tankard of mead that honestly turns my stomach, but I spent 4 coppers I couldn't afford on it, so I'll sit right here until I've drained it.
I'm a weary half an hour into failing to drown my sorrows when I notice him across the bar. I mean, no one in this room doesn't notice him. He's the most beautiful man I've ever seen. I've always thought elves were the fairest of the races and love watching the graceful elf maidens browsing our booth on market days. But this man's beauty didn't stop at natural elfin beauty. He was transcendent. In a flash his eyes cut to mine and I immediately dropped my gaze to my mead, picking it up and downing more of the vile stuff. I felt him slide into the seat next to me without looking up from my tankard. "You don't look like you're enjoying that," he practically purred. "I'm not much of a drinker," I replied. "Well there's your mistake," he said. "You don't want to start with the mead at this place. Horrible swill." Almost too quickly to follow, he swapped my tankard for the crystal goblet he was drinking out of, most definitely too fine a piece to belong to this establishment.
"You don't think that I'm just going to drink something that a stranger hands me do you-" I snapped as I looked up and made close eye contact for the first time. His face was barely a foot away from mine as he leaned in. I choked on the last of my sentence as I fell into those eyes. What color were they? They seemed to shift in the tavern light. Amber? Deep mahogany? "I think that you look like a woman who needs her spirits lifted" he replied, leaning even closer and edging the glass closer still to me. And with no reasonable explanation that I can think of, I picked up his glass and sealed my fate. I took a sip. It tasted like distilled joy, like all of the happy days of childhood rolled into one. I could feel my blood singing as my mind and body completely relaxed, maybe for the first time in all of my adult years. I grabbed at the glass and greedily downed the rest of the contents in one swig. My drinking companion chuckled, a sound like angels in my ears, but was there a note of mocking to it? "That might've been a bit much for a first timer," he said, "but I'll watch over you."
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My Darkness and My Light (Little Star)
FanfictionOC meets Astarion just before the events of BG3. Story takes place set vaguely in and around the timelines of BG3 with the BG3 party but not in any of the major plot lines of the game. Content Warnings for implied non-con, trauma, and angst. A good...
