My Darkness and My Light (Little Star)

Chapter Two: My Many Deaths

I woke on a cold stone floor in an ornate room that was both beautiful and monstrous. My head pounded and my body ached torturously. I have never had a hangover, but if this is what they normally feel like, then no one in the history of Faerûn would have ever had a second drink. The physical pain was compounded by raw fear. How could I have ever done such a dangerous and stupid thing!? I am in real life threatening danger here. I can taste evil in the air. This is a house of pain and anguish. If any place could on its own just be cruel due to the sheer amount of cruelty that had taken place in it, then this place was. Of course, my drinking companion was nowhere to be seen. And in fact, I would come to find that I wouldn't be seeing him again at all within these walls. He had clearly done whatever his part was, and he was gone. A kidnapper for monsters. A monster himself.

I won't be recounting details of the time that I spent alive in that beastly place. I cannot stomach to relive them for the retelling. The only reprieve that I received were the many, many times that I found myself dead after creatures unnameable took their pleasure in me. Leaving me only pain. The master of the house, a real and true vampire, would drain me into death. But as he took some delight in the taste of me, I was always resurrected and returned to him within a few nights. It felt like many lifetimes of horror and pain spent at the hands of such vile creatures. I would find upon escape that little more than a month had passed. Death was all I longed for. It got to where I was practically begging for the vampire master to come at the end of the night and deliver me out of the pain of my broken and violated body into the quiet of death.

I always found myself in a soft hazy wood. At first, I only recognized it as from a childhood dream. But as I wandered in deeper, more of the wood came back to my memory. It was on maybe the 10th or so time that I died at my captor's hands that I found the well and remembered. As a very very young child, I wandered too deeply into the woods following a injured bird hopping along with a broken wing in an attempt to catch and help it. I had fallen over a hundred feet into a dry well, which by all rights should have killed me and certainly at least grievously injured me. But I have faint memories of a man who seemed more woods than man. I can remember dreaming about him now. He told me I was fine just as the bird would also be fine and I vaguely had an idea that he carried me as I slept. I remember now trying to explain it to my parents, when late that evening they found me asleep out in the hay barn. They told me that I had dreamt it all after such a busy summer's day playing in the wood. And as I grew up, I knew obviously that I must have dreamt it all. But here was the well. Here in death, as real as it was in life.

It took maybe another 20 days, nights, and torturous deaths, each death spent exploring in the wood before in desperation, I flung myself down the well. And of course there he was. "Welcome back, child of the fields and woods" he said to me. I fell into his arms and cried out my whole terrible awful story. I begged him to let me stay, to stay dead and here with him, not to let them force me back. "You'll go back this one last time child" he said. "But I'll send you back with as much of my power as you have the strength to take. Learn to weld that power and you will never find yourself a victim again." As he spoke those last words I could feel the pull of resurrection. I could see the world around me starting to shimmer and disappear. I reached out to pull him to me, to cling to him, to pull him with me if I could.

As I was pulled back into the world of the living, everything in him that I had a hold of came with me and I could feel it hit me square in the chest and fill my body as my eyes flew open. I could feel raw power that I had no idea how to wield, but I knew certainly wasn't going to allow any more torment. As I shoved a ball of wild magic from myself outward towards my tormentors, I locked eyes with my resurrector and realized she was new, she wasn't one of them, at just the moment that my magic hit her and threw her across the room. "Astarion! I don't think this one wants to come with us!" she shouted at the fleeing form of a man as he passed through the doorway opposite the room. A vaguely familiar sounding voice shouted back "she leaves with us, or none of us leaves!" Sounds of a scuffle came from the direction of the voice. As my resurrector, a serious looking although beautiful brunette, righted herself and stood, another man stopped and reached down to scoop me into his massive arms. He was by far the largest elf I had ever seen. He carried me at a sprint through the door the others had headed through and skirted around the combat. He carried me as if I weighed nothing and held me tightly to his chest. He smelled of wood and fur and safety. I could feel my new magic reach out to his and curl around it. They spoke the same language and were already comfortable with each other.