Chapter Text
SALVAGING
A Story of Astarion Ancunín
200 years. One master. No rescue.
"Don't let the bastards grind you down." — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
"I survived. It's enough." — Astarion Ancunín
PART ONE: THE FIRST DECADE
"You learn the rules in order. First: his name is Master. Second: the candles. Third: do not let anyone tell you their name if you can avoid it. I learned the third one myself."
Chapter One
Night
I will tell you what I remember of being alive, which is less than you might expect and more than I have ever wanted.
I remember the quality of morning light on the Baldur's Gate magisters' court, that particular grey that comes off the harbour, the way it made everything look provisional, like a city that hadn't yet decided whether to stay. I remember the smell of my robes, which I hated. I remember that I was good at my work, which I also hated, though for different reasons, the way you hate a talent that has eaten your other possibilities.
I remember the Gur woman's face when I read the verdict. How she didn't cry. How she looked at me with something that wasn't anger, something slower, more considered. I told myself later that I had done what the law required. This was true. It is also true that I knew, when I read that verdict, whose money had bought it, and I read it anyway.
Cazador had been generous. That is what I told myself. It is extraordinary, the things you can tell yourself when the alternative is knowing who you are.
—
They came for me three nights later. Not the Gur, or not only the Gur. Cazador's money had bought the verdict but it had also arranged for word of it to reach certain ears at a certain useful time. He was thorough. He always was. I have had two hundred years to admire the architecture of it: how cleanly it was constructed, how little I suspected, how perfectly I walked into every room he had prepared for me.
The attack was not elegant. Alleys rarely are. I will not tell you what they did. What matters is what came after. What matters is the temple.
—
The Temple of Kelemvor is not a comfortable building. Stone floors. Candles that burn without warmth. The smell of cold and something older than cold. I had never been devout. But I was dying. And dying changes the relationship a man has with his own theology.
I prayed. I will not tell you what I said. Not because it was undignified (it was, comprehensively) but because it was private, and privacy is something Cazador has taken most things from me, but not that. Not that one night.
The silence was very complete.
And then, from behind me, the soft precise sound of a man who has learned to move without disturbing air: "I heard you."
—
He crouched beside me on the cold floor, and he was not even slightly out of breath. He spoke of power. Of eternity. Of being seen — finally, truly seen — by someone who understood what I was. He said: "Be my companion, Astarion. Be everything you want to be and be that thing for all eternity."
He said it simply, plainly, the way you state a fact. And because I was dying, and because the god had not answered, and because everything he said about the city and the law and the careful pointless performance of my entire adult life was true —
I took his hand.
He drained me to the threshold and brought me back across it. The last thing I heard, before the dark, was the sound of soil. Beginning, somewhere above, to move.