Page 65 of Astarion

“If I had that last, I wouldn’t be lurking in the sewers right now, believe me.”

“I must say you don’t look that ancient, either.”

“I’m a little over two hundred. What about you?”

“A hundred and three.”

“You don’t look it. I suppose it must be all that clean living I’ve been hearing about.”

Den Suriel laughed before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to and turned it into a cough. “Clean living. Yes. That.”

“At any rate,” Astarion said, removing his jacket and rolling it into a pillow, “I am twice your age and need my rest if I am to remain this extraordinarily good-looking. You may wake me when the sun goes down.”

“Aren’t you worried I’ll kill you in your sleep?”

“Darling,” Astarion said, rolling over, “if you can’t trust an oath-sworn paladin, who can you trust?”

—

Darkness and the smell of dust. Cold stone leaching the heat from his body. Grit under his fingertips. And the ceiling was close, far too close, and the air didn’t move, so the smell of dust mixed with the smell of unwashed velvet and the unmistakable musty odor of ancient bones.

Astarion knew all those sensations, knew them more intimately than any lover. He was in the mausoleum, in the locked crypt only three paces wide. He had torn his nails to the quick and shredded his flesh until he was scraping his own exposed finger bones against the stone door.

Not again, he thought, feeling the mindless animal panic rising in his chest. Not again!

But if not again…was it still?

What if he’d never gotten out at all? What if he had been here all this time, and his release had only been a dream brought on by madness, the people in that dream his own creations? Dalyria, Yousen, den Suriel, all puppets born of confinement and loneliness.

“Astarion?”

The tortures had felt real enough, but no more real than the agony of his fingertips. The great upheavals, the Spellplague and the Time of Troubles, that had rearranged the gods in the heavens—perhaps those had only been fever dreams as he starved and died and was reborn, as endlessly as a god himself.

“Astarion, I think you’re dreaming.”

I’m an elf. I don’t dream. And I know that, so…is there someone else here?

That rich, rough voice was familiar, but of course it would be if Astarion had hallucinated it in the first place. And it must be a hallucination, because no one came and spoke his name while he was trapped in the crypt. He heard people walk by sometimes, but his tongue was so swollen in his mouth that he could not call out to them. Mist condensed on the cold marble door sometimes, and he was able to lick it off, but it was not enough to slake the thirst of a mouse, let alone a man.

“Astarion?”

Someone touched his shoulder, and Astarion’s hand shot up and caught their wrist with the speed of a striking snake. His eyes came open, and he stared into the blank white eyes of an aasimar.

“Tell me this,” he growled, the dream still clinging to him like scraps of fog. “Are you real?”

“I think so,” den Suriel said, “but I don’t have any way to prove it.” The paladin’s voice was deliberately soothing, gravel turning to stones washed in a streambed. “You’ve been having a nightmare.”

“This isn’t the crypt?”

“It’s part of the sewer system, remember?”

“Oh.” Astarion swallowed. “Yes, of course.” There was a pulse beating slow and steady under his thumb, and he realized he was still clutching den Suriel’s wrist. He peeled his fingers off, one at a time. The man had removed his gauntlets, fortunately, or Astarion would have either dented the metal or dented his own hand.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. This is normal.” Astarion sat up.

“Crying in your sleep is normal?”