[He's frozen through his shoulders under what's left of a broken sky. Broken scene. Broken comprehension with its fangs sunk in deep into his flesh until he can feel the puncture marks pushed clean through everything he's ever known. Rime-still and sharp and wary on instinct in a way that leaves him sunken over the bow of his own spine. A pale silhouette made paler by the overlap of damp curls and hunkered contours and torn silk. Thin and wild. Kissed by shock (a thousand times) instead of comfort, it's absolutely true he's staying out of fear.
Terror is right.
And simultaneously immensely wrong.
Blood spills. A blade drops low into the thick of it as hadal ripples of pure silver-blue ebb back under marked skin. Feathered armor. Alien and— Hells' wretched Teeth, perhaps it is all shock and animal instinct leading Astarion by the bloodied nose— because the very next laid thought throughout that healthy sense of lurching dread is: beautiful. Remarkable. Magnificent the way only dislocated reality ever could be at its heart: that purely primal difference between awestruck and afraid defined by stories about the gods appearing in mortal guises never made much sense to him before.
Now, he doesn't know what to think. How to think, no less. The sky's still splintering about the shoulders of an elf whose gore-slicked stature conceptually rises tall enough to meet it in that moment, contrasted with the fact that Astarion's more on his heels than standing (or bracing) in an offset slouch, blunt nails dug into the dirt. Ears pinned back flat. Eyes wide.
(There's got to be a joke somewhere in all this mess about how he can't stop himself grasping for the very first offered palm that moves to save him at his worst. And if there is, maybe he'll at least get to laugh about it later when he pays for it in blood, giving past another swing at proving prologue in the margins.)
For now, he shifts his weight. Tentative. The careful consideration of keeping his dagger in his good hand while the one that aches and seethes is lifted, carved right through by a shard of avid green. (Oh, that's not good.)]
I—
[What are you, he thinks in the half-beat before his fingertips touch gauntleted metal. What are you.
Before something in that foreign magic rolls out like a shockwave, and the agony that jettisons from it up his arm throws him down onto his knees.]
no subject
Terror is right.
And simultaneously immensely wrong.
Blood spills. A blade drops low into the thick of it as hadal ripples of pure silver-blue ebb back under marked skin. Feathered armor. Alien and— Hells' wretched Teeth, perhaps it is all shock and animal instinct leading Astarion by the bloodied nose— because the very next laid thought throughout that healthy sense of lurching dread is: beautiful. Remarkable. Magnificent the way only dislocated reality ever could be at its heart: that purely primal difference between awestruck and afraid defined by stories about the gods appearing in mortal guises never made much sense to him before.
Now, he doesn't know what to think. How to think, no less. The sky's still splintering about the shoulders of an elf whose gore-slicked stature conceptually rises tall enough to meet it in that moment, contrasted with the fact that Astarion's more on his heels than standing (or bracing) in an offset slouch, blunt nails dug into the dirt. Ears pinned back flat. Eyes wide.
(There's got to be a joke somewhere in all this mess about how he can't stop himself grasping for the very first offered palm that moves to save him at his worst. And if there is, maybe he'll at least get to laugh about it later when he pays for it in blood, giving past another swing at proving prologue in the margins.)
For now, he shifts his weight. Tentative. The careful consideration of keeping his dagger in his good hand while the one that aches and seethes is lifted, carved right through by a shard of avid green. (Oh, that's not good.)]
I—
[What are you, he thinks in the half-beat before his fingertips touch gauntleted metal. What are you.
Before something in that foreign magic rolls out like a shockwave, and the agony that jettisons from it up his arm throws him down onto his knees.]
—agh!!
Fuck— fuck—