Archive of Our Own

Flies. 

They landed no longer than it took to deposit their gifts upon the corpse, the eggs that would grow to be chubby little maggots in but a few hours. Late nights and long days spent studying dissolving bodies strewn and stacked like books and papers upon a scholar’s desk passed through memory with the fleeting attitude of a dream. Before long, it was gone — dissolved into the rest of the throbbing cavern of nothingness between her ears. Fleeting as it was, it had appeared. A piece of something from her lost history. 

When all the world faded to fog, long after the last cities had crumbled, the flies would remain. The maggots would rule their fetid kingdom. 

The sea breeze blew briskly across chapped lips, startling the lost dreamer into wakefulness. There she stood, suddenly aware of her surroundings. How long had she been staring, unblinking and drunk with awe at the corpse at her feet? Minutes or months, it was lost on the woman who held scarcely a name in her head. 

Lilith. 

Her own name. It was all she had now on that beach. Smoke tickled her lungs, enough for a cough to interrupt the smirk that subconsciously wove into her lips. She supposed the scale mail hanging from her fatigued frame counted as something, but she might as well have been naked for all the help it afforded her. She felt hot underneath it. The pungent odor of death radiating from the crushed fisherman had sent blood to all of the most sinister and tantalizing places. 

Licking the cracked skin at the corner of her mouth, Lilith set her intent as she patted down the pockets of the sorry soul for any loose change or supplies before stepping away — creating distance. If she feasted her senses on every rotting treat on this beach, she wouldn’t make it ten meters by sundown. 

Shoulders rolled back and head held neutral, she turned her attention further down the beach. More dark piles burned and twitched along the otherwise pristine beach. The sand crunched beneath her boots as she stepped out from the shady enclave of the fragmented nautiloid. When had she last felt the sun on her face? Had it ever felt welcoming to her? The dusty, pallid color of her skin didn’t appear to have seen daylight for years. Not that she’d looked in a mirror recently. Her hair must’ve been in quite the state. At least the corpses wouldn’t mind her disheveled curls. Her decomposing friends would never judge her. 

In only a handful of steps, another body. This one was familiar. Narrowing her eyes into a feline squint, Lilith peered down at a raven-haired woman. A fellow half-elf, it seemed. Funny. Her corpse seemed remarkably untouched, all things considered. She seemed peaceful, if anything. Like she was sleeping. 

Lilith’s breath snagged in her throat when she caught sight of the woman’s chest gently rising, then falling. She was still alive. How this could be, Lilith didn’t care. Her hand twitched, begging to draw her weapon and carve poems into the woman’s belly. 

No. 

She wasn’t sure what it was that gave her pause. Had that been a voice in her head? Lilith couldn’t recall ever having a conscience. Then again, she couldn’t recall much at all. Did this have anything to do with the parasite in her empty skull? Perhaps it wanted her to spare other incubating Illithid spawn. Whatever the source was, she took it as a sign to keep walking. Only death would come by her hand, and she was not sure she was ready to parse the implications of that just yet. Maybe ever.

A shadow of foresight warned her that once blood was spilled, there would be little she could do to stop it pouring. 

——————

Her vision had gone fuzzy again. 

As though blinking through blood, the red that stained the corners of her vision cleared when her eyes rolled down, righting their ways. What she found at her feet gave her a start. 

A hand. A bloodied, severed hand. 

Lilith caught herself on her back foot, nearly losing her balance and falling before her instincts kicked in to keep her upright. Ragged breaths tore through her throat, sticky and metallic. Wiping her lips with the back of her forearm, the skin came back red. Blood layered thick with more smears of blood. 

Frantically whipping her head left and right to check for witnesses, the tree-dotted surroundings betrayed no one’s presence. No one to tell her what had happened, no, but no one to run and tattle on her, either. 

The perfect crime. Not even she could recall the events that had transpired there. 

The echo of a voice played in her memory. Not the same one that had whispered words of conscience like the vaguely remembered, but the screams of a tortured man begging for his life. There was a foul stench that wafted to her, something else atop the already smoky air from the burning nautiloid. If she didn’t know any better, she might’ve thought it smelled like…rotten magic. 

Stooping down to investigate the hand where it sat a good bounce away from the rocky wall in front of her, Lilith picked up the fleshy stub and lifted it just below her nose. She breathed in, sniffing the appendage only to be validated. 

Yes, the chunk of meat reeked of necrosis, an all-too familiar scent that made her head throb if she tried to remember why. 

Strangely enough…the hand seemed to be perfectly healthy, all things considered. A faint memory suggested that this full-bodied odor would only radiate off of flesh far further down the road of rot. Strips of skin should be falling off the bone, worms feasting and liquifying. 

Lilith slipped the putrid hand into her bag, deciding to keep the evidence for later. She collected it as if by default—as though she had stored enough fleshy prizes that it had become second nature. She could meditate on it when she had time to rest, maybe come nightfall if she was lucky enough not to have to walk through the dark in search of a place to sleep. 

In her ragged leather pack, she was pleasantly surprised by a jug of fresh water. She vaguely remembered pilfering it from a bucket further down the beach. Her head throbbed with now-dull pain as the recollection died down, and she uncorked the bottle and swigged the surprisingly refreshing liquid. It soothed her aching tongue, salved her itchy throat. She used it to rinse the rotten blood, gargling and spitting, splashing across her face and hands to clear the evidence from her skin. 

Now. That was better. 

Stowing her things away, the dazed woman pivoted in no particular direction. Down the hill burned the remnants of the Illithid ship, still hazy with mirages of heat bending the air before her very eyes. She started down the hill, retracing her steps. Had she come up this way? She couldn’t remember. 

Along her path, all of the bodies had already been pillaged of valuables. A mind flayer corpse lay with its head crushed in, and she recognized the silvery albino blood drying around the bottom of her boot. A room of intellect devourers in various states of ruin provided her with little more than twitching piles of latent viscera to observe. Had she triggered the apparent explosion that had blown their chunks all over the cavern? Someone had been busy. She wished she could remember it, if it had in fact been her doing. 

Stumbling out of the wreckage and back into the fresh seaside path, Lilith stared at her boots as they crunched time and time again into the dusty hillside. One step, then another. None of it looked familiar to her, but the harvested cerebellums in her pack seemed to argue she was simply retracing her steps. 

It frustrated her to no end. Her skull was no better than a cracked bucket whose one job it was to keep the contents it held inside. Her world jolted and skipped like a smashed music box. None of her mechanisms worked right. 

She was about to take a leap off of the rocky cliff she had stared over. Would dropping from that height be enough to kill her, she wondered? Probably not. What a pity. 

A scratch of footsteps on the rocky path startled her. Her head snapped to the direction of the disturbance, hand stilling over her blade’s handle where it was sheathed behind her back. 

Red wobbles encroached on the edges of her vision as she stared at a huddled figure that waved to get her attention. 

Well, what did she have here? She wasn’t sure she’d ever been gifted such a delicious surprise. Not that Lilith would have remembered if she had. Maybe, tucked away in her back pocket, she had a whole collection of beautiful memories of such captivating corpses. She already had a hacked-off hand and a mouth full of rancid blood, and that had been less than an hour ago. Maybe the flesh had belonged to someone just as enticing. Maybe she could double her prize with one she could remember.

The thought excited her. She might have had use for that hand later, during a dusky leisure time. Two of them? Hells, she could throw a one-woman, two-hand party. 

“You, over there!” 

Lilith blinked. The crimson crawled steadily into her vision as she twitched her head ever so slightly. 

“I have one of those brain things cornered. Can you kill it?” 

Her interest reflected in her piqued brow. Would she enjoy watching one of those cerebral spider creatures tearing this stranger apart? She might. 

Unfortunately, that would prevent her from doing it herself. 

“Of course,” Lilith murmured with enough volume it was doubtful she’d even been heard. Her feet carried her towards the elf with no conscious approval. They worked on their own. Instinctively. 

However, something inside her creaked irritably as she neared the pale man. Her reddened vision pulled back as though retreating, scared to the edges of her eyes like a fleeing vignette. The sky became bluer, the foliage greener. Colors other than that of blood developed saturation that she couldn’t recall having ever seen before. It was…quite beautiful. 

Beautiful? 

This shift threw her off-kilter. Lilith twitched, sniffed, and shook her head. Something wasn’t right. Her feet were already pivoted, the rest of her readying to turn away. “You…you look competent enough.” Even to herself, she sounded disoriented. Flustered. 

Something in her resisted. Lilith couldn’t pinpoint exactly what, but that small something had prevented her from defiling that woman on the beach had reared once again, prickling her neck. This man needed to be left alone. 

She caught herself amidst a stumble. Her sure steps faltered. That was enough. 

Cold metal flashed in front of her throat as steely strength wrenched her back. Lilith realized too late she lacked the constitution to resist. Slammed to the ground, she grunted and lost all her remaining breath to the impact. 

“Not, a, sound.”

Blinking rapidly, Lilith wheezed and refocused her vision.

The silhouette of the pretty man loomed over her like a bitter, beautiful god’s. 

——————

“Well well well.”

Lilith’s lungs expanded with a sudden refreshing breath of crisp, nighttime forest air. At least, she had expected crispness. 

Something metallic and muggy radiated damp heat from below her sore arms. She flexed her fingers, noticing how stiffly they had settled into rigid claws as though they’d been gripping the edge of a cliff for hours and had fatigued frozen beyond movement. 

“Don’t be alarmed,” that same voice requested – casual, yet soothing – as though attempting to comfort an injured fox before it scrambled away and hurt itself more during the effort. “I’m sure she did something to deserve it.”

Blinking firmly, Lilith’s eyelids gummed together with hot wetness. Her vision refocused just enough to finally observe her surroundings. By the fire, nestled right beside her bedroll, she straddled the remains of a corpse — brutalized almost beyond recognition. If not for the blood-soaked frays of the torn, colorful clothes, Lilith likely would have been unable to identify the pile of stinking sin to be the bard who had found their camp that night. Her name almost escaped her in the amnesiatic haze that blanketed her mind.

Alfira.

Lilith twitched and gasped, her hips pulling back from the puddle of viscera she straddled. A heated wetness pulsed up from where the gore had seeped through her pants. Her hips stilled from where they had been keeping a rhythm she no longer felt any desire to maintain. 

This was why she had ordered the bard to return to the grove. This was why Lilith had denied access to the handful of interested folk who wished to travel in her company. She had thought she had developed better control at that point. She and her bloodthirsty traveling partner, one Astarion, had slept beside each other for more than a week without issue, and the first night adding a new companion had resulted in exactly what Lilith had feared.

She scrambled backwards, kicking up mud she had made with the shredded body. Even after distance between her and the scene had been created, she inhaled nothing but the bouquet of the butchery from where must have gotten into her nostrils. 

“Oh, spare me the theatrics. No one else is here.”

Dilated pupils searched for the voice, although Lilith already knew who she’d find. Behind her, Astarion sat casually draping his elbow over a propped knee. He seemed carefully-staged, as though he’d angled himself just so. As though he wanted to capture the murderer’s attention when she came to. 

“W-what is this?” Lilith croaked, wetting her lips with a swift tongue, and being unsurprised with the taste of sweet soul coin — metallic, sulfurous tiefling blood. 

“Don’t look at me, darling. I think it’s plenty obvious what happened here.” Astarion peered down his angular nose at her, jutting his chin at Alfira’s corpse. “You killed the bard. And you weren’t very subtle about it.”

Lilith’s hurried breathing slowed enough for her to nod like a trembling, mechanical toy. “How many times—or, how long did it—”

“Ten minutes, give or take. Quite the display of endurance, I’d say.” Astarion imitated her stabbing hand in a parody of successive air impalements. The elf stared her down, pausing before continuing with a relaxed shrug as he deemed her in control of her faculties enough for him not to be in harm’s way. “I go hunting for less than an hour, and what do I find?” Astarion scoffed with a sour smile. “You, moaning and stabbing like a goblin in heat. I knew you were off, my dagger-happy friend, but I’ll admit, you surprised me.”

Lilith didn’t budge. What was there to say? Her groin stung with painful demands, begging her to continue her grotesque mating ritual. Her own lip twitched up when she noticed a strange glint in the vampire’s eyes. 

She recognized that look. It was one she had been sure she had only imagined the night she had awoken to him atop her, attempting to pilfer her blood in her sleep. The glint, dark and wanting, demanded something of her. 

At the time, she had convinced herself that the demand simply ended at her spilt blood. He had desired nothing more than her sanguine nectar, just as she had desired nothing more than to slice his belly open and stuff herself within his silky intestines. Sure, she had been left wanting, but the subsequent, drained slumber had been a deep one. 

Still, she reckoned he owed her something for her bloody donation. 

“This…” she murmured, reaching for a handful of Alfira to rip from the gelatinous heap, “doesn’t bother you, does it.” A statement, not a question. 

A sharp, melodious laugh tinkled from the other side of the flickering campfire between them. Astarion appeared quite entertained. “Why would it? You put on fine dinner theater.”

One of Lilith’s scarred brows raised, and she opened her fist to let the handful of wet meat drop with a mushy plop to the gravel beside her bedroll. She held her pose for just long enough to make an ordinary man sweat, but she already knew Astarion as more than ordinary – even if he was, still, just a man. The two could have remained unbudging all night, making eyes at each other with the blanket of tension draped over the bloodied campsite. 

Astarion had no quip ready. No half-joke. He sat there, gaze held steady. Unbroken. Two hunters sizing one another up, determining if there was to be a fight or a frenzy. 

Lilith broke first. “I thought you didn’t like me.” 

“You have your…charms, certainly.” Lilith could tell that the pause as he searched for the right word could have been any number of other descriptors. Still, he sighed as though his conversational partner wasn’t knee deep in gore, and this was just polite conversation. “More than you think.”

“I don’t remember killing her,” Lilith admitted plainly. 

“Do you regret it?”

She took a beat to ponder this seriously, although her twitching, pulsing hand made it hard to think about anything but how silky her wet skin felt. “I don’t have an answer for that. Not yet.”

“A shame.” 

Lilith watched as Astarion heaved to stand up, lazy but nimble. She scoffed. “Are you leaving?”

“No.” 

The half-elf admired the subtle dance of the flames against Astarion’s pale, glassy skin. Its warmth added to his own. His v-neck blouse, snowy and pristine, fluttered open with the breeze that passed through. From his post above her, she recalled when they had first met — how he had caught her unawares. He could have slit her throat if he had so chosen to. Perhaps he should have. That had been the only reason she had agreed to ally with him — he could hold his own. 

“You know what I think, Lilith?” Although he asked it, the rhetorical nature did not earn him a response. After a healthy pause, Astarion continued. “I think you want to be known.” Molten rubies pierced through her as they all but enchanted her through their focus. He took a single step closer. “To be tasted.”

“I don’t even know myself.” Her own words surprised her in their whispered, hoarse admission. Once they began, they began to trickle more freely, her hands trembling. “I remember nothing from before the nautiloid. More memories are lost every day. I am plagued by constant thoughts of murder and carnage. I am violence incarnate, whether I choose to be or not.” 

Astarion silently listened, even stretching the emptiness well after she had finished. Finally, just as Lilith wondered if he would speak at all, he did. “What do you think about, Lilith? Not this… “inner darkness”, but you?”

It was her time to let the silence cast its spell. She stared up at him, and he stared back. Perhaps minutes passed. Tension grew. A strange new vibration shook Lilith’s hands, as though she were about to channel a spell through them. 

Lilith broke first. Initially, she simply dropped her palm to crush the flesh into the dirt, savoring the sensation. Rotating from where she sat, she began to crawl towards him. One gritty handprint at a time, she approached him on all fours like a predatory cat — deliberately, as though attempting to camouflage herself within her gory backdrop. 

“I think…” she murmured between each approaching step, “about how you taste.” 

Astarion’s lips parted, as though surprised. He recovered an instant later, but an instant too late for it to go unnoticed. 

“And I think…you want to let me.” Lilith purred in her husky alto, now a mere meter from her novel, risky fixation. 

Astarion’s lids had dropped to a lusty half-mast as he drank her visage below him: her blood-drenched camp clothes stuck to her muscular, feminine curves—her wild, messy curls. He finished his lazy gander at the pair of delirious, frenzied eyes that had turned entirely black with pupil from where she crawled steadily towards him. He seemed to appreciate what he saw. 

“Do you promise not to bite?” Bending down ever so slightly, he brushed a clean, cool thumb over her blood-stained lips. Lilith parted them to allow his fleshy digit into her mouth. Their eye contact still held strong as she closed her lips around it, sucking gently before gingerly applying pressure with her teeth. 

Around them, she smiled and murmured. “Only if you promise you will.”

Astarion visibly shivered. Lilith took the opportunity to wrap her firm grip around his wrist and pull him down to her level, guiding him back down so that he sat on the edge of her bedroll, half-soaked in the nearby puddle of Alfira. Relinquishing his thumb, she climbed onto his lap with calculated control. Soon, she had straddled him like she had the heap of mutilated tiefling only moments before. 

In an instant, their lips collided. Like magnets knocking together, their teeth struck each other’s painfully, like they’d both been baring them in simultaneous offense and defense. Neither of them seemed surprised. Only thirsty. Ravenous.

Lilith generously shared the essence of her kill for him to lick greedily from the inside of her cheeks, a growl of approval rumbling from deep in her throat at the sensuous buffet of death found behind Astarion’s lips—the latent remnants of his own successful hunt. Like morgue candy, only richer. More heady. She hadn’t tasted vampire before. Although his skin was smooth, his recent meal had heated him enough from the inside to feel nearly flush against her own. 

Astarion suddenly wrenched his mouth from hers, quite the difficult feat since Lilith had been gripping the back of his neck to hold him in place while she so-deeply tasted him. Her flushed, sensitive lips downturned, and she blinked open her eyes as if to ask why he’d broken their kiss. 

If the words caught in his throat, she was none the wiser after Astarion licked up the side of her gore-streaked cheek. Lilith heard a girlish giggle of delight ring out between them, only after hearing it realizing it came from her. 

“You like that?” Astarion mused. 

“Mmm,” Lilith nodded sensually, pulling him closer from her hold around his neck. Her hips circled slowly atop his groin, the heat from her excited mound sensing the evidence of his own enjoyment. “And you like that?” 

He didn’t respond verbally. Instead, he sought out her mouth with his once more. Together, they decomposed. 

They undid each other, piece by piece. Lilith’s ruined garments disappeared into the gore heap. Astarion proved more conscientious, but only enough to toss his attire out of the pit of assured stains. They rolled and repositioned against each other as they helped the other unclothe, undulating between almost ripping the garments in fervor, and the patience of unwrapping a long-awaited gift. 

Nails became claws. Teeth became fangs. Allies became lovers. 

Lilith moaned hoarsely against Astarion’s shoulder where she stabilized herself as his hands roamed her. Astarion hissed as her teeth latched onto the sensitive flesh along his collar bone, and all she could do was laugh. This earned Lilith a rather robust shove, sending her toppling back into the puddle of gore with an earthy splash. 

This seemed to only add to her mirth as she threw back her head and rolled in the gore like a child in a summery city fountain. It took her a moment to refocus herself from the dirty entrails and back to the pale vampire. 

Although there was a glint of something displeased in his expression, Astarion wasn’t disgusted like Lilith had thought he might be upon witnessing such behavior. In truth, Lilith found him quite impossible to read. 

“Don’t tell me you’ve never dreamed of taking a literal blood bath, Astarion?” Lilith drawled, chewing her lip as she plucked a wet handful up to paint across her bare chest. She lazily smeared her full breasts, bolstered by firm muscle and soft from womanhood. She eyed him languidly from bottom to his top, staring into his eyes from her own half-lids. “You’ve already made a mess of yourself. What’s a little more?”

The pale elf laughed, myriad emotions fluttering in that panicked, frenetic sound. Lilith suddenly wondered if she had finally gone too far, perhaps had broken him. He was such a clean creature. He spent all of his time bathing in the running waters and rivers around the grove and woods. 

To her surprise, the elf didn’t answer her with some snappy quip or snarky insinuation. Rather, he seemed to lose himself in the decision he made. 

Crawling atop her, Astarion took his time to let his skin find purchase against her, dragging his chest to her thighs, up her hips, along her chest, until finally he had caged her in with his hands planted firmly on either side of her head. 

From his perch above her, he stared down like a bewildered fallen angel, his halo of white curls backlit by the candelabra of the moon. The smears of gore only accentuated the contrast of his conflicted soul. 

Lilith, for all her amnesia and mindless craving for violence, held her breath as Astarion ducked down,  lips breathing tickling air along her sensitive, blood-damp ear. 

“To conjure a creature such as you, even in a dream, is beyond me.” 

Lilith’s goose flesh rose in painful rows along every inch of exposed skin. She shivered, leaning in ever so slightly as she let her gore-soaked hand hover over Astarion’s shoulder. For a moment, they both held their breath together. A silent challenge. An impasse. 

“Tell me yes,” Astarion finally groaned, still not daring to touch her skin with his mouth, no matter how little space separated them. 

“To what, exactly?” Lilith mused cruelly back, a wicked grin glinting under the forested moonlight. 

“To whatever you want,” Astarion promised broadly, although even lower in his whisper. “Let us lose ourselves to this night, and lose ourselves in each other.”

Lilith breathed out a response that felt as though it originated from somewhere deeper than her own throat. 

“Yes. I want you, Astarion.” 

But…a pause. A beat. Not even nearby crickets dared interrupt. It was as though they’d known to steer clear from anywhere this terrible duo might have chosen to lay. 

“Do you want…me?”

There was only a moment of hesitation, nearly enough to make Lilith back away and introduce potentially-needed space between them.

Only, she couldn’t pull away. Not when his answer was his greedy lips on hers, carnivorous and starving, lapping her up with such salaciousness it would be unbecoming of anyone else. 

Their bodies began to writhe within the mud, gripping each other with tender violence as they found purchase however they could. Hands became claws, tongues grew tentacles. They spawned into something far more grotesque than a mind-flayer could ever conjure, for the rampant sin was beyond the scope of what an Illithid could likely ever crave. 

If they were to turn into those monsters and lose their blackened souls, at least they’d lose it like the lowly beasts they already were. 

At some point, Lilith felt Astarion’s palm circling her clit with firm, knowing pressure. The blood acted as part lube, but her own lascivious wetness provided more than plenty to allow him plenty of slickness. Lilith groaned, grinding her strong hips upward to encourage his touch. 

Astarion pulled back just enough to connect their eyes, foreheads touching as he palmed her, making sure he had her full attention before bringing that same palm up between their faces. He licked her wetness and the swirled gore off in a flat drag of his tongue. The sensation made his eyes roll back ever so slightly in delight. 

“It tastes good, yeah?” Lilith grunted breathlessly. 

Astarion shivered and pushed her back, making her land hard on her elbows where she caught herself. Before she could incorrectly assume he was ending their tryst, he was diving down head first between her bare thighs. 

Pulling her hips down towards him, Astarion adjusted her briefly before diving in, led by his wanting tongue.  

The night she first awoke with him atop her, fangs out and half ready to plunge in her neck, he had been so feral. Blind with thirst and need, his eyes had glowed the rich crimson that signaled the predator he was. Oftentimes, bright, unnatural colors in nature were a sign of toxicity, harm, danger. 

Now, those same eyes were fueled with a similar thirst, glowing a bright red as they flickered up at her from between her thighs. He feasted there, not unlike he had feasted from her throat later that first night. 

“Do it, Astarion.” Her low order crawled from her lips.

His brows furrowed ever so slightly in questioning. He pulled away wetly, a string of happy, red saliva webbing between her honeypot and his greedy lips. “What is that, darling?” 

“You know what.” The dark challenge in her voice made Astarion ponder for just a moment.

One encouraging hand came down to wrap through his curls, pulling ever so gently at the base of his scalp, as though coaxing. 

His eyes lit up with tentative understanding. Without another wasted beat, his eyes flashed an even brighter red, fangs throbbing as they elongated and pushed from between his lips, called to action. 

Licking a brief question with his tongue up the sensitive inner thigh before him, he kept his eyes up on the predatory dilated pair above him, and bit down. 

Lilith bucked and moaned, throwing her head back in pure ecstasy as Astarion feasted on her. The pinch of pain and delectable swirl of pleasure as he gripped her thigh with one firm hand and cupped her clit with the other, the vampire consumed her thoroughly. 

She wondered if her own hot blood, putrid and dark from murderous lusts, tasted any sweeter with her want for him. Could he taste her desire? The electricity within her veins that begged for him? 

As though to answer her question, all too soon Astarion was wrenching his fangs from her thigh. Lilith hadn’t even noticed that the flesh had gone a bit cold, not when the sensations had encouraged so much pleasure in every inch of her body. 

As the camp firelight reflected hot tongues along the black puddles they adorned, their own mirror images could be seen upside down in the mud. The pale elf rose above the bloodied paladin of sin, her legs spread and wanting, and he mounted her easily. With a trickle of her blood gathered at his chin, he dove in to kiss her, to share her flavor, while his hips thrust in unison. 

Lilith gasped into Astarion’s mouth as his hard length parted her with such abruptness. The shock of the pain produced trembling pleasure to rip through her, and she shuddered against his firm body. 

“Are you alright?” Astarion’s low voice held concern, and he held frozen in his deep thrust, not daring to go further. 

Lilith panted against his lips, slowly inching her tongue out to swirl around his blood-swollen flesh. Her ankles hooked themselves around his back, answering with a sudden flexing that pulled his buttocks forward, deeper into her. 

They both groaned in response, both shaking with pitiful lack of control. 

They didn’t speak much after that. Neither had the capacity for words, not then. Not as they cried out into each other’s mouths, swallowing the other’s pleasure to digest for later recollections. The coppery tang of a robbed life and two bodies freely given rocked back and forth with the grinding and slamming of their flesh. 

Astarion’s hips closed in deeper then, staying flush against her entrance where he flexed his erection deep inside. He watched in a flushed trance as the mysterious murderer nearly cried with pleasure, clawing for him to come closer and closer, always closer.

“Nngh,” Astarion pushed out from between gritted teeth as her hips ground against him. Their foreheads were still pushed together, their breaths intermingling with their own luxurious bouquets of life and death. “You’re close to peaking. I…can feel it.” He exhaled into her mouth again, as though he could force his air into her lungs like his cock in her sheath. 

Lilith shuddered, nodding breathlessly. She remembered nothing from her past. She couldn’t recall ever experiencing anything like this, nor did she have the wherewithal to try when Astarion had her so folded up like this. 

“Peaking…?” 

Astarion paused, stilling. 

“Oh, my dagger-happy darling,” he mused in his low, lusty way. But there was something sad there, too. “You really don’t remember anything, do you.” A statement. Not a question. 

Before she could protest, Astarion suddenly pulled back just enough from her to slam back down against her with all his might. It knocked the air from her lungs, draining her of any will to resist. 

Again, he thrust. It elicited a small, pitiful cry from an unknown depth within her, deeper even than her darkest urge. 

And again. Deeper. Harder. Sharper.

Again. 

And again. 

And again. 

The speed picked up before Lilith knew what was happening, and she gripped with nails and bit into his shoulder with crying teeth as his skilled body dragged her soul up from Nessus all the way up to Chronias and back. 

For a brief, blissful moment, Lilith was of her own body. Her own flesh belonged to her, as did her blood. The colors that flowed in her did so within him, too. Awash in possession of that moment, of the body within she dwelled, Lilith experienced what it was like to be flesh and blood. To be alive. To be…

Crying out a sigh of a whisper, Lilith exploded within herself. Her thighs quaked around Astarion’s hips, loosening just enough as she lost all control of her faculties and went semi-limp in his arms. 

“Good—girl…” Astarion cooed between thrusts, maintaining his rhythm and depth as to maintain the high his partner was riding. 

Lilith was only partially aware of anything beyond Astarion, and she clung to him as he began to shake and stiffen as well, holding onto her as though they would fall off a cliff without proper purchase. 

The countless gods might’ve known how long they sat there, wound up together and panting, little cries passed back and forth as sorry excuses for shallow, shared breaths. 

The bloodied mud had time to dry and crust on their skins, copper curing under the blue moonlight.