The First March — The Polymorph

The next morning, the party moves.

You don't know the tactical details — Tav and Gale handled the planning, something about following leads on a potential cure, a healer at the Emerald Grove, and a village on the way that might have supplies. You don't ask. Route planning at the party level isn't your concern. Your concern is keeping up with people who have been adventuring together long enough to have a rhythm you haven't learned yet.

Mama stays near the camp perimeter with the cub. "Guard duty," you tell her, scratching behind her ear. "If anything comes near camp, eat it." She clicks her beak — the obviously click — and tucks the cub against her belly.

You fall into step with the group. And immediately, Astarion falls into step with you.

Not beside you. At you. He positions himself at your left elbow with the precision of someone who has calculated the optimal proximity for conversation, observation, and — though you won't realize this for weeks — escape routes.

"So," he says, and his voice has that theatrical, silk-over-velvet quality that you've already started categorizing as the one he uses when he wants something. "The woman who rode an owlbear, punched a goddess's psychic probe, and apparently sweats fire retardant. Tell me — is there anything about you that's not delightfully chaotic?"

"I organize my herb pouches alphabetically."

"Devastating. My entire assessment, shattered."

"What about you?" You don't look at him — you're scanning the tree line, old habits dying hard. "You're walking around with a ticking mind-flayer monster in your skull, marching into cultists, and complaining about people being 'dull' about dying. Sounds like you're winging it just as much as I am."

His smirk falters. It's fast — a micro-expression, there and gone like a fish breaking the surface — but you see it. A flicker of something behind the performance. Surprise, maybe, at being read that quickly. Or discomfort at being seen.

"Touche, my dear." The smirk returns, polished and bright. "Perhaps we are both a pair of beautifully unhinged creatures."

You note: the mask slipped. File under: interesting.

The Blighted Village is half a day's march through increasingly damaged forest — trees blackened by some kind of blight, the undergrowth withered, the air carrying a faint, acrid tang that reminds you of spoiled grain. The village itself is ruined, occupied by a scattering of goblins and a few things that are decidedly worse.

You bench yourself from the fight.

"I want to watch," you tell Tav. "How you guys handle a raid. I'll stay back and observe."

Tav looks at you — assessing, considering, and then nodding with the faintly relieved expression of someone who's glad they don't have to worry about the wild card during a tactical operation.

You find a vantage point on a crumbled wall and you watch.

Astarion. His feet. His boots find the one patch of thick moss on each surface, avoiding twigs, gravel, anything that would betray his position. He climbs a ruined wall like a spider — silent, boneless, his center of gravity impossibly low. When he strikes, it's from behind, always from behind, and by the time his target starts to fall, he's already moving to the next one.

Note: Don't just look where you're walking. Look at what you're stepping on.

Tav. The shield stance. When a goblin charges, Tav doesn't brace against the impact — they absorb it, sinking their weight into a widened stance, letting the kinetic force flow through them like water through a net, and then redirecting it in a fluid counter-twist that sends the goblin sprawling.

Note: Momentum is free energy. Don't fight it. Use it.

Karlach. The great-axe. She shouldn't be able to control a weapon that size with that precision, but she does — the axe-head's weight does the work, she just guides the arc, and the result is a controlled spin that clears a six-foot radius of anything that was standing in it.

Gale. The magic missiles. Not the wild, crackling bursts of energy you've been producing — these are precise. Calm, geometric hand gestures, fingers tracing invisible patterns in the air, and then bolts of force that lance from his palms with the accuracy of thrown darts. Three targets, three impacts, not a single wasted erg.

Note: You don't always need a giant boulder when a tiny spike will do the same job.

You're cataloguing all of this. Filing it in the part of your brain that has always been good at watching, mimicking, adapting. You've always learned like this — not from books, not from instruction, but from observation. See how someone holds a knife. Copy the grip. Adjust. Improve.

Afterward, in the ruins of the village square, the party catches their breath. Karlach is picking goblin teeth out of her axe. Gale is doing something fussy with a ward. Tav is checking the bodies for intelligence.

You summarize.

"Tav, your shield stance is a low-center-of-gravity momentum redirect — the kinetic impact flows through you instead of stopping at you." Tav blinks, nods slowly. "Karlach, you're using the axe-head weight as a flywheel — you're not swinging it, you're guiding it." Karlach grins. "Gale, your hand gestures aren't decorative — they're a containment structure. You're drawing a geometric boundary that focuses the force vector." Gale's eyebrows rise to a height you didn't think human eyebrows could achieve.

Then you turn to Astarion. And casually: "So, how long have you been a vampire, anyway?"

The courtyard goes silent.

Astarion's smirk doesn't vanish — it calcifies. Freezes in place, a rictus grin held together by two centuries of practice, and beneath it you see the flash of calculation: Does she know enough to be a threat? No. Can I use this? Yes. And something else — something older, rawer — before the mask slides down.

"You were going to tell them eventually," you say, and your tone is so aggressively casual that it borders on disrespectful. "I saw the footwork. No heartbeat. You avoid sunlight. And your skin —" you flick your fingers at him "— is room temperature in the summer. It's not complicated."

"You truly are a menace to my sanity, aren't you?"

"Don't worry. I'm not particularly racist to nocturnal beings." You crack your knuckles. "If you need blood, I have a neat trick to get you some."

The blood-juicer demonstration happens in front of everyone.

There's a dead bugbear in the village — courtesy of Karlach's axe — and its blood is still warm. You crouch beside the carcass, focus your mind the way Gale focuses his hands, and use a kinetic squeeze — a compressed, precise application of telekinetic force — to wring the blood from the tissue.

It's disgusting. It's also impressive. The blood flows upward, against gravity, in a thin, controlled stream, and you guide it into a goblin mug that you found in the rubble. No spill. No mess. No migraine — because you used Gale's geometric containment technique, tracing the mental pattern he demonstrated during the fight, and the force stayed contained instead of radiating outward.

You hold the mug out to Astarion. "Fresh, contained, and you don't even have to mess up your collar. You're welcome."

Gale: "She just used a somatic compression matrix to hydraulically harvest blood from a carcass."

Karlach: "That is the most metal thing I've ever seen!"

Astarion takes the mug. His expression is unreadable — somewhere between calculation and something he doesn't want to name. His fingers close around the rim, and for a moment, just a moment, the performance flickers.

Nobody has ever done this for him. Not like this — not casually, not as a solved problem, not as logistics. Every time someone has offered him blood, there were strings attached. Expectations. Angles.

You're already walking away, looking for something else to eat.

He files this under: useful. The word is comfortable. The feeling is not.

End notes for Chapters 7-8: Content warnings — references to past isolation (Karlach), mild violence. No sexual content.