Chapter Text

Prologue

The Assistant Manager

“I kissed you, and even the dark turned gentle for a while.”

— Unknown

“I want to speak with your manager.”

The words no said manager wants to hear but is prepared to decimate with their weaponized customer service tone, alongside a smile so crisp it could gut a fish. Bernadette arranged the last candle on the display, Mahogany Teakwood, third shelf, label out, because corporate had sent another planogram email that morning and God forbid the Mahogany Teakwood be a quarter-inch left of its ordained position. She rose from her squat and prepared herself for just that kind of mastery.

She glanced over her left shoulder. Mrs. Kinsey. Of course it was Mrs. Kinsey. A stout woman who penciled on her eyebrows with a black from Wet n’ Wild’s collection of cheap eyeliner. The kind that smudged and gave her this permanent look of surprise. Kinsey was a regular. A regular who did this kind of shit all the time, but especially to the younger staff, because there was something about a twenty-year-old with a name tag that activated the dormant tyrant in certain middle-aged women.

Behind the register, Cherri stood with her side-shave, septum piercing, and graphic eyeliner that would make Amy Winehouse give an encore from beyond the grave. She did the thing where her jaw went tight, nostrils flared, and her hand gripped the edge of the counter like she was restraining herself from saying something that would get her fired. Bernadette recognized the posture.

“Bernadette—uh—this woman—”

“Hello, what seems to be the problem? How can I assist you, Mrs. Kinsey?” Bernadette simulated the voice. The my customer service went to Harvard voice. The voice that said I respect you as a valued customer while communicating, I will bury you in policy and procedure until you choke on it.

Kinsey, who always had this haughty self-absorbed attitude of most right-leaning women, leafed through cardboard coupons in her hands as if preparing to present evidence at trial. “Your staff here—” she clicked her tongue—“won’t take my coupon.”

Bernadette smiled, although strained, and held together by the knowledge that rent was due in three weeks. She extended her hand. Kinsey reluctantly surrendered the glossy mailers. Bernadette knew before she looked, but she humored the customer, because humoring the customer was what they paid her thirteen dollars and seventy-five cents an hour to do.

“Let’s see, hm.” Her eyes traced the postcard-sized coupon. Buy three, get three free. Standard promotional mailer, sent to every address in the 46383 zip code, redeemable once per transaction. She looked at the register screen and the purchase lined up beside it: three body sprays and three lotions.

Sometimes Bernadette wished she had a placard for her forehead with flashing lights that said SORRY, YOU CAN’T DOUBLE DIP ON COUPONS.

She tucked one arm on her hip. Smiled at Kinsey again. “Sorry, my staff is right. We can’t accept more than one of these per transaction. You’ve purchased six items—”

“But I am buying three—”

Nope. Not today.

Bernadette nodded while she died inside. “I understand why you would think that, Mrs. Kinsey, and I appreciate you bringing it to our attention. But unfortunately, you are purchasing six items, and this coupon entitles you to three of them for free. Which it has already done.” She gestured to the register total, which reflected the discount the coupon provided. “So, the good news is, you’re already getting the deal. Now—would you like to pay cash or card today?”

Kinsey’s eyebrows compressed. Her mouth opened to argue and Bernadette tapped cheer-aggressively on the counter. “Card,” Kinsey said, with the poisoned politeness of a woman who intended to leave a one-star Google review and start shit in the local Facebook group before she ever reached the parking lot.

“Wonderful.” Bernadette stepped back and let Cherri finish the transaction. She waited until Kinsey’s flats had clacked across the tile. It wasn't until the glass door swung shut and the little chime sang its two-note goodbye that she finally turned to Cherri.

Cherri’s face was still tight. Her septum ring turned at an unnatural angle alongside her scrunched nose. 

“Hey.” Bernadette put a hand on the counter. “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

Cherri exhaled through her nose. “She comes in every week. Every week, Bernadette. She tries the double coupon thing every fucking time.”

“I know.”

“She called me hun. You know the tone.”

“I know the tone.” Bernadette straightened the stack of tissue paper by the register. “I have been the recipient of that tone more times than I can remember. It doesn’t get better. You just get better at not stabbing the customers.”

Cherri cracked a reluctant smile. “You’re my manager, should you really be giving me that kind of hope?.”

“Hope? I can afford. Your bail? I cannot.”

Bernadette circled the store. She selected five fall fragrance three-wick candles from the front display—Pumpkin Pecan Waffles, Flannel, Sweater Weather, and two Vampire Blood, the last of which she held up to the light with the reverence other women reserved for engagement rings.

“Vampire Blood,” she said, mostly to herself.

She set the candles on the counter. Cherri scanned them and applied the forty-percent employee discount, and the total dropped to something more than Bernadette should have been spending. But it was also payday and sometimes you had to treat yourself.

“Five candles.” Cherri raised an eyebrow. The shaved half of her head caught the store’s overhead lighting. “Splurging, are we?”

“It’s Friday. It’s payday. The Halloween candles go super fast—you know this. And—” Bernadette tucked the bag into her tote. “I’m going to Starbucks to get a caramel macchiato when I clock out, and then I’m going home to enjoy my first weekend off in two months.”

“Two months?”

“Oh, yeah. Two months. I have worked nine consecutive weekends, Cherri. I have earned these candles. I have earned a macchiato. I have earned the right to sit on my couch and do absolutely nothing for forty-eight hours.”

“Living the dream.”

“Living the goddamn dream,” Bernadette confirmed, and clocked out, and walked out into the October evening.

The Starbucks was behind the strip mall. The kind of strip mall that existed in every midsized Indiana town with a stretch of beige storefronts neighboring a Target. Next to a Crumbl Cookie and a Mattress Firm that was always empty. Bernadette sometimes wondered if it was a money laundering business. The air was crisp and damp, carrying the smell of wet leaves, exhaust, and midwestern melancholy of a season turning. Bernadette’s Demonia boots, her daily-wears, black with silver buckles, crunched across the asphalt.

She ordered the caramel macchiato. Venti. Extra shot. She considered oat milk, decided she deserved real dairy, and added whipped cream because she was a grown woman and could make her own caloric decisions. The barista called her name and she collected her drink. She took the first sip in the parking lot and closed her eyes, letting the sugar and caffeine hit her bloodstream.

Then Barnes & Noble. It was a two-minute walk. She was parked closer to the back of the lot anyways. She walked across the main parking lot, past McDonald’s, Great Clips, and Claire’s, to the Barnes & Noble that anchored the other end of Pier One. Bernadette stepped through the automatic doors into the scent of a bookstore: new paper, fresh ink, and the faint underlayer of a thousand unread stories waiting.

She knew where she was going. Fantasy and Science Fiction, second aisle from the back, bottom shelf where they kept the paperback romances with the painted covers and the titles that promised exactly the kind of filth she was in the mood for. She crouched down, her knees protested, because crouching was an increasingly feeble act at thirty-four, and scanned the spines.

She selected a vampire smut novel with a cover featuring a shirtless man with deep hip dips and a woman in a corset who appeared to be fainting, which was either from desire or a lack of oxygen, and either way Bernadette knew it would scratch the itch. She tucked it under her arm and stood.

That was when she heard an argument. It came from the next aisle over, History, or possibly Philosophy. She wasn't sure because the shelving in this location was chaos. The dispute was conducted in a register of a man who was not interested in moderating his volume.  

“Young man, I assure you, this volume was here not three days past. I placed it here myself. It is leather-bound, approximately this thick—”

“Sir, we don’t carry leather-bound anything. Our inventory is all print-on-demand and trade paperback—”

“Bah. Your inventory is a travesty. In my day, a bookseller knew his stock as a vintner knows his cellar—”

Bernadette peered around the corner of the shelf. The man was geriatric. Tall, with a long white beard that reached past his sternum and hair to match, flowing over shoulders wrapped in what appeared to be—Bernadette blinked—a grey wool cloak. Fastened at the throat with a silver clasp. Beneath it, she glimpsed grey fabric, and boots that looked handmade. His eyes blue and nettled.

The Barnes & Noble employee, a younger man in a smock who looked like he was questioning every life choice that had led to this moment, held up his tablet and began to type.

“Sir, I can check our system if you have a title or ISBN—”

“ISBN. Bah.” The old man waved a hand with knotted, wrinkly fingers. “The book does not have a number. It has a purpose. Which is more than I can say for this—” He gestured at the entirety of the store with magnificent contempt. “Emporium.”

He turned on his heel, cloak swirling with a dramatic flourish. And as he did, something fell from the crook of his arm. A leather-bound book, dark and worn, about the size of a trade paperback but thicker, hit the worn carpet with a muffled thump.

Bernadette stepped forward. “Sir—hey, excuse me, you dropped—” She bent down and picked it up. It was warm.  A gentle, radiating heat that pulsed against her palm, making the fine hairs on her forearm stand up. The leather was soft. She checked the spine, no title or author. She opened it. The pages blank and cream-colored. She glanced up. The old man was gone. The Barnes & Noble employee was already walking the other direction. The tablet tucked against his chest and probably grateful for the reprieve. Bernadette’s head swiveled and she squinted, looking every which way. The old man wasn’t down the aisle, didn’t step around any corner that she could see. He was simply gone. 

She traced all the nearby aisles just in case and the only thing she could find was a faint scent of pipe tobacco. Bernadette stood in the aisle holding the blank journal against her chest and her vampire smut novel under the wing of her arm and felt a prickling unease of having witnessed something that did not fit into the agreed-upon rules of reality.

She looked at the journal once more. Just a blank journal. Bernadette didn’t have a rational reason, but she put it in her tote bag. She paid for the vampire novel, crossed the main drag to her car, and drove home. 

Home was Lot 14, Meadow Ridge Mobile Home Community, which was neither on a ridge nor near any meadows and whose claim to community was barbeques at best.

The trailer park sat on the northeast side of Valparaiso, past the rail yard, in a stretch of unincorporated county that the city’s Chamber of Commerce pretended did not exist. Where sidewalks were not planned into the infrastructure. The road into the court was potholed to the point that outsiders would bottom out their suspension if they didn’t know better. Bernadette’s 2009 Honda Civic, which had 177,777 miles and a check engine light that had been on for so long she’d covered it with Sharpie marker, navigated the craters with a slow dip to the right at each axis.

The park was forty-two lots arranged in crooked rows and one cul-de-sac. Some of the trailers stayed maintained with skirting intact, potted plants on the steps, American flags or wind chimes. Some had those solar-powered garden lights that lasted about three weeks before the methheads stole them. The other trailers? They were actively decomposing, their siding peeling or missing entirely. Windows clouded or busted out. Yards covered in detritus and plastic Walmart bags, blowing around like a Katy Perry song.

Lot 14 slid somewhere into the other category. Bernadette’s trailer was a 1992 single-wide, one bedroom, one bath. The skirting was not intact. The steps were solid. She had a doormat that said ‘COME BACK WITH A WARRANT’ in a cheerful font, and a dead cactus on the railing that she kept meaning to throw away and never did. The rent was five hundred and sixty dollars a month, which was almost exactly half her take-home pay, which was a ratio that personal finance experts would have described as catastrophic but that was just Indiana and late-stage capitalism.

She parked. Collected her tote bag and climbed the three metal steps to her front door. Inside, the trailer smelled like the Wallflower plug-in she’d installed last week and the slightly musty undertone that plagued trailers after several decades. She locked the door. She set the tote on the kitchen counter. She took a long pull of the macchiato, which was now lukewarm but still sweet, and she looked at her reflection in the microwave door and said, “Forty-eight hours. No customers. No coupons. Just you, the couch and the candles and the filth.”

The work clothes came off. The khaki pants, the company polo that made her look like she was cosplaying as a suburban golf instructor, and she stood in her bedroom in her underwear for a moment, deliberating. Let’s see. Friday night, no social engagements, no need to leave, no reason whatsoever to dress up. But Bernadette didn’t put on the South Park pajama pants. She put on the outfit, not for anyone but herself. Because sometimes Bernadette needed to look in the mirror and see the version of herself that existed outside the Bath & Body Works polo and the customer service smile and the monotony of being a normal, boring woman in a normal, Indiana town with a normal life.

She needed to see that girl she’d been at fifteen, the one who’d dyed her hair black and discovered Tool and spent her weekends in her bedroom writing poetry about darkness and longing in spiral-bound notebooks.

The black jean shorts hugged her curves. The sleeved fishnet top with the diamond pattern. A throwback to the kind she’d bought at Hot Topic in her youth. A black tank top over it. She sat on the edge of the bed and laced up her four-inch Demonia platform boots, The black ones with silver buckles, chunky soles that added height she didn't need, but which made her feel powerful in a way she couldn't explain.

She rifled through her makeup. Black felt liner, winged at the corners. Dark shadow blended into the crease. Mascara. A lip color that was technically called “Black Cherry”, but she called “don’t talk to me.” She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Five-foot-nine, two hundred and thirty-four pounds of pale skin and auburn waves and black everything else. And she felt, for the first time since five-forty-five that morning when her alarm had dragged her out of a dream she couldn’t remember, like herself.

She lit the Vampire Blood candle. Set it on the coffee table. The scent filled the small room with sweet berries & plum, the kind of fragrance that was designed to evoke gothic romance and Halloween. Two things which Bernadette had a deep ardor for that stretched all the way back to The Crow and Interview with a Vampire. She tossed the purple BIC lighter onto the table beside the totebag.

Her PC sat in the corner of the living room on a desk she’d assembled from a flat-pack she’d bought at Walmart and a piece of plywood she’d cut to size herself, because the desk surface cracked during assembly, and she’d refused to return it. The tower was her build, assembled over two tax-return seasons from components she’d researched for months on Reddit threads and YouTube tear-downs. An AMD Ryzen 7. An RTX 3070 she’d gotten secondhand from a guy on Facebook Marketplace who was upgrading to a 4090. Thirty-two gigs of RAM. RGB lighting she’d set to a pulsing red-violet cycle because she was, at her core, a creature of aesthetics.

She dropped into her chair, black with red stitching, one armrest slightly wonky, and booted the system. The fans spun up with a hum more soothing than any white noise machine. The monitor flickered to life. She clicked through the desktop icons. Baldur’s Gate 3.

The loading screen bloomed across the monitor. She leaned back. Cracked her knuckles. Rolled her neck. The Vampire Blood candle flickered on the coffee table behind her, illuminating the room in dancing shadows. Her save loaded. Act Three. The Szarr Palace. Her Dark Urge character stood on the dais, red-eyed and devastating. She’d spent four hours in character creation sculpting because if she was going to be an instrument of cosmic violence, she was going to look immaculate doing so. The party was assembled: Astarion, Gale, Shadowheart. The dream team. The murder squad. She clicked on Astarion.

He turned. His familiar animation. The slight tilt of his head, the curl of the lip, the way the light caught his silver hair and his red-brown eyes dazzled between mischief and malice.  

“I’m all pointy ears, my love.”

Bernadette pressed her hand to her chest. “Hello, darling,” she said to the screen, low and breathy. “Yes, you are. You are all pointy ears, and I love you and tonight we are going to go kill your terrible master and it is going to be magnificent.”

She was aware that this was insane. She was aware that she was a thirty-four-year-old woman living in a trailer park in Valparaiso, in full goth regalia, talking to a video game character as if he were a real person who could hear her and cared about her feelings. She was aware that if anyone walked in right now—not that anyone would, because nobody visited Lot 14 except the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they had stopped trying after the third time she answered the door in a Cradle of Filth t-shirt—they would have questions.

She did not care. This was the only relationship in her life that had never disappointed her, because Astarion could not disappoint her, because Astarion was not real, and the not-real were the only lovers who kept their promises.

She navigated the party down into the depths of the Szarr Palace. Through the corridors, past the servants, through the doors to the ballroom that required the Szarr family ring she’d picked up hours ago and forgotten about. Then it was time to take the dais down to the Tourmaline Depths. The music shifted, the score that told you something terrible was coming. The defiled chapel in all its green tourmaline glory.

The cutscene triggered. The camera swept across the ritual circle showing the spawn floating in the back, glyphs of blood magic pulsing, the whole operatic nightmare rendered in Unreal Engine glory. And there he was. Cazador Szarr.  He stood on the ritual circle. His character model was all severe angles and exaggerated menace. His face twisted into a permanent sneer. And his voice—Jesus, his voice. It came through her speakers with a shrill that sounded like a bad impression of a villain from a Saturday morning cartoon:

“You will BURN, and I will ASCEND!”

Bernadette threw her head back and cackled, a full-body rattle from hearing this line three times across three playthroughs. And it was still funny. It was so bad. The voice actor had clearly been directed to make this man into the punchline of a joke, and the result was a villain who sounded less like a mighty vampire lord and more like community theater Dracula who’d had too much espresso.

“Don’t worry, Astarion,” she said to the screen, already selecting her combat abilities, queueing up Shadowheart’s Spirit Guardians and Gale’s Counterspell. “We got your back, pookie. We’re gonna fuck him up.”

Her Durge was first in the round and dashed across the dais to release Astarion. The second round she casted Daylight. A critical hit and Cazador staggered. Bernadette whooped. Gale dropped a Fireball that caught three of the lesser enemies. Shadowheart healed the party because we don’t have time for miss attacks.

“Yeah, buddy!” Bernadette pounded the desk. “That’s what you get! That’s what you get for being a shitty master and having a stupid voice!”

She killed him. Three rounds. Steadily watching Cazador’s HP bar drain with petty satisfaction. As a woman who had played this game for a thousand hours… she never once felt bad about the outcome.

The cutscene played. Astarion pulled his tormenter from the coffin and threw him to the ground like a potato. He stood over the body, and the dialogue options appeared. The one that determined whether he took the power or refused it, whether he ascended or stayed himself.

She rolled. She always chose the spawn ending because she loved him, the parasocial, screen-mediated, fictional elf, and she wanted him free, not powerful. She wanted the version of him that could learn to be a person and maybe, in some imagined epilogue the game didn’t show, figure out how to be happy.

The scene played. Astarion’s face hardened and he stabbed Cazador. Much like Carl the psychotic llama with a hat stabbed a man fifty-seven times in the chest. Astarion collapsed to his knees and bawled in catharsis. Bernadette’s eyes stung, because it got her every time.

“There you go, Star,” she whispered to the screen. “You’re free.”

She sat with it for a moment. She saved and closed the game.

The Vampire Blood candle continued to burn. The room smelled like warmed wax and plums. She stretched, joints popping, and migrated to the couch. 

She read. The trailer settled around her with its familiar creaks and sighs. She was forty pages in. The vampire had just torn the heroine’s corset with his teeth, which seemed excessive but appropriate, when she heard it.

This wasn't a normal trailer sound. She knew the click of the furnace, the hum of the refrigerator, and the distant bass of DJ Rick in Lot 22 playing Lil Wayne at a volume that guaranteed a visit from the cops before midnight.

This was something she had no category for. A resonant hum, like a tuning fork pressed against bone, a frequency she felt in her teeth before she heard it with her ears.

And she smelled something else burning. Not the candle. She jumped up, thinking the lighter somehow caught her tote bag on fire. That was not burning, no. But it did glow. Through the canvas of the tote, she saw the violet light intensifying with pulses. The hum climbed in pitch. The Vampire Blood candle flickered. The overhead light buzzed and dimmed.

“What the fuck?”

Bernadette crossed to the table and reached into the tote bag.

She closed her hand around it. The journal was incalescent and alive in a way that leather and paper should not. Violet light bled from the edges of the cover, casting shadows on the ceiling that moved in different broken directions. She pulled it out slowly. The moment it cleared the canvas bag, the cover fell open. The blank pages were no longer blank. She could see, through the glare, the suggestion of writing, diagrams, something forming on the paper in real time, as if an invisible hand were scrawling across it with ink made of light.

The hum became a roar. The light erupted. An opening formed all around. A tearing, a splitting, a wound in the air itself. The linoleum beneath her boots cracked, and the ceiling disappeared. The walls of the trailer curled and blackened like burning film while violet light swallowed the room, the couch, the candles, the macchiato, and the vampire novel facedown on the cushion.

Gravity inverted. Bernadette's hands gripped the journal and the tote bag as she fell. She plunged through color and sound. She screamed, but the light deafened the sound. Right before the world went pitch black, she caught one final glimpse of the Vampire Blood candle on the coffee table, the flames reaching toward her like fingers pointing the way.

Chapter One

The Displacement

“Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ordinary ways of being seen.” 

Bernadette crashed into a hard surface on her hands and knees, and the impact sang up through her wrists and into her shoulders like a bell being struck. She screeched out loud, followed by a pained, droning whimper. The light from before vanished. There was an awful sour tang in the back of her throat. She tried to force it up and spit on the… cobblestones?

Bernadette held herself up on her hands for a long moment trying to breath. The uneven stone under her palms felt slick with brine. She could taste it in the air with fish guts, woodsmoke, and the reek of a harbor. Her fingers were scraped raw. Her mesh sleeves torn at one shoulder. One of her Demonia boots had come unbuckled. Her tote bag was somehow still looped over one arm. And it was dark, insanely dark. She glanced up.

Wooden pilings thick as tree trunks, flanked in green seaweed. Ships rocked in a harbor that stretched wide and dark under a sky bruised with stars she did not recognize. Lanterns hung from iron hooks along the pier. Beyond the docks, rising against the dark was a city. Crooked silhouettes of rooftops stacked against one another. The amber glow from hundreds of windows. A skyline she had seen rendered for over a thousand hours of gameplay, rotating her camera angle, adjusting her brightness settings, pausing to screenshot gorgeous scenes.

Baldur’s Gate.

“Oh,” Bernadette said to nobody, her voice thin, “fuck.”

She sat along the edge of the dock and took inventory. The tote bag had made it through. Inside were the remaining candles. The journal was there too. Her wallet was in the tote, containing thirty-seven dollars in cash, a Chase debit card, her Indiana driver’s license, and a Starbucks rewards card with enough points for one free drink she would never redeem.

She pulled her phone out of her back pocket. The screen cracked in transit but it powered on. No signal, which in part meant no data, and the likelihood of WIFI was bleak. The time read 9:47 PM, which was meaningless here, and the date read October 11, 2026, which was even more meaningless. She had thirty-five percent battery and nothing to charge it with. She opened the camera. Took a photo of the harbor, the ships, the city rising beyond the docks. If nothing else, she would have proof. The phone would die eventually, but the photo would be there, timestamped and geotagged to nowhere. She put the phone away. Pulled her knees up to her chest. Wrapped her arms around them. The dock workers moved around her, unconcerned by the woman in strange clothes having a quiet crisis near the pier.

Maybe she could ground herself with the facts? She was in Baldur’s Gate, this was a fact. Not the game, the actual city. That journal had somehow, brought her here. She had no weapons, no stats, no spell slots, no character sheet. She was a level-zero commoner, thirty-four years old, five-foot-nine, two hundred and thirty-four pounds of absolutely nothing useful in a medieval fantasy city. She could not swing a sword. She could not cast a cantrip. She could not pick a lock.

What Bernadette could remember is that she knew this city, its districts, and its power players. She was in the Lower City. Above it, connected by a series of gates and steep roads, was the Upper City, where the patriar families lived in their walled estates and pretended the Lower City didn't exist. The whole thing sat on the Chionthar River, which fed into the Sea of Swords.

She needed money. She needed shelter. She needed to not get stabbed in an alley in the next thirty minutes. She walked. She didn't know where she was walking, but she walked. The Demonia boots were not made for cobblestone. The platforms caught on every uneven edge, every gap between stones, and twice she nearly tumbled hard before she learned to pick up her feet and watch the ground. The streets wound uphill, away from the water, and the buildings pressed closer as she climbed the bluffs.

A group of men came around a corner ahead of her and she stepped sideways into a doorway without thinking, pressing her back against the wood, making herself as small as a woman of her bearings could make herself. They passed without seeing her, three of them, rough-looking, armed, talking in low voices about someone who owed someone else money. The language was Common, which sounded like English to her ears but wasn't quite. It had a differing phonetic, different vowel sounds, like English filtered through several centuries. Archaic, aha! That’s the word Bernadette. Good job. When they were gone, she stepped out and kept walking.

She found a temple. This wasn't the temple she would have chosen. The one she would have chosen was dedicated to Selûne, if she could have found it, because Selûne was the goddess of the moon and wanderers and she was, at the moment, very much a wanderer. But the temple she found was dedicated to Ilmater, the god of suffering and endurance, and she supposed that was appropriate enough.

It was a low stone building set back from the street, with a wooden door that was scarred and battered, and light coming from inside that was steadier than the street lanterns. There was a symbol carved above the door: bound hands on a blood-red background and a wooden sign that read, in Common she could somehow parse, All Who Suffer Are Welcome.

The interior was stone floors, wooden pews, an altar at the far end draped in red cloth. Candles burned in iron sconces along the walls. Not many folks inside. A man slept on one of the pews. A woman sitting near the altar with her head bowed. A cleric in red robes, moving between the pews with a clay pitcher.

The cleric took notice of Bernadette and came round. He was a halfling and had a small, round-face. "You look lost, child," he said.

The cleric's name was Brother Harken, and he did not ask her where she was from or how she'd gotten there or why she was dressed like she'd been expelled from a traveling circus. He gave her water, bread, and a blanket. Let her cry until she was done, and then he told her she could stay the night in the temple and they would figure things out in the morning.

In the morning, Bernadette began the process of surviving Baldur's Gate.

It was not glamorous. There was no quest giver who appeared to hand her a mission and a starting weapon. There was no tutorial. Her phone was dead before the first tide. Honestly, she kept pulling it out to check it as if somehow, someway there might be a notification from discord, or an email from Amazon.

Bernadette understood one thing and that was capitalism. She traded one of the Bath and Body Works candles to a market vendor for a decent pocket of copper. Enough to buy food and a change of clothes. Which she did, she bought a darker linen shift and a wool overdress. She kept her regular clothes and put them in the small chest that Brother Harken gave her. Bernadette stayed at the temple for the next three days. 

She learned to navigate the city with her feet instead of a mouse cursor. The real city was a living thing, enormous and indifferent. Full of smells and sounds and people who were not quest NPCs but actual human beings—well humanoid enough—Halflings, elves, dwarves, gnomes, the occasional dragonborn, and so much more. Going about their lives with no regard for whether Bernadette was having an existential crisis in their midst. The first time she saw a high elf in person she gawked. She couldn’t help it, not in the slightest. To which case said elf scrunched up his nose and dismissed her as strange. They weren’t what she thought of when she thought of Elves. Tolkien would roll over in his grave. These were not weak, ethereal little creatures with big pointy cat ears. These were efficient, whipcorded people who could snare you, or hold you at knife-point in an instant. 

Another thing Bernadette noticed about Baldur's Gate was it was not a 1:1 match of the game. It’s true that she could make out key landmarks. Sorcerous Sundries, High Hall up near the Upper City, The Elfsong Tavern, and Even the Blushing Mermaid were in all the places one would expect them to be. But damn, there was so much more. The graveyard was not where she pictured it to be, neither was the city park, and to her surprise neither was the Szarr Palace. Which in the game sat on the Upper City wall overlooking like a vulture.

Without ordaining a pass to the Upper City. She wouldn’t be able to find it or see it anyways, and that was probably for the best. 

In a city of corded elves and tanker sized dragonborns and lean, weather-beaten humans who worked the docks and trades, Bernadette was...there was no delicate way to put it. She was a spectacle. She was rolling, unapologetic curves. Her hips were wide. Her thighs were thick. Her bust was full, straining the laces of the chemise the seamstress had sold her. Her skin was winter-pale, white as cream, without a single freckle. Her auburn hair fell in long, soft layers past her shoulders.

She caught looks everywhere. Dock workers paused mid-rope to watch her pass. The merchant gave her an extra apple and didn’t charge for it. The elf poet at the Elfsong called her “voluptuous” and then “decadent” in the same breath. This was a world where famine was a season and soft flesh meant abundance. 

Through Harken she met Olorin. A wine merchant who supplied the Upper City’s better households. Olorin was a dwarf with a magnificent beard and a gustation so refined he could identify a vineyard by a sip alone. He had hired Bernadette. And she had accepted the position easily enough. All she had to do was load crates for the sommelier, and keep a running inventory. Honestly, Olorin couldn’t have found an employee with a better skillset than a prior assistant manager of a franchise. He was very impressed that she was literate. She worked through her first tenday and still crashed in the temple at night.

It was Olorin who was contracted to supply wine for a gathering at the Vanthampur estate. And it was he who, when one of his regular serving girls fell ill, looked at Bernadette with an appraising eye and said, “Can you pour wine without fumbling?”

“Hell yeah—I mean, forsooth, my dude. Er, my liege,” Bernadette stammered, squeezing her eyes shut for a fraction of a second as she tried to archaicify her voice. Olorin stared at her for a long second. As a Lower City merchant, his Common was basically gritty, working-class English, making her entire performance unnecessary. He let out a heavy sigh through his magnificent beard, generously choosing to ignore whatever the hell she had just said.

He gave a weathered smile and wagged a finger at her. “Good.” She was about to turn back to load more of the crates when his rough hand caught her wrist and she met his eyes. “One more thing, yeah? Be careful up there.” He worked his mouth and tongue. “Keep your head down and be careful what you say. Those people don’t take kindly to outsiders, and there’s some real monsters up there.”

The night and day beyond the Manor Gate was insulting. The Vanthampur estate reminded her of the 1.3 million dollar mansions on the east side of Valparaiso. The environs had manicured hedges that were comically Seussical. The manse was three stories, with a steep austere tower, slate-tiled roofs, half-timbered upper stories, and windows that sparkled with a glow of the revelry inside. Servants in pressed livery. The kind of wealth that proclaimed power inscribed into everything, the grain of the wood, the silver, oil paintings of ancestors who all had the same chiseled jawline. 

Given a dress for the evening, a server's uniform, a simple thing in grey linen with a black apron. It was too tight across the bust and too short in the hem. She had twisted her auburn hair up and pinned it with two wooden sticks, and she had bitten her lips to give them color, and she had told herself that she was here to pour wine, collect her pay, and leave.

She moved through the ballroom with her tray. The room gorgeous with high ceilings painted with scenes of maritime triumph, crystal chandeliers throwing prismatic light across polished floors, tall windows draped in cloth-of-gold. The guests were the wealthiest and most powerful people in the city, and they sure looked the part. Bernadette finished pouring a Cormyrian Red for a woman whose earrings were adorned with gold filigree. She turned to carry her tray back to the kitchen to restock and nearly collided with someone. 

Someone caught her. A hand closed around her upper arm, to steady her. The tray miraculously didn’t tumble over and she didn't fall. And she looked up. And up. He was nearly six and a half feet tall. And because even in her Demonias, she would have had to tip her chin up, in flat serving shoes she had to crane her neck.

"Careful." His voice drew her in. "These floors are treacherous when they have been waxed."

The face looming over her wasn't just beautiful; it was arresting. He had the kind of striking, androgynous bone structure that belonged on the cover of a nineties gothic rock album. His skin was flawless, carrying a cool-toned almond pulled taut over high, sweeping elven cheekbones. But it was his eyes that drew her in. They angled slightly downward at the corners, framed by lush lashes, casting faint shadows on his cheeks. The jawline on this man was sculpted for days, it looked inhuman. His hair swept back, gleaming with blue-black luster in the candlelight. Through the dark silk of it rose the distinct, tapering points of his ears.

He didn't have the soft, flushed look of the other wealthy men in the room. He was incredibly tall, broad across the shoulders, narrowing down to the waist and hips. He was dressed in deep burgundy with black accents, a high-collared coat of rich brocade over a dark wine-red silk shirt that moved like water when he shifted. One button was left undone at his chest. His hands were large, the fingers long and deft, capping off in medium stiletto-shaped nails that women back home would have easily paid three hundred dollars for.

He was, without qualification or caveat, the most debonair man she had ever seen. He looked familiar in a way that made her stomach drop, but her brain couldn't quite connect the dots yet. The digital, cartoonish caricature from the game she had memorized was nothing compared to the living, breathing art standing in front of her.

And then he smiled. It was a small smile. It lifted just one corner of his plush mouth, creating a single crease beside it, and it did beautiful things to his face.

“You’re staring,” he said. His voice was low and unhurried, accented in a way she couldn’t quite place.

“You’re very tall.” Honesty was the only option left in her arsenal when all other cognitive function had ceased.

His smile widened by a fraction. “I am.”

“Sorry. I mean—” She lifted the wine bottle. “Can I pour you a glass?”

He tilted his head. The gesture was avian, curious, and it made the candlelight slide along the edge of his ear. “What are you pouring?”

“Cormyrian Red. 1263 vintage.” She turned the bottle to show the label. “Olorin says it's one of the better years, but honestly, I can’t tell the difference between this and the house wine at the Elfsong, so you’d be trusting my pouring arm more than my palate.”

A short laugh caught in his throat. “Your honesty is enlivening. Most of the servers in this house would have contrived an entire vineyard history to–” He worked his mouth, eyes shifting to the side in thought. “To bespell me.”

“Well, I’m not from around here,” she said, which was the understatement of the year. “So my vineyard knowledge is limited to ‘red’ and ’white’ and ‘the pink one.’”

“The pink one,” he repeated, and there was something in the way he said it, an amusement that was not condescending but charmed. It made a hot flush prickle the back of her neck. He extended his glass. “Pour, please.”

She poured him a generous draught. Her hand stayed steady, thank god. She watched the wine fill his glass, dark as blood, and she watched his fingers curl around the stem.

“You said you’re not from around here.” He sipped. Regarded her over the rim. “Where, then?”

“Far away,” She carefully set the tray aside on an entryway console. “Very far away. Somewhere you’ve never heard of.”

“I have heard of many places.”

“Not this one.” She smiled at him, her smile sat on her mouth like a dare. “Trust me.”

A cool draft swept in from the ballroom terrace, lifting a few stray, auburn curls from her shoulder. The elf didn't blink. He simply leaned into her space by a fraction of an inch, lifted the crystal he was cradling, swirled it.

She wouldn't say he sniffed the wine so much as he inhaled, as if deciding if he liked the vintage. Those eyes moved over her face. Moving from her forehead, cheekbones, the line of her jaw, and finally resting on her mouth. His lips curved into a slow, ruinous smile. "A challenge, then," he murmured. “I am Cazador Szarr,” he said, and gave a small bow. “Member of the Council of Peers. Patron of the Szarr Foundation for Wayward Youth. I fund four orphanages around the region.” The corner of his lip flipped up, wry and vulpine. “Among other things.”

She knew. Of course she knew. “Bernadette,” she said.

He tilted his head, waiting for more. “And your house?”

“No house. Just Bernadette. Just a server who is good at pouring wine and bad at pretending to know anything about it.”

Cazador spoke it in the back of his throat, rolling the r until it blurred into the n, skipping the softness of the vowels. It wasn't "Bernadette." It was Brr-nn-dtt, a sotto rumble that finished with a sibilant, gentle hiss through his teeth.

“A singular name without a lineage, spoken in an accent I cannot place,” he observed smoothly, his gaze dropping to her mouth before meeting her eyes again. “That is not a Baldurian pedigree.”

“It’s not,” she agreed.

He smiled again, and this time it reached his eyes. “Tell me, Bernadette-who-is-not-from-here.” His voice dropped half a register, conspiratorial, as if they were the only two people in a room full of Baldurian aristocracy, “How did you come to be pouring wine in the Vanthampur house?”

She gave him the abridged version of events. The one that omitted dimensional or planar travel. His brow arched when she mentioned she had been staying at the temple and didn’t have anywhere else to go. She must have been touched in the head at this point. Perhaps he’d charmed her. Vampires could do that right? She felt like she needed to shove her foot into her mouth, but she just kept on talking to him. He listened and never interrupted her, he would wait until she was finished speaking before asking her to clarify about the temple or Olorin. When she finished her tale, she stole a sip from one of the gardevins, crossed the bottle and her arms and looked out at the crowd. 

He reached out with his free hand and touched her wrist. Just his fingertips, resting them against the pulse point where the hem of her sleeve ended and her bare skin began. His fingers were warm. Not the corpse-like cold she’d imagined vampires would have. She could feel her own pulse hammering against his touch, and she knew he could feel it too.

“Do not pour another glass for these sycophants,” he murmured. “Accompany me to the Szarr Palace. I have an excess of guest rooms, and you do not belong here.”

She looked at his hand on her wrist. She looked at his face, those dark eyes that she could finally discern: a deep chestnut, wine red.

“What is the cost for a guest room?” She wasn’t an idiot. Men like this didn’t offer charity to random women without strings attached. Cazador’s thumb smoothed over her pulse point in small tandem circles. “There is no cost. Only curiosity. You are displaced from far. Allow me to offer you sanctuary while you determine your next move.” 

Damn this guy is smooth. She thought about the game: the ritual, the spawn, the kennels, and the Tourmaline Depths beneath the palace. She thought about Astarion, chained and screaming. She thought about the version of Cazador she had killed three times.

And then she thought about the man standing in front of her. The one who had laughed when she said “the pink one.” The one who was touching her wrist with gentleness. The one who was nearly six and a half feet tall and looking at her like she was the only interesting thing that had happened to him in a century.

He is a vampire lord, she told herself.

He funds orphanages, she told herself back.

He will destroy you.

He is touching your wrist like you are made of spun glass.

And then there was the other part that she felt ashamed to address. Sleeping on a cot in a temple was uncomfortable and there were usually other people seeking refuge alongside her. Strangers who could rob her blind in the night, slit her throat, the possibilities were quite endless. This was, in a twisted sense, the devil she knew?

“I—I’m working.” She gestured vaguely at the ballroom. “Olorin asked me to cover this shift…I need the pay.” The last part she struggled to get out.

Cazador’s hand slid from her wrist and reached into the breast pocket of his brocade coat. He pulled out a small heavy pouch of crushed velvet and set it in the center of her empty serving tray. It clinked with the weight of coins. “Give that to the dwarf. Consider your contact for the evening bought out… with a substantial gratuity for his inconvenience. Surely, these people can figure out how to pour their own wine.” 

Bernadette’s mouth gaped open, then she stared at the pouch, then she looked past him. Several Patriars were milling near the archway. A woman dripping in turquoise was staring directly at them, her eyes wide with curiosity before she hastily snapped her fan open and looked away. 

Bernadette remembered herself. “You’re making a scene.”

His nose crinkled from his restrained grin. “I am standing perfectly still. The rest of the room is making the scene. “He moved two fingers towards the kitchen and tilted his head. “Give the dwarf his gold. Take your share. My carriage is waiting at the gate.”

Bernadette looked at the pouch, then the man offering her sanctuary. She grabbed the pouch. 

“Ok,” she said.