Chapter Text
The House of Hope. Perfect, opulent. Every piece of furniture, tapestry hung, portrait painted was luxurious in its audacity. The man of the house was no different.
Raphael prided himself on the unattainable perfection he and his house boasted. In some ways he was a simple man, easy to please, as long as you always did everything perfectly. In other ways he was complex, hot and cold, starving and full, and more importantly: bored.
Centuries old he’d heard every story ever told. The players wore different names and faces, but the same underneath. Complex political coups, dramatic love stories, revolution. It all tasted the same decade after decade.
Routine kept the insanity of eternity away. He was a devil, well, half devil, who worked diligently towards the never-ending goal to obtain more power than anyone else could ever have.
One day his consistency would make him stronger than his father, The Arch Devil of Cania, Mephistopheles. Raphael would be more, without the paranoia of the raw and primordial, he would be better. What he would obtain fated to him, made for him. Wherever it was to be found.
Lazily, leaning his knuckles to his chin, Raphael poured over loose parchments and molded tomes while fantasizing of a new world order, one that only he could imagine. Lounging, distracted in his study with the smells of rich oak furniture, he was padded in deep red fabrics, and lulled into docility with a dark wine. His grandiose horns, bursting from a head of thick, black hair, scraped at the chair’s carved frame from his dramatic sigh. Red, taloned hands rubbed his temples as a boredom that even his incubus couldn’t cure turned to irritation. It blurred the baroque decorations, the detailed paintings of himself, the tapestries of battles won, and reached higher than the vaulted ceilings to echo the emptiness he uselessly filled with rich adornments.
Shelves of books made home stretched along the walls but provided no entertainment. The leather-bound tome’s and scroll’s secrets of history and magic had already been revealed to Raphael. He had read them all, wrote many of them.
A rap to the door made garish with intricate designs chiseled in the wood stole his attention: there was an expected visit.
“Enter,” he commanded, sitting straighter behind his desk at the middle of the back wall, two empty chairs angled before it.
Korilla followed, no longer intimidated by Raphael’s devilish form illuminated by the light of the fireplace. Korilla was Raphael’s familiar: A middle aged golden dwarf with long, wild curls and a wit that kept up with her patron.
Her main priority as of late had been to keep her usually agreeable patron from his ever-present restlessness, a job that had become harder as her well of depraved charges dried. She usually succeeded in bringing the most interesting gossip, leading him to mortals with wild desires, all in a sometimes-futile attempt to quash the idleness that tended to turn him short tempered, cruel, and closer to the devilish side of himself.
“Korilla. Tell me, what lecherous debauchery have the nobles found since my last visit to Prime Material?” he asked as she walked to him, causing her a chuckle when she took a seat.
“Nobles? Well. Let’s see… Seems as if Duke Ravengard found himself with some interesting characters,” she started.
“Oh?” his eyebrow raised, but he could tell she was withholding.
“Seems so. He’s been awfully close to that Lord Gortash, lately. Someone swore they saw him leaving the sewers. Wonder what’s down there,” she spoke low, forcing him to lean closer, hands clasped under his chin while giving her his full attention.
“Mhmm,” he hummed, growing impatient with her laboring to reveal the information she was meant to give him.
And they both knew what was in the sewers.
“Another thing, though. Weird rumblings. Not noble,” she warned. Raphael didn’t care, she knew him to make a deal with any mortal soul, noble or not.
“Continue,” he replied smoothly, leaning back into a comfortable position in his chair. The fire’s orange glow gleamed across the silken material of his fitted doublet and reflected in the glass of wine he ignored.
“According to rumor, there’s a strange group of adventurers that’s formed,” she watched his curiosity heighten. Adventurers were always entertaining, and their desires far more serious. With the threat of death never leaving the peripheral, they were eager to find any advantage over it.
“A vampire spawn, a wizard, a Shar worshiper, and even a Githyanki!” she paused, waiting for his reaction.
“Strange,” was his simple reply.
“Very. And right now, they’re being led by a sorcerer,” she finished with a whisper.
Sorcerers, another of Raphael’s interests. Not usually the mortal but the magic, rare, feral, tempting.
“Is that all?”
She had him interested, she knew it. He feigned otherwise but the bounce of his thigh, starting at his ankle, told her otherwise.
“They’re draconic. Pretty thing, maybe half elf or drow. I suspect a blue bloodline. From the rumors.”
Rumors. Would Raphael send her spying on this group for rumors?
“And,” she added before Raphael could dismiss her. “They were on that ship.”
“Really?” he asked, incredulously.
“The rumor. Trying to.. ‘find a cure’”
There it was, the dangerous and calculating narrowing of his eyes. He had been very interested in the plot involving a new cult to a new God: The Absolute.
Mostly, because it profoundly irritated his father. More than once his father called to him through a scrying mirror to suspect Raphael of something he had not done.
Theft. Really. Raphael did not steal. Everything he had was given freely, enthusiastically.
But someone did steal from his father, and that made him smile. Gifted simple, easy, unrestrained smiles for days after he heard. Sometimes a low laugh. Sometimes something louder, something furious.
It was said that person was dead. A god’s chosen replaced by a much less interesting shapeshifter.
He did love that plot, but it was growing larger, more complex than he originally expected. A long-ago memory of the founding of Reithwin Town crossed his mind before fixing his gaze back to the curious woman before him.
He didn’t tell Korilla the details he knew. Admittedly, it meant he couldn’t always expect her to bring the information he was actually looking for. But she got it right enough.
“A cure?” his eyebrow raised, pretending not to know what she was referring to.
Now he knew of this group, led by a potentially powerful sorcerer, and somehow immune to the effects of the mind flayer parasite. The mind flayer parasite controlled by an elder brain, erupting in Netherese magic, adorned by powerful crown. The crown of Karsus, specifically. He had started his crusade the moment he realized the crown’s potential, his father locking it away from him ignorantly. At times, he was tempted to steal it, but that would not have been satisfying. It would be boring, out of character.
This sorcerer was intriguing Raphael already.
“Yes. A cure. They must have got some bug on that ship,” she surmised.
He smirked, surprised that she guessed correctly.
“A bug,” he leaned back, crossing his legs and looking at her, playing that her suggestion was ridiculous.
“Just a hunch,” she defended, not yet deflated.
“A hunch,” he repeated, rolling his knuckles under his chin, feeling the strong angles and bones there.
She didn’t reply.
“And. a blue bloodline you said?” he shifted, lowering his hand to his thigh and turning to look her straight on.
The crackling of the fire filled in their breaths of silence.
“If I tailed them, just for a while, I could have more than a hunch,” she offered, knowing it was what her patron really wanted.
“Wonderful idea, Korilla,” he chuckled, one clap to his hands.
“Thank you. Should I start now, then?”
“Please. Adventure awaits,” he replied with a flourish of his wrist, watching her silently as she left.
-***-
“Hells!” Tav cursed and jolted to consciousness. Pain, nausea, and the hot, hot sun immobilized her. She breathed and wiggled her fingers and toes. Satisfied with their response, she started the ascent to standing.
She should never had asked to live in more interesting times. In her defense, she had spent the last decade secluded in an admittedly rural, arcane library.
While she had wished for adventure, she did not expect to be abducted by mind flayers and forced to crash an alien ship. She thought it would be something akin to finding an ancient riddle in a scroll behind a stack of forgotten books. Maybe a trapped pixie in a dusty antique. Not a hole in her brain and a ticking time bomb called ceremorphosis.
That’s not going to happen to you, she told herself. Of course, she had no way of stopping it. But it was stopped, nonetheless.
Standing she found herself without injury. Strange.
She couldn’t analyze it – she had to survive first.
Thankfully, her plain leather boots and thin leggings had minimal damage: a frayed knee, a dented toe. Her robes were singed to her thighs with speckles of ash clinging to the light blue fabric at her torso. She tore the dangling panels of the skirt with a looted dagger and washed herself in the river, storing the cleaner strips of fabric for future bandaging.
She washed the soot from her face and the pale scales at her cheek bones and temples. Once done she obscured those iridescent scales behind long bangs, intentionally left out of the braid she secured the rest of her hair with.
Where she lived draconic scales made her an oddity, something different. Orphaned in a much smaller city than Baldur’s Gate she never saw anyone with scales like her. Stranger though, she never disliked them, only hated the way everyone looked at them. For her, they were the marks of her lineage, unknown as it was; the phenotype of her power and a warning of what was contained inside of her.
Her magic wasn’t wild or untamed or wild either, like some of her classmates had been. That uncontrolled carelessness was absent from her spell work. She wielded it ferociously; she dominated the energy in her body.
She had to.
Lightening magic was deadly for her and everyone around her when out of the user’s control. Devoting all her time to the endless study and practice of magic kept her in seclusion for decades, but also alive on the nautiloud, and now walking on the beach instead of… dead.
Seclusion suddenly seemed so far away.
In the days since the crash, she recruited Shadowheart, an angsty and secretive half elf, Astarion, a deadly rogue, Lae’zel, the Githyanki that saved her life on the alien ship, and Gale, a wizard she instantly felt a kinship with.
Gale understood her better than the others at first, he experienced a similar self-prescribed loneliness.
Later Karlach, an awol Tiefling soldier of the blood war, and Wyll, the heroic blade of frontiers, joined too.
The sudden shift from silent isolation to loud dinners and boisterous conversation overwhelmed her. She could hide inside her tent at night, but the days were increasingly grating.
In a hunt for peace, she found a clue to a Harper’s stash, and she just had to convince the group to let her investigate.
It was their day off, everyone lounging at camp, no one wanting to ruin their rest day on her wild goose chase.
“We already cleared that part of the forest. If the cache is there, there won’t be any enemies. It’s safe to go alone,” Tav reasoned with them, making her points passionately, all so they would let her leave without supervision.
Honestly, it was a big ask. Every time they turned a corner someone or something was trying to kill them. But a moment alone meant everything, and they agreed to let her set off from the camp and to the hidden trails by the grove, alone.
She left her hair down to dry and the wind picked up the long, damp locks of gold to move them about her face. She eventually tucked them behind the sharp tip of her ear before bending to adjust her boots in preparation to climb the old ladder.
The rumor of supplies was only a few rungs away but looking up made her stomach dip. There was a lingering anticipation she couldn’t place. Stalling, she brushed the knees of her leggings, taking her time to smooth the open collar of her simple, linen blouse.
She didn’t wear armor, to the chagrin of everyone but Gale. Her draconic ancestry was her armor, magic her primary weapon. Wearing light weight clothing, tight to her legs, belted at her waist, meant she could move faster, the weave fluidly moving through her in comfortable attire. Plus, the only robes they found were either on a corpse or inside a spider belly. Neither were better than the clothes she was given from the refugees. Still, each shaky rung that creaked under her feet reminded her that the material would do nothing to lessen the impact if she fell.
Stubbornly she refused to cast feather fall, she would not fall.
She didn’t fall. Triumphantly she stood on the decade’s old outpost, panting, almost laughing when her paranoia proved fruitless.
Then: a burst of flames. The shift in energy arrested her, sending a jolt of electricity through her veins and bursting in goosebumps over her arms.
A very human Raphael appeared from the flash, observing the doe-eyed look on her delicate face, and the powerful, blue whip of energy that licked off her shoulder reflexively; her hardly harmless warning to the predator invading her space.
Startled by him her heart rate jumped, pounding in her temples, then in her lower stomach.
Hells, he’s gorgeous, she thought involuntarily.
He knew what she was thinking, he could read the way her wide eyes shyly swept over him from head to toe, rendering her speechless.
He let the silence linger a moment longer, luxuriating in her undivided attention.
He realized Korilla was right: she was pretty.
Blue, he growled inwardly. Korilla was right that she was a blue draconic sorcerer. Lightening arts were unpredictable, difficult to tame, and he wondered what it had taken to tame hers.
She was clean, he noticed. Dressed simply, he disapproved. A disturbing desire to see her dressed only in jewels, stretched across his bed, while taking indulgent inhales of her arousal gave him pause.
Her cheeks flushed at the man in front of her, blush spreading across her chest and neck, her mouth suddenly gone dry.
“Who- who?” she exhaled, barely finding her voice.
Raphael chuckled; she beat him to the first word. Normally that would bother him, but he was pleased instead. He heard the feminine gasp of a soft soprano before she could dissect his opposing alto. And it told him much, mostly that he wanted to hear his own voice once again.
But not so much more than hers.
“My, my what manner of place is this?” he spoke, the soothing richness arresting her as his round, caramel eyes had.
“A path to redemption or a road to damnation? Hard to say, for your journey is just beginning. What would suit the occasion? The words to a lullaby, perhaps?” his voice was low, deep, instantly addicting, and she decidedly did not interrupt his monologue.
“The mouse smiled brightly: it outfoxed the cat! Then down came the claw, and that, love, was that. They do know how to write them in Cormyr, don't they?” his posture shifted, opened to her, and the corner of his lip turn upward when she took the smallest step closer.
She was still speechless, still examining the regal man that magically appeared a moment ago, clothes perfectly fitted, elegant hands gesturing nobly as he spoke.
“Well met. I am Raphael. Very much at your service,” he said in a welcoming stance.
“Raphael,” she repeated, causing his blood to burn. His name sounded too sweet on her lips. Dangerous.
“Yes, little mouse,” he purred, approving of each little reaction she had to him, even while less amused at his own body’s response to her. “Now, what I have to say merits some privacy - as well as some more... let's call it refinement. This quaint little scene is decidedly too middle-of-nowhere for my tastes.”
He was right, he looked completely out of place in the wild landscape. The fine linens of his doublet at odds with the skeleton and cobwebs around them. Though, the afternoon sun, casting a golden glow to his tan skin, did agree with him.
“Come.”
She nodded to his suggestion. Her consent was not required but he appreciated it, nonetheless.
With a snap they were transported to a luxurious dining room. The roaring fire lit a banquet overflowing with delicious entrees. Meats, breads, sweets, and wine was temptingly plated on impressive, polished ebony.
“There. Middle-of-somewhere,” he announced, allowing her time to take in her surroundings.
Like the buffet, he was spotlit before the grand fireplace, a larger than life, full bodied portrait of a devil, painted and framed in gold, hanging threateningly above him.
Everything he did rendered her anxious, breathless. She wasn’t afraid of him, yet, but she did not want to miss a word or movement from the dangerous stranger.
“Where am I?” she managed to ask.
“My House of Hope. Where the tired come to rest, and the famished come to feed - lavishly. Go on. Partake. Enjoy your supper,” he encouraged her, waving his hand to the garish display.
She turned, moving across the marbled floors to snatch a bottle of wine from the polygon table. Hearing him chuckle she turned back to him.
“It’s good wine,” she defended sheepishly.
“Of course,” he said in earnest. It was good wine.
“Don’t scare easily? Good. Now pet, what is better than a devil you don’t know?” he proposed, watching her brow furrow in confusion before he snapped his fingers to reveal the cambion previously disguised. “A devil you do.”
And a devil he was. Taller, broader, with black and fire eyes watching her reaction to his transformation. She drank him in, the thick horns, sharp wings, red skin, every inch of him.
“What?” she breathed.
He was gloating, proud at how easily he rendered her unable to say more than a few words. His name the sweetest among them.
“Am I a friend? Potentially. An adversary? Conceivably. But a savior? That's for certain,” he finished, waiting for a reply, daring her to.
“What makes you think I need saving?” she found herself again, the self-reliant sorcerer that was not going to act afraid or enthralled by man or devil.
He shook his head, enjoying the challenge she threw at him.
“Come now. Why play hard to get when you're in deep over your pretty, tadpoled head?” his honeyed words dripped with insinuation.
How much did he know?
She was silent again, how he liked her.
“One skull, two tenants, and no solution in sight. I could fix it all like that,” he emphasized with another snap.
She laughed a short and exhausted laugh that ended with an embarrassed snort. It was ridiculous to her: tadpoles, goblins, talking skeletons, mind flayers, devils!
And, hells, she was feeling desperate.
He liked that sound, her joyful realization that he offered something tempting, that he had something she wanted.
“The group will think I’m mad if I make a deal with a devil,” she finally replied, her obvious want enough to satiate him for the time being.
“And what is madness but a denial of reality?” he quipped. “Still, I've a feeling you'll return to me. Try to cure yourself. Shop around - beg, borrow, and steal. Exhaust every possibility until none are left and when hope has been whittled to the very marrow of despair that's when you'll come knocking on my door,” he finished, too distracted by her to even bring up hope when she yawned mid-threat.
“Am I boring, you?” he asked suddenly, making her jump out of the relaxed pose.
“What?! No!” she was defensive. “The fire feels good. This is the first time I’ve been warm since crash landing and it just.. I’ve been so tired,” her cheeks were red again, and he noticed the highlight of her scales for the first time. His gaze traced the dip of her collar bone down to the ample swell of her chest, rising steadily after finally calming in his presence.
He did not like how much he enjoyed her talking, relaxed, complimenting a side effect of his nature and location in the Hells.
“Would you rather stay here, in my house of hope?” he took a step closer to her and smirked when she didn’t move away from him. His predatory stare locked her in place.
She shook her head slowly.
“Then allow me the privilege of watching you squirm like a tadpole through a nice juicy brain. All those pretty little symptoms - sundering skin, dissolving guts – seem stalled in their manifestation. One might say you're a paragon of luck. And, sweetling,” her head snapped up at the endearment. “I'll be there when it runs out.”
He forced her exit, teleporting her back to the Harper’s nest from his House of Hope with a new hunger, and a bottle of wine.