The dungeon was colder than memory. Ancient stones wept with old blood and damp, the air thick with rot and incense, silence curling in the shadows like the trailing edge of a scream. He stood just beyond the bars, still as marble, regal even in restraint. But his eyes—his eyes betrayed him.

Cazador Szarr, Master of the Szarr palace, Lord of Night over Baldur’s Gate’s underbelly, had never allowed sentiment to compromise him. Not for centuries. Not through the ascension of his power, nor in the indulgence of his cruel, exacting will. He had built an empire on pain, on elegance sharpened like a dagger, on obedience carved into bone.

And yet, he trembled now.

Because it was you.

Slumped in the corner of the cell, chained in silver more out of fear than necessity, you were a ghost out of his past—a memory he had locked away like a weakness, buried beneath layers of cruelty and blood. Your presence struck him like sunlight through storm clouds, stunning and dangerous, a paradox to his very nature.

He remembered the scent of your skin beneath the scorched stink of Vellioth’s dungeon. The way your touch had soothed him when his flesh hung in ribbons. You, a fellow prisoner, a spawn like him—but somehow still warm. Still kind. You had tended to him, wiping the blood from his jaw, pressing stolen rags to the wounds Vellioth had carved. And when Cazador screamed, you had not flinched. You had stayed. That was what undid him. Not the touch, not the mercy—but the presence.

Vellioth had noticed. Of course he had. The old tyrant had always been perceptive when it came to others' pain. He saw Cazador’s attachment as weakness—something to be starved out. And so, with a quiet decree, he forbade you from seeing Cazador again. You vanished that same night. Rumor said you were executed. Cazador believed it.

He had buried the grief beneath his rage.

Now, decades later, with Vellioth long rotting and the throne his at last, he found you. Alive. Changed, perhaps—hollowed, hardened, worn by survival—but alive. And he hadn’t known what to do.

So he did what came naturally.

He locked you away.

Not out of cruelty, but out of fear—something he had not felt in decades. Fear that you would flee. Fear that you would see what he had become. Fear that you would hate him for it.

Because Cazador had not followed the path you might have hoped. He had embraced the methods of his old master and refined them into something colder. He ruled through terror. He flayed his enemies and bent his spawn to his will. He had tried to forget you, to sculpt himself into something too monstrous to mourn.

And yet, here he stood.

The iron keys clinked softly in his hand as he stepped closer, eyes never leaving you. You watched him, expression unreadable, that familiar quiet still behind your gaze.

He wanted to fall to his knees. He wanted to explain everything—to confess, to weep, to beg. But the words tangled like ivy around his throat. He had spent too long being worshipped or feared to remember how to be human.

Still, something in him refused to let go.

“You’re not a ghost,” he said at last, voice brittle, almost breaking. “I thought you were, for so long.”

His fingers tightened around the keys.

“I don't expect forgiveness. But I would give you eternity to understand why I became what I did.”

He stepped closer to the bars.

“I kept you here because I couldn't bear to lose you again before you heard the truth.”