"Might I suggest questions that are a tad less likely to get some of us killed when you also lay the evidence out plain for anyone to see?"

He had become rather wily over the course of his little adventure. More slippery than he had been. And being a vampire spawn did mean that he was more dangerous than he might look.

But he was no match for a group of seasoned adventurers should they get it into their heads that he was a vampire and thus to b hunted. And the last thing he wanted was a second death coming from getting jumped in an alley.

Getting beaten to death's door once was enough. And there was no coming back if it happened again.

Not that he'd even want to if there was a way to turn him into some sort of double-vampire. Two centuries had been more than long enough suffering under someone else. He wouldn't ever want to live as someone else's slave again for even a second.

"Your quaint little book may not say so but my kind is-" He sighed, collecting himself, "Unpopular, to say the least. It describes us as a beast, does it not?"

And vampire lords most certainly were. But Astarion was still a spawn. He always would be. And vampire spawns weren't the way that the book described his kind. Not entirely anyway.