#DA:Inquisition

[del-hayelite]

Veilguard this veilguard that what about her? ?…..? Yeah that’s what I thought

Also STOP SHOWING ME YOUR GAME BIOWARE!!!!! JUST RELEASE IT

[nadas-dirthalen]

she, the mender; he, the break (1)

solas/lavellan, rated T.

synopsis: The one unfortunate enough to take in the Mark has, astoundingly, survived it. Whether that is a miracle or a terrible omen remains to be seen.

content warnings: canon-typical violence, depiction of a canonical seizure, canon-typical profanity, canon-typical religious references, canon-typical depictions of depression.

read on ao3!

One Solas

Four hours after a Dalish mage stumbles from a tear in the Veil, a thumb runs across her limp palm. Its wielder furrows his brow.

A pair of eyes seeks to burn a hole between his shoulder blades, judging by the force of the glare behind him.

“I have no answers,” he tells the human without looking over a shoulder, though it’s not what she—or anyone who knows what befell the Conclave—wants to hear. It’s true enough, at least.

He has no answers as to how this Dalish mage survived what he knows, with grim certainty, should have killed her. Would have killed her lessers. He had counted on it: that his focus, pent up with millennia’s worth of neglected, unspent energy, would eliminate the one unfortunate enough to open it.

The first survivor is enough of a loose end. A walking, talking threat of peril upon all Thedas.

The second is a miracle, for she, at least, is mortal.

Probably.

Under his touch, the mark of his magic thrums, rattling up her nerve. Mercifully unconscious, she does not stir—but even through the thick robe covering most of her form, the summer-grass glow brightens her arm enough for the Seeker behind him to audibly wince.

The magic, from what he can tell, forges deeper into her tissue. Whether to twine with the fabric of her being or rip it apart at the seams, he cannot rightly say.

In these early hours, the only clue she gives is the quick rise and fall of her chest, her breaths shallow. Kept on the floor of a cell, robbed of dignity that she cannot fight to keep, much of her pale blonde hair has fallen free of its high braid. Sweat beads on her forehead one minute, only to cool before the hour’s up.

“You have no answers?” the Seeker behind him prods.

He forces his shoulders not to tighten, knelt by the Dalish’s side as he is. Smiles falsely, even where the Seeker cannot see, so his tone stays congenial. “Not yet.”

Would that he were alone, that he could knock on the bounds of this survivor’s dreams and ask.

What would she offer him, if he did? Would she confess to what ails her, or turn her nose up at his unmarked face, as so many of her kin? Or, so far from home, would she turn a kinder eye to the human behind him, paying an elven apostate no heed?

In the Fade, none might delay him much: none left alive can rightly keep the skies of their dreams from darkening with their unspoken fear. And when the realm folds around them, confounding mortal senses, none can truly flee far.

Whatever the truth of her prognosis, one thing is certain. Even under the press of his thumb, summoned by his silent call, the magic of his focus will not uncoil from her bones.

Whatever the Dread Wolf of her people’s legend has unwillingly given her, she is doomed to the consequence.

He could almost call it irony.

~

As day lapses into night, the Dalish survivor is unaware that every witness within a mile bickers over her fate.

They are calling her a miracle. They are calling her a monster.

It has not dawned on any of them that she could ever be a victim.

He has, in spite of the Seeker’s objections to flame and ammunition, been generously afforded a candle. Its light throws long shadows over the survivor’s drawn expression. Like this, he must lower himself from resting on his heels to squint, inches from her face, in order to track the movement of her eyes behind their lids.

She is dreaming. At least there is that.

His mark has buried itself into her left hand, the green of rifts lighting a slice in her palm despite her skin remaining unbroken. Thus he sits on her left, now, furthest from the cell door. A better vantage for the Seeker, who has left to argue, to scowl at him from all evening.

A poorer vantage to scowl back unseen, but one must accept their occasional losses.

At least like this, his back can rest against the cell’s rear wall, and he can watch the door when he is not watching over the survivor. He keeps it in his periphery while his gaze lowers, half-lidded, as he once again puts two fingers to her wrist to measure her pulse.

Two hours ago, he insisted to the human healer that he could count it perfectly well. The healer looked down at the survivor’s valasslin while he passed over a clipboard, mumbling a request that her pulse be measured and recorded every hour through the night.

That human healer neglected to leave any thanks.

The Dalish’s heartbeat is almost furious against his touch, pounding as though her limp body is sprinting: a pulse that would roar in her ears, if she could hear it. He counts sixty beats in thirty seconds, ignoring the twist of his insides when he releases her to record the finding.

Ten higher than last count. A battle her body has begun to lose.

The healer should be measuring more than her pulse, but his efforts are farcical at best: make a play of trying to keep the survivor alive, keep meticulous record of all the ways this prison has failed her, justify her death was unpreventable because so many watched it unfold. To those yelling over the Dalish’s fate beyond this row of cells, that would be enough to satisfy.

It would assuage their worry, to watch her fade to nothing. To some, it would provide relief. Their Chantry, no longer under threat—nor scrutiny.

They should be measuring her temperature. Whether she perspires. Whether, and how often, she stirs.

It is due diligence—and perhaps atonement—that an elven apostate from nowhere does all three in their stead.

Her brow is warm against his knuckles, but less than it was. Her body adapts to fight the mark. In the harsher chill of night, the cell damp and lightless, her brow is free of sweat, the loose curls once plastered to it hanging free over her temples.

He thinks the barest trace of a frown passes over her at his touch, but it vanishes, her face again serene at rest, too fast for his tired eyes to register.

Once he makes record of all three, writing in the margins of the healer’s notes, he rests his head on the cool stone behind him, allowing his eyes to fall shut until the next hour demands he rise anew.

~

The survivor screams before the sun can crest the mountains.

He must give her credit: it earns her the attention of all those who’d been content to debate her survival from afar. Within moments, the cell is crowded with everyone endowed with both local renown and an opinion.

The Seeker’s voice is loudest. He supposes he should have expected as much.

“Surely you know what this means, Adan?”

The healer—Adan—is clearly in the Seeker’s good graces enough that his sneer doesn’t earn him retribution. “I don’t understand. Her pulse is normal now. Her fever, gone. And the screaming comes in fits… but why?”

Then, naturally, he turns his puzzled frustration on the nearest apostate.

“You wrote her pulse was high through the night.”

That nearest apostate, still knelt at her side, commendably ignoring the bruising on his tailbone, keeps his voice perfectly level. “I did.”

“And that it didn’t change until the thrashing began.”

“I did, yes.”

“And after administering elfroot to hasten her wakening, it had stopped—”

“Very observant.”

That earns him a scowl from the Seeker and more than a fair few muttered insults from the other half-dozen people inside the cell. More soldiers, someone in Chantry robes convincingly pretending not to tremble behind them.

“Don’t play coy with me, elf,” Adan sneers, pulling the apostate’s attention back.

Before he can brace for some spit curse, the survivor’s hand jerks out from under his. Her spine arches, her ear scraping over the stone when her neck follows suit. His palm lands gently on her shoulder before she can tip herself onto her back, but does nothing to stop the kick of her leg.

“The grey,” she slurs, lips catching the dirt of the cell floor. “The grey…”

“Maker’s fucking breath,” Adan hisses, reeling back. “What is she…?”

“The grey,” the survivor groans again, muscles still tense, unconscious eyes screwed shut.

Every gaze in the room finds his mark on her palm—save for hers. The magic lights stronger, rift-green blazing up the veins of her wrist. Only when it dims do her convulsions ease.

“So it is true,” the Chantry member mutters, soft as prayer. “She is chosen.”

“Chosen?” Adan echoes, whipping back long enough to fire off what is probably a scowl. By the time his attention returns to the Dalish survivor, a more dangerous sort of ire has hardened on his features. “No. This—this mage shit cannot be a sign of anything good.”

“Is that what you call it?” Indignation burns up the apostate’s throat before he can think to smother it. “What you belittle with the profane may well be the only hope you have against the demons amassing beyond these doors.”

“Watch yourself, apostate,” the Seeker warns, a hand on the pommel of her blade.

This time, he meets her glare. “Are you so sure that I am wrong?”

“Enough of this fucking charade,” Adan declares, throwing up his hands in distaste. “Andraste’s ass—there’s not a healer alive who could understand what so possesses her. If she makes it past midday, someone pry me from my drink.”

With that, he shoves through a half-dozen humans, neither sword nor glare leveled against him on the way out. Instead, the prattling Chantry member follows on the healer’s heels, and the Seeker on the Chantry’s, and the soldiers on the Seeker’s.

With them gone, the cell falls silent. Not for the first time, death and the Dread Wolf loom together over the body of a mortal.

The next spasm starts: rigid spine, arching neck. This time, his hand finds not her shoulder, but her wrist. Thumb driven deep into the meat of her palm, he feeds the mark a morsel of his own magic, a beacon sent out over the churning forces inside the survivor’s skin.

A flare of dull green light, and the spasm stops.

Rather than a scream, she surrenders a murmur. “The grey…”

He eases her onto her back, careful not to relinquish her marked palm. Smooths hair from her face with his free hand, another sliver of his magic employed to mend her abraded ear. Dignities the Chantry, the Seeker, and the prison guards, for all their talk of prophecy, still do not afford their Dalish charge.

“I know. I know, lethallan,” he answers, once he is sure no human ears are near enough to question his tongue. “Ir abelas.”

~

The first attempt on the survivor’s life comes, brazenly, at dusk on the second day.

While the apostate takes a meal a floor above her cell—only at the Seeker’s stubborn insistence—the cell lies guarded by another. When he returns, that other is bent over her motionless body, a dagger unsheathed from their belt.

At his shout, the Seeker barrels down the stairwell past him, shield drawn. She collides with the would-be assailant a second after the noise turns their attention away from the survivor, pinning their body to the floor. Another soldier clamps manacles around the assailant’s wrists, but murmurs assurances that certainly, all was done with the best of intentions.

It is all the apostate can do to quell the urge to send a streak of rift-green sailing past both their faces, goading them to speak their so-called assurances for all the fortress to hear.

As they draw close to move up the stairwell, he meets the assailant’s gaze and mutters, “You know not what you trifle with.”

The Seeker, though she is in earshot, does not listen to the assailant’s bitter retort. Rather, she faces the apostate after several moments, dark circles under her topaz eyes, a hand raking through her short mop of dark hair.

“Do you really think…” she pauses, folding her arms. “Do you really think she could be our only hope?”

She will not look at the survivor, so he does. His mark burns bright even across the room, steadier now. If it hasn’t killed her by now, it won’t.

“I am certain,” he answers. Then, because it is what most everyone here has already decided: “She is a miracle.”

But they have not lived to see millennia wax and wane. They forget a crucial detail.

Miracles, be they borne of flesh or circumstance, have one thing in common.

They should never have been real.

~

The second attempt on the survivor’s life comes far past nightfall, when the apostate’s eyes are closed.

This time, her would-be killer is the very soldier to have clamped manacles on the first.

When heavy footfalls thunder down the stairwell in answer to the screaming, the apostate watches as they rush toward the soldier—only to reel back when their torchlight glints in the ice pinning their comrade to the wall.

The apostate claims it was self-defense with hardly more than a shrug, failing to flinch in the face of six pointed blades.

Afterward, the Seeker only leaves the cell to sleep.

~

The dawn of the third day is the last he has the survivor alone.

Bleary-eyed, he parts her lips with the knuckle of his thumb to administer three more drops of elf-root tincture on her tongue, disparaging the common name. When he does, he whispers its name in the language her people have taught her—vhenanalas, heart-root—because it is similar enough to the one he knows.

Once, it was said that all elvhen would wake to their own tongue, like a mother calling children home.

All the Dalish survivor has done, thus far, is frown.

Through the night, the roar of demons from beyond the cell climbed louder. Whiling away the hours, pretending not to hear, he found that the magic of his mark swims through her veins to follow his touch, unless he wills it not to.

Three days, and still he does not know if the mark pains her, or if she’ll do more than knot her brows together or press her lips white-thin when she’s conscious of the new power in her marrow. What he does know is that each hourly administration of elf-root twists her face the same way. When she stirs enough to tilt her jaw, the digits of her right hand curl, but not her left. When the mark of his magic flares brighter, a noise always rises from her throat—one that stops sooner if he makes a single sound, like it had only been seeking an answer. Any answer, he found, once he’d made a series of unintelligible syllables in reply to test the theory.

She fights it on her own, now, even though he no longer risks the press of his thumb over the gash-shaped green. He does not know her name, and yet is powerless to deny her stubborn will.

“Perhaps that is why they have marked you for the Keeper of Secrets,” he mutters to no one, watching the blood-markings beneath her lower lip smooth as she falls motionless once more.

No tip of the jaw, no curled fingers on right hand or left. She slips into relative peace, the ailment of his magic overcome, for now.

He almost laughs, but the sound cuts short. Instead, he whispers, “You will need that stubborn streak, with what lies ahead.”

She never gives him an answer. The next time she frowns, and the next and the next, he speaks in her language until the Seeker wakes.

Vhenanalas. Vhenanalas. Vhenanalas.

Ir abelas. Ir abelas. Ir abelas.

~

Demons encroach too close to the prison, nearer by the hour. The derisive look the Seeker snaps to him says that where she goes, so, too, will he.

He leaves the survivor because there is more he can do to ensure she lives by holding back the horde outside these walls. He swears she stirs at his hushed goodbye, mouth hanging parted the last time he looks back.

The sun strikes him too brightly, after days without it, worse for its glint on the snow outdoors. The first demon to fall before him collapses with a splinter of ice through its core, and the apology he cannot speak aloud sticks thorns in his chest. There is nothing he can do for it, or anyone, without the focus he’d so callously lost.

By the fifth, a haze settles over his awareness, a guard against the lapping tide of remorse.

The thrum of his magic outside his skin pulls him out of it. Every shriek of these unwilling spirits, painful against his eardrums. Worse, when crossbow bolts find their mark, when the Seeker’s sword sings as it is pulled from her sheath.

He cannot turn with a shade pressing its advantage, instead forced to arc his staff and pull forth the power behind another icy blast. The green of his mark careens into his periphery while he stands rooted, and then the survivor pulls it back—

To shove a lone blade through the demon with her opposite hand, crackling with violet energy. 

Then, with his vision still blurred, his ears still ringing… quiet. The last demon of this rift, vanquished. Only his erratic pulse and the remains of his focus thrumming in time with it from the gash-shaped glow in the survivor’s palm.

“Quickly,” he gasps, already moving. Just enough to alert her to what is to come. “Before more come through!”

He has no time to process that she is awake, standing, before his grip curls around her wrist, thumb pressed into the soft of her palm. As with each time before, the magic within—his magic—follows his touch.

In a mockery of his every hope for the Veil, a verdant ray erupts from her skin. Its power plunges into the rift above them both and, under his guidance, sews it shut.

After, only wintry sky remains in its place: no touch of Fade nor lick of its magic. This time there is no great urgency to the quiet that falls. Only the rhythm of the survivor’s ragged breath, as fast it had been the first night.

She slips the mark—her hand—from his grasp. A sliver of warmth leaves his core as it goes.

When he pries his eyes from where the rift once existed, she is already peering up at him. The sight drives another guilty lance through his sternum before any haze can dull the blow.

The green of rifts is threaded around her pupils, tainting even her otherwise stone-grey gaze. His mark—the one that’ll end her life—rooted in her every inch.

Her white-blonde hair is still streaked with the dirt of her cell floor. Her ear’s still red from where he mended scrapes. Dark circles beneath her eyes betray the weakness these days have awarded her.

And under, her panting mouth curves into a disbelieving smile.

“What did you do?”

“I did nothing,” he answers, too fast, avoiding the Seeker’s cutting stare that looms behind the survivor. He neglects to append save for cause the curse that’ll end your life. Instead, amid the stench of slain demons, heedless of the cries of battle still raging on ahead, he summons a pleasing smile. “The credit is all yours.”

The Dalish lowers her eyes, brow furrowing. His world narrows on the way she studies her palm, her own thumb running over the mark, following the curve his had just taken. She concentrates on the motion, repeating it, a thin press to her mouth not unlike the one she makes when heart-root lands on her tongue.

Calculating, now that she is conscious. No longer a simple show of distaste, but an equation she visibly puzzles over.

Her eyes lift to greet his again, something in them hardened now. “You mean this.”

He tries to ignore the way the mark’s thrum strengthens in response to his own dogged pulse. “Whatever magic opened the Breach in the sky also placed that mark upon your hand,” he says, just as he’d told the Seeker hours ago. He leaves out and I’m sorry for my role in it. “I theorized the mark might be able to close the rifts that have opened in the Breach’s wake—and it seems I was correct.”

The Seeker seems just as pleased now as then: barely. “Meaning it could also close the Breach itself.”

“Possibly,” he says, just true enough. Something guaranteed, from millennia of knowing, is indeed also possible.

The survivor, meanwhile, watches him still with open curiosity—the sort that borders dangerously on hope. The expression is a dozen questions in itself.

He scrapes another apology from his tongue, searching for some other answer to her wordless prying. Something that will buy them all a little more peace, a little more time. 

He manages, if only just, “It seems you hold the key to our salvation.”

“Good to know!” the dwarf from the cells near theirs interjects, striding closer to the survivor in spite of how her muscles tense. Bearing a wide grin, he jests, “I thought we’d be ass-deep in demons forever.”

The survivor flexes her fingers around the hilt of her dagger, a mirror of the way her right hand would curl in discomfort. Deliberate, now. Alive. Alive.

The dwarf goes on, “Varric Tethras: rogue, storyteller, and occasionally unwelcome tagalong.”

The wink he gives the Seeker is met with a scowl.

“It’s…” Blearily, the survivor manages a nod, a new set to her jaw she hadn’t had the mind to employ before. The line of it is sharper as she forces a smile. “Good to meet you, Varric.”

She hadn’t heard his idle chatter in the cell, then—or anything else, apology or otherwise. 

“You may reconsider that stance, in time,” the apostate asserts, suppressing a flinch at the line he knows he’s toed. He affixes that careful smile to his face as three sets of eyes land upon him, though only watches the survivor’s.

He’d assumed something of her. Too much. He looks for disdain in her raised brow, or perhaps for ire in the line of her mouth.

“Awww,” Varric mocks, wrenching him from the study. “I’m sure we’ll become great friends in the valley, Chuckles.”

Chuckles, in truth, can do no else but blink, just once. The survivor weighs the expression, watching in silence—whether a haze like his, simple fatigue, or something else.

“Absolutely not,” the Seeker takes over, voice stern. “Your help is appreciated, Varric, but…”

The raven blood-marked in the Dalish’s face shifts as she borders on a smirk. Haughty, irreverent, when it is her braids pulled half-free from days of unconscious tumult, her ill-fitting armor stained with all manner of dirt and damp.

“Have you been in the valley lately, Seeker?” the dwarf goes on a distant two steps away. Neither the apostate or the survivor turn to watch. “Your soldiers aren’t in control anymore. You need me.”

“Ugh.”

“My name is Solas,” spills from the apostate’s mouth, heedless of his will, near an entire minute too late. “If there are to be introductions.”

Varric and the Seeker stop to raise their brows in unison. The survivor, understandably, fails to mask her confusion.

“I am…” Pinned under three stares, he has no hope of uttering even a false explanation, nor an apology, nor anything to explain away the same dirt and damp staining his coat, three days and nights of foregone hygiene. “Pleased to see you still live.”

Pleased does not touch the bone-deep relief, nor the chill of dread that none of them can hope to grasp, but he still does not know her name. This will have to suffice.

Varric only laughs sharper, grins wider. “He means, ‘I kept that mark from killing you while you slept.’”

That, too, Solas supposes.

The survivor hums the beginnings of a laugh, low in her throat. Her crooked smile dimples a cheek, undeterred by the biting wind tousling the knotted strands of her hair. The green of his mark blazes in her eyes, crinkled at their corners. “Then I owe you my thanks.”

And her wrath, but that seems inconsequential, with demons in uproar higher on the hill.

Everything does, outside of the fact that she still draws breath. That all this might yet be undone.

“Thank me if we manage to close the Breach without killing you in the process,” he tells her. And, because three days and nights with her life in his hands is too long not to know: “Tell me your name.”

~

Ithalia.

One of the many names rippling across Haven on whispering tongues. Ithalia Haleir Lavellan. Herald. Miracle. Divine.

They can afford to whisper, to do anything but run for their lives, because it is she—without his touch—that has sealed the Breach and mended the heavens.

Three more days and nights she sleeps, but this time, no seed of doubt roots in Solas’ core.

He is certain: she will live long enough to mend the very world he aims to break, before it can be made whole again.

[shepard-you-are-in-my-chair]

DRAGON AGE INQUISITION

DALISH HUNTER - ASSASSIN

Control shot for visiting the BE to make some changes

[meme-the-frog]

I see you enjoy playing with fire, Inquisitor.. 🫣🫣

[rainswolfs]

i'm sorry but astarion and karlach are mlm and wlw only

[lvl2druid]

Listen, man, I'm replaying DA:Inquisition for the twelve-thousandth time and I have crawled back into the arms of the egg

I can't escape him, he's just so INTERESTING

Oh, you saved the elves from their oppressors just to have them be delivered into the shackles of other tyrants? And you want to fix your mistakes but can only do so by handing off an unknowable power to a literal mad mage who attempted to enter the Golden City, only for it to go horribly wrong and so it leads you into the folds of the people trying to STOP him, along with a weird Dalish Elf? OH and that Dalish Elf is trying to cling to the interpretation of lost elven history that you abhore so much because you know the actual truth? And, somehow, against all odds, you- a self-inflicted loner and wanderer- find comfort in her spirit and she nearly breaks your steel will to follow through with your plans to tear down the veil? And though it breaks your heart in so many ways, you end the beautiful thing you had with her? BUT NOT BEFORE she potentially takes in the essence of Mythal? Despite it all, you still visit her in her dreams to make sure that, no matter what, she's safe, but you can't bring yourself to speak with her, lest she almost breaks your will again?

Solas never leaves my mind.

[lethendralis-paints]

Ukrainian Twitter community is slowly migrating to Bluesky, and as Ukrainians always do in a new place, we create a church and mythology around the place we inhabit.

This DA:Inquisition-style mural is my attempt at capturing the quirky vibe of our Bluesky cluster and the jokes about the blessed Invitedrasil tree that transports users to the Heavenly Blue :D

[demilypyro]

With all the 'buff' and 'muscley' and generally treated as huge female characters in gaming and anime who are anything but, I would LOVE to see a design based off of a female version of The Iron Bull from DA:Inquisition.

No less muscle, no less chunk, just a big, beefy woman who can and will carry a horde of her smaller friends on her shoulders for fun.

Kind of like Noi from Dorohedoro, you know?

Bioware is on my shitlist until they put in a scene where a female qunari fucks the hell out of my MC. I'm normal

[linka-from-captain-planet]

wellp I gave DA:Inquisition another shot this weekend and now I’m obsessed and have to care about the new game

[janrockart]

Both Hands of the Divine. DA:Inquisition inspired tarot pieces I've done some time ago!

[lunian]

scariest thing in playing DA:Inquisition for me so far is now realizing that if my character was an elven woman I would def fall for fckin Solas' romance

[shepard-you-are-in-my-chair]

DA: INQUISITION

[meme-the-frog]

Maybe that’s what I really needed...

[lysblack]

Gortash's Coronation Ball

Alright, I'm getting close to reaching Baldur's Gate and Gortash's Coronation in the fanfic I'm writing.

So, following up on THIS post... We're attending the Ball, folks!

Brainstorming ideas right now, but since I plan on temporarily allying Tav with Gortash (him being Lawful Evil as Bane commands and actually seeing Tav as an equal in his plans to dominate everything is really too nice not to be played with), at least some of the party is attending the Ball we were robbed of.

Obviously Tav's gonna be there, Astarion couldn't be kept away from such a fancy event even if Tav wanted to and Nere's coming along because he'd see that as the most terrible scorn to bring the vampire spawn and not him at this point in their relationship.

Everybody looking sideways on Drow Tav and Nere, voices of this weird group of people being heroes or threats to Baldur's Gate, they're obviously suspicious but strangely charming and by the end of the night they end up getting hit on multiple times (I'm considering an intercourse with Tav and Gortash just for funsies and to really test their collaboration but who knows, we'll see).

BUT: what about Wyll? Him being extremely uncomfortable with his new appearance, having to mingle with the nobility who's known him for ages but now eyes him with suspicion, distrust and even disgust.

Karlach? Her trying her best not to fall for Gortash's previous teasing and insults. Feeling really out of her element, painfully aware of her own big size and inability to properly dance even if she'd really like to enjoy the music and her new fancy attire that she's equally embarassed wearing but also secretly really likes. Dresses and fancy parties aren't her thing so why is she caring so much- and suddenly she sees Wyll's uneasiness and I don't know who asks first but now they're dancing together having fun and nobody else exists in the room anymore.

Gale panicking after a while and sending his magic copy to talk to people in his place. Every guest finds it funny and exotic, but Astarion knows it's a defence mechanism and goes to check on their Waterdeep wizard, finding him hiding on a secluded balcony talking to Tara the Tressym. Astarion suggesting he should take Tara inside, everybody loves cats and she'll give him even more points with the crowd while being his emotional support.

Shadowheart, still in her faith crysis, hair freshly dyed white, wearing the most beautiful dress that shines like a starred night. Did she ever go to a party? She doesn't remember, but probably not. She does not know the steps, doesn't know how to smalltalk. Tav notice and he twirls her around the ballroom until she laughs - is it the first time Tav has heard her laughter?

Honestly for the others I can't really see Lae'zel being interested in going to such a waste-of-time thing, Halsin being comfortable in dressing up and mingling with fake/posh people and Jaheira suffering through an entire night of being cornered into smalltalking with admirers of her past adventures.

The whole feeling will be a lot like the "Wicked eyes and wicked hearts" quest in DA:Inquisition.

There'll be romance, intrigue and probably an attempted murder or so, because what fun is a party without at least a couple deaths?

I'm also seriously thinking of adding Cazador to the guest list. Him seeing Astarion surrounded by people and still not understanding shit about them being friends and not pawns/accessories, underestimating the threat that such a close group (almost family now) actually poses to his Ascension plan.

Also thinking about everybody's fancy attires, pinterest is my salvation and curse.

[outcastpack]

Rules - pick four of your favourite characters from four different pieces of media and let the tumblr people decide which one most suits your vibe.

Tagged by @wolfboy88

(This was so hard to pick characters)

Tagging @chasing-chimeras @transdunbar @de-constructmybones @theoceanismyinkwell @equallyloyalandlethal @thiamsxbitch