#The Nightsong

[naomistares]

dame aylin the woman that you are....

dame aylin..? more like daammmnnn aylin 😻

[kawareo]

Worst In-Laws in Toril

[bugcowboyart]

Is she.. y’know… a Selunite? 💅

Bonus Live Shadowheart Reaction:

Canon fact: her hand actually only hurts if she thinks about kissing girls

[lululandd]

@hrgnm "I love she her list of things to do after two hundred years was 'kill that dude' and 'my girlfriend'"

[oathkeeper-of-tarth]

One really tiny but really flavourful detail in BG3 for me is one of the steps in the "Find the Nightsong" quest. The quest in itself is a big fave of mine, not just because of its buildup and dramatic twist and the fact that it deals with my personal favourite character, but also because of the way it winds through all three acts of this immense game. Here, though, I want to highlight a small and relatively early portion of it.

Initially, when you are sent after the mysterious and much sought-after relic called the Nightsong - classic adventurer stuff, really, there's even a wizard in a tower who'll pay you for it - all you have to go on are rumours that it is hidden in an old Selûnite temple in the region you happened to crash in. And sure enough, you explore the cool temple ruins, maybe you do a little puzzle-solving to open a sealed moon-themed door leading to a passage deep below - or you get into the Underdark via one of the other routes available. In any case, once there, you find the tragically doomed underground outpost some of the temple's residents tried to establish, as well as several records of their final hours. But there are no signs of the Nightsong or anything related to it ever being there at all. At that point you have no more info to go on, and your quest journal updates to say so:

Explore the Underdark. The trail goes cold in the Underdark. Where is the Nightsong?

Except... there is something here. And that something is a book - not an ancient record, but a recent publication: This tome appears fairly new-printed; it can't be more than a decade or two old, the item description says. But above all, it is very conspicuously and prominently placed at the foot of the large statue of Selûne that dominates the remnants of the outpost (and that, as part of its defenses, shoots rather deadly magical moonlight beams until you disable it).

The book is called "In Search of the Nightsong". It is marked as a quest item and it is there purely to provide you with a lead and to bridge the gap until the next bit of insight into the Nightsong you will get (which is at this point probably quite a ways away in Act 2, other than the possible tidbit around Nere and the collapsed bridge as you approach one possible end of Act 1). You are absolutely meant to find it and read it.

Fascinating that such a seemingly valuable object has proven so difficult to track down. Indeed, treasure-hunters the realm over have travelled to the Sword Coast with one goal in mind: To find the Nightsong. Yet each by each they have failed, indicating dead ends, rebuffs, or else disappearing altogether. My latest enquiry was with a half-orc named Graly, who insisted he'd come as close as possible to the relic as one may go without forfeiting his or her life. He indicated that the object is not, as most reports indicate, in the Selûnite fort adjacent to the river Chionthar. It is, in fact, held in an old Sharran fortress somewhere in the environs of Moonrise Towers. However, Graly reported that some kind of potent shadow prevents one from approaching where this fortress might be.

In fact, your next quest journal update comes from going into your inventory and reading the book:

Find the Sharran Temple. We found a book that told of a secret Sharran temple that contains the Nightsong. It is hidden underground, somewhere near Moonrise Towers.

How did this recently-published book end up sitting there, just waiting for you to read it, in the sealed, long-abandoned outpost, beset on all sides by unfriendly crowds of goblins, drow, minotaurs, a spectator, you name it? And why is this cool to me? Well, it's a bit meta, but it turns out that Selûne, She Who Guides, goddess of, among other things, questers, seekers, navigators, and the lost finding their path, has more than earned her title. And indeed, here we see that both in gameplay and in lore, Selûne guides.

In this particular case, though you don't know that yet, she's guiding you, both the character and the player, to hopefully save her long-lost daughter.

[doe-eyes-dekarios]

Thinkin about them

[moyashidoodles]

Thank you all for the input! I was able to commit to the colors and finally finished this piece. Eye catching colors and rendering are my weak points as an artist so this was me practicing both of those things. I hope you like this piece, I worked really hard on it!

[boodarko]

the nightsong 🌙✨

[emblazons]

"all along I believed I would find you."

Dame Aylin & Isobel Thorm • MoonMaiden x 1000 Years ⤷ for @laiostoudenn's BG3 Pride challenge "I dreamt every night that you'd come back to me. That it was all somehow a nightmare that dawn would undo."

[westruun]

Dame Aylin, daughter of the goddess Selûne.

[winter-wise]

Love at first sight isn't always a believable concept, but for Isobel and Dame Aylin? Believable, 100%. If I was Isobel Thorm and laid eyes upon Dame Aylin for the first time ever, then I too would be irrevocably down bad for 6 feet of hunky Aasimar paladin

[azotho]

⚔️🪽

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Prints - society6.com/thepaleindigo

[bratzoid]

Aylin <3

Sorta decided last minute to chuck a bit of animation into this one, but admittedly it's a pretty half hearted attempt lol

[gayspacemonk]

shadowheart and the nightsong freed each other at the same time in the same gesture, are you kidding me

[trappedinafantasy37]

It’s 2 o’clock in the morning and I can’t sleep so I’m just gonna start rambling about what’s on my mind. You wanna know what that is? Isobel. To be specific, Durge and Isobel.

Since my very first Durge run, it never quite made sense to me as to why the Urge would specifically want you to kill Isobel. Up until that point, the Urge has kinda been impulsive and acted without thought. But with Isobel, that’s very deliberate. Sceleritas Fel literally shows up in the middle of the night and gives you a name and a face. That’s never happened before. With Alfira, she was just a victim of convenience. Same thing with Gale, Arabella, the squirrel the grove, all victims of convenience. None of their deaths were planned before hand, but Isobel’s very much is premeditated and the only one that is.

But, there is something about the interaction with Fel that is super easy to overlook. If you talk to Fel about Isobel before you actually meet Isobel, you can ask him as to why you should kill her. He tries to reason with you by saying that the inn will fall if she dies and it will be a mass spectacle of murder... How the fuck does Fel know that? You aren’t even informed of that possibility of the inn falling upon her death until you meet Isobel herself.

Even if you don’t talk to Fel before hand and you meet Isobel first, the Urge and the narrator constantly keep trying to push you into killing Isobel. Now, the narrator does kinda goad Durge a lot, but not quite as much as when interacting with Isobel.

If you choose not to kill Isobel, Fel shows back up again and tells you of another premeditated murder and that is your companion with the highest affinity, or your romantic partner. Again, very weird. With Isobel, it’s a premeditated murder that you are in control of. But with your favorite person, it’s premeditated, but you’re not in control. But why? Sure, you can believe Fel at his word when he says that your body craves violence and it hasn’t gotten its full when you chose not to kill Isobel. But, it could be anybody. You can satiate your bloodlust on literally anybody. So, why your favorite companion?

It’s almost like the urge can only be satiated with your favorite companion because something, or someone, is punishing you for not killing Isobel. But again, why is Isobel so god damn fucking important?

If you kill Isobel or you kill your romance partner, you are granted the Slayer form. Yay! But there’s a very unique scenario that can happen in which you can be granted the Slayer form without killing Isobel yourself and that is if you allow Shadowheart to become a Dark Justiciar. This, I always found to be super weird. Technically, Shadow is responsible for the death of Isobel, and yet, you get rewarded for it anyway and your urge is considered satiated even though you didn’t directly do anything.

If your approval with Shadow is like 40 or higher, by default, she will always choose to spare the Nightsong on her own. Which means if you are above the 40 threshold, the only way Shadow becomes a DJ is if you tell her to. So, although you didn’t kill Isobel, you become indirectly responsible for her death which is why you get rewarded.

But you love doing the direct killing themselves. You love getting your hands wet with blood and gore. And this indirect route is… well… too clean for you. If anything, it’s Shadow’s hands that are bloody, not yours. So, why is your urge satiated when you didn’t do the killing yourself and the blood isn’t even on your hands?

That’s because the murder of Isobel is a fucking hit job. It’s an assassination. It doesn’t matter how she dies or when she dies, just that she dies. Now, I’m sure that this really isn’t some kind of monumental revelation, but the Urge is Bhaal. In the moments where you lose control, yeah, that’s Bhaal basically possessing you. It makes sense as to why you’re forced to target your favorite person after failing to kill Isobel, Bhaal is pissed that you disobeyed and is trying to teach you a lesson.

But, it also means that, for whatever reason, Bhaal wants Isobel dead. The only explanation I have is because it fucks over Ketheric which by consequence fucks over Myrkul. And we know for sure that the Dead Three and their Chosen entered into this alliance with the intention of betraying the other two eventually. It also pieces together how Fel knows that killing Isobel guarantees the fall of the inn and that’s because Bhaal knows. Marcus has been hanging around the inn for some time so he would already know of Isobel’s importance to the inn and relayed that information to Ketheric. It’s very much possible that Orin could have stumbled upon that info herself, or even pre-lobotomy Durge.

But, Bhaal is the pure definition of chaotic stupid. Killing Isobel in of itself doesn’t necessarily hurt Ketheric. In fact, when she dies, he may not always know. I think the only way that he does know that Isobel is dead is if Marcus ends up taking her corpse back to Moonrise in which Ketheric resurrects her and puts a worm in her brain. At that point, he can guarantee that not only will Isobel always be alive, but she will always be by his side. It’s pretty morbid and fucked up, but it actually ends up strengthening Ketheric.

Anyways, it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and I’ve been awake for 22 hours. Sorry if the rambling is a little incoherent. I just really had to get this shit outta my head. Now, I’m gonna go lay in bed and stare at the ceiling for another 3 hours cause I’m still not tired.

[emahriel]

Unshackled from shadows, she will rise in moonlit glory and carve a path of brightness to the accursed one's second death.