#anyway ik the durge cannibalism is a Thing but like. i don't think she would have eaten them lmao but she definitely wanted to Study them

[seldaryne]

10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17 for durge~

10. What motivates your Dark Urge to either embrace or resist the tadpole?

Pragmatic though Velrith may be, consuming more tadpoles & utilizing their abilities seems to be a more favourable route. In her mind, there's obviously some sort of reason that she hasn't undergone the transformation yet--some sort of protection that's keeping the effects at bay. The tadpole itself is a parasite, and it does need her at least semi-alive as its host. There's also an element of wanting to know more about her current situation, and part of that desire means that someone has to be a guinea pig. Particularly in Act 1, her feelings about herself are pretty nebulous. She's not overly concerned for her personal safety, and actually finds it reassuring that she's surrounded by people both willing & capable of putting her down if she starts to turn into a mindflayer, so she thinks of it as a calculated risk. Also, interactions with the Cult of the Absolute go considerably smoother when she's not operating from a place of total darkness.

Basically, once she weighed the options, there were more benefits to be found from tapping into the tadpole over ignoring it entirely. The Astral Tadpole is a different story. At that point, she's started to lose trust in the Emperor (though she's still fine with working towards his goals, at least until she feels like she has a better grasp of the entire situation. Like the tadpole, he clearly needs her alive for something. It's a truce, for now), and she's more interested in keeping ownership over herself. The Astral Tadpole seems a step too far away from that desire, and she refuses to budge on that.

11. What motivates your Dark Urge to either embrace or resist the Urge?

Answered here.

12. How does your Dark Urge feel about being a bhaalspawn?

In a word?

Despair.

It's a very unique feeling of helplessness, of knowing that she was always more or less doomed to fail. Her own desires didn't matter. She was never expected to develop her own path. She's not even sure what the point of allowing her developmental years to be comparatively 'normal,' unless it was to perhaps cultivate resentment & make her eventual indoctrination more spiteful. She doesn't remember feeling any of that, though; just emptiness. A void where her core should have been, distant from the very idea of what it meant to be truly alive.

Now, since she was a child, she'd always been interested in finding out the way things worked. What makes the clock tick? How do the wheels of a carriage know how to turn? Even if she's not as obvious about it later on, she still retains the curiosity. As Bhaal's chosen, it manifests in a less-than-acceptable fashion. More detached than she'd ever been, she started cutting into bodies to see if they had something tangible that she didn't. Externally, they were the same. Bhaal hadn't made something physically deviant, at least. So maybe there was something inside, tucked away behind the ribs and lungs, threaded in amongst the viscera & woven around the nerves.

Her abhorrent butler was delighted, naturally, and assumed the dissection-turned-vivisection was motivated by torturous desires. She never bothered to mention how part of her longed to crawl inside the open chest cavities, wrapping herself up in the wet warmth, hoping she could somehow absorb a patchwork version of her ideal self in that way.

She understands, in retrospect, why she was doing this. But she doesn't know whether to be more angry at herself for seeing the habit as something both justified and necessary, or being put in a position where she ever had the opportunity to discover it in the first place.

15. What is your Dark Urge’s greatest fear?

To slip again, to lose herself to the Urge, to die as an animal lost to its instincts rather than herself.

She knows she's technically rejected it, but the fear lingers. She can't rest until she makes those in close proximity to her swear that they're willing to prevent her from hurting anyone, and it's one of the few topics you can see cracks of real, honest anxiety in her face & hear it in her voice. It's not so much the fear of hurting the people she's come to care about (that's definitely a portion of it, though), it's losing everything she's worked so hard for in the process.

When she finished Orin off and was subsequently punished for rejecting Bhaal (her father--creator, really) she knew she was dying. She didn't want to die, and resisted as much as she was physically capable of doing, but she knew it was happening anyway. Her vision flickered, fading in time with the numbness spreading from her chest. Someone may have been yelling in the distance, muffled and far, far away. Or maybe that was the sound of her own screaming. It was hard to tell.

Yet, she was somehow happy to do it.

She was dying, but she was aware of it, and it was her, not some abomination of Bhaal. Those last moments of fleeting consciousness belonged wholly and entirely to her, to Velrith, and all of the decisions she made that led to that point. And Bhaal could take her life, but he couldn't take away that fierce shock of pride at it being hers.

Should she fall, it has to be on her own terms. She's not eager to embrace death, but she has that requirement of it when it comes.

16. What is your Dark Urge’s greatest desire?

It's selfish, and she's not convinced she deserves it. But she wants to live.

She's been given a second chance when she knows she likely deserves no less than execution for her past actions. She's found a small group of people who care for her despite all evidence prior dictating she should be shunned at the absolute minimum. From that, she's even found what she recognizes to be happiness in a romantic partnership (she still finds confusing fascination in how quickly Astarion was able to accept her, and doesn't know if she'll ever understand--but she's endlessly grateful). There are strangers whose faces she doesn't recognize who see her as a hero, as someone they can trust to help with their problems.

She is happy. More dangerously, she is content. And it feels so unfair, somehow, that she can sit there, basking in all this warmth when her body has been the instrument of so much destruction. Why should her hands be held gently, when they were made & used for tearing apart soft flesh & crushing bones? She should be, at the very least, generally hated & scorned if she's allowed to walk free after that.

But she isn't. It doesn't seem to happen (at least, not in anyone she's encountered yet).

She wants to keep living like this. She won't let herself put down the burden of her past. It seems an added cruelty that she can't make herself participate in. But even carrying that, it doesn't change the fact that's she wants to live.

17. What is your Dark Urge’s greatest regret?

Is it perhaps too dramatic to say it might just be her entire creation?

Velrith has never really been able to properly make peace with her past. It's not something you can ask either, since there's no way anyone would have a proper frame of reference. Well, you weren't as bad as Orin. You weren't as bad as Gortash. Do those statements even carry meaning? What good is being the lesser of two evils when the scale is that vast to begin with? (Besides, she can't even say with any degree of certainty that she wasn't worse. Evidence seems to point in the other direction.)

She's done good things. She's helped people. She knows this; she's even seen some of it firsthand.

And yet, the couple who selflessly took her in would still be alive.

And yet, the blood of so many innocents who just happened to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time wouldn't have been spilled.

And yet, the city of Baldur's Gate likely wouldn't have been under this current threat if not for her past actions.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

So perhaps, on the whole, everyone would have been better off had she never been here in the first place.

durge asks.