#bg3 poems

[nowandthane]

About a character/ship + prompts/metaphor/imagery, what about Thane (and his Siha) post ME3? (if you want, feel free to expand on A Second Chance's epilogue😉). Or may I interest you in my headcanon of Astarion getting flashbacks of his mortal life thanks to the sound of a violin (https://www.tumblr.com/sillyliterature/741057677852033024/so-back-at-the-surroundings-of-rosymorn-monastery?source=share) 🤔

Looking forward to reading what you'll write 👀😍

thanks for the ask! clickable link of Aurora's post here, which inspired this poem (and also provided the soundtrack). love this headcanon, i thought it very appropriately bittersweet to Astarion's character <3

it’s easier to survive hell if you forget— not heaven, which i never did find but the feel of strings under calloused fingers sugary scents spicing the air the bow gliding, graceful as any a dagger i’ve slashed the music it creates harmonising with their voices softly speaking i had forgotten them but oh, not you, my paradise never you

[captainsieni]

BG3 Tarot Poems

[wizardsimper]

Honestly there was a real missed opportunity for a scene involving Gale reading the player some of his poetry

[liorlen]

Pyr y’n gwna ni byrhoedled? / Digawn llawryded, / kywestwch a bed.

[turbomnstr]

KEEP SHARING MY MUSIC WITH YOUR FRIENDS IF YOU WANT MORE NEW MUSIC, VIDEOS, MERCH & MORE. SPREAD THE WORD !!!

[somethingyoirelated]

I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me

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[sorceresssundries]

Gale's Poetry Journal - For Astarion

I would give you the sunlight.

I would bottle it, seal it, then stir it with wine. I would draw blood from sunbirds and infuse it with mine, Just for you to taste the dawn on your lips. I would halt an eclipse. 

And in place of the bindings of shadowy rope, I would spin silk from sunbeams, and stitch you with hope, Just so you could feel the sun on your skin. I would steal, beg and sin.

And if I can’t,

If the sun must outrun us, if dusk’s all we can hold, Then there’s warmth enough here to melt away cold. There will always be shadow - so we’ll embrace the night. We’ll let the day set, and savour sweet starlight.

[michellerosewilliams]

me & my biggest painting yet! oil on canvas 48x75”

support pls :) anything helps! $$ ✨ PayPal: @michellerose94

art supplies & canvases are expensive!! 😅

[nightmarist]

Rhapsody: Cazador's love of poetry arose after he read on the naked stomach of a dead child in his homeland. The child was hung from the lowest branch of a tree. Cazador read the poem, and looked at the child, and he knew that here was the artform for him.

Woe: The gentle tap-tap-tap of a staff on stone sparked terror for all in Cazador's palace. It signalled an approaching storm, and all they could do was shrink into the background and pray its wrath would not fall on them.

[lelalyo]

Ok but when I was fighting Haarlep, he kept running in circles in Raphael's room and everytime he'd run past Astarion, Astarion would perform an [opportunity attack]. It hit EVERYTIME but not just that, because Haarlep had his back to him, it always looked like Astarion was stabbing Haarlep in the ass which, I headcanon, is how Raphael even knew we were in his house.

Oh and Haarlep charmed Gale which, I gotta be honest, I was disappointed in our resident wizard. All it took was an incubus running around in his underwear to make him changed sides, can't believe it, Gale. After all the magical items I fed him - I thought we were friends, man. We cast a spell together once, GALE. Where's the loyalty? This ain't one off either, first it was the harpies, now Haarlep, where does the betrayal end?

[the-girl-who-didnt-make-anysense]

It's a bad idea right?

[mashamorevvna]

ORIN THE RED; HOUSE OF INCEST by Anaïs Nin

[bhaal-battle-beer-bard]

Gale aesthetic

Here the bardic aesthetic version of the Gale poem "Wash my pain away" did for @alpydk 's Book of Gale

[uruncletobi]

“The thought was persistent

Aching underneath my skin like a reminder of my undoing,

Past the point of no return

I swallowed it all down along with everything else,

The incessant lingering of a strangers touch

The taste of the city and its bitterness on my tongue,

The stench of lust like a filth I could not wash off

A creature defiled by immortality

A soul beyond redemption”

“No Return” a poem inspired by the pale elf

[gale-force-storm]

You Are...

You are a sunbeam, Warm and bright, Your heat sinking into my bones, And making me sigh in contentment. I bask in you, Like a cat in a window, Like a lizard on a stone, Like a person on a calm and quiet beach.

You are the wind, Swift and bracing, Rushing by and leaving me breathless. How I love getting swept up in you. A flurry of movement, Of powerful excitement, And then a calm, Before the storm thrills again.

You are the stars, Sparkling in the night, Beautiful and captivating. A swath of wonder in a sea of darkness. You are full of stories. Your own, And those which others read into you. I prefer the map you make of yourself.

You are a man, Complicated and messy, Full of contradiction, And all the lovelier for it. A beating heart, A racing mind, Eyes full of warmth, And a soul full to bursting with love.

Like the deepest forest, Like the most compelling book, Like the vastest ocean, Like the most riveting puzzle, Like the richest music, Like the most moving poetry, I could spend the rest of my life Getting lost in you.

[abigailmoment]

Astarion's hands started to move. Opening and closing. Flinching up to his chest in quick, aborted motions. Like he was trying to stop something. Starting to protect himself but but unable to complete the gesture. He made a noise. A whining complaint.

Nightmare, Tav thought. That wasn't really a surprise, given the little she knew about him. She scooted closer and reached out to shake him awake.

But then Astarion made another noise. It was so quiet Tav could barely hear it. She wouldn't have, if she hadn't moved close. It was so much softer than any sound he ever made while awake. Something halfway between a gasp and a sob. Stifled, like he was trying not to be heard.

Full text below. Full Text On AO3

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It was peaceful at camp. Peaceful as it only ever was in the dark hours of night when all of the powerful personalities were asleep.

Tav was ostensibly keeping watch. And she was at least keeping the woods in her peripheral vision. An observer would think she was toying with her violin. She adjusted the strings from sharp to flat and flat to sharp. She tested the tension with her fingertips, feeling the timbre of the silent notes trapped inside. But really, that was just something to do with her hands while her mind churned over her true occupation for the night: figuring out ways to diffuse the growing tension between Shadowheart and Lae'zel.

Solving interpersonal issues like that was pretty much her entire life since the Nautoloid crash. In her free time she stumbled through a crash course in wilderness survival, desperately searched for a cure for the tadpoles, and fought all the things that wanted to kill them.

(Gods, there were so many. She was never leaving Baldur's Gate again after this.)

But her main job was keeping her companions from murdering each other or having breakdowns.

Juggling her motley crew was like juggling knives. Actually scratch that. Tav had done both and the knives were undebatably easier. Because under all the surface problems this group had, all the different cultures and different values, was a simmering tension of fear. Everyone was afraid of what they were becoming. And that fear under the natural conflicts--it was like an oil spill shining under torches. A seemingly stable situation that might explode the moment someone dropped something incendiary. Like the wrong sort of comment.

So Tav managed them. She left everyone nice at camp when she was planning to buy things from the Zhentarim. She asked Astarion to steal something on the far side of the market while she, Wyll and Karlach covertly completed some hasty heroics. She minimized how much anyone but her ever talked to Lae'zel.

Gods, Lae'zel. Was she healthy for a githyanki? Tav just didn't have the context to tell. No one else was anything approaching emotionally intact. Years in hell, amnesia, pacts with demons, and broken hearts that might explode. Tav had only just started getting to know her new brain-worm-enforced social circle and she could already tell that everyone was sitting on years, or in one case apparently centuries, of extremely fraught baggage.

Baggage which they couldn't address right now because they were all busy with the very important collective job of not dying.

Tav sighed and decided to take a break from thinking. She played with her violin a bit more, but doing that was an unsatisfying tease since she couldn't play it right now. She decided to unsatisfyingly tease herself in a different way and shifted so she could stare at Astarion.

She did that sometimes while on watch because being on watch was boring and Astarion was extremely pretty and he had set the doing-creepy-things-while-we-sleep bar of their relationship extremely low when he tried to bite her. Her gaze was more appreciative than lecherous, anyway. She was an artist, and he was like some classical painting come to life. Face of perfect, pale skin drawn in sharp, eye-catching angles.

No, not a painting, she thought. More like a sculpture. He was so still while he slept. Was that an elf thing, or a vampire thing? Either way, the stillness and his pallor made it seem a bit like he might be carved from marble. Actual artwork. And the way delicate white curls framed his features looked faintly celestial.

Ha. That effect would dispelled the second he woke.

Gods, he was beautiful. Tav wasn't going to do anything about it of course. She was already juggling knives. Adding a romantic entanglement to this situation would be like setting the knives on fire. She'd just tuck these thoughts away and tell him he looked like an angel when he slept the next time he got maudlin about mirrors. That would make him laugh and cheer him right up.

As she thought and watched Astarion the statue impression fell away. Something disturbed the stillness of his not-quite-sleep. Tav watched the edges of his mouth tugging down from peaceful blankness into a frown.

Then his hands started to move. Opening and closing. Flinching up to his chest in quick, aborted motions, like he was trying to stop something. Starting to protect himself but but unable to complete the motion. He made a noise. A whining complaint.

Nightmare, Tav thought. That wasn't really a surprise, given the little she knew about him. Tav scooted closer and reached out to shake him awake.

But then Astarion made another noise. It was so quiet Tav could barely hear it. She wouldn't have, if she hadn't moved close. It was so much softer than any sound he ever made while awake. Something halfway between a gasp and a sob. Stifled, like he was trying not to be heard.

Tav froze, barely an inch away from him. Shit. She couldn't wake him up, she realized. She absolutely couldn't wake him up.

Astarion tossed his past around like caltrops, peppering conversations with horrific details, daring her to pity him. Tav knew a thing or five about emotional manipulation, it's why she ended up managing most groups she fell in with, but before Astarion she'd never met someone who tried to demand sympathy at knife-point. Even more novel, and somewhat impressive, he actually sort of made it work.

But when he talked about his past, it was on his terms. They were only just starting to be anything more than strangers, and she already understood--that was important. It was something to do with control. Everything she learned about him had to be on his terms.

So if he knew she'd seen this, if he knew she'd stumbled in on this moment of vulnerability, if he ever guessed she heard him make that sound. It would be like a betrayal.

He'd resent. Retract. It would shatter the easy rapport she was working so hard to build with him. It wouldn't matter that this was an accident. Stray cats don't care if it was accidental when you clip them with your boot in the dark. It's as good as a kick and they never, ever trust you again.

She'd just...leave it be. Tav scuttled back from him, quietly as she could. She resolutely turned to scan the dark treeline. She was keeping watch. She was a good party member, keeping everyone safe in this thoroughly unremarkable night where nothing at all was happening. Her companions' dreams were their own business.

She listened to crickets singing. She listened to the wind sighing. She listened to the branches of the trees brush against each other as the wind played its primal sort of music with them. She listened to Astarion make another barely-there noise. A whimper that threaded on and on.

He sounded like he was actively being hurt.

Tav clenched her hands and then sat on them. She lectured herself sternly in her head. She couldn't go wake him up. She was good at reading people and all her instincts told her that would be a mistake. Even beyond how much it could fuck up their relationship, it could fuck up his coping strategies, which involved a lot of feigned indifference and pretending awful things were funny. It was hard to feign indifference when you got caught crying in your sleep. They had a temple full of traps and goblins to go through tomorrow. If her rogue was off his game it might kill someone.

The worst thing about this, she thought as she listened, was that it sounded like Astarion was trying to be in pain quietly. Trying not to draw attention to himself. Which felt very wrong. What made him do that, instinctively, while he slept?

The whimpering finally trailed off, or at least quieted the the point of being drowned out by forest sounds. That was a relief for a moment, but then Tav found she hated the silence more. It meant she didn't know what was going on. She managed to watch the treeline and pretend that everything was fine for maybe a minute. Then she gave up, turned around and checked on him.

Astarion had rolled onto his side, half off of his bedroll. His face was taught and somehow even more pale than usual. His shoulders were hunched. Like maybe his back was hurting him? His hands still moved, but the movements had lost focus. He no longer tried to ward off whatever was happening in his mind. He just twitched.

Tav got up. Being here felt like an invasion of his privacy and was also unbearable. She'd go on a patrol around the camp. By the time she got back he'd be out of this. He'd have to be. A nightmare couldn't last that long, she told herself.

She stowed her violin and had just finished belting on her rapier when she heard Astarion speak. For a moment she thought he might have roused himself, but no. His voice was vague and slurred with sleep, so much she could only clearly make out the last word:

"...please."

It was his tone that made her stop in her tracks. Astarion sounded so completely hopeless. Like the word was a perfunctory gesture. Like he knew begging wouldn't help, but he was driven to it by whatever was happening to him. Because there was nothing else to do.

Tav covered her face with her hands. She was having a lot of feelings. Most of them revolved around finding out who Astarion was talking to, in his dream, and arranging their gruesome murder. But that was a long term project. It wasn't relevant right now. She took a deep breath.

When she uncovered her face she had shifted into a different mindset. It was her problem-solving mindset. For when she needed to think fast and act precisely. For when she needed to micromanage her team to the point of shouting orders every six seconds. A mindset for when something was very wrong and needed to be attended to urgently. Like a burning building. Or an owlbear attack. Or this.

This was a problem. She would solve it. She spent all day finding creative solutions to terrible problems. She just needed to find the sneaking-past-the-lookouts-and-convincing-the-guards-you-were-supposed-to-be-here-because-the-lookouts-let-you-through solution to this emotional goblin ambush.

Begin by brainstorming. Consider the limitations: Couldn't wake him up. For stated reasons. Couldn't leave him to the nightmare. That idea was unconscionable.

Could she change the dream? Maybe tadpole brain-jump into Astarion's head and interfere with what was happening? That was fraught. On multiple levels. Call that plan C.

Maybe she could incidentally wake him? Sound a fake alarm. Adrenaline was good for clearing the head and shaking off nightmares. But...no. That would wake everyone else, and she didn't want to have to juggle everyone else.

She liked the idea of trying to interfere with his dream. She circled back to that. Could she do that without the tadpole? His responses were so visceral, she'd bet this was as much memory as it was dream. Could she subtly oust it? Change the context? Background music could dramatically change a scene--why not a dream? What's something that would be incompatible with his past? Something that he couldn't possibly have felt back when this happened to him?

She didn't know enough about his past. Vampires then. What can't vampires experience?

Running water. Dousing Astarion with water would wake him up. Not helpful.

Food? She couldn't feed him while he was asleep, and she wasn't even sure about that one.

Sunlight. That held promise. He loved the light. Turned to it like a sunflower every morning. But it was night right now.

But wait. She could fix that.

Tav took action. The thinking had taken no time at all--it never did when she was in this mindset. She hustled over to Gale's tent. He was a deep, slightly snore-y sleeper and didn't even stir. She rifled through his things. She'd given him the scrolls of they'd found in the secret laboratory, two days ago. And if she remembered right...ah! There it was. Parchment marked with a blue, starburst circle at the top. A scroll of Daylight. The power to enchant an object so that it shone with true sunlight.

Tav winced when she saw the complicated casting instructions. This was a little over her skill level. But it's not like she needed the full, shadow-monster-obliterating power of dawn. She just needed a handful of morning. She bet she could coax something out of it.

Gale had a dark-crystal ball that felt like it would be a good target. It was round like the sun, which felt right. And it wasn't too big. Tav rolled out the scroll of Daylight on the ground in front of her. She started going through the motions of the spell. Arms crossed, then sliding along each other until the backs of her hands pressed together. Then flip so her palms were together. She whispered the incantations as she pulled her palms slowly apart and felt the shiver of magic and light prickle into being between her fingers.

Halfway through the incantation Tav hit some symbols she didn't quite know how to pronounce. She just kind of hummed her way through them. The light in her hands flickered and dimmed, but she whistled a coaxing tune and it didn't quite go out. She leaned forward to press the light into the dark glass of the crystal ball.

There was a silent flare as the glass went from murky black to white. It cast a warm, pure light over Tav and Gale's tent. Even shoddily performed, the daylight was a stark contrast to the night. Tav grabbed a nearby basket, upended it in a shower of spell components, and stuffed it over the crystal ball, muting the light from afternoon to twilight.

She glanced over at the tent. She heard Gale snuffle a few times, but he didn't stir more than that. Gods bless wizards and their chronic lack of situational awareness.

Tav picked up the basket of daylight, holding it against her chest as she hustled back to Astarion.

He was entirely curled in on himself. Legs drawn up, arms folded against his chest. His face was buried in his hands, so Tav couldn't see his expression, but she could hear his teeth grinding together, clacking as molars hit long canines. Sometimes his shoulders jerked. Not flinches. More like spasms. Fucking Hells. What in the planes was he remembering?

Tav lay the basket down in front of him and drew the lip of it up so that the light crept out, spreading over the sleeping vampire. A very small dawn, just for one person.

The twitching tension did not dissipate immediately, but Astarion's hands flexed slightly away from his face. His head tilted, quizzical. Like someone listening to a new refrain in a song they thought they knew by heart. Not quite sure what it meant. Not trusting it.

Confusion was leagues better than suffering, and Tav would happily call this a success if she managed to bewilder him out of his nightmare. She lifted the basket a little more. The poorly-cast daylight spell had stabilized at gloaming dim, but the light was still sunlight. Clear and clean in that ineffable way. Astarion sighed. He seemed to be relaxing just a bit. His fingers flexed.

Then his hands shot out, rogue quick, and snatched the bauble of sun out from under the basket. The motion was so fast, Tav almost missed it in a blink. One moment the crystal ball was in her basket, the next Astarion had it cradled in his arms, clutched tightly, like the realm's strangest teddy bear.

Tav almost laughed, but stopped herself. Astarion's shoulders were relaxing more and the spasms had stopped, thank the gods. And while it was out of the basket, the way he curled around the crystal kept it from shining on anyone else. Greedy man.

Tav was filled with the deep and absurd desire to pet his head. Run her fingers very gently through his hair in soothing motions. Not now. Maybe someday. Maybe...she would reconsider her policy about juggling fire.

For now she settled back down. She had the woods in her peripheral vision again and new things to think about. Like taxing her bardic knowledge for insight about how vampires. Their culture. Their weaknesses. And how she might go about utterly destroying whoever Astarion had been dreaming about.

*** Next chapter >

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