Thank you for all the Uno Reverses and the tag @missfortunetherogue, @archduchessgortash, @lucretiouswept, and @fireflyeyes!! Your writing is literally a blessing to my eyeballs every time! <3
This post is dedicated SPECIFICALLY to @lucretiouswept because, in their words, they need "More. Please just more." of my take on the mind of Ascended Astarion. Well, darling, YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND!!
I am choosing to interpret "More." as more WORDS! Please accept 806 of them picked precisely for YOUR eyeballs :D
It’s been five years since the night I completed the Black Mass and ascended and I have not slept once. Not one hour. Not one measly minute. Not even the brief merciful slip of consciousness that most people experience by simply tuning out of the present and slipping into unawareness. I can do none of that. Nothing. Every night stretches out before me in the same way- endless and yawning and completely, suffocatingly awake.
And before you start to make assumptions about my resourcefulness, I have tried everything. Wine, first- the good kind, Amnian, expensive enough that lesser men would feel the rate of my consumption as a genuine loss to their cellars. It simply made my thoughts louder. I even almost overdosed on sleeping potions once. At the time I seriously thought that an obscene amount of them might override the fae DNA in my blood, but I just ended up making myself profusely sick instead. I tried many handcrafted tinctures and miracle tonics from local apothecaries that did not work. And a particularly foul smelling paste that my contact within the Zhentarim swore on his life would drop a cave troll within an hour. Instead, I laid awake in my bed and stared at the ceiling thinking about all of the ways I was going to drain him dry.
I counted the ceiling tiles of my bed chambers within the Crimson Palace one night when things were particularly desperate. There are four hundred and twelve of them, if you were wondering. I know because I counted them fourteen times just to be certain.
And that was only the second year into my rise to power.
The mind was not built to run without stopping. I understand that now in ways I didn’t during the two centuries of my life when I was merely a spawn, when I would fall into a trance whether I wanted it or not and I had the blessed luxury of taking it entirely for granted. The brain requires darkness the way a candle flame requires the absence of wind- it needs the small nightly death of unconsciousness to process the accumulation of living. To file away memories. To forget, mercifully, the ones that do not need keeping. Without that nightly release everything simply… remains. Every thought. Every memory. Every conversation and slight and moment of tedium from every single day, stacked in an ever growing pile with nowhere to go and no relief on the horizon.
I had endured two hundred years of Cazador’s cruelty and I had never once considered that he was accidentally doing me a kindness by working me until my body simply gave out at the precipice of every dawn. How grateful my used body had been to collapse on my bunk along with my brothers and sisters. How safe my dreams had felt in those stolen hours- small and secret and entirely my own, the one place where no one else could follow me.
I hadn’t appreciated that generosity until it was all of the sudden gone.
I would give almost almost anything to dream again. To be able to dream again.
So I found other ways to cope with the sleepless nights.
It started as something innocent- or at least that’s what I told myself at the time, and I was convincing enough that I nearly believed it. Every night after the city quieted and the candlelight from the windows finally guttered out, I would walk. The Upper City. The Lower City. The Outer City. The winding residential streets of Bloomridge and the crowded alleys of the Gray Harbor where ordinary people lived their ordinary lives and slept in their ordinary beds without a single thought spared for just how extraordinary that was.
And thanks to the ascension, I could now simply let myself in.
Not forcefully, no, nothing so crude as that. I was like a shadow stepping through a cracked shutter. A tendril of darkness finding the gap between a door and its frame. I was quiet in ways that even the most careful of burglars could never manage- I was not there to take anything, after all. At least, not anything that they would notice had gone missing.
I would find a corner of their bed chamber and simply watch them as they slept. Imagining myself in their place, tucked safely into their beds and simply unaware of their surroundings.
The idea to cast “detect thoughts” came later, once the watching had stopped being enough. It was a small thing, the ritual spell. Delicate. A gossamer thread slipped into an unguarded sleeping mind, careful enough to not disturb anything, and just enough to let me see. To stand at the threshold of someone else’s dream and observe the theater of their subconscious from the doorway.
Let us see, my tags are going out to @et-augury, @alleiramagic, @akelan, @theendofanerror, @thedarksilkpen, @ele-millennial-weirdo, @dutifullylazybread, and the best big sister ever @gortashsrighthand!! SHOW ME WHAT Y'ALL GOT IN THE ARSENAL!!
I do not know why but dark, angsty, depraved Ascended Astarion is just my bread and butter. And I would have it no other way. I will fight you just to stay well within his clutches and I mean that on EVERYTHING!
Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this rather large snippet (again, 806 words). There is so much more to share because I am nowhere NEAR being done with this mini still unnamed project :3
