How To Bang Your Monster

Vicar Amelia, commissioned by a friend :)

South of Midnight

You got a leg cramp and had to sit down for a while. The sun was setting, so he said he'd go to the top of the ridge and see how much farther there was to go. You had your suspicions but in the end, you trusted him, and what a mistake that was.

An entity that can't understand any emotion besides what they think is love part 2

You don’t remember when it started. At first, it was just small things. A bad day that somehow fixed itself. A thing that inconvenienced you suddenly… gone. A strange sense of being watched, but never in a way that felt dangerous or threatening in the slightest. If anything, it felt almost safe.

The first time you saw it, you thought you were dreaming. standing at the foot of your bed, not looming over, in fact, you don't even think it was touching anything in your room. It was just… there. Wings folded neatly behind its back, though it did nothing to hide them as they were too large for its frame. Its face was polished and smooth like a statue or doll, eyes fixed on you, and even though they were hollow, you could still understand the emotion behind them

“Don’t be afraid,” the way it spoke didn't sound like it was coming from its mouth, even if its lips moved, because you could hear it directly inside your head. “I’ve finally reached you.”

In almost a state of paralysis, you found you were unable to move, whether it was it's power over you or your brain itself not being able to comprehend what you were seeing. “Reached me?” you managed to say. It tilted its head slightly, as though your question confuses it, like you weren't supposed to ask such a thing. “Yes,” it spoke again, “you can see me now.”

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After that night, it never really left. Sometimes it wanted to be seen, sometimes it didn't, but just because you couldn't see it, didn't mean it wasn't there or that you couldn't feel it. In the quiet moments that you were alone, there were sounds that should have been there, in days that should have rained, it stayed sunny, and when purposely tried to make your day worse?..you couldn't remember.

You didn't know exactly how long it had been going on for, nor did you want to keep track of how long it had been, but at some point you kinda just accepted its place.

“Someone at work is making me uncomfortable,” you mutter one evening as you sat 'alone' at your dining table, you weren't even sure why you decided to say it out loud. Maybe you just wanted to speak to it again out of curiosity. The smell of old paper filled your nose, “I understand,” it replied from behind you.

The next day, that same coworker doesn’t show up in fact, they never come back. No explanation from your boss, Nothing. When you ask about them to your coworkers, people just shrug. “I heard they quit,” "pretty sure they talked with the boss about it a while back, yeah." None of them seemed to actually dig any deeper than that.

But then again, who would? It wasn't their problem, and it certainly wasn't yours.

Later that night, it appears again. no longer standing behind you this time, kneeling next to you its played with its hand like it wanted to lay in your lap but was holding itself back. “I’ve removed the source of your distress."

“Removed?” you echo.

It smiled, “They were making you feel uncomfortable, that's what you said, didn't you?” Its head tilted slightly, just like it did the first time you met. “That is not permitted.” The air around became colder. “You didn’t have to do that,” you whispered, not making eye contact with it.

For the first time, it paused “I did,” for the first time it pressed a hand to your pant leg “because you asked me to, I'm very good at listening to what's mine, aren't I?”

Mine, the word lingered in your head. “I’m not-” you start, but its cold face laying on your lap shut you up. “You are,” it said gently. And somehow the calmness of its tone made it worse than if it were shouting at you.

Things seemed to change after that with you two it was no longer just hovering idly around and wanted you to see it more frequently. Along with that, people had stopped bothering you, then they stopped approaching you altogether, and finally, they stopped noticing you at all.

You were a background character in your own life, but to it, you were center stage as it watched. A show you couldn't control as its director told everything was fine.

“You’re isolating me,” you say one night alone in your bedroom. You had had enough of whatever this was. You felt it behind you, gently placing a hand on your shoulder. “You are not isolated,” it replied, its smooth face pressed to your back. “You have me.”

Its wings unfold, closing around you, “I don’t want this,” you whispered back.

For a long moment, it says nothing, then you hear a crack. “I have done everything correctly,” it murmurs. You glance behind you to see its face filled with cracks. “I learned what makes you happy. I removed what causes pain. I put this face on so as to not scare you.”

Its voice trembles almost sadly, “Was I wrong?” You don’t answer, you didn't know how to. It took one hand off your shoulder and began to take its mask off. “I can adjust”.

A different voice, a new voice now spoke. “I will try again.” Its wings open now, letting you go. “Until you love me properly.”

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Horny

That aside, my take on Emmrich's lich choice is a lot more nuanced.

in any version where I'm in the driver seat, and Emmrich is asking for input on his choice, I steer him away from choosing lichdom. I am a mortal being who will need to make peace with death. In my media, I am most interested in exploring how to do that (vs the very understandable fantasy others may be interested in exploring, a world in which that is not a choice you are forced to make.)

I'm more open to stories in which this is a choice Emmrich has already made and therefore has to. You know. Live with the consequences of. There's some fun stuff to explore there, mistakes made as a "young" man (mid-50s lmao), or the opportunity for a kind of rebirth, a realization that the past century was misspent and a change of values, all that is cool. Personally not into the tragedy of losing people to death as an immortal, I just don't like dipping into those emotions.

The way liches are presented here is VERY WEIRD compared to standard Dragon Age lore, which is an entire universe filled with unpleasant and politically power hungry people almost to the exclusion of anything else. The idea of them being benevolent is INCREDIBLY strange inside the world DA has set up. The idea that they actively avoid influencing the outside world... firstly, it's just a very strange assertion inside the DA world, and secondly, it's even stranger that nobody ever challenges that. This is the series of "not even the good guys escape corruption, even the higher ups of the Grey Wardens, aka the closest things we have to heroes, suck so bad." like. C'mon. And then ignoring DA universe objection for the moment: I object. Personally, morally, even spiritually, which is a very unusual one for me. There are people with supposedly great and vast powers and they do nothing to improve the lot of the mortals around them. Even if they genuinely abstain from politics, on those grounds: get FUCKED, liches. It's just a visceral thing for me: if someone has power and privilege, and you're not using it to help others, then they're repulsive to me. (I could be slightly more interested if they were presented as cloistered academics who relentlessly pursue mysteries of the universe and then try to spread their knowledge and abstain from more humane things because they are obsessively driven-- but the secrecy, and the narrative presentation that they're hoarding secrets? Ugh.)

anyway. Honestly, what I've come to realize recently is that my take on Emmrich is that his engagement with Nevarran culture is, quite frankly, a form of mental self-harm. I see a lot of parallels between how he feels about death and obsesses over it as like. OCD rumination. To be clear, I don't think he needs to move out of Nevarra or stop engaging culturally, but I think... it's one of those things where the question is "how do I live with knowing that I'm going to die?" the answer, with greatest sincerity, is "you have to learn how to spend less time thinking about the dying and more about the living." It sounds a bit flippant, I know, "just stop thinking about it!" but the reality I'm talking about here is like. The more time you spend thinking about your problems, the bigger they grow in your head. The more you can engage with the world around you and the good things in your life, the less oppressive the problems become. (Especially relevant with OCD, where thoughts easily get stuck... but you gotta keep disengaging over and over and over and over and over because ultimately, no amount of engaging will make it better...)

Pulling text from an ancient post I wrote about this subject...

To become a lich, Emmrich must cease to be himself. I don't mean some nonsense about flesh or having a human body (although I have thoughts about that too)-- I mean, very concretely, that the way Emmrich moves through the world is incompatible with lichdom. In my personal characterization of him, he loves deeply, but struggles with impermanence, with endings-- heartbreak shatters him, and he finds it difficult to move on. People he'd known and loved deeply for a year or two become light anecdotes, yes, but only after decades have passed. (Far more years than he'd ever known them; the wounds run deep.)

To survive lichdom sane, I think he would need to detach. Shutter his heart. Learn to hold the world and the people in it more lightly; eventually, come not to hold them at all.

Emmrich, I think, views lichdom as a triumph: a shining chance to become something greater than a human. To give the world more than he could with time cut short.

The picture I have of his immortality is nothing like his, and it haunts me: there is, you see, more than one way to dig your own grave. Emmrich Volkarin, centuries from now, sits in the library that he has amassed, fully withdrawn into his tomes. The time comes when he no longer has windows-- for the light damages the books, you see-- no longer lights the braziers. He reads by the light of his own eyes.

The only people in his life exist as memories-- and slowly, they, too, fade.

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a dancing automaton who is more than she looks like - Camellia (outfit in progress) opened up version under the cut