#dalyria

I'm having trouble with D&D Beyond and had to contact Support lolll but in the meantime until I can actually read it, there is new art available on the website~

It looks like the entire book is set pre-game, so they didn't make a statement on Ascended vs. Spawn ending. I have mixed feelings* about that, but LOOK at the most cursed family portrait of all time my gods

There is a whole section on "Cazador Szarr's Family" apparently (among other things I'm excited to read, but one thing at a time):

More beneath the cut:

Recreating @maetersart art as a screenshot has finally worked out.

This has been a gestalt since November, but the zine distracted me back then and it was difficult to implement, but now I've managed to pull it off as best I can. I love this art, and the guys do too.

Screenshots of the other six.

I really love drawing Astarion and Petras fighting. I imagine Petras making constantly stupid decisions and Astarion getting more and more pissed by it haha

Intro: Welcome to my Kinktober 2025 masterlist!!! I am your host with the most @vim-pop-girl and together I will take you through 31 days, 31 stories, and 31 kinks.

Notes: hello all I'd never ever thought I'd do a kinktober since I might be the world's slowest most unmotivated writer but here we are! To those who read my fics I thank you very much. You could be reading anything else but you chose to sit down and indulge an exhausted 20 year college student's fanfiction aspirations and may the universe bless you for it. All the fics are about Baldur's gate 3 characters, I mean the line up is basically Orin-tober but I managed to work it a few other characters in there lol. Please enjoy.

Warnings: Smut 18+, minors dni.

P.S. let me know about any spelling mistakes, and I'll do my best to fix them right up. I started writing these pretty late, so there's about 99.9% chance that mistakes were made, lol.

I have put unreasonable amounts of time into thinking about what the dynamics were like during Cazador's reign in that house. I mean, imagine sharing the same tasks, bedrooms, and general experiences of abuse and duress with the same people FOR TWO HUNDRED YEARS. That's absolute madness. If any of you have had experiences with co-living with family under stress for any extensive amount of time, you know very well the levels of emotional 4D chess-ing that tend to take place as a result. You end up distributing so much frustration and anger around and often onto the very same people you will ultimately seek comfort from - this is that situation but blown up to impossible proportions.

So, "strained" doesn't really do justice as a descriptor here. I believe the family had a dynamic, ever-evolving hierarchy within itself, years-worthy of time where the spawn shifted alliances and made "cliques" within themselves - rebels would evolve into pushovers and trusted friends would turn into snitches. You had endless amounts of drama within the group and flies on the walls would witness them cut each other's heads off one day and sob into one another's laps the next.

Naturally I think all of them were resistant to the concept of being a "family" at first, but it's pretty much impossible to not develop family-like ties throughout that long of a period. Following Cazador's death, I believe there would be further splintering within as some want to maintain said ties and others are eager to cut them - seeing both their siblings and the relationships themselves as yet another painful reminder of what Cazador imposed upon them.

I think Astarion falls into the latter category. If he had his way, he would never see, speak, or think of his brothers and sisters again. And while the sibling nomenclature is a deeply-rooted habit, he doesn't think it holds any legitimacy whatsoever (whether or not that's the case in his heart is another matter).

Dalyria (the moon-elf physician, whom I have come up with a story, personality, background and motivations during several long showers that might not necessarily line up with yours, so, if anything of what I'm about to say seems pulled out of a hat, it's because it was) is the opposite. She has grown attached to the constant presence of her siblings and taken a mother-goose role upon herself. With the Exception of Leonard and Violet (more on that later) she has decided they are her responsibility and wishes the group would stick together.

I like to think that there's a lot of history between those two in particular. Obviously, the interactions between Astarion and his siblings are very brief, but It's enough to run with. Dalyria shows a lot of concern and understanding towards him and even pleads when he threatens Petras' life - again, I think she did a lot of trying to pragmatically keep the peace among them and genuinely grew attached to a few - Astarion being the main one of said few. You even get the smallest hint of a on-and-off intimate relationship with the way he derisively calls her by her nickname.

Also, Astarion very occasionally showcases enough emotional maturity that I could see him latching onto the one other person around who seems to have her wits about her, but he's still flawed enough that Dalyria can think of him as a younger sibling that needs her care. Not to mention that, to me, she demonstrates a penchant for moral superiority and a dash of a machiavellian outlook, based on her diary and her completely unapologetic initiative to kill a child on the small chance it would lead her to a cure - not any child either, but Leonard's child. I can totally see Astarion sympathizing and gravitating towards someone like that.

Which brings us to the rest of the siblings - I would wager that, at least by the end of it all, Leonard and Violet were the odd-ones out. As it tends to happen within any tight-knit group, when one succeeds by stepping over the others (even if the reasons for it are justifiable) that brews a lot of resentment and eventual exclusion. Leonard not only did that, but he apparently still held onto hope of future and family outside the Szarr house; wheter or not everybody wanted out, I think a us-versus-them mentality is unavoidable under those circumstances, and Leonard was looked down upon by the others in their respective ways for what he was trying to do.

Violet just seems like she had gone a little cuckoo to me. We get very little about her, but when I think of an adult woman playing childish pranks on her roomates while you are all stuck in what's essentially a human trafficking ring... I think of a person who's either just a very silly breed of evil or who has lost touch with reality, and the latter is more interesting, imo. I think no one liked her, not only because she was a nuisance but also because she became completely emotionally untouchable. I think both Violet and Leonard are spawn who did not survive long after they were all freed.

I'll stop here before I ramble on for another 8 paragraphs about Aurelia, Yousen and Petras (Oh Petras, my beloved), but, yes, suffice to say that I believe it was kind of complicated LOL