#mal things

"They are difficult to avoid in Sanctuary. Particularly invasive in multiple regions, including all the places you would rather not find them."

Out of sight but not hearing, Lyndon chuckled: "I thought they were ugly enough you'd like them. That is your preferred aesthetic. Functionally sharp and armored?"

Malthael pinched his lips distastefully. "My preferred aesthetic is less leprosy. Or were you unaware of that joyful fact?"

"I didn't say you had to pet them. You're the one imagining that part. Also, no. I wasn't aware." He paused. "Wait, why do you know that, of all things? Not to question your omnipotent, over-stuffed cranium, but ... armadillos?"

"They nest in old logs."

"Yes, and you nest in a home most of the time. What about it?"

"Very old, very large, hollow logs."

"...Except when you're moonlighting as a tramp, I suppose...was it at least cute?"'

"I did not give it much thought at the time."

At the time, it had been dark and he had been somewhat freshly made mortal. All he had been able to see was two glowing eyes in the dark, followed by a shrieking, angry armadillo shaped silhouette. He hadn't even known it was an armadillo until he had skewered it defensively and brought it to back to Salvos' church for proper identification.

The priest's surprised yelp had been the first indication something was amiss. The second was his vexed lecture on all the plagues carried by armored mammals. The third was his insistence that Malthael sleep in the abandoned cellar until they could confirm he hadn't become a carrier.

Beauty, beloved, cherished, my heart.

(Brown-haired Alina + short hair under the cut!)

I had some fun in the BG3 character creator because I was trying to figure out some things with Mal's hair. The exact cut sort of varies in my head based on both the point in the story and how I feel at that moment while writing. I'm inconsistent.

I do figure he spent that first year cutting it himself, and there's a non-zero chance this went on throughout the entire first series, because no one was going to tell him how uneven it all was. It does become more obvious the more the necro-silver comes out.

Then, of course, I had to test out the "someone gives Mal a proper haircut and he actually washes it well and maybe brushes it" and uh.

(Pardon the side part, it should be more in the middle.)

Excuse me, this doesn't look like a man who hides in trees and comes home soggy, covered in mud and guts. Maybe he looks like this further into Archfall, when he's been forbidden from dungeon diving for half a year and has some self-care imposed on him.

~🐟

This is a really good question, because it immediately runs into something I was somehow, in my mid-30s, unaware of until I made the Mal Likes Biscuits joke -- which is that your mileage on content for biscuits varies widely across the world.

So there's actually two answers to this question.

Mal's "biscuits" are Canadian biscuits, at least from my area, which are commonly called Tea Biscuits, but are not the cookie tea biscuits a lot of people think of. Usually they're a recipe variant brought over by all of our great-grandparents from the UK or Scotland. They're not a flat biscuit or cookie type thing, or the corn bread biscuits I've seen in the USA. They're simple ingredients, fluffy, and taste amazing with honey or jam spread on them.

This is my scribbled out, short form, of my great-grandma's recipe. You traditionally cook them with lard instead of shortening.

"Blend everything but milk. Heat milk slightly." Should also say add milk to the rest there. Don't stick it in a blender, just mix it up with your hands or a fork, or whatever.

Anyway, we mix this up, put it in those little mini muffin pans, bake accordingly, and you get biscuit muffins. Most folks just roll them into a little ball and bake right on a pan.

I had to do some image searching, but if you make them rolled on the pan, they come out looking approximately like this image:

These are the biscuits Mal is talking about. I picked them because this is a very old recipe that was passed down and would have been used, in some variation, by many families in previous centuries. "Modern" leavening agents like baking soda or powder have been around since the early to mid 1800s, and before that, something like yeast would have been used.

Your mileage on the actual historical time period for Diablo varies, so I let this one stand because it was a fun thing to put in. And these are really damn good biscuits. They should taste plain, but they're one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten, especially warm out of the oven. Add the honey on top and just trust me on that.

Answer to question two, which is "what type of cookie biscuit/standard cookie does Mal like":

It's a nod to where his character would start again, predominately. When I was doing character creation I was thinking a lot about why Mal would be there, beyond me just wanting to have fun walking around a necro that looks like him.

Because Sanctuary in D4 is understandably very different from the Sanctuary Mal is from. I genuinely like the setting and appreciate why some things were retconned from D3 -- notably the damage Malthael actually did in the world.

Mal fucked up pretty bad, where he's from. Him and the reapers flattened Westmarch. They did notable damage in other major cities, and had the Nephalem not stopped them, they would have proceeded to walk over every other mortal on the planet. But the majority of his forces were in Westmarch, because that is where the Nephalem began to oppose him, so that's where more of the reapers went.

It's pretty clear at the end of D3 that Malthael didn't do any sort of world-level devastation to Sanctuary. But in D4, we've been told by the developers that 90% of the world's population has died since D3 50 years prior, predominately killed off by the reapers.

It's no wonder Sanctuary is so rough. The entire world has been trying to survive and rebuild while being assaulted by anything threatening left. Toss in Lilith and Inarius' forces to the mix, and it's a (not legit) miracle anyone is alive.

What would bring Mal there? Mal ends up back on Sanctuary in all my stories because the sound of mortals is louder than the Arch. (The Arch has been corrupted and is failing, after all, whether it's obvious how bad at the time or not.) Particularly, he hears the sound of mortals trying so desperately to live and survive, just like he wants to do. There's a large amount of them .... near Westmarch, where the survivors of his attack settled.

You see how this happened, there?

Who knows the state of the Arch in D4. Would he hear it? Would he even exist to hear mortals? One thing remains common though, between the two worlds, and that there's no shortage of people trying to live.

I'm not sure where he wakes up in Sanctuary, exactly. Or how long he wanders. But it's not the Mal we know. This is Malthael. Possibly sane, possibly not. And he is surrounded by the breathtaking scope of just how badly he's ruined this world.

And that's how we start back right at the beginning. Black hair with flecks of growing silver, as he gradually is dragged back into the Eternal Conflict whether he wants it or not.

This is not a happy story. There's no Nephalem cultural capital, no explosive growth from darkness. No librarian.

Act 1 isn't so much the first Act as it's the epilogue that the previous series really needed. There were a whole bunch of character loose ends floating around, mostly for Mal, that needed to be addressed. And by the end of it, you know he's in a much better place (or will be shortly).

I feel comfortable letting the story sit on the theme of "taking care of and being gentle with yourself is the most important thing you can do" because although it doesn't resolve any of the impending Archfall plot points, it's at least a character catharsis for him.