Allo! This is the side blog from my personal blog @machine-elf for all things writing. This will mostly be what I'm writing about, and anything else relevant. Onto the fics.
Pre-tadpole AU where Astarion is freed from Cazador, but taken under the wing of The Dark Urge. When he realizes he's become a pawn for another madman, he'll find out just how far he'll go for true freedom. And there's some Durgetash. A downward spiral with no happy endings.
Complete. 70k words.
The Dark Urge through the eyes of Astarion. After witnessing Durge's brutal killing of Alfira, a new alliance forms. Over time, Astarion realizes just how similar they are, and the relationship deepens. This is the nice one with a happy ending.
AO3 for all the other one-shots. There might be some smut in there.
Featuring big themes and scrapped endings. Spoilers ahead.
Astarion was always going to come out on top, as this was a story of his rise and Tebryn’s fall. Simultaneously, Astarion also experienced a moral decline/corruption through the creation of vampire spawn, Ascension, and becoming Chosen. Tebryn experienced a (slight) moral redemption through realizing his humanity (elfity?) by experiencing love for Orin and Gortash, and questioning his lifelong role as Bhaal’s Chosen.
Saving or selling one’s soul was a big theme in this (hence the title). TFR is a setting where souls are tangible things that can be owed to deities for blessings in life and/or a desired afterlife, so I took it fairly literally. Astarion sells a lot of himself (body and soul, and many souls of victims like himself and his own creations) for power to the point the Dead Three recognize him to be strong and power-hungry enough to defeat their Chosen and represent them. Tebryn has never had a choice, and his soul has always been owned by Bhaal, until he finally starts to break free of that mould and realizes he doesn’t want this. Unfortunately for him, he’s done so much damage to the world around him, it’s too little too late.
Astarion was able to turn his fate around because he realized more power would never be enough. Ascension wasn’t enough, he got the tadpole. After being freed from the Absolute, he was claimed by Myrkul. Through Shadowheart, he saw the gods could be defied, even when they thrust their “blessings” upon someone. Where Tebryn was unable to save his soul, Astarion was able to at the last minute by refusing the Dead Three.
This was always going to be how the story went, but the very ending went through a few iterations (and yeah, Gortash was always gonna die, sorry about that). The first ending was that Astarion went back to the Bhaal Temple and buried Tebryn, creating a subservient spawn. The epilogue was a year of Tebryn’s life in misery, reflecting on his failures, and killing himself by walking in the sun. Depressing! Then it changed to spawn!Tebryn behaving like the failed Bhaalspawn ending, just a mindless, feral killing machine. Astarion had experimented on him, trying to get him lucid because he wanted to take something from Bhaal as a final slight. He would have succeeded by giving him a drop of his own blood. Tebryn was then brain damaged, half-forgetting the events of the story, but somewhat at peace with his situation. Something would remind him of Gortash, and he would feel a flood of emotion, but unable to truly place it.
So it could have been a lot worse!
But I just didn’t like how much Astarion had truly “won” in this situation. Yes, he beat Tebryn, yes, he saved what’s left of his soul from the Dead Three, but none of that absolved him from the awful shit he’d done to get there. Again, he rose in status, but fell from grace. Tebryn fell from status, but gained some grace. (And to be clear, it’s not a lot of grace. It’s more a stumble from grace. Gaining a thimbleful of grace.) So I wanted a proper punishment for both of them, because Astarion doesn’t just get to walk away from the Dead Three after forsaking them. Tebryn being bound to him for eternity and neither of them having the spoons to kill the other due to a master-spawn bond headcanon explored earlier was perfect. (I might expand on this headcanon in another post, tbd.)
Whether or not Tebryn coming back as a vampire spawn is the doing of the Dead Three is up to interpretation! I think it’s feasible, especially since Myrkul was closest to Astarion and has domain over the undead, but I don’t have a big explanation or the gods’ thought process for it. Tebryn and Astarion suspect it was divine intervention, but it very well could be an unlucky coincidence. It’s only a narrative consequence for them.
So yeah, for a while the message seemed to be to succeed in life you must become morally bankrupt and if you try to reverse course, you will be weak and die. Bit of a nihilistic takeaway. They are bad people who don't get redemption and deserve to be miserable with each other.
