Asra's appearance unconsciously becoming more like Salim's with age. He finds an old pair of his father's glasses one day on a trip to Zadithi where he runs into former academic colleagues of the long lost Alnazars.
Asra doesn't get much of a lead on the location of Salim and Aisha, but he comes back with the glasses. He struggles to pursue his parents' whereabouts in the most ethical ways he can, but the temptation to make deals with Arcana or dip his toes back into darker areas of magic always haunts him. As court magician to the Countess, he gets mistaken more and more for his father by foreign scholars visiting Vesuvia. He leans into this, growing his hair long, shaving less, and relying on the glasses outside of reading.
There is a sad comfort he finds in being mistaken for Salim. Part of him has accepted that he will never locate his parents or be reunited with them or their remains. This familial resemblance and closeness to magical study is all he has.
Oh damn. I’m about to give my actual 🧐opinions🧐 on the arcana. Scary stuff!
By the end of the Asra tale, I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did. And thankfully it wasn’t because I was practically asra-starved and surviving so long off my own damn content, but honestly because there were several key elements in the story that appealed to me personally. I’ll be going over those below the cut.
I’m also going to discuss how my apprentice Kipling and her specific connection with magic fits into all of this. Once again, that wasn’t really something I was expecting to develop so easily as I played the tale, but the experience was just too delightful to just keep to myself until I’m ready to write a fic.
There will be spoilers!
*Everything is under the cut!*
I’ll start with the basics first and then move onto Kip.
Locked boxes. Ok, not what you would expect in terms of things from the tale that are supposed to light up a reader’s brain, but whenever I see this little device (be it metaphor, motif, or just a plot developer) I go a little feral.
First of all, I KNOW the box is empty. They almost always are, but that’s not the point. Locked boxes (and to be clear, I’m talking about the chest Gavin hands over) could represent a lot of things — a personal challenge, an unnamed reward, possible disappointment, tiny little worlds that the characters are entrusted to protect. They spark questions like: why me? Do I have what it takes (to open this bad boy?) Is this what I’m meant to do? What does it mean if I can unlock/protect/discover its contents? What does it say about me if I can’t???
As a writer who LOVES to drag out simple devices until there’s not a single crumb left, I was LIVING for that chest as soon as it was placed in Asra and the MC’s care. If I could extend the tale, it would be such that Asra and the MC end up taking the box with them in addition to the Hyberian spices. Or at least some version of the box (which I am happy to elaborate on in a future fic!)
Asra’s character was sooooo consistent! Y’all. With the unfortunate decline of the quality of writing in Muriel’s route, I was losing faith in the devs’ ability to maintain Asra’s character. We all know that he’s a little flighty — a trait that I find endearing and also a little personal because I’m also kind of spacey as well as naturally prone to overlooking details because of either (1) daydreaming (2) don’t think it really matters.
Sorry — Anyway. Back to my point. Even though Asra’s supposed to give off the head-in-the-clouds vibe, they took that way too far in the last couple chapters of Muriel’s route to the point where (for me) he seemed rather childish and unreliable. For that reason, I was worried that this would be the case in the new tale. But it wasn’t! I felt like this tale showed all the sides of Asra that we came to know and love from his original route. It was so balanced and refreshing that for many points, I sat there staring at the sprites and the text, just processing all of the warm feelings I was having. And on top of Asra being consistent, he had also changed! The MC pointed out that Asra had been hiding his feelings for so long and now he no longer had to. I thought the scene where he got really protective of the MC was a great example of that. I don’t think that’s a side of himself he shows very often, especially in front of the MC because he doesn’t want to freak them out or push their feelings in a certain direction. For most of his route, it’s clear how much effort he puts into letting the MC make their own decisions and removing his personal desires from the equation in order to minimize any bias. But by the time this tale takes place, you can see that Asra is fully comfortable with being more open about his emotions. Instead of seething and shooting judge mental glares with salty comments, (because he also does this a lot) he actually elaborates on what he finds upsetting about the situation. He defends the MC without holding back as much as he has in the past. It was so hot 🥵 cool to see Asra stand up to Gavin like that! At the same time we got to see the bashful side of Asra in the bar. There were just so many sweet, fun small moments between him in the MC. I can’t wait to explore them in some way in the future!
THE CG???
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???? Y'ALL REALLY AIMED A MAGNIFYING GLASS ON THOSE DIMPLES AND LIPS AND SAID LOOK AT THIS???? I WAS SWEATING. I WAS CRYING. I WAS LIVING. I WAS DYING. HNNNNNNNNNN 😩🥴👌🏽👌🏽👌🏽👌🏽🫀🫀🫀🫀
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Now I'm going to get a little bit into Kipling's magic...
For the record, my apprentice Kipling wields two types of magic: plant magic and teleportation magic. Though she relies on her plant magic more on average because of her job, it’s actually her secondary skill. Teleportation or grey magic is her primary and her mastery over it has taken much longer due to the fact that it’s tied to her culture, which she was not only separated from when she moved to Vesuvia, but also didn’t have a lot access to in the first place thanks to the centuries of cultural genocide that took place on her home island.
My timeline for Kip’s mastery of her primary magic doesn’t really sync up for when this tale takes place in the arcana timeline, so I have to repurpose it to fit the Door Lord timeline that takes place in my fics.
LOL I said all of that just to point out that during a lot of the chase scenes, Asra and Kip relied on her teleportation to evade the guild thieves. And since Kip is something of a locksmith when it comes to her magic, she was very intrigued with the box and was more concerned about opening it to see what was inside rather than delivering it to the marked location.
Also, in the Herbalist Hideaway, Kip’s first instinct to trade the box for the Hyberian spices because she felt that making Selasi happy was worth more than all this craziness with the chest. 😆 Asra of course, had to talk her out of it and encouraged her to give the merchant a reading instead.
There was definitely more that I loved about the tale, but these are the strongest highlights for me. Thanks for letting me brain dump on your dash!
I think about Asra as an orphan a lot. Before he met Muriel, Asra didn’t have anyone except the Magician. The devs don’t give us a whole lot about their relationship, but I feel like it’s a huge contributor to Asra’s secretive nature and his instinct to leave the apprentice when tensions are high or he’s feeling defensive. I think that without really meaning to, Asra adopted a lot of the traits of a wild fox. Foxes are solitary creatures. They occupy this role of both predator and prey, which for me connects to so many other aspects of Asra’s character.
So imagine a young Asra, fending for themself in an overcrowded, dirty city with lots of transient occupants. Asra would have had to adapt to navigating among people of so many different cultural backgrounds and attitudes. And when I say adapt, I mean that he would have had to learn very fast who he could steal from or at the very least run some kind of con to get a little money in order to get by vs. who to stay away from. Just as foxes are painstakingly selective and cautious about how they hunt and which territory they enter, so would have been the same for young Asra. I think about how Asra would have reacted when confronted by older, more experienced orphans would have tried to assert dominance to claim territory or establish their pecking order. I see Asra having taken his fair share of beatings, maybe even some brushes with death (as foxes often do in the wild when they first become independent) but in the end, Asra would have outlived all of that rise and fall of the different street kid tribes simply due to the shifting nature of Vesuvian life (not to mention his own growth through trial and error.) I see the older street kids maturing into occupations of high risk, high reward. They might have been easily recruited to piracy/seafaring mercenary work, the Red Market infrastructure, or gambling dens, etc. But Asra, eventually stabilized by Muriel’s companionship and still emotionally tied to that area of Vesuvia where the memory (and hope of reunion) of his parents still remains, refuses to leave and thus becomes a veteran at survival. They also easily slide into this role of a mentor to Muriel much in the way the Magician first assisted Asra in learning how to find your niche in such rough territory.
art by the wonderful @helpiminhell | original art/prompt can be found here
This lovely piece that M made a while back totally gave me brainworms about Asra's bout with dark magic, which then resulted in this little ficlet. Enjoy!
The subject: Asra becomes acquainted with necromancy at the expense of his personal comfort level. (To put it lightly.)
Note: For this phase in the timeline, I do hc Asra as going through a period where he suppresses most of his guilt for the mc’s death. This is primarily for practical reasons. He has to save face for Nadia and appear confident before Lucio and the court. He also understands that if he wants to achieve any sort of mastery over the necromantic arts, he’s got to go in with a clear head (not quite the same as a clear conscience). It’s not until closer to the execution of the ritual that Asra experiences a sort of emotional spiraling / emotional-mental breakdown – resulting more from the toll of the time spent dabbling in the dark arts rather than any hesitation towards lying to the guests at the dinner party. I envision that the dam on Asra’s guilt does not truly break until after the mc wakes up.
cw: slight horror elements, necromancy stuff
~ 520 words
****
The shopfront is neat, organized, not a single mote of dust to be seen in between the jars and asymmetrical gemstones. The lamps were glowing soft, welcoming light. A red scarf strewn over the countertop appeared to be the only careless feature. But it was done purposefully, perhaps to prove that everything was still normal here. With nothing out of place, the customers might think this strange. They might wonder if their favorite local magician was holding onto grief from those years of city waste and decay. Not Asra – not Asra too.
That’s why the magician had been so careful about the way he draped the scarf across the counter. He had also been very careful to lock the door to the building’s interior. Lest a customer see the total dysfunction and alarming chaos the rest of Asra’s home had descended into…
Asra had never used a stool before. Not to study magic. Stools were for catching up with friends at tea houses or doing readings on the go in the city. Cushions were for reading and researching and spending time with magic.
But Asra wanted to do this the right way. So he abandoned his cozy blanket fort setting for a desk, a stool, and something that he didn’t expect to need, but nonetheless brought it home when the shelf clerk at the dark arts emporium told him it was absolutely necessary.
A skull.
To track your progress, he had been told. Whatever that was supposed to mean. So far, the artifact had only served to unsettle and harass him with a needling sense of dread.
In an effort to lighten the mood and reclaim some sense of himself in this cold, unfamiliar space, Asra dipped his thumb in a sleeve of glitter and dragged it across the brow of the small skull. He grinned dimly in satisfaction before getting to work. But when he looked up for the first time from his research, the glitter had vanished. The skull stared at him just as bone hollow and deathly as before.
The days passed painfully as Asra moved through his self-teachings. The skull remained unresponsive most of the time, but eventually developed its own method of letting Asra know when he was getting closer to or further from reaching his final goal.
He learned to read the signs.
Ash collecting in the mouth – colder
The skull appearing in places where it shouldn’t – warmer
Individual teeth falling out – colder
Hollow eyes becoming… not so hollow anymore – definitely warmer
Faust did not appreciate the artifact’s presence on the days it followed Asra around the shop. She hissed at it so frequently, Asra had stopped trying to comfort her. He had stopped trying to comfort himself too on the mornings where he awoke to the skull resting on the pillow beside him, eyes drooling with something gross and unique.
Nowadays, he simply gathered his scrolls and journals full of dark marks, and made his way to his desk and stool. There was no need to bring along the skull.
It splinters. It caves. It doesn’t want your name in it.
But the path Asra’s blade takes is so smooth, legible, so true.
There was no magic to help him out. He doesn’t need it.
His hand is steady because… this isn’t the first time.
Asra’s hand knows what to do because of practice.
Even Asra questions his skill with the knife, wondering: did it come from all that writing, carving, etching,
back when his hand was always trembling and the words were crooked and careless? When his eyes would not stop burning? When his heart hurt so much? Like… it didn’t want to be a part of him anymore?
Now as Asra worked the knife deeper into the bark, he felt his heart trying to fight — no reject — him again, trying to get back to you and put your name back together with something warm and alive.
