I'm Haseley, and this is what I look like, just with less hair and distinctly more human-like features. There's a word for that, but I don't know what it is.
I've made the jump onto tumblr, and I'm going to be spending most of my time simping over mine and other's OC's and sharing Minecraft and Baldur's Gate stuff. When I'm not pretending to be a cow on the internet, I sell shoes, play guitar, and do fatherly and husbandly things for my family.
Feel free to stop by and say hi! ❤️
(Thank you Toxi DeVyne for the art! Check out her stuff in the watermarked link.)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Hey guys! I posted the few chapters that I’ve banged out of my BG3 fanfiction. It’s only up to the first meet of Astarion, but I’ve really enjoyed writing it and can’t wait to continue. I hope y’all like it too! :)
**********
Chapters: 3/?
Fandom: Baldur's Gate (Video Games)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Characters: Haseley Wildere, Huxley - Character, Shadowheart (Baldur's Gate), Astarion (Baldur's Gate), Wyll (Baldur's Gate), Lae'zel (Baldur's Gate), Halsin (Baldur's Gate), Nettie (Baldur's Gate), Rath (Baldur's Gate), Tav (Baldur's Gate)
Additional Tags: Adventure, Adventure & Romance, Fantasy, Inspired by Dungeons & Dragons
Series: Part 1 of Brothers In Arms
Summary:
After waking up in a strange place, with illithid tadpoles swimming around their heads, Haseley the Ranger and Huxley the Monk must begin their separate quests to seek out a cure, gathering friends and allies along the way, and slaying the foes that take up arms against them.
The first of a 3-part series covering the timeline of Baldur's Gate 3, this story will cover Act 1 of the game. Certain creative liberties may be taken for narrative purposes, but the story as a whole will be true to the events of the game.
What's up, party people? I've been working in the background on a Baldur's Gate-inspired fanfiction featuring a couple of the Tavs that I have completed the game with. It's going to be a story of friends, enemies, lovers, and one (1) miniature giant space hamster.
I'll be uploading it to AO3 at some point, with all the necessary ratings and tags, but for now, I thought I’d share this little snippet from the first chapter, perfectly safe for consumption by all. (But if your children starting using the phrase “Bahamut’s bollocks,” I claim no responsibility.)
I hope y’all enjoy! ❤️
********************************
Summary: Haseley Wildere, Ranger of The Heartlands, awakens on the banks of a river, unaware of where he is or how he got there. But he’s about to remember.
Haseley stirred, the bright light of sunshine rousing him from a deep, dreamless slumber. Slowly, he cracked open his eyes, staring upwards into an almost artificially blue sky, completely barren of any clouds. He hummed quietly to himself as he blinked away the blurriness left in his eyes from his kip, and his eyes opened wide to yet another beautiful day in Faerun.
Mmmmm…morning already?
Dull cracking sounds filled his ears as he stretched his aching limbs in all manner of directions, his joints popping like so many tiny bibberbangs just below the surface of his skin, including a few he was not used to feeling. Placing his palms flat on the ground to raise himself up, it didn’t take more than a moment for him to realise he was laying on…
…Sand? What? Where…
Quickly rising to his feet, he scanned the landscape in front of him, looking for any semblance of a landmark that could help him orient himself to where he might be. Before him was a rather large river, with clean, clear water that flowed as calmly as it did swiftly. Haseley meandered across the sandy beach up to the water’s edge, kneeling down and cupping his hands into the stream and splashing his face. The water was cold, bitterly cold, and it could not have been a more welcome sensation on his skin as it cleared the remaining cobwebs from his still somewhat sleep-addled mind.
Haseley smiled as he rose to his feet once more, surveying the scene before him. It was beautiful; nature as pure and untouched as he’d ever experienced it. Sure, the sun was a little bright for his liking, but the warmth of its rays kissing his skin was something he cherished in this moment. He had spent quite a while traversing the more heavily wooded areas of Faerun, preferring to avoid the sun as often as he could and instead staying under cover of brush during the day and walking along in the light of Selûne’s moon at night. It made hunting and tracking much simpler, but it was a life of solitude, cloistered away from even the nurturing radiance of the noon day sun. He didn’t know how he ended up here, on a beach, basking in the daytime glow, but it wasn’t an unwelcome diversion. The sun felt warm against his skin. The sound of waves gently lapping against the shoreline serenaded him. Along the gently blowing breeze wafted the delicate smell of…
Smoke…
Something was burning. A few things, if the assaultive blend of different odors in his nostrils was any indication. He could detect foliage being consumed by fire–that particular scent was unmistakable–but there was more. Blood. Singed human flesh. And something alien, but with hints of familiarity. It smelled almost exactly the same as the burning human flesh, but…not quite. A particularly strong whiff caught his nose, and the acrid, almost wet stench nearly made him gag. Definitely burning flesh…but not any flesh he recognised.
“Gods, what is that wretched smell?” he grumbled, scrunching up his nose in displeasure as the smell once more pierced his nostrils and stirred the bile in his belly.
It didn’t take long to find his answer.
The breeze gusted a little more strongly across the beach, carrying a great deal of smoke and a few burning bits of leaves and underbrush, which stung at the side of Haseley’s neck as they alighted on his skin. He hissed and slapped at the lightly singing flesh, rubbing it tenderly once the flames were extinguished and the tiny searing sensations subsided. He turned his head towards the direction the embers had come from, but what he saw out of the corner of his eye kept his head turning, and his body along with it, until he was looking directly behind him.
“Bahamut’s bollocks …” he whispered aloud.
Before him sat the twisted, flaming wreckage of a mind flayer nautiloid, an illithid ship so hideous and grotesque in its design it was just as nauseating as the creatures that piloted it. Swirling patterns of grey and purple hull reinforcements adorned the exterior of the ship as if it were crafted from the entrails of mutant hill giants. Spikes and spires jutted out at all different angles of the vessel, piercing into the air around the nautiloid in such a way that Haseley almost felt them like splinters stabbing through his eyes directly into his brain. Tentacles of various lengths–some smouldering, some still slick and wet–snaked from the underbelly of the ship and lay motionless in the cindering brush.
It was a sight to behold, a stark contrast to the serene landscape that Haseley had just moments before been revelling in. He couldn’t believe he was seeing what he was, and more so, he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten he’d seen it before.
The memories came flooding back to him like a river that had burst its dam. He had been in Scornubel, selling his most recent catches to a local butcher after several days hunting in the Reaching Woods just east of Elturgard. He was on his way to the market for supplies when a great shadow had been cast over the centre of the Caravan City. He looked up and saw the belly of the nautiloid, just as tentacles began to rain down from the sky, kidnapping random citizens with their illithid teleportation abilities. He remembered drawing his bow and firing off a few arrows at tentacles chasing their prey, warding some of them off with varying degrees of success. And then a shriek, a twist of his head to the sky above him, and then…dust.
He remembered being dust. It was pain at its strongest, as if he were being ripped apart at the cellular level in an instant. But just as quickly as the pain came, it went, and he had reformed inside of an illithid capture pod. He remembered struggling to no avail, he remembered watching others he had just seen walking the streets of Scornubel doing the same inside their capture pods. And then, there were the mind flayers…
The sickening squid-like creatures milled about a fleshy cauldron at the centre of the room where he and the many others were held captive. One of them reached into the cauldron and pulled out a tiny creature, no larger than a blood leech or moth larvae. He remembered the illithid making eye contact with him and gliding over, the creature still held tightly between its large, skeletal talons. And as much as he wished he didn’t, he remembered the creature, teeth bared and squealing, burrowing behind his eye and lodging itself in his brain.
Then, blackness, for how long he wasn’t sure. It could’ve been days, it could’ve been only minutes, but what came next was a blur. He awoke to the pod falling open, and he escaped from his prison and ran out of the room onto the deck of the nautiloid, only to find a bloody hellscape before him. Quite literally. The bleak and ravaged wasteland of Avernus lay below him, where devils and demons fought possibly the goriest battle he’d ever witnessed, while dragons and imps were dogfighting all around him in the air. He ran for cover and stumbled into another room of captive pods, most of which were empty, but one of which held a prisoner. He remembered her begging him to get her out, but that was where his memory failed him. Whether it was caused by the new intruder digging into his skull or the sheer unmitigated stress of the entire situation, the sequence of events between then and now was naught but so much static in his mind, try as he might to remember something, anything beyond that point.
Haseley collapsed to his knees and let out a loud grunt of frustration, slamming his fist into the sand. “Great. Simply fucking wonderful! ” he shouted at no-one in particular, punching the sand once more before pulling his hand from the miniature crater left by his fist. Almost as if in response to his frustrated yell, the worm in his brain wriggled. “I haven’t forgotten about you, don’t you worry!” he shouted back.
Taking a moment to calm himself, he finally let out an exasperated sigh and sluggishly rose to his feet. “I don’t even have any of my things…” he muttered to himself, patting himself down to see what if any items he might have kept on his person. To his surprise, he found a dagger hilted in the scabbard belted to his waist, as well as a few gold pieces in the pocket of his pants; but most importantly, his longbow lay in the sand by his feet, completely undamaged by whatever terrible sequence of events had befallen him in the blank spots of his memories. The quiver that rested next to it even contained about a dozen or so of the arrows he had been carrying at the time of his abduction. He smirked a little. The absolute bare minimum he needed to forage and defend himself, and enough to afford maybe one meal if he were lucky enough to find a settlement. He'd been here before; the very same circumstances as when he'd left his home of Beregost and begun his journey as a ranger of the Heartlands of Faerûn. It seemed the challenge was being set before him once more.
“Very well," he muttered to no one, reaching down to retrieve his bow and quiver from their resting places in the sand. “Challenge accepted.”
