I beg of thee. Vampires are meant to be an uncanny valley type of thing. An undead creature of the night that passes itself as just the right amount of living and mortal for you to let your guard down. I need more examples of his vampiric nature showing once he's grown comfortable enough, and I need it now.
~
An Astarion who is so silent in his movements that you often got jump scared by it in the earlier stages of your relationship.
You'd be lounging around on the sofa. Reading a book, lost in thought, all serene and cozy beneath a nice knitted blanket-- just having an all around nice, relaxing time when you see movement out of the corner of your eye. You glance up for just a moment, to the space before you that was previously unoccupied, and his entire face is suddenly hovering right in front of you.
Just waiting. Not moving. Pupils blown so huge that there's barely any color left to his eyes. Fangs are peeking out over the bruise-purple skin of his bottom lip. He's pallid. White as a corpse. Definitely in need of a good feeding.
His intentions were entirely innocent. He really only meant to ask you a question, and here you are being all dramatic and jumping several feet into the air and throwing your book off to the side in a panic. Thankfully, you're able to catch yourself before you full on shriek in his face.
(You love him and his ghoulishly handsome face, you really and truly do, but you sincerely thought for a moment that he was a spectre come to take you to the afterlife.)
~
Astarion, who routinely forgets to breathe. Yanno, like it's nothing.
You're well aware of the fact that vampires don't need to breathe. It's more of a force of habit than anything else, really-- something left over from when he was still mortal, he says.
Although, during bouts of intense emotion, or some sort of uh, stimulation, the focus on something so trivial gets put on the backburner for a bit.
The two of you will be sharing a particularly passionate kiss (or worse) when you feel the rapid rise and fall of his chest stop short. It's like all of the air has gotten caught in his lungs, and he ends up making these creaky grudge-like sounds in place of his usual low moaning. A clicking in the back of his throat in place of a sigh. If you play your cards just right, there might even be a rattling from deep within his chest that almost sounds like a purr.
When he finally does breathe, usually due to a well executed nip to his bottom lip, or the gentle brush of your fingers against one of his ears as you play with his hair, it comes out as an animalistic hiss. A sharp, choking gasp that sends goosebumps down the length of your arms.
~
How you catch him watching you sleep.
How you'll wake up in the pitch black of your bedroom in a cold sweat. Your hair is stood on end, a fearful shudder threatening to rattle your frame. A spike in your pulse that has your sleep addled brain doing somersaults in your skull. All of your instinctual alarm bells go off at once, telling you that something must be terribly wrong. Something must be watching you.
You try to blink away the bleariness-- try to shake off the fog of sleep for long enough to get your bearings, and catch a glint in the dark so ominous that for a moment you're scared stock still.
Something is watching you. Someone, rather.
Astarion's eyes gleam back at you in the dark like a wild animal's might. A bobcat, maybe, like the ones you'd often find stalking pray outside the tree line of camp all those nights ago. Pupils that glow a filmy, holographic orange despite there being no light to reflect off of them.
You don't notice until after you've taken a second to calm yourself that he's hovering over you. The bed just barely dips from his weight as he supports himself, and you'd be baffled by it all if you had any braincells left.
"Go back to sleep, darling." His voice is so soft, even over the pounding against your eardrums. Soothing. Tranquilizing. And though your eyes do begin to feel heavy, you're not exactly in the mood for rest anymore.
Especially not when he's pressing cold, feather-light kisses down the length of your throat not a moment later.
~
Please, I beg. Give me more.
Listen... I love how floppy and throwable Astarion is. I love that he has a whopping 8 strength. I adore that a particularly stiff breeze could send him far, far away, and you'd have to search the trees for half an hour to find where he went.
BUT I do headcanon that he has the strength benefits of vampirism like any other spawn. They're just kind of? Inaccessible unless he's VERY well fed and/or is in a situation he'd very desperately rather not be in.
Like a mom who summons the strength of 100 gorillas to lift a truck off of her child. He's scooping you up with one arm and leaping out of the way of danger like it's nothing. Or snapping a guy's neck like a twig when he ambushes the two of you one night. Or punching a hole through a rock wall and bending back metal bars as thick as your forearm to break your asses out of jail.
He'll also be just as surprised as you are when it happens. Every time it happens. And then once that wears off, he'll be ridiculously smug and giddy about if for the next ten-day AT LEAST.
Breaking News Alert: our gracious prince has found the beautiful young woman who came thrice to his ball—once in a dress shimmering like starlight, once in a dress luminous as the moon, and once in a dress as golden and radiant as the sun on a summer day—only to discover that she was a scullery maid working in his own kitchen! needless to say she has been executed
An order of reclusive monks moved deep into the chthonic depths of the underworld to better commune with the primordial darkness and discover secret knowledge therein. In the years since they have changed, permanently altered by the knowledge they have gained.
•Magic has a cost. The more powerful the spell, the more it drains the caster’s life.
•’We tried that ages ago.The gods grew angry at our arrogance and stripped most of our powers away.’
•Magic is tied to the stars and planets. Its full potential can only manifest on certain astrological events.(And these are once-in-a-millennia type events)
•Only one will a pure heart and selfless intentions can use their full power.
•All magic users are descendants of a (god/spirit). As the years have gone by, the blood has become more diluted, and magic has grown weaker as a result.
•Spell casters can only cast (finite number of spells). They end up using their gift on trivial matters.
•’After the war, we realized the dangers that magic presented. And so we sealed it away, lest it destroy the world.’
•Everyone has magic. Trying to solve one problem is futile as it can be easily undone(often violently and with much destruction)
•inverse of the above: everyone has magic, but their powers are limited and (mostly) harmless.
•Individual, company, or nation has a monopoly on the only substance that can negate magic. As they rule the world, they have installed anti-magic devices everywhere.
•Individual, group, company, or nation has a monopoly on magic. To insure their grip on power, all magic users that do not submit to them are killed.
•An act of good will spawn one of evil. The use of fire will cause somewhere to grow cold and dark. And to save a life, one must sacrifice another.
•The only magic people have access to is Chaos Magic. No one uses it, for obvious reasons.
—••• •• ——• ——• • ••• —•• •• —•—• —•— ••— •••
Etaf is a wife and mother of 5 from Ghazzah. Last year, she and her family's home was destroyed, a long with her husband's source of income and their car.
They were displaced for 200 days, all the way induring the hellish tribulations of genocide. Luckily, they were able to flee into Egypt; however their struggles are not over.
Due to their lack of income, Etaf and her husband struggle to provide their children with food, clothing, and education. On top of that, they are struggling to pay the rent on their house as winter approaches.
TAG LIST (DM me for removal)
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good morning let’s hear it for Mildly Cool Outside a round of applause for Mildly Cool Outside
rite
I want to play a game with you all.
You have to make a new word by changing only one letter of the last word.
Dirt
(a realization about dialogue formatting, from a comic artist turned novelist.)
One of the first things a novice writer learns about speech tags is that they’re part of the “scaffolding” of prose. They should be largely invisible to the reader: use them when necessary, omit them when not, and be sparing in the application of verbs other than “said”. They serve only the function of clarifying who is speaking when it is necessary to do so.
Except:
Sometimes you might want to use a speech tag in spite of the redundancy. The fact that the reader’s eyes slide right over them is an exploitable property. By slicing a line of dialogue in half with a speech tag, you can force the reader to perceive a meaningful pause between two utterances—and the effect is much stronger than you might get out of an ellipsis or an em dash. Developing an intuition for when and how to do this is a huge part of learning to write dialogue, I think.
(And yes: if you ever wondered, this is exactly same the reason why comic artists sometimes “double bubble” their speech bubbles. Same end, different means!)
"There, and I will live to tell the tale, when I've found the day to bid farewell...!" -- Ringmasters, Notre Dame Medley
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