infatuation ☾ bg3 writings

a letter to my mother - astarion x fem!oc

This is a letter written by Cirice to her late mother. Mentions of trauma, murder, panic attacks... 

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Mother,

I think of you often. As if you've come back from that cold ground they buried your bones in so many years ago just to sit with me by the fire while it warms my undead flesh and bones. I feel your presence when the curtains stir. It comes in waves, usually at night once our palace has gone to sleep and the world is quiet and I'm left alone with my thoughts. It makes me wonder if you ever really left me, or if you've forgiven me for what I did to you. Sometimes it feels like you're still here, like I could turn around and see you standing in the doorway, smiling at me the way you used to when I was young and you thought I wasn't looking. Maybe you are still here – you are in my mind, in my dreams, and in the way that I try so hard to remember how your hands, pale like mine and soft, felt on my skin. How your voice sounded when you told me I was more than the darkness that I was seeded from...

You always believed that, didn't you? You always believed that I was capable of love, of something purer than what father made me to be. I never saw it. I don't think I understood back then. But you did. You believed in me.

I miss you.

I shouldn't.

You'd think that after what I did to you – after the way that your blood ran cold over my hands and stained my skin – that I would've severed whatever bond we had. But I didn't. Once I believed that I had, but it was a lie. I can't do it, I never could. And maybe that's why I'm writing this now, however overdue it may be, because I miss you. Because I miss your gentleness and the love that only a mother could give a broken girl like me. I miss the way that you looked at me, even when I was terrible to you. You saw something in me that I never found. You knew that I was innocent and capable of being kind.

Mother, am I still innocent?

Am I capable of being kind?

It's strange. I've somehow found someone through the fiery rubble and debris I leave in my wake. Someone else who sees something in me now, someone who I never thought I would care for, nevertheless learn to love, but I do. Gods, mother, I really do. His name is Astarion. I don't know if you'd approve of him. He's not like the men in the storybooks you used to read to me while I fell asleep, and he's definitely not like you. He's dark, dangerous, and broken. Like me. But he cares for me in ways I never expected anyone would. Not long ago he asked me to marry him with the most beautiful stone I've ever laid my eyes on, and I said yes. Mother, can you believe that? Me, who thought I'd forgotten how to love. Me, who had no room in her heart for anything after your corpse was dragged away from her feet. I never thought I'd be capable of something like this again. But I was so wrong, mother. I was so wrong.

But I didn't get here cleanly. My hands are stained the entire way. The night that we met I tried to murder him. I wanted his blood to seep into the dirt and congeal, and he wanted mine to do the same. We nearly killed each other when I was sloppy and desperate, starving, but for some reason he showed me compassion. I think he saw deep in me what you once did. He knew what I did not, and yet I continued to manipulate him when he offered me his hand. I did things to him – terrible things – to make sure this happened. To make sure he saw me, wanted me, needed me. I used him, twisted him in ways he still may never fully understand so that he could make me powerful. So that I could abandon my father once and for all and become my own God. I thought I didn't need him then. I thought he was a temporary companion on my path to ascension and revenge against my sister. But oh, no. I knew he was broken and fragile, I could see it in his eyes, and somehow he saw it in mine, too. And yet I was cruel to him. It was wrong. I regret it, but I don't regret what we have now. I don't regret the power, the strength, the real and true love that's grown from it. I don't regret him. No, not at all.