Thank you, darling 🥰

thank you! 💖

and i definitely recommend them, the before-after difference is SO satisfying 😅

thank you so much, friend 💖 i have SO much lore for them, haha, i wish i was better at sharing it in a more coherent manner 😩

you can definitely see your love for them through you art! 💖

thank you, my friend 🥰 maybe one day i will write/make something for that AU (i did fall into a 'mal stays with halsin and watches him grow owl' AU hole once and snapped an entire set of photos 😅)!!

happy birthday! hope you have a good one 💖

also sorry i did not expect to type such a long response sdfsfs i just have A LOT of thoughts about them!!! 🫣

treat the sick that come seeking his help. where, at the end of the day, they both settle by a hearth, with their little daughter, reading books and whittling and embracing each other. where neither of them feel alone. where all of them feel at home. it's a nice image to think about!

but there is a part of me that likes to think of this idyllic picture, where everything goes remotely ok. where maleane is content living in their wooden cabin at the edge of the forest, maybe with halsin creating her a space where people cannot bother her. where mal makes potions that help halsin

who knows how halsin's presence would've changed her? she might've never embraced eilistraee, instead turning to halsin's druidic ways. or turned to a healer, venturing out to help the sick and the injured and... maybe getting sick herself and dying young, you never know!

and that set off a chain of events that leads to thoriel being captured by a vampire lord and maleane trades her life to save her, becoming a vampiric slave in the process. thoriel wasn't prepared for something like that because astarion was absent in her life.

in thinking that deep down she has kindness in her heart. and besides... sometimes minor little shifts in a story can have unintended consequences!
like in VENA CAVA, the only big difference in the story was astarion's choice not to return to mal after finding out she had thoriel.

polyamory in the long run. and he's just.. good. compassionate, understanding, offering to give and give freely to anyone who'd ask. and she's... none of those things. so she'd either have to pretend to keep up with halsin's expectations or he might start to see that maybe he was wrong

and then i am not sure how well maleane would've fared with halsin in the long run. part of me thinks she would've grown... content. halsin is stability, he's truly like soil: nurturing, nourishing, something reliable. but it can also be suffocating. i'm also not sure how she would deal with his

she traded all that for a happy childhood in a community surrounded by her own people. who knows how kind the people of reithwin would've been to a drow child with mismatched eyes, yaknow? especially considering how some of them treated maleane when she lived there (she faced mistrust & gossip).

and being surrounded by her own people and growing up with her culture and traditions gives thoriel a crucial foundation to build her personality and beliefs on. it's knowing that she's not alone in this world. so yeah, in a sense, thoriel lost her dad when mal left halsin, but in the long run

(maleane struggled her entire life with the fact that she doesn't belong anywhere and has no family or community) is the exact thing that pushes her to find her father's surface-dwelling drow community. so thoriel would have 'a village', so to speak.

and sure, out of all of them, i think that thoriel ends up living the most fulfilling and happy life and that does stem from the fact that mal DID leave halsin, in a major way. because being in solitude and realizing that mal doesn't want her child to end up the same way as her in case she dies