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nulfaga · 6 years

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Can I ask about Badr? I'm really interested about them 👻

I just want you to know how positively giddy this ask made me….. i’ve been dying for someone to ask me about badr for perhaps millenia…you’ve opened pandora’s box tho i’m very sorry in advance

cw for mentions of csa, suicidal ideation and probably some other unwholesome stuff (mobile ppl just scroll past really fast lol)

so usually when i make a fan character for something it’s because 1) it’s a fuckin rpg and i need a character to play as lol and 2) i find That One Canon Character that completely and irrevocably grows on me for whatever reason, and i create a character specifically to complement the canon char or interact with them in interesting ways. you might have noticed from my incessant kanaposting that for poe it was…dun dun dun.. kana… but it’s not like badr’s entire character is based around him. most of his personality and backstory came together for me while i was playing the white march II and during the thaos flashbacks (i’ve looked in detail at a few of badr’s past lives as well, just to see how their souls would manifest and influence him after his Awakening—the most prominent is sophronia, the inquisitor of the leaden key who betrayed iovara, her lover)

but yeah um i’ve written this up like, on my phone before but it was long and horrifyingly difficult to follow (just as this post has been and will continue to be, unfortunately; brain broke :/)

so badr was born in 2793 AI (he’s turning 30 the year poe takes place), in the early morning on 12 fonestu (high summer if i remember right). his mother, dionísia, had been visiting family in her hometown—a tiny fishing village in the northern tip of old vailia—and had just embarked on the boat ride back to aedyr. on the second night of the journey, dionísia woke up in the middle of the night (something she later attributed to ondra’s influence, as she was always a heavy sleeper and there had been no noise or movement to wake her) and felt compelled to head to the top deck of the ship, where, under the full moon, she went into labor.

dionísia’s family and her village at large would later attribute badr’s being born a moon godlike to this: if ondra calls you to stand under the full moon, in the middle of the sea, on the day you deliver, how can you expect her not to stake her claim on the baby?

the name “badr” was suggested by a heavily scarred pale elven man, who was on his first-ever journey out of his home in the living lands. it meant “full moon”, which obviously had little to do with the baby’s appearance (he was covered in crescent moon shapes lol), instead the name was to honor of the night of the birth, and the divine intervention of the sea queen.

the baby spent his first few weeks in the communal care of people from all walks of life, all headed to aedyr for different reasons. when dionísia and her baby arrived home at last, her husband gislenus was…less than thrilled. after a lifetime of careful saving, gislenus had finally built up his fortune enough to buy an estate and land for his family, and to entreat the aedyran senate for a noble title. but a godlike child—an awkward record stain at best in aedyr, at worst a bad omen which is quietly drowned or left for dead—threw a wrench into his plans. dionísia would not hear of giving the child away, let alone killing it; moon godlike are considered a good omen in her village, living good-luck charms for the fishers, but even that aside, she loved her baby and would not see him harmed.

gislenus held badr at arm’s length—physically and metaphorically—for a time, but his elder son, kári, a strapping boy of six, immediately took to his little brother, and gislenus couldn’t help but follow his wife and son’s good example. besides, badr was a charming child, vocal and whip-smart, constantly burbling, later humming, then singing, and thick as thieves with kári despite the age gap.

gislenus shelved his ambitions of nobility, at least until badr came of age.

for the most part, badr grew up happily in a family of moderate means—he learned his mother’s tongue, vailian, as well as aedyran, picked up the basics of some instruments, although he always preferred to sing, and joined kári in epic pretend battles and sparring matches. i say for the most part…this is the part i hate talking about, so i’ll say it quick, a great uncle from gislenus’ side of the family sexually abused badr from the age of about 12 until he came of age at 18, specifically because he was a moon godlike and “beautiful” as a result. he never breathed a word of it to his family. so there. i mention it because it’s a big part of his arc and the person he later becomes. sorry

anyway in 2811 AI, badr turns 18, and gislenus at last has the opportunity to elevate the house falkaheri to minor nobility—if he strikes badr’s name from the family record. badr agrees to be legally disowned, so that kári (now 24, a military man who had married a dyrwoodan girl the previous year) can establish the legacy gislenus is so bent on. at dionísia’s encouragement, badr moves into a temple of ondra two towns over; he has heard the story of his miraculous birth many times and considers ondra almost a second mother figure, and so goes happily. the piece of shit great uncle dies a few weeks after he leaves, which at the time badr quietly celebrates, but in the long run leaves him without the closure he needs to leave it behind.

he was happy there, for a while. growing up, badr had gone from an extroverted, happy, take-charge child to a young man who rarely spoke and seemed to come alive only when he was singing—the ondrites applauded him for his quiet wisdom, and gave him the opportunity to lead the hymns, that the faithful might contemplate their memories as he sang. hymns, dirges, stories are all an integral part of ondric worship, and badr’s experience as a singer was a boon to the temple.

badr played at being a giftbearer for a few short months, but found the job put too heavy a burden on his shoulders. during his stint, a young red-headed woman barely older than he placed a tarnished silver locket in his hands and tearfully confided in him about the sexual abuse she herself had faced as a little girl. he never threw the locket away as his duty prescribed; to this day he has no idea why. was it some sick spite, “if i can’t forget, no one can”? did his belief in ondra’s power to wipe memories falter? did he simply lose track of the stupid thing as it sat in his pack gathering dust? whatever the case, the locket stayed with him.

the longer badr stayed on with the ondrites, the more townspeople attended the services to see him sing. at 22, he is asked instead to join an ondric cloister far to the north, as the high abbot recognizes his talent, but thinks it inappropriate that the temple should become a haven for gawkers. better that badr ply his talents somewhere less public. badr was fine with it—he still got to sing, and the cloister was a perfect sphere of quiet which suited the shy, reflective young man he’d become. when he arrived, the high abbot explained to him the duty that lay ahead, the knowledge that soon enough he would have to retire to the halls of low tide and forget himself before being washed away in the next rising. badr was fine with it. maybe in the halls of low tide he would find peace. maybe when ondra’s floods swept him away, it would be into her embrace.

by 2818 the time had almost come for the changing of the tides and badr, now 25, took a last trip home. his visit was short, less than a week, and he was mauled by a wolf on his way, causing heavy scarring on his lips but barely affecting his speech or (more importantly) his singing. kári, now 31, was on furlough and his wife had just given birth to their third daughter. for lack of a gift, badr rooted around in his pockets and found an old silver locket just the size for a child. gislenus (now, at last, Thayn Falkaheri), clapped him on the shoulder and promised to stock up on those dark rauatai cookies for the next time badr visited.

and one sunny morning in the beginning of 2819 AI, badr was woken early by a beam of light. he was groggy and tired, but in looking at that beam of light, he was seized with a sudden panic—a nauseating claustrophobia at the idea of being stuck in the halls of low tide for decades—a need to escape, to live. he ran. with little except the clothes on his back, he snuck out of the temple and fled south on foot. it was a hard journey home. he had no money and no means of contacting his family, and the only people who would even look his way, let alone give him a place to sleep or a meal for the night, were addicts and orlan slaves. a lot of the time he was hunting or looting just to live, picking up basic survival skills

he arrived home, finally, in the dead of winter (which, granted, isn’t that cold in aedyr, but have you seen the robes the ondrites wear??). he found that his father had died of a latent heart sickness, his brother had been slain in the field, and his mother had gone home heartbroken to old vailia. the only person left to turn to was kári’s widow, now the Thayna Falkaheri. she sheltered him in the (now very respectable) falkaheri estate for a little over a year, but in the summer of 2820 she proposed to him—more in the spirit of an official haemneg than a marriage for love—and badr, both very gay and very afraid of intimacy, politely excused himself to a different fucking continent

he caught the first ship to old vailia and joined his mother in her home village, where she now worked as a seamstress. badr bought a sword and joined up with a third-rate mercenary company to help support them for a few months. one night as he sat in a port tavern, a red-haired woman with hard eyes came up to him. “ondra’s tides, you’re the singer, aren’t you! of course you are, how many ocean-born are there with southern aedyran accents and a crescent crown?”

apparently starstruck, she offered to buy him a drink—"this part of the country’s famous for its cherry wine, you have to try it!“—and he downed the entire fucking thing in one go, and his lips began to itch. the woman’s eyes went wide with surprised glee. "you’re an evil, false giftbearer,” she spat, stood up, and left him to scream as whatever was in the drink ate away at his throat. it was like fire, like swallowing coals. no prayer, no healing, no water could stop it, and by the time he lost consciousness, his voice didn’t sound like a voice anymore.

he woke up in his mother’s bed, still with that burning in his throat and his chest, and a soul-deep panic beginning to take hold of him. the two set sail for aedyr that same week, hoping to find a cure, or a balm, or anything—but to no avail. every physician said the same thing; his vocal chords had been fused together and corroded irreperably. none of them had seen anything like it. dionisia went home, and a humiliated badr crawled back onto the doorstep of the Thayna, completely at a loss.

she was incredible. had he preferred women, he would have married her a thousand times over. she sent for a tutor in the aedyran sign language, sent for a healer who was rumored to have been breaking new ground (and who eventually was able to restore badr’s voice to the point of a tiny, broken whisper. better than nothing), even procured an animancer—not an easy feat in aedyr—just to make doubly sure that nothing more could be done.

over the course of the next two years, badr learned to communicate (with a sort of clumsiness he could never quite polish away) through sign language, but the process was long and lonely. he took the time to contemplate; why did he wake up before any of the others on that day in 2819? it couldn’t have been ondra’s doing—why would she bid him escape from his own duty to her? and why would she have allowed the chain of events that led to him losing his voice, his instrument of worship? was it his punishment? would he be happier if he had just accepted his fate and gone to live in the halls of low tide? probably.

but by the end of 2822 he’s come to terms with the events of the past few years, and begins to toy with the theory that perhaps that beam of light was eothas’ doing—but it happened years after the dyrwoodans supposedly killed eothas! he becomes struck with the desire to travel to the site of the saint’s war to investigate, and that’s where he is in 2823, on the way to gilded vale, voiceless and between faiths. thank u

***

so that’s like his backstory leading up to the beginning of poe, but as far as what happens during the game here’s some stuff

-basically the crux of his whole conflict is like, is it better to forget and cast away the person those memories made you into, or to remember and suffer? he runs into this time and again with the grieving mother’s quest, maneha’s quest, and basically the entire abbey of the fallen moon is a huge #tbt for him lmao. he doesn’t wipe the GM’s memory, and he lets maneha decide what to do with hers; she decides to wipe it and seems much happier for it, which just frustrates badr even more, like he’ll never get that no matter how badly he wants it

-he frees the low tide ppl, but he has to think about it. he thinks drowning them would be doing them a mercy, but the ex-tidebringer convinces him otherwise. this is a turning point for him as it’s the first time he consciously and actively chooses to help people work toward redemption rather than washing away the wrongs

-he decides to stay behind to strike the crystal, not for any noble reason but simply because ondra said so, and in his heart he still believes that she has his best interests at heart, rather than just her own. it’s a frustrating as fuck decision for him to make, because he’s just spent the last few months reconnecting with life and hope and now he has to throw it all away? but the way he sees it, he owes ondra a debt for sneaking out of his own rising, and after this, whatever happens his slate is clean.

-idk what else lol i could go on and talk abt his dynamics with different party members (spoilers he falls for kana and he boots durance out of the party after literally one hour, but theres more lol) but this post is already so long…i’ll leave it for now gfhjkljdf i hope this wasn’t too bad to slog through

-no wait i’ll say one thing, when the party reaches stalwart and badr hears that bard in the tavern sing the sea and her love he Freaks cus that used to be like….His Song lol and it’s really upsetting not being able to sing along or anything so he just sits there being mad lmao. kana picks up on it, one thing -> another, badr ends up watcher-projecting an old memory from the temple so kana can hear him sing. the first thing kana can think to say is just like, “would that we’d had the chance to sing a duet!”

#I wanted to answer this as an audio file bc i think that would actually be more coherent for once lol #maybe another time #THANK U FOR ASKING THO seriously!!!!!#badr #god-delusion

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