#vurma

[spottedenchants]

While it is extremely fun to clown on Essek for his disguises, consider:

What if they're shoddy because we know him? 👀 To anyone that's spent time studying his mannerisms and speech patterns and personality (say, an avid fan base or the friends that saved his life by ruining it), it's practically that Song of Achilles quote. To anyone else (purely in-universe now), perhaps they'd recognize the accent or find his casting methods unique. Without prompting, would they realize 'that's Essek Thelyss, the once-Shadowhand of the Kryn Dynasty'? Did anyone learn him well enough before he fled the Dynasty to recognize him in an instant? In a conversation? In a day?

What if Essek's disguises are good because they count on no one knowing the person beneath them? 👀

[augentrust]

love how essek objects to jester hugging him in front of the guards at the outpost only to let caleb gently cradle his cheek in full view not two hours later. he really was going through it, huh

[hello-eeveev]

current cause of death: whatever the heck this is

[Video description:

Matt as Essek: “…it’s just one left.”

Liam as Caleb sighs, lifts one corner of his mouth, then mimes patting Essek on the back. He says, “Come on. Let’s go down.”

End video description.]

[bugunbirazleylayim]

Bugün baharın ilk günü Mart ayı yap şovunu bee

[exandriacityshowdown]

Round 1 Stage 4 Poll 1

Zephrah, Tal'Dorei: Zephrah is the home of the Air Ashari. It is situated in western Tal’Dorei. It is the hometown of Keyleth of Vox Machina, and Orym of Bells Hells. Both parties have spent time there during their adventures.

image from tal'dorei campaign setting reborn / link

Vurmas, Wildemount: Vurmas is a floating settlement built on a small fleet of Kryn Dynasty ships anchored off the coast of Eiselcross, as an outpost for the Dynasty’s explorations in the region. Although the Mighty Nein had interactions with the Dynasty in Eiselcross, they never visited Vurmas itself, only a smaller satellite outpost on the mainland.

image by brian valeza from explorer's guide to wildemount

[birharabe]

'Hayat sana vuruyorsa sen kaçmak yerine diğer yanağını uzat ki iyice delirsin. İşte hayatta kalmanın kısa ve net formülü. Yine de bu sıralar kimse bana vurmasın çünkü dayak yiye yiye şaftım kaydı azizim.

[bunedycom]

"Serdar yabancı değilim" hayatını kaybetti

Serdar Yabancı Değilim adıyla bilinen sosyal medya fenomeni, yüksek dozda parasetamol alması sonucu hayatını kaybetti. Geniş bir takipçi kitlesine sahip olan ve popüler olan Serdar Yabancı Değilim, “öyle vurma nolursun” ve “sen insan değil misin” gibi söylemleriyle anılıyor. Ancak, ölümünün arkasında yaşanan bir kavga ve Serdar Çetin isimli bir kişinin rolü olduğu ortaya çıktı. “Öyle Vurma…

[neinofthem]

the aeor arc is so beautiful like the nein are having the shittiest time of their lives they find out that essek’s in eiselcross they are EXTREMELY suspicious but they go to check it out because what the hell they just fought a dragon might as fucking well. so they rock up to vurmas and essek is having the worlds’ longest most awkward panic attack which they politely ignore. they tell him about the dead member of the wizard cabinet in caleb’s back pocket and essek overcomes five separate complexes to ask them to please leave which they do but then they come back and are like uh. hey. ikithon’s after you. woops. and essek is like um ok well i will die which is like whatever. and THEN caleb’s like well we actually want to ally with trent are you cool with that and essek’s like fuck no but i’m still in love with you :( so the nein lock themselves in his office to debate whether or not they trust him while essek paces outside and considers killing himself and then when they let him back in they’re like ok essek we trust you more than the child torturer like we don’t trust you that much but you can come with us. and essek is too busy staging a dream ballet in his head after he heard the word ‘trust’ to listen to the rest so he gives an impassioned monologue about trust and friendship until the nein are like. well :/ sure buddy if it helps you sleep at night. i guess. and then when they saved the world together for actual real essek helps ONCE and it’s to assist in taking a nap. absolutely insane that this happened on my screen and i’m still here to tell the tale i don’t know how i’m still standing to be honest.

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

[ay-simay]

Papatya çayı gerçekten sakinleştirici

Hele bardağıyla beraber birini kafasına vurunca of!! inanılmaz sakinleştirici.... 😂🤭

Vurma kısmı hayâli... 😂😁

... 🌼...

[augentrust]

i always saw essek's relationship with touch being like 'if i'm comfortable with you, you can touch me'. i think he genuinely likes jester, but things like her peer pressuring him into a thank you hug for the xhorhaus makes him being comfortable with her touch take longer.

that, or it was the fact that caleb touched him in a secluded room instead of in front of the whole base, lol

i definitely think essek comes into his interactions with the nein with a very different attitude towards touch (both personally and culturally), but that’s especially true when they reach him at the outpost. forget casual touch -- he can barely even look them in the eyes

prior to their in-person reunion, it’s been weeks of silence following a very tense parting at the peace talks. essek has no idea where they stand beyond a few frantic (and frankly, desperate) sendings over the last few days. there’s a ton of factors that go into his reaction to jester’s hug (see some of the very funny tags from folks on my previous post) but if i had to throw a guess out, i’d say that the poor man panicked. he walked floated out to meet them with a polite smile and an internal monologue of “oh gods, oh gods, oh gods” and got a hug. essek absolutely strikes me as someone who falls back on court appearances and protocol in times of full on blue-screening 

flash forward to leaving his meeting with the nein, when caleb goes in for the face touch: essek's had a chance to talk, an opportunity to gauge where their relationship stands (not great, but not unsalvageable), and has also received enough terrible information such that there is not enough whiskey chocolate in the world to make it better. he's still incredibly stressed, but for larger, external reasons and caleb (after being fairly distant during their chat) reads that on him and offers a quiet word. you're very correct that a few guards is different from an entire outpost, and i think it also helped that liam made a point to acknowledge that there were people around and that that influenced caleb's words and behavior

(on a very meta sidenote, laura announced jester’s hug explicitly, while caleb’s face touch was a quiet gesture on liam’s part -- there might be something there in terms of how obvious the action is and how that influences matt's decision to have essek respond to it)

regardless, i think essek accepting caleb’s touch was extremely important to him -- both because he values caleb’s opinion of him in particular (see: essek struggling to look at any of them but not making eye contact with caleb) but also because in the two hours since they arrived, the nein have complicated his life immensely. they've inadvertently connected him to the murder of an assembly member, asked him to abscond from the outpost that he (arguably very suspiciously) requested, and informed him that, without intervention, the end of the world was imminent. that’s a lot for anyone, let alone essek. and yet, as they’re leaving, he still accepts and even appreciates caleb’s attempt to console him about these new struggles that have been piled on top of everything else that he’s currently processing

even though one touch was gently rebuffed and the other was quietly accepted, i think both jester and caleb’s interactions with him were important during that reunion: jester’s showing essek that the nein still cared about him, and his reaction to caleb’s showing that the same was true in return

[ariadne-mouse]

(mlm here is multi level marketing not men loving men)

this is a joke please vote with your spleen

if you choose court scandal tell me what it is in the tags

by "weird little man" I actually mean weird ambiguously heighted man, Essek is whatever height the narrative requires

[duygusal--ritimler]

Ebû Saîd-İ Ebu’l-Hayr hazretleri bir rubâî'sinde:

"Yârim bana hep neşter üstüne neşter vurur..!

"Vurma" derim, inadına daha çok vurur.

Değil mi ki gönlümde yeri vâr gündüz gece korktuğum şu ki; neşteri kendine vurur." buyuruyor.

[edelgarfield]

so if essek isn't actively being hunted by the dynasty, but he's under heavy investigation, does that mean he's not publicly known as a traitor? he just abandoned his post one day and disappeared and most people don't know why?

m9 shows up, hugs him, he's nicer to them than anyone at vurmas has ever seen, m9 asks him to go into the depths of aeor on a suicide mission, they miraculously survive & then a few months later essek disappears? I'm pretty sure everyone at vurmas thinks he defected to the empire to join the world's most chaotic polycule.

[tarydarrington]

Well into the night, Essek folds his hands at last with nothing left to say. Caleb’s study feels hollowed out, refilled to bursting with the ghosts of every word exchanged. There had been a lot of them. All carefully chosen, some shouted, all heated.

This isn't the end of the conversation, but it's the end of their talk. A satisfactory end to the first of many chapters. Essek takes a deep breath.

"Thank you for listening."

Across the coffee table, his mother folds her hands in her lap. "Thank you for your honesty."

As though this is the end of a business meeting and not the second most harrowing conversation of Essek's life, they exchange a polite nod.

He stands, clasping his hands behind his back.

"Allow me to show you to your room."

Hours ago, Caleb had retreated to his quarters to allow them some privacy. Much as Essek would like to follow, he will stay away while his mother is here. Whatever assumptions Deirta might make about their involvement would not be true—not yet, anyway—and he will not sour their uneasy truce with a misunderstanding.

“My quarters are there,” he says, gesturing to the door with the star carving. “Caleb’s are across the landing.”

He points out the rest of the rooms below as they approach the landing. The tower has been tinkered with over time; the rooms usually reserved for the rest of the Nein have become workshops, research stations, and other such spaces that have proved useful in their explorations.

Before he can lead her down through the iris, his mother holds up a hand.

“If I might impose,” she says, “I should like to read over the reports you mentioned.”

Of course—he had mentioned the Vurmas reports during the initial buffer of small talk. They would make their way to the Dynasty eventually, but reading them beforehand will give his mother a leg up. The first of many gestures Essek suspects it will take to make up for her silence.

A small price to pay. Until he had known for certain that the Umavi would not cut all contact upon learning of his treason, he hadn’t realized how much he had dreaded the possibility.

He turns away from the iris and toward his room. His mother waits outside as he slips in, leaving the door ajar behind him as he sifts through the stack of papers left on the table in the entryway.

“Pardon the mess,” he says out of habit, as though the space is not spotless. Caleb arranges this room from scratch each night; there is not so much as a speck of dust to offend.

It stops Essek mid-hover, then, to see his mother’s eyebrows raised when he turns back.

“Think nothing of it,” she says, and already the polite smile is back in place. “Tell me, do your friends’ quarters share the same design?”

Essek follows her eye line over his shoulder. Caleb has laid out his rooms as he usually does, all purples and stars and fine fabrics. An array of arcane instruments waits patiently on a table under the window. Essek's mother looks past it all and into the bedroom. He frowns. There is nothing terribly unusual there, save—

It's all he can do not to swallow his own tongue.

The bed. His mother is staring at his bed.

For a drow of his age to sleep once in a while is not unheard of, of course; particularly when ill, they are known to indulge. Be that as it may, Essek knows as well as Deirta that one would hardly purchase a bed for a once-in-a-blue-moon nap. It comes with certain implications. 

It was not a purchase, Essek insists to himself. Everything in this room was pulled from the ether to make him comfortable. The logic is with him.

"Indeed," he says. "The colors are customized to suit us each as individuals, but the layout is the same."

This is the part where he pretends that he hasn't spent more than one night positively snug under those blankets for comfort's sake, and especially pretends he has not realized that the mattress is wide enough to fit two.

Essek’s mother is an intelligent woman. She will put two and two together: Caleb is a human, and a human unused to drow customs might make such a faux pas with innocent intentions. One tends not to think twice about habits that are second nature, and someone of Caleb’s background would not think twice about placing a bed in a bedroom.

Essek has done the same mental math more than once, with varying levels of desperation.

“Well,” he says, and presses the files into his mother’s arms with as much dignity as he can scrape together, “let me show you to your rooms.”

They make their way in silence down through the tower’s central column. Essek thinks auf rather than saying it this time; better, just in case, to keep the magic words from his mother.

He leaves the way to the front door open. She has far too much decorum to snoop during the night.

They touch down on the fifth floor. Silently, Essek thanks Caleb for neglecting to put a dodecahedron on the guest room door.

“These are yours.” He draws the door open for her, bowing his head as he gestures inside.

With no small swell of pride, he watches her take in Caleb’s handiwork as her head turns on a slow swivel, then sneaks a glance himself.

Strands of crystal drape the ceiling like a canopy of iridescent vines. Caleb has replicated perfectly the sitting room Essek had described, complete with his mother's favorite tea steaming on the low table. Everything from the molding to the doilies speaks to both the gravity of her station and her own personal tastes.

There is no bed.

The Umavi’s manners are immaculate. He knows, as she turns a smile on him that is barely thinner than usual, that he will not hear a word about it. He will simply be cursed with the mortifying knowledge that she has arrived at her own conclusions.

Perhaps, if he tried very hard, he could claw his way out of his skin.

“Thank you very much,” Deirta says, hands folded in front of her. “Please pass on my gratitude to Master Widogast.”

He will hold eye contact. He will hold eye contact and smile politely. It is perfectly acceptable for his mother to suspect that he—

“Of course,” he says. “Should you require anything, the cats will assist.”

With utmost grace and one final nod, the Umavi shuts the door behind her. Essek, hands folded behind his back, counts to ten before deflating.

The bed is just as they’d left it, when he finds his way back to his chambers. Essek lingers in the doorway regarding it for a long moment before sinking down on the edge.

The bedding is soft. Is this the sort of fabric Caleb imagines Essek would prefer, or the sort that Caleb himself enjoys? He runs his thumb over a seam, letting the thought settle in with a warm buzz. It feels less forbidden this time, and several times more dangerous.

He leans into both feelings, climbing the rest of the way onto the bed and under the covers.

Two floors down and two doors over, his mother is doubtless turning their conversation over in her head. She will spend the night picking apart his every transgression, weighing it against whatever sentimental value he holds to her.

Essek breathes out and turns his face into the softness of the pillowcase.

It smells like him. Like Essek himself—just the way it would after many days of use. Essek shuts his eyes, pressing his hands to his face as the liquid warmth of that realization makes its way through him.

Two doors down, he is increasingly certain that Caleb, too, is thinking of him.

His mother is in the tower. This is not the time to dwell on such things, much as his body would like to.

With a deep breath, Essek runs his thumb across the soft ridges of the duvet. His nail catches on one, then two, then three—he counts until his pulse begins to listen to reason, then breathes out. For now, he will take it as a safety net. Something to fall into at the end of the day when all else is uncertain. A soft place to land.

Let his mother assume what she will. It would be the least of his crimes she’s learned of tonight.

The threads of a Sending pull taut between his fingers, buzzing with potential. He takes a breath and lets it out.

“We are finished for the night,” he says. “Much more to come. My thanks and hers for your hospitality.”

He curls his lip at himself. Formality is not a leg on which he’s felt the need to stand in some time, where Caleb is concerned. His mother’s presence has him falling back into old means of keeping balanced.

“Sleep well. Perhaps with one eye open.”

Caleb knows him well enough to take it in jest. Essek lets the spell go, shutting his eyes with a long breath out.

Later, the memory of Caleb’s voice in his head as he sinks into the mattress will do him no favors at all.

“Glad to hear it went well,” he says, laughter in his voice. “I will have breakfast ready early. She will be impressed, I hope.”

Essek counts the stars on the ceiling. The pause stretches on for two constellations.

“Until morning, dear friend,” Caleb finishes. “Sleep well.”

Something warm unspools in Essek’s chest as the magic dissipates around him. There is more than one story in the tower that is only in the first of many chapters. The words to this one will be harder to find—but their writing, he thinks, will be sweeter.

---

a very happy, very late birthday to my friend @sosobriquet, who tossed this concept around with me many months ago 🍰💜

[sky-scribbles]

One thing that interests me about where Caleb is emotionally in the twoshot is that while we haven’t got confirmation either way yet (I think), it’s entirely possible that this is before he goes with Essek to Aeor and destroys the T-Dock.

It’s definitely vague - Liam describes Caleb keeping in touch with Essek ‘the first six months to a year’, seemingly with the intention of going to Aeor with him in some point during that time. Matt doesn’t specify when exactly Essek leaves Vurmas, either. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Liam was picturing the Aeor date trip happening something like six to twelve months after the end of Campaign 2.

If that’s the case, then there’s a good chance that Mighty Nein Reunited happens before that time. And that’s... really interesting. Because if that’s true, the Caleb who’s giving a lecture on Transmutation magic, and the why of how you use it, is a Caleb facing up to the idea that soon he’s going to have to make a decision about whether he’ll use that magic to save his parents. It’s a Caleb who’s really strongly considering the whys behind his desire to do that. It’s  a Caleb thinking hard about what his decision will be, and thinking about what will happen if he decides against it.

It’s a Caleb who is slowly, slowly, easing himself into the life he could have - as a teacher, the thing he always wanted to become. A Caleb who is perhaps starting to realise I can have a future, with my friends around me, shaping these bright young minds. And yet it’s a Caleb who hasn’t quite brought himself to take the teaching job yet - not for himself, not for Beau, who wants a man on the inside.

Because this is a Caleb who has not yet taken the decision to destroy the T-Dock, and as long as that’s the case, Caleb has not committed to this future he’s building. Because when Caleb destroys the Dock, he is forgiving himself. He is stepping away from that awful, aching desire to Undo the Bad Thing, because that’s the only way he can think of to exist after what he did. Destroying the ability to amend his past is  Caleb committing to his future.

It’s entirely possible that Caleb in the twoshot is still carrying a book of letters to his parents in his book holsters. Caleb has not quite yet opened himself to that grief yet, has not truly allowed himself to mourn Una and Leofric.

And it’s so wonderful to me to imagine that it’s after all this - after seeing Uk’otoa threaten again and seeing such clear evidence that happiness is hard, and complicated, and sometimes living still hurts, but your friends will pull together anyway to get you through it - that’s when he takes Essek to Aeor, and they turn towards the future. Caleb lets the grief in, and begins the long, slow, tricky journey of processing and mourning and healing.

And maybe after that, Caleb thinks about that teaching position and thinks, yes. I’m ready now.