Essek Thelyss - Blog Posts

It's my 1 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

Oh gosh, has it really been a year already? This has been a journey, for sure, and thank you to everyone who follows me! Your support means I get to keep doing what I love, which is making cute, cuddly amigurumi babies. Here's a look back at some of the things I've made!

Ludinus your ex correspondant traitor / grooming victim and Ikithons runaway protege are in love now. yeah they're making out. they live in a cottage with cats and have a couple portrait.

God, I'm still laughing about Jester blatantly lying about realizing Essek was there. I love the entirety of Vasselheim apparently watching this silly and bewildering exchange. Some random guy in disguise just helped this wizard—from the party the Bright Queen endorsed—resurrect somebody with dunamancy, revealed himself to be of Kryn origin, and immediately evaded a very sudden and pointed attempt at capture by the Kryn contingent. This party who no one in Vasselheim actually met, but who was, to reiterate, endorsed by the Bright Queen, blatantly lies to their benefactor about knowing who this guy was despite the fact that he was basically in the wizard's lap. The Divine Gate shattered ninety seconds ago and here on the ground the most unrelated minute-long melodrama is playing out for seemingly no reason.

The rest of the world suddenly remembers why they stopped inviting Wildemount to anything.

A Very Cursed Thought;

So, Essek has his wrist pocket spell, yes? I have read a few fics where it could be dispelled, but most usually in the Fanon I've seen it has been ruled that it drops when he is killed.

Please please imagine that Essek gets got (and no worries, he has 2 (two) Clerics and a whole rest of the Nein invested in his eventual survival, he'll be fine), but yeah he Gets Got and, as the stuff spills out of his dimensional wrist pocket, please imagine the sound Sonic the Hedgehog Makes when he gets got and the golden rings pop out.

That is all XD

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.)

essek's disguise getting dispelled in front of bells hells has the same energy of that comic panel where some villian is shapeshifted into the flash and he takes of his mask to discover the secret identity and is like 'i have no idea who this is'

Essek skyrocketing my pulse making me come out of my hiatus hole and sketch at 4:30 am

Astrid hid in the smut shop because she thought it would be the one place Essek wouldn't go. Unfortunately for her he has been inured by years of friendship with Jester and smut shops are now his favoured terrain.

"and genuine hot boi!"

There's something so bittersweet, though, about 'Seth Domade', sorcerer and archivist of the Cobalt Soul.

Something about Seth being from a tavern family, a place where you'd be surrounded by laughter and life; no pretension, no expectations, no loneliness. Something about Essek's mother being an Umavi, and Seth's being an ordinary tavernkeep. 'My mother has never made Kraft cheese' vs 'my mother can stop time with her ale!' Something about Seth being a sorcerer, a class that just gets their talent and doesn't have to work and work and work to achieve more, until you've shut out everything else but your studies. Something about Seth being in the Cobalt Soul, where he'd always have peers and where all knowledge is shared.

Something, too, about Seth being a human from a humble family who realised he had arcane talent, and went off and studied and was happy. Something about Seth being a combination of the life Caleb should have lived, and the life Essek never could.

look man. look

essek saying "bren" out loud, claiming a position on caleb's side as the mouthpiece of his regards to astrid, did something to me. i can't tell if it opened a wound or punched me or gave me a hug. all i know is that i am feeling so many emotions right now

more under the cut because i'm about to get rambly:

"bren aldric ermendrud" is a separate character from caleb widogast. he's a young boy learning how to make magic. he's a deeply traumatized and indoctrinated teenager. he's the boy who curled up with astrid and eadwulf in a freezing tower for warmth all night.

essek never met bren. he met caleb and he's never known him as anyone else. if i'm remembering correctly, caleb never even said the name "bren" to him during the campaign, and neither did any of the nein.

essek knows caleb widogast. he knows the man who held up the object of his worst crime and then kissed him in the bowels of a ship and made a floor of infinite stars for them to walk through together. he knows the person who healed over bren's wounds—thinly, but enough. he knows the man that the boy has become.

astrid knows bren. she barely knows who caleb is. she still calls him bren after hearing him referred to as caleb repeatedly. she can't know him as the man he is, she only knows the boy. there's some of bren in caleb, but there is no caleb in bren.

essek saying "bren sends his regards" is him gauging astrid's reaction, on one level—if she freaks out, which she did, she's in opposition to caleb's cause and thus a threat. on another level, it's essek delivering a very different subtextual message from caleb: "the boy who loved you is giving you one final warning."

because essek is a threat to astrid. their last meaningful interaction was slinging spells at each other in the blooming grove. and that's funny in a "current boyfriend vs ex girlfriend exclusively fight each other" kind of way, but it's also deeply tied to caleb's recurring theme of transformation. "bren sends his regards" also means "i have healed enough to love enough for someone else to know this name and use it with my consent. and this someone else is your enemy. what does that make you think i've become?"

it also does a fantastic job of communicating subtle offscreen discussions that have happened over the years since the end of c2. we don't have the details of when or how caleb told essek his birth name, but we know that he did, and we know from all of c2 that the name bren occupies a place of immense emotional weight for caleb. it functions similarly to a deadname in terms of who uses it and for what purpose. trent exclusively calls caleb bren to wound him and place himself in a position of power. astrid calls him bren to remind both him and herself of who they used to be—same with eadwulf, though obviously he's not here.

the first time we hear essek say "bren" is on caleb's behalf and confronting one of the narrative representations of caleb's trauma. it's four words that manage to communicate "i, your enemy on a hundred levels, can speak for both the man i love and the boy who loved you, because i know him in his entirety."

astrid knows bren and essek knows caleb, but only essek can speak for both. because at some point, caleb gave bren to essek. and we know this from four words. four IMPROVISED words.

god. this moment is just so fucking good

did i clock matthew using they pronouns for essek at least once in tonight’s episode? he/they essek thelyss canon?!

I hope Essek never stops using stupid ass aliases. Okay (es)SE(k)TH(elyss) or Lord Lord from Around or Barry Beacon or Drew Krymm you've successfully tricked me

Honestly the fact that the other Assembly members are helping Ludinus is a surprise. But it also is kinda expected. He thrives in the viper’s nest, he always has. Even the Vanguard has tenuous relations and I doubt he has any misgivings about how that is. He’s been the head of the Cerberus Assembly for centuries, he knows backstabbing and undermining like the back of his hand. And Ludinus probably loves that shit.

Because truly he can’t handle genuine relationships. Sincere care or compliments. It’s why Jester throws him off so much. Because her smiles are real. Because her compliments are genuine and not backhanded.

The fake smiles and promises, the underhanded slights and backstabs is the world Ludinus moves like water through. He plays the political game so very well. Delilah, the charismatic witch, herself said it. Everyone knows Ludinus is a snake but they all fall for his traps anyway. But people like Jester throw him off because it breaks his world view. It breaks the idea that the world is dog eat dog all the time and you have to play this game to get yours. He rejects these genuine connections, romantic and platonic because “it’s beneath him”, but truly also because he can’t fathom the idea of those things meaning something real, having worth in a world in which those are all tools to manipulate and gain something from you, distractions from a larger goal.

The conversation he had with Essek is reframed in this light. It is not just that he thinks Essek gaining friendship is a distraction, makes him weak. It’s that he cannot see how a wizard similar to him can believe in such things. “Maybe you should try friends” was a sick burn but also there is this notion that Ludinus doesn’t get that. He doesn’t believe that is possible. True friendship isn’t something good or meaningful, it’s supposed to be a tool. In his mind Essek should have used the M9 to get further ahead.

Oh yes I do believe he does care for Liliana in some way. But it is also in the way that he needs her for his plans. Everything he does is framed around his goals, his needs. Because he cannot see relationships as anything but transactional. Subconsciously perhaps he desires deeper connections, but he will consciously bar himself from committing to such a thing because he has no faith in such a thing.

So yeah he is going to surround himself with people that hate him, people that he knows will backstab him at some point. Because he gets that. That’s familiar to him. He can deal with hatred and jealousy, but he can’t deal with genuineness.

Man, if I had a nickel for every time Essek Thelyss's disguise was dispelled via Anti-Magic field in a situation somehow related to Ludinus Da'leth, I'd have two nickels.

Which isn't alot, but it's weird that it has happened twice.

spent way too long making a shadowgast propaganda slideshow for the tumblr ship poll….. EVERYONE GO VOTE NOW FOR THE BEST SHIP IN THE BRACKET!

Thinking about how Essek is, like, the elven equivalent of 22 at the time of C2, and imagining him at like five or six hundred looking back at his youth floored by how reckless he was/the stupid stuff he did.

I'm not even talking about everything with the Beacons and the Assembly, but like: "Shit, how did I EVER think it was a good idea for Me, a Wizard, who relies solely on magic, to travel to Aeor, -alone-, with only my Wizard lover, who -also- only relied solely on magic, in a place WELL KNOWN to be brimming with Extremely Deadly Anti-Magic Creatures, Anti-magic Fields, and a surplus of Anti-Wizard Traps???"

Essek really do be a Starboy™, huh?

Okay, so this is an extremely stupid thought, is in no way plausible, is totally a crack theory/headcanon, and I’m not gonna do anything with it. But it was 3:30 AM when my brain came up with it, so just take a moment, don’t think, and just imagine this concept with me:

Essek is the physical embodiment of the beacons that have already been found.

it he

Critters, has anyone made a shadowgast pet name compilation? If so, please send it to me 😭 I just want every moment Caleb called Essek “dear” 😭

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Pros to having the wildemount gays all live together: 

Gardening buddies

Empire sibs collectively dying from queer exposure

wlw mlm solidarity

xhorhass gays get to welcome empire sibs home after a long workday and honestly, i think we all need this

collective couch snuggles probably.

THERE ARE LIKE TEN CATS AND DOGS COMBINED HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THIS CONSEPT I’M-

Cons:

There are none.

Everything is as it should be. UwU<3