Chapter Text
Two lights above the sea
The artifact, a pretty shining thing—humbly charmed with Dancing Lights, the gift of grateful parents who had little enough of their own to hand out, even to pay for their daughter’s rescue—had done nothing. Well, Gale amended as he stared blankly up at the roof of his tent, it had done the bare minimum. It had kept skin and bone together and kept their corner of the Wild from turning into vapor and ash.
Inside him the orb churned restlessly. He felt it, in the constriction in his throat, the dark and hungry pulse of it that rode along with each heartbeat, a terrible rhythm. In that, he wasn’t sure if it truly was an orb anymore, if that knot just beneath his breastbone was now only the nexus for something that had stretched its tendrils into every corner of his being. Behind his right eye even the tadpole was silent, as if perplexed by something more powerful and inexorable than itself.
Gale sighed and swallowed, wincing at the taste of acid in the back of his mouth. If you were going to dampen what precious few abilities remain to me, why couldn’t you at least do something about the chaos in my chest? The tadpole did not respond.
Turning on his side did nothing to dislodge the pain or the thoughts that inevitably came with it. The book he’d brought with him, one of several they’d hauled back from Ethel’s lair, lay abandoned on the traveling desk next to his blankets. Other books, also abandoned, sat one atop the other in a forlorn pile. He stared at the spines without even seeing them and tried to will his muscles to unravel. The acidic pain of the orb twisted them back up again.
Outside, beyond the nominal privacy of his tent flap, the rest of the camp was settling into the end of its evening routine. Astarion had likely gone off to hunt—Gale couldn’t hear him anywhere—and Lae’zel had returned to the grindstone. Wyll was saying something to Karlach, whose booming laughter sounded like thunder. Think you could dry dishes with just your hands, Karlach? Or would you crack them? He couldn’t hear Shadowheart, but that wasn’t so unusual.
And then, over the back-and-forth, the soft steps of bare feet across the dirt and the shush of fabric, quiet fingers fumbling at the ties holding Gale’s tent shut, the thinnest barrier of privacy that vanished before Gale could muster the energy to stop it.
Arafel’s head poked in a moment later, auburn hair turned copper and silver fire by Gale’s magelight. It caught in her eyes and on the small orbs of her eyebrow piercing, and for a moment she was uncanny until she whispered in that oddly-pitched voice that invariably drew his attention to it, “Gale? You didn’t eat.”
He hadn’t even cooked. Wyll was competent enough, if somewhat uninspired, but even uninspiring food threatened to send his stomach into open revolt.
“I apologize.” Gale forced himself to sit upright, pushing himself back against the pillows. It was at least slightly more dignified than being curled in a miserable lump beneath his blankets. “I… well, my stomach felt it would be best not to partake tonight. No offense to Wyll’s cooking.”
“None taken on his part,” Arafel replied. She scooted in and somehow wedged herself into a corner of the tent without touching him, withdrawing her arms and legs in on herself, like a spider. She had her lyre with her, as always, though Gale had never seen her play it outside of combat. “Wyll saw you weren’t feeling well even before he started making the stew—though,” she fumbled in her bag for a moment before producing a small wax-paper package, “he did send some bread and fruit, if you wanted it. Shadowheart suggested it.”
“That’s…” Gale accepted the package numbly and set it in his lap. “That’s very kind of them both. I’ll be sure to thank them, when I can.”
“You’ve done the same for them before,” Arafel said, regarding him over the ledge of her knees. The distance, bare as it was, was no comfort—Gale felt unbearably exposed. Her eyes were the kind of blue he’d once seen in the harbor on the day after a storm, dark and dangerous. Her hair, coming down from its plaits at the end of the day, just covered the delicate tips of her ears. Curled up as he was, he felt large and ungainly in her presence, too much desire and pain and agitation to be contained correctly in his own body.
“Fighting that hag today took a lot out of me,” Gale said. He returned his gaze to the roof of his tent, telling himself that if he didn’t look at her she would fail to divine the truth in his eyes. “I suppose the only thing worse than one hag is several hags, even if they are illusory. Thank the gods for Magic Missile, eh?”
“It’s not the hag,” Arafel said decisively, ignoring his attempt at a joke. She straightened from her awkward slouch. “It’s—it’s the orb isn’t it? You were troubled by it earlier, before we found Ethel. You said it wasn’t responding the way it should to the locket.”
“Indeed.” It seemed the time for greater explanations was at hand, like it or not. He focused on a few loose threads, wondering if he could will them back into place. “I’m not sure if it’s the tadpole’s influence, or merely the culmination of something inevitable, but I fear the orb is truly beginning to destabilize.”
To her credit, Arafel didn’t instantly leap up and run screaming out of the tent, or order him to leave it and get far away. She sat there, still as stone. “What can I do for you? What can I do to help you?”
“I don’t know.” Those were words Gale hated uttering in the best of circumstances. In the absolute worst of circumstances—and their, his, current circumstances certainly qualified—he hated them even more. “I think the time for help is passing, much more swiftly than I wanted. But I swore to you before, and I’ll swear it again, if—when—the orb becomes too unstable to manage, I promise to get as far away—”
“Oh, fuck your promises.”
“A paladin telling me to fuck my promises? That’s a new one for me.”
Arafel’s mouth went thin the way it did when she was angry and fighting for a reasonable way to respond to provocation. Gale had seen it go either direction—into a paladinian lecture on virtue or a virtuosic verbal performance, or into bloodshed. His entire body ached and every nerve protested its existence, and he wondered if perhaps she could do them both a favor and knock him unconscious with her sword pommel. Or maybe just let him go.
“I took that vow for myself,” Arafel said at last. The look she gave him was flaying. “And it has so far not ended in my death. Yours…” she mutters something obscene and bardic, “Well, promises run two ways and I don’t accept your promise. And anyway, I didn’t come here to pester you into leaving, I came here to see if I could help.”
“As I said—”
“Not with another trinket.” Arafel’s imperious glare reminded him, uncomfortably, of Tara. “Do you remember that night you showed me how to work the Weave?”
To his embarrassment, Gale did remember, and remembered it with a clarity that troubled him in his more lucid and responsible moments. It seems almost out of place to think of a kiss, and yet in the days and nights since then he’d thought of it at the edge of sleep or waking, or in the abrupt stillness after another battle, as if the memory waited for unguarded moments to tap him on the shoulder. And he, because he was helpless, always turned his head to look back.
Ridiculous, because it wasn’t even a memory, only a vision of something hoped-for and that would never be: her mouth soft and wondering on his, her hands cupping his face and his hands on her hips to keep her close—or maybe his fingers sifting through her hair, discovering its softness for himself, tugging it free from the ribbon sweeping it up—
Stop it. The woman herself was right here, barely a meter away, watching him like a hawk.
And even more embarrassingly, while Gale found himself tangled up in memories of the kiss-that-had-never-been, Arafel was still talking. “We talked about music, poetry, how those arts are like the study of the Weave, the creation of magic. Yes? And I said I imagined working my own magic, such as it is, was like composing my music.”
“Um,” Gale said, fumbling his way back into the conversation, “yes.” Her face had come alight when he’d spoken of it—music, poetry, art, dance, all the possible manifestations of beauty surrounding, enveloping, weaving through the self. Weaving the self and other together, into one. Looking at her now he could see a similar light on her face, an eagerness only slightly dimmed by something he might call hesitation.
“I can’t give you the Weave,” Arafel said, and now she was pulling her lyre out, settling it in her left arm while she began to tune it, a few random notes drifting pure as rainwater between them. “But I can give you the next best thing. Music. It might not sate you, but… it could bring you comfort.”
Something twisted viciously in Gale’s chest. It wasn’t the orb this time, but something long-buried under months and years of isolation. “You would do that for me?”
“Of course I would,” Arafel scoffed. “In the colleges, they say music can heal as well as wound. Even if I can’t drive away the orb,” she glared at his chest, as if about ready to cut him open to extract the thing herself, “I can maybe quiet it a little.”
“I don’t want to impose,” Gale started, and was instantly cut off by Arafel’s thunderous expression and her curt It’s no imposition, Gale, shut up.
“Thank you,” he said, and receded back into his blankets.
“Don’t expect me to sing,” Arafel said, mock-severely. She bent her head back to the lyre, fingers fussing at the tuning pegs and the strings. “I never… I only wrote songs for Karels and Lisset and played accompaniment for them. Audiences don’t enjoy being tortured, as it turns out.”
“I would never presume to dictate a maestra’s programme to her,” Gale said with all the gallantry he could manage, which was not much. Still, it earned him an arch look and a shake of Arafel’s dark, disheveled head, and a smile Arafel hid against the neck of her lyre. Karels? Lisset? he’d seen the pain in her face, a flash only before her attention had gone back to the instrument. Partners, he supposed. Friends. Lovers? It wouldn’t surprise him.
“Attend me now,” Arafel said, a quiet resonance to her voice distracting him from his thoughts. She settled the lyre more comfortably in her embrace and began to play. Into the first slow march of notes, she said, “Relax. We aren’t standing on formality here. If the music is boring enough, you’re welcome to sleep.”
Obediently, Gale shut his eyes. The darkness behind his lids swirled with the deeper oblivion of the orb. Down, down, to some oblivion he feared and yet couldn’t help but yearn toward, with only the thin strands of Arafel’s song weaving around him to hold him back.
As the harmony twined around him Gale found himself following it—a slow, pulsing rhythm that reminded him of the endless pulse of the waves outside his tower. Slowly, slowly, a different pace to match himself to, a warm flush like the sun coming through the clouds on a summer’s day. The lyre marched slowly back and forth across its scales, its waves heights of aching clarity and depths that cradled him, and somewhere in the back of his mind the orb curled sullenly, retreating.
Another voice, not the lyre’s chimed in, sliding in alongside each distinct and ringing note. Wordless, at first, only a hum lacing itself through the crystal clarity of the lyre, an earthiness to it that kept the music from soaring out of reach. Arafel, Gale thought hazily. Arafel was singing.
Her voice wasn’t beautiful, but it was soft and true, catching the notes of the melody and riding them like a crow on the breeze. It wasn’t true singing but a murmur-whisper, an incantation, a conjuring. An evoking, Gale thought hazily, pulling him out of himself and towards her. Despite himself, Gale’s attention found itself fastened to her voice in the darkness, following the wordless croon along until it became speech, a bright light to follow until it seemed he was at her side.
Love, aching for you
I arose at daybreak
and hurried barefoot
through snow,
through cold,
and searched the empty seas
to chance a sight of your wind-borne sails,
a glimpse of the prow of your ship.
For a moment Gale couldn’t breathe. He’d heard the poem before, maybe had a copy of the lyric in a book somewhere. Hearing it now, though, had tightened that knot beneath his heart and made his breath come short, and set something to aching deep in his belly, or maybe deeper still than that. He could picture it in the warm dark: Waterdeep in the heart of winter, the late ships coming home to the harbor with cargoes and loved ones aboard; watchers lining the docks, bundled in scarves and heavy coats, shouting despite the wind that blew their cries back at them.
Who would look for you? he wondered. Who would look to see if you ever returned? His mother, Tara. He imagined being on that ship, scanning the docks for some beloved face waiting. Would Arafel’s face be there? It was a beautiful, dangerous fantasy.
Love, finding you then
I took you to myself
and breathed into you
my warmth,
my life,
and as the tides return
you returned—to our beloved hearth,
to our bed, to my waiting heart.
He worked his mouth, which had gone dry and tight with yearning, until he could finally form words, speaking them into the meditative space between the notes.
“That’s one of yours?”
“No, no,” Arafel said. Daringly, Gale opened his eyes and turned to look at her. She was blushing faintly, pink clouds beneath the constellations of freckles. “An old song from Waterdeep. I thought, well, it would remind you of home.”
“I don’t need reminders.” Somewhere just beneath the cancerous pain of the orb lay his homesickness. Impatiently, Gale blinked back the tears that had crept up into the corners of his eyes. One made its trickling, tickling way down his cheek. Gods, I wish I could go home.
“I’m sorry,” Arafel said quietly. She shook her head angrily, though he could see the anger was for herself. “I misjudged. And I should know—sometimes home is a painful thing to think about. Would you like me to go?”
“No!” Gale sat up, catching her wrist as she stood and groped for balance. Arafel froze, staring at his hand, darker skin against her own. Muttering an apology, Gale released her, but Arafel remained unmoving. Almost fey, he thought, in the magelight, a creature who didn’t belong to him but had come, inexplicably, to stay for a small space.
“No,” Gale said again. The tightness in his throat wasn’t entirely the orb now. “It’s—it was lovely. And for a moment, the orb was quiet.” That had been true, at least; even the yearning hurt less, a desire for something other than what the orb offered him. “I felt…” Dekarios, what has happened to your vocabulary? All the words he could think of felt too inadequate, or too dangerous. “I felt safe.”
Arafel rocked back into her corner again. “I’m glad.”
Gale coughed. “Could you play another? If it’s not imposing.”
“I already said it’s not imposing,” Arafel snapped, though the quiet smile she offered him said she wasn’t truly irritated. “If you want, I’ll stay until you fall asleep.”
“You don’t need—”
“I want it, if it’s what you want,” Arafel interrupted. “Let yourself need something, Gale, other than lockets.”
Rest. Suddenly and insupportably exhausted, Gale curled on his side and drew a blanket over himself. Oddly he remembered his mother, one of the first memories he could conjure up, sitting by his bedside when he’d been sick, her hand on his forehead to check for fever. I’ll be here, my Gale. I will be always here, and all will be well.
He closed his eyes again. Arafel took up a new song, this one unknown to him. It had no progression that he could follow, no structure or refrain, but climbed and twisted like ivy around him, wrapping around him gently to tug him away from himself. He had the sense that Arafel had him, bound and safe in the confines of her song, suspended safely above the terrifying deep.
One of yours? he wasn’t entirely sure if he asked the question or not; the notes plucked at him gently, pulling him apart fiber by fiber until he drifted like barely-united strands on the Weave. Yes, he thought she replied, or maybe she did not; the answer seemed unimportant as she and the song led him gently, by stages, down and down into warmth and comfort and nothing except for peace.