The Blood of Lathander

by HermeticPrinciples

Summary:

Astarion wants the sun. He wants to bask in the light of dawn, unafraid and unharmed; let it kiss him and not burn; let its light be his private joy, not his fear. How exhausting it is, to be afraid of something he loves so desperately.

 

It turns out the feeling is mutual.

Astarion's quest to see the sun again triggers multiple religious (and romantic) crises.

~

Note on romantic content (setting expectations): Bloodweave takes center-stage in terms of screen time, and the Astarion/Lathander relationship tag is the stage the boys are struggling to survive on. Shadowheart often mediates everyone's experience with love and the gods, for better or worse.

Chapter 1: an intractable problem

Gale moves like a potion master in his own kitchen. Astarion never did appreciate the full extent of Gale’s culinary craft during their long journey together to eliminate their tadpoles—their “unwelcome guests inserted through the ocular region”—but in the stillness of their new lives, Astarion can appreciate it better.

“This one is imported from Cormyr; here, have a whiff,” Gale says, and tilts the small glass jar up at Astarion where the vampire sits perched on a counter.

Astarion’s dead tongue will never permit the taste of food again, but his nose can discern enough to appreciate what Gale is trying to do.

The spice Gale holds up to him is strong and pungent. It’s also a little too similar to garlic for Astarion’s liking.

“Ugh. Only a small amount, if you must,” Astarion says.

It’s considerate of Gale to include Astarion in these evening rituals. The wizard remains as insufferable as Astarion remembers; too considerate, too earnest, too generous. It’s all going to make Astarion sick, but he is also too selfish to say no to Gale’s generosity.

A few years have passed since their shared adventure, and new lines have appeared around Gale’s eyes. He’s a human, a being that ages and disappears too quickly. Astarion didn’t realized it had been so long, for Gale, since they’d last seen each other. When Astarion approached the wizard’s door in Waterdeep for help and saw Gale again, flecks of grey at his temples, Astarion’s heart felt oddly heavy. Never has Astarion had to watch people he admired age and die—his former life as a slave never allowed him to get close enough to anyone to experience such slow-moving sorrow.

Astarion has come here for help with a research problem—Gale’s favorite kind of problem. At heart, the wizard is a librarian, and being asked to put his research skills to the test has filled him with an urgent and determined energy. It also flatters Gale’s ego that Astarion thinks the wizard might be able to find a lead in such an intractable problem.

Astarion misses the sun. He tried to go back to an unlife without it, but every missed sunrise proved too painful. The brief and perilous journey with Gale and the others had afforded Astarion the ability to bear sunlight—no, not bear, bask in it—and Astarion still dreams about the warm kiss of the sun on his alabaster skin in his resting trances. Something in the illithid parasite had held Astarion’s vulnerability to radiance in stasis, but now even imagined sunlight makes his skin itch, and Astarion can’t help but think there must be another way.

When Gale finishes making his dinner, they both go into the small dining room adjacent to the kitchen. Gale’s tower—because of course every wizard is in want of a tower—is modest, furnished only with every luxury necessary to be comfortable. Gale’s vanity lies in his learning, not his possessions. Astarion finds it all a little drab, there’s so much potential for theatrics in a wizard’s tower.

Before Gale can take his seat at the table, the tressym that has adopted Gale—a self-important cat creature with a pair of wings that goes by ‘Tara’—leaps onto the table and meows at his face.

Gale picks back up his food. “Oh, excellent. I have made just enough to stretch between two. Some extra wine and cheese, perhaps some bread—!” Then the wizard is back in his kitchen.

Astarion puts out his hand. Tara drops her chin on his fingers and the vampire scratches her fur with his extra long, hard nails. A well-fed spawn, it turns out, will grow longer nails and hair. Astarion has had to trim both recently.

Gale shouts from the kitchen. “Remind Shadowheart that Astarion is here, will you, Tara? I don’t want our friend to have a run in with that relic unprotected.”

Tara hops onto the ground and darts out the door on all fours. She avoids using her wings inside because Gale gets cross with her for knocking things over.

Their old traveling companion, Shadowheart, had sent ahead a letter asking Gale if she might stay in his tower when she arrived in Waterdeep. She’s in the city as an ambassador of Selûne, goddess of the moon, here to deliver a relic back into the hands of the local dawnbringers. When Astarion read the letter over Gale’s shoulder, he scoffed: the Blood of Lathander was Shadowheart’s to keep, he thought. It was a life-threatening piece of work she’d performed to extract the damn thing out from where it had been kept, otherwise useless and locked away in the bowels of a long-destroyed monastery dedicated to a god that didn’t bother to save his own faithful.

And Astarion has fond memories of that relic. During his brief time as a sun-bathing vampire, he wielded the relic mace. He can recall in vivid detail the sound it made when it crashed into his old master’s skull, the burns that erupted and blistered over the old vampire’s skin when the radiant light of the relic fell over his disgusting face—

The idea of it back in the hands of such self-important, overenthusiastic devotees to the dawn—it makes the blood in his stomach coagulate. The dawnbringers of Waterdeep, the bright, optimistic faithful to the church of Lathander, are intolerable. They smile too much, they laugh too loudly, and soak up the rising sun with such thoughtless ease; they make Astarion sick. He’d love to punch one, just once, but doing that would probably give his knuckles burns.

Tara slinks back into the dining room, and behind her is Shadowheart. The half-elf smiles when she sees Astarion. “It’s been a while,” she says. The radiance of her smile is soft and subtle, like moonlight, so Astarion can tolerate it. There is a dark-colored case hanging from one of her hands, the relic, no doubt, its radiance locked away for Astarion’s sake.

“How are you, my precious little moon witch?” Astarion asks, bowing slightly.

Shadowheart laughs, but follows it with an obligatory scold. “It’s been years since we’ve seen one another and you choose to greet me with blasphemy. Really, Astarion.”

“My dear, my very existence is blasphemy. Don’t let my pretty face fool you into forgetting.”

Gale appears in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. “Dinner is just about prepared, Shadowheart. Do you have a preferred choice of wine?”

Shadowheart directs the light of her attention to Gale. She still keeps her hair moonlight-white. “You shouldn’t have waited up for me, Gale. But maybe I shouldn’t complain too much. I think often about your cooking. Only you could have made old fish heads appetizing.”

As much as Gale craves praise, it never fails to make him a little pink in the face. Part of the reason he keeps a beard, despite the tressym’s motherly displeasure with it, is to avoid looking more boyish than he already behaves. “I assure you that tonight’s meal will be more robust than those thin soups born on the road of such dire necessity. Now, red or white wine, or would you prefer something more powerful?”

“Was it Ashaba Dusk we shared celebrating our victory over the goblins?” Shadowheart asks.

“It was,” Gale says, and smiles. “Shall I fetch a bottle?”

“If you don’t mind.”

Ugh. Astarion puts his hand out and waits for the tressym’s chin to appear in his palm. This never went anywhere. It was always chaste flirting between those two. So utterly boring.

Astarion’s hands are kept busy with petting and scratching Tara, who has become an absolute slut for his attention. Astarion’s sinister-looking nails dig under her fur just right, and she purrs loudly the whole time. Shadowheart and Gale talk enthusiastically over their dinner—stretched with a few additions from Gale’s pantry—and ramble on about what life has been like post-parasite.

Shadowheart, at this point, is a high-ranking member of Selûne’s faithful and has many adventures to recount. Gale teaches, and he complains about grading. They talk as if no time at all has passed since they last shared a celebratory bottle of wine at the end of their battle against the Netherbrain; Astarion had not been there to celebrate with them—he’d had to outrun the burning light of the sun once they’d all been cured.

Darkness—it has all been darkness since then. It’s an old and familiar friend, and he knows how to thrive in the dark, but still—it gets boring, the lack of color.

“And where have you been hiding, Astarion?” Shadowheart asks, since he has yet to insert himself into the conversation.

Tara puts a paw on Astarion’s hand when he pauses; he has to attend to the tressym’s demand for attention while he speaks. “Oh, here and there. As you know, there’s a lot to be done in the dark.”

Shadowheart, a former faithful to the church of Shar, Lady of Darkness and Mistress of Loss, nods. “I see.”

Gale gestures at Shadowheart with his fork. “He’s been meditating in the dark. Nothing sinister.”

Vampires don’t develop calluses, so it’s not obvious he still continues to lead a monk’s life. His hands remain soft and delicate, despite how often he uses his fists. The solitude of the practice had helped him come to terms with his new life as a master-less spawn, and Tav, who introduced him to the practice in the first place, had been right: there’s nothing quite like the power that lies within your own body. Astarion spends his days harnessing the subtle ki energies within his undead flesh, somehow still alive with power that’s independent of either the Weave or the Shadow Weave. Gale finds it all fascinating, of course, and asks him a lot of questions.

Though, this has not stopped Astarion from the occasional night of pickpocketing and, it turns out, the world doesn’t mind if you kill people, so long as you kill the right people when no one is looking. Astarion never went hungry again after his former master was slain.

“And,” Gale adds, “we’ve been doing research. His relationship to the sun is hostile for now, but we’ve done more impossible things than put a vampire out to comfortably sunbathe, haven’t we, Astarion?”

The wizard is as confident and optimistic as a dawnbringer. Astarion rolls his eyes but smiles a little.

Shadowheart, who has always been curiously comfortable making exceptions to the doctrine of whatever goddess she follows, looks pleased by the news. “I’m glad to hear it,” she says. As a cleric of Selûne, the undead are among her enemies; except, of course, Astarion. The Moon Maiden, at least, wasn’t a zealous exterminator of the undead who often existed under her light, so perhaps this exception was easier for Shadowheart than it would be for other clerics. The case Shadowheart left in the corner of the room is thick for a reason: just a few drops of blood from the avatar of a god opposed to undeath was enough to forge a weapon that blinded and exterminated the undead with its mere presence.

“Speaking of our friend’s condition: Shadowheart, I don’t suppose you have mana to spare later tonight for a little restoration magic?”

Shadowheart rolls her head, rather dramatically, to look at Astarion, and it makes her long braid sway. “Really?”

Astarion puts up a hand in defense. “He offers. Don’t look at me. Who am I to turn down such a gift?”

Gale also comes to his defense. “It’s nothing, truly, Shadowheart. Just a little something to keep him out of the sewers of Waterdeep. It’s a very practical arrangement.”

Shadowheart hums. “That explains the sinful lack of garlic in your cooking.”

Gale scoffs and looks genuinely offended. “It doesn’t need garlic, it’s perfectly flavorful without it! Possibly better, even.”

And Shadowheart looks amused. “Yes, I have healing energies to spare, Gale, if you wish.”

Gale dips his head. “I appreciate your generosity, O Faithful Selûnite.”

Shadowheart rolls her eyes; Astarion thinks Tara does, too.

Astarion is bored of this banter. They should go find a room, honestly, but that would require their chaste little hearts to contemplate the idea of sex, and they’re still much too shy to consider something as bestial as that.

The vampire excuses himself from dinner, saying the smell of the food had overwhelmed his superior senses, and he leaves with Tara close behind. Gale has more than once called the cat-thing a traitor for her obvious shift in favoritism, and he does so now. The truth tonight, however, is funnier: Tara can’t stand to watch the clumsy attempts those two make to connect, either. The tressym sees Gale as her young kit and, like a mother, groans at the sight of his blundering attempts to flirt.

Astarion goes to Gale’s bedroom to wait. It’s about once every week or so that the wizard offers blood after his own dinner. Gale is lethargic afterwards, so Astarion visits him in his bed so the man doesn’t have to think about walking after the blood loss. If Shadowheart visits Gale in his bedroom after Astarion is done, perhaps Gale can play the part of sickly waif and get attention that way. Just a small kiss to make it better, Shadowheart—

If only.

The room is small, and feels smaller because of the desk, bookshelves, and stacks of books that migrate here from around the tower and form stacks around where Gale sleeps. It smells like old ink and paper—and lavender, because Gale likes a little sensory enchantment; he teaches illusions, after all. Gale is not as interested in power as he once was; instead, he thinks a lot about color, light, smell, sound, and so on. Who knew it was possible to wax so philosophically about olfaction? The great Gale of Waterdeep, once the Chosen of Mystra, the goddess of magic herself, now goes by simple Gale Dekarios, a professor in illusion magic and grader to an endless stream of amateur scrolls. Astarion will never understand what Gale finds preferable about working with young scholars who probably ignore him half the time. The wizard both complains and speaks with great pride whenever it comes to his students.

Tara is asleep at the foot of the bed—she’s usually sleeping when she’s not fussing over Gale or hunting Astarion down for scratches. Astarion looks out the window from where he sits cross-legged on the mattress. It would be wise to meditate before Gale comes in. It’s easier to stop himself from overindulging in the wizard’s kindness if Astarion is settled in his own body. At least the night is quiet.

Gale’s tower is somewhat removed from the busiest parts of the Waterdeep settlement, but they are near Mt. Waterdeep, which is where the Spires of the Morning are located—the tall, gaudy temple dedicated to Lathander that comes to life every early morning in preparation for a dawn-time ceremony and an awful lot of singing. The clerics and their families live near the spires. Because the rabble rise before the sun, the area is quiet this time of night, the faithful having already had dinner and gone to bed. It’s when Astarion has to rest, just before dawn, that they start to make noise, and it’s incredibly irritating.

In the stillness, Astarion breathes—an unnecessary exercise in his condition but a helpful one. This is a standard exercise but not always an easy one. To find the ki in his body, he has to find, well, his body, and this is challenging. Astarion spent his two hundred or so years as a vampire spawn under the thrall of Cazador Szarr perfecting how to not do that.

Astarion comes at the exercise sideways and first thinks of Tav. The unassuming human with calluses on her fists and a plain, open face, had one talent Astarion still begrudgingly envies: she knew how to listen. It’s this skill in listening that made it possible for her to gather such an eclectic collection of survivors from the nautiloid crash, herself among them, and make them into a team capable of that final, epic feat of defeating the Netherbrain. It’s also because she was a good listener that she noticed how often Astarion psychologically drifted away, sometimes mid-combat, and gently suggested he might try a few of her “little exercises.”

The tadpole had disrupted her hard-earned connection to her body and ki, making her, in some ways, a novice to her body again. She had to relearn herself, and invited Astarion to learn these lessons with her. It had been awful, it’s still awful, because returning to his body means returning to everything that had been done to it, done to others through it, and the things he’d done with it voluntarily.

Astarion used to do this with an amulet in his hand, a haunted trinket that threatened to cast him into a giggle fit if he didn’t focus on the feel of the simple metal and the somewhat-rough cut out of the Lathanderian sun. It had belonged to a monk, one cursed by Shar to laugh forever in the face of his undeath as a ghost. Astarion doesn’t miss the little voice of the now-banished spirit, but he misses the weight of the object, as well as some of its old power. The ghost had left behind some of his ki in the amulet and Astarion once drew upon the residual magic to aid his own fists. He can’t touch it now: holy symbols are antithetical to his vampiric condition.

Breathe.

The flow of his ki is blocked tonight in a typical place: his back. It’s usually his back, his neck, or his pelvis that harbors a block, a dam within himself he wouldn’t notice unless he went looking for it, and releasing the block—why does he do this again? The whole point of “dissociating,” as Tav called it, was to make the day-to-day tolerable. This is intolerable—

Astarion pulls air into his empty lungs to remind his body that it exists, that it moves, and that it feels.

Gods, it feels everything, doesn’t it? It’s so hard to feel safe in his own body.

He can almost hear the splash and hiss of a demonic dagger being dipped into blessed water—blessed so that the marks will be permanent. Cazador played with liquid death, dipping his precious blade into water blessed by the worst possible kind of cleric, a cleric of light, life, and dawn. He used it to cut open his spawn, enjoying most the torture of the one he said screamed the sweetest.

Astarion forces more air into his body, air it doesn’t need but air he wants because it’s the only way he’s going to ride through this damn exercise. The scars in his back itch. He has to witness this, has to witness the whole of this damn nightmare—what his mind recalls, what his body remembers—because if he runs away now, it will be difficult to come back.

Oh, but he would love to run away. He’s very good at that.

That power he’s familiar with now quivers deep within his belly, and he observes this, too. No, he can’t run away, not now. There is something within him he wants, and to get it, he has to accept all his body has to offer, the pain of the past included.

It’s a shame, really, that Tav isn’t here to compliment his efforts. He always appreciated that. But she’s somewhere in the stars now, helping their alien friend Lae’zel do battle against an ancient lich and demi-god, riding on the backs of dragons, no doubt. Astarion’s struggles seem so small compared to all that.

—more air, an ongoing reminder to his body that it exists.

The imitation breathing is something Astarion has always done to speak, forcing air through his vocal cords when he needed to flatter and seduce lonely souls into Cazador’s palace. He knows how to use air to scream, too, because the agony of his servitude wanted out of his body, out into the world, and it was the only way he knew how to get it out—gods, Cazador loved that awful sound.

Breathing is also the first thing he’d done when he realized he stood in the sun, unharmed. Perhaps it was an old vestigial reflex, like a gasp. The air he sucked into his body that day on the beach was warm, and the sun poured the heat of the day over his his cool, unharmed flesh, warmer than any kiss a mortal could have placed upon his cheeks. Powerful, gentle, and constant.

His body remembers the sun. Whatever the sun felt like in his past life, the life before vampirism, was a memory lost to time and darkness. The sun he remembers now is the sun that watched him and his companions as he made his way back to Baldur’s Gate, the sun that rose over their camp each morning and announced the start of a new day—a day that brought them closer to either doom or a cure. The smell of Gale’s cooking usually followed soon after the sun broke over the horizon, along with the the sound of Lae’zel’s fighting drills, and Tav greeted the light with a gentle, practiced series of bows and stretches Astarion always found curious.

Shadowheart had not been a morning person back then, and she likely still isn’t. At some point in their travels, she would allow Lae’zel, of all people, to fix her hair in the morning while she nursed a cup of tea provided by the druid Halsin and suffered Gale’s verbose insistence that a robust breakfast before a long day of hard adventuring was of dire importance. Astarion sympathized, the sun still had an exhausting effect on his system, but he was always awake when the sun rose, and he made sure to be positioned in the sunniest spot for the event, usually on top of a boulder near where everyone camped. Halsin said he looked like a fluffy white cat sunbathing, which made Astarion scowl. The druid had then gone so far as to wildshape into such a cat and placed himself next to Astarion to illustrate. Halsin thought himself very funny. Astarion landed a swift kick that sent Halsin-as-a-cat sailing off the boulder and the comment had not been made again.

Astarion’s back still aches, but the ki flows more easily through his body. He hadn’t noticed the blockage crumble. The breathing he does now is an act of appreciation: his body exists.

Gale opens the door to the bedroom and whispers the word for a cantrip and casts the fire into the hearth nearby. He stops next to the hearth and bends to move some books he decides are too close to the fire. He grunts when he bends over.

One of the stacks of books tumbles and Gale grumbles at his past self who’d thought such a tall stack was a good idea. Tara uncurls from where she sleeps on the bed and hops over to where Gale is still bent over. Then she climbs onto his back. He places his fists on his hips, still bent. “Really, now.”

Tara purrs.

Astarion moves from where he sits and slides over the mattress onto his stomach. He watches, face held up on his fists, as Gale reorganizes the mess he’s made into a more acceptable mess; the criteria for what constitutes a more acceptable mess is not clear to Astarion. Tara darts out of the room once Gale seems to be done. She’s never around to watch this next part. Astarion doubts the tressym approves.

Astarion slithers onto his side, props his head up on his palm, and pats the bed next to himself.

Astarion can sense the blood rush into Gale’s face, which is why Astarion does this. It’s very funny, watching Gale struggle in the minutes that lead up to feeding.

“Such—ministration—is not necessary. I keep telling you this,” Gale says, and sits on the edge of the bed to remove his shoes.

Sure it isn’t. Gale insists he does this favor as a friend, whatever he thinks that means, but Astarion knows it’s never that simple. Gifts are not given for their own pleasure; there’s always a cost at the end of them. Astarion trusts Gale, as in, trusts that whatever this will cost Astarion is something he’s willing to pay. Well, at least Astarion hopes the cost won’t hurt too much; willing blood is more filling, and it’s almost impossible to turn down.

Gale waves a hand over his shoulder at Astarion. “Stop that.”

Right. No bedroom eyes. Astarion rolls his eyes instead and Gale lies down. Astarion works his jaw and breathes to tune himself to the ki still moving through his body more-or-less uninhibited. He’ll take only what he needs and go. Shadowheart is probably somewhere in the hall, waiting for Astarion to appear, likely prepared with a sharp, disapproving look. No one except Gale ever really got used to Astarion’s condition, and Gale is motivated by curiosity first, a need to survive second.

Maybe this whole arrangement is going to cost Astarion a lot of stolen books, he thinks, amused with himself.

Astarion hovers above Gale, who makes a point of looking toward the door so that his neck is bared and his eyes are aimed elsewhere. Physical intimacy isn’t something Gale is proficient in; his last lover had been a goddess who insisted on incorporeal experiences and his only friend until now was an ornery cat with wings. Hugs from his overbearing mother don’t count.

The vampire gives Gale a quick puff of air on the neck before biting because it doesn’t startle the wizard as badly that way. There’s no getting used to something like this.

Compared to Astarion’s cold mouth, Gale’s blood is hot. Astarion breathes in through his nose to keep his head level—as level as he can, anyway—because he’s in danger of getting lost in the heat that pools in his mouth and down his throat. The ki that rests in Astarion’s body lights up when the blood rolls into his stomach.

Gale puts a hand on the side of Astarion’s head and breathes, too, relaxed, now that the initial shock of Astarion’s teeth is over. As Gale’s heart beats underneath Astarion’s chest, he pulls small mouthfuls of blood out through the wound with every beat. Trace amounts of the smells Gale had put under Astarion’s nose earlier in the kitchen linger in Gale’s veins.

And Astarion dutifully remains tuned to his body’s need so that he doesn’t take more than what’s necessary.

It’s not a lot, turns out; with the regularity Gale offers his neck and the filling nature of willing blood, there’s not much Astarion needs to take. What Astarion’s instincts want to do is take and take until there’s nothing left for taking, but that’s an old impulse, one that wouldn’t ultimately satisfy Astarion. It’s an impulse Cazador never grew out of: child-like hunger, where the eyes were bigger than the stomach and the satisfaction never true.

Besides, Astarion prefers Gale alive.

Astarion sits up, hips hovering above Gale’s because the wizard prefers not to be straddled during these interactions. Gale covers his neck with a hand. “Are you sure, Astarion? That’s far less than your usual. I hardly notice the loss this time.”

Patting Gale’s cheek, Astarion gets up and off the bed. “I promise I’m quite satisfied.”

“You’re not scared of Shadowheart coming in with the Blood of Lathander, I hope?” Gale asks, wry, sitting up only a little, propped up on his elbows.

Astarion laughs. “No, my friend, I am not afraid of the little moon witch.” Relying on touch, since he can’t check his reflection, Astarion wipes away what traces of blood he can from the corners of his mouth. “Consider me well fed.”

Gale doesn’t look convinced. “Promise?”

Astarion laughs. “I promise. Anything more would be dessert, and as sweet as you are, I’m not in the mood tonight.”

This works to shut Gale up, and the blood has returned to the wizard’s cheeks.

As expected, Shadowheart is just outside the door in the hall. She gestures to an empty spot on her face when Astarion tries to pass her by. He stops, recognizes the gesture as a sign there’s still something on his face, and mirrors her rubbing circular motions until she nods. “You got it,” she says. They walk around each other, Shadowheart to heal Gale and Astarion to the library.

Books, tomes, scrolls, endless, endless paper—some enchanted, some almost too old to be handled, and some held together entirely by traces of magic. Astarion doesn’t like to read, but he has become desperate. Without saying as much, Astarion has gone a little mad with the idea of returning to the sun. Gale’s enthusiasm tempers Astarion’s impatience but only by a fraction.

He needs this—Astarion needs the sunlight; the sight of it, the feel of it, the scent of it—does sunlight have a scent?—that distinct smell that comes with the dawn, when everything is roused by the light and heat and the promise of another day.

So, he reads, even though he hates it. Why Gale and other wizards find this chore so delightful is entirely lost on Astarion. The words practically hop around the page, for gods’ sake, and holding down a written idea for more than a few minutes is impossible. Honestly, Astarion has wrestled with easier to tame goblins. Gale looked puzzled when Astarion asked if there was a spell to keep the letters in place, and when Gale asked why Astarion did so much reading on the road to Baldur’s Gate if he hated the activity so much, Astarion didn’t have the heart to tell the wizard that the “reading” was for show. Always camped near Gale, Astarion decided to make himself look as non-threatening as possible during their idle hours and Gale’s stack of books had been right there. Astarion had actually read some of them, but it had been a somewhat painful exercise. It at least had been oddly satisfying, doing something with someone without actually having to interact, and Gale is always so pleased to make recommendations. There had been so many dusty old books on the road to be perused.

But now Astarion has to actually read, and all this reading has done so far is mock him. Wherever Astarion or Gale look for answers about how to cure vampirism, the recommended “cure” is usually at the end of a stake or a bath in sunlight—put it down, all the records say. Put the damned thing down.

When they study radiance itself, that thing Astarion misses so much, all the material they have is steeped in overly intense theology and worshipful poetry that may or may not mean something practically applicable. The gods can’t hear Astarion—he’s already tried to reach them, for hundreds of years he tried—but the soul of an undead creature is of no interest to the gods. When they study undeath—this research is more difficult for Gale to acquire and some of it is acquired via questionable channels—all they get are instructions for commanding the undead or becoming powerful through undeath. Alas, the price for such power is often sun-intolerance.

Astarion watches the sky from the library windows. The sky goes from black to dark grey, from grey to dark blue—dawn is coming, and Astarion isn’t an inch closer to it than he was on the evening of their victory over the Netherbrain.

He misses the parasite. Sometimes he likes to pretend it would have been possible to stay infected with it forever. Astarion’s little vacation in the sun away from thralldom was a delightful illusion he relives in his trances every day.

Gale’s next line of inquiry will be in medicine and alchemy. This particular area involves a lot of math and funny pictures of sex in bottles, neither of which make sense to Astarion, so it’s up to Gale to see if there’s anything helpful to be found among those studies. Gale has also begun to work on illusions he thinks might, at least, help Astarion feel like he’s in the sun. So far, the illusions Gale has come up with either pale in comparison to the true sensation or actively burn Astarion’s skin. Besides, the illusions won’t make it safe for Astarion to witness a true sunrise or go to the morning markets with Gale to pick out vegetables—Astarion likes the idea of it, these little domestic tasks Gale finds so much delight in doing during the day. Well, not in the idea of doing them himself, but the idea of watching someone else do them—Gale, specifically; Astarion will be damned again if anyone tries to make him carry things like bread and apples.

The dawnbringers, the damn Lathanderians, are up and about, getting ready to make a lot of noise. Astarion watches the earliest risers step into the streets and peers at the spires where more tiny shapes move about. Gale says the temple is built out of a pink marble; that detail is mostly lost to Astarion, since he never has enough light to perceive the pale color. Theoretically, Astarion could approach the spires at night with a firelight for a closer look, but he’d likely be struck down by some zealous cosmic force if he so much as looked in the direction of Lathander’s faithful.

The statue of their god positioned outside the spires, his arms upraised toward the west and a bright, star-shape planted on his brow, is depicted with his foot pressed over a skull, a clear, obvious stance on what’s to be done with the undead. Unlife is an affront to true life and must be exterminated—that’s the Lathanderian position.

Astarion goes to the room Gale has kindly set aside for him. There are no windows, and the wizard had even gone so far as to get soil from Astarion’s un-birth place to make the spawn’s rest as restful as possible. Gale is a man of learned details.

The soil is under the bed because gods forbid Astarion actually sleep in dirt. He lies down and positions himself neatly for a trance. Already, he can feel the weight of the radiant dawn outside. It makes his body heavy and sleepy.

It’s disappointing nights like these that make him regret passing up his chance to complete the Rite of Profane Ascension.

Astarion closes his eyes and breathes, witnessing his ki. When he does, Astarion also notices his skin begins to itch. Memories of the sun will do that—

But this itch is awful. Astarion sits up and rubs his arms and legs and growls as the sensation continues and spreads. He looks around the room, then he bends over to look under the bed—nothing: no source of light or anything radiant. The itch shifts to a burn and panic rises in Astarion’s throat. He checks the walls. Is there a crack somewhere letting in the daylight?

Nothing.

—and then it’s gone. The pain and the itch fade, and the room is as it was before: dark. Astarion stares into the air for a while, body tense, hands braced for a fight. When he finally relaxes and positions himself again, his trance-visions are of early morning sunlight. In his visions, the light doesn’t burn.

Chapter 2: when the sun meets the moon

Notes:

Nothing like a little spiritual reticence with Shadowheart for Easter.

A very special thank you to Chthonion for beta-reading this cosmic mess. I appreciate you.

“You can’t cast a shadow without some light.” - Shadowheart

---

Of course Gale has been feeding Astarion, why wouldn’t he be feeding the wayward spawn? The wizard had never let any of them go without a meal even in the shadow-cursed landscape around Moonrise Towers; naturally, he would be offering dinner to even the undead of their companions. Back then, no one had worried about where Astarion’s sustenance came from because he made do with the blood of their enemies. But now someone has to worry about Astarion, and of course it’s Gale.

Gale to the rescue; if he didn’t feel useful, he felt worthless—an observation Shadowheart made, not a confession from the wizard himself. She isn’t sure how she feels about Astarion seeking out Gale’s help—the wizard doesn’t turn down a need or a challenge—but it’s not like there is anywhere else for Astarion to turn to for, well, anything. The vampire’s unlife is always on a knife’s edge, no matter what he decides to do with himself. Last Shadowheart had seen Astarion, he giggled about his new found calling as a “hero,” a life of accepting work that gave him permission to kill and meet his hunger, but all it takes to ruin that kind of adventuring life is a ray of sunlight or a perceptive paladin. He will, in theory, live until the world itself collapses; if he can outrun the sun for that long, anyway.

And then there is Gale’s neck. Shadowheart doesn’t know how to feel about this little arrangement, either. Her Sharren training held the undead as tools at best, her Selûnite training declares the undead are to be eliminated—though it’s interesting Selûne’s light doesn’t bother vampires the way Lathander’s does, and Shadowheart’s personal experience with Astarion suggests it’s—not necessary to worry about this one; undeath is supposed to warp the corpse of its victim into a single-minded, soulless and inherently evil entity, but Astarion is—complicated. It’s never been clear to Shadowheart if he’s fighting some evil within or just hungry. Vampirism is nothing if not a ceaseless yank on an unholy appetite for power and blood.

As Shadowheart sits on the very edge of the wizard’s mattress, Shadowheart summons a pinch of restoration magic with a word and a flick of her fingers. Her patron deity’s power flows gently through Shadowheart’s mind. Gale closes his eyes against the blue light that swells around her hand and Shadowheart touches his throat where Astarion just finished his dinner. The bite marks, already partly closed, disappear, as she reverses the damage.

Gale pokes his flesh experimentally. “My gratitude.”

“How long does he plan to stay?” Shadowheart asks. Gale looks older than she remembers, and she is reminded how quickly humans age. Feeding Astarion can’t be doing his longevity any favors. Gale can do what he wants with his limited time alive but he doesn’t have a history of being overly concerned for his own wellbeing.

Gale sits up and pulls on his head to stretch his neck. “There isn’t a timeline, exactly. We’re on a mission to do something that hitherto hasn’t been done, so far as we can tell. It will take time.”

Nothing short of divine intervention is going to fix Astarion’s problem, Shadowheart thinks, but saying so would just sound like a challenge to Gale—and it’s best not to mention anything that might remind the wizard he passed up an opportunity to become divine intervention itself. Godhood wouldn’t have suited him, anyway. He’d likely have lost his sweet brown eyes to some kind of gaudy divine luminescence and his forgiving nature to the stringent way of the gods. Shadowheart takes an extra moment to look at and remember the color of his eyes. But loss—they will be lost, in time—

And she sets aside the old lesson. She holds onto the memory. “Don’t go dry in the meantime,” Shadowheart says, remembering still the incredible quantities of blood Astarion is capable of consuming.

Gale shrugs. “Please, it was hardly a nibble. Without cultists to fight every day, he’s not as hungry, it seems.”

Shadowheart can attest to that—she’s both less hungry and a little fatter, now that their adventures are over. These days, her clerical duties are more, well, clerical. The extent of her exercise tonight will be walking to the Spires of the Morning as an ambassador with the Blood of Lathander.

She’ll stay up a little later than her typical hour to make the trip, returning to the dawnbringers their holy relic at the break of day. She initially held onto the weapon after Baldur’s Gate, fond of the memories it evoked when she gripped it in her fist. It reminds her of the days she fought the darkness even as she considered herself a warrior for the darkness—her truer self came out in her actions even when her conscious mind was surrendered to Shar.

Most of Shadowheart’s earliest memories are ones formed not that long ago. Many of them feature Gale hunched over his spell book and Astarion pretending to read beside the wizard, or Tav doing her meditations and Halsin communing with nature by talking to ornery squirrels. The sound of Lae’zel’s whet stone against the edge of her blade is the ever-present background noise to all of these recollections.

However fond Shadowheart is of the mace and the memories attached to it, she uses the mace so infrequently she’s begun to feel guilty keeping it. The thing is designed to fight the undead, but Shadowheart doesn’t do that anymore. So, she consulted her superiors, and they recommended she return the relic to their Lathanderian allies. The dawnbringers had assumed the weapon was lost after the destruction of the Rosymorn monastery. They welcomed the proposed gift with delighted and exuberant messages and asked Shadowheart to bring it to their greatest cathedral, the one in Waterdeep, on ceremony; the moon will hand the mace’s light to the sun at that infinitely small moment when both bodies rule the sky and mark the beginning of a new day.

“Will you stay in Waterdeep long?” Gale asks. “There are many excellent sights to see and many restaurants—all memorable experiences,” he says, adding the last part at the end with a bit of cheek and mischief in his eye. “There’s plenty to do in Waterdeep, even at night, if you prefer moonlight.”

When Shadowheart got to Waterdeep, she thought she might stay for a little while, take in a few sights, meditate in Selûne’s temple, reminisce with Gale and Astarion over dinner and wine because reliving past experiences is a novelty she can enjoy now—but she met with the High Priestess at the Selûnite temple, the House of the Moon, before arriving at Gale’s tower; there had been a conversation about her future. Shadowheart doesn’t know how to feel about it yet.

“It’s unclear, but I won’t overstay my welcome.”

Tara jumps onto the bed and positions herself at Gale’s other side, paws on his leg, waiting for attention. Gale scratches her chin. “Oh, don’t worry about that. Company is always welcome. It’s rather quiet around here, especially on the days I teach. Make yourself at home for as long as you need. Tara doesn’t bite.”

The tressym grabs Gale’s finger with her teeth.

“You’re quite terrible, I hope you know that,” Gale says, to Tara.

With remembering comes the capacity to miss things, like the quiet and unassuming way Gale insists. Shadowheart missed this; she hugs Gale around his shoulders when she stands before she can stop herself. Shadowheart can’t be shy with the human because she will later remember being shy and will regret being shy when it’s too late to be less so; Gale, of course, doesn’t know what to do with the gesture except pat her back and mutter something only partly comprehensible about her staying longer as “not a problem.”

“Rest well, Gale. I’ll be making some preparations for an annoyingly long night,” she says, straightening a crease in her robes. “I’m going to what I’m sure is going to be a very loud and bright morning ceremony in honor of the Morninglord. I’ll be back after dawn.”

Gale’s look is knowing. “Oh, dear. Good luck. They can be quite rowdy.”

That’s probably an understatement. Lathander is among the most popular of the gods; the god of beginnings is beseeched for blessings and offered prayers by even the most unreligious because everyone starts something new with the hope it will go well. New children, new marriages, new businesses, new adventures, and so on. Shadowheart and her fellow Selûnites meditate on change, a much slower, more contemplative domain, where beginnings are simply a part of the longer cycle of being. Lathander explodes over the world every morning with optimistic promise and bright energy that’s a bit too much for someone like Shadowheart. He and his followers are allies to Selûne—but at a distance.

It’s funny that Astarion, who despises such obnoxious optimism and bright gaiety, adored the dawn so much during their travels. It’s tragic, too, how much time and energy he puts toward trying to see it again; he so loved the sun—if only the feeling were mutual. Shadowheart ultimately hopes Gale succeeds in bringing Astarion back into the daylight, she just won’t say so out loud. If anyone can do this impossible thing, it’s Gale.

In the guest room down the hall from Gale’s, Shadowheart kneels to meditate in the moonlight admitted through the window.

Shadowheart’s head had once been very empty, and that made it easy to meditate on her identity as a servant of Shar. Everything left after memories are surrendered to the Lady of Loss are the scraps that serve Shar’s purposes. It was easy to meditate back then. It was easy to serve. There is some truth in Shar’s teaching, even if Shadowheart ought not admit it out loud: there is freedom in not knowing. A mind full of memories carries with it burdens.

It’s difficult now to meditate because the memories flicker around the edges of her mind and often trample through the center of her peace. Simple memories tumble through, such as that of Gale contemplating the weight of the Crown he pulled from the harbor and the sinking sensation it made in her stomach when, for a moment, Shadowheart worried he would keep it. Bittersweet memories of loss follow soon after, like that of watching her companions, Lae’zel and Tav, take off into the sky on the backs of dragons to slay a pretender god. In the timelessness of the astral planes, they may fight for centuries or more: Shadowheart may never see them again.

—the chilling sight of Astarion’s skin flaking away almost faster than he could run when the full extent of his condition reclaimed his body. They had just crawled out of the harbor after only barely surviving their fight against the Netherbrain above Baldur’s Gate; it’s impressive that Astarion had any strength left to run. He’s still running.

And her parents: Shadowheart found her parents, but she will never remember them, and Shar robbed her of the opportunity to know them again. What’s left of them are moon motes, drifting through the mortal plane, gentle lights in the darkness that lead lost souls onto surer paths. Shadowheart will never know who she was before Shar, not even through the memories of another.

Watching memories form before her eyes hurts, too, because then those events and those people will sail past and fall behind Shadowheart, in time.

Except Astarion, probably. He’ll outlive them all if he keeps running. Shadowheart wonders how much he’ll remember a thousand years from now, if he even gets that far—his quest to see the sun might get him killed if he’s not careful.

She is not very good at this. It was easier to lose herself in the darkness. But darkness isn’t what she wants. Shadowheart wants to know herself.

—eventually. She can’t take another minute of this. Selûne will wait a moment. Shadowheart gets off her knees and pulls the Lathanderian relic from under the bed. She removes the Blood of Lathander from its case.

The light mace is warm in her palm. The head is small, but the spines are long and wickedly sharp. Light emanates from the blood of the Morninglord speckled within the amber head and shines through the golden spines. When Lathander himself appeared in avatar form to strike down a lich who once stood among Mystra’s Chosen, the avatar was struck, and Lathander bled from his side, an embarrassing injury, but one he and his faithful used to forge a weapon designed specifically to slay the undead for the offense. Protected from the weapon’s spines by the light armor of her robes, Shadowheart puts the mace on her hip by her right hand, and walks.

She remembers this, the feeling of its light at her side—and she remembers the particular way it sticks into the flesh of her enemies. It’s neither clean or efficient but it is sinfully gratifying. She sits in these memories and makes her walk into a walking meditation: remembering, but by her own volition and desire. Her mind fetches scraps from the past, it puts them together, the flavor always slightly different, never the same twice, and the inconsistency of it makes her heart ache. Remembering is a fight against loss, a fight against the inevitable fading away of every worthwhile moment she’s ever had—

The moon above Shadowheart’s head, shining down on the street where she walks, reminds her: the full moon gives way to the new and the new moon gives way to the full. Cycles and seasons, day and night, the new moon and the full: change defines everything. This is what Shar robbed of her followers: the chance to change. There are no new beginnings for someone who has become a void. The Lady of Loss would render the new moon into a black hole, like her gaping black mirrors—take everything and create nothing.

These Waterdeep streets are mostly empty and the air is cold. It’s chilliest just before the dawn, and the slight light that begins to touch the sky ahead of the sun signals the end of nighttime activities. In this space between night and day, Lathander stirs and Selûne prepares for bed, gods passing by one another and touching hands in an ageless transfer of dominion, though Selûne will often linger in the background even as the sun shines, an unassuming and ghostly moon in the sky.

The path that leads up to the Spires of Morning is pale, made of the same pink marble as the spires themselves. Shadowheart’s steps are careful and deliberate, reverent, because this is holy ground. She is a guest of the Morning Lord and will conduct herself with the appropriate respect as she steps into a new day.

There is the flicker of movement ahead: people preparing for a special ceremony.

The Spires of Morning are a cathedral made up of seven towers, each capped with a combination of bronze, silver, and gold, and each tower is perforated with many stain glass windows. The path takes Shadowheart toward the coast where she will meet the Morninglord upon his arrival. Lathander’s likeness stands guard in front of the cathedral, a man with his arms spread out above his head, a star on his brow, and golden spines meant to emulate the rays of the sun extend out from his arms and his hands. Under his foot is a skull, easy to miss if the eyes of the faithful are turned up toward Lathander’s radiant face, shining with a finish that makes the stone of the likeness glow in response to the faintest trace of light.

It’s all a little flashy, Shadowheart thinks. Selûnites encourage muted tones, as well as confident but soft shows of power, strength, and praise. The soft glow of the moon doesn’t rouse the senses the way the first burst of sunlight does when it shoots out over the world. When the moon rises, it’s quiet and unassuming, but when the sun rises, roosters scream, sunflowers twist their heads, babies shriek, and people stumble together into a new day of venture with the promise of a fresh start.

Gods, Shadowheart does not miss mornings on the road. Everyone she traveled with during that precarious journey to Baldur’s Gate had been a morning person—even the vampire would be awake and positioned to receive the first rays of the sun. Lae’zel and Tav got up with the discipline of warriors, Gale with the anxiety of a mother who knew that someone had to make breakfast, and Halsin probably got up to talk to the damn birds who screamed every morning—

She does not like mornings, but she is fond of remembering those mornings. Shadowheart chooses to reflect on those mornings as she prepares to face this one.

Ahead, there is loud, joyful noise—the sound of bells, chimes, cymbals and drums and happy people chatting about nothing and laughing over everything. The tall doors to the cathedral open for Shadowheart. She braces herself.

Let’s get on with it.

The Selûnite is met with the noise of a cacophonous and cheerful welcome from many mouths and a room full of bright reds and pinks and golds. The air is thick with the smell of a hot breakfast filled with meats, eggs, fruits, and sweets. Clerics and priests and the very-faithful have already begun their morning ministrations—of laughter and song—and there are small children everywhere. Bright light beams out from lanterns above the crowd and radiant smiles greet Shadowheart as arms extend toward her. She is met with hugs, light touches, kisses on the face, and tiny hands on the lower half of her robes. Her right side is given a wide birth—no one wants a personal encounter with the Blood of Lathander. Shadowheart finds herself leaning in that direction to get some air.

“We should not overwhelm the Moon Maiden’s faithful!” shouts a voice, cheerful and powerful, laced with something familiar to Shadowheart. She knows the unsettling feeling of divinity-laced words spoken from the heart of an aasimar. Their words press upon the skin with the energy of the aasimar’s godly sire.

A paladin, tall and broad and radiant with their own light, stands at the end of the celebration hall. Their wings are revealed, spread open and wide, the feathers gold like the trimming around their heavy-plate armor; the metal is otherwise a shining, pale pink. A large symbol for the god Lathander, the sun rising over a road, sits at the center of their chest-plate. The paladin smiles broadly with perfect, white teeth at Shadowheart when the enthusiastic welcome committee creates space for her to move again.

The paladin extends their arms. Their eyes, typical of aasimar, have no pupils. “My sister in divine light. Welcome! You honor us with the return of my father’s blood. I am Knight Callahan, the Dawn Star of Waterdeep. I am here to greet you and take you to our Sunrise Lord.” Then Callahan waves their arm over toward the feasting table where food and drink are stacked. “The dawn is almost upon us: eat! We will meet my father’s light prepared for a new day.”

This paladin possesses the same intensity as Dame Aylin, Selûne’s own beloved aasimar; once a prisoner of Shar, Aylin’s death was supposed to be Shadowheart’s final trial of faith for Shar’s favor—a trial she failed to complete. In sparing the aasimar, Shadowheart helped to shake Shar’s shadow curse off the walls of Moonrise Towers before she and her companions ever reached the Gate. It was Aylin’s intensity, righteous fury and soul-shattering conviction that shook the last of the scales off Shadowheart’s eyes. The aasimar saw in Shadowheart what not even the Lady of Loss could take: her light.

Dame Aylin is a loyal and faithful friend, but she is also an awful lot. This aasimar is like that, too, Shadowheart can feel it from here at the other end of the hall.

Moon Maiden, preserve me.

Shadowheart isn’t allowed to simply walk past the feast, so she accepts fruit, which someone insists cannot be appreciated without sweetmeat, which another insists must be accompanied by wine. Her hands are sticky when Shadowheart manages to get away.

Knight Callahan does not tuck their wings away more than they must. When Shadowheart approaches the paladin, they merely move their wing aside and wave to the stairs that lead further up into the tower. The wings hover behind Shadowheart as Callahan follows her. Aasimar are as theatric as their sires, Shadowheart thinks. Dame Aylin is also dramatic, but at least she puts her wings away in the company of others—usually. Aylin will sometimes leave her silvery wings out when her lover Isobel is nearby to see, obviously and deliberately peacocking. It was always someone else who picked the wayward feathers off the floor.

They climb. The Spires are built out of pink marble inside and out, and the metal-frame windows placed at every turn in the tower are wrought with expert craft and skill, inlaid with with thick, colored glass in rich reds and autumns. The halls are flushed with low, anticipatory light from the outside, as well as the radiant light from the mace at Shadowheart’s hip. This is a sight Shadowheart decides to internalize, and she takes in every detail she can so that there’s more for her to recall later. Here, it is warm and beautiful.

She and the aasimar step out onto the terrace that caps the spire. A Sunrise Lord, the highest ranked among the dawn priests of Lathander’s clergy, opens his arms, mimicking the raised gesture of the god’s likeness towering behind him. His sun robes, a thick set of garments in red and gold, thickly embroidered with shimmering thread to the greatest extent the fabric allows, audibly rustle when he moves. The headpiece that compliments his robes is equally heavy, red, and overly-ornamented. The soft glow of the emerging sun highlights the edges of his form. “Honored servant of the Moon Maiden, the dawn welcomes you.”

The air shifts when the dawn is about to break. Shadowheart can feel it in the way the temperature drops, just a little, and in the settling of her spirit as her goddess hands the day over to her old ally. Shadowheart’s movements are guided by a tug at her mind, guidance from her goddess, on what to do. She takes the mace off her hip and holds it up to the sky; Lathander’s blood, encased in his own amber-ichor, beams as the dawn breaks.

It blinds Shadowheart, the light. She closes her eyes and the hair stands on her skin as the light floods over the terrace and their bodies. The Spires burst into song. The throat of every nearby faithful bursts into a sudden practiced harmony to welcome the Morninglord. The Sunrise Lord’s voice is bright and powerful, but Knight Callahan’s voice behind Shadowheart has an etherial quality to it, striking among the rest, crackling with diluted divinity.

She doesn’t notice when her fist is empty. Shadowheart clamps her hands together and then grabs her hips. The mace is gone. The Blood of Lathander is not here. As the paladin and the Sunrise Lord continue to sing, Shadowheart looks around stupidly for the relic and an old fear rises up in her throat: one of the memories Shar leaves in her faithful is the fear of failure and memories of the swift, painful punishments that follow.

The song flooding the spire persists. The faithful continue to sing. But Callahan laughs, deep and rich, and breaks away from the song as they do. Their eyes are brighter than they’d been before when they look at Shadowheart. There is no painful retribution here. When they speak, their golden feathered wings stretch to their fullest breadth. “My father has accepted back his blood. The relic has been returned to his side.”

Shadowheart stares at Callahan. This was supposed to happen. Right—though a warning would have been nice. And what a waste, she thinks, before she can stop herself. It was a good weapon.

The voices stop, and when they do, the world is, for a moment, unnaturally quiet and pregnant with possibility.

Then the birds resume their own less coordinated tunes.

That’s the sound of bedtime for Shadowheart. She would like to do that now. As one of the Moon Maiden’s faithful, she favors a little darkness, and all of that has been banished from here. It’s time to rest.

Knight Callahan extends their arms. “I would like to take you to the morning grove as a guest. Our wines and harvests are rich and we would honor your a little longer. May I?”

It would not be diplomatic to say no. She’s here as an ambassador, she should play the part. Lathander and Selûne are among the most powerful of the gods and aligned with every other need and desire of mortals; they are the powers behind the ongoing fight against death and darkness. Their clergy are obligated to get along.

Shadowheart takes a deep breath. Better get this over with. “Lead the way,” she says.

Shadowheart doesn’t like the way Knight Callahan smiles when they step closer, and then she realizes what the aasimar is about to do. Dame Aylin has made similar looks before performing similar stunts—it’s too late to protest when the paladin seizes Shadowheart and their wings grab the air.

The ground is torn away. They are going to, quite literally, kiss the sun at this height. Shadowheart is glad she did not accept more than a small sampling of the breakfast feast before because her stomach seizes when she’s thrust into the sky in defiance of gravity. It’s worse when the aasimar stabilizes, stalls and drops them both.

Shadowheart is not the sort to scream, she only gasps, as her heart lurches into her throat and threatens to come out alongside her breakfast.

Knight Callahan’s wings snap out to catch the fall and float them down the last twenty feet. Their boots softly touch the grass. Shadowheart staggers back and grabs her knees, bending over to catch her breath and sense of balance. “Do that again,” she breathes, she looks back up at the paladin, “and I’ll rip your damn wings off. Slowly.”

Callahan smiles with that broad, perfect grin, but their wings also disappear with a flicker of light. “I thought we might personally greet my father on this happy occasion.”

Shadowheart glares.

Callahan laughs nervously and their pupil-less eyes turn away. “But you’re right. I should have warned you.” Then they move some of their golden hair off their shoulder and point toward a gazebo in the nearby orchard. “Come! We have prepared for you only our finest.”

The load-bearing pillars of the gazebo are statues of Lathander, each facing out from the center of the structure like guardians, and each holds up in his arms a babe with spines of sunlight emanating from around the child’s head. If the god isn’t depicted as a personified sunrise, he is depicted holding a baby. As the god of all new beginnings, he is a frequent favorite to midwives and new mothers, as well as agriculturists and merchants, people who rely habitually on new deals, ventures, and harvests. The edges of each statue’s robes are decorated with fine, pink stones that catch the sunlight.

Children play in the field nearby, whooping and shrieking at each other under the eyes of their parents.

The table is laid with another breakfast, more robust than the initial feast foisted on Shadowheart earlier. Callahan sits only after Shadowheart does; and then they play host: this bread is made from flour produced at one of the church’s nearby mills, this wine is from the old Rosymorn monastery—I thought it fitting, these fruits were grown not ten feet from this table, try this cheese from the traders in the east—

And they gesture at a part of the grove behind Shadowheart, where there’s more empty space. “And yours truly is sourced from this very earth, just past the orchard.”

Shadowheart, who has been nodding and muttering the occasional obligatory “thank you” and “very interesting,” blinks because she doesn’t understand.

Callahan continues. “I woke up wrapped in a simple robe, blinking at a new sunrise, on the longest day of the year. Looking back, I imagine it must have been picturesque. I was too new to life to appreciate the poetry of it at the time.”

Shadowheart looks back over her shoulder. The whole of the sun is above the horizon and it is properly morning. Everyone except people like herself and Astarion are awake and about their business now. The land behind her, where the children play and their parents linger, is all grass and tiny white flowers. “You weren’t born.”

They smile. “Not in the traditional sense, no. My mother is the earth and my father is the dawn.”

Some aasimar do just…appear. Most are born, entering the world with a sliver of celestial blood that lay dormant in their families until the event of their birth, but aasimar like Aylin and Callahan do show up on occasion. It makes more sense why this aasimar is favored by the most powerful of the Lathanderian temples: they're a small miracle.

Shadowheart drinks some of the spring water Callahan offered: gods are so unserious, she thinks—Lathander spent his seed like any other man before rising from bed and then the god decided to make a whole person out of the afterthought.

“Will you be long in Waterdeep?” Callahan asks. They had stopped talking, Shadowheart realizes, and they stare at her. She clears her throat and drinks more water as well as some of the rose wine.

“I might,” she says, and continues because she is talking to a fellow in faith. “I’ve been invited to have a conversation with the priestesses at the House of the Moon tonight about what I assume is an offer to stay on some kind of priestly appointment.”

The aasimar looks thoughtful, an eery look when they have no pupils. Their golden hair is paler in the full light of the sun, almost white. “I’ve heard the story of your return to Selûne. A whole life in Shar’s domain, praising her name and serving her darkness, and yet—well, here you are. The dark ultimately couldn’t withstand the light of your true faith.” They smile again; they do it a lot, and it’s genuine, which makes it both more and less annoying. “You are not only a hero of Baldur’s Gate, but a hero of faith. A cleric as incredible as yourself would of course be promoted among Selûne’s faithful.”

Naturally, her host would know the story. It has cycled through most churches dedicated to gods allied with Selûne’s light and her faithful. But the story was always told poorly: Shadowheart has no “inner light” or greater wisdom deep within that brought her back to Selûne; it had been her friends on her journey to the Gate that made the difference; their faith in her, not her faith in the gods, is what cut through Shar’s darkness.

But if she tries to correct the story with other clerics or paladins or priests, it makes the conversation suddenly very uncomfortable and oddly short. And then Shadowheart is never invited for another. So Shadowheart simply nods and says “thank you” and continues to appreciate the gifts Callahan is so eager to have her sample.

“What was it like? The darkness, I mean,” they ask.

This is not a polite and normal way to continue the conversation, and Shadowheart finds it rather refreshing, even if answering the question is—difficult. It’s also not something she can comfortably talk about in the company of other Selûnites. These are thoughts she keeps to herself because no one wants to hear them. The transgressive question makes up for some of Callahan’s obnoxious behavior.

Shadowheart wipes her fingers and the corners of her mouth with the thick, red napkin available on the table. “It’s a bit of a misconception, I think, to speak of Shar as a goddess of darkness,” she says. “It was worse than darkness; it was a complete and total absence. Darkness is an absence of light, but it’s the sort that can be washed away.” Shadowheart gestures back toward the sun that continues to rise over their breakfast. “The dawn fills the world with new life, light, and possibility when it casts out the shadows. But absence, true and complete and total absence—that’s not something light can banish because there is nothing to banish. There is nothing.” Shadowheart folds the napkin on her lap to give her fingers something to do and her eyes somewhere to go that isn’t Callahan. They watch her intently. “I wouldn’t know how to describe it. The whole point was loss. I have forgotten how it was.”

As an object of the spiritual tug-of-war between Selûne and Shar, Shadowheart is rendered into a lesson and piece of theology wherever she goes, even in her own mind. It strikes Shadowheart as odd that someone so small and fragile as herself should be at the center of a cosmic struggle between the two sisters, goddesses among the most ancient of the gods. The fight destroyed Shadowheart—it destroyed her over and over again—and she can’t be repaired, only reforged. Like the shattered countenance of Dame Aylin, daughter of Selûne, her face broken open and remade with golden scars; Shadowheart’s shattered soul remains faithful because that is the shape of her being, but the cracks are filled in with the imperfect love and devotion of the people who love her; it holds her together and makes her beautiful.

Shadowheart is faithful; to what is an important but secondary concern.

“But you’re here now,” Callahan says. They still look thoughtful. “There was absence, and then there was light. What changed, exactly? The stories don’t say.”

Another impolite and atypical question for the paladin to ask. The lesson of Shadowheart’s story is supposed to be this: the light of righteous gods perseveres over the darkness of lesser gods. And Callahan asks such a question here, at the foot of their godly father’s grandest church and the site of their miraculous birth.

The holes in Shadowheart’s mind and the absence in her heart had been filled by the words and actions of her companions, a wild bunch of messy people thrown together by desperate times and held together by devotion. They gave her something worth remembering. Absence gave way to their presence.

“Good company,” Shadowheart says, deliberately cryptic.

Callahan smiles once more, warmer this time. They lift a glass. “To good company, then.”

It’s not long before the children, circling them now with uncertain but eager eyes, approach Callahan and begin to ask if the paladin is done, if they can wrestle, if they can fly, if, if, if—

And Callahan indulges the pleas for play. They extend a quick apology to Shadowheart and take the most energetic and loud of the children into their arms. They summon their wings, stretch them wide, and take off with the shrieking child into the sky. Shadowheart flicks a feather off her plate.

The walk back to Gale’s tower is loud and bright and Shadowheart doesn’t care for it. She can’t stop yawning. Though, she takes the opportunity to buy some hot bread and tempting looking fruits. Shadowheart will leave these in the kitchen for Gale to find later—well, most of it will end up in the kitchen. The bread won’t be hot forever.

It briefly crosses Shadowheart’s mind that she could go to Selûne’s temple, the House of the Moon, instead, and accept the accommodations they offered her there; the idea crosses her mind, but it doesn’t stay there.

Shadowheart is very glad when she makes it back to Gale’s tower and the guest bed waiting for her there. Shadowheart draws the bedroom curtains, happily done with the Morning lord’s exuberance. She covers every corner and edge of the window she can and collapses into the mattress. Shadowheart is asleep before she thinks to remove her boots.

Chapter 3: bygone apotheosis

Notes:

Gale angst, as a treat.

“The Outer Planes. This is where the gods dwell. Where they observe us from afar. Where they make play-things of us.” - Gale Dekarios

---

It’s tasteless, the things Gale is willing to do to keep the attention of his students. Illusionary magic is among the most easily exploited for the purposes of adventure, but it lacks the instant gratification and destructive allure of abjuration or evocation magics. So, Gale uses what works to keep his students’ ears open, and that includes allusions to the possibilities this school of magic opens in the bedroom.

It works wonders for keeping their attention, even if it’s only a comment every now and then, or a vague gesture at how a spell could be used for less than academic purposes. But it also means he has to frequently include vignettes about the ethics of illusionary magic and the students hate those—but alas, it must be done. He will not let it be said Gale Dekarios encourages ethically unsavory courting techniques.

Though, Gale still has to field complaints about his methods. He’s received yet another note from the master of the Blackstaff Academy that contains a distilled and dried complaint from “a concerned parent to one of your students.” The complaint is not about the sexual content peppered into his lessons, it’s a complaint about the sheer amount of ethical theories of sex delivered alongside the occasional crude allusions. Gale writes a short note to remind the master that the students are all adults by the standards of their race and by now should appreciate the importance of using magic responsibly in all cases. This will be passed back to the “concerned parent,” who is likely also a patron to the academy. The master wouldn’t bother with such motions if the complaint came from just any parent. There’s money attached to this administrative gesture.

Such dull daily considerations are a far cry from what Gale had once expected out of life. Once, he lounged in Elysium beside the Weave itself, a Chosen and lover to Mystra—before his pride tore him away and pushed him to a precipice hanging over oblivion. Gale of Waterdeep was supposed to have become a legendary example of wizardry; then Gale was supposed to have made up for his folly by sacrificing his life for the sake of the Sword Coast. Neither of these things happened: now, he teaches, and it’s sometimes a bit of headache.

But at the same time, it makes his days feel substantial. Mornings feel good. He doesn’t mind that he has to be up extra early to do extensive spell book preparations that compliment his lesson plans. The students may complain and they may at times—frequent times—bullshit their way through their studies, but they do learn, eventually. And when a student suddenly gets it, gods, it’s rather addictive, that look in their eyes; it’s a sign their world has just gotten a little bigger. Gale remembers this feeling, this sense that anything and everything is possible and those possibilities rested just at his finger tips.

Still, grading is tedious. Gale sits in his office at the academy and marks the imitation spell scrolls stacked in front of him with heavy sighs and a heavy pen. One of the scrolls isn’t even an attempt at the assignment, but a hastily written and half-hearted apology for not completing a scroll. Gale’s not sure why they feel compelled to do that; don’t turn in the damn thing if you have nothing to turn in.

There are good examples in here, however, and each one makes Gale’s soul glow with pride. There are some true masters-in-the-making here, and Gale has the honor of witnessing their becoming-greatness.

Did Mystra ever look at him this way? Was she ever pleased to witness his growing mastery in magic? Did she ever glow with pride? Gale wonders sometimes; it’s not good to wonder, however, because that’s when the mental gymnastics begin, and Tara says those aren’t good for his health.

But it’s not like he can stop thinking about Mystra: the Weave is Mystra and the Weave is that the fabric of his life, the soul of his craft, and source of his very self; and it is loaded with tainted memories. Working with the Weave means working with the very essence of Mystra, an essence he is intimately familiar with and often would rather forget—but that’s the way with gods, isn’t it? They aren’t just characters in sermons or voices somewhere in the skies—they are the fabric of every mortal’s reality, including Gale. Mystra is magic, not just a past lover, not just his old tutor, not just a god—she is everything. Mystra owes mortals nothing and they owe her everything: she is the framework that makes life as Faerûn knows it possible.

But Gale remains sore about the whole affair. How can he not be? She never communicated with him, opting for the all-knowing mystery of a goddess who asked him to simply trust her judgment. Sure, Gale’s eyes were clouded by ambition, but she is Mystra—she had every possible means at her disposal to make him see, to guide his hand, to still his heart and enlighten his mind. He would have listened if she had just given him something to listen to other than ‘trust me.’

Then Mystra punished him when his pride and lack of understanding crashed into one another. She could have supported him or she could have gently put him aside for his folly, but no—it was a simple tressym that took care of Gale. It was Tara who insisted they find a solution to his condition, it was Tara who snuck around Waterdeep and stole magical objects to keep the orb under control, and it was Tara who refused to give up on his spirit. Gale would have cast himself into the ocean long ago if not for that.

—but Mystra is magic. She didn’t owe Gale, a mere human, anything. When she asked him to redeem himself by falling on the blade of his folly, he’d almost done it because he owed her everything, and he wanted forgiveness, even Mystra’s idea of forgiveness felt like more than he deserved. She would have, ultimately, collected his soul, once it was done, whatever that looks like. But when the moment came, the moment when he was to die for the Sword Coast—no, that’s a lie—die for Mystra’s divine wrath, Gale didn’t follow through because by that point he had friends.

These friends, mortal and bumbling and flawed, who didn’t understand what Gale understood about Mystra’s domain—their voices won out against Gale’s understanding. Lae’zel, the prickly githyanki with only a few bones of sympathy to spare, had been enraged on Gale’s behalf, despite never once looking his way with more than a curt word or a nod of approval, saying very loudly to Tav one night as they sat together under the stars by the Rosymorn Monastery: “Mystra demands Gale’s faith—but holds no faith in him. Why else would she demand Gale sacrifice himself? Does she not think he can destroy the Absolute with his own immense talents? Does she not know the mighty company that he keeps?”

Mighty company indeed. Gale refused Mystra’s final command because an elvish druid made him tea in the evenings when Gale’s knees hurt from ill-advised feats of physicality mid-battle. He ignored Mystra because a plain-faced, human monk graciously and foolishly insisted they remain companions in adventure despite his deadly condition. Gale forgot the fount of his power because a randy vampire spawn wrapped Gale in a strange cloak of normalcy by making him the butt of every other crude joke that fell from between his fangs. Gale defied the goddess of magic because the Sharren cleric who healed his wounds stood in front of Shar herself and said no.

Gale had been enough for these incredible people—souls made of fire and grit that surpassed imagination. Such an honor made Gale stay his hand, he trusted their resolve, and together they made it so that such a sacrifice from Gale was never necessary.

The disapproving look Mystra gave him at the Stormshore Tabernacle however still frequents Gale’s mind. She was quite disappointed to see Gale alive, and quite disappointed that he knew more about the Crown and the orb than he was ever meant to know. Of course that’s what it took to get her attention: suddenly, Gale represented a flicker of a threat to Mystra’s essence. For a moment, it was incredibly tempting to embody that threat. He was Gale of Waterdeep, he would succeed where Karsus failed, he would take the Crown and become another kind of magic, neither Weave or shadow weave, but something new and independent of either Mystra or Shar’s parasitic alternative.

But what would happen to Gale Dekarios? Tav asked, when Gale voiced his vision. I rather like Gale Dekarios.

And then Astarion put aside his own chance to ascend, not to godhood, but to something terrifying and beautiful, all the same: a vampire lord that walks in the sun and eats not because he is compelled, but because he desires—and despite hungering after this power with crazed single-mindedness, Astarion hesitated, and then he put the opportunity aside. Such power was designed to dominate and control, squash everything and everyone before they had a chance to become a threat, a preventative measure against the fear that ruled Astarion’s every conscious moment. Except—the fear Astarion hoped such power would eliminate had already begun to dull in their travels together, despite the final, looming threat they faced in the end. Simple people like Tav and Gale Dekarios had been…enough.

Gale puts his pen back into the ink pot on the desk. He’s going to stop grading for the day. His mind is not focused, and the students behind each of these scrolls deserves a little more of his attention than he’s able to give right now. Gale stands, stretching when he realizes his body has gone stiff—how many hours had be been stooped like this? He looks out the window.

The evening sun casts the city below in warm shadows and the air is thick with city smells, both pleasant and unfortunate. The streets are clogged with evening intentions, people walking past one another either to find the comfort of their homes or the comfort of a tavern. Astarion will be awake soon.

The poor bastard would enjoy this view, Gale thinks. The vampire has a preference for heights, like a bird—or a bat, more like. The subtler quirks of Astarion’s condition are endearing.

The Blackstaff Academy is mostly empty of students and professors alike. Though, some linger, the ones who always have a bit of the whiff of death about them, the ones studying necromancy that keep odd, moon-lit schedules and variable bathing routines. Sometimes Gale fantasizes about sharing Astarion’s perfume with them: the somewhat erotic mix of bergamot, rosemary and brandy the vampire puts together to banish any lingering scent of the crypt. Gale wouldn’t notice the smell, honestly, the vampire bathes too often for the scent to linger, but Astarion insists on the perfume for the sake of his own nose. When Gale realized the rosemary in his kitchen had suddenly started to run out, he planted bushes of the stuff around the yard of his tower, and there’s more than enough brandy in the cellars to last Astarion many years of mixing perfume.

The bergamot has to be fresh, though, so Gale decides he will pick up some on his way home. Astarion distills the scent from the fruit himself, a rather labor intensive alchemical process, but one he’s perfected with the help of Gale’s own apothecary tools. Gale tried to suggest the vampire take up alchemy, once, and Astarion had snarled at him for it. He snarls a lot, so it’s not clear if the snarl meant much. If anything, Gale takes it as a compliment that Astarion is comfortable enough to snarl with all his teeth because that means the vampire is not afraid Gale will react poorly to the sight.

Mystra’s eight-pointed star hangs above the entrance to Blackstaff. Gale considers it for a moment, fingering the small copy of the star that hangs from his ear. There’s enough silver in it to pay for a decent burial, should he ever be found dead in a condition to be buried, and a diamond at its center, should he have the luck to be found dead by a cleric with the skill required to resurrect him. This is why he keeps it on, he tells himself. He doesn’t have a story for why he hasn’t replaced it with something of equal value.

On his way home, toward the north-western edge of Waterdeep where his tower is situated near the shore, Gale picks up more bergamots and cheese—Shadowheart eats a lot of cheese. Once home, Gale finds Shadowheart shuffling out of the kitchen with tea and a piece of bread. It’s obvious she woke up only a little while ago and this is her breakfast. Her white hair is an unkept mess around her shoulders. Gale rarely sees Shadowheart with her hair down. He rather likes the look of it.

“Good ‘morning,’ Shadowheart,” Gale says, smiling. “I hope you were able to rest well?” He goes into the kitchen to put away the food and finds there is more fruit on the counter than there was before. He is first confused, then warmed by the sight—very thoughtful of her.

Shadowheart sits at the table in the dining room with the mug of tea and sniffs. “Eventually.” And Shadowheart yawns. “Where have you been all day?”

“Teaching. Grading. The usual,” he says, and scratches behind Tara’s ears when she jumps up onto the table she knows she’s not allowed to jump on—“not allowed” is a strong way to put it—Gale would prefer she not jump on the table.

“It sounds boring, but you smile when you say it.” Shadowheart says. “How different things are now.”

Yes, indeed; neither of them adventure anymore. Who knew becoming important meant spending more time at a desk or more time in meetings with questionably long agendas.

At least Gale has a quest to pursue: Astarion’s need to see the dawn.

Speaking of: “how was it at the Spires of Morning? They’re quite the enthusiastic crowd, aren’t they?”

Shadowheart nods, once, and sips her tea before answering with a few, sharp words. “I never want to see another dawn.”

Gale laughs. It startles Tara and she leaps off the table and runs down the hall.

“I mean it. Moon Maiden forgive me, but they are—quite a lot.”

Gale, still smiling, says “yes, they are interesting neighbors. There’s no need for an alarm clock around here. I’m always on schedule.”

Shadowheart scoffs. “Bugger schedules.”

And they both laugh. Gale missed this, and he missed her. Shadowheart and Astarion both are an acquired taste in company, both are a little prickly, and their mouths don’t contain filters. And, now that Gale thinks about it, neither can really tolerate mornings. Perhaps Gale should find a new tower. Lathander doesn’t make for a good neighbor when Gale’s guests are night creatures.

“Speaking of schedules,” Shadowheart says, “I’m going to find some cheese and then make myself presentable. Not willingly, but—” and Shadowheart makes another disgusted noise before finishing her tea, coughing because it’s still slightly too hot. “I have a meeting at the House of the Moon.”

She’d been mysterious about her other errands when they spoke last night, Gale recalls. He has a feeling she is being faced with a promotion, given the mixed feelings folded into her voice and the noncommittal answers she gives to questions about how long she’ll stay in Waterdeep.

“I hope it goes well,” Gale says, not pressing for answers. “And I hope you take me up on my offer to host you here for as long as you need.” Navigating real estate in Waterdeep can be a nightmare.

“I might just,” she says.

In the late evening, when the sun is all but a distant light behind the horizon, Gale goes to the library where he expects to find Astarion.

Tara is already here, getting scratches from Astarion’s long, hard nails. The vampire scratches the tressym just under the wings and she purrs loudly. They both glance at Gale when he walks in.

“Is she gone already?” Astarion asks, meaning Shadowheart.

Gale walks over to pet the top of Tara’s head. She is delighted by the doubled attention. “Shadowheart is out on business, but she’ll be back. She might even stay in Waterdeep awhile, depending on the nature of today’s business.” Gale looks down at the table Astarion sits at; there are already books and scrolls spread over most of the surface. The only empty space is where Tara sits. Astarion nudges the tressym to shoo her away. Tara bites his finger before she hops down and slinks out of the library.

Gale takes a chair and sits across from Astarion, who proceeds to assume a relaxed, open posture when the wizard sits down. “Is the little moon witch moving in? It’s about time with you two.”

Gale clears his throat and pulls some of the documents Astarion has laid out toward himself to see what line of inquiry is being pursued tonight. “Light sensitivity conditions and sunscreens, I see. What about this felt worth revisiting, may I ask?”

Astarion rolls his eyes and shifts in his seat, less open and inviting now, more annoyed. “I don’t know. I feel like I’m spinning in circles. I’m just—reading, at this point.”

And Astarion hates reading. Gale, who likes reading, has also grown tired of the many words they’ve sifted through with nothing to show for it. Gale has also begun to dance around a troubling idea he doesn’t quite like. It’s not exactly a new idea, but the implications on this particular problem are fraught.

“I’ve been meditating on something,” he says. Gale gestures over to one of the documents, one about brewing sunscreens for people afflicted with photosensitivity entirely unrelated to undeath. “There’s the physical ailment against the sun,” and then Gale gestures to a poem they’d found in their searches; it’s a piece of “comedy” about a vampire that tried to use sunscreen to walk in the sun but gave up when he realized he could not use it to cover his eyeballs. “And there is the metaphysical ailment against the sun.”

“You said it’s not clear if the distinction is real,” Astarion says, tart.

Gale nods. “Agreed. I’m not sure such a distinction truly exists, but it’s caused me to consider another distinction that is—well, let’s talk about this while the cleric is out, shall we?”

Astarion leans forward. “Oh my. Are you about to say something sacrilegious? Do go on.”

So Gale puts his hands out, fingers ready to trace the paths of his thinking. “Consider the moral declarations of the gods: some claim to be good, some claim to be evil—though they often use other words for it, and some abstain from alignment altogether.”

Astarion follows Gale’s finger as it points to different spots in the air: good, bad, neutral. “Yes, but all gods consider themselves above looking even sideways at my ruined soul. Where is this going?”

Gale doesn’t like it when Astarion talks about the state of his soul because it makes Gale ache with worry about what happens to Astarion when his body finally gives out, either to stakes, the sun, or magical mishap. So the wizard sidesteps the topic. “Good and evil are metaphysical realities for the gods. The light of Ilmater or Lathander, for instance, quite literally destroys what falls in the domain of evil, such as undeath. Good and evil materially and spiritually oppose each other.”

Astarion sniffs. “I think I read something about where this is going.” The vampire groans. “Are you going to say something grand like good and evil are more complicated than the gods say it is? The whole—” and Astarion’s voice drops into a mockery of an academic’s dry delivery: “‘is it good because the gods say it’s good, or do the gods say its good because it’s good?’” Astarion scoffs. “It’s one of those stupid dry riddles without an answer you people write about for thousands of years to feel important. That doesn’t fix my problem, Gale. I could act the perfect saint—believe it, even—and I’d still be roasted if I tried to tan.”

“But hang on,” Gale says. “I think you’re right. You could be the perfect picture of sainthood and still never see the sun safely because metaphysical good and evil don’t always match very neatly over what’s ethically good or evil.”

Astarion titters. “You’re cute, you know, when you blaspheme.”

The heat in Gale’s face is annoying. He keeps his eyes on the table and his hands. “This mismatch between metaphysical good and ethical good makes me wonder about the mismatch between the metaphysical dimensions of your condition as well as the physical dimensions.”

Astarion rolls his eyes again. “Sunlight and garlic fucking hurt, Gale. That’s as physical as it gets.” And then Astarion’s body grows very still, as it does when he’s about to be very serious. “And mortal saints can still be turned into vampires or zombies. I didn’t do anything wrong. Someone did this to me.” He pauses. It’s a long pause. “The gods punish me for evil I didn’t do.”

Gale grabs the air between them. “There. It’s in that messy disconnect where I think we might find answers. You didn’t invite the evil upon yourself, and even after becoming a vampire you still chose heroism when the Sword Coast was imperiled.”

Astarion tilts his hand and makes a pinched expression. “‘Chose’ is a strong word to associate with that whole adventure, darling. Walking away meant death of another kind.”

“Don’t be modest. Villainy was well within our grasp as well.” Gale doesn’t add it was a path they were both especially tempted to take.

Astarion shrugs the point off. “Fine. Sure. But to the point: my vampirism. Someone did this to me and it can’t be undone.” Astarion’s voice rises, and cracks when it does. “And we already looked into reversal by true resurrection. If we killed me and hope we have a good scroll of true resurrection, it might not even work. That skeletal mystery we traveled with to Baldur’s Gate resurrected me numerous times, if you recall, because I certainly do, and I came back as I am every time. Nothing changed! I don’t get to reverse the evil that was done to me.”

The very idea of attempting true resurrection on Astarion makes Gale sick to his stomach. Without the tadpole disrupting the nature of his condition, Astarion might simply turn into dust if killed, if the bodily damage he received throughout his unlife was extensive enough, and then there would be nothing to resurrect. He’d simply be gone: soul unbound, unclaimed, and possibly undone. And even if there were a body to resurrect, Gale doesn’t know if it would fix the problem or even resurrect him properly—they might bring back an entirely different person, the person Astarion was when he died all those years ago. No, whatever primordial magics they had available to them on their journey to Baldur’s Gate were unique and are unhelpful now.

“I don’t suggest we investigate that line of inquiry again. But I wonder—well, you were transformed via the metaphysical evil that animates vampirism. I can’t help but wonder if the solution is another metaphysical transformation, one instead mediated by godly good.”

Astarion wags his finger in a circular motion. “We’re back to holy water being an ill-advised bath option, and drinking it isn’t any better. ‘Godly good’ is quite literally the problem.”

Gale sighs heavily. This is where his own mind is stuck. Metaphysical evil and good cannot coexist; the good wins out and eliminates the evil. If only they could eliminate the evil without eliminating Astarion, too.

Astarion grumbles. “Ugh, my head hurts. Are you’re sure you can’t just ask that goddess of yours to do something? She’s one of those neutral types, after all.”

Gale has reminded Astarion multiple times of the steep and unpredictable costs associated with even attempting to bargain with the gods. Devils are at least predictable and bound to the letter of their words. Gods are not. “We’ve been over this,” he says, chest heavy.

Astarion growls. “We stood up to gods like it was going out of fashion, once.”

This makes Gale laugh, though only a little. “At the time there was a lot at stake for even the gods. Our mission mattered to them. And even then, it cost us. We lost many friends, and it’s not even over: Lae’zel and Tav are fighting a war that might go on for centuries out there in the astral planes, and that’s just against a lich turned demi-god, at best. I worry sometimes, too, that Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul might have plans of revenge on our humble little gang of adventurers. Gods are petty. Not to mention the tug-of-war Shar and Selûne made out of Shadowheart’s life.”

Astarion blinks at Gale as if he’s waiting. When Gale just returns a confused look, Astarion says, “and nothing changed after you put your foot down with Mystra.”

The wizard sighs again. “Turning my back on Mystra isn’t exactly an option, or at least, not one I want to take. When I assume command over the Weave, it is by Mystra’s grace I am provided any control. She’s the fabric of my life, Astarion.”

The vampire makes a curdled expression and mumbles “it’s not the only Weave in town.”

Gale is very aware: there is also the shadow weave, a shadowy imitation of Mystra’s essence that exists between the gaps where the Weave holds together the universe. In between the fibers of the Weave where Weave does not exist, that is where Shar extends her power. As a former chosen, much of the service Gale performed for Mystra involved dismissing and dispelling the shadow weave’s influence. Sharrens channel their magic through their Dark Mistress’ weave. In theory, wizards can as well, but its potential is, quite literally, a shadow of Mystra’s. It’s the sort of thing a wizard taps into if they want to conceal their work from Mystra’s eyes, and there are few reasons to do that, given Mystra’s ongoing neutrality toward, well, most things. If it threatens the integrity of her domain, she cares, otherwise, she does not. Mortals and immortals alike may do what they wish with magic so long as the magic itself is not disturbed or disrespected.

“A poor imitation, and touching it is not worth Mystra’s wrath. I’ve invited enough of that. I am but a simple and humble wizard these days. And it’s…more than I deserve.”

Something bites Gale’s ankle—it’s Tara, the sneak. Gale swears at the tressym and when Astarion realizes what’s happened under the table he laughs in that loud and high-pitched way of his when delight catches him by surprise. Tara jumps into Astarion’s lap. “Good kitty,” Astarion says, which earns him a nasty bite on the hand from Tara, who is not a cat and hates to be called one. The vampire scratches Tara behind the ears as if the bite never happened.

Astarion’s tenacity is rather incredible. Let’s just wrestle with the gods again, he says. It’s inspiring and a little frightening, the dogged energy and determination Astarion is capable of when he puts his mind to a problem. The vampire Cazador Szarr had kept spawn of unusually strong will, a necessary feature if the spawn were going to pass as normal people while never once being fed properly. Hundreds of years of starvation should have reduced Astarion and the other spawn into crazed beasts, but their minds won out through it all.

And surely, Gale thinks, Astarion must be the strongest among them because when given the choice, he did not Ascend. True, Astarion needed a bit of encouragement because in the moment he was drunk on blood, violence, and the magnitude of the possibilities. But he only needed small encouragement from someone he respected: Tav, at the time. He didn’t conduct the Black Mass, he didn’t sacrifice the many thousand souls trapped by vampirism in the Rite of Profane Ascension, and he did not lose himself. Astarion walked away from the path of his master, and in doing so walked away from the only known way a vampire could live a life outside of the shadows.

“Do you think that works with me?” Astarion mutters at Tara, who has bitten him again for some other offense. “My teeth are bigger than yours—” she bites his hand. “Oh, really. One of these days I’m going to bite back and drain you dry, you little beast.”

Astarion didn’t break free from Cazador alone, the tadpole gave him the edge he needed; Astarion didn’t choose to be better alone, Tav helped; but Astarion did escape and he did choose to be better, and that counts for everything. It was everything. He’s the greatest man Gale will ever know, and Gale personally knows many heroes and living legends.

Astarion’s words cut into Gale’s thoughts. “Why are you looking at me like that? I thought we weren’t flirting, Gale.” Astarion twirls one of his curls with a finger. “Changed your mind?”

The wizard uses his hands to collect the scrolls and documents together on the table. They won’t need these tonight. It’s time to return to studying esoteric musings on divinity, and there’s some material Gale will want to purchase or borrow on the subject. “Pardon,” Gale mutters.

“Don’t apologize, darling. I know I’m irresistible. Do enjoy the view.”

Astarion is incredible but he is also insufferable. He and Tara both.

They take out from Gale’s shelves materials on radiance and godly goodness and fighting the undead with prayer. They hadn’t given these materials a lot of thought the first time they scanned it because it is all antagonistic to Astarion’s very existence, but this time they’re going to read between the lines. They’re going to have to find an answer in what the sages don’t say. Gale yawns when they start to sort the material and he sits down to write out a plan for approaching each genre of document and their relative themes. He doesn’t get enough sleep these days. He tried naps between the end of his teaching hours and Astarion’s waking hours, but both were just a little too unpredictable to form a proper rest schedule.

And Gale is irritated. None of this would be necessary if he himself were divine. All this study on the nature of godly goodness reminds Gale of his old ambitions, and Astarion’s plight makes him wish he’d held onto that ambition. Gale tries not to regret passing the Crown of Karsus over to Mystra, he tries not to think about the possibilities he closed off to himself, but he would have been a god, one in command of an alternative to both Mystra’s and Shar’s weave—a Karsite weave, Gale’s weave, totally removed from Mystra and her jealous command over the universe. He could have even extended some of that divinity to Astarion—they could be in Elysium together right now, removed from all worries about the sun and their total subservience to the gods because they would carve out domains for themselves, gods of their own making.

But that is where the Dead Three—Bhaal, Bane, and Myrkul—came from, isn’t it? Once men but men no longer, they’d become the embodiment of their ambitions and ultimately cannot seem to see past their realms of murder, domination, and restless death. Paltry and narrow-minded gods. The Three had become so blind in their godhood that they’d attempted to doom the world with a plan that would eliminate the very source of nearly all their godly power—the souls of every mortal across Faerûn. What is there to murder, to control, to resurrect, when there is nothing. Absence—that is Shar’s domain.

Did the Dark Lady laugh at them? One can only wonder.

And—this is a private thought that will remain such until the day Gale dies, and well after—Gale begins to ponder if Mystra is any more capable of thought past herself.

—he is very tired. Gale stopped focusing on his pen a while ago, and Astarion is teasing Tara with something fluffy he likes to keep in his pocket to undermine Tara’s false propriety. She follows the twitch of the toy with wide pupils and swats at it with sharp claws. Gale decides he must go to bed. Astarion has a place to start, at least.

“Shall I set you up with something to meditate on?” Gale asks, trying not to yawn.

Astarion groans. “I suppose.”

Tara sits on Astarion’s lap when he sits on a couch with a book. His brow furrows as he flicks open the front cover and does his best to sort through the words in front of his face, one of his long nails tracing under and around the words. Astarion’s elven features look sharper when he’s focusing, and a little of his age shows, too. Vampires are immune to normal aging, but they’re not immune to creases around the eyes, it seems.

Gale takes a crumpled blanket off the couch and folds it, rather sloppily and absentmindedly, and places it next to Astarion for Tara to use later. She likes to sleep next to Gale when he reads; Gale assumes Astarion will also eventually fidget and force Tara to move.

“How did you manage, back when you were a magistrate?” Gale asks, glancing again at the pitched expression Astarion makes as he scans the text in his hands.

Without looking up, Astarion says, “I don’t remember much from before Cazador, as you know. Assume I was a poor student of the law, more eager to hand out punishment then sort through nuance.” Then he glances up at Gale, very briefly, a flick of the eyes not meant to be noticed.

Candid. Gale changes the subject because it’s obvious in the shift of Astarion’s shoulders that he’s uncomfortable the topic even came up. “Perhaps there’s a spell I can conjure later to make this easer for you. I deal in perception these days—I suspect it might be a simple solution.”

Astarion purses his lips and says nothing. Gale bids him goodnight and leaves him to his nightly struggle.

When Gale passes by Shadowheart in the hall that leads to his bedroom, he notices her lips are drawn in that particularly sharp look of displeasure she once reserved exclusively for Selûne’s followers. His heart races a little bit when he sees her, despite the cloud forming around her head, simply happy to see Shadowheart before bed.

“Something the matter?” Gale asks.

Shadowheart sighs and her face relaxes. She turns and, as Gale expects, she says, “I’ve been offered a position in the Selûnite priesthood at the House of the Moon here in Waterdeep.”

“Are congratulations in order?”

Shadowheart shrugs one shoulder. “I suppose. I did accept it.”

“You will make a fine addition to the local Selûnite community.” He scratches his jaw, thinking in the back of his mind that his beard is due for a trim. “Realtors are easy to find in Waterdeep, but the good ones less so. I can ask around, get some recommendations, if you’d like.”

Shadowheart shakes her head. “No need. Priestesses live in their temples.”

—right. She will be leaving immediately, then. Gale is too tired to realize he’s made a rather dejected expression before it’s too late to catch. He does his best not to visibly pine around Shadowheart because a single, slightly drunk kiss at a party celebrating their first victory over the Absolute does not warrant this ongoing struggle in his chest. And now Gale has to recover before this scrutinizing look Shadowheart makes manifests into some kind of conversation.

“Astarion is in the library studying divinity,” Gale says, a bit too loudly. “If you’re not busy tonight, I don’t suppose you’d be open to lending some kind of expertise? We’re at a bit of a loss on how to approach this topic, specifically. I’m a master of magic, not faith.”

Shadowheart’s expression cools and closes. Crisis averted. “Perhaps. Though I’m not sure he’s keen to talk to a cleric about his troubles,” she says.

Gale gestures as if that’s nothing. “Nonsense. You’re friends and companions, colleagues in arms, as it were.”

“If you recall, Gale,” Shadowheart says, patiently, “we didn’t usually interact more than necessary. He’s as skittish as a stray cat and only ever really talked to Tav. Then you. Eventually.”

Astarion did tend to keep to himself in those days, though toward the end of their adventure he would approach Tav or Gale for more than basic necessities. Astarion was scared back then, rightly so, of being cast out the moment someone took issue with his condition—especially after being caught trying to bite Tav in the middle of the night before anyone realized what was different about him. Poor Astarion mistakenly assumed the human slept heavier than their other companions. “Fair enough,” Gale says, “but consider this: Tav and myself were usually the first to approach him. Astarion put a lot of effort into looking as nonthreatening as possible. Or he tried to be useful. Stray cats are skittish because people like to throw things at them. He’ll warm up to you, I’m sure, if you keep an open mind.”

Shadowheart looks pensive. “If you’re sure…”

“Splendid. Thank you. Now, I should be going to bed. A tired professor professes nonsense.” Gale turns toward his door, but he stops because he has one more thought: “you’re a healer, of a sort. I don’t suppose you can tell if someone such as our friend is eating enough?”

Shadowheart blinks. “You think he’s not eating enough.”

“That’s the thing—I’m not sure.”

“Curious,” she says.

Gale shrugs. “Just a thought. Hungry vampires make for sour company.”

“Aren’t they always hungry?”

That’s—a good point. Astarion once said something to that effect when he was still talking about conducting the Black Mass that would have removed all the negative side effects of vampirism as well as elevate his undead form to new power. Ascension would have taken away the hunger, he said, as well as the darkness.

“There’s not really healing magic for that sort of thing, is there?”

“An unnaturally bottomless appetite? No, not really, and if there were, I doubt it could be used on the undead. Most healing doesn’t work on vampires except their own vampiric powers—their health has to come from someone else.”

Discouraging, but Gale’s done impossible things before, and so has Shadowheart. “Give it some more thought?” Gale asks. It’s not like there’s another healer to consult about Astarion’s condition. Shadowheart is the only one who wouldn’t try to cure Astarion with a stake.

“If it means you’ll stop worrying, I’ll give it more thought.” She nods. “Goodnight, Gale. Rest well.”

When Gale is in bed, he can’t sleep. His mind spins in memories from that party, so long ago now, over and over in his head and he is—besotted—he cannot sleep.

Shadowheart’s hair was black back then, and the clothes she wore before bed were awful thin. The wine they shared wasn’t even that good, but in the moment, after several brushes with near-death and a whole camp of tieflings praising their heroism, it was the richest, sweetest liquor Gale can ever recall drinking. In his mind, it surpasses even the wine Mystra serves in the pleasure domes of her celestial domain.

—and Shadowheart finds it very funny that those architectural features are called “pleasure domes.” She snorts when she giggles sometimes.

Gale turns over on his mattress and tries to think about the impossible problem instead, the cure for Astarion’s sun hypersensitivity: but all he can really conjure up in his mind is the sound of Astarion’s giggle now, the carefree and unstrained one he makes when Tara is being nasty and biting his fingers. It makes Gale want to melt, the sight of Tara playing with Astarion as if he’s always been here. Tara is a nasty little traitor, but he can’t blame her for favoring Astarion’s company; Gale does, too.

Gale grumbles to himself as he looks through his bedside table for a basic scroll and some oil. He’ll just get this fire out of his system with the assistance of a simple illusion and hope he can sleep afterwards. Easy enough.

—and when that doesn’t help, because it doesn’t, he grabs one of his cloaks out of the closet to go outside for a walk. He takes one of his more powerful staffs and an enchanted cowl—it’s nice that he can retain such items now without having to feed them to his old affliction—and he leaves through the front door. Tara meets him before he exits. Gale kneels, puts out his arm, and she jumps up onto his shoulder, claws gripping the thick fabric of the cloak before she settles on his shoulder in the crook of Gale’s neck.

Tara’s superior vision looks out for any possible night-time danger they would rather not encounter. It’s generally safe on these shores, even at night, since so many clerics live near the holy places here. And it’s especially safe for a wizard of Gale’s caliber. Nights don’t frighten Gale.

He makes his way to the docks only half an hour’s walk from the tower. Sometimes Tara finds crabs scuttling over the sand to catch at night. She jumps off Gale’s shoulder when they reach the beach to begin her hunt.

Gale walks down one of the piers and sits on the furthest-most edge. He removes his boots and lets his toes hang just above the water slapping the wooden posts holding up the pier. How unseemly he must look, sulking like this. The initial joy Gale felt when his friends came wandering his way has been eclipsed by the gnawing sense that the longer they stay, the sooner they’ll recognize he is not, in fact, worth their time. Gale’s value lies in his skills as a wizard, and there’s little opportunity to exercise that strength now that they are off the road and living quieter lives. He’ll fumble, at some point, and they’ll move on. And Gale is frustrated he hasn’t made any real progress on Astarion’s problem. He can tell the vampire has become impatient, and Gale worries Astarion will leave before they find an answer.

Gale will have to make the most of the time he has now and grieve the inevitable when it comes. In the meantime, he will need to keep his shamefully promiscuous and more-than-friendly feelings in check.

Somewhere on the beach Tara pounces and her wings flutter as her paws and teeth scramble to snag something out of the sand; a small crunch follows soon after. Gale chuckles to himself. There will be Tara, at least.

Gale lies back on the pier and stares at the stars. It’s not like the outer planes, the sight is dim by comparison, but the subtleties of the mortal realm have grown on him. How odd, to think he’s spent so much time in Mystra’s domain that the mortal realm, in some ways, feels novel. Gale hadn’t even reached puberty when he caught the attention of Mystra’s other chosen, then Mystra herself.

Gale worries his fingers over the earring on the left side of his head. The symbol for magic: a reminder of what once was and what he could have been. Chosen—few are chosen by the gods, and yet it wasn’t enough for Gale; he’d wanted more, to trust and be trusted with the Weave to the very limit of his capabilities, to reach further into Mystra’s essence and know her and the whole its limits—if such limits existed.

Ah, well. That’s over now. Somehow, he’s found a way to be satisfied. Ambition is a poison to happiness, he’s learned, when taken in more than very small doses. It presents a very convincing illusion of happiness, to be sure, but actual happiness—no, he is much happier reading and cooking and strolling these shores.

Mostly.

Besides, he still gets to play Gale of Waterdeep every now and then. His powers gradually returned when the orb was removed from his body by Mystra’s grace. When he feels the need to remind others he was once-Chosen, a demonstration is a flick of the wrist away. Plus, if anyone truly tests his patience, he likes to make a vague suggestion he’s perfectly capable of blowing up—no one has to know the orb is gone. Gale will wear the mark of his folly like a badge, a warning to ambitious young wizards of the perils of testing Mystra’s patience.

Tara brings her kill onto the pier and drops it near Gale’s head, then she gnaws on the tough armor of the crab, making a rather obnoxious noise just by Gale’s ear. “Really?” he asks. Tara doesn’t respond, too preoccupied with getting her sharp little teeth into the labor-intensive snack. Gale closes his eyes and bears the ongoing sound of Tara’s teeth and raspy tongue working over the crab’s innards.

Gale is shaken from almost falling asleep when Tara hisses and jumps onto Gale’s chest.

“Tara, you absolute—” and he stops because her hackles rise and a low, rumbling growl echos in her chest. Gale rolls over, Tara steps off him when he does, and she does not move her eyes from the cause for alarm.

There is a figure on the beach.

It’s not unusual to see others on the beach at night, but there is something curious about this one that also raises the hair on the back of Gale’s neck. He lays very still and grips his staff more tightly.

Wrapped in layers of its own light, a figure moseys along the shore, practically floating as it moves. It’s a humanoid figure, probably, middling in height but broad, adorned in long, light looking robes and a veil that reaches from the top of its head down to its feet. The veil seems to contain most of the radiance emanating from the figure’s body; as it moves, the light ripples. There is a thick, metal mace on its hip, bright, like the wearer.

The air around the figure not only glows, it feels charged with something powerful and strange that tastes alarmingly familiar to Gale—there is something divine at work here.

But it is not Mystra’s divinity; he knows that too well to mistake her for another. Unsure of exactly what it is he’s looking at, Gale stays low. The figure is likely already aware of Gale’s presence, but he would like to avoid drawing its attention. Ideally, Gale is considered beneath its notice. Lying beside Tara who is pressed into his side, Gale watches.

They wait for it to pass. The only sound is the water, snapping at the beach and at the pier. The figure continues its slow walk along the water’s edge. The closer it comes to where Gale and Tara watch, the more Gale can feel it—like a charge in his teeth, a prickle on his neck, a sense that the very presence of this being is too much for Gale’s frail body. What a celestial being such as this is doing alone on the beach is beyond Gale’s wildest guess. He just hopes it leaves soon; his knees have begun to ache.

It stops on the sand just before the pier. Gale’s stomach drops when it appears to turn whatever face lies under the veil in his direction.

Tara’s heart flutters fiercely against both of their ribcages.

The wood does not groan under its feet when it walks up the pier toward where Gale and Tara are at the very edge, trapped between it and the ocean. Its feet are silent. Gale can swim, but not very well, and if there is going to be spell casting, Gale has to know what he’s faced with first because his spell book is loaded with too many lower level illusions for comfort. He always has more dramatic spells in reserve, but they were prepared with less dire straits in mind.

Gale sits up in a kneeling position. “It’s a fine night for star gazing,” he says, with the loud confidence of Gale of Waterdeep.

The voice that comes out from behind the veil is not what Gale expects. He is braced for something charged, loud, or something that would crawl over his skin with an entitled and domineering energy. Mystra’s voice is like that. But when this figure speaks, the voice is low and—soft, like a warm breeze and the tittering of mourning doves.

“My blood knows you,” it says.

Oh good, it knows him. That doesn’t bode well. If something this powerful knows Gale, they know Gale of Waterdeep, Mystra’s Chosen, and that Gale had always been up to something. He made enemies, in Mystra’s name, across every domain.

“Gale of Waterdeep,” it says, softer still, when the wizard doesn’t respond.

He clears his throat. “Gale Dekarios is fine.”

“How curious,” it hums. The sound of its voice remains soft, but there is an edge to it. “I am familiar with Mystra's chosen and their ambition. They do not choose humility.”

If this visitation is about anything Gale of Waterdeep did in the past, now is his chance to put some distance between himself and that old fool. “Former Chosen. My mother’s name is a grand enough title for me these days.”

It’s like bells—little, sharp, happy bells—the way the figure laughs. “That’s for the better.”

Gale suspects his odds of surviving tonight’s encounter have increased substantially.

The being extends out an arm. The arm remains cloaked in the layers of fabric that contain the majority of the being’s radiance. It gestures over Gale, heat rolling off its body as the veil is disturbed. Something in the air changes—and fear shoots back up Gale’s spine when he realizes what’s happened. He’s been encased in a holy zone of truth. There are divine chains on his tongue, tethering Gale to the light of honesty. The figure speaks once again, voice still airy, but serious. “I am looking for the heroes of Baldur’s Gate. You are one of them. Where are the others?”

Gale is the easiest to find out of the lot, of course. Halsin is somewhere in the woods, probably, and Shadowheart leads a semi-nomadic lifestyle. Tav and Lae’zel shoot through the stars of the astral planes in their fight against the githyanki’s tyrant queen. Gale is a professor, and those can be looked up in a directory.

Though, somehow, Gale doesn’t think this thing found him through Blackstaff’s directory.

“I’m not aware of everyone’s whereabouts these days,” Gale says. He doesn’t know where Lae’zel and Tav are, exactly. He has an idea, but he doesn’t know. This is the truth, an evasive truth the figure will recognize as such but it is the truth. Gale talks perhaps too much, but his tongue is practiced in weaving with the logic of the universe. He could do this all day.

The figure startles Gale when it very unexpectedly stamps its foot on the pier, which makes a thick sound, and the gesture is neither graceful or gentle. It’s the gesture of a very impatient young man. For a moment, it is brighter. “No games, wizard,” it whispers.

“Gale,” he corrects, sensing an opportunity. If this thing has a temper, he should be able to gain control over the conversation. Gale can be very annoying. The fear for his own life has been overruled by a new fear: this thing is looking for his friends.

The thing paces and turns in a full circle, robes and veil flapping, and then it takes from its hip the mace. It holds the weapon out at Gale’s nose. The metal hums with several powerful enchantments. For the first time in a long time, Gale wishes he still had that orb in his chest—this is the kind of magic it hungered for ceaselessly—and now would be a good time to be able to absorb such artifacts.

“Where is the pale one?”

Gale doesn’t like the implications of that question. He thinks. Tav was fairly pale. “She is somewhere in the astral planes,” Gale says.

The figure gently touches Gale’s nose with the edge of the mace. The metal is warm. “Must I say it? Where is the vampire?”

Gale had a feeling this is who the figure meant, and the radiant divinity that saturates this thing’s entirety tells Gale what he needs to know about its motivations: this being is on a holy mission to slay the undead. Why Astarion of all vampires would inspire a hunt lead by a celestial of this caliber is odd, and stranger still it would still refer to Astarion as a hero of Baldur’s Gate when it knows what Astarion is. No one is supposed to know that, and no one would call him a hero if they knew.

Gale mentally sorts through the spell options he has immediately at the tip of his tongue. The lessons he taught that morning required only some mana. He might be able to pull off a plane shift if he’s quick.

Gale says, “I’d rather not tell—” and his breath continues as his tongue forms the incantation he needs to disappear and his fingers twitch instinctively for the threads of the Weave around them: et ali—

The tip of the mace touches Gale’s lips and the hiss of his breath stops. Gale pulls his head back. He coughs—which makes no sound. He has been silenced.

The figure squats to meet Gale’s gaze with what is presumedly its eyes behind the veil. The ocean breeze ruffles the fabrics wrapped around the being’s body, making it flicker like a star. “I am familiar with Mystra’s chosen,” it says again, and there is a trace of smug mirth in its soft and airy voice. The being, still squatting before where Gale kneels, withdraws and holds its mace in both hands. A silenced wizard is hardly a threat, brandishing the weapon is, truly, no longer necessary. “They are very annoying.”

Well, Gale can’t say anything now, truth or lies. This will have to do. What’s important is Astarion remain hidden.

They are still in the zone of truth. But when the being speaks again, Gale does not believe what it says: “I will not harm the vampire hero of Baldur’s Gate, and I have no desire to.” Then it sighs, a rather loud sound in comparison to its speaking voice. “Because I suspect, by the look in your eye, that you would die in an effort to conceal him from me, I will honor your devotion and press no more.” Its voice dips into a very soft and rich register. “Such as this is rare.”

—and it vanishes. It’s there, and then it is not. The light of it is gone; the stars remain. Gale neither sees or feels any sign it had been or it had gone.

Except the silence is still on his mouth. That will be annoying until it wears off in a few minutes. He turns his head to look at Tara, who is still curled against his back. “Thoughts?” he mouths.

“I think,” she says, in that raspy, high pitched voice of hers, “we should go home.”

It’s not like Tara to be so incurious, but perhaps curiosity should wait until they are behind the many arcane fortifications wrapped around Gale’s tower. He stands, then bends over when he smells something odd—like the smell of a fireplace. Gale taps the planks of the pier with the end of his staff. The wood is burnt where the figure just stood. How interesting.

Gale reaches down for Tara as he stands. Her claws dig deeper into the fabric and scrape his skin this time; she is still rattled by whatever visitor it was they’d just witnessed. Divinity lingering along the shores of Waterdeep looking for vampires: how interesting that would be if it weren’t for the fact it’s looking for Astarion.

Notes:

Special thank you again to Chthonion for doing beta-read parties with me.

Chapter 4: silent morning prayers

Notes:

CW: for disability-flavored angst and wack mental gymnastics about self-care and value, probably. Also, cosmology. So much fantasy cosmology.

Also, have some Bloodweave kissy.

“I shan’t be paying my respects to any of the gods on show.” | “You never felt the call of the divine, Astarion?” | “Oh, I tried them all. None of them answered.” - Astarion and Gale, outside of the Stormshore Tabernacle

---

Sunlight doesn’t insist; it doesn’t push, prod, pull, unbutton or undress. Sunlight meets the body exactly as it is, demanding nothing and giving everything, falling along every curve as presented. With a gentle but firm and self-assured presence, the sunlight kisses all that it touches with generous and undemanding delight. Sunlight does not complain when it is blocked, it does not seek out the spaces where it is not wanted, it does not lust, it simply is and it is abundant.

The bed Astarion kept at the Elfsong Tavern back in Baldur’s Gate, in those last few days he walked with his companions through sunlit streets, had a window above the headrest he kept uncovered. When Astarion’s trances were done and he waited for the humans among the group to wake, he would harness his ki before the start of the day, prepared for battle and prepared to face whatever terrible memories the city wanted to bombard him with next. It was during those meditations that the first rods of light from the morning sun would pierce through the window glass and fall over Astarion’s lap.

He often thinks about mornings in Elfsong Tavern.

Astarion stops reading the materials Gale left him with because he can’t stomach another page of the swimming text, so Astarion casts off the books full of theology and hymnals and sermons and just remembers. It’s all he has right now, and if he sits in the memories long enough, they feel close and real; the sunlight is almost his again.

But then Astarion is disturbed by a new presence. He scowls when he opens his eyes and sees Shadowheart entering the library. Moonlight is fine, but it’s not what he’s interested in right now. It’s not the same. And clerics make him understandably nervous, even this one. They traveled and fought together, sure, and trusted one another the way one trusts a companion in arms, but their campaign against the Absolute is over, and now they are on opposite sides of a more ancient war.

“Gale said you might want insight into something?” she asks, as she sits in a chair across from where Astarion is lounging on the library couch. Paper, bound and unbound, is scattered over the ground between them where Astarion has tossed aside the materials Gale graciously provided.

“Unless your goddess has a workaround for me, no, I’m fine, thank you,” he says, more terse than he means to be. This line of inquiry will go nowhere and now he can’t even indulge in his fantasies.

Shadowheart was always the sort to move slowly, with care and precision. It’s fluid and quiet, the way she bends in her chair to pick up some of the documents close to her feet. Years of Sharren training in stealth and subtlety persist. She looks over the material in her hands, the sound of paper sliding over paper the loudest noise in the room, Shadowheart’s breathing the second. “What is Gale up to? This is a sermon.”

Astarion sighs. “I don’t really know, if I’m honest. He went on a bit about godly goodness versus ethical goodness. Something about how it’s strange my tongue doesn’t blister when I tell the truth but gods literally forbid I get anywhere near their idea of goodness, or whatever separation he tried to make. So, we’re looking at sermons.”

“Ah,” she says, as if what Astarion says makes perfect sense. “He’s trying to learn more about your place in the cosmology of the known universe.”

—right. Of course he is. Start from the very beginning, why don’t you, Gale. Astarion would rather go back to daydreaming than go on about this, but Shadowheart sounds as if she understands Gale’s latest little intellectual excursion.

“Does there happen to be a solution at the end of this grand question about my ‘place in the universe?’”

This is where her clerical training is supposed to kick in, where she reminds Astarion—as the sun reminds him every day—that he has no place in a just universe. As every other text on undeath from the clergy states, he is an affront to true life.

However, Shadowheart’s brow furrows just a bit as she thinks, which is—possibly promising. “Maybe, or at least an answer to whether or not it’s possible to adjust your place in the universe,” she finally says. “Your sun intolerance is ultimately rooted in the fundamental energies that underlie everything, including the gods.” She scans the floor again and sifts through the materials, possibly looking for something.

“Then there’s no way to pray it away,” Astarion says, bitter. “Of course.”

Shadowheart makes stacks out of the materials around her. “There’s a bit of cosmology Shar’s followers learn because it’s supposed to illustrate something about the Dark Lady’s ‘great power.’ It might be true, and if it is, it might be worth thinking about.” She looks up at Astarion. “May I share it with you?”

He sighs. “More sermons?”

Shadowheart’s smile is small and mysterious. “I’ll do my best not to burn your ears off.”

Very funny. “Well, go on, then. I won’t tell on you to the other moon witches for sharing Shar’s teachings.”

Shadowheart gets on her knees and continues to sort through what’s on the ground. It doesn’t look like she’s finding what she’s looking for. “We were taught that negative energy and it’s opposite, positive energy, along with the elemental planes, are what made up the stuff of every universe. It’s the foundation of everything, or nearly everything. The difference between life and unlife is more—well, I guess the distinction makes more sense when you think about the energy planes.”

Shadowheart puts a hand out to her left. “Nothing alive could traverse the negative energy plane because it was fundamentally opposed to the positive energy plane where life originates. Only the undead and its native beings could move through the negative plane with impunity. And,” she goes on, and puts out her right hand and reaches a little to catch the moonlight coming into the library through the window. “The undead and anything native to the negative plane would be erased by the power of the positive plane, the stuff of life. What is of one can’t co-exist with what is of the other—and when exposed to each other, the positive plane conquers the negative.”

That doesn’t answer the question of why his variety of undeath is so intolerant of sunlight. “But a filthy little zombie can walk in the sun,” Astarion says, bitter. Damn every one of his undead cousins for their sun tolerance. “What makes me oh so special?”

Shadowheart draws her hands together. “Well, this is an outdated cosmology, and there’s nuance that connects negative energy to your condition. At some point after the Spellplague, when the Weave was undone and magic became uncontrollable, way back when Mystra had only just been reformed out of what was left of the goddess Mystral, the negative and positive planes collapsed. And this is where Shar comes in: we were taught that the Dark Lady,” Shadowheart’s voice becomes bitter and sarcastic as she rolls her eyes, “so great in power and ingenuity among the gods, siphoned the death energy out of the negative plane before its collapse and used it to form the Shadowfell. Both energy planes were restored later after the Second Sundering, but the Shadowfell persists under Shar’s domain.” Shadowheart makes a small noise, like a laugh. “Though, Shar lost much of her influence as a result of the Second Sundering because she’s no longer the exclusive dealer in negative energy.”

Then Shadowheart sits very still, thinking though her next piece. Unlike Gale, who lights up with an intense, crackling energy when he thinks, Shadowheart’s eyes suggest her own thinking is slow and deliberate. When she speaks, she does not explode with the energy of her ideas, but with care, cautious and uncertain: “Undeath in the form of vampirism originates in the Shadowfell. That might have something to do with your unique intolerance for light among the undead.” Then Shadowheart smiles, a grim smile. “True healing magic, not the vampiric kind, but the kind I do now, is sourced out of the positive plane by the gods and granted to their faithful through the structure provided by the Weave. But not so with Shar’s followers: the healing I did back then was also vampiric in nature—sourced from life trapped in the Shadowfell.”

Astarion risks a jab. “It seems we had more in common than I realized.”

To his surprise, Shadowheart simply nods. “Yes, we did.” The cleric puts her hand out into the moonlight again. “Shar’s darkness is dispelled by light. There can’t be any true healing in the darkness, it must be sourced from something that can tolerate the light. Vampirism is like this—parasitic.”

Yes, yes, Astarion is a bloodsucking leech with no value to give, all he can do it take. He knows this. Astarion is impatient to see where this cosmology talk is going if it doesn’t lead back where he started. “I’m stuck lurking in the shadows, is what you’re saying,” he says, again, more aggressive than he means to be, so he shuts his mouth to keep his canines hidden.

Shadowheart continues to think in that slow, deliberate way of hers, and her next words are hesitant. She turns her hand over a few times in the moonlight. “You know, we still share something in common. I walk under the same moon as you, which…is strange, now that I think about it.”

Astarion watches Shadowheart’s pale flesh turn over the silvery light. He looks up at the window where the moon is visible outside in the sky. “That light comes from the positive energy planes, I assume? It’s just sort of…diluted?”

Shadowheart has forgotten Astarion for the moment. Her brow is deeply furrowed. “When Dame Aylin brought me back the transformed Spear of Night, she did say whatever Shar calls her own, Selûne has equal claim to. I—still don’t understand what that means, and I don’t know why it would extend to vampires—if it extends to vampires. And it’s not just moonlight, either, but healing itself is an odd case if we’re thinking about the energy planes. I was taught that before the collapse of the energy planes, a true healing spell would have damaged the undead because it channeled that which is antithetical to the undead’s existence. But this isn’t true anymore, if it ever was. My spells can’t heal you, but they don’t hurt you, either.”

Her frustration with these contradictions isn’t exactly inspiring, but Astarion is left with the sense there might still be a way, which he will hang onto. He puts his hand out, too, and his skin glows, much like Shadowheart’s.

This light is beautiful, but it’s not the same. Astarion needs the raw, unfiltered presence of the sun, not this…conciliatory light. He closes his hand and looks at his long, glassy nails that need a trim again. Perhaps he’s being a glutton, as he’s want to be in this condition, not happy or satisfied with enough; he’s stuck with an ache that can’t be filled, never enough blood, never enough light, never enough—

“Astarion?”

He looks at Shadowheart. “Hm?”

“I think this is where Gale should take over because honestly, this whole line of thought has made me feel the need to bathe and repent, and you look like you’re about to bite me.”

Astarion leans back into the couch and puts his arms over the back of it. “Only if you’re offering. Perhaps some of that godly goodness of yours will rub off on me,” he says, risking another jab at her clerical sensibilities.

Shadowheart’s lips form a flat line, but she doesn’t flinch like a reasonable person would. “Do you eat enough, Astarion?”

He sits very still. “Excuse me?”

The cleric sighs and a bit of her old, bitter impatience creeps around the edge of her words. “I asked if you eat enough.”

Astarion has to choose his words carefully and avoid snapping at her—no doubt Gale put her up to this, the softhearted fool. “‘Enough’ is…a bit of an awkward word,” he says. The hunger—the ceaseless, bottomless hunger that would drive him mad if he let it—the ache of it never stops and will never stop, not matter how much he takes. Not even the tadpole had spared him from it. “I take what I need. It will have to be enough.”

Hunger—the raw pain of absence where one wants abundance—courtesy of Shar, it turns out. A shame Astarion can’t also stick it to the Dark Lady and tell her he wants nothing to do with her “dark embrace.” His condition doesn’t afford him the same luxury of doing so that Shadowheart was afforded.

Shadowheart shows no interest in prying further. She has always been good at respecting another’s desire to keep secrets and sitting comfortably in ignorance: old Sharren habits.

She looks once again at the documents by her knees. “Everything Gale has here is about the faiths surrounding Lathander, Mystra, Selûne, Helm, Tyr and so on. They’re all good or at least neutral gods; the ones who deal in the positive plane’s energies through the Weave. However, I wonder if…” and Shadowheart looks toward the moonlight coming in through the window. “I hate to suggest the Shadowfell might have answers, but…you two might want to look at material from less reputable sources.”

That Astarion understands, that Astarion can do: disreputable is his bread and butter.

“And you should find scholarship on ki,” she adds, like it just occurs to her. “It’s strange to me that you’re still harnessing ki energy.”

Astarion shifts, suddenly uncomfortable. This is the one thing he has left from his time partly-untethered from the drawbacks of his vampirism. He doesn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. With his luck, just second-guessing his good fortune would get it taken away. “Why?” he growls.

Shadowheart is not intimidated by the snarling or his teeth. “I don’t know much about ki, only that harnessing ki is a spiritual practice that can be used to channel the light, the shadows, or other powers entirely. From what I understand, most practitioners are dedicated to themselves, but both Lathander and Shar have monastic devotees. It doesn’t strike me as something the undead should be able to do, and yet, well—” she gestures to all of him. “Here you are. It’s possibly worth investigation if you’re this determined—” and she gestures at all the old paper, “to return to the sun.”

A “spiritual” practice, what an odd thought: Tav was a quiet monk with little to say about the metaphysics of her practice—asking questions about the fundamental nature of the rocks on the road is a wizard’s job—so there was no insight from her on that, and as for Astarion, harnessing his ki has been uncomfortably and sometimes intolerably physical. He wonders now what “spiritual” means—

Ugh, and he’s begun to think like Gale, asking stupidly big questions.

Astarion steeples his fingers. “You’ve been wonderfully generous with your words, my dear cleric, and you have my thanks. And, as delightful as I’ve found your insight, I wonder—would you be so kind as to share it with the wizard yourself? I won’t do it justice.”

Shadowheart snorts and laughs. She didn’t do much of that during their adventures, too preoccupied with piecing together what little of her mind was left after Shar harvested most of it, though toward the end of their shared journey sometimes Gale made her laugh. It’s a clean and gentle laugh.

“Of course. I’ll talk with him this afternoon when I wake up.” Then Shadowheart stretches as she stands. Her Selûnite robes are silvery and ripple with moonlight when she moves. “But now I need to sleep. Enjoy the silence before the dawn, Astarion.”

Astarion is left alone with old paper and old cosmologies and no answers to a very old problem. He groans, falls across the couch and sulks.

Gale had better get a new idea from Shadowheart’s little lesson in cosmology. Though, Astarion wonders if the cosmology the Sharrens learn is any good. In his experience, all the gods are equally trustworthy, which is to say, not very. Yes, the Lady of Loss is a big fat liar by omission, it’s her specialty, but Mystra is manipulative and condescending, and all those other sunshine good gods are pig-headed do-gooders who do good only when it suits the mission of their portfolio. And none of them ever listened to Astarion when he begged and cried for help, they all thought the same thing about him: worthless, is what Astarion is to these things.

He wants to hit something.

Astarion gets up and goes outside where Gale’s yard is set up for nights like this. There are wooden posts and stuffed training dummies and things to climb on out here. There is also a small box of scrolls Gale has politely requested Astarion use when he feels the need to make noise at odd hours. Astarion reaches into the box and plucks out one of the tiny scrolls for a silence spell; he casts it with a word, the parchment crumbles into dust, and everything becomes—quiet.

Silence doesn’t permit sound to exist within the dome of the spell’s effect. Nothing inside makes noise: not Astarion’s fists, not the cracking of wood, not Astarion’s breathing or his screams—nothing. In the auditory absence, Astarion throws himself at the dummies and wooden posts made to give his body something to hit, maintaining as he does the low-level of concentration required to sustain the spell.

Astarion is sick of the endless asking of questions.

The ki in Astarion’s body unfurls and he throws it through his arm as he directs an open-handed blow onto the wooden post in front of him. Astarion feels it crack, just a little, under the force. If the spell wasn’t up, Astarion imagines the break would have made a satisfyingly thick noise. He positions himself for another hit and strikes again.

No more prayer. It didn’t work the first time, the tenth time, the hundredth time—and it won’t work for Astarion the umpteenth time. Why did he think this was a good idea, looking into the will of the gods and the stuff of the universe? It has nothing to do with him, greater spiritual meaning never applied to him—

They’re asking these questions because Gale thought it made sense. And now Shadowheart seems to agree. But all Astarion has now is this idea that there is something fundamentally different about his condition that leaves him trapped in the dark.

Yes, something fundamentally different, something fundamentally wrong—

Again, and again, Astarion strikes the wood, and the wood gives more each time. He hits along the grain of the wood and the post expands as it’s blown apart by the energy Astarion pushes in and out of his fists. Not a sound is made; he remains wrapped in the vacuum of silence.

The fundamental good of the universe would erase Astarion. There will be no divine intervention in the vampire’s favor. Every god that draws upon that positive fundamental energy would see him smote as they clutch at the foundation of their righteousness. He is an affront to true life, an unlife, with no way to salvation.

He is nothing; he is worse than nothing. Astarion is a leech on what is good, he takes and returns nothing. Gale’s precious health, supplied by the positive plane, is sapped by Astarion’s most basic need and it’s someone like Shadowheart that has to fill Gale back up again. It’s not that Astarion is ashamed to take—he’s rather fond of theft—but there isn’t even the option to settle such enormous debts.

Astarion opens his hands and rakes his savage nails—claws, really—across the training post and tears away splinters of the collapsing wood. Cazador did this to him; Cazador broke him, poisoned him, chewed him up and spat out this pathetic, worthless—

Astarion forgets to be in his body; he hits the post, but the force behind the hit is angled wrong, and his hand grazes over the splintering wood and Astarion curses as it pierces his skin. Nothing actually comes out of Astarion’s mouth, of course. Without sound, there is no satisfaction or relief in the curse. He huffs, chest heaving. Then Astarion falls back into his body, into the pain and into the energetic blocks gumming up the flow of his ki and he screams.

It rips his throat. It makes no sound. There is no evidence his pain exists.

Astarion steps out of the sphere of silence and his knees fall into the grass. It crunches softly beneath him. He breathes to hear his body and looks up toward the sky. It’s scattered with little stars and punctuated with a portion of the moon—gentle light that does not seek to burn him off the face of Faerûn. There are not as many stars in Waterdeep as there are on the road because the city is active and bright during all hours and midnight pleasure drowns out some of the fainter celestial light. Still, there are stars, and the moon is never far. Perhaps Astarion should find some kind of peace with this and be grateful lights such as these won’t harm him.

But they never helped him, either. Selûne was just as deaf to Astarion’s cries for help as the gods who ruled the day. Not even the mistress of darkness herself would touch Astarion’s ruined soul—ruined by the very fount of her power; vampirism made its original start in her own backyard.

Bugger them all. Astarion wants the sun. He wants to bask in the light of dawn, unafraid and unharmed; let it kiss him and not burn; let its light be his private joy, not his fear. How exhausting it is, to be afraid of something he loves so desperately.

Astarion should have made that trade with Mephistopheles in Cazador’s stead, he should have sundered the souls from his vampiric kin and tossed them to the devils who find at least some value in the souls of ruined beasts such as they; if Astarion had just been selfish enough, he wouldn’t be here, begging for scraps off what little light Gale and Shadowheart had to offer—

There’s no point in thinking about this. Astarion stumbles back into the dome of silence to weep over himself, as he does, the self-absorbed and pathetic thing that he is—he weeps in silence, since no one will hear him, anyway.

Naturally, Astarion doesn’t notice anyone approach. When something touches Astarion’s shoulder, he wheels around, fist up and ready, but stops: Gale—of course it’s Gale. The wizard’s eyes are fixed on Astarion’s pale fist hovering just by his face, brows raised, hands up and fingers folded in an odd looking gesture, a precursor to spell-casting.

“What are you doing?” Astarion snarls—and realizes of course nothing actually comes out of his mouth except for air. He mentally releases the silence spell. The sounds of the world—horny insects, the wind in the trees, Gale’s breathing, the soft coo of nighttime birds—wash back into his ears.

“Apologies,” Gale murmurs. “I couldn’t sleep, and you weren’t in the library, so I thought I’d check on you.”

The human looks tired, and it makes him look older. Astarion hopes Gale is one of those wizards that takes measures to double his natural life because right now Astarion selfishly can’t stand the idea of Gale’s mortal condition. This insufferable worrywart simply isn’t allowed to go anywhere.

“What’s on your mind, Astarion?”

Astarion hopes his look is withering. “What do you think?”

“Better that I not assume,” Gale says, sheepish, but smiling. Then he sees Astarion’s hand, clocking the small injury in the dark despite his inferior nighttime vision. “You need a spot of healing?”

“I’m fine,” Astarion snaps. He takes a breath in, then out. “I’m fine,” he says, slowly this time. “I don’t heal as fast as a true vampire, but I do heal with time.”

Gale looks dubious. “Yes, vampire spawn heal quickly, but you haven’t really been eating.”

“I’ve barely needed it. Would you stop fussing over my diet? You’re worse than Tara.”

Mention of the tressym makes Gale smile knowingly. Tara fusses over Gale more than his own mother, and his mother fusses far too much, always sending too many letters and notes, half of which are her waxing worried about Gale’s return to a reclusive lifestyle; she doesn’t know Astarion lives in the tower. “It’s just that you’re accustomed to starvation,” Gale goes on, “plus, we both know you don’t like gifts, even if you need them.”

Astarion scowls.

“So,” Gale says, more firm this time. “Have you been eating enough? I won’t judge you, either, if it turns out you’ve been sneaking off to feed off the scum of Waterdeep—I just want you to be honest with me. At least while you live here. I know what it is to hunger and what it sometimes takes to sate that hunger.”

Ugh. Intolerable. “Yes, I’ve been eating enough; no, I have not been going out at night to eat beggars and criminals.” Astarion crosses his arms. “I don’t need nearly as much as I once did, not when I’m this inactive. Reading doesn’t exactly work up an appetite, a headache, but not an appetite.”

Gales nods. “Then I’ll believe you. But do tell me if you need healing—need feeding? I can’t cast a spell to heal you, unfortunately, but I can have Shadowheart cast a spell to heal myself. It’s really just a small extra step.” Then Gale makes a face—that thinking face he makes when he has an idea, for better or worse: “just one extra step,” he says, to himself this time.

Working away at the problem at every hour of the day. Gale is not a god but he does try to answer Astarion’s prayers, and Astarion is going to get disgustingly emotional again and his face itches just thinking about it. Enough with the tears—he has shed enough tears for a lifetime and they never do him any good.

“You’re scowling at me again.”

Astarion huffs. “Let’s just go inside.”

In the dining room, Gale insists on casting a small light and making sure they dig all of the wood out of Astarion’s flesh. “You really went at it this time,” Gale says, plucking the splinters out from under Astarion’s soft skin. “It’s inconvenient that you don’t develop callouses. Your hands are as soft as a scholar’s.”

Tara is awake and watching them from where she’s perched on the table. She’s not supposed to be on the table, but Astarion is sitting on it while Gale attends to his hand, so exceptions are being made.

When Gale is done, he makes Astarion hold out both of his hands and turn them over for inspection. Splinter-free. Satisfied, Gale dismisses the light and somewhere in the room Tara jumps onto the floor and slips through Gale’s legs as she leaves the room.

Astarion taps Gale’s shoulder, who is blinded for the moment because the light is gone, so he doesn’t quite look at Astarion when he turns. In the dark, Astarion makes a half-hearted gesture as if inviting a hug. Sometimes Tav would do this for him, when Astarion lost his grasp on his ki after spiraling in his emotions and he needed grounding. An embrace makes Astarion feel terrifyingly vulnerable, soft and exposed, but Gale is—well, Gale.

The wizard meets Astarion’s invitation and holds Astarion in a firm hug, arms pressed around his ribs. He’s warm, and Astarion likes it the way a snake likes a hot rock in the sun.

It’s safe here.

And it’s annoying how good Gale smells because Astarion is now suddenly peckish. Sort of—honestly, Astarion isn’t sure what he’s feeling, but he would like to put his face on Gale’s neck, so he does, and the human doesn’t even flinch. There’s always a bit of lavender in Gale’s clothes, to the point it might be a permanent smell in his skin.

Astarion’s lips are closed and pressed on Gale’s neck, just where the faint, purple scarring from the Gale’s old, magical wound is still tattooed into his skin.

“Changed your mind?” Gale mutters, still holding Astarion, still unflinching, still disgustingly good and generous Gale.

Astarion sighs against Gale’s skin. “No,” he says, pulls away, and places his lips on Gale’s. It’s just a peck, really, but it sends Gale’s heart audibly racing and the blood rushes into the wizard’s face. Gale pulls back immediately.

His words are panicked and rehearsed: “I’ve made it very clear you don’t owe me anything and I don’t expect anything like this from you—”

Gods, he’s such a bore. “I know, Gale!” Astarion snaps. “It’s for me, not for you.”

A miracle has occurred: Gale is speechless, no silence spell required. He’s still got his arms around Astarion, too, so perhaps this isn’t a total gaffe.

“Do you mind? I wasn’t done.”

It’s warm and soft, the careful way Gale kisses him back. There’s something very chaste about it, very careful—Gale doesn’t want to demand but Astarion is familiar with the raw want in the wizard’s lips. It’s a bit of a fight for Astarion to wrestle down the instinct that insists he use this moment to wrap Gale up in a confused, heated mess that’s easy to manipulate and easy to control. It is easy for Astarion to hand his body over to the fever of another; it’s second nature, to be the lure for someone else’s prey. But there is no predator, and there is no prey. There’s just Gale. So instead, Astarion tunes into his ki that has also become a part of his nature, and lets the energies that originate with his body help him learn what desire feels like again, just for a moment. And Astarion desires this: a gentle kiss, firm, self-assured and generous. There’s no terrible goal at the end of it, there isn’t even a goal, just—this. There’s a bit of the dawn on Gale’s tongue, warm and undemanding.

Astarion doesn’t mean to make the tiny and undignified noise that he does. Gale’s lips work deeper into Astarion’s, and there’s also something new quivering along the edges of Astarion’s ki energies: it’s Gale’s ki, thin and undisciplined, but very much there and pressed against Astarion’s stronger and more self-aware and practiced inner power. The boundaries between them are thin.

Gale pulls back, just a little, but enough to separate their lips and leave Astarion with a novel sense of longing—how very irritating. The wizard makes an inquisitive noise, like the sound of someone just waking up. “What’s going on here?”

Ever the inquisitive one, of course. Astarion doesn’t know what he expected. “That’s your ki leaning against mine.”

Gale looks embarrassed and presses a hand over the center of his chest where an orb used to be, a familiar and old gesture. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it could—”

Astarion holds Gale’s face to press both thumbs on the wizard’s mouth so he’ll shut up. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

The look in Gale’s big, brown eyes suggests he is properly admonished. Astarion holds Gale’s gaze for a moment, thinking. He’s precious, and Astarion can understand for a moment why the goddess of magic coveted the attention of this trusting fool, as small and fragile as he is; but perhaps Gale’s frailty was part of the appeal—and Astarion is angry with the gods again, possibly more so this time.

The wizard is making a face—gods, what a face, and Astarion has no idea what it means and he’s afraid to guess. Gale isn’t displaying emotions Astarion is trained to detect like a bloodhound: anger, disgust, lust, signals that danger is near—no, this expression is one Astarion doesn’t know how to read.

And of course he can’t read—it seems he can’t read anything useful these days. Perhaps Astarion has tripped over whatever is or isn’t going on between Gale and Shadowheart, but it’s fine—Astarion doesn’t need another moment like this; it was nice while it lasted.

He has to go. And Astarion should meditate on this in the dark privacy of his room. The instinct to press down every other thought trying to bubble up in his mind is strong, but doing that would put his ki out of balance; he has to think about this—feel things about this, later, in his own time. It’s more painful than reading.

It’s alarming how quiet Gale is; his voice is a noise that Astarion doesn’t always notice but he always notices its absence. Astarion should probably do or say something reassuring. Gale’s brain is very good at creating stories out of very little information and it’s best not to let the wizard spin in his own self-loathing. He kisses Gale’s brow before he lets go of his face. “You’re sweet, you know. But I’m afraid the sun is going to cut our time short. I need to, uh, do meditations before I trance.”

Astarion slides off the dining table. They both could use a change of subject, something important and straightforward. “Shadowheart has some interesting stories about ‘energy planes’ to share with you when she wakes. I didn’t understand most of what she said, but I’m sure it will give you at least three new ideas.”

Gale grunts and steps back—several unnecessary steps back. “Right, the quest continues, and we should rest—”

The relief washing over Astarion and the sheer intensity of it threatens to unbalance him. The wizard is a master in making a whole lot out of very little, and this just now was not a little thing—

“—but Astarion, I wanted to ask—” Gale pauses, collecting his thoughts.

Gods, the silence was too good to be true, wasn’t it?

Gale’s tone dips into something serious. “Don’t go outside this tower, at least not without me. For now.” A shadow passes through Gale’s eyes, a frightening thing for anyone who knows what he’s capable of. “Earlier, I think I ran into a paladin or some sort that’s out monster hunting. Vampires. It’s looking for vampires.”

—oh.

An old, sickening fear washes through Astarion, up the back of his neck and down his throat. “I see.” Now every inch of Astarion screams for him to find a dark corner to hide in. His voice is fragile. “Then I’ll go tuck myself away for the night.” Hiding. Cowering. Taking shelter behind the power of others. Astarion is good at that.

“Seek me if you need anything,” Gale says, firm. It’s an offer for things Gale is good at—magic of renown, knowledge, something to eat, and—bless him—an end to a conversation Astarion didn’t want to have.

It’s difficult to say: “thank you.”

This makes Gale blush, something Astarion can smell in the dark. Astarion leaves before Gale changes his mind and tries to talk about other things that don’t need to be talked about, traces of Gale still on Astarion’s teeth.

The vampire locks himself in his room. He glares around at the space, an old reflex—to scan for threats and possible means of hiding. It’s a very plain space with almost nothing in it. The grave dirt under the bed is a familiar smell, as well as the ever-lingering smell of his own undeath and traces of the perfume he uses to disguise it.

This room is a bloody crypt, Astarion thinks. It’s—awful. He hates this, and he understands better these days why powerful vampires like Cazador put so much money and effort into decorating their castles—it’s all an effort to pretend their home isn’t a bloody mausoleum, to pretend they’re alive and still exist.

Astarion should move on, but he won’t because he’s selfish. Gale has let Astarion nest here, and the wizard shows no signs of shooing him out. Perhaps Astarion can afford to settle in, just a little bit. Not much, just—he can afford to keep a few things, trinkets or practical items to pass the time. Stuff he can afford to leave behind or won’t miss when he returns to the road.

It wasn’t the plan to stay so long with Gale. Honestly, Astarion didn’t have a real plan when he arrived to Waterdeep beyond “ask Gale for help.” Of course the help he needed was going to be an extensive research project full of dead ends and waiting. So much waiting—for a cure that will likely never come.

When Gale gives up on the problem as hopeless, Astarion wonders what staying might cost, since Gale will no longer be entertained by interesting problems. The cost associated with everything Astarion has taken from Gale seems to be getting awful—weighty. And there’s still no hint as to what exactly that cost will be. Honestly, it’s infuriating, the way Gale quietly insists he doesn’t want anything. Everyone wants for something.

But for now, this is Astarion’s crypt. Perhaps he will do something with it. Typical trances only last a few hours, and his fewer still. Technically, Astarion doesn’t need to trance, no vampire requires rest typical of the living, but Astarion has found he gets quite cross without routine trances. When he first started trancing again it was to disguise his nature from the others when they didn’t know he was a vampire. Then he kept doing it, a routine born of being attached to others with similar routines, and it persisted after the fact, a piece of old companionships lingering in Astarion’s habits. But even if he trances, there are many day hours to kill.

He will think more about decorating and ways to pass the day hours. Summer is here, the days continue to get longer and the sun spends more time in the sky, which means fewer hours that Astarion can spend outside of this windowless room. He could write a bit—just a bit—of himself into the space, for the time being.

Gale doesn’t take full advantage of the theatrics expected of his ilk, but Astarion certainly can. Finding skulls and black candles and mysterious looking bottles for his perfumes should be easy. And there are plenty of old books around here he can snatch for show. Astarion catches himself smiling at the idea. Yes, he could make this space rather sinister and make it look like a vampire dwells here, not just a corpse.

Astarion will ask Gale about the idea first, however. It’s not clear the wizard can handle any more surprises. Astarion groans; he hopes Gale doesn’t decide to initiate some kind of conversation later. There’s no need for one, really—it won’t happen again. Unless Gale asks, of course. Then it might.

—this is awful. Astarion needs to work out the pins and needles prickling through his skin, the thick feeling churning in his chest and the fear gnawing at his mind. Precious Gale, who continues to stand between Astarion and the ever-present threats on his unlife—ugh.

How is he supposed to meditate or trance like this?

Gods, it’s going to be a long day.

Notes:

Special thank you again to Chthonion for your relentless enthusiasm.

Chapter 5: Sunny songs under a waning moon

Notes:

we're doing cute stuff today before the (next) crisis

“‘Let all who worship the changing tides of life and knowledge feel the blessings of Selûne.’ As a moon-bathed cleric, this is your moment to bask in her lunar light and imbue your spirit with her majesty and grace.” - Narrator, in the Stormshore Tabernacle

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Shadowheart is surprised to find Gale in the kitchen looking as if he’s also just woken up. It’s the afternoon, Shadowheart’s usual waking hour, not Gale’s. He has a book in his hands and water boiling on the stove and his hair has not been brushed. He glances up when Shadowheart approaches. “Tea or coffee?” he asks, voice rough.

“Tea, if it’s black.”

Gale turns and picks out a tin from one of the cabinets and places it on the counter. He resumes his reading. The darkness around his eyes suggests his sleep the previous night had been poor. It typically takes Shadowheart about an hour to become personable after waking, so she doesn’t mind the silence, but it is strange to find silence next to Gale. She grabs a mug and a stool and sits by where Gale stands as they wait for the water to boil.

Gale pours hot water for them both. Shadowheart sits with a warm mug in her hands, existing, as Gale turns his eyes once more to his book. Leaning, she peeks at the title: Celestial Heralds. Curious material for someone like Gale. Shadowheart looks back up at his face; his eyes don’t move, and he hasn’t turned a single page since she arrived. She is familiar with Gale’s superior reading speed and the intense, focused way he sometimes will flip back and forth between the covers of a book as he connects ideas between the pages. Clearly, something is amiss.

“Troubled?” she asks.

Gale grunts and lets the book droop in his hand. “After a fashion,” he says. Then he turns to look at Shadowheart, directly this time. “You talked with Astarion last night about the cosmos?”

“I did,” she says, and tests the heat of her tea. It’s still too hot. “I suppose you’ll want to hear about it.”

“Please,” he grunts, and slides the book onto the counter, out of the way, as he pulls open a few of the cabinets.

Shadowheart gives Gale a slightly more concise version of her thoughts from the previous night as he moves his hands through he kitchen to prepare a late breakfast. He listens with a notch in his brow. Gale asks no questions, also strange, but Shadowheart can see the shadows of his thoughts move across his face as he sorts Shadowheart’s words into his existing paradigms.

“Interesting,” he mutters. “Mystra remained mysterious with me about the Shadowfell, understandably, since the shadow weave underlying its existence is a direct attack on and insult to Mystra’s domain. My service to her was generally in dispelling and dismissing such antagonistic magics, and I only ever learned enough to do just that. Wielding the shadows was not something I was interested in at the time. This current line of thought makes me almost wish I tried when you suggested it back at Moonrise.” Then Gale shakes his head of the sacrilegious thought. “I’ve read a few vague stories about the formation of the Shadowfell, not all of them make sense and they don’t all agree on the mechanics, of course. I wonder about this version told among the Sharrens. What strikes me is that your narrative is curiously—detailed, unlike the others.”

He puts food together on two plates, it’s hot and steaming: eggs and rice and tomatoes mixed in with a sauce that Shadowheart doesn’t recognize but it smells very good. Gale pushes a full plate toward Shadowheart by where she sits. “Shar would know best how her domain operates, but she’s not always forthcoming with the truth,” Gale says, and adds, “few gods are.”

Painfully correct.

“For that reason,” Shadowheart says, “I suggested to Astarion that you two look at less reputable sources of information. The materials that might help at this stage of your investigation are unlikely to be in any old bookstore or accessible in a well-lit temple.”

Gale leans his hip against the counter near Shadowheart and picks up the other plate for himself. He waves his fork in the air as he says, “back to the night market, then.”

“‘Back?’” Shadowheart asks, smiling a little and picks up her food to have a taste. It’s flavorful and savory and wakes up her appetite. She realizes this must be what people mean when they say there’s nothing quite as good as the cooking they grew up with; Shadowheart doesn’t have such flavored childhood memories, it’s Gale’s cooking that sits in their place instead.

“I have to source my materials on necromancy from somewhere,” Gale says, as if it’s obvious he would go to the night market in Waterdeep.

“I’d like to join you,” Shadowheart says, without thinking—and then it occurs to her that it’s not exactly the most priestess-like thing to do, going to a night market. She’ll have to use a disguise self ritual, but even that doesn’t promise anonymity at the Waterdeep night market when there’s a chance someone will be walking around with true sight, though she is fairly sure she is beneath the notice of such power even in her true form.

Gale appears to think. “I appreciate the offer. I might take you up on it.”

Surely, there’s no harm in going with Gale. They aren’t up to anything nefarious, if anything, looking for a way to ease Astarion’s suffering falls neatly within her domain as a healer. Even if he’s undead.

They stay in the kitchen to eat, Gale stands and Shadowheart sits on the high stool. She compliments his cooking, he says it’s nothing special. The tea is good, and Shadowheart’s body is warm, full and content. She likes it here: the warmth of the kitchen and Gale’s smile. It’s odd that Gale still isn’t talking, but perhaps even he needs a break from his voice every now and then.

“I wanted to ask you something,” Shadowheart begins, as she takes the dishes before Gale can deal with them himself. He looks like he wants to protest, but he doesn’t, still weirdly quiet. Shadowheart washes the plates off in the sink. “I mentioned before that the Selûnite priestesses typically live in their temples, but I—well, may I stay just a little longer? I think I would like to look at an alternative arrangement. I’m not sure I want to live there, at least not all the time.”

Gale runs his hands through his hair, pulling out the more dramatic evidence of his previous night’s tossing and turning. “You are welcome to stay for as long as it pleases you,” he says, not looking at her.

“And I might take you up on connecting with a reputable realtor,” Shadowheart says, as she dries her hands on a nearby rag. “I grew up in a cloister, surrounded by faith at all times. I don’t think I want to return to that.” She pauses. “Not to suggest the Selûnite temple possesses the same kind of oppressive darkness, but I would like some space between myself and godly concerns,” she says. What Shadowheart doesn’t add is that it would be better if she had an address independent of the temple for those times Nocturne sends letters. Correspondence between herself and her old Sharren friend should not be exposed to Selûne’s light for now.

Nocturne will find her own way in her own time. In the meantime, Shadowheart has no intention of making the feud between their goddesses a feud between themselves. Besides, Nocturne offers Shadowheart information about nefarious Sharren dealings on occasion when the Dark Lady’s servants are up to something darker than Nocturne feels is strictly necessary. She’s confused—they both are—about many things except this: they are friends and will remain so until the end of their days. The bond between Shadowheart and Nocturne persisted through multiple instances of Shadowheart being subjected to great memory loss. The divide between their respective goddesses will not extend between them.

Gale thanks Shadowheart with some sheepishness for taking care of their dishes and he wipes the counter. His hair is still disheveled and floats around his ears. Shadowheart taps his shoulder and he turns to her. She indicates she is about to fix his hair, so he bends to let her, his cheeks burning before she even starts.

Gale’s brown hair is light and thin, easy to put back in place behind his ears. “I think you’d look rather dashing with some of this pulled back,” Shadowheart says, moving his hair around experimentally. Pulling back his hair exposes more of the silver at his temples. It’s been several years since Shadowheart got this close to Gale, and they’d been a little drunk at the time. Back then, they were shocked to still be alive: the high of their first successful adventure made everything rosy and exciting, and the knowledge they had a long way to go with no promise of success made every moment feel urgent.

In the quiet of their new lives, Shadowheart still likes the shape of Gale’s lips and the taste of his cooking. Instead of the sweat of adventure and tang of wine, he smells like lavender and old paper. It suits him, of course. Shadowheart runs her thumb just under his lower lip, along his recently-trimmed beard, a question in her touch. He rests his head against hers and sighs. “I’ve been poor company this morning. I apologize.”

“Something the matter?” Shadowheart asks, whispering because their faces are already so close.

He takes a moment to answer, still resting in her touch. “Maybe. But I’m glad you aren’t leaving just yet.”

Emboldened, Shadowheart plants a delicate kiss on Gale’s lips and her nose brushes against his. He tastes of coffee. Shadowheart can feel the heat in Gale’s face under her hand where she’s placed it on his jaw. He makes a soft, startled noise into her mouth.

Gale is warm and familiar and safe; his touch is as comfortable as a familiar bed, warm from long and peaceful rest; it’s a feeling she associates with the word “home,” not a word that’s meant very much to her except in recent years, and it’s difficult to find, even now when she knows what it’s supposed to mean.

They both linger in each other’s breath. The kiss doesn’t end so much as it dissolves: they touch, it lingers, and it fades. Shadowheart tilts her head up and looks Gale in the eye; he’s flushed, of course, and looks like he’s seized up in some kind of Gale-typical panic. His anxiety isn’t numbed by alcohol and adrenaline this time, and now Shadowheart worries she has overstepped because he’s quiet again. Shadowheart leans back a bit more, giving him space. “Tell me if that was presumptuous,” she says.

Gale clears his throat, “not at all—no. I—uh—didn’t think—I wasn’t expecting—you’re very—you’ve always been, well—” He leans back. “I apologize. I’m being rather awkward. I just—” then Gale places his hand over the center of his chest in an old, practiced gesture, despite there being no danger of him exploding now that Mystra has long since removed the blight next to his heart.

Shadowheart turns away just a fraction, eyeing him sideways. “I personally wouldn’t call your kisses awkward, but I can test them a few more times and give you a more educated opinion, if you’d like.”

The noise Gale makes is a bit high and panicked and he is suddenly busy with the kitchen again, putting away the remaining ingredients, ears still pink.

In the days when there was a volatile orb of magic stashed away in Gale’s body, Shadowheart and the others assumed he refrained from expressing his feelings too much in an effort to keep the magical blight contained. He’d said as much. Now, Shadowheart wonders; perhaps he’s stuck in old habits.

She—hopes he’s stuck in old habits. Ones that can be forgotten with time. The ghost of the orb might be haunting him. Successful suppression of strong emotions meant life or death, once, for Gale Dekarios.

Shadowheart decides not to push him further; he’s at his limit. She leaves Gale where he is, cleaning some invisible spot on the counter, and goes to the guest room to brush and braid her hair. Adding the chain that contains her wispy white hair in its braid is a bit of a process.

When she’s ready, dressed in Selûnite robes and her prayers done, Shadowheart stops to look in the kitchen: Gale is not there, and he is no where else that she checks as she makes her way to the front door. They might need to talk about this later, but, an expert in setting her thoughts aside, Shadowheart puts the concern down to worry over when the day is done. Gale might need time, anyway, and Shadowheart has an appointment.

—not an appointment she wants to go to, but she will go.

It’s easier to settle her mind when she walks. Perhaps it’s because she found this version of herself while traveling, walking away in both body and spirit from the dark stillness of a Sharren cloister. If she sits in total stillness, her mind reaches and grabs at thinly spread memories, old and fresh, at simple ideas and pains, but when Shadowheart’s feet travel, falling against the hardness of the road and her ears are kissed by moving air, it is easier to find and be with herself, find a single, whole person, rather than scraps.

Shadowheart’s meditation carries her from the warm embrace of Gale’s simple tower to the extravagance of the Selûnite temple in Waterdeep.

The House of the Moon dwarfs the neighboring villas. Gale mentioned they’re all owned by various nobles whose families have lived on the west side of Waterdeep for hundreds of years, comfortable with their place in history by the shore. The temple itself is old and magnificent, a multi-story complex encased in white marble tiles adorned by moonglow, a light-producing spell shaped here into runes that project out into the world simple words for the faithful to meditate on and live by. Change. Life. Knowledge.

The central tower is the tallest tower on this side of Waterdeep, taller than even the towers of the Morninglord’s temple; it and the four shorter towers that together make up the temple are domed in white-gold, tipped by crescent moons, decorated with balconies and windows that overlook the homes and streets below.

Shadowheart stops to stand at the base of the steps that lead into the front entrance. It is grand. She is small.

The gates depict Selûne as a triumphant combatant in the throwing down of Shar, the dark sister’s body prone by Selûne’s feet where her hair obscures her face in darkness. The eyes of the moon goddess’ likeness are directed out toward those who would approach the House of the Moon; stoic in expression, as always. The fight against her sister Shar is not a fight Selûne relishes. They are among the most ancient of deities, possibly among the first, and the sisters once worked together to forge the world. The union shattered when Selûne reached for the light at the heart of the fire plane and bore the sun.

Shar could not bear the light.

The fight broke Selûne, and Shar continues to thrash under her sister’s feet.

The central tower reaches high into the sky to receive as much moonlight as possible during all seasons and every possible phase of the moon. The window glass shines bright in the afternoon sun, rendering the tower a beacon. The priesthood performs ceremonies and powerful castings up there.

And Shadowheart is about to be one of them.

Shadowheart doesn’t like heights. And she doesn’t like crowds, either, which might be a hangup from her Sharren upbringing; there are a lot of people here, pilgrims and locals, the poor and the rich, worshipers and oglers; and the air is full of their sound, their shape, their presence. Simple blessings and healings are done by the minor priestesses for any and all who come to the House of the Moon. Their hands extend out and down toward the heads of the faithful who kneel at the feet of Selûne’s representatives.

Shadowheart doesn’t want to step through the cacophony, but she is fortified by a good breakfast. Shadowheart passes into the crowd, her body brushing close by many others, she catches the eye of a few curious onlookers, and climbs the familiar steps to enter the temple.

The halls are painted in shades of blue, darkest by the ground and brightest where the walls meet the domed ceilings; a transition from dark to light. There are also people inside, though the flavor of the company here is different from those who clamor outside: everyone here is dressed in clothing that costs gold to acquire and more gold to keep. These are merchants and nobles and scholars, men and women who have come to do business and research in the temple’s libraries. Merchants come to find maps and figures, scholars seek scraps of information that might elevate their magic or their station, and who knows what, exactly, nobles need to know to win their internal squabbles. They glance at Shadowheart as she passes them by.

Everyone who comes to the House of the Moon seeks change; a change of health, a change of fortune, a change of heart—and the priestesses meet seekers at these intersections of change, providing spells, materials, and assurances. Selûne, as a goddess, does not claim to be whole, herself an imperfect product of strife and change when she and Shar went their separate ways at the dawn of the world. It is her gentle but broad-sweeping, waxing and waning power that draws so many to her doors.

Still, Shadowheart’s journey out of the darkness into the light of Selûne has not brought her the constancy she craves, and now she has been asked to guide others through their own periods of darkness, be it poor health, ignorance, or grief; she is to be a light that comes and goes. The only surety in this domain the surety of change.

Taking in the weight of this place and the even weightier need placed upon it, Shadowheart wishes desperately she was in Gale’s kitchen drinking coffee. All she wanted when dedicated to Shar was a greater purpose, a place to put her faith, and guidance when she herself had been so empty. Now that she isn’t quite so empty, full of warm memories and a warm breakfast, this all feels like—she isn’t sure she wants so much—it’s just that—

Shadowheart is outside and she is walking back down the steps. She ignores the people who recognize her robes and begin to ask for her attention—she puts her eyes on her feet, her feet on the road—

Shadowheart bumps into someone and apologizes. She walks faster, this time trying to be more aware of the outline of the people who aim their bodies towards the temple—

—and there are feathers. Shadowheart’s body slams straight into something big, firm, and covered in feathers. She falls back onto the ground, grunts, and shields her eyes against the sun when she peers up at what’s gotten in her way this time.

Someone makes a strangled, frustrated yelp above Shadowheart. “I am—so sorry!” They step forward and extend a hand. Their wings stretch up to block the sun out of Shadowheart’s eyes. “I thought you saw me. And then my wings—! I am very, very sorry. Are you hurt?”

It’s the Lathanderian, the paladin, the fucking aasimar: Knight Callahan.

Shadowheart finds paladins insufferable, as a rule; dedicated to flat, sweeping oaths of power motivated by a single-minded commitment to how the world should be, they often sing to a single tune—a single note, really, and always a loud one. A paladin like Dame Aylin or Knight Callahan, practically born into their oaths, are even less tolerable company. Aylin tumbled out from Selûne’s celestial womb with a sword in her hand, and it must have been the same for Callahan, rising from the field of their birth with an oath of devotion on their lips to the only thing they understood—the brilliance of their sire. Born into worship and carved for devotion, they are pure and relentless.

Shadowheart helps herself up. “I’m fine.” She brushes off the seat of her robes. “What do you want?”

The aasimar puts up their hands as if to shield their chest. They are long, thin hands. Callahan isn’t wearing their armor, which makes them look thin and tall because they are very long and wiry without it. “Pardon, I came here for you—you mentioned you would be appointed among the priesthood and I assumed you dwelled among them. At the very least, I was going to leave a message.”

“That doesn’t explain what it is you want,” Shadowheart says, harsher than is probably appropriate, but her heart is still racing. The weight of the temple is still on her shoulders and Shadowheart can still feel the eyes of Selûne’s likeness on the back of her head.

Callahan’s shoulders are drawn up to their ears, though their wings are still out, still shielding Shadowheart from having to squint toward the sun. The light halos their body and makes their golden hair and the edges of their wings glow. “I wanted to offer to show you some of the city, since you’re new to Waterdeep.”

Shadowheart scans Callahan: they are not armored, and they are not wearing anything affiliated with their sire. There is a simple quarterstaff hanging on their back. The robes they wear are thin, pale and light, and it compliments the aasimar’s long, bronze figure where the fabric hangs suggestively over their obvious muscles and slight curves. Callahan isn’t dressed as if on Lathanderian business. If anything, they’ve dressed suggestively and with intention.

“So, are you busy?” they ask, when Shadowheart doesn’t respond with more than her obvious scrutiny. The pitch of their voice suggests they’re confident, but cautious, like a druid approaching a jaguar. They wait with calm, self-assured patience for a response. Shadowheart does have a soft spot for the confident ones, even if they do eventually disappoint.

She glances back over her shoulder at the House of the Moon. She is a terrible Selûnite, but Shadowheart already knows this. “No, I’m not,” she says. “What did you have in mind?”

Immediately, they brighten, and the Callahan Shadowheart remembers shines through in their wide, perfect smile. Their shoulders relax and their arms fall out in a wide, inviting gesture; Shadowheart steps back just a bit because it’s a little too similar to the motion they made just before scooping her up into the air above the Spires of the Morning. “Markets, taverns, temples, theaters, parks—it’s Waterdeep, there’s everything you could possibly want to see. Name your pleasure, I will take you there.”

Somewhere in the temple, the priesthood is waiting for Shadowheart.

—she will make excuses later. As a cleric and a healer, she can’t exactly say she fell ill and be believed, but perhaps accepting Callahan’s offer will inspire a story.

She didn’t come to Waterdeep with any opinions or ideas; she had planned to ask Gale to show her a few noteworthy sights before she left behind the Blood of Lathander. Now, since her plans have been changed for her, Shadowheart should give the city more thought. The decision to stay with Gale had been her first real choice, to follow Callahan will be her second.

Shadowheart shrugs a shoulder and sneaks a peak once again at the House of the Moon behind her. “You first—show me your pleasure. Take me to where you would want to go.”

Callahan makes a slightly dramatic show of thinking, a finger on their jaw, a fist on their hip. They stand like someone who knows they’re beautiful and would like to remind their audience of the fact. “Well, you don’t like heights.”

“I do not. Thank you, for remembering.”

They laugh. “Do you like taverns?”

Not a very holy haunt, Shadowheart thinks, and she appreciates Callahan for the suggestion. She had half expected a guided tour through a temple or a graveyard dedicated to the bones of old heroes. Callahan was literally made to be a paladin and presumedly knew less of life outside their godly calling than even Shadowheart. But perhaps Callahan will surprise her with a little worldliness.

“Only if the food they serve is very good,” Shadowheart says.

Callahan presses their hands together and takes a moment to consider if their next words are appropriate for their audience. “Do you…mind the smell of sailors?”

It’s Shadowheart’s turn to laugh. “Better than the smell of old perfume and the tasteless foods lords and ladies pretend to enjoy.”

Callahan’s wings twitch, flicker, and disappear with a flash of light, leaving behind a few feathers that wink out of existence and a few more that fall onto the ground. They gesture northward with a sweeping gesture, away from the temple and toward the sunlit city street.

Shadowheart lets Callahan talk because they, like before, have a lot to say, except it’s—different this time. Instead of playing proud hostess on behalf of the Lathanderian temple, Callahan tells stories. They point to an unassuming building and ask what she knows about the Zhentarim. It takes Shadowheart a moment to recognize Callahan is actually asking for a response, so she says she is vaguely familiar with the mercenary organization, and decides not to mention for now that her mace is somewhat familiar with their skulls. “That lot used to explicitly serve the old god Cyric, did you know that? Their leaders—” Callahan begins, and a story is started.

The walk is slow, leisurely, even. Callahan has honored Shadowheart’s desire not to fly, and it seems they also understand Shadowheart does not like to move quickly, in general. The forced slowness of their steps leaves the aasimar simmering and twitching with energy, and it comes out in the fluttering of their fingers as they speak and the many gestures they make to punctuate their sentences. Callahan knows a story for what feels like every other cobblestone, one “interesting fact” leads into another, and another, filling the air of Waterdeep with a sense of history and age, grander and purpose.

Callahan’s tongue flits between stories of villainy, demonstrations of faith, and unexpected acts of heroism; they take Shadowheart back and forth in time, through many hundreds of years of world-shattering events and humble victories, the collective memory of the road under their feet as kept by the words of writers, historians, bards and enthusiastic story-tellers like Callahan, who glows not with the light of their godly sire, but the radiance of their own delight.

Callahan pulls Shadowheart into their words, inviting her to guess, to wonder, to correct, to scoff and laugh. She is looped into the adventures Callahan shares in bits and pieces, scraps of history that came before them in these very streets. Shadowheart is just out of reach of an unexpectedly honorable rogue, a heart- and oath-broken paladin, a sentimental fighter, a clever bard, and every other adventurer that peppers the history of Waterdeep with their unexpected interventions in the progress of fate.

These are not sermons, these are the stories of people. Callahan’s previous prying into Shadowheart’s past adventures begins to make more sense. Callahan is weak for a good story and deft in the art of taking threads from the annals of collective memory and weaving them into something new, just for Shadowheart, the result presented to her with child-like pride. How many hours of Callahan’s holy calling have been shirked in favor of guzzling this encyclopedic knowledge of Waterdeep’s heroes and villains?

Callahan is eager to fill her ears and Shadowheart is happy to tuck away what she’s given into her mind for later. Shadowheart forgets to stiffen herself against possible advances or touches because they never come. The afternoon sun is warm on her back, Callahan’s smile warm on her eyes, and they fill her mind with memories handed between story tellers, wrapped in the touch of the aasimar’s reverence for the past.

And they are—filling in gaps; Callahan’s words fall into spaces within Shadowheart that have long sat empty, the places where bedtime stories go, where bard songs belong, where the child Shadowheart must have been, once, would find wonder and mystery.

Shadowheart realizes they have not walked very far and the place they stop could have been reached along a shorter route, by the look of the roads. She doesn’t mention this. Callahan points at the tavern from across the road. The Fiery Flagon—the words written in old paint under a much fresher looking image of a flagon on fire. There is a lot of noise coming from within, even at this hour, and there are people outside cussing and laughing at each other, dressed as if they’ve been sailing or are about to be, and they likely smell like it, too—salty and sweaty and wet with alcohol. “You sure?” Callahan asks, a genuine question.

“You said you like it here?”

They laugh a little. A crack in their confidence. “More than I should, probably.”

Few places match the debauchery of a Sharren cloister. Shadowheart is unlikely to be surprised by anything she sees this afternoon. A tavern full of unsavory characters will not spoil her good mood. She gestures forward. “Lead the way.”

Callahan looks unsure of themself, doubting now the wisdom of this decision, but Shadowheart has not provided an out, and they’re too proud to turn back now. She follows Callahan through the entrance where already two men have given Callahan a familiar and friendly nod.

It is loud in here: sailors, so many sailors, swearing and laughing and arguing and drinking and sweating. Rope hangs in decorative loops and knots under the ceiling, as well as nets, large bones, dried starfish, ocean shells, broken tridents, pieces of sail, broken wood covered in barnacles—all thrown together and interwoven over and under the ropes, bits of old sea adventures suspended above the heads of the patrons. And it smells exactly as Callahan warned, but there’s also the smell of—gods, the frying fish Shadowheart smells must be incredible. Without thinking, she moves toward the bar that separates the kitchen from the rest of the tavern.

It’s warm and the fire nearby is not necessary and probably contributes to the sweaty atmosphere, but the heat is welcoming, insulating.

“You owe me a song, paladin!” someone shouts.

From behind her, Callahan’s voice drops in pitch, it takes on a roughness Shadowheart hasn’t heard until now, and they snap back, “shut up, you jack off, I’m not here to entertain you.”

Callahan’s ire is met with laughs and giggles. There is the gentle thud-thud of darts being thrown into the wall at an all-but disintegrated target painted into the wood, someone swears and money moves across a table, and Shadowheart’s practiced eye notices some of the money is palmed away somewhere it likely wasn’t supposed to go.

Shadowheart pushes down a little on her shoulder with a hand. The muscles in her back have relaxed for the first time since—she’s not sure. But they’re sore and pleading now, and the heat from the fire looks appealing. There’s a small empty table by the fire and one of the chairs is turned back toward the flame. She might insist on sitting by the heat. They’ll sweat, but everyone here is sweating.

The barkeep is a dwarf, and she scans Shadowheart with a bemused look. She looks old by dwarven standards. “Can I help you, clergy?” she asks, and she looks at Callahan over Shadowheart’s shoulder. “No lute today? Pity. Your voice always encourages spendin’ in the odd hours.”

Callahan is slightly pink across the nose, and they don’t acknowledge the comment. “Food, Nasnar. We’re here for lunch and a drink.”

Nasnar glances at Shadowheart again. “Are you the wine type?”

“I’m not picky,” Shadowheart says.

“Good,” Nasnar says. “Because I ain’t got wine. You like fish?”

Shadowheart nods.

Nasner grunts. “Good. Cuz it’s what we got. We just finished fryin’ another round of it. The sauce is mine, and it’s very good. You sittin’?” The dwarf scans Shadowheart again. “What’s your name? You ain’t the last one he brought here.”

“Nasner, please,” Callahan says, voice high and embarrassed. They’ve made up their mind: they regret this idea. Shadowheart savors the way the paladin’s confidence finally crumbles. Callahan is left exposed and nervous like they should be for this sort of thing. Shadowheart likes the confident ones partly because she likes to watch when their confidence falls apart.

“What? You brought ‘er here. I don’t know what you expected.” Nasner smiles, knowing exactly what it is she’s doing. “You should do a song to impress ‘er.”

Callahan grows warmer in the face by the second. “What a shame, I left my lute at home.”

Nasner sniffs, then steps off her stool behind the bar, bends out of sight, and a moment later an old lute slides over the bar. She steps back onto her stool and leans her elbow on the counter. “Food and drink are free if you sing.”

Shadowheart is being polite and not laughing, not even smiling, because she’s not sure how much Callahan can take at the moment. She wants to see what the recovery will look like.

Callahan crosses their arms. “No.”

Nasner looks at Shadowheart. “They’re very good at it.”

“Are you?” Shadowheart asks, with exaggerated curiosity.

The dwarf nods her head in a sage-looking gesture. “Indeed. And they sing bawdy tunes best.”

Callahan rubs their long hands over their face, then they look toward Shadowheart, but not quite at her. “Are we sitting?”

“By the fire, please,” she says.

“That’s a good place to sit for a show,” Nasner says, scratching her chin.

“You’re trying to kill me, Nasner.”

The barkeep laughs.

“I wouldn’t mind a song,” Shadowheart says, innocently.

Callahan grunts at Nasner, but they also snatch the lute off the counter by the neck when they twist to walk toward the table by the fire.

The seat is not particularly comfortable, but Shadowheart sighs when she falls into it and her back is to the fire. In the heat, she unbuttons her robes to shrug off the topmost layer of her outfit. Callahan’s eyes flick up to her as their fingers dance over the strings of the lute with experimental plucks made to check the sound. They look away again as they twist the pegs to tune the instrument.

As promised, the fish is excellent. Nasner is right to be proud of her sauce. Shadowheart drinks rum that makes her face feel hot and the fire makes her sweat. She sheds another layer and her shoulders are exposed. That everyone else in the tavern wears thin and half-open shirts makes more sense, and Shadowheart’s nose has forgotten the smell of everyone else’s body, full instead of liquor and flavorful food.

The lute leans against Callahan’s chair as they eat. Tongue loosened, shoulders relaxed, Shadowheart decides it’s her turn to share a story. She does her best to give Callahan every detail of how Halsin was rescued from the goblin camp, back in those first days of the tadpole infection when her friends were still strangers who didn’t trust each other. Shadowheart stumbles a few times, remembering just in time to avoid mentioning any of the tricks Astarion used that are particular to his condition. It takes away from the story, she has to talk about him less, and the picture Shadowheart paints as a result is less accurate, Astarion rendered into a shadow, rather than a central figure key to their success. It’s a shame; Astarion’s bold maneuver on Minthara’s neck is song-worthy—he shouldn’t have survived the smite the paladin slammed into his chest a moment later, but he did, and the bite had put Minthara at a disadvantage and the rest of their party was given the edge they needed to win the fight. When Tav, half-jokingly, later asked if the drow tasted any good, Astarion spit on the ground.

“And you rescued him out of an abandoned Selûnite temple, no less! Surely, this was an act of fate. Your true goddess was with you from the very start.”

Shadowheart makes a noise in her throat, hot with alcohol, before she thinks not to say, “please. There are so many Selûnite temples, it was an act of statistics.”

Callahan explodes with high-pitched, unrestrained laughter and Shadowheart burns with shame when she realizes a moment later exactly what it is she has said. She is terrible at this—a truly terrible choice of priestess, drunk and blaspheming when she should be praying at a ceremony to elevate her in the eyes of the faithful. No wonder Shar stripped Shadowheart of so many memories to keep her behaved.

“You snarl at the gods and fate itself. You’re greater than your legend,” Callahan says, flush and still smiling, totally and utterly unbothered by her impudence.

She decides to shrug past the blunder and continues her story. Callahan is a gratifying audience. Shadowheart can see in their eyes that they’re absorbing every detail, anticipating what comes next, exclaiming at times, laughing when appropriate, and they urge Shadowheart to spare no details in describing the fights. They want to know exactly how Lae’zel wielded her sword, the idea of the alien fighter particularly exciting to them.

They also tease Shadowheart for her description of Halsin, which makes her turn redder than she already is, because they’re right—she fondly remembers most of Halsin’s—everything. But everyone in camp noticed Halsin’s everything, he was too big not to notice and too sweet and earnest to ignore. And he often didn’t wear clothes at camp because druids are like that. Shadowheart tries to defend herself, she does it poorly, she is red as a tomato, and Callahan won’t stop laughing at her expense as she fumbles over tipsy excuses like “but his arms really were that thick” and “elves aren’t supposed to be that big!” It doesn’t help that Shadowheart saw more of Halsin—a lot more of Halsin—than the others. She is biased and it shown in her story-telling.

Shadowheart has to rescue herself. “You owe me a song,” she grumbles, and throws back the last of her drink—only to notice the glass is already empty, which makes her more embarrassed.

“I suppose I do,” Callahan says. They grab the neck of the lute next to them and runs a finger up and down the strings for a final listen to the tuning. “Are we drunk enough for love songs to be acceptable? I know love songs.”

“Nasner said you do bawdy songs best,” Shadowheart reminds them.

Callahan is already pink with drink and laughter, they can’t get much pinker. “I am too drunk to sing, I think,” they say.

Easily remedied: Shadowheart puts her hand out toward Callahan, and they watch, visibly alarmed, as she rests her fingers over their wrist. “Te absolvo,” Shadowheart says, and a lesser restoration spell shoots from her hand and rolls through Callahan, making them jump in their seat. “Oh, where is the fun in this!” they yelp, now fully, entirely, unbearably sober.

“Are you going to sing?” Someone shouts from not that far away, someone who has noticed Callahan holding the lute. Another voice follows with, “you still owe me a song, asshole.”

Callahan pats their hand over the sound hole in the lute and the strings make a muffled, dull and irritated noise. “Fine, fine,” they mutter, poorly suppressing a growing grin. “I’ll sing.”

Shadowheart watches, elbows on the table, fingers laced together, and peers over her hands as Callahan stands and saunters toward the center of the tavern. Because they’d been sweating next to the fire with Shadowheart, their clothes are stuck to their curves—on and around their chest, down their back and around their hips—it’s indecently suggestive, especially given that the fabric is pale and thin. This is a far cry from the battle-ready paladin Shadowheart met at the Spires of the Morning; though, the gold of their hair and the perfection of their smile is the same. The establishment is suddenly full of the sound of shuffling chairs, interested mumbles and a few whistles.

“Get ‘em a stage,” Nasner barks to no one in particular. People get up to move and push furniture across the floor. By “stage,” Nasner meant tables shoved together to give Callahan a place to stand on display above the heads of the patrons.

Callahan uses a chair as a step up onto the conjoined tables and their fingers fiddle in no particular rhythm or tune over the lute strings, and the effect is almost immediate. Patrons stop talking, some whisper but they are shushed; the tavern noise dies faster than packed temple pews at the behest of a priest.

They hum for a bit, as if to themself in privacy, still searching for a song, still teasing the strings of the instrument. Callahan sways a little and turns as they do. Everyone has a chance to see every side of them. Shadowheart wonders if there’s a single time and place the aasimar doesn’t expect to be the center of attention.

Someone makes an impatient noise, it’s echoed, and then both sources are shushed.

Callahan stamps their boot on the table underneath them, once, twice, three times, and a rhythm is established. Half of the patrons in the tavern understand this is a cue to carry; they clap, they tap the tables, they strike the floor with their own feet. Callahan’s fingers curl over the lute’s neck, strum over the strings, and they fill the room with a bold and explosive set of bars.

It startles Shadowheart, a little bit, the explosion of energy. A good number of the people here seem to know this song, by the way they stamp and clap for it and the awkward voices of patrons who hum some of the notes, which does nothing to take away from Callahan’s voice: theirs is loud, bold and strong, almost too perfect and too divine.

The brilliant power of their godly sire saturates Callahan’s voice with a terrible, awful and beautiful peal. Their throat pours living notes into the air, their tongue sharpens them into weapons, the song is eager and penetrating, and the lyrics are—delightfully disgusting. If Shadowheart didn’t understand the words Callahan wrapped around the notes, she would mistake this for temple-worthy veneration, but it certainly is—oh, it is not pious.

This is a song for sailors. It’s a simple and nasty ditty with too many explicit details and possibly too many notes, but Callahan handles every note and every word with practiced fingers and lips. They make the mundane, the base, the filthy, into an act of worship; in this beat-for-beat telling of perhaps a physically impossible piece of love-making, the woman with her ankles behind her lover’s head is a saint in sex, the man sweating over her is a god of pleasure, and their rutting is something only just shy of world-shattering.

Shadowheart is not drunk enough for this. There is no more alcohol on the table.

By Selûne’s grace, it’s not a long song. Callahan giggles before they get to the final note—it’s perhaps the only way the song should finish because it brings everyone back to reality—and the tavern is already noisy with applause and demands for more song as well as demands for more drink and more food. Nasner is an experienced business woman.

Callahan acts as if they notice none of applause. They step over the air beside the table and land directly onto the floor with a slight bend of their knees. They walk to stand before Shadowheart’s table where she’s still seated and hot in the face from the fire—thankfully there is the fire and the drink to blame for her complexion. She’s not a blushing maid and doesn’t want to look like one. The aasimar dips in a dramatic bow. “Satisfied?” they ask.

Shadowheart tips her shoulder as nonchalantly as her inebriation will allow. “I suppose. I’ve heard worse,” she says, like a challenge.

Their eyes flash, provoked—excited—by her dismissive tone. “I see.” Callahan gestures at the busy bar with the borrowed lute and asks her to wait a moment. Shadowheart throws her robes back over her body and steps away from the table. She casts a lesser restoration on herself and staggers a bit as the alcohol is banished from her system. The clarity comes a moment later: the reality of the heat, the muggy air and the smells crash back over her senses and she suddenly would like some space, some air, and a bath. And, possibly, some penance. What is she doing here?

“It’s good to see you doin’ better,” Nasner says, when Callahan pushes the lute back at her, speaking with just enough volume for Shadowheart’s half-elf ears to pick up through the sea of happy noises the other patrons throw into the air as they eat and drink and start singing their own songs.

“Missed the extra income?” Callahan asks, wry.

“And your smile.”

Callahan makes a throaty, disgusted noise and waves their hand as if to cast off Nasner’s sincerity, which makes the dwarf laugh.

When Callahan returns to Shadowheart’s side, they offer an arm, which she declines. The aasimar seems hardly affected by the rejection. Standing close, they leave the establishment’s thick air behind, and both sigh when they step outside because an ocean breeze washes over their sweat-slick bodies. Shadowheart adjusts the top-piece at the root of her braid. “You should show me more of Waterdeep sometime,” Shadowheart says.

Callahan grins—the stupid, perfect grin. “I should. I will.”

They offer to walk Shadowheart back to the House of the Moon, and Shadowheart allows it. She will let Callahan assume the temple is where she lives, for now, at least. They both walk with their hands clasped behind their backs, not touching, and talk of—mundane things, of schedules and duties and weather; it makes Shadowheart chest feel full and warm, like the sun on her back.

Indeed, there is a much shorter route between the Fiery Flagon and the House of the Moon. Callahan leads her that way this time, and Shadowheart says nothing about it. Callahan shakes their shoulders when they arrive near the temple, and their wings materialize behind their back with a rush of air. The breeze snaking through the city rustles their feathers. Shadowheart examines Callahan’s wings with a little more scrutiny than she has up until now. It’s not polite to stare at another person’s features when they don’t match your own: tiefling horns, elf ears, aasimar wings—

Callahan stretches their wingspan further, preening. The gold color is deeper in the evening sun than it is in the morning’s. Shadowheart rolls her eyes up to meet Callahan’s, who regards her with a self-satisfied smirk: remarkable, aren’t I?

Shadowheart rolls her eyes. “A humble specimen, aren't you?”

“Not often, no,” they say, and laugh. Callahan bends a little and their wings block the sunlight above. They still smell like whiskey and effort. “May I kiss you?”

—they are. So much.

Shadowheart nods and tips her face up. She is expecting something forceful or eager, but the touch of Callahan’s lips is light, cautious the way a pilgrim’s feet are cautious across unfamiliar, hallowed ground. The veneration makes Shadowheart’s head spin.

Is this how godhood feels?

And they are too brief about it. Callahan stands straight and stretches their wings again. “Do I—do you want me to see you here again, or—?”

That, she does not, and now is not the time to clarify her undetermined living situation—or her undetermined romantic situation. The Spires of the Morning are closer to Gale’s tower than here, anyway; and, if this is going to happen again, Shadowheart wants to be—as prepared as she can be.

“I’ll find you,” she says.

Callahan attempts to diminish the obvious victory in their smile; they do not succeed. Then their gold, pupil-less eyes flicker as something appears to cross their mind, and whatever it is, it sobers their expression. “I will be occupied with temple business,” they say, a severe edge in their voice when they do. “For a week. Perhaps less.” They relax and look at Shadowheart again, their expression softer than it had been before and stretch their wings. “But then I am very available. Don’t keep me long,” they say, wink, then launch into the air with—such deliberate drama. Shadowheart waves a stray feather off before it can land in her hair.

With her back still to the House of the Moon, she peers into the sky until she can no longer spot Callahan. Once the aasimar is gone from sight, she begins her walk to Gale’s tower.

She takes the walk slow. Gale—she is going to have to talk to Gale. There is an unfinished conversation hanging between them that Shadowheart now regrets having left hanging for so long. The appointment she left Gale behind for hadn’t even happened, and she’s still not sure what she’s going to use as an excuse for the Selûnite priesthood. As Shadowheart walks, she comes to the grim conclusion that honesty will be her best excuse—she’d been kidnapped; she of course won’t actually say this, Shadowheart will tell the priesthood that she had walked the other way because she is not ready.

And she doesn’t want to be.

Then they will talk her back into it; she will, eventually, inevitably, cave.

All her roads lead back to the gods. Some are just longer than others.

The evening shadows are long. She pays no mind to the people on the road and they pay no mind to her, other mortals wandering and stumbling toward the end of another day. Shadowheart keeps her mind on her feet. The last stretch of road that leads through an alley to Gale’s tower rarely has more than a cat or a lost traveler on it. This evening, it is quiet between the buildings, and she can see the tower directly ahead, reaching for the sky, deceptively thin in appearance. Like every other wizard of his caliber, Gale owns a tower that is much larger on the inside, a necessary feature if it’s going to contain all those books.

As she walks, Shadowheart senses something—familiar. Nearby, there is some of the subtle, charged taste of divinity always lingering around Callahan. She stops in the alleyway and looks toward the sky. A few birds dart across her line of sight. Shadowheart looks to her right and her left. A fat rat slinks along the corner between a stone wall and the path.

Shadowheart turns around, expecting to see Callahan, the paladin crossing the line from confident to arrogant—but the figure Shadowheart spots down the path is not Callahan. It is far too short to be Callahan, and it is also something much—more.

That flicker of divinity she mistook for the aasimar comes off the edges of a veiled figure, concealed from the crown of its head to the tips of its feet in light, wispy fabric, a humanoid, if the body underneath is anything like its outline suggests; but its presence feels like no humanoid Shadowheart has ever encountered. It feels—big, in the way Shar is big—immense. Except, where Shar once stood before Shadowheart as a towering, hungry void ready to consume what little was left of her, this figure is a spot of total and unrelenting presence.

Her legs fold, and she gets down on her knees.

Shadowheart shouldn’t have shirked her duties to the House of the Moon, she shouldn’t have been out listening to bawdy songs and drinking rum when she was supposed to have been in Selûne’s temple accepting her new priestly duties, she shouldn’t have run off at the first opportunity—

The entity approaches. Shadowheart bends her head down further, eyes on the road’s cobblestones, and her white braid falls over her shoulder and brushes the ground. Moonmaiden forgive me.

The entity slides into a crouch before her, the light of it flickering with the movement of its body-length veil. The voice is incredible and soft and unbearable and light. “Do not kneel for me. You belong to a more ancient light than mine.”

The words are gentle and forgiving. Shadowheart’s spirit cannot bear it.

The entity—this sending—extends to her a hand out from under the veil, slow and unassuming in its movement, but the hand is bright—much, much too bright. Shadowheart screws her eyes shut and blindly takes the hand with a slack grip, letting the being raise her up.

The voice in her ears permits nothing else to enter and it banishes the evening shadows from her heart. “My blood knows you well, child of moonlight, the almost-Chosen of Shar. Don’t be afraid. I am here to seek, not to judge.”

—mercy. What more could the gods possibly seek of her? What more is there to give? She’s given it all up already—multiple times. How can they ask for what isn’t there? Why is Shadowheart, a small, fragile, broken and minuscule vessel, the jar the gods insist on digging through for crumbs? She can’t last much longer, not like this.

It asks: “where is the vampire hero of Baldur’s Gate?”

Her mind—halts. It turns back. She opens her eyes. The look she gives this sending is not kind. “What did you say?”

The voice remains soft, but there is something sharp about its next words. “Your friend, your companion in arms against the Absolute, the vampire: where is he?”

This is a piece of raw divinity unlike anything Shadowheart has known since her days as a Sharren, and it is everything Shar is not: bright, warm, and gentle; but like Shar, it is heavy, somehow more real than everything else around it, rendering the rest of the world into a foggy dream, Shadowheart’s thoughts included.

What could something like this possibly want with Astarion except to erase him?

Shadowheart steps back and reclaims her hand. “Why do you ask?”

“I would know him again.”

That sounds—much worse. “Know” him? Shadowheart understands what it is to be known by such utterly terrible and beautiful power so much like what stands in front of her. The entity holds unnaturally still, it covers itself in a veil, it tries very hard to appear unassuming and nonthreatening. But Shadowheart isn’t a fool.

This fragment of divinity would claim yet another piece of Shadowheart’s past, take from her one of the few faces she truly knows, a strange but foundational piece of her new self. The gods won’t take this from her—they won’t take anymore—not even Astarion. He is a part of her as much as the others who all fill in the deep cracks branching through her mind like canyons; the “vampire hero of Baldur’s Gate” is a part of her story.

It shifts its shoulders, a deliberate gesture made to imitate uncertainty. “You will not tell me,” it says, not a question.

Shadowheart bears her teeth. It’s a primitive, animal and mortal display. “No.”

Retribution doesn’t come. The air hardly moves. The being hums, the sound soft and etherial. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected otherwise.” Then an edge enters the air before it speaks its next words, and it cuts at Shadowheart’s resolve. “Then give me his name.”

The gods are absurd. This is laughable. “Really? You don’t even know his name? You said you knew him.”

Now, the air trembles, a rumble like stones that shift just before the avalanche. “I have forgotten his name. I am forgetting. I will not forget any more. Thus, I would know him again. So I ask: what is his name?”

Shaking, Shadowheart bends her head and takes back her hand. “I will give you nothing.”

The calm and collected resolve of the figure, its unnatural stillness and deliberate patience, it all evaporates in a moment; it throws up its arms and a sharp noise like stone fracturing explodes through the air. Shadowheart stands dead-still, unmoved. Shar, in the heart of the Shadowfell, the Dark Lady’s own domain, could not force Shadowheart to buckle against her will, and neither will this petulant sending. The soul-shaking sound fades. The air around the figure crackles.

“How much further am I going to have to reduce myself?” It hisses—a fierce hiss, worse than the sound of steam that escapes a rattling infernal engine. And its voice rises, echoing and loud as if contained in a cavern, no longer like a voice any corporeal throat could make; it enters her heart, it presses on her soul. “Who are you to deny me?”

Shadowheart’s voice is gentle and untroubled when she says, “I am but a humble cleric. I’m afraid my gratitude is all I have left to offer the gods.”

The entity is bigger now, no longer standing at a height to match Shadowheart’s, but many heads taller, and it looms. The veil flutters and the light underneath flickers across the walls that hedge them in. The air has become unbearable hot.

Shadowheart suspects it’s time for spell casting. This might also be her last bout of spell casting, if she’s not able to slip out of the fight. It’s not the way Shadowheart wants to die, she thinks, as she draws power through the Weave toward herself by her goddess’ grace. But perhaps this is how it was supposed to be: death at the hands of the gods, who take until there’s nothing left to take.

The voice enveloping Shadowheart is the sound of earth shattering. “I see why it is the others covet your devotion.”

And then there is void—the energy, the noise, the light—everything of the entity that suffused Shadowheart’s air—goes out.

It’s dark. Shadowheart stumbles and turns around, searching. The strange and angry figure, its ire, desperation and fury, all of its power, is gone. The alley is empty. She looks up.

The sky is bare and darkening. The evening sun will set soon. Shadowheart looks back toward Gale’s tower. The twilight’s orange light touches the tip of the cone that caps the top.

It’s been too long since Shadowheart has had to truly run. She feels it in the stitches that form immediately in her sides. Shadowheart wants to get behind the arcane protections around Gale’s property before whatever that sending was decides to come back. And she needs to talk to Gale—now.

She throws opens the front door too fast and it slams into the wall. “Gale!”

There is no immediate response.

Shadowheart runs up the stairs toward where she can smell food. He’s prepared dinner: fish, by the smell of it.

Shadowheart nearly bowls into Astarion where he stands in the dining room. He catches her by the shoulders before her body crashes into his, his talon-like nails digging into the flesh of her upper arms. “Sweet hells, Shadowheart. What are you running from?”

Seeing Astarion standing here sends a wave of relief through Shadowheart’s frazzled mind, but right now they need a plan. “Where’s Gale?” she pants. “I—we need to talk to Gale.”

Astarion’s face is not easy to read. It’s closed off and a little pinched. “I was about to look for him as well. He left out dinner, because of course he did, but he’s not here. I was going to search upstairs in his rooms. Something in the air smells—sour.” They are already in the stairwell and taking steps three at a time before Astarion finishes speaking.

“‘Sour?’” Shadowheart demands, her heart and thoughts still racing.

“Yes,” Astarion says, voice dark. “This tower stinks of panic.”

Chapter 6: Arcane Wards

Notes:

CW: The narrator is spiraling in self-loathing and does an impressive job at cutting himself down. Proceed with caution and plans for self-care if you, too, struggle with spirals such as this.

“Please tell me you’ve at least made inroads when it comes to finding someone to settle down with. Myself and Mrs. Dekarios are starting to think you intend to die alone.” - Tara, Gale origin dialogue

---

Gale prepares fish for dinner in the kitchen and Tara sits nearby, waiting for him to offer her some. He doesn’t notice her initially, too absorbed in his own thoughts, and he’s not as focused on his knife as he should be. Gale is trying to cut up and put away his troubled thoughts as well as the fish.

Astarion is his friend and his guest. He needs Gale’s help. Gale will help because they are friends. Clearly, Gale has failed to make this last detail clear: Gale won’t ask Astarion for a trade. He’d rather, under other circumstance, maybe—

Gale pushes aside the strips of fish on the cutting board to make room for more. He drops another piece of the bright pink flesh onto the board under his knife.

Shadowheart is his friend and his guest. She needs a place to stay. Gale would love it if she stayed for as long as she needs the space because they are friends. They are colleagues in adventure, but also long separated from the heat of battle, and—

“Mr. Dekarios, I’ve been waiting very patiently,” Tara says, and Gale startles, brushing his finger with the knife blade, but the cut is only as deep as a paper cut. He casts the prestidigitation cantrip to clean the wound, puts the knife down, peels a piece of fish off the cutting board and kneels to offer it to Tara.

Gale scratches her between her jaw and ear as she scarfs down the snack. She prefers pigeon, but she’s never refused a bit of fish. The fish is too fresh by the sea, here in Waterdeep, for even the pickiest eater to turn it down. Tara’s wings flap, she stretches, then she tucks them neatly against her body and leans into the scratch.

“I see my attention is deemed adequate during the daytime,” Gale says, wry. He picks up the brown feather that’s fallen from Tara’s wing and tosses it into the trash.

Tara makes a high-pitched sniffle, like a sneeze. “Heavens forbid I enjoy the company of our guests half as often as you do, my dear.”

Gale’s stomach twists horribly. It’s time to distract himself with dinner preparations again. Gale doesn’t know what he’s going to do when Astarion gets up, or what he’s going to say when Shadowheart returns for dinner.

The best option? Nothing—do and say nothing. It’s an awful option, but it’s his best option. Hopefully, they take this option, too. Gale finds and grabs some cooking oil and lights a fire on the stove as he looks for a cast iron pan to heat up.

Tara keeps talking, of course: “they’re good for you, I think. Your mother and I were so worried you’d gone back to your reclusive ways. It made some sense before, of course, back when you had a Weave-gobbling bomb in your chest, but those days are behind you now.” She sighs, licks her paw and starts cleaning around her ears. “I suppose I should let you tell Mrs. Dekarios when you’ve finally settled down with someone.”

Gale puts the pan down onto the stove with too much gravity and it lands too heavily. “There’s nothing to tell and no one to tell it to; Tara, please. They’re my guests.”

She’s licking the corners of her mouth. “Oh, please, Mr. Dekarios. I’m very aware of what your feelings are about your guests. You’ve pined after them both for years.’”

Of course she’s aware; Tara is a tressym, as nosey and entitled to the space as a cat and a damn gossip. “You will say nothing to my mother,” Gale grumbles.

“Yes, yes,” she says. “I’ll leave the honor to you.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

Tara’s tail twitches. “My goodness, Mr. Dekarios, are you really going to pretend nothing has changed since they arrived?”

Gale pours salt into the pan as it heats. There’s a tightness forming in his chest. It sets off a vestigial twinge of panic and he puts a hand over his sternum. “I’m not going to pretend nothing has changed. Nothing has changed, so there will be no pretending. There have been a few—friendly conversations, but ones I will not be repeating.”

Tara makes that displeased sneeze of hers again and flaps her wings at him. “You’re not serious.”

“I am quite serious.”

Tara hops onto the counter and hisses at Gale when he tries to shoo her away. “Why? Oh, don’t do this to me, you know I worry about you, especially when you lock yourself away like this.”

She’s incorrigible. “I’m not locking people out, Tara! I mean it when I say nothing has changed that warrants this conversation. Now would you please get off the counter? I don’t want fur or feathers in my dinner.”

“Locking yourself away, locking others out—either way, it’s the same door and the same key. Honestly, Mr. Dekarios, you’re going to drive me into an early grave.”

Gale removes the pan from the stove and pours out the salt. “Not to worry,” he says. “I’ll ask Shadowheart to revive you. At my expense, of course.”

Tara hisses at him again. Gale drowns the noise out with the hiss of the fish being pressed and crisped on the heat of the pan. She’ll probably bite him for this later.

Gale can’t help his feelings or the strength of them, he can only protect others from his shamefully promiscuous heart. He’s always been like this: too easy to please, too quick to trust, too happy to love—there are many beautiful, wondrous people in this world and Gale is, well, very sensitive to that fact.

His heart admits them all. And when Gale slacks the vice-grip he keeps on his impulses for even for a moment, he ends up in situations like this.

There’s no good way to navigate it; Gale will have to ignore it because he’s not about to look Shadowheart or Astarion in the eye and admit he’s been so pitifully rash and clumsy in his affections because then they’ll leave, the tower will be empty again, and he can’t stomach the thought. It’s this kind of unthinking, eager devotion where he acts first and thinks second that originally led him off the path of Mystra’s favor. Why is he like this?

Gale burns his finger. He plucks the fish out of the pan before he burns that, too. This is what he gets for not keeping his thoughts in check. His year of isolation with the orb should have made him an expert at setting aside such troublesome feelings, casting down every twinge that might perturb the orb in his chest. Back then, the entire Waterdeep settlement would have been leveled if he failed to keep his mind controlled. He must have let the suppressive skill earned during that time slip, now that the immediate danger to thousands is no longer imminent. Gale should be an expert in protecting others from his feelings by now.

But, clearly, he is not.

Gale stops trying to cook and puts his head in his hands and puts his elbows on the counter. What a mess he’s made. He seems only able to make a complete mess of every meaningful connection he’s ever had. It feels like he’s stepping all over Mystra’s domain again; Gale of Waterdeep, waltzing confidently into a self-assigned quest to find a lost piece of the Weave as a gift to Mystra, a show of devotion, a romantic gesture, even—except it had not been a piece of the Weave. The orb he found instead should have killed him. It really should have. It was reckless, even for someone with his talents and experience; Gale of Waterdeep, acting as if he didn’t have a head attached to his shoulders. A very well-trained and well-read head, in fact! He should use it more. It’s more stable than anything that’s ever sat under his ribs.

“Mr. Dekarios,” Tara says, voice gentler than before. She’s still seated on the counter. “Your friends have seen you through far worse straits than this. Or have you forgotten? Don’t you trust them to be open to understanding? Even if they are upset with you, they won’t abandon you. They’re not the sort.”

Gale drops his hands, grabs his elbows, and looks at the tressym. Nestled among Gale’s books and parchments, this furry and feathery beast bore witness to Gale’s greatest triumphs—and his greatest failures. To this day, they still study the Weave together, sort through its puzzles and nuances, and craft spells only the other can truly appreciate.

She’s always fussed over him, too, probably at some point mistaking Gale for a kit. Well, he had been a “kit” by her standards when they met. Gale hadn’t even touched puberty when he summoned the tressym. After his mother said no, they will not be adopting a cat, Gale plucked the best equivalent he could out of the ether, at the time still not aware of just how exceptional his natural command of the Weave was; and now here is Tara, grey around the snout and very cross with Gale, yet again, for reasons the wizard cannot understand.

“No one is quite as understanding as you, Tara.”

The tressym makes a low, dubious noise. “Debatable.”

Gale groans. “I will think about what you’ve said. Does that satisfy?”

Tara makes another dubious noise. “For now.”

He continues to make dinner. Gale thinks about Shadowheart’s preferences, the things she would and would not finish when he cooked for them on the road, and he makes adjustments to the meal accordingly. He also makes sure to leave out anything that might upset Astarion’s constitution in case he needs to feed later.

It occurs to Gale that such close proximity with Astarion at this time might create a conversation. Or—well. Gale mentally relived the caress of Astarion’s lips on his own for a long, long while after their little—whatever they were doing. Gale couldn’t sleep until just before dawn, tossing and turning the whole night. Gale would be tempted to revisit that intimacy if Astarion got that close again, and Astarion might let him—encourage him, even. Now that Gale knows the the sheer joy of that unexpectedly tender and careful kiss, he’s not sure he can trust himself to stop Astarion’s advances. It’s bad enough that Astarion is convinced he owes Gale, and the body is a simple trade Astarion knows how to make.

He will not take advantage.

Under other circumstances, Gale might relish this development and take the time to do this dance properly, with the romance and deference Astarion deserves. Not that Astarion would know what to do with such overtures, he’d likely tease Gale ruthlessly, but that would be part of the fun, now that he thinks about it—

Then there’s Shadowheart, its own development that would feel less dramatic if it had just been Shadowheart. Gale still thinks about their brief snatches of intimacy shared long ago—so long ago in fact that it’s honestly not worth ruminating on. They’d been different people back then. But Gale ruminates, of course, because his heart doesn’t listen to his reason. Shadowheart acts on the world with such deliberate force of will it’s hard not stop and just…admire. When she smiles at him, he almost understands the cosmic-sized struggle for her loyalty.

He adores them both, and Gale is thinking about them both—both, like a gods’ damned roué. His treacherous heart thinks it can be a lover to them all. Didn’t it once host space for a literal goddess? Surely, there is room for so many, it pleads.

The heart does not prioritize with sense. As it wallows, he should be thinking through much more urgent matters. Such as the visitor. There is a celestial something out somewhere in Waterdeep looking for Astarion, specifically! Gale still must talk to both Astarion and Shadowheart about the encounter, having learned nothing from his pitiful attempt to find a clue in his books about what the thing could possibly be; the words wouldn’t come into focus, he’d been left rereading the same passages over and over and understood none of it. Because he kept thinking about him, about her, about them—

He’s due to check up on the integrity of the arcane wards around his tower. If something is out to harm Astarion, Gale is the one best positioned to keep him hidden and safe; Gale must do so, obviously. Magic of incredible renown, his bread and butter, shall be bent toward ensuring the safety and security of those who pulled him from the precipice of damnation. It’s the least he can do. It’s what he’s good for.

The tiredness in Gale’s eyes feels heavy. He covers the food he’s prepared with thick clay bowls to keep it warm and braces himself against the counter again. His chest is tight and his fingers probe at the space where the orb used to be, as if he expects it to reappear. Gale’s skin crawls. Nothing in the kitchen is quite in focus.

There’s the closet, he could go to the closet—he hasn’t done that for a while but now seems like a good time.

He climbs the tower steps, walks into his room and shuts the door. Tara steps around his heels, always weaving around his ankles whenever he makes a beeline for the safety of his cave as if to prevent Gale from running. He throws open the door to the long, narrow walk-in space where he keeps his clothes, robes, wearable artifacts and staffs. Gale steps in and closes the door immediately behind himself, swallowed up in familiar darkness. Pushing through the crowded space, he finds the back of the closest and slides down the wall. His hands are shaking.

Gale leans back and his hands clamp over his chest again. His heart is racing and he can feel it in his neck. Ghosts of the orb’s old hunger float through Gale’s mind, almost convincing him it has returned. There is no arcane hunger to feed here, but right now it certainly feels like it.

Tara crawls into Gale’s lap. The heat of her tiny, boney body is comforting and familiar. He squeezes her to his chest and puts his nose in the soft fur on the top of her head. She purrs; the vibration of it used to distract him from the itch of the orb. When the foreign magic used to threaten Gale’s life and the life of everything else within miles, Tara would knead biscuits into the front of Gale’s shirt, totally and utterly unafraid of the bomb under her claws.

Tara kneads, and Gale cries into her fur. The cry is an ugly, halting sob, the kind that hurts when it comes out and hurts more to fight. Tara’s purr is very loud.

Gale doesn’t hear Shadowheart and Astarion come up the stairs, only hears them when the bedroom door opens. He should have cast a lock on the door. Gale holds Tara a little tighter where he’s curled up in the back of the closet and hopes Shadowheart and Astarion look elsewhere because he can’t—he just can’t, not right now.

But it’s too much to hope for. Astarion has the nose of a predator, and Gale is sweating like a lamb before slaughter. The closet door opens and Astarion’s faintly luminescent, red eyes fall on Gale where he’s hunched in the dark. “He’s in here,” Astarion says, then he crawls inside, nails clacking on the wood floor. “Are you hurt, darling?”

Gale is hurting all the damn time.

Tara, ever the traitor, gets off Gale’s lap, and it gives Astarion the space he needs to examine Gale more closely. The vampire checks Gale’s face and scans his body, eyes and fingers flickering over Gale with an unbearable attentiveness. Astarion says to Shadowheart, as she comes in after him, “he’s not injured or charmed, it looks like.”

Gale covers his face with both hands. He breathes very carefully.

“Small blessings,” Shadowheart says, huffing a little heavily, as if she’s been running. “Gale, what’s the matter?”

Not here. Not like this. Gale keeps his hands over his face.

Astarion grunts. “It’s too crowded. I’m going to climb over you—” and Gale senses Astarion move away as Shadowheart’s crawls closer. She stops, and then there’s a tingle in the air and a prick of divinity-mediated Weave enters the room. Gale opens his eyes and lowers his hands to look. The pale, blue light of Shadowheart’s magic flickers around her fingers.

“I’m just checking to make sure you’re not hurt,” she says, when he reveals his wetted face. Shadowheart drops her hands and the light fades. “Has something happened?”

Astarion’s red eyes float in the dark somewhere outside the door, watching from a distance.

“Nothing to be worried about,” Gale whispers. He clears his throat, and his next words are stronger, louder. “What’s happened that has you searching for wounds and charms?”

“What’s happened that has you locked in a dark closest?” Shadowheart claps back.

“These are both excellent questions and I think both should be answered as quickly as possible,” Astarion says, irritated and bitter.

Shadowheart grunts as she stands up. “We should find a more comfortable place to sit,” she says, and extends a hand to Gale.

He accepts her hand up, remembering belatedly that his hand is wet from crying. That Shadowheart doesn’t indicate she notices doesn’t erase the fresh swell of embarrassment washing through Gale, making him want to collapse and disappear through the floor where they can’t find him.

Astarion is already sitting on Gale’s bed, legs crossed, and Tara joins him as Gale and Shadowheart sit at the edge. Tara curls up on Astarion’s lap. Astarion’s eyes follow Gale with too much interest.

Shadowheart has Gale sit on the bed before she takes the last third of the mattress for herself. “Threat assessment,” she says, a phrase Gale hasn’t heard from her in years. It’s language she picked up from Lae’zel. He doesn’t like where this is going; he said there is nothing to worry about. He’s fine—or he will be.

“Why are you in the closet?” Shadowheart asks, quick and detached.

She’s going to insist on this. “If you must know, I had a little bit of a meltdown. We all have those days.”

Shadowheart takes a beat to think. “What is the source of the upset?”

This is very irritating. “Nothing dangerous—to anyone, not to me, not to you—I haven’t become another walking time bomb, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

She narrows her eyes at Gale. Astarion looks back and forth between them, glowering, the face he usually makes during a threat assessment. He never liked the exercise—possibly because he was the threat in question when they performed their first one on the road—and he usually didn’t participate unless someone insisted on his input. Gale can sympathize; he and his orb were the second threat to be subjected to the process.

They should press on. “Continuing the threat assessment—why are you here?” he asks, voice firm, and offers no room in his tone for pushback.

The cleric presses her hands together, collecting her thoughts. Her look is distant and hardened. “I met something outside the tower that’s looking for Astarion.”

—oh, no.

Astarion sits up very straight. “What?”

“‘Something?’” Gale asks. The tension in his chest, while not gone, lessens. Gale’s thoughts bend back to the previous night, eager to work over a problem he stands a chance of solving. “Was it, per chance, humanoid, curiously bright, wearing a body-length veil? Had a bit of a temper?”

Shadowheart stares at Gale like he’s grown a third eye. “Yes.”

Astarion’s voice has climbed to its highest pitch. “What?”

There’s something stalking around Gale’s tower looking for Astarion and Gale’s been in the closet crying over himself. Gods, he’s pathetic—and distracted from more pressing concerns and sensible endeavors.

“I should check on the wards,” Gale says, standing.

“Wait,” Shadowheart says, voice firm. “We should talk more first and act second. And you’re still not well. Now, this thing: it doesn’t know where Astarion is—it doesn’t even know his name.”

Gale sits back down and leans toward Shadowheart. “Did it say that it’s looking for the ‘vampire hero of Baldur’s gate?’”

“That’s—exactly what it said, actually.”

Astarion’s voice is shrill. “Why? Someone talk to me, damn it!”

They both look at Astarion, who is scowling at them both. “Well?” he demands. “Go on. Tell me whatever the fuck it is you’re going on about.”

Gale puts up a finger. “I’ll start,” he says, and explains to them both what, exactly, happened last night on the beach. Every physical observation he can recall, the zone of truth, the entity’s words, the burns it left on the pier and the short temper it had with Gale.

“You said you saw a paladin,” Astarion snaps. “And you said it was hunting vampires, not hunting me.”

Gale sighs. “I said something like a paladin. I wasn’t sure, and I wanted to learn more before I raised the alarm.”

The vampire throws up his hands. “Were you even going to tell me?”

“Yes! But I didn’t want you to panic and run off into the night and expose yourself to that thing until I knew more.”

Astarion growls and it sounds more like an animal than a man.

Shadowheart puts up her hands. “Before you rip each other’s throats out, I want to add to this story with what I saw just half an hour ago.”

So Shadowheart explains: the way it looked, the way it spoke, and the curious claims it made: it wants to know Astarion again.

Both Shadowheart and Gale look at Astarion when she’s done, and he looks back at them with equal ignorance. “What? I don’t know what it means, if that’s what you’re wondering. I’ve never seen anything like what you’ve described. Not since I turned, anyway. I can’t speak for my past-self, before Cazador.”

Shadowheart looks back at Gale. “It’s almost certainly divine in origin, and it tried very hard to disguise that fact,” she says.

“But then it lost its temper.”

Shadowheart nods. “Very quickly.”

Gale frowns. “That doesn’t bode well. It’s impatient.”

“But impatient enemies do make mistakes,” Shadowheart points out.

“True enough,” Gale says. “But what kind of god would send something after Astarion without even knowing his name? Surely not one of the Three. It felt nothing like any of those half-baked disasters.”

Shadowheart shakes her head and her braid wobbles. “No. It wasn’t one of them. It was—bigger.”

Astarion scoffs. “But clearly not big enough to know my name.”

“Or,” Shadowheart starts, with caution. “It told the truth.”

“What kind of god forgets?” Astarion asks, totally unconvinced and totally panicking.

Gale makes a thoughtful noise. He’s glad to be discussing something he knows how to talk about. “You’d be surprised. Their portfolios are very specific. Thought doesn’t really—it doesn’t work the same way for the gods as it does for us. They’re bent utterly and totally toward their domains. If something sits outside of their domain, they’re unlikely to give it enough consideration to remember it ever crossed their path. It was something Mystra frequently laughed about when she gossiped to me about her colleagues—something she could get away with, since I wasn’t exactly important to anyone else except her. Ilmater struck her as particularly pathetic, like a whimpering blind man who is blind because he tears out his own eyes and thus can only see suffering. She still holds a grudge against Helm for his bullheaded commitment to order. And she likes to call Lathander an optimistic idiot that only behaves because Selûne knows how to talk him off a ledge. It’s a great, cosmic madhouse out there in Elysium.”

Astarion’s lips are pressed into a thin line. “I’m so comforted,” he says, “by the idea that a god looking for me might also be bloody mad.”

Shadowheart looks at Astarion, scanning, assessing, even as she asks Gale: “And I suppose Mystra thought herself above the narrow-mindedness of the other gods?” she asks, through a ghost of a smile.

Gale makes a noncommittal shrug. “She considered herself well versed in their madnesses, perhaps making her ‘the maddest of them all.’” He lifts his hands. “Her words. Not mine. Honestly, that should have served as one of many signs my time with her wasn’t going to end well.”

“Alright, fine,” Astarion says, leaning forward where he sits and Tara has to get out of his lap or be squashed. Now that his neck might be on the line, he’s ready to participate. “Let’s suppose this thing looking for me has divine origins. There are so many gods, Gale, and not one ever answered my prayers, and I prayed a lot. None answered. Not the god of suffering, not the god of protection, and certainly never any of the gods who considered themselves champions against the undead. Not even Shar paid me any mind. But I suppose that’s her whole deal—leaving things behind to be forgotten.”

Indeed, Astarion’s condition, by design, renders him in some ways invisible to the gods. Who knows where his soul will linger, when unlife ends. Gale chest tightens again with the thought.

“The gods are petty,” Shadowheart says.

Gale and Astarion both look at her and wait. Gale respects Shadowheart’s understanding of the divine more than he would other clerics or other priestly sorts; that she continues to pray, after everything the gods put her through, baffles and intrigues him. When she speaks of the gods, he listens.

“The gods are petty,” she repeats, and looks at her hands. “It doesn’t take much to evoke their ire or their interest.” Shadowheart gives Gale a knowing, steady look. “We were both children when gods decided to make projects of us. You were unusually talented with the Weave, and I was from a family devoted to Selûne, which made Shar jealous. That’s all it took.”

That is a grim truth.

Astarion whines. “What could I have possibly done to provoke a god! I cursed them all the time—every one single one. So what? We all do it. And it’s been years since I bothered to speak any of their names. And my voice should be too small for them to hear!” He scoffs. “I’m a leftover, a spawn of a vampire that doesn’t even exist anymore.”

Shadowheart’s hands fold into fists. Then she extends three of her fingers on the left. “We thwarted the Three, but the being held no resemblance to any of them or their followers.” She extends another finger. “We angered Shar, but that entity isn’t of her, I can promise.” On her right hand, she extends one finger. “I turned to Selûne, with your help, but this wasn’t from the Moonmaiden.” And Shadowheart extends a second finger on that same hand. “And there was Lathander, whose blood we carried through the Shadowcurse and used to defeat Cazador. Astarion handled the mace multiple times, if I recall.”

Gale takes a long, long breath. “You’re suggesting that thing was sent by the Morninglord.”

Astarion makes a dismissive gesture. “We gave the mace back, didn’t we? And he was happy to have it returned, from what I hear. Went and personally plucked it right out of Shadowheart’s fist, even.”

But there is more to consider, now that they’re thinking about the god of dawns. Gale sees in his mind’s eye a cherished memory of Astarion laying outside of his tent, hands behind his head, eyes closed, as he basks in the sun. His face is open and calm, unafraid and relaxed. The white curls on his head glow softly in the light. Back then, Astarion wore clothing that gave him more mobility by exposing the sides of his midriff, and when the vampire relaxed with the others at camp, he would open the front of the garment to expose even more of his skin. Astarion often moseyed around the edges of their camp in a lazy, appreciative dance with the sunshine.

This particular memory happens to be one from their campsite in the mountain pass outside of the Rosymorn Monastery, where they also passed many statues of Lathander. The sandaled feet of the god’s depiction were everywhere, just at eye level, as were the skulls under his feet. Astarion gestured at one of the skulls under the Morninglord’s foot with a quick, “I’ll try not to take it personally,” as he jogged past the statue behind Shadowheart as she searched for clues to locating the Blood of Lathander. Everyone assumed it was already lost to past pillages, but Shadowheart had not been convinced, and was later proven right.

“You walked in the sun,” Gale says, quiet. At Lathander’s feet, no less. “You’re a vampire that greeted the dawn and lived. Over and over again. All the way to Baldur’s Gate.”

The silence is thick. Astarion doesn’t breathe. “You can’t be serious,” he whispers. “You think—no, that’s absurd. Gale! Stop being absurd.”

“The sending arrived only after I returned the Blood of Lathander. I worry that isn’t a coincidence,” Shadowheart says.

“I’m inclined to agree. Astarion has been here for months already, and until now I’ve remained unbothered by any such divine messengers. Then you returned the mace. Perhaps we provoked an old memory: the vampire spawn who lived under the light of dawn. I can’t imagine the Morninglord took kindly to that.”

“I’m going to be sick,” Astarion says.

Gale stands again. “I’m going to improve the wards,” he says. Nothing will get in, if he can help it, and Gale can help it—the Weave is at his fingertips and Mystra answers his prayers. Nothing short of Lathander himself will cross his threshold uninvited, and even a god will be forced to put effort into a siege on this tower.

“Should you do that now?” Shadowheart demands, also standing. “I’m not convinced your head is in the right place to be performing that kind of magic.”

“Enough,” Gale snaps, and regrets it immediately. He says next, more softly: “I’ve achieved far greater under worse conditions. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

He steps outside onto the porch. The night is clear and the stars shimmer above the ocean. There’s a bit of wind, so he ties his hair back to keep it from his eyes. Then, Gale reaches out and his hands get to work between the warp and weft of the Weave. He hooks his fingers and bends his wrists as he opens the fabric of magical reality, a world of endless possibility, with a few precise somatic gestures. Gale gets elbow-deep into the construction of the tower’s wards. Tara comes out to sit by his feet, wrapping her tail around her paws, and she, too, looks into Mystra’s domain, and watches Gale work.

Behind Gale, through the door he’s left open, he hears Shadowheart say, “easy, Astarion—”

Gale’s concentration falters. He stops.

“Don’t touch me,” Astarion hisses.

“You need to breathe,” Shadowheart says, calm.

Astarion’s voice has bite. “A very stupid thing to say! I don’t need to fucking breathe.”

Shadowheart’s tone loses most of its softness. “I very much think you do.”

—the wards. Gale will focus on the wards. He reorientates himself. This is what he’s good at—what he’s good for—and he must focus.

The wards as they stand are fine, of course. Gale makes only a few adjustments in places where the magic has started to loosen, a loosening that perhaps only Gale would have noticed. He sorts through the nuances of the spells that make up the wards, the intricacies he and Tara put together in an effort to protect Gale from the outside and to protect the outside from Gale. The idea was it would contain the fallout of the orb’s imminent explosion, but they’d obviously never tested it. He likes to think it would have worked, but he is not so curious that he wishes to test the wards from this side.

Gale intends to make some immediate changes. More advanced changes will wait until tomorrow. For now—

Pulling apart the components designed to protect the world from the orb, Gale re-inserts them to add layers of protection against outside, otherworldly magic and force. The calculations he made regarding the orb’s potential for destruction are comparable to the destructive power of a god. Of course, a god like Lathander is much, much bigger than the power of the orb, but that old shard of mortal-made divinity is Gale’s best point of comparison in this immediate moment. He will move these ward components to the outside for now, and then he will make new calculations and add to the existing spells later.

This new project is much less interesting and far more stressful. Still, it is a project, and Gale is very good at those. Perhaps it’s best that Gale failed to find a solution to Astarion’s desire to see the sun again if this divine messenger means what they think it means. No need to further provoke a god’s interest.

Still next to Gale, Tara meows.

“An excellent catch, Tara, as always,” he says, adjusting his handling on one of the last components, the heavier of the set. His mind had begun to drift, and Tara caught the minor adjustment he didn’t mean to make.

The fatigue doesn’t hit until after Gale is done and has removed his hands from the Weave to let it all settle back into place. Gale lets out a small huff and finds the edge of the bench nearby with a hand and sits.

Tara jumps up to join him and places herself across his leg. She purrs when he scratches her head. The salty breeze ruffles the feathers of her wings. The moonlight exaggerates the silver in her fur, and the sight of it fills Gale with another wave of nauseatingly complicated emotions, as if he needed more. She’s old. Tara has been with him since he was a boy and now she is very old for her kind. Sure, magic wielders tend to use their talents to prolong life and make age more comfortable, but it only goes so far.

His thoughts are interrupted by the feeling of her claws in his leg when she starts to knead his pants. Gale wishes she would trim them, but she insists it’s no fun to hunt without something sharp. He rubs her head too hard in retaliation, and she bites him, which eases the tension in his chest.

When Gale walks back inside and closes the door, he doesn’t immediately see either Shadowheart or Astarion. He walks around the bed and looks down. Astarion is on the ground on the other side of the bed, curled up with is arms locked around his knees, head bowed. Shadowheart sits beside him. She meets Gale’s eyes. “I will grab dinner. We need it,” she says, and glances at Astarion as she gets up. Gale understands the signal.

The wizard sits beside Astarion.

Astarion lifts his head just enough to direct an eye at Gale and glare over his crossed arms. “Next time? Do me the honor of telling me all the information I might want to know from the beginning.”

Gale rubs his palm across his chest. “I apologize. It felt important to know more before I said anything more.” Incomplete information scares Gale more than most things. It’s easy to be misunderstood or lose control of a situation when he only has half the story to give.

“So you left me in the dark?” Astarion snaps. He turns his head back into his arms and lets out a frustrated noise into his sleeves. Then he sighs and his shoulders sag. “I’m done with people making decisions for me.”

He should know better after all they’ve seen together. Nothing upsets Astarion more than secrets. Not that this was a secret, Gale just wanted more information, but—perhaps there’s no functional difference for Astarion. “You’re right, of course,” Gale says, his forearm crossed over his chest and his hand clasped on the opposite shoulder.

“I am!” Astarion snaps, and his head comes up, too. He rolls back his shoulders and uncurls. “Thank you for saying so.”

Gale smells the dinner he’d prepared before the door opens. Shadowheart balances a tray with the food, as well we a set of drinking glasses and a bottle of wine. There are three glasses. Astarion doesn’t drink wine anymore, but Gale must have neglected to mention that to Shadowheart. What little Astarion got out of drinking during their adventuring days no longer applies now that the tadpole is gone. He complains often that he doesn’t have the option of getting drunk to pass the time he’s stuck hiding in the dark.

Shadowheart bends and crouches before them, placing a plate of food in front of Gale. Then she lifts a knife off the tray. Astarion and Gale both watch in baffled silence as she rolls back her sleeve.

Like Gale has seen her do before, Shadowheart takes the knife to her arm with practiced ease and, like she once did for Shar as a sacrifice upon the goddess’ many alters outside Moonrise, cuts open her wrist. Shadowheart works the blood into the third glass, grimacing a bit as she encourages the flow. Astarion watches rather wide-eyed and, obviously, hungry. The red in his eyes intensifies in the moments before he feeds from Gale, and his eyes do that now.

Shadowheart heals herself with a word before she puts the glass in front of Astarion, then she picks up her own food as Gale reaches to open and serve the wine.

Astarion stares at the bloody glass.

“Don’t let it get too cold,” Shadowheart mutters.

With deliberate and careful slowness, Astarion takes the glass off the ground and curls back into the fetal position he’d been in before and puts the offering to his face.

They eat without chatter. They are all—quite tired. Gale is still quietly pleased with how the fish turned out. He was worried his anxiety had flavored his work.

“How are you feeling now, Gale?” Shadowheart asks, after they’ve gotten halfway through their dinner. Astarion’s glass has been set aside, as clear as if it were clean.

Astarion turns to look at Gale. “Yes, you smelled like a cornered animal when we found you up here.”

This is exasperating. They won’t let him preserve his dignity, will they?

“It’s nothing pressing. A year locked up with an explosive waiting to go off at any time will do things to one’s psyche. I’ve recovered, thank you.”

“You’re lying, of course,” Astarion says, too perceptive. Sitting cross-legged, he taps his knee with a finger. “At least tell me that it has nothing more to do with the mysterious sending? I’m still cross with you. I don’t like secrets. There were enough of those haunting us on the road and not one of them was worth keeping.”

Gale struggles for the right words. “No, no. There’s no—and it’s not about you, or rather—”

Astarion continues to tap his knee, faster now. His eyes are fierce. “You’re a bad liar, Gale.”

Gale’s throat tightens. He’s lost his words. Now he’s not sure what he would have said because his mind has gone blank with the white noise of a panic: both Astarion and Shadowheart look at him and he is—woefully ill-prepared to address his mistakes at the moment.

Shadowheart is trying to swallow what’s in her mouth and she puts down her plate to raise and wave her hands. “Hold on, Astarion—”

Astarion doesn’t hold on. He stands and smooths his pants with a quick brush over his thighs. “Thank you, for the meal,” he says, to Shadowheart, and steps around them to leave out the door.

In some ways, the crisis is averted, but—Gale bows his head and presses his thumbs into his brow. His eyes sting. Gods, after just getting his thoughts under control—he’s an incompetent mess the moment the Weave is no longer involved. Why does he bother doing anything else?

Shadowheart’s hand rests on Gale’s shoulder and the weighty realness of her touch breaks him. He can’t stop the shuddering sob that takes over his lungs. Vaguely aware of Tara and Shadowheart on either side of him, Gale cries worse than before. Not even Tara’s little claws can shake him out of it. His cry doesn’t make a lot of noise, but it’s a violent thing: his whole body insists on participating, and his mind is scrubbed of coherent thought or reason. Cries like these were once frightening, horrible things, possibly the last experience Gale could expect to have before detonation. Somehow, it still feels like the world is about to erupt.

Shadowheart holds him around the shoulders and mutters meaningless words of kindness. Tara purrs into his side.

There is eventually the breaking point when his body can’t sustain such a tight coil, and Gale lifts his head to breathe. “I apologize,” he croaks. He clears his throat. “Excuse me.” Gale digs his fingers into Tara’s fur and turns to spare Shadowheart the sight of his face.

“Has something happened between the two of you?” Shadowheart asks.

If only Gale could say it had been something petty like a fight. It’s easy to point fingers and make simple explanations for something like that. He sighs. “It’s complicated.”

“Do you want to talk?”

Gale chuckles, or something like it comes out of his mouth. “Not really.”

Shadowheart hums. “That would be a first.”

And then Gale does chuckle, weakly. He turns to look at Shadowheart. The room is dim, and Gale appreciates the cover the darkness provides that disguise the ugliness of the emotions still wet on his face. “I’m due to have a conversation with someone at some point. Listen, I—this morning—ah, wait—” he says, when Shadowheart leans back and he can see she’s about to begin making apologies, too. “Wait.”

Shadowheart presses her lips together and waits.

“This morning,” Gale starts again. “Or, rather, I think it was the afternoon. It was rather late, wasn’t it? But never mind—” Gale tries one more time. “Your assumptions aren’t—wrong. I still feel things. About you. About us. We’ve seen much together, fought and cried at each other’s side and saw to the end great evils as well as our own troubles. I love you, you must know this. But I am also, oh, what’s the best way to put it—” Gale runs his hands through Tara’s fur. “In possession of a duplicitous and disloyal heart. I cannot be what I should be. To anyone.”

They’re subtle, the expressions Shadowheart makes, and a small series of them pass over her features as she tries to process Gale’s words. “I don’t think I follow.”

Gale breathes, glad, at least, he’s got control over his lungs again. “I hold similar feelings toward Astarion. It seems I cannot make my heart stay put and I have begun to act, well, somewhat promiscuously among my house guests.”

Understanding dawns on her face, as well as—is that relief? This is more confusing and possibly worse than what he expected.

“In fairness,” Shadowheart says, “It would require a very cold set of loins to ignore Astarion. But—jest aside, Gale,” she says, voice unbearably calm and devoid of indignation. “I do think a part of me assumed you two were already…involved? I really should have asked before trying to revisit old adventures.”

—excellent. He’s already been identified as a licentious lover.

Shadowheart continues, her hands pressed together. “I apologize for my advances, or, rather, for their poor timing and the lack of notice. That’s probably a better way to put it.” She smiles sweetly. “But it wouldn’t bother me to be loved among multiple. Assuming everyone is aware of each other.”

This is—it’s very upsetting, the flush that Gale feels rise in his face. It’s not anger, per se, but something related burning inside his chest. “You’re kind—too kind. But I won’t in good conscience give anyone less than the whole of my heart. Call me stubborn or old fashioned, but I won’t divvy my attention up like a piece of bread between people who deserve much more than that.”

The mood between them shifts—lurches, more like. Shadowheart stiffens, and she looks like she’s smelled something foul. “Right,” she says, a bit sharp. “Because that’s how love works. Bread.” She scoffs. “I’m not a pigeon, Gale.” Then Shadowheart takes a very, very deep and loud intake of air that makes it clear she doesn’t want Gale to interject as she collects her thoughts. “You should know that I’m not going to limit my love or my experiences. I have a lot of life to catch up on. But even if I were to dedicate myself to a single person, I would not demand such. The gods demand everything, but I don’t—I wouldn’t.”

Is she trying to make this about Mystra? Perhaps he should ask her to leave before he has a few choice words about that—

“Love shouldn’t demand such…piety,” Shadowheart says, before Gale can interject. “Even if you offered me everything, I wouldn’t take it because if I did, there wouldn’t be any Gale left to love.” She looks at Gale with a serious, practically furious expression, one he hasn’t seen in many years. “I gave everything to Shar, and there was hardly anything of me left when she was done. I would not give you the whole of myself or ask for the same in return. Not even Selûne will have that much of me. To ask you to lose yourself in me completely—I can’t.” She breathes. “I won’t, and no one should.”

He has upset her, as he expected he would. Gale would like to return to the closet now and never come back out again. “I’m sorry,” Gale whispers. “I don’t mean to imply such a thing.”

“Thank you,” Shadowheart says, her expression still sour. “I’m glad you said something. I would also advise talking to Astarion. At some point. But perhaps not now.” She bends and collects the plates and the glasses off the floor, places them on the tray, and grabs the bottle of wine before she stands. “I’ll be in the kitchen,” she says, and leaves.

Gale wilts over the floor and groans. Tara lays on his back and he can feel her tuck her paws under her chest. He won’t complain because the weight, however slight, is always nice.

Shadowheart is in the kitchen, and the assumption is that Astarion has gone somewhere dark and secluded to brood, possibly his room, or he is outside punching things. Either way, it’s likely they’ve all remained somewhere within the wards. Still, Gale won’t be able to sleep until he has first checked that Astarion is and will remain somewhere safe. It will just—take a moment to collect himself.

When Gale’s joints begin to complain about the unnatural position he’s assumed on the hard floor, he stands; Tara waits to tumble off his back until the last possible second. He makes his way down the stairs, steps slow with that lethargic, floating feeling he always has after a night of too much crying. The fight to keep himself together is so exhausting.

Gale doesn’t want to talk to Astarion at this exact moment, but he also won’t be able to sleep until they exchange words and possibly a promise neither will go far until they better understand the possible threat on Astarion’s life.

Shadowheart is in the kitchen. He can hear her washing the dishes: the gentle sound of water, the clinking of porcelain and glass. Gale steps quietly through the dining room and hopes she won’t notice him walk by.

The short hall that leads to Astarion’s room is dark by design. Gale can barely see when he gets to the door. He casts a small light above his palm with a murmured word and uses it to find the handle and open the door.

It’s unlocked, and when Gale steps inside, he doesn’t see Astarion. He scans the sparse space, looks at the chair, the plain desk, and the bed. Nothing. Gale’s chest sinks. He’s going to have to go looking, and while he searches, he’s going to have to field a growing sense of panic that will rise with the impending dawn until he finds the vampire.

But, before leaving, Gale looks up.

“Shit,” Astarion says.

Gale laughs—laughs too hard, and with too much relief. From where he clings to the ceiling, Astarion hisses at Gale, red eyes glowing against the light in Gale’s palm. “Shut up.”

Sometimes Gale forgets Astarion can do this—scale walls and ceilings. The first time Gale saw Astarion on the side of his tower at night, scurrying over the stones like a pale lizard, Gale nearly had a heart attack because there’s a primitive part of his psyche that knows it should be frightened by the sight. Vampires scale walls and ceilings because it makes ambushing their preferred prey easy, especially at night. This particular power was lost to Astarion until the tadpole was removed, and Gale forgets, sometimes, that Astarion’s more curious traits returned alongside his intolerance of the sun.

Astarion lands on the ground in front of Gale, and he glowers. His fists are balled at his side and his shoulders hunch. “What do you want?”

Gale looks past Astarion at the wall. “I came only to make sure you were safe. And I wanted to add that I am not keeping anything else pressing from you.” He looks at Astarion’s face now. “There are no secrets, just—a conversation we need to have, but one we can have later. I am exhausted with talking for the evening.”

“Is this about last night?” Astarion asks, voice strained and high. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I swear.”

If Gale had one of his staffs with him, he’d be tempted to thwack one of Astarion’s legs with it. He is exhausted. “You’re infuriating, you know that?”

Astarion’s lips press into a thin line. He’s not breathing, coiled too tightly to think of it.

Gale breathes deeply for them both. “We will talk about less dire matters after I’ve had an opportunity to sleep. Last night was—unexpected, but not unwelcome. I’m not upset with you.”

Astarion is quite good at making eyes up at Gale that make him feel like he’s just kicked a puppy. “Alright,” Astarion says, unclenching and clenching his fists.

“Trust me, the idea of a conversation terrifies me, too.”

This makes Astarion visibly relax, if only a little.

Because Gale is an idiot, he then asks out of habit, “did you want to eat before I retire?”

“Gale,” Astarion says, unusually serious.

Right, right—it’s probably an ill-advised proposition, given the circumstances.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” Astarion grumbles. Then he sighs. “But thank you—” he makes the words sound painful— “for offering.” Astarion gestures at and looks up and down Gale’s figure, one of his crooked grins forming at the corner of his mouth. “You’re a treat, but it won’t do either of us any good if I suck you dry. There’s only so much to go around, after all.”

Astarion is right, of course. Gale isn’t able to offer anyone enough. He should have taken that bloody crown and its promise of godhood—

Astarion’s nose crinkles. “Ugh, Gale, you’re doing it again. Whatever it is you’ve got running through your head, it makes you smell. Why? What’s wrong?”

Gale sets aside the magical light he’s been holding up to float in the air beside them. With a word and a twist of his fingers, Gale casts a quick prestidigitation, and keeps his eyes locked with Astarion’s when he does it. Whatever scents Astarion might be picking up should be gone now, and, for emphasis, there’s a light touch of lavender in the air.

“Problem solved,” Gale mutters.

Astarion rolls his eyes. “You think you’re funny, do you? You can no more magic away your problems than I can punch through mine. It doesn’t work that way.”

“I am tired,” Gale says, with emphasis and increasing gravity in each syllable. “We will talk. Tomorrow.”

Astarion growls in his throat and his eyes flash. “What, so you can sleep it off, wake up fresh and proceed to treat the dawn like an opportunity to forget as much of the pain as possible? Talk yourself into thinking it wasn’t as bad as you remember as you get out of bed? Convince yourself that you ‘over reacted’ as you get breakfast? Then finally walk in here and talk around the problem instead of about the problem?”

Gale hums, dangerously. “An expert, are we?”

“I know you, Gale! You did the same damn thing after we had to talk you down from literally blowing yourself up underneath Moonrise. The following morning—the next fucking day—you decided to act like you hadn’t just tried to run to your death—after openly preparing to do so for a whole month! You wanted to talk about book shopping.” Astarion’s tone has become sharp—mean, even. “And now that I think about it, you still haven’t had a conversation with anyone about that, have you, Gale?”

“I think we’re done for the night,” Gale whispers. He opens the door behind him. “Goodnight, Astarion.”

Hands pressed together, his body straight as a knife, Astarion tilts his chin up, just enough to look down his nose at Gale. “Goodnight. I look forward to talking with you in the morning about ‘nothing important.’”

The anger leaves him before he can stop himself—it goes out into his arm and Gale slams the door closed. The door shudders. The sick release the violence gives Gale is immense.

And he is still on this side of the door with Astarion.

“Look at that,” Astarion purrs. “He can bite.”

This feels awful—brutal—his heart races and his neck is hot, his chest aches, and control is slipping out from between Gale’s fingers like sand. His mind is an un-contained wildfire.

—he needs a cleric. Shadowheart is a proficient caster in calm emotions, something she used often to keep fights in the camp from escalating into bloodshed in the earliest days of their alliance. Gale needs that and he needs it immediately.

“This smells better on you,” Astarion says, gesturing again over the length of Gale’s body, as if Gale doesn’t look like he’s about to erupt and blow them both off the face of the planet with a choice word. “Now, maybe you’ll say something you actually mean.”

Everything Gale is about to say he will regret, but he is so past caring. His voice is hoarse before he even starts: “This? This is how you want to talk? You want me to slam doors and shatter dishes and scream at you until you’re cowering into a corner?”

Astarion’s brows shoot up, but he’s otherwise unmoved. For once, he has no quips or jabs. That feeds the fire—this awful fire. Gale is going to go up in smoke and incinerate this room with them—his voice rises, he can’t stop it—it’s burning his throat open. Gale can’t control himself—he can’t control any of his feelings. He tries—he tries so hard to keep their destructive potential in check, but it seems he just can’t—

“Shall I list our collective failures and vices?” Gale snaps, voice rising further still. “Spin bleak visions of our future? Wax poetic about what a tragedy we can’t help but become? Then leave you here alone with your ears rattling and the knowledge nothing will change?”

Because that’s how this always goes. Gale has seen it played out before, over and over again, like a terrible cyclone that keeps coming back to rip apart what little could be rebuilt after the last time. Nothing good comes from feeling so strongly. Not even Mystra, who holds half of the realm itself together, could tolerate the magnitude of what Gale is capable of feeling; that last tragic act of misguided devotion truly demonstrated that he is both always too much and never enough.

At some point, Astarion has tipped his chin back down. He looks up at Gale, and his look is gallingly steady. Why does Astarion insist on weathering this storm?

Surely, the whole tower must hear him, every creature and crevice. “Is this how you prefer me!” The sound of his own voice echos in Gale’s ears.

Astarion blinks. “The authenticity of it, perhaps,” he says.

Gale is going to collapse, crumble—he is going to disintegrate into fucking ash. “Astarion,” Gale says, voice broken and pleading, his face is wet all over again, and he presses the tips of all his fingers into his chest as if it will somehow make Astarion understand. “I can’t be what you need me to be.”

Astarion’s composure breaks. Eyes wide, he splutters, “wait, is that what this is about?” He groans. “Gale.”

This is pointless—Gale is done. He has lost control, and he is done, left to crawl away and pick up the pieces of the mess he’s made of this relationship because unfortunately he has survived this. Honestly, Astarion will probably be gone before morning. It’s not like there’s anything left to keep him attached to the tower. There will be no pieces to pick up.

“I’m sorry, I tried—” Gale whispers, and tries to find the door handle, the escape.

Gale doesn’t completely understand Astarion’s next words; they’re too calm, too soft. “You need to sit,” he murmurs, voice near Gale’s ear. “You’re about to float out of your body and I swear your ki is about to snap, if that’s even possible—and if it is possible, you’d probably be the one to do it.” Astarion’s hands are cold on Gale’s. “Let’s settle your body down, at least.”

No, no—then Astarion will see exactly how broken Gale is—sense what a pathetic person he is at a fundamentally spiritual level—

“My dear,” Astarion says; his voice demands attention and has an authority it almost never possesses. This would alarm Gale more if he were in a state of mind to think more than half-formed thoughts. Instead, the words unravel the wards Gale is trying to get back around his heart.

Again, with that unbearably quiet voice, Astarion say, “Please. Sit.”

Gale cannot refuse the look is Astarion’s eyes. There isn’t a trace of hurt, anger, or fear in them, just—patience. If he refuses this look, Gale might become undone again and he’s not sure how much of him there is left to undo.

Astarion asks Gale to sit on the edge of the bed. The earthy smell lingering in the room is strongest here. Gale sits above the dirt of Astarion’s gave. The vampire sits on the bed, too.

“If you’ll permit me,” Astarion says, and holds out a hand.

Gale’s heart is too fragmented to understand. He stares at Astarion’s palm. His throat hurts. “What are you going to do?”

Astarion takes a deep breath. “I’m not going to push you again. I—I’ll give you something to hold onto, that’s all,” Astarion says. His tone shifts from calm and collected to something rueful. Astarion flexes the long fingers of his outstretched hand apart.

Gale gives Astarion his hand, self-conscious of how clammy it is and how much he must smell like his failure. Astarion places Gale’s palm on his chest; his body is cool the way fresh bedsheets are cool at night and it’s unexpectedly grounding—soothing, even. Then Astarion reaches out with his free hand to place it over Gale’s sternum. Gale flinches. Astarion’s hand twitches back and hovers above Gale’s shirt.

“If I may,” Astarion says.

It takes a moment, but Gale decides he will—allow this. He isn’t sure how he feels about the shape of this reconciliation, but it’s—better than nothing. By all rights, Astarion should toss Gale out of the room, bite back, or simply leave Gale and his failures behind, but they are here instead, doing something odd—one of Astarion’s esoteric, monkish exercises.

Gale uses his free hand to press Astarion’s chilly palm against his chest. They both twist where they sit to make the angles less awkward, and it brings their shoulders in line. Gale’s fingers tremble and he tries not to think about it, which makes it worse, of course. There’s not enough left in Gale’s body to cry. He’s too hollowed out and rattled, a broken jar full of its own shattered glass.

“I’m going to breathe. You’re going to breathe with me,” Astarion says, his eyes on Gale’s chest where the wizard has him pinned.

“And?” Gale adds.

Astarion shrugs. “That’s all.”

Dread. Gale feels dread wash through him, but there might be some kind of atonement in this exercise, however imperfect, so he holds on. He grips Astarion’s cool fingers. “Alright,” he says, and concedes.

It’s—really quite awkward at first. Gale can’t pretend to be alright when his breath hitches. There’s a death-like stillness to Astarion’s features that makes it impossible to tell if the vampire notices or cares. The silence, the absence of snide remarks or teasing or baseless flirting is itself disconcerting. Gale can’t gauge if this is working, if Astarion is disappointed in Gale’s pitiful effort to reconcile or if he’s going to forgive him—

And it’s unexpectedly intimate, mimicking the rise and fall of Astarion’s chest. They breathe, and in breathing, the edges of their intentions are blurred into one another. Sensing this boundary shift makes Gale’s throat feel thick. Guiltily, he begins to savor the feel of Astarion’s body making the deliberate choice to move, to breathe, to live—as much as he can—under Gale’s hand. Astarion’s cool body takes away some of the unbearable heat and Gale relishes the sensation, even as he hates himself for it.

A prickling sensation forms at the back of Gale’s mind and spreads, creeping down the back of his neck and down his spine like a fat drop of water. Gale shudders. He has become painfully aware of his body, its aches and tension, where his clothes stick to his skin, the tiredness in his bones, the rawness in his throat left over from shouting, and the way Astarion’s hand leeches the heat from his chest. Gale thinks he’s going to cry again—gods, not again—

“Keep breathing. I’ve got you,” Astarion says, eyes still cast down and voice still hushed—thank goodness there’s no risk of eye contact. Gale’s not sure he could tolerate it. Astarion adds, “you are doing very well.”

He is most certainly not doing well, but the words are a dash of water over parched lips.

This is awful—how Astarion can routinely tolerate such an exercise is beyond Gale’s understanding—the shared breathing unwraps and upsets things in Gale’s body that he can’t shove aside without disrupting his breath; the choice is to breathe and feel unfettered or stop breathing and put it all away where it belongs.

This will have to do. He can’t risk coming apart again. Gale adjusts his grip on Astarion’s hand and interrupts the breathing to say, “I apologize, my outburst just now was not—”

Astarion’s eyes roll up to meet Gale’s. They shine like a cat’s in the dim light, reflecting back a little of their redness. The wizard swallows. He’s lost the thought.

They both sit back, reclaiming their hands and returning to their respective bodies. Gale rubs his palms over his pant legs and Astarion places his hands over his boney knees.

“You wanted to talk more in the morning,” Astarion says, unreadable and calm. “I’ll be here when you’re ready, and I will, uhm—” he pauses, pushing some hair behind his ear. He looks at Gale with those eyes again. “I’ll listen.”

Gale doesn’t quite believe him, but he would like to. The wizard stands and puts out the light still floating in the room and the eerie shadows vanish. “Goodnight,” Gale says, wishing he would say more, but—he doesn’t want to. Guilt claws at his mind; he should show some gratitude for Astarion’s calm, collected response to Gale’s outburst. Surely, this composure must be difficult for Astarion to maintain. Gale can’t think of many times Astarion was ever calm—quiet, but not calm.

But Gale is tired.

Tara is in bed waiting for him. She kneads his back after he falls face-first into the mattress. Sleep takes him immediately. Small blessings.

Notes:

My partner in crime and beta-reader is a gd treasure.

Chapter 7: Visible Mends

Summary:

Astarion has regrets.

Notes:

So, the next two chapters I had lined up ballooned into 5 whole ass chapters during revisions. The chapter count has been adjusted accordingly.

A very special thank you to Chthonion and anecjotes and syrupwit

for beta-reading and helping me manage my cast of (beloved) idiots.

“They say that the only thing a vampire can feel is hunger. Nothing else touches them—not grief, or mercy. Or any sense of what is just.” — High Harper Jaheira

---

Astarion doesn’t have the required discipline to meditate or trance, not after that. He used up all his patience for the night making sure Gale came back down from the ledge of some kind of mental implosion.

“Implosion” because Astarion is convinced Gale is a danger only to himself.

Ugh, Gale. Even when the wizard loses his temper he directs the ire right back onto himself. Astarion is durable, he can take a hit, he knows how to duck—why didn’t Gale take the opening—the invitation, to let something out? It’s not like Gale’s body is capable of leveling a city anymore.

Even wizards need something to hit, surely.

Cazador Szarr was a wizard, after a fashion. But he wasn’t like Gale. Cazador didn’t study the Weave to understand it, he studied because it was power. Cazador liked power.

When they stole into the Szarr palace, Gale couldn’t help but scan the books in the study where they found the entrance to the palace catacombs; he made a passing comment Astarion still cherishes: “that’s a rather charming little collection of novice’s tomes.”

The vampire lord hardly knew how to use his staff properly. It was an impressive looking piece, long and capped with a masterfully crafted bat (of course) and it simmered with necrotic and demonic energies. Gale kept it, naturally, and it’s somewhere in this tower now: “what a novel piece,” he’d said, when he picked it up off the ground and moved it back and forth between his hands as if weighing it. Astarion has never asked to see it and Gale has never offered to pull it out; the staff has no use to Astarion now because it was one of the keys to a ritual he never performed and it serves no purpose except to evoke bad memories. The staff is likely collecting dust somewhere with other artifacts in Gale’s collection of novelties.

There is nothing novel about how Cazador used the staff. It was something he carried with him at almost all times to appear as if he were more than a beast haunted by violence and hunger, but when he used the staff, it was a stick—because he beat others over the head with it; no arcane prowess required.

Everyone, including and especially Astarion, knew how to read the stick. There’s a certain tap-tap that means Cazador is itching to find an excuse to lash out, another kind of tap-tap-tap that means he is excited and the excitement spells trouble for a specific someone—that specific someone was often Astarion. Cazador preferred targets that fought back. Even on his perpetually empty stomach, Astarion fought like a rabid animal. It was the only way he could stay alive—in some sense of the word.

The bastard always managed to snag that stupid bat on Astarion’s clothes, too, and it left awful tears. Astarion’s body healed eventually on its own, but he always had to mend the clothes himself. It annoyed him more than the scars because at least the scars would fade. The mends, if the tear was bad enough, would be visible.

Cazador always felt much better once he’d used the stick. Days—sometimes even weeks—of peace settled over the palace after someone got a good thrashing.

The staff was a stick until the very end.

In the heat of combat against the vampire lord, Gale stood and carefully considered his words as he cast his spells, his own staff buzzing with energy. And Cazador? He swatted Shadowheart’s feet out from under her with his stick. Halsin threw the vampire across the room with his bear’s claws before Cazador could drop on the cleric with his teeth.

It’s not that Cazador was middling in power; he was very powerful, but in the way vampires are powerful: strong, vicious, and difficult to catch. His mouth was a weapon of the cruelest sort, preoccupied with biting or with insults—all aimed at Astarion, of course. He did not address cattle, only other predators, even if they were as small as Astarion. Though, ultimately, Cazador made him to be consumed; Astarion was made to eat and be eaten.

But Astarion had grown into so much more than what Cazador had made him to be, and he came to fight on a full stomach—as full as his condition would allow, anyway.

And he brought friends. Gale’s carefully chosen words hurled red comets of flesh-splitting power into Cazador’s chest, the better wizard casting from where he stood in the daylight Shadowheart summoned at the center of the room. The light of Lathander’s blood in Astarion’s fist made it impossible for the vampire lord to hide in the shadows of his mist. Astarion chased Cazador into a corner of the room with his own stick and proceeded to beat Cazador to death with it—the brilliance of the light was the only favor a god ever did for him. The spines of the mace caught in the orbits of Cazador’s skull and the weapon’s blood felt especially warm that day.

At the end of the fight, Gale slipped on a piece of a ghoul’s rotten viscera and fell on his backside with a soft “ow.” It’s the only injury he complained about after the fact because it bruised his ego.

When it was over, Astarion was left kneeling over a corpse that would not get up again and no hope for a future in the sun or a quiet stomach. He didn’t ascend because no one in their company stepped up to help him complete the final step. Instead, the ritual components the hells demanded in exchange for ascension—over seven thousand vampire spawn—were released into the Underdark. Those spawn were not like Astarion; they could not control themselves. Hungry, they descended upon the denizens of the Underdark. Weak and confused things that they were, most didn’t last for very long, not down there. There are many monsters lurking where the sun can’t reach, vampire spawn least among them.

“I’m sorry,” Tav said, a hand on Astarion’s shoulder. “But thank you, for being better than him.”

She didn’t fucking get it. He didn’t have a choice.

Astarion is reliving things in his head again. He’s not sure he can make it stop. Cazador this, Cazador that: two centuries of life as that creature’s spawn is hard to overwrite with only two or so years of relative harmony and trite little breathing exercises.

It didn’t have to be this way.

He’s confined—condemned—to the dark. There was a chance, there was a way, and every hand that helped him up until that point was suddenly unwilling to act. Now, he is masterless, hungry, and hopeless. So he makes do, he stays safe, he is with Gale, but he can’t seem to do even that without setting off traps that blow the whole arrangement up in his face. He can’t hit his way out of this.

He spends several hours trying to find peace or a distraction in the barren room he calls ‘home’ before he gives up and moves to another part of the tower. Astarion can’t sit still, not while he wades through this thick mire of resentment and shame. He resents his companions for choosing the lives of the other spawn over Astarion’s needs, he resents Gale for not hitting back, and he’s ashamed to admit it; he’s a selfish monster they all like to pretend has become somehow better than he is—sentimental cattle, all of them.

He wants to hit something, but he’s too afraid to go outside and he’s not about to break any furniture—that has happened exactly once and he still feels embarrassed about it, even if Gale didn’t seem to care about the chair or its fate. Gale had been worried about Astarion; it’s why Gale later set up an exercise space outside, to give Astarion something to hit.

Gale is more than happy to set up something for Astarion to hit, but he’s not inclined to use it himself—not even a little bit. He’d sooner beat himself.

It was a mistake to try and bait Gale into a fight. Honestly, why did Astarion expect Gale’s knife to land anywhere but the wizard’s own chest—that’s where it’s always aimed.

Shadowheart is still up when Astarion emerges from his cave. She’s at the table in the dining room and in front of her is a bottle. Just a bottle. When Astarion walks in and she spots him, she tips her chin up, a tired greeting.

Even on the road, she’d been a bit of an enthusiastic drinker. It’s easier to accept loss if your ability to ruminate is gone as well.

“Embracing loss tonight?” Astarion asks, testing her tolerance for blasphemy.

Shadowheart—simply nods.

They’re all in a bad way then, it seems. Even Tara is likely at her limit, no doubt curled protectively around her middle-aged kit somewhere in Gale’s bedroom.

“I couldn’t help but overhear—” Shadowheart starts to say, then she covers her mouth as if to contain a hiccup. “Alright, I could, but I didn’t.” She puts the bottle further away from herself. “What in the hells was that noise earlier? It sounded like Gale, but I’d sooner believe it was a changeling using his voice.”

Astarion sits across the table from Shadowheart. He takes the bottle and looks inside. Not much is left. He gives it a try, anyway, and it tastes like piss. No respite to be found here—no respite anywhere. “It was Gale,” Astarion says, as he puts the now-empty bottle back on the table.

“Why?” Shadowheart asks, with a great deal of slurred emphasis.

“I—pushed him. On purpose. Which I regret, before you ask.”

Shadowheart sighs. “You’re fucking serious.” She looks at her hands and a faint trace of divine energy shows up around her palms. “Te absolu—no.” Shadowheart clears her throat. “Vivi—ah, no.”

“I believe in you,” Astarion says, mouth quirked.

“Fuck off.” Shadowheart mumbles, then, with a deep breath, taps her head and recites, “Vincere est…vivere.” A moment after the words successfully make it out of her mouth and the light washes over her skin she bends over, braces herself against the table, and makes a sick noise from deep in her chest.

“This can’t be good for you,” Astarion says.

She leans back and grunts. “It’s not. That’s the point.” Shadowheart rolls her fingers over the table where she still grips the edge of it. “We need a plan.”

“For which crisis?”

Shadowheart thinks, staring off into space, making calculations. Or she is just trying to keep her thoughts straight. “There’s not a lot either of us can do about this thing out there looking for you, not without Gale. He’s the best equipped out of the three of us to deal with something so large—by leagues and realms. So, we should start with Gale.”

Of course. However: “If I’m honest, I feel as equipped to deal with Gale as I do a god,” he says.

That earns Astarion a small laugh, which is gratifying, a balm amid the tension in the air. Shadowheart leans forward. “But gods are simple. They like offerings and devotion and they like to be told that they are the most important thing to have ever happened to Faerûn. It’s all very straight forward, and Gale has a comparable ego, I think.”

It’s Astarion’s turn to offer a small, mean laugh. “Right, but when you put it like that,” Astarion says, waving a finger in the air, doodling through his thoughts. “I’m not sure how different they are from mortals.” All it took, back in those days when he lured people into Cazador’s palace, was a little flattery, a drink, and some sex to get people to do what he needed them to do. For a night, he met their most basic needs, and that’s how he killed them.

Shadowheart frames some of the air in front of her with her hands. “A matter of scale, maybe.”

If only it were that simple. “But we know what the gods want, they make it very clear—they even give everyone little sets of instructions. We don’t know why Gale was in the closet smelling like that, and he doesn’t want to say.”

The cleric blinks, obviously tired but still trying to engage. “Do you remember when I told everyone about my devotion to Shar?”

Astarion hardly remembers the event. He does, however, vaguely recall she’d been very shifty when making the admission, braced either to run or to fight. At the time, the knowledge had changed exactly nothing about how Astarion felt about Shadowheart. A prickly cleric is a prickly cleric, and by that time Astarion didn’t think much about the gods.

“Somewhat.”

Shadowheart rolls her eyes. “I only did it because I trusted at least half of you to respond with some pragmatism.”

Astarion’s stomach flips. “What are you trying to say? Do not suggest Gale doesn’t trust us—we’ve seen him through so much worse,” Astarion blurts, angry, a surprise to them both—they both startle when the words come out with the energy they do. He can’t help the next part, either: “We’re the ones who said don’t go blow up in the wilderness alone, we’ll stick together.” Well, someone said it, not Astarion, not at the time. “And we brought him all the magical artifacts he could ever need to contain the orb—I only ever complained about it once—” because he’d liked those boots. “We’re the ones who told him to stop begging at the ends of Mystra’s skirt when his so-called ‘good friend’ Elminster came to deliver the order to kill himself.” That, Astarion had been loud about. It would have been a waste of a perfectly good Gale. “We’re the ones—!” And it’s Astarion’s turn to lose his temper and be too loud, “—who said do not try to save the world by sacrificing yourself.”

Astarion was the one who guarded Gale’s back in the last fight: one eye on combat and one eye on Gale’s hands. Thankfully, those hands only wove spells around the real enemy. Astarion was fast and he was strong—he never let Gale think for a moment that it would be necessary to resort to self-detonation to win the day.

Gale knows he can trust Astarion with his life. He does it every damn time Astarion feeds. Or, perhaps, Gale simply doesn’t care if feeding Astarion is safe—

Shadowheart sniffs, unfazed by the escalating volume of Astarion’s voice. The cleric is doing math in her head again. She runs a finger over the top of the table. “We did tell him what not to do quite often, didn’t we?” Then she makes a tugging gesture with her hands, as if she’s holding a string and pulling at both ends. “The will of the gods versus the will of mortals. In either case, he can’t stand to disappoint, can he?”

The anger crashes out of Astarion’s body. Now he just feels sick. The wine he tried to enjoy earlier is heavy and gross in his stomach and he’d like to throw up. Astarion knows all too well what it’s like to be told what not to do for the sake of some ‘greater good.’

“Sometimes, I wish you were less perceptive,” he says, his lip curled inelegantly.

“I often am.” Shadowheart rubs her eyes and puts her elbows on the table as if it’s all that’s keeping her up and awake. “Listen, he didn’t want to die. He said as much. We were right to talk him down from every attempted suicide mission. But in the rush to save ourselves and the rest of the Sword Coast, we never did provide him space to sort out much else. Not for very long, anyway. We didn’t have the time.”

No, there hadn’t been much time to say more than “don’t you dare.” Astarion had been especially vigilant about it toward the end, taking the bed next to Gale’s when they stayed at the Elfsong Tavern because it was at night Gale would start to doubt himself—the doubt would write itself all over his sad face as he tossed and turned looking for sleep—and Astarion would interrupt the spirals with a crude joke or toss laundry over Gale’s face. Sometimes Astarion would go out of his way to say something so obviously stupid Gale felt compelled to lecture him about it like the professor he is; Astarion let him talk without listening much, it was just good to hear the wizard’s voice because it meant he was alive and had something to say.

Now they all have time—all the time in the world, in fact, to sort through their other problems. Well, Astarion does, anyway.

Shadowheart is right, though, and it irritates Astarion that she is: Gale was and still is loathe to inconvenience anyone with his less palatable thoughts. A lot of the available emotional space back then was filled by Astarion and Shadowheart’s own battles against their old masters—and Lae’zel’s loud, repeated vows to free her people from the tyranny of a pretender-god. A lot of Astarion’s time in Baldur’s Gate with the others is obscured by a haze of fear and desperation. He can remember more of what happened after Cazador’s death than before, and by then they were very close to the end. His greatest anxiety, once Cazador was dead, was making sure Gale continued to choose life.

Astarion wasn’t sure Gale would.

And he did—Gale chose life, but he also didn’t choose much else. The Crown of Karsus went back to Mystra, and Gale went back to his tower. Astarion couldn’t ascend, his companions quietly pried that chance out of his fist, Gale simply—didn’t. Mystra plucked from Gale’s open hand his chance to choose godhood.

Shadowheart speaks again, slow with tiredness. “There are certain things we encountered on the road that I don’t think are quite finished with us.” She tips her head back. “But right now? I’m going to bed.” She stands, takes the empty bottle, and wraps her arm around the corner into the kitchen to toss it in the trash.

She stops before the entryway to the staircase and peers at Astarion. “Where will you be for the night?”

“Around,” he says, and tries to shrug casually, but his body is stiff and the gesture is unnatural.

Shadowheart stares at him with tired, hung-over eyes. “Please, don’t run off. We going to do this together. It’s something we’re good at, despite the odds.”

Astarion smile is crooked because he doesn’t know how to feel about Shadowheart, of all people, looking at him like that—like she’s worried. “Oh, don’t worry about me,” he says, and looks away. “I won’t be going anywhere. I’m a coward, first and foremost.”

He does what he has to in order to survive, for better or worse.

Shadowheart makes a displeased face, but doesn’t linger to argue. Her soft steps fade up the stairs.

Astarion is alone in the dark with his thoughts again.

He’d really love to hit something. Slouching, he grabs his head and leans his arms on the table.

Nothing about his life gets to be simple, not even this—the simplest thing he could possibly do now that he’s a lonely spawn with no future to look forward to is just sit next to Gale and talk about books. It was a simple plan: entertain the wizard so he’d have somewhere safe to hide and maybe get the benefit of seeing the sun again.

But no—the simple plan goes out the window because he likes Gale. And now there’s a bigger problem both inside and outside of the tower that threaten Astarion’s peace, and it’s not clear which will prove more difficult to resolve.

The wizard will pretend to be fine in the morning. Astarion hates it when Gale does that. The wizard needs to throw a good tantrum every now and then—a proper tantrum, where he hurls insults or blows at something else for once. It would be good for him. There’s a whole set up outside for just the occasion. Astarion should show Gale how to make a fist instead of all those funny gestures.

But that’s not Gale, is it? He doesn’t make fists, he opens his hands; he doesn’t resist, he capitulates; he doesn’t make demands, he just gives. At least two of Astarion’s “siblings” under Cazador were like that. They were hollowed out within a year of abuse. Watching them mentally evaporate had infuriated Astarion, who himself remained the favorite subject of torment because he kept fighting—two hundred fucking years of fighting.

That fight ended, at least. And now he’s tired—so tired. He just wants to lay in the sunlight and do absolutely nothing. Perhaps tantrums will only go so far.

He feels awfully heavy. The feeling swimming through Astarion’s chest is not one he’s sure how to identify. He leans back and places a hand over his chest and tries to allow it to roll through him. It takes a minute to accept the feeling instead of shut it out. It hurts, too. The last time he felt something like this, it was over himself; this is grief—thick, wet grief. He’s used to feeling such things when it’s over himself, but the texture is different in this moment because it’s grief over Gale.

Astarion’s worst fight is over, surely, and so is Shadowheart’s, and Lae’zel likes fighting—she is out there somewhere relishing the rebellion against a lich-queen. Gale, however, does not fight; he’s a fantastic battlemage when the need arises, and he’ll flush deliciously with the thrill of danger, but he doesn’t fight. Mystra got what she wanted from Gale, in the end. He gave her the Crown of Karsus and in return she promised to “answer all his prayers”—pah.

Why is it that everyone got to shake off the yokes of their masters except Gale? He never did cast Mystra aside. But that’s not exactly an option for Gale, is it? There’s no magic without Mystra, and without magic, there is no wizard.

And magic holds the world together, ultimately. That much Astarion remembers from the many, many lessons Gale prattles off when Astarion is around to listen.

It isn’t fucking fair. None of this is fair. They literally did the impossible. What do they have to show for it? Gale’s still beholden to Mystra and no longer among her Chosen—he’d declined the offer to take the position back, Shadowheart will never get her memories back, Tav and Lae’zel have to keep fighting in a timeless war, and Halsin just ended up with more of those endless responsibilities he’s always picking up.

Astarion went back to the darkness.

Gods, he should have ascended.

It wouldn’t have cured his vampirism, but he would have been a living vampire—a man remade and unbothered by the shadows or hunger.

But he’s stuck with this body, and the most it has to offer for times like this is its ki, which requires ongoing, endless discipline.

Endless.

Not able to sit still any longer, Astarion gets up and goes into the library and stares inside from within the doorway. He looks at the books and scrolls on the table. Generous Gale, spending many of his limited human hours on Astarion’s selfish little complaint over his otherwise immortal and relatively powerful body. He’s stronger, faster, lean and mean—he’s not a true vampire, but he has no master, and he can do what other spawn cannot—control himself. Astarion has a long life ahead of him, and he could do whatever he sets his mind to, probably—except, of course, see the sun.

Who really needs the sun? Not Astarion. He’ll keep telling himself that. Whatever he needs to tell himself to fend off this regret.

He stands in the doorway to the kitchen. It’s spotless. Gale is an archmage, he really doesn’t need to cook like everyone else does—he could hire someone, easily, or set up charms and spells that would do most of it for him. But he likes to cook. Cooking is entirely Gale and is also entirely without Mystra’s magic. There is a Gale without Mystra, and he’s usually in the kitchen. He’d boasted of his cooking to the others when he started to actually envision a future for himself, a life after the orb. But everyone by then already knew he was an excellent cook—he made the food they found along the way somehow appetizing. Astarion never got a taste, of course, but he was keenly aware of how full everyone else made themselves on Gale’s proficiency, the way their blood rushed to their stomachs and their sleepiness after. The wizard rendered everyone in camp into a tempting snack Astarion never got to taste.

Gale probably would have fed Astarion back then if it were possible, but the orb poisoned his blood. When Gale bled, it smelled like bile—utterly unappetizing. How different it would have been back then, to have the luxury of not fighting for his food. But he understands—no one wants to be bitten.

Except Gale, it seems.

Ugh.

Fool that he is, Gale extended an open invitation to his home to everyone, should they survive their final business with the Netherbrain, and he explicitly included Astarion when he made the invitation because vampires require it. The invitation included an offer to cook dinner.

Years later, Astarion showed up in the dead of night, scaring Gale witless; Astarion walked into the library with his hands held up in a gesture of surrender, but it didn’t make the shock to Gale’s system any less. Astarion would have felt bad about that, except there was the fear of being spotted by anyone who might be sharp enough to recognize Astarion as a monster. It would have been a real tragedy to die outside of Gale’s door because someone decided to do their neighbor a favor.

Interestingly, none of the wards had proven to be an issue when Astarion let himself in, and Gale recovered from the shock within seconds. Within days, he’d offered Astarion something to eat: Gale did not, he said, want to exclude Astarion from his promise to serve dinner.

The vampire was the last of their company to eventually accept Gale’s invitation, but he proved to be the longest-stayed visitor—though, honestly, ‘visitor’ might not be the right word for it anymore.

In the kitchen, Astarion digs through the pantries.

He doesn’t know the first thing about cooking, and he’s not going to try, but he’s going to try that thing Gale does and give the wizard something to eat. Astarion owes Gale some kind of—gesture, or something. There’s nothing Astarion has to offer the world—for fucks’s sake, he can’t even cook and wouldn’t know where to start, given he can’t taste or smell anything properly—but he has seen people eat things just sort of—collected together on a plate. He can do that.

The first step in survival is to eat.

There’s cheese. Wizards love cheese. This is a fact. There is also that fish Gale sometimes smokes and puts away for later, much to the dismay of Astarion’s nose. He finds that easily. Then there’s that awful snack Gale will sometimes have in the afternoon—stuffed grape leaves, ugh, the smell of those is more intolerable than the smoked fish. It’s stored in tins somewhere. When Astarion finds the tins, he taps the top of one with his claw-like finger nail. They’re supposed to be tossed if the lid is raised. This one, he thinks, is fine.

This whole exercise is ridiculous, but it helps. He’s forgetting Cazador.

Fruit is an obvious choice—Astarion finds and rolls an apple and some kind of citrus over the counter next to the cheese. He also has to find a knife—a very specific kind of knife because Gale only uses that specific little knife when he’s eating fruit; he doesn’t bite his apples, he slices them, blade turned toward his thumb—risky business, honestly, for someone who lives with a vampire—and then he’ll slide the fruit off the knife with his mouth.

Astarion finds the fruit-eating knife and then searches for breads. People like to have grainy things at most meals, which Astarion remembers because it often makes their blood sweet. Shadowheart complained a great deal on the road about not having access to enough bread. Gale’s cooking could make up for only so much lost comfort. It’s possible that this experience has informed Gale’s shopping habits because there is a lot of bread in what appears to be a small pantry dedicated to bread only, by the look and smell of it.

Astarion’s skin starts to prickle, a warning that dawn will arrive soon. They’ve gotten worse lately, the warning pains, and now he has a guess as to why that might be. Hells. As if mornings weren’t bad enough, now he possibly has to think about Lathander himself—

But he can’t do anything about that right now. Like Shadowheart said, they first have to think about Gale. It’s the most practical first priority.

Astarion realizes he doesn’t know what dish is appropriate for this sort of thing. A bowl will be easy, so he puts the collection of random foodstuffs and the knife in a bowl, then slinks out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

It’s because Astarion is a predator made for sneaking into bedrooms to take prey unawares that he is able to get into Gale’s room without waking even Tara. She does however lift her head when Astarion places the haphazard offering on Gale’s bedside table.

Gale is asleep, wrapped tightly under his blanket and turned down toward the mattress. He usually sleeps like this, with everything held close together and tucked away, a terrible target for someone like Astarion because hardly any skin is exposed. The steady rise and fall of Gale’s body is at least a reassuring sight. It means his brain has slowed down and that his human need for sleep is doing its job: settling his mind. Gale also smells better than he did earlier, more like his usual self. The tang of anxiety still lingers, though.

Astarion’s teeth ache looking at Gale like this. The wizard is so easy to take and consume; he practically hands himself over on a platter and then has the gall to apologize for not being more.

And Astarion wishes he didn’t like it so much. It makes him feel like a parasite.

Tara stretches on the bed, reaching forward with her paws as she arches her back. Astarion puts his finger to his lips and makes a sharp gesture to indicate that no, she will not be getting scratches. She sits on the corner of the bed and looks at him expectantly anyway. Astarion caves and gives her chin a quick but satisfying scratch.

Then, as quietly as he came in, Astarion leaves and hurries down the stairs. He needs to get to his darkened room to lock himself up for the next seventeen hours.

The last window he passes on the way to his room is open. Astarion looks out at the dark blue that the sky assumes just before the sun rise. He frowns.

Dawn.

Astarion taps the glass with a nail and watches the sky continue to lighten as the sun hastens toward the horizon. His skin itches terribly.

That thing out there looking for Astarion said it didn’t want to hurt him, but who knows if it’s obligated to be honest underneath its own zone of truth. They don’t actually know if it’s sent from Lathander, either. It’s a guess—a good guess, if Shadowheart’s instincts are to be trusted, and they are, but the whole situation also feels incredibly absurd. Still, as Shadowheart said, gods are petty.

Often very petty.

—and they also surprise mortals when they choose otherwise. That’s why it’s called a miracle.

Astarion steps to the side of the window with his back to the wall and watches as the first ray of the day’s sunlight shines across the room. The itch on every square inch of his body becomes more like the burn of a terrible rash. Still, Astarion lifts a hand and takes a deep breath in, then touches his finger to the light.

The hiss his skin makes is louder than the hiss he lets out between his teeth. Astarion snatches his hand back, cursing. His finger is grey and the skin falls off in flakes of ash. Astarion retreats into the darkness of the hallway. That was a stupid idea, a stupid thought—

His finger is healing even as he locks himself in the dark. Vampiric healing at its best. Astarion flexes his hand a few times, testing the pain, and when it feels fine, he gently curls his digits, tilts his hand as he pulls back his arm, and strikes one of the bed posts with the heel of his palm. It shatters.

Astarion crouches, cursing and swearing, and collects the broken wood off the ground and shoves them under the bed with the grave dirt. He only spends as much time as he does picking up the smallest splinters because if Gale ever comes in, he doesn’t want the wizard’s foot getting stabbed through his slippers. So, he stays crouched over the ground, picking up tiny slivers of wood with his fingernails.

The jagged leftovers of the bedpost still attached to the frame are alarmingly stake-like. Astarion breaks off the knife-shaped bits leftover from the break and shoves those under the bed, too, and then fishes a few splinters out of his palm with his nails.

There are hours to kill and he doesn’t feel like lying down. Astarion rummages through the few things he can lay claim to that he keeps in the desk drawers and pulls out a pair of pants due for some work around the seams at the inner thigh. He picks up the tin case where he stores his needles and thread.

Sewing is one of the few habits from his past life that Astarion still keeps: it’s practical as well as mindless, which he appreciates. Meditating like an ascetic monk only goes so far in keeping Astarion’s mind from sinking into an endless brood. He’s very good at brooding, but it’s not helpful.

Astarion owns few things, and most of those items are clothes. This has always been true; it’s why he taught himself to mend and embroider as a spawn under Cazador in the first place. He didn’t own his own mind or body, and not even his ruined soul was his own—promised to a devil by the scars on his back, but Astarion had his clothes.

Even back then, Astarion took very good care of his clothes and made them look quite nice. These days, he steals expensive items made out of durable or exotic fabrics and tailors them to fit flatteringly. Sometimes he improves the embroidery, if there is any, and adds some if he feels so inclined.

The project at hand is a practical one. Astarion’s fighting exercises sometimes strain the seams on the clothes he steals. The pants he works on were torn doing kicks because they’re designed to attract attention, not perform feats of athleticism. Astarion periodically picks up this pair to alter so he can look both irresistible and kick without incident. It’s not like Astarion expects to have an audience when he exercises, but he likes to know he looks excellent because some nights Gale will watch from one of the tower’s balconies, usually wrapped up in one of his silly night robes and a mug of tea in his hands.

It helps, the feel of the thread pulling through the fabric and the repeated, bloodless stabbing. Mending is an act that assumes tomorrow will come, that there is use yet to be gotten out of the materials being brought back together; Astarion forgets, mostly, the phantom pain lingering in his finger. His mind worries instead over the memory of Gale’s explosive episode, how it tore open the wizard and nothing else.

The mend will have to be visible: the edges of the tear are too ragged to hide.

Chapter 8: Stars at the peak of darkness

Summary:

Astarion expresses his regrets. Gale also expresses regrets. They are both confused.

Notes:

Also, have more Bloodweave kissy. ❤️

Thank you Chthonion and anecjotes for beta-reading and helping me to sharpen this chapter. And thank you also to my commenters, subscribers, kudos-givers, and bookmarking babes. Y'all make this story a better one and the experience I've had writing it has been such a joy. ☀️

“There’s an almost reverent silence that accompanies the peak of darkness, when you’d almost believe the dawn will never break.” - Gale Dekarios

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After a long morning of sewing, a bad trance and several hours of disturbed meditation later, someone knocks on Astarion’s door.

Here it is. Astarion rolls up from where he’s seated on the floor and grabs the door handle in a single, smooth motion. It’s Gale, of course, with something in his arms. He holds it out to Astarion. “I left this out in the sun for you,” he says.

Astarion takes the blanket. It’s warm and smells like it has been outside. The wizard is determined to make Astarion cry, isn’t he? Where does this seemingly endless fount of generosity come from, anyway? The wizard’s reserves are obviously not about to run out, either, even as he looks at Astarion with exhausted eyes.

Astarion balls up the blanket and tosses himself onto the bed and holds the crumpled up fabric to his chest. It is deliciously warm.

He’ll accept the token, even if it’s a bad sign. Gale’s probably here to apologize. Astarion would rather he didn’t; it’s not Astarion that’s owed an apology.

Gale whispers to cast a light and closes the door. Astarion watches from where he is curled up on his side, waiting. Gale looks and smells better; sleep—true sleep, is an enviable trait. Living elves have to trance through old memories from this and sometimes past lives, which isn’t very relaxing. Humans get to just…forget, for a while, at least. And then there’s Astarion, who gets no good rest at all.

The wizard looks better—but not at his best. Gale still appears incredibly tired.

It’s awful how quickly the heat from the blanket is seeping away.

Gale sits on the edge of the bed, looking at his hands as he presses them together, not at Astarion. “I want to talk about last night.”

Astarion grips the peace offering more tightly as the heat continues to fade. “I’m sorry about—” he starts.

Gale cuts him off, which takes Astarion by surprise. “You said you would listen,” Gale says, tone serious, flat, even, and he looks down at where Astarion’s head rests on the mattress.

“Right. I did say that,” Astarion says, and puts the still-warm blanket over the lower half of his face. “Continue.”

The wizard looks back at his hands, fiddles with his fingers and stretches the delicate joints. “You’re right. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about what happened—or didn’t happen, rather—under Moonrise. I chose to think instead about the crown, but you know that already—I recall you saying something to the effect of ‘for the love of everything living and dead, please talk about something else other than that fucking crown.’ Something like that.”

“Something like that,” Astarion mutters.

A ghost of a smile passes over Gale’s lips. “But I did talk about Moonrise with someone later.” Then he smiles impishly, which is unusual. “Would you like to know with who?”

The obvious answer is Tav; Astarion says so.

Gale continues to smile at his hands. “I spoke with Lae’zel.”

Astarion scoffs. “Now you’re trying to tell jokes.”

“It’s not a joke. I did speak with Lae’zel, and only Lae’zel.” Gale flexes all the fingers on both of his hands experimentally, then drops them on his thighs. “I spoke with Lae’zel because I thought she would understand best what I was trying to accomplish by taking the crown. It’s foolish, looking back, the things I said, but at the time it made sense. I asked her to imagine what kind of aid I could offer her people in the fight against their lich-queen if I had the power of a god at my disposal. I needed someone on my side, I wanted—I needed someone to want the power I could offer. I needed a pretense for my ambition if I was going to go through with it.”

There’s a heavy thought hanging in the air that goes unspoken. Gale is thinking. Or stalling.

The heat from the sun has all but gone from the blanket. Astarion digs through the folds of the fabric to see if he can’t find a little more at the center. There’s a bit, and Astarion presses the warm material to his face. When he does, he finds a small hole in the fabric’s weave and makes note of it.

“You’d think it was an easy sell,” Gale says. Definitely stalling.

Astarion smiles under the blanket. This isn’t an apology, at least not yet. The wizard is trying to explain something with this story and has just asked, in his own way, that Astarion help him continue. “Well, now I’m curious. What did she say?”

Gale hums. “She said that if I didn’t consider myself mighty without the crown, then I would be no mightier with it.” Gale scoffs. “Absurd, obviously, in the most literal sense.”

That does sound like something Lae’zel would have said.

“And then she insisted on bringing up Moonrise. I told her this my offer had nothing to do with Moonrise. Lae’zel said she would discuss it with me anyway.” Gales groans. “She was right, of course; my heart was still under Moonrise. I was still prepared to sacrifice myself. Not on Mystra’s altar, mind you, but on one of my own making. Gale Dekarios, Gale of Waterdeep, Gale—he didn’t fit into my vision of the future, but I could make him useful, one last time, at least.”

Astarion isn’t surprised by what Gale is saying, but he’s surprised the admission was made to the githyanki first, of all people. “You told Lae’zel this?” he asks, voice muffled by the cooling blanket. The question comes from a selfish place: why didn’t Gale try to tell Astarion this? Ever? They shared the same bloody corner in the Elfsong for weeks. He was right there, and Astarion had been just as prepared to talk Gale down from madness as Lae’zel. And he would have been nicer about it, too, which is saying something.

Gale laughs, painfully. “It’s more like she dragged it out of me. She insisted that ‘a bitter heart turns the sword against its wielder’ or something like that—you know how she was, unexpectedly poetic at times—and she was of the opinion I would fail miserably in godhood. ‘The realms do not need another cowardly godling afraid of its own shadow;’ I remember that line because it made me particularly irate. We argued for several hours. Her questions were brutal and cutting, let me tell you. She wanted to know that I would draw from the might of our company, not the—” Gale breathes out and in again as if to bolster himself with the air. “Not the ‘might of my own self-loathing.’”

“Well,” Astarion says, and he sits up. He clutches the sunned blanket to his chest even though the heat is gone; Astarion’s body has absorbed it all and he’s still cold. “She was never one to choose gentleness, was she?” But it is—interesting that Lae’zel spent literal hours sparring with Gale in a format the wizard is better equipped to win. The githyanki is a woman of action—sword, silver and steel—not debate, but she could, on occasion, cut her companions open with her words. It’s part of what endeared Tav to Lae’zel in the first place, as well as her alien brutality and strangeness. Tav likes dangerous things.

“‘Gentle’ is not how I would describe anyone in our company,” Gale says, rather ruefully. “No, she was not gentle. But she was right, so I listened.” Then Gale twists to look at Astarion. “There. I have talked with someone about Moonrise. Twice.”

Well, Gale has talked about talking about Moonrise, at least. Astarion spreads the blanket over his lap instead of pointing this out.

They stare at one another. Astarion isn’t sure what to do, exactly, with the way Gale looks at him. In the dark, lit by nothing but the thin light floating in the room near the bed, the heaviness under Gale’s eyes seems particularly heavy in the shadows.

And his big, dark eyes are kind. Tired, but kind. Astarion wants to sink further into the bed until he’s too small and too harmless to hurt the wizard ever again. He’d wanted to see some gods-dammed fight in Gale, but Astarion’s deliberate attack only uncovered a well of pain. An echo of last night’s grief moves back through his chest.

“Am I allowed to apologize now?” Astarion asks.

Gale appears to think. There’s a pause. “Yes, I think so.”

“Then I’m sorry for last night—I am, really, if that’s worth anything.”

“It is.” Gale goes back to looking at his hands. “You’ll ask me eventually about the state you found me in yesterday, so I might as well explain that also, since I’m doing confessions.” He pulls his fingers down the palm of his other hand. They are long, delicate hands, though still somewhat square, like the rest of him. “I’ve failed, in some ways, as a friend. I spent maybe too long dwelling on it and I—unraveled, I guess you could say.”

At that, Astarion squints. “This isn’t about not fixing my sun hypersensitivity is it? I might actually bite you if it is.”

Gale actually laughs. “I’m not so full of hubris as to think I should have solved that by now. It’s an ancient problem. Those take time to solve. No, it’s—you must know I hold certain, uhm, feelings for Shadowheart.”

Confused, Astarion thinks the wisest option here will be to nod. Still sitting up straight, he keeps his hands in his lap and nods.

Gale looks at him. “You must also know that I hold similar feelings for you.”

Oh, dear. Well, yes, Astarion knows, but they’re not supposed to say these sorts of things out loud. They have a neat little dance going. Astarion is comfortable in that little dance. They can just keep dancing around the inconvenience—except actually, no, they can’t because Astarion got greedy. This is about the other night, gods-dammit—

“My heart is not faithful,” Gale says.

—now Astarion is confused.

“And I’m sorry. I think I’ve mislead you both.”

Astarion feels as if he missed a key part of the conversation. He puts the blanket out in front of himself and holds it up, folds it in half, throws it over his arm and folds it again, giving his face a cover and his hands something to do. He doesn’t want his face to say something—insensitive, but he has no idea what he looks like, so he isn’t sure what exactly his face is doing. “Hold on,” he says, “I’m trying to—” and Astarion drops the half-folded blanket into his lap and gives up trying to disguise how terribly confused he is; he feels rather stupid because clearly he has missed something Gale finds extremely important. “I’m sorry. You’re going to have to explain that again.”

The wizard is visibly distressed, visibly hurt and that smell is back—the sour scent of Gale’s acute distress. Astarion wishes his condition didn’t make such signals so obvious; a sharp sense of smell is an excellent hunting tool, but Astarion isn’t hunting, and he’d prefer to avoid making Gale smell like he’s being hunted, but it seems he cannot.

“Perhaps I’ve explained poorly. Let me try this again,” Gale says, and goes back to stretching his fingers, but a little too forcefully this time. “I hold romantic feelings for you and for Shadowheart. I cannot help my feelings in either case. For that, I’m sorry.”

“My dear wizard,” Astarion says, his words touched with a hint of reproach. “Don’t act like your love is some kind of punishment.”

Gale groans. “Astarion,” he says, eyes squeezed shut. “Please, listen. Even if you returned my affections, I can’t love you properly. My heart is unfaithful and it won’t be satisfied, as much as I wish it otherwise. I think I am incapable of fidelity.”

Oh. Well. This, unfortunately, makes sense. Right. That’s what this is about. Astarion wishes it wasn’t so obvious now: of course Gale is afraid of his own desires—no, afraid of his blatant and obvious need. He loves generously and hungers, of course, for generous amounts of love in return.

And of course Gale won’t admit this if he can help it. The wizard hid the nature of his orb’s hunger for as long as possible early in their travels, and that was a life threatening hunger. Old habits, it seems.

Gale waits, looking wretched.

How is Astarion supposed to approach this? With something Gale would do, probably, since Astarion’s own methods are obviously not suited to Gale’s temperament.

Astarion lifts the blanket out of his lap and puts some of it over Gale’s shoulder. The wizard gives him a look—a rather withering one, actually—but doesn’t stop him, and Astarion shuffles across the bed to get behind Gale and put the rest of the blanket around his broad back.

He rests his face on Gale’s right shoulder blade. Astarion can feel the muscles in Gale’s back relax against his cheek. “Warming the blanket up again?” Gale asks, wry.

Astarion smiles into the blanket. “Exactly. You see right through me.”

They sit like this for a while.

Astarion isn’t and has never been concerned about this idea of “fidelity.” It might be Astarion’s agelessness, it might be his own complicated history with intimacy, it might be related to his elfish ancestry—Corellon isn’t known for his commitment to rigid roles and rules—or it just doesn’t make sense to Astarion that Gale should starve himself of affection. It’s the orb all over again; Gale will explode if he keeps trying to suffocate instead of feed his desires. The city is a veritable feast of sweethearts, Gale just has to ask nicely—why not take a platter? Have one, have two, have ten—it’s not like Gale wouldn’t want to dote tenderly on a legion of souls…and be doted on in turn.

Fidelity isn’t the problem, Gale’s faithfulness is unquestionable, it’s that Gale insists on starving.

“I don’t think a lack of loyalty is the issue, Gale,” Astarion says, voice measured and quiet.

“No, I suppose it’s not. ‘Greedy’ might be a better word for it,” Gale says, and Astarion can hear his voice wither as he speaks.

They could argue about it, Astarion is sure, and imitate that old conversation Gale had with Lae’zel, but doing that is just going to make Gale smell like a cornered animal again. Right now, he smells like lavender and smoked fish, and Astarion prefers him this way.

“I wish I was different,” Gale whispers.

With his face still pressed against Gale’s back, Astarion says, “I don’t.”

“You’re sure about that?” Gale asks, with a slight turn of his neck and a hint of exhaustion in his words. He tips his head back and turns his chin to look down behind his shoulder, and his hair brushes over Astarion’s nose. The ear on this side doesn’t wear an earring, nor are there any orb-related scars on this side of Gale’s neck. “You seemed rather displeased with me last night.”

Oh, he’s insisting on debate. Fine. Astarion sits up and turns his face away. “I was. And I am! Sometimes I wish you’d get angry. So I goaded you. It wasn’t right—I won’t pretend that it was, but—listen, it—it makes me afraid, the way seal yourself up—” Astarion sighs, a heavy one meant to cut off tears before they can form and his voice gets annoyingly thick. He glares back at Gale. “It reminds me of Moonrise.”

Gale turns just enough to look at Astarion out of the corner of his eye. His expression is totally unreadable. “I see”

Astarion shifts uncomfortably. “But I won’t do it again—goad you, I mean.”

“Thank you,” Gale says, simply.

They pointedly don’t look at each other. Astarion fidgets with his nails and remembers he meant to trim them last night. He should find a rougher file—his nails are too tough these days to maintain with the delicate instruments he’s used to using. The consistent feeding has made his nails into proper claws.

“I hope I haven’t made you uncomfortable with my earlier admission.” Gale says, after a while.

Astarion turns. They’re frowning at each other. Gale’s serious.

“No. I mean—” and Astarion forces what he hopes is a playful laugh, willing the mood in the room to shift into something less serious. “Look at me. You’re neither blind or stupid. Congratulations.”

The silent pause and the loaded way Gale continues to look at Astarion tells him that he has failed to lighten the mood. Miserably. When Gale breaks the increasingly unbearable silence, he says, “I wish I could love you properly.”

Astarion is so fed up with this. “I don’t even know what that means, Gale.”

Gale puts his finger to his temples and closes his eyes. Astarion can sense the wizard has already begun to retreat back into whatever protected tower he keeps in his head, that place he goes when there’s a problem to solve or a problem to shut out. Astarion chases Gale through the door of that mental sanctuary with his words because if Gale isn’t going to fight, then he’s going to listen until he can no longer insist he’s a damn villain. That’s Astarion’s role.

“I wish others would love like you do,” Astarion says, not meaning to sound so angry, but he is, and he means it. Gale flinches and becomes smaller. “You’ve witnessed me at my lowest, at my worst—possibly the worst anyone has ever been!—when I was prepared to sacrifice thousands to secure my future.” His voice is rough because he’s fighting down a growl. “You saw the enormous persuasive power Tav had to exercise to keep the blood off my hands.” Astarion rolls his eyes and then closes them as he pinches the bridge of his nose; he can’t believe this is the conversation they’re having. “Now you want to—what, cuddle? With me? As if I’m not a dangerous predator.” Astarion blurts, voice cracking again.

It’s one thing when a stranger wants to cozy up to Astarion because they don’t know what Astarion is; they only know Astarion is pretty and that he can make them feel important for a night. It’s another thing entirely when someone like Gale—who has seen all and the worst of Astarion—wants to do, well, whatever Gale would do. Astarion has no idea what Gale’s idea of romance looks like.

Gale is, at least, listening. The wizard holds very still and Astarion can tell he puts effort into making himself listen because he also looks like he’s in pain when he looks Astarion in the eye.

Astarion sighs—more like forces the air out of his body as if attempting to blow out a bonfire. He can’t get the thickness out of his throat. “There are days,” Astarion hisses through his teeth, “that I’m almost—almost—convinced that the thousands of lifetimes of suffering caused by Cazador could have been prevented by someone like you.”

The wizard’s fingers wrap and unwrap around each other as he wrings his hands and fidgets with his nails in his lap, watching Astarion. “I’m flattered—and troubled, if I’m honest—that you think my love has the destructive power to deal with such evils.” Gale looks at his hands.

He’s so ridiculous. “What do you think I’m still doing here?” Astarion asks. “I’m surrounded by moving water and smelly fish. This isn’t exactly my idea of a paradise location.”

Gale’s mouth flattens into a line. “You’re here because you need help mitigating your sunlight hypersensitivity.”

It’s so much worse than that, and Astarion hasn’t had the stomach to admit it to himself or to Gale. He’d begun to devolve into a creature out there in the world, alone, half-feral and fragile. Astarion hid in caves and ruins during the day—there are too many daylight hours—and he came out at night when most people worth associating with were already asleep. The crowd he’s too familiar with is awake at night: the tavern crawlers—drunk, restless, depressed, debauched; he tries to avoid them. There really aren’t any Gales or Tavs or even Shadowhearts lurking in the shadows he was forced to hide in.

That life was too cold and quiet.

Adventuring and doing favors for others—murderous favors, admittedly—only took him so far. Sucking on the blood of a mangy criminal lost the veneer of luxury it once had. They’d started to taste like rats.

And Astarion had been so very hopeful about his future when he left Baldur’s Gate to find his own path; but he couldn’t properly be with people, not while leading a life like that, and more than once he’d been ambushed in the dark by a perceptive would-be hero. Not even the dark could make him feel safe anymore.

Astarion has thrived only once because he was in the company of others, but the company had been temporary and forced, and it was quick to scatter out of necessity; except Gale, of course, he’d just gone back to his books and left his door open.

Yes, Astarion needs the sun again, and he needs so much more, besides.

The heady rush that freedom from Cazador gave Astarion lasted maybe a year. He’d been happy, but only because the worst of the nightmare ended. Now, he has to contend with the long-lasting problems caused by what Cazador did to him. He once basked in the relief of freedom, but he is still haunted by shadows and the ever-present threat of sunlight and do-gooders.

But there was also still Gale. So, Astarion found the wizard and hid under the archmage’s robes because here it’s safe, not to mention the possibility of relief from the worst of Astarion’s condition. The only reason Astarion hadn’t completely regressed into a bitter beast that fed and killed where he pleased—something that would eventually die to the aspirations of a monster-slayer—was because there’d been an option: he knew Gale, and he knew Gale would take care of him, at least for a little while.

“I mean, yes,” Astarion says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “If a cure is possible, it would be you that figures it out, but I’m not—I’m not convinced that it’s possible. I’m not—” he sighs loudly again to stifle the tears that keep threatening to come up and waste his precious fluids. “I’m not holding my breath.” Astarion avoids looking at Gale, who has begun to produce an entirely new scent Astarion doesn’t know how to interpret—it’s rich like his panic, but it’s not sour, so Astarion doesn’t know what to think of it. It’s not a scent he’s made to understand. “I don’t exactly have plans for after either possibility—the grandest plan I have for my first day in the sun is—” he scoffs “—grocery shopping. I’m not offering to carry anything for you, by the way, I just want to watch. I think it would be funny to see the great archmage, Gale of Waterdeep, fuss over the bruises on an apple—” Astarion tries to laugh but he can’t make it happen. He puts his head in his hands. “I don’t have any plans for after this.”

Gale makes a noise—like a groan, but weaker and sharp—the sound of an animal caught in a snare. “I don’t think I understand.”

Astarion splutters. “Neither do I!” And now he can’t stop himself; here come the tears. He places his fingers at the corners of his eyes to stop them from rolling down his face. They’re cold like the rest of him. “Gale,” he sobs. “You sweet idiot.”

“Oh dear,” Gale says, and he stands. He takes the blanket off his back and wraps it around Astarion’s shoulders. It’s warm; the heat isn’t as intense as it would be if left in the sun, but it’s comforting and it’s Gale’s and Astarion’s cold flesh soaks it up greedily. Gale then launches into the expected apologies: “I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”

“Shut up, Gale,” Astarion snaps, and sniffs, because the tears are still falling. This shouldn’t be allowed, this crying—he’s dead; the downpour is going to dehydrate him and Astarion hasn’t been eating enough. The luxury of tears is for the living.

Astarion wipes the tears from his eyes with fast, fierce flicks of his fingers to avoid the sensation of them rolling down his cheeks, careful of his nails. He hates crying, he’s done so much crying; he’s a weak, pathetic creature that cries too much.

Gale holds a corner of the blanket up. “Here.”

That’s a good idea—Astarion uses the blanket to mop up his face.

Gale, still sitting very close, asks, voice low, “Would you want to stay?”

That makes Astarion inexplicably angry. What an idiot—Gale doesn’t get it. “You should know better than to invite monsters into your home,” he growls.

“You’re not a monster. You’re the strongest man I know,” Gale says with all the conviction of a man who believes in things like justice and the law—a sucker and choice-prey.

He likes Gale too much to let this continue. This is Astarion’s fatal flaw, it seems, getting attached to prey. He was made to consume and be consumed, but he just—keeps choosing to put his teeth away and roll over as if he’ll somehow come out on top. He wants to be more than teeth and nails and dark desires, and he might be, but not by much.

Astarion decides to tell Gale what he has tried very hard to keep from everyone, including himself. It feels wrong to encourage Gale in this fantasy they both keep trying to spin about Astarion’s personhood—the personhood he lost a long time ago.

“I regret not ascending,” Astarion says, firm and with conviction because it’s true, and he waits.

Gale breathes. “I see.”

—being alone again is going to be worse than the dark.

“That makes sense to me,” Gale adds.

Astarion glares at Gale because the last thing Astarion wants is more pity. “Don’t patronize me.”

Gale’s sad eyes don’t look away. “Then help me understand. Why didn’t you ascend?”

Oh, that’s easy and possibly obvious—though perhaps not to Gale, who clearly doesn’t recognize a monster when he sees one. “Because Tav insisted! You’d all have turned on me if I did. She was so convinced I could ‘do better’ than Cazador—but I don’t want to do better,” he says the last word with a sneer.

Astarion turns his head so he doesn’t have to look at Gale, who hasn’t had a single sensible response to any of this. “I want to live. But none of you were going to help me try when I, against all odds, had a solution in my hands. I knew that performing the Rite would have been a monstrous thing to do, and I didn’t care—I still don’t care. But no one was going to choose me over some ‘greater good,’ and I understood that.” He’s going to fucking cry again. “I tried to accept unlife—I really did. I accepted the shadows because I know they’re a part of me now, but the rest of the world can’t accept me like this. For fuck’s sake, it keeps trying to kill me. This isn’t a life. I’m just—existing.”

Gale moves as if he’s going to touch Astarion, but his hand redirects and he makes a point of adjusting some corner of the blanket hanging off Astarion instead. “It was an awful choice—the one you describe, I mean, not the choice between power and people you don’t know, but the choice between the self-sufficiency of power and finding safety in numbers with people who might not…fully understand what you give up to be with them.”

Astarion isn’t going to let Gale play the pure-hearted sympathizer. “You didn’t help me. None of you did.”

“We did not,” Gale agrees. “I did not.” He preoccupies his hands with stretches again. “Does it matter to you why I didn’t? I can’t speak for the others, only myself.”

It—doesn’t. But.

“I think I’d like to know,” Astarion says.

Astarion has all but admitted that if the opportunity to ascend presented itself again—complete with a full platter of other spawn laid out and ready to exchange with the hells, he’d take it. Gale is far too calm about this. Someone should be crying or yelling again, but Astarion is too tired to cry. He feels like a wrung out rag, still damp with the wet of his earlier weakness.

“I say this knowing that the Szarr Palace was all you knew, that the consuming darkness and cruelty of that place was typical of most of your experiences,” Gale says. “For me, however, it was—quite profound. In all my travels, I’ve never gone into a place marked so strikingly by suffering and despair. Every step we took into into the bowels of that palace seized me with such—” Gale breathes, searching for words as he continues to move his hands. “The hopelessness of that place clung to all of us like cobweb. I remain in awe of your spirit. Two hours in that place left me chilled to the bone, I can’t fathom two centuries of it.”

Astarion is not searching for bloody compliments.

Gale continues, however, before Astarion can snap at him. “Especially in my diminished state of power, facing a vampire lord was no small undertaking. But we did it—you did it—and when it was time to make a choice about what to do with all the suffering he’d wrought, you…asked us to go with you deeper into that ruthless darkness he created. You asked us to end the suffering, yours and the suffering of every spawn that bastard ever sired.”

Something academic creeps into Gale’s voice and he gestures at the air as if highlighting each point in his thoughts. “This is how I understand it: if you took the ascension offered by the hells, then the other spawn would be damned, the pain of their hunger replaced by the pain of fiery damnation and they would no longer a threat to others outside of the palace. Their suffering wouldn’t end, but they would not add to the suffering of the world with their insatiable hunger. In exchange, you would walk in the sun under your own power and always be sated. All the suffering within the Szarr palace would be removed from our plane of existence entirely. The cycle of Szarr’s cruelty would end.” The wizard looks at Astarion with sad eyes, and not a trace of anger or conviction lurks in their depths. There is only sadness. “And so much more, besides, would end with it.”

Astarion scoffs. His voice is thin and is colder than he expects it to sound, given the ire rising in his throat. “Nothing worthwhile would have ended,” he says.

Gale just looks at him, eyes still big and intolerably soft. “So you say,” he mutters, and he exhales. “Still, it seems the hells thought otherwise, if Mephistopheles was prepared to grant such incredible power in exchange. But I will concede this: I betrayed you, in a way, and I’m sorry, but I could not do what you asked of me.”

Astarion is not braced for such talk. How very—unexpected. Gale didn’t sing a single note about right and wrong, power and control, or spin some pretty theory about the sanctity of life no one should violate on some privileged principle. It’s just—Gale, afraid of losing something he can’t even name. Astarion was prepared to stiffen himself against a lecture in ethics, not this. He doesn’t know how he feels now.

“I regret we couldn’t meet such a deep well of need,” Gale says, after they’ve been quiet for a while.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Astarion sighs, all possible fight gone out of him, and he adds, bitterly, “most of the other spawn are dead now. It’s just me and a handful of others who survive by lying low. The suffering ended itself—after some bloodshed, of course. They did manage to do quite a lot of killing when we let them go.”

Gale bites his lip. “Yes,” he says, after a pause. “Naturally, they would.” He looks at Astarion again. “I’m under the impression that you’ve told me about your regrets because you want me to think less of you.”

Astarion lifts his chin but doesn’t look directly at Gale. “You should.”

There’s another long pause as something works behind the wizard’s eyes. “An arbiter in ethics now, are you?” Gale asks, and Astarion can hear the stupid smile in his voice even though it doesn’t touch his lips.

Astarion laughs, but it’s really a sob. He wipes the blanket across one eye and then the other because he’s leaking precious fluids again. He looks at Gale, who hasn’t hardened even a little in the face of Astarion’s awful admissions. “Touché.”

Gale pulls his knees up to his chest, hugs his legs, and sinks further back into the mattress. “My opinion of you hasn’t diminished. That admission took courage, actually, and I admire you for it.”

Astarion rolls his eyes. Of course.

“And please stay—if you want to stay,” Gale says. “I would like that very much.”

Astarion should have braced himself for this—this look Gale makes with his big, wet eyes. How is anyone supposed to bear the weight of that look? Astarion certainly can’t. He covers his face again to avoid it.

“You’re serious,” Astarion grumbles.

Gale nods. “Very.”

Astarion whines. “You’re impossible.”

“No more or less than you,” Gale says, dead serious.

Astarion takes a stabilizing breath. “Fine. Then I want to decorate,” Astarion says, with more force than necessary.

“I think you should.”

—because of course.

Astarion straightens his posture up and puts his hands on his knees. His face is dry and he’s going to keep it that way. He aims his eyes at the wall. “I want to decorate everything. This whole tower is dull.”

Gale nods, like this is reasonable. “By all means.”

“And you could stand to own thicker curtains.”

Here, Gale smiles. His posture relaxes, he lets his legs back down over the side of the bed and leans on one hand as he gestures with the other. “And I could enchant them with some magical darkness. It would take time away from our original inquiry into mitigating your sun hypersensitivity, but—”

“I choose the curtains.”

“Then you shall have curtains. I’ll write to Waterdeep’s weaver’s guild tonight,” Gale says. Then, with a serious look, he adds, “And we will continue looking for a way into the sun. I want this for you.”

Ugh, Gale. There’s an awful knot in Astarion’s stomach, his anxiety twisting with the fear of cost. He scowls at the ground and breathes to try and shove the feeling down.

“In light of all this, I have an important question, Astarion,” Gale says.

The twist inside his gut becomes a writhe and Astarion stops breathing.

“Go on,” Astarion mumbles, keeping his face directed at the ground so Gale can’t see whatever it’s probably doing.

Gale hums like he’d rather not ask the question but is working himself up to the task. “Given my earlier admission, are you—would you still—” Gale flicks his hand back and forth in a gesture at the space between them. “Are you still comfortable with the, well, proximity of natural feeding, or should I switch to using a glass?”

“Please,” Astarion says, too fast, and looks back to Gale, “do not use a glass.”

Gale puts up his hands. “Straight from the source, then.”

Astarion appreciates he has not been asked to explain. One sincere admission for the year is enough. There’s no way to know how far Gale’s tolerance for Astarion’s monstrous condition or finicky moral compass goes. He hungers for blood, for life, and to bite—to lock his teeth into something and know it is his.

He tries not to think about it. Brief feedings help stave off the worst of it. But the hunger is always there.

Vampirism is ugly.

“Thank you.” Astarion says, and he looks down at where Gale leans on his hand into the mattress between them. Astarion hesitates for a beat, but then drops his fingers over Gale’s. “You’re a treasure.”

Gale looks down at their hands. His skin is hot under Astarion’s, living flesh against dead. “Can also I ask you something about the other night? After I found you exercising in the yard,” Gale asks, and looks up, having leaned in closer than he had been before.

If this next piece makes Astarion cry again, he’s going to be so irritated. He nods, but also lets the corners of his lips turn down.

At least Gale is amused by whatever Astarion’s face is doing; he smiles a little, looks down again, clears his throat, and with his eyes still on their hands where they’re loosely connected, he asks: “why did you kiss me?”

What a silly question; because he wanted to, obviously. Why else? Though—as Astarion looks at Gale’s downturned expression, who keeps his eyes on their hands as if afraid to look back up into Astarion’s face, he realizes it might not be so obvious. Astarion has a history of trading his body for help, and the wizard knows this.

Fine, it’s a fair question.

This time it wasn’t a trade, it was desire—a hunger, if he’s honest. Astarion decides to make this unbearable for them both, as revenge for all this overwhelming feeling Gale continues to insist on inspiring.

“Because you’re the closest thing I have to a sunrise.”

Gale lets out a long breath and grumbles, “you’re fighting with poetry now, I see. That’s a wicked maneuver.”

Astarion grins and bears his teeth when he does. “And I mean it, which makes it so much worse.”

Gale looks up to meet Astarion’s impish gaze, eyes bright. “You’re a monster.”

The gall of him—Astarion laughs, hard, so utterly taken aback, delighted and annoyed. “I do my best, darling.” He steers the conversation into less certain waters, but he feels appallingly brave with Gale. “But now, because fair is fair, I get to ask you why you reciprocated.”

Gale bites the inside of his cheek and looks over Astarion’s shoulder. “Yes, I suppose that’s fair.”

The pause is long. Astarion doesn’t interrupt or even bother breathing. The silence is heavy. When Gale looks back at Astarion, he says, “Fine. But I’ll show you instead.”

Astarion arches a brow.

Gale fingers pinch the air and he pulls his hands apart. “Close your eyes.”

Astarion trusts Gale, but he glares before closing his eyes, anyway.

There’s a burst of the smell of rosewater in the air, and the room is a little colder, too. Dutifully, Astarion’s eyes remain closed as he lets Gale work his magic. The way Gale mutters the incantations under his breath, the hiss of air between his teeth and the confidence underlying every syllable—the audible closeness of Gale’s mouth makes Astarion feel more vulnerable than not being able to see, and he doesn’t hate it.

“There. Open your eyes.”

Astarion looks at Gale first and takes in the rest of his surroundings one piece at a time. The little light in the corner is gone—and so is the corner. They’re outside, or, rather, it looks like they’re outside. Above them is the sky, covered in a canopy of stars too bright to be shining above Waterdeep’s light-noise.

Astarion puts his hands on the bed as if to check for its realness. It’s there, but it doesn’t feel as real as he’d like. Everything else in the room that wasn’t there before feels far too real.

“Take a moment. We’re still in your room,” Gale says, noticing Astarion’s disorientation.

“There’s a point to this?” Astarion asks, breathing, trying to reclaim some sense of where he is.

Gale does more with his hands and his lips. Grass—it smells like grass, and—more importantly, like the riverside where they’d made camp their first night after the nautiloid crash. The shadows in the room take vague, familiar shapes. There’s a trace of the smokey scent of a hastily made fire, as well as a bright light meant to imitate it. Astarion can smell old, wet wood decomposing on the shore of the river where a fishing boat has been abandoned. The thick stink of springtime forest pollen wafts between all the other smells.

They’d all been strangers back then. He’d also been very afraid, still not sure where he was, how he got there, when he’d be found out as a vampire, and if he’d be safe again at sunrise. But it was also the first time Astarion’s mind had been his own. He became possessed with a fierce, sick kind of hope that made him stupid, and when he ate—properly, for the first time—that is when he’d first been happy.

Both—the old fear and past thrill of possibility—are thick in his chest. Gale takes one of Astarion’s hands and he snares Gale’s fingers in his own before the wizard can change his mind. With his other hand, Gale gestures at the “sky” conjured above their heads.

“There’s a sort of reverent silence at the peak of darkness,” he says, “a moment when you’d almost believe the dawn will never break.”

Astarion is familiar with what the peak of natural darkness feels like: it’s the only time the world is safe for Astarion, especially under a clear sky, surrounded by the warmth and safety of others who see his fangs and think—little of them.

Gale keeps talking. “It cradles eternities: the vast potential of poetry, the timelessness of lovers, and every possible fantasy. It’s in that silence—in that dark stillness—that souls reach for one other.”

Astarion watches Gale speak. Gale watches the stars.

“I feel something like that when I’m with you,” Gale says.

Oh dear. “But why?” Astarion whispers, or whimpers—it’s something in-between.

Gale puts a hand on the back of his own neck. “Part of it, I’m sure, is rooted in our adventures. Nothing brings people together quite like the thrill of danger. You learn very quickly who you can trust and what they’re willing to put aside at a moment’s notice for the sake of others.” He looks at Astarion and he wishes Gale wouldn’t.

“I didn’t like you at first,” Gale says, flatly.

Astarion titters and relaxes. “The feeling was mutual.”

Gale smiles. “I know. You said it often enough.”

And they laugh.

Still smiling, Gale leans in and holds the air in front of him with that grasping gesture he makes when he has something exciting to explain. “I need you to understand—you’re incredible. You seize upon the world with such ferocity, you demand—no, insist—that life give you every ounce of joy you deserve and then more.”

“N-now, hold on—”

Gale gestures for silence with the authority of a lecturer and its unexpectedness makes Astarion shut his mouth. The professor continues: “In the face of impossible circumstances, you chose to live. Your courage and strength are beautiful, Astarion. I want you to understand that, for me, witnessing you live—it meant everything. At a time when I was ready to throw my life away for a chance at forgiveness from a goddess who would sooner forget me, I was changed for the better, and it’s largely because of you. Witnessing you is the sort of thing that makes me want to live. You put the stars to shame.”

Astarion grunts. Gale can’t just call Astarion “beautiful” and call it a day, can he?

Gale looks rather satisfied with himself. “There. I’m not a poet, but I can hold my own in a fight with verse, should the need arise,” he says, and smiles wickedly as he wags a finger at Astarion. “Choose your battles more wisely, friend.”

“Oh, is that what we’re doing? ‘Fighting?’” Astarion asks, laughing weakly. Of course Gale would decide to hit him over the head with sincere and elaborate declarations of admiration. Why did Astarion expect otherwise? Gale thrusts words into Astarion that are going to burn him up from the inside as if he has swallowed the Morninglord’s mace somehow; it’s bright and beautiful and blinding and gods, he wants this.

Gale hums. “I’d call it sparing, maybe. Or dancing. Poetry.” He sighs. “Debate. Theology. Philosophy. They’re all just back-and-forth meetings of the mind or body that act as different venues by which one soul meets another, I think.”

—there, an opening. Astarion finds his opportunity to get back at Gale for this overwhelming show of sentimentality and filter some of the intense light of Gale’s affection. “And sex,” he adds.

Gale clears his throat. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re listing ways souls meet. Sex is one of them.”

Astarion can smell the blood rush into Gale’s face. The wizard’s eyes remain fixed on the illusory stars. “Yes, it can be.”

The wizard is disarmed, and Astarion takes his opening. “Have you only ever had one partner in poetry? Or debate? You strike me as a promiscuous debater.”

Gale makes a low, displeased noise. “I think I see where this is going.”

Astarion grins. “And where is this going?”

“Nowhere I’m ready to go just now,” Gale says, gravely. “And I’m still trying to get my head around some rather weighty ideas Shadowheart handed me last night. I need time to think.”

Fair enough. “Shall we call it a draw, then?” Astarion asks.

It’s clear by the look in his eye that Gale does not want to concede to a “draw.” He breathes as he looks into the sky he conjured above their heads, biting the inside of his mouth. “I can’t believe you’d compare me to a sunrise,” Gale mumbles. “I know exactly what that means to you.”

Astarion looks up, too. The stars are as he remembers them. Gale must have gazed at the canopy over the campsite just as often as he did because this imitation is perfect. “I think I deserve additional points for the efficiency of my move,” Astarion says.

“It was elegant,” Gale admits.

“And true,” Astarion emphasizes, just one more time.

“What are we doing, exactly?” Gale asks, still looking at the stars.

Astarion doesn’t know. “I can only speak for myself,” he says, conscious now of their closeness on the bed. “Like I said, I don’t have plans beyond chasing down the next sunrise. If I get there—I don’t know, I’ll improvise.”

“As you do,” Gale says, smile audible in his voice.

Astarion puts his arms up above his head, rolling his palms out and stretching everything up to the tips of his fingers. “This is all very romantic,” he says. “But what are you doing, exactly, Gale Dekarios?”

“Testing the waters, mostly,” he says, with more confidence that Astarion expected. “When I put that blanket out on my porch this morning, I sat beside it in the sun for a while, thinking. Mind you, I did not attempt to forget last night. That was a nasty accusation—” and Gale takes a moment to steady his voice again. “But anyway. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know how to love mortals.”

When Gale doesn’t add to that thought, and there already seems to be something very wrong with it, Astarion prods Gale’s arm with a finger. “Go on.”

Gale looks at him. The stars are reflected in his eyes. “Do you mind if I talk about my time with Mystra?”

Gods above, finally. “By all means,” Astarion whispers, afraid to say more.

Gale grids off his thoughts with his hands. “Intimacy, in my mind, is a demand, or a promise, loaded with expectations, and it’s—directional.” He points out, away from himself. “To love is to worship, to surrender yourself with no expectation of anything in return. With Mystra, specifically, I became an offering. In that submission, I found incomprehensible ecstasy. It was everything with her. She was everything. So, I gave her everything because it was already hers. She’s—I mean, she’s Mystra. I shouldn’t have asked for more than the honor of servitude.”

Gale’s shoulders rise near his ears, clearly uncomfortable with having admitted to any of this. Astarion holds very still so as not to scare him away from this rare, voluntary show of vulnerability. “It’s when I sought more than what she permits her casters that everything fell apart. When I sought to cross her boundaries and take more—that’s how I got into that whole mess with the orb in the first place. And—” he takes a moment to form these words, closing his eyes as he grabs for them out of the air. “It’s been brought to my attention that this might not be the best model for loving other mortals.”

It sounds like a terrible model, period, but Astarion doesn’t say so; they called a draw earlier and Astarion would hate to see Gale run back into his mental tower. But Astarion has done his fair share of bowing to the whims of others and he can’t fathom why Gale would want to keep doing so—but perhaps it’s different with gods.

Still, Astarion wouldn’t do it, personally. A god might be nicer about it than a vampire lord, but servitude is servitude. And while Astarion got on his back for scraps, it seems Gale got on his back for—nothing. The wizard’s access to magic and his status as Mystra’s Chosen were not dependent on his submission to her love. The affair started well after he’d reached the highest possible threshold of power and status among magic users.

Astarion doesn’t understand.

“You look troubled,” Gale says, quiet.

Right—his face is doing something, probably. He’s should choose his next words carefully. Perhaps, if Astarion steals some of the vocabulary that just fell out of Gale’s own mouth, he might not botch this whole conversation. “Thinking, really—uhm. Gale. Does this mean you’re—oh, what’s the best way to put this—” Astarion takes his turn to search for words out of the air, makes a circle with his hand and looks down at his knee. “Do you mean to study a different ‘model’ of love, then?”

Gale looks taken aback, but in the way he is taken aback by an unexpected line in a dense piece of theory—challenged and pleased to be challenged. He pushes some of his hair behind his ear where it’s already tucked. “I don’t know. That’s an idea.”

The relief is like that following the successful disarming of an explosive trap. Astarion smiles with one side of his mouth. “Care to share your findings as you go about your studies?”

Gale’s cheeks darken. “Of course. I’m nothing if not a responsible scholar.” He draws a hand over his mouth and looks away. “I don’t suppose I could try this again? I’d like to kiss you.”

Astarion is quite done with words. He leans over and closes the short distance between their faces, moves Gale’s chin over a with a light touch of his finger, and presses his lips over Gale’s.

The contact floods Astarion’s chest with warmth: the heat, the wetness, the way Gale’s breath hitches and his lips part immediately for Astarion’s; every prayer Astarion ever uttered, returned to his lips with plain and simple Gale Dekarios. He pushes his fingers up into the wizard’s hair and relishes the warmth of his scalp as he secures Gale’s mouth against his own.

Astarion devours; he doesn’t attempt to navigate the kiss around his fangs and Gale doesn’t avoid them. The closeness of Gale’s body makes Astarion’s teeth express bitter venom at the promise of blood. If Gale can taste the venom, he shows no sign of it.

Astarion can’t recall a time something like this actually felt good, but this feels good—really good—and his head is swept up by it and he loses his bearings. It’s unexpected, the heady rush, too much like drinking from a thick, healthy vein, and it’s his hard-earned discipline that holds him back from attempting to bite.

A small and painfully cold drop of fear forms in his stomach and a part of him feels as though he is falling.

Astarion decides he will ignore it—

Except he doesn’t get an opportunity to try and ignore the fall because Gale tempers Astarion’s roving tongue by closing his mouth and traces Astarion’s lips with a series of small kisses, cooling the fire of Astarion’s advances. The vampire bares his fangs at Gale, lip curled back, annoyed that he’s been denied. Gale kisses the corner of Astarion’s open mouth. His beard prickles. Softly, Gale murmurs next to Astarion’s cheek, “I am very close to overwhelmed.”

Astarion puts his fangs away.

Gale draws his thumb across Astarion’s closed lips. “Thank you.”

Astarion drops his face into Gale’s shirt and inhales deeply the smell of Gale’s ever-present lavender, tinged with the thick musk of the human’s arousal. Gale touches the curls around Astarion’s ear and strokes Astarion’s scalp with a finger as he pushes the hair back—ah, that feels very good.

“Keep doing that with your fingers,” he says into Gale’s shirt.

Gale lifts his hand, pauses, then runs his finger again over Astarion’s ear through his hair. Astarion makes a loud grumbling noise in his throat. The chilly pit of fear has left his system; Astarion didn’t notice when it left, only notices now that it is gone. There’s just Gale’s heat and the rich smell of him.

This is nice. Astarion hasn’t earned an ounce of this comfort, but he is selfish, so he will take it anyway.

Gale stays with Astarion in the crypt that is his room a little while longer; Gale dismisses the illusions and they opt to talk about mundane things—routines, clothing, and Tara’s sillier habits—lingering in each other’s company for the sake of it. Astarion shows Gale the alterations he made to the pants he worked on earlier. Gale mumbles something about liking that particular pair on Astarion.

They lie down when they talk. Gale is still exhausted from the previous night and begins to fall asleep. Astarion is brave and steals a few chaste kisses before sleep pulls the wizard back into oblivion. Astarion then goes and finds that hole he noticed in the blanket earlier and sews it shut before it can get any bigger. The hole is big enough to admit a finger, so Astarion embroiders a five-pointed star over the spot once it’s sewn closed to strengthen that part of the fabric against re-opening; he chooses five because he’s never see a star associated with Mystra have five points on it. There are enough of those around the tower already.

Astarion then slides himself next to Gale, trying to get close enough to feel the wizard’s heat but not, well, overstay his welcome, so to speak. But then Gale rolls over Astarion’s arm and he is pinned. Ah, well. So Astarion does his best to avoid disturbing Gale’s rest by lying incredibly still—that’s easy because he’s dead—and he watches Gale breathe.

Humans are heavy sleepers. It’s endearing, but also a little loud, the way they breathe when they rest. Still, Astarion doesn’t move. He doesn’t have much of a circulation to speak of, so his arm is only somewhat uncomfortable with Gale on top of it. The wizard curls in his sleep toward Astarion and the vampire makes sure the blanket covers as much of Gale as possible. To trance like this would be difficult, and Astarion doesn’t care to relive old memories right now: he’s more interested in this moment.

Astarion has no idea what they’re doing, but this—this is nice.

There is also, unfortunately, the hunger. It sours the moment.

Gale is a heavy sleeper, warm and well-fed—the perfect prize for a vampire. It would be so easy to steal a bite. Of course, Astarion won’t obey the desire, but he can’t ignore it. The sound of Gale’s heart beating in his chest is loud in Astarion’s sharpened ears. He listens, bitterly aware of the fragility of the body that tethers Gale to the plane of existence he shares with Astarion. When he’d been infected with that parasite, walking in the sun had been a temporary luxury with the ever-present threat of a horrible catch; this, too, is a luxury Astarion sees ending far, far too soon.

Astarion sits with the hunger. He observes the beast as it begs to be satiated and claws in Gale’s direction. His ki wavers, but the energy inherent to his body is stronger after several years of discipline. Gale is not in danger, but Astarion is miserable.

Astarion decides to breathe. It helps.

Gale’s finger comes up to trace Astarion’s jaw—he’s woken up, but only just, and he looks at Astarion like the vampire is a pretty a figment in his dreams. “Do you mind,” he says, mumbling through his tiredness, “if I continue to offer you something to eat? I assume it’s obvious by now that I’ve grown fond of the, eh, intimacy of it, as it were.”

Astarion flicks the very tip of Gale’s nose with a finger. “You’re an odd sort.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Keep offering,” Astarion whispers, and nestles in closer so that he’s enclosed in Gale’s arms. He pushes Gale’s hair back behind his ear, exposing the light, gossamer-thin scar that runs from his chest, up his neck, to just under his left eye. “I don’t like to ask.”

Gale tips back his chin. Astarion prepares the wizard’s neck for the shock of his teeth by covering it in soft kisses. The hair on the back of Gale’s neck rises. Astarion bites, and the soft whimper that comes out of Gale’s mouth sends Astarion into an almost painful full-bodied shudder that he can’t suppress. He fastens Gale flush against himself, thinking too late about his claws digging into Gale’s back.

Afraid, Astarion initiates the fight in himself to pull out before he does something he doesn’t mean to, but Gale pushes his fingers through Astarion’s hair and holds the vampire fast against his neck and continues to make those awful, delicious noises. It settles something in Astarion, this invitation, and his ki drones a note that keeps his mind clear enough to know when to stop.

It’s fine. This is safe. But—only just.

Notes:

Note: Corellon Larethian is the Creator of Elves and the primary elven (Seldarine) diety.

I also wrote a "psalm" to the Morninglord for kicks, spun directly off a Psalm I once loved very much out of the Old Testament/the Hebrew Bible.

Chapter 9: Nature's blessings

Summary:

Shadowheart stops to have a cottagecore moment and also think about Halsin. When Gale shows up, they talk about feelings and the gods.

Notes:

Thank you anecjotes for beta-reading and helping me wrangle this chapter in while my life goes upside-down crazy.

“Halsin, you must have accumulated considerable wisdom on matters of the heart in your long life. Anything you'd like to pass on to a strapping, love-struck wizard such as myself? | Dispensing advice on matters of the heart would be like swapping boots—what suits me may be a poor fit for you. | Ah. Well, there's no faulting that logic. At least you didn't tell me to 'be myself.’ | Oh no, perish the thought. That can be outright cruel advice to offer in certain cases.” - Gale and Halsin, if the player is romancing Gale

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Shadowheart is tired and irritable when she wakes up. She gets dressed and does her hair. Her mood does not improve. When she goes into the kitchen to find something to drink, Gale is not there. In fact, the kitchen appears entirely undisturbed since she saw it last.

Her mood isn’t improved, but it shifts: she is less irritated and more concerned. The dishes are where she left them to dry the previous night and the counter doesn’t show evidence of having been used since she wiped it down. One of the cabinets is ajar, a sign someone has gone looking for snacks, but there’s no evidence that Gale took time to cook himself breakfast, and it’s close to his lunchtime.

Gale is a creature of routine. A spotless kitchen strikes Shadowheart as ominous. She puts the dishes away and finds coffee. It’s another hour before she has the initiative to make herself something to eat, also.

There remains no sign of Gale.

After everything, Shadowheart imagines he might want space and, under simpler circumstances, Shadowheart would rather not disturb his silence. But after the encounter she had with that divine-something on the road last night, she can’t justify the risk of leaving Gale alone.

She goes to his chambers and sees that Gale’s bed is made. Tara is asleep on the comforter, her whiskers twitching in her sleep where she lies in the sun. Signs that the wizard ate a rather random assortment of food sit nearby on a chair: a bowl, a knife, a tin, some leftover apple and bread crust—this is all very unlike Gale.

The library is as she recalls seeing it last—a strategic mess of books and notes, and the two studies she has access to are vacant. In the back of her mind, Shadowheart thinks Gale could stand to dust some of these places more often; books attract history as well as keep it, and it’s going to make her sneeze.

There is no Gale in the yard that wraps around the tower. The only creatures visible here are some fat bumble bees wrestling with little white flowers.

Gale is not in the wine cellar. At least there’s that.

Astarion’s room is her next best guess, but Shadowheart hesitates. She’s flush from jogging up and down and around the tower and while she isn’t ready to panic yet, if Gale isn’t with Astarion, then she might start to panic—or is it a teaching day? She realizes she doesn’t know. Perhaps she’ll have to walk to the Blackstaff Academy to find Gale…wherever that is in Waterdeep. And there’s more to the tower, surely, she just doesn’t know where its additional doors and staircases would be hidden. Wizards insist that everything be a puzzle, including their own home.

Gods, nothing here is simple.

Shadowheart grabs the handle on the door to Astarion’s room and makes sure it creates a noise the elf sensitive ears will hear even if he’s in trance, and she waits. There’s no responding noise from inside, so she opens the door.

She pops her head in and sees Astarion on the bed, his face turned toward her, a finger crossed over his lips and a mean look in his eye—a threat. Gale is asleep on top of Astarion’s other arm, which explains the weird twist Astarion makes to look in her direction from where he lies. She can only really see the rise and fall of Gale’s shoulder under a blanket, but she recognizes his ever-present lavender scent lingering in the room.

Very good. His immediate safety is accounted for and he seems to have made up with Astarion. Feeling lighter even if she is full of new questions, Shadowheart closes the door.

It’s a good afternoon for silence. A portion of the moon is visible in the clear daytime sky, so she goes into the gardens to conduct her meditations and prayer. The ghostly presence of the moon during the day is a thin comfort, but a comfort nonetheless. Shadowheart opts to do walking meditations and circles the tower. As her heart bends toward the coming and going tides of Selûne’s presence, she keeps her eyes open and keeps watch. The heat that comes off the sun above her head feels particularly intense.

The previous night left her exhausted and her eyes are heavy. There’s very little in the way of a paradigm with which Shadowheart can approach the problems of last night, so she is—somewhat at a loss. It’s not that she hasn’t been in opposition to a god before, but those had been nefarious beings. Lathander is—he’s one of the good ones. She thinks. There are good gods, and he’s one of them.

That’s—how it goes.

And she is convinced there’s divinity at play here. That it is Lathander’s divinity that’s at play is only her best guess, but the more she sits on the timing of the events, the more convinced Shadowheart is by her own intuition. Where Shar is absence, Lathander is presence, and they both embody the extreme form of their domains that makes an unmistakable impression on the world. Shadowheart has worked alongside Lathanderians before, she has felt the Morninglord’s light by proxy, and even in the thin droplets of power granted to the god’s followers, it is—a lot.

Possible conflict with the divine isn’t the only problem before Shadowheart, either. Something between herself and Gale has changed, too, and Shadowheart isn’t sure how she is supposed to feel about it or what she should do.

The easy choice, in some ways, would be to return to the path she has been assigned. These uncomfortable changes and appearances began the moment she came to Waterdeep and began to entertain thoughts of wandering off her assigned path. Then she wandered off her path with Callahan, of all people, a total stranger. And now she doesn’t know where she’s supposed to place her next step.

Perhaps Shadowheart should return to the House of the Moon, apologize for letting her heart stray, and finally pick up her priestly calling. She looks up, crosses her arms, and contemplates the craters that blemish the quarter-moon’s surface.

The idea doesn’t feel quite right. There’s something missing. It’s too—flat. Too simple, like Shar’s black mirror. It also feels like a poorly timed retreat. Looking up and down the length of Gale’s tower, it occurs to Shadowheart that there is a lot here she stands to lose if she takes the obvious path of faith. And it doesn’t feel like she owes Selûne an apology. If anyone is owed an apology, it’s Gale, not the gods.

Hm.

Not sure what to do with that thought, Shadowheart tries to walk off the disturbance rippling across her soul. She is partially successful.

In doing circles around the tower, Shadowheart takes in the details of the yard. The space carved out for Astarion’s exercise routines is on the west-side of the tower where the shade of the building can protect him from the sunrise if he’s ever caught outside past his celestially mandated curfew. One of the posts set up for hitting is broken, splinters of it scattered across the ground.

On the eastern side, there is a small vegetable garden at the base of the tower. Its air and soil hum with energy, obviously enchanted in some way or another. Typical Gale.

It’s not well tended, however. Some of the plants are overgrown and crowding each other, and there are robust and healthy intruders growing alongside the vegetables. There’s one weed in particular that sticks out further than the rest and it tickles Shadowheart’s ankle when she walks past. On one of her rotations, Shadowheart stops, stoops, and pulls it out of the ground. When she does, a particular kind of relief washes through her. She thinks she might as well pull out the weed’s neighbor, and the neighbor next to that—

This dirty work helps more than the walking did. On her hands and knees, with her braid dangling over her shoulder, Shadowheart tends to the garden bed. The roots of the invading plants are strong and a little woody; it’s been a while since Gale attended to this garden, and no wonder: he’s a highly sought out scholar and prone to giving his time away at the drop of a hat. Nature took over here.

Hand deep in the dirt, nose full of the smell of broken roots and upturned earth, Shadowheart smiles, a little, as she recalls Halsin’s rather rueful and complicated feelings about agriculture. It’s nice, she thinks, to have memories to recall. Though, right now she could do without thinking of Halsin. She directs her attention elsewhere.

Some of the produce is ready to be picked. Shadowheart begins to pull up root vegetables, break off leafy greens, and twist fruits off their stems: beets, carrots, kale, lettuces, eggplants and tomatoes—there’s a lot ready for picking, and the pile becomes large. Shadowheart removes the outer layer of her clerical garments and piles the food into the robe to carry inside.

Shadowheart loosens and smooths out some of the soil she disturbed by weeding and she creates water with a small spell to apologize to the plants for the necessary upheaval.

It seems Shar took from Shadowheart any memories of gardening, but clearly Shadowheart still remembers how to garden. This happens sometimes, remembering how to do something only because she has already decided to do it. There had been a lot of that on the road to Baldur’s Gate: remembering how to scratch a dog behind the ears, how to wash blood out of her clothes, how to sharpen a knife, how to cook over an open fire. She’d also realized she knew how to tell jokes and stories, how to hug and kiss, and how to make love.

—no, absolutely not. She does not want to think about Halsin right now—does not want to think about another unresolved problem.

Shadowheart picks up the spoils rescued from Gale’s garden, walks back around the tower and tries instead to think of what she might do with the vegetables when she gets inside. It occurs to Shadowheart that perhaps, at least while she stays, she can be the one to tend to the yard. The enchantments on the soil will only go so far and Gale is busy tending to so much else.

She pauses to look up at a speck of movement flickering in the corner of her vision.

A pigeon flies in large, wide circles around the tower. Shadowheart stops to examine it more closely. Her elven eyes are sharp enough to notice the bird is distressed and that there is something attached to its leg.

Shadowheart walks away from the tower to stand underneath the pigeon’s path around the tower, her arms still burdened with a robe full of produce. The bird changes course and dives toward her. It lands at her feet and Shadowheart crouches, puts down her garden spoils, and removes the tiny tube attached to the pigeon’s leg. The bird twitches its wings and coos agitatedly at her. Shadowheart puts a finger out toward it and the pigeon lets her rub the feathers on the crown of its head, seemingly less distressed under the shadow of her hand.

She pulls out from the impossibly vast space within the enchanted tube two letters larger than her palm. Once Shadowheart reattaches the messenger bird’s tube of holding, the creature launches back into the air and flies fast and far away from the tower.

Looking down at the letters, Shadowheart belatedly recalls that Tara’s favorite game is pigeon. That might explain the bird’s distress. The tressym is nowhere to be seen, but her scent is likely everywhere. Poor bird. Shadowheart puts the letters into her clerical robes-turned-vegetable sack and goes inside, to the kitchen, and unloads her harvest.

Shadowheart doesn’t bother to read the letters’ addressees until the vegetables are washed and sorted along the counter. When she glances over the envelopes, expecting to see Gale’s name, she’s alarmed to see both envelopes bear her name instead.

Gods, more to think about. Of course.

Shadowheart decides to wash her face before dealing with whatever news these letters bring. Just what she needs—another development.

Her nose is pink, she notices, when she spots herself in the bathroom mirror, from being out too long in the sun. It makes the scar on her cheek more obvious.

The late afternoon light in the library is gentle, its intensity filtered somewhat by the rippled glass windows. Shadowheart takes a seat on the couch to open the letters. The first is from the House of the Moon.

Their high priestess assumes that she misremembered or misinformed Shadowheart about what day she was expected at the temple and the letter is deeply apologetic. A new date is set for two days from now, and the priestess assures Shadowheart that the date is written down this time for both of their records.

The second letter was forwarded from the House of the Moon to Gale’s tower because the author doesn’t know Shadowheart’s current address.

It’s from Callahan.

The paper weighs heavily in Shadowheart’s hands and she turns it down onto her leg before reading more than the author’s name. The events of last night fill up the space in her mind again, pressing up against memories of her time at Halsin’s side. Her head is so full and it’s deeply unpleasant.

Shadowheart hasn’t even been in Waterdeep a whole week and there are already so many variables to consider before making a single move in any direction. She is used to having a single goal, a guiding imperative that directs her decisions, but now there are many options and many possible endings where not one is obviously better than the others. It’s disquieting. Taking a deep breath, Shadowheart turns the letter back over and notes the fierce flutter it inspires in her chest.

It’s a simple letter, nothing ominous, of course, and Shadowheart doesn’t know why she expected it to be. It’s not like Callahan would be aware of anything Lathander or the god’s other servants are up to; the letter is a simple reminder that Callahan looks forward to “—the special pleasure of your brilliant company—” again very soon.

Shadowheart feels the same and she’s not sure what to do with that information—it would be reckless to allow any of Lathander’s servants near Astarion now, even once-removed. This is also another reason to consider removing herself from Gale’s tower entirely and find her way back to Selûne’s temple.

Groaning, Shadowheart puts both letters aside on the couch and covers her face with her hands. She misses the simplicity of her old life. She doesn’t miss Shar’s embrace, but she misses the idea of it. Shadowheart had a purpose back then that aligned with her desires, as artificial as they were.

There is no one to lean on for advice, either, because she can’t exactly consult with Selûne’s faithful about her doubts regarding her holy calling or the divine threat against her friend who is also a vampire. At least when she was on the road with the others, there was always someone to talk to, often Tav or Halsin—usually Halsin, toward the end. He was much older than the rest of them and able to host so much more space for Shadowheart’s struggles than the others.

She and Halsin were also often conveniently alone together, which made such conversations with Halsin easier to start. She did a lot of crying back then; she would like to do some of that now, actually, but her eyes won’t provide the tears. Her chest just aches.

Shadowheart could write to Halsin for advice. She’s done it before, but—well, it’s been a while. They went their separate ways to follow the callings of their faith. Halsin declared himself honor-bound to help regrow the Reithwin settlement around Moonrise as it recovered from Shar’s curse. The fight against the Absolute had also made many children into orphans and the eternally-youthful spirit of the land surrounding Reithwin craved playmates; the settlement is young, both in spirit and its people. Halsin is its keeper and father as a servant of Silvanus. He happily gave up his place among other druids to tell bedtime stories.

Similarly, Shadowheart followed Isobel and Dame Aylin in the Moonmaiden’s light. This took her north, away from Halsin, and she has since been a servant to various Selûnite churches and temples as her skills are requested. Among Selûne’s faithful, she is a well-known healer as well as a favorite living hero. She is asked to recount the tale of the Absolute’s downfall as often as she is asked to cast healing spells. When it’s children that ask, she indulges them.

She and Halsin exchanged letters since parting ways at Baldur’s Gate, their past intimacy quickly whittled down to dry, paper exchanges, and it is always Shadowheart who sends a letter first. When she finds an excuse to write, to ask for his wisdom or his opinion, she writes. As a result, he hears much about her travels, but she knows little of what he does now. He mentions bits and pieces of his new life in his replies, but the notes are short and sometimes apologetic—he wrote once that the details of his new life would likely bore her.

Their exchanges grew fewer and far between over time. It has been many months since Shadowheart wrote last: it was a short letter she sent with a simple ask for advice—if he thought it might be presumptuous to seek out lodging with Gale when she eventually made it to Waterdeep. She received a short reply in return, a reminder that Gale often expressed his desire for company in roundabout ways by offering dinner, lodging, and other service within his wizardly skillset.

The exchange had been warm, but—brief and impersonal.

Shadowheart doesn’t resent his ways; Halsin settles where the wind takes him, but she is—a little sour about how easily he seems to float through life. Perhaps she is unjustly sour. He is much like the Selûnites in that he follows the tides of change and the cycles of nature without pause or question. Shadowheart agrees that it’s not wise to resist change, but—

Halsin is wise, but a bit stupid, Shadowheart decides. He should write more, given their history; they shared so many hopes and anxieties, as well as their beds and bodies, under too many moonlit nights to justify this wordless petering out. Their lives are disentangled and Shadowheart is left at a loss.

Shadowheart is stewing in her resentment when her stomach churns with hunger. Her festering thoughts come to a halt. She will decide if it’s worth writing to Halsin for advice after she has something to eat. The sunlight in the library is orange, reminding her that now is not the best time to make important decisions. She should use some of the vegetables from Gale’s yard to make something.

The wizard of the tower must still be in Astarion’s room because the kitchen remains spotless. Shadowheart’s cooking will never rival Gale’s, but she’s learned a few tricks in recent years that make for decent enough meals; she might as well cook something for them both. Her favorite culinary trick—and one she’s mastered in recent years—is the art of removing the intolerable bitterness from green vegetables. She sets out to blanch some of the greens.

It takes a while to find exactly the knives she needs and she can’t fathom why Gale would store the cutting boards where he does. Shadowheart also makes a point to not look for garlic, even though it would help combat the bitterness of the greens. There might not be any in this kitchen, anyway.

As she cuts vegetables, Shadowheart broods. She won’t lie—she’s deeply upset with Halsin and has avoided thinking about him for this exact reason. Honestly, it’s probably foolish of her to think that the ancient elf would spare her as much thought as she does for him. He filled a great void in her heart, once, but she is by contrast a mere spot on his vast experience. Sure, he made many proclamations to the contrary, declaring she was the first in over a hundred years to spark such joy in his heart, but those words have not matched their communications since parting ways.

In thinking about Halsin, Shadowheart remembers she has tucked somewhere among her things an amulet he gave to her on the road, one she doesn’t wear anymore because looking at it makes her chest ache. She pauses, knife suspended above a half-sliced eggplant. The enchantment on the amulet allows any wearer to channel a lesser restoration spell through the mercy of the god of nature.

Shadowheart grunts and turns where she stands to stir around the vegetables she’s cooking in an iron pan, swatting at the steam and annoyed by her forgetfulness. Even now, her memories go up like smoke if she’s not careful, but holding onto them feels like trying to clutch a gallon of water in her fists. She finishes slicing the eggplant and swipes it off the cutting board into the pan. She should have thought of this before: she will give the amulet to Gale. Wizards can’t channel healing magic and Shadowheart won’t necessarily be around to heal him every time Astarion feels peckish.

Shadowheart hears Gale shuffle into the kitchen behind her before she sees him. She glances over her shoulder as she fetches plates for their dinner. He looks as if he’s still waking up: his hair is a mess around his ears and shoulders and he looks a little pale. “Evening,” Gale mutters, blinking and he stretches his wrists out in front of him.

It takes a moment for Shadowheart to recognize that the dark smudges on his face are blood; dried, and likely his. There’s some on his neck, too. Shadowheart turns, rolls her eyes where he can’t see, and finds a rag. She wets it and approaches Gale. “There’s something on your face.”

He touches his lips with his fingers and looks at his nails where some of the blood has flaked off. “Oh, dear. Right.”

Shadowheart hands him the rag and gestures at his neck with her other hand. “There, too.”

Embarrassed, he pulls the rag quickly and roughly over the lower half of his face and around his neck.

“I’m almost done making us dinner,” Shadowheart adds. “Go, sit.”

The look he gives her is mixed, something between gratitude and regret, but he might be too tired to protest, as he goes into the dining room to do as he’s told. He slouches in his seat and rubs his eyes.

Shadowheart finds bread and wine to compliment the dinner. Esmeltar Red goes well with what she made, if she recalls correctly—she hopes she does. It would be nice to remember something so straightforwardly without it being attached to another, more complicated memory.

Gale mumbles “thank you” perhaps three too many times when she puts the food, a glass, and the wine down in front of him. Shadowheart fetches a pitcher of water and two more glasses and goes so far as to pour some for Gale and shove it toward him with the authority of a nurse who is not suggesting, but demanding, that her patient drink. He does so, looking over the glass up at her with those big, trusting eyes of his, framed by tired lines. Shadowheart is supremely annoyed with how that wet look makes her heart flip.

Shadowheart puts her own food down in front of the seat beside Gale’s and tells him she will return in a moment because she needs to fetch something from upstairs.

Digging through her bags, Shadowheart finds the amulet. It’s slightly heavier than she remembers it being. Her heart flips yet again when she turns it over in her hands.

The men she loves are incredibly annoying.

She takes her seat beside Gale, who has already started to eat, and she places the amulet on the table between them. “This is for you and Astarion.”

Gale tips his head and wipes his fingers on a napkin before picking up the artifact. He twists it around in the air, examining it closely, his brow knit. The amulet is unassuming, made of a tarnished bronze with a dull green stone in the center. On the other side is engraved a holy symbol for Silvanus—a small waterfall in a forest.

“Is this the one Halsin gave you?”

“Yes, but I don’t use it. It can channel a bit of divinity into a lesser restoration spell about twice a day. I think you should have it.”

Gale frowns at the amulet and pushes some of his bed-messed hair behind his ear. “It feels wrong to take this from you.”

“Gale,” Shadowheart says, a warning in her voice.

He sighs and holds up his free hand, closing his eyes. “I understand.” Gale places the amulet back down on the table gingerly. “You won’t always be around to cast the spell,” he says, voice grave.

Shadowheart grabs her fork and focuses on her food before she can say something she’ll regret. She can hear it in his words: Gale thinks the amulet is some kind of sign she’s going to leave. This is infuriating—these men are infuriating. She wants to put them both—Halsin and Gale—into a jar and shake them.

“This is quite good, by the way,” Gale says, voice light again when he makes the quick change in subject. “There’s more green in here than I’m brave enough to attempt with my own cooking. You should show me how exactly you did this.” He covers his mouth with the back of his hand and adds in a whisper, “Between you and me, I miss garlic.”

Shadowheart holds back a surprised laugh, just in case Astarion can hear them. These idiots—she’s annoyed that it’s difficult to stay mad at these idiots. Forgetting her anger, but not its source, she begins to relax.

They talk about cooking. Shadowheart explains her process, as well as the many trials and errors she made along the way in developing one that satisfied her sensitive pallet. Gale is a gratifying student, attentive and full of questions. There’s a hint of that same glimmer in his eyes that often appears when he waxes poetic about the Weave. He’s precious, and Shadowheart is irritated because it’s difficult to be upset with him when he’s this precious.

Difficult—but not impossible. Now that she is fed and her emotions are a little easier to manage, she speaks to the unspoken grief still lingering in Gale’s face.

Shadowheart puts her hands together, fingers laced, and drops them onto her lap. “I want to explicitly state that I gave you the necklace as a practical measure. It’s not a sign that I intend to leave.”

Gale’s face wears several emotions at once: his brow furrows, the side of his mouth quirks, he looks away and touches his chest where his heart rests under his scars. “Are my thoughts so obvious?”

How should she phrase this? Shadowheart takes a moment to consider her words. “I don’t think your heart can hide or be hidden.”

Gale turns unexpectedly red. “I see.”

“I appreciate that about you, you know,” Shadowheart adds, in case it helps.

“Right,” Gale says, still red. “Well—there’s something I wanted to say—mind you, I thought of this before dinner—I understand if you would prefer to take up a room with the Selûnites in light of all the, ah, drama I seem to have wrapped my tower in, as of late.”

Shadowheart thinks again about a jar and shaking him in it. Instead, she puts out a hand and looks at him with what she hopes isn’t too withering of a look, but she can only help how much vinegar shows up in her face at times like these. “Do you want me to leave, Gale?”

“Well, no—”

“Then I would like to stay,” she interrupts, before he can go off again about how uncomfortable and inconvenient it must be to bear his less-than-perfect presence.

Gale swallows. “I would like that.”

Shadowheart nods and continues to clarify her position. “I would like to eventually find a space of my own if I continue to live in Waterdeep, but I’m not in a hurry. I like it here.”

“Wait, ‘if’ you live in Waterdeep?” Gale asks, frowning. “I thought you accepted a position with the temple.”

Damn. She’s just let that tressym out of the bag, and if she doesn’t explain, Gale might wonder if he did something else to drive her away. Plus, well, she trusts Gale enough to mention in now.

Shadowheart leans back in her seat and flounders with her words. “Well. I haven’t gone through the ceremony yet. They’re not—it’s not—I’m not entirely sure I want to accept the position. I might. I probably will.”

“But?” Gale asks, eyes big and maddeningly vulnerable.

Shadowheart sighs, loud and aggressive. “It’s just so much, to be a priestess. One step closer to the gods and ten steps further away from the rest of the world. I’m exhausted. I’d much rather be here drinking tea while you cook breakfast.”

Gale is pink in the face again. “Ah. I see.” His voice also gets a little loud, as it does when he’s uncomfortable and pretending that he’s not. “I should put this on,” he mutters, and picks up the amulet of Silvanus as he stands. Shadowheart takes their dishes off the table and notices he doesn’t make noisy protests when she cleans up this time.

Gale is still fumbling with the clasp of the amulet when Shadowheart walks back into the dining room. She insists on helping. Sweeping Gale’s hair aside, she stands behind him and when she does she catches traces of Astarion’s usual perfume. Her lip quirks up when she recognizes the smell. At least those two made up after whatever happened last night. But now she has questions.

She also notes the puncture marks on Gale’s neck. Shadowheart wonders about Gale’s existing stock of healing potions and salves and thinks she might want to locate it to check how much is available, and also to see if there are signs Gale dips into the stock at all. The bite isn’t much of anything, but if Gale is regularly being drained, some more thought out preparation in the interest of his health might be in order.

“Be mindful of the holy symbol,” Shadowheart says. “Astarion’s vampirism doesn’t allow him to touch it safely.”

Gale runs a finger over the amulet once it’s secured. “Noted.” He presses his hand down on the amulet and murmurs a simple plea into the air in the language of the Weave, and Silvanus’ blessing washes through him. A little color returns to his cheeks.

“Better?” Shadowheart asks, wry.

Gale stretches out his arms, fingers laced together as he stretches those, too. “Yes, much, actually. Thank you—for the excellent meal and the timely enchantment.” He runs his hands through his hair, tidying himself but also, more importantly, Shadowheart thinks, he does it to give his hands something to do. There’s a deep line in Gale’s brow and Shadowheart can sense he is trying to work himself up into saying something. It’s rare that Gale has to work himself up to speak—typically, he has the opposite problem—so it must be important. She waits.

Shadowheart’s patient silence pays off. Gale’s words are halting and unsteady, but delivered with seriousness.

“Shadowheart. I—well. Not at this moment, but at some point, I would like to return to, er, this,” Gale says, gesturing at the space between where they stand. “‘Us,’ I mean. If that’s alright?” He reddens again and grabs at his chest, his fingers fumbling over the amulet. He tucks it into his shirt. “I’m not sure yet what it is Astarion and I are doing.”

That answers one of her questions: Gale intends to talk about their relationship, rather than dismiss its future possibilities.

The fluttering in Shadowheart’s chest is cause both by a spike of anxiety and an optimistic rush and it sets her heart racing. She keeps her voice even, however. “I would like that. Though, take your time. There are other attachments I also need to figure out.”

“Halsin?” Gale asks, cautious.

“Among others,” she admits, thinking of Callahan.

Gale exhales like he has just put something heavy down. “I see.”

“I should say something here, I think,” Shadowheart sighs. She wants to be careful with her words. She doesn’t know how Gale will respond to this next part and she’s still haunted by the sight of him crying in the corner of his closet the previous night. It had been difficult to witness and—Shadowheart can admit this to herself now—she feels somewhat responsible. “When it comes to matters of the heart, my convictions are not unlike Halsin’s,” —she brings the druid up because he is her only point of reference, she realizes— “in that I’m happy to find love and pleasure wherever it finds me in return. That said, I don’t want to suggest there’s anything wrong with your desire to keep your love life focused on a single union. Love is complicated enough when it’s just with one,” she says, and laughs, a little sadly.

Complicated, indeed. She’s going to be upset with Halsin for a while, she realizes, resigned to it.

Continuing, Shadowheart adds: “I’ve already said that I’m not upset with the generosity of your feelings, but I will understand if you desire something more ’old fashioned,’ as you put it, with someone else. What suits my heart isn’t necessarily going to suit yours.”

“And if it did?” Gale blurts, surprising them both. They sort of look at each other, awkward, and Shadowheart doesn’t know what either of them are supposed to say now. She isn’t confident they should have that conversation just now. But then Gale grumbles and waves his hand as if he can dismiss what he just said out of their minds. “Sorry. I don’t—there’s no complete thought behind that outburst. Continue.”

Shadowheart relaxes. That’s fine. She isn’t going to ask him to commit to anything. She will be optimistic about future conversations regarding their mutual affection. Still, she should be firm about certain convictions.

“I remain partial toward Halsin,” Shadowheart says, leaving out the rest of what that relationship may or may not look like. Halsin isn’t the point, it’s that her heart admits multiple occupants at once.

Gale nods, his expression sober.

“And others,” Shadowheart adds, thinking again about Callahan, and she is annoyed that doing so brings heat to her face. “I don’t expect that to change. I don’t plan to change it.”

Gale looks at his hands.

Shadowheart shifts her weight from one foot to the other. She looks at the ground. Gale is wearing slippers.

“I should have said something more explicit about my multiple attachments before,” she admits. Halsin had extended Shadowheart the courtesy of a conversation about his attachments before he ever touched her—she should have imitated his approach in this, she realizes, belatedly.

…she should also mention it to Callahan.

“It would have helped,” Gale says, voice small.

“I’m sorry,” she says, finally.

Gale looks like he wants to shrug the apology off as if it’s too heavy. He clears his throat. “Thank you,” he sighs, like he’s about to choke on it. “Truly.” He clears his throat again.

“And I’m not going to ask you to explain to me your desires this second. I won’t assume you know them well, either. I just wanted to tell you how I intend to navigate mine as I figure myself out.”

Gale makes a rueful chuckle. “That’s good because I—I don’t know what I want, Shadowheart.” He continues to wring his hands and continues to look at them. “But I know that I appreciate you being here, as well as your patience.”

Before Shadowheart can return the sentiment out loud, Gale speaks up in that loud voice that betrays his discomfort. “Would you like to join me in my study while I work on strengthening the wards? There is the rather pressing issue of the divine intervention at our doorstep, as it were, and I would—like the company.”

What an unusually selfish request. Delighted, Shadowheart smiles and nods. “Of course.” And she has an idea for how to occupy herself while Gale does his work—she has a potentially important letter to write. “I assume you have paper there?”

He laughs. “Of course! What do you take me for?”

Gale’s upper study, hidden by a wall that’s not actually a wall, is a perfectly round room that appears to take up the whole width of the tower. It’s packed to full with cluttered desks, over-full bookshelves, countless books, tables with runes scrawled or scratched into their surface, mysterious objects of various shapes, sizes and material, and everywhere there is parchment and paper—really, there is too much paper. There’s a bottle of ink on the ground under one of the over-crowded tables and the ink that spilled out on the tile is long dry, the bottle dusty and forgotten.

The walls glitter with lines of spell work.

What can be seen of the floor is a mosaic. The white tiles embedded among the many more dark blue ones make up the holy symbol for Mystra: seven stars and the river that flows between them. The widest part of the river starts at the door and it narrows as it winds across the floor. It ends where Gale sits at the largest desk on the opposite end of the room. He places shiny cuffs on his wrists and enchantment runes light up across the metal as he does, then he bends and pulls up his pant legs, just enough to put similar cuffs on his ankles.

Shadowheart turns her face back up to look at the spell work above her head. There are innumerable spots of light suspended in the air and they feel both vast and far away. They twinkle. It’s like stargazing, and she could gaze for hours.

The ceiling is high, and the walls are covered in iridescent, silvery lines that shimmer like spider silk between the spots of light. The intricate shapes and patterns they make look a little like city street maps or star charts. They emit a slight hum that she can feel in her teeth; it’s barely noticeable, and Shadowheart’s elfish ancestry might be why she notices it at all. The slight, natural tug toward magic in her bones resonates with the tapestry Gale has woven in and around the room.

Mastering magic, the sort of power gained through study, not faith, takes even an elf the majority of their lifetime. One does not have to be Mystra’s faithful to access her power—you just have to understand her. The power is available to all—well, in theory, anyway—you have to be sharp to get at it. But how can anyone study magic and orientate so much of themselves around the Weave without falling a little in love? Gale, one of magic’s mayfly-users, a human who can’t expect to last more than a hundred years without intervention, lives and breathes the deepest mysteries Mystra permits his mortal mind.

It’s easy, Shadowheart thinks, to forget that Gale is a magical marvel. He’s powerful beyond her comprehension. Yet, when she thinks of Gale, she first thinks of good food, his undying affinity for lavender, and how warm his smile makes her feel. Shadowheart has witnessed Gale devastate the battlefield with fire, has been personally wrapped in its warmth as it scorched their foes to cinder as it also left her untouched when she stood in the heart of its hellish tempest—save the light kiss of its lethal potential just above her skin; when the wizard speaks, his enemies burn.

Gale stands and places a foot in the air. His heel stays positioned where it’s placed above the ground, and then he ascends an invisible staircase up into the room and does so with impossible speed, his hands and fingers outstretched before him. As he moves, so do the silvery lines that decorate the wall. Tendrils of spell work extend toward him and reach out into the air above Shadowheart’s head as the universe spreads open for Gale. The wizard hums an arhythmic tune as he reaches into the Weave and adjusts its threading.

There’s something practiced and knowing, like the fluidity of a dancer or an experienced orchestral conductor, the way Gale’s body plunges into the Weave. His mouth parts its fibers and his hands thrust into the depths of the arcane with precision and intent. Gale’s mind—his whole body—is alive. He’s like this on the battlefield. It’s familiar to Shadowheart. There’s an undeniable fierceness to Gale’s relationship with magic. The air smells like rosewater and ozone—like luxury and raw potential.

Wizards are routinely teased as well as admired for their cerebral engagement with magic; it’s nothing like how magic is wielded by other classes of casters, such as clerics, bards or sorcerers. Clerics appeal to the gods for access to the Weave’s potential, bards tease it out with their song, and sorcerers are themselves nodes of concentrated magic made flesh with little care for its curators. Unlike other casters, wizards must know the Weave with a studied, mental intimacy to enact their will upon the world. When thinking about wizards, people often think about their books, pens, robes, and bad backs caused by years of study.

But there is something physical, too, that wizards must do to access Mystra’s power. They must know how to part, pull, and mend its fibers if they are to string up the universe in their will. Wizards must know the where and why of the Weave and then pull on its threads with surgeon-like precision. All casters must embody some song and dance; in this, wizards are no different.

The Weave responds brilliantly to Gale, and how could it not? Watching, Shadowheart knows it must love him. Though, it’s odd, watching Gale work outside the heat of danger: no hurry, all intention. Witnessing the care and confidence with which he coaxes magic into the world with his whispers and practiced hands feels almost like an intrusion.

Shadowheart should—find something else to do. She’s gawking.

“I’m stealing some of this paper,” Shadowheart calls out. Gale makes an affirmative noise without taking his eyes or hands off his work.

Shadowheart steps across the tiled floor to find a desk with a chair not burdened with too many books. She puts the small stack of literature aside, slaps the dust off her hands, and sits. It takes a moment, but she finds a pen, ink, and unmarked paper.

The whiteness of the paper is daunting. Where does she even begin? Already, she wants to start with something rude. The food only took the ravenous edge off her irritation. In her travels since parting ways with Halsin, Shadowheart never stopped long enough to sit with her evolving feelings concerning the druid, but now that she’s here, resting in Gale’s tower long enough to notice her feelings, she’s sick with them.

As she is trying to find words, she looks up, and watches Gale for a little while longer as she waits for inspiration to come. Gale’s hair falls over one side of his face as he tilts his head and he flicks it back with an irritated brush of his hand that doesn’t quite do the job, so he does it again.

Gale should tie his hair back. It would look good on him.

But—Halsin. Shadowheart looks back down and frowns at the desk. She isn’t sure she even has a right to be angry. She runs her fingers over the purity of the empty page and tries to walk her mind back from the ledge of her unruly emotions.

Halsin is responsible for—a lot. His life has been steered for hundreds of years by calling after calling: right now, he rebuilds Reithwin and raises many of the children left behind by the war against the Absolute; before that, his calling was the war itself where he fought at Shadowheart’s side. Before that, he sought to remove the curse surrounding Moonrise. And before that, he assumed leadership of the Emerald Grove at the end of another holy war against Shar’s faithful—

Shadowheart is not on this list of of endless greater callings.

Halsin believes desire should flourish wherever it finds purchase and grow wherever it is inclined, ground permitting. Shadowheart likes this idea very much. It suits her spirit, which chafes at the idea of turning down the possibility of memorable experiences. She doesn’t want to make firm-nosed decisions that refuse to take into consideration the constancy of change. It seems unwise to fight her desires when she already struggles to know them.

It’s bitterly ironic that Halsin is also the one who vanished the ground out from underneath Shadowheart’s nascent desires, evaporating like a ghost and fading from her life—though Shadowheart herself floated from one goddess to another, the roots of her own desire thin and shallow because they never had the time to deepen.

Shadowheart never did ask Halsin if she could come with him to Reithwin, but he never asked if she would come, either. Now Shadowheart has to wonder if Halsin’s relationship to desire is what he thinks it is, or—if she herself thinks enough about the friction between her desires and her own callings.

Setting aside the paper and pen again, she decides not to write to Halsin—not right now. More meditation might be in order before she commits to the next move she makes in this relationship. Shadowheart promises to herself that, at the very least, she will not let it peter out like a used candle. If it needs to change, she will be intentional and deliberate in the way she guides that change.

Shadowheart leans back in her seat to look up at Gale. He stands mid-air amid a web of light: he threads it together, he plies it apart, his face glows with the magic and the promise of possibility. He attempts to create wards that would thwart a god.

Typical Gale.

He bends the universe to create a space where Astarion will be fed, comfortable, and safe. It still strikes Shadowheart as odd, the sheer effort he puts into his idea of “being a good host,” but it’s clear Gale likes this—he likes building the nest where others will find their roost. He wants company, though he’s not very good at asking for it. Gale tries instead very hard to entice people to stay—he’s doing it now, floating in the air above Shadowheart and casting brilliant webs.

At the moment, however, Gale appears to be caught up in a problem that he struggles to find traction in. Gale frowns at the threads floating between his long fingers, thinking. The pause goes on for several minutes. Shadowheart watches, admiring him, and he pays her no mind, too engrossed in his project. Then he huffs and puts it all away, the affordances of his spell work retreating back onto the walls as he dismisses them with an impatient outcast of his arms. “Bugger this,” he swears.

When Gale lands on the ground with feather-light steps, he removes the cuffs off his wrists and ankles. “You’ve been frowning at a blank sheet of paper for a while, I see. My condolences. I know the feeling.”

“I tried to write to Halsin,” Shadowheart admits. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Oh?” Gale asks, his brow lifting. He steps away to put the cuffs back into the drawer from where he’d retrieved them—a gesture that feels absurdly at odds the mess he’s made of the rest of the study.

Shadowheart sighs. “We stopped talking—rather abruptly, I’d say—when we took up our respective callings. We write, of course, but not about anything substantial.”

Gale returns to sit in a chair by her side. She taps the blank paper with a finger.

“I have to figure out what it is I want, I think, before I write.”

Gale smiles a little sadly, but there’s love in his eyes. “That’s wise of you. I like that you take such deliberate time to think. I admire that about you.” Gale’s expression becomes serious and he leans back in his chair. “If you don’t mind my asking: is there a reason that is it a question of ‘what’ you want and not ‘who’ you want? It feels like you’re implying that the answers to each won’t necessarily be the same thing.”

Oh, dear. The answer to that comes down to her fear of losing herself again—it always does. “While the question of ‘who’ is important,” she says, cautious, aware that Gale watches her closely, his big, brown eyes only curious. He is unlikely to judge anything that comes out of her mouth, but being witnessed is unnerving, especially after a life of trying to avoid being witnessed by anyone, including herself. “But I try not to make it the first question I ask. If I lose myself in ‘who’—in other people, then I risk losing sight of myself and forget to ask ‘what’ I want or ‘why’ I want it. What I want and why I want it—well, these are still new questions for me. Once, I used to think of Shar and only Shar. She was the ‘who,’ the ‘what,’ and the ‘why.’ She was everything. After Shar, there wasn’t—honestly, there still isn’t—much of me, so I’m trying to guard what little of myself is left.”

Gale makes a small noise, like he’s thinking, and he leans forward.

“If anyone else besides myself comes first in my thinking,” Shadowheart continues, “ then all of my desire and purpose might follow after them, and I’m afraid I would lose myself again if I do that. I know that neither you or Halsin would ask me to give myself so over so completely, but—I might do it anyway, if I’m not careful.”

“Is that why you’re not sure you will accept the role of priestess?” Gale asks. “Because that is a good point. Service to a god at that level is, I suppose, demanding to the point of self-effacement.”

Shadowheart frowns at him.

Gale puts out his palms and sits up straight in his seat. “It seems I’ve struck a nerve. Apologies.”

He has struck a nerve and she can’t help the venom in her voice when she says, “I was talking about how I’m trying to approach love and romance, not service to the gods.”

Gale’s lips twitch like he’s trying not to say what quickly becomes obvious to Shadowheart, who immediately relaxes and groans because she is embarrassed and her anger withers as quickly as it had sprung up. “Right.”

Mystra.

The wizard is forgiving, and his grin says so. “Perhaps I am the more extreme example of what it looks like when those are the same conversation—devotion to mortals versus devotion to the gods.”

Shadowheart kicks softly one of the legs of Gale’s chair, annoyed. “No, you’re right.” Of course he’s right. “I did just put romance on the same spectrum of devotion as serving the gods, after all.”

Gale hums. “Be wary, anyway, of anything I have to say about either subject. I’ve proven to be something of an extremist in both cases. And—before you make another one of those faces at me, please—if I’m honest, I not sure that I know what love looks like, not after—” he sighs and gestures at the air. “It’s different with the gods. At this point, I don’t even know what I want—or need, frankly.”

Shadowheart continues to look at him sourly, then sniffs and rubs her face with her hands. If only that weren’t so true for the both of them. What is love to someone who has already once given everything up to the gods?

Still, she is annoyed by the implication that her allegiance to Selûne can be so easily compared to their past devotion to Shar or Mystra. And Gale’s comment lingers in the air, suggesting that Shadowheart’s approach makes a special and unjustified exception for Selûne, and Gale’s attempt to turn the conversation onto his own failings is also irritating.

Shadowheart doesn’t let the comment pass.

“I want to say it is different with Selûne,” Shadowheart says, crossing her arms and tapping her foot on the ground where one of Mystra’s stars is represented in the floor’s tile work. Shadowheart isn’t sure if she’s about to rescue herself or dig the hole deeper. “The demands of the other gods are different than the demands Selûne makes of her faithful.”

“Are they really?” Gale asks, and he looks a little too pleased by this turn in the conversation. Shadowheart seems to have nudged the part of Gale’s mind that’s always poised to engage in ideas for their own sake. How annoying. He’s no doubt going to irritate her further with some kind of retort at some point, too. Though he is at least less likely to self-flagellate when he’s locked in debate that doesn’t include himself as its subject.

“The gods aren’t whole,” Shadowheart says, and Gale tilts his head, more of his academic side showing up in his eyes. “But they expect us to make them whole. When we don’t—because we can’t—they blame us for their incompleteness. Devotion to the gods is fraught because they would take everything if we let them. And they often do. Shar is just an obvious example.”

“What a thing to say,” Gale whispers, cautious but not displeased. He pushes stray hair from his face.

Emboldened, Shadowheart continues, and at the same time she removes one of the pins and fastens from her braid. “You and I both know that all it takes is one mistake—just the one—and our lives are ruined by the same god to whom we’ve given everything. Be it Netherese magic, broken oaths, a simple change in our priorities—the moment we don’t neatly fit into their portfolio, our lives are ruined. Why? Because they take our changeability and fallibility as personal slights. And I’m not sure they can help it—as you said before, it’s a madhouse out there in Elysium.”

Gale starts laughing. “You’re dangerous,” he says, and laughs again, a little less restrained than before, and from Gale such a noise is a little disconcerting. “You belong in an academy, not a temple, I’m almost certain.”

Shadowheart scrunches her nose at him because the suggestion is absurd. She also passes the pin and fasten to Gale. “You should tie some of your hair back.”

Gale takes and scrutinizes the pin and fasten. As he examines them, he says, gentle and cautious: “But, tell me, faithful Selûnite, why is it that your goddess is the exception? There’s something worryingly familiar about this conversation we’re having.” There is true concern under his words. He gathers up the offending locks of hair by his face and pulls them back, and he fumbles with the pin behind his head.

The question is the one she set him up to ask, but it’s still irritating to hear it out loud. It’s irritating because she’s been in the theological trenches with it so much already: the theology among Selûnites demands a great deal of ink because, among the gods, Selûne is the only one that wears her incomplete nature on her breast so openly. She is incomplete and unwholesome—full only on the love and light of the life that honors her, no matter her phase. Selûne lost her sister and other half, Shar, in the cosmic fight that broke out over their differences, and that loss defines them both. The shared wound became Shar’s entire domain; Selûne is resigned to it.

But Gale isn’t like the Selûnites or other faithful in that he’s going to have a personal theological bone to pick with her over this—he’s driven by curiosity before anything else. Gale honors Mystra, as every wizard should, but he is not among her devoted clerics. Wizards, unlike Mystra’s clergy, don’t pray for their power; they fuss with the boundaries of the Weave through their own understanding, and they reach as far as Mystra will allow and then just a little further still. They push at her limits—which means they know she has them.

Shadowheart doesn’t mind continuing this conversation with Gale.

“It’s different because Selûne’s domain encompasses change itself,” she says. “If I ever change my priorities, I don’t have to worry about retribution, not from her.”

Gale hums again. “Interesting. Though, I’d be less worried about Selûne’s wrath if you ever dwelled in an excess of change. I’d be more worried about your personal health. And you did say that even if your paramour never asked too much of you, you’re in danger of giving too much anyway, should you neglect to arrange your properties to protect yourself.”

Shadowheart, her arms still crossed, kicks the leg of Gale’s chair again.

“I am agreeing with you, I hope you’ve noticed!” Gale says, grinning, laughing again. How infuriating—he’s terribly cute and Shadowheart is terribly fond.

Yes, Gale has agreed with everything Shadowheart said and in doing so he exposed big holes in her thinking. Now she’s going to have to patch them up.

“I hope you heard yourself just now,” Shadowheart says, repeatedly kicking the leg of Gale’s chair, not looking at him because then she’ll smile. She has lost this little debate, of course, so she’s going to be obnoxious in retaliation.

Gale pushes her foot away with his own, and she resists. Their feet fight for control of the space between them and they both poorly stifle giggles. “The irony of this conversation is not lost on me,” Gale grunts, and he finds the leverage he needs to shove Shadowheart’s foot back. She lets him, pulls back her leg so that there’s no resistance to push against, and the force behind Gale’s leg goes out too fast, too quickly, and he slips down his seat with an “oof!”

Shadowheart sniggers. Gale inelegantly slides the rest of the way off his seat and stands, smoothing out his robes with a huff. Looking at his hair, half of it crudely pinned back in a bun, Shadowheart decides she was right: he looks dashing with it pulled back.

“Such childishness,” Gale mutters, and he flicks at hair that would be in his face but isn’t there. “Speaking of gods, we should come up with a plan of action for a somewhat more pressing matter. I don’t want to rely solely on these wards moving forward, as impressive as they are. I’ll go find Astarion. I don’t think he knows where the door to this space is hidden.”

Shadowheart stands when Gale stands. “He can’t come into this space,” she says, and gestures with a wide sweep of her arm at the floor. Gale looks down. He doesn’t understand.

“The holy symbol,” Shadowheart adds.

Understanding sets in. “Ah. Right.” Gale raises a hand. “These stars have always been part of my personal horizon. It didn’t occur to me.” Gale whispers a few choice words and his fingers dance across the invisible threads of the Weave as he casts. The floor shudders, and every white tile that makes up the holy symbol of Mystra wriggles out from between the darker tiles where they’re set. The clicking and clattering of the ceramic tiles is loud and echos off the walls. Gale rolls his wrists and the displaced tiles tumble together into a pile at the center of the room. The dust of the old and disturbed mortar floats in the air as a grey haze in an already very disorganized room. “I’ve wanted to retile the floor, anyway.”

Shadowheart regards the mess. “I suppose you’ll do it?” she asks, doubtful.

“I did the tile in here myself, actually, thank you,” Gale retorts, his words a little heated, but there is still the sense of play in his tone. “Magic isn’t all these hands can do.”

They walk down the steps that take them to the library. Astarion isn’t there. Gale lights the lamps along the walls, with magic, of course. “I’ll go find him,” he says, turning away.

Shadowheart catches him very gently by the arm. Gale stops and looks first at her hand, then into her face. “Yes?”

“Do you mind if I hug you?” She asks.

There he goes again, turning very pink. He utters a very small, “no—I mean—no, I don’t mind, I just—sure.”

She initiates a gentle hug that doesn’t assume much in return. It’s Gale that tightens his arms around her and presses her firmly into the thick fabric of his robes. Shadowheart sighs deeply. He’s warm and easy to melt into, even if he’s a bit boney everywhere. Her heart pounds fiercely in her chest.

“Being here with you is, honestly, the closest thing I have to coming home,” she mumbles, “—if you don’t mind me being this bold and saying so.”

Gale grumbles rather unintelligibly. She assumes he’s red in the face again. Shadowheart knows that she is, anyway. They don’t look at each other when the hug dissolves. Gale leaves to find Astarion.

In the library, Shadowheart looks briefly over the shelves and the literature scattered on the table. This space is tidier than the study upstairs, but it’s still a small nexus of controlled chaos. She looks at a stack of blank paper on the small writing desk in the corner. She considers it for a moment, then sits.

 

Halsin—

I hope you and yours are well. I’ve settled down in Waterdeep’s Sea Ward. I’m glad that you taught me to swim. I’m staying in Gale’s tower, for now, but I hope to find my own home very soon. I expect a priestess’ income will allow it, though I’m warned the market here is rather bad.

I hope Reithwin flourishes. Everything does under your hands.

—Shadowheart

 

There. Something simple without any request for help or wisdom might be the way to go. Shadowheart is thinking of him and she would like him to know where she lives now, and this letter will tell him as much.

Shadowheart folds up the short note, finds an envelope in the desk drawer, and puts Halsin’s name and “Reithwin, Sword Coast” on the front. She holds it out in front of her, contemplating. Still feeling inspired, she grabs the pen again and writes a note to Callahan: I think of you often. I hope your business finishes in haste so we might create memories again soon.

She folds this up, too. As she does, Tara jumps onto the writing desk and slinks under Shadowheart’s hands to demand pets. Shadowheart obliges the tressym, smiling. When Tara sits, she sniffs the note.

“I don’t suppose you’d take these two items to a courier for me?” Shadowheart asks.

Tara flaps her wings as if irritated by the mere suggestion she can be asked to run errands, but then she bends to take the notes in her teeth.

“Thank you,” Shadowheart says, and grins as Tara clamps her sharp incisors into the paper. The tressym glides off the desk and lands in the hallway. The sound of Astarion and Gale bickering over something echos through the doorway, and they appear in the library only after Tara is gone.

“I don’t care where these theoretical skulls come from,” Gale says, “I just don’t want the dining room to look like I’m about to host Strahd von Zarovich.”

Astarion does a poor job of looking offended. “But it’s my culture, darling.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being serious,” Gale mutters, as he walks toward the couch, hands behind his back and Astarion at his coattails.

Astarion raises his voice into that high register it always hits right before he’s about to laugh at his own jest. “I’m dead serious!” he says, and he cackles.

Gale groans.

They’re cute, but…Shadowheart won’t forget to ask Gale again about finding a realtor when the time comes.

Notes:

I expect to update this piece about once a month.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of The Dawn Cataclysm