Chapter Text
“…and Ruathlek, the language of illusionists, was said to be created by Leira, the Lady of Mists. Most accounts mark Ruathlek as being descended from Netherese, although whether it has any merit as a translator for the dead language is still up for debate by scholars. The destruction of primary sources from Netheril following the collapse of the empire further complicates that matter of translation.”
Gale stood at the front of a fairly sizable lecture hall, with elegant wood-paneled walls and rows of desks sloping upward. The chamber could’ve easily sat at least fifty, but only eight students filled the space. They were spaced apart across the room, each in their own world as they half-listened to today’s lecture. Only one sat in the front row, furiously scribbling notes into a leather-bound book.
“The use of Ruathlek as an illusionist’s language comes from Leira developing it alongside the illusionists of Nimbral,” he kept lecturing, pacing back and forth across the stage. In his hand was a dusty tome he’d borrowed from the Blackstaff, and he held it out towards his small audience. “But if you’ve done the reading—and I’ll be charitable enough to assume you did—you knew that already. Now: Who wants to take a gander at this Nimbrian illusionist’s textbook?”
He wasn’t surprised when nobody moved, the class averting their gazes to look anywhere but at him, but he was a bit disappointed nonetheless. If only they had the same fervor for history that they had for the practical application of their studies, he lamented. Gale was preparing to awkwardly move on when the human woman at the front of the class raised her hand. Her name was Lucia, and she’d proven herself to be his hardest-working pupil, even if not gifted with the raw talent for magic that her peers used to glide through their classes. Gesturing for her to come to the front of the class, Gale noticed a few other students taking notice, their eyes brightening when just moments before they’d been glazed over in boredom.
Lucia approached the podium with swift, cutting purpose, taking the Ruathlek textbook from him without a second thought. She pushed locks of dark hair from her face, adjusting her glasses.
“Paragraph four of the bookmarked page, if you would,” Gale directed, “Read the passage aloud, and then translate it.”
Nodding, she began to methodically speak the Ruathlek words on the page. Her voice came with a confident clarity he wasn’t used to hearing from her, which brought him some pride. This was his favorite part of any class, when he began to get a sense of a student’s particular strengths. When she’d finished reading, she closed the book, snapping shut the clasp on the front cover and handing it back to Gale.
She cleared her throat. “It’s steps for crafting a believable Major Image.” Lucia was meticulous as she described each step she’d just read a minute prior. Her grasp of the language was strong, and though he corrected a few pronunciation errors, he found himself rather impressed. The other students attending the lecture appeared to share a fraction of his growing enthusiasm, a few of them nodding passively. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed Lucia, stepping back to the lectern.
“Would anyone else like to read?” Gale offered. A few others raised their hands, enough to take up the rest of the class period. While he had another half hour’s worth of lecture planned, he found that it was best to discard the meandering tendencies of his speeches in favor of hands-on learning where he could. It was plain for him to see that most of the others hadn’t put much thought into linguistics, making careless errors they would likely mock in any other context, but he appreciated them for trying. When one student was brave enough to speak first, the others would follow suit, like ducks in a row.
After class, the apprentices filed out of the chamber, save for Lucia. She lingered briefly, steps slowed by the quiet contemplation he’d come to recognize from her. He’d taught long enough to know when someone wanted something of him.
“Lucia?” he called to her, “Did you need something?”
She paused, fidgeting with the emblem of Mystra around her neck, before nodding and heading his way. “Your Ruathlek textbook. Are there any spare copies that you know of?”
“You might try the Font of Knowledge—they’ve almost definitely got a copy somewhere,” he answered, “The House of Wonder is also likely to have a copy, since the Mystran priests there specialize in the arcane.”
He had a vague memory of reading a Ruathlek textbook at the temple to Mystra years ago, when he’d been a mischievous young apprentice at Blackstaff. It had been in a mostly futile attempt impress a dashing illusionist he’d developed a thoughtless crush on. Gale never did make a move, too busy in worried ruminations to try, but the memory amused him now.
Dipping her head in thanks, Lucia smiled. “Thank you, I’ll try the House of Wonder. My parents both work there as scribes, so it should be no issue.”
“You’re very welcome,” he replied.
After Lucia left, he sighed, sitting down at his ornate work desk. Gale closed his eyes, resting in the tranquil silence of the empty chamber. Although it wasn’t usually his preferred method of leisure, a nap sounded divine right now, and–
The second sleep crossed his mind, a sharp burst of pain flared at his temple. White light flooded his vision, bringing with it a high-pitched humming that echoed in his ears. Gale screwed his eyes tightly shut, covering his eyes with shaking hands. It didn’t work; his body did not respond to his nerves.
And as swiftly as it had arrived, the headache abated. Gale gasped, staring down at his shaking hands. He was lying on his side, his chair toppled over next to him.
“What in the–“ Rushing to stand, he hastily replaced the chair in its proper position. His limbs buzzed with frantic nervous energy. A knock on the door hurled him back to reality. “Come in!”
He was surprised to see the Blackstaff herself entering the lecture hall. As usual, she was clad in her typical black-and-gold robes and carried her towering staff in hand. Her face betrayed no hint of hearing any commotion, and Gale breathed a sigh of relief.
“Dekarios,” she greeted, waving a hand in his direction.
Gale nodded a brief salutation, wishing his racing heart and mind would still. “Vajra. Did you need something?”
She laughed. “No; nothing serious, that is. The rest of the professors are going to the Pampered Traveler for drinks. They wanted to know if you were coming along, and I was passing through.”
He couldn’t help but be flattered at the invitation, a giddy excitement fluttering in his chest. Much of Blackstaff’s staff or professors and senior apprentices were people he’d looked up to since his youth, and the wonderment of working with them had yet to grow old.
“I might be able to take this evening off,” he said, “Provided there’s no work for me to do here.”
“We’ll be happy to have you, if that’s the case.” With that, Vajra left, leaving Gale alone in the classroom.
For a moment, he hesitated, raising his hand to his forehead. He tenderly massaged his forehead, finding no trace of the pain that had gripped it. Strange; how quickly this had come to pass. Grabbing his leather book-bag from his desk, he finally left the room, starting down the stone hallway.
As per their usual daily routine, Tara joined him on his route down the tower’s central staircase. Her whiskers twitched as he recounted the day, and she occasionally cut in with her own—often scathing—commentary. Upon hearing him mention the sudden headache, she shook her head.
“You’re just going to go drink? Mr. Dekarios, this can’t possibly be good for you!”
“Oh, you would say that, Tara,” he complained.
“Yes, I would,” Tara snipped.
By the time they’d reached the bottom of the stairs, the sun had begun to set on the marble buildings of Waterdeep’s Castle Ward. White and tan buildings glowed with golden-orange light like they were graced by the same glow that shone on Elysium. The Tears of Selûne were barely visible in the dusky twilight, looming in front of the half-moon hanging in the sky. The streets of Waterdeep did not match the serenity offered by the evening sky’s canvas, bustling with nobles and wealthy merchants hawking their wares. Their walk to the Pampered Traveler was a short distance, but took substantially longer than the half-mile should’ve on account of the swell of foot traffic.
The front of the tavern and inn was akin to that of the rest of the well-off establishments in the Castle Ward, with its imposing stone brick foundation and dignified wood detailing. Arched windows revealed rowdy customers within, a few of whom he recognized to be his colleagues. All were dressed in at least some degree of finery, and he sheepishly wondered if he should’ve changed out of his comparatively bland teaching robes. Tara flew off to the rooftops to search for her own dinner. A set of chimes on the door jingled as he entered.
“Oi, Gale!” One of the senior apprentices, an older halfling man called Willem, beckoned him over to the bar. They didn’t know each other well, however Willem’s gregarious nature made up for their lack of familiarity.
He joined him, sitting down at the tall three-legged stool next to him. “Hello, and good evening to you.”
“Happy to see you finally joining us, mate,” he paused, shouting over to the bartender as they walked by, “One Ashaba Dusk over ‘ere!”
“I live to serve,” Gale joked, grinning, “And I’m not late at all. Some of us have teaching to do, Willem.”
He grumbled a reply. “Don’t remind me. Ever since Vajra decided that sendin’ me out to Suzail for field work was a good idea, I’m hardly in Waterdeep.”
The bartender set down Gale’s bottle with a loud thunk against the wooden countertop. He took a sip, savoring the taste despite the drink’s flatness.
“Two tendays ago, I was actually in Baldur’s Gate,” Willem mentioned.
Gale leaned forward in his seat, his interest piqued. It had been some time since he’d last been to the Gate, and he’d begun to miss it—flawed and harsh as it was compared to the City of Splendors. Wyll and Astarion both wrote to him with updates whenever they were in the city, for of all his unlikely companions they frequented the city most often. Two months ago, Shadowheart had made a pilgrimage to the House of the Moon, and she’d excitedly told him about the rebuilding efforts she’d witnessed. He felt like the odd one out, not having been to the city in quite a while, though he supposed Lae’zel must also share his plight.
“I found a poster with your face on it,” he said, chuckling.
Gale stared at him, dumbfounded. Willem’s smile made no indication of irony.
“A poster,” he repeated, “With my face on it.”
“Aye. Found it in the gutter while hunting down a bunch of grease mephits. It was in a pile of wanted posters. You and a couple others.”
He held back a laugh of his own. “Ah, that. See, if you’d specified that it was a wanted poster, I wouldn’t have been so surprised—that’s old news to me.”
Gortash’s Flaming Fist had put a bounty on their heads after the destruction of the Steel Watch, and drawn up some truly inspired wanted posters to match. Gale had been sketched with a terrible rendition of his own facial hair, like he’d shaved in the dark. When Tara had seen the posters, she’d remarked that’s what his beard always looked like. He was unwilling to hear more on the matter.
“I thought you’d get a kick out of it,” Willem said, “Though the drawing looked nothin’ like you.”
“I’ll toast to that.”
Willem pulled a few other senior apprentices into their conversation after that, neither of whom he knew. It wasn’t until he was met directly with how few mages he knew that he was fully met with the effects of his time in solitude. Time away from Waterdeep had compounded this effect. It didn’t end up mattering, because these apprentices already knew about him, enough that he quickly grew embarrassed. For the next hour, he ended up retreating to a corner of the bar, making more conversation in his head than with the rest of the patrons. People-watching was engaging enough for him.
Gale began to feel his eyes growing heavy again, the dim corner of the bar and the lull of laughter conducive to a drunken sleep. Resting his head on his hand, he nodded off.
It would not be for long. Sleep greeted him for but a moment before the pain struck again, just behind his eyelids. Burning and straining against the barriers of his mind, the headache—though to call it that seemed a minimization of how awful this felt—returned in full force. His eyes shot back open, the flash of psychic pain instantly beginning to recede, echoes of the sensation fading already. Before the ache could leave him entirely, an image flashed into his mind, more vivid than any daydream he’d ever had:
A stone floor, grooves cut into the surface filling with blood. The stonework was carved into some kind of symbol—what that was, he could not tell. A hand, bony beneath dark cloth gloves, was outstretched towards something unseen in the distance. The image was gone was soon as it had burned into his retinas, leaving him back in the bar. Despite being well-lit with a flickering chandelier and sconces set into the walls, it seemed dull by comparison.
His body reacted before his mind could process what had occurred. Gale forced himself from his seat, bruising his thigh on the edge of his table as he tried to regain his bearings. The Pampered Traveler was by no means a particularly loud place, but at the moment it overwhelmed his tenses just enough that he was fighting the urge to leave them and there. No, that wouldn’t do; he still had some sense of decorum. Gale paid his tab and left with only a quick half-wave to Willem and the others.
“Tara!” he called, his voice echoing across the street, “Where are– oh.”
Tara stood at his feet, her watery yellow eyes staring at him expectantly. “Finally, Mr. Dekarios. I assumed you’d be in there forever, but I see you’ve come to your senses.”
Sighing, Gale leaned against the tavern’s outer wall. The pain was gone, but his head was still pounding, the cobblestone street a blur before his tired eyes. “I thought it best to take an early night. Plenty to do tomorrow.”
It was a white lie, and Tara evidently saw through it, pointing out, “You look terrible—your face is gray, for gods’ sake!”
“Utter nonsense,” he brushed her off, “It’s not– shut up! You’ve got a godsdamned pigeon feather sticking out of your mouth, so I’m not about to let you criticize my appearance.”
“You really must tell me what is going on, Mr. Dekarios,” Tara chastised him, but not before spitting the gray feather from her mouth. “You can’t be getting ill now, can you?”
An appeal to his overachievement and ambition, and one that would work.
“I had another headache,” he admitted, “It was just as brief as the last, but incredibly painful. I think it’s best if I turn in early for the night.”
“How very peculiar indeed,” Tara mused, “It sounds like nothing I’ve heard of.”
When he was a teenager studying at Blackstaff Academy, Gale had begun to develop stress headaches by the second semester. They became so debilitating that he’d started secretly spending his pocket change on healing potions so his mother wouldn’t find out. This and those felt nothing alike, in both duration and type of pain.
The walk back to his tower was a tiring one, worsened by the bruised leg he’d received from his collision with the table in the Pampered Traveler. Waterdeep was cold at night, despite the lazy warmth that had carried into early evening. He could take a scarce bit of comfort in the beauty of the indigo-violet sky, the sun having fully crossed the horizon an hour ago. On a better day, he might’ve mustered up a teleportation spell to ease the trip, but tonight he couldn’t muster it up. No matter how much he told himself not to worry, something about these headaches stuck in his mind. The irony of that thought was not lost on him, given the transitory nature of the pain.
Reaching the door to his tower, he broke into a relieved smile, one that only widened as he finally reached his living quarters. He readied himself for sleep as quickly as he could, took his Ruathlek textbook from his book-bag, and climbed into bed. Tara curled up on a pillow next to him. Gale always read at least a chapter of whichever tome or novel he was working through before bed, and tonight he figured it best to prepare for tomorrow’s lecture. The routine had kept him sane during his year away from society.
Fifteen minutes of reading later, he set the book down on his nightstand, pulling his blankets over himself until he was wrapped in a warm cocoon. Dozing off was easy enough after the day he’d had. His eyes fluttered to a close, thoughts slowing into lethargic nonsense as sleep took him.
The tranquility would be fleeting. He wasn’t so lucky as to have a good night’s rest: The instant he fell into a slumber, so too came a stab of agony straight to his cranium. Half-aware, Gale strained to open his eyes, to ease the pain like he had twice before now. Darkness was all he opened his eyes to—no, not darkness. He was instead staring at a stone floor, shrouded in shade that would’ve been at home in the Shadowfell. Again, he saw a vision of the blood, winding through carvings on the stone floor like a river would a valley. The blood was his own, he realized, seeping through his gloves, which were not of dark fabric but stained rust-red from the liquid. The scene was so vivid he could smell it, taste it; the iron in his mouth and the agony in his head combining into a slew of horror that overwhelmed his senses all at once. Strange houghts filled his mind, foreign and invasive.
“Please, help me,” they cried out, clawing at his gray matter, “I did this all for you.”
He did not know who the thoughts were directed towards, but from them he could dimly sense an almost religious reverence. The unfamiliar voice in his head kept on babbling, yet Gale’s mind was far too muddled to comprehend the voice’s shattered pleas.
“Open your eyes. Open your eyes,” he tried to force the words off his tongue, unsure whether they came out or not. “Open your eyes. Open your eyes.”
They would not open—could not. There was nothing beyond the hurting of his mind and the drip-dripping of blood onto rock. And there was nothing he could do except let the visions carry him through the night.
Jolting awake, Gale gasped. He was clutching his head, his body coated in a cold sweat. Shivering, he tried to steady his breathing, regaining his bearings. Moonlight streamed through his window, painting his bedroom in a silver glow. All was as it had been, not a book on his shelf out of place. Tara was curled up beside him, unaware he’d been woken. Already, the headache was fading. The phantom scent of blood was all that lingered. He had slept, but he had not rested.
“Just what exactly was that?” he wondered aloud, with all the bravado he could manage. By now, his cautious optimism that this was some run-of-the-mill issue was entirely shaken.
Tara stirred, languidly stretching as his voice woke her. “Mr. Dekarios? It’s not even dawn.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he mumbled the reply, “I’m going to find myself something to eat.” He’d left the bar too early to have dinner yesterday, and he regretted it.
He wandered down the stairs, to his tower’s kitchen and pantry. There were a few slices of stale bread sitting out from two nights ago. With a bit of olive oil, it would be a serviceable late-night snack. Halfway to his dining table, plate in hand, he did a double take.
His right hand was bleeding, rivulets of red falling down his wrist and dripping onto the floor.
His plate clattered to the ground, shattering into shards of porcelain. For a second, he stood, frozen in place. All the while, his hand kept bleeding, a dull ache throbbing at the wound’s opening.
Gale could not rationalize this. There was no way he could’ve scratched himself in his sleep; the wound was far too clean for that. He bit back a yell, his shuddering breaths quick and shallow.
Heading back upstairs, he left the plate on the floor. His appetite had vanished.
Gale didn’t dare go back to sleep, so he spent the hours until dawn fretting about and rereading his lesson plans. Tara had fallen back asleep, her soft purrs a quiet solace to his stress. Before he left for Blackstaff, he slipped on a pair of gloves, not stopping to wake the tressym.
The day was a blur, his lecture unfocused. He knew this; saw it in the doubt etched into the faces of his pupils. At one point, he misspoke and referred to Elminster as a ‘young man,’ which caused a brief uproar of laughter in the otherwise eerily quiet chamber. Deeming it best to end the lecture early, he told the audience he’d be covering the rest of the material next tenday. They all privately rejoiced, and he couldn’t blame them.
Closing his eyes as the last of the young mages hurried out, he hoped only for a respite from his lethargy, if nothing else. But like a monster hiding in the dark, waiting for him to drop his guard, the agony struck again, forcing him unceremoniously back to the waking world. Tears poured from his eyes. He could not help them. Keeping his head down as he rushed down the spiral staircase, he avoided a gaggle of students talking in the stairwell. One of them had a bandaged hand, and as he glanced up, he realized it was Lucia. She shoved her hand into the pocket of her overcoat, as if self-conscious. Her gaze lingered on his own gloved hands for a moment, before she turned back to her friends.
Before leaving the Blackstaff proper, he sat down on a waist-high wall protecting a flower patch. The combination of a lack of sleep, the headaches—both in their manifestations and the fear the thought of them induced—was wearing him down. His chest was tight, each inhale difficult. The feeling was similar to the Orb’s sapping of life force, and he kept anxiously checking by his collarbones, as if the Weave’s sickness would suddenly show in his skin as it had months ago.
The logical thing to do would’ve been to go back to his tower and cry. Yet his childish subconscious had other ideas, and he found himself wandering towards a completely different part of the city. Gale approached the edge of a block’s worth of gardens and fields, the sweet smell of flowers tickling his nose. At the edge of the field, nestled among a couple of cobblestone shops was a two-story home with a vegetable patch out front. Without second-guessing himself, he knocked on the door. A minute passed, and he heard a clatter coming from within.
The door swung open, a gray-haired woman in a wrinkled tunic standing on the other end. Her brown eyes widened with shock, and she rushed to make space for him to enter.
“Mother,” he exclaimed, “I think something is horribly wrong with me.”
Morena Dekarios regarded him, taking in his unkempt attire and wild-eyed panic with the acceptance that only a mother could have.
“Come in,” she said, a note of concern in the undertones of her voice, “I’ll make tea.”