Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Camp at the treeline, nightfall.

It is a curious thing, to find oneself alive when all signs suggest one should not be. 

By rights, I should be dead; scattered across the Weave, dissolved into nothing. Instead, I am here. Breathing. Thinking. Writing. And yet those thoughts no longer belong entirely to me. Something else lives behind them now: a parasite, planted in my skull by a mind flayer. I can feel it if I concentrate—a faint hum just beneath the surface, like a note out of tune. It isn’t painful, exactly. More like a quiet reminder that my body is no longer wholly my own.

I do not know why I’m writing this. Maybe to make sense of it. Maybe to prove to myself that I still can—that I still have enough of a mind left to put words in order. Maybe because writing it down makes it real, and if it’s real, then perhaps it can be solved.

I have spent the evening cataloguing the shape of this new misfortune and yet the greater oddity is that I am not facing it alone.

We are an unlikely company, bound by circumstance more than choice: a githyanki warrior whose contempt is matched only by her skill; a cleric with secrets she guards more fiercely than her prayers. And then there is Tav.

The first time I saw her, I was still half-dazed from the collapse, dragged from the ruin of a spell gone wrong, blinking against sunlight I hadn’t expected to see again. There was blood on her sleeve, ash on her cheek, and a strange, unshakable steadiness in the way she looked at me—as if saving a stranger from a dying portal were simply another task on a long list of impossible ones.

Stormlight crackled faintly at her fingertips and I knew immediately that it was not magic as I was taught it—disciplined, scholarly, precise—but something older and wilder, like watching the wind decide where to go. I recognize her kind, mages that don’t cast so much as will things into being, with little regard for the principles that underpin them. There is a restlessness to her, a kind of kinetic disquiet that stands my hair on end.

I have not yet decided what to make of her. That uncertainty is, in itself, unsettling.

Our first night together as a band of ill-fated adventurers has been… tolerable. The fire burns low, and the others sleep easily—or pretend to. I washed my hands in the stream and watched the water warp my fingers. For a brief moment—panic disguised as revelation—I imagined that the ripples were not ripples but glimpses of another surface under this one, a second river that insists in the same place as the first. That is how it feels inside my head: thoughts and other-thoughts running alongside each other, both convinced they are the real current. I held my breath until the picture steadied. Sometimes survival is as primitive as that: stop, count, resume.

So what does a man do, on the first night of a borrowed life? He inventories. I find myself still awake, scribbling this, trying to make sense of the bargain I seem to have struck with fate. I have shared few details of my own situation—there are things better left unspoken, for now—but I will admit that the company, however mismatched, is preferable to solitude. The mind flayer’s ship scattered us like seeds across a hostile landscape, and perhaps that is what we are now: disparate lives taking root in the same cracked soil.

There is a future somewhere in which I am whole again, wherein my power and my judgment make peace, where hunger is replaced by something like appetite instead of need, and where the only voices in my mind are mine and those I invite. That future feels preposterous. But I am alive when I should not be. That, too, is preposterous. Perhaps absurdity is the friend we need for a while.

Tomorrow, we seek a healer. Or a cure. Or, if the gods are kind, both. But for tonight, I will listen to the wind stirring the leaves, and to the faint, electric whisper of Tav’s storm lingering in the air, even as she sleeps. I will make myself useful. And I will be, stubbornly, alive.

Chapter Text

I am beginning to wonder if the parasite is not the most dangerous affliction among us. There is a contagion of chaos spreading through this band—and Tav seems determined to be at the center of it.

She has taken to leadership in the way a lightning bolt “takes” to a tree: sudden, scorching, and with little thought for the damage left behind. Decisions are made in the moment, instinctively, with a confidence that would almost be admirable if it weren’t so reckless. 

Case in point: we have acquired a vampire.

His name is Astarion. He held a knife to Tav's throat this morning and she did not strike him down. She invited him to stay. Listened to his breathless explanation about mind flayers and tadpoles and wasn't it funny, we were all in the same boat, so to speak?

I have known fools in my time—students drunk on their own potential, mages who thought themselves clever enough to bind devils and bargain with death—but there is something singular about her particular brand of imprudence. She seems to think the world will bend to her will simply because she wills it. And yet, infuriatingly, it often does.

The elf is precisely the kind of company I would have advised against keeping even before a mind flayer larva began rewriting our fates. He is dangerous, cunning, far too amused by his own depravity. I do not trust him. I trust her judgment even less.

When he revealed himself as a vampire spawn—because of course he is—I expected her to hesitate. Vampirism is not generally a condition that inspires trust. Instead, she nodded as if he'd told her he had a bad knee, asked a few practical questions about sunlight tolerance and dietary requirements, and invited him to join us.

"He has a parasite too," she said, when I objected. "He's in the same position we are."

"He's a vampire."

"And you're a wizard. Lae'zel's githyanki. Shadowheart's—" she paused, glanced at the cleric, who was radiating quiet hostility "—Shadowheart. We're all something."

The logic is simultaneously infuriating and impossible to argue with. So now we have a vampire. Wonderful.

Astarion, for his part, seems delighted by his good fortune. He's been insufferably cheerful since feeding on a boar this morning (at least it was a boar), making quips about our "merry band" and asking pointed questions about everyone's blood type with the kind of smile that makes one instinctively check for missing valuables. I've made it clear that if he so much as looks at my neck with intent, I'll introduce him to the concept of Sunbeam in very practical terms. He found this amusing, which tells me everything I need to know about his survival instincts.

We walked for most of the day, following a deer path through scrub oak and bramble, and I've had ample opportunity to observe her methodology, if one can call it that. "Methodology" implies system. What she practices is closer to controlled chaos.

This morning, we encountered a pair of intellect devourers. Nasty creatures—all teeth and malice and psionic interference. I was midway through the somatic components for Magic Missile, fingers tracing the proper angles, when she simply… reached. That's the only word for it. She didn't cast. She reached into the air, grabbed a fistful of lightning, and threw it.

It worked. Obviously it worked. The devourers convulsed and died, and we moved on. But the lack of structure, the utter absence of theory or formula...it's like watching someone solve an equation by guessing and somehow arriving at the correct answer anyway. Infuriating. Unscholarly. Sloppy.

I may have mentioned this to her.

"Sloppy?" she repeated, in that dangerously mild tone I'm beginning to recognize as precursor to trouble. "It's dead, isn't it?"

"That's not the point—"

"Then what is?"

I attempted to explain. The importance of precision. The elegance of proper spellcraft. The art of it. She listened with the sort of polite attention one gives to a street preacher explaining the end times, then asked if I was quite finished because we had a road to travel and she wasn't interested in a lecture on magical theory from someone whose idea of practical application apparently involved "finger choreography."

Finger. Choreography.

I am traveling with barbarians.

It’s been a full day now with the thing inside me, and I’ve started to notice the ways it rearranges the silence.

The first hour of morning was the worst—my mind doesn’t wake gently at the best of times, but now there’s another heartbeat nested inside my thoughts, faint and off-rhythm. It hums when I’m quiet, nudges when I’m undecided. Not enough to seize control, but enough to remind me it’s there, waiting.

I keep telling myself that I am still me. Gale Dekarios. Scholar. Wizard. Master of my craft, not its servant. But even that certainty feels thinner around the edges, like parchment that’s been damp and dried again—fine for writing, but easy to tear. It’s an unsettling thing, to feel your sense of self become something you must defend instead of something you simply are.

Ceramorphosis. The word tastes clinical, but the reality is anything but. I catch myself picturing the final moments, not as theory but as inevitability: thought dissolving, language falling away, the self unspooled into something alien.

We made camp in the early evening, still a few hours from what we hope is some sort of druidic enclave. I taste it in the air: faint myrrh, wet bark, the particular static of a wild boundary spell. 

Even as we busy ourselves in small, silent ways around camp, I suspect we’re all thinking it, though no one says it aloud. Lae'zel talks about crèches and cures with the confidence of someone who believes solutions are just a matter of finding the right weapon. Tav is in her head about it, almost certainly. I saw her watching me once as we stopped to rest, the way one watches a candle guttering in a draft. She tries to be discreet, but subtlety is not her strong suit. She asked me at one point if I could “feel it changing me.” A blunt question, and an irritating one, but not without merit. I told her no. Which is true enough—I haven't sprouted tentacles, haven't felt my thoughts reorganizing into a hive mind. But the question itself lingers in the space the parasite has cleared out for doubt.

Can I feel it changing me? Would I even know?

The tadpole hums now even as I write, a reminder that time is not limitless. I don’t know how many days I have before its patience runs out, or if patience is even a quality it possesses. 

What I do know is this: if I am to die as myself, I will record as much of that self as I can before it slips away. I will chronicle these days—not because they are heroic or even particularly meaningful, but because they are mine. Because I want to remember what it felt like to be Gale: flawed, frightened, fascinated by the world and resentful of its cruelties, clinging stubbornly to the conviction that knowledge is worth the price of seeking it.

Tomorrow we push further inland. The others speak of druids and cures and answers. I will speak of contingencies. If ceramorphosis is inevitable, then let this journal be a map of what I once was. If it is not—if I prevail—then let it serve as evidence that even under the shadow of annihilation, I kept thinking, and wondering, and trying to understand.

The orb is quiet tonight. A small mercy. Sometimes I can almost forget it's there, coiled in my chest like a sleeping serpent. Then I reach for the Weave and feel it hunger, feel the way it pulls at magic like a drain pulls at water, and I remember.

I am running out of time. In more ways than one. But tonight, mercifully, I am still myself.

Chapter Text

Within the grove's walls, by wandlight. The druids' inner sanctum still glows faintly in the distance.

One day at the Emerald Grove, and I've filled more pages with observations than I have in months. I should be focusing on our tadpole problem, on finding a cure, on the very real threat of transformation. Instead, I find myself cataloging the thousand small ways our leader manages to be simultaneously effective and absolutely maddening.

Let me start with our arrival.

We approached to find the grove gates under siege—goblins swarming, adventurers and tiefling refugees fighting a desperate defense. I caught a glimpse of someone in the thick of it: a young man with a rapier, fighting with theatrical flourishes that somehow remained effective. A Baldurian by his accent, calling out encouragement to the refugees even as he parried goblin blades. 

A perfect opportunity, I thought, to demonstrate our capabilities as potential allies. She had other ideas.

I should have known the moment I saw the lightning dancing between her fingers. The air around her changed, that peculiar charge that precedes a storm, the scent of ozone, the way the small hairs on one's arms stand at attention.

"We should coordinate with the defenders," I started to say.

She was already moving.

Not running—that would have been reckless enough. No, she charged, and as she did, lightning arced from her hands in wild, branching patterns. Not aimed, precisely, but guided by instinct, following the path of least resistance directly into goblin flesh. I watched the very air respond to her, bending and twisting in ways that should require careful shaping, careful control. She wasn't controlling it. She was riding it, directing the chaos through sheer force of will and what I can only describe as an intimate understanding of destruction.

It was, I must admit, remarkable to witness. Terrible, certainly. Undisciplined, absolutely. But remarkable nonetheless. Lae'zel made an approving sound—never a good sign. Even Astarion stopped his usual commentary to simply watch. I found myself providing cover fire more out of morbid fascination than tactical judgment.

An arrow caught her in the shoulder mid-cast. The kind of hit that should shatter concentration, break the spell, send the magic scattering wildly. The lightning didn't even flicker. She absorbed the impact, shifted her stance, and redirected the current as if pain were merely a minor inconvenience rather than a serious injury.

"She's going to get herself killed," I said.

"Probably," Shadowheart agreed. "Should we stop her?"

I admitted that I didn’t think we could if we tried. We looked at each other. At the battlefield, where goblins were fleeing from the walking storm that had once been our composed, clinical leader. At the defenders, who had stopped fighting and started staring. When the last goblin fell—electrocuted, I should mention, with a casual flick of her wrist that suggested she'd been holding back before—she stood there for a moment, breathing hard, lightning still crackling faintly across her skin.

Then she reached up and yanked the arrow out of her shoulder. Just. Yanked it out. The sound it made will feature in tonight's nightmares, I'm certain.

Shadowheart was already moving with healing magic when I heard myself ask: "How often are you planning on getting hit?"

She looked at me, and for just a moment, the lightning still dancing in her eyes made them seem to glow. "As often as necessary."

The worst part? It worked. Perfectly. The goblins were routed, the gates were saved, and we were ushered inside as heroes before I could even process what I'd witnessed.

The scene inside was chaos of a different sort.

A man—Aradin, mercenary leader, clearly injured from the fighting—was in the middle of a heated argument with a tiefling who could only be Zevlor, the Hellrider everyone had mentioned. Something about a contract, a mission gone wrong, a druid trapped in a temple. The crowd was watching, tensions high. 

It was the kind of moment that required diplomacy, careful words, de-escalation, what have you, so naturally Tav walked up and punched Aradin in the face.

Not a spell. Not even a particularly technical punch. Just a straightforward application of fist to face, delivered with the full weight of her body. He went down hard, blood streaming from his nose. The silence that followed was exquisite in its horror.

"Anyone else want to discuss the economics of abandoning people to die?" she asked the assembled crowd, shaking out her hand.

No one did. Remarkable, that.

I should have stayed quiet. I know this even as I write it. Wisdom would have been silence, or perhaps a strategic retreat. But I've never been particularly wise, and the words were out before I could reconsider.

"Well," I said, "that was brutish."

She turned those storm-touched eyes on me. Still crackling faintly with residual magic. "Your point?"

"One doesn't typically introduce oneself to potential allies by assaulting people on their doorstep."

"He's not an ally. He's a coward who left people to die for coin."

"And you determined this from a thirty-second argument? How thorough. Most of us require at least a minute or two of evidence before dispensing violence."

Her jaw tightened. "He admitted it. Right there. In front of everyone. What more evidence do you need?"

"Context, perhaps? The full story? Some acknowledgment that combat situations are complicated and that—"

"He. Left. People. To. Die." Each word was punctuated, precise. "There's your context. There's your full story."

"How beautifully simple your moral universe must be. Do you ever consider that perhaps—"

"That perhaps what? That perhaps abandoning a rescue mission is actually fine if you've got a good enough reason? That perhaps leaving someone trapped in a goblin temple is just 'complicated'? Please, enlighten me, Gale. I'm fascinated to hear the sophisticated ethical framework that makes cowardice acceptable."

She was angry. Properly angry, not the clinical detachment I'd seen before. The lightning was back, dancing across her fingertips, responding to her emotion.

Lae'zel made an approving sound. "She has the right of it. The mercenary displayed weakness. Weakness must be corrected."

"Oh, good," I said, "the githyanki agrees with you. That's definitely a sign you're on the right path."

"Chk. The wizard runs his mouth when he should be observing his betters."

"My betters? I wasn't aware we were taking tactical advice from people whose solution to every problem involves—"

"Perhaps," Shadowheart interrupted, stepping smoothly between us, "we could continue this fascinating debate at camp? Where the entire grove isn't witnessing our group's internal dynamics?"

She directed this at me, specifically, which seemed rather unfair given I wasn't the one who'd started a fistfight. But she was right. The crowd was staring. Zevlor looked like he was reconsidering the wisdom of allowing us entry. And our leader…well, our leader was looking at me with an expression I couldn't quite read. Anger, yes, but something else underneath it. Something that looked almost like disappointment. Which was absurd. Why should I care if she was disappointed in me?

We moved deeper into the grove and the tension followed us like a bad smell.

The grove itself is remarkable; a testament to druidic magic and natural harmony, though currently strained by the refugee crisis. We were introduced to various residents, each with their own problems, their own requests for help.

Every quest, every favor, every complicated situation that would delay our search for a cure. When I pointed out—quite reasonably—that we had a rather pressing deadline in the form of our impending ceremorphosis, she simply explained the transactional logic: the druid who might cure us is trapped in a goblin temple, to get him back we need to deal with the goblins, to deal with the goblins we need the grove's cooperation, to get their cooperation we solve their problems.

I could follow the reasoning. What I couldn't follow was why this extended to helping a tiefling child find her missing dragon.

Even Astarion—who normally delights in chaos—looked exasperated. I caught him later, muttering about "bleeding hearts" and "strategic inefficiency" while our leader was crouched down listening with complete sincerity to a child's description of her "dragon's" favorite hiding spots.

She said she'd help. As if that alone were justification enough. The woman is absolutely infuriating.

We met the Baldurian who had fought with us at the gates shortly after: Wyll Ravenguard, the Blade of Frontiers himself, demon-slayer and folk hero, defending tiefling children from training dummies with theatrical flair and genuine skill. He introduced himself with practiced humility, all charm and noble purpose, and I waited for our leader to eviscerate him the way she had Aradin. To tear apart his heroism, to call out the performance of it.

Instead, she smiled. Actually smiled. First genuine smile I'd seen from her.

I watched from a distance as they spoke—something about his exploits, the devil at the toll bridge, the gnolls near Baldur's Gate. She knew the stories. More than that, she seemed to respect them. They fell into easy conversation about combat techniques, about protecting refugees, about the goblin threat. No arguments. No philosophical debates. Just two people who apparently understood each other perfectly.

I found myself unsettled by it.

When Wyll revealed his own tadpole, his own infection, she welcomed him to our group without hesitation. No inventory of his usefulness, no clinical assessment. Just: "We could use someone like you. Join us."

And he agreed. Just like that.

Later, after we'd made camp within the grove's walls, after we'd been assigned sleeping spaces and warned about the various political tensions, I found myself watching them. Wyll and Tav, talking by the fire. He was telling some story—animated, cheerful, the kind of tale meant to inspire. She was listening with actual attention, asking questions, even laughing at one point.

Laughing. She never laughed at my jokes. And my jokes are excellent.

It's the ease of it that troubles me. With Wyll, there's no tension, no careful navigation of words. Just mutual respect between two people who see the world in the same uncomplicated terms: see problem, fix problem, move on. No debate about whether the problem is worth fixing, no consideration of the broader implications, no paralysis by analysis.

I should admire it. Perhaps I do, in a way. There's something almost noble in that kind of moral clarity—the ability to look at a situation and simply know what's right, to act without the weight of doubt or the burden of considering every possible consequence.

Mostly, I find it frustrating.

The world is more complicated than 'save everyone, punch the bad people, move on.' Eventually one has to make hard choices. One has to prioritize. One has to accept that not everyone can be saved and that sometimes the right answer isn't clear. That's not cynicism—it's realism. It's understanding that resources are finite, that time is precious, that every choice to help one person is implicitly a choice not to help another.

Greatness requires this kind of thinking. Not cruelty, not callousness, but a willingness to see the larger picture. To understand that sometimes the greatest good requires difficult sacrifices. Mystra taught me that—showed me how the Weave itself operates on principles of balance, of give and take, of power measured against cost.

When I was younger, I thought I could have both. The moral clarity of heroism and the grand ambitions of true greatness. Save everyone and achieve the impossible. Be universally good and universally significant. I've learned better since then. Learned that ambition means choosing where to direct your efforts, that significance often requires you to prioritize the many over the few, that changing the world in meaningful ways sometimes means making choices that don't fit neatly into heroic tales.

That's what separates the merely good from the truly great, isn't it? The ability to see beyond the immediate, the individual, the emotionally satisfying choice. To calculate, to strategize, to accept that the right path isn't always the kind one.

And yet.

Watching her laugh at Wyll's stories, seeing the way the firelight softens the hard edges she usually carries—there's something in me that envies it. That remembers what it was like to believe in simple heroism, before I learned that simple heroism has limits. Before I reached for something greater and found the cost inscribed in my chest.

Maybe that's what troubles me most. Not that she's wrong, precisely, but that I used to think the way she does. Used to believe that wanting to help was enough, that good intentions paired with sufficient power could solve anything.

I know better now. The orb has taught me what ambition costs, what reaching for greatness demands. And perhaps I resent her for still having the luxury of not knowing. For being able to punch a coward and call it justice, to collect impossible quests and call it heroism, to throw herself at every problem as if sheer determination were sufficient. For still believing the world is simple enough that trying is the same as succeeding.

Or perhaps—and this is the thought that truly unsettles me—perhaps I resent that she might be right. That perhaps greatness and goodness aren't as incompatible as I've convinced myself. That perhaps the calculations I've grown so comfortable with are just another form of cowardice, dressed up in philosophical sophistication.

 I told myself I would sleep after finishing that last paragraph. I should be sleeping—we have an early start tomorrow, and the tadpole situation requires us to be sharp.

Instead, I'm adding to this already excessive entry because apparently it seems I'm incapable of simply accepting kindness without interrogating its methodology. This is apparently true whether the kindness comes from goddesses or storm sorcerers, though at least Mystra never looked quite so baffled by my capacity for self-sabotage. In my defense—and I'm aware this is a poor defense—she started it by being unexpectedly considerate.

"I need to apologize," Tav started.

My mind raced through possibilities. The punch? The reckless storm magic? The complete disregard for tactical planning? The way she'd dismissed my very reasonable concerns about our lack of progress on the tadpole situation?

"For punching Aradin?" I ventured. "Because while I found it brutish—"

"What? No. He had it coming." 

"For the lightning display at the gates, then? I suppose when one has power simply handed to them at birth, restraint becomes more of a—"

She waved this off. "I meant to give you a better camp spot. You got stuck near the water, and it's damp, and it’s not personal, and I didn’t want you to think otherwise."

"Oh." I wasn't quite sure what to do with this. It was, indeed, where I could have simply said thank you, accepted the consideration, and moved on.

She tilted her head slightly. "Wait. What did you just say? About power being handed to me?"

And there it was. The moment where wisdom should have prevailed over pride. It did not.

"I merely meant that sorcery—storm sorcery specifically—is an innate gift rather than a studied discipline. It's not a criticism, simply a factual observation about the nature of—"

"No, I want to understand this. I came here to apologize about a bedroll, and you're... what? Implying my magic doesn't count because I was born with it?"

"That's not what I said—"

"That's exactly what you said. 'Power simply handed to them.' Like it's something I didn't earn."

I should have stopped. Every instinct that had kept me alive this long was screaming at me to stop. But she was looking at me with that direct, unflinching gaze, and I'd already said it, and now I was in the deeply uncomfortable position of either admitting I'd been needlessly insulting or defending a point I'd made without thinking.

"It's not about earning," I said, which was absolutely the wrong thing to say. "It's about methodology. Sorcery is innate. Instinctual. It doesn't require the same level of theoretical understanding that wizardry demands. That's simply definitional."

"Definitional," she repeated, voice flat.

"Yes. Storm sorcery is blood magic—power that manifests through lineage or circumstance rather than study. There's no need for you to understand the fundamental principles of the Weave, no requirement to master the theoretical framework underlying spellcraft. You just... feel it and hope for the best."

The lightning started sparking at her fingertips. Unconscious. Emotional. Exhibit A, though I had enough self-preservation not to say so aloud.

She stared at me. "You think I didn't have to learn? You think the storm just does what I want because I asked nicely?"

"I think you have an instinctive affinity that requires significantly less intellectual rigor than actual wizardry. There's a reason sorcery is considered—" I caught myself, but too late.

"Considered what? Lesser? Inferior? Not real magic? Let me guess. You spent years in your tower with your books and your carefully measured components, and that makes you superior to someone who had to figure out how not to electrocute everyone around them before they could read."

"That's not what I—"

"That's exactly what you meant. I've met wizards like you before. So proud of your studies, your dissertations, your precise little formulas. As if magic is something you can own by reading about it. As if understanding theory is the same as actually doing it."

"Theory informs practice! Without understanding the fundamental principles—"

"I understand the principles just fine. I understand them in my blood, in my bones. I don't need a thousand-page tome to tell me how lightning moves because I am the lightning. That's not inferior, Gale. It's just different."

"Different," I repeated, and I could hear the condescension in my own voice. "Yes, well. I suppose we can call it that."

The lightning intensified around her hands. Not threatening—just there, responding to her frustration without conscious thought.

Does she realize that she stands like a living testament to everything my training has taught me to reject? Raw power responding to emotion rather than will, magic as reflex rather than choice. Every principle Mystra had instilled in me about control, about separation of feeling from craft, stood in direct opposition to the woman crackling with lightning in front of me.

If she did at that moment, she did not care to notice.

"You know what your problem is?" she said, voice tight. "You're so obsessed with being right that you can't imagine another way might work just as well. Maybe better. You see me cast without your precious precision and it bothers you. Because if I can do it my way and succeed, what does that say about all those years you spent studying?"

The words hit harder than they should have. Because she was wrong—she had to be wrong. Magic wasn't just about results, it was about understanding, about mastery, about earning power through dedication and discipline.

Wasn't it?

"My education with Mystra—"

"Oh, here we go. Mystra herself. Let me guess, she taught you the 'proper' way to approach magic? The refined, civilized, wizardly way? And anyone who learned differently is just some untrained amateur playing with forces they don't understand?"

"That's not—you're twisting—"

"Am I? Because you've been looking down your nose at my magic since the moment you saw it. Every spell I cast, you're there cataloging how it's wrong, how it's reckless, how it's not up to your standards. Well forgive me for not conforming to your academic expectations while I'm busy keeping us alive!"

"Keeping us alive by taking arrows to the shoulder and yanking them out like splinters! That's not skill, that's—"

"At least I'm doing something! At least I'm not standing back analyzing the optimal approach while goblins are killing refugees! You want to talk about my methods being wrong? Your methods mean people die while you're still deciding on the perfect strategy!"

"That's absurd—"

"How long did you spend this morning trying to decide which spell would be most tactically sound before you just cast Magic Missile like everyone expected? How many times have you started to help with something and then stopped to consider if it was the most efficient use of your abilities?"

"Children," Astarion's voice cut through the tension before I could respond, light and amused. "Are we really doing this? Having a magical pissing contest in a druid grove? Because I have to say, while I'm enjoying the show, it's getting a bit repetitive."

We both turned to glare at him.

He held up his hands, grinning. "Oh, don't stop on my account. I'm fascinated by this whole 'my magic is better than your magic' debate. Very intellectual. Very mature. Truly, this is why I follow you lot—for the sparkling dinner conversation."

"This doesn't concern you," I said stiffly.

"Darling, when you're shouting loud enough for the entire grove to hear, it concerns everyone. Besides, our fearless leader here looks like she's about to demonstrate her 'inferior' sorcery by turning you into a lightning rod, and I'd rather not lose our wizard three days into this adventure. Who else would provide such delightful pompous commentary?"

Despite everything, I saw her mouth twitch. Almost a smile.

"He's not wrong," she said. "You are remarkably pompous."

"I prefer 'articulate,'" I said, some of the heat fading from my voice.

"You would."

We stood there for a moment, the anger deflating into something more like mutual irritation.

"The damp spot really is terrible," Astarion said conversationally. "I checked earlier. There's probably a perfectly good space near the supplies that our tactically-minded leader could arrange for you. If you asked. Nicely."

She crossed her arms. "He'd have to apologize first."

"For what? Accurately describing your approach to magic?"

"For being an insufferable ass about it."

"I wasn't—" I stopped. Considered. "I may have been somewhat... pointed in my criticism."

"Somewhat?"

"Fine. I was an ass. Your magic is effective, even if I don't understand the methodology."

"That's the worst apology I've ever heard."

"It is all you're getting."

She actually laughed at that. Short and surprised, but genuine. "Fine. You can have the spot near the supplies. But only because I don't want to explain to everyone why our wizard died of pneumonia."

"How pragmatic of you."

"Someone has to be."

Astarion looked between us, eyebrow raised. "Is this... are you two actually done? That's it? Because I was expecting at least another ten minutes of bickering."

"I have better things to do than argue with wizards about the philosophical underpinnings of magic," she said, already turning to leave.

"And I have better things to do than explain basic magical theory to sorcerers who wouldn't appreciate it anyway," I called after her.

She made a rude gesture without turning around. Astarion, naturally, had further commentary. Something about us being exhausting, about her getting the better of me with the over-analyzing comment, about how I was currently proving her point by standing there debating whether to follow and apologize properly or maintain my dignity.

He is observant, if little else.

I'm writing this now in my assigned corner of camp while the others sleep. Tomorrow we investigate the goblin situation, search for the druid Halsin, and presumably collect more impossible quests.

I keep returning to that moment at the gates, watching lightning dance across her skin. The storm magic that comes from blood, chaotic and wild and somehow perfectly aimed. She's right that I don't understand it—how could I? Everything I know about magic comes from discipline, from careful study, from the measured application of power through precise technique.

Her magic is instinct. It's emotion given form. It's standing in the storm and daring it to strike you, then directing the lightning before it kills you.

It should be reckless. It is reckless. But it's also undeniably effective, and I can't quite reconcile the two.

There's something about the way she fights—the way she lives—that reminds me of what I used to be. Before the orb. Before the careful measurements and the constant calculations of how much magic is too much, how much risk is too great.

I used to chase storms too, in my own way. Used to think that ambition and talent were enough, that the only limit worth respecting was the one I chose to acknowledge.

Mystra taught me differently. 

The orb teaches me daily. 

But watching her call lightning down like she was born to it, I felt something I haven't felt in a long time: envy. Not of her power—I have power enough, when I can risk using it—but of her certainty. Her willingness to trust herself even when the storm threatens to consume her.

I wonder if she knows what that costs. I suspect she does, and simply pays the price without complaint.

Tomorrow I'll watch her throw herself at the next impossible task. I'll probably criticize her approach, she'll probably ignore me, and we'll continue this strange dance of mutual distrust and reluctant cooperation.

But tonight, just for a moment, I can admit—here, in my private journal where no one else will read it—that perhaps I'm not entirely right about her. I find myself circling around the uncomfortable implications of tonight's argument. If her magic works—and it does, demonstrably—without the theoretical framework I spent years mastering, what does that say about the necessity of that framework? It's a question that leads to places I'm not inclined to go.

She was trying to be considerate. I was... less so. The points I made about sorcery versus wizardry remain valid, but perhaps the timing and delivery could have been more strategic.

Then again, she did call me pompous. So perhaps we're even.

Notes: Should prepare Mage Armor and Shield tomorrow. Something tells me our approach to the goblin situation will be less "strategic reconnaissance" and more "direct application of lightning." I should also review Counterspell—if only to have something ready when she inevitably does something reckless that requires magical intervention.

Also: remember to keep distance from Lae'zel during combat. The githyanki has no concept of "spell range" and keeps ending up exactly where my AOE effects land.

Chapter Text

A mean little camp on the Risen Road, shielded by brush and exposed to everything else.

By every account I can recall—and I recall more than I’d like—I should no longer be writing this.

Volo’s Anatomia Illithica claims full ceremorphosis within seventy-two hours. Other, less hysterical sources extend the range to five days at most. It has been eight. My handwriting remains legible, my thoughts (mostly) my own, and my appetite for certainty as inconvenient as ever. It would be comforting to say I still feel like myself, but to say I am entirely unchanged would be a lie.

The dreams certainly don't help. We've all been having them: a voice like distant thunder promising protection, speaking of our “potential.” None of us can explain it, but the pattern is too precise to ignore. If we’re all dreaming the same voice, the same presence, then the source isn’t imagination. It’s the parasite.

Mine came three nights ago. I was standing in my tower in Waterdeep—not as it is now, sealed and abandoned, but as it was. Sunlight through the windows. Books organized on their shelves. The particular quality of silence that comes from being somewhere you belong. And then, a presence. Not quite a figure, more like the idea of one, wrapped in light that hurt to look at directly. For a moment I thought, hoped—

But no. Not her.

They spoke. "You are protected, Gale of Waterdeep. The transformation will not claim you. Not yet."

"Why?" I asked, or tried to ask. The dream had that quality where you're not sure if you're speaking or just thinking loudly.

"There is work to be done." They moved closer, and the light shifted. "Work that requires you. Your knowledge. Your... potential."

The word hung there. Potential. Not achievement. Not yet greatness. The future tense of worth—the thing you might become if you try hard enough, if you prove yourself worthy, if you finally, finally manage not to fail. I woke with the certainty that I'd been told something crucial, and no ability to articulate what it was.

Tav described hers as "like talking to a memory of someone I should know but don't." Shadowheart went silent and changed the subject when asked. Lae'zel called it a "psychic intrusion" and suggested we all practice better mental discipline, which is very on-brand for her. The others wear the same expression I do: that subtle, inward gaze of people turning over a thought they can’t quite name.

The tadpoles are doing something to us, or something is using them to reach us. Either way, it’s a reminder that our silence isn’t private, and our minds aren’t entirely ours.

This morning brought proof. I was speaking to Shadowheart about warding runes when suddenly I tasted her tea: bitter root steeped too long. I felt her wariness, her careful control, the way she was watching me watch her. And underneath that: pain. Old and deep and deliberately ignored. She looked up at precisely the same instant and winced, hand half-raised to her temple. The link lasted a breath, no longer, mere seconds of thought bleeding into thought. The boundary of the self, tested and found permeable.

We said nothing. What is there to say? “I was in your head briefly, the décor is austere”?

Perhaps the parasite was merely reminding us who holds the leash. Or perhaps the delay in transformation is part of the design—a longer fermentation yielding a finer monster.

As if to illustrate the point, we nearly lost both Shadowheart and Lae’zel before dawn. I woke to voices—low and deadly calm, which is somehow worse than shouting. By the time I'd extracted myself from my bedroll and made it to the center of camp, Lae'zel had Shadowheart pinned against a tree, one blade pressed to her throat.

"You will release it," Lae'zel was saying. "Or I will open you from collar to navel and retrieve it myself."

Shadowheart's face was bone-white, but her voice was steady. "Touch the artifact and I'll show you what my goddess thinks of githyanki threats."

The artifact. Of course. That mysterious thing Shadowheart guards so fiercely, wrapped in cloth and secured in her pack with more care than she shows anything else. I don't know what it is—none of us do—but Lae'zel has clearly decided it's significant enough to kill for. Or perhaps she simply decided that Shadowheart's secrecy was a threat. Lae'zel's worldview doesn't leave much room for nuance. You're either an ally who proves their worth, or an enemy who needs eliminating. Shadowheart's refusal to explain herself put her firmly in the latter category.

It was Tav who ended it. She didn't shout or threaten or appeal to reason. She simply stepped between them—walked directly into the space where the blade was, forcing Lae'zel to either lower it or cut her—and said: "Enough."

There was a long, awful pause where I genuinely thought Lae'zel might go through her to get to Shadowheart. Then, slowly, she stepped back. Sheathed her blade. 

The tadpoles may be sleeping, but everything else in us is raw and near the surface.

The grove could no longer hold us—nor we it. The refugees needed a future, the druids needed their archdruid back, and rumor named the goblin camp as the place Halsin vanished and the raiders gathered. So, we shouldered our packs and set to walking.

That's what adventuring actually is, I'm discovering. Not the dramatic battles or the heroic moments, but the walking. Hours of it. Miles of it. Endless stretches of road punctuated by brief moments of terror and long stretches of tedium. As of writing this, we've been on the road for three days, following what our leader optimistically calls "a heading" and what I would call "a vague gesture toward where we think goblins might be." My feet hurt. My back hurts. The orb hurts, though that's unrelated to the walking.

Tav, naturally, seems unaffected. She walks like someone who's been doing this her entire life, which perhaps she has. She sets a brutal pace, and the rest of us simply have to keep up.

I realized somewhere around midday that I know almost nothing about her. Storm sorcerer, reckless tactician, apparently tireless. But beyond that? Nothing. This bothers me more than it should. I'm a wizard. I collect information the way other people collect debts or bad habits. So, this would not do. 

I tried asking casually during one of our rest stops, when she was checking her equipment with that focused intensity she brings to everything.

"So. Storm sorcery." I kept my tone light, conversational. "Family bloodline, or spontaneous manifestation?"

"Does it matter?"

"Academic curiosity. Storm magic often has interesting origin stories. Draconic ancestry, elemental exposure, divine intervention—"

"It's storm magic."

"Yes, but the source can tell us a great deal about how it manifests, what limitations—"

"It manifests when I need it to. That's all you need to know."

She stood before I could press further, already moving to check on something else. Conversation over. 

I tried again that evening, while we were setting up camp. She was helping Wyll arrange the watch rotation.

"You have a Baldurian accent," I observed. "Mostly. Though sometimes the vowels shift. Spent time on the coast?"

"Spent time in a lot of places."

"Which places specifically?"

"The kind with roads."

"How charmingly vague. And before the roads? Surely you grew up somewhere. Had a family, received some kind of training—"

"Training happened. Family's alive. Does that satisfy your inventory?"

It absolutely did not satisfy my inventory.

"I'm simply trying to know the people I'm traveling with," I said, perhaps more stiffly than intended. “Sorcery often runs in families. Sometimes it starts in a crisis. Sometimes it’s a bloodline. Sometimes it’s a promise someone else made before you were born.”

“Sometimes it’s all three,” she said, standing and turning her eyes away from the task, a sure sign that I had fully annoyed her, “and you stop looking for which thread is the one that pulled the others.”

“Is there anyone we should avoid,” I persisted, “besides the usual—priests, paladins, former lovers, current creditors?”

That earned the twitch of a smile. “No creditors,” she said. “No one who’ll come for you because of me.”

She walked away before I could formulate a response. 

By our second day on the road I'd accumulated the following information about our leader: her family is alive (status confirmed, details absent). She learned storm magic somewhere, from someone, under circumstances she won't discuss. She's been to Baldur's Gate and other places with roads. She prefers action to introspection, deflection to disclosure, and apparently considers personal history less relevant than tactical readiness.

Also, she's excellent at skipping stones. I observed this at a creek crossing when she sent a flat stone hopping five times across the surface with what appeared to be casual effort but was almost certainly practiced precision.

"Nice throw," I said.

"Thank you."

"Learn that somewhere specific, or more roads-and-places?"

"You don't give up, do you?"

"I'm a wizard. Persistence is in the job description."

"So's knowing when to stop asking questions."

"Actually, that's the opposite of the job description. Asking questions is rather the entire point."

"Then here's a question for you." She turned to face me properly. "Why does it matter? My past, my family, where I learned magic. How does any of that help us survive the next week?"

It was a fair question. I'd been asking myself the same thing, actually, in between bouts of frustrated curiosity.

"It helps me understand how you think," I said finally. "How you make decisions. Whether you're likely to get us all killed through reckless heroism or calculated risk-taking. Whether—"

"Whether you can trust me."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to." She picked up another stone, weighed it in her hand. "Here's what you need to know: I keep people alive. That's what I do. How I learned to do it, where I came from, who taught me—none of that changes the fact that I'm going to get us through this. You can trust that or not. Your choice."

She skipped the stone. Six hops this time.

The sum total of what I’ve learned, in between the lines of actual fact: Tav trusts the we faster than she trusts the I. She’ll throw herself into a fight for us without hesitation, but she won’t give us her story. Those are different currencies, and she spends only one. It’s maddening—partly because it's a bad strategy, but mostly because it’s mine. 

Make yourself indispensable in the present so no one thinks to look behind you. Fina camouflage through a different kind of transparency—facts, quips, theories, whatever convinces them they’ve reached the interior—while keeping the real engine sealed away. Perhaps that’s why her reticence grates: I can’t decide if I want to pry them open or thank her for keeping them shut. It’s an unpleasant mirror to hold.

Shadowheart joined me at the bank as I filled the kettles. “You are aware,” she said lightly, “that she’s better at not answering than you are at asking.”

“I noticed.”

“She thinks you’re trying to manage her,” Shadowheart said.

“I’m trying to predict her.”

“Same thing, to people who’ve had enough of it.”

I capped the kettle. “Your sympathy is noted.”

“My observation,” she said, “is free.”

By day three, we had acquired a rhythm. Not harmony—let’s not be absurd—but rhythm, at least.

Lae'zel wakes first, always, and stretches like she’s preparing to kill the sunrise. She speaks little in the mornings, which I’ve learned is a mercy. Shadowheart emerges next, silent and self-contained, finding a private spot for her own devotions. 

Wyll is unmissable, aggressively cheerful in the mornings in a way that should be illegal. "Another beautiful morning!" he announced yesterday, to a sky that was predominantly grey and threatening rain. I admire the man’s optimism. I do not share it. Astarion, when finally roused, treats dawn like an insult. He emerges from his tent radiating aristocratic suffering, and then proceeds to complain through breakfast with the effortless charm of someone who knows it’s part of his appeal. Then, as if compensating for lost attention, he proceeds to flirt indiscriminately with the nearest breathing organism—usually Tav.

"I had the most intriguing dream last night," he announces to no one in particular, though he's clearly performing. "Very athletic. Surprisingly flexible. I won't bore you with details, but there was lightning involved."

"Sounds exhausting."

"Oh, it was." A smirk. He leans closer. "You know, if you ever wanted to make it a reality, I'm told I'm quite good with my hands. And other parts."

She rolls her eyes, but the corner of her mouth betrays her. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Please do. The offer stands. Or lies down. Whichever you prefer.”

He does it artfully, I'll grant him that. Though "artfully" might be generous—he's about as subtle as a fireball in a library. But that, I suspect, is the point. The more absurd he becomes, the more she rolls her eyes, and the more he seems to enjoy himself. It's escalated over the past few days into something of a dance. Yesterday he spent ten minutes describing the "structural integrity" of various bedrolls. This morning, apparently, we've graduated to prophetic dreams.

I can't quite tell if he's actually interested or if he's simply discovered that outrageousness is the one thing that makes her react. She deflects everything else—questions about her past, observations about her tactics, expressions of concern—with practiced efficiency. But Astarion's shameless innuendo? That gets the eye roll, the sigh, the occasional “you’re impossible” that sounds almost fond.

He’s found the crack in her armor and exploits it with the diligence of a man who has nothing better to do.

Or—and this is the part I'm less certain about—he's actually interested and using the performance as cover. It's easier to be rejected when you're joking. Safer to proposition someone when you're clearly not being serious. If she said yes, well, excellent. If she says no—as she does, repeatedly—well, he can claim it was all in jest.

Either way, it continues. His increasingly ridiculous suggestions, her practiced dismissals, the way she occasionally lets him think he's winning, and though it means nothing—or claims to mean nothing—it's noticeable, to say the least.

Shadowheart certainly finds it entertaining. She watches them with barely concealed amusement, occasionally catching my eye as if to say "are you seeing this?"

I am. I don't particularly enjoy that I am, but I am.

Breakfast, of course, is my jurisdiction. Wyll keeps offering to cook, and I keep preventing him—for the sake of the group, and civilization more broadly.

Wyll has many admirable qualities. He's brave, principled, genuinely committed to helping people. He also cannot cook to save his life. Or ours. The first morning I allowed it, he produced something that was simultaneously burnt and undercooked, a feat I would have thought physically impossible. When I pointed this out, he smiled bravely and said "just needs more salt." It did not need more salt. It needed a proper burial and possibly an exorcism.

I’ve since reclaimed the duty. I can’t decide if I’m good at it because of or in spite of my upbringing. My mother was a scientist of domestic order—measure, stir, correct, repeat. Cooking beside her was my first apprenticeship in the pleasure of predictability. There’s something reassuring about the way the fire behaves, at least—heat that obeys its laws.

Tav wakes somewhere in the middle of all this, stretches like a cat, and immediately starts talking about the day's route as if she's been planning it for hours. Maybe she has. I'm not convinced she sleeps properly.

Most evenings, when we make camp, Wyll and Lae'zel spar.

It's become something of a ritual. They clear a space, check their weapons, and proceed to try to kill each other with what I've been assured is "friendly" intent. I watch from a safe distance—twenty feet minimum, thirty if I can manage it—and marvel at the sheer discipline of it. She drives him back again and again until, on the third evening, he anticipates her feint and lands a clean strike. For a moment she actually smiles. The expression looks foreign on her and therefore precious.

It is, incidentally, the only time she smiles all day.

Shadowheart helps me with the cooking sometimes, in her quiet way. Chopping vegetables with the same focused precision she brings to everything. We don't talk much during these moments—there's something comfortable about the shared silence, two people working toward the same goal without needing to fill the space with words.

It's during these quieter tasks that I've learned the most about her. Not the big things—she's still carefully guarded about Shar, about her past, about the artifact she keeps hidden. But small things. How she has surprisingly strong opinions about proper knife maintenance. That she finds Astarion's jokes funnier than she wants to admit, though she'd never give him the satisfaction of laughing.

Yesterday, while we were preparing a fresh bundle of leeks, she mentioned almost casually that she used to have a pet mouse as a child. She named it Mister Whiskers, fed it cheese scraps, and kept it in a box under her bed until her parents found out. It was such a normal, deeply human detail that it caught me completely off-guard. This woman who cloaks herself in mystery and shadows, who guards her secrets like dragons guard gold had a pet mouse named Mister Whiskers.

"What happened to it?" I asked.

"My mother made me let it go outside. Said it wasn't proper to keep wild things trapped." A pause. "I cried for a week."

She said it matter-of-factly, but there was something underneath—grief, maybe, or irony, or both. The memory of a child who loved something small and lost it. I wondered if she was thinking about the artifact, about the things she's keeping trapped now.

I didn't ask. We have an unspoken agreement, she and I: we're both carrying secrets, both keeping things locked away that we're not ready to share. We recognize that in each other, and we respect it.

It's become a strange kind of friendship, built on the foundation of mutual non-disclosure. We talk about books, about theology, about the absurdity of our situation. We argue about the proper way to ward a campsite (she prefers divine wards, I maintain arcane barriers are more reliable). We share cooking duties and comfortable silences. And we don't ask the questions we both know the other won't answer.

It's nice. It's also a lie, in its way, because I'm sitting here building this tentative trust while harboring a secret that could kill her. Could kill all of them.

Every conversation feels like a betrayal I'm committing in advance. And then tonight, the betrayal caught up with me. 

We were settling camp when it hit—a surge, hot and violent, like the weave itself turning on me from the inside. I dropped whatever I was holding. Don’t even remember what it was. The world went white around the edges and my hand went to my chest on instinct.

Someone said my name. Her voice. Too close.

“Don’t,” I managed, waving her back. “It’s fine.”

It was not fine. My knees were in the dirt. The air was trembling. I could feel it, the hunger, that terrible pull at the core of me. She ignored me—of course she did—and crouched down, reaching for my shoulder. I flinched. “Gale? What’s happening?”

“Nothing.”

Her grip tightened. “That was not nothing.”

The world steadied, just slightly. The flare began to subside, leaving the dull, hollow ache of absence in its place. I could have lied again, I think, if she hadn’t been looking at me like that—her gaze steady and expectant.

“I have a complication,” I said finally. My voice sounded distant, even to me. “A... condition. Magical in nature.”

“Condition.” Her tone was flat. The firelight licked at the side of her face. “Meaning what, exactly?”

I swallowed. “Meaning it feeds. On magic. And when it’s hungry, it does this.”

She blinked once, as if waiting for me to admit that it was a joke. “Feeds,” she repeated slowly. “Like a parasite.”

“Well, that’s one way to phrase it,” I said lightly, though I could feel my throat closing. “I prefer to think of it as an enchantment with an appetite.”

She did not laugh. “And you’re feeding it?”

“Better I do than let it grow restless.”

She finally looked at me then, and there was something in her eyes that made me wish I’d stayed silent. Not fear, exactly, but the recognition of danger. The kind that makes you reach, subtly, for a weapon you hope you won’t have to use.

“My condition requires me to consume magical artifacts,” I told her plainly. “The stronger, the better. The weave within them sustains me.”

“And what happens if you don’t get them?”

“I wither,” I said. “Or worse.”

There was a long pause. This was it, then. The moment where she'd look at me with that clinical assessment and tell me, kindly or not, that the group couldn't afford the cost of keeping me alive against the risk of letting me die. It's what I would do in her position—what any reasonable tactician would do.

"I understand," I said, words tumbling out faster than I meant them to, "that this is a burden that will weigh down the group. That asking you to sacrifice resources for my continued survival when we have limited supplies and even less time is—it's not reasonable. I wouldn't expect you to—"

“This will help?” In my rambling, I had looked away. She had reached into her pouch and produced a silver ring that hummed faintly with abjuration. 

“Yes,” I said. The word came out low, reluctant.

She pressed it into my hand. “Then take it.” I think she meant it sincerely. Or maybe she didn’t. I can’t tell with her yet. 

I hate the ritual. There is technique to eating a magic—you do not gnaw so much as you loose the magic from its physical tether. I nested the ring in my palm and unspooled the pattern, let the Weave loosen thread by greedy thread until the resonance slid across my nerves and into the waiting appetite. The orb drank. The pain went from unapologetic to a tired, sullen quiet. The silence it leaves is not relief; it is the knowledge that it will soon speak again.

Tav watched. She tried not to, which meant she did it gently over my shoulder. When I met her eyes again, I tried for levity.

“I’d hoped to feel faint in a more heroic context—saving a child, perhaps. This feels rather more domestic.”

“I’d rather not have to drag your body through another swamp.” Her familiar dry tone had returned, but her eyes were still concerned. She kept them trained on me a few seconds more before retreating back into the nighttime routine. 

The relief lasted perhaps an hour before the weight of it settled in.

I needed something. She gave it to me. I consumed it. That's the transaction, reduced to its elements. There was a time I would have found the equation elegant in its balance, but balance implies parity, and there’s none here. What I take is not mine to have, and what I give in return is risk. And the pattern will repeat, again and again, until either we find a cure or the orb decides it's had enough of waiting. 

Later, when the camp quieted, I felt it: the pulse in my chest, the reminder of what waits for me. I thought of her hands, the deliberate patience with which she’d unlaced the ring from her belt pouch. She didn’t ask if I was all right after. Didn’t pretend to care more than she does.

There’s a kind of mercy in her indifference. It gives me space to lie gracefully.

I would prefer not to write Mystra’s name tonight. It wakes something in me I keep trying to let die. But I cannot describe this hunger without her shadow falling across the page. 

Once, I was permitted to drink from a river that makes oceans. To touch the Weave not as a practitioner touches a tool, but as a beloved touches divinity. She would let me taste raw magic, pure and undiluted, the kind that most wizards only theorize about, and it was proof that I had earned something precious beyond measure. I mistook her generosity for my worthiness. 

There are many parables that share the shape of my mistake: people who reach for what dazzles them and forget that light can blind. I thought being chosen meant I would always be chosen. That access, once granted, could not be revoked. When I reached high enough, proved myself brilliant enough, became exceptional enough—I would never have to need again. I would simply be, and being would be sufficient.

She taught me otherwise.

When the tide of her generosity withdrew, I did what desperate and selfish men do with absence: I called it a test. And in my desperation to prove I could still reach her, still touch what I'd lost, I did what she would have told me never to do.

I reached anyway. And something ancient and cruel found the well I had dug in myself and filled it with different water entirely.

Mystra taught me that need was a weakness of faith. Devotion, she said, should be complete enough to erase hunger. That was her favorite cruelty: to demand surrender and then scorn the act of it. I believed her. I learned to disguise every want as ambition, every ache as discipline. Now, I am all need; an entire body built around it. I tell myself I consume to survive, but to survive is to need, and to need is to fail her lesson. I don’t know what disgusts me more—that I need so desperately, or that I still think of her when I do.

There are nights I can almost convince myself she still listens. That the tremor in the Weave before I sleep is her breath, not the pulse of the thing inside me. That this hunger is merely another trial, another chance to prove worthiness through restraint. It’s not her, of course. It’s the Weave closing its hand around me again, to remind me of who is holding the leash.

Tav made it easier tonight. That is the truth I would rather not commend her for. I am grateful, and ashamed of being grateful, and angrier than either feeling merits. It is exhausting to be the site of so many disagreeing nouns. The orb quiets, full and patient. I am neither.

Notes: Tomorrow’s preparations will include Mage Armor first. I’ve burned through more magic than planned in my starvation, and we’re moving deeper into goblin territory. Can’t afford to be caught unprotected when the fighting inevitably starts. Detect Magic second. Necessary for identifying artifacts before the others stumble on them. The more I can find alone, the less I’ll need to ask. Better to locate potential sources now—quietly—than wait until desperation makes the asking unavoidable.