Rachel ✨

"Why did you not tell me?" The accumulated weight of the question was audible in every syllable. "Why did you not trust me with this? I have loved you through decay and mind-shattering madness. I have loved you when you were nothing but a broken woman who could sing and barely function beneath the weight of your own fractured mind. I stood beside you when the knowledge that you had been the architect of everything—of the Absolute, of all its consequences—threatened to destroy every certainty I possessed about you, about us."

"It did shatter me," Celeste said quietly. "And I will forever be grateful for your refusal to let it define me. I mean that. I am alive because of you, Gale. I survived because of your extraordinary, stubborn refusal to abandon me."

"Why, then?" His voice broke, fractionally, beneath the strain of the question. "What could possibly have justified this? What could have been more important than honesty with me?"

Celeste set down her glass with great deliberateness, and when she looked at him again, she felt relief. The truth was out, not whole, not perfect. But close enough.

"The Code of Conduct I am subject to," she said quietly, "forbids me from sharing information. Even with a beloved spouse." A beat. "Even with you."

Gale stared at her.

And she watched, with the particular attention of a woman who knew this man's mind as well as she knew anything in the world, as the implications assembled themselves behind his eyes with methodical efficiency. Each piece finding its place, the shape of the whole emerging, the full weight of what she had done and what it meant and what it would cost both of them settling over him all at once.

He fell back into the chair he had half risen from, as though the understanding had physically displaced him.

"No," he whispered.

Celeste inclined her head with a smirk.

"Yes."

For a moment, Gale simply stared at her.

The pieces had already fallen into place—Celeste could see it happening behind his eyes with the particular, terrible efficiency of a mind that had spent decades training itself never to stop assembling information into conclusions. One certainty linking itself inexorably to the next, each answer collapsing into the one that followed, every thread she had carefully kept separate drawing itself together into things and lies she could no longer separate, laid bare between them, plain enough to touch.

And yet Gale had always possessed a remarkable capacity for resisting certain truths when they wounded him deeply enough. Not out of ignorance— he was constitutionally incapable of ignorance and had always suffered for it—but out of hope. Out of the stubborn, quietly heroic belief that perhaps there had been some misunderstanding, some crucial detail not yet accounted for that would render the situation considerably less alarming than it appeared.

She had always loved him for it, even when it complicated things.

Slowly, and with far more force than was strictly necessary, he set his whiskey glass upon the table.

The sharp sound echoed through the study.

He leaned forward. His hands came together beneath his face, fingers interlacing tightly enough that the knuckles whitened, both thumbs resting beneath his chin while his index fingers pressed against the bridge of his nose as though the physical effort of holding his thoughts in coherent formation required structural support.

For several long seconds, he said nothing, and Celeste did not press him, understanding by now precisely when silence was the only thing she could usefully offer him.

When he finally spoke, his voice had gone dangerously quiet. Not angry, not yet, but something considerably worse: the particular quality of a man approaching a conclusion he had been hoping, with increasing desperation, to avoid.

"Celeste."

His gaze lifted to hers, and there was so much disbelief in it that she smiled despite herself—not the deflecting smile, not the strategic one, but smaller and more honest and entirely involuntary.

"Please tell me I have arrived at an absurd conclusion." A humourless laugh escaped him, brief and brittle. "I would very much prefer to have arrived at an absurd conclusion."

His eyes searched hers with the particular quality of a man looking for an exit he already knows is not there, finding exactly what he had expected to find, which was nothing that helped him at all.

The silence stretched between them, and the fire shifted, and somewhere outside the city continued its midnight business without any awareness that something significant was occurring in a study on this particular street, which struck Celeste, not for the first time, as one of the more remarkable things about cities.

Then Gale inhaled. Slowly, deeply and with the careful deliberateness of a man bracing himself against knowledge he has no choice but to walk towards.

"Are you telling me," he began, each word measured with the painful precision of a scholar who has decided that if this sentence must exist, it will at least be constructed correctly, "that while I was under the impression my wife was occupying herself with harmless social engagements, charitable endeavors, and the occasional entirely reasonable criminal conspiracy—"

His mouth tightened.

"—you somehow managed to become a Masked Lord of Waterdeep?"

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🩸Basics🩸

Name: Nienna Helaván (no middle name)

Aliases: Nini (Geraldus calls her this 🥺)

Race: High Elf

Background: Acolyte

Gender: Nonbinary Femme (same as me...haha. Essentially, I've always defined this for myself and Nienna as not really identifying with the gender binary on an internal level but feeling most comfortable presenting femme).

Sexuality: Pansexual

Pronouns: she/her/them/them; she's totally okay with being called "girl" or "gal," but she doesn't feel the term "woman" ever really fit her and prefers to not be called one.

🩸Other🩸

Family: Her parents were Vala and Ainu Helaván, two half-orcs who found her as a baby abandoned, crying and covered in dirt, at the base of a large tree in a forest outside Rivington and raised her like their own, giving her the name they had hoped to give their daughter who did not survive childbirth. Having significantly shorter lifespans than high elves, they had both passed away by the time she was 60, still only a child by elven standards.

During the events of Her Harper, His Sufferer, she develops a very beautiful found-family, but I don't want to spoil it too much 🤭

Birthplace: Unknown, but as she was found as an abandoned infant in Rivington, she may have been born there or born elsewhere and left there. Regardless, she considers Rivington her home.

Job: Cleric of Ilmater at the Open Hand Temple in Rivington.

Phobias/fears: Lighting/lightning storms - they remind her of a very traumatic event from her childhood (spoiler for Her Harper, His Sufferer 🤫). Geraldus comforts her and plays with her hair during these storms and it helps her feel safe ❤️‍🩹

Hobbies: Hiking in the forests around Rivington, drinking tea that she brews from herbs that she forages on her hikes, reading books from the library in the Open Hand Temple, and cuddling and smooching Geraldus 🥰🥰 hehe

🩸Morals🩸

Alignment: Neutral good; she does the best she can to reduce suffering around her without causing too much chaos or a scene but she also recognizes that some laws were made in order to cause harm and cruelty, so she's not afraid to bend the rules to mitigate the violence these certain laws cause. At the end of the day, she only answers to Ilmater.

Flaws: Nienna is deeply traumatized from the horrible bullying she endured as a child and the loss of her adoptive parents. Serving Ilmater provides her a way to channel her emotional pain for good in a way that feels meaningful to her. She's very self-sacrificial, which can come off as reckless to others (she stresses Geraldus TF out with this....); she will also work herself sick helping others before she helps herself. She tends to think that her presence in the world causes more harm than good to those around her, even though that's really not true.

Virtues: Empathic, loyal, patient, understanding, and brave (even if she doesn't always think so). Always available to sit with someone who is grieving and help them bear the suffering. Would literally give someone the shirt off her back. Everything she does is done with pure, genuine love.

🩸This or That🩸

Introvert/Ambivert/Extrovert, Organized/Disorganized, Closed-minded/Open-minded, Calm/Anxious/Restless, Disagreeable/In-Between/Agreeable, Patient/In-Between/Impatient, Outspoken/In-Between/Reserved, Leader/Follower/Flexible, Empathetic/In-Between/Apathetic, Optimist/Realist/Pessimist, Traditional/In-between/Modern, Hard-working/In-Between/Lazy

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