#avinryd

On any other night, the soft riffle of worn parchment shuffling would be comforting, meditative work in Mollymauk’s hands. On any other night, there would be a blood-deep satisfaction in the near-inaudible sound of cards placed on threadbare fabric. On any other night, the glow of moonlight would light his spread and sing in his veins and there would be the humming feeling of not only Sehanine’s gentle presence, but a hint of mischievous spark from Jester’s Traveler and, underneath his incense and the floral warmth of the Wildmother, the sharp scent of ozone. Yasha’s Stormlord.

On any other night. But not tonight. Because Yasha is...Yasha is— 

Footsteps on the stairs of the Ready Room—ascending, growing louder, stopping on the landing.

“If we’re not discussing how to get her back, I’m not coming downstairs.” Molly says flatly, not looking up from his cards.

“I am not here to fetch you back, Mollymauk.”

Caleb. Soft-spoken, level-headed, absolutely fucking calm Caleb. How can he sound so gods-damned calm? How can all of them be so cold to just walk away and let that door close and— 

His mental tirade is interrupted by movement in his periphery. Just off the edge of his tarot cloth, one of Caduces’s wooden bowls slides into view. It’s full of a creamy stew of some sort, dinged iron spoon leaning against the edge, being held by a bandaged hand. It’s followed shortly by a chipped ceramic mug of steaming liquid, borne by a matching other hand. Molly looks up to see Caleb crouched across from him, fancy new coat pooled on the gritty wood floor and not meeting his eyes.

“You need to eat. You’re no good to her wasted away to nothing.”

Molly scoffs. “I’m no good to her stuck here either! Miles and a mountain and a half away, sitting in a fucking military storehouse when I should still be in there, still—” 

“Still what, Mollymauk? You wouldn’t still be anything. You would be stabbed through by another gods-verdammt oversized blade and by the time your neat little trick got around to bringing you back, there would be more time wasted than we are using right now.”

Caleb isn’t so soft-spoken, isn’t so calm now. His voice is low, but it’s tense and rough and he’s meeting Molly’s gaze now—deep purple bruising under his eyes and brows furrowed in consternation as he pins Molly with a hard look and it stops his mind short. This Caleb is familiar, for all Molly never actually got to meet him. This is the Caleb that rode up the Glory Run Road, dragging broken friends and compatriots away from a fresh grave to rescue the ones yet living. 

Molly swallows the spitting retort that’s fast dying on his devil’s tongue and carefully returns the cards to his deck, inverse of how they’d been placed and rolls up the cloth, sets them both aside and reaches for the bowl.

He eats in silence. Caleb shifts, sits against the bunk that hides Molly’s corner from the rest of the large room and pulls out a loop of silver thread to fiddle with. Moonlight catches in the threads and Molly recognizes the geometric patterns.

“No Molly, if you do it that way—see? You’ve got it tangled now.”

Molly made a face at the snarls of string binding up his wrists and fingers. Yasha only laughed softly and reached to pick apart the knots.

“Where did you even learn this? Practice for building snares in the Xorhassian wastes?”

“Jester taught me while we were at sea. It was a long journey and you run out of things to do on a ship, eventually.”

There was a waft of sea-salt tang rising from the string, nearly masked by the scent of dry parchment and flowers that clung to everything stored in Yasha’s belt-pouch. He wiggled his fingers gleefully once Yasha freed them, then looped the string around once more.

“Alright. Show me again.”

Molly sets the empty bowl aside—when had he finished it? Must have been hungrier than he thought—and scoots over across from Caleb. The wizard has reached a point in the pattern where he can’t move further. Wordless, Molly reaches in and deftly moves the strings, pulls them off Caleb’s hands and into the next pattern, then holds it out.

Their eyes meet in a quick glance, all that Caleb allows, then burn-scarred fingers reach across to pluck at the web spanned between Molly’s hands; gingerly pinching strings together, then looping them around and pulling back. Another familiar pattern. Molly follows along, and so they go, the silence stretching on and growing more comfortable as it does. Comfortable, but it’s not enough to soothe the agitation still simmering in Molly’s blood.

The emotions still boil up in him, horror and fear and anguish that steam out as anger at the situation, anger at his friends, their hesitance, their—

Caleb nudges Molly’s elbow with his own. Their hands are suddenly knotted together—Molly’s hands having spasmed and yanked the careful magic out of true, tangling the thread. Shit. Fuck. Gods damn it all, can't even get a simple children’s game right, let alone anything more useful. He doesn’t move as Caleb slips his own fingers free and starts untangling the thread. Still quiet, movements slow and purposeful and fucking hells below.

“How are you all so calm about this?” He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t.

There is a long moment of silence, Caleb slipping the last knots from the thread and winding it carefully before replying, “Everyone is in shock, Mollymauk. Do not mistake it for apathy.”

“Bullshit. If any of you gave a—” Caleb doesn’t let him finish, talks over him.

“Beauregard hasn’t said a single word since your shouting match three hours and twenty-seven minutes ago. Jester started crying halfway through that argument and hasn’t stopped. Caduceus burned the stew and oversteeped three separate pots of tea. Nott has done nothing but drink since we got back and Fjord has let his accent slip at least four times in that span.”

“And you?” Molly is still stuck on their firebrand wizard and his icy calm all through the ride back to Bazzoxan—stuck and enraged, if he’s honest with himself. 

Caleb laughs, dry as dust. “Well.” 

He holds out his right hand for inspection and Molly takes in what he hadn’t noticed earlier. The bandages on the outer blade of his hand are scorched brown, black at the edges, and there are red smears in the palm mirrored by the rusty brown caked under burned short nails. Unthinking, he reaches out to cradle it in his own two as Caleb continues,

“Nott told me to find something to do with myself before the proprietor noticed I was burning a hole in their table. So I brought you food.”

The hand in Molly’s grasp is shaking, as if only just being held back from clenching into a fist once more. Molly has to take a moment, has to sit with what Caleb’s just told him. He wants to stay angry, wants it more than anything, because if he’s angry then nothing else can get to him—if he’s angry, the rest of the awful, awful things...

Ah, too late. 

Their game of Cat’s Cradle had brought him and Caleb knee-to-knee, so it’s not far to go when Molly slumps forward to knock his head into Caleb’s shoulder. Months and months ago, back when they’d all first met, the Caleb Molly had known would have jerked back on instinct. The Caleb Molly had known wouldn’t have let his hand be held so tenderly either, or played a silly string game with him in grief-stricken silence. This Caleb has done all those things, and more—twisting his hand just enough to clasp around Molly’s forearm in a firm hold.

“I hate this.” Molly says to their laps, forehead pressed into the shoulder seam of Caleb’s fancy new coat. “Is this what it felt like? When I… When I was gone?”

“Nein,” Caleb replies, harsh and certain. Molly jerks upright at the tone.

“How?”

Caleb’s frown deepens. “You were dead, Mollymauk. You were dead and you were gone and we mourned you.” His hand tightens on Molly’s arm. “Yasha is not. She is alive, and we may not be strong enough yet, but we will get her back. I don’t— I’m not sure how we can, but we will, Molly. I swear it.”

Caleb’s free hand has lifted to rub at his face and Molly sees a smear of crimson when it comes away—a cut on his jaw that should have been healed many cleric spells ago. There’s dried blood crusted under the nails of that hand as well. Had he picked open that shaving nick over the course of the night?

There’s a hard lump in Molly’s throat that he tries to swallow past, but can’t. It blocks all his words except the few syllables he needs to send up to the Moonweaver as he reaches out to touch Caleb’s jaw. The silver crescent charm on his horn chimes softly as it spins and hits keratin, and a sparkle of divine blue light dances in the blue of Caleb’s eyes as Molly draws on the absolute last of his strength to seal up the tiny cut. He doesn’t move his hand after—keeps it there to feel the subtle movement of Caleb adjusting his jaw, relaxing clenched teeth.

It’s not far to go when their foreheads press together, made shorter by Caleb leaning in to meet him halfway. Molly lets his hand drop to fall atop Caleb’s wrapped ones in their laps, closes his eyes and tries to just breathe—he feels like he hasn’t properly since that door closed. 

“...here. Place your hand over my heart. Let me show you.”

Sharing this—sharing his folly—with these near-strangers is… Well, to be frank, it’s not just terrifying, it’s mortifying. His greatest mistake out for all to see before he’s even had a chance to prove he’s grown since. There is, of course, no helping it. Strangers or no, their lots are cast together and shame is not something Gale intends to let stand in the way of their group’s safety. They have enough out for their blood already.

And so, he grasps the sorcerer’s hand in a mirror of their first meeting and presses their palm to his chest: just right of his heart, squarely atop the orb. Their hand—Arden’s hand—is warm, their palm dry and seeming to crackle with power. That power sparks, arcs. Arden’s muscles twitch, instinctively trying to jerk back and away from the void Gale carries, but before Gale can tighten his grip he feels Arden steel themself in a display of ironclad self control. As their minds open to one another, he tries to smother his surprise at their show of physical will.

Reliving the past is something Gale has made into an art this past year, and the picture he paints hurts as much in the telling as it did in the living. He draws the eye away from his crippling insecurity with sweeping brush strokes of hubris, offsets the fug of desperation to prove his worth with the stomach-dropping rush of falling from the pinnacle of grace, straight into the manticore’s den. The tadpole behind his eye twists and control of the memory slips from Gale’s grasp. Magic, darker than blackest night, blossoms from the book in his hands and pounces, digging void-cold tendrils into his chest, his heart, his very being, twined up in his essence—greedy, voracious, hungry. 

Desperate to be free of the past, Gale forces his eyes open to find Arden’s brown-red brows drawn together over unsettling blue-fire eyes. It’s his only warning before he feels tendons flex under his palm, power rising and crackling, then surging in a white-hot rush and it’s…

Well. In those first few moments, it’s everything.

The sense of relief is unlike anything Gale has ever felt; no orgasm(not even one divinely-gifted) has ever granted such a feeling of release. It is nothing like the soulless influx of artificed items. This is living magic, surging and pulsing and roaring with more force than the Chionthar, swollen with spring runoff. The tide pulls him under for precious, blissful seconds, gulping swallows of cool autumn air before a storm, before sense returns to him in a drenching of cold sweat. He shoves at Arden, but the orb has them well and truly in its pull, and worse they themself resist his efforts.

“Stop!” Another ineffectual shove. “Arden, you need to— shit, you need to pull back!”

There’s no response, just the knot between their brows knitting tighter and the magic surging brighter, hotter. Fuck.

Approaching frantic now, Gale signals to Wyll, Shadowheart, anyone.

“Pull them off,” he grits, then closes his eyes once more and sinks back into his mind.

Gale is not as adept with his new psionic gifts as, say, Arden or Astarion, but he’s certainly dabbled—

(When the options while cornered by a fanatic goblin are fight or True Soul bluff, there’s really only one option to Gale’s way of thinking.)

—thus, the mental stretch he makes is not entirely unfamiliar. More difficult in that there is no brand shining as a beacon; but also easier, Arden’s tadpole squirming and reaching through their already-open connection, almost as if it knows the danger its host is in.

There’s no resistance. Gale reaches, trips, and falls into Arden’s mind. Like their eyes, their voice, their skin, Arden’s mind crackles with magic—free of the Weave, a maelstrom subject to only their whims. Gale can taste those whims on the wind, a storm’s approach on his tongue. Pressing in on all sides is a determination that’s oppressive in its totality, but creeping in Gale catches the stirrings of doubt—yellow whisps of petrichor. He follows them through the storm; searching, searching, there.

The eye of the storm.

Where he might have waited for permission in other circumstances, now Gale doesn’t hesitate to step into the singing, shining brightness of Arden’s consciousness. The change is abrupt. Gale is jerked out of the abstract ambience of the mind and into the grounded reality of Arden’s focus…and it’s worse than he feared. Now he feels the arc of power from the other side, feels it rushing and flowing and draining—that storm under Arden’s rich brown skin being siphoned and stolen, feeling their fingers start to go cold, then numb.

You need to stop, he pleads, pressing his urgency, his fear against their mind.

No! I almost have it! It’s almost…

Somewhere far away, Gale feels his flesh-and-blood form reach out and give Arden a shake by the shoulders. Mentally, he pushes,

Yes, that’s the problem! “Almost”. You’ll almost have it, all the way until you’re “almost” to oblivion, and by then it will be too late. Please, let it go.

Arden is trembling, both in body and mind—the orb has ravaged through all of their magic now, Gale realizes in horror. All that power, swirled away like some cataclysmic tavern outhouse, and still the awful thing drains. Magic is in the sorcerer’s very blood and that blood helpless to the pull.

I can do this, Arden’s mental voice is starting to thin. I can— I can…I can’t—

One of them is stammering the words through numb lips—I can’t, I can’t—and Gale isn’t sure which one of them it is. He can’t even retreat to try and sure up his defenses. Arden’s mind has seized in alien panic—the tadpole no doubt, trying to protect itself and inevitably leading to all of their dooms.

The rushing-roaring-shrieking fills their shared mindscape, so loud Gale can barely parse the scent of regret and feathered touch of remorse underneath the cacophony. Fear slips away, giving ground to a calm resignation. This was always going to be his fate, after all. He just wishes it was only his fate, not that of so many others.The creation of a literal black hole fills all of his awareness, growing louder and louder, until suddenly—

—it doesn’t

Abruptly, Gale finds himself deposited back in his own mind, and more importantly his own body. Pushing away the shock with rough hands, he immediately calls familiar wards and charms to his fingers, locking his folly behind seven-fold gates and no fewer than three blood wards. By the end of it, there’s a cold sweat trickling down his back and the smell of blood in his nose. Lovely.

Then his brain catches up and his eyes fly open.

Two feet away, kneeling and collapsed back against an annoyed-looking Lae’zel, Arden is ashen faced and shaking. They won’t meet Gale’s gaze, which is honestly fine because before Gale can think of what to say, both Wyll and Astarion are in his face; Wyll in a righteous fury over the orb’s destructive power, Astarion in a rather surprising, protective indignation on their sorcerer’s behalf.

Gale argues them down with half an ear, the other straining to catch the hushed exchange between their other companions. Lae’zel seems curious in spite of herself, while Shadowheart hisses invective most unbecoming of a cleric under her breath as she examines Arden for injuries. Arden—still pale enough to give their undead friend a run for his money—tries gamely to answer their questions, but the words are mumbled and Gale doesn’t catch more than fine and rest and my fault.

That last being a sentiment shared by no one else in camp, apparently. Even after explaining, multiple times in multiple ways to multiple people, the evening ends with Gale’s offer to take watch shot down out of hand by suspicious-eyed compatriots, the air terse and sullen as they all prepare for bed.

Unsurprisingly, Gale cannot sleep. Not for pain—no, after such an inundation the orb should be satiated for at least a ten-day—but for anxiety. Arden had been gently frogmarched to their tent after Shadowheart’s examination and had yet to emerge by the time the camp settled down for sleep. Haunted by the memory of dull eyes and shaking limbs, Gale spends the night dredging up memories of projects long abandoned: wards and charms half-constructed, then tossed aside upon acceptance of his new life of isolation. The equations still refuse to balance, and it’s only when the first birds start to sing that his eyes finally fall closed.

-

No one comes to wake him and it’s nearly midday when he emerges, squinting, from his tent. The camp is silent and Gale would think they’d all left him for a lost cause(understandable) but for the fact that everyone’s tents are still pitched. A closer look finds the skeletal Whithers pacing by the river, muttering his mysterious numbers, a silently meditating Lae’zel in the mouth of her tent, and Arden, sitting by the ashes of last night fire with one knee pulled to their chest. The rest of their merry band nowhere to be found.

Arden’s silent gaze is far away, fixed on a space miles beyond the long cold embers. They don’t look up when Gale approaches, nor when he sits down. He sighs and reaches over to their camp provision to pull forth two apples. He offers one over, deliberately putting his hand in their line of sight.

“I know that look,” he tries. “You are thinking too many thoughts on too empty a stomach. Was Shadowheart’s attempt at breakfast really so terrible?”

Arden’s vacant stare focuses in on the red of Gale’s offering--red like their sleep-flattened hair--and they blink a few times before seeming to shake away the daze and accepting the apple.

“Wyll’s, actually,” they reply, taking a mechanical bite of the apple, as if running on muscle memory alone. “He tried to revive hardtack by frying it.”

Gale winces. “Ah. So jerky and cheese all around?”

“Mmhm.”

(This is not their first run-in with Wyll’s…imaginative culinary pursuits. After the Blade’s “signature stew” of two days whence, Gale had vowed to make that their last run-in with said pursuits.)

“My apologies for not commandeering the cookfire in a timely manner. I found myself…distracted to the point of insomnia, last night.”

Arden’s snort makes it clear exactly how well that understatement landed, but they don’t comment further. Silence stretches longer and longer, less and less comfortable by the minute until Lae’zel gives a very pointed, very irritated cough.

Ah.

“I fear,” Gale begins, “that if we don’t address the oliphaunt in the room, our dear githyanki friend might renege on her promise to our compatriots and force us to confront it at swordpoint.”

Lae’zel’s affirming silence is deafening and Arden only holds out for a moment before sighing and turning to face Gale properly, at last. Under their carefully-applied blue paint, Gale can see dark smudges beneath their eyes, and while rest has returned the color to their fine half-elven features, they still look distinctly unwell. They take a breath as if to speak, but seeing them so worn has Gale blurting before they can begin,

“What in Mystra’s name were you thinking?”

He keeps his voice below a shout, barely, but Arden flinches as if he hadn’t. Still, their voice is level when they reply,

“What do you mean, ‘what was I thinking’? You were in my mind. You know. You saw.”

‘What I saw was a stubborn fool with more power than sense,’ Gale does not say. That would brand him the most egregious hypocrite on the Sword Coast, after all. Instead he exhales deliberately though his nose, searching for calm before he speaks again.

“Your mind is a maelstrom, Arden—” fuck, he can’t quite keep the awe from his voice  “—and I am no illithid master of the psionic arts. At least, not yet. So I ask again: what in the Hells were you thinking? Did nothing I said, no impression of the severity of the situation make an impact on you?”

“Of course it did!” They snap back, eyes flashing in a very literal sense. “The situation seems rather dire, so I chose the most expedient solution available.”

“How does ‘pouring your entire life force and then some down a drain’ register to you as a solution at all? Let alone the most expedient!”

“This, coming from the man whose apparent life plan is to find the darkest corner of Faerun to detonate his mistake, rather than find a way to fix it. Your self-preservation record seems as black as mine, Gale of Waterdeep.”

And therein lay the risk of sharing your mind with another—they weren’t supposed to have seen that. Before Gale can sputter out a reply, they continue bitterly,

“There’s a hole in the Weave sitting in your chest, and I’m brim-full of the stuff that threads the loom.”

Lightning crackles between their fingers as if to illustrate.

“It’s just…so much. It stood to reason that enough of it could er—fill the hole, as it were.”

(There’s more to it than that; Gale’s no fool. The sorcerer’s hands have balled into fists, some deep-seated frustration robbing them of their usual eloquence. “Brim-full”. “So much”. If Gale had to guess—with that part of his mind not worried about the apocalypse in his chest—he’d conjecture that Arden suffers under a problem diametrically opposed to his own. He shelves the thought for later.)

Arden at least has the decency to look ashamed.

“Clearly, I’m outclassed. I’d never encountered Netherese magic before last night. I won’t— 

“Fuck, I won’t apologize for my actions, but I did not take you at your word and for that, I am sorry.”

The apology hangs in the air, nearly tangible—an offering between them—and for a moment Gale considers dismissing it. Well intentioned or not, Arden’s impulsivity had nearly cost them his grip on the orb. If his calculations are even close to accurate, the scope would not only vaporize their camp; it would flatten the Emerald Grove, druids and tieflings alike, and while the goblin threat would be most handily dealth with, there would also be a large chunk missing from the mountains nearby. It might even take down that dragon on the horizon.

And yet… 

And yet.

Arden is also the first person(other than Tara) Gale has encountered through his whole ordeal willing to place everything on the line for him at the first sign of trouble. Not even Elmister, his dear mentor and most powerful ally, had been so immediately forthcoming in his aid when Gale came to his tower in desperation. And that’s not nothing. Gods above, it’s more than “not nothing”—it’s more than he could have dreamed these last years, and certainly more than he deserves.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to relieve the tension in his brow.

“Your…candor is appreciated,” is what he finally manages. “And while I cannot condone your actions, please know that it does not come from a place of thanklessness. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“No one has ever… Well. Shall we just say, your immediate eagerness to help has not gone unnoticed, and leave it at that.”

Arden’s pursed, too-perceptive expression hints that no, they would not like to leave it at that, thank you all the same, but for whatever reason they stay their clever tongue to a simple,

“Alright, then.”

A beat.

“Just…” Gale attempts, “swear to me you will not attempt such a foolhardy stunt again?”

Their eyes lock, blue-fire on hazel.

“I swear, on all the magic within me, that I will not attempt another such hubristic feat without discussing all the particulars with you before the act.”

Gale narrows his eyes. “Somehow, that does not quite assuage my concerns, but it’ll do for now.”

Arden’s answering grin is all mischief, but before they can reply the conversation is interrupted by an explosive sigh from Lae’zel’s direction.

“Vlakkith preserve me, I thought you’d never reach an accord. Do all istik insist on settling their conflicts with such drawn-out conversation? Do none of you bring your differences to a close with combat, as is right?”

Even after this near ten-day of travel, Lae’zel’s convictions regarding diplomacy and conflict resolution never fail to surprise Gale into silence. It’s the stark contrast between battle-hardened resolve and societal naivete, he thinks distractedly, and is still in the process of pulling words into a semblance of sense when Arden quips,

“If we did that for every conflict, our party would soon consist of only you and myself, Lae’zel. And, strong as we are, I prefer our odds in a fight with at least two of our friends at our backs. Don’t you?”