When the moment comes, it’s very simple. The Harpers and the Fist upstairs and Jaheira here, who fought so hard for them. June and Shadowheart, whose lives together can now begin. Wyll and Duke Ravengard, and a gaping void of power in Baldur’s Gate.
A principle she has had to explain to many a paladin, but never a wizard: if you don’t understand a threat, how do you really know if it’s gone?
There isn’t time to reason it out, why Mystra would prefer blood on her hands, knowledge lost. Following the will of the gods is mostly intuition, and Aliafer has always trusted hers.
“You can’t do this,” she says.
“I choose you,” he says, and her stomach lurches: that isn’t the choice she meant to pose. But it’s what she said, isn’t it. Maybe not what she meant, but what she said. And he chooses her, the way she couldn’t quite ever say she chose him.
But there’s a different god to deal with just now. June strikes the killing blow, but the crumpled form of Ketheric Thorm falls at Aliafer’s feet. He cries out for his god and receives no answer.
The gods don’t just answer. That’s what people who profess no particular faith don’t understand. They don’t just answer, and the Lady of Mysteries least of all.
When she sees Gale pacing in the corner of Moonrise, apart from the exhausted celebrations, she readies herself for a torrent of guilt. But he’s too much like her: on to the next thing, his mind consumed already by the sight of that crown—the promise, as he clutches her shoulder, caresses the back of her neck with his thumb as he speaks, that they haven’t ruined everything.
And in the shine in his eyes, Aliafer understands. There was always another way. Mystra must have known of this, must have feared the death gods and the Elder Brain. Must have known there was indeed only one person who could defeat it: Gale, with his lifetime of study of Netherese magic, with his prodigious talent and skill.
Intuition. Is it as Gale says, her anger and envy, keeping him from this second Netherese artefact? Forcing him to choose death over the temptation of power?
Or does she fear what will become of him if he tempts fate a second time? Was his death to be salvation from destruction?
There are things that can destroy a mortal soul, rend it in too many pieces for a god to collect and bring to their afterlife. Becoming a mindflayer, of course, is one such thing.
Do you understand, she wants to say, testing her thumb against the points of the star of Mystra in her pocket, the chain of her holy symbol snapped during the fight, that you cannot chose me without choosing her, too?
Does he understand that for her, Mystra is not a lover, not a mentor, not even a muse? She is the ever-present sensation of the Weave; she is the promise of mysteries to uncover; she is the feeling of knowledge settling itself into understanding after hard work and study. All the things that wizards know and seek to master, she feels, she worships. That is what they share, not the mere name of a goddess, not paired holy symbols that they carry.
“There is another way, a better way, for both of us,” he says, and she has to believe that he does.
“I think that sounds like an excellent idea,” she says.
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