i am going to write a dairy

"A thing of nature, perhaps I should say," she says.

A deep, rumbling hum of acknowledgement, though he smiles a little, too. Well, in over two hundred years, he's surely heard every variation of this question, and of every other. No wonder, she thinks, he wants to keep roaming. She has never envied elven longevity.

"I do not," he says with a slight air of apology, of confession. "But perhaps that is my own bias at work. The magic of wizards--the manipulation of the Weave--it has never seemed to be of nature, not the way the magic granted to me by Sylvanus is. But who am I to say that the work of a god is unnatural? But of course--you would know better than I."

"You're certainly the expert on nature," Aliafer laughs. "I've done my fair share of traveling, but I've never--I don't see it like you do."

"Not nature, perhaps," he agrees. "But as a cleric of Mystra, you are in an unusual position: you both study and practice the magic of the Weave, but you are also granted power by your god. And so you, perhaps, are best placed to say: do they feel different? Is the Weave an expression of Mystra's divinity, as surely as the earth is of Sylvanus? Or is it something other that she merely maintains?"

"Without Mystra--a Mystra--there is no Weave." An old story, one she knew by rote long before Gale told it. "There are some who say they are one and the same, she and it. And others believe she tends it, as you say."

"But what do you say?" he prompts--gently, always gently, even though she is less and less sure he is, at heart, a gentle man. But he knows it, too, doesn't he? That's why he's learned how to handle things carefully, how to move with caution and grace. He knows what he is capable of. He understands himself, and what he must do to not fear himself.

Aliafer calls a cantrip to her fingers, a palmful of holy fire. She snuffs it out and tries again: a bright and clear orb of light. Halsin laughs as she does it a few more times, back and forth, trying to feel the difference between the way her words brush the Weave as she casts.

"I don't know," she says, dousing the light and looking to him. Now, though, the brightness suddenly gone, she can barely make him out in the dark. "To me, they both feel natural. The Weave seems to me to sit like another element, something alongside the air or the earth or the water. Woven into them. But maybe I've been casting this way too long to feel the difference anymore."

"Or perhaps that is faith," Halsin says, his voice a soft rumble in the dark. He can still see her; she can feel him looking. "To embrace the vastness of the thing we worship by accepting our small place within it. That we can only see what we see, feel what we feel, know what we know."

The stars are so bright above them. It's easy to feel small in the vastness; to imagine the gods in the Astral Plane, where time stops and nothing changes. She sees the longing in Gale's eyes when he looks there, seeking Elysium. Seeking eternity. Seeking everything.

sashenstar family portrait 🔮 🎭 ⚔️

The three tiefling siblings: Lia, Rolan and baby Cal