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When one’s journey began with a Mindflayer abduction and attempted assimilation, one expected some amount of terrible violence.
The sight Gale awoke to on a breezy summer morning at their riverside camp was so far beyond his expectations, he almost couldn't believe the evidence that stood before his very eyes.
Come to think of it, Leviathan had confided in him about abnormal memory loss and violent urges. Gale ought to have taken them a bit more seriously, it seemed. That poor girl.
Gale sat in the entrance of his tent pretending he was very occupied with something, because even looking in the direction of the corpse nauseated him to his core. His heart rate hadn't slowed to a reasonable pace yet. In short, he was terrified. With good reason to be—on just the other side of a rocky outcropping, there stood a murderer.
Granted, they'd all killed at this point. Gale thought he had the more elegant way of it, magic keeping him without literal blood on his hands, but needs must. Leviathan fought with a bow; Gale had seen their arrows pierce the skulls of bandits and the hearts of harpies alike. But those killings were neat, brief necessities.
Poor Alfira hadn't just been slaughtered, she had been brutalized. Desecrated. Fileted. There were half a dozen more words Gale could have used, but being a walking thesaurus was, unsurprisingly, very useless in this moment. No matter how it was described, the girl had been slain, with horrifying precision, while all the rest of them slept, and the killer was perhaps four yards from Gale.
Granted, the killer seemed to be in absolute agony about the whole thing. It had been difficult for Gale to believe them in any way innocent when they were staring at a corpse with grim resolution on their face, but they had spent the last fifteen minutes crying these anguished, soul-tearing sobs, after Withers had said in that calm way of his that there would be no returning Alfira to life.
When one watched a person cry so ferociously it made them retch bile onto the sand, it became difficult to believe they would in any way have chosen to do this.
Leviathan made one last ragged noise, almost a scream. Gale would easily believe they tore their throat raw with it. Then, they stalked past him, refusing to look at the horror scene of their own creation, and went straight to the riverside.
Good. They could drown, for all Gale cared.
Shadowheart was saying some kind of prayer over the body—Gale did not recognize it. She was devoted to a god unlike any Gale had ever pledged himself to. He could tell as much even without knowing the deity’s name.
Astarion and Lae’zel were having a hushed conversation in the space of neutral ground between their two tents. Eventually, he left and followed Leviathan’s tracks to the river, and she tailed him. Perhaps they were going to talk to Leviathan—perhaps they were going to kill them.
There was briefly a smell of burning flesh, and then nothing. Gale looked out of his tent cautiously, to find that Karlach, once again the junior member of their party, had reduced the body to ash more succinctly than any crematorium Gale had ever known of.
The ritual circle beneath it sat undisturbed.
Finally, Gale felt settled enough to join the small cluster of the others.
“…don’t know where they came from, who they were before the Nautiloid,” Shadowheart was saying.
“Yeah, but you saw their face.” Karlach crossed her arms, her stance strong to the point of being argumentative. “It’s pretty clear to me that they weren’t in control.”
Will’s response was a bit more measured. “I have never known Lev to be anything but a kind soul. These past few days, they’ve gone around protecting tiefling children—helping Alfira through her grief, even. But that doesn’t make them safe. I don’t know what this is. Possession, maybe? Some devilish influence?”
Shadowheart tipped her chin in Gale’s direction in greeting.
“I dunno,” Karlach said. Her attention flicked to Gale as well. “You’re a wizard, right? Did you sense anything weird and magical about it all?”
A bit reductive, but not an unfounded question. “I searched for any sign of magic as soon as we woke up to a corpse,” Gale said, “nothing. I fear this is a tragically mundane act.”
Shadowheart mirrored Karlach’s pose on the other side of the ritual circle painted in dried blood on sandy soil. “I could try detecting evil,” she said, “but that will only give us a lead if a fey, fiend, or undead is responsible, and even then, we’ll only know if its presence is still detectable this long after the act.”
Wyll rubbed his chin, his good eye looking in the direction of the ritual circle, but his attention miles away. “We’ll need to set up a watch at night,” he said. “Someone to keep an eye at all times.”
“I’ve half a mind to kick them out of the group entirely,” Gale said. “You’re all thinking it, yes? Which of us is going to be next?”
Their faces all fell. Wyll scuffed the toe of his boot against the edge of the circle. It didn’t break the sigil. “Of course that’s a worry. But it may be more dangerous to just set them loose on the Sword Coast with no knowledge of what’s happening to them, and no one who can watch to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Gale suddenly felt very worn. His mind had been repeating one thought, turning it over until it was frayed and thin: how could Leviathan have done this? This was the man who had, upon Gale’s revelation of his condition, asked no questions, only said they would help. Later that day, Leviathan turned up at his tent with a spear that had just enough of the Weave in it to satisfy Gale’s arcane hunger. He hadn’t even had to ask; Leviathan had just gone out and found something for him.
They performed magic tricks for children, let old ladies fuss over them, played little songs on their fiddle beside the campfire at night, took in lost dogs—it was all so damn incongruous with this awful act of violence.
Who knew what went on in their head, though. They’d tried to tell Gale, and he’d just joked about murdering someone over a book.
Suddenly, Gale cared very much about whether Leviathan drowned, and about whether Astarion and Lae’zel had gone after them to end them.
“I need to… go check on them, I think.”
He made the quick trek to the river, and found that neither grisly outcome was the case. Astarion was sitting on a rock, boots off and pant legs rolled up, with a stark-naked and pitifully bedraggled six feet of muscular tiefling between his knees. He was also berating them for not bringing soap to wash the blood off. Lae’zel was a few feet upriver, washing Leviathan’s clothes and using the fine sand of the riverbank to scour them.
“I have soap,” Gale said.
Leviathan looked up at him without lifting their head. Their yellow eyes looked deadened, their face covered in streaks of red, runoff from their hair. Astarion’s fingernail was digging a stubborn bloodstain out of the groove in Leviathan’s left horn.
“Well? Go fetch it, then, this wretched creature isn’t going to wash itself, apparently.”
It made sense that two of the more frontline fighters would know how to clean blood off. Lae’zel in particular always ended up with streaks of gore all over her armor. Astarion was a bit neater, but there was only so tidy one could be when sneaking up on a foe and slicing their carotid.
Gale hurried back to his tent, slung his whole bag of toiletries over his shoulder, and returned.
Astarion sniffed at the small bottle he was handed, and raised his eyebrows, apparently in pleasant surprise. “I should have known you’d carry the posh shit,” he said, pouring a dollop into Leviathan’s hair. The lather immediately turned pink.
“Thank you, Astarion,” Leviathan said, their deep voice weak. “I was about to just cut it all off.”
“And what a shame that would be,” Astarion said, using a comb to work the bigger, more clotted chunks loose. He looked up at Gale while he worked. “Are things… taken care of, back at camp?”
“Indeed,” Gale said. “Karlach cremated the body, and Shadowheart did some sort of prayer. It wasn’t the grandest funeral, but we’ve done what we can.”
Leviathan nodded wearily.
“Good,” Astarion said, “Leviathan, tip your head back, for the love of the gods. Do you want soap in your eyes atop it all?”
They only sighed and did as told, so Astarion could pour a bucket of water on their head and wash out the lather.
“Of course you do, it’s what you deserve, right?” Astarion was veering from comforting to bitchy, and Gale almost stepped in, but then his voice softened. “Trust me, whatever you deserve, I deserve worse. And Lae’zel openly admitted to killing several of her own cousins just last night!”
Lae’zel scoffed in her peculiar little Githyanki way. “That was in honorable rite of combat.”
“Right, Astarion, you ought to have known, those were sanctioned murders of other children,” Gale said. Lae’zel said something in her native tongue that sounded offensive.
At Gale’s comment, Leviathan’s eyes met his again. “When do they want me to go?”
“They’re not going to kick you out,” Astarion said, “because that would be incredibly stupid. Right, Gale?” He placed his final words cautiously, like he was talking to a child that might dissolve into a tantrum at any moment.
“Of course not,” Gale said, snapping at Astarion and not at Leviathan. “We’re going to set up a night watch.”
“Well, I can handle that,” Astarion said, reaching for one of Leviathan’s hands and using a rag to clean the undersides of their claws. “I only need to rest half as long as all of you.”
“You’re all putting yourselves at risk keeping me around,” Leviathan said. They were shaking. “I could wake up with anyone’s blood on my hands.”
“Precisely why we’re keeping you under our eye,” Gale said. “We allow nobody into the camp who is not a competent fighter. Those of us who don’t already sleep with a weapon close at hand will do so. And we work together to figure out what it is that’s happened to you.”
Leviathan stood, stepping out of the water. They were taller than Gale by a head, and the horns made their height even more intimidating. Ordinarily, Gale might try and have more of a peek at their body, but today, it was important he met their eyes.
“What is there to say something’s happened to me,” they said, “what is to say this is not just who I am?”
Gale swallowed to clear the knot in his throat. “I find I cannot believe that,” he said.
Because if nobody believed Leviathan was truly good at their core, it would be all too easy for them to slip further into depravity. Gale would believe in them, would push them toward good, until the moment he saw them go for another innocent life.
And then, he would use all the power Mystra had ever granted him, and take them down.