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She’d known, from the moment she felt the first inkling of soft warmth he'd brought her, that it wouldn’t last.
Mayflies, her mother’s voice had whispered as it had once snapped at her, disapproving of her daughter’s choice to strike out amongst the more ephemeral races of Toril. Disapproving of the one her daughter now fixated on, as she would have done if she were here to see it. Gone before you know it. A waste of time. A waste of life.
And she’d known, down to her bones, that her mother was right, even as she had allowed herself to daydream of something more in the Weave’s embrace. Perhaps he might live to a century, or perhaps not. A human might, a wizard might, but then, they might not, and a wizard whose veins burned with magic eating him alive might well have burnt his candle to its last dregs even before age came for him.
Yes, she’d known, and still, she’d let the warmth be. Let it grow, let it fester, an ember gleaming red in a hearth untended to spring into roaring flame later on. What was the harm, she’d thought then. The odds were that none of them would live long enough for the trifling matter of a human’s lifespan to matter, after all. The odds were that they’d meet their respective ends – whether that be death or ceremorphosis – whilst they were both young for their own kinds. With such a fate hanging ominously over their heads, she had needed everything she could find to carry her onwards. The warmth of his presence was a pleasant, soothing thing, a rare joy and rarer comfort amidst fear and worry and illness and the never-ending trudging of road after road.
It had warmed her. Given her a reason to smile. She had let herself be grounded in his soft smiles, in his touch. He had made himself real in a world that sometimes seemed more of a dream than anything she had ever dreamt in her reverie. He had carved himself a place in her heart – in her soul – with every bowl of something-or-other he had pressed into her hands by the campfire, with every smile that drew forth the lines around his eyes, with every chuckle at the antics of their strange group of misfits.
She had known it would hurt when she lost those smiles. She had known the day would come that she asked herself if she had erred in letting herself care for him. She had known she would hear her mother’s judgement whispering again in her ear, reminding her that she had brought herself the pain.
But gods above, she’d thought she had time.
Not much, certainly. Less time than it had taken for her to be grown enough to leave her childhood behind, but some time, still, years and decades in which she could carefully etch his face and voice and the feel of his skin beneath her fingers permanently in her memory. She had thought that she would have time to make a life’s worth of memories with him, memories of a life worth living, memories beyond that of their frantic quest. Years in which she could find a way to keep a piece of him with her, keepsakes and lasting things to remember that which was so very short-lived.
She had thought.
When the goddess that spurned him charged him to die for her forgiveness, she’d sat at his side until he could find the words to speak again.
When they found the heart of the Absolute beneath Moonrise, she’d put a staying hand over his, and he had stopped – and so she’d thought they had the time to make memories again. To become real. Lasting.
It felt as though she had blinked, and a month vanished. Evenings spent recovering from a day’s misadventures in a city she found she disliked passed in and out of her memory like water from a sieve. They’d been unremarkable, and so she hadn’t focused on making them stick, and so they vanished as they came. A month’s worth.
A life’s worth.
For a moment – just a moment, even by a human’s count – she’d thought that that life was within reach. All she had to do was take a step forward into the portal of Orpheus’s making. Take one step further to watch as the githyanki-turned-illithid used the Netherstones to subdue the brain, to end this misbegotten quest at last.
She’d taken a step forward, then, ready for the end that would be a new beginning.
Instead, she’d found herself stepping into a portal she hadn’t seen being cast, and walked into an end that was only that.
She hadn’t known what to think for a single, heart-stopping moment.
Beside her, the others who had stood high above the city stepped out of portals, just as confused, muttering bewildered questions to each other. Who had cast the portals, they asked, and why? And then she’d understood, suddenly, why he had cast so very little magic as they fought their way through the Upper City and up the Netherbrain’s stem. He had been saving his spells, saving every drop of Weave he could to overpower the portals, to send down his allies and his friends and everyone who fought with them, because he wouldn’t need any magic at all to end it, would he?
She had taken another step forward, reaching for- what was she reaching for? A potion, to fly back up to him, perhaps, and stop-
Her brain, so treacherous, so easily deceived by his promises of an after, had only begun to work as it should have done before at that very moment, when it was far too late. The Netherbrain was too far, too high; she would never reach it, she thought, and yet, her thoughts had been so very wrong already. She had taken another step, and another, ignoring the calls of her friends behind her, another step and another and another because surely there was enough time just for this-
Of course there isn’t time, her mother’s voice had murmured, phantom fingers ghosting gently over her brow. Silly daughter of mine. With humans there is no time at all.
She had taken her tenth step forward when her time, their time, his time ran out. When he let his own hourglass run dry, bathing the city of Baldur’s Gate in an impossible, eerie purple for a single, ephemeral second of power.
And then, like a mayfly, that too was gone.
There was nothing in the sky above. No Netherbrain. No nautiloids.
No Gale.
See, daughter? One cannot love a mayfly. Appreciate its life, its place in the world, but love it? No. You should have known better, my dear. They are alive one second and gone the next, not a trace left behind, for that is their fate – to live and vanish. Remember that.
She had remembered it. She had remembered it as she had poured cooling ice magic into Karlach, holding her heart’s engine back long enough for Wyll to follow her to Avernus. She had remembered it as she distributed healing potions made by a mayfly to those in need, handing out piece after piece of what was left of him to be consumed and erased from the world as he had been. She had remembered it as she cast healing spell after healing spell on terrified civilians, as she called upon her god’s strength to do what needed to be done, to be the cleric she was expected to be. She remembered it as she was pulled to the Elfsong, as something alcoholic was pressed into her hands, as she was seated in a place of honour, as she sat and sat and sat, a bubble of silence in the merriment of survivors rejoicing in the lives they had yet to live because they were not mayflies.
She remembered that he was, though. She could not, now, forget.
She remembered that he was a mayfly when she heard a Waterdhavian tune from a bard’s lyre that would have made him smile.
She remembered that he was a mayfly when a beaming tiefling tried to invite her to dance in the mayfly’s absence.
She remembered that he was a mayfly when, long after the last of the revelry had faded, she had found herself before the statue of his goddess in the Stormshore Tabernacle, searching for the slightest trace of him.
She remembered that he was a mayfly when she cried herself hoarse, there before the altar that was as empty of his presence as the rest of the world.
She remembered that he was a mayfly, a tiny, infinitesimal thing, when she looked upon the goddess’s statue and knew the unmoving stone face of the one who'd snuffed out his life was all she had left.
She remembered that he was a mayfly as she woke with the sun and prayed, again and again, for the strength to survive another day’s labours in the shattered city, .
She remembered that he was a mayfly as she laid in a shadowed room and prayed, again and again, for the peace to rest unhaunted by longing for memories she hadn't made.
She remembered that he was a mayfly when she saw his face again six months later, a flickering illusion that had tricked her into just a single, gasping moment’s hope.
She remembered that he was a mayfly when he faded at her touch, vanishing from the world again and leaving that treacherous hope to curdle into acrid poison in her gut.
“I’ve gotta believe you’ll find each other again, somehow,” Karlach told her, her hands burning-hot as they clasped around hers. “Maybe not for a while, yeah? But someday.”
“He was a mayfly,” she answered. “A mayfly lives, and then it is gone. Even if there’s anything left of him- he’s in a place I can’t follow, Karlach. Our feet were never going to walk the same eternal paths. Different gods. Different fates. I knew that all along. I just- I just wish I’d had more time to make it count.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Karlach. “I wish you did too. Bet he does too, wherever he is.”
They all vanished after the night of memory, one by one, not quite mayflies but not quite real, either. If she blinked again, if she let the years slip by as they inevitably escaped her grasp, they’d all be gone almost before she knew it. A human-turned-devil and a tiefling on the front lines of an infernal war, an already-old half-elf and a human kept alive only by the machinations of a miniature giant space hamster. Mayflies, it seemed. She’d blink, and she’d know the truth again, her mother’s lessons. The elf that surrounds themselves with mayflies shall have a mayfly’s heart, daughter-mine.
She hated that she knew her mother was right.
But there was nothing to do about it. Nothing that could be done, she knew. She had only herself left, herself and her duties and her pledge to Larethian.
She let herself sink into that familiar shell, and she blinked, and never saw her mayfly again.