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Aella had spent many a night on the road, camping under stars and the moonmaiden's light, but she'd never traveled with company. Certainly not the kinds of company she now found herself bunking with.
"Alright, who did it?!"
Aella looked up from her place by the campfire, where she used her well of magic to light the half-wet logs. It had rained, a phenomenon that a few members of the party (one, really. A certain pale elf) hadn't ceased complaining about.
It was Shadowheart who had burst out of her tent, though, her voice bordering on a new range of shrill for her.
"Did what?" Aella asked.
"Oh, you know perfectly well what I'm talking about." The half-elf gritted her teeth as she stormed toward Aella. She lifted an accusatory finger. "You've been waiting for a chance this whole time!"
"A chance?"
"Don't be coy! Give it back!"
Aella rose, brows furrowing together. She'd been wary of Shadowheart from the moment they'd met, though she couldn't have put her finger on why. Perhaps now was the time the other cleric had decided to show her true colors. Aella crossed her arms. "Give what back? Your sanity? I can't hand over something I didn't know you had to begin with."
"Nine Hells..." hissed a voice. If Aella had bothered to look, she'd have seen Gale peaking his head out of his tent, his mouth agape. In fact, several members of the camp were either rousing from their tents or glancing over from their places at the fringes of their shared spaces.
Shadowheart's face turned such a violent shade of red that Aella thought her head might pop off. "You absolute sack of goblin piss..."
"Just tell me what you're looking for," Aella said, rolling her eyes. "We'll find it, I swear. Just stop throwing accusations around."
"Someone took it, there's no other explanation--"
"Again, took what?"
"The artifact, by Tymora's tits, what else?!"
Aella blinked. Her heart dropped into her stomach. "The artifact? Are you sure? That's not good."
"Noo...."
"Something going on here?" Said a voice, warm and melodious, and Aellas ears pricked at it. Wyll had returned from bathing in the river, and must have heard the commotion. He dabbed at his hair with a towel. Good gods of Mount Celestia; he was shirtless.
Ignoring this (rather successfully, Aella thought), she looked away and gestured back to Shadowheart. "The artifact is missing."
"I'm telling you, someone stole it."
"I haven't noticed any weird activity at night," Astarion chimed in from his tent, which was barely cracked open. "And if you don't mind, some of us are trying to rest."
"You're an elf, you don't sleep," Aella said.
"That doesn't mean you get to disturb the peace!"
"Alright, let's calm down, everybody." Wyll lifted his hands. "Shadowheart, did you check your bag?"
The look she gave him was pure venom. "Why would I have not checked my bag?"
"Right. Fair point. Well, we can all check our things, in case it accidently got mixed up..."
"I know she has it." The half-elf pointed at Aella.
"What is your problem?" Aella whirled on her. She made a show of turning her pockets inside out. "Look, you're paranoid--"
Something tumbled to the ground.
The three of them all looked down in unison. There, plunked in the grass, was the twenty-sided metal contraption.
Shadowheart reached for her weapon. "I knew it."
Wyll stepped between them, holding out his hands. "Hang on, don't do anything rash..."
"Stay out of this, Blade!"
But Aella ignored her, her face slack with shock. She bent to pick up the artifact. It was warm to the touch, and pulsed faintly. "How..."
Shadowheart, seeing her, stopped. Wyll looked on, and the whole camp approached as they all came to the simultaneous conclusion.
The thing had moved, all of its own accord.
"She seems to have calmed for now," Wyll said as he stirred the pot of water for tea. His bare torso almost glowed in the firelight, warm and inviting.
Aella broke her gaze away. She glanced at Shadowheart's tent, where she'd retreated once Aella returned the artifact. "Yeah. For now."
"Do the two of you have a history?" He asked. He poured the leaves in. They both were having trouble falling asleep, so he'd offered to make something to calm them both and hopefully invite slumber to both their minds.
So far, it wasn't working, because Aella's entire focus was trying not to stare at Wylls shoulders and back. At the corded muscle of his arm as he stirred the tea, the firelight that danced across his features.
"Uh--no," she said. She stretched her feet out in front of her, clicking the toes of her shoes together idly. "We met first on the nautiloid. I freed her from her pod."
"That was a very daring thing to do," he commended, and Aella pretended like it didn't make her want to preen, just a little. "What with the whole thing moments from crashing, I'm sure there were other things occupying your mind."
"No kidding."
Wyll chuckled, and handed her a cup of steaming tea. Their fingertips made contact, just for a moment. "The way you two quarrel, I'd have thought you were sisters or something."
"No, we're not." She laughed at the notion. The idea that Shadowheart-- guarded, intense, Shadowheart-- even had a family at all was odd, though Aella supposed she must have someone, somewhere. Not that she'd divulged any information in the few days they'd known each other.
"Do you have one back home?" Wyll asked, swirling the tea in his mug. "A sister, I mean. Or a brother."
Aella eyed him. He'd yet to acknowledge her, and the fact that they'd actually met before. Once, briefly, but it had happened. "No. My parents weren't fond of trying again after having me." She gestured to herself, her horns and tail. A tiefling, born into a non-tiefling family, product of a long-forgotten blood curse. It was something she'd never been able to set aside.
She eyed Wyll again, her wondering at his non-acknowledgement turning to a curious itch she had to scratch. Did he really not remember? "What about you? Any family waiting for the day the Blade of Frontiers decides to visit home?"
His words came carefully. "Ah, yes. And no."
"Yes and no? Do tell."
A smirk, but there was something cautious about it. "Yes, there is family. No, they are not waiting for me to visit."
"Why? You're not barred from it, are you? You couldn't visit him, not even briefly?"
And at that moment, Aella knew from Wyll's expression-- the panic and the glances around as though afraid someone might be listening‐- that he remembered. He remembered that night they'd shared all those years ago, talking under moonlight and dancing across a ballroom, remembered perhaps even the conversation and the heat of warmed cheeks at whispered comments.
Their eyes met, her pale blue, nearly colorless ones to his brown and stone ones. Years passed between them like smoke upon waters, or messages sent between secret lovers.
"Why didn't you say something?" Aella asked, barely breathed, her voice hardly a whisper.
Wyll didn't look away, the light in his good eye so sorrowful. "I couldn't. It would raise questions."
"Who would ask, and what were you afraid of them asking?"
"You know what. I've left it all behind. I don't want to remember that life. He's dead, the prince you danced with."
"You don't want to remember it? It's part of you."
"You don't seem very fond of dredging up your own past. Why should I?"
"What about the Gate?"
"What about it? They've moved on. No one even remembers me."
Her heart panged in grief insurmoutable. "I remembered you."
His chest rose and fell like a man drowning, his eyes roving over her face, searching for... what? Was he looking for the young girl who had danced with him and refused to give him her name? Was he trying to find evidence of the young boy he himself once was? Aella found herself transfixed, suspended by the silence of the moment and the weight of the past.
What had happened in the years they'd been apart? What had made him change so much? There was a deep yearning in him now, one that reached ever forward, ever toward a future that Aella herself could not glean. To be a hero of folktales, traveling the Sword Coast in pursuit of its small, scattered justices. To be that justice, not in the way his father had, but in a more actionable way.
"Aella." Her name on his mouth was more sincere than a prayer. "Believe me when I say I do not regret the hand I've been delt. Do not pity me. I grieve only for the fact that we had not met again sooner, in our travels. The rest is gone, and I have long made my peace with that. Let me leave it behind, for now."
She let the matter go. After all, who was she to judge? She'd practically abandoned her own family, in the name of piety-- happily, at that. She was seldom shameful of the fact that the Moonmaiden had been more of a mother to her than the woman who had birthed her. She hadn't been back to Baldur's Gate in a long time.
"I'm sorry," she said, clutching her mug in her hands and looking away. She gazed into the fire. "I won't tell the others, if it bothers you so."
"Thank you." Wyll shifted beside her, stretched out his legs, and leaned back on an elbow.
They sat in silence for a long time, listening to the crackling embers of the fire as it swayed and eddied beneath the moonlit sky. Aella wondered now, as she often did, if she was listening in now. The holy texts were vague on the details of just how much the gods liked to involve themselves. She liked to think, though, that this moment was nice just between her and Wyll.
"You never told me where you went," Wyll said. He quirked his mouth to the side. "You didn't run from me, I hope."
Aella took a sip from her mug. The tea had a strong, earthy flavor to it, mixed with lavender and honey. Her eyelids were drooping already. "You flatter yourself still, I see."
"Can't deny a prince his vanity."
"I was called away on spiritual business," she said, setting her tea down and laying back. She tucked her hands behind her head. "I went to a temple of Selune, where I spent the next few years in a small cloister. We actually visited that temple recently. I had no idea it had fallen into such disrepair."
His eyes widened. "That sacked goblin hole was your temple?"
"Yes. I think She knew I needed to not be there. I don't think I'd have survived if I was there when the goblins raided."
"I'm so sorry."
Aella shrugged, though her chest squeezed. "It happens. Life ends. Religious iconography is destroyed. Friends are lost. I won't say I didn't relish each and every goblin's death in that place, though."
"You sound like Shadowheart when you say that."
She hummed, fiddling with a strand of hair. "The statement is only fatalistic if you end it there. What matters is not what happens in ruin, but what comes after. Now that the temple is cleared out, it has room to become something else. Maybe Selunites will find it again. Maybe nature will overtake it. Maybe an adventure group like ours will seek refuge there for a while."
"You don't want to reclaim it yourself?"
"We don't have time now." She tapped the side of her head. She could almost feel the tadpole wriggle in response.
"Well, yes, but what about after?"
Though she'd just spoken about afters and their importance, she realized she hadn't really thought about an after in the context of ceremorphosis. "Maybe."
When she didn't offer anything more, Wyll laid back beside her and gazed up at the stars.
"I never got to tell you," he said. Aella looked over and saw him smile at her. "You were a wonderful dance partner."
Her cheeks warmed, her heart fluttered, and Aella thought that that moment, laying under the stars with Wyll Ravenguard, was one of the finest things she could be doing.