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The crackling of the fire at the center of the camp cuts into Anara’s fragile concentration. She opens her eyes just enough to see a shower of flickering embers shoot out of a log that has just split from the heat, temporarily brightening the darkness of the cursed land around them, the heaviness of the shadows in the air lightened for a moment. The fire dies down again and despite its light, the shadows press in on her. She shifts where she sits, on the hard ground on her heels. Beside her, Shadowheart sighs.
“You’re not supposed to be moving,” she says. A touch of impatience is clear in her tone. “Stillness. Stillness and quiet. That’s how my Dark Lady will hear you.”
Anara straightens up. Her lower back is starting to hurt, another ache to add to a long list of aches and scrapes and bruises and whatever is happening behind her eyes, not quite a headache but not quite nothing, and never seeming to fade enough into the background of her consciousness. She feels as though she has always had this headache, was born with it, raised with it, even if she can’t remember past last month.
Stillness, she repeats in her mind, hearing the echo of Shadowheart’s direction bounce around the vast cavern of her skull, amidst the utter emptiness within. Stillness and quiet. Stillness is difficult. Anara’s body betrays her at every turn, shifting constantly, her hands in her hair before she knows it, or rubbing at the scars on her chest, or plucking a blade of grass from the broken and twisted ground they sit upon. She can’t seem to stay still. Quiet then, she thinks, pleads with herself. One out of two is better than none. Perhaps Shar would cut her some slack, seeing as how she has holes in her brain now and a tadpole crawling through the holes.
She moves again, forward slightly, pressing both her knees into the dirt as she lifts herself off her heels for a beat.
Shadowheart opens her eyes. Her lips are pursed into a fine line. “You weren’t cut out for prayer, I’m afraid,” she says.
Frustration builds in Anara’s throat, like a cough. “Maybe,” she says.
Shadowheart’s back is straight, hands on her knees, the perfect cleric. She was made for prayer. Anara isn’t sure what she was made for. When she tries to sit as straight as Shadowheart does, the heavy scarring on her chest and down her stomach feels tight, as though it might burst open.
“Is prayer familiar to you?” Shadowheart asks. “Ringing any bells? Is that why you wanted to pray with me now?”
Questions. Too many questions. Anara’s headache builds slowly, as steady as a drumbeat.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It feels like praying to something is… something I used to do. Being on the floor like this is familiar. I don’t know.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Shadowheart frowning at the dirt before them.
“Well, I doubt you worshiped Shar in your past life,” she says after a beat. “But you’re welcome to sit with me if you can keep your movements to a minimum.”
A tender feeling spreads through her chest. It’s fragile, as though it might break if she thinks about it too deeply. She sits back on her heels. Shadowheart closes her eyes.
“Stillness and quiet,” she whispers.
Anara closes her eyes too, and imagines a deity like Shar filling the holes in her head. The Lady of Loss, giving for a change. Unlikely. She stays by Shadowheart anyway, feeling her presence and the heaviness of her concentration, matching her slow breathing until the hard beat of her heart quiets just a little bit.
.
Under the glow of the moon maiden’s shield behind the Last Light Inn, the grass looks like blades of silver shooting up from the cracked earth. Anara runs her hand over it, watching the blades catch between her fingers. She stops moving and places her hands on her lap, looking up at Halsin, who watches her with a small smile on his face.
“Why did you stop touching the grass?” he asks her.
She looks back down at the ground. She sits with her legs crossed in front of her, and Halsin mirrors her just ahead, slouching forward slightly. The moon shield’s light falls on his face, shadows catching on the deep scars on his cheek, making them look even deeper.
“We’re supposed to be praying,” she says. “I fidget a lot. It’s distracting, isn’t it?”
“We are praying,” he says with a nod. “The two of us sitting here is prayer. Your hand on the grass was prayer. Being in nature, absorbing it, allowing it to absorb you. This is how I connect with Silvanus. And how he connects with me.”
He looks at her expectantly. She places her hand back onto the grass, feeling the soft earth give way as she leans on her palm and readjusts her legs. A breeze blows past suddenly, disrupting the still tree branches overhead, and their shadows move over Halsin’s face, deepening the scars even further.
“Is your version of prayer very different?” he asks.
Anara starts to think back, to yank the memory from whatever hole in her brain it has run into, hiding from her, but her head twinges almost in warning. “I don’t know. I think so.”
He nods as if this makes perfect sense. As he moves his head, his hair falls over the side of his face and covers his scars. He looks younger suddenly, at home outside, comfortable despite the darkness that clings to the air and thickens it. She isn’t sure of much but she is sure that she must not have been an outside type of person, before. The way the wind brushes past her hair, sunlight on her skin, water from a creek rushing past all feel and look and sound strange to her, alien, otherworldly. She wonders what Silvanus must make of her, whether he knows what she used to be, the knowledge hidden in the breeze and the swaying of tree branches, or something.
“If prayer is just this—” she pauses, gesturing around them at the grass, the trees, the air still heavy with the shadowed and corrupted presence that cuts into the protection of the moon shield, “—then how do you ask for things? Do you ask for things?”
“I do,” he says. “Sometimes. Most times, I try to just exist. Would you like to ask for something now?”
She doesn’t respond, just runs her hand through the grass beside her again, the silvery blades soft under her palm, like fur.
“I don’t know,” she says again. Her mantra, her mouth so used to speaking the words that they pour out of her before she’s even aware of it. She doesn’t know, she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, she might never know. What deity can she pray to to fill the holes in her brain and this empty, yawning cavity in her chest? What is the god she used to pray to doing now, watching her suffer but not lifting a divine finger to help?
“It’s alright,” Halsin says, closing his eyes again. “I’m going to stay out here another few minutes. I would appreciate your company.”
She thinks about getting up and walking back into the inn, under the stable roof instead of the ever shifting, wide open sky. Instead, she closes her eyes and takes it in, the proximity of another body, the utter unfamiliarity of it all.
.
“Mind if I join you?”
A tiny orb of light follows Gale as he walks toward her bedroll where she’s set it up as close to the campfire as possible. It trails behind him like a shadow, casting him in a warm glow.
She sits up a little. “No. Go ahead.”
She watches him take a seat on the ground beside her, crossing his legs underneath him. He's holding a book, one of the ancient tomes they found in the ruins of Reithwin and props it open on his lap. As he flips through the pages, his orb of light hovers dutifully over his shoulder, illuminating the text for him.
She lays back on her bedroll and stares up at the blank, cursed sky. She feels the holes in her head acutely, as if looking at a map of the ruin of her brain, and tries to take some comfort in his closeness. “Gale,” she says.
His eyes fall on her easily, like he’s been waiting for her to say his name. “Yes?”
She keeps her eyes trained on the sky, imagining the stars behind the cursed cover above them. “I’ve just realized I haven’t seen you pray before. Do you pray to Mystra at all?”
He closes his book. “Not exactly. At least, it’s not the same prayer others would be used to. Wizards commune with Mystra any time we use her Weave.”
“So you talk to her?” Even as she says it, she feels a shiver build at the base of her spine. Talking to a deity, that seems… right somehow. More direct than prayer. More familiar.
“In a manner of speaking, yes. Why do you ask?”
She places one hand over the other on her chest. Through her palm, she can feel her heartbeat. She counts five beats before she tries to speak.
“I… have been trying to pray. It just feels like something I should be doing. But I can’t figure out who to pray to.”
He’s quiet for a moment. She can almost hear his brain working, whole and full of coherent thoughts and memories and feelings that make sense. She wishes she could open his skull like a hinged door and peer inside, to compare, perhaps even to take something from his head and transfer it over to hers. The familiar urge surges through her body. She clenches her hands into fists where they lay over her chest, waiting for it to pass, gritting her teeth.
His hand is soft as it covers her fists. The movement is soft, his eyes as they meet hers are soft, and she is anything but. She stays as still as she can so she doesn’t scare him. Deep inside the pit of her empty brain, a half formed thought surfaces of biting his hand until she draws blood. She swallows it down.
“Deep breaths now,” he says. His voice cuts through her violent fantasy, weaving between her heartbeats, falling gently over her ears. His breathing is steady. She matches him breath for breath, and after a minute she finds she’s able to look him in the face.
He smiles. He’s always smiling at her. “There is a prayer we may attempt, if you still want to try. A plea for guidance. It doesn’t always work,” he adds, touching his chest absently with his free hand. “The gods are fickle like that. And we mortals will always ascribe their silence to our failure. But I find it comforting all the same.”
Anara sits up and slowly unclenches her fists, stretching her fingers out, listening to her knuckles pop. “Yes. Let’s try this plea.”
“Very well. Take my hands.”
He puts his hands out, palms up. She places hers over his, their palms touching, their fingers slowly curling around each other. She’s ready for the fluttering in the pit of her stomach when it hits her, the lightness of the feeling contrasting with the dull headache she’s always fighting, the aching of her body as it clenches and unclenches around the bloody daydreams she moves in and out of every day. He doesn’t touch her often, but whenever he does it’s like this, some small and light thing that breaks through the wrong she always feels.
He closes his eyes. “Hallowed Lady, guide my thoughts now. Light my way, inform my deeds, enlighten me as you enlighten all. Show me what is best to do.”
The floating light appears between them, just over their intertwined hands. As it moves, the shadows on Gale’s face also move, and his eyes look extra bright as they fall back on her.
“Do you feel anything?” she asks. Her voice comes out in a whisper.
He shrugs. “Prayer is more for mortals than it is for the gods. Mystra is with me every time I use her magic. She’s with me now, as I use a little concentration to keep up this light you see before you. Do you feel anything?”
She glances down at the light. As if acknowledging her, the light drifts over her left hand and then her right, moving slowly. She’s no wizard, and without a scroll, magic is as unreachable to her as the starlight that sits above the cavernous dark that surrounds them. Mystra wouldn’t cast a second thought toward her even if she does heed Gale’s plea.
“I feel…” she trails. Gale’s thumb brushes the back of her knuckles gently. The lightness comes back, the fluttering feeling. She takes a deep breath. “I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t prayer I’m supposed to do exactly.”
He shifts a little closer to her, never letting go of her hands. “How about you try to do what feels good to you, instead of what you think you’re supposed to do? Perhaps you’ll find that those two things will intersect.”
Good. Another wrong word, she can feel it sit strangely on the tip of her tongue. Whatever it is in the shadowed past she can’t remember, it wasn’t good. And the good that will scratch the violent itch she feels deep inside her isn’t something she wants Gale to see. But his hands on her feel good. His closeness, the way he looks at her, the way she feels she can say anything, do anything, and the softness in his eyes won’t change, that feels good too.
His little light floats by his shoulder now, casting its pale glow upon his cheek. The darkness around them weighs on her, but he always knows how to make it a little more bearable. Without thinking, she brings his hands up to her face and presses her lips to the backs of his knuckles, one hand at a time. His breath hitches as he watches her, and then it all comes out in one long whoosh. One of his hands breaks away to massage his chest. She watches the tendrils of gray that snake up his neck shift as he swallows.
“Was that… good?” he asks haltingly.
The gods are silent, somewhere in their plane, but Gale is right here. His face is a little flushed, and the things she can say or do have an immediate effect, and when she touches him she doesn’t feel like so much is missing from her broken brain and her beat up body. She holds onto his hand with both of hers and brings it close to her chest, like she’s seen the others do, almost like a prayer.
“Yes,” she says, and she kisses his hand again, using the warmth that surges though her to try and fill the unknown gaps within.