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Shadowheart casts guidance.
The tips of her fingers touch the back of Gale’s neck. A cooling sensation spreads, starting at her wrist, spreading across the tendons and blue veins up the back of her hand, onto her knuckles, her fingers, until she feels Gale shiver. She stands close behind him, close enough to see the goosebumps rise on his neck. He takes one step forward. She clutches her hand close to her chest, trying to hold onto the last vestiges of the cast, trying to pull some of that cooling certainty for herself, but it’s gone.
Gale raises his hand and casts a spell, and somewhere in the distance, a flash of lightning strikes his target perfectly and the smell of smoke is everywhere.
It’s only after the fight, standing on the shore of the river by bodies still smoking from Gale’s magic, that she lets her concentration finally drop. As the spell fades, he looks up at her where he kneels by the bodies, beside Astarion. His hand is half in, half out the pocket of one of their attackers. She can see the exact moment the connection between them fades. It leaves his eyes first. It always starts with the eyes.
“Thank you,” he mouths, and he turns back to the body, lifting a stoppered potion from its pocket and holding it up to the sunlight for a closer look. As he lifts his arm, his collar shifts, and she spots the soft, smoky lines of the orb, drifting up his neck and into his beard.
At times, she can pretend the lines, and the orb they come from, aren’t there. Since they’ve arrived in the city, he’s been wearing a cloak around his shoulders to ward off the chill that seems to come from the water, especially in the early mornings when a fog sits on the surface of the river, rolling along with the softly moving streams. The cloak is clasped around his neck with a pin they found somewhere. It covers the wispy evidence of his folly. She can only see the lines along his cheek if he looks directly at her. And recently, he’s been looking up, toward the city, and the decorated domes of the wizard shop they’re slowly making their way towards.
Shadowheart isn’t sure what they’ll find. But Gale seems to be. And something in the way he keeps looking up toward the shop has her clutching her hand close to her chest. But her spell has long since faded, and she can’t yet muster the energy to draw it out again.
.
She can’t remember these city streets, the broken cobblestones that line the paths, the sun bleached bricks that make up buildings and stores and homes. Between Astarion, Wyll, and Karlach, city dwellers in their parasite-less former lives, they find their way around somehow. Shadowheart and Gale stick to the back of the party, being led down winding side streets. They get lost, more than a few times. Karlach pops into a nearby shop for directions. Gale leans against a wall and looks around, his chin raised slightly, as if he can somehow orient himself in this unfamiliar city while buildings rise high over their heads.
“Cast guidance,” he tells her.
“I can’t,” she says. “I need to rest.”
His lips purse, just slightly. He’s been in a hurry since they arrived. All of them are, but Gale especially. There’s a sense of impatience about him. Something more than the mission that propels them all forward.
He looks back down, at her, and touches her gently, the back of his knuckle brushing her hair from her face, soft white hair that sweeps across her forehead and sometimes falls into her line of sight, startling her. She still hasn’t gotten used to the white.
“Let’s head back to camp, then,” he says. “I can tell you’re tired.”
She starts to sink into his touch, but he’s already withdrawn his hand and is looking up again, up and around, searching. He hasn’t stopped searching since they crossed through Wyrm’s Rock. The city holds something, something he’s looking for. Shadowheart leans against the cool brick wall and watches him. She searches his face, but besides a wrinkle between his knit together brows, he doesn’t give anything away.
.
She wakes when he finally enters her tent but doesn’t make it known, keeping her eyes closed and her breathing steady. He lays down behind her. His arm winds around her and brings her back up against his front. The fronts of his knees touch the backs of hers. His face is pressed against the back of her head. They fit together perfectly, but Shadowheart feels distraction in the way his fingertips lightly lay on her hip. He takes a deep breath of her hair and sighs. His breath on the back of her neck raises goosebumps. He stirs slightly.
“Are you awake?” he whispers, so quietly that he hardly makes a sound.
“A little,” she whispers back.
For a moment, the only sound is of their breathing. He stirs again, shifting against her back, and removes his hand from her hip.
“The book,” she starts.
“Hm?”
“The book you’re looking for. About the thing we saw on the Absolute.” There’s a question on the tip of her tongue but she doesn’t ask it. She turns to face him, taking in the dark circles around his eyes, the gray lines that disappear into his beard. His eyes are unfocused as she turns, but snap to attention suddenly.
“We’ll see when we find it,” he says. “I don’t want to speak too soon.”
He kisses her, lightly, then turns to his other side. She watches his hair slide down the back of his neck and pool onto the rolled up blanket they’re using as a pillow.
“Gale,” she says to the back of his head. The question comes back, pushing against the backs of her teeth.
His body stills, as though waiting for her. When nothing comes, he says, “Goodnight, my love,” and moves his head as he readjusts, the sound of his hair slipping against the fabric of their bedroll raising goosebumps on her skin.
.
Shadowheart casts guidance.
Her fingertips are pressed into the small of Gale’s back. Even through his robes she can feel the dip of the base of his spine, familiar to her now from all the times she’s touched him there in the dark. He shudders, then raises his hand and reaches for the book.
It looks ordinary, if a little old. Shadowheart doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be looking for. Some indication of what this book means, to Gale, to her, to this tender thing between them. He tucks it under his arm. The room shifts and the dimensions twist. She keeps her eyes on the back of Gale’s head, on the soft brown hair that’s peppered here and there with shiny gray, trying to hold onto her concentration. Her attention keeps being pulled to the dusty cover of the old book.
Outside, in the sunny plaza, Gale closes the book and stares down at the cover. He meets her eyes eventually. His face breaks into a smile. He pulls her toward him by the edge of her sleeve. When he kisses her, she finally breaks her concentration, and the sudden loss of connection makes her catch her breath, a gasp as her lips meet his.
“You’ve been patient with me,” he says, a murmur against her mouth. The rest of the party shuffles around, she can distinctly hear Astarion scoff, but Gale holds her close, too close to look behind her. “I have something for you. A proposition. We can speak more tonight.”
He holds the book close to his chest, tightly in his hand.
.
Gale speaks, about magic, about gods, and Shadowheart thinks about her hair.
It’s white now, something that still shocks her when she catches a glimpse of herself in a shop window or a puddle of water, or the still surface of her red wine as she brings her glass to her lips to take a sip. Her hand twinges with an echo of pain, a figment of her imagination, any time she thinks too deeply on this change, this new hair, the color of the moon. She knows, in her heart, she will never be free of the whims of the gods. She isn’t surprised when Gale says he wants to become one.
He tells her in his tent, surrounded by books and trinkets. The book, the dustiest one, the oldest one, is on his lap. She stares at it as he speaks, and words from his mouth whip past her as though she’s standing in the middle of a windstorm. Now “crown” and then “reforge” and then “ascend”. He stops talking, at one point. She looks up at him. The marks under his eye that winds down into his beard are darker against his skin in the pale moonlight that filters down into his tent.
“Shadowheart,” he says gently. “Say something, my love.”
The same question, bubbling up in her mouth, pooling there like water. She wants to spit it out. But his face. His careful consideration of her. What if she told him to give it up? What god could protect them from the wrath and the whims of other gods, if he can’t?
She pushes the book off his lap and presses herself close to him. One of his hands touches her back, holding her close. She glances to her side. His other hand is reaching for the book.
.
Shadowheart casts guidance.
A wave of goosebumps rises over Gale’s bare chest. She can see it, the little bumps, the hairs standing on end. Her fingertips are cool. She holds them lightly over his mark, watching the glow of the cast illuminate this and him and the effect on his skin before it fades, drenching them in darkness.
The slight pull of him on the edges of her concentration is like the very edge of her sleeve being tugged, noticeable but not overwhelming. The thread connecting them is invisible but there in the tent, in the dark. She follows it, up his chest, following the lines of his mark, up his neck, onto his jaw, until she meets his lips and he sighs into her mouth.
“So,” he whispers. He won’t let a moment pass in silence. His mind is like a forest, a hundred trees with a thousand branches and a million million leaves, everything moving and breathing and thinking all the time. “I’m feeling very guided right now. Very wise.”
She nudges him, her hand pushing his shoulder. He nudges her back. He’s been smiling more since they found the book, been more playful, more himself.
“Good,” she says. “Now think. Focus on this decision. Tell me what feels right to you.” The question, finally, pushes past the backs of her teeth where it has been pressing, “What do you want us to do?”
He closes his eyes. “Can you cast on yourself?” he asks, although he knows the answer.
“I can,” she tells him.
“And have you? To seek some guidance perhaps, on this decision?”
“It’s not my decision,” she points out.
He opens his eyes and gives her a look, pursed lips, a little impatient.
“It’s not,” she says. “Now, focus.”
He closes his eyes again. Outside, the fire cracks. Someone whispers something to someone else. A breeze pushes through the camp and stirs the trees around them. Shadowheart lets all these sounds and thoughts pass through her, holding onto her concentration.
She also holds tightly to Gale. Her body is pressed closely to his, almost on top of him. If she focuses hard enough, she can feel the residue of her cast in the shape of his collarbones, in the softness of his belly, the hair on his chest and his arms. He slips an arm around her waist. His fingers trace the shape of her hip bone. Her concentration begins to drop, and she refocuses, snapping back to attention.
His eyes are still closed. “Shadowheart,” he says in an almost whisper, his lips barely moving. “I think I can do it.”
Under his eye, the wispy lines of his last attempt at greatness are stark against his skin. She wonders if they’ll stay there if he becomes a god, or if they’ll be erased, along with the orb and the marks on his neck and his chest, and the old scar on his forehead, and the gray in his hair. And the soft touch of his hand on her hip. And his eyes when he looks at her. She curls up against him, feeling him slip away even now, just as easily as her concentration slips and then drops.
A shudder runs through them as she lets go of the cast. The thread between them disappears. Gale opens his eyes and gives her a smile. She holds him as closely as she can, trying to absorb the coolness of certainty from his skin before it fades, but it fades, it fades, and Gale is still smiling.