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Lae'zel sometimes wears armor to their dragon chess sessions. It's a practical decision, likely, as their games usually happen after the conclusion of dinner and her sword training drills, and she simply chooses the path of least resistance in wearing her armor. She makes excuses: it sharpens her mind, it puts her in a strategic mindset, it's a show of bravado. Excuses are what they are, but he's certainly not going to be the one to push back on her. You don't question someone who routinely and proudly wields a giant sword.
Gale, of course, changes into clean clothes as soon as he's washed the remains of chopped herbs off of his hands. Sometimes earlier, when he doesn't want the stench of their earlier battles marring the aroma of a delicate stew. He's a simple man, and very cognizant of the fact that clean clothes can be a luxury. In the Shadowlands, you take whatever luxuries you can get.
Tonight, Lae'zel is not armored. They've corrupted her, made her fond of more mortal comforts. She's in her usual sleepwear with an additional blanket draped over her shoulders. The Shadowlands is a strange cold, a kind of bone chill without any wind. Blankets are only a suggestion of aid, but they help if you have the right mindset.
"Good evening," he says pleasantly, as she sits down across from him.
"Good evening," she replies, and tugs the blanket tighter around her shoulders. The lighting, as always, is dismal in the Shadowlands. The board is as monochrome as the trees, and the two of them lack the ability to see in these conditions. She leans in to the board to see, and he moves the lantern closer to her side of the table.
"Are you cold?" he asks.
She shakes her head immediately. The blanket heaves. He swears that her jaw is chattering. "No. I'm fine."
He'd like to make some display of gallantry, but he has nothing. "Let's begin."
He usually sets the board to let Lae'zel go first. She deliberates her decisions. She had learned the rules of the game quickly, and part of the strategy. She might have been at an advantage even; Githyanki training involved more thinking in the third dimension than any lessons in His wizarding education.
She moves and he moves, and so it continues on and on until she's stuck in a difficult position, and sits staring at the board for minutes on end.
It's fine. He's passed his time in worse settings. Every so often she reaches for a piece and then stops, mutters something, and re-evaluates.
"You should stop staring." She glares at him, and he realizes that he is.
He turns his palms up in supplication. "I mean no offense."
She shakes her head but seems to believe him. "I suppose it's proper. An act of intimidation."
"I don't mean to intimidate you."
She places her hand on a piece but does not lift it. "You mean to win." The flicker of the lantern throws shadows across her face. It makes her expression more ominous.
"Well, of course."
"Why stare, then? Am I merely a puzzle to you?"
The truth is not so dastardly. He just likes to look at her.
"Something like that."
She removes her hand from the piece and props her chin on her fist. "What have you learned?"
Gale might have assumed she was stalling, if he thought that Lae'zel was the kind of person to stall. "You are well-educated."
"You knew that upon meeting me."
"I wasn't thinking on it, when I met you." He had been rather focused on extracting himself from that rock. What he knew was that he had tumbled out of that strange void into the sun, and found his arm in the grasp of a woman unlike any he'd ever met. Only later had he learned that she was the only other one in the party who knew the word "ceremorphosis," and even later that her derision for books only came from their impermanence.
"You are efficient. Brave." He doesn't add the word beautiful, though he most certainly thinks it.
"Susceptible to flattery." He thinks she smiles, though it might just be a trick of the bad lighting.
"Hardly. You just appreciate the truth."
She makes her move. She lifts the piece she had been toying with, and sets it down, and cringes as soon as she lifts her hand off of it. His own move had been planned five minutes ago, and she scowls as he indicates for her to once again move.
"You hate this game," he offers, as another truth.
"Very astute of you."
"Yet you continue to play it. Why?"
"It's bloodless."
"What do you mean?" She's ignored half of his question. He thinks.
"There's no meat to it. Look, I am killing your sylph." She makes a move as if to crush the sylph with her dragon, but then just closes her palm over it and pulls it away, leaving the space vacant. Her dragon takes the spot, and despite it's supposed peacefulness wears a mean snarl. "She goes silently."
"It's a game of strategy." He knows what she means, of course, but already she's gearing up for a more convincing argument, and there's no point in him getting in the way of that.
"As war is. But here we forget the immediacy of it."
"The joy of it?"
"Yes, the joy. But also something else. It isn't a worthy replication, is what I mean." She scrutinizes the board without really looking at it at all. "It's too distant."
What he thinks she means is that war isn't distant, for her. Even in their easy fights, Lae'zel is in the midst of it, soaking in the twilight of life and death. She sinks her sword into their enemies, relishes in the warm spray of their blood on her. She enjoys that nearness.
"For you. I cast fireball." He mimes the area of effect over her hapless thieves and clerics, who cluster and cower at the center of the middle board. There's that rare and stunning smile again, visible despite the dark.
But that slips, too, and she looks him in the eye as she takes his basilisk. "It's playing at godhood."
"Isn't it tempting? Even a little?" He can see her denial of the answer immediately, probably before she does. There they are on the middle board: one of her warriors, nearing the possibility of ascension to the next rank, to heroism.
He thinks himself a mage, but he too is merely a warrior hoping for promotion. He is more powerful perhaps, but just as disposable. Say that for his own predicament: a chess piece can only ever capture one other. He can play a board-wide fireball, for infinite cost.
Of course, that's an abstraction of the fear he feels. She is right despite his arguing. For all the talk of fireballs and capturing, there is the very physical caged anger of the contained weave in his chest. And it's easier to put his mind on dragonchess than think about what that means to him.
He's been thinking for a while, and Lae'zel has been staring, and she looks at him with a dark and unreadable expression. She moves her warrior and promotes it to hero.
"I understand the appeal. Nevertheless, I hate the game."
"We don't have to keep playing." It is late, and Lae'zel does so prudently value her rest.
"I want to win." She pins him with a glare. What she means is, I want to beat you.
They continue, and he wins, though not easily. He'd been victorious every game they'd played, aside from the few Lae'zel had forced into stalemates.
"You've won," she says, and offers her hand in traditional Faerun sportsmanship.
"You played well." He offers her, as a truth and a compliment.
"You've proven yourself." Suddenly, he feels the discomfort of being looked at like a puzzle. Lae'zel looks at him with some strange question in her eyes, and he doesn't want to make any assumptions. Doesn't know what to assume. "We will battle again."
"It's late." It is late, and the camp has settled to the eerie quiet of the Shadowlands, where one feels the thump of their own chest like thunder. And his ears buzz in the silence, and the orb thrums, and his own reactionary heart beneath beats out some foreign tune, but he doesn't think that has much to do with the Shadowlands at all.
"I will meet you tomorrow night." She stands. He is very sure that the battle tomorrow will be anything but bloodless. Despite that, he welcomes the thought.