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Chapter One – The First Spark
I was born in Waterdeep, in the Year of the Emerald Sun—1454 DR, though no one remarked upon it as an auspicious year. There were no comets in the sky, no royal births, no prophecies fulfilled in alleys or temples. It was a quiet year, all told. But even quiet years carry seeds that split the world open, and I… I was one such seed.
Our home was a narrow three-story building just off Delzorin Street, close enough to the market that the scent of honeyed almonds and fresh parchment often mingled through the open windows. My mother kept a bookshop on the ground floor, “The Gilded Glyph,” though the shop itself was far from grand, to me it was a dragon’s hoard—tales of planar travelers, long-lost grimoires, and first edition romances—lived in the cramped shelves and teetering stacks.
Even now, decades removed, I remember the sound of Waterdeep in the early morning—street vendors shouting over the cries of gulls, temple bells chiming high above the roar of cart wheels, and somewhere in the distance, the echo of distant spellwork, like a storm held just beneath the skin of the world.
I was still a child when I first realized that not all cities are created equal. Waterdeep is a living thing, restless and ancient. It sleeps with one eye open and dreams in labyrinths. It has roots that stretch deep—so deep that even the bravest mages tread carefully, and fools vanish with barely a whisper. But I was no fool. I was watching.
From the windows of my mother’s shop, I learned the city like a language. I saw masked Lords pass in anonymous finery, their sigils sewn into silk linings, trailing mystery behind them like perfume. I watched cloaked figures in the colors of the Watchful Order glide through crowds unnoticed, their spellbooks clutched to their sides like lovers. I watched a man burn to ash in Trollskull Alley once, struck down by a rival mage for reasons never spoken aloud.
But I was never afraid. Not once.
I was enchanted.
While other children played at war or chased hoops through alleys, I watched the movements of adventurers in the Yawning Portal. I looked on as the famed barkeep Durnan sized up mercenaries from across the taproom, always knowing which would return from Undermountain bloodied and changed—and which would never return at all. I would sneak in through the side doors on my rare moments of freedom and press myself between dwarves and sellswords, wide-eyed as they spoke of monsters and marvels in the dark.
I yearned—not for fame, not for gold, but for knowledge. For the magic that ran like molten silver beneath their stories. I wanted to see it. Touch it. To test myself against the labyrinth beneath the city, against the riddles of Halaster Blackcloak’s cursed domain. What child doesn’t dream of dragons? But I… I dreamed of becoming one.
I knew the names of Waterdeep’s archmages long before I understood what they represented. Khelben Arunsun, Laeral Silverhand… I traced their legacies like constellations, whispering their feats as if they were bedtime prayers. My mother indulged me—how could she not? She had fallen in love with stories too, once. But even she didn’t quite understand that I wasn’t pretending.
I wasn’t dressing up in scraps of magic like a child in a costume.
I was studying the city.
Learning its pulse.
There were dragons here, of course, though most wore masks of their own—some literal, some far more clever. Rumors of the Deep Lord, the great wyrm who watched over the city’s gold from the shadows, fascinated me. I asked questions. I listened to whispers that were not meant for my ears. There is something about a child’s curiosity—so small, so easily overlooked—that lets it slip through the cracks in the world. I heard things.
And I remembered everything.
By the time Elminster visited us, I had already begun assembling a map in my mind—not of streets or towers, but of connections. Who bowed to whom. Which temples traded favors in whispers. Which mages dined together once a month, and which crossed the street rather than meet one another’s gaze. I knew which alley behind the House of Inspired Hands would sometimes flash with lightning just past midnight, and where in the Castle Ward a silver raven landed once every third day, always at the same hour, always gone in a blink.
Waterdeep taught me that the world was not a straight road. It was a spiral staircase—sometimes ascending, sometimes descending, often both at once.
******
My father was already dying when I was born. I do not remember much of his voice, only the weight of his hand when he held me, thin and trembling, like the final brushstroke of a painting left unfinished. Something had happened to him, something awful, but it was never spoken of.
He passed before my sixth nameday, and my mother, brave and burning with unspent love, took me to the House of Wonder, weeping and worried. I understand now that it was to plead with her, to claim him, to not leave him to the Wall of Souls in the City of the Dead.
The temple of Mystra stands like a pillar of dawn in Sea Ward—its spires gilded in goldleaf, its stained-glass windows vast enough to cradle constellations. I had never seen anything so vast, so alive. The air shimmered there. I do not speak in metaphor—the air truly shimmered, full of held magic, humming beneath the breath of prayer and invocation.
I remember clutching her hand as we walked the inner sanctum, but she gently let go, as if to exclude me from her grief. I wandered. I touched the silver thread carved into the stonework. I stood before the statue of Mystra with her eyes half-closed in beatific knowing. And somewhere in that sanctuary, I heard the Weave speak.
Not in words.
Not even in music.
It moved through me.
A current. A rhythm. A knowing. I can’t explain it better than that.
I cast my first spell a week later.
Dancing Lights.
A scroll had fallen between the floorboards in the shop’s back room, likely tucked there by a distracted customer or my father, long before. I retrieved it like it was treasure, whispered the syllables, and watched as soft spheres of light gathered in the air like fireflies in spring. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The world had obeyed me.
My mother did not scream. She stood in the doorway, her eyes wide and full of tears.
“Oh, Gale,” she whispered, “you are his son.”
It was only months later that Elminster came to call.
Not in glory, not in fire and spellwork—just an old man in a robe that smelled of old pipeweed and mountain wind, who asked for tea and spoke of fate in riddles. He offered me a place at Blackstaff Tower. “He’s already listening to the Weave,” he told my mother over a cracked ceramic cup. “If he is not taught to sing with it, it will drown him in its song.”
She didn’t want to let me go. But she knew. She had always known. My mother loved magic in stories, in symbols, in myth. I loved it in motion—in the pulse of light, the turn of a phrase into power, the hush before the storm.
And so I went, not weeping, but writing. My early spellwork was all in verse—evocations shaped like elegies, illusions cast in couplets. It was how I kept her close. How I remembered where I had come from.
You, dear reader, may think this is leading toward my well-known rise, my dalliance with divinity, the slow, steady seduction of power that began with Mystra and ended with exile.
But that is not how this story begins.
This is the tale of a boy in a holy place, reaching toward a thread he could not see, and finding that it wrapped around him already—ancient and infinite and whispering his name.