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Gale floats in and out of consciousness. How long has he been chained to this altar, subjected to Orin’s knife and blood-white smile? Hours? Days? It’s hard to tell when he’s been knocked out for most of it.
The only thing he can really hear anymore is Orin’s voice, grating and sharp as the dagger she wields. She recounts to him the horror on her “blood-kin's" face upon finding out Gale was taken. That imagery alone is the only thing keeping Gale from nuking the vile temple and himself with it—his love is certainly searching for him now, and she’d be indescribably devastated to discover Gale was already gone. He could never do that to her, so he keeps the Weave inside, fluttering and weak against his ribs.
When he hears Clarity’s voice, he imagines he’s hallucinating. After this long without sustenance, coupled with the trauma he’s endured, he can hardly trust his own mind when it tells him he’s saved.
Orin’s voice warbles over him—smug, then shrieking with anger, then smug again. He can hardly guess what she’s saying, only able to tell that she’s walking away from the altar now. What if Clarity gets hurt? There’s got to be more to the chosen of Bhaal than she’s presented to the party, more than Clarity is prepared to go against. Gale longs to sit up, to see and understand everything that’s going on around him, but his body refuses to comply.
His mind latches onto one sentence only, and it belongs to his love. “Give him back. Now.”
Oh. She sounds even more furious than when Mystra instructed him to kill himself—then, she was shaking with tears, desperate to talk him down from that metaphorical ledge. Now, oh, now…Orin will not survive this encounter. Gale has never been more certain of another’s fate until this moment.
Not two seconds after he forms the thought, there’s an animalistic shriek coupled with the painful thud of a body hitting the floor. Orin’s screams overlap with Clarity’s, making it impossible to guess who will emerge victorious, and who will be nothing more than a pile of viscera on her father’s floors.
Orin, however, has always had such an obnoxiously high-pitched voice that her wailing beats Clarity’s by a long shot.
“No- NO! FATHER!”
It’s a raw cry of desperation, and then it’s nothing. Bhaal’s temple goes silent.
Gale claws against his crippling exhaustion to sit up, but his wrists and ankles are bound tight, making it a fruitless effort.
Then, the sound of Clarity’s shaky breaths. “Gale—”
Her voice suddenly seizes like she’s been choked. The startled exclamations of their friends—is that Wyll, Shadowheart, and Minthara? —give away that this is no mere show of distress. Something’s wrong.
An overwhelming presence floods the room, the smell of blood and rotting flesh so potent that it makes Gale’s throat burn. He can only make an educated guess, as surely no one has ever survived to make such a documentation, but he knows. He knows which god has popped in for a visit, and it likely isn’t to hand out a “well done” sticker.
With a lurch that nearly makes him sick, Gale’s consciousness shuts down again, abandoning Clarity in the face of her father.
***
The air isn’t rotten anymore. His body no longer aches and burns, his wrists and ankles no longer sore from being shackled. But most importantly, he finds himself wrapped in somebody’s warm embrace, his head against a heartbeat.
He doesn’t rise just yet. If this is just a dream, he wants to savor it for as long as he can—here, he is loved. Here, Orin can’t find him. He couldn’t have been down in the temple for more than a week, yet the gentle hand against his hair sets him fit to weep as it strokes rather than yanks. There’s no blood to mat down the locks anymore, so the familiar fingers slide through easily. Did someone bathe him as he rested? Did Clarity…?
Clarity.
He wants to see her, finally speak with her after all this time.
He shifts, trying to pull himself away, but those arms pull him right back down against a sturdy chest.
“Wait,” Clarity whispers, her breath warm against his hair. “Just a little longer.”
Gale almost laughs. This is how she intends to reunite? By keeping him from seeing her just so she can hold him some more? So unorthodox. So very Clarity. “Love,” he mumbles against her collarbone. His voice is weak and raspy, pushing through his throat like a straggler in a desert plane. “Please?”
She exhales—an unsteady sound that helps Gale understand the state she must be in—and squeezes him tightly once more before loosening her grip, her hands now resting warmly against his ribs, and Gale shifts to see her.
The sight of her face alone makes his eyes sting. It’s really her—every blemish on her dusky blue skin begging to be kissed and cherished a thousand times over, the azure fire of her eyes acting as the hearth that welcomes a weary adventurer home after years away.
She doesn’t give him long to drink her in; she never had much impulse control, anyway. Instead, she buries her face in his neck and clutches him tightly against her body, hands splayed across his upper and lower back like she fully intends to melt his form to hers, holding him for eternity.
“Clarity, please,” Gale chuckles weakly. “I need to see your face.”
“Sorry,” she mumbles quickly, pulling back once more. Her cheeks, he realizes, are wet.
He reaches up, cupping her face between careful, reverent hands, his touch even more like a prayer once it sinks in that he almost forever lost the chance to hold this face. His own life seems scant compared to never holding the world in his hands again.
“You extraordinary woman,” he breathes, enraptured by the way her lashes flutter under the weight of his worship. “You came for me.”
“Don’t you dare praise me for that,” she mumbles predictably, hands squeezing lovingly against his sides. “Just…don’t.”
“Ordering me around so soon after my first taste of freedom, are you?” He presses a kiss to her forehead with a full, aching heart. “How cruel.”
She huffs out a feigned noise of irritation as she continues to run chaste hands over his body, memorizing every inch of him like he might be violently ripped away from her again. “I’m in no mood for teasing, Gale.”
In any normal situation, he’d poke at her just a bit more, sidestepping the barriers she wiggles in his face like a particularly shiny trinket. This, however, is not any normal situation, so he settles for planting kiss after lingering kiss to every inch of Infernal skin he can reach.
Her voice trembles, thick and wet, when she next speaks. “Are you…are you in any pain at all? Shadowheart did what she could, but…”
He hums softly. It hadn’t even occurred to him that the cleric must have cast some sort of healing spell over his battered body, though in hindsight it should have been obvious.
“I’m perfectly alright, love,” he sighs. He rests his forehead gently against hers, and she presses up into the contact like Tara demanding extra pettings. “Physically, at least—though I have full confidence that the psychological damages will be few and far between with you at my side.”
She doesn’t seem completely satisfied, but at least satisfied enough not to press the matter, because she doesn’t say anything else about it.
In the quiet, Gale abruptly remembers something that occurred down in Bhaal’s temple—the presence of the Murder Lord himself.
“What happened down there?” he asks, and feels Clarity go still. “Bhaal—I felt him, before I fell unconscious again. Are you alright?”
“Oh,” she says. “…How do I explain this without sounding crazy?”
“Love, you’re a Bhaalspawn,” he says. “I’m quite used to crazy when I’m with you.”
She exhales in what might be a weak attempt at a laugh. “Touché. Though what I meant was closer to ‘how do I explain this in a way that sounds believable?’”
He waits for her to get her thoughts together. Her exchange with Bhaal was certainly not a simple one, so he can hardly blame her for not having the words for it. He can’t help but worry nonetheless—what if Bhaal returned her memories, breaking her spirit with every cruel thing she’s ever done before the Nautiloid? What if he cursed her? Placed a copmulsion over her that she’d have no choice but to obey? Every single possibility swims through Gale’s head with more urgency than the tadpole, none of them pleasant.
“Bhaal appeared before me, that’s true,” Clarity says eventually. “And he wanted me to destroy the entire world, basically.”
Gale blinks, his heart momentarily jumping. “And…did you agree?”
The words slip out before he can control them, but they don’t come from a place of doubt. Not in Clarity’s character, anyway—he just knows that there’s no way she could have survived denying Bhaal.
She pulls a face. “Of course I didn’t. What do you take me for?”
Gale stares at her, now searching for any sign that Bhaal really did place a curse over her. “You…you denied a god and lived unscathed to tell the tale?” Gale of all people understands that you can’t just do whatever you want when it comes to the gods, especially not one you’re connected to intimately—whether they be lover or father.
Clarity sucks air through her teeth, looking supremely awkward now. “Well, no. He killed me immediately.”
“Excuse me?”
“But I got better!” she says, holding up her pointer finger, a habit Gale notices she’s picked up from him. “Withers brought me back, but without my divine blood.”
“Hold on, hold on,” he says, lifting a hand to stop her. “Go back—Bhaal killed you?”
“Stripped me of my blood right there on the temple floor,” she confirms, nodding.
Gale feels as though he’s just had his bedroll yanked out from under him. “And…Withers brought you back?”
“Basically told Bhaal to go fuck himself because I worked so hard to defy him all this time,” she says, almost thoughtfully.
“Without your divine blood?” Gale says in disbelief.
“Gale, my lovely, must I repeat everything I just recounted?” she says, gripping his cheeks and squeezing gently.
There’s no tension in her hands, he realizes. Every time she held his face before, it was as if she were constantly restraining herself from crushing his skull like a sunmelon—but now, there’s nothing. Her eyes, always flicking about distractedly, now hold his gaze with unabashed softness. She seems…peaceful.
“Clarity—” He grips her shoulders, eyes positively glowing. “You’re cured of your violent urges?”
“Cured!” she exclaims delightedly. “I don’t need to protect you from myself anymore!”
Exhaustion from his kidnapping momentarily forgotten, Gale kisses her hard. All her guilt over her urges, all the terror that she might kill him in her sleep one day, gone. She’s free. Perhaps she’ll never truly be free from her past, but now her future is hers for the taking.
“I always had faith in you, you know,” he says softly, inches from her mouth. She hums happily, basking in the praise like a dragonborn in the sun. “My darling, I am so proud of you. You’re stronger than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“We’ve fought an Avatar of Myrkul together, yet me telling my father to piss off is what impresses you?” she chuckles. “I should find Mystra next.”
“Do not,” he warns, his eyes alight with mischief at the same time. “I’m not entirely sure Withers would bring you back that time.”
She just grins. “Alright, alright. I’ll refrain from antagonizing every god that’s ever known of my existence.”
“Good,” he replies dryly.
-
It isn’t until later, when he’s been welcomed back by the rest of their companions, that Gale finds out how Orin died: Clarity, in a moment of blinding rage, had tackled her to the ground and beat the shit out of her so violently that she died before she could transform into a monster.
And, well. If that isn’t a choice final murder under Bhaal’s thumb, he doesn’t know what is.