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Gilmore has been a master and merchant of the arcane for so long that he's almost forgotten that the divine exists. Oh, it's always around him, and in a decidedly non-abstract way—Emon is not short of temples and churches—but he spends so much of his time in his own cloister, his shop, that the bells at his door are always louder than the ones outside calling worshippers to service.
Then he almost dies.
When he comes back out of that dance with death, that close encounter with the end of everything, the radiance of Pike's power is almost too much to bear. He never forgets the feeling of Vax's arms around him, of course, or the pain of remembering how to breathe properly again, but that light takes up residence in his mind in a way nothing else quite manages.
Leaving Emon is a painful necessity but it's fascinating to discover Whitestone, albeit mostly from a bed in the early days. He only vaguely remembers the city from when he was a good deal younger, before the de Rolos were—were slaughtered. It would be dishonest and disrespectful to think of it any other way.
Most of Vox Machina depart on their newest adventure.
Pike stays.
Gilmore heals, slowly.
Sherri yells at him every time he overexerts himself, and teams up with Cassandra de Rolo to restore the city to some degree of functionality, using her business savvy to do everything from compiling a census of refugees and matching them to available housing, to figuring out a basic rate of trading labor for food. The de Rolo coffers are not bottomless, and much of the money goes on healing supplies.
When Gilmore is back on his feet he realizes just how much healing is required. He watches Pike make every awful decision: a child's broken bone can be set and left to heal without magical aid, but a festering wound across the back of a man's scalp needs divine assistance. A suppurating burn running the length of a woman's calf gets a sweet herb-infused ointment reapplied three times daily, but an Emon soldier complaining of blinding headaches gets a worried look and a healing spell.
"How do you choose?" he asks her on the second day of following her around, dutifully toting bandages and jars.
Pike considers this, then shrugs. "I let Sarenrae guide me."
Gilmore has to accept this, because he knows it's the only explanation she can and will give. Oh, there are other divine casters in Whitestone who can provide magical healing. There's a halfling druid who does nothing but cast cure spells and mix potions all day until she drops. There's a wet-behind-the-ears human cleric of Sarenrae who thinks Pike's not just a cleric but an actual avatar of their shared deity. There are people with lesser training who have been acting as triage nurses whenever new refugees come into Whitestone.
But Pike is the only one with that deep, profound radiance.
One evening their already precarious routine is disrupted entirely. One of the farmers, who's been working hard to ready a long-neglected field for replanting, is brought in on a rough-made stretcher by his friends.
"Is there anything you can do?" one of the friends asks Gilmore, who happens to be the one to find them entering the makeshift hospital.
Gilmore can't personally do anything, but he's already yelling as loud as he can for Pike, because if anyone can do something for the man on the litter with the mattock embedded in his chest, it's her.
"He tripped over the rock he was tryin' to shift," the same friend explains, as if evidence of the farmer's hard work will stop the blood bubbling out of his mouth with every difficult breath. "We're gonna plant wheat..."
Pike comes flying into the entryway, stops short, and says a remarkably understated, "Oh, dear." She drops to her knees beside the litter, grasping her holy symbol of Sarenrae and placing her hand on the man's chest. "Be ready to pull it out when I say," she tells the man's friends and, although they all go sickly green, one kneels across from her, hands on the head of the mattock, while another grasps the shaft.
Gilmore holds his breath. He hasn't been on this side of one of Pike's big miracles yet. Her small miracles, yes. But this—this looks impossible to fix.
The mattock comes out with a sickening slurp on Pike's command and Gilmore sees rather more of the inside of the farmer's chest than he would ever care to see.
But then, as she fervently calls upon her goddess for aid, that radiance slowly envelops her, beginning with the holy symbol clasped in one hand and lighting up that arm before creeping down to her other hand, which is pressed now over the gaping bloody hole.
And the shattered bone, muscle, and flesh begin to knit.
"Oh, holy..." one of the standing farmers says in a sigh, dropping to one knee. The other two follow suit, until they're all bending knee to Pike across the farmer's body.
"Not to me," Pike says with a bit of a snap in her voice. "Never to me." The farmer's eyes open, and she smiles down at him, her expression going from stern to sweet in a second. "Hey there. Can you breathe okay?"
The farmer coughs. Gilmore kneels by his head and holds a cloth for him to spit into, one hand cradling the back of his head. The poor bastard's only twenty at the oldest. Lucky for him they have Pike; he would doubtless be dead without her, and twenty is far too young to die.
"What happened to me?" the farmer asks.
His friends explain to him, words tumbling over each other. Pike quietly rises and goes to have a word with one of the townspeople who've been assisting in the hospital. Gilmore keeps alternately wiping blood from the man's lips and giving him sips of water until finally he spits saliva that's only slightly tinged with pink.
Pike returns with an armload of fabric—they've been making do with roughspun wool if they have to, but this is rather nicer linen, an extra comfort for the man who just nearly died.
"Bring him through and we'll get him cleaned up," she says, and his friends lift the stretcher again with alacrity, leaving a splotch of blood on the floor beneath it. Gilmore moves to at least put a cloth over it, but one of the de Rolo maids is on standby with a mop and shoos him away, so he follows the litter.
As soon as the man's offloaded onto a freshly cleared bed, Pike sends his friends out. "Go clean his tools so they're ready for him to use when he comes back," she says, and they go, but not without one last reverent look at her.
"Do you think he'll want to go back to work?" Gilmore asks Pike.
"Got to work," the farmer rasps. "Good of the city."
"Don't talk," Gilmore and Pike say together.
The farmer seems to agree with this, closing his eyes. He looks worn out from the experience, as he has every right to do, but so does Pike when Gilmore looks at her, dark circles under her eyes that weren't there fifteen minutes ago.
"Go sleep," he says, giving her a little push.
She gives him a troubled look. "But—"
"Go. You need it." Gilmore gestures to the farmer, who's still wearing his blood-crusted clothes. "I can make him comfortable."
Pike still looks worried, but it's her default expression these days. She leaves Gilmore to strip the soiled clothes off the man, sponge the blood and mud from his body, and get him into one of the linen hospital robes that's been thrown together by one of the seamstresses.
Once he's finished tucking the young farmer into bed, making sure he has enough blankets and pillows, and letting the other ward workers know about the man's condition, Gilmore goes to check in on the other patients.
It's dark down this end of the ward, and candles are hard to come by. Gilmore casts a light spell on one of the lanterns, chafing at the fact that unless there's an actual attack on Whitestone, his arcane magic is useful for fuck-all else. There's literally only so far he can use teleport and, while dancing lights and ghost sounds have proven to be useful entertainment when he's beset by Salda's children, they're hardly anything... glorious.
The woman with the burn on her calf is clearly in pain, and when Gilmore unwraps her bandages he sees why: part of the wound has turned a nasty infected red. For a moment he considers finding Pike, but she looked far too drained when he sent her away.
Instead he fetches out the herbal ointment and gently wipes the wound clean before reapplying it. The woman—her name is Esta, and she was once a guard in Emon, before Emon stopped being a place—gives a sigh of relief.
"'s nice," she murmurs.
"You were lucky to get away with your life." Gilmore hasn't said it to any of them before, but he's thought it plenty of times.
"No luck in it. Just a lot of running."
"On that?"
"Why do you think it's so bad?" Her tone is acerbic but not unkind.
"Well." Gilmore finishes applying the ointment and carefully wraps it with a fresh bandage. "It's better than it was." This is true. Esta's leg no longer smells like it's going to rot off.
"It is, thanks be to Sarenrae."
"Sarenrae's blessing on you," Gilmore echoes, mostly because it's what Pike always says, regardless of whether she's actually provided any magical healing or not.
The palm of his hand where it rests against Esta's bandage flares with a sudden warmth, and Esta gasps.
"Oh! What did you do?" She sits up and scrabbles at the bandage, though Gilmore tries to stop her, and pulls it down enough to show that the new angry red lines have receded. "How did you do that? It feels so much better!"
"I don't know," Gilmore says, fixing the bandage back in place and persuading Esta to lie back down. It takes him a few minutes, but at last he can escape to a quiet dim alcove.
The shadows around him only make it easier to see the soft radiance in the middle of his palm. It's like he's captured a single dancing light, or a tiny glowing rune. Except that it's neither. It's his own small spark of the same brilliant glow he's seen around Pike before.
"Sarenrae?" he whispers, and the light flares briefly before fading completely.
But he can still feel it inside him, and when he leaves the ward it's for a purpose other than to find food and sleep.
It's getting late, but someone in town is bound to be willing to craft him a holy symbol.
He knows just the gnome to bless it, too, when she wakes up.