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It had been a long fucking day.
The breeze rushed over Hollow's face, so heavy with the promise of rain that it felt like she was teetering on the moment just before breaking the surface of water.
Wrestling with gnolls tended to have a lot of unpleasant side effects, not the least of which was smelling like wet dog. They were all beaten and bruised and in a foul mood, the humid weather bringing no relief from the heat, tracks of moisture cutting through the dust on their faces.
None of them spoke much. Astarion stuck to the shadows wherever he could find them. Shadowheart had shed her mail and was carrying it slung over one shoulder, her long dark hair stubbornly stuck to her cheeks and forehead. Gale had tied his up into a bun, though that didn't seem to help his lagging pace behind the rest of the group. Compared to all of them, Hol dealt with heat the best, the fires of hell that singed her bloodline taking away most of the brunt. But her ribs ached, and her ankle throbbed from when she'd landed painfully after a gnoll had pulled her down from an outcropping where she was trying to hide.
And it was still an hour to camp.
They were approaching the cliffside path that led back to their temporary home, the dusty incline smugly beckoning them and all their bruises. Hol shifted her gaze past the edge of the cliff, to the far, far ground below them — their intended destination.
"Gale," she said, "you still alive back there?"
"I will be generous and say 'yes.'" Gale attempted to stand straighter under her scrutiny, but was leaning heavily on his staff.
Just 'yes' would have sufficed, but the man still decided to squeeze out a full sentence. Hol would be the first to admit — emphatically and with rude gestures — that she and the wizard did not see eye to eye.
He was also frustratingly amicable. He seemed to take the moments when she cut off his lectures in stride, and when she had disparaged his cooking to cut to the chase of the favor he was clearly working up to, he simply obliged her. Granted, that was probably because both of them knew that she ate twice the helpings of his meals than anyone else in the party.
It nagged at her, like a pebble stuck in a boot. In her experience, people like him were kind to people like her for three reasons: to mock, to keep up appearances, or because they wanted something. Hol was pretty convinced that it was 'all of the above' with Gale.
"You got any tricks left in you? 'Cause if so, I'd rather we all float down there," she hooked a thumb toward the sheer drop, "than have to drag our sorry asses down the path."
Gale looked at her mutely, heat and exhaustion turning his mind to molasses, but eventually the idea clicked.
"You want me to featherfall us?", he ran a hand over his beard in thought. "Yes, we can certainly do that."
The wizard stepped up beside her and looked over the edge, mumbling something about distance and velocity under his breath.
Hollow looked to the other two.
"You good with that?"
Shadowheart shrugged. "As long as we don't end up crashing halfway to the bottom, I don't see why not."
Astarion smirked while tugging at the sleeves of his doublet, surreptitiously trying to air out the sweat patches that had spread from his armpits. He tilted his head artfully, dislodging a bit of gnoll gunk in the process. "I do so love to travel in style."
Hol nudged Gale with an elbow, startling him out of his calculations. "Waitin' on you, magic man."
The magic man in question smiled slightly before he let the spell carry him away. It was brief — this spell was simple — but Hollow noticed that every time he cast, no matter the purpose, he approached the task with a sort of reverence. It wasn’t trepidation, more like… a wistful savouring. His gaze went somewhere far off, and he performed the somatic components as if they were a caress, his fingers tracing slowly through the air.
It was slightly off-putting to watch, as if she was intruding on a private moment. But the spell took, as it always did, encircling all of them with wisps of slightly shimmering magic.
It felt like the moment just before a moving cart halts to a stop, a perpetual weightlessness. Hol bounced on the balls of her feet, testing it.
She loved the feeling. The first time Gale had cast it on her, when a bandit had pushed her off a rickety scaffold, she thought to herself that the weird power of her pact had better be able to do that too. She hadn’t gotten around to trying. Not yet, anyway.
Satisfied that the effect took, she threw a nod of thanks at Gale.
Then she stepped backwards off the cliff, flicking off a salute to the rest of them.
The rocky edge fell away from her gently, soaked up by the heavy swab of clouds. She swayed slowly back and forth as if lying in a hammock, hands laced behind her head; the very vision of indulgent relaxation.
Her companions followed soon after.
Shadowheart stepped off with a cheerful hop that neither she nor Hol expected. She soon recovered though, and aligned herself into a more serious pose, ready to land. She either didn't realise or didn't try to hide the twinkling joy in her eyes, though, her lips curved upward slightly, either at the view or the reprieve from the hard slog they were on before.
Astarion, much like Hollow, leapt off backwards, all but ready to land on an enormous feather bed. Legs and arms akimbo, he swung himself around to face the nearly-setting sun. He looked older like this, more real, the dim light of an overcast day carving grooves around his mouth and below his eyes, as if the darkness he lived in for so long was tucking away into his face to wait out the sunlight.
Gale gathered up his robes in one hand and took the same casual step he would when descending a staircase. Then he whipped out a small book and began to read, looking for all the world like he was lounging in a library. Hol rolled her eyes but held in a derisive snort. Wouldn't do to have him 'accidentally' drop the spell on her a few feet above the ground.
After her feet hit solid earth again Hollow said, “Was the book really necessary?"
Gale just shrugged, that insufferable little smile on his face. "I also like to travel in style?"
This time she did scoff at him, then whipped around to continue limping back to camp.
"Arrgh!" Hollow said, as her spell landed her in the pond. Again.
It was the night after their gnoll excursion, and, true to her word, she had been trying to steal Gale's featherfall for her own repertoire.
It was going… like shit.
She had climbed a small hill near their camp, mostly away from prying ears. She was sure they could hear her cursing, but, more importantly, they'd also hear if she was being mauled to death by angry wildlife and presumably come to her rescue.
Her plan was thus: climb, leap, and cast. The minor fall would trigger something primal in her brain, and that moment of inertia at the top of her jump would inspire her magic to lower her gently to the ground. In theory.
On her first try, she vanished mid-jump and reappeared to smack her head horns-first into a tree. Nothing happened on the second, and she rolled her ankle unpleasantly as she landed on the dewy grass. The last four times her misty step had deposited her in increasingly murky water.
She was soaked up to the waist, covered in mud, and eye-to-eye with a frog. It blinked at her in disbelief and jumped to vanish in the water lilies.
Hollow laughed in manic frustration and thwacked the lilypad where the frog had been, then sloshed her way back to shore.
She knew how to misty step, could do it with pinpoint accuracy in the middle of desperate combat. But whenever she tried to reach past what she knew, to cast a spell more gentle than she'd ever tried before, her body snapped her away on reflex.
She was busy muttering to herself and wringing out her tunic after another failed attempt when a sudden "good grief!" made her whip around, eldritch energy humming to life in her hand.
It was Gale. Of literally anyone else in camp it had to be the one person she was trying — and failing — so hard to emulate.
She was preparing to bite his head off, but was taken aback by the look on his face. It wasn’t condescension, amusement, or even concern. It was… the best she could describe it was "puzzled frustration." He looked for all the world like a professor who had caught his star pupil making a rudimentary mistake on an exam.
"Why are you here, Gale?"
"Well, we were all fine with the cursing, but when you started laughing maniacally I drew the short straw to investigate," he said, stepping closer and rubbing at his chin. "What in the world are you doing?"
She crossed her arms. "I'm practicing."
Hollow expected a glib remark but he just kept gazing at her, rubbing his chin. "Could I get you to try something?"
She quirked an eyebrow, tilting her head to look down at Gale as he slowly stepped up beside her on her practice hill, facing the same way.
"Just follow my movements," he said, lifting his arms in front of him. It was that same strange caress he performed to cast spells, deliberately slowed for her eyes to follow. Hol’s skin felt like it was shimmering with a resonance, friendly and welcoming in a way that made her hackles want to raise.
But she'd never forgive herself if she couldn't follow something he clearly thought of as basic, motions that he simplified down to her level. So she bored her eyes into him and mirrored the dance all the way to the feeling of warmth that revolted her so utterly. Her hands and fingers finally caught on some ethereal thread, and it pulled them along, following a pattern she never and always knew.
Something… clicked into place, like vertebrae aligning after a particularly good stretch. She didn't know when she'd closed her eyes, but she could feel a brightness waiting like a patient visitor behind her eyelids. She peeled them open to a glittering sea of magic — purple and blue and magenta — hovering about her in meandering patterns. Her gaze drifted sidelong to Gale.
He put on a good appearance of cheer, most days, but she'd never confuse it now with the genuine joy that lit up his face. His dark brown eyes soaked in and reflected the lights around them as he turned them to her.
"Try now," he said quietly.
She looked askance at him, but the gentle fizz of magic surrounding them both soothed her suspicions a bit. So she closed her eyes again.
Hol recalled the motions of the spell, and, like a thread catching and unraveling the seam of gravity, weightlessness spread from her fingertips to her feet, then to Gale. She felt a hand on her elbow, nudging her forward, so she took a step into nothingness.
She opened her eyes just in time to catch the last few seconds of their landing before her feet hit the dewy grass. Gale was grinning at her from the corner of her eye. Hollow could feel his giddy, invasive pride for her like a wave through the weave that stretched between them.
It was too much. She twisted away from the connection like a cat, letting it shatter into pieces.
Gale's smile followed suit as he dropped back into scholarly curiosity. "How do you feel?"
"Good. Fine. It worked," she waved her hands beside her head mockingly, "Bully for you, teaching an old dog new tricks."
Gale sighed. "Oh, I've taught worse than you, believe me."
Whatever magical ties remained between them snapped at that. Hollow's eyes glittered with something unshed.
"No, you haven't," and with a puff of mist, she was gone. Her heavy footsteps landed a ways away, and stomped sullenly to camp.
Gale looked at the spot where Hollow just was, but his eyes were turned inward. To the utter openness in her expression as the tiefling had drifted through the air softly, of her own accord. He had felt the self doubt, the prickly frustration. But beneath it, tucked away but unmistakably there: wonder. And a careless word from him had shattered it.
"How boorish of me."
He turned to make his way back to camp, only to find the lightness in his step… persisted.
Hollow was holding onto the spell, concentrating even as she fumed.
Gale smiled to himself, climbed back up to the edge of the hill, then took a step past it. A leap of faith, again, for both of them.