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The group came upon the remains of a raided caravan tumbled off the edge of the road. Among the shattered crates and broken carts, they found a stash of booze. Their spirits lifted immediately. Wyll held up a bottle to the sun. It shone a dark red, its label plain.
“Nothing fancy,” he said. “But I say we take a break this evening and enjoy ourselves.”
Lae’zel scowled. “You would inebriate yourselves at a time like this? Has the tadpole addled all your senses?”
“Oh, leave off it, Lae’zel,” Shadowheart said. “We’ve been traveling for weeks, and we’ve been fine. I say we take the opportunity to rest. Have some fun for once.”
Karlach let out a whoop of excitement. “Now that sounds like a great idea!”
Lae’zel turned a look to Gale and Elvayne that was almost imploring. Normally, Gale would be inclined to agree with her, but he was tired, and he didn’t think they’d achieve all that much more by pushing ahead that afternoon. Besides, he had ulterior motives for wanting to get a little drunk. He glanced at Elvayne out of the corner of his eye, and gave her a wicked grin.
“I do believe you owe me a story,” he said. “One about a certain cow named Stephanie.”
Elvayne huffed. “I suppose I do.”
“It’s settled, then,” Wyll said. “Tonight we indulge.”
—
Gale stared intently at Elvayne across the tree stump. Two half empty cups sat between them. He’d lost track some time ago of how many times he’d filled it up and drained it dry. He was quite rapidly moving from delightfully tipsy to full on drunk, and it would be wise to slow down.
But first, he needed to win. His fingers twitched slightly at his side.
“Fire mephit,” he said. “We became friends.”
“True!” Karlach crowed, and the crowd let out a roar.
He wasn’t entirely sure how the game started, but now him and Elvayne were throwing out monsters they’d summoned and what happened to them, trying to one up one another, with Karlach using the tadpole to keep them honest. Everyone else watched with rapt attention, except Lae’zel, who refused to partake in the evening festivities and had instead sequestered herself in her tent.
He’d won this round. A fire mephit might be a common summon, but it rarely ended in anything less than bitter enmity. Elvayne’s expression remained blank as she took her drink and drained it. Wyll had it filled to the brim a second later. She tipped it at Gale in challenge, her expression unreadable.
She’d had just as much to drink as him, he was sure, but she remained just as collected as she had at the beginning of the night. She might as well have been drinking water. He wanted to know what would make that shell crack. He wanted to be the one to do it.
He raised an eyebrow. She gave a small nod of affirmation. Another round, then.
“Cloaker,” he said. “Rode it like a pony.”
“Oooh,” Karlach said, her voice hushed. “True.”
Such a summoning was significantly higher than anything either of them had said so far this evening. Everyone looked a little awed.
Except Elvayne. She flashed a small, predatory smile, and he knew he was about to lose terribly.
“Aboleth. Stole its memories.”
He finished his drink before Karlach even confirmed it.
—
Gale was leaning on Elvayne, and they were going somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. On an adventure. Or just a walk. To fight something? Or summon something? It didn’t matter. They were going together.
They were sitting beside the river. Of course they were; that was their spot. Elvayne was talking, but her words escaped his understanding, slippery as a fish. Gods, he was so drunk. His head spun, and he leaned against her shoulder, waited for the world to right itself, but it just kept spinning and spinning.
“Ice devil,” he said, except it came out more like “Iiishe de’l.”
He just remembered. They’d been playing a game, and he’d actually lost. To a sorcerer. The shame would have been enough to kill him if it hadn’t been Elvayne. Elvayne who struggled so much with magic, who never wanted anything to do with it. Elvayne, who was having fun, for once.
“Iishe de’l,” he said again as he tried to pick up the unraveling threads of conversation.
That was what had cost him the last round. He’d surrendered after that, not because he hadn’t summoned more dangerous monstrosities, but because he was afraid of what Elvayne would say to top it. And maybe, just a little, he wanted her to win so she’d keep talking about magic with him.
She said something. He didn’t catch it, the thread slipping from his grasp again, but she was nice, so she repeated herself.
“Still hung up on that, wizard? I’m surprised you gave up so soon.”
He shook his head weakly, tried to explain, but the words were thick and heavy on his tongue, and he gave up and mumbled what he hoped was a clear enough request for her to keep talking. She never talked enough, and he wanted to know everything that was going on inside her head.
Elvayne was smiling, small but happy, and he loved that smile, and he wanted to reach up and kiss the corner of it, but he decided that would not be gentlemanly. So he just sat there and looked at her and hoped she never stopped.
Gale was flat on his back. Elvayne was still there, sitting next to him, but too far away. He didn’t like it. He wanted to be next her, close enough to smell her. She smelled…well, she smelled like they’d been traveling for several tendays without a proper bath, but he found he quite liked it.
“I wanted a pet,” Elvayne said, her voice soft and sad. “But I don’t like to think about what my father would have made me do to a pet.”
Gale struggled into a sitting position, flung an arm around her shoulder. He didn’t want to think about who her father was; he didn’t want to think about her committing unspeakable acts. He wanted her to smile again. He wanted to give her a pet that she could love, and that she didn’t need to worry about.
“You can have Tara,” he said. “You’d love her. And she’d love you.”
Elvayne let out a little huff of air, the closest thing to a laugh he’d ever heard from her.
“Tara is your tressym, Gale.”
Right. That was a very important obstacle to his plan. But it was alright because he was quite good at solving problems. He was a wizard of exceptional talents, after all. He thought for a moment, made difficult by the soupy morass his mind had become, but then the solution came to him, obvious in its simplicity.
“You’ll just have to come live in my tower, too.”
It was a great plan, absolutely flawless. A testament to his genius. He imagined them sitting in his tower, Tara on Elvayne’s lap, his head on her shoulder just like it was now, if perhaps not so drunk.
“I’ll get you another cat, if Tara isn’t quite up to snuff. She’s absolutely brilliant, but maybe you want a real cat. I’ll get you a proper one, fat and orange. Two cats, or even three. As many cats as you want, if it keeps you smiling like that.”
She would pet them, and he would pet her, and maybe other things besides.
Elvayne sighed, but he could hear the humor in it.
“I’m going to save you from yourself now,” she whispered into his hair.
She gave him a light tap between the eyes, magic sparking from her fingertips. He blinked as his head cleared.
In that moment, Gale learned something new, but without the usual thrill he felt at such discoveries. No. This knowledge was terrible.
He learned that there was nothing worse than going from stupefyingly drunk to stone cold sober in less than a heartbeat. It made one much too aware of the fool one was still in the process of making oneself.
He shot bolt upright, acutely cognizant of how he had been hanging off Elvayne like a limpet, of the inappropriate paths he had let his mind wander down, of the deeply embarrassing things that had come out of his mouth.
He considered crawling into the river and drowning himself.
“I apologize,” he said. “That was…”
Mortifying. Unpardonable. The actions of a man two decades his junior on his first night out on the town.
Gods, what must Elvayne think of him? She was certainly not having the pleasant daydreams he’d been having of her. At least he hadn’t been so far gone as to share those thoughts.
Unless. Cold dread settled in his stomach. His mental barriers required a certain degree of concentration, and he had been woefully addled. If she had seen…
He prayed the orb would detonate and end his humiliation.
“Funny,” she said, eyes bright in the moonlight as she looked at him.
His stomach settled. His mind stopped contemplating increasingly elaborate ways to end himself. Elvayne was smiling again, and he thought maybe she was drunker than she let on, to smile so much.
“That was pretty funny. But I figured I’d help you out before you made too much of a fool of yourself.”
He looked at her sheepishly.
“I, uh, hope I didn’t say…or think…anything too uncouth?”
“Your words were perfectly pleasant, if somewhat nonsensical,” she said. “I can’t say anything for your thoughts. Your self-control remains impeccable as always.”
She looked back toward the campfire, where Wyll had wrangled Astarion into a dance while Karlach and Shadowheart shared a bottle of wine. Even Lae’zel had come out of her tent to sit near the fire.
“I do have some bad news, though.”
A brief flash of panic, but she was smiling again—and he loved that smile, and he never wanted her to stop—as she said, “The night’s still young, and you’re now much too sober.”
—
They had all coalesced around the fire, swapping tales of previous adventures. Elvayne found herself squeezed between Shadowheart and Astarion, her head warm and fuzzy with drink. It was getting late, and their stories had taken a decidedly bawdy turn.
Lae’zel, perched next to Astarion, was giving a surprisingly raunchy account of her youth in Crèche K’liir.
“Darling,” Astarion laughed. “I had no idea you had time for anything besides battling to the death.”
“I have no objections to partaking in the pleasures of the flesh,” Lae’zel said. “So long as they do not interfere with my duties.”
Astarion leaned in close, but not so close that no one else could hear. “You know, I’ve never bedded a githyanki before.”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“If you keep that pretty mouth of yours shut and learn to obey, perhaps we could attempt it.”
Astarion let out a laugh. Elvayne thought there was an edge of panic to it, but when he responded, it was in his usual flirtatious manner.
“Maybe I’ll find you later, then. We can see how talented you really are with a sword.”
“Please don’t encourage him,” Shadowheart said. “He’s insufferable enough as it is, without thinking his paltry lines actually work.”
Astarion pouted.
“Excuse me? I’ll have you know I’ve seduced some of the finest men and women of Baldur’s Gate with my ‘paltry lines.’”
Shadowheart rolled her eyes. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Oh, come now,” Wyll said. “His lines may sound like they come out of a pulp romance, but you must admit there’s a certain charm in how he delivers them.”
Astarion looked smug. “See? Even the monster hunter thinks I’m charming.”
“Then tell us about your greatest seduction,” Shadowheart said. “Let us be the judge.”
Astarion wasted no time in launching into a tale so ribald that even Lae’zel had a faint blush by the end of it. With every new lurid detail, each more far-fetched than the last, Wyll’s and Karlach’s merriment increased tenfold, until they were reduced to twin puddles of laughter. Gale sat between them, looking distinctly uncomfortable.
Elvayne wasn’t the only one who noticed.
“You’re quite domestic, aren’t you, Gale?” Shadowheart teased.
“Darling, he’s a wizard,” Astarion said. “When they aren’t celibate, they’re engaged in the most mind-numbingly boring vanilla sex imaginable. Poor Gale probably has no idea what true pleasure is.”
Gale bristled.
“I’ll have you know that I have made a goddess my lover.”
A goddess. Elvayne stiffened as her understanding of Gale and his place in the world shifted. Not just a lonely wizard in a tower. Not just an arch-mage. Not just a Chosen. No, the most coveted position of them all. For it was obvious who he meant. There was no other goddess it could be.
All his praise of magic, of Mystra, took on new meaning.
There was a hot feeling in her stomach that felt an awful lot like jealousy, if she didn’t know better.
It was the wine going to her head. She’d imbibed far too much this night.
“A goddess?” Wyll asked in disbelief. “Now that is a story I think we’d all like to hear.”
“Yes, do tell,” Astarion said, leaning forward. “And don’t leave out a single, sordid detail.”
Gale flashed them all a cocksure grin. Elvayne didn’t quite know what to make of the responding flutter in her stomach.
“I lay with the Mother of Magic herself,” he said. “It was euphoric, incandescent. Not sordid.”
“All her, I assume,” Astarion said. He raked his gaze up and down Gale with a sneer. “I doubt you brought much to the table.”
“I admit, her control of the Weave is beyond compare,” Gale replied. “She is the goddess of magic, after all. But I learned a thing or two.” That evil little smile again. “And you don’t romance a goddess by being a miserable bore between the sheets.”
Elvayne stood outside Gale’s tent, knowing that she was about to make a very bad decision. Everyone had gone to bed, and she stood alone and unobserved. And Gale was just on the other side of the thin piece of fabric in front of her. She took one last swig of the wine bottle before she dropped it.
She was much too drunk, too drunk by far.
She could justify her friendliness with Gale all evening in any number of ways. The game hadn’t been her idea. She’d sat with him by the river because it was her fault he’d been so intoxicated. As for the warmth that suffused her at the brief flash of his thoughts while he’d rambled about Tara and all manner of cats, well, she’d simply been enamored by the idea of a companionship she sorely lacked in her life.
What she couldn’t do was justify why she thought it was a good idea to have sex with him. But gods above and below, did she want it.
Elvayne tried to talk herself out of it, only to be talked right back into it.
No way was he as good as he claimed. It was standard wizard boasting.
He had to be good, if he seduced a goddess. She needed to know how he did it.
It helped that Gale was handsome, especially in the firelight, warmed by a few drinks. She’d liked the way the firelight had caught in his hair, and the way his hands moved when he told a story.
Such expressive hands. What could he do with those hands?
He was a wizard. Wizards were arrogant. Arrogant lovers made shit lovers.
But he’d slept with a goddess. Multiple times.
Hells, she’d just have to test it out herself. What else was a good scholar supposed to do?
—
The night—or rather early morning—had wound down. Gale was sprawled across his sleeping roll, warm and drowsy with alcohol and memories of laughter and friendship. The orb thrummed almost pleasantly in his chest, sated in his contentment.
There was a sound at the entrance to his tent, and he jolted to full awareness as Elvayne stumbled her way inside.
“Can I come in?” she asked, voice quiet.
He looked up at her standing nearly on top of him, the tent flap closed firmly behind her. His pulse quickened.
“It seems you already have,” he answered dryly.
She apparently took that as permission to get comfortable, and she settled down next to him, face dangerously close to his, knees brushing his side. His heart stuttered with sudden want at the touch, and the great, gnawing ache that was the orb flared to life, consuming just a little more of his magic in sympathetic resonance.
It was not a good sign that such minimal contact was causing such a reaction.
He took a deep breath, tried to calm both himself and the orb. He should tell her to go, or at least to give him some space, before his desire caused the orb to consume the last shreds of his power. But he just lay there and studied her face.
He couldn’t see much in the dark: the curve of her brow, the hint of her lips curved up in a smile, her hair falling in unruly waves all around her.
He thought if he were to reach out and tuck a strand behind her ear that the want blooming inside him might finally tip him over the edge into oblivion.
“Is it true?” she asked, her voice soft. “Did you really have sex with Mystra?”
It was hard to think about Mystra with Elvayne so close to him, her breath steady and warm on his cheek. He could smell the wine she’d been drinking, hear the slight slur to her words. Her clothes were rumpled, her shirt askew, messy in a way Mystra had never been. Elvayne ran a hand through her hair, mussed it even further.
She was so terribly mortal. So perfectly alive.
“I did,” he said.
“What was it like?”
How did one explain joining with a goddess in the Outer Realms? How did one explain a joining that went beyond mere bodies? How could one hope to describe the perfect meshing of Weave and passion? What could he say that he had not already said that evening? That would not reduce his divine coupling to a cheap, lewd joke?
There was really only one word for it, and he found he didn’t want to tell her, to scare her away from him, but she had asked, and he must be honest.
“Transcendent.”
And then she was straddling him, her hand on his cheek.
“Show me,” she whispered.
He thought—as his body reacted to her warm proximity, as the burgeoning hunger of the orb caused it to ignite in purple light, as its glow turned Elvayne into a shining goddess in her own right—he thought that maybe there was something better than transcendent.
The light let him see her so much more clearly; more, perhaps, than he wanted to. She was beautiful, yes, but she was swaying where normally she was still as a forest pond, and there was a glassy sheen to her eyes he didn’t entirely like.
“This isn’t a good idea,” Gale said, voice strained.
She looked down at the orb. Slowly, tentatively, she trailed her hand down his chest to trace the edge of it. His nerves lit up, hot and cold, electricity dancing through him.
“Elvayne,” he said, her name coming out choked and desperate.
Her eyes flicked up and met his, and he thought he might drown in their gray depths. Her hand moved back up, cupped the side of his neck as she gently ran a thumb along the edge of his jaw. He reached a hand out, laid it over hers. She was so close. It was all he could do not to pull her to him, to let the orb overwhelm him completely.
Her breath was warm as she pressed her mouth to his ear.
“I can feel how much you want me.”
His hand tightened on hers.
Gale took a deep breath. Ignoring his own desires, he gently pushed her off him.
“My wants have nothing to do with it. You are far too drunk for this,” he said. “And quite besides that, I am not one for such temporary trysts.”
“Wizards,” she groaned. “So boring.”
She rolled closer to him, nestled her head against his chest. It would be so easy to take her in his arms, to doom them both with a final moment of passion.
“Can I stay here?” she mumbled. “Will you hold me?”
It was a bad idea, for more than one reason, but he hesitated only a moment before he put his arms around her, his touch feather light.
“That I will accommodate.”
The orb continued to glow, continued to eat away at him. He would need another magical artifact sooner than expected at this rate, and he should tell her to go. But the orb had taken so much from him already, and he didn’t want to give it any more.
“Continue your ode to how wonderful I am,” she murmured.
Gale snorted. “I’m a mite too exhausted for original composition. But I can recite something, if you so desire.”
She gave a sleepy sound of assent.
“Oh! Mischevious usurper of my peace;
Oh! Soft intruder on my solitude,
Charming disturber of my ease,
That hast my nobler fate pursued,
And all the glories of my life subdued—“
“Boo, that doesn’t like a compliment.”
Gale stroked her hair. “Ssh, keep listening.”
“Where hast thou been this live-long age
That from my birth till now,
Thou never couldst one thought engage,
Or charm my soul with thy uneasy rage
That made it all its humble feebles know?
“Yes, yes dear tormentor, I have found thee now;
And found to whom thou dost thy being owe:
‘Tis thou the blushes dost impart,
For thee this languishment I wear,
Tis thou that tremblest in my heart
When the dear sorcerer does appear,
I faint, I die with pleasing pain,
My words intruding sighing break
When e’ver I touch the charming swain
When e’ver I gaze, when e’ver I speak.”
“More.”
He pressed his lips ever so gently to her forehead.
“You are insatiable, my dear.”
“Sate me,” she said, voice heavy with sleep.
Gale recited a long while before she drifted off, and he laid there another long while after that, staring at the ceiling of his tent and listening to her gentle snores.
By even the simplest measures, things were not going well.
They had tadpoles in their heads, and they reeked, and the aching in his chest was becoming nearly unbearable. They had only tenuous leads on how to remove their unwelcome guests, and every sign pointed to larger, more sinister forces at work.
Despite all of it, this was the happiest he’d been in a long time.
—
Lae’zel stood in the opening to his tent, the sun turning her into a vengeful shadow. Gale blinked against the light, his head thick and murky after last night’s binge.
Elvayne groaned next to him, and he was suddenly very aware of the way their limbs were tangled together and what this must look like. He did his best to extricate himself with as much poise as he could muster.
Judging by the look on Laezel’s face, he was not very successful.
“Tch,” she said, more disdainfully than usual. “This is not the time to indulge in such carnal frivolities.”
Gale felt his face turn red. “It’s not—“
Lae’zel cut him off. “We must continue our search for a crèche immediately.”
“But we weren’t—,” he said. “It’s not like that.”
“I do not care how you spend what time we have left,” Lae’zel snapped. “So long as you do not waste mine.”
And with that she stalked off, letting the tent flap fall shut behind her.
Shame washed through Gale as he sat in the dim light, at what Lae’zel had seen and at what she’d tell the others. He was not ashamed because he’d spent the night in Elvayne’s arms, but because he was afraid that her affection had been a lie born of intoxication, and he’d taken advantage of her inebriated state. Ashamed because he’d lied, too. He’d told her he didn’t do temporary arrangements, but if she’d been more sober, if there wasn’t a bomb lodged in his chest, he very may well have, if only to have at least one night with her. A lie by omission, but a lie all the same.
Elvayne yawned and stretched next to him, and Gale did his best not to stare at the way her body bent, or think about other ways he could make her back arch like that. He knew what he thought about last night, knew how he’d treasure it in the coming days, hold close the memory of her skin against his, her smile, the tenderness in her eyes. He feared she would not feel the same, and instead think it all a mistake and an embarrassment, a night best forgotten.
She turned and looked at him with half-lidded eyes, the open laughing face of last night gone, and her usual stoic expression returned. His chest tightened.
He shifted away from her and tried not to be disappointed when she did the same.
“You talk in your sleep, you know,” she said.
He let out a dry laugh. “Ah, yes, I have been told this on a number of occasions.”
“A number of occasions? Did Mystra complain that much?”
“Oh no, not at all,” he said quickly. “Mystra and I—We—“
He had no idea how to make clear that his and Mystra’s relationship was not like a mortal one. Words lay leaden on his tongue, his usual acuity fast fled away.
He swallowed and tried again.
“My relationship with Mystra was primarily one of the spirit, not flesh. She was not interested in being around while I slumbered.”
Oh, what he would give to know what Elvayne was thinking. But to use the tadpole, to betray her trust, that would ruin everything before it began. He must not reach. He must be contented with reading the lines around her mouth and the movement of shadow on her cheek. They were terribly opaque, and he thought he might spend the rest of eternity learning to translate them.
“Sounds lonely.”
Her words cut deep, into a hollowness he did not want to acknowledge.
“I was not,” he said, his words clipped, harsh even to his own ears.
She turned away from him, and he recognized that he had mis-stepped. She spoke with her back to him, and he wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder, turn her back toward him, and smooth over whatever hurt he’d caused.
“You talked about her, you know. In your sleep.”
Oh.
“I didn’t realize. Can’t much control what the unconscious mind does, eh?”
She turned to him, her gaze penetrating straight to the core of his being.
“Do you still love her?”
Heavy silence descended between them. The question demanded an honesty that Gale didn’t want to give, but that he owed her.
“She’s the Mother of Magic, Master of the Weave. She’s my goddess.” Even he could hear the desperate longing in his voice, pathetic, weak man that he was. “How could I not?”
“I see.” Elvayne stood. “Sorry for disturbing you last night.”
She disappeared through the tent flap, whatever closeness that had existed between them extinguished in the bright light of day.