Chapter Text
Before the orb, before the tower, before the goddess, before the word folly wrapped itself around his name and refused to loosen, Gale Dekarios was a boy with ink on his fingers and starlight in his eyes.
He was small for his age, all elbows and earnestness, with hair that never quite obeyed a comb and a gaze that seemed forever fixed on something just past the visible world. While other children ran through the streets of Waterdeep with wooden swords and scraped knees, Gale sat cross-legged on the floor of his father’s abandoned study, surrounded by books too large for his lap.
He did not read them so much as disappear into them.
“Gale,” his mother called from the doorway one evening, her voice carrying the practiced warmth of someone who had already called his name twice before. “Supper.”
She saw her son sitting there as he did most days. The study had not been used since her husband passed, though she didn’t have the heart to change it. She dusted it, aired it, kept the moths from the curtains and the damp from the books, but she did not linger there. The room belonged to absence. To a chair no one sat in. To shelves of books written in languages she could not read. To a man whose name Gale had learned not to ask about too often.
He did not answer.
Morena Dekarios folded her arms and watched him for a moment. He had one hand buried in his hair, the other tracing the same sigil again and again onto a slate. His lips moved silently. A candle beside him burned low, trembling as if it, too, were holding its breath.
“Gale.”
This time the boy startled. His chalk snapped cleanly in half.
“Oh! Mother. I was only—”
“Only forgetting the mortal needs of the body again?”
He looked down at himself, then at the tower of open books around him, as if one of them might supply a defense.
“I was close.”
“You are always close.”
“But I was.”
Morena came into the room and knelt beside him, gathering one of the books before it could slide off the pile and flatten his foot. The page was filled with diagrams of force, motion, and arcane resonance. Not a children’s primer. Not even a simple apprentice text.
She sighed, but not angrily.
“You are eight years old.”
“Nine in three months.”
“Ah, well. Practically an archmage, then.”
Gale gave her a wounded look. “I know it sounds silly.”
“It does not sound silly.” She brushed a chalk smear from his cheek with her thumb. “It sounds like you. Which is much more dangerous.”
He tried not to smile, failed, then immediately looked back down at the slate.
“I almost moved the cup.”
Morena followed his gaze. A small blue cup sat at the edge of the desk. It was the sort of cup that had survived several years of drops, chips, and childhood experiments. Gale glared at it with the intensity another child might reserve for a mortal enemy.
“You almost moved it,” she repeated.
“I felt it answer.”
“The cup?”
“No.” He frowned, trying to find the words. “The spell. The air. The…” He lifted one hand and flexed his fingers. “The thing between.”
Morena’s expression softened.
“The Weave.”
Gale looked up quickly. “Yes.”
The word filled the room differently when spoken aloud. Not loudly. Not grandly. But it seemed to settle over everything: the desk, the books, the candle, the cup, the boy who wanted so badly to be understood that he mistook understanding for oxygen.
“I felt it,” he said. “Not like in the lessons. Not like reciting. It was there. Like someone listening.”
Morena did not laugh. That was one of the first kindnesses Gale remembered clearly: his mother rarely laughed when he was serious, even when other people did.
Instead she sat back on her heels and considered him.
“Show me.”
His eyes widened. “Now?”
“Unless the cup has other engagements.”
Gale swallowed. He wiped his chalky fingers on his trousers, then seemed to realize this made them no cleaner. He reached toward the cup, stopped, muttered something under his breath, adjusted his hand, then began again.
His voice was soft. Careful. Each syllable shaped with a precision that made him seem older than he was and younger at once. The candle flame bent toward him. Shadows lengthened along the wall.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the cup trembled.
Gale’s breath caught.
It slid half an inch across the desk.
Not far. Not gracefully. It scraped more than floated. But it moved.
The spell broke as soon as Gale gasped, and the cup toppled onto its side.
Silence filled the study.
Then Gale looked at his mother as if the world had just opened beneath him and revealed stairs.
For one terrible, tender moment, Morena did not see only her son. She saw another pair of hands, another mind too quick for peace, another hunger the world had not known how to gentle.
“Did you see?”
Morena pressed a hand to her mouth.
He mistook the gesture for disappointment.
“I know it was not very good. I can do it better. I think I rushed the second phrase, and my hand was too high, and maybe if I—”
“Gale.”
He stopped.
Her eyes were shining.
“I saw, my love.”
The pride in her voice struck him harder than any spell. His face changed, brightening so suddenly it hurt to look at. For that single moment, he was not odd. Not too intense. Not the boy who corrected tutors and frightened visiting relatives by asking whether souls had measurable weight. He was simply Gale, and his mother was proud.
He looked back at the fallen cup.
“I want to do it again.”
“After supper.”
“But—”
“Even archmages eat.”
“I’m not an archmage.”
“Not yet.”
He grinned at that.
It was a small thing. A cup moved by half an inch across a desk.
To Gale, it was a door.
And once he knew doors could open, he could not stop reaching for the handles.
By ten, he could light every candle in the sitting room with a snap of his fingers, though he was only permitted to do so under supervision after the incident with the curtains.
By eleven, he had charmed a raincloud no larger than a dinner plate into hovering above the kitchen table because he wanted to understand localized weather. The maid resigned. Morena gave him a stern lecture while secretly laughing into her sleeve.
By twelve, his tutors had stopped saying gifted with uncomplicated delight.
They said it more carefully then.
Gifted, yes.
Advanced, certainly.
Difficult, sometimes.
Unusual, often.
Too quick. Too hungry. Too eager to skip the lesson and reach for the principle beneath it. Gale did not mean to be troublesome, but his mind moved like a thrown spark. It landed where it wished. It lit what it touched.
He learned early that adults admired cleverness most when it came wrapped in obedience.
He tried to be obedient.
Mostly.
At least when he remembered.
His mother found him one afternoon in the garden, standing very still beneath the old pear tree with both hands raised toward a nest of baby birds.
“Gale Dekarios,” she said in a tone that had stopped household disasters before, “tell me those birds are not enchanted.”
“They are not enchanted.”
The branch above him chirped.
Morena narrowed her eyes. “Tell me truthfully.”
“They are not permanently enchanted.”
“Gale.”
“One of them fell,” he said quickly, pointing toward a damp, indignant fledgling tucked safely back in its nest. “I only lifted him. Just a little. And then I thought, well, if the principle holds for a cup, and living things have their own animating force, then perhaps the spell could be gentler if I adjusted for—”
“For the fact that it is a bird and not a cup?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose.
The fledgling sneezed.
Gale looked up with deep concern. “Do birds sneeze?”
“Apparently they do after being used as arcane research.”
“I rescued him.”
“You experimented on him.”
“I did both.”
Morena lowered her hand and tried very hard not to smile. Gale saw it anyway.
“You cannot treat every living thing as a question waiting to be answered,” she said.
His face fell slightly. “I didn’t hurt him.”
“I know you didn’t intend to.”
“That is not the same?”
“No, my love. It is not always the same.”
He turned that over in his mind. His seriousness returned, solemn and almost painful.
“I’ll remember.”
She believed he meant it.
That was one of the hardest things about raising Gale. He meant nearly everything. His apologies. His promises. His impossible plans. He was not careless with feeling. He was only careless with limits, because limits seemed to him like temporary misunderstandings between himself and the world.
Morena came to stand beside him beneath the pear tree.
“You know,” she said, “there are other children in the square today. The Midsummer games have started.”
“I know.”
“You could join them.”
He looked toward the street beyond the garden wall. The shouts of children drifted in with the warm air: laughter, mock battle cries, the clatter of sticks against shields.
“I tried last year.”
“I remember.”
“They said I was cheating.”
“You did animate the hoop.”
“It was rolling the wrong direction.”
“That is rather the point of a hoop race.”
He flushed. “I was improving it.”
“You were winning.”
“I could have improved everyone’s.”
Morena’s smile faded at the edges.
There it was. The thing he never said directly but carried everywhere, tucked behind his ribs like a second heart.
He did not understand why other children didn’t want the things he wanted. He did not understand why showing them something wonderful made them step back. He did not understand why being able to do more made him less welcome instead of more.
“I don’t mind being here,” he said, too quickly.
“I know.”
“I like studying.”
“I know that too.”
“And I like the birds.”
The nest chirped above them.
Morena looked at her son. He was trying to reassure her. That was the worst part. He had seen her worry and decided to make himself smaller around it.
She touched his shoulder.
“Gale, there is nothing wrong with liking books. Or magic. Or birds. Or questions. There is nothing wrong with being different.”
He looked down.
“People always say that when different is lonely.”
The words landed quietly, but they struck deep.
Morena had no spell for that. No countercharm. No clever mother’s phrase that would unmake the ache in him.
So she did the only thing she could. She drew him into her arms.
At twelve, Gale was beginning to think he was too old to be held in the garden by his mother. But he did not pull away.
“I want you to be happy,” she said into his hair.
“I am happy.”
“Gale.”
He shut his eyes.
“I am happy when I’m learning.”
“That is not the same as being happy.”
“It’s close.”
“No,” she said gently. “It is where you go when happiness feels too uncertain.”
He stiffened a little, not because she was wrong, but because she was right in a way that embarrassed him.
“I don’t need lots of friends,” he muttered.
“No. You don’t.”
“I don’t even know what I would do with lots of friends.”
“One or two might be manageable.”
He made a face against her shoulder. “Maybe one.”
“One, then.”
“But someone who doesn’t mind if I talk about spellcraft.”
“For your sake, I hope they enjoy it.”
“And someone who doesn’t think I’m showing off when I’m only excited.”
Morena held him tighter.
“Yes,” she said. “Someone like that.”
The Weave stirred faintly around them, catching sunlight in the leaves. Gale felt it before he saw it: that soft, invisible hum beneath the skin of the world. It was always there when he was upset. Or perhaps he only noticed it then. A presence. A promise. A door waiting to open.
Someone like that, his mother had said.
But the Weave was already like that.
The Weave did not sigh when he asked too many questions.
It did not call him strange.
It did not step away.
It listened.
For three weeks after the incident with the birds, Gale was forbidden from practicing unsupervised levitation on anything with feathers.
This, he argued, was a regrettably broad restriction.
“Feathers are not the issue,” he told Morena over breakfast.
“The bird was the issue,” said Morena.
“The bird is made of many things besides feathers.”
“Gale.”
“I am only saying the wording lacks precision.”
“The wording is mine, and it stands.”
He accepted this with the wounded dignity of a boy unjustly persecuted by grammar.
Which was how, deprived of birds, he turned his attention to summoning.
Not serious summoning. Not infernal circles or binding contracts or anything involving blood, bones, or phrases that made the wallpaper peel. Gale was not reckless.
Not intentionally.
He only wanted to see whether a minor conjuration lattice could be adapted to invite a willing familiar-like presence across planar distance without coercion. It was, he decided, a morally superior experiment. No one would be forced. Nothing would be dragged. He would simply open the tiniest possible door and see whether anything wished to look through.
He performed the working in his father’s study with a circle drawn in chalk, three candles, a saucer of cream, and a confidence that was only partly earned.
For several long minutes, nothing happened.
Then the saucer vanished.
Gale stared.
The chalk circle flashed once, bright as lightning behind his eyes.
Something heavy landed on the desk.
Books toppled. Papers flew. One candle went out. The remaining two flames bent sideways as if bowing to a superior authority.
A creature stood among the wreckage: cat-shaped, winged, golden-eyed, and deeply offended.
She looked around the study. She looked at the saucer, now empty. She looked at Gale.
“Well,” she said, “that was rude.”
Gale made a sound no known language could claim.
The creature sat, wrapped her tail around her paws, and gave one wing an irritated shake.
“I was eating.”
“You can talk.”
“So can you, though you are presently doing a poor job of proving it.”
Gale scrambled backward so quickly he knocked into a stack of books. “I didn’t mean to summon— I mean, I meant to summon something, but not against its will, only if it wished to come, and I used cream because several texts suggested—”
“The cream was acceptable.”
“Oh. Good.”
“The arrival was not.”
“I apologize.”
“You should.”
He swallowed. “Are you a familiar?”
Her ears flattened.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Not in a diminished sense,” Gale said quickly. “Only taxonomically. You resemble descriptions of winged feline magical companions, and your speech indicates higher reasoning, and your wings suggest—”
“I am a tressym, thank you very much and my wings suggest I can leave if I become bored.”
Gale shut his mouth.
The tressym studied him for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then she looked around the room again, taking in the abandoned chair, the dustless shelves, the books with cracked spines, the little boy sitting amid them like he had mistaken inheritance for shelter.
“What is your name?” she asked.
“Gale Dekarios.”
“Hm.”
“What is yours?”
“Tara.”
He waited, expecting more.
She offered nothing.
“Tara,” he repeated carefully. “I am very sorry if I interrupted your meal.”
“You did.”
“I can get more cream.”
“That would be wise.”
He scrambled to his feet.
At the doorway, he stopped and turned back. Tara had begun grooming one paw, as if appearing in a strange boy’s forbidden study was merely an inconvenience in an otherwise orderly day.
“Are you going to leave?” he asked.
She paused.
The question had come out too quickly. Too bare.
Gale felt his face heat. “I only mean, if you require assistance returning, I should like to know the parameters before—”
“Yes,” Tara said.
His stomach dropped.
“Eventually,” she added.
He looked up.
Tara resumed grooming. “I have not yet decided whether you are interesting or intolerable.”
“Oh.”
“Cream will help.”
Gale smiled despite himself.
When Morena found them twenty minutes later, Gale was sitting cross-legged on the study floor with a bowl of cream in his lap while Tara occupied the chair no one had sat in for years.
Morena stopped in the doorway.
Tara looked up.
Morena looked at Gale.
Gale looked at the floor.
“This is Tara,” he said.
“I see.”
“She is not a bird.”
“No,” Morena said slowly. “She is not.”
“And I did not levitate her.”
“That is becoming less reassuring the more specific you are.”
Tara flicked an ear. “You must be the mother.”
Morena pressed one hand to the doorframe.
“I need to sit down.”
“You may use the chair,” Tara said. “When I am finished with it.”
Gale made a strangled noise that might have been horror or delight.
Morena stared.
Then, unexpectedly, she laughed.
Not a polite laugh. Not a nervous laugh. A real one, hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking, grief and surprise and exhaustion all breaking open at once.
Tara watched her with solemn approval.
“Yes,” she said. “You’ll do.”
And somehow, after that, Tara stayed.
Not always. Not every hour. She came and went by methods Gale could not entirely map, which frustrated him for nearly a year. She slept in sunbeams. She stole fish from the kitchen. She corrected his posture during spellwork and bit his sleeve when he forgot to eat.
“You cannot improve your mind by starving your body,” she informed him one afternoon.
“That sounds like something my mother would say.”
“Your mother is sensible.”
“My mother does not understand translocation matrices.”
“And yet she understands lunch.”
The letter from Blackstaff Academy arrived in autumn.
Gale was thirteen.
It came sealed in deep black wax, stamped with a tower and staff, and delivered by a woman in formal robes who looked very unimpressed by the fact that Gale nearly tripped over a rug in his haste to reach the door.
“For Mistress Morena Dekarios,” the woman said.
Gale stopped so abruptly one of his shoes slid on the polished floor.
Morena accepted the letter with more composure than he could muster at his age. “Thank you.”
The woman’s gaze flicked briefly to Gale.
“So this is the boy.”
Gale stood straighter.
“I am Gale Dekarios.”
“So I understand.”
He could not tell whether she approved of this fact.
The woman inclined her head to Morena. “The Academy will expect a reply within ten days.”
After she left, the hall seemed too quiet.
Gale stared at the letter.
Morena stared at Gale.
Neither moved.
“Well?” he said finally, in a voice so tight it squeaked.
“Well what?”
“Open it.”
“It is addressed to me.”
“About me.”
“Presumably.”
“Mother.”
She turned the envelope over with deliberate slowness.
Gale made a strangled sound.
Morena laughed then, warm and helpless, and broke the seal.
He watched her face as she read. He had always been good at reading her expressions: worry hidden under patience, amusement hidden under scolding, pride hidden because she feared too much of it might feed the wrong fire in him.
This time, for several unbearable seconds, he could read nothing at all.
Then her mouth softened.
“Oh, Gale.”
His heart leapt so hard it hurt.
“What? What does it say?”
She looked up at him.
“You’ve been accepted.”
For once, Gale had no words.
Morena handed him the letter, and he snatched it with both hands. His eyes devoured the page.
Accepted.
Formal apprenticeship track.
Arcane theory placement.
Practical evaluation pending.
Blackstaff Academy.
He read it once, twice, three times, and still the words did not become ordinary.
Accepted.
Not tolerated. Not humored. Not managed.
Accepted.
He sank down onto the bottom stair.
Morena sat beside him.
“I got in,” he said.
“You did.”
“I really got in.”
“Yes.”
“They know about the incident with the weather charm?”
“I believe everyone within three streets knew about the incident with the weather charm.”
“And they still—”
“Yes.”
“And the birds?”
“I did not include the birds.”
He turned to her in alarm. “Should we tell them about the birds?”
“No.”
“But what if they ask?”
“Then you may say you have a demonstrated interest in applied levitation.”
He considered this, then nodded solemnly.
Morena laughed again, but her eyes were wet.
Gale noticed.
“Are you sad?”
“No.”
“You look sad.”
“I am allowed to have more than one feeling at a time.”
“That seems contradictory.”
“It is called being a mother.”
He folded the letter carefully along its creases.
“I’ll make you proud.”
Her face changed.
“You already have.”
“I mean properly.”
“Gale.”
“I mean it.” He looked down at the letter in his hands. “I’ll do well. I’ll work harder than anyone. I’ll learn everything they let me learn, and then I’ll learn the things they don’t. I’ll prove they were right to choose me.”
Morena was quiet.
“Do you think he would have been proud?” Gale asked.
Morena’s hand stilled on the letter.
There were questions a child asked only once, and questions he asked in different forms his entire life. This was both.
“Yes,” she said carefully. “I think he would have understood what this means to you.”
Gale noticed the carefulness. He noticed everything.
“That is not the same.”
“No,” Morena admitted. “It is not.”
Outside, a carriage passed over the cobbles. Somewhere in the house, a kettle began to whistle.
“Is that why you want to go?” she asked.
His brow furrowed. “What?”
“To make him proud?”
He looked at her as if the question had never occurred to him.
“I want to learn.”
“Yes.”
“And they can teach me.”
“Yes.”
“And there will be others there who understand.”
There. The real answer, slipped between the grander ones.
Morena leaned her shoulder gently against his.
“You hope there will be.”
He looked away.
“At least they won’t think magic is strange.”
“No. I imagine not.”
“At least if I talk about spellwork, they’ll know what I mean.”
“Most likely.”
“At least…” He stopped, embarrassed by the force of his own wanting.
Morena waited.
“At least there might be somewhere I fit.”
The words were smaller than his ambitions. That made them harder to hear.
She reached for his hand.
“Oh, my little spark.”
He groaned. “Mother.”
“You will endure the affection.”
“I’m thirteen.”
“And yet still my little spark.”
He tried to look annoyed, but his hand tightened around hers.
“I don’t want to be odd forever,” he said.
“There isn’t anything wrong with being odd.”
“That is not comforting.”
“But you will not be alone forever.”
He looked at her then. Really looked. There was a fierceness in her expression, the kind she hid from everyone else. Morena Dekarios could be gentle, but she was not fragile. She had raised a storm-hearted boy in a city full of watching eyes and whispered judgments. She had stood between him and the world more often than he knew.
“You do not have to earn the right to be loved,” she said.
Gale looked down at their joined hands.
“I know.”
“No,” she said softly. “You know that I love you. That is not the same.”
He had no answer.
Because somewhere deep inside him, in a place too young to be wise and too wounded to be simple, Gale already believed love was something that could be secured through brilliance. If he was useful enough, impressive enough, extraordinary enough, then no one would leave. No one would look away. No one would call him weird and mean it as a verdict.
The Weave hummed at the edge of his awareness.
Endless.
Patient.
Waiting.
He folded the acceptance letter once more, sharpening the crease with his thumb.
“I’ll be happy there,” he said.
It sounded almost like a promise.
Morena kissed the top of his head.
“I hope so.” she said quietly. “I believe you have someone else to tell.”
Gale nodded slowly and went to talk to Tara.
“Accepted,” he whispered.
“So I heard.”
“I got in.”
“Yes, you said that already.”
He looked at her, shining and terrified. “There will be real masters there. Proper libraries. Other students. Advanced instruction.”
“And rules,” Tara said.
“Yes, but advanced rules.”
She stretched one wing. “I am not coming with you.”
The joy in him faltered.
“What?”
“Blackstaff Academy does not allow unregistered magical companions in first-year residences.”
“How do you know?”
“I can read.”
“But perhaps if we petition—”
“No.”
“If we explain that you are not a familiar in the traditional sense—”
“No.”
“If I classify you as an independent arcane associate—”
“Absolutely not.”
Gale’s mouth shut.
Tara’s expression softened, though only by degrees. “This is something you must do among your own kind.”
“Wizards?”
“Children.”
He frowned. “I’m thirteen.”
“Yes. Tragic.”
“I don’t know how to be among children.”
“I have noticed.”
He looked down at the letter.
“I thought you would come.”
“I will visit.”
“That is not the same.”
“No,” Tara said. “It is not.”
The words hurt more because she did not try to sweeten them.
She hopped down from the rail and came to sit beside him on the step, her wing brushing his arm.
“You will be odd there too,” she said.
Gale stared at her.
“That was meant to comfort me?”
“It was meant to be true. You will be odd there too, because you are odd everywhere. But at least there, oddity is part of the curriculum.”
Despite himself, he laughed once.
Tara looked pleased.
“You do not need to become ordinary to be loved, Mr. Dekarios.”
He swallowed.
“My mother says that.”
“Your mother is often correct.”
“And you?”
“I am always correct.”
“That seems statistically unlikely.”
She nipped his sleeve.
He smiled down at the letter again, but his eyes burned.
“When I come back,” he said, “I’ll show you everything I’ve learned.”
“I expect you will show me far more than I asked to see.”
“And you’ll listen?”
Tara sighed with great theatrical suffering.
“I suppose someone must.”
Blackstaff Academy was everything Gale had imagined and nothing like it at the same time.
The first morning, he stood beneath its high dark towers with his satchel clutched too tightly in one hand and his mother’s farewell still warm against his cheek. Students moved around him in clusters, robes swishing, voices bright with confidence or carefully disguised fear.
For once, Gale was surrounded by children who carried books.
For once, no one stared because his satchel was overfull.
For once, when someone mentioned transmutation theory beside the fountain, three other students argued back.
He should have felt immediately at home.
Instead he felt a new and terrible possibility open beneath him.
What if he was odd here too?
A boy with immaculate cuffs glanced at Gale’s worn satchel and then at the ink stains on his fingers.
“First year?”
“Yes,” Gale said.
“Scholarship?”
“No.”
The boy looked faintly disappointed, as if denied a simple category.
“I’m Gale Dekarios.”
“Rolanth Ammakyl.”
Gale brightened. “Ammakyl. As in Ammakyl House? Your family endowed the west lecture hall.”
Rolanth blinked.
“I read the Academy history.”
“Why?”
“It was assigned.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Oh.” Gale adjusted his grip on his satchel. “Then I suppose I assigned it to myself.”
A girl nearby snorted.
Gale turned.
She was leaning against the fountain, dark curls pinned messily back, a stack of books balanced against one hip. “You assigned yourself Academy history before classes started?”
“It seemed prudent.”
“It seems unbearable.”
Rolanth laughed.
Gale felt heat rise in his face. “I only wanted to know where I was going.”
The girl tilted her head, studying him.
Then she smiled.
“I’m Elara.”
Gale hesitated.
It was not a cruel smile.
“Elara,” he repeated. “Hello.”
“You always talk like a lecturer who swallowed a dictionary?”
Rolanth laughed again, sharper this time.
Gale’s shoulders tightened.
Elara rolled her eyes at Rolanth. “That wasn’t meant as an insult.”
“It sounded like one,” Gale said.
“It was an observation.”
“That is what people call insults when they wish to avoid consequences.”
Elara stared at him for one second.
Then she burst out laughing.
Not at him, somehow. Or not only at him. There was surprise in it. Delight.
Gale did not know what to do with delight.
“You’re funny,” she said.
“I am?”
“Maybe not on purpose.”
“That seems less encouraging.”
“It’s still something.”
Rolanth made a bored sound and wandered off toward a group of older students.
Gale watched him go, feeling both relieved and dismissed.
Elara nudged the side of his satchel with her book. “Come on, self-assigned Academy historian. Orientation is this way.”
“You know where it is?”
“No. But I walk confidently.”
“That seems like a poor substitute for information.”
“It works more often than you’d think.”
Gale followed.
By the end of the first week, he knew three things.
First, Blackstaff Academy was not a sanctuary from loneliness. Not entirely. Students could be just as petty with spellbooks in their hands as children with wooden swords.
Second, he was advanced. Not merely a little. Painfully, visibly advanced in some subjects and embarrassingly untrained in others. He could explain complex Weave interactions beyond the expected level, but he had never learned certain classroom fundamentals because he had leapt past them in private study. This made instructors frown at him in two different ways.
Third, he loved it.
Gods, he loved it.
He loved the lecture halls with their chalk-dust air and enchanted ceilings. He loved the practice rooms warded against fire, frost, acid, and youthful arrogance. He loved the library most of all: tier upon tier of books climbing upward like an invitation to become more than himself.
Every spell was a door.
Every door was a dare.
And Gale, who had spent so much of childhood pressing his ear to the walls of ordinary life, could not stop opening them.
One evening, after a practical lesson in basic abjuration had ended with Gale accidentally reinforcing his shield spell so thoroughly that his instructor had to fetch a senior mage to dispel it, he found himself alone in the library.
He had meant to write to his mother.
The blank parchment sat before him.
Dear Mother, he had written.
Then nothing.
What could he say?
That he was happy?
He was.
That he had made friends?
Perhaps. Elara sat with him at meals sometimes. She stole his rolls and told him when he sounded pompous. That seemed friend-adjacent.
That he fit?
Not exactly.
He dipped his quill and tried again.
Dear Mother,
The Academy is extraordinary. The library alone would take years to properly understand, though I have made a beginning. My instructors are demanding, but not unfair. I may have caused a minor incident in abjuration, but no one was injured, and Master Halvin said my instinctive reinforcement showed “unsettling promise,” which I am choosing to interpret positively.
He paused.
Then added:
There are others here who love magic.
That was true.
He stared at the sentence for a long time before continuing.
I think I will be all right.
The words looked smaller on the page than they had felt in his heart.
A soft sound drew his attention upward.
The library’s upper windows had caught the last violet light of evening. Dust drifted through it in shining threads. Gale lifted one hand without thinking. The motes shifted, circling his fingers.
The Weave answered.
A familiar warmth bloomed beneath his skin.
Not praise. Not exactly.
Not friendship.
Not love.
But something close enough to mistake for all three.
He smiled despite himself.
“There you are,” he whispered.
The light moved across his palm.
He imagined the Weave as a presence leaning close, patient and endless, pleased with him. He imagined it had been waiting all day for this moment, just as he had. Beneath the hum of distant voices, beneath the scratch of quills and the rustle of pages, it seemed to speak in a language older than words.
More.
Gale’s smile widened.
“Yes,” he breathed. “I know.”
He did not hear the danger in it.
Not yet.
He was young enough to think the gods were fair.
Young enough to believe that light was good simply because it was beautiful.
Young enough to believe that if a door opened, he was meant to walk through it.
And so he reached.
Not for power, he would have said.
Not for glory.
Not yet.
He reached for the light with unshaking hands.
He reached because the Weave listened.
He reached because his mother wanted him happy, and happiness seemed to live just beyond the next lesson, the next spell, the next impossible thing made real.
He reached because somewhere, surely, there was a place where a boy like him could belong.
And the light, generous and terrible, opened.
Lyrics
I learned the names of stars by candle flame
Counted truths in chalk along the floor
Every symbol whispered try again
Every failure only asked for more
They said the Weave was endless
Said it listens if you dare
I felt it breathing softly
Like a promise in the air
Every spell a door
Every door a dare
If I learn enough
I’ll belong somewhere
I was reaching for the light
With unshaking hands
Not knowing yet
What the light demands
Books like towers, towers like the sky
I climbed until my breath ran thin
They called it brilliance, called it fate
I only knew I wanted in
Every spell a door
Every door a dare
I was young enough
To think the gods were fair
I didn’t want to be a legend
I just didn’t want to be alone