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Mirin sat at the centre of the storm and felt nothing.
The roar of the collapsing temple was gone now, replaced by the muted, muddled noise of the Elfsong Tavern at rest. Voices rose and fell around her: Lae’zel arguing with someone over a dented tankard, Astarion laughing too sharply at a joke he didn’t really find funny, Wyll speaking low and measured, Shadowheart’s voice a steady thread. Somewhere in the background, the spectral song of the tavern’s resident spirit rose and faded like sea-mist.
All of it washed over Mirin as though she were underwater.
She stared into the dregs of her drink, waiting for the familiar hum beneath her skin—the quiet, insistent buzz of a storm building on the horizon. For weeks now, that hum had been her constant companion, more herself than the hand she lifted, more certain than the ground beneath her boots.
There was nothing.
She flexed her fingers around the cup. No answering prickle, no scent of ozone, no answering churn of clouds in her blood. She imagined it at first—she must be drained, stunned from Bhaal’s touch, from Orin’s death, from her own. Magic didn’t just vanish. Sorcery was not a spellbook to misplace.
You died, a voice whispered in the back of her skull. And then a god took back what he lent you.
“Mir?” Karlach’s voice boomed over her shoulder, warm and bright. “You want another?”
Mirin blinked, realising her drink was still nearly full. “I’m good,” she said. Her voice sounded almost normal. That felt like a lie.
Karlach grinned at her anyway, great molten eyes crinkling. “Suit yourself. I’m drinking for two tonight—one for me, one for the absolute mess that bastard of a bhaalspawn made down there. Man, I know you can’t choose your family, but Sarevok was a proper piece of work.” She clapped Mirin’s shoulder with a careful but still too-strong pat. “You did good, you know.”
Did I? Mirin thought. Or was it him, through me?
“Just tired,” Mirin said aloud.
Everyone accepted it. Of course they did. They’d seen her body broken open like a dropped doll, blood slick on stone, felt the cold breath of Bhaal curl through the air as he reached into her and—
She forced herself not to shudder.
Withers—no, Jergal, she corrected herself wearily, because apparently she’d been travelling with the scribe of the dead and that was just a normal thing now—had hauled her back across that thin grey threshold, bones re-knit, heart kick-started by a will older than temple she would have been buried in. They had all flooded to her: hands on her shoulders, frantic voices in her ears, relief so intense it bordered on pain.
You’re here. You’re alright. You’re back.
She had smiled, because that was what you did when the people who dragged you out of hell looked at you like that. She had assured them she was fine. She had believed, for a handful of stunned, grateful heartbeats, that she was.
And then, beneath the relief and the ache and the echo of godly fingers on her soul, she’d reached for the storm.
And found nothing.
Conversation swelled around her again, blessedly shifting away—Wyll and Karlach reenacting some particularly dramatic moment from the temple, Shadowheart trying and failing not to look smug about some quiet victory of her own, Astarion complaining about blood on his boots.
No one noticed how rigid Mirin’s posture had become. No one noticed the whiteness of her knuckles around her cup. She had always been expressive, quick with a grin or a retort, her magic sparking at her fingertips when emotions ran high. Quiet, from her, read as exhaustion.
It gave her just enough cover.
Mirin stood, chair scraping softly against the floorboards. “I’m going to get some air,” she said, mostly to the table, not sure who was even listening.
“Don’t get murdered,” Astarion called absently, raising his glass.
“Again,” Lae’zel muttered, but there was a strange, reluctant affection under the bite.
“Shout if you need anything,” Wyll added, already mid-discussion with Karlach.
She nodded, said nothing more, and slipped away.
The Elfsong’s interior warmth fell away behind her as she pushed out into the night. Baldur’s Gate wrapped around her in crooked lines and shadowed alleys, the air thick with the smells of damp stone, spilt ale, smoke, and too many bodies in too little space.
The city was alive in the way only a city that had seen blood spilt in its name could be. Beggars huddled near doorways, their eyes hollow and watchful. A pair of rough-looking men argued over dice at the corner, their voices low and mean. A woman with a scar splitting her upper lip watched Mirin pass with the exhausted sharpness of someone who’d stolen and killed to see another sunrise.
Mirin moved through them on autopilot. Once, this kind of street would have thrilled her. Once, each flicker of torchlight would have sung in her veins, each breath of wind a promise she could answer.
She brushed her palm against her thigh, where Bloodthirst’s weight rode her hip. The dagger felt wrong on her—too still. Its faint, unnatural chill bit through the leather, a presence that made her stomach knot. A gift, a curse, a tool, a reminder. She had taken it from Orin, from a battlefield slick with viscera and divine spite.
Without her magic, it felt like a lie.
The realisation slid cold and thin into her: if one of the men at the dice table decided she looked like an easy mark, if some half-drunk thug fancied her cloak, if anything went wrong at all—she couldn’t reach for thunder. She couldn’t snap her fingers and call lightning into her grip. Storms wouldn’t answer her anymore.
She was just a woman with a knife she barely trusted.
Her pace quickened. The city pressed closer. Every shadow seemed thicker, every sound too loud. Her breath skated higher in her chest.
Find somewhere quiet, she told herself. Somewhere small.
She turned down a narrower alley, then another, until a crooked little dead-end pressed her into a corner between two leaning buildings. Barrels, long since emptied, slouched nearby. It smelled of damp and rot and stale piss.
Perfect.
Mirin put her back to the wall, slid down until she was sitting on the cold cobbles, and finally stopped pretending.
She reached for the storm one more time. Reached deep.
Her mind knew the path intimately. The first step had always been breath in, breath out; set your feet, feel the way the world hums. The second: open your palms and let the wind slip between your fingers. The third: call it, don’t command it—ask, and the storm inside will answer.
It had answered when she was thirteen and furious, when thunder first cracked out of a clear sky at her shout. It had answered when she was half-asleep, when simple dreams of rain turned into sheets of water drumming against her shutters. It had answered when a mind flayer’s ship ripped through the sky, when she woke with a tadpole in her skull and terror in her throat.
It had answered in the Underdark, on the Risen Road, in the cursed shadow of Shar’s domain. It had answered for Bhaal’s Chosen, of all people.
“Come on,” she whispered.
Nothing.
No tingle, no gathering pressure, no shift in the air. The weave lay around her, impenetrable and distant, like starlight seen from the bottom of the sea.
Her chest constricted.
“Come on,” she said again, louder this time, a hitch climbing into her throat. “You don’t get to just—” Her voice broke. “You don’t get to leave.”
Panic surged up from her gut, hot and dizzying. She curled forward, forearms braced over her knees, fingers digging into her hair.
You died. You died, and the god who carved storms into your bones ripped himself out and took everything with him.
Her breath hitched. She forced it in, forced it out, but each inhale seemed too shallow and each exhale too sharp.
“You were mine,” she rasped into the darkness. “You were the one thing I had before… before nautiloids and gods and whatever the hell any of this is. You were supposed to be mine.”
Her voice bounced uselessly off stone. No sympathetic rumble of thunder responded, no static crackle to raise the hairs on her arms. The silence felt obscene.
Tears burned at the back of her eyes. She squeezed them shut anyway, as if that would hold everything in place—her composure, her sanity, the jagged pieces of herself now cutting at the inside of her ribs.
She had lost things on this road. Time, innocence, whatever fragile tether had once tied her to something like an ordinary life. But through it all, she had always had this: the magic that was her and hers alone.
Now there was… space. A hollow where she had always been full.
Her breathing sped up. It felt like the walls were closing in, like the sky had been replaced by stone. Her heart thudded so hard it hurt.
“I can fight,” she choked, the words tumbling out to the empty alley. “I know I can fight without it. I know I’m not useless.”
Her hand spasmed toward Bloodthirst’s hilt, fingers hovering just shy of touching it.
“But gods—” Her voice frayed entirely. “I don’t know who I am without it.”
The admission ripped something open. A sob clawed its way up, wrenching out of her before she could clamp it down. She turned her face toward the rough stone, pressing her forehead into it as if she could ground herself there, if she could just press hard enough.
Her shoulders shook. The sound of her own quiet, helpless weeping seemed foreign to her ears, like it belonged to someone else.
Footsteps scuffed at the mouth of the alley.
Mirin froze, breath catching, hand snapping properly to Bloodthirst’s hilt this time. The dagger slid halfway free with a whisper.
“Easy,” came a familiar voice, low and careful. “It’s just me.”
Gale stepped into the thin spill of torchlight, hands raised in the universal gesture of I come unarmed, or at least uninterested in stabbing.
Mirin blinked against the blur in her eyes and hastily scrubbed at her face with the heel of her hand. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people in alleys,” she managed, aiming for flippant and landing somewhere closer to hoarse.
Gale considered the narrow space, the way she was curled against the wall, the half-drawn dagger. His eyes softened. “Noted,” he said gently. “Though, in my defence, you left without your usual parting orders, and I found that… concerning.”
He moved more fully into the alley, but stopped a few paces away, giving her space. The torchlight caught in the threads of his robes, the ones that still managed to look vaguely arcane even when travel-worn.
“Everyone is exhausted,” Mirin said. She tried for a shrug. It felt like the motion belonged to someone wearing her body as an ill-fitting coat. “I’m no exception.”
Gale tilted his head. “No. But even when you’re not filling the silence, you knwo how to command a room.” His smile ghosted across his mouth, there and gone. “Your reluctance is… unusual. I thought perhaps you deserved an audience for it.”
She huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh in better circumstances. “You followed me to be an audience for my silence?”
“And for whatever might be hiding inside it,” he said, his shrug unnervingly honest. “May I?” He gestured to a relatively dry patch of cobblestone not far from her.
Mirin hesitated, the instinct to tell him to go away warring with the sharp ache in her chest that wanted—something. Witness, perhaps. Or just someone to say this out loud to before it swallowed her whole.
She let Bloodthirst slide back into its sheath.
“Do what you want,” she muttered.
“That is a dangerous invitation to offer a wizard,” he said lightly as he lowered himself to sit. His joints cracked faintly in protest. “But I shall endeavour to be worthy of the trust.”
They sat in silence for a moment. The distant murmur of the city pressed at the edges: laughter from the tavern, a cart rattling by, a shout that might have been anger or joy.
Gale clasped his hands loosely in his lap. He didn’t look at her directly; he studied the opposite wall instead. “You died today,” he said, very matter-of-factly.
Mirin flinched. “Thank you for the reminder.”
“It is not intended as cruelty,” he said softly. “Only as… acknowledgement. We stride so quickly from victory to victory—if we can call them that—that sometimes the enormity of what happens to us is never properly named.”
He glanced at her then, eyes dark and searching. “A god killed you, Mirin. Then another god, who had been hiding in plain sight, intervened to tug you back across a threshold most never return from. That is not an ordeal one simply shrugs off by having a drink and a nap.”
Her jaw clenched. “I’m aware.”
“But that’s not what’s troubling you most,” he added quietly.
The words scraped against something too raw. Mirin stared at her hands. Her fingers trembled, just enough that she curled them into fists to hide it.
“Gale,” she started, then stopped. The name tasted odd on her tongue in this small, ugly space.
She swallowed. “I can’t feel it,” she said finally, the admission leaving her like a pulled tooth. “My magic. It’s… gone.”
The alley seemed to hold its breath.
Gale’s brows knitted. “Gone?”
She laughed once, high and sharp, immediately hating the sound. “That’s the part where you tell me it’s just exhaustion. That I need rest. That it will come back.”
“I don’t make a habit of lying to my friends to comfort them,” Gale said, almost absently. His gaze had gone distant, thoughtful. “What do you mean, precisely, by gone?”
“I mean—” Her throat tightened. She forced the words out steady. “I reach for it, and there’s nothing there. No tingle, no pull, no… no sense. You’ve seen me when I’m trying not to cast.” She gestured loosely. “It’s always there, humming. But now… it’s like someone cut it out of me.”
She pressed a hand flat to her sternum, as if she might find a seam there, a scar where Bhaal’s hand had reached in. “He stripped me,” she said quietly. “Of everything that was his. Apparently, that included… this.”
She let out a shaky breath. The words tumbled faster now that they’d started. “I know I can fight with a blade. I know I can shout and run and do all the regular, tedious, mortal things. But that storm… that was mine. Before him. Before any of this. It was the one thing I knew was me, even when something else tried to stake a claim.”
Her voice cracked. “And now I can’t find it. I don’t know who I am without it, Gale. I feel… hollow.”
Gale was very still.
“I am so sorry,” he said at last. The words were simple, but they landed with the weight of someone who knew exactly what it was to lose a piece of himself. “More than I can say.”
He was quiet for a heartbeat, then another. “May I ask you a question?”
Mirin let out a wet, humourless huff. “You usually do regardless.”
He almost smiled. “Fair.” His expression sobered again. “When you first felt your storm—before Bhaal’s shadow ever touched you—what did it feel like?”
She closed her eyes. For a moment, memory tried to answer on reflex.
“Like…” She groped for the words. “Like… the air just before a summer storm. Heavy, but in a good way. Promising. Like something big was about to happen, and I was in on the secret.”
A faint ghost of a smile pulled at her mouth. “I could taste it, back then. On my tongue. Tinny, like biting your cheek. And I could feel it in my teeth, in the roots of my hair. Like I was more… awake. More myself.”
“And when Bhaal… touched you?” he prompted gently.
She shivered. “That was different. Colder. Sharper. Like… a knife slid into that same space. He could use the storm, bend it, corrupt it, but he wasn’t—he wasn’t the first thing there.”
Her hand curled into her shirt, knuckles pressing into her sternum. “It was mine first.”
Gale nodded slowly. “That distinction matters,” he murmured. “Gods are greedy things. They take credit for every spark and surge as if they were its sole author. But the weave belongs to no one, and the ways we touch it are… ours.”
He shifted, turning enough that he could see her properly. “Would you permit me to try something?”
Mirin eyed him warily. “Try what? If you say dissection, I’m leaving.”
“Later,” he said, deadpan. “For now, something far less bloody.” His tone gentled. “Do you remember, in the early days, when I offered to show you how I perceive the weave?”
She snorted faintly. “Yes. I believe my exact words were ‘I’ll pass on the magical hand-holding, thanks.’”
“And I, in a rare moment of respect for boundaries, did not press the matter.” A corner of his mouth twitched. “But the offer was made in earnest. It remains so.”
She frowned. “Gale, I just told you—I don’t have anything. I can’t feel it at all. I think whatever Bhaal did—”
“—was violent,” he finished for her. “Cruel. Designed to make you feel powerless. But what he stripped was his mark upon you, his channel to exert influence. He is not the author of your soul, Mirin.”
He leaned forward slightly, voice lower. “Sorcery marks you, yes. But you are not just your magic. And your magic is not just one flavour of divinity’s touch.”
She looked away, jaw tightening. “That sounds pretty, but it doesn’t change the fact that when I reach, there’s nothing.”
“I am not asking you to change that by will alone,” he said. “I’m asking you to let me… lend you my eyes, as it were. To show you the weave as I see it, and see if, perhaps, there is still a thread there that grief and shock have simply shrouded.”
Mirin swallowed. The idea was terrifying in a way she couldn’t quite name. To reach and feel nothing had already hurt; to reach with him watching, to fail in front of him—it made something inside her curl up.
“What if there really is nothing?” she asked, voice small.
“Then we will face that truth together,” Gale said softly. “And I will still be here. You will still be here. And we will find out what that means, in time.”
He held her gaze, steady and warm. “But if there is something… if the storm is simply buried under what you’ve endured—then perhaps I can help you brush aside some of the rubble.”
The alley felt very quiet. Mirin realised her breathing had slowed, just a little, under the cadence of his voice.
“Fine,” she said at last, more exhale than word. “What do I have to do?”
Gale’s relief was subtle, a small softening of his shoulders. “Nothing too taxing, I promise.”
He shifted to sit cross-legged, then extended one hand to her, palm up. “First: take my hand. If you’re comfortable with that.”
She eyed it. She remembered the way he talked about the weave—like a lover, like an old friend, like a tapestry he was both in awe of and desperate to mend. She had teased him for his poetic waxing more than once.
Now, that same reverence felt like a lifeline.
Her fingers trembled as she reached out. His hand was warm, steady. He curled his fingers gently around hers, not too tight.
“Good,” he murmured. “Now, close your eyes.”
She hesitated, then obeyed. Darkness folded in.
“Listen to my voice,” Gale said, his tone taking on a faint, familiar rhythm—like the time he had talked the group through a particularly tricky teleportation circle, or coaxed wild magic back into its cage around a miscast spell.
“Breathe in slowly. Hold. Breathe out. Again.”
She did. The cold edges of panic eased with each deliberate wave of air.
“Now,” he continued, “set aside the idea of your magic as something inside you. For a moment, imagine it outside instead. The weave is not a battery in your chest; it is an ocean, and we are always already swimming in it.”
She frowned faintly. “Gale—”
“Hush, scholar at work,” he said, but there was warmth in it. “Remember what a storm feels like, just before it breaks. Not your storm—just… weather. The heaviness. The taste on the air. The sense of potential.”
Her shoulders relaxed a fraction. She could do that. She knew storms like she knew her own hand.
“I want you to imagine that sensation now,” he said. “Not as something you summon, but as something you notice. Don’t reach. Just… look.”
She let herself drift back to a memory not tainted by blood or gods: a field outside a nowhere village, sky piled high with bruise-colored clouds, wind teasing her hair. The low, anticipatory growl on the horizon.
“Yes,” Gale murmured, as if he could see inside her mind. “Good. Keep that. Now—this is the part where I cheat a little.”
She felt it then: a gentle warmth threading up through his hand into hers, not invasive, more like someone standing beside her and pointing. There was no surge of power, no forced channel—just… guidance.
“Tell me what you notice,” he said quietly. “Not inside. Around.”
At first, there was only the alley: the cold damp of the stone at her back, the faint breeze sneaking in from the street, the smell of old wood and older refuse.
Then, slowly, something else.
It was subtle, so subtle she almost missed it: a faint vibration, like the pluck of a distant string. Not the bright, crackling rush her storm had always been, but a quieter, steadier hum.
“I… there’s…” She frowned deeper, trying to follow it. “Something. Thin. Like… threads in the air.”
He exhaled, relief ghosting across the sound. “That’s the weave,” he said. “You’ve always been attuned to one particular current within it. A certain flavour, if you will. Bhaal laid his claim there as well. But the weave itself is older than he is, and kinder.”
The warmth from his hand guided her gently, nudging her perception one way, then another.
“See how it moves?” he asked. “Like light seen through water. How it thickens near living things, how it curls around stone and metal.”
Mirin’s breath caught. It was all still there—the vast, intricate web that underpinned every spell she’d ever cast, every miracle and horror she’d witnessed. She had simply never looked at it this way before, never stepped outside her own roaring river to see the sea containing it.
“But I don’t feel my storm,” she whispered.
“No,” Gale agreed softly. “Not as you knew it. That wound is too fresh. But look again. Very gently. Where the weave brushes you—”
She shifted her attention. The threads she saw—not with sight, but with whatever strange sense he’d coaxed awake—skimmed past her skin, pooled faintly at the edges of her. Where they touched, there was a… hush. A space the weave skirted, like water around a stone.
“It’s avoiding me,” she said, stomach dropping.
“Not avoiding,” he said at once. “Adjusting. There is a scar there now, perhaps. The residue of divine meddling. The weave is… wary of fresh wounds. It is not a cruel thing.”
He squeezed her hand gently. “But scars are not voids, Mirin. They are a record. And wounds heal.”
She swallowed hard. “What if it never does?”
“Then you, of all people, will teach the weave a new way to move around you,” he said simply. “But I do not think that will be your fate.”
The warmth in his hand dimmed, and the strange, enhanced clarity with it. The threads of the weave blurred, receding to that distant, star-like sensation.
Mirin opened her eyes.
The alley was the same—ugly, cramped, dim—but she felt fractionally more… anchored.
“I can’t call it,” she said, voice small. “Not like before.”
“I didn’t expect you to,” Gale replied. “What we did was not a spell, Mirin. It was… orientation.” He offered a careful smile. “You have spent years being the storm. Tonight, perhaps you took your first step toward also being the sky that holds it.”
She made a face at him. “How poetic.”
“You say that now.” His eyes softened. “But you reached. Even hurt and afraid, you reached.”
Somewhere under the ache and the hollow space in her chest, a small stubborn ember flared. She’d reached. She’d looked. The weave had not been gone.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For… not telling me it’s fine when it’s not.”
He inclined his head. “You are grieving,” he said. “For a part of yourself. That grief is real. It deserves to be named, and held, not brushed aside in favour of heroics and tavern songs.”
She snorted, a wet, wobbly sound. “I don’t think anyone’s writing ballads about ‘The Hero Who Had a Panic Attack in an Alley.’”
“Give me a week and a lute, and I’ll see what I can do,” he said solemnly.
She blinked—and then, to her own surprise, she laughed. It was thin, but it was real. Some of the pressure in her chest eased.
Gale’s answering smile was small and proud. “There she is.”
She wiped at her face again, smearing damp tracks without much success. “So… what now? I just… keep trying to touch it until it stops flinching away?”
“In essence,” he said. “With patience. With care. With the understanding that what you had before was shaped, in part, by a god who weaponised your gift. What grows in the absence of that influence may be different. Quieter, perhaps. Wilder. Or something else entirely.”
He tilted his head. “If you like, I can… continue to help. Not to remake you in my image—gods forfend we have another me running about—but to sit with you, as we did now, and look. To remind you that even if your storm is sleeping, you are not empty.”
The offer landed somewhere deep, in that hollow space where her magic had once thrummed. It hurt, but in a way that felt… bearable. She could almost imagine filling that space with something new, something that was truly hers this time.
“Yeah,” she said, voice rough but steadier. “I’d like that.”
“Good.” Gale pushed himself to his feet, joints protesting enough that he made a small, affronted noise at his own body. He offered her his hand again. “For now, though, I suggest we return before our companions decide I have lured you away for nefarious wizard purposes.”
She eyed his hand, then took it. He pulled her up with more strength than she expected.
“I mean,” she said as she steadied herself, “have you lured me away for nefarious wizard purposes?”
He adopted a lofty air. “If by ‘nefarious’ you mean ‘emotionally supportive’ and by ‘wizard purposes’ you mean ‘clever metaphors about the weave,’ then yes. My reputation is ruined.”
“Tragic,” she said. But the word came with an actual smirk this time.
They stepped back toward the mouth of the alley together. The city’s sounds swelled again, the slice of sky overhead dotted with distant stars.
Mirin reached out, very tentatively, with the new sense he’d shown her. The weave brushed past her like a river current around a stone—gentle, cautious.
For the first time since she’d woken up on cold stone with god-blood on her hands and her magic gone, she did not feel like she was falling.
“Gale?” she said, as they walked.
“Yes?”
“If it doesn’t come back,” she said slowly, “I reserve the right to be unbearable about it.”
He smiled, looking ahead toward the warm spill of light from the Elfsong. “I would expect nothing less,” he replied. “And I will be right there beside you, being equally unbearable about whatever marvel you become next.”
She rolled her eyes. But as they stepped back into the tavern’s glow, and her friends’ voices rose to greet them, the hollow place in her chest felt just a little less like a void, and a little more like a space waiting to be filled.
Not by Bhaal. Not by any god.
By her.