Chapter Text
It started as the faintest sense that he wasn’t alone.
At first, Gale assumed it was Tara lingering nearby while he studied or cooked, but he couldn’t spot his small friend when he bothered to turn around and investigate.
He tried to ignore it, but the nagging feeling that someone hovered close by persisted. That was disconcerting.
When another odd feeling of being watched wiggled down his neck, Gale went searching for the tressym. He found her in another room, sleeping as she soaked up the sun in one of the windowsills.
He concluded that Tara was not the culprit.
He checked his tower for ghosts on more than one occasion.
Nothing.
The sound haunting him later grew into hushed murmurs, the impression of distantly uttered syllables.
He really didn’t like that.
Once upon a time, Gale would have checked his books and artifacts for a possible charm or even a trapped soul, someone fused into their magic—things that would plausibly cause such a disturbance—but he had long since run out of such objects.
Such objects had long since been force-fed into the ravenous orb aching within his chest.
The voice in his mind wasn’t her, either, of course. Mystra never came to his aid after the incident, not even as a whisper. Gale’s power and potential had been consumed by the orb, and apparently—it ate his prayers too because his pleas for absolution went unanswered. The only witness to his tears had been Tara.
The void his goddess left behind was as vast as she.
The audible prickling at the back of his mind was most likely caused by the orb, he decided. For where else would the subtle hallucinations come from? And if not from the orb itself, then it was likely some side-effect caused by acting as the orb’s host.
Or his isolation was getting the better of him. That was also an option. He was already talking to himself more than he used to, with or without Tara in the room.
That was worrisome. And solitude often leads to a particularly tragic variety of madness.
But with time, Gale got somewhat used to the rustling at the base of his skull. He found ways to manage the disturbance. He had become quite good at managing disturbances, in general.
This disturbance was like the sound of paper being blown in a breeze. Notable, sometimes irritating, but manageable.
Sometimes the sound of the ocean outside of his window was enough to drown out the noise. Other times he would talk over it with his own voice, rambling about his findings—or lack thereof—in the solitude of his library. Such a counter-measure left him appearing madder but feeling more sane.
A small blessing.
He decided that, so far as side effects went, persistent background noise was a relatively minor one. The gnawing hunger for magic in his body and the imminent threat of detonation—that was far more distracting.
The deep pressure against the inside of his ribs was awful, and it often left him sweating and gasping for air when the cyst in his chest spasmed. This sometimes lasted for hours.
He forgot about the vague whispers entirely for a bit after being kidnapped and subsequently forced to host a second occupant; there was a worm in his head.
This second affliction threatened to change him entirely—body and soul—if he wasn’t quick. Disembodied voices were less concerning than the possibility of sprouting tentacles and joining an illithid hive-mind.
There were others, too, plagued by the same threat of imminent erasure via ceremorphosis. Some of them collectively pulled Gale out of a hole of his own making—a spell gone wrong, a mistake, like everything else in his life over the last year.
After Gale came crashing back into the world and sent both himself and his saviors tumbling into the bushes, they invited him to travel in search for a cure.
The promise of company was enticing. So he went, accompanied by a gaggle of strangers who had never heard of ‘Gale of Waterdeep.’
This was a novel experience.
His traveling companions weren’t exactly happy to be in each other’s company, either, but their shared need made the bond necessary. On their first night together they set up camp by a river in respectful, cooperative silence.
They argued about where they should go first in search of help. Then they were hungry.
Gale offered to cook, for which his new companions were audibly grateful. They all agreed that the food was surprisingly good, and as this was their only other shared experience, the collective appreciation for the meal became the talk of night.
That gave Gale a weird new feeling in his chest, but he didn’t hate it.
Seeking the removal of their tadpoles was a dubiously viable venture, but it wasn’t a lonely project, at least. Gale cooked not for one, but many, and there was always someone around willing to chop vegetables, which was lovely.
Unfortunately for Gale, the first orb lodged next to his heart still hungered—if anything, it grew hungrier, jealously demanding it remain his first priority.
So Gale begged help of his new colleagues. Not all of them were terribly happy about the cost, but they provided what scraps of enchanted material they could find to his cause, even if they frowned about it.
This was also when Gale started to have some rather unusual dreams.
Well, they all had unusual dreams, of which they eagerly spoke over breakfast—a rich and hearty meal, if Gale could manage it—and they weighed against their collective conscience the propositions made by their dream visitor, a being who claimed to be their guardian.
But Gale had other visions too, ones no one else shared and unrelated to their collective concern.
He began to dream of cities in the sky.
It was a world held aloft by threads of the Weave: impossible cities, ones built on top of jagged wedges of earth torn from the ground and suspended above the rest of the world—literal castles in the sky.
And there was one more magnificent than the rest.
The floating settlement’s architecture was assembled out of marble, quartz, and granite—copious amounts of these precious materials all hewn and shaped into buildings clearly made to impress with their sheer height, breadth, unnecessary intricacies, and sprawling feats of engineering. Many were completely suspended in the air above ground that already defied gravity.
In these dreams, Gale spent a lot of time looking down on the settlement. A heady and delighted feeling would rush through him during these moments, though the reason for the feeling was not clear.
And perhaps a small part of him understood that the world was of his own subconscious creation because it brought him that select variety of joy—the satisfaction of a job very well done.
It was just so lovely to look at—it was a city that wanted to be looked at.
Decorating each and every surface of the city’s magnificent feats of architecture were elaborate and expressive pieces of stonework, mosaics, and painted murals of every style, from the most realistic to the most impressionist and abstract depictions. Some of the already breathtaking artwork slid along winding paths of illusory magics designed to dazzle onlookers with added dance and theater.
That seemed right to Gale. The end of every effort should be beauty. What would be the point, otherwise?
The subjects of these arts were wide and varied: sweeping golden fields of grain; menacing looking dragons; stunning portraits of gods lined in gold; and humans dressed in shimmering robes and armor—adventurers and heroes.
The eyes through which Gale witnessed it all liked to revisit some sights more than others. He had no true free rein in these visions—they played out somewhat like memories—and he spectated through the eyes of a theoretical other.
And this someone appeared to always have somewhere to be, given how much he traveled through the imagined space.
The other people who inhabited this impossible world were a sight to behold, too. They walked on air between the magnificent buildings, the silk and feathers of their clothing fluttering behind them as they went.
They all appeared so leisurely and carefree, confident in their weightlessness. Not a single step they took came with unintended consequences.
And of the artwork looming over the city’s citizens, his favorite appeared to be whichever ones included a particular man—an individual situated beside it all, and embedded deep into the enclave’s self-image.
He was depicted somewhat differently across each medium, but he remained in each instance a recognizable, repeating motif. He was always depicted with strange purple eyes, dark hair, and dressed in the elaborate and golden robes of an archmage.
Gale didn’t know why he knew this—that an archmage in this world wore golden robes.
Gods, did his heart swell at the sight of this paradise—not in gratitude, but in a fierce, possessive pride.
Though, this bit of the experience confused him—primarily, the strength of the feeling. He often woke in a muddled, disorientated state as the intense and foreign emotion faded from his body.
Gale hadn’t felt anything quite like it since—well, not for some time.
But the borrowed confidence did put a little energy in his step, and his companions noticed—and approved. He liked that.
He liked less the darker implications of his nighttime reveries.
Gale tried not to dwell on it, but the uncomfortable wrinkles in his experience proved difficult to ignore.
The problem was this: the settlement Gale presided over in his dreams bore a clear and obvious resemblance to Netheril, or at least, what Netheril was said to have been like before its final destruction.
Every wizard eventually learned about Netheril because there was a lesson the story of its demise was crafted to convey. The Mystran clergy across Faerûn made sure the tale never died:
Once, there had been no limit to what a mage could do with the power of the Weave. But Netheril—forged and founded by its mage-kings with the aid of their unfettered access to the Weave’s potential—saw its demise at the hands of those who created it.
Netheril’s ancient mages climbed too high into the sky—quite literally—and then their greatest climber fastened his fingers into the goddess of magic herself—Mystryl, she was called then—and proceeded to rip open the Weave.
Karsus didn’t mean to tear it all down, but like the empire itself, he didn’t pause to consider moderation or humility. He ignored magic’s finitude and inherent limitations. In his folly, Karsus destroyed everything the Netherese built over their thousands of years of wanton, reckless discovery and design.
Mystra, the goddess of magic that emerged after the death of her predecessor, enforced boundaries on the Weave’s access and potential. She would not permit the possibility of another Karsus.
He did become “great,” in the end; his name and the lesson he became were impossible to forget.
How shameless of Gale, to preen at cities of his own conjuring as if they were some grand accomplishment in the wake of his own overreach. Justly, when he woke, he was once again subject to the laws of gravity, Mystra’s will, and his shame.
Gale should have been more abashed concerning his nighttime visions and the feelings they evoked, but he wasn’t, which was worse. He knew he would happily escape to the fantasy again each night.
Because of course he would. His waking hours were hard as well as numbered because the quest to prevent demise by ceremorphosis continued, and it proved to be involved and prolonged. And as they struggled along in their collectively sickened and diminished state, Gale’s unique affliction grew worse.
It became clear to Gale that he was going to die soon.
He’d known it would eventually end like this—with a bang—but lately the idea of his demise had become heavier and more terrible than before because now there were people he would leave behind.
Gale mourned the idea of losing the tenuous bonds cultivated over shared meals, daily talk of strategy, or the periodic resetting of a bone. He would miss cooking for them and miss their eager and sincere compliments spoken over full mouths and full stomachs.
The idea of death was rendered more difficult to swallow than it had been before as his previous resignation gave way to some measure of bitterness.
Then along the way, Gale was met by an old friend and a new directive: die, for the good of all.
The order from Mystra came with some relief, at least. His goddess worked through their mutual friend, and with her blessing Elminster cast a spell that would keep the orb’s hunger at bay until Gale was in a position to execute his final act of obedience.
Forgiveness for his past transgressions would come after. Supposedly.
The visit was brief. His old friend had more important things to do for Mystra than linger while Gale sulked over the new development.
He was going to die, as he expected. Mystra sent a message, something he didn’t expect, but the message was merely a confirmation that this was how it was supposed to end.
A pity; he’d secretly hoped for a miracle.
After Mystra’s treatment, Gale’s chest became both light and once again heavy; he no longer had to scramble to find nourishment to feed the arcane blight threatening to eat him up from the inside, but time no longer felt so infinite, now that he could see his final destination on the horizon. He wouldn’t be alone, at least, when the time came.
His companions offered to help him prepare dinner more often after that, chopping vegetables more finely than necessary to create the time they used to insist on finding another way, defying Mystra’s will.
But Gale had done that once already, and it had ended poorly.
He decided it would better to listen to her this time. That would be the right thing to do, the “I’ve learned my lesson” thing to do.
But his companions made resigned obedience difficult.
With onions and potatoes skins on their fingers, they continued to insist on the possibility of an alternative.
It would have been so much easier to die alone in a desert or in some uninhabited hole in the underdark. Not like this: beside a warm fire, steeped in the scent of a fresh meal, surrounded by the sound gracious mouths.
—mouths that continued to speak blasphemy: Disobey.
And, as if this new development wasn’t enough, stabilizing the orb also came with an additional and unexpected change to what he experienced in the privacy of his mind: there emerged more disembodied whispers only heard by himself, louder and more frequent than before.
It was both worrisome and distracting. The inescapable noise—like rats fussing around in a nest at the back of his mind—made it difficult sometimes to keep track of when his companions needed his attention.
In the seclusion of his tent, Gale gave himself over to curiosity, sitting in a sphere of magically conjured silence in an effort to parse through the whispers, in case they meant something. It was preferable to thinking about death.
In listening, he eventually picked out possible… words?
He listened more closely.
Yes… some of the utterances were repeated in the way a common phrase, imperative, or expletive might often be spoken in real speech! Gale wrote down what these utterances sounded like and revised the phonetic approximations on occasion when he became more familiar with their sound. The words—he would assume they were such—tended to feature somewhat guttural sounds, much of the vocalization happening at the back of the throat, perhaps, with sharp front-of-mouth enunciations.
He listened further, fascinated by the emerging patterns and continuity.
Gale lifted the magical silence surrounding his tent and repeated his best approximation of the sounds in a hushed tone and wrote them down, trying to get his tongue to imitate what his memory could retain. In reciting the words, he was left with the sense of there being something vaguely familiar about them, and Gale became convinced that the words truly meant something.
But Gale needed resources. There wasn’t much of that readily available on the road, but he made do with what he could find. His companions grew impatient with how often Gale insisted that he stow away various written paraphernalia salvaged out of old temples and libraries, and grew more impatient when he refused to sell half of the material with their other loot to merchants who would have been interested in the reuse of the old paper and vellum.
Gale didn’t bother to explain.
He needed a variety of written examples of the many languages scattered across the Realms, as well as anything that might speak of curses or enchantments unfamiliar to him. He found many examples of language, but none of the material pointed him toward any definitive idea of what he might be hearing. None of the material told him anything new about curses or enchantments, either. He needed a proper library, not this makeshift collection of abandoned materials. But it was all he had to work with.
And there were the dreams, which continued to manifest in increasingly vivid detail. The city’s lights grew brighter, its buildings taller, and its airborne paths crowded with people wearing elaborate and impractical dress, fluttering in the air like moths around a lamp.
Gale flit through the world as one of its citizens, and it seemed he lived as same player every time he closed his eyes. This version of Gale practiced higher-order magic, casting on a whim high level spells to meet any and every need, from lacing his robes to moving between rooms to getting from one end of the city to the other. It was an obscene kind of opulence.
A guilty pleasure. A gilded comfort.
During the day, every step Gale made dirtied his boots and brought him closer to his predestined demise. But at night, alone in his tent, he lived out another life entirely—a life where he never had to touch the ground.
As might be expected, his sleep didn’t amount to very good rest. He was very pleased when they found coffee to add to their provisions, and his companions made delighted noises when they smelled the brew each morning.
His interest in the mystery wavered however when they entered the shadowlands.
The malignant miasma lay thick over the land and it made their progress slow. The sunless, lifeless landscape weighed down his mind as well as his body.
Their fights were against shadows, remnants of people already long dead, and bits of their souls persisted even after the fights were over—scraps of rot loaded with memories that penetrated the mind if one got too close.
Gale made the mistake of touching one—“in her former life, this girl played in the nearby woods… she was always the best at climbing trees.”
He’d wept after that. Someone had held him through the tears.
In such conditions it became all too easy to brood. Deep in the heart of this awful curse, they would likely find Gale’s final objective. His last days would feature no sunlight and little hope.
He stopped working on his private translation project. Why did he bother? The whispers and dreams likely represented a meaningless puzzle, perhaps the result of a psychic residue from one or both of his afflictions. Surely, they meant nothing.
He was slotted to die, anyway. It didn’t matter.
Gale gave up on searching for meaning. His thoughts returned to the practical utility of the orb itself—his eventual demise.
There was no point in pondering puzzles.
He was a dead man.
The dreams and whispers didn’t stop, however, even if he’d stopped trying to make sense of them. And honestly, they weren’t much of a mystery if Gale stopped to think more practically about the whole affair.
There was a perfectly normal and potentially revealing explanation for the nature of his nightly visions: It made sense that his mind would conjure up images which resembled descriptions of Netheril because his own folly was comparable in magnitude, given that he was a walking shadow of the promise he once held.
Netheril was the empire that had everything but would not be content, and it reached for more until it all came crashing down. Nothing but vestigial remnants of their culture remained, bits of it spread across other peoples, and the original language rendered into a stiff and archaic construct of what it once was, an ephemeral relic only useful for casting.
Incredible: to think Gale once enjoyed Mystra’s company in both mind, body, and soul, and yet he’d desired more—sought more, despite being told it wasn’t his to have.
Then he’d shattered the proverbial cookie jar and had the audacity to cry about it when the broken shards cut his hands.
Great mages are destined to fall, it seems.
Poor Karsus—he never stood a chance against his own hubris. And perhaps that’s true of Gale as well.
It’s because of men like Karsus that Mystra went on to set the boundaries Gale had been so eager to cross. Karsus tore down an entire civilization, a goddess, and all of magic with a flick of the wrist, after all.
Gale wondered if Karsus wept upon realizing what it was he’d done.
But it was somewhat different for Gale, wasn’t it? Karsus didn’t know or care for the goddess who presided over the Weave, he only cared for power. Gale, on the other hand, loved the Mistress of Magic, but—perhaps that made his blunder worse… and possibly inevitable.
People will go to great lengths in an attempt to impress the object of their affections.
Gods, Gale really thought he would be an exception, and be the one to return a fragment of the Weave shattered in Karsus’ folly to Mystra after all this time, like some unasked for token of affection given with the expectation of something in return.
He sought to prove his devotion, but in doing so revealed a worse folly—that his devotion was to the possible power of the Weave, not to the Weave itself, and that he was a god of liars—so powerful in his domain that he deceived even himself.
That is the way with mages.
No, Mystra was right—better for Gale to go the way of Karsus and pay for all possible future crimes now because they were inevitable, surely.
The Netherese blight balled up in his chest would be put to good use, at least. Gale would do what Mystra asked and use his folly to save others rather than let it consume the world around him.
Though, until then… since he was already made to live the alternate life, he continued to indulge in his dreams of floating cities and casting spells well beyond what should be possible.
At night, Gale enjoyed the dark pleasure of a world without restriction, where the Weave itself was the limit.