Chapter Text
The sea had calmed by the time Gale set aside his nightly studies, the ship’s rocking beneath him reduced to a gentle sway that could almost make him forget he was not back at home in his tower. By lamplight, the small, wood-panelled stateroom felt little different from one of the cozy nooks in his private library.
Though with significantly fewer books. A concession to his travelling companions, who had pleaded with him to consider the weight and choose only the volumes he absolutely could not do without. Gale had given in with only performative protestations. He knew they would be insufferable without reading material of their own to make it through this most tedious leg of the journey.
Case in point, a worn copy of The True and Impossible Adventures of Tenebrux Morrow lay open page-down on the pillow beside Arabella’s head. It seemed like only yesterday Gale had plucked the volume out of a jumbled heap in a goblin-blighted village, dusted it off, and recalled with a pang of nostalgia how, as a boy, it had fueled his own dreams of adventure in the Astral Sea.
The fantasy, of course, had proven far rosier than reality. He feared he would be unable to read the tale now without a bitter reminder of his youthful ignorance.
But such ignorance—or innocence, as some would have it—was the prerogative of the young. Marking the page, he set the book aside, and brushed a lock of ginger hair from the tiefling girl’s face. Careful not to wake her or Tara, who slept curled at the girl’s feet. Sleep was a precious commodity in an unfamiliar environ, and Arabella’s had been particularly hardwon. Not everyone was blessed with a Waterdhavian’s natural constitution for seafaring. Gale would have to see about finding her a remedy for her seasickness in the morning. But Arabella was holding up admirably under the circumstances: with plenty of complaining, and even more fortitude and determination. For all she had lost to the Absolute’s ambition, she deserved to find some peace.
Sleep was far from Gale this evening as well, if not for the same reasons. He had always been something of a night owl, losing track of time as he lost himself down the winding pathways of a good book.
But these days it was the light of dawn that made him drowsy.
He slipped quietly from the cabin, stretching limbs gone stiff from sitting as he emerged into the cool night air. The wind off the waves smelled of deep open water, purer than the brininess of the harbor back home.
The crew on night duty huddled together in quiet conversation, punctuated now and then by laughter and puffs of pipesmoke. Silverbeans, the tabaxi yeoman, practiced a shanty on his squeezebox, and Gale spared him a few words of encouragement as he went by. Catfolk were a rare sight in Baldur’s Gate, rarer still in Waterdeep, and the scholar in Gale yearned to question the young man about his distant homeland. But charming as it was, Beans’s was not the company he craved tonight.
He found Astarion alone at the ship’s prow, head tilted up toward the moonless sky. Once Gale had been fortunate enough to catch him in a similar position, soaking up the warmth of the sun’s first rays on his bare skin, not knowing how long he would have the privilege and intent on making the most of every morning he did.
Now starlight would have to do. It shimmered on his face, made his curls glow like a comet’s halo as they danced in the wind. For a little while, not a creature of undeath, but an eternal astral elf, sailing the waterless expanse of Wildspace.
But that was just Tenebrux Morrow’s influence on an easily excitable imagination. The product of a darkvision spell cast under the influence of infatuation. Some would call him a hopeless romantic, as if that were an insult, but Gale had always embraced his weakness for beauty. A pity Astarion couldn’t see for himself just what a rare beauty he was.
“Admiring the view?” he said to Gale without turning.
Astarion hadn’t changed. He was still all but impossible to sneak up on.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” said Gale, leaning against the railing beside him. “You seem quite taken with those stars.”
“Jealous, darling?”
“Hardly.”
“They’re even more brilliant out here than when we were camped in the wilderness. Back in the city, you almost forget just how many stars there are. The lights drown out all but the brightest.”
A memory of Astarion reclining on his bedroll, gazing up at the night sky, flashed through Gale’s mind. How quickly Astarion had turned the conversation to flattery and mind games, desperate to secure himself an ally, a protector. When all he must have wanted, truly wanted, was to enjoy the view in peaceful silence.
And Gale wondered, not for the first time, what those flickering pinpoints of light must look like to an elf, whose eyes were attuned to the darkness, magnifying the slightest illumination. If the river of stars truly sparkled like diamonds strewn across a velvet sky, as the poets would have one believe. He wished he could see them through Astarion’s eyes, just once. But the tadpoles were long gone, and a man’s mind should be his own sanctum sanctorum, untrampled by trespassers.
Though invited company was another matter.
As if reading his thoughts, Astarion glanced over at him with a lopsided smile and confessed, “They remind me of the first night we spent in your little mind palace within the Weave.”
A thrill of excitement, of exquisite pleasure remembered, leaped in Gale’s belly. His usual facility with words failed him so he could only utter a graceless “Oh? A favorable comparison, I hope.”
That earned him a hearty laugh. “You know, when you put it like that, I have half a mind to make you squirm.”
But Astarion was in no mood for games, and quickly sobered.
“I must have been raving mad to agree to this voyage. This is the farthest I’ve been from dry land—our brief excursion aboard a nautiloid notwithstanding. There are a hundred ways things could go horribly wrong for me at sea, quite a number of them lethal to someone of my . . . particular sensitivities.”
Sea monsters and marauders weren’t what haunted Astarion’s thoughts, and a man who had no need of air had little to fear from drowning.
It was the sun. On a wooden vessel in the middle of the open sea, there were precious few places to hide from it. Granted, they had plans in place in the event it was necessary to abandon ship during the day. An Astarion-sized crate all four had agreed to call his lifeboat, but that was for all intents and purposes nothing but a sunlight-tight, floating coffin. A concession to stereotype the vampire was understandably prickly about.
“And yet,” Astarion blinked, shaking his head at himself, “I’m not worried. As long as you’re here with me, I know I’ll be alright.”
“I wouldn’t let any harm come to you,” Gale assured him. “Nor would Tara or Arabella, if they had any say in matters. They’ve grown quite fond of you.”
“And I them. But best not to tell them that,” Astarion said with a roguish gleam in his eyes. “I have a reputation to maintain, after all.”
When he looked back out toward the sea, toward the false dawn where the celestial river met the water, the gleam vanished, and he seemed a million miles away, beyond even the Tears of Selûne. No tears would ever fall down that face again, though sadness was etched into every inch of it.
Gale knew that look. Knew Astarion didn’t want to be reached where he was. There was nothing to do but wait for him to come back to earth.
“There are endless worlds out there,” he said at last. “That’s what you said to me that night. Countless ways to declare love.”
“I must have made quite an impression if you remember my words well enough to quote me.”
It wasn’t Gale’s intent to be flippant. So much of his concentration that night had been devoted to ensuring the magic held. He’d wanted everything to be perfect. And so his defenses had been down, his heart pouring its contents directly into Astarion’s. It was reassuring to know Gale hadn’t been rambling nonsensically all the while.
“You must be joking,” Astarion scoffed. “No one ever touched me so deeply. No one ever bothered to try. For the first time in . . .” The words “two hundred years” died on his lips as the truth hit him: “As far back as I could remember, I was seen and . . . loved . . . for who I was. Not for what someone could take from me. I wanted to commit every second of that night to memory. In case—”
In case it was the last of such nights they shared. The last they had. Gale didn’t wish to be reminded how close he came to ending his own life for a mere chance at Mystra’s forgiveness, any more than Astarion wished to cede any power to a fate that never came to pass.
“No. I’ve spent too much of my life looking back,” he said instead, “looking over my shoulder. Dwelling on a past I could not change. But no more. It’s time I looked forward, to endless worlds.
“And I have you,” Astarion said, with eyes clear and present as they met Gale's, “my love, to share them with.”
The future was theirs, to do with as they wished. No hungry orbs or cruel masters, no threat of ceremorphosis looming over their heads. No thrones of blood nor crowns of power shackling them in solitude to the worst aspects of their nature.
They were as free as any two creatures of the material plane could hope to be, bound only to one another’s welfare. But those were bonds Gale had no intention of ever breaking.
“To endless worlds, then.”
And countless more declarations.