Chapter Text
Who can say how the gods love? They love as they are able to. They love as their nature requires of them.
And they love as all things love: selfishly, possessively, and with no thought for the damage they may leave in their wake.
***
When they first met, he was everything she was not.
Wealthy. Confident. Kind.
Audie was none of these things. Hungry, scraping out a living in a city that cared nothing for the children that scampered through its busy arteries, she had already learned to live on an empty stomach and a well-executed magic trick. She could wheedle coins and pity out of parents and enchant their children, but she couldn’t do it if there was a boy her own age running around wielding actual magic, and accusing her of fraudulence.
She should have known, even that young, that Gale was special. Chosen. What other five-year-old can cast a spell, even one as simple as Dancing Lights? His parents were not noble, or wizards themselves. They did not hire him a tutor, planning instead to send him to academy when he was old enough.
Where could he have learned the spells?
In the years after he was taken, Audie would ask herself this, over and over again.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Gale Dekarios ruined her trick, and she vowed to hate him forever. She vowed to prove him wrong.
At first that was her only interest in magic—to gain the upper hand, to win. But when Nharaen taught her to cast her first spell, when she performed it in front of Gale, something changed.
It wasn’t easy. She closed her eyes, screwed up her nose, and felt something within her reaching out. For a moment, she felt it—felt her fingers slip off the edges of the Weave like rain from a leaf. Panicked, she reached out further, one last burst of energy, something in her heart turned ice-cold, and then she had it: the place within her closed, a single, tiny strand of the Weave held within it. Audie held it, held it—and let it go. The air around her exploded into light.
The children around her danced and giggled.
Gale Dekarios caught one mote of light in his hand. It seemed to dance for him alone. His face was unreadable.
More, she thought, and suddenly the whole square was alight, glittering like a thousand stars, each one a diamond within her grasp.
It was an impressive display. But the boy in the middle of it wasn’t looking at her.
She let the lights fall.
***
“Here. You shouldn’t go so many hours without eating. It’s not good for you.”
Audie was used to hunger, but her pride was sorely tested, smelling the fresh-baked bread in Gale’s sandwich, watching the juice from the tomatoes drip onto the cobblestones of the street.
But the look in his eyes… she recognized that look.
“No thanks,” she said, turning away. “I don’t want your pity.”
He took a step back, surprised. “It’s not pity,” he said. “It’s—what friends do. Share. That’s what my mother said.”
She squinted at him. Friends? Them? “Why would I want to be friends with you, Gale Dekarios?”
His face turned as red as the tomato in his sandwich. “Well—I don’t really know. But I know why I want to be friends with you.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“You’re smart. And funny. And—no one else knows magic. No one else can—feel the Weave.” He ran his hand through the air as if he was plucking at invisible threads, a far off look in his eye. Maybe, Audie thought, remembering the way her own spell had responded to him, he is touching the Weave itself.
(In another lifetime, she told him she was better than him. He left half the sandwich for her on the stone bench, and she threw it away.
In another lifetime, he only told her that he wanted to be friends years later, when it was all too late.
Are you paying attention?
This is not that lifetime.)
Touching the Weave? She shook her head. Ridiculous. This was Gale Dekarios in front of her, not Elminster himself.
Examining him again, the far-off look was gone, but she scrutinized his face long enough for him to squirm before making up her mind. He just looked like any other boy.
She took the sandwich, devoured it in approximately four bites, making a mess of her face and her shirt.
Gale’s smile was sunshine itself.
***
When Nharaen gave her the dragon book, she didn’t know what it means. Audie was the smartest girl in her grade. She always had the right answers. She had devoured every book Nharaen had ever given her, but she didn’t understand this one.
The dragon guarded a princess in her tower—or did it capture the princess, and then put her in the tower? The princess wanted to save the dragon, loved the dragon, but she watched the prince kill the dragon and married him anyway.
“Why?” Audie asked Nharaen. “Why does she marry him anyway?”
“Because that’s the way the story goes, Audie,” Nharaen said.
“I don’t understand,” Audie said.
“Someday you might,” her mentor told her.
Watching Gale with Elvira, Audie sensed dragonish feelings rising through her. Mine, she thought, even as she let them study alone and listened to Elvira explain what liking Gale means. The dragonish feelings yawned in her chest, and when she walked home with Gale that afternoon she found to her horror that she wanted to curl around him like he was a chest of gold. Suddenly, she understood the instinct to keep him safe and locked away from princes with swords.
But she was not a dragon, and Gale was not a princess. They were only children, and friends, and even she knew that locking him up, even if she could, even if she wanted to, wouldn’t last for long.
Gale could do anything, after all. He was the most gifted student she had ever seen. Sometimes, in the mornings, he would tell her that he’d dreamed of a new spell, and cast it right there—everything from Daylight to summoning a Tressym. She didn’t admit it, not to him, but Audie had to trip over herself studying just to keep up—and sometimes, when he came running out to greet her with his hair still mussed from oversleeping, she swore she could see the Weave itself reflected in his soft brown eyes.
It was becoming a problem.
When she asks him about Elvira, he doesn’t give her the answer she expects.
“Just because she likes me doesn’t mean I like her back. That’s not how that works. Besides, she’s not nice to you. I’d never like someone that isn’t nice to you.”
She felt warm all over.
***
“What do you love most about magic?” she’d asked him once, lying on her back in Nharaen’s garden.
His eyes had gone starry. “The possibility. The chance to do anything, if I can only think it up. No boundaries, except the ones imposed by our own limits.”
“Which, of course, you don’t have,” she teased.
“Which you don’t have, Audelia Wands,” he told her.
***
What is a boy to a goddess?
(Come now, you know the answer. A student, a tool, a distraction, a lover.)
***
In this lifetime, when he moved up to seventh-year Magic Training, she let the injustice of it roll over her, white hot. It all came so easily to him—the magic that she worked for, trained for, spent all her time studying for, came to him in lightning flashes of inspiration, in dreams. Her magic took blood and sweat and tears; his was effortless, pulled from that spark inside him that she glimpsed sometimes in his eyes.
This is not to say he did not study, or work hard. He did. But it didn’t seem to matter if he did all the reading or read some other apocryphal magical treatise instead, if he took careful notes during the lecture or if he worked on his own projects. Magic came as naturally to him as breathing. Audie could choke on her own jealousy.
It was no wonder that they wanted to move him up.
Bile filled her throat.
In this lifetime, before Audie could say anything, Gale stepped in. “Professor Sylvia,” he said, “I don’t think my test results are a wholly accurate picture of my abilities. I got lucky.” His eyes skitter to Audie’s. “But I’d like to stay with the sixth years. I’m afraid that my lack of practice going into year seven might make me a danger to my classmates.”
Audie’s mouth almost dropped open. What was he doing? She knew, with complete and utter certainty, that if it were her, she would have kept her mouth shut.
“I assure you, Gale,” Professor Sylvia said, “We would not have suggested it if we were not certain of your abilities.”
“I appreciate the gesture, very much.” Gale’s voice was respectful but firm. “But I would far rather remain with my own class. I know that is where I will learn best.”
“If you’re certain,” the professor said, “Then I suppose I cannot force you.”
“Thank you again, Professor.” Gale gave a short bow, then grabbed Audie’s arm and pulled her, still gobsmacked, out of the room.
“What are you doing?” she hissed at him when they were back in the corridor. “What about becoming Gale of Waterdeep? What about becoming the greatest wizard in the world?”
“I’m staying where I’ll learn best,” Gale said, still in that implacable tone.
“Gale, this is stupid,” she protested.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “I’ll learn more with you anyway. We’ll steal the seventh years’ book from the library, and we’ll practice together.”
“I can’t let you do this,” she said, face red with anger, fighting tears. “I told you, I don’t want your pity.”
“It’s not pity!” Gale burst out. “I just—I don’t want to be alone. You’re my only friend, Audie. You and Tara. And they won’t let her on school grounds.”
She looked at him, eyes stinging.
“I’m not lying,” he said. “I swear it. I swear it on Mystra herself.”
Audie nodded. It was the last conversation they had on the matter.
The next term, they moved up together.
(In another lifetime, he joined the seventh years alone. Something changed irrevocably between them.
In this lifetime, he moved more slowly through his childhood. Perhaps that was why Mystra left him to his own devices.
For a time, at least.)
***
Audie lost a family, and gained another. She was a noble now, and she knew she should be seeing less of Gale, but—he knew her when she was Audie Clearwater, before Nharaen, before House Wands, before her magic, before all of it.
That first night, after Delphina told her about the deal her family had struck, she’d Misty Stepped out of Nharaen’s daughter’s bedroom and run, a wraith in a black cloak, to Gale’s house. She’d tossed pebbles at his window until he appeared, his face white in the moonlight, and that was all it took for her to fall, sobbing, to her knees.
He caught her before she hit the street.
She told him nothing about why she was there, that night, or what she was crying over.
When he asked, she said she didn’t want to be alone.
***
They have been orbiting each other for a decade. Someday, they will have to collide.
***
On the night she debuted, Gale met her on the dance floor. They were sixteen, soon to graduate, his brown eyes trained on her face, clad in purple to match her own gown. He had an earring in one newly-pierced ear, and Audie couldn’t help but think it dashing the first time she saw it. The clothes made him look older. They made Audie feel older too—like she was trying on someone else’s skin for a night, someone carefree and beautiful and brilliant, all the things she wanted to be.
The whole evening was a whirl of light and laughter, music swirling around her. She danced with every eligible noble young man, but her eyes kept going to Gale, who watched her from the sidelines, his gaze hot upon her. She would have to marry soon, she should conduct herself as would become a daughter of House Wands, but—she felt she could taste the magic in the air every time Gale took her hand or leaned in to whisper a joke in her ear. The Weave seemed particularly close that night, cold as water from a mountain stream, vibrating through her, half-heard music and faint perfume on the air. The mix was heady, irresistible, and she felt all the dragonish feelings she’d spent a decade trying to ignore slither out again, whisper mine, mine, mine every time she looked at Gale’s soft brown hair and clear eyes.
Two glasses of champagne later, as the ball drew to its end, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from slipping out the back door of the ballroom onto the porch, and pulling Gale with her.
“What are you doing?” He asks, breathless as the door closes behind them with a soft thud. “Don’t you have guests?”
“You’re the only one that matters,” she whispered, and let the dragon within her roar to life, pushing him back against a pillar and rising on her tiptoes to reach his lips.
At first, he seemed too shocked to respond, but when she started to pull away he chased her, and let out a little noise in his throat that she thought she could spend a lifetime trying to elicit. He tasted like champagne, and the cake they’d eaten earlier, and also, somehow, like magic itself.
He grasped at her hair and her waist, moving his mouth from her lips to her jaw, chin, throat. “Gods above, Audie,” he whispered, pulling back for a moment. “What brought this on?”
“I didn’t want to be alone.”
Later, she will tell herself that she didn’t mean to let it go so far. That she just wanted to know what it was like, to kiss him, to taste the salt on his skin, to feel those hands and those eyes upon her. She just wanted a taste.
Lies, all of it. The gaping hole in her chest could never be satisfied with a taste. She had only ever wanted him, all of him, forever.
He laid her down on the soft grass in the garden and fumbled with the stays on her gown. She slipped her hands inside his robe, pressed her palm to his heartbeat, and placed inexpert kisses on his neck, his hands, his chest. When at last she had him on his back, so beautiful in his hesitation and inexperience, she fit him inside herself and found a rhythm that made her body sing.
Mine, she thought. Mine, mine, mine.
The way he looked at her then—no one and nothing else existed.
(She thought only the stars had witnessed. But there was magic there, too.)
After, she snuck him up the back stairs and into her childhood bed and did it all over again, and the air itself was porous and heavy with change, change she thought was their doing but, in truth, did not belong to either of them at all.
***
She fell asleep curled into his chest, his heartbeat a tattoo against her ear.
“I love you, Audelia,” he whispered, and slept. And dreamed.
And in the morning, everything was different.
***
He was hers long before he was Mystra’s.
But what is the love of a girl to a goddess?