Work Text:
Sunset was perhaps an hour off, perhaps a little less, when Gale admitted he had run out of inspiration for the day. He’d moved from the library to the terrace, thinking the briny air and distant gullcries might refresh his focus, but had soon lost himself to staring at the seafoam overwriting its own unspooling forms. He glanced one last time at the sheaf of paper he’d brought out with him, which now lay next to his thigh on the bench, though he could not actually remember setting it down. The pages bore loose diagrams of potential high-level somatic components, but they were all just complicated variations on familiar, uninspired shapes. It had felt like a waste of ink even as his hand was in the act of moving across the paper. He’d hoped that once he started improvising, momentum would take over: that he might fall into the reverie of invention, where the truly striking possibilities hid, and they’d run out of his quill as if propelled by their own need to come into existence.
Well, not tonight, apparently. So he gathered the pages and went back in, absentmindedly riffling them with his thumb while he shut the terrace door with his other hand. He ended up setting them a nearby stack of books, chosen more or less at random.
For his whole life he’d been more likely to accidentally stay up till sunrise than wake early enough to watch it. He could always think of just one more book in which he might find the information he sought. In the throes of designing a spell, one trial cast would spark ideas for the next three, and he couldn't help it: the idea of merely jotting them down to continue tomorrow... excruciating. Impossible. It was a matter of minutes to see the result of the next experiment. And just a few more minutes for the one after that.
But two or three years ago, the all-nighters had tapered off.
It was probably aging. Chosen of Mystra didn't really age, but developing a taste for early bedtimes in one’s mid-thirties was hardly comparable to true infirmity and decline.
And it was probably good for him. To be able to set down his quill, stretch, yawn, dismiss his conjured light, and feel… what, exactly? Maybe a soft twinge of impatience, at most. He had joked to Mystra, one night floating in Her presence in the Outer Planes, that in the end, not even self-discipline was beyond Gale of Waterdeep.
It will serve you well. Her voice, or the impression it made within him, was neutral, but approval leached into the ether between them and reached his heart like a trail of phosphorescence borne by all the awful majesty of the ocean only to be deposited on the humble shore in a delicate wash. His mind was quiet, his soul serene. Sometimes the Weave itself loved him. He wanted for nothing.
Now, as he stood in his library idly fondling his earring and wondering what he wanted to do for tonight, he reflected that a life dedicated to closing an infinite distance had a certain romanticism to it. He tapped his fingers against one of the statuettes decorating his desk.
There was really only one way he could think to spend the evening.
He set out the enchanted candles and lit them with silver magefire. With sparkling illusion he embroidered the very air of his library with Her symbols, from the familiar eight-pointed star to the occult glyphs She’d taught him Herself. He reverently slipped his earring from its place, pressed it against the skin of his chest, and concentrated on sending his awareness into the Weave, where any thread it followed would lead inevitably to Her.
It is good to hear from you, my Chosen. What would you like to do tonight.
“I would experience Your immanence. I would join with You where You dwell. I would transcend myself to better understand the magic You are.”
It was, word-for-word, a request he’d made many times before. He expected he would being saying it for centuries yet. If he was to have an ever-reaching heart, then let it always reach for Her. The forward-falling rush of being lifted to Her breast took him, and his vision went blue.
-
She projected no bodily form that night, but She could play sensations straight into his nerves, lay images written in magic directly onto his retinas. She could intangibly light up the skin of his inner thigh as though a hand, a blade, and a feather stroked it all as one. The facets of light and color shifting in beauty across Elysium’s sky and revolving their geometries through his mind—that was all Her. Sheets of Weave unfolded within his chest like the packed petals of an opening carnation, an endless inhalation, expanding fuller and deeper and never reaching the point where it must turn around and let the breath back out. It dizzied him. His senses insisted his blood was foaming in his brain. He felt certain he would pass out from pleasure.
But there it was—the discontinuity. The stitch in the Weave. He’d gotten better at noticing it. It didn’t always manifest the same way: it could be a hairline crack beneath his fingertips, a fraying spot in his vision, a dissonant ring in his ears. But the soul-deep awareness of magic he carried with him at all times saw beneath these surface forms, and knew they were all the same scar, the same incompletion. He could never latch on to it for more than a moment, but there was only one thing it could be: A lost piece, out there somewhere even now, though not a single God knew where. The mark of Karsus on Her still.
Something about it thrilled him.
He slipped helplessly back into the vaporization of Her love. When that slight waver in Her spectrum possessed him, the roughness was release; when it faded and he once more beheld Her perfect, the release was rough.
Have You been showing me, more and more lately, a fuller picture of You? The question seemed to ask itself. When the Weave dissolved him to this extent, thought and speech blurred together; it was impossible for him to lie and at times impossible even to keep his thoughts within himself.
What do you mean.
Sometimes, when I am drowning in You, I think I see… an edge. For lack of a better term. One of those last missing fragments. The place it should be. He barely registered what he was saying but nevertheless it flowed from him like memorized poetry. He was extended beyond mortal limits. There was a Gale who had been driven to ecstasy past thought, and a Gale who held his own powers of reason with a flawless grasp, and those two Gales were fully overlaid on one another.
Mystra neither answered nor ceased pleasuring him. She rolled him gently in Her embrace and with each turn a filament of Her stroked somewhere surprising within him. It was by this timeless pause that he realized—how he loved that in the Weave, all realizations came quick and clear—realized that he had surprised Her.
Not once in all their interactions had the tone of Her voice slipped into anything like shock or sadness or fear; Her control over it was perfect. Palpable anger, yes, a few times, when She had wanted him to know he’d angered Her—and occasionally joy, when he had especially pleased Her. But for the most part She addressed him with placid grandeur.
Yet even She could not feign speaking before She knew what She wanted to say. And for all Her poise, She sometimes indulged in taking Her time deliberating to find the perfect words with which to communicate to him Her will. As if it were the most natural thing in all existence that She should make him wait for Her answer.
Gale had heard it said that the Gods communicate by what is absent—usually by the type of clerics he considered a little too zealous. What a vague sentiment, a little bit of self-reassurance for those who had to say every prayer without any expectation that their God’s literal voice would respond—which was almost everybody. But now he understood that even when the object of your devotion Chose you, showed you their face and cradled you in their arms and deigned to answer your questions, still so much went unsaid—was, perhaps, unsayable.
Yet for all that, this was a sign that he had said something unexpected to Her.
It is not for you to think of Me as unwhole. The Weave fills itself as it fills you. The utter unconcern and terrific insistence of the statement seeped into him, while simultaneously Her light continued to slide around his organs and She swelled his bliss to the gasping point.
I… did not mean unwhole. I thought it was something You had decided to start showing me. I thought I was meant to notice.
To that She replied immediately. It is indeed remarkable that you noticed it at all. Congratulations are deserved, that your inner sense for magic has become this keen. The implication of reproach had left Her words once more, and its absence felt like tenderness. But those edges are not for you to think more of.
The very volume of this plane was full of more dimensions than Gale could comprehend, even as what passed for his body merged with all of them—and they all bent in accordance with Mystra’s universalizing will. To deny Her would be to deny reality itself.
Then it will be as You desire, my love, my Goddess, my life.
-
He almost succeeded at putting the exchange out of mind. He turned over what it meant, that She hadn’t been aware he could see those details of Her form. But several weeks passed and he came to no conclusions that changed anything. He made incremental progress in his documentation of under-explored somatic casting styles.
It took but one sentence to bring it screaming back to the top of his thoughts. “Reportedly, those who approach the temple library feel irresistably compelled to perform magic, whether they are capable of wonders, or only the meanest prestidigitation.” He reflexively swivelled the book one-handed to look at the title and author; he’d plucked it from the shelf so cursorily that he hadn’t absorbed them. An Authoritative Survey of Arcane Anomalies in the Sword Mountains, Fifth Edition, by Glovemender and Nallis, stamped on a faded cover that might have been blue once. He had no idea who Glovemender or Nallis were, and they had clearly had no idea the import of the casting-compulsion they had blithely recorded into their “authoritative survey” as if it were just a charming little oddity. Well, few enough would. But Gale made it his business to be one of the few.
He recognized it for what it was: a logical side-effect of the presence of ungoverned, sealed-off Weave. A phenomenon attested only rarely in the literature, but the handful of confirmed cases had all been connected to something decidedly pre-Netherese in origin. So as long as Glovemender and Nallis, or whomever they’d compiled reports from, hadn’t simply pulled the idea out of their ass…
He scanned several paragraphs up, assessing how much credence he should lend this text before letting his mind run away with itself. It told of a vast, abandoned underground temple complex nestled between the steep walls of a remote glen. Much of it had long been plundered, but some of the volumes in the library were magically sealed, bound to the shelves, or both. The footnotes went into encouraging detail about the plenitude of sources, which varied from persistent local rumors, all the way up to an actual survey team commissioned by a respected Waterdhavian artifact dealer. Skilled enough casters could supposedly sense a pull on the Weave from within a mile or so, which wasn’t too unusual for artifacts with enough arcane power. The surveyors’ mage was quoted as saying “In there… it felt like magic itself couldn’t help but be expressed.”
He let out a long, silent exhalation. The description seemed to burn on the page like a prophecy. He semi-consciously ran his fingernails up and down his forearms, up and down. Was it significant that he, of all people, had stumbled upon this obscure lead?
He reflected on the events that had led him here. On his way home from making his customary offering at Mystra’s temple, he’d taken a more roundabout path than usual, enjoying the streets of Waterdeep bustling with wholesome morning activity. He popped into a used book shop which had opened a month or so prior.
It turned out to be one of those that attracted the most idiosyncratic of books: small-press, self-published, even a handwritten manuscript here and there. It had an entire section devoted to first-hand accounts of strange magical phenomena. Mostly nonsense, of course, but he often found the nonsense entertaining.
This was not nonsense. He searched for any other books by the same authors, but found none. He grabbed two slim clothbounds (mostly out of some superstitious urge not to let on how excited he was about his real find), paid, and immediately hired a carriage home. He was already mentally outlining several potential avenues of preliminary research. Colleagues to consult, archives to visit… he would begin today.
-
After a week of late nights poring over maps, casting divinations, tearing through any information he could get on properties of pre-Netherese Weave, and even unsuccessfully trying to contact the adventurers named as sources by Glovemender and Nallis (who, he’d learned, were dead and missing, respectively), he was quite sure that there was something exciting in that temple, lying largely ignored for centuries. He suspected it had been bound to a book, as this was one of the strongest ways to hold magic captive. In some legends—the kind that he judged had the ring of truth in them somewhere—a powerful enough binding could hide its contents even from the eyes of the Gods. He read up on every method of arcane book-sealing on which he could find a paper, including some very unsavory methods utilizing damned souls. He made a list of anything he could think of which might help him break such an enchantment.
But the most important unknown remained: what, exactly, was it that was hidden away, or perhaps just forgotten, somewhere in those stacks? He’d solicited Elminster for theories, but in typical wise old man fashion, Elminster had done nothing but stress how little there was to go off of. The casting-compulsion was an extremely suggestive clue, but Gale kept reminding himself that just because it was known to occur in the presence of ancient Weave fragments didn’t mean it couldn’t occur in the presence of other things as well. There were too few confirmed cases to draw any confident conclusion. He knew that.
Not that he had any idea what else could cause such a thing.
The one measure he hadn’t taken since the unassuming grey book sent him down this well was to commune with Mystra.
He needed time—just a short, forgivable stretch of time—to revel in this, before She told him to drop his pursuit. It was the most excited he’d been about an idea in years. To recover a missing piece of the original Mystryl’s Weave… it would quite possibly be his greatest act as a wizard. If it were his to do.
But he could not let himself indulge indefinitely. That was not, he ultimately admitted, the right thing to do, as Mystra’s Chosen. Indeed, he was a little surprised She hadn’t summoned him by now. It would be unbecoming of him—sulky, even—to avoid Her much longer. So, dutifully, he had prepared himself to be told no, to set aside this sudden obsession and go back to his ideas about somatic geometry.
He lit the candles, conjured the symbols, closed his eyes and concentrated on his earring. He braced himself for the moment She spoke.
It is good to hear from you, my Chosen. What would you like to do tonight.
There was nothing ungentle in Her words, voice, face. His mouth covered his surprise with a well-practiced, smooth-worn phrase of his own. “I desire merely to spend time with You, my love. Would You—converse with me while I make dinner?” His voice barely teetered as he improvised his choice of activity. Regular meals had quite fallen by the wayside over the past week. He’d have to come up with something using whatever was in the pantry.
She acquiesced and, taking the form of a violet hum, followed him to the kitchen in silence. It was a silence that ordinarily would be comfortable. He used the break in conversation to try to understand why She had not confronted him about his research. He hadn’t really known what he expected Her to do, but this was not it. He excused himself to the pantry and found onions, oil, aromatics. A simple enough place to start.
Outwardly, the night unfolded much like any other. He babbled about recipes he wanted to try, the latest popular novel, gossip about his colleagues, while She asked the occasional followup question: Why omit the thyme from the herb blend this time? Who do you think might be behind that obvious penname? All in Her smooth, stately manner—sometimes he even forgot that She was indulging him, that fiction and flavor profiles and who had taken on a surprising apprentice were beyond inconsequential to Her.
(That used to bother him, years ago—a much younger man’s prickliness at being patronized, he’d say now.)
But even if he’d had it in him to be irritated, he was far too distracted, taken entirely with confusion and trepidation, frantically reviewing what exactly She had said, what She had and what She hadn’t actually forbidden. Her presence in his home this night had become a negative space he couldn’t fit into his mind; he could not come up with an explanation capable of filling the hole left by what She was not saying.
Eventually they made their goodbyes and he finished eating in silence.
-
She was omniscient. She knew what he was doing, of that he had no doubt. In the decade of his entwinement with Her—of what he sometimes had to remind himself not to think of as their marriage—he had never been at such a loss as to what Her behavior meant.
He had thought She might respond with… well, yes, he had known from the beginning that it might anger Her. Every minute of the past week that he’d spent combing through dense text or calculating how long it would take to travel to that temple, he’d done it knowing he was risking Her divine ire—because ire, he could manage. It was unpleasant to bow and be chastised, yes, but there was a surefire solution: he would simply stop doing what had angered Her. She would summon him and tell him in no uncertain terms how he’d displeased Her, and that he was to cease this research immediately. And he would obey. He always had and always would. That was how this worked.
But for Her not even to acknowledge that he was spending practically every waking hour on an obsessive hunt for what might very well be Her last missing piece…
The Gods communicate by what is absent.
-
Once he started making plans in earnest, it all went very fast. Next to his door sat a bulging pack and a pair of new boots. Whenever his eye lit upon them he was filled with a guilty thrill. At first he had tried his best not to feel it—both the guilt and the thrill—but he’d given up.
He couldn’t quite imagine what his life would look like on the other side of this little excursion. A month ago he would have assumed there were few significant changes left for him, at least not for a long, long time. He'd gotten there: archmage, Chosen, every academic resource at his fingertips, publishing according to his own whims, in semiregular correspondence with just about every arcane researcher on the Sword Coast. And beloved by Her, the incarnation of his own first love, the Weave.
When She’d first offered to let him find not just intellectual but sexual satisfaction in their liaisons, he’d wondered, in a rush of queasy excitement, whether it was a trick. Whether the righteous thing to do was pretend he’d never thought of his Goddess while touching himself. But She must have seen his fear, and deigned to reassure him. I am suggesting this because I know your wants, and it benefits neither of us to deny them, She’d said. You long to share your life fully with somebody, and you will never know another lover to the depth I can help you know Me. Her voice in that moment seemed as comforting as a mortal’s.
He’d been an entirely different man back then; that’s how long ago it had been. Maybe barely a man, though he’d have been offended by that assessment at the time. But despite how alien his youthful self had become to him, he also couldn’t imagine having made any other choices.
The lumps in his pack looked uncomfortable. Maybe he had overpacked—and that was just the supplies he wanted easily accessible, outside the bag of holding. He tried to tell himself he was excited to not know exactly what he was doing, but his fingernails were digging into the base of his thumbs. You should just ask permission. The thought fidgeted within him, heavy and sour.
With a great heaving breath he went to his knees, a little harder than he meant to, and rummaged around for the candles. He was sick of this stupid game, this game he wasn’t sure Mystra was even playing. Anger rose like vomit. Actual anger. How long had he been angry without naming it?
He was always the one who had to ask. After nearly two decades of Her in his life, after worrying at the question like a scab, he still couldn’t discern whether She wanted him to do this or not, and that made him madder—he couldn’t say whether at Her or himself. And what if everything he'd been doing was simply beneath Her notice? His stomach churned.
He would find out once and for all. Face Her and ask. And if She were to cut the whole operation off right there? Maybe he would feel satisfaction in doing the right thing, like the worshipper and supplicant he loved being, for Her. One of the few privileged to have Her ear, let alone Her touch.
He cradled his earring in his hand, and his resignation and resolve in his heart. Surely his exasperation and submission both were leaking into the conduit that led to Her. Surely his calling to Her reeked of his turmoil, and surely She would react to it. To him.
Her presence arrived like the stars coming out after sunset. It is good to hear from you, my Chosen. What would you like to do tonight.
He opened his mouth, uncharacteristically found himself at a loss for words, and even more uncharacteristically, didn’t bother to try to cover it up. Mystra floated in his vision, implacable and patient as the sky.
“...I would like to practice illusioncraft with You.”
His sense of the Weave flowing between self and environment, and extending raylike into other planes, sharpened: a gift from Her. It felt like running his hands through Her hair and being able to count each strand by touch. The sprites of color unfolded between his fingertips before he could consciously register which threads he must stroke to coax them into seeming. Somewhere in the fathomless depths of his truest being he had merged with the Weave itself, and, wielding this state of utmost clarity, his apparent surroundings changed into anything he wanted.
Nothing about their relationship could be the same after tonight. He knew it like he knew how to cast, an acceptance more overwhelming even than the Goddess Herself flooding into his soul and out of his hands. The moment to change course was lost and passed. For all his love for Her, for all his effort to deserve his station, he could not bring himself to ask for Her approval, and that sealed it: either he would prove to Her that he was the worthiest Chosen She would ever have—worthy to be granted all-suffusing magic on a scale that could change the course of civilizations—or he would fail, and… well, one way or another, it would be an end to what he was now.
He whispered an intuited invocation and the prismatic light streaming from him, rendering the outer planes into a form mortal eyes could be tricked into thinking they understood, spilled down the walls of his tower and into the surrounding neighborhood streets. The delight of passersby came to him like strings being plucked. Mystra resolved into the form of a woman (Midnight, he supposed, though it occurred to him he’d never actually confirmed that) and mimed a polite clap of approval.
He let it all shimmer around them as he lowered his hands, the mirage sustained as passively as his heartbeat. He strode toward the purple-white apparition leaning against his desk. His eyes followed the curve of one thigh seen through the other. He ran one hand along Her marble-smooth, air-soft jawline; the Weave of it was arranged in patterns signifying warmth to his practiced touch but just then he was more attuned to the texture of the arcane than to those nerves of his which registered actual warmth.
It had been a long time since they’d made love on the material plane. He wondered if She was waiting for him to ask to be taken into Her divine realm. These days it was a request he made with the reliability of ritual. He wondered if Gods ever truly waited for mortals to do anything. She always acquiesced, after he asked.
But tonight, he asked nothing as he lowered Her projection gently to the floor. It regarded him with playful raised eyebrows. Any thoughts She might have had, She did not voice through it. He kissed the valley of Her breasts and the projection arched convincingly into his open mouth. The light-formed skin felt like tingling water on his lips.
Mystra had once told him, when he was trying to imagine how Gods experience reality, that She didn’t need worship. She didn’t even need people to practice magic: if tomorrow every wizard woke up with no desire to cast another spell for the rest of their lives, the loss would be to humanity, not to Her. Your kind thinks it feeds something in us, She’d explained, because you can’t imagine an existence without hunger.
Lost in thought, he pressed his thumbs against the projection’s inner thighs; it gracefully parted its knees and formed a cunt for him to nestle into. He moaned at the quasi-tangible give of its surface. He wondered if She could imagine the desolation his life would be without his craft in it. He sank fully into Her, slow with bliss, the embrace of Her projection creamy and invigorating around his flesh. He couldn’t stop thinking about the thick hair and sweat of his groin rubbing up against Her form of eerie glow. His scrotum tightened and he swelled to a peak of hardness as he came, sticky and warm. When, some time later, She said farewell and evaporated, every trace of cum disappeared with Her and he didn’t even have to clean up after himself.
-
Of course he still brought his silver candles along on his expedition. To leave himself completely unable to contact Her was, despite everything, unthinkable. But he did not use them, not for the entire month it took him to find his way to the cavern-temple, and they gradually settled to the jumbled bottom of his pack. She in turn sent him neither summons nor any sign She found his silence noteworthy.
He did continue to pray, but they were only the composed prayers of comforting recitation. They were not the sort of prayers that begged a response.
In the temple’s antechamber the smell of mildew struck him, but as he ventured deeper it faded, or he became accustomed to it, and from then on he only detected the clean smell of condensation on stone. At first he let himself wander the ancient corridors. It was a simple joy to explore the magnificent halls and faded rooms. He would turn down a side-path simply to get a closer look at a neat statue or remnant of tapestry. In many places, skylights or long chute-like windows had been bored through the earth, scattering daylight into the complex and casting beautiful, dramatic lines and shadows throughout the open spaces of its chambers. He idled for half an hour examining the murals of the enormous, echoing sanctum. Nothing moved in this place; the loudest sound was the rustle of his own robes. Perhaps it had been years since the last time any adventurer had come looking for sellables. The temple seemed emptied of everything but peace.
But his soul was pointing, the whole time, in a single direction—something was pulling his magical attention to a single point, below his feet by a story, opposite from where he’d entered. The lure of it reminded him of the first time Mystra had manifested before him and he’d wanted nothing more than to find out how it felt to sink his hands into Her translucent chest. It wasn’t long before he began to search for a staircase going down. When he found one, he cast an orb of warm, orange light before stepping over the threshold into the unlit yawn.
The passages of the lower level were narrower, utilitarian, broken periodically by alcoves, about half of which still bore their sconces. The library had not been in those sections of the temple open to pilgrims.
A terrible, itching restlessness filled his limbs and he ran his hands over his own upper arms, as if to warm them, though he was not cold. He evoked little sparks that nipped pleasantly at his senses. It felt good to crackle these flourishes from his palms. He spun up a whole string of light-motes to go with the first.
Oh. He must be getting close, then. He grinned and let off a celebratory spray of magic missiles into the ceiling.
At the terminus of a hallway stood a double-doorway, plain but solid, and larger than the other doors he’d been passing. The Weave drew him straight ahead, a hook lodged in his throat. He rested his open palm against the door and when he pushed it resisted not at all. He opened it just wide enough to slip through, left shoulder first. His lights flurried through the gap like dandelion fluff.
The shelves inside reached the ceiling and were spaced barely far enough apart for a single person to pass between, but they were also mostly cleared of books. Gale had the strange dual impressions of cramp and emptiness. The dark seemed dense as an earthen wall against the limits of his multicolored light, and, unable to see beyond his immediate surroundings, he envisioned the room stretching miles into the shadows.
Behind the dark there was the Weave, suffusing the interstices of everything, pressed against the walls and reeling, textured like a strong current below the unrippled surface of mundane senses. The pulse of it lived—maybe even thought. Was that possible? His body ached with how long the thing had lain trapped in this room. It sang to him: confinement, intolerable, indefinite. He found himself nodding vigorously. He supposed he must look unhinged.
From that point the search was quick. Distantly, something within Gale fell into an overwhelming, relieved sympathy with this entity’s deep need to be found. The path to it was as obvious as a river’s current. Gale approached a small, once-locked back room; its door had been hacked open by force. He stepped over the remains of the planks to see that whoever had chopped their way in had nevertheless been stymied by the still-living spell sealing the tome to its plinth.
He wondered what Mystra would have to say to him if he contacted Her here and now. But the only words he truly wanted to hear from Her were those She would have for him after it was already, irrevocably done—no matter what those words might be.
He ran his hand, his whole hand, flush from heel to fingerprints, over the embossed pattern on the book’s cover. It seemed to become more complex before his eyes, details multiplying beyond what was physically possible to be pressed into leather. Sometimes it looked like it had pages, but between the darts of his eyes they became mist and dark glamour—only to reappear when he looked again.
The enchantment binding everything purred under his touch. All he’d read on this topic, the diagrams, the theory, numerous incantations which might instruct the world that the book before him should be open, came to his mind in full detail. He understood what to do before he had time to think it in words. He turned the structure of the spell over in his head and it was as self-evident as a straight line, the exact motions and visualizations to render it undone. It sighed apart for him like a fraying rag.
Whether he opened the book or it opened itself, he could not say—in some way, those two things were really one unified action. And then—
Howling black. It fled from the covers and sprang up at his face, a storm of pure, distilled cutting. He was helpless, thrashing in its sharp embrace. It scraped a tunnel into his breastbone with its teeth. His entire existence flashed to pain, cold and bright and everything became bottomless torture. The thing ate and ate and when it was done and the worst of the agony was over, Gale found himself lying on the stone floor, terrified to still be alive. He was wracked with a new and incomprehensible hunger, one he would do anything to sate. And no matter what he tried—prayer, spells, apologies, begging, screaming—Mystra did not respond.