Thanks for the tags @optimisticgrey and @gortashsrighthand
What passes for self indulgence with me…is making the magic make sense. My sense of Gale’s whole story arc is that the Act 2 “celestial canvas” scene is the most important scene in his character arc. It’s everyone’s favorite and the devs say it’s the best work they’ve ever done.
I, being me…count the spell slots and the amount of concentration spells and am..annoyed. Nonetheless, DnD 5.5 circle casting to the rescue ! One mage can hold the concentration for another, so I give you…the horniest…filthiest thing in wizardom…the intimacy of casting together.
From Marginalia at the Edge of the Divine
I reached for a familiar volume from the side table. “This one here is called The Art of the Night. It details the first thousand nights of a newlywed king and queen.”
Lily laughed. “You’re going to read me dirty stories from Amn?”
“They turned everything they did into an art. The art of conversation. The art of taste. Time-honored and newly acquired. What say we take a page from their book?”
I opened the volume between us and laid my hand upon the page.
She placed her fingers beside mine.
The Weave answered us at once.
It rose through the spell in luminous strands, first along the lines I had prepared, then beyond them. Light ran through the terrace stones and climbed the balustrade in branching filaments. The music from the piano softened, each note acquiring colour and shape until the air itself seemed strung with harmony.
My magic had always possessed architecture. Even in passion, I sought pattern, correspondence, the hidden geometry by which one impossible thing might be joined to another. I opened that design to her carefully, revealing each working as I might reveal the pages of an arcanabula no hand but mine had ever touched.
Lily entered without hesitation.
I had expected to guide her.
Magic lived in her according to another law. It did not gather itself into ordered formulae before obeying. It moved with the instinctive precision of Corellon’s ancient art, with thought and body joined so completely that distinction between them became meaningless. Where I had built structure, she found music. Where I had drawn boundaries, she moved through them and made them part of the dance.
The spell changed around us.
Not weakened. Not broken.
The walls of the tower opened into immensity. Waterdeep fell away beneath us, its lights becoming stars, its streets the shining lines of some vast celestial sigil. The terrace remained beneath our feet, and yet we stood also beyond it, suspended where distance and flesh had surrendered their ordinary authority.
I felt her presence within the spell, unmistakable and undiminished.
That astonished me more than anything.
The Weave is capable of swallowing the unprepared. It overwhelms the senses, strips thought of its mortal proportions, and makes even accomplished practitioners seem small before the immensity they seek to command. Lily did not vanish within it. She shone more clearly.
I had brought her into my magic.
Her hand rose to my chest.
The orb stirred beneath her palm, a dark hunger awakening within the radiance. Karsite power tore a wound through the harmony, its appetite reaching instinctively for everything I had conjured.
Her fingers spread over the mark. Her magic answered mine, holding neither the orb nor the Weave in submission, but holding fast to me between them.
For the first time since that ruinous fragment entered my body, I did not experience it as a secret carried alone.
The distance between us vanished in every form at once. Her body met mine upon the terrace; her spirit moved beside mine through the spell. A hundred luminous reflections unfolded around us, possibilities given shape, each touch echoed through another configuration of light and longing.
I told her everything in words, in touch, and most of all in magic, the language we had shared before either of us dared trust words or touch.
She answered without fear or pretense.
I released one careful measure of control, enough that the spell might have faltered.
The Weave gathered around her hands and passed back into mine transformed, silvered by her presence, carrying the bright, fierce cadence of her soul. Magic moved between us as breath did, given and returned, until I could no longer say with certainty which of us sustained the working. My casting entered her spell without diminishing it, giving weight to grace, structure to song. I felt, absurdly, exposed. Not because she had taken anything from me, but because the spell had received me so naturally, as though some part of her magic had made room before either of us admitted what we were becoming.
There was danger in that surrender.
Excitedly tagging @archduchessgortash @missfortunetherogue @kcwriter-blog
@elceewunjo @asorceresswrites and @alstromeri-a
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