Thanks for all the tags. ( @emmy-and-the-tieflings @optimisticgrey , @archduchessgortash ..probably others..I know. I suck)
Work travel and husband surgery has severely cut in to my “fun” time, so it’s taken me much longer than I expected to get my Valentine’s Day fics done.
So, as penance, I offer my entry from Gale’s memoir …
Art by the amazing @ritzeldraws
From Marginalia from the Edge of the Divine : The collected Papers of Gale Dekarios
While memory is fickle, I remember with absolute clarity the only time I underestimated Lily Silverfrost. It proved to be the most fortuitous miscalculation of my career, personal and otherwise — the first trembling note in the long concerto of my life with Lily — a work neither of us yet understood we’d begun to write.
It was early in our first adventure together. I was still very much Mystra’s fallen Chosen — though in truth I behaved more like her abandoned acolyte, clutching at the hem of her favor, desperate for some benevolent redemption.
Lily found me that evening shaping an illusion of Mystra’s face from the Weave itself. It was a foolish indulgence. Not worship — not precisely — but something perilously adjacent. The light gathered at my hands with familiar obedience, sketching cheekbones in radiant violet thread.
Lily stood beside me in silence for some time. I mistook that silence for reverence — or perhaps I simply failed to notice her, so enrapt was I in my own performance.
“You look like a smitten schoolboy,” she said at last.
I banished the image at once, the illusion unraveling into harmless motes. “Oh—I didn’t—”
“Why are you conjuring an image of the goddess?”
There was no accusation in it. Only curiosity. Which, somehow, made it worse.
I straightened reflexively, brushing nonexistent dust from my sleeve. “It was merely… contemplation. Mystra is—” I hesitated only a moment before finishing the thought I had carried unquestioned for years. “Mystra is all magic. And as far as I am concerned, she is all creation.”
Lily studied me in her quiet, elven way. Then she politely stifled what can only be described as a snort — as though listening to a lovesick youth insist that the moon itself invented the tide.
I should have heard it then — the kindness in her perspective. The way she regarded me as tenderly misguided.
Instead, I invited her to reach into the weave with me, to experience each other’s magic.
I crafted the components. She raised a skeptical eyebrow and followed my lead.
Expectedly, the warmth of the Weave bloomed around us, connecting us in a way that had nothing to do with the violation of the tadpole in our heads.
That’s where I made my mistake. Instinctively, I uttered, “Very good…” offering my approval to a mage who’d cast her first spell decades before I was born. The words left my mouth with such casual certainty that, for a heartbeat, I did not even register them.
We were tethered together in the Weave, its strands luminous and humming, cradling us with a lover’s touch — her hand in mine, her breath steady, focused, reverent.
She kissed me — not shyly, not as some moon-touched maiden rehearsing romance, but with unmistakable intent.
Right there, with magic still thrumming along my skin, she took my face in her hands and closed the distance. It was deliberate. Intimate. Inevitable.
Her kiss tasted like risk — like rebellion, like something sacred defiled and made holy again by the heat of it. It was freedom: swift, immediate, entirely unbeholden.
For one suspended instant, I was not Mystra’s Chosen. I was simply a man — utterly enchanted.
The world, for one sacred moment — ever vast, ever cruel — softened.
Still, what I remember most is the look in her eyes just before she moved. That flicker of mischief, of daring — as though she knew precisely the spell she was casting and how utterly unprepared I was to receive it.
I stared at her like a moon-struck apprentice, cheeks warm, heart pounding a rhythm that had nothing to do with magic.
The Weave still hummed around us, low and intimate against my skin. I felt it everywhere — through my fingers, along the line of my jaw where her hand had rested, in the riotous cadence of my own pulse.
I had just told her Mystra was all magic. She answered by reminding me that I was not immune to mortal wonder, and I was utterly, catastrophically enraptured.
The kiss, the warmth, the subtle pressure of her hands framing my face, the fierce certainty of her mouth claiming mine.
It was magic, an illusion.
When my concentration faltered — when desire overwhelmed discipline — the lattice collapsed in a sigh of unraveling light.
The world rushed back in.
Lily stood precisely where she had always stood — composed, balanced, not even slightly breathless.
There was no lingering touch. No warmth on my lips.
Only the quiet night air and the faint afterglow of magic dissipating between us.
She regarded me with that same unreadable calm — and then she turned and walked away.
I sighed — and though I might have denied it at the time, there was real disappointment in the sound.
I replayed it endlessly — the image, the look in her eyes just before the illusion took shape. That flash of daring. That subtle question hidden beneath her composure.
But gods help me, I wanted to. I wanted to know…everything.
At first, I told myself it had been nothing more than mischief — Lily correcting my arrogance with intent and precision. But the recollection resisted dismissal. She had not stumbled into that closeness. She had not seemed startled by it. If anything, she had appeared… assured.
As if she had known exactly what would happen, and that certainty haunted me.
I found myself imagining what might occur if the next kiss were not illusion — not conjured from filaments of the Weave.
I imagined leaning closer deliberately, not undone by surprise but invited by it. The elegant line of her neck beneath moonlight. The sound she’d make — soft, delighted, and unguarded — meant only for me. I imagined her fingers curling in my collar, her breath catching in approval. A coo, a sigh, perhaps even my name — if I abandoned rhetoric and answered her boldness in kind.
It was imprudent. It was extravagant. And it refused to subside.
Days passed, yet the memory lingered like the aftertaste of spiced wine — subtle, intoxicating, impossible to ignore.
It bloomed at inconvenient hours — while I mismeasured reagents, while I burned breakfast, while I misplaced my own spellbook like a distracted novice.
The Weave itself seemed different after that night, as though every thread I touched carried her scent, her warmth, her pulse. She was in my magic now. In me. I could not separate the two, nor did I want to.
I dreamed of our magic intertwined, debates over craft and cadence — her dry corrections when my ego galloped too far ahead of reason.
Before long, she had taken up residence in my tower — within the dangerous architecture of my thoughts.
Her books beside mine. Her boots by the door. The Weave responding differently to us together — threaded not through one prodigy, but through two hearts, two minds in deliberate harmony.
I crafted visions of nights where she did not vanish the moment focus faltered — where her warmth was real and tangible, where I could trace the line of her spine without fearing I might ignite catastrophe beneath my ribs.
I imagined lying beside her afterward — her breath slow against my shoulder — discussing philosophy like proper scholars while our hands wandered with scandalous inconsistency.
I imagined her laughter. Quieter. Softer.
I imagined catching her watching me and not pretending otherwise.
I dreamed — with reckless optimism — that she might choose me.
And I, who had grown accustomed to thinking of my future in narrow increments, found myself wanting something reckless.
Tickle, absolutely no obligation tags for @missfortunetherogue @gortashsrighthand @kcwriter-blog (who I know has puppy obligations) @babydinosaur930 and @dr4gonwriter
