When I say "I love you," it's not because I want you or because I can't have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I've seen your kindness and your strength. I've seen the best and worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are. You're a hell of a woman.
Render done by the most wonderful, kind and beloved @rdekarios.
I'd like to use my 'birthday privilege' and share with you one of the many works I've been quietly working on. As some of you know, I am working on my main story, The Tempest and The Tether, which is based on in-game events with tweaks and changes to fit my narrative and my character, Deia. I've written a lot already, but there are a lot of doubts and fears that still gut me, so I am not sharing much with it with the world just yet. However, today is a special day.
I wrote this chapter shortly after my dog passed away. It started as 10 pages, just a brief something, since I did not write anything in a decade before this. After that, I abandoned it and moved on. Months later, I decided that this chapter has to stay, so I've rewritten it and fit it as my own spin on Gale's Act 1 Weave Scene to fit Deia more. So here it is. There's a lot of feelings, love and grief woven between the sentences. I can only hope you will find a moment of your time to read it, and, perhaps, resonate with it.
Link to Ao3 + a little snippet below.
“You lost control for a moment,” he says. “That matters. I do not intend to pretend otherwise. But Deia, I saw what came before it. You acted to save him. You aimed through fear. You struck what meant to kill him. The failure was not that you felt too much. The failure was that your magic has been taught, brutally and repeatedly, that feeling means survival, and survival means violence.”
Her eyes return to the sky. Above them, the stars remain cold and mercilessly beautiful. Gale’s voice threads through the quiet, steady as a hand extended palm-up.
“You need not confine yourself to that alone.”
The sentence folds around her more gently than she expects.
“You may not trust it yet,” he says, “and I cannot ask you to trust it simply because I believe you should. Trust is not a lever one pulls and finds the machinery obedient. But I believe magic such as yours can be shaped differently. Not erased. Not denied. Shaped. Given more than one language.”
She swallows. The movement is small. Gale sees it anyway.
“Magic can hold other sensations,” he continues. “Warmth. Stillness. Serenity. Joy, even. An absurd number of petty inconveniences, if one has the imagination for it. Cleaning soot from sleeves. Chilling wine. Summoning lights for reading when the sensible hour for reading has long since passed. Making an apple taste very briefly of cinnamon, which I assure you is a perfectly respectable use of arcane study despite what certain professors of my youth might claim.”
Despite herself, Deia’s mouth moves.
“You used magic to make apples taste like cinnamon?”
“I was twelve. It seemed vitally important at the time.”
“Was it?”
“Exceedingly.”
The answer is so solemn she almost laughs. Almost. Gale smiles faintly, then lets it soften.
“There are endless possibilities, really,” he says. “Most limited only by a lack of imagination. Or, in some tragic cases, by a lack of snacks.”
“There he is,” she murmurs.
He accepts this with a small, graceful tilt of his head, then grows quiet again. The humor has done what it needed to do. It has loosened the knot without pretending there was no knot. Deia feels it. So does he. The air between them remains tender, threaded with something neither of them is naming, and underneath it all her magic sits quiet beneath her skin like an animal listening from its den. Gale turns more fully toward her. His hands rest open over his knees. No spell yet. No movement that assumes permission before it is given. The restraint of it catches at her, strange and warm and miserable in the softest way.
“Perhaps,” he says, “I can show you.”
Deia’s gaze meets his. The clearing seems to shrink to the space between them.
“Show me,” she repeats.
“If you wish,” he speaks carefully now, each word placed where she can step around it if she needs to. “I could reach into the Weave here, with you near. Nothing invasive. Nothing that asks anything of you. A demonstration, no more than that. I could show you what I mean when I speak of magic as something other than force.”
His thumb brushes once over his own palm, a small nervous motion quickly stilled.
“And perhaps,” he adds, voice softening further, “if it feels safe enough, you might sense some part of it too.”
Deia’s breath catches, though barely. Gale does not miss it. He holds her gaze, brown eyes warm in the moonlight, patient and luminous with an offering he clearly hopes she will accept but will not press into her hands.
“Only if you let me.”
Gentle tags, since this is a big step for me. I appreciate your time and support <3
WIP Wednesday | The Lady Not Listed [Regency Era AU]
tagged by my beloved @optimisticgrey
So, I decided to do something. Something that Hanna did. I want to share my writing with everyone, however, I'm not ready to drop it on Ao3 yet. So I was thinking to split my first chapter in several parts (as it is already broken, really. If you've read something from me before, you know that my chapters are usually divided) and then share it here. Every WIP Wednesday or Self-Indulgent Sunday, I will drop a part that is between 2k to 3k words. Up until the chapter ends, and you, my darlings, may decide if it's worth reading and waiting for. So here we go. First chapter, first part, little less than 3,000 words, something that I wrote for fun at first, and since then developed a whole plot.
High Hall dresses itself for conquest.
Every arch and pillar gleams as though the stone itself wishes to be thought wealthy. Candlelight trembles along gilded mouldings, gathers in the cut crystal of chandeliers, and scatters itself over silk, satin, jewels, polished boots, powdered throats, and every manner of self-satisfaction Baldur’s Gate manages to crowd beneath one roof. Music rises from the far end of the ballroom with an elegance so flawless it borders upon indifference. It does not invite feeling so much as instruct it where to stand. The occasion, if one believes the host, is a celebration.
The Dekarios family has arrived from Waterdeep. This, apparently, is reason enough to summon half the city into a fever of perfume and speculation. The noble houses come first, as they always do, drawn by rank as surely as moths to expensive flame. Then come the wealthy merchants, the old families with new fortunes, the new families with old pretensions, the daughters in pale gowns, the mothers with sharper eyes than any duelist, the fathers pretending not to calculate. The lesser relations, the useful widows, the ambitious cousins, the priests, the patrons, the artists, the mages, and all those curious creatures who belong nowhere in particular but have contrived, by invitation or audacity, to be present all the same.
And beneath them, between them, behind the moving screens of trays and folded linen, go the servants. No one looks at them for long. That, Deia finds, is the great convenience of service. A lady may be studied for the angle of her fan, a gentleman for the width of his smile, but a servant girl can pass within arm’s reach of a secret and be forgotten before the secret finishes drawing breath. She enters by the eastern passage with a tray balanced upon one palm and Lune half a step behind her, carrying folded cloths she does not need and wearing a cap that makes her look both younger and more frightened than she has any right to be.
“Stop staring,” Deia murmurs, without turning her head.
“I’m not staring.”
“You are staring with such devotion the walls may begin to blush.”
Lune swallows a laugh and nearly drops the linens.
“Gods, Deia, look at it. There’s more gold in this corridor than in the counting-house at the docks.”
“Then we must pity the corridor. It has been made vulgar without consent.”
Lune gives her a look from beneath the brim of her servant’s cap.
“You’ll mock gilding itself before the night’s done.”
“Only if it insists upon provoking me.”
They move past two footmen, a harried steward, and a young maid carrying a basket of glassware with both hands clutched white around the handles. No one stops them. No one asks where they have come from. High Hall has imported half its staff for the evening, or so the gossip in the lower passage claims, and where excess reigns, confusion is often mistaken for order. Deia has always thought noble houses safest when overcrowded. Too many people make certainty difficult. Too much noise makes truth shy. A girl can disappear in such a place, if she wishes. Or if someone else wishes it for her. Her fingers tighten upon the tray. Lune notices. Of course she does. Lune has a talent for noticing the things Deia would rather bury under sarcasm and forward motion.
“Not here,” Lune whispers.
Deia’s gaze cuts toward her. Lune lowers her voice further.
“I mean, they would not take anyone here. Not from a ball this grand.”
“No?”
“No one would dare.”
Deia’s mouth curves, not quite into a smile.
“My sweet Lune, daring is seldom in short supply among men convinced consequences were invented for others.”
The words settle between them, unwelcome but familiar. Beyond the corridor, music swells, bright and graceful, while somewhere below stairs a servant girl laughs too quickly at something a footman says. The sound tightens the air. There have been too many missing. Kitchen girls. Laundresses. Tavern maids. Seamstresses. Singers with no patrons and no fathers to make inquiries. Girls who change lodgings often enough that a gap in their absence may be explained away. Girls whose employers mutter about stolen coin, whose landlords shrug over unpaid rent, whose names are written nowhere that matters. The city has a remarkable talent for misplacing women it has never valued.
Lune knows two of them. Deia knows three. That is why they come to High Hall in caps and aprons, with borrowed trays and knives hidden where no gentleman’s gaze is permitted to wander. Not for the dancing. Not for the music. Certainly not for the pleasure of watching wealth perspire beneath chandeliers. There are letters somewhere in this house, according to a girl from the lower kitchens who has seen too much and grown wise enough to be afraid. A certain seal. A certain black ribbon. A list of names passed between gentlemen who speak of charity in public and purchases in private. High Hall, for all its polished marble and excessive floral arrangements, has become a place where whispers converge. And Deia has no intention of leaving empty-handed.
At the turn of the passage, she slips through a half-open door and into a narrow retiring room meant, perhaps, for some lady overcome by heat or humiliation. Lune follows, shuts the door gently, and leans her back against it. For one breath, both listen. Footsteps pass. Voices drift by. No shout comes. No alarm. No steward bursts in to demand their business. Lune exhales so hard she nearly folds over.
“I hate this.”
“You said you wished to see the ballroom.”
“I wished to see it while not committing three separate crimes.”
“Then you should have cultivated duller friendships.”
Deia sets the tray down, reaches behind her neck, and begins undoing the plain outer garment that marks her as staff. The grey cloth falls from her shoulders without ceremony. Beneath it she wears a gown of dark blue silk, almost black where the candlelight fails to touch it. It is not new. A fashionable eye would know so at once. The cut has been altered, the hem mended, the sleeves reworked with patience rather than coin. Yet it fits her figure cleanly, close enough to suggest intention, modest enough to avoid immediate scandal, and severe enough to look less like a plea than a warning. Lune stares. Deia looks down at herself.
“What?”
“You look…” Lune’s mouth twists, searching for a word grand enough and failing cheerfully. “You look like you robbed a widow and made it tasteful.”
“A generous review.”
“You did rob a widow, didn’t you?”
“She was not widowed at the time.”
“Deia.”
“She was also dreadful. Hold still.”
Lune laughs despite herself as Deia steps close and plucks the servant’s cap from her hair. Beneath her own plain covering, Lune has tucked soft brown curls into a knot too nervous to be called elegant. Her gown, when she shrugs free of the outer cloth, is pale green and simpler still, with a ribbon at the waist pressed smooth within an inch of its existence. She looks young. Pretty. Frightened. Too much like the kind of girl the world swallows and then insists has wandered willingly into its mouth. Deia’s fingers slow for the smallest moment as she adjusts one of Lune’s pins. Lune catches her wrist.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re already planning to stab someone on my behalf.”
“I often plan to stab people. You are not as singular as you imagine.”
Lune squeezes her wrist once, quick and fierce, then lets go. Deia turns to the mirror. A narrow crack runs through its lower corner, splitting her reflection from shoulder to hip. Her horns rise dark from the sweep of black hair she now loosens and rearranges with efficient hands. Tieflings are not unheard of in noble houses, particularly not in Baldur’s Gate, where money can soften many prejudices so long as it arrives properly laundered. There are two in the ballroom already, she has been told: one a merchant’s son with lacquered horns and rings enough to blind a saint, another a distant relation to some duchess or other who has learned to smile as though forgiveness were a currency.
Deia’s own horns are not what will betray her. It is everything else. The slight disorder no maid’s hands have corrected. The absence of jewels. The plain gloves. The too-watchful eyes. The scar at her collarbone half-hidden by dark lace. The faint scales near her temples that catch light without asking permission. The manner of a woman who has learned how to stand in beautiful rooms but not how to trust them. She looks good. She does not look refined. That, she suspects, is the difficulty. True refinement requires either long practice or an impressive willingness to lie to oneself. Deia possesses practice in abundance, but little talent for that second art. Lune comes to stand beside her in the mirror.
“We’ll be noticed.”
“Of course we shall.”
“That was not comforting.”
“It was not meant to be. Comfort breeds inaccuracy.”
“Could you try lying, once?”
“I am lying. Look at me.”
Lune looks, and her smile turns smaller. Deia softens before she can stop herself. She reaches up and straightens the ribbon at Lune’s waist.
“Keep to the edges. Do not drink anything you have not watched poured. Do not follow any man into a corridor, even if he speaks sweetly enough to rot your teeth. If we are separated, you go to the kitchens first. If you cannot reach them, the eastern passage. If that is blocked, the courtyard with the orange trees.”
“I remember.”
“Say it.”
“The kitchens. Eastern passage. Orange trees.”
“And if someone touches you?”
Lune’s chin lifts.
“I scream.”
“No.”
Lune blinks. Deia’s eyes hold hers in the mirror.
“You break something first. Then you scream.”
A beat passes. Then Lune nods. Satisfied, Deia takes a pair of little silver pins from her pocket and fixes back the front pieces of her hair so that the dark weight of it falls more neatly over her shoulders. The effect is not quite fashionable. It is not quite improper either. It lives in that precarious country between invitation and insult, where Deia spends much of her life.
“Come,” she says. “Let us go be decorative.”
“Gods save the decorations.”
“No one else will.”
They leave the retiring room as two women transformed by nothing more substantial than posture, silk, and a shared willingness to be mistaken for belonging. The nearer they draw to the ballroom, the more the sound of the assembly gathers itself: violins, laughter, the whisper of skirts, the formal announcement of names, the soft percussion of shoes upon polished floor.
At the threshold, Lune stops. Deia does not blame her. High Hall’s ballroom opens before them like a jewel box constructed by someone with more money than restraint. Tall windows reflect the candlelight until it seems the night itself has been invited indoors and persuaded to wear diamonds. Garlands of white flowers loop from pillar to pillar. The floor shines so brightly one might use it to examine one’s conscience, had conscience been fashionable. Everywhere, people move in circles of rank and desire.
Young ladies stand arranged in delicate clusters, each one a pastel hope with a mother nearby to interpret opportunity. Gentlemen linger with affected ease, speaking of horses, politics, and weather as though these subjects have not been exhausted by every generation before them. Older women watch with the grave intensity of generals. Older men watch the wine.
There are mages too, though they wear their art with varying degrees of taste. Rings glimmer with warding spells. Brooches hold minor enchantments. A few visible familiars perch upon shoulders or chair backs, tolerated so long as they do not shed. Near the upper end of the room, beneath a crest worked in silver thread, the host speaks animatedly with a priest of Mystra whose ceremonial blue robes seem determined to be seen from Waterdeep. Lune’s mouth falls open. Deia sighs.
“Close your mouth. You will catch a husband by accident.”
Lune shuts it at once, then opens it again to laugh.
“Would that be so terrible?”
“In this room? Statistically, yes.”
They move to the side of the assembly, near enough to observe, far enough to avoid immediate scrutiny. Deia accepts a glass of wine from a passing servant with a nod that makes him glance twice, uncertain whether she is above or below him. She enjoys that. Confusion is a small art, and she has cultivated it lovingly. Lune takes her own glass and stares at the chandeliers.
“I never thought I’d see it from this side.”
“This side?”
“The side with the wine.”
“Do not grow sentimental. It is poor wine.”
“You tasted it?”
“I suffered it.”
Lune hides her smile behind the rim of her glass.
“You’d call the heavens badly arranged if you found yourself among them.”
“Only if they hang the stars with such desperation.”
Lune’s shoulders shake. Deia watches the room over the edge of her glass. The laughter. The bowed heads. The fluttering fans. The measured glances exchanged between people who have perfected the art of never saying plainly what they mean to sell. It is not that she despises beauty. Beauty, in honest form, has always undone her a little. Music heard through an open tavern door. A field after rain. The first orange flame caught in a cold hearth. A child asleep with crumbs on her chin. The curve of a good blade. But this is not beauty. This is display.
“It affords me constant astonishment,” Deia says, “that gentlemen should profess such a fancy for assemblies so entirely devoid of necessity.”
Lune laughs outright this time, though she quickly turns it into a cough when a lady nearby glances in their direction.
“You may say so, but plenty find necessity in them.”
“Then they are too easily satisfied.”
“Aye, well, not everyone can be satisfied by lurking in corridors and frightening criminals.”
“I have many interests.”
“Name one that does not involve knives.”
“Wine.”
“You just insulted the wine.”
“I did not claim a lack of standards.”
Lune leans closer, eyes bright despite the lingering tension at their edges.
“You know why they’re all here, don’t you?”
“To impersonate peacocks and obstruct the floor?”
“For the Dekarios family.”
“So I gather from the excessive reverence paid to every person wearing blue.”
“They have come all the way from Waterdeep. The whole family, near enough. Or the important ones, at least.”
“Families are very fond of declaring which of their members matter. It saves strangers the trouble of judging incorrectly.”
Lune ignores that with admirable discipline.
“And Mr. Dekarios is to be here.”
Deia’s gaze does not move from the room.
“How fortunate for Mr. Dekarios.”
“You’ve heard of him, then?”
“I have ears.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is an explanation.”
“Deia.”
She sighs.
“Yes, I have heard of him. Half the city has contrived to speak of little else for three days.”
“Only three? At the tavern it has been five.”
“The tavern has always been ambitious in its sufferings.”
Lune nudges her lightly.
“They say he is handsome.”
“They say many things.”
“And brilliant.”
“A more dangerous accusation.”
“And rich.”
“The least imaginative of virtues.”
“And still unmarried.”
Deia finally looks at her. Lune has the good grace to look only partly guilty.
“No,” Deia says.
“I did not say anything.”
“You inhaled with intention.”
“Well, why not?”
“Because I possess a functioning mind.”
“An inconvenient possession for a woman, I am told.”
“By men who fear competition.”
Lune smiles, then softens her voice.
“I only mean that if he is half so pleasant to look upon as they say, and if he has even a quarter of the fortune, gaining his attention would not be the worst endeavour.”
“For whom?”
“For any woman with sense.”
“Then may she enjoy him.”
“For you, goose.”
Deia stares at her. Lune lifts both brows.
“What? You could do worse than a handsome rich mage from Waterdeep.”
“I could also throw myself into the harbour and achieve dampness more directly.”
“Deia.”
“Please.” Deia turns back to the ballroom, the glass stem cool between her fingers. “The gentleman would not grant me a second glance, much less offer a word of greeting. Moreover, however great his fortune or talent, it matters little if a man of such means possesses no true merit.”
She says it quietly enough that the words are meant for Lune alone. Unfortunately, ballrooms have a strange fondness for betrayal. A hush passes near the great doors, not silence exactly, but a rearrangement of attention. Conversations loosen, then tighten. Fans lift. Spines straighten. A mother in rose silk seizes her daughter’s wrist with such swiftness one might mistake the gesture for rescue. Lune’s eyes widen. Deia does not turn at once. She does not need to. The room already tells her enough. Some presence has entered and is immediately weighed, admired, appraised, desired, envied, and offered up to speculation. The air itself seems to adjust its posture. Lune whispers, with the doomed delight of a girl watching a carriage roll directly toward a puddle,
“I think Mr. Dekarios has arrived.”
Deia takes a slow sip of the poor wine. It has not improved.
Tagging according to my Tag List post and private agreements. If you want to be on a Tag List, interact with this post or let me know in some other way. If you want to be removed, let me know too.
Broken, feverish, bound in chains that have bitten so deeply into her that iron seems another part of her body. A child of no brood he recognises, and yet unmistakably draconic. Something old sleeps beneath all that ruined flesh, some ember even ten years of darkness have failed to extinguish. Io sees it too. Sees enough to answer. Enough to ease what pain can still be eased. And Ghaedrath does not ignore the bidding of the ancient god who has chosen him.
What he does not expect is to love her.
Ghaedrath is so old that counting the years has long since become meaningless. He has watched kingdoms rise where forests once stood and watched forests swallow their stones again. He remembers languages no living mouth can speak. He has seen gods born, gods slain, gods return beneath different names. Entire peoples have appeared upon the world since he first spread his wings beneath its sun.
Yet somehow his vast, ancient heart makes room for one furious little girl who refuses her supper and cries only when she believes no one is looking.
Deia hates him in those first years. She hates him for finding her. Hates him for not finding her sooner. Hates him for saving a life she believes has already been ruined beyond repair. Sometimes she clings to him in her sleep and wakes furious for having done it. Sometimes she demands that he leave her alone and panics when he obeys. She is contradiction given flesh.
Ghaedrath gives her patience.
Nothing else can be demanded of her.
One does not drag a child from ten years of torment and expect a woman to emerge whole from the dark. Ten years without sunlight. Ten years of pain made ritual. Ten years of learning that every approaching hand may hurt. Whatever the world expects from her now, Ghaedrath expects only that she remains.
He is a creature capable of terrible things. He has broken armies. He has known the taste of fear in those who look upward and see his shadow passing over them. For most of his existence, power has meant teeth, flame, wings wide enough to eclipse the sun.
Deia teaches him another measure of it.
Sometimes strength is sitting beside a frightened child while supper grows cold between you.
Sometimes it is hearing go away and understanding please do not leave me.
Sometimes the greatest thing a creature of immense power can do is lower his head, make himself gentle, and wait until a small trembling hand finally reaches for him first.
