#eiragon

[walkpathe-arch]

lips curled in a faint snarl,   the shade observes the figure before him in utter silence,  letting it stretch and settle between them like a dark omen.  something terrible to behold.  a blood red moon,  birds rushing in the opposite direction,  death tapping on your shoulder.  he appears to @eiragon unchanged,  like his blade had never struck true and pierced his heart,  and revels in the rider's reaction.  these are the final stages of sleep,  caught between dream and reality,  death and life woven together,  and this is where durza has found their way in.  little rider,  did you think we would have left you alone? 

shoulders to a wall,  he lets out a laugh,  coarse and brittle like bones rattling.  a venomous kind of amusement.  death is an endlessly boring affair,  when he is not the one to deal it out,  and if this is to be his sole pastime..  well,  he better get as much fun out of it as possible.   '  tell me,  have we left a mark?  does your back hurt each time you move?  '  for what is a haunting without terror and pain? durza will live as long as eragon shadeslayer lives, festering on his very skin, burning through his senses. he has not lost at all. his enemy's torment makes for his own brand of victory.

[recitedemise]

nothing will happen to you. nothing. i could not stand it.

This is the problem with heroes, Gale suggests: even when saddled with the truth, they vie only for fantasy. They cling desperate to chances, their claws in the belly of both pipedreams and hope. Yet, the wizard's but a lamb, a thing upon the altar as its ferried toward its death, but what's the future that will follow? What's the summer that will come? He can hardly bear to think it, this dragon-hearted man with his bones so swelled with warmth. A future and a world made paler in his absence? Eragon fight. With both sword and fire, he'll not have that hurt.

But — such is the reality, loathed, admonished, and denied or not. Gale looks right at him, his plate of gooey pie left crumbled at his fork. Yet, what a tantalizing sentiment, so strong, so sure, and so full of conviction. It makes his marrow ache, his gums with his teeth caught singing in his skull. Nothing will happen to you. Nothing, not at all. Soft, Gale picks carefully at a mouthful of peach.

"As awfully convincing as you are, you can color me surprised that you aren't some merchant." All the hope he would sell with that gentle, honeyed mouth-- "It's really rather fortunate. You'd have left me penniless." And the Absolute is near. He can feel it in his bones as foul Moonrise calls them. Gale's scaping at a crumb, tonguing the sugar left clung to his cheek, and all that kindness that this knight has shown him... He's greedy. He wants. The inn about them falls sleepy and quiet. "If you don't mind," please, don't mind, "whatever the word would mean here, I wouldn't deny your company should you keep me through the night."

Hero or not, this may be his last.

[recitedemise]

you wanted happiness. i can't blame you for that.

That's certainly a way of looking at it, isn't it? Still, when worded like that, Gale sat across from at the fire, nearly shutters apart.

It's such a simple little phrase, an innocent string of words to describe his predicament. He'd desired very much, mighty love, respect, and the esteem of his goddess. His peers had deemed him mad, his cravings more the gnaw of an unquenchable hubris, and to be so shuttered from heaven for his hunger? Well, what you reap, so they'd said, is what you ultimately sow.

They had thought him haughty. He had rotted in his tower with their fanged and cruel remarks. But Eragon speaks truly, his tongue so bereft of their nasty condemnation. Gale had only sought happiness, to be loved so fully and so warmly, irrevocably. He thought he hadn't earned it, had to struggle up a peak for the barest crumbs, but with Eragon, it all feels to come so naturally and easily... No pain. No deeds. And no sacrifices.

This, he knows now, is how it should've always been.

"You are too generous with me. I can't help but to wonder how differently things could have been had I only your kindness from the start," Gale murmurs. "To not merely be tolerated but sought for as I am... I'd feel the richest among us having but a second in your company. Full. How anyone can want beside you, I may never know."

[recitedemise]

i have met an extraordinarily few men quite as fascinating and delightful as yourself.

"Believe me, I know."

The spell ends. The air frazzles. There upon the field, the dead and rotting lay. A green color lingers -- all earth in the throat and rainfall on tongue -- as it washes over Gale in a tapering shimmer. His necromancy's strong, clinging to the treetops like dew in the morning, and for leagues and miles, his damning spells throb. He, in the sunlight, seems all an archmage. He smiles to him now, something maddeningly cocky in the shelf of his brow. His hair's wonderfully mussed, fingered, perhaps, by the carding of storms, and that damnable orb rests quiet where his heart sings. In its place, there roars but power, maelstrom, and the groaning dead.

Watch. Gale feels powerful. He steps on down from the hill with its leaves. A flush is in his face as he looks downright glowing. Halsin returns with the boy. They did this.

"Not that I don't appreciate the reminder, of course," says the wizard, "but may I ask to the reason for this showering of flattery?"

[recitedemise]

what would, by chance, be your opinion on riding by dragonback?

"Well, by chance, were I ever offered the opportunity to, my response would be positively enthusiastic."

Peering up from his book, it seems his hypothetical's gone and got him. See, Gale has always been curious, a creature for experience and all such wonders both new and strange. He had never learned contentment, starved in his appetite for all that would scintillate, and perhaps that'd explain why he'd marvel at the cosmos! Even now, he would gawp at those stars that now hang by their heads. He eyes this rider, imagining the chance to all but touch them. He'd neither rely on illusions or the might of spellcraft... At his skin, a tickle of excitement pricks his hairs.

"I'm also confident in saying my knees would be all the happier for it." Eragon! "Are you meaning to take me to the stars and back?"

Imagine that! Anticipating, Gale, a twinkle working in his chest, watches his dear friend raptly.

[recitedemise]

you must know you did nothing wrong.

"What a comforting thought, but you'll have to excuse me if I don't find myself particularly convinced. Had it not been, I'm not entirely certain I'd feel this way."

But luck so fleeting has entirely failed him, and so he, split open, inevitably rots. He sits there working, rolling and rolling that length of his gauze. Fetid, Gale seems half like a corpse, a whole foot in the grave and his orb all an epitaph. It's not an image he fancies and further from a memory he'd cared to impress, but regrettably, there's Eragon now to behold him in his folly. How embarrassing. He's bleeding and he's cracking and it's oh so embarrassing.

Sat by the river, Gale tries for light, but the laugh he manages is like plunging for dredges. About his arm, a rivulet of blood sluices gluttonous and thick. He'd fought viciously today and his body plainly loathes it. To think that magic, his love, would be the very thing that tears him... He fumbles the roll. What a shame. His knuckles half-ruptured pull tight when he fists them.

"I never quite new when to respect my limits," he says.

Love. Perhaps he had loved too deeply, too much.

[recitedemise]

i believe i should like to stay.

How wonderful. "I was rather hoping you'd say that." Looking up, Gale's tent, cozy, is ensconced in light.

Shyly, that little floating mote bathes everything blue. It casts a jewel-like number, a color that waltzes beautifully on those borders of dream. It can encourage one's slumber, something deep and distant from the horrors of the road, and it's no surprise at all why the wizard ducks in here: it's an escape, an oil painting, and a corner of solace. Finding Eragon knelt here, Gale decides that its fixings rather suit him comfortably. Naturally, the hearth from his tower would have greeted him better, but smiling, he finds that those words stifle all of his fuss. "Of course, had the opposite been true," his confidante picks up again, "I wouldn't have known where to start with such a demanding example of extraplanar travel. That said, do know that there is no expense I would have spared in seeing to your wishes. After all, as your host, it would have been my responsibility."

"Though, I wouldn't have relished in it in case you misunderstand me. Every now and then, even wizards can be selfish." To think: his dear, sweet friend journeying beside him! Closing his reading, Gale straightens in his roll. "So be it. As you would like to remain here, we should start to seeing to your own tent. For now, you are free to call my own yours until you're settled. Just a warning though: I'm a kicker."

Still, abandoning all that he knows... "I ask only you're that you're certain."

[recitedemise]

you appear … displeased.

"My displeasure," Gale grits, "is not to be bridged by language."

Gale of Waterdeep is fuming.

Gale of Waterdeep never fumes.

And so, spotting him there in the empty of the room, that furrowing, knitted brow is all a surprise. Fury has swept him totally, his body wounding madly like a bolt of string. He's usually an instrument, a vessel fashioned solely to weave what awes, but the lines about his shoulders speak of nothing so beautiful. Instead, he's looking on the precipice and the verge of break. 

Why? Gale's back is to Eragon, the others idly sampling the pleasures of the city. On his cot, that book they had pilfered lays some quarter way pried. Beneath them, the bardtales in the Elfsong peal and warble. "Despite the magic I command," he scowls, face framed by the starlight, "I had held no illusions to the details of our relationship. Mystra is a god—" creation! "—and I am not, but the sheer measure of my disposability has never been more plain." 

He's tempestuous. To leave him all alone to rot in his tower? "I was her golden opportunity to take Karsus' crown." What a joke. "Gale Dekarios is but a means to an end."