A GalexM!Tav fic, slowburning with just a small sharp edge inside.
Ileleste reached towards his robe. Gale jumped a little as his fingers touched the edge. ((spectacles)) he signed, and Gale smiled. ‘Top pocket.’
He slid his hand gently beneath Gale’s outer robe, searching for the edge of the pocket. His hand brushed over Gale’s breast, for some reason filling out here on the road. He wondered how Gale ate, if he ate, locked away in his Tower. If Tara had to fly him in food, morsel by morsel. It took him a few goes to find the edge of his pocket, and his palm rubbed against Gale’s nipple by mistake. It hardened even beneath his white shirt.
Ileleste pulled out the spectacles and unhooked them. He placed them gently on Gale’s red nose, tucked them over his pink ears. Gale looked at him, and Ileleste felt something stir in his own breast that he hadn’t felt in so long. Not even for Zilvaun. Ileleste knew he was not pretty, but the bed of a man as rich and powerful as Gale would never have been empty for long. A man like him must hunger. If he was swifter than the others, he may well get a taste of him.
But would it be wise? Would he himself not hunger all the more for having supped?
Gale coughed awkwardly and broke the silence. He realised he’d been staring. Well, that wasn’t the way to do it, no matter how humans courted. Gale brought the handle of his knife once more to his face to admire it.
It is sweet? He thinks to himself as he throws the apple core over his shoulder.
((it be breakfast)) He watches Gale watch him lick the drops of juice running down his wrist.
“Oh, no,” he murmurs. ‘Sweets for breakfast? I can hear my great-grandfather spinning all the way over the Shining Sea. No, it’s dessert.” Ileleste had heard of this dessert thing from his husband, when they’d been entertaining a husband and wife pair of Evereskan high elves. Apparently, it was the height of civilization in Everlynd AND Evereska to eat a second sweet meal before the first had even digested. That evening had been the first time he’d had dessert, for most of his life subsisting on two meals a day and feeling lucky for it.
He isn’t sure how much of the meaning of his memory transfers to Gale through the worm, but he leans in closer, the sharp ends of his beard hairs tickling Ileleste’s ear. He can do nothing but tremble. A goddess’s parzdiamo, whispering in his ear.
“We could always be extra naughty, and have ice cream as well.” Their memory of ice cream is so similar as to be mutual, watching with wide eyes as a wizard measures salt into a metal tub of milk chilled with an ice spell, before spinning the mixture and watching milk begin to take sweet, solid form. In Ilelete’s memory, the wizard uses just a spell to send the milk spinning in on itself, to Gale’s fascination. In Gales, the wizard is a woman, a dark brown halfling, all curves, sending a wooden tool almost twice her size swirling through enough milk to drown her with barely a crease in her brow. They both taste cream on their tongues, the Underdark version salty, the surface redolent with a rich mellowness Ileleste has never tasted before. Each tastes the other’s desire come into full bloom for the first time, Ileleste swirls his tongue around the curls in Gale's memory of first desire, sweet and low. Gale penetrates his own mind, he thinks at first, for the somatic, but Gale is exploring far beyond, licking up the lingering trails of Ileleste’s desire.
The weather is nkt cooperating with my holiday, so I'm responding to the Caturday Catch Up from @tociminna. Tagging @dr4gonwriter @bhaalest
I've got the dialogue with this part down alright, but as usual I'm struggljng with white room syndrome and need to jmprove the description
Across the camp, Gale screamed. He came stumbling out of his tent and fell on his back, yelling again.‘
What’s the matter? What do you need?’ said Karlach, rushing to him.
‘Maggots - it’s full of maggots!’
Karlach stuck her head inside the tent. ‘Can’t see any soldier.’
‘Are you talking in your sleep again?’ asked Astarion, lazily flipping a dagger.
‘MY ARM! IT’s FULL of MAGGOTS!’
Ileleste reached him, and pushed down the fireball Gale was trying to make with his other hand, smothering it.
((be still. these maggots be your friend)) Halsin gently cupped a fly in his hands and sent it to sleep so he could inspect.
‘Yes, he’s right. These maggots are doing you more good than harm. The worse thing that might have happened is the fly stepped in something dirty. But that was long ago, looking at an infestation like this.’
Gale whimpered, his face paling.
((be not silly child)
)‘Surfacers don’t tend to use healing maggots or leeches. He’s terrified. In fact, it might be better if we-’ Halsin sent Gale to sleep, then covered the writing mass with a blanket.
((should not remove them))
‘Well, that’s up to Gale. I do have other options to clean his wound if he’d rather,’ Halsin switched to Drowish.
((I heard them a few nights ago. I be saying something if I thought he would not like))
Karlach finished throwing up. ‘How the hell could he not know?’
‘Depends what he was doing to care for his wound. Depends what the wound was. It may well have felt merely ticklish to him.’
‘Erm, what’s full of maggots?’ Shadowheart called across the camp.
‘Gale’s full of maggots,’ shouted Astarion, disdainfully.
‘We are all full of maggots,’ joked Lae’zel.
Wyll jogged over. ‘What killed him? Is the camp secure? How long has he been gone? We can get him back?’
‘Calm, child, I just put him to sleep to stop him hurting himself. The maggots are helping him.’
‘Ugh, stop it,’ complained Karlach. ‘You can heat a blade up on me, but you’ll have to bring it over. I’m not staying. That was fucking awful. Poor Gale.’
‘Right after you ate all that blue cheese as well,’ said Wyll, to a delighted shriek of laughter from Astarion.
‘Fuck you,’ Karlach zoomed away, clutching her stomach.
They rotated their marching order, and Wyll feigned ignorance on romantic matters when Gale tried to heavily hint that he might be getting somewhere with Ileleste.
Maybe?
Gods, his mother would kill him, fooling around with a married man. So he said he was getting divorced. They all say that, his mother said. She despaired of his roaming, but it wasn’t his fault. No-one ever saw him. He doubted his mother could find someone who could, because his mother, gods love her, never saw him either.
Tara mewed at him, asking to be let into his guarded thoughts. He set his pack down and picked her up instead, nuzzling into her sun-warmed fur. ‘What do you think of Ileleste?’
‘Does it matter what I think?’ she said. ‘You’ll do as you always do, which is whatever you want.’
this is from the Bone Spindle which just got 1000 hits, so I'm feeling very grateful that people like me story. We are finally at Tiefling Party, except .... it's all gone wrong.
This wip piece has SPOILERS for Chapter 13, although if you were following closely you probably already worked it out
Can't recall who's been tagged so: @stupidsexywizard @optimisticgrey @bhaalest
‘So you’re a family man, then?’
Gale leaned out of his tent, clearly drunk. If Ileleste had been watching from the sidelines, he’d have said that Gale was jealous. But he was lucky to have had one lover - such as he was - and one marriage - such as it was, with everything that Ileleste was and had been and could never be.
Gale clearly had a spider up his arse about something else, and it intrigued Ileleste, who was sick of people being very good to each other right about now.
((my husband has three daughters from his first marriage. We have one son together. And all of my brothers and sisters and aunties and uncles.))
‘You never mentioned him.’
((I did. And I showed you memory of him.))
‘You never said he was your husband. In fact, I distinctly remember you said friend.’
((I said khal’abbil. Common does not have this word, I think. The person you trust most in this world.))
‘He must be quite the man, then. Quite the wizard, if I’m remembering your memory correctly.’
((he stop being wizard after he hurt our son in accident. Now he is bard, like he always dream of. But then he go to Calimsham to be bard in noble court. He was supposed to be back three years ago.))
Gale takes a long drink from his goblet. ‘Calishite schools are hardly a match on Blackstaff. But I don’t recall much barding happening in either. Not much of a oh, I don’t know how to pronounce it. Not much of a person you can trust, is he?.’
((Now you know why I don’t speak of him.))
Gale regards him with dark eyes. ‘Where is your son?’
((him at school in Imberlur. One of the first boys to become scholar. You would like. Him know Common, and reading, and histories.))
‘Why doesn’t he teach you Common? Or how to read?’
((Only see him every fourth moon. Want to make sure he not become all dusty. Make sure he remember how to dance, and sing, and fish, and fight. He is Leste’s to look after, not to look after Leste.))
I was atgged by @optimisticgrey, no pressure tags for @tociminna, @dr4gonwriter @jbenn656 @bhaalest
Trigger warning: character death
Ileleste struggles to choose Gale against...?
The hag’s lair was exactly how the other two had been. Stinking, even through its glamour, and expansive. Ileleste envied it immensely - Gale could tell; not put off by the bog outside. At least it was good defence, he thought, but Ileleste had chattered endlessly, pointing out the tiniest of flowers, the thick wet peat. He stood and stared at a majestic waterbird as if they had all the time in the world. He was the same inside, carefully appreciating the sunlit beauty of all the hag had taken for herself.
‘I could see you in a wizard’s tower. Not your mothers,’ he clarified, as Ileleste immediately tensed. ‘Or your husbands’,’ he added, not sure which woeful wizard had left such a great wound on his psyche.
Ileleste put down the frog-shaped teapot he was admiring and snorted. ((Zilvaun didn’t have a tower. We had Ileleste’s hag hut, and be not good enough. He wanted to be city man. Live in blanket box in sky, telling all it be a tower))
Ileleste showed him an image of a sparkling city in the dark, small houses in huge towers, or carved directly into the cavern wall. Each house was clearly only made for adult drow, as they had no bedroom, and little more than a hot brick and bowl for a kitchen. He couldn’t imagine Ileleste cooped up in such a place.
‘So he abandoned the quest for a tower to play music all day? Is that what’s in Calimsham for him? A place in a noble court? Gods know I’ve thought of giving up myself, but, ah, it would never be the same. Once I was able to lift a tower from its foundations with a flourish, make the fire in that hearth become a dragon. I could never give that up, not even to live in a palace. I had my chance at that life, and I chose differently.’
Ileleste waved his hand dismissively. ((I be sure that living in a palace be very nice, but it be not yours, right? Not home. But maybe all that backstabbing and deal-making be feeling like home to Zilvaun; it be just like the mound of Lolth he crawled out of))
At least, Gale thought that’s what happened. Here on the Fugue Plane, his memories are being stripped from him, one by one. He knew that he had three day’s time for his companions to bring him back before the orb detonated, but that seemed like it had already ran out. Or maybe no time at all had passed. He relived each memory before they were taken from him; seemingly without regard for what they were. The innate coldness of the Universe, as Ileleste had once said, sapped everything from him, slowly but surely.
It shouldn’t take his companions three days to recover him - but what if it did? What little would be left of him then? His magic, his memories, both gone?
…
Ileleste stared at the corpse for a while, from a safe distance. The necrotic magic of Netheril crackled and sparked when anything came near. Several insects had fallen out of the sky and smashed into dust over the aura left behind.
Was this far enough away from any living village to let the orb safely explode? Those beautiful wetlands would go with it, but what was the alternative?
He’d been the first to realise Gale was missing as they began their climb to the surface, and he’d scampered back down, thinking he’d find Gale lost in thought, pondering one of the hag’s puzzles or the architecture of her house.
Instead he’d found that sad little scrap of a thing that, were it not for the robe it was wrapped in, he would not even recognise it.
The shade it had produced watched him, a little sadder than before.
Gale laughed, the first time Ileleste had made him laugh in a while, and he wished it had happened in the day so he could watch the darkening of his throat as his face flushed. Gods, even fighting with Gale had him blood-full and dark-eyed in seconds. He felt like a young man again.
‘You’re so much older than me.’ Gale sat down on a log behind him. ‘I, of course, meant that as a mark of respect.’
((what else would it have been?))
‘Well, in many human cultures it is youth and vigour that is valued,’ Gale puffed out his chest at that. ‘But I think one sees the folly in that when one’s vigour faults long before their youth. Not that their youth is with them much longer.’
Ileleste crouches beside him, remembering the conversation they’d had when his moths had returned to him. ((Gale is in his prime, no?))
‘Ha! Oh, I wish we’d met when I had been. A Chosen, and a well-regarded scholar, and a fixture of the city. I had many offers of marriage, you know.’
((Ileleste not wish so. Ileleste likes the Gale he meets alone in the dark.))
‘I-Ileleste, forgive me, but that sounds rather like flirting, and you’re married. It doesn’t work that way on the surface. Except in some wood-elf grove.’
((doesn’t work that way underground, either)) IS he flirting?
((what I mean to say is that I like the Gale I meet now. Or maybe the Gale I meet in a few moons time))
Gale smiles at him. ‘The Gale not primed to explode? The Gale-sans-tadpole?’
((I look forward to both of those))
They say goodnight, parting as friends, with a hearty handshake.
Ragar peers into the raging whirlwind of emotions.
There is a beautiful man and I wanted him so and couldn’t stand him to look at me with disgust, he explains
Will come another time, she consoles him.
Not for one who looks like me.Thinks like me. I can’t even read, Ragar.
What does that have to do with fucking? Two-legs are so confusing.
…
They went back for the girl, and there was not another time. If he hadn’t spent so much time puzzling over his robe, Ileleste wouldn’t have even recognised Gale.
In which Gale's death scene happens a little differently than most GalexTav fics....
Link here to Chapter Fifteen
'Why aren’t you doing it?’ yelled Wyll. ‘He’s dead!’
((would be a sin. spoil his chance at re-incarnation))
‘Humans don’t reincarnate! He’s our friend! And how many people will he take out with him?’
He reaches for the special pouch but Ileleste neatly evades his grasp. Ileleste considered this new information for a moment, and then signed ((Halsin won’t like it))
‘And since when did you give a fig about what Halsin thinks?’ Wyll retorts, in Elvish better than Ileleste’s own. ((what if he not help us?)) But Wyll doesn’t understand. ((should be a vote)) he tries again, and Wyll gets that, at least.
‘Fine,’ he rolls his eyes, and they slowly return to the surface. ‘Shadowheart won’t need much convincing,’ he says to himself. ‘Astarion, well, he’ll follow whoever looks like they are winning, Halsin is a no, apparently, and Karlach, yes, obviously.’
