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Tav: So, your last name is Dekarios? Gale: It is. Courtasy of my mother, the inimitable, dare I say it sometimes unavoidable Morena Dekarios. It's been so long since I've used it. 'Gale Dekarios' cuts a poor figure next to the wizarding prowess of 'Gale of Waterdeep.' Tav: Gale Dekarios… I think I like him more.

Gif commissions

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✨All we have is each other✨

Part 2.2: Let me work my magic.

summary: More programming and longing and a long night with Silas.

author's note:Thank you for voting and sticking with me. Checking in, sending your thoughts, leaving your kudos and comments. It means more than words can ever express 🫶

Theme song: Architects - Doomsday

content warning: recreational drug use (alcohol, weed), therapy mentioned

word count: 3,6k

Excerpt below AO3 Link

While the system begins to process, you return to motion. Longer walks with Mal. Short, clumsy runs. You were fit in Faerûn — lean muscle built on survival, on climbing cliffs and dodging blades — but that was battle, not cardio. Not rhythm or routine. Still, you move.

You have to move. Because you know what happens if you do not.

Stopping is not an option. Not now. Not when forward is the only thing left. If you stop, the fear will take hold. It waits for the smallest stillness. You can feel it.

That gnawing truth you refuse to name: what if you’ve already lost everything?

It haunts the corners of your thoughts like a ghost. And you will not let it win.

The first calculations crash at 43%. Six weeks of sleepless labor unravel in a single failed thread. You try to breathe through it, try not to drown in that rising tide of panic. Half a bottle of gin buys you enough numbness to crawl out of the wreckage and try again.

It takes two weeks to isolate the mistake. Two weeks of pacing, of silence, of staring blankly at your ceiling at 3AM and wondering if this is the moment where you lose your grip on reality.

You are in the final phase of your job’s major project — deadlines, deliverables, responsibilities — and you can barely see straight. You push through. Because that is what you do.

It works. You still close the project on time. You just do not care anymore.

You force yourself through every hour like it is a battlefield. Joking to yourself that you have seen worse — you have seen Avernus, even if only for a moment — but the fire does n’o feel funny anymore. Not when it burns this way.

When the third run fails — because of an input error so basic it would embarrass your first-year self — you put the bottle down, pick up your phone, and schedule therapy.

It takes too long to comb through the logs. One line of bad code. One line. It makes your stomach turn. You know better. You are better.

Do better.

The doubt slips in like a crack through glass.

What if Faerûn was never yours to keep?

What if it was only a borrowed thread of fate, a tether meant to serve a purpose — resolve the Absolute, save a world — and once it was done, the thread snapped.

Your time was up.

Your presence: spent.

No. That does not track. You know it. Silas cast the spell — on a rare moon, during the right constellation. A fluke. A freak alignment of magic and math. It should not have worked and yet it did.

Still, you are terrified of what the numbers will say. You are rebuilding a spell you barely understand, in a world that barely believes magic ever existed. If the magic here is waning — if the spell hinges on timing, on a dying planet's last breath of starlight — how long will it take to work again?

You know how the galaxy works. How rare the right alignments are. You understand time dilation. It refers to the seemingly odd fact that time passes at different rates for different observers, depending on their relative motion or positions in a gravitational field.

Everyone who has seen Interstellar does.

But if six hours here are six months in Faerûn?

Gale might already be gone.

You have wasted so much time. Years, maybe. Decades even. And you cannot figure out how to fix it.

You were sent to Faerûn at a specific moment. That must mean something. The spell references time. But it is cryptic, fractured. And you have no one left to ask. Gale would have seen it instantly. He would have explained it to you like a story, gentle and precise.

The source material is scattered, fragmented — destroyed during inquisitions, dismissed as fiction, lost to time. Forgotten Realms lore offers nothing. Just fantasy, they say. Just someone’s invention.

So you bury yourself in the math. Logic is something you can understand, you can hide in, bursy your mind with.

Therapy helps, more than you expected. You talk in metaphors. You say “loss,” when you mean him. You say “helpless,” when you mean forcefully removed. You talk about a love you could not save. A life that slipped through your fingers like mist.

It helps. A little. Just enough.

Laura and Silas do their best. They offer joy, distraction, the weight of their love. You pretend it is a depressive episode. Something explainable.

It hurts, not to tell them the truth.

But you know what happens if you do.

They will worry. Suggest hospitalization. And you would not blame them.

You would have said the same, once.

Before you fell in love with a man born of Weave and wonder. A man who kissed you like you were made of starlight and ruin. Who held you with hands gentle enough to silence every scream you kept buried.

You refuse to touch the game.

You refuse to touch the game. It would not be right. He would not be the same. None of them would. It would be an echo. And you cannot bear to feel that kind of wrongness.

So you stay away. You prepare.

Your mind sharpens to a point. Fixed. Clear.

There is no room for failure now.

No plan B. No what if.

You do not imagine what happens if the algorithm fails.

You cannot.

This is total commitment.

You will return to Faerûn.

You will find Gale.

You will go home.

Continue on AO3

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I adore the idea of a Tav absolutely loving Gale's facial hair. Tav will be openly complimenting it saying they find it so attractive. Gale is beaming and basking in Tav's praise.

Tara overhears and is just like: GODS now I have to try and convince two people to shave that gods awful thing off his chin! 

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the wizard of waterdeep

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This is amazing.

Night yaps.

This is their entire Act 1 arc for me. The nights get longer. The conversations get deeper. The bodies grow closer and the lines blurrier...

It's all fun and games until someone falls asleep in your arms.

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THE MIRROR

OC Vibes

I wasn't tagged. I secretly stole it from @optimisticgrey with a slight of hand check. I think I'll do Sadie from my stardew fic too just for fun :') ALSO HOW PERFECT IS THE MIRROR??

The rules are simple: go to Pinterest, search "your OC's name + core", post six pictures. Then tag six people!

Seraphyne-Core

Tagging whomever wants to give it a go :)

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Tranquility ✨

My second Blender render!

I saw a stock photo and knew I had to try to replicate the pose! I am incredibly proud of how the hands came out. And Gale's contented face. And - believe it or not - the book! Such a tiny part of the scene but I had to learn something new to be able to get it to work.

Took me about 4 hours to get the lighting to work, but I figured it out in the end, so that's what counts 😜

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I love how surprisingly fitting these are 😅

OC Vibes

Tagged by the beautiful @optimisticgrey - this was too much fun! And Celestecore is STUNNING! 😱

The rules are simple: go to Pinterest, search "your OC's name + core", post six pictures. Then tag six people!

Ooh! I had trouble picking just 6! 🖤✨

I'm tagging: @druizard, @utrennyaya, @e-on-edge, @instigator9000-blog, @goosebuermps, @aoifethephoenixqueen and tbh, anyone else cause this was too much FUN! 👀✨

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This is absolutely beautiful and I would be more than flattered!

a little intro piece for @irrelechan7's fanfic "The Last Ember's Light"

knowing she's a graphic designer had me in sweats over this one. lacking any modicum of self-control, i got in a protracted battle with coloring. i wasn't going to post the colored version because i know there are problems, but i'm trying to be brave. (╥﹏╥)

irrelechan7's words are far more elegant than mine.

next work is likely gonna be fanfics from @lostintheweave / @usherdownthesky

when i get my chops up, i'll attempt a smut piece from @chordialy and/or @optimisticgrey

i also need to go back to "art school" (i.e. youtube), so expect some random chaos in between.

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OC Vibes

Thank you @optimisticgrey for the tag! ❤️

The rules are simple: go to Pinterest, search "your OC's name + core", post six pictures. Then tag six people!

Here is Seraphina core - stargazing, books, pretty dresses and a little poetry? Yep, that's my girl 🥹

Tagging: @thiriann, @necrodette, @violet-dekarios, @miradelletarot, @mintharasfreckles, @emmy-dekarios-bg3

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Late Night Thoughts wt. Lenore

I am having a rough ass time, so please forgive the 35 late night thoughts that are all eerily similar to one another, but this is literally all I'm thinking about these days

♡

His velvety robe welcomed your tear-stained cheeks as you snuggled close, breathing in his warm musk. The ache between your legs was not pleasant, nor was it borne of Gale’s teasing. It was ugly; relentless, and nothing you had tried thus far had even managed to touch it. The discomfort worsened, as if honored you had been gracing it with your attention, and you groaned again, the sound now muffled by Gale’s chest.

His hands skated up and down your back in comforting lines, alternating between flat palms and the edges of his fingernails, and he read to you—a book of his choosing. It was a fantasy novel, but he insisted on reading it to you, claiming that it reminded him of Faerun. With each description that deviated, however, he would pause in his reading and correct the inaccuracies.

It made you smile, his eagerness to share with you what he knew—what was his. Bringing you into his world - as much as your world allowed - had always been paramount to him, and you often found yourself wondering how you had been lucky enough to receive his affection. Although, when you had voiced such thoughts aloud, he frequently rebutted that his musings often mirrored those same sentiments regarding you.

You swore he had been in the middle of an explanation about the difference between fae folk and fairies that the book had failed to mention when you closed your eyes. But when you next opened them, he had moved on to gnomes, somehow, and how they often were mistaken for dwarves. Dwarves were creatures of tradition and sameness, reluctant to reform their ways for anything, he said. While gnomes were naturally curious and innovative, opting to create something new to solve age-old problems.

"So you're distantly related to a dwarf, then," you tittered, tracing a line along a seam in his robe with your finger.

"I should say not!" He refuted with a sputter.

"You are quite set in your ways, you know," you continued to tease. "Although," you seceded, "I can't say much. I'm not exactly an "innovator" myself."

"At least you're aware," he chortled.

"Unlike some,: you hummed in return and he smirked down at you.

"Very well, I surrender. I am a man of comfort and predictability can certainly come in such a form. However, I will have you know that I have partaken in plenty of mad adventures where predictability was so slim that I hardly knew what I'd eat meal by meal. You're even aware of them!" he tacked on, like he had just remembered, and you laughed.

"My darling Gale is a man of many facets, I see." You ran your fingernails through his beard, lightly scratching his chin.

"Mmm." He practically purred at the sensation, grinning as he gave you better access. "Indeed he is. Your darling Gale is simply thankful that he can be charming enough to make his love stop crying."

~

Late Night Thoughts Series💤 | Buy Me a Coffee ☕

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Friendly reminder from Gale

HOW TO TRIGGER:

(Thank you to @chordialy for confirming!)

Condition: Must have already had his weave lesson, teiflings saved.

Dialogue options in order:

> Sounds, er, fun?

> She must be very smart, to have done all that.

> What if she doesn't like me?

> She sounds great. But I was hoping I meant more to you than an animal companion.

- I'm flattered. Is your good opinion so hard to come by?

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Netherese Orb + Physical Impacts.

I want to talk more on the subject of the specific physical impact of the orb on Gale, because I think it’s very glossed over in canon (and because I like this wizard a normal and socially acceptable amount).

When you see the night of “Gale’s Folly” through his memories, the narrator describes it as “…blackest Weave that pounces. Its teeth, its claws, its unstoppable as it digs through and becomes part of you. And gods, is it ever-hungry…”

Netherese Weave is not just dangerous - it is the kind of dangerous that even deities like Mystra refuse to touch because of the threat it poses to the very nature of reality and magic. Karsus’s attempt to ascend to godhood not only brought his civilization to ruin but destabilized the entire Weave.

In Forgotten Realms lore: “[The Weave] is an essential element of the universe. It runs through everything in unseen threads. It is what makes magic possible.“ (Excerpt from Magic of the Weave - An Introduction)

If we view the Weave as a constant source of underlying energy, like electrical currents, then absorbing even a fragment of Netherese Weave into a biological system would be like plugging an entire unstable power grid directly into your nervous system.

It seems unlikely, almost unreasonable, that such an unstable, predatory force would plant itself neatly in his sternum and neck and leave the rest of his body untouched.

Gale himself speaks about the orb like a chronic illness (“affliction”, “condition”, “remedy”, “stabilization”) and describes biological symptoms that track incredibly closely with neuropathy (nerve damage) if he does not feed the orb: “It begins with a biological deterioration. muscle spasms, disorientation, a slight ringing in the ears. and if left for too long… catastrophe.”

Based on what we know about Netherese Weave and the descriptions if his condition isn’t managed, the original incident likely was devastatingly medically and magically traumatic to his body - regardless of the subsequent status of the orb. Nerve damage to that severity would leave permanent consequences.

Think:

- Hands that shake when he’s tired or magically spent

- A slight limp, barely noticeable, after a long day of walking

- Rising just a bit slower, or leaning on his staff too heavily to disguise muscle weakness

These would be consequences that last regardless of the orb’s status, and likely are irreparable due to the nature of their origin.

While magic in the Forgotten Realms can heal and restore functionality, there is a limit to what it can do. Healing spells fix “recent injuries,” but can’t undo deep trauma or structural damage beyond what the body can naturally mend and even spells like Restoration have limits. Additionally, the narrator says the Netherese Weave “becomes part of [him]”. That doesn’t suggest just damage - it suggests fundamental magical and biological rewriting.

It’s also directly shown that the orb causes him pain/discomfort when he gets the Arcane Hunger status effect - but it doesn’t seem to be a surprise to him. He doubles over and clutches his chest (indicating the severity) but doesn’t cry out and speaks to you with in pained, but calm tones. This is not the behavior of someone with sudden, unexpected pain - this is the behavior of someone with constant chronic pain noticing the point where it becomes unsustainable. (Sidenote: This is a pretty common headcanon, I’m just mentioning it for context - other people have explored the idea of Gale & chronic pain supported by canon much more deeply. I’m looking more at consequences of nerve damage more specifically in this post)

So I present:

Gale with chronic pain and neuropathy. Gale with hands that shake when he’s exhausted. Gale who knows how to work around the reminders of his body’s limitations. Gale who can still cast and is a force to behold in battle, but who adjusts subtly afterwards to hide the way he’s favoring one leg - because the other is giving out on him. Gale who overuses Mage Hand because he doesn’t trust his own. Gale who sits by the fire a few minutes too long after a stressful day because the world feels like it’s spinning. Gale who is still himself, but who bears physical consequences of his ambition.

Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.

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The Vanishing of Celeste Dekarios, Part 7 - Gale

summary: Gale has some more to time to think and reflect and comes to a surprising conclusion.

author's note: This is the most important chapter and I cannot believe I put myself through this again. I hope it came out okay.

Theme song: Frederic Wiedmann - A Song of Love and Loss

content warning: Just our favorite wizard self loathing and thinking - but coming to a surprising realization

word count: 2,2k

Excerpt below

Start at the beginning

AO3 Link

The days dragged on, indistinct and excruciatingly long, each one bleeding into the next like ink spilled across a parchment Gale could no longer decipher.

And with every sunrise, Celeste’s absence carved deeper into him — not a wound, but a canyon, growing wider, darker, more impossible to traverse.

What began as grief had become something else. Something ravenous.

The most recent lead — yet another whisper, another half-truth wrapped in illusion — had proven worthless. The search had led him to an abandoned tenement, half-swallowed by ivy and rot. He had, once again, flung open the doors as though salvation waited on the other side.

Instead, there had been only dust. Silence. The echo of his own foolish hope collapsing in on itself.

Another dead end.

Another futile raid.

Another empty place where he had once imagined finding her.

Tara had found him afterward, soot-streaked and bitter, muttering to the walls of his study as if they could answer him. She’d scolded him, her tiny form brimming with righteous fury — berating him not only for his recklessness, but for the way he had shut her out, dismissed her concern, let the distortion creep into his thoughts like mold beneath the floorboards. And he had not defended himself.

How could he? She was right.

And yet she forgave him, as she always did. Climbed into his lap and curled up there, purring as he stroked her fur with trembling fingers, the motion meditative. For a time, the storm within him dulled to a low hum.

But the reprieve did not last.

Frustration rose again — boiled and seethed and coiled around his grief until the two were indistinguishable, a single hydra of emotion with too many heads to name.

During the following days, he began snapping, not just at himself but at others. Words he didn’t mean, edged with venom, spilled from his mouth unbidden. He startled even himself. And the others withdrew. Even those who once sought his counsel now gave him space, a kindness that felt like punishment.

Gale hated it, aware that he deserved it.

Halsin remained, ever stalwart, offering him a quiet presence and the occasional word of sense — gently spoken, never condescending.

The druid’s steady company should have brought solace. Instead, it deepened Gale’s guilt. Halsin had lost her too. Yet he bore the pain with grace, while Gale… unraveled.

Celeste was gone. Vanished into shadow, without word or trace.

And the mind, ever cruel, supplied every possibility — each one more horrifying than the last. Taken. Enslaved. Tortured. Gods, worse.

He could imagine it too easily: her voice hoarse from screaming, her magic bound or drained, her will chipped away by cruel hands. The images haunted him. They eroded him.

This wasn’t how the story was meant to unfold.

Continue on AO3

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May your good heart be in good hands.

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OC Vibes

Tagged by the wonderful @babydinosaur930 - thank you so much!

The rules are simple: go to Pinterest, search "your OC's name + core", post six pictures. Then tag six people!

I proudly present: Celeste core

I AM IN LOVE

Tags for @whiskeyskin @worfs-glorious-hair @dearest-and-nearest @astarioffsimpmain @rdekarios @enbyofwaterdeep