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sheslikealionimagines · 8 days ago

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Ash and Aether ~ Part 3

Pairings: Gale Dekarios x Fem!OC

Rating: G

Genre: Slow burn romance

Words: 3.6k

Summary: Aryn, a self-taught mage with wild, instinctive magic, crosses paths with Gale, a brilliant but burdened wizard whose life is tethered to a volatile arcane secret. What begins as an uneasy alliance deepens into a partnership of intellect, trust, and unspoken yearning as they challenge each other’s beliefs—and slowly unravel the walls around their hearts. Together, they discover that the most powerful magic isn’t found in tomes or incantations, but in the quiet understanding between two souls brave enough to truly see one another.

~~~~~~~~~~~

They had been studying together for weeks now—longer than either had planned, certainly longer than either would have admitted at the outset. What had begun in the broken, uncertain quiet after fire and guilt and too many sleepless nights had settled into something else entirely. Not easy. Not simple. But steady. Real.

Their partnership had been born of necessity—Gale’s knowledge, Aryn’s raw power—but it had grown in the spaces between danger. In the shared looks when a spell worked. In the long silences filled not with tension, but with thought. They had come to inhabit the same rhythm, not by design, but by quiet accumulation. Like two instruments gradually learning to harmonize.

Aryn had changed. Not softened, exactly—she was still sharp-edged, still more storm than breeze—but she no longer bristled at instruction or deflected with silence. She argued now. Fiercely. Teased. Her dry wit was quick as ever, but laced now with warmth instead of warning. She laughed with her whole body. She interrupted Gale when he got too pedantic. She listened when he grew quiet.

And Gale… Gale had started looking forward to the hours between dusk and dawn. To the sound of her boots on the stairs. To the way her presence filled the tower with something that didn’t feel like dread or memory. He laughed again, not because it was polite, but because she surprised him into it. She reminded him that he could still be surprised.

Tonight, they stood in one of the upper tower chambers—an old space with high, slanted ceilings and windows half-fogged from the damp. The stone bore the evidence of past missteps and quiet triumphs: scorch marks near the baseboards, sigils half-faded on the walls, chalk smudges like ghostly fingerprints. Crystalline residue glittered in the corners where spellwork had unraveled. Nothing in the room was pristine. And maybe that was why Gale preferred it.

Between them, a resonance matrix stretched across the floor—carefully drawn arcs and concentric circles, each inscribed with runes that shimmered softly under the lamplight. The Weave pulsed faintly at its edges, waiting.

Gale knelt near one of the outer glyphs, adjusting it with a precision born of years spent chasing perfection—failing, chasing again. “This should, in theory, allow us to align magical frequencies in tandem,” he said quietly. “It’ll let us track distortions without destabilizing the source.”

Aryn crouched across from him, tucking a few strands of hair behind her ear with ink-smeared fingers. “Right. Or it’ll pull another carpet fire.”

He didn’t look up. “That was your improvisation.”

“Which stopped your sleeve from combusting. You’re welcome, by the way.”

His mouth twitched. “The sleeve was enchanted.”

“Badly,” she muttered with a smirk, rising to her feet.

They stepped into their respective circles, the chalk flaring softly beneath their boots. Pale gold and silver lines traced up their legs like veins, threading toward the heart of the matrix. The chamber responded like something waking slowly—tentative, uncertain.

They lifted their hands in unison. Mirror images.

And the magic pushed back.

Her energy surged, bold and unshaped. His moved like water over glass—measured, restrained. The clash wasn’t violent, but palpable. The tension prickled in the air, a low crackle of resistance that stirred the dust around their feet.

For a moment, it felt like the spell would tear apart at the seams. But then—just barely—they adjusted.

A shared breath.

A shift in pressure.

The two flows, so different, began to find one another. Not forced. Not tamed. Aligned.

Gale exhaled slowly, the tension bleeding from his shoulders. The Weave slipped between them now in fine threads, humming softly, like notes of a half-remembered melody. The arcane lines shimmered with color, shifting with emotion more than intent.

Aryn’s hand sparked—a ribbon of blue-white energy curling from her fingers to his. It brushed his wrist, warm and electric. He flinched, not from pain, but from surprise.

She blinked. “That was… assertive.”

“Assertive is one word,” Gale murmured, watching as another thread of light wrapped slowly around his forearm.

“Suggestive?”

He gave her a dry look. “Possessive.”

“Oh. So, your type, then.”

He might’ve laughed—might’ve—but something in the room was changing. Deepening.

More strands rose from the field, drifting like soft silk. One slid along her collarbone, light as breath. Another curved behind his neck, curious, weightless.

Aryn’s posture shifted. Less playful now. Her eyes met his, unguarded for a beat too long.

“This feels…” she started, but didn’t finish. A shadow crossed her face—uncertainty, maybe even awe. “It feels like it… knows us.”

Gale hesitated. “Magic remembers intent.”

“Then what’s it remembering now?”

He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Because to answer would mean admitting something aloud he hadn’t even admitted to himself.

That he had started looking for her in the silences.

That her presence was no longer an interruption to his solitude—but its end.

The energy between them pulsed again, a slow wave that pressed into skin and bone like memory. Aryn’s fingers shifted—brushed his.

Deliberate.

An invitation, not an accident.

Gale didn’t move. Not away.

“Is this part of the diagram?” she asked, voice low.

“No,” he said. “This is… beyond it.”

Their eyes met across the spell’s glowing seam. She didn’t look away. Neither did he.

“It doesn’t feel dangerous,” she said.

“No,” he breathed. “It feels… personal.”

The final strand of magic hovered between them like a breath held too long—then dissolved, scattering into luminous mist. The light faded. The chalk lines dulled. The circles vanished.

But neither of them moved.

Not right away.

Eventually, Gale stepped back. Too careful. Too practiced. He cleared his throat like it might hide the way his pulse was still trying to catch up.

Aryn rolled her shoulders and shook out her hands, as if to dispel static. “So,” she said, trying for casual. “Resonance achieved?”

“On several levels,” he said, a little too dryly.

She grinned. “Emotionally catastrophic?”

“Inevitable.”

The sound she made then—half laugh, half sigh—was softer than her usual retorts. Earnest. Familiar. She grabbed her satchel, slinging it over her shoulder like armor.

“Come on,” she said. “You’re buying me dinner. Again.”

“And if I decline?”

“I’ll tell everyone you cried during that spell last week.”

“That was dust.”

She was already turning toward the door, boots tapping lightly against stone. But then she paused in the archway, glancing back over her shoulder.

“Don’t take too long,” she said, quieter now.

Then she was gone.

Gale stood there alone in the chamber, the room still humming faintly with the echo of shared magic. The spell had passed. But something else remained.

A residue. A shift. A beginning he wasn’t sure he was ready for—but couldn’t deny.

His hand drifted to his chest, over the place where the orb still pulsed in its silent rhythm. For once, it didn’t feel like a threat. Just… a reminder. That his heart was still his.

That he still had something left to give.

And maybe—just maybe—someone willing to receive it.

He turned toward the dark corridor she’d left behind, breath catching in his throat.

Then he followed.

Not quickly.

But he followed.

The candles burned low on the long table, their flames flickering like they, too, were growing drowsy with the hour. Scrolls lay unrolled and half-annotated, and the spine of a tome had given way under the weight of their discussion—folded open like a worn secret between them. Outside, the night had deepened into stillness, but inside the tower, the room hummed softly with the residue of long-spent magic and shared concentration.

Aryn sat cross-legged in her chair, her hair coming loose from its braid, a smear of ink on the side of one finger where she’d been too focused to notice. Gale leaned forward, elbows braced on the table, one hand gesturing idly as he spoke.

“—and of course, I was convinced it was her mistake,” he said, voice colored with reluctant amusement. “I spent half the day recalculating every rune in the matrix to prove her wrong. I even went to Karsus’ Notes for reference, if you can imagine.”

Aryn looked up, brow arched. “You argued with Mystra’s instructions using Karsus as a source?”

Gale sighed. “I was seventeen. The definition of hubris.”

She snorted softly, the sound barely breaking the quiet between them. “What happened?”

“She let me finish the spell exactly as I’d revised it,” he said, leaning back. “Which, of course, triggered a minor dimensional collapse in the practice chamber.”

Aryn blinked. “A collapse?”

“Localized. No casualties, unless you count my pride.” He smiled faintly, glancing away. “Mystra simply waited outside the entire time. Then afterward, she said—very kindly, which only made it worse—‘Sometimes, we must be humbled before we understand the shape of what we hold.’”

He expected her to laugh again, but when he looked, she wasn’t laughing. Her expression had softened into something quieter—contemplative, eyes tracing the motion of his hands more than the words.

Gale stilled.

Something in her gaze held him there—open, unflinching. Not wonder. Not admiration. Just… presence. Like she was trying to memorize the lines of what he wasn’t saying.

“What?” he asked, his voice coming out lower than he meant.

Aryn blinked, startled, then looked down at the book between them. “Nothing. Just—” She hesitated. “You speak about her like she’s still watching.”

“She might be,” he said lightly, though he didn’t quite smile. “The gods are rarely polite with their absences.”

“Do you miss it?” she asked after a moment. “Her attention?”

He was quiet, his fingers grazing the worn edge of the open page. “Some days. Others… I think I’m still learning what it means to be whole without needing to be watched.”

That seemed to strike something in her. She sat back, drawing a slow breath.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been watched properly,” she said. “Not in the way that sees, not just measures.”

Gale glanced at her, but her gaze had returned to the text. She flipped a page absently, not reading. “People see the flare. The recklessness. Or they look for discipline I never had the chance to learn. Either way, they see a version of me I’m supposed to grow into—or out of. Never just… me.”

Her voice was calm, but there was an edge of fatigue behind it. Not drama, not vulnerability worn for sympathy—just truth, laid down like a quiet blade between them.

He didn’t speak for a while. The fire cracked once in the hearth. Then he said, “Maybe the question isn’t whether you’ll grow into something, but whether anyone will let you shape it yourself.”

She looked at him again. Her expression hadn’t changed, but something in her posture did—a subtle loosening, a shift from bracing to listening.

They fell into silence again. Not uncomfortable. Not quite companionable. Just full of something unspoken and shared.

After a while, Gale reached for the book between them to mark a section they hadn’t covered. His hand brushed hers—an ordinary contact, brief, and not especially charged. But neither of them moved away. His fingers lingered longer than necessary, and she didn’t adjust her hand.

The verse lay forgotten beneath their touch.

They stayed that way a moment longer—hands touching, eyes lowered, words scattered and irrelevant.

Then, quietly, Aryn said, “We should stop for the night.”

Gale nodded, but didn’t move right away. “We’ll finish the section tomorrow.”

“Yes.” She stood slowly, gathering her notes. “But I’m keeping your copy. Mine doesn’t have the margins.”

He gave a soft laugh, one brow lifting. “Careful. You’ll start to think like me.”

“Only when it’s useful,” she said over her shoulder, already half gone down the hall.

He watched her go, the echo of her footsteps fading through the tower’s stone spine, and found himself still smiling—not for what had passed between them, but for what hadn’t needed to.

A few days had passed since their last attempt, and the larger practice chamber still carried the echo of that effort—subtle, lingering. Tonight, the room was slowly warming under the enchantments Gale had activated earlier, the air shimmering with residual heat. Beyond the tall arched windows, night pressed close, the mist outside softening the lamplight into a silvery haze that spilled across the stone walls, casting long, expectant shadows. There was a hush to the space, not of emptiness, but of something waiting—like the pause before a spell takes shape.

Aryn stood near the center of the room, arms crossed, one eyebrow lifted. “You said this one would be fun.”

“It is fun,” Gale replied, his hands deftly adjusting the angle of one of the mirrored foci. “In the same way that scaling a cliff during a thunderstorm is fun.”

Aryn gave him a dry look. “Is that a Waterdhavian thing, or just a Gale thing?”

He smiled without looking up. “You wound me.”

“You terrify me.”

He chuckled, straightening and stepping back to admire the overlapping circle he’d drawn in chalk. Runes glowed faintly along the outer ring, pulsing in tandem with the slow rhythm of their breath. “It’s a simple shared conjuration framework—”

“That destabilizes into an interplanar feedback loop if we’re not synchronized?” she finished, scanning the runes.

“Precisely. See? You have been paying attention.”

She exhaled, adjusting the cuffs of her sleeves as she stepped into her designated ring. “Fine. But if anything bites, slithers, or sprouts extra limbs, I reserve the right to name it after you.”

“Fair,” he said, moving to his own side of the circle. “And if it spontaneously lectures me about safety protocol, I’ll know who to blame.”

The spell began with a breath.

Then another.

Their hands rose in mirror to one another’s, fingers parting in a slow, practiced motion. Between them, the Weave stirred to life—brilliant threads of magic pulling together in a symmetrical lattice. The mirrored foci caught the light and threw it back, illuminating their faces in gold and violet hues.

For a few blissful moments, it worked. The conjuration pattern spun cleanly through the air, folding inward as Gale shaped the outer structure and Aryn anchored the core. He watched her out of the corner of his eye—how naturally she met the Weave now, no longer yanking at it or flinching from its pull. She was learning to listen. To feel.

Then something shifted.

A thread in the lattice twitched—no visible rupture, just a slight stutter, like a breath caught mid-sentence.

Gale’s brow furrowed. “Did you—?”

“I didn’t—” Aryn’s eyes widened. “Wait, no—”

The spell shimmered.

Then it flared.

And with a loud pop, the lattice collapsed in on itself in a shower of sparks—and when the smoke cleared, hovering in the air where the spell’s core had been was a faintly glowing, six-legged chicken.

It flapped once, slowly. Its feathers shimmered faintly with arcane residue. It blinked with unsettling composure.

Aryn stared.

Gale stared.

The chicken gave a soft, echoing brrr-AWK.

“…Well,” Gale said after a beat. “That’s new.”

Aryn blinked. “We conjured a chicken.”

“A magically enhanced, potentially extraplanar chicken,” he corrected.

“Don’t make it worse.”

The chicken drifted lazily in the air, slowly rotating. One of its legs twitched. Then, quite suddenly, it cast a minor illusion—a perfect replica of Aryn’s face, except the mouth was open and shouting something incoherent.

Gale made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a choke. “Did it just—?”

“It mocked me,” Aryn said, offended.

The chicken puffed slightly, as though proud. Then it exploded into a burst of glittering smoke and vanished without a sound.

Silence followed.

Aryn, now dusted in shimmering sparkles, turned to Gale with a blank expression.

He opened his mouth.

She raised a hand. “No. You don’t get to explain that.”

He closed his mouth.

Then—against her best efforts, despite the absurdity of it all—Aryn laughed. Short at first, startled, then deeper, until she had to clutch her side, the sound spilling out of her like breath breaking through pressure.

Gale watched her, expression softening. There was something in that laugh—something honest. It hadn’t been coaxed or performed. It simply was, unguarded and bright and real in a way that made his chest ache a little.

“Your face,” she managed, gasping between laughs. “You looked so betrayed.”

“It was supposed to be a beacon,” he said, mock-dignified. “Not… poultry.”

Aryn wiped her eyes. “Do all your lessons end with existential chickens?”

“Only the most memorable ones.”

The moment stretched, still warm with shared laughter, and Gale felt it settle in his bones—this ease between them. The magic may have gone sideways, but they hadn’t. Not once. Even in failure, there was a rhythm here. A shared instinct. Trust.

They started cleaning the ritual circle together, their conversation drifting into a more subdued register.

“You handled that well,” Gale said, glancing at her as he dispelled the glowing residue from one of the crystals.

“I was just happy it didn’t lay an egg.”

“It could have,” he mused. “Imagine the possibilities.”

“I am, and I hate it.”

Gale chuckled again, then paused. “But really. You didn’t panic. You adapted.”

Aryn shrugged, brushing stray chalk off her sleeve. “Well… you were calm.”

“I wasn’t,” he said quietly. “I just trusted you.”

That pulled her up short. She looked at him—really looked—and something in her expression faltered, then shifted. Softened.

The air between them was still charged, but no longer with chaos. It was steadier now. Shared.

“You don’t say things like that casually, do you?” she asked.

“No,” he admitted. “Not often.”

She nodded slowly. “Then I’ll try not to take it lightly.”

He smiled—not the polite one, not the careful one. A real one, quiet and a little tired. “We’re learning together. That matters more than getting the spell right.”

Aryn gave a small nod, then, on impulse, reached into her pocket and pulled out one of the shimmer-feathers the chicken had left behind. She held it up between two fingers.

“For the record,” she said, “if you ever publish this as part of your magical memoirs, I expect to be listed under ‘co-conspirator,’ not ‘victim.’”

“Of course,” he said. “But I reserve the right to name the chapter ‘Fowl Play.’”

She groaned aloud.

And he laughed.

Not because of the joke—it was terrible—but because she stayed. Because they were still here, brushing glitter off their sleeves and trading terrible puns beneath the flickering light of conjuration lamps.

Because for all the chaos, something between them had held fast.

Something was taking shape.

The tower had settled into its late-night hush, the kind that seeped into stone and marrow alike. After the laughter. After the magic. After the chicken, of all things, still warm in the center of the study table. The spell circle had been drawn, tested, nearly sung into resonance—close, but not yet whole. And now only the quiet remained, stretching long and wide around him like the silence that follows a heartbeat too strong.

Gale stayed behind when the rest of the evening had ended. Aryn had gone, soft-footed and tired, her departure marked by a murmured goodnight and a lingering glance he hadn’t quite known how to return. Not properly. Not without giving something away.

He moved slowly through the room now, as if the walls might bruise under too much haste. One by one, he extinguished the candles, his hand steady, his magic gentler than necessary. The scent of warm wax and parchment curled into the air, mingling with the fading trace of fire-roasted herbs and ash. He told himself he was simply tidying. That he was only preserving the order of things.

But that wasn’t it. Not entirely.

Aryn’s side of the table still looked lived-in, chaotic in a way that made sense only if you knew her. Scrolls folded unevenly. An inkwell sitting precariously on its side, dried ink feathering out like a shadow. Quills scattered at thoughtless angles, as though she’d reached for them mid-sentence and never looked down. It was, impossibly, endearing.

He reached to stack her notes, brushing the edge of the top sheet—and paused as one slipped free, fluttering down across the open pages of the tome they’d shared.

He followed it, fingers catching the edge.

It wasn’t spellwork. Not precisely.

In the cramped, hurried handwriting he recognized as hers, the margin beside one of their more intricate diagrams held a few stark, quiet words:

Anchor with intent, not force.

G’s method balances yield with precision—remember the shape of the silence between.

Beneath it, she had drawn a sketch of the lattice they’d failed to hold—a net of interlocking threads labeled not with arcane notation, but with something more intimate.

Trust. Restraint. Invitation. Patience.

Gale sank slowly into her chair, the parchment whispering against his sleeve. The breath he drew in caught at the back of his throat.

She had listened. Really listened.

Not just to the spell, not just to the theory, but to him. His rhythms, the deliberate hesitations he used to give the Weave time to settle. She had seen him—seen him—and thought it worth writing down.

He closed his eyes against the rush that rose, unbidden and sharp.

So much of his life had been spent trying to prove himself—brilliant enough, useful enough, worthy enough for gods and councils and lovers alike. And when it all came crashing down—when Mystra turned her back, when his own hubris nearly tore the fabric of the world—he had come to believe that the only things left to him were penance and containment. He had become careful. Controlled. Alone by necessity, not by choice.

But here she was. Aryn. Messy, raw, stubborn—and devastatingly earnest. She didn’t flinch from the cracks in his magic, or the shadows beneath it. She wrote his method in the margin as though it mattered. As though he mattered.

His gaze dropped again to the drawing.

At the center of the sketched lattice, she’d marked two faint sigils—small, flame-like, nearly hidden. They mirrored each other, not identical but clearly meant to exist in tandem. One without the other would tip the whole thing off balance.

He stared at it, unblinking, the ache behind his ribs growing heavier with every beat of his heart. He had no idea what to do with this—this vulnerability, this invitation. The fear inside him curled tight like a wound refusing to heal.

Because what if she was wrong? What if she saw only what she wanted to see?

What if he let her close and became the ruin he was so desperately trying not to be?

His hand moved without his full permission, conjuring a shimmer of warm, soft light at his fingertip. He hovered it just above the sigils, barely touching, and let a breath of his own magic fall into the space beside hers. It left no mark—nothing visible. But it was there.

His reply. Wordless, uncertain, but true.

I see you. I don’t know how to do this. But I want to try.

He placed the page gently atop the others, face-up. He wouldn’t pretend he hadn’t read it. But he wouldn’t mark it, either. Some things needed to remain untouched.

The tome closed with a quiet weight, the parchment slipped inside to keep their place.

He gathered his cloak and paused in the doorway, casting one last glance over his shoulder at the still-lit study—the room that had, somehow, begun to feel less like a battleground and more like a home.

“Anchor with intent,” he said softly, letting the words fall into the hush like a blessing or a plea.

And then he stepped into the darkened corridor, her trust tucked carefully against the hurt he still carried—fragile, glowing, and impossibly real.

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