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amandacanwrite · 3 months

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The Violet Thread of Fate ||

Reluctant Mentor Gale x Unskilled Wizard F!Tav

Length || About 4,000 Words

POV || Dual Narration, Third Person

Warnings || Descriptions of viscera, age gap (about ten years, both adults)

Summary || After waking up on the craggy shoreline of the sword coast, Elinna and Gale reunite with a new common ground.

A/n || I am feeling sort of on the fence about Gale's eagerness in his attraction to Elinna, but I also feel like it's still at least somewhat in character for him--after all in any playthrough you can wind up being blindsided by his feelings for you since he is usually so subtle about his affections. I also just think it's so fun to get the internal narration of Gale's attraction. He always seems so put together, polite and proper. I just love to see a man precariously balancing his carnal desires with his conscience and desire to be a good man. I hope you like it, I know things feel a little slow right now, but I'm planning on taking some creative liberties in the next couple parts. Please also lemme know what you think if you read it! I am absolutely tinkerbell and need the dopamine to live

Chapter Two: A Nightmare, An Awakening

Read Part One Here • Join Tag List Here

A Nightmare

Elinna thought she had died; thought the disintegration of her bodily form was the end of her short, unremarkable life. Much to her surprise, though when her vision once again returned to her she realized she had merely been spirited away somehow.

It took a few moments for her eyes to properly focus. When they finally did, she almost wished that the contact with the tentacle had killed her. It would have been far preferable to where she had wound up.

She found herself locked in a great chitinous pod, looking through smeared membranous glass at what she could only suppose was the nautiloid she had tried to escape from.

Yes…death would have been a far preferable fate to becoming a mindless thrall on a mindflayer ship. As she squinted through the clear panel in front of her and saw what appeared to be a brain walking on four spindly limbs, she realized that her fate could be even worse than regular enthrallment.

The minutes she spent entrapped in the pod felt like hours. A miserable limbo of wondering what would be coming next for her. What if she was already marked for turning into an intellect devourer? What if the enthrallment had already been put in place and she could simply be ordered to do something whenever a mindflayer so wished it?

She couldn’t just stay here. She had to move.

She tried, in vain, to wrench her arms free of the fleshy brindings within the pod. The sinuous tendrils only tightened more and more, leaving her fingertips throbbing and tingling from the blood flow being cut off. She tried to move her feet next and her boots sloshed in some sort of viscera at the base of the pod. She did her best not to vomit as the viscera eked some ichorous fluid into the fibers of her clothing and through the porous leather of her soft-soled shoes.

The last thing she needed in addition to all of this was to be covered in the contents of her own stomach–empty as it was.

The shock of panic cinched tight around her ribcage, making it hard to breathe. And as she struggled to get her lungs to fill, she also struggled to think.

“Calm down, Elinna,” she told herself. “Think about what you’ve read. Think about what you know.”

What did she know about Illithids? They were hivemind organisms. They required high-moisture, high-humidity environments to protect the mucosal membranes of their skin. They primarily fed on the brains of their prey and used psionic energy not only to fight but to control their biomechanical machinery.

She craned her head forward to look for some sort of control panel–something that could get her out of this cocoon of horror.

As she did, a valve-like door opened on the far side of the room, revealing a dizzying network of corridors. And…and one of them. A mind flayer.

Elinna went dizzy as her heart thumped in her temples. She watched in horror and sickly anticipation as it levitated toward something in the center of the room; a cistern of sorts from what she could see. It waved a four-fingered hand and the vessel opened, revealing a golden, glowing brine pool that may have been beautiful if Elinna didn’t know precisely what it was.

The mindflayer coaxed one of those disgusting tadpoles out of the amber liquid and levitated over to Elinna’s pod. She recoiled away from it as the pod opened, turning her face away from the creature and squeezing her eyes shut. She knew exactly how mindflayers reproduced, and she was not interested in getting a first hand experience with ceremorphosis.

She didn’t have much of a choice, though. Even without the parasite, the illithid was able to compel her to stillness.

It was an atrocious violation of her agency; surreal and nightmarish in the worst ways. Her mind was fully intact as the creature made her muscles release the tension they held and coerced her eyes to open. Her body was still and calm, but her heart was racing like a trapped rabbit’s. She watched uselessly as the tiny creature floated closer to her. She cried to cry out as it latched onto the orb of her eye and started to wriggle and squirm until it could find purchase beneath her eyelid.

She was silent. Infuriatingly, horribly silent as the creature continued to burrow its way into her skull.

Her pulse hammered in her ears as she screamed inside her own body, begging herself to fight, to tear her own eye out rather than let the process of ceremorphosis take place.

But her body was still as the tiny parasite worked its way into her eye socket and back into her brain.

Elinna lost consciousness as she felt the unsettling pressure of her brain matter being displaced to accommodate her unwelcome guest.

When she awoke next, she didn’t immediately know where she was. She only knew that it was loud and it was cold. The sound of air ripping past her pointed ears is what brought her back into full consciousness, and though her eyes were open, she wasn’t actually seeing at first.

There was a vast expanse of stars above her, the smell of salty air, the lingering cling of something far more acrid–like the smell of burnt sulfur woven into her clothes.

She tried to parse what was going on, it felt like she was sinking into the ocean–but if that were the case, shouldn’t she not be able to breathe?

Then she saw the burning wreckage of the Nautiloid and everything came back to her.

The travel to Waterdeep, the encounter with Mr. Dekarios, the parasite and…

And she was falling through the sky!

“Not again!” she cried as she stared at the ground rising to meet her with startling velocity. “No, no, no! I will not–This is not how I die!”

It didn’t go very well the last time, but it wasn’t as if she had any other ideas of what to do. She scoped out the approaching shoreline, selecting one spot and earmarking it. After choosing a point on a craggy cliffside, she shut her eyes and tried to gulp in a breath before it was whipped out of her mouth.

“Inveniam Viam!” she shouted.

That strange, surreal feeling of not moving, yet being in a different place came again, only this time it was followed very quickly by the feeling smashing into the ground beneath her, square onto her back. It wasn’t a far drop, perhaps only a few feet, but it was enough to hurt her. She blinked up at the sky above her, the glow of the stars somewhat dampened by the flaming wreckage of the nautiloid as it loudly crashed into the earth just a few moments after her.

She ached as she stood and looked out over the cliffside she’d misty stepped to, seeing the vast expanse of an unfamiliar coast crawling with intellect devourers and the blazing with fires choking out great plumes of black smoke. She dropped to her knees, feeling utterly defeated.

She had no idea where she was. She had no money. No food. Not even a change of clothes with her. She didn’t even know where she was–and she knew she was more than a little directionally challenged.

Her keepers at The Scribes Nest had told her not to leave; had warned her that there were dangers in the world. That she couldn’t hope to survive on the knowledge she’d amassed from books alone. That the lives of wizards often ended in folly.

She knew this, of course. She’d read extensively about every wizard she could find and more than half of them were done in by their own curiosity.

But the ones who hadn’t been rendered themselves undone…they were amazing. Elminster and Blackstaff. Lorroikan and Sammaster. Karsus and Dekarios.

Wait….

Gale Dekarios–he’d been touched by the tentacles, too!

And if she hadn’t died, then that meant he probably hadn’t either. If she could find him, if she could just appeal to him for one favor…maybe he could help her get back to Waterdeep. Maybe she would have an opportunity to prove to him that she could be a good apprentice; that she was worth the trouble of taking on as a student. Maybe he would know how to get rid of the tadpole squirming in her brain.

But none of that would happen if she just sat there on her knees and despaired.

She would need to get back up and put one bloody boot in front of the other.

She would have to be brave and she would have to trust that Mystra would guide her to what came next.

An Awakening

Hells…it just had to be a pocket dimension that saved him, didn’t it?

They were tricky little things–a slice of wild magic that functioned like an oubliette; a place to put things to be forgotten, or to be summoned at a different point in time. He’d used a few in his time, but never for more than storage during travel or to hide the occasional failed potion. He’d thought once that he might use one when it was clear that the orb would no longer be sated by the magic artifacts he consumed; discussed the idea with Tara before she requested not to speak of it until necessary.

“I don’t like think of that eventuality, Mr. Dekarios,” Tara had said to him. “I know I tend to be pragmatic…but it makes me far too sad.”

“Focus,” he scolded himself as he looked around the darkened pocket. He needed to find an opening–or at least find a way to make one, failing that.

It was a mistake that he’d even ended up in one in the first place. A mistake that stemmed from the first mistake when he’d tried to help that girl.

If he’d had any sense, he would have let her run and gone straight to help his mother and make sure Tara would be okay. He could only hope that they were still safely nestled at his childhood home in Waterdeep. At least he’d not seen either of them during his wanderings about the ship.

But then the spelljammer had lurched and started falling out of the sky, and he’d grabbed onto the strongest strand of weave he could find and followed it here. The unfortunate side of that, of course, was that the strength of that thread is precisely what made this particular pocket realm exceedingly hard to get out of. And the parasite so rudely deposited into his brain was not doing wonders for his ability to concentrate.

He held his hands up and closed his eyes, attempting to feel out the strands of weave in this darkened place. Wherever he’d been transported to, it felt very far away from Mystra indeed. Like whatever reality he’d blipped into was one almost entirely devoid of magic at all.

He focused a bit harder, the tadpole in his head wriggling with the effort. He continued to focus, trying not to think too hard about the unnerving sensation. Finally, with some challenge, he managed to pool some magic together. It felt similar to trying to collect enough morning dew on a leaf to drink.

There came a crackle, then a tear. Not nearly large enough to fit himself entirely through, but enough that he could get an arm out.

Perhaps with at least one hand in Faerun, he could channel whatever remaining weave he needed to fully escape this dark corner of nothing.

A sheen of perspiration shone on his brow as he felt around outside of the oubliette. He could feel the familiar moisture of coastal air and it sent a wave of relief through him. He wasn’t far from Waterdeep at all, then. Or at least he’d hoped as much.

Perhaps he could just appear on the main road and hurry straight to his mother to make sure that she and Tara were alright.

He was trying to grasp onto the weave when he suddenly felt the soft, almost tentative brush of fingertips on the palm of his hand.

A person! Perfect! There was no better way to anchor a teleportation spell than to another living soul. It would be a little complex to explain that, though, and he was sure a mysterious arm poking out of wherever he could reach was more than a little unnerving so he settled for simplicity instead.

“Hello?!” He called through the tear in the fabric of space and time. “Is anyone there? A hand? Please?”

He felt the hand withdraw for a moment, then it returned with what he assumed was the person’s other hand. One closed tightly around his fingers, the other grasped a bit higher, accompanied by the sensation of fingertips curling into the fabric of his sleeve. Small, gentle hands. Not small enough to be a child–but perhaps a woman.

He closed his eyes once more and took a deep breath, allowing himself to feel the energy of the stranger on the other side of the opening. He tapped into it, smelling the faint, sweetly lactic scent of peaches; tasting on the tip of his tongue the light flavor of…honeyscotch candy. If Mystra’s energy was violet in color…this energy was the color of the sky during sunrise…a gradient of lilac, rose and cerulean.

Pretty… he thought to himself before slamming the heel of his hand to his brow.

Focus you touch-starved buffoon.

“Whatever you’re doing is working wonders!” he said encouragingly. “I think if you just give me a good pull, I should come right out!”

The stranger pulled and he joined that effort by pushing himself through from the other side with what remained of that pooled bit of magic he’d gathered together.

Finally, he flew out of the pocket realm like a cork from a bottle, regrettably landing right on top of the poor woman who had helped him.

He was quick to shift his weight so he didn’t put the entirety of his considerable heft on the poor thing. Yet, his creaky knees slowed him down when it came to properly getting up. Then again…he couldn’t deny a certain reluctance to rise. He hated to admit it, and if anyone ever asked him he would deny it to the grave…but it was pleasant to feel the soft curves of a woman against him. A year was such a long time to be without it, and to feel warmth beneath him again…

It was a lascivious thought not becoming of a gentleman, he remembered, but one that occurred almost automatically much to his chagrin.

“Hells,” he said. “Forgive me miss. I’m usually much better at this–and usually not so long sedentary that my limbs can’t keep up with my manners. Allow me to–”

He lifted himself up onto his elbows and finally laid eyes on his savior.

It was the girl from before. What was the name? Elinna Inklynn.

She stared up at him with wide eyes and a face flushed with exertion. How hard had she needed to work to pull him out of that portal? Seeing her so close now, he picked up on some of the qualities he’d missed in the dim light of the Waterdhavian evening.

A constellation of mauve-tinged freckles dusted across her flushed nose and cheeks. In the daylight, her skin was almost pale pink. The soft swell of her lips sat slightly parted with a look of surprise. And her eyes…my those eyes were something to behold. Verdant as a sprig of mint and flecked with gold as if she had a vein of ore curling through the irises of her eyes.

“A-allow me to help you up,” he finally stammered. “You’re not hurt are you?”

“Not by you,” she said somewhat breathlessly.

He grunted slightly as he got back onto his feet, now allowing himself to think of the way her soft curves shifted beneath him. He reached a hand down and helped her back up to her feet as well, dusting off her theadbare apron and her slightly puffed sleeves. She was still flushed–perhaps dehydration or fever…or…

“You haven’t happened to have been on the receiving end of a rather unwelcome insertion in the ocular region, have you?” he asked.

The flush could be a sign of the beginning stages of ceremorphosis.

“I couldn’t have phrased it more repellently myself,” Elinna replied.

“No use sugarcoating it, is there?” he asked with a smirk. “I don’t suppose you know what these little passengers will cause if left to their own devices?”

“Ceremorphosis,” she answered without missing a beat. “At least–if we don’t get it handled in a few days…”

Well, color him surprised.

It wasn’t very often that ceremorphosis was talked about among the common man–it was even hard to find books detailing the finer details of the process. The girl may have been a poor magician, but she was clearly learned.

“Suffice to say, it is a process that should be avoided,” he said.

“Agreed,” she said.

It occurred to him that she was behaving…a bit stiff; almost aloof. The young woman he’d encountered in front of his tower had a bit more fire to her than this one did. Then again, they’d just gone through quite the harrowing experience. Both of them were covered in mysterious viscera, they’d been taken hostage on a mindflayer ship and well–the poor girl did just have a strange older man on top of her.

The girl bit down on her lower lip and he found his eyes unconscionably glued to her mouth. She released her lower lip and he watched as the pale pink color returned to it, wondering idly what it would feel like to–

“Are we just—are we just going to pretend that I didn’t beg you to take me on as an apprentice and that you quite sumerilly told me to bugger off?” she asked. “Are we just going to be compatriots now?”

He blinked down at her, his mind catching up with her words.

Good gods, he really was behaving like a lech. He didn’t know where this was coming from. Perhaps it was an undocumented symptom of ceremorphosis–this…uncommon desire he was feeling.

Or maybe he was just, well, desperate.

“Well, I take umbrage with that analysis. I don’t believe I told you to bugger off…At least not verbatim. I do try to not be a miserable ass,” Gale said a bit sheepishly. “But I hasten to point out that we do have a shared problem now–some common ground we didn’t have before. It seems wasteful to part ways at a juncture such as this, don’t you think?”

He looked around in the early morning daylight and frowned realizing that he didn’t recognize anything. “I certainly don’t know the area after all, and judging by the history you disclosed with me, you likely don’t either.”

“Well…no, I don’t. Aside from Waterdeep I’ve not been anywhere other than the Moonshae Islands.” she said.

“And you seem to not have a very strong sense of location judging by our time in the alleyways,” he pointed out.

“That’s true…so then… does that mean you’ll do it?” she asked. “You’ll take me on as your student?”

He grimmaced.

“No,” he said with not a moment’s hesitation. “Not a student–an ally. An equal. It’s best that we tackle this issue together, don’t you think? It makes no sense to travel separately when our searching will likely lead us to the same places. And besides that…”

Besides that, if he started to change into a mindflayer, he wanted to be sure he had someone nearby who could…put him out of his misery and get his body somewhere safe before it leveled a city.

“But I could be more helpful if you teach me,” she pleaded. “I’d just be a liability without your help.”

“I have seen your magic,” Gale said with a bit of a teasing gaze. “And I don’t know if there is much I can do for someone who casts Misty Step with their eyes closed. It seems you’d be more of a liability with the magic than without.”

She blinked up at him like he’d grown a second head.

“Oh, please,” he said. “You must know that it’s a spell that requires a clear line of sight.”

She shrank a bit. “I…didn’t know. No,” she said.

“How could you not know such a thing? You must have read a scroll to learn the incantation,” he said.

“I mean this with the utmost respect, but when is the last time you’ve read a scroll, Mr. Dekarios?”

He inhaled, lifting an index finger. Then he closed his mouth and looked off to the side.

When was the last time? It must have been ages.

“Well,” she said without waiting for his answer. “Most spell scrolls assume a certain basis of classical training, or at minimum an innate understanding of how to channel the weave.”

“I see,” he said. “I’m to assume you’re not a sorceress then?”

“Not to my knowledge,” she said with a sigh.

He clenched his jaw as he looked down at the younger woman. Gods, she really did need a teacher. Maybe he could at least talk to her about theory–or give her a few simple exercises for manipulating the–

No. No.

He had more than enough on his plate without adding a poorly self-taught mage to it.

“Elinna,” he said. “Tell you what. I have a deal to offer–a concession if your like. If we make it through this and…make it out of wherever we are and back to Waterdeep, I promise I will introduce you to some colleagues that will help you get your start as a novice wizard. How does that sound? Fair?”

To his great surprise, she still looked disappointed by that answer. The girl really was an ambitious thing–coming right to his tower to seek his tutelage and no one else's? The poor girl had no idea what she was trying to sign herself up for; a depressed, anti-social, explosive wizard. A depressed, anti-social, explosive and impatient wizard. As far as teachers went, he was not the best candidate for the job.

“Alright,” she finally said. “Let’s see if we can go find a healer together…or maybe some other survivors…of a bath.”

“Oh, to find a bath,” Gale agreed. “Ah, but–before you think you’re journeying with most ill mannered a man–”

Gale gave the young woman a slight bow. “Thank you for pulling me out of that stone.”

When he stood up to his full height again, the young woman was smiling at him, her pretty viridian eyes crinkling at the edges. She tucked a pale copper strand of hair behind one of her delicately pointed ears and looked a bit sheepishly down the craggy shore.

“Ah–it’s almost a dead end over here–I think there might be more ground to cover if we cross through the wreckage…but I didn’t want to do that on my own,” she said.

“A wise choice, I think,” Gale said. “No telling what you would have run into. Not to imply that you can’t hold your own, of course–”

“No, you’re right,” she said, looking away from him a little timidly. “I’ll feel better with you there–it’s nice to have a friend.”

He huffed a soft breath and found himself smiling at how willing she was to call him her friend. Even after all the ways he had been a bit of an oaf to her, he felt in her he had found a bit of a kindred spirit. Someone else who sought camaraderie in perhaps…unworthy places.

She looked up at him and bit the swell of her lower lip again. “Shall we go then?” she asked him.

He gestured to the road ahead. “After you,” he said with a magnanimous smile. “Consider me your ever faithful guard dog, ready at the first sign of trouble.”

She snorted a little laugh and shook her head.

And as he followed after her, for the first time in the last year, he hoped the pang in his chest was because of the orb.

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