#reduced to an exceptionally quiet man for a time... no... I can't even envision it. Nor do I want to!!

[recitedemise]

Can you imagine Gale during his isolation? An entire year, an entire year with little more than the shadows swelling in the corner of your library and the growing thoughts pressing hard against the cage of your skull. Gale with his Molotov of emotions, his bouts of extreme sorrow, bone-crushing hopelessness, the anger, the bitterness, the acceptance of a guilt he has no business accepting. Imagine how he suffered before he found out how to temper the teeth and hunger of the orb in his chest. Did he suffer? Did the rot spiral to a frightening degree? What he thought when he felt the skin of his arm break, spot the drip of blood that poured not red but purple, a shade of purple so steep and dark that it paled night and voids and whole penumbras. How he felt as Tara turned her eyes on him, her composure riled, ruptured just a touch with a worry she tries so very hard not to show around Mr. Dekarios. How he felt getting letters from acquaintances, not friends, that dwindled and dwindled as the months passed on with no response from Gale of Waterdeep, famed archmage and lover of Mystra herself. How he lost so much of his magic. How he felt spurned from the goddess he looked up to for nearly all his life, how he felt when the Weave, when the spells he spent so long learning and perfecting were torn from him, swallowed by this sucking bomb in his bones.

How alone. How quiet. How Tara would leave to find artefacts once they discovered the Weave inside them would balm and thwart his ticking doom by a whisper of time. How, in those days, he would sit there with books he's already read thrice over, his hair speckled with more grey, the beard he's been growing out scratching against his face. His lonely terrace. Mother's tone of increasing concern in her hand-written letters, piled together on Gale's desk with quaint twine, the broken seal of House Dekarios waxed in an indigo shade over the parchment. It smells of her. He misses home, and home has never felt so far.