Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

That first day, he fell into step beside her. They walked through the woods and the leaves dappled their skin with white shadows. The birds sang as though the world were still beautiful, as if they weren’t afraid for their souls.

Beside her, looking at the light glittering her freckles, Gale said, “You know, I’ve never met a githyanki before. Only read about them.”

His admission of ignorance left Lae’zel tired, and she didn’t have the energy to roll her eyes. 

Karlach was humming a tune to the birds some paces ahead, half-walking, half-dancing, and now this human was entrenching on Lae’zel’s space with his unbelievably massive nose. 

Looking straight ahead, she said, “Am I as menacing as the pictures in your little books?”

Gale’s expression shifted to worry, “Oh, no no. I didn’t mean to imply- Did I seem to imply that? Your demeanor maybe. The, ah, disposition, of sorts. But this is all beside the point. Lae’zel, it was? I meant-”

“I’ve never met a human, but you are as ridiculous and insolent as I've always heard.”

He faltered for a second, then recalibrated. They continued walking in step. 

He said, “Interesting adjectives, if I do say so. Very interesting indeed. I’ve been called both- not in the same sentence, mind you. But! Since we’re going there, have you noticed that you are exactly as abrasive as githyanki are often described?”

So he had some spine. She quickened her pace so he couldn’t see her grin. 

In battle that day, on ruins beside cliffs to the sea, she caught sight of him in the corner of her eye. A flash. A glow. The way his eyes and cheeks, his precisely laid arms and hands, illuminated light. Glinting silver tinkling against his ear. His lips mouthed spells she could not hear from where she stood. Practiced. Focused. No color in his eyes, only blankness.

Beneath her feet lay a freshly felled body. Her sword dripped red onto the stones. 

His voice thundered as he said, Detono. She watched him propell a man over a cliff to his death. With only his words. With nothing at all. 

She turned back to battle, the image of Gale’s form never leaving her mind. His wide-stanced boots. His illuminated arms and face and mastered hands. Eyes glowing like a demon. 

This was not what she’d learned of humans. 

The first night, in camp, she listened to Gale tell Karlach about his goddess by the fire, eating meat and grilled roots from the forest. 

Lae’zel understood this devotion. But his boasting, of his romance with the goddess, died out quickly. He suddenly stopped. His bright eyes fell to a faraway look, until he was looking mid-distance, at nothing at all. 

The skewer, forgotten in his hands, dripped oils onto the dirt. 

It has been six days since, and it is night, and she’s just woken up. She’d dozed off outside her tent. 

She turns over now to look out across camp. She doesn’t know what time it is.

She sees that Wyll also fell asleep outside, on his belly, in his armor still, with one leg pulled up to the side. 

Behind Wyll, some ways in the distance, Gale was sitting in front of his tent, looking up. 

Lae’zel watched him through the dim haze of the night. The torches quietly flicked and popped. Their light was dying. 

She could barely see the purple velvet of Gale’s tunic through the dark. The silver glint of his earring, catching moonlight. 

She leaned up on her forearm, blinked the sleep from her eyes. 

The slow revealing of a person. How, when you first meet someone, your eyes are only half-open. Their body, their face: mottled. Shadows, shifting. Only slowly, do your eyes open up, gain focus.

There is something about his upturned chin, his shoulders, the color purple in relation to his skin. His long, brown hair tinged lilac by the moon.

He blinks himself out of his trance and stands up. Brushes his clothes off. He looks around the camp, catches sight of her across the distance and smiles cordially, nodding his head once. Sly grin. Then he goes into his tent and the openings flap shut. 

The slow unraveling of a person – until they are in hyper-focus. Lae’zel held the image, the memory, of his eyes crinkled mischievously at the corners as he went in. As if they shared something together. Knew one another. Shared something knowing and secret. 

The human should be so ugly to her, so hideous with his pink-tinged skin and unwieldy nose. His low eyebrows and too much hair. She’d never seen so much hair on a man. 

When she passed his half-open tent one morning, when the air was still cool with dew, she caught sight of him knelt inside. He was buttoning his robe. 

He did not see her as she walked past the crack in the tent. How she saw his defined chest, his abdomen, the subtle fat at his waist. The strange, smoke-like markings on his chest. Curing upwards to his neck. 

When he lifted his head, she was already out of sight.

When he told her about his orb, his bomb, she did not believe him at first. 

It was on the third day, before setting off on the road, that he came over to her. 

“Lae’zel, your highness,” a grin on his face and a silly bow. “I have a proposition. Albeit a strange one, if you’ll indulge me.”

“Highness?” she grimaced. 

She looked around at their companions readying themselves for the day. Their packs. Astarion was moaning about a stain he’d just found on his shirt. Lae’zel still had to sharpen her sword.

“All jokes,” he said, grinning with his eyes. “But, so- proposition.”

“Ask, istik.”

“Ah, istik, yes. That I am. But insults aside, I’ve got a bit of a problem. Thing is, I need, well, there’s no easy way to put this- your boots.”

Lae’zel blinked. Felt a tendon in her neck move. 

“My boots? Are you sick, or mad?”

“Oh, I wish. Well- probably a bit mad, but. That’s beside the point. You see-”

“I have things to do, Gale,” picking up her sword to sharpen.

He followed her, holding one hand to his chest.“See, see, I’ve got this magic orb in my chest, very long story, but it needs magic to hold off, well, erm, doom.” He opened his palms and made a poof sound with his mouth. 

She looked at him. Remembered the black-tendriled marking on his chest. 

“Of sorts,” he finished.

“Gale, whatever toils you’ve burdened yourself with are not my concern.” And she started the grindstone and seared the air with the sound.

Gale waited, mouth half-open. She stared at him for an ungodly amount of time as their ears rang with the sound.

“I just- Lae’zel,” he said more loudly, “I really need those boots! Your life- all our lives- depend on it!” 

She stopped the wheel, looked at her sword in the light. 

“Astarion has some, ring, go ask him.”

“No, Astarion?” he laughed in a strange way, “Yes, that’s- Not him. He unnerves me, to say the least.”

Lae’zel rolled her eyes. Here was the weakness she’d long heard of. Dripping off of him. 

But she saw what looked like veins under his eye. The curled, delicate ends of smoke. Trailing from his cheek into his beard. She remembered the mark on his chest.

“Speak plainly,” she said.

He spoke, told her all of it. She listened.

When he finished his tale, she said, “I cannot give you my boots, but I will help you look.”

He stopped, searched her eyes. 

She stared at his nose, how obnoxiously large it was. Strange growth on his face. Yet, something in his face made her want to continue to look. As though she were gaining clearer and clearer vision.

“I will, keep my eye out, as your people say,” she said, earnestly. 

“I- thank you, Lae’zel. I will do my best to steel myself through the day.” He winced, smiled. “I’ll be in your debt.”

She watched him trudge off to his tent, holding his chest. Pained, as she was often pained. Beholden to a god, as she was beholden.

Now, she looked at the space in front of his tent where he no longer was.

She’d had no clearer image of him until now. He was, and she didn’t like this, intriguing. 

She did not like this feeling of gravity. This feeling of being like a planet – pulling against the gravity of another. She felt this in her arms, in her stomach, her loins. 

She should not feel this for an istik, and somehow, this resistance, this disgust, made her loins fire even more.

As she grew tired, crickets sang their tender desires to one another, and Lae’zel wondered what it meant to be a man on the verge of splitting in two. In two, into endless two’s.

In the middle of the night, she awoke to her body screaming to pee. 

She got up, lept over the creek, and slipped into the woods. The sky was cloudless and the moon gave the air a soft, pale blue glow. 

When she finished and stood up, she heard a shifting somewhere in the distance. The slide of a foot on leaves. She looked around and saw nothing. Pines. Only their needles on the forest floor like scattered cinnamon. The coolness of the silent barks. Blackberry bushes tangled out of the ground, their berries shining as though wet. 

A single nightbird cooed into the dark. Its need for someone, for anyone, to hear.

She walked towards the shifting. Careful. Quiet. One foot on the ground, and then another. She would make no sound.

The quiet trickles of the creek grew so distant she could no longer hear it. Far overhead, the creak of heavy branches in the wind. 

Then she heard breaths. A man’s. Frantic. A slick, repetitive clicking of wetness. She raised her brows, understanding and yet disbelieving what this was. But still, she crept. 

She saw his back first: a flash of purple through the black-green brush. 

Gale stood in front of a tall magnolia tree, one outstretched palm pressed against the bark. His other hand, his arm, moving by his hip. 

He was whispering something. Quietly. The way he spoke, at times, when he cast a spell.

It was so desperate, this display, and she shouldn’t watch, should be repulsed, should want to laugh. But his strange skin, which showed at his neck, his ear, his hand - normally sickly-looking, radiated a color like lilac. A pale blueness that she could not unlatch her eyes from. 

It was taboo among her people to desire other races. Unheard of except in warnings and sick tales of the rare, wayward githyanki. To watch an istik the way she was, for her loins to pull and quiver with heat the way they were . . .

She crept around the base of another magnolia to better see him, to see the quality of his need on the lines of his face. Needing, herself, to know what it looked like when a human male was sick with want. 

When she saw it, she lost all breath, and her clit jumped to fire.

It was so big that, for a second, she could not believe what she was seeing. That thing between his legs. It embarrassed her to describe it. Big and beautiful and standing out from his undone pants. It was slick, wet - the whole length of it - and dripping from the tip. 

She wondered why she did not know this about humans – that their members grew to such lengths. 

Gale’s long hair shifted as he stroked. He groaned and breathed. The deep sound of his voice. He removed his hand from the magnolia’s bark and joined it on his staff with the other. Both of his hands, now, moving up and down on the rod. He stepped his feet apart further. His shoulders pulled back and broad while he wielded and worked. His hips gently, so gently, pushing forward to meet his hands. 

His eyes were dark and sheathed under a tense brow. Focused. Thinking.

How had she not been told that humans wielded such a sword? Her cunt swelled, grew plush, grew wet by the sight of it. Like fire, like incineration. 

As her pussy seeped, she wondered if he would smell her. Another githyanki would know. From an even further distance, they would know. Like the nightbird, this was a calling she could not control. Would Gale know this scent? 

But he did not turn. He was made differently than she was. He only whispered something to himself. Small, whispered chant. She watched him stroke his cock with a poise she did not often see in him. With control. With dominion. As though he were giving someone that knelt before him something greater than them. 

His usual modesty, then, was a farce. A sham. She grinned, pleased. This dirty man.

He stroked like massage - slow and deliberate - his thumbs along the top and his hands curling around. Lae’zel’s thighs clenched at the sight. His hands moving faster now, working that swollen, veined beast of a cock. 

When he came, he shot powerfully, sending a stream of cum through the air onto the ground. Gale put his hand back on the magnolia and turned his head and shoulders into the bark, as though he could no longer hold himself. He shuddered, his hips gently inching. He let go of his penis and it fell heavily. Dangled and bobbed and spit the last of its thick cum on the leaves. His brown hair fell, and his earring tinkled by his jaw. He shuddered, in that gorgeous voice of his, and wiped his brow. 

Before Gale regained himself, Lae’zel left, stifling her sound over the leaves and brush. When she closed up in her tent, she gathered her pillows and knelt down on them. Worked her hips and her pussy with a madness she hadn’t felt in so long. Quieting her breaths. Nursing the image of him. Imagining her inflamed pussy rubbing on Gale’s cock. 

Imagining him looking at her under his brows, a grin on his lips. 

She came, her forehead falling forward. 

After, she laid on her side, a pillow still latched between her thighs. She cursed herself, quietly, under her breath. 

She thought of his eyes. Brown and glinting. As if he could see her now. Knowingly. Knowing how disgusted she felt for wanting him. Why did he always look like he knew so much? Like he could see right through you? 

She heard the faintest crack of a twig in the distance. Footsteps far off. Then a thunk and splash – Gale’s voice exclaiming from a tripped foot in the creek. 

She heard a strained, half-whispered, “Oh my ankle’s going to love that come morning.” 

She rolled her eyes, and she heard his tent flaps shift, and shut.

The next day, the party stopped at a market of sorts that was set up on both sides of the road. The mountains in the distance were stretching taller and taller, and the trees were turning to silvery olives and cypresses. The occasional willow. In another couple days or so, they would arrive, hopefully, at the crèche.

She found Gale in front of a shop with a cartful of books. She stepped up to his side. He’d been his usual, mostly-lighthearted, often-sarcastic self all day. He knew nothing of what she’d seen, and for now, she wanted to keep it that way.

Next to him, she said, “I do not understand why your texts are like this,” picking one up and turning it around in the daylight.

“Discovery, Lae’zel. Discovery.” Gale was grinning, looking deeply into a book. His eye glinting.

She rolled her eyes. "Chk, I know what a text is. I am learned beyond even your comprehension. It is the way they look.” 

She opened the one she held, so unlike tir’su disks. Illustrations stared up at her from the paper. Innards of human bodies. 

“With these drawings,” she said, flipping through it. 

“Ah yes, anatomy. What a beautiful science.”

The word anatomy had her thinking of what she saw last night, but she continued flipping through it as if she wasn’t, while Gale peered over her shoulder. 

There were pages on the inner shellwork of human ears, pages on the little bones of their hands. She stopped at drawings of bodies, one on either side of the page: a nude human male and female. 

She was confused. Greatly so. Her brow quirked. 

“I do not understand. Are they this small? But yours is–” 

She stilled. He froze. Their eyes locked onto the page. 

Lae’zel had not prepared to approach him about this, about her burgeoning hunger for him, but she guessed this would have to be the moment. How else to get out of this situation than to face it head on? 

She tossed the book back onto the cart, sighed, and said, “I have seen your penis, Gale. How humongous it is.” She looked at him straight on. “I desire it.”

Gale’s jaw fell open. His eyes blown wide. He turned his neck like it was cemented in place - with great difficulty and fear - to see if anyone heard. The young man running the bookshop was staring at them. At the terrified human and stoic githyanki. 

The day was warm and the sound of beetles and bees thrummed the air. Behind her glinting armor and his purple robes, people milled about and bought things like any other day.

Lae’zel said, “The moment I saw it I yearned. I want to worship it. Kneel before it and smell your scent.”

Gale, jaw-dropped, locked eyes with the clerk whose jaw was equally dropped. Gale held his hand up, lifted his forearm, and recited, Impero tibi. His eyes and arm glowed. Instantly, the young clerk fell asleep in his chair. 

Gale turned to Lae’zel, face and cheeks so red he was turning purple.

She gestured to the closed book again, “Why do these illustrations show such a small member?”

He blinked, put a hesitant hand on her shoulder, and pulled her away from the vendor, behind the tents and stalls, and some paces into the forest behind them. 

She shifted her shoulder away from him. They stopped where they stood and looked at each other.

“Why do you look afraid? I am telling you that I find you intoxicating.”

Gale’s cheeks were inflamed with embarrassment. Panic. Self-revulsion. His mind was churning miles and miles a minute.

“You saw me?” he managed to let out. He was eyeing her carefully. Trying to determine when exactly she saw. The night before? The one before that? One was the correct answer, the other was not. The other made him want to burrow into the ground at his feet.

The forest-cover brought a coolness to their skin. Reprieve, finally, from the day’s heat. Branches shifted overhead from the wind and there were echoes of a calling bird far off. The faintest murmur of the market’s bustle by the road. They were alone.

She rolled her eyes. “Yes.”

“Yesterday?”

“Chk. Yes.”

“So, you–” Gale looked sick. “By Mystra’s…” he put his hands on his hips and looked down.

She looked at him. He was blooming, like something red and deepening. 

“You were pleasuring yourself,” she said. The memory of it excited her. He looked like he was about to faint. 

“I did not know humans have such enormous members. You must sire so many spawn.”

He looked at her as though she’d turned into an illithid. He crouched to the ground as though standing had become too much. But then he made a face like he regretted it and mumbled a comment about his knees.

“I must be honest, this is the most embarrassed I’ve ever been in my entire life. And Lae’zel, mind you,” he said, wagging his finger, “if you’ve known me for as long as I’ve known myself, that’s saying something.” 

“You have nothing to be embarrassed about. Your body is like a god’s.” She held her chin up.

He smirked, laughed once, went red again. 

“It is relieving that you don’t…” and he peered back at the road to check if they were alone. 

As he stood back up, he said, “Lae’zel, humans don’t have- How best to word this? It’s magic. I was using magic.”

She blinked. 

“My, member, is rather lackluster without it. You asked me if I was mad? I must be,” nodding his head and staring mid-distance at nothing, “I must be. To do such a shameful thing,” nodding. “Shameful indeed. You know, back home, I don’t even change clothes in front of my tressym Tara.” He laughed to himself. 

“So I have been fooled . . .” she said, looking away from him, thinking.

Still, there was something tantalizing about how ridiculous his needs were. Knowing he liked to grow himself with magic. It was ludicrous. 

He was pacing, looking at the ground, screwing his face up. “Gods, this is embarrassing. That sight is simply– I mean– ugh. That is simply not a thing one ought to see.” He bowed his head and rubbed his temples with his fingers. 

“Gale.” 

He looked over, under his hand that still rested on his forehead.

“I still desire you. The fact is- the fact is that I have been unable to get my mind off you since I saw you in battle that first day.”

It almost startled him, more than anything else she’d said. He met her gaze. She seemed uncomfortable now. Conflicted. And he was running through such an array of emotions that he did not know what to do. How to proceed. 

He lied to her the day they met, when he said he’d only read about githyanki in books. 

Lie of omission. 

The lie of telling the least of it.

Chapter Text

When he was in his early twenties, during his more formal arcane schooling, he walked past a lecture hall and caught sight of a ghustil leading a lecture. He backtracked and peered in through the open door. 

He hadn’t known that a githyanki worked at the academy, and he’d never seen one before. Gale watched and found the man fascinating, transfixed to his nose, or rather, the lack thereof. But he crept in and watched the entire lesson. Noted, also, the regal poise of the man. His long neck and long silver hair. The sunlight from the tall windows striking him in place.

At one point, as an aside, the man said, “My people would be very unhappy that I’m here,” chuckling. “Silly, if you ask me. Don’t tell,” putting a finger to his lips.

After that, Gale asked to join the course. He didn’t care much for healing magics, but he wanted to know more about the Astral Plane anyway, and the knowledge the githyanki had was deep, and beautiful. And like all knowledge, he was driven to it. Anything to further his arcane mastery. 

A week after joining the class, he was in the school’s library, deep in the oakwood stacks, when he found a book on githyanki fighting tactics. 

He fell onto a chapter with a particularly high amount of illustrations of the women. They stood in their half-plate armor. In their skirts that covered nothing when their legs were splayed in battle-stance. Lunged forward, you could see, essentially, their entire ass. Taut, rounded, sweating asscheeks under shifting leather lapels. 

“By Mystr–” and he peered around, his cheeks burning.  

There was only the tall bookshelves and the daylight coming in from the cieling’s skylight far, far above his head.

He looked back upon the page, blushing, mouth all screwed up, and continued to look. At the gith women and their . . . 

These artists. Good gods, he thought. Touching the page. 

One where a single lapel was threaded through the center– 

Does a sword swing bring that much momentum? he wondered incredulously. And one just got caught?? 

“Mad. You’re mad, Gale,” he mumbled to himself, flipping another page. Feeling his cock grow beneath his robe. He looked around again, feeling set-up. Disbelieving that an artist of an encyclopedia would draw– 

I mean look how big–

He closed the book quietly, rearranged his cock down his pant leg, and, during his next class, thought about it throughout.

Like some dog, he went back to his dorm, closed himself up, and immediately took his dick out to jack off to the images of their butts in those skirts. 

After coming, looking back at the book, he said, “Who would do this?” Breathing, “Who would draw them like this?” 

Knowing full well that he was going to look at them again. 

A month after the library, having exhausted his ogling of the fighting tactics book, he went to a deep-city cellar of a bookstore. A place he knew he could find lascivious texts. 

In a dim-lit back corner, pretending he didn’t see a short elf cowering under her glasses and a book of nude women, Gale found, in his shame, a copy of Women of the Realms Vol. 6: Githyanki. Drawn by some drow. Some drow as mad as Gale was – maybe moreso.

The short woman looked over at him, at the cover of his book, and they shared strained half-smiles to each other. 

In his bedroom that was so overfilled with bookcases and leaflets and tomes, he would lock himself in and jack off with the open book on the desk. 

Sometimes, he was so frantic to get home to his book and touch himself to githyanki women, that he simply freed his cock from his pants, and stood with one palm on the desk, and jacked off with his bag of herbs and crystals still slung across his back. 

In the book, githyanki women were rendered in full detail, in every position and situation imaginable. Their breasts were pressed into too-tight chest plates, the curved tops peaking out with a sheen as though wet. The drow had, conveniently, edited their armor to show ridiculous amounts of cleavage.

There was a page Gale came back to again and again where women were on their knees, or sitting on ledges, their assholes completely in view while they held their buttcheeks open for him to see. Their bare feet under their butts while they knelt. How quickly he came, staring transfixed at their assholes that they held open on display. Like they knew, like they knew and were pleased by the way his cock burned and filled and burst at the sight. 

Gale’s favorite image was of a woman reclined on an overly draped bed. Peach-colored jewelry, and nothing else, on every limb, and in her hair like pearls. Holding her huge breasts up, her nipples stared right at him, while she stared right at him, and held her tits up for him to see. 

There were a number of times back then, when he masturbated, that he imagined this woman on her knees in front of his magically enlarged cock. Sometimes conjuring an actual projection of her. How guilty he’d feel. A beautiful, glowing githyanki woman knelt at his feet, worshiping his cock. Licking it, smelling it. Kissing the bulbous tip repeatedly in front.

He’d sit in his chair afterwards with his spent cock hanging between his legs, and run a hand through his hair. Shake his head at himself. 

Then he acquired every single copy of Women of the Realms. For research, of course. 

This fixation was more than ten years ago, but the memories flooded back to him the first day he saw Lae’zel.

When he fell out the portal and looked up, he stopped himself from reacting. Her proud chin. Her watchful golden eyes and black paint underneath. Her dark brown hair shining flecks the color of roses in the sun. The silver ornaments clicking in her hair.

After the group started down the road, his eyes locked on her back. Her waist, her moving hips. He couldn’t help it. Her armor was so severe except for this feature below the waist. And it was staring him right in the face, right in front of him. 

The leather lapels of her skirt shifted over her butt as she walked. He saw freckles on each cheek, and more down her legs. Her pretty thighs. So much gorgeous skin coming in and out of sight between the lapels as she walked. He could hear the leather almost clicking as it shifted. Her butt, so slightly, shook as she walked. He could imagine brushing the lapels apart, taking her cheeks in each hand and squeezing. Taking his thumbs and pulling apart at the center. Looking between.

But then he felt sick to his stomach and cursed himself a bastard, a wanker, and Gale, you lecherous–, and shut his thoughts out of his brain. 

During one of their first battles, in the ruined tomb, Lae’zel killed an undead with a single swing of her blade. Fire in her eyes and in her voice.

She spit when she finished, voiced a “chk”, and wiped sweat-matted hairs from her face. 

They caught sight of each other across the dank crypt. The distance of the entire room. 

Dead-lock stare. Her fallen hair. His gleaming brow. 

What were they looking at in one another? 

Then Gale made like something was under his boot, on the floor, as excuse to look away. 

“Are you quite alright?” Astarion asked by his side. 

“There was-” and he looked again to Lae’zel but she was now barreling towards a door that was opening at the back of the crypt, her sword readied by her face. Shadowheart followed behind, albeit a tad more tentatively, and then Astarion was following too and Gale was half-running to catch up. The image of her ungodly fury seared in his mind. 

Over the fire, over food, Lae’zel had made him and the others laugh so hard he couldn’t breathe. Because it came out of nowhere. 

“Lae’zel. Was that a joke?” he asked, incredulous.

She only grinned, pleased to have been found funny. 

But then she got up shortly after, when the conversation shifted, and walked away as if it were all too much. As if she didn’t know what to do next. 

“Hey, you didn’t finish-” Karlach called out, but Lae’zel walked back to her tent and lied down on her mat with her back pointedly turned to them. Making like she was going to sleep. 

Watching her back, Gale felt that she was, most likely, terribly shy. The same way that he was shy, and insecure, under his layers of grandiosity. 

He smiled at her back, feeling tenderness. Then he turned back to the others, to the flames casting light over their laughing faces. 

“Shadowheart’s devotion to this goddess of loss is pointless,” she’d said to him quietly one day as Shadowheart knelt before a cracked statue of Shar. 

They were in the mountains, and a cool wind from a nearby ridge was blowing their hairs.

“But,” Lae’zel said, more gently, “I understand it.” She raised her chin in a fashion that said, Yes, I understand it. And it is beautiful. 

Gale looked at her. Like Vlaakith, he supposed. 

He said quietly, “You know, you’re a lovely person, Lae’zel. Rather lovely indeed.” 

She stared at him. He could see the wheels of her mind, churning.

“I’m not patronizing you, if that’s what you’re thinking.” But he was getting embarrassed, overthinking, and knew it was beginning to show on his face.

She turned back towards Shadowheart and the crumbled statue. Looked past her, over the ridge, over the endless trees and some half-felled castle in the far, far, distance. 

Her mind was still churning, like waves, and he was so red-faced now that he walked away, saying something stupid like, “Is that henbane? Lucky day, this.” 

Now, in the forest by the mountain pass market, Lae’zel grabbed Gale’s arm and led him further into the trees. Pulled him until the sounds of the market grew more distant and distant. 

“I want it now, Gale. I want it right here in these woods.”

“But– what about–”

She led him around a broad pine and pushed him into the trunk. “I think I am right in that you desire me too, that you have desired me. Am I not wrong?” she asked.

She stood before him, brushed back her hair, “We will be swift. I smell it. Your cock’s already grown big. I smell its sweat.”

Her eyes were wide open. Golden. Bronze sunlight catching her freckles and dark hair. 

Truly, Gale had never seen a woman more beautiful to him, gith or otherwise. Mystra, or otherwise. He’d thought it ever since he fell and looked up at her face.

He wasn’t accustomed to fucking this quickly, but the excitement, Lae’zel’s impossible beauty, and her filthy words that she didn’t even register as filthy, emboldened him.

Grinning, he said, “You have quite the mouth on you, Lae’zel. I rather like it.”

“Chk. I am simply stating the obvious. It is sickening how good you smell. I am– I am embarrassed by it.” A lilt of desperation in her voice.

She stepped into him, placed her nose to his neck and breathed in. It was almost sweet, and his skin was warm. She exhaled deeply, pulled back, smelled the other side. Gale couldn’t believe how turned-on this made him.

“You’re intoxicating, Gale,” she said against his neck. “It is– disconcerting. Are you not disgusted that I am not of your kind?” 

She stepped back then, and they looked at one another. Fully seeing each other. 

A githyanki warrior. A human mage. Exhausted, from their travels, from their battles, from being moments away from a flaying, hideous death. 

The two of them, truly, should never have met. 

But he said, earnestly, “I hardly know how to word how beautiful you are. Truly, I’m surprised you find anything of note in me.”

“Shka'keth. Do not disrespect my tastes. When you disrespect yourself you disrespect me.” 

She tossed her hair over her shoulders again. “And of course I’m beautiful. I am gith.”

He smiled. “You are,” and he reached up and touched a finger and thumb to her chin. Looked at her face, her gold eyes and black paint. Ears like angel wings. 

He said, “I want to take you right here. Right here in these woods. But I worry we don’t have the time necessary. I want to fully indulge in you.”

Her eyes stared widely into his. She felt her face warm. 

“It might smell even better, by end of day,” he continued, grinning wickedly. 

She shook her head. “You are–” and she made a sound of frustration. “I do not want to wait. I am ready for you now. I am so wet and inflamed it hurts me.”

He thought of it. The thought of her quivering, needing pussy. He wanted it. Needed to see it.

He peered around again, as if there were anyone. Only the trees and their boughs shifting in the wind.

So he knelt down to the ground. Looked at the lapels at the front of her skirt and then up at her. 

“Can I?” 

She blinked, so fully was she in disbelief. Then she smirked, said, “Yes.”

He parted her lapels, opened them to either side of her hips and held her there. She reached a hand down and pulled aside her panties, moist with want and sweat, for him to see. 

He stared right at it. Puffy, pretty. One string of wetness connecting to her thigh. There was a freckle on each lip. Flushed skin and soft auburn hair along the top.

He looked up at her, then slowly moved in and put his mouth on her. Breathed in. He licked up, once. Kissed the top, once. He kept kissing and kissing around her clit.

It did not take long. His gentleness and light flicks of his tongue. Small sucks on her clit. Long laps of his tongue over the whole length of her. Over the hole, over everything.

He groaned at the taste, how good it was to know how she tasted and smelled. She moaned at the madness he was bringing to her, the soft touches with his lips, the sudden, more forceful sucks on her clit.

“You– damn it,” she said, and gripped his hair and began to come against his mouth. He licked the wetness coming from her cunt while she finished. Kissed her hole, then her clit, then the plushness at the top. 

When her hips stopped their light humps, he let her lapels go so they could fall back in place, and he leaned back and wiped his mouth and his beard. He smiled up at her.

Then he reached for the back of his neck. “Oh, my neck,” he said, getting up. “Goddess above.”

While he rubbed his neck, while he righted himself and said something about not being a spring sap anymore, she looked him up and down. So purely pleased by the specimen of him. He wiped his mouth that was now slightly red around his lips. His damp facial hair. His cock was hard and poking against his robe.

He saw her expression and winked at her, “Surely it can’t be a surprise that I have a practiced tongue.”

She began to roll her eyes when, off in the distance, they heard Shadowheart calling, “Gale? Lae’zel?”

“Ah, perfect timing,” he said sarcastically. “So punctual, that Shadowheart.”

Lae’zel shifted to stand squarely in front of the pine, out of sight from the road.

“Go on,” he said, gesturing with his head against the tree. “I need a second for, you know.” He nodded down.

She was hesitant to leave. They both flirted with the idea of making Shadowheart and the rest wait. To flock around confused, calling their names, while they fucked like animals in the woods. 

Lae’zel imagined herself on her back on the ground while Gale laid waste to her with his giant cock. His eyes blank and demon-like while he pistoned into her body. Working his hips to pleasure his big staff in her dripping cunt. His balls spanking her butt. He’d be fully clothed, while she lay naked and beautiful for him on the green and yellow leaves. 

Shadowheart’s voice rang out again, echoing through the woods. Overhead, a gust of wind shook the leaves.

Gale stood before the pine, just looking at her. His cock still staring forward at her, mirroring the want that glazed his eyes, his brows. 

She could not think while looking at this man. How this man would immolate her. She was, already, on fire. 

“Tsk’va. We must wait. I will tell them I do not know where you are.”

“Yes, excellent. The best confidant, Lae’zel,” and he looked at her with those shining, knowing eyes of his.

“I will think about it for the rest of the day. I will have it tonight.” She started back, her steps shifting leaves on the forest floor. 

Gale waited for silence, for the sound of only wind in the trees, and then took out his cock. Spit thickly onto it. He came in his hand in only a few measured strokes. Shuddering against the pine.

Chapter Text

The mountains were on the verge of autumn. Orange-green trees and wild grasses the color of wheat. They were still full. Bursting, still. But soon, in weeks, they would begin to die. 

Lae’zel and Gale walked on either side of the group, as though they had no more relation to each other than anyone else. The others would see nothing between them. They were just a wizard and a warrior who had little to do with each other. 

Her chest was burning. She gnashed her teeth in frustration. Night could not come quicker. Where was her discipline? A slivered crack was forming in her resolve, and for what? For some obscene wizard? 

She glanced at him. He seemed fine but absent. Lost somewhere in his mind and smiling at the wind. Occasionally, he’d wiggle his knee before stepping down on his bad leg, or place a hand to rub at the base of his back. 

At one point, he said, “I wish on none of you the burden of a back such as this. Wicked affliction, this.”

She didn’t want to see him in her peripheral anymore – he was a distraction – so she shifted to the right to walk in front of him. They were so close to a cure. To a zaith'isk. 

Out of nowhere, she felt a dissonance. It was in her mind, in her vision – someone’s tadpole seeking entrance. She heard Gale’s voice in her head, as if he were right beside her and not some paces behind. 

I’m afraid you don’t quite understand the way your- manner of dress, affects me.

Lae’zel wasn’t sure what he meant. Yes, her armor was certainly beautiful. It was of the highest level of githyanki craftsmanship. 

Why do you speak to me with this ghaik trickery?  

Because– It’s that your armor affects me. 

Lae’zel recalled half-forgotten teachings of human propensities of dress and their desires for half-clad skin. She understood, then, that Gale liked seeing her rear. 

He was saying something stupid to her now about how the githyanki created such an awe- um, inspiring, piece of armor, and so Lae’zel began to switch her hips more languidly, moving them with just a little more exaggeration. Gale’s voice halted completely. 

Because she enjoyed this, enjoyed his ridiculous desire for something so simple, she reached back, swept her fingers against the leather lapels at one side of her skirt and pulled them, all of them, across her ass and held them bunched at her hip. She continued to walk as though she weren’t revealing her entire ass to a man in the middle of nowhere.

She heard his steps falter, heard them stop. 

You like its design? she asked, feeling the wind against her naked skin. It is made to be both beautiful and practical.

Gale’s mind was starting and restarting. It was so huge. Shifting and moving. Her skin like autumn leaves. Oh this day is long in pleasure. Lae’zel, I cannot– You have no idea how badly I cannot. 

You are mindless for it? 

Yes. Yes I’m mad. I bemoan to admit how typical I am. If the others turn around–

“Gods look at THAT,” Karlach said, and the group’s attention turned rightward, towards a cliff overlooking the gorges and waterfalls.

Lae’zel released her skirt and followed them nonchalantly towards the cliff. To sightsee. They were all sightseeing now. And Gale held back some because his cock was pulsing red in his pants like some netherese power rod. 

He stood behind her so that if the others looked back he’d be somewhat obscured. 

She heard him whisper, “How I waste with yearning.” A misery in his voice.

She turned and saw the image of this sad, aroused man. The bulge in his pants as he stood there stupidly. It was so amusing to see Gale like this. And, because she liked his desperation, enjoyed it so much, she bent over to retie her sandals that did not need to be retied at all. 

Gale’s gaze, he couldn’t help it, zeroed in on the freckles on both of her buttcheeks. He was so typical. Evolution had failed him, utterly. It had set him up. The roundness of her butt peeked through the openings in her skirt. He saw her pussy, just barely. It barely fit into her panties. As though her panties were sizes too small.

Gale shook his head slowly in disbelief, his cock throbbing. With their connected minds, he thought about taking his dick out of his pants, stepping up behind her, and lining it up to her while she bent over. The slightest press of the tip to her hole. They both watched the moving picture of themselves on this cliff: Gale holding Lae’zel’s waist strongly and opening her pussy, slowly, slowly, more and more of his rod slipping inside, filling her up. They watched how, like a beast, he moved her body back and forward on his cock. Using her to feel good. To make his cock feel better, to feel relief from this fire. 

Lae’zel’s thighs clenched against her cunt and her hips itched forward involuntarily. 

As she stood back up, Gale released from her mind and walked away. Calling out something to the group about having seen some herbs back there and “I’ve done some thought and I simply cannot go on without retrieving them.”

She was going to implode because of this man. Simply die if she could not get her hands on him soon. It felt like drowning in water so boiling it melted skin. Like being flayed by winds, by some rough tempest that was ripping her apart. 

At first, Lae’zel was not sure if she’d heard correctly. But the woman from the Society of Brilliance was smirking, sneering, staring right at her.

Lae’zel unsheathed her greatsword. She said through her teeth, “How dare you. If you have any sense you will put up your blade.” 

The amused smirks from Shadowheart and Astarion. All the frantic wait’s and hold on's from Wyll, Halsin, and Karlach. And Gale. 

Everyone’s reactions were background noise, except for his. It made Lae’zel crane her neck, slowly, to look at him. The gold of her eyes like flame. 

The way, cornered and angry, he put up a fight, “You’ve got to be kidding, Lae’zel. Think! Is this really the way to handle this?”

She turned to him fully, her blade still up. She heard Esther agree in the far background, heard her say something about See, this is exactly what I’m talking about, but all Lae’zel could really hear was silence, was Gale’s face. 

“You think I do not think, Gale?” she asked, clutching her sword’s hilt. 

It seemed, somehow, looking into the brown embers of Gale’s eyes, that they were right back in the forest. Considering if they should touch. 

Gale started to open his mouth, but Lae’zel continued, “Are you simply incapable of imagining if it was a human baby? Your baby? Does that not warrant your passion?”

She turned back to the woman, “The suggestion! To steal an egg from my people. It is sick. I will not have it.”

Through an incredible amount of diplomacy, they left Esther untouched. But by the end, just about all of them wanted Esther dead. All her insults to Lae’zel. Shadowheart was the first, after Lae’zel, to take out her mace and point it at the woman – it had been that bad. 

As they continued on through the mountains, Lae’zel saw Gale shake his head at himself in her peripheral. He looked off over the ridges, their clouds of mist. The wind blew his hair.

“I spoke too soon. It seems I need to think more,” he said quietly. “For all my talk.” A faint grin at her, because he could sense her looking. “Not so brilliant after all, that woman,” he said, wagging his finger.

Lae’zel thought of what she’d said. When she asked Gale to imagine a baby. Your baby.  

Round pupils. Human skin. Like a prophecy of a future she was not in. Could never be in.

She didn’t know that Gale was thinking the same thing. Thinking of what he could make one day, and what he wouldn’t be able to, if he and Lae’zel . . .

They shared this thought, even apart. 

In camp that night, they sat around the fire as Wyll showed Karlach how to dance. The structured ballroom dancing he’d learned growing up. They smiled and clapped, because Karlach was clumsy and earnest, and Wyll so beautiful and elegant, and it felt so good to feel like they weren’t all dying. 

Gale and Lae’zel sat beside each other, unseeming and casual. The distance between their arms coursed like the heat in front of them. The part, inside the fire, near the ashes, that was so hot it marbled and warped the air. It crackled. How painful, desire could be. 

Gale found, strangely, that he felt shy. He turned to her, the corners of his eyes crinkling, “I’d ask you to dance if I knew how.”

She didn’t look at him, simply stared forward. She could see him clearly even without looking. “I can teach you.”

Gale raised his brows. “I was going to exclaim in surprise, like a right fool, but then I remembered githyanki are in fact quite the connoisseurs of the arts.”

“Yes,” she said, the corner of her lip curling up. “I am pleased that you know this about my people. The caste which dwells in the arts is indeed small, but we do have them. Mlar, they are called. And with arts such as dance, it is a very small subsect.” She peered at him, “But you seem to know this.”

“The very least of it. I’d love to hear you tell me more,” he said, truly wanting to know more.

She stared at him. Skeptical. “Very well.” 

She told him and he leaned back on his arm and listened. Watched her eyes light up as she spoke proudly into the flames, never once looking at him. He watched the lines of her jaw and her chin, her lips move as she spoke. Slightly red, and pursed, and beautiful. The silver ornaments in her hair shone like stars. He wanted to thread his fingers through her hair and simply look upon her face. He heard the others laughing, but he could only see her.

He could conjure wind, but not like this. Not like this woman who was beginning to shred him to pieces. 

The adoration he’d felt for Mystra did not feel like this. He’d felt like he was running, ceaselessly, to someone whose back was already turned and receding into shadow. With Lae’zel, he wanted . . . he didn’t know yet. 

Lae’zel finished speaking. With his tadpole, he said, I cannot get my eyes off you. How beautiful you are in this light. Your knowledge.

Lae’zel wanted to run him through with a blade. For him to say such a thing to her. Skin was one thing. But this, to be so unabashed with sentiment with all these people near. Of course she was beautiful – this did not need to be said. She looked around but their companions were still focused on Karlach and Wyll.

You sicken me. I cannot handle words such as these. 

I am so sick for you, Lae’zel. 

“K'chakhi,” she whispered under her breath. I need them to stop this charade and go to sleep. So that I may touch you. 

He was still looking at her as though she were a goddess, and Lae’zel almost feared this Mystra. If his mistress were to know, were to see the way he looked at her. The sight of Gale and his shining brown eyes, his stupid hair tucked so gently behind his ears. The quirk of his lips when he smiled, those lips that had pressed to her cunt and made love to her there. That disgusting facial hair and stupid, stupid nose. She wanted this man to never stop looking at her.

She looked him full in the eyes, not caring if the others saw. She understood, so deeply now, that she was hsharl’ak. A traitor to be hunted on sight. For the ghaik tadpole making a burrow of her brain. For Gale.

Lae’zel got up and brushed off her pants. Do not come to me. I will find you. And she walked away from the fire.

Chapter Text

When she entered his tent that night, she saw the ocean. Orange with sunset. The sound of waves, shifting softly. 

He sat on the edge of a great canopied bed that stood against the right wall. It was a bedroom, with a balcony that opened to that ocean in the distance. Blue curtains framed the open doors. Gale lifted his head and looked at her. Grinned.

He was in his purple robe he wore during the day, and she was, somehow, in her armor. Fully dressed and sandaled, with her hair done. She’d not come in like this.

“You live in a world of illusion,’ she said, grimacing. 

Still, as she looked around, she was impressed. This man was formidable and it terrified her. He was so arrogant. Such a show-off. He sat on his bed smirking, and all around were stacks of istik texts, intricately carved bookshelves lining the walls, a desk so covered in leaflets and tomes she could hardly see its form. Beside it stood a statue of a lion with wings. Across the room, a statue of a woman with grapes covering her crossed legs.

She eyed a tir’su disk atop a stack of books and went to it. Picked it up. 

Joy rushed in her chest, “This tells of Vlaakith.” 

“I made a gallant effort to read it many years ago,” he said, stepping over. “Tir’su was quite the challenge. But, the way your people weave words is magic.”

She registered his praise, and it delighted her. “It is not magic,” she said, feeling her face heat.

She smelled his skin. He had not washed from the day. He’d kept this, even beneath this extravagant trickery, for her sake.

She turned to him, “Your smell is so strong it is clouding my mind. I need it, Gale. I cannot wait any longer.”

The sound of the waves in the distance, folding, folding. 

He put his hand, gently, on the back of her neck, “Then let us not wait.”

He pulled her to him. She stared at him in surprise and excitement and he grinned with his eyes. They were very close in height. 

He moved his jaw, once. Coaxing her lips. She let him, let him open them, kiss them. His beard smelled of citrus oils and lavender, and his skin like sweat. She brought her hands to cup his cheeks and kissed him hungrily, opening her mouth. 

He held her neck and felt the fullness of her lips. He tasted them, slipped his tongue into her mouth. He was breaching her, entering her. And because of this, she breathed out a sigh, like melting. 

She grabbed his robe and shifted him against a bookshelf, pushed him into it, to get right at his mouth. She threaded her fingers through his hair. 

Pressed against the shelves, he slipped his arms around her waist and pulled her body in, and kissed, and kissed her. Their breaths and sighs. Like for the first time in a long time, they could breathe. 

The scent of salt carried in from the ocean, and Gale worried about Mystra’s ever-present gaze. He thought of casting his most powerful illusion spells, but knew they wouldn’t work. Mystra would see. She would see this. But he was drowning by magma, for this woman in his arms. He pulled Lae’zel tighter, his body searing with the desire to have her, to protect her, to fuck her, as his jaw worked her open. 

This was madness. This fury. There was no wisdom in this, nothing logical. Lae’zel knew, after they finished, she would be free of him. All her body needed was to be sated. 

But in her mind, rushing forward from somewhere dark, she saw them fighting. Saw herself punch him to the ground, to eviscerate him. This was a grey wasteland, his wizard’s staff flung somewhere far off. She was leaving his skin bruised and cut. Letting him fight her off, fight back, to kneel above her and punch her and punch her. Until her skin was marred like plum, like his, and she bled. The world billowing with char and heat.

Gale stilled, and looked at her. She realized her tadpole had let him in.

She said, “When you speak to me of yearning, of being mad, this is what that means for gith.”

He brought a hand up, slowly, to stroke her hair. Threading his fingers. She did not understand this calculating look he was giving her. 

Then, he closed his fist in her hair. The slightest sting of pain as his grip pulled her gaze up. 

Instantly, she felt her cunt throb. He’d made her no panties in this place, so she dripped onto her thighs. 

“Your desires may be a tad dark for my tastes,” he said carefully. His gaze was blank and grave, revealing nothing.

“Then whose hand is it that pulls my hair?” She nudged her thigh forward, between his legs, pressing gently against his cock. His breath hitched. 

She said, “You play as though you are so righteous, Gale. So clean. But I know what you are. All these illusions. You crave control, you want endless power, but you will never say it.”

A flash of genuine anger in his face. “Is that what I crave? How you know me. How lucky I am to have you to know me. And you are not righteous, Lae’zel? What battles do you fight, letting me touch you?”

He knew too much of her people. “You do not know what battles I fight.” 

She felt a flash of revulsion, remembering who they both were. It was a revulsion built up over her entire life, and she seethed because all she’d wanted was a good laying. Not whatever the hells was happening here. 

“Enough of this senseless banter.”

She stepped back and, while looking at him, undid her armor, freed her shoulders and chest and let the metal drop heavily to the polished hardwood floor. 

Gale’s moment of frustration, at being read so astutely, dissipated. 

The orange sun was like liquid behind her, like the end of a world, or the beginning of one. 

He’d never noticed the black streaks of paint around her neck, like a choker. Her gold eyes watched him. 

Freckles ran along her shoulders, down the curves of her waist. On top of one breast was a curved scar, like a shard of the moon. Her breasts were full and tender, and her braids rested gently on her shoulders. Her ears like fairy wings, or an angel’s.

“Even the sunlight grieves,” he said, managing a smile. “Straight through my heart, the wound is quick and keen.”

She grimaced, “I should despise when you say these things.”

She stepped closer, put her hands to his chest and began to open his robe, unfastening, pulling. As she opened his robe, his brown chest hair came into sight, coarse and thick, and the drawing of the flaming circle. It reached up, curling delicately, like smoke. Trickles on his cheek, beneath his eye. Ghosts. 

She stepped in and pressed her breasts on his chest. Sighing, feeling his skin and his hair against her skin. 

She put her nose to him and smelled his neck, his jaw, his cheeks, as though she couldn’t get enough of him. While she did this, Gale snaked both arms around her waist. He reached down her back, down lower, over her hips, over her ass. Threaded his fingers through the pleats of her skirt. 

She felt his cock push against her front.

“If you only knew how much I’ve wanted to do this,” he whispered, cupping her butt in his palms. It was so big, so firm, and it did not fit in his hands. He squeezed and pulled her cheeks apart. Knowing, if he were behind her, he’d see her asshole. 

Her hips ground forward against her will. She groaned and pulled the rest of his robe apart. Shifted it over his shoulders until it dropped. He stood against the bookshelf with his bulge tenting his pants.

How badly she needed it. 

How badly he needed her to touch it. 

Lae’zel knelt and began to pull down his hem, slowly, over the length of his cock. More and more pink-tinged skin came into sight. More thickness, more veins. The flushed, flared head. Then the full length of it popped free and the hot smell of it wafted up and filled her nose. She breathed and exhaled in pleasure. 

She said, “So virile. It is steaming hot. You are crazy for woman. For breasts, for my ass.”

No words left his mouth. He couldn’t believe her.

“It is so big already, Gale. You do not need magic.”

A bead of pre dripped off the tip.

“But, I am coming to understand that you are a greedy man,” and she looked up at him. 

His over-reddened cheeks. His expression like he couldn’t believe what he saw, but liking it very, very much.

He said, with a grin, “That I am.” 

He started whispering a spell, Extende. Flicked his forearm and hand, and slowly, his cock began to grow. Swelling, growing length. The head dripped, and the bigger his cock grew the hornier it became. It grew longer still, heavier and heavier. Swollen, bursting. Turgid, almost red. 

Gale did want power. He was greedy. And he loved every second that he submitted to that want. He just hated that Lae’zel could see this. And sort of loved it too. 

His balls were growing and when Lae’zel noticed, she freed them from his pants. She was cupping them, feeling how huge and taut they were. Gale saw her lean in, put her face to them, feel her breathe in their scent. As she sniffed his ball sack, as she felt their heat against her cheek, her pussy pulsed and dripped.

She pulled back and let them drop. She held his cock in one hand as she sniffed around his groin, against his thick pubic hair, underneath his cock. She drew back and smelled over his penis, both sides of it. It was strong, gave off heat, and glowed lightly from his spell. She began to lick it and kiss.

Then Gale stopped his incantation. His cock had grown to its full length. Or at least, one that he liked.

She pulled back so she could look at the entirety of it. A wicked smirk on Gale’s face.

She opened her lips. And with two hands on his staff, pressed it to her mouth, into it, over her tongue. She felt how giant his cockhead was, how thick the shaft. She swallowed, and sucked, and hungered more than she’d ever hungered in her life. She could feel its subtle pulses, its veins. There was so much cock left that she couldn’t get into her mouth, so she stroked the exposed length with her hands. 

Gale aimed and spit down onto the exposed part of his cock. Precise, as though he’d done it many times. She coated it with her strokes. Saliva pushed out of her mouth and down her chin – because his cock was so big, because it was the absolute limit of what her mouth could afford. She looked drenched in wetness.

As she sucked him, she brought one hand to her cunt and touched herself, rolling her clit against her fingers. She could not help it. It burned. 

Not long after, Gale came – groaning deeply. Saying her name. His penis filled her cheeks with so much cum she was forced to swallow. It blasted down her throat like a hose and she swallowed as much as she could. More and more of it, coaxing it with her lips, while her fingers on her pussy quickened and she was coming herself. Wetting her fingers, her thighs, the polished floor. Her hips gyrating through the waves, while his cum fed her throat. She wondered when it would end, but then he groaned and relaxed, finally sated.

She began to pull off. He said, “Goddess above,” while he watched inch after inch of his penis pull out from Lae’zel’s mouth. Until it slipped out slickly and bobbed down.

Her red lips were swollen. Saliva coated her mouth, and chin, and nose. She looked wildly pleased, as though she’d conquered and won.

He said, “You are maddening, Lae’zel.” And she looked even more pleased.

She eyed him when she stood up, then took her sandals off, tossed them aside, and walked further into the room. 

For a time, he showed her things from his life in Waterdeep. Trinkets and books and endless awards for teaching. “I still need to frame those. I am so bad at that. My mother has been pestering me ceaselessly for a copy.” 

Lae’zel told herself that she only bore this in anticipation of his stamina. For nothing else. 

~

The sky was a softer orange now, more pink. The gnarled branches of peach trees hung on either side of the balcony, their trunks clutching the cliffs. They were ripe. Shifting in the wind. 

Lae’zel walked to the right and plucked one. Turned it around in the dying light. This man and his illusions. She wondered if she could ever really understand a man like this.

She frowned and left the peach on the railing.

When she turned back, he was staring far off into the water. She followed his gaze and stepped up beside him at the railing.

Gale watched the horizon. “I’ve spent so much time here,” he said. “Lifetimes, it feels. How I miss it.”

The ocean lapped at the rocks beneath them.

“You will not have to miss it for long, my people will have a cure. I am certain of it.”

“I hope so. For all our sakes.”

“Do not merely hope. My queen guides me.”

Her queen. Gale thought of the orb in his chest. His folly. His stupid, stupid folly. He had no goddess anymore. He had to become his own god, or die. 

Gale looked to the right, at the glints of fading sunlight on Lae’zel’s skin. She wore nothing but the bottom half of her armor. The armor that he’d conjured. The brown freckles along her back made her waist seem slimmer, made her butt look huge. 

Under this sun, her hair was the color of dark red roses.

Staring forward, she said, “I know only blood-red and death-black. You are blood-red, and when I behold you, when I feel you, I feel like death.”

Gale could not speak. As though the air had been forced out of him. 

She continued, “You cannot understand how unnatural this is. This is not my way. You have–” she cut herself off. Said nothing. Stared forward into the water.

Gale understood that he and Lae’zel were straying further and further into a place the others could not follow. They would be alone in this, affected by the other for the rest of their lives, even if, after all of this, they were to part. 

If they were to become mind flayers soon, he wondered if under the layers of flesh, he would remember her. If his orb were to detonate, what would become of their atoms? Would they find each other, among the embers?

“We have not bonded yet. We have not fought. I do not know this,” she said, meeting his eyes. 

“I haven’t known this either. Not quite like this.” Gale felt that magma again, in his veins.

When you meet someone at the wrong time, what do you do, then, about desire?

Her entire face scrunched in frustration. “This is– this is a distraction. This is the ghaik, twisting me. This is lunacy. We must–,” and she turned to him, stepped into him. They were both shirtless.

She put a hand on his bulge. It was still oversized from his spell. She felt its mass, its heft, where it was cupped in his pants. Her need for it flared her entire body. She was primed, ready, aching for him to ravage her and fill her like he did her mouth.

“When I was young and in training,” she said, “I had a sa’varsh who I found very beautiful and had enormous breasts. I wanted to be her.”

Gale hitched his breath at her hand’s pressure. This woman’s hands, both of them now, rubbing circles around his bulge. He couldn’t believe what she’d said. The implication. 

She said, “I want you to do this to me.”

He stared at her. “I want to make very clear that I heard you right. Are you saying what I suspect you’re saying?”

“Chk. How clear must I make it for you?” Frustrated, she grabbed his wrists and placed his hands on her breasts.

They were so soft under his fingers, and against his will, his bulge throbbed against her thigh. 

He could make these big. He would make these big. Lae’zel was asking him to. She was looking at him, smirking, urging him with her gaze, and because Gale loved the power to create and form the world to his will, he grinned. 

He grasped her breasts, and whispered the incantation. He whispered more words she didn’t know. 

Lae’zel’s cunt dripped from the feeling of his firm hands on her tits. He was holding her, owning her, was going to make her exactly what he liked. 

A building pressure filled her breasts, and then she felt them, slowly, begin to fill out, to press further into Gale’s hands. It felt good. He’d used this spell on her whole body in battle once, and she’d felt nothing, only stronger. It must be the other incantations, the ones he was whispering under his breath.

Gale watched as Lae’zel’s boobs grew bigger, grew heavier in his hands. They began, slowly, to overfill his palms. He could feel her nipples grow hard, grow swollen, growing bigger in tandem with her breasts. Her cleavage was deepening, meeting at the center, filling upward. Dark shadows in-between. He had to use more and more arm strength as they grew. His cock was straining so hard against his underwear he thought he was going to tear through them. 

Finally, her breath broke. “Gale . . . it feels– this pleasure . . . why does it feel this way?”

He felt such delight at giving her this. “I want you to enjoy every second of this.” 

“Stop, soon. Before I look ridiculous. They are already so–”

So he stopped, and the glowing in his face and arms dissipated. Gently, he let go of her breasts and they dropped heavily. 

Her areola had grown puffy and her nipples were big and slightly raised, and all of it stared him right in the face.

He whispered, “By Ahghairon’s lost. . .” How they taunted him. How unnaturally perky and round they stayed despite their size. 

Lae’zel was watching him. Wearing the black paint-necklace around her neck and little else. The sun glinting her skin with its warmth. It had almost fallen behind the ocean. Her body was the same as it always was, and now she had the breasts of some goddess. For fucking. For staring at and wanting. 

Gale pulled his pants down enough to free his cock because it hurt so much. It hung with its weight, but he was fully, painfully erect. He would come so much inside her. He already knew.

Lae’zel’s pussy gushed from the sight of Gale’s cock. She could see her boobs in her peripheral, how plush and deep her cleavage was. How strongly her nipples strained. Every part of her body needed sex.

She shifted past him and went to the bench. As she leaned forward and placed her hands on the back of the bench, she noticed a book lying on the end. Dark purple binding. Something about a lonely wizard and a shadowed forest. Lae’zel looked at it and didn’t want to be whatever Gale needed. This man would require opening, unfurling, and she did not want to open. This is simply sex. This is simply sex. A flesh-bond, even, but– 

Her breasts pressed against the wood, and Gale was saying things like What a sight you are and she knew that the lapels of her skirt were spread apart and showed everything. With her hands on the wood, Lae’zel turned to look at him, at this beautiful man stepping out of his pants. His rigid cock swung ever so slightly as he moved. 

With one hand on the bench, she undid her armor and let it drop to the ground. She reached back and spread her butt, opening it, showing him her flushed cunt. Everything was plump, pulsing, and wet with sweat. And even from the back, Gale could see Lae’zel’s humongous breasts that he’d made, pressed against the bench. 

She looked down, seemed to strain a bit. She said something about the weight of them, and she breathed out. Almost frustrated. 

Gale came up behind her. How nervous he was, how unprepared for a sight like this. 

She told him to put his staff inside her, that she needed it, that she was on the verge of death, so he grasped his cock in one hand and lined it up with her pussy. 

There was a burst of wetness from her cunt as he pressed. He coated his head with her juices, with her sweat, rubbing against the plushness of her labia. Staring, always, at her asshole. Then he lined up once again and began to push in. 

He put his hands on either side of hers on the back of the bench, as though his body were covering her. He cast a spell so that the breach of his dick would be easy – pure pleasure for them both. 

Leaned over the bench like animals, she felt the giant insertion of his dick spread and spread her. It was so wide, and her pussy was accommodating all of it. Every inch. Just a little more, every moment, for her to take in. He pressed and pressed his hips closer, and her cunt engulfed him, rubbing and pulsing hot against every part of his cock. He was sheathed in bloodhot, and his veins pulsed. His cockhead was so flared and angry inside of her – his desire hurt. He wanted more, and more. 

When Gale was fully in, they both groaned, their voices breaking. He looked down at the sight of it, Lae’zel’s huge, wide butt pressed against his hips. Her freckles. Her beautiful skin. He thought of sunflowers, their seeds.

He pulled back, and as his cock unsheathed, it was fully coated in slick. Long strands of wetness. 

Seeing it, Gale couldn’t believe how much cock he’d put in her. His penis raged for more. He pushed back in - the sound of wetness gushing. The sound of the lapping waves below them on the rocks.

Gale began to fuck madly and Lae’zel reached back and grasped his ass with one hand to urge his hips. His balls spanked her butt with each thrust, and she felt the weight of them as they hit. 

Gale reached under and grasped her tits. Lae’zel made a sound at this and he held them while he fucked. Squeezing just slightly. Lae’zel recalled that this was how he held his cock in the woods under the magnolia in the night. With control, like he owned. Like she was his, like she was exactly how he liked. They were both over-sexed, over-magicked, and nothing they were doing should be beautiful. Gale’s nakedness, his hair. Lae’zel’s sweating body. The disgusting sounds their bodies made. Their breaths and moans. He was swearing more than he’d ever sworn before. This place, this dimming, orange world.

With one palm on the back of the bench, Gale reached beneath Lae’zel and touched her cunt. Her pulsing clit. He could feel the nub of it, how hard and wanting and wet it was. He rubbed her while he fucked. He would come soon. He was pumping his dick in her with his hips and he would come soon.

Lae’zel knew she would never stop wanting this. That there would be no sating this fire, even after Gale snapped his fingers and ended this world that didn’t exist.

“I want for time, Lae’zel, but I’m afraid I cannot last.”

“Do not tell me, Gale, just–” because she was on the verge herself. Because so much penis was filling her pussy, like a weapon sheathing and unsheathing itself inside her, and with a few more circles of Gale’s fingers on her cunt– 

Her body shuddered. Her voice broke. Gale rubbed her through her waves. Then he straightened his back, held her waist, stepped his legs apart further, and quickened his hips. He looked down at her, at this gorgeous woman, and moved her body back and forward on his dick, watching her breasts, because they were visible even from the back – until he came. It rushed and blasted out, and so much cum was filling her cunt. It filled her so much it pushed out the sides and coated her thighs, his balls. It went on for so long. He draped his body over top of hers, snaking an arm around her waist, and held her like that while his balls emptied. With the subtlest presses of his hips and his pumping cock, she rode the last waves of her orgasm.

Froth from the ocean waves sparkled against the rocks. The sun was red, and nothing that was here existed. 

Chapter Text

As a child, Lae’zel crouched in the woods and touched a dark flower she’d never seen before that felt like velvet on her thumb. The flower was purple, blackish, like the space between the stars. A gold-yellow center, like a heart. 

“They are called pansies,” her varsh had said to her from the trail. Her peers ran ahead for training. 

This varsh, this caretaker, was the only concept Lae’zel had of the mother Gale had spoken of – the mother that he said wanted his framed teaching awards.

Back then, Lae’zel plucked the pansy from the forest floor and took it with her, and the varsh had said nothing. Just watched her as she ran past and caught up with her peers. It was something the other varsh would have scolded her for. 

But he’d let her stop, and marvel at it. Let her know its name. 

Gale and Lae’zel stepped out of the tent into the night. Whatever was inside was receding into annihilation. She stood in her nightclothes again, and Gale was in his purple tunic with the embroidered silver neck.

The wind was strong against her face. She saw the others’ tents, and the reality of everything crashed down on her. She started back to her own. She needed to polish her armor and sleep.

“Wait,” Gale said. 

She stopped and stared at him. The mountain pass air was very cool, almost cold. It filled the lungs. The stars were so bright here that she knew even Gale, without any darkvision, could see. 

“Sit with me for a while? My lady Lae’zel of Crèche K’liir? Bide some time together among the stars?” 

Ridiculous and insolent. She’d told him this the day they met.

“We must rest. We have wasted precious time of stillness for tomorrow's battles.”

“Ah but no time was wasted. We were within–” he tilted his head a bit trying to find the right words, “–a pocket, of sorts, of the astral plane.” He was pleased with this answer, nodded his head.

Her home. But it had looked nothing like her home. It had been sunlit and bleeding, like the last moments of a world. Ridiculous, is what Gale was. All feeling. Everything she’d been taught to never show. She’d said too much, in that room. 

The sounds of the waterfalls in the distance, like the waves they’d just left. From here, they could see them, stretching endlessly into the shadowed horizon. How much water, this planet held.

“That istik text on your bench. What was it?” she asked. The one with the dark purple binding.

“Oh,” he said with a tone of surprise, like he didn’t expect it. “That– That’s– It’s a tale, of sorts. About a wizard. A rather old and powerful wizard. Very lonely, for many years. But one day a knight stumbles upon his tower. Which is impossible because he’s enchanted the entire forest to attract the most terrible monsters and beasts. Right ungodly things. So, there should be no knight. And yet there she stands, at the foot of his tower, covered in blood and viscera and–”

Gale and Lae’zel lock eyes, and it is as though the world has slowed. The mountains, the wind, their blowing hair. 

He continues, clearly flustered, “It’s something of a, well, a romance. Pained. They are both very pained. She came to the forest to die, but, she is too powerful. Nothing can best her. And the wizard is so old and feels . . . Well. It’s a very good book. Or text, rather. I shan't spoil it,” and he grins. But weakly.

Lae'zel wonders why this knight wants to die. Does she have no goddess? No purpose? No objectives? 

But the desire to immolate. Lae’zel has only known this feeling in relation to this human: when she beholds him. His gentle brown eyes.

She turns and starts back to her tent again, says, “We are flesh-bonded now. I will want sex again, but not like whatever it is that we have done. I do not want your– trickery again.”

“Trickery ? Lae’zel–”

She stopped mid-track. Frustrated, “We have sated ourselves.” 

“That’s–” but then Gale stopped. Sighed. “Shame. I wanted to ask if I could show you how to use magic. Feel the weave.” 

He moved his hand around in the air like conducting, and a gentle glow the color of lilac appeared. Lavender strands like threads, or falling sand.

Then he closed his palm shut, and the glow died out. 

“Trickery . . .” he said to himself. “Hm.”

He looked at her, just looked for a little while, then he said, “You put the stars to shame.”

Like a blow. 

Like her image of the burning wasteland where he punched and punched her. She did not tell him the words in her head. Zhak vo'n'ash duj. Source of my bruises. 

Because Gale Dekarios couldn’t be. Not yet. 

Tomorrow, they would arrive at the crèche within Rosymorn Monastery. They did not know that they would leave it changed. Leave it bloody and speechless. 

Gale would puke as they exited the monastery doors, at the magnitude of what they’d all done, and the rest would be grave or shaking or crying. And Lae’zel would not speak for days and days, even as they moved towards the shadows and the land that was dead.

Lae’zel would have to reckon, as Gale was now reckoning, with a loss of a love so great it could not be put into words. 

They would walk in tandem through these hells as something more than companions. Embers, sizzling and flickering through the night, and coming together to touch.