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“Why is love intensified by absence? Long ago, men went to sea and women wait for them, standing on the edge of the water, standing in the horizon for the tiny ship.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
Gale is in his kitchen when she arrives. She stands and watches him for a millennia as he deftly slices a summer squash into thick half-moons, drizzling oil and sprinkling salt. He lavishes the same care and attention on the simple dish as he does while puzzling out the arcane mysteries of the Weave, and she loves him for it. She remembers to tell him, this time. Last time she forgot. They were arguing again - they often argue, now - about the scale of his ambition, his hunger for forbidden magic. Age has not tempered his enthusiasm for the arcane arts that lie beyond his reach and he has been sulking, like a child, not even offering due deference when he draws on her power. She meant to stay away. But there he is, puttering about in his tower, so small and so human. How can she not love him?
"I love seeing you like this," Mystra says, announcing her presence. It is a mark of how comfortable he has grown around her that he does not jump at her voice and fall to his knees like he would have done years (minutes?) ago. Instead he graces her with a smile, flung over his shoulder like a man greeting his wife after a day of work, and all is forgiven.
"Cooking?" Gale laughs, running a hand through his silver-streaked hair. "Barefoot and unshaven?"
She slips her arms around his waist and inhales the scent of him, presses her nose into nape of his neck. Sweat and salt and rosemary. Echoes of her own silvermist and the white tobacco cologne he has favoured since his beard came in. "Peaceful," she corrects him. "Contented."
"How could I be anything but, with you here?" He asks, slipping around in her arms to face her. How indeed? His breath is warm and wet on her neck; so refreshing. She drinks him in, her personal oasis. "It's been a while," he says. "And yes, I deserved it."
"How long is a while?" Mystra asks.
"A few tendays," he replies.
"Tell me about them," she says, and he does, indulging her in all the little mortal trivia she so loves to hear. He wrote a paper. A letter from his mother arrived; she is painting again. Tara gave a concert his neighbours did not appreciate. The orange tree on his balcony is flourishing. He missed her. He's sorry. He's a mortal fool, and knows she loves him for it. (That's the problem.)
"Tell me about yours," Gale says, when all-too-soon the minutiae has run out. Mystra indulges him. She tells him about her manipulation of the Weave, of her supervision of magic and knowledge and the cosmic responsibility she tends to like he tends to his orange tree. He listens, enraptured, until the sky grows dark and there is a burning, acrid smell in the air. Mystra dismisses whatever it is with barely a crackle of magic and thinks no more of it. She is with her Chosen and all is right with the world.
Much later, when she is lying on his bed, head on his chest, she hears his stomach produce a rumbling sound, like Tara when she purrs. (Tara does not purr in Mystra's presence. Mystra would like her to, is fascinated by her, would like to plunge her hands into that fur and count every feather. Tara's hackles raise when she sees her, and no longer averts her gaze in deference to the Goddess of Magic as she did when Gale was young. It is no matter. A cat may look at a king.)
Tara is waiting outside when Mystra exits the bedroom, leaving Gale asleep behind her. They do not usually speak, but tonight she lingers in the doorway.
"He's not a god," the tressym says, inexplicably cross. "He has to eat." Then she stalks past Mystra and curls up in the space she abandoned, settled over his heart.
*
Gale finds his first grey hair and, half-joking, prays to her for its removal. She does not oblige him. She likes every silvered shooting star that streaks over his head and tells him so, kissing each one in turn. When she returns to the astral plane she will memorialize them all into a new constellation just for him.
"When I am as old and grey as Elminster," he teases, "will you still kiss me?"
Mystra laughs. "Elminster isn't old."
*
"I am nearing thirty," Gale laughs, trying to take the object from her hands. She bats him away, mirroring his smile. "You cannot blame me for being embarrassed at having her sit in scrutiny of anyone, let alone my goddess."
Her. Mystra looks at her stolen prize; a bundle of cloth and down and embroidery floss she found tucked away on a high shelf. The velvet fabric is stained and threadbare in places. It had caught her eye as being out of place in his new tower full of wonderful toys, and now she's fascinated by it. "What is it?
" She is a cat," he explains, somewhat nonsensically as she studies the stitching. "I've had her since I was a babe - before Tara, even. My mother made her for me."
"Morena is a good craftswoman," Mystra argues, presenting the collection of rags back to him. "This is falling apart. Why does she not make a new one to replace the old?"
"Oh, she could never be replaced so easily," Gale says, take it back from her and holding it like a babe. "There was a time I couldn't sleep without her. She has born the brunt of my clumsy affections; dragged through puddles, left in gardens, wept on, hugged too tightly until her stuffing burst... she had beaded eyes once, they've been lost to time." He sighs, stroking a finger across the velvet. "'Falling apart' is a bit harsh, though, my darling. 'Well-loved', I would say."
"Loved to destruction," she teases. "I hope you're more careful with Tara."
"Oh, Tara has endured her fair share of being wept on, though I've never dragged her through a puddle." Gale returns the thing - cat - to the high shelf. The blush in his cheeks is distractingly tempting. "I can show you much more impressive things, my love."
He does attempt to do so; magic trinkets, new workings of spells, new inventions of pleasure in the astral plane. She keeps thinking back to the forlorn bundle of rags, loved so hard as to be unrecognisable.
*
Mystra loves the parts of Gale he shies away from; his scent, the soft hair of his chest, the wonderful fat on his stomach and thighs. He loves to be taken in the Weave, but she loves him here, warm-blooded and inelegant and exquisitely human. She adores every moan and sigh and snore he tries to suppress, collects them like a magpie hoarding trinkets. And always, there is something new to add to her hoard.
"How long has there been a hole in your ear?" She asks, after lavishing it with her tongue.
He laughs her second-favourite laugh; a self-conscious trill. "A few tendays." A while, her mind supplies. "Tara says I'm making up for lost teenage rebellion, and at least it's not a gold hoop."
It's a small silver stud that rests in his earlobe. Tasteful. She smirks, channels a minute portion of the Weave around it until it molds itself quite willingly into a seven-pointed star. Her star, for her Chosen.
"You've put a tag on me," Gale accuses her later, preening at his reflection in silvered glass. "Like a dog." He loves it. He tells her so with his body, bringing her to new heights of pleasure, her clever, clever student.
Mystra watches as he's honoured at Blackstaff Academy for some achievement or other. The earring glints in the light streaming through stained glass windows of her likeness. Lilac dances over the planes of his face. Mine, she thinks. Mine, mine, mine.
"So precocious," a member of the faculty murmurs. "Just one-and-twenty."
*
Mortal time escapes Mystra; once she thinks she has spent mere moments contemplating an arcane knot, and when she unties it, satisfied and proud of her work, she wants to tell her new Chosen about it. She is baffled to find him on his knees, slumped at the base of her shrine, cheeks streaked with wet.
"My dearest," she says to him, kneeling so they are physically at the same level. "What has befallen you, that you weep so?"
Gale breathes her name, calls her goddess, and she watches greedily as her mere presence breathes life back into him. She takes him into the heart of the Weave, eager to show off the problem that had been plaguing her and the solution she arrived at. He marvels, asks questions, but does not offer opinion as he might once have done.
He is different, she realises slowly, watching him manipulate the Weave around them with clumsy, eager fingers. There is hair on his chin that wasn't there the last time they spoke. A minute scar by his left eyebrow. He's a little more... deferential , a little more humble. As if he fears he's out of favour, though nothing could be further from the truth. When she presses him on it, he admits that her absence scared him.
"Remind me," she asks Elminster later. "How long is a year? Put it in context."
Elminster sighs. "I have lived over three hundred of them."
"And Gale?"
When he speaks, it is with the weight of all those years hanging heavy in his voice. "Nineteen."
*
When Gale shyly admits that he's never been kissed, Mystra can't help herself reaching out to steal it. It's all the mortal pleasures she half remembers - the last chocolate in the box, the cream on top of the milk, the thrill of perfect, untrodden snow. She is greedy for him, this wizard, this prodigy, this boy. She suffuses the kiss with gratitude. Mortals have such small souls, and he has dedicated every part of his to her worship. How could she not love him? How could she not want to devour him?
Gale instills a renewed love of magic in her. Everything is new, seen through his eyes, everything is filled with potential. He is experiment and curiosity, mischief and wonder, he is boundless enthusiasm and adoring eyes. Mystra takes his hand and drags him through the cosmos, through pools filled with velvet night sky and lilypad-stars. He cannot tire so easily in the Astral Plane, mortal body long forgotten in favour of magic and wonder and worship.
When she does return him to his body it is different to how she remembers it; a little gaunt, a little sallow. Gale sleeps almost immediately, a young tressym curled up by his side. Mystra puts out a hand to pet her - she loves creatures of magic. The creature submits, head bowed in deference, whiskers twitching nervously.
"Ask me what it is you want to ask," Mystra tells her, benevolent. "You have my leave."
The tressym takes a moment to calm herself. She licks a paw, feigning nonchalance. "I hope you will remember that he is mortal, my lady," she says eventually. "It takes a lot out of a body to travel in the Astral Plane. And he's so young."
"I will remember," Mystra says. "I promise."
*
"Gale is very young," Elminster says, after a pause Mystra assumes was deliberately long. She wouldn't normally notice, but she makes an effort for her Chosen.
"What is young?" She asks.
Elminster matches her gaze audaciously, blue eyes boring into hers. "Your mortal self -Caitlin Moonsong - was young," he reminds her.
Mystra thinks about Caitlin Moonsong, and how much she would have liked to be kissed.