Unleash Me

Chapter 9

She stood in the dark of the Faith-Leap Trial of the Gauntlet, staring broodingly at the sacrificial bowl that a bust of Shar held in its pale white arms, watching the small pool of dark red blood that Shadowheart had summoned forth from her palm with a blade slowly ripple.

Taking a breath, she lifted her gaze to cast it out into the darkness that stretched out to an unknown distance before her, and as the rest of her companions watched her in silence, she walked slowly towards the ledge beside her. Once she reached its edge, she looked down and out, her eyes finding nothing but incorporeal darkness that seemed to fall down into an eternity of nothingness and silence.

"Alright," she whispered to herself resolutely, trying to muster up a courage that she did not feel, and began to step forward into the black void. But as she did, a hand suddenly gripped her forearm and pulled her back.

"Wait."

Startled, she looked down at the hand that was holding her arm firmly, and then up into a face that was staring with narrowed, focused eyes out into the unnatural dark. As he scanned the gloom, Gale stepped closer towards her, his hand staying on her arm as he spoke quietly.

"Look," he said, and pointed out to where the barely perceptible outlines of massive statues of Shar rose up out of the dark at varying intervals of distance between them and their goal. "I can just teleport us to those. Much better than potentially taking a… very long walk off of a short pier, no?"

His voice was a low and flat murmur in the dark, the oppressive shadows seeming to both suppress and amplify the tones as he stood directly beside her. She looked up at him silently, watching as he kept his gaze trained ahead, feeling the prickles of uneasiness start to fester in her head as his expression remained flat and empty.

Something was off, she knew, and had been off from the moment that they had awoken that morning. It had been evidenced when she had opened her eyes sleepily to find him staring across the campfire at her in a brooding and heavy silence. There had been a set to his jaw that had instantly invoked a sense of aloofness, and his hard gaze had not gone unnoticed by their companions as they had all readied themselves to embark. When spoken to, he had only responded mono-syllabically, and had seemed to deeply resent having to expend even that tiny amount of effort to answer the words directed his way.

To his credit, Astarion had not shied away from remarking pointedly upon the wizard's mood, succinctly informing him that a goblin could teach him a thing or two about social niceties and to stop being such a cantankerous little bitch. The biting remarks had, shockingly, done nothing to alter the wizard's mood towards the better, and had -- again shockingly -- only seemed to have made it worse.

After a moment, she followed his gaze out to where he was pointing, and after sighting the closest two statues, she shook her head.

"Your range isn't going to be enough to get us to the gem," she murmured back, "And I would prefer not to spend the rest of my days calling a Shar statue home."

Gale's expression remained fixed and inscrutable at this, although he did finally lower his gaze to find hers. When he did, his eyes were dark and guarded, and in the same flat monotone, he replied.

"I can cast it more than once, and one of us can go the rest of the distance once we make it to the statue."

And then his hands were raising to his chest, and before she could speak a word of dissent, he cast the spell.

"Mundai ianua," he whispered, and then something that felt akin to a roped arrow sank into her solar plexus and yanked her into the void.

She tried to steel herself against the disorienting feeling that she knew that the spell would invoke, tried to prepare herself for the nauseating dizziness that she knew would follow, but when her feet landed on the narrow precipice that framed the back of the statue's base, the sudden lurch of reality made her stumble.