Chapter Text
Wyll is nineteen years old. The road is long and open. He carries a mirror with him.
Just yesterday he’d parlayed with a tribe of trolls. They’d been gorging themselves on livestock, and—if the elders of the local village were to be believed—on a few missing shepherds as well. Wyll had made them see sense: first through careful diplomacy, and then at the tip of his blade. Which circles back around to a kind of diplomacy, really. You have to meet the locals where they are.
The villagers had been very grateful. Perhaps he should have asked for their help with the wound.
It tears at his side until blood seeps through the bandages. He swears and pulls off the road, steps heavy. Collapses against an old farm fence. His body feels hot and cold by turns.
He knows very little of medicine. He has no potions at all.
He rebandages himself, then closes his eyes for a spell. He’d meant to only rest a moment, but instead the dreams find him: a star in a chasm. A girl running down the boulevards of the Upper City, pondering the gift she’ll buy for her brother’s birthday. A cleric washing her feet at the Open Hand Temple, wondering if she’ll ever be able to give a sermon without stuttering. A man on his knees somewhere in the Lower City, staring at his pale hands, wishing for it all to be over as the lash finds his back again and again—
Wyll jolts awake. The Gate fades to a murmur in the back of his mind. For all of the city’s pain—all its terror—waking from it feels like a loss. If he were home, he could try to find the suffering ones. He could try to help.
The map beats against his mind every day. It begs him: go back, go back, go back.
Without much conscious thought, he pulls the hand mirror from his pack. He winces at the sight of himself: clammy, the sweat heavy on his brow.
His reflection’s features twist without his input. Its voice comes like a battering ram: an urgency he’s never heard there before. “He is gone! He’s left the city. He’s unleashed himself on the world, his darkest deeds unpunished—”
“Slow down!” Wyll rasps. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
His reflection growls: an animal sound. The whites of its eyes seem unnaturally stark, glowing against Wyll’s skin.
“The Knights! Their agent. He is—I cannot feel him anymore.”
“He?” Wyll says. His mouth is dry. His head’s beginning to spin. “What do you mean, he? You never told me you were looking for a person.”
His reflection snaps its jaws, a baited dog. “He is not—”
It stills.
Wyll’s eyelids flutter. His side throbs.
Finally, the Heart corrects itself. Pain drags up through its voice like water from a very deep well.
“It. It is not a person.”
“Alright,” Wyll says. Exhaustion swells over him, a rising tide. The air is clean and mild. “I can’t do a godsdamn thing about that, you know. I can’t—I can’t do much of anything for the city anymore.”
Save defend its borders. Beat back the frontiers.
He drifts for a moment. The road unspools in front of him. The sound of rushing water fills his head: that strange terror. The idea that the star could—without preservation, without his defense—go out.
“Wyll,” the Heart says. Its voice is rough and low. It’s never used his name before. “You need to clean the wound out with stole-grass. It grows in abundance along the southern Coast.”
Wyll frowns. Herb-wisdom doesn’t sound right coming from the city’s voice. It’s an oddly personal recommendation, at that: no grand declarations about the drifting thoughts of the citizenry. No pattern of streets like spider webbing.
“How would you know that?” he slurs.
“I was not always the Heart of the Gate. I once traveled with a friend who was…not unlike yourself.”
Wyll’s reflection angles its head. It hardens its jaw as though it’s said too much. “Now rise, boy. Live to defend the Gate another day.”
The command hooks something inside of him—instinctive, or drilled in by years of martial training, or a mix between the two. He crawls along the roadside until he finds the herbs he needs.
Exile can’t last forever, he knows. He was born to protect the Gate.
***
Wyll is twenty-four years old. His body’s not his own. Great horns rise from his skull, hard and glinting black. He doesn't regret it—can’t, with Karlach sitting next to him by the fire—but he’s sick of being tossed around like a rowboat on the Sea of Swords.
He’s growing tired of voices in his head.
“We cannot trust our own minds!” Lae’zel spits over the campfire’s crackle. “We are infected, our psychic defenses useless. A dreamwalker must be treated as a hostile actor!”
Karlach’s tail twitches unhappily. “I know, Lae, but they’re sort of all we’ve got. If they’re telling the truth about holding back the worms in our heads—”
“We have no reason to believe them. How are we to know we are not a part of some greater scheme?”
And on and on it goes. Wyll rebandages his hand by firelight, wincing as the stalks of stolegrass pull away from his skin. An acid splash had disarmed him in the goblin camp. A light punishment, all things considered. By contrast, Shadowheart had spent all afternoon reconstructing Gale’s ribcage.
“What say our intrepid leader?” Gale rasps now. He’s looking drawn—pale—but wholly in one piece. Worth every drop of the curative magic they’d been rationing so carefully.
Wyll sighs. He begins to wrap the new bandage around his wrist. “I don’t much like it, myself. But I’ve been surprised before: a strange voice in the darkness can sometimes turn out to be an unconventional friend.”
If only, he thinks wryly, the Dream Visitor had shown mercy and appeared as someone other than Great Aunt Eurinda, who looks rather distressing in full plate. Perhaps the Visitor had drawn from his many memories of her lectures—table manners, appropriate greetings at luncheons versus high teas—and assumed she was a source of great wisdom in his life.
Still: it could have been much worse. He imagines opening his eyes to that bright and melting landscape to see Father looming there.
Standing over him. Offering his protection. His eyes never moving to Wyll’s horns.
He shakes his head to clear it, tying off the bandage. Then he looks up to find his companions still watching him. Wind rustles the trees, a darkness beyond.
“What? What did I say?”
“Oh, nothing, dear.” Astarion stretches out his long legs, fireflies winking around his white curls. His lashes flutter, more an attempt to needle than flirt. “Just that the rest of us might not be quite so eager to sign off on contracts from grasping hands in the dark.”
Wyll jolts. “That’s not…”
That’s not what he’d meant. That’s never—he’ll call Mizora a friend the day the hells collapse together and burn the sky down.
But he hasn’t told them all, just yet, about the voice of the Gate. His buried star, cavernous in the heart of him. Mizora makes herself known whether he wills it or not. The Heart has been his solitary secret since he was ten years old.
“I don’t mean Mizora,” he settles on. “And never fear: I mean to treat the Visitor cautiously.”
“So say we all,” Astarion drawls. He tilts his head, and those sharp eyes pin Wyll down. Curious. Considering.
Their band drifts off to bed one by one. Shadowheart stops him, her small hand curling around his arm.
“Let me see the wound. I think I’ve recovered enough power to take the edge off.”
He frowns. “You don’t need to. We have to save what’s left for tomorrow. Those gnolls—”
“Shut up, Wyll,” she tells him flatly. “Don’t be a hero.”
She touches his hand through the bandages, and his skin goes briefly cold: an icy midnight. A night without stars.
Shar’s void is different from the underground chasm in his dreams. Still: Wyll recognizes a resonance between the two. An absence. An overwhelming sense of loss.
The Heart of the Gate had been a person once. Had it known love? Had it lost it?
“Thank you,” he says. “You know, I’m used to traveling alone.”
“Really?” Shadowheart says wryly, already halfway to her tent. “You’d never guess.”
He watches her go, standing motionless in the middle of camp for longer than he’d care to admit. Then, alone, he returns to the fireside. He pulls out his mirror, bracing himself for the sight of his horns. Needs must.
He opens himself to the hurried patter of feet on cobblestone. A map built of minds. A key.
“The Gate bends towards tyranny disguised as protection,” his reflection says. “It will not be long now. What news from the road?”
“The Visitor claims to be protecting us. Do you know if that’s true?”
His reflection snarls, an absent-minded gesture. Wyll’s grown to recognize the difference between its discontent and its true rages. Both are sucking, smoldering things, but only the latter sends sympathetic shudders down his spine.
“I can sense very little beyond the city’s borders,” the Heart says. “You are my only window. My only ally, my only…” It hesitates, its eyes flickering over Wyll’s changed face. Almost tender.
It’s strange, after all this time: to feel his mirror looking back at him. A comforting imposition.
“Best not let Lae’zel hear you talking to yourself,” Astarion says, making Wyll jump a foot in the air. “She’ll assume you’re succumbing to a darker force than vanity.”
Wyll shoves the mirror into his pack. “How in the hells did you—”
“I’m very subtle.” Astarion sits beside him with great aplomb, uncomfortably close—examining his nails. “But you should probably work on your situational awareness if you’re going to be a total weirdo out where anyone can see you. Darling.”
Astarion had come right up behind him. Wyll hadn’t caught even a glimpse. He’d thought—he could’ve sworn—
“I was just trying to get used to the horns,” he mutters.
“And they do look delicious. But I’m not sure it’s much of a remedy, dithering to yourself about…city borders and strange windows.” His gaze strikes fast, then slides away again.
The moon rides full over the treetops.
Wyll’s heart thuds in his chest. He’d always talked to mirrors in private. He hadn’t considered, all this time, that the mirror’s contributions could’ve been spilling from his own mouth.
His breath catches in his throat. He imagines himself at fourteen, his lips bared in a snarl. His neck tilting far as it will go. A boy alone in his bedroom, his body moving without his knowledge or consent.
His spine runs cold.
He takes a deep breath, shaking off an unjustified fear. The star is an ally. It has to be. The Heart of the city that bids Wyll return.
And he’s so close, now, drawing nearer to the Gate every day. After seven years of hearing the city’s dreams in his head—the rich and the poor, their ever-churning desperation, their sweet loves and their burning desires—he can finally heed their call.
Why else would the Heart have found him, all those years ago? Why else would all of this have happened to him; why else would he have needed Mizora’s power? He was born to protect the Gate.
“I have responsibilities,” he says carefully, “that go beyond my pact. I owe other fealties.”
Astarion seems uninterested in pressing. He tosses back his curls, deceptively careless. “Don’t worry so much, dear. You’re hardly the oddest duck in our traveling freak show.”
“Not that you’d know,” Wyll manages. “You’re perfectly normal, saer magistrate.”
“Quite.” Astarion stands with a stretch, his arms unfolding gracefully above his head. “In any case, I can hardly blame a man with your looks for becoming obsessed with his own reflection. I’ve been down that road before.”
“How strange,” Wyll says mildly. “If that’s the case, you’d think I’d have seen you coming. In the mirror, I mean.”
Astarion’s chest stops moving. His shoulders bunch high around his neck.
“Peace, Astarion,” Wyll says, and means it. “You’re hardly our oddest duck.”
***
Not a month later, he stands inside the Astral Prism on Vlaakith’s orders. She’d commanded him to kill his savior.
“Without me, you’d become a mindflayer before your next dawn,” Aunt Eurinda says. She stands straighter than he’d ever seen her stand in life. Her armor gleams golden, and the sheer incongruity of it all keeps Wyll’s head leveler than a thousand cautions from his party ever could.
“We just need to know who you are,” Wyll says. “If you’d trust us—”
He steps forward, and something between them ripples. Eurinda’s face falls.
The city shrieks in his head: the Heart, beating faster. The chasm collapsing, water rushing in. He doubles over, suddenly sick.
Anger bubbles up inside of him, not his own, like water in the void, like the Heart baring its teeth, killer butcher parasite—
The Heart doesn’t rage alone.
“Traitor!” Eurinda booms, her face suddenly twisted with a contrasting fury, cold where the Heart runs hot. Painful purple, an almost-light, pulses around her edges. “I should have seen—thrall of a traitor!”
She thrusts out a hand, and Wyll’s thrown backward: out through the archway, skidding along dream rock that scrapes his skin all the same. He tumbles, end over end, the swirling sky growing closer, and oh gods he’s going to be thrown off their scrap of an island and into the churning void—
He rams into leather armor and cold skin. Astarion’s arms lock around Wyll’s chest, slowing him—rolling with him, sliding backwards until they come to a stop just in time. He hears pebbles skittering down the cosmic cliffside, just past Astarion’s shoulders.
They lie there, breathing hard. Karlach shouts in the distance. Lae’zel swears.
After a moment, Astarion props himself on his hand, his eyes wild. Strange lights give color to his cheeks. His hair is a mess of flyaways.
He stares down at Wyll, intrigued and offended both. The effect is quite charming, Wyll thinks—even seen through the blood that’s run down from his temple and into his eyes.
Wyll coughs a few times. “I don’t think the Visitor likes me overmuch.”
Astarion gives a disbelieving laugh. “Yes, well. You seem a regular chew toy for strange dark forces.”
He smears Wyll’s brow clean with a rough thumb, his gaze a prickling thing. “Just who in the hells are you, Wyll Ravengard?”
***
To Wyll’s immense relief, the Visitor doesn’t abandon them to die. Some necessity must bind them all together with a greater force than disgust can muster. The Visitor conveys cryptic wisdom to Shadowheart and tempts Gale with strange powers, but they never darken the doorstep of Wyll’s dreams again.
The Heart explains nothing—denies even being aware of the confrontation. But Wyll had felt its rage, racing through him like mounted Fists charging through the city gates. Like runners in the shop district, like the Chionthiar pounding against Wyrm’s Rock.
Why would the Heart lie to him? Why would his city lie?
The road is long and open. Mizora bids him save an asset, and despite everything—despite the urgency of their quest, despite the gods and monsters on their tail—his companions leap to his aid.
Sometimes he stays up late at night, thinking about it. It makes him want to pen heroic lays about Prince Haryk and his loyal knights. His band of brothers, his closest friends, separable by neither fire nor blood.
“I’m used to traveling alone,” he explains as he helps Halsin brew a smorgasbord of helpful potions.
Halsin merely nods, a comforting brusqueness, and Wyll wonders if he’s said this once or twice already.
He regains his magic in dribs and drabs. He helps people. He reads his heroic lays to Astarion, who makes a variety of disgusted noises and then leans in to kiss him on the road: quick pecks on his cheek, on his neck, when no one’s looking.
It’s enough, sometimes, to make him forget the city. To drown the Gate in a warm pleasure that scares as much as delights him.
But he can’t get carried away: the city needs him, now more than ever. A tyrant rules.
He sets foot in the Outer City and falls to knees, there on the dirt road into Rivington.
It’s a quake in the depths of him. It’s a note below hearing. It’s a city’s worth of sentience snapping between his neurons, lightning, life life life—
He keels over, laughing. Everything’s gone wrong, the city’s under a jackboot, the refugees go hungry, and his father—
His father—
“Easy, now,” Gale says, helping him to a sitting position. He’s muddying his robes, down here in the dirt with Wyll. “Easy. Er, shall I fetch Shadowheart? She’s gone ahead, but I’m sure it won’t be a—”
“I’m fine,” Wyll gasps. “I’m—”
He leans back on his hands and breathes in the smell: farm animals, meat spices, waste, and—just on the edge of his senses—the salt of the sea.
He gestures to the city on the horizon, past its high walls. “They just keep living, don’t they?”
His friends blink down at him. Frightened, which seems a kindness to him. Prince Haryk and his band of brothers.
Then Jaheira barks a laugh. She props her elbow on Astarion’s shoulder, to his annoyance—grins down at Wyll with a rueful energy he recognizes. “That we do, cub. Like ugly roots breaking up a foundation, growing back no matter what you throw at us. We’re a city of mean bastards, but you have to admire us for it, eh?”
Astarion gives a derisive sniff. “Emphasis on bastards.”
“Right,” Wyll says, grateful not to have to find the words himself. “Right.”
And there, sat down in wagon tracks and mud, he tells his friends about the Heart. About the city he was born to save.
They help him to his feet.
***
Wyll is twenty-four years old when he finds his father again.
He’d pictured the moment a thousand times; sought out blueprints in ballads and sonnets. Trilug Torn-Tooth returning to his tribe with the head of a traitor slung over his shoulder. Lady Ghorza begging her father’s forgiveness, his long-lost magic ring sitting cool in her hand.
He hadn’t pictured a cramped submersible, his father frail and empty, slumped over in his seat as far from Wyll as he can get. He hadn’t pictured Mizora’s spite: her minions slowing their escape to a crawl.
People had died because of him.
“Your father will soon realize his error,” Lae’zel says, sitting with her arms crossed beside him. Her thigh is gashed open, a parting gift from the fish folk. She gestures to Ulder with her chin, not even attempting to keep her voice down. “Anyone with an ounce of sense can see you for the warrior you are.”
Father’s eyes flicker to his, just briefly. Then away again.
Wyll searches for words of thanks and comes up dry. “Let’s just get to the inn. Sort it out there.”
Lae’zel apparently isn’t done yet. “You have made a thousand sacrifices: for the good of our collective, and for the safety of your own city. You began this work when you were but young. None may fault your courage, nor your commitment to the whole.”
“I don’t know about that,” Astarion says breezily from the front of the submersible, reclining under Jaheira’s ministrations. “There’s someone here who’s doing his level best to find fault, and damn any evidence contrariwise.”
Father moves as though to stand, his brow drawn and thunderous. His knees shake, and he falls back to his seat. The sight sends a bolt through Wyll’s heart.
“Peace, everyone,” he pleads. “Peace. There’s more left to do, yet.”
“Peace,” Lae’zel mutters. “Always this talk of peace. Never mind the shrapnel rotting in the wound.”
The submersible surfaces. They stumble back to the Elfsong, where the quality of conversation does not improve.
“My son, an unrepentant diabolist!” Father rails. “More than that: a devil. I’d prayed that perhaps on the road you’d have found some measure of peace; a way to make recompense. But to see you now—”
He breaks off, overcome. He sits stiffly on the edge of his bed. In the rain, all those years ago, Wyll hadn’t been able to tell if his father wept. Now, Ulder is dry-eyed, but he looks none the better for it. As though his tears had run dry long ago.
The suite is empty, save for them. His friends had left only at his urging.
“I’ve made recompense,” Wyll says quietly, though the word tastes strange—inexact—on his tongue. “Every day I’ve fought for the Gate. Just as I did at seventeen.”
“How am I to believe that, when you travel with a devil at your side? When you—” He gestures at Wyll’s horns, the ridges on his face, and Wyll feels himself a monster.
Condemned by the greatest man he’d ever known.
He slides to the floor, sitting with his back to Father’s bed. The mattress creaks as Father shifts, uncomfortably, away. Song and laughter rise from the tavern below.
Perhaps, in another world, they could talk together. Wyll could find the right words, and Father would hear him all the way through.
But Ulder is a man of action, a saddler of horses, and their conversations have always followed certain rhythms: grooves worn deep by responsibility. Anything else meant falling off the map.
“Can—can I just show you?” Wyll says. To his distress, his voice shakes. “I think it’d be easier. For the both of us.”
Father lets out a hard breath through his nose. But he doesn’t leave, and his legs keep still beside Wyll’s body. His hems are pressed neatly, and his boots are polished bright.
Wyll opens the tadpole connection. He puts himself and his father on their horses, riding out to Dusthawk Hill. Laughing, racing.
Then the sky turns like a kaleidoscope, sinks to night, and he looks down on the cultists linking hands. He shovels up every sensory memory; presses them into Ulder’s hands like an offering to some fickle pagan god. The sending stone hooking into his flesh. The curve of Mizora’s smile—her face, close, too close, too—tugging his leash, sealing his lips. Himself at nineteen, stumbling up and down the Coast, wounded. Feverish and confused.
After an eternity—after no time at all—the current of the connection shifts. Wyll doesn’t need to push the memories into his father’s arms anymore, because Ulder is pulling them from him: a frantic, grasping extraction. A voracious reader; a whirlpool eddy on the Chionthar.
Disbelieving. Horrified.
Wyll shows him the city, then. He takes Father's hand and walks him through the spider web map in his head, the one that’s grown inside of him since he was small. The baker, the jailer, the counting-house master, the thief. The source of his strange insight: a gift from the Heart. The city’s love for Wyll made real.
See? He wants to say. Not from the devil-deal at all. You misunderstood.
And then, insuppressible: You hurt me.
It hits him like a walloping blow. It rattles the connection between them. You hurt me. You caused me so much pain.
Father recoils from Wyll’s hurt, at first. Then—slowly and deliberately—he touches it again. Runs the fingers of his mind down its edges. Ulder Ravengard is many things, but he is not a coward.
The flood of their connection slows to a trickle, until nothing is left but the pain between them: great, darkening bruises of it. Blood just below the surface.
Wyll cuts the cord. Father’s crying, now. Great, sobbing gasps.
Wyll feels sick to his stomach, staring at his knees. He can’t muster up the courage to see his father like that: to see him frail and fallible and capable of great wrongs. He thinks it would tear him apart.
“My son,” Ulder says. “My son. Born to protect the Gate.”
