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Chapter 3: A Touch Divine
Prologue
This chapter, or parts of it, was never meant to be written.
The story that follows was meant to remain tucked away in a letter I never sent, hidden between the pages of The Song of the Seven Stars, where dust and time might soften its edges. But Lily found it—this morning, in fact—while searching for something entirely different (though I’ve long suspected she sometimes goes looking for relics of me on purpose).
She read the letter without a word, then slid it across the table to rest beside my teacup. “You should include her,” she said. “It makes you more… human.” That smile—half challenge, half affection—curved her lips, the one I can never quite resist. Of course, coming from her, “human” is rarely a compliment. And yet, I took it as one.
I told her it was a distraction. She disagreed.
“First love,” she said, “is a spell we all cast at least once. Sometimes it takes. Sometimes it burns.”
So, dear reader, I ask for your indulgence. This chapter may not offer revelations about the gods or the high secrets of the Weave. But it does contain something I lost along the way, for a spell: wonder, laughter, and the quiet ache of a road not taken.
This is the story of Aelin Morae—my first kiss, my first love. The one who taught me to be human before I ever sought to become divine.
Now, let us begin.
*****
There exists a certain kind of trouble reserved for prodigies—a trouble that is neither loud nor chaotic, but instead a quiet, persistent undermining of authority. I was not rebellious; I was simply correct. In the realm of academia, this could be more dangerous than defiance.
By the age of twelve, I had rewritten the summoning matrices in three fundamental texts—not in pursuit of glory, but because the existing logic was flawed, careless, and lacking elegance. When I corrected the glyphs during a class demonstration, my instructor turned a deep shade resembling boiled wine and accused me of arrogance.
I informed him, quite gently, that he ought to re-read Kalthorne’s Secondary Principles, which he had misquoted in front of the class. I then offered him my annotated copy.
I was not popular.
They called me a teacher’s pet, though the Blackstaff never coddled me. Quite the opposite. When word of my “corrective tendencies” reached him, he summoned me at once—not to scold, but to test. He conjured a spell lattice I had never seen before and asked me what was missing.
I spent ten minutes adjusting the weave, muttering to myself in an iambic rhythm to keep the pattern straight. When I was done, he grunted, waved a hand, and dismissed me with, “A fair effort for an apprentice.”
Despite its brusque delivery, I took this as encouragement—a sacred mandate.
From that moment on, I frequently found myself in his chambers—not as a student, but as an inquisitive enigma. He presented me with fragments of lore without context, grimoires consumed by fire, riddles in Deep Speech, and once, a book that bit me. I eagerly absorbed every piece.
The other instructors despaired.
I was too young for senior lectures yet too advanced for junior ones. My questions often revealed their rusty grasp of fundamental principles. I quoted forgotten texts and restructured defensive wards to resonate with the caster’s breath, rather than merely echoing.
No one wishes to befriend the boy who corrects sigils and completes your incantations. Even fewer desire to sit beside the child who scribbles his own spells in the margins of prescribed texts.
I felt it keenly—though I never let it show.
Except in my casting.
My magic was flourished, always. I began lacing my incantations with meter—hexameter, at one point, until I realized it made counterspelling me so hellishly difficult that I abandoned it out of pity for those assigned the task. I constructed shields with mirrored stanzas. Conjured light to match the rhythm of a sonnet I’d written on longing.
I told myself it was an homage to my mother—her love of language, of beauty, of form. But truthfully, I think I just needed something to anchor me. Something human in a world that increasingly asked me to be something else.
That was when I met Aelin. I was seventeen.
She was a year or so older, studying to enter the ranks of the Watchful Order, and already so clearly unsuited for it that even I could tell. She laughed too often, took her notes in brightly colored ink, and once turned a lecture on planar convergence into a limerick that scandalized half the tower.
She was utterly, gloriously unserious—and that, I think, was why I noticed her. Or why she noticed me.
“Do you always scowl at your scrolls like they insulted your ancestors?” she asked one afternoon, catching me mid-glare at a treatise on sigil decay.
“I wasn’t scowling,” I replied. “I was thinking.”
“Same thing, really,” she said, and sat beside me. She had wild ginger hair that defied every braid, and eyes that shimmered like dew caught on fresh mint.
When I spoke of stars and theory, she laughed and told me to drink my tea before it cooled. Always with cinnamon—never enough, she’d say, grinning as she added more. That scent still makes something in me pause, even now. It was the first time I knew the magic of something entirely mortal: her fingers brushing mine, the weight of her gaze as she told me I thought too much. She didn’t ask me to be brilliant. She made me laugh.
Tara adored her, as she always seemed to have a treat tucked into the sleeve of her robes. Tara slept on her velvet cloak more than once, and not a single complaint ever passed Aelin’s lips about the shedding.
I remember that, strangely. That she never minded being slightly inconvenienced by joy. When I muttered about constellations and transmutation matrices, she’d only smile and say, “Tell me a story instead.”
I was almost eighteen when she kissed me for the first time.
We were in the reading room atop the south tower, where the walls were all windowpanes and dust motes hung like constellations in the light. She had smuggled in tea—cinnamon, as always—and a stolen sweetbread wrapped in a napkin embroidered with the Tower’s crest. We weren’t supposed to be there after curfew, but Aelin had a gift for laughing in the face of rules until they bent to her will.
She was reading aloud from some old epic, and I—fool that I was—was pretending to follow the text while watching her mouth form every word. When she paused to sip her tea, she looked over and said, “You’re not listening at all.”
“I am,” I lied, and she smiled. “You’re watching me.”
“That too,” I admitted.
And then she kissed me—suddenly, without hesitation, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And perhaps it was. She always made things feel—no, made me feel—both incredibly special and utterly ordinary. Not the prodigious young mage, but the smitten young man.
That night we didn’t go back to our dormitories. We stayed in the tower, curled together beneath her cloak—the velvet one Tara would come to claim as her throne. We talked, we kissed, and somewhere between our laughter and the hush of midnight, we crossed the threshold from childhood to something else. Something sacred.
She was my first. And I hers.
It was not perfect. Not polished. It was tender, awkward, real. Nervous, and slow, and full of whispered questions. But gods, it was beautiful. She trembled, and I kissed her tears when they came—not from fear or regret, but from wonder, I think. There was no magic in it, and yet it remains, perhaps, the most spellbound I’ve ever been. I remember how, afterward, she pressed a kiss to the corner of my mouth like a seal. Like a promise.
I thought we had time. I thought we were beginning. But, I traded the comfort of her arms for the chill of arcane secrets, and in that quiet hunger, I mistook absence for purpose—until Mystra took me by the hand and called it devotion.
When Mystra’s whispers began to curl around my dreams, I turned toward them. I began to spend nights in the library instead of with her. I left her notes instead of words. Spellbooks instead of stories. Tara clicked her tongue at me in reproach. “She is the only one who loves you,” she said, voice low, eyes gleaming like twin embers. “Not for your brilliance. Not for your potential. Just you. And you’re trading her for a goddess who only sees what she can take.”
Tara was right about one thing. When she first called to me, Mystra, I answered.
I cast alone in the upper halls, where the latticework of wards shimmered so thin they let in starlight, and I began to feel her presence.
The Weave would tremble differently around me. Not broken—but breathing.
Sometimes, a spell would finish itself, as if guided by a second hand.
Sometimes, my fingers moved in gestures I had not learned, patterns that came as instinct, not instruction.
And once—just once—when I was meditating in the sanctum above the atrium, I felt warmth slide along my spine like the trailing end of a lover’s hand. Not heat. Not magic. Something older. Something watching.
Aelin noticed. She saw me in a way no one else bothered to.
“You look for her in everything now,” she said. “I don’t think you even notice it.”
“She is everything,” I said. “Don’t you feel it? The way the Weave changes when you call her name?”
She had only smiled, sadly. “I don’t, Gale. I think you’re imagining things.”
What could I say? That the Weave flirted with me? That my spells turned lyrical without my will? That the stars themselves felt closer when I whispered poetry into my casting?
It was not madness. It was communion.
I knew her name. I knew the shape she left behind. A melody unfinished. A presence at the edge of invocation. If she was watching, it was through mirrors. Through frost on the glass.
They said Mystra was dead—or diminished. Broken across the planes. Her Chosen scattered or slain, the Weave itself fraying like old silk. And yet, in quiet moments, I felt her rebuilding herself through me, nurtured by my benedictions.
That thought thrilled me. Consumed me. And it shaped everything that followed.
I began casting spells not for power, not even for theory, but to catch glimpses of her. I would structure incantations like sonnets—place her echoes at the volta, wrap the arcane logic in the lilt of longing. Every incantation, every scroll I penned, every sleepless night spent coaxing the impossible into being—I did for her. I thought if I could just say it right, she would answer.
And sometimes, I thought she did.
Not in words. Not yet. But in results.
Spells I had no right to command came easily.
Sigils shimmered where there was no chalk. Light responded to sorrow. A wish I only imagined whispered through my dreams, folding space like paper.
I was in love—not with Aelin, but with a goddess I had never touched.
Mystra became the silence between syllables, the gleam at the edge of every spell.
She was the shape my magic bent toward, the breath I held at the height of incantation.
Not a mentor. Not even a deity.
She was desire, distilled. The ache of the unattainable, cloaked in stars.
I wrote her odes. Hid them in my notebooks between diagrams and formulae. I imagined her hair was made of runes, her eyes pale as burned-out stars. I conjured her in metaphor—the soft-footed sovereign of silence, the breath before the word.
It was absurd. I knew it.
And yet… I believed she saw me.
She never spoke. Never touched. But I knew the difference between ordinary magic and hers.
The stewards of the Tower noticed the change. At first, they praised my devotion, mistaking it for the bright-eyed fervor of a gifted student seeking meaning in the divine.
But devotion can sour into obsession.
I spoke of Mystra too often, too intimately, as if she were not a goddess but a presence in my bed, a breath at my ear. My spells grew stronger, stranger. I began to shape magic not as they taught, but as I felt it—intuitively, instinctively, as though she whispered each incantation into my soul.
Aelin and I drifted apart.
I postponed plans. Declined invitations to wander the city. Slept through classes we once shared. I almost didn’t meet her the day she told me—an early spring day that should have belonged to promises.
The first crocuses had pushed their way through the stone cracks near the tower’s outer garden, and she had that look again—that shine in her eyes like she was already halfway gone. She sat beside me on the steps outside the lecture hall, knees drawn up beneath her cloak, her journal open but forgotten in her lap. The air still held the chill of winter, but her smile was all sunlight.
“I’m leaving,” Aelin said, not looking at me, her fingers tracing the spiral stamped into the journal’s cover. “Not just the Tower. I mean… leaving this path.”
I felt the magic drain from my limbs, leaving behind only the ache of understanding. “What do you mean?” I asked, though I already knew.
She glanced sideways, her curls tumbling loose from the ribbon she never tied properly. “I mean—I think wizardry, for me, was a means to an end. I wanted to understand things. But lately, I’m starting to feel like it’s only made me want to control them. Pin every truth to a page. Measure, dissect, repeat. But stories… stories breathe. They live in people, not spellbooks.”
I stared at her, dumb with the kind of grief you can’t name.
“Oghma’s temples have taken me in,” she said softly. “They’re sending me to Calimport first. Then perhaps to Halruaa, or back to Candlekeep. I’ll follow the tales wherever they take me.”
“And leave this behind?” I asked. “The arcane, the work we’ve done together?”
She touched my hand. “Not leave. Just… walk another way. One with more joy. One where I don’t wake every morning already anxious about how I’ll be tested next.”
Then she leaned in and pressed her forehead to mine, eyes shining.
“I’ll miss you, Gale. But I can’t stay. I don’t like the way this place turns wonder into hunger.”
I didn’t kiss her. I should have. But I think I knew, even then, that this was the kind of goodbye that would echo forever if I gave it weight.
So instead, I said, “I’ll write. Send messages.”
I never did.
I told myself she would be happier without me. That I was bound for something greater. That the Weave had called me, and I had no right to answer anything else.
But sometimes, even now, I dream of her walking away down a sunlit road, arms full of books, her hair catching fire in the light. She never looks back.
And when the scent of cinnamon drifts through a room, when Liri doodles in her spellbooks in brightly colored ink,
I feel that old ache stir—sharp and sweet as a forgotten song.
It passes, as all things do. But for a breath, I’m twenty again, watching her vanish into the sun.
The first person I ever loved. The first thing I ever lost to magic.