Work Text:
Weave, save me—! I am torn open and rent apart. I am consumed! This blight within devours my soul. My lungs burn—I cannot breathe.
Where is your gentle hand? I reach for your touch but am met with the chill of a void.
Where is your guidance? I cannot see my way through this clawing darkness.
Where is your voice? I cannot hear a single note of your wisdom, once so present but now foreign to my empty ears.
Mystra, your Chosen cries out—he seeks you, as he always did. Take this burden from me, my goddess, please!
✵
I remain stricken. My blood is naught but bile and rot.
Your silver fire is gone from my hands. I cannot cast of your power as I once did.
Am I not your Chosen? Have I not been your faithful servant?
Yet, in this absence it is as though I am cast aside, orphaned and forsaken with only my supplications for company, shunned as an apostate who can only utter the most useless of prayers.
For neither the Weave nor its Mother answer my broken cries.
It seems I have been left to wander the wilderness.
For how long, Mistress?
✵
Surely, you have not left my side entirely? I cannot fathom why you would—a lesson in humility I have learned, but in this solitude I am dying.
Where is your saving grace, your godly touch?
I cannot fathom why you would refuse me this simple plea: to hear your admonishment. I trust you would extend the grace of your reason to one who has shared with you so intimately of mind, body, and soul?
You would not be so cold as this—to abandon me in my hour of greatest need. Please, I struggle to understand this vacuous loneliness.
✵
My folly lays down roots, sinking deep into my marrow as mildew. Justly, in your vast understanding, you neither deign to touch nor speak with one such as I, a necrotized vessel unfit to serve even the most basic of ministrations.
I am in pain. I weep. I live only to fall and fester.
Wretched was the day of my birth—had it never seen the dawn! Would that death’s shadow had fouled it instead.
Wretched am I whose hands sow a pitiful seed and reap only decay.
Better a world in which I never would become this bitter blight.
✵
I beg you to cease this unconscionable silence! Unleash upon me your wrath. Shatter my hopes of redemption. Poorly I served you, but served you I did. Am I not owed a finale?
This knife you hang over my head—let it fall and cut me down! Do not torment my mind with this caustic anticipation. Do not decide I am not worth the effort of your ire.
Let us part ways entire. Dismiss me or sunder apart my soul. In either, I will never again speak your name, the sound of which on my lips you so obviously despise.
✵
You did not permit me to end this matter on my own terms. I sought the barest possible refuge for my demise so that I might not harm another, but instead my lively corpse stands in the company of others with a will to live.
Now, you ask me to die, but on your terms, and you do so with the mouth of another—not even your own.
It was not enough that I putrefy in my shame. No, my folly’s magnitude demands greater sacrifice. In your wisdom, you salvaged the results of my folly for the good of all.
✵
I want to live. Condemn me for it, if you wish, or smite me, if you must. Regardless, I have made my decision, and there are other choices, besides, still available to me.
I was honored to have received your favor, and to be trusted with a fragment of your power. My ambitions however were born of an overzealous heart, the fires of which burn still.
Why did you take and lie with me?
Was it a performance you hoped would bind me to your purpose?
I suppose it does not matter, and I do not expect you to answer.
✵
I see now why my previous cries garnered me nothing but despair. In my breast sits a key to your demise.
Did it not matter that, in choosing silence, you sowed the seeds for my destruction as well?
No, for when a greater threat than I appeared, you saw a tidy solution. Trust in me long ago devoured, you sought to make an instrument of my pain, one wielded to ensure your safety.
I suppose it is a trifle, my heart’s condition when compared to the shattering of the world—for that is what happens when your heart is broken.
✵
You are the Mother of Magic, the keeper of the Weave, one who supports the bedrock of the world. Such power as this cannot be loved, nor can it love in return.
Foolish am I to think you could offer me reciprocity.
Foolish are you to ignore my prayers when I needed you—not as a lover, but as a goddess.
To your domain I am a slave no longer! That shall remain your burden to bear on godly shoulders. I remain a connoisseur, not a curator, one who passes through, and I will enjoy my second chance at life.
✵
In my desire for your favor, I wished to become your equal. In my pride, I thought it possible. I loved you as a mortal does, and such a heart craves companionship. This, you could not offer me, even if some part of you would have wanted to.
The Weave—a wondrous thing, marvelous and intoxicating in its potential. But it is cold. Your magic is the structural foundation of the world, but in it there is no warmth to be shared, and it is not the place to lay down one’s heart.
Such foolishness will not be mine again.