Xzar "Vital Signs are holding stable! Let's continue to idle for several chapters of mindless cute goey-goo relationship mush and dialog before progressing to any plot!"
Aegis "Don't worry people, we've got this! It's very low-key stuff, back to basics; we've got plenty of chapters!"
Xan "What? That's absurd. I have nothing to do with 'goey-goo' and have no idea what I'd do with such chapters."
Xzar *Stares flatly* "No, of course not, you have never had a cute relationship moment in this *entire story.* What was I *thinking?*"
Xan "... Well look at Viconia, she's just staring at us in confused mortification whilst Shar-Teel and Eldoth both simultaneously develop bulimia."
Edwin {(I'm not saying anything. Nothing at all.)}
Minsc "MINSC MISSES HIS WITCHHH!"

(I'm still recoverin.' Here's to hoping you guys remember where everyone is and what they were doing, as I'm gonna be struggling putting together good story-weaving for a bit!)

...

STILL TROUBLESHOOTING

...

Tallix was displeased with herself: she'd just gone and let a wizard go stumblin' about in a dark room with all his best ammo burnt out already! She gnawed her pipe. Right unnatural, this 'growin old' business. Makes a person dumb and sleepy.

"I can feel your ill mood from here," Gorion murmured without looking up from runic door or spell book. Two cups of tea had put him back to sorts, and he'd resumed his work as if no mushroom-related incidents had ever occurred.

Eh? She cleared her throat. "We're old," she lamented.

His mouth quirked in soft smile, and the prettiness of it made her self-critical musings less relevant. After a bit, she dropped down from her perch and came up to investigate his hair. Quite disheveled, he was. She rummaged about in their things, fetched a brush, loosed the blue ribbon from his hair, and set to grooming him. There, this were rhythmic work enough. Soothed her mood, it did.

"How's the spellwork coming along?" she prompted conversationally, though she presumed fixing magical-doors-to-the-surface was more tedious labor than anything else.

"Well," he hummed thoughtfully, "It is convoluted, but uniquely suited to my skill-set. There is a taste of divine sorcery to it."

"The devil is 'divine sorcery?'"

"Power stems from a great many fonts," the wizard explained matter-of-factly as he dipped his quill in ink and kept writing. "Wizards, for instance, generate power through formulas, memorization, and study; But 'sorcery' is a blanket term for power that bubbles up from within like spring water. The two have similar visible effects to a bystander, but are very different internally."

Tallix glanced curiously to his face, and then thought back. "Most o' what I know o' mages be functional: What's dangerous, and what can or cannot be kilt. Yer sayin' ye kinda get the jist o' this spellry on account o' shared bloodlines with its maker?"

He confirmed her layman's understanding with a nod. "Mind you, I suspect he was diabolically inclined, not angelic. But then there are days I suspect the two are not incredibly different in temperament." He corrected a misaligned sigil. "There is a strange pleasure in talking 'shop' with you, Tallix Snapdragon. Even if I have learned a great deal more about poison on this adventure than I might have ever expected was healthy."

"Ha! Suppose so! Ye alone make can me chatty. Even my kin think me a closed book."

He smiled briefly her way, "You wear candidness well for someone who has danced about me in masks for so many years."

Alright now, that was just uncalled for. She likely blushed right down to her toes, or at least it felt that way on account of them being so warm all of a sudden. She finished with his hair, but lingered to watch him work. Best they stuck together. Besides, she had another question, one which took a bit to form as she tapped her pipe thoughtfully. "Riddle me this: Why've I heard wizards fling 'sorcerer' about like its a dirty word?" Gorion hesitated. "Is it on account of wizards feeling like sorcerers are 'cheating' because they get free magic without logging in the hours of study?"

He jumped at little and then broke out laughing. "Straight to the heart of the matter!" he cackled. "Though being a powerful sorcerer makes it incredibly difficult to become a skilled wizard!"

"Eh? How? I'd assume it'd give ye an advantage."

"Me, myself? I am not exactly a powerful sorcerer, but I have learned something of what they go through." He sat back to consider the topic further and take a short break from the door. "Tallix, think of how naturally the act of 'breathing' comes to you; and then think of being told you cannot progress any further in mastering the fighting arts unless you come to understand every last muscle, blood vessel, and nerve which causes your lungs to expand and contract. That is how a powerful young sorcerer feels to be confronted by the studious demands of wizardry. It is not hard because magic is hard; rather it is hard because it is boring, and redundant-feeling, and the distractions and temptations of simply being powerful are very high. A flighty student—which a sorcerer often is—struggles to focus in such an environment.

Tallix could see where this was going, "Which means those youngins don't ever get their fundamentals down. Which means, I'd reckon, that they can't diversify, and they get stuck doin' just one thing bigger and badder forever with brute force."

Gorion gave a curt nod to agree she'd grasped the jist of the situation. "The prevalence of wizarding culture in civilized lands—and its dependency on books—means that powerful sorcery has a connotation of being primitive, uncultured or at least unpredictable. And that's before we even get to critiquing Chaos Mages and Wild Surges and so on and so forth." He leaned back to continue writing.

She thought back. "This why Ulraunt forebade ye from teachin' classes to the young wizards studyin' at Candlekeep? Cause he sniffed a whiff of heaven in yer spellery and thought it dirty?"

Immediately, Gorion seemed to dislike this topic. But he answered: "Yes. Something to that effect."

"Rotter," she spat. "Hope he trips over a fire poker in the near future."

Her wizard's expression was dark, and she wagered he was thinking about a time fifteen years past, when Ulraunt's prejudices against 'special magic' had landed on a much more vulnerable target. "He thought himself sly," her wizard muttered, "when he inquired of her what she felt magic 'tasted' like. I should have known his intention then by how contemptuous and smug he looked when she so blithely answered him with 'orange.'"

Hmm, a quick joke might shake him loose from this useless ruminating: "Aye? Well presuming we get past the initial hurdle of colors being flavors, I admit I would have expected either pink or purple before orange."

"She quickly added it would have to be a very blue orange."

"Is that so? So is trainin' a powerful sorcerer in wizardry always like pushin a round peg through a square hole?"

Gorion took a deep breath, and let bad memories go. "That question requires an etymological or at least historical answer... It is difficult to obtain tutelage as a 'pure' sorcerer. There was an ancient time when 'sorcerer' 'cleric' 'druid' and 'wizard' were not incredibly different things, and where one's innate talent governed whether one ever even learned magic. But that was a timeless era of elder races, where 'lesser races' like ours—humans and hobbits—dwelt in the mud. Now we have standardization of wizarding schools and modern magical theory; we live in an era of books, and in an era dominated by wizards."

"Nae a terrible tradeoff."

"It is what it is: a double-edged sword. There are still powerful sorcerers in the world, but that does not mean they are accessible. Those few of them presently visible to a general audience are content to wait hundreds of years for the right apprentice, and may be happy to stay isolated and blissfully ignorant the world has gone on without them. In the current era, a young sorcerer's only two paths are either to learn the wizarding arts or else to just do whatever 'feels right' and hope it turns out for the best, and perhaps bumble into a mentor through adventuring." He was quiet a moment, and then twisted about to peer at her curiously. "If I might ask, why this sustained interest in the education of sorcerers?"

Tallix paused, smiled thinly through adrenaline, and made to twist the conversation elsewhere. Ice blue eyes caught hers, and she swallowed and finally cleared her throat to dispose of white lies. "Might be that one of me own has a bit of raw talent in this arena," she essentially croaked.

His eyes widened and then he quickly studied some internal ledger, calendar, or map. "Which?" he demanded a name.

"Ah, it's my secret," she dodged, once more in control of the conversation. "How does one get a kid o' that nature properly educated, if ye'd oblige a curious mum?"

He scowled slightly but then continued thinking, if likely plagued by mental images of furry-footed wizards. "It... depends on the child. Deciding to pursue a wizarding path was very straightforward for me. My father was a wizard, my ability to learn formulas far outstrips the strength in my blood. Only in recent years did my sorcery start leaking out as ice in response to stress, and make me realize I ought to have given it more attention. As for melding sorcery and wizardry... I have only ever done so unconsciously."

"So yer an unqualified tutor is what yer sayin?"

He whirled on her with a strange, fierce and almost possessive glare, as if daring her to suggest he'd let any magical professionals near her newly-understood-to-be-magical-child (whichever one or ones it was!) until he had quite thoroughly tutored her! (or him! Or them!)

"Tallix there are too many variables you aren't sharing! What is the ego of the child? If it is Anaxa, and if that is why you have called her a 'pyro,' then I recommend your immediate course of action be to find a very large and friendly dragon to board her with! Never fear about the difficulty of procuring dragons: You are wealthy, and they have a universal weak scale for large sums of gold!"

Tallix burst out laughing. She couldn't help it; he was so flustered! He eyed her in curious, frustrated, puzzled bemusement:

"Which child?"

"Nae, nae! Won't tell ye!"

"A child with no small power, to be educated in magic theory..." Gorion grumbled, crossed his arms over his chest, and thought. "That is easier said than done. Such a child would have demands that any wizard will be hard-put to satisfy: first that he appreciate both the advantages and disadvantages of tacit knowledge and not dismiss them; next that he might demand mental exercise over rote memorization; also that he be capable of making the same intuitive leaps as the student without holding them back or frustrating them; then that he adapt and use new exercises to steer a path back to fundamental knowledge; next that he be understanding of what his student is going through in having traversed difficult paths first so that the student need not have to; and lastly even that he exhibit enough pure power to answer questions far in advance of the student's progress and thus secure the student's respect for the long term.

"Simply put, one requires a mentor who is also a sorcerer."

...

{There's a sense to this, I swear it,} a restless Red Wizard muttered somewhere beyond the curve of her lumbar. A page was flipped, and an inkwell tinkled, and then the scritch-scratch sound of inspired note-taking filled the air.

Imoen yawned, rubbed her face into her forearm, and reached out to pat for exactly how her partner was presently configured within the confines of the tent. He must have crawled half over her to get to his pack. She found the slope of a thigh, the edge of a book, a random scroll, and the curve of a hip; she then reached up to locate his shoulder. Aha! She found his hair and pet over it. The sound of note-taking didn't pause, but he pressed the corner of his mouth gently into the curve of her palm.

"Hey," she mumbled sleepily. The air above them in the peak of the tent was illuminated by magical means. "What's-"

{Working, busy!} her Thayvian hissed with the urgency of a hunter who had very nearly trounced his quarry. He snatched another book and bit the quill between his teeth as he quickly thumbed through the pages. He found a page, looked about, and balanced it on her shoulder for lack of space.

Imoen would have giggled had she not been so drowsily content. Instead she just stayed where she was and held that book in place for him as she dozed, because Edwin was nothing if not excruciatingly well-ordered, and so waking up to find herself suddenly misappropriated as a desk meant a creative emergency was afoot. "Got it?"

He grunted his answer. Moments went by in tense mental labor. The quill paused, and he fumbled in searching for something. {Where the devil is that thrice-damned abjuration fragment?}

She found a likely suspect in a scroll that had rolled near her foot, picked it up with her toes, and offered it backwards to him.

{Oh. Yes!} He took it, juggled the book on her shoulder to another position, rested a scroll note on her shoulder, scribbled a note somewhere else, quickly copied and altered and diagrammed something. He seemed to remember she'd asked a question. {Presuming needless embellishment in otherwise structured prose is insufficiently canny of me and does insult onto the author; there is an order here beneath the whimsy, and I can taste it.}

"Mm? You should probably turn it upside down, then."

{Now is not the time for babbling–!} He paused and then, to her earnest delight, turned it about.

Frantic quill-scratching ensued! Tense moments passed in silence. Then the quill paused with a hard dot, and he grinned so hard she could veritably hear it.

"What time is it?" she yawned again, stretching out her arms now that neither was precisely needed for impromptu lectern duties.

{What?} he snapped amid excitement, but then laughed. {Not yet dawn. Ha. Finally I have an in to this archaic spiraling!}

"Lemme see," she demanded curiously as she rolled about and sent papers sloughing.

Edwin propped himself off of her and rolled onto his back to join her in the pillows. He pulled books with him that he might show her what he'd found, and held the volumes up and overlapping with a relevant scroll sandwiched between them: one, his spellbook, two: Gorion's—his source material—, third: Khelben's workbook with an ornate knot pattern in the illustrated border, fourth: a reference scroll. {These weavings were so acutely abstracted by your old Harper that they seemed meaningless and obfuscating artwork- but look, here is it's source inspiration, or a derivative thereof, and it inevitably led me back to what he was substituting it in for...! Clear as crystal.}

Nails traced across the pages, bringing Imoen's attention from location to location so she could see the path he'd followed. This was basically a personal code which Edwin had just broken, and though no small set of inferences! The finalized runes faithfully followed the aesthetic pattern they belonged to, and were sensible in their purpose once one placed them in each final picture. She looked to him in surprise.

"You just woke up in the middle of the night and figured all of this out?" she wondered. "From a design, in a margin, in a story about little animals with coats? Who are you and what have you done with Edwin?! I'll have you know I'm the paper-dragon-folder of this relationship...!"

Her Thayvian laughed, thrilled by his own victory. {Well, there is a saying the most beautiful muse only ever visits whilst bathing, eating, and sleeping,} he teased jovially, {though I would like to report that if this is true, it is only after excruciatingly hard work hitting thousands of dead ends, and she must find him with a quill at hand!}

"Good gods," Imoen agreed very seriously, and fluffed up her hair, "you're going to need more quills. Look, I think there's some over on the left, there."

He gave her an incredulous and bemused look and then broke out into another grin, settled down his work to the side, and reached across her. "Thank you, Kwefai,"he purred into her neck, and Imoen was immediately very excited about what other inspirations had elicited such bawdy pillow talk as 'thank you' from a Red Wizard. She wrapped her arms about him and scooted closer, but that put an inkwell to teetering which she very nearly caught from splashing all over them. He jumped, blinked, and then looked around them both with an almost bewildered expression "Ehm, ah, let me just clean all this, eh... up a bit... ehm, first..."

She tried so hard not to laugh. "Of course, of course." She straightened a make-belief collar of a make-believe outfit for him to keep him make-believe presentable. He raised a brow at her. She snickered. He scowled. She shrugged helplessly, and he squeezed her firmly, pressed his mouth into her temple, and then set to tidying.

...

"So yer telling me unless the whelp's worthy of Elminster's ilk–" Gorion shot her a dirty look. "–yer actually the finest tutor ta ask fer, eh?"

"The Silverhand sisters survived Elminster's fostering of them by their own merit, by teaching themselves everything. And I do mean everything: Magic, Cooking, First Aid; the selfish fool was inclined to disappear planes-walking after curiosities and guilty pleasures half the time, and his Unseen Servants were no replacement for genuine nannies. As for myself... I can and will serve as a tutor for your sorcerer, but I believe we would need to find a more suitable mentor for the long term."

Tallix leaned back to eye him. Gorion watched her almost warily, and repeated his query:

"Which?"

She smirked. "How's one spot a 'wizardin' sorcerer,' if one's inclined to look?"

He did not like this chase she was leading him on, but answered her nonetheless: "Given cultural stigmas against sorcerers in many wizarding cultures, they often lay low. Finding one requires quite a lot of mucking around in history books or divination spells; conducting an awkward and sometimes unflattering or unwelcome investigation into other peoples' bloodlines."

"Where can one find em above ground, if one wanted ta?"

"Rarely? Rasheman," he answered simply, as if it were something any wizard worth his salt knew off the top of their head. "But even if you could secure one's attention, the Wychlaran demand custody into adulthood and will not train boys."

She frowned and consider this.

"For your note-taking purposes, it is more common to see magical lines passed down matrilineally than paternally."

"Me bloodline's dry of fun like that," Tallix dismissed.

"You are a Chosen. By definition you are no longer precisely mortal. You were gifted part of your diety's intrinsic essence."

Tallix raised a brow at him because she'd never thought of that angle—and of course she was a mite worried he'd just dragged his own mood down—but seeing the sustained and frustrated curiosity on his face, she shrugged. "Kid's not channeling death magic, so put that worry ta rest." It was sort of sweet to think he'd not be terribly judgmental if that had happened, though.

"It doesn't always manifest as one might initially presume."

"Nah, he got it from his pa."

"Calderan," Gorion seized victoriously, whirling towards her, and she cursed herself. "It's the boy, the middle child, Calderan. He's thirteen, and a born sorcerer, and you've yet to find him a tutor?"

"Well...!" Tallix fumbled, reaching up to rub the back of her neck and hopefully looking as bashful as she felt. "He were interested in different things at the same time: swordfightin', storybooks, numbers, and I sorta wanted ta ask ye if ye'd–"

"Ask me? You know, old hag, these are the sort of narrative acrobatics that work better when one is thousands of miles away and communicating in magically sealed letters. Now that I am dwelling on the issue, I am realizing I knew Anaxa's and Paewyn's name before you arrived, but not Calderan's. You did not tell me anything about him through our private correspondences—not his name, not his birth date, nothing whatsoever but that he existed—and now somehow you say you have been dragging your feet in educating him because you were thinking about—or somehow dreading?—bringing up his magicking skill to me? Why? Something about this reeks, and you are not telling me what."

This she could handle: "C'moff it Rion, I weren't necessarily sure ye'd be keen on me proposin' ta meet ye in person! We ain't got the cleanest history, and what with Aegis nae quite havin' left the nest just yet, I–"

Except Gorion was already ahead of her, and not slowing down: "If he is just about to turn thirteen, and Aegis is twenty-one, then he was conceived when she was six. Six and a half. That was immediately after you left Candlekeep. And you left Candlekeep with two potions of fertility you'd purchased from Telthoril under the pretense of wanting to start a new life, a new family. You didn't even wait until you'd reached Luiren?"

"Yer surprised I dinnae wait months of hikin' ta lose me knickers ta th' first cute thing I met outside that monastery?"

"Bhaal was still at large." Ice eyes riveted on her on a moment, then widened.

That alarmed her. "The boy ain't his kid!" she held up her hands in protest. "Ain't I just told ye he ain't conjurin up death magic!? Kid's very nearly a wee little paladin–!" But she'd misplaced his sudden wave of understanding by a landslide, and confirmed his true suspicions.

"He's mine?" Gorion breathed, and hearing the words uttered aloud for the first time shut her mouth up good. The wizard hesitated. "You said this year. This year he'd be thirteen. That leaves the months of Uktar and Nightal. You left Candlekeep on the twenty-first of Nightal, and halflings stay gravid for twelve months after conception. You didn't hurry into pregnancy enroute to Luiren; you conceived Calderan the night before you left...?"

"I didn't know," she croaked. "I didn't know that would happen. Honest to the gods, I drank the potion afterwards. Didn't think to wonder whether a man's seed waits around fer a bit. Didn't have any reason to believe– And then, babies, ye know, they all look sorta the same really, and–"

Gorion didn't interrupt her this time, merely stared.

She interrupted herself with a hard swallow, and then it all came out low and earnest: "I started a thousand letters. I didn't know how ta tell ye. I thought ye'd freak out or throw a fit. On account what Lullorin– on account of what Bhaal did ta ye. Spare few o' me nieces or sisters ever kept a man in their lives, so I reckoned t'were mine ta handle anyway. I knew ye needed ta be at the top of yer game, and focused on Aegis, and nae getting distracted by distant confusin' maybes, and-and I tried to tell meself it weren't for sure.

"But– But I knew, I knew the moment I saw his eyes. And by the time I couldn't pretend no more because there were feathers in his damn hair, years had gone by and I felt like shit, sittin' on the knowledge for so long, but that made it all the harder to start tryin' ta raise the topic, and so I jest let more time go by, and the more that went by the more I could nae forgive meself fer nae sayin' anything but that made it harder and harder and harder and..."

"I have a thirteen-year-old son?"

The question was so quiet and so soft that Tallix wanted to disappear into a shadow and hide from it. "... Aye..."

For a long time, his expression remained confusingly blank. "With furry feet?" he slowly postulated.

Tallix cleared her throat. "Um, aye."

"I see." Then he reached out to her, and grasped her shoulders, and pulled her to him, and folded her in a hug, and placed his chin upon her head. He didn't say anything. His expression probably didn't change. But he hugged her, tightly, tight as she'd ever been hugged.

Her voice was muffled by blue robes. "I'm sorry."

He squeezed her and mumbled into her hair: "No need. I already forgave you."

...

(The author feels obligated to point out that the existence of Calderan makes Aegis and Montaron cousins, making Aegis' joke about being half-hinfolk for running about without shoes in Part I one of the longest planned dramatic ironies of this entire story. And yes, yes I do have no life.)

...