Gale brightened when she finally accepted. “Well! Then you’re in good company. We’ll both be flustered messes.”
He had been the one making the offer, technically, but this was a lifeline for him, too: imagining a potential future for himself. Daring himself to make actual plans with someone, rather than seeing nothing else for himself but eventually dying in a conflagration. (Divination magic wasn’t his specialty, and even then, he’d been too nervous to peer into a sliver of the future. Too worried that he would try and only see blank black emptiness. A dead end.)
So he took a deep breath, and extended one hand for a formal handshake. “It’s an agreement, then. A sacred compact.”
As he grasped her palm again, she could feel that hand wasn’t rough from wielding heavy swords or axes or pulling bowstrings; instead there’s a knobbly writer’s callus on one finger, and a few healed burns from errant fire spells gone awry. The physical marks of a wizard’s life lived.
“And it’s good,” he said, “to have something to look forward to.”
It didn’t even need to be a grand promise or a great expectation. Just a good friend, by his side. That was enough, and more than what he’d had before.
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He had been the one making the offer, technically, but this was a lifeline for him, too: imagining a potential future for himself. Daring himself to make actual plans with someone, rather than seeing nothing else for himself but eventually dying in a conflagration. (Divination magic wasn’t his specialty, and even then, he’d been too nervous to peer into a sliver of the future. Too worried that he would try and only see blank black emptiness. A dead end.)
So he took a deep breath, and extended one hand for a formal handshake. “It’s an agreement, then. A sacred compact.”
As he grasped her palm again, she could feel that hand wasn’t rough from wielding heavy swords or axes or pulling bowstrings; instead there’s a knobbly writer’s callus on one finger, and a few healed burns from errant fire spells gone awry. The physical marks of a wizard’s life lived.
“And it’s good,” he said, “to have something to look forward to.”
It didn’t even need to be a grand promise or a great expectation. Just a good friend, by his side. That was enough, and more than what he’d had before.