Art By Rt0no

Art by rt0no

You have a purpose - and a choice

Six of Swords

Slate and Gale

Upright: healing, moving forward, stability, escape, journeys, passage from pain

Reversed: feeling trapped, instability, abuse, unresolved issues, carrying baggage from your past

Had a lot of fun with this one! The symbols on the swords represent each characters abuser (Zhentarim for Slate, and Mystra for Gale). There are the obvious signs of the past sins committed (the blood on Slate's hands and Gale's orb), but the two characters are in a place of acceptance and healing together, moving on from past transgressions. This card usually depicts a boat on water, so I thought it would be cool to set the piece in the astral sea from their Act 3 romance scene!

Orin the red - art by Bella Bergolts

Run, love run For all the things we wished we’d done Run from all you know that’s coming Run to show that love’s worth running to. - “love run” the amazing devil

I think Larian has in general played somewhat fast and loose with the cannon Forgotten Realms timeline. Because that would mean (if we assume he is 35 at the start of the game which seems a good middleground imo), he is 23 when Mystra returns, and its implied he was quite young when Mystra first took an interest in him (young enough that it was grooming). Given that he was extremely talented from a young age it seems unlikely she'd be as much a teacher at that age rather than muse.

wyll: this was a hospital? feels more like a prison. gale: a common enough interpretation. sickness has a nasty habit of making you feel trapped, if only within the confines of your body. gale: i once spent weeks convalescing in the hospice of st. laupsenn after a nasty bout of ruddy pox. for all their kindness, leaving that place behind felt like freedom to me. wyll: i've always relied on the kindness of the healers and menders of the coast. better a cleric's healing touch than a chirurgeon's scalpel.

i'm assuming this banter is supposed to trigger upon entering the house of healing, but it hasn't triggered for me. still very much interesting. not only does it offer another insight into gale's past before the events of the game, but also the hospice he found himself in for weeks is interesting itself as well:

"The Hospice of St. Laupsenn (N73) is a Sancturary of Ilmater in the North Ward of Waterdeep. In the City of Splendors, worship of The Triad has long been subsumed by the Halls of Justice, Waterdeep’s temple of Tyr. After the Time of Troubles during the early stages of the Spellplague, large swaths of the citizenry were afflicted with fiendish plagues. While most recovered with clerical attention, for some the effects of the disease continued to linger, resistant to the healing effects of magic. As few Waterdhavians would have anything to do with the fiend-afflicted sufferers, for fear of catching the plague anew, the llmatari decided to create a place for the lepers. The Order of the Golden Cup erected the Hospice of St Laupsenn, named for the priest who tended those similarly affected in the aftermath of the Weeping War, and have continued in quiet service to this day. The hospice is funded by private charitable contributions (many of which come from the personal holdings of the Lords) and tithes from the Halls of Justice and the Order itself." [source]

i was at first playing around with the idea of gale suffering from such a long illness because he might have been affected by the spellplague. then again, the spellplague usually affected magic users mentally rather than physically, so this might really just be the pox, common in big cities and beyond of course, probably during his childhood.

if larian had kept to the lore and the timeline, the effects of the spellplague should have been more central to gale's childhood and made it much more harrowing, especially since he is so intrinsically connected and linked to the weave itself.