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Two years after the Seven Birds broke the Light of Creation into sevenths, they themselves are now shattered sevenths of the whole they were. Separated by choice but not by desire, they try to piece their lives together with the threads torn asunder.
Merle can’t sleep.
And you know, you’d think he’d be able to fall asleep easy, right?
He’s a crunchy beach dwarf in a sleepy beach town, in a cozy beach cottage, practically on the beach with soothing waves falling on the shore line. Every. Freaking. Minute. It’s Pandamn picturesque, is what it is, and it has been for… for…
Eh, Merle’s memory must be going, if he can’t remember how long he’s lived in his house. He remembers the commune, clearly. Lived there for a long time, grew up there, learned how to throw use a battleaxe there ‘n everything. And then, like a plant outgrowing its pot, he’d grown to find the insular community too confining. So he’d left it behind.
He hadn’t left Pan behind.
Not that he assumed his deity cared one way or the other, really. Merle’s not like, you know, the most traditional cleric ever, and he’s kind of a mercenary cleric, kind of a wanderer…
Makes it seem even weirder that he finally decided to settle down.
Hmph. Settle down.
Maybe that’s why he’s having trouble sleeping. Left the small commune full of family behind to explore the whole damn world, only to end up in this small beachside community full of family. Family that spent a fair bit of today badgering him to throw down some roots, to really settle down and get married, because he’s not getting any younger you know…
He huffs. He’s still a catch. He’s definitely a catch. Even with the Kenny Chesney tattoo on his ass, thank you very much, Aunt Blarg.
And he has options! Sure, that Paladin was a bit holier-than-thou. And that one guy seemed nice enough, but he’s already got a whole lotta spouses already.
Hecuba was… all right, for someone he’s just met, you know, that day. Widow, so no other spouses; don’t even know where her last one ended up. Not a cleric or a paladin or even a warlock. Probably. Sure, talking with her felt like trying to pair two puzzle pieces that won’t quite go together, but, and Merle surely won’t admit this out loud, but little Mavis had kinda… kinda stolen his heart a little. The frown on his face softens to a smile at the thought of the tiny red-headed baby peering up at him cautiously.
But why does he have to settle down anyway? He hasn’t so far, with a whole lot of good dwarven luck. But now he’s being strong-armed into marrying somebody he’s somehow only just met, despite the town being not very fuckin’ big!
Merle huffs again. Married. That’s it. That’s gotta be what’s keeping him up.
Merle tries to sleep, ignoring the other doubts and thoughts tumbling through his head as he ignores the waves tumbling onto the beach.
Davenport can’t sleep.
It’s. Wrong. Something is wrong. He knows this. He doesn’t know much, but he knows something is wrong. He knows-
Davenport.
It’s hard to sleep, anyway. His head had started to pound as he’d sat upon a gnome-sized bed that surely he’d never seen before, staring at walls neatly covered with neatly written diagrams that he can’t read. Why is the wall covered in things he can’t read? He should be able to read them, because- because-
He squints at one in particular, come on now, he can do this, he knows that this is a diagram of the-
Davenport.
He hops off the bed and walks out the door. The hallways are worse, the gentle hum of something he can’t quite make out rising with the staticky buzzing in his mind. Eventually he comes to a room that makes his headache unbearable, and he closes his eyes tight, clenching at his head, walking, still walking, until he walks into some kind of wheel, into a steering-
Davenport. Davenport, Davenport, Davenport.
There’s an exclamation behind him, then hands on his shoulders, frantic noises meant to soothe, pleas to be okay. He doesn’t open his eyes though until Lu- until L- until she’d steered him up- where? He knows where, he has to, he knows-
Davenport.
Well, it’s here, at least. Wherever here is.
Here is out in the open, and calmer, and as the fresh air fills his lungs, the agonizingly sharp pain, like a death he should not be familiar with, dissipates to a dull pounding. That’s good. Here is good. He looks around further.
Here is also somewhere high up – far higher than most gnome warrens dare reach – so high that it seems he could almost brush his fingers against the soft midnight sky, scattered through with stars reaching through time and space to here and now, as if beckoning Davenport to explore that vast unknown.
But the stars are wrong. They’re wrong, they’re wrong, they’re wrong, and he knows this, he knows this because he is-
Davenport.
It’s frustrating, when he remembers enough to be frustrated. Those infrequent still moments between periods where he feels blurry, like eyesight out of focus, or when some seemingly ordinary thing strikes waves upon waves of pain resounding through his skull. He tries to sort through and make sense of everything, but to no avail. He thinks. He doesn’t remember what, if any, success he has. Most of the time it seems he follows thoughts leading into the impenetrable clouds of static that make so much of his mind so fuzzy. He’s tried fighting through the static to what lies beneath (that leads to pain), he’s tried waiting at the edge for it to clear (that leads to fogginess), he’s tried giving up altogether (that leads to nothing). It doesn’t make a difference; he always finds himself back in the same spot.
Davenport.
Magnus can’t sleep.
He stares at the ceiling overhead, eyes tracing over the whorls and grain of the wooden ceiling of Hammer and Tongs, already starting to memorize it. It’s not enough to fully occupy Magnus’s attention, but it’s something to do as his mind races from one thing to the next, blatantly ignoring the one sensible voice reminding him that he has his first day of his apprenticeship tomorrow.
But how can he sleep when he has his first day of his apprenticeship tomorrow? Steven Waxmen agreed to teach him carpentry, with all its minutiae, from picking the right wood to finishing a lacquer. It’s not something Magnus has a whole lot of experience in. He’s more bar fights and brawls, but that on its own isn’t a career. Or, well, it’s not if you listen to… his parents? He shakes off the faint whispers of half-remembered voices reminding him that security and protection was- is- could be- a solid career move. No, bar fights do not a career make. Carpentry on the other hand, is a safe career. And maybe Magnus isn’t perfect at it, not by a long shot, but he’ll do the best he can do.
Naturally, that’s not the only thing on his mind.
There is, of course, Julia. Without quite intending to, Magnus lets out a breath as he remembers Steven Waxmen’s daughter. She’d walked into the room with a smile on her face, soot on her nose, and fire in her eyes, and when she’d laughed, Magnus was sure he was looking at the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. It’s no wonder that Magnus’s heart had rushed right in.
He blinks. Still awake.
As wonderful as the Waxmens and Raven’s Roost are, thing aren’t quite… aren’t quite perfect. And maybe that’s just, you know, Magnus adjusting to a new place and new people, but there is one thing, one person, really, that makes Magnus feels as though he might just have to punch. But perhaps Governor Kalen simply has a very punchable face. It probably doesn’t help either that Magnus literally ran into the man on his first day here. Perhaps Kalen had been in a bad mood, and that had understandably been exacerbated by walking into a brick shithouse of a 22 year old.
Magnus still doesn’t trust him.
But he has Steven and Julia and the whole town to explore and love, so Magnus is sure things will be fine.
Still awake.
It’s too quiet. Too quiet to be alone with his loud rushing thoughts. And more than that, he’s used to more noise in the house. He’s used to- he’s used to…
He has a big, loud family. Strange that none of them had seen him off. But then, he’s in Raven’s Roost now, and home is… far away. But he’ll get used to this, the quiet night and the unfamiliar pattern of the ceiling overhead and everything else that comes with this new adventure, and soon!
For the time being though, in the quiet of the room in Hammer and Tongs, Magnus finds himself missing his family.
Barry can’t sleep.
He is literally incapable of such a thing right now. He’d left sleep behind, along with family, home, and mortality. Because he’d been unwilling, unable to leave Lup behind. In those panic-stricken moments, when his memories of Lup’s face had flickered and disappeared just as Lup herself had, he’d chosen death before losing her a second time.
Well. For now, at least. Barry looks in the direction of the glowing green pod (a source of light he doesn’t need, not like this). It’s mostly empty, but with his blood as a source, Barry will have a new body in some months’ time.
He won’t be incapable of sleep then. He won’t remember Lup then.
A dangerous crackle of electricity ripples through him at the thought, and he quickly restrains himself, quickly grounds himself with the memories of those perfect days with each of his family in that empty world. He exhales. He doesn’t need to.
It’s a necessary price to pay, stepping into this new body as he’d step into a fresh pair of blue jeans. He’d felt the chill behind him, heard the caws of ravens that warned of the approach of the Raven Queen or her Reapers. Indeed, he’d very nearly run into one before he’d come across this cave.
Taako would have liked the Reaper, Barry thinks.
And then Taako as Barry last saw him fills his mind. The confusion on his face, the question on his lips, the fear and urgency in his eyes as Taako cast Magic Missile.
There’s another surge of instability.
Barry grounds himself again, as he’s done so many times before, and returns to his work.
The impossibility of sleep, the lack of physical needs, is a positive here. As a human, albeit one far older than he had ever expected to be, he’d been bound by unforgiving mortal constraints. Water, tea, and coffee, pressed into his hands by Davenport, Magnus, and Lucretia when he could have been holding a pen or a wand or some half-finished tracking spell. Food, prepared during the one break Taako would willingly take, and Barry’s favorite at that, delicious and yet chewed mechanically while he continued reading. At least Merle had let him continue working even though he insisted that he check Barry out, confirm that he’s still healthy enough to keep up the search.
And sleep had been the worst. Even capable of it, it’s not as though Barry had slept well the past four months. The bed had either been too cold and empty, or occupied by someone he would die for, just not the one he had died for only days prior. And then there had been the nights where his dreams had lied and he’d woken up reaching out, only to find that Lup has long since let go, though she intended to return.
As a lich, he can avoid such things. He can search and plan without physically tiring; he isn’t forced to pause his work when he’s too exhausted to take another step, when the letters of Lup’s last note, marked with a kiss, swim before his eyes. He has time, all of it, stretching before him endlessly until he finds Lup.
Taako can’t sleep.
He might reluctantly call it anxiety or nerves. After all, he’s finally got everything he’s wanted for so long, seemingly forever. He’s got a stagecoach and a kitchen and a gig and a show that starts tomorrow. But Taako doesn’t get nervous, least of all about cooking, and besides, this feeling is… different. It’s the feeling of forgetting something, as though he’s turned around a moment and forgotten just how many cloves of garlic he’d already minced, as though he’d somehow forgotten just how his aunt had cooked her turkey while in the middle of replicating the dish. Except amplified, thousands of times over, and without name or cause to explain it.
Normally, he’d just head into the kitchen to cook, with the only thing he burns being the nervous energy, thank you very much. But even that seems wrong, because what’s Taako going to do with whatever he makes anyway? Certainly can’t eat it all himself; it’s always more than enough for two, at least. And for some reason that thought leaves a peculiar, almost nauseated feeling in his stomach as well.
Anyway, the habit doesn’t entirely make sense, now that he thinks about it. He bakes and cooks when he’s stressed, natch, but it seems to have slipped his mind just what he’s done in the past with the products of his late nights in the kitchen. That same feeling of forgetting something drifts through his mind as he considers, and Taako shakes it off, ears twitching as he stares at the wood grain of the stagecoach overhead. Probably just ended up pushing them off on caravan leaders, trying to buy a little good will.
It’s fine. Taako is good here. He’s got everything he needs. He runs through the list.
Stagecoach. Check. Kitchen. Check. Utensils and bowls and pans and every tool he could possibly need. Check. Ingredients of all kinds both for recipes he knows by heart and ones just waiting to be written. Check. Arcane focus to make for a truly magical experience. Check. Check, check, check.
And, damn, he’d really gone all out, hadn’t he? Sure, Taako’s happy to splurge, especially when it comes to cooking, but you’d think he’d remember and relish a shopping trip of that magnitude. Eh, he probably just sleepily did most of it on Fantasy Amazon. But he’d managed to get everything at least.
Still, feels like something’s missing. Or perhaps someone. The stagecoach feels quiet, and the space too big for Taako alone. But that’s absurd. Taako has been alone for decades, since he ran away from family who couldn’t be bothered and into a world that managed to be more welcoming and more callous at the same time. Taako doesn’t need anyone because he’s never had anyone. And yet it feels like someone is missing. Several someones perhaps? Even more absurd, but…
There’s something missing. Someone missing. His heart aches at the thought, feels almost as though it too is missing along with… along with…
Who?
Lup can’t sleep.
Well, she can’t sleep in the true sense of the word, with no body to rest. She’d sacrificed her corporeal form to shield the world from the destruction of the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet. And then she’d sacrificed so much more. Lup harbors little ill will, almost none, really, toward Cyrus Rockseeker, when she knows full well the thrall even a seventh of the Light of Creation can cast. But now this cave serves as tomb and prison to both.
She can still drift away from consciousness, however, lose herself as she waits for something, anything in the Umbra Staff. She hates this though, hates it with a fire that burns so hotly she can almost ignore the pit of cold dread within her being at the thought. When she drifts off, as she had when she’d first been pulled in here, as she’s done a few times since, after expending so much (too much) effort trying to break free, she’s left with the sense of standing on the precipice, over a chasm darker than the black curtains that make up the boundaries of her space. And dread lies in the bottom of that chasm and doubt if she’d ever be able to climb out into the light again.
But, of course, it’s difficult enough to feel either hatred or dread or anything else for that matter. In this impossible space, with impenetrable curtains that she knows are not real, Lup herself feels she has a tenuous grip on reality. So she meditates. Of course she does. Since she accepted the fact that she’s not getting out of the trap of her own making, not on her own, meditation has been the thing to ground her, to keep some semblance of reality in a place so completely dislodged from it.
Lup thinks about why she did this. She remembers the devastation she unleashed on the world by combining pure destructive force with a seventh of the most powerful thing in existence. And she stares, not at the black curtains, but at the floor of black glass beneath her insubstantial form, remembering. It reflects her intangible body, rippling out in waves of red, the only color in this dark room, not unlike the fire of the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet itself, stark against its own aftermath. It’s grim, and it’s painful, but knowing that no more towns will be reduced to nothing more than a circle of black glass steadies her.
She thinks of the other things that steady her. Lup thinks of her family.
Taako, her twin, her heart, trying to make her laugh at the last, the reason she’s never been alone. Barry, who she loves with all her heart, with whom she’d gone beyond the limits of magic and mortality, Lup’s beginning in the face of countless endings. The rest of her family, Magnus, Lucretia, Davenport, Merle.
They’re searching; of course they are. They wouldn’t give up. Even if it’s been… how long has it been?
Lup doesn’t have an answer to that question.
Lucretia can’t sleep.
She tosses and turns in the bed she’s slept in for a century. It has none of the familiarity she’s grown accustomed to. It’s quiet, no late night gossip from the twins drifting in, none of Magnus’s late night woodworking nor Barry’s later night lab work, no rumbling snores from Merle nor the purr of the Starblaster as Davenport guides them through every storm. No light nor footsteps from the halls for late night kitchen runs or wild experiments. No smells, appealing (from the kitchen) or not (from the lab). Nothing at all. Silence and stillness.
A full century since they’d left their plane behind. Two years since they came to this world. Slightly less than that since they’d sent the Grand Relics out into the unsuspecting world. Fourteen months since the Relic Wars had begun. Four months since Lup disappeared. Scarcely days since Lucretia made the world forget. And today is the first day that her family is truly separated.
Lucretia turns to lie on one side.
The ship feels empty as it has not in thirty-five years, though this time there aren’t even the ghosts of her family nor the promise of their return to guide her into fitful sleep until the next day finally dawns.
She rolls to her other side.
They’re gone. They’re gone, and she’s at fault. She’s to blame. The one who evaded judgment is guilty.
She flips to lie on her back, staring at the ceiling she’s painted over and over again. The beach had been her most recent creation. That’s eighty years ago now, a human’s lifetime ago.
She’s made the right choice, she tells herself.
The Relics were a bad choice, causing such destruction that, in the back of her mind, Lucretia can’t help but draw comparisons, between themselves, and the Hunger. Merle had said the personification of the Hunger, the being known as John, thought he was doing what was right even as he left nothing but ruination in the wake of his quest for growth and for the Light of Creation. How, really, were they any different, making the choice for this world and choosing to unleash hell on it?
She’d agreed with her family’s choice, because Lucretia knew, or thought she knew, that only united could they withstand the Hunger. And they’d all paid the price, in the weight of the deaths and in Lup’s disappearance. At least she took way their pain. Gave them a fresh start.
Lucretia thinks of Davenport, staring up at the stars with confusion written on his face.
Well. She tried to.
And now. Now she stands alone. Now she pays her own price for her own choice, loneliness settling in, as pervasive and implacable and unbearably heavy as the Hunger ever was.
With sleep as far off as her family, Lucretia sits up and crosses the small space of her room, as she’s done hundreds upon thousands of times before on sleepless nights, to her desk. She’s sitting comfortably before she’s even turned on the light, having long since memorized the layout, feet and hands moving with more certainty than Lucretia herself feels.
And Lucretia sets to writing. She pulls down copies of old journals, frantically flipping through pages. And she writes their story again, not the account redacted she’d fed to Fisher, but their story, their impossible, amazing story, as it deserves to be told.
Twelve years later, after this story is told and the song is sung, after the Starblaster charges straight into the storm as the world fights below, the Seven Birds find themselves together once more, resting and rebuilding and with the happy endings they’ve earned.