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There are ghosts that follow at her ankles. There have been for a long time; Vex cannot remember when she first spotted the fox that sniffed at the ground beside her, translucent and barely there as her mother walked through it as though it was nothing, but she remembers that she didn’t think it was odd.
Vex sees the ghosts of animals, lingering in the corners of the world. Humanoid ghosts everyone knows have the potential linger, but people forget about animals, especially animals in magic-rich areas. When she and Vax are taken to Syngorn she’s struck by the number of ghosts that trail through the city, some close to people they must have loved in life and some more vengeful. She remembers the ugly, scarred, bruised ghost of a cat, constantly snarling and try to claw out the Akhilus Tendon of one of her classmates. It’s why she’d been determined to avoid him.
Vax sees... well they’re not ghosts, not quite. They are humanoid, that’s for sure, but Vax describes them to her like echoes or impressions of people, not a full lingering soul. Usually they fade eventually - some of them he tries to speak to, tries to get alone and gently helps to pass on, to dissipate, to find some peace.
Sometimes Vex wonders if she should do that for the animals that she sees, but animals don’t see the world the way that people do, she knows that. Some of them might not even recognise that they’re dead. Those of them that do - she suspects they’d be a lot more panicked if they didn’t want it.
They leave Syngorn when they’re fourteen. Their mother’s ghost - and it’s definitely a ghost, not the echoes Vax sees but Vex can’t, because Vex sees their mother standing there, skirt singed and one arm burned off into terrible charred embers, her eyes wet as she stares at them.
They know she only ever wanted the best for them. That she had never wanted to let them go. That she hadn’t had a choice.
But without the prospect of their mother’s home to return to, the prospect of being able to provide for her as their father failed to, they don’t really have much cause to stay. They’ve already learned plenty from their classes; one evening Vex whispers to the ghosts she’s befriended and they leave the city without a trace.
Their mother’s ghost doesn’t follow. She’d looked at them, and they’d understood she was gone, and they said their goodbyes. Their mother was the only one they’d ever told about what they could see. It doesn’t surprise them so terribly she’d try to at least find them to say goodbye - at least let them know.
That done... they say their goodbyes, and she kisses a whisper-breeze of a kiss to their foreheads, and she is gone.
And so they go too.
Vax is away in town when the two hunters come to Vex’s hearth out in the woods. It’s several years on and they’ve made good living. Vax’s echoes tell him things - advice on who to trust and who not to, where to steal from, what jobs are worth taking. Vex’s ghosts can show her where to forage, where to hunt, what pools of water are clean and safe and what have been spiked with poison or become tainted with disease. She never over-hunts, never takes any more than she needs to, is never cruel as she kills, and it gives her some security, the simple pragmatism she approaches it with.
She wonders, given that, why none of her ghosts warn her when the pair turn up. When they drug her. When they haul her away.
She thinks she understands when she wakes, though, when she sees the place these poachers have made, sees the ghosts here, angry and upset and terrible, sees the wavering edge around the immense bear by the fire and that can’t be good, she’s only seen a ghost in a body when the body was close to death.
The hunters are proud. Arrogant. Think they have her where they want her, but they really, really, don’t. Out in the woods Vax has learned better what his echoes need and Vex? Vex has learned how to use her little natural magic to empower the spirits that keep her company.
When hunter-him comes over to her cage, pulling at the ties of his trousers in a way she knows can only mean bad or worse, she reaches out to the ghosts around her and pulls.
A wildcat leaps out of nothing onto his shoulders. A double-headed Ianos Adder coils tigt around his ankles. As the man screams she forces her way out of the cage. She leaves hunter-him to the ghosts. She takes care of hunter-her herself.
The bear, she knows, is beyond her helping. She offers her hand to it’s nose. At her feet the wildcat’s paws leave no mark in the dust, the snake that coils up her leg is weightless. The fox, gently nosing at the bear’s cheek, leaves no mark.
Slowly, carefully, the mother bear uncurls from around her cub. Vex has never needed words to understand nature.
There is always a ghost at Trinket’s shoulder as he grows up in Vex’s care - a ghost even Vax can see, and it strikes Vex and makes her wonder. Is it because she mercy-killed her? Is it because this animal knew what was coming, had been warned by the other ghosts?
The mother bear, immense and strong in death as she hadn’t been just before it, stays with them for years.
Ghosts following people says many things. For all Keyleth’s grief for her mother there’s no echo at her shoulder, watching over her - there is something at Scanlan’s, a small, sweet-faced woman with his features, a little older and more worn.
Percy, when they meet him, has a host of echoes, each one looking worse than the last. Vax describes them to her, a murmured description in Abyssal as they debate what to do with the strange man in the cell. One’s eyes have been put out, one has no fingers, one has been disembowelled. One is missing teeth and they all have bruises all over, have gaping wounds and ones neatly stitched shut.
Whoever these echoes were, they were murdered, they were tortured, they were hurt and Vex can see her brother’s fingers itching to do something, to help them, to find out if the person who so injured them is the one sitting in the cell before them.
It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve seen a murderer followed by those he murdered. Percy is certainly strange enough it doesn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility.
Until, as Vax watches them, he sees something that makes his shoulders relax. Makes him sigh. Makes him sheathe his daggers and reach for his lockpicks.
“Whitey,” he says, “You’ve got some explaining to do.”
Later, when Vex asks, Vax tells her: he saw one of the ghosts, one of seven total, reach out to brush Percy’s hair back, to neaten his collar.
“They care about him,” he says - in Abyssal again, because even if everyone’s asleep they’ve not told the others the whole of what they can do just yet. “I think. I couldn’t tell at first, with the injuries and his white hair, but I think they’re family.”
Vex remembers their mother, hand burned to charcoal, skirt singed, eyes full of tears, and wonder what creates echoes so many and so strong and so terribly injured.
She wonders if, perhaps, that is why Percy’s so very quiet and so very strange.