Work Text:
It starts with a clock tower.
At least, some part of it does. The story goes like this: once upon a time, there was a town far to the north of Tal’Dorei that suffered a period of great loss. As time passed, the town was delivered from its subjugation, though it carried a strange darkness beneath it; try as the most brilliant minds in the continent might, the darkness lay festering and dormant for many moons with little hope of a remedy. When the root of that darkness began to grow and spread throughout many lands, all hope seemed lost — until a group of brave, determined heroes rose up to defy it and banished the darkness from their realm. Though their losses were great, their victory was greater, and the world owed them more than it would ever know to repay. Thus, the idea for the clock tower was born: a shining monument to love and sacrifice, telling their story through innovation and beauty for many generations to come.
But that, my dear, is not truly where it started.
Perhaps we should go back to the beginning: once upon a time, a man with white hair and glasses and a woman with red hair and freckles stood inside a bunker beneath a dragon-ruined city, staring at a blank wall and arguing over how best to utilize its canvas. The man, ruthlessly pragmatic in many ways, saw the wall covered in the stories of those who came before, those who stayed loyal to their city despite the dangers and those who delivered them to safety below. The woman, selfless in heart though naive in experience, had seen enough death in preceding days for the weight of it to grow heavy on her shoulders. She said with eyes bloodshot and shadow-smeared, “I don’t really agree with immortalizing ourselves in stone way before we’re even dead,” the words delivered with the ache of millennia she had not yet had a chance to live. And after all, her failure was part of the reason so many were dead — how could she stand that kind of immortality?
The man looked at the wall a long moment before answering. “This place is the human soul,” he said. As if he’d seen this before and knew the shape of it to be true. “This is what we have built with our tiny moments. To lose a place like this… we don’t feel it immediately, but it would ruin everyone in small ways.”
The woman glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “Not all of us are lucky enough to have a lineage in a name,” she said, knowing he had many of those to spare.
He smirked in return, though the edges were too sober to be sharp. “Not all of us are lucky enough to have a lineage in a lifespan,” he said, knowing the burden of that future was far heavier to bear than its blessing.
They stood beneath a half-burned city, watching life begin anew from its ashes. Perhaps that is the reason they both agreed on the importance of saving everyone and everything they could.
But that isn’t truly the start either, is it? Perhaps this marks only the conception of conviction, not the birth of it. So maybe it goes like this:
A man enters a temple to death and seeks communion with its god. Blood laps around his ankles, his waist, his chin. (It does nothing for the blood that already stains his hands.) His lungs fill and he begs a god he does not believe in for answers, kneels on an altar of jagged pieces. (Later, hours later, he will realize those pieces are all his own.)
“Did it choose me because I was broken or did it break me?” he asks. Swallows. Mouth full of iron-copper-rust and he can’t even wince at the tang of it. Too familiar with the taste, the way it coats his tongue, but he cannot look away from this. Not now.
The goddess surveys him, peers deep into the parts of him still aching and raw. “You were always broken, Percival.” The voice is soft, almost gentle. “You were preyed upon, just as it preys upon others, and will continue to do so until finally destroyed.”
Something tightens in his chest. “Can it be fixed?”
“Perhaps.” The head tilts behind its great mask. Porcelain white stares back at him, white as the faces that haunt his dreams. “Your deeds will guide your path to salvation or damnation. The choice is yours. You skirt that line still.”
(Is this all that’s left for him? Being laid bare and pulled apart? Measured and still found wanting?)
It catches in his throat, then, the shards of something desperate. “Is there nowhere I can look for healing?” Begging, pleading. Like he hasn’t done since he was a boy beneath a castle. Since he stumbled out, bloodied, not quite the only one to survive it.
(What’s done cannot be undone. He doesn’t know if that means he’s doomed not to try.)
“All life is inherently broken from the start, Percival,” She says. “Take solace in that. You are all broken, but also understand: mortals can achieve great things. I did.”
He thinks it’s meant to be appeasing. She’s done with him before he can ask anything else.
He wakes on the side of a pool of blood, scrapes away the stain from everything but his hands, begins the long walk to a rented room heavy beneath the weight of his own sins.
Perhaps that is the start.
Or perhaps it isn’t.
Imagine this: two children, battered and bleeding, flee through a snow-covered wood. Only one of them escapes their pursuers. He spends the next few years running, tormented by the agony of his own grief, until something seeps into his nightmares, offering him the power to seek retribution for what was lost.
Imagine this: A young man stands before a coal forge, bending the steel before him into submission. He does not see his shadow where it slinks across the floor — if he did, it would be clawed and venomed. Something hisses in his ear; he tells himself it’s just steam from the quench, and he does not remember engraving the names on the barrel. (Perhaps this is for the best, though he will not know that just yet.)
Imagine this: A white-haired man who was once a brown-haired boy stands in a darkened wood, holding a weapon he’s just barely finished to his chest. He vomits the first time survival forces him to take human life with it. (The blood on his hands stains him red, red, red.) He feels horror crawl up his throat but with it a sense of wonder — he clutches the weapon, knowing even now what destruction he’s wrought.
If you asked him, he would tell you that this is where it begins.
Though he thinks he is, the fact of the matter is that he is not always right.
Let me paint you a picture. Deep in the Umbra Hills: a jail cell. Bars covering the windows, light too weak to seep in through the cracks. Afternoon bleeds into evening; a man sits, clapped in irons, head hung low. He does not look up when the door groans on its hinges. He doesn’t have to — once they’ve stepped through, he can see them all.
Enter: a cleric, a bard and a druid all walk into a bar. (Or, more accurately, a jail cell, but he supposes needs must and all that.) By the looks on their faces he can tell they don’t know what to expect of him. That’s fair, though inconvenient. The presence of a cult has everyone jumpy. The fact that his weapon burns powder and pierces silence like a demon has done him no favors. Plus, the jailer is in on the whole thing. He can’t blame this unlikely trio for their caution. Still — he’s been in here too long. They need him. And besides — at this point, he’ll take any chance he can to get out.
Change scene: a cleric, a bard, a druid and a recently-released gunslinger walk into a cult gathering. (There’s a punchline in there somewhere. He’s a little too busy with a flaming horse to find it.) His wrists ache from two weeks of shackles. His gun is in his hand. It’s the most power he’s had over a situation in a fortnight. His new companions seem torn between focus and panic — perhaps they think they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. He unloads bullets into the nightmare, one after another. The first tears through the meat of its shoulder. The second rips through its throat. It burns, consumes itself until only the skull is left. It’s over — he’s not quite sure what he’s doing here.
(And still. He doesn’t leave.)
Change scene: a cleric, a bard, a druid, a gunslinger, a rogue, a ranger, and a barbarian walk into a tower. (The joke’s getting away from him at this point but still, no punchline.) They gather around a glyph etched into the floor. The skull of a nightmare and heart of a nymph are sacrificed for the cause; a man he’s never seen before begins muttering an incantation. He watches the soul of a lich scream from the goliath’s body — it shatters with the pieces of the nightmare’s skull. He finds himself trapped in an unexpected embrace. The goliath puts him down only when it becomes clear he’s struggling to breathe, and he could walk out of here right now, but he doesn’t. They thank the mage, gather their things, trail out from the tower.
(Still. He doesn’t leave.)
Change scene: a cleric, a bard, a druid, a gunslinger, a rogue, a ranger, and a barbarian walk into a bar. They sit down at a table and order a round of ales. They drink until satisfied, exit, and proceed to keep walking into bars and homes and hell and high water with each other as long as they live.
(The punchline, my dear one, is family. But he will only learn that truth when he’s staring down the ghosts of his past and he realizes: his family’s been with him all along.)
But wait — consider this:
— her eyes peer up at him through a thin sheen of saline, shoulders squared against the judgment she’s asked him to deliver. He doesn’t know how to tell her that when it comes to judgment she is his own; doesn’t know how to breathe through the ache of it, knowing that he’s encountered hundreds of people with money and none of them, none of them have ever been worth her —
Consider this:
— he’s staring down the barrel of a gun that is not his own, blood in his mouth and eyes and lungs, and he has only a moment to forgive before he’s falling, darkness and agony and all he deserves until she calls him back, her lips on his skin a blessing, offering up something he has no right to hold —
Consider this:
— she pins him to the wall, all soft skin and calluses beneath his hands, and when she kisses him he swears, he swears he can still taste the Courage on her tongue —
Consider this:
— “made blood of my blood, bone of my bone, and while we both wish it, I give you that which is mine to give.” Silk wraps around the hand that binds him to her. He breathes love into the space between them, lungs full with the ache of breathing her in; when her ring slides against him he thinks it feels like coming home —
Consider this:
— their daughter is born on a winter’s dawn, a bundle of dark eyes and light hair and a set of lungs all her own. He holds his wife with one arm and his child with the other, and if he hides his face in her shoulder for awhile, she says nothing about the tears that dampen their skin —
And consider this:
— a man sits in the corner of a crowded bar, sword across his lap a dark reflection, thousand yard stare seeking answers and finding none.
“I think I was going to be a clockmaker, once,” he says. His hands shake where they seek hers.
When they return home, he vows to never make another gun —
(A voice from beyond the Gate whispers, “The threads of fate are not puppet strings. They connect life to destiny.”
A clock ticks, a gear turns.
A thin gold thread surges on.)
Dear ones, the moment has come where we must ask: where does it start? What marks a lineage? Where is the birth of a legacy, the careful pouring of a foundation that will long outlive its creator? What are the moments that count, in the end — what are the threads that weave fate together?
Oh, my child, the answer is so simple.
I think you’ll find it’s all of them.
It’s in the quiet moments around a campfire, in the debate over what history will decorate the walls.
It’s in the prayers of the faithless, the cries of the aching.
It’s in the laughter and tears, the light and the darkness, the loss and the grief, the joy and the pain.
It’s in the love. It’s in creation.
And yes: it’s in a name.
(A dark-haired woman weaves through the revelers in a crowd, heavy with the weight of the child that will be her last. She finds her husband; presses against his side, leans her head on his shoulder. Inhales the parchwood and teak scent of him. Feels his arm wrap around her waist, as familiar to her as breathing. Lays her palm on his chest, over the scars she knows to be there. Draws patterns on his waistcoat with her fingertips to mark him as her own.
“Is it everything you hoped it’d be?” she asks, and listens for his heartbeat beneath her ear.
He pauses. Smiles. Watches his children play before him, feels the warmth of her at his side. Gazes up at the clock tower, at the story he’s told for all of them, thinks of those he’s loved and lost. The ache is there, ever present, but it doesn’t hurt quite as much as it once did.
“Yes,” he says. Finds that for the first time, he means it.
They hold each other, tangled as they’ll always be, and together they stare up into the night.)
It all starts with a clock tower. But oh, my dears.
That is so, so far from where it ends.