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Chapter Text

1. Always treat the gun as though it were loaded

It is twelve days to the summer solstice when the Lord of Whitestone Percy de Rolo finds the gun in his daughter’s room.

It is hidden in a book shelved on her desk, a history of Vox Machina, and it is only this fact that had made him pull it from its little enclosure and open the cover, expecting annotations, perhaps, or little notes on the field study of he and Vex’ahlia in the wild. He had found no such thing. Indeed, the pages had been carefully pasted together and hollowed out into a holster for the gun itself, no more than a shapely pocket pistol, with a slender handle and a single chamber.

It is too delicate for him.

He stares down at it, sitting numbly down in the chair he’d made to match the desk, with wheels at the bottom. She’s burned her own name in careful, etched print along the side: Vesper Elaine de Rolo.

At twenty-four years old, his daughter is a grown woman. She can… she can make her own choices, he reminds himself as his eyes blur. He stares down, unseeing. When did she do this? How, between her studies and her duties, did she find the time to polish the handle, to shape the chamber, to fit them together and bind them into one armament? How long has it been hidden on her desk? He hesitates before touching it, then strokes his thumb against the curve of the trigger, remembers hoisting Vesper up on his shoulders to run through the halls of the manor, her white hair streaming out behind her as she shrieked with laughter.

His thumb doesn’t fit against the trigger. His hands are too large– and try as he might, all he can picture is Vesper’s hands, once small enough to wrap around only one of his fingers, now wrapped around this thing instead.

Something opens its eyes, slinking through his veins– not anger, but something tense and cloying that draws his body into the tight orbit of a monstrous black hole in his chest. He knows what these weapons do. He has been their dread instrument, their astrolabe through the world of men. He knows what they do. 

He knows well what you put a name along a barrel for.

With monumental effort, he closes the book, reshelving it perfectly in place before leaving his daughter’s bedroom and closing the door behind him. He will say nothing. Apparently, he is good at it. A public confrontation would be cruel. It would drive her away.

His heart twists in his chest. He has never meant to drive her away.

They do not speak at the dinner table. They do not speak as the manor settles down for bed. They do not speak when he opens her door and stands on the threshold, the words welling up in the back of his throat as she stares at him questioningly, her face wide with innocence. “Father, are you well?”

His words curdle as he swallows them. “Yes,” he finally says. “Yes, dear. Pardon. Everything is… fine.”

In his dreams, he will stand once more in the doorway, watching her shape breathe softly as she sleeps, one pale, doll-like hand fallen over the edge of her bed and towards a floor that ripples with mist. A riot of flapping wings tells him that something has landed on the windowsill, and when he finally tears his eyes away from his daughter, he sees only darkness, so solid and impermeable that it blots out the moonlight that ought to silhouette it.

He dares not look away.

Burning eyes open to glare back. A beak clacks once, twice, yellowed dog teeth gleaming under keratin. It– whatever it is– could almost be smiling. You know what’s coming, a voice hisses like air escaping a punctured lung. You can’t protect her.

His lips part, both in the dream and in the physical stillness of repose. “I can’t do this again,” Percy whispers aloud.

It’s almost enough to wake him. The bedroom fades into liminality until all he sees is that suspended cheshire grin, burned into his mind’s eye. Good, the voice says. Good.

1. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction

The sky rolls with thunder.

“Gwendolyn,” Vex’hlia sighs as she crouches by the grand dining room table, “it’s just a thunderstorm. It’s alright.”

It is ten days to the summer solstice, and the sky, as it is wont to do, especially in summer, has seen fit to throw something of a temper tantrum about these proceedings. Gwendolyn is curled in a ball with her hands clapped over her ears and her eyes squinted shut. When Vex’ahlia places a hand on her back, she gasps, opening her eyes wide just in time for the sky to crackle with lightning and growl like a caged animal. The poor dear is sobbing. “It’s alright,” Vex’ahlia repeats, putting her knees to the floor and sidling under the table to sit with her daughter. “Oh, darling. It’s alright.”

“It’s not! ”

Gwen is almost hysterical with terror. Once more, Vex’ahlia thinks of her own mother, and of her seemingly endless patience. She carefully draws Gwennie into her lap and begins to scratch at the base of her little horns with her nails, which are long and impeccably manicured. “Is this better?”

Gwennie shakes her head in a little jerk of a movement. “Mm mm.”

“Would you like to tell me about it?”

The rain lashes against the windows. Gwennie burrows into her embrace like a tick into a fur coat. “It’s so loud,” she finally manages. “Mommy, everyone’s yelling.”

Gwennie’s delicate white dress snags on the buttons sewn onto Vex’s wrist, and she deftly disconnects them before her daughter can even notice. She doesn’t need to feel trapped, too. “I’m not yelling.”

Horns just against her chin. Deft, strong little fingers dig into her side. The thunder rolls, and Gwennie cringes, trembling. “Don’t you hear it?”

“I do,” Vex says softly, smoothing a hand along the planes of her daughter’s back. “But I’m not scared. It sounds just like Trinket. The storm’s just a big, rumbly old bear, and we’re not afraid of those, are we?”

Gwennie looks up, her lower lip trembling. “Where’s Aunt Cass?” she whimpers– Vex feels her heart stammer at the question. “She doesn’t like it either. Is she okay?”

Cassandra has been delirious for almost a week now. She doesn’t like thunder, Gwennie is right, but thunder is not the least of what the poor girl is dealing with now. She always does poorly in summer, especially around the solstice. Percival has been staying in her room at night– it’s an old magic, he tells her. The de Rolo family is tangled up in the Sun Tree. They wax and wane with its leaves and branches, wilting in the winter only to unfurl once more with the spring.

“Then shouldn’t she be healthier?” Vex had asked him once, late at night in his workshop as he’d tried to replicate Keyleth’s recipe for a less addictive laudanum substitute. Goddamn that girl’s handwriting, truly. “I don’t understand why she’s–”

“She was,” Percy tells her before she can try to come up with a name for Cassandra’s symptoms. “Healthier. More vital, I mean. We all were.”

Before, he doesn’t say, but only because he doesn’t have to. Vex takes a deep breath, and lets it out through her nose. “Then why isn’t she healthy now?”

He shrugs silently, and does not look up from his vial and dropper.

“Percy.”

“She has theories,” he concedes with a slightly impetuous sigh. “I disagree with them, but she has theories.”

Vex’ahlia waits. Her husband is not forthcoming. She takes another deep breath– goddamn her, too, for marrying a genius. “Then what about you?”

He shrugs again, though now that Vex is watching, the effort seems to cost him. “I am as I ever am.”

“Which means?”

Percy finally puts down the dropper and raises his head, making a concerted effort to pop his neck. “As far as I can tell, the effect is amplified the more time one spends in the city,” he tells her, and then hesitates before adding: “And the Sun Tree does not take kindly to ill will.”

Vex’ahlia feels the line of her mouth soften without her input. “Percy–”

“It is recovering,” he finishes without looking up at her. His hands find the edge of the table as he stares at the flat gray of his workshop wall. “We are all recovering.”

She ekes the truth out of him in pieces. The Sun Tree’s roots stretch into her family’s bloodstream, wind carnivorous through the tubes of their lungs to tap into their oxygen supplies. It amplifies fortitude, reflex– it draws on the strength of the de Rolo family to support Whitestone’s people, and for many years, Cassandra’s power, both within and without, was abused, her every reflex tuned to survive in a household that made her pray for death.

Like any other tree around any other abandoned axe, the two of them have grown together, and they cannot be carved apart now.

“What about you?” she’d finally cornered him, some days later that same summer. “Does it hurt you too?”

“The Tree?”

“ Being here ,” she had demanded. Her stomach had felt heavy– now, she knows, it had not been weighed down with dread, but with their first child. “Back in Whitestone. Darling…”

Percy’s silence, even momentary, had told her everything she needed to know. “I haven’t been here as long as Cassandra,” he’d finally said, though his voice had been hollow and ponderous. “There’s less of me caught in it. There’s… less of it in me .”

She had taken his face in her hands, then, as though to kiss him, as though to snap his neck, and he had kissed her palm, as though to give her permission and forgive her all at once. “That is not what I asked.”

Back in the present, Gwendolyn shivers in her lap, and Vex’ahlia cards a hand through her daughter’s corn-silk hair on autopilot as she frees herself from the serrated teeth of memory. The summer will pass. Cassandra will be better soon. All of them will be. They just need to wait for the heatwave to break.

Lightning flashes outside, and she pulls her daughter closer. Gwendolyn whimpers, but they wait together, and the thunder does not appear. It’s a good omen. “I think it’s over,” Vex murmurs delicately. “I think it’s done, sweet girl.”

She shakes her head. “No!”

“The bear’s gone to sleep.”

She shakes her head, her little horns pushing into the soft skin under Vex’ahlia’s chin. Her voice is thin and high and trembling, heavy with tears. “Stop it!”

“Darling?” She leans back to look at her daughter’s face, tight and pale with pain. “The storm is over–”

Gwen only sobs, her eyes overflowing with tarry, pitch-black tears as her voice rises to the keening edge of a scream. “It hurts!”

Footsteps fly by the doorway, and Vex curls Gwennie in on instinct– she can hear Percy’s voice, ripe with dual panic and pain. Something twists in her chest. Something lights up her hunter’s sixth sense. Something is wrong. A lightning storm could not truly harm the Sun Tree. It is an impossibility.

She smells smoke.

Distantly, Cassandra begins to scream.

Chapter Text

3. Always keep your finger straight and off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.

It is well-known throughout the city of Whitestone that the manor locks its doors at sundown. The drawbridge remains down to allow passage, but it plays host only to the Grey Wardens, Whitestone’s guards throughout town. No one is allowed over the drawbridge that Lord de Rolo has not vetted himself, be they scullery maid or visiting foreign dignitary. No one.

Eligibility for the de Rolo family’s personal guard– in Veras’ time as Captain of the Grey Wardens, which must now be some twenty-odd years, there have been less than ten deemed suitable for the task. It is a strenuous process, to say the least. Many leave before they are turned away, and he might criticize the seemingly excessive security measures if they didn’t work so goddamn well .

Every few months, the Lady de Rolo hands Captain Veras a full dossier of suspicious characters in the town proper. She is impeccably manicured, elegantly dressed. She always does it with a pleasant, ladylike smile.

And she is always fucking right.

He doesn’t know how she does it, but be it through sheer force of will or divine intervention, every single person she notes is always halfway through some act of sedition, if not outright rebellion or treason. It’s not just against the de Rolos, either– she’d once caught an infant plot by a visiting lady in waiting to bankrupt Tal’dorei itself, and to this day, he has no idea how. He has no idea.

She’s made enemies, of course. After a life like hers, who wouldn’t? Her reactivity is prudent. Captain Veras knows that. He’s borne witness to the horrors that spawn from complacency, from open trust. He was born in Whitestone, after all, to a family of residuum miners in those terrible years following the coup. He remembers. He will never forget those years. He will never be able to.

Veras knows what awaits his city if he ever falters.

He tries not to kill, these days, if he does not have to– he believes in rehabilitation, in second chances. He does not fire his gun if he has not first extended a hand in peace.

He is… luckier than some to be given that option.

Years ago, in bleakest midwinter, Veras had witnessed the only altercation in his tenure that led to a direct death. Something had gone wrong with the background checks– someone had not looked deep enough into someone else’s history, and a turncoat warlock had revealed themself at just the right moment, waiting with a scroll of Psychic Lance for a moment alone with Lord de Rolo. Veras remembers only a terrible battlecry, the smell of gunsmoke–

It had been over in moments, almost faster than it had begun. Death had been precise. Lord de Rolo put a bullet between the warlock’s eyes before they’d made it into casting range, and then, as their body collapsed to the group in a bloody, twitching heap, he had calmly unloaded and dismantled his firearm. “Captain Veras,” he’d said steadily, “Would you kindly send your men to find my wife?”

Veras had done as he’d been told, still affected by no small amount of shock, and watched in the silence of a cleared room as Lord de Rolo laid the naked barrel of the gun on the table. The man’s eyes had been vacant, cavernous, the calculation and intelligence usually apparent in his gaze suddenly and uncomfortably absent, the echo of a scream cut short. He’d sat forward, his head hanging from his shoulders and gone mechanically still.

Without knowing quite what to do, he had turned his back and faced the door, standing an impeccable guard while the rest of his company found Lady Vex’ahlia, the Lord of Whitestone breathing in a soft rattle behind him. In that moment, he had only done what he found himself capable of doing, and he did not– would not– leave his charge alone in the room with that body.

Apparently, that had made all the difference. 

Veras had expected to be fired that day, but it’s been years– if retribution is coming, it has not arrived swiftly. He pulls his hood around his head to shelter himself from the rain, and watches from the corner of his eye as Lord de Rolo fails to do the same, rain sluicing through his hair. His eyes, though grim with determination, are ringed with the black and red of a lost night’s sleep. He knows the effort will not bear fruit, but Veras tries nonetheless to dissuade the lord from their present course of action. “You don’t look well.”

“I’m fine,” Lord de Rolo says gruffly, with the tone of a sunrise-shift guard coming in with coffee still in their hand. Veras might laugh if his charge didn’t look so unsteady, so drawn. “I want this over with.”

“Some of the upper boughs are still–”

“I know.” 

Veras glances around the both of them as they come off the drawbridge, just as alert as ever. No one is out on the street today. News has spread through town. Curtains are drawn. Businesses are closed for the day. The street lights are still glowing in the darkness of the storm. “We could wait,” he says so that only Lord de Rolo could possibly hear him. “Let the rain put the fire out, my lord. There’s nothing you can accomplish right now.”

The Lord of Whitestone looks towards the horizon, the sprawl of which is interrupted only by the smoking branches of the Sun Tree. His lips move soundlessly before coming to form a tight, thin line, and he shakes his head as though attempting to dislodge a fly from his shoulder or cheek. “I don’t want to do this on my own,” he finally says.

The implication is clear. Veras says nothing more.

Tongues of soot mar the upper trunk of the Sun Tree, carving their way down its ancient length. Ash drifts from the upper branches to settle into the soil, where the rain pins it against the roots, only dirtying them further. It is a disgrace, but not on the Sun Tree itself– the Tree is holy, a gift from the Dawnfather. It is the people meant to maintain her, Veras knows, who have failed so miserably in this scene.

Mud clings to the treads of his boots as he helps Lord de Rolo close the distance to the trunk, helping the older man make his way over the largest of the roots as dirty rainwater pours down from the upper branches. He stumbles, and Veras freezes, not sure whether to catch him, but the man rights himself with his cane before any such action is necessary. Someone else might not have noticed him faltering so, and Veras says nothing, but they both know.

They know.

Lord de Rolo removes a soaking kid-leather glove and lays a palm flat against the wood of the Tree as Veras stands guard. He does not turn to look at his charge, though not out of respect. There is something twisting in his gut, and it says that it recognizes the expression behind the mask of Lord de Rolo’s face.

Veras lifts his chin and attempts to pay that little voice no heed. If he concentrates, he can hear the Lord’s voice just over the patter of the rain, but he does not understand the language being spoken. He is desperate, says that nagging voice, and though Veras does not close his eyes, the hair on the back of his neck stands on end, as though someone is standing just behind him and whispering into his ear. Did you know he could feel desperation?

Thunder rumbles overhead. The fire crackles. Something like skin drags itself across the back of his skull.

Don’t you know what’s coming?

As always, Veras is a fraction of a second too late on the draw. When he turns, there is no one at his shoulder, and no shadow to suggest there ever might have been. Whoever or whatever had been speaking to him is long gone– and he can only watch as fire blooms under Lord de Rolo’s hands. “My lord!”

He reels back with a strangled gasp of pain, and Veras takes hold of his shoulders so that he does not slip or fall. Even momentary contact with the searing-hot bark of the Tree has left his hands raw and red, scratched and blistered as though he had been put to flame much longer than a moment. For all the pain he must be in, the man says nothing more, just lifts his gaze from his scorched palms to the fire still smoldering in the upper boughs. “Lord de Rolo,” Veras says in a low voice, attempting to wrest back his attention, “are you alright?”

Nothing. The lord’s eyes are pale with the reflection of the distant sky.

“Percival?”

This breach of protocol seems to succeed where decorum has failed him. Certainly, it brings Lord de Rolo out of his thoughts enough to speak. “Did you see that?”

Veras sees the rain patter down across his palms. It must be agony, but the lord doesn’t even flinch. “See what?”

Lord de Rolo shakes his head, again as though attempting to clear a fly from his skin. “Post a guard,” he finally says, his voice taut and thin like a wire. “Quarantine the Tree. No one comes into the square while it’s still on fire.”

“Are you certain?”

“I am.” His hands flutter for a moment as he realizes he will not be able to close his coat. Veras lets go of his shoulders, but offers him a supporting arm as they make their way back to the manor. He will not be able to hold his cane with an injury such as this. “The rain’s not putting it out.”

Veras glances up at the sky, where Lord de Rolo had been staring only moments ago. The storm looks wrong, like billowing smoke. High in the cloud cover, too high to make out form or species, a black shape wheels like a vulture.

“Yes, milord,” Veras hears himself say. “It will be done.”

The de Rolos keep the castle locked at night. Nine days from the summer solstice, Lord de Rolo orders it locked during the day, too.

Chapter Text

4. Always keep the gun unloaded until you are ready to use it.

In the wake of the revolution, when she and her brother had taken back their ancestral home and cleared it of its monstrous infestation, Cassandra had numbly laid herself down in the same bed she had slept in since the coup, in a windowless chamber only a room away from the master bedroom, and she had not truly expected to wake.

Percy had stayed with her, sitting at the foot of the bed facing the door, a blade in hand in lieu of a firearm. He’d asked if she wanted to sleep somewhere else, anywhere else, and she had turned him down. This was the bed upon which she had waited so many years for death.

It seemed fitting to finally lay herself to rest in it.

They never did change that bedframe. Oh, the covers were changed many times over the years. The marred, stained mattress was taken away and summarily destroyed. The canopy was replaced, yes– but the frame of the bed is just the same as it’s always been. She cannot sleep anywhere else, though the gods only know how often she has tried. It is as if she is the living punchline of some terrible joke.

“Cass.”

She pulls the covers tighter around her shoulders, but the chill remains. From where he sits in a chair next to her, Percy sighs. “You need to eat.”

She stares at the wall instead of him. If she tries, she can still see the holes where the manacles were bolted so long ago. They were mere inches too short to allow her to climb into her own bed. Sylas had made her wear them if she wouldn’t sleep– to help her remember that unconsciousness was a privilege, he’d said. “I’m not hungry.”

“You’re going to feel worse if you don’t eat anything.”

There’s worry in his voice, but laced throughout it more subtly is frustration, plain and simple. She knows that he doesn’t want to be here. He has never wanted to be here– not in this room, not in this house, not in this city. Percy’s a runner. “You don’t have to take care of me,” she says tonelessly. “I’m not going to die on you.”

“I know.”

He doesn’t get the joke. Something less than a laugh ghosts out on an exhale. It’s eight days to the summer solstice, Vesper told her this morning, but it’s cold as bleak midwinter in this room, like she’s still lying in the snow, dreaming through a phantom timeline as she chokes on the arrows in her throat.

Fuck. Cassandra squeezes her eyes shut and tries not to open them. Why did she think that? Why does she always think that? “You should go,” she tells Percy. A cold breeze sweeps in from the darkness inside her skull, and gooseflesh rises up on her skin. Sylas speaks for her, and the words only barely avoid playing out in the third person. “I’ll eat when I’m hungry.”

“I think we need to give up on the idea that you’ll be hungry,” Percy says with a huffy little sigh. Even after all this time, his bedside manor is as bad as ever. Maybe she ought to be kinder– he’s in pain, too. His knee always flares up in the summer. “Could I get you to drink some water?”

The snow makes her shiver without meaning to. Maybe she’s been shivering for a while. It’s always a possibility. She can hear something growling nearby– scenthounds. She speaks in a whisper, but at least it’s her own voice this time. “Tea?”

A hand finds hers and squeezes reassuringly. Cassandra barely manages to not flinch. “Of course.”

She doesn’t open her eyes, though Percy must leave her for a moment, because she hears the door open and close, and then from somewhere far away her mother says, “Oh, dear. What’s happened to you?”

Cassandra shudders all over, curling into the fetal position in the tacky-damp bedsheets. It’s sweat, she knows. It must be. Through the bedcovers, a cool hand lights on her brow, and her mother’s voice, closer now, tuts softly. “Did you catch a chill from the snow?”

She is not real. She cannot be real. Cassandra drags in a harsh, aching breath through her teeth and attempts to remind herself of that fact. Nothing she sees here is real, and none of it can hurt her. “Go away,” she grits out. “I don’t want you here. Leave.”

“You don’t want me here?” The voice sounds almost offended, though not heartbroken the way anyone else might be. “That’s a horrible thing to say to me, pet.”

She does not reply.

Her mother’s voice sighs, and a weight appears on the end of the bed as though someone has sat down upon it. “You’ve been dreaming,” she says. “You’ve been very sick, love, but don’t fret. I’m here now. I’ll take care of you.”

Cassandra bites her tongue and tastes blood. It is trying to trick her, she knows. They play this sorry game every solstice. Her hand creeps under her pillow and finds nothing– goddamn her brother for taking her knife while she is ill! Goddamn her, too, for chewing her nails down to the quick and leaving herself defenseless! How could she have been so stupid? She forces her eyes shut, holding to reality as though it can save her. None of this is real. None of this is real.

“I’ll take care of you,” her mother murmurs. A delicate hand cards soothingly through her hair, and a lump rises alongside bile in her throat. “I will always take care of you.”

Cassandra tries to swallow, and finds that she cannot. The sensation is intimately familiar, but it is not nostalgia that causes her eyes to well with tears– it is an unforgettable agony as she finds her hands already clawing at her throat, and they tell her that they have found purchase around the woden shaft of a blood-slick arrow, but that cannot be, no matter what her body tells her. She is not that girl anymore. None of this is–

But the hand on her scalp grips a handful of hair and wrenches her head back, and she tries to scream, but sound cannot cut through the splintery material now piercing her esophagus, cannot navigate the way her muscles clench around the terrible intrusion, so she chokes on it, gagging on herself, and her eyes fly open to reveal a sky full of winter’s constellations, a heavy cover of blood-soaked snow around her where only blankets ought to lie. What little horrified breath she manages to choke out streams in a column to the sky, escaping the nightmare in her place, and her mother’s fine hand caresses her cheek. “I’m here,” she says softly. “Be still, pet.”

One of the arrows in her throat twinges as someone takes hold of the shaft. Her eyes flicker across the scene, across the perfect, uncaring stars, her brother’s footprints in the snow, the toothy shadows at the edge of her consciousness. It is winter in Whitestone, and she is only a girl again, and she cannot remember Lady de Rolo’s face. It has been blasted away like marble by enchantment and time. Her mother, Delilah Briarwood, smiles down at her in the darkness, and her bodies align, and she knows as though gazing through time itself exactly what comes next.

The vision wavers.

I could take it away, the shadows whisper into her ear. I do not need to hurt you. You know what I want.

Cassandra struggles for breath. She does not speak. She cannot.

The shadows sigh. Almost begrudgingly, the weight of the arrows disappear from her throat. Tell me.

The pain melts like butter on a hot pan, and she takes a breath of snow-pure air. “Tell you what?” she croaks.

One of her mother’s hounds snarls in warning. You are many things, the shadows seethe, but you have never been this stupid. Tell me about the plan.

Distantly, she feels her shoulders relax, the bedsheets soft around the edges of her reality. How desperate must it be to come crawling on its belly like this? “She’s going to kill you,” Cassandra whispers. A girlish smile twitches at her mouth. “She’s finally going to kill you.”

The darkness screams.

Her little smile catches like fire at the corner of dry paper, spreading slowly across the expanse of her face, and she says nothing more, even as the arrows return to her throat, as her mother rips at her hair, as the dogs begin to tear her flesh from her bones. This is not real, she knows now, and she is somewhere beyond pain, beyond fear, high into the winter constellations. Nothing here can hurt her.

She is going to be free.

Chapter Text

5. Never point the gun at anything you don’t intend to destroy.

When Percy de Rolo returns to his sister’s bedside, he is relieved to find that she has not perished in his absence.

He extricates her from the tangled sheets and arranges her on her side so that she will not drown if she vomits, though there is little in her system that lends itself to expulsion. He hesitates before leaving the copper teakettle on her nightstand, still wrapped in a pink cosy so that it won’t be cold when she drinks it, and prepares to settle back into the rickety wooden chair next to her bed– never mind how it makes his knee stiff to sit still for so long. He will be there for her this time.

Soft footsteps move in the hallway.

A flickering shadow moves under the door, perfectly sized for a wandering miscreant child. Gwendolyn is restless again, no doubt. It almost brings a smile to his face, but when he finally gets up to open the door, he is just in time to watch a figure holding what must be a candlestick turn the corner and disappear out of sight, the darkness billowing out behind them. They are taller than Gwendolyn by at least two feet, if his initial glance portrayed them accurately, and the light did not behave as though it were glinting off of hair. It was duller, more spread out, and he knows with a familiar certainty that he has seen these refractory patterns before, but he cannot place where–

Cassandra murmurs something he does not catch, and when he looks over his shoulder at her, her face is still, deep in dreaming. “Cassie?”

She does not stir.

He looks back down the hallway. There is no trace of the light he saw a moment ago, though he remembers suddenly where he has seen it before: around a fireplace deep in the reaches of Scanlan’s mansion, half-asleep and tipsy off of red wine, watching Vax’ildan’s wings gleam in the wavering heat off the hearth.

Oh. Percy’s bones ache with age made suddenly apparent. Those days seem so far from reach, now.

What a blessing , he thinks distantly. Good gods. What a cruelty.

His reflection almost wholly distracts him from the matter of the light at hand, but when it circulates back around to the forefront of his mind, he is surprised to find himself already following the figure’s path down the hallway, having closed Cassandra’s door behind him. The blisters on his hand pulse with fresh discomfort, but they do him a service– as soon as he catches up to himself, he lightens his step, moving with a practiced and almost total silence. His body, it seems, remembers.

Perhaps those days are not so far from reach, after all.

He rounds the hall to the top of the grand staircase, and just barely catches the figure and its flickering light move through a set of closing double doors into the library. Again, he catches that same gleam, the singular spray of firelight glancing off a feathered surface. There is no mistaking it now.

He stops moving.

It is folly to imagine that Vax’ildan might ever return, but hope, that strange delusion, is harder to deny than most of its ilk. Even now, years after his crossing the veil, Percy finds himself looking for his brother whenever Pike brings by a basket of Byroden sourdough, as though at any moment he will swan into the room and make off with the whole loaf before he can be stopped. Fuck– he still expects Vax to claim that favorite bedroom in the manor, the one with the balcony where he would sit for hours with Keyleth, where their laughter would drift out over the poison gardens like tropical birdsong…

He tears himself away from memory. Keyleth doesn’t laugh that way anymore, Percy reminds himself. It is folly, indeed, to imagine that Vax’ildan might slot back into the hole that his absence leaves in the world. It is folly to imagine that he even could.

But a light grows behind the frosted panes of glass in the library doors, and despite the years, foolish hope springs eternal. Percy moves down the stairs and, in a fluid motion, crosses the floor and flings the doors open–

What had he expected?

A candelabra burns behind several bookshelves, and it is by this light that he finds Vesper sitting by an open window, nursing a mug of some foul-smelling herbal concoction and taking notes in a journal bound in leather. She sits up as he approaches, and closes her notebook before he can see anything she’s written. “Father?”

He stops a few paces away from her, and does not come any closer. The image of the fine, curved trigger flashes in his mind, and it is only through tremendous effort that he manages not to wince. “Vesper,” he says in turn, leaning on his cane as his burned palms seethe. “It’s late.”

Her white hair is unbraided, and it falls in waves around her round face. She looks so much like her namesake. “I know.”

“What are you doing out of bed?”

She glances down at her book, and he barely catches an image of a shadowy, vaguely humanoid monster, its open jaws bristling with jagged teeth as it leans over a child in bed before she closes it, too. “Research.”

“On–”

“Is Aunt Cass alright?” Vesper asks before he can question what it is, exactly, that she’s researching. Her eyes glitter inscrutably in the candlelight. “I heard her screaming earlier.”

“She’s fine,” Percy says without thinking, and then sighs in defeat when Vesper narrows her eyes. There is nothing to be gained from being caught in a lie. “I don’t know,” he tries again. “It’s… hard to get anything lucid out of her.”

The breeze flutters in through that open window, gently tousling her hair. It still smells like smoke. “It’s worse this year, isn’t it?”

There is no point in lying. “It is,” he tells her, his voice only as grave as he allows it to be, then finishes lamely, “but autumn will be here in a few months.”

“I know,” she echoes him. Her gaze sweeps slowly across the room before returning to his face. “Gwennie’s scared.”

“She is,” Percy agrees. Her eyes are already sliding away– it is this, perhaps, that makes him speak. “Vesper, are you scared, too?”

Her eyes do not return to him, but he sees one of her hands drift to pick at the tattery lace cuff of her dressing-gown sleeve. “I don’t know,” she finally says, her voice distant. “Do you think it’ll happen to us, too? When we’re older?”

“It didn’t happen to me.”

Vesper’s focus snaps back to his face, as though his inability to conjure any more of an explanation is an intentional fault. “You weren’t here, though,” she says slowly, like he won’t understand if she speaks too quickly. Her eyes glitter darkly, but they are ringed with shadowy bruises, and it is these he narrows in on, not her strange intensity. “Were you?”

“Have you been sleeping?”

She blinks, surprised, as though this is not at all relevant, but he does not allow her to look away, not with the evidence all over her face. “Not well,” she finally says, her fingers busy pulling a long thread from her sleeve. “I’ve just been busy.”

“I see.” It’s a bold-faced lie, and they both know it. He gives her a moment to come clean, then presses on. “Busy with what?”

“My research–”

“Vesper, your thesis isn’t due until the spring.” Percy leans against a bookcase and watches his daughter bite her tongue, something flickering behind her eyes. “You don’t need to be keeping yourself up so late with it now. Besides, you told me you were writing about the movements of celestial bodies, not…” He gestures to her book, to the moldering title winking in the moonlight: A TREATISE ON THE RESUSCITATION OF CERTAIN GHOSTS. “Gods, whatever that is.”

“Father–”

“ And ,” he says heavily, interrupting her, “and, Vesper, you likewise failed to inform me about the firearm you’ve been keeping in your bedroom .”

He sees her jerk, as though burned, but her face does not open in panic or guilt. Rather, it closes, turning hard, ice creeping into her eyes. Unease twists like a handkerchief in his stomach. He should not be the one wrong-footed in this exchange. He speaks before the silence can settle in and turn this scene into an interrogation. “Is there anything you’d like to say for yourself?”

Vesper straightens her back and raises her chin. “Yes, sir.”

“Go on, then.”

There is an infinite moment during which she seems to choose her words, loading them into the barrel so that he has time to back down, and when he does not, she finally pulls the trigger with a practiced, mechanical motion. “Is the problem that I have a firearm in my room, or is it that I failed to inform you?”

He feels his eyebrows enter the upper atmosphere. “ Excuse me?”

“Well, you have a gun in your room,” Vesper says, her tone deadly clinical in its calibration, “and you didn’t tell us about it, so I’m just wondering what I’ve done that’s so… problematic.”

Percy stares. He tries, unsuccessfully, to collect his jaw from the library floor as Vesper looks on, seemingly curious. “I did not raise you to speak that way,” he finally manages, practically spitting the words, but it’s a useless attempt at controlling the situation. “Though if I’ve not managed to impress upon you by now that my actions should not serve as a guide for your own, then clearly I’ve done a worse job raising you than I thought.”

Vesper tugs another long piece of thread from her wrist cuff. Her candles flicker in the breeze. Her face might as well be carved from stone. “You didn’t answer the question, though.”

“You’re grounded.”

Her face blooms into furious shock. “What?”

He can barely keep his voice from shaking. “If you’re going to act like a child, you’re going to get treated like one.”

“I’m twenty-three years old, you can’t ground me–”

“You are my daughter, and you live in my house–”

“It’s not your house!” Vesper stands up so suddenly that her chair slams against the desk, practically lunging towards him, and he doesn’t flinch, but it’s a near thing. Her eyes blaze, and her soft, porcelain hands ball into fists at her side. “ It is not your fucking house, father! That’s the whole goddamn problem!”

Her voice echoes through the library, slowly fading, swallowed up by paper and wood. Her chest heaves as though she’s been running. Her face is carved in desperation, fear, rage, and Percy opens his mouth to say something, anything, to offer a hand, to take it all back–

But Vesper takes a deep breath, and her face closes again, and just like that, the moment is gone. She turns her back to him and starts gathering her books and her candelabra. “I’m going to bed,” she says shortly, her voice empty, exhausted. “We can discuss how long I’m grounded for in the morning.”

“Vesper–”

She tucks her books under one arm, and picks up her candelabra in her free hand. “I’m going to bed,” she repeats without looking him in the eye. She does not wait for him to step aside, but instead angles her shoulders and slips by him like a shadow. Her dressing gown rustles softly against the floor. “Goodnight, father.”

He tries for words, but what is there for him to say? He watches her leave through the double doors, her light flickering up the staircase and out of sight, leaving the library dark and lonely in her absence.

“Well, fuck me,” Percy mutters to himself. “Damn it.”

Another breeze moves through the window behind him, still carrying the scent of woodsmoke. He hears something large flap its wings and land clumsily on the sill, but he does not turn to look, still gazing after his daughter. Goddamnit– he knows, already, what he’s going to see.

His hallucination does not share his sense of defeat– indeed, it presses on regardless. “You know it’s not your fault,” it says in a harsh rendition of Vax’ildan’s voice. He– it– does not sound unsympathetic. “You can’t protect her from everything, Freddy.”

He closes his eyes, but the afterimage of her retreating up the stairs is already burned into his mind. What is a daughter if not some kind of perpetual motion machine, only ever travelling away, away, away?

From the windowsill, Vax’ildan rustles his feathers. “I’m sorry.”

There’s no one there. “I know,” Percy responds softly, though the words will do no good. His shoulders fall. “I know.”

Chapter Text

6. Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.

Vex’ahlia de Rolo is used to dreams of finery, of balls, of the gentle tinkling of crystal on crystal amidst amused laughter, but something here is… wrong.

Something here is wrong.

A hand brushes against the small of her back, and she turns her head to see who has touched her, only to settle when she finds familiar eyes behind a mask wrought from purest silk. She curtsies as muscle memory directs her to, and the figure bows back, equally polite, equally mischievous as though they, too, are aware that none of this is real. “I have waited so long to speak with you, my lady.”

She does not remember who this figure is, but she dismisses this gap in her memory to the convolutions of dreaming. It hardly matters– something in their voice puts her at ease. “Have we met before?” she wonders aloud.

Somewhere nearby, the band strikes up a slow, warbling tune. Without a word, she and the figure arrange themselves into the stance for a partnered waltz. His hand finds her waist to lead her around the floor as he smiles, revealing laugh lines around his dark lips. “No,” he tells her, “but I have heard of your exploits, my lady. You are a credit to your house.”

A credit to her house. She blinks slowly as the world drifts around her. Is she dancing or floating? “Who…?”

His thumb rests upon her cheekbone, and the questions melt away, no more than glass candy in the mouth of her mind. “In another life,” he tells her, “we might have been family.”

Memory catches, then snags. Didn’t Vax once say something similar about the clergy of the Raven Queen? She can’t quite call the conversation to mind. “Are you an angel?”

He smiles bashfully. “Oh, I’ve been called lots of things.”

They’re definitely floating, now. The sky ripples out into forever around them, the music radiating through the stars themselves. He keeps leading their dance. It takes her a moment to remember what she ought to say next. “Why are you here?”

“You invited me.”

“To the party?”

He twirls her around in a circle. Eternity glitters. “You needed me,” he reminds her gently. “You wanted to see your brother again.”

She did. She does! As soon as he reminds her, that vacuous hole opens once more in her soul, the maw that closes only in her sleep, that lone place where truth cannot reach her. “You can do that?”

“I can bring him here, yes.”

“Why–”

He leans in close, so that no one can hear them, even though they are alone. “Because I require your help.”

His breath tickles her ear like a fly against her skin, but it hardly matters what he’s said. She would not be so bold awake, but she is dreaming, and she speaks before she can stop herself. “Anything.”

A cold breeze ruffles the hem of her skirt. All at once, the stars snuff into darkness, but the singing remains, and the figure smiles in perfect, celestial harmony. “Done,” he says gratefully. “Thank you.”

“What–”

Vex’ahlia plummets.

Her skull cracks against the marble dancefloor, and the world smears into sickening technicolor as the band keens. She knows without looking that it is a mortal wound, knows it in the cold breeze whistling over the jagged, smashed edges of her open cranium, ghosting over her seeping brain, the way she gasps for breath like a fish out of water. Instinctually, she tries to find the edge of the pain, even though she knows the effort to be futile. This is an agony that goes out forever.

But the band harmonizes. Somewhere, velvet rustles over her skin. High heels click as the dancers take the obstacle of her broken body in stride. She tries to scream, but the action disintegrates– there’s not enough brain in her head to remember what screaming is. The scene around her exists in descriptions she no longer possesses.

Something whispers in her ear, the last thing she can possibly comprehend, the holiest truth of high society: this is what we do with troublesome women.

Time moves, but only because it has no other option. Vex’ahlia does not move with it. She mewls on the marble floor, leaking, delirious, only alive because dreaming will not allow her to die. It would be a mercy, yes, but one cannot expect to hook a prized specimen on a cheap lure. Some creatures sense suffering in the air, and it is one of these that the nightmare means to draw now.

Crystal tinkles. People laugh. Time spins on. The dream waits. It has promises to keep, after all.

Its quarry enters the scene right on cue.

The creature looks, at first, like a roiling star made of missing things, of lifelines cut short by happenstance, by malice, of the debris of pain and loss held together by the singular and gravitational force of grief. The dream warps as it enters, then settles as it stops spinning, as its stormy geography settles into high cheekbones, into dark, glossy hair, into iridescent wings that all at once seem to absorb and refract and emit light. In a motion that is somehow the natural-born opposition to a final breath, every part of the creature becomes more orderly, coalescing at last into the shape of a dark angel, the Champion of Ravens, whose eyes glitter with divine purpose.

He takes in his surroundings in a languid sweep, and although his expression does not change, his body relaxes into what could almost be amusement. Without lifting a finger, a half-mask made of whorling bone appears over the left side of his face. The other dancers titter among themselves, but they hardly matter. They part for him almost absentmindedly– he exists apart from their number, after all. They are but stalks of wild grass bending away from the predator’s body, only set dressing for the scene that lays before him, where suffering hangs heavy in the air, like blood blossoming through water.

He moves closer, catching sight of his prey, a sole lingering shade in the land of dreaming. His brow creases in wary confusion. This alone should not have drawn him here. He crouches by the creature’s ruined body and, with a calloused, unflinching hand, rolls its head along the curve of a broken neck to catch a glimpse at its face. What is this?

Dull eyes stare up from a visage made deathly pale by blood loss. The ghoul moans his name.

God help him. It is his own face.

The Champion recoils from it like a hound catching sight of itself in a mirror as he lets go of its jaw, the suffering in the air giving way to a terrible sense of confusion, of dread. This is a trap, and he has stepped into it without any thought towards the danger. A dark blade appears in his hand, and he shifts his weight, preparing for an ambush–

A moment passes. Two. Three. 

Nothing. 

He looks back to the shattered woman on the floor. Something mortal and traitorous gutters in his heart. In spite of his better judgment, he is already coursing divine healing magic through her, watching her wounds trickle closed, watching sense return to her eyes. She heaves a great, shuddering gasp and reaches for his wrist, and he does not cringe when her feverish hand touches his skin, though he feels the taint of it on his skin as though he will never wash clean. “You came,” she whispers hoarsely, trying to catch his eye. “Oh, is it really you?”

It’s a laughable question. The Champion of Ravens is a being which goes on forever, a celestial soul the size of a skyscraper collapsed into the event horizon of a half-elf body, not even six feet tall. He is a phrase, unending, a life sentence, inevitable judgment, an infinite mercy–

His sister’s hand burns against his wrist, but he does not pull away. How could he forget? She always did run hot.

“Vax’ildan?”

The jaws of the trap close. Eternity dissolves into a daydream. He is only a man. “Yes,” he says, taking her hand in his own. He tries to speak as though it had never been a question. It might work. He’s a very good liar. “It’s me.”

She stares up at him, her lips parting slightly. “How–”

There are many things he wishes to say to her, both as her brother and as an emissary of the Matron of Ravens, but this is how it goes, that old, familiar tune. He does not get to answer her. There is a snap under her hand, a sound of bone breaking, and the dream melts away, though the sensation of something broken in her grasp does not, nor does he. Vex’ahlia reaches for him with her free hand, but his visage flickers into darkness under her touch. “Don’t go,” she begs him as tears spring to her eyes. “I love you. Don’t go.”

His eyes turn mournful, but it’s not his choice– they both know that he is already gone.

Vex’alia awakens standing in the poison garden, clothed only in her dressing gown and no idea how she arrived there. She feels mud caking the soles of her feet, and as she stares blankly at her hands, she thinks it must be on her palms, too, before realizing that it must be something else. Mud does not drip or stain this way, drooling gentle traceries down her wrists. Mud does not glitter in moonlight.

Her heart jumps in sudden terror. It’s blood.

“Lady de Rolo?”

She whirls to find the Ashari gardener standing in the doorway of their cottage, the candle on the sill full of hot wax, as though they had already been awake. The stars tell her that it is past midnight, but here they are, their eyes wide. “What are you doing here?” they ask, their voice trembling.

They are a young, slight thing, especially for a firbolg– she can see their tail dancing nervously in the candlelight, their hands light on the doorjamb as though they were unsure what to do with them. Vex stares, her mind frozen like a deer in a spotlight. Her breath catches in her mouth. There’s blood on her hands. Why is there blood on her hands?

Their eyes wander to the ground between two hemlock plants just behind her. She follows their gaze, and together they find a feathery white heap on the ground, a body reminiscent of any strangled chicken. She knows at a glance, though, that this is not a chicken, and as she moves closer, she takes in the hook of its beak, the darkness of its eyes, the width of the flight feathers, the blood, the blood, the blood–

It’s a snow-white raven with a broken neck. The bone pierces through its skin.

“My lady?”

There are five days until the solstice. She will spend the hours between now and dawn washing the mud off her feet, the blood from her hands, the dread from her mind in the wake of a dream she barely remembers. No matter how tightly she holds it, the memory washes away like sand between her fingers and the blood stains her lifeline, as though she will never truly come clean. Underneath it all, a certainty she cannot shake: she knows what’s coming. She must. She just…

Vex looks out the bedroom window as she comes back to bed, dawn barely breathing into the sky. Her husband is not there. She tries not to tremble.

The lights in the Ashari’s cottage are still burning.

Chapter Text

7. Learn the mechanical and handling characteristics of the gun you are using.

Once upon a time, there was a tree.

People say it was always a mighty oak, but it was just a sapling, really, in those first days. It was still learning how to grow its own acorns and hold them aloft in its spindly little branches– it was a child of a tree, and like all children, hope rested upon it. Its limbs grew heavy with the weight of the future.

Vesper’s father tells her this story the first time he shows her how to assemble a gun. She is to keep the disparate parts in her bag, where they will disguise themselves as little silvery trinkets, and if anything ever goes wrong, anything at all, she is to assemble them and fire before anyone realizes that she is a threat. He tells her that this information is tantamount to her future, and therefore to the future of her people, and that she cannot afford to be protected from this lesson.

She assembles and disassembles the pistol over and over and over, until she’s confident she could do it in her sleep, and her father watches, steely-eyed, timing her attempts until she can perform the motions in just under ten seconds. He keeps telling her about the tree– how a community had formed around it, how they had watered it with their dreams, their ambitions. They loved their tree, the way they loved their ruling family, the way they loved their city’s heir, a cherub of a boy whose name has long been lost to history.

The tree grew. The heir grew with it. They were tied together, the people said. Their city endured so long as they both lived.

After her final attempt, Vesper’s father nods curtly, and she steps back from the table. He looks over her work, picking up the gun to test that each mechanism is in place. She sees him flick off the safety.

And then he points the gun at her.

The tree grew ill with blight. Out of necessity, the cherub heir became a druid, and he healed the tree, and that is where most versions of the story end. If she asks in town, that is where the story ends.

Behind her father’s eyes, the cherub boy tells her that his sacrifice was not enough.

The oldest versions of the story say that the heir had not wanted to become a druid. He had wanted to remain a sticky-fingered boy, content to steal desserts off their trays for the sake of his own appetite, flowers from their vases with which to delight his mother. He had hated every moment of his scholarly apprenticeship, but he had pursued it with fervor, knowing that it was for his people, and for his family, who every day that the tree withered looked upon him with a growing shame and disappointment in their eyes. He would have done anything to make them smile again, he tells Vesper, who has quite suddenly forgotten how to breathe, small and singular in the eye of the pistol’s muzzle. When he speaks in her father’s voice, it is pained. He would have done anything.

Vesper is thirteen years old. She is too young to understand what is happening, or why, and she has very few tools with which to protect herself. She opens her mouth and screams.

She finds out the rest of the story from her aunt, who wakes her from her sleepwalking and reassures her that none of it had been real. It was just a nightmare, she says wanly, smiling in such a way that she reveals her terrible canines, and Vesper, still trembling in terror, feels safer, somehow. Her aunt is the scariest woman she’s ever met, a guardian force against monsters in closets and portraits, shadows that lurk golden-eyed and stinking of blood under beds– if Aunt Cass says that she does not need to be afraid, Vesper will believe her.

She is provided no such platitudes. Her aunt tells her that she needs to be very afraid, indeed.

The cherub heir– Clarrin, her aunt snarls, Clarrin Ignatius Felix de Rolo the First, that ungrateful bastard– learned the truth too late. The tree had grown overburdened and unsupported under the weight of the hopes and dreams of its people. The future, in whatever shape it unfolded, required sacrifice. Begrudgingly, he delivered his findings to his mother. Something must be done, he told her, glancing towards the babe at her breast. You know what is coming if we fail to act.

His mother saw something bitter and un-cherublike in his eyes then. I do, she told him. Rest easy, my son. I will do what is necessary.

That night, when Lord Clarrin slept, his mother ordered him buried alive amidst the roots of the city’s tree, so that his flesh and blood might allow it to grow. As he screamed and struggled in the soldier’s iron grip, she prayed to the Dawnfather for a future so bright its light could blast away the terrible shadows of her present. She delivered her son as a sacrificial lamb to her people and their destiny, and the Dawnfather smiled upon them, and the Sun Tree flourished, growing once more ripe with fruit, and all was well.

And Clarrin seethed.

Every solstice, his spirit rises, a shadowy beast that delivers terrible judgment onto the people of Whitestone and their Sun Tree. He is visible only to the heirs of the de Rolo family, and he passes like a bloodstain from hand to hand along the trunk of their family tree. He is a curse, and a responsibility, and a terrible secret, and Vesper understands why she is being told this history, because she, too, is a firstborn heir– but understanding a burden makes it no easier to carry. She is only thirteen. She still has very few tools with which to protect herself. She is afraid, and confused, and unsteady.

Clarrin does not wait for her to find her footing.

So she does it all scared. She grows from thirteen to fourteen, and then fourteen to fifteen, and she learns to handle a gun even though she has to fight hard not to flinch when her father asks her to assemble a pistol for the first time. She learns every one of the rules about how this ought to be done– this being the handling of a weapon, this being also the handling of a terrible secret. She learns that Clarrin is vengeful and terrifying, that he will take the form of anything and everything that might cow her into submission, but that his power never surpasses her own. She is only given fights that she and her aunt can win.

The three of them fall into a pattern. They circle the ring, looking for openings in a perfect gridlock.

And then Cassandra starts getting sick.

She’s always gotten sick around the solstices, but this is different. Vesper’s father summons doctors, and then just as quickly brings in clerics and druids, who can only tell him the same thing. It’s not just her body, anymore– it’s something worse, something insidious and psychosomatic, she overhears from the hallway where she’s eavesdropping. It’s something Vesper can’t help fight with herbs or exercise or by covering for her aunt while she regains her strength between meetings. They say it’s all in her head, and the spellcasters might use slightly kinder terms, but it doesn’t matter. Her own head is where Cassandra is supposed to live, thank you very much, so there needs to be a way to fix it.

There is not a way to fix it.

The people in the manor put away their medical instruments and their channeling symbols, and they start using words like degenerative and psychological and treatment plans and timelines until her father sends them all away. It’s no good keeping them around any longer. They can’t help.

Vesper is seventeen when her aunt tells her that she will have to start fighting Clarrin on her own.

There’s nothing else for it. They both understood that it was simply the truth of the matter, and that Clarrin would not wait. “I can’t do this by myself,” Vesper had told her once, in a moment of weakness. “Aunt Cass, I don’t know how.”

They’d been alone in Cass’ bedroom as the fever rollicked through her bloodstream, attempting to go over next steps. Mostly, Vesper had been trying to plan out a strategy for Clarrin’s winter assault, and Cass had been nodding along, both trying to be helpful and not look at things that weren’t there. “He’s never beat us before.”

“But you won’t–” Vesper had tugged harshly at the roots of her hair, trying to articulate her points. “He’s going to kill me eventually,” she’d finally said, the words acrid and stale in her mouth, a long-held thought finally thrown into the air for someone else to examine. “I have to do this twice a year for the rest of my life, and I have to do it alone, and he can’t die.”

Her aunt’s hand had found hers, lying atop the bedcovers, and squeezed it tightly. Vesper squeezed back, though she did not know who this gesture was meant to reassure. “You are not alone,” Cassandra had told her in a strange, distant rattle of a voice. “There are always… other options.”

So in the interim stretch of winter before Clarrin’s attack, Vesper donned a soft cloak and disguised her features with an enchanted hood and put all the pieces of her pistol in her bag the way she’d been taught, and in the dead of night made for the temple of the Raven Queen.

The priest wasn’t supposed to know that she was coming, but they had made preparations for her arrival, nonetheless, and they did not gawk or gasp when she removed her hood and asked to take communion– they only brought her to a small room wrapped in shadows just off the main sanctuary and gave her a keen blade and a bottle of rose wine, and asked once, and only once, if she would need assistance.

Time grew short. The safety that company might provide her was not a luxury she could afford. “Leave me.”

No one needed to explain to her what communion with the Raven Queen entailed– Vesper had been dancing the line between life and death for many years, now, and she was familiar with that twilight space in between where things beyond divinity and mortal ken might be sighted. She took a swig of the rose wine for courage, and then took the blade and did what she knew must be done.

When darkness began to creep into the edges of her vision, she staggered to a wall and slid bloody down its height to curl into an indelicate and crumpled heap on the ground. She did not pray. She did not weep. She simply proceeded.

The shadows, in turn, unfolded like silk around her, and Vesper soon found herself in a place beyond darkness and dreaming, both, and when a figure approached her from the golden eternity of the cimmerian moors that stretched out before her, she did not move, for her body had lost itself in the time spent journeying to the realms of the dead. Every blink cost her hours. Every breath seemed finite. Forever spiraled out like the sky, and yet the stranger crossed it as though it were any other terrain, displaying some grim mastery of the lands now before her–

When he reached her, she felt a vital magic creep into her opened veins with the same sensation as a limb regaining blood flow. The stranger, their face hidden, stared down silently at her, as though they were dumb to her purpose here. “Speak,” they bade her in an unfamiliar voice. “Why have you come here?”

Speech took effort. She wondered, briefly, if Clarrin had been to this place when he was buried alive so long ago. “I can no longer do what must be done,” she finally managed. “I need your power.”

The stranger stared down, unflinching, their face a mask. They said nothing.

Adrenaline crashed inside her. With a monumental effort, Vesper reached forward and grasped for the hem of their robes. “I can’t do it on my own,” she told them in a desperate gasp. “Please help me.”

A wind howled a strange and terrible melody. The golden moors twinkled and glittered against the never-ending backdrop of lightlessness. The stranger knelt, taking her trembling hand in their own, which she could feel was calloused and thin and strangely warm. “Oh, Vesper,” they whispered, their strange voice suddenly tender, and behind the timeless mask of the stranger’s face, she found eyes that might have belonged to her own mother, some twenty years ago, and she understood. “I hoped I wouldn’t meet you this way.”

Her hands would not stop shaking. “You know why I’ve come.”

“I do.”

“I need to speak with your lady.”

In a moment, the tenderness in his face abstracted, splitting between the gentle fondness of witnessing a loved one and the bloody mess of a pulverized steak. “You don’t know what it would cost you.”

“I need to–”

“Vesper,” he whispered, raising her knuckles to his lips as though she were yet a little girl playing pretend and this might quiet her. “I cannot allow that.”

She stared, wordless, gaping not like a fish, but like a wound exposed to air. “You don’t understand.”

“I do.”

Her knuckles are white. She must be hurting him, but he makes no sound to convey it. What is a little girl’s fear to the angel of death? “He’s going to kill them,” she tells him, trying not to slur her words– the blood loss wants to make her sloppy. She cannot afford this. “He’ll kill everyone, and I’m alone, and I can’t stop it.”

“What about Cassandra?” he asks her, and then, when she shakes her head, tears welling in her eyes: “Your mother?”

Clarrin’s terrible form flickers in her mind, flesh split by the Sun Tree, tongues of root licking the marrow out of still-living bones. “She’s Pelor’s,” Vesper manages. “He would destroy her. I–”

Her uncle’s face shutters. “What about you?”

She is the firstborn heiress of Whitestone. She knows her answer by rote. “Which of us can you bear to lose?”

So the priest of the Raven Queen finds her sitting lucid in a pool of her own blood in the back room, holding the half-empty bottle of rose wine by the neck like she means to strangle it. They get her to her feet and help her wash the blood out of her dress, and they do not mention how her makeup has been smudged and ruined from crying. “I hope you found what you were looking for,” they finally tell her. “Truly.”

They do not meet her eyes, and they do not say anything when she scoffs.

Her uncle, as the preeminent emissary of the Raven Queen, grants her a fraction of his goddess’ power for, likewise, a fragment of her soul. His boon takes the form of an albino raven with watery eyes and pin feathers that seem to be constantly crusted with dirt and other foul matter no matter how often she attempts to groom him– a mockery, she supposes, of them both. His beak is cracked. His cry is wretched. He seems incapable of actually staying dead, for which Vesper is grateful, because she is sure that it is only this blessing which keeps him alive at all.

He’s not a pet, she tells herself. He’s a spy. Like her, he is only a tool.

She does not name him. Indeed, she wants to strangle him more often than not. He’s an ugly reminder that she wasn’t enough on her own, a parting shot, a kick in the teeth when she was already on the ground. “I despise you,” she tells him one day. “You are abhorrent to me, I hope you know.”

The damned bird cocks his head, and then squawks so loudly she’s sure her mother hears him from a floor away.

She does not die to Clarrin that solstice. The bird grants her a glimmer of its own loose immortality– she is just fast enough to dodge his strongest attacks, and just strong enough to withstand the rest, but no faster, no stronger. She is only ever a passing grade on an uncurved test.

So she lives. Exhausted, bruised, trembling from exertion in every limb, she lives.

And then she gets ready to do it again.