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Percy has one child, a daughter, out of duty more than anything else. As the eldest de Rolo and one of only two, it is now his responsibility to ensure that the family line continues. He marries for duty as well, a noble woman from a distant port who is wealthy and charming and helps him create trade routes from Whitestone to the sea and back. He’s not in love with her, but then she’s not in love with him either, so the arrangement works out well for both of them.
Responsibility and obligation are the noose that Percy has chosen to hang himself with. He asks them not to interfere and, because he is their friend, they oblige.
The fact that their marriage breaks a thousand hearts and strains the already fraying bonds tying Vox Machina together is irrelevant to everyone.
There is love in the castle, of course there is. Percy and his wife love each other, though not in the way he loves someone else and not in the way she loves someone else, and they shower affection on their daughter who Percy swears to himself will never feel lost or alone. He will protect her, no matter the cost, the way he couldn’t protect the people who would’ve been her grandparents, would’ve been her aunts and uncles, would’ve given her cousins and taught her things Percy couldn’t.
Instead of the hundreds of relatives she should’ve had, she has Cassandra. And Keyleth.
Keyleth returns to Whitestone on Percy’s daughter’s first birthday. He’s ashamed to say he almost doesn’t recognize her. Gone is the awkward druid he spent the best years of his life traveling with and fighting beside. In her place is a mysterious stranger, an unknown and unknowable woman who radiates power and leaves behind small patches of grass and flowers where she steps. Her smile is older, her eyes are sad and distant, but when she hugs him it’s the same hug he remembers: wiry strength, the smell of growing things, a warmth that seeps into his bones and chases away the cold tiredness that he didn’t notice was there until it was gone.
“Hi Percy.” Her voice is the same but not. It’s deeper now. It echoes. Behind it is the weight of everything she’s seen that he hasn’t.
“Hello Keyleth.”
She pulls away and turns towards the small crib that still rests in his bedroom. His daughter is old enough now to sleep alone but he can’t bear to be apart from her. Keyleth looks down into the blankets where his daughter naps and smiles down at her.
“She looks just like you,” Keyleth tells him, looking back at him over her shoulder.
“You know, you’re actually the first person to tell me that.”
A small noise interrupts them both. His daughter is awake.
She makes another noise and smiles up at Keyleth, standing up on unsteady feet and reaching for the antlers that still adorn Keyleth’s head. “Pretty,” she says.
A small cluster of baby’s breath appears in Keyleth’s hand and she tucks it behind the little girl’s ear. “Now we match.”
Percy’s daughter looks absolutely enchanted by this magic trick and she smiles wider. “Flower!” she says with delight, reaching up to touch it and almost crushing the delicate blossoms beneath chubby, eager fingers.
Percy approaches and leans against the crib until he’s at eye-level with his daughter. “Dear, can you say hello to your Aunt Keyleth?” He points at Keyleth, who waves. “Say ‘hello.’” He says the word slowly and his daughter watches his mouth closely like she’s trying to make sure she gets the word right.
His daughter points at Keyleth and, with complete confidence, says, “Flower!”
Keyleth laughs and that, at least, hasn’t changed.
Percy shakes his head and smiles.
She’s never enjoyed the cold. She’s not fond of the mountains either. There’s something about them, the way things struggle so much harder here, that makes her tired and pushes her away.
But she stays.
She stays and she keeps them safe.
From here, she can only see the tops of the castle’s tallest turrets. She sits down next to the seven stones beside her and watches the sun rise over the town. She wipes off some of the snow that’s built up around them and sighs.
The names on each stone are familiar, as familiar to her as her own. The faces are blurred with time and distance, the exact cadence of voices softened and dulled, the details of all their adventures mixed together, but the pain of loss hasn’t lessened.
They aren’t buried here. They drifted away with the winds to places she couldn’t follow and even the plants themselves couldn’t find.
Only Percy stayed in one place.
He’s buried far below her, in a grave hidden by the curve of a castle wall topped with one of the turrets she can see from here.
Instead of bodies, each grave has a piece of her heart buried beneath. Each piece has a name, a face.
She didn’t know exactly when they died. She had to guess.
Tiberius’ grave she put up first. Dragonborns don’t live very long.
Percy’s she put up next. For his, she didn’t have to guess.
(The town of Whitestone mourned below her, every home and shop and inhabitant adorned in black, somber faces turning to her as she arrived for his funeral, looking exactly the same as she had the day she first arrived. She stood next to Percy’s daughter and his wife as the pew was enveloped with tiny, star-shaped cypress flowers, and held their hands as they cried.
Her eyes were dry. Sometimes pain is too deep for tears.)
Grog’s was next. He’d probably died long before, doing something reckless, but she waited as long as she could. Maybe Pike had calmed him down, taught him restraint. Maybe time had made him cautious. She laughed a little at the thought. Not likely.
She put Vex’s and Vax’s up at the same time. She couldn’t imagine one in this world without the other, couldn’t imagine them being born together and then dying apart.
(She placed them in the ground and stared at the twin names, the twin stones, the remnants of the twin people who had loved so deeply and been left with nothing but broken hearts. She turned into a raven and cawed, pouring into the sound all of her pain, all of her sorrow, all that could’ve been but never was. She cawed until her voice was hoarse and she grew exhausted and fell asleep. When she awoke, three more ravens had joined her. They nodded at her and then at the stone and each plucked one beautiful black feather from their plumage to lay on the ground in front of the stone. She croaked out a hoarse thank you as they flew away.)
Scanlan’s was next. He’d always said he was old. She tried to sing one of his songs, but she couldn’t remember it very well and didn’t think she got it quite right.
And then Pike’s. She twisted a vine into the shape on Pike’s symbol and bowed her head in front of the stone. Please, she thought. She wasn’t sure what she was asking for, but the vine never grew or died or changed its shape no matter the weather, so she must’ve been heard.
The light washes over her, the weak winter sun barely heating her skin.
Vox Machina, that intrepid band of adventurers, once known far and wide for their brave and noble deeds.
And now I’m all that’s left.
Seven empty graves all in a row.
And her.
Every first birthday, every wedding, every funeral, every Winterscrest, she climbs down from the mountains and visits the de Rolos. To each generation she is Aunt Keyleth and she crafts flowers and transforms into fantastical creatures for their entertainment. She loves them and they love her, even if, in time, they forget who she is or where she came from.
She forgets too. Never why or where, but who. Who this generation is, how they’re related to the ones who came before, whether their name was theirs originally or borrowed from an ancestor. There is a young Percy who looks so much like hers that she forgets for a moment.
“What was it like before the Briarwoods?” she asks and then stops herself, reminded of the neat little row of seven gravestones sitting atop her mountain. Cypress flowers grow and curl around the antlers in her hair like a crown of stars. This Percy wouldn’t know. He wasn’t there.
She plucks one of the flowers and pretends to eat it to cover her sadness, her momentary lapse. A younger de Rolo on the carpet claps and laughs and she smiles.
When night falls, she creeps away. A storm tears across the valley and her tears fall like rain.
The next time the town celebrates, she isn’t there in the crowd. Her flowers and wild shapes stay in the mountains and don’t come down again.
The people of Whitestone whisper to each other of the strange woman who lives in the mountains, older than the stones of the castle, older than time itself. The guardian of the de Rolo family, sent by Pelor himself, to keep the town safe from harm. As long as there’s a de Rolo in Castle Whitestone, they say, nothing bad can happen. The crops will grow, the hunting will be good, and Whitestone will never falter.
“I live as long as Whitestone lives,” Percy had said once. And she will not let it die.