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Vax'ildan is no stranger to the Raven Queen visiting him as he dreams.
She speaks to him in gentle tones, bearing him aloft upon her palm or walking alongside him. Sometimes she asks questions - small ones at first, simple ones, her tone laced with something he might tentatively term curiosity. He answers, of course, as best he can. She accepts his answers with a gentle nod and for a time he thinks nothing more of it.
When she comes to him on this night, however, it feels different.
She approaches him not as the towering goddess he is familiar with, not tonight. Instead she wears her mortal form, though still bearing the blank porcelain mask he has come to know as familiarly as his own face. Her dress, white as bone, hangs from her in gentle drapes of silk and lace that seem to glow in the featureless void around them. Feathers decorate her shoulders in a mantle much like his own, ink-black and perfect.
She slows and then stops, her form barely more than a single pace from his. If Vax looks up and around he can see the countless strings, thin golden wires crisscrossing the darkness, humming with tension. The Raven Queen regards him, her head canted to one side throwing the mask off-balance with a calm curiosity.
One of her hands reaches up and catches against the edge of his cheek, cupping his jawline with a touch far more tender than he is accustomed to. Her skin, bloodlessly pale, is warmer than he expects it to be against his own. He tells himself not to lean into the touch. But he does.
The Raven Queen’s other hand reaches up, not towards Vax’s face but toward her own, pulling the mask away and then dropping it, abandoned, somewhere in the gold-threaded darkness all around. It does not clatter as it hits the floor. Perhaps, as is the way of dreams, it never does land.
The porcelain mask of the Raven Queen is beautiful, but it is a cold, empty beauty, like a statue captured in marble. The face she shows him now - the mortal she was millenia ago, before taking the mantle of a goddess - is just as pale as the mask, her red eyes regarding him with a mixture of sadness, warmth, and other emotions he cannot identify, even on her.
"Vax'ildan," she whispers, lips parting around his name as a smile curves across them. "My dear, beautiful Champion." The words kindle something in Vax; heat flares low in his stomach as he turns his face just a fraction, his breath ghosting warm across the goddess's palm. He presses a kiss to the crease at the base of her thumb, and his eyelids flutter for a moment.
She's pleased with him. He knows: he can feel it, a physical thing, curling warm in his lungs. The soft, sweet sensation makes his breath stutter for a moment. "My Lady," he says, more a breath or a sigh than a real word.
The Raven Queen's hand shifts. She turns Vax's face so that he's looking at her through heavy eyelids; she's still smiling, and she steps in even closer to him until their bodies nearly touch. Her thumb moves, the pad of it drawing down in a slow sweep over his lips, lingering when it catches against the swell of his lower lip. Vax fights down the urge to take it into his mouth.
Her lips are not cold when they press against his.
They are warm, and despite that he is dreaming right now the pressure they exert against his mouth feels entirely real. Vax leans into the kiss, leans into her, and it feels entirely natural and right for him to do so. That heat working through him flares hotter as he reaches out, catching the Raven Queen's hips under his hands and pulling her to him. He thinks he feels her gasp into the kiss.
He would kneel for her, Vax knows, if she asked it of him. He would go to his knees and worship her with his mouth and he'd be happy to do it, without remorse; he would enjoy it, if only she were to ask him to do it. Vax wonders what that says about him, about who she has molded him into being.
He does not open his eyes. He slides one hand up against the Raven Queen's ribs - they feel fragile, delicate, mortal beneath his touch - and while he may not open his eyes he opens his mouth to deepen the kiss, just as she does the same. Her mouth and tongue taste of nothing; he does not know what he expected but it was not this absence.
He feels her hands move up his spine, press into the space between his shoulderblades where the wings of his armour unfurl. He shivers, tries to drag her closer in response, but they are already pressed flush to one another, the sensation of her body against his dulled by his armour and yet sharp at the same time. There's fire in his blood, sparks of heat coiled tight in his bones.
She pulls away from the kiss only far enough to put a little distance between her mouth and his, their lips still brushing, their mingled breath still hot against Vax's teeth. She calls him her champion again, calls him hers, her voice a breathless moan against his parted, still-flushed lips. If there is fire in Vax's blood then there is fire in her eyes, too, the red of them like vivid blood. He can feel one of her hands in his hair, fingers wrapped tight enough to tug at the strands yet not tight enough to hurt.
She leans back in. Her hand, the one not in his hair, smooths across his hip, and--
Vax wakes with a gasp, alone and aching, mind still racing with thoughts of his Queen - her beauty made of spun gold and inky feathers and kisses that tasted like the void.
He breathes carefully through his nose, face pressed to the pillow, trying to ignore the way his entire body feels raw and overly-sensitive. He considers his options; it's late, so he can't go shower, and he can't go back to sleep like this. Vax rolls over, onto his back, trailing a hand down his chest - feeling too aware of the way the sweat cools upon his skin - and dipping it down beneath the tangled-up covers.
The woman he pictures is tall, and slender, and that is where her resemblance to Keyleth ends. No matter how he tries, her hair remains sleek and black, her skin stays porcelain-white, her voice stays that smooth, soft tone. His other hand slides up over his mouth and he closes his eyes, recalls the way the Raven Queen's body had felt under his hands, the soft noises she had made into his mouth, how he wanted - wanted --
Wants. Wants her.
Shame prickles through him alongside the pleasure, the two feelings tangled up and impossible to tell apart. Vax muffles all noise into the palm of his hand, squeezing his eyes even tighter shut and breathing ragged through his nose. He's dimly aware of himself, his body, his hips rocking up into his hand. Then he lets himself relax against the sheets, still shivering.
He cannot be sure where devotion ends and love begins, or if there was ever a difference to begin with. Perhaps it's not truly important. Whichever it is, whatever he feels, he knows this will not be the last time she walks in his dreams, and it will not be the last time he goes to her so willingly.