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Percy was a survivor, that’s what his father once told him.
He had been born quiet, weak and still apparently. The dead frost of winter had seeped into the castle and it had taken all of Keeper Yennen’s efforts to resuscitate him as his mother prayed for the survival of her third child.
He had survived, that was the important thing. Nevermind the caution with which his mother and father had treated him as a babe, the way they’d hovered when he’d caught his first cold as an infant, the fear they had those long nights when he’d gasped and wheezed through fitful sleep.
“It hurts now, but it won’t later,” Lord Frederick had said to him one warm summer day after Percy had skinned his knee falling from a stone wall. “Keep your chin up, you were born tougher than a scratch.”
Percy had listened then, steeling himself as his father helped to clean the grit and dirt from his knee.
When Percy was eight he got lost in the Parchwood.
As an adult, he doesn’t remember much of that night, lost and scared, hiding from the monsters his mind conjured up. He didn’t know then that there were real monsters out there, waiting.
When he was found in the morning his mother and older sister were there, holding him close as he cried into his mother’s cloak.
“You’re alright,” Lady Johanna assured him, rubbing his back. “You survived.”
Vesper had held his hand on the way back to the castle, all the way until he was being checked over by Keeper Yennen and the other clerics.
Keeper Yennen had ruffled his shaggy brown hair, affectionate as she’d always been. “The Dawnfather will always protect you,” she’d told him. “Even in the dark.”
When Percy was seventeen he survived much more than a night in the woods.
He had been spared by Ripley during the coup, his mind interested her as she had interested him, before it all came crashing down. The torture that she had put him through only made him wish for his father’s gentle hand once again, for his mother’s open arms. But they were dead, and he and Cassandra were the only ones left.
Somehow, Cassandra got them both out.
Then Percy was the only one left.
He survived the river, though he remembers the choking feeling of water flooding his lungs. Then the burning pain as he gagged and gasped in his first breaths onboard a fishing vessel, suddenly far from the only home he’d ever known, and painfully, dreadfully alive.
He survived the next two years in a fugue state. He still doesn’t know quite what he did during that time, but he knows he ended up deep inland, working on a weapon burned in the back of his eyelids.
He was a survivor, his father once told him, the words echoing in his mind as he fired his weapon in the skull of a bandit who had sensed weakness and hadn’t realized the danger they were stepping into.
His attempt to kill Ripley failed, and he was certain his father had been wrong when he was rotting in a jail cell in the Umbra Hills.
Salvation came in the form of six strangers and a bear, pulling him from his isolated misery to the warmth of taverns, of camaraderie. It seemed he wasn’t done surviving yet.
A year passed, the Briarwood’s came at the worst possible time, only this time he wasn’t stuck in a cell with his sister.
This time he wasn’t surviving alone.
They stopped the Briarwoods, and the demon he hadn’t known he’d harbored, and for the first time in years, Percy had reasons to keep going.
He got cocky.
He’s just grateful that Vex’ahlia was a survivor as well.
It took three dragons dying, his demon returning with Ripley’s help, and a whirlwind love affair for him to resolve to be better. He had said once that he lived as long as Whitestone lived, and as long as he survived, he would work to repair the damage he’d done to the world. He would make it through these trying times, for Cassandra, for Vex’ahlia . . . for himself.
Whitestone burned around him, the castle falling apart as the hatchling dragons fled into the night sky.
As they arrived at the Isle of Glintshore, Percy knew only a few things for certain.
- His friends would help him, to the best of their abilities, to avenge his home
- He was determined to survive this too, to return to his family and friends.
- He was hopelessly in love with Vex’ahlia.
His confession lay heavy in the air when Vex’ahlia stepped back, the light of the setting sun bright across her face. She was beautiful, even if his heart ached.
He would get through this too, so they could talk later.
The factory burned around him, his entire being thrummed with pain from the explosion he’d set off, half his thoughts were on his friends, still suffering over an hour later from the delirium gas that Ripley had deployed. Ripley was buried in here, though, and rage pulsed through his bruised and burned body as he forced himself to keep moving.
He just wanted to be a better person.
Was that so wrong?
As his blood pooled in his lungs, painful and heavy, he was reminded of the river.
His mind slipped through his fingers like sand in an hourglass, but he could still hear his father’s voice. “It hurts now, but it won’t later.”
Percy was a survivor, his father once told him.