Archive of Our Own

Scanlan Shorthalt did not see the beginning.

That was the part that would ruin him later.

Not the green light. Not the terrible voice that crawled through the world like rot under floorboards. Not the chanting. Not the scream. Not even the sight of Vax’ildan coming apart beneath the hand of something newly divine and anciently cruel.

The beginning happened without him.

There had been no warning. No prophetic tug in his chest. No heroic instinct dragged him upright with a friend’s name already on his tongue. No strange tremor in Mythcarver, because Mythcarver was not his anymore. No glimmering blade humming against his palm. No golden song threading itself through steel and spellwork and fate.

He had given it away.

He had put it in Pike’s hands.

He had watched Vox Machina leave with one of the few parts of him that had ever felt brave, and then he had stayed behind.

Again.

That was the word that kept returning, sharp and ugly.

Again.

He had stayed behind again.

At the time, it had felt like a choice. A real one. A hard one, maybe, but the kind of hard choice people respected if they were not being complete assholes about it. His daughter needed him. Kaylie was flesh and blood and music and anger and forgiveness he had not earned but had been foolish enough to want anyway. She was the life he had missed. The future he had almost ruined before knowing it existed. The one person in the world who made him look at himself and think, with some horror, that perhaps he could become something other than a punchline in expensive boots.

So he stayed.

Vox Machina had come to him loud and messy and desperate, bursting back into his life with old wounds in their mouths and a world-ending errand hidden under table talk. They had needed Mythcarver. They had needed him, perhaps, but not enough to say it clearly before everything went sideways. And he had been angry. Gods, he had been so angry. Angry that they had found him. Angry that they wanted something. Angry that part of him had wanted to go the moment he saw their stupid, battered, beloved faces.

Pike’s eyes had hurt the worst.

She had looked at him like she was trying not to ask him to come home.

And he had not.

He had given them Mythcarver. He had apologized in the crooked, insufficient way Scanlan Shorthalt apologized, with too much shame caught behind his teeth and not enough courage to make it clean. Then he had watched them go.

He told himself it was not abandonment.

He told himself a father staying with his daughter was not the same thing as a coward leaving his friends.

He told himself many things.

He was good at that.

That night, the tavern was nearly empty after the show.

Not his old kind of empty. Not the luxurious, roaring emptiness that followed applause, when the crowd had finally spilled into the street and left behind sticky floors, half-drunk cups, and the warm afterglow of being adored. This was a softer emptiness. Domestic, almost. Kaylie sat cross-legged on a table near the small stage, tuning her instrument with a furrowed brow and the severe concentration of someone performing surgery on a king. The last of the candles burned low. Rain tapped at the windows in quick, silver fingers. Somewhere in the kitchen, someone laughed too loudly and then shushed themselves.

Scanlan stood by the bar with a damp cloth in one hand, wiping the same spot in the wood for the fifth time.

He was not thinking about them.

That was another lie.

He had been thinking about them all evening.

He thought about Grog first, because thinking about Grog was usually safer than thinking about anyone else. He imagined the big idiot trying to be quiet in Thar Amphala and failing spectacularly. He imagined him whispering at the volume of falling masonry. He imagined Pike elbowing him in the ribs, Vex hissing threats, Percy looking pained, Keyleth worrying herself into a knot, and Vax slipping through shadows with that insufferable grace that made a person want to both admire him and kick him in the shin.

He imagined them alive.

He imagined them annoyed.

He imagined them winning.

That was what Vox Machina did.

They won badly. They won covered in blood, swearing, limping, arguing, and occasionally on fire, but they won. They had faced dragons. Vampires. Demons. Tyrants. Their own spectacularly terrible decision-making. They had dragged victory out of disasters so often that Scanlan had started treating survival like a recurring bit.

Surely they would survive this, too.

Surely.

Kaylie plucked a string. It came out sour.

She grimaced. “Ugh. That sounds like a goose dying in a brothel.”

Scanlan blinked, then looked over his shoulder. “That is an incredibly specific sound.”

“I’m your daughter.”

“Right. That explains the brothel goose expertise.”

She pointed at him without looking up. “Don’t make it weird.”

“I make nothing weird. Weirdness blossoms naturally around me.”

“Like mould?”

“Like genius.”

“Like mouldy genius.”

He smiled despite himself.

It was not a big smile. Not the bright, practiced thing he wore for crowds. It was smaller. Tired around the edges. Real enough to make his face ache.

Kaylie glanced at him and softened, though only for a moment. She hated being caught looking concerned. She had inherited that from him, too.

“You’re doing it again,” she said.

Scanlan looked back down at the spotless patch of bar. “Doing what?”

“Pretending polishing wood counts as a personality.”

“I’ll have you know, polishing wood has been central to my personality for decades.”

“Dad.”

The word stopped him.

It still did that.

Dad.

Not always. Sometimes she weaponized it. Sometimes she threw it at him like a knife. Sometimes she said it with exasperation so thick it almost became affection. But now and then, it landed softly. Careful. New.

He turned around.

Kaylie had set her instrument aside.

“You’re thinking about them.”

Scanlan opened his mouth.

No joke came.

That was happening more lately. It was unsettling. A man built entirely out of jokes should not be left without one. It made him feel structurally unsound.

Finally, he shrugged. “They’re hard not to think about.”

“Because you’re worried?”

“Because they’re loud.”

“Dad.”

“There’s the tone again. Very intimidating. You could command armies with that tone.”

She stared.

He exhaled.

The tavern felt warmer than it should have, the air heavy with old smoke and rain-damp wool. He rubbed at the back of his neck, fingers catching briefly in the ends of his hair.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m worried.”

Kaylie’s expression shifted.

Not satisfied. Not exactly. But something in her eased, as if the truth, even late and reluctant, was still better than another song and dance around it.

“They have the sword,” she said.

“Guitar.”

“Not anymore.”

He winced.

It was ridiculous, the tiny hurt of that. Mythcarver had been ridiculous as a guitar. Glorious, obviously. Inspired. Possibly the sexiest thing anyone had ever done with a Vestige of Divergence. But it had been his. His absurdity stamped onto ancient power—his refusal to hold a legendary weapon without making it louder, brighter, more him.

And now it was gone.

Not stolen. Not lost.

Given.

He had put it in Pike’s hands, and Pike had looked at him like he had handed her more than a weapon.

He wondered if she understood what it cost him.

He wondered if he had understood.

“The sword is with the people who need it,” Scanlan said.

Kaylie watched him carefully. “And are you?”

There it was.

The question he had been avoiding all night.

All week.

Maybe all his life.

Scanlan looked toward the stage. One of the candles near the edge flickered. Its flame leaned sharply to the left, though there was no breeze.

“I’m with you,” he said.

Kaylie did not smile.

She looked down at her hands instead, and the silence that followed was not comfortable. It was thick and living. It settled between them like a third person neither of them wanted to acknowledge.

“I know,” she said.

There was something wrong with her voice.

Scanlan straightened. “Kaylie?”

The candle went out.

Only one.

Then another.

Then all of them.

Darkness swallowed the tavern in a single breath.

A hush dropped so abruptly that even the rain seemed to stop.

Scanlan’s hand went to his lute.

Not Mythcarver. Just his lute. Ordinary wood. Ordinary strings. Scratched from travel, stained in one place from a tavern fight in Westruun, bearing a tiny carved mark Kaylie had added one drunken evening because she claimed it improved the acoustics. It was familiar in his hands, warm from proximity to his body, comforting in a way he did not have time to appreciate.

Across the room, Kaylie slid off the table.

“Dad?”

The floor trembled.

Not violently. Not enough to break glass. It was worse than that. Subtle. Deep. A shudder passing under the bones of the world.

Scanlan stopped breathing.

The darkness changed.

At first, he thought his eyes were adjusting. Shapes emerged where none should have been: tables, chairs, the bar, Kaylie’s pale face across from him. Then the shadows thickened, pulling themselves into long, crooked lines. They bent toward the center of the room. The temperature dropped so quickly that his next breath came out white.

Something cold touched the back of his neck.

He spun.

Nothing.

Then the voices began.

They did not come from outside.

They came from everywhere.

From the walls. From the floor. From the empty cups. From the hollow body of his lute. From his own teeth.

A thousand whispers slid through the tavern, layered one over another until they became almost musical, if music could rot.

We are his blood.

Kaylie flinched and clapped her hands over her ears.

Scanlan’s stomach turned to ice.

The phrase crawled under his skin with intimate familiarity, though he had never heard it in this room before. He had heard enough from the others. Enough from cultists. Enough from the dark thing wearing a bard’s face who had come for Mythcarver. Enough to know whose shadow had found him.

We are his blood.

“No,” Scanlan whispered.

The tavern windows flashed green.

Outside, the city began to scream.

Not one person. Not one street. Everywhere at once. Chairs scraped overhead in rented rooms. Someone shouted for a child. The horses in the stable shrieked and kicked against their stalls. Bells began ringing somewhere in the distance, frantic and uneven, as if the hands pulling the ropes were shaking too badly to keep rhythm.

Kaylie moved toward him.

Scanlan grabbed her wrist and pulled her behind him.

It was stupid. Instinctive. He was small. She could probably shove him aside if she wanted to. Whatever had just reached through the world would not be impressed by one terrified gnome with a lute and a history of poor impulse control.

Still.

Behind him.

Please, behind him.

The green light brightened.

His lute began to hum.

Scanlan looked down.

The strings vibrated beneath his fingers, though he had not touched them. Each note was wrong. Not out of tune. In pain. The sound trembled through the wood and into his palms, sharp enough to sting. The carved mark Kaylie had made glowed faintly, then vanished beneath a spreading sheen of unnatural light.

The polished body of the lute became reflective.

Not like a mirror.

Like water.

The tavern warped across its surface. Scanlan saw his own face stretch and distort: wide eyes, parted mouth, cheeks gone bloodless beneath old stage paint he had not fully washed away. Then his reflection dissolved.

For a heartbeat, there was nothing but green.

Then he saw the portal.

The orb’s magic tore open the world in a blaze of violent, impossible light. It was not elegant. It was not the clean, glittering doorway of a practiced spell. It looked forced. Wounded. A hole ripped through reality by hands that had no patience left for doors.

Figures spilled out of it.

Scanlan’s heart stopped.

Vox Machina.

They came through battered, stumbling, half-collapsing into one another as the light of Thar Amphala bled around them. For one wild, stupid second, relief hit him so hard he almost laughed.

They were alive.

He saw Grog first because Grog was impossible to miss, enormous even when hunched and bloodied, one arm flung around Pike as if he could shield her from the entire sky. Pike was alive too, pale and shaking, her armour streaked with darkness, her white hair wild around a face that looked like it had forgotten how to be young.

Percy staggered after them, soot and blood cutting sharp lines through his aristocratic pallor. Vex was at his side, bow in hand, eyes fierce and feverish. Keyleth came through wrapped in fading elemental light, her hair loose, face streaked with ash, one hand gripping something bright.

Mythcarver.

Scanlan’s fingers spasmed around the lute.

There it was.

Not a guitar anymore.

A sword.

Ancient, gleaming, terrible.

His joke was stripped away. His song sharpened back into a blade.

For one irrational moment, he felt betrayed by it.

Then he saw Vax.

Vax came last.

Or perhaps he had been there all along, and Scanlan’s mind had avoided him out of mercy.

He looked wrong.

Not dead. Not yet. But wrong in a way Scanlan could not make sense of quickly enough. There was exhaustion in him that no sleep would answer. The marks beneath his skin had changed, or faded, or been healed badly; Scanlan could not tell through the magic. Golden light clung to him in ragged edges, not glorious now but spent, like the last light of a candle cupped in shaking hands.

Keyleth turned toward him as soon as the portal spat them out.

The look on her face made Scanlan’s knees weaken.

That was not relief.

That was fear delayed by one breath.

The portal did not close.

It widened.

The green light swelled.

The voices outside grew louder.

We are his blood.

The image in the lute lurched upward, as if dragged by an invisible hand. The portal’s ragged mouth opened onto something vast and purple-black beyond the returned battlefield. Thar Amphala, or what remained of it, trembled in the distance. Above it, where victory should have left emptiness, something rose.

Not a man.

Not anymore.

Scanlan had sung about gods before. He had rhymed them with bods, rods, odds, and, on one memorable occasion, extremely generous cods. He had made holy things profane because holy things made him nervous, and profanity made better tips.

This was not holy.

This was divinity turned inside out.

The Whispered One filled the sky like an infection given shape. His presence pressed through the lute’s vision and into the tavern until the wood groaned around them. Shadows bowed. Glass cracked. Somewhere, a woman screamed a prayer that broke halfway through and became begging.

Scanlan tried to cast.

He did not think. He simply opened his mouth and shoved magic into the first note he could reach. A sending, a countercharm, a shield, a scream, anything. His voice cracked against the air and came back to him distorted, swallowed by the chorus pouring through the world.

The spell died on his tongue.

“No,” he said.

His hands began to shake.

The vision sharpened with cruel precision.

The Whispered One spoke.

Scanlan could not catch every word. The magic carried meaning more than sound, pressure more than language. But he understood enough. Everyone understood enough. The entire tavern had gone still around him, all the strangers and staff frozen beneath the weight of the broadcast.

Bow.

Submit.

Kneel, and Vax would live.

The world tilted.

Scanlan reached blindly for the bar and missed.

Kaylie caught his arm.

He barely felt it.

Keyleth moved first.

Of course she did.

Of course, the woman who had crossed continents, elements, grief, fear, and prophecy for love would be the first to break beneath the threat of losing him. Her face crumpled. Not dramatically. Not prettily. It was small, and that made it worse. Her mouth parted around a sound Scanlan could not hear, and then her knees hit the ground.

Keyleth knelt.

The sight punched the air from his lungs.

“No,” Scanlan breathed. “Kiki, no.”

But he understood.

Gods help him, he understood.

He would have knelt, too.

That was the horror of it.

Not that she surrendered. Not that she failed. That love made failure look like the only possible shape of survival.

Vex went down next.

Her eyes never left Vax.

Scanlan had seen Vex angry. Seen her smug. Seen her grieving. Seen her terrified and pretending otherwise. This was something below all of that, something stripped bare and blood-dark. Percy knelt beside her, one hand reaching for hers, face carved hollow with helpless fury.

Pike lowered herself to the ground.

Scanlan flinched.

Pike.

Pike, with Mythcarver’s light still caught near her, with grief and guilt and whatever had happened in that place written all over her. Pike, who had looked at Scanlan when he handed her the Vestige, as if she wanted to believe he was coming after them eventually. Pike, who had needed him to be better than his fear.

Pike knelt.

Grog followed.

The big man’s face was wet.

That was when Scanlan’s vision blurred.

Not from magic.

From tears.

Grog knelt like the motion hurt more than any wound. His shoulders shook. His hands curled into fists against the ground, fingers gouging furrows where they pressed. Grog, who could smash through walls, who could wrestle monsters, who could laugh with blood in his teeth, had been given something he could not hit.

One by one, Vox Machina lowered themselves before the new god.

And there was an empty space where Scanlan should have been.

His throat closed.

The thought did not arrive gently.

It ripped through him.

That space is mine.

Between Pike and Grog. Slightly behind Vex, because she always liked pretending she did not need anyone steadying her. Near enough to Percy to make some obscene comment about kneeling that would earn him a murderous look. Close enough for Keyleth to hear him say her name, even if it fixed nothing. Close enough for Vax to roll his eyes one last time.

That space was his.

And it was empty.

Because he had stayed behind.

Again.

Scanlan made a sound low in his throat.

Kaylie’s hand tightened around his arm. “Dad?”

He did not answer.

He was watching Vax.

Vax did not kneel.

Everyone else had bent beneath the impossible weight of love, fear, grief, and threat.

Vax stood.

Of course he did.

Beautiful, infuriating, self-sacrificing bastard that he was, Vax’ildan stood in front of a newborn god with death already reaching for him and still found enough defiance to keep his spine straight.

Scanlan hated him in that instant.

He loved him so much he could hardly breathe.

“Don’t,” Scanlan whispered.

The word was nothing. Less than nothing. A scrape of sound beneath the roar of a god. His voice had filled banquet halls, distracted dragons, broken spells, seduced enemies, annoyed friends, and once, memorably, convinced an entire room that ducks were a legitimate military threat.

Now it could not cross the space between his mouth and the vision.

“Vax,” he said, louder.

No one turned.

“Vax!”

The lute burned.

Scanlan looked down only long enough to see smoke curling from beneath his fingers. The strings had bitten into his skin, thin red lines opening across his palms. He did not let go. Pain flared hot and immediate, and he clung to it because pain was simple and this was not.

In the vision, Vax looked at the Whispered One.

Then he spat.

Scanlan’s entire body went cold.

“Oh, you stupid—”

The Whispered One raised his hand.

Keyleth surged forward from her knees.

Vex screamed.

Pike’s light flared, frantic and useless.

Percy reached for a weapon that he could not fire fast enough.

Grog moved like a landslide beginning too late.

Green light struck Vax.

Scanlan stopped being a person.

For one impossible second, Vax was illuminated from within. Not golden now. Green. Sick. Violent. The light cut through him, outlining bone and wing and the thin, stubborn shape of his body. His head snapped back. His hands opened.

Then he fell.

No.

Not fell.

That would have been merciful.

He hit the ground and began to come apart.

Ash lifted from him in glowing fragments. His cloak collapsed around a body that was already becoming absence. His face turned toward Keyleth, and whatever he tried to say was stolen by the broadcast, by distance, by the greedy silence of death.

Keyleth reached him.

Her hands went through light.

Through dust.

Through nothing.

Then her scream came.

It did not come from the lute.

It came from the sky.

From the earth.

From every open mouth in the city and every trembling pane of glass. It tore through Exandria with the broadcast, raw and ruined and unbearably mortal beneath the Whispered One’s divine laughter.

Kaylie gasped and stumbled back.

Scanlan dropped to his knees.

The lute crashed against his chest, still glowing, still showing him the impossible cruelty of the world continuing after Vax was gone.

Vex broke.

There was no better word for it.

She lunged for her brother, and Percy caught her before she could throw herself into the place where his body had been. Her mouth was open, soundless in the vision, but Scanlan knew that kind of scream. He had heard it in too many battlefields, too many alleys, too many songs he never performed because some grief did not deserve rhyme.

Pike pressed both hands over her mouth, her eyes enormous and wet, light flickering between her fingers as if her magic kept trying to heal a wound with no body attached to it.

Grog stared.

Just stared.

The biggest heart Scanlan had ever known sat frozen inside the biggest body he had ever known, and for once, there was no rage large enough to move him.

Keyleth bent over Vax’s empty cloak.

Her hands shook as she gathered it against herself.

The motion was small.

Tender.

Final.

Scanlan’s mouth opened.

Nothing came out.

No joke.

No song.

No filthy little remark to make everyone angry enough to survive the next breath.

His voice, his precious, endless voice, failed him completely.

The broadcast kept going.

The Whispered One spoke to the world, but Scanlan heard none of it. The words became noise. Triumph. Threat. Promise. Worship. It all blurred beneath the sight of his friends on their knees around the place where Vax had been.

Where Scanlan should have been.

Where Scanlan should have been.

Where Scanlan should have been.

“I did this,” he whispered.

Kaylie turned sharply. “No.”

He did not look at her.

The words came again, softer and worse.

“I did this.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I gave them Mythcarver.”

“You gave them what they needed.”

“I stayed.”

“You stayed with me.”

“I stayed,” he repeated, and now his voice cracked, jagged and pathetic. “I stayed, and Pike had to carry my song into that place. Keyleth had to use my blade. Vax had to stand there without me. They all—” His breath hitched. “They all knelt without me.”

Kaylie knelt in front of him.

He barely saw her.

His eyes would not leave the lute.

The vision was fading now, not mercifully but slowly, like a hand withdrawing from a wound it had made. The green light dimmed. The kneeling figures blurred. Keyleth’s red hair smeared into darkness. Vex’s white-knuckled grip on Percy’s sleeve vanished. Pike’s flickering light guttered. Grog’s bowed head dissolved.

The last thing Scanlan saw was the cloak.

Empty.

Then only his reflection stared back from the lute.

He looked old.

Not charmingly seasoned. Not rakish. Not like a bard with stories etched handsomely around his eyes. Old in the frightened, naked way children looked at fathers when fathers failed them.

His cheeks were wet.

His hands were bleeding.

His mouth hung open around breath he could not seem to use.

“I did this,” he said again.

Kaylie grabbed his face with both hands.

The burns on his palms screamed where the lute slipped against his lap, but he did not move.

“Look at me,” she said.

He tried.

He failed.

“Dad.”

That word again.

It pulled at him like a hook.

He looked up.

Kaylie’s eyes were full of tears and fury. She looked like him. Gods, she looked like him. All sharp edges and trembling pride, terrified of needing anyone and angrier still at being needed. He wondered if this was what people saw when they looked at him without stage lights.

“You did not kill him,” she said.

Scanlan’s face twisted.

“I wasn’t there.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It feels the same.”

“I don’t care what it feels like.”

That snapped through him.

He stared at her.

Kaylie’s voice shook, but she did not let it soften. “You don’t get to turn his death into proof that you’re the worst person alive.”

Scanlan flinched as if struck.

“You don’t,” she said again. “That’s not grief. That’s you trying to make guilt useful because guilt is easier than not knowing what to do.”

His breath caught.

For a moment, he hated that she was right.

Not truly. Not fully. But enough for shame to bare its teeth.

Because guilt was familiar.

Guilt had shape. Weight. A melody. Guilt could be held, polished, performed. Guilt made him important to the disaster. If he had done this, then at least he mattered. At least the universe had bent around his failure. At least Vax’s death had a reason with Scanlan’s name on it.

But Vax had not died to punish him.

Vax had died because Vax stood.

Because the Whispered One was cruel.

Because gods and monsters and fate had teeth.

Because love, sometimes, arrived too late with both hands empty.

Scanlan lowered his head.

His shoulders began to shake.

At first, he tried to stop it. Some last humiliating instinct reached for dignity, as if dignity had ever done anything useful for him. But the sob tore through anyway, ugly and strangled. Then another. Then another.

Kaylie’s hands slipped from his face to his shoulders.

He folded around the lute and wept.

Not elegantly. Not poetically. He cried with his teeth clenched and his breath breaking, with blood drying on his hands and snot threatening to ruin what little remained of his composure. He cried for Vax, who had always looked half a ghost and still somehow made dying feel impossible until it happened. He cried for Vex, who had lost half her own heartbeat. He cried for Keyleth, whose scream would live in him forever. He cried for Pike, who had carried Mythcarver because he had given it to her and gone nowhere. He cried for Grog, who would not understand why there was nothing to smash until understanding came and hurt worse. He cried for Percy, who knew too much about graves and still deserved fewer of them.

And yes, he cried for himself.

For the empty space.

For the man he wanted to be and the coward he feared he still was.

For every time he had left before someone could leave him.

For every joke that had covered a wound instead of cleaning it.

For the horrible, impossible truth that he could make the right choice and still hurt someone by not making another.

Kaylie moved closer and wrapped her arms around him.

He froze at first.

Then he clung to her.

“I’m sorry,” he choked.

Her hand tightened at the back of his shirt. “Don’t apologize for staying with me.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m sorry there isn’t enough of me,” he said.

The words came out small.

Too honest.

He wished immediately he could swallow them back.

Kaylie went still.

The tavern around them remained silent. He had forgotten there were others there until someone sniffed nearby. Nobody laughed. Nobody whispered. Nobody asked for a song.

Good.

There was no song for this.

Not yet.

Kaylie pulled back just enough to look at him. Her face had gone softer than he knew what to do with.

“There doesn’t have to be enough of you for everyone all at once,” she said.

Scanlan tried to answer, but his throat closed.

“That’s not how people work,” she continued. “Even annoying heroic people.”

A laugh broke out of him.

It was awful. Wet and cracked and barely alive.

Kaylie’s mouth trembled like she might smile and cry at the same time, which was deeply unfair because that was his move.

“But,” she said, and there was the knife, “you do have to decide what the next right thing is.”

The next right thing.

Simple.

Terrible.

He looked down at his hands.

The cuts from the strings were shallow but vivid, red lines crossing his palms like badly written music. He flexed his fingers. They hurt. They worked.

That mattered.

They worked.

The lute lay across his lap, ordinary again. The glow had gone. The reflection showed only the dark tavern, Kaylie’s bent head, his own wrecked face.

Mythcarver was gone.

Vax was gone.

The world had not ended, which meant it expected something from the living.

Scanlan hated that.

He hated being alive in the first breath after someone else was not. It felt rude. Obscene. Like continuing a song after the lead instrument had snapped in half.

But he was alive.

His daughter was alive.

Somewhere, his friends were alive in a world that had watched them kneel.

He pressed one burned hand against his chest.

Breathe in.

It hurt.

Good.

Breathe out.

Still here.

Damn it.

He looked at Kaylie.

“I have to go.”

Her jaw tightened.

There it was. The second wound of the night.

He saw it land. Saw her brace for it. Saw the girl who had spent most of her life without him hear, beneath everything he meant, the old familiar rhythm of being left.

It nearly broke him all over again.

“I know,” she said.

“No.” Scanlan shook his head quickly. “No, I need you to hear me. I’m not choosing them instead of you.”

Her expression shuttered.

He reached for her, stopped when he saw the blood on his hand, and let it fall uselessly between them.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he admitted. “Any of it. Fatherhood. Friendship. Heroism. Basic emotional honesty before noon. I am spectacularly underqualified for every meaningful part of my life.”

Kaylie huffed. It was almost a laugh.

“But I know this,” he said. “If I stay here now because I’m afraid of leaving you, then I’m not staying for love. I’m staying because fear is wearing love’s clothes, and I’m too much of a coward to tell the difference.”

Her eyes shone.

“I stayed before because I wanted to be your father,” he said. “I still do. More than anything. But right now, my friends are on their knees in front of a god who just murdered their brother, and they think I am somewhere safe, doing nothing.”

His voice cracked again.

“I can’t be doing nothing.”

Kaylie looked away.

The room seemed to hold its breath with him.

Then she stood.

Scanlan’s stomach dropped.

But she did not walk away.

She crossed to the table where her instrument still lay and picked up her bag from underneath it.

“What are you doing?” Scanlan asked.

“Packing.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No, absolutely not. No. Did you miss the part where the floating death god turned Vax into decorative dust?”

Kaylie shot him a look. “Did you miss the part where you can barely stand?”

“I can stand.”

He tried.

His knees disagreed.

Kaylie raised an eyebrow.

Scanlan sat back down.

“Temporarily,” he muttered.

“I’m not marching into battle with you,” Kaylie said. “I’m making sure you don’t collapse in a ditch before you reach someone useful.”

“I am useful.”

“You are bleeding on your lute.”

“That’s a bard thing.”

“That’s a medical thing.”

He stared at her.

She stared back.

It was terrible, being loved by someone as stubborn as himself.

“You don’t have to come,” he said quietly.

“I know.”

“You can stay somewhere safe.”

“I know.”

“I might not be able to protect you.”

At that, Kaylie’s face changed.

Not softer.

Sharper.

“Then don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said. “Just don’t disappear without saying goodbye.”

The words opened him neatly.

Scanlan swallowed.

Once.

Twice.

“I won’t,” he said.

Kaylie held his gaze for a long moment, measuring him.

Then she nodded.

That nod felt heavier than any applause he had ever received.

Around them, the tavern began to move again. Slowly. Stiffly. A chair scraped. Someone whispered a prayer. Someone else started crying softly into their hands. The bartender emerged from behind the counter with a face the colour of flour and stared at Scanlan as if he might have answers.

Scanlan almost laughed.

Him.

Answers.

He pushed himself upright, slower this time. Kaylie offered an arm. He took it because, apparently, the world had ended enough for humility to become an option.

His legs held.

Barely.

He slung the lute over his shoulder. The strap pulled against him in its familiar place, settling across his body like an old hand. His palms throbbed. His throat felt scraped raw. His chest ached with every breath.

Good.

Still here.

At the tavern door, he paused.

The rain outside had changed.

It fell black in the greenish light, staining the sky. Not truly black, maybe, but dark enough to look like ink running down the windows. The street beyond was crowded with frightened figures staring upward. No one knew where to go. No one knew what to do. The whole city had the stunned, hollow look of an audience after the stage had burned down.

Scanlan stepped into the rain.

It soaked him immediately, cold and merciless.

Kaylie followed, her shoulder brushing his.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Above the rooftops, the clouds churned with unnatural light. Somewhere far away, the Whispered One’s voice still murmured through the bones of the world, softer now but not gone. Perhaps it would never fully be gone again. Perhaps this was simply what Exandria sounded like now: rain, fear, and the echo of a god who had won.

Scanlan closed his eyes.

He saw Vax standing.

He saw Keyleth kneeling.

He saw Vex breaking.

He saw Pike with Mythcarver in her hands.

He saw the empty space.

“I did this,” he whispered.

Kaylie looked at him sharply.

Scanlan opened his eyes.

“No,” he said before she could speak.

The rain ran down his face, mingling with tears he had not finished shedding.

“No, I didn’t. Not all of it. Not him. Not that.”

His voice trembled.

“But I did leave a space empty.”

Kaylie said nothing.

He looked toward the road.

Toward Whitestone, though he could not see it.

Toward his family, though he did not know yet whether they would want him.

Toward the end of the world, which had apparently decided to start without him.

Scanlan’s hand found the strings of his lute.

He did not play a song.

Not properly.

Just one note.

Small.

Unsteady.

Alive.

It rang out beneath the rain and did not fix a single thing.

Still, a few people in the street turned toward him.

He almost hated them for it.

Then he thought of Vax again.

That impossible defiance.

That last refusal.

That beautiful, stupid spine refusing to bend.

Scanlan took a breath.

“I’m coming,” he said.

To Pike.

To Grog.

To Vex and Percy.

To Keyleth.

To the empty cloak.

To the space he should have filled.

His hands shook. His voice broke. His heart sat in his chest like shattered glass.

But his feet moved.

One step.

Then another.

Then another.

Behind him, Kaylie kept pace.

The world was ending.

Scanlan Shorthalt had already missed the beginning.

He would not miss what came next.