Work Text:
Grog asks him if he is scared, and he cannot answer. In the face of Keyleth’s tears, Vex’s heartbreak, Percy’s anger, Vax will not answer.
But of course he is scared. Of course he is. How could he be anything else?
This is what it was all leading to, he tells himself as comfort. Every moment, all up up, to bring him here. Vecna defeated, his sisters alive, his love bound to lead her people. It is a comfort to him, to think of it this way, to remind himself that his goddess deals in fate, and that this was his.
Everything has built to this inevitability, from the moment he and Vex were carried off to meet their father by hired soldiers who cared little for children or their tears. All of it has lead to this. The worst of it: the humiliation of Syngorn, the miserable trials of living on the road, the Clasp, the swamp rot stench of Stilben, the constant death and terror, the usurpers, the dragons, the vengeful demon, the kraken that swallowed him whole, the sight of his death moments before it actually reached him. And the best of it too: the campfire burning to embers beneath a starry sky while and he his sister and his nephew slept free of their father’s demands, meeting a bunch of fuck-ups in a tavern who would call themselves shits, falling for Shaun, falling for Keyleth, pranks and his friends’ hair between his fingers and sinking Percival’s sword into the monster who killed his mother. His chase of the Everlight that ended with him stumbling desperately into the Matron’s embrace. Every time he napped in the sun on a Zephran mountainside and knew a moment of peace. It all led to him, now, walking to his mother, leaving behind his friends and knowing, at last, they would all be safe.
But he knows so little.
Until he walks away for the last time and truly belongs at the Matron’s side, he was afforded a mortal’s comfort. Before the veil closed behind him, one moment led to the next. Even dead, as he’d been as he had walked Exandria for his final days, with cold skin and a halting heartbeat, a dagger in his hand was a dagger in his hand, and only a dagger, nothing more.
His mother is waiting for him.
The Archfey who crushed his throat with a closed hand had stretched an hour out like taffy, pulled it into the shape of a day.
Child’s play, besides the fluidity of everything within the Matron’s domain.
The Raven Queen reigns only over the threshold, and this gift he is afforded, the time at last to see his mother as the man he grew to be, is only a moment, and it is, too, every minute they were denied in each other’s presence, before she returns to her rest and he takes up the eternity of his duty. It is wonderful, and it is only the beginning.
In the Raven Queen’s domain, he walks-swims-flies through what is vast cosmic space and a cold winter’s breeze and the long-chilled blood of the fallen, where he once drowned. He needs no longer breathe, so it does not matter that he cannot, and he moves in all these three ways and more, all at once.
As he had before, he beholds fate itself. It is easy, with eyes no longer mortal but truly made of this place, to find his family’s threads. It is only when he lays eyes on them that he he at last begins to understand.
He looks for destiny. Instead, he finds options, choices, and possibilities, as infinite as this domain itself. He finds knots there and not. Threads that are frayed and cut, but at once are whole and only might become ruined. Paths between two souls who will change each other’s lives forever that he can only half touch, as they only half exist. Lives that end next Grissen or carry on or begin again, and even he, here, standing among the skein, cannot tell which is or will be.
They are like afterimages burned in his eyes on a bright day, that lingered in his vision even when he turned away and blinked hard, but arriving ahead instead of overstaying their welcome, and much more than simply images now. He can feel the multitude of fates in his hands, each solid to the touch until he reaches for the next.
He finds his sister’s thread, which is a task easily done, for how entwined their lives were from before the moment of their birth, and he reaches out to trace her fate. He finds her old and happy, surrounded by grandchildren; and he finds her a vengeful young widow; and he finds her dead in childbirth; and he finds her slain in battle having lived only twice the age she is now; and they find her at the head of a table of nobles, shining and confident. Her future is not a line, not the promise he’d thought he’d bargained for, but a tapestry of possibility.
“I do not understand,” he says. There is fear in his voice, which he has and does not have, as his lungs were turned to ash in the Shadowfell.
“My Champion.” The Raven Queen reaches for him. She is so infinitely large that her hand ensconces the shape of him whole, and she is his size, perhaps just a bit shorter, and her fingers tangle in his hair until he turns his head to look at her, to meet the deep gaze of her mask. “Ask of me what you will.”
“I thought—I thought it was always going to happen.” He shows her the fate of his sister, the permeability, the uncertainty. “It all fell into place. We—we walked into a dive in a swap town on the edge of the continent, and then all of this came from that. All of it. It doesn’t make sense, if it was not your plan, or someone’s. Where is the sense in it? In any of it?” He wants something solid to hold tight to, here in this shapeless place. He feels desperate as he asks, as the certainty he’d been afforded in life crumbles away beneath him. “Percival opened the coffin. He had to, to lead us here.”
“He chose to.” She is gentle with him, and sad, and speaks with a voice of knowing. “It was his decision, just as your path was yours.”
“She was dead in my arms,” says Vax. He feels sickness and dread to even remember it, the still weight of her clutched to his chest, and he hates himself a little for how dearly he misses the weight of her, even in that most awful moment, because he had known what he was holding and he had known what to do. “There was no other choice.”
“There were choices.”
“But I would choose nothing else,” he says.
“You never would. Not by my will, but by who you are. This is why I had hoped you would be mine.”
When she looks over them with him, his vision does not clarify, but his understanding does. He sees that the paths are many, but not infinite, and a great number of them are simply inevitable. He sees Percival, Percival, Percival. He sees Whitestone. He sees a daughter, already on her way. He sees her thread cross and twine with their friends, with their family, for as long as she lives. No path guaranteed, but it stretches out ahead of them, when it would have been severed a year ago.
“I took comfort in the certainty that there was only one path before me. That all of it meant something.”
“It did,” says the Raven Queen. “It does. There are many paths, and all of them have one ending. That is what we bring to this world, that is what we defend, above all. There are few things reliable to all mortals. Our charge is one. Your nature is another. That is what you are, fate-touched. It is not my design that you would offer your pledge to me, nor the will of any but yourself. We guard and defend our domains, but even the gods do not make you choices for you.”
“Could he have done it?” asks Vax.
“Who?” She tilts her head, and her hair flows out around her, midnight black and red-tipped.
“Forgive me,” says Vax. Even in her service, he misunderstands. Perhaps because he came to her so late, perhaps because it has never been a strength of his to understand limitations. The gods are immeasurably powerful, but are still left to rely on mortals to carry out their deeds. They are ancient, even her, the youngest, but still not all-knowing, and he forgets this. Forgets that even he may know more than a god, despite how many he has met. “Scanlan. My friend, Scanlan. He had a spell, or something. He thought it would…” Vax realizes he does not know either. Still, after all of it, he does not know what Scanlan is keeping close to his chest. “He thought he could keep me there, but he had to give it up, to stop Vecna. Was that possible?”
He knows, somehow, that she smiles beneath the mask. “There are few who know better than I, my Champion, the power that a mortal can wield in the face of the gods.”
The Raven Queen had been a mortal herself. She had made this transition, as he does now, become greater and stranger and gauzier. Before she too learned to be many places and many things at once, she was just a woman, who walked Exandria and suffered and struggled and rejoiced through each moment in sequence like the rest of them. How easy it is, to forget, when he stands and flies and swims in the face of her now.
“He made the right choice,” says Vax. He knows this is true, though he hates it. His sister’s thread in his hands is nothing like the heft of her hair, freshly washed and still damp, as he combed it into sections, but he focuses on the length of it, the extra time she was afforded, first by Vax’s choice, and then by Scanlan’s, and that makes it sting just a little less.
“He always would have.”
Vax is more than a person now too. He is death, in his own way, the cold chill and beckoning hand to bring the newly dead across the threshold. He is the ravens, which are their own creatures too, who peck at crumbs outside a bakery in Whitestone, and nest in the tall cliffs of Zephrah.
He walks in skin that mimics what he’d worn all of his short life, but which lacks the weight of flesh. In the way of the dead, the changes which befall his appearance are of a particular kind of transformation. Parts of him fall away, and sink in. The skin on his shoulder does not rot, as there is no life in his Mistress’s small domain to carry out such a task. Instead, it sloughs away in strips that do not bleed, and do not fall, but simply no longer are. The antlers spiral from his arm, bleach bone, white as death.
The boots his sister had so coveted are no more or less him than his own hand, his hair, the wings that root in the blades of his shoulder and drift to dust at the edges. He has the mask of a raven’s face, though it would not be strictly true to say that he wears it, for it is part of him too.
He is hollow. No need any longer for all of the intricacies of a lifeform, and the half-used organs with which she’d outfitted him for his final days dissolve, like snowfall that sinks into the drift. Had he need of blood, there is plenty here to flow through him without him needing to carry his own within him.
He is many places at once, across the material plane and beyond, because death is inevitable and, thus, everywhere.
He feels his sister’s thread snap because he is holding it, and he is holding it because it has snapped. Both are true, and there is no distinguishing.
She is still young, her daughter is not year a year in age, and she has drowned in the sea.
“Please!” he cries. His voice is a breathless raven’s croak, spilling out into the cool nothingness of a winter’s night. “This was not our arrangement. It is not her time. Send her back.”
“She is not yet here,” says the Raven Queen. She looms over him, stern and impassive, as death is. “She stands on the brink, but she may yet endure, to meet this moment again another time. Your friends are powerful, and may well bend this fate. But if they do not, to linger after fate’s end is to pervert the cycle. If she is to join us, she must move on.”
Vax trembles with fury and betrayal, but there is nothing he can do, and he knows his bargain has brought her even the chance she has now. He lowers his head and conceals his expression, the raven’s face stoic where his half-elven face could never be. “Thy will be done,” he says.
“Not my will,” says the Raven Queen. Her sorrow seeps through the blood around them, conveyed through the rustle of raven’s wings. “My charge.”
Scanlan does it.
He cannot save Vax, he does not unmake his bargain, but he speaks out into the universe so convincingly that the gods must obey, and Vax travels through the lattice of the Divine Gate to stand at the top of a cliff, and say a few words at his sister’s wedding.
It is beautiful. His still heart swells for his sister, for his brother, for his love and his family and that clever fucking gnome who never learned his place. There could be no greater gift than for him to stand among them this night, to see all of them together around him, and share the love and joy in their lives. His sister is aglow with daylight and motherhood. Keyleth stands tall and respected. How lucky he is to be here, among them all again.
And it is agony.
Ont he other side, he is so many places, he is so many things. But on the material plane, he is once again something physical and singular. It is like shuffling forward in shackles, to move only from one moment to the next, and not crossways. His sight has tunneled, dimmed without the glow of fate and possibility to illuminate his way. He cannot even see where his next step will take him.
He is no longer made for this.
To speak at the wedding, he needs a body. He needs a throat and lungs, and these are both unfamiliar to him now. Still or no, his chest is unused to the dense lump that is a heart, and it aches within him to stand with its weight. He looks not unlike he did in life, skinny enough to be taunted for it, but when he had shape before, he never noticed the weight of his own bones pinning him down. The skin is binding, a prison made to contain only a fraction of him, now stretched to the brim holding back all of what he is.
The indefiniteness of him threatens to spill through the seams of this body.
He is happy. He is so glad, to touch them, to hold them, to thank them once more.
And he is gladder still when it is over.
The Raven Queen welcomes him back with kindness.
“I understand,” he says. “I understand. I do. There is no going back.”
She helps him free of his binds. “It is that that gives it meaning,” she says. She is infinitely tall. She stands before him, no taller than he, and wipes a tear from his cheek. “There is no going back. But there is so much more.”
At her touch, his skin and bones rip away, sinew pulling apart like tissue paper, and wash out into the ocean of blood around them. It is like the greatest of exhalations.
The Champion of Ravens spreads his wings, free. And Vax’ildan, at last, is only part of the whole.