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The first year after a surprise retirement from adventuring ended up being the most difficult, funnily enough. One could blame the fact that Cree gave up trying to see all of it from the deck of a sailing ship for the world suddenly calming itself around her if not for the fact that it had done so for everyone. They all knew that eventually there would be an incident that would require them- Jayne and her allies had given them seven years of peace, but Ludinus and the remnants of the Assembly had offered no such promises.
So they waited. Some of them hunted. Some of them learned. Most of them simply found quieter lives. Cree counted herself among the few who managed to do it successfully, turning herself into a local hedgewitch in a cottage just close enough to the Run that anyone could feel safe traveling to and from without worrying about the still-Blighted forest. The creep of the Blight had slowed to the point of stillness, meaning she never had to worry about coming out to her garden and finding the purple vines choking her herbs and root vegetables. The trees might never sing again and the beasts would persist the deeper in you went, but the Ashari who came to help were doing their best to make certain it never swallowed the town whole.
The Nein were scattered, but they were close by and well within reach of a Sending spell, and she always knew where they were thanks to the blood vials displayed prominently, now that her satchel had been put away in a closet, on a shelf high enough that even the most enterprising young rogue couldn’t climb it. It was a lovely conversation piece for the locals coming for her healing or her medicinal knowledge that revealed the extent of what she could do with blood. In the Empire, she was certain she’d be run out of town as a hag. Here in the Run, the superstitious fey-wary Wildlands folk nodded. ”Good way to avoid doppelgangers and changelings.”
Thanks to the rumor mill, for the first time in her life, people were offering her blood. Midwives now habitually drew blood from newborn babies little by little until there was a full vial for mothers to wear around their necks and when their infants were colicky or fussier than they usually were or too quiet, they would run to her and beg her to confirm that their child was truly theirs and no one had replaced it with a changeling. Cree never once had to tell a mother their suspicions were correct and it brought a profound change to the Run she hadn’t realized was there. It had never occurred to her that even the children with loving parents not left on the street might have suffered, living on eggshells lest their parents suspect they were a fey trickster in disguise.
They were all still committed to changing the world, now in small ways and with intention, usually. Here in the Run, she and Lucien and the other Tombtakers and even Essek, in his own way, carved a place for themselves that made them dedicated members of the community. Fjord’s lack of interest in siding with any governing force but having kinship with all of them through his business allowed him the freedom to keep his hands untied politically, turning him into a favored neutral third option for people in the Coast who had reason to distrust Concordian or Revelry vessels. Molly and Caleb were simultaneously constantly in the throes of hunting for signs of Ludinus and doing odd little turns for every town they went to that required assistance. More than a few songs had ended up in Chance’s favorite Byroden tavern about a purple tiefling and a red-headed wizard and when brought up to Caleb, his ears would turn as red as his hair. Jester, on top of being Fjord’s new Quartermaster, used her teleport ring judiciously to the point where there was not a single governing official on any continent in all of Exandria that had not met her, personally, heard of her fiancée’s business, and had a dick drawn somewhere in their buildings. Beau was wrenching the Cobalt Soul into a better future, holding the Soul, itself accountable, even while she was keeping eyes on the Empire as it went through post-Assembly traction. Veth was running her camp with an iron fist and more than one Mighty Nein gathering was specifically for helping her teach new lessons to her Wildlings.
And then there was Caduceus, content in his Grove, both in and out of the Run- a prominent part of its culture, but always held separate. He kept his graves, made his tea, comforted the bereaved, and did a lot with the Ashari to understand the damage done to the Wood and why it might have happened even if there was no true way to fully reverse the damage. Occasionally, he would come to visit her with bags of new tealeaves and she would dig up some of her vegetables by their deep roots and they would laugh about the first time they met.
A month after the seventh year passed with a collective held breath that Cree could feel through the blood on her shelf and no sign of Jayne, Caduceus arrived on her doorstep with empty hands and pockets and blood on his clothes that wasn’t his.
“Hey,” he said simply, as if this was normal.
Cree hissed between her teeth. Behind her, she heard a chair scraping and the padding of tiny feet as a shrieking five year old came running. “Is that Uncle Cad? Hi, Uncle Cad!”
Before the tiny black-furred tabaxi could launch herself upon Caduceus, Cree caught her by the back of her neck to scruff her into compliance. “Lock, what have I said?”
“No tackling?”
“Aye,” she lowered her daughter to the floor and instantly regretted not pivoting her to face back into the cottage. Her golden eyes went wide as she noticed the blood.
“Uncle Caduceus, why are you covered in blood?” She sniffed. “It’s not yours. Did you kill someone?”
Normally Caduceus would have teased her, but he knelt down to get on her level and handed her something from his pocket- a shard of amethyst plucked from his sister’s stash of materials. “Here. Let me save you the trouble of you trying to steal it. I need to talk to your mom.”
At first Lock huffed and puffed. “It’s not fun if I can’t take it while you’re not looking.”
“Lock on an Open Door,” Cree hissed. “Say thank you and go back to your drawings, please. Your uncle and I need to talk.”
Lock stuck her chin out but swiftly snatched the amethyst and darted back to the table, leaving Cree to step outside and shut the door behind her. “What is it? What’s happened?”
Caduceus let out a bone-weary sigh now that there were no children to impress. “Something happened in Zephrah. A terrible attack. Stasya Hydriss came through a tree in the Grove looking for help, covered in blood. There’s… something not right about the dead.”
“What do you mean?” Cree tilted her head.
“I mean they can’t bring them back.” Caduceus leaned on his staff, resting his forehead against the amethysts, like he was already tired before anything could be done. “The assassins had a poison on their blades… Honestly, Stasya was hysterical so I didn’t get a whole lot out of her. She said they were after the Tempest.”
Cree swallowed down a noise of deep discontent. “Is she-“
“Alive, yeah. She sent Stasya to find us, specifically.”
A cold tremor was working its way up Cree’s back. She didn’t like where this was going. “Why us?”
“Well… You can probably guess why me. They’re beyond any resurrection spell or they would have done it already. That’s a lot of people who need to deal with their grief. But you…” He narrowed his eyes. “You know why.”
“Because if there is a poison in the blood, I might be able to understand it,” she nodded, content to believe it was solely that and nothing else. She needn’t have worried at all. It was only a tragedy that needed experienced hands to solve.
But Caduceus was staring at her with that somber look of disappointment that she was willing to play stupid when the true answer was right in front of her face. “He was there and you’re the only one who can talk to him.”
●
Cree Deeproots, much like her name and not her catlike nature, could never be said to be a woman of many homes. Oh, she had tried, now that she had discovered the taste of freedom and the ability to go and do whatever she wanted that had always existed within her, but no one she had been around until the Nein had thought to tell her so and, in fact, benefited from her assuming such a thing was impossible. With the world laid out before her, she had tried to be the sort of person who thrived in wanderlust, but the wonder wouldn’t come. The sea was tumultuous, the ports loud and colorful in ways that overwhelmed her. She did, eventually, make it back to Marquet, the only other place but the Run that could be home besides her people, years after trading out her pirate’s hat and corset and returned with the finest things she would ever own that were still plain by Marquesian standards- silks and shawls and pretty things fit for a hedgewitch. Molly had even convinced her to buy the braided gold chain that could hook from her septum piercing to one of the hoops pierced into her ear, arguing that it wasn’t even real gold.
But Marquet could never be home either. She simply wished to embrace the parts of her that still claimed it. The rest of her she gave over to the Run, setting her roots in and deciding that she would only leave when she was desperately called. It happened often enough to be a joke about her never getting her roots set deep enough before someone came along to pluck her. Lock’s birth had at least guaranteed her three years of relative peace where no one asked much of her that couldn’t be done within the walls of her cottage, but now her child was precocious and wild and hardly an excuse when she so badly wanted to see everything, herself, now.
Of all the places that called her, Zephrah she owed the least to and yet it was her own fault it asked anything of her at all. She had been the fool who, after Corrin Clay had pointed out that Caduceus had earned a debt from an Air Ashari that he ought to take advantage of, had followed him when he went to ask for assistance with healing the Savalirwood and understanding its curse. She had been the one who told the pretty red-head with the mantle of leaves and the crown of antlers that she was the first priestess of the man she had loved. After that, she was invited back so often that it was as if it was trying to be a second home.
It was even here that Lock had earned her vice at the age of four. Having no real experience in tabaxi culture, Cree had deferred to Chance in naming their daughter. When she was born in the Grove, they gave her the milk name of Crystal to match the Clay naming scheme and because Cree was so delirious from the difficult labor that she named her the first thing she saw- Caduceus’s blight staff. It would have been embarrassing had Lock not been meant to earn her own name. By Chance’s estimation, most Briskmist tabaxi had figured out their vices by their teenage years, but Lock found hers quickly. After sneaking into several unlocked huts just to prove she could, Chance had, in exasperation, crowed that she’d “seek out the lock on an open door.” And something just clicked.
Business with the Savalirwood was always her priority- rogueish kittens aside- but she was also, in many ways favored of the Tempest and that was the true reason for her being invited when they could have just asked the Clays and the Clays alone. At first, Keyleth had been awkward and, admittedly, she hadn’t stopped being awkward, but she had stopped looking like she wanted Cree to leave and stay at the same time every time they spoke. There was nothing she could do for the Champion and his former love, but the two of them shared a middling, if not fully unfair in Caduceus’s eyes, disdain for the Matron, and perhaps Keyleth liked having that specific kind of petty dislike for someone who had only ever asked that they move on and grown weary of them when they refused validated. In Cree’s case, she had dominion over what happened when a person refused to move on and tied the skein in knots to get what she wanted. The Matron’s disdain for her was palpable and she knew one day that she owed the world a great debt for her meddling.
This she had told Keyleth once over tea. The Tempest couldn’t hide her jealousy as she stared into a blend Caduceus had dropped off on his way to speak to some of the Ashari who had been conscripted as part of the Savalirwood detail.
“The cost is going to be more than you can pay,” she had said, at last. “I don’t know if I could have done it, knowing that.”
“The Matron is a cunt, but she is a fair one. The scales will be as balanced precisely against what I took and no more,” Cree muttered over the lip of her cup and there the conversation had been destined to rest. It was hard for Keyleth to accept fairness in anything, that perhaps the Champion was as he was because he had chosen it. Their dislike for the Matron was not created equal, no matter how unfathomably petty it was on both sides. One couldn’t argue the case when you were the Fate-Breaker- she always got her way and Keyleth didn’t, and that was the most base truth there was.
And yet, Keyleth still asked her to come to Zephrah, the requests always balanced with the weight of a request that she couldn’t ask for and Cree would not be able to offer in a way that would be satisfying. Ever since the defeat of the Chained Oblivion’s myriad of thralls in this world that had made the gods open and vocal, the Champion only spoke to her in signs, her communes limited to raven croaks of “yes” and “no.” She never told Keyleth that he had once spoken to her in full sentences, though she suspected she knew- how else would Cree have known who to find when she and Caduceus stepped through the tree Corrin opened up for them for the first time. The Tempest was lonely, isolated, trapped on a pedestal, and perhaps Cree understood the agony of it having brought down her share of her own idols and treated her the way a friend would, while not knowing her so well that she would pry.
Normally she would step through the big cherry tree in the center of the mountain village and breathe in the sweet smell of mountain air and prepare herself for an afternoon of gentle conversation, card games, and tea while she and Keyleth did everything but talk about the Champion or the Skein or the Matron until, eventually, the Tempest would release the held tension and ask whatever she needed to ask that day that had prompted the invitation. Normally, there would be children rushing up to demand that Caduceus show them ‘the bugs.’ Normally, this place would be alive.
It was as cold as a tomb, colder than the mountain air around them, just a week out from New Dawn when the thaw hadn’t fully broken yet. Empty, too, with everyone having vanished off the street, leaving nothing but patterns of arterial spray on the stones that no one could scrub off. Cree shuddered underneath her thin silks and looked to Caduceus whose expression was more pinched than he’d ever seen it. Between them, Stasya Hydriss, normally as stone-faced as her father, was shaking, her spear rattling in her iron grip. None of the blood that had stained Caduceus’s clothes when he came to get her had been hers.
“They came out of nowhere,” she explained as she walked them past spots where people had fallen. “Assassins in gray. They were after the Tempest, I think. Derrig and Will held the line, but Leeta, Orym, and I held back, and…” Her eyes dropped to a spot in the center of town where the blood hadn’t fully dried, two massive splotches reaching out to each other, stopping before it could converge. Cree knelt here and pulled out two vials, working what blood still remained, heavy and pooling, off the rocks until she had two samples.
Stasya retched but Caduceus caught her before she could keel over. “They cut them down like dogs in front of us,” she yelled, loud enough to pierce the quiet.
“And you do not know why they came?” Cree asked, stoppering the vials and placing them in her satchel, out of sight and out of mind. She would need better samples from the corpses themselves, but the more she had, the more she could look into what had was used that disconnected all hope of divinity reaching them.
The tiefling woman gave a sniff and rubbed at her mismatched eyes. “Do they need a reason? The Tempest has plenty of enemies. Some of the Remnants came a few years back and we killed every one of them. Whitestone took care of the rest.” She swallowed hard and forced herself to stand with dignity, despite her auburn hair falling out of its braid and the shadows under her eyes. “The… the bodies are in there.”
She gestured to a large building- most meetings in Zephrah occurred outside in the open air, but every community needed its community hub for inclement weather. Cree found herself wondering how long it would be before anyone could stomach going in there knowing what it had been used for recently.
The reek of death was stronger here, concentrated, and the grief was more suffocating than Run humidity. There were twelve corpses in total, more injured, huddled together with frantic healers sweating over wounds that wouldn’t close. A good portion of the uninjured were hovering in huddled masses around covered bodies. A pair held away from the rest, draped more ceremonially than the others as if marking them for a separate burial, were guarded by a lone halfling with a dark brown crewcut with his forehead on his knees.
“I’ll see what I can get from the healers,” Caduceus whispered and left Cree to be led to the two mostly unattended corpses by a dejected looking Stasya.
“Hey, Orym. Where’s Leeta and Maeve?”
“Mom took them to get something to eat and talk to the Tempest,” he said. He was soft-spoken, but the strength of his voice didn’t waver despite the shellshock of a war veteran in his bright eyes. “You should go join them, Stacy.”
Stasya’s red skin flushed even redder. “Fuck you. Don’t call me Stacy just to make yourself laugh when I get mad, you little shit.”
The dry chuckle that came out of the halfling was genuine even if his smile wouldn’t quite reach his eyes. “Works every time.”
“I swear you and Will never let-“ Stasya cut herself off and Orym froze, horrified. “I- I’m so sorry, Orym. I didn’t. I…”
Slowly, Orym began to relax. By observation alone, it was not a state he wished to be in, but rather something he wished to convey to stop Stasya from panicking over his feelings. A clear conveyance of See? I’m fine! “It’s… it’s gonna take some getting used to.”
“I… Right. I’ll just go talk to the Tempest, then.” And off she went, her boots clopping across the stones, loud enough to be deafening in the grim silence of the mourners. Even the door opening and shutting was too loud.
That left Cree here alone with this grief-stricken stranger and nothing to do but the job she’d been tasked with. “I… do not believe we have met properly. I know you are a Tempest Blade, but-“
“Orym,” he said politely, removing a hand from where it was wrapped around his tiny knees to hold it out to her. Her massive paw swallowed it when she shook it. “You’re Cree, right?”
“Aye, yes. The blood-worker.”
“The priestess of the Champion,” he corrected with a lopsided grin, as if that was the part that was more impressive. Maybe here it would be, given everything.
“Yes, and I am certain I have much to ask him, but I do not know what questions to ask until I speak with the blood.” She was not as good as Caduceus at counseling grief, because she simply did not deal with the dead nearly as often. Blood was best when it came from a living person. Death had a tendency to spoil its potency- still, even without Tyffial, there were questions that dead blood could answer and the difference between the blood left to dry in the air on the stones and the blood left congealing in the veins could be the difference in determining the exact nature of the poison. “Will I offend you if I take some?”
Orym shook his head. “I want to know what happened.”
He did look away when Cree removed the ceremonial cloth from the first corpse, revealing a handsome dark-haired half-elf, younger than her. He was covered in dozens of slashes and over a spot where a fatal blow had pierced his heart she could see the remains of where a diamond had shattered and failed to bring him back.
Cree pulled the blood from there, careful to gather up every shred of the diamond dust to see if she could peel apart why the spell failed to take. She did the same with the second- an older half-elf with the younger’s same hair and face shape, gone a bit more rugged with age. A father and a son.
Both the halfling and the younger half-elf bore matching bands made of silver shaped like entwined vines- a fact she only noticed because the halfling couldn’t stop staring at the dead boy’s finger like he was fighting the urge to take the ring, knowing what it would symbolize if he did.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Cree murmured and didn’t wait for a response before she awkwardly excused herself to, even more awkwardly, ask for blood samples from the living. She fled the building and its stagnant air and left Caduceus to do his work, gathering herself at the edge of the mountain to focus and ground herself. A large raven nearly the size of a hunting dog, balanced in the branches of a nearby tree growing crookedly out of the side of the cliff, cocked its head at her curiously.
“I will speak to you in a moment when I know what I should ask,” she muttered. She paused as she arranged her vials. “Were you really here?”
The raven croaked at her, miserably, which was not fully an answer. “That was a bold thing you did, if so. Bolder than anything I have done.”
The raven shuffled off the branch and landed in front of her, nudging the vials around with his beak. He danced away when she tried to swat at him. “Give me space to work. This is not my bailiwick.” They should have gotten Tyffial, but that would have meant waiting until she was back from leading a group into Molaesmyr. Time was of the essence right now.
Cree lost herself in her work, manipulating the blood until she had as close to an idea as she could get without Tyffial’s poison expertise. It wasn’t much of one, but even a glimmer can suggest at the bigger picture.
Poison peeled away from the blood when a blood-worker willed it to. Lucien had learned how to do it because he was jealous of Tyffial and Jurrell’s own version of the Bane allowing them to cheat at drinking contests and intimidate folk by swallowing poisons in front of them, and they had spent the better part of a year teaching him in secret how to remove toxins from the blood using his Blood Maledicts. Cree was not nearly as gifted with that, but she could manipulate the blood itself, peel it away into component parts until she could judge all manner of things about how it settled back into the vial.
The blood would not settle correctly. She had a fine layer of grit from the diamonds glinting at the top of the vials taken from the corpses, and the rest of the blood had separated out, but now she could see thick black striations through all of it, the poison refusing to be pulled out. She held it to the light and frowned.
The blood taken from the stones and the blood from the living reacted the same way. No matter how hard she tried to separate it, it refused to settle on its own. It remained bonded to the blood.
“There is a lesson they teach in the Orders, Champion,” she murmured as she stared at her perfect array of matching blood vials, while the large bird bowed his head in concern. “’The blood and the soul are one.’”
She did not elaborate, merely shoved her vials back into her satchel for bringing to Tyffial later, and gathered up her incense to start her commune. As the smoke billowed between her and the raven, she blinked and a man in feathers and leather, a skull mask over his face and a growth of bone-like fungus protruding from his shoulder was crouched across from her, balanced so precariously that one bad step would send him off the side of the cliff.
“Were you able to ferry them to your Queen’s domain?”
For the first time in almost seven years, the Champion spoke to her through his own voice and not his raven’s. Her heart thundered in her chest, knowing what this might mean. “I was.”
“Was that why you were here? To play psychopomp to the dead?”
The Champion tilted his head at her at a neck-breaking angle. His glassy dead man’s eyes behind the mask held a look of avian judgment. “That is a waste of a question.”
“So you admit that you were here against your lady’s orders to protect the Tempest?”
“That is also a waste of a question.”
“It told me everything,” Cree said. She cast the spell again, preventing him from vanishing in a flutter of feathers. Cat and raven glared at each other across the oud-smelling smoke. “Was it difficult to ferry them?”
“No.”
“What happened when they attempted to call them back? I know it is you who escorts them.”
“You cannot ask me that like this.”
“Oh I can’t? This is the most you have spoken to me in years. Is my bill finally coming due.”
“Yes.”
Cree gripped the symbol around her neck- her blood-stained raven’s skull with its satchel of moondrops tucked within. Divine intervention. “I want three honest, complete answers, Champion. Tell me now, then, what happened when they were called back.”
She watched the Champion sigh, heavily, with only the faintest traces of his usual amusement at her intensity. “Healing and resurrection require divinity, regardless of where it is pulled from. It is, by its nature, solely in the purview of the divine magics. The poison rejects it.”
No healing. No resurrection. What a cruel and specific way to kill someone. Cree pondered this with the theory already churning in her head. “If the blood and soul are one then the blood being inhospitable to the soul means that it cannot return if a person dies, and the wounds will never properly heal, if they survive, because the poison will degrade the connection to the soul over time. It will eventually claim you no matter what. Is that correct?”
The Champion nodded slowly. “Souls are, in essence, the spark that the gods gave their creations to bring them to life, to allow them to grow independent and free of their makers. In essence, every mortal soul bears a scrap of that divine creation.”
“And this unravels that connection.” She hissed. “Who would create something like this?”
At that, her deity just chuckled, slowly rising to his feet, having finally reached the end of her questioning. Pebbles broke off from the cliff beneath the heels of his boots as he balanced precariously on the hairsbreadth of plummeting down the mountain. “What society do you know of that despises the gods so much that they would risk their own unmaking to spite them?”
He stepped backwards, the fwooph of wings being snapped out louder than the wind howling its mourning song. When she saw him again, he was a raven again bursting free of the canyon below and sailing off into the open sky, leaving her shaking in the wake of his response.
Aeor.
The bill had, indeed, finally come due.
●
Not long after Cree had finished with her commune, a frazzled Ashari woman whose entire purpose seemed to be running hither and yon to keep herself from having a single thought about what had happened came to fetch her, claiming the Tempest was ready to see her. She was led, though the path was a familiar one, to the two-storey home at the edge of the village, so choked with ivy that the pale wood beneath was no longer visible. The domed rooof sloped gently and the wraparound balcony gave a view of everything from the village, itself, to the mountains at its back.
Her guide, faced with the idea that she might not have another task to do, began to fidget as she led Cree into the bottom floor, boasting a modest public room with a spiral staircase leading up to Keyleth’s private quarters. “I can see myself up. Could you find my friend? The tall pink one? And give him this note.” She passed over a folded paper with notes about her commune written in Sylvan script. She could not trust anyone here to not be nosy when it came to their lives and even with the layer of protection she did not dare put in any information about how this could be her fault.
The Ashari girl bowed, gratefully, and took off running, leaving Cree to ascend the staircase into the Voice of the Tempest’s private sanctum where she had taken tea and had many an awkward conversation over the last seven years. Plants overtook every surface, all of them growing wild and untamed out of their pots, making the entire floor a tripping hazard. Cree walked past the closed bedroom door into the open sitting room with its massive open air balcony, the mosquito netting and thick curtains peeled back to reveal the leader of the Air Ashari, herself, resplendent in her cloak and antlered crown. Rather than stand there watching over her broken people, she faced the mountain and even from a distance, Cree could see the way her shoulders rippled under the cloak, begging for a transformation, to take flight and distance herself from the petty complications of politics.
The thing about druids is we can’t really shut out brains off when we transform, so it’s not like it would do any good. It would just make me a coward, she had told her once with a miserable laugh, after Cree had compared that impulse to Caleb’s love of polymorph therapy.
For a long time neither woman spoke, though the creaking of the wooden boards beneath Cree’s heavy feet gave her away. Keyleth pressed her hands against the polished wood of the balustrade as if she hoped she would grow roots there and plant herself forever in this space, within a breath of the perch she had built for ravens to come and visit, just so she wouldn’t find cause to drift away and forget that she was a leader and leaders needed to be steadfast and unwavering and do what was best for their people, even when they, themselves, were suffering. “Did you find out anything?”
Cree kept her place, respectfully two paces behind the Ashari leader. There were some things that could never be taken from her- deference was not the sin that most of the Mighty Nein believed it was. It was important when wielded correctly and not to your own detriment. “It is a poison, Tempest, but not one I have ever seen before. It eats away at any shred of divinity that it takes in.”
Her lip twitched as she turned her head slightly. “What does that mean?”
“It is incurable, because it cannot be healed. The infection spreads, not to the body, but to the spirit, so it kills slowly and those who are claimed by it cannot return to a body that has become inhospitable to it.” Cree hissed, wincing. “You must understand, Tempest. I have done the nearly impossible. I have brought a soul back nearly three years after the body was buried in a place I could never find. When I tell you that I cannot bring them back nor can I heal those who have survived it, it is not because I am an terrible cleric, but because it cannot be done.”
“I thought…” Keyleth started and then stopped, a bitter laugh warbling from her throat like the mountain breeze through the windchimes tied just to the left of the raven’s perch. “No, it’s stupid. Of course he was here for me.”
If she had not already heard it twice now and once from the bird’s own beak, she would have grimaced. “He could ferry their souls to the Matron, regardless of the poison. But that would not have required him to make himself known to you. That was a foolish thing he did.”
At that Keyleth chuckled, all the bitterness of decades making it humorless and without anything resembling mirth. “You know him as a god of death. I know him as a man,” Keyleth cut her off, gently. “And I think it was the man who called the shots today.”
“And for all the shit he gives me about referring to him as such.” Cree made an agitated pah sound. “I do not believe he would come to you so often if you told him to go.”
“Now’s not the time.” This time the Tempest wasn’t gentle, her voice lowered to an almost animal growl like she was near to wild shaping so that they may settle this like beasts where settling it like adult women would be impossible. Cree knew the threads that bound her and the Champion were tight, tighter even than the ones that bound her and Lucien and fraught in ways the two of them had often been. The tumult of loving a person who became more concept than mortal was a horror she knew well. But Lucien had always been with her, even then. He had been at her side. He had still been hers to love and lose, even as he was also the Somnovem’s.
And then he hadn’t been and she’d taken herself to Zadash to sit stagnant in misery with a cloak he stole from an undead frost giant’s hoard and only hope to keep her going. She had been Keyleth once. This was the softest epilogue she could have had if Lucien had stayed gone.
But he hadn’t. And it was difficult to call any epilogue soft when it came at such a cost. Cree saw the ideal of loss, left with support networks and distractions and everything to build a life with one empty space in it, comparing it to herself nine years ago. She knew a worse ache, but loneliness was loneliness and the higher on the pedestal you are, the lonelier you tended to be, so did she really have justification to chastise her? Especially here when her people were so newly slaughtered by brutes who wanted to make sure no one could come back from the damage dealt and those brutes might well have been powered by something that she caused by demanding her better ending? This was so empathetically personal and she was only making it worse.
So she pushed aside her disapproval and bowed her head. “My apologies, Tempest. I let my frustration with him color my words sometimes.”
“It’s fine. I stay frustrated. I stay angry.” But not at him. No, never the one who deserved her ire, who kept the hearth burning by claiming himself not a man, but falling to a man’s impulses. Cree let that thought, too, go unspoken, watching as Keyleth crossed her arms over her chest and walked away from the balcony and its empty raven’s perch that mocked her. Cree stared at her back as she retreated further into her sitting room, wondering if she should be honest about why this was happening. How much more harm could she cause this woman just by her connection to something so deeply entwined with her? She knew about the debt she owed Fate, but it was different to know that and to know that the consequences had befallen her as some sort of collateral.
She chose cowardice. It wouldn’t help to tell the faithless that something so divinely keyed into fate and the Matron wielded by a mortal’s careless, selfish hands might have led to this tragedy, anyway. There was no true way of knowing how much her actions actually caused or how much was merely course-corrected. Fate was not about an absence of choices. Nothing was preordained, but moments of significance had a way of happening, regardless. If there was no world where Lucien was not touched by the Somnovem, then perhaps there was no world where the Ashari didn’t suffer this loss either.
It didn’t assuage her guilt, but it gave her a decent excuse not to bring it up.
Stick with what could actually be handled by mortal hands and leave everything else to the gods and the ones who served them while she was here in this place. That was better. That was safer. That would actually do something to make the Tempest feel less lost. “I have a friend who is well-versed in poisons and a theory of where it might have come from. I do not know if she will be able to save those who have been infected in time, but perhaps she could slow it down until she has time to come up with an antidote.”
“That would be ideal.” Keyleth adjusted her cloak and sat down on her couch, inviting Cree to come join her. She came, though at a slow, measured, uncomfortable pace, knowing what was coming. It was never fair of her to ask these things of her, but it was also not fair that she knew. Could she have been any better if it were Lucien acting as demigod and patron to some stranger, whispering in her ear while being far beyond her ken?
“What else did he say?”
She sighed. Ah yes, here we go again. “He was… unhelpful. As I have told you before, Tempest, he is bound by the rules of the Gate, regardless of how well he walks outside of it.”
“Not all of the rules.” Keyleth glanced towards the empty perch. “If he can defy her so often, then why would he stay with her? It doesn’t make sense.”
In her eye, Vax’ildan was a caged bird. It did not occur to her that the Champion had walked willingly into his Matron’s arms. He could have told her as much a thousand times and all she saw was the proof that he was not committed, rather than someone too new to his station to fully separate himself from the things that bound him to the world. He had told her countless times that for every person who remembered Vax’ildan it was that much harder for him to be the Champion fully. Their love made him real, rather than a concept. It was a vicious cycle that would not break until all of them had been passed into the realms of the dead. It was not a fault of his commitment, but a fault of how the world worked. So long as you are remembered, you cannot stop being a person. That was how the Somnovem were defeated, after all.
“Devotion is not the same as love, Keyleth,” Cree said, carefully, using the Tempest’s name in the same way she used the Champion’s- to remind them that if they were going to behave as mortals and not demigods or larger than life heroes of the realm then she would refer to them as such. “You are speaking to someone who has often conflated the two. And you, of all people, should understand that duty supersedes all else. Had he survived past the end of his story, what would it have looked like? Could you have kept him here, with your wariness of the gods?”
“His devotion to her was never a threat to me,” Keyleth’s fingers gripped her skirt and Cree watched them briefly turn into talons before she calmed herself. “I was fine that he served her.”
No, she was fine with it because it did not leave her lonely and bereft. She could share space in his heart. This she also knew- Lucien, in his youth and foolisness, before either of them realized that romantic love of the sort men write poetry about was of no interest to him and maybe beyond him, had tried to love her the way she wanted him to, because he thought he was supposed to. And then he devoted himself to the Somnovem whose love was something greater, something he understood. Lucien loved with obsession, with reckless abandon, carelessly and with a deep sort of affection and the Somnovem validated him. It was an intimacy to wide for words and one had to be fully committed to it to understand it. Keyleth would never understand the love of an acolyte was different from that of a husband because she believed that there had been a choice. Vax’ildan did not choose the Raven Queen, he chose duty, just as she had. They would always be going to in different directions, peeling away their mortality in long strips to become something on a pedestal, to be looked towards, to bring hope, to bring peace in life and at the edge of death. The sun and the moon did not share the sky at the same time for a reason.
All of this Cree could say and it would only make Keyleth angry and maybe that was a risk she was willing to take, but Keyleth didn’t want it. She was the one who changed the subject to focus on something beyond the truth of why the Matron was never her enemy and was not keeping him in her thrall. It was only a ghost that couldn’t stop haunting her. “Was it the poison that made him come to protect me? That wasn’t the first time I’ve been attacked. He wasn’t there before.”
“He… did not say. I can only imagine it was. It felt as if it terrified him.” She could sense it in him from the way he appeared to her as a man instead of a bird to the way he had held himself above the precipice like he was chasing death to get back to her side faster. Something was terribly wrong in the world.
Keyleth’s regal impatience warred with her desire to not shoot the messenger, but Cree watched it flash in her green eyes for the tiniest of moments before she said, tightly, her white teeth showing just slightly beneath too-pursed lips. “So he didn’t give a reason why?”
For all her preferred deference, Cree still had developed, as Beauregard would bluntly put it, a spine. She could be polite and bow her head to people who deserved it, but she no longer tolerated being bullied. Were Keyleth not so much like her, she might have walked out, owing her nothing. The Mighty Nein had brought her her mother back- every thing they had done since had been a kindness. The Savalirwood’s Ashari presence was a boon to repay them for their mercy towards Vilya. Cree no longer lived in terms of balancing scales, but if she did, then there was nothing that should keep her here.
It was just more complicated than that. Cree saw her worst fate in Keyleth and Keyleth saw in Cree, even if she didn’t know how deep the devilish details went, someone who had gotten everything. The difference in them would always be status, that great bitch of a thing. Neither of them could be the other, truly, based on the circumstances of how they were born. Most of their disagreements came down to that gulf. Cree did not feel like reminding her that no one, not even the gods, was in the habit of feeling like she was owed a straight answer like someone with true power might.
“He did not.”
It was bigger than simply the Champion. Her people had died and she didn’t know whether to expect another attack, nor did she know what they had wanted. Cree wondered if she could consult the Skein and trace the threads back to their source, but she knew that if she did every thread would just come back to her. Trying to find where it all was truly stemming from would just lead her down paths to show her how much this was her fault and how much worse she could make it if she kept meddling instead of handling the consequences as she had promised the Matron she would.
She and Keyleth parted with bitter goodbyes and a promise to send her word when Tyffial had examined the blood and learned more about the poison. A trip back to Aeor could be in the Tombtakers’ future. A chill went down Cree’s spine, recalling the vision she had seen once of all of her friends splayed out and broken on the icy stones. I broke that thread. It will not happen.
Or did you just delay it?
Could she change anything, truly? Or was she just dragging out the inevitable, bringing new threads to life as they reached out from the ones she broke, like a hydra as it snapped and bit and tried to bring things back to the way they were meant to be. What worse things had she invited into the world by letting her friends live? Had she just added extra steps to their deaths?
How could she blame Keyleth for wanting to hold onto the traces of a dead man who kept coming to her when he knew better when she had destroyed Fate’s plan for her and her own? She was Keyleth’s antithesis. No better, no worse.
She found Caduceus on the edge of the village, pinched and exhausted, his spider-silk sleeves dipped in blood from where he had leaned over corpses to hasten the process of decomposition. The Air Ashari did not bury their dead. They believed in sky burials like the Menagerie, but no one had the stomach for it with so many to prepare. Caduceus did the bulk of the work making them ready for the beasts of the sky to take their fill and it was clearly weighing on him the way other people’s grief seldom did.
She could see her letter crumpled up in his left hand, while his right held his staff. His eyes were closed in deep contemplation, but he greeted her when she arrived as if he could smell the snowdrops and blood on her from using her cloak to run as far from Keyleth’s home as she could, lest she make more demands of her she could not fulfill.
“You knew it was going to happen.”
“I do not know what you’re talking about,” she deadpanned. Leave it to him to figure out what she wasn’t saying. It was not a difficult equation to parse out- if Lucien hadn’t survived then no one would have released those Aeoran wizards, because Ikithon wouldn’t have had to have been called as an emergency Nonagon. Every action taken had a ripple effect.
Yes, it was obvious that the Skein was making her pay for her selfishness, but in saving Tyffial, she could still fix it. She would not be shamed for saving her friends. Just because others had failed to break Fate and secure the ending she had taken for herself did not mean she was wrong to have won. It just meant that she would have to pay the piper.
“It’s starting again,” he said, refusing to acknowledge her affected ignorance. “There’s something wrong here. You can feel it, can’t you?”
The holy were always the canaries in the coal mines to greater disasters. The Gate kept the gods away, but their fear could ripple out and affect their followers. This was the same fear that had dragged the Nein into a fight for the very existence of Exandria.
A fight they had never truly finished. The mastermind was still there, dreaming in the Abyss, and its servants only gave a reprieve of seven years. The gods were shaking and between Tharizdun and the very people who led a city that had to be struck from the sky for daring to threaten them walking among mortals again, they had much to fear. Their Divine Gate had become a cage in which to make them easy prey.
This was the start of something, a slow crawl to a disaster, and only the Mighty Nein understood how tangled the Skein truly was, because they were the ones in the middle of it. All eyes were on them. This time Cree was receptive to precisely what that meant, rather than fighting it with tooth and claw.
“I can,” Cree murmured. With great trepidation, she lifted her head towards the sky, watching the birds circling over where the corpses of the fallen Ashari had been laid to rest on the high clifftops. “We must alert the others and warn them to be on guard. I believe the world is asking for the Mighty Nein again.”