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In the halls of the Rexentrum Civil Sanatorium, the sun never quite rises. The small braziers that dot the smooth stone brick walls are barely bright enough to read or write by, even when they are lit. At the far eastern end of one hall, a single oilcloth window leaks soiled sunlight for a few hours each morning. Beyond that, the world here cycles between dusk and dark, as though trying to keep its inhabitants in perpetual sleep, afraid to wake them.
On the western end of the hall, Bren Aldric Ermendrud, eighteen and long given up on sleep, lies awake and counts the hours. It is well past midnight, and even now the hall is not silent. The clerics may hope in vain that the dark will keep their patients sedate, but from what Bren can tell, all it seems to have done is erase their sense of time. There is always someone awake here, muttering or moaning or screaming to be let out.
Bren’s sense of time is not so easily muddled. Even in the unchanging darkness, long after the braziers have been doused, he feels time tick by at the same agonizingly steady rate as ever. It is an instinct, an inborn talent, as bitter now as all the rest; when he cannot sleep, he counts out the passing minutes like a man keeping vigil at his own grave, a directionless protest he knows he does not deserve, and cannot give up.
“One year,” Bren whispers to himself, curled up on the thin mattress of his cot, fingers picking at the edges of the bandages that wrap around his forearms, ending just before his wrists. “One year.”
At least, he thinks that’s how long it has been. For all Bren can count each hour to the minute, he’s unsure if tonight marks the exact anniversary of the night- the night he broke. Time afterward is a haze of screams and smoke in his memories. By the time he came back to himself, it could have been days or months later. He thinks, based on what he was able to pry from the tight-lipped clerics, it was probably about two weeks. Therefore: one year.
One year of dry stone brick. One year of clerics who never seem to do any actual healing, who speak to him so little they might be paid not to. One year of tasteless meals and no books and no sun. Bren’s mind traps every moment, but with no changes from day to day it’s begun to feel like his brain has bloated with nothingness, like he’s swallowing air. His new memories aren’t a play in his mind so much as an endless empty stage, and without anything new, there is nothing left but to live in endless repetition of the old.
He is fifteen, and there is a letter with his name on it sealed in the finest envelope Bren has ever seen, and he is holding it in his hand. A heavy clatter of reckless footsteps come up the path, and Bren looks up just in time for Astrid and Eodwulf both to nearly tackle him to the ground.
“You got one too?! I knew it. I knew it, I knew it!” Astrid is rambling against his chest. His arms go around her on instinct and his heart soars when she hugs him back, Eodwulf grinning like a fool in the dust beside them. She pulls away a few seconds later, and Bren hardly has space to be disappointed in letting her go when she’s glowing like that, dirt smudged on one cheek, her own letter clutched so tightly in her hand it’s nearly crumpled.
“We did it, Bren. We’re going to the Academy!”
In the dim glow of a single dancing light - cast from a pickpocketed matchstick, the most magic he ever dares cast these days, and even then only when as much of the hall is asleep as possible - Bren lets his gaze fall on the coat draped over his chair. The Academy uniform jacket he arrived here in, the single possession he’d been allowed to keep. He isn’t sure why they let him keep it, actually, or whether he’s glad for it. It’s a reminder of how close he’d come and how greatly he’d failed. He reaches out and pulls the fine, sturdy black fabric into his lap. He runs his fingers over the delicate silver and gold embroidery and swallows around a surge of nausea that’s the closest thing to a feeling he’s had in days.
He is sixteen and his arms are burning. There is blood dripping onto the floor as he carefully redoes Astrid’s bandages. Something about the way Ikithon pumps magic into the sharp shards of crystal he slices into them makes the cuts resistant to healing magic. They will close with time, but they seem to bleed inordinately long, weeping through the layers of linen and leaving thin, silvery scars in their wake.
Bren raises the hand in his, presses a kiss to the small palm. “You did well today,” he tells her, because it is true but mostly because it is what she needs to hear. It is what makes all this pain worth it - the idea that it is making them better, more powerful, a stronger weapon for the Empire to wield against their enemies.
She nods, her eyes dry and emptier than they’d once been. “You as well,” she tells him. “You are going to be brilliant, Bren. We all are. We are going to tear down the world.” She’s right and Bren cannot wait. No matter how much it hurts, he cannot wait.
Bren’s fingers are steady as he reaches inside the jacket, slipping into the small, secret slice in the silk lining, pulling out what is inside and holding it up to his single dim light. It’s a terrible relief to hold the tiny, razor-sharp shard of crystal in his hand, a reminder that his memories are real and also of all the ways he failed. It’s beautiful. He runs his thumb along one sharp edge, testing the bite of it, remembering the aching sting of the way it had dug into his forearm. The traitorous pride he’d felt as he’d slipped the single piece up his sleeve at the end of their class, sneaking it away to examine more closely alone is his room. Perhaps he’d already been a traitor then, even before he’d broken beyond repair.
He is seventeen and they’ve been brought to watch the death of a traitor. Bren doesn’t know exactly what the pale, sickly-looking half-orcish man has done. He only knows the man surely deserves it when Master Ikithon reaches out strikes him down with a single spell. He’s just as sure the following month, when the three of them are tasked with sniffing out their own dissenters, and doing the killing themselves.
“Remember, what you are doing is righteous,” Ikithon tells them sternly, three lifeless bodies still cooling on the floor of the execution chamber. Bren knows they deserved to die, but it is something else to strike the blow, and he fights to keep his stomach from turning. “You may be unsettled by this deed, but do not be swayed by this. It is weakness. Do not feel pity for these people.
“According to the laws of the Empire, these rats forfeited their own lives the moment they spat on the love and protection of their rightful King. They died long before you ever laid eyes on them. And there is no law of man nor god against killing a man who is already dead.”
One year. One year an orphan of his own making, a victim of his own weakness. A traitor, he knows, in all but name. One year out of whatever lifetime he manages to survive in here - after a year of no visitors, he’s done with illusions that he might get better one day, that he might heal enough to be freed. That Ikithon didn’t imprison him or simply kill him for his weakness is a mercy Bren does not deserve, cannot survive.
He considers the crystal, sharp and beautiful in his palm.
There is no law, Bren knows, against killing a man who is already dead.
Far above - or perhaps just far beyond - Rexentrum, on the Astral Plane, the Champion of the Raven Queen sits in deep meditation. It’s a new practice for him, relatively speaking, having only really picked it up in the last handful of Exandrian years. He’d never quite gotten the feel for it as a mortal: too twitchy, too curious, too aware. Now, it’s become almost easy to close his eyes and slip from the astral seas into the black abyss of fate.
From here, the world is dark and glittering. From here, he can see the Web, its golden strands stretching out infinitely into rich, inky darkness, tangling with each other to create bright knots of light like so many stars. With each sentient birth and death, individual threads blink in and out of existence, and the web is constantly shifting, rearranging itself to accommodate each addition and loss, and to account for important decisions made along the way. It pulses like a living, breathing thing, each thread a single life, spun together across space and time, all hopelessly tangled about each other; a net that holds up the world.
It had unsettled the Champion, at first, bearing witness to the sheer volume of lives shivering in and out of existence on the Material Plane, but now meditating amidst the web brings him a sense of peace. There’s a rightness to it, a steadiness to the ever-shifting knots of golden thread, winding out and out and out and never fully unraveling. Rarely, a single thread will seem to shift a large swath of the net, like a comet bearing the future on its tail, like the whole sky had to be rearranged for it.
“Naga hagoral,” his Queen had told him when he’d inquired. Lives that could change the very structure of the web of fate without even knowing it. Not more important than other lives, necessarily, but more impactful, lynch-pins amidst the entropic currents of destiny. He is familiar with this particular burden. “Yes, your thread looked like that, once. Keep a careful eye on them, my Champion. Watch over them - they carry the future with them.”
The Champion is not a shepherd for departed souls. There wouldn’t be time, and for most such a guide is hardly necessary; people tend to know when they are dying. Generally he serves as a kind of emissary for his Queen, communicating with her champions on Exandria. Occasionally he intercedes when some necromancer or another threatens to pull the threads of the future apart through sheer force of will. Mostly, he watches the seas or meditates. Mostly, he waits.
Tonight, something catches at the corner of his eye. A thread is flickering. Not blinking out entirely, but pulsing in and out of darkness. In and out of existence. A soul that cannot figure out whether or not it has died, or perhaps whether or not it wants to. More than that, it is the web around the thread that catches the Champion’s attention: as the thread flickers, vast swaths of the net fly to rearrange themselves, the whole map of fate thrown into chaos as this single life threatens to shudder out entirely. Curious and vaguely alarmed, the Champion reaches out a hand and touches the thread. He sees-
A boy, no older than eighteen, alone in a dark cell. A memory of fire and smoke. A flash of magic. An endless well of confusion; fury; shame. A pair of glassy eyes staring fearfully into nothing, into the blood pooling onto the embroidered coat on his lap as it drips from-
Maybe it’s the bleeding heart not even death could take from him that does it. Maybe it’s because he hasn’t been the Champion for more than a handful of years, the yearnings and trappings of mortal life still clinging to him like silken threads. Maybe it’s just a memory. Whatever it is that shocks through him at the sight, The Champion doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t pause to ask his Queen if she requires his intervention this time. He doesn’t waste a single second. He goes.
Bren’s world is getting quieter. His heart is tripping over its own rhythm, galloping in his chest, but there’s not enough- what? Not enough magic? Not enough blood? Not enough Bren. There’s never been enough of him; he’s been hungry for as long as he can remember but it never mattered before. Ikithon had looked at the fire burning in his empty belly and smiled, praised the hunger as it had carved Bren hollow, and for a while that had been enough. The praise, the power. It had been enough, but Bren hadn’t been, and now he is broken and emptier than ever.
And now he is dying. It hurts. Bren knows this pain, but it wasn’t supposed to feel like this. Something in his gut, something mewling and young and older than all that hunger at once claws at his insides, begs him to survive even as the world spots out black. Bren closes his eyes. Above his head, the single dancing light gutters out.
...“Hey. Hey, none of that.”
Cool hands wrap firmly around Bren’s wrists, and his eyes fly open as an alien warmth surges through his body like a slow motion shock wave.
There is a man crouched over him on the bed. If Bren had any strength left in him he would be scrambling back, but he can’t make any of his limbs move. He’s too heavy and too disconnected from his body all at once, and all he can do is stare at the strange man who looms over him. His face is fine featured and serious as he stares down at Bren, his long dark hair and black armour making him seem to have materialized out of the shadows.
“Who are you?” Bren demands weakly, still struggling to back away up the bed. His muscles have finally unfrozen, though weakly, and he’s suddenly sweating as he manages to move a few inches. The man lets him, but doesn’t let go of him. “Identify yourself.”
The cell the boy is in is even bleaker in person, Vax thinks as he takes it in. It’s dry and warm at least, clean even, but beyond that it appears no effort has been made at joy or even comfort, in particular. There is a single chair and table, the table scattered with a few papers, a chipped inkwell, and a lone nub of a quill. The windowless walls are bare. In the corner is a thin, sparse bed. That is where the Champion is currently crouched, trying to hold the cell’s occupant in place long enough to heal him.
The thing is, the cuts, pulsing warm blood sluggishly beneath the Champion’s palms, don’t seem to want to heal. It’s like they’re resisting the magic, like they want to stay open. He’s already pocketed the little shard of crystal the boy had apparently made them with - something about it is deeply unsettling, not necromantic but magical in a way that seems wrong nonetheless, twisted.
The boy looks about one good flick to the forehead away from passing out again, even as he begins to struggle in the Champion’s grasp, babbling in a language it takes a moment to recognize as Zemnian, a regional tongue from somewhere in central Wildemount. He can understand the boy, a twist of magic that is part of his position, and could make himself understood even if it turns out the boy doesn't speak Common, but he couldn’t speak the language for himself.
“Come on, calf, none of that now,” he murmurs instead of answering. The endearment falls from his mouth before he realizes he’s thought of it, but that’s what this boy reminds him of right now: a calf escaped from the slaughterhouse of his own mind, still trapped in the pen, bloodied and half-wild with useless desperation. The Champion just follows him as he moves, hands still wrapped around his weeping wrists, still willing the flesh to close. The boy doesn’t get far.
“You’re alright,” he continues, trying to keep his voice soft and reassuring. “I’m sorry the healing isn’t better - picked it up a bit late - but you’re alright now. What’s your name, calf?” He’s actually restored the boy as much as he possibly could right now, but there is no such thing as a quick recovery from death, and it doesn’t seem likely he was strong to begin with.
“Who are you?” the boy demands again, still in his native tongue. “What are you?”
Bren watches as the man’s head cocks to one side. It’s eerie - he’s only just realized that there is still no light in the room. By all rights, he shouldn’t be able to see a thing, but somehow the man is visible anyway, his face and hands almost glowing from his dark clothing and the inky mass of air that shifts like a living thing behind his back.
“I am the Emissary of the Raven Queen, Goddess of Death and Destiny, Guard of Fate,” he says. His accent is soft and wide, lilting, foreign to Bren’s ear. His tone is curiously gentle, almost pleading when he adds, “And what is your name?"
“Bren.” The name falls from his mouth like a dried flower crumbling into dust. He’s not even sure if it’s real. Maybe he doesn’t get to have a name anymore.
He focuses on the figure again instead of thinking about it, placing the rustling black air behind him as a mass of shifting feathered wings. Bren knows of the Raven Queen, in the abstract. She’s one of the few approved religious figureheads in the Empire, and her domain is indeed- Oh. Oh.
“Are you the reaper?”
Had it worked? But then, why is Bren still here? His stomach rolls nervously. Is this the hell he was doomed to after all, eternity in the endless darkness of the Sanatorium either way?
“Well. A bit, yes,” the man says, and releases Bren’s wrists, settling back on his heels at the foot of the bed. “But not tonight.”
Bren holds his wrists up. The pale glow from the man - the Emissary - isn’t enough to see by from here. He hears a quiet ah, and then soft light fills Bren’s cell, shining from a short, rather wicked looking dagger now held aloft in the Emissary’s hand.
He looks again. He isn’t bleeding anymore, that’s the first thing he realizes. Beneath the smears of drying blood are two fresh pink scars. When they heal they’ll hardly look any different from the rest that line his arms, and it hits Bren that he’s failed in this, too. He is alive. He isn’t sure whether to be relieved or ashamed, or perhaps both.
“Why?” With the nausea of adrenaline fading, the old familiar numbness comes creeping back in like the fog. “Why not?”
“It was not your time,” the Emissary says, something like a bittersweet smile tugging at the corner of his pale mouth. “The world still needs you, calf.”
It’s the third time he’s called Bren that. “What does that mean, calf?”
The Emissary looks confused. “I- a young cow? You have them in Wildemount, don’t you?”
Bren shakes his head, frustrated. “I mean why are you calling me that? I told you my name.”
The Emissary pauses, seemingly needing time to consider, like he hadn’t realized until just now it was strange. “I suppose I- my family, I had nicknames for all of them. It’s just an old habit.”
“You asked for my name,” Bren reminds him, not even sure what he’s trying to get at. Calf. The word conjures all kinds of strange images in Bren’s mind. The word pairing that jumps most readily to mind is sacrificial.
The Emissary twists his hands, a gesture that strikes Bren as strangely uncertain, coming from someone who works for a god. “You didn’t seem to like it very much.”
Oh. That is… a more keen observation than Bren can process, at the moment. “Calf,” he murmurs. Then, even more softly, “...kalb.” It’s softer in his mouth in Zemnian, almost comforting.
“Yeah, alright then," the Emissary agrees, with a small smile. "Kalb." It sounds frighteningly like a blessing.
Silence hangs between them. Bren’s head is swimming. His wrists still ache despite the healing, and his stomach is one oily knot in his gut, refusing to unclench or lay still. Across from him, the dagger still casts ethereal light in the cell, and an Emissary of the goddess of death, who just saved his life, has given him a gottverdammt nickname.
“Do- ah, do you have a name then, Emissary?” He asks.
The Champion blinks. He hasn’t forgotten, it hasn’t really been that long, but it still takes a moment to drag the name out of his chest and into the open air. “Vax’ildan.” The name comes out rough, like the scrape of an opening mausoleum. “Ah- Vax. My name is Vax.”
The boy wrinkles his nose curiously. He looks so, so young. “Vax,” he says experimentally, and the Champion’s heart twists in his chest at the way his accent makes it sound so much like something else. “That is a strange name.”
“It’s elvish,” the Champion - Vax, he’s still Vax, somewhere underneath all these dark feathers. He always will be - tells him, “and Tal’Doriean. That’s where I’m from.”
“You are... from somewhere?”
Vax runs a hand through his hair, fingers skimming over the collection of baubles scattered amongst small braids: a gold bead, nicked from a purple silk shirt; bits of sea glass; an uneven lump of silver; a single blue feather.
“I was. I was alive, once. Not terribly long ago. I had a family, friends. You remind me very much of some of them, kalb.” He sighs. “I know you must be in terrible pain, and I am sorry.”
There is sadness in the Emissary’s eyes. Sadness, and something far too much like pity. Like he understands. Like Bren needs or wants understanding. Like a man who apparently walked into death and was rewarded for it could possibly understand anything if he thought nothing of taking this one reprieve from Bren. This one choice.
“Then why did you stop me?” Bren demands, suddenly overcome with furious grief. “Why did she not just let it work?” He meets Vax’s eyes, his hands clenched white around the stiff fabric in his lap, still damp with his own blood.
“It is not your time,” Vax tells him with a weary smile. “You are-” he looks like he’s reaching around for words for a moment, “Naga hagoral, hm?” he intones carefully. The words hang strangely in the air, a rhyming-but-not lilt, almost musical. Celestial. Bren isn’t fluent, but he’s studied enough to be able to guess at the meaning before Vax says- “Fate-touched. Your future plays an important role in the future of the web of fate. It is not your hour to die yet. There are so many people who will need you.”
Bren scoffs. “I have been alone here for a year. No one has come for me. There is no one who needs me.”
“They will,” Vax insists gently.
“What if I don’t care?” Bren asks, heat creeping back into his voice. “Do you think you are the first person to tell me these things? That I am important? That I am special? That I am going to change the world?”
The boy’s eyes, red with unshed tears, flicker down to the bloody coat still crumpled in his lap. He seems to gather himself.
“Well, I don’t care,” he spits, voice trembling, “I am done being special. I tried. I was going to be important, once, but I failed. I do not care anymore what some god wants of me. I have had enough of that for a lifetime.”
Despite himself, Vax feels a spark of anger at the boy’s tone. He can sense only bits and pieces of this boy’s story, but it’s enough to know his dealings were always with mortal evil, never divine.
“Stop that,” he snaps, wings rustling ominously. “Do not dare compare the Matron to your petty, sniveling tyrant. He is no god, boy.”
“And look at where it’s gotten me!”
Vax stops. For the first time in years, he thinks of dragons. Of scales in black and white; red and green. He should know more than most how, in the wrong light, the difference between gods and monsters can seem circumstantial, philosophical at best. He also knows more than most the truth of it.
“Kalb,” Vax says carefully. “Do you think you are the only person who has ever failed? Who has ever broken?”
He reaches out, tugging the bloodied coat from Bren’s grip, fingers running consideringly over the fine embroidery before he sets it off to the side. He settles himself more comfortably on the bed, seated beside Bren rather than looming over him, setting the dagger down on his far side with the coat, near the foot of the bed. Bren doesn’t seem to want to look at him, so he faces forward, addressing the wall opposite them.
“Do you know I was a massive fuck-up, when I was a man?” In his periphery, he sees Bren’s head jerk up, his eyes surprised, confused. Vax laughs. “Oh, I was a mess, kalb. I thought I was built for sadness. I thought I knew everything. We all did, really. And a few times… a few times it cost us very dearly.”
There’s a bittersweet expression on Vax’s face, Bren can just make it out in the low light of the dagger. He turns his head to the side, facing Bren. Bren’s gaze skitters away under the contact, but he feels more stable than a moment ago. Less like the grief and anger is going to tear his skin apart. He flexes his hands. Breathes.
“I think,” Vax says to him, “you are going to be important in a different way than you imagined. I know this burden, kalb. I know it is difficult and- I don’t know where your thread leads. I cannot see the future. I only know it looks much more fraught without you in it.”
Bren’s arms curl around himself, finally bringing himself to look Vax in the face once more. He doesn’t want this. More than that, he doesn’t know what to do with it. Bren knows he isn’t a good person. He is a failure, practically a traitor. In what kind of future could he possibly be important to the fate of the world? In what future could he possibly do anything other than fuck it up all over again?
“I don’t know what you want from me,” he whispers.
To his surprise, Vax smiles. He leans in, a cool hand wrapping around the back of Bren’s skull, pressing their foreheads together in a way that Bren should hate, that should feel uncomfortably intimate, but just feels like relief. Maybe it’s divine magic. Maybe Bren is just that tired. Whatever it is, he lets out a small breath, accepting the strange comfort.
“You’ve been wronged, kalb,” Vax says, softly but firmly. His eyes are dark and intent. “I can’t explain it to you, but you have been greatly, deeply wronged. You will understand someday. When you do, you will know your path.”
“I don’t understand,” Bren pleads. “Why can you not just tell me? Is there anything of the future you can tell me at all?”
Vax’s eyes close, and he seems to consider. “There is someone coming for you,” he says at last. “The web of fate does not offer a great deal of...specifics, about the future. But. Someone is coming who will help you. A woman. But there will be days, between now and then, and perhaps after, when you will...find yourself having to choose again, like tonight.”
When he will want to die, again, Bren realizes. His stomach turns in a mix of dread and preemptive grief.
“When those nights come,” Vax continues, “I want you to remember, the future needs you. The world is more right with you in it. Do not give up, alright? Promise me.” He sounds like he has made this plea before, like he’s hiding a pool of blood under his tongue, his words earnest and stinging. “Promise me you will not give up. There is purpose for you in this world, kalb. You only have to survive long enough to meet it.”
Survive. It sounds like so much to ask, right now. Bren looks down at the fresh pink lines on his wrists, the cuts that shouldn’t have healed with magic, but did. He looks back up at Vax, a construction of faith and joy and sadness the likes of which Bren has never seen in his life. For some unfathomable reason, he trusts him.
“I promise,” he whispers.
Vax watches Bren carefully. He hasn’t lied to him. He wishes he could see the future. More than that, he wishes he was allowed to do more for this boy. He wishes his family were here, like old times, picking the lock and pulling one more broken thing out of the dirt, bullying him into becoming family. But Vax isn’t a part of this world anymore, not really, and his sister isn’t here. He can keep this boy from dying tonight, but then all he can do is leave him here. Leave him to find his own way.
"Is there anything of the future you can tell me at all?" the boy asks.
A broken boy can be a terrible thing to loose upon the world. Vax knows this - has lived it, has raised the dead for it in more ways than one. And there is destruction in this boy. There is selfishness, oh yes, and the capacity for cruelty. But before Vax ever earned his wings, he learned faith at the feet of the Lady of second chances. Her lessons, like the memories of his family, still cling to him. This boy could be a terror, yes. Could be a monster. But he does not have to be.
It is hard to judge exactly what role he will play in fate’s future. The web doesn’t judge moral character, only impact, and it’s impossible to say just what Bren’s will be. Vax knows better than to try but- he recognizes too much in this boy. He spares what he can.
“I promise,” the boy says, and Vax believes him.
Vax lets him go with an unfurling grin. “Good man,” he says. As he backs away, his eyes catch on the bloodied coat, still sitting like an omen at the foot of the bed. “I have to go back soon but um...I could clean that up? If you like.”
It’s a tiny gesture, but Bren seems thrown by it all the same. After a moment, though, he shakes his head.
“Could you just take it, instead?” he asks, seeming surprised by his own question.
Vax looks at him for a long, steady beat. Then he smiles again, and it feels a little like pride. “Yeah,” he assures Bren quickly. He feels like he’s choking up, gods, immortality hasn’t taken the sap from him yet, apparently. “Yeah, I can do that.”
He stands, folding the coat and tucking it against his side along with the dagger, where both nearly disappear into the shadows of his body and wings. He reaches out and clasps the boy by the shoulder one last time.
“You won’t be alone forever, kalb,” he says. “For now, know that I am with you, alright?”
“Alright- Vax’ildan,” Bren says, and Vax can almost see the proud boy he must have once been. The capable man he’s going to become.
With a final smile, the Champion goes home.
Vax - the Emissary - disappears in a swirl of shadows. Bren is suddenly too exhausted to keep his eyes open a moment longer. When he wakes the next morning, weak sunlight hardly making it down the long stone hallway, the previous night feels mostly like a very strange dream, the way a lot of his life feels these days.
Except. Except his coat is gone, and - after a frantic search to confirm his suspicions - so is the little shard of crystal. On the foot of the bed, innocent as anything, is a single black feather.
The Champion doesn't shepherd lost souls, and he doesn’t watch over the living. But he checks in, once in a while. Sometimes on people dabbling in magic they shouldn’t, in case he needs to intervene on his Queen’s behalf. Sometimes on his family, on days he can stand the heartache.
“You look in on him often,” his Queen says one day, in the sonorous voice that speaks from everywhere in the dusk of the astral plane. “The young Zemnian man.”
The Champion looks around and finds her face, paler than the moon above him, leaning toward him with what he’s come to read as a curious tilt to her porcelain mask.
“He is Fate-Touched,” he says after a moment. “and he has gone astray before.”
“Many are Fate-Touched, my champion,” she says, a gentle prod. They have this conversation more than once, across the years. “And he has not strayed in years, despite his hardships.”
How to explain? It’s difficult to watch, that decade of blank, writhing emptiness, watching him struggle. Watching him fade, a little more with each passing year, until he is little more than a hollow shell, continuing to exist by force of habit, by sheer muscle memory.
“He reminds me of...of a boy I once knew,” the Champion says haltingly.
He sees when the woman comes. He sees when the shroud is lifted from Bren’s eyes, watches with a heart that recognizes the spark of planned vengeance with fierce pride.
“He reminds me of my brother.”
He watches his kalb, nameless now but for a series of costume titles he adopts like cheap masks, pull himself back into the world. He watches him struggle, and stumble, and steal, and land himself in seedy small town jails he can’t afford to buy himself out of.
“It is alright, Vax’ildan,” the Raven Queen says, and the Champion shivers; he doesn’t remember the last time she called him by his name. “I didn’t call you to me just to have you forget what it is to be mortal. Your love of them is your strength. It is what keeps your purpose true, it always has been.”
Her mask tilts toward him a little more, a gesture that is the closest thing he’s ever experienced to a smile from his goddess.
“Keep watching him. It will do you good I think, to see him succeed.”
The Champion knows this mortal man he watches has a future, a destiny, waiting for him. Each time his kalb stumbles across someone new, the Champion wonders if perhaps this is the one, if he’s finally on the right path. It takes five long years, but the Champion watches the web of fate grow surer and surer, and he watches the kalb, and he doesn’t lose faith.
“Hey fleabag, you a wizard or something?” the reedy-voiced goblin girl who has been sharing his cell for the last few days asks suddenly. He raises an eyebrow, glancing up at the dancing lights that have been floating lazily around his head. He lets his head lean back against the wall of the cell.
“Ja, I was,” he says tiredly, voice coming out scratchy from disuse. It hardly feels like he can call himself that, these days. Five years of trying to build up his skills again, of trying to track down enough secrets of the arcane to finally fix this, this mess that is his life, and what has it gotten him? The fanciest thing he can do is Disguise Self, and that is practically child’s play.
But the goblin girl gave him a pastry last night, half-rotted though it was, and she looks in need of entertainment. He waves his hands over his body, casting the image of a handsome elf over himself.
The goblin’s eyes go wide. She hops off the cot, creeping closer curiously. “Impressive,” she says. “You must be very clever.”
She reaches out a small clawed hand, probably just to test the illusion, but he flinches away before he can stop himself. She draws back instantly, something knowing flickering in her wide yellow eyes, a softness that doesn’t fit quite right on her sharp, hungry features.
“I was that too, once. These days I am mostly a con man and a thief,” he says, waving the spell away. “And not a very good one at that, as you can guess. That spell I just cast is not so impressive. Children learn it.”
“Hm.” the goblin makes a considering sound. Then she turns around, digging through her small pouch. “Would you like another pastry? I think I have a few left.”
He accepts the squashed, half-molded tart, too hungry to be choosy. Days-old fruit and cheese coat his tongue thickly. Still, it is a gesture of kindness from an unexpected quarter, and it eases him a bit.
“Could you teach me that spell?” she asks abruptly. “I don’t know much about magic, I mostly only know about chemicals, and really not even much of that, but I’ve been learning a bit and-” she stumbles over her words, babbling and backtracking into her own sentences. When she loses her way, she digs out another pastry and stuffs half into her mouth whole, silencing herself. He blinks slowly at her. It is an odd request, but what else does he have to do in this place?
“Ja, I could, I suppose.”
She nods, and holds out the remaining half a pastry. He accepts it instinctively. He watches her watch him chew, staring at him contemplatively, like she’s looking for something in the gaunt, dirt-streaked frame of his face.
Maybe she finds it, because she suddenly grins, crumbs spilling from her pointed teeth. “What do you say we get out of here?”
He frowns. “We are in a locked cell, fräulein.” She rolls her eyes, then pops off a shoe, turning it over and shaking it until a small set of metal picks tumbles into her waiting palm. At his surprised sound, she winks one large eye.
“You aren’t the only one with secret talents,” she says smugly. With a snap of her fingers a translucent hand shimmers into existence, picking up the tools and deftly slipping them through the narrow bars of the cell. A little magic, indeed. She narrows her eyes in concentration.
“Almost...almost...there!”
With a click, the lock opens. She pushes a hand against the door and unbelievably, it swings open, toward freedom. She glances back over her shoulder as she goes to leave.
“You coming, wizard man?”
He can’t get to his feet fast enough. Together, they run.
“You know,” Vax watches the man say to the goblin woman when they are half a town away, crouched in an alley and recovered from fits of the wheezing, incredulous laughter of unexpected freedom. “You could use those tarts of yours for magic, when they become too old to eat.”
“Really?”
“Really,” the man assures her. He’s grinning from ear to ear, breathless and giddy from their wild escape, waving away the guard disguise he used to escort her from the cells. “It is not one I have used, but I know of it. You can incapacitate your enemies with laughter! All you need is some tarts, a feather, and-” he leans down close to her, lowering his voice to a near whisper, “you need to tell a very bad joke.”
“Oh, I can do that,” the goblin says, laughing and grinning in kind. She sticks out a hand, wrapped in bandages not unlike the man’s own. “I’m Nott, by the way. Nott the Brave, no comma. What’s yours?”
The man accepts her handshake. There is a beat of silence, then: “Caleb. Caleb Widogast.” He looks like he’s pulled the name from nowhere, but the Champion grins to hear it.
Caleb. It sounds an awful lot like another name, a name the Champion had called him, one dark night nearly fifteen years ago. And it is something else, too. A name, in Celestial, more obscure than Bren-Kalb-Caleb probably knows. Calev. Loyal, like a hound. Faithful one. Whole-hearted.
It might mean nothing, but the Champion doesn't think so. This is the right path, at long last. Caleb has done it. He’s found his destiny, at least the beginnings of it. He’s a much different man than he was when the Champion first saw it in him, but at last his future is before him; he’s survived long enough to meet it.
The Champion closes his eyes, and smiles.
When Caleb Widogast lays down to sleep, he always fears what he might find in his dreams. But tonight there is no fire, no blood, no stone walls or sharp crystals or cold eyes. Tonight, there is only the comforting darkness of huge black wings.
In his dream, for once, Caleb breathes deeply, comfortably. He is lying on his back on soft, dry grass. Somewhere in the distance is the gentle sound of the sea. Above him, the wings melt into the shape of a wide black sky. The stars come out, gold rather than white, brighter and brighter against the inky black. A shooting star leaves a trail in its wake. Then another, then another. Soon the sky is a massive net of shining gold dots and lines, shifting and winking with warm light. In his dream, for once, Caleb smiles. In the darkness, the web of fate shines bright and sure all around him.