Chapter Text
“And how do you know these upstanding citizens?” Percy inquired of Vex, continuing to hunt for some advantage against the ropes that had both their hands and feet securely bound and staked to the earth.
“Just the one, supposedly,” Vex grunted with her own efforts to free herself. “I…there was a time when I was kidnapped. I managed to escape and I killed the two poachers that had taken me.” A conflicted expression darkened her face. “They were evil folk, going to sell me into slavery or worse,” she expanded, as if she felt the need to justify herself. “I didn’t see him at the time, but apparently the tall one with the scar was another member of their party. I can’t believe he even recognizes me! It was so long ago. But it seems like he’s since upgraded the company he keeps.”
“Right, lovely,” Percy commented dryly. After a moment more, he shouted, frustrated, “God damnit these ropes are tight! I can’t even…nngh…” His couldn’t manage to gather even a millimeter of slack between his wrists. “We don’t know what they did with our weapons, and our chance of escaping these binds is disappearing with every passing minute, so our plan is…?”
“To try to talk our way out or otherwise hope the rest of Vox Machina finds us in time.”
“Right.”
“We’ve had worse plans.”
Percy furrowed his brow, doubting that statement but not going to argue with her about it.
They grew quiet as their captors returned. Two humans, one with a scar immediately below his left eye that Vex identified as the one that would be sporting the vendetta, and one half-orc. They all looked a poor match for civilized company, accustomed to life in the wilderness, used to getting their way and quite capable of handling whatever came their way.
“So what do you want to do with them?” the half-orc asked the one with the scar.
“Excuse me,” Vex said, layering her words with honey, “I’m afraid this has all been a terrible misunderstanding. On my honor I have never seen the likes of you gentlemen before. But no trouble needs to come from this, we’d be very happy to go on our way. No hard feelings.”
The scarred man grabbed Vex roughly by the chin, staring ruthlessly into her face. “We haven’t hung anyone in a while,” he mused, and the darkness in his tone caused fear to stir in both of his captives.
This was quickly taking a turn for the worse.
“We’ve already got the fire going, though,” the half-orc lamented, gesturing to their camp. “Hanging ‘ems a lot more effort.”
“We have friends with money,” Percy interjected, starting to panic. “We are worth much more alive as ransom, I assure you—”
The scarred man grinned with a flash of inspiration and a chill went down Vex’s spine. “Oy Bronst,” he said, smacking the back of his hand into the chest of the other human. “Ain’t there that big pit off towards the hills?”
The other human, stouter but muscled from head to toe, apparently Bronst, answered affirmatively with a subtle nod.
“This one,” the scarred man pointed at Percy, “needs some roughening up. How’d you like to kill the little half-elf for us?” he asked Percy. Percy glared defiantly, but his words made him nervous. What game was he playing at? Surely he didn’t just expect him to turn on his companion.
“Heh, that’s what I thought,” the man said, grinning with sadistic delight and slapping Percy playfully on the cheek.
“You in the mood to make a new werewolf tonight?” the man asked Bronst. “Cause I think the two of them could have some fun together.”
Percy mouth went completely dry. “Excuse me?”
Bronst shrugged and took a menacing step toward Percy. He opened his mouth a revealed a set of canid fangs that would easily rip a person’s throat out.
“Percy!” Vex yelled.
“Wait, no, stop!” Percy yelled, and renewed his struggles against his bindings with everything he had, but the one with the scars grabbed him roughly by the bicep and threw him into Bronst’s waiting arms. Bronst was strong, much stronger than he should have been, and he trapped Percy in an iron grip against his chest.
“Unhand me this instant!” Percy tried to knee him in the groin, the only freedom of movement he had, but he couldn’t get the right angle, and then Bronst stepped on the rope tying his ankles, pinning his legs straight. Bronst looked Percy square in the face, smirking, and ripped his glasses from his face, throwing them off to the side.
“Don’t you dare touch him!” Vex cried, terrified. “He’s done nothing to you. Your quarrel is with me.”
Her pleas fell on deaf ears, Bronst tore back Percy’s coat and shirt to expose his shoulder and sunk his maw deep into Percy’s collarbone. Percy locked his jaw shut and muffled his own scream, not giving them the satisfaction.
“Percy!” Vex screamed, fighting to get closer to him from where she was still tied to the ground. “You fucking monsters!”
Bronst pulled his mouth off of Percy with an exaggerated pop, and threw him to the ground. Percy hissed with pain, blood running freely down his chest and soaking into his coat. A gag was shoved in his mouth and Vex received the same treatment. She continued to try to scream around it.
“I ain’t walking all the way to the pit,” the half-orc commented.
“Fine, guard the camp, then,” the scarred man directed. “We’ll be back soon,” he said. He immobilized Percy and Vex further, wrapping them individually in some sort of hide, and lifted Vex over his shoulder. Bronst did the same to Percy and they were carried like sacks of meat through the woods.
The leather Percy had been wrapped in was far too warm for the mild evening, Percy was sweltering in it. He found himself growing weaker and lulled into a daze by the rhythmic jostling of step after step carrying them further from their friends. He lost track of time, everything blurring together, until suddenly his body impacted the ground, hard. He tried to muster a sense of his surroundings, but the rough man-handling tossing him this way and that as he was unbound made that next to impossible.
He was free, facedown in the grass, and then a kick connected solidly with his stomach and sent him flying. He was airborne, wind rushing past him, and then he hit packed earth. He heard more than felt the snapping of multiple ribs across his back.
Vex was thrown into the pit after him and landed hard on her right arm.
A glob of spit followed her down and soaked the dirt next to her face. “That’s for Angus and Gertle, you bitch.” And then they were left alone.
With a groan, Vex pushed herself up to a sitting position with her good arm and took in the situation. The pit was a good fifteen feet deep and just as wide, carved into the earth. The walls and floor were dirt with thin roots that sparsely poked through at various points. A number of small and medium sized animal carcasses in various states of decomposition littered the ground. The sun had set in the time since they’d been hauled away from the camp and she could see stars in the darkening sky above them.
Free of any bindings now, the pit deemed a sufficient snare, she stook shakily to her feet and rushed over to Percy laying limply on his side, poking at her right wrist as she went. It was broken.
“Percy! It’s okay, I’m here,” she reassured. His eyes found hers and they were fever bright, sweat dripping down his forehead.
“Vex, oh thank god,” Percy mumbled. He tried to push himself up and was immediately overcome with pain, falling back to the ground.
“Don’t move. Where are you hurt?” she asked, checking him head to toe.
“Landed on…ribs.” He gingerly gestured to the area that currently throbbed, ready to flare into white hot pain at any sudden movement.
“That I can do something about.” She tied the leather than normally protected her midsection around Percy’s ribcage as a brace the best she could, using her opposite elbow to keep the cord taught as she tied it off with her good hand, and carefully helped Percy roll onto his stomach to relieve the pressure on his back. He wasn’t coughing up blood, which was a good sign that nothing had penetrated his lungs.
Percy felt like he was going to vomit, but with a few deep, steadying breaths he was able to get out, “What about you? I can’t see, it’s dark and they took my glasses.”
“I’m fine, I got lucky. Just a broken wrist I think.”
“Why is it so hot?” Percy complained, slurring his words. “Did we land in a volcano?”
“You’re feverish, darling.” Vex held her palm to Percy’s forehead. He was burning up.
“Am I?...Oh.” Ever so sluggishly, like wading through mud, an idea seemed to bubble to the surface for him. “I think I’m turning into a werewolf, and I think they mean for me to kill you.”
Vex pressed her lips together and her heart beat frantically in her chest. “They could have just been playing some sick mind game with us,” she proposed, desperate for an alternative to latch onto, but she didn’t believe her own words, not with the state of Percy’s bite wound. In a mere half hour or so since he’d been bitten, it had completely healed over to solid, unbroken skin that had a sickly yellow hue and dark veins running through it. She’d never seen anything like it before, and it was surely the reason for Percy’s fever.
“Give me a moment,” Vex told him, running her hand down his arm comfortingly, then stepped away to the edge of the pit. She called for help at the top of her lungs while she cannibalized parts of her outfit to gerrymander her own brace, and grimaced as she pulled it tight around her wrist.
“Help! Please! Anyone! We’re stuck down here.” Vex called out into the empty night. She listened carefully but heard no response, so she set about inspecting the walls around them for the most promising climbing route that might get her up out of the pit. All of the roots within her reach were far too weak and immediately dislodged from the wall in a clump of soil when she put any weight on them. There was one that was thicker and woodier and looked like it might belong to a tree, but it teased her from twelve feet above her. So instead looked for crannies in the compacted dirt that might hold a foot or hand, particularly those under the tree root. She wasn’t a particularly good climber, but she was light, and that was to her advantage.
Having found a route to test, she nervously bounced on the balls of her feet and then gradually, ever so gently applied her weight to the first hand hold. From there she was able to dig the toes of her boots in to spots a foot and half off the ground and push herself up. Her right hand dangling uselessly at her side, she psyched herself up to let go with her left hand and with the speed of a striking snake she grabbed onto another crevice in the wall higher up. It immediately crumbled in her hand, sending her falling backward to the ground and she cried out as sharp pain split through her right wrist.
She alternated between climbing attempts and calling for help. Neither was bearing any fruit, and she was trying to stay levelheaded and not let her frustration get the best of her. They were running out of time. She needed to get them out of here and throwing a tantrum wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
“Vex—” she heard her name called from right over her shoulder, and she whipped around, startled, not expecting Percy to be standing right behind her.
“What? How are you up?” she wondered, taken aback. He was plainly weak, swaying slightly from side to side, but he was standing under his own power and he seemed more focused and alert.
“I can see,” he said, deadly serious, as if that was sufficient explanation. Vex looked at him, confused. “Humans can’t see in the dark, not like half-elves. Now I can. Everything’s clear, I don’t need my glasses. I’m getting worse.”
Vex ran her hand down his arm and guided him down to a sitting position next to her. “You just need to hold on. Our friends will find us. I’m sure Keyleth and Scanlan are scouting for us as we speak and those brutes weren’t exactly the stealthy type. There’s probably a trail of damaged bushes and downtrodden grass leading them straight to us.”
“We can’t count on that,” Percy told her. He looked her directly in the eyes. “I don’t know how long I have. And I’ve been thinking…it only makes sense that at some point I’m going to get stronger, but right now I’m still weak. You could close off my windpipe and I wouldn’t fight, I could just slip away peacefully—”
Vex leapt to her feet, furious. “Are you fucking kidding? I’m here trying to save our asses and you’ve just been sitting around making suicide plans in the corner?” She flung her good arm in his direction. “I can’t believe you right now.”
“I know it’s not what either of us want, but we have to be practical here. It’s too late for me, and there’s no reason why we both have to die. You need to get back to your brother.”
His voice was completely even and devoid of emotion, and it made Vex’s blood boil, how little value he put on his own life, and how dare he use her brother against her like that. She could have hit him, she was so angry.
“There’s enough leaps in logic there to cross a canyon,” Vex bit out. “We don’t know the first thing about whatever this—” she gestured to his festering collarbone, “—is, if it even is lycanthropy. Between Keyleth and Pike, they can heal just about anything, and if not them, there’s temples. It is not too late, and I’m not entertaining your death wish. Keep it together, for god’s sakes.”
“Vex, please—”
She turned her back to him and started searching for other, still intact handholds in the wall. “No, we’re done talking about this,” she said in clipped tones. “If you’d like to actually be helpful, that would be marvelous, else do shut up and let me work.”
Silence fell, her poking and prodding the only noise reaching her ears, and she assumed Percival had taken her direction to heart when, after a minute, she heard a muffled sob behind her. She turned to see Percy bent over his knees with his head buried in his arms, and all the anger she felt directed toward him instantly melted. She crouched next to him and ran her hand across his upper back.
“Oh, darling…” she was at a loss for words. In her years of knowing him, she had never seen him cry. Pain made him tear up, of course, but he’d never honest-to-goodness cried, not even when he was reunited with his sister.
He wiped his eyes on his sleeves and kept his face hidden from her. Through hitching breath, he forced out, “I don't want to kill you Vex. Please don’t make me do it.”
“Look at me please.” She kept rubbing his back and waited until he raised his head so she could look into his red-rimmed eyes and make sure he understood how fervently she meant what she was about to say. “Just as you cannot kill me, I could never bare the thought of killing you, and it is unfair for you to ask it of me. So we’ll find another way, all right?”
Percy deflated and let out a long sigh, working out the remaining spasms in his chest, and rested his hand on her arm in turn. “All right.” She stood up, offered her hand to him, and he let her pull him upright to his feet. The world spun around him, but he remained standing.
“I don’t expect you’re in any condition to climb, but will you help me look for handholds?” Vex asked.
“Which areas have you already covered?” he asked, and they set about their work, alternatively crying at the top of their lungs for anyone to hear them and working at the wall as it crumbled around them.
She tried to keep him from noticing, but Vex was watching Percy closely for any change that could be a warning sign. A light tremble started to shake his entire body, and Vex pursed her lips in worry. It was nearly unbearable not knowing how long Percy had. It could be seconds, it could be days…but unlikely. All they could do was keep going.
“What if you stand on my shoulders? You’d be able to reach that root, then,” Percy suggested, gesturing at the tree root.
Vex’s eyes lit up. “Yes! Of course, get me up there.”
“Your ribs?” she asked him as he lined himself up under the root, scratching nervously up and down his arms.
“Good enough,” he replied, and held out his hands with fingers interwoven for her to step into. She hadn’t given him more than a third of her weight, though, when he wheezed and dropped her. “Wait,” he pleaded and bent over to rest his hands on his knees. “The ribs aren’t bothering me, but I just…I’ve got nothing in me. If I brace against the wall like so,” and he created a larger bend in his knees, pushing his back against the wall, “then I can direct more of your weight off of me rather than just taking it straight up and down.”
“All right,” Vex nodded encouragingly.
“Go quickly, please.”
Vex stepped off of his knee and dug the heel of her boot into his belt at his waist. That was enough height to then get her knee on top of Percy’s shoulder, and he grunted with effort and shook below her as he took all of her weight. She raced upward, stretching up to wrap her good hand around the root, and immediately started working on footholds.
“I’ve got i—” she called to him at the same time that Percy yelled—
“Vex!” and his knees buckled. Vex flailed, swinging by one arm as Percy fell out from underneath her.
She blindly started to search for footholds, testing first one spot and then another, and they all immediately broke apart under her boot. “Can you guide my feet?” Vex called down to Percy.
“I—” was all he was able to get out around his labored breathing. Vex dare not try to twist her head to look down behind her, but she could only guess that Percy was still collapsed on the ground. She was on her own.
Finally, her foot caught on solid earth that she could push against and she nearly cried with relief. Pulling from the root and pushing from the foothold, she was able to get herself higher to find a new threshold and—
“No!” she yelled defiantly as the earth broke apart underneath her. Gravity yanked her back and she lost her grip on the root, falling all the way back to the bottom of the pit. An entire chunk of the wall, feet deep, collapsed like an avalanche and showered Percy in a heavy deluge of dirt and rock.
“Shit!” Ignoring the pain in her arm she pulled Percy away from the damaged wall and knocked the pile of dirt off him as he coughed. Once he was free, she stormed off to the other side of the pit to kick the wall and throw herself against it.
“I was so close! Damn it, I had it! Fuck!” She beat her fist against the wall for good measure, and then slid her back down it until she was sitting crumpled in a heap like a puppet with their strings cut. She shut her eyes.
“Vex…” Percy called out, and there was an odd choking quality to it.
“What?” she whined, beating her head against the wall behind her.
“I will…try…hold back…as long…can,” Percy bit out between gasping breaths, and then he let out a blood curdling scream.
Vex was immediately on her feet running back to him. She could see tear tracks on his cheeks reflecting the moonlight. No, no, no, no, they needed time, just a little longer, it can’t be, not yet…
“I’m here,” she told him, scanning frantically up and down his body that was now uncontrollably and violently shaking. “Tell me what I can do.”
“Get…away…” he bit out between heaving breaths and tried to shove her away from him. He gritted his teeth together and Vex watched, horrified, as his neck grew in length, forcing his head further away from his body in discrete bursts, each accompanied by a sick popping sound.
“No, I’m not leaving you,” she insisted. “Hold on, you just need to hold on. Please, hold on.” Her hand hovered over his convulsing form, desperately needing to be put to use but she felt powerless to do anything as Percy was taken by whatever blood curse had infected him.
“Whatever happens, I need to you to know that it’s not your fault and that I don’t blame you.”
He screamed again and dug his fingers into the ground, stretching his rear into the air behind him in a mockery of sadistic supplication. A chain of knobby bone limply connected by a thin, almost translucent casing of skin pushed out from his lower back, tenting the back of his trousers. It had the skeletal quality of a gravely emaciated dog hovering on death’s door. Vex, jumping at the opportunity to do something—anything—undid his belt and pulled his trousers down far enough to create the space for the new flesh to fill out with muscle and connective tissue into a functioning tail.
Percy collapsed onto his side, throwing up a cloud of dust that clung to the mix of tears and snot dripping from his face. He ripped his shirt in half and scratched at his chest as if he were attempting to claw his own skin off. Vex pinned his hands to the ground under her, sure he could buck her off if he tried, but Percy was drowning in reaction and reflex, the most basal part of him single-mindedly focused on escaping pain, and she saw little conscious thought behind his eyes. She didn’t even know if he was aware of her presence at this point. Vex wiped the tears from her eyes. She had no idea it would be so…violent. Torture. There was no other word for it. She swore to herself that she would kill those men that did this to them, and it wasn’t going to be quick.
Percy howled in agony as his ribcage ballooned outward with a series of cracks that Vex felt in her very bones, each rib in stark relief stretching the skin with it and creating grotesque valleys in-between. Vex looked around frantically, wondering if it would be a kindness to try and knock him out, but she had no suitable implement at her disposal. Instead she used her turned head as an opportunity to be sick, soiling her top, the familiar smell of acid mixing with blood in the air.
His spittle ran red with blood, dripping from his mouth, as his teeth reshaped themselves into a vicious maw and shredded his gum line. His jaw expanded to make space for the set of predator’s teeth, pulling his entire face forward into a sharply defined snout, and Percy’s voice warped into an animalistic keen as he moaned through it. Just like that, Percy was…subsumed. She could no longer see her friend in the pitiful, hellish creature quaking before her.
Whining and panting, he wrenched his hands back from her, except that they looked more like paws with his palms horribly stretched and the tips of his fingers bleeding crimson where sharp claws had ripped through. He dragged those claws across his body leaving angry red lines where thick, white fur was beginning burst from his skin, down his chest and up his neck, across his snout and into his ears that were migrating up his skull and fanning out into a larger, more pointed shape.
As he thrashed, he snagged her with two of his claws. Vex yelped reflexively as he split the skin and tore down to the muscle of her forearm on her bad side. Percy, suddenly aware of his surrounding, whipped his almost fully wolf-like head around to pin her in his inhuman gaze, the same green as Percy’s eyes. He pulled his flexible upper lip back in a snarl to reveal his long, sharp fangs, mouth still bloodied, staining the surrounding white fur, and growled, low and threatening, the guttural vibration resonating through his torso. The image of a vicious killer.
He snapped at her with his jaws, but Vex was already scrambling backwards, every instinct telling her to run, and she cleared the attack by inches. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, but she got her feet under her and careened to the other side of the pit, putting the meager fifteen feet of distance between them that Percy could probably cross in a single bound.
Percy rose to his four feet and stepped toward her in pursuit, but was slowed by the final throes of transformation still twisting his form. His conformation was somewhere between a human on all fours and a true quadruped, and his limbs continued to adjust their length and position, sending him tumbling back to the ground. He took out his anger on the nearby animal skeleton, crushing the skull to pieces in his powerful jaws.
She looked for anything she could use to defend herself and pulled a femur from one of the surrounding animal carcasses to wield as a club. Her heart was beating a mile a minute in her chest and she sobbed as she wiped the dirt and tears out of her eyes. Somehow, she thought that it would still be Percy, deep inside, and that he’d be able to control it, or she’d be able to tame it, or reason with it, or—but there was no calming a lone wolf driven to frenzy by excruciating pain, and she knew then that she was going to die. She’d seen the same unchecked rage in Trinket at his most violent, tearing their enemies into pieces, and—
Trinket! A spark of hope bloomed in Vex’s chest and she scrabbled at her throat for the amulet their would-be murderers neglected to take from her. She released Trinket from it and the bear that she had raised from a cub immediately roared at the snarling threat before them, positioning himself in front of Vex protectively. Percy—the wolf—was large for a normal wolf but not so large as to be unrecognizable as one. Trinket must have outweighed it four times over, and animals were very good at judging when they were outmatched. It was how they survived. If Trinket could intimidate the wolf into backing down, then nobody needed to get hurt.
“Get as big and loud and scary as you can,” Vex instructed the bear. “Get it to back off, defend yourself, but don’t kill it. I know this won’t make sense but it’s important.”
Trinket growled his understanding and pushed off the ground, his sheer mass jiggling as he stood up to his full nine foot height, blocking the moonlight as he towered over Vex. He bared his teeth and roared, sending shockwaves of booming, reverberating sound out into the night, sending spit flying from his maw. Vex heard the chitter of startled birds taking flight from their overnight perches.
Vex peered around Trinket’s bulk to find the threat. The white wolf, crimson staining its muzzle and paws, now looked whole and complete in its canid anatomy, and it lunged straight for Trinket’s throat. Vex gasped and covered her mouth in shock.
Trinket blocked the wolf’s attack with his paws, swiping straight down onto the wolf’s head, but the wolf turned its head to the side to catch the bear’s limb in its jaws and bit down, latching onto him. Trinket cried and whipped the wolf from side to side, careening through the air, but could not dislodge his attacker, and the wolf scrabbled to get close enough to gore Trinket’s soft underbelly with its claws.
Trinket sent the wolf to the ground and put his momentum behind his other foreleg to stomp it, intending to shatter bone, but the wolf was too quick and leapt away from the strike, leaping nimbly back onto its feet and posed for another attack. Trinket was ready, solidly on all fours now facing the wolf head-on to protect his backside. He roared a challenge.
The wolf momentarily took its focus off of Trinket to glance to the outside wall, then, defying expectations, launched itself askew at the wall. It pushed off of the wall, and used the angle to come right at Trinket’s flank, bypassing the deadly teeth and claws. It sunk its claws into the side of Trinket’s belly, tearing. Trinket’s blood sprayed into the air and soaked into both animals’ fur and he roared in pain. There was no way that the wolf should have been able to shift Trinket’s massive bulk given the size difference, but the impact pushed Trinket off-balance and teetering on his outside legs. By the time Trinket righted himself and reached with his teeth, the wolf had danced backwards and then, at the opportune moment, snapped in again with its teeth, driving Trinket’s hindquarters away from the threat, glancing at her as it charged past.
Vex clung to the wall, horrified. It may have looked like a normal wolf, but it did not fight like a normal wolf. It wielded vastly superior strength and intelligence. Percy’s intelligence, she thought. She had seen Percy pull off a similar trick shot once, ricocheting a bullet off a solid stone wall to hit his target. He knew how to use his environment to his advantage, and so, seemingly, did the wolf that had consumed his body and mind. She had misjudged the situation badly, and was suddenly terrified for Trinket’s life as well as her own.
The wolf confused her bear, feinting attacks from both the front and again from the wall. Trinket moaned in trepidation, not knowing what direction the attack would come from and not agile enough to adjust in real time. He instinctively backed away, putting distance between them, and the wolf pressed the advantage, driving him further until the wolf had Trinket pinned in the opposite corner of the pit from Vex, effectively separating the two with itself between. The wolf turned its head back at her, seeing she was now defenseless.
When Trinket realized what had happened and that Vex was now in danger of attack, he bellowed with renewed fury. He used the wolf’s momentary distraction to charge straight at it, 900 lbs of pure ferocity, and Vex was prepared to dodge out of the way, but the wolf was once again too quick. It hopped two feet to the right, then came right back at Trinket from the side, digging its teeth into Trinket’s muzzle and, with a combination of sheer force and turning the bear’s shoulders, pulled the bear’s tremendous momentum off course, forcing Trinket into the side wall such that Trinket had to turn back into his corner. The wolf took a sizeable chunk of Trinket’s muzzle with it, ripping the flesh from his face, and Trinket bellowed, whipping his head from side to side, blood pouring down into his mouth and flinging into his eyes.
“Trinket!” Vex screamed, sick to her stomach, not caring if it drew the wolf’s attention. The air was now heavy with the bear’s blood, the bitter metallic tang coating Vex’s throat, the wolf was painted in it, and still Trinket had yet to land a single significant blow to his opponent. He was severely outmatched.
Trinket regrouped and stepped to the left, then the right, then the left again, trying to find some opening to get back to Vex, and he moaned pitifully when the wolf blocked him at every point, keeping him away from her. Trinket called directly to her just as he did when he was a cub, fearful and anxious, and Vex’s heart broke. She couldn’t take it any longer and summoned him back into her amulet. She wouldn’t, couldn’t let Trinket be killed. This way he would be safe until Vox Machina found her body, and then they would take care of him.
Then it was just Vex’ahlia, weaponless and defenseless against the supernatural predator. It snarled at the sudden loss of its opponent, turning every which way in search of him, scenting the air, scenting the ground. Finally it howled its triumph to the stars. Then it lowered its head and stared at her, licking its lips clean of Trinket’s blood.
Vex let herself sink to the ground, heart hammering in her chest, and shut her eyes, waiting for the end to come, hoping only that it would be quick and that the wolf would not toy with its food. She waited, and waited, the wolf’s growls echoing around the pit and making it difficult to pinpoint the source, but there was no attack.
Time seemed to stretch on forever, teetering on a knife’s edge, and then Vex opened her eyes. The wolf was pacing the width of the pit, wound tight as a spring, snapping at thin air, pouncing on a nearby animal carcass to shred its decaying flesh to pieces, seemingly looking for any target for its aggression, but it didn’t come any closer to her.
She watched it pace back and forth, back and forth, wondering what it was waiting for. It almost reminded her a sentinel, disciplined in its route, treading and re-treading its steps, as if there was still an invisible enemy on the other side of the pit that it was intent on keeping her from.
Protecting her from, the idea bubbled up, unbidden. She re-examined the wolf’s behavior through a different possible lens: the way it glanced back at her, checking on her, during the fight. The way it immediately drove Trinket from her in a series of planned maneuvers, forcing him into the opposite corner. The way it seemed more interested on keeping him there than going in for the kill.
Vex could distill the entire battle down into Trinket and the wolf fighting over the same need to be the one owning the space directly in front of her. Could it be that they were both fighting to protect her from the other?
That the wolf was determined to own her space was clear. What it wanted to do with said ownership remained to be seen. It could very well still be protecting its food from other imagined threats.
Vex figured this must have continued for near on half an hour, her mind was starting to wander with the monotony, predator on the prowl or no, when she noticed the wolf’s hackles relax against its back. The bouts of snarling grew less and less frequent until it was content to pace silently, more languid than tense. The feral, uncontainable aggression that boiled over in its every movement, needing a target, now only simmered at the ready should the need arise.
Without warning, it deviated from its path, turning in and stopping mere feet in front of her, pinning her in the intensity of its gaze. Vex started to cry, whether from fear or hope or need or simply an adrenaline crash, she couldn’t say. Her emotions were a tangled, incomprehensible mess throbbing under her skin.
“Percy?” she whispered, hardly daring to hope.
Its jaws closed the distance to her face and a new wave of fear shot through her as she held perfectly still, but its mouth remained closed and it only smelled. It rooted through her hair, continuously snuffling, then trailed down to her neck, smearing Trinket's blood across her skin with its cold, wet nose. It breathed hot, moist air down into her cleavage, quickly honed in on the patch of clothing that she’d soiled with her own vomit, and then nudged her good arm up with its head so that it could poke its nose into her armpit.
She was so shocked at the turn of events that she even let it crowd her groin for a few moments before she came to her senses and, daring to move, pulled up her knees, forcing it to step back.
Seemingly satisfied with whatever it had discovered, it laid down in front of her, resting its head on its front paws, and stared out into the empty pit, tail softly undulating behind it.
Vex giggled with the absurdity of it all and suddenly felt drained of every speck of energy she had left. She couldn’t stand even if she wanted to. She leaned back and let her eyes drift shut, feeling strangely safe with Percival there to watch over her.