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Silence, Percy had found, was preferable to the current state of his voice. This was not to say he enjoyed being silent. But faced with the veneer of aloof, reserved detachment, or the reality of how his hard fought articulation and diction had been lost, well he'd choose the former.
All the more maddening was that the words were crisp in his head. It was where they met his tongue the problems began. It took a hellish amount of concentration to convey his speech in an organized manner. And the slightest disruption to his focus, be it an interruption from another person or merely an ill timed noise, sent all his carefully crafted words falling away like water off a leaf. The experience was infuriating.
As it was it hardly mattered. With no one to talk to, and only his workshop for company it was easy to let his voice fall into disuse. Smoke filled his days, and it wasn't until he found himself in a jail cell, accused of being a cult leader that he truly processed how taxing the act of using his voice had become.
Maybe it was the proximity to Ripley. Or perhaps the constant cloak of smoke that had become his sole companion. But when he tried to explain to the town guard that they had it all wrong his breath ran out before the end of his thought. Surely he should be able to draw enough air to express a complete thought.
His lungs disagreed, turning the tail end of his words into a slurred together mess. Maybe this was a sign he was dying. That something had broken irreparably in his brain.
But then, he'd been dying for years now. A mere shell of the boy he'd once been. It felt morbidly fitting it would be in a cell that he finally met his end. A fate he'd been running from since the Briarwoods had stolen his home.
Time blurred in the dungeon. Dark monotone cold blanketed him, settling into his lungs, into his bones.
Until a group of gnomes and half elves found him.