Chapter Text
Day 4, Nightfall
Percy took long, exaggerated breaths, trying to calm his pounding heart and steady himself after having been thrust out the other side of the change. Questions that were cementing themselves as a checklist for the occasion pressed at him.
1) Where am I?
2) How did I get here?
3) What do I do next?
The first was easy enough. He was in his room at Greyskull. It was dark outside—another day lost—and a single lantern glowed on his dresser. He mopped the sweat from his skin with a shirt due for laundering as he thought back to how he’d ended up here. The experience was still fresh in his mind of being carried by a giant—no, he’d had the unfortunate pleasure of encountering giants, both alive and undead, and the creature that had held him snuggly in the crook of their arm was at least twice again as tall as any giant he’d encountered.
Their form had been covered in hues of burnt oranges and reds, and he knew he had felt safe with the-one-that-wielded-nature.
Percy blinked, confused by the foreign thought that felt like his own.
Keyleth , he realized. The-one-that-wielded-nature was how the raven thought of Keyleth. It was Keyleth that had brought him back to his room just recently. His pride wasn’t thrilled with the idea of being carried around in others’ arms like some helpless thing (that he was) , but it was also the least of his considerable set of problems, and he was grateful to her that she had thought to bestow him this privacy.
Percy had the nagging feeling that there was something important that he was missing, something he had to do or something that needed his attention, but the abrupt transition from simple-minded creature to being reconstituted as Percival de Rolo, with all the awareness that entailed, was overwhelming in a way that brought tears to his eyes, not wholly dissimilar to the experience of a baby nestled in the warm darkness of their mother’s womb suddenly thrust through the birth canal to have every sense assaulted by the world around them. It was all he could do to stay afloat in the flood of everything that was rushing back to him. Though his mind raced to catch up, still running on the adrenaline of the transformation, there was something escaping him. Something important. Something he needed—
The temple! The temple of the Raven Queen. They were going back to the temple to get answers—or—Percy had to remind himself that a day had passed—they had gone to the temple? Had they? For whatever reason, it seemed like he was not yet cured if he was still changing at sunset.
After they’d been stymied at the Raven Queen’s temple the night before, they had continued on, going temple to temple for another four hours, seeking anyone with healing or magical expertise that would know how to help Percy, or could at least identify the affliction. They called upon the Wildmother’s, because it was an animal transformation and she, the goddess of nature. The Platinum Dragon’s, since, as one of the largest temples in the city, it attracted masters of various kinds looking to do good. The Dawnfather’s, which Percy approached cynically but let himself be directed to nonetheless. The Dawnfather hadn’t protected his family before, and he hadn’t expected to receive his help now. Then Pike had escorted them to other healers of The Everlight, and they had even woken Allura in the middle of the night just for her to confirm that the transformations were not arcane in nature.
Though they had much better luck in being received, the answers they got from those they consulted were always more or less the same: they had never heard of such a thing, it didn’t make sense to them, the magic was strange and unfamiliar. At one point they were accused of spinning tales for attention.
So the followers of the Raven Queen were Percy’s last remaining hope. And Vox Machina was supposed to have returned to them today…
Percy tried to cast his memory back to earlier in the day while he was a raven. The memories were there, but he had to work for them, they weren’t effortlessly at his disposal. He disliked that feeling of needing to dig for them immensely; it felt too similar to the spotty, indistinct memories of his time immediately after escaping the murder of his family when he had drifted, barely functioning, and that was the last thing he wanted brought up for him, especially under the current circumstances. He wanted that time in his life firmly behind him, relegated to the past.
He also didn’t want to know what his hours spent transformed were like. The glimpses he got in transition were already disturbing, and keeping it arm’s length made it easier to push it all down when he needed to be focusing on keeping himself together. The curse was already stealing fifteen hours of each day from him, he wasn’t about to let it have the remaining nine.
Stronger than his aversion, though, was his need to know what had happened today. He was desperate to know, and so he steeled himself, swallowing the queasy feeling that bloomed in him at the prospect, and reached for the memories with single-minded determination.
Images of a flat, open field teased at his awareness. There was sun and a breeze, and he’d been wrapped in some sort of fabric, constrictive but not uncomfortable. Good, that was good, his friends were keeping him restrained as he’d asked. A different moment—lots of people, whitewashed walls, bits and bobs everywhere—
It was...strange. What he pulled forward for examination was challenging to make sense of and he was forced to reckon with the disquieting fact that he perceived the world very differently in that changed state. There was a paradoxical peculiarity in how it was simultaneously completely alien to his experience and also indisputably him that had experienced it and for whom it had felt natural in the moment, and Percy hit against the limit of what he could wrap his mind around. It didn’t feel like viewing the memories of someone else; he knew that he had lived this day, not as Percival de Rolo, that was not Percival de Rolo, but as something vastly altered that was nonetheless still him.
The colors of things were similar, but the scenes he recalled were downright strange when everything around him was blown up to gargantuan proportions and the angle he was looking from was closer to the ground.
And visual discrepancies aside, Percy was learning that what mattered to the raven—what he focused on and what was worth remembering—was also quite different. Underlying it all, there was a sense of continual seeking alertness that never settled, and he realized that his attention was constantly jumping from subject to subject in a way that his human sensibilities would have considered restless. Any new movement in his surroundings was immediately more important than anything already known. When nothing had a name and things simply were what they were, they warranted less focus and tended to fall into the background.
He could recall little of faces in a way that would allow him to recognize them now and even less of facial expressions. Faces had been mostly interesting for determining what a person was looking at and a secondary signal (after sound and body gestures) of how calm or agitated they were, and both of those things required but a moment to ascertain before his focus could shift away to more curious matters, such as what could lay hidden in nearby patches of grass.
Sifting through his memories gave Percy the impression of looking through a fun mirror at a traveling carnival if, rather than distorting the image itself, the mirror instead warped the very significance of the things it reflected, shrouding some things in blind spots and highlighting the most mundane details in others in a way that made the entire world feel off-kilter.
All of this to say, Percy had to take to pen and paper to begin to decipher the possible mappings of the raven’s impressions to things he was familiar with, not unlike his early exercises in translating Celestial texts as a boy. He set to the task, hastily jotting down what was in his head with sloppy sketches and notes. Then he took a second pass to annotate them with his ideas of what various things could be. He ended up with lots of words circled with question marks at their end ( people lining up to tall wall = cloudtop gate?? ) but also underlines where he was confident and arrows that created various associations between fragments.
Setting the pen down, he reviewed what he’d been able to piece together. Vox Machina had brought him back to the Raven Queen’s temple. He was sure of that much. They’d gone into a dark, quiet area shaded from the sun and isolated from the noise of the street—inside the temple. Three others were there with shapeless robes that obscured their figures. But what he really needed to know—what was said—thwarted him. It bothered him to no end, but the words simply weren’t there, and he only succeeded in frustrating himself when he tried to reach for them. The raven interpreted tone, pitch, and rhythm, he heard the difference between ‘a’ and ‘o’ and could pick out when a certain sound or sequence of sounds was repeated, but because the sounds held no meaning for him at the time, there was quite simply nothing to remember.
The priests gave him very little to go off of. They had been rigidly still and calm, with an even and neutral tone of voice. At some point one of them had cast magic on him and—oh gods—in truly bestial fashion, he’d responded by trying to bite their finger off. He buried his hands in his hair, torn between revulsion at his own degrading behavior and concern for what more could have been done to him without his knowledge.
Sometime after that, Vox Machina grew angry and Pike had outright yelled. Then…he failed to pinpoint anything of significance after that. More talking, more yelling perhaps?
Percy tapped his foot anxiously. He did not like it. He did not like it at all. But then he’d be a fool if he were to expect tact from Vox Machina. They had about as much tact between them combined as he had in his little finger. It’s not like he’d had another choice…
Ultimately, it was precious little to go off of. He needed to get the rest of the story from the group and find out when they’d set up the second meeting for. He could salvage this.
He pulled open the door to his room, and—
—ran headfirst into Keyleth’s pointed half-elven ear as her head was turned to the side.
“What in the—” Percy exclaimed with surprise, catching himself on the door frame.
“Sorry!” Keyleth said, straightening to her full height and showing her teeth apologetically. “I wasn’t—I mean, I was—I was eavesdropping. But I just wanted to make sure you were okay. We wanted to give you your privacy, but we also needed to make sure you were safe, so it was kind of a compromise—”
“Thank you,” Percy interjected.
“—uh, thank you?” Keyleth echoed, confused.
“For thinking to return me to my room before…” he dipped his head to the side. “I appreciate it.”
“Oh! You’re welcome.” Keyleth gave him a genuine smile, though still mixed with concern. “How are you feeling?”
The dark circles under his eyes and pinch at the corners were answer enough, and Keyleth frowned.
“Did you manage to get any sleep last night after we got back? I don’t think you slept at all when you were with us today.”
“No,” he answered dutifully, then scrubbed his hands over his face. “I appreciate the concern but could we skip the pleasantries? I need to know what happened with the Raven Queen priests today. I’ve got pieces but…when I’m like that I can’t understand what people are saying.” He knew it, she knew it, so why did it feel like a needle lodged under his rib to say it out loud?
Keyleth’s eyebrows raised and her face softened into a terrible look of sympathy. Percy’s heart sunk in his chest before she’d even said a word. “We tried. We tried everything. They don’t want to help.”
“Yes, well, under those robes they are still only people and people can be persuaded. When is the next meeting?”
Keyleth didn’t answer.
“Keyleth?” he pressed.
She shook her head limply. “There isn’t one. They wouldn’t—”
“There isn’t…” His heart dropped fully to the pit of his stomach and his leg started trembling of its own accord. Whatever small burst of energy the transformation had left him running on evaporated into smoke and the terrible exhaustion he’d been fighting for the past couple days sank its claws back into him. It was the kind of insomniac exhaustion that felt halfway to undeath, far beyond the point of being able to actually fall asleep. It dragged on him and made it difficult for him to think.
“How am I to negotiate with them when I can’t even talk—” He sputtered. “This is my life on the line, Keyleth!”
He was so tired, but a coal of anger was also starting to smolder in him. All he’d needed was this one thing, just this one thing that he’d had no choice but to depend on them for. He’d accepted all the bar brawls, the brashness, all the fighting they could have completely avoided if not for the indelicate approach, and just this once he’d been counting on them to demonstrate just the minimum bar of diplomacy needed to secure a simple meeting, just to give him a chance to take his fate into his own hands, but they couldn’t even do that.
This was a cruel joke. He almost couldn’t believe it. The most talented negotiator in their group by leaps and bounds and he was physically blocked from being able to speak with the people that may hold the key to curing him due to the small snag of him only existing in the middle of the goddamn night. He would laugh if it didn’t make him want to rip his hair out. He already had his fill of being helpless as a bird, he couldn’t bear also feeling helpless as a person.
“I know! Believe me, we all know that. We did everything we could, you have to believe that, but after they said their bit they refused to have anything more to do with us. After they kicked us out we stood on their doorstep for hours more but they just ignored us.”
Percy referenced his memories. It was true, they had.
“They’re a freaking death cult, nothing that we could offer holds any weight for them. They don’t care about favors or connections or prestige. They wouldn’t trade, they didn’t want our money—”
“How much did you offer them?” he questioned.
“Uh…I don’t know.”
“Try to think.” Percy pressed on the bridge of his glasses.
“I don’t think a number ever came up? We just said we’d be willing to pay, and made it clear we could afford whatever price they named.”
“And what was the offer of payment for?”
Keyleth furrowed her brow.
“Was it payment for information? Or for another meeting? What was it? The details are important.” He needed to keep his impatience in check.
“It was to help us. We asked them for anything they could tell us or do that would help restore you and that they could name their price.”
Percy rubbed his eyes. “An actual number can be more persuasive. It’s…” Percy struggled to find the words he wanted. He couldn’t think! He felt like he was wading through a pit of molasses. “It’s right there in their face, makes it that much easier for the other party to agree to,” he managed to finish.
“Okay? But at that point it wasn’t clear if they even knew anything to pay them for. It was more like ‘we are happy to pay you for any help you would be able to provide’…Maybe I should just start at the beginning.”
“Yes, I need to know what happened in its entirety,” Percy agreed. He waved her inside to take a seat next to him on the bed.
“We got there. They let us inside and three of them met with us, but only one of them ever talked, Priest Rhumald. We explained everything: Kastein, the artifact, the transformations, everything we’d already eliminated as a possibility. Then they were like—”
Percy frowned. This was like pulling teeth. “Their words. What were their actual words?” he pressed.
“Rhumald said ,” Keyleth amended, “‘What would you ask of us?’ Pike asked for…” Keyleth took a breath and briefly shut her eyes as she attempted to recite from memory. “…‘anything that you can do or anything you can tell us that would help us restore our friend’. Rhumald said their purpose was to help people come to terms with their destined path, that they weren’t healers, which, obviously ,” Keyleth added her own commentary.
“That’s when we started trying to bargain, offering payment or our services or whatever else they wanted. Vax insisted they at least take a look at you since we were there, and the good news is that they did and we actually got some information. It wasn’t a complete waste of time.”
Percy tensed, hanging on her every word.
“He examined you with his magic—”
Percy’s frown deepened. “Is that all that it did? The magic he cast on me?”
“It was just an examination, Pike made sure of that and supervised the process closely. I know how you feel, but we weren’t going to get anywhere if we didn’t let them look at you and that was the whole reason why we were there.”
“Yes, of course,” Percy murmured, giving his post-factum consent.
Keyleth hesitated, as if she wasn’t sure how he was going to take what she had to say next. “He said that your fate was corrupted. That it’s vul—um, vulerating?—no that’s not right. Basically it’s fluctuating.”
“Vacillating?” Percy supplied, trying to keep his frustration hidden from her.
“Yes! That was it. Your fate is vacillating. Because it’s untethered. Or unmoored? Maybe he said unmoored.”
Percy dug his fingernails into his temples. “Untethered? Or unmoored?”
Some temple devouts spoke in metaphor, and in such cases every word mattered. ‘Untethered’ and ‘unmoored’ seemed equivalent at face value, but what if, when considered from a different perspective, the distinction ended up being critical to sorting this out? His future could be hanging on that single word.
“I think it was ‘untethered’. ‘His fate is corrupted. It vacillates because it’s untethered.’ I think that was it.” Keyleth played with her hands nervously, bending her palms forward and back around her interlaced fingers.
Percy snorted derisively. This is why he had no love for holy people, not the ones that did this, speaking in roundabout mysticisms with the pretense that they were some wisdom of the universe that they were singularly qualified to divulge.
His fate was corrupted? What was he to do with that? How did it even make sense to consider fate as some concrete object that could be corrupted or restored? And what did that have anything to do with turning into a raven, other than the creature being the symbol of the goddess that claimed fate as part of her dominion. The Raven Queen, The Matron, The Lady of Fates. It all connected, but it failed to come together in a way that made any sense.
“Untethered from what?” Percy questioned. “What should I be tethered to?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?” Percy said, bracing his hands on his thighs.
“No?” she answered, pitch rising at the end uncertainly.
“Of course not,” he commented under his breath, frustrating finding its way into his tone. This forced reliance was intolerable, that he should be permitted only that which Vox Machina thought to bring back to him.
“Percy…” Keyleth continued, intent on a line of thought, “ Corruption ? Do you think this has to do with Orthax? When he manifested, his smoke form had a bird-like appearance.”
Percy considered the idea, he wouldn’t be surprised if his unintended pact with the demon came back to haunt him eventually, but he shook his head.
“No. Everything about this, the artifact, the raven, fate, it all comes back to the Raven Queen and her worshippers. Pike was able to detect something of Orthax’s influence before, she would know if this were related to him. I tell you, the answer lies with the temple. They clearly have some knowledge of this where no one else has had even an inkling.
“What did they say about corrupted fate? Do they have any idea how to fix it?”
“No, that was the only bit of useful information they gave us. Rhumald didn’t know how such a thing could happen and he also didn’t know anything about the artifact.”
“But he could have contacts that know more! Or, surely they have a research library—” Percy protested.
“Scanlan said the same thing. We also asked if they could help us locate the artifact, offered to restore it to their custody. We argued every possibility we could think of until their security kicked us out, but he shut down everything we proposed and it was like arguing with a stone wall. I’ve had more productive conversations with blades of grass.” Keyleth’s anger at the man reignited as she recounted where they’d ended up at, and she balled her fist in Percy’s blanket. “You were right there, plainly in need, and he just didn’t care.”
“But why? What reasons did he give? If we’re to counter or make inroads with one of his peers—” Percy couldn’t accept that the temple was a dead end. That simply was not an option. There was always a thread to pull if one knew where to look. Surely there must be some kind of leverage, something they had missed, but his hands were tied behind his back when all he had to work with was a faulty, second-hand recollection. It was unacceptable. He needed more.
“It was just the same b.s. that lets them go to bed each night with a clear conscience while they rest high on their laurels and do no actual good in the world.”
“Words, Keyleth! Words matter,” he insisted, balling his hands into fists. “What precisely was his argument? How did he formulate his dismissal?”
Keyleth sighed, exasperated. “I don’t remember. They were just excuses.”
Percy slammed his hands down next to his hips.
“Then what good are you?!” he lashed out.
He regretted the outburst before it had even left his tongue, but it was too late to stop. Inadvertently, he’d thrust a hot poker squarely into Keyleth’s deepest insecurity.
Keyleth’s jaw went slack and she glared, hurt and angry.
“I don’t know, sometimes I wonder,” she seethed.
Percy dropped his gaze to his knees. “That was uncalled for,” he amended, and looked back to her, regret in his eyes. “The oversight is mine. I should have thought to have a scribe accompany us, I just didn’t realize there’d be no other opportunities—”
But Keyleth had already pushed herself to her feet and was halfway to the door. She turned back to him, open palm pressed to her chest.
“We are working non-stop trying to help you, do you get that?”
“Yes, of course I do, I—"
“Everyone’s waiting downstairs for you so we can plan our next steps,” she told him icily, waving her arm to the side in resignation, “so, uh, come down when you’re ready if you think we’re worth your time.”
She shut the door behind her with a pronounced thud.
Percy buried his face into his hands and let his torso fall back flat onto the mattress.
He lay there, the lantern casting flickering shadows on the stone walls, trying not to think about the fact that this was all going to repeat in eight and a half hours.
Long ago he’d come around to the belief that there was too much chaos in the world for casting one’s mind toward the future to be a productive exercise. You planned to become a clockmaker only to end up a killer leaving a trail of bodies in your wake.
Just then, tomorrow was too far in the future. A distraction from where his focus needed to be. What he needed was to know where he was next placing his foot directly in front of him.
For a few precious minutes, he allowed himself the rare indulgence of absolute quiet, staring at the ceiling, just simply existing and thinking nothing at all.
Then he took his next step.
He made his way down to the common area and, true to Keyleth’s word, Vox Machina was spread between the dining area and the lounge that they had repurposed from the former laboratory. Scanlan and Grog were indulging in a late night snack. Pike watched the twins turn a simple game of darts into a fierce competition, and Keyleth had curled up as Minxie in a chair, a successful strategy for hiding in plain sight while surrounded by people.
Percy cleared his throat to announce his presence. Scanlan poked his head around the corner and, for a reason Percy didn’t understand, seemed genuinely happy to see him.
“Hey Grog, finish up. Percy’s back,” Scanlan called back into the dining area.
“No need to rush on my account,” Percy told them, loudly enough for his voice to travel across the rooms. “I need to speak to you all individually first anyway.”
“Oh?” Vex’ahlia remarked with a raised eyebrow, curious.
“Would you join me in the war room, Vex?”
“After you, dear.” She waved him on and flashed a perplexed look to the rest of Vox Machina before slipping into the room with him.
He asked Vex to recount the events at the temple to the best of her ability and this time, having learned his lesson, acted the perfectly neutral witness, interrupting only to ask for clarifications and taking notes on everything she said. He proceeded to do the same with Vax, Pike, Scanlan, and yes, even Grog on the off-chance that he could offer a perspective that could be valuable in its…distinctiveness, until he had six independent accounts of the same meeting.
Any one account would have omissions and errors, but if he took that as given and worked with the limitations, he could finesse it into what he needed. By the nature of them, errors were unique. Vax and Scanlan were unlikely to come up with the same mistaken recollection. Therefore, by cross-checking and giving more weight to the details that recurred across multiple accounts, Percy was able to produce an authoritative reference of what had been said that he could feel more confident in the accuracy of. This he could work with, and it lightened a small amount of the weight from his chest. He felt less like a bystander while affairs that materially impacted him unfolded without him.
He concluded that Keyleth’s recollection had been very faithful in spirit, but most importantly he had a new wording for his diagnosis: His fate is corrupted. It is unmoored, vacillating in the winds of time. A shiver ran down his spine.
Lastly, he asked Keyleth to join him in the war room and she returned to her half-elven form.
“Yes?” She watched him, closed-off and guarded against further scorn.
Percy looked down at the paper in his hand. He was far too spent for spontaneous eloquence, and Keyleth deserved eloquence, so instead he read from his own handwriting. “I owe you an apology. In no way did you deserve my anger, and please know that I am indeed grateful for everything you’ve been doing. In fact, I’m quite certain I would be dead right now without you all looking after me." He rubbed at his forehead. "This has not been easy on you, and I regret that I am once again a burden--”
“—You’re not a burden, Percy,” Keyleth told him as she wrapped her arms around him in a hug. “And I forgive you.”
He lightly returned the embrace, uncertain. “You do?”
“Yes, I do. I don’t have the energy to spare to be mad right now, do you?”
He didn’t respond, letting Keyleth think that he considered the question rhetorical. He wished he could tell her ‘no’, but the truth was that he had quite a lot to be mad about right then, and it was perhaps consuming too much of the little energy he had. Still, he paused, allowing her warmth at his chest to bleed into him and convince him that they were on good terms, and then he called the rest of the team back together.
“I understand you wanted to plan?” Percy inquired, taking a seat at the table.
“Indeed,” Vax said. “To summarize, we believe the artifact caused this, but we don’t know where it is or who the people were that made off with it. The temple wasn’t the slam dunk we were hoping for, but we know a little more now than we did yesterday and I think we’ve got a couple of options that we could pursue.”
“Option one,” Pike offered. “Be a gigantic pain in the ass until the temple can’t ignore us anymore and are forced to work with us.”
“Option two,” Scanlan spoke. “Skip over the gatekeeping asshole and make friends ,” Scanlan summoned a lick of purple magic in his palm to convey his meaning, “with another priest that’s more approachable. And frequently unaccompanied. They gotta come outside at some point right?”
“Option three,” Vex chipped in. “Get the council involved, maybe even Uriel. Ask them to put in a good word with the temple on our behalf.”
“Option four,” Vax added, playing with his dagger in his hand. “Make the trip back to Vasselheim, hope we have better luck with the temple there.”
Keyleth spoke up, “Speaking with Percy and going over it all again in my head, I realized don’t trust Rhumald. Just something about him, the way his demeanor changed after he examined Percy. Not that he was super friendly from the beginning, but he was hospitable. After, though, he clammed up and started shutting us down at every opportunity. I’m worried he saw something in Percy, I think this corrupted fate thing means something to him, and he’s not sharing. And I don’t trust him when he says he doesn’t know how this would have happened.”
Percy ran his finger down the transcript pages in front of him to look for a certain section. The writing kept blurring as he struggled to keep his gaze focused at the correct distance in front of him, so he took off his glasses to rub at his eyes. “Actually, to Keyleth’s point…was it…yes, it does seem odd that Rhumald was adamant he had no knowledge of nor interest in the artifact, and yet he also brings it up casually at another point. Like one would if they were trying to glean more information about the artifact without drawing attention to themselves. Is that accurate to what happened?”
He received nods around the table.
“So, what?” Vax said. “We’ve turned him on to the fact that this artifact was taken by who knows who, and now he wants it for himself and is shutting us out?”
“Or they are worried about the consequences of it being out there in the possession of gods know who, it’s of the Raven Queen after all. Perhaps they want to suppress any waves it could cause, keep their hands clean. If it can do this to Percy, who knows what else it is capable of,” Vex commented.
“And either way they are okay with just hanging us out to dry and letting Percy continue to live like this?” Pike asked.
“Isn’t that their thing?” Keyleth questioned cynically. “The whole ‘We don’t interfere in the fates of others.’”
“But it’s their artifact, they should be responsible for it!” Pike insisted.
“Entitlement to something they consider theirs, or covering up something that could bring trouble down upon their heads. Both are powerful motivators for acting solely in their own interests,” Percy observed.
“What was that you told me, Percy?” Keyleth spoke. “Under those robes they are just people? Look I could be right or wrong on this, but I think we just need to consider the possibility that, if they are being deceptive, and assuming the various temples talk to each other, we could have problems getting inroads with any temple of the Raven Queen, maybe even with Uriel’s influence backing us up.”
“So what is our alternative then?” Vax asked.
“—Werewolves!”
“—Kastein.”
Grog and Vex both supplied suggestions, talking over each other.
Scanlan held out his pointer finger to Vex on his right, a silent request for her to hold her thought, and then turned to Grog on his left, miming clearing earwax from his ear. “I’m sorry, I thought you said werewolves,” he said with a chuckle, “but I must not have heard correctly because you were talking at the same time as Vex—”
“I did say werewolves,” Grog confirmed earnestly, the sardonic antics lost on him.
“I see. Well, we’re going to come back to that one,” Scanlan told him. “Vex?”
Vex peeled her gaze away from Grog.
“Right, um, well Kastein wasn’t affiliated with a major temple, right? It sounded like she established her own modest place of worship and catered to travelers on the road. If anyone affiliated with the Raven Queen would be independent and fair-minded, it’s her. Also she fucking owes us.”
“But we don’t know where she is,” Vax reminded his sister.
“Well, it’s one avenue we could pursue at least, track her down,” Vex continued.
“We also still have the sketches and rubbings we brought back from the artifact chamber to go through,” Pike reminded them. “See if there’s anything we can learn from them.”
“Can I talk about the werewolves now?” Grog asked.
“You do realize that werewolves turn into wolves, and Percy turns into a bird ?” Scanlan probed. “One is a mammal and the other is, well, a bird.”
“Well, yeah, but they’re both animals,” Grog argued, correctly. “Werewolves change with the moon and Percy changes with the sun, so doesn’t that make them, like, cousins or something? What if they also have weird fate stuff? They could know something about Percy’s curse that we don’t.”
“Do you know any werewolves?” Pike asked him.
“I wish! That would be so cool.” Grog turned to Percy with a sheepish expression. “Not that you’re not cool, but you’re not werewolf-cool.”
“I understand completely,” Percy reassured him.
“I can turn into a dire wolf, why am I not cool?” Keyleth wanted to know. “No, you know what, never mind.”
Keyleth turned to address the table. “Honestly, I think it couldn’t hurt. It would also mean we’re not putting all our eggs in the Raven Queen basket, which I’m a fan of.”
Vax silently appraised all of the ideas that had been thrown out around the table, then turned to Percy. “What do you think, Percival?”
Though Percy’s chest still felt tremendously heavy, it lightened just another hair.
“I think that there are seven…well, six and a half of us, and that tasks that are broken out into simultaneous pieces get done quicker.”
“Fair enough,” Vax acknowledged. “So we’ve got the chamber rubbings, continued attempts with the temple, possibly also the one in Vasselheim, tracking down Kastein and tracking down a werewolf clan. In that case, I think it’s about time we all got to bed. We’ve got a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”