Chapter Text
Day 1
While the rest of the party slept around her, Vex’ahlia kept one eye on the dark wilderness beyond the light of their campfire and passed the time stitching the tears in her spare tunic. She’d volunteered for the last watch. Being up this early was nice, on occasion. It was chilly, but she enjoyed the peaceful stillness of it and witnessing the first rays of sun slowly beginning to wake the earth and bring warmth back to the land. They would have to decide whether they were going to push hard to arrive back in Emon late into the coming night, or whether to split the remainder of their trip into two days travel, but in any case, she was looking forward to returning home, another successful job under their belt and in their coin purse. She ran through a mental list of things she needed to attend to once they had arrived back at Greyskull.
The rustling of a sleeping roll drew her attention and she looked in the direction of the noise: it was Percy, tossing and turning in his sleep with clear agitation. Another nightmare…her heart went out to him, but unless they got too bad, it was typically best to let him sort it out himself. Vex hoped that as time continued to pass, putting their fight to free Whitestone of the Briarwoods’ rot further and further behind them, the nightmares would plague him less frequently.
That had been her experience. She’d woken up in a cold sweat on many occasions after she and Vax had had enough of the opportunities Syngorn offered and decided to return to simpler life with their mother in Byroden, only to find the village destroyed by a dragon’s rampage and their mother’s corpse buried in the hastily expanded cemetery. Her mind had creatively conjured a number of horrible scenarios for what their mother’s last minutes alive could have been like, but she and her brother had helped each other mourn, and eventually she left Byroden behind both physically and mentally, able to sleep through the night undisturbed once more.
That was her greatest wish for Percy, that somehow he could find a way to put it behind him. But that remained to be seen.
He gasped, startling awake, but rather than re-orienting himself, reaching for his glasses and settling into the here and now as he usually did, he grunted with alarm and kicked out with his leg.
Vex frowned. That was unusual. “Percy?” She crossed the fifteen feet of distance to check on him, crouching down by his side.
Her heart leapt with concern when he looked up at her. Deep lines etched his face as he braced against some sort of physical pain. This was no nightmare.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded and immediately unbuttoned his sleeping roll so she could flip the top cover over and get access to him.
“I don’t…everywhere,” he gritted out between labored breaths, but he fought against a spasm in his back to try to grab hold of his boot in an attempt to pry it off, so Vex followed his lead and set upon removing his footwear. She turned her head over her shoulder and yelled for Pike, knowing that it would rouse the entire team.
She pushed his pant leg up and registered, almost as a side note, her surprise at how thin his calf was—for all their constant activity, she would have expected him to have more muscle definition than that. It was when she got his sock off that she was truly taken aback, however.
Vex gasped. Every inch of skin on his foot had become a dark ash grey and was scaly and tough like the tissue had died and started to desiccate, though there were no off odors or other signs of putrefaction. It wasn’t anywhere near cold enough for frost bite and the damaged skin transitioned back to its normal suppleness in such a neat and regular fashion at his ankle that it was hard to imagine any natural phenomenon being the cause. It seemed like a wound from necrotic magic.
The entire foot could not be dead, though, when she felt the bones in his instep moving below her fingers.
“What in the—” Her eyes widened in shock when those same bones started to grow lengthwise, stretching longer and longer until his foot was so grotesquely disproportioned as to be nearly the same length again as his lower leg. It lost its arch and heel and the bone structure thinned to a uniformly skinny width all the way down to his toes, a simple straight shot of bone extending out from the ankle.
“Aaurgh!” Percy cried. He kicked again, forcing the foot from her grasp and jolting her from her momentary stupor. She didn’t know what awful magic was crippling him, but she did know that something or some one was responsible for this. She pulled her head up to frantically scan their surroundings. Had she missed an assailant that had gotten to Percy while he slept?
The clang of armor at her back announced Pike’s arrival, and Vex wasted no time in leaping to action against the potential threat. “Check him for cursed items,” she directed Pike, and left Percy to her capable, healing hands. She rushed back to her own things, warning the rest of Vox Machina that they could be under attack, and armed herself with her bow in hand and a dagger at her hip, always there in case someone slipped past her defenses and got too close.
She nocked an arrow, ready to draw at a moment’s notice, and, aiming down her sightline into the darkness, she pushed out beyond their campsite, all senses trained on detecting nearby enemies. She asked Trinket to sniff out anyone he could find and sent him off to hunt through the field to her left. Out of the corner of her eye to her right she saw Vax and Scanlan covering the other compass directions, and Keyleth circled above them in her eagle form, giving them eyes in the sky and ready to provide backup to any one of them should they need it. Pike and Grog stayed at camp to protect their injured. Forged and honed through enough trials, they had learned each others’ capabilities and fought well as a team now. Nary a word needed to be spoken to organize them. They all knew what to do.
They had set up camp in a heavily treaded area of an open field where the grass came up only two thirds of the way to her knees. There was a forest about a half mile off to the west that stretched to the Ozmit Sea but if an enemy had made it to the trees then they had already escaped and there was nothing to be done about it. Alternatively, if they were still nearby, there were precious few places they could hide, but there was always the possibility of illusion. Boulders or pits could be magicked to look like flat, open ground, or an attacker could render themselves invisible. Because of this, Vex first and foremost relied on her ears, listening for any hint of movement as she traced a winding search pattern through the field that took her progressively further and further out from camp. She watched carefully with the keen vision bestowed to her by her elven heritage for any grass that seemed to be bending without cause or dust kicked up into the air.
There was a sudden rustle to her left, and she spun, drawing her bow in a split second to target the source of the noise. She held her breath, tense, ready to set her arrow loose. A movement in the grass—
—It was only a rabbit. It hopped away and she released her drawstring, falling back to her search.
The needling doubt that she could have let someone slip into camp drove her forward, but ten minutes into the hunt when she’d found no clues to suggest there was anyone else in the vicinity, she had to concede. If there had been a magic wielder that had gotten the drop on them, though why they would have wanted to hurt Percy like that she had no idea, chances were that they had gotten away at this point. With the adrenaline slowly leaving her system and recognizing the prospect of diminishing returns, she made her way back to camp in the strengthening dawn light, content to leave Trinket on the prowl. She saw that Keyleth, Scanlan, and Vax had also returned and had joined Pike and Grog in a small circle.
She hurried over to them. “I couldn’t find anyone, I’m assuming you found the same. How’s Percy?” She expected to see Percy at their feet and slowed her step when she realized he was not. Only Keyleth and Pike were sitting on the ground while the others stood around them. She glanced to Percy’s empty bedroll, and then quickly scanned the entire camp. Percy was nowhere to be found.
“Where’s Percy? Is he okay?” she asked, joining their circle. She was deeply confused; they were just standing there, looking at a wretched bird of all things that was either already dead or deserved to be put out of its misery.
Her brother unfolded an arm from across his chest to gesture down to the raven propped up on a flattened sack at his feet, expression serious. “That’s Percy. Does he look okay?”
Vex’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline. “The bird, is Percy?” she questioned skeptically. The mood was anxious among them and there was no reason for them to jest about something like this, but still Vex couldn't quite bring herself to believe Vax’s claim. It was only when she spied Percy’s bedclothes discarded in a pile behind Keyleth that the truth of it sunk in for her.
Her heart leapt into her throat, the situation immediately more serious than she’d realized. It was not the transformation itself that concerned her so, she’d been around shapeshifters long enough at this point to have become accustomed to such things, but rather the terrible state he was in. That was not a healthy raven before her. He was sprawled haphazardly on his side, wings outstretched at odd angles that bent his feathers. More alarming, though, was how deathly still he was save for a tremor that shook his small form. Vex leaned down to wave a hand in front of his face, and…nothing. She had no idea if he was even registering her presence.
“Gods! It was a polymorph then?”
Keyleth shook her head. “Something similar, maybe, but this is like no polymorph I’ve ever encountered. It doesn’t even feel like nature magic, I have no idea what it is.”
“He had no items on him, nothing that could have been cursed,” Scanlan supplied.
“We’re worried that it’s hurting him,” Pike added, voice wavering.
Vex agreed. “There’s nothing you can do? Pike, doesn’t your magic work on animals? Haven’t you healed Trinket before?”
“It does. But between Keyleth, Scanlan, and myself, we’ve tried everything we know how to do.” Pike informed her. “It’s like there’s nothing to heal or dispel. We can’t find anything wrong, and we can’t revert whatever’s transformed him.”
“There’s obviously something ,” Vex insisted, heart thudding in her chest. She could see no wounds, no feathers matted with blood, and she dare not move him for fear of what damage there might be internally, but she ever so lightly started to run the tips of her fingers down his back from the neck, feeling for anything abnormal that his feathers could be hiding. He trembled under her hand, muscles tight as her bowstring.
Percy immediately protested the touch, emitting a single caw of distress, and Vex pulled her hand back. It was a reaction, at least he wasn’t completely paralyzed, but not the one she wanted. She called up her own bit of healing magic into her hands and let it radiate into Percy, but, true to Pike’s experience, it dissipated, finding nothing to act upon.
“Percy, can you show us what hurts?” No response. His nearly black eyes, only a hint of difference between the iris and the pupil, looked blankly out at the space in front of him. Frustration pricked under her skin at not be able to reach him when he was right there in front of her.
“Can he even understand us?” Vex asked Keyleth.
“It’s hard to say for sure,” Keyleth told her. “I was just about to cast my speaking spell that lets me talk with animals, see if I could get through to him that way.”
“Do it,” Vax nodded his encouragement.
“All right.” Keyleth wove her magic around herself, and when it faded she leaned in closer to the raven laid out before her.
“Can you understand me now? Can you tell us what’s wrong?” she asked, in what sounded like normal Common to Vex. Percy’s shoulders twitched in a motion that was distinct from the continuous trembling, and Keyleth frowned. “Percy…” She slowly reached out a hand, and Percy let out a muffled croak that stilled her approach.
Vex straightened her shoulders, looking to Keyleth expectantly, and Keyleth’s brow furrowed.
“Did he say something?” Vax asked.
“ Wrong ,” Keyleth translated. “He just said… wrong .”
Percy still refused to move his head, but his voice came to sudden life with a string of cries, sharp in their insistence. Dismay grew on Keyleth’s face as she translated for rest of them.
“ Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Help. Wrong. Help .” Keyleth shook her head. “We’re trying to help, Percy, I’m trying. Can you tell us where it hurts?”
Another distressed croak. “ Broken ,” Keyleth translated.
Vax’s face became still and solemn in the way it did whenever he thought things had taken a turn for the worse.
Keyleth looked up to him with an expression of pained helplessness. “I don’t understand. None of his bones are broken. There’s nothing to heal!”
Vex’s mind raced, furiously brainstorming as Percy continued to shake. “Okay, so…where does that leave us? Physically he’s fine, but something is broken. Something is wrong…”
“Uh, yeah!” Grog chipped in. “What’s wrong is that Percy’s a bird .”
“Well, obviously,” Keyleth replied, throwing her hands up. “But—”
“Wait,” Vex jumped in and held up her hand. “Hold on. I think Grog’s onto something.”
“Of course I am.”
“I think we can all agree that Percy being a bird is not ideal, but that doesn’t explain why he’s acting like he’s in pain!” Keyleth pointed out.
“It could, though,” Vex countered. When she tried to consider things from Percy’s perspective and how she might feel in the same circumstances, rather than just going off of what she knew of shapeshifting from Scanlan and Keyleth, she thought it could make sense.
“He’s probably in shock from the transformation,” she said, a shiver running down her spine as her mind drew the connection between the miniature taloned feet before her and Percy’s foot distending like it was being pulled by some invisible torture device, “and now his body is wrong . Imagine you suddenly had a wing where you expected to have an arm.”
“I don’t have to imagine, I do it all the time,” Keyleth reminded her. “It’s not wrong, it’s just different.”
Vex nodded. “For you it is, but Percy may never been on the receiving end of transformation magic before in his life, and this would be a terrible first experience.”
Keyleth didn’t look convinced. “I don’t want to miss something important because we’re just assuming it’s nothing more than him not liking his current form. This,” she gestured to Percy, “is really—” and she silently mouthed the word ‘bad’, cognizant of her active speaking spell.
“I agree,” Vex acknowledged. “We shouldn’t let it rule out any other possibilities, but right now we don’t have—”
Percy let out another croak, more pitiful than the ones before, and Keyleth dug her nails into her temple. “He’s still asking for help.”
“Keyleth, this of it this way. Instead imagine that your hand was amputated. It doesn’t hurt, but you reflexively go to reach for something and it’s not there. You’d feel—”
“—broken,” Keyleth finished, sad realization spreading across her features. “Oh.”
“Muscle memory is a powerful thing. I’m able to hit my targets without thinking because, after so many years’ practice, my body’s grown so accustomed to the bow that it just knows what to do. Every time he breathes, let alone moves, his muscle memory must be screaming at him of the wrongness of it all. That could be why he’s so rigid and tense.”
“You know when you’re going down the stairs and you think there’s another step at the bottom but there’s not and when you hit the landing where you didn’t expect it to be you get thrown off-balance?” Pike spoke up. “Maybe it’s like that, but just continuously, all over his body.” Her nose wrinkled in sympathy. “So what do we do?”
They all looked to each other, hoping someone would have an idea.
“There is only one thing to do,” Vex concluded. “We need to get him back to his own body.”
Keyleth bit her lip. “The good news is that spells like this only tend to last for about an hour. Forcing something against its nature is difficult magic, it can only hold for so long until it gives way. Given that nothing else we’ve tried has worked, the default option would be to just wait it out.”
She turned to address Percy. “Okay, Percy? I’m sorry we can’t fix this faster, but you will be back to yourself, you just have to hold on. Is there anything you need, anything we can do to make this easier?”
Percy croaked, and with the way Keyleth’s face fell, Vex was pretty sure she didn’t need a translation.
Help.
🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦
The pit in Vex’s stomach expanded with every minute past the hour that had been the tentatively proposed expiration for the transformation spell. Another hour beyond that and they were forced to reckon with the reality that this curse wasn’t going to relinquish its hold on Percy so easily, leaving them back at square one and Percy continuing to suffer. Each member of Vox Machina had their own way of handling the stress. Keyleth paced back and forth in a way that was very reminiscent of Minxie, her saber-tooth tiger form. Vex and Pike kept watch over Percy, letting Vax and Scanlan take the lead on figuring out their next steps. Grog just wanted to hit something.
“I’m telling you,” Scanlan insisted, “it’s no coincidence that we end up in some ancient secret chamber of the Raven Queen’s and then a day later one of us poofs into a raven. That’s her thing. It’s literally what she is the queen of.”
“It makes sense,” Vax agreed, “but it doesn’t tell us how to reverse it. Another priest would have the best chance of knowing more, so we should be heading to the nearest temple.”
“Or go back to the ritual site while we’re still nearby, figure out what’s up with it,” Scanlan suggested.
“Those people got away with the artifact, I don’t know that there’s anything left to find,” Pike commented.
“And they could be anywhere at this point,” Grog lamented.
“I say we head straight back to Emon,” Keyleth put forth. “We have powerful allies with specialized knowledge, let’s use them.”
Vex was only half listening to the group debate. She sat off to the side with Percy, whose condition remained deeply concerning when he still either wouldn’t or couldn’t move, not even to turn or lift his head. She was growing increasingly anxious that that included refusing to eat or drink. It wasn’t scorching hot this early in the summer, but it was promising to be a warm day and the air was dry without the benefit of the humidity that graced the coastline. She had no idea how long birds could go without water and for all she knew he had already started off the day dehydrated. The last time he would have had a drink would have been sometime the day before.
Worse yet, she wouldn’t even be able to tell if severe dehydration was setting in given that its primary symptoms—lethargy, weakness, loss of coordination—would be near invisible in his already crippled state. She’d provided shade for him with a partially set up tent, but still, if she couldn’t get some water into him at some point, the situation was going to turn dire.
“Can we just get going already?” she asked the group. “We’re not doing Percy any good by just sitting here in the middle of nowhere.”
“We can as soon as we have a direction,” Vax responded.
“We need the most direct route to someone that can turn Percy back. We can’t afford a detour back to that chamber right now,” Vex told her brother.
“Well, that sounds like north back to Emon then.” Vax looked at his map. “We could take a chance that we could find a closer temple at the Emerald Outpost, but Emon is a certainty, and we have a number of options of people we already know that might be able to restore him.”
“What if we split up,” Scanlan suggested. “You get Percy back to Emon, and me and Pike could go back to the chamber, see what we can find. There could be information there that’s important for restoring him.”
“I kind of want to stay with Percy,” Pike told him. “I know I’m not doing any good, but just in case…I don’t want to leave him like this. But maybe Grog would come with you?”
“Let’s do it,” Grog agreed. “I can watch your back. With any luck those men are back there and we can have another go around. More likely to have some fun than just walking the main road back to Emon.”
Scanlan sighed, disappointed. “That works too, I guess.”
With a chorus of assents, Vox Machina set to packing up their camp and loading the horses. Since any touch or movement bothered Percy and they thought a horse’s gait would jostle him too much, Pike devised a means to carry him. She fashioned a small platform from a spare wooden shield from the bag of holding and tied rope into its corners that any of them could strap over their shoulders. While she was working on that, Vex lashed together a small frame from branches that could rest on top of the shield and block the sun to keep him cool.
When Keyleth dragged her pack past where Vex was sitting with Percy, Vex took the opportunity to flag her down.
“Keyleth, could you please be so kind as to inform Percy that I don’t care how miserable he is, it is hot and dry and he simply has to drink if he doesn’t want to die out here.”
Keyleth’s eyes went wide. “He’s at risk of dying?”
“Not yet,” Vex backtracked. “Nothing to throw the alarm up about just yet, but eventually we’re going to have a problem and I’d rather not let it get anywhere near that point. You actually got him to say something, you’re the only one of us who can reach him, so if you could just stress to him that he has to drink something…”
Keyleth shook her head. “I can’t, though. My speaking spell wore off a while ago. It only lasts for a couple minutes, and I can’t cast it again for another day.”
Vex squeezed her eyes shut. “Damn it.”
Keyleth’s posture crumbled. She searched in vain for any sign of life in their friend. “I’m sorry. I would if I could. He’s so…it’s like he’s not even with us, like he’s locked up in his own head. I’m worried about him.”
“Me too.”
A heavy silence fell between them.
“Would you mind staying with him for a few minutes?” Vex asked. “I just need to pack a couple things.”
“Of course.”
Vex handed most of her rations over to Grog to tide them over on their extended trip, sloppily assembled her pack only to have to re-pack it to make everything fit, and then buckled it to her horse’s saddle. When she returned, she was struck with the sight of not one, but two ravens, and that was two ravens too many. She was immediately fearful that another of her team had fallen to the same affliction, and she reflexively looked for her brother. She found him just off to her right behind a tent, helping Scanlan divide up the gear. He was fine, it wasn’t him, and with that small reassurance, her brain started working again. She realized that the newcomer must be their newly absent Ashari and that there was no cause for alarm specifically when it was her who was suddenly a bird. Vex shook her head. Magic .
A shallow bowl of water had appeared next to Percy’s head and Keyleth was alternating between drinking from it in a slow, exaggerated fashion and glaring expectantly at Percy. When that got no reaction, she tapped her beak against the ceramic rim, producing a bright clinking sound, and then she flung a few drops of water outside the bowl to splash on his face.
Vex watched, disheartened, as Percy did no more than blink, and a minute later Keyleth re-materialized in front of her, frowning.
“It was a good thought,” Vex told her, laying her hand on Keyleth’s shoulder, hoping she wasn’t being too hard on herself. “We can try again later.”
They bid a temporary farewell to Grog and Scanlan, and then the three half-elves and one gnome, with one feathered Lord of Whitestone in tow, continued north on the Emerald Path. They took turns carrying Percy in the shallow dip of the shield while the other three rode.
They inevitably passed travelers on the road, and when they did, the passing curious looks they got from them, so incongruous to the seriousness of their predicament, made Vex grit her teeth. Her jaw grew sore from it, and she resisted the impulse to shake the next nosey person she caught casually peering at them until they recognized the straits Percy was in. Intellectually, she knew that the gravity of their situation was invisible to anyone else, that at first glance they appeared no more than a mildly interesting oddity, parading around with an ornamental dead raven in a palanquin-like carrier. But even so, she shouldn’t help taking it personally and feeling like the looks they garnered were of a deliberate disregard; they were too similar to the looks that she’d been subject to on a daily basis growing up as a half-blood in elven society, strange enough to draw attention but undeserving of recognition. They made her ache.
Their time on the road seemed to stretch on forever when Vex had nothing but her worry to occupy her thoughts, but Keyleth eventually pulled them off to the side of the road to take a short rest. As soon as she dismounted her horse she carried the water bowl over to where Keyleth had set Percy down.
“Surely you have to be thirsty by now,” Vex told the bird, angling the bowl to dip just the tip of his beak into the water. “Drink. You have to drink. For god’s sake Percival!” she raised her voice, trying to stir some action in him, but he remained unresponsive.
“I could hold his beak open so you could pour some into his mouth,” Keyleth suggested.
“I’m considering that a last resort,” Vex told her. “I don’t want to force him, especially when he’s like this. I can’t say I know how dangerous it is for birds if they choke under normal conditions, and, like this, I don’t know if he even has the raven’s reflexes that would clear any water from his airways. If his reflexes are confused or weak, he could suffocate. Before we got to that point, I think it would be better for you to just fly him directly back to Allura, as fast as you can, and we pray that she’s able to help him.”
Keyleth paled at the idea of being solely responsible for Percy while he was in such a precarious state, but she told Vex resolutely, “I can do that. I could carry him in my talons. But I can’t really check on him while I’m flying with him, I wouldn’t know if he’d gotten worse until we landed.”
“Let’s keep that as a back-up plan, then. We still have time, he could still improve,” Vex said, though she didn’t feel the optimism in her words.
Vex returned to her mare and tended to the horse on autopilot. She unsaddled her to give her back a break, checked her hooves for stones, and provided water for her. It was the routine she’d learned many years ago from a horse trainer in Syngorn named Master Chestra, whom she’d often visited when she needed an excuse to step away from her father’s house. On mornings when she didn’t have school she’d wander over to the stable, drape her arms over the fence, and watch him work with the gorgeous animals. She’d marveled at the connection he had with them and how he could communicate with them with body language alone. Whenever he’d had a free moment for questions, he’d kindly obliged her curiosity, and that was how she’d learned her horsemanship.
Vex snapped off a few chunks of carrot and held them out one at a time, first to each side of the horse’s shoulders and then down between her front legs so that the mare had to bend her long, flexible neck all the way around to reach for the treats. It was something Master Chestra had taught her as a way to encourage a horse to stretch its neck.
She was absent-mindedly patting the horse’s shoulder while the mare loudly crunched away on the carrot pieces when an idea struck her. There was another exercise she’d learned from him, and if, just maybe, it could work on a bird as well as a horse...
“There’s something I want to try,” she told Keyleth, returning to her and Percy, “but I don’t think Percy’s going to like it. Could you…you can probably read his body language better than I can, can you tell me if you think I’m going too far?”
“Uh, yeah, okay. What are you going to do?”
“Something that may help him relax and work through whatever’s got him locked up so tightly.” She already knew he didn’t want to be touched, but Vex chose an initial target that was minimally different from his human body in the hopes that that would be less offensive to him. Starting below the shoulder blades, she ran a fingertip down his spine with light but steady pressure, not wanting to tease. As soon as she made contact he started to tremble again, but she didn’t let that deter her this time. She kept the motion of her finger consistent and predictable as it smoothed over the silky feathers down his back.
“Easy,” she tried to assuage him. “I know, dear, I know.”
She didn’t know what was going on in his head, if perhaps he could be dissociating from the new body he’d been forced into, but… “We need you functioning, Percy, for your own safety. Whether you like it or not, that means being present and alert in your current form.” She switched to stroking his breastbone with the back of her finger, then moved on to the crown of his head. Her goal with each touch was to force him to be aware of his body if he wasn’t already. They’d given him time and he wasn’t working through it himself, so now she thought she needed to push.
She glanced to Keyleth before going in on his shoulder, assuming his wings would be particularly sensitive for him, likely a good chunk of what he had earlier described as wrong . Sure enough, the moment she touched his shoulder joint a noise of protest came from his throat, though he didn’t voice it. The muscles under her fingers were rock hard, shaking with tension. If birds were anything like people, they must have been aching with how taut he was holding them.
To even attempt what she had in mind, she needed him to loosen up, not fully but just a bit, so she ignored Percy’s muffled protests and massaged the joint, just until it showed some give when she pushed on the muscle around it.
“There you go,” she told him. “I have to imagine that feels at least a little bit better?”
She moved on to his neck, massaging in small circles until the muscles weren’t quite so tight. Every gesture had to be small and precise when she could cradle Percy’s entire body in one arm.
Then she was ready to try and get his head moving.
She gently repositioned him on the shield with his head hanging over the side and then, with one hand underneath to stabilize his chest, she pressed on the back of his head in short bursts, looking for the minimal amount of pressure it would take to get him to yield. Not much, it turned out. He didn’t resist her, but when she started to actually move his head he opened his mouth and cried out, loud and sharp. She immediately removed her hands from him, but he stayed where she left him, so it wasn’t the position itself that was paining him. Rather, it seemed to be the act of moving itself that he objected to so strongly.
Vex bit her lip. “Should I stop?” she asked Keyleth, who was watching the whole thing next to her.
“I…I think it’s no small thing that would get him to cry out like that, not with how quiet he's been otherwise. But Percy’s also strong, and he can take a lot. If you think this could help him…I know he can’t, but if he could make the choice for himself I think he’d tell you to keep going. Don’t underestimate his trust in you.”
A bubbly warmth blossomed in her chest (he trusted her? they certainly worked well together…) only for it to immediately curdle into gnawing doubt. Whatever trust she had earned with him, what if she was only abusing it now, putting him through this for nothing?
But stopping now meant giving up the whole thing, and it’s not as if they had a better idea, or any other idea really, other than a gamble on finding someone beyond Pike’s already considerable ability that could expediently restore him.
Maybe the massage helped a little, maybe it hurt a little, but that was only leading up to being able to try the Master Chestra’s technique with him. Ultimately, what she needed for the technique was for Percy to be able to move his head on his own and they weren’t there yet.
“There’s a strong mind-body connection in a horse,” she remembered Chestra instructing her one chilly morning while he held tight to the lead rope of a horse dancing in place and repeatedly jerking its head up and away. “When they get wound up and anxious like this, there’s a feedback cycle between their body and their brain that spirals in a negative direction. They’re no longer paying attention, they’re not thinking, they’re just caught up in their instinct to get away, prey animals that they are. But you can break the cycle if you can get them to lower their head. Not yank their head down mind you, that won’t do a thing, but if can get them to choose to lower their head, that movement helps them relax and focus so that they can recover and realize there’s no danger to run from.”
Vex still believed it was worth trying if she could just get him to work through whatever bothered him so much about moving his head, so she took a deep breath and nodded at Keyleth. “Okay.”
She pushed him through a small range of motion and steeled her heart against the way he cried.
The rest of their team came rushing over, alerted by the noise, and Keyleth had to wave them away with half an explanation so they wouldn’t crowd them.
Percy’s protests soon died down, though, and she was relieved when he started letting her move his head without vocal complaint. “That’s it, there you go.” She now had a lifeless doll in her hands rather than a rigid statue. It wasn’t what she wanted, but it was progress.
“Now, the hard part,” Vex informed her spectators. How was she going to get him to move his head on his own? She had nothing to incentivize him with when he had no interest in food. Ultimately, it was going to come down to him and if he would choose to follow her lead, even when she asked him to do the very same thing he had a fierce aversion to. All she could do was ask.
This would be so much easier if she could actually talk to him, but as it was, and not knowing what kind of intelligence currently lived behind that unreadable gaze, she’d have to teach him what she wanted in a way she hoped even a raven could learn. Giving him a touch target would be easiest, she decided. She lightly tapped him on the tip of his beak with her finger and clicked her tongue to give this gesture special meaning. Then she drew her finger a half inch away and pushed from the other side of his beak to bring him back into contact with her.
“Good,” she told him, hoping her tone of voice would convey to him that she was pleased. “That’s what I want. My finger’s the target. You just have to touch my finger.”
She repeated the exercise with him. Touch, click, move, touch, relax. Touch, click, move, touch, relax. Then she was ready to test him. She tapped his beak, clicked, moved her finger just a millimeter away, and waited to see if he’d follow on his own.
Percy lay there, still except for the way he continued to tremble.
“We’re so close!” Vex insisted. “You asked us for help, this is me trying to help you. But I need you to work with me. I need you to trust me, Percy.”
She tried again and waited to see if he’d follow her. “You can do this, I know you can.”
This time, he shifted his head just the small amount needed to reach her, and it was all she could do to keep herself from leaping to her feet and whooping with joy.
“You got him to move!” Keyleth exclaimed.
“Yes! Excellent! That’s exactly what I wanted,” Vex encouraged.
She coaxed him past his reluctance into bending his neck more and more until she hit up upon his limit with his head turned almost squarely to the left. He should have had the flexibility to go much further and rotate his head nearly all the way back, but she thought it likely not a coincidence that he refused to go beyond the more limited range of motion he had as a human. That was perfectly fine with her, though, what he was giving her was enough.
Finally, she was ready to ask him to lower his head. She almost didn’t want to, didn’t want to be disappointed to find that it was no different than any of the other exercises they’d already been doing and that it had been a young girl’s folly to think otherwise.
She held her breath and presented him with a final target down below the lip of the shield. He dipped his beak down, paused, seeming to gauge the distance, and then continued to drop his head all the way down, bottoming out in a decent stretch to meet her. When he did, a shudder rippled through his body from shoulder to tail and the dense weave of small contour feathers that covered his head and torso raised up off his skin, giving him a fluffy silhouette.
Vex’s eyes widened in surprise when Percy made a series of clicking noises, very different in character from what they’d heard from him thus far, and he lifted his wings from where they had been haphazardly sprawled at his sides and dragging at his shoulder joints. He stretched them out to their full, luxurious extent, and then, in one smooth motion, folded them into their intended resting position along his back and sides as naturally if he’d been born with them.
“You did it!” Keyleth exclaimed, grabbing Vex’s hand in hers, and Vex squeezed back.
“Brilliant!” Vax chimed in. “You’ve been holding out on me, sister. I never knew you had such talented hands. I could have used a good massage after I jumped out of the palace window, you know.”
“Shut it,” Vex told him, but she had a hard time faking annoyance at him when she was brimming with accomplishment and relief. She couldn’t believe her idea had worked at all, let alone this well. Her fingers explored along his back again, this time mindful of his wings, and she found that all the tension he had been holding had melted out of him. He no longer shook. He was…not content, there was still a sullen quality about him, but for the first time in the hours since he’d been transformed he was at ease and resting and Vex could breathe easier.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she whispered under her breath.
“How did that make such a difference?” Pike asked, trying to put words to what she’d just witnessed. “It’s like you…released him. You have to teach me.”
“I don’t really know, to be perfectly honest. I think it just helped to cut through whatever mental block he was caught up in, get him re-centered in this body. There’s not really anything to teach. He just had to choose to drop his head."
While she explained this to Pike, she refilled the bowl they’d been using as a water dish, and this time when she offered it to Percy, he drank. She waited until she was sure he was done, letting him have his fill, and then grabbed hold of it, intending to move it off to the side so it wasn’t directly in his face. Before she could, however, Percy latched onto her pinky finger with his beak and gently tugged.
Vex looked down into the eyes that were looking right back up at her. “All right, I’ll leave it. I wasn’t going to move it far.”
“No,” Keyleth told her. “I think he’s trying to say thank you.”