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enkelimagnus · 3 years

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A Castle in the Forest

Percy x Vex’ahlia, Chapter 9, 3123 words,

A Modern AU, in which Vex is a park ranger taking over the Alabaster Sierras post, and finds much more than she bargained for

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“Well, hello, there. Who are you?”

The question is asked in two voices, one humanoid enough and the other dark and deep and fiendish. It resounds around her as if the room is much bigger than it actually is.

Vex can’t breathe. She’s made the biggest mistake of her life, and she’s going to die. This is the fiend, it has to be. The barbed devil from before seems ridiculously small and weak. It took seconds to bring it down, even if it was three against one. This one though? There’s no way Vex is coming out of here alive, if they start to fight.

Their arms are to their side, one of their hands resting on something on a belt around their hips. Sword hilt? She can’t think about what else it could be.

The door behind her is open, so there is somewhere for her to go. She could try to book it and run but she doubts she’ll be able to make it back out, unless there’s some sort of magical field keeping the fiend inside. She might make it to the tunnel.

Vex tries to make out what the creature’s shoes are, hoping desperately that they would make it hard for them to run after her but the smoke billowing on the ground makes it hard to see. The edges of the smoke are starting to reach Vex’s feet, too. She doesn’t want to find out what will happen if they start wrapping around her legs. She takes a step back.

“You came into my home, the least you could do is tell me your name,” they continue, taking a step forward, keeping the distance between them equal.

The unilateral blinking is unnerving. Vex has never seen something like this. She doesn’t remember learning about it in any class she’s taken either. It’s deeply wrong, but she can’t tell what’s happening, or what it is.

She doesn’t want to give them her name. Names have power, she knows that. She’s learned that. Staying silent isn’t a great option either.

“Wade,” she blurts out. She has no idea where it comes from, but it seems to work. Maybe she has a little bit of luck. Hopefully, she hasn’t burned it all on lying about her name.

“Wade…” The creature shifts a little, hand tilting to the other side, as they repeat the name she’s given them. “What brings you to me, today? You look… emotional.”

They would be emotional if they were in front of something like this fiend. A bit of rage rises inside of her. How dare they call her emotional? But she swallows it down. It’s not the fucking time. She can’t let her emotions ruin this for her too.

The clothing on them is beautiful, though old. It has seen wear without care for a while. The blue color is faded and the gold thread is scuffed, dulled. They look like a strange, faded version of a noble.

If they're noble, and standing in the basement dungeon of Castle Whitestone, there’s not a hundred different options on who they could be.

“Are you a De Rolo?” She asks bluntly.

A ripple of emotions erupts on the right side of the creature’s face, the side where the eye is blue. They seem relieved at first, then sad. Then worried. It's a rollercoaster on one side of the face. Once again, it feels wrong to Vex.

It does give her incentive to keep talking though.

“You have the clothing of a noble, but it’s old. And there haven’t been nobles in Whitestone for years,” she points out. “You have to be one of them.”

She wishes she’d researched them more, right now. If she knew their names, she could try to guess which one they were, she could try to appeal to their past to an extent. But she doesn’t know. All she knows is that this thing might be a de Rolo. Were they a fiend all along? Had they snapped and killed the entire family in one go after posing as one of them for so long?

Long enough to look like a twenty-year-old human. Vex is almost impressed. That sure was a long con. She wouldn’t have been able to handle pretending to be someone else for decades. She’d tried that for a couple of years as a teenager and it hadn’t worked.

“Are you from Whitestone, Wade?” De Rolo starts again. They don’t answer anything to Vex’s comments, but she’s seen enough. They shift and lean forward, taking a deep, loud inhale. “You don’t smell like the city. Like the dust and rot of this godsforsaken ugly little town. You…” They inhale again deeply. “You smell like woods. Like wild magic. Like Fey… it’s faded but it’s there, Wade. Why do you smell like Fey, when you’re obviously not one?”

Vex feels nauseous suddenly. She smells like fey. It has to be Saundor’s influence, still stuck in her, on her. His magic, his energy, his essence, wrapped around her and smothering hers still. It’s been seven fucking months. How long until she’s free? How many baths until she stops smelling like him?

The creature smirks. “See? It’s fun when someone reminds you of a painful past, isn’t it, little othlir?”

Vex takes another step back. She tries to reassure herself that they don’t know her, the term othlir is commonly used enough by full-blooded elves that it would make sense she’d been referred to by it once. It doesn’t have to mean they know her.

She raises her hands. “I don’t want to fight you,” she says. Her voice manages to be unwavering. “I will not tell anyone you’re here. I just want to leave.”

She wants to run home to Vax and never leave. She wants to stay alive. She wants to run from those words and the knowledge this thing seems to have. She wants to go and scrub Saundor off her once again. At least she doesn’t have to be careful of her burns anymore. They’ve healed months ago.

The creature’s mouth shifts as they smirk at her. It’s distorted and, once again, wrong. Vex’s hair rises on the back of her neck. They look predatory. And she’s the prey. She takes another step back. The creature follows, not letting her put distance between them.

She’s reaching for her bow when something changes. The black eye flickers, the darkness filling it seems to be shoved away and it turns to the same blue the other one is. The creature hisses loudly, bending on themselves. Something’s happening to them.

“RUN!” The voice is broken and desperate, but lacking the darker, deeper fiendish tone from before. It’s not both voices anymore, just one. And they seem to want her to leave.

Blue eyes meet hers as the body contorts, the smoke wrapping around it almost angrily. A struggle is happening. Vex feels so deeply out of her depths. She watches as their eyes flicker between blue with white sclera and fully black, the hissing resounding in Vex’s ears. They look in pain.

“Please,” they whisper again. When the eyes are blue, they look desperate.

Something snaps and Vex starts moving. It’s instinctive and she’s through the door before she can really realize what she’s doing.

The hissing gets louder and suddenly, there’s a beast snarling behind her, loud and angry. She jumps through the crumbled part of the wall and starts running down the tunnel. It’s dark and empty and the noises resound around her. They’re everywhere, the fiend is everywhere.

She turns with the tunnel’s path and she can see the outside light. She’s almost out. And once she’s out… Hopefully, it won’t be able to follow her past the tunnel’s exit. Once she’s out in the world, she hopefully will be okay.

She’s almost halfway there when a loud bang thunders through the tunnel. Her ears ring with the loudness of it. Barely a second later, her shoulder explodes with pain.

She screams. Tears rise in her eyes from the pain and she stumbles. Somehow, thank the Gods, she doesn’t fall. Her legs push her towards the outside. She can’t look behind herself. She can’t do anything but cry and run.

Vex bolts out of the tunnel and keeps going until she can’t stop anymore. Her clothing is dark with blood, the pain is horrible and she’s aware the only reason she’s alive right now is that it didn’t hit major blood vessels. Or at least, not too much.

Fuck. She stops for a second and reaches up. Her hands stumble through the motions of her Cure Wounds spell. She’s vaguely aware that she’s making noise, desperate noises of pain and fear. The magic wraps around her and seeps into the wound, managing to repair some of the damage but it’s not enough.

She isn’t sure how much more she can heal herself, and all her potions are at the cabin. She’s vulnerable, bleeding, leaving a trail behind herself, and the Parchwood Timberlands are notoriously dangerous. With a shoulder like this, she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to draw her bow correctly. She’s virtually defenseless.

She needs Vax. She reaches down for her phone. Thankfully, it’s intact and in her pocket. Her fingers manage to find the right places to click to send him her geolocation before she switches to her contact list. She hits ‘call’ and waits, and prays. She prays to anyone that can hear that he has his phone, that he has service, and that he’s still at the cabin and not in town the way he said he would be.

The call rings in the silence, for so long. Vex is almost certain he’s not going to pick up when he does.

“Vex?”

“I’m injured,” she blurts out. “Sent you my location. I don’t know where I am or how to get home, and I don’t think I can draw my bow.” Her voice is shaking.

This isn’t the first time she calls him in despair. Tears sting her eyes again at the thought. Useless.

“I’m on my way,” he promises. “I’ll take a healing potion.”

He hangs up then, probably to get everything she needs and get to her faster, but the silence is overwhelming. Vex looks behind herself, searching for a blue coat and dark smoke.

She desperately throws herself in her awareness. The fiend shows on her radar, but it’s far away. She finds herself relaxing a bit. Pain shoots through her shoulder again. She looks down at the hole in her coat, then at the hole in her body. It’s unlike anything she’s seen before.

What in the Nine Hells did this to her? Not an arrow, unless it was heavily modified. And the loud thundering bang… She can’t identify it. She knows a lot about weapons but that noise, she’d never heard before.

Another question that lacks answers.

She’s not going to get any answer right now anyway. She’s hopefully far enough away that she won’t end up face to face with the fiend and whatever caused that wound for now. She sighs heavily. With all of this, she hasn’t hunted. Fuck. She’s useless. She can only sit there and mope at her own stupidity.

Snow starts falling again as she waits, covering her clothes and her hair with little flakes of pure white that eventually melt from her body heat. She should be aware of the beauty of it, but right now, she’s not able to enjoy this. She’s hurt and tired and her mind won’t stop yelling at her. Vax is taking so much time.

She should check where she is. She doesn’t. Vax will find her eventually, he’s not that terrible in nature. She needs to stop giving him so little credit. He’s saved her enough times to prove his skills.

Everything is silent as the snow falls on her, and she sits there, quiet. She’s breathing. She’s okay. She didn’t die. That’s already something, right? She wishes she could stop her mind from working right now. It won’t shut up.

She doesn’t know how long she waits. She refuses to check her phone if it isn’t ringing. It’s not. She only has Vax after all, who else would make it ring? She just… sits there and waits, cold and tired and quiet.

The crunching of feet on snow makes her snap her head to see what’s coming. It’s Vax, all dressed in his black clothing, like a large ink stain on the white of the snow, purposefully not stealthy. Probably so she won’t shoot him. Smart.

Vex should be happier to see him. She’s not. It’s a bitter relief.

His eyes stop on the red stain of blood around her shoulder and barely move from that.

“I’ve given myself a Cure Wounds,” she calls out. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

Vax nods quietly and hands her the red healing potion. She uncorks it and swallows. It’s sour and sweet at once, warming her from the inside out, despite not being heated. She feels the warmth seep into her bones and gather around her shoulder, where the wound is.

The pain disappears. She doesn’t look to see if it’s completely healed yet. She doesn’t want to take off too many layers while in the snow.

“What happened?” Vax asks after a second, when she puts the empty glass vial in her pocket and stands up, probably looking much better than when he found her.

Vex sighs and picks up her bow. “I went after a fiend.”

Vax blinks at her, then rolls his eyes. “You, alone, against a fiend? Vex….”

“It was a mistake, I get it,” Vex snaps and starts walking. “I’m lucky I made it out alive. That’s what you wanna hear?” She hisses.

There’s a bit of bewildered silence. “Are you okay?”

“I think the potion healed the last of the damage,” Vex replies. She knows that’s not what he meant, but she doesn’t want to talk about her stupid feelings. Especially not right now, when he seems so fine about it all.

Vex keeps going forward, until she realizes she can’t hear his crunchy footsteps anymore. She turns around. He’s standing a hundred feet back, arms crossed.

“What the fuck are you doing?” She shouts.

Vax sighs heavily. “You’re going the wrong way, stubby,” he huffs.

Embarrassment burns hot on Vex’s cheeks. Useless, she can’t stop being useless. She starts moving back towards him.

“Tell me about the fiend,” Vax says once she reaches him. “I thought you’d dealt with one already a few days ago.”

Vex exhales. “I did. A Barbed Devil that had seemingly killed the ranger before me, Regae. I wasn’t alone. I found two others to help me, out-of-towners.” She explains. “I thought we were done.”

She tells him the rest of the story, at least the big lines. She doesn’t tell him she was screaming in the snow, or that she was searching for Saundor when she felt the fiend. She does tell him about Keyleth, about the path, about the fiend. The fiend that might actually be a person.

He’s silent while she talks, and she’s just done with the story of the wound and how she can’t tell what did it when they make it home.

Vax helps her out of her heavy coat and out of her blood-drenched shirt and undershirt. He draws her a bath and takes care of the stains on her clothing. Vex curls up on herself in the hot water. He takes care of her and her things efficiently and Vex wants to cry again. She should be able to do this by herself.

“Your things are gonna dry out,” Vax says, peeking out of the door of the bathroom. “I’m going out to hunt for that meat. I’m taking the crossbow that’s under the bed.”

“Be careful!” She calls after him.

He mumbles something she can’t really make out and starts walking away. The door slams and his footsteps disappear and then there’s only silence. Vex exhales. There’s a new fiend. It’s much stronger than the Barbed Devil. She’s going to need Pike and Grog on her side again. Maybe even more people. She’ll need to go back to the temples and ask for more. Fuck. She isn’t looking forward to that.

She closes her eyes. What was that thing? All that black smoke looked magical, but the body… the body was humanoid. The pale face, with those sharp features. They looked young, and humanoid. Blue eyes… Flickering between blue and black. And the two voices. The normal one, and the fiendish one.

Fuck. There’s a De Rolo in Castle Whitestone, and they might be possessed. They have a weapon that makes holes in people’s bodies, holes unlike anything she’s ever seen, unlike arrows from bows or bolts from crossbows.

The crossbow that’s under the bed.

There might be a crossbow under the bed. But there’s also Fenthras. And Vax might have seen it.

Panic overtakes Vex and she bolts out of the bath, opens the door and throws herself to the bed to pull the case out. She’s dripping water everywhere, and she’s thankful for the fire, because else she’d be freezing but that’s not what matters now. The case is there, a little dusty, except for the places where her fingers have undone the latches. She repeats her usual motions and opens the case.

It’s there. It’s there, in all of its glory. Vex feels like she’s breathing again.

Since the first day she saw it, in Saundor’s hands, she’s been in awe of it. Still now, it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. Verdant green, dark brown leather, golden bronze inlay. The craftsmanship is breathtaking. It seems to breathe and shift on its own, alive with its own strange consciousness. Vex wonders if it knows it isn’t Saundor’s anymore.

She closes the case back and puts it under the bed again. She dries herself off and puts on some clothes. She doesn’t bother with stays right now, Just a shirt and some pants. She’s not going back outside.

Trinket comes out of a hiding spot he’s found under one of the chairs to climb on her lap and snuggle into her. Maybe she’s calming down a little now. She yawns.

When Vax comes back, he finds her buried under blankets, curled up on the bed, fast asleep. Trinket naps against her and she seems deep enough in her rest that he doesn’t disturb her to ask questions about why Saundor’s bow is under her bed. That’s for another day. A day where they both feel less like they’re teetering on the edge of a cliff.

#perc'ahlia #vex'ahlia #percy de rolo #vox machina #critical role #mine #fic

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irarelypostanything · 5 years

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Slice of Life[10]

Clarence watched the Sacramento lights in his rearview mirror, the towering buildings that stood alongside I80 slowly receding into the distance. He saw the Sacramento Regional Transit station pass him on the left, then picked up speed to merge right as far as he could go. He remembered the rush of the cars. He remembered taking a last look at the exit. Then, when he returned to his apartment, he closed his eyes and tried to remember that drive.

It was the last time he ever took it.

Clarence looked outside his window, and listened. A couple was arguing nearby. He heard a female voice shout something about never texting. He heard a male voice shout something about never caring. Clarence tuned that out, laid on his floor, stared at his ceiling, and waited.

He didn’t count how many seconds he lay there, staring into nothing, but then he picked up his phone and made a call. Dan. Seven rings. Clarence didn’t bother to leave a voicemail.

The actions that followed were well-known and well-documented, unlike Clarence’s thought process. It was verified, both by police investigators and the local gun store, that the shotgun Clarence used to kill himself was legally purchased and properly sold.

[Jake]

The team spent another day arguing politics, religion, and Game of Thrones.

“We’re going to try something different,” said Andy. They were at the meeting room again. “Everyone will get one minute, only you, no interruption. You will tell the room how you feel, you will be completely honest, and then we will go to the next person.”

He motioned to Kevin, whose jet black hair had noticeably more gray strands in it than it had a week ago.

“Jake,” said Kevin, “when I look at you, I don’t see a person. I see a quintessential Trump supporter, the human embodiment of the racist, sexist, self-absorbed idiot who believes so blindly in his own importance that he re-tweets hate speech to rack likes instead of taking the five seconds it requires to realize it’s ACTUAL fake news originating from far right white supremacist fucks. He’s turning this entire country into a collection of horrible, ignorant, bigoted people who deserve to be imprisoned for their crimes against humanity. I hate you, I hate everything you stand for, and the real reason I refuse to go to the gun range with you isn’t because I actually care that much about gun control, but because I know I would not be able to resist the temptation to shoot you in your stupid fucking face.”

“Time,” said Andy. “Jake, go ahead.”

“Kevin,” said Jake, “when I look at you, I don’t see a person. I see an overgrown man-child liberal effeminate soy boy fuckface who thinks he knows everything about politics because of the 30 seconds it takes him to type huffingtonpost.com into a web browser. You liberal assholes act like you’re the party of love and tolerance, then you literally assault people you disagree with and call everything you remotely disagree with hate speech before banning them into the oblivion. I’m glad you brought up that you don’t care about gun control because it’s unclear to me what you even stand for from one day to the next. Seriously? What do you actually care about? I feel like you care more about making violent and offensive threats against Trump supporters because you think they’re so violent and offensive than you care about actual policy or...what’s the word...politics.”

“Time,” said Andy, “Amy, go ahead.”

“I don’t just hate both of you,” said Amy, as she pointed to Jake and Kevin, “I actually hate all of you. Two-party politics is just another dick-waving contest invented by Master Dick to distract us from the fact that the roads are still bumpy, our debts are still unpaid, and the plane we spent most of our careers contributing to just crashed straight into the fucking ground because instead of polishing and securing our code base, we were standing here threatening each other’s families for what essentially amounts to fuck nothing.”

“Time,” said Andy. “You know what? I don’t think it’s necessary to continue. You three, take the day off. Come back when you’re ready to work.”

“That’s all it takes?” asked Jake. “We should have had this conversation sooner.”

“While you’re off, though, can you pick up Nora from the airport?”

“If I pick her up,” asked Ryan, “can I take the day off as well?”

“No,” said Andy, “you’re still one of the three only software engineers in this building who understands the difference between unsigned int and uint32_t.”

[Nora]

It was just like so many nights before in Midtown. They started by getting really drunk at University of Beer. Then they walked down the street and got really drunk at Coin Op. Then they took another walk and got really drunk at Cafeteria 15L.

“This is what friends are for,” said Kevin. They were sitting in 15L, and their conversation was hard to hear over the dozens of well-dressed tweens who were wearing glowing bracelets and equally glowy headphones. “Friends get really fucked up together.”

“You know what?” said Jake, who had now consumed five 18-ounce beers and three ultra-sweet, diabetes-inducing beverages called crushed meads, “I love you guys. I even love you, Kevin.”

“I love you too, man,” said Kevin. “Also you, Amy.”

“Please don’t touch me,” said Amy. Amy had driven there, and had subsequently consumed 4.5 drops of beer.

“To sobriety!” said Nora, clinking her glass with Amy’s. Nora had consumed eight glasses of red wine, which had cost her the rough San Francisco software engineer’s salary of like six cents.

It was just like so many nights before in Midtown, only nothing felt real about it. There would come another time when they weren’t here, and then the others would get overworked and blow off steam at yet another bar in Sacramento.

But not Nora.

Nothing about it felt real to her. It’s like they were going through the motions of buying drinks, buying food, being friends. But when the time came and it was the day to leave again, these old friends would serve no other purpose until the next time she returned.

Still, things were say cheaper than they were in San Francisco. Nora figured she may as well make the best of it.

[Amy]

Early the next morning, Andy opened his office door to find Amy sitting in his seat.

“Amy!” he said, his voice as irritating and as patronizing as ever. “Why are you...why are you in my chair?”

Amy stood. “I’ve been thinking about something,” she said. She picked up one of Andy’s whiteboard markers, erased two weeks of math equations and process flow diagrams from Andy’s whiteboard, and began to draw.

“This is the hardware card.” She drew a box. “Data feeds from that card into my adapter. Other portions, too...my adapter. “ She drew more boxes. “Geolocation? My adapter. The other card? Guess what. My adapter.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I realized there’s a bottleneck,” said Amy. She grabbed another one of Andy’s markers from his desk and violently crossed out the box for her adapter. Then she drew sad faces over every other box.

“Associate software engineer,” said Amy. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“Yes, that’s-”

“That’s my rank. And it’s puzzling...every major system you need for a 25.6 million dollar demo depends on software I, an associate software engineer, will provide to you. You know what I think?”

“Yes, I-”

“I think you need me. But propping up a 25.6 million dollar demo doesn’t sound like a very associate software engineer thing to do, now does it?”

Andy’s face reddened. “I’ll see what I can do.”

[Kevin]

The further west on I80 you went, the better it became. The horrific hellscape of North Highlands became the slightly more tolerable nowhere land of Citrus Heights. The nowhere land of Citrus Heights became the gorgeous mall town of Roseville, then the historic mining sites of Rocklin. From there it was a few unfamiliar places, and then...if you went up far enough…

Auburn. The indescribable beauty of Auburn.

There were hiking sites. There were lakes and trails, peaks and dams, preserves and falls. It was just far enough away that Kevin felt he never had reason to visit it, but then he found a reason. He remembered going there, on a warm spring morning, walking along a short trail, and then saying goodbye to Clarence one last time before they dropped earth above the place where his body rested.

Kevin brought three red roses to the spot where Clarence’s tombstone stood. Clarence always used to say that flowers were for wusses, but Kevin figured he wasn’t going to make fun of him anytime soon.

“Clarence,” said Kevin, laying the flowers down, “you’re one of the only two people at my company I ever cared about, the one friend who really had a sense of right and wrong. How could I have let this happen?” A tear formed. “Why is it that everyone I ever care about either moves away from me or dies?”

A shadow appeared behind him. Kevin knew just from the shortness of the shadow who it was.

“God damn it, Dan,” said Kevin, without bothering to turn around, “what the fuck are you doing here?”

#short story #fiction

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