Velora stops at the shrine to the Raven Queen first, padding cautiously into the room, the stonework ice-cold beneath her bare feet, and says, softly, experimentally, "I hate you."
The shrine is empty at this early-evening hour, and so her words echo louder and more certain than she means them to. She swallows shyness with the remembered taste of ashes on her tongue, pushes past the heavy stench of blood in her nose and mouth, and says it louder, her voice cracking on the shout. "I hate you!"
There are no ripples on the surface of the small pool of blood, no dramatic flurry of feathers or dark wings curling around her. It's just a cold, stinky room.
She clears her throat, rubs her face to stop her lower lip quivering, and says, "Thank you," before turning on her heel and starting the long, slow trudge up to the castle.
She finds Percy first, after waving her way past the bemused guards and wandering aimlessly through a series of empty doorways. He's in his workshop, shirtsleeves pulled up past his elbows, weird hairy human arms covered in some sort of black grease as he scrubs with a cloth at an oversized contraption made of cogged wheels.
She watches him from the doorway, her brother by marriage, and not for the first time, her eyes catch on the rounded tips of his ears, the lenses that imperfectly correct his imperfect vision, the scruff on his chin and above his upper lip. These things, she knows, are the parts of her brother and sister that made them different and hated and neglected, the parts that made them not quite her brother and sister. Back when he'd been so terribly lost and sad, that had made a lot more sense. Now, watching him smile as he works, humming a quiet song she recognizes as a Syngornian lullaby she'd taught her sister, something twists in her chest.
When he sees her, he nearly drops the cloth in his hand in his surprise, eyebrows climbing toward his hairline. "Velora?"
She watches the expressions shift on his face: uncertainty, a self-conscious warmth, just plain self-consciousness, like he's trying to decide who to call to come deal with this situation. Then he visibly resets his stance, takes a breath, and smiles the kind of smile grown-ups rarely give her: honest, unsure, out of his depth. "Hi, Percy," she says, and leaps at him for a hug.
"You've gotten so big," he says, a little breathlessly. He's holding his hands awkwardly to the sides, trying to avoid smudging her fine clothing, but he finally relents and smooths her hair down when she beams up at him. "Not that it isn't a delight to see you, but what are you doing here?"
"Came to visit. Father and I were in Zephrah, and Keyleth opened the Sun Tree for me. It's a two-way thing, did you know that? She's opening it up again tomorrow, an hour after dawn."
Percy's brow furrows, and he takes a step back, looking her up and down. "You're not wearing shoes. Did anybody come with you?"
"Shoes are the worst," Velora tells him. "D'you know where Vex is?"
He narrows his eyes at the obvious distraction, but when she pulls him by the hand, he sighs and trails after her. "I expect she's fletching arrows in the study. What brought you to Zephrah?"
Velora hesitates at a cross-corridor, revisiting her memories of the castle, and can't quite stifle a grin when Percy would-be casually swings his hand toward the right corridor. Pulling him along with her, she says, "Father was there on some sort of diplomatic mission, and I asked if I could come along and see Keyleth."
"A diplomatic mission to Zephrah seems unusual," Percy says, thoughtfully, and she winces. He really is too smart.
Fortunately, that's when they round the corner and walk straight into her sister.
Velora yelps and flings herself into Vex's arms, dragging Percy with her into an awkward three-person hug that it takes Vex a full five seconds to settle into, out of sheer surprise. When she does, she says, "Hello, darling," in a wonderfully teary-eyed voice and plants a kiss on the crown of Velora's head—no longer as easy a task as it was when she was littler—and for just a moment everything in the world is wonderful and warm.
"I'll catch you two up later," Percy says, softly, disentangling himself from the hug. "Things were coming to a head with the clockwork mechanism, and I'd like to finish it off before taking a day to relax."
"Only one day?" Velora, cheek pressed against her shoulder, feels the shiver of her sister's barely suppressed laughter.
"A day or two," Percy says. "Three. A week. I'll take a week." And then, with an air of panic, "She's not wearing shoes, you know."
Velora backs up to yell, "Traitor!" at his retreating form, but finds herself bearing the full brunt of an appraising look from her sister.
Vex looks different, after Vecna, after Vasselheim, after... She looks different. Her smiles are a little slower to come, her laughter a little warmer, the lines at her eyes more pronounced than even her half-human side could explain. And sometimes, when she looks at Velora, she has a terribly sad smile that wrinkles the skin between her brows, and that smile didn't belong to her, before.
"Where in all the hells did you put your shoes, dear?"
Velora grins. Last year, when he and Zahra had come to visit Syngorn for the first time, Kashaw had called her a little shit for that exact grin. It's now her favorite grin to practice at every possible opportunity. "Zephrah."
Vex can't pick Velora up and carry her anymore—well, she probably could if she wanted to make a pretty hilarious display out of it—but the arm around her shoulders is vise-like as she draws her back into the study. "And what," Vex says, the same laughter still in her voice, "were you doing in Zephrah?"
Shrugging free, Velora settles into an overstuffed chair, bringing her knees up to her chest and pressing her dirty toes into the fabric. "Dad wanted to see the tree. The one Keyleth planted for Vax."
Vex falls more than sits in the chair across from her. "Oh."
Velora doesn't really want to look up, picking instead at some of the dirt caked under her toenail. "Yeah, I guess he'd sort of been avoiding it. It's real pretty, though. And he just kind of asked to be alone for a bit, I guess, you know. Talking to it. So I asked Keyleth if she could open the Sun Tree for me to come up here for the night."
"Velora. Dear." There's a long pause after the words, and Velora falls right into the trap, glancing up and meeting Vex's direct stare. "You shouldn't have come through alone. You walked up from the Sun Tree on your own?"
Probably best not to mention the detour to the Raven Queen's shrine. "No. I mean, yes, but I've done that kind of thing before. It's okay. The guards know me by now."
Vex's face crumples into a tearful smile. "Gods, you're not all that much younger than Vax and I were when we—" She swipes a hand across her eyes, then smiles bigger, brighter. "I'm sorry, darling. It's been a strange day. I'm delighted to see you, although I may have to have a word with Kiki about the age-appropriateness of sending a child to another city alone. And your hair is so short!"
Velora reaches up to it, shyly, tousling the locks that barely cover the tips of her ears. "You like it?"
"I love it."
Velora grins her little-shit grin. "Father hates it."
Vex laughs, leaning back in her chair. "Then I positively adore it."
Velora straightens, shuffles to the edge of her seat, lets her legs swing down to rest on the ground. "How are you?"
That catches Vex by surprise, and she pauses midway through what looks like a reflexive laugh. Grown-ups do that a lot, Velora has found, when she asks a question like an adult. But after the brief hesitation, Vex smiles and says, "Better every day, sweetheart. Thank you for asking. How are you?"
Velora chews her lower lip, staring down, wringing her hands in her lap. "I dream a lot. And it's never the parts of it I want to dream about, the nice people cheering, the nice people at the Platinum Sanctuary. Vax. It's... it's green light, and... and nobody says it, everybody tries really hard not to say it, but I died, didn't I?"
Silence; Velora can almost hear the lies being shuffled through, carefully selected and discarded, one by one. Then Vex says, "You did. I did, too. A while ago. We never told you the details. Our brother made a deal for my life. Kashaw raised me then, too, only I think the Raven Queen interfered before Vesh could get involved the way she did with you."
Velora meets her gaze again, steady and unflinching. "I think I've been dreaming about Vesh. I tried to tell Kashaw last time I saw him. He just sort of got scared. But I dream about her a lot."
The words hang in the air for a long, long moment until she fears the weight of them will crush them both.
Then, "Gods. Fuck," Vex says, and the first word somehow feels like a stronger curse than the second. She pushes up from her chair, paces up and down the room, breathing fast, like something caged.
Startled, Velora hops to her feet. "What is it? Is it bad? What does it mean?"
Vex whirls around, and there's a truly stricken expression on her face that's so, so much worse than the soft murmurs of death and pain and horror that find her at night. The tears begin to streak down Velora's cheeks before she's even aware she's started crying, and Vex seems to snap back to herself in that moment, face closing off into a concerned half-smile, pulling Velora into a tight hug, pressing her face to her shoulder the way she had in Vasselheim, the way she had after the fight, and Velora remembers the taste of ashes.
"It's all right, darling. I'm sorry I scared you. Nightmares are normal after what you've been through. I'll talk to your mother about clerics in Syngorn, all right? We'll find someone to help you, to talk to you."
Velora inhales, shakily, the faint perfumes barely masking the scent of forest and sweat, and says, "I'm sorry I made you sad again."
"Never, darling. Never." Vex lifts her off her feet for a moment, twirls her in a little half-spin. "I'm so glad you told me. I'm just sorry you were suffering alone."
They stay like that for a long, long time, until Velora starts to get self-conscious about how much snot she's getting on her sister's fine robes and pulls back a bit. Vex responds by bending down so they're eye-to-eye, the way Vax always used to, and brushes the tears away. "I love you, dear. You're not alone, and you're welcome here anytime." A wink. "We'll just have to figure out a way to get you here more often so you don't have to take advantage of a certain well-meaning but distracted archdruid to sneak away."
"Okay," Velora says, and when Vex sits back in her chair, she cuddles up next to her, a bit too tall and lanky now to make it comfortable, but they both pretend to ignore the discomforts of bony elbows and knees. "Did you dream? After you died, I mean."
"Not that time. But there was another time I was hurt very badly." Unexpectedly, Vex smiles, settling a hand comfortably in Velora's hair and staring at the opposite wall of the room with a warmth of memory. "I was flying above the battlefield and a spell brought me down. I was so sure when I finally went to sleep that I'd dream of falling and falling and falling, but it turned out the only thing my brain cared to remember when I was asleep was the flying part."
Velora laughs. "That's really wonderful, in a weird sort of way."
"I'm a little alarmed that you're grasping the idea of backhanded compliments so young. Feeling better?"
Velora doesn't answer right away, considering. "Yeah. I think I am. Just tired."
Another crooked smile, not quite hers. "I know. And dear? What do you think about nieces and nephews?"
Velora takes a time to consider that one as well. "I think Trinket will always be my favorite."
Vex laughs, low and warm and genuine. "He'll be delighted to hear that. Your room's all made up and ready, you know. It always is. We can talk in the morning, which is when I assume you've scammed Keyleth into smuggling you back?"
Velora, disentangling herself from the chair, manages to stay stone-faced for about two heartbeats before she bursts out laughing. "Yeah. I'll talk to you in the morning."
Tousling her hair, Vex grins. "Sleep well."
Late in the night, when the moon hangs high and she grows tired of waiting for her racing thoughts to slow, Velora begrudgingly slips on her borrowed boots and a heavy coat and treads softly out the door of her room into the corridors of the castle.
She knows how to carry herself to look a little bit older from a distance so a guard won't stop her on sight, knows how to keep to the shadows that human vision cannot penetrate. It's easy enough to slip past the outward-facing defenses of the castle and into the cold night air, watching her breath fog before her, the heat from the city below hanging in masses of fog like smoke in the air. She doesn't like looking down at the city from here, remembers with nightmarish precision how Vasselheim had looked from above, burning and burning and with the taste of her own death at the back of her tongue.
Veering away, she steps almost immediately off the well-trodden paths into snow that cracks and sinks under her weight, slowing her progress like wading through a world coated in heavy blankets that tug at her feet and legs, urging her to stop and rest.
She's breathing heavily by the time she finds the small clearing, eyes already welling up at the possibility that she's misremembered the path, that she's managed to get lost, that she'll wander forever alone in the dark. She's come out here twice before, alone both times, after Vex had shown her the spot, but there are plenty of twists and turns to trip up a distracted mind...
She finds it all the same: two trees with slightly more gnarled branches than most, and a single bench, lovingly but imperfectly constructed beneath it.
Swiping at her streaming nose and the tears in her eyes, she huffs out a breath and plops down into the middle of the bench, staring up through the gaps in the branches above at the uncommonly clear night sky. A low grunt of breath draws her attention.
"Hi," she says, softly.
Two bright eyes between the tree trunks shift closer, obscured by the fog of breath in the air, and then sleek, silvery fur glints under the moonlight as the wolf pads up to sit beside the bench and rest his head on her lap.
She scratches behind his ears, distractedly, already back to watching the stars. "You remember me, don't you? I didn't think you'd be here still. I didn't think there were wolves in these woods. The grown-ups never mentioned you. Maybe I'm imagining you."
The wolf grumbles, nosing into her hand, and she sighs, stroking his muzzle, pausing only to pick at some of the dirt and twigs caked into his fur. "Father says I can't have a pet, which means I desperately want to bring you home with me, but that's probably not fair to you."
The wolf sighs. She sighs back. It's cold outside, but between the warm coat and the wolf's heavy weight, she feels positively cosy.
A light streaks across the sky, a shooting star, and she smiles up at it. "I didn't even know I had a brother for a long time," she says. "I wanted brothers and sisters when I was little, so badly, and then there were these two tall angry grown-ups who sometimes yelled at Father but always smiled at me."
She pauses in scratching the wolf's head, just to hear his semi-inquisitive grunt, before starting again. "And now I've got Percy and Cassandra and Keyleth and Scanlan and Pike and Grog, and they're my brothers and sisters, too. And I guess maybe I thought that was how it worked, that you just kept getting more and more and more family and none of them ever went away for good."
She reaches down, pulls the belt from around her waist, and tells the wolf, sternly, "Be nice to Simon. He's very shy."
The snake twists to life, coils around her arm, clinging almost painfully to her, and she whispers, "Sorry about the cold," and lets him coil up inside her coat to keep warm.
She waits a moment or two, but the wolf doesn't seem interested in having a snake for dinner, and eventually she relaxes again. "Father talks to Vax, sometimes. At the tree. Other times. But I don't think I want to do that. I don't think I want to talk to him unless he can talk to me, too. Unless I can see him."
She closes her eyes and holds her breath for several heartbeats, fooling herself into listening for a whisper of wings, gripping so tightly to the fur on the top of the wolf's head that he whines a soft protest.
"Sorry," she whispers, opening her eyes and petting the spot she'd pulled. "Sorry." She glances up at a glint of light; another shooting star, she thinks, or just the regular stars smearing a bit with tears.
"Anyway," she says, "I'm going to head back to the castle and maybe see if I can try to dream about flying, but for a little bit, would it be okay if I talked to you instead? If I told you all the things I wanted to tell him?"
The wolf glances up at her with one baleful eye, snorts, then backs away, plopping down in the snow and regarding her with an eerily intelligent expression.
Velora draws her knees up to her chest, curling protectively around Simon, and says, softly, "I miss you," and watches the stars, and says nothing more.