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In 805, Lord Frederick de Rolo welcomed Delilah Briarwood and her husband to Whitestone.
In 843, Lord Percival de Rolo allows Delilah Briarwood to enter Whitestone.
Him, his seven children and his wife, greet her and her retinue in the grand hall of the Castle.
He shook hands first with her husband, an austere man in fitted leather gloves that hide the cold pallor of his hand.
To the lady beside him, he bows formally, and places a chaste kiss upon her lace-gloved fingers.
Pleasantries are exchanged.
The journey from Wildemount was taxing, and their tour of the human kingdom Tal’dorei spent in carriages without much room to breathe.
Each were appreciative of being received by the Lord of Whitestone personally at this late hour of the evening.
She is unrecognizable until her name is spoken. The corpse that is unwrapped before his daughter and his office floor is thin, in dark and travel-stained clothing, still red where he is told a woman named Otohan Thull cut her down. He watches this unfold, the canvas peeled away from her frame, itself mattered with the black of dead blood. He is pretending to listen to the adventurers as each try to fill the room at once with the sounds of their own voices; many years taking court in this city has perfected the face of detached interest as he hears their pleas. He recognizes the body, but not for its resemblance to Lady Briarwood whose face, as a young man, he had carved into his memory and his fantasies. In undeath now twice-over, he sees his wife’s profile in the woman’s face.
One by one the children introduced themselves.
The grand hall is lit with candles, the staircases freshly washed that morning by the servants, and commented on by those dark-dressed accompaniments of the Wildemountese.
The eldest sister, Vesper, had her hair pinned immaculately in a circlet around her powdered face. The azure ribbon in her dark hair coordinated with the bows her two sisters had upon their dresses.
The youngest sibling, Cassandra, chewed her cheek to mince, nervous that she would not follow her graceful sister in this practice. Julius complimented the Lord Briarwood on the brooch pinning his silk cravat.
They struck conversation quickly, Julius de Rolo explained to whom the suits of armor down the hall once belonged to, the Lord having recognized them of ancient Dwendelian make.
Keyleth had given them her blessing, and Percival questions his old friend’s judgment. It has been many decades since he has done this - forgetting, for an instant, who he is and that she is not the anxious girl with whom he first became acquainted. It is Keyleth, the Tempest, who’s name the halfling man invokes. This woman’s goodness that is too precious to allow to fall to dust. He nearly laughs, but does not, for the sound would be bitter and off-putting. He asks them, “why should we undertake such a trial for your friend when so many others fall and are surrendered to dust?”. For without a moment’s hesitation, he could fill up all the fingers of both hands with the dead gone before the living were yet done with them.
“The Lady Briarwood is quite lovely, don’t you think, Percy?” asked Oliver, who had been next youngest to Percival in age.
He shared his brother’s want to move and be active, but his graces were made more for social compliments and charismatic endeavors.
The brothers both went before the remainder of the family, youth permitting them degrees of freedom not granted to their elder siblings.
Each had bowed, and said fine compliments, and were holding back complaints about the stuffiness of the robes in the family colors they wore only on such occasions.
Percival had said nothing, immune to and better than his younger brother’s wandering eye.
He had been irritable much of that evening for having left a book nearly finished but with fifty pages left unread; he had no time to judge if the Lady was flattering or sharp.
His first impressions had been that she looked no different than the dozens of well-bred women that attended courtly holdings.
He dismisses the Hells. Both for his temper’s sake and for the truth of the matter being they came to him, a man of science, to question on matters divine. He had no business with them, even if they had his sympathies. He wanted no business with them, holding in his mind’s eye the memory of his saintly wife, gone gray and cold and dead upon a temple ground, because his hands had been impatient with the pace of work. He wants to leave, and he wants his daughter to leave too, but it is important, he knows this, for Gwendolyn not to be afraid of death. She is too young, a part of him aches to see. They are all, forever, too young for pain. Yet, if they are afraid of death, they are afraid of their uncle’s work, and when inevitably Vax must meet his nieces and his nephews, Percy wants them not to shudder or to scream.
Mother made him promise to show the Lady Briarwood the pocket-watch he had yesterday completed.
Once per the hour it would produce a little tinkling charm to the tune of their father’s favorite song.
It is not special. He had consumed the remains of a music-box that Whitney no longer saw use for, and he has distaste for his work being treated as a novelty to guests.
The Lady smiled, and her lips were the color of brandy not yet exposed to air. She took great interest in clever, promising youths, and would love to see his work.
Vex’ahlia, bless her, brings the air back into his lungs. The twins follow her, snapping like hunting dogs at one another’s ankles, and his wife places a brief kiss upon his cheek. He wants to grab her hand and hold it. He wants to look upon her face and see it full of life, energy, red from being out in cold air and the hunting grounds. But unlike him, she has changed so little since their adventuring days, and the cut of her jaw and brows is the same as the dead woman on his office carpet.
"Why are you so tense, darling? They're friends."
“Most gracious hosts and friends to be,” the Lady Briarwood called Mother and Father.
She had only the finest things to say of Tal’dorei thus far; in turn, she told Father of distant, dreary Rexxentrum, and how unwelcoming the court was there.
While the Briarwoods, of course, would return such hospitality if Lord de Rolo and his family should ever visit the Empire, she laughed a little as she said,
“Though you may not find my countrymen as welcoming as yours.”
“I think what we were hoping, Lord de Rolo, is that our friend, that Laudna, could receive the same rebirth and second chance that Whitestone received.”
And who, young man, are you to arbitrate what second chances are deserved?
The first course served was whipped pale cheese on squares of black bread and a sprig of dill, out of season for the commoners but plentiful in the Castle kitchens.
Oliver watched the Lady Briarwood take small bites, cutting them first with knife and fork into precise, surgical slices.
In his brother's distraction, Ludwig snuck the slices into his coat pockets, detesting both the seeds in the bread and the tang of the dill. But Percy noticed, and made note to scold Ludwig later for it.
She is too lax, Percy will sometimes tease his wife, when Wolfe and Leona argue before strangers. It is childish to continue cutting in to one another over who struck more targets in a practice. It has earned him comments from lower barons who are brave (for few of equal status would dare snipe at the House de Rolo), and from Scanlan, when the twins were younger and their fighting drowned out his flute-playing. They need to stop this behavior, but neither Vex’halia nor Percy see to curbing this behavior. Vex tells him that he spoils them too much. Each finds the twins’ pettiness nostalgic in their own ways, and know that if all was quiet, they would miss the comments dearly.
In his wife’s sharp ear, he tells her these strangers have brought a corpse with them. She is not so lax, and she wants to spare them any passing pain as she can while they still are young. They will always be young, to her.
The second course was the amuse-bouche and the chef had outdone himself, Father was so proud to inform his guests about.
Carefully salted strips of northern salmon, caught that very morning off in the bay of Mooren, with a dot of cream and pickled roe all served on silver spoons.
Lord Briarwood gave apology - he did not eat seafood, from an allergy, he said. So he did not touch the spoon to his lips or skin.
Pike laughs and calls him Percy and thumps his back, because few of his friends are as aged and tired as he is, for he is human and death comes quickly for his kind. But he has always been this way, they would say, if he brought it up over wine and tavern-fare. He was already old and crotchety and pessimistic when he was in his twenties. Why do they need to treat him differently now?
It is still the same.
It is still the same that he sees what his friends do not. It is still the same that worry falls to Percival, the pessimist, when doesn’t it always end up quite alright?
While her husband did not smile much, the Lady Briarwood was generous, gregarious.
She laughed a little hummingbird laugh whenever a joke was told. She had no hair loose or falling out of her exquisite bun, which is held in place by some manner of metal clasp.
It looked of silver, but it does not catch the light that same way, and only Percival seems to notice.
It was because of late, he had put many hours into the study of mineralogy and engineering, to answer for himself what manner of metal was best used for constructing clocks.
Only he noticed that, and that her eyes remained dark, thick-lashed and even, despite the levity of her voice and compliments to their hosts in Whitestone.
“It was you. She was you.”
Hair just a touch darker than the shade of lavender that had been Leona’s infant blanket, the woman says it as an accusation to the Lady of Whitestone. She knows it before Vex’ahlia speaks it, before perhaps Vex’ahlia even notices that the woman and her share not the same complexion, but the same line of the chin. Perhaps in life they had shared even more. Laudna, now, has suffered the ravages of time and hunger. She is thin, and stretched, and her long hair has no luster. Vex’ahlia is still beautiful; her elven blood will see her beautiful for hundred year more. Her mouth is full, and red, and her skin tans in the sun rather than molding from the grave.
But this woman knows who Vex’ahlia is. She knows that Vox Machina had been the reason her friend suffered that first death, the painful, torturous end that was the promise of their future if they came to the vampire’s castle. She spits it with her eyes, the wrinkles around her nose, the clench of her fingers to a loose fist. You did this. You are why she suffered. You stole her future from her and from me.
He does not blame her; he knows this anger very well.
“Are you the cleverest one?” she asked Cassandra. “It’s always the little ones you don’t suspect.”
Cassandra had not spoken much.
She had been faced with the tremendous task of keeping her back straight, and her head at the proper angles, the way her etiquette teacher had drilled into her with books and yard-sticks when she hunched her back.
Vesper did not need to watch so carefully.
Even Whitney had her ankles folded at the proper angle, with a napkin on her knees, carefully sipping the third course’s soup off of her spoon so she did not slurp.
“No, milady. Percy is the smart one.”
“Then what are you, my dear?”
He remembers her surprise when, on that first day of their acquaintance, he, delirious and skeletal from his time in prison, gave Vex’ahlia all the gold to his name. He told her he would spend it foolishly if someone did not keep his books for him. From there, then, she, and of course Vax, would be the only ones allowed around her when she was counting the group’s coin. She always ran the numbers three separate times to be certain every copper was accounted for, even though her calculations impressed him with their accuracy, and her penmanship was perfect in the little ledger-book she kept.
Now Vex has an armful of diamonds and does blink when she passes them to Pike. It is not enough that the gods hoard their mercy miserly, Percy sneers to himself. They ask for money too.
“What makes your sister say you are the clever one?”
It was idle conversation he was bored by.
Most conversations, even amongst adults, quickly dulled him, which was why Percival did not want to participate in tonight’s banquet.
He was staring off to the far distance reciting the table of elemental interactions in his head to keep himself occupied before the entrees were brought forth.
“I like to learn,” he might have answered her with.
“What sorts of things do you like most to learn?” She dabbed her lips with a napkin in such a way no paint came off her smile.
“I do as well. I spent many, many years in school, studying magic.”
He was aware that if he told her that magic was the dullest subject his tutors taught, he would be rude.
On the floor, Laudna’s head is rolled back. Not with sweat does her dark hair cling to her neck, but rather with condensation, being colder than the air was around her corpse. He remembers that the Briarwoods had paid close enough attention to Vex’ahlia that they arranged the braid of her effigy the same way. It must have been Delilah herself who did it. Cassandra has told him, during the years that he abandoned her to Whitestone alone, that Delilah would come and coo when she cried, and she would comb her hair. It hurt, Cassandra said, because her nails were sharp and she kept her comb as if a razor, but still, Cassandra let her. It was easier than to fight her. Sometimes, she needed the company too.
She wanted no hair left untucked. No detail out of her arrangements. She wanted to be sure that when Vox Machina came, they knew who each body was meant to be within a second of sight. She dug through the farmhands, through the children, and he suspects that if no living replica was found she would have built her own out of spare flesh left by the slaughter. Thus, while the girl with braided hair and bluejay feathers pinned into it had been human, her ears were cut with a blade so sharp that the flesh had not frayed but scarred into a perfect point.
“I’m here, darling,” Vex whispers in his ear. She still pretends that her death in the temple had been her carelessness and not his fault, so she may not know why he has turned his eyes away.
“The weather is so mild for the autumn. Does it stay that way in winter too?”
“Most assuredly not. Whitestone freezes over toe to tip - but it does make spring all the brighter when it comes.”
“I would love to see the city in the springtime. I’m sure it is quite beautiful indeed.”
“There’s - there’s two souls here –”
Get out, he does not say, because he is a man and a father and a Lord and not a frightened little boy. Get out, get out, get out of my home and my city, get away from my family, he does not roar and he does not aim his gun at the woman with stormy eyes who looks at him with betrayal writ across her face, because he has not held a weapon in more than thirty years.
“Then it is done.”
He clicks his cane upon the stone.
“She is to remain gone.”
Percival was not paying attention any longer. His mind was firmly on his book, upstairs and left by his bedside, where he would much rather be.
He does not see the guards in Whitestone’s colors leave their post by the door behind his father’s chair.
They were always there; it was the furniture, the paper on the walls.
One was not meant to pay attention to the help.
“Well, haven't you ever lost someone that you've cared about before?”
As a boy he had enjoyed tales of the fey and their realm. As a man he bent his fingers around the ball of his cane, and restrained himself from throwing it at the woman with a doe’s legs and horn, who speaks so dreamily of what she could not possibly comprehend. For the fey don’t care; their world is separate, full of sunshine and flowers and soft grasses that never wither and die. To them it is all a hypothetical or perhaps a game they play, dying and leaving behind their body. The mourners are all just participants in the game of strict ritual and rule.
"I've lost nearly everyone I've cared about."
He is angry, so his voice is calm. He is furious, so he speaks with precise, short syllables, and levels his eyes at her. He is seething, frothing rage, so he feels nothing whatsoever.
“So then, you know it feels,” she says, as if that ever has made a lick of difference.
“Wasn’t your soul held by another?” says the halfling man, as if he has the right to speak of such things and judge Percy long after he has been damned.
“What if we could end her for good?” throws the woman who must somehow know what dreams he had as a young man and does not balk before their ferocity.
He thinks of Gwendolyn. He thinks of Wolfe. He thinks of Leona, Vesper, Vax’ildan his son, and where they were right now, in this very second. And he cannot summon five separate answers quick enough for his liking.
“It’s getting rather late, isn’t it Sylas, my dear?”
“I must agree. Perhaps we should bring this night to a close?”
“Look, I'm sorry for the loss of your friend. I'm certain she was a wonderful woman.”
He does not care. He finds he does not care who she was before she was Laudna and before she was Vex and if she might too have been a scared, frightened child lacking comprehension for what was happening to her while Delilah Briarwood smiled sweetly and braided her hair. He does not care, because in this moment all that mattered was where his children had run off too - who else he come to his Castle, disguising themselves as a friend –
“We've all lost wonderful people, but whatever joy or smile she would bring back would be far outweighed by the death, the destruction, the torture, and the upheaval –”
Of course none of them would understand. Of course they look at him for being the cold, uncaring monster, and resenting him for making the hard but necessary choice.
Even Vex betrays him, in the end. She lets go his hand and kneels to cradle the corpse in her arms the way she does Vesper’s bloodied, torn throat in his nightmares.
Mother was screaming.
She was clutching her daughter to her knees and chest and screaming, all decorum and evening graces gone, and bloodying her lace gloves and the pearls upon her wrists.
She was trying, with all the might that she possessed, to close the throat that their dinner guest ripped out from her first born baby girl.
“I mean, we both have some fault in this, don’t we?”
He had read books about vampires and wraiths.
He should have known: they can’t touch silver.
What good was learning if he could not use his knowledge as needed?
He should have known.
He should have seen –!
He should have warned Father before his head flung off and on to the floor, rolling until it hit the wall and his eyes stared up at the ceiling, still with color and life too them, for that had been how fast he died.
He swore to her in vows to remain forever by her side. Percy has his back to her, to Vex and to Vex’ahlia, as she gently calls for him, “Darling?”, his figure in the doorway. It must be so. He has his throat closed and his hands are holding the ball of his cane so very, very tightly that had he not been wearing gloves himself, his knuckles would match all his scars for how white and bulging that they were.
“– do nothing without my approval.”
The Lord of Whitestone marches on. He hears in his ears the frantic footsteps -
- running down the hallway, away, away, the way a coward runs –
- with a third and extra click, that comes his cane, because his knee had never healed quite properly since he died that last time. Time had only made it weaker to deal with its long strain. In a few more years, he may not be able to walk properly at all.
Bad News is dusty now. It hangs upon a mount in the office of the Captain of the Pale Guard so that they remember what it means to fire their first round, and what their rifles’ presence truly meant for the world that Lord de Rolo had saved. He knows where it is and he checks it weekly, making sure it did not get stolen by some recruit as a prank or proof of valor. It’s lack of presence, there on his back, means that things are bad . It has been thirty years, and he still thinks his shoulders should not be this light, that he should walk with even heavier, guarded steps.
“FATHER!”
“Hi Papa.”
Gwendolyn has brought with her the little wolf-toy she’d been given. She has Galdric perched, sitting like a good boy dog, beside her plush owlbear that her siblings think she ought to have overgrown. Because she did not listen to him, she is sitting in his office, on the carpet beside his desk where she as a toddler would sit, coloring flowers on spare paper while he did his work. Reading a book, because she had not finished what she wanted to read before she’d been interrupted.
Despite his knee, Percy lowers himself to the floor. Despite the fine tailoring of his coat, and that some of Laudna’s blood has rubbed off onto the carpet and left a stain, forever now, as it is nearly impossible to remove that blood from wool, he sits beside her. Gwendolyn smiles at him. Her fangs are starting to come in, and they crowd her grin, a too-toothy look that he treasures, as if made given only to him.
“Do I need to leave the office?”
“Not at all,” he says, and he does not hear that he has spoken at all. He places one hand on the top of Gwendolyn’s head, and tilts it, so that he can put a little kiss right between her budding little horns. He strokes her plaited hair, he brings her close in for a hug, and only when her little arms wrap themselves around his torso does his hand begin to steady. She is so small. All of them are small and Gwendolyn is still so small that he fears he may break her and have to bury her in pieces, like the aunts and uncles she had never a chance to meet.
She frowns up at him, not understanding why he was doing that if there was important Lord business and guests to attend to. She knows Mother is the one to hug, and sometimes, if he is surprised, he goes all stiff and quiet and she’s thought she’d hurt him.
“Gwendolyn, dearest, would you like to help your father with a task?”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes,” he says, his heartbeat still muting his own words. She pouts. This has been the worst thing to ever happen to her; he wants it to remain that way. “I need your help finding where all your brothers and sisters have run off to. Can you help me find them all?”
“Fine,” she says. “If I can bring Galdric and Gemma with me.” So she holds the owlbear, and the carved wolf toy, in her other hand, and keeps her left wrapped around Percy’s fingers as they walk through all of the Castle halls, knocking on each door they pass, until Percy has seen with his own eyes that each of his children is safe.
Delilah Briarwood held on to Whitestone for five years.
Delilah Briarwood has held on to Laudna’s soul for thirty-eight years.
He’ll let her keep it. If in exchange, he has what he needs.