Chapter Text
It always snows at the edge of the world.
It snows the day the Briarwoods take Whitestone, and the day Anna Ripley’s experiment with residuum kills him, and the day they pull him back up from the dirt to turn him. And it snows again, that fateful evening Cassandra grabs his wrist and runs.
In between the increments of waking and sleeping and dying and waking, he succumbs to the sensation of falling somewhere far below. His days smear one into the next into the next. In these long divots away from consciousness he reflects on whenever Cassandra grew frustrated with her art, swiping her palm into the blue and gold oils and cleaving the portrait of their mother in two—the way the image blends dizzily into itself, now a mere guess of what it was supposed to be.
Percy awakens from his slumber to the underside of a forest canopy and a veil of frost over him like a cotton down blanket, heavy as his sins.
He shakes the snow from himself. He doesn’t feel the cold but he feels the exhaustion of his travels setting deep into his bones. He only sleeps because he chooses to. Or, evidently speaking, when he’s got a crossbow bolt wedged between his ribs.
Percy tears the arrow from his torso. It no longer hurts to be hurt.
“Is this how much I have to endure?” he says to the sky. “Is this how much weight I will have to bear, just to know if I’m capable of coming out alive?”
There is no answer. Not from the gods nor the family he thinks are supposed to be watching over him. It’s in those quiet intervals between dying and waking that he considers the instability of chance but also inevitability, the inherent horror of losing everything in the same moment he came to appreciate what he had, came to want more from it—
And in between, only quiet.
The man who shot him is easy to track despite the coating of drift over his blood trail. A half-orc, clutching a lantern in one hand and the wound Percy clawed into his side with the other, stumbles blindly about the night-blackened woodlands. Just beyond the corona of his shadow, Percy follows silently.
In the distance, minutes later: an owl careens its head in the direction of a shrill scream.
Percy gazes down at the withered corpse of Anna Ripley’s messenger, who’d been delivering a package to her residence in the next town over when Percy happened upon him. It took only a convenient discussion of words regarding Doctor Ripley at the tavern, and a few days of pursuing the half-orc’s footsteps, to make it to this juncture in his endless timeline.
Percy licks a long stripe of blood from the back of his glove.
Snow gathers slowly over both the cadaver and himself. Like an art piece, Percy muses, recalling Cassandra again; a still life painting of a glimpse into the world reclaiming its own creation. Then he collects the messenger’s bag.
Percy adjusts the rifle on his back to accommodate it; the satchel is filled with the various metals Anna Ripley had tasked him with delivering and a dozen pages of correspondence lined margin to spine with her chicken scratch handwriting. Talks of: the decent pay, bonuses for swift travels, a pretty penny for keeping his mouth shut, where to find her.
The Umbra Hills. How fittingly cryptic for Ripley to conduct her sciences in the places tucked away from common travel.
She would soon regret ever turning him.
As a boy, Percy built and drew and tinkered because it was all he knew. Now, three years apart from who he used to be and on the wrong side of the afterlife, he’d found his only solace in tearing things apart.
It doesn’t snow the day he meets Vox Machina.
In fact, it hasn’t snowed in weeks. Percy awakens to the inside of his new cell with a sharp ache in his shoulder that is stubborn in its refusal to heal. Early spring warmth seeps into the holding room from the faraway windows.
Despite how little he sleeps, he never sleeps well anymore.
In his dreams he relives the final moments of his family’s demise but from the wrong angle. To reflect his suspected deteriorating mentality, key details are missing or entirely incorrect, such as—faces blurred by blackened lines, distorted voices, the blood on his hands belonging suddenly to someone else—and each time he sleeps something new slipped away from him. Something important, he figures, because why else would he be so terrified of loss?
Percy adjusts himself against the wall and notes, distantly, his thirst. It isn't like he’ll die in—not like he'll die, but gods damn does he wish he had the energy reserves to at least escape this place. He’d been careless with the good doctor and lost too much blood in the ensuing skirmish, and now all that remains of him is a glass of water he’ll been nursing just to have something to do and an inability to stay dead.
In the background, the last of the neglected inmates—locals arrested for misdemeanors that Percy suspects never made the official law books—scream for freedom and for mercy, not in the same day, but in that order. They will disappear soon enough. Victims chosen for the cult’s perceived greater purpose.
Percy closes his eyes and waits.