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When she takes him home, he is still warm from the embrace of living things and flush with the memory of mortality. Stepping into the shadows has always been a comfort, but there’s a finality to it now. His slowing heart beat stutters and stills.
The hand that takes his is cold, but oh so steady. She says, “Come. We have work to do, you and I.”
He doesn’t look back. That is a mortal impulse, and Vax has not been mortal for some time. His mortal body is ash. He looks up. She is impossibly tall, and he can’t make out her face. Above him is dark, dark, dark. Rustling feathers.
At the edge of his awareness, fate-threads thrum. Hints of gold out of the corner of his eye. A low pulse to replace his still heart.
He feels her eyes on him. Neither of them are afraid. He has been chasing fear for so long and now there is no adrenaline. It’s just purpose. Cloudless and searing and certain as the dark.
(Later, he will remember how he thinks about this moment as going home, and it will hurt. If he were mortal he might have wept. Because he is not, he holds the hurt in his hands and finds it feels entirely like something else).
___
The Champion knows of course, that home has never exactly been place, but people.
He watches Vox Machina’s threads carefully. The Matron does not stop him. Sometimes she stands with him, tugging a little on the tangled golden weaves.
“They’re strange, your family,” she says.
“The strangest.”
___
When she takes him home, he is cold from the embrace of his goddess, and still with the memory of blood and ash. They step into the dark and snuff out all the lanterns. Zephrah was home, once, for a year. He remembers the way the wind had felt in his hair, the playful, wicked sting of it. And then, later, in ravens bodies, he had sat long nights in the trees here, circled high above the clouds. And again, strangely, the feeling returns, slow and foreign with its material-plane heat.
Keyleth touches his cheek. She’s so warm. “Hey there,” she says softly.
“Hello.” He feels the memory of a laugh in his throat, but doesn’t quite know how to let it out. It simmers, strange as his new heartbeat.
He takes a breath. Air, sweet and cold, rushes to fill all the crevices of this mortal-shape. He breathes out. He tastes salt.
Another touch on his cheek. She’s wiped away a tear.
The dark beckons, but he does step back.
Somewhere, a golden thread snaps. The death scrapes along his soul him like a knife-prick, sharper and warmer in this plane than it might have at—
Home?
Yes, still. He is dead, after all. He is dust.
But.
Morrighan catches the frayed edges of the thread and tugs, pulling the soul to her. He feels the shiver of her power, brighter, a blaze instead of a steady flame. She is over-eager, and has not died yet. He lets her take this one.
“Do you need to go?” Keyleth asks. Once, when they were young, she might have asked a different question. She might have held him fast. Her rage might have been a tangible thing; wind and fire and smoke on his tongue. But now she asks it softly. This new beginning is slow, warm with the memory of who they used to be and who they could have been. Rage is too loud of a feeling. They have the luxury of slow grief now. Of wanting.
“No,” the Champion whispers, ducking his head. And this, he remembers, will remember through all echoes of the forms he takes: her embrace has always been safe. She tangles her fingers into his hair, slides her hands up his shoulders, rubs his neck.
“Alright then,” The Voice of the Tempest says. Her breaths are warm in his ear.
He remembers that he can breathe and inhales. She smells of soap and storms: a hint of petrichor, a touch of flowers.
___
“Have you come to take me home?” Shaun Gilmore asks when The Champion—Vax, Vax, Vax—knocks on his door.
Shaun is old now, white-bearded and bleary eyed and glorious.
Vax has walked this plane long enough that the smile is instinctual. “Not just yet, old friend,” he says.
And then the Champion is held, and loved, and Gilmore is crying and it all aches so fiercely he doesn’t know what to do.
___
He misses her.
He walks the in between part of his (their) realm, blood pooling around his ankles. He tilts head back and watches the ever-expanding skein of threads twist and pulse and wonders when he will see hers. Will he know? He has to know it.
Morrighan finds him sitting on the edge of a cliff in Zephrah. She sits beside him, twitching ears the only sign that she’s nervous. It has been a decade. He is not alone. He is so alone. He is home. He is not home. He is dust. He can breathe. There’s warmth here. He is still most comfortable in the dark.
“She’ll be okay,” she says, eventually, like she always does. ‘She’s done this a few times, now, right?”
What he does not say is that he knows, but he worries. He worries where she will be born. He wonders if she’ll know that she’s loved. He worries that he won’t be able to find her.
When he doesn’t say anything, Morrighan rests her head on his shoulder. She slides a hand in his. She’s not as warm as she once was. The coolness of her touch, the slow, slow pulse in her wrist, is steadying.
“She found us,” she says. “When we needed her? We’ll find her.”
He would not have described their first meeting that way, but he remembers feathers in the wind, a soft voice in his ear, “left,” wings erupting out of ancient armor. He remembers blood under his nails and the aching surrender in a blood pool.
“Yes,” Vax says, because those memories hold so much weight of the person he used to be that the name settles. And then, as the Champion, “how is it? For you?” He means fate. Bearing the weight of all of it. Death. The strange echo of their realm without her.
Morrighan’s ears twitch against his cheek. “I feel like I’m doing something that matters,” she whispers like a secret. “For the very first time. Does that make sense?”
He remembers his sister’s body in his arms and blood on his tongue and cold certainty in his bones. “Yes,” Vax’ildan says. “It makes perfect sense.”
___
The fourteenth year, a thread frays to the point of breaking, and Vax catches it up on his fingers and says, “Fuck.” It’s a very Vax sentiment. He holds on to that, even as his still chest throbs with the pain of it.
Morrighan lets him have this one. It can only ever be him.
“Ah, just what I thought I’d see,” Shaun whispers when Vax pulls the thread to his chest, and oh he remembers, he remembers this. They could be so much younger, in the burnt out frame of an old shop, blood-soaked, Shaun’s head in his lap.
“Come on, that was a little funny,” Gilmore says when Vax doesn’t laugh. Hi soul is so warm, so bright. Vax cradles it close. Shaun does not need help—he knows where to go—but the Champion has walked the mortal plane for too long now, and he’s remembered what it is like to be selfish.
Gilmore reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind one of Vax’s ears. His touch is cooling as he settles into death, but the tips of his fingers still sting with magic and the memory of being mortal. “Come on, bird boy. Take me home.”
___
The fifteenth year, a thread begins to hurt—a sharp pulse along the fate-skein that he feels louder than a heartbeat. And oh, why was he ever worried?
He finds her in Whitestone of all fucking places.
Vax, Champion to his dead-bones, turns down a path away from the Sun Tree and walks through the crowded square. Morrighan is at his heels, practically vibrating with excitement. New deaths prick along the edges of both of their concisenesses. He feels her flinch. She says, “Can we wait? Just this once?”
Vax has put off rituals before, of course, but this is why there are two of them. He says without turning, “You know your duty,” and he hears it, the way his voice echoes, the power in it, deeper than divine magic.
And she does. Morrighan doesn’t protest. She catches at his arm. She kisses his cheek. She whispers, “go bring her home, Vax.” And she leaps off towards their realm to continue the work.
And he is alone.
Except he isn’t. Not anymore.
The thread pulses sharper, and Vax bites back a curse at it. She would be impatient. It’s why she loved him, all those years ago. Although she taught him to be still. He supposes it’s time to return the favor.
So he kneels on the outskirts of the square. He had caught a glimpse of her earlier with her parents. He’s been watching for a few days. She’ll pass this way soon, on her way to go play with her friends who live on the other side of the city.
And then, there she is: a young tiefling girl with blood-red skin. She’s wearing a simple summer dress. Her dark hair is tied back in a braid. She has a bag slung over one shoulder that he knows is full of books.
He feels the moment she sees him like a cold touch along the back of his neck. A shiver. She stops walking.
“Hello,” Vax says. “I’ve been looking for you.”
And then she is running. Five steps away she leaps. He laughs, and it’s a smaller echo of falling out of the sky with feathers in his hair. He seizes her wrist and pulls her the rest of the way into his arms. She’s so small; still a child. She locks her arms around his neck. Her horns scrape under his chin, sharp as little blades.
“There you are,” he whispers into her hair.
He thinks: home and home and home.
She’s trembling. Is she crying?
He pulls away gently. “Let me see you, please.”
She tilts her face up, and ah, there are her eyes: black still, and dark enough to drown in. “Hello, my Champion,” she whispers. Her voice is sweet.
He’s already kneeling, but he inclines his head. “Hello.”
She touches his cheek. “I dreamed of you,” she whispers. “That’s how I remembered.”
Vax’ildan no longer dreams, but Morrighan had mentioned something similar. “What did you dream?”
She laughs. “You called me a bad word.”
“Bitch?” His lips curl a little on the word. He has known his purpose for many years but now it feels more settled. He has missed her more fiercely than he thought possible.
She grins, and it’s such an impish, mortal expression that he’s a little taken aback. But she is mortal now, isn’t she? Isn’t that the point?
She says, “take me home.”
___
He takes her to the small temple in the Greyfield. He has been the caretaker in recent years, and it is fairly empty. There are a scattering of flowers. A few chalices of blood, because that is the communion they have always shared.
But it is the shadows that are most sacred to the two of them. The dappling of in between light.
He leads her by the hand into one. She tilts her head back and takes a deep breath.
“How is it, this time?” Vax asks. “Being mortal?”
“I don’t know,” she says, soft. “I’m just getting started.”