o, let me living die (critical role | vilya, ensemble)

[fiachairecht]

o, let me living die. critical role, vilya, vesh, korren, patisse, cerkonos, uvenda. stops along the path of vilya's aramente. 1.3k words, rated t.

i. Korren is not yet old when the tempest begins to falter.

It's hardly noticeable, at first. The winds are a little more quiet, the flowers in Melora's garden a little more dull. Just the season's change, they think, and the druids who stand solid in front of the maelstrom barring the elemental plane say nothing as the lines of Korren's face grow deeper.

When things larger than air elementals start to slip through, when Vilya begins spending more and more nights sleepless in front of the doorway, they can no longer ignore the knowledge that the tempest has made its choice.

I'm sorry, Vilya says, as they watch their daughter play. Keyleth lies on the ground, giggling to herself as she spins baubles of air and water over her head for the birds to chase. I do not wish to leave you alone with her, with everything that's coming.

Korren pulls her close to his side, kisses her temple. I know, he says. But there is only so much longer I can hold the gate. The tempest's choice cannot be denied, and should it take my voice before you return...

So. Vilya leaves, alone.

*

ii. The ground in Terrah shifts and roils under her feet, unsteady and inconstant. Still there is a solidity to it, and it is not until she lifts her face to the sun, feels its light pour through her body and root deep in the earth, that she understands exactly what has been fading in Zephra for the past years.

But the air is still and hot, and though the druids here are her siblings, she knows that their magics exist uneasy with her. Terrah grounds her, but there is such a fine line between stability and a cage.

It's good that you've come, Patisse says, regarding her solemnly across the dinner table. The tempest is strong in you. Your patron's voice is waiting.

Patron. Vilya turns the word over and over in her mind, and this alone does not settle. The air has not taught her, Melora not spoken to her, and if the rock's murmurs hold a name they do not have the language to share it.

The nights are firey-hot, yet Vilya dreams only of the ocean, clear blue water spiraling up her body until it turns grey with storms. In her dreams the water replaces breath and blood, fills her til her fragile skin seems it ought to burst under so much pressure and yet it never does. She sinks weightless into the wind-tossed ocean as easily as she floated through Zephra's skies, and still she lives.

What do you dream of, child? Patisse asks, after she has drowned every night for two months.

Not death, she answers, something far more broken.

His face crumbles at her words. She leaves the next day, still alone.

*

interlude. The flight over the Ozmit Sea is nearly unbearable. Vilya spends most of it bent over the side of the skyship, caught tense between sea and sky, eyelids fluttering in the harsh wind as she searches the water for a sign. Of what she does not know, but there are patterns in the reflections she thinks she must grasp, if only she has enough time.

To be Ashari means to have knowledge of barriers and boundaries sunk into your skin. Still, Vilya thinks, nothing could have prepared her for this.

Sometimes she takes the shape of the seabirds that chase them, plunges down towards the water before pulling back and streaking up, up, up past the ship as the sailors whistle and clap for her. They think it a bit of fun for a starry-eyed druid who has not yet seen the ocean's vast expanse, and Vilya forces herself to smile, for their concern would be ever worse.

She has never felt so thin and spread out in her life: Zephra's call of home, Terrah's anchor around her wrist, Pyrah beckoning from ahead, Vesrah's steady waves below it all. And always now another pull, the storm and the sea and the whirlpool where they meet.

Vilya is no stranger to open skies, but she has never felt so raw beneath them.

*

iii. The Cindergrove welcomes her in a way that Vasselheim's Abundant Terrace never quite did. She had meant to stop there, to draw strength from Melora's trees and renew her pledge to complete her Aramente for her people, but all the green threatened was suffocation.

The sea that she dreams of is not Melora's, she knows this now. Maybe it never was.

Cerkonos takes her to the Fire Plane, where the wind is blistering against her skin but is at least present, and her breath spirals away from her as if daring her to give chase. When he asks her to fight, she does so easily, a decade on the road more of a training ground than anything Zephra provided.

The shift to her water elemental form is instinctive, even as she feels the fires press close around her, but as she struggles with Cerkonos high above the battlefield, the winds tearing at both their forms, it feels more right than any other form she has taken in a long while.

You fight well, Cerkonos says when she wears him down enough that his human body falls to the sands. Vilya drops her elemental form, blinks against the sun and offers him her hand. His fingers dig into her wrist as he rises, and he says, I only hope that She does not one day ask you to turn that fury against us.

I wouldn't— Vilya starts, but Cerkonos silences her with a shake of his head.

To be the tempest's voice is not only to speak, child, he says. Your path is not a lonely one, though you may wish it, by the end.

She leaves Pyrah more comfortable in her own power, and more certain than ever that the pull of the water on her heart is the pull of someone as well.

*

iv. She takes to the water seeking Vesrah, and for the first time begins to wonder if it will ever truly give her back. She spins wind and waves around her fingers and thinks of Keyleth, growing up alone, growing up powerful, growing up with no knowledge of what is to come.

It will be worth it, it must, to keep her daughter safe.

When the storms come, Vilya lies flat on her back just high enough in the air to be out of her crew's way and lets the rain soak into her skin. Perhaps she is an offering. Perhaps she is simply waiting.

There are voices in the winds, and for the first time she can make out snatches of words. Promises to be kept or perhaps to be broken, and when she falls to her knees in front of Uvenda in the water along Vesrah's black sand beach she thinks she makes out pity in the old woman's eyes.

You walk to other planes with more behind your back than most, child, Uvenda says. Our portal falters here, though not the same as that in your home. It is ... fitting that you are to help here before your return.

I walk with my friends, Vilya says slowly, as Uvenda's words creep over her as slowly and inexorably as the tide and winds erode the rock. I come ... to be a new voice for the tempest, and a new sister to the tides.

Uvenda grips her chin in a surprisingly strong hand. You speak more truth than you know, she says. More, perhaps, than you should be asked to bear. But the Lady's absence is worth it.

*

interlude. Vilya floats, timeless and senseless amongst the broken bodies of her friends. They followed without asking, even when she told them almost nothing, and had she the ability to mourn them, she would.

But death feeds life, and the elements she guarded were never hers.

There is a woman tangled in the seaweed and she alone apart from Vilya is whole, with blue-black skin that ripples in the waves and blue-black hair that reaches out like the kraken's tentacles.

My name is Vesh, she says.

And I love you.

In the infinite ocean that Vilya now knows she will never leave, she closes her eyes to accept Vesh's kiss and does not scream.