i entitled you my favourite scar (critical role | raven queen/vesh)

[fiachairecht]

i entitled you my favourite scar. critical role, raven queen/vesh. a young woman marries the god of death, and kills her too. 1k words, rated t.

Is there literally anything in canon to support my theory that Vesh is the Exandrian version of the mostly-dead remnants of Nerull, the former god of death and wife of the Raven Queen? No. Is there literally anything in canon to contradict it? Actually, also no. Has that changed since I first wrote that in 2017? Honestly I don't know and don't care.

It is easy to hunt death when you are little.

It is easy, in a world still reeling, where the rains burrow holes into skin and the ground weeps hailstones wrapped around the memories of city walls, to hold your hands out for lost souls, feel them slip through your fingers cleaner than any water you've ever known.

There is little control anymore, as the earth shifts and screams absent the hands of its guiding gods, and the reclaiming things that yet bear no name have no interest in one little girl.

But the Weave does. It hunts, now, eager and hungry for the former divine, and when warped strings of gold hang heavy behind your eyelids, pour black and gold from your body like claw-tipped wings, you cannot escape the knowledge that something has claimed you.

Cannot escape the knowledge, in the deep nights when you shelter so far down in snowbanks so vast you think you might fall straight through to the other side of the earth, that you have let it.

Sorcery is not the only way to live in this new world, but it is the only way to live for long, and the thread lodged in your chest is so long, so alive, that there is nothing else for you.

There are ravens on your shoulders and chains around your neck and in the blasted world you hunt death, and you wait.

*

Death is a woman when she comes to you, sleek and whole like nothing else you have ever seen.

This is not strange, though she is strange, a storm for a season like the world hasn't seen in decades. There is gold at the very bottoms of her eyes and you would cast yourself into them without a thought, falling and never thinking anything but that the gold in your chest would pull you back to solid ground.

(It is not until much, much later that you realise there is no such thing as solid ground around Vesh.)

But you do not have to; whether she feels a pull like yours or whether she simply likes the look of you, it is all the same. She pries secrets from your tongue with icicle-sharp teeth, presses apologies back into your body with an oddly soft tongue. It is enough. It is right.

It takes her three days to ask your name, and when she finally does you hardly hear the question, murmured into your neck as the two of you rest in a gossamer-spun hammock high in the branches of tree that is not quite living.

You don't answer. The creaking of the branches says sorrow, the cry of the ravens says knowledge, the drumming of the rain says stillness. They are all more true than anything you could say: of all the things you can give to Death and let her take, this you will keep.

Mine, she says, and her teeth close around your collarbone. You feel the cold in your blood, seeping in through the holes in your skin where the threads of fate don't move. I think I will call you mine.

*

You are hers, for nothing you are with Vesh would be possible without her. The world around you picks up pieces of the old age more quickly now, their newfound affection for gates affecting even passage into the Shadowfell.

And so you flee, before solid becomes permanent.

With her you are a queen, with her you watch the dead dance with newly-freed limbs while at your feet their threads pile higher and higher, pale remnants of the lattice overstretching the world, hanging across your vision even when you sleep now.

They snap so easily when we want them to, Vesh says, and she binds them around your wrists, through your hair. They smear ashy residue across your skin and Vesh licks it clean.

Her lips and tongue are warmer now, her teeth show less often. You are not sure you are in the Shadowfell at all anymore.

You have found death, and she has found you, and the specifics of where you are matters not when you are always already hung spread and aching for her as she pulls your hair and slips between your thighs and her summer storm breaks endlessly against your winter mirror.

You think, sometimes, you are in danger of slipping free of the threads' embrace, times in the forever-dusk when your chest aches as though your thread has been dug out by her claws. But she, but fate has bound you too well. When the knots burn, sink into your skin and let you accept them as new, you grit your teeth and arch your back and laugh breathless into her mouth.

When she covers you in golden ropes, twisted so tight you cannot move, you let her kingdom swallow you whole and wonder how long it will take for her to choke on the spikes she's helped drive into your numb body.

*

You know all the ways there are to die that there are; you have met shades of every victim and every chosen one.

You turn them over in your head again and again and again, only letting go when Vesh's hands on you spin away all thoughts but those of her.

But it is easy to plan, when you are a trophy. Easy to plan, when she has not yet realised that a domain untaught it not a domain unlearned.

The dead choose, move, shift. They grow in number, Vesh bringing them to you with gleaming eyes and a presence dripping blood like you drip fate under your consort's robes. You gain favour from the dead, and let her think she has gained the same from you: your wait is not that for spring, but something far more patient.

Your chest aches, with the memory of her mouth or with the promise of potential, you cannot say.

The Shadowfell is not alive, but neither are you. Vesh's realm is not entirely beyond the divine gate, but neither are you.

The plane stretches out before you, and it is filled with your dead.

Mine, you murmur, fingers tight around Vesh's neck on one of the rare nights she is fully formed. You've grown colder here, can feel the ice spread to cover her body, all tied up with gold. I think I will call you mine.

*

She has your name, or something close enough.

And for that she can never die.

But for that she is nearly nothing.