a heart-shaped knot of roots (critical role | keyleth/vex, keyleth/raishan)

[fiachairecht]

a heart-shaped knot of roots. critical role campaign 1, keyleth/vex, keyleth/raishan. vex keeps a vigil. 1.5k words, rated t.

ladiesbingo 2019: confessions
spook_me 2019: plant monster

Keyleth died at midnight.

For the brief moment Vex wanted to make herself feel better about that, she told herself that the Keyleth she knew died years — decades ago, when she left the tattered remnants of Vox Machina for Raishan. The body she had killed, the one sprawled out on the grass and flowers at the far edge of the Vesper Timberland, was merely a formality.

It didn't matter. The Keyleth that died at midnight at Vex's hand was still the same Keyleth who she had loved since the dragons came.

She was home, of a sort, but the cost of it stuck in Vex's throat like one of her own arrows.

This far north, the midnight suns fell in a golden streak across Keyleth's face, the one that hadn't aged a day since she left and would never age again. The arrow in her heart was already starting to blossom, a vine winding its way down the shaft and joining the pool of blood on Keyleth's chest.

Vex sat down, rested Fenthras across her lap, stared into Keyleth's blank eyes, and began to cry.

The woods were silent around them, nothing to muffle the sounds of her tears. They dripped down her cheeks and onto the grass like rain, falling onto the white of the dress Keyleth died in and the green of the new growth spilling from the hole in her heart.

The vigil was a lonely one, under the trees. She hunted on her own more often these days, though there was no shortage of offers from others at the Slayer's Take. Keyleth had always been her main quarry, no matter what Vanessa or the contracts said, and that hunt—

Well. She hadn't wanted or expected this outcome, though she had always known it was a possibility. But it was only right that the ending was theirs alone.

It was a lonely vigil. Vex had never learned the secrets of speaking with either plants or the dead, and absent any companions she was left with only the scattered woodland wildlife as possible conversation partners. And the animals were as scarce as any comfort: they knew unnatural death for what it was, even if their minds were too small to put a name to it.

Vex would feel sorry for intruding on their home like this, if she had the feelings to spare. If they weren't all focussed arrow-sharp on Keyleth's body, on the ground where it's lain untouched for—

She could lie to herself, say that she didn't know how many days it had been. But she can't stop counting the turning of the sun overhead, any more than she could uncurl her fingers from Fenthras' grip, any more than she could take her eyes off the vine-wreathed knot of green and brown spilling up from the blood and skin and cloth where Keyleth's chest used to be.

She ate — she must have eaten. Slept, sometimes, the dreams of Keyleth with her red hair spilling over the scarred green skin of Raishan's spread thighs, or leaning over the side of an airship with her arms outstretched like wings not better than the reality of her broken corpse.

Existed. Lived. More than she could say for her former lover.

The roots grew with unnatural speed. It was still over a week before they filled the whole of Keyleth's caved-in chest, where what should have been a clean kill shot had expanded as Keyleth had writhed in pain, tore at her chest with black nails and screamed her last breaths to the sky.

It was easier, after that. Once Keyleth's body was firmly anchored to the ground, the vines were freer to roam. Keyleth had worn no armour when she died, and the dress decayed faster than the skin, and the greenery cradled her corpse with its long flowering fingers tighter and tighter until anything that could ever resemble flesh was entirely hidden from view.

When her cheeks sank inwards, Vex reached out for the first time and placed two fingers in the hollow. The skin was rough like bark, neither soft with decay nor stiff with death.

For the first time, Vex let herself begin to believe that Keyleth was transforming under Fenthras' power: becoming something new, rather than having been given over to something old.

"Oh, darling," Vex said, on a day when the vines had not quite reached down to Keyleth's hips, but they had begun to flower, "I do wish you would hurry up, if you're ever going to come back to me."

She didn't expect a response, not really, and she didn't get one, unless she counted the slight brush of the wind through her hair. It was soft, and nothing like Keyleth's hands.

Keyleth had always been a creature outside of time, hung heavy with the weight of her years yet to come from the day Vex had first met her. Now she had hollyhock for ears and butterfly weed for hair and her lips were thistle-purple absent any other blood.

Dead, Keyleth was more a part of the earth than the air, and Vex wondered if she would hate her for that. If she would rather have withered away into a shell of a thing that could be blown through the elemental gates, or fly free above Zephra forever.

Probably, Vex usually thought, she would rather have rather faced all those thousand years and then handled whatever death came to Ashari headmasters on her own. But then, she had turned around, at the end of the hunt. Smiling, arms spread as if for a hug, she had stepped forward—

Not for a hug. Vex shook her head to clear it of the thought: the thing Keyleth had become would never have shown her such affection.

But she would always have to remember the sight of Keyleth's eyes widening as the arrow struck true. Disbelief, pain, and not the slightest hint she remembered what Fenthras would do. Not a single sign that Vex was setting her free, rather than murdering her in cold blood.

And it had been cold. Was still cold, in the Othanzian wastes, where the trees would themselves resemble corpses in the winter.

Keyleth's eyes were still open, though her clothes were nearly gone. It was the only way Vex had to measure the passage of time, as the as the plants across Keyleth's chest slowly grew in and out like a tide — though the sun could mark out days, the clearing remained still, static, a breath held too long.

In the silence, Vex buried the confessions that she could never gift to a Keyleth alive.

"You're beautiful like this, you know," it was one day, when the sunset had managed to spill over the treetops and limn Keyleth's remaining hair red and gold and orange. "Not more than you were alive. Not less. Just different."

And then, when Keyleth's eyes were gone and the lilies were fully at home in the sockets: "I don't regret it. Not even now. I don't think you — the real you, I mean, darling — would regret it either."

Strange, to give something so viciously alive as regret to a gently falling apart corpse. Bit by bit Keyleth was returning to the land, sloughing off each of the layers built up over her time with Raishan that had made her something ... else.

It was freedom, though not the kind of freedom Vex was used to using Fenthras to bestow.

Freedom from skin. Freedom from eternity. Freedom from a woman Vex still struggled to accept that she had loved.

Keyleth's bones were as white as the fabric of her dress had been, now. Vex can't remember the last time she had slept. It was hard to think about sleep, when the knotted roots that had taken up residence in the hollows of Keyleth's ribcage pulsed hypnotically just like a heart.

"It's a beautiful heart," Vex whispered to the body on the ground. "But then, it's your heart, darling. It could only ever be beautiful."

I love this one of your hearts, too: the confession that still had yet to slip from her lips.

The trees overhead lost their leaves and gained them back. Other members of the Slayer's Take brought Vex food — they must have, at least, because Vex was certain that she was still alive, and that she would have perished if she was left to forage on her own.

Fenthras was still in her lap: she hadn't unstrung it since the day Keyleth died, but neither had she nocked an arrow since the one that flew to Keyleth's heart, so much surer of its path there than Vex had ever been of her own.

She was beginning to think that Fenthras had had a mind of its own, when it started to create from Keyleth's body.

That, after all, could be the only reason that Keyleth sat up at the summer solstice, her bones held together by moss and petals and the occasional ivy vine. The only reason why Keyleth's flower of a mouth leaned over to kiss her.

Buried under a garden of her own creation, Vex couldn't have screamed even if she had wanted to.