Archive of Our Own ^beta

The air bears only the first scant traces of spring warmth, or what passes for it in the Parchwood Forest this close to the mountains, and Scanlan doesn't make it that far out of the city before two problems make themselves forcefully known:

First, nightgowns and dried pudding aren't that warm. Second, death is exhausting.

Kaylie notices at least the first, although not until after Scanlan has resolved to walk until his feet are bloody and even then walk on his knees - better that than show weakness in front of his daughter. Again. But once they're clear of the city walls, on the road through the forest whose name Scanlan never bothered to catch, she ducks behind a particularly dense section of forest. Then she pops her head back out.

"If you want to put more clothes on, this is probably as good a place as any," she says.

"Right," Scanlan says, and tries to judge the daylight. Then he realizes that he has no idea what time it is, or what day even. It doesn't feel much stranger, frankly, than walking out of Whitestone Castle in a nightgown after being killed by a dragon twice. Perhaps there's a maximum level of disorientation that a gnome can reach, and after that, it's just a matter of maintaining the plateau. "Tell you what," Scanlan says. "Do you want to see my mansion?"

Kaylie looks at him blankly. "Do you mean your Keep?" she asks, in a tone that makes it clear that she's wondering whether death scrambled his brain.

"Watch this," Scanlan says, and takes a moment to fumble the spell components out of his pack. Then he steps back, chooses a suitable position for the door, and casts the spell. The familiar arcane heat tingles through his arms and fingers as he does, pulsing even hotter than he remembered it, but his lingering exhaustion almost staggers him - but the spell still completes, and the portal shimmers in front of them. "Welcome," he says, trying not to sound winded, "to Scanlan's Magnificent Mansion. After you." He gestures, and Kaylie only gives him a half-second dubious glance before stepping through.

He takes a moment to catch his breath before he follows, and immediately feels the relief of actual, honest-to-gods heat on his skin instead of the aching, relentless wind that he hadn't even registered until it was gone. He can almost feel it dripping through his skin, pore by pore, making its way into his poor, chilled bones.

Then his overwhelming feeling is panic as he realizes that he set the Mansion up out of habit, with its usual layout - meaning it not only has all the rooms that will stand empty without Vox Machina to fill them, but the entrance hall provides an excellent view of Garmelie's portrait of the group as well.

Kaylie stands before it, one arm tucked across her chest and the other resting against it to prop her hand against her lips as she stares at the portrait. After the initial pulse of panic, Scanlan almost can't muster up the energy to worry about what she might think as her eyes dart across the charcoal. Almost.

She turns back to him and points at the sketch. "That," she proclaims, "is a fucking masterpiece."

A knot of anxiety in Scanlan's stomach relaxes, although he makes the mistake of looking past her at the portrait itself and the feeling is immediately replaced by desolate exhaustion at the reminder of happier times. "It was done by the most annoying Archfey in the Feywild," he tells her, turning his face from it. "I'll have to tell you the story sometime."

Frowning a bit, Kaylie looks him over, head to toe, her gaze lingering at the collar of the nightgown. "Maybe you should get some more rest first," she says, and there's an unsteadiness to her voice that isn't quite uncertainty. His collar is hanging low, Scanlan realizes when he pays attention to the air on his skin, tugged down on one side by the weight of his pack shifting as he walked, and he pulls the cloth back up without looking.

"Maybe," he agrees. "You - you have a room here, if you'd like. I made it for you. The servants can take your things, too - " They come out of the other hall as they're called, arms outstretched, and Scanlan hands over his pack immediately. "See what you can do about laundering and repairing my clothes - some of them are worse off than others," he tells one, who nods in return.

"Servants," he hears Kaylie mutter. "You've got to be kidding me."

"It's part of the spell," Scanlan tells her. She clutches her pack strap and her violin case even closer as the servants descend on her, and Scanlan pitches his voice a bit louder to add, "But they won't take anything you don't want them to."

The servants hesitate, and Kaylie says, "I'll keep hold of all this, thanks."

They move back, shoulders drooping.

"The bedrooms are over here," Scanlan says, and begins to lead the way. The brief period of standing still has only exacerbated the ache in his - well, everything, really, and each step jostles from the bones of his feet up his sternum to the flu-like rawness at the back of his throat. Kaylie follows, as does the servant carrying Scanlan's things, and together they climb the stairs to the second floor. "Bedrooms are on this side, while the downstairs has the parlor, billiards room, music room, that sort of thing," Scanlan explains as they pass Vox Machina's empty quarters. "Feel free to take full run of the place. There's a spa in the basement, which is quite nice, if I do say so myself."

"Tents," Kaylie says abruptly. "This is why you told them to buy tents."

Scanlan's jaw sets for a moment, but it only makes his headache worse, so he forcibly relaxes it. "Yes," he says, "and my room is at the end of the hallway, with yours right next to it. Next time I can form the mansion without all the…extra deadweight."

Kaylie glances at him. "You think your friends'll never come back? What if they left something in here?"

"They didn't. Anything from the outside world that you leave in the mansion gets ejected when the spell ends, and anything you try to take out with you poofs into smoke." Scanlan rubs his eyes against the ache there. There's a metaphor in that, somewhere, but he's too spent to find it. "And if they do come back, I can just make them again. Probably. I don't really care right now, to be honest. Here you are." He stops in front of Kaylie's door and opens it with a sweep of his arm. Rather than try to guess at her style or impose his own on her, he had imagined this room as a fairly simple one, based more on the nondescript style he's seen at a thousand taverns: four-poster bed with curtains to keep the firelight out in the face of a hangover, a small desk equipped with paper and quill next to a music stand should she need it, and a vanity equipped with drawers, a small basin for washing up, and a mirror.

The only concession he allowed himself is the portrait hung on the wall. In it, Scanlan stands behind Kaylie, both of them painted from the chest-up in vibrant oils, with his hands resting reassuringly and supportively on her shoulders. In the portrait, they're both smiling.

Kaylie steps into the room, looking around at it. "Well," she says, dropping her pack by the bed, "I suppose this isn't half - "

But then she sees the portrait and stares at it for a long moment. Eventually she points at it and turns to Scanlan. "Seriously?" she says. "Seriously?"

Scanlan's shoulders ache as they rise up defensively. "What?" he says. "You're special to me! I don't mind showing it!"

Kaylie just rolls her eyes and flops herself backwards on the bed.

Scanlan decides to take that as a win and quit while he's ahead. "I'm going to get changed," he says. "There's chicken and refreshments down in the dining hall - help yourself to whatever you'd like."

"Yeah, all right," Kaylie says vaguely, and Scanlan retreats to his own room.

The servant follows him in, which immediately proves itself to be a vital development when Scanlan's aching muscles refuse to coordinate long enough to take the fucking nightgown off. The oddly squishy hands help him ease it off, and Scanlan takes a moment to mimic Kaylie and fall back on his own bed.

The giant mirror hanging above it shows the ragged, twisting scars, ugly red not yet faded to white, across his chest. Even on Grog, they would be massive, and on Scanlan his chest seems to be more scar than skin. The first starts just above his right collarbone, hooking down and across his chest to where the claw came out just above his hip. That one he remembers, at least partially - about down to the end of his sternum. The other one he doesn't remember at all, a slash just below but parallel to the bottom edge of his ribcage, making an abbreviated 'X' across his entire torso.

He hesitates, then puts his fingers against the scars, feeling the topography of them like contours of mountains. He remembers his ribs snapping, and he can almost feel the echoes of the sensation, the cracking reverberation of them one after the other until, finally, there was only darkness.

He curls onto his side, squeezing his eyes shut against the memory, and focuses on breathing past his quickening pulse, the shaking in his hands, the terror rising at the back of his throat.

The exhaustion of coming back from the dead, though, is stronger than he'd reckoned with; he doesn't know how much longer it is before he wakes up, but the small damp spot of drool beneath his mouth suggests the passage of time.

Once he's cleaned himself up a bit and had the servants help him put his last set of clean, untorn, unburnt clothes on, he goes downstairs to see to his stomach, which is empty enough to begin bothering him with the pangs he hasn't had to deal with in decades, not seriously. He doesn't expect to see Kaylie down at the breakfast table in front of a plate of chicken and a cup of coffee.

She notices when he comes in, though, and says over one shoulder to him, "Tired, were you? I guess death really takes it out of you. Also - " she holds up a drumstrick to punctuate her point - "is there a reason it's only chicken?"

"What's wrong with chicken?" Scanlan says without thinking.

"It's just an odd breakfast, that's all."

"I was out that long?" Scanlan says, taking a seat two places down from Kaylie - he doesn't want to crowd her, but neither does he want to be too far away.

"You certainly were," Kaylie says. "There's coffee."

"Yes, please, all the coffee would be delightful," Scanlan says, taking the offered pot from her. But he puts it on the table and looks around for the nearest servant. "Kaylie gets whatever she asks for, do you understand?" he tells it, and the servant bows his response and hurries to the kitchen.

Kaylie snorts quietly. "That's a dangerous order to give," she says.

"I'm sure there are limits on what the spell can make," Scanlan replies. "If you manage to find them, good for you. And, of course, you can't take any of it outside. Did you get dinner last night? Did you sleep? Was the room to your liking?"

"Yes, yes, and fancier than anyplace I've ever been." Kaylie puts down the leg bone, now cleaned of meat, and gives Scanlan a look that's half-appraisal, half-curiosity. "You can just make this? Whenever you want?"

"Well, sort of," Scanlan says. "It's a pretty powerful spell, so I can't really, you know, cast it more than once a day or anything like that. Well," he corrects himself, "twice, but then I can't cast anything more powerful until I've rested. I've only been able to do it at all for a few months. You're actually one of the first people to stay here that's not - not a member of Vox Machina."

A servant comes by and puts a plate of chicken in front of Scanlan, and nothing has ever looked as appetizing to him. Well, almost nothing: he chugs a mug of coffee first to try to clear the cobwebs from his head. The achy post-resurrection fogginess is only slightly diminished, but it's enough for him to dig into his chicken with gusto.

"You're not having second thoughts, are you?" Kaylie says, her voice slightly strained. Scanlan swallows his mouthful and looks at her. The tension in her shoulders and at the corners of her eyes is obvious, although she keeps her own gaze on the plate in front of her. "Thinking about going back to them?"

"No," Scanlan says slowly. "They - I - what I said in there wasn't a lie. I need to figure out what it means to be - to be not a member of Vox Machina for a while. To just be me. Not…fighting dragons or any of that shit."

"Right," Kaylie says, and meets his eyes. "So when you say it wasn't a lie, does that include the part where you said you died twice?"

Scanlan says, "Uh."

"Were you going to mention that to me?" Kaylie sets her fork down and turns her upper body so that she can face Scanlan more fully. "Or were you going to let that fall by the wayside?"

"In my defense, the first time was only like three days ago! I think! I don’t actually know how long I was…out. This is all happening really, really fast--"

"No more lying. No white lies, no fibs, no lies of omission, none of it. You tell me the truth, do you understand?" Kaylie points at him, her eyes intent and almost desperate. "The truth or nothing."

Scanlan is speechless for only a moment before he says, "I promise."

"Good, because I don't want to have to say it twice." Kaylie goes back to her food, tearing away a chunk of chicken as Scanlan more demurely turns back to his own food.

There's something calming about walking. It's almost a rocking motion, a constant momentum of foot after foot after foot against the ground, that Scanlan had just about forgotten. It's been a while - had been a while - since Vox Machina had needed to travel on foot, after all, and Scanlan chalks it up as one of the many pleasant things in his life he'd been missing while pretending to be a noble adventurer. As he walks, he thinks of the other things on the list, although the main one is, of course, irresponsible carousing. Despite his own natural affinity for getting into trouble, all the rest of Vox Machina always seemed to best him at it, and someone had to be the one to go step-by-step through the plan, to play devil's advocate to make it stronger, to defuse the barfight or talk someone out of jail or jump off a fucking tower after a rakshasa.

It's oddly comforting to know that there is absolutely no way his life can get more exciting. Or stranger.

They walk in silence, enjoying the forest. These days, balanced between winter and spring, it's the spring sunlight that chases away the chill winter nights, and the contrast of frigid air and warmth on his skin is refreshing. It's odd to think that not that long ago his skin would've transmitted none of this to his mind; his body would have been as cold as the night, inert and empty.

Around lunchtime, Scanlan realizes that, while traveling with Vox Machina, he's fallen out of the habit of carrying his own provisions. Between the Bag of Holding, the Bag of Colding, Vex's hunting skills, and, of course, their ability to walk to town to town through trees instead of on foot, he hasn't had to carry his own meals in…a while.

So he doesn't have any, and they'll probably make it to the next town by nightfall, but his knees are already starting to feel weak. Maybe it's his recent deaths, or just the fact that he's out of practice going without meals; either way, he decides that there's no reason to suffer through it if he doesn't have to.

"How about I cast the mansion again so we can have lunch?" he says, breaking the companionable silence with Kaylie, who's only a few steps ahead of him at this point.

She slows, letting him catch up and frowns at him, more cynical than confused. "You've got that much magic to spare?" she says. "To just throw a powerful spell like that away on lunch?"

He exaggerates a shrug. "The dragons are gone - what else would I use that spell slot on? Also, lunch is a thing that I enjoy having and would rather not go without, so…"

The look shifts to decidedly judgmental. "Have you ever gone without a meal, then?" Kaylie asks in a flat tone that makes her answer clear. Sybil had the income of a quilter, Kaylie had said; not much, Scanlan supposes, and being the only gnome in her town on top of that paints a rather vivid picture of what those missed meals might have come with. If Scanlan had known -

But that doesn't matter to this conversation, so Scanlan just says, "Quite regularly, when I was younger."

Kaylie raises her eyebrows at him. "The whole truth, if you please. Remember, you promised."

"I did," Scanlan agrees, cursing himself. "After my mother died, there wasn't…I was on my own. I didn't have a flute yet, didn't have anything but my voice, so I did my best to get by on the streets. Never quite got the hang of pickpocketing, unfortunately. That would've made my life much easier. But I begged when I had to, and that got me some money, which got me some food. The rest of the time, I got used to being hungry." He forces an easy smile at her, more out of habit than a genuine impulse. "It's a habit I was happy to break. And then, of course, Dr. Dranzel found me, gave me a flute and a stage, and things turned around."

After a quiet moment of taking this in, Kaylie says, "Well. Cast the mansion, then, and let's eat."

So he casts the mansion, and they sit down to a magnificent lunch of chicken. Scanlan watches to see if Kaylie will request something else, but, to his surprise, she doesn't. She does, however, chug enough coffee that he wonders if she'll spontaneously combust.

"So where were you planning on going?" she asks halfway through the meal, and Scanlan pauses with his fork hovering over a bite of white meat.

"Well," he says slowly, "you were in Kymal, weren't you?" Kaylie nods. "Are you in a hurry to get back there?"

She stops, too, just long enough to give him a suspicious look. "Why?"

"If you're okay with the detour," he says, "I thought maybe you could come with me to Moorenmarsh. It's the town where I grew up, just across the Mooren Lake from Drynna. It's - that's where - my mother's buried there."

Kaylie stares at him for a long moment, her eyes round and unblinking. "Okay," she says eventually. Then she sits back in her chair in exasperation. "You can't just say something like that and not tell the story, all right? What happened?"

"Oh," Scanlan says. "Well, I guess - she was a smith. She had the only forge in Moorenmarsh. Mostly nails, hinges, wheels for carts, nothing fancy, and it wasn't big. Obviously. Nothing in the town was - it was mostly gnomes, with a couple halfling families. Lots of fishing and farming. And Mom - Juniper - she was a spitfire of a woman." He smiles a bit as he remembers, in spite of the ache that comes with the memories. "She'd threaten to flick red-hot nails at the other kids if they bothered her while they were working, but every festival we'd all follow her around and try to see how many of us she could lift at a time - she had the biggest muscles from the forge. But, uh, when the goblins came…a lot of people in the town died, but most of them hid or ran, but Mom wouldn't - she wasn't the kind of person to run. So she hid me behind the forge because, a tiny gnome kid like me behind a big forge like that, who'd see me? And she told me not to attract any attention until she'd taken care of them. She picked up her hammer in one hand and a bundle of these iron rods that she'd been heating in the other, still red-hot, and when the goblins came in - I think they thought there'd be gold in the forge, they weren't very smart - she just started mowing them down like a reaper in the fields. Until one of them got a lucky swing with their sword." Kaylie stays silent, and Scanlan clears his throat a bit; it's tight. "I buried her there, but I've never been back. Everyone cleared out to Drynna. Better defenses in a bigger city. That's where Dr. Dranzel found me."

Sensing that the story is over, Kaylie sits back in her chair, still quiet.

"And…" Scanlan takes a deep breath; he's been avoiding this question. "Your mother. Is she…?"

Kaylie continues to stare, although her brow wrinkles with a frown, even as Scanlan nods suggestively. Then it clicks, and she rolls her eyes. "Mum's fine. She's still in Kymal, still a quilter. She's got no idea I've even met you."

"Oh," Scanlan says. "I'm - glad? That she's fine, anyway."

She gives him another look, a mixture of exasperation and resignation that's starting to become very familiar. "What was I supposed to say? 'By the way, Mum, I tracked down the man who broke your heart, tried to kill him and ended up helping bring him back from the dead instead?'"

"There was some time in between those last two, though. I'm just pointing that out."

This time, Kaylie looks at him with a raised eyebrow and steel in her gaze. "Are you going to tell her?"

"Gods, no," Scanlan says. "I'm perfectly fine never seeing her again. Unless you planned - "

"Absolutely not!"

"Then we're agreed. No need for that."

"None at all!"

"Great."

Another moment of silence between them, and then Kaylie clears her throat. "So. To - what was it, again? Moorenmarsh?"

"If it's okay with you," Scanlan says, and even Kaylie's noncommittal shrug warms his heart.

They take their time walking, letting distances that would normally take hours take days. When there are towns, they perform; when there aren’t, they have quiet dinners. Kaylie, it turns out, prefers to camp, although the Mansion becomes a consistent source of lunches. They pass from forests and foothills to fields, lingering in the Turst Fields for a few days. Scanlan considers trying to find some suude – this was where Jarrett had said it could be found, after all – but he dismisses the idea almost instantly. He had wanted a rush, or at least a better chance at survival, and it had given him neither.

The subject of honesty comes up again. It's a very honest conversation. It's a very honest scar.

Overall, it could have gone worse. Scanlan can't quite wrap his mind around the fact that she came back.

Once they've meandered their way down towards the eastern coast, they arrive in Drynna at sunset. They could've continued to Moorenmarsh, about an hour away on the far side of the Mooren Lake, but even that route leads through Drynna to get to the bridge across the Drynn River and as soon as they step into the city, Kaylie's whole demeanor relaxes. Scanlan hadn't even realized she held that tension on the road, but once they're in a space where the houses touch each other and they have to shoulder their way through crowds, Kaylie's back in her element - a city girl at heart, evidently.

So Scanlan suggests they find an inn. He has the money for it, kept in his own private funds from Thordak's loot, and a tavern might let Kaylie unwind in a way that the Mansion, with its servants and grandiosity, might not.

Drynna hasn't changed much in the years since Scanlan was here last, and he spent at least three winters on its streets before Dr. Dranzel discovered him; he may not know the interiors of many buildings, but he knows the layout and the rhythm of the city, and it chafes. The streets that he remembers as wide enough for an easy, nimble escape after a fumbled pickpocketing feel cramped and narrow, the buildings he remembers as looming seem squat now, and he knows the whole city itself, which felt like an entire nation after the single-dirt-road of Moorenmarsh, to be tiny in comparison to Emon or Ank'Harel. This is his first time stepping foot in Drynna since he left with the Troupe, and either the city hasn't aged well or he hasn't.

Scanlan remembers the Reed Whistle from those days, and it's still as well-kept but otherwise nondescript as he remembers, nestled in a mostly residential area near the city gates and aimed at people passing through to use the city's access the Mooren Lake or the Drynn River. Scanlan passes over the gold for a night's stay as Kaylie takes up a table in the far corner of the common room, putting her back to a wall and surveying the space like she's trying to figure out who might be a pickpocket. Which she probably is - Scanlan recognizes Dr. Dranzel's Rule #1: Be the Pickpocket, Not the Pickpocketed.

There's a band playing in corner next to the bar with a space emptied for a dance floor in front of them. It only takes half a measure to mark them as a mostly unremarkable group lacking both special talent or noteworthy ineptitude, so Scanlan brings Kaylie a mug of ale and sits with her, taking the other seat that puts a wall to his back.

"Food should be coming soon," he tells her.

"Not chicken, I hope," she says.

"You can ask the servants in the mansion for whatever you'd like."

Kaylie takes a quaff of ale. "Why is it chicken, though?"

"I just like chicken, I guess."

"I don't believe you."

"I do!"

"That can't be all of it. Nobody likes chicken that much."

Scanlan sips his own ale - about as mediocre as he'd expected - while he thinks about it. Eventually he says, "I guess I just thought it was funny."

"For them?" Kaylie says, with a slight quirk to her eyebrows, and Scanlan knows exactly who she's talking about.

"I guess," he says again, and drinks even deeper.

Their food, when it comes, is not chicken. It's fish, caught from the Drynn and prepared simply, put over a fire whole with butter and herbs and some potatoes. A local preparation, one that Scanlan realizes suddenly he hasn't had in years. Decades, even. It's the standard flavor combination for this coast of Tal'Dorei and he had it in Stillben frequently, but being directly on the coast of the Lucidian Ocean it was always a saltwater fish. His mother taught him how to make this dish, and he hadn't realized how much it would even smell like home, even after all this time.

He feels, suddenly, like a ghost.

"Are those bones?" Kaylie says, aghast, and Scanlan snaps out of his reverie to watch her poke at the fish.

"Yeah," Scanlan says. "Have you never…?"

"Don't eat a lot of fish in Kymal," Kaylie mutters. "Had some on the road, but - bits of 'em. Not like this." She stares at the plate, and then says, "It's giving me a dirty look. It's like it knows I'm going to eat it."

"Should I ask for something else?" Scanlan says quickly. "I can go to the kitchen and - "

"No," Kaylie says firmly, lifting her fork and knife with determination. "Now it's a challenge, and I'm not one to turn down a challenge. Particularly one that's giving me the eye like this."

It takes Scanlan a lot of effort and causes him almost physical pain, but - especially after the first glare he gets from Kaylie while trying to help - he stays silent as Kaylie trial-and-errors her way through how to eat the damn fish. He eats his own, obviously, and it's odd; it's both better than he remembers, in that he'd forgotten how much he likes this recipe, and worse than he remembers, in that he's fairly certain his mother's was better.

As they eat, the band hits its stride. This probably has something to do with the influx of customers as the evening wears on, and Scanlan notices that most of them don't sit down to eat but order drinks and glance at the dance floor. He's been in his fair share of taverns like this: some set up the open area in the hopes of showing their patrons how much fun they can be, but others actually have people come to dance, and this inn seems to be the latter. Once the band switches from quiet melodies intended to serenade diners to the quicker, heavier beats for the dancers, their enthusiasm increases even if the overall quality of their performance doesn't.

Neither of them dance - Scanlan is still exhausted from the lingering effects of the resurrection spell, and also he's a pretty terrible dancer, and although Kaylie watches the dancers with a notably more practiced eye than Scanlan's, she doesn't get up to join them.

Eventually Kaylie looks at Scanlan and says, "You look like you're about to fall out of your chair."

"Am not," Scanlan says, although he shifts his center of gravity to ensure he stays upright because, yeah, he was.

"You should get some sleep," Kaylie says. "You've got a room, yeah?"

"I got both of us rooms. Separate, obviously."

"Good," Kaylie says, and makes a shooing motion with her hands. "Then go get some rest."

"I don't want to abandon you," Scanlan objects.

Kaylie goes a bit pale and says, "Are you expecting us to spend every waking moment together? Because I can tell you, that's not my style."

Scanlan considers this, and then nods and stands up. "All right. Don't start any bar fights - save them for when I can back you up or bail you out, okay?"

Kaylie rolls her eyes and takes a chug of her ale in response. Scanlan sighs, but makes his way upstairs to the room he rented.

All of his clothes are freshly laundered from another stopover in the Mansion, even the ones he wore in the battles with dragons. The shirt from the second fight with Raishan has been carefully repaired with neat, small stitches that are barely visible - suitable for tucking under a vest at the very least. Good. He'll have to pay a lot more attention to his money now that he doesn't have party funds to draw on. He was with Vox Machina long enough to fall out of some important habits - his extra clothes, for example, are stashed in Greyskull Keep to free up space in a smaller, more combat-friendly pack - but he kept some other habits from his days on the road, like keeping a sewing kit at the bottom of his bag just in case.

He fumbles through his pack for his softest, most tattered shirt, and replaces the one he's wearing as quickly as he can. The thought of sleeping nude, or even shirtless, and seeing the harsh ridges of scar tissue left by Raishan couldn't be less appealing, so this will work well enough as a sleep shirt for now.

As he prepares for bed, it strikes him that the last time he was away from Vox Machina this long, he'd been in Vasselheim and they'd run off to Pyrah so Keyleth could continue her Aramente. He'd been bewildered but unconcerned then, trusting they'd come back or indicate to him if they really needed him, and sure enough, eventually they'd returned. Even though he'd missed Pike entirely.

Even though they'd abandoned him in the first place.

The thought makes his chest ache in a way that makes him feel almost helpless. Even in the heat of the moment, he'd known he might miss Vox Machina. That he likely would, even. But he hadn't expected it to be so soon, or so strong, or to coexist with simmering resentment and half-desperate misery. He'd thought he might, eventually, after spending time with Kaylie and finding himself and finding happiness, realize that he wasn't angry at them anymore, that he was a better person and willing to forgive them all their faults, and then he'd go back.

But he still feels the kick of irritation, the rising litany of everything he's done for them that hasn't been done for him, the bone-deep certainty that if they didn't notice it must mean they didn't care, not really, and the jealousy that it's easy for them, so easy to just pair off and support each other and shrug off dying as if it's nothing.

And he misses them anyway.

He shakes his head to try to shoo the thoughts out and searches his pack for his toothbrush. As he pulls it out, the backs of his fingers brush against something smooth and unfamiliar, and he frowns and takes out the strange object as well.

It's Grog's salt-lick rock.

He stares at it for a little bit, perplexed once again by both its general existence and the fact that he has it. Then, hesitantly, he raises it to his lips and gingerly licks it.

It's not even salty.

"What the fuck, Grog," he says to himself, shaking his head, but even when he's done brushing his teeth he finds himself smiling slightly. As he wraps himself in the quilt on the bed, he muses that of course, of course Grog would manage to find a salt-lick rock that isn't salt.

He falls asleep still smiling.

The walk to Moorenmarsh from Drynna takes about an hour, and Scanlan gets himself and Kaylie sweet breakfast pastries from a small bakery that he remembers stealing day-old buns from. This time he pays, handing over the money to the son - or maybe grandson - of the baker he remembers from his youth.

They take the Bridge Way through the city to the Drynn River, where the Green Bridge, so named for its mossy support columns, takes them out of the city. On the other side of the river, the Bridge Way's flagstones give way to a simple dirt road, not as well-maintained as the city street but clearly not unused, that curves along the north end of Mooren Lake, snaking between farms mostly. The lake, marked by Drynna and the connection to the Drynn River at the northwest corner, floods into marshlands to the east, and Moorenmarsh stood at the north end of the wetlands, where the ground stayed dry and unflooded about nine months out of the year.

For a girl who has never spared Scanlan the wrath of her tongue before, Kaylie's silence is somewhat disconcerting as they walk. Scanlan accepts it. He doesn't quite know what to say, either, and he has no idea what he'll say once they're in Moorenmarsh. He doesn't even know how much of Moorenmarsh is still standing. It's possible the whole city's been dismantled, the wood of its buildings repurposed for firewood, or even that the city's been revived under a new name. The idea has some appeal - let someone grow a new home on the skeleton of where he grew up, and breathe new life into it - but he also hopes it's been left as a memorial not just for his mother, but for the others who died there.

After about forty-five minutes, the road curves to the south to follow the coast of the lake, and Scanlan leads Kaylie straight instead. There are no farms here, due to the frequent flooding, as they now skirt the north end of the wetlands. There's been rain recently, judging by the squelching of Scanlan's boots, but he keeps going through the tall grasses and the occasional tree.

Within about five minutes, there's the smudge of a settlement on the horizon. Ten minutes after that, they step into Moorenmarsh.

Even before the goblin raid, it had never been a large town, and what's left of it still isn't. Most of the buildings' roofs have collapsed, and a few houses have toppled over entirely. Moss and vines creep onto the structures, and what was once the central - and only - road is now just a stretch of slightly shorter grasses. Some of the remaining logs still bear char marks beneath the moss.

Kaylie looks around, her lips thinned. Then she turns to Scanlan and waves a hand to vaguely indicate the town. "How long ago was this?"

Scanlan sighs. "Forty-seven years ago," he admits.

"How fucking old are you?" Kaylie demands, her eyes wide.

"Fifty-nine," Scanlan says. "I was eleven when it happened, and this - " he gestures to his face, pushing his jaw forward so the sunlight can accentuate his still-taut skin and, frankly, excellent bone structure - "is one of the few advantages to being a gnome. When you're coming up on sixty, you'll look this good, too. Better, probably."

"Damn right I will," Kaylie says, but she looks almost confused as she says it, caught off-guard; the response seems more habitual than genuine.

Scanlan ignores it and starts walking to the other end of town. It isn't a long walk at all, since the town is so small - more a collection of buildings that happened to be central to the farms around the marsh - and Kaylie keeps up easily. On the far end stands what's left of the Shorthalt Forge, the last building before organized civilization yields once again to farmland, now just as ramshackle and broken-down as the rest of Moorenmarsh.

But the paint, while flaked, is still legible, and Kaylie hums thoughtfully when she sees it.

"Shorthalt?" she says, pointing at it. "Was that your mother's name, too?"

"I took her name, yes," Scanlan says. "My father wasn't really around, so it seemed more appropriate. Besides, Scanlan Murnig doesn't quite have the same ring to it - the alliteration has appeal for the stage."

"I can understand that," Kaylie says, and squares her shoulders. "That's why I did the same. Kaylie Cupshigh."

"That," Scanlan admits, "is a fucking amazing name for the stage. Cupshigh. Wow." Part of him wants to be resentful that Kaylie is a Shorthalt without being a Shorthalt in name, but honestly? If he had a name like Cupshigh, he wouldn't give it up either.

"So this is where you grew up?" Kaylie says, stepping forward to look through the destroyed front of the building. The forge is still there, and there had never been much to the front wall anyway, to allow the air to circulate, so dead leaves, dirt, and the general detritus of almost fifty years of apathy choke the floor.

"The bedrooms were upstairs," Scanlan says, and steps forward to try to peer at the ceiling of the forge. With the sun at the angle that it is, it's too dark, and he can't quite see. "It was always warm and cozy, because of the forge downstairs. We're just close enough to the coast that we'd get a great breeze in the summer to keep us cool. But I'd spend hours just watching my mom work. She loved it - said every nail she made was a piece of her that someone else was carrying out into the world. And she'd have me sing for her."

The sight of the forge itself brings back memories that he hasn't thought of in years. Juniper would pound out a beat with her hammer and Scanlan, lying on the floor to soak up the coolness so he could stand the proximity to the forge, would make up songs to the beats. Nonsense songs at first, but he got better, and Juniper, who couldn't carry a tune with a bucket, would encourage him to keep going. Once, when he was too hot and too tired and too cranky to sing for her, he'd asked her why she even bothered listening to him, and she'd said, "Because I use this forge to make something out of something, but you, Scanlan, make something out of nothing but air."

He can almost hear her voice say it, smoke-choked and equally prone to laughter and yelling, and his throat tightens abruptly.

He clears it, and says, "She's back here."

The tree behind the forge is closer than he remembers it being - it had felt like an interminable gulf when he'd pulled her body back around - and there, at its foot, is the stone he'd pulled up from the floor of their house to use as a grave marker. There's a layer of dirt on it, but the recent floods must have washed away any substantial detritus. The stone is blank. He'd never figured out how to mark it.

Kaylie comes to stand next to him in front of the stone, looking down at it. A long silence stretches between them.

Eventually Scanlan says, "She would've liked you." After a moment, he amends, "She would've loved you."

Kaylie sounds a bit distracted as she replies, "Yeah."

"I think you would've liked her, too," Scanlan says, and wipes at his cheeks. The salt water stings the still-scabbed line beneath his eye. The truth or nothing, Kaylie had said, so he doesn't try to hide his tears, nor does he force them. He doesn't have to. They're just coming whether he likes it or not, a steady pour that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the ache at the base of his lungs or the throbbing in his head or even how he's feeling. The tears just are, like a rainstorm or the flow of a stream, a force of nature that doesn't even notice him.

When Kaylie looks over at him, there are tears in her eyes, too, and she says, "She sounds like a fighter, yeah? I would've liked her, too."

They stand there, side by side, in a peaceful quiet for so long that the moment seems to loop in on itself. The last time Scanlan was here, his hands were dirty with the soil he heaped back over the grave. Everyone else in town was either dead or gone, fled to Drynna, and Scanlan waited only long enough to bury his mother before he followed. But he made sure she was laid to rest, because he thought that, wherever she was, she might have cared about that.

"Do you want some time alone?" Kaylie says eventually. "I can meet you back in Drynna, at the tavern."

"Yeah," Scanlan says hoarsely, "thanks."

He gives Kaylie a solid fifteen minutes to make sure she isn't hanging around before he kneels at the grave. It's an awkward motion, not one that he's used to, but he tries to mimic the posture when he's seen Pike do it. He definitely doesn't get the same air of serene piety, but maybe he gets somewhere close.

Then he puts his hands together in front of him, because he figures that's something people do when they pray.

"Uh," he says, and screws his eyes shut because what the hell, in for a copper, in for a gold. "Dear Raven Queen? I guess that's how these things start? Sure. Dear Raven Queen." He takes a steadying breath. "Thank you for watching over my mother's spirit and I guess seeing her to…wherever. I don't really know how this kind of thing works. Or how dying works, apparently, because what Vax said and what happened to me - well, that's neither here nor there. Thank you for seeing my mom to her rest. There.

"Um. I know you're all buddy-buddy with Vax, and apparently you're big on fate and stuff, too, but…I'm asking you to watch over my friends. Especially your chosen one, who is literally incapable of not running head first into trouble and would basically be screwed without the rest of Vox Machina watching his back. I mean, I once had to jump eight stories off a tower to heal his ass because he went on a walk, and the rest of the group isn't necessarily more rational, but…together, they can take anything you throw at them, but they need all of them. The world needs all of them. And whatever you need Vax for, you're not going to get it without all of them."

He stays there quietly for a long moment, and then says, "Amen, I guess? Is that how these things end? I'm not very good at this."

Then he hesitates again, and drops his hands from their position in front of his chest with a sigh. "I miss you, Mom," he says, looking at the plain stone embedded in the dirt. "I wish I could believe I'd see you again, but I know better now. Twice over, in fact."

His pulse throbs in his throat, the ache so sharp he can hardly breathe past it. He pulls himself to his feet with a groan, brushing the dirt off his hands, and after one last glance at the grave, begins the walk back to Drynna.

Kaylie is no doubt somewhere in the town, but it isn't the Reed Whistle. When he goes back there to meet her, she's nowhere to be found. The quiet weight of the visit still hangs over Scanlan, so he doesn't try to find her; instead, he just wanders through Drynna and enjoys the novelty of being on his own. A lot of the city has changed in almost fifty years, but gnomes aren't the only long-lived race, and some of the fruit vendors and shops that he used to busk by or occasionally steal from are still there. He even recognizes a few faces, although nobody recognizes him.

He returns to the inn for dinner and finds Kaylie still absent, so he situates himself in the same corner table that they occupied the night before and settles in with a meal and a tankard of ale. The same band plays in the opposite corner, and now that Scanlan has a better sense of what they sound like at their best, he can tell that their problem is less a lack of talent and more a lack of enthusiasm for the gentle mealtime serenades. The dancing is where they excel, and that usually doesn't start until an hour or two after sundown.

It's disconcerting, really, to realize that he has nothing to do. He keeps thinking, out of habit, that he needs to be planning, strategizing, thinking up the next song to inspire one of his friends, since it could be the difference between life and death against a dragon. But the dragons are dead and his friends are - who knows where they are.

Scanlan tells himself he doesn't care where they are. He's better off here, anyway. Just because he's forgotten to relax doesn't mean he'll never pick up the knack again, and this is as good a time as any.

There are only a few other patrons in the inn, which makes it particularly noticeable when the door opens again. Scanlan looks over, glancing for Kaylie, and sees instead four metallic Dragonborn enter, in tattered and stained robes and patchwork armor. One of them uses a crutch, and Scanlan catches a glimpse of a stump where he expected to see a leg.

All four have tails.

He can't hear the conversation from here, but he watches as the four Dragonborn step up to the bar, and one of them, a bronze Dragonborn whose armor bears the familiar symbol of Bahamut, leans forward and engages the innkeeper in conversation. She gesticulates constantly, short, clipped motions that convey her frustration even from across the room, and at one point one of her companions leans in towards her and puts a hand on her arm. She shrugs it off and goes back to her discussion with the innkeeper, and Scanlan must have learned more about Dragonborn body language than he realized, because everything about the situation screams to him of increasing tension. Her tail, in particular, whips back and forth, coiling from one side to the other with displeasure and unhappiness.

He must have also picked up a working knowledge of Dragonborn injuries, since, as he watches this unfold, he notices raw, chafed scales around the wrists and necks of some of the newcomers.

For a moment he can almost see the statue of Tiberius that they left behind in Wildmount, standing tall and proud above the words I encourage peace, and he may not have been there to save Tiberius and he may not have landed the avenging blow himself, but this - maybe he can do something about this.

He slides out of his chair and sidles up to the bar, climbing up onto one of the stools with practiced ease to get to eye level with all parties involved, and says, pointedly, "Everything all right here?"

All eyes turn to him, and after a second the innkeeper says, "Everything's fine, sir, you can go back to your meal. These folks were just leaving."

"And I told you," the bronze Dragonborn says, her voice filled with mingled frustration and desperation, "we have nowhere to go, no coin to pay you, and no shelter. We are refugees - we escaped the ruins of Draconia with only what we could carry - "

"Our charity's been stretched enough with the destruction of Emon and Westruun," the innkeeper snaps back, glaring, "and it sure don't extend to anything with scales."

The frills on the side of the Dragonborn's head go flat in a gesture that Scanlan definitely recognizes, so he speaks quickly, leaning in towards the innkeeper.

"Good thing there's no charity necessary on your part, then," he says, and pulls an appropriate amount of gold from his bag. "Certainly you won't deny paying customers a meal and rooms for the night?"

The innkeeper scowls at him, and he responds with his most brilliant and bullshit smile.

"Fine," the innkeeper says, sweeping the gold towards herself. "Meals and one night."

"Your graciousness is greatly appreciated," Scanlan says, and turns the smile on the Draconians. "Friends, I don't suppose you'd like to join me? I have a table right this way."

"Thank you, tiny one," the bronze Dragonborn says, and leads the rest of the group to the table.

The other Dragonborn are copper, brass, and silver; it's the brass one that's missing a leg, but together they manage to get situated at the table with Scanlan.

"You have our sincerest thanks," the brass Dragonborn tells him, and the creak to his voice betrays his advanced age - not as old as Tooma, but certainly not as young as Tiberius. As Tiberius was. "My name is Arjhan Turnuroth, and this - " he indicates the copper Dragonborn - "is my son Patrin. That's Kava Myastan, and this cleric saved our life when the Ravinites, who picked the bones of Draconia like vultures, would have seen us die as slaves."

The bronze Dragonborn's shoulders go stiff with displeasure again, but she introduces herself: "I am Drakka Stormwind, proud daughter of Draconia."

Scanlan's breath leaves him for a moment. "Stormwind," he repeats once he can.

"You may have heard of our family," Drakka says, her jaw tight, and as Scanlan looks, he can see the resemblance: not in color, but in the way she holds herself, the cadence to her speech. "The Stormwinds have always been quite prominent."

Despite his best efforts, Scanlan can't for the life of him remember if Tiberius ever mentioned having a sister - perhaps a cousin, or even an aunt? Scanlan isn't very good at estimating Dragonborn ages.

"I knew a Stormwind," he says cautiously, just in case. "Tiberius."

Drakka recoils slightly, and Kava says, quietly, "Tiberius fell with Draconia."

"I know," Scanlan says. "I saw. My name is Scanlan Shorthalt. Tiberius was - a friend. A good friend."

"Shorthalt," Drakka repeats, frowning at him. "A gnome - the bard? You're one of the adventurers he ran off with."

Scanlan inclines his head. "I was lucky enough to fight alongside him for a time. Are you…?"

"I'm his sister," Drakka says. "Or, I suppose, I was. Now I'm just one of the last Stormwinds. Our parents, Jerahd, Tiberius - they all fell. Faeryn's been off adventuring who-knows-where, and Father had sent me off to King Dwendell's court to observe the Winter's Crest festivities there. By the time I heard what had happened and returned, the Ravinites had plundered everything of value and put the survivors of Draconia in chains." Her frills flicker forward and back, as though trying to dislodge a fly. "I rescued who I could."

"We planned to petition Sovereign Uriel for assistance," Patrin says. "Ask for assistance taking back what was left of our floating cities. Only now we know that the Sovereign is dead as well…"

"And, of course," Kava adds, her voice suffused with misery, "there's the matter of the dragons."

Scanlan realizes with a bit of a start that it's been only a few days since Thordak fell - not long enough for it to be public knowledge, apparently, or at least not in relatively backwater cities like Drynna.

"I have good news for you on that front," he says. "The dragons have been defeated. All of them."

All four Dragonborn stare at him.

"All of them," Arjhan repeats. "I personally saw at least three, and you mean to tell me that, in scarcely more than a month, all three have been slain."

"Well, there were four," Scanlan says, "but yes. Umbrasyl, the black dragon, fell first. Then Vorugal, the Frigid Doom - avenged in your brother's name, for what it's worth," he says to Drakka. "Then the Cinder King himself, and finally Raishan, the green one. I don't know as many of the details about the last, but I'm sure it was quite a battle."

All four Draconians stare at him, and eventually it's Kava that breaks the silence.

"It makes little difference," she says. "We have nothing left. Our cities have fallen and the Ravinites have claimed the ruins. The damage is done."

"There are refugees everywhere these days," Scanlan says. "I'm sure you can find somewhere - "

"Being refugees is not a guarantee of receiving assistance," Patrin says, his snout twitching with anger. "The Ravinites were content enough to see us razed."

"Yeah, you know, about that," Scanlan says, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table. "We met the Ravinites. They helped us fell Vorugal. We wouldn't have been able to do it without them, and you know what?" He turns his gaze on Drakka. "Tiberius never mentioned that Draconia held slaves."

Drakka stiffens, then relaxes again with a sigh. "He wouldn't have. We were born to it - as natural as breathing. Although it's no matter now. There's no Draconia to speak of, not anymore. The Ravinites are free to walk on the corpses of our people, as they've no doubt wanted to."

Patrin spits dismissively on the floor of the tavern, and Scanlan decides to ignore the gesture.

"Not necessarily," he says. "With the assistance of the Ravinites, we - that is, Vox Machina - laid Tiberius to rest. Properly. And like I said, it was Lady Vex'ahlia who dealt the killing blow to the Frigid Doom."

Drakka blinks and looks away. Scanlan never saw Tiberius on the verge of tears, so he has no frame of reference for the gleaming in her eyes.

"It comforts me, a bit, to know it was his friends," she says.

"But it does nothing for the rest of us," Patrin says bitterly. "It does nothing for my leg. Did you lay to rest the others that were left on the killing fields, impaled as trophies? Can you raise Draconia back into the air, bring back the ones that were killed? Free the Draconians who weren't as lucky as us to escape?"

Arjhan's voice is sharp when he says, "Patrin. Enough."

Patrin starts, "But - "

"No," Arjhan says, drawing himself up to sit straight in his chair. "This gnome did Drakka a kindness, and a kindness to the memory of his friend. That he cannot make himself an infinite well of that kindness is no reason to blame him."

"Kindness or no," Kava says, staring at the surface of the table, "what do we do now?"

Scanlan stares at them. If Vox Machina were with him, they would help; in Tiberius's memory or just because it's the right thing to do, they would insist on helping. But Scanlan is just one gnome, and one gnome with a distinct and recent track record of failure at that, and he's…he's exhausted. Whatever energy he's accumulated from doing good and fighting monsters is gone, depleted from fear and death and the constant distraction of his promise - and the grief of having broken it.

He's not, as Arjhan said, an infinite well of kindness. At this point, he's a dried-out well of it.

Then he frowns. "You know," he says, a thought occurring to him, "I may not be able to help you, but…I might know someone who can." He looks again to Drakka. "You're a cleric of Bahamut, right?"

Drakka's talons come up to clutch the holy symbol on her armor. "Of course," she says.

"I happen to know someone who really, really likes fighting big fights, and who also really likes Bahamut," Scanlan says. "She's - well, I think she's been spending a lot of time in Emon recently, but her home temple is Bahamut's Rest in Westruun."

Kava perks up slightly, and even Patrin looks interested.

"I'm not as fast as I used to be," Arjhan says dubiously, glancing at Drakka, "so two, perhaps three days - and we know so little about Tal'Dorei's geography…"

"I think I'm going in that direction anyway," Scanlan says, which isn't untrue, strictly speaking; as far as he knows, he and Kaylie aren't going in any particular direction, so they can't diverge from a plan that they don't have. "I have a spell I can cast that creates a mansion that we can sleep in. Speed won't be an issue - I'm happy to take my time, and I'm sure Kaylie will be, too."

Drakka frowns. "Kaylie?"

"My daughter," Scanlan says, and takes a moment to revel in how easily the words leave his lips. "We're traveling together."

"Is that why you aren't with the rest of your group?" Drakka says.

Close enough. "Yes," Scanlan says. "I'm sure she won't mind." Although now that he thinks about it, he's not sure of any such thing.

"We've taken so much of your hospitality already," Arjhan begins to object.

The trick to manipulating people, Scanlan has discovered over the years, is only lying as much as you have to for the desired effect. No need to lie when a truth will serve perfectly well. So he looks Arjhan in the eye and says, "When Tiberius needed me, needed us, we weren't there. I'll live with that for the rest of my life. It's the least, the very least I can do to help you now, because it's what he would've wanted."

Drakka looks down, and Patrin says, quietly, "You knew him that well?"

"…he was very dear to us," Scanlan says after a moment. "To all of us. We didn't always get along, but - it doesn't matter." He looks at Drakka again. "I'm very sorry for your loss, and I don't know if it's a consolation, but you aren't mourning alone."

"No one here even seems to know that Draconia fell," Kava says in a small voice. "When we've heard of the dragons, it's been all talk of Emon and Westruun. A whole people crushed, and nobody here seems to care."

"Grief is selfish," Scanlan says. "Give us time. I can't promise that Lady Kima will be able to help you, but I'm confident that Bahamut's Rest will at least give you somewhere safe to stay, and I can get you there."

"What could bandits be to someone who saw dragons fall," Drakka murmurs, one talon tracing the grain of the table absently.

"We thank you," Arjhan says, and looks at the other Draconians. "I feel confident speaking on behalf of all of us when I say that we accept with the greatest gratitude." Then he glares at his son. "Don't we, Patrin?"

"The utmost gratitude," Patrin says, his voice bone-dry.

"Great!" Scanlan says, and rubs his hands together. "Then we can start our journey, say, tomorrow? I'm afraid I don't have funds to spare for horses, but like I said, I have a mansion."

The logistics don't take long after that, and eating dinner takes even less time for the hungry travelers, and eventually the four Draconians retreat to rest and prepare for their journey.

Scanlan, though, stays downstairs, waiting for Kaylie.

The inn's common room fills up within a few hours with dancers, and the band once again obliges with peppy tunes and sawing reels. Scanlan watches, trying to pick apart the patterns of footfalls and hand-clasps and turns, but he's never been one for dancing. He's always been happier on the other side of the music.

It's about an hour after midnight that Kaylie finally returns, walking loosely but without a stagger. If her tolerance is anything like Scanlan's was at that age - and with Dr. Dranzel - she may have been drinking for hours and only have a steady buzz to show for it. Part of him pricks up with alarm at the thought of his daughter, his precious daughter, wandering through Drynna inebriated and unprotected; the rest of him remembers quite forcefully that the first time they met, the only reason he survived was because she had a change of heart at the last minute.

Kaylie joins him at the table and opens the conversation with, "You get what you need?"

"I…think so," Scanlan says. "Did you?"

"Sure," Kaylie says with a supremely unconcerned shrug.

"Great, because I may have promised four Draconians that we'd help them get to Bahamut's Rest in Westruun."

Kaylie looks at him, and he can almost trace the comprehension as it filters through her mind. "Westruun?" she says. "There's - is the temple even still there?"

"…shit," Scanlan says. "I hope so? It has to be, right? Westruun's been dragon-free for a while now…"

"How the fuck did you even find four Draconians here?" Kaylie continues. "I left you alone for half a day - "

"They're refugees," Scanlan says.

"Of Westruun?"

"No, of Draconia!"

"The dragons attacked Draconia, too?"

Scanlan sighs. "I guess word of that didn't travel particularly fast, but yes. They actually destroyed it. Then the tailless Dragonborn - you know what, the details don’t matter right now. The point is that they have nowhere else to go, but one of them is a cleric of Bahamut so I thought that maybe - "

Some strange emotion flickers across Kaylie's face, too fast for Scanlan to identify, and she crosses her arms. "It's not your job anymore," she says.

"What?"

"You might've been an adventurer with your friends - " and it's astonishing how much disdain she can pack into that word - "but it sure seemed like one of the reasons you left was so that you could be not that."

"I - well, I mean, yes, but - "

"Then why are you jumping into this? So there are refugees here - there are refugees everywhere! Why are these refugees our problem?"

The question brings Scanlan up short, just for a second, because the answer is such a tangled knot of grief and guilt and a thousand other things he doesn't want Kaylie to see, any more than he wanted her to see his torn, ruined corpse.

The truth or nothing, he reminds himself.

"The cleric, Drakka," he says. "She's, uh."

"Oh, gods," Kaylie says, dropping her head onto the table with an audible thunk. "What is it with you and holy women? Tell me you didn't."

"What? No! I never met her before today!"

"Then what?"

"I knew her brother," Scanlan says. "Tiberius. He was - I guess you never met him. He left our group just before we met you. Almost to the day, now that I think of it." He frowns. "Was it to the day?"

"So her brother used to be one of you?" Kaylie still sounds supremely unimpressed, but at least she's lifted her head from the table.

"Yes. We went through a lot together. We didn't really get along, per se, but he - he was a friend."

Now Kaylie's looking intently at Scanlan, squinting slightly as though trying to puzzle something out. "And then he left."

"And then he left," Scanlan agrees, and finishes past the knot in his throat, "and then he died. He fell with Draconia. And now his sister needs help." Kaylie stays silent, looking steadily at him, and he - gods help him - begins to babble. "I just think that, you know, it's not going to be that much of an inconvenience - I know we haven't talked about where to go next, and I don't know where Vex got you from, but Kymal's nearby, right? So maybe we could stop in there if you want to visit, you know, and then go find Dr. Dranzel. And I have this mansion that will feed and house all of us, so, you know, I figured why not?"

"You want to go back to Dr. Dranzel," Kaylie says, without a trace of a question in her voice.

"I…thought you'd want to," Scanlan says, frowning at her. "I could be wrong, obviously, but - you haven't parted ways with him, have you?"

Kaylie sits all the way up and back in her chair, crossing her arms. "Only to save your life," she says. "I was still with him when your friend came to find me."

"Right. So you - do you not want to go back to him? I guess I just thought that it would be easy - "

"You want to be in a traveling music troupe with your daughter? Really? After going out and fighting dragons and being, apparently, a selfless noble hero?"

Scanlan stares, and then says, "Well, yes."

Kaylie stares back.

Scanlan continues, "I mean, the more important part, for me, is the 'with you' part, and since you were with Dr. Dranzel I thought that's where you'd want to go."

A long silence hangs between them, heavy and uncomfortable as Kaylie narrows her eyes at him. Then she says, "Dr. Dranzel's in Kymal. Or at least he was when I left, and he didn't have plans to move on any time soon. So we should go there."

Despite his hesitation, Scanlan says, "After Westruun, or…?"

Kaylie rolls her eyes. "After Westruun."

Relief floods him. "Thank you, Kaylie."

"I take it you were close?" she says. "You and the cleric's brother, I mean."

"Tiberius," Scanlan repeats. "We - we actually didn't really get along. I mean, it didn't look like it. I think - no, I definitely irritated him, and he could be so pompous and prim. But he always had my back, and I always had his, and no matter how much I'd be annoyed at him in the moment, once he was gone things were just…not quite as much fun. A little duller, I guess." Scanlan looks into his mug of ale. "He was family, I guess. It didn't mean I liked him, but, gods, I do miss him."

When he looks up, Kaylie's gaze is squarely on him, and she's chewing pensively on her lower lip. Seeing him looking, she pulls his mug away from him and takes a chug. He opens his mouth to protest, but goes silent at her glare.

"Here's the thing, Scanlan," she says once she's swallowed. "I can't get wrap my head around you. All the stories I've heard from Dr. Dranzel - all the stories you told me before you knew who I was, and especially the ones you told me after - and then you go off and fight dragons and die and get into shouting matches with your friends and now you're going around actually acting like a normal person, being sad about your mother and your friend and - it's maddening, do you get that? I don't know what to make of you."

"I'm…sorry?" Scanlan says, flummoxed. "I mean, you said you wanted me to be honest, so - "

"I s'pose you've always got to be careful what you wish for," Kaylie says bitterly. Then she empties Scanlan's tankard and hops off the chair. "If we're getting back on the road tomorrow, I'm going to bed."

She walks off, and Scanlan lets her, putting his face into his hands with a sigh. "I'm so bad at this," he mutters to himself, before following her example and going up to bed.

He dreams that night about each of his bones snapping under Raishan's claws, one by one, preceded by a razor-sharp cold spreading through him, slicing at his skin and freezing him solid at the same time. The process starts at his toes, locking him in place, and spreads up his body slow enough for him to feel the reverberation of each break like the twang of a harp string.

He wakes up, tangled in his bedsheets, to the sound of someone pounding on his door. It opens just enough for the innkeeper to poke her head through with a severe frown, and she whispers loudly at him, "Keep it down! Whatever you think you're doing in here, my patrons are trying to sleep!"

"…sorry!" Scanlan whispers back, and the innkeeper shuts the door. When he swallows, his throat is sore, as if he's been yelling.

Delightful.

He doesn't get much sleep after that, although he tries his hardest, so the departure the next morning is subdued and exhausted. Kaylie, for all her steadiness the night before, chugs enough water at breakfast to make it clear that a hangover is at least present, if not forcefully making itself felt. The Draconians, for their part, look just as tired as they did the night before, and Scanlan can't blame them; it felt like a long voyage to Draconia even when he was taking a tree-based shortcut, and they went the long way.

Westruun is directly to the west of Drynna, and though the road isn't as nice or well-maintained as the Silvercut Roadway that will take Scanlan and Kaylie on to Kymal afterward, the path is well-worn at least. It's dusty in a way that Scanlan had almost forgotten was possible, especially since the path between Whitestone and Drynna had been mostly forested. This is all fields and grass and long spaces for the winds to whip up nice and strong, raking across the land and getting dust everywhere. He's traveled this way in all four seasons, in his time as a traveling musician, and this isn't the worst time to do it - the dust is preferable to the winter snows and the spring mud.

The going is slower than the pace he had set with Kaylie, due to Patrin's makeshift crutch, but Patrin, Kava, and Drakka all take turns helping him. Nobody seems to be in the mood for conversation, which suits Scanlan just fine. He keeps thinking of Tiberius, impaled on an icy spike, and Tiberius, the last time he activated the teleportation circle in Greyskull Keep. With Vox Machina, he might have papered this melancholy over with whatever scraps of frenetic energy he could, but Kaylie wants honesty and the Draconians probably just want some quiet at this point. Besides, Kaylie already knows how weak he is; there's hardly any use in pretending otherwise now.

Besides, with Patrin setting the pace, it's less of a hike and more of a stroll. Typically, the trip from Drynna to Westruun on foot would be, at most, a day and a half; when Scanlan casts the mansion that night, they're barely a quarter of the way there. But, as he reminds himself, he has nowhere he has to be.

As they walk into the mansion, the Draconians look around with wide eyes, gratifyingly impressed. But Kaylie makes a beeline to one of the servants and says, "Steak for dinner tonight, yeah?"

The servant looks at Scanlan, who gives a 'the lady wants what she wants' shrug. The servant turns back to Kaylie and says, "Of course, miss. Steak it is."

"Good," Kaylie says, and makes for the stairs without waiting for anyone else.

"Dinner in half an hour," Scanlan calls after her, and then turns back to the Draconians. "There are guest rooms this way," he says, and leads them through the entrance hall to the stairs. As he does, something through the doorway to the dining area catches his eye and he pauses, trying to put his finger on what it is. Then he realizes that it's what's not there: Garmelie's portrait of Vox Machina.

Panic sparks in him for a moment as he wonders if that means it's gone for good, so instead he turns to another servant. "Please show our guests to their rooms - I need to check on something," he says.

"Of course, sir," the servant says, bowing. "If you would follow me."

With the Draconians seen to, Scanlan goes into the dining room, straight for the nearest servant assigned to that area. "The portrait that's been hanging there before," Scanlan says without preamble, pointing to the empty space where the portrait was. "Does it still exist?"

"Of course, sir," the servant says placidly, and the fist clenching Scanlan's heart relaxes a bit. She leads Scanlan to a sideboard with a fully-stocked bar set up (each label, he notices, bears a chicken), but when she opens one of the small drawers, Scanlan sees a rolled-up sheet of butcher paper. "It was desired, but desired to be unobtrusive, sir," the servant says. "And so it was created in this way."

"Good," Scanlan says, and then hesitates. "Uh…how can you know things that I don't, by the way? You're not, like…people, right?"

"I know no more than you know, sir," the servant says, bowing her head. "But I might know things that you don't know that you know. And if we are anyone, sir, we are you. We were born of your magic, after all."

Scanlan looks blankly at her for a long moment, and then says, his voice bone-dry, "Thanks. I was really looking for another way my life was fucked up, so I'm glad I can add that to the list."

She gives him a full-on curtsy this time and says, "Happy to be of service, sir."

Great. Now even the servants of his subconscious are fucking with him.

He goes to his room to change before dinner and discovers, this time to his immediate relief, that the displaced portrait isn't the only change to the mansion. There are no mirrors above his bed.

There's some time to kill before dinner, and he wants to make sure the Draconians have a chance to bathe and clean themselves up as much as they want, so he heads to the music room downstairs. In some of the downtime between dragons, on the road or resting, he'd begun to teach some of the servants how to accompany him on songs. It was a pale imitation of the improvisational style of Dr. Dranzel's troupe, since the servants lack any great measure of creativity (which, if they're his subconscious, doesn't bode well), but it was better than nothing. The real advantage, though, was that Scanlan's main instruments have always been woodwinds; he can't sing and accompany himself at the same time. But the servants seem to have his knack for sounding things out, and after careful coaching, he set up a system where he could continue to write songs with more than lyrics and a flute solo.

He brings with him the sheaf of song lyric notes, the ones that he writes mostly out of habit for the stage and that have no useful place on the battlefield, and leafs through them. The bard's place in combat has always been as much to survive and record the goings-on as it has been to actually fight, and some of the songs reflect that. Some of them are just self-indulgent, written to bleed off some emotion while the others sleep.

He picks one of the self-indulgent ones. He wrote it for Tiberius, after the Conclave attacked but before they knew he fell; it's a goodbye and fare-thee-well and until-we-meet-again all in one, and contains a stanza ruminating on the possibility that they won't meet again that particularly stings now that it's a truth and not a hypothetical.

But he tells the servants to play that one anyway, in the hopes that it will act as catharsis rather than wallowing. The notes come easily off his tongue, and the servants, faithful as always, provide the appropriate accompaniment: a rolling mandolin line, a steady drumbeat, and the strumming of a lute to guide the other lines through it.

Scanlan sings the words, from the lines promising to remember him and think fondly of him until he can come back to the lines promising to praise and celebrate him, and allows himself to just miss the hell out of Tiberius; maybe if he can pack all the missing into the singing of the song, he'll run out of it and be able to move on.

The song reaches the mandolin solo leading into the bridge when he sees Kaylie standing in the doorway to the music room, watching with that same odd look on her face from the night before. Scanlan resumes his singing at the appropriate time, and Kaylie takes it as an invitation to come further into the room. As far as music rooms go, Scanlan thinks it's a fairly nice one, with replicas of each instrument he's ever seen - which, with his travels, is basically all of them - and chairs, music stands, pitchers of water and glasses, and anything else he's ever wished he had partway through a gig. Kaylie wanders the room, putting her hands on the instruments to silently test them, and Scanlan lets the song continue until it reaches its conclusion.

"I haven't heard that one before," Kaylie says once it's done, picking up a violin and plucking at it.

Scanlan winces - he doesn't even play the violin and he can tell how out-of-tune the instrument is. "I wrote it," he says.

"For - what was his name? Tibberoth?"

"Tiberius," Scanlan says immediately. "Although we called him Tibbsy sometimes."

Kaylie glances over her shoulder at him, one eyebrow raised. "He liked that?"

"He tolerated it," Scanlan concedes. Then he gestures to the servants. "Did you want to play anything? The instruments themselves are a bit…off, but the servants seem to be able to play them just fine. I'm not sure how it works, but it's probably magic."

"Must be nice," Kaylie says, looking around. "You know, Dr. Dranzel and Kent always said that you were talented. That it wasn't just how you played, but the songs you wrote. I think that's the first time I heard one of your originals."

"Well, I think the last time we played together was my last time on stage in…gods, years. Since I joined Vox Machina, I think."

Kaylie turns back to him, raising her eyebrows. "Don't you play on the battlefield? Isn't that how this magic all works?"

"Yes, but that's different - that's not songwriting as much as it is…" He shrugs. "Grasping at whatever songs you can remember and changing them to fit the spell you're trying to cast. It's not really singing for the sake of singing."

"Do you miss it?" she asks, sizing him up.

Scanlan can't quite find the words to say that he doesn't even know how to start answering that; that so much of the time since the Conclave attacked, since Emon was destroyed, since he met Kaylie - so much of it has just been a blur of exhausted grayness, finding dissatisfaction where he used to find joy, plastering on a false smile and spouting falser words of comfort to his companions. And since he died, since that first fight with Raishan, it's been even worse: a desperate, unsettled sadness, a numbness that can't be touched even by the frantic, panicked racing of his heart. It's only been days, but it feels like there was never anything else.

And that cracking sensation of his ribcage as Raishan played his bones like a drum. How can that exist side by side with rhythm, music, actual drumbeats? These private performances in this music room, only for himself, are one thing, but he almost can't remember what it feels like to be on stage. The memories that he has of that must belong to someone else.

He articulates this by sounding a noncommittal, "Enh."

Kaylie walks behind one of the servants and takes a look over his shoulder at the sheet of lyrics in front of him. "But you're still writing?"

"Of course!"

"Can I see the others?"

Scanlan hesitates. "They weren't really - I mean, I figured I might perform them some day, but they're still, you know, in the workshopping phase - "

"Then I can workshop them," Kaylie says, and raises her eyebrows at him pointedly. "Unless you mean to workshop them alone, which seems a bit counterproductive."

"I - all right, then." Scanlan goes to his pack and pulls out the other pieces. It's a mixed bag, honestly; he's much happier with some than others, and the styles vary widely - as widely as the styles of Vox Machina themselves. While he didn't consciously write for specific people, he certainly took his inspiration where he could, and he'd be the first to admit that, say, the sea shanty was for Pike. Along with the twenty-odd love ballads.

He hands them to Kaylie and immediately has no idea what to do with himself as she begins to read. He settles for coming next to her and reading along over her shoulder, and though she gives him a sidelong irritated glance, she allows it.

"Oh, this one," he says, seeing the title: The Fall of the Frigid Doom. "It's - I stretched the metaphor too much, it's overwrought - "

"Let me read it," Kaylie says, jerking the papers away. "Honestly."

So he agonizes in silence as she frowns in concentration at the lyrics. This song is unequivocally Vex's: the first verse recounts the fight with Saundor, while the others focus on Vorugal himself and, particularly, Vex's killing blow. The metaphor in question seemed like a good idea when Scanlan began writing it, portraying Vex's heart as a forest that Saundor wanted to fell. It had seemed brilliant when he scribbled down the first idea of it, late at night after some fight that he can't even remember now, and with the tree that grew from Vorugal's corpse it had seemed appropriate, but now -

"Keep it," Kaylie says, drawing Scanlan's attention back to her.

"Sorry?"

"The bit about the forest in the chorus," Kaylie says. "It gives thematic cohesion to the two story threads. It should stay." Scanlan stares at her, and she shrugs. "What? So I picked up a thing or two at the College of the White Duke. What does this sound like, though?"

Scanlan reaches for his flute. "I can play you a bit, if you want."

"No, I mean, why's this only the words? Why haven't you put down the notes?"

"Well," Scanlan says, "that would be because I can't read or write music. Not all of us went to the College of the White Duke."

Kaylie blinks at him, then looks back down at the song. "Oh," she says. "With the way Dr. Dranzel talks about you, I thought there was nothing you couldn't do."

Except survive fights against dragons, apparently - but Scanlan doesn't say that.

"My flaws only serve to highlight the perfection I exhibit in other areas," Scanlan says in as snotty a voice as he can muster, and, based on the eyeroll he receives, achieves a great deal of snottiness.

"I can show you, if you want," Kaylie says, gesturing vaguely with the papers. "It's not hard, once you've got the hang of it, and then you can write down the rest of it."

The offer steals his breath for a moment, but finally he manages to nod and say, "I would like that very much, Kaylie."

Kaylie glances at him, visibly unsettled by his gratitude. "If you're going to do it, you should do it properly, is all. Have you got a quill?"

They spend the rest of the time before dinner slowly, note by note, writing out the melody for the Fall of the Frigid Doom.

The next day shows just how hostile Tal'Dorei can be to refugees, or, rather, the bandits that attack them do.

The terrain transitions from the flat lowlands of the coast to rolling hills, not yet the foothills outside of Westruun that will precede the appearance of Gatshadow towering over the city but enough of an up-and-down that they don't see the bandits hiding in the tall grasses to either side of the road until they're in a low dip between two hills.

There are seven of them, and they don't even bother surrounding or even flanking the group - and why would they? Four ragged Draconians and two gnomes - Scanlan curses himself for not realizing how vulnerable they looked until now. He's used to having a goliath and the obviousness of the twins' weapons and attitude problems to dissuade petty banditry like this.

And now there are seven fucking bandits fifty feet ahead of them, looking smug as hell.

"Let's not make this more complicated than it needs to be, yeah?" says one of the ones off to the side. She's got a beat-up sword, although it seems to mostly be dirty and a bit dinged; it may not be the sharpest, but that probably won't be an impediment in a fight like this. Or at least, in the fight they seem to be spoiling for. "How about you just hand over all of your gold and valuables and we'll let you keep walking."

Out of the corner of his eye, Scanlan sees Kaylie reach for her belt, and before she has a chance to do anything stupid, he steps forward with his hands out. "We're just trying to get to Westruun, friends," he says. "There's no need for this, yeah? You just let us go our way and you go your way, no harm, no foul."

They look at each other, and at least two of them are smiling unpleasant who-does-this-gnome-think-he-is smiles. Scanlan thinks, come on, just do it, just walk away, just listen to me and we can all walk away from this -

A vaguely familiar tingle surges through him, almost like his bardic magic and almost like the rush of suude - which is ridiculous because he isn't casting a spell and he hasn't taken any suude because it was fucking useless, but the sensation is undeniably arcane that's recognizable the same way Moorenmarsh was recognizable but so changed after so long -

And then one of the bandits, on the other end of the group from the one who spoke before, tosses his head irritably. "Look at them, though. Is it even worth the trouble? Maybe we should just let them by."

Scanlan's eyes widen in shock, but he doesn't dare look away. The pulse surges again, this time crawling over his skin like semicorporeal ants, and he can see Kaylie twitch slightly in his peripheral vision. He can't quite see any of the Draconians, but he hears a startled gasp from Kava somewhere off to his right.

None of the bandits seem to notice, and another one even says, "We're here for merchants, not for - whoever the fuck these people are. They're not gonna have anything."

"Bahamut," Drakka says loudly, stepping forward into Scanlan's field of view, "doesn't take kindly to those who would rob those they think defenseless!"

"Let me handle this," Scanlan says through gritted teeth, loud enough for Drakka to hear but quiet enough that the bandits hopefully won't.

"Don't underestimate me, gnome," Drakka spits at him, and oh, yep, there's the family resemblance to Tiberius all right.

"You're making it worse," Kaylie hisses at her.

"Stay out of this, girl," Patrin says back.

"Well, then," the first bandit says, hefting up her sword. "If it's a fight you want…"

"It's not!" Scanlan shouts, throwing up a hand to ward her off. It's only then that he realizes that it's shaking. He's shaking all over, and the adrenaline is back, and all he wanted was a break from this shit but here he is - and it won't take a dragon to take Kaylie down, or Drakka or any of the others. All it takes is a lucky fucking shot, and he doesn't have anyone to back him up -

"Have you nothing better to do than attack those who are just as poorly off as you are?" Kava demands, and Scanlan risks glancing at her. She's got a staff - where the fuck did she get a staff? And Patrin, gods, Patrin has a crossbow.

"You're worse than vultures," Patrin spits, and Scanlan can see that his hands are shaking, too - he won't be able to aim it worth a damn, not when he's still leaning on his crutch. "You're peasants!" He says the word with the same cadence Scanlan heard Tiberius say it a hundred times - dismissive and arrogant and as though there's no worse insult in Exandria.

"We were going to send you on your way to Westruun with lighter packs," says another bandit, drawing out a sling, "but I don't think that's going to be necessary anymore."

The other weapons all come out, too, and Scanlan feels the rake of Raishan's claws, the thrumming of magic waiting, and only one thought crowds out all others in his head, over and over again: no no no no no -

He pulls out his flute and quickly blows, trilling out a rapid rising scale. His magic flows out with his breath, and all seven bandits - who so considerately stayed grouped together - stare at him in varying shades of unimpressed.

Then gravity reverses.

There's nothing for them to hold onto, and three of them shriek with shock as their feet lose contact with the ground. Without anything to brace against, some of them spin awkwardly, pitching as even the concept of being upright loses all meaning. It's only a few seconds until they're at their apex, fifty feet up.

"Let us down, you tiny son of a bitch!" one of them shouts.

Two thoughts cross Scanlan's mind. The first is that today, less than two days after visiting his mother's grave for the first time in fifty years, is not a good day to call him that. The second is that he once jumped off a tower almost twice as tall as they are high and only bruised the hell out of himself; if they want to get down, fine.

He takes the flute from his lips and drops the spell. This, incidentally, drops the bandits.

"Bahamut's mercy," Arjhan whispers, and the bandits hit the ground. They hit it very hard.

"Well," Drakka says, tilting her head to survey the bodies, "that takes care of that."

Scanlan stares. There is a lot of blood.

"Gods," Kaylie says faintly, and Scanlan manages to wrench his gaze away to look at her; her eyes are wide as she looks back at him. "You really did slay dragons, didn't you."

He glances back at the corpses. He can see one where the ribs, snapped sharp, emerge from the chest, and he knows exactly what that feels like.

"If you'll excuse me for just a moment," he says, and gets as far into the tall grass as he can before he throws up.

Once he's rinsed his mouth and face, it takes only another few minutes to stop shaking enough to start the short walk back towards the road. He reminds himself that they don't feel it anymore; they don't feel anything at all.

The grass, luckily, is tall enough that he's out of sight until he hits the road itself. By the time he does, the bodies are gone, although the red, wet marks on the road show where they were. Patrin and Drakka are gone, while Kava, Arjhan, and Kaylie wait on the road.

"Where - " Scanlan begins.

"Patrin is a wizard," Arjhan says. "He and Drakka are taking care of the remains. Burying them. It seemed the kindest thing to do."

"It's more than Draconia got," Kava mutters.

"That's what makes us better than the dragons," Arjhan tells her forcefully. Then he turns back to Scanlan. "Thank you. After being helpless in the face of so much, I fear that Drakka and Patrin were determined to have a fight. You made it considerably shorter. Thank you."

"I didn't - " Scanlan says, and feels the bile rise in the back of his throat again. He takes a swig from his water skin and tries again. "The thing about fighting dragons," he says, taking the effort to lighten his voice, "is that you forget that normal people aren't really as…hearty."

"Lots of folk would do just about anything to be able to end a fight that fast," Kaylie says.

"Most of my fights recently haven't been that fast," Scanlan says, and takes another sip.

Drakka and Patrin return a few minutes later.

"I see now why my brother fought alongside you, bard," Drakka says, dusting her hands off on her trousers. "You're surprisingly formidable. Was that your magic, before you took out your flute?"

"No, I didn't cast anything until I reversed gravity. Maybe one of them was a spellcaster."

Patrin frowns at him, more irritated than confused. "If you don't want to share your arcane secrets, fine," he says, "but there's no need to lie about it."

"What are you talking about? I'm a bard - I can't do anything unless I sing or play."

"I don't know what you did," Patrin says with a shrug, "but I felt it wash over me, and it didn't come from their direction - it came from yours. And it wasn't bardic magic, either."

Scanlan stares. "So what the hell was it, then?"

Patrin rolls his eyes. "Fine. Keep your secrets. Can we at least get moving?"

Kava takes the cue and begins to walk immediately, and Drakka follows, pausing only long enough to give Scanlan a perplexed look.

For once, Scanlan almost wishes he were lying; then at least he would have an explanation for the creeping, unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He doesn't sleep well that night, either. More accurately, he doesn't sleep at all. He spends a few hours in bed, tossing and turning and wishing for some suude or something to chase this feeling away, but of course now he knows that suude doesn't do shit. It didn't distract him, it didn't take his worries away, and it didn't even keep him alive.

The thought occurs to him that maybe Drakka or one of the other Draconians could use some time forgetting everything going on in their lives, too, and might appreciate a midnight visit. But bold as Scanlan is, the idea of fucking anyone while sharing the mansion with Kaylie is, frankly, a bonerkiller of the highest order.

Eventually he gives up, goes to the music room, and continues struggling through writing down the notes to his songs until breakfast.

Bahamut's Rest, when they arrive late the next day, is exactly where it's supposed to be. More than that, it's even mostly intact. Although the whole city is still rebuilding, Scanlan hadn't realized how much he was relying on the temple having a roof to put over the Draconians' heads until he saw that it did, indeed, have one.

It's not one of the temples that Scanlan's ever been in, and the only other temple to Bahamut he's been in was the Platinum Sanctuary in Vasselheim. While the Sanctuary was very Vasselheim-y, this one has Westruun all over it, crammed in between two other buildings and made of sturdy stone. The Platinum Sanctuary was clearly designed to put the fear of Bahamut into any passersby, but there's something about Bahamut's Rest that's more welcoming.

As soon as they step foot in the temple, Drakka takes charge, finding the nearest cleric and striking up a conversation that Scanlan doesn't hear because he's back at the entrance due to not really giving a shit. Kaylie turns towards Scanlan, putting her back to the other Draconians, and whispers to him, "So we can go to Kymal now, right?"

"If that's what you want," Scanlan says back quietly.

"It's where Dr. Dranzel is."

"Then sure, let's go to Kymal." He glances past her, looking around the temple. The chances of Kima being around are slim, but he can't help but be paranoid. "I just want to make sure these guys are situated before we ditch them."

"And if the temple won't take them?" Kaylie says, raising her eyebrows. "Then what? We take them to Kymal? Escort them to Emon? Bring them with us on the road?"

Scanlan lets out a short, sharp sigh. "What do you want me to do, Kaylie? Just leave them?"

"Not everything is your problem to solve. That's all."

"Trust me, I'm well aware of that! But can we just - see how this plays out?"

Kaylie meets his eyes unflinchingly, then breaks the gaze with a huff. "We shouldn't travel in the dark anyway, so I suppose we'll be staying the night here tonight."

"I can cast the Mansion for the night," Scanlan says. "Unless - would you rather we found an inn?"

Kaylie crosses her arms tightly over her chest. "It doesn't creep you out?"

"What, the Mansion? Really?"

"It's quiet," Kaylie says. "That doesn't bother you?" She doesn't wait for him to reply and says, "Kymal may not be a big town, but I suppose it was big enough for me to grow up a city girl."

"There are quiet nights on the road with Dr. Dranzel, surely," Scanlan says.

"There were nights where everything other than us was quiet, sure," Kaylie says. "That's why we made so much noise."

"Fair enough." Scanlan pulls a few platinum from his purse and passes it to her. "Do you want to go ahead and find an inn while I finish things up here?"

Kaylie takes the coins almost reverently, and Scanlan realizes that she's probably never seen platinum before. A shock rolls over him - not that she hasn't seen that much value in one coin, but that somehow he lives a life where carrying hundreds of platinum with him for emergencies has become normal.

For a second, just a split second, he wonders if she'll take the money and run. He wouldn't really blame her if she did - it's a lot of money, and he's a shitty dad anyway.

But instead she says, "I don't know what inns are open yet - I'll come back once I've found us somewhere to stay."

Then she's gone.

Scanlan sighs, leans against the wall near the door, and settles in to wait.

It takes about an hour before Drakka makes a reappearance. Patrin spends the time praying, kneeling awkwardly in front of the altar of Bahamut; Arjhan just sits in the pews and stares, weary and vacant, at the wall ahead of him; and Kava takes a nap.

But Drakka, when she comes back in, doesn't come alone.

"Scanlan!" Allura says, cutting ahead of Drakka and - oh, gods, it's Kima. Of course it's Kima. "Drakka said that it was you, but I couldn't quite believe it."

"Surprise, I guess," Scanlan says, standing up straight. "Hi, Allura. Hi, Kima."

"What are you doing in Westruun?" Kima asks, as Drakka splits off from them to speak to Arjhan. "We heard gossip that you ran off to spend time with your daughter or something."

"I did, yes," Scanlan says. "She's making sure we have a place to stay the night, before we head off again in the morning - assuming these four are taken care of…?"

"Of course they are," Allura says immediately.

"We'll take care of them here," Kima says, glancing back at Drakka. "See what we can do about the situation up in Draconia. It sounds like things have gotten bad up there."

"Hey," Scanlan says, a thought suddenly occurring to him. "If you do go back to - to figure out what to do with the Draconians and the Ravinites, you should take Tofor Brotoras. We learned the hard way that the view we got of Draconia from Tiberius was…skewed. Tofor might have another perspective."

Allura raises his eyebrows. "That's a very good idea."

"Yes, shocking, I know," Scanlan says. "Anyway, what are you two doing here? I would've thought you'd be in Emon, or Whitestone, or…basically anywhere other than here."

"We're only here for a few days," Allura says. "I'm restrengthening several of the protections on the Cobalt Reserve so that sensitive items from Thordak's hoard can be dealt with appropriately. As much damage as the Cobalt Reserve took, the libraries and repositories of Emon took more."

"And since Allie was going to be here anyway, I figured I'd check in here at the temple," Kima says. "And you're really just…what? Walking around?"

"Spending time with my daughter," Scanlan says, voice clipped.

"I think we met her," Allura offers. "Outside the temple in Whitestone."

"She was the drunk one, right?" Kima says to Allura.

"She seemed quite steady by the time she left the temple."

"That sounds like her," Scanlan says, glancing behind him to the door. Modifying their memories to forget this conversation and, more importantly, so that he could escape this conversation is probably overkill, and also, Kima would literally murder him this time.

There's a long, awkward silence.

Allura breaks the silence. "You know, we were just talking about Vox Machina."

Scanlan tries not to care, and says, "Really? They get tents yet?"

"What?" Kima says, frowning.

"Nothing. Are they - they're not here, are they? In Westruun?"

"No," Allura says, "but a few of them were, briefly, to consult with what's left of the Cobalt Reserve. I believe they're taking some time to recover from the fights with the dragons."

Kima adds, "And they fought a kraken."

Scanlan stares at her. "I'm sorry, they what?"

"Apparently it's what Keyleth's water druid friends do for fun - wrestle krakens." Kima shrugs. "I'm not a huge fan of the beach, myself."

"Uh…they were all there, though, right?"

"Don't worry, Scanlan, they were all accounted for," Allura says, with a brief smile.

"They even had an extra, from what I've heard," Kima says. "Tall, blond, had a giant metal automaton. They're doing pretty well for themselves, I guess."

"Oh," Scanlan says. "That's. Great. Good for them."

He even manages not to be jealous as he says it, because he would have to care to be jealous, and he doesn't care. It's wonderfully freeing, this not-caring thing.

The door opens behind him, and Kaylie's face pops in.

"Oi, Shorthalt," she says, "I found us a place to stay - are we going to get to Kymal in the next two days or what?"

Scanlan calls back, "I'll be right there!" and adds, "Daughter!" for good measure.

Kaylie's glance in return is flat and unenthusiastic, but if she recognizes Kima or Allura, she gives no sign of it as she lets the door close behind her.

"Well, I should probably go," Scanlan says, turning back to Kima and Allura. "Since, you know." He hooks his thumb over his shoulder in Kaylie's general direction. "Got all that to take care of."

"Of course," Allura says.

"Sure," Kima says, with an extra helping of skepticism.

"But the Draconians will be okay?" Scanlan says. "Drakka and them?"

"We'll take care of them," Kima says, her voice shifting all the way to irritated now.

"Okay, okay, but - you know Drakka's Tiberius's sister, right?"

"It came up," Allura says quietly. "And I understand your insistence - she's family of family, after all. But don't worry. She and her friends are in good hands."

Scanlan hadn't thought about it like that, family of family, but - yeah. It fits. "Okay. Thanks."

"Could I trouble you for a brief word, actually?" Allura says, and tilts her head slightly to one side to indicate that he should follow her.

"I should get back to this anyway," Kima says, looking over her shoulder at Drakka and Arjhan, deep in conversation now. "But I'll talk to Tofor. That's a good call." She looks at Scanlan and sighs. "Well. Try not to die."

"Because I've been so good at that lately," Scanlan murmurs, and then says, louder, "You stay safe, too." Then he follows Allura to a more private corner of the temple.

"I don't want to be presumptuous," Allura begins as soon as Scanlan's close enough, "but I wanted to remind you that I've made the choice that you made as well. The choice to step aside from the battles in favor of a quieter life - or," she corrects herself, "a safer one, in at least some respects. I say this because I know it's a difficult one, and I know there are those who would judge you for it or call you a coward - I received my fair share of such words at one point. No, don't argue, I just want to get this out. I want you to know that I don't regret stepping out of the role of adventurer, but what I do regret is having cut that part of me out of my life entirely." She glances at Kima and continues, "I wish I hadn't thought that not being on a battlefield meant not being around those I had fought alongside. It doesn't have to. I know how hard it can be to watch the people you love throw themselves into the same dangerous situations that you used to protect them in, but, for what it's worth, I've found it to be worth it." She looks back at Scanlan with a flatly resigned expression. "I know you may not find this advice helpful, but, as I said, it's what I wish I had done differently. Perhaps it might be something to think about as you choose your path now."

Scanlan swallows past the tightness in his throat. "I'll take it under advisement," he says.

"And I'm - very relieved that you're well again," Allura says. "For my own sake, as well as Vox Machina's. Kima, Drake, and I lost many in our fight against the Cinder King, and when we fought our way out of Raishan's lair, watching your friends…it brought back memories that perhaps were best left undisturbed. I'm joyful that your story had a happier ending than ours did."

"Sure," Scanlan says. "Joyful."

"Well, I'll let you get back to your daughter," Allura says, pushing one of her braids back over her shoulder self-consciously. "Safe travels, Scanlan Shorthalt."

"Safe travels, Allura Vysoren." Scanlan turns to leave, then hesitates. "Look, this is maybe a weird request, but - if you see Vox Machina, could you…not mention that you saw me? I'm sort of trying to have some me-time. You know."

The corner of Allura's mouth twitches, but she manages to keep a straight face as she says, "I understand. Everyone needs some me-time."

"Thanks, Allura. You know, you're pretty cool. I don't think we say that enough. And so's your girlfiend."

Allura smiles faintly. "She is, isn't she."

Kaylie is so much more relaxed when they go back to the inn and get settled that Scanlan notices the tension she had been carrying in her shoulders in the mansion - now that it's gone, it's retrospectively obvious. But her ease in the inn puts Scanlan a bit more at ease by extension, even if he feels a brief pang for the rest of the roadtrip that he had envisioned, with nights spent bonding in the mansion. Something about being able to materially provide for her, as opposed to providing with coin, felt more meaningful - but if this makes her happier, then this makes her happier.

They eat standard Westruun fare and drink standard Westruun ale with dinner and once the sun sets, a band starts playing standard Westruun music. It's another inn with a dance floor, Scanlan realizes, and he watches Kaylie watch the dancers.

Scanlan knows fuck-all about formal dancing. He knows the standard beats and melodies, how to accompany a reel or a waltz, but when it comes to actually moving his body, he's basically clueless. Before he met up with Dr. Dranzel, all of his dancing was children's dancing: formless spinning and jumping and hopping. After he met up with Dr. Dranzel, he was the one providing all the music.

"Do you dance?" he asks once he can't help it anymore. "You're tapping your foot against the table leg."

Her foot stills immediately and she sits back in her chair. "I picked up a few steps at the College. Don't you? Traveling with the Troupe as long as you did - "

"Other people did the dancing." Scanlan shakes his head. "My contributions were purely accompaniment."

Kaylie narrows her eyes at him, and Scanlan feels a flutter of nerves at the way she sizes him up. Then she hops out of the (overlarge, as always) chair and holds her hand out to him. "Then I'll teach you. Come on."

Scanlan laughs out loud at that. "That's very sweet, but no. I know my strengths, and coordination isn't one of them, unless it's general evasive tactics."

"D'you really think telling me you'll make a fool of yourself will make me want to make you do it less?" Kaylie says, flapping her still-extended hand insistently. "Come on. I mean it. You're going to learn how to dance tonight, boy-o."

The smile left over from laughing fades into a grimace, but it occurs to Scanlan that, other than the promise to stay alive, this may be the first time Kaylie has asked for something - or wanted to share something of hers, rather than help him with something of his.

"I'm not responsible," he says, pushing himself off the chair with a groan, "for any damage I might cause by stepping on your feet. Or tripping you. Or accidentally slapping you."

"I'll take my chances." Kaylie pulls him out onto the dance floor. It's a standard song, one that he knows with a decent beat and an easy enough melody to follow, but most of the dancers are human, elvish, or somewhere in the middle, and it takes attention not to worry that they'll step on him. Luckily, they all seem to be better dancers than he is.

Kaylie walks him through the sets of steps briskly, and laughs at his errors - which are many. It's a partner dance, which at least contains his incompetence to Kaylie, and it involves a series of bows, elbow-hooks, turns, claps, and lifting his knees higher than he is physically capable of.

But Kaylie's laugh is worth it, even when she's laughing at him, and she delivers her corrections and advice over a steady stream of giggles. Her face flushes with joy, and when he begins a stream of curses - genuinely by accident - she throws her head back and laughs like he's never heard her laugh.

"Shit shit shit," he wheezes, because it turns out dancing is also fucking hard work.

"My dance partner in practice would always say 'fuckery' like that," Kaylie responds with a grin, her pace not faltering at all and not even a gleam of sweat on her brow. "Just over and over again, fuckery fuckery fuckery. He said the 'f' sound made him a better dancer."

Scanlan gives it a try. It doesn't help.

The song, mercifully, comes to an end, and Scanlan feels sore in muscles he hadn't realized he had - like the muscle connecting to the back of his neck to his shoulder. He thought only Grog had that muscle, because all of Grog's muscles are unfairly large and defined, but it turns out he has it too because it burns.

"Well that was fun," he says, bracing his hands on his knees and trying to catch his breath. "I'm not sure I'll ever do that again, but it was fun."

Even breathing stings the inside of his windpipe - the song was five minutes long at the most and he's spent battle after battle breathing hard and fighting, but those are usually over so quick and this is just dancing, why is it so fucking hard?

"You don't want another dance?" Kaylie asks, and he whips his head up to stare at her in horror. The gleam in her eye, he realizes, means she's joking.

"How about," he says, "I sit down and you keep dancing and I can watch you and begin to better understand the distance between how terrible a dancer I am and how well it's possible to dance, as exemplified by you."

"Flatterer," Kaylie says, but she's smiling, and it's a much better word than 'scoundrel.'

They arrive in Kymal the next evening, and Kaylie takes them directly to the inn that Vex had retrieved her from. Dr. Dranzel has never been one for predictability, so Scanlan seriously considers the possibility that they'll have to scour Kymal and possibly the entire Tal'Dorei countryside to find the Troupe, but as soon as they enter the inn, there Dr. Dranzel is, already significantly drunk and heckling the (admittedly horrendous) performers.

But almost as soon as Kaylie and Scanlan are through the door, Dr. Dranzel catches sight of them and stops halfway through insulting the drummer's parentage.

"Scanlan Shorthalt!" he yells, standing up. "How the fuck are you alive?"

"A question I ask myself every day," Scanlan says, walking with Kaylie to join him. "I'm glad to see you're doing well - did Pike's healing on your foot stick?"

"Ha!" Dr. Dranzel stomps said foot on the floor to demonstrate. "Worked like a charm."

"I mean, charm spells are something else, but I take your point," Scanlan says.

"And Kaylie! You disappeared in a hurry when that half-elf friend of his showed up."

"She sent me to bring this one back," Kaylie says, jerking her head towards Scanlan. "And it worked, obviously."

"So I see! Please, please, sit." Dr. Dranzel motions to his table, and both Kaylie and Scanlan sit at it with him.

"Where's everybody else?" Scanlan says. "Are you still waiting to meet up with them?"

"Oh, gods, no," Dr. Dranzel says. "We've got a bit of a lag between gigs, so they're working other venues. We're bunking here, you see."

"Ah. Understood," Scanlan says, and it's just common sense, really, not to pickpocket where you're sleeping. "I don't suppose you have room in the Troupe for some more woodwinds, by any chance?"

He sees Kaylie stiffen a bit in his peripheral vision, but when he looks directly at her to check, he can't actually tell the difference.

"There's always room for you, old friend," Dr. Dranzel says. "But you seemed rather attached to your, uh, previous occupation. What happened?"

"The dragons are gone now. All of them. So there doesn't seem to be much of a point to going around fighting everything, does there?" Scanlan shrugs. "No need."

"They had a tiff," Kaylie breaks in.

"It wasn't a - " Scanlan begins.

"If it wasn't a tiff, it was a fight." She gives him a flat look. "It certainly wasn't less than a tiff."

"We had…a difference of opinion," Scanlan says through slightly gritted teeth. "I'm on my own for at least a while, and I thought I'd like to spend some time with Kaylie."

"Like I said," Dr. Dranzel says, his voice firm, "you're always welcome on any stage that welcomes me. And we were planning on leaving soon - we'd talked about going to Vasselheim, like you said, but if all the dragons are gone we may not need to."

Scanlan shrugs one shoulder, trying to calculate the probability of Vox Machina being in Vasselheim as opposed to anywhere else. "They still could do with some music and merriment up there," he says. "If you ask me. It's been pretty dour every time I've been."

"Sounds like a cheerful place to go," Kaylie mutters, and then looks around, her eyes finally landing on the halfling tending the bar. "I need a drink," she announces, and hops off her chair to head over.

Scanlan stares after her, and Dr. Dranzel chuckles.

"Don't worry about her, Scanlan," he says. "She always gets a bit antsy in Kymal."

"I thought she'd be comfortable here," Scanlan says. "I mean, she's from here, right?"

"Yes, that's the problem," Dr. Dranzel agrees. Scanlan thinks of the odd ill-fitting sensation of being back in Drynna and Moorenmarsh, the sense of everything being just slightly out of proportion and just different enough to throw him off, and thinks he can understand that. But then Dr. Dranzel continues, "And since her mom doesn't know that she was kicked out of the College of the White Duke, well, that doesn't help things."

Scanlan's attention snaps back to Dr. Dranzel. "Her mother doesn't know? Wait - kicked out?"

Dr. Dranzel waves a hand dismissively. "The capriciousness of youth, no? Oh, don't give me that look. You were up to far worse when you were her age, don't bother denying it, because I was there. Your Grace," he adds pointedly.

Scanlan sits up with indignation. "You can't use that against me! The Duke of Marchborough is legally dead."

"Yeah, that was a pretty important step in the payout, as I recall," Dr. Dranzel says, and delicately takes another sip of his ale. "I spoke to the Duchess the last time we were down that way, a few years ago. She sends her regards to her late husband."

Burying his face in his hands, Scanlan mutters, "You marry one Duchess and you never hear the end of it, honestly. Doesn't matter that she was in on the con, doesn't matter that the marriage was legally annulled when the Duke died - "

"Cleanest death we ever faked," Dr. Dranzel says wistfully. "I wonder what that wizard, that transmuter guy, is up to."

"Who knows?" Scanlan says, lifting his face again. "But, listen, about Kaylie - "

The voice of Kent Plucker interrupts: "Scanlan! Dr. Dranzel told us you were dead!"

Sure enough, Kent walks up to the table from the entrance, followed by a dwarf, a tiefling, and an elf. Scanlan recognizes the elf as Esilmere, the singer who was with Dr. Dranzel back in Emon before the Conclave's attack, but the dwarf and the tiefling seem to be new. Kent is, of course, Kent: same as ever.

"It was accurate at the time," Scanlan says, forcing a smile. "Good to see you, Kent, and - Esilmere, right?"

"Indeed," Esilmere says, rewarding Scanlan with a smile of her own.

"I don't think you've met our two newest recruits," Dr. Dranzel says, leaning forward to plant his elbows on the table. "Zedd decided to return to Westruun, but Ilde Frostbeard here is a drummer for the ages."

"You're Scanlan Shorthalt? Kaylie's da?" the dwarf says, shaking her head. "I've heard a lot."

"Oh, gods, I hope some of it was good," Scanlan says.

"Not particularly, but don't worry - I wouldn't like you as much if it were," Ilde says, and gives Scanlan a wink.

"And this is Rapture," Dr. Dranzel says, reaching across the table to clap the tiefling on the shoulder. "Have you ever heard a violone, Scanlan? It's fucking huge, and Rapture here plays it amazingly."

"I do what I can," Rapture says. He's a purple tiefling, which Scanlan has basically no experience dealing with, but Scanlan thinks he can see slightly darker patches appear on Rapture's cheeks at the praise.

"Kaylie's back, too," Dr. Dranzel tells the rest of the Troupe, and gestures vaguely towards the bar. "She's off getting hydrated."

"I'm going to go say hello," Esilmere says, and gives Scanlan a respectful nod. "Good to see you again, Scanlan."

"You'll be seeing a lot more of him," Dr. Dranzel says with a toothy grin. "He's joining back up!"

"You are?" Kent says.

"It turns out the whole adventuring thing doesn't make as much sense when you've got nothing left to fight," Scanlan replies.

Kent looks Scanlan up and down, and then smiles slightly. "You missed the music, didn't you."

Kent's always been a bit obsessed with the music - although he holds down the lute parts for the standard songs, he also obtained a Bag of Holding just so he could carry around his collection of bizarre instruments that he kept insisting would revolutionize music. When Scanlan left the Troupe, Kent was at thirteen different instruments that he could play at least passably. Roadside jam sessions, after camp was set up but before anyone was ready to go to bed, were a hell of a lot of fun, if only because nobody ever knew what Kent would whip out.

"Something like that," Scanlan says. "Nice to get away for a while, think about things."

"Sure, sure," Kent says. "You and Kaylie got rooms yet?"

"We just walked in a few minutes ago."

Kent glances at Dr. Dranzel. "Should I take care of that?"

"We've had a couple good gigs - go ahead," Dr. Dranzel says. "Spend it while you got it, as I always say."

Scanlan lets a faint smile rest on his face at that. His days with Dr. Dranzel were either the highest highs or the lowest lows, with nothing in between. He decides he can come back to the topic of Kaylie later - this is his time to relax, after all. "I have some good news on that front," he says. "Have I told you about my mansion?"

They spend the evening relaxing and catching up and providing a running commentary for the performers onstage. Another table gets pulled closer to Dr. Dranzel's to accommodate everyone, and Kaylie and Esilmere return to the table with "hydration" for everyone. It's not an unpleasant way to spend the evening, swapping stories and jokes, although Kaylie sits at the far end of the table from Scanlan and won't meet his eye when he tries to catch her.

But Scanlan feels the weight of the years, and, more importantly, the weight of simply being out of practice staying up to drunkenly greet the dawn, and it's a bit after midnight that he announces he's going to bed over a yawn.

"I'm a bit tuckered out, too," Kent says, leaving his own chair. "I'll show you your room on the way?"

Scanlan's heart beats a bit faster. "Sure, thanks."

"Rest up, Shorthalt, we're going to train you to live like a musician again whether you like it or not," Dr. Dranzel says, toasting with his mug of ale.

Scanlan holds up a hand in agreement. "I'm counting on it." As he circles the table to get to Kent and the side of the inn that actually has the rooms, he passes Kaylie and says, "Goodnight, Kaylie."

"Night," she says back, which isn't quite what he'd hoped for but is better than nothing.

Kent leads him through the emptying inn to the stairs up to the guest rooms. Once they're out of earshot, Kent says, "We didn't get a chance to catch up properly when we were in Emon, did we?"

"No," Scanlan agrees. "You interested in…catching up?"

Kent grins at Scanlan. "Unless you've got other plans. Sometimes familiar's nice, you know? And sometimes you just want something without expectations."

"Yep, yeah, I definitely know that feeling," Scanlan says. "You, uh - you never mentioned our little arrangement to Kaylie, did you?"

With a shrug, Kent says, "Honestly, and this isn't a knock on you - it never came up because it just didn't mean enough."

"Thank fuck," Scanlan says fervently. "No offense, but I'm not sleeping with you if you're going to get sappy about it, and I'm definitely not sleeping with you if Kaylie knows."

Kent keeps leading, all the way to the very end of the hallway, and takes out a key. "Not a worry," he tells Scanlan. "This is your room, and Kaylie's is the first next to the stairs. There's nowhere else in this inn that she'll be further away."

"Planning ahead - I like it." Scanlan follows Kent into his room and doesn't even spare a glance for it - it takes half a second of seeing it in his peripheral vision to determine that it looks like every other inn room in a town like Kymal. He kicks the door shut behind him and drops his pack by the door before he smiles at Kent. "Hi."

"Hi," Kent says back, stepping closer and kissing Scanlan. Scanlan kisses back without hesitation. They've done a lot of kissing over the years, and Kent still remembers what Scanlan likes; based on the hitch in Kent's breath and the hand that pulls on Scanlan's hip to get him closer, Scanlan still remembers what Kent likes, too. This, now, this is simple, this is something he's good at, this is something he can do where he is beholden to absolutely no one but himself: no one to let down or fail or prove right or wrong. There's just the heat where their bodies meet, the pressure of lips on lips, the slow, building rush that heralds an erection.

Keeping one hand on Scanlan's hip, Kent brings his other hand up to loose Scanlan's hair from its tie, though it takes a few tries, given the distractions. Scanlan's hair falls to his shoulders, and Kent immediately threads his fingers through it, pulling gently, and Scanlan delights in the rediscovery that, oh yeah, Kent has a thing for that. Scanlan rakes his nails against the back of Kent's neck, and Kent groans gratifyingly into Scanlan's mouth.

Kent's hand on Scanlan's hip begins tugging Scanlan's shirt up, and the first few brushes of the back of Kent's fingers against Scanlan's stomach feel absolutely fucking amazing - but then he hits a patch of desensitized scar tissue and Scanlan pushes Kent's arms away without thinking.

"Scanlan?" Kent says breathily, frowning.

"I - the shirt stays on," Scanlan says, breathing heavily back for reasons that he tells himself are entirely erotic and not related to the sudden, vicious reminder of the scars across his chest. "We can do whatever you want, but the shirt stays on."

Kent stares, and for a horrible moment Scanlan thinks he's going to ask why. But then Kent shrugs and says, "Sure, whatever," and Scanlan remembers why they used to do this so much: the orgasms never really translated to an emotional connection beyond amicable peers and, on good days, friends.

So Scanlan keeps his shirt on, but everything else comes off, and for the first time in a long, long time, Scanlan doesn't think about anything for a while.

He doesn't kick Kent out, partly because he's too comfortably exhausted to give a shit and partly because the bit of his brain that does still give a shit doesn't want to risk Kaylie seeing. They share the small bed instead, favored for once by their small statures, sleeping back-to-back with only Scanlan's shirt between them, now standing in for a nightshirt. Scanlan gets the best sleep that he's had since he died, and he wakes up only once with the shivering foreboding of an incipient nightmare chased away by Kent horse-kicking back at his ankle and mumbling, "Shut up, Scanlan, I'm trying to sleep."

Scanlan remembers this, too: Kent's an odd mix of a light and heavy sleeper, in that he'll half-awaken at the slightest provocation and almost immediately go back to sleep, and half the time he doesn't remember the interruption the next morning. In short, he's perfect, as Scanlan discovers that night, as an early-warning system for Scanlan's nightmares.

The next morning, Scanlan wakes up feeling actually rested instead of possibly passable, and the firm weight of Kent at his back is oddly comforting.

Kaylie is the last to come down to the dining room of the inn that morning, although it's a slow start for just about everyone - although Scanlan reminds himself that it isn't a slow start if this is when they always get up. He's on a musician's schedule now; he can finally start acting like it.

But it isn't until after breakfast - well, brunch - that Scanlan manages to snag Kaylie while the others are dispersing to their taverns to pickpocket. More accurately, Kaylie, swept immediately back into the fold, gets an assignment like anyone else, although Scanlan is spared, and Scanlan follows her.

As soon as Kaylie sees him - which is almost immediately, since Scanlan manages to accidentally kick a bucket into a cat after the first turn that Kaylie makes, and the cat is not happy - she stops, crossing her arms and watching him. "I've seen you dance. Don't tell me Dr. Dranzel's trying to get you pickpocketing. It's not going to end well."

"Well, no, it definitely wouldn't," Scanlan agrees, catching up to her. "No, I just wanted to talk to you."

"About what?" Kaylie says, her shoulders stiffening slightly. "We're in Kymal, we're back with Dr. Dranzel - I thought this was what you wanted. Congratulations."

"No, it is, I just - well, when Dr. Dranzel and I were talking last night he mentioned - were you kicked out of the College of the White Duke?"

She shrugs. "Once I knew Dr. Dranzel'd take me, I didn't see much reason to keep my opinions to myself. They didn't much like it."

"Uh-huh," Scanlan says. "And did you really not tell your mother what you're doing?"

Kaylie gives him a flat look. "No, I never told her that I dropped out of my training to track down, humiliate, and murder the father I never met. Somehow, I don't think she'd take too kindly to it."

Scanlan stares, trying to move past her casual use of the word 'murder' - he'd known, obviously, but hearing her say it so baldly and unrepentantly is something he wasn't prepared for. "When you put it like that," he manages, "it does sound like…something she wouldn't take kindly to."

But his reluctance must come through in his voice, because Kaylie's eyes narrow. "If you're going to tell me off, just remember that you weren't going to tell me you died. You've got no right to tell me off."

"I know, I know, you're right," Scanlan says, but something in him resists, like a tree branch pulled back too far. The past week with Kaylie has been more than he ever could have asked for, definitely more than he deserves, and he can't move past the desire to just shower her with everything she wants and bask in her attention, in this person that he helped make and who's willing to spend time with him.

But for all his calculations of what she wants to hear, of what to say and how to say it, the words just burst out: "No, you know what, fuck that. I was wrong to even consider not telling you. That was a mistake, and I shouldn't have done it. But I've made a lot of mistakes, and if they can somehow be helpful - if you can learn from them and avoid the massive, massive fuckups I've stumbled, run, and occasionally Dimension Door-ed into, then maybe you can avoid some of the consequences that I didn't."

Kaylie's mouth thins into a line. "You can't even stop singing songs about yourself when they're tragedies, can you?"

Scanlan has to take a moment to breathe past the sting of the remark before he can speak again. "I know I hurt you. I may have had good intentions, but those don't count for shit for something like this. Nothing I do can make it not have happened, but maybe now I can start repairing the damage. And I know you don't want to hear it, and I know I might not have the…strongest memories of your mother, but maybe you can do better with her than I did with you."

After a long moment of quiet, Kaylie says, "Are you going to tell her?"

"Gods, no, I'm not going to tell her! It's not my place. And also I'm not sure she'd believe me. And also she probably hates me - am I wrong?"

"She's not particularly fond of you, no."

"Right, so, no, I'm not going to tell her. But I'm sorry, because I still think you should. I know you have no reason to listen to me, but I hope you do anyway, because I do love you. And because I know how much…how much hurt and pain can come out of what you're doing, and I think you do, too. You may not want to hear it, but there it is."

The moment hangs between them, Kaylie looking at him with her jaw set and a hard cast to her eye. "Consider it said and heard," she says, her voice tight. "Now get back to the inn before you get me caught. You look conspicuous as hell."

She turns and walks away before Scanlan can say anything else.

It's three hours until dawn that night when Kaylie finally returns, and Scanlan can barely keep his eyes open. Dr. Dranzel, sprawled out across the table, didn't even make it up to his room before going to sleep, and Kent went to bed without Scanlan when it became obvious that Scanlan was determined to wait up.

"You know she probably got in a fight, right?" Kent said before he went. "You might not want to see the result."

Scanlan waited anyway, and here Kaylie comes. Kent was right: Scanlan doesn't like the result.

A crusty trail of dried blood bridges the gap between her nose and mouth, smeared across her cheek where she wiped it poorly. Her left cheek, beginning to purple, has swollen enough to close her eye, and her hair somehow seems messy despite being cut even shorter than Scanlan's. She sways a bit as she walks in, but she catches sight of Scanlan and freezes.

"Why aren't you sleeping?" she says, with less of a slur to her voice than Scanlan would've expected.

Scanlan hops out of the chair - one day, one day he'll go to an inn that has seating proportioned for gnomes - and goes to her, weaving between empty tables. "I got worried," he says, and reaches out a hand to heal her.

She swats it away. "Stop it."

"I can heal you - "

"It's fine, just leave it."

"You look terrible."

"Good. I earned it. It takes a lot of effort to get this roughed up."

Scanlan sighs, but drops his hand. "I assume the other guy looks worse?"

"It was five guys, and yeah, all of 'em look like shit."

"That's my girl." Scanlan turns so that he's facing the back of the room, where the stairs are, and offers Kaylie his arm. "May I walk you to your room, miss?"

She squints at him, breathing through her mouth, and Scanlan realizes there's a new bump in her nose. Great. "Sure," she says finally, and together they maneuver the stairs. Scanlan makes a mental note to thank Kent for putting Kaylie's room right at the top of the stairs.

Scanlan gets Kaylie into bed, gets her boots off, and even gets her a cup of water from the pitcher on the dresser. She sips it slowly as he sits at her feet, and he watches her watch him, unsure of what else to do. He has his own routine to try to avoid a hangover, but nobody's ever put him to bed like this when he hasn't been grievously injured, and he's not sure what comes next.

Thrusting the now-empty cup back at Scanlan, Kaylie says, "Did your mum sing? You sing, I sing. Did she?"

Scanlan takes the cup back to the dresser to buy some time in answering. "Not a lot," he says eventually. "There was a lullaby she sang to me a couple times. Enough for me to learn it. That's all I remember her singing."

He turns back around and sees that Kaylie's fully reclined now, glaring with her one eye open through her messy hair spiked all around her face. "Well?" she says. "Let's hear it."

So Scanlan sits back at her feet and sings quietly. It's a song about comfort and distance, about imagining someone thinking of you even when they might be far away, and whenever Scanlan's mother would sing it to him, he would imagine that his dad was singing it somewhere, too, thinking of him. After the attack on Moorenmarsh, when he sang himself to sleep in the alleys of Drynna, he would imagine that his mother was singing it with him from wherever her spirit went. Of course, he knows better now.

It's odd, but he realizes as he sings that despite all the battle cries and songs of rest, he never shared this with Vox Machina, and that thought brings him an odd mixture of vindictive pleasure and hollow loss. Wherever they are, whatever they're doing, they certainly aren't singing this and thinking of him right now. They've already replaced him, probably with someone who can actually leave a fight as alive as they went into it.

By the time the song ends, Kaylie's asleep; her breathing is too even and her face too awkwardly slack for her to be faking it. Scanlan smiles a bit to himself and folds the blanket over from the other side of the bed to cover her, and then rests a hand on her arm to heal her.

That strange, itchy heat rushes through him to pool in his fingers again, and a light flashes from the foot of the bed. When Scanlan's vision clears, he sees a white horse, standing in the moonlight filtering in from the window, with a single, elegant horn spiraling from its forehead.

A unicorn.

There's a fucking unicorn in Kaylie's room.

Scanlan stares at the unicorn. The unicorn looks back at him with placid black eyes. Scanlan's brain stutters to a stop on the thought that there is a fucking unicorn in Kaylie's room.

After about thirty seconds of this staring contest, the unicorn gets bored, looking away and surveying the rest of the room. It leans its long neck forward to sniff the edge of the dresser, its horn knocking over Kaylie's cup on top of it, but the cup just rolls to the back of the dresser and rests against the wall instead of falling to the floor.

The unicorn licks the dresser. Its spittle, a small part of Scanlan's mind notes, does not visibly have any interesting properties.

Then that same small part of Scanlan's mind, the part that's still capable of thoughts other than there's a fucking unicorn in Kaylie's room, provides this gem: can horses go down stairs? Can unicorns? If not, how is the unicorn going to get out?

The problem resolves itself about a minute after the unicorn's initial appearance, when another flash emanates from it and by the time Scanlan can see again, the unicorn is gone.

Scanlan looks at his hand, still on Kaylie's arm. Then he looks at Kaylie's face, where the ridge on her nose is gone and the swelling in her cheekbone has lessened enough to free her other eye. He removes his hand slowly, flexing it to see if any trace of that surge of energy remains, and feels nothing but a sinking heaviness in his stomach: the dawning knowledge that something just isn't right.

Between waiting up for Kaylie and trying to get to sleep while distracted by spontaneous unicorns, Scanlan doesn't sleep very well, and he doesn't make it downstairs until noon. Even that's a halfhearted effort: his hair, pulled back haphazardly, falls in hanks out of its ponytail, and he only realizes at the foot of the stairs that his shirt is on backwards. Then he realizes that he didn't put any armor on at all, even though he's still been defaulting to it out of habit, and he almost goes back upstairs. Then he decides that, no, he's just a musician now, and regular musicians don't have to wear armor at all times.

But once he's noticed that it's not there, he has to fight the feeling of being naked without it.

The rest of the troupe is already downstairs, sitting in front of plates scattered with the remnants of breakfast. Dr. Dranzel lifts his tankard when he sees Scanlan come down the stairs and calls, "Good news, Scanlan! We've lined up a gig for tonight. Ready to get back on the stage?"

Scanlan clambers into one of the free seats at the table, his foot slipping twice before he manages the climb. Once he's settled, Dr. Dranzel's words actually register. "I suppose," he says, looking at the table. Everyone's there, except - "Where's Kaylie?"

Esilmere shrugs. "She was finishing breakfast when I came down, and then she left."

"Not uncommon when we've been in Kymal before," Dr. Dranzel says with a glance at Scanlan. "Nothing to be worried about."

"It is if we're down a flautist for the night," Ilde mutters.

"Good news on that front!" Kent says with a bright smile at Scanlan. "What do you think?"

Scanlan hesitates, but only for a moment. "I mean, it's that or the shawm, so…"

Kent groans and rolls his eyes, and Scanlan remembers with fondness that Kent was never a fan of the shawm.

"Might be a nice counterpoint if Kaylie gets back in time," Rapture says thoughtfully.

"That is the one and only circumstance in which a shawm is acceptable, I agree," Kent says forcefully. "It needs something to balance it out, or else it's just honking up there in the middle of the song."

The innkeeper brings Scanlan some breakfast, accompanied by a morning ale. He hesitates only for a moment - daydrinking with Vox Machina was one thing, since everyone generally assumed that if everyone was drunk together they'd at least have each other if something went horribly wrong, as it inevitably did. But, he reminds himself, the dragons are dead, and he's not an adventurer anymore. He's just a bard now, and bards start drinking in the morning.

The whole day is filled with things just bards do, forcefully reminding Scanlan both of the good old days and of what it's like to actually hang around with musicians. They rehearse, and the people around him actually have an opinion about what he's doing beyond thanks for the healing or inspiration - halfway through one of the old standards, For the Dancing and the Dreaming, Ilde suddenly shifts the tempo in a way that releases the melody like water bursting from a broken dam. Scanlan's mind kicks into high gear to compensate, and everyone else is shifting too, but they share the same instincts even without looking at each other or consulting -

Until Esilmere stops the lyric line and gives Scanlan a suggestion, a zig instead of a zag, and for a second Scanlan's shoulders stiffen in a knee-jerk reaction. Then he reminds himself that Esilmere actually knows what she's talking about, and when he gives it a shot, it sounds even better than what he had been doing.

It's an entirely different type of quick thinking than fighting as a bard, and it feels like running after days of bedrest - exhilarating and freeing and more tiring than he remembers it being.

There are also people to lend him cleaning fluid for his flute, to remove the tarnish that nobody gave a shit about on the battlefield but which matters a lot more on stage (and Ilde gives him a lecture about proper maintenance when she sees); there are people off singing songs in between rehearsal sets, and others arguing about what to put on the setlist; and there's the sheer wonder in hearing familiar songs played with a new set of instruments. (The violone, it turns out, makes a significant difference. Scanlan has no idea how Rapture moves with it, since it's as tall as he is and almost certainly heavier - the bow alone is as long as the Mythcarver - but it's worth it for the oaky bass it adds to the music.)

It's hard not to think that this is what it means to be a Shorthalt: singing until his voice takes on the husky quality it used to have when he was doing this every day, playing until even the limits of his own formidable breath control are tested and he feels lightheaded, and, frankly, being around people who actually recognize his talent and care enough to appreciate it.

He ignores the niggling voice at the back of his head suggesting that no matter how much fun this is, it would be more fun if Vox Machina were here.

Kaylie stays gone all day, which Dr. Dranzel insists five separate times isn't odd, so Scanlan fills in at the gig. Rehearsal, in comparison, was nothing. It's a quiet one, just serenading some diners at another inn across town, without the dance floor this time. But every now and then he'll look out at the crowd in the middle of a song and see someone glance over at them with an approving smile between bites, or catch someone tapping their toes along, and somehow it feels more momentous than any cut he ever healed in a fight. These people he can actually make happy.

And after the gig, he goes back to his room with Kent Plucker, and they make each other very happy again.

It's the first good day he's had in a long damn time.

So of course there's no way it can last, and the other shoe drops when Kaylie returns the next day at lunchtime.

With her mother.

Scanlan nearly drops his flute, which he's in the middle of cleaning, but he catches it at the last moment. Now that he sees her, haloed in the doorway by light from the street, he recognizes her immediately despite the years. The golden hair, kept so much longer than Kaylie's own and hanging loose around her face, was relegated to a ponytail when Scanlan knew her all those years ago, and the bright brown eyes have lines at the corners from laughter and years. But the slight frame, which was so much to his taste back then and so isn't now, is the same, as is the heart shape to her face.

And now, seeing her again, he can chart the midpoints between her features and his and see how Kaylie resulted. It makes his heart swell in a way that takes him by surprise; he bedded Sybil before, but suddenly, inexplicably, he loves her for the part they both played in bringing Kaylie into the world.

However, now he also has half an ounce of fucking sense, so he lets no trace of this sudden swell of emotion show as he stares.

Sybil comes over to him, looking him over. Then she says, "We need to talk."

There's the accent. It had entranced him once, he remembers; he'd joked to their drummer at the time, whose name he can't remember, that it indicated a special tongue.

Kaylie, following her, plucks the flute and cleaning equipment from Scanlan's hands. "How about you two go for a walk? I'll finish up for you here, Father."

"I - " Scanlan says, now overtaken by sharp - and utterly reasonable, he thinks - fear. "Maybe - that is - um. Sure."

So he goes for a walk with Sybil.

It's silent at first. Sybil leads the way, walking him through the streets with the air of someone who knows where she's going but is going nowhere in particular. Scanlan, for once in his life, decides that the wisest thing to do if he ever wants his daughter's affection is to shut the hell up.

That resolve lasts about ten minutes before he says, "So…how are you?"

Sybil says, "Kaylie didn't tell me she was looking for you, let alone that she left the College of the White Duke. I'd've told her not to."

"Okay, well, that's fair. But I'm glad she found me," Scanlan says. "I'm - I'm very glad she's in my life. I only regret that it couldn't have happened sooner."

Sybil snorts. "No you don't."

"…yes I do?" Scanlan says.

"Well, I've got no such regrets. It's nice that you seem to now be the sort of person who cares about Kaylie, but there's a reason I never sought you out when she was born. We got along just fine without you, and you didn't seem like the fatherly type."

Scanlan bristles. "We'll never know now, will we? I would've visited. I would've - "

"Doesn't matter what you would've. What's done is done."

"I would've liked to have been a part of her life. Whether she was with me or not, she was part of mine all this time, just one I didn't know about."

Sybil stops and turns to look Scanlan dead in the eye. "You can tell yourself that."

"I'm trying to be better for her," Scanlan says. "How much better would I be now if I'd started this when she was born?"

"See, that's the thing, Scanlan Shorthalt." Sybil points a finger right at his chest. "The thing that she doesn't seem to understand any more than you do. Her life ain't about you. Would she be better off if you'd come through town every year or two to say hello, give her presents, and disappear again? I was the one who was around to make that decision, and I made it. I don't regret it, even if she did decide to track you down anyway."

The fear mingled with acute discomfort flashes again as Scanlan wonders how much Kaylie told her. "Uh - she told you about that?"

"She told me she found you and she beat you at your own game - a flute-off, because that's apparently a thing you musician-types do. And she told me she was prepared to take her revenge out on your flesh, and you…you were prepared to let her." She gets quiet for a moment. "I admit, I don't think I understand you very well."

"And you're okay with all that?" Scanlan says. "With what she wanted to do? I mean, to be honest, I understand where she was coming from, but you're not concerned about the fact that our daughter's the type of person who would do…all that?"

"I raised my girl to survive."

"And I'm very grateful for that," Scanlan says immediately, "but - I want her to be happy. When I met her, she didn't seem…that. And I don't know how to make her happy." He laughs roughly. "I don't know how to fix her problems any more than I know how to fix my own."

Sybil's mouth twitches downward, and Scanlan realizes she's fighting a smile, like she wants to but he hasn't earned it. "Congratulations. You're truly a parent now."

That's not comforting. Scanlan clears his throat. "Sybil - I'm sorry if I hurt you."

"You did," Sybil says immediately.

Scanlan nods, taking it in stride. "Then I'm sorry that I did hurt you, in that time we spent together, but I can't say I'm sorry that it happened. Not if it brought Kaylie into the world."

With a sigh, Sybil says, "I feel about the same."

"I don't know what your circumstances are now, but - I do have some money…"

"Kaylie told me how she won all your coin."

"Uh. Right. Yes, she did, but, um, I was recently involved in some fights against some…dragons? And it turns out they have a lot of gold, so I got some there."

Sybil looks flatly at Scanlan. "That's right, Kaylie said you told her that. I can't say I'm convinced."

That gives Scanlan pause, but this is Kaylie's mother. If she feels as strongly as he does that Kaylie deserves the best - and she possibly does even more - then she deserves to know that Kaylie's at least in hands that are trying, if not yet capable. And if Kaylie wants honesty, that probably extends to her mother. So he reluctantly unbuttons the top three buttons of his shirt to reveal the top of his scar. In the few glances he's had to endure, he's gathered that they're pretty clearly not induced by anything normal.

"This," he says, "was the work of the green dragon, Raishan. My - the people I was traveling with did most of the work, if I'm honest, but I was there. Even if I wished I wasn't."

Sybil stares at it, then looks back at Scanlan's face. "Well," she says. "You're here now. I can't control what Kaylie does any more than the next person, and I can't exactly make you do anything, either. But you've got my daughter's heart in your hands now and I hope by all the gods you'll be careful with it."

"I hope so too," Scanlan says, and Sybil gives him a strange look.

"You're a lot easier to like than you are to love," she says.

Scanlan thinks of Vox Machina, laughing at his jokes and taking his healing and eating his chicken and never asking him a damn thing. "That sounds about right," he says.

When they return to the tavern, Kaylie hands Scanlan a perfectly clean flute, takes her mother's arm, and walks outside again. Scanlan lets them go and throws himself into the nearest, shortest chair with a whumf of relief.

"Sybil's a wonderful woman, isn't she?" Esilmere says, the only other person in the room, from across the stage, where she's restringing a mandolin with a perfect elven poker face.

Scanlan narrows his eyes at her, and after a moment says, "I feel like you're fucking with me."

"We've heard plenty of the backstory, so yes, I am," Esilmere says with a bright smile. She looks back down at the mandolin and says, "Kaylie's got a lot of talent. I don't think even she knows how much yet. And when she sets her mind to something, gods help anyone who stands in her way."

Fondness kindles in Scanlan's heart. "That sounds like her."

"I was that person once," Esilmere continues, turning the tuner knob. "It's not as easy when there's nothing to set your mind to."

Scanlan hesitates in his response, and before he can think of anything to say, Kaylie returns.

"I s'pose I'm relieved you didn't kill each other," she says without preamble. "I guess I got all the murderous impulses in the family."

"I've just gotten it all out of my system," Scanlan says, his mouth on automatic.

Kaylie just snorts. "Fair enough. Esilmere, where'd the rest of them go?"

"They're back at the Drunken Duke to retrieve Rapture's violone from last night," Esilmere says, and Scanlan suddenly remembers that, in the wake of the gig when everyone was drunk on alcohol and music, they had judged it safer to leave Rapture's violone at the venue rather than risk dropping it on the way back. "Dr. Dranzel was talking about moving on, though, now that you've seen your mother."

Scanlan breathes a sigh of relief.

"Sounds good to me," Kaylie says, and looks at Scanlan. "He hasn't shut up about Vasselheim since you put the idea in his head."

Vasselheim had been an ideal choice when all the other cities Scanlan could think of were infested with dragons, but he has nowhere else to be now. Not Whitestone, not Emon, not Greyskull Keep.

"I guess we're going to Vasselheim, then," he says.

He doesn't so much settle into the rhythm of life on the road as much as it swallows him back up. Back in the old days, Scanlan could tell how much Dr. Dranzel liked the drummer by whether he would cough up the money for a cart to carry the drums, but with Rapture's violone it's a bit harder to tell whether the motivation is Ilde - who admittedly grows more on Scanlan every day - or the extra faces that the violone brings in, by virtue of it being a rarer instrument. Everyone's heard a violin or a flute, but the deep, resonant bass of the violone is something relatively new.

Scanlan casts the Mansion every night and lets Kaylie set the menu. Garmelie's portrait of Vox Machina stays safely tucked in the sideboard, reconstituted but not on display. The music rooms get more traffic than they ever have, and Scanlan finds himself workshopping his backlog of unshared music with more than just Kaylie at night: Rapture takes to the lush celebration of nature that Scanlan had written with Keyleth in mind, while Ilde prefers the hard, pulsing beat of his sea shanty to Pike.

Some songs he keeps to himself, from Kaylie as well as the rest of the troupe. He's developing quite a collection of songs for Kaylie herself, from new verses of his mother's lullaby to new lullabies entirely, and one song that gently and fondly accuses her of ruining his life by changing everything. Ironically, he thinks she'd like the last one the best.

Kaylie herself continues teaching Scanlan to put his musical notes to paper, and makes him take down the additional parts the other members of the Troupe come up with as "an exercise."

They spend their days traveling and their evenings performing at whatever towns they come across. Scanlan spends his nights with Kent, whose uncanny knack for waking him just before a nightmare continues.

They pass through Emon, and Scanlan decides to indulge his cowardice. Instead of walking in the front door of Greyskull Keep, he Dimension Doors from outside the gates to and out of his room to retrieve his extra clothing. No one notices.

But the journey has its fair share of oddities. One night, about four days after leaving Kymal, Scanlan casts the Mansion and once again feels the tingling suffuse his arm. As soon as the portal to the Mansion appears, Scanlan hears faint, ethereal music coming from nowhere in particular.

"Do you - " Rapture begins, looking around in confusion. "Did you do that?"

"Uhhh," Scanlan says.

"Is that music?" Esilmere agrees, turning her heard. "It's definitely coming from you, Scanlan."

"Have you been holding out on us?" Dr. Dranzel asks, clapping a hand down on Scanlan's shoulder. "If you can just magically make music whenever you want - "

"No, I don't know how this - " Scanlan begins, and the music fades out.

"It was mediocre anyway," Ilde says with a sniff.

"I just cast the Mansion," Scanlan insists. "That's the only spell I cast!"

"Doesn't sound like it's the only spell that happened, though," Kaylie says. "You sure you're as good at magic as you think?"

Scanlan opens his mouth to argue, but nothing comes out. Everyone else files into the Mansion without any further thought.

Scanlan, though - Scanlan thinks about it a lot, and about a unicorn, and about whatever it was the Draconians felt when he fought the bandits.

He also thinks a lot about suude, and how it didn't seem to do anything.

He begins to wonder if that's true.

He's pretty sure it's not true three days later, when he casts the Mansion and pink bubbles come out of his mouth every time he tries to speak for a minute.

He's absolutely certain it's not true two days from the coast, when casting the Mansion also creates a fireball on himself.

The rest of the troupe, very politely, pretends that magic going this wrong is normal.

They find a ship to take them to Vasselheim, and Rapture gets horrifically seasick while Ilde discovers a surprising love of the sea. They play for the crew at the midday and evening meal times to cover the gap between what their passage costs and what Dr. Dranzel is willing to pay, and while Kaylie puts on her performance face whenever they're playing, Scanlan sees her twitch and slouch when they're just relaxing on the ship, a strange, restless exhaustion.

On the fourth night out of port, Scanlan takes it on himself to lighten Kaylie's mood, no matter what it takes.

"Kaylie," he says, once most of the sailors have left the mess and the troupe is packing up. "I haven't been practicing, but - do you think you could try to show me how to dance again?"

Kaylie looks at him with blank surprise for a moment before his words register, and then she grins. "If you wanted to entertain the folks," she says, gesturing around the mess, "you should've done it when there were more people here. But I suppose if you really want to try to branch out into comedy, we can give it a shot."

Scanlan grimaces, halfway to a smile. "What can I say? I'm looking forward to expanding my horizons."

"I've seen you dance, Scanlan," Dr. Dranzel says, pausing in putting away his violin. "Are you certain you want to?"

"I'm never going to get better unless I try," Scanlan says with resignation.

"You have to survive to get better," Kent says, the only other one who's seen Scanlan dance.

"I really appreciate all of your support, genuinely." Scanlan glares between them. "I'm so glad to know that when it comes to my attempting self-improvement - "

Dr. Dranzel bursts into outright laughter at that.

"Play something good," Kaylie instructs Dr. Dranzel, also grinning. "Not too hard, not too easy."

The song Dr. Dranzel picks has a lovely violin melody, which is probably why he picked it, but it, too, is a song Scanlan's played, so he can at least anticipate what comes next.

"Oh, fuck you," Scanlan yells as soon as it starts; it's a tune with a notoriously abrupt tempo shift halfway through, and three bars in Scanlan's already struggling to do the steps at regular time; when it goes to double-time, he's doomed.

The lute part drops out of the song, but Scanlan's too busy watching his own feet to pay much attention, and the tempo shift looms closer and closer. He's just barely gotten to the point where he's consistently avoiding Kaylie's feet when it hits, and suddenly Kaylie lets go of him entirely. Staggering backwards, he watches Kent step in, following Kaylie in an egregiously more complex version of the dance Scanlan was failing at. Where Scanlan and Kaylie had stepped slowly, repeating the same motions over and over in roughly the same spot in the room, Kaylie and Kent careen around the room like a top set spinning, their knees rising in bounding steps back and forth.

Scanlan gratefully drops his ass to the floor to watch, trying to catch his breath. He holds himself sitting upright with his hands splayed out behind him, and Kaylie and Kent strike the floor hard enough that he can feel the reverberation of their footfalls in the wood.

The look on Kaylie's face is one Scanlan hasn't seen before - at least, not one he's seen without a preceding bar fight. She's happy - no, more than happy, she's unconcerned. Relaxed and exhilarated at the same time.

(He definitely has seen Kent like that before. He sees Kent like that almost every night.)

It makes it easier for Scanlan to relax, and he fills his tankard more frequently for the rest of the night than he has been up to this point. The troupe keeps playing, long past when they've normally adjourned to the deck or their berths, and within a few hours he's past his normal sustained tipsiness and is well into drunkenness.

Kaylie even drags him out for a few more dances, and Kent and Ilde do for a couple, too, even though his coordination is shot to hell. He and Ilde fall outright twice in a row, but he's drunk enough to laugh it off.

Eventually Dr. Dranzel, taking a break from playing to wet his own metaphorical whistle, turns to Scanlan and says, "You know, you never told us how you all killed that dragon."

Two seconds earlier and Scanlan might have choked on his drink; luckily, he's just finished swallowing when Dr. Dranzel asks this. "I didn't?" he says, and now that he thinks about it, he realizes that he hasn't told any stories about Vox Machina. He wasn't even doing it deliberately. It just sort of…happened.

"The black dragon," Dr. Dranzel continues, oblivious. "I know you took it down, but there has to be a story there. That song of yours about the white dragon gave me a sense of how that one went down, but what about the black dragon?"

Scanlan takes another sip of ale to stall for time, but it doesn't work - when he lowers his tankard, he sees that the other members of the troupe are watching him, waiting for the story.

"Well," he begins. "We had a whole bunch of barbarians on our side, which helped. A little. At first."

"We saw it flying away," Kaylie says, her voice still breathy from the exertion of dancing.

"It did fly away, yes. It, uh - sort of took us with it," Scanlan admits. "Two of us, anyway. Three," he immediately corrects himself. "Grog was trailing behind, hanging from his axe."

"And two of you were…riding it?" Esilmere prompts.

"No, we sort of had this idea that - well, so Vax has daggers, right? And I can cast Dimension Door and kind of poof myself places, right? But it has to be someone my size, and Vax had this potion to make himself smaller, and we thought, well, if we're going to have trouble hitting the dragon because of the armor it's got on the outside, maybe we could be…not outside it."

He receives stares in various keys of horrified.

"I mean, it worked!" he says. "We got all up in there and did some, you know, stabbing and some magic and did some damage."

"Scanlan," Rapture says, very seriously. "You need to start at the beginning and tell us everything."

So he does, and it feels -

It feels great to have these people hanging on his every word. He focuses on that, not on the ache that unfurls in his chest at thinking about a time that he felt like he belonged with Vox Machina, before the doubt that Kaylie planted, however inadvertently, began to fester; before it became Vax-and-Keyleth and Vex-and-Percy to go with the perpetual Pike-and-Grog. Before it really hit him that promising Kaylie to live meant promising not to die for his friends.

The story of Umbrasyl leads to the story of Rimefang, which Scanlan figures is appropriate since they're headed to Vasselheim; then Earthbreaker Groon (his impression of a drunken Vax attempting to fight makes Ilde laugh so hard she almost pukes), then Hotis in Whitestone, and finally he tells the story of destroying Duke Vedmire's mansion in Whitestone, just to see if they'll believe him. (They don't.)

But while most of the troupe is exactly the kind of audience that Scanlan loves, bursting in occasionally with a ribald joke and gasping at dramatic moments and laughing and cheering at the more outrageous parts, he catches Kaylie's smile freezing on her face every now and then. As soon as she sees him notice, it turns genuine again, but it stays with him, even after the group disbands for the night and he's stumbled into bed with Kent, too drunk to do anything but sleep.

He wakes up early, hungover and tense from one of the rare nightmares that didn't make him thrash enough to wake Kent up. He eases out of bed carefully, leaving Kent asleep, and pulls the rest of his clothes on. Once he's done that, he hesitates, then pulls Grog's salt lick rock out of his pack as well and gives it a small lick.

It still doesn't taste like salt, and the irritation that causes, oddly, makes him feel better.

He goes up to the deck and finds the sun just risen, glittering a wide lane across the ocean behind them. As much as the light hurts his eyes, it's a poetic image, and Scanlan appreciates that as much as he appreciates the cool salt breeze across his face.

There are a few crates at the back of the ship - the stern, maybe? - pushed up against the railing so that the shorter passengers and crew can get a look over when they want it, so Scanlan goes back there. To his surprise, it's already occupied: Kaylie rests her chin on the railing, her eyes closed as she basks in the rising sun.

"Up early, or really, really late?" Scanlan asks, coming to join her.

Kaylie groans, lifting her head to turn towards Scanlan. "Couldn't sleep very well," she says. "Might've gotten an hour or two here and there, but it turns out I can dance like that or drink like that - both at the same time, and on a ship, is a recipe to feed the fish."

Scanlan pulls himself onto a crate next to her, lifting his elbows to rest them on the railing even though it's still just high enough to be uncomfortable. "It'll only get worse as you get older," he says with a sigh. "Want me to rub your back? Hold your hair back?"

Kaylie laughs. "I don't need anyone to make me feel better."

"I was asking entirely for myself," Scanlan says, only half-joking. "If I'm going to be your dad, I might as well be useful."

Looking back out at the ocean, Kaylie makes a noncommittal hum. Then she asks, "Have you ever been on an airship?"

"I have," Scanlan says. "Twice."

"What was it like?"

Scanlan takes a moment to think about it. The first answer that comes to his mind is that Captain Damon was much more attractive than Captain Rishi, as much respect as Scanlan has for her. He decides not to share that with Kaylie. Instead he says, "If you took being on a ship like this, and just sort of…took away the water - no, don't look at me like that, I'm going somewhere with this. All the water, and the sloshing, and the waves and all that. As fast as we're going, it makes it feel a little…heavy here on the ocean. If you take that away, it's basically what an airship is like."

"Free," Kaylie says softly, blinking at the sunrise.

"You remind me of Vex a little bit," Scanlan says before he can think better of it, and it almost doesn't hurt to say.

"You miss them, don't you," Kaylie says.

Scanlan opens his mouth to lie out of habit, but catches himself with the reminder: the truth or nothing. And besides, she'll be able to tell. "Yes. A little."

"Do you think they miss you?"

With a sigh, Scanlan says, "I think they might, but…I can't quite believe it, if that makes sense." They both go quiet for a moment. "I wasn't very kind to them when I left."

"I heard. But it didn't sound like they were kind, either."

"I still…regret it. I meant what I said, and I think I still do, at least for parts of it, but I still regret it."

Kaylie takes half a step back to turn to face Scanlan entirely. "Do you want to go back to them? And don't you lie to me."

He has to think about it for a second, to try to put words to the roiling conflict he's been trying so desperately to ignore. "I honestly don't know," he says finally. "I don't really like the person I was with them, by the end, and I want to change. And I don't…" He hesitates. "Vox Machina's really, really good at attracting trouble, and I - I just can't keep up. I can't. I'm not that strong." Kaylie stares at him. "What?"

"Sounds to me like you've fought monsters and beasts on every corner of this fucking continent," she says, "and don't forget that we were in Drynna - Drynna! Tal'Dorei's forgotten, waterlogged taint! - you managed to find refugees who needed help and help them. So you can say you don't want to, or you're done with that life, but if you think you can't keep up, then you're just telling yourself a story, and a flimsy one at that." She hesitates, then pokes Scanlan in the chest with one accusatory finger. "And besides - don't talk that way about my da."

Then she hops off the crate and leaves. Scanlan stays there a bit longer, letting the glitter-trail of sunlight burn pockmarks into his vision.

The ship comes in a bit south of Vasselheim, depositing them about forty miles away. Dr. Dranzel delights in this, which Scanlan attributes to his overdramatic nature.

"The voyage to Vasselheim is always meant to be a pilgrimage," Dr. Dranzel says reverently.

Meanwhile, Scanlan holds his breath the two times he casts the Mansion for them to rest as they steadily head towards the city; nothing happens either time, and he can tell by the exhalations around him that he isn't the only one relieved.

He begins writing a new song - literally writing it, putting the notes down for each piece and tweaking all at once, instead of practicing it through and trying to keep it all in his head the whole time. It's an odd process, but one which quickly shows its advantages. The song itself, well, maybe it was telling the stories of Umbrasyl and fighting Hotis one after the other, but the song reminds him of Vax. Scanlan channels that feeling of dancing in the mess hall of the ship into the song, the revelry of dancing after death and shedding the weight of all of life's concerns for even the shortest bit of time. He writes into it everything he wishes he could convince himself - everything that he apparently convinced Vax. And where behind it all looms the shadow of the Raven Queen, Scanlan tries to put in a more benevolent figure, watching over the passing of the torch and the celebration across generations.

Because that night on the ship, a dead man and his daughter put aside their worries and danced. If Scanlan leaves Kaylie with nothing else, he hopes she remembers that.

They arrive in Vasselheim without incident and find the Leaping Star Inn in the Quadroads, not far from the Slayer's Take. It's the same inn that Scanlan stayed at in between visits to the local brothel their first time in Vasselheim, when the rest of Vox Machina had left him for a week to help Keyleth with her Aramente.

Dr. Dranzel works his magic and secures them lodging at the Leaping Star in exchange for nightly performances, which suits Scanlan just fine. He considers, for about half a second, cashing in his member's privileges at the Slayer's Take and staying there, but, for one thing, he doesn't think he'd be able to bring Kent with him; for another, he definitely doesn't think he'd be allowed to bring Kaylie with him. And besides, the inn is comfortable enough, and at some point Scanlan does want to run his new song past Kaylie. She's left her mark on every song of his she's heard, and they've all been the better for it.

And the idea that's been brewing in the back of his head, a potential solution to his little magic problem, has to be addressed, too.

They have some time to kill before their first gig that evening, though. Well, Scanlan and Ilde do - the rest of the troupe have string instruments that require tender attention and retuning after so long in the ocean air.

"Do you not have a single string instrument?" Kaylie asks, surprised, when she realizes.

Scanlan nearly gives his customary reply - that he's best with his mouth and can provide the testimonials to back it up - but instead pushes out a slightly strangled, "Nope."

"That's not fair," Kaylie says. "Haven't you ever thought to learn?"

"Why would I need to? I have my flute, and my shawm - "

"Why do you say that like it's a good thing," Kent mutters.

"My shawm," Scanlan repeats, throwing Kent a dirty look. "And, of course, my voice. What else would I need?"

"I think she means," Dr. Dranzel suggests, "that it's unfair that you don't have to deal with getting rosin everywhere - "

"Or calluses," Esilmere breaks in.

"Or neck pain," Kaylie adds.

"Or so many calluses," Kent says sadly.

"I think," Kaylie says slowly, "that it would be good for you to learn."

Scanlan laughs out loud and moves pointedly to a chair on the other end of the inn. "I'm good," he calls.

"No, really," Kaylie says, a sadistic smile creeping across her face. "C'mere."

"No thanks!"

"Really, this one's already gnome-sized, it's perfect - "

"I'm fine as is!"

"But if you'll just give it a try - "

"You just want to see me be terrible at it so you can laugh at me," Scanlan accuses.

Kaylie hesitates, but only for a second, and then she flutters her eyes with exaggerated innocence. "But don't you want to make me laugh, Father?"

"That's - that is so devious, and manipulative, and I am so proud of you," Scanlan says, which is how he begins to learn to play the violin.

He is absolutely terrible at it, and Kaylie laughs a lot, so it's worth it.

It's a week before Scanlan gathers the courage to go to the Slayer's Take: a week of violin lessons, provided by Kaylie, nitpicked by Dr. Dranzel, and heckled by the rest of the troupe. A week of finally debuting the songs he's been working on with the troupe in front of an audience, to general acclaim - there are enough old standards going around that the introduction of fresh material is always guaranteed to generate some buzz, but the audiences do also seem to genuinely like the stuff, which is nice.

A week of putting off trying to find answers, for fear of what they might be.

The Slayer's Take Guild Hall is comfortingly unchanged as he arrives, complete with Murtin in the front room, but Scanlan doesn't even have a chance to greet him before he hears a familiar voice.

"Scanlan!" Zahra says, on her way out as Scanlan comes in. "I didn't realize Vox Machina was in town."

"Zahra!" Scanlan says. "I…didn't realize you weren't in Whitestone anymore."

"Well, darling, it'd been a while since Kash and I - well, since I, at least - checked in here with the Take, and with the dragons gone we decided we were overdue. Where's everyone else?"

"I'm not actually here with them - I'm here with my old performing troupe. And my daughter."

"Daughter?" Zahra says, her eyebrows rising. "Did I know you have a daughter?"

Scanlan laughs, letting some of his nerves seep into it. "You may not have, actually - I didn't know when we first met. She found me just before the dragons attacked, so now we're getting to know each other a bit better."

That gets a smile, to Scanlan's surprise. "Good for you. You're showing her the world, then? Showing off your achievements?"

"Actually, I was hoping to use the library here," Scanlan says. "I mean, yes, we've been travelling, obviously, but I've, uh, been meaning to check something for a while and I figured, who knows a lot about a lot? Probably the Slayer's Take!"

Zahra's smile grows into the satisfied expression of someone about to enjoy throwing a problem into someone else's lap. "The library, huh? You know who you want to talk to about that, right?"

Scanlan takes a fortifying breath. "About twice my height, human, wizard, kind of a creepy obsession with that asshole Aldor…?"

"Rings a faint bell," Zahra says. "I'll tell you what - I'm not sure where she is and I'd rather like to meet your daughter. How about we meet up for some drinks? There's a lovely tavern in the Braving Grounds that Kash and I quite like, and I should be able to track down Lyra by an appropriate time."

"Drinks would be great," Scanlan lies, "but, and I'm so disappointed about this, Kaylie and I are actually playing at the Leaping Star tonight. And every night, basically. Part of that whole bard thing."

Zahra's eyes light up. "Even better! Then we can hear you play. I'll bring Lyra there."

"Oh, no, that's not what I - "

"I hope you know 'The Cave of Two Lovers,'" Zahra calls over her shoulder as she begins to walk away. "I'm warning you now, I'm going to request it!"

"We don't take requests!" Scanlan yells through cupped hands, but Zahra's already gone.

Sure enough, Zahra and Lyra appear shortly after the troupe's first break of the evening. With Kashaw, no less. Scanlan manages to finish out the song without major incident, although Kaylie catches a slight squeak from him and manages to give him a confused look even over her own flute, and in the brief lull between songs Scanlan manages to give Dr. Dranzel a quick whisper explaining the situation. Then he steps off the stage, making his way towards Zahra, Kashaw, and Lyra.

Behind him, he hears Dr. Dranzel consult with the rest of the troupe, and then the opening words of the requested song: "Two lovers, forbidden from one another; a war divides their people…"

"It's always a delight to have an in with the band," Zahra says with a wide grin as Scanlan joins them at their table.

"Scanlan!" Lyra says. "It's so great to see you! I heard that I just missed you the last time you were in town."

"Like two ships passing in the night," Scanlan agrees. "Hey, Kashaw."

"'Sup," says Kashaw, and takes a long draught of ale.

"You know, you're pretty good," Zahra says, gesturing with her own tankard towards the stage.

Scanlan tries to ignore the way his hackles go up at her surprise, and instead transforms it into pure ego. "I know," he says, and grabs the unclaimed tankard in the middle of the table. "Recovering from the fire giants?"

"Fully recovered," Kashaw says. "You recovered from the dragons?"

"Well, the dragons are gone and I'm not, so," Scanlan says.

"Here, here," Zahra murmurs, lifting her drink in a toast. Everyone follows suit.

"I heard about the dragons," Lyra says. "Five of them, working together? I've never heard of anything like it. I thought Rimefang was bad! Was there another white dragon? What colors were they? Why were they working together? Did they display any affinities for each other based on their color, or - "

"Yes," Scanlan says loudly, "there was another white dragon. It was white, black, green, and red - apparently there was a blue one, but we'd already taken care of him. And they were basically working together because Thordak, the big red one, was an asshole."

"What brings you to Vasselheim, Scanlan?" Kash says before Lyra can say anything else. "The balmy summers?"

Scanlan shudders. "Definitely not. I don't remember it being this cold and miserable the last time we were here."

"Oh, it was definitely just as cold," Lyra assures him. "Although the part with the ice dragon was a bit chillier. Oh! And you said you fought another white dragon, right? Maybe that's why it feels colder?"

Scanlan suddenly remembers Raishan's Cone of Cold and the way the heat radiated from Pike's arms, warming him through, when he woke up from it. From dying. "Yeah, must be the dragons," he mutters.

"You having fun without me?"

Scanlan starts a bit as Kaylie comes up behind him.

"Kaylie!" he says. "Definitely not having fun without you. I wouldn't dare."

"Good," she says, and jerks her chin at the table. "Who's this, then?"

"Kaylie Cupshigh, may I introduce you to Zahra Hydris, Kashaw…I don't actually know your last name," Scanlan says to Kash, not bothering to make it apologetic.

"Good," Kash says.

"I'm Lyra!" Lyra says, waving one hand frantically.

"Everyone, this is my daughter, Kaylie."

"Please, join us. You've clearly inherited your father's talent," Zahra tells Kaylie.

Kaylie snorts as she pulls a chair over from an empty table behind her. "I think of it more that he's a pale imitation of the talent I've eventually perfected."

"Wow, your daughter's way cooler than you," Kash says immediately as Zahra laughs.

"I know," Scanlan says smugly.

"You should see me in a fight," Kaylie says with a razor-thin smile.

"I've seen him in a fight," Kash says, pointing to Scanlan. "He's a slippery little fucker."

Scanlan drowns his response in a quaff of ale.

"Hey, don't knock him!" Lyra says. "He caught a dragon one time with a big purple hand. That's got to count for a lot."

"You're that Lyra?" Kaylie says, surprised. "The one who fought the dragon, the smaller white one - "

"It was very big for an adult dragon!" Lyra says, and Scanlan decides it's time to change the subject to something a bit less acrimonious. Or at least more likely to make Kash and Zahra leave.

"So Lyra," he says, "how's Aldor?"

"Oh, I'm over Aldor," Lyra says.

Scanlan stares in stunned silence. When he finds his voice again, he says, "You what?"

"I got over him," Lyra repeats sunnily, and leans in to gesticulate even more. "You see, once I started getting more sexual experience, I realized that Aldor lacked a few really important qualities that I wanted in a lover."

Scanlan can't keep himself from saying, as kindly as he can, "You mean the liking-you-back part?"

"Oh, no! I mean the ability to find the clitoris."

Kaylie's eyes light up as if she's found her new best friend.

Kashaw, meanwhile, points to Lyra and says to Scanlan, "If you were wondering why we fought a dragon instead of coming back to Vasselheim, now you know."

"Speaking of Vasselheim, Scanlan," Lyra says, "Zahra said you came here with a question, or something to check…?"

"I do," Scanlan says, ignoring the sudden questioning look from Kaylie.

"How obscure a question?" Lyra says. "Because, you know, technically with Vasselheim and everything we're not supposed to keep a lot of information about arcane magic and that sort of thing…but if it's really obscure, or really arcane I guess, I can show you my personal library!"

"It's so obscure," Scanlan assures her. "So obscure and so arcane that I couldn't trust it to anyone but you, Lyra. I remembered how organized and thoughtful and…and leader-y you were when we hunted Rimefang, and I thought, I bet she has a meticulously systematized library that would hold all the answers."

"You are absolutely right," Lyra says. "The books are organized by category, then author, then usefulness. Do you want to see it?"

"I would love to," Scanlan says, and looks around the table. "Well? Who else wants to see the library?"

"I've already seen it," Zahra says.

"I literally could not have less interest," Kash says.

Kaylie narrows her eyes suspiciously at Scanlan, and then she points to Zahra and Kash and says, "These two seem like more fun. Does Dr. Dranzel know you're planning to go?"

"I gave him a heads-up already," Scanlan says. "Besides, it was getting embarrassing how you were fluting circles around me."

Kaylie's lips tighten, just for a moment, and then she's back to her affectation of relaxation. "Yeah, it was. Should we expect you back tonight?"

After a moment of looking blankly at her, Scanlan realizes what's going on: Kaylie thinks he's going to have sex with Lyra. In retrospect, the clitoris comment probably pointed in that direction.

But before he can answer, Lyra says brightly, "Depends how hard his question is! Sometimes these things take all night to fully address. Man, I haven't pulled a library all-nighter in years, and I've just missed it so much - "

"Yes," Scanlan tells Kaylie firmly. "I'll be back tonight."

Kaylie looks at him, then at Lyra, and then cracks into a rueful smile. "Sure, all right. You have fun, then."

Lyra's private library, it turns out, basically is her quarters in the Take - or possibly she sleeps in a library. It's unclear to Scanlan. There's a small cot stuffed in the corner, a table set out with quills and ink for notetaking, and oversized cushions strewn across the room for, presumably, more comfortable reading. But three of the walls are entirely covered in bookshelves, while the fourth - the one with the door that Lyra and Scanlan enter through - has a desk set up with flagons and test tubes and decanters of strange chemicals. It reminds Scanlan a bit of Percy's workshop, except without the blacksmithing. And, of course, without Percy, which Scanlan chooses to take as a blessing. Percy is young enough to think he's old, and Scanlan can forgive him a lot, but it will take time for him to get over that fucking shit girl comment about Kaylie.

It's petty, particularly compared to the still-relatively-fresh memory of standing on a broken glass beach looking at Percy's still body so soon after finding Tiberius.

But Scanlan is fine with being petty for a bit.

"Okay," Lyra says, throwing off her cloak and draping it over one of the chairs at the table with an air of excitement. "Let's hear it."

"Okay," Scanlan says, and allows generous pauses for effect. "What would you say if I told you…that I knew someone…whose magic kept doing things he didn't want it to?"

Lyra lifts her gaze to the ceiling in thought. "I'm intrigued," she says, "assuming you don't mean he's just completely incompetent. Go on."

"Sometimes when he casts spells, the spells happen, but so do…other things."

Taking a step towards one of the shelves, Lyra says over her shoulder, "Like?"

"All kinds of things," Scanlan says. "One time there was sort of…music. Out of nowhere. Another time he couldn't talk and instead pink bubbles floated out of his mouth. Another time he cast Fireball, even though that's not a spell he even knows, and also he summoned a fucking unicorn so something super weird is going on."

Lyra turns back to Scanlan with a dissatisfied frown. "Oh. That's a little basic."

Scanlan raises his eyebrows. "Accidentally summoning a unicorn out of thin air is fucking basic?"

"It's a textbook wild magic surge," Lyra says, and throws her hands up. "Congratulations, your friend's a wild magic sorcerer! Sometimes it doesn't pop up until later in life, even when it's hereditary, or - ooh! Did something really weird and cool happen to him?"

Scanlan blinks, trying not to reel at the word sorcerer. "Like what?"

"Did he accidentally go through a planar portal? Was he blessed by some otherworldly creature or exposed to a massive amount of raw magic?"

"Like…more magic than usual?" Scanlan asks.

"Like the inner workings of the universe," Lyra says.

"Then no, definitely not."

"Or," Lyra corrects herself, "and intensely and inherently magical place. Especially if something weird happened there."

"Can you give me an example?"

"I'm so glad you asked! Now I can pull out the obscure books." She heads in the opposite direction of the shelf she had gone for at first and pulls one down, flipping through it. "In the Age of Arcanum," she says, only half paying attention to Scanlan, "there was a mighty hero who ventured into Vecna's sanctum - "

The hairs on the back of Scanlan's neck stand up. "Vecna? The necromancer?"

"Yeah, the hero was tracking another necromancer who wanted to follow in Vecna's footsteps, but instead the necromancer killed him. The hero, not Vecna. One of the hero's allies brought him back, but there was so much ambient magic in Vecna's sanctum that was meant to trap and alter souls that he came back a sorcerer. It's still really unlikely to happen, obviously," Lyra continues, oblivious to the way Scanlan has suddenly broken out in a sweat, "because it would take a really powerful necromancer's lair, and those were pretty rare circumstances."

"Uhhhh," Scanlan says, trying to quell the panic rising up in him, "have you heard of a guy named Opash?"

Lyra laughs out loud, and for a second Scanlan dares to hope. "Oh yeah, one of Opash's laboratories would definitely do it."

Scanlan stops hoping.

"Opash was all about messing with souls," Lyra continues. "I mean, there are plenty of other stories where it nothing would happen - it was the Age of Arcanum, after all, so there was actually another kind of puny necromancer who wanted to figure out how to create sorcerers, so he just kept murdering people in Vecna's old sanctum and bringing them back to try to see if it would work, but it didn't. He had even heard some of the stories about the barbarian tribes in Wildmount whose warriors would take suude before battle and if they fell, sometimes they would have wild magic when they were revived."

Everything goes cold, and suddenly Scanlan can't quite breathe. "Suude?"

"Yeah, it's illegal. That's one of the reasons, actually. Necromancers in the Age of Arcanum loved that stuff, but then again, I guess anyone who really craves power and will stop at nothing to get it would like something that gives you more magic."

Scanlan thinks to himself, but doesn't say, or dumbasses who don't know what it does. He does say, "So if someone, say, had just taken some suude in the lair of Opash and died and got brought back to life…?"

Lyra gives him a very blank look. "Your friend's addicted to suude?"

"No! He…dabbled. It wasn't really what he expected, so he didn't…you know. Do it a lot."

"It's an incredibly addictive and powerful and really really illegal substance, how does someone just dabble in it?" Lyra asks, her eyes going wide.

"An opportunity presented itself and I took it, okay?"

Lyra gasps and points at Scanlan. "You don't have a friend at all!"

Scanlan winces. "Could you be a little more careful with your phrasing? That's a bit of a touchy subject at the - "

"You're a sorcerer?" she demands.

"Yes, okay, fine," Scanlan says, waving a hand as if to clear the air, "I'm the sorcerer, I took one little dose of suude and got killed by an ancient green dragon in an old necromancer's laboratory one time and all of a sudden I'm creating fireballs and unicorns so can we just skip to the part where you tell me how to fix it?" Lyra looks at him for a long moment, looking confused, so he clarifies, "I just want to be a bard again! A regular albeit incredibly attractive and talented bard! None of this wild magic shit."

Lyra says softly, "I don't think you can."

Scanlan stares back at her. "But - but how am I supposed to fight? How am I supposed to heal? I can't - my magic is broken."

"Not broken, just…different!" She tries a comforting smile that is of no comfort at all.

"I can't use it if I can't trust it, and without it I'm - I'm just a dude," Scanlan says, and feels suddenly as though someone has untethered his head from his shoulders. The trajectory he hadn't even realized he had been imagining dissolves suddenly, its existence made obvious by its absence: all the things he threw at his friends for underappreciating were at least things that he could do, and if he can't do them anymore, why would they take him back?

There's another uncomfortable silence, and then Lyra says, "You can probably learn some cool new spells now if that makes you feel better!"

Scanlan is nothing if not a performer, so he pulls himself together, puts on a small, curious smile, and says, "Like what?"

Lyra smiles back encouragingly. "Ooh, you know what spell I've always found really helpful? Firebolt."

Scanlan actually perks up a bit at this. "I do like fire…"

"Okay, well, here's the secret. I mean, a lot of people say that it's a really bad idea and it's reckless and dangerous or whatever, but the way to learn a spell really, really well…" here she leans in as though sharing a secret - "is to drink heavily while you're practicing."

After a moment, Scanlan says, "I'm sorry?"

"You practice it until you think you've got it more or less down, and then you take a shot and you do it again until you can do it again. Then you take another shot and you do it again - "

"This is either the most brilliant or most stupid thing I've ever heard."

Lyra goes to a cabinet and says over her shoulder, "Look, any spell you can cast when you can't even stay on your feet is a spell you can cast while you're staring down a dragon, and I'm speaking from experience here."

After a second of rummaging, she pulls down a bottle and looks at Scanlan expectantly.

"You know what?" Scanlan says. "Fuck it. Let's learn how to firebolt, why the fuck not."

There is, unfortunately, about an hour of actual, genuine studying that precedes the drinking. Lyra teaches him the words and makes him repeat them back over and over again, until the shapes of them are practically inscribed on his tongue. Then there are visualization exercises, which are actually pretty nice since Scanlan imagines fire and heat and not the oppressive, cloying cold of Vasselheim, only slightly mitigated at the moment by the library's hearth. Then she holds up a candle and tells him to close his eyes and sense it.

"Is this really the best way to - "

"Start small and work your way up," Lyra says, reaching out and putting a hand over Scanlan's eyes. "Now tell me: Can you see the fire?"

Scanlan sighs. "Yes."

"Good!" Lyra takes her hand off Scanlan's eyes and covers Scanlan's hands with her own. "Now say the incantation, but don't let the magic out."

Scanlan says the incantation, and sure enough, the magic flares - it almost takes him by surprise since he hadn't thought it would actually work, but he holds the energy back until it dissipates, uncast.

"Perfect!" Lyra says, letting go of Scanlan's hands and going over to the bottle. She uncorks it, takes a long chug, and nearly chokes, spilling a little bit on her shirt. Not deterred despite her watering eyes, she holds the bottle out to Scanlan and motions for him to do the same.

He does, and he manages not to spill all over himself, although the liquor - whatever it is, it's something even he hasn't tried, which is remarkable in and of itself - is sweet and fruity and strong, leaving behind a burn that reaches up and attacks his nostrils from behind.

"Now," Lyra says with a bright smile, "we do it again."

They do it again, and then drink again, and repeat until Lyra's satisfied, which isn't until they've made a significant dent in the bottle. Scanlan can't remember the last time he was this drunk, although that might be because of how drunk he is.

Lyra, for some reason, announces her final approval by shrieking "YOU GOT IT!" and then throwing her arms out so wide that she overbalances and falls to the floor. Once there, she rolls over on her back and stays, pronouncing it "very comfy," and Scanlan decides it would only be polite to join her.

She's right. It's very comfy.

"Hey…hey," he says, craning his neck to look over at her despite the fact that she's vaguely above him, or would be if they were standing. She cranes her head to do the same. "So you're really done with Aldor?" Scanlan says.

Lyra tucks her chin back down and sighs. "Yeah. Yeah, and I was actually a little angry there for a while. Or a lot angry. I might've set his bed on fire when I realized he didn't care about me. He wasn't in it at the time."

Scanlan hums in agreement. "I'm more of a shit-in-their-bed man myself, but I understand the impulse."

"And the - the dumbest thing is that - I don't really like him anymore, you know, but sometimes I miss liking him. The person I thought he was, I guess. Even though I know I shouldn't."

It takes surprising effort to swallow past the sudden tightness in his throat. "I'm - I'm sorry. That sucks."

There's a rustle of clothing above him, and Scanlan looks up to see Lyra turning over and propping herself up on her elbows to look at him. "You know what? Yeah. It does suck. Thank you, Scanlan. That was really affirming." A moment passes as she looks at him expectantly, and then she says, "What about you?"

"What what about what?" Scanlan says.

"It's your turn," Lyra says, her eyes going soulful. "We're bonding."

Scanlan laughs at that, a hollow, burbling sound. "No, I don't - I don't miss anyone. Anything."

"What about your friends?"

"Vox Machina?" He scoffs. "I don't miss them. They didn't care about me and they sure as hell don't miss me right now. If they cared, they would've asked. Or - or if they asked, they would've - would've asked more, or better, or something. Would've done things that showed that they cared."

Lyra looks down at him silently, and he finds that he can't stop talking.

"I would've died for them, any day, because I figured, you know, better me than one of them. And that's a hard habit to break, but I did! I finally did, so that I could keep my promise, even when it hurt - even when it shredded me to do nothing when I could've done something, I tried, and then I fucking died anyway and what did they do? They didn't care. They put me in a nightgown and covered me in pudding and laughed like it was some fucking joke. In front of my daughter. And maybe it is a joke to them, because they seem to die every other day and they just keep going like it doesn't even matter. And it probably doesn't for them, because they're so fucking strong - they just get back up and keep going and I'm just - just broken, and they don't even care enough to notice. So thank the gods I got out of there before they had a chance to figure out how weak and useless I am."

He suddenly hears the words that he's saying, and he scrubs at his face. "Sorry. I - I'm really drunk. I didn't mean that."

"I think you did," Lyra says, and her mouth sort of tucks to the side as she looks down, thinking. He can feel his defensiveness rising, preparing for her pity, but - "That all sucks," she says. "I'm really sorry."

He almost gasps, because that's not at all what he was expecting and it cuts so much deeper than any pity could have. Scanlan keeps his hands over his eyes and tells himself that he's just so drunk, so drunk, that his eyes are getting all watery. Then he sits up, clearing his throat. "Well, Lyra, it's been great, but I should head back to the tavern for the night."

"Oh," Lyra says, and she actually sounds a little disappointed. "I - well - okay."

Scanlan stands up and immediately wobbles, but manages to steady himself.

Then Lyra leans forward, sitting on her knees, and pulls Scanlan into a hug. "I'm really glad we bonded," she says, even as she nearly knocks him over, "and that we've grown closer as friends."

Scanlan pats her back gently, trying not to let the compression from the hug make him puke all over her. "I'm really glad you're having satisfying sex with people who aren't Aldor."

"It really is so satisfying - "

Extricating himself as gently as he can, Scanlan says, "I really have to go, though."

"Right. Yeah." Lyra sits back, putting her palms on the ground to keep herself upright, and says, "This was fun. We should do this again the next time you're in town."

"Yeah," Scanlan says, and, to his surprise, finds he might actually mean it. "We should."

He is so drunk. He is so immensely drunk, and although it wasn't all that obvious while he was practicing spells or lying on Lyra's floor, it's impossible to ignore now that he's stumbling the scant blocks back to the Leaping Star. The ground keeps dodging out of the way of his feet, the buildings on either side of the street tilt without warning, and he can feel the bile at the back of his throat, just waiting.

The performance is over and Kash and Zahra are gone by the time Scanlan finally arrives; the fires have been stoked for the night and even the innkeeper has gone to bed. But Kaylie and Dr. Dranzel sit by the embers of the fire, cleaning their respective instruments and humming harmoniously, a sound which ends abruptly as soon as Scanlan lets the door close behind him.

"So," Kaylie says, putting her flute aside and crossing her arms. "Did you and Lyra make some magic?"

"The good news," Scanlan says, "is that I can throw fire at stuff. The bad news is I may start vomiting and never stop."

Dr. Dranzel laughs out loud, and Kaylie frowns at Scanlan, a strange look of wonder in her eye.

"Is that a hint of an accent?" Kaylie asks, her mouth twitching towards a smile.

"What? No!" Scanlan says, slapping a hand over his traitorous mouth.

"You should've heard him when he first joined us!" Dr. Dranzel tells Kaylie. "He absolutely insisted on dropping it because people kept calling it cute - "

"It's not cute!" Scanlan snaps.

"Yep, there it is again!" Dr. Dranzel says cheerfully. "This is about as drunk as he gets while still being able to talk. One more shot and he'll just be out for the night."

"Stop telling my daughter the rules of…me," Scanlan says, grabbing a nearby table for support.

Kaylie stands up. "All right, Father, you're done for the night. Come on."

Scanlan doesn't argue. The hangover is already beginning, even though he's not done being drunk; his head pounds and the texture of his mouth feels off and he wasn't joking about the vomiting.

Kaylie loops an arm under his shoulder, and though he tries to carry his own weight, he finds himself leaning on her more and more, especially for the stairs. But they navigate their way up with a minimum of fuss, and Kaylie deposits him in his bed with remarkably little commentary.

"Is this revenge," Scanlan mumbles as Kaylie pulls off his boots, "for when I did this to you?"

"A little," Kaylie says, folding the quilt over him and sitting on the side of the bed.

"It was nice to take care of you," Scanlan admits, turning onto his side towards her and curling his knees up. The motion does nothing to help his stomach settle, but it feels more comfortable anyway.

Kaylie hesitates, on the verge of speaking, but when she opens her mouth, she sings instead.

She sings the lullaby Scanlan's mom would sing to him.

Her voice is nothing like Juniper's was - Kaylie's a musician and her voice reflects it, cultivated and practiced, but it's nice. Nobody's sung to him in a long time. Nobody's put him to bed in a long time - did someone put him to bed in Ank'harel? That's the last time he was this drunk, and he can't quite remember. His thoughts begin to go vague as he continues listening to Kaylie sing, sleep beginning to overtake him.

Until his stomach objects and he throws up off the side of the bed.

Kaylie bursts out laughing, and the warmth of a hand lands on Scanlan's arm once he's done retching.

"I think this is the most I've ever loved you, Da," she says.

Scanlan thinks worth it before he passes out.

They stay in Vasselheim long enough to feel the ragged winter begin to warm, even this far north. Nobody quite believes Scanlan when he says that he can throw fire now, and he doesn't feel the need to prove it just yet. But he knows that he knows it, because he knows the feeling when he's finally mastered a spell - when it's practically written into his lungs, hovering on his breath, waiting to be released with the right song.

And he goes back to Lyra and she teaches him a few other spells, other ones that wizards and sorcerers have in common. His grasp of sorcery isn't the best, and Lyra reminds him multiple times that a sorcerer would make a better teacher, but he manages a few helpful spells. The more sorcery he does, they discover, the less often his bardic magic becomes unpredictable; the reigning theory is that it somehow bleeds off the wildness. Lyra proclaims that she'll write a paper about it for the Arcana Pansophical.

Kaylie keeps teaching him the fiddle, and forces him to dance, and makes him write down the songs that he keeps writing. Kent keeps him company in bed, to the point where Scanlan feels no need for the brothels he's frequented in this city before, and wakes him less and less frequently as the nightmares subside. The troupe debuts his songs to adoring - or at least appreciative - crowds, to Dr. Dranzel's approval.

But Kaylie - Kaylie's antsy, or maybe distracted. Scanlan keeps finding her awake before anyone else, sitting over her breakfast and poking at it thoughtfully. He catches glimpses of the way she'll stare off into space in their downtime, worrying her lower lip with her teeth.

One night, close to the equinox, Scanlan ventures into the Braving Grounds, just on a whim. They don't have a gig and Kaylie feels like dancing, and Scanlan, having no intention of yet another evening of being laughed at in public, escapes to wander the city.

His feet take him to the Crucible, more out of idle curiosity than any real attachment, and it's late enough that the fights are over, the crowd spilling out of the building.

And coming out of the doorway as Scanlan passes by, taller than most of the bystanders by several feet, is a familiar Goliath figure with a familiar gnome on his shoulder.

"Monstah!" Grog proclaims, and Scanlan panics, turning himself invisible.

"Monstah!" Pike chimes in, raising her arms in celebration.

Scanlan backs out of the street, maintaining a decent view of the two of them. They're happy--more than happy, they're downright exuberant. Drying blood smears out from now-healed wounds on Grog's face and Pike's wrists are wrapped, but they're grinning and shouting and glowing with joy. Or possibly it's just sweat in the low city lights - it's hard to tell.

Scanlan watches as Pike wraps one arm around Grog's head and gives it a hug as Grog lets out another shout. He can't remember the last time he felt as happy as Grog and Pike look. At least, the last time that wasn't associated with someone rising from the dead, and even then there was the aftertaste of fear and shock. Grog and Pike, now, exhibit the kind of unadulterated joy that something in Scanlan remembers only dimly, from so long ago that he can't even associate it with a specific memory.

The thought strikes him like a blow to the solar plexus, all the residual anger that he felt when he left disappearing in an instant: He was never this happy with Vox Machina. He laughed and made jokes and no matter how bad things got he pretended he wasn't sad or worried, but maybe that pretending just dragged it out and kept it below the surface even when it wasn't wanted because the uncomplicated happiness radiating from two of the people he cares most about in the world feels foreign.

And they're this happy without him.

He stays invisible all the way back to his room at the Leaping Star.

"If you could do anything," he says to Kaylie the next morning when she comes yawning down to the dining room of the inn, "anything at all, provided it's not in Vasselheim, what would you do?"

She gives him an exhausted, dull-eyed look, but takes the seat across from him anyway. Scanlan's already eating lunch, having risen early after a poor night's sleep, and the rest of the troupe is already out and about for the day.

"What's this about?" she says, reaching across the table and taking Scanlan's ale.

"I'm thinking of moving on," Scanlan says, watching her.

She doesn't choke on her drink or anything so dramatic, just frowns as she swallows. "Has Dr. Dranzel been talking about going?"

"No, but if he doesn't want to come, I'll - I'll probably go anyway."

Kaylie frowns aggressively at him, and he relents.

"I saw Pike and Grog last night," he says. "Over in the Braving Grounds. I don't know if the rest of Vox Machina is in town, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were, and even if it's just them, I - I'd just rather be somewhere else."

"Oh." Kaylie leans back in her chair, contemplating. "Do you want to go back to them?"

"No," Scanlan says, then corrects himself, "well, yes, maybe eventually. If they'll take me. But I - " He hesitates, trying to assemble his feelings into words. The temptation to hand over an easy lie, wrapped up in a bow, is there, but Kaylie will see right through it. Damn her. "I think I started blaming all my problems on them," he says. "But all my problems all just came with me when I left, so I think - no, I'm pretty sure I'm the cause. And if I went back to Vox Machina before I solved anything, I'd just start blaming them again, and being the person who pretends and lies to make everyone else happy and instead makes everyone miserable."

Kaylie's face stays impassive as he talks, and he rallies himself.

"So if you have anything you want to do that's not in Vasselheim, I say we go and make it happen. What do you think? Any scores to settle?"

Taking another sip of Scanlan's ale, Kaylie looks away. After a moment, still not looking at him, she says, "I want to go back to the College of the White Duke."

"Oh," Scanlan says.

"I don't like the terms I left on," Kaylie continues. "Like I left on their terms instead of mine. I'm not done with them."

Scanlan eventually says, "Okay. Then - yeah. We can make that happen."

"I'm not saying I want to enroll again," Kaylie adds quickly. "Or - maybe I do. I don't know either. But I at least want to look the Head of the College in his damn smug face and make my own decision."

"That's more than fair," Scanlan says, trying to ignore the way his heart lifts. He rests his hand on Mythcarver, a leftover habit of making sure he's armed, then frowns. "The College of the White Duke, you said?"

The Head of the College of the White Duke embodies everything Scanlan has ever hated about another bard: he has long, golden hair, tied ostentatiously back and draped deliberately over the shoulder so that it glints in the Westruun sunlight coming through the windows. Every inch of his clothing is covered in either embroidery or beads, and every finger wears a ring. His nails gleam with a perfect manicure. Scanlan instantly hates him. Colorful clothing, a certain amount of jewelry, and a stage presence comes with the territory of being a bard, but every sartorial choice the man in front of him made screams look at me, I'm better than you!

"Yes, hello?" says the Head of the College of the White Duke, looking down at Scanlan.

"Ah, yes, hi," Scanlan says. "Are you…the White Duke?"

"Of course not," the man says, laughing. "I'm Crukas Songsteel, Head of the College. The White Duke is long dead, but of course we remember him fondly here in his hallowed halls. And who, may I ask, are you?"

"I'm Scanlan Shorthalt," Scanlan says, and pointedly puts a hand on Mythcarver's hilt at his belt.

Crukas's eyes follow Scanlan's motion, and go wide at the sight of the sword. "Is - is that - "

"Oh, this old thing?" Scanlan says, drawing Mythcarver and brandishing it for Crukas to see. "Yes, this is my sword."

"The Mythcarver," Crukas breathes.

"I used this to fell a pit fiend in the City of Brass," Scanlan says, keeping his voice conversational and his gaze on his blade. "Another time, I jumped from an eight-story tower with it and nearly sliced a rakshasa in half. I also wielded it in battle against the dragons that destroyed this land." Then he makes a show of sheathing it and glancing at Crukas, as though only now noticing him. "I'm sorry, I didn't finish introducing myself, did I? I'm Scanlan Shorthalt, Kingslayer, wielder of the Mythcarver, member of Vox Machina and the Tal'Dorei Council. Do you have a moment to discuss one of your students?"

"Of…of course," Crukas says, his voice faint, and steps back to let Scanlan into his office.

It looks like the office of an administrator rather than a musician: the folios of music are confined in glass cases, the instruments are displayed on the walls, and the desk crowds out any room for, say, a music stand. Crukas hurriedly takes the seat behind the desk, and Scanlan makes a show of glancing at the bookshelves before taking the chair on the other side. His heart may be racing at the thought of Kaylie leaving him, but damned if he won't do everything he can to get her back into this stupid school if that's what she wants.

"You know that the Mythcarver belonged to the White Duke himself," Crukas says, his eyes shifting repeatedly towards Scanlan's belt.

"I heard that, yes," Scanlan says. "But about that student."

"Ah, yes, of course. Which student was it?"

"Kaylie Cupshigh."

Crukas's demeanor shifts instantly, his shoulders slumping with irritation as he leans back in the high backing of his chair. Terrible posture, Scanlan notes - definitely not a wind instrument player. "Miss Cupshigh," he says, "is no longer a student here. She left before the pause in instruction due to the dragon attack and expressed her…lack of interest in continuing her studies."

"I see," Scanlan says.

"So the College bears no responsibility for any conduct she may have displayed," Crukas says forcefully.

"What a shame," Scanlan says, looking away with as strong an air of disappointment as he can muster. "She mentioned her training here and, well, we recently found ourselves in the same traveling troupe and she's just been teaching me so much."

Crukas stares flatly at him. "She what."

"I mostly play the flute, myself," Scanlan continues, "but she took it upon herself to pass on some of the excellent instruction she received here on the violin, and, while I'm certainly not at her level yet, I must say I've been very impressed with what I've seen. She's also been teaching me to read music as, you see, I learned on the road. By ear. But with her help - not only with the transcribing, but with the writing - I've experienced something of a creative renaissance, writing songs about the downfall of the Chroma Conclave from a boots-on-the-ground perspective. Since, of course, I was there." He sighs wistfully. "I had thought that the College might benefit from adding those songs to the roster, but, well, there simply isn't anyone else I would trust to pass them along except Kaylie. But if she isn't a student anymore - "

"The College would love to incorporate those songs into our repertoire," Crukas says hastily. "While Miss Cupshigh certainly had her fair share of, uh, creative differences with the staff…and students…and passers-by, her decision to leave the College was her own. As much as we would love to have a student like her back, I don't think there's any reason the circulation of your work should rely on - "

Scanlan fixes Crukas with a pointed gaze. "So if she wanted to come back, you'd take her? Is that what you're saying?"

Crukas hesitates for a scant moment. "Under the circumstances of her departure, I doubt she would willingly return, to be frank."

"'Circumstances of her departure'? What'd she do, set something on fire?"

"The fire was by all accounts accidental," Crukas demurs, "if predictable. What I'm saying, my good sir, is that it's a rather moot point."

"Not so moot, given that she expressed to me just a few days ago that she wanted to return but didn't think she'd be allowed to," Scanlan says smoothly. "But it sounds like that isn't as much of an obstacle as she might have thought. Right?"

"I…suppose not," Crukas says, with the clear look in his eye of someone realizing he's been outmaneuvered.

"Excellent!" Scanlan says, rubbing his hands together and hopping out of the chair. "Then we can go talk to her. I'll let her know the good news and give her my blessing to share my songs."

"Speak to her? She's here? Now?" Crukas looks vaguely panicked.

"Downstairs," Scanlan says. "I'm sure she'd like to hear it from you directly. Seeing as she's so…forthright."

"You must have had a…unique experience with her," Crukas says bemusedly, also standing.

"I've learned a lot from her. If you're lucky, maybe the College will learn something from her, too."

"If I may - " Crukas comes around his desk. "How did you come to have the Mythcarver?"

Scanlan's hand goes to the hilt again, this time protectively. "We needed weapons to fight a bunch of dragons. That was…powerful motivation."

"I have no doubt. But the Mythcarver is an object of legend for those of us who follow the White Duke's teachings, and to say that we've looked for it would be - well, it would be a significant understatement. If Miss Cupshigh's reenrollment were to come with, say, the generous donation of such an item of lore - "

Scanlan laughs out loud. "Yeah, absolutely not."

Crukas narrows his eyes. "It belongs here, my good sir."

"It belongs where it will be used," Scanlan says. "Honestly, if you hung it on a wall here, it would get bored."

"Swords don't get bored," Crukas snaps.

Scanlan thinks of Craven Edge, and decides that it's not worth arguing about. Although maybe he'll write a quick song about Craven Edge and send it with Kaylie, just to show Crukas how much he doesn't know. "You'll take Kaylie back," Scanlan says, "because she's a damn good bard. You'll get the songs because I'm feeling generous. And you can rest easy knowing that the Mythcarver is out in the world, doing what it was intended to do with someone who wasn't afraid to wield it."

"And have you been wielding it much in a traveling troupe?" Crukas sneers.

Scanlan's hand tightens on the sword, then relaxes. He lets go of it entirely, holding both his hands up empty. "This sword was at my side as I faced down fiends, fire giants, dragons, horrors the likes of which you could never imagine. I wielded it as I died - twice! But if you think you can take it from me - if you think you deserve it - by all means, go ahead and try."

Crukas stares down at him, and Scanlan can see the calculations going on behind his eyes.

"Yeah," Scanlan says after a minute. "That's what I thought."

And he leaves.

Crukas hurries after him, all the way down to the front hall of the College where Kaylie waits. She perks up when she sees them coming, setting her shoulders and standing up straight.

"Kaylie," Scanlan says as he approaches her, letting his voice carry, "I spoke to good old Crocus here, and he said he's willing to have you back."

"I - I'd certainly be open to a discussion," Crukas says, "if you feel that's really the best decision for you at this point - "

"He's very excited about your return, what with the talent you display," Scanlan continues over him, finally coming to a stop in front of Kaylie. "Isn't that right, Crunkle?"

Crukas, slightly winded, looks at Scanlan, then composes himself and turns towards Kaylie. "Miss Cupshigh," he says, "we may have been…hasty in striking your name from our books. If you wish to return, you have a place with us."

Kaylie looks at Crukas, letting the moment stretch out, and Scanlan clasps his hands behind his back to hide how they're shaking. As much as he wants to stop her, shake her and yell pick me - especially after her conspicuous silence on the topic in the voyage back to Westruun - he reminds himself that she came back once. Even if she goes now, she may very well return again, once she's done what she has to do.

"You know," Kaylie says finally, "I've thought a lot about it, and I think I'd rather be just about anywhere else. Thank you for seeing me, though," she adds. "It feels really nice to say that to your face." Then she turns back to Scanlan and holds out her arm. "Shall we, Da?"

"It would be my pleasure," Scanlan says fervently, looping his arm through hers. As they walk away, he twiddles a wave at the sputtering Crukas behind them. "Maybe next time I'm in town, Crukie-poo!"

As soon as they're out of the building, Kaylie says, "That felt amazing."

"We make a great team," Scanlan agrees, and he means it. Maybe it's that Kaylie chose him again, maybe it's the closure he can feel radiating off of her, or maybe it's just the joy of finally winning at something, but he can't shake the feeling that he's walking out a different person than he walked in. For once, it feels like a good thing - a positive change.

He wonders what else he can change.

"Not half-bad," Kaylie allows, and keeps her arm in his as they continue through Westruun.

There's a festival set up in the town square, the same place they fought Kevdak. It looks different set up with carts and chairs and strewn with flowers rather than wooden spikes and blood. Overall, it's a much better look. Children race across the cobblestones, chasing each other and laughing, while adults pour themselves ale from the free-flowing casks and chat or dance.

"It's the equinox," Kaylie says suddenly. "I forgot."

"So did I," Scanlan says. Three months. It feels like it's been at once impossibly longer and no time at all since he left Vox Machina.

They wander through the festival for what's left of the afternoon, and as it wanes into evening, the musicians, set up in front of the Margrave's home, begin to play in earnest with a pounding, popping beat that twinges Scanlan's memory.

As the singer comes in, he realizes: he wrote this song. This is the song he wrote while thinking of Vax and Kaylie, about death and dancing and hope. It sounds foreign coming from another voice, like he's hearing it for the first time.

"Oh, now, we have to dance to this one," Kaylie says, depositing her mug of ale on a nearby table.

Scanlan opens his mouth to object, then decides not to. It's a change, and it, too, feels like a positive one.

Kaylie still dances better than him, but he shoves aside any embarrassment or self-consciousness, allowing himself to stomp and jump and clap and wail out harmonies to his own words as they come to him. Kaylie does the same, but with much better footwork, and the song melds into another, and another, and they're singing the stories he wrote: about Vex and Vax and Pike and Grog and Keyleth and even Percy (although Scanlan's work-in-progress "You May Be Royal But You're Still A Shithead" has sat abandoned since the bite left his memories of Vox Machina in Vasselheim).

And Scanlan remains anonymous in the crowd, dancing like anyone else, flooded by music and not memories. He doesn't think about what he said to them, or about whether the songs will make up for it, or whether there's anything that could ever make up for that cruelty - that impulse to hurt them as much as he was hurt. He lets tonight be about Kaylie, not about them, and it feels good.

The sun goes down and the courtyard stays illuminated by a bonfire, casting wild shadows against the buildings and whipping patterns of light and dark into the dancers. It feels like summer, heat and woodsmoke and sticky ale and glowing red against black.

Eventually his energy flags, and Kaylie loses herself in the crowd, dancing with people who are actually okay at dancing. So he maneuvers himself back to the table where they put their drinks down to catch his breath.

"You know, you really are a terrible dancer."

Scanlan turns, mug in hand, to see Kaylie join him. She fans at her flushed face with one hand, and she, too, has picked up her ale with the other.

"You know, I've been trying to point that out to you this entire time," Scanlan tells her, "but thank you for finally realizing that I'm right." Then he holds out his mug, and Kaylie smiles and tinks her own against it.

"You know…I don't know what to do now," she admits, and quaffs.

Scanlan watches the musicians, the way the flautist's fingers dart across the keys. "I'm very excited to see what you're going to do next. If I know nothing else, I know that whatever it is, it's going to be better than anything I've ever done. You're smarter and stronger than I've ever been. And," he interrupts before she can say anything, "it might mean that you screw up bigger than I ever could, too, so if that happens just know that whatever you face…you have me on your side, right behind you. Not literally right behind you, obviously, metaphorically right behind you, at a respectful distance that you're comfortable with, whatever that may be."

Kaylie laughs a bit at that. "Well, good." She looks down into her ale and clears her throat. "I think I might stick around with you. You obviously need a keeper. Some days you look like shit."

"You know," Scanlan says, leaning his back against the table and laying his arms out across it, "I have it on good authority that I am, in fact, a little shit."

"Yeah, I heard that part of the argument," Kaylie says.

"Oh. Right."

Kaylie swirls her mug and shrugs. "Well, he had a bit of a point."

Scanlan considers this for a moment. "Maybe I should start introducing myself as Scanlan Shithalt, just to clear the air immediately."

"Oh, I think that fits you quite nicely," Kaylie says, straight-faced, and comes to lean her back against the table next to Scanlan, just within the curl of his arm.

Scanlan decides to take this as a victory and ride high on it. "Scanlan Shithalt: Kingslayer. It scans. I like it."

"Kaylie Shithalt. Doesn't sound half bad."

Scanlan looks over at her, even though she avoids his gaze. "Wait - I thought - "

"I've added a middle name. Kaylie Shorthalt Cupshigh. Even better stage name, yeah?"

Scanlan feels the sudden rush of tears to his eyes again, and when Kaylie glances up and sees, she groans and pushes his face away.

"Don't look at me like that. I just took one name from my mum so it only made sense to take one from my grandmum."

"She would be delighted," Scanlan says, and clears his throat to rid it of the huskiness. Then he says, "Although it's Shithalt. Kaylie Shithalt Cupshigh."

Kaylie looks at him with exasperation, and then gives in with a smile. "I'll introduce myself with pride."

Scanlan pats her far shoulder with one extended arm, and she leans in and bumps the other shoulder against his chest. Slowly, carefully, he lets his arm curl around her, and she leans further into it, allowing him to half-hug her a bit closer.

A good kind of change, indeed. This won't last. He knows it won't, that this is just a high point of what will inevitably be a rocky relationship, but if the highs are this high, the lows can't be anything but worth it.

Kaylie pulls back within moments, and Scanlan's honestly a bit relieved - between the encroaching summer heat and the sweat from dancing, a little distance is preferable.

"I want to travel," she says. "Go somewhere I've never been before - not that that's hard. Vasselheim was the first time I left Tal'Dorei."

"Vasselheim as in when we were there a few weeks ago?" Scanlan says, raising his eyebrows.

"I was only with Dr. Dranzel for a few months before we came across you, and then there were some dragons," she reminds him.

"Right, those," Scanlan says. He thinks, suddenly, of being back in the College of the White Duke, setting Crukas up for Kaylie to knock down. It was such a small thing, but it went so flawlessly, and so much more felt in reach - they could've swindled him, robbed him, or, hell, negotiated for some of those fancy and expensive-looking folios and instruments.

"How," Scanlan says, "would you like to go to Ank'Harel?"

Kaylie narrows her eyes at him, considering. "Tell me more," she says.

New magic, new relationship with his daughter - maybe all he needs is a new city and a new identity to go with it, to figure out what it means to be a Shorthalt, or at least what he wants it to mean. Maybe then he can figure out how to get to the person he wants to be.

They talk most of the night, planning as the equinox - the day where the world balances light and dark on a knife edge, denying either an advantage - inches closer to the next season, and they start out again the next morning towards Ank'Harel and whatever it might bring.