The Hunt for the Hand

The following story takes place in the world of Exandria, after the events chronicled by the cast of Critical Role in their first campaign, Vox Machina. Some of the characters and all of the places mentioned herein were originally created by and belong to Matthew Mercer, Travis Willingham, Ashley Johnson, Laura Bailey, Marisha Ray, Taliesin Jaffe, Liam O'Brien, and Sam Riegel.

“And thus was born Iethe, the Gem of Memory, the Rod of Oblivion. God of all things misremembered and of Gem Dragons,...” - Scroll 108/Line 11421/An Expanded History of Exandria/Archivist Harold Obben of the Cobalt Soul 

Her vision was always shrouded with the vibrant tint of a sun half hidden by the horizon, and her sense of her domain was borne out of her connection to its light. On this endless beach that Sarenrae, the Goddess of Atonement, presided over, each grain of sand was a pearl, gently reflecting the sunlight to form a second surf that hovered just above the first, an ocean that went on forever parallel to the beach and even farther stretching away from the shore. From her viewpoint in the ruby-encased eternal flames at the highest point of her crystal cathedral, despite the infinite nature of these, her, beaches, she could see the calm waters of the sea that surrounded her little island, placid and glassy. 

The second presence arrived so soon after the first, Sarenrae sensed the ripples in her ocean of light at the same time. Of course he would be quick, she mused. The second presence, always dimly upon her consciousness, as he was also the tint of light in her periphery, was that of the Dawnfather, with whom she shared the Plane of Light. It was just a pinprick, but the arrival of the first presence surprised Sarenrae. She remained put within her ruby, absorbing the scene as many of her kinfolk appeared, sure she knew how this would play out. She sensed the Stormlord, the Changebringer, the Platinum Dragon. The Lawbearer and the Archheart were present, the Wildmother and the Allhammer. Even the Matron of Ravens arrived, calmly and deliberately entering the scene last. All save the Moonweaver and the Knowing Mistress, locked away in her library, recovering from her wound, had come. In all of Sarenrae’s everlasting memory, something like this had never happened. 

The pause after their arrival was minute, nearly indiscernible, even to Sarenrae’s divine perception, but within it, the newcomers to her pearlescent beach made an agreement. Only the Raven Queen refrained from unleashing her celestial wrath upon the first presence. In a terrible display of power, for a moment, or for an eternity, depending on your perspective, the majority of the prime deities of Exandria directed the full might of their anger upon the second mortal to ever be locked behind the Divine Gate, and it was terrible to behold. The very fabric of the Island of Renewal trembled, threatening to tear at the focal point of their combined attention. The pearls of the beach beneath the feet of these gods shattered. The sound was a cacophony of vibration that would rend molecules to their component parts and then, for good measure, blast them into the depths of the void. This was a concentration of energy that would have erased most any being, mortal or otherwise, so completely even a stray memory of their face in a crowd would have been lost forever. As Sarenrae watched from above, the sight was of two orbs orbiting each other at incomprehensible speed, one of burning light and energy and one of freezing darkness. 

The commotion stopped. The powers there circled the focus of their terrible wroth, that strange, minute particle of essence, waiting to see if their awesome strength had left any further trace that needed stamping out. The moment unraveled slowly. The pearls surrounding the circle of divine entities shone brighter, the light gleaming off them like it does off a calm lake at sunrise, and the shadows between them darkened in response. 

Sarenrae experienced her second moment of surprise then, as that pinprick of essence reappeared in the center of the divine circle. As soon as it did, Pelor, the Dawnfather, the Sun himself unleashed his fury again, the others following suit a split second after. This collection of powers, which would have destroyed any of the beings present, exploded upon the singular point of essence again. And again, moments after the gods relented, impossibly, the consciousness reappeared. 

—

Veyhra awoke with a start and a shiver. The snow, which must have begun after she had dozed off, now lay like a coverlet in a thin layer over the ground beneath the canopy of the Savalier Wood. To make the cold that much less comfortable, Veyhra could feel a thin sheen of sweat across her face and torso. She had been having a strange dream, but the remnants of it faded like the sparks of color before her vision as she blinked her eyes open. Strange dreams, what she called the nightmares when one of her companions would ask about them, had become commonplace for Veyhra over the past nearly seven years. Sometimes she remembered them very vividly, and they all seemed to start the same way. She would be back in battle on the streets of Vasselheim, surrounded by the rapid destruction of her city. Massive boulders were tumbling from the Heaven’s Stair, the mountain at whose base Vasselheim had stood since the dawn of civilization, and from the reanimated earth titan whose massive feet were crushing homes, temples, inns, and shops indiscriminately. Just ahead of her was Reina. Veyhra dodged to the left of an incoming bolt of sickly green-grey magical energy, but as she did, Reina was hit by a similar bolt. It knocked her to one knee, but she was just starting to get up and Veyhra reached her hand toward her, trying to pull her away from the boulder she hadn’t seen… but then the boulder wasn’t a boulder. It was Vecna’s immense, necrotic fist, the same smooth grey as the boulder had been, snatching Reina away from her. Or the cracks in the stone melted into the red scaled head of Tiamat, that evil, five-headed dragon queen of greed, biting into Reina at the waste and swallowing her whole. Or it was one of a thousand different monsters, all stealing her wife from her. She couldn’t remember who the most recent culprit was, and she was glad of that, at least. She had spent so long in her grief, she was determined not to waste another minute.

But it was strange, this dream. Her wife’s death had played over in her head this way for so many nights, now, that her memory of the actual event was beginning to warp. Every time she awoke from the nightmare, it took Veyhra a fraction of a moment longer to remember she hadn’t actually been there when Reina was killed. Reina had been in the air, fighting from the back of her wyvern. Veyhra was scared of what those fractions of moments could build into, if there would come a day where she would be totally overwhelmed by her survivor’s guilt, unable to forgive herself even in the smallest moments of the day. A day when her memory would falter for good, fed by the guilt she still clung to. 

She scooted closer to the embers of the fire, where Kira sat silently, eyes focused closely on the forest surrounding them. Not that any of the creatures who inhabited this side of the Savalier were likely to bother them with Aporro stretched out beside their camp. The size of the young dragon was becoming imposing, but it was always good to be careful. Their full length, from snout to tail and all the silver scales between, was now something like half a meter more than Veyhra’s full height, and she was tall, even for an elf. She took a deep breath and sighed. Though she was glad the dragon was maturing healthfully, its growth served as a reminder of the amount of time she had spent with this group, chasing down fruitless leads across the continent, and even, at times, across the globe. Seven years, Veyhra ruminated, and still, seemingly, not a bit closer to capturing or killing Arkhan than when they began, when Aporro had arrived in her life, a wee wyrmling curled around Perry’s shoulders, having guided him and Kira safely through the Fey Wild. 

Veyhra grumbled a ‘good morn’ in the direction of Kira, whose lack of response was unsurprising. Equally so was the lack of a roaring, warm fire, which Veyhra would have appreciated. Kira always let the fire burn low on her watches. The half of her that held goliath ancestry was clearly responsible for her temperature regulation as well as her imposing stature. But getting a fire going was no kind of issue for Veyhra, who, after blowing some warm air into her hands and flexing her fingers a bit traced a draconic sigil into the air, uttered the corresponding speech, and managed a small smile as a fire leapt to crackling life in the pit in front of her. 

The morning light, tinted purple by the corrupted leaves of this forest, was actually comforting to Veyhra. She never knew why, but in all her years, this particular place, despite its magical corruption, always awakened some deep feelings of connectedness within her. When she had first begun traveling with Kira, Aporro, and Perry, whose halfling body was tucked neatly in the crevice of one of Aporro’s wings, twinkling in the dawn light, she had wanted to avoid the forest for that reason. She liked to be alone in this place, and feeling so vulnerable in front of her subordinates had, at first, felt unbecoming. But, with time and with need, she became more comfortable with her companions and herself. And there was no chance she would let a lead get away from her because of her own discomfort. No, that was not the reason they arrived at Molaesmyr two days too late to catch Arkhan. If it was, it would be easier to be angry with herself. Instead, it felt as if they were thwarted anew by dumb luck, which only served to depress Veyhra, and to exhaust her. She extended her hands toward the fuelless fire in front of her to warm them, and ruminated on the journey up to this point. She looked at the silent, watchful form of Kira, the lightly snoring Perry, and the peeling scales of Aporro, and wondered, not for the first time, why they were still with her. After all this effort, most recently braving the irritable spirits and hungry monstrosities of Molaesmyr, they had accomplished so little of what they had set out to do. In fact, strictly speaking, they had accomplished none of it. Meanwhile, instead of news of Arkhan’s demise or capture at their hands, the news of his destructive deeds across Exandria continued to spread. 

If the roles had been reversed, Veyhra knew she would have, at best, abandoned the group. At worst she might have led a mutiny. Even given her leadership of this little band, she was getting to the point where she spent more time questioning herself than not. Her confidence was hanging by its last thread, if it wasn’t already completely shot. Staring into the magical flames in front of her, a rainbow of magical embers dancing in the center, Veyhra remembered the words of Highbearer Vord as she had blessed Veyhra and her journey, “Go with my blessing and remove the blight of Arkhan the Cruel from our land. Destroy the cursed hand he took and prevent him from his goal of releasing Tiamat, the Queen of Chaos. May the Platinum Dragon guide you, and may you return having purged the world of another evil, or not at all.” The shame of her failure weighed on her shoulders, and she hung her head. Veyhra again cursed this unending quest, Lady Kima for recommending her for it, and Highbearer Vord for listening to Kima. They had been kind, saying to take time to grieve before setting out, but of course she hadn’t, just as they should have expected. This turned her thoughts to Reina, and her absence, but she quickly diverted her attention back to the purple leaves before she might acknowledge that she was angry at Reina too, for not being with her throughout this journey. 

—

“STOP.” Every pearl on the beach lit up with bright beams that shot into the sky, changing its light blue color to bright white. Sarenrae descended from the peak of her cathedral, from within the refractive casing of the massive red gem. As she spoke, she took the more physical form she favored, a womanly figure with the flame of the Everlight where a head might have been. She descended over top of the other deities and landed above the pinprick of essence, which was still trying to take some kind of form. “I will not have you bring this bent on destruction to my beach. Begone with you all!”

Pelor stepped forward, his bassey voice the rumbling of an eternal explosion. “But the lich must be destroyed. He has overstepped his bounds. Move, Everlight.” 

“Pelor,” Sarenrae responded, her tone carrying a hint of condescension. “Indeed, the lich overstepped, I do not deny it. But they are the lich no longer, whoever they are now.”

“And how do you come to believe this, Sarenrae, who shares my domain?” Pelor responded, with a bit of venom in his voice. “How could you, of all beings, the Light that Cleanses, protect that shadow?”

“You sense it as well as I do. As well do you all! Why does our Matron of Ravens withhold herself from your violent acts?” 

The Raven Queen asserted her quiet, sure voice. “Speak not for me, Everlight. I need not participate in the violence, but I have no desire to see the Undying King survive in this, or any realm. I came simply to witness its passing.” 

All faces, from the raven to the sun, turned toward Sarenrae then. She stared back with equal intensity, her voice vibrating with the temor of her lightness. “Yet were you not changed by your path through the Divine Gate? We know the Gate cannot be altered, and Vecna had completed their ascension to divinity. So it must be the one who went through the gate who is no more. They are changed, and must make a choice about who they will become.” Once again, all the pearls that form the beach of the Island of Renewal lit up, their beams filling the sky with white light. “Away with you all!” she shouted, her voice cracking like the explosion of a wet log in the fire, and as the light faded, so too did the forms of her kin. 

Sarenrae knelt next to this new being that was once the Undying King, Lich-god of the Material plane. As they took form before her, Sarenrae watched the form of a bloody human newborn materialize, a recently cut umbilical cord dangling from their belly. They had dark red veins running through their body; their skin was a pale, ashy white, covered in the yellows, greens, purples, blues of bruises; and they had no left hand. They cried. 

Sarenrae knelt next to the form and lifted them into her arms, wiping away some of the blood and kissing them on the forehead. The child continued to cry, so she held them against her chest and rocked gently back and forth. “What salvation do you bring, child?” she whispered in their ear. 

—

Kira cocked her head curiously at a tree. Aporro, sleeping soundly a moment before, raised their head as well. “What is it?” Veyhra whispered to Kira, who responded in her usual way, by simply not responding. She did, however, reach toward her waist, where many pouches and vials full of alchemical ingredients and mixes hung. In one smooth motion, she plucked a small pouch filled with a carrot colored powder and flung it just behind the tree she had been staring at. 

The pouch poofed its contents into an incandescent cloud of orange dust and from behind the tree, coughing and crying and gasping for air, a familiar form stumbled into view. The ruby red scaled figure, covered in orange dust, fell to their hands and knees, vomited, and mumbled something unintelligible. Kira smiled, she was always excited when her mixtures worked to their full potency. Perry opened one eye at the abhorrent noises emanating from this newcomer, but as Aporro laid their head back on the ground, looking away from the newly made mess, he quickly returned to lightly snoring.

Veyhra couldn’t help but chuckle at the image of the red dragonborn spluttering in their own sick, reduced by one of Kira’s tricks. She held a hand out toward Kira, signaling that everything was fine. Veyhra didn’t even get up and move over to them, she stayed put by the warmth of the fire and watched as the figure slowly recovered themself. After a minute, they rose and shuffled over to the fire, runny-eyed and sniveling, where they sat down across from Veyhra, looking both angry and diminished. 

“Well, clean yourself up, Aeren.” Veyhra tossed a handkerchief across the fire, which the dragonborn caught and used to wipe themselves up. Veyhra continued, her tone broaching on sarcastic, “To what do we owe the pleasure? Funny that you should show up again, after all this time. Funnier still that Kira had no more trouble making a fool of you now than seven years ago. You’re making a habit of retching your way into our camps. Though you do look a bit more mature than last we met.” That was as much a compliment as Veyhra was going to give, and it was as close as she was willing to get to admitting the guilt she had felt since their last meeting with Aeren, but it didn’t quite describe the transformation that they had undergone. Their chest and shoulders were as broad as Kira’s now, and more muscled. Their arms and legs had thickened into strong branches for limbs. But the most arresting difference was in their eyes. Despite having just crawled out of their own vomit, their eyes didn’t look angry, just tired. Tired of seeing ugly things. Veyhra, despite herself, felt a kinship with the brutal exhaustion in Aeren’s eyes. 

Aeren coughed again, then spat a fat glob of orange spit into the fire, where it sizzled and emitted, for a moment, a sickly sweet scent and plum colored smoke. They cleared their throat. “Funny, I seem to have a different memory of our first meeting. I believe I actually retched my way out of your camp. But I’m glad to see you’re still as much of a shrew as you were then.” Veyhra scoffed, more insulted by the clarification than the insult, and arched her eyebrows at Aeren, who she hoped, after holding her gaze for a moment, understood that she would get deadly serious at any moment’s notice. They broke eye contact first, which gave Veyhra a brief sense of contentment, and continued, “Arkhan is going to the Lucidian Coast. There is an artifact lost beneath the waves there, in an old shipwreck. An artifact which he believes will help him transport Avernus into the material plane, and thus release the Chromatic Tyrant. The final Orb of Dragonkind. He will be traveling there in three weeks time, to conduct his search during the Seventh Tide.” 

Veyhra considered this, eyeing Aeren up and down, suddenly much more serious than she had expected to be. This journey had dragged on to the point she almost assumed it would never end. Arkhan would never achieve his goals, she would never reach hers. But certain aspects of their story rang true. If Arkhan had indeed been searching for the Orbs of Dragonkind that would explain why he had gone to Molaesmyr and before that to Uthodurn. There were many rumors about the whereabouts of these powerful orbs. It also explained the secretive stops in cities with famous libraries. And if Aeren was earnest, as they appeared, after seven long years, Veyhra would finally have the step ahead of Arkhan she had spent so long searching for. She couldn’t deny the excitement of this possibility, she and her unmet adversary suddenly so close to their goals, and leaned in closer to the fire, feeling her heart pounding faster in her chest. Still, she felt wary, and she didn’t want to travel all the way to the Lucidian Coast without proof that Arkhan would show up there, surprised to find her waiting for him. 

Veyhra let none of this emotion show and looked up from the fire into Aeren’s eyes. “And why should I trust you, Aeren? How did you even come to know this information? How do I know Arkhan didn’t send you to me, as some trick intended to set us up? I know you spent some time following them, how do I know you didn’t join Arkhan’s insane cause? And how did you find us again?” 

Aeren looked around at the group, at Kira looking pointedly away, at Perry and Aporro cuddled up with each other, breathing steadily, and finally at Veyhra, staring at them with bloodshot eyes. They chewed on the words and the lingering taste of their puke. “I’ll start with how I found you,” they said, “and in exchange I’d appreciate it if you had something I could clean my mouth out with. That orange shit tastes like a rat died on my tongue.” They took a swig from their water skin, swished it around in their mouth, and spat it to the side. “I found you because I knew you’d been following Arkhan, so I figured you couldn’t be far from Molaesmyr. Then I just looked for your friend there who likes to fly about.” They nodded at Aporro, who didn’t acknowledge their guilt in leading Aeren to discover their party, and instead let out a long, sleepy sigh. 

Veyhra nodded at Kira, who produced a small twig with a few serrated green leaves and handed it to Aeren, who regarded it suspiciously. He sniffed it, then, satisfied, popped it into his mouth and chewed. Kira smiled a toothy, wide smile. “Just mint,” she offered. 

“Heh. Thanks.” After a couple chews without releasing any noxious fumes or falling down paralyzed, they relaxed their shoulders. They looked back to Veyhra, taking in the elf’s lithe form wrapped in a bed roll and a woolen pajama top. “Not especially hard when the dragon is shedding the way they are, either.” Aeren chuckled, mostly just to nettle Veyhra a bit more. Then they reached into the pack on their back and pulled out a bit of shed silver dragon skin and tossed it over to Veyhra. She caught the skin, then tossed it back and sighed. 

“I know they are shedding.” She sat back, a frown crinkling her cheek and brow, resigned to the difficulty of keeping hidden with a rapidly growing dragon in tow. She added that to her list of things to curse in the evening before she went to sleep. “What I want to know is if I can trust you. I remember when you came to us at the beginning of this whole damnable endeavor, skinny as my nephew’s pinky and lost as a bat in the noontime sun. And now you’ve returned, all this time later, claiming not just to want to help but to have the information to do so.” She paused, looking Aeren up and down. Even before, when they first met, Veyhra had noticed something unique about Aeren’s appearance, a shimmer around their scales that gave those hardened red shields a ruby-esque appearance as opposed to the typical muted, almost rusty red-brown of most red dragonborn. Since then, the shimmer had only grown in intensity, to the point where they almost emitted their own aura of faint light. “I’ll admit, you look more prepared today than you did when we first met.” 

“I entered the forge, Veyhra.” Aeren grimaced. “As I told you when we first met, I have wanted to enter the service of Kord for a long time, for my own reasons. I was never allowed into Vasselheim because I’m a red dragonborn, and finally, when the group was sent out to pursue Arkhan and the Hand of Vecna from the Trial Forge, I took my chance. I was denied again and laughed away by them, and then, one last time, by you, just outside the gates of the Holy City.” Veyhra cringed internally, she couldn’t remember the cruel words with which she had sent the young dragonborn on their way. “So I chose to find my own forge, to make my own trials. I figured if I traveled around the Stormlord would present me with a proper challenge. After about a year, I realized what my challenge was to be, that all the events of my life had led me down a very specific path. I followed the group of Trial Forge monks and went and joined Arkhan’s followers and the cult of the Tyrant Queen.” They paused, looking down at their hands. “And I grew strong. The monks were quickly discovered and killed, and I was burned to prove I held no loyalty to them, but I grew strong, as I wanted. And I continued to grow. I admit, and regret, I was even swayed by the promise of more strength, more abilities, more power. I learned quickly and the pain I experienced during my trials I let flow off my scales, though I earned a few scars.” At that they lifted up the sleeve of the woolen tunic they wore to reveal their shoulder, where a latticework of thin yellow lines crisscrossed over their bright red scales and stretched down over their chest, disappearing beneath the tunic. They dropped the sleeve back down. “It was the desire for more strength that kept me there so long. I was thirsty and no one had ever let me drink as they did. They encouraged me, even, to indulge and indulge. And I did. I wanted it so badly…” they trailed off. 

Veyhra cut in, bringing Aeren back to the present. “So, you are prone to temptation and grew your strength in the bowels of the enemy’s machinations? You watched soldiers of Vasselheim killed and did nothing except prove your scorn for them and their refusal of you? If you grew so strong there, why did you leave? And is there anyone coming after you?” 

“No.” Aeren responded with an edge in their voice, the scales on the back of their neck and around their face bristling. “No. No one will be coming after me. They’ll think I’m dead, shambling along with the rest of Arkhan’s infantry. You can summon your Zone of Truth again, like you did the first time, if you need. But they think I’m dead. I was out on a scouting mission, moving North from Molaesmyr. We were set upon by a group of corrupted beast plants, like foxes twisted up in thorny vines. They came out of nowhere, and we dispatched them with relative ease, but they left my two companions poisoned. So I took my chance. I killed them, made it look like the woods had done it and I’d fallen with them, and I left.”

“I still don’t understand why, though, Aeren. Why did you leave?”

Aeren looked from Veyhra to Kira, whom they had almost forgotten about after she had handed them the twig of mint. She was sitting there, a few feet from the fire, quietly, staring intently into the woods but obviously listening twice as carefully to their conversation. She wore one pelt of fur wrapped like a sash around her chest and another like a skirt around her waist. Dangling from little loops sewed onto the two pieces of fur were all manner of pouches and vials, all padded with leather and other soft materials so they didn’t jingle as she moved around. “I was reminded of something…of someone. And of why I went there in the first place. I learned what I needed to learn, and now I’ve brought that information to the people who can do something about it.” They paused. “And I’d like to help bring an end to that bastard if you’ll have me.” 

Veyhra sat, considering this new information. Half of her was eager, finally, it seemed she had a step on Arkhan, but the other half was not so sure. Aeren seemed honest enough, but almost too honest, as if they had been intentionally misled in some way. And she felt deep within her the inertia of her failure up to this point. It was like a nail being driven down from her abdomen into the dirt, anchoring her in place. She looked at Kira and the still slumbering forms of Perry and Aporro. She remembered the excitement of their entrance to the Platinum Sanctuary, her introduction to them by Highbearer Vord, and the words she had shared after their first meeting, where Veyhra had learned how Grog Strongjaw had recovered Arkhan’s severed hand after the Banishment of Vecna and presented it to Earthbreaker Groon, and Perry had related his story of getting lost in the Fey and finding Aporro, then Kira, and eventually the Platinum Sanctuary.  

“Why did you choose me and not Udire?” Veyhra had asked.

Highbearer Vord sighed, tired wrinkles creasing her brow. “Because Udire has mentioned aspiring to a more…political role. And Kima, damn that irritating halfling, intercepted me after I received word of the hand and said to send you. She made some obscene threats and claims about my lack of intelligence if I were to send anyone else.” A smile had tugged at the corner of Veyhra’s lips, she had been flattered. “I thought that might please you,” the Highbearer chuckled. “And, if I do say so myself, I am inclined to agree that you are the best suited for this task, Veyhra. But I mean it when I say do not rush. Rest and recover, your quarry is dangerous, even more so with his new hand, and we, and you, have suffered great losses.” 

“Fuck it, I suppose.” Veyhra had apparently lapsed into a longer silence than she meant to. Both Kira and Aeren snapped their heads around to watch her face as she spoke. “We have been forced to be overly patient. Let’s not allow this inertia to keep us still.” She turned to Aeren. “Do you have a more specific location? The Lucidian Coast is long.”

—

The child sat alone on the beach. This was most of what it knew. The beach, its pearls. The sky, ever bright. 

They felt out of place in the austere landscape and its strange limitations and extensions. The child looked around and saw no one else, just the endless beach, bordered on one end by the endless ocean and the other by the brush, which also turned out to lack an end. They had tried to push through the sparse greenery to the immense building, it seemed like an immense statue to them, that lay beyond the small grassy dunes and couldn’t find a path, or at least only found paths that looped around to their beginnings or stretched as far as the child could with each step. They had swam out into the ocean, thinking perhaps something could be found that way, but when they came to land it turned out to be the same beach as always. Or a different, everlasting pearl beach with a statue of a large, gem-headed woman somewhere distant over the dunes. The child saw no difference if that was, indeed, the case. So they walked in one direction over the pearls for what seemed, to them, a very long time, for their legs became weary. Not finding anything, they rested, then turned around and walked the other way until their legs became weary again, and they rested, and then kept going. But the pearls, too, were endless.

Each time they rested, though they did not shut their eyes nor sleep, they dreamt. Each terrible dream they experienced the world twist and spiral well beyond the point of discomfort, well beyond pain. They knew not what the original image was, just that it had gotten so twisted that they could feel it, and hear it, and see it, and it felt like nausea and looked like a spiral and sounded like it had no end. 

The child did not hunger, nor thirst, but they had not for a long time, a time they had mostly forgotten at this point, a time before things got twisted, before the beach. The beach, though it had no end, at least did not feel twisted, the child thought. There was nothing to fear.

In the absence of fear, the child played. They picked up a pearl, held it close to their eyes, and studied it. They put it to their ears and listened, weighed it carefully, even placed it in their mouth and tasted it. It weighed very little and tasted like less, but when the child held it to their ear they heard a faint vibration, and when they put it in their mouth they could feel the buzzing on their tongue. And when they held it up to their eyes, focusing intently, they saw the story of the pearl. Suddenly, the tiny orb, the size of the child’s finger tip, seemed massive and awe inspiring. It was awash with colors the child had never considered to be possibilities before. They picked up a second pearl and held it to their ear. Its music was different, more active. They held it to their eye and saw a second new spectrum of colors. They looked deeper. They threw it out into the water, watched it splash. It reappeared in their hand. They threw the other one. It splashed and reappeared. They put both pearls back on the ground. As they did, they noticed something new about the beach. A small black spot that appeared on the ground directly below the pearl as they knelt to replace it on the ground. The black spot darkened and shrunk as they moved the pearl closer to the beach, as if to embrace it, and then stretched and faded as they moved the pearl away. 

Sarenrae watched from above as the child returned to the brush. They walked with purpose this time, searching with their ashy white, humanoid hands and feet. There were veins too, the color of mulberry wine underneath the child’s skin, that pulsed as they bent over and excitedly pulled a pair of sticks from beneath the brush. They rushed back to the beach, picking some of the taller grass along the way. The child took one of the branches and bent it into the shape of a big loop, wrapping the connecting point with the grass to hold it there. With the other, they pushed the new hoop, and it rolled, one way and another, forward and back, deisul and widdershins. 

As it rolled, the inside of the hoop rippled with energy. For the third time in what was a comparably short span in her existence, Sarenrae felt surprise course through her. Children were inherently full of surprises, it seemed. She wasn’t fully aware of the extent of the child’s discovery, but felt the significance of the moment, the shift in the energy of her domain. As they rolled the hoop the other way, the energy inside the hoop inverted. The color changed from one impossibility to another, the sounds made such perfect opposites you could hear in the silence the need to be within the circle to hear. It felt, when the hoop rolled one way, that one’s life became richer. When it rolled the opposite way, it felt as if one had stepped outside of their body and gained an understanding of the evolution of the dead things, the perfectly opposite balance of everything they had ever known and felt to be true. It was a feeling of such incredible magnitude it made the witness feel small. Within her cathedral, Sarenrae watched her flame shrink at the influx of negative energy. 

But the child, just moments ago toddling, now pushing the boundaries of adolescence, reached out toward the misting of anti-energy with its missing left hand. They just brushed the edge of the energy where a finger would have been, and a dark, inky pulse went through it. As Sarenrae watched, the energy rippled outward and the grass and wooden circle transmuted into a crystalline, colorful gem, still in the same hollow circular shape. When the child reached their second stick out and it made contact with the circle, the energy rippled through it, too, and transformed it to the same colorful crystal. As the child continued to play, the colors within the crystal oscillated in a viscous way within the gems, eventually bleeding out of the stone and into the circle as if drawn toward the center point of it, where drop by drop, the color collected. The child was fascinated, smiling happily at their toy, laughing, tapping the circle this way and that. When the last drop of color splashed like water into the vibrating energy of the center of this, Sarenrae didn’t have a name for something like this, this new creation, an image clarified, rolling that way and this, as the child continued to play. 

—

The warmth of the sun along the coast was a pleasant change of pace from the slow onset of winter in the north. “Ahhhh,” Perry extended his arms as wide as they could go and turned his almond colored face up to the sun, “now this is more like it!” He smiled. “This is why you bring me with you Veyhra, so I can bring us to lovely places such as this one.”

Perry reached up, scratched Aporro under the chin and said in the voice one reserves for pets and infants, “And that’s all thanks to you, Sweet Pea. You guided me to the place where I learned to do this, yes you did.” Aporro rolled over onto their back, wiggling in the warm, soft sand. Perry climbed onto their stomach and started scratching all along their neck and belly, “Who’s such a smart dragon, huh? Are you a smart dragon?” Suddenly, Aporro swung to their feet, flinging Perry to crash into the sand seven meters away, and started digging, flinging a huge spray of sand behind them. 

Veyhra rolled her eyes. “Yeah, when you decide to wake up. Truly, Perry, I have never met anyone who sleeps as much as you. You even outpace Aporro, and dragons are nearly as lazy as they are greedy.” She stuck her tongue out at the silver serpent, who paid her no mind as they continued to dig. 

They reminded her too much of Glumthing, the cat that had visited her and Reina before Vecna’s invasion began. Reina had named it that for its mopey expression. Stray cats were always running around the city, chasing mice and rats and insects, but this one had shown persistence in getting Veyhra’s attention, even after she had kicked it two or three times. It had followed her home and immediately stole Reina’s heart upon arrival. Much to Veyhra’s dismay, when Reina saw the cat at her feet in the doorway she had gone to the pantry and the cupboard and put down a bowl of water and a few bits of cured meats for the cat, fawning over how much it loved Veyhra. When she had told Reina just how far it had followed her she had just about melted, which Veyhra had found melodramatic, but tolerated because it was the first smile she had seen on Reina’s face in weeks, since the dreams had begun. Veyhra blinked rapidly, trying not to remember the suffering she had seen in Reina’s face and body in the weeks leading up to the battle and her death. The dreams Vecna had forced into people’s minds affected Reina terribly, and Veyhra felt a chill go down her spine as she thought of it, the same chill that she felt every morning when she awoke and felt that she had failed to save Reina’s life. 

Perry laid there, smiling, face upturned in the sunlight, curling his hairy toes in the sand. Dressed in a white tunic and green vest, with a poof of ruffled curls atop his head, he was a picture of contentment. In contrast, Kira hunched at Veyhra’s side, looking deeply uncomfortable in the newfound heat. 

Perry, shading his eyes from the sun and turning to look at his two longest standing traveling companions, immediately noticed Kira’s discomfort and addressed her. “Please, Kira,” he smiled as warmly as the weather and began to stand and dust the sand from his clothes, “I promise you, the cold is the time for tension and shivering. Relax your shoulders…there you go, and take a deep… a deep…” Perry’s head was cocked as he tried to shake some sand from his hair, but a curious expression took over his face as he tailed off in the middle of his sentence. He had fallen from Aporro at the base of a dune, and from his position he could see around it, just a little bit, in a direction that was blocked for his compatriots. 

Kira took a deep breath, looking at Veyhra’s back and the ocean beyond her form. She squinted, and looked back at Perry, who continued to stare at the same point around the edge of the dune. “A deep what, Perry? … Perry? Are you going to sneeze?”

“Oh shit!” Kira and Veyhra both looked quickly toward Aeren, the source of the swear. They had been walking over toward Perry when he had been flung and now followed his gaze around the edge of the dune. “There’s something digging over here,” they reported over their shoulder. “Digging deep, too.” 

After a long moment, a load of sand floated up out of the hole, seemingly of its own accord, and fell on one of a few small piles on the other side of it. A moment of stretched silence passed and another shovel load of sand lifted itself from within the hole to plop, unceremoniously, into the growing dune. 

The group approached the hole, creeping slowly. Peering over the edge and down, into its depths, they saw the source of the digging. A red dragonborn was pointing a long, crooked finger that didn’t match the red scale of the rest of their body. Instead, their left hand was a drawn, leathery skin, pallid and sickly grey. They looked up. 

In retrospect, Veyhra would be proud of how quickly she acted, and the way she did. It would take her a long time to come to terms with the results of her action, and her failure to see the bigger picture of the moment, but the action itself, well, it was just how she had been picturing it for seven long years. 

As soon as she had seen the long, knobbed finger with the black, ichorous nail moving the sand simply by pointing at it, she knew she had finally found her quarry. It was shocking. It was too convenient. But her prey was below her, digging a hole in the beach like a child. She pounced. Magical draconic speech spewed from her throat without her slightest thought. The silver dragon head on the pommel of her sword glowed and her sword erupted in bright light as she leapt down upon Arkhan, the Cruel. 

Her sword bit flesh, just where she had aimed it, at the left elbow, to sever the Hand of Vecna from the arm of the evildoer it was attached to. Blood spurted and muscle was cleaved as a divine radiance burst from Veyhra’s two handed strike. She had put all her strength, all her weight, the upper limit of her magical power, and the momentum of her fall into the swing. She knew she could have easily cloven the head from the ox in one with a swing as mighty as this. But when it split the muscle and tendons around the elbow of Arkhan, driving into the bone, it was stopped completely, the sudden jerking causing the sword to fly from Veyhra’s grip. The bone, she realized, was already corrupted deeply by the magic of the hand. The rumors she had heard about Krull, Arkhan’s right hand tortle, harvesting unicorn horns to help deal with this corruption must have been true, she figured, but whatever concoction the tortle was making wasn’t working, or at least was only helping mask the true extent of the infection. The bone, when she hit it, was like striking down on thickly frozen ice with your bare hand. The pain shot through her arms like lightning as she felt her own bones crack with the impact, followed by the scorching of a sudden and blood freezing wind as a pulse of necrotic energy blasted up her limbs. Somewhere between the flashing in front of her eyes, Veyhra heard Aporro screech. 

Arkhan looked at the wound in his arm, then down at the form of Veyhra, kneeling and clutching her limp arms to her chest, gasping in pain, and chortled amiably. “Well, well. Veyhra of the Platinum Sanctuary. You’ve been following me for a while. Pathetically, I might add.” He reached toward her with the dead, clammy fingers of his borrowed hand and grabbed her around the throat. She swung her arms limply against his. She had no feeling in her fingers, couldn’t even try to peel his from around her neck. He continued smiling at her feeble efforts. “Yes, hardly even worth a thought, even with the help of one of my own, but you never know, do you, when someone might prove useful.”

Above, at the rim of the pit, her companions stood, frozen in a red glow. Aporro was still screeching on the other side of the dune. Arkhan began to levitate upwards, carrying Veyhra with him. “I actually learned that trick from Vecna themself,” he commented benignly, gesturing at Aporro as they rose past the rim of the pit, who was trapped in a cage just over the crest of the dune, screeching and throwing themself violently against magical bars of force. “But your wyrmling is for later, Veyrha. Today, I need you.” He flicked his wrist and though they were still flailing and opening their jaw as if to scream, sound stopped emanating from the dragon. They were now floating past Kira’s head and straining to turn her gaze, Veyhra could see that, emerging from the ocean, Krull had his maul extended toward her friends, the skulls embedded in his weapon alight with the same red magic glow surrounding her companions. Behind him, dozens, maybe hundreds, of seaweed wrapped, barnacle covered humanoid skeletons were emerging slowly from the small, lapping waves. And as they rose above the height of the dune, Veyhra could see still more rising from the sand where Aporro had been digging. 

Veyhra gasped for breath. She could barely even see Arkhan’s face now, but the stench of his breath was becoming overpowering. Her flickering consciousness was filled with the scents of iron and rot. “You see below you?” Arkahn turned Veyhra to face the ground as they rose even higher, twenty, thirty feet in the air. “The world changes so much, for so many reasons. It is evolution. This beach used to be under the waves. And your Platinum ancestors happened to use it as a shipping route.” Below her, the ground was becoming fuzzier and fuzzier. In the distance, she could see the change in color that indicated the jungle, in one direction, and the sea, in the other. “And once, when they were carrying a particularly powerful item across the world, called an Orb of Dragonkind, some of my ancestors in worship tried to take it.” Black closed in around the edges of Veyhra’s vision. All she could see was the oozing, bloody wound she left in Arkhan’s arm. Pathetic, she thought, I have finally failed. “They managed to stop the ship, but they all died, along with all of your people. The ship sunk, vanished. Only it didn’t vanish. Your people cast a blood curse on the ship with their dying breaths, to hide it. So I need your blood to balance the scales, open the ship back up.” Arkhan reached his other hand, the red-scaled one, down, and from within the pit, Veyhra’s sword rushed up into it. “You’ve been following me for so long, Veyhra. Almost since we defeated the Undying King together! It is fitting one like you would be the one to help me collect the last piece of the puzzle.” Veyhra’s vision was just shapes now, but all the sudden she could see, with vivid clarity, Reina’s face turned toward her, her hand outstretched for help, her mouth forming the first syllable of Veyhra’s name. But as Veyhra was about to reach her it was the tip of her own sword emerging from Reina’s mouth and her momentum carried her into the blade, which ran her through the chest. Then Arkahn dropped her limp body, which crashed into the pit, staining the sand below it a muddy, rusty brown.

—

As the young being rolled their new toy back and forth, back and forth, Sarenrae watched the image within the circular frame shift and coalesce into a discernable figure, before losing its form just as quickly when the child reversed the direction of the hoop. 

Sarenrae watched from afar with deep interest for a long time. The images in the hoop passed in succession so rapidly they created movement, almost like a scrying well, but Sarenrae could tell this was not something happening upon the material plane. The images connected in movement, but the backgrounds were amorphous, forms flitting in and out with no apparent logic. Sarenrae’s divine eyes could just barely keep track of the imagery, the nature of this magic making her unsure she was seeing clearly. A dragon spread its wings and became a butterfly, forests melted into lakes and froze into eyes, flowers wilted then bloomed then folded in on themselves into small moonstones. And though other figures appeared and disappeared, only one seemed to reappear. An elven woman clad in the armor of Vasselheim’s Platinum Sanctuary. Except now it was her as a young girl, staring in wonder at a suit of chainmail, and now as an adult, wearing one. And then she was on the battlefield, swinging a greatsword in the midst of combat, and then she was reaching out desperately, over the edge of a cliff, screaming into the void. 

And then a second figure reappeared. When it bumped into the first, nearly knocking it from the edge, a bird came out of its mouth and grabbed them both, holding them until a third figure appeared. This one was covered in spores and fungus and seemed to grow over the first two, holding them back from the edge. And then a third, an amorphous, red blob, pulling the group back from the cliff, that, as soon as they touched, began to crystalize into sharp, ruby form. 

—

Veyhra blinked. Everything was bright and blurry. A face, cocked to the side, was over hers. It said something, but the voice sounded thick and slow. Somewhere in the room someone was crying. She felt disoriented, sluggish. There had been some strange dream, or something. There had been danger, too, though she wasn’t sure if that had been part of the dream? Maybe it was a nightmare? Her forearms were aching intensely. She closed her eyes

Veyhra pulled herself up to a seat, wincing as she tried to put weight on her arms. She fell back onto a wall, and used that to support her as she wiggled into a slouched seat. A voice to her right spoke, low and firm. “Slow.” It was Kira. She winced as she heard a chair scrape and Kira came into view, helping her sit up straight. Veyhra took in her surroundings. They were in a small room, sparsely furnished. She was on the only cot. Kira sat back down in the only chair. Aeren slouched on the floor in the corner. From below the cot she heard sniffling. Veyhra turned to Kira, “What?” Her voice felt like pins and needles coming up through her throat. “What happened?”

Aeren lifted their head. “I am so sorry. I’m glad you’re alive. This is all my fucking fault.”

Veyhra looked over at them. She wanted to be mad, but she was stuck on another feeling. Something from her dream? Something was there, just at the edge of her consciousness that she couldn’t grasp. She scrunched her face, frustrated, then looked back at Kira. “What happened?” 

Kira looked at her with reserve, hesitation, but began to talk. “Arkhan is a behemoth. You struck him with a blow that could’ve felled a werebear, but he hardly flinched. He killed you and dropped you in the pit. Your blood began to fill the pit but then there must have been others, or the volume was magically increased, because it filled the pit and you floated to the top. The blood drew a red line through the sand, which split, and from it a wave of red carrying an old ship came up onto the beach from under the sands. It threw Perry from his paralysis and he grabbed me, Aeren, and your body, and teleported us away.” At that an immense sob emerged from under the bed. “Then we ran.”

“Oh, Aporro, how I have abandoned you!” The sound of Perry’s cries rose to Veyhra’s ears through the cushion between them. “I am awful, I will never live down this shame. Once you saved me, guided me through my troubles, and now I have abandoned you to die.” He sniffled, then poked his head out from beneath the cot. “I am nothing more than a rawhide.” 

Veyhra sympathized with the halfling. This was practically all she had felt for the last seven years. A rawhide. But strangely, at this juncture, following what was clearly the most dramatic and serious of her failures since that first one, when she had failed Reina, she felt a lightness. She couldn’t say why, though it was related to that strange hangover from her dream. “Wait,” she said. “Wait.” Each of her companions looked at her. “Did you say Arkhan killed me?” 

None of them made eye contact with her, which was as good as a vigorous affirmative nod. The silence stretched out for a while. 

Aeren spoke first. “It’s a good thing you travel prepared, Veyhra,” they said. “We had to use several of the diamonds to bring you back.” Veyhra reached to her belt and found that her bag was missing. Seeing the panicked look, Kira picked up the bag, which was under her chair, and dropped it on the bed. 

Veyhra stuck her hand in the bag and pulled out one small jewel. “Fuck. So this is the only one left?” 

“I’m afraid so,” Aeren said. “And I shouldn’t say we. It was all Kira. Between the diamonds and her array of herbs and fungi she was able to get you breathing again. Then we all went to work on your arms. I splinted them while Perry used magical healing and Kira rubbed them down with poultices… We did a good job. Honestly a fucking miraculous job. But I expect they’ll still be quite painful for a while.” 

As she focused on the pain pulsing through her arms, Veyhra felt a little more clarity return. “And, dare I ask…?” She let the question hang in the air, unfinished. 

Perry responded with a wail. “Oh, tragedy of our times! Arkhan took Aporro. And I left them behind!” He sniffed again, in resignation. 

“And, I suppose, he probably got what he came for and left.” This was Aeren speaking up. “The orb of dragonkind. The actual damn dragon was just a bonus.”

At that, Veyhra’s stomach sank like a stone, the levity vanished in an instant. Her memory returned in a flash, and she could hear Arkhan’s voice again. “The last piece of the puzzle.” 

“Crap.” She looked around the room in a panic. “That was it. He has everything he needs. He told me.” She paused, afraid to even speak of the possibility. “He’s going to try to summon Tiamat by funneling her spirit into Aporro’s body.” 

Silence overtook the room like a chill shadow. Her companions looked at Veyhra like they were uncertain if this statement was some bald side-effect of her recent brush with the veil. They looked at each other, then back at her.

“Damn it.” Veyhra cursed as she tried to bring herself to standing. “How long have I been out?” 

Kira immediately stood up, half to help her avoid stepping on Perry’s face and half to encourage her to sit back down. “Not long,” she said, grabbing under Veyhra’s armpits, “maybe five, six hours.”

“Damn it,” Veyhra swore again, “damn it, we need to fucking go, Kira, stop trying to make me sit. We’re already too far behind!” She looked around again, as if searching for something, anger rising in her reddening face. “And the bastard took my fucking sword!” 

Perry, from below the bed, in a soft tone, asked, “But, Veyhra, where are we going?” 

She paused, leaning on Kira for support, but it was Aeren who spoke. “We need to go to the Thorain Tundra. That’s where he plans to conduct his ritual. He hasn’t let anyone except Krull travel there with him.”

About twenty minutes later, a matronly dwarvish figure entered the room with a plate of biscuits and tea. They looked around, confused at their lack of guests. “They couldn’t have gone out the front without me noticing,” they muttered to themselves, and went to search the rest of the small corridor. 

—

And then the bird transformed into a massive dragon of glass, lifting the entire group in its sure talons and flying out over the edge of the cliff. 

Sarenrae descended to the beach, to her pearls, to the child, now adolescent, playing with the hoop and the stick. 

Upon seeing Sarenrae for the first time they could remember, they stood up and watched her approach carefully. “Are you my mother?” they asked. 

“I think I am,” said the Everlight. 

“You have never given me a name, mother, why is that? I have been waiting for so long.”

Sarenrae pondered. “Well, I have just named you as my child. And though you have not seen me, I have always been there, caring for you until you were strong enough to choose your own.” 

“Did I ever have a name?”

“You did,” Sarenrae’s voice was a gentle caress, “would you like to know it?”

After thinking it over, the adolescent responded, “I think I would.”

“Very well, if you would like to know then you shall,” said Sarenrae. “Vecna is what you called yourself. The Undying King.”

At this the adolescent began to cry. Not loud sobs, just the tears beading down their cheeks. “That is a strong name.”

“Yes. It carried much power. It still does, for some.”

“Lightmother,” the child asked, their tears flowing faster, their voice cracking, “I was not always on this beach, was I? There are parts of me beyond my reach that hold great evil. And there is the terrible, twisting dream.”

“No, my child, you were not always on this beach.” Sarenrae felt for the child as she watched their heart break at her answer. “But none of us is beyond renewal.” 

“Will you leave, mother? Can you stay with me?” the adolescent took a hopeful step forward as a sob wracked their body, lowered their head.

Sarenrae met the child, folded them into her embrace. “Not all mothers must leave their children so quickly, and for that we must be grateful.” She leaned down and plucked, with gentle, practiced care, a pearl from the beach and handed it to the child.

—

Behind them, a vast wall of fire stretched, seemingly arcing into a miles long ring. “I know a little about how teleportation works,” Perry remarked, looking back at the flames, “and we should consider ourselves lucky we didn’t just cook ourselves.” He looked at Veyhra, Kira, and Aeren. “Are we sure about this?” 

“Come, Perry,” Kira responded, “and let’s save Aporro.” With one more wary glance at the roaring inferno behind them, the group headed toward the center of the massive circle of flames. 

“We need to hurry,” Aeren advised. “These flames must be the first step in the ritual.” 

As they pressed forward across the snowy tundra, the smokeless, roiling fire surrounding them seemed to grow, instead of shrink with the distance. Eventually, after four or five miles, they could see a gathering in the distance, with a large, glowing energy source in the middle. 

Perry reached out and touched each of them, whispering an incantation. “I think this might be useful,” he offered, “as we get closer.” As he finished speaking in his singsong tone, he traced an arc through the air and all four of them vanished from sight, becoming only footprints in the snow, moving toward the center of this fiery ring. 

On the edge of the crowd, the invisible group of four could see an array of figures. Many animated skeletons wandered dumbly around the limits of this ceremony. In the heart of the crowd all variety of humanoids watched, enraptured, the two characters on an elevated stage, leading these happenings. Arkhan, the Cruel and Krull circled opposite each other around the perimeter of a platform sixty feet across. Runes, unreadable from their perspective, glowed from on top of the platform. At five points, halfway between the edge and the very center of the stage, ice pillars, inlaid with massive gemstones, held five different colored orbs aloft. Magical energy sparked from each of them, erupting with loud cracks to singe the closest spectators. At the very center, floating in a magical cage similar to the one in which they had first been entrapped, but now also sustained by metal rods, was Aporro, the young silver dragon. They rammed uselessly against the bars of the cage, and though they tried to scream, still no sound came out.

Arkhan and Krull stopped their movements. The runes on the stage flared up, emitting five different colors of light. The same five colors of the orbs. Black, green, red, blue, and white. Aporro writhed in their cage. Veyhra, Kira, Aeren, and Perry watched in terror as, starting along the sides of their neck, Aporro’s scales and skin began to peel back, revealing their dark, bloody musculature beneath. 

This was not peeling like shedding their skin in order to grow, as they had been doing. No. Veyhra, Perry, Kira, and Aeren couldn’t avert their eyes from the horror as the magic at work began to flay Aporro alive, from the neck outward. The dragon flung itself, ever more frantically, against the bars of its cage, smashing its head into the metal and trying to bite at the magical force holding it in. Their skin peeled down to their shoulders now, and lifted up to the base of the skull, tearing into five flaps of skin. 

Again, Veyhra moved without thinking. She knew what needed to be done. She pulled Kira, Perry, and Aeren forward, shoving through the crowd. A commotion began to arise around them. Neither Arkhan nor Krull paid it any notice, their faces filled with admiration for this climactic moment.

Materializing with flourish from nowhere, Aeren punched one of the people standing next to them, knocking them out cold. Their fists flying, they had knocked out three more before anyone near even noticed, but then the press was on. Hundreds of bodies collapsed on Aeren, and though they fought valiantly, nimbly dodging the initial onslaught while stunning enemy after enemy with focused, direct strikes, empowered by their ki, the numbers were too much. As they succumbed to the pressure of the crowd, they could see Aporro slowing down, laboring to breathe, as their scales were peeled past their eyes and over their front legs and stomach. 

Now Arkhan took notice, irritated that this squabble would detract from the moment. His moment, that he had worked so long and so hard for. He waited for the culprit to be pushed forward, and couldn’t conceal the surprise on his face when Aeren was thrust from the crowd. “Hmm,” Arkhan murmured. The moment stretched out. 

“I won’t waste much time with you,” Arkhan pointed his long, deathly finger at Aeren. A shadow of his hand, bigger than the hand itself seemed to rise, also pointing at Aeren. Suddenly, a beam of energy, the color of a dark, dark wine, leapt from the shadowy finger. Aeren flinched, willing to make the sacrifice but knowing a painful death was an eyelash away. But it didn’t beam directly toward Aeren, like it was supposed to. Instead, three figures, instantaneously coming into view at the same time, let loose three spells. One of them, from Perry, was directed at Arkhan. With a shout that sounded like the clear tone of a well made chime, Perry loosed a small ball of shimmering energy that, as it neared Arkhan, attracted the magic emanating from his hand and absorbed it, before poofing into a cloud of silver dust. 

Kira threw a huge cloud of spores up in the air that immediately swarmed Apporro’s cage, eating through the metal and magical bars like acid. 

And Veyhra vowed to herself she wouldn't make the same mistake twice. Instead of aiming for Arkhan’s hand, she focused her concentration down at a space seemingly below the podium on which this action was occurring, speaking rapidly under her breath and slowly extending her arms. 

Aeren felt the ground beneath their feet shift, ever so slightly. 

Then, with a massive flash of color, everything exploded. A shard of red stone struck Aeren in the chest, knocking them prone. 

The stage erupted, massive chunks of it sent flying into the crowd to crush Arkhan’s followers. Krull was pinned beneath a boulder as the ground beneath his feet cartwheeled to pin him down. Perry was flung into the air and he transformed himself into a dragonfly to avoid falling into the mess. Kira managed to keep her feet by dropping several seeds that sprouted into vines that kept her upright. Veyhra dropped to a knee and gasped as the spell took full effect, the ground just in front of her dropping into itself and away. 

Apporro and Arkhan were nowhere to be seen, hidden by the dust rising after the massive quake. 

For a moment, everything stood still, and it seemed the shadow of a massive hand moved through the dust. Veyhra choked as she recognized the shape of the hand, her index finger extended as if pointing, but she knew it was just the last to close into a fist after failing to catch Reina. 

Then a roar cracked through the stillness, reminding Veyhra what was real and what was a dream. A massive, winged serpentine form rose through the dust cloud, much larger than Apporro. In the shadows of the dust it was difficult to tell what it was. It looked like the creature had many heads. 

With a second roar even louder than the quake, the form broke into the light. It was resplendent, shimmering from snout to tail. It had one head, but skin and scales flapping around loosely from its neck. As it crashed back to the earth amongst the settling dust, Aeren, Veyhra, Kira, and Perry, could all see the diamond and crystal scales emerging where moments before had been exposed pink flesh. 

They could also see, in Apporro’s mouth, one arm, hanging. They dropped the arm in front of Veyhra and launched into the air, swooping down amongst the remaining crowd and letting loose a massive gout of bright, burning flame. As the hand fell in front of her, the fingers unclenched, and again Veyhra felt her perception shift, as if the hand was hers and she was looking past the extended fingers. Instead of the necrotic, pallid grey, her hand radiated prismatic energy. 

Then she was looking down at the arm and hand beside her feet and she laughed. She wasn’t sure exactly what had just happened. Clearly they had disrupted the ritual in some vital way, and something unexpected had happened. Apporro changed in some unanticipated way, but at least they weren’t Tiamat, and they weren’t flayed to death, and they were having no problem finishing the job here. And at her feet lay the arm of Arkhan, the Cruel and the Hand of Vecna, the Undying King, the former red and the latter pallid, deathly grey. Then her laughs turned to sobs, and she fell to her knees, unsure if she was laughing or crying or both. 

—

The child, unraveling itself partway from the hug, offered up their missing left hand to take the pearl. Sarenrae dropped the tiny orb in what would have been the palm of the child’s hand. As it dropped, the pearl lost its form. Drips of color fell from it, collecting into a pool of multicolored liquid suspended in the air. The rainbow of colors gradually took the shape of a hand, attaching itself to the child’s wrist through the dark, purple veins, and following those lines, filled the child’s body with colorful light that, at last, shined from their eyes.

They looked up at Sarenrae, sniffled, then forced a smile. “I think I will forget that old name, and take a new one.” 

Then they reached for the hoop with their prismatic hand, and, as they touched it, Sarenrae saw the group she had seen before, the elven woman now transformed as well.