Thanks Tumblr For Further Depression.

I wish you would write a fic where Percy and Vex need to get warm.

Do with that what you will. (It is effing cold here so it’s on my mind) lol

This welcome has been, so nice and warm

900+ words | Gen | Perc'ahlia | TLOVM s3 and C1 compliant, set in the 1-year timeskip.

I wish you would write a fic where... prompt game

EDIT: Now cleaned up and on AO3!

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Vex loves Percy. I mean, it’s a simple, straightforward fact. So much of him is reflected in Whitestone that it’s impossible not to love the city too. 

She might just love it a bit less right now, though. Apparently something about turning Whitestone into a necromancer's paradise impacted weather patterns (guess it’s hard to raise undead in frozen ground?) - because Percy remarked, during Winter’s Crest last year, that it was an unusually balmy winter.

This one is not unusually balmy. It’s cold. It’s skin-prickling, hair-frosting, finger-tingling fucking oppressively cold. 

Vex never knew it was even possible to be too cold for snow. But she’s definitely fucking familiar with the concept now!

It sure doesn’t feel like the Dawnfather smiles on her when the dawn was several hours late, and she woke up to several feet of snow, and to have any hope of catching anything she had to leave her very cozy bed and even cozier Percy.

Another thing to hate about this weather? Dressing up. Gone are the days of throwing on boots and bounding off for a hunt. She needs not one but two hosen on her legs, and a sweater and a jacket and a cloak on top, and gloves, and big huge boots that make her feel like the clumsiest thing in the whole fucking Alabaster Sierras if the rest of the outfit didn’t already accomplish that.

And a hat. A knit, tight hat that she has to drag over her ears or the points will freeze. It feels like she’s going deaf when she wears the thing.

After several hours of vigil in a tree - a third of them taken before sunrise when even that couldn’t warm her - Vex finally just gave up and trekked home. Because even for the Grand Mistress of the Grey Hunt there was only so long she could fight off shivers to stay still. And feel every breath sharply. And watch her scarf and fur collar and stray strands of her own fucking hair slowly prickle with frost. 

She must have frostbite. Even if her magic doesn’t seem to catch on any damage. She’ll get inside, take off her gloves, and see that her fingers are black and falling off and Pike will have to leave the bakery to put them back on.

Not like she has any use for those stupid fingers; they’re stiff with cold, and she doesn’t have any game to haul back.

Everything sucks even more knowing she - don’t forget, the Grand Mistress of the Grey Hunt - didn’t even hunt anything. Not even a rabbit, or a turkey, or a glimpse of that Grey Render. Funny thing: the wildlife has the sense not to be out in this weather, even if she doesn’t.

(The worst part is that Trinket, for the first time in his whole life, has decided to hibernate. Because the Parchwood is the sort of place bears want nothing to do with when the days start to shorten. And it means that Vax is in Zephrah, where it never snows, and Trinket is soundly sleeping in the warmest part of her mansion, and Vex is out here alone.)

(It means there’s less body heat to keep her warm out here. Of course.)

Grand Mistress of the Grey Hunt who sucks at hunting in the Parchwood for a third of the year. It’s times like these where she’s really giddy the mansion was completed not long after the first frost; she can avoid the (surely super judgemental) stares of the townsfolk.

She just… has to fight through knee-high snow to get back. Or awkwardly step through the tracks she left in the morning. Or test the thin sheet of ice on the top of the snow, make it a few strides before crashing through. And no matter what she does her socks end up cold and wet!

By the time the lights are in sight she’s exhausted, and sweaty, and pissed, and really itching to kill something. And above all else, freezing. It’s almost enough to dull the ire - almost.

A petty part of her heart hisses that she never, ever should have fallen in love with a clever, thoughtful, nerdy, proud, cynical, and extremely sexy man who happens to live where it gets fuckoff cold for a solid third of the year.

Except as she trudges closer, she can see his silhouette in the window. And the moment that interruption in the light jerk upright because he’s seen her, too.

Except he leaves that warm, cozy home they’ve made to meet her outside with his coat and slippers. And he kisses her burning cheek and steals her hunting gear and rambles about some idle nothing - and notes he’s got hot chocolate on the stove. 

Except once they’re in the mudroom, and her cold skin prickles at how balmy it is in here, he’s taking her hands and warming them in his. And he’s taking off her boots and grimacing in sympathy at the packed snow and agreeing it’s awful out there, she’s entirely correct, and he’ll be sure to have those poor cold feet in his lap as soon as possible. Yes, by the fire, of course, he’s not a madman.

Except he’s so delighted to have her back, so happy to have an excuse to pamper her. And Percy, with an impish delight, cocoons her in thick blankets and tugs her along to the little nest he’s made by the hearth. And Vex, impossibly, falls a little more in love with him every time he leads her through this dance.

Because Percy, as a man of fuckoff-cold Whitestone, has getting warm down to a science, and Vex can almost forget she was ever cold in the first place.

(She has her own thoughts on how two lovers could warm eachother up, of course - but she did fall in love with a clever man.)

"Vax coming back wouldn't be narratively satisfying!" is a take I keep seeing so it's time for my daily reminder:

This narrative does not exist to satisfy you.

This is a group of people you don't know who have been kind enough to share their personal, deeply emotional DnD campaigns will an audience. If Matthew Mercer decides that its worth it to let his friends have a happily ever after including Vax - you're just gonna have to suck it up. If it bothers you so much that you have to write full-length essays on Tumblr, or, god forbid , harass the CAST, go make some friends and run your own campaign. Or write a fucking fanfic.

happy birthday to the kids from zach and cody or whatever

Who do y'all think Liam will play if Vox machina returns as playable characters?

מעניין כמה אנשים הולכים להתעצבן על זה. תרגישו חופשי לתרגם את זה. Didn't make this

There won't be another Aeor now, because Aeor was a very specific kind of tragedy, wherein the gods prioritized their own survival over the survival of huge swathes of mortals. They had choice after choice after choice where they could have diverted to a more merciful path. Even in the very last moments, they could have just destroyed the Factorum Malleus and spared the rest of the city, and found another way to deal with the knowledge that had been disseminated. But they chose their own immediate security over the lives of every regular person in Aeor, every refugee and civilian and child. The Primes may love mortals, may work to protect them, but when it comes down to it, they will choose themselves (and their Betrayer kin!) every time. It is love with a very big caveat.

Two thirds of the world's population died in the Calamity because the Betrayers were initially banished, not destroyed. The gods say they cannot let any of the Betrayers die because they might need them if a bigger threat arises, but what good does that potential possible protection do Exandria if their warring wipes the world out now? Why should anyone, god or mortal, expect that the Betrayers would help fend off such a threat anyway, when they very clearly want the Primes and all mortals dead? There was so much emphasis in Downfall on how, despite it all, the Primes and Betrayers are family and the Primes cannot let that go. It's hard to take Ayden at face value when he says that they need the Betrayers, in the light of that. SILAHA says "That's all our problem. It's all about ourselves. At least I have the, well, confidence to actually accept it." And that's the truth of their motivation that their actions indicate in Downfall.

The Arch Heart and the Matron explicitly told the Hells that the world was on the cusp of another Calamity. Except for those two, when confronted with the possibility of Predathos, the gods wanted to chose, once again, to sacrifice the lives of countless mortals in order to protect themselves. The Divine Gate is meant to stop another Calamity, but now we know that they are willing to tear it down to save themselves. So Calamity is the threat that hangs over the world much more immediately than potential cosmic horrors.

I don't think anyone is out here saying that this plan with the gods becoming mortal means that there will never be any danger to Exandria again. There ARE terrible threats that exist, like the Chained Oblivion and there are almost certainly more that exist out is the cosmos that are currently unknown. Predathos might eat those or it might not, we don't actually know. There absolutely will be more evil mortals, just as there will be mortal heroes to stop them, as they always have. This is not the creation of utopia. It's the aversion of another apocalypse.

But something that struck me, at least, about Aeor, something that I think often get lost underneath all the other debate, under the focus on hubris, is the stark fact that mortal understanding grew to the point where they could create a weapon that could kill a god. That's incredible. If the gods saw mortal understanding reach so far and instead of saying "you are children and cannot comprehend and so we will strike your knowledge from the world because it is too dangerous for you," said "you are our children and you are growing up, perhaps we should help you understand" what might mortal innovation have accomplished? What solutions would mortal creativity come up with that might have surprised their creators? If the gods chose to treat mortal attempts to understand with encouragement instead of condescension, what might the Cassida Previns of the world built?

You say that level of power has to exist to fight off the next eldritch horror that arrives. Why does that power have to be concentrated in a small handful of gods above any sort of accountability? Why can't it be power distributed amongst a larger number of mortals, defending themselves? Why can't it be mortals, no longer children to be shielded but instead come into their ascendancy to fully inherit the world and its responsibilities? Why can't mortals be equal to the gods, not in the sense sought by those power-hungry mages, but as a collective, with the gods reborn among them and treating them, as it were, as adults, who might come to understand?

In the final narration for Downfall, Brennan says:

"In short, brief life can even the infinite change, realize, recognize, commit to something new, singular. To move forward on the paths of destiny and fate, changed."

And I think this choice being given to the gods to become mortal again, beyond just giving them the ability to survive at the cost of their power, is also offering them the chance to learn and grow the way mortals do again. Being mortal in their quest to destroy Aeor, ending even as it did in something horrific, did actually change them enough that they created the Divine Gate. That was a sacrifice and it was better than what was before it. But it was not enough and now that the flaws in that approach have become clear, it's time to look for another path. Mortality offers that. And I think seeing how mortality could change them further will be a hell of a story, and I'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, I don't particularly think this is going to convince you or anything, you seem pretty mad, but it's fun to talk about this stuff, and you gave me an excuse, so thanks.

They crave violence

I finished them all!

Not sure about Cad,but by the gods these are all fucking accurate

I got bored so I put the m9 into the random headcanon generator

Sometimes you have to frantically doodle a mini comic after the show ends b/c that moment was TOO GOOD XD

Something, something Vesper representing heaven as an assimar and being Percy's best qualities while Gwen is hell and possibly having the worst parts of Percy's qualities while also being Percy's almost favourite child-

(also thank you our lovely Dani Carr for confirming Vesper's race)