Chapter Text
The Netherbrain falls into the sea with an enormous crack. For one startled instant, Vermillia Lash thinks that maybe the world has decided to finish itself after all. It’s an irritating thought, given all the effort she’s had to put into saving it. Thankfully, though, it’s only the sound of a dead god-mind striking the water. The world isn’t ending today.
Vermillia falls too. One moment, she’s standing in the wreckage surrounded by organic bits, her blades slick with some foul illithid ichor. The next, the platform dissolves and she’s plummeting, the waves rising cold and black to claim her.
Salt stings her eyes. Her sodden cloak drags at her, pulling her deeper into the water. Alive, she thinks, as her lungs begin to burn.
She kicks.
When she breaks back through the surface, the air feels sharp and new. Vermillia drags herself toward shore, hair plastered in dark ropes against her face. She wrings seawater from her sleeves, muttering in irritation. “Unbelievable.”
Karlach is already burning at the dock’s edge. Flames curl around her until Vermillia and Wyll manage to talk her into not dying, and then Wyll follows her into hell. The portal blooms behind them red-gold. Heat presses against the cooling air, and then hell closes with a hiss and a snap.
And just like that, it’s over. Only Vermillia and half her party are left on the dock, damp and blinking while seawater drips from the seams of their armor.
Someone— she isn’t sure who— suggests a celebration. No one objects strongly enough to prevent it, so they all march back to the Elfsong Tavern and drink what passes for wine until the small hours of the night.
-
Back at the tavern, the staff don’t seem overly concerned with anyone’s tab. Alan produces barrels from somewhere in the back, red-faced and grinning as if he slew the Brain himself. Lakrissa leads a cheer when he taps one open and toasts the city’s newly minted heroes. Eventually Roveer appears from the kitchens with an armful of aperitifs he must have been hoarding for better customers.
Apart from their party and the staff, the tavern is nearly empty. The city is elsewhere now, tending rubble and burying its dead. Vermillia finds that she prefers the privacy.
Gale corners her first, somewhere over by the bar. “Of course, I never doubted our chances for a second,” he’s saying. "Well, maybe for a second— but only a fleeting one!”
He paces for a while, babbling and gesturing with a mug he keeps forgetting to drink from. At some point he lifts both hands and fills the ceiling with stars.
“Honestly,” he adds, beaming faintly, “after everything we’ve seen, I think we deserve something a bit grander than musty old rafters. Don’t you?”
Vermillia leans back in her chair, dizzy, and tells herself it’s only the alcohol that’s making her feel this way. “If one of those falls on my head, I’m going to be very mad at you.”
She feels like she’s been moving toward something since the nautiloid. Survival, a cure: even when she didn’t know what concrete goal she was moving toward, there was always motion. Another task to accomplish, another throat to cut, another scheme to unravel. The urgency had weight, direction. Now there’s nowhere to go, no murder-god whispering in her ear. No Absolute. It’s over, and she lived. The end.
As Vermillia watches the stars spin, she feels strangely unmoored.
Eventually, Jaheira stands and raps her knuckles lightly against a tabletop. “A toast,” she says. “We did what needed doing. The city stands, and I am proud of each one of you. The rest is tomorrow’s work.”
She raises her glass, and the rest of them follow. Vermillia drinks and tries not to roll her eyes into the cup.
Minsc leaps up as soon as Jaheira sits, with a hard scrape of his chair. “And to the righteous boot,” he adds, “applied with precision and vigor to the backsides of evil!” He pantomimes the kick for emphasis. Boo squeaks approval from somewhere in his armor.
The evening rolls on like that. Astarion lurks in the shadows and complains about the quality of the wine, but he drinks a whole bottle of it anyway. “Appalling,” he says when Vermillia approaches him. He looks lighter somehow. Calmer.
Vermillia studies him and wonders for a moment what she looks like, now that the world has failed to end.
The night unravels gently after that.
-
In the morning, the party starts to break apart. After breakfast, the packing begins, and soon there’s a pile of unwanted knicknacks and armor bits on the floor in front of the dumbwaiter. Quiet goodbyes begin to happen in corners. Friends and allies find Vermillia and offer her hugs. And then, by lunchtime, people begin to depart.
Gale leaves first. Already, he’s halfway to Waterdeep in his mind. He fusses with his cloak on the way out the door, hands around little magical cards with his mailing address, promises letters. It’s all quite dramatic. Astarion, in contrast, slips away almost unseen, vague to the point of rudeness about where he’s headed.
Jaheira and Minsc leave together around midafternoon when a surly letter from Rion arrives. There’s little ceremony, since they’re only going across town. Not long after, Halsin leaves for Reithwin, carrying purpose like a talisman between his big hands.
“How long do you bet he stays human once he’s out of Rivington?” Shadowheart asks.
The tavern is quiet that night.
Shadowheart stays the longest, waiting for her mother’s health to improve enough for travel. Two days after the Netherbrain fell, Vermillia lurks in the corner of her sleeping alcove watching her pack.
“Where are you going?” she asks eventually.
Shadowheart stops and considers. “Someplace green, I think. With a big sky. I’m tired of the dark.”
It’s such a simple, modest ambition. A big sky. Vermillia nearly envies it.
Vermillia her leave with the strange awareness that she hasn’t been asked to come along. No one asks her, in fact. They all assume (correctly) that she has her own plans, her own arrangements. Though as yet, she hasn’t a clue what those arrangements ought to be.
Scratch follows Shadowheart out the door. The owlbear cub went with Halsin. Even the animals know where they belong.
So presently, Vermillia is left alone in the formerly overfull Elfsong Tavern. Alan seems in no hurry to kick her out, though he does reclaim the rest of the floor. Vermillia moves into Stelmane’s old suite. After all, she’s never minded a bit of dried blood on the floor.
What did I used to do, when I was alone? Vermillia wonders. The fact that she doesn’t know makes her want to break something.
She goes down to the kitchen, where Roveer greets her gruffly. “Is it alright if I make tea?
Nod and grunt.
Vermillia takes this as a yes. There are tealeaves in her alchemy pouch; she crushes them between her hands and sets the water boiling. The kettle whistles, and the sound startles her more than it has any right to. She stares for a long time at her hand on the teacup before drinking. It mostly just looks like her hand.
(She expected to be angry, she thinks, but she mostly just feels wrung out. The end of the world is past, and she survived it.)
Murder and alchemy are the only things Vermillia remembers enjoying since she woke on the Nautiloid. Alchemy then, if only to avoid the unpleasantness that might follow if the Hero of Baldur’s Gate started killing people. That settled, she fastens her cloak around her neck and ventures out in search of materials.
It’s a bright day, though the roads are still dusty and cluttered with fallen rubble. Vermillia whistles as she walks. Without making a conscious decision, she finds herself ambling towards Basilisks Gate, then across the bridge to Wyrm’s Rock. There’s an alchemy shop over at the South Span; that must be where she’s going. Yet somehow, she finds herself stopping at the fortress gate.
“Lady Lash!” Recognizing her, one of the guards snaps to attention and elbows the man beside him.
“Hello,” she greets them. “I’m here to call on Lord Gortash.”
Half of her expects them to tell her that he’s dead, or gone, or that he’s been pacing back and forth on the rooftop cursing her for the last two days and has no interest seeing her. Instead, the guards step aside.
“Of course, Lady Lash. Right this way.”
The first guard, the one who recognized her, leans over and whispers something to the other as she passes. Something something saved the city. Vermillia tucks the words aside for further consideration and heads upstairs.
-
Enver Gortash doesn’t rise when she enters. That’s the first thing Vermillia notices.
He’s sitting next to a tall window overlooking the river. Late light catches in the glass and spills across the floorboards. The room is orderly the way she supposes his spaces must always be: papers stacked square, chair in perfect alignment with the desk. Whatever chaos followed the Brain’s fall, there’s no evidence of it here. Or rather, no physical evidence.
Enver’s coat is as immaculate as ever. His ridiculous glossy-red boots are polished to a shine. But the rest of him betrays the effort.
One hand rests on his chair arm, fingers curled tight enough that the tendons stand out stark beneath the skin. The other lies bare in his lap: no gauntlet, no Netherstone. He’s not even within reach of a weapon. Vermillia thinks suddenly that he seems smaller, almost stripped without all that metal.
In the same instant, she notices how he sits with one leg out and his cane nearby. Her mind, always practical where bodies are concerned, intuits that he must be injured, in the leg or thigh or the hip. Something that makes standing inconvenient.
It takes her two tries to say his name, and she's suddenly ashamed of how weak her voice feels, how it breaks. Enver looks up without surprise.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Vermillia closes the door softly behind her. She doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she smiles. Tries. “You’re hurt.”
“Yes.”
His eyes follow her with precise, unsettling attention. She can see him measuring her: how quickly she could reach him, how little time he would have to go for his crossbow. It’s all over his jaw muscles, the faint flex of his fingers against the chair arm. He knows well that if Vermillia chooses to finish it now, there will be no struggle worth remembering.
(She can picture it somehow: the Elder Brain commands Enver Gortash to die. He is tossed away like a rag-doll and his brain pulps like overripe fruit.)
(She isn’t here to kill him)
The light shifts as a cloud passes in front of the sun. For a moment, Enver’s face is divided between shadow and dull gold. It does him no favors. Bruise-dark hollows stand out beneath his eyes.
“The Parliament has written,” he says, as if returning to some earlier conversation. “They’re asking whether I intend to step down now that the crisis has passed.”
“And do you?”
He exhales carefully. “I do not.”
Vermillia nods. He remains Archduke, then. It suits him still, even now, even stripped. She wonders if it always has, or if there was a time when he was still a cobbler’s boy, when he didn’t walk like he was born to authority.
“I’m staying at the Elfsong,” she says.
His reaction is small but unmistakable: a flicker of something sharp behind his eyes. Surprise, maybe. Disapproval.
“The Elfsong,” he repeats, with a note of distaste.
“It has a bed. And food.”
“And rats.”
Vermillia laughs despite herself. “Not anymore,” she tells him, and leaves him to imagine how she might have solved that problem.
He studies her again then, as if comparing her to some earlier sketch and finding the lines altered. Probably, the old Vermillia would have turned up her nose at the Elfsong. Now, it’s the only bed in the city she has any memory of sleeping in.
(She almost asks him where she used to live, before. Doesn't. In her heart of hearts, she's afraid he'll tell her she stayed at her father's crumbling temple.)
Silence settles then.
Enver shifts carefully, pretending like adjusting his weight is only a minor matter. A lie, of course: the effort to conceal his discomfort is obvious to her. Vermillia catches the careful way he holds his back when he shifts, the controlled breath slipping through his nose a moment later.
The hip, then.
Vermillia stays quiet about it, though the sight surprises her. She wasn’t expecting his tumble to the floor to hurt him, really; only now does she remember that he had a limp, before.
“If you intend to kill me,” Enver says at last, “do it now.”
She doesn’t move; of course not. Instead, she regards him with open interest. The great fortress is too large for him like this. The absence of machinery, of Watchers and infernal ambition, leaves the stone echoing.
“I’m not here for that,” she says. She wants to say, obviously, but that feels too petty even for her.
Enver’s eyes sharpen, just a fraction. “Then why are you here?”
She opens her mouth with a perfectly serviceable answer prepared and discovers, to her annoyance, that it won’t come. “I wanted to see you,” she says at last. “And to tell you where I am."
Irritated with herself, she turns toward the door.
“Come back,” Enver says. It’s quiet enough that for a moment, she almost wonders if she imagined it.
Vermillia pauses. “Tomorrow.”
For a brief, unguarded moment, relief crosses his face, naked and swift as lightning. His breath stutters once, then steadies.
“Tomorrow,” he repeats softly, inclining his head as though accepting terms he had not dared hope to win.
The stairs back down to the street feel interminable.
-
Vermillia meanders away from the fortress without paying much attention, until presently she lands at Bonecloak’s Apothecary. Probably, she is only here to purchase supplies— only some worg fang, or a bit of fire amber. Yes. That seems appropriate.
The door opens with the soft chiming of a bell. Inside, it smells like dried roots and sharp oils, familiar and comforting. Shelves climb the walls in tidy ranks; glass jars wink in the dim light. Yet in the midst of it all, it’s the noblestalk that catches her eye.
The mushroom sits in a modest display, dark and unassuming. “You found more,” Vermillia says.
Derryth Bonecloak looks up from her counter. “Aye. After you found my useless lump of a husband and told me where to look, I harvested a fair bit more. Even got spores growing upstairs. If they take, I’ll never have to set foot in that cursed hole again.”
Vermillia’s gaze hangs on the mushrooms. “Do they really restore memory?”
“Aye, they do.”
“Then why is your husband still…?”
Derryth’s mouth twitches.
“Between you and me,” she says, leaning closer, “him losing his mind was the best thing that ever happened to either of us. Right vicious bastard, he was.”
Vermillia considered this.
Not the husband— he interests her not at all— but the woman. There’s something briskly admirable in that answer, something which reminds Vermillia in a heartbeat of her own best self. Here is no weeping widow of circumstance, no soft creature wringing her hands over what might have been. Here is a woman who has looked misfortune squarely in the eye and said, Very well. I shall make use of you.
Yes, Vermillia thinks slowly. That's the way of it.
“I’ll take some noblestalk,” she says finally. “As much as you can spare. Write out the dosage information on a card for me, if you don’t mind. And add in some worg fang and fire amber while you’re at it.”
Orin might have ruined her memory in the mindflayer colony, but Vermillia Lash is not without recourse. That night, in her room at the Elfsong, she grinds the noblestalk to fine essence and sprinkles it across her stew.
-
(“I don’t understand,” Vermillia says plaintively, “why we can’t just play lanceboard.”
They’re seated opposite one another in his office, cards fanned between them and a decanter sweating faintly at Enver’s elbow. The afternoon light slants through the tall windows and gilds the edges of everything: the cards, the rim of his glass, the sharp line of his cheek.
“We’ve already played it twice.” Enver says mildly. “You were better than me.”
It must have cost him something to say that, she thinks. No matter that he only taught himself lanceboard last year and she has been playing since girlhood; no matter that he learned from manuals rather than tutors. Enver does not enjoy losing, even in miniature. He tolerates it as a temporary condition, nothing more.
“And you play cards with the Zhentarim. This option is hardly the great equalizer.” Vermillia makes an irritable, elegant gesture with her hand, as though dismissing the very concept of fairness.
“I would think you’d enjoy three-dragon ante. You like misdirection.” He studies her over the edge of his hand. “And you have a deck on your shelf.”
“Enver, you flatter me. Yes, of course I can play. But that’s not the point. The point is…”
She stops, scowling. She can't, in the memory, articulate what the point is. Only that she dislikes being handled, and is irritated by how deftly Enver always seems to manage it.
He exhales through his nose and deals. Two cards to her, one to himself. “The point is that you’re already bored. I understand, and I’ll try to keep your attention.”
She considers correcting him. Bored is too small a word for it. Restless, maybe. Ravenous. But she lets it stand.
Moments later, he claims her overgenerous ante, and Vermillia’s gaze snaps to his, sharp and suddenly invested. "Oh, you smug bastard." Enver wins all five hands. But only just.)
The memory ends there, and it’s not what she expected: no blades or balls, no sweet scent of poison or clever schemes. Only cards, and sunlight, and the faint pleasure of matching wits with someone interesting and fun.
Yet still, it hits her with a strange, foreign pang. Like being caught on the edge of one of Gale’s lightning bolt spells, or waking in the middle of the night to find yourself in the middle of a battle. Like there’s a part of her heart now that exists only to ache when she catches glimpses of her former self, from before Orin and the tadpole cut her life into such messes.
There was, Vermillia understands suddenly, a Vermillia Lash who had never been hungry, or helpless, or even really afraid. She was happy and comfortable, and there was no reason for her to think that would ever change. The present Vermillia envies that woman so sharply it might have taken her out at the knee, had she been standing.
(There has to be a difference, she decides, between taking back what belongs to her and wallowing in it like a fool. There must be— otherwise she may as well give the whole enterprise up now and save herself the tedium.)
It’s only minutes later, as she’s pouring herself a nightcap, that she pauses to consider Enver’s role in the memory at all.
Cards with the Zhentarim? Really?
She tips the glass and watches the liquid catch the lamplight. She dismantled most of the city’s Zhent network herself, in the process of securing the Guild. Enver may not yet know the extent of it. She imagines his expression when he learns.
A beat later, another thought surfaces, delicate and provocative. Was I really better than him at lanceboard?
There’s only one way to find out.
-
The lanceboard set she scrounges up is old and scratched. The pieces are painted wood with edges softened by years of careless handling. They feel too light when she hefts them. Still. She has contrived victories lately with tools far poorer than this.
When Vermillia arrives at Wyrm’s Rock, she’s directed to Enver’s private quarters rather than his office. The curtains are drawn when she enters. In the dark, she hears the telltale click of a crossbow being cocked, and rolls her eyes.
She doesn’t reach for her own weapon, although it hangs by her hip where it’s always lived. She notices the direction of the sound, the distance between them, the delay between the motion and his soft breath.
“It’s only me, Enver.”
There’s a fractional pause from his corner. Then, the answering shift of metal easing against leather as he lowers the weapon. In the dark she hears the small, flint-edged sound he always seems to make in his throat when he’s displeased.
“Your new ‘hero of the city’ reputation does not entitle you to access my private rooms. You will tell me which guard permitted this.”
Vermillia rolls her eyes again. She moves toward the curtains, too aware of the space between them, the angle of his body in the dark.
“Honestly,” she says, “they all look the same to me. Tall-ish male human in a Flaming Fist uniform?”
She hears the breath he draws to rebuke her.
“And didn’t you want to be the hero of the city?” she continues smoothly, not allowing him the interruption. Her fingers close around the curtain cord. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have been letting yourself into every private room in Baldur’s Gate, if that had worked out for you.”
The word treacherous is already forming in his mouth when she pulls the curtains open.
Light floods the room, harsh and unflattering. It finds Enver seated at the edge of his bed rather than behind a desk, coat discarded, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow. His cane leans against the wall within easy reach; his crossbow rests across his knees.
“Insolent, treacherous Bhaalspawn—”
“Play a game with me,” she says, crossing the room and setting the battered lanceboard on the nearest flat surface: not his desk this time, but a low table by the window.
She sits and begins unboxing the pieces. He watches her. That is the longest part of it.
“What,” he says at last, voice level again, “do you imagine this will accomplish?”
Vermillia finishes arranging the final rank before answering. “I’d like to see whether you were lying.”
A pause. “About which matter?”
“About losing.”
Only then does she lift her gaze to his. The green of her eyes catches the window light and holds it like glass.
“There’s a card game I recall where you said I was better than you at lanceboard.”
“That was almost ten years ago,” he answers, and she doesn’t know what to say to the thread of bitterness winding through Enver’s voice, so she lets it go.
“Then I trust you’ve improved,” Vermillia flashes him a smile that shows all her teeth. “Come play.”
-
Enver takes white just to spite her, she suspects. Or maybe it’s because white moves first, and he refuses to ever let her dictate an opening again.
He castles long, and that’s when she realizes he’s out for blood.
His pawns begin their advance down her kingside in a slow, relentless roll: squat little soldiers trundling forward with the ugly inevitability of siege engines. A knight-errant springs out behind them, its painted flank nicked from old mishandling, yet it lands squarely where it must, guarded by his Mystra. A moment later his castle glides into the half-open file with the quiet authority of a magistrate taking his chair.
“You’re overcommitting.”
“You knocked me unconscious,” Enver says. His voice is perfectly level. “I intend to win something.”
Well. That’s almost charming.
Vermillia shifts her attention to the opposite flank. If he means to storm one wall, she will simply open another. Her Razor’s Edge glides forward, testing; a pawn follows. Enver barely even looks.
Another pawn push from him, and the file tears open like a curtain ripped from its rod. Enver’s Mystra and castle align with merciless clarity. Vermillia’s Cyric, suddenly cramped for air, slides back a square, then another, and finds there is nowhere left to go.
“Checkmate.” Enver says it through his teeth.
Vermillia studies the wreckage of her position. “Very subtle.”
“I was not aiming for subtle.” He doesn’t bother to disguise the satisfaction in his voice as he begins resetting the pieces with crisp, economical motions. “Again.”
-
He wins the second game too, though this time he opts not to fling his forces forward like a man storming a barricade. The violence is still there though; she hears it in the faint grind of his teeth whenever he believes himself unobserved. He plays more conservatively now, like precision might prove a point that fury couldn't.
“You didn’t even fight me,” Enver says at last. He sets his final piece down with too much neatness. “You struck me once and vanished.”
(There’s nothing he can say that will wound her now. Vermillia has been dead and resurrected in the same city. She's survived the very worst, and she's still standing.)
“How would you have preferred it, exactly?” she asks. She can’t help the irritated note that comes into her voice, and she doesn’t particularly try.
“The Steel Watch would have come to my defense.”
“Please. I’d have handled them.”
“You were no longer Bhaal’s,” he snaps. “The Black Hand—”
“I’d have handled that too.”
It’s almost endearing, she thinks, his insistence that there should have been rules. That there should have been a proper contest, a victor crowned at the end of it. Enver can't abide any story where he is not the author.
“How?” he demands.
She lifts one shoulder. “Does it matter? I wasn’t battling you. I was leaving.”
His lip curls. “You wanted me out of the way.”
“I wanted you unconscious,” she corrects. “It worked beautifully, by the way.”
“I had traps, chokepoints…”
Vermillia laughs, dark and humorless. “You were counting on a betrayal then? Good.”
Abruptly, Enver abandons his chair and goes to the window. His shoulders go taut under his thin shirt, one hand braced against the frame. Light spills around him, silhouetting the rigid lines of him standing there.
“We could have done it,” he hisses.
“I didn’t trust the Brain!”
There’s silence after that: several minutes of it. When Enver speaks again, his voice comes out resigned, like oversteeped dregs. “And you lumped me in with it.”
“No,” Vermillia says, “I didn’t.”
She rises to leave, because she knows then that if she stays, one of them will say something that ruins the peace between them forever.
Enver stops her. “Come back tomorrow.” This time, it’s clearly an order. For a moment it rankles, but Vermillia overcomes her ire through gritted teeth.
“Fine,” she says. She glances back over her shoulder, mouth curving. “But if you’re brooding in a darkened bedroom again, you don’t get to berate me for entering.”
She doesn’t wait for permission to go. She leaves him standing at the window, the curtains open, the light full on his face.
-
Back across the bridge, Vermillia pauses to study the city. Around Basilisk’s Gate, there’s still too much rubble on the ground: stone split like old bone, shutters hanging at odd angles, a cart overturned and abandoned where some desperate last stand must have ended. Some people are hard at work clearing it; others step neatly around, going about their business.
The work crews are made up of all sorts: old men with bent backs and young girls with arms freckled from the sun. There are dwarves with dust in their beards, tieflings with ash caught in the grooves of their horns, even half-orcs hauling blocks of stone as if they weigh no more than bread loaves. They all wear a swatch of Baldurian blue fabric pinned to their shoulders, the only thing setting them apart from those passing them by in their regular lives.
For a moment, Vermillia wonders who these people are. Convicts, maybe, earning their way back into society’s good graces? Refugees grateful to earn a little coin by lifting a shovel? Are they being paid for their labor, or are they merely civic-minded volunteers? That last notion draws an involuntary sniff from her. Vermillia has never trusted altruism.
Regardless of who they are, the rubble diminishes under their hands all the same.
Involuntarily, a grim pleasure and pride in her half-remembered home town fills her. As Jaheira often says, it's a ruthless, impudent place, and that's why Vermillia likes it. Even after the Netherbrain, mindflayers in the streets and detritus crashing from the sky, it rebuilds.
I’m like Baldur's Gate, she thinks. It takes more than the end of the world to end me.
Passing the fountain, Vermillia catches sight of one of Enver’s coronation posters, half-shredded on a wall. The paper hangs in ragged strips, one corner plastered flat by dried rain, another flapping faintly in the breeze. Before she can think the better of it, she crosses and carefully pries it up.
From the page, the young Archduke is flawless: there’s no scar on his chin, no sunken bruises beneath his eyes. He is haloed with light, like he really might save the city.
(Like he could have done what Vermillia did.)
She studies the painted face for a long moment, weighing it against the memory of him seated at the edge of his bed, crossbow across his knees. The contrast catches in her chest, unexpectedly tender. When she knew him before, did he ever look the way he does on the poster? She doesn’t remember.
Suddenly, a passing worker recognizes her and shouts, “Oi! Hero lady! The missus is on her way over with sticky buns. Stick around a minute and we’d both be honored to share ’em with you, maybe shake your hand.”
It takes Vermillia a moment to realize she’s being addressed. Hero lady. She glances over her shoulder, as if the title might belong to someone else. But the man is grinning at her, dust in his teeth, eyes earnest as a dog’s.
“Alright,” she says finally, and seats herself with deliberate composure on a half-ruined bench nearby to wait. She crosses one ankle over the other as if she has accepted invitations like this her entire life. A few minutes pass, and presently a stout little goodwife arrives, a covered tray carried in both arms.
The worker’s hand, when he clasps Vermillia’s, is sweaty and caked in dirt, grit grinding faintly against her skin. His wife’s is small and a bit too moist for comfort, her grip enthusiastic to the point of compression. Vermillia allows it all with an expression that might almost be warmth, if one squints.
But the sticky bun they give her is sweet and decadent, spiced to perfection and frosted in little dollops of white, sugar-spun icing. Cinnamon blooms against her tongue when she tastes it. Butter. A trace of nutmeg.
The goodwife beams as if she herself has been crowned. Such a simple creature, Vermillia thinks, with something like disdain and another something like envy.
“For what you did,” the woman says, breathless. “For all of us.”
Vermillia chews thoughtfully, eyes drifting back to the blue swatches pinned to shoulders, to the rubble shrinking under calloused hands. She thinks of Enver’s voice at the window— we could have done it— and of the Elder Brain sinking into black water.
The bun is absurdly good.
“Mm,” she says, swallowing. “You’re very welcome.”