Critical Role: Vox Machina--Stories Untold

Under Golden Boughs

Martin Cahill

By the time I was born, there was no more Calamity. There was only the silence of a world brought low by war. Just the held breath of survivors, waiting to see if destruction would return. The absence of gods, who, in compromise, left to save what they could.

The earth reeked of death, the sky scorched with fire. Even the very ley lines of Exandria shook and quivered, as fragile as glass, terrified in their own way.

Exandria was a smoking ruin. Though it yet lived, it would be ages before it thrived once more.

Before he left beyond the gates his siblings made for themselves, my creator came to the world he loved so much one last time.

And there, he planted me.

I can tell you only what I recall, and what I recall is very little. But there will always be something about the thought of my progenitor that sends me back to the moment of my own creation: Why did he make me? And what did he wish for me?

In the deep roots of myself, where all my feelings and thoughts live, if I try very hard, I can conjure the image of him at my planting. You, whose mortal eyes are not made for it, cannot stare directly into the sun. But I, whose body was made for my creator’s light, can vaguely recall the details of him.

There was weariness in him, though you’d not know it by looking. There was a meagerness to his core, which pulsed with frenzied brightness, but to me, it was clear he ached. And though no mortal could discern them, there were wounds within his molten visage that would not heal for generations, patches of darkness swallowed and held away from the world he loved.

My creator. My parent. The Dawnfather. Oh, my father, shattered from a long, heartbreaking war.

Within his corona, a crown that is the sun itself, there is light. Fire. Destruction. Creation. Judgment. Severity. But gentleness, too. And yes, kindness.

As I was lowered into the scorched, blackened earth, high in the mountains, that was what I remembered most: even the supreme sun may handle the smallest thing with tender care. Hands, each a burning bonfire, buried me deep into the soil. His divine warmth wrapped around me like a swaddling blanket.

How long he stood there after, I could not say. Not that I could even think yet, let alone speak. That would come later. But I can imagine it, his loneliness. His unfiltered rage. A shadow to my father’s sun.

My father stood there for a long time and, in doing so, showed me what my tasks were to be: To watch. To witness. To stand for as long as I could. To shine, regardless of the dark. And, in shining, to see and know all around me.

Of course, he left at some point. I couldn’t tell you when or why. I imagine he heard, from somewhere beyond the stars, the words of his siblings, calling him home before the closing of the divine gates, wrought of pure will. Or perhaps it was the plea of a faithful, beseeching his light and aid. I know it was most likely some other horror that needed his might, but I’ll always hope for him to find joy when he expects conflict.

Either way, he left. And before he did, he laid a massive, hot palm across my planting site. I can hear his sigh even now, as though sound were steel, carved into my very heart.

To hear a god exhausted.

Someday, my limbs would be large enough to hold him. For even the sun needs comfort and rest. But then I was still but a seed and could do nothing.

I can see him standing now, lighting every angle of the Alabaster Sierras, like the dawn.

And like every dawn, he leaves.

The light fades, and in my seed, I slumber, dreaming of sweet, sweet sun.

Like those who raise their voices in worship, scattered throughout the city around me, I have never known exactly what purpose my father had for me, but, like them, I hoped. Hoped to one day know. Hoped to one day fulfill it, to make him happy and proud.

But I believe I can say with assurance that what began to happen to me in my slumber was something he had not and could not have anticipated.

Yes, I began to grow, unfurling from my seed in fits and starts, nourished by rain and light, the nutrients of the dark earth. Yet, there too was something else in the soil. Something different. Something divine.

For didn’t the blood of the Knowing Mistress water this earth, coagulated and still beneath the surface? Didn’t some small part of the oblivion that was defeated linger here, flaring in long stretches of starless shadow? And even my father—hadn’t his divine gold lit the valley and mountains like a pyre with his wrath?

All this divinity, blood and shadow and light, it had changed the very earth I had been planted in.

And so, as I grew from the sustenance all growing things need, there was another nourishment that I drank in. The taste of myth itself became a part of my core. When those legends found root within me, I began to change in ways beautiful and unexpected.

With the blood of the Knowing Mistress, my mind began to form. Thought and cognition. Reason and emotion. Idea and memory. All churning and braiding together, carving pathways through me, as though consciousness were a carpenter’s knife that, year by year, defined me with care. Each sunrise, I awoke with new understandings of my existence and Exandria at large. Leaves fell, and I knew it as gravity, autumn, color, and weight. Flowers budded and bloomed across me, and I knew metabolism, sunlight, stars, summer, heat, and beauty. Snow accumulated on my bare crown, and I knew cold, slumber, hunger, winter, and want. I began to know this world in its complexity and reveled in the education.

At times, memories of the Calamity would burn in me, that horror and heartbreak of the ages, when cities fell from the sky and the air itself was aflame. From them, like the Knowing Mistress, I knew sorrow.

From the deep shadow of an oblivion I had never met but feared nonetheless, I came to know dread. Though I knew it was chained once more, in a space beyond reach of mortal and god alike, I could still taste it in my roots. Its unending fury, its terrible hate, its mindless hunger . . . whatever it was, it left a stain on Exandria, a world it could not help but yearn for, for no reason other than it was made to devour. Months would pass before a vision from its smoking shadow would rear inside of my mind, fuliginous flashes of deepest umbra, a chaos so vehement and unsatisfied it could drink the sky dry of stars and still wish for more. And yet, this fear, it was an education. Especially coming from an alien being I could think of only as my parent’s very antithesis. As I was born in sun, so, too, I came to understand the shadow.

And as the years went by, as I grew from thin stalk to stolid sapling, from the smallest of timber to a budding tree, my very soul was brought to life by my father. The Dawnfather’s touch left divine magic in me—just the smallest spark, and yet . . . it was enough to feel through my roots the deep and loving song of the stone far beneath me, trading gossip in tectonic shifts. It was enough to taste life on the wind that flowed over my branches and around my growing trunk; in my slight golden leaves, I caught the flavors of birdsong and beetle buzz, learned the differences between rain cloud and snowstorm. And his spark within me, yes, gave me just enough reach to know and feel the ley lines of Exandria. Roads of pure magic, forged even before my father’s time, before even the elemental spirits began their joyful dance. If I really focused, I might be able to know their aurora, converging above me just as night arrived. And on those days of solstice, I did not even need to concentrate; the ley lines danced for me, an audience of one.

Ah, life. Beautiful, complicated, bittersweet life.

As I grew, I felt it, the terrible conundrum.

Life ended. Death came for all. Even with that spark of sunlight in me, I knew it the way the sea knows water, and the way fire knows heat: even I, someday, might die.

I had already shut myself off from all the little deaths I felt in and around me. The spider ensnared by the jay’s quick beak. The flowers that suffocated beneath the first snow. One evening I even saw the smallest pinprick of a star simply vanish, gone wherever stars go when they cease their blaze.

It changed me, that shadow of oblivion I had supped on. And yet I was not ungrateful for it—to know the void, to have some sliver of it within me, as I had a mind of knowledge and a soul of sunlight. For in holding it close, that darkness, I understood the promise of life: to rise with the light, to experience and know all there is, and to one day slumber in shadow.

I cannot imagine the conflict that took place on the soil where I am planted now. That restless, many-limbed oblivion; the bleeding breast of the Knowing Mistress, leaking wisdom; the Dawnfather’s blade like the core of the sun.

I am a marker of that conflict. As I grow, I know more than I ever dreamed I might.

I know history can change in the blink of a mortal eye.

And so it did.