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Fjord is already steadying himself against the tower’s wall when the crossbow bolt thunks into his back. The pain radiates, tugging on his muscles, and he looks down hazily to his breastplate. He’s confused, for a moment. He’s been able to keep taking it one step at a time, racing with the others to where they know Eodwulf’s hiding. Already one eye is half-blind with crusted blood, and he’s really going to need Jester to take a look at whatever evocation spell had burned through his forearm guard-- but the bolt is what stops him. Two steps up Caleb grabs Fjord’s left hand and with manic determination hauls his friend up his level, shouting something unintelligible and possibly Zemnian. Fjord can’t hear him. The vision of the narrow tower walls and Caleb’s panicked face is turning white at the edges, fuzzy. His endurance has been running out, and a wave of weakness cuts off any reply he might give. Fjord’s teeth numb as he registers Dwueth’var fall out of his grasp, and he’s falling, backwards, no one strong enough there to catch him and his skull cracks against a stone step and it all ends in a glorious burst of white.
--
Fjord finds himself again. The sand shifts under his elbows as he immediately pushes upwards. The grey ocean laps further down the shore, and for a lurching, nauseous moment he thinks he’s been cast back in time. But there’s no serpent’s-falchion waiting for him, and his throat doesn’t feel like fire and sandpaper. He splays a palm over his chest. There’s no blood. No pain, no wound, no burn scars or acid. Even his talons are in perfect condition.
He gets to his feet. He’s been stripped of armor or cape, even boots. The beach is dense and the ocean stretches forever, slate-colored. As Fjord turns around he sees the edge of a forest in winter.
A man is standing there. On instinct Fjord reaches for his sword’s hilt, but there is nothing to grasp, and his arm falls limp at his side. Slowly, the newcomer walks towards him, cloaked in a heavy mantle of black feathers. He stops just five feet from Fjord, appraising. Fjord can see the colorful glass beads woven into his hair and that single touch of personalization keeps Fjord standing still, ready to negotiate.
“Paladin of the Wildmother.” The stranger’s voice is raspy, otherworldly, yet young. “Strange to see you wash up on our shores so early.”
Fjord takes a second to breathe before responding. “Where am I?” he whispers. “Where is this place?”
“I am a ward of the Raven Queen,” says the man. “Once her champion.” He spreads his arms wide. “This is simply the first stage of the afterlife, unless your friends can revive you.”
All at once Fjord gets it. “I’m dead.” It’s an easy enough statement to ring true. The silence around them absorbs his voice, leaving only calmness behind.
“You fell,” says the champion, like it’s that simple. “There’s a chance still to revive you, but I would not be so cruel as to give you false hope. Sometimes fate cannot be reversed.”
“Revive me,” whispers Fjord. “How?”
“It’s not for you to decide. We will wait.” At this the champion sits, not minding the way the sand clumps into his feathers. Taking the cue Fjord sits as well, heart beating steadily.
Should I have a heartbeat if I’m dead? He thinks. He feels in working order. Fjord doesn’t know how long they sit-- it doesn’t feel more than an hour. Eventually the champion sighs and gets back to his feet. “Come with me.”
Fjord stands with him. “That’s it, then?” He can’t keep the disbelief out of his voice. All of his time, on the sea, with Vandren, and with the Mighty Nein, cut short in a single jolt. Will he never see them again? As a half-orc, Fjord was under no illusions he’d live longer than his family, but he doesn’t think it’s selfish to want more.
“I cannot control what fate’s decided for you.” The man begins walking, and with a last backwards glance Fjord follows. “Don’t worry. You’ll see them again, when it’s their time.”
“Are you sure? Is that how it works?” Dulled anxiety tries to find its way into Fjord’s brain, but something about the forest they’re now walking through pushes it back.
He can’t be certain but the champion sounds like he’s smiling. “I’m sure.”
This is the Raven Queen’s domain, Fjord remembers. Does the goddess of death grant a personal audience to all that pass through her gates? Will she be kind? A smaller part of Fjord thinks, will it hurt?
“We’re almost there. Then you’ll be on your way.” Possibly sensing Fjord’s nerves, the champion continues, “You will see the process is not as--”
“No, sorry,” says a sudden voice, half-laughing. “Shit. Well, sorry guys, I guess-- yeah, we’ll have to walk that one back a little. That’s on me.”
The Raven Queen’s champion has frozen, his head tilted like he’s listening. The voice has echoed out of everywhere, surrounding them. Then it all fades to silence.
“Did you hear that?” asks Fjord, stepping closer to his companion. Immediately he sees the problem: the man’s facial expression does not shift, his eyes don’t snap back to Fjord. His chest rises and falls with breath but there’s no spirit under it. Fjord whirls around, the forest by nature is eternally still and quiet, but now it is unnaturally so. Experience with the otherworldly, divine and terrible, is not out of Fjord’s repertoire, but not this. This is something beyond, and animal instinct he’d thought trained out of him slams into his mind to panic, and.
All of the planes of existence slide off their shelves like porcelain plates.
All he sees if a flash of light and a rushing wind.
Every tree breaks into ribbons, twisting in on each other, every sinew and bone of each creature tangled and vibrating like cello strings, like the glowing threads of the Beacon, but multiplied and certainly not holy. It doesn’t hurt because pain isn't a concept that exists. Fjord feels his soul evaporate, and that’s fine, because he never existed either.
--
When the world re-knits, Fjord jolts and raises his elbows from the table he’s sitting at. He’s solid again, and nothing is dreamlike.
The table itself is an odd shape, a sort of diamond, where his side and the side across from him slant together to a coffin-like edge. The walls look like stone, but slightly unreal, and purple light is splayed across them from somewhere. Above his head is a series of metal riggings, painted black, the purpose of which is unclear.
There’s someone sitting directly to his right, in an etched alcove at the table’s other end, a small wooden screen propped up between them. It’s not nearly high enough to obscure any of his features. Fjord can vaguely see the tops of papers attached to its inside. As he moves again, to verify that he can, his hand knocks against a similarly wooden tray, leather-lined with many dice inside.
Fjord can’t speak for the moment. He still feels like a hunted deer and the afterlife interruption and lights-from-nowhere and disturbing teleportation certainly isn’t helping.
“Hey, do you need a moment? It’s okay.” Fjord turns to the speaker, a human man with hair down to his shoulders, wearing a strange thin shirt and a heavier vest overtop. He’s smiling apologetically, expression focused as he leans forward. “Sorry about that, it’s, ah-- that technically shouldn’t have happened.”
“What,” is all Fjord can think to say.
“You shouldn’t have died. That was our fault, sorry.”
Fjord looks over the man. He doesn’t seem dangerous, but appearances aren’t enough to go on. “Is this the real afterlife?” he asks softly. He doesn’t have the most concrete knowledge of religion but none of this is matching up with any folktale or sermon he’s ever heard of. “Who… are you?”
“I’m Matthew Mercer,” the man says, all matter-of-fact. “I’m a-- no, well, my job wouldn’t make any sense to you and it isn’t important right now anyway. Uh, what is relevant, is that.” He pauses for a second. “I don’t think I can sugarcoat this. I am the god of your universe.”
“What,” says Fjord again.
“I made it up. All of Exandria. That’s the easiest way I can think to explain all of this, but it is the truth. Technically.”
“So you’re… a god.” This is a normal fucking human man and Fjord is having trouble processing. It reminds him in a way of the Traveler, watching Jester giggle and talk to a spirit that isn’t there-- until a hooded figure protects her in battle. “Did you make up all of the other gods too?”
“Mostly,” says Mercer. “Some of them are more established in… other lore, but for the purposes of this, yes I did.”
“So this is the real afterlife.”
“Well, no. Not for you. Your process with the Raven Queen, that was the afterlife for you.” Mercer raises his arms and gestures around the room. “This is just our normal, I guess dimension here. Would it help to think of it as a plane of existence? Like that.”
This makes some degree of sense, although Fjord can’t think of why he’s being told it. He can see heavy closed doors on the far side of the room. “Ah, so.” Fjord picks up the dice tray for a second. “Our, our existence takes place inside yours.” He shakes the tray and then sets it back down.
“That’s a way to think about it. There’s no real correct way to say this, but here you don’t actually exist? You’re a creation of my friend Travis. I know you’re your own person, but that’s in Exandria, here you don’t--”
“I don’t exist,” cuts in Fjord, calm. He’s not the best at reading people but he can tell Mercer is telling the truth. Not out of trust, but because he can feel it, his lack of spirit or soul. He has no idea what eldritch energy is keeping him, or whatever remains here to sit and talk and breathe, but it is not where he belongs. He watches his hands shake distant from the sensation.
“Why am I here?” he asks after a long moment. “I died, didn’t I? Why me? Did you… need me for something?” Despite the situation the old hopeful feeling comes back, of being chosen.
“No, you’re here because, well.” Mercer shrugs, all what-can-you-do. “We fucked up. You shouldn’t have died to that crossbow bolt in the first place because, um. You’re a half-orc.”
“Are you giving half-orcs… immunity…. To that now?” How should he be acting here? This guy being god, singular, apparently, makes sense to Fjord in the same way everything else has so far. But the casualness is astounding. There’s nothing he can sense that would signal he needs to manipulate or charm this man. Everything is so out-in-the-open.
A thought strikes him. “We? Are there more of you?”
“Kind of.” Mercer leans back in his chair, contemplative. “You see the other seats around the table? Those, and the seat you’re in, are for my friends. We get together every week and, well, play around in my universe. It’s still my creation. But they get to be people in it.” For the first time he looks more than uncomfortable in passing. “One of them plays you.”
“I still don’t understand.” Fjord feels like he’s floating, like with U’katoa or the Wildmother. “I don’t think I’m dreaming, but none of this makes sense. Exandria is a game to you? You control us?”
Fjord’s heard of the goddess of destiny, and of course the reincarnation of the drow. The threads of fate he’d personally seen in the Beacon were distant, wherever they stretched from beyond even the power of the Luxon. It seems he now knows the source.
Mercer stands up and leans to pluck one of the dice off Fjord’s tray. “You see this? This is the d20 that Travis was using tonight. Whenever you want to hit an enemy, or persuade a stranger, or any action like that, we roll for it.” The die thunks against the bottom of the tray and comes up in a three. “See, back on Wildemount, you would have just failed to hit whoever you were attacking. I get to describe exactly how that goes down, but it’s just chance.”
The process is so simple and hollow. Some of the confusion breaks inside him. “So you all use random chance to decide how our lives play out.”
Mercer’s smile is pained. “I don’t want you to think you don’t have free will. Fjord-the-character doesn’t, it’s whatever Travis decides to do, but you as a real person, in Exandria, you’re making your own choices.”
“But I’m not,” insists Fjord. “None of us are.” He gets up and paces around the table’s chairs under Mercer’s watchful eye. On further inspection it’s clear who sits where. There’s a tiny figurine of Frumpkin, a miniature of a spiked lollipop, a huge silver flask. And dice, always dice. He stops at Jester’s seat-- or whoever controls Jester-- directly across from Mercer. “We’re all being puppeted.” There’s only eight seats at this table. Who controls everyone else in the world outside of the Mighty Nein?
He looks up at Mercer again with a quiet horror at home inside him.
“You control everything, don’t you?” he whispers. Before Mercer can answer, Fjord continues. “When I threw the falchion into the forge, I thought for the first real time I was taking control of my life. I was rejecting what had been chosen for me, and I entered my oath with the Wildmother knowing it was my own decision. It was my choice. But it wasn’t. If this is real, then none of my life has been.”
“You were never supposed to know,” says Mercer. His wry apologeticism from earlier has faded into something more serious. “And you won’t know. If your free will feels real, Fjord, does it matter if it’s true or not?”
Fjord places his palms flat on the table, wanting something to take some of his weight. “I don’t know if I have an answer to that.” Stylized neatly into the table’s surface is a sort of logo, another die with the words Critical Role. Fjord’s not sure he wants to know. “This Travis, did he decide everything about me?”
Mercer drums his fingers on the table. “I mean, when I asked everyone what type of character they’d like to play, he sent me your backstory and everything.” He clasps his hands together in a steeple and directs them towards Fjord. “But I don’t want to get too far away from the point here. The point is, you shouldn’t have died, I’m sorry about that, and this is just the in-between before I officially walk back the timeline. And I know that none of this is easy to hear, and I’m sorry about that too.”
He sounds so sincere it undercuts some of the building anger inside Fjord. “I died for nothing.”
“Like I said, it was a mistake. I know how-- gah, how insensitive that sounds. I mean, we all make mistakes, that’s part of the game. But a player death? That’s a huge deal, it wouldn’t be. It wouldn’t be fair not to consider all of the, the actual factors that go into something like that. So we all agreed to just retcon it and come back next week.”
Reassurances are doing nothing. Fjord thinks about every pint of blood he’s lost, of scraping down his tusks with a nail file at eleven years old. He sent me your backstory and everything. A character. Sabien’s betrayal, dying over and over in U’katoa’s nightmares. The reality of what happened to him. Of what happened to Beau, to… to Caleb, gods, to Nott -- same as him, the waters of their respective drownings clawing into their lungs as the light above gets dimmer, dimmer.
Dice rolls. Molly’s broken body in a permafrost grave outside of Shady Creek Run. They’d met Caduceus right afterwards.
Fjord’s talons scrape through the table’s varnish.
“How can I go back?” he demands. “Knowing-- knowing all this.” He looks up. “Why would you tell me?”
Mercer holds his hands up, palms placating. He looks worried, but not scared. Objectively Fjord could beat this man in a physical fight, so the lack of fear scares him more than anything else so far. “I know you’re angry. I’d be angry, too.”
“I’m not sure that begins to cover it.”
“It’s just something that happens, when things need to be walked back. I-- I don’t know if I’m crazy either, okay? It’ll be fine. Listen, no one but me even knows this is happening, and once I say the timeline is reversed it’ll be so and you won’t even know about this. You’ll just, appear. Back at that moment in the Rexxentrum tower, as the bolt hits. But this time, with your relentless endurance.”
“You’re going to make me forget,” says Fjord.
“There will be nothing to forget.”
“No.”
“You have to go back one way or another,” Mercer says, sounding miserable. “I can’t just erase you from existence, there’s more people invested in Exandria, in your story, than just me. So many others. You can certainly try other options, but I don’t know if you have any. At least this way, you can go back to your family.”
The words ring emotional and Fjord hates that they work. Even now it feels out of place to not have the others at his side. Expositor Beauregard would trailblaze ahead, Caleb choosing his own questions carefully at just the right moments, Caduceus’ calm understanding to keep them all peaceful. It’s them that he’s fighting for. It’s them that he’s continuing on for, really.
Mercer must see Fjord’s turmoil, because he tosses something over the table. Fjord fumbles for a moment and then catches it, the d20 from earlier. The small die and its carved numbers looks alien in his palm.
“That’s the one Travis rolls,” Mercer tells him again. His tone is back to carefully hopeful. “That’s your fate, right there. I can’t say it’s going to change anything, but if you’d like, you can roll for it. To be able to keep it in-game. I mean, in your world. And maybe one day when the campaign is done, I’ll make you remember. That I can promise you.”
“Roll for it,” Fjord echoes. It’s a measure of control over his own destiny. The respect doesn’t go unnoticed. Fjord knows that he won’t remember, understands even through the pain that this god can’t afford him that luxury. But the opportunity to, one day…
Without hesitation he lets the die slide off his hand to roll across the table.
Ten.
“Don’t worry,” says Mercer, laughing. “That’s a success.” He clears his throat. “So, last we left off,”
--
Two steps up Caleb grabs Fjord’s left hand and with manic determination hauls his friend up his level, shouting something unintelligible and possibly Zemnian. Fjord can’t hear him. The vision of the narrow tower walls and Caleb’s panicked face is turning white at the edges, fuzzy. His endurance has been running out, and a wave of weakness cuts off any reply he might give.
No. The orcish blood in his veins cries out and he viciously shakes off the moment of dizziness. Fjord presses his hand further to his chest and concentrates as best he can, the healing force of the Wildmother soothing the wound. He’s nowhere near alright, but it’s enough to keep going, to shout for Jester or Caduceus.
“Fjord? Fjord?” Caleb is shaking him.
“Get a cleric,” he grits out. Caleb fumbles for his copper wire. Using Dwueth’var Fjord props himself up, and with a cry he yanks the crossbow bolt out of his back. Something falls out of his sleeve onto the steps. A moment later one of Caduceus’ beetles lands on his armor and his flesh re-knits, strength surging back through him.
“Alright?” Caleb asks.
“Alright,” replies Fjord. He ducks as fast as he can allow to pick up the item that fell, scrutinizing it for one precious moment. A die? An oddly-shaped one as well, and not one Fjord remembers he’s had.
He can’t lose focus, tucking the die into his pocket. “Let’s go get this bastard.” Fjord leverages a foot on the stone steps and runs, rapidly catching up to where the rest of his family is fighting. Not today, he thinks, as he gets closer to Beau’s fists and Jester’s spiritual weapon and Yasha’s cleaver.
Not when they need me.