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“Go on.”
From where she sat in the wagon, Strix gave Simon a nod of encouragement and a nudge with her foot. Somewhat impeded by the wagon’s jostling to and fro as it rolled out of Barovia, he walked to where Paultin waited with an outstretched hand, curled up next to a pair of wine casks. Paultin settled Simon in next to him and looked back up at Strix, his expression completely unreadable. A long moment passed in which neither of them spoke. Then, slowly, he turned to face the opposite wall, uncorked one of his many bottles of wine, and began to drink.
Strix had forgotten that about him, the way he would retreat, bottle or flask in hand, into his own head for hours at a time. In her memories he was always laughing, playing music, not-quite fending off Evelyn and always ready with some clever quip that never failed to make her roll her eyes. Simon, this Simon, had known Paultin for such a short time; she couldn’t remember if he’d had a chance to see him in one of his moods. She wondered if Paultin was everything he’d expected, after all the stories she’d told of him over the years.
Evelyn too was different than Strix remembered. It had been a shock to see her, a being of metal, wood, and leather wake up and brush off the dirt from the grave; somehow, despite the ring Strix had worn on her finger all the long years Evelyn had been gone, she had managed to forget how she had looked in her final days. She had remembered her only as flesh and blood, always smiling and talking about Lathander this and that (Butthander, how long had it been since she’d last thought of their old joke?), always a bit too ready with a hug, though Strix found she no longer minded in the least. Evelyn, now, sat out on the front of the wagon with Juniper, uncannily motionless except for when she would occasionally lean over to whisper something to Waffles as she lumbered along after them.
Nowhere, though, was the difference more pronounced than the one Strix now saw with Diath. He had been with her almost since she found herself in Faerûn, and despite her unwavering belief in those bygone days that they were all one mishap away from utter disaster, there had been some part of her that couldn’t imagine that he could ever be gone.
She had dreamed of him for years after she heard the news from Ravenloft. He would breeze right in through her hut’s front door, completely nonchalant, and chide her about the mess, or for keeping Simon around, or for any number of things, and they would bicker like nothing had changed. Each morning after, before she came crashing back to reality, there was a brief, euphoric moment between sleep and waking where she believed it was real, that Diath had managed the impossible and lived, because that was what he did. He took the impossible, took things like forging four broken people into a family, and made them possible, even made them look easy.
Diath, now, clung to her robes as they sat side by side in the back of the cart, his face pressed into her shoulder. He was shaking, crying, gasping out apologies she could barely understand. She had forgotten–and how she hated herself for forgetting!–that something had weighed on him in his final days which had pushed him near to breaking, and she had been waiting for him to talk when he was ready. She had believed, mistakenly, that they had had so much more time. She wished she could recall something, anything that he had said in all his years of comforting her while she was crying; maybe then she would know how to help him now. All she could remember, though, was that no matter how silly or stupid the thing that had upset her had been, he had always been there.
“Diath,” she started, “everything’s”–her voice caught in her throat and for a moment she couldn’t bring herself to continue. “We’re all together again,” she said, wrapping her arms around him and pulling him closer. He was still shaking. “Things will be fine.” She made the promise in the hope that it was what he needed to hear, though she herself wasn’t sure it could ever be true. “I’ll make sure of it.”