#de rolos

perpetually vexin’ & percyin’

Laudna is Vesper de Rolo who was killed by the Briarwoods and brought back, maybe as a Dhampir or just other necromantic stuff making her undead. She escaped and never returned. 

May or maybe not knows about her brother and sister.

Reasons why:

Black hair with white streak

Posh accent

Vesper cause Percy names his kid after her

Also eldest making her feel responsible.

5 is my lucky number and I haven’t said anything about it yet, so…”bit of a crit thing” is my, I dunno, 2/3-written? fic in which an assassination attempt leads to Cassandra being Feebleminded, which leads to Percy and Kynan going on a search through the castle for her. 

I had a nice narrative device (I think?) in which I alternated scenes with close pov to Percy with an exterior, omniscient narrator keeping track of Cassandra with line like, “Keep in mind that she has been here before - this familiar maze of stone and swords and shadow, but also: this scared, this trapped, this furious and flinching and helpless.” 

There was something going on, metaphorically, with Percy being important to Cassandra’s past and Kynan important to her future (I still kinda ship it, or at least friendship it), but it wasn’t entirely working.

I also wanted to suggest, in the omniscient narration and then clearer at the end once they find and Greater Restoration her (Pike is around, fortuitously), that Delilah did this to her at least once, and probably more than once, as a punishment and teaching tool. (It’s much easier to retrain someone’s instincts when instincts are all they have.)

I’m almost certainly not going to finish it, so I’ll spoil it: they find her in Percy’s workshop, because it’s the only room in the castle that never belonged more to the Briarwoods’, or to their people, than it did to its original occupant. Ripley mostly worked elsewhere, and that room was so firmly Percy’s, growing up, that it was a neutral spot for all the other siblings.