Keyleth hadn't even seen Zahra come in, and she started a little at the familiar voice. Her mind had been racing, thinking over when it had been a sword and Grog. Pike had set it right then. (What she wouldn't give to have Pike here. Or to be where Pike was, more rightly.) How had she done it? Keyleth could remember a spell, remember Grog still and cold and then abruptly back with them and free of influence. But she couldn't quite remember how Pike had done it. How did she forget something so important at a moment like this? How was she coming up so short whenever she was needed?
Zahra got there first. "Yes," Keyleth breathed, relieved and chagrined, to not have known, at the same time. "I can. I have it prepared. I just ... it's fine. I can do it." The spell. She'd done it before, but not for something like this. Souls and spirits - it was Pike's job. Keyleth didn't understand them the same way, didn't have faith. What if she failed? She couldn't. She couldn't keep Percy alive in the first place, she couldn't get them home through a damned tree. She had to do this. "Give me the gun," she told Kashaw, swallowing and making her voice resolute.
When Kash handed it over, Keyleth felt her skin crawl. The gun felt too heavy and unnatural. She set it down in front of her, preparing for a moment and focusing. The room, too bright and too strange and filled with uncomfortable amounts of people she didn't know well shifted, the brightness edging with shadows. Or a shadow. It was a living, terrifying thing, and she knew it. Orthax. Not physically there, exactly, but there nonetheless, tied by strings of shadow and will to the gun in front of her. And at the center of the seething mass of him was what she could feel was Percy, diminished and being eaten away by the thing that held him.
Keyleth made a soft, wounded noise without realizing it, but she rallied, hands flexing and reaching. To everyone else in the room, she was grasping at nothing, but to her view, she reached for the shadows that bound Percy to the shadows, and the shadows to the weapon. It was difficult to grip, and she heard a voice, familiar and sinister, protesting that she couldn't take what was his. Keyleth ignored it, because it could fuck RIGHT off, Percy wasn't Orthax's. The shadows moved and slid, slippery and strong, but Keyleth held on, and the spell flashed and she pulled - as much with her will as with her hands. Abruptly the shadows tore away, dissipating, and the spell gave out with a flash. The names that had been written on the gun disappeared, along with the heavy, oppressive feeling of power it carried with it.
And Percy, the bright, damaged spirit of him, was free, and started to drift away. The sight the spell had granted that let her see him was already fading, and Keyleth panicked. "PERCY!" she screamed. "DON'T YOU DARE JUST LEAVE! I don't know where I am and you need to get back and explain it right now! We NEED you! DON'T MAKE US EXPLAIN THIS TO YOUR SISTER! YOU KNOW HOW BAD WE ARE AT THAT. GET BACK HERE!" Her view of him faded in time for Keyleth to realize she was yelling into the air like an insane person and she flushed, but she was still scowling, staring into the spot where his spirt had been drifting. "Go, keep going," she told Kash. Her voice was quieter, but still speaking to someone no one else had seen was really there, and still more fierce than anything else, despite the fact that she'd stopped yelling. "Whatever world this is, it's worse if you're not in it, Percy."