I've been wanting to say my own piece about the repeated calls I keep seeing for Vax to let Keyleth mourn him, either by calling off his ravens or, worse, by breaking his pact with the Matron and dying more fully, beyond the reach of resurrection, so Keyleth can finally accept that he's gone. It both places full blame on Vax for Keyleth's choices, which are in turn rooted in her refusal to afford him any agency in his own choices; and affords no respect for Vax's choice to honour his oath and sacrifice his life for his family, while giving full respect to Keyleth's choice to stay mad about it for thirty years.
I have no problem with Keyleth feeling this way, because she isn't the one calling for Vax to die more comprehensively because his death would be easier for her to deal with than his absence and therefore Vax, the Matron, and all of the dead of Exandria should have to accommodate that, no matter the cost to them. I have full sympathy for the way the nature of Vax's continued existence, his ability to act on the physical world in ways an evil arch-mage can wager his life's work on, makes it exceedingly difficult for her to see through to what is nevertheless true: That Vax is as dead as he needs to be for her to grieve for him and move forward.
Vax is already beyond the reach of resurrection, either because in his celestial form he is not “dead enough” for it to work on him, or because he wouldn't be a “willing creature” even if it did. Just because Keyleth will not accept this does not mean Vax should have to be wiped from existence in order for her to get it through her head that he is not permanently coming back.*
That's not fair to Vax and, above-table, it's wildly unfair to Liam. The idea that he should have to take the ending he so lovingly crafted for his character, out of his own grief at the time, and consign him instead to dust—because Matt sent Keyleth a raven every day, and then Marisha turned it into the reason Keyleth can never get over Vax—is just mind-bendingly awful. I'm fine with Marisha sticking to her guns about Keyleth never getting over Vax. I wish Keyleth would find peace instead—she has such a long life of loss ahead of her, it does not bode well if this is how she takes the first one—but I am not going to knock a firm choice, as long as the player owns it and isn't putting it on someone else. Liam also made a firm choice, hers shouldn't cancel his out.
We all grow new selves around our losses, That is the way of it. Keyleth's current incarnation is a creature of anger, but she seems aware of it, and so far she's weaponised it to fairly noble ends. She will not wear her heart on her sleeve—Matt played her as cagey where Vax was concerned, and Marisha has been careful to distinguish between the front she puts on and what she actually feels—and she seems terrified of her own hope.
Well, I hate to tell her but that hope never leaves you. That Vax exists in a state from which she thinks he could be recovered only amplifies what is there regardless—the wish that the person you lost could still be with you. Vax's unique circumstances did not create it, and that wish will not go away if he ceases to exist (or just stops sending the damn ravens and stays in his lane). All she will have lost is what she did have left of him. And the reminders of him will still come for her, from everywhere, from the simplest, the stupidest, the most unexpected places, and whenever the fuck they want to.
If that one particular raven stops coming, Vax will become every raven she ever sees, anywhere. And if it isn't a raven, it will be the snowdrops, or a song she hears, a scent she catches, a colour he loved to see on her, the cup he always drank from, some vegetable that was overcooked one time and his rant about it was so unhinged she hears it every time she eats even a perfectly prepared one, a dumb random factoid about pens she only knows because he told her and she can never pick one up without thinking about it, a joke she hears that he would love and the immediate thought that “I have to tell Vax this one!” that reaches her brain before the part of her that knows can head it off. If the Matron frees him and he ceases to exist, that wish will fucking endure. There is no degree of acceptance in the world, no measure of time, that can kill it.
It was there in the light of the Big Moon that Orym sat under on the deck of the skyship when he pulled out his sending stone to talk to Dorian and tell him “I wish you were here,” before turning to Will in the sky and saying, “I miss you, too.” He had died himself only days earlier, with the thought of seeing Will again in his head, and the stone that connects him to Dorian in his hand. Will has been explicitly beyond the reach of resurrection from the beginning, we never knew him, and it still took Orym six years to be comfortable with his feelings for someone else, Will has brushed up against him in his dance with Dorian at every turn. He always will. And that's okay.
It will be this way for Keyleth, and that will be okay too.
Destroying Vax only robs him of the chance to fulfil the sacred duty he pledged himself to, the Matron of her Champion, and the rest of the world of the comfort he brings them in death. It does nothing for Keyleth but force her to see something clearly that she should have come to understand anyway, and then she'll realise that, and he will only have been sacrificed to her refusal to see it otherwise.
* Unless, you know, he does come back, and then all those ravens and the occasional drop in for a bit of rescue (from which he ends up needing to be rescued) retroactively become signs that the thread connecting him to her had never been completely severed; and her “inability to get over him” will be reframed as a “refusal to give up on him” that the story has both validated and rewarded. But let's pretend we don't have to think about that.
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