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If Felix had to plan an ambush, he’d stage it here too. The air was thick and oppressive. In every direction there was lava. To his left, Sylvain muttered, “Gotta say, this isn’t where I’d pick to die.”
He traded looks with Felix: Sylvain unhappy but resolved, Felix tense but sympathetic as sweat slid down his temples. With a nod goodbye, Sylvain swung up onto his black horse.
That was the last Felix saw of him for a while.
The enemy had them pinned down in the valley. Felix couldn’t spot the snipers through the plumes of smoke and ash, and Dimitri was a golden, catastrophic force, making it impossible to shield him effectively. In an attempt to seize an elevated expanse of blackened rock, Felix almost got his arm cleaved off by a mounted soldier. Then both soldier and horse were hammered back by a blast of wind magic.
Felix huffed, looking for Annette. She wiggled her fingers back at him.
Lord Gwendel was visible to the north, surrounded by bannermen. Dimitri seemed intent on battering straight through; Felix had to forcibly hold him back by the shoulder while Annette urged, “Your Highness, please wait.”
The lava surrounding them was already bubbling. A second later, a column of sulfuric gas and flame spewed up from the ground.
Dimitri finally relented, wrenching himself out of Felix’s grasp. Felix drew his hand back inside the wall of his body. He felt exhausted by the heat, reflexively angry.
They waited out the inferno. Felix put himself between Annette and the fire and hid most of his own face behind his arm, skin getting scorched red and raw. The rocks burned against his boots. At least this position provided a decent vantage point. The professor was to the east with her giant radiant sword, hacking her way through. Ashe and his battalion were south, laying cover for Mercedes and hers. A white wing flashed through smoky sky. That left one more.
Felix searched until he saw it: Sylvain’s horse without its rider.
The earth inside of Felix froze over. Annette said, “Felix, go,” but Felix was already going.
He found two dead House Rowe soldiers, one of them impaled by half of Sylvain’s broken lance, and a live one with his axe raised.
It became clear why Sylvain’d run into trouble. The remaining soldier was big, nearly twice Felix’s size. Even the impact of his axe barely grazing Felix’s shoulder was enough to punch the breath from his lungs.
Felix darted past the axe, inside range. He slashed at the vulnerable opening under the soldier’s helmet. Blood sprayed out from the jugular vein in his neck.
Felix didn’t wait for the body to hit the ground. His senses converged: the stench of the volcano; steel hacking behind and above and ahead of him; the red of Sylvain’s hair indistinguishable from the cratered dirt beneath him or the blood leaking effortlessly through his armor and the side of his head.
Felix dropped to his knees. “Sylvain,” he said.
“Hi,” coughed Sylvain.
“Stop talking.” He scanned Sylvain’s injuries. The head wound itself wasn’t serious. Further below, however, the axe had carved through Sylvain’s abdomen. The gash there was deep and soft.
Felix looked away. He had no interest in learning what Sylvain’s insides looked like.
And Sylvain had not, in fact, stopped talking. “I told you it’s too hot,” he said, in a voice that scraped out of his bloody mouth.
“I told you to shut up,” Felix growled. “Don’t move or you’ll make it worse.”
Sylvain tried to touch his oozing stomach wound. Next he was going to retort, “Tell me how I can make this any worse.” Then he would die and Felix was going to have to eulogize Sylvain Jose Gautier, last of his bloodline, who wasted his final moments trying to get the last word in.
Instead Sylvain just gazed up at him. The shock was settling in. His pupils ate away the gold of his eyes as he stared into Felix’s face. He said something that sounded like, “Your hair looks nice today.”
Savage tenderness hit Felix like a stone dropping through a bottomless well.
Sylvain squeezed, without any actual strength, and only then did Felix realize he was holding Sylvain’s hand. It felt simultaneously like a massive, inseverable weight, and also light enough to drop. More than anything, it simply felt sticky with blood. It was going to be a slow death. Felix imagined a version of things where he could kneel there and support Sylvain’s head in his lap until it was done. But he had already allowed Dimitri to get too far ahead; Annette, too far behind.
Felix squeezed back and stood up and then—because anything else he could think of to provide Sylvain right then felt useless and agonizing and small—he settled for brushing a piece of hair away from Sylvain’s forehead.
Felix’s body hauled itself away. The deeper he went into the valley, the more disorienting all the fire. An arrow sliced past Felix’s cheek. It barely registered.
The next one, he definitely felt.
Felix’s shoulder twisted back from the force of the blow. The pain was quick and deep and shocking.
Stupid. How could he be so stupid. His fury rose above the agony of trying to stay standing. He’d let himself get separated and cornered. Hadn’t paid attention. He’d left something back there on the ground with Sylvain.
More House Rowe soldiers were approaching. Felix snarled and gripped his sword.
A third arrow found him before any of it mattered. He died quietly.
1
To his left, Sylvain muttered, “Gotta say, this isn’t where I’d pick to die.”
He looked at Felix, unhappy but resolved. Felix looked back with a pang of confused dread, and started to say, “Wait—”
Sylvain frowned. “What’s wrong?” He gestured at the army gathering above the valley, shimmering in the heat. “Besides the obvious, that is.”
Felix pushed aside the strange fog of emotional agitation. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just be careful.”
With a nod goodbye, Sylvain swung up onto his black horse.
Later, Felix almost got his arm cleaved off by a mounted soldier. Both soldier and horse were hammered back by a blast of wind magic. Annette wiggled her fingers back at him.
Felix’s heart immediately started racing. His breath slid into a clipped, deliberate pattern. He looked around for the new threat his body was responding to, but didn’t see one.
Then a thought sharpened in his brain and Felix almost choked.
“Stay with Dimitri,” he ordered Annette.
One dead House Rowe soldier, impaled by half of Sylvain’s broken lance. Sylvain, on his feet, wielded the other half with a grim, focused expression as he faced his last two opponents. Felix went straight for the one with the axe.
He recognized this soldier’s rhythm now. The axe missed Felix’s shoulder by an extra inch. Felix darted inside range and slashed at the vulnerable opening under the soldier’s helmet. Blood sprayed out from the jugular vein in his neck. Felix didn’t wait for the body to hit the ground. He whirled around, but the final soldier was dead too.
“Where the hell did you come from?” Sylvain panted.
Felix didn’t speak until he’d wrestled some control over himself. “It doesn’t matter. Where’s the rest of your battalion?”
“They stayed on their horses, unlike yours truly.”
Sylvain tossed aside his broken lance and stole one off a dead body instead. His hands shook with adrenaline.
“Are you hurt?” Felix asked, knowing how he sounded.
“I’m fine.” Sylvain climbed back onto his horse. Once mounted, he inhaled deeply and finally looked at Felix. “It won’t happen again.”
“Good,” Felix said.
That made Sylvain grin a little, like he knew something Felix didn’t. “His Highness still charging north?”
When Felix grunted back a yes, Sylvain said, “I can get you there.”
Felix’s thighs crushed uncomfortably against Sylvain’s in the saddle. He let the intensity of his relief crest over him as they rode on.
Then they found Annette’s small frame motionless against a rock. Then Dimitri’s much larger one, his right side burnt beyond recognition. Then Felix hurled himself off the horse to be sick and as Sylvain attempted to gather him back up they missed the fucking snipers again.
2
“It's obviously an ambush,” Felix spat out, at the exact same time the professor said, “We need to be ready for an ambush.”
The professor’s face didn’t change, but she somehow looked surprised. Personally speaking, Felix wasn’t surprised at all. Of course the same woman who seemed constantly to defy age and death and any of the negative effects of eating five dinners a day would be involved in a cosmic stunt like this.
It was too late to pull their forces back, and they were fundamentally unprepared to wage battle in this kind of geography. The professor assigned Felix to lead a small unit and cut around their enemy’s left flank. Get out of the valley as fast as possible before it became a killbox. Capture the high ground. Maybe don’t get killed, for once.
They fell into the same formation they’d always adopted as kids. Sylvain in front, Felix behind, Ingrid as lookout. Dimitri wasn’t here, but that had been true for years. The Dimitri who had played along in Sylvain’s games, and let Ingrid lead, and was gentle and forgiving when Felix was bratty and needy, had long been devoured by the Dimitri who preferred the love of the dead.
Felix finished dispatching a sniper who looked barely over eighteen just as Sylvain came riding back towards him, lance bloody. “I don’t like the look of the terrain ahead,” he said.
“Sylvain’s right,” Ingrid cut in. “The ground’s not stable, Felix. We should find another way around.”
“I know it’s not stable, it’s a fucking volcano,” Felix said, which earned him an impatient look from Sylvain and what he knew was a matching glare from Ingrid above. Fine. Felix tried again. “We’re wasting time here. We need to get out of this valley,” he said, painstakingly even, trying to convey the truth of what he was saying. Trying to convey every inch of I do not want you both to die.
Sylvain assessed him carefully, for long enough that Felix had to jerk his own gaze away.
Finally he said, “Alright,” and called up to Ingrid, “Time for another round of Felix Says.”
Ingrid laughed shortly.
Sylvain thumped his fist against Felix’s shoulder as he trotted past. All these old rituals they’d developed just so no one’d ever have to come out and actually say “I trust you.”
They were almost in the clear when the rocky ground beneath them erupted with a vengeance. The rest happened swiftly: Ingrid dropped like a smoking comet out of the sky. Their troops screamed as they burned. Sylvain’s suffering was silent, his horse rearing up, swallowed by the fire. Felix had just enough time to think, Fuck me, before he died too.
3
Felix’s solo attempt to kill Lord Gwendel was, you could say, a qualified success.
Maybe he was foolish for thinking the rest of the army would retreat once their commander fell. It was possible Felix’d never had a very honest understanding of why anyone would follow anyone else. His own loyalty was a pinned insect with wings, at once fragile and hardened by resin. His iridescent devotion and resentment, constantly shifting in the light.
Clouds of volcanic dust had turned the sky a vivid blue-violet. The sun was setting. It meant they were lasting longer this time around, at least. Maybe in this version, his old man’s promised reinforcements would actually fucking arrive.
Felix pushed a gloved fist into the ground and tried to propel himself back up onto his knees. All that accomplished was a level of pain that made his eyes water and his breath panicky and shallow. His legs weren’t working. He dragged himself forward on his stomach instead, inch by inch past the bodies of Lord Gwendel and half a dozen of his men, towards his sword.
He heard Ingrid’s clear voice, shouting, but couldn’t make out what she was saying.
The second voice was much closer: “You crazy bastard—”
Sylvain came running on foot, tall and blood-splattered and handsome. Felix wanted to scream. You’re the crazy bastard. Get back on your damn horse. What the hell did I do all this for, if you get yourself killed anyway?
Unable to speak, Felix just lay there. A hundred emotions phased rapidly across Sylvain’s hovering face; it made Felix dizzy.
When he came back to himself, he was on his back, gasping, and Sylvain was even closer still.
“Sorry, sorry,” Sylvain chanted under his breath, “I had to move you. Hang on, Felix.”
Felix resigned himself to watching Sylvain dredge up the memory of an amateur healing spell. It must’ve been over five years ago that Mercedes taught it to him, but these things came naturally to Sylvain, as much as he tried to leave all the good parts of himself to spoil. Felix wondered if he should tell him that. You wasted all that effort. You weren’t actually that good at being unlovable. Now seemed like as good a time as any.
The lance wound in Felix’s gut slowly closed. It didn’t do shit for the blood loss. Felix blinked up at the sky.
Get back on your horse, he repeated, hoping Sylvain would understand.
Sylvain looked into Felix’s face but saw something else.
He cupped Felix’s cheek in a large hand. The texture of his glove was grimy and rough and, realizing this, Sylvain ripped it off. The next touch was unbearably hot on Felix’s skin.
Sylvain thumbed over Felix’s dried tears and stroked down the length of Felix’s hair. It must’ve come loose while Felix had been fighting.
“Your hair looks nice today,” Sylvain said softly.
You absolute idiot, Felix thought, without knowing who he meant it for.
A second later, an arrow sunk into the side of Sylvain’s armor. Sylvain stared down at the blue fletching, stunned. By the time Sylvain staggered back to his feet, a second arrow had joined the first. Brandishing his lance, Sylvain turned to confront a foe Felix couldn’t see. Just once, just once Felix wanted to be the one to die first.
4
Felix was beginning to think he’d actually died the very first time, and it just turned out that the afterlife was more of the same tiresome war. Why not? Sylvain would think it was funny.
Ahead, Dimitri pushed on through the fire like a man self-immolating. He was still wearing that massive fur cloak in the middle of a literal battlefield of lava, as if he couldn’t stop making himself suffer in even this smallest, stupidest way. If Felix was dead, that meant somewhere above ground Dimitri was excavating his remains to lovingly consult. Or perhaps down here was the real Dimitri, and Felix was merely another shadow in the boar’s mind. Hadn’t this always been Dimitri’s desire anyway: an eternity of killing and dying and reliving and killing and dying and reliving?
Felix’s mistake, each and every time, was leaving Dimitri’s side. It was clear, now, how this trial was designed. Sylvain had to die for Dimitri. One way or another, they were all going to die for Dimitri.
Annette yelled, livid and heartbroken, when Felix ignored Sylvain’s riderless horse. He wanted to yell back. What did she even know about it? How many images of Sylvain, torn apart by axes and arrows and fire, had she planted away in her memory? Each time Sylvain came back, ready to die all over again in this hot, hateful place, was like a divine slap to the face.
Felix himself had never cared for religion, but he imagined what Mercedes would think. You think you’re being punished, Felix, she might say, in that voice of hers. But isn’t it also a gift, to be able to see him again?
Something like that.
In the end Dimitri fell anyway, gouged by two lances. The professor was the only one left, her composure finally broken and ceding to despair. Somewhere else, Sylvain was lying dead too. Dimitri’s eye flickered open and focused cloudily on the ground, then over to Felix.
Of course now you recognize me, Felix thought, and managed to crawl the rest of the way to Dimitri before they both finished dying.
5
“Gotta say,” Sylvain muttered, “this isn’t where I’d pick to die.”
This was the part where they looked at each other. Felix prepared himself. He felt his own anger and grief like some kind of explosive material packed inside his body. Someday it was going to detonate and overcome him entirely.
Sylvain swung up onto his black horse. This time he hesitated. He wore a different expression than all the iterations before: complicated and uncertain. Felix wasn’t sure what his own face looked like, to make Sylvain look back at him like that.
“Felix?” Sylvain said.
Felix was just so fucking tired. They had more than enough time to die. It wasn’t too much to ask for one extra minute.
Sylvain stayed mounted on his horse, so Felix had to get on his toes to reach him. He hauled Sylvain down by the worn leather collar of his gorget. Sylvain said, “Whoa,” but bent towards Felix easily.
Felix didn’t try to explain himself. He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against Sylvain’s with enough force to hurt. He grabbed a fistful of Sylvain’s hair too, for good measure. A gift, Felix repeated to himself, absurdly. So he unwrapped the details of Sylvain’s quickening breath on his cheek, the tension in Sylvain’s broad shoulders, the soft texture of Sylvain’s hair, the scent of him musky and alive. Sylvain made a gentle noise but said nothing else. When he gripped Felix’s shoulder to steady himself, the moment shifted—from Sylvain allowing himself to be held this way, to Sylvain clutching Felix back just as intently.
They stood like that for a few seconds, until it was clear they had a battle to either win painfully or lose gruesomely, and the rest of their army couldn’t just keep politely ignoring them.
Sylvain let go first. “Uh,” he said, at a miraculous loss for words.
Felix put a hand on Sylvain’s chestplate, where the heartbeat was enduring and strong, and shoved Sylvain back upright on his horse.
“I won’t stop trying,” he said.
Sylvain stared down at Felix. Then he laughed. “What? You won’t stop trying to kiss me? Alright, bring it on.”
Felix turned a dull red. “Whatever,” he said. “I’ll see you when it’s over.”
“See you later,” Sylvain said wonderingly.
-
Later, Felix almost got his arm cleaved off by a mounted soldier.
Then a lance flew through the air and embedded itself in the soldier’s chest. A blast of wind magic threw the soldier the rest of the way off his horse.
The earth inside of Felix froze over. Annette wiggled her fingers back at him, and Sylvain galloped over to retrieve his lance from the body.
Felix heard himself ask, his voice a touch wild, “Where the hell did you come from?”
“I was worried about you,” Sylvain said. “You were acting really weird earlier. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“Annette had it,” Felix argued instinctively.
“You can just say thank you. Or would you melt the second you tried?”
“Don’t get distracted,” Annette shouted over her shoulder.
She didn’t need to worry. Felix’s muscles ached viciously, but his mind felt abruptly clear.
As the sun set, the professor descended upon Lord Gwendel like a hurricane from the east. Felix’s old man finally appeared in the west.
Suddenly it was over.
At the top of the valley, above the field of bodies and the plumes of smoke and ash, Felix sank heavily onto the ground. A second after, Sylvain sat down beside him.
They watched Ingrid’s pegasus land ahead of the rest of her flying battalion. Annette nearly knocked her over with the strength of her running hug. Ashe stood clear-eyed at the valley’s edge and picked off any stragglers that their reinforcements had missed. His aim had been affected. He was favoring his right shoulder in a way that was concerning but survivable.
Okay, Felix thought. Okay, and he breathed until the tightness in his chest eased up and let in a little bit of light.
“So this was a terrible day,” Sylvain said aloud.
Felix bent his head forward, shaking his hair loose. It was disgustingly sweaty. His throat felt like it’d suffered a drought.
The temperature dropped by half a degree in the Valley of Torment once the sun was down. Felix closed his eyes against the hint of a breeze. When he opened them again, Sylvain was offering him a drink of water, eyebrows raised.
There was soot all over Sylvain’s nose and forehead. His eyes were unobstructed and golden in the dusk.
Felix leaned forward to accept the canteen, then completed the journey the rest of the way.
Sylvain kissed him back fully and immediately. He cupped Felix’s cheek in one large hand, stroked Felix’s hair with the other. For a moment Felix recalled a different version, a bloody mouth, but he allowed that image to fall away. Here there was Sylvain’s unusually self-conscious touch and unsurprisingly effective tongue. The wind was cool on Felix’s face. Here was the living, insistent, warm.