Chapter Text
—
Jeralt dies.
The blade enters through his back and his breath catches in his throat and Byleth reaches out and grabs time, twists it up in her fists, tries to pull, tries to make it hers, but it doesn’t work it doesn’t work it doesn’t work—
The hot-cold energy of her divine pulse shivers through her veins, useless and unspent. She hates it, all of a sudden—hates Sothis and hates Seiros and hates everything that brought her to Garreg Mach, to this place where she is alive and her father is not, where she can only lean over his too-still body and wish and pray and curse and cry—she wants to go back, she wants to go back—
“—ch. Teach. Byleth.”
She looks up.
Someone kneels beside her. Claude. Rain flattens his hair, runs down his face, drips off his chin. He leans toward her slowly, like reaching for something he’s afraid might burn him, and touches her cheek. The skin of his thumb is rough where he runs it beneath her eye.
“You’re crying,” he wonders.
She blinks. To think that the first time I saw you cry…
She doesn’t want to look down at Jeralt.
She doesn’t want to look away.
To think that the first time I saw you cry, your tears would be for me. What kind of a thought—who else would she ever cry for? Who else but him, her only family, his last breath taken by the rain?
“Byleth, hey,” Claude says, tugging her into his arms. She goes willingly. The ground is muddy and her chest hurts and she feels like she’s falling apart—but for all of that, Claude is warm. Quiet. “Shh. It’s alright. I’ve got you.”
He holds her, and she thinks, Oh.
—
Guardian Moon. Bright and cold.
Grief is an unfamiliar tide; it swells and ebbs and swells again, pressing in waves against the ache in her chest. Byleth does her best to keep her head above water. Hanneman and Manuela insist on taking over her classes to give her time and space, which leaves her with nothing but time and space. All she knows is to keep her hands busy, to keep moving, so she finds other ways to work. She spars in the training grounds. She hauls crates for the traders. She sorts through the armory and cobwebbed storage rooms and cleans weapons and armor until they shine. She helps cut vegetables in the kitchen and digs out weeds in the garden and tends to the horses, and keeps working until she falls face-first into dreamless sleep each night.
It feels like too much. It doesn’t feel like enough.
At the end of her week-long furlough, she sits on the dock of the fishing pond with her bare feet dangling in the cold water below. Fish will eat your toes if you’re not careful, Jeralt told her once when she was younger. She had been a solemn child, and he often said such silly things in an attempt to make her laugh. Such smaller memories are the ones that come to the surface now—the lines at the corners of his eyes, his voice, amused: they look like little earthworms!
Byleth hooks a larva and casts a line, gets comfortable with the fishing pole in her hands. It’s a clear day. This end of the monastery is quiet. A large number of Knights are out searching the nearby valley and beyond, looking fruitlessly for any sign of Monica or the pale mage or their demonic beasts, and everyone that remains at Garreg Mach has been stepping carefully around her. They stop her in the halls, their faces so full of open pity and grief as they offer their support.
It’s their condolences, she thinks, that are the most difficult to stomach, their words like weights against her chest, each one heavier than the last: I’m sorry, and he was a good man, and he loved you very much.
People die. She’s killed a few herself. She was never under any illusion that her father was immortal, but she’d assumed—
Water laps at her ankles. The knot in her throat aches.
He was her father. She had assumed they’d have more time.
As a mercenary, Jeralt had been her leader, and as a father, he’d been her home. It had been his path they’d taken back to the monastery, but now that he’s… now that she’s alone, she’s not sure what to do with herself.
She could leave.
She could find the mercenaries, and go back to her simple life on the road.
You will do no such thing, Sothis says, a sudden specter at her shoulder. This is where you belong!
“This place was his,” Byleth says quietly, kicking at the water.
And now it is yours.
She shakes her head.
Are you always going to quit when it gets hard? Sothis huffs. She floats just at the edge of Byleth’s vision, a girl of green and pink and light. Her emotions are always so loud ; Byleth is not accustomed to feeling so much, and the impatience and urgency in her voice is overwhelming. Fódlan needs you. These people need you. And I think you need them, too.
“Stop,” Byleth snaps. She looks at Sothis and shoves, slams closed the connection between them.
Silence.
The breeze ruffles her hair, pushes gentle waves of water against her shins.
A fish bumps against her foot.
Nothing is catching her line. It’s not like she’s been paying much attention, she admits to herself, to the blessed quiet inside her own head. As she reels her hook back in, a silver-grey cat slinks out of the shadow of a nearby wicker basket and sniffs at the little bag of bait at her side.
“Hi,” she says. “Hungry?”
She keeps hold of her fishing pole with one hand, and pulls a little herring from the bag with the other. The cat watches. He retreats to his basket when she extends her hand too quickly, but reconsiders when he realizes what she’s holding, and takes his time inspecting her gift—smells its head, examines its scales.
They spend enough time in this negotiation that they both grow complacent, Byleth and the cat, watching each other watch this fish, that neither of them notice someone approaching.
“Making friends?”
Byleth startles. The cat bursts into motion—he jumps, skitters backwards, bumps into the empty wicker basket and sends it off the pier and into the pond. With his hiding spot gone, and the fur of his tail bristling, the cat sprints between Claude’s feet and takes off toward the marketplace.
“That’s rude,” Claude says, hands on his hips. “I was trying to talk to him.”
“You scared the life out of him.”
“Ah, well. He’s got at least four more.” He sits down next to her and leans back on his hands. “I think that’s the one Hilda named Stormcloud. She saw him fall off the dormitory roof the other day and just walk it off. I’m thinking he could probably survive anything.”
“Ignatz calls him Silverclaw.”
“Hm. A little better. What about… Glintelion?”
That would be an apt name as well, she supposes, nodding. She takes the bloated larva off her hook and tosses it into the pond, secures the cat’s forgotten herring instead, and casts another line.
“Catching much today?” Claude asks. “Ha: cat ching.”
“That’s awful. And no, not today.”
Beside her, Claude stretches his arms and reclines in the sunlight, much like a cat himself. His fingers tap idly against the dock, and he looks out at the water, the windmill behind the Greenhouse, the gossamer glint of Byleth’s fishing line bobbing in the wind.
“Mithril?” she offers.
“Too simple. That cat deserves something with panache. Ferocity. A fitting name for a true warrior.”
A true warrior who, probably two weeks ago now, fell from a tree outside her classroom in pursuit of a sparrow.
As the sun curves across the sky, Byleth sits and listens as he suggests names for the clumsy grey cat, each one as inspired and amusing as the last. Ashrain. Greywhisker. Lightningfang von Irion. Eventually her bare feet grow too cold, and Claude offers to take the fishing pole while she massages warmth back into her skin, while she pulls on her socks and laces her boots. He cheers when they finally catch a tiny goby—“the power of teamwork,” he insists, pressing a hand to his chest in mock sincerity—and helps her pick out a new piece of bait with a critical eye.
Slowly, gradually, Byleth feels her shoulders relax. Ever since he sat down next to her, she’s been waiting, she realizes, for him to speak about Jeralt—to apologize for his passing or to tell her some story that illustrates the kind of man that her father was, great and strong and noble—or, worse, for him to ask her how she feels, to… chide her, perhaps, for crying on his shoulder, for so easily showing him her weakness when she is meant to lead him and his class. She even expects him to ask her about Jeralt’s diary, as if it’s the key to unlocking the strange, hollow vault of her past.
So she waits, and holds her breath, but Claude seems content to sit on the dock next to her, comfortable in her silence.
Byleth could leave.
But she could always stay. Teach. Learn more about herself, about the terrifying sword that calls to her blood, about the monastery that saw the extraordinary circumstances of her birth.
These people need her, after all, she thinks, watching Claude reel in another goby. And she might need them, too.
—
She finds herself paying closer attention to Claude after that, studying him the way she would an ally or an enemy, the way Jeralt taught her to analyze a new member of the company—or their mark.
The basic and most vital information she’d collected the day they first met. Claude von Riegan, heir to the Leicester Alliance. Right-handed. Slight weakness in his left ankle. Quick on his feet. Works best at long range, and even better at high ground.
With time, she’s picked up other little facts, ones beyond the life-and-death of a battlefield. She learns that he likes teppanyaki and Daphnel stew, and that each meal finds him sitting at a different table, with a different group of people. He is an easy conversationalist, and is able to ask questions in such an offhand way that people feel comfortable telling him their life stories. It’s a deceptively valuable skill—to question without revealing true intent, to distract, to answer without divulging anything of himself in return.
She learns that he is always listening: during meals and recreation, on the field, at church services. He is attentive during class and picks up skills easily during training. On more than one occasion, she’s stumbled upon him eavesdropping on scribes in the library, or nobles in the reception hall, or even Rhea and Seteth in the cathedral’s advisory room.
She learns that he’s shrewd, and his schemes are unpredictable, and clever, and sometimes dangerous.
She learns that he is dangerous. Your presence in my life has quickly become invaluable , he’s told her, but how far past her ability to wield the Sword does that esteem go?
She learns to keep an eye on him.
And she learns that he’s watching her, too.
—
“Now,” Byleth says, adjusting Marianne’s grip on the wooden dagger, blunted blade pointed up. They’re both wearing simple clothes to exercise in, and without her long, layered dresses, Marianne looks so much smaller. Vulnerable. It reminds her of Flayn, lying unconscious in that underground passage just a few months ago, and reinforces Byleth’s determination to teach her students more self-defense skills. “Traditional hold. Easiest way not to stab yourself while trying to stab someone else.”
“I… I don’t really want to stab anyone,” Marianne says.
“I know. Just a precaution. If someone attacks you, it’s important that you’re able to defend yourself, no matter the circumstance.” Byleth holds Marianne’s hand in both of hers, the dagger between them, and squeezes. She ducks her head to meet Marianne’s downturned gaze. “Okay?”
It takes a moment, but Marianne swallows, and nods. “I… Okay. Yes. I can try.”
“Good. Now stab me.”
Marianne squares her shoulders. Her first swing is hesitant, half-hearted. The second is much the same. It’s not the movement that she has trouble with—the actual technique she picks up easily enough—but she doesn’t put any force behind the execution. Byleth knows that Marianne prefers using magic at a distance, and doesn’t enjoy working in the training grounds much to begin with, but even if all they manage during this session is building confidence, that’ll be worth the time spent.
The simple practice is good for Byleth, too. When Solon trapped her in that realm of darkness, Sothis had taken her own life—everything she had left of herself—and gave it to Byleth. The rush of energy had been immense. Euphoric. Agonizing. It poured into and through her, water through a sieve, until that burst of blinding bright light was all she could see, all she could feel, all that she was—
And she’d taken all that power for herself. She chose it, because the only other option was to wander an endless nothing for eternity, and that hadn’t been a choice at all. It would take a god to leave this place, Sothis had said, and Byleth used the Sword forged of her body and the power of her soul and cut clean through the dark.
It’s left her… exhausted, admittedly. Even now, days later.
She tries not to show frustration. Marianne doesn’t show marked improvement at using a dagger, but she gets in one strong hit without apologizing too profusely, and Byleth doesn’t want to discourage her progress.
“Okay,” she says, stepping back. “That’s enough for today.”
From his lean against one of the tall stone pillars, and also dressed in his exercise clothes, Claude cheers. “Good job, Marianne!”
Marianne flushes. “Claude! Were you… how long have you been here?”
For about half of their training session, Byleth thinks as he approaches. She flips the wooden dagger up in the air and catches it, one rotation and then another. She’d noticed him step in while she was showing Marianne a few vulnerable spots to stab at, and assumed he was here to spectate while waiting for his turn.
He winks at her, knowing, and pats Marianne on the shoulder. “Long enough to watch you kick the professor’s butt. Color me impressed.”
“Oh, well! I certainly didn’t do anything to be impressed about.” She glances at Byleth and then starts backing away, as if she’s going to have to start training again. “It’s time for my next lecture, anyway! Manuela won’t want me to be late! Thanks, Professor, Claude, okay, goodbye!”
They watch her leave. She’s almost running.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Manuela get somewhere on time,” Claude muses, hands on his hips. Loose-limbed. Unsuspecting. “Ashe said she slept through half a lecture last week. You’d think she’d show a little more respo—”
Byleth bends and sweeps her leg at the back of Claude’s ankles.
He yelps and goes down immediately. To his credit, with the grace of a kid who’s had his feet knocked out from under him one too many times, he catches himself, and twists his body so that he doesn’t land prone and leave himself completely vulnerable. As quick, Byleth moves into his space, wooden dagger in hand, ready to strike.
He ducks under her swing and takes a few steps back, hands up. Long legs; the distance grows quick. “Whoa, hey! Teach! You’d attack an unarmed man? Where’s your honor?”
Surprise settles too perfectly across his face.
Byleth narrows her eyes.
She doesn’t think she’s wrong.
As she rushes him, his expression doesn’t change, but his stance shifts—just enough to pull a wooden dagger, hidden beneath his shirt. He parries, pushes her back hard enough that her boots slide against the ground.
Just a few feet apart now. Claude waves the dagger at her, smug confidence, a successful scheme.
A beat, a breath, and then they are moving.
The fatigue that’s plagued her since breaking out of Solon’s banishment makes her a little bit slower, a little less dexterous, like moving through water, fighting her own body. She’s not sure others have noticed, but there isn’t much that Claude doesn’t see. The first few rounds he spends watching her, letting her lead—he drops back when she does, presses forward when she’s ready, a patient, passive partner.
Anger rushes hot through her head. What she needs is to get back to her own strength, not for him to coddle her.
She feints, waits until Claude mirrors her, and then charges forward. He puts an arm up to block her raised fist, which gives her the chance to grab his practice dagger. She rips it out of his hand, tosses it across the arena.
“Stop it,” she snaps.
He doesn’t keep up pretense. “We don’t know what your body went through, with that transformation. It’s alright to need rest, Teach,” he says, jumping back from her swing. He ducks her next one, and grunts, raises his shoulder, puts his full weight into a shove and knocks her to the ground. “You’re being stubborn.”
“I’m fine, ” she growls, the words pushed from between clenched teeth. She pushes herself to her feet. The arena sways—she feels like she’s floating, for a moment, suspended in the air. She swats away his hand. Spoils for a fight. She’s fine. They need her to be fine. “You are being stubborn.”
Claude nods. The muscles at his jaw flex. He crosses the arena—and for one awful moment she thinks she’s crossed the line, pushed him too far, he’s leaving—but he only picks up his wooden dagger. Without warning, he throws it at her head; it brushes past her hair, and then there’s a glint of steel and Byleth’s focus narrows, sharpens, because Claude’s pulled a silver dagger from a holster around his ankle.
She drops her wooden dagger, unsheathes the knife she keeps at her belt.
They circle one another. It’s much like the night they danced under the Ethereal Moon, during the ball—synchronized steps, beat for beat. He had led her across the ballroom floor so easily then, making up for her hesitant steps with amused grace.
She likes this dance much better—slash, dodge, parry, sidestep, stab. She likes this trust better, too. No half-truths hidden in quips and stories; no lies masquerading in silence. It’s body language, honest and real and easy. It’s hitting hard enough to hurt, but careful enough not to damage. There’s a moment that she fears she’s thrown a punch too hard, but he stumbles back, hand to his jaw, and grins.
They spend this sparring session moving around the arena, using pillars and dummies as obstacles, up and down the stairs. Underhanded mercenary tactics don’t catch him up as easily as the other students—he’s clever, and perhaps has been studying her closely, because he dodges and counters and ends up surprising her a devious tactic of his own.
“Tired yet?” he asks, slashing his dagger across her belly.
She jumps back and clicks her tongue at him. It’s a lazy move, and perhaps purposeful, but she is tired and aching and prideful, and she is ready to end their session. He goes down without struggle when she tackles him to the ground. She straddles his hips, pins one of his wrists, presses the flat of her blade to his throat.
A breath, a beat.
Neither of them move.
He swallows against the pressure. A bead of sweat crawls down his temple. His eyes are focused, and vividly green.
“I win,” Byleth says.
His smile is a slow, sharp thing. “Me too.”
She frowns, and looks down. With his free hand, he presses his dagger to her ribs. One hard press and a longer blade would drive right into her lung.
Huh.
“Color me impressed,” she says.
The sound of his laughter feels like butterflies in her chest.
She must be getting sick.
—
The storm above Garreg Mach has been building since dawn: dark, swirling clouds that hang just above the pointed steeples like a shroud, and wind wails in an eerie, mournful hymn through the corridors.
“You may want to wait before venturing outside the cathedral,” Seteth says, peering through the window of his office. His icy demeanor has thawed after Byleth’s efforts to rescue Flayn, and though she may not have his complete trust yet, she’s certainly earned his gratitude. The hint of a smile touches his face. “May I suggest visiting the library? It has a wonderful calm about it during these storms.”
“I will,” Byleth says, gathering the resource acquisitions they’ve been working on and standing. She offers him a smile in return. “Thank you.”
Seteth returns to his work, and Byleth closes the door behind her. A soft susurrous leads her down the empty, echoing halls. Thunder rolls. A flash of lightning opens the sky.
The sound of rain on stone is—familiar, in a way that doesn’t quite fit.
The library doors are open, welcoming. Golden candlelight pours into the hallway. It flickers like waves against the shore, and Byleth feels oddly seasick, wobbly. She stops just short of the door and leans against the wall. The world tilts. A blurry almost-memory ripples against her consciousness. Thunder bursts again, and she hears a lullaby, a war drum like a heartbeat, slow, slow, slower.
It fades.
“Professor?” A scribe stands in the doorway. Concern wrinkles his brow. “Are you alright?”
“Yes,” she says. She blinks, and the dizziness is better. She blinks, and pulls herself upright. “Thank you.”
He nods and moves aside to let her pass. His gaze lingers on her back—she feels it heavy and curious against her shoulder blades, and wonders, for a moment, what he saw in her face while she was seeing double—but he lets her be, and Byleth is grateful.
Thankfully there aren’t too many people in the library: a few scribes at their desks, Lysithea, focusing on a worn, thick tome at a side table, and Claude, busy browsing the shelves near the back wall. They do not pay her any attention, but Byleth is careful to place her work quietly on a table and sit down slowly. The library does feel quieter today, as Seteth says: the light glows warmer, and the air is heavier, sleepier with the storm.
Are you there? she thinks, reaching out to Sothis, looking for that tall, empty throne. Is this you? Are these your memories?
Sothis does not respond. The walls do not move. Her vision remains her own.
Byleth sighs, and takes out a book.
The first suggestion that Rhea gave her is a thick tome, yellowed and worn at the edges. Byleth reads through a few chapters of Garreg Mach’s long and storied history. It’s a very dry text, nearly a thousand years’ worth of dates and names and events, listed and rote. At their last meeting, Rhea suggested she make time to brush up on her knowledge of the Church of Seiros, to which Byleth readily agreed. So much of her past—so much of her father’s past—seems to be tied to this monastery, to this faith, and now that Sothis is gone… well, now that she and Sothis are one, now that she’s inherited the powers of a god and is starting to have strange visions of a past that is not her own, it’s probably prudent to learn all that she can.
She’s not sure if she can trust Rhea, not sure that she should ask: I know you’ve entrusted the welfare of these students to me, but I’ve been hearing voices, and now I’ve inherited the powers of a goddess—what’s that about?
When that starts to get monotonous, she switches over to the next part of her stack and reads through a few of her students’ essays. She marks a few suggestions to Hilda’s essay on covert troop advancement—namely the ideas of being covert, and effectively utilizing her troops, and advancing. The more she reads, the more she doubts that Hilda even wrote this essay. Is this Hilda’s handwriting?
Has she ever seen Hilda’s handwriting?
“Hey.”
She looks up. Claude stands at her table, a book in hand, and pulls out the chair across from her. “Mind if I join you?”
A few tables down, without looking up, Lysithea hisses, “Shh.”
“Shh,” Claude repeats to Byleth. He shakes his head in disappointment. “Jeez, Teach, can’t you lower your voice? We’re in the library.”
“Sorry,” Byleth says, deadpan.
He snorts, and when she waves her acquiescence, he sits down.
Despite her spread of academia, there’s more than enough room for him at the table. He flips to a specific chapter in his book and starts taking notes, immediately focused. It takes Byleth some time to slog through Hilda’s meandering essay—most of which she spends untangling strange metaphors and trying to remember what Hilda’s actual handwriting looks like—and then moves onto Leonie’s essay with relief, but her focus has waned.
Claude sits across from her, reading, brow furrowed in concentration. He turns a page. She wonders if he ever has the same… preoccupation. Looking at her, the way she looks at him. Categorizing expressions. Measuring the line of his nose, the curve of his lips—details that are irrelevant to their duties, for no other reason than mere curiosity.
Under the table, his foot taps against hers. One-two.
Heat flushes up her neck. She looks back to her work, caught. The most important part about trust, Leonie writes, Byleth reads, over and over again. The words look like letters look like shapes, meaningless lines against the parchment.
Under the table, Claude doesn’t move his foot where it rests against hers, and so she doesn’t move hers, either.
The most important part about trust, Leonie writes, is that it goes both ways. As a former captain of the Knights of Seiros and the leader of his own group of mercenaries, Jeralt taught me that a leader and their soldiers are part of a team. Though they may be many in number, they function as a single unit. The leader trusts in the soldier’s capabilities, and the soldier trusts the leader to command them wisely and effectively. It’s important that the unit knows one another well for this trust to succeed.
“Hey, Teach. Can I ask you a question?”
Claude is studying her, his chin resting in his hand. She taps her foot against his in answer, one-two, yes . It makes him smile. Voice quiet, as not to disturb their neighbor again, he asks, “I’ve been wondering. Why’d you choose Golden Deer, all those months ago?”
She thinks about loyalty and strength and cleverness, and a trust that goes both ways. She thinks about sparring like dancing and dancing like sparring, about a warm place to rest in the midst of the worst kind of rainstorm.
She thinks about the day they met, outside Remire Village. Edelgard and Dimitri, serious and earnest, and Claude, arms open, smiling. Let’s get to know each other.
It’s too much to say. Sometimes it’s too much to feel. Sothis and her damned emotions—one last gift, after she disappeared into that swirling golden light.
Rain pounds against the roof, and takes with it the faint murmur of a girl’s snicker.
“You made me laugh,” Byleth says.
Claude blinks. His smile is crooked, rueful, as he shakes his head. “I haven’t seen that miracle yet, but I’ll believe you this time.”
A slam on the table near theirs make them both jump. Lysithea stands up, hands braced on her table. “If you two could please take your gossiping elsewhere, I am trying to get some actual work done! Someone needs to be prepared for our next encounter with Solon and his lackeys!”
Shoulders shaking, Claude ducks his face behind his raised book. Byleth returns to her essay yet again. On the battlefield, the strength of this relationship could be the line between life and death...
—
The Holy Tomb is cold, and smells of stone and dust.
As she descends the last staircase, Byleth feels like she’s being submerged, like sinking into too-high water. The chandeliers and the lanterns on the walls glow dim and strangely green, as if the centuries have rusted even the firelight. Witchlight, she’s heard it called. Ghostlight. Even the shadows flicker off-kilter. It’s quiet as they advance—her allies are subdued, fanning out around her and Rhea, curious and alert and spooked.
It’s hard for her to breathe, the air thick with nearly a thousand years of history. Garreg Mach was built to house the bodies of the Creator and her children. Byleth… feels them here. Close to the surface.
The feeling persists as Imperial soldiers storm the tomb and pry open the ancient stone caskets. A panic that is not her own grips her by the throat, and she watches with horror as a soldier reaches into a coffin and pulls free a small, red Crest stone.
She swallows down the bile that burns up her throat. “We have to stop them. Get all the stones. Let none escape!”
It is a chaotic, terrifying battle. The discordant snarling of demonic beasts echoes in such an enclosed space, and leaves little room to maneuver around them. They are grim distractions from the soldiers who, wary of their own monsters, skirt the outsides of the room to locate caskets and kick them open.
Byleth splits her students into smaller and smaller groups, sends them out, whatever it takes. She feels herself fraying, tugged in every direction, a tiny light a tiny pulse like a heartbeat there and there and there there there—
A cloud of dust rises from crumbling stone. A knight stands over the coffin, fist clenched, and Byleth is on him quick, takes the knife from her belt, jams in into the vulnerable place between his helmet and his shoulder.
Blood blooms hot and so, so red beneath her hands. The knight falls, gasping, and the Crest stone rolls out of his grip as he hits the ground.
His partner sees Byleth through the dust and lunges.
She dives.
The moment her hand touches the Crest stone, her mind feels like it empties out.
Rain on stone. A war drum like a thunderstorm. Tall canyon walls and fields of blood-red flowers and soft green hair, a voice like the wind through the reeds, a smile, a daughter, a sound strange the silver glint of a blade beneath the sun a scream so shrill a scream she they everyone is screaming her daughter her daughter no why—
A warm hand on her face. Green eyes.
She blinks, and Claude is kneeling in front of her, gently tapping her face. There’s a cut on his cheekbone, bleeding. He’s breathing hard but his eyes are focused as they skim her face. “You in there, Teach?” He looks over his shoulder, shouts at someone, “Get Marianne! Hurry!”
A glint of heavy armor. A clang of steel. Raphael.
The monastery spins with green fireflies. Torches. Ghostlight, she remembers. The color of Rhea’s hair, a dragon soaring through the sky. Byleth feels like she’s been dropped from very, very high up. There’s—she can’t focus on one thing, she’s seeing double, now and then and now again, and—her chest burns —
“Hey, Marianne is pinned down, so it’s just you and me. I need you to look at me,” Claude says. “Can you hear me, Teach?”
She nods. She hears him. It feels like she’s hearing everything— a voice whispers in the back of her head—my daughter my daughter how dare you—
“...take...“
With a vehement curse, Claude grabs his bow and reaches back for an arrow, lets it fly at something behind her. A grunt, and then a thud. “Yeah? Take what?”
She has a white-knuckle grip on the Crest stone. It pulses in her hand. It pulses in her veins. Vengeance. Vengeance.
“Take it.”
Claude looks down. She offers him the stone—unwilling yet desperate, two souls of one body, your will and mine are now as one—and he pries it from her fingers. The relief is instant: she slumps forward, her forehead falling onto the breastplate of his armor. He rocks back on his heels with the sudden weight, and balances himself with a hand on her shoulder. He smells like leather. Iron. Blood.
“The stone,” she murmurs.
“Don’t let you touch the stones,” he says. He squeezes her shoulder, a brief, reassuring hold, and then he’s slinging his bow over his shoulder and sliding an arm around her back. “Got it. You think you can stay on your feet?”
“Vengeance upon those who desecrate my tomb.”
“We can definitely talk about whatever that is later. Come on, on your feet.”
He more or less hefts her to her feet, puts a sword in her hand. Regular steel, silvered blade, leather grip.
On your feet, kid.
The battlefield is no place for idle thoughts. Letting your mind wander is a sure way to get yourself killed.
She blinks, hard. “I’m fine.”
“I’ll take ‘fine’ for now,” Claude says, nocking another arrow. “I’ll lead. We’re pushing forward. You with me?”
She’s terrified, and exhausted, and angry—she tastes blood in her mouth and ash in the air and feels the press of ghosts like static along the back of her neck—but she’s herself, alone, in her own body, with a sword in her hand and an enemy in sight.
And she’s with Claude. “Yes. Let’s go.”
—
Byleth appreciates the enduring history of the plants in the greenhouse, recognizes the significance of their lineage, but mostly she just likes to get her hands into the dirt. The Greenhouse Keeper, Ada, has allowed her to work under supervision with the newer species of medicinal herbs, so Byleth crawls into the plot between the taller stalks and gets to work: weeding, watering, spreading bonemeal.
It’s slow work, but satisfying. She likes watching things grow. She doesn’t remember settling in one place for so long—having the opportunity to put down roots, seeing the steady progress gifted by time, watching the tiny green leaves turn to buds to flowers to food is rewarding.
“Professor Byleth?” A flash of pink peeks through the greenery, and a familiar voice, muffled, asks, “You in there?”
“Hilda?” Byleth calls.
“The one and only! I feel like I’m talking to the trees out here. Do you have a moment?”
Byleth eases herself out of the flowerbed and stands, wipes her hands on her borrowed apron.
“You still have dirt,” Hilda begins, waving at Byleth’s boots, and knees, and elbows, and face, “On your… everything. Nevermind. How are you feeling?”
“Fine. Keeper Ada’s allowed me to help with the herbs. Our echinacea is coming in well.”
“I see that. How are you feeling after the Tomb? I saw how you got a little…” Hilda shudders, and then wiggles her fingers, decides on, “creepy. And then with Edelgard? Can you even believe that? I knew she was ambitious, but to think she’s been the Flame Emperor this whole time? Incredible.”
Creepy would be one way to describe it. It had certainly felt creepy, sensing the presence of the Crest stones like embers in the dark, touching one, experiencing its past as her own--it had debilitated her, taken her mind and breath and body.
And Edelgard—Emperor of the Adrestian Empire. Declaring war on the Church of Seiros. Their enemy, now.
How is she feeling? “I’m alright, I think. Tired.”
“Yeah, me too. There’s so much going on now,” she groans, and then tips her head to the side, a picture of curious innocence. “Ugh. Let’s talk about something else. I have a question! And you have to be honest.”
“Okay.”
“Me and Mari were wondering—what’s going on with you and Claude?”
That’s… not a question that she was expecting. They had parted ways that morning after meeting about Imperial troop movements, but that hadn’t been unusual.
She must have a look on her face. Hilda sighs. “He looks like he was clubbed over the head, is all.”
An uncomfortable hiccup catches in her chest—adrenaline, a missed breath. She had just said goodbye to him, right outside the greenhouse. He had made a joke, and she had laughed and winked in imitation of him and waved goodbye. How had something happened to him between then and now? “Is he injured? Where is he?”
“What?” Hilda frowns. “Professor, no. He’s fine. It’s a figure of speech—like saying he looks dazed, or stunned. Seriously, did Jeralt raise you in a barn ?”
“What—why?”
“Why… is that a saying? Or why does Claude look dizzy? Or why did Jeralt raise you in a barn, because seriously, I don’t think I could even begin to answer any of those questions.”
Relief drains the quick-jolt energy from her body, and she sits down on the stone wall of the flowerbed, hard.
Hilda looks at the space on the ledge beside her, rolls her eyes, and sits beside Byleth. “Look. You just seem a little chummy, is all.”
“I don’t—"
“You don’t play favorites, I know, but this thing with you and Claude just seems a little different. I know there are more important things to worry about with the war and impending doom and all, but people are important, too. You and Claude are important. When that Solon guy made you disappear, Claude never doubted you’d come back—not once. And when we carried you back, the way he looked at you... Just—keep that in mind, I guess. About people. And Claude.”
A silence settles between them. Byleth looks down at a smudge of dirt on her knee and tries to understand the tangle of emotions knotted in her gut. Hilda looks at Byleth.
“Whew. That’s enough of that for today. You’re welcome, and I expect a favor for that wise bit of advice in the future!” Hilda says, getting to her feet and brushing off her skirt. She plucks a nearby cluster of delicate, pink meadowsweet, tucks it behind her ear, and escapes before Keeper Ada can fuss at her for picking flowers.
Byleth exhales. She crawls back into the flowerbed, and tries not to think so hard about anything at all. It’s not easy: the garden is full of so much verdant green.
—
An insidious heat licks through her veins, and she tries to scream but her throat is worn bloody. She is alone, lying prone on a wet, muddy field, and she can’t make a sound, can’t call out, can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe—
Someone laughs. It’s a deep, rasping sound, like dread, like evil.
She blinks rain out of her eyes, and looks up. Muddied boots. Night-black armor. Skin and hair pale as moonlight. Lightning rips across the sky, and Thales laughs. He kicks her sword away. He bends down and grabs her by the neck, lifts her up, up, until she is dangling in front of him.
“All alone?” he asks, voice soft, curious. He tilts his head. Pale blue lines pulse at his temples, around his eyes, and when he smiles, his teeth are sharp like fangs. “Shame.”
When he squeezes her throat, it’s like a vice wraps around her entire body. Smoke billows from the shadows, morphs into hundreds of void-black snakes that slither up her feet, her legs, around her waist and arms and chest. She tries to reach for the divine. She tries to scream. She can’t breathe.
His voice, like her pulse, slowing, echoing: all alone... all alone... all alone.
She wakes with a gasp.
For a moment, she’s still on that field, twisted up in writhing snakes—she kicks, and struggles, and claws at her throat, but it’s just her bedsheets, wrapped around her body. She rips them free and stumbles out of bed and to her feet. It takes a moment to catch her breath, to get her wits about her. She’s okay. She’s in her bedroom. She’s fine.
Thales.
Cursing, hands shaking, she lights a candle and sits at the edge of her bed. She can’t get his face out of her head—his pupilless eyes, like glassy marbles, and that sinister-slow smile. All alone? Shame.
Byleth yanks her boots on over her loose trousers and tugs on an overlarge tunic. She looks like she’s just rolled out of bed, but it’s the middle of the night, so nobody but the night guards should be up and about. She’s not planning to go far, anyway. There’s a small, grassy garden that she visits sometimes, when she has trouble sleeping. It’s at the edge of the monastery, surrounded by trees and high walls, and feels secluded. Safe.
The full moon lights her path. She likes the night—less bustle, more space to breathe, to empty her head. It makes her miss night watch around the fire, when she was with the mercenaries: nothing but the tall lines of the forest stretching up toward the stars, the snores of her company, the hiss and snap of the fire.
When she steps into the garden, she feels a little thrill of surprise to see someone already there. At first it just looks like a body lying on the ground, but then it moves, the motion familiar, and she realizes it’s Claude. He’s resting on his back in the grass, his head propped up on an arm, and he’s looking up at the night sky.
He, too, is dressed in light sleeping clothes, boots unlaced, hair astray. The little braid at his ear is coming loose, and there’s something serene about the loose line of his body in the light of the moon.
She doesn’t think she’s ever seen him so still. Even during class he is bouncing a foot, tapping a quill; on the battlefield he twists arrows between his fingers, knocks his fingers against his bow, motionless but for a moment as he breathes in deep and sights an enemy down the field, and then on the move again once he looses an arrow.
It feels strange to stand here and watch him. She hopes he doesn’t mind her company.
She crosses the grass, stepping loudly so he hears her approach. He doesn’t react, doesn’t seem overly concerned about being attacked in the middle of the night, which, as the heir to the Leicester Alliance, he could afford to be more cautious.
That lecture will keep for another day.
She lies down in the grass next to him. They’re close enough that she can feel the warmth of his arm, hear the quiet sound of his breathing.
She taps his foot against his, one-two, a question: okay?
And he taps hers twice: all good.
It’s on the tip of her tongue: to ask him why he’s awake, what he’s doing out here, but she imagines his reasons are much the same as hers. Restless nights. Distressing dreams. Nothing seems easy at the Academy anymore, at the Monastery as a whole. Kidnapping and monsters and complicated, centuries-old politics. The impending threat of war at their doorstep. The impossible power of the goddess in her soul, and the ill-fitting stretch of her skin, pulling at the seams.
And this, too. The small distance between them.
She sighs.
Above them, a cloudless night opens the sky to thousands of twinkling lights.
“See that bright blue star, just there?” Claude asks, pointing. Byleth hums in question, and watches him draw a line to the next, and the next. “If you go this way, and connect to those three in a row. You see a key?”
Maybe a lumpy… something, if she tilts her head. Maybe she didn’t follow his line correctly.
He scoots closer. They’re pressed together thigh-hip-arm-shoulder. The side of his head knocks into hers. “Sorry.”
She stares resolutely at the sky, silent, warmed through.
“Okay. Give me your hand.”
She gives him her hand.
He rearranges her fingers so that she’s pointing, and uses her hand as a guide. “Blue star. Got it?”
She can’t help the quiet laugh that bubbles from her. “Yes, Claude. I can see the blue star.”
She can hear him smile. “Just making sure you’re still with me! Blue star. Dim star. Boom, boom, boom. Okay, and then that little cluster just there. See a key?”
With his hand still around hers, she traces the line of the constellation again. A key.
“The Almyrans have a legend,” Claude says, satisfied, lowering their hands. He doesn’t let go, threads his fingers between hers, instead. “An origin myth about the different constellations. Long ago, when the world was created, the goddess of the moon and the goddess of the sun fell in love while they created the stars. When their work was done, they were forbidden to see one another again for fear that their meeting would bring eternal darkness to the land.”
“So they meet during the eclipse?”
He nudges her leg with their joined hands. “Would you let me tell the story? Before they parted, the goddess of the moon placed a key in the stars that would unlock a doorway so that she could visit her love—yes, during the eclipse, where they would finally be able to meet in the sky.”
She wonders if the goddesses were lonely, in those long months between. She wonders about the depth of that kind of devotion. “Do you think it was worth it? Waiting for so long?”
“For someone they loved?” He nods, answers without hesitation. “Yeah.”
Crickets sing in the still dark. Byleth searches the sky. Using their joined hands, she traces a lumpy circle, and then a smaller one with two lines atop. “Rabbit.”
He laughs, a silent shake of his shoulders. “Ah, the wonderful Fódlan myth: the rabbit.”
“It was my favorite, growing up,” she admits. “Jeralt taught me the bow when I was young, and my first kill was a rabbit. He showed me how to skin it, how to cook it through. It’s the first constellation I look for at night.”
“Show me again.”
She does—the curved back, the small head, the points for its soft, floppy ears. Back and forth they share shapes in the sky, some of them familiar, some of them new: a warrior, and a castle, and a frog. It’s a calming practice; the stories, and the low sound of his voice.
There’s a raised scar on the soft skin between his thumb and forefinger. She hesitates, then traces it with her thumb.
“What was keeping you up?” she asks.
“Thinking about the future. There’s so much to plan for, so much that I can’t plan for.” He squeezes her hand. “Sometimes it makes me nervous, not to be able to have contingency plans for everything.”
She nods. She can understand that.
“What about you? What was keeping you up?” he asks.
“Nightmares.”
“Need to talk about it?”
She certainly doesn’t want to talk about it, but if there’s anybody who would listen—who wouldn’t look at her any differently for the things that haunt her at night, for the words that she struggles to find—
“It was… do you remember Thales?” she begins, dropping his hand to wrap her arms around her stomach. She tries to focus on the cool breeze on her skin, the soft grass beneath her head, grounding, grounded. The dark makes it harder to say, but slowly, she manages: “He—in my dreams, he’s always laughing. It’s… horrible. It sounds horrible . And these snakes wrap around my body until I suffocate, and he—he tells me that I’m alone.”
To her own surprise—to her own horror —Byleth feels her throat ache, and her eyes well up. The stars blur.
“I dream that I’m back in that space Solon trapped me in, and I can’t remember anything. I don’t know who I am or where I’ve been or what I’ve done, and then I hear this lullaby and Rhea’s there, and she—she plunges her hand inside my chest and it feels like I’m on fire, and she turns me into this—this thing —“
“Byleth,” Claude says.
Her breath shakes, and then she is sobbing, trying to say everything she’s been holding so close for months, trying to tell him just how terrified she’s been—of Thales and Solon, of the Empire, of herself , hollowed out, nothing but an empty shell for an old god’s power. Her tears are a wave, a waterfall, carrying her words through the rapids: she tells him about the way she’s able to move through time, about how it takes every time she uses it, about the ease with which Thales was able to stop her the only time it mattered. She tells him about the empty space inside her head where Sothis used to sit, and the jarring echoes of an ancient past that slides against her senses.
Somewhere among the words, Claude slips his arm under her head and pulls her close, lets her cry against his shoulder as they lay together in the grass. He holds her until she runs out of words, rubs her back in small circles, over and over again, like casting a spell with the simple warmth of his hand.
“I’m sorry,” Byleth murmurs, once she’s gotten ahold of herself. She feels… empty, and relieved, and embarrassed, mostly. Abruptly she sits up, runs her hand over her face. “I shouldn’t have—that was inappropriate.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” he says. “Teach, really, it’s okay.”
She gets to her feet, begins a hasty retreat, but Claude catches her wrist. It’s a gentle grasp, one she could easily break free of, but he says her name again, and it’s enough to hold her still.
She turns. He’s plucked a flower from the nearby greenery, holds it out to her. The small yellow petals are washed out in the deep blue midnight. “No matter how dark the night gets—you’re not alone, Byleth.”
She nods, and takes the flower. She doesn’t think she can say much else.
When she gets back to her room, she takes Jeralt’s diary from beneath her mattress and presses the flower between its pages, keeps it safe as secrets.
—
The white dragon roars.
It’s a primal sound that shakes the heavens, thunders across the bright blue dome of the sky. Byleth feels it ring impossibly loud inside her head, feels it take root in her bones, her muscles, her false heart. She inhales—
—the dragon inhales—red light, orange, black, burning like an ember and shrinking, expanding , pulling in sunlight, pulling in sound—
—the dragon, Rhea, releases a breath of pure divine energy, drives it across the battlefield.
Byleth can’t breathe.
The light vaporizes Adrestian soldiers where they stand, leaves behind nothing but ash. It rips through the town. Mounds of earth erupt from the ground, and towering plumes of smoke billow from the wreckage.
From the chaos, hulking, snarling demonic beasts emerge and bring the dragon to the ground.
And Byleth is moving. Despite her feelings for Rhea—despite the unstable earth beneath her feet and the double-shift twist of her vision, the past screaming daughter my daughter my daughter —Byleth runs, pulls the Sword of the Creator, and lets the blade fly. It’s almost easy. Like cutting through mountains.
And then Thales is there, holding a globe of night between his hands—
—she inhales—
—and then there is nothing but air, and silence.
—
The truth of it is that when someone faces death for the first time… well, they figure out who they are.
They learn if they can do it again.
Are you prepared to die?
We may not be connected by blood, but I believe our bond goes deeper than that. Now that we know each other, our hearts are connected.
Even if our paths diverge and we’re forced to say good-bye…
I know that we’ll meet again.
Fódlan needs you. These people need you. And I think you need them, too.
So stay vigilant, and lead them well.
I believe that you are destined to be a source of great hope for all.
We’re all looking at you to guide us.
Everybody here, young and old, is in your hands.
Hey, kid. Time to wake up.
—
to be continued