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When Byleth dives in front of the bandit’s axe to save the white-haired girl, there’s a voice in her head that barks, “Balestra.”
She obeys on instinct, leaping forward and twisting into a lunge, wielding her iron sword like a rapier. She catches the bandit at the peak of his jump, skewering him on her sword with his own momentum, and he falls with a weak gargle. There’s a low, satisfied hum that echoes in the back of her mind.
She wrenches the blade from the body and turns. “Are you alright?”
The girl stares at the body of the fallen bandit before shaking off her shock.
“Yes, I’m fine,” she says, “thanks to you.”
Byleth nods, flicking her wrist and sending blood splattering across the grass. The other two students are quick to join them, followed closely by her father, and when the loud man in armor that soon arrives proclaims himself a knight of Seiros, something in the back of her mind snarls.
—
Rhea is… cold, somehow. Something about the archbishop is off putting—and this is before taking into consideration the way her swordhand twitches whenever the sunlight glints off of her pale hair.
Her reaction to the adviser, Seteth (although the name sounds wrong), is no better, his furrowed brow and condescending frown making irritation spike hot and vicious down her spine.
Something like a chuckle reverberates in her ears, even though nobody is talking.
“All these years,” a familiar voice rumbles, “and those damn Nabateans haven’t changed a bit.”
It takes all her willpower not to whirl around and look for the speaker. She bites the inside of her cheek instead, hard enough that it draws blood.
She and her father are dismissed, and she retreats to privacy of her new quarters to brood.
—
The voice grows louder.
On the day of the mock battle, it bites out strategy to her and mocking jeers to her opponents, and her grip on her sword’s hilt stays white-knuckled long after the battle’s end.
She hasn’t tried… talking back. She absolutely does not intend to, either, but when Claude claps her on the back with a beaming grin the voice drawls out, “So that’s what the Riegan line has come to?” and she snarls back, “Shut. Up.”
There’s a beat of silence, then booming laughter.
—
The Golden Deer’s first assignment is the eradication of a nearby bandit camp.
The voice, unsurprisingly, has opinions, which she blocks out for several grueling weeks as she trains her students so they don’t die on their first mission.
The night before they leave, when she slumps into bed, drained and brimming with frustration—at Hilda, for refusing to take anything seriously; at Lorenz, for thinking that it might be a good time to interview potential wives; at Rhea, for making her responsible for these children’s lives in the first place—she dreams.
—
She’s on some barren wasteland, surrounded by blood-blackened dirt and broken weapons.
There’s a man standing in front of her, staring off at the horizon, the sunrise painting him crimson and amber. He’s massive, twist as broad in the shoulders as she is and over a head taller, scars striping his bare chest like war paint.
“Of all the people to get stuck with, at least I got one who knows what they’re doing,” he comments, still not looking at her. She recognizes his voice. It takes her a moment to find hers.
“Who are you?” she manages.
He looks at her, finally. His eyes are molten gold, blazing where Rhea’s were frigid.
“I am a god killer,” he says. “I am the King of Liberation. I am—”
“Nemesis,” Byleth whispers into the empty room, eyes fluttering open.
—
She surprises herself by taking the fact that the ghost of the king of old now resides in her head in stride, and promptly decides that absolutely nobody is ever going to find out about it, and especially not the church.
The ruffians, thankfully, are not much trouble. Her students are capable of handling this much, at least, and even Hilda seems to find that putting in some effort is a preferable alternative to death.
Byleth recognizes the leader of the outlaws, the same man from those weeks ago, who had tried to kill the students. She allows herself a moment of mildly bemusement that he’d apparently survived their last encounter, then dispatches him, cold and quick, before he can even spit vitriol.
She sees Claude finish the last of them with an arrow between the eyes, and Ignatz stumbles, looking ill, and Raphael comforts him with a large hand on his shoulder.
“We’re done here,” she calls. “Get your horses. We’ll need to hurry to get back to the monastery before dark.”
She waits until she hears the chorus of affirmatives before she turns back to the rapidly cooling corpse. Dead for good, this time.
“Curious,” Nemesis murmurs, and Byleth restrains a flinch. “A coincidence?”
“What would be a coincidence?” she presses.
He hums. “His presence. Is it not curious that you would encounter the same bandit twice in two months?”
Perhaps. She’ll be damned if she admits it out loud, though.
“You’re overthinking things,” she says instead, but Nemesis’ low chuckle implies he knows better.
—
Life falls into something resembling a rhythm. It’s not easy adjusting to life at the monastery after so many years as a mercenary, and she’d never been terribly interested in teaching, but she’s at least teaching something she knows.
Rhea still makes her antsy, though, like hoarfrost creeping into her bones. She attends faculty meetings regardless, stands and nods through their orders.
“We have our suspicions that the Western Church is planning a coup,” Seteth tells her. “The Golden Deer house has been assigned to accompany the Knights of Seiros to Faerghus and observe.”
Byleth bows shallowly, ignoring Nemesis’ caustic bite of, “You’ve become quite the dog of the church, haven’t you?”
“Of course,” she says levelly, and Nemesis snorts like she’d been answering him. “I will prepare my students as best I can.”
Rhea nods to dismiss her with a placid, serene smile, and Byleth’s coat billows as she turns to leave, fabric snapping at her heels.
“Why does she bother changing her name?” Nemesis grumbles, once she’s out of sight from Rhea’s prying gaze. “She’s stayed the same since the day she killed me. Her and that bastard Cichol.”
She pauses midstep. “Who?”
“That archbishop. Whatever she goes by now. Seiros.”
Byleth swallows thickly, taking the steps down to the ground floor two at a time. “You mean…?”
Nemesis scoffs. “I thought you were supposed to be one of the ones with brains. Yes, I mean that.”
She braces a hand on the wall as her knees go weak. “Oh.”
She takes a moment to process that. Seiros. Rhea. Seteth, too, apparently, and if he’s involved, then Flayn as well—
She blinks. Then, with nothing better to do, she blinks again. “Oh,” she repeats, then continues down the stairs.
—
Even with this new revelation, life continues as is. It’s one thing to know that Rhea and Seiros are one and the same, and quite another to do something about it.
Nemesis takes some measure of satisfaction that Rhea, Seteth, and Flayn seem to be the last of their kind.
“Should have done a better job wiping them out,” he growls one evening, in the privacy of her room. “Them and that bloody false god, looking down on us like we were to be pitied.”
His hatred floods her like fire, but her blood runs cold, dread pooling in her veins.
“And what,” Byleth says, slow and measured, “do you mean by that?”
Nemesis scoffs. “What do you think?”
She finds that she rather doesn’t want to think about it.
—
And again, life goes on, regardless that Rhea is some kind of immortal, regardless that the soul of a mass-murdering king has taken up a cozy residence in her head. She has tea with Claude, who she threatens with a year of detention if any of his concoctions ever wind up in her drink, pairs Hilda and Marianne on assignments in the hopes that one of them can inspire the other to do some kind of work, bans Lorenz from so much as looking at the local women—
And then that fucking sword finds its way into her hands, and Nemesis howls with glee.
—
Rhea, for some reason, seems delighted by the fact that Byleth can wield the sword made from her mother’s bones. Nemesis seems to have an inkling why, something that fills him with dark, wicked satisfaction, but refuses to divulge the information.
“Her disappointment will be all the more satisfying,” he rumbles, so she leaves it at that.
—
The more things change, the more things stay the same, Byleth muses. The Sword of the Creator feels good in her hands, as much as it sickens her to admit it. Rhea fawns over her, but she is still a professor, still a dog of the church.
So she leads her students against Miklan’s bandits, rescues Flayn from that damnable Death Knight, survives the carnage of Remire—
And then her father dies.
And, finally, things start to change.
—
They’re standing in a void of unfathomable black. Nemesis looks thoroughly unamused.
“Reckless,” he says, too dry to truly be a beration, “to be trapped like that, by an old man and a half-dead, fleeing coward.”
The sword trembles in her white-knuckled grip.
“Help me,” she says. “Help me kill him. What’s one man to a god-killer?”
He bares his teeth in a mockery of a smile. “Any powers I grant will be more a curse than a blessing.”
“I don’t care.”
Nemesis laughs, crossing the distance between them. Heat radiates from him like an open forge; he reeks of metal and blood.
“Spit on Seiros for me, little one,” he says, and brings a massive hand to her throat.
His fingers are searing, sinking into her flesh, and she grits her teeth against the scream that bubbles up in her chest, and Nemesis is melting into the blackness around them, dissipating like smoke, and when she breathes in she smells fire.
The Sword of the Creator glows, bright enough to chase away the impermeable darkness, bright enough to pierce through the abyss—
She lifts the blade and cuts.
—
“Teach,” Claude chokes out, shock and awe and something like terror etched into his features.
She wipes the Solon’s blood off her sword onto the cloak of his own corpse before she turns, pinning Claude with an empty gaze.
He’s oddly pale, and his expression shifts, back to the mien of easy good humor and a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “New look, huh?”
She blinks slowly, then reaches for the dagger at her belt and unsheathes it to study her reflection on the blade.
Nothing much about her has changed, she thinks, the same face peering back on her on the metal, except—
Except her eyes, glowing a bright, molten gold.
She collapses.
—
Byleth wakes up at the gates to the monastery, cradled gingerly in Raphael’s trunk-like arms. Apparently Claude had attempted to get Hilda to carry her, failed miserably, and then recruited Raphael's help instead.
She pats the student on the shoulder as he lets her down, reassuring her crowding students with a wave of her hand.
“You should see a proper healer,” Marianne starts, eyes wide and anxious.
“Let me report to the archbishop,” Byleth says. “Then I’ll go to the infirmary.”
“I’ll go with you,” Claude says, mouth set in a stubborn line, and then immediately deflates when she says, “You will not.”
The walk to the audience chamber is short, but made longer by the unfamiliar echoing silence in her head, and when she finally pushes past the doors—
Seteth goes pale, jaw clenched and eyes wide with something akin to fear, and Rhea—
Rhea looks furious.
Byleth smiles.