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Attn: Laboratory of Hanneman von Essar
Garreg Mach Monastery
Teacher, I am writing to you to propose investigating a relation between crests, with which you are very familiar and whose history is well established, and bending, which remains less understood.
I have come across, and to an extent created, a trove of documents from the former Kingdom that greatly illuminate the case of my former classmate Ashe Ubert. You will remember well that she was a commoner who excelled in all manners of archery and equitation.
The common history of fire according to our mythology, and perhaps our history, as those two frequently intertwine, has two components. First is that the Goddess took human form and tamed the dragons of Fódlan. This is not controversial in the literature; indeed it is upheld by Church doctrine. Second, from the dragons the Goddess took the art of firebending as tribute, and shared it with the people of Fódlan. This is only implied in our religious texts, but does explain well why, for example, the people of Dagda and Brigid do not use fire as we do.
According to the diaries of Pan, it was specifically with fire that Loog and Kyphon defeated the Empire on the Tailtean Plains. Subsequent inquiries with historians specializing in the former Kingdom confirm that this is not a widely known fact datum, even within the territory. Why might this be?
Firebending has historically been associated with nobles because nobility has often used it to exert power and quell rebellion. In this way it resembles the crests. However, as I will share, firebending has spontaneously arisen among commoners as well. Often it is linked to desperation. In the spiritual-religious framework, fire was compensation to the dirt-poor for their poverty and to the bone-starved for their hunger. Because nobility seek to maintain themselves as separate from commoners, the shared potential for firebending meant that it did not become an integral part of the noble identity. This would explain why many of my classmates, indeed, many of previous generations after, have neglected their potential to become firebenders; they are not aware they possess it.
Based on my interviews with Ashe and those who know her, as well as fragments from journals and reports, I would advise against any attempt to spread awareness.
I have assembled a generally cohesive account of the development of Ashe Ubert’s capabilities:
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The broadest details are common knowledge about the Ubert knight: she and her siblings are serendipitously adopted by Lord Lonato of Castle Gaspard. Lonato’s oldest son Christophe is implicated in the Tragedy of Duscur, which is a fabrication to detract from a more scandalous plot against the Central Church. Within these scaffolds we find room for much elaboration.
As a matter of historical record and due diligence: she had another name affixed to her being before, but names are tied to us by much looser strings than fire or fate. Her old name is lost and it is of interest to no one to scavenge the detritus of history for it.
Fire finds Ashe after the death of her parents. She is still young. She lives with her siblings in rotting crates on the inner streets of Gaspard. She tells no one she has fire, but goes about using it to warm herself and her small family as they sleep.
She is prone to deflection when I ask her why she really thinks Lord Lonato took her in. Her practiced refrain is that he was a good man who despised suffering. In a moment of relaxation she admitted it may have been because he saw her using fire. Human hearts can hold two feelings in one moment; in Lonato’s there may have been pity at her squalor and also a desire to keep the fire close.
Lonato hired tutors for Ashe’s instruction in bending and told her to use her bending outside the castle only in cases of life and death. On one occasion a guard of Gaspar reported to Lonato that they had seen Ashe using fire to warm food for a group of orphans in the slums where she uses to live. She loved the fluffy-hearted, brown-crusted rye bread that the castle bakers produced and thought the other children would enjoy it too. The lesson Ashe took from this was to be more discreet when sneaking out. This was one of few things that let Ashe steel herself against total adoration for her adoptive father, and perhaps foreshadows later events.
After Christophe’s execution for involvement in certain plots against the Church, on whose specifics I am not prepared to offer speculation, both Ashe and Lonato grieved profoundly. Ashe said they both became easily agitated, simmering just below furious. I found it hard to believe. She compared it to frying oil attacking a donut with heat and bubbles and froth.
Lonato named Ashe heir to Gaspard in the midst of this emotional hurricane. This did not smooth things over; indeed while such rapid arrangements are common among the wealthy, Ashe, being new to the culture, felt that Christophe was being erased, mourned too quickly.
Ashe came to believe that Christophe’s participation in the anti-Church plot was a misdirected attempt to rebel against Lonato’s stringency. The Church was more powerful an institution that represented the apex of authoritarian direction.
Ashe doesn’t remember what sparked it. Some people hold key moments of their lives in crystal clarity, mountain-lake crispness in their halls of memory. Ashe has gone the opposite direction and deliberately forgotten. I understand and envy her.
I obtained her consent to use magic to extract what remains of her memory. I did it as she slept, the time when memory creeps to the surface of the unconscious like a film gathering on hot milk. There was one condition she insisted upon. We are to never tell her about anything we recover. She considers total cession of her memory a gift. I told her we would be happy to give by taking it.
We have shards, and like a potter-artist filling them with seams of gold I have done my best to highlight both what we do know and what we don’t.
What happened is Lonato does something, likely routine, that Ashe sees as emblematic of the suffocating over-control that, subtracting intermediate steps, resulted in Christophe’s death. After a series of confrontations that become increasingly public, Lonato refuses to concede.
It is in an unlit room that she reaches the limit of her insistence. The haze of time has blurred the corners and colors of this space, but I have identified it as the Castle Gaspard chapel. Cobalt walls lifting frescoes illuminated in gold match no other locations.
Anger doesn’t come easily to Ashe, so we can wonder whether it was with a placid or trembling voice she yells, “For Christophe’s memory, I challenge you to an agni kai!”
Lonato laughs hoarsely, dismissively, and lights a candle. “My child, what foolishness.”
Ashe flinches, believing for a moment that she had repeated something from a book, fashioned herself too much a hero. The visceral shock of wondering whether she had miscalculated, misunderstood everything that led up to this.
What follows is not dismissal. Lonato is a principled man who does not waver even when the challenger is his own daughter.
“Very well,” he declares with appropriate gravity, then continues walking his prior path.
Ashe’s breathing hitches sharply, as if a lance had found its way between her ribs. She looks at the carpet to ground herself and stop the spinning. It’s happening. It will be the next day in an outer bailey.
Like weddings, agni kais create meaning from their result. Everything in the lead-up is fanfare. Neither Ashe nor Lonato are fans of fanfare.
They eat dinner together that evening with Ashe's other siblings. There is no protocol demanding otherwise, or Lonato would have known about it.
“There will be dessert tonight,” Lonato announces three bites into the meal. “Eat accordingly.” This draws applause from Ashe’s younger siblings; a squint and a sugar-dusting smile from Ashe. Dessert is for festivals and none is approaching.
They chew meat and exchange niceties about knighthood. Lonato remarks that few knights are nobles, so a fire-wielding knight is unheard of.
They trade many more messages through this subtext to not upset the veneer of a peaceful mealtime. Both agree that emotional restraint is a key component of knighthood.
After the main course is cleared away, a cut of meat and assortment of veggies not worth remembering, the servants cart out saghert and cream.
“I bought berries for you, with the sweet cream and the wafer.” Lonato remarks. He doesn’t meet her eyes but she does his, spending who knows how long on the man she wants to remember: the wrinkles, the crow’s feet, the cloud-white hair tucked behind his left ear.
While her siblings have no restraint in digging in, Ashe swallows the beginnings of sadness in her eyes and focuses on her stomach.
The early sense of constant gratitude, thank you for not letting me shrink to nothing on the streets, floods back. It had numbed to a background constancy. Now she realizes this meal could be their last, for one or both of them. By the Goddess they were going to eat like it.
This is not Lonato’s favorite dessert. It is Ashe’s. I think this is a small condescension on Lonato’s part. He could have ordered a different dish for each of them, not knowing whose last meal it will be. Yet when Ashe sees the same thing, she warms at the sharing of it.
Ashe keeps it together until orange and red drain from the sky and night fills her with anticipation. Once the thrumming fades to carved-out fatigue, she collects herself and prepares. She sits in front of the mirror and cuts her hair with two hands, one to hold the silver scissors and one to hold steady the hand that holds the scissors. Her expression frozen in determined sadness.
Her hair is short enough for her bangs to clear her eyes. It’s been years since it swept incompletely across her forehead instead of hanging past her shoulders. Scattered on the floor is so much hair that poked out of her scalp when Christophe was still alive.
It forms a ring like a sparse nest around her, a halo in the ground. She gathers it in a pile in her hand. she has one thought to burn it, forget her history in a rancid fume. The flame is in her hand. The will is not in her heart. the pile of trimmings goes into a velvet pouch and stays tucked in her armoire.
She sleeps like an owl during the night; that is, not. Her nerves are restless and active, her eyes wide. Dawn catches on her irises, jade. By daybreak, what part of her body doesn’t become a heartbeat? Every organ and sense throbs with sweat-drenched dread.
She dresses herself drowsily, carrying the night with her under her eyes. The armor is flexible leather she hasn’t worn in some time. As she fumbles with the straps that are just starting to get tight around her thighs, she realizes what a gamble it was to challenge without checking it. Her mind was on her plate armor, which fit well. No way that would have worked in a battle of dexterity and heat.
Lonato arrives in similar armor. The gilded sideways crescent of the Gaspard crest jeers from each shoulder. But for the occasion, they are dressed for any training exercise.
She wraps her arms around Lonato and doesn’t feel better. He puts a consoling hand on her back. She imagines Lonato doesn’t feel any better either. The leather is cold. It's only when Lonato takes her hand that she feels any kind of warmth from him. Then his fingers slip away.
“So we do this,” Ashe warbles with the finality of a promise and the cadence of a question.
“If we don’t keep to our word between us, then what meaning does it have?” Lonato’s retreat to questions is his first sign of unrest seeping through.
They walk abreast through the doors into the yard. This is the only one that’s all stone, no grass. Their next step, into the light, finds an overcast day where the diffuse clouds could be a snowbank.
They pretend to be brave. Well, Ashe pretends. Lonato has two generations of practice.
There are few observers besides the servants, who Lonato quickly shoos off to continue their duties. Until there is a result, an agni kai need be a matter between two people only.
They bow to each other. When Ashe’s head reaches the nadir of the gesture, her whole will goes towards not vomiting. Her mind is full of muddy water and her guts are tight from throat to asshole.
Before any combat, both parties offer fire to the goddess. Faerghus likes to believe that it preserves an ancient aspect of the ceremony, but a survey of the records identifies this practice as dating to the founding of the empire and no earlier. Perhaps it was added by order of the Church of Seiros.
Ashe grounds herself. She can’t be out before the ritual even begins. Her nerves are taut enough to play as strings. Breath staggers through her lungs. Fire doesn’t flow. She throws sparks from her palms that are as dangerous as fireflies.
“Holding back is an insult,” Lonato booms, sending a column of red fire into the sky. “Show me what the goddess has given you.”
What Ashe started with was flintspark motes of light. Lonato’s auspices have cultivated her skills: she has cooked with yellow tongues and woven braids of flame. None of that matters now. In the lizard-brain moments of panic, all learning is stripped away.
Lonato pushes a spiral of slow-moving fireballs at Ashe, a probative gesture. They rotate hypnotically through the air. She dodges easily.
This is ceremonial, which means nothing in the way of weighing mortality. The outcome is not predetermined. There is room in ceremonial for anything between injury and death.
They will go until someone relents. The arbiter of the end isn’t death, but shame.
Ashe finds her fire, rubs her palms together and casts a stringy orange arc. Like a ripple it dissipates with distance. Lonato slices through it with ease.
He knows what Ashe can do. It's embarrassing for her to flounder so ineptly.
He slings a swift shaft of white heat, aimed at her chest. Ashe drops to the ground, elbows stinging as she rolls.
Her voice shakes with her knees as she stands. “Do you intend to kill me?”
“If the fire wills it.” Lonato quotes Loog. This was how the first king dealt with turncoats and deserters. Fitting; this damn agni kai began as Ashe’s fantasy, projecting herself into what Kyphon did in defense of Loog.
What was she thinking, really? She knows nothing about using fire for combat, outside of stages intellectual exercises. The fire that she understands, she has only used to nourish. It was small and desperate but at least joyful. This is only desperate.
What fed her fire has always been the instinct to live, the stubbornness to survive. She summons all of her everything in a deep breath and lets loose. A beautiful ball of smooth white flame saunters towards Lonato.
Ashe’s fire has always been different from Lonato’s, more contained. Her tutors called it timid. It was controlled.
Lonato darts out of the way. The white ball bursts. A rope of slow lightning lashes out. He doesn’t know until it strikes him in the back, between the shoulder-blades. Tongues of flame lick his body and sear his flesh. The plasma glows bright and blue, releasing the held pressure to make diamonds.
Screaming something, Ashe runs towards him. She takes the hand he lifts to her.
“My daughter, well done.” Lonato is laughing as he winces in pain.
Ashe undoes the armor caging his torso. The burn on his chest shows lightning entering and cradling his heart in luminous hands.
“I struck you from behind, there’s nothing to be proud of.”
“No, no. you were victorious. Don’t make me use these breaths proving it to you. You know what to do when I go. “
Ashe furiously blinks away the tears that ripen and swell in her eyes. They fall on Lonato’s cheeks.
“My heart was hit when I brought you in. My regrets are your warnings.” He squeezes her hand weakly. “Christophe and I will have a long wait for you.” The stern man dies with an enigmatic smile on his face.
It would have been more merciful for the fire and lightning to have lashed his heart and stopped it before he could speak, to spare this wounding.
Ashe can’t think above her own wailing, can’t see above her own crying. Near-solid streams of salted water run in cords down her face.
She swears a vow to herself to never draw fire again. before it had been a conduit for fuel from elsewhere. That is how she thought of it. Now it is patricide, loss, shame.
In the moment Lonato died— excuse me; language lets us play tricks on perception; Ashe was adamant about this being the moment she killed him, her heart was for once like coal, finite and fast-burning. Differently now, she is closed off from whatever source provides it.
For that reason she does not use fire. She doesn’t know how much of it she has left.
At this point in her recollection, time at once freezes like sugar glass and melts like molasses.
She walks inside. The shape of Lonato’s body is no longer against hers. Do the servants take him away? Does she carry him? Is it day? Is it night? For her, these are details not worth remembering. Instead, looping inside her head like a dog chasing a tail, like a monk fingering prayer beads, is a mantra, “This is all mine now. What have I done. I know what I've done.”
In another crystal fragment she tells her younger brother and sister that fire had taken Lonato. Whether she used those words or only had that thought pounding in her skull is unclear. The young ones come to believe that their father died of a sudden heart attack, which is technically correct.
It is notable for firebending research as in crestology that siblings in similar circumstances do not rise to the same level of talent. Ashe’s siblings had no aptitude for bending. All evidence points to not even an interest in it, merely an understanding of it as a boon for their elder sister. Ashe advised against pursuing their recollections on the grounds that re-traumatizing them was not an ethical undertaking. Nevertheless, I have drafted a letter of intent to them. We can discuss our options here at a later date.
At the most faded end follows a procession of other memories: going through Lonato’s belongings, the funeral, a sad use of lilies. They sadden me and would sadden you, but they are of no importance to our research.
There are other investigations to be done around this core topic about the loss of fire, why it correlates poorly if at all with age or emotion.
In later writing I hope to document my own experience of flames coming to me and then departing in my darkest time. Currently it is not as prepared as this narrative. You will understand that that sort of personal excavation takes time; the distance I have from the events Ashe recounts are in a sense insulation.
Thus concludes my report at this time.
I have written many scrolls and I sincerely hope they arrive safely and in order.
Your student, the one who aspires,
Lysithea von Ordelia