Chapter Text
There was a hollow spot in Libra’s heart which had been carved long ago, the wet, bloody emptiness where the love of his mother and father should have bloomed but had instead been ripped up by its roots and trampled into the dust of the road as they left him behind. It had been a home for many things since, the hollow, but it was anger which knew its walls the best. It was anger which had picked the lock so many times, anger which had turned to mist or ooze and seeped in through the gap between the door and the doorframe when he had tried, in vain, to keep it out, anger which had painted the walls of the hollow spot with its colors.
‘If you feel yourself so empty,’ the priest who had taken him in as an adolescent had told him, ‘you may fill yourself up with the love of Naga and her court. Naga does not judge by whether or not you feel your heart to be whole or incomplete. Naga does not judge by your anger. She is not so harsh a judge as you have feared, young man, and she would welcome you as she has welcomed many far worse. And in time, you may even find that your anger has cooled, and your heart begun to grow once more. She is a great healer, our Lady, and she has made whole much which has labored forever thinking it would remain broken.’
So they had told him, the priest and his fellows, when Libra had first become part of their order. They had offered him the healing he sought, even if he did not know it. They had offered him the healing which he had in that moment shaken his head against, laughing in disbelief for the impossibility of it. If not healing, they had amended, seeing little point in fighting against his incredulity, then at least fulfillment. Though he had not spoken of such to them, a penniless beggar with such a deathly mien might find something in the priesthood which would grant him a sense of purpose he had perhaps been lacking? He might, it was suggested pointedly, find a home for himself there where he had despaired of ever finding such?
Libra had become a priest of Naga without possessing any particular devotion to Naga herself. That had come later. He had become a priest of Naga, and through that he had sought the sense of purpose his wandering feet had lacked. Through that, he had sought an end to the emptiness that yawned hungrily within him.
He found it—sometimes. There were times when a shaft of sunlight would pierce the clouds and his carven heart would rejoice, for the sun shone down upon him and he felt as if the love of Naga, which had long been a mutable, borderless thing whose nature he could never fully comprehend, had finally suffused him and filled up all of the empty spots within him as he had for years longed for it to do. But then the clouds would envelop the sun again, and he would be left with himself, just himself, once again, with all that that entailed.
Naga’s love had been a constant for him, but it was not a constant in the manner of the sun, or in the manner of the air which he breathed and the warmth which a hearth fire would provide him. Naga’s love had been a constant as the pain of a fresh wound was a constant. It was something that, for its intensity, never allowed him to be totally at ease. Whenever he would lose track of it for even a moment, it would find its way to reach fever pitch once more, cursing his inattentiveness, cursing his complacency, urging him to look and see, look and see, to attend to the wounded world the way he would have attended to his wounded body. Naga’s love was as the throbbing of a fresh wound. It was something which reminded him that he yet had a heart capable of beating, capable of circulating the blood which seeped through the tears in his flesh.
Naga’s love had been a shelter of a sort. It was not a shelter which provided him gentle rest. He could sink into his pain, there, and find something more to it than the vain howling of the wind which had persisted in the empty places of his heart before he had come to the priesthood. But it was not a homely sort of love. That sort of love, he had only ever found in the eyes and the hands and the mouths of his fellow man.
The band of roving priests and clerics who had sheltered him had given him such a love as that, the love which, for a time, was a sweet balm to all which ached seemingly without end. Venerable Bernard, covered in scars, who had taught him to read and to write and taught him all of the verses of prayer and the litanies they would offer up to the gods. Donatien with his silvery voice, who had taught Libra, whose voice was more of tin, to sing the hymns which lifted praise up on high, and taught him how to resound with the joy which the notes did carry. Eglantine, at whose side he had so often ministered to the poor and the sick. Callum, who had taught him to channel magic through staves. Nerina, who had taught him to take life with an axe.
In the company of all of them, even Eglantine who complained so often of her twinned left feet, he had learned the sacred dances by which they offered up their devotions to Naga and her starry court, and in the shared rhythm of their swaying bodies, Libra achieved something as close to the peace he had wanted so terribly for himself as he had ever found, in all of his years of searching for it. Never had he heard the voice of Naga in his heart, but he thought that the receptacle for it might have been in that hollow spot where wind whistled still, and blood yet dripped.
He had found peace, of a sort. It was the peace that shifted and tumbled restlessly beneath his feet, but it did so in a pattern which he recognized, and could anticipate. He had found the sort of love which would remind him that he was not yet dead to this world. He had found the sort of love which one could make a home out of.
In the shadowed hills of devil-haunted Plegia, he still had one of those things.
Just the one.
Just one, and each death which had added another shadow to his steps bored out a new hollow spot in his heart, until his honeycombed heart became as a vessel for light to pass through, and for nothing to reside within.
But he still had his axe, with which he could deal death, and he still had his staff, with which he could he could close up the wounds of those whose company he had joined after they had all of them failed to save the Exalt from the death the dead lands hungered for her. And there was still the love of Naga, which was a perfect match for the howling desolation where those who had once turned him aside from the gloom of the open grave he had been inching towards no longer existed. Love and rage intertwined could be a holy thing, when one had watched innocent blood pour out into ravenous earth to the tune of thousands of screeching cheers.
-0-0-0-
Ariadne had woken in a field with Chrom and Lissa standing over her, with Frederick behind them speaking words of caution, and before that, there was nothing. Her past awaited her behind layers upon layers of veils and shadows, but it waited in vain, for Ariadne could find no path which would carry her to it. It waited in vain, for Ariadne could feel something lying in wait upon the paths her feet could not find, and thus it was that she invested little joy in the idea of remembering all that she had lost.
Not to say it did not haunt her. There was a saying which impressed itself vividly upon her mind, even as she could not remember where first she had heard it: the past was the most persistent ghost which ever would haunt you, especially if you did nothing to exorcise it. It had probably been a bit more pithy in the mouth of the first person to say it around her, whoever that person had been, but Ariadne didn’t do pithy quips on command, after all. You already wanted her for a soldier and a strategist; she’d do wisecracks when she came up with something particularly inspired, and when inspiration shone down upon her at the fortuitous moment, which… Yeah, maybe once or twice, if that.
And… and it was hard to be witty at the drop of a hat, when she followed after Chrom and Lissa and all of the others and she found more and more to haunt her. More and more which responded to the echoes of all that she had forgotten which rattled still in the back of her mind.
As they ventured deeper and deeper into Plegia after the bloody trail they who had abducted Emmeryn left in their wake, Ariadne found that Frederick no longer regarded her with the suspicion he had once harbored. No longer did he track her movements round the campfire or in the training ring as if he expected her to draw a dagger from her coat and strike down his charges. But still did he look upon her with doubt, and she found she could not blame him, for it was quite the story, wasn’t it? It was quite the story, that she could have just wandered off somewhere and forgotten everything she had ever known, and yet still been able to read and write, still been able to fight with the best of them, still possessed a grasp of strategy which eclipsed that of those around her, still been able to pull random bits and pieces of information out of the ether to liven up her conversation.
It was quite the story, and though Frederick’s suspicion had always chafed, Ariadne found that she could not look askance on his doubt. She had a host of doubts of her own, which only grew the longer she inhabited her second life, while all the ways back were shadowed against her. For that great expanse in her mind where she knew nothing, heard nothing, remembered nothing, did not feel empty. It felt instead like the great expanse of the sea, which ringed the continent of Ylisse. If you came to the coast and stared out upon the blue waters stretching off towards the horizon, it might look empty. It might look as if there was nothing which dwelled within, might look as if you could swim across it without encountering anything living within the waters which would trouble you. But do not be deceived, O swimmer, do not be deceived. The sea is full of things which will swallow you whole, if you are not on your guard against them. Against some of those things, there was no defense. You would never see them coming, for you had no idea they were there. And then, they would eat you, and you would be gone.
Ensconced in her tent, Ariadne took off her gloves as she never did in front of the other Shepherds, and regarded the intricate mark on the back of her hand, while the triplet rows of stylized eyes which made up its body stared back at her. Thorns scraped her heart and worried at the fabrics of her mind, tormenting her with all she had forgotten, all which had sprouted teeth and claws waiting for her to thrust an arm or a leg into the sea of all that she had forgotten. She thought of the emblems she had seen on the armor and the clothing of some of the Plegians they had done battle against, and she drew a deep breath, cold in the harsh night away from the fires. Ignorance was not bliss.
-0-0-0-
She had been presumed lost alongside Chrom after that final assault on Validar’s chief band. Other rumors there were of exactly what had become of the Plegian mercenary who had risen to become the Exalt’s closest friend and advisor, and these, Libra had never known how much to credit. The rumors would grow darker and darker and bloodier and fouler, and never had Libra known how much he wanted to give them any credit.
Ariadne was… She was gone. It was not that there was no hope left in his honeycombed heart. Indeed, Libra found that there was much that he hoped for, no matter whether or not it might later be proven that he had been hoping in vain. Indeed, he found now that he hoped that she was gone. The portents which he might read in any alternative were harder and harsher and far darker than anything which he could have read in the idea that she had fallen into death at Chrom’s side. She had whispered to him of alternatives in the night, had woven their spell over his skin in the blind dark when he had been in need of something to chill his blood and the bastardization of the divine would do. She had murmured to him of the poison of holiness, the shackles of blood, the oblivion which the gods of this land might grant you, if enough favor was unearthed from the mountains of their hearts.
‘There are worse things than death,’ she had said to him, staring blindly up at the ceiling in the dark, and Libra had watched the moonlight scatter over her skin like the speckling of a corpse, and he had watched the deeper shadow on her hand twist and writhe and seem to look his way, and he had not disagreed with her.
She had spoken of herself, and she had been prescient for speaking on behalf of the world entire, for in the latter days of this world, there was a pall over the sun which never lifted, and there was a fly-ridden shadow of horror which never ceased to dog the steps of the living, and alongside the living walked the restless dead, creatures both mindless and malicious who supped eagerly of the flesh of those whose hearts yet fountained blood, and wanted for nothing else but that. There were things far worse than death, and in the minds of many, to linger in these latter days of the earth was one of them.
As long as he felt the light of the sun upon him and the light of Naga, however it might sputter and gutter in the growing sea of darkness which the specter of Grima cast over this world, Libra did not agree with them. But he could not deny that he had felt the shadow. He could not deny that he had felt the biting chill in the wind. He could not deny that when the rest of the camp was gripped by the same, overwhelming dream, when they all were courted by invitations to come and dine at the Dragon’s Table, when they all were heralded by commandments to come and worship at the feet of the lord of the earth, he dreamed exactly the same. He was transported in his dreams to the great plane and pillars of the Dragon’s Table, and he stood before the offerings which were submitted to the nameless, formless thing whose many eyes glowed in the smoke of the great bonfires lit all about the altar, and he knew deep in his bones just how small and transitory he really was.
Small and transitory and weak and fleeting, the nameless thing said to him, but he could be eternal if he would come and drink, come and eat, come and offer up.
Come and sup with me, dear one, and you shall never die.
He had heard it. He had seen it. There was a different truth which roamed the halls and caverns of his heart, and perhaps that was all that fortified him against it, though if the others, many of whom were not at all devout and professed faith neither in Naga nor in other gods, could deny the callings of the thing which styled itself their lord and master, perhaps its power was less great than it thought. Perhaps it had less power to wield over the human heart than it thought.
And perhaps from that would come Grima’s downfall, for Libra did not see in the power it wielded over the air and the earth and the water and the legions of the restless dead any chink in the armor which a skilled tactician could have exploited. If they had had such a skilled tactician in their ranks as all that. If she had not gone down into darkness and the unknown. If she did not wander now in the circuitous rivers of rumor which linked the many scrabbling camps of they who yet remained to resist the restless dead and the thing which named itself their master. If she did not vanish forever and ever, even in his heart.
Perhaps that was the avenue by which victory would find them. It had not found Libra, and would not.
There were things worse than death, things which the wise would fear above all else. When the tides of battle engulfed them and the Risen took him away alive, Libra began to know the bite of this fear as intimately as he had ever known the beat of his feet upon the floor in the many ceremonial dances of his worship.
-0-0-0-
“How long have you been a painter?”
Gangrel had been cut down before the very gates of his palace, and there was yet much unrest in Plegia which the Shepherds and all who would follow them must spend much time quelling. The path which had taken them to Plegia and then away from it, then back to it and away from it again, had carried them down the hard-packed earth, past little streams of water and little rivers of snaking woodland alike, down the arid hills and into the heart of the desert which Plegia seemed to feel best for harboring the heart of their land.
Libra had hoped to shut the book on this land and never lay eyes upon it again, for all that he returned to it in his dreams, for all that his dreaming feet still prowled the bloodied battlefields. No such luck. He and the others whom he had learned to call his comrades had left their business in this land unfinished. Gangrel was dead, but the nobles and the surviving generals and high-ranking priests of this land were yet troublesome, and must be quieted. There were ghosts rooted in this land who must see justice done and quiet restored to the land before they, too, could rest.
(It would not be rest for him. When his friends found the roots of whatever bound their echoes to the earth pried up from the hard-packed earth of Plegia, their homes would be found all the time in the hollows of his heart. It would not be peace for him, what was peace for them. But he would not have wished for it. They had given up their lives in this place, and though it had ultimately been in vain, he desired not for them to be forgotten. They who had planted the seed of life in the soil of his heart once more, he did not wish to forget them.)
In the first, terrible flight from the Plegian capital, and every place their weary feet had caried them since, Libra had had many occasions to speak to the Shepherds’ tactician. He had accepted a posting in the medical tent beside Princess Lissa, Maribelle, roughly a dozen painfully young priests and clerics, and a few mages who had decided to branch out into healing as well, along with the requisite apothecaries and surgeons. He had argued with her fiercely when she had reaffirmed that the healers were to stick to the back line and only emerge from it if they needed closer proximity to ply their craft or if they spotted someone who needed to be removed from the field entirely.
“There is another reason,” she had said, “that I want you in particular in the back line with the other healers.”
He remembered that he had smiled at her. “And what reason might that be?” Long ago had Libra perfected the art of keeping a pacific tone in spite of whatever turbulence might rule him, but his smile had nevertheless been strained, like a length of linen bandages pulled so taut that it might tear and rip before it could ever be used to staunch the flow of blood.
She had tilted her head to the side like a bird, a gesture he had seen often from her and yet still found disarmingly charming, though he could not entirely have said why. “I know the healers are constantly busy during battle; I guess you haven’t had time to really look at the others’ equipment. But most of them aren’t actually armed. Lissa and Maribelle are starting to learn their way around a tome, but neither of them are good enough at it that I’d be comfortable letting them fight with one. Only a handful of our healers can really hold their own in battle, and chief among them is you.” After a deep breath, “I would prefer it if you stayed with them. Obviously, you can’t fight off an entire raiding party by yourself, but you could buy enough time for us to come and reinforce you if somebody else got a signal out.”
It had been that which had ultimately swayed Libra, and if there was some small balm to be found in the company of those who had devoted themselves to Naga as he had, the young ones who might look to an older priest for guidance or to answer their questions or simply to have someone to complain to about the annoyances of their vocation whom they could trust to understand, he did not speak of this to her. It was not something of which he ever really spoke. Like the air he breathed which freshened his lungs, like the sweat which wetted his brow when he worked, it was something so much of the fabric of his life that he could not really speak of it. The searing of loss was as natural as breathing. To speak of it would have been so utterly beyond him that he did not think he could have stood it.
Beyond that, there were other topics of conversation which would naturally flow between a war monk attached to the Shepherds and the Shepherds’ tactician. There were casualty reports to be made, directions to be handed out on where the medical tents were to be erected, guard duty rosters and meal shift rosters and the rest of the horde of minutiae which went into determining what would need to be done and by whom to keep a camp of the size they so often traveled with going in good order.
And often enough had Libra heard others speak of Ariadne. She did, after all, distill herself into quite an interesting story, even if she seemed largely unaware of just how the camp gossiped about her. The whom from nowhere, whom Prince Chrom and Princess Lissa had found lying sleeping in a field south of Ylisstol, who remembered not how she had come to be sleeping there, who remembered naught of her life before she had woken to find Exalt Emmeryn’s brother and sister hovering over her. Her, who had quickly become fast friends with Prince Chrom. Her, who nevertheless had risen quickly through the ranks of the Shepherds, her prowess with magic and the sword and her head for tactics and strategy unmatched.
Quite a story, indeed. Libra did not know what to make of it. He thought that there were some things which might have been to her what loss was to him, something written too deep into the ever-shifting fabric of her body for her to pry loose enough to read from and then read to others. He could not help but mark that certain, swaying inflection in her voice, though, could not help but mark how similar she looked to some of the women in the villages they had passed through during their many forays into this country.
He did not know what to think of it, and said nothing of it. Most likely, there was… He could not say there was nothing to it. Nearly all of the Plegians Libra encountered had been fanatically loyal either to their king, to Grima, or to them both, so many that when he encountered those few, like Tharja, who actually seemed capable of thinking for themselves, he could not help but mark it. But it was not his place to question it, and there already seemed to be plenty who did, with varying degrees of gentleness. He had no desire to question it, not really. This world was composed of all sorts. He had seen things far, far stranger.
One thing that was strange was just how often Ariadne had turned the topic of conversation back to painting once she had found Libra working away on one in his tent. Peculiar, how much interest she took in his painting, though not unpleasant. Just… just strange.
“Many years,” Libra told her diffidently, regarding the array of paintbrushes and the box of oil paints and box of pigments for watercolors he had set out on the low table. This much, she no doubt could divine from the age of his boxes. Paintbrushes had to be replaced every once in a while, especially when the painter handled them as roughly as Libra sometimes did. And though his paints had been replaced many times—the droughts during the years when he’d not had the money to do so had been alleviated by sudden windfalls—the boxes had been… gifts. They had been given to him many years ago by gently smiling Bernard—“Something to soothe your anger, my son? I am glad of it.” and he had not frowned when Libra had snapped at him to never call him ‘my son’—and they…
He had been happy enough to find them untouched in the church they had set out from when they had started on their mad errand, when all but one of them had taken the first step in a series of many—but not enough, never enough, not for any of them, but just as the late Exalt had stepped and stepped and stepped until there was nothing left to do but topple to the ground, so too had they all stepped and stepped and stepped until it was impossible for their bodies to resist the sweet call of oblivion the hungry earth crooned forth—towards their own open graves. Libra had been happy enough to take custody of them once more when he had had the opportunity to regard to that church, though his heart had been drowsing in shadow.
‘Many years,’ he saw Ariadne mouth to herself, her brow furrowed as if she was trying to do some calculations in her head. His age, perhaps. Just as a frustrating number of people tended to take Libra for a woman when first they laid eyes upon him, it was not uncommon either for them to take him for some four or five years younger than the actual span which was his, though they had at least finally ceased to mistake him for a child. He must bear it patiently and gracefully, he knew. The only ones who had ever meant any ill by it were those soldiers he had encountered the night before his path had crossed the Shepherds’, and the earth had been watered plentifully with their blood, the earth had been happy to drink up their blood.
“Well, I still say your work is excellent, no matter what you say about it,” Ariadne asserted, with a by-now familiar stubborn set to her jaw. Her gaze drifted to the length of vellum he had been seated at when she had found him in his tent. She took a step forward, stubborn set of her jaw replaced by the spark of a mischievous smile. “If you won’t let me see what you’re working on—”
Libra set a firm hand on the screen he had thrown up to shield the vellum from her sight when earlier she had tried to flout his wishes and take a look at what was not permitted to her. “I allow no one to view my work before it is finished.”
After all, to look at a half-finished painting was rather like looking at a half-finished person, was it not? If you wanted to look at the glistening viscera over which no muscle or skin had yet been devised to cover it, that was one thing, but the maker might well wish you not look at it, anyways. Look at it half-finished, and you might well judge it grotesque when that would have been nothing but hopelessly unjust.
Not that Libra was unacquainted with the grotesque even in his finished products. Sometimes he was struck with something which he believed to be divine inspiration, which came from nowhere and refused to return whence it came until after he had cut it all from his mind and his heart and arranged its entrails into intelligible shapes upon whatever medium he had at his disposal. Sometimes, he grew frustrated at how soulless his work felt and he just—
“Maybe you’ll at least show me a little of your earlier work?” she asked, seemingly oblivious to just where Libra’s mind had just carried him. “You’ve seen the squiggles I made when I tried to draw, and I think everybody’s seen the chicken scratch that is my handwriting by now.”
Her eyes were very bright, like twin stars in the gloom of his tent. He was caught off-guard sometimes by the brightness of her eyes, and the warmth of her expression. Even when she was doing something so perfectly banal and dry as handing out the assignments for the night watch, the warmth of her manner took the sting of it nearly totally away. When they had exchanged casualty reports, there was nothing which could erase the sting of learning of new deaths or having to act as the herald of them, but she had been everything… kind. She had been as kind as he thought she was even capable of being. And she had seemed as if the deaths of their people pained her, for all that she attempted to work without giving this pain license. He would have thought that a tactician would respond to the deaths of soldiers she monitored more impassively, but there had been a tightness around her bright eyes which spoke of a tactician who would be staying up late into the night attempting to devise troop movements which would be more effective in mitigating casualties. There had been a redness to the whites of her eyes come the following morning following those battles which suggested she had spent the night doing exactly that.
That request, Libra thought he might have granted, had it been at all possible. As it was…
Libra shook his head regretfully, setting his hand down hard on a few papers on the low table in his tent as the winter wind chose that exact moment to bluster its way through. “Alas, I cannot. They are lost to me now.”
She blinked those bright eyes of hers, the wind tossing her auburn hair about her head. “They’re lost to you? How—” Comprehension dawned. “Oh.” She grimaced. “I imagine it would be difficult to carry it all around with you as you traveled, let alone keeping it all intact.”
“That is not precisely what I meant.” Libra set about to finding something which could serve as a paperweight to keep those papers he had been looking through from blowing off of the table. The boxes he kept his paints in would not do. And it kept him from having to look into her face as he spoke. Pacific tones were one thing; keeping perceptible strain from his face was another. “Some of them have been lost to time, it is true. I began to draw and to paint when I was yet a boy, and some of those pieces would inevitably been lost when we would move between churches, but most of my early work was not lost that way.”
“Did you donate it to the churches where you were staying?” Ariadne asked him innocently.
Libra could not quite resist the urge to smile bitterly to himself. Such had been suggested to him on more than one occasion. Even those who told him that his work was flat and lifeless-looking never denied that that same soulless work possessed technical skill. When the time came for them to journey to another part of Ylisse once more, it had been suggested to Libra on more than one occasion, either by one of his late comrades or by someone connected to the church where they had been staying that he leave his artwork with them, and allow it to beautify the walls of the church itself.
When he had yet been an adolescent boy, oh, how that suggestion had offended him. His spirit had not been an especially generous one in those days, and though even as a grown man he looked back on those incidents with eyebrows raised at the boldness of the priests and clerics and nuns who made such suggestions to him, he recognized that he had perhaps reacted somewhat… precipitously. Adolescence was not known as a time of great temperance in those currently undergoing its turmoil. Sometimes, he regretted it. Sometimes, he regretted his reactions still, to one extent or another. But in other respects…
“Much of what I created early on was not worth preserving.” It was better to be honest, though he saw little point in dwelling on the minutiae of what had led him to what he had done, years ago. “The emotions which inspired them were destructive, and such was reflected in the results. I thought it better that they be destroyed.”
The gods alone knew how many had been tossed on the fire or else torn to shreds by his fitful hands. For all that Libra was protective of the sanctity of the process of creating art in the first place, he had never felt especially attached to the finished products themselves. The moment they were out on canvas or parchment or vellum, no matter how dear they had been to him while they were still drifting half-formed in the shadowed halls of his imagination, they became as flat and as lifeless to him as everyone else claimed them to be. His fondness for them was rooted entirely in the amount of effort it had taken to produce them to start with. Some of them, perhaps, he had been proud of, but none of them had he truly loved. Love was for those of flesh and blood who stood at his shoulders. Love was for Naga, who had granted him his life and bid him keep it, however little he might have been worthy of such a boon. Not for this.
It was not an attitude which many shared. He did not expect her to share it. Indeed, with this revelation, Ariadne’s expression of puzzlement became one of shock. “What, really? All of it?”
Libra managed a smile, though he could scarcely hide his bitterness. “As you have said, I traveled often from church to church, and only the necessary could be carried with me. Even had it not been my own desire to see my older work destroyed, it would have been impossible to take all of it with me after a while—I was very prolific when I was younger,” he added unnecessarily, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “There was little in my life besides learning the ways of Naga from the priests and clerics who had taken me in, and I often found myself desirous of something to distract me from my thoughts. But destructive thoughts bred destructive results, and precious little of what I created those first few years would have ever been considered worth preserving.”
Some of it had been, however empty, sufficiently evocative that it had been considered good for churches. Some of it had been, however grotesque, sufficiently beautiful that they who had run the churches he had stayed in had nevertheless wanted it to hang on their walls. The pleasure he had taken in destroying it had gone beyond the catharsis of shedding—or so it felt like to him—all that had led him to create such artwork in the first place. But there was no need to tell her that. There was no need at all. It was another thing written too close and too deep against Libra’s skin for him to explain adequately.
Ariadne looked away. “The only thing I have that’s more than a few months old is my coat.” One of her gloved hands went to trace one of the highly visible stylized eyes on the sleeve of that same coat, the eyes which had always raised so many questions in Libra’s mind, for he recognized the emblem they mimicked, even if they were not identical. He recognized it all too well. “I think I would have liked to have had something else which I could have said was mine,” she muttered, mouth pressed in a thin, brittle line, crooked like a river flowing through a canyon. “I think I would have liked to have had some evidence of where it was I had come from, and what I had been doing. Even if it wasn’t very nice.”
Yes, Libra imagined that she would have. He was not insensible to the difficulties which her position must have created for her, both in terms of the doubts of others, and the doubts which must have germinated within. What must it be like, to wander through such darkness? And yet here he found her, shining like a star in the dark which gathered about her.
Another smile did Libra manage, this one somewhat gentler than the last. “Your situation is… is very specific, Ariadne. Mine was not the same as yours. I… I may at least promise you that had I found anything which I believed to be yours before you lost your memories, I would have brought it to you whole and undamaged.”
She did not smile in turn. “I should hope so. But you make me sad, speaking of your own work in such tones. It feels like self-violence, at least of a sort, and I don’t like to think of you hurting yourself. And I still think you sell yourself too short.”
With that, she left. Libra was left to stare at the spot where she had stood in some bewilderment, left to wonder what sort of turbulence might have precipitated that outburst. Something squirmed in the hollows of his honeycombed heart. It wriggled through the tunnels, seemingly venturing deeper and deeper, searching for one so narrow that it could not possible have found a way through. He had no name for it, and did not wish to dwell on it. There was so much for him to do before he could lay himself down to sleep. And there was still what he had been painting, though when at last he had the time to turn his attention back to the vellum, he found that the image in his mind’s eye had altogether changed.
-0-0-0-
‘Wow!’ Sumia had exclaimed once, when Ariadne had told her what it was that she and everyone knew of just how she had come to join the Shepherds. Eyes wide, hand over her mouth, a light like dancing flame in those wide brown eyes of hers, ‘I wonder if you fell into Fairyland. Maybe that’s why you can’t remember anything!’
Sully had come along quickly enough and put paid to such a notion, shooting Sumia a frown she seemed to have thought Ariadne couldn’t see. Ariadne hadn’t cared to address that frown, any more than she had cared to address Sumia’s suggestion in the first place. She wasn’t fool enough to think that Sumia had actually meant anything harmful by it, just as she was not fool enough to think that there was nothing to be concerned about in all that she could not remember. Ignorance was not bliss. Ignorance was never bliss.
Fell into Fairyland, she would sometimes think to herself, running her hand through her hair. Fell into Fairyland, and ate some fairy food, and then the fairies came along and demanded I give them all of my memories as payment for the food I stole.
Oh, the gods have made a jape of my life.
Keeping busy was a great balm to such wonderings and such sharp fears. From the moment when she had first become aware of how abnormal it was for people to wake up in fields and have no memories of anything that had gone on before, let alone how she had even gotten there or where she had come from, there had been something to keep her busy. Ylisse was a country which was ever besieged by some sort of trouble, be it by the kingdom which had been dealt with so cruelly in their last war and which now was consumed by an overpowering desire for revenge, by raiders and pirates harrying the coastlines, by unfavorable weather conditions which wreaked havoc upon the harvests, or, as the war had begun to peter out into military forays intended to pacify Plegia rather than conquer it (it was what Chrom had done, whether he chose to acknowledge it or not), the sort of plotting and backstabbing which Ariadne was told was unfortunately not unheard-of in royal courts the world over. There had been much, so very much, to keep her busy, to guide her thoughts away from the great dark sea which lapped at the shores of her conscious mind.
But she could not be busy all of the time. Irony of ironies, Ariadne had once cautioned Cordelia that if she did not set aside time to relax and to rest, her body would choose that time for her, and would exact every last groat of backpay it was owed from her ability to do anything at all. This she had cautioned her, and yet Ariadne found herself with perhaps an hour or two of true leisure time every day, and very much by her own choice. Chrom would catch her for meals or for sparring sometimes, and would ask her, half-joking and half very, very serious, if she ever really slept at all. Of course Ariadne slept. Just as soon as she was tired enough that she could be sure she would drop off immediately upon lying down on her pallet, of course.
She could not be busy all of the time. A fine thing it would be if the Shepherds’ tactician exhausted herself so utterly that she would have to lay herself up in a medical tent while she was needed elsewhere. They could have been washed away into the bitter rivers of defeat while she was too exhausted even to lift herself off of the cot, and then where would they all be?
(She knew it wasn’t sustainable. It could not be, not forever. Not one woman, not for the whole army. Take a close look at a chessboard, and you would see the problem soon enough: no one piece, no matter how minor or powerful, could be in more than one square at once. And if those pieces spent too much time skating across the chessboard, responding to all threats themselves, the position of their army as a whole would weaken. Perhaps they themselves would be captured, snuck up upon by furtive bishop or wild, unpredictable knight while their back was turned. Or perhaps they would turn around to find the hosts of the opposite side all around them, and them the only piece left standing between the devouring horde and the vulnerable king-piece.
So Ariadne had begun casting her nets looking for others who could have worked in concert with her, the better to ensure the success of their armies. But so far, she had found no one who worked to her standards. Virion, she had thought, would have made a good choice as a partner-tactician—he put a lot of time into cultivating an image as a fop, but he had a sharp mind beneath that peacock-like exterior and a good head for strategy in particular. But he himself had refused her, shaking his head and telling her kindly that their own mindsets were far too incompatible to make it possible for them to work together harmoniously. One of them looked ever to mitigate casualties as much as it was possible for them to do, and the other took a far, far more pragmatic view towards the same. The lack of consistency in strategies would sow chaos among the ranks, and it would be a disaster for morale.
She had found no partners, not yet. She began to grow pessimistic on the question of whether she ever would. But she would keep looking. She could do nothing but keep looking.)
Ariadne could not be busy all of the time. Her hands could not always be full, and she could not always have her table laden heavily down with reports and books of strategy and maps of the areas she was in or would be approaching or, or… whatever it might be that she could have used to keep her mind rooted firmly in the present which was hers to navigate, and the future which was hers to forge.
Dark were the seas of all which she could not remember, but not empty, oh, not empty at all. She would come to the edges of that sea and there she would trip over the flotsam and jetsam which washed up on the shore, jagged debris which could cut her legs wide open if she was not careful where she was going, jagged debris which could explode in a shower of splinters to pierce her everywhere, though most of them seemed to most ardently desire to pierce her eyes, her heart, her mouth.
Nothing concrete. Nothing which could have given her a solid narrative which she could have used to stitch together the unraveled tapestry of her past. She supposed she could have tried anyways, based on what little it was that she had managed to glean, but in all likelihood, the shape would have been so unutterably strange that it would have carried her far, far, far off to lands so far from what she knew that she might as well have journeyed straight to the underworld or the furthest reaches of the moon, and might as well have concocted a language of utter gibberish to explain it all. No good would it have done her. She would never have understood any of it all, and even if she could have understood a narrative of her past which she had concocted nearly whole cloth from these little slivers, it would never have given her any peace. She never could have trusted it. Never.
Not that things would ever progress to the question of whether to trust what she had pieced together of her past. There was nothing of it that formed a large enough piece for her to look down upon it and derive anything of value.
No, no, nothing large enough to begin constructing a narrative from. Instead, there was just enough there to torment her, to tear chunks out of the boundaries of her dreams through which darkness gushed forth, the dark sea so full of hidden debris that to wade so much as a foot into its depths was to invite mutilation.
And when she was here in Plegia, it was all the worse.
Ariadne remembered nothing of having ever been in Plegia before the first time she had entered it as a Shepherd, tearing after abducted Emmeryn, to no good end. She could summon no conscious memories of trekking its great hills and deserts, nor of creeping through the tough, hardy copses you might find sheltering in the shadow of the mountains. She remembered nothing of fording its rivers. Its villages were nothing like what she could remember seeing at any point in her life, and its cities, few though there were which could be found intact (Chrom had once told her, pale, as if he could not decide whether it was a great evil or whether it had been justified—this had been after Emmeryn had died, and she could not imagine him being struck by any such indecision beforehand, not with the way he had spoken of his father to her—that his father had had most of Plegia’s cities razed during the war he had prosecuted against them), were as alien to her as Ylisstol and the other cities of Ylisse were familiar. There was nothing here which called to her conscious mind. There was nothing here which she could remember visiting before she had woken up in that field in the south of Ylisse. There was nothing here which she could look upon and say had once been hers in any real fashion.
The conscious mind only ruled the conscious body. The conscious mind could only account for part of her mind. And when it came to that dark, danger-ridden sea in the back of Ariadne’s mind, her conscious mind felt more as an island than as a kingdom. A small island, perhaps. An island whose coastline seemed to be crumbling, inch by inch by bitter, faithless inch.
Never could the conscious mind reconcile to her satisfaction the heady feeling of belonging which had washed over her when first Ariadne had felt the dry wind of the dry steppes of the edges of Plegia’s heartland on her face, that ring of miles before the tough, dry grass which scraped at the legs as if its blades were of knives gave way to stone and to dry soil and to sand. Nor could she reconcile the tears which had sprung to the corners of her eyes when she had breathed in the sharp, heady scent of the cedar trees of the forest upon whose borders they had made their camp.
They would pass through a village and Ariadne would walk past a house with its kitchen windows open, and the aroma of meat cooking in a stewpot with all of the local spices and favored grains and vegetables would waft past, carried on the dry breeze which had felt so oddly like coming home, and when it would come time for them to stop and pass out the evening rations or set up their mess tent to fix an actual meal (of varying quality, starting with the mysterious qualities of the meat, which Ariadne was told and was inclined to agree did not improve upon closer inspection), she would always be struck with surprised disappointment when she was handed her plate and it did not contain whatever she had smelled cooking from open kitchen windows earlier in the day. They would walk by one of Plegia’s rivers, and far down on the bank, there would be women who either did not notice the army’s presence or simply did not care, and they would be singing their songs as they washed their clothes, and Ariadne would find herself struck with the almost overpowering urge to join in, for she found that she knew the melody of the song entire even when she had heard only a few chords, and the lyrics of the verses to follow were no surprise to her.
There had been the eye motifs on the clothing of some of the women who would stand in their shaded doorways and watch in forbidding silence, colorful veils and scarves pulled up over all of their faces but their own eyes of brown and green and blue and dark, dark black, as the Shepherds would walk by. The older women, mostly, for the younger women tended to go about with their heads bare, and Ariadne could not have told you just how it was that she knew that, either, for there was no indication of age in the eyes of these women. There had been the way that Tharja’s eyes had widened in something so very much like recognition when they had first laid eyes upon each other.
And slowly, so slowly, Ariadne’s shadow seemed to take on a shape all its own, something which did not resemble her body at all, something which she had no context for which would have made any sense to her at all. Her shadow seemed too long to detach itself from her body and fly away to find something which better fit its own nature.
And then there was the mark on her hand, and how similar it appeared to certain other marks she had seen all over the country, in the hallowed places, and sewn onto the clothes of certain of the people—and sewn into the coat she had woken up in, in that field south of Ylisstol.
No, no, Ariadne had never gone to Fairyland. She refused to believe in something as fanciful as that. But she stood on the ground of Plegia and sometimes she felt…
She’d never gone to Fairyland. She hadn’t lost her memories by eating fairy food. But even if she had, the most important question wasn’t how it was that she had lost her memories of her prior life, left only with the slivers in the storm-tossed dark sea seeping out from the back of her mind. No.
The most important question, Ariadne thought grimly, as she settled down onto her pallet for the night, was just where—and who—she had been before she’d lost her memories in the first place.
-0-0-0-
The unconscious mind did dream.
The unconscious mind loved little more than it loved dreaming.
Ariadne would, if asked, say that she remembered nothing of which she dreamed, that she only knew that she did dream.
This… This was a lie.
Ariadne did dream, and though she could not say that she remembered of what she dreamed all of the time, her dreams were not a blank to her. The images came to her like shadows made of the smoke of a campfire, black and fuzzy and amorphous and stinging.
And there were the eyes. There were always the eyes.
And the voice—
This night, at least, she woke upon the first intonation of that terrible voice. No time did it have to say anything to her, no time did it have to speak its prophecies of destruction. She was left awake in the night, the cool, dry air of spring turning sour in her open mouth, staring at the fluttering ceiling of her tent. She was left awake, her mouth open, and the words which lingered upon her lips.
She knew those words. Those words had been meant as an answer to the words of the formless thing which spoke to her in her dreams. What sort of answer they might have been, agreement or fierce defiance, she did not know. She never knew. This much, at least, Ariadne never did remember. Often had her dreams passed beyond this point, but she could not remember when she woke how it had gone. Perhaps that was for the best. Ariadne wiped the chilled sweat from her brow. She was not certain she would have liked to remember what it was she was saying.
No, no, that was a lie, too. The mark on the back of her hand stared mockingly down at her, smug and patient, and Ariadne could only stare back at it, discontented, her heart maintaining a sickly-fast pace, her stomach churning strangely. She knew that she would not have liked to know what she said in reply to the formless lord of her dreams.
It was… She couldn’t remember whose turn it was to go on night watch tonight. Not hers. She knew that much. Had it been Ariadne’s turn to go on night watch and stay awake through the windy cool of the spring night, she knew just where she would have been, and it wouldn’t have been here. She smiled ruefully up at the ceiling. ‘You should rest’ reverberated in her ears, taking on a different voice for each syllable, but still, she thought that if she could have gotten away with relieving someone of a largely-disliked post a few hours early, she would have done it, and gladly.
Alas, everyone who took on the night watches was on guard against that since the first time she had been caught doing it, and been caught thereafter yawning all day, though insisting that she was alright, and that nothing was wrong—an assertion quite thoroughly given the lie, Frederick told her sternly, when they were ambushed that day and her sleep-longing body was too slow and sluggish to jump out of the way of a sword slash in time. If she did not want to roll over and try to seek out dreamless sleep, she would have to seek some other occupation, and one that did not waste their expensive candles or the equally expensive oil that lit their oil lamps.
Maybe she could just take a walk around the camp. It would be something to do that wasn’t staring up at the fluttering ceiling of her tent, which was plucked and puckered as if a giant hand was situated over it and teased the canvas incessantly. And maybe it would tire her out enough that she could lie back down later and fall asleep once more without any trouble, and without dreaming. That would have been nice. Someone in her position had to know when to be optimistic, didn’t they?
Ariadne rose and dressed, and slipped out past the weighted flaps of her tent, into the spring night which sat like a soft, velvety shroud over the harsh landscape of Plegia. Their camp currently sat nestled in the shadowed plateau of a ridge, overlooking a valley far below. There did no one live, or at least, no one whom Ariadne knew of. She thought she had heard that there was a road down there which shepherds and goatherds used when guiding their flocks to and from the nearest city, but that road would have been difficult to pick out amongst all of the cedar and fir trees, and she was not certain where the nearest city left intact was supposed to be, nowadays. It might have been the capital, where even now the Plegians vied amongst themselves to see who would be king after Gangrel, whose body they never had managed to reclaim from the battlefield where he fell, and who now, most likely, had served as food for vultures and jackals, and whose bones would now have been indistinguishable from those of the soldiers he had whipped up into a nationalistic froth.
And overhead, the cloudless sky was that rich, rich blue-black which Ariadne had come to admire, truly a velvet shroud set with a hundred million tiny, sparkling jewels in the form of the many stars which shone high above them. The moon had set some time ago, disappearing behind the jagged hills at the far edge of the valley. From the night fires did plume up thin, snaking spires of white smoke, which at times fooled Ariadne into thinking a few last rays of moonlight had found her here.
A beautiful country, she thought, for such a benighted people.
And if you are one of them? What does that make you?
Ariadne turned away from the valley, and began instead to wind a path through the camp.
She found no one awake. The guards who were meant to be keeping watch she found instead dozing, and though she knew it would have been wiser to wake them, she thought instead to let them sleep. They had had no trouble here, not from raiders, nor even from the wildlife—though her heart still did stop for a moment whenever she thought of that time when she had gone to see what was making such a racket in one of the outlying tents, only to open the flap and find a skinny lioness pawing at a chest full of smoked meat, grappling fruitlessly with the lock.
The whole camp was sheltered by sleep, it seemed, except for her. There was no one she could have sat down with, no one she could have spoken to. Frederick had turned in some time ago, the chores which played on his mind so much apparently completed to his satisfaction. Cordelia seemed to have run out of things to do and blown out the candle in her tent. Lon’qu wasn’t up early for training today. Neither was Sully, or Chrom.
This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? Ariadne asked herself ruefully, drawing her coat more closely about her. The dryness of the air meant that the cool bore little sting, but still, she thought she would be more comfortable when the sun began stretching its first rosy fingers over the hills. I wanted a quiet place to walk in, where no one would ask me why I was not in my tent, asleep. I wanted somewhere I could tire myself out in peace, and ensure that my only sleep would be too exhausted for dreams.
She’d gotten what she wanted. She wondered if she would ever stop being dissatisfied in some small way or another with the results.
Ariadne had almost come to the point where she would have been ready to just pick her way back to her own tent (hopefully managing not to walk into the wrong one in the process and wake up whoever might be sleeping there; she’d done that more than once, under other circumstances, and couldn’t remember a single time when it hadn’t been so awkward that there hadn’t been a moment when she wished she could have just sunk into the earth and let it swallow her whole) and try to sleep again when she spied the ray of light dancing at her feet. She stared at it, frowning, watching as it plucked and quivered as would the inverse of a shadow of a dancer—light firing off from the feet of some sort of creature so utterly devoured by light that they could not put off darkness even as a shadow. It wasn’t something she would have expected to be put off from a night fire, and looked more like the light put off by a tall candle, or perhaps an oil lamp.
She followed the ray of light to its source, and when she found it seeping back under the flaps of one tent in particular near the edge of the camp, she realized what it was she had been following, and she could not even pretend to be surprised.
There were no churches dedicated to Naga or her court to be found anywhere in Plegia. Not in the heartland or the boundaries of the heartland, anyways. Ariadne thought she had seen one or two in the borderlands, but they were… well, they were rare.
You would not find a church dedicated to Naga past the flinching, furtive borderlands of Plegia. No idols or roadside shrines, at least not any which had been intact. Ariadne had stumbled across the remains of what she thought had once been shrines, but the outer structure had since been stripped to its dry, wooden bones, whatever adornments had been within had been looted, and the stone idol had been cast down to the hard-packed earth. Its head had been missing.
And it was not as if there were even shrines or churches to be found dedicated to the gods of Plegia, either. Again, she was to understand that the late Exalt—she… she really needed to start referring to him consistently as ‘Chrom’s father’ in her head; it absolutely would not have done to confuse his actions for Emmeryn’s, not even for a moment, not even just in her own head—had ordered the destruction of every church and shrine he found which was not dedicated to the worship of Naga and those gods who stood in attendance upon her. Most of them, then. They would not find a single church or shrine of this land’s gods which had stood for more than fifteen years. There were a few rough posts drilled into the ground at certain points along the road, all of them decorated all over with staring eyes. That was all.
She could not help but wonder, more than once, why it was that none of the Plegians had ever bothered to build new churches or shrines. The Grimleal, she would have expected to have embarked upon such building projects, but even in the heartlands where they held most sway, she had seen nothing which indicated such. Had Gangrel forbidden it, perhaps? But that made little sense. Gangrel was a man who had seemed to place much importance in maintaining control over his own people. If there was anything the scholars agreed on, it was that organized religion was a vital tool in successfully influencing the mood of the people of a kingdom, and…
Well, perhaps the Grimleal had not been interested in serving as an arm of the state. But that didn’t make any sense either, considering that the Grimleal had often been seen to be doing Gangrel’s bidding.
Ah, Ariadne would learn nothing revolving around these circles of thought once more. She had wandered its circuits more than once, trying to understand more about the people of the land it was her task to pacify. (Trying to understand more about the people who seemed so disconcertingly familiar to her, and who revealed more of themselves to her with the utmost reluctance, and seemingly never consciously.) Never had her studies yielded up anything of significance. Never had she gleaned anything which she could have used to form conclusions, nor even points of interest for closer inquiry.
As it stood, there was nowhere nearby handy for the devout in their camp to worship, and even if there had been, it wouldn’t have been safe. There had been incidents of soldiers wandering off from the camp by themselves and never returning. It wasn’t clear just what it was that had happened, if they had been picked off by assassins or perhaps fallen prey to the more ravenous of the wildlife, that which might actually stand a chance of picking off grown men and women who knew their way around the weapons of war. Perhaps even Risen had been responsible, for they had seen a few bands of the undead roaming the empty lands from time to time.
There was a natural solution for such a problem as this, if you stopped to think about it for more than a few seconds. If you can’t trust the local churches or shrines, and there aren’t any around at hand anyways, set up one of your own.
Not that it was much of a shrine. Ariadne had seen a few of them on the roads leading in and out of Ylisstol, and what they had set up in the tent was paltry compared to it. Nothing but a low pedestal of splintering pine, and upon it sat an idol of Naga some three feet tall, utterly bare of even the slightest adornment.
(“No paint?” Ariadne asked in puzzlement as Libra set the idol down upon the pedestal. She regarded the idol dubiously as Libra, having apparently gotten the steps out of order, looked for a bit of cloth to set under the base of the idol. Even the humblest shrine she had seen in Ylisse, no matter which god it seemed to be devoted to, had at least been able to procure paint to give some color to its idols. There had been a wide array of paint jobs, some of them in one color or two, and only a few she had seen which had managed more than four. They ran on a spectrum from simple and understated to bright and garish and gay. She had never seen one without any paint at all.
Libra held the idol a long moment, staring down at its gentle countenance with a look of pensive contemplation on his face. There was something about his face when he looked like that, the way the crisp lines of his jaw and his cheekbones would soften a little and the cool look like spring frost in his eyes would thaw a little, that always stopped Ariadne short, just a little bit. Whenever it was over, she always felt as if a little of the light had gone out of the room.
“This idol had paint at some point, I would say.” He held it up for her inspection, and sure enough, there were a few green flecks clinging to the stone in bits and pieces which she might have thought to have been lichen in weaker light. “But it is old, and has been outside for many a year, and it had been abandoned at some point, for I found it on the roadside on our way here, covered by some leaves.”
“Really?” Ariadne would admit she liked a little mystery, even if this one did not seem to lead them anywhere significant. Perhaps that was why she liked that mystery at all. Mysteries which led to places of significance did not seem to have any happy answers. “I wonder why it would have been abandoned.”
He favored her with a small smile which seemed to want some crookedness, though it was too short for such a thing. “If I had to guess, I would say that whoever once held this idol as theirs obtained one of higher quality. One whose features have not been battered long enough by the wind to grow soft. After that, it would have been the work of an hour to find a quiet place to abandon this statue.” He shook his head, eyes flashing with some nameless emotion. “As if the visage of Naga is something to be discarded in such a fashion.”
There was a bitterness there which begged for an explanation, though Ariadne could guess well enough that she’d be getting no such explanation, not this time. She could not just go asking such prying questions and expect them to be answered, and Libra… Libra had always sidestepped questions of just who and where and what he had been before he had been a priest with practiced expertise.
“Will you give it a fresh coat of paint?” Ariadne asked instead, resisting the urge to set her hand over his.
He shook his head. “Not as of yet. Later, perhaps, when we have returned to Ylisse, and there will be churches and shrines aplenty for the soldiers to visit. But I shall keep it safe until that day arrives, and this idol shall know the sting of abandonment no more.”)
It wasn’t much of a shrine, not really. People did not leave offerings here as they might have done at a roadside shrine or a shrine which sat in a town or nearby a church. The impermanent nature of it saw to that; no one wanted their little slips of paper with their prayers on it to be read, and no one wanted whatever little trinkets they might offer to appear on the persons of their fellows. And Ariadne did not think she had seen too many people come here to pray to start with, did not think she had seen too many of the soldiers or too many of the clerics and priests attached to the camp go to the tent designated as the local shrine. It seemed as if the impermanent, novel nature of the shrine had denied it legitimacy in the eyes of many.
There was at least one whom Ariadne knew of who could be counted on to treat this place with reverence, though. (Ariadne was going to say the ‘proper reverence,’ but she did not know, she just did not know at all.) And judging by the light which spilled from the crack in the tent flaps, she thought she knew just where he was now.
Libra in prayer was an odd sight. Ariadne had seen many of the younger priests and clerics in prayer, and none of them were ever still while they did it. They fidgeted, they smoothed out their skirts or their trousers. Their eyes would dart to the windows or the ceiling, and of course, their mouths would move as they prayed, even if they elected to pray silently. It seemed that though one did not need to speak prayers to Naga or her courtiers aloud, one did at least need to form the words in order for those gods to understand what it was the supplicant asked for.
Or so it seemed, anyways.
Libra was so still in prayer that Ariadne could have believed him constructed of the same materials as the idol which he knelt before now. He never lifted his head towards the idol, and his mouth never moved. Truth be told, she could not have said that she knew him to be praying at all. He could have been sitting quietly, seeking a moment’s peace away from the hustle and bustle of the camp. But it was so dark outside, still, and they were quite possibly the only ones awake. That could not be it.
Ariadne sat down silently beside him, smoothing down her trousers and arranging her coat so that it did not grate against her legs. She breathed in the peaceful silence of the tent quietly. It did not feel any different from her own tent, but it did not contain her pallet, and she would not have been expected to sleep here, and flee her own strange, at times distressing dreams.
At length, Libra straightened a little, his eyes shifting towards her so slowly that she could almost have believed him asleep. “I do not believe I have ever seen you come here to pray,” he said quietly.
With a rueful, grimacing smile, “I’m… I’m not actually here to pray. I couldn’t sleep—” not strictly the truth, but not strictly a lie, either “—and I thought I’d take a walk around the camp. I came here when I saw a light shining from within.”
And now, Libra’s gaze drifted to the tent flaps, where his brow furrowed upon seeing the sheer darkness without. “I… I did not think I had been here so long. I—” He attempted to stand, only to topple back to the ground, hissing. “I think I should wait until my legs have woken, and are not too numb to stand upon.”
“No judgment there. Do you know how many times I’ve tried to get up from paperwork only to find my legs have put in their resignation?”
“I cannot imagine. There are days when you seem to do little else.”
“Someone has to keep the camp running. Unfortunately, that means subjecting everyone to my chicken scratch.”
Libra chose to sit in a considerably less formal position, his legs stretched out before him. He let his gaze drift up to the ceiling, and for the first time, Ariadne saw the shadows which gathered under his eyes. It seemed as if he had been here for hours. Judging by his confusion when he saw how dark it was outside, possibly when there had still been some light streaking across the sky.
She ought to leave him. In all likelihood, Libra would go from here to his tent, to try and pin down a few hours’ sleep before the morning came. No one did well after pulling all-nighters; even Frederick started to look a little ragged after spending the entire night awake. The kinder thing to do was leave him, and go seek out her own tent to try and catch a few hours’ more sleep for herself. Kinder for her, and kinder for him.
But she wanted his company. His company was… She could not say what it was, only that it made her feel better when she was unsettled. If this inclined her a little toward selfishness, so be it.
So Ariadne asked one of the questions which had been bothering her for a while. “I wonder,” she wondered aloud, “why it is that none of the Plegians have rebuilt their churches or their shrines. It’s been years, and I can’t imagine Emmeryn would have ever tried to deny them that, but I haven’t seen a single church beyond those little ones dedicated to Naga near the border.”
Libra shrugged. “Principal worship in this land is to Grima, who is a god of evil and of darkness. He is the sort of god whom I cannot imagine you would bind to the confines of a church. The absence of shrines is more interesting, but most shrines are centered around idols, and they were all smashed during that war.” Just a little irritably, “There are so many obscure and arcane rules surrounding the creation of idols in Ylisse that I cannot imagine it would be any different in Plegia. It is possible that the infrastructure to create new idols may no longer exist.”
All of that was very interesting, but Ariadne had gotten caught up on the earliest point. Which, frankly, was bothering her just as much as the absence of churches and shrines in this land.
“Why would anyone worship such a god?” she burst out, frowning up at the idol as if it could have answered her, though she had known no idols which could answer questions, and she had never seriously expected them to. “Who on earth would ever worship a god of evil? I mean, I suppose there are evil men everywhere, and they might think worshipping Grima was well and good, but not everyone in this country can be evil. I imagine not even most of them are evil. Why would any of them worship a god of evil who longs for evil works?”
All that time, she did not look at the eyes stitched into her coat. All that time, she very carefully did not think about the mark on the back of her hand. She did not think about how she could never determine whether it was a tattoo which had been inked upon her skin at some point or another in her life, or if it was a birthmark which had been with her since she had emerged from the womb. She very carefully did not think about all of the things it might mean, either way.
Libra did not answer her right away. From his narrowed eyes when he looked her way, she thought it meant that he was giving the question serious thought, rather than preparing one of the rote answers she thought that one of the younger priests, sheltered and not yet wise enough to the world to really think about that question, would have rattled off for her. For a long time, he said nothing, and the silence settled down between them, an uneasy friend uncertain of its welcome, but happy enough for a light to sit before, nonetheless.
Or perhaps it would not have been such a comfortable place to sit, after all. Between Ariadne and Libra there dwelled the shadow of the idol, which did hungrily devour the light that lapped against the ground. Such a hungry shadow would not have been happy to be obscured by anything which might hope to distort its edges.
“I… have no answers for you,” he said at length. “I have made few attempts to minister to the people here. I was soundly rebuffed when I tried to do so, by those who tell me that their own priests suit them well enough and that they do not wish for the sheep of the Butcher—”
“I take that to be Chrom and Lissa’s father?”
“The same. I do not believe that Prince Chrom has yet crossed such lines as to make any but the most hardline of the Plegians refer to him in such a manner, and neither Princess Lissa nor Exalt Emmeryn have ever behaved in such a way as to even begin to justify such a title. They said to me that they did not wish for the sheep of the Butcher to profane their homes by coming into them and speaking of foreign gods.” Libra scratched at the hard earth with his right hand, fingers digging deep into the soil. “I do not think that our pantheons are entirely discrete, but they made their opinions clear, and I did not stay where I was not wanted.”
Bitterness had seeped into his face again, beneath that mild tone, and Ariadne could not help but flinch to hear it, just a little. It did not feel… No, it was not that it did not feel natural there. Sad to say, but bitterness seemed an old friend upon Libra’s tongue, though tamped down often enough that she did not think it had ever been given full license much—at least not since he had joined the clergy. But she didn’t like to hear it, anyways, any more than she liked to hear the bitterness in Chrom’s voice when he spoke of the way Emmeryn had been treated by their people as a child, when he spoke so shudderingly of his father’s massive, devouring shadow. Perhaps there was one advantage to having no past which she could remember—though there was much in that dark sea to disquiet her, there was nothing in it which was capable, by itself, of inspiring choking bitterness inside of her.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?’
Of course there was something else. There was always something else. That was the way with people. There was more to Cordelia’s diligence, more to Sumia’s love of romantic stories, more to Virion’s foppish façade, and more to Lon’qu’s skittishness around women. More to Libra and his quiet bitterness, and there was always the impulse in Ariadne to reach out too quickly, too eagerly, almost hungrily, seeking to delve in and root it out to its source.
It wasn’t appropriate, of course. She had done nothing to earn such an intimacy, not with him. (Not yet.) But she still hungered for such intimacy with someone, and that was the problem with having your conscious memories go back less than a year, with no one who had known you before everything was shattered and tossed into the great dark sea at the back of your mind, wasn’t it? There could be no intimacy of such a kind for someone with no past, not when there were still so many questions surrounding you and everything could slip away from you again with no warning, and…
Ariadne resisted a bitter look of her own. Perhaps there was something in her life which was a ripe source of bitterness after all. Perhaps she had been just a little too charitable where her own life was concerned.
“My heart was not glad at the idea of ministering to these people,” Libra told her frankly. He did not seem proud of it. He did not seem ashamed of it. It seemed as though it simply was, at least for him. “This land holds many memories for me, and all of them are soaked in blood and filled with the cries of those whom I have held dear. Though I know such thoughts to be unworthy of me, I still think that I will be happier when we are back in Ylisse, when I am back in my own lands, and may hearken to the voices of my own gods in the wind and the rain and the earth.”
“I’ll… I’ll be happy to be home, as well.” He had been one of a company of priests who had set out to rescue Emmeryn. Ariadne knew that. And she knew that he was the only one left remaining. Never had he told her exactly what it was that had become of them, but she would be a fool to suppose that there was more than one potential explanation.
And Libra would have been a fool to suppose that Ariadne’s reasons for being glad to return to Ylisse were the same as his. She did not think him a fool. But hypocrite that she was, though she was full of questions of her own, she did not think she could bear his in return. She had so few answers to give, and none that she thought would have granted either of them joy, nor her esteem in his eyes.
“I will say this.” Libra smoothed a wrinkle in his trousers. He seemed more interested in examining that seam than he was in meeting her gaze. “There were those who would speak to me some on the nature of their gods, and I cannot say that any of them seemed to have any joy of Grima. When they spoke of him, it seemed to me that they spoke instead of death which long had they hoped for. Such people—”
“Are unhappy.” Ariadne liked to think she was an apt enough student of human nature to guess as much. “And are so unhappy that things which otherwise might have been unthinkable to them become more and more acceptable.”
“And I do allow that this unhappy land has been given many reasons to bow its head in sorrow.” Libra sighed heavily, his gaze returning to the idol. “I do allow that,” he mumbled. “But I am not Naga, to possess what power would be necessary to cure the land in its entirety of its sorrows. And I am not Naga, to be possessed of the boundless grace which such a task would require. I fear that were I to attempt it, I would be in danger of botching the job thoroughly.”
Somewhat impulsively, Ariadne blurted out, “Well, I hope you will be happier when we are back in Ylisse. There’s going to be a lot to keep us busy there, too. It might be busy enough to give you some peace.”
Libra arched a thin, delicate brow. “And will you be so busy that you cannot come pester me to show you my unfinished artwork?”
A startled but pleased laugh jarred from Ariadne’s mouth. “Not that busy, I hope! Life has to have some pleasures in it, and mine would be the poorer for the loss of your company.”
It occurred to her too late that that might have been too forward. Distant as he was, Libra might think that too forward. But if he grasped at the potential for more than what was said, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he smiled at her, a small, thin smile like dawn trying to break around the lip of a night-shaded hill.
The way he smiled made Ariadne want to draw closer. But the shadow of the idol yet sat between them, and it was a barrier she could not surmount.