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Derdriu, 1189.
Their rooms in the rented villa in Derdriu adjoined—something Sylvain had pointed out to them with a wink—but Annette had had much more fun than him tonight on the Gloucester pleasure barge and had fallen asleep almost as soon as Sylvain and Felix got her into her own bed. Thus deprived of his usual late night activity, and without the attention span required to read a novel or write letters, Felix found himself in the villa's library, staring at the dying embers in the fireplace.
He could open the trunk at the foot of his bed, he thought.
He was not going to open the trunk at the foot of his bed.
The dim light cast long shadows over the couches and the bookshelves. He would think about something else instead. The window was open, and the night air, filled with the thick, sickly scent of peonies from the villa's garden, filled the room. He could go out there and train, but he still wasn't sure where all the lanterns were and he didn't want to wake a servant.
Sylvain insisted that Felix do fun things, and he couldn't say no to Sylvain and Annette at the same time. It seemed unreal that Lorenz Hellman Gloucester should have something he referred to as his pleasure barge, and even more unreal that Sylvain should be such good friends these days with Lorenz Hellman Gloucester that he'd have a standing invitation to any parties thrown on it. And tonight Felix had spent four long hours on a boat drinking as little as possible and trying to keep Annette from falling into the bay.
He was so tired. He could just peek into the trunk. It wouldn't hurt anything—he was being ridiculous. It was just a shield, after all. An ugly, heavy old shield that he'd used for one battle because it made him feel nostalgic, and regretted it ever since.
"Felix?"
Annette's soft voice came from the library doorway. Felix kept his eyes on the fireplace. If he moved from this spot, he was going to end up back in his bedroom, and if he ended up back in his bedroom—
"I thought I'd find you here," she said. "Since we came to Derdriu, the dreams have gotten worse for me."
"I haven't slept yet," said Felix.
Her footfalls were soft on the thick carpet. From the corner of his eye, he saw that she'd changed into a white nightrail, one of the frilly ones that covered her from neck to ankle. Her hair had gotten long since the war.
"What are we going to do?" Felix asked.
Her slim arms came around his waist, squeezing him tight from behind. He was trembling, he realized. They both were.
"I have a plan," Annette said. "It's not a good plan, but we can't go on like this. I'll tell you in the morning."
-
Caledonian Plateau, 1186.
In that last long battle, he'd seen the woman high above him on the bone-white pegasus and known precisely who she was.
Her blood called to his. His Crest knew her Crest. This was the first Fraldarius, one of the Ten Elites, resurrected along with Nemesis to lay waste to Fodlan. She bore her Relic and a terrible magic lance, and Felix shot her cleanly through the eye with a bow he'd taken off a fallen enemy soldier, and she died like any mortal. In the exact same moment, Annette cast a lightning spell and struck down the man on the wyvern who'd been flying at Fraldarius's side. The dead should stay dead, Felix thought, and then the tide of battle swept them away.
After the battle, Annette came to his tent. Her head was bandaged. Felix was exhausted and covered in small wounds. She'd looked up at him with a wolf-like hunger in her eyes, and suddenly Felix had never wanted anyone so badly in his entire life.
Except—he'd never wanted Annette at all before that night. It wasn't a post-battle rush. He had not until that moment found her any prettier or more charming than he normally did. She was beautiful, but she'd never inspired any lust in him. They were friends, and not very good ones at that; just because they were both from Faerghus, two of the three who'd come to fight along with Claude and Professor Byleth, didn't mean they had to be close.
"I don't know why we did that," Annette had said afterward, curled up into the smallest space possible on Felix's bedroll. "Oh, Goddess. We have to do it again. It'll be perfect next time, I know it."
"It's already perfect," Felix replied. "It's just a matter of refining the technique."
"Felix!"
"I'm right. Get some sleep. We've had a long day."
But his heart was pounding. It had been good. It had been better than good. But more than that, it felt familiar. He'd known exactly what to do, and Annette had known exactly what to do to him, and they hadn't been able to stop.
That night, he dreamed of a slight, dark-haired woman and a red-haired man with an unkempt beard. They sat together in a bower of willow trees and roses, their faces half-obscured by shadow. The woman put her hand on the man's forearm and leaned her head on his shoulder and sighed. Felix knew her. He knew her. He'd killed her.
-
Derdriu, 1189.
The next morning, Felix opened the trunk at the foot of his bed.
The same thing happened that always did when he gave in to the compulsion to open the trunk, which was: nothing much. The Aegis shield was at the bottom, buried underneath his clothes. He pulled it out and set it on his bed. The yellowed bone of the surface glowed a faint gold at his touch. It was always flesh-warm, and he sat down on the bed next to it, and gazing down at it.
It hated him. Everyone said that Heroes' Relics were willful and hard to master, and this was why: they did not want to be wielded. They wanted you to make a mistake and die. The longer he stared at the Aegis shield, the more it looked like an enraged face. He was transfixed by it for longer than he cared to.
On the other side of the villa, Annette would be doing the exact same thing with Crusher.
It was known by those few people in the world who had cause to know that Heroes' Relics shouldn't be stored together. It was instinct: put two of them too close together and they rejected one another. The feeling was sudden and violent, and you'd feel wrong until you separated them. Even on the trip to Derdriu from Garreg Mach, they'd had to be stored in different carriages. The Lance of Ruin was stored in a third spot, as far away from the other two weapons as possible.
Felix didn't dream of the weapon much. But when he did, he dreamed of his ancestor kissing a beautiful green-haired woman, and then driving a shortsword through that woman's breast. The woman dissolved in an explosion of light, and then Felix woke up in a cold sweat, tears running down his face. He'd told Annette about nearly all of the dreams, but he hadn't told her about those ones.
-
Garreg Mach, 1187.
At Queen Byleth's command, Garreg Mach was hastily reopened. Annette took a position as its professor of sorcery. Felix had tried to bid her farewell and go off to join Leonie, who'd offered him a job as her lieutenant in the mercenary company she was starting. The farther he got from Annette, he reasoned, the less hold this weird problem would have on him.
It didn't work. He spent one night away from Garreg Mach, away from Annette, and came back the next morning to ask to stay on as the weapons master.
"I didn't like you," Annette said. She'd shoved him down in the chair in her office—once Professor Hanneman's—to climb on top of him and pepper his face with kisses. "I don't like you!"
"But here we are," Felix said, sliding the short blue jacket she wore off her shoulders and flinging it to the floor.
Annette was noticeably distressed about that, so he stood, still holding her up with one arm, bent, and set the jacket on the desk. Annette shrieked with delight and surprise at his strength. If some magic wasn't compelling him to do it, it would have been flattering.
"We need to talk about this," Annette said, "I've been having dreams...."
"Me too."
He told Annette about them. Mostly, they were the same scene: their ancestors in the bower, the night before the battle with Saint Seiros's army. But sometimes he dreamed about the two of them sparring and laughing together, or flying side-by-side on their mounts, and he woke up with a knot in his throat and his chest so full he thought it would burst. He left that last part out.
As Annette listened, she chewed at her lower lip. He'd never noticed she did that. Now, he was stuck noticing everything about her.
"I have the same dreams, more or less," she said. "We killed them, and now we're under some kind of spell, some... dying curse they cast on us, Felix, cut it out!"
He stopped kissing her neck. As necks went, it wasn't very special, he told himself. Except for the place they'd been born, and they place they could never go back to, he and Annette had nothing in common.
"Okay. How do we make it stop?" Felix asked.
"I don't know, but I'm going to find out. I'll go to Abyss—I'll write to sorcerers in Morfis and Almyra if I have to. My old teachers at the School of Sorcery have contacts."
The stubborn set of Annette's chin and the pure determination in her voice as she said it made Felix's pride, which was considerable, twinge.
"I didn't realize you found me that disgusting," he said.
She took his face in both of her hands and kissed his forehead. "You don't want to do this with me. I don't want to do this with you. Let's make the best of it while we can, and then when it's over, we'll forget all about it. Okay?"
-
Derdriu, 1189.
That was two years ago. Felix never stopped reminding himself that this didn't mean anything.
After last night on the pleasure barge, Sylvain looked like he'd been kicked by a drafthorse, but he still managed to keep up the entire breakfast conversation by himself while Felix glared out the window and Annette picked at her pastries. She was pale, and wore an unadorned yellow dress with a blue ribbon in her hair.
"Cichol's hairy balls," Sylvain said abruptly, "the two of you are getting a romantic getaway in sunny Derdriu for free. You could act a little happier about it."
Felix looked up from his coffee to say something, but Annette got there first.
"Me and Felix are old and boring now! I should have slept in until noon," Annette said. "But I have weird dreams when I sleep in new beds." She laid her hand on Sylvain's forearm and squeezed it.
Felix immediately saw red. He breathed in and out. This jealousy wasn't his feeling, but after a few years of dreaming you were another person every night and having their emotions run through you like poison every day, who was to say where the line was anymore? He'd gotten into the habit of wanting Annette, but really, he didn't care what Annette did. If she went to Sylvain tonight instead of him, the core of him that remained untouched by his ancestor would be fine with it, probably. But the part of him that couldn't tell Annette apart from a smiling red-haired man with a bolt axe and a bad-tempered wyvern would not be.
After all this time, after all her research, Annette had a plan. This could be over very soon. He told himself that, but then Sylvain ruffled Annette's hair and Felix had to let go of his coffee cup before his Crest fired off and he broke it.
"It's okay," Sylvain said. "If you guys hate the parties, you don't have to go."
"I like them," Annette said. "Felix is the one who thinks they're awful."
"The ball last week wasn't so bad," Felix grumbled into his coffee. It had been a masquerade, which cut down on a lot of awkward conversations, like What's your name? and Where are you from?
Sylvain put his hand to his mouth. "Annie, did you hear that? Am I imagining things? Did Felix just tell us he didn't hate a party? They say love changes you, but I never realized...."
Annette stared hollowly between Sylvain and Felix, and then appeared to remember that everyone thought they were in wildly in love and that she should find this funny. She smiled up at Sylvain. To Felix's eyes, it looked brittle.
"We're all very different people these days, Your Grace," she said, prodding at Sylvain's shoulder. (By royal decree, the Margraviate of Gautier was a Duchy now. Blaiddyd and Fraldarius were no more, after all.) "I think we should take a carriage ride around the park! The lilacs are in bloom, and I need some fresh air."
-
Garreg Mach, 1188.
The students wanted to see Felix and Annette spar, but more than that, they'd collectively put on their big puppy eyes and asked if they could please bring out the Heroes' Relics while they did it? Felix had been ready to say no. It was very easy to say no to a bunch of teenagers. He did it every day. But Annette had gotten a look in her eye that said that she wasn't entirely the one driving the cart at the moment—Felix could recognize it now—and said that the match was set.
As soon as he faced Annette on the training grounds, he knew he'd made a terrible mistake in agreeing to this.
He'd seen her wield Crusher, but that was years ago and he'd usually been busy elsewhere while she was using it. Seeing her now, carrying an axe as tall as her as if it was light as a feather and chatting happily with her house's leader, made him unaccountably nervous. And she didn't just have Crusher, she had magics more powerful than he could dream of bringing to bear on an opponent. Being afraid once in a while kept him sharp.
The Aegis shield on his arm was a reassuring weight, and as he hefted it in front of him to begin, he felt his doubts fall away. He'd done this a thousand times—he had not done this a thousand times. He knew every step of this dance—no, he'd sparred with Annette three, maybe four times in all the time they'd known each other, and that had been years ago. He'd dreamed and dreamed and dreamed this exact scene over and over again, but he had a different build in those dreams and Annette's ancestor was taller and broader.
He looked down at his hand and found that without thinking, he'd taken a lance off of the rack of training weapons, not a sword. It felt righter in his hand than any sword ever had.
-
Derdriu, 1189.
At the last minute, Sylvain made a nonsense excuse as to why he couldn't go driving with them. This annoyed Felix more than Sylvain's presence would have; when Sylvain was around, Felix felt more like himself than he did at any other time.
Annette took the carriage's reins. The horses calmed at her touch. (Before the situation with their ancestors started, she'd never had any particular skill with animals.)
"You said you had a plan," Felix said.
"Sometimes I dream about Crusher," she said, flicking the reins to set the horses off at a trot. "About how Crusher was made."
They talked about their other dreams, but two years of being under this geas, and they still didn't talk about their Relics. Felix kept silent.
"If we both have the same dreams, that means you must dream about your shield, too."
"I do," he said.
"What happens in those dreams?" Annette asked.
There was a beautiful woman, and she was in love with him—with his ancestor. And he hunted her down, killed her, and turned her inhuman skull into a shield. All this had happened a thousand years ago. It had nothing to do with him. It was just a hunk of magic bone. But when the shield called out to him he felt its rage and betrayal, and he felt his ancestor's equal and absolute lack of remorse at what she'd done.
"Nothing good," Felix said. "How about yours?"
"It's awful," Annette said. "He was proud of his work."
Deftly, she turned the corner into the park. They weren't the only people out driving. The copses of white lilacs in the center of the park perfumed the air even from this far away.
Annette sighed. "I don't know if I can make this stop. I've tried read everything, written to anyone, and no one has any idea what's wrong with us. But I think we have to destroy the relics."
"No," Felix said immediately. It felt wrong, and not just because it was his last connection to his family. The Sword of Moralta was missing along with his father's body, and he hadn't taken any mementos before the sale of the Fraldarius estates: the shield was it. It had been retrieved from Glenn's body on the day of his death, for the Goddess's sake.
"I don't want to do it, either. He doesn't want to do it. It's so hard for me even to say this out loud without the part of him that's in me trying to stop me! But Felix"—her eyes were set grimly on the path ahead of them—"we both know these weapons shouldn't exist. It can't hurt to rid the world of them."
Now that he was paying attention, he could feel his ancestor in him rejecting the idea. The weapons had been made at great personal risk. They were made from bones of the dumb animals, the monsters, that enslaved Fodlan, and had been used to defend humanity countless times in the centuries before Felix was born.
"Okay. Let's do it," he said. "Just to piss them off."
When Annette turned to him and grinned like that—for the first time, he knew for certain that the magnetic pull he felt toward her was all his own feelings, and not anyone's memory.