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The winds of winter whisper through trees bereft of leaves, in between the stones comprising ancient castles, and into the ears of the lords.
“My lords,” murmurs a soldier, bowing before Felix and his father. “While the battle in the Rowe lands went well, we didn’t find him there...”
Felix says nothing, merely casting his face to the side, where the shadows contrasting the hearth’s fire can twist his visage into a monstrosity to rival that in his chest.
“Thank you,” his father quietly replies. Felix hears the rasp of cloth, senses the air shift with a hand raised and never settling.
“I’m fine,” he says, taking a step away from his father.
“Son—”
“I said I’m fine.” The heels of his boots click like teeth fraught with cold as he leaves the room.
“I’m cold,” Felix whimpered, pressing closer to Dimitri. “I’m scared, too.”
The furs they had bundled themselves in, proudly without the aid of attendants, did not suffice to stave off Faerghus’ winter bite. Its teeth went past the layers of their clothes, sinking into their bones, the ice seeping into their blood, where it melted to lower their temperature. Every blink came with more difficulty, the already-absent colors in the woods fading. Soon only black and white would remain.
Dimitri’s small arms couldn’t wrap around Felix. Instead, he reached for Felix’s gloved hand. In the wind’s howling, distorted by the depression of ice they nestled in, Felix could not hear well, but he felt the comforting puff of Dimitri’s hand on his.
“Don’t be scared, Felix. They’ll find us,” Dimitri said, and vowed by a future king, what else could it be but the truth? He unwrapped his scarf and carefully began to tie it around both of their necks, lacing them together. “Are you a bit warmer?” he asked, muffled by the cloth.
Felix leaned in the scarf and breathed in deeply: the clarity of snow, the earthiness of its wool, and Dimitri’s own scent. He could not say what scents Dimitri consisted of, only that it was him, offered in remnants on a scarf. Felix hid his smile behind the scarf. “I am,” he said.
Felix had not been thinking as he left; he had not been aware of where he would go, just that it needed to be elsewhere. His feet have taken him to the only place he realizes he could have gone—the indoor training grounds, haven from the inclement weather. He grabs a sword from the wall, the first he sees; it doesn’t matter. The weight is wrong, its hilt too rough, but sometimes you need a challenge. If you can handle something not made for you, you can handle anything.
He cuts simple shapes in the air, testing how to shift his weight, the way he holds the sword. He brings it flatly up and on the rippled metal catches his reflection: the sleeplessness under his eyes, the gauntness of his cheeks, the hair growing without purpose or direction, a bright square of light—but that is not from him. To his left, a window is white with furious snow.
Their forsaken kingdom had been carved out of poor land, unforgiving in its climes and politics, and so it will be until time forgot itself. One dead king and then another. His father, Sylvain, and Ingrid openly wear their pain over Dimitri’s death. They ask after Felix.
I’m fine, he snaps every time, every ache and regret and fear rolling around the hollowness of his gut.
He slashes the sword down, light from beyond the window dazzling along its path, reverberating when the sword, strength miscalculated, buries its edge through the wood floor.
“Spar with me,” Felix said, tossing Dimitri a lance before Dimitri could accept.
“A sword against a lance?” Dimitri said with a slight smile. “Is that fair?”
“Battles won’t be fair. This’ll be good practice. Or what,” Felix said, drawing into a stance, “are you afraid of me, boar?”
There was a flash across Dimitri’s eyes, and the thrill it stabbed through Felix immediately infuriated him. He lunged, sword aimed for the gap Dimitri’s lance could not cover.
But of course Dimitri knew the shortcomings of a lance. Graceful as a dancer he jumped back, distance growing between them, insurmountable by a sword. His lance tipped away Felix’s attacks. But the lance took time to be raised for renewed offense, and Felix was swift to attack with the fierceness of a man unwilling to think of anything but his present moment, extended just to a sword.
Outside, snow came to silent rest on the monastery, perfect as a painting in how it dusted the spires, the trees, the ground. The cold was immutable, if beautiful.
Inside, their sparring demanded their energy, warming Felix’s muscles with their repeated use, long-needed in the lull of the festivities. Sweat gathered on his brow, its tightness loosened by constant motion, his hair coming out of its updo strand by strand. The sweat dripped on the floor wholly; it fell as sweat, salt and water, and not ice. And it dripped in multitudes. A practice match it might have been, but Dimitri did not put a single movement to waste. It was too real to him, and to Felix, who did not fear the lance for its inherent brutality but its wielder’s. He gaped at the rictus of Dimitri’s grin as he thrust the lance with intent to kill.
It was who Felix knew Dimitri to be. But it was one thing to know of the monster dwelling inside a man and another to meet it, to look it in the eyes and be unable to smite it.
Felix let Dimitri push, and there, in that split moment before Dimitri could pull back his arm to defend, he scurried up to him, scraping the wooden sword against the wood of the lance before twisting the sword down, blunted end leveled at Dimitri’s face.
Neither of them spoke, but they both lived, they lived: in their heavy breathing, out of tandem, in the wobble of their arms, exhausted by the match.
It was Dimitri’s laughter that split it open.
“Well done, Felix!” he said. “Had this been a real fight, you would have decidedly won. I’m quite fortunate you are my ally.”
Felix harrumphed. “Only if you don’t annoy me into leaving.”
“True enough. That your loyalty is bound to merit, not name, is one of your many admirable qualities.” Dimitri lowered the lance with as much ease as if it were a branch. “You are magnificent when you fight. Have you been told that?”
“What? No. Shut up. What are you even saying?” More warm-faced than the exercise warranted, he hurried over to put the sword away, fumbling in it.
Footsteps behind him—Dimitri, come to put away his own lance. “Then allow me to be the first to say it! Your hours of training have awarded you handsomely.”
“Ugh.” Felix turned around, finding a spot where wall joined ceiling to glare at. “If you think I’m gonna thank you like some sycophant, think again.”
“That wasn’t my intent—ah, your hair.”
Against his better thoughts, Felix looked at Dimitri, confused. The confusion quivered when he noticed Dimitri’s hand inches from his face.
“Huh?” Felix said, more a breath than a word.
“It must have come undone from the spar,” Dimitri said an awkward moment later. He withdrew his hand, became the one unable to look at Felix. “Well. Thank you for the match. Good day, Felix.” His cape swished as he walked away.
“Felix, please—”
Felix yanks away from Rodrigue’s hand, concerned at his shoulder. The motion is so violent his horse whickers. “I’m the only one who can find him. Don’t get in my way, old man. I already made up my mind. You can fight this war without me.”
“You must at least take a few men! It’s madness to seek him on your own.”
“Maybe, in order to find him,” Felix says, throwing his rucksack over the horse’s flank, “I need to be mad, too.”
Dimitri had always been mad. He’d buried it beneath layers of snow-white smiles and lies, but everything, in time, melts. It had melted in pockets at first, off-white spaces little different from snow, but Felix had known what to watch for: he had glimpsed something other than purity in Dimitri once. Perhaps now, away from Felix’s purview—perhaps now Dimitri’s cool has melted fully, and the madness has nothing to lose. Who but Dimitri would be the vagrant, wild as an animal in his slaughter of the Empire’s men, at the periphery of Faerghus?
Because Dimitri could not be dead. If something has happened to him, Felix would know. Death could not be so pathetic, so pointless, that it would claim a man vital to his own life with not as much as a whisper in his ear. An omen, an ill feeling; something would happen to Felix when Dimitri died. It could not just be nothing. Otherwise, the cruelty of it— what kind of goddess did they pray to if she could not grant Felix this much?
Wherever Dimitri is, in the clutches of the Empire or dead or worse—because death was a mercy for its ending, and not a circle of terror for the accused and those he loved—Felix would find him. It is Felix’s vow as it is his grief. He had failed Dimitri in losing him, and then again in never ripping the madness out of him. Let this journey and glory—please, a glory—be his penance.
A kingdom wailed for its heir, its king-to-be as dead as the father. A kingdom wailed with one thousand-thousand voices minus one. That voice raged, instead.
“He’s not dead!” Felix spat, red-faced to his friends’ pallidness, more like ghosts than anything Dimitri ever conjured. “We have no proof except the Empire’s word, and you’re eating it like they haven’t been poisoning us since the start!”
“How long are you going to deny it, Felix?” Ingrid knelt, aimlessly wading her gloves through the fallen snow. “He’s gone.”
“‘Gone’? You have the gall to think he’s dead, and the best you can do is say it like he’s off on some trip?”
“Oh, you want me to say it?” Fury and grief swirled like a blizzard in her eyes, or his reflected in hers, or both of them, mirrors upon mirrors of mourning. “You want me to tell you, who followed him around like a puppy, that Dimitri is dead, that he’s never coming back, that you’re going to spend the rest of your life wishing you didn’t have it because he’s dead and you’re not?”
Sylvain clamped a hand on Felix’s shoulder before he got any awful, regrettable word out. “Easy, both of you. There’s no use yelling at each other. We lost him.” His hand gripped Felix firmer. “All of us.”
“But he’s not dead, damn you!”
“What, you think Edelgard let him go?” Everything was calm, then perfectly disturbed by Sylvain’s voice cutting through it. “You think the people who want to take us back into their empire would capture our future leader and then release him? Their plan,” Sylvain said, the sharpness breaking, both his hands now on Felix’s shoulders, “was always to kill us. They just… started with who they would have ended with.”
“Shut up,” Felix whispered.
“I don’t like it any more than you do, Felix! But what is denial going to do for us, huh? We have a war we need to fight. And maybe—” Sylvain took his hands away, roughly wiped at his eyes. “Maybe we’ll recover his body and lay—”
“Shut up!” Felix’s strength, wiry with years of sword training, concentrated onto his palms, shoving Sylvain away with such force he doubled over breathless.
Felix spun, seeing everything devoid of color, the air itself blanching with the sound of his name being called behind him.
The winter rages through Fódlan. It flattens dead fields; it stings as it traverses through thick clothes. Woe to the man or beast that attempts a life here: the barest they can do is survive. To hoard sufficient food that will last through spring, to curl up in a shelter protecting against the elements—singular tasks to fulfill unless this winter becomes their last. Felix is no animal, not yet, and his task is simpler. To find one man among millions lest a kingdom go without rule, an adjacent empire be unbounded by its avarice, and one heart left to rot, unanswered.
Felix follows the river, for where there is water, there are people, and where there are people, there are tales. Further out from the Empire, the tales of a two-legged murderous beast grow wilder, more fancy than fact. As Felix travels south, the climes mellow, but not what he hears: everything inhuman, very much what Dimitri could muster. Imperial soldiers torn apart like dolls, hands shoved down mouths full of broken teeth, stomachs split open to spool out intestines, laid out in messages that needed no crone’s divining: they were coiled to say revenge, no mercy, death to them all. The rules of war ignored. Those were no battles; that was madness.
This is Dimitri. Felix becomes surer of it with every mile he travels.
“Hup,” Dimitri said, falling back on a pile of snow.
Felix cried out, tiny hand reaching for him. But nothing awful happened. The snow sighed almost imperceptibly as it welcomed Dimitri, arms and legs spread as wide as he could in his many layers, and at his size. Dimitri swooped his limbs, the snow sibilant as he disturbed it, methodically.
Felix crouched, curious but worried. “What are you doing? Are you okay?”
Dimitri stilled and smiled. “I’m okay. Can you help me up?” He held out a hand, and Felix clasped it with all his might, pulling Dimitri up. “See?” Dimitri said, pointing down.
“What is it?”
“It’s like I have wings!”
Felix squinted, tilted his head left and right. “I guess...”
“Glenn told me about it.”
“Oh!” Felix said with a quiet gasp, the interplay of shadows in dips and flatness coalescing into an image. “I see it, I see it!”
Dimitri padded over to a spot with fresh snow, happily throwing himself back on it. “You should try too, Felix!”
Carefully, Felix sat and even more carefully laid down. With ears close to the snow, he could hear it crunch as it gave way under him, pillowing his head. Above, the sun hid behind an endless blankness of clouds; and if he were a bird the snow-covered ground would be the same as the heavens. Overwhelmed, Felix closed his eyes.
“Dimitri?” he said, quietly.
“Mm-hmm?”
“Could I hold your hand?”
He did not hear affirmation—he only felt it, a small, gloved hand clasping his own. What he did hear was: “Felix, if it’s scary, you don’t have to look up. You can look at me if you want.”
He turned his head toward that sweet, kind voice, the ice numbing his exposed ear, but the ear that the sun would have warmed, had it not been shy that morning—that ear was warm. When he opened his eyes, it was to find Dimitri smiling at him.
“Let’s make the figures together,” Dimitri said. “It’ll look like they’re flying away holding hands.”
“But I’m not going anywhere.” Tears welled up in Felix’s eyes. “You’re not either, are you?”
“No, but if I was, I’d take you with me. So don’t cry, Felix. I’m here and you’re here and that’s how it’ll be forever!”
Felix sniffed, pulled up a smile. “Okay. Together, then.”
In a clasp that no sword could pierce through, they swept their legs and arms as one.
Winter yet again thaws into spring and Felix has learned nothing more tangible than the tales he’s chased since his departure. At the very least, he has recently heard that the rumored beast-man is streaked with filthy yellow.
A cloud glides in front of the sun, splintering its rays. Felix still averts his eyes, heart too heavy to withstand holding his head up, filled with thoughts of the past.
In a few days’ time, it will be exactly five years since Dimitri had promised Byleth the Blue Lions would meet them again, older and wiser, eager to share stories over bread and mead no longer as teacher and students, but fellows.
Look where hope got them.
He’s heard of House Gautier’s frontline struggles, but not much of Sylvain himself; likewise for Ingrid. Dedue vanished along with Dimitri all those years ago. Annette and Ashe were always too kind and are unlikely to be fighting—should not be, if their goddess has any shred of pity left in her heart. And Dimitri is a story he chases, no better than hope itself.
Five years of this, too.
Felix spots a run-down tavern, surely thriving when nearby Garreg Mach was not in ruins. When the Empire did not creep in further with each passing night. His hand does not stray from the hilt of his sword as he enters the tavern, empty but for the keeper, loitering behind the old wood counter. She brightens at Felix’s arrival, welcoming him like a lost son. She serves him drink and food without his asking; uncomfortable but unwilling to berate her kindness, Felix does not refuse.
“Have you heard anything about a beast on the loose?” he asks her, picking at the skewer of meat, his appetite lacking as of late.
“A beast? Hmm. Not as the like, but I heard tell of a beastly man down at the monastery.”
The skewer clatters as it falls back on its plate. “Do you know anything else about the—man?”
“That he’s hairy!” She chuckles. “Might be furs, though. ‘Specially if he’s livin’ in that broken down ol’ place. It’d get drafty, I reckon. Though,” she adds, leaning down conspiratorially, “I did hear it ain’t no ordinary vagabond. I heard that when he first wandered in, that he was bloodied like he’d risen from hell itself!”
A boulder dropped on a frozen river will crack it, deep enough to tremble the bones of any passing animal; and with the ice broken at that point of contact, the shattering starts in fractals, ending in annihilation, the gush of a boulder sinking.
That same sensation has Felix in its grasp.
He pushes the plate away, half-eaten; the drink had gone untouched. He clinks the counter with far more coins than he owes and leaves, faster than the growing tendrils a boulder dropped on ice can make.
“Felix! Where are you going with that sword? We have an upcoming history exam; now is the time to study books, not the art of warfare.”
Felix grit his jaw, caught by the worst person possible. He whirled toward Dimitri. “Faerghus is cold and a pain in the ass to invade,” he said. “There, saved you a few hundred pages of reading.” He hastened to leave, but Dimitri caught up. Damn his long-legged stride.
“While that isn’t untrue,” Dimitri said with a chuckle, “you’ll have to know more details than that for good marks.”
“As long as I pass, I don’t care.” He maneuvered around Dimitri, using his lithe size to his advantage—but for naught, because quickness often yielded to brute strength, and Dimitri’s hand on his shoulder was strong.
“Felix, don’t be like that! You’d be the only one missing. That would dishearten me.”
“Ugh. Fine.” He crossed his arms, face turned away from Dimitri. “But only because otherwise you and the others would annoy me later if I didn’t go.”
“Yes, yes.” Dimitri laughed, a twinkling thing that could have been the snowflakes tapping against the monastery’s many windows. “You know,” he said as they walked, “it is a most appropriate time for studying up on your history of Faerghus.”
“What? Why? Don’t give me any of that ‘it’s because we’re making it’ horseshit.”
“Heavens, no!” That laugh; how could it come out of a man like him, where in the light, the blood that has stained his hands could be mistaken for shadows? “What moon is it, Felix?”
“The Red Wolf—oh.” He frowned. “It’s almost Founding Day.”
“Indeed. The very winds and snow that these walls keep us safe from—back home, they must be making quite the commotion, just as they did centuries ago when Faerghus came to be.”
“Yeah. Wouldn’t be Faerghus if it wasn’t always freezing and windy and miserable.”
They rounded a corner, the light from burning sconces flickering with their lost angle before those in the new hall took over—and, briefly, the shadows settled on Dimitri’s face with familiarity.
“Don’t you wonder what that must have been like?” Dimitri asked. “History is deemed so in retrospect, but for something as monumental as the founding of a nation, our ancestors surely knew their names would never be forgotten. And they haven’t. Here we are, still Blaiddyd and Fraldarius.”
“You’re not going to believe it, but no, I don’t wonder. Even if I did,” Felix said, glancing out the window, to the skies darkening in the sunset come early, but the ground white with the snow relentless, “I don’t think it’s inspiring that the same few names matter now, like back then. What’s even changed?”
Dimitri suddenly stopped and Felix bumped into his back. A barb at the tip of his tongue did not break through—Dimitri turned around and smiled something that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“That’s true,” he said. “Our forefathers hated the Empire. All this time later, our blood is hotter than we know what to do with. Perhaps we’ll have to do as they did.”
Unease pooled in Felix’s gut: that, though the kingdom’s stagnancy was his genuine, bitter belief, he had somehow said the wrong thing. He took a breath in. “I don’t—”
“There you are! Sheesh, we were thinking you got trapped in the snow again.”
Felix flicked his gaze away from Dimitri and to Sylvain, poking his head out from the open library doors. He waved them over. Dimitri, smiling, went on.
A conversation for another time. If ever.
Felix went after Dimitri, watching the regal line of his back, complimenting the pretty things he said, themselves glossed over the gore of what he truly coveted. What could Felix tell Dimitri that he would heed? How to best the madness more beloved of a man than another man ever would be?
Centuries had fallen on themselves while Garreg Mach still stood, the proud harbinger of the very leaders who, outside its mighty stone walls, waged war against each other.
This war encompassed too much of the continent, too many of its students, for Garreg Mach to not fall. It is tragic for more than Felix’s nostalgia. It is history itself toppled like a child’s toys. Now it is home to nothing more than crows—and one man.
Dimitri would come here. Even in the throes of his delusions, his promise of reunion would ring in his troubled mind and bring him to Garreg Mach’s ruins. It is the logical conclusion. What it is not is a hope, verging on prayer; it is not a series of pleases hissed, in invocation and threat, to whatever or whoever would listen.
Felix urges his horse faster. If he is wrong—but of course he isn’t, he can’t be—what will he do?
Nothing comes of that worry, because the man is Dimitri. Certainly.
The ride has been heavy, Felix’s spirits heavier. He sheds off his cloak, wiping the sweat beaded at his hairline, pursing his dried lips, the whole of him pulsing with the franticness of his heart. He ties the horse to a tree, a ragged thing just-budding, growing at the edges of ruin. The death and destruction that had overtaken Garreg Mach five years ago is still rotten in the soil; the horse whickers, smelling the sins of their past in the scant tufts of grass it tries to eat, in the very air Felix and it breathe. Felix pats its flank.
“You’ll be fine,” he says, looking at the teetering towers of the once-proud monastery, and then in the things between its asymmetric shadows. Just darkness and stone. No movement except the shadows shifting with the sun behind the clouds. No movement except Felix’s, one soft step at a time.
Were the steps up to the monastery always this long? He did not recall them being treacherous, missing stones that would have made less careful men stumble. But how swiftly they’d all flown up and down the steps, the future never further off than tomorrow’s school assignments. In the right light, Felix sees the ghosts of who they were.
He shakes his head, and the memories vanish. He climbs the steps, up up up, to go with the thump thump thump of his heart, worsening with each empty hall and room he enters. In shafts of light, dust floats in silent courting with itself, ignoring the littered rubble and bones, incapable of knowing the stench of the monastery, of something lived-in and unloved.
The wind, in what should be gibberish through the breaks in the monastery, carries words. Death, revenge, blood. Felix hears them clear as prayers.
He walks, hand on the hilt of his sword, swallowing a name and bile and everything else it is too soon to scream out, following the voice.
It comes from the monastery proper, the cavernous space where those with more fervor than Felix would sing their liturgies. Empty of students and the faithful and caretakers, the stained glass is filthy and shattered, scattering dim almost-rainbows on the dusty ground, reaching far where shadows lurk.
And there—terrible as the winter, as welcome as spring. Hunched, bedraggled in furs matted as his hair, tarnished like fool’s gold. Pleading and cursing in turns. The man wavers through Felix’s blurry-eyed tumult. There, Dimitri.