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The sky above Garreg Mach writhed with the tattered, tangled wings of battling wyvern, but Cethleann did not lose sight of her father amid the chaos. This was not their first war, and she knew how he moved through the air. She watched him to the point of distraction, and so she did not miss the moment he plummeted to his death.
General Ladislava was clever enough to weigh her own usefulness against the impact of dealing such a blow to the Church of Seiros. Judging it a decent bargain, she grabbed Cichol's wyvern by the reins and slit the creature's throat.
Ladislava and Cethleann's father fell together.
It should never have happened. Cichol was Nabatean. His wingspan felt like it had stretched to eternity, when Cethleann had been small and shadowed by her father's full height. The last war had broken an essential part of him, though. A spear that'd once been his brother — of his brother, bone and scale — had impaled her father. It missed his heart, but something else had cracked in him that day and had never healed.
The Earth Dragon had carved Garreg Mach out of the ground, one slab of stone at a time, and its foundation still remembered him. Its earth accepted his body too eagerly.
Cethleann screamed, starting to run toward where the wyvern had fallen, but she was pulled forcibly short by a hand grabbing her wrist. Byleth's face shone with sweat.
“You can't!”
“My father — !” This loss wasn’t real yet, but her mother’s memory butted up against every test of her skill. The part of her that’d seen so many deaths knew there was no sense in wasting time and energy in attempts to revive her father, but it was drowned out by the desperation that’d see her try and try until she collapsed beside his corpse.
“Listen,” Byleth said, with that low-pitched compassion she'd associated with the professor until the moment Byleth had crowned a heretic. They squeezed her wrist. “He would tell you to run if he could, but he’s gone. You need to go, while you still can.”
They let go. Cethleann stared at Byleth, almost willing them to strike, but their former teacher only looked back with stillness and heartbreak in their eyes. Then Edelgard called, and Byleth’s head turned, and the last threads of Cethleann’s survival instinct jerked her into motion.
Cethleann fled the battlefield, unable to outpace the fact that she was alone. Seiros would not follow — her ire was fixed on Edelgard and Byleth, and she would not give up until she was torn to pieces. Isolated and half-mad, Cethleann’s uncles would fall before the emperor. It was a matter of time now, choices made centuries past that had yet to fully damn them.
Cethleann was orphaned, and so profoundly so as to be the last of her kind. Finally, fatally, forever alone.
She got away. The moment she staggered out of the humans’ world, the humans’ shape, she fell apart.
☆
“Linhardt!”
Linhardt von Hevring, the dedicated scholar who would have been condemned to gilded exhaustion if not for Emperor Edelgard's intercession, winced at the precise angle of Her Majesty's scolding tone. They were years removed from their time at Garreg Mach, but he'd never outrun the memory of Edelgard chasing him toward class.
“Yes, Your Majesty?” Linhardt asked. Knowing she had come to deliver an upbraiding he may or may not have earned, he made a token effort at sounding contrite.
The emperor’s arms were folded. “We missed you in the meeting this morning.”
Ah, yes. He'd slept through that. In his defense, he hadn't realized anyone would notice his absence. He did his best to contribute the bare minimum, but even that was impactful. Such was the price of genius.
“If toppling the hereditary nobility doesn't excuse me from mandatory meetings, I retroactively retract my cooperation.”
“I could use your keen mind.”
“I'm sure you could,” he agreed. “Unfortunate, then, that I've had such trouble concentrating lately. Outside of the purely hypothetical, I won't be much help.”
The emperor sighed, but she didn't argue with him. Proving herself wiser than his father, Edelgard had learned that there was no way to force Linhardt to be useful against his will.
“In an effort to re-keen my mind, I've decided to take a brief trip," he said. "I hope to return with a sense of direction.”
“And I appreciate your optimism,” she said, dryly.
It was a gentle ribbing, all things considered. He'd allow it, especially since she hadn't forced him to remind her that he'd only taken her up on her offer of the tailor-made position as the head of the yet-unfounded Fódlan Crest Institute because she'd promised him unlimited vacation time.
“I will send a message should I be longer than a month.”
“A month? ” the emperor demanded, then seemed to quickly remember she didn’t have any real leverage against him. “Fine. I would like for you to keep up communication. Where will you be going?”
“I'm not sure. I thought I'd follow my heart.”
The emperor sighed again, interpreting this as sarcasm, and he let her have that part of their old pattern. Linhardt had recently developed a strange pressure in his chest. Well, that was partially untrue; the draw had existed for some time, but he'd thought the urge to go , to be somewhere else — somewhere specific, where he could re-sync his heartbeat to a natural rhythm he struggled to name — he thought it was a symptom of wartime stress.
If anything, it'd gotten stronger since Rhea's death. The urge to go north beckoned him in his dreams, a ribbon-thin command woven between his ribs. It cinched tight through repetition, the pressure increasing until he woke up gasping for air.
If there was one secret Linhardt had never bothered keeping, it was that he hated to lose sleep.
“Peace, such as we've achieved it, is not as solid as I'd like. Be careful.”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” Linhardt said, and dipped a bow.
It didn't take him long to pack, so he was loaded up and out of Enbarr before Edelgard could change her mind about whether or not he could be excused from her many, many meetings.
The urge to push toward the north of Fódlan settled between his shoulderblades, a firm guiding weight in the familiar shape of his Crest. Others might have questioned it more, and many would have fought it, but Linhardt was a scholar first and foremost. This was a curious development, and curiosity powered him more reliably than any other catalyst he'd come across.
Even so, not knowing his destination made travel arduous. Linhardt could not simply take a coach to the source of this strange pull. He had to pick his way carefully, and mostly by foot. He suspected that his route would have been a direct path, had he enjoyed the ability to fly.
That the Cethleann-shaped hook beneath his ribs reeled him in to the Rhodos Coast was no real surprise. The riddle of his Crest synchronization was a rudimentary one, but he'd avoided the obvious answer, shying from the possibility his personal saint might still be alive. Her survival couldn't be an uncomplicated miracle, and gnawing on the various scenarios tired him as much as the journey itself.
He'd marvel, later, that he'd managed to set up camp without seeing her. Blending into her surroundings was a specialty, but it was still incredible that he could sleep within a stone's throw of an entire dragon and not realize it until she chose to make herself known.
☆
The fact that Cethleann had spent most of her time at the monastery avoiding sleep like it was a pursuing Great Beast was a cruel joke. She had slept too much since leaving, and deeply — so much so that she didn't immediately wake up when Linhardt stumbled into the wooded seaside clearing where she, herself, had crashed. The fright of finding him snoring in the crescent of her shadow could have killed her, were she as fragile as a human.
Linhardt had gotten close enough that she recognized him immediately, and that was terrifying. Cethleann took flight, wheeling above the snoring scholar until she wore herself out. She crouched in the thick underbrush until her panic gave way to boredom.
“What are you doing here?” Cethleann asked, when she finally tired of waiting for Linhardt to stir on his own. She was patient by human standards, but absolutely and incurably impulsive by the measurements used by Nabateans.
Linhardt appreciated directness, so she brought it to him, for once.
He woke with a jolt at the sound of her voice, peeling his eyes open one at a time, and looked up (and up ) at Cethleann. She stood tall, wings spread, and did not deny him the truth of herself by blending in. She was fully capable of rendering herself invisible, pushing light so that she reflected the world around her seamlessly, but she was tired.
Hiding had never worked. She wasn’t sure what she was doing in the woods by the shore, but it wasn’t hiding. Mourning, definitely. Moldering, probably. Whatever she’d been twisting through had been interrupted by no longer being alone, and she could not get back to it until her curiosity had been satisfied.
“I'm on vacation,” Linhardt said, pawing at his bleary eyes. After a moment's thought, he said, “That, or you might have called me. I'm not entirely sure. Very interested in finding out, though.”
Linhardt spoke with the deliberate care of the long-lived, sensitive and strange because she'd only passed on the best gifts her blood had to offer.
Cethleann wasn't sure if she regretted the depth of her past generosity. She wasn't even sure if she'd called him to the coast. Her loneliness had a desperate grip, could easily have called out because she felt like she would die from sadness alone, but she could not be happy to see him. Linhardt might have been the first of her line to feel like a dragon, but he was her enemy.
“You might as well just end my life now that you have found me. It would be a kindness,” Cethleann said, pulling in a wet hissing breath. She sat back down, folding her wings against her long back. Tears pushed against the corners of her eyes, begging to be shed, but she was so tired of weeping.
“Even if I did agree with you, which I don't, that's a terrible thing to ask someone to do on their vacation.” He yawned, wide and unbothered by the truth of her form. She’d expected at least a little bit of panicking on his part — in the past, humans had stammered, stared, or pointed — but Linhardt wasn’t really the type to startle at unfamiliar things, so long as they were interesting enough to spark his curiosity. “Byleth thinks you should live. Why would anyone disagree?”
“But Edelgard — ”
“Didn't stop Byleth then, and she hasn't come after you since,” Linhardt said, evenly.
“I wish I could believe you,” Cethleann said. It felt painfully like the truth. She wished, oh how she wished, that she could believe she’d ever really been a friend to her classmates.
“I understand why you don't,” Linhardt said, and walked away.
She cried in earnest, and told herself it was from relief. Relief from what, she couldn’t be sure — to have been found, to have been left, to have been listened to, for once. As she’d done every day for a stretch of time too grief-stricken to name, Cethleann wept herself to sleep. She was so uncharacteristically tired nowadays, for as little as she did.
When she slogged back from the shore of troubled dreams, night had fallen in her little glen. The heavens were speckled with starlight, their radiance reaching her as a soft and honeyed hum from infinitely far away.
For the second time since she’d fled the monastery, Cethleann did not wake up alone. Linhardt had returned. He’d set up a tent and a cook-fire; his catch sizzled over the open flame, skins split and flesh fragrant.
“I caught dinner,” Linhardt said, leaving a plate dangerously close to her nose. She could have leisurely taken his arm off at the elbow without stretching her neck, but she didn't have the energy or the desire to snap her jaws. Her broken heart ought to have been too compromised by betrayal to hold any fondness for Linhardt von Hevring, but Cethleann loved with reckless abandon. That part of herself had survived, somehow.
“I am not hungry,” she said, angling her snout away.
“Guess it’ll go to waste,” Linhardt said, shrugging. “Too bad.”
Cethleann watched him carefully tuck into the bony little fish he’d caught. Lacking a boat or proper teeth, he’d only managed to catch a handful of lean fish. Cethleann could have shown him how to call in the fattest fish, their flesh so sweet that even the human fishermen had eaten them raw enough to still gasp for the Goddess, but life had taught her that there was nothing to be gained from sharing with non-Nabateans. She’d resisted that lesson for centuries, had fought with her father countless times over the unfairness of hoarding knowledge, but in the end she was alone with the dangerous riches her people had accumulated over their long lives.
Cethleann rested her chin on her paws, suddenly tired again. It felt as though the weariness would never leave her, that the too-meaty sound of her father’s body hitting the earth had found its way into her marrow as a leeching poison and it could only get worse with time. The idea that healing would come eventually felt unkind and untrue.
“I should have known they would have you track me down one day,” she more sighed than said, her breath ruffling the scrubby grass she’d flattened over the course of a season’s worth of nightmares.
“My stance on blood hasn't changed since we last met,” Linhard said. “Nobody would be foolish enough to try to make an assassin out of me.”
Cethleann huffed. A daisy bobbed its head in sympathy with her annoyance. “They would only need you to locate me.”
“Oh, yes,” said Linhardt, his enthusiasm bright and fake. She knew it was sarcasm, because she’d seen the way he looked when actually enthused: lit from within, because her gift only knew how to express itself through radiance. “Because they would have needed my help, what with you cleverly hiding in mostly-plain sight.”
“My blood is precious beyond comparison,” Cethleann argued. It baffled her that she even had to point this out — did he not remember their time at Garreg Mach? Had he written her out of his memories already? “You underestimate what your people — what your Flame Emperor — would do if they could have me.”
Linhardt picked a spindly bone from between his teeth with a grumble. “I don’t think Edelgard wants you, and even if she did, she’d have to find you herself.”
“If she did not want me, then why was I taken by the Death Knight? Why was I — was my — ” Cethleann gulped hard. She tried to clamp down on the urge to cry, but she’d let her misery flow too freely for too long to have any control over the stream now.
Crying was painful. This was true even for humans, she supposed, but for Nabateans the emotional hurt spilled out into physical form. Crying wasn’t a passive activity; the too-thick tears had to be pushed out, forced from her, and the fact that they didn’t fully harden until they cooled wasn’t as much of a blessing as one would assume.
“So those are tears!” Linhardt said, excited, and Cethleann snorted inelegantly at his lack of tact. It made her laugh, which just lodged the slippery knot of tears deeper in her chest.
She didn’t want to laugh. She wanted to lose that ability, like her father had lost everything that could've saved him in his final dive. Laughter felt like a betrayal, especially when she was mid-sob.
“You understand that your rudeness is not appreciated, yes?” Cethleann asked, sniffing.
“I'd offer you a handkerchief,” Linhardt said, crouched at the edge of her pool. Plucking one of her tears from the silt, he inspected it in the firelight. Even though the stone was smooth, it painted the side of his face in a stolen rainbow's worth of scattered color. “But I'm noting a distinct lack of absorbency, so it wouldn't do you much good.”
“You could offer me your compassion!”
“I’m trying. I know I’m not good company.” Linhardt picked up another one of her shed tears, rolling it in his palm. “Crested children have sticky tears. It's a common hallmark, but one I didn’t know until I was ten. The things that made us different from normal humans are rarely committed to writing, so I thought I was uniquely monstrous until I saw Constance von Nuvelle crying behind the Imperial stable. Until just now, I’d always wondered why Crestbearers have such a strange consistency to their tears.”
“You wanted power, wanted to be different, but never wanted that known,” Cethleann said, incensed for a reason she couldn’t put a claw on. If she were meaner, she would have asked if he’d figured out that Crested humans were ashamed of their history of perverse, pervasive gluttony. They’d sucked the magic from Nabatean bones, the mineral remnants cloying stickily in the tears of their descendents.
But Linhardt’s forefathers hadn’t taken from the Nabateans. Cethleann had given gladly, deeply, to her own detriment.
And she wasn’t sorry, even now.
“I never wanted any of that. I only sought to understand why I was different,” Linhardt said, simply. “And I long suspected that the answer was you.”
She’d known that, the first time Linhardt had cornered her with questions. He’d been bright with the triumph of having solved a difficult equation, focused and awake in a way that was rare for someone so weighed-down by a need for sleep too large to fit his thin question mark of a body. Linhardt had known who he was looking at when he saw her, and that identification had terrified her. Seiros had built an effigy named Saint Cethleann in her absence, and she had no idea how to be that person.
The only scenario Cethleann hadn’t entertained was that Linhardt might keep the truth to himself. She was so accustomed to being drained and misused, she’d waited for him to use his advantage against her. They’d been enemies, after all.
That’s what she’d thought, at least. Linhardt had sided with the army that’d dragged her father from his wyvern and to his death, and Cethleann did not let herself forget that.
When she didn’t respond, Linhardt finished his meal and settled into his bed roll. He fell asleep quickly, but she didn’t interpret this as a show of fearlessness. Sleep claimed him forcefully, regardless of how many dragons lurked in his immediate surroundings, but Cethleann did not take advantage of this opportunity to do anything more surreptitious than eat the fish she’d claimed she didn’t want.
☆
It'd been two weeks since he'd found Flayn, but Linhardt had yet to adjust to the strangeness of seeing his every theory about his bloodline answered in effulgent flesh. He understood, finally, why his Crest was called the sign of the Light: sunlight, moonlight, and starlight clung to her, gilding the fine edges of her scales. Even in the dark, she shone atop her sea of beautiful, miserable crystalline tears.
Linhardt wasn't a good cook. He liked fishing, but he'd always had someone else around to do the troublesome work of ferrying his catch from pole to plate. His knifework was clumsy, so it was almost inevitable that he'd cut himself.
The knife slipped mid-scaling, its tip opening a deep furrow across his palm; his fingers spasmed, tendons and nerves slit. Linhardt sucked hard against his teeth, automatically turning away from the sight of blood. Instead of cursing his inattention, he decided to test a theory.
With one of Flayn’s tears clutched in his fist, he cast the healing spell. A small one — enough to rouse natural coagulation, but insufficient when used against an injury of this depth —
It shouldn't have worked at all, since healers were typically limited to saving anyone but themselves, but the effect was immediate and incandescent. It scoured him from the inside out, white-hot. The catalyst of her pain chased his injury with salt-brine bitterness.
Once he'd caught his breath again, Linhardt examined his hand. His palm was gritty with glittering residue, but the wound had knit neatly. He knew, somehow, that her tears could have done so much more.
The potential of it was staggering. He almost wished he had not discovered it.
“Do you understand now?” Flayn asked, quietly. He hadn't realized she was awake.
Linhardt flexed his hand. Not even the memory of his injury remained. "It's terribly inconvenient, being useful."
“My usefulness saw me involved in two wars, yes. Though one might argue I was not as useful as I should have been.”
“Would you like to talk about it?” For all the time he'd spent in the clearing where he'd discovered her, Flayn had largely ignored him. This might have been a successful tactic deployed against someone else, but Linhardt had been raised on a steady diet of neglect.
“I believed that if I proved myself useful enough, we would be safe. That my friends would protect me.” Her lambent eyes dimmed, hooded by centuries of accumulated grief. “I do not think I have ever had friends among humans, in truth.”
“If I were not your friend, I would have told the Imperial army where to find the other saintly beasts when they were looking to arm their Crested generals.”
“Would you like me to be grateful?” she demanded.
“I'd like you to be objective. And not to write me off quite so easily, unless you don't consider me a friend.”
“You cannot call yourself my friend — you, who helped murder my father!”
To Linhardt's great surprise, that accusation hurt.
“I tried to resuscitate him, but that was beyond my abilities. Byleth took his body into the Holy Tomb. You probably would have preferred we bury him with your mother, but we wanted to prevent anyone from stealing his remains. I'm sorry we couldn't do more.”
He heard in her soft, shuddering breath the shape of the tiny girl she'd seemed to be. The true Saint Cethleann was big enough to snap him up in two bites or less, but she still felt small.
“It did not have to end this way,” she said, her voice sorrow-shrunken to an infinitesimal silhouette. “I, more than any of you, understand the need for change. You could have had my loyalty, if only you'd just asked .”
Even if she hadn't been one of the worst liars he knew, Linhardt would've known that she was telling the truth. It was an operatic tragedy, whole and real.
“I'd wager the emperor assumed you'd side with your kin.”
“I do not agree with all that Seiros has done. I cannot.” Flayn's voice quavered. Linhardt laid a placating hand on her side without thinking. She didn't flinch away. He was fascinated to find her scales sleek to the touch, warm and giving as any flesh. It did not surprise him that even in this form, Flayn had no natural armor. “I did not ask to be cast as a saint. No one has ever asked what I believe is right, what I want to do — ”
“Fine,” Linhardt interrupted, before her warbling congestion solidified into too-powerful tears again. “What do you want to do?”
“If I knew that, I would not be here.” The angle of her tapered head gestured weakly at the nameless meadow, her shiny throne of misery.
“I don't know what I'm doing, either. Though I prefer to call this a vacation.” It was an insufficient palliative, and he knew that. Linhardt was the last person anyone would want comforting them, but no one else had followed the signal flare of her sadness.
“If you were not my friend, I would have told you to vacation elsewhere,” Flayn said, and curled her graceful neck around him. It wasn't forgiveness, but it was a start.
☆
Linhardt's fishing attempts were charming, in their pitiful way, but woefully insufficient for someone of Cethleann's size. Now that she wasn't sleeping quite so much, talking more and even laughing some, her appetite had returned with sharp-toothed vigor. When dawn woke her, she slipped into the surf to catch a proper breakfast.
Ever her mother's daughter, Cethleann was the perfect aquatic hunter. Her long body undulated with the currents, her camouflage shimmering her into invisibility with the bent underwater light. The fish never saw her coming. While she appreciated the way fishing with a rod built patience in her kind, she'd always left that particular hobby to others.
Cethleann surrendered herself to instinct. She did not care to think, did not want to reflect on how much her father had enjoyed fishing in that droplet of a pond at the monastery, so she narrowed her attention to the beautiful fat-moon white of piscine underbellies and thought of nothing else.
She felt better for having swam, but once she returned to dry land with her catch, new worries found her.
“Where is the beast, boy?”
“I already told you. I don't know, and I couldn't help you even if I wanted to — which, to reiterate, I don't,” Linhardt said, managing to sound bored despite the way pain had pulled his voice tight. “I'm no tracker.”
Cethleann hunkered low, instantly rippling to invisibility. It was not easy for her to move silently, but she didn't have to do it for long — couldn't, once she got close enough to see the black-robed figure with the knife.
The stench of Agarthium, the heavy metal poison forged against Nabatean bones, singed the inside of Cethleann's nostrils. She charged, shrieking her rage that they would try to take one more person away from her. Her cousins. Her friends. Her mother —
Cethleann caught the Agarthan mage between her jaws, shaking the man once before throwing him against the ground. When he did not get back up, she turned her attention to Linhardt.
The iron richness of human blood could be overwhelming for a person comfortable with raw game, and Linhardt’s blood had the addled potency of smelling just a little too much like the memory of her own past wounds. His bathyal blue eyes had already gone cloudy.
It was bad. She’d witnessed a thousand deaths, and the knowledge that she couldn’t bear the weight of remembering one more galvanized her to action.
Cethleann fell back into herself. Dragon palms had little in the way of tactile sensitivity, inept for healing. She could easily break his ribs, and by the pulped sound of Linhardt's breathing, he could not afford another cracked bone against his lungs.
All that Cethleann had been holding back surged through him, knitting Linhardt back together with swift fury. She’d pretended to be incapable of high-level healing spells, had lied to Byleth with wide and innocent eyes when they’d begged her to try, just try, because she’d known that trying would loosen her stays until healing poured out of her like a cleansing fire. Rafail and Tathlum, her sweet twin cousin, had learned from her, mimicked her. It was a bitter stroke of luck that Mercedes, a descendent of the man who had murdered the siblings, had saved Cethleann from having to reveal her true potential as a healer.
She jerked him back from death’s door, unwilling to lose yet another friend.
Linhardt gasped, trembling from shock. Cethleann squeezed his hand.
“I am sorry I did not return sooner.”
“Tardy or not, I appreciate it.” With her help, Linhardt levered himself into a seated position. He glanced at the unmoving shape of his hooded assailant. “Is he…?”
Cethleann caught her lower lip between the points of her teeth. “No. I know that I should kill him — that we must kill him — but I hate this.”
“A trait I am glad to share with you, as troublesome as it makes things in practice,” Linhardt said. He massaged his healed ribcage. “True, we can't let him go. It's fortunate, then, that I have recently been made the head of an Institute for Crest Research. I can think of all kinds of relevant things to ask him. Hubert will be thrilled to lend a hand.”
Cethleann took the deepest breath her much-reduced lungs could manage. It wasn't enough to fully dispel her anxiety, but this place had never been safe. She'd been born in Enbarr. If what Linhardt had said about the emperor was true, there was a possibility she could make it her home again.
“I could answer your questions, too. If you have more for me,” she offered, running her fingers nervously through her curls.
“Oh, I'm sure I can think of a few,” Linhardt said, his smile a little too eager.
☆
Emperor Edelgard caught Linhardt on his way to Hubert's office. As much as he wanted to hear what her right-hand man had wrung from their guest, he understood the need to engage in small talk with one's liege.
“Did you enjoy your trip?”
“It was very fruitful, Your Majesty. In fact, I've brought home an assistant.”
Her pale brows arched with interest. “Have you now?”
“Yes. One with information about the Agarthans that has been lost to time immoreal.”
Edelgard frowned absently. “So Hubert has told me. Even so, I feel like you are leading me on, Linhardt.”
“I am, I suppose. I'd like to double check with you that I do in fact have final say on the staffing at my nascent Institute.”
“If this assistant is being truthful, we'd welcome such a source.”
“Oh, she's a terrible liar, so I believe her.”
Linhardt knew that the emperor wouldn't be thrilled when she finally met his new employee for the second time, but he was confident this wouldn't backfire. He had been careful never to do anything truly stupid to anger Edelgard. Inconvenience her? Of course. But never anger her. He had been saving that card, and the mea culpa attached.
Linhardt had a habit of judging his relationship with people by the limits of said relationship — not on purpose, but as a defense mechanism. His inherently solitary interests and difficult sleep schedule double-teamed his best intentions, leaving him to sometimes forget about people. It wasn’t a malicious omission, but he’d lost more than one relationship to neglect. This caused him to question the limits of any relationship; there was comfort in having at least a working theory of what the worst was that he could do. He’d saved enough lives over the course of Edelgard’s war to justify making her angry, just once.
Linhardt knew he was strange. Maybe that was why he was always going to be biased toward his saintly beast.