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As Colonel Mustang spoke, Robbins darted a glance toward the boy lounging on the Colonel’s sofa, his oversized boots actually resting on the arm of it—long golden hair pulled back in a braid, wildcat eyes glaring up at him. The boy was dressed in black, the only color in his outfit the long red coat, slightly tattered at the lower edge, but most alarming of all was the mask which the boy toyed with as those uncanny amber eyes remained locked on Robbins. It was thick black leather with dully gleaming red stitching, beaked like an enormous bird of prey, the eye apertures covered by dark glass lenses.
The slumber party ghost stories and the fearful whispers called them reapers, black dogs, banshees. Really, Robbins had no reason to assume that the boy was one of them. He might just be a bad-tempered teenager with an attitude problem; there was nothing about him to suggest that he was capable of raising the dead or quieting them.
Robbins swallowed. “But… raising the dead…”
“Is a complex legal question,” Mustang said coolly. “Even one who focuses on laying them has to study the theory.” Robbins stammered, but Mustang cut him off. “It’s no fault of yours you didn’t know. Necromancers—those who are good enough to get the dead to listen—are exceedingly rare.” His eyes settled on the boy. “Fullmetal,” Mustang said reprovingly.
The boy swung his legs off the sofa. For a second, his shadow was too big to be his. “I thought you had either an assignment or something that needed researching for me.”
“I do,” Mustang said. “Time to get to work.”
Pinako Rockbell was no fool. She knew exactly what it meant when the Elric boys returned, Edward’s eyes fever-bright, torn between excitement and fear.
Military necromancers were given one last leave home before they were shipped off for training. They were given the choice to tell their families or not. One last leave, just in case their family turned their backs after finding out the truth of the “new opportunity.”
Pinako took Edward into the kitchen, shooed her granddaughter and her former friend’s second son outside, and told him the truth about that night—the night the Elrics had attempted to bring Trisha back from the dead.
Edward’s heart had stopped three times as Pinako worked to stabilize him, stop the bleeding, keeping hypovolemic shock at bay. Three times, it had started again. The third time, Pinako hadn’t even begun to attempt resuscitation when Edward came back with a gasp.
“Either you’re too stubborn for Death, boy,” Pinako said, tapping her pipe to empty the ash into the tray, “or Death has work for you.”
Those fiery gold eyes looked at her just as they had when Edward had declared he would complete a three-year process in one, and Pinako knew that she had said the right thing.
Some necromancers—the grim-faced, hardened ones—used bone. Others—the smiling, theatrical ones—used hair. One particularly unpleasant man used… whatever he could get his hands on.
While Edward Elric could make bones dance and hair sing, however, his true specialization was souls.
Mustang wondered how anyone could possibly fail to see that as Elric faced down a revenant, spinning fine the regret and rage holding a fragment of will to its winter-bitten body, then cutting it with surgical precision, as gentle and merciful as the touch of a friend. Next to Elric, men like Basque Grand and Giolo Comanche were bumbling neophytes, and yet no one seemed to see it but Roy.
Maybe it was for the best. No one else would be mad enough to even attempt to touch a soul.
Reapers , people called state-certified necromancers. Banshees. Black dogs. Omens of death, true, but what the popular rumor missed was that reapers, and banshees, and black dogs were psychopomps, guides to the dead.
Necromancers were not.
Except for one.
Edward faced Kimblee for a second time. He gave the creep a dangerous grin. “I don’t think you realize just what you’re dealing with.”
Stolen skin and sinew were no use against the screams of the thousands Kimblee had slaughtered.
No use at all.
Roy Mustang ran into the room the puppet-soldiers seemed to have come from, praying that he hadn’t been too late, his fingers poised to snap. His allies seemed not to have sustained any casualties. Good. He couldn’t allow himself the luxury of relief. There was still work to—
Edward Elric stood at the center of that room, shielding Scar and the chimeras. He still gripped the dragon spear he favored with his left hand, but his right was held high, lit with a ghost light that dimmed and brightened in time with the sway of the mannequins around him. Even Roy could see the misty forms that flickered in and out as the light brightened and dimmed.
Elric breathed deep and spoke—something Roy guessed was a word, a command, though it appeared in his perception as a void in space. His brain couldn’t comprehend the shape of it and Roy was glad it was void, that it would fade quickly from memory.
The light brightened, the misty forms solidifying, drawn to the light like moths—pulled into it like smoke into a vacuum.
The mannequin soldiers crumpled to the ground, empty husks once more. The light faded.
Elric breathed out.
Mustang torched the inhuman bodies of the dead, the only funeral they were likely to have.
It felt like a mercy.
Edward could see the Truth more clearly than ever as he faced the creature that desired to swallow God. He saw a petty, gluttonous little thing that was farther from the Truth than ever.
“Get. Up.” Edward snarled.
Father—the Dwarf in the Flask—the Homunculus hurled an attack at him. It was laughably easy to free the souls he used. They broke free of that foul perversion of alchemy and hovered around Edward.
Before you pass on, would you like to be avenged on him? he asked them silently. Their response was unanimous and resounding.
Edward advanced. “You thought you had conquered Death, didn’t you? With science, with alchemy, with necromancy. Answer this: how can you conquer something when you fail to even comprehend what it is?” Each step carried him closer to the creature that had sought to make all of Amestris fuel to the fire of false immortality. “I will explain one thing to you and I won’t repeat myself. Death. Is. Patient. Death comes to all things. Death is not your enemy unless you choose to make it your enemy.” Edward stood still. “Get up, third string, and I’ll show you!”