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Sylvain learns during one of Manuela’s class lectures that each element correlates to their temperament: Dimitri favors Thunder magic – loud, violent bursts of energy that disperses just as quickly as it appears. Claude prefers wind spells – flighty and whimsical, but vicious. Edelgard has an affinity for fire, and as it turns out, so does Sylvain. Fire is charismatic and eloquent, but fire is wild, unforgiving, and brutal.
It makes sense that he should naturally favor something so cruel. After all, he has a great capacity for it.
Sylvain watches his classmates more keenly during class and learns that Felix, like Dimitri, also favors thunder, that Annette and Ashe prefer wind, and that Dedue and Mercedes have fire in their veins, too.
Only Ingrid is different. His heart skips a beat when she laughs, a little startled but pleased at the element she’s channeled, her cheeks flushed with effort. When she holds her hands out to show him, ice crystals bloom like tiny stars in her palms.
He should have known, then, what that meant.
#
Sylvain goes when the Professor summons him to her office, his body buzzing with excitement. How badly can he burn himself this time, and how quickly can he get expelled from Garreg Mach for fraternization? Her proposition is not what he imagines.
“I sense great potential in you,” the Professor says, her eyes appraising him, so similar and so different from the way his father does. “How would you like to join the Black Eagles?”
Yes, he hears himself say. Yes, of course.
#
While Sylvain had expected Ingrid to take the news of his transfer badly, he did not predict exactly how upset she would be.
She gives him the silent treatment for days. At first, this seemed like a blessing, but Sylvain begins to miss her lectures and her persistent nagging. He tries to worm his way back into her good graces – he tries to placate her with food, he times his chores to align with hers, and once he even offers to train with her – but Ingrid shoots him a withering look each time and stalks away.
Serves you right, is the only thing Felix has to say about it.
“Seriously, Ingrid?” he says to her late one evening in the Knight’s Hall, where she is battering a straw dummy like it has personally offended her, “I thought you’d be happy I’m showing some personal growth for once. Cultural exchange, promoting diplomatic relationships, and all that.”
She ignores this too, but Sylvain sees her subtle clench of her jaw and hears the sharp intake of her breath as she stabs again at the dummy. He babbles on about how lame the Black Eagles students are, about Ferdinand’s stupid tea rituals and about how creepy Hubert is. He tries to get under her skin by telling her about all the dates gone wrong, but even that fails to solicit a reaction. He considers telling Ingrid what a good instructor the Professor is and how much he’s learning, but Sylvain knows Ingrid would rather die than give even an impression of betraying Faerghus.
In the end, Sylvain slinks back to his room, defeated.
It is only after they dispatch Ingrid’s suitor that she defrosts. The evening air is cool on his skin, a contrast to the sweltering heat of Ailell. Sylvain finds Ingrid sitting beside a creek, alone, and something clenches in his stomach. He’ll disobey the Professor next time and finish the job if the rat-faced bastard was stupid enough to come back. The simmering rage he feels boils hot when he sees that her eyes shine with unshed tears, but Sylvain stamps it down when she draws her knees into her chest.
Her voice is small and hoarse when she finally speaks. “You didn’t have to come.”
“I did.” Ingrid doesn’t resist when Sylvain pulls her into his arms. It’s always surprising to him how small she really is, especially without her armor, but she is alive and warm, and she is here with him. He presses his mouth against her hair and she trembles. “Me and you, remember? We promised.”
It was ages ago, made when they were children under a great oak tree and again from the opposite side of a door. Sylvain knows he hasn’t been the best friend to Ingrid, and that he regularly drags her into trouble. But even still, he knows this much: he keeps his promises to his friends. He always does.
“I’m not leaving you,” he tells her. “I promise.”
#
Fire is all-consuming. It destroys everything in its path, undiscerning, suffocating, until it burns itself out or it is quenched. It is hate in its most physical form.
“I envision a world where your worth is based on your merit, not what’s in your blood,” Edelgard tells him one day as he is wiping down the chalkboard after class. “What do you believe?”
Sylvain thinks of Miklan, dead by his hand. He thinks of Ingrid, of Felix, of Glenn, of Dimitri, of himself – what the Crests have done to them, taken from them. He’d tear the whole damn world apart with his hands if he could and build a place where Ingrid didn’t have to be robbed of her future, where Dimitri and Felix didn’t bear the burdens of an entire nation, and where he could be more than a prized studhorse.
“I hate Crests,” he tells her honestly, his chest tight with anger, though he’s not sure why the future Emperor of Adrestia cares what he thinks on the matter. “I want to see a world where it doesn’t matter if you have a Crest or not.”
Edelgard nods slowly, a small smile tugging on the edge of her lips. “I see.”
#
“Come with me,” Sylvain implores, and it isn’t until Ingrid’s face lights up that he realizes he’s been holding his breath. The Great Fodlan Food Tour won’t stop her father from searching for the most eligible bachelor after their impending graduation and it won’t lift the yoke of Gautier from his shoulders, but at least it’ll buy them a little more time before the dream ends.
#
There is something afoot, even if Sylvain isn’t privy to the details himself. The silence when he enters the Black Eagles classroom to find the Professor and Edelgard conspiring, the Flame Emperor, Flayn’s disappearance and Monica’s reappearance. It is as if he is sitting on a powder keg, waiting for the spark to ignite the world in flames.
#
Humans have always had a strange fascination with fire. It is easy to draw them close, and easier still to burn them when they do. Sylvain is in the library with Ingrid when it happens – the librarian has threatened to kick them out more than once for their rowdiness, and though he no longer remembers the joke, Sylvain laughs so hard that Ingrid muffles his mouth with her hand.
He assumes she is going to scold him, but strangely, Ingrid’s eyes are wide and bright when she removes her hand, and she swallows thickly. He wants to tell her that she is beautiful and that she deserves a far better world than the one they lived in now, but he finds that his mouth has gone suddenly dry.
Slowly, Ingrid winds her fingers into his hair and pulls his face down to meet hers.
#
The monastery is in smoking rubble, and there is more blood than Sylvain has ever seen in his life spilled across the flagstones.
“I need to know where you stand,” asks the Professor, her face awash with splattered gore. “There may come a time where you will have to fight – and kill – your old comrades. Can I depend on you?”
Sylvain looks at the debris and the carnage – how many corpses lay smoldering under the ruins? Was Ingrid alright? Was Felix and Dimitri? Would the Kingdom even take him back now, after what he has done? Certainly, there would be no great culinary tour now, not after this. He imagines Ingrid’s disappointment, and thinks of a world without Crests. She deserved better. They all did.
“Yes,” he says hoarsely. “You can count on me.”
#
Except they can’t. His father was right – he has always been a disappointment. Sylvain thinks he can hear Miklan’s ghost, laughing.
The Professor and Edelgard must know this by now. He can tell from the furrow in their brows, the judgment in their eyes when he botches another mission. He knows he is a liability, but what could they possibly have expected from him? Five years of burning unopened letters, five years of scorched earth combat, five years without the scent of orange blossoms and the sound of Ingrid’s laugh, five years of scrubbing dried blood and dirt from beneath his fingernails, five years without the brutal lashing of Felix’s temper or Dimitri’s long-suffering and doe-eyed disappointment, five years of looking into the mirror and not recognizing the man staring back at him. Like the surface of a frozen lake, there was only so much his soul could take before it began to crack.
Despite his years amongst the Black Eagles, Sylvain hasn’t really made any friends amongst them, and so it is unusual when he is summoned to the dungeons on Hubert’s request.
Hubert’s voice is smooth as silk as he sets down his quill to assess him. “You are one of the Emperor’s most valuable assets.” The insinuation that he is still nothing more than a commodity chafes at Sylvain, but weren’t they all, in a war? Hubert continues, “You have intimate knowledge of Faerghus’s political and military structure, for one. You are a skilled General when you can pull your head out of your ass, for another. And, if necessary, you are a prized bargaining chip.”
“What a flattering assessment.” The words spill out of Sylvain’s mouth, biting, before he can stop them, though there is a sick part of himself that purrs at the fact that he is valued for his ability and not simply for the blood that runs in his veins. “Did you call me here just to shower me with compliments?”
Hubert’s mouth quirks up in a half-smile, almost vicious. “It is the truth. But, as I suspect you know, you are also a liability. You are reckless at best, incompetent at worst, and to tell the truth, it has given us reason to doubt your allegiance.”
For one terrible moment, Sylvain wonders if Hubert has brought him to the dungeons and to his own ruin; it isn’t until it is too late that he realizes that he alone had damned himself long before this moment. He wanted too much, wanted it all – the perfect world, the girl, the sick need for validation – and he helped burn down the continent for it.
“We are aware that you have friends on the other side of the war, and that you have certain, ah, affections for the Galatea girl.” He pauses here, and Sylvain can hear the steady drip of moisture in the dark and damp dungeon. Hubert is watching him carefully, the firelight flickering on his face and obscuring the other half in shadow. “This puts you in a difficult position, but the Emperor is gracious, and so she wishes to extend to you this bargain: your focus and your fealty, in exchange for her safety. Think of it as an incentive, hm?”
It is here that Sylvain understands why Hubert summoned him here; he imagines Ingrid behind bars, trading a gilded cage in Galatea for an Enbarr dungeon. But she would be safe, he could keep her safe, he could keep her alive until the War was over and then he would set her free. It was a small price to pay for her survival.
“Our intelligence sources tell us that she will be at Arianrhod,” says Hubert, returning to his documents, the scratch of the quill on parchment his dismissal. “You’re a clever man. I’m sure you won’t waste this opportunity.”
#
Except he does.
It was too much to assume that Ingrid and Felix could both be saved; the Fraldarius banners fall one after the other before he can even get a chance to try. With Ingrid, Sylvain begs and bargains, down on his knees and looking like a damn fool, and even still she only raises her lance and tells him that she’s bringing him home. (You promised me that you wouldn’t leave, she says, her eyes bright with unshed tears.) He doesn’t raise the Lance of Ruin – he could never, not against her – but in the end, it doesn't matter. Javelins of light fall from the sky and the next thing he knows, he opens his eyes to the Silver Maiden in ruin and rubble.
“Ingrid,” he croaks as the Professor breathes a sigh of relief and sits back on her heels. Every bone and muscle in his body aches; it smells like ash and iron. “Where is Ingrid?”
The Professor looks at him for a moment, considering, and then sighs and closes her eyes. In that instant, his blood runs like fire and ice all at once, and images flash vivid before his eyes as if he is hallucinating: Ingrid, crushed under the rubble, a piece of golden hair fluttering in the wind; Ingrid, rising from bended knee wearing Blaiddyd blue; Ingrid, bleeding in his arms as he frantically tries to close her fatal wounds (I hate you, she says with her final ragged breath; I love you, he sobs in reply); Ingrid, a pinprick on the horizon as she flies into the sunset and across the Throat; Ingrid, laying motionless in the Enbarr dungeons, her wrists slashed from a makeshift shiv; Ingrid, and of kisses in the dark in Gautier, a smile stretching across her wrinkled face as she reaches for his gnarled hand.
When the Professor opens her eyes, her expression is pitying.
“I’m sorry,” she says at last. There are dark circles under her eyes, and it is as if she has aged several lifetimes in those brief few seconds. “There was nothing we could have done to save her.”
There isn’t enough whiskey in the world to drown out the pain.
#
In the end, he isn’t sure if it is a gift or a punishment when Edelgard presents Ingrid’s body to him, shrouded in linen. There is the lingering sweet scent of decay that overpower the wildflowers here at the edge of the clearing, even though the Emperor tells him that Linhardt had done what he could to preserve her for this moment. The crunch of twigs and grass underfoot fade, and Sylvain is left all alone with Ingrid.
It is customary these days to burn corpses; there are simply too many to bury, and digging graves takes time that they do not have. Sylvain thinks of the sun-bleached bones and the charred remains of villages that litter the Faerghan countryside. He has built a small pyre here on the grassy outskirts of former Rowe territory, where the Empire’s destruction had not yet reached; Ingrid lays on it, crumpled and misshapen and smaller than he remembers, a sacrifice of his ambition.
Sylvain is drunk, but he is still a coward – he is too afraid to peel back the shroud, to look at what he’s done. But still – would her fate have been any different, had he not betrayed them? Would his? Soon, they would march on Fhirdiad and end the war, and everything and everyone he loved will have died for a world he’s not sure will be any kinder than the one before it. He will still be tethered to Gautier, he will still be nothing more than an asset to someone, but now he will be alone. He has simply traded one master for another.
With a snap of his fingers, the dry kindling sparks – a flame begins to catch, the linen curls in on itself and turns black. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Perhaps in a different life, she could be free, happy; perhaps in a different life, he wouldn’t be a monster disguised as a man.
Me and you, remember? We promised.
Between the flames, he sees Galatea green, cropped blonde hair stained red, limbs ajar – fabric and flesh catching fire, melting, evaporating. He knows he should step back - that he is too close and that the sharp sensation he feels on his skin means that he, too, is beginning to burn - but why should he? He was the devil, and devils didn’t burn.
Sylvain offers himself up on the pyre.