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The choppy dark waters of Derdriu Harbor lapped at the edges of the concrete boardwalk. In six months and a few years’ time, the promenade would be crowded with tourists and sightseers, ladies and gentlemen enjoying the Aquatic Capital in their summer finest. Their heels would clack over the blood-soaked pavement, their parasols would cast shade over the spots where so many Alliance soldiers once laid down their lives.
On this freezing day in late Guardian Moon, Edelgard walked down the long boardwalk alone. She looked upon her enemy, and the boy from the academy looked back at her.
“You’ve grown lovelier than ever, Edelgard.”
So had he. Atop a brilliant white wyvern, decked in capes and finery, Claude appeared almost regal. His shoulders seemed broader and jawline stronger, grown from a mischievous boy into a man whose handsome face and quick wit could give him the whole world—if only Edelgard were not standing in his way.
She returned the compliment. He laughed as if it pained him and lined up his shot.
Edelgard knew how to approach an archer: shield up, head down. In this way Ignatz’s arrows had bounced off the shining twin-headed eagle adorning her shield harmlessly. At the end of the battle for Myrddin, a trail of the useless things marked her path across the bridge to a bloody pool beneath the body of the man who fired them.
So, Claude’s first arrow came as a shock. She raised her head after the impact to find the molten tip of it staring her between the eyes, pierced straight through layers of reinforced steel.
“I’ll have to be careful not to scar that little face of yours,” was what he’d told her almost a lifetime ago, when they first stood against each other in what seemed now nothing more than a children’s game. The look in Claude’s eyes told her he no longer held those same reservations.
With the ability to pierce her shield, his advantage became undeniable. He was faster than her even on his feet, twice as fast on his wyvern and unlimited in mobility. Where Edelgard could not step off the boardwalk without sinking into the harbor, Claude could flit about over the choppy waters wherever he pleased. She collected three more of his arrows in her shield as he flew circles around her.
Myrddin had fallen. The Almyran ships cleared the harbor. Derdiru was at her finger tips. The city’s last line of defense would not go down without a fight, but he would go down. That beast of his would simply have to go down first.
None of Edelgard’s classmates had impressed her so much in the five years since the academy than dear Bernadetta. The girl she had once had to drag by the heels from her dormitory to their classroom lie in wait behind a stack of shipping crates on the dock with her own bow drawn, waiting for her shot. Unaware of her presence, it wasn't long before Claude gave it to her. Two arrows flew, two wings pierced in quick succession. The mighty creature fell to the pavement like a stone and crushed its master’s left leg beneath its flank.
She approached him with heavy footsteps, the confident gait of a hunter approaching her wounded prey. A deer with a broken leg, pinned and trapped, wide-eyed and struggling against the inevitable. When she was but ten paces away, Claude forfeit his escape to line up another shot. At point blank distance, his hastily fired arrow cut through her shield like paper.
White hot pain shot through Edelgard’s face, emanating from just beneath her right eye. Her shield had slowed it enough to keep it from piercing straight through her head, but the tip of the arrow had lodged itself solidly in her cheek. She dropped her axe to grip the arrow’s shaft and wrest it out of her face. Behind her shield, Claude let out a strained groan and pulled himself across the pavement, dragging his leg behind him.
One more shot, and his Crest might heal that leg enough to support his weight. Blood rushed down Edelgard’s face as she tossed his arrow to the side and took her axe in hand again.
A cornered buck was dangerous, but considerably less so without his antlers.
He had his next arrow drawn a second too late. Edelgard kicked it from his grasp and sent his hand splaying outward against the ground. Before he could raise it again, she brought the head of her axe down on his wrist.
Claude had not the honor of being the first nor the last man Edelgard would dismember. There was familiar a pattern of reaction he followed at first—the initial cry of pain, followed by a moment of dazed confusion. Then, as she lifted the head of her axe and allowed him to look upon his own amputated hand, he laughed deliriously, disbelieving, uttering expletives between each frenzied hitch of his breath.
“Fuck—hah ha, oh shit, shit—”
Edelgard stepped heavily on his stumped wrist. He cried out again as she loomed over him, shifting her weight until the flow of his blood slowed. It was a practicality as much as a cruel mercy. She needed him coherent before she asked her question.
“Do you surrender?”
His reply came with another weak, desperate laugh. “What other choice do I have?”
“I could kill you, if you would prefer.”
Her chest tightened as she said it. Claude—if that was his real name—had always been an enigma. Even Hubert, normally decisive to a fault, went back and forth on his opinion for dealing with him. To kill him would be a waste of his mind, but to let him live would be to let that same mind—and his boundless charisma—free to work against them. The unexpected appearance of the Almyran Navy in the form of reinforcements, however, tipped the scales. If he was important enough to pull such favors, there was no telling what kind of retribution his death might bring upon her.
But if he’d rather die than live on in defeat, as a man deposed and disfigured, she would kill him. She owed him that, if it were his final choice.
“Did you give the others that same generous offer?" He grit his teeth, fighting to keep his voice from shattering. “Ignatz, Judith, Hilda—did they get to choose?”
Hilda’s blood still stained Edelgard’s axe, now layered under the splatter of Claude’s own. Her staunch defense had been little surprise to Edelgard, but a heart-rending shock to him. She wondered how he could been so oblivious as to think his right hand would not die for him.
“They made their choice to stand their ground. They refused to retreat, as you no doubt ordered them to, and fought for you to the last,” she said. “Will you follow them?”
Claude looked past her, past his severed hand, to Hilda’s body crumpled against the pavement at the edge of the promenade. Tears burned at the corners of his eyes. As he blinked them away, one escaped down his cheek.
“Maybe it makes me a coward,” he said, “but I have to live.”
Hubert and Byleth appeared on either side of her momentarily, peering down at the enemy pinned beneath the emperor’s boot. Claude looked up at the two of them with a strange ambivalent expression, the corner of his mouth twitched as he forced it into a grimacing smile.
“Duke Riegan has surrendered,” she told them. “Derdriu is ours.”
--
Even on the rough winter waters of the Whitehorn Sea, the massive Almyran ship barely lurched. She cut through the icy waves at a steady pace, making her way home to the east.
“How ya doin’, kiddo?”
Khalid sat up in bed, staring with deaf ears at the stump of his left wrist. If he focused, he could still feel his fingers flex. A phantom pain shot up his arm with the imagined movement.
The bed shifted with Nader’s added weight on its edge. “It’s really not so bad, prince. I’ve had archers lose hands before. A few weeks and a wooden replacement later, they’re back up and shooting just as well as before. It might even give you a little air of distinction—”
“I lost.” Khalid’s voice was monotone and his tongue out of practice. His father’s language tasted bitter. “Three of my best friends. My city. My country. My future. Are you going to replace those with wood too?”
Nader looked upon his former student with pained eyes. “If it’s revenge you’re after, I’m sure the king’s favorite son could easily convince His Majesty to—”
Khalid shook his head. “No. At the end of this war, someone is going to control all of Fodlan,” he said. “If it can’t be me, it has to be Edelgard. I can’t condemn all those people to continued, unopposed oppression just because I have a grudge against the only person left who can free them.”
“You really believe she can?”
The abrupt end of Khalid’s left wrist flared up in pain. He wrapped his remaining hand around it and squeezed.
“What other choice do I have?”