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Linhardt could hardly sleep sometimes, for how the Crests invaded his dreams.
They danced and transfigured, sloping down manifolds and vibrating along harmonics and notations that needed years of study to grasp. And he was just barely starting to grasp them, brachistochrone symmetries and hyperbolic flights that condensed into sentences that took his breath away—and moments later, flitted past his fingertips, while he stumbled clumsy behind them.
It was like meeting your soulmate, but only in your dreams. In his waking hours he could scratch and fumble and spend page upon page trying to capture their mystery, bleed bare scraps of it onto paper—and then watch them dissipate the moment he tried to share with someone else, as incarnadine enigma receded into their collective future. It chased him into the arms of the divine, but that was never a traditional embrace, because his eyes were fixed always further.
It could make him wish to never wake up, except for one thing.
— ★ —
Two boys were toiling up a hill with a wagon. The terrain was rocky and there was barely the suggestion of a path, but despite the heavy summer heat, they pushed and pulled it gamely over every obstacle. They chattered about aimless things to adult ears: whether it would be possible to see the nearby chapel from the hilltop, if the small faraway clouds looked more like sheep or dandelions, whether butterflies could taste differences between flowers.
Finally they reached the summit, and looked over the long sunlit sweep of fields and farms and trees. Insects droned, and they were both quite sweaty, but a breeze ruffled their hair.
"Huh," Caspar said after a short space. "Guess you can't see the chapel, I thought we were high enough."
Linhardt hummed. "The angles are wrong."
Caspar, lacking ingredients or interest to argue, shrugged. He shifted his attention to the slope now open to them, speckled with flowers and a bit steep, softened in patches by shady groves of trees.
He pointed. "How about that way? If we hit the scoop right, I bet it'll throw us right over the creek."
Linhardt critically evaluated the proposed route, which had even less of a path than the side they had just climbed. He grinned. "Let's find out."
They rolled the wagon to the desired launching spot, then folded themselves into it, Caspar in front and Linhardt peering over him from behind. With one last inhale of the sweet summer air, they pushed off. The wagon swiftly gathered speed, and they whooped as it bounced over bumps. Both of them threw themselves into a leaning steer, narrowly avoiding the overturn risk posed by a curve, and then hit the much-anticipated dip and lift.
They were airborne, shouting in delight as they cleared a fallen log—but then they clipped a tree branch, sending them spinning onto the water and rocks below. They rolled, bounced, and finally ground to a halt.
Linhardt groaned as he levered himself up. He was blinking, not even sure yet how bruised he was, but a bit shock-giddy with the flight. "Ow. If we'd pitched left back there, we could've made the stream—"
He stopped as he turned and saw Caspar, sprawled motionless over a rock. Splashing over, Linhardt turned him onto his back. Caspar's eyes were closed, and blood poured from his forehead, curling and spreading away in the water.
Later, after parents and a doctor had been summoned, after Caspar was awake and pronounced well enough to be in trouble, Linhardt calmed down. But when Caspar complained that his hair would hide the wound and he wouldn't have a cool scar, Linhardt still couldn't look at it.
— ★ —
Linhardt was ten when everything changed. He was in the study, where paper drifts of his mother's mathematical theorems merged seamlessly into his father's endless reports of border skirmishes and Brigid entry agreements. Linhardt ventured freely and eclectically among the books in the room, but tonight he fetched up against a neglected pile of his father's personal letters. He flipped through them until he found the page with the diagrams, where he stopped dead.
His father found him a while later, sat on the floor with crossed legs and shoulders bowed over the paper he grasped tight in two careful hands. The Count squinted down, then chuckled ruefully. "Do you want that one, Lin? If you can make heads or tails of it, that'll make two people in the world."
Linhardt didn't answer, and his father found the manifest he'd been seeking and left to partition prisoners between hard and easy labor. Linhardt remained hunched over his treasure: two pages in a spidery hand, sprawling with diagrams and connecting lines and frantic near-illegible notes in between. The forms were flowing, bold and swooping; the annotations talked about sacred geometries, unfolding symmetries, missing nexus points. The unfamiliar words fluttered over Linhardt's head, wings beating in a mad tumult. He sunk, spiraling and unconscious of the passage of time until his retiring parents pushed him off into the arms of the maid.
That night, he didn't sleep—he tossed, stormwashed and exalted, on a sea of ideas and half-glimpsed truths. In the morning, he was exhausted. But the schedule waited for no petulant child, so he was ushered off to breakfast despite his sleepy mumbles. He nodded off during his lessons for the first time, unable to articulate what he had seen while awake and unable to grasp it while asleep.
The next years vanished that way, half-slumbering and all consumed.
— ★ —
Linhardt couldn't interest anybody in the visions or the truth he could half-glimpse behind them. Adults just told him to focus on his studies, wake up, stop dream-walking his way through his life. People his age were more likely to torment him.
Caspar, having decided the pictures were pretty and obviously exciting to Linhardt, was uninterested in pursuing the matter. It was while trying to insist, digging out the already folded and creased pages, that Linhardt discovered Caspar had trouble reading. After the third attempt to focus his attention on the note Linhardt was trying to puzzle out, Caspar pushed it away with uncharacteristic temper, ripping one edge of the paper.
"I said I can't!" he flared back to Linhardt's offense. "The words don't work for me."
"What does that mean?" frowned Linhardt. "Words don't work; they just sit there and say things."
"They don't. They kind of squiggle around, and the more I try to focus, the worse it gets."
That was enough to distract Linhardt briefly from his obsession. A burst of questioning left him bewildered but convinced, and Caspar's shoulders up around his ears.
"You don't have to tell me I'm dumb," Caspar said. "I already know."
"You aren't. You memorize pages of tactical formations that I can't see a single reason anybody would want to remember."
Caspar snorted. "Because if you're a general and you can't get your people to the right place at the right time, a lot of folks die."
"That sounds like a good reason to never be a general." Linhardt sighed. "Well, we'll just have to do our lessons together when we can. I'll help with the written bits, and you can be good enough at all the rest to distract the teachers."
"You mean it?" Caspar's shoulders started to relax.
Linhardt yawned. "Of course. It'll be much more efficient that way; more time for napping."
— ★ —
Linhardt was trying to move into his room at the Academy, which was exhausting, which meant it would go easier with a nap. That relief was currently impossible, because Caspar was sprawled across the bed, immobile no matter how many reproachful looks Linhardt cast in his direction. He'd arrived earlier, and already made a tour of the Academy and surrounding areas, which he was now recounting incoherently for Linhardt.
Linhardt heaved a sigh and turned back to unpacking books. "And would you describe the classroom seats as excruciatingly, or merely dreadfully uncomfortable?"
"Who cares? It's the learning part that really hurts, anyway. They've got a big library, though, you'll like that."
"Yes," Linhardt brightened, "I am looking forward to seeing that. And the princess? Have you checked in to pay your respects, yet?" His parents had given detailed instructions, which he had almost listened to.
"Nope, I've dodged her and that scary big shadow of hers, until I had you along to distract 'em. Teamwork, right?"
"Right. What about the others?"
That launched a catalogue of their classmates and rivals—categories with some overlap—though the whole account was a bit centered around the dining hall and prospects Caspar foresaw there. The problem was, apparently, that he'd had a little trouble escaping groups of girls who wanted to sit with him, and who other boys had wanted his opinion of. Caspar finally waved a hand in frustration. "Think I'm just not into girls that much."
Linhardt hummed, having given the matter only desultory thought himself. "Boys, then?"
Caspar grunted noncommittally. "I dunno, maybe I'll try it sometime? Thing is, if you're short, people expect you to take it in the butt."
That was enough to make Linhardt look up, blinking, from completed arrangement of books. "Why, is there some of geometric… no, that doesn't really make sense if you do it lying down, does it?" He frowned.
Caspar shrugged. "Who knows? But it's definitely a thing. Hey, wanna go check out the knights' hall?"
"What for? Unless it's on the way to the library."
"Sure, more or less. C'mon, we can swing by the classroom and carve initials somewhere in the last row. Stake that territory."
He wiggled a knife, and Linhardt shrugged agreement to the minor sacrilege of damaging monastery property. "Deal. But then I nap."
— ★ —
The missing piece at the center of the web was the Crest of Flames. Inscribed in terrible curves, it ignited Fódlan, tumbling them all toward the center in pyroclastic revelation.
— ★ —
Linhardt swayed, spitting out bile. The world swayed with him, and he didn't know if the darkness was all around him or just over his eyes.
A firm hand held his shoulder, anchoring him until he found his hands clenched over his knees, until his spine remembered how to stiffen, until he was able to wobble upright. "All right. Here, swish and spit." A wineskin was pushed into his hand, and he blearily obeyed the trusted voice—with a little extra vigor on the spitting.
"Ugh. I thought all the wine in the stores was the same, Caspar. How do you even find the bad stuff?"
"Everybody's got talents. You okay there?" Caspar let go of his shoulder, but peered up at him critically.
"I'm fine. I just… ugh, I need to get back to the infirmary." He started to navigate out of the alley between tents they were standing in, breeze-whipped and dark in the chilly post-battle drizzle.
Caspar blocked him with a friendly but immobile arm. "Nah. Manuela said keep you out until I can't push you over with one finger. So why don't you sit down and catch your breath, before I have to get myself accused of bullying." He helpfully pointed out a heap of equipment sheltered from the weather and away from the contents of Linhardt's recently emptied stomach, and Linhardt let himself be steered.
Before long, his head was clearer, except for the dull ache and the even duller and heavier sense of inevitability. He stared across the slice of camp he could see, at people wearily transporting gear and wounded comrades, and then looked away again as his stomach started to turn anew.
"I hate this," he said softly. "I've heard Edelgard's reasons. I'm not saying she's wrong. But I hate every minute of it."
Caspar, slouched beside him and inspecting his muddy and battered boots, nodded. "Someone told me to think happy thoughts, the other day. That's gotta be research for you, right? Just piles and piles of books and papers that nobody but you and Professor Hanneman can make sense of."
Linhardt's mouth curved, but he couldn't hold it. "After the war, my father wants me to take up training for his duties in earnest. He believes in planning ahead. Do you know, my mother said he was as scholarly as she was when they married? But the job consumed him, all the numbers and figures and none of the wonder left."
Caspar considered that, tiredly working his gauntlets off. "You could quit, couldn't you? Like Hanneman did."
"Don't think I haven't considered it." He felt it again now, like a sweet wind blowing across the fields, bringing the rustle of the stream and faraway smoke from something cooking. Then a gust of chilly breeze snaked under his collar and he shivered, back in the moment. "I don't know."
"I just… I never had anything that eats me up inside the way that stuff does you. Not sure I want it, exactly, but sometimes I envy it. Be a shame to just let go." Caspar wasn't looking at Linhardt, frowning fiercely down at the scuffs and scrapes on his hands.
Linhardt looked away first. "I don't have a strong personality. He always seems to argue me around to what he wants, you know how it is."
"Oh, yeah. I know." Caspar bumped his shoulder, a moment of old brotherhood, and then he lifted his head. "So what if you didn't ask? Just wrote a note, like, out for an extremely long nap, please find another heir. Sleepily, Linhardt. And then run away. Stay on the road and don't turn up until they've found someone else."
It was ridiculous, but it planted a kernel of warmth somewhere between Linhardt's shoulders. He closed his eyes, and for a moment he could feel the wagon balanced on the edge, the perilous downhill yawning before him.
Further beyond, somewhere in the realms of sleep, the lacework of Crests swayed in a tapestry of diamond and blades. Fierce patterns glittered and sliced, but he had long ago accepted that they might cut him to pieces before he found his way through.
Caspar's shoulder was warm and solid beside him. "You know," Linhardt murmured without opening his eyes, "I don't think I could do that. But maybe we could."
The last thing he heard was Caspar's soft scoff. "Obviously 'we.' Who the fuck else is going to keep watch while you sleep?"