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It had been one year since Rhea had followed Sitri and Jeralt to the Red Canyon. One year and four months since Byleth had first let out their first desperate gasp of air, as Rhea carefully inserted half of her crest into the child’s chest cavity; one year and three months since Seteth had seen the relief shining on her face as the former captain of the knights and his beloved wife had held their child in their arms and cried tears of joy.
“Go,” he had told her, “I will stand alongside Garreg Mach in your place, as I always have.”
It was Sitri’s condition that finally made Rhea find her decision. While Sitri’s life still burned the immense toll giving birth had taken on caused it to flicker, so that even infusions of Rhea’s blood did not help. They needed the healing of the Goddess’s holy land. They needed Zanado.
Jeralt still understood little but since the near disaster of Byleth’s birth, and after seeing Rhea’s state once she had attended to his wife he had begun to ask only the questions that mattered – how can I help, what do we feed the baby, what can I do for Sitri.
Rhea was thankful, for while Jeralt had respected her secrets before it had been different since the marriage. Despite her ardent blessing the air between them had grown tumultuous as Jeralt had attempted to fulfill the role he thought a husband should and Rhea found herself unable to step back from her long-held place as Sitri’s guardian, but now, they were united in their desire for Sitri and her child’s health as well as the continued longevity of the family.
Somewhere along the way Jeralt had stopped needed explanations and started to simply ask how to continue on, and this Rhea found was something she could do for him once convinced Seteth had the church firmly within his grasp.
The Red Canyon had long had a patrol route to keep out bandits but now the Knights of Seiros ventured further inward to tame what wild was there. Jeralt had sent in his letter of resignation to Seteth as soon as their plans were in place but all had been surprised when his former squire Alois had insisted on coming with them, and only later did Rhea come to appreciate this help. The part of the Red Canyon held by the church was only the beginnings of the Zanado and they needed to go deeper into the valley for Sitri’s sake.
It is there they build the house. Jeralt calls in his Faerghan connections and Alois recommends merchants from his wife’s hometown for the materials. When Rhea is not with Sitri and the child she is pouring over blueprints or telling Jeralt what type of wood would stand up best in the red clay ground.
These tasks keep her from other thoughts and Sitri, even before their permanent shelter is built, starts to have the color return to her cheeks. Rhea has brought along her one attendant who knows all – Alessia – and she helps act a nursemaid when Sitri cannot produce enough milk.
“My sister does this instead of monasticism,” she tells the two other women one day when they are gathered around a particular fussy Byleth; Sitri looks near to tears for the simple fact she cannot provide for her child but Alessia merely says in her assured way: “it’s quite common for women of all statures to need the help. You have already done the hardest work bringing life to the babe, after all.”
Sitri does cry then whether at the truth of her strength or the gentle tone she has never heard from the archbishop’s attendant before, and as she does so Rhea brushes out her hair and sings and eventually Byleth quiets and they all find rest.
Rhea does not sleep, and instead watches over Sitri and her child. She had attempted rest at Alessia’s insistence as over their years together at Garreg Mach the archbishop had taken to slumber or some semblance of it before she had to be dressed for morning prayers; however, proximity to Zanado brings with it dreams so vivid that Rhea shivers in her skin and the Immaculate One laying there just beneath thrashes as if they are back at war again.
Rhea flies to the mountain peak that night and stays there ‘til morning. She does not again try to sleep. Her body is strong, even with a halved crest, she reasons, and there are better things to do with her time.
Instead, she starts the garden; trellis agriculture had been common back when her brothers and sisters still lived here and Rhea thinks that will be good for the future, as it meant Jeralt and Alois would not need as many supply runs (already Jeralt spends enough time earning them money by working and hunting in Faergus) but she starts simple. Zanado fruit grow in the thorny bushes alongside ravines and so she starts a garden plot just for flowers and pollination. Later, she will grow vegetables and make them into stew so that Sitri will find strength, and so that Byleth will grow – and then…
Sometimes her thoughts come to a halt and she finds herself wanting to wander further into the canyon to the place of her memories. When she does this, when she walks too far from her garden so that her skirts start to brush harsh against the newly formed buds it is always Sitri who calls out to her.
“Oh, Mama,” she tells her, “not now.”
Mama, she thinks, and remembers when that word first dropped from her beloved shooting star’s mouth and the potent emotions it stirred in her; grief and awe – those were normal, but it was the want that startled here, that and the horrible realization that because that want had momentarily replaced her deepest and longest wish she has, she knows, failed.
(Turning to her in the moonlight, Rhea thinks about the word again. About how it would sound in Nabatean. She had never said it herself, but sometimes, now more than ever she wants just to hear it, just to check and see if it will slip into her memories and complete something there like a missing puzzle piece).
“We need you here,” Sitri insists through the fog and Rhea will ask why, and darling light that she is Sitri will take her by the hand and lead her back but always with a task in mind.
“Byleth is fussing again you know how your singing helps them,”
or
“We need to finish writing down that story you once told me. You remember where we left off, do you not; it was during a storm at the height of the tower.”
or
“Won’t you come sit with me?”
Sitri leads her back the house each time and Rhea marvels at how those hands once so fragile feel so strong compared to her own.
-
She starts to work the land herself, despite Alessia and Sitri’s protests; for while Jeralt, Alois, and their band have been able to stay for days at a time now it is not enough and even if they were here Rhea cannot says she trusts them to work with this precious soil. She has never written down what Zanado had looked like as a flourishing nation – still, its grandeur of culture and bounty of food and wine appear before her every time she closes her eyes, alongside the banquets they would hold to honor the goddess in great halls and those same walls painted red with blood. She could never forget.
EIbhear had done this work when Rhea was still just a child, running through the fields and dirtying her tunics in the process. She remembers his kind laugh and the way in which he had shown her where each sprout lay beneath the earth, giving her a ripened plum as an exchange for her promise not to trample his hard-earned work.
She remembers too much, and so she works until even her body starts to grow weary and her mind quiets. It is only ever temporary but, in the moment, it is enough.
The first time she loses an hour she decides to speak to no one but Alessia of it, and she starts to drink the herbal tea she had always favored back at Garreg Mach. She assures her that is all she needs.
But the next time she finds herself sitting in the tilled soil with the sun half way down the sky, she wonders how long she must keep up this pace for there to be enough for the next fall harvest in a year’s time. Byleth will have turned two then, and they would be able to have a proper celebration.
She wonders without truly finishing the thought if when she completes this project, creates for Sitri a place of security and a garden of life, might she finally lay her head down upon the canyon ground and sink into it? If she stays there, covered in dirt and green, perhaps she could provide for the fruit and vegetables as she had the people at Garreg Mach. Perhaps they too could multiply like the castle town and Rhea could again rest in the shadows, in the shade of the garden.
(She could rejoin her brethren).
When Rhea next comes to she sees a small fire pit in the distance, and the sound of laughter coming from the direction of Sitri’s house; Jeralt must have come back, she thinks. She rises from her crouch and is surprised to find that the all of the Zanado fruit have blossomed; here, she is surrounded by their flowers, and looking away from the fire and laughter she now sees that their bounty spreads out in blankets far enough into the canyon that she cannot make them all out in this light.
“You there,” comes a voice, youthful but steeped in the feel of authority, “why are you not celebrating with the others?”
Rhea looks up to see a young girl and she gasps for even if she had not been clothed in the garb of her people she was undeniably Nabatean with her green, silken hair tied up in ribbons to reveal her pointed ears and eyes the color of an early summer sky. And yet she was no one Rhea recognized.
“I am… oh, my dear child – might I ask your name?”
The other’s eyes flare at that and suddenly Rhea finds herself swept up in another emotion as those eyes of summer sky turn to that of a sudden hurricane.
“How impudent you are! To ask who I am here of all places. Why I am, Sothis, She of the Beginning, of course. And you?”
Rhea watches the one standing above her for any sign of deceit and finds nothing but fervor. Her emotions are so fully on display she can near feel them toss about in the air around her. Those words that had dropped so freely from her mouth were the truth as she saw them, and Rhea with her millennia’s worth of desperation for just such a confirmation can almost believe.
“But you look… can it truly be you, Mother?”
“Mother,” the other repeats, face changing again, this time seemingly in thought, “mother, hm… it is true as the Progenitor I know I have birthed many a thing: the four directions, the stars in the sky, the veritable bounty of this land, but it is all so hazy still. To think I have a daughter of my own!”
“You believe me?” Rhea whispers, unsure even of what she is asking. There is so much more she wants to say, as there always have. What of my kin, she wants to know – the many who had fallen before me and had been laid to rest before your throne. That day she had arrived to a ransacked throne room had been the day she wanted to rest her head on her mother’s lap, to hear her gentle breathing as she slept, and to whisper the questions she never could when they were both face to face.
But there was no throne here, no sense of familiarity but instead the eerie and all of Rhea’s long-held pleas feel caught in the back of her throat.
The girl, seeming unaffected, nods. “I can tell your words contain no falsehoods. Now, you asked for my name and I have given it. But what of yours?”
She holds a hand out to Rhea, and gently cups her face; head tilted so their eyes might meet. Rhea does not think she can breathe, does not even want to; perhaps this was her intended end: here on her knees, in the dirt of her beloved land in the presence of…
“My name, the precious gift you bestowed upon me, you do not remember it?”
The voice that speaks the question is as unrecognizable as the person in front of her, but surely the question is her own. A breath is let out, and she tastes tears.
“As I said much is hazy,” she is told, and the girl kneels down to meet her, hand dropping from her face to the fists balled in Rhea’s lap, “but though it is a slow process I feel I regain something each day.”
Rhea lets the other pry open one hand, and focuses on the heart beat there. Is it her own, or...? No, she cannot tell.
“I am sure once you tell me all will be clear. Let me call you home, little one.”
This time the heart racing she knows is her own for its beating near tears her apart. She does not let go of the hand in her own, but her other digs into the soft soil beneath her with fingers sharpened to claws. The flowers there scatter into the air and their color is the red of ripe fruit, the red of the canyon soil, the red of Mother.
She has never forgotten. She could not. To forget would be to deny her very self, and yet was this now truly an act of remembering? Of reverence?
Her companion frowns, confused, and brings Rhea’s hand clasped in her own to rest on her breast. “Come now, none of that. Will you not let me bring you back with me?”
Rhea has waited so long, to be embraced; to be made whole again, so why then, is she tearing apart? She pulls away from the touch and curls in upon herself because she feels it again, the despair that writhes beneath her skin in tendrils, in fissures that proceed from her very heart.
The stone her mother had given her.
“I –” Rhea attempts, “I, ah,” she almost gets the next word out but it is replaced by a wail, her heartbeat is so loud in her ears she cannot make out what the other is saying even as her lips move.
Whatever it is, it is not her name.
“I cannot!” she declares, both hands now plunged into the soil, for everything else around her feels distant and unreal. Her heart is breaking, it must be; and the ground beneath her too as she digs up flower after flower.
Her hands stained red with the sticky remnants of Zanado fruit come to her face and she shudders as her own storm of words continues without end:
“I cannot, forgive me, I cannot, I cannot!”
-
She must have been screaming for ages, judging by the state of her throat. Her voice is hoarse but it still does not feel like her own, and yet it is, as are the hands that would still cover her face but for the one fighting her.
“Mama, please.”
Rhea sits upright, nearly causing Sitri who had been hovering over her to fall to the floor. They are both in Rhea’s room inside Sitri’s house and the bed, usually pristine, never touched, looks as if it has been the abode of someone with a terrible affliction.
There is blood on the sheets and Rhea looks down at her hands, realizing though it sticks to her, it is not her own. Her heart breaks a second time.
“Sitri, beloved. Did I –”
Before she can finish her question Sitri has wrapped her arms around her waist, sighing in contentment as if it was she who had awakened from a nightmare: “oh, Mother, it’s alright now.”
“I hurt you,” Rhea says, shaking her head, voice horrified.
“It is nothing a bandage cannot solve. Now please, you collapsed and so must tell me-”
Whether it is the sight of blood as red and vivid as those blooming field of flowers, or the insistent pounding of her heart that reverberates between them Rhea finds herself suddenly brought to tears. She rends the bed clothes in an attempt to get herself to stop but once she starts crying she is powerless to stop.
As powerless as she had been in that dream.
She feels Sitri crawl onto the bed beside her, and though she bites the underside of her lips she cannot stop the choked sounds of her despair from slipping past them and so turns away; even still, the smaller woman pulls Rhea against her with unexpected strength.
Gentle fingers run through Rhea’s hair as she is embraced from behind, and unlike the gesture of the girl in the dream this she remembers. This is right.
So many times she had held Sitri like this when the girl was upset or exhausted, and though it happened less and less throughout the years as Sitri had grown and Rhea felt she needed to create some distance to protect her, she could never forget the joy she felt when the child would calm in her arms whether with a smile or a gaze of awe.
“Sitri,” she manages, voice broken; it is all she can manage but paltry as it the response comes: “I am here,” and Rhea turns toward the voice, startled to see Sitri too is in tears.
“Have I hurt you again?” She asks, impossibly lost, and Sitri holds her tighter at that.
“No, Mama. I am crying for you.”
That was right. It was not just the girl’s own emotions that were so bright and beautiful – no, Sitri had always felt so much, and for so many. During her early childhood when Sitri’s world had only been Rhea and her attendants she would fret over the cats at the monastery and often when a kitten fell sick she would beg Rhea to teach her magic to heal the little one and when Rhea had solemnly explained Sitri simply could not wield such power with the burden of her heart she would do everything else in her power to comfort and protect the ailing animal.
Sitri was good, and it was precisely why Rhea should not burden her. Even now the knowledge she had caused her to bleed makes her want to pull away but the child’s grip is so strong, and Rhea cannot remember the last time she has been held like this. She should not be, should not be crying. Should not be here.
“You do not even know what is wrong,”
“If I asked,” Sitri says, her own voice breaking as she cradles Rhea’s face, “would you tell me?”
Do not burden her, Rhea’s mind repeats but those eyes, not distant like the summer sky but sparkling close in the lamp light. That flame she had nearly lost. The feel of it all standing atop her prior sorrows finally prompts Rhea to speak.
“In my dream… I saw my mother.”
Sitri watches her face closely as she speaks and Rhea finds herself holding her hand again, gentler now; near listless, as she tells her: “it was her, it must have been; but in so many ways she was not – for she was just a child, and she… she did not remember me.”
Again, her voice cracks but this time she understands it as her own.
“After everything, I reasoned I could recognize Her no matter what shape she took – that none of it mattered so long as she could return, so long as I could speak to her once more but, oh, seeing her regard me with confusion… with common sympathy! It was agony!”
They cry together then, with Sitri carding her hands through Rhea’s hair, humming all of the hymns she had stolen away with while the choir director looked the other way; but eventually, she too turns from light tears to sobs and it is Rhea who holds her face then, and wraps the hands she has bloodied.
It feels as if Sitri is a newborn again, as if the dark of Rhea’s long-held vigil has ended with this dear new light. Her light who in turn begot another.
“What of Byleth,” she asks suddenly, kicking off the sheets, while Sitri stares uncomprehending.
“I must see them,” Rhea says, even after being told the child was being looked after by Alessia and so the two women, walk down the hallway, arm and arm, to the nursery.
Alessia has fallen asleep in her chair but there, in their bassinet is Byleth – hale and whole, unlike when Rhea had first held them (the only time she had held them).
Rhea’s hands tremble and Sitri, knowing her state, carefully picks the child up and brings them over. Byleth makes a noise of indignation at being awoken and Rhea finds herself in hiccups with a mix of laughter and relief.
“I had thought my heart had given out on me. That my crest had finally burst into pieces. It felt like it, and yet – there they are, none the worse for it. How miraculous your child is, Sitri.”
Sitri rests her head on Rhea’s shoulder and for one moment, she thinks to pull away, but Alessia is stirring now thanks to the commotion and Byleth continues to fuss, looking up at her with sleep-crusted eyes.
Rhea wraps an arm around Sitri and watches as she brings Byleth to her chest and hums a tune.
“They are simply very strong, just like you, Mother. Please.”
Sitri shifts so that Byleth is now near Rhea’s chest and the young one sniffles, confused, and leaning into Rhea’s warmth none the wiser.
“I cann-”
“You must stop hurting yourself. And know, you would never hurt them. Now, please.”
It is no longer a simple request, and Rhea blinks, looking from the stern expression on Sitri’s face to the amused Alessia in the corner. And then back down at Byleth.
She takes the child in her arms, though she does not let Sitri go either.
She does not let either of them go as Alessia forces the three of them back to bed, Sitri’s this time, soon after. Rhea doubts she can sleep, staring at mother and child as if seeing them for the first time but soon the sound of three heartbeats has her remember the music she had heard in her dream, the drumbeats and the fire.
“Mama?”
Sitri whispers and Rhea kisses her forehead. “I am here,” she replies.
-
When Rhea first wakes it is to Sitri feeding Byleth, a beautiful sight she intends to watch if not for Alessia insisting she drink her tea. Rhea does so, and finds herself falling asleep again, only truly drifting off once she hears the women giggling as they help the child bring up wind.
When she wakes again, Byleth sleeps next to her in their bassinet. She pushes herself up on one arm, feeling the soreness of her body for the first time in ages, and merely watches as the other murmurs, dream-like, in sleep.
Jeralt must have come back judging from the lilt of Sitri’s voice and the bustle in the front rooms so when Byleth starts to awaken she finds herself rocking the child back and forth in her arms.
It is then that the door previously half askance opens, and Jeralt enters. He just stares for a moment, and Rhea does so back, wondering idly if her eyes are as red as they feel.
“Rhea,” he nods, mouth turned up at the corner. He must be remembering all the times he had reported to her in the audience chamber with that same opening.
“You have returned safely,” she says, responding in turn.
“Did indeed,” he says, scratching his cheek, “I, uh, heard you’ve been pushing yourself out there in the fields.” Rhea just looks at him until Jeralt puts his hands up in a sign of defeat.
“Just saying, if you need the help Alois and I have got ourselves a good group now. I’ll introduce you some time.”
“I should certainly hope so if they intend to take my garden from me,” Rhea says with little bite behind it. Jeralt laughs, and she wonders how long it has been since she last heard that sound.
“Hey, I know you’ll put them through their training. Just thought I’d let you know. I’m home after all, and well, Sitri told me to take a break. Eat with the family. Isn’t it about time you do the same?”
Rhea swallows, nods. When she rises, Byleth still in her arms, she feels, despite the soreness, hardier than she has in some time. She hands the child to Jeralt and wonders at the feeling inside her as Byleth lights up upon seeing their father’s face.
“Lady Rhea,” Alois calls, as she passes Jeralt and enters the hall, “my wife has brought bread and news from the castle town! Come join us, won’t you?”
She sees Sitri, making up the table in the front room and they meet each other’s gaze. The soreness has spread to her eyes now, and yet…
“I would very much like that. Why not sit down and let me finish setting the table, Sitri?”
“Oh, Mother,” she says, shaking her head with a laugh; and Rhea walks toward the sound with a smile alighting upon her lips.
-
(Rhea lets go of The Beginning and steps into her beginning.)