Chapter Text
The war that nearly came in 1181 did not.
Later, people would speak of it as though peace had arrived naturally, as though history had, for once, chosen mercy. But peace was no accident or “blessing” granted by the Goddess. It had been argued for, fought over, and held together by stubborn hands.
By the time Edelgard von Hresvelg stood ready to wage war, the professor she had once shared a classroom with had taught her, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, and Claude von Riegan, in their turns.
Then Archbishop Rhea fell into a sleep so deep it seemed eternal, and Byleth rose in her place. Before armies could march, the new Archbishop brought the three future rulers to the same table and refused to let them leave it until a solution was found. No one agreed at first as old wounds lingered between them.
But for the first time, they listened long enough to understand one another.
What followed was not peace, not immediately, but four bitter years of quieter conflict. Together, they turned their attention toward the enemy each had only begun to glimpse alone: Those Who Slither in the Dark, the remnant of an older age hailing from Agartha, having retreated deep beneath Fódlan.
Solon, Thales, Kronya, Myson, Cleobulus, and all the rest were brought down in a long campaign that culminated at Shambhala in 1185, and the three nations emerged from it scarred but whole, and standing.
The reforms that followed were quieter and more lasting than any war would have been. Crests remained “gifts” for the strength they conferred, but ceased to decide inheritance, marriage, or whose voice deserved weight in a council chamber. Noble houses kept their lands and responsibilities, though power itself bent, strongly, toward something less cruel. Church and state stepped apart, carefully, deliberately, though the Church of Seiros remained the heart of faith across the continent, with Archbishop Byleth still watching over Garreg Mach. More than twenty years later, the three monarchs: Edelgard in Enbarr, Dimitri in Fhirdiad, and Claude, who ruled Almyra in his own right, while maintaining influence in the Alliance have kept a peace that was real but tender, and an alliance that was old but, like most old things, not what it had once been.
And now, at last, the burden of that peace and legacy belonged to their children.
~
Enbarr, 1st of the Lone Moon, Imperial Year 1209.
An argument about the border patrols echoed throughout the Imperial Palace for nearly an hour, until the sun began to gild the flower garden. Edelgard had moved her work outside because the palace had grown stifling, and her (now) shiny brown hair fell loose over one shoulder, streaked at the crown with the white the experiments had left her, the only mark these days that she had once been someone else.
Caspar had come back from the war room sweating and mud-splattered, throwing himself onto the bench beside her with the theatrical resignation that meant he was about to ask for something difficult.
"I need your seal," he announced, dropping a folded order onto her open ledger. "Reinforcements for the south coast watch. The captain there is ready to mobilize."
"No." She did not look up.
"El-"
"No, Caspar. Not without scouts. We do not yet know who our enemy is."
He threw his hands up in defeat as she did not put down her pen. After twenty years of marriage they had both learned the choreography, and both of them, in fact, enjoyed it. Neither would have admitted it under oath.
"Hubert would tell you I am right," he tried.
She gave him a long, mild look. "Hubert is not here to tell me anything."
That landed. He deflated slightly, sitting back against the bench and crossing his arms. "Any ideas when he will be back?"
"None," she said, "other than the fact that he and Shamir, are away for political reasons."
The Vestra family being abroad on an intelligence mission whose details Edelgard had not been told in writing was a strange absence in the palace. Hubert was the rhythm of her court. Shamir was the silence at the end of her corridors. She softened, just slightly, and finally set down the pen.
"They will come home," she said, more gently.
Caspar exhaled, leaning his head briefly against her shoulder. "I know."
Down the path their son brought a training axe through a wooden post in one clean strike. Archibald von Hresvelg was eighteen and built like his father had been at that age, but his hair was just like Edelgard's when she was younger, brown and shiny, and his eyes were Caspar's, that clear bright blue that fooled people into thinking he was an open book. He was not. He smiled like his father and thought like his mother, and most days he could not have told you which one of the two he shaped the most of his own personality after.
"He looks just like you!" Caspar scoffed.
"He fights like you," she answered, rolling her eyes.
Caspar laid his hand briefly over hers, laughing as he thought that it was not a bad thing. Archibald hid a lot behind his father's smile.
For longer than they expected, they both watched Archie split a second post.
They stayed in the garden until the light went gold. Archie noticed them watching and grinned wider, waved the axe over his head, which earned him a shout from his father as he brought it down, chuckling. At dinner he was loud and hungry and exactly what he was expected to be.
That night, alone in his chambers with the lamp turned low, he sat at the foot of his bed and did not move for almost an hour. He was eighteen. He was the heir to an empire his mother had bled to reform where a Church was present that his mother still did not, in her quietest hours, entirely trust, no matter how often she sent the Archbishop (who was her former teacher) courteous letters and met her in person without conflict. He had grown up listening to his mother's careful, contained skepticism and to his father's more balanced point of views; he had not yet decided whose view he agreed with, and he suspected the answer was neither.
In three days, Archibald would travel to Fhirdiad in Faerghus to spend a week with the Kingdom's royal family as part of a pact between Edelgard, Dimitri and Claude to introduce the three new heirs in the same graduating class of the Officers' Academy.
In a month he would arrive there, and walk the halls, and have to make up his own mind about… everything.
The new and amended peace treaty signed by all three regions was twenty-two years old and it felt to him, sometimes, like a shallow oath protecting fragile alliances. He did not know if it would hold.
He also did not know whether the smile he had been wearing since he was young was the only useful thing about him. He did not cry. He never cried, even now as he sat at the foot of his bed and looked at the wall for more than an hour, as afraid as he could be about the future.
He ended up banking the lamp to his side right before falling asleep. However, what Archibald did not know was that his mother was watching him through the window from the garden right below the Imperial prince’s chambers, and she had not gone to him, because she had been eighteen once and she remembered.
~
Fhirdiad, 2nd of the Lone Moon, Imperial Year 1209.
The practice yard at Fhirdiad smelled of wet stone and horse sweat, and a brown long-eared dog whined gently from the bench while Juliet Anselma Blaiddyd called her father a coward.
"You are letting me win!" she said, leaning on her lance.
"I am, in fact, not!" Dimitri replied, letting a hand go through his long blonde hair.
"If you are going to embarrass yourself like this, you might at least do it where the help cannot see." She straightened, gesturing at the open yard with the butt of her lance. "Or do you enjoy giving the kitchen something to gossip about?"
She was seventeen, tall and sharp-limbed, her hair falling in long waves of pale blue, softer and lighter than her mother’s. But it was her eyes people noticed: her father’s, piercing and impossible to ignore, set in a face shaped by her mother’s quiet softness. The contrast unsettled people. It always had. Dimitri stared at her over the rim of his own lance and could not, for a moment, remember when she had become tall enough to be looked at like that.
"You will tire yourself out," she continued, her tone losing some of its edge, "and you will not tell me. And I will find out from the castle bishop in two days, and we will have this same argument again."
"Juliet-”
"You are not dying." She said it like a fact as she held her hand up in front of him, prompting him to let her finish. "I know you are not dying and it’s just an illness that comes with getting old but you are simply not as well as you like to pretend, and pretending is making it worse, father!"
She dropped the lance, walking off the yard without looking back. The dog hesitated for half a second between the king and the princess, then trotted after the princess, which seemed to be a habit. The only person it would follow in any situation, that was not Juliet, was her mother, Marianne.
Speaking of her, the blue-haired queen found him on the bench. She did not ask if he was all right as she sat down beside him and waited until he had had time to settle. After a while, she touched his sleeve lightly.
"You know she loves you very much." she said quietly.
"I know," Dimitri answered.
"She is just frightened. That is just how she shows it."
Marianne lingered beside him a little longer before rising at last. She kissed the crown of his head, gentle as always, and slipped away toward the castle kitchens, offering warm greetings to the cooks she passed. By the time she returned and he joined her, a bowl of fish stew had been set aside for him, still warm, waiting patiently for him to eat.
She had been his wife… his queen for eighteen years and the most-trusted council in his court for considerably longer than either. She had not changed all that much in twenty years. She was still soft-spoken; she still flinched when a door slammed; she still wrote her daily prayers in her own hand every morning before breakfast. The change in her was small but mighty. The change was that she could speak when it mattered, and the room listened. The change was that she could tell a stranger her name without looking down.
Juliet, who had ridden until both she and her horse were sweating, stopped at a small chapel three miles from the castle. She did not pray. She did not believe in praying, which would be considered an ironic twist of fate. She knelt in front of the statue of Saint Cethleann and tried to imagine a future in which her father was simply… well and healthy forever with her mother. A future where her older brother was still… with them, and the four of them were playing in the stables. But she could not, and she sat with the failure of imagining it for a while. Then she rode home. At dinner, her mother asked if she had enjoyed the ride.
"It was fine but I know my mare, something feels different. I think she may be with foal, mother.” Juliet said, her eyes on her plate. Patricia was a four-year-old horse Juliet had personally bred and raised, sleeping beside her in the stables when she was still a foal. Marianne only smiled and refilled her glass. “I thought the same thing, Lili. She will probably have them when you will be in Derdriu with Claude and Petra’s daughter. You should visit the Edmund domain while you are there.”
~
Brigid, 3nd of the Lone Moon, Imperial Year 1209.
The palace’s terrace overlooked the western sea, as Petra, Queen of Brigid, stood there, looking at the view.
Brigid had changed greatly in the years since she took over from her grandfather, growing steadily beneath her rule. Inspired by what she had once seen in Fódlan, better roads and stronger ports had slowly risen across the land, and the strong diplomatic ties with Almyra and Fodlan that had taken a decade to negotiate and some extra years to ratify had opened Brigid to the wider world. Yet Petra herself had changed far less. She still carried the same stillness she had walked into the throne room with, at twenty-two. Now that she was fourty-four years old, her Fódlan, after all this time, was smooth and exact, slipping only occasionally where the rhythm of her first language preferred a different turn.
She was enjoying herself a fresh mango.
"You are dripping on the railing," she said, without turning.
"I am going to be dripping on this whole archipelago if I keep going," her husband replied, joining her. The King of Almyra was barefoot and wet, in defiance of every protocol he was meant to observe in another country, and pleased about it. "Your daughter pushed me in."
"My daughter pushed you in?"
"Our daughter pushed me in."
"In which case she was being correct." Petra tilted her head, considering. "I think she was being more correct than usual." Claude laughed as he kissed her forehead.
Below them, in the curve of the harbor where the palace stairs descended to the sea, their daughter was riding a four-year-old wyvern through the surf. Esmeralda von Riegan was eighteen and tanned the color of dark honey, and the Brigid tribal marks Petra had drawn beneath her left eye a few moons ago, in a ceremony Claude had wept through and would deny to his grave, traced the bone in violet ink. Her hair was the same color as her father's, with streaks of Petra's purple woven through where the sun caught it, tied in the same way as her mother’s. Her eyes were Claude's exact green, and she had, since she was nine years old, used them to evade every reasonable consequence she had ever brought down on her own head. The wyvern was named Talia. Esmeralda had raised her from a fledgling.
She had spent more of her life in transit than any other student who would walk through Garreg Mach's gates in three weeks. Born in Almyra. Raised in Brigid until she was eight. Going back and forth between her father's palace and her mother's for the four years after, with long stops in Derdriu in between, until the question of where she belonged had become both impossible and irrelevant. The Crest of Riegan, dormant and quiet inside her, would one day make her the next leader of Leicester. The day following her graduation from the academy, she would be the Grand Duchess Riegan, and she knew it, and so for the last three years she had lived in Derdriu, learning everything she could about politics and its families and dialect. She had come home to Brigid for the summer. She would go back to Fodlan, Enbarr more specifically, for one final week before the year began because of the pact between the three current rulers to introduce the heirs to each other.
"She is the funniest person I know," Claude said. "She is the funniest person anyone knows," Petra agreed. "She gets it from you." Petra glanced at him sideways before laughing and handing him a piece of mango.
They watched their daughter laugh herself off Talia's back into a wave, and the wyvern surface a moment later looking deeply ashamed.
“There has been a letter," Petra said, after a while.
"From whom?"
"From Enbarr, Edelgard is talking about Esmeralda and her son meeting soon."
The first years had been difficult. Edelgard had returned the Brigid royal seal to Petra and had announced that Brigid was not a vassal state anymore, and the Empire was sorry for having pretended otherwise. Petra had taken the seal. Neither of them had embraced. They had not been alone in a room together again for nearly three years following that, and the correspondence between their courts had been polite and careful as well as stiff for longer than that. Then slowly, they became friendly again. Not as they had been at the Officers Academy; neither of them were these young women anymore, and too much had been done and undone. But friendly. Real letters again, eventually. Birthdays remembered. Coronations attended.
Claude had watched all of it and had never quite trusted the empress himself, and Petra knew this, and Petra also knew that her husband's suspicion was a useful thing to keep on the table.
Below them, Talia had finally tired of being splashed. She lifted from the water with Esmeralda on her back in two long sweeps of her wings, climbed high, banked too sharply, miscalculated her approach to the upper terrace, and crashed, with a tremendous cracking of branches and a louder shriek of human laughter, coming from the princess herself. She had directly landed into the upper crown of the old fig tree that grew against the palace wall. Esmeralda emerged after a moment in the foliage above, hanging upside-down by one knee from a branch, still laughing. Talia, several feet above her, was very still, in the way a creature is still when it does not entirely believe what has happened to it.
Petra closed her eyes briefly after making sure their daughter was fine. "She is as smart as she is reckless. And she is very smart. It almost reminds me of someone," she said.
Claude, watching his daughter dangle, had abandoned dignity entirely. He looked at their daughter there, grinning like she had accomplished something remarkable, as he looked impossibly proud despite the endless trouble she managed to find.
Esmeralda swung herself down from the branch, dropped, and rolled neatly onto the terrace at her parents' feet. She kissed her mother on the cheek then her father on the cheek and took the last of her mother's mango out of her hand.
"What were you two talking about?"
"You," Claude said.
"Bad?"
"Mostly good."
"You will be visiting your aunt in Enbarr next week," Petra said.
Esmeralda blinked. "I have an aunt in Enbarr? I thought I was visiting–"
"No." Petra's mouth twitched. "You have an empress in Enbarr."
~
It was the last month before the Academy term began, and all across Fódlan, eager young people stood on the edge of departure.
Anyone and everyone in Aegir was invited to the Prime Minister’s daughter’s send-off. Octavia danced through her own farewell party and did not slow down at all for her last days. She danced with her mother and her father and cousins and an ambassador whose name she had not bothered to learn, and packed three dresses too many, weeping extravagantly at the carriage door and then laughing extravagantly thirty seconds later. Ferdinand and Dorothea watched her go from the front steps. "She is going to be insufferable at the monastery," Dorothea murmured with a chuckle. "She is going to be magnificent," Ferdinand replied.
At a restored manor in Nuvelle, Ludwig sat at a piano and his mother sat beside him on the bench. Constance, whose condition was cured thanks to her research, was now the same before and after sundown. They played nothing in particular, in a piece that had built itself in the household over years from her improvisations and his quieter additions. His father had gone for a walk an hour earlier: Jeritza or… “Papa Emile” as he calls him, said goodbye in motion the way Constance said it in music, and it was easier for all of them. When the piece ended, his mother kissed his head. “Send me a letter when you see your cousins.” she said before hugging him. The Victor twins were his cousins, through Mercedes and Emile and he had not seen them in a while.
Speaking of the twins, Percy and Eddy were also departing. Their mother had sent them off with kisses, hugs and prayers murmured into their hair. Ignatz had given each of them a small bound sketchbook, Percival’s in green leather, Edward’s in brown and said only that they should send him what they made or wrote. Percival cried his eyes out but Edward was too excited to begin this new adventure.
As in Hevring, Otto did his best to appear unimpressed by the whole affair. He packed little and spent his final days lingering in the kitchens, trying all sorts of cakes from their estate. Lysithea, long since cured, her two Crests removed, stood in the doorway with her arms folded, pretending she did not see through her son’s fake disinterest. Linhardt was asleep on the floor of their library and would remain so until the carriage was actually leaving. At the gate Lysithea held her son for a long time without speaking, before he noticed a few tears down her face as Linhardt joined and embraced both of them.
In the County of Varley, Victoria woke up in the back of a carriage when her father slowed the horses, as she saw Gareth in front of a lake before she had fully registered where she was. She was out before Yuri had finished unhitching the horses, tearing down the slope with her hair coming loose. Gareth turned, dropped the stone he had been about to skip, and caught her at the bottom of the hill and they went down laughing together in a tangle of arms.
"I think she will be all right… I hope.” Bernadetta said quietly to Yuri on the porch. "I know she will be, she also has Gareth, although if he is anything like his mother, I am scared for her…" Yuri answered. Hapi hit the back of his head before they laughed together, with Ashe setting their boots off on the railing, allowing herself a small, dry smile, as the two families ate together in the inn dining room until well past dark.
In the Duchy of Fraldarius, Vincent had repacked his trunk four times. Felix found him at midnight checking the latch and sat down on the floor across from him without speaking. After a long while, his father reached out and touched the back of his hand, briefly, until the boy stopped fussing with the buckle. "I think you got it." Felix said. He stood up, ruffled his son's hair, and left. Annette sang Vincent out of his anxiety the next morning over breakfast and Felix, watching from the doorway with his coffee, allowed himself a small private smile.
Daphne packed in twenty minutes and went hunting in the wilds she knew so well, those of the Margravate of Gautier. Sylvain tried to give her some tips, claiming he had a lot of success at her age but she declined them with a flatness that was unmistakably Ingrid's. "Dad! I would rather meet people on my own terms. I need to go!" He laughed and pulled her into a hug as she pretended to fight, and Ingrid watched from the upper window, smiling at the two redheads she loved so much.
On the cliffs of Duscur, Gloria stood beside her father at the edge of the sea while Flayn was at their house, pacing, because Flayn had never been good at endings even after a thousand years of them. Gloria had packed her things in a small wooden chest with a brass lock she had made herself. She was half her mother's Nabatean blood and half her father's Duscuran blood, and she would carry both to the academy. Gloria was also looking forward to seeing the Archbishop's daughter, Tris Eisner who was living full-time at the monastery. She was technically her aunt through Flayn's father Seteth, but they were as close as two sisters could be.
At the Rangeld household, Alistair embraced his father Alois and all of his relatives in a chain that took fifteen minutes and ended with Alois weeping openly in the courtyard.
“Do not grow up too fast, son, you are my last baby.." the old knight told him, his hands on his shoulders. "I will try," Alistair said solemnly, smiling.
He wore the old sword his father used to wield at his hip; he had cleaned it the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that, since the carriage had been scheduled.
In Gloucester, Isaac rehearsed his arrival bow for two hours in front of a mirror. Catherine finally took him by the shoulders. "Isaac. It is just a school, relax."
"It is an institution, my son," Lorenz corrected, taking the other shoulder, "and bearing is paramount." Catherine rolled her eyes, chuckling as Isaac bowed again. By the end of the afternoon his back ached and his mother had given up trying to stop him as his father was lecturing him about Gloucester tea ceremony etiquette which he had answered with exhausting perfection.
In Goneril territory, Priscilla packed six trunks. Hilda personally added a seventh. Balthus quietly tucked a deck of marked cards into the lining of the smallest one, with a note. Priscilla found them within the hour, laughed for ten minutes, repacked them in a different trunk where her mother could not find them, and added a second deck of her own. The fun had just begun, she thought to herself. In pure Goneril fashion, her wardrobe alone weighed more than the rest of her luggage combined. She was looking forward to it.
At an inn outside Ailell, Jeralt cooked a goodbye breakfast for nineteen people and cried twice during the eggs, and did not apologize for either. Raphael was crying more loudly. Leonie was outside trying to load the trunks with dry eyes and not entirely succeeding. Jeralt was happy to start the year at the Officers’ Academy but he will miss everyone.
~
Garreg Mach Monastery, 29th of the Lone Moon, Imperial Year 1209.
The new term was about to begin.
In the cathedral, two nights before the Great Tree Moon’s start, Tris Eisner finished her evening prayers but did not stand up. She knelt for a long time with her hands folded and her hair loose over her shoulders, thinking about whether a girl who would live for what seemed to be forever could ever truly be a friend to people who would not. She did not have an answer. She did not stand up until her mother came and knelt beside her without speaking.
Ramona von Essar was going to be older than every other student in her year. She would be twenty-two by the term's end. Her parents, Hanneman & Manuela, had insisted she enrolls at the academy, on the grounds that being raised inside the monastery by two professors did not, in their opinion, qualify as schooling. Ramona did not agree at first, but her father’s recent death a year earlier had changed her mind. She had spent a lot of time reading her father's crest research and her mother's medical files. She could pretty much always be found reading in the cathedral garden with her shoes off. Her mother spared her the burden of welcome preparations, wishing her a brief moment of ordinary belonging among the other new students.
In the training grounds, Yasmin von Daphnel was sparring with a knight twice her weight and managed to win. She had been at the monastery since the spring. Her mother, Judith, was busy in the Alliance, and her father, Nader, was somewhere east of Almyra. They wrote often but they did not visit, and Yasmin, at seventeen, had stopped expecting them to.
Deep down in the Abyss, in a small records room near the secret library engulfed down there, at around two in the morning, Agatha von Vestra was going through the incoming class enrollment files with a lantern in her hands, having gained access to those thanks to her… unconventional means.
She had been at the monastery longer than any of the others who did not call it home. Her parents were not the reason, surprisingly enough, as they had offered to keep her at home in Enbarr with the Imperial family while they were abroad, and she had declined the offer in writing, with several reasons given, none of them true.
The real one was that she had wanted to know the monastery, inside and out, before the new class of students began to arrive. She had wanted to read about them. To her quiet satisfaction, the files had been detailed enough to oblige her. She had wanted to know her year before any of her year knew her.
She skimmed through it methodically. She had been at it for three nights running. She knew the files. She was not looking for new information so much as for what had changed in them since she had read them last. Her father had taught her that. And it was in some older archives, the ones the Empire kept on its lesser houses, that she had come across something she had not expected.
In the file on House Ochs, a minor Adrestian family, only two members were mentioned that she had heard about: Monica von Ochs, who had been a Black Eagles student before her own dad and was widely believed to have died at the hands of Those Who Slither in the Dark before being recovered alive, and the mercenary she married, of unclear lineage, coming from Ordelia territory, named Shez.
Tonight there was a third.
An enrollment slip had been slid between two of the older pages. “Name: Cedric von Ochs. Sixteen. Date of submission: three days ago.” She read it twice. She had never heard of Monica having a child. No one had. The Ochs heiress had vanished from Imperial society after her recovery and no one spoke of her anymore, including her marriage, nor any child that might have followed. Agatha copied the slip into her notebook, returned it exactly as she had found it, and blew out the lantern. She walked the cloisters until dawn, awfully curious about who this boy was.
~
Barony of Ochs, 31st of the Lone Moon, Imperial Year 1209.
In the easternmost reach of the Empire, a carriage left a small estate before dawn with one boy in it.
Cedric von Ochs was indeed sixteen. He had his mother's red hair and his father's purple eyes. He had said his goodbyes to Monica and Shez in their small garden, his mother holding him longer than usual, his father pressing his palm briefly to the boy's chest, just above his heart, and then he was on the road. It was only decided that he would attend the academy recently and his mother was not fully convinced of it until Cedric himself showed a lot of interest in doing so. As he was losing himself in his thoughts, what seemed to be a voice resonated in his mind.
“Child.” He did not move. The carriage moved. He did not.
It was not, properly, a voice per say. It came to him the way a name comes to a man who has been trying to remember it all day and then, quite suddenly, does not have to. It was quiet, unknown yet… already familiar.
“At last.” He looked at the empty seat across from him. The empty seat, in a manner of speaking, looked back. The voice did not speak again. It did not need to.
Outside, the year ended. Somewhere ahead of him, the bells of the monastery began, very faintly, to ring.