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Day 25 of the Ethereal Moon
Byleth Eisner has relived this day fifty-three times.
At this point, she’s not even trying to change reality. She’s grown accustomed to the feeling of the fabric of time. On the twenty-fifth day of this moon, that fabric feels firm and pliant, a rough cotton that she can grab hold of and alter as she pleases. But on that day一on the twenty-sixth一time’s fabric slips through her fingers like buttered silk. No matter what she does, she can’t grasp it and manipulate it. Not really.
Not that she hasn’t tried! That first time, after the rushed burial, she wrenched control of the Divine Pulse and forced Sothis一despite the woman’s vehement objections一to turn time back as far as she could. That had bought her a day’s worth of reality to mold and shape to her will. Twenty-four hours before the flash of a knife changed everything.
As soon as Time’s wheel had stopped spinning, she’d gone to Jeralt’s chambers and tailed him the whole day. She’d tried to get him drunk at the ball, which took little effort. But she should have realized that wouldn’t work; Jeralt always had a stomach made of lead. He’d popped up the next morning without the slightest hint of a hangover.
From there, her attempts became increasingly more elaborate. She studied Seteth’s handwriting and forged new orders for Jeralt that sent him far from the monastery; he simply appeared back at Garreg Mach that same dreadful morning. His horse had mysteriously thrown a shoe. Another rewind, she tried to mildly poison her father; Rhea simply healed him as easy as breathing. Locking the doors to his quarters hadn’t yielded the desired result, either. Nor had stealing any number of questionable toxicants from Hubert’s chambers. The Marquis-in-waiting even caught her one time. To her surprise, he didn’t try to stop her, as if he somehow knew and approved of her crusade to foil Monica’s plans. Or maybe he just approved of surreptitious poisoning. It was always so hard to tell with him.
She has also attempted to sabotage that red-haired bitch with equal futility. No matter whether she drugged Monica senseless, trapped her in the caverns underneath the monastery, stole all her weaponry, or even gotten her expelled一she would have found Seteth’s unjust ire at the girl almost humorous if not for the satisfaction it gave her一one fact never changed: Monica always showed up at the chapel. Even the time she didn’t have a weapon on her person, Monica simply sank her teeth into Jeralt’s throat and ripped it out like a feral beast.
In one last-ditch effort, Byleth took the most drastic measures she could think of: she cut off her own father’s arm. His screams at that moment, the look of betrayal on his face一that horror still didn’t measure up to the terror of that his shallow gasp when he was stabbed. For extra impact, she even let him stand there bleeding for a moment before finally putting a tourniquet on his mangled stump and dragging him to the infirmary. But he’d still shown up at the battle the next day with his amputated arm cauterized.
That day, he’d only died faster, crushed in the jaws of a divine beast. And Monica simply cackled over his corpse.
After that, she stopped trying to intervene. But she kept pulling on the hands of the clock, spinning Time back to the dawn of the twenty-fifth.
And how can she not? With this thread of divinity at her fingertips, how is she supposed to resist the call to preserve his final day? Maybe, if she turns the clock long enough, she’ll finally think of a plan that actually works. Or perhaps, if she manhandles Time long enough, its gears will rust and it will just stop moving entirely, leaving them suspended in the void. Strangely, that idea doesn’t sound so bad anymore.
“The time has come to move forward, little one,” Sothis urges.
She says that every time the twenty-fifth draws to a close. And every time, Byleth ignores her.
At this point, she realizes that she’s addicted to it一to this power, this capacity to alter reality as easily as she’d pluck the string on a harp. The very first time she’d attempted it, pulling back Time to spare Lysithea from that errant arrow at the beginning of term, she easily resisted the urge to alter Time again until another weapon threatened one of her charges.
The Pulse has always spared them. So why couldn’t it spare Jeralt?
Since the chapel incident, she has never been able to resist Time’s call. Now it welcomes her back like an old friend, and every time she folds herself into its embrace. She justifies her choice with the knowledge that it allows her to cling to Jeralt and his last full day on earth.
You look so happy when you’re instructing the brats.
Was she happy? Was that what the warmth in her chest was called? That bubble had been so foreign, so unlike the barren emptiness that’s been her mind for so long. Not that it matters now. That warmth is gone, and she doubts it will ever return.
The clock chimes again: five notes pealing through the monastery. She could do what’s become a habit and go join Jeralt for one penultimate meal together. The past week一can she even call it that if it’s just been seven iterations of the same day? This week, she’s let him drink her under the table every night at dinner before the ball (which she’s long since stopped bothering to attend). Their indulgence never made him hungover enough to miss the fateful battle, but the hum of alcohol in her skull dulls the volume of Sothis’s voice.
And so she joins Jeralt for dinner. They scarf down the Gronder Meat Skewers and wash it down with cheap ale, just like the old days. She wonders how Jeralt even manages to get it inside the monastery一Seteth’s all-too-familiar scowl proves that this particular drink is contraband一but she’s grateful for it. Its burn makes even Alois’s jokes seem funny enough that she doesn’t have to force a laugh.
“For all the buying and selling they do, they’re no good at trading blows!” Alois intones.
How many times has he told that same wretched joke in this jumble of past and present? And yet, true to himself, Jeralt laughs. It’s begrudging at first, and then his own hiccup mid-giggle sets him off. He throws his head back, and before long, the sound of his guffaw shakes the rafters overhead.
A few nearby students gape, then return to their meal. They’ve come to take the Knight Captain’s laughter for granted, rare though it is. And why should they care? They’re anticipating a night of frivolity, not the flash of a knife in less than a day.
For Byleth, though, the sound of Jeralt’s laughter wrenches in her gut; it’s the same laugh he gave last night. It’s identical right down to the tear he wipes away when he finally calms himself and the belch he makes when he takes another swig of ale. To her, the sound is…empty.
He’s becoming as much of a shell as she is, she realizes. She’s begun to worship a homunculus of Jeralt, not the man himself.
How has Monica done it? Even now, in these fleeting hours before she stabs him, the flame-haired devil has somehow managed to suck the life from Jeralt while he’s still breathing.
“Monica isn’t the one killing him now,” Sothis murmurs. “You are. You’re destroying his memory by forcing him to stay.”
“Go. Away,” Byleth growls, realizing too late that she’s spoken aloud.
Jeralt looks at her quizzically but doesn’t press the issue. He just jerks another bottle her way. She takes it and knocks it back quickly. If Sothis says much else, she doesn’t hear it. True awareness gives way to a feverish haze that ought to get her fired.
It’s not until she’s stumbling back to her dormitory that she realizes it’s almost time to turn back the clock. She ought to do it now; she can’t risk passing out in a complete stupor and losing an hour of stolen time. And so she turns inward, reaching out with hands that don’t quite feel like hers to clasp the clock that turns the world itself. A few clicks will be all it takes.
But before she can grasp the Pulse, something bats her hand away. She tries again, but this time, the force deterring her is even stronger, as if someone has stamped on her outstretched hand and broken her mental fingers.
“Enough.”
“Get out of the way,” Byleth tells her.
“No. I’m done coddling you.”
“I’m not done grieving. You of all people know that.”
“You haven’t even begun to grieve, child. And you never will if you keep doing this.”
Byleth surges towards the Pulse again, but it’s as though her fingers ram into stone. Sothis has shut her out of it. “Let me do this,” she insists.
“I heard you admit it yourself. Tonight you realized that he’s already gone. So let him go.”
A primal sort of fury surges inside her, unlike anything she’s felt before. How dare Sothis refuse her this? She pushes again, this time exerting the same force she’d use against an enemy. She punches at the barrier Sothis has erected in their consciousness. Each blow sends pain rocketing through her, but still she beats at it. It’s yielding, fracturing a little more with every blow. This is her mind. Sothis isn’t in charge here.
But deep down, she knows the truth that neither of them has yet fully voiced: this voice in her head belongs to the same Goddess that Rhea worships. And with that reality comes a power she cannot possibly comprehend.
That same terrible power shreds through her entire being now. It pummels her and grinds her into submission. It is ravaging fire, drowning water, crushing earth, and roaring air all at once. It is light and it is darkness. It is creation and unmaking, all reducing her to a sense of nothing other than pain.
The progenitor god, indeed.
She cannot scream, cry, or beg for it to stop. She can’t even apologize. All she can do is submit.
In the same moment she realizes this, the pain eases. The force abates enough that she can think straight. The pressure on her limbs eases to the point that it almost seems as if Sothis is holding her hands一half to prevent her from touching the Pulse again, but half in comfort. They linger there.
“Please, Sothis,” she finally breathes. “I don’t know how to let him go. I can’t.”
“You must, Byleth,” Sothis says. Her voice is both sympathetic and commanding. It’s a strange sound, coming from someone who looks so childish. “The world has already been robbed of Jeralt. Don’t rob it of yourself, too.”
“What good am I to anyone without him?”
“You will never know who you could become until you face the world without him.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“Don’t become trapped by the grief you’re avoiding. You must face it. Survive it. Move forward. Please don’t…don’t become another Rhea.”
“Another Rhea? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Sothis pauses. “All these years later, she clings to her grief. It’s what drives her,” she whispers at last.
“Again, not helpful.”
Sothis seems to think better of this topic, and she doesn’t pursue it. “You’re my partner now. And I won’t allow any partner of mine to wallow in self-pity. I will not stand by and watch you waste away.”
“...P-partner?”
The word feels swollen and sluggish on her tongue. She has never once considered herself a person with…attachments. And how can she? Growing up as a mercenary, she’s lost so many comrades. At the monastery, she’s gotten soft; she realizes now that she’d gotten far too comfortable with the idea that death wasn’t always a misstep away. She’s lost her edge. Perhaps that’s why Jeralt’s death was so jarring. She took for granted that he could die.
Partners with Sothis一could she even entertain that possibility?
“I can think of no better word for it. For good or ill, you and I are linked.”
Linked. Inextricably so, at least, as far as she can tell. Strangely, that doesn’t sound so bad anymore. Yes, the girl annoys her to no end一her running commentary during lectures is unbelievably distracting一but she’s omnipresent. And no one’s dagger can steal Sothis away. All at once, the world doesn’t feel so suffocating anymore.
The next day, the twenty-sixth, dawns as it has fifty-four times before. But today, with Sothis’s help, she finally lets the hands of Time tick past.
It’s a bit like a bad hangover. Her head pounds mercilessly as she watches Jeralt’s murder one last time. The voices in that moment are all muddled, too. The ground seems to spin under her feet, as if Fodlan itself is waiting for her to send it twisting back to the past. Bile rises in her throat. Can she really let him go?
There’s a moment where she almost reaches for the Pulse again. But Sothis gives her a knowing, grim smile.
“Reach for my hand, little one.”
Byleth takes the goddess’s outstretched hand, and together, they finally soar away from the overturned time-sands of the Ethereal Moon.