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I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
This story assumes a Forde/Eirika A-support (and perhaps a bit more), plus a few background pairings blessed by game canon.
Dedicated to Raphiael, for love of art.
In a sense, it was all Kyle's fault. Kyle'd found the little carved statuette in a Carcinese bazaar, right before all the back-stabbing started. The vendor had a provenance for it; 'twas based on an ancient statue, she said, a piece of great antiquity and unparalleled workmanship, unearthed in the mountains and now housed in some Councilman's art collection. One of the five heroes of yore, no doubt.
Forde doubted it. Representations of the Five hadn't changed much since the first century of the Age. The medium mattered little, and the skill of the artist mattered even less. Freyja always sat atop her pegasus, lance poised ready to strike. Latona was always shown with a staff in her hands, and nine times out of ten her eyes were closed in meditation. Jehanna's founder always had red hair even though the stories from Renais claimed that he was a man and the stories told by the Frelians claimed she was a woman.
The headless statuette might have been King Jehan or Queen Jehain; they carried a sword in any event, which meant it couldn't possibly be King Siegmund or Emperor Grado. Something about that identification seemed off-base to Forde, though he couldn't place it. It was the pose, he thought, the pose and the clothes. He'd never once seen Jehan depicted in such a static, standoffish way, with one hand placed at the hip and the sword pointed down at an angle.
Kyle didn't give any credit to Forde's objections, and Forde didn't see any reason to press the issue. If the original statue was as old as the Carcinese vendor claimed, the iconography of the Five might not have been established yet. So the headless King Jehan joined the wooden animals in Kyle's collection, and Forde thought nothing more about it until Franz dug up a surprise in Jehan's own land.
Jehain's land, rather. The Jehannans proved adamant about their founder; as graceful and lovely as poor Queen Ismaire, they said. At this point, Forde didn't much care one way or another as long as the rest of them got out of Jehanna alive, but he did have a good long ponder over the little agate medallion that his brother discovered in the sands. The figure carved into the pale stone still had its head, but otherwise every detail matched neatly to Kyle's Carcinese statuette. Sword held out with its tip to the ground, the other arm posed with the elbow jutting out, clothes that just seemed... archaic.
Forde showed the medallion to the Jehannan ladies; Tethys cooed over it but didn't seem recognize it as anything. Marisa just blinked at Forde and acted as though he'd done something offensive by holding out a piece of jewelry at her. Forde gave up and told Franz to give the trinket to his little Gradan friend. Once upon a time, there'd been someone famous enough to merit statues in the northern mountains and commemorative medallions in the southern deserts, and now they'd been forgotten. The Demon King likely had something to do with it, Forde thought. The Demon King seemed to be the answer to everything else.
-x-
Freyja upon her winged steed. Saint Latona contemplating the inner light. Red-haired Jehain slicing the air with her sword. Grado with his axe and Siegmund with his lance. Even in Rausten's oldest and most sacred temple, the Five Heroes were exactly as Forde knew them. He wondered how that had come about; why was it that Latona was shown with her staff, and not as mistress of the light tome called Ivaldi? It wasn't any less difficult to paint or sculpt or inlay a book in her hands.
For that matter, why was Latona always shown as a girl on the verge of womanhood when she'd reigned as Rausten's first monarch for nigh on five decades? Why was Emperor Grado shown as a mature man, his face lined and bearded, when the history books and legends alike claimed he'd been a brash youth like his comrades at the time of their victory? How were flesh-and-blood warriors transfigured into the demigods that brooded from the temple alcoves, from humble villages of Renais to the great palaces of Rausten?
How indeed. The idea struck Forde at the oddest and most inappropriate moments. He was riding one afternoon alongside Princess Eirika, hoping to lighten her mood with a joke and so bring a smile to her face. As she turned to face him, Forde saw her for a moment as she might be if captured in a mosaic or a stained-glass window. A glow of light, a play of color, an impression that created Eirika of Renais.
Forde wondered what hands might shape the image of Princess Eirika that this Age might hand down to the next. In that moment, as the princess resolved again into warm flesh and soft hair, Forde realized where his calling lay.
-x-
Forde had not painted a human face since his mother died, but he took it up again once they returned to Renais. Kyle had a broken heart and a collection of wooden figurines, brother Franz had his little rose of Grado, and Forde had his paints, his brushes, and his new calling. The first portrait he painted was hers, of course, but his signature was hardly upon it before the commissions came in. He wasn't interested in painting the nobles that spent the war looking out for their own skins, but Forde couldn't refuse Queen Eirika's request that Forde paint her brother.
The job gave him fits, though. That first portrait of Queen Eirika translated easily from his eye to his mind to the canvas; he'd spent the last months of the war thinking of how best to paint her, of precisely how to place her hands and illuminate the curves of her face. How to show Eirika as everything she was- queen and woman, valiant as Freyja yet touched by the grace that set Latona apart from her fellows. He'd spent weeks just contemplating her smile.
Her brother the king presented a different challenge. The robes of a crowned king didn't suit Ephraim, and faced with a fidgety model and a dull choice of acceptable poses, Forde decided to go off-course and try something a little unorthodox. He presented the new King of Renais not as a grave and contemplative "father of the people" but as a warrior, the genuine heir of Siegmund's scarlet mantle. At the portrait's unveiling, Forde felt the shiver that passed around the room. He'd dared to show Ephraim uncrowned, in battle dress, reaching out toward the viewer.
Uncouth, the critics said of the outstretched hand and contorted pose. His Majesty had been turned into a wild man by this eccentric ex-knight. But the critics hadn't seen Ephraim strike down four knights in succession with a javelin, hadn't seen him drive the head of a lance deep into the maw of a three-headed beast. And Queen Eirika adored the portrait, so Forde really couldn't ask for anything better.
-x-
After painting several more conventional works, Forde decided to try again at placing Eirika on his canvas. He wanted something dynamic, something vivid that captured the sense of Eirika in motion. A little less of serene Saint Latona, a little more of graceful, dangerous Jehain. And so he painted Eirika as a man might encounter her on the battlefield, her body caught in mid-curve, her hair streaming on the wind.
Kyle didn't like it.
"It's crooked," he said.
It was a little off-balance; that was the point. Queen Eirika looked to be on the verge of stepping out of the frame, ready to engage the viewer in a duel. Beautiful, arresting...
Indecent, said the critics.
But the controversy brought Forde commissions, from Frelia and elsewhere. That kept him more busy than he wanted to be, though Forde felt he hadn't quite made his final statement on the royal twins of Renais.
-x-
Carcino sent Queen Eirika seven wagonloads of tribute to apologize for the unpleasant incident back in Port Kiris. Casks of wine, jeweled and gilded vessels for the temple, a box filled with pearls the size of chickpeas... and fine works of art. Forde got to inventory the art, mostly Frelian seascapes and altar-pieces from Rausten. But in the middle of the third wagon, he found one familiar statue.
Great antiquity was right; Forde sensed it had to be a relic of the lost Age, the era Fomortiis ended with his first reign of darkness. Finely modeled arms, exquisite textures worked into the carved clothing, a edge to the sword so sharp that Forde imagined it might yet draw blood... no, Kyle's little souvenir hadn't done it justice. Hadn't begun to.
One statue of the hero Siegmund, bearing the Thunder Blade instead of the Fire Lance. Head missing. That's what the Bill of Lading claimed, and Forde didn't believe it for a moment. But "Siegmund" was set up in the palace where all comers could admire him, and Forde kept his silence. He did have to object to the suggestion that the statue be given a new head; some things shouldn't be done to art, and fortunately the queen sided with Forde.
In the end, it wasn't a bad thing that he was confronted with the misidentified statue each time he passed through the palace. The false Siegmund gave Forde ideas, and not the sort of ideas that would cause Kyle to roll his eyes skyward and moan in exasperation.
-x-
His earlier portraits of the king and queen fell short of Forde's new ideal. They were too individual, too dependent on the bond between artist and subject. They could not be copied successfully, and while Forde had once been pleased in this, he now saw it as a shortcoming. The new goal became something that didn't depend so heavily on use of color or tricks of perspective, an image that might be rendered in glass or marble or the agate of a cameo. He would find that essential impression of them both, and use that to fashion the image of the King and Queen that would define this new Age of civilization.
At first, he asked them to pose- crowned and uncrowned, robed and sceptered and in simple everyday wear, dressed for battle and dressed for the temple. And, in Eirika's case, dressed for the bath and the boudoir. Forde admitted that the last was, perhaps, a bit of mutual self-indulgence. And once he'd seen and sketched them them almost every way that could be imagined, Forde went to work.
He'd used clay models in the past, but now he began to work in stone, foregoing precious sleep that he might find the essence of his king inside a block of alabaster. His early attempts looked shameful beside the crudest of Kyle's figurines, but Forde slowly achieved something close to competence in his new medium. At least, he learned in rapid succession a very long lists of things that shouldn't be done when attempting a statue. Fingers gave him trouble. The shaft of King Ephraim's lance and the edge of Queen Eirika's sword gave him trouble. Proportion, the simple ratio of head to foot, proved a nightmare. But Forde carried on, with a discipline that stunned Kyle when he came to call.
"You're obsessed," said Kyle. He'd brought along his son, who asked questions about everything- the mine the marble and alabaster came from, the animals that provided the hairs for Forde's paintbrushes, all of it.
"It's my new mission in life."
"I can see that." Kyle reached out for one half-finished sculpture of King Ephraim, then shook his head and withdrew his hand. "Well, it's good you found something to..."
"To clear my head?"
"It's not that anymore, I can see that much. To give you a purpose."
"We all need one, don't we?"
"Of course we do."
Forde saw the way that Kyle's attention drifted to his son. Two former knights, one buried in dabs of paint and chips of marble, the other gone domestic and grown stout around the middle. Each man on a course the other would never entirely comprehend.
"I'm glad you came by, Kyle. I'm sorry we haven't seen more of once another since... the peace."
Forde tried to be polite about Kyle's marriage, really he did. He understood that Kyle hadn't taken the loss of that Frelian falcoknight well, but taking up with a mage girl who wouldn't look anyone in the eye when she spoke to them just didn't seem the most sensible reaction.
Then again, compared to Queen Eirika, all other women seemed to be a bit... lacking. And once Kyle had collected his son and gone home to be with his wife, Forde returned to his great work of instilling Eirika's spirit into a lump of pale stone.
-x-
At last he had his ideal model. King Ephraim, depicted as he'd been ten years before, his lithe body in a battle stance and his lance posed so that it seemed an organic part of his whole. One arm raised and the other lowered, a suggestion of movement without any outlandish gestures. Eyes direct and fearless, a face youthful but not guileless. Forde saw how Queen Eirika's eyes danced with light as she examined the scaled-down statuette he'd provided for her inspection.
"It's perfect, Forde."
"I believe it is, milady."
Eirika asked him that night for a life-sized statue of her brother in his glory. It took Forde two years and more to complete; he had just finished work on the eyes, with their unmistakable warning glare, when King Ephraim died. Forde unveiled the statue once the period of mourning ended; instead of the usual mutters and insults, the court greeted Forde's work with acclaim. With rapture.
Maybe it was an accident of timing, but Forde couldn't have asked for better success at turning Ephraim of Renais into the world's icon. Sculptures, temple windows, coins and commemorative medallions... all bore the image crafted by Forde. And paintings, of course. He'd never been busier- though it seemed to Forde he said that every year. At least he had a pupil now, as Kyle had apprenticed his own son to Forde upon seeing the statue of King Ephraim.
And he'd given comfort to Eirika.
"We could move that old statue of Siegmund someplace else and put your statue of my brother there instead," she said to him one night.
"No, milady. Leave poor Siegmund where he is; he's suffered enough in losing his head." He never had bothered to correct her.
Eirika ordered Forde's statue to be placed alongside the antique, as though the finest relic of the long-vanished Age and the finest work of the new should stand shoulder to shoulder. Forde thought the display just a little excessive, but Eirika's pride, and her smile... well, they did have an effect on him.
-x-
It had taken Forde a decade and more to find an image of King Ephraim that would endure for an Age. He spent the next three decades searching for his perfected Eirika. He worked her profile into conch-shell, her smile into stone. He sought to capture the light in her eyes, the serenity of her brow, in tempera and watercolor. With her rapier and with the Thunder Blade, on horseback and seated upon Siegmund's sacred throne, crowned with pearls and with a rose in her hand...
Forde died in his studio. Lack of sleep, they said, after his only student found him there one morning, dead among seven new studies of Queen Eirika. When said student released the first posthumous assessment of Forde's work, it was stated that his debut portrait of Queen Eirika, the so-called Restoration Portrait, was likely the best.
The End
Author's Notes: Sardonic Kender Smile deserves a shout-out for the gameplay anecdote about Ephraim getting four critical hits in a row... with a javelin.