Rebooting Tactician because playing Fire Emblem again and again is no good for my health, but probably better than the other activities I could be engaging in during spring break. Like drinking myself stupid.

But if Hemingway can be believed, I can do both. Or something to that extent.

Story Start

King Fado didn't seem to be a rich man to me, though I doubt any castle on this island could compare to the grand palace of Bern or the snowy halls of Edessa. But compared even to the strongholds in the Lycian city-states, Castle Renais still seems relatively tiny.

Despite the modesty around me, there was an air of knighthood around here, the type of air that I breathed in the tents and camps of the two armies I'd fought along side. A tactician yearns for this environment, because it means that his knights would not only grow, but grow together.

In Castle Renais, the dining hall doubled as the throne room, and King Fado was seated on the round table with his men. I was introduced to them. To his left sat a young man with sharp eyes named Orson, his lady wife on his other side. The King's children, no more than ten years of age, were seated to his right. Ephraim spoke his name like a knight under his father's service, his tone low and respectful with a hint of steel. Eirika met my eye boldly and her words were almost a declaration of battle. Both earned my smile.

"So you are a bard, you say?" King Fado finally directed to me, indicating that he had finished dining. I stopped picking at my food and nodded at him.

"Yes, my King."

"Well, then, tell a story!" Eirika interjected, enthusiastic as children are.

I nodded at her solemnly and brought out the lyre in my pack. "I'm here today," I strummed and half-sang, half-said, "to tell the story of Prince Marth, from-"

"But I've heard that one already!" Eirika whined. The king looked secretly relieved as well.

"Do not mind my daughter, Sir Bard. You may sing us whatever you wish."

I looked to him, judging him. This was a good table. They'd undoubtedly heard the stories of Siegfried the Rebel. They'd probably even heard the story of the Eight Generals of the Scouring, from my homeland.

But I had a rather special tale indeed, that I had saved up for a good amount of years.

"Well, I'd hate to bore the princess, my king. I do have one story that I can be certain she has never heard. This is a difficult story indeed, a story of assassins and traitors, of knights and sages, of legends meeting their start and legends meeting their end…"

Tactician

I'm Doug. Doug Deeping. Laugh it out before I continue.

I'm the son of the Wyvern General Jeremy Deeping, who was once the Highmaster of the Wyvern Corps of Bern. I'm from a family of nobility to an extent. We owned very little land and a collection of small villages that we were indebted to some bankers in Etruria over. But then my father became general and the King paid it off in a pair of rubies.

My father learned the spear from his collection of pictures, of Paladin Barrigan. Perhaps that was why he was so successful in the Corps - he was capable of unseating his commander from the day he joined as a teenager.

I'm shit with a lance. It's too heavy for me, especially since the general earned twenty thousand gold pieces a year and I'm weak and lazy according to my father. I haven't used a coin of his since I was seven, to be honest with you.

While my father's hero was Knight Barrigan, my hero was Bramimond the Enigma. According to the writings of the Archsage, while Barrigan gave his horse, charred to the bone, to the cause, Bramimond gave something infinitely more important - her soul. When she smashed her Ring and used the remains to forge the tome Apocalypse, she lost all semblance of personality and became what she aspired to be - humanity's last hope. When the Archsage could cast no more spells and the Saint had run dry of prayers, the Enigma reversed the flow of nature and froze the breath of dragons in their throats.

Barrigan would go on to ride a pegasus and lead frozen Ilia to the beginnings of prosperity. Bramimond would go on to be sealed in a shrine for hundreds of years.

When I was sixteen, the same age as my father when he was recruited to ride wyverns, Bern had four pillars of its military might. The most well known might have been the people sitting on fun-sized dragons, but there was also a future for those who would rather play with swords or axes - a future of the ground, that is. Bern didn't have a cavalry to speak of, but the bulk of the army, a good half of it, consisted of men swinging axes they'd chopped down a tree with earlier in the morning and boys with their family sword. Usually the family sword had been mass produced in an earlier time.

There were two other, less illustrious, branches - the Mage's Guild and Intelligence. While I had liked the idea of flinging spells around, and an old childhood friend of mine was a ranking member of the Guild, Intelligence gave me an offer I couldn't resist in the form of a mentor.

He was the one and only Legault, twenty five years old, flagrantly homosexual and a genius with a curved blade that was called the Edge. You could find it in some stores for several thousand gold pieces, but the military didn't officially carry any. He'd been the Head of Intelligence for nearly four years to the date, slitting throats in foreign countries with the true efficiency of a blackheart.

Legault was damn good at what he did and I wasn't afraid to use my budding sexuality to convince him to teach me some of the more difficult tricks of the trade. My father was quite disgusted when I pranced out of the house in a coat with nothing underneath, tight pants and leather boots.

On the day my story begins, I was eighteen years old. My father was in the yard, his lance dancing to a melody that only he could hear. He wasn't the most muscular of the Wyvern Corps, but he was quicker than most of the thieves and other riffraff in Intelligence and as durable as his successor and protege, General Murdock, in his clunky armor.

"Are you going out dressed like that to work?" He never failed to comment on it. When I was younger, watching him off the back of Blackie was the most terrifying experience ever. In truth, General Deeping's wyvern was probably the most terrifying wyvern to have ever been born. It had been named after its color, a deep coal, and it was at least sixty years older than the second eldest wyvern in Bern. Blackie had been the mount my father's grandfather rode into war with Etruria a hundred years ago.

"Yeah." My reply was curt, but it didn't deter him from chastising me about my life choices yet again.

"You're too good for intelligence. Being taught everything is an right and not a privilege in the Corps-"

I cut him off. "If there aren't good men in Intelligence, then the Bernese military machine would be blind."

"Indeed, Highmaster."

I turned to my most recent broken heart. Parva was blonde and beautiful and four years older than me. She had been my childhood friend for a while before her family moved to a different manse. Adding to the fact that we were only in the city during the winters anyway, it became really difficult to stay friends with her. Naturally, when I rose through the ranks in the military, we became lovers. Naturally, it ended in tears for both of us.

"Hello, Parva." My father smiled. He approved of her and they discussed magical theory once in a while. Naturally, he didn't know we had stopped seeing one another. He was also unaware of how far we had gone in our relationship.

"General Deeping," she returned, her grin somewhat forced. "I've come to collect Doug. There's been a bit of an incident down at Intel."

Intelligence was a good ways away - past the city center and the King's gardens. I had never been taught how to teleport despite my education in magic - it was too flashy for my business, after all. Parva gave me a smile that told me quite clearly that I was walking and she disappeared into the ether.

"Girl problems?" my father asked, relieved that he had some sort of common ground with me.

"Something like that," I grimaced.

"I think I'll fly down as well. Something tells me that having a ranking sage of the Guild as a messenger girl doesn't bode well."

I nodded, suddenly pensive. My father was rarely wrong when it came to catastrophe. He took off riding Blackie bareback, giving me a smile that told me quite clearly that I was walking.

As I stomped over to the gate I muttered expletives under my breath about both of them.

I checked my pockets as I walked further from the manse. I had maybe enough wound paste for a papercut and several hundred gold pieces on me. Hidden inside the folds of my coat was a tome that I had acquired in Lycia when I visited - Nosferatu the Vampire, the Second Magic of Bramimond. It allowed the practitioner to feed on the soul of their victim and heal the body, but I'm certain that it damages the mind. I also had a dented lockpick and my dirk.

The dirk is an interesting weapon. It seems to be a cross between a sword and a dagger, but the technique required to perform with it is like neither. It does make assassinations delightfully easy, as the point is just thin enough to fit comfortably between a helmet and a platebody and hit the nerve stem in the back of the neck.

It'd be nearly thirty minutes until I got to Intelligence.

I was not prepared for what I saw.