'Everything that he was, before, was lost in the fire. Only this time, there are some diamonds in the rough, hidden under the ash. But the question is, will it be enough?'
Fate/stay Night, Tsukihime, and all related products are owned by Type-Moon and Nasu. I own nothing. Please support the official release.
Beta-Ed by ZeroZalazor
Warning!: While the M-rating is primarily for suggestive content that will occur later, this first chapter contains a large, canonical, death count. There's going to be some dark bit's. You have been alerted.
Authors Note: Many apologies, forgot to check if the formatting carried over. It didn't, so I've fixed the italics and scene breaks.
Prologue: Because Of A Driven Nail
It was an ordinary day in the lovely Japanese town of Fuyuki City.
Or, at least, it appeared to be.
The town, while picturesque, held a great many secrets, that belied the area's natural beauty.
In truth, the town had been designed specifically to be the battlefield of The Holy Grail War, a fight between magi to manifest a Sorcery that had been lost long ago.
The Heaven's Feel. Manifestation of the Soul. The Third True Magic. The ability to touch the Root, the origin of all existence, and bring someone back from the dead.
For that prize, anything went in the conflict to grasp it. Particularly, because that was not all the Holy Grail could accomplish.
At full power, the Grail could grant nearly any wish one asked of it, in part due to the immense power it possessed, and also due to the connection to Akasha that was developed to grant the wish of the one who held it, touching upon the crystallization of all human knowledge.
But such an immense amount of energy could not come from nothing.
Forging a path to the Swirl of Existence, even with all the magic energy in the world, was impossible. So, the developers of the Holy Grail War had to find a way to do the impossible.
And, in the end, they did.
By cheating the system.
Forcing something like a True Magic to happen through just pure power could not occur, no matter how long some of most the powerful and knowledgeable magi on the planet puzzled over it.
So, they determined what they could do.
Spells existed, particularly among the Einzbern, the family that had originally possessed the Heaven's Feel, to temporarily incarnate Heroic Spirits, legendary figures from throughout history, whose deeds had been so great that they had ascended after death.
The only problem was, they had no way to use that in any meaningful way.
The energy requirements for such a spell was far beyond anything any single magus, or even an army of magi, could achieve.
Until, one of them, a man by the last name Tohsaka, realized that they didn't have to use their own energy.
They could use the energy of the planet, leylines.
That route had its own problems, though.
There simply was not a leyline powerful enough to do anything on the scale they needed that was unoccupied.
Humanity tended to gather along wells of natural energy, just as they were drawn to fertile rivers, and such areas would not allow for the base preparations that would be required for such a massive ritual.
It had, this time, been the Matou that had come up with an answer.
If humans gathered along large channels of mana, could the opposite be done?
They possessed a property near a monastery, that possessed a reasonable well of magic energy, but nowhere near what was needed.
But the discussion had sparked an idea in the Matou clan, and with that, a plan was devised.
The basis of the Matou magecraft was to 'bind onto oneself'. And so, in one of the largest feats of magecraft since the Age of The Gods, they bound the concept of 'humanity' onto the leyline.
Such an achievement could not come without cost, and the act had burnt out the entire physical Matou Magic Crest, and permanently crippled the Magic Circuits of all the members of the Matou family, barring the patriarch, Zouken.
It had not been in vain, however.
The magecraft now connected people directly to the leyline, and used them as living magic batteries, pouring their energy into the natural river of power for later use.
Despite this massive work, the brains behind the Holy Grail still didn't have a method to use all the magic for anything.
Though all the families claimed credit for the final product, the true architect of the most important part of the system has been lost to the annals of time.
Someone had, at some point, determined that the Heroic Spirits they had designed everything up until that point to summon could, in fact, create a suitable connection to Akasha.
They just needed to summon more than one.
Even for the area they were in the process of developing into an area for people to live in, there would be no way to support more than one Spirit.
It had been the Tohsaka that had, once again, devised a solution.
Their magic revolved around 'the filling of containers', so they determined that they could make molds for the Heroic Spirits to fill, instead of summoning them in full.
Saber.
Archer.
Lancer.
Rider.
Caster.
Assassin.
Berserker.
They determined the great archetypes that would allow for the largest potential yield of Heroes, and called it the Servant System.
Next had come the number of Servants.
At one point, the mystery involving the heroes allowed for more mana to be produced then went into the summoning.
They settled on seven, one of each class, in the end, due to any higher a number causing an undue strain on the artificially strengthened leyline.
Killing the population of the town before they had even begun would not have been conductive to the War.
Everything was in place, until the first Servant had been summoned as a test.
The identity of the summoned hero was unknown, but they are believed to have belonged to one of what would become known as the 'knight classes'.
Right after the summoning, with no connection to the earth, and no way replenish their energy, the Servant had immediately began to fade.
Enraged at this indignation, the hero skewered their unlucky caller, killing them even as the spirit faded away.
They, eventually, had used the last remains of the Matou magic, managing to solve both issues at once, with the creation of the Command Seals.
By 'binding' the summoner as a Master to the Servant, this provided an anchor and solid stream of mana to the summoned entity, as well as a method to prevent one's vastly superior Servant from doing absolutely whatever they wished.
And so, with the framework in place, the wheels of the Holy Grail War began to turn.
Crushing any left behind in the cogs.
-/-
The day he died had been going well for Shirou(?) [Redacted].
He had woken up, helped his mommy finish cutting vegetables for lunch, and had fed the tabby cat in an alleyway near his dad's barbershop sardines that he had convinced his mom he loved.
The people around him were happy, and so was he.
Just as things were beginning to get into late evening, the cat had demanded a scratching, the red-headed child saw something beautiful.
He hadn't been supposed to go where he had, so the child cut through some back alleys to reach his family's apartment in time.
As he was exiting from between two buildings, two blocks from home, there, for just a split second, was a shining, golden blade, held by a beautiful blond woman with a steel breastplate.
Utopia, a part of his mind the child could not yet understand, whispered.
It was just a glimpse, but he knew, somehow, that the image would be ingrained in his mind forever.
And then, in a flash of motion, he saw terror.
There was another blond, a man this time, in gorgeous gold armor, fighting with the woman so fast he couldn't keep up, even if he had been able to.
And he couldn't.
For he had glimpsed the man's sword.
It was round, and so could not be sharp.
But it cut.
It was in several clear parts, and should shatter.
But it held firm.
It was an impossible blade.
But it held the Truth.
So caught up in the paradox, the child did not notice the cup appearing in the street, nor the woman's anguished shouts as she was forced to destroy it.
And as such, he came back into awareness to the smell of burning flesh, and the taste of ash on his tongue.
The Great Fire of Fuyuki City had begun.
-/-
Curses drenched the earth.
So the land burnt.
People were caught in the flames.
They died in agony, wailing for a salvation that would never come.
The acrid smoke was a palpable thing.
Those who had escaped the bite of the flames by traveling upwards choked, spitting vile down to join the curses as they fell.
It was Hell.
And yet, a child walked through the landscape.
His red-hair was matted with a mixture of sweat, blood, and ash; his clothes were tattered wrecks, protecting nothing; and his golden eyes were glazed, taking in everything, but there was nothing left to react to his surroundings.
The body moved, but it's owner was dead on his feet.
The child had walked past half melted homes.
A woman, presumably a mother, grasped at her already dead son, even as she slipped away, her formally pretty visage warped and twisted, with bits of white skull plainly visible.
The boy had walked by the twisted remains of a school.
Schoolchildren lay in the playground, cooked alive by the flames, those left calling for teachers and parents long since dead.
The husk walked by a shattered store.
People out for their groceries sat in piles, their clothing either gone or melted into their own flesh, even their bodies beginning to lose shape.
All of this, and more, the child walked through.
It was not physical strength that had carried him this far, for while he was not weak, others far surpassed him in that regard.
It was not the love of a family that sustained him, for he had passed their corpses long ago, and moved past.
It was not even willpower that was his saving grace, for while that was vast, even that alone could not allow what he had done.
In the end, it was an impossible wish. An ever distant dream.
The boy simply wanted for this pointless fire to have never happened.
He wanted to save the people around him, but even those that clung to life were dead, much like him, their minds not yet accepting the inevitable.
And it was for that wish that he had continued long past the point that his body could withstand.
Every part of him had been emptied in order to continue the march towards salvation, all to take just a single step more.
While this would, in nearly every other iteration, be the point the boy collapsed, as everything left him, this time, the boy managed another step forward.
In the end, it had been two swords, copies of the impossible originals, that had been all that remained.
Those, and the wish.
But even that was not enough to continue on indefinitely, and, as the first drop of rain touched his head, the child lurched forward, falling towards the still warm ash.
And then, a miracle occurred.
Something caught him and, as he looked up, he saw a man, crying, with the most radiant smile in the world on his face.
His black hair was worse off than the child's, and the trench coat still on his frame was worse than ruined, but the man looked so happy.
The boy then felt something press into his chest, and he felt, more than saw, a golden light that resonated with him.
And, even though he didn't know why, as the boy's consciousness faded, a beatific smile graced his lips.
It mirrored the man above him.
-/-
Even as the body rested, the soul continued its work.
Within the child lay a literally infinite plane, with red soil and a sky as broad as the eye could see.
And there, the world's sole denizens sat.
But neither was truly there.
One, a fantastic blue and silver blade, appeared ephemeral.
It was a Last Phantasm, made of materials not found on Earth.
The Sword of Promised Victory. The Blade of King Arthur. Successor of the Blade That Selected The King.
Excalibur.
And even this endless forge could not replicate the weapon.
The other seemed to be even less substantial, flickering in and out like television static, black with red lines, and screaming of something otherworldly.
The Sword of Rupture. The Blade that Held The 'Truth' Of The World. The only weapon that belonged exclusively to Gilgamesh.
Ea.
Even more than Excalibur, this world could not record the weapon, the blade that existed before the concept 'Sword', made of materials that had never existed.
And yet...
... The land was the embodiment of everything the child was, so even if It could not think, striving towards the impossible was what the boy did.
So the Blade Works would do the impossible.
It would improve, until even the existance that embodied, that was the world before heaven and earth split, sat in the cracked earth.
All that was needed was time, and power.
And, as twenty-seven conduits of the soul opened, and poured energy in, those were two things the boy possessed in spades.
-/-
It is the little things, more often than not, that make the biggest changes.
Because of a brush with literal salvation, simply seeing the manifestation of a burgeoning dream, events began to shift.
One misspoken word, and the red-headed child's friendship with the blue haired Matou ended prematurely.
An accidental action bound the purple maiden tighter, and yet so far away.
A chance meeting, and the interest of a black-haired idol was drawn earlier.
And those ripples continued on.
One simple question to a magi's mentor.
The passing fancy of the first king, allowing just a single familiar to escape.
And so, word of the early Grail War reached the ear of Roa.
A new plan was formed, and thus, an Executor's path was changed.
Just a tiny deviation, from one Japanese city to another.
But, in the end, it made all the difference in the world.