Dark Sun of Desire
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Warning: This is a crossover between FE3/11 (the Marth games) and FE2, which is canonically a sidestory to the Marth games and takes place on a neighboring continent. This story covers the post-war lives of some of the characters from the continents of Archanea and Valencia, and it focuses on Queen Nyna of Archanea. It is dark, not meant for young readers in the slightest, will be rated T verging on M, and contains many, many spoilers for the games. Consider yourself warned! I will not warn for any of the canon pairings but will warn for pairings not blessed by canon.
This is written in a non-linear but not entirely random fashion. In other words, the scenes alternate between Nyna's past and her present.
Part One: Failed Queen
She turned her head to cry out, and as her cheek brushed against the taut canvas she felt the wetness of her own saliva. There was no strength in her voice and so the cry came out as a tremulous moan. She heard the quick footsteps of her servant and wondered yet again that Timur could be so sure-footed on this storm-tossed ship.
"Mistress Niena, do you need the basin?"
"No," she whispered, and closed her eyes. They said that if one kept one's eyes focused on a point, the sickness would lessen, but they were wrong. The sickness gripped her whether she opened her eyes or closed them, whether Timur walked her along the deck in the salt air or she lay, limp as a corpse, upon this rude bed.
"Do you want me to sing, Mistress Niena?"
"No, Timur. You sing beautifully, but my head aches so...." She sounded like a drunk, each word slurring into the next. "How many days has it been, Timur?"
"Thirty-two," the boy said. Thirty-two days, when the journey was supposed to be only a month.
"Are we within sight of land?" She dreaded the answer.
"No, mistress. The captain has not even seen shore birds yet."
She had the impulse to stand, then, to totter above-decks and stare at the unyielding horizon with her own eyes, but as she raised her head another fit of nausea crashed over her, like the very waves that pummeled the Swiftsure. Nyna tried to mouth a prayer for relief and mercy, but what spilled from her mouth was a bubble of green bile-- thin and watery, for there was no food left in her stomach. Once Timur had cleaned her up, she smiled at him rather than try to thank him with words and bring on another episode.
Timur promised the healer would come soon, but one of the cabin boys had taken a fall and needed his shoulder set, and....
And Mistress Niena and her sea-sickness had taken up an inordinate amount of the good healer's time. Mistress Niena was enough of a burden to the crew of the Swiftsure that they all rather wished she'd yield up her miserable soul and spare them any more concern. Timur offered a charmingly lopsided smile and shrugged in the expressive way of his people.
"If the gods are willing, the seas will calm soon," he concluded.
The gods were not willing. Nyna lay on her aching stomach with her face dangled over the side of her cot. She almost prayed for death, if death would end this terrible sickness, but she knew that if she died here, in the ocean between the land of her birth and the western island, she would pass out of life with nothing to her credit. They would wrap her in a winding-sheet and lower her from the ship without ceremony; she would slip into the water and so be washed from the pages of history-- no name, no marker, no legacy.
If she died now, she would be failing him one more time, one last inexcusable time. She would be failing them all.
-X-
Nyna's world was fragmented, as the reflection of a shattered mirror. Eyes in faces, sounds that issued from mouths, the arc of a weapon and the damage it caused-- all these registered as separate experiences. Only one thing, one person, served as her tether in the confusion of the Dragon's Altar, and she lost him. Nyna ran through the shadows and the bursts of light, seeking her savior. She kept running long after most of the shapes around her had fallen still.
"Nyna!" The voice resonated in her memory, the hand on her arm restrained her gently, but when she looked up at the young man she saw a tumble of dark hair, and her heart sank.
"Careful, Nyna. This place is filled with many unknown dangers."
"Camus is not dead, Marth. I saw him. Where has he...."
But he held up a finger to silence her. Nyna looked at his hand, at the dark blood that ran between his fingers and soaked the backs of his gloves, and was quiet.
"The man you saw is called Sirius. He came across the seas, from the west."
"No." The world around her now was changing; the sharp and disconnected images melded together, as though she peered through a smeared glass. The frantic energy inside her began to drain away, and she realized she needed to sleep. She did not know, truly, when she had last slept at all.
"Empress Nyna." He spoke cautiously, as though he did not fully expect her to understand. "Someone who loved you greatly asked me to take care of you."
"I have to find Camus, Marth. I know it was Camus."
"Please, Nyna. It's time to go home."
His voice seemed to come from high above her, and she wondered if he had always been that tall. He had changed, she thought. Everything had changed.
"I don't know where that is," she said, staring over his shoulder, searching for a glimpse of waving yellow hair, the flash of a silver mask.
Marth's hands closed around hers, and she saw her pale fingers between his stained ones. Nyna bowed her head and allowed him to lead her away.
-X-
The forty-first day of their voyage found the Swiftsure moored in heavy swells off the coast of the western land. Some hilltop bandit ruled that coast, the captain said, and he was taking his sweet pleasure in granting them permission to come ashore.
She lay on her cot, attended now not by Timur but by the healer, the captain's elder sister. Nyna watched with indifference as Madam Hilde wrapped a bundle of blood-soaked rags. Hilde dropped the bundle into a bucket where it landed with a dull heavy sound; Nyna wondered if they would burn the rags or simply pitch them over the side, into the turbulent sea.
"The bleeding is less today, but should it continue at this strength tomorrow, you are in a great deal of trouble."
Nyna blinked; she was unused to this degree of honesty in a healer. A queen, a princess, would never hear that she was incurably ill, that she'd sustained a mortal wound or been deprived forever of her senses. She was always to be granted hope, would be given reassurance until the last breath escaped her. The healers understood that they must lie, and the princesses generally understood it to be a lie, and so the disagreeable fiction continued through the centuries.
"Are you fleeing a bad marriage, lady?" Hilde must have read dismay in Nyna's face, for she added, "You had the ghost of a ring around your finger when you joined us."
Nyna examined both of her hands-- poor shrunken things they seemed now, with little of the beauty they'd possessed in her girlhood. If the trace of her wedding ring still lay upon her hand, she could not see it.
"Yes," she said, and let her hands fall back at her sides.
"'Tis a pity. So many of our good men have died, and only the dregs remain."
It was true, and it was not, and Nyna didn't particularly care. Her head was already spinning from loss of blood and the ship's constant motion, but Hilde gave her wine with something bitter in it that made her head spin still more, until she tumbled into a dreamless darkness.
-X-
Marth kept her close to his side thereafter. Nyna saw the pale young woman who gazed after them like a forlorn shade and asked why Marth did not instead spend his time with his betrothed, who had chanced so much and followed him so faithfully.
"I promised to take care of you," was all he would say.
On Nyna's return to her capital, she was placed upon a white horse and taken through the streets to prove to the citizens that she was alive and sound. As Nyna followed Marth through the shattered city, she felt it less of a victory parade than an echo of the processions of centuries past, when the queens of conquered barbarian tribes would displayed in public as spoils of war. She tried to superimpose the Pales of her youth-- the Holy City, the city eternal, seat of law and culture for six unbroken centuries-- over the scenes around her, but could not. The layout of the avenues was the same, even the most damaged of the buildings was recognizable for what it had been, but something of the spirit of Pales was gone, perhaps irretrievably so. Nyna saw it in the men and women who had been her people. Some cheered for her, some for him, but many-- so many-- of the upturned faces looked on in a sullen, wary silence.
She brought her horse alongside his and spoke to him without moving her lips.
"Why is there so little love for you?"
He continued to look ahead, continued to raise a hand to the crowd as he responded.
"They believe I started this war."
"Why would anyone do such a thing?"
"Lust of land, desire for power. The unholy joy of spilling men's blood, perhaps." He had been so relentlessly solemn of late that the tinge of familiar sarcasm was unexpectedly touching, and she would have smiled if not for his next words. "Some might say, for you."
"That's madness." It was all she could say, even as the relentless paces of his horse left her behind.
"Many will assume it, given the outcome." He did not glance at her even once as he spoke. "Your husband is dead. I killed him. I have your city and I have you. What else does any man need?"
This time, she was not even tempted to smile at his sarcasm.
-X-
After so long below decks, the light briefly blinded her. Nyna pulled her shawl down over her eyes and peered through its weave at the coast of Valencia. The colors were so rich she felt that she could taste them; she drew in long breaths of air enriched by salt and earth and unfamiliar flowers. The sky was deep and cloudless blue, the waters a bright-blue green etched with patterns of light. The coastline was jutting red rocks and yellow sand, so different from the muted grays and browns of Archanean granite. Clusters of brightly feathered birds-- green and gold and scarlet-- hung upside down from the trees like chattering fruit.
"Mistress Niena, the captain has a boat ready for us."
"Tell him I will be a moment, Timur." She closed her eyes and allowed the patterns of sunlight to play over her face. The sun was merciless here, she thought; already perspiration trickled down from beneath her shawl. "I have not enjoyed myself much of late, and I wish to do so a few moments longer."
"It is good to see you smile again, lady," he said, with a charming lack of guile. "It has been too long."
"I think I will smile often here," she said. "This world is new."
-X-
Nyna ruled over the lands of the dead, for Millennium Court was a catacomb, a darkened maze of ghosts. It was not the place where she had been her father's daughter, not the place where she had been the people's princess, their sole hope for the future. It was not even the place where she had been first Hardin's wife and then his prisoner. She was a specter holding court with memories, queen of twittering shades. The grandeur of "empress" was buried with Hardin; she was Queen Nyna, the true daughter of Archanea. And yet, she was not.
As Nyna stood at the bier of the man who had been her teacher, confessor, and confidant, she did not cry. As she stood at the tomb of the man who had briefly shared her throne, she felt no sorrow, only a hollow ache that longed to be filled by something. Nyna tried to fill it any way she could-- she took off her slippers and raced barefoot through the corridors, in a way she never had, not even as a child. She drank one night until she was sick, just to see what would happen. She sprawled out in the courtyard, weaving for herself a crown of flowers. It was here that Marth found her, at an hour when she should have been in council.
"It is said that Queen Nyna has changed, that she may not be the same woman who was taken to the Dragon's Altar by the rogue bishops." His voice carried no shading of scorn or blame; his eyes, fringed by those arresting dark lashes that had briefly caught her fancy, gave nothing away. "It is whispered that the queen may be mad."
"I am not mad, Marth." She sat up, her crown of poppy-blossoms drooping into one eye. Nyna looked down at the spatters of poppy sap on her gown and her arms; they resembled streaks of drying blood. As she stood, she realized how ridiculous her position was. "I should leave."
"Yes, I think you probably ought to."
He regarded her with the gaze of one who knew too much about her-- he seemed to look through her now, past the soiled gown and tangled hair, rather than at her. She wondered what he truly saw there.
"You must hate me."
"I don't." The denial sounded to her more harsh than an affirmation could have been. He tilted his head, and for a moment he looked as young as he'd been when first they'd met. "I don't know if I could have loved you."
Nyna touched a fingertip to her tongue; the taste of the poppies was bitter, as bitter as poison. She wondered how much she would have to drink to forget herself completely.
"He loved you, you realize."
She looked at him without comprehension for a moment.
"Sirius?"
He recoiled from her. His eyes, she thought, seemed as dark as the ocean.
"Your late husband, Your Majesty," he replied. "Loved you beyond all reason, apparently."
She wondered what it would take now to genuinely anger him. She could goad him to the edge, but he never crossed it. She closed her sticky hands around his wrist.
"I am sorry." The words were true yet wholly inadequate. "I will go away and never trouble you again. Once you are free of me, you can be with your Caeda and be happy."
He stepped back, wrenching out of her grasp.
"For the love of all the saints, Nyna, do you truly not understand?"
"I understand that the gods have damned me and exalted you, for no reason other than some accident of our births. I understand that I'm more happy in my damnation than I ever was as the hope of our people."
"Is that all you've learned?"
"I've learned Camus is alive."
He bowed his head, the very same way the poppies bowed before the winds and the rain.
"He is not free, Nyna. He is not the Camus you remember... any more than you are the Nyna I remember."
"I must leave," she repeated. The feel of the warm summer air rushing around her was really quite pleasant. She almost felt at though she might spread her arms in place of wings and fly across the seas.
"I knew you would," he whispered. "It doesn't make it any easier for me."
"Did you ever truly need me?" She asked because she was genuinely curious, because she did, in a sense, want to know whatever it was he found necessary when he had lost most things and denied himself the rest.
"Perhaps I needed something to believe in, something beyond myself. I do know that I believed in Hardin... and I believed in you."
"I am sorry," she repeated. "But you don't need us now. I don't know that you need anyone."
They stood only steps apart, but there was a barrier between them, invisible but altogether real. She held out her coronet of poppies for him to take, and he turned his back on her.
-X-
She stumbled upon leaving the small boat that carried them to shore; Nyna heard both Timur and one of the sailors shout as she toppled forward. But Nyna had, in her wanderings, learned now to fall without injuring herself. She righted herself, clutching part of Valencia in both her hands.
"Are you hurt, mistress?"
"No, Timur, I am fine." The golden sand streamed down her wrists and into her sleeves. It was hot, and she imagined rivulets of fire in her hands. She wondered briefly if she could still perform magic in this land. It had been so long since she had heard the call of thunder. "The gods have taken everything else from me, but now they give me this."
She held out the fistfuls of sand to Timur, and he watched her with large eyes, uncertain if this was some joke he might share with his mistress. After a moment, the corners of his mouth quirked up.
"We are home, Timur."
To Be Continued....
Author's Notes: Queen Nyna abdicates the throne after the "War of Heroes," aka Book Two of FE3. Given that one massive war was fought in part to restore her to the throne, and another war was caused by her husband Hardin after their marriage fell apart, Nyna's decision to skip town and go chasing after her lost love General Camus (which is implied but not stated directly) has always troubled me. For those of you wondering what the heck is going on, a recap of canon: after the War of Darkness (covered in FE11), Nyna was given the choice to marry either Prince Marth of Altea or Lord Hardin of Aurelis. She went for Hardin because Marth already had a girlfriend. This turned out to be a bad move, because Hardin was passionately in love with Nyna and she did NOT feel the same about him. Hardin snapped and decided to take all his frustrations out on Marth, which ended up in a continent-consuming war and Hardin's own death. As for General Camus... it turns out he wasn't quite as dead as everyone believed. In fact, he'd turned into quite the International Man of Mystery by this stage in history....