We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.

I own nothing but my own ideas.

This story is partly built on the premise that the Elise in this conquest story is a mental time traveler from the birthright timeline, gobe into the Conquest one. Dying and hindsight perspective tends to put a different lense on events.

Perhaps I should have noticed that my life had become a horror story. After all, most people don't come back from the dead. Or travel through time. If that has actually happened outside of my head.

That never happened here. So many things happened differently here. Corrin stayed. The ice tribe did not rebel. Azura came home. We invaded Hoshido. But I can't erase the feeling of the sword going through my skin, blood soaking my dress, and spilling onto the floor.

Sometimes I look at my brother and I wonder if he remembers too. I dont think he would treat me the same way he always has, if he did. My big brother is no where near as scary as people think. I seem to be the only one who can see a world where Corrin sided with Hoshido. Its something I once would have thought to be impossible.

I have been called imaginative in the past.

Maybe thats just it. Maybe it was all just dreaming. Does that make it better or worse. All I know, is that things like this never happened before I came back from the dead.

I blame a lot of it on Takumi.

That's not really fair, I know, but something out there in life, seems to really have it out for him. Its not even really him, most of the time.

Whenever I see him, he's always so angry. Thats how I remember him still. And any attempt to reason with him seemed to make him more irrational.

Soon I noticed something else staring out at me from behind his eyes.

I didn't know what it was, but his ghost seemed to have left his body.

I had never seen a ghost before, but what else could it be? A pale imitation of him staring right at me. I looked back.

What else could I do? He glared. And even though it was insubstantial, I felt the heat of his anger.

One thing, I still regret.

I didn't save him.

I looked for ways of course, but I was plagued by doubts. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if he would want to be saved. I dont know if I would have asked him, had I gotten the chance.

I still thought I had a chance right up until he jumped off that cliff.

I was sad, but also relieved.

I thought it was over.

I focused on the war. I focused on the living. I tried to make friends with his sister.

The war should have been over. We had taken the castle. His brother had run his sword through himself. Father was in the throne room

That should have meant it was over. I wish that it had been over, and I could go back and apologize to Sakura.

Corrin and Azura said there was something we needed to see.

I wished I could unsee it.

I wish I could say I knew my father. Not as the same man Xander once knew. Not as the man my mother was devoted to.

I learned that my father was a lie. The man I knew as father was nothing more than a monster. Dripping from the white throne, he turned, and ordered us dead.

Reeling from this revelation, we were then forced to fight for our lives.

I wish I could say it was over, after that.

I really do.

There are many things that we thought we would do after that.

Scream. Cry. Sit down and crash from exhaustion. It wasnt over yet, unfortunately.

Still, no one was expecting Takumi.

He walked wrong.

That was the first thing I noticed.

He walked wrong, and his skin was grey, and his eyes were red. He was shaking, not just his hands, but a full body shaking, that seemed to rattle his bones. He spoke in a voice not his own, about betrayal, a subject he had often shouted about.

The words could barely get out of his throat.

And his bow, was no longer Fujin Yumi.

Something was tainted in it. It was dark, spouting shadows, and an energy that scared me.

He almost killed me. He almost killed all of us at one point or another, during that battle. Starting with Corrin.

To this day, I'm still not sure how Corrin survived.

Though, I have a memory, that's not a memory, of a place from long ago, where I met Corrin while dead.

But that never happened. Never will happen. I am alive. I plan to stay that way.

Eventually we killed him, or should I say, killed him again.

That can't erase the knowledge we learned.

There are monsters in this world. Not just the monsters we built, or the monsters we became.

Monsters that worn your way inside you, and kill you from within. That give you a ghost before your body has stopped.

I don't know what it is called.

I do know how to look for it now. I do know, that I have every intention of finding it and destroying it.

I'm not afraid of monsters that walk in the light or hide in the dark.

It's out there.

One day I'll find it.

This started as a fun conversation about how Elise in conquest could be a time traveler from birthright. And then I started talking about how from a different perspective, the ending of Conquest, puts the lives of the nohrian siblings as "Our father became a slime monster and somehow we never noticed. Elise never knew her father, she only knew slime Garon. And Now, Takumi has come back as a possessed Zombie to kill us all. This sounds like it could be a plot from Azura's Horror stories."

And then this happened.

Not quite what I expected to write for my first Conquest story, but I like it.