But With Cause

by Zhan Shi

Follow two young Ishbalan siblings on a life-scaring and embittering journey to survive the Ishbal War, and the to-be quest of fufilling a promise-- a promise of reaping revenge on the State Military and State Alchemists.

Disclaimer: How many times does one have to say this? I do not own Fullmetal Alchemist, the non-made up characters to be mentioned in further reading, the idea of the Ishbal War, nor do I claim to own any of the aforementioned articles. Thank you.

I was born a year after the Ishbal War had started, in 1902, where our country of Ishbal had begun to rebel against Amestris. We wanted to stay away from their influences of alchemy, to just worship Ishbala in peace, but the State Military would not have it so. It is widely known that during an inspection of our village, a military officer shot and killed a child, allegedly a mistake, but we believed it to be an intended provocation and an excuse to get the people riled up and high strung. Riots and outbreaks started, and soon it escalated into a civil war. It was true, during most of the seven years of the rebellion many lives were lost, and many more were injured, on both the Ishbalan side and State Military.

The nights, each long, fear instilled night, would be stained and kindled red and lit with orange like an ominous new dawn, with constant bombings and heavy artillery used by the military, against our generation-old rifles, handguns, pistols, and pitchforks. It seemed we had no chance of survival for even a week, but somehow a higher power wanted us to live until every single person died defending what they believed in. Ishbala wanted us to live for seven years, defending our beliefs in him, the creator who gave us everything we were all thankful for: we were unlike those ungrateful sinners, who called themselves alchemists, changing that which is given to them by God and using the altered artifacts for evil.

Constantly, I remember, even when I was three or four years old, that we, being my two sisters, brother, myself, mother and father, were constantly going from hideout to hideout; kindly neighbors would take us all in for a fortnight, then after that place was infiltrated by military forces, we were obliged to move again.

Death first wracked my family when I was four. A bomb exploded while we were camped out at a friend's, in the room that one of my sisters, Kaia, as well as my father's friend, his wife, and daughter, were sleeping in, and that was the first human loss of my family. My father's friend and his family perished as well in the explosion. It was also the first death I had experienced, as in the death of someone close to me: I was confused by it—to the point where I truly understood the meaning of love. I thought I had hated my sisters and brother because I was always the outcast, the oddball of the family, and was looked down upon, and was teased by my siblings as well. But Kaia's death told me that no matter how much my outside feelings raged, I found I loved her as if she'd been close to me all the time.

The death of my father occurred when I was four and a half, and our new home, one abandoned from lack of resources and such, was stormed by militants, their faces as black shadows in my minds but their guns and rifles burned bright scars in my memory. My father had seen them coming, and hurried us out the back door, and tried to hold the invading soldiers at bay. Yet they shot down the door, and in the process shot and killed him. The last I saw of my father, the soldiers were moving his corpse out with the rest of the dead bodies they had found in the area to a pile in the middle of the road.

The stench of human carcasses being piled like debris was overwhelming, and made my younger brother sick, where he would regurgitate whatever sparse food we had been able to salvage, and I pitied Ziekel. He was one year my junior, and even so, I thought I had greatly disliked him, but since the loss of our eldest sister and father, we three remaining had grown rather close, as did our mother, but we could see her health was failing. Yet she tried to hide it, and to keep our spirits up. She was a strong woman, both in body and heart, and that is why I think father loved her. That is also why I think Ishbala spared her as long as he did, but the time finally came when he needed her for his great army of dearly departed.

Every night there was the terror of being caught in an explosion, there was fear of falling prey to a stray bullet. There was the horror of screams of innocent women and children outside as they were butchered without mercy, and there were the cries of pain from men who were dying, who had tried to defend their families to the last. For six long years my siblings and I had to deal with this, or at least, my brother and I did. The death of our second eldest sister, Akima, as well as our mother, came swiftly, but gruesomely.

When I was six, our fading hope was with us as we hunkered down in a forsaken bomb shelter, in an area where State Military soldiers had long moved away from, and our mother held us three tightly. Akima, Ziekel, and I were always looking up towards the roof of the shelter, waiting for it to collapse, for the sound of grenade shells and empty cartridges were always raining down upon the ground above, where astray explosives and used bullet casings were cast. Now, looking back, it seemed a foolish idea to stay in a crumbling bomb shelter, but it was the best idea we had, as it was out of the way of live, stray bullets and misfired missiles.

A particularly loud crack sounded from above our heads, and that was when Ziekel's and my sister lost it. Akima stood, screaming, her hands covering her ears, her face etched with indescribable fear. Tears stained her features and made them red, and she attempted to run away, but to where? She shocked our mother and us, and mother rose and hurried after our sister to retrieve her, but that proved fatal. That last ear deafening crack had shaken the walls of the shelter, and it now began to cave in—far too quickly than I or Ziekel could have imagined. We both saw and watched in horror as the whole slab of solid rock and cement above Mother and Akima's heads fall on top of them, and judging from the generous amount of soil and water that came down with it, both of us knew they had died instantly. Our fears and doubts were confirmed as we stood there, dumbfounded and in utter shock, with rain forcing our eyes to blink. We saw, even in the smoke-hazed moonlight, two trails of blood seep towards us from under the mass of concrete, blending in and running side by side with the rain that puddled along. To me, that gave a whole new meaning to 'blood is thicker than water'. It certainly is; it was the last of our hope, our will to live, and it was becoming surrounded and sinking with the water of hatred, of anger, of grief and remorse. We knew the rest of our family was gone, taken from us by an unjust and hopeless war. Ziekel fell to his knees, and without knowing it, I placed my hand on the top of his head, and felt his dark brown, short hair, and I could feel him trembling beneath my hand, grieving for our ultimate losses. I myself felt I had nothing left to live for, as tears forced themselves from my eyes and blurred my vision. I couldn't let them fall, though. There was a burning inside of me, as I recounted those past four years of my life I could remember, and what I and my siblings had grown up in: a carcass of a country still enveloped and surrounded by predators of war.

After what seemed like a lifetime, which was really just a couple of hours, a hand reached down from above; at first I thought it was Ishbala coming to save Ziekel and I, to reunite us with our family, to bring us home and to where we really belong. But it was not him, but another Ishbalan, a middle aged man; I could tell by his full head of dark hair he wasn't old. That much was obvious to me. I heard him speak.

He said, "Hey! There's a little girl and boy down here! Help me get them out of here!"

Then three more of our people I did not recognize thrust their heads over the gaping hole above our heads, and Ziekel and I could clearly see concern in their eyes, even from at least ten feet up. They lowered rope down to us, and because the sides of the holes weren't stable enough, told me and my brother to hold on very tightly to the loops they had made in the rope. We did, and the men hauled us up and out of the hole. The same Ishbalan who had first discovered us checked us over, and said that we had only suffered minor injuries, and that I had many scratches on my forearms. He bandaged my arms and my brother's head, who had gotten hit by a piece of falling debris. I remember the kindness in his voice, and realized that it was a shame to have people like him be killed for no reason. In fact, it was happening every day, every week. I also remember him asking many questions, and telling Ziekel and I his name. His name was Sayid. Sayid asked me my and my brother's name and age.

"Katriel. I'm six," I answered him.

"I'm Ziekel and I'm five," my brother answered, hold up that many fingers. He asked if we had a last name, so that he and his friends might be able to find our parents.

"Mahar," I said, but Ziekel told him they were both dead.

"How do you know that?" He asked us softly.

"We saw them die," I replied. Sayid said he was sorry to hear that, and that he would let his friends take care of us for the time being. They were nice, and kind, and guided us to their own, more established encampment. By established, I mean better-built, defended by automatic rifles taken from dead soldiers' bodies that littered the ground, and armored with steel plates salvaged from wreckage.

Ziekel and I managed to stay out of their way as they looked for more survivors, more refugees to take to a secret refugee camp—the Ishbalan survivor Mecca. The State Military didn't know about this camp, didn't bother to look for one; they thought that all survivors and those who still lived unscathed were fighting to the end, staying stubbornly in the city to aimlessly fend off the soldiers.

And even our rekindled hope was snuffed out as Sayid and his friends were discovered. They hid us among their camp, but tore it down around us, making it look like there was nothing there, and that my brother and I were to stay there, unmoving, until everything was over. I saw in Sayid's eyes a look of a triumphant man, one who is triumphant but death has coming knocking on his door, ready to take him to God. And so, as Ziekel and I huddled together, staring out of the small gaps between wreckage, we both watched the on-site execution of Sayid and of those who had helped save other Ishbalan lives. I couldn't close my eyes when the gunshots rung in my ears, when the small explosions from the assault rifles flashed and momentarily blinded me, but I did flinch when the gunshots were fired, an beside me I felt my brother do the same. I couldn't look away when I saw the backs of the men who had saved us be ripped open by countless bullets, piercing them through and through, when I saw the blood fly from their backs and race down their shirts, as I saw them fall, helpless, dying, dead, to the ground in tattered heaps. Only when Sayid raised his head and part of his upper torso to look up to Ishbala and was shot again, dead, was when I was snapped back to reality, and when I finally tore my eyes from the gruesome and sad sight. I wanted so badly to cry out, scream, to punch anything I could, to kill those who murdered those who had saved us. But that would not happen. What would a six year old and a five year old do against eleven armed State Military soldiers? Nothing. My brother and I could not do a damn thing, and we felt so helpless, so alone, so small in a world filled with cruelty and injustice towards those who thought differently from others.

It was dawn before Ziekel and I decided to move from our small but rather effective hiding spot, and we went to the spot where Sayid's body and his friends' bodies would be, but there was nothing. The only think to indicate they had been there was the ground. It was a pure crimson color, a sickening color, a color I never wanted to see in my life again. But unfortunately that could never be avoided. The ground was permanently stained, whether or not the naked eye could see it or not, but that color was etched into my memory, as well as my brother's, and I hated that red color ever since.

I don't remember how in the next week we managed to survive, but we did, and from avoiding stray bullets and explosions to evading mines and soldiers, that week was the worst anyone could possibly have. Ziekel and I were living off of stale bread, rusty water, food taken from soldiers—which was very hard—and anything we could make edible without killing ourselves. But the end of the week brought on the real chaos: that was when the State Military General decided to bring in Alchemists. The general was the known as the Blood Iron Alchemist, and created a branch of the military dealing with only Alchemists.

There weren't many Alchemists to actually use during the war, but they created chimeras, larger explosions and havoc that not even the bombs could imitate, and killed the remaining Ishbal population using horrific methods. I remember a face, a man in the blue military suit, in black hair, and he wore a glove with a red circle on it. He raised his hand, and I saw a pretty ring, a silver band with a small red sphere. I remember seeing all the alchemists we encountered with that same type of ring. But the man snapped his fingers, and the building behind us burst to flames, exploding with the mere force of the fire that now threatened to topple the ruins of a three story building. Ziekel and I took cover behind a cement wall, and there we stayed, unnoticed, and gratefully unharmed—for now.

When we looked up, there was a different person there, standing ominously above us, a maniacal look on his features. His grin was evil and pitiless, his eyes were full of ill intent and malevolence. They were scary eyes—they were icy blue and very shallow, and as cold as ice. His hand was outstretched towards us, and on his pale palm was a red, six pointed star inside of a triangle inside of a circle and a last, slightly bigger circle around that. We didn't know what it was, but dread suddenly filled my brother and I. I also noticed he had the same sort of ring, and this time it glinted dangerously and threateningly in the waning daylight.

"Hello… children," He said in a mockingly sweet voice. The voice grated against my ears, but I could do nothing to block him out, as all my attention was on his palm, with the red array. Again I could feel Ziekel trembling beside me, and I could also feel myself doing much the same. I also suppose that our looks of immaculate fear and terror on our tear and bloodstained faces egged the evil man on, for his grin widened. Then I saw the red circle slowly begin to glow in a purple light, and I waited for death to come. My brother and I cringed, waiting for the pain to take us away in death.

But it did not come. As we looked up, another Ishbalan, tall, who also had white hair on the top of his head, stood between us and the Alchemist, arms locked in a strength competition. That was before the alchemist began screaming in pain. His hand with the circles looked like it turned to candle wax; it was disfigured, melted, and some of it even dripped from his wrist like hot candle wax. The white and brown haired Ishbalan turned back to look at my brother and I, and seemed shocked at our presence. I saw he had a deep cut on his face, but it was more on his forehead, and his cut looked like an 'X', where the lower half of the 'x' traveled straight through his eyes, blood trickling down his face. He looked away, before returning his attentions to harming the attacking alchemist. The evil man raised his other hand, with the same red circles on it, and aimed is palm at my brother and I. He grinned, though it was pained from his own un-wellbeing, and again I saw the purple light brighten the outline of the circle array. Some odd shape formed before his palm, in the same purple light, but his hand was knocked away by the scarred man's arm, which held tattoos I had never seen before.

I don't remember what happened during that time, but I do know that a strange feeling came over me, then wave after wave of pain flooded my mind and body, from my scalp to my toes, and there was darkness. I saw my brother in the darkness, but he was being pulled away from me, toward a narrow strip of light that blinded me as I tried to look at him. But before he was swallowed up completely the purple light engulfed him and what was left of him was an illuminated silhouette that seemed to change shape before my eyes, and before the light took him.

My brother vanished, and I was left alone to fear that blinding light: there was only darkness all around me, and there was darkness beyond that light. But I was too afraid to go to it. It didn't feel right, I felt scared to go to the light. So I stayed where I was. Then I felt myself being pulled towards the vertical beam of light, and I became even more frightened. It was drawing closer and closer… until I could feel its heat, like heat from the sun.

I awoke with a start, to find myself in a small tent, though I was on a small cot. My vision was still blurred, but I could see enough to decide that I had been taken prisoner in a medical tent of State Military soldiers. That, in fact, was not true, but I was ready to make a run for it. I found it had long turned to the next day, and discovered that it was already afternoon.

An old man, looking to be in his mid forties, entered the tent, and looked surprised that I was awake. He gave me a weak smile, and that confused me profoundly. I moved to get out of the cot and to stand, but he quickly came to me, holding me down, forcing me gently back into the cot.

"A little girl like you shouldn't be out here. You don't even deserve to be out here," He said to me, shaking his head. He took my left hand, which I then found was bandaged. "You have an odd little cut there, missy. But don't worry. I'm sure it's nothing to worry about," He said. His eyes were kind, and around them were many lines and wrinkles. There were dark circles around his eyes as if he had not slept in days, and he had a very tired look to him. I saw on his finger the same ring, the ring I now associated with fear.

I quickly backed away from him, moving as far as I could away from him without falling off of the cot, my red eyes fixed on the ring, and he noticed my apprehension. A sad look crossed his creased features, and he shook his head; then he hid his hand bearing the ring behind his back. I looked up at him, and he smiled again, as if trying to reassure me without words that he would not use it against me. He then pointed to a large, storm grey crow who was sitting quietly on a stack of books in the tent.

"It seems to know you," The man said, an amused light in his eyes. "So I let it stay."

I knew, somehow, that it was Ziekel—no one else would come for me like that, and that perhaps this crow was a reincarnation of my brother—that God had sent his soul back down to earth and put it in a pretty raven's body. A faint smile curved my mouth for the first time in my short life but long years, and it felt weird.

"My name is Doctor Marco," the old man said, turning my attention back to him. "I know this might be strange, my helping you, but I'm a doctor, and I have to help those who are in need. I can easily see you're from Ishbal, but don't worry. I'm not going to hurt your or your bird, and I'm not going to let any one else hurt you, as long as you are here with me. I believe that your parents are dead, no?" He said, and I nodded. "So they are dead?"

I confirmed it with another nod.

"What would you say about going to a foster family? I can send you with some of my friends back to Amestris; I'm sure they can find you a kind and loving family willing to take in a sweet little girl and her bird."

I shook my head.

"Well, I don't really have any other options for you, if you want to live, but if you want to go back out there, you'll be taking a really high risk, and you may just get killed," he told me. I thought about it for about five seconds.

"I want to go back. I want to look for my family," I said, even though I had just said my parents were dead. But he didn't know my siblings were dead as well, except for Ziekel.

"Okay, but don't let me catch you dead, you hear?" He said, then helped me off of the cot.

I took one last look at his ring before exiting the medical tent, and the storm grey crow followed me. He perched on my shoulder.

"You're Ziekel, aren't you?" I asked him. The raven nodded as in a human gesture, and this time I frowned. "Does it hurt?" I meant if it did being a bird. He shook his head no. "How do I change you back? Back to human?" I asked him, and he flexed his wings so that it made a human gesture of shrugging.

After I and Ziekel, now a raven, had left the medical tent of Doctor Marco, we found ourselves wandering through the western outer ring of the Ishbal city in which we once lived. We saw only rubble, bullet cartridges, empty magazine clips from machine guns and dismembered limbs and body parts strewn as the debris that littered the village throughout. Carcasses of animals and humans alike obscured the rest of the war-torn buildings, and everywhere there were the smoldering ashes of a detonated bomb and the work of an alchemist—that is to say, the destruction an alchemist or two had left behind.

Among the piles of human corpses, stacked on top of one another as if firewood, there were faces of neighbors I vaguely remembered, faces of friends whom I had known since birth. All of their faces were wide eyed, full of shock, and wrought in pain. The dried blood and the insects that swarm to rotting things made the sight even worse. I tried to look away, but I couldn't tear my eyes from it. There were just… naked and half-clothed bodies…mountains and hills of carnage… multiple, sharp pieces of glass and stakes of splintered wood protruded from almost every visible human being in any possible way. Some of the unintended projectiles, as the glass and wood, stuck out of eyes, necks, ribcages, arms, legs, abdomens, stomachs, skulls, and all of them were covered in blood and dirt, most of the bodies maimed severely, or decapitated all in all. There were several of these piles, and I noticed another thing: there was evidence of piles of nearly burnt corpses having been in a certain spot, but weren't there anymore. It was too plain that even I noticed it, and so did Ziekel, as young as he was, and I, for that matter. What I did fail to notice were the considerable amount of soldiers' bodies that lay about, but they did not attract my attention as those of Ishbal did; the soldiers were lain out and looked as though they had been attempted in being given a 'proper' burial at war.

My fear of wanting to know where the bodies had gone and what the soldiers might have done with them now evolved to anger and a seething rage, seeing as how carelessly the slain people of Ishbal were handled and disposed of, in comparison to their own fallen comrades. Even so my rage subsided back to fear, as I saw a gruesome, four-legged creature emerge from the smoke that wafted from a charred building.

It looked like a cross between a lion and…something else. Later in my life I found it was a chimera, an animal created using alchemy from two different beings with different genetic make ups. It stared at Ziekel and I as it advanced. The lion's head had what appeared, to my horror, human eyes and a human mouth. Its body was that of a lion, as well as the tail, but the legs were humanoid—except for the dinner plate sized paws. Those paws were lethally armed with cruelly curved talons for nails, long, thin, and menacing.

As the chimera slowly but steadily drew closer and closer, I could begin to make out its eyes, its human features from which it had been derived. They eyes looked so familiar… so recognizable… but I didn't know what this meant. My fears were brought roughly back to me when the storm grey raven perched on my shoulder squawked, and flapped his wings uselessly, as my brother was still getting used to being a member of the strigiforme family.

The creature before us some yards away showed no signs of hostility nor aggression, but it still sent chills down our spines, and I slowly backed away, taking one careful step after another, making sure not to trip on anything. But my movement was restricted, as the lion chimera came closer faster than I could keep a distance between the three of us, and I was stopped short by a wall of corpses piled on top of one another. After that my legs wouldn't move, they wouldn't carry me any further, let alone barely support my weight at that moment. At what seemed an eternity the chimera was six feet away from me; that hardly enough distance for me to get myself and Ziekel out of harm's way, should the creature decide to attack. But it was also then when I realized what had happened to the pile of corpses I had seen to not exist anymore: Alchemists had transmuted the predatory feline and the humans together, and because no human soul existed to help the large cat think, it was only a predator, merely mutated into something more horrific. And now the familiarity of the pair of human eyes now broke upon me as well. They were my father's eyes. As this came to realization, the memory of my father's corpse being taken from the building, in which we had lived for a short while, two years ago, flashed in my mind.

A barely audible growl that came from the chimera brought me back to the present once again, and I pressed myself into the bodies, however much it pained me emotionally to do so. But I found that the growl had not come from the creature's mouth, but from its stomach. With a sick dread I knew that it intended to eat me, the creature that had been infused with my father as well neighbors and friends, I assumed. The lion stared at me, and I stared back, my eyes wide, and I could feel fear gripping me once again. For as long as that feeling of dread had consumed me for my entire life, it felt always like something new to experience.

As the human eyes blinked, the chimera's lion and human features suddenly turned to extreme hostility, and I saw, in what seemed like slow motion, its hind muscles flex as it launched itself for the kill: my brother and I. Instinctively I threw my hands and arms up to protect me and Ziekel, who was cowering, as a bird could, on my shoulder, and again I waited for the fangs beyond those human lips and mouth to sink into my flesh, to crack my bones with a snap of its jaws.

I felt the chimera's face hit my left hand, and I felt its jaws trying to close around it. But something prevented that from happening, and I opened my eyes and looked to see what I had not purposely done. There was a light that burned through my bandages, a bright, red-orange light, and it felt as if a thousand candles were trying to melt my hand into wax, as I had seen the white-haired Ishbalan do to the alchemist. I wanted to pull my hand away, because I thought the creature was doing causing my burn, but I could not do that. I thought my hand was melting to wax, but as I opened an eye wet and squinted from tears of pain, my fingers were fine, as was the rest of my hand. But it did not feel fine. Not by a long shot.

Now the chimera's own roars of pain alerted me and distracted me for about a second, before the anguish in my palm and the side opposite my palm intensified. That amount of agony concentrated on a single area is indescribable. There are no words to let one picture or imagine that sort of suffering, unless they have been afflicted with it themselves. Nor were there any words for the shock and terror of what happened next.

The mutated lion's skin rippled, as if something were happening to its insides and muscles, and then it exploded. The skin of the chimera was burst open by its muscles and what guts it had, as if a cannon had been fired inside the creature, and now it was lain open like a skinned rabbit. I paid it no attention, even as the blood splattered against Ziekel and I, and spattered onto the ground in all directions, for I had now undone the bloody bandages on my left hand to see what had happened.

What Doctor Marco had said was true: the laceration was deep, blood streamed from the severely broken skin, and where the flesh was exposed was blackened, as if burned. A light seemed to die from beneath my skin, for it shone out of the open and bleeding cuts, tracing the laceration's outline of a transmutation array.

My eyes widened when I saw what the array was: a three sided figure in the shape of a three-pointed razor blade, a roughly shaped omega symbol, and what looked to be symmetric patterns for 'butterfly wings' on either side of the array. This took up almost the whole surface area of the back of my hand, from my knuckles to where my wrist started.

I felt Ziekel tap his beak to my face, and I took flight, fleeing from the now dead chimera, with my younger brother flapping his wings to keep stabilized as I clumsily traveled over more dead, strewn bodies, debris, piles of rubble, and under fallen crossbeams where buildings once stood.

For one of my age, I had gone far, even though I hadn't been running at full speed. I was more tired than I could have ever imagined myself to ever become, and I found myself in the city outskirts, where the desert lay beyond, and just out of reach. I had gone three hundred yards, a great feat for me, and I slumped down against a large stone slab of concrete, where a building once stood firm. I was fatigued, and it clouded my vision and fogged my senses, to the point where I did not care what happened then, and I let myself be taken by sleep. The last I felt was Ziekel leaving my shoulder, and I watched him walk upon the ground, shifting his wings, spreading them, then folding them back up again. He was testing out his new body, and though he was able to fly, I knew he was slightly afraid, and I didn't blame him at all. Finally he settled himself beside me, fluffing up his feathers, but he acted like a sentry before falling asleep himself; he slept not as long as I, for with his sensitive hearing and sharp eyesight he was alerted to things I could not have known otherwise.

Alchemy. It was a sin among my people and its culture and religion. I thought about the things that had happened during my sad, short life, and my life to come, and slowly a thought grew inside of me that I could resist no longer. There was something that had triggered a deep hatred for not only State Alchemists, but a deep hate for the State Military as well. A helpless rage that needed to be quenched before it consumed me, before I went mad trying to resist it.

All of that war and bloodshed I had seen had weakened me. I succumbed to the rage and hatred, and now I've made my purpose on this earth to avenge all of the families and friends like mine killed meaninglessly and ruthlessly during the Ishbal War and Ishbal Massacre, and it will all be accomplished by what the Alchemists had done to me and my brother. They'd see. They'd get their taste of a massacre.