Palindrome
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Sometimes she heard the plants at night poking their way through the soil. She heard the cicadas chewing at roots under the ground and the termites swarming in the dead trees. The voice of the earth, her father called it, though it seemed that he never heard its call himself.
Her father took her once to the Darkling Woods, to visit Lady Myrrh, and the sound of the woods was so great that she clapped her hands over both ears and wanted to scream. Her father had always told her it was a quiet place, a peaceful place, but it buzzed and burbled and moaned with something old and frightening. When she complained about the sounds, Lady Myrrh looked at her with those deep red eyes, and it seemed that Lady Myrrh could hear the echoes of that terrible sound.
-x-
They called her Ada. Adah was a common enough name in Caer Pelyn, even sometimes found down in the lowlands, but her parents snipped the "h" off her name and made her just A-D-A, the same going backwards and forwards. She had one foot in the past and one in the future, ever divided. If Ada imagined herself a plant uncoiling her roots in the soil, one-half of her roots belonged in the thin ground of Caer Pelyn while the other half snaked away over the mountains into a place called Renais.
She was half and half and therefore not quite a whole of anything. She was something new and different, just as the color of her hair was something unlike her mother's (the same shade as turquoise beads from Jehanna) or her father's (the same color as the shaggy soft bark that peeled from the trunks of gum trees). Mother said that Ada's hair looked like the ocean under the sun; Ada had never seen the ocean, either on a cloudy day or a sunny one. Mother said the ocean had its own voice, deep and rich and beautiful. If Ada heard it, Mother said, she would want to chase after it forever.
Sometimes Ada thought that Mother heard the voice of the earth. She would sometimes catch her mother listening, intent on something, even when the leaves were still upon the trees and no birds chattered. Yet Mother never spoke of it. She would only stop at times, would put off kneading the bread or sharpening a blade, and just listen.
-x-
Once for her birthday, Ada received a present from her uncle, her mother's brother who lived in the lowlands and never came to visit. It was a shell, larger than Ada's hand, creamy white and pink like the clouds at sunset. It came from a place called Grado, which her uncle ruled along with faraway Renais. When Ada put it to her ear, she could hear something there, a faint ringing and rolling. Mother said it was the sound of the sea, an echo trapped within that shell. When Ada asked her father what sort of magic could put the seas into a shell like that, he only laughed.
When Ada slept with the shell next to her head, she had the strangest dreams.
-x-
Like all children of Caer Pelyn, Ada was made to learn. From Uncle Ewan, her father's pupil now grown, she learned the basics- to read script and runes, to form the characters of her own name with a quill, to know the nations of Magvel and their stories. She learned the ancient tales of Caer Pelyn, how Nada Kuya fought off foreign invaders with her dragon-fang sword, and she learned of the Demon King and the five heroes who sealed him away for eight centuries.
But when it came to the art of defense, Ada learned most from her mother. Mother taught her how to use a blade, not with great slashing cuts like the mercenaries that streamed over the mountains from Jehanna to Carcino, but with swift graceful movements that made the tip of a sword its deadliest spot. Mother tried to teach some of the other children of Caer Pelyn to fight in that style, but most of them gave up and went back to their books, or back to mimicking the two-handed blows of the sellswords.
One had to be born to her style of fighting, Mother said in the end. Ada thought it meant that only someone with blood from Renais could do it right.
It was just as well that she could fight with her mother's old sword, because Ada was no good with magic. She could hear the power of anima, she could feel it in her breast and her hands, but she could not make that power form whirls of fire or needles of ice.
Sometimes Ada wondered if this was the curse of being half-and-half, that she was always aware of the power surrounding her, yet unable to use it.
-x-
As she grew, Ada could hear the call of the mountains more clearly than before. Something slept there, she thought, slept there in the earth, rather like the great beasts that supposedly dwelt in that place called the ocean.
It did not frighten her; Ada felt reassurance that something so large and grand as this sleeping presence could feel safe in Caer Pelyn. It was the opposite of the way the Darkling Woods felt.
She once asked her father if something terrible was sleeping in the woods. His mouth became stern, and creases deepened around his eyes.
"Not anymore," he said.
-x-
Ada was twelve when she coaxed Uncle Ewan into taking her to the place in the mountains where the great presence slept. Ewan had mastery of anima magic, and Ada felt secure in his company. Even so, she brought along Mother's old sword, the one with the fancy guard around the hilt, like a gilded basket.
Uncle Ewan liked to laugh, and his eyes glinted with mischief, and sometimes he seemed no older than Ada as they prowled through the rocks. When Ada found a tunnel that seemed to go back some distance into the mountain, Ewan made an orb of fire to be their lantern and they went in, deeper and deeper still, until they emerged into a chamber that was as high and wide as most buildings in Caer Pelyn. It was filled with rubble, but around its ceiling were words formed from runes carved as large as Ada was tall, words that had no meaning to her yet caused her to feel most strange as she read them.
Holsety
Cheiney
Mila
Ewan did not know these names. When she later asked Father, he did not know them either. Only Great-Grandmother had answers for Ada- these were the names of the Great Ones, the ancients, Those Who Came Before.
Before what? asked Ada.
Before the Age of the Stones, said the wisdom of Caer Pelyn.
And for Ada, born after the Age of the Stones, these names seemed ancient as the earth itself.
-x-
The names of the Great Ones filled Ada's dreams. She stood upon the distant shores of continents no man had seen in a thousand years and walked alongside the divine. She sailed upon the winds, danced beneath trees that groaned beneath the weight of their own bright fruit, and left a brand of light upon the skies with her sword.
The battle princess led her armies of spirit and illusion through the night, and when she woke and found herself merely Ada again, she reached out for the shell next to her pillow. The ocean sang in her ear, and Ada thought she tasted something unfamiliar in the air. Salt, she thought, like the fine gray salt from Frelia that cost its weight in gold.
-x-
From then on, Ada lived not only in the space between Caer Pelyn and Renais, but in the space between the world where her parents lived and breathed and the flickering world of shades. She bent her head over her calligraphy lessons and her quill traced out characters that none could read, not even her honored Great-Grandmother.
Father took her to the Darkling Woods again to see Lady Myrrh, and this time Ada did not put her hands over her ears. She could still hear the woods- chirping, rustling, hissing, slithering, moldering in the dark- but she remembered leading armies in the night, and so the Darkling Woods no longer held terrors for her. She had looked up into the red eye of a dying god, she had plunged her sword-arm into a dragon's mouth. She'd walked through the blazing desert with wyverns circling overhead.
Lady Myrrh looked at the page of Ada's writing, and the Great Dragon with her twelve centuries of knowledge could only say, "I don't know. It is a script that is very old, older than Magvel itself."
And those dark red eyes watched Ada from the gloom of the woods. Not so different, Ada thought, from the eyes of the gods in her dreams.
-x-
Ada was fourteen when she asked Ewan to lead her again to that secret place beneath the earth where the names of the Great Ones survived upon the walls. The rubble was not as bad as Ada remembered- she was, after all, taller- and with her hands and Ewan's magic, they cleared a path through the chamber until they reached an arched passageway low in the rear wall.
"There's something bright there in the dust," said Uncle Ewan, and he nudged that something with the toe of his boot as he held his orb of flame high for them to see.
It was the hilt of a sword, Ada thought, one quite unlike the ornate hilt of Mother's rapier. This one had gems embedded in it, green and red stones that gleamed in the light of Ewan's fire. Ada ignored the scattering of bones around the buried sword and bent down to touch its hilt; as she grasped it, Ada heard a sound like the echo of the seas trapped within her white-and-pink shell. She drew the sword as easily as though it had been planted in new earth. Its blade was long and narrow, though slightly wider at the tip, and its end was as sharp as Mother's rapier. Ada could see it perfectly, for the sword cast its own light.
"I guess we don't need this anymore," said Uncle Ewan as his torch flickered out.
The light from the ancient blade would show them the way.
-x-
Ada followed the light of her sword to another chamber, one not as tall or as broad but with walls covered in mosaics- damaged and faded with the centuries, but still haunting in their beauty. Ada saw scenes she knew from her dreams, scenes from the battlefields she had walked... and she saw things she did not understand. There was one mosaic like a family portrait, father-mother-and-child. The child had the mother's face and the father's hair, blue hair almost the color of Ada's. There was another scene of a man and woman embracing in a garden. And there was an image of a sword with a jeweled hilt and glowing blade, and grand winged figures were frozen in the act of giving that sword to a young woman. Her face was familiar, for it was what Ada saw whenever she borrowed her mother's silver-backed mirror.
"Nada Kuya." Uncle Ewan's whisper echoed in the shadows. "I'd wondered..."
Nada Kuya. Ada looked down at the blade in her hand and considered what forces might turn a dragon's fang into that elegant shape.
"Were those her bones at the entryway, Uncle?"
"I don't know, but she's not the only one buried here. Look."
For in the center of the chamber was a kind of altar, and upon it lay the body of a woman. Or, as Ada quickly realized, a woman that wasn't a woman.
"It is the Great Dragon," said Uncle Ewan, and for once there was no laughter in his voice- only reverence.
The greatest of all dragons, the mother of them all, lay before them in her sleep of millennia. Ada looked upon the sleeping woman, the sleeping goddess, with green coils of hair like the ferns of early spring and a face that seemed too beautiful and perfect to be human. It was a face seen many times in the mosaics around them- and these were the hands that granted the sword to Nada Kuya, the hands that cradled the Sacred Stones before they were scattered throughout Magvel.
In the silence beneath the ground, Ada's ears echoed with too many questions. Is this what Lady Myrrh would become, in a time when she would have developed her full power? Was there something that would wake the Great One from her sleep, something more terrible than any war yet upon Magvel? Had the breaking of four of the Stones driven her deeper into slumber, or closer to the day of waking? And why had no one disturbed her, taken her ornate jewels or harmed her sleeping body, during all these ages? Did she repel the armies of the Demon King even now?
Ada and Ewan left that room without answers, but as she turned away from the last glimpse of a mosaic- one of a single figure in the darkness, armed with a sliver of light that matched the blade in Ada's hand- Ada thought her dreams might yet give her some understanding.
-x-
Father went down before Ada when she returned with Nada Kuya's sword, paying her homage the way he did to Lady Myrrh. Mother stood a pace back, her hands clasped and a strange lack of expression on her face. Then the stillness broke, and she was Mother again, and she embraced Ada without saying a word.
The people of Caer Pelyn said a great deal.
"Nada Kuya has returned to us. Her power is with us again."
"But why has Nada Kuya come to us again now? What perils do we face?"
What future terror could be worse than what they'd already seen- the rise of the Demon King and his dark creatures, the thousands of lives ended and the thousands of dead who staggered up to their feet again to serve Fomortiis?
Ada's mother had answers for them. It was one thing to purge darkness from Magvel, she said, as a healer purges an infected wound of rot. But the wound must then heal, or a deeper and fatal rot would surely set in. This time of healing after the war was the most dangerous time, as hopes turned easily to fears, and fears to rage. In this time of healing, Magvel's people needed every advantage that heaven might lend them. Including the legacy of Nada Kuya.
-x-
Ada's dreams turned to nightmares then, as she slept with the sword of the battle princess ever in reach. She knew the desolate loneliness of Nada Kuya, the loneliness of a woman who was blessed by the dragons and so placed above all humans in her reach, a woman for whom the voices of the mountains, of the forests, spoke louder than the voices of her fellow men. Ada walked inside the skin of a woman grown aged and worn and lay herself down at the threshold of the Great One, sword in hand, on watch for all time.
She would wake covered in a film of her own perspiration, and in the darkness she would each for the cool surface of her shell. She would listen to the faint echoes of the sea until her heart slowed its pounding and her eyes grew heavy again. Yet, on the other side of the curtain that separated dreams from waking, the ghosts waited for her. They gave her words of warning, words of encouragement. They knew more of Ada than Ada knew of herself.
Perhaps she was not even Ada anymore, not half-and-half but a mixture of all things.
-x-
And then the letter came from Magvel, a letter on fine parchment with a gilt-edged seal. Her mother, gentle and firm, broke the seal and read the letter silently, then conveyed the news to Ada.
"My brother... your uncle... has decided to declare you his heir."
For some years, Ada had expected this moment; she understood perfectly well that Mother was King Ephraim's only sister, and that King Ephraim had no wife and no children, and so in time either Mother must become queen or the throne would pass directly to Ada herself. This, after all, was why Ada had been taught to write in the florid looped script of Renais, why she had been made to be half-and-half, instead of being Ada of Caer Pelyn. Why she was Ada instead of another Adah.
And this, then, was why she had been granted the sword of Nada Kuya. Ada would need the strength and grace and will of Nada Kuya to keep her uncle's great empire from crumbling, to ensure that Magvel itself remained whole and uncorrupted, from the icy shores of Frelia to the pale dunes of Jehanna. Uncorrupted to the sea, the blue sea sparkling beneath the sun, the things she knew without laying eyes upon them.
It would take the whole of her life, the whole of her being, the way that restoring Renais and Grado had become the whole of her uncle's purpose. But she could not say she was unready for it. They'd been making her ready since before she could speak, from the moment she first heard the plants threading their roots to the soil. She was Ada, stretching backwards before the time of the Stones, and forward into a future the greatest sages could not prophecy. Once and future, now and forever, on watch from the beginning to time to its end.
The sea was calling, and now she might answer.
The End... for now
Author's Note: This is the result of many, many attempts to grapple with the story of the daughter of Saleh and Eirika, who "bears a great resemblance to Nada Kuya." I am not at all sure what the purpose of the story of Nada Kuya and her dragon fang sword even was in the context of FE8- a nod to earlier games and their legendary weapons? A snippet of a discarded plotline from the beta version of the game? Anyway, I've tried writing this kid as a serious heroine, tried writing her as a tongue-in-cheek Mary Sue, and finally landed on this, which takes inspiration from Adah in The Poisonwood Bible. My Ada is not, however, a blistering cynic, so those familiar with that novel might argue that perhaps I should have named her "Leah," heh.
Basically, the conceit of this is that Magvel is the repository of all the culture and myths from the continents in the first five Fire Emblem games- Archanea, Valencia, Jugdral. The divine dragon race to which Myrrh belongs is descended from the race which produced the likes of Narga/Naga/Nagi, Gotoh, Xane/Cheiney, Holsety, Tiki, and (IMO) Mila, with Tiki being the "mother" of that race after the bottleneck depicted in FE3. The grown Tiki, therefore, is the true Great Dragon of Magvel, Nada Kuya's sword and the five Sacred Stones are the treasures she once guarded, and Morva and Myrrh are her descendants.
As for Ada, all I have to left to say is that the sea (so important in the geography of the early games) is calling to her for a reason. Today Magvel, tomorrow the world...