"If you know the secret Name of God, you can build worlds and you can destroy them."
The desert was white before the war.
At least, that's what they told her. She had only ever seen its ruined afterimages, like photographs torn at the edges from the touch of too many fingertips. Something so corrupted it retained only a passing likeness to its former self.
Blood stained the sand crimson. Nitroamine and grain charges reduced the cities to rubble. Craters pockmarked the dunes, the rocks edging the peripheries fused lumps of charcoal from the heat. Everything smelled of sulfur and cordite and dying things. Flies orbited the distended bodies, drunk on the decay. The sun burned high and hot, searing sand and skin and souls. The sky was a clear, immodest blue. Suspended above the destruction, hanging over their heads like a reminder of how things ought to be. Detached from the carnage, and unreachable from the trenches.
She couldn't see the sky from her hiding place. But she could hear the coming dusk in the hum of the cicadas. It sounded strange in the adjacent moments between gunfire and explosions. A hymn, a canticle for things forgotten.
Perhaps the setting sun was a way of reminding humanity about the balance between good and evil, night and day. The sun sets. Light fades, dies, resurrects. Darkness falls. Nothing is eternal, and everything ends.
She pressed her back against a low wall and came to the abrupt realization that she was going to die.
It had been an ambush. Stupid, really. Careless. Her unit had been returning from a long firefight, trying to secure a few small blocks in the Gunja District, and when the gunfire erupted, they didn't have the arms or the manpower to hold the ground. Pinned down on the first floor of an abandoned flat, she wasn't able to get a clear shot at the enemy. Most of her comrades had panicked and tried to flee the building. They hadn't even reached the street.
The enemy occupied positions at her six and three. Most were civilians, armed with little more than farming implements. But there were two snipers on the roof opposite her hiding place, both of whom had been more solicitous of their ammo than she had, and she could hear reinforcements moving through the rubble in the adjoining street.
She pressed the trigger of her rifle. The empty click sounded obscenely loud. The floor was littered with bullet casings. She had propped the dead bodies of her comrades against the arched windows, hoping their silhouettes would fool the enemy soldiers into thinking Amestris still held the building. It hadn't worked. The lolling heads had been hole-punched by bullets. The fading sunlight streamed through the cracks, throwing spectral shadows across the far wall. Rearing and lurching like something out of a nightmare.
She tried to stand up and she felt something shift inside, and from what meager medical knowledge she had, she knew her innards shouldn't be moving around like they were. She didn't like to look at it, the tear in her stomach; it made her feel lightheaded, and she couldn't afford the luxury of going into shock. With one hand, black from the blood, she kept her wound closed. With the other, she held a double-edged hunting knife, the weapon that had injured her, taken from its owner. She waited.
War is a current, a push and a pull, surge and recession. The fighting usually ebbed during the nighttime, obeying some tacit lunar cycle like the tide. A lull in the battle would be an opportunity for her commanding officers to send an extraction. But she didn't think she warranted the effort, even if she did survive long enough for the possibility to present itself.
Sometimes she was tempted to believe in heaven. It made her feel less lonely. Even if heaven wouldn't take her, and she was slated for the other place, at least she could delude herself with the false comfort of an existence beyond her short, sad life.
She had never thought of herself as being made for glory. Greatness awaited futures far grander than hers: it was the fate of Führers and war heroes and dark-eyed flame alchemists. No; she had never been one for a life of comfort and security. But… she believed she was owed better than Ishval, than hiding from the scrutiny of red eyes, waiting to die, fading with the daylight.
But was there any better way to fall in battle, she wondered. She didn't believe in honor. There was no gallantry in fighting for old men who sat at tables half a world away and squabbled over casualty reports. At least, hunkered down under the barrage of enemy fire, at the mercy of a people long bereft of magnanimity, she would die quietly, and no one else would lose their lives on the other end of her crosshair.
And if the Ishvalans didn't finish her, the blood loss would.
When she heard footfalls on the landing below her, she didn't try to run. She gripped her knife a little tighter, and sat up a little straighter. And hoped the sun wouldn't set quite yet; she wanted to be able to see the man who was going to kill her.
One of the grunts found her. An old man, his white hair cut short, his hoary beard gathered in a ribbon at his chest, a livid scar running from his right ear to the soft flesh under his neck. He wore the tunic and sash of the Ishvalan ecclesiastic gentry, but had outfitted himself in crude body armor; the animal hides were criss-crossed in knife slashes and bullet holes. Dark bags pulled at his eyes. His leathery skin hung from his bones, his cheekbones sharp enough to chip stone. When he spotted her, cowering behind the remnants of a countertop, he hefted his staff and crouched beside her in the dust.
He smelled of silica and sweat and hot sand.
"You're the last one," he said gruffly, the desert rubbing his throat raw. It was not a question.
She nodded.
"You killed most of our advance guard before you ran out of ammunition." He grunted. "Seems some lucky son of Ishvala landed a blow."
Something in her gut shifted. "Not so lucky, sir." She held the hunting knife for emphasis.
"You should know by now, Amestrian: you may have adopted a war of attrition, but attrition is all we Ishvalans have ever known. This is our world, a place you do not understand. You ought to have been more resourceful… with your bullets, and your life."
She didn't say anything, but her eyes flicked towards her rifle, resting against her knee. The Ishvalan caught the movement.
"You're the sniper, aren't you? The one who, they say, cannot miss her target."
"They are wrong." The sun hadn't set yet, but the room was getting darker. Her extremities felt warm.
"Do you have a name? I trust "Hawk's Eye" isn't written on your induction orders."
"My name is Riza." The words were wet and sticky from the blood in her mouth.
"Riza." The Ishvalan sat in front of her, crossing his legs in the lotus position. "How many years have you seen, Riza?"
"Nineteen."
"Nineteen? Ishvala preserve us." His red eyes hardened. "Do you know how many of my countrymen you have killed, Riza?"
"Enough."
"Do you know their faces?"
"I was told… to never forget the people… you kill. Because they won't… forget you."
"An Amestrian told you this?"
"An alchemist."
"Ah. Then I pray I shall never cross his path. He understands the art of combat far better than you or I." The Ishvalan stood, his arthritic joints bending slowly and methodically. He removed a dagger from his belt. "Do you have anything you want to say, Riza?"
There were many things she wanted to say. But she didn't have the strength to form the words anymore… she was so tired.
"Can you forgive me?" she murmured.
"No." The man placed his dagger over her heart. "But I, Perim Cotte, can pray the next life treats you with more kindness than this one.
"Thank you, Perim Cotte." She closed her eyes. "That is far more than I deserve."
"I will give you a moment to pray."
"There is… no one listening for me… anymore."
"Then I shall pray for you."
Perim Cotte muttered something into the folds of his tunic. His prayer perhaps, or a blessing. Or a curse, thought Riza Hawkeye. Like so many things in her life, like her father's research, like the politics behind the damnable war, like the Flame Alchemist with the haunted look in his dark eyes, she didn't know the ingredients of the world's bastardized alchemy anymore. She spoke the words of sin, even if she didn't understand the language.
So she waited for the rending pain in her chest, and the drop into the long dark.
Sleep. Far more than she deserved.
But it never came.
She heard a gunshot instead, before tasting Perim Cotte's blood on her lips, and feeling the Ishvalan cleric slump across her lap, a hole in his skull opposite his right eye.
She looked up. A second Ishvalan stood in the stairway, the barrel of his pistol still smoking. His eyes were dull and unfocused, cracked like a broken mirror. Most of his teeth had fallen out; the few left were broken and rotting. His skin, once the color of caramel, was dangerously pale.
The left side of his head had been completely blown off, exposing necrotic brain tissue underneath. Flies picked through the suppuration. Maggots wriggled in the black flesh. He was very, very dead.
Very, very dead… and holding a pistol, standing upright, killing his countrymen.
Riza's attention was drawn to his face. His skin was adorned in intricate tattoos, snaking under his eyes and across his lips, latin runes edging the curve of his jawline and running under the ridges of sharp cheekbones.
Alchemy.
He looked at her, through her, staring somewhere she could not see.
"Cadet Hawkeye," he intoned, the words slurred and gluey through the rot in his gums, still tinted with the rich accent of the Ishvalan language, "Major Rosin's unit is on the way. Stay here. Stay alive."
Riza Hawkeye sighed. She nodded to the dead man, who shambled back down the steps, down into the city to kill more of his fellow Ishvalans. Eating their forces away from the inside.
Before she lost consciousness, she supposed she ought to count herself fortunate.
The Golem Formator was on the move.