Long Moments of Silence
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
For allitalksfandom for Summer Nagamas '14
"Oh my friends, my friends, forgive me, That I live and you are gone"
In the end, he was only a man.
The children- no, Oifaye had to stop thinking of them that way, the young Crusaders- hung back from the corpse of the dreaded emperor, as though afraid the darkness that contaminated the man's soul might spread to them as plague passed from one victim to the next. Whatever the state of the late emperor's soul, his mortal remains showed signs of corruption mere hours after death; it fell to Oifaye to arrange for a hasty burial of the man once hailed as the hero of the civilized world. He did the best that he could; Arvis of Velthomer was at least given a shroud and a coffin, rather than being sent into the earth naked and with wrists bound like they'd done to Travant of Thracia.
Few attended, as Lord Seliph by his own absence set an example. Lewyn came, and Ced; the silence of their estrangement added to the tension in the chapel. Young Corple recited prayers over the corpse, not because he especially wanted to but because the great Crusader Bragi in his infinite compassion would have done so for an enemy. Then it was done, and the remains shut away in the vault meant for Baldur's line. Oifaye did his best not to dwell on the idea that Emperor Arvis now lay precisely where Duke Byron and Lord Sigurd should have gone to rest.
Corple left the scene as quickly as decorum would let him, and in the meantime Lewyn too vanished without even some pithy phrase to mark to occasion. Oifaye found only Ced at his side; though barely seventeen, the Silessian prince already had old eyes in his young face— the thousand-yard stare of the battle-weary.
"This ends nothing," said the prince. "The worst is yet to come."
"Yes," Oifaye agreed. "Once again, the final reckoning will be at Behalla."
The crusade might have ended at Chalphy, where it all began on a fine spring day in a world where the Dark Lord was but a bogeyman from legends. But Oifaye had been right in his conviction that Emperor Arvis wasn't the ultimate source of the darkness over Jugdral. Arvis was only a man, and Chalphy only another battleground among many.
-x-
Outside the soot-stained walls of Chalphy, the tents and banners of Lord Seliph's army looked almost festive beneath the sun. The blue-and-argent flag of New Thracia, the green pennant of Isaach, the bold ensign of Freege… they made Oifaye wonder if Arvis had taken a last look down from Chalphy at the might arrayed against him, and if so, what thoughts filled the emperor's head.
Oifaye's own tent bore the standard of Baldur's line, the very one that would properly be raised over Chalphy once Lord Seliph returned to lay claim to his estates. His Highness hadn't bothered with ceremony after the duel with Arvis, as instead he'd dashed back off toward the coast with the claim he needed to look further into the matter of captive children hidden away by the cliffs. Oifaye didn't think that was all there was to the story, but he'd left Seliph go. A homecoming to Chalphy could wait a few more days.
They'd waited twenty-one years.
"Fee, are you there?"
"Yes!"
She had a book in her hands— a history chronicle, Oifaye thought, not a tome or a prayer-book, though he didn't have much chance to see it before she slammed the pages shut and rose to her feet.
"I admit I'm a little surprised at you for not attending the service," he said to her. "I thought you might have wanted to help us mark the occasion. Your brother was present."
Oifaye did not mention Lewyn. He knew far better than to bring that up.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I know these things are important, and I thought about coming after you, but I didn't want to look silly by showing up late…"
Her head drooped downward just a little as she spoke, and he reached out to brush her cheek.
"It's all right. Perhaps I'm the silly one for wanting to give a murderer more respect than he gave to my… to my kin."
Fee made a loud swallow and just shook her head, and so Oifaye decided not to say any more on that subject. He sat down on the ground next to the camp stool she'd risen from, and after a few moments Fee took her seat again. She'd lost her place in the book, though, and as she searched for it Oifaye asked the question that had bothered him for some days.
"Did you notice anything about the garrison that the empire stationed here at Chalphy?"
"They weren't much of a challenge," said Fee.
"I suppose they weren't," Oifaye agreed, as it was the consensus in camp that the fabled Roten Ritter didn't measure up to their terrible legend. "Well, they were entirely mages."
"That was the emperor's way, wasn't it?"
"Yes, but it was an odd thing to see here at Chalphy. That's not how things were."
Fee stopped rustling through the book.
"Tell me," she said after a moment.
"Well, of course we had the Gruenen Ritter then. Our flag has a red field, and some knights wore red armor to honor it, but many wore green out of pride in the squadron. And there weren't any battle mages in Chalphy; we had cavalry and heavy infantry only. When Lord Byron led them to Isaach, we hadn't any doubts that the Gruenen Ritter could handle whatever Isaach could throw at them…"
Oifaye stopped, because at the mention of that murky, convoluted war that no side truly won, he saw the sudden sharp image of himself at fourteen, bidding Lord Byron goodbye without the faintest idea that every knight present was riding to his death.
"I'm sorry, Fee. I haven't talked about this, as it wasn't an appropriate subject to discuss with anyone when we stayed in Isaach."
The Gruenen Ritter had disappeared, both from the world and from history. Isaach saw them as villains, or at best as pawns of Grannvale sent to do evil in foreign lands. The Empire too saw them as pawns to sweep from the board, and the resistance didn't sing of them because they hadn't been part of Lord Sigurd's tragedy. They'd served Lord Byron and died in doing so, and that was their end and now, Oifaye remembered their faces but not any names beyond the names of Lord Sigurd's three close companions.
"Arvis murdered them, too, didn't he? Not personally, I mean, but if you look at the whole picture, he really did them all in," said Fee.
"That's one way of looking at it." He could've mentioned Reptor and Langbart and Andrei and the rest of the villains, but it didn't change the "whole picture" as Fee spoke of it.
Now she was the one stroking his hair, letting him know it was all right to be the silly sort of person who cared about a pointless gesture of respect in a world of betrayal and murder. Letting him know that she didn't want him to be the sort of person who'd leave a dead man's body out for the crows, however much Arvis of Velthomer might have deserved it.
-x-
Lord Seliph did not return the following day, so the Crusaders remained outside Chalphy's walls as though besieging the empty castle. Already the feeling of catharsis over the emperor's death was fading, replaced by the grim realization that Ced had voiced aloud: Arvis was dead, the Dark Lord still lived, and the war was far from ended.
The suggestion did go around that they claim the castle in Lord Seliph's stead and prepare a suitable homecoming for His Highness, but Seliph's cousin Lord Leif put that idea to rest.
"This is Lord Seliph's home," said the youth who now called himself King of all Thracia. "Let him be the first to truly cross the threshold and see its banner raised."
Oifaye didn't mind the delay. He found himself curiously reluctant to see what other changes Arvis and the mages of Velthomer had wrought to the place he'd also once called home. So many moments in the crusade had been as bittersweet homecomings, so many others in their company had already faced that odd moment of claiming an estate they'd never seen, or reclaiming a homeland defiled by enemies. This moment was Oifaye's own turn to walk into a castle of ghosts and memories, to confront a lost world from which he was, as far as he knew, the last living inhabitant.
He could wait. The Chalphy of memory had been obliterated so thoroughly that Arvis could make a home there. The forgotten dead of the Gruenen Ritter lay scattered from Isaach to Lubeck in unmarked graves. Noish and Alec and Arden had turned to ashes alongside Lord Sigurd, even as Oifaye made his way to safety with young Seliph in his arms. Even the date on which Chalphy had fallen wasn't clear— there'd been no siege, no battle. Its lords and knights had been systematically killed far from home, and Arvis likely walked right into an undefended castle, even as Lord Seliph would do upon his return.
In giving Chalphy a long, long, moment of silence, Oifaye was doing the only thing that he could at present.
-x-
Lights flashed in the sky, clouds of smoke drifted over the walls of Chalphy, embers rained down from the heavens. Instead of running for their lives and returning fire, the young Crusaders sent of cheers and applause, because the display was nothing more than the result of Arthur of Freege growing bored.
Oifaye and Fee sat upon the patchy grass of their encampment while Arthur turned his versatile gifts to their amusement.
"Show-off," Fee muttered as she made knots in a blade of grass. "Does this bother you, Oifaye?"
"Not at all." A blossom of Vala-red light turned to silver as it opened wide above them. "I was thinking just this afternoon of how there are no sad memories at all here— none that I lived through. When Lord Byron left for Isaach, I knew I was safe with Lord Sigurd. When I rode off with Lord Sigurd to rescue Lady Aideen, we had no inkling that we'd never be back. How could we? And yet, how careless I was…"
Bursts of pale-blue light sizzled and popped above the ramparts, and Oifaye felt Fee's hand over his own.
"Don't be ashamed," she said, her voice pitched low so he could hear it through the cacophony of the fireworks.
"Ashamed of being a foolish child?"
"Don't we all start that way? Even Ced's been there."
That was quite the gesture, to offer up the brother she held on a pedestal.
"I may not be proud of everything I've done to stay alive," Oifaye replied, "but that doesn't mean I'm not thankful to be here in this moment. When Lord Seliph returns, he'll claim Chalphy, and then we'll be on to the next battle, and if fortune is kind, at the end of it all I'll be back here to make it my home again."
"Do you want me to go searching for Lord Seliph tomorrow? I think I know just where he went."
"Yes, but if you do find him, just let him be. I think after all that's happened, His Highness needed a few days to himself."
"Do you need some time to yourself?" She was sending dissonant signals; the sudden grip of her hand didn't match the softness to her voice.
"No," he said, and the tension in her hand lessened.
The ghosts of Chalphy weren't there in the smoke and thunder overhead, and neither was the shadow of the foolish boy who'd thought himself a clever tactician. In the long, dark silence that followed the fireworks, though, Oifaye looked at Chalphy's silhouette with an ever-deeper sense of unease.
"Perhaps I'm still only fooling myself," he said aloud, believing Fee had gone to sleep at his side.
"Nobody can really go home again," came the unexpected reply, fuzzy with sleep yet remarkably keen.
"No."
If the young Oifaye from Chalphy had been too wrapped up in adventure and his own cleverness to notice true danger, the Oifaye of that moment had too much invested his maturity and composure, his faith and his honor, to admit he didn't much want to see what all Emperor Arvis had done to his childhood home. He preferred to hang back a few paces and take it in through Lord Seliph's eyes, the present superimposed over a second-hand past learned only from Oifaye's old stories.
"Well, even if there's no official curfew tonight, Fee, it's past time we turned in."
At the moment, there was no time to make anything more of Chalphy than it was— a base for launching their campaign against the heart of Grannvale. There was no sense in confronting the remains of his old bedroom now, any more than there'd be time to scrape every symbol of Velthomer's occupation from the walls, floor, and ceiling and make Chalphy new again. Months from now, or years, Oifaye would have to face the task of doing exactly that— making Chalphy new, because Fee was right and it was beyond anyone's power to make it as it once had been.
And perhaps, in time, he'd be able to assign a name to every half-remembered face, and lay their memories to rest with the respect and ceremony accorded the man who'd orchestrated all their terrible deaths.
The End