A/N: Okay, this fanfiction idea popped in my head at 2:00 a.m., so yeah. Bear with me. It has mondo FE8 (Sacred Stones) and FEDS (Shadow Dragon) spoilers, so be aware. I own neither of the games nor anything to do with Fire Emblem.

Enjoy, I hope!

The Scenic Route

Prologue: Seeds of Jealousy

Serafew, the continent of Magvel, on the Grado-Renais border, local calendar year 801 (two years ago)

"Oh, good morning, Lyon!"

"Good morning, Eirika, Ephraim." Prince Lyon of Grado greeted his Renais-born friends with enthusiasm.

Eirika walked up to Lyon a bit faster than her twin brother. "How are you today?"

"I'm good. How are you and Ephraim?" the Grado heir replied.

"We're good," said Ephraim. "Sorry we're late. Eirika stayed up all night perfecting a fencing maneuver and she had trouble waking up this morning." Eirika elbowed her brother.

"Oh, that's no problem at all," said Lyon. "She is quite the fencer. She defeats me quite regularly." Lyon had always been second-best to his friends. No matter what he tried, it seemed, Ephraim or Eirika (or sometimes both) always trumped him. Fencing: Eirika had him beat. Lance training: Ephraim came out on top. Even simple games of chance he seemed to have consistently poor luck. He'd been keeping track of their records in simple fifty-fifty games, such as a flip of a coin. So far, against Eirika, he'd won 23 games and lost 47. Against Ephraim he was even worse: 16-52.

The one thing he could do better than the twins was dark magic. And because it was the only thing he had over them, he practiced it diligently. He was moderately proficient at it. Eirika had tried a beginner spell, which had no potential to do any form of damage. Something went wrong and a vial on a shelf was shattered, cleaved in half by an errant burst of the allegedly non-threatening magic. She promptly gave up the craft.

"She is getting better," agreed Ephraim. God, how Lyon wished he was like his friends. They were kinder, more loved, and all around better people than he was, he had convinced himself. So much so that Lyon had committed himself to the failure-to-rule-pile after his father, Vigarde, passed on. This stress constantly nagged at him, destroying the very fibers of his soul.

"Well, thank you, Brother." Lyon's jealousy slowly but surely increased, and with time, it would bring him to a disastrous discovery...

Chapter One: Friend or Foe?

Black Temple, northeast Magvel, in the heart of Darkling Woods; local calendar year 803

It had come down to this. The Demon King and his semi-willing puppet, Lyon, were the final obstacles. And Eirika and Ephraim, in the name of peace, justice, and good, were ready to destroy their friend for his own sake.

Joining them on this final assault were their various-minded comrades. A group of men and women they had garnered to aid them on their quest. And now that Eirika and Ephraim got to thinking about it, they both realized how messed up their team was.

A gambling addict, a crybaby, a man who painted on the battlefield, and that was just a few of them. But they were all good fighters. Joshua was adept at landing killing strokes. Neimi never missed, ever. Forde was a great multitasker. So despite their near-psychotic-level flaws, neither of the twins would trade their army for the world.

Which they would almost have to do, not too long from now. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

But for now, Eirika and Ephraim had Lyon cornered in the back room of the temple.

"Lyon!" shouted Ephraim.

"Ephraim," said Lyon, quite calmly. "Good of you to join us." Us? What did he mean by that?

"Give up, Lyon," said Ephraim. "You can still turn back and make up for all you've done!"

Eirika was a bit kinder. "Lyon, please, you're our friend."

Lyon shushed her with a wave of his arm. "Oh please. Your friend? It's far too late for that. Though I once cherished our friendship, those days are far behind us."

"No, Lyon, you're wrong!" shouted Ephraim. "You can still come with us--"

"And what?" Lyon interrupted. "Come back with you to a life where I will never know how strong I can be? You two have always beaten me at everything. I'll never know my limits unless we come to blows until the end of us!" He calmed down. "And besides. I've already found something I can do that you can't hope to match. Either of you."

Eirika shuddered. She could feel the truth in those words. "What do you mean, Lyon?" she asked.

"Consider this a test." Lyon began an ominous chant, and runes appeared all over the floor, primarily beneath the feet of each member of the Magvel Liberation Army.

"Lyon, what are you doing?!?" said Ephraim.

"Exactly what I said. Testing you."

The runes began to climb up the bodies of the Army, covering them in their dark energies.

"Lyon!--" Eirika cried out, but then she was gone. As was Ephraim and the rest of them.

"With any luck," Lyon said once he was alone, "they'll pass."

"But," he said again, more malevolently, "will they succeed?"

Time for a little physics refresher. Bear with me.

We know that motion through space exists in three dimensions. Each object has a specific set of coordinates, defining its location by its distance from a reference point along three axes, or directions. As we move, these coordinates change depending on our direction of motion, and how far we move.

But there is in fact a fourth dimension, in addition to length, width, and depth: time. An object's position can also be defined as its point in time, relative to a reference. All objects, as far as we can observe, proceed through time at the same rate, much like gravity affects all objects with the same force. We are pulled, or pushed, inexorably through time by some force, at uniform rate.

Once one understands that, and knows how to counteract this force, how to move something along all four dimensions, time travel is simple.

The other common issue with time travel is the concept of paradox: If Eirika were to go back in time and kill her father, before she was born, then who bore Eirika, in order to kill her father? However, thinking of backwards time travel in terms of events that have already happened, if Eirika were to go back to kill her father, then her father would have already been killed, and the issue resolves itself, as Eirika would never have existed in the timeline. But because she DOES exist, this is impossible. Basically, any repercussions from time travel would already have occurred, and thus never could have occurred. This way, paradoxes within the time stream are self-correcting.

Try not to think too hard on it. It took me a long time to figure it out, it's okay if you don't.

The point is, Lyon had cracked the secret to time travel. And though he could not go back to stop himself from using the Dark Stone, because he would never have thought to do so if he had, sending his foes to another space entirely helped avoid the possibility of paradoxes arising, and was the next-best thing. At least this way he could prevent them having to tear him to pieces to destroy the Demon King for a little longer.

Magvel texts recorded the history of another land, presenting that history as a mythology of the war-torn land Archanea.

It was time for the Liberation Army to become mythical.

A/N: There you go. The first bits of this little crossover story. I know, crossover automatically raises red flags among the fanbase.

This is, if nothing else, experimentation. And I hope you like it. I actually started writing this several months ago, and it lay dormant on my hard drive for a while, and I only recently finished it. Sorry it's so damn short.