Hearts of Glass
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
This was my entry for the fourth round of the fe_contest comm at LJ. The theme was "temper," and I took a tangent into the realm of tempered glass via the historical oddity known in our world as "Prince Rupert's Drops," blobs of tempered glass with some curious properties. This ended up taking first place!
Merric didn't need to see the ragged gray band on the pale horizon to know the rains were coming. The wind whispered it to him as it caressed his face and raised gooseflesh on his legs. Rain rain rain. By the following day, the skies above Khadein would stream with water, and then the desert floor would burst with pale blooms, short-lived and fragile. The "season" for rain would last but a few weeks, but last year's festival had been so grand, so exciting, that Merric had spent all this term anticipating it.
As Merric darted through the corridors of the Academy of Magic, he found his way blocked by a senior student. He tried to slip past, but soon found himself hemmed in by taller boys, all of them in the long robes worn by upperclassmen. Merric felt small before them, standing there with his knees exposed.
"It's the Altean sprout."
"Now, men, we must be kind to our underclassmen." Ellerean, one of Master Wendell's finest students, appeared to be the leader of this gang. He already had a name for himself as a thunder adept, and looked the part with his grave, stern brow and waving fair hair. But now he spoke almost gently to Merric. "Put out your hand."
Merric obeyed, though he noticed that the older students were watching him with taut anticipation. Some smiled, while others merely looked wary.
"It's a gift for the Rain Festival." Ellerean placed in Merric's waiting hand a drop of clear glass with a bulbous end and the long, thin tail of a tadpole. "It's for luck."
Even as Merric opened his mouth to thank the senior student for his gift, Ellerean bared his teeth in a mocking smile and leveled his finger at Merric. A spark shot forth from Ellerean's finger and touched the tail end of the glass. It shattered completely, turned to glittering powder in Merric's hand.
The act surprised Merric, but in the back of his head he'd been expecting some trick. What truly surprised him was the way the glass was destroyed so thoroughly, with so little sound.
"May I have another?"
This was not what the upperclassmen wanted from him; the less disciplined of Ellerean's friends showed their confusion.
"Make your own," Ellerean muttered. "Be sure to spread the luck around."
It took only a few rounds of questioning his classmates before Merric learned the name of these curious drops of glass. Dragon's Tears, they were called, and the library had more than a few tomes that mentioned how they could be made. Though only a second-year student, Merric had impressed Master Wendell enough to be allowed a free hand when it came to gathering ingredients and running his own his experiments. He claimed for himself a disused closet that became his laboratory, and there Merric experimented for hours, pouring driblets of molten glass into basins of ice-cold water. Out of the basin emerged smooth drops with whiplike tails-- marvelous things, born of the union of sand and fire, water and air. They were impervious to all force; Merric could bang the drops on a table, whack them with heavy objects, and trample upon them without doing the slightest bit of damage as long as he didn't harm the tail. If he broke off even the very tip of the tail, the Dragon's Tear turned to dust with barely a sound. He made dozens and saved the best of them, the ones with beautifully rounded bulbs and graceful tails. The misshapen ones he exploded for the sheer pleasure of it.
Merric found many other pursuits in his years at Khadein-- not least of them the mastery of wind magic-- but he returned often to his laboratory to make his Dragon's Tears. Perhaps they didn't bring him luck, but they did bring him a sense of satisfaction.
-X-
Merric had a dozen or so Dragon's Tears in his possession when he made his escape from Khadein after the servants of the Dark Pontifex seized control of the Academy. He used a few of them up on his journey to Aurelis, as he performed "magic shows" to earn himself lodging. He sold another to a wealthy man who paid far, far too much for a simple piece of glass; Merric suspected the man to be an agent of the King of Aurelis, and in fact received a fair amount of assistance from him. So Merric, his supply of tomes and potions, and his remaining Dragon's Tears reached Aurelis in time to join with the exiled Alteans who now rallied around their prince.
Who, as luck would have it, was Merric's close personal friend.
"What in the world are these?" Prince Marth had taken the liberty of 'inspecting' all Merric's possessions as they settled in to their tent for the night, and the cluster of glass tadpoles seemed a mystery to him. Merric smiled to himself; this would prove amusing.
"Do you have a hammer?"
"No. I can certainly borrow one."
"Use the hilt of your sword then."
"I don't want to--" Marth felt as protective of his rapier as Merric did about the pages of his Excalibur tome, and for a moment it seemed his interest would die there. But the prince tipped his head to the side, considered Merric and his strange suggestions for a moment, and said, "Fine."
Marth used the hilt of his dagger to strike one Dragon's Tear. The hilt made a clinking sound as it impacted the glass, but did not even mar the smooth shining surface. Marth struck the glass with the flat of his blade, chipped at it with the dagger's tip, and the glass stayed impervious. Merric rose up on his tip-toes and fought-- though not very hard-- to conceal a smile.
"It's magic?"
"Not really. I make them by dropping the hot glass into ice water. It's something the sudden cooling does to the glass that makes it unbelievably strong.
"Oh, like hardening steel for a blade."
"Yes." Merric had never thought of the comparison before, but it did make sense to him now. "Though I hope your sword doesn't have the same flaw as this glass. If you touch it at its weak point, it crumbles to nothing."
"Prove it."
And Merric did, by using the prince's dagger to nip off the tail-tip of the Tear. Marth's eyes widened in genuine surprise as the glass disintegrated.
"Yes, I should hope my sword never breaks in that manner."
Merric drew the best of the Dragon's Tears from his collection and held out to the prince as an offering.
"Keep it for luck. Just be careful of the other end."
Merric sold another of the Dragon's Tears in Pyrathi, as they were low on gold and he convinced one of the village elders it was a mystical jewel of great powers. So he was down to but a few of them when they found Knorda Market... and Linde. She was barefoot and in boys' clothes, with her long hair tucked beneath a turban of rags. Merric thought she might be lovely if she smiled, and so he did his best to bring a smile to the face of the orphaned light mage. His magic tricks didn't excite her, as she could do them well enough herself. The Dragon's Tear was a different matter; Linde had never been to Khadein and wouldn't see the surprise coming.
Her lips formed a little circle when he placed the droplet in her hands, but when Merric performed his trick and turned the droplet back to sparkling sand, her expression was odd-- her lips smiled, but her eyes seemed moist for a moment, as though tears formed and were swiftly blinked away.
"My father used to make these for me when I was small. I thought it was his own secret."
"It's a well-kept secret among the students of Khadein." But, of course, Linde's father had been one of the greatest to ever graduate from the Academy.
"Do you know how they work?" And her face colored with a passion that Merric well recognized, the passion to know, to understand their marvelous world. "The surface is held together by the most incredible tension, but inside the center is under such pressure that if the surface is broken, it all just flies apart."
He knew it, of course, but it was wonderful to hear someone speaking in his own language, and so Merric listened happily as Linde talked.
"I have another if you want to keep it." His supply was dwindling fast, but he did want to see Linde smile.
-X-
Liberating Khadein from the tools of the Dark Pontifex was thrilling, and Merric took Linde on a whirlwind tour of his school and its secrets. Coming home to Altea, though, didn't go the way they anticipated. Merric's parents were long dead, and he wasn't surprised to find his grandfather in a frail state. But Prince Marth had genuinely hoped to find his mother and elder sister imprisoned in the castle that had once been their home, and to find one dead and the other whisked away to some mysterious place turned the glittering triumph to dust.
Merric watched, tongue-tied with misery, as Marth paced back and forth in the room where they had once studied spelling and penmanship. He longed to say how sorry he was about Queen Liza, how devastated he was himself that they had yet to find Princess Elice. Yet Marth wouldn't allow him the chance to put a word in; the prince just kept on talking without saying anything of real meaning, as though he needed to keep his mouth and his mind busy. He needed to keep his hands busy, too-- he took down books from their shelves, rifled through them without truly reading a word, and set them back in the wrong place. He played with his dagger and the contents of his pockets, including the Dragon's Tear. Marth placed that on a shelf, then picked it up again to run his fingers over the bulbous end. Merric had a flash of premonition as to what would come next, and thought to call out a warning. The words hadn't time to leave his lips before Marth snapped the thin end of the Dragon's Tear.
Marth hissed through his teeth as sparkling powder cascaded through his fingers onto the floor.
"You'll want to get your gloves off before any of the dust works its way underneath," Merric said promptly. Glass was glass, after all, no matter how small the particles.
"I am sorry, Merric. I didn't intend to do that," Marth said, as he held out his hands so that Merric could assist him with the fingerless gloves. "I simply wasn't thinking."
"I know."
"If you have another, Merric...."
"I do, sire."
"I'd like one, but not for myself this time. I'll carry it for Elice, for when we see her again." He had a bright, hard look in his eye that suggested no argument or objection would be welcome. "Perhaps I'll be more careful with hers."
Merric looked down at the floor, where grains of white sand nestled in the pile of the ruined carpet. He thought of Elice, beautiful and serene, the oracle of their childhood, the one who always had the answers. He remembered, now-- though he never had truly forgotten-- that when he'd gone off to Khadein as a boy of twelve, intent on mastering his magic, her name had been upon his lips.
"Of course, sire."
-X-
When Merric unleashed the powers of Starlight on the Dark Pontifex, he did it for Linde and her poor murdered father, for Prince Marth and his slaughtered parents, for Master Wendell and everyone Merric loved at Khadein, and for Elice most of all. So he told himself, anyway.
At the victory celebrations, Linde wore a gown of satin in the color of peach-blossoms. Her hair tumbled down free to her knees, and she smiled and laughed as Merric had never seen her laugh before. Elice wore robes of white silk embroidered with gold, and she had a small, almost secretive smile hovering at her lips. Merric talked easily with Linde, about magic and battles and everything else under the sun, and he found that speaking with Elice caused his tongue to tie itself in knots until he embarrassed himself as badly as Prince Marth did when speaking to pretty women. But both of them-- the Sage of Light and the Life-Giving Sister-- wore a strange sort of gem around their necks, a crystalline droplet with a curious long tail. Merric hoped that neither would think to ask the other about the coincidence.
-X-
Being the close personal friend of the Prince of Altea had its drawbacks, as Marth seemed to be a magnet for trouble and chaos. Once again, the trouble seeped northward to Khadein, and news that his sovereign was an Enemy of the State put a target on Merric's own back. His checkered history with Ellerean did the rest. Ellerean's stooges smashed his laboratory, not because there was anything of value in it, but because Merric had been happy there. Even when he made his peace with Ellerean and they swore to rebuild Khadein together, Merric knew that the laboratory, and the Academy itself, was lost to him.
Elice was lost to him, too. She'd surrendered herself to the imperial soldiers in the wake of her brother's "rebellion," and it was like old times again in the worst possible way as Marth and Merric chased her image from Altea to Pales, from Pales to the Dragon's Altar. When he held her, shuddering and sobbing and utterly unlike the Princess Elice he knew, Merric thought the horror was finally over. When he placed the Dragon's Tear around her neck where it belonged, he thought it was one final teardrop for the both of them.
-X-
Many vanished after the war, but Linde wasn't among them. She was there at his side, following him almost like a familiar. If the wars had ground many of their comrades down, had broken them, it seemed only to make Linde stronger and more beautiful. She'd helped to defeat the darkness that had taken her father, after all. Where others seemed dimmed, seemed shadowed, Linde sparkled.
When Elice announced that she would found a new school of magic untainted by the darkness that had gripped Khadein, Merric swore to be there. So, too, did Linde.
-X-
"I don't understand." The satin cord was knotted in his fingers, and the Dragon's Tear hung as a dead weight at the end of it. "At times, she seems fine, and yet other times she doesn't know me."
"The strongest heart can only take so much." Marth watched the droplet as it swung from Merric's numb fingers. There was something muted in his voice, the dull sound of an untuned drum. "We don't know all that happened to her at the Dragon's Altar. I don't think we want to know."
Merric knew what the ancient Archsage had said of Elice, that her soul had been damaged by the ritual of raising the Dark Dragon. He hadn't wanted to believe it. Elice had known him, had recognized him, had come back to herself fully. Hadn't she?
"Give it time, Merric. Push her now, and...." Marth took the pendant and held it up in front of Merric's face. It looked like a lump of ice as it dangled from its cord. "Well, you hardly need the demonstration."
-X-
"I love you, Merric."
The words came not from Elice's lips, but from Linde's. Linde, who glowed like rose petals and glossy ripe chestnuts. Linde, who bloomed where others withered. Linde, who destroyed the Dark Pontifex for all time when Merric had only managed to subdue him for a couple of years.
He stammered his protests, that he cared about her very much, but not like that, never like that.
"That could change," she whispered, warm and sweet as a zephyr in the desert. Warm and sweet as the raindrops of a Khadein spring.
He was a fool for leading her on for so many years. He was doubly a fool for rejecting her now.
-X-
She left an envelope on his desk. Merric knew what it was before he opened it, before he poured the stream of colorless dust into his palm. He sat there, in the corner of Elice's Academy that he claimed as his sanctuary, with Elice's pendant shut away in his desk and Linde's bauble turned to sand between his fingers. He felt as though the skin encasing his soul had gone cold and tight, as though pressure beyond bearing welled in his chest. If he moved so much as an eyelash, he would cease to exist. Then the madness passed, and Merric walked to the open window and brushed the powdered glass into the garden where it sparkled on the flower petals. Glass was nothing more than sand, after all, and the sands endured when the blessings of rain and beauty of flowers were fleeting.
It occurred to Merric that, in the twists and turns of their relationship, he owed his old comrade Ellerean a favor. Perhaps he could teach at Khadein for a term or two as a form of payment? He seated himself again at his desk, reached not for the drawer with Elice's pendant but for the one with his best parchment, and began to write a letter.
The End