While You Were Sleeping

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.


(Prologue)

The lantern in Patty's hand didn't do much against the ink-black darkness of the catacombs beneath Belhalla. She could only see a few steps in front of her at a time as she descended the narrow spiraling staircase that dangled on metal ropes from the floor above; until she reached the bottom, Patty had no idea how far down the stairs went or if there even was a bottom. But the final stair led her to a solid stone floor.

"Huh. It's dry down here. That's a good sign."

Patty went to work on her survey of catacombs, using the sound of her own voice to keep her company. She wasn't really scared of what might be down there- after going through the war with Sir Seliph, Patty reckoned she could take on anybody short of the Dark Lord himself... as long as there weren't too many anybodies coming at her at once, that is.

There turned out not to be much down there beneath the palace aside from a lot of old bones peeping out from niches on the wall- bones, and Lopt graffiti. Patty wondered if the dark sect had been living down there, right under the noses of the Grannvale kings. Patty'd been exploring for over an hour before she finally found something promising- a large blocky shape like a treasure chest, there on the floor in front of her. Light bounced off its polished surface and left Patty dazzled for a moment. The chest was made out of glass, she thought.

Patty rushed toward it and held her lantern to the glass, but what she found there wasn't diamonds and gold, or silver and turquoise either. Patty saw a white face and red hair, and the pale shape of a pair of folded hands.

Dark Lord Julius.

Patty let out a screech and leapt away, dropping her lantern in the process. The little ball of light cracked and went out, but Patty kept running. She felt things whack at her shins as she stumbled through the catacombs, but the sixth sense that always served her well for tomb-robbing got her safely to the staircase, and Patty scrambled back up into the respectable part of the palace- gooseflesh on her arms and her heart pounding in her ears.

Even so, she'd had a chance while she was running to think about her strange find, and she'd decided that it maybe wasn't the Dark Lord, dead or sleeping, after all. Something didn't add up about the details she did remember.

"Shanan! SHANAN!"

She wanted to find Shanan, but Patty was happy to grab the arm of the first adult she tumbled into, which happened to be Sir Finn. He'd been coming down the hall from the opposite way, his son Delmud right on his heels. Patty flung herself at Finn and shouted loud enough to obliterate whatever it was Delmud was saying.

"There's dead bodies in the basement!"

It said a lot about what they'd all been up to for the last year that this announcement didn't startle Finn in the least. He only looked down at her, waiting for the rest of the story. As for Delmud, he seemed honestly kind of relieved that she'd come barreling into the middle of their conversation.

"Well, it's really one dead body," Patty amended. "In some kinda glass coffin. But maybe there's more?"

"A glass coffin?" Finn repeated. He and Delmud exchanged what might be called a Significant Look.

"I'll get some torches," said Delmud, before he was asked.

-x-

Patty didn't have any problem leading her helpers back to the place in the catacombs where the "treasure" was located. The torchlight didn't show much more than Patty's lantern had; the catacomb was all old bones, cobwebs, and scribbled hymns to the Dark God. The glass coffin turned out to be in a little circular dead-end on one of the corridors, and the walls there were simply covered in Lopt graffiti. Almost like someone had wanted to make that room an extra-special holy place. Patty felt the gooseflesh rise on her arms again.

Delmud held his torch aloft, and Patty downright shivered as the flickering light illuminated the pale face of the dead man. He was young, she thought- younger than Shanan for sure, and cute in a kind of girly way. His hair was every bit as red as the Dark Lord's but wasn't as long, and he didn't have a holy mark on his forehead

"So that's what happened to you," she heard Finn mutter.

"Huh? You know this guy?"

"That's Lord Azel. He was the younger brother of Emperor Arvis."

"Really?" A prince locked away in a crystal coffin hidden deep within the palace? Patty wondered if there'd been any gold or jewels buried with him. But the name sounded awfully familiar. "Wait a minute. Doesn't that make him-"

But Finn was already telling Delmud to go find Lewyn, and the grouchy bard coming onto the scene meant that, if cute Lord Azel had jewels on him, Patty wasn't going to be getting a share of them.

"I don't s'pose there'd be a reward in finding him? He'd be awfully important to somebody, right?"

Her voice seemed very small and echoey in the black caverns beneath the palace, and neither father nor son paid her fancies any mind.

(Awakening)

"Hey, Azel. You still in there?"

He thought he recognized the voice. The words filtered down through the soft gray place where Azel found himself, and Azel for his part was floating up towards a slit of light. The light broke around him, like sunbeams made solid or a flood of warm water. Azel stared up into coldly beautiful features softened by a cascade of unruly green hair.

"Lewyn?"

"That's right." Something flat and cold in his voice let on that Lewyn wasn't what he once had been, but Azel figured that went for all of them.

All of them.

"But what are you-"

"Easy now." Fingers lightly pressed against his chest pinned him back to the bed with deceptively firm pressure. "It's been a while, Azel. You slept off the hangover we all got from Sigurd's war."

"Uh..."

Lewyn's supposed to be in Silesse, Azel thought as frantic sentences arranged themselves in his head. I was in Silesse, but then I left Tiltyu and went to Belhalla. Is this Silesse now? Did Lewyn rescue me from...

From Manfroy. Azel shuddered at the memory of dark magic closing around him like a winding-sheet.

"You may as well let him see, Lewyn."

Azel thought he recognized that voice, too. He squinted at the two men who stood against the opposite wall- one tall and lithe, with black hair spilling halfway down his back, the other less tall but broader across the shoulders, with a fierce mustache that matched his mane of brown hair. They seemed vaguely familiar.

"Do you remember us, Azel?" said the taller of the pair. "We've grown up a bit since we parted ways in Lubeck."

"Lubeck?" Who'd left their company in Lubeck? Then the image of two gawky adolescent boys popped into his head. "Shanan? And... Oifaye? How is this even possible?"

They couldn't be any older than twenty. At least, the Shanan and Oifaye that Azel knew couldn't be more than twenty, but these two men facing him now were close to thirty. Or past it. Was this some kind of trick, another of Manfroy's diabolical machinations?

Lewyn's cool voice snapped that chain of thoughts.

"Azel, what year is it?"

"763." He said it without a moment's hesitation, because 763 was Tinny's year the way that 761 was Arthur's.

"Yeah. Like I said, you've been out for a while."

"So what year... what year is it?"

"778."

Azel whipped his head to follow the sound of yet another oddly familiar voice- clear and even and yet strangely flat, the same way Lewyn sounded flat.

"Oh, hey, Finn. So you're here, too..."

Finn was standing in the glare of the window, and for a moment Azel thought that the knight from Leonster looked exactly as he had when they'd last seen another in Silesse. But as Finn shifted position to give Azel his due as a Lord of House Velthomer (and when was the last time anyone had done that?), Azel noticed shadowed eyes and a general air of hard times that recalled what Lewyn had said about the aftermath of the war being a giant hangover.

"Yeah, Azel,"Lewyn was saying. "We've assembled a little party for you."

Azel took a second look at Lewyn now that his grasp on the entire situation had tilted. The heir to Forseti's power still did have the luminous beauty that Azel remembered- flawless as a sculpture of marble or ice- but on closer inspection Azel noticed the hard eyes and grim mouth of a man closing in on forty.

Azel wondered what he looked like now, but no one offered him a mirror; when he glanced down at his hands they looked the same as they ever had. His voice, too, didn't seem any different than it had the last time that he remembered speaking...

Fifteen years before.

"Why are you here? And where is this?"

"We're here- and this is Belhalla, by the way- on business. Mostly finished business," said Lewyn, and Azel didn't entirely like the implications of mostly. "There's been some changes around here of late."

"Belhalla? Is Arvis..."

"He's not here anymore," said Lewyn, before Azel could even finish asking.

"So Arvis is gone. And we're here... I'm here." Arvis being gone- dead- wasn't even a real thing to him yet. "Is there anyone else?"

"Aideen's still with us," Oifaye volunteered from his spot against the wall. "She's done with making war and stayed behind in Isaach when we moved south, but she's doing well."

It was kind of him to remember that Azel might be concerned about Aideen, but giving good news of her was like offering Azel a sop instead of the round of bread that he actually wanted.

"How's Tiltyu?" he asked, since no one was going to tell him if he didn't.

"Things didn't work out so good for her," Lewyn replied. "Sorry, Azel."

He didn't sound as though he meant it. Azel stared into Lewyn's impassive face as he forged ahead with his questions.

"And I'm guessing things didn't work out so well for the kids, either..."

To his surprise, Lewyn seemed to soften a little.

"Well, about that, actually..."

"We thought it might be best if you got accustomed to us- as we are now," said Oifaye, "before we showed you anything more."

"More..."

"Yeah," Shanan put in, and the crooked smile that flicked across his face belonged to the child from Azel's own time. "There's a whole lot more outside this room that you never even imagined."

"Are you ready?" Lewyn asked him, and finally withdrew his hand so that Azel could fully sit up. Azel looked around the sparsely furnished room- servants' quarters, he thought- and the faces of the four men that he knew and yet didn't know.

"Does it matter if I am?" No one answered him. Azel didn't expect they would.


Author's Notes: A word of explanation on this scenario. Among the extensive "designers' notes" and "dream scenarios" that Shouzou Kaga and others made for FE4 were some pretty cracked out ideas. One of them involved Azel leaving Tiltyu in Silesse with the kids while he went to confront Alvis over Arvis's various, er, policies. Manfroy felt the sibling reunion would be bad news for his grand plans (because Arvis still loved Azel too much not to be swayed by him) and zapped Azel into a magic sleep as soon as Azel reached Belhalla. Azel was then stashed in the basement beneath the palace (no, really) until he was discovered after Seliph and Friends defeated Julius. This is not "what really happened" (Kaga was clear on this point- it's more like creator's headcanon from very early on in the development process. And no, Sleeping Beauty Azel is not the weirdest thing in those notes, not by a long shot.

Anyway, the idea is too ridiculous not to play with, even if I am not following the strict outline of that particular dream scenario because eh, parts of it just don't work for me and they don't mesh sufficiently with the final game canon we have in FE4.