Author's Note: Spoilers for Chapter 19xx of Fire Emblem 7. Set back in the Arcadian days.
More or less 'apathy and depression: the oneshot'.
His head ached.
His head had begun to always ache, these days.
Nergal knew he was losing himself. He barely cared.
This village was a senseless mockery. Athos marveled over dragons and humans living in peace, when that very order of things had been destroyed by the war Athos and his friends waged. The Archsage could justify it however he wanted – there had been no cause for war in Ilia. And yet the war had come there, too.
He had lived centuries too long. Had he perished then, like so many, he could have rested. But because he was left alive, duty to one long dead kept him dragging on through a hopeless and joyless existence. So long as there was a hope of infinite power – power great enough to bring back the dead – he had to go on.
He should have died in her place.
Even the children would have been happier that way: they could have had one parent to accompany them beyond the Dragon's Gate. They might mourn him for decades, or perhaps even a century or two, but they would forget him in time. Dragons were shaped for long life. Their bodies and minds were far better equipped to bear eternity than those of fragile humankind.
When he'd met Athos, he'd had some glimmer of interest in life for its own sake for a time, and even deluded himself, briefly, into thinking he might recover from his grief. But then they had found Arcadia, and he had felt the grey weight of doom upon his shoulders, as certain as the apocalypse his daughter had once glimpsed in nightmare. Tormented by a utopia that reminded him of what he had once had, and been unable to defend, he would descend ever further into desperation and madness, down to some depth even he could not comprehend. Perhaps he'd become a vacant shell, as those who lost themselves in the dark did, or take his own life from utter deadness. Or go mad.
Madness would be welcome by now as an end to this emptiness.
Athos would be fine. Nergal's only friend or not, he had many, many friends; the entire village loved him, save those too bitter to ever forgive one of the Eight Generals. Once, he might still have missed Nergal – frail human that he was – but their paths had diverged over the years. Athos still had hope for the world, Nergal had none: that gap, which had once seemed bridgeable, now yawned as wide as the chasm between life and death.
Any pain Nergal felt was only the consequence of foolishness, of thinking that it could ever be otherwise.
His sole consolation was his newest discovery in the deepest recesses of the Arcadian library: the forbidden draconic art of quintessence, that which the Fire Dragon generals had used to corrupt a captive Divine Dragon child and convert her into a fount of soulless, mindless abominations. In the horror at what the generals had done with the art, the pacifists of Arcadia had barred its use and study – yet preserved the knowledge, in the general draconic way. Beings that lived for millennia were loath to ever get rid of anything for good, no matter how great their disgust; some instinct forbade them from it, lest they glean something of value from it in eons to come.
He might. It promised power far beyond what he could gather on his own – a way past that unbridgeable chasm, a road toward the impossible… a path to godhood. Its sole price was the energy of the soul.
Plants died without the sun, animals without their food. What was so different? The sanctity of life – and yet, were dragons not carnivores? Did humans not butcher each other over far pettier things? In a world in which life was fleeting and the virtuous died more cruelly than the vicious – why should this, of all arts, be denied?
Why should the loss of one dragon girl's soul have been more grievous than the loss of countless draconic lives?
He knew once he would have had answers. His own justifications broke him even as he accepted them. He should never have come to a state in which he could devise them; he should have died long before he could not deny them.
The Scouring had broken the entire world, and even the cessation of the Ending Winter had not returned the world that was. Why were those who had waged that war so privileged as to have done so? What stopped him, too, from pursuing his own desires down whatever road they led, whatever the cost? The world went mad long ago; only his own folly and hesitancy had prevented him from joining it.
Until now.
As he slaughtered small animals and practiced taking their life-force, he sent a few silent words of apology towards Athos. He could not say them to the man's face, of course; Athos's worldview was so radically different now that his words would seem incomprehensible, the silliness of an ignorant child or the perversion of a madman. He understood.
And yet he would never behave so toward Athos, so why pretend this was even still a friendship –
No, Athos was as much a friend as he possibly could be. He could not help his nature. Nergal was not yet so cruel as to enlighten him.
That day would come, however.
And for that, he felt one final surge of sorrow.