Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist is not mine. I'm just...well, just read on.

Chapter 33: Killing the Truth

Once, long ago, Alphonse Elric had been the Philosophers Stone. Not held it, not used it, been it. For a few brief weeks, his soul had been bound not to a suit of ancient armour but to a mobile mass of steel-coated red stone, coursing with an incredible amount of power. It had been horrible – knowing how many people had died to provide the fuel for the stone, it could hardly have been otherwise – but he had also felt like the only thing that kept him from flying was force of habit. He had been so light, so free of any kind of limitation that it had made him giddy. Ed had worn himself out trying to keep up. Al could have carried him easily if he had let him. He could have carried a train.

That was the nearest he had ever come to what it felt like to have the Gatekeepers soaring through him.

They did not stay still. One of them did not just 'ride' inside him. They flowed around him and Noah, a breath of wind one minute, a breaking wave the next, colouring the world until it shone with a thousand different hues. He could see the alchemy filling the room, see the paths it was taking by trails of juggled molecules and rearranged atoms. It was so beautiful that he almost missed the tangled knots of bright lines that told him there were other people in the room. He blinked, focusing on what was beneath the colour. One of the Templars was cradling a woman's body. Without a trace of doubt, he knew she was dead. A younger man was slowly, painfully pulling himself over the floor towards her, his face and hair so like Ed's but his body whole and full of a deep emptiness. Al wanted to help them, to reach out and sweep them all away to somewhere they would be safe. He couldn't. Not yet.

Ed lay beside him now, surrounded by what little was left of his auto-mail. Winry was probably going to beat him senseless for that. He was looking up at them, face a picture of utter shock. Al couldn't keep himself from smiling.

"Don't worry brother." The Gatekeepers had done something to his voice, making it echo over and over. "Everything's going to be alright."
It felt good to be the one saying that. But right then, everything felt good.

The brightest knot of light shifted and Al laid eyes upon the man responsible for all that had happened. He wondered how Chambers could possibly move with so much alchemy wound around his body. It was of every shade, every shape, every style, an entire universe's knowledge bound together and twisted. The sheer weight of it all was making the world bend and crack. It was wrong. It had no right to be there, not like that.

Chamber raised his hands and brought them together. Array after array wove together, so many that they would have been blinding if you could have seen with normal eyes. Diligence whispered to Al and told him to strike his staff on the ground. He did and suddenly the arrays fell apart, the energy streaming into the wood, earthed. The floor repaired itself, the stone slabs smoothed back into shape. More arrays formed, harsher, destructive. Those too were dragged down and the anteroom outside was mended, the beams lifted back into place, the walls closed up. Again, Chambers drew invisible circles with his mind and again, they drained away. The staff grew hot in Al's hand.

Nothing had been done to it to make it into an alchemic conduit. Nothing needed to be done to it. A small part of the energy passing through was constantly repairing the damage done by the rest. Said rest dispersed itself into the biggest array Al had ever created. Not that he really had created it. It had been there waiting, ready-made.

The curve of the earth was not perfect. But no circle you can draw in the real world can ever be perfect.

Noah's head was awash with voices.

High and deep, loud and soft, male and female, they rose and fell around her, sounding like nothing so much as a forest in the wind. It should have been overwhelming. But it wasn't. It was breathtaking, certainly, to be able to catch glimpses of so many lives. The Gatekeepers, though, made it bearable. They cut nothing out. They did not exclude a single thought. They simply unlocked all the doors in her mind and let the sounds of a million souls breeze through.

One in particular was louder than the rest. It was different, too. There were other voices mixed into it, shouting to be heard over a low rumbling chant that was threatening to drown them out. And that chant was getting louder, submerging its surroundings, becoming stronger.

It was Chambers, tiring of his failure to beat Al with alchemy, trying to attack them with the force of his will. Just as the Gatekeepers had predicted.

Noah had never thought about her power in terms of sound before. She had only ever seen the pictures people kept in their memories. Yet it was so obvious now that noise and vision were one and the same when you were inside someone's a soul. They were made from the same stuff, written in the same way – all you had to do was change the way you looked at them and they swapped places. Suddenly the strength of someone's will came down to how loud they were shouting. And all you had to do to keep them out was to shout louder.

Chambers fought hard. He tried to smother her, to strangle her, to wear her down with the screams of dying children and the shrieks of carrion crows. He dredged up the worst things he could find and made them sing to her, a chorus of thundering malice. But she was Diligence and Patience and Abstinence and she could sing in every voice that had ever lived.

They were evenly matched. He could not break her, she would not break him.

Stalemate.

Chambers had dismissed his alchemy. He stared at Al and Noah expressionlessly.
"How are you countering me?"
Al smiled.
"Is something wrong?"
"You should not have such power."
The younger Elric started walking clockwise around the edge of the central array.
"Are you sure?"
Noah began walking in the opposite direction.
"Why shouldn't we?" she asked.
Chambers did not answer, nor did he make a move to keep them in his line of sight.

"It's about knowledge," Al explained benignly.
"About the Truth," Noah added.
"Knowing how the world works is how we change it."
"The Truth is the way the world works."
"The Gatekeepers were born from the Truth."
"And we are the Gatekeepers."
"So we know everything they know."
"So we know everything," she stated.
"Therefore we have the power to stop you," he concluded.
They were directly behind Chambers now. He did not reply. They kept walking.

"Your premise is flawed," he said eventually, "Your Truth is gone. I have dismantled it. I have transformed it. It can give you no power."
"Because you have put your truth in its place?" Al asked lightly.
"Yes."
Noah smiled but kept silent. Al gave the impression of thinking hard.
"How did you do that?"
"I broke your Gate," Chambers answered coldly, "Your Truth died with it."
"The Truth can't die," objected Noah.
"If it could," argued Al, "it wouldn't be the Truth."
"That is incorrect," came the response, "You appear to have forgotten that I have had access to all that you know."
"Oh, yes..." Noah frowned. "You captured Kindness."
"I know what she knows. I am well aware that 'the Truth' is mutable. Through it, reality is decided. Thus, by changing the Truth, I have changed reality."

They came round in front him again and Al glanced at Chambers without breaking step.
"But the Truth is decided by reality. It's made from the souls of everyone who has ever lived. That means you've got it backwards."
"The flow of time has no bearing on these matters. A change in one will be reflected in the other. Replacing one Truth with another has replaced one reality with another."
"But you haven't changed reality," Noah persisted, "We can still use our Truth against you."
Chambers' eyes twitched ever so slightly.
"Clearly an anomaly due to the incompleteness of the transmutation process."
"Are you sure?" Al sounded surprised. "A moment ago you were saying we couldn't possibly have any power."
"A hasty conclusion. I expected to have effected a greater change by now. This distraction must have reduced the rate at which my work is progressing."

Thus satisfied that he had resolved the situation, Chambers willed himself to recommence his transit back to the Gate.

Something prevented him from doing so.

He lifted his head a fraction and, for the first time, turned to look directly at the younger man.
"What are you doing?"
His voice was very quiet. Al spoke just as quietly.
"According to you, we can't be doing anything."
"I have revised my analysis. What are you doing?"
"Why don't you tell us? You're the one who's 'replacing' the Truth."
Silence fell. It lasted nearly half a minute, broken only by footsteps.
"You are creating a circle," Chambers said at last, "Using alchemy to counteract mine."
This time, it was Noah who smiled.
"Yes. And you can't stop us."
"Nor can you stop the reaction I have begun."
"We don't have to."

Taking up the conversation again, Al spoke in the tone of a lecturer trying to correct an over-enthusiastic student.
"You still think you've done what you wanted to do. That what you saw in Kindness' mind and what you thought you saw are the same thing. But what if you got it backwards? What if what you think is the cause is really the effect? You think by changing the Truth you can change everything. But what if to change the Truth, you'd have to change everything? The Gate's in everyone, after all..."
"Those are reflections of the true Gate." Chambers blinked. "I am not misinterpreting the information."
"You're human," Noah told him, "How could you understand all of it?"
"I have taken Kindness within me," he stated bluntly, "I have all her faculties at my command."
"Really? Then tell me what a bat thinks when it flies. Tell me what it feels like to swim in the deepest sea. Tell me what a star sounds like when it's born."
"Those are meaningless."
"No." Al's staff hit the flags with a loud crack. "They are part of the Truth. Kindness would understand those things. You cannot. You are human. And you cannot be one of us. No matter how much of her power you took, you could only believe, could only see what you wanted to."

"You are incorrect."
The contradiction came almost immediately. Al shook his head.
"No. You've convinced yourself to see things one way. You can't see that it could be wrong. But that doesn't change the Truth that you are. The Gates in people aren't the reflections. The one you broke down is. It's a reflection of your Gate."
"You aren't transmuting the universe," Noah finished, "You're transmuting yourself."
"You are lying," Chambers accused slowly.
"We cannot."
"We speak only the Truth."
"The Truth that still exists."
"The Truth that you have not broken."

It no longer mattered which of them was speaking. Their voice was the same.
"You have opened the way for forces you can't control."
"But you haven't harmed the Truth."
"It's greater than you."
"Greater than anything."
"You are part of it."
"It is part of you."
"You have only changed yourself."
"You know we cannot lie."
"This is the Truth."

They kept walking. Chambers stood beneath his halo, as still as stone. His mouth thinned, his lips pressed tightly together. His nostrils flared a little. His spectacles glinted.

And then he frowned.

It was not a deep frown. It was a curious, quizzical frown, the frown of someone spotting something in their work that does not make sense. Somewhere, the equations seemed to have gone astray, to have done something counter-intuitive. As doubts go, it was vague and ill-formed and, above all, brief. The equations did add up. They did make sense.

And yet...

It was enough.

The universe tilted on its axis. The Gate opened. Not the edifice, the image drawn from a species' collective imagination and superimposed over the top, but the heart of the matter, the bridge between worlds that lay beneath. Gold and white broke loose, thoughts and ideas thundering free. Al and Noah and Gatekeepers were swallowed by it, flung into an ocean with no end and no beginning.

They/He/She swam through the waves with ease. It was what she/they/he had been born to do. Down and down he/they/she went, back into the past – or what was called the past or what had once been the past – back until they/she/he reached the place where the waves began to wash in different directions.

It did not look like much, seen from that angle. A man sitting before a fire, scratching lines onto parchment. There came a moment though, when he began to murmur softly and brush powder onto his work. He traced the edges of his drawings. He focused. He prayed. He desired.

He split into two frozen copies of himself, drifting away from the origin. A spark hovered between them. Nothing grand, nothing brilliant. Just a spark. Pain and struggle and power had all converged on that spark, had all strained to push it away from one of those copies and towards the other. The effort to shift it even half that distance had been immense.

To them/her/him, it was nothing to push it back to where it was meant to be.

One of the arrays glowed for a few seconds and the dust changed colour. One of the arrays did nothing.

That is perhaps how it was. And then again, perhaps it was not. But that was what he/she saw. What the Gatekeepers had seen, she/he would never know.

The ring of golden light vanished.

Chambers gasped. His face lost what colour it had had. He buckled at the knees and collapsed, putting out his hands just in time. A figure was left standing in the space he had left, a figure with obsidian skin wearing a long white cloak.

Kindness laid her fingers on his head. Something curled out from him, like smoke rising from his eyes. A wisp that might have been a man. Another followed, that could have been a boy with no arm and no leg. More came. Men, women, sometimes children. Envy leered as he evaporated. Falconer faded. The Marquis vanished. Hohenheim of Light seemed to pause and smile. The ruin of Huskisson silently screamed its way out of existence.

When they were all gone, the man who was left on the floor was not the man who had tried to rebuild the cosmos. He was trembling uncontrollably, his fingers scrabbling uselessly against the floor. His eyes were wide and unfocused and his face...

Raw, primal, uncomprehending horror was written in every line.

Kindness knelt beside him and rested her head against the side of his.
"Goodbye, Benedict," she whispered.
The shadow of a thin arm felt its way up Chambers' back. Then a second crept over his leg. And a third wrapped itself around his throat. More and more came, the Hunger grasping and clawing at him. Kindness stood, standing back.

And what was left of Benedict Chambers disappeared into the blackness without a word.

In Rush Valley, people began to emerge into the sun, unsure of whether the sky was going to fall on them or not. Winry and Paninya joined them, the latter clutching a shattered auto-mail hand.
"Is it over?" she wondered, half-afraid of the answer.

Winry had none for her.
"I don't know..."

Havoc watched as the black cloud beneath them doubled over and over on itself until it had vanished completely. He and Dakota turned away from the crevice, looked at one another and as one man sank to the blessedly still ground.

The major fumbled for his cigarettes.
"Ok. Why the hell was it a bad idea to move the capital again?"

"Mom! The sky's not shaking any more!"
Tawny leant back in Rose's arms, staring upwards in awe. Around them, the people of Lior were murmuring and pointing. Someone began to sing. Soon half the city seemed to have joined it.

All Rose could do was hold onto her son and hug him as tight as she could.

Pinako Rockbell ran a critical eye over the damage to her house. Several fields over, a group of farmhands was whooping and hollering, dancing over the crops they had so carefully planted. Den limped up to the old lady's side and flopped down, exhausted.

She snorted and began picking up broken pots.

A/N: Jeepers creepers, that was complicated. Even more because....well, stay tuned for that!

Thanks are owed once more to Dailenna for looking this over. I've amended the last chapter a bit at her suggestion, though I admit I haven't actually got rid of the bit she really had a problem with. There are several reasons for that, not least because I know exactly how the trick is done and it's all alchemy! Anyone guess how...? One of the amendments might give you a clue...but that's neither here nor there, really! Stand by folks - the final chapter is coming!