A Note from the Author: Thank you SO MUCH for your patience with updates, everyone, if you're still reading this. I was waiting to see how events in the manga progressed, and have since decided to continue my canon-compliant AU course. I hope for updates to be more frequent now! 3
Chapter 14: Shiganshina
On account of the dark, the trio dismounted and walked the horses in case of any debris. Annie and Mercedes held the lanterns ahead, while Oliver led the horses. Mercedes took the opportunity to look around for any clues that the Legion had been here. There was much more mud on the stone underfoot, but it didn't have the churned quality left after many horses. Neither were there large Titan footprints, and no fresh rubble.
Thunder echoed through the strangely dank tunnel. Water dripped onto them as they passed through.
"It might be easier to make camp here," said Oliver.
"We can retrace our steps if we need to," Mercedes replied, "but I just...I need to see for myself."
The other end of the tunnel did have a small amount of ambient light, but not much. Mercedes pushed ahead, anxious for any kind of sign or perhaps even the sight of the Legion victorious, camped for the night. She was never much one for hope, though, and her steps quickening to take her the last small stretch was merely to put that hope to rest for good.
Directly across from this doorway of dark, in the distance was a much more solid door of faint light - the outer gate, sealed with the same glowing crystallized bone-rock that was housed in their lanterns. But the second Mercedes felt relief, she also felt confusion. She wasn't sure what she was looking at between her and that outer gate. Or rather, what she didn't see.
"It wasn't like this when we passed through," she muttered.
Though difficult to tell precisely in the dark, it seemed as though Shiganshina was far more decayed and flattened than it had been the last time they were here. The flashes of lightning cast all too brief light on a landscape softened by a strange amount of greenery, as though someone had come along and placed a blanket over it. No Titans, no buildings taller than a single floor, no fires. There was an acrid smell in the air that wasn't quite that of death, which was somehow more worrying.
"They're not here," she said when she felt Oliver and Annie come up beside her.
Oliver began, "They could just be -"
"No, they're not here." After another scan of the bleak landscape, she pulled herself into Sabine's saddle. "Let's head toward the other gate - there's bound to be more clues there."
Thunder and lightning continued to duel overhead, but no forks struck ground. Mercedes almost wished they would - maybe it would discharge the unease, too. They walked the horses down the main thoroughfare at a cautious pace, taking in what they could. She was more than a little disconcerted by the fresh rubble and the great number of rocks and boulders scattered everywhere, as if they'd fallen from the sky like hail.
At one point Mercedes paused Sabine and bent to examine the greenery that'd taken over the town. She was surprised when it turned out to be the same flower Jean had sent her in his letter - lush emerald-green clouds of tapered oval leaves approaching six feet high in spots with more of the nearly black bell-shaped flowers and the green nubs of new berries. The acrid smell, she determined, was from them. No doubt all the rain had washed much of it out of the air and she was grateful for that - too deep an inhale and her stomach churned.
She caught back up with Annie and Oliver, who had stopped. Oliver pointed upward, "Hey, look."
Mercedes squinted and searched around where he was pointing. She heard the rather weak, panting call of an eagle, which helped her look and eventually she spotted it circling above them.
"It's been following us for a few, I think," Oliver said. "Getting lower, too."
Curious, Mercedes whistled up at it in the long, undulating note usually used to call messenger hawks. It responded almost immediately and began to wind lower and lower. Oliver handed his lantern to Annie, grabbed a spare saddle blanket from one of the other horses and wrapped it around one wrist and forearm, held it high. Mercedes whistled again.
The golden eagle flapped its large wings frantically before landing on Oliver's arm; it stood about as high as his head from his torso and for the moment it kept its wings aloft, she hazarded a guess that its wingspan was as wide as she was tall. She navigated Sabine nearer so that she could investigate the message capsule tied to its ankle, and it pecked at her knuckles a few times.
"I thought all the hawks the Queen sent came back to her?" said Oliver. "I've never seen this kind before."
"It's a golden eagle," Mercedes clarified, managing to detach the capsule and draw away. "I remember Fhalz showing one to me in a book. They're pretty rare to see trained nowadays. I didn't know the Queen had one."
"Do you think it's been flying around this whole time or was it sent to meet us here?"
"That it was sent is more likely." Mercedes pried the top off the capsule and after removing the single slip of paper, placed the capsule in her lap. A tap of her heels sent Sabine a few steps closer to Annie and to light. She read the salutation and her stomach churned; she folded the paper back with her fingers and looked away for a moment. Annie caught her eye, but said nothing. Mercedes forced herself to read:
I hope this finds you well, Dead Warden.
I have every faith that unlike most, you will not have become a corpse by now. Were your reputation not so severe at this point your actions could have been framed as heroic. I have to admit to enjoying the proceedings. I imagine you continue to believe that you will triumph even now - that you can do anything.
One thing even a Carello cannot do, however, is be two places at once.
Your Queen is strong-willed but you have left her dreadfully exposed, to say nothing of those closest to you. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that should our prior conversation be made public in any way, you will be returning to a far more unstable kingdom than what you find out there.
With earnest wishes for your safe return. Feel free to keep the eagle for your use.
A smaller version of that familiar seal was embossed at the bottom of the page.
The acrid smell in the air felt as though it had crystallized in Mercedes' mouth by the time she was done reading. Oliver and Annie were looking at her expectantly and she had nothing, really, to tell them. Panic for Julia clamored in her. And what of Historia? Could Zackly really make good on such a threat, or was it merely a bluff? Not that she could do anything about it. Moreover, is there any way he could be involved in what they'd found here at Shiganshina? At Karanese he seemed to have been genuinely uncertain about why she was leaving.
Too many questions, not enough answers. She scratched at her temple despite wanting to pull on her hair to relieve the headache that was emerging.
"Well?" Annie intoned. She shifted in the saddle, almost as though she was bored.
Mercedes hesitated.
"From the Queen?" Oliver tried, but the hope in his voice was brittle.
"From the Commander-in-Chief," Mercedes admitted. "Just taunting me like he did at the gate. Evidently has no better use for time or resources." She folded the letter away and tucked it in her pocket, glanced at the eagle. "Either way, we need to send word back that the outer gate has been sealed. I have a feeling the rest will take us longer to figure out but this is still momentous." She tried to buoy herself up on this idea - no matter the circumstances, the gate was still sealed. Wall Maria was, effectively, reclaimed. At what price was potentially news to deliver in person. She hunted around in her saddlebag for paper and something to write with.
She halted several times in writing a response, decided to keep it simple. For one, she didn't want to cloud things with alarming details. Secondly, she couldn't be sure if this eagle belonged to the queen and thus who would read this information first. If Zackly were the recipient it was better to be brief. As an afterthought she snagged another sprig of the ubiquitous bell-flowered plant and enclosed it with a note for someone to try to identify it.
When the eagle was launched into the air with the tenuous reply, the three of them stared up at it long after it was lost in the low-hanging clouds. Mercedes felt a weight settle on her with its leaving, like their briefly-reclaimed lifeline to the real world was gone. The lightning continued to tremble.
She breathed in deeply, slowly. "There'll be more clues by the outer gate," she repeated quietly, reorienting them.
Oliver took back his lantern from Annie, and they resumed their slow walk toward the gently-luminous, sealed outer gate.
The bitter smell of snapped and crushed vegetation underfoot began to linger in her nostrils. Mercedes tried to avoid stepping on it but it was well and truly trying to take over the area, even the roads. She peered around her more desperately than she would have liked, trying to make sense of the town. She'd never been here and had no point of reference. Despite the stillness of the air it also seemed like things moved in the corners of her vision - every one of them potentially Jean. Each time it wasn't she felt a splinter of anxiety press into her footsteps.
What worried her more was that not only did she feel like she was being watched, but she felt, absurdly, like her father had been here. The headache and the smells reminded her of her parents' bedroom in the House of Heaven and that valerian concoction Marco had been instructed to give her.
Mercedes refocused. That'll do you no good. It's not smart to separate to search, but you can still gather information. She looked at Annie. "When I first mentioned my father as Two Swords, it seemed like you knew that name. Have you met him?"
Annie looked at the ground, sighing, and tucked her hair behind her ear.
Mercedes gave her another moment, then when nothing came, added, "Back at Julia's you asked me if I was my father's daughter. So I guess you did meet." Saying it aloud made it worse, but as always she pressed on. "Did he - did you work together?" Her throat felt unexpectedly constricted by the idea, particularly here, now, in the echo of the first nightmare.
"We met, yeah. Once I think," Annie said at length. "A few years ago. He moved separately from us." She further surprised Mercedes by looking at her. "I don't have anything else to tell you about him." There was a trace of sympathy in her tone. It vanished when she continued. "Why bring him up?"
"The plants, right?" Oliver said before Mercedes could decide how much to divulge.
"The plants?" Annie repeated.
They three of them detoured around a fallen building into a side street, then out into a small courtyard with a well in its center, separating to flow around it like leaves in a river flowing around a stone.
"Last time we met, he showed a knack for herbalism, let's say," Mercedes answered as they flowed back together. "These plants are weird so I couldn't help but think of him." She looked at Annie, "They look familiar to you?"
Annie paused, leaned over to examine them in the poor light. She straightened. "I don't think so. But then, not like I paid attention to this kind of thing."
They were nearly at the Wall, now. Mercedes turned over Annie's responses, weighing their potential truth. She supposed there was no reason for her to lie about those things. Progress, in a way.
She decided to reward it with an olive branch of a kind. "For the record, I thought Reiner and Bertholdt would be here. Maybe they were affected by whatever happened here, too."
Annie said nothing.
As Mercedes remembered with the breach zone in Trost, the buildings stopped and the ground began to slope toward the sealed gate. They rejoined the main road and followed it. Even the plants seemed to recede and Mercedes tried to use the faint light given off by the gate, like moonlight from behind a thin veil of clouds, and the intermittent lightning to examine the ground further. Nothing that looked fresh or disturbed. She took Annie's lantern and ventured a little off-track, hunkering low, eyes darting over everything desperately. Every faint shadow was the edge of a footprint, every softened edge of something fallen a green-cloaked unmoving back. The hoovefalls of the horses grew fainter and in their obscurity she thought she heard other sounds - human footfalls, tapping, whispers.
Then, she found something strange - a disembodied hoof, the white-gray of the strip of coat around its ankle stained to rust.
Mercedes frowned and crouched. Though she didn't touch it, when she craned her neck she could see that part of the hoof itself had a chunk missing, down to the marrow. She stood and kept going, scanning. It didn't take long.
The exposed ribs were like a hand reaching toward the sky. The horse lay twisted at an unnatural angle, one leg totally gone from the thigh down and another halfway, its neck and back clearly broken in several places. The saddle was half-off, forgotten in the grass. It had been ripped open at the gullet and when she covered her nose and mouth to peer closer, she saw that its organs were gone and nowhere nearby. What pained her more was the grimace of terror on its face, its lower jaw missing and the skin peeled back from a third of the rest of its head. It was chaotic but somehow deliberate in its chaos.
Her skin and eyes prickled. Her frown scored itself deeper into one of regret. She crouched and laid a hand on the cold stiffness of its intact flank for a moment, then stroked the blood-clotted mane.
White. A white horse. Commander Erwin's horse. But this doesn't look like the work of a Titan. And it's alone. She looked over its body into the dark - a rising squawk like a strangled foxcall was reaching for her.
"Mercedes."
The sound was gone, and Mercedes pushed down the feeling of fear. You imagined it, she told herself.
Mercedes stood upright and turned to Annie, whose tone was unusual. She and Oliver were farther away than she'd realized; she left the horse reluctantly and jogged over the soft earth to rejoin them and their horses, which were stamping and turning nervously, at the uneven foot of the crystallized gateway. Oliver looked like he was about to vomit and Annie, more alarmingly, didn't look much better.
Nonetheless Oliver swallowed and said, "Look." He raised his lantern high.
The light swept over the pearly face of Eren's work. It was beautiful. Within it, however, were several human shadows in varying degrees of clarity and darkness.
The only reason Mercedes understood she wasn't imagining this, too, was because of a long blonde pigtail faintly moving in the air stirred by the snorts and whinnies of the horses - she traced it nearly a head above Oliver to the bird-pecked hand and half-exposed face of a Scout. Her expression was one of anguish.
