15 - CAGED GHOSTS
.
Felix
.
.
I wrap my hands around Morcliff's throat to hold back the bleeding and focus desperately on the healing spell. I've been practicing them every night as Sylvain sleeps, keeping my promise to him that next time he is hurt I will be able to save him.
The skin fuses back together again, but I know that isn't enough. I push through the hazy feeling in my mind and search his body with the healing magic, fixing the damage done internally. He chokes and coughs up blood as I finish the spell. As he spits an insult at me, I breathe a sigh of relief at the fact I healed him well enough that he can talk. We wouldn't have been able to get an explanation and confession out of him if I hadn't fixed his vocal chords well enough.
Letting go of him, I say, "Dimitri! Help me carry him out of here!"
But as I turn around, the sight that meets me chills me to the bone.
The nightshade poison is spreading swiftly through the confined space of the small house and it has caught up to Dimitri. He is standing a few feet away, staring at me like he is seeing a ghost.
"Fuck. Get out of here! Dimitri! Get out!" I cry, bolting towards the door. If I can get him out into the fresh air before he breathes too much of the poison, maybe he won't-
With a roar, he lunges at me and tackles me to the floor, his huge, strong body hitting me so hard it knocks the breath from my lungs. I gasp air back into my lungs instinctively, realizing my mistake a split-second too late.
Fuck. Fuck!
My vision blurs, light and shadow swirling in disorienting patterns around us. I look up into Dimitri's wide eyes and his face flickers and distorts. For one horrible second, I see a boar looking back at me, blood dripping from its massive jaws, its eyes solid black like gouged holes. I blink and the image vanishes.
"Get off me!" I say, struggling under his grip. I hear laughter in the background. Morcliff's.
"It's all a trap!" Dimitri hisses. "You are not real!"
"I am real! Get the fuck off me! Get out of here!"
He keeps me pinned to the ground, expressions of fear and horror passing across his face as he struggles to look at me clearly. "You are not real. They take your bodies and they come back to slither among us! But I will not let you take my friends from me! I will not let you take anything else from me!" He moves his hands to my throat furiously. "Where is Felix? Where is Sylvain?"
"Dimitri, it's me!" I croak, grabbing his wrists and trying to wrestle them away to no avail.
"How many people are you going to take from me?" he demands. "Father, mother, Glenn, Edelgard… You are soaked in the blood of people I loved! Now you take my two dearest friends? What do you want from me? Why have you come slithering from your shadows to torment me again?"
"Dima," I gasp. "Please…"
The childhood nickname stirs something in him and his fingers loosen around my throat.
"Dima, it's really me. The drug is messing with your mind! The imposter is gone. It's just me here. We need to escape! Let go of me."
Agony twists his expression. "You lie."
"I'm not lying. Trust-" I stop mid-sentence as a figure materializes behind him, standing in the corner, sword drawn but lowered. It is too wreathed in shadows and indistinct to make out at first, then I recognize its face and a choked cry of pain escapes my lips. "Glenn."
No, no, no, no. It's Dimitri's words messing with me, his own ghosts invading my mind to haunt me. It's not real. None of this is real!
Run, Felix! Run! Get out of here! You have to find Sylvain! You have to-
Glenn steps closer, still fading in and out of existence. His brow furrows in grief and he whispers something but I can't hear him over the pounding of my own heart and the ragged pants of Dimitri's breathing.
The world spins, grows dark. Blood blooms across Glenn's chest, flowing from too many wounds to count, spreading from his hands to the blade of his sword, dripping down onto the floor. Again he speaks but again I can't hear his voice.
Can I even remember what his voice sounded like?
Abruptly, Dimitri lets go of me and whirls around, scrambling to his feet and grabbing his lance. He stabs it into the shadows and says, "Get back! Leave us!"
I can't see the demons he is fighting. I can't get up. I can't move. I can't tear my eyes away from Glenn, watching in a paralysis of agony as fire licks at his skin along with the blood, searing it away to blackened flesh. He drops the sword and falls to his knees.
"No-" I breathe. "No, Glenn, please-"
My paralysis breaks and I haul myself to my hands and knees. Crawling forward, I try to touch him but my hand sweeps through the air without making contact. I reach for him desperately, a healing spell glowing in my hands.
"Hold on, I can save you!" I gasp. "Glenn-"
An anguished cry cuts through me. Not mine. Glenn's? No, Dimitri's.
Something hot and wet is spreading across my face. Blood? No, tears.
My eyes burn, my lungs ache, my heart pounds so hard it feels like it is bludgeoning my chest from the inside.
Glenn mouths the word 'go' and when I throw myself towards him to grab him, he vanishes entirely and I fall through the space where he was a second ago and hit the floor.
Whimpers. Tears. My own.
A voice screaming out names of ghosts. Dimitri's.
Laughter. Manic and pained. Morcliff's.
I stumble up, dodging the swing of Dimitri's lance as he crashes through the house attacking shadows. I look for the door but when I finally find it, steel bars are blocking it off. As I turn around, I see that the house itself is gone, replaced with a cage, a prison, only reeling darkness and smoke visible through its bars.
.
.
Sylvain
.
Instincts sharpened through years of battle lend me the speed to evade his attack and I am back on my feet, dodging out of reach of him in seconds.
"Who are you? What do you want with us?" I say, dancing away as he swings at me again.
"With you? Nothing," the demon in Sterling's body answers with a clipped laugh. "You and your friends are just lab rats. That's all you humans are good for! And once we have our weapons readied, you will die in fire and smoke, slaughtering each other like animals."
"Just like Remire Village," I say, remembering the stench of death in the air and the eerie moment Tomas transformed into the demon.
Sterling circles me, looking for an opening, but each time he attacks, I am just a little faster. There is something about the way he moves that doesn't seem quite natural, like his body is a puppet on strings. There is always a tiny second of delay in his movements. If I can just stay one step ahead, I could survive this.
Stay sharp, Sylvain. Look for a weapon! Keep him talking.
"Morcliff was just a tool for your experiments, wasn't he?" I say.
"Once the fires of your hatred and fears are stoked, you humans take very little pushing to do our work for us. It really is disgusting," he replies. "Asmer was chomping at the bit for a chance to carve up more victims. And Hamish was so easy to manipulate into turning his anger on you instead of his real tormentors." He laughs again. "It's like watching bad theater. You all are so stupid."
"And yet we still caught you," I answer, leaping out of the way of another strike.
"You would have lived if you hadn't stuck your nose in too deep."
"None of us are dead yet."
Sterling stops moving for a moment then disappears. I jump forward but cannot get out of the way in time to stop his blade from slicing across my back as he teleports behind me.
Pain burns through me from the wound, but it is not enough to stagger me. This time when he vanishes again, I whip around and grab his arm with both hands as he stabs at me again. I wrench the blade from him and thrust his arm down, bringing my knee up at the same time to collide with it.
The bone snaps and he yells in pain. For an instant Sterling's form flickers, betraying a glimpse of a different person beneath it. Then he teleports again and when he appears a few feet away from me, his image has stabilized to Sterling's once more.
I grab the knife up off the ground but the second I touch it, it dematerializes. Sterling's right arm hangs limp and broken at his side, but he summons another unearthly blade to his left hand and attacks.
.
.
Felix
.
I spin in circles, taking in the nightmare around me. All along the walls of our cage are strung bodies. They writhe and flicker in the corner of my eye, but the moment I blink and stare at them they hang limp and dead once more. I count them in horror, more appearing each time I look again.
Thena. The first girl we found in the woods.
Orin. The blinded man.
Harriet and Miles. The two soldiers who killed each other beside him.
The girl with the cut throat.
Sterling's rotten body, covered in scarred symbols.
Oh god no. No.
I turn around and see a seventh body in the shadows in the corner of the room, the crest of Fraldarius bleeding in his chest. It's Sylvain.
With a strangled cry, I run to him, but I trip and fall flat on my face. When I look up, he is gone and all the corpses have vanished. I try to get up, but I'm too light-headed and exhausted to move.
A voice whispers in the distance but I can't make out who it is or what he is saying. Clutching my head in my hands, I try to block out all the hallucinations, try to tell myself to focus on what is real. But I can't make the voice go away. It's calling my name.
I move my hands away from my ears and listen, a spark of hope lighting up in my mind as I recognize the voice as Sylvain's.
"I love you."
But he's not here. He's dead. I saw his body on the wall with the others.
"I love you, Fee," he says again, "more than anything."
Slowly, I pick myself up and shake my head a bit to clear away the haze, looking for him. "Sylvain!"
He doesn't reply. The voice falls silent.
"I love you too," I whisper.
The emotion grows so strong that I feel energy returning to my body - desperate, terrified, but steady. Sure.
"I love you," I say to the darkness. I know he can't hear me. But the words are like a lifeline to sanity nonetheless.
"Sylvain?" I call, straining my eyes to see through the swirling, distorted world around me. But I can't find him anywhere. Instead I see a great, hulking shadow in the corner, huddled in on itself, shuddering. A glimmer of blue and gold. Dimitri.
Run, Felix! Now, while he isn't looking. Run!
Just enough clarity remains in my mind to answer the panicked thought.
No.
Crawling over to him, I kneel down next to him and say his name. He doesn't respond, curling in on himself, shoulders shaking.
Tentatively, I reach out and touch his back, fingers brushing the rough hide of a boar. No, not a boar. Just the fur of his cloak.
"Dima."
He looks up at me, one eye a black hole, the other a glistening shard of blue sky, glowing with fear. Tear streaks cover his reddened face.
My head is spinning and my vision is still fading in and out, but I struggle through the haze, shaking my head a bit to clear it.
"Dima," I whisper. I touch his cheek and he flinches, causing me to yank my hand back in alarm.
"I can't do this," he says hoarsely. "Not again. I left these ghosts behind. I can't let them come back to haunt me."
"It's only in your mind," I tell him. "They're not real."
"I always knew that and yet it never made them any less terrifying."
He looks past me, staring into nothing. He opens his mouth to speak again then falls silent.
"Can you break through the bars?" I ask.
He stirs. "What bars?"
"The cage. Can you break us out? I don't think I can. I'm too…" Weak. Exhausted. Unsteady. I'm not sure my trembling hands can even hold a sword.
Dimitri gets to his feet, looking around determinedly. Then he freezes and says, "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?" I ask, dragging myself up.
He jumps and grabs his lance. "That voice."
I hold my breath and listen but there is only silence, torn by ragged startled breaths.
"Byleth," he whispers.
He runs forward and slams the hilt of his lance against the steel bars barricading the door. They splinter like wood and light blinds my eyes agonizingly, followed by a rush of cold wind in my face.
The shadows thin. The smoke clears. I stumble towards the light, plunging out into the open sky. I only make it a few steps before I collapse onto the dirt, heaving for breath. A racking cough wrenches my lungs, but as I suck fresh air back into them, a rush of clarity sweeps away some of the poison in my mind and I remember.
Sylvain is alive, but he disappeared with the imposter. We have to find him.
