Chapter 14: Unison
Cyril had seen Claude riding a horse once with his bow in hand.
Leonie had mentioned she wanted to become a bow knight, and Claude had offered to show her how to get a feel for shooting from horseback. It wasn't like using a sword or lance astride—those weapons still allowed one arm to keep a grip on the reins if necessary. With a bow, it was impossible to use without both hands, leaving the rider with only their legs to maneuver their horses.
From what Cyril had seen, Claude was good. Watching him, it was like a rein was superfluous. The horse seemed to know exactly when to turn so that what had been a wild twist of Claude's body in fact aligned perfectly with the targets as they passed.
From the blue, Cyril suddenly remembered the riders he had seen once as a young child when his parents had taken him to the Festival of the Five Tribes in Anadolu. Years had passed since he thought of it, but once the first ghost of a memory slipped through, the rest of it entered uninvited.
Something had gone right that year, and his mother had decided that they could travel to the province capital for the festival instead of celebrating in town.
He remembered how the packed buildings and the winding alleyways had dizzied him. The festival wasn't like the one held in town, attended only by locals. He had smelled the incense clinging to the clothes of the tradesman from Obodas, seen the newly invented wonders being shown in crowded stalls by Amanian scholars, and heard the quick paced prairie songs on Temuji horsehead fiddles. He had even spotted one of the veiled holy women, rumored to almost never leave their homes in the cliffsides of Obodas. Their presence was likely because the king himself had come from the Almyran capital to celebrate in his home province, so even they sent a few of their numbers out.
But the memory that came the most vividly were those of the festival games. It had been more a show of talent than anything else. Khidr had sent out their finest wyvern riders, but Cyril had been enthralled by the equestrians from Kamangir and Temujin. Even the best wyvern rider kept a firm grip on the reins, letting go only to shoot. There was a clear distinction between man and beast, working together, but separate all the same.
The equestrians had been different. He could not recall a moment when their hands touched the horses—they hadn't even attached reins. The horses had been like extensions of their riders. They had turned and leapt in tight circles, lunging forward and backwards, all while the rider remained straight-backed in the saddle, lazily shooting their arrows at increasingly difficult targets. Two parts of one smooth action.
Those people were born in the saddle, his father had said.
Claude rode like that. Like someone raised in the saddle.
Which was why it came as a surprise when Claude was paired with him for sky watch.
Cyril stared as Claude cooed at a wyvern that was returning his affections with her own rumbling purr as he scritched her jaw. It was hard to believe that the wyvern had never seen Claude before today from how well she was responding to his attempts at buttering her up.
"Ah, I really missed this," Claude said, face for once shining as bright and warm as the yellow cape slung over his shoulders. There was no restraint to his giddiness—what was usually a locked book written with invisible ink had now opened its pages, displaying its joy for all to read in loopy lettering. "Can you believe they won't let students near the wyverns without 2 months of training?"
"Well, they're big, and can take a bite at ya if you don't get their respect," Cyril said as he climbed on top of his own wyvern. "...but I like them a lot too."
Claude stopped blubbering over his and swung himself into the saddle with one smooth jump. "Is that why you're always on wyvern duty?"
"I-I'm not always—"
"But you do always volunteer to swap other chores for it," Claude grinned. "Not that I blame you. Nothing beats a wyvern." With a kick, the wyvern took off and dragged Claude's excited whoop up into the air with her.
Cyril groaned. They were supposed to stay together. Shaking his head, he kicked his wyvern and felt the rush of wind accompanying their ascent. Despite himself, Cyril could feel his frown twitch upward into a grin as his stomach gave a satisfying flip that only the sensation of being airborne could give.
He stopped the ascent when he was just level with the tallest spire of the cathedral. Even from that low height, the world seemed to shrink beneath him. Garreg Mach was situated at the precipice of the mountain. From the back of the wyvern he could see how the monastery spilled off the cliffs and dripped itself down the mountainside with little rooms and stairs cut into the cliffs. The gaping maw of the mountains breathed its misty breath up into the monastery, pooling so that from the ground the fog seemed endless, but from the air, it was as if the heavens were inverted and clouds had fallen to the earth.
It was wide world out there. The higher it went, the wider the view, and the smaller his world in the monastery became.
"Don't want to keep going up?" Claude said, descending to level himself with Cyril.
"Nah, any higher and we won't be able to see people anymore." Cyril's inquisitive frown returned. "How come you're not training to be a bow knight?"
"It's a rite of passage to fly a wyvern." Claude patted his wyvern fondly. "Even if I'm in Fodlan, that doesn't change."
Cyril blinked. It was said that the people of Khidr were once called "the people of the wind" because they were the first to tame wyverns. That tradition had persisted over a millennium, and even the feeblest children eventually learned to handle a wyvern. But he didn't expect to hear of those rites from Claude.
"Aren't you from Kamangir? It should be horses then, right?"
"No?" Claude lifted an eyebrow. "I'm from Khidr."
"What?!" Cyril's stomach gave another odd little flip. The same province. He didn't think of Almyra as home, not really, but there was something comforting about the knowledge that there was another with ties so close to his own.
"What's with the shock?" Claude said with a laugh. "Only people from Khidr really interact with Fodlan. Any Almyran you run into in here would be from Khidr. Although…" He tilted his head. "It is true I spent most of my time in Kamangir. How'd you guess?"
"Umm...well…" Now that he knew it was wrong, Cyril felt embarrassed to say it aloud. "I thought you rode like a Kamangi."
Claude let out an even louder peal of laughter. "Never say that to someone from Kamangir, they'd take it as an insult. I, however, am very flattered. Thank you, Cyril. Makes all those times my father tied me to a horse worth it."
It was strange to hear those words, those names, so casually. He had long put away that knowledge in the back of his mind and kept the box firmly shut, but now the curios from his childhood were rattling and begging to be let out.
"Why were you in Kamangir?" he asked before he could stop himself.
"My father works in the capital, but I still lived in Anadolu for a few months every year."
"You lived in Parsa? Do they have wyverns there?"
"Well, it's nothing compared to the numbers in Khidr, but they had a fair share." Claude smiled fondly. "Even got my own egg to hatch."
Cyril's jaw dropped. His parents had been breeders, so naturally he had seen a fair few hatch, but none of them were ones that he had called his own. When you're older, they had told him. It wasn't like a horse where you could start training a child from infancy to ride and fall. Cyril could understand why they had told him so, but that didn't make the sting of never reaching that when with them any less painful.
"A real beauty too," Claude said unprompted, apparently all too glad to have an excuse to gush about his wyvern. "Her scales are like pearls."
"...did you pick an albino?"
"I did."
"That's...dangerous isn't it?" Cyril said hesitantly. "White's so easy to spot, and they're usually the runts of the clutch."
Claude's fond smile turned distant. "Something that's unlucky in one situation could be a boon in another."
"I dunno if I can see when a brighter target would be a good thing. In the wild they mostly just die…"
"Well, there's many ways to live," Claude said, gazing out somewhere far beyond where Cyril could see. "Something isn't useless because it's different. It'll just have a different purpose than what's expected, that's all."
"Take a common wyvern. Compared to horses, they require more food and more training. In an open field with limited resources, it's more practical to have a horse. It wasn't until people were forced to cross mountains that the value of a wyvern became apparent."
Suddenly, Cyril was even happier that Garreg Mach was high in the mountains. "I'm glad that they keep wyverns here," he said.
"Well they're too useful to get rid of," Claude said, gaze returning to focus. "Foreign ideas are easier to swallow when it's a convenient one."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Cyril said, confused by the turn of the conversation.
"This is for your ears only, alright? Don't go repeating this to the monks." Claude edged his wyvern closer and leaned in conspiratorially. Cyril considered plugging his ears.
"All is given by the goddess in Fodlan," Claude started as Cyril was still considering. "Every blessing, every idea, and because of that, tradition is tied to faith. In turn, anything that changes tradition could be seen as an attack on the faith. Creatures with an appearance similar to wyverns are divine messengers of the goddess here, and that belief can trace its roots to the earliest worship of the goddess, predating even the founding of the Seiros faith. Some of the early texts I found even refer to wyverns themselves as lower messengers of the goddess."
"It's unlikely that the people of Fodlan would've thought to tame them like beasts unless outsiders—like say, our ancestors—had shown them that it was possible. Then, because they were too useful to be without, wyverns were dragged down from their place of worship and became mere beasts on the level of pegasi. Faith and tradition agreed to change as one for the sake of convenience."
Claude leaned back and grinned. "Or, that's my ongoing theory anyway. Pretty interesting though, right?"
Cyril narrowed his eyes. "I thought you didn't care about the church. Seteth complains about you skipping out on prayer all the time."
"That's not true at all. I bet the only way for any smooth shift in tradition to occur would be if the faith was willing to mold itself to the change. In that sense, I care a lot about the church."
"Sounds pretty blasphemous," Cyril said flatly.
"You say that like you worship the goddess."
"I don't. I was saying it sounds blasphemous for any faith." He shook his head. "You're pretty odd, you know that Claude?"
"Oh?" Claude leaned forward again. "Good odd, bad odd?"
Which indeed. At times it seemed comforting, and at others, like that comfort had a catch. "...both, I guess," Cyril said after several seconds.
"Glad to see my efforts to keep you guessing are working fantastically," Claude said brightly. "Although, I do hope it'll err on the side of good in the end."
Cyril hoped that as well, but he couldn't help the growing discomfort as Claude's earlier words settled. Cyril knew he'd always stand by Lady Rhea without question, but he hoped that those odd ideas wouldn't lead Claude to stand on an opposing side.
Copying and pasting this author note too since I dropped a lot of names this chapter. Here's a quick guide to the provinces of Almyra in this fic.
Khidr - Bordering Fodlan. Cyril and Claude's father are from here. Anadolu is the capital city. A border province without much prestige up until the ascent of the current king.
Kamangir - Contains the Almyran capital, Parsa. The original hero king was from here, and historically, most kings were selected from this province.
Temujin - The other equestrian province to the east of Kamangir.
Obodas - Province with many trade routes. Most of their cities are built into the stone cliffsides of the mountains there. Have a sect of people living there that don't follow the same faith as the rest of Almyra.
Amani - A province known for its high concentration of scholars.