The memory segment at the start of this chapter gets fairly intense when it comes to depictions of violence. Reader discretion is highly advised.

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?, The Before

The dark was suffocating. There was no light. Only darkness. Darkness and screams. So much screaming, it echoed in her head and she couldn't tell if they were actually real or just the memories of the insane. She was probably insane at this point. Anyone would be insane after... after... She didn't want to think about it.

She'd pray to every God she'd ever met if a single one could save her from this living hell. Her body hurt, ached in ways she didn't know possible. All of it. Every inch, both inside and out. It felt like all her blood had been slowly drained from her veins. She thinks she remembers needles and men with hungry eyes, but again, she doesn't know if those are memories or just her delusions. She doesn't know and she just wants it all to stop. The screams, the screams, the screams. They're everywhere. Loud and constant.

Each one is a voice she can recognize. The names fade on her tongue alongside any other words she could have spoken. What even are words at this point but babble to a woman who's slowly begun to lose all sense of self in this darkness. She's tired. But she can't sleep. The darkness keeps closing in on her throat. She isn't even sure if she's asleep or awake, but she's so very tired and screams just won't stop.

Children. Her children. She knows they're the ones screaming but she can't do anything about it. She's so very weak. She should be asleep right now. She should be safe. But the chains around her wrists sting and burn and she can't sleep. She has no strength to move, let alone the strength to do her job.

The images are still scorched into her eyes, and no matter how much the darkness continues to swirl around her she continues to see the same scenes on a looping repeat. She sees blood being drained from bodies. Bones being carved out of still living people before being thrown into furnaces. Melted down and made into... she's going to be sick. The panicked screams and the desperate pleas are haunting. The worst part is the fact there's nothing she can do, there's no power left in her weary body. Behind her own eyelids, she sees a spray of crimson as red-stained white is pulled from the rib cages of still screaming people. Those are people! People! It's sick and disgusting and fucked up and maybe their hair is green and their ears are pointed but those are fucking people.

She feels sicker.

Her own body aches and she doesn't even know if anything has been pulled from her yet. She doesn't know if she has arms or legs anymore. Everything hurts and she can't move any of her limbs, so she assumes not. She can't even feel her own tongue. Then again, she should really be dead if she's already had her turn to have the bones yanked from her still living body.

Maybe she is dead, and this is just her punishment. She doesn't think she's done anything in her life deserving of punishment, and she doesn't know of any Gods above her who could parse out a punishment like this, but at this point she's run out of other options. She doesn't want to believe the humans she loved so dearly could do things this demented to her and her children. And for what? Spite? Jealousy?

Her stomach churns and she wants to throw up but there's nothing in her stomach except for bile. She hasn't eaten in weeks. She must still have bones because she's pretty sure she can feel them pressed against the ground through a thin layer of skin. Maybe it's on purpose, so they're easier to take out and clean.

Her heart is a frantic patter against her chest. Why hasn't anyone even tried to save her? All these younger Gods she's taken in, and not a single one has so much as tried. Not she who rules Tellius, recently merged once more into a single divine. Not she who rules Ylisse, or they who rule Valm. The Goddess of Ylisse is her very own kin, and yet here she sits, alone in the dark like some kind of feral animal waiting for slaughter.

She cannot truly blame these other Gods though. She fell. Her children fell. Her champion and other half even fell, and there was no mortal more ferocious than the Godslayer who she called best friend. Dead. Dead on the blade of the man who dared to call himself a King. She hated him. She hated him so much and everything he'd done to her and her children. Surely, there was no one left who could face him. Her only solace was that it would eventually, hopefully, end.

Finally, finally, the screams stop. If only for a moment. They'll start again soon, she's sure of it. She isn't sure if that or the silence is worse though. In the silence, she can hear her own thoughts far more clearly. She can't pierce the darkness and so she feels like she's drowning in a never-ending sea. She tried to image some of her creations, in particular, the Sea Dragons. Still the undisputed rulers and protectors this world. She imagined those dear children as her protectors now, swimming in this sea of darkness and snarling at the threats.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a sea. It was a small, cold room made out of stone. And there was no one left who could protect her here.

She felt her heart rate start to speed up when she heard the clicking of a door. A violent swing and light finally burst through the darkness. The light of fire, the light of a torch. She wasn't sure if she wanted to desperately try to wiggle towards it or recoil away.

In the firelight, she could clearly see the bars of her cage. Cold and steel. But that was about all she could see as she lacked the strength to properly move her head. A man approached the bars, his yellow eyes glinting to reflect the light of the torch. White hair slicked back and wild. His expression was insane at best. He dared to call himself King. The pathetic fool.

"It's your turn," he said quietly. Two more men appeared and her tiny body was lifted up with so very little effort. She didn't know where they were taking her but it was nowhere good, she knew that for certain.

She blacked out for a couple of minutes on the way to wherever they were taking her. She was being dragged one moment and the next she was being strapped onto a table of some sort, face down. Her face was pressed into a small hole, allowing her back to be presented to the rest of the world. A knife tore through her clothing, truly exposing her skin. She didn't even have the strength to shiver from the chill, but she felt her mind rush with shame before filling with fear.

There were words spoken, but everything was starting to spin and she felt sick again. She wretched slightly as cool fingers pressed against her spine. The smallest droplets of bile escaped from her lips in a dry heave. There was nothing left in her body to be thrown up. No, no, no, no, please. She tried to speak but she couldn't form words. She would have cried but there was no water left in her body either. Creatures like her weren't worth the waste of such resources. She was so dehydrated, hungry, tired. She didn't want this, no, no, no, no. Please, anyone, no. No please please.

Her body shivered violently as the first wave of pain hit her. A knife, right between her shoulder blades. Digging in until it felt bone.

"Careful. If we want to make the weapon properly, she needs to be alive as long as possible. The longer we keep her, the more potent the magic that stays within the weapon. Preferably we'd like to keep her alive till we make the Creststone, but I know given what we're going for that might be difficult," a cold and clinical kind of voice spoke. Like they were talking about a science experiment and not a person, screaming and trying to thrash. But there were bindings on her wrists and she felt so very, very weak.

No more, please, no more.

If she had any magic left in her body, any power left at all, she would have ended it herself.

"Remember, to make a good Creststone, you have to be able to also trap the soul. And if you want the power of the weapons to be strong, it'll need to be fresh."

The knife glided across her skin, opening up her body to the world. Click, click, click, it pressed gently against the bones and she could feel herself losing the ability to move as nerves were severed. Needles were pressed inside of her and she kept screaming. Something felt like it was being removed and she kept screaming.

She would keep screaming. Screaming up until they rammed their grubby fingers into her chest and pulled out what they so desired to make into a Creststone. Her very own frantically beating heart. She wanted it to end, but the release she so desired didn't come until her heart was turned to stone and her entire body felt boneless. Even then her mind wasn't allowed to fully fade.

She was a Goddess after all. And for better or worse, Goddess' don't die easily.

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Byleth woke up in a cold sweat, panic and fear clinging to her heart. It was dark, too dark in her little room. She was about to panic until a burst of light stunned her for a moment. She recovered slowly, turning towards her desk. A single candle was lit up.

She heard terrified pants, and it took her a short moment to realize they weren't her own. It took her another moment to fully come back to her own senses and realize what exactly was going on. It was still too dark and she felt dizzy. She... was in bed. At the Officer's Academy. No dark dungeons, nothing of the sort. No cramped cells, nothing of the sort. She was safely in bed after spending a wonderful afternoon with the Black Eagles, getting to know them once more.

Pressed into her side like a terrified animal was Sothis. Sothis liked to sleep whenever Byleth slept. Sothis also didn't really like sleeping inside of Byleth's head. Since the bed was decidedly big enough considering how tiny Sothis was, a habit had been formed where they usually slept together. The very little sister like Sothis enjoyed it and it decidedly made Byleth feel much safer. Unless things like this happened. The downside of their pairship was the fact that sometimes dreams were shared between the two. Not all the time, but occasionally it would happen.

It seemed to happen a lot more often with nightmares.

Nightmares of the war they could deal with. Byleth had mostly acclimatized to war and death, and Sothis seemed mostly unperturbed. Or at least pretended to be. They were used to it enough that they could calm each other down and go back to sleep. This was something different entirely. This was the kind of nightmare that demanded both of them wake up immediately and light up every candle in the room. Usually, Byleth bought extra, but she hadn't gotten the chance because she was with the Black Eagles all day prior. Meaning the single candle they had was the one Sothis had immediately ignited in a panic on Byleth's desk.

Byleth turned to Sothis and pressed her hands to either side of Sothis' face. The smaller girl was shaking. Outright shaking. So was Byleth, but it didn't matter. However bad this was for Byleth, it was decidedly worse for Sothis. It went unsaid whose nightmare it was. "Are you okay?" She asked, turning Sothis' attention towards her.

The goddess looked up at her with big doe-like eyes, jittering like a leaf trying to cling to its tree during a hurricane. Despite that, she managed a hesitant nod. She swallowed hard, took a large breath through her nose, and let it out through her mouth. Both members of the pair began breathing like this, Byleth letting her hands drop and mimicking he pace that Sothis set.

The two stayed like this until the shaking stopped. Until Sothis pressed her face into Byleth's chest and held her hands until Byleth was almost convinced her fingerbones would break. They stayed like this a while longer, neither one trusting their voice. Neither one wanting to be too far away from what equated to the other half of their existence.

"Do you want to try going back to sleep? It's around 3ish..." Sothis said, but the answer was obvious just as it always was for nightmares like this. Byleth shook her head and so began the regular routine they'd developed after enough of these types of nightmares.

Byleth grabbed her cloak, pulling it on over her nightdress and actually slipping her arms inside of it. It wasn't that she was cold, the temperature had stopped bothering her after living in both extremes. She just felt more comfortable when her entire body was wrapped tightly. Almost like a hug. She was a bit too old to go and ask her dad for hugs because she'd had a nightmare so this and what comforts Sothis could offer as a sister figure would have to do. She was pretty sure if she tried to go talk to her dad he'd worry himself sick over the rare display of human weakness. Which was a shame since she kind of missed parental comforts.

She'd really screwed herself as a child by trying to be all independent when she had really bad nightmares. Back then though she also spent a lot of time with her godfather and godmother who could read her like a book and offer what support they could. Not to mention a plethora of older and younger friends who were sibling-like figures. She'd never quite missed Ylisse like she did when she had a nightmare.

As soon as the two were ready they left Byleth's room. Both noticeably barefooted. Sothis walked at Byleth's side in complete silence, Byleth setting a slightly slower pace for her companion. They went to their regular destination, the stables. For some reason, it was the most relaxing place in the monastery for Byleth. Perhaps it was because it had the highest concentration of animals. Wyverns, pegasi, horses, and the various barn cats which hunted the rodent population to near extinction. Something was calming about the presence of so many creatures.

It made her miss her own pets, but it was enough.

The routine was calming enough for Byleth as well as Sothis, and that's all they really needed. All she needed was somewhere off the ground she could perch and hum lullabies to herself. Songs her found family in Plegia would sing her, or the songs the Herons of Tellius taught her. A cat friend might visit her and she'd feel safer the farther from the ground she got. It wasn't her preferred method for calming herself down, but her favorite method would require something that could fly. When she was younger, midnight flights were actually enough to lull her back to sleep. For now, this would be enough.

When they got there Byleth pulled herself up onto a small wall which overlooked the surrounding area, as well as put the moon into a much easier view. Ever the comfort it watched over her now alongside a million different stars. There were no guards around at this time of night, not with any frequency, so she wouldn't be getting any visitors. At least, she shouldn't have been.

Low and behold, it wasn't the first time Byleth would be wrong about something. Wouldn't be the last either.

"Fancy meeting you here, professor," a voice drawled from behind her. A familiar voice. She turned around on her perch, catching sight of Sylvain who sauntered up to the wall as suave as ever. "You look a bit stressed. Anything I can help you with this fine evening?" He asked, all smiles and charm like Sylvain always was. Her brain decided now would be a good time to take a vacation and she started to panic for a response. It was never a good thing when Byleth started to panic.

"I'm a lesbian," she blurted out without thinking. As though that would accomplish something?

Byleth was vaguely aware of Sothis putting her head in her hands, perched not that far away with a cat already in her lap. Byleth could feel Sothis' disappointment, and honestly, Byleth was a little disappointed herself. "And a useless one at that," she muttered as Sylvain and Byleth just looked at each other quietly.

"Valid," Sylvain said with a shrug. The charm instantly dropped away, his tone becoming comparatively more 'normal'. At least by her usual measure of Sylvain and his character. "Still though, you aren't looking too hot. Well, you do look hot and I'm sure you know it, but you get what I'm trying to say. I'm here if you wanna talk." His voice was almost unsettlingly gentle and it was giving Byleth whiplash. So instead of responding like teacher Byleth, she responded like Archbishop/Queen/Emperor's Advisor Byleth.

"Even if I don't respond to your terrible flirting," she could already feel the barest hint of a smile forming at the corner of her mouth. Sylvain gasped, looking like she'd insulted his grandmother.

"My good lady, that makes you a sister in arms! You must be aided and protected as you know full well the physical pain of trying to flirt with cute girls," Sylvain nodded decisively, pressing a hand to his chest and speaking in an overly dramatic tone. His expression dropped slightly and his tone return to normal, his eyes a little sader. "Seriously though, you don't look okay. I don't know. Maybe I'm off. We don't even really know each other yet. But something about your expression feels... wrong somehow?"

Byleth shrugged, turning her attention upwards once more and back towards the moon. "I just feel a little homesick I suppose. Maybe you might think it's weird. I was born in Fodlan, but it's never felt like my home. I don't have any of my friends or family here. I'm alone. That combined with a pretty nasty nightmare, and well, I just miss my home. My real home," she didn't know why she was admitting this but Sylvain wasn't acting like the 19-year-old mess Sylvain. He was acting more like her Sylvain. The knight who swore his allegiance to her when she beat back Nemesis and Claude left her terrified and alone on a throne she never wanted.

he was acting like the Sylvain who would follow her around, pretending to be intimidating whenever a particularly disliked advisor would come calling. He was acting like the Sylvain who once threw one of her suitors out of the front door after he started refusing to take 'no' and 'gay' for an answer. He was the same Sylvain who had somehow become the only person who could consistently make her laugh.

It was weird and uncanny, and it left her admitting more than she cared to. Which was especially weird, because it was still Sylvain. She'd be reeling if it was any of her students if she was being honest with herself. But Sylvain had a very weird habit of making himself an especially good best friend to Byleth when she sided with Claude and Dimitri. It left this interaction feeling weird and familiar and perhaps that's where her blunt honesty was coming from.

Sylvain took it in stride though, humming and nodding as she spoke. His eyes were soft. He might have been a chaotic flirt, but he wasn't the worst when it came to helping others. Byleth felt like she could relax without being rendered dangerously vulnerable. And she so despised ever being vulnerable.

"I can't really say I understand how you feel. All the people I'm closest to are right here with me. If I want to go bother Dimitri, Felix, or Ingrid all I have to do is go a couple of doors down from my own. I can understand the sentiment though. The pain of losing something or more accurately someone important," Sylvain patted her gently between the shoulder blades. The physical contact there of all places ignited a confusing mixture of emotions. On one hand, she desperately needed touch because it was grounding after a nightmare. Especially the touch of someone she deemed a close friend. Any of her students would do, she just needed some kind of physical interaction to push away the feeling of cold fingers and colder knives.

On the other hand, the single press along her spine of all places was enough to send shoots of pain running up and down her body in icy waves. To remind her all the more vividly of knives and blood and screams.

For half of a second she could have sworn she saw Sothis shiver.

In the end, it was a miracle she didn't throw herself off the wall and as far away from the memories as possible. Sylvain didn't seem to notice, or if he did he tactfully ignored it in favor of leaning against the wall she was perched on looking off into the distance. "I think it's going to be okay though. There are a lot of good people at this school. If it's family you're missing, I'm sure you can find a ton of new family here."

Sylvain didn't know how right he was. With a sigh he straightened up, popping his back with a stretch and taking a deep breath. "Whelp. Don't stay up too late, okay? I'm sure the Golden Deer are going to harass you tomorrow and you're going to want as much energy as possible to deal with them." He made to leave but curiosity got the better of Byleth.

"Wait. What were you doing up so late?"

She expected him to lie. Or maybe she expected him to regale her with tales of all the women he'd charmed. Byleth knew from experience he'd never actually charmed a girl into his bed. He was smarter than that. People saw him as a stud horse because of his crest. He wasn't going to risk giving it to them, bastard or not. That being said, he wasn't above outlandish tales of conquest when he wanted to keep people from questioning his late-night activities. She didn't expect honesty.

But Sylvain had always been a surprising creature.

He paused, seeming to go back and forth for a quick second as though trying to decide how he wanted to answer the question. Eventually, he cracked a grin and winked at Byleth. "You aren't the only one out here because you were trying to escape a nightmare." Before Byleth could quiz him further he turned on his heels and disappeared once more. The ice rushed to freeze her blood again.

"Well..." Sothis looked back and forth between Byleth and where Sylvain was standing before eventually settling on Byleth. "That was wholesome if not a touch awkward. Given the fact everything you do is awkward, I shouldn't be shocked. Though I have to admit, some of his actions and words did catch my attention."

Byleth was starting to get eerily familiar flashbacks to the actions of Claude earlier. And that worried her.

She nodded, feeling quite confused. Sothis continued, half muttering to herself and half to Byleth. "It's not unusual for someone to eventually remember. Those who are most affected by our powers tend to have some of its effects bleed into their conscious which dredges up the memories of the past runs. But this has only ever been something to happen at the very end of a reset. Never at the start. And only through fairly vague nightmares and dreams which could easily be interpreted as the nonsense of the sleeping mind. While it's happened before to the likes of Sylvain, Bernadetta, Lysithea, and various other students, those you tend to keep especially close in every reset, it has never happened this early. It's never even happened before the end of the war if memory serves correctly."

That wasn't all of it either. There was a certain observable set of rules as well which applied to this retrieval of memory.

"Ah yes," Sothis muttered with a tone of distaste. "That rule. As far as we know, or used to know, only those who survived to the end of the war were able to retrieve their memories. And they could only retrieve the memories of resets they'd managed to survive. Up until Edelgard in the last route, this rule had not been broken."

Byleth and Sothis had put this to the test before. The two during the Golden Deer route had purposefully used their powers on Sylvian and Hilda to trigger the memories as a form of a test. Sylvain was the controlled variable as there wasn't a route so far he hadn't survived, much like Claude, but testing on a lord was deemed 'too dangerous' by Sothis. Hilda was the test as multiple mistakes had led to Hilda not surviving when Byleth had gone through the Church Route. Her dear and valiant friend had fallen in the fight against the Immaculate One of all things after Byleth ran out of Divine Pulses. She and Sothis swore to never let something like that happen again after hearing her screams.

It had turned out that Sylvain eventually remembered both routes before the Golden Deer one, but Hilda could only remember the Blue Lions as she'd been recruited during that route and lived. Sothis and Byleth agreed that this was some kind of rule after some further testing during the Black Eagles route.

The one exception so far had been Edelgard, and Byleth wasn't sure if Edelgard's memories returning had been due to their tampering or something else entirely since Edelgard seemed to break the rule. For all they knew it could have something terrible to do with Those Who Slither In The Dark, but again, neither Byleth nor Sothis was entirely sure at this point.

Now here they were the reset after one exception seemingly facing down another. If assumptions were to be believed, Sylvain had started to remember. Given the way he was acting combined with the fact he said it was a nightmare that drew him out. There was also Claude, who Byleth still wasn't sure about. There was the chance he could remember, or there was also just the chance Claude was being Claude and decided to play matchmaker for one reason or another. Claude's thoughts seemed to always be the hardest for Byleth to glean.

She was almost a little worried about what might happen if Claude did remember. Claud was a good boy, a very good boy, but he was not a smart teenager. He was a clever teenage. Smart and clever were two different things and he didn't fully embrace smart until adulthood. Byleth was very convinced of the fact he could make things worse before he made them better.

"I have to wonder. if Edelgard so far seems to be the only exception to the death rule... are we also exceptions or..." Sothis trailed off. Both Byleth and Sothis became very quiet while Byleth became acutely aware of a glaring inconsistency in her memories for lack of better words.

Byleth finally found her voice again, speaking in a quiet hush in case there was someone else skulking about who could hear. "Weren't we both in agreement that the start of this reset, the reset had been forced somehow?"

Sothis nodded absently before continuing the train of thought. "But I remember us actively resetting before Edelgard's execution..."

...

...

"Fuck!" Both blurted out at the same time. Byleth threw herself from her perch, turning back towards her room.

"Are we gonna go write letters?" Sothis asked as she much more gracefully dislodged herself from her perch, floating down like some kind of fairy. She was outright running in an attempt to keep up with Byleth who was speed walking back to their room. Terror running inside her veins like electricity. There was something wrong. Deeply wrong. And she didn't like to be alone or unprepared when something was wrong.

"So many letters," Byleth confirmed.

Neither was going to be getting much sleep tonight. Sothis could interact with the world around her and through experimentation, they'd found that their handwriting was identical. So they might as well spend the night writing letters. So many fucking letters. "Sothis, get the manaketes."

"How many manaketes?"

"All the manaketes."

"Byleth, I love you, but that's too many manaketes!"

"Fine, then just start writing letters to the Jugdral company branch. I'll get started on Ylisse."