Chapter Twelve – Into the Lair

"Well, that didn't take long. You must really love him—or one of them, at least."

I barely made it out of the territory belonging to the Garreg Mach Monastery and into the very edges of what had formerly been the Varley territory when the same mysterious man as always appeared before me. He did not seem the least bit spent, meaning he had either not been involved in the events just hours earlier or they truly outmatched our forces. I hoped for the former given the options.

"You made me walk all this way. Any particular reason why you couldn't have just saved me the trouble and visited Garreg Mach?" I asked. The man smiled at me. It reminded me a little of the way Hubert used to smile at me, like he had all sorts of secrets that would make my skin crawl.

"Do you really want to exchange secrets here?" He gestured around at the land surrounding us. Given the geography of Fódlan and the mountains to the north, Varley territory was the driest of all the former Adrestian Empire. Vegetation didn't grow here particularly well, leaving the expanse before us rather open. As a battlefield, it wasn't anything compared to the nearby Gronder Field because of the slopes from the mountains, but it would suffice given necessity.

Now, though, the open valley was dotted with the bodies of the fallen. There was no evidence that the Agarthans had dropped another javelin of light, given that the land was intact. But they must have attacked suddenly and massively, eliminating our troop with a unified attack that overwhelmed them before they could even draw their swords. Most of the bodies still held their swords in their sheaths.

But the one thing in common among these knights was the unusual blistering of skin that had occurred on the men and women back in Hrym territory. Like those rebels, the exposed flesh of these soldiers was crackling and peeling back, revealing the muscle below stained black, not as though burned but as though rotting. It was the touch of dark magic, magic far stronger than whatever Annette had been attempting. I doubted she would have succeeded at casting the spell surreptitiously given how advanced these people were.

I wanted to do something for the fallen soldiers, but I feared there was nothing I could do to give them an honorable death.

"Perhaps it would be better to do so later," I agreed. "One thing, though. I think by now I have the right to know your name. You know mine—both of them."

"That I do, Sothis. I am but a mere descendant of the original Agarthans, so I am not nearly as special as the others. To know my name would bestow an honor upon me of which I do not deserve." His fake smile, not unlike Claude's in hiding whatever it was he actually felt, twitched slightly, but he managed to keep it up.

"You're not one of the original Agarthans?" I repeated. "Then why do you hold such a grudge against the Nabateans?"

"Again, I ask, you would like to hold this conversation here?" He took a step towards me and held out his hands. "Your weapons. And remember that you are not in a position to refuse."

I handed him the Sword of the Creator, followed by the sheath holding my silver sword and the bow and arrows. He seemed to struggle immediately with the weight of the Sword of the Creator. In the hands of someone who could not use it, it was heavier than it was to me. That, paired with the other weapons, made him look awkward instead of his usual self.

"Name?" I asked once more.

He wrapped the belt for the sheath around his shoulder with the bow and quiver, and then returned his gaze to mine. I wondered if, being a descendant of the Agarthans, his ultimate goals in this didn't line up the same with the others. Was this a piece of information I could use to my advantage?

"Adonis."

He put a hand on my shoulder, and the world shattered around us. I had seen Edelgard and the others she conspired with teleport before, perhaps through the dark magic gifted to them by the Agarthans, but I had never experienced it for myself. It wasn't the same as being sent to Zahras and then ripping my way back from it. No, this was like being pulled through time and space itself, all in less time than I could blink. I barely had a moment to process it before my vision settled and I realized I was someplace else.

It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness around me. There was light, but it was not flame or sun that provided it. I could see no lanterns or lamps lighting the streets around me, but it was as if the roads themselves were light. No, not quite. Some sort of bluish glow emitted from what might have been cracks in the road, along with more bluish light from the walls of buildings surrounding us.

But it was as if we had been transplanted through time to night because when I looked up, I saw no sky, no sun, no stars. It was only a pitch-black canvas above us, like a blanket stretching from one side of the horizon to another. Yet the buildings around us stood tall but didn't quite seem to reach the mysterious sky, making it seem much higher above us than I thought.

I didn't know where we were, but it was clear this was no ordinary place. Did Adonis drag me to another world, like Solon had done when he cast the forbidden spell of Zahras? No, this wasn't like that. He would've had to cast a spell, and he had teleported the same way I saw Edelgard do. But why did it look so different from the rest of Fódlan I knew?

"Welcome to Shambhala," Adonis said, holding out his arm free from the Sword of the Creator and allowing me into this world around us.

"What is this place?"

He gestured for me to follow him, and not having much of another choice, I obeyed. "I admit I do not find humans so different from us. We, too, are seekers of answers. Always asking questions, always looking for reason to make sense of the world. The only difference really is that we clung to that knowledge and bettered ourselves, while you…" Adonis glanced over his shoulder at me and laughed mockingly. "Well, you believe in fairy tales about false goddesses to make yourselves feel better about your failures."

"To be fair, my father raised me without religion. Now that I think about it, that was probably because he knew deep down what Rhea had done to me and wanted to spare me the pain of all that. But I spent most of my life not even knowing what the Church of Seiros was…" I smiled when I thought of my father, which he wouldn't have believed back then. "What did that make those of us who didn't, then?"

Adonis didn't seem to have an answer for me. But I knew. We were the victims, the innocent who got slaughtered in the never-ending war between the Nabateans and the Agarthans. They got the humans involved in their conflict, time and time again. Their hands were in everything. And for the ones who never wanted to pick a side, they were just the hopeless fallen.

"What's the next step?" I continued. "I came with you here. You set my friends free, and I do whatever you want. Something with my blood, isn't it?"

Adonis, who had the blessing of looking naturally judgmental at all times, narrowed his eyes to amplify the effect. "I don't think you're in a position to bargain." He held the Sword of the Creator up, examining it from a multitude of angles before lowering it to his side again. "But I'll bite. You know what this is, don't you? Did Seiros tell you that much at least?"

In the distance, beyond Adonis in front of me, I could see people walking by. The light was not enough to make out their features, but they had to be more Agarthans. I doubted they would allow simple prisoners the right to walk around freely. But how many were there? The only one I met since this all began was Adonis, and he claimed to be a "mere" descendant, meaning there were original Agarthans alive, as well.

I turned my attention back to Adonis before he could notice my snooping. "Sothis. Or… part of her."

"And who do you think forged these weapons? A simple-minded fool like Nemesis could never have created such a weapon. The same holds true of the other Hero's Relics, as well. But the unique qualities of the Sword of the Creator set it apart from the others—namely that only the one with the Crest of Flames could wield it." Adonis held the weapon out to me, and when I grabbed it, it glowed with an ethereal red light. A perfect contrast of the blue light of Shambhala.

One might think it brave that Adonis would hand such a powerful weapon, one that only I could wield, back to me, but the fact of the matter was that he couldn't have used it, anyway. It was useless in his hands. If I wanted my family to survive, I couldn't make a move. There were other witnesses here—he wanted me to see those other Agarthans behind him.

All the same, I could not risk my self-control. I passed the weapon back to him. "And I bear the Crest of Flames. Do you simply need me to wield the weapon for you?"

"Not quite. Consider for a moment why you bear the Crest of Flames. Why do any of the descendants of the Ten Elites bear crests?"

Why? Well, it was true that the crests were transferred via blood, but because the ties weakened over time, the chance of being born with a crest had diminished. Hence why the Fódlandy nobility put such emphasis on it—they were rare, they were more powerful, they were wielders of the relics. But it was a status symbol more than anything. And for all the wrong reasons.

"I don't know," I responded.

"Because we made it so."

We turned around what I could only describe as a street corner, bearing left onto an even wider street with buildings on all sides of us. We had finally caught up with the people ahead of us, and I could see now that they had that same eerie look to them that the others did. Like Solon or Adonis, these people appeared other-worldly somehow in appearance, like they weren't quite human and yet almost entirely so.

"I don't understand."

"I would have thought you of all people would," Adonis said sharply. "The crests of your friends are named for the Ten Elites, but those fools were not the original owners of such power. That came from the Nabateans. When they were removed from this world, we harvested their blood and gave it to those who would become the Ten Elites. Then we forged the relics and gave them to those whose blood now carried that of the original owner. But only one—only the Crest of Flames—came from the goddess herself."

I didn't quite understand. I grew up ignorant of so much of the world. I knew nothing of the church or crests or any of the legends of old. And it seemed now that there was still a great deal of information that Rhea never shared with me even after she told me she did.

I did not doubt that Adonis told me the truth. While he perhaps had every reason to lie and even more to hate me for my connection to Sothis, there was just something about him that seemed… calculated. Like this knowledge being given to me would all lead to something that would help him in the long run.

"So, what, you want my blood? You want to give more people the Crest of Flames so that more people can wield the Sword of the Creator? And what would be the end goal of all that?" I asked.

My skepticism didn't seem to faze Adonis, though, for he merely smiled. "Humans are fragile creatures. You can't just take a fraction of their blood and give it to another and expect a crest to appear. We have performed hundreds of experiments to perfect the process. And our greatest achievement of all failed us."

Edelgard…

"The Crest of Flames can be inherited in two ways: through birth—which, as I recall, neither of your offspring was born with it—or through transplant," Adonis continued.

My stomach seemed to sink within me, and a sudden wave of nausea ran through me. My children… how did he know that neither of my children bore the Crest of Flames? How long had they been watching, biding their time for the perfect opportunity to strike?

Still, I had one thing to be thankful for: that neither of my kids had my crest. If they had, surely the Agarthans would have been after them, too.

"And?" I pressed.

"You and your husband destroyed our chance during the war of finalizing our revenge. With the murder of Thales, who you may remember as Lord Arundel, much of the knowledge of the next phase of our plan vanished. This was why we had to wait so long to reappear. We had to reconstruct a solution using what Thales left behind, and even then, it was incomplete. Only now do we have an idea of what to do next."

Lord Arundel? Oh, Dimitri's and Edelgard's uncle. If he was connected to the Agarthans, too, that connected another pair of dots—why the donations to the church stopped, for one. Sothis had suggested that Arundel died, and that was why the donations ceased. But then we met him alive and well—only… well, Arundel had died, it seemed, only to be replaced with another imposter.

And if he was Thales… I remembered that man now. He had been the one to stop me from interfering with Kronya's murder of my father. Another Agarthan, as inhuman as the rest. We had seen him once with the "Flame Emperor" talking, too.

It was a lucky coincidence that we killed him, but clearly it had only set them back several years, not permanently.

"And what will you do next?" I asked.

Adonis glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes. "In due time, Sothis."

He led me up some steps to a large stone building and held the door open for me. The appearance inside was not so different from its outside; the blue tones still served as their form of light, with dark stone forming most of the interior as well. The furniture in the entryway appeared to be carved from stone, too, but there were furs and other materials set on top as cushions.

We continued down a long hallway to some contraption that brought us down below the building. It felt like we went down forever. And the further down we got, the weirder it all felt—like I had the weight of everything on top of me pressing down slowly on my body. I wondered for a moment if we were underground. Not just by going downstairs, but if this entire place, this Shambhala, was underground.

Could they build an entire civilization underground? It seemed like a fantasy. No one could possibly survive like this for a thousand years.

Except, it seemed they had.

The sinking contraption finally stopped, and Adonis led me out to what appeared to be an open room filled with people. My eyes connected almost immediately with those of my husband's, and I ran forward towards him, only to be stopped by a glass wall that spanned from floor to ceiling. I wondered if Dimitri had thought to hit it, knowing his brute strength could easily shatter glass, but I had to expect that he had tried that already given the bloodied makeshift bandage around his right hand.

"Dimitri," I said, placing my hand on the glass. He put his on the other side. His fingers were longer than mine, his palm wider. There were calluses on it, just like on mine, and I could almost feel the warmth of his skin touching mine. But I knew that was just an illusion made by memory.

His lips moved, but I heard nothing. Then Felix, then Sylvain, and soon Annette, Dedue, Ashe, Gustave, Ingrid were all there, too. There was a rush of emotions that flew through their faces in seconds—first, what had to be excitement at seeing me, perhaps even hope. But that faded quickly when they realized the reason I was here, that I had to have given myself up. Horror, then, maybe even guilt. Annette began to tear up.

"They do not know where we are. So, they can spend their whole lives searching for you, but still they will never find you. If you wish for them to be released, then so be it," Adonis said.

Dimitri's lips moved again, followed by Annette's. I watched a silent conversation flow back and forth. Dimitri, being overly chivalrous these days to make up even now for his behavior during the war, was likely discussing the possibility of staying behind. If he did, Annette could place a tracking spell on him, and they could come back for us.

It would never work. The Agarthans saw through everything. They would never allow it.

"Can I say goodbye?" I asked, looking over my shoulder at Adonis.

"I'm afraid not. Allowing you the chance to speak would be dangerous. I know that you are fine to offer yourself up, but I cannot say the same of those who love you. Ah, and so many do. You were a good professor, weren't you?" He smiled at me, mockingly so, and I frowned as I returned my gaze to the glass.

"I was."

Adonis stepped forward and put a hand on the glass, just like me. "Remove your hand."

I did, staring at Dimitri on the other side and wishing terribly that I could say goodbye. The only thing I could do was mouth to him, knowing he could not hear me either way, "Take care of the kids."

And in a matter of seconds, the lot of them was gone. I could not feel my heart beat, but I could feel it ache all the same.

Adonis dropped his hand from the glass and turned to me. "A deal is a deal, is it not, Sothis?"

I nodded, unable to find my voice to say anything more.

"Then allow us to begin. We will be taking that crest of yours—and I'm afraid, with it, your life."


Author's Note: You get an update today because I'm having surgery on Saturday and won't be able to access a computer all weekend. Wish me luck!