Symmetry

Chapter Seven: Secrets Worth Knowing

Out of the torch-starred gloom the Cyclops came at them in a run, swinging its heavy axe in wide sweeps that could have felled long ranks of ordinary soldiers at a time. Fortunately for the knights and princess of Renais, it was as subtle as an elephant in clogs, and by the time it had rumbled its was across the cavern, the three had scattered in a disorienting burst.

What do we do what do we do what do we do what do – Amelia cut herself off in mid-panic and took stock of their surroundings, which took a depressingly short time. The underground chamber was almost completely bare, except for their now-blocked entrance, the torches, and occasional banks of spikes set into the rounded walls for no obvious reason, except to make it clear to anyone looking for the broom closet that they had gotten lost. Fine, she thought, gripping her lance tightly. The bigger they are, the harder they – oh, to heck with it. She stabbed the confused monster in the back of one giant leg.

With surprising efficiency, the behemoth pivoted and swung its axe at her like a pendulum; Amelia yanked her lance out of its near-bloodless flesh and rolled backwards out of harm's way. Fortunately, Franz came at it from the side, placing a deep gash on its arm before the beast even noticed he was there. Like Amelia, his weapon bit deeply, but the Cyclops didn't seem at all concerned, and when Franz withdrew and struck again, no blood flowed from either wound.

"Princess!" Franz shouted. "I don't think we're dealing with an ordinary monster here!"

Come to think of it, why isn't Lady Eirika just using Sieglinde on it like before? wondered Amelia. She spotted the princess circling around the monster, her everyday rapier in hand, but the recruit didn't believe for a moment that she had forgotten her sacred weapon in her other suit of armor, so what was going on? No time for that. "Franz, bait it!"

When the virtues of the Renais knight called Franz are listed, somewhere around the top should be a note that, when asked by his partner and rival – all right, she's more than those, but the point, the actual point – to act as bait for a twenty-foot walking guillotine and given no particular reason why, he ran in close, stabbed it in the foot, and was prepared to start impugning its family honour. The fact that the Cyclops immediately tried to behead him made the last step unnecessary.

Even as Franz threw up his shield, leapt out of the way, and prayed for the divine light to have mercy on brave idiots, Amelia pounced, wrapped her arms around its tree-trunk-thick wrist, and let the monster haul her up to ceiling height. There was something strange about its skin under her fingers – she knew from the start this would be another bad day for her already-weatherbeaten hands – but she didn't have time to think about that.

Given a boost on its flailing arm, Amelia scrambled to get a foothold and forced herself down toward the beast's torso by sheer willpower. It moved under her feet, making balance more of a hope than a fact at any given moment, but Franz kept the Cyclops manoeuvring and watching, never getting close enough to him to strike. The recruit had just enough time to heave herself onto the creature's shoulder before it tried to fling her off again, and only seconds before it could do the same with a simple shrug – seconds she used to knock its head back with a kick and drive her lance into its eye.

"Oh, that's just wrong," said Amelia in astonishment. Shards and dust crumbled away from the point where she had thrust, but the Cyclops didn't seem at all perturbed. Its single giant eye wasn't the disgusting substance she expected to be leaking all over her boots, but mere stone with a garnet iris and empty black pupil. A stone eye set in a stone face. The entire golem was as solid as its mountain home.

"Amelia? What is it?" Franz called from below.

She stared as the golem blinked once, slowly, without appearing to have a care in the world for the hole in its eye. Then it swung a massive fist to smash the pesky human standing on its shoulders. Amelia dropped, but stabbed out again with her lance with such force that it drove into the monster's granite chest and held, suspending her there.

"The whole blasted thing is rock!" she bellowed. "Where's Eirika?"

"She's…" Franz realised that he, a paladin and brevet commander, had lost track of the princess of Renais. "…Busy somewhere else! I say we chop its legs off and go from there!"

"Great," Amelia muttered, and tried desperately to fold herself up tightly enough to dodge the Cyclops' clumsy swings at slashing her off its chest. "You know, lances don't really chop all that well!"

"Do you have a different plan?" Franz asked, somehow avoiding any trace of sarcasm.

All around the domed cavern, the torches burst to greater blazes, revealing the monster's stony nature more clearly, and casting long, jagged shadows from the thickets of spikes that jutted out in all directions where the floor and wall met. The sharp-edged darkness seemed to create hundreds of long, thin strips of light that ran from the edges to the very centre of the cavern.

It almost seemed appropriate that the Sacred Stone lay there, unattended, almost looking unwanted.

"Oh, bloody–" Franz began, the pure-white crystal catching his attention with its flickering light. But he was cut off in mid-curse by a yelp from Amelia, who was finding that she really should have had a backup plan, perhaps labelled 'In Case of Hostile Cyclops Being Turned to Living Rock by That Blasted Summoner'. For an agonised second, he twitched between the two, paralysed by uncertainty. At last duty resolved itself, and he sheathed his sword, dashing toward the Stone.

Two steps later, he pivoted on one armor-booted foot like an ice-skater and charged back the other way, silently deciding Stuff duty, in the privacy of his thoughts. Amelia had been dodging brilliantly so far, unwilling to let go of her planted weapon but still capable of swinging out of the way of the Cyclops' unthinking assault. At last it had hit on the idea of hacking her and her lance right off its body with a guillotine axe-swing, and was winding up to do so.

As he ran, Franz drew the other sword he had brought, snapping it free of its scabbard with a flick that was probably edging towards the overdramatic. Amelia frowned at the thin, light blade, and was about to warn him not to take such an idiotic risk when she noticed that it gleamed much, much more than any sword had a right to. Her mental description had been very literally right.

Franz leapt and the Light Brand blazed with fierce magic, leaving an afterimage arc in its trail as he brought the weapon down in an overhead slash – the only proper description of the sound was unfortunately centuries away from Magvel; it was like listening to a circular saw carve through a city block's worth of power transformers – and one giant stone hand fell to the ground, its wrist red-hot and smoking. It still clutched the axe.

The Cyclops stared in disbelief. So did Franz. Amelia was the only one with the sense to take advantage of the moment, bracing her feet against the monster's chest and wrenching her lance out again. She fell, of course, and her landing was less than catlike, but a roll and an ache later, the recruit was up and ready for another go.

The paladin turned to catch her eye and grinned, trying to cover his own shock with an amused confidence that she would have to make sure didn't grow too fast. "See? Chopping stuff off almost always defuses the–"

"Duck," said Amelia.

"Defuses the duck? What would that even mean?" At which point the Cyclops used its blunted arm to lay him out flat on the cavern floor. Luckily, his shield had absorbed much of the blow, but already they had bigger problems to worry about.

Spikes had shifted aside and a hole had opened in the far wall of the cavern, revealing a small space suitable for a spectator who thought monster-duelling should be a professional sport. It was empty now, and a black-robed man stood in the centre of the floor, holding the Sacred Stone aloft.

"At last!" Arnord exulted. "Mine at last! The power greater than even the Demon King and his armies, held in my hand!"

The world seemed to hold its breath. There was nothing but the deep stillness of the cave and the shifting pure light of the Stone.

"So…" Amelia asked eventually, "are you going to do anything with it, or what?"

Arnord glared at her. "What? …Impudent brat!" Still he looked uncomfortably at the Stone, apparently realising that he didn't actually know how to harness its power into a terrible lance of retribution to incinerate her on the spot. Something of an oversight, yes, but he was still the one with the magically-improved Cyclops on his side, rumbling up behind the child-knights with a sound… disturbingly like hoofbeats…

Not needing a warning, Arnord did duck, and so Sieglinde swept over his head as Eirika rode past, again mounted on the horse she could summon with the Lunar Brace. She looked irritated, and was bleeding from a shallow scratch across one leg. The spike banks made for good hiding places in a dark room, but they were anything other than comfortable.

"Princess, we still have to get the General's head back!" Franz reminded her.

"It was only going to be a warning decapitation," she snarled, riding back up to the summoner more slowly, the mythic Sword of Thunder at the ready. "There. You've got the Stone. Now tell me where the rest of Seth is and I might not thrash you too badly before I take it back."

The summoner only smirked. "Of all the times to make demands, the worst must be just after you give up all your bargaining chips."

"I've got one left and it's very sharp."

"Well then, if you want your precious Seth's head, you may feel free to take it," said Arnord, pointing over Eirika's shoulder. She half-turned her mount to keep the summoner in view while she looked, but the only thing he seemed to be pointing at was… an iron box, chained firmly around the Cyclops' waist, with the belt that she had sometimes seen such monsters decorate with various skulls. This dark mage had a really sick sense of humour. Of course, he also had an excellent sense of timing, waiting until the princess was slowed by maximum revulsion.

Arnord moved with unexpected speed, slipping the Stone into a hidden pocket with one hand while casting a volley of six spiralling dark orbs at the cave wall – a Luna spell. He ran after the magical blast, leaving a quickly-summoned phantom in his wake, and as Eirika urged her horse into smashing it with a hoof to the helm, she couldn't imagine what he was thinking.

That became much clearer as the Luna magic carved into the stone like a hot wyvern through butter, digging an escape tunnel that the summoner charged through just second later. Furious, Eirika followed at a gallop, with Franz and Amelia lagging behind, mountless. The princess quickly emerged into bright sunlight, and then equally quickly found herself flooded from above; the tunnel led out underneath the waterfall. Sputtering and futilely shaking her hair out of her eyes, Eirika directed the horse out to dry ground, where she caught sight of Arnord again. He clung to another phantom, which was using its inhuman strength to quickly scale the cliff wall.

Franz and Amelia followed her into the open air again, but the Cyclops was far too massive to fit through the tunnel. It solved the problem in its usual way, by bashing through the relatively thin rock wall encasing its cave. Eirika looked oddly vindicated.

"Hah! I told you there's always a secret passage behind the waterfall," she said.

"I'm not sure this counts–" said Franz, who was having the sort of day that involved getting cut off a lot.

"Look: waterfall, door. Everything else is semantics. Now how do we get up this cliff, and how do we kill that thing?" The stone Cyclops had stumbled into the pool that fed into the river and instantly sunk to the bottom, but as it didn't need air or much anything else, it was hauling itself out without trouble.

"What, at the same time?" Franz balked.

"It'd be nice," the princess agreed.

"That's practically sheer stone," the paladin pointed out. "Not the best place for fencing footwork. And without phantom strength, I don't see how we can climb… oh." He caught sight of Amelia, already scrabbling to the second level of branches on a nearby tree.

"Were you ever a kid?" she asked briefly, and resumed her ascent. The forest was old, and sturdy cedars grew close to the cliff wall, with sturdy branches inviting a brave fool to test their luck. All Eirika had to see was the tail of Arnord's cloak vanish over the top and she had dismissed her horse back to the Lunar bracelet, already running for the nearest tree. Franz wondered if he should stay behind to hold back the Cyclops, but he had already been lucky too often to count on it much longer.

Though Amelia had a head start, what Sergeant Faval had referred to as her 'altitudinal deficit' meant that the taller and fiercely motivated princess reached the top first, flinging herself out through open space for a frozen moment before she got hold of the ground again, landing on all fours. Arnord watched her impassively from the top of a rocky heap, still cradling the Sacred Stone. He flicked a finger and the phantom that had carried him up the cliff charged.

Eirika wasn't worried by a mere phantom, until she noticed the bizarre shape of its axe and the blood-stained glow that shone in its etchings. A Swordslayer – blasted summoner had managed to conjure up a Swordslayer! The princess shifted as quickly as she could into a defensive stance, sweeping and twisting as the wraith-warrior struck in a desperate attempt to parry the creature's attack. As usual, her rapier seemed to bounce off the Swordslayer's side, but the untalented phantom still overshot and buried its weapon in the ground.

She sidestepped around the spirit and slashed from behind, but without a spine to worry about, the phantom merely rotated its torso a full hundred-eighty degrees and batted the cut aside carelessly, shoving ahead and smacking Eirika off her feet with the mostly blunt top of its axe. The upper corner of its curving edge still gouged into her flesh, and from further unwanted experience, she knew that the weapon's magic would keep that wound bleeding for a very long time.

The phantom advanced, apparently enjoying Eirika's shudder every time it made an inhuman twist. Though the wraith's legs carried it forward in an ordinary line, its torso spun and swayed like reeds on a top, weaving the enchanted axe through endless orbiting crescents. The princess retreated as slowly as possible, never trying to block these wild slashes, merely waiting until it got overconfident and made a tactical mistake… like that one.

Apparently hoping for surprise, the phantom changed direction several times in a few seconds, swinging its axe like a mere fencer's foil. Most warriors would have been terrified, knowing how heavy and unwieldy Swordslayers were, but the spine thing had desensitised Eirika to creepiness. She brought her rapier in with an overhand thrust, tip pointing down, and wedged it into one of the wicked axe's many nooks. She pushed harder, keeping their blades locked, until the phantom had essentially been nailed to the ground by its weapon. Princess and wraith faced off, eyes just inches apart.

The phantom exploded. Its axe disintegrated with the rest of it, and Eirika stumbled off-balance for a moment, coughing in what she dearly hoped was smoke and not Essence of Undeath. Franz was still holding his Light Brand out when the arcane dust had vanished, but he aimed it now at Arnord instead of the unfortunate phantom. "I'd say something awesome right now, only I'm absolutely exhausted, so give us the Stone and the rest of Seth and I might not blow your Light-forsaken head off."

"A tip, boy," said Arnord. "Don't tell your enemies when you're exhausted." With a shove he hurled a Flux spell through the air – its only sign was a shadow racing across the ground, too fast to be dodged, before it erupted as Franz's feet and slammed him from all sides with oceanic pressure. "Lucky for you I'm not a murderer." Arnord skipped lightly to the bottom of the heap, brushing his robes off and looking up just in time to blast the charging princess with Luna.

Six flashes of light later, a few formless shreds of dark magic earthed themselves in the ground and burned the grass brown. Sieglinde gleamed brilliantly in the sunlight, and even Arnord had to admit it looked good in Eirika's grasp. Its penchant for cutting apart his spells, however, wasn't so much a selling point. Things might have gone very badly for the summoner just then if she hadn't been smashed off her feet by a meteoritic recruit, hurled by the mountain-skinned Cyclops finally joining them at the cliff top.

Wondering if he would ever breathe normally again, Franz was nevertheless the first to his feet, and first to take stock of the damage they had so far managed to inflict on the behemoth. A hole in its eye that didn't seem to make any difference. One hand missing and charred black, thank you very much, a crater in its chest from Amelia's lance, a new one in its bicep, and a handful of shallow gashes that seemed to be slowly leaking a dark fluid. Aside from that, there didn't seem to be anything–

With life-saving instinct, Franz leapt frantically to the side when the Cyclops swung at him with its intact arm, though it was still twenty or thirty feet away. When its fist ground a trench into the earth where he had been standing, Franz saved the thanks to the Light for later, preferring right not to recoil in shock at its arm. From the minor injury inflicted in its upper arm by Amelia, who had managed to spar with the monster even as she clambered up a tree, a hundred minor fractures ran out through the stone, and when it punched, they stretched wide. Its arm was held together only by the thick black sludge that trickled from its other injuries, but clearly the Cyclops had found a way to use that to its advantage.

The arm retracted, snapping back into place perfectly. Eirika and Amelia had seen the same freakish attack, and warily moved to help Franz in surrounding it, while Arnord quickly retreated out of the soon-to-be-chaotic battlefield.

"Okay," said Amelia. "Anyone got ideas on how we can use its lack of depth perception?"

"It has a hole in its eye," Franz reminded her.

"Right. Probably not a normal Cyclops," she decided. "Well, maybe–"

"Franz, keep it from retreating!" Eirika commanded, apparently deciding to Take Command. "Amelia, charge it from the side, keep that arm busy!" Duty having reasserted itself over the screaming mob of Franz's emotions, he managed to obey and hold his ground as Amelia came in on the Cyclops' right. It swung its arm in a great vertical arc, like a revenant swatting a fly, but with her newly typical agility, the recruit rolled out of the way, used her lance to vault over its arm a second later, and tried to smash its knuckles.

Though that failed, Eirika had the Thunder Blade and a much clearer path on the Cyclops' left where she stayed below and outside the flailing range of its broken arm. That limited her options, but Sieglinde's long, wind-thin tip easily lashed out under its arm and hacked through the giant's leg, taking advantage of Amelia's first, shallow strike. The princess was dismayed to see that the black core-sludge within the Cyclops was as impossible to sever as a rushing river, though she got its attention and had to flee another meteor-slap when its arm retracted.

"We really should have just hanged Rennac when we had the chance," said Franz, who was still standing firm where Eirika darted to safety. "Wouldn't have got us much, but at least we wouldn't have been trapped so many times."

"I'm still giving the rat a chance to redeem himself," the princess replied. "He might have a plan. When we were in the tunnel underground, the one that turned out to be full of spikes, he was pretty pointed about letting me see that embroidery on his jacket."

"A phoenix, right?" Franz recalled.

"Normally," Eirika agreed. "But he was wearing the fake. The pony that he used to trick Colm when they were having that thieving competition."

"What does that mean?" the paladin asked.

"I have no earthly idea," said Eirika. Amelia was keeping up her distracting tactics, and the Cyclops was still enjoying its new long-range attack. Swing up high, 'throw' its hand out to hammer the ground, let it snap back into place, swing, throw, hammer, snap, swing, throw…

She got an idea, and ran again. Swing, and even as Amelia dug her lance into the ground to pole-vault away, Eirika was running to take her place. Throw, and the princess barely sidestepped in time to avoid the hand, which nearly shook her off her feet when it hit the ground – hammer – and Eirika hopped onto it, trying desperately to keep her balance in the crags of its fingers. Snap, and with a shove at the right moment, the hand was like a launching pad, catapulting Eirika at its face Sieglinde-first.

The Sacred Twin seemed to sing a chord on contact with the Cyclops, which had tried to lean out of the way but had little success. The flash of blue and golden lightning from Eirika's sword was followed by a soft shower, or perhaps a snowstorm, as the burning dust and ashes that had comprised its stone eye drifted down around her. The Cyclops bellowed its frustration, but then crumpled to the ground, as if paralysed by its blindness.

"Now are we done?" Amelia asked, hopefully, in the new silence.

"That depends," Eirika admitted, carefully cutting the Cyclops' chain-belt with Sieglinde and passing the lockbox to Franz, who could usually be depended on to bring keys. She turned around in a slow circle to address the entire cliff-side field. "Arnord! We can have some stupid one-on-one duel if you really want, but I think it's clear that you'd get flensed, so why not…" She trailed off, catching sight of four figures near the edge of the precipice. "…Franz, Seth's head is in there, right?"

"Yes, milady," he reported, unwrapping the fabric it had been packed in. "I think some of his hair fractured, but otherwise he's in good condition."

"Nevertheless," Arnord stated smugly, "I think you've proportionally lost out on this one." Beside him were both of his phantoms, who had clearly just performed another heavy-lifting task. Between them was a kneeling stone paladin, missing its head. They had taken Seth's body from the cart, meaning that Eirikia had one-twentieth of the general, and Arnord had the other nineteen. One of the phantoms waved its axe at them cheerfully.

"Don't you ever get bored?" Eirika demanded furiously.

"Having too much time on his hands is probably the problem to start with," Amelia suggested.

"Your Cyclops is down, don't bother trying to scare us with phantoms," the princess snapped at him. "Even you can't call up Swordslayers and killer axes that often."

"That is unfortunately true," Arnord agreed, raising a finger thoughtfully. "…But irrelevant." The finger snapped down and the two phantoms charged, while Arnord drew a circle of light in the air before him, indicating a triple-powered spell being cast.

Franz and Amelia shifted to intercept the phantoms, while Eirika moved for Arnord. Technically, Amelia should have been at a greater disadvantage, as lances always are against axe-wielders, but Franz was slower, seeing something odd about his foe as it approached. Where the phantom's helmet opened, usually revealing shaped shadows and glowing yellow eyes, this one appeared to be wearing a facemask or bandanna. Apparently its sight wasn't blocked, but Franz easily parried the heavy blow and leaned in to take a closer look.

A swatch of leather had been fastened in place of its usual visor. On it, gleaming golden threads outlined a phoenix, wings extended, tail trailing through the sky. Franz almost laughed as he chopped into the phantom's axe with his Light Brand, wrenched it out of his foe's hands and cast both weapons aside, preferring to fight this one with fists alone. Until he found out what it was for, he wasn't about to destroy it.

Eirika danced around the dark blasts that erupted around her and rocketed past as Arnord threw spell after spell at her, but with the arcane powers that seeped into all mages over time, he was just fast enough to dodge Sieglinde's blade every time, as well. The standoff continued even with Arnord's increasing distraction; he kept looking at the Cyclops, seeming to wonder why it refused to move.

At last Eirika twisted, thrust, began to sink her blade into him, and when Sieglinde cut, it burned with light again. The summoner shrieked with pain and grabbed Eirika by the neck, matching her sacred might with the elder power of Nosferatu. Even as the blade cut, the summoner sealed his wound with her life force. When Sieglinde burned brighter, the swirling darkness intensified in turn, until Eirika reached into his pocket with her other hand and took back the Sacred Stone. It overloaded the circuit and a shockwave shoved the two apart, sending them rolling on the grass. Arnord staggered back to his feet faster; Eirika had been doubly drained by the energy her sword demanded to maintain its power.

"Go already!" Arnord roared at the behemoth, fumbling in one of his pockets. "Crush them, break them, kill them however you want, just move!" With that, he triumphantly produced something from his robes and held it overhead, his hand nearly crushing his monster-enslaving talisman in his rage.

Crunch, said the little bottle, which wasn't a talisman, but was full of a clear, yellow-green fluid that sluiced down his arm from the broken glass. With that, the Cyclops did move, leaping immediately to its feet and sniffing the air with mad intensity. It picked out the scent quickly and charged, using its one good arm to propel it faster toward Arnord, who realised absently that he was standing closer to the cliff than he should. His desperate gaze fell on Rennac, sitting at the bottom of the rock pile and dangling his talisman.

"You know, I never liked you," the rogue informed him.

The Cyclops hit him then, but was barely aware of the impact, and soon both of them were much more concerned with their expeditious plummet toward the distant ground.

After a brief glance over the edge, Rennac moved quickly, leaving the weakened princess to stare at the broken pile of stones that would serve as Arnord's cairn. The Cyclops' ichor leaked out of the debris, trickling away to merge with the pure waterfall pool, where it caught fire and burned to nothing.

Nodding to Amelia, still frozen in shock in the pose of someone running a phantom through – minus, of course, the long-gone phantom – Rennac flipped out a dagger and stabbed Franz's opponent in the heart-ish region, made much easier by the way the paladin was currently knotting his enemy's arms behind its back. When the phantom disintegrated, one thing was left intact – a flash of some mystery mixture that had been hidden in the wraith's head, with his phoenix embroidery wrapped around it. He caught it before it could fall, and trotted off to the petrified paladin.

"…What?" asked Eirika. It was a good question, partly because it was short enough for her brain to deal with at a time like this. The entire world seemed to be gently reverberating.

"Where should I start?" he countered, now searching for Seth's head in the grass.

She tried again. "What?"

"That was the bit you've been waiting for," Rennac said, mercifully not dragging it out any longer. "The one I've been waiting for, too. I've always hated him. Anyway, starting from the pained admission that I can't actually get away with whatever I want, keep in mind that I had to be subtle if I wanted to pull this whole thing off. Most of it has just been about getting you to go along with his plans, you realise."

"Because you're a controlling jerk and apprentice puppet-master?" Eirika guessed. The easiest ability to get back, after 'what', was Rennac-abusing.

"Do you see that speck in the sky?" the rogue asked, indicating a distant, miniscule shadow over the horizon.

"Yes."

"Keep watching. Now, this orange stuff here," he went on, "is Rockbinder potion, which my insane uncle had brewed up in case his Cyclops ever needed patching, but it ought to work equally well on that lonely neck over there. That phantom that Franz was holding off was meant to be full of synthetic Smashpetal extract." Rennac glanced at all three Renais warriors to make sure they were properly baffled. "It was a rare plant with a fragrance that sent Cyclopes into a berserk rage, hence the name and the fact that it doesn't grow wild any more."

"I'm guessing that was what Arnord accidentally drenched himself with?" Amelia interjected.

"That's the stuff. He'd have noticed if I tried to just walk off with anything strongly enchanted – he was always able to sense magic objects – so I did a little switcharound. Take the Smashpetal oil, replace it with the Rockbinder I was supposed to be carrying, then swap the nectar for the amulet and the result is what you saw, achieved with my usual brilliance–"

"That speck just flapped," said Eirika, leaping to her feet.

"Well, Seth only has a few petrified hours left," Rennac said. "Oh, by the way, you owe me again, since if I hadn't sent one of my uncle's mercenary messengers to Caer Pelyn, Myrrh wouldn't be bringing Saleh here as we speak to make this Rockbinder stuff work. It requires healing staves and such."

"I owe you?" Eirika repeated. "Well, what did Arnord promise you for betraying us?"

The rogue's face instantly darkened to something more appropriate on a stormy midnight. "We don't need to go into that."

"All right," the princess relented. "But I could probably help if it had anything to do with Princess L'Arachel–"

"NO! No, it did not! I'm amazed you would think so! That's the most ridiculous…" He stopped and composed himself. "Nothing of the kind. Now, can we just get Seth repaired and go back to Renais so I can bask in some proper adulation?"

What Franz found curious was that of all the people at Renais Castle, Seth seemed to think there was the least to celebrate, despite being the man with the most to be grateful for, decapitation-wise. He was silent on the journey back, which Eirika instructed them all to allow, considering what he had endured, but Franz considered this paladin business. Amelia readily slipped out the cart's window to ride on the roof and prod Rennac about L'Arachel, leaving Franz free for friendly interrogation.

"Sir," he said, a greeting that doubled as a useful prompt. It made a space that needed filling.

"That armor looks good on you," Seth said eventually. "I understand you performed brilliantly in my absence."

"That's not what's bothering you, is it? I'm only as good as I am, whatever that might be, through your training," he said. Seth remained hunched against the wall, looking quite literally beaten. "…But that's not it. Isn't everything just fine? We have the Stone, you're alive, and now you and the princess…" At that, Seth did look up, not sharply, but with a hint of venom in his eyes. It was the sort of glare that preceded a declaration of 'You dare to presume?'

The moment collapsed like cardboard under a Cyclops. "No."

Franz was confounded. 'No' never left room to argue. He tried a different angle. "It's good to see Amelia again. She's been gone for ages."

"Yes," Seth agreed. "You and she will make great knights before long. I can already imagine the kind of victories you'll achieve, the legends the people of Renais will tell for generations."

"I bet you can," Franz said with a grin. "Impossible quests, unavoidable peril, unconquerable odds… We won't save the kingdom single-handedly, of course, but it'll matter that we're out there. Renais will be better for whatever we can manage." He watched Seth very closely. "Good thing she's not royalty, or none of it would ever happen."

"Will you cease your unsubtle hinting?" Seth requested darkly. "I will not cast aside my duty to the monarchy."

"But it's the same thing! Aren't you old enough to get it by now? There are only four things in the world: right, wrong, what we want, and what we don't. You can't spin them or flip them until they turn into something else. I love Amelia. It's been hard to get this far and I'm only seventeen – but I know what I want, and I know what's right, and that's why everything you imagine is going to be true. And you and I are a whole lot alike; we're just… flipped, or something. Reflections. Symmetrical. But those four things are what they are no matter how you turn it."

"There are greater things than what we want," said Seth, demanding an end to words.

Franz sighed, stood, and went to look out the cart window. Before he leaned through, he looked back at the shadow-wrapped paladin again. "That duty of yours, it's to follow whatever course the monarchy wishes, isn't it?"

"No matter the personal cost," Seth agreed, meaningfully.

"Have you checked what those wishes are, lately?" he asked, and half-emerged into the sun.

That same summer sun was on its way to setting when they reached Renais Castle, where Franz hoped to see some change in the general. But upon their arrival he only spoke briefly with Kyle – who seemed to be convinced he was in danger of 'relapse' and kept stretching all his joints to keep them from turning to stone – before vanishing into his quarters for hours.

Every other inhabitant, however, seemed to emerge from petrifaction with gratitude and up to two days' worth of pent-up energy. Saleh roamed the halls with a Restore staff, joined by Artur and Lute once they were properly turned back into flesh, blood, faith, and know-it-all-ness, and the castle grew ever louder in their wake. Rather than giving endless explanations, the sages just instructed everyone to gather in the throne room, where Eirika, Franz, and Amelia answered all the questions they could.

What the young knights couldn't help noticing was that their princess seemed to keep leaving out the more dramatic aspects concerning herself and Seth, and they were pretty sure she was trying to avoid mentioning the Sacred Stone too often, either. Amelia tried making up for this by quietly informing anyone she could of just what amazing bravery had led to the general's capture, and soon that spread through the growing crowd as well.

So it was understandable that a ripple of quiet spread through the hall, centring on Seth as he calmly made his way through the throng, apparently in no hurry to reach the princess. The crowd, with predictable telepathy, parted like a sea normally doesn't, to leave him a clear, straight path that the Silver Knight reluctantly followed until he stood, perfectly straight and military, before Eirika. Franz was perhaps the last to notice what was going on, far too wrapped up in the destruction of the dark Gorgon, and his armored boot went clang as Amelia attempted to stomp it again.

"General Seth, it's good to see you up," said Eirika, obviously amused by the formality of her own words, and the paladin's stance.

"I have a request, milady," said Seth.

"Good," the princess said. "It's traditional, of course, when you save the princess's life."

"I would like to apply for immediate transfer to the Knights of Frelia."

The few whispered conversations that had been growing in the quiet were thoroughly obliterated.

"THE HELL?" Eirika belatedly realised that this wasn't quite princessly behaviour. Immediately after that, she realised that while there were many people who might have cared, she wasn't one of them. "What are you…" She heard her own voice and took a deep, steadying breath. "Explain."

"Here in Renais there are complicating factors that keep me from performing my duty with proper detachment and efficiency. I believe I will be of greater benefit in Frelia, where the military command was largely slain in the last war," Seth replied, with the sturdy calm of a dam holding back a turbulent river.

"I don't want you to go. And your duty is what I say it is," Eirika stated.

"So I have been reminded," Seth acknowledged. "But that would nevertheless be a betrayal of the oath I first swore upon entering the knights. There is no escape except transfer. I will await your approval of my application." He saluted, pivoted with slick precision, and strode back toward the court doors.

Those doors slammed open as Seth approached, and the paladin was driven backwards, rather hastily, by a quickly advancing figure whose long, black cape billowed behind him with every relentless step. A battalion of cavaliers stood ready in the hall outside, and two followed him in to flank the door.

"General Seth, I order you to marry my sister!" King Ephraim bellowed. He paced Seth back until the paladin had been forced to climb the steps to the twin thrones, at which point Ephraim spun to face the crowd, with less precision than Seth but a great deal more flair. "Well, what are all of you doing here? Are we having a celebration of some kind? It could become annual. We'll call it Flexible Day."

Franz broke the stunned silence with a snort of laughter that dissolved quickly into stifled chortling. Ephraim's arm whipped up and gained the sort of attention usually only given to deadly weapons as it pointed to him, then Amelia.

"As for you two – immediate promotion to… Knight-Sergeant and Knight-Lieutenant. I'm sorry, it's an age thing," he told the recruit. "You'll catch up after your next birthday." Still looking stern and obviously enjoying himself too much, her surveyed the crowd. "You're still just standing there. What is it?" He looked back and saw that Seth and Eirika were still irritatingly not attached at the lips. "Is there a problem?"

"Um, milord, I have applied–" Seth began.

"Yeah, I heard about that. Denied. Go pick out a ring."

Eirika saw the face of rescue running through the crowd, hastily trying to put her blue hair back into a ponytail. "Tana, what happened? Did you let him have sugar or something?"

All proper and innocent, the Queen looked up at Ephraim on the throne dais. "Is there a problem, milord?"

"Not at all, milady," he assured her. "Today is a fantastic day to be king."

"So much for rescue," Eirika muttered. She had a prickling feeling on the back of her neck, as though, somewhere, hundreds of people were watching her expectantly. There really was no escape. And as she turned to Seth, she saw again the look in his eyes that had last been there just moments before the Gorgon attacked. The look of someone who has taken a battering ram to their emotional barricades.

Possibly the entire castle joined in the cheer as princess and knight kissed at last. Because he was in that kind of mood, Ephraim didn't bother asking for quiet, but merely shouted over the jubilant tumult. "Now, before we do get down to proper celebration, does anyone know why there's an army on my lawn?"