Track 6: Crystal Bullets and Silver Crosses

Fixing a country is not something that's done in a single night, let alone a few years. Healing a nation with such deeply ingrained war-mongering tendencies and as damaged as Nohr, not to mention stupidly prideful would be a gargantuan task. Honestly I didn't even have faith it was something that would be fixed in a generation or two, but if nothing was ventured, there would be no gains. One of the main reasons things went to shit in canon, from what I pieced together with a combination of common sense, my education and what Arete told me, is that Hoshido actively refused to trade with Nohr for reasons never explained in-game coupled with a complicated economic situation within Nohr. Reasons I would actively find and play to accordingly.

However, I was not convinced that the stupidly prideful members of the court would settle for the terms Hoshido would lay firsthand, and even then it was perfectly possible that their initial offerings were also less than ideal in an effort to spite us, provided we even got talks going in the first place. To start with I needed to get communications going between nations, and for that task I needed a major involvement from Arete, task that wasn't easy on its own because of her own limited contacts. Of course Arete had been trying for all of her life as a Queen, however, the more we talked together, the more I realized that even if she had such a position, she still had her hands tied in a lot of matters unless Garon himself gave his approval in person. Of course the assholes were yes men that sang praises and cowardly placated him in his presence, but would actively seek to sabotage Arete's efforts the instant Garon's back was turned in an effort to defame her.

There was also the fact that even if the communications got going, Sumeragi himself wouldn't approve for Hoshido's end. Our initial idea was to keep the mediation through Mikoto and Arete, but it was soon made evident that we needed a lot of failsafes in case shit started going awry on the other end, which, knowing my luck, was mandatory. We both didn't know much of Sumeragi's character outside of how he also had his Hoshidan pride to hold onto.

Ugh, I fucking hate pride.

We started making an effort on that end by sending a few members that at least listened to Queen Arete rather than outright antagonizing her. I knew we couldn't plead to their morals; their loyalties lied to Garon and his archaic prideful ways, so we had to be craftier than that if we wanted a better front.

So if they wouldn't comply, we would play dirty in return. We started gathering dirt on every single member of the Court, and we knew it would be the easiest to start on the Treasury. Numbers are the most volatile asset within any company if not supervised zealously, and thankfully for us, medieval accounting had heaps and leaps to get onto the times. We started sneakily gathering their records and bills and looking through their numbers. Of course there was a lot of foul play involved, politicians never change across the eras, and amidst stolen resources and shaky incongruences in the balances, we started taking note of who had the biggest skeletons in their closets.

We wouldn't shake them open quite yet, we would need to play it smart.

We also uh… adjusted some records a bit where we could in order to hit them harder.

Hey, all's fair in love and war. Besides, I soon found out Arete actually had a bit of a vengeful streak, so she was eager to assist me. There were quite a few people she wished to get back on. Yikes.

And let me tell you that crunching through our national accounts with a fucking wooden abacus is something I don't want to repeat ever again. Excel, I miss you something fierce. Yeah, we actually both sat down multiple nights and did the grunt work. Shocking, eh? I in particular got a boatload of work. Arete would bite the bullet and help me do so via making me publicly start some parts of my education earlier. It would cause a lot of stir among the concubines and the court, but I decided I'd take the risk. One of the bastard children of Garon suddenly trying to match the crown prince? Unheard of.

I must say that having reacquired my addiction to caffeine at such a young age is not something I'm quite proud of. I missed you, my dark mistress, even if I know you only wish to drown me in your inky depths of no return.

Anyways, while we were working around starting causing discord within the Royal Court (process which was kickstarted once I started pestering the accountants and treasurers), I got help from Arete to involve a certain someone I hadn't expected to find within the list my mother left behind. In it she said one of the people I could fully trust was none other than the wandering merchant Anna. Friggin' RNGoddess Anna was actually a thing in this setting, even if she was DLC in the game, which further got my hopes up of the Dragon Gate actually being real. The problem was that it would be a challenge to actually contact her, being a wandering merchant and all, but we still would search her. Arete was skeptical of her by all means, but I was fervent on getting her on ship. If there's someone that can make a fortune out of a fucking dirt jar, it's her. And if she's been wandering for any significant time, there's no one better to tell us about what really goes on in the market and help us revitalize it.

Perhaps she'll break open our vaults and leave us broke, but it's a risk I'm willing to take. Arete's not so sure though, understandably.

I'll pray to Anna, just like I did every time I went into a Lunatic map.

Which uh… in hindsight, isn't actually all that assuring. Never actually completed any Lunatic routes whatsoever in Fates nor any other Fire Emblem… and I don't think Abyssal maps from Heroes count?

EITHER WAY, we don't lose anything by trying. And if we can pique Anna's greed enough, which should be easy, considering we're royalty and all, we can get one very strong ally.

The reasoning we came up with to be very aggressive in our approach was that we needed to actually destabilize Nohr to discourage war, but do it in a specific way. In my words, I want to actually make the so promised internal revolution that Conquest's slogan lied upon (One filthy lie I'll never forgive) a truth, but I just couldn't go up in arms, kill Garon and call it a day, of course not. Even if I'm completely bookdumb when it comes to history and politics, I understand that a nation's problems are often a web of interconnected links that affect each other and often resonate in the most insane and unexpected ways.

For example, let's just say I kill the whole fucking court, because fuck those guys, they're downright impossible to work with. Who takes their places? Who're even qualified to assume their functions? Do they even know what they should be doing? What about their allies? From my experience in my past life as a corporate slave, when I was fresh out of college and landed my first job, I didn't have a fucking clue of where to start with and my boss was a complete asshole, so I needed to invest myself into my position and make a slow crawl from there. I was never able to do much and left the job soon enough because fuck that guy, but, and here's a big but, the asshole actually knew what he was doing. I could've never done his job myself, fuck no, it was a lot of responsibility as it was, so trying to take upon his job or suddenly delegating a task to some random schmuck is stupid. Arete actually agreed with me on a lot of points, which makes sense being that she actually was royalty and trained to do this kind of job, both in Valla and Nohr.

But here's another teeny tiny little detail: There's only so much work one single person can do. We're no kryptonians or demigods with endless stamina, in my case even worse since I was still a child in body.

That's why delegation exists and why multiple people work together. The problem with the Royal Court is that by all means it was stagnant as hell. Too many older people still resided in those seats, some from even before Garon took the throne (fucking artifacts, sweet Naga! Some of those decrepit vampires were straight out of a fucking Hitchcock nightmare on steroids) and deeply rooted in their racism and pro-war beliefs, and their friggin' mafia of contacts extended way too deep. We'd need to pluck them by the roots, but we just couldn't take the whole stem from the beginning.

So rather, I proposed two ideas that would need at least some time to produce their full fruits, though for now I did expect to cause some upheaval in the following months and years. The first one was to start aggressively doing R&D on our agricultural practices. While I had no extensive knowledge about it, I was thankfully able to introduce the Queen to the ideas of organic fertilizers, crop rotation, and perhaps the one that interested her most, chinampas. The first two were not known whatsoever, which was a huge relief for me because they allowed me to explore the idea of making at least some areas more profitable provided they got going, I didn't expect them to solve all of our crop problems, but if it proved feasible, it'd help our food problems somewhat and spread good rep for the Queen (who obviously was at the forefront of these campaigns). Chinampas I wasn't too hot on, but considering how a lot of Nohrian territory was covered in bogs and swamps, I thought that maybe it could be worthwhile to try, and the Queen actually thought it could work. For those who don't know, chinampas were a method the Aztecs used to farm. In a nutshell, they were boats made out of dirt and clay that would be filled with crops that required high amounts of water. The main enemy we faced, however, was still the lack of sun, so Arete was trying to get our territories nearest to the Bottomless Canyon that weren't engulfed in eternal thunderstorms to start experimenting, as those areas had more sunlight to work with, not much of course, but it was better than nothing.

The other idea, and the shakiest one, was to start also investing in our law and magic schools as well as select knight academies by offering scholarships like those from my original world. In a nutshell, the Nohrian royal family would actually sponsor a few select kids (the process of handpicking we still were arguing about, as both of us weren't exactly able to cover much ground in that way) and help them get through schools and be offered a position within the Royal Family we wanted them to fill and could actually create so long they didn't break the status quo too much, and then we'd keep them by all means on a leash by making them pay back the money we spent on them.

The concept was novel to the Queen, but she actually liked it a lot. Scary woman.

She liked the idea because that way we could start pushing out people we didn't want in key parts of the Court and even let the concept filter to specific deputies and lands that could be useful to us, to slowly start integrating people indebted to her the Queen.

However, and a BIG however here, is that this scholarship program thing would never be approved by Garon. An operation of that scale would need massive funding, funding we were both sure Garon would prefer spending on the army and weapons, and it was as infuriating as you could imagine.

That was one problem; my personal one with the tuition idea is that it was, to put it bluntly, too slow. I needed to get the Royal Court doing what Arete and I needed pronto, and though the tuition could work on the long run, it could very well backfire since it would be such a slow burn. For now we had decided to at least extend the invitation to more army/combat-oriented minor noble families that would readily accept getting their sons and daughters to work for the Royal Family. I chuckled when I found out a certain loyal knight with a penchant for playing therapist in the original game would be coming to be working under us maybe about a year from now on provided everything went smoothly. Sorry, Corn, but I really need someone like Silas with me. His family may not be powerful, but he's the type that will earnestly work and reflect his station with dignity, and will give back everything with returns.

I'm not going to make him my retainer or anything like that though, or at least I don't think I need to do that. I actually already have in mind who I'll be getting to work directly with me when the time comes. We start getting personal retainers when we reach 14 years old, with Xander being an exception due to crown prince status, as he already has his pair.

A pair that if canon is to follow, will not serve him for long; they're not Laslow and Peri, that's for sure.

I still have no fucking clue how Peri ended being a retainer in canon, actually. But I'll worry about my elder brother's choices in women when I can break it down to him without being tried for the weirdest case of fraternal harassment in the history of ever. Not sure telling my 11 year old brother as an 8 year old that he shouldn't be sticking his dick in a crazy he still hasn't met is sensible.

…Could I prevent that somehow? Food for thought.

Anyways, with all that said, some of the contacts that my mother left provided interesting for Arete. Most of them were not mentioned in canon whatsoever (what a shocker), but apparently, there were a few people already within the Court (in relatively low places within the hierarchy) who Arete had been keeping an eye on ever since before. I left that to her judgement, but she told me she'd start stirring the sharks on her own with those names in mind.

It was actually kind of heartwarming. In a bizarre way, I felt like my mother and Queen Arete were hitting it off.

Uh… don't know what's in store for those guys in particular though, so I'll apologize to them in advance.

There's still a lot to work on.

Aside from our megalomaniacal scheming and emptied barrels of coffee, Arete also entertained me with her knowledge.

I had shared with Arete what I knew from the game in general terms regarding to what happens around Azura. She now knew that at some point, she would disappear and it would set Azura's path in stone; we still didn't know the finer details, but as I insisted that she would become an aqueous puppet to the Silent Dragon, it didn't bode well regarding Vallite invaders.

Arete revealed to me what she knew about Vallite magic in return. As I had suspected with Corrin and Azura, Vallite magic focused a lot on manipulating water. Arete herself was capable of altering the temperature of any given liquid provided it had some measure of water in it, with less water making this control harder to perform, as well as control its movements, which is how she had willed the tea of that time to freeze and push the resulting needles to my throat without ever touching the tea herself. As I understood it, this was due to their particular strain of Dragon Blood in them, particularly it being of Anankos himself. Then there was also the matter of the infamous song.

The song functioned just like it did in canon. It was composed by Anankos himself and required the pendant made from his own body to take effect. When someone with his Dragon Blood used both in conjunction, it would weaken him tremendously. I questioned Arete regarding it damaging the singer, and she revealed something that was brilliant in hindsight.

When the song was used outside of Valla, it was then that it would cause death to the singer, as apparently, the magic used to empower it, coming from Anankos himself, called also upon very the power of Valla in return, the land he had blessed. Singing it outside of Valla was basically forcing the cursed magic of that place upon the user, which to put it in another way, would be like slowly and indirectly triggering the curse that would make one disappear should they speak the trigger words outside Vallite borders. It explained why Azura would disappear in a Birthright or Conquest scenario: she used the song in this world, while she was safe from its effects in a Revelations scenario, as she'd then use it within Valla.

It's infuriatingly brilliant.

Azura for her part didn't have much talent for Vallite magic, from what Arete told me. Vallite magic was unlike common magic in the sense that it was locked to their bloodline and functioned under different rules, being draconic and all. It seems actual draconic magic is a big deal in this world, which is why us Royals being able to tap into the Dragon Veins and having basically been blessed by the physical gods puts us above the normal populace.

What a load of bullcrap.

There also were a few more miscellaneous but very important things to have in count regarding it. Turns out, the aqueous soldiers, and those of the Vallite Royal Family, can actually use friggin' water warping, as in using water as a means of travel. She told me it's one of the single most exhausting abilities they have, leaving it unsuitable for combat, but it was how Anankos mobilized his armies. For the living, it was a magic incredibly difficult to use, that even she herself was not able to use it leisurely, but the undead of course didn't have this limitation, which is what made the invisible soldiers so dangerous. The two saving graces and limitations regarding this bullshit ability were the fact that the body of water must be able to house the warped objects or persons in volume, so it's safe to assume one cannot send a soldier through a glass of water, and that the bodies of water must be interconnected for it to work, which also explained why in the last chapters of Revelations and certain paralogues like Siegbert's cutting out the water would stop the reinforcements.

Arete could also use what essentially boiled down to "Water Heal", as in using water to heal wounds. That was damn useful, since it didn't actually require staves. Too bad it was also limited in application, being that it didn't restore lost blood or organs or anything major compared to what a staff could, though it still had the convenience on not requiring any outside equipment.

I wouldn't be waterbending anytime soon, sadly.

Our discussions eventually brought a particular topic in mind: Corrin. Arete had explained to me that while the song would give us a fighting chance, it would mean squat if we couldn't actually kill Anankos, a thing that was only possible through the Fire Emblem, as foretold by the Rainbow Sage. In this world, the Yato was the Fire Emblem, but it needed the other 4 sacred weapons to obtain its true form, a detail which Arete actually didn't know, and brought us to a crux: In order to ensure Azura would live and Anankos die, we basically needed a Revelations scenario, or to bring both Dawn and Dusk families together. If Corrin was bound to the Yato in some bullshit destined shtick, we would need her to push that way too.

Yeah, turns out that this world's Corn is a girl. Eat your heart out, Professor Oak.

And that topic again brought us to yet another very important detail regarding the in-game timeline: Garon's touching of rockbottom and Corrin's kidnapping. Arete still wasn't convinced on why exactly only 3 paths existed based on that, and honestly, I just didn't have the metaphysical knowledge to delve into quantum physics to explain that. In the end I decided to break it down through as the possibilities I knew were possible.

Which sad to say, didn't inspire much confidence in the Queen. She understandably questioned me about everything I said, and the only thing I kept technically lying about was that I was from beyond the Dragon Gate. I had explained to her that in my original world, this whole business was just a story with three different versions to its ending and I attributed what I didn't know to either not remembering the story clearly or said details not being within the story; not worth going through the whole "YOU'RE A VIDEOGAME CHARACTER, STEP-MOM!" fiasco. It's already complicated as it is. It certainly wasn't the ideal scenario, but I want to think I grew close to Arete in the months we spent talking and planning, and that my strange knowledge and way of seeing the world, completely unbefit of both a Nohrian and even less a child allowed me to come across as genuine to a degree.

…One of the thoughts that kept me awake at night was if I was dooming this world to failure merely by existing. I had managed to make Arete promise she'd live to see the endgame, and to keep an eye on Garon, all in an effort to save as many lives as possible, but I was often paralyzed by thoughts of all this being a fruitless endeavor.

I explained to Arete that even if we pushed to an ideal Revelations-esque scenario, I wouldn't forsake my brothers and sisters, and I plead to her to do the same for herself.

And she disarmed me completely when she asked me if I included Azura in that assertion. Up until that point I still hadn't started getting particularly close to any of my siblings, with the concubine wars still going full force in the background. Azura was of course collateral damage in all of this, if not an outright target.

So, she made me promise that from here on, and even if all of our plans failed, that I would protect Azura. That question wasn't one of the Queen of Nohr or someone who wanted to protect the world, no. She had just asked me as a mother worried for her child.

I learned that day that Arete, virtuous as she might be, would always hold Azura above everybody else in this world, above Anankos, above Garon, above Mikoto, and me and the bastard children of course.

She was just a mother who wanted to protect her beloved child, and wouldn't stop at anything to see it through.

With a heavy heart, I accepted her request. I knew for certain it would be no easy task, but I think I owed Arete that much. Azura was bullied and ostracized, and I didn't ever know how close she had been to any of the siblings. I think I recall her being close to at least Camilla, and maybe Xander to a degree, while Elise never knew about her. But even then, remembering the somber lady she grew up to be in game, I couldn't say no to her. I owed it to Arete at the least.

On the 3rd of March, right on the eve of Azura's 7th birthday, I promised her mother I'd become her big brother and guardian. That day I also plead for Arete to fight for a future alongside her daughter rather than just try to open the way for her.

I didn't believe her smile when she told me she would.