End of All Roads
He cradled the dead saint in his lap and wondered how it might've been different.
"You're here, Mother," said the woman he had caught drifting down through broken dragon scales and cathedral glass. Rhea could not be the Immaculate One, and yet she was, wholly, absolutely: Was she not, now, immaculate? The first time he saw her he thought goddess. Saints were not so far removed from divinity. Verdant blood leaked from verdant veins. So her blood matched her hair and eyes. Somehow he still had it in him to smile.
"It's a relief, in the end," Rhea continued. One hand caught his cheek. "The rest of us are dead, Mother. I wonder if I should not also have died, long ago."
Against a heap of rubble encircled the mess of spine and cartilage that was the Sword of the Creator, used at last for its cruel and ultimate purpose. He remembered the snick snack of the hinging blade. The roar of pain, of betrayal, of pure and pitiless necessity. Later they would tell him it had all been inevitable – minds were not made to last a thousand years, not even the divine. Already Rhea's eyes shut, breaths slowing, light like a fading sunrise.
"Don't mourn for me," Rhea said in a voice he had to bend down to hear. "I entrust the fate of Fódlan to you – "
"You traitor! Fools who do not accept their own sins are underserving of salvation!"
He dodged the blast of flame like a miniature sun raising welts along his skin. He and Edelgard struck as one, Raging Storm and Ruptured Heaven, twin sacrileges. They would end this heresy as they began it – together.
The Immaculate One died in light and flame, died screaming damnations in a foreign tongue from a bestial throat. One look at that dragon corpse, and he wondered how he had ever sympathized with the woman it used to be. They had been fooled, all of them, for hundreds of years.
Edelgard rested one gauntleted hand across his shoulder, a rare smile on her lips. "It's over, Professor."
Fhirdiad burned, a choking silence. So quiet, victory should not be so quiet. The Knights of Seiros still fought and died in the flames their dead leader lit. Did they know Rhea was dead? Would it matter?
Was it worth it, he meant to say, as Edelgard fell against him, two hundred pounds of Imperial armor almost collapsing him.
A warm, viscous liquid wet his sleeve.
He propped Edelgard up, staring at the fist-sized crater in her chest.
"We're free," Edelgard rasped, lung tissue puffing beneath the ragged killing wound, whose edges still scorched. He dirtied his thumb against the ash-blackened ram's horn crown. At what cost?He gazed at the woman whose conviction had stirred the most apathetic heart. Peace, at last, on that war-etched face. She would accept this end.
Most would call that victory.
In his mind he reached back –
– and stabbed the Hegemon in the chest, where its heart used to be. Twin orbs cracked. The abomination's shriek shattered sanity. It sank to its haunches, the sinewy husk unspooling, leaving only Edelgard kneeling like a supplicant on the carmine carpet before the throne. Her face betrayed no defeat. Beneath the steel-and-blood armor she was steel and blood too.
How could one woman cause so much death? So much hate?
"El…"
Dimitri whispered her name like the first prayer for new gods. Dirty, exhausted, showered in viscera, he looked every inch a king, royal blue wolverine cloak fluttering in the last vestiges of evaporating Crest power. In his right hand he held Areadbhar, that great Nabatean incisor (how had Byleth known that?). In his left hand he offered her the world.
There was that old Dimitri. Always believing the best in others. He would become the greatest ruler of them all –
A flash of silver. Areadbhar buried itself into Edelgard's abdomen. Her dagger founds Dimitri's throat.
He fell forward spluttering red, embracing a woman just as dying as he. He screamed no fury; here, at the convergence of paths, his anger desiccated. For a man seeking death for so long, he had finally found it.
Do people really change? Are we fated to die as we were as children?
Beyond, the palace waited in drawn breaths of ringing metal, in harsh ozone tangs of magic, as all their hopes bled out in double suicide. The Empire and the Kingdom both waited to see who would step from the throne room. Who would save us? The seconds paused.
"Do you see yet?" said the girl on the throne. "Given enough time, all possibilities become equally meaningless. How old do you think I am? Then multiple that by a million, because that's only in this timeline…"
The enemy army crested the peak of the mountain, white dragon banner heralding the edge of dawn. His own soldiers marshalled uneasily at the foot of the Tailtean Plains, the no-man's land that would soon become the slaughter field. The weeds would drink well this week.
Byleth strode forth from the ranks of his soldiers, his worshippers. They chanted his name, one long eternal ululation to a dead goddess. In the metallic light of the morning he visualized the face of the enemy. Their legions marched down the mountain slope in rippling alabaster. So many, she must've roused half the continent against him.
He raised his sword, the spinal blade, vertebral edges snickketing to monstrous length. The tip scraped the clouds.
He swung.
The mountain split –
"It had to be done," Claude said, leaning against his bow, the most tired Byleth had ever seen him. "I didn't want to do it either. But Dimitri had to be stopped. He's changed."
Do people really change? Are we fated to –
The mad king rotted in the mud that would become his grave. Death had intensified his hate, immortalized the sneering mask. Towards the end, bloodied by a dozen fatal wounds and still rampaging, Dimitri had recaptured a spark of glory. For all the complexities of the world, the spiderwebs of schemes and sentiments, Dimitri stood out as achingly simple.
"C'mon, Teach," Claude said. "We've earned some rest."
Claude swept blood-tousled hair from his eyes. Impossibly, stacked against an emperor and a king, this half-sired vagabond perhaps possessed the greatest scope of vision. Entire continents warred beyond Fódlan, but not even Claude knew the truth, that there existed worlds and chronologies beyond this one insignificant infinitesimal fragment of reality.
The cries of the dead drifted over Gronder Field, the self-same battle lost, won, repeated. How many times had he fought here? Like the minute and hour hands of a clock, converging and diverging and converging again. His memory was unreliable as of late.
Claude pulled himself up, offering a hand. Byleth grasped the callused knuckles –
– and slit Claude's throat, and turned on the other two, blood fountaining their school uniforms –
"The javelins are ready, my liege."
In sunless Shambhala the technicians made their final adjustments. Byleth strode through rune-engraved halls, the gentle pulsating light, less harsh than the sun above. The world was hushed here. The semidark had driven him mad, when he first arrived – and the damp, and the recycled air, and the frothy texture of mushrooms, their staple crop. With time (ha ha) one could grow used to anything.
"Finally we will have our revenge upon the world," Thales said. "Today is a day for rejoicing, my liege. In a hundred years our descendants will mark today as the start of the new calendar."
Byleth took the subterranean throne that had been built for him, or someone like him, a thousand years ago. The same Crest in the same body, the same sword in the same hand. Little wonder Thales thought him Nemesis reborn. The old man still believed they warred against the goddess, a notion too useful for Byleth to disabuse.
The javelins carved ringed channels through a sky he had forgotten the blue of. In Leicester a prince played politics, in Faerghus a king sought the truth of tragedy, and in Adrestia an emperor plotted her war against them all. It would end as all things ended.
And the final secret: a fourth javelin, aimed at Shambhala. Why should those who slither suffer alone against fate? After all, if nothing truly mattered, he would hurry the world along.
"Back again," said the girl on the throne. "Are you as bored as I am yet?"
She yawned, propping her head against a fist. The seat devoured her, and yet she eclipsed it, monstrous shadows swimming.
"Why? That's what you're thinking. How many times do I need to redo it? Will I ever get it perfect? Does it even matter? Why? Why? Why?"
She laughed, a tinkling sound, too innocent for so ancient a creature. Hopping off the throne, she strode forward on nothingness, as if gravity was caprice as fickle as everything else she adored, which it probably was, here in this barren realm. His mind it might've been, but he faced no illusion this place was anywhere but hers.
"That's the secret, you see, of being a goddess. God. Whatever. When Rhea fused me within you, she thought you would become the new god, and she was disappointed when you didn't. But apotheosis never comes quickly."
Sothis floated lazy circles around him. It occurred to him he never understood her and never would.
"I'm sorry for what I've done to you, child." Sothis's eyes softened, voice no longer hiding behind the jocular tone, and that, more than anything, terrified him. "Only when you see all possible paths and realize their futility will you finally escape the shackles of mortality. To ascend, you must cast away everything you've ever loved. You've brought yourself here, at last, to the end of all roads. Godhood is a lonely summit. Hasn't anyone ever told you that?"
She took his head into her hands, cradling it as he once cradled another, lifetimes ago.
"You have two choices. You can go back and do it over again, as you've been doing. You'll never get it perfect, but you'll come a little closer each time, and maybe one day, that'll be enough. Or you can choose what I chose."
He reached up into the light –