(A/N): Hi, I am not dead. Please enjoy.

The world came to a grinding halt. It was as if the vibrancy of life itself had been snuffed out. The cheerful voices that had filled the air and the warm light of the town had all grown dim. Even the stars that had twinkled so brightly in the sky seemed to waver.

It felt as though Marth was drowning once more. Her lungs screamed at her yet she made no sound. Her body wanted to run yet it could not move a muscle.

The words the man, Azul, had spoke nailed her to ground, paralyzing her.

"How are you still alive…?"

Then, a searing, white-hot pain tore through her, coursing through her veins, running down her spine. The flames of this agonizing pain tore all the way to her head. With a guttural cry that seared from her throat, Marth collapsed to her knees.

"H-hey!" Azul exclaimed, his voice taut with concern, rushing to her side. "What's wrong? Are you alright?"

The world was spinning. The dim colors of the world began to warp. Flashes of white seared her vision. Throughout it all, the pain never left. The burning pain was the only thing to remain. Pain excruciating enough to torment her vision.

But that's when she saw it.

It was for but a brief moment. But what she was as clear as what the world once was. It was the blade she had yearned to see again for the so long.

Falchion.

But it wasn't in her hands. No, in the instance she saw it, she didn't see it in the reunion she had been desperately waiting for so long.

Her hands were nowhere near the blade. In fact, Falchion's blade was nowhere to be seen. Instead, all Marth saw was the hilt, the familiar pommel and grip.

It was the only visible part of the blade as the rest was buried within her chest.

The moment the image crossed her tormented mind, and piercing cold had taken root in her heart, her blood freezing over.

"Lucina, snap out of it!"

A resounding smack echoed through the empty alleyway, a white flash appearing before Marth's eyes, a sting spreading across her left cheek. Instantly, Falchion disappeared from her sight, bring Marth back to the world from beyond what she had just seen. Even most of the pain had disappeared.

But the hollowness that had been carved inside her heart remained.

As soon as Marth turned her gaze to Azul, he bowed apologetically.

"S-sorry. You suddenly went stiff, as if you were frozen. I called out to you and even shook you but you wouldn't respond. I was running out of options. Please forgive me."

Marth touched her cheek where Azul had slapped her back to consciousness. It still slightly stung, the skin around her cheek slightly swollen from the force of the blow. As her slender fingers grazed the skin of her face, all she could feel was how cold her skin had felt to the touch.

Everywhere except for where Azul had touched.

She felt a semblance of warmth where Azul's hand had struck. Something about its warmth gave her an air of familiarity.

But not much more.

"It's fine…" Marth finally said, her voice barely a whisper. Her thoughts were running in hundreds of different directions. She barely had time to recollect her own thoughts on what she had just witnessed when Azul began to speak.

"What made you just… freeze like that?"

Marth fell silent. How could she even begin to explain to anyone what she had just seen? From Azul's reaction, she couldn't have been gone stiff for much more than a fraction of a minute but the vision she had seen went for much longer.

And she had only seen a fragment of it.

Marth shook her head. "I don't know. My head just went blank…" She lied.

Azul was quiet for a moment. It was hard to tell what he was thinking with a mask covering his face but the same should have applied to Marth as well. She prayed that the mercenary wouldn't try to pry past her obvious lie. To her complete surprise, he didn't press the issue any further.

Azul helped Marth to the stone steps that crested the outside of a run-down building in the alley. Even in a small, yet bustling town as this decay persisted. Where life thrived, so did its counterpart. The thought made Marth wince as she slowly settled herself onto the cobblestone steps. Azul parked himself several steps away, leaning against the wooden boards of a neighboring building, his hands resting idly against his frame. He seemed drained of strength, much more so than Marth herself.

Marth recalled back to what Azul had asked her, against her better judgment.

Are you still with the Order of Heroes? How are you still alive? Azul had prefaced the entire thing by telling her of a hero he knew who had perished on the battlefield. And how that supposed hero was supposed to be Marth.

No, that name was just a mask.

Lucina.

As soon as the name, her name by birth and right, crossed her mind, a deep sadness welled inside of her body. It was one of the few bastions of her fractured memory she still had left, a memory she knew by all that was true to be her own. She clenched her hands together, as if to hold onto the thought with all the strength she could muster. It was a foolish notion but it was all she had left.

This world's Lucina perished on the battlefield. The man before had solidified that for her. Even the sparse conversation between Kiran and Prince Bruno on the night of her Trial only further confirmed her suspicions. Even the Trial she had endured in the Tears of Spirits, at the complete mercy of the goddess of this world, the very hardship that made her question her legitimacy as a hero, sunk the knife deeper.

The Order and Azul clearly knew something about her she didn't. But one thing was true:

In this world, Princess Lucina was no more.

Then was that what she had seen? The fractured memory that tore through her mind like a whirlwind? Where her beloved blade Falchion had to rest inside her chest?

Was that her final moments she was witnessing one more time?

Marth briefly looked up at Azul. His aged mask dangled before his neck, his hair disheveled. He seemed to be consumed by thought as much as she was. As to what he was thinking about, Marth could not tell but the deep forlorn and emptiness in Azul's visible eye, his left, was telling enough.

He was thinking about the death of the hero he knew, a death he had borne witness to with his own two eyes.

Then the sudden realization came to Marth. It was like a crashing tidal wave.

But he didn't want to know.

How could she? It was ironic. The one opportunity she finally had to learn more about who she was and finally resolve the demons that tormented her rested merely an arm's reach away but every voice in her body fought against it. Even when she opened her lips to speak, her mouth ran dry, void of what her mind intended to say. She bit hard against her lip, enough to break skin.

A deep warmth began to flow from the edge of her mouth. It slowly ran to the edge of her chin before it dripped away, dotting the stone beneath her feet with a deep crimson. The blood shone brightly back at her, glistening with the moonlight and all the stars that seemed to have rekindled above. It reflected her face, the masked vestige that she had lived with for so long, the face of a stranger she had come to terms with. As more blood fell, more and more of the masked faces stared back at her, all of their eyes staring into her own.

Marth's hands reached for bloodied lip. Its warmth still radiating against her long, cold fingers.

"I'm still alive." She muttered to herself.

She clenched her hand, driving her blood-covered finger to the palm of her hand.

Yes, she was still alive. Her story hadn't ended with the death of Lucina. She had to strengthen her resolve. If she ever wanted to make it back home, this was the only way forward. She was sure of it.

She loosened her hand and turned to Azul whose empty eye was as vacant as before.

"You said you witnessed her death, right?"

Immediately, Azul was jolted back to consciousness, the life coming back into his eyes. Still, the melancholic air remained. Lacking the liveliness he had previously had, he nodded sluggishly. Marth knew that the man that stood before had his own demons as well but the two would not be able to move forward if all they did was dawdle in their weakness. Marth did notice the slight shiver in Azul's frame when she did not refer to the Lucina of this world as herself but someone else.

"How… how did she die?"

Azul kicked himself off the wall he leaned against. In a single bound, he was already only but a footstep in front of her.

"Do you really want to know?"

His voice contained no malice. Yet, there was an ominous force behind it. A foreboding warning. His words were telling her that there was no going back from this point forward.

She had already resolved within herself that she would be ready for whatever came next.

Gulping one last time, as if casting away her doubts, Marth nodded.

"I do."

Azul took a step back from where he stood. His sharp gaze darted at blazing speed around the alley. When his eyes finally returned to lock with Marth's own, her heart was already pounding, awaiting his answer.

"It was a suicide mission. One no one would have come back alive from. There, she met her end, at the end of her own blade, by the man she had come to love." He gritted his teeth. "She was sent to her death, by the people she shed her blood and tears for."

His eyes pierced straight into her own, as if peering into her soul.

"The Order of Heroes killed her."

End