Chapter Two: Angel

Disclaimer: I still don't own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

I fell with my angel down the chain of command

Instead, she took him to a port city in the east, the very place from which Abel and the other survivors of 602 had fled to Talys. The pier he remembered was a fragment of rotting wood, but a round plaque of blue ceramic gave testimony as to this ruin's place in history. To the south, a grand new pier surrounded by sturdy vessels backed Catria's story of the importance of trade in modern Altea. Abel had seen such ships in the distance, especially from his lookout in the Lonely Isles; these ships were tall-masted, many-sailed, and one ship in particular was excessively so. The ship was the floating equivalent of the Guildhall-- so vast, so grand, so ornate in decoration that Abel was surprised any mind could conceive of such a construction, much less build one.

"Is that the royal flagship?"

"The Heart of Talys II," Catria affirmed. "Ten years old and the finest ship in Archanean waters. Possibly the finest in all the world."

"I didn't realize a vessel so large could even keep afloat." He wondered, too, where trees tall enough to form her masts might grow. Macedon, perhaps... he had dim memories of great forests to the south of Dolhr.

"The original Heart of Talys was the flagship for the expedition to Yugdral," she said, as though it would make sense to him.

"Yugdral? What... where is that?"

"Strange place. It's a continent far more vast than Archanea. Actually, I'm surprised you haven't heard of it, as your little island was probably closer to it than any other part of Archanea."

He stared at her then, as he remembered the foreigners that passed through the Lonely Isles in their curious longboats. The eternal mad question-- Did Est go there?-- nearly crossed his lips.

Port Colpe proved a busy place; vendors hawked everything from roasted nuts to cheap jewelry to brightly-painted pots. Abel passed them by-- he had no gold in his wallet, after all-- but he did slow down at a series of colored portraits propped up against the city wall. The style of the art was pleasing to his eye; it was thoroughly traditional, without the strange innovations that Abel suspected came from Valencia or some other foreign realm. He would have browsed through the pictures happily for as long as Catria would let him, and his eye soon settled on a portrait of three young girls riding white pegasi. For a moment, he fancied they might be Est and her sisters, and after a brief study, it dawned on him with something akin to horror that the subject matter was exactly that. Beneath the autumn sun, the colors were rich and vivid; it might have been one of his own memories, grown more intense with the years.

"How is that... possible?"

"Ah. Yes, that's a popular one," Catria said, with enough carelessness that nobody could possibly imagine she was one of the girls in the picture. "The original is in Millennium Court. So's the original of that."

She pointed to a portrait of a young man on horseback, sword drawn and mantle billowing dramatically around him in a manner most impractical for actual battle.

"I reckon every household in Altea has a copy of that one," she said with feigned cheer. "That was done after we crushed the 610 rebellion in Leifcandith."

"Don't tell me the prince learned to fight on horseback." How well he remembered having to slow down his mount, to take care that the little heir of Altea wasn't left stranded and vulnerable in the tumult of battle.

"The prince may not have, but the king certainly did." She pursed her lips, though the expression was more thoughtful than sour. "But you didn't know him for that long, did you?"

Abel had developed a habit of selective deafness where Catria was concerned.

"You do not ever speak of Pales. Does the city yet exist?"

"It's still the ceremonial capital of the Unified Kingdom," she replied. "It competes with Khadein for the scholarly laurels-- the old Academy versus the new one, of course. But Altea City is where the true life of the continent makes its home."

-X-

He bought the portrait, of course, or rather Catria bought it for him. It was the first he'd looked upon Est's dear face in many a year, excepting that scribble on parchment he'd drawn himself, and he could not pass up the chance to connect with her through this bright scrap of canvas.

"Palla was the pretty one," Catria said as she ran a finger along the edge of the portrait. "Est the cute one. I... well, someone once told me I had a charming laugh."

Abel put the portrait on the wall opposite his fireplace, where he might sit and gaze upon it in the evening. He imagined guests coming to his cottage, imagined saying to them, "Ah, yes. That is my wife, when she was a girl." He never had occasion to say the words, as no guests came to his door-- save Catria, who needed to such introduction to Est. Even Catria visited him little through the winter, which proved rather more cold than Abel remembered Altean winters to be. Though, to be sure, it was less cold than the Lonely Isles.

The cold woke him by itself one morning; Abel reached out for the familiar wood of his bunk, and grasped only air. He rolled to the side then, surprised by the sudden burst of pain down his leg. He sat, and realized he did not know his location in the slightest. The spare room with its single bed resembled an infirmary, but there was no room such as this on the grounds of Castle Altea that he'd ever seen.

"Cain? Frey? Anyone?"

He began to search about the room with a rising sense of panic; he came across the face of a pretty girl scratched on an old bit of parchment, and though he didn't know her, the sight of her caused him to remember something else entirely. They'd been attacked. He must have been injured, and left behind-- unless he was somehow the only survivor.

"Sir Jagen? Cain? Someone, please answer me."

He stumbled out of the bedchamber into an adjoining room; an old woman stood there, a bundle of firewood in her arms.

"Abel, what in the name of Lord Narga are you screaming about?"

He stared at her, not knowing her face, though her voice seemed to him oddly familiar. Ally, he thought, and hoped to St. Anri his instinct was true.

"Where is the prince? I have to find him... we have to leave this place."

She set down the firewood and placed her small hands on his shoulders; he froze, uncertain as to whether this was an attack or an embrace of sorts.

"Abel, it's 648. Six-forty-eight. There's no war, no invasion, you've nothing to defend."

"I have to find...."

"The prince grew up and got married and died a long time ago. He doesn't need you any more." Catria's voice was harsh with disgust. She walked to the portrait of Est and sharply tapped the canvas. "She doesn't need you any more, either."

Abel stared at her; it seemed a mist was slowly burning away from his mind. He felt keen-witted again, but also felt shamed and horrified at himself for having lost his place in time. Catria, meanwhile, continued her lecture.

"They're pictures, Abel. They stopped being real half a lifetime ago. More than that, even."

"You're saying Est is dead, then?"

"That one in the middle looks like a cheerful girl," Catria said of her former self. "I wonder what happened to her?"

After that, Catria insisted on taking Abel out more, claiming he needed it. So it was that he saw the Crown Princess one more time, when she opened a new bridge near his own cottage. He did not press forward with the crowd to pelt the girl with flowers; he stood at a respectful distance, and watched in silence as she struck the dust from his memories with every word and gesture. Abel did not think much, at first, of the Archsage that accompanied young Ismene. A princess would have a retinue, after all, and an Archsage was a fitting enough companion to the heiress of all Archanea. He took note of the elder lady only when a civilian near to Abel's own age bowed deeply before the Archsage and offered her a gift of bluebells. When Abel did truly see her, he was forced to stare; though her shoulders were bent, her hair pure white with age, all the years between them had not taken away her serenity. Abel felt his heart flutter as the deep blue eyes of the Archsage locked on his. He was caught, and by none other than the Princess of his own era. She had entrusted the life of her brother to him, so many years before. His broken vow had been made to her personally. She smiled a slow, sad smile; the blow from a pole-axe could not have hurt more. His oath of fealty had been blessed by that same smile. When she looked away, Abel thought she had done him a mercy.

Abel was short of breath when he confronted Catria after the dedication.

"You never told me Elice was still alive." It came out as an accusation.

"I said there were still a few relics like us. I don't owe you the full accounting," she said with plain unconcern. "Merric's dead, though. Some horrible wasting ailment that had him coughing up blood. I've always suspected his crazy experiments had something to do with it."

The fact of Merric's death hurt him far less than the recollection of Elice's smile.

"They got married, didn't they?" The words came out with even less interest than he felt.

"Married right after the war. Two children, five or six grandchildren these days-- I've lost count. Just like a fairytale, if fairytales involved decades of teaching schoolchildren how to blow things up. Oh, that reminds me-- you asked about the windmills before."

She launched into a story about Khadein students and their obsession with "perpetual mechanisms" and Merric's attempt to build one that would harness the power of wind.

"Well, it wasn't any kind of perpetual anything, but the king realized it could actually be useful, and so up went the windmill towers and now Altea's grain-milling capacity has multiplied by... oh, I don't remember the factor. Cain would, I'm sure. Anyway, there are more of them in Aurelis, out on the plains where the wind never seems to stop."

"Stop. Yes, please stop."

"Abel, what has gotten into you?"

For he was huddled on the ground, heedless of the pain through his bad leg, both hands pressed to his head in the manner of the madmen who heard phantom voices.

"The more I see, the more I can't stand this."

They were phantom voices-- phantoms of memory. Protect my brother, with your lives if it comes to that. See him to safety at all costs. That memory triggered another, triggered the memory he relived more often than any other-- any, that is, besides the moment that Est and her pegasus vanished from his sight. His hand went automatically to the scar beneath his ear.

"Would that my head were stricken from its shoulders that day," he whispered. "It was no mercy to keep me alive."

Catria snorted.

"I see. You only agreed to come out of your hole because you reckoned I was the last of us, and you'd never have to face the others. You're a fool as well as a coward, Brother."

"Who else is there? Tell me, Catria, how many others are left?" He cast about in the seas of memory to speak names not uttered in years. "Lena? Ogma? Palla, what of Palla?"

"I'm sorry, Abel. You really don't deserve to know." Her face, her voice, even her eyes betrayed nothing. "We searched for you, all of us. We scoured the land from Thabes to Macedon on your behalf. These were our orders: Abel is forgiven, pardoned, exonerated. Bring him back to me. And one by one, the others gave up the search, until only two of us held out that we would find you again. And then, in the end, there was only me."

She crouched down before him, so her eyes were level with his, and in those eyes he saw no sympathy.

"The Crown forgave you, Abel. I never said anything about my own feelings." And yet, her voice was strangely soft, like the tone of one explaining hard truth to a small child. "I saw you aim your lance. I saw you strike. If you had drawn blood, I would have killed you with my own hands."

Abel remembered the flash of a rapier's blade, and felt again the sick certainty that he was going to die as so many cavaliers had before him, die from one swift thrust of that fragile-looking weapon.

"Many days, I have regretted the mercy our lord showed you. Better to have my sister a widow than the wife of a craven traitor."

"She would have died. They planned to kill her if I took arms against the occupation."

"Better to have my sister dead than save her at the cost of all the world." Catria's voice was as smooth and unyielding as polished granite. "Est was a knight, Abel. She'd taken her oaths. She understood. And you, out of some blasted romantic folly, tried to 'protect' her by committing a horrible, horrible act."

He wanted to protest that Est was no knight, not by then. She was the little wife of a shopkeeper, and happier for it. Part of him doubted that Est had ever embraced the warrior code her sisters both lived by. And he'd loved her for it, loved that there was one girl in his life who would wrinkle her nose up at discussions of tactics and armaments and fortress design. One girl who would look at him with those big eyes and confess that she was glad, so very glad, that she didn't have to get up every day and kill people any longer.

"Which betrayal did she leave me for?" The words had been buried so deep within him that letting them out now pained him. "I've never known, Catria. Did she leave me because I betrayed my lord, or because I left her to die in that cell? For what I meant to do, or what I couldn't do?"

Catria stared at him then, and her mouth twisted in an expression he could only deem quizzical.

"Abel." She spoke slowly, gravely, as though each word were of utmost importance. "Do you believe, even for one moment, that they would have let her live?"

To hear her echo back at him the terrible doubts he'd kept deep in his heart, to hear her voice those doubts with plain and simple words, was a pain beyond measure. Ballista bolts, Elfire spells, the breath of a mage-dragon-- even Imhullu hadn't felt so unbearable. No dark magic he'd known possessed the shattering power of Catria's relentless recitation.

"You'd have come back from the battle, your lance desecrated with your own lord's blood, and they would have shown you Est's corpse. And they'd have packed you off to hell before you'd finished screaming."

He wanted to contradict her, if only to say that no, they would have allowed him to live, if only to take pleasure in his agony.

"These were not misguided men of honor, Abel. These were criminals, the same strain of vermin who cheat at cards and bring re-forged weapons to the fighting arenas."

"I know that, Catria. I lived under their rule while you and your prince were playing treasure hunt at Lord Gotoh's pleasure."

He'd gone too far. Her eyes flared with something unmistakable as anything but blood-lust. How well he remembered that spark of blue flame, burning in her gaze as Catria the White sailed out to bring the unjust to their fate. In earlier times, she at least would have slapped him. Now, she leaned back on her heels, breathing heavily through her nose until the fire in her eyes smoldered low.

"What would you know of that? You, cowering like a dog in your filth, the brave knight afraid to fight, while we--" She bit on her lip to keep herself from saying any more.

"While you what?" He hadn't felt this reckless in years, not since in his arena-fighting days when each morning's bread was purchased with another man's life. She turned away from him, breaking eye contact, and he watched her shoulders heave for a few deep breaths.

"Through the fire and the ice," she said, sounding strangely distant. "No, you would never understand."

A veil seemed to fall between them; when it no longer appeared that Catria was truly angered, Abel pleaded with her once more.

"Catria, take me to the place where I lived."

-X-

She did, not on that day but some weeks later. Abel found himself standing before the little structure that served as his home and his domain for so brief a time. It was a shop still, a toy-shop in fact, and Abel found himself thinking of the children he and Est had talked about, had imagined fondly, but never had brought into being. There were more tangible reminders of Est, though-- the little square of stained glass with a pegasus in it was still in the upstairs window, and those were Est's own rose-bushes under the windows, he was certain of it.

Another of those blue ceramic plaques was set into the wall, next to the door.

"At this residence in 607 lived ABEL and his wife EST, knights of Altea martyred in the War of Heroes."

Abel read it twice, three times, to make sure his eyes were not failing him.

"Martyrs...." He grazed his fingertips across the smooth surface of the plaque. "Who decided we were dead?"

"Cain." Catria packed several layers of meaning into that one syllable. "I told you, he's been more or less running the country for years. One of the first things he did was to declare the both of you dead, and then put this plaque up. It was tying off a loose end, you see. Cain wanted people to move on, to quit reliving the wars. New king, new age, no need to keep fretting about who-did-what back at the turn of the century. Bury the last of the glorious dead, and stop looking askance at the neighbors."

"But all of you knew we survived the war, Catria."

"And Falchion was never used to take back Altea," she replied. "I told you. I wasn't on the Statue Committee. I'm not on the Council to Register Historic Places, either. Cain takes care of that sort of thing, and I just look after the army."

They stood in silence, both gazing at the plaque and its shameless untruth, until she spoke in a fainter, softer voice.

"Your names are listed on the War Memorial...."

Something in the way her voice trailed off made the hairs stand up on Abel's arms.

"I am truly a ghost in this world."

-X-

Of all the great buildings of Altea, the Temple of Anri was the least changed. From the outside, it was just as Abel remembered. Inside, there were two major additions, one of them being the War Memorial. He would have gone there first, as his fingers longed to run across the letters of Est's name, but Catria steered him away.

"You will face this, Abel." She pushed him along the aisle, past the gallery of dead kings-- St. Anri set in granite, then the sleeping statues of his lesser heirs, and down to the end of the row. The very simplicity of the tomb defied all the elaborate architecture of this age-- plain white stone, inscribed with only a name and dates, and the barest facts. No accounts of great deeds and accomplishments... Abel supposed the name spoke for itself. The sword resting atop the sarcophagus told its own part of the story.

"Falchion is just lying there in the open?"

"Lord Gotoh placed a binding spell on it, so only the rightful heir can touch it. Just try to place a hand on it; you won't even get close." She stretched out her own hand to show him the invisible barrier. "The rest of the time it stays here, where it honestly belongs."

"Has it even been used?"

"Not once. There haven't been any dragon attacks in years." There was something forced about her casual tone. "There are minor upheavals every now and again, about taxes and whatnot, but our current monarch never comes out personally. He leaves that kind of business to the knights."

Abel stared up at the ceiling. Faded banners from past campaigns drooped down, everything from the crude flags of pirates to the magnificent flag of Dark Emperor Hardin. He noted the personal standard of King Jiol of Gra, which still bore the imprint of the conqueror's boot. And there, to the left, was the banner of Dolhr, torn and singed at one corner. He remembered taking that flag down from above the Altean throne, remembered handing it personally to his prince.

"It was the most ridiculous thing," Catria said, in that artificial voice. "Some madman in the swamps east of Aurelis gathered up a little army and some weapons. Claimed he was the vessel for Emperor Hardin's soul and that he would liberate Aurelis from the yoke of Archanea. Pure foolishness. I was ordered to pacify them, but not to harm any. Well, the ringleader wouldn't surrender to anyone but the king. A word from the king, personally, and Emperor Hardin's soul would go home to rest. I brought the message back to His Majesty, unsure as to where I should go from there, and... well, he took the invitation. I think it amused him, really, to have history play out a second time as a bloodless farce."

Abel, still gazing up into the collection of victory trophies, tried to drown out Catria's recitation with his own memories, but her low voice kept breaking into his thoughts.

"The air was like poison there. All pink and green above in the twilight, and black with biting flies below. The flies didn't bother me any, as I was up above the miasma. The cavaliers and foot-soldiers were plagued by them, though. Nearly half of them were ill before we even set off on the return. Half were ill, and several died. It was something in the blood that made them reel in the saddle as though drunk, made them shake with chills in the heat of the day and burn with fever in the night. Some fought with it for weeks, others succumbed within days. He fought longer than most, but in the end...." Catria held up her hand, her thumb and index finger just a bit apart, the space of a biting fly's wingspan. "A little insect, and one drop of tainted blood, could do what the darkest forces upon Archanea failed to accomplish."

Abel didn't want to listen to her, but against his own will he remembered a dusty town along the road from Khadein to Thabes, remembered the local cleric calling all citizens together beneath the blistering sun to tell them the news that no could believe. He remembered the strange silence that fell over the assembly in the still moment before the weeping and denials, remembered the strange outrage on the faces of so many of the young, as though the gods had somehow betrayed them all.

Catria looked at the temple floor now; she dragged one foot across the mosaic, just as she'd scratched patterns in the dust so many years before.

"If I had to live my life over again, I'd kill the False Hardin on my first trip through and claim it as a suicide. But I was still young and didn't know any better, and so I spared the madman."

Abel watched her closely, watched her hard face and dry eyes, and the memory of the Dragon's Altar, of a girl's last inconsolable whisper, flickered again in his mind.

"Cain took the duty of telling the little prince his father was dead. Said he had experience with that sort of thing." Her lips twitched in a mirthless smile, and Abel felt as though time and history were folding around him like crumpled paper. "It fell to me to then explain to a seventeen-year-old boy how I'd failed to protect his father. From flies."

Abel turned away from her then, and spent a while contemplating the sarcophagus. He couldn't touch the sacred sword, had he even wanted to, but the marble itself was unprotected and he could trace the letters and numerals with his hand. 588-- he'd been five years old himself when the future king was born. Five years old, living with his mother in the small town now swallowed up by the bustling city. Such a very long time ago....

Something else bothered him about the stark design of the tomb.

"Why isn't Caeda next to him?"

"Caeda?" Catria raised one eyebrow in apparent surprise. "Oh, the Queen Mother is spending her golden years in Talys. I personally find the climate terrible there, but she seems used to it."

Each surprise did him additional damage. This time, Abel felt as though his chest had been kicked open. Yet he remained on his feet, his fingertips pressed to the unyielding white marble.

"Caeda... I'm sorry, Princess," he said at last, once he regained his breath. Sorry for what, he wasn't entirely sure; he was sorry, perhaps, that a great knight had shown less fortitude than a little slip of a girl.

"I told you, she's not in there. If you want to give your regrets to Caeda, I can bring her a letter."

Catria's voice seemed to come from a great distance. For a moment, she seemed to leave him entirely, then Abel realized his cheek was resting against the sarcophagus.

"Get away," Catria was saying. "The bishop hates it when people come here and cry and make a mess of things."

"Do they often?" He asked without really caring.

"Old ladies do. The younger girls would rather go to the plaza and sigh over that blasted statue."

Abel straightened himself, even as he felt a sudden fluttering panic.

"Catria, tell me if Est still lives. Tell me what--"

"I don't owe that to you, Abel. I'll give to you what is owed you, and nothing more."

Her face, her voice, were as cold as the stone beneath his hands.

"You decided to hide from the world, but the rest of us kept right on living in it." For a moment, the lines of her cheek seemed to soften. "Come, I'll show you your own cenotaph."

-X-

"Dedicated to the memory of all those who gave their lives for Altea, that their sacrifice will not pass unnoticed by the generations...." Abel's eyes passed quickly over the rest of the inscription; it took several attempts for the florid preamble to register in his mind. "Cain didn't write this. Too many words."

From the corner of his eye, he saw the hint of a smile cross Catria's lips.

Abel ran down through the list top to bottom, taking in the names of old comrades. The dead of 602: the knights slaughtered by their allies at the battle of Menedy River, the trainees murdered in their bunks when the Gra garrison overran the castle, and those who sacrificed themselves so that a handful might escape the castle as it fell. The dead of the 604-605 campaign. The fallen of the 607 ambush when the combined forces of Archanea, Aurelis, and Gra converged on the castle in an attack as brutal as it was unexpected. The brave resisters who perished in the occupation, struck down in open defiance of the Emperor or tortured in prison cells. And, finally, those who fell in the 607-608 counterattack. There, near the very end of the list, was the name he'd been seeking.

Est.

Abel ran his fingers over the grooves carved into marble, the grooves that spelled out the name he bore in his heart and his conscience. It no longer mattered to him that 608 was not-- at least as far as he knew-- the true date of her death. It was the date she had ceased to be as a person in his world, the date she passed from vivid life to misty memory. He could say at last in his heart that Est was dead, or at the very least that the Est he'd been chasing for so many years had truly had vanished from the earth. And so, of course, had he. The monument said so, in plain-graven letters.

When Catria led him from the Temple, Abel found the world to be changed. The painting in his sitting-room was no longer a portrait of his beloved wife, but simply a pleasant image of three spirited girls with their pegasi. He hoped, for the first time, that Est had moved along with the turning world, that she'd put behind the memory of her miserable traitor of a husband, that she'd found love in another's arms, and raised pretty girls of her own. He hoped that he now qualified as simply a mistake of her youth, and not as the point about which her life spun in ever-shrinking circles.

The pilgrimage to the Temple was his last journey beyond the confines of his little village. Waves of pain, of pressure, radiated through his chest and left him lightheaded and short of breath. Catria did not leave him again, and though it bothered him at first to have her cooking meals and washing his linen, he did not feel it worth the effort to argue. Abel did not know how many days passed in this manner; time no longer flowed in an orderly progression of sunrise and sunset. He had broken free of time now-- not frozen in place, not carried along on its tide, but simply floating through disconnected moments without reference to past or future.

"I'm sorry for taking you away from your duties," he said, as Catria brought him a plate of eggs and toasted bread. Breakfast, he assumed, but it might have been supper.

"Don't trouble yourself with it, Brother. I had to learn to delegate responsibilities eventually. Commander Catria is due to retire next year, and it would be improper of her not to prepare her lieutenants for the day."

"Ah. I can't imagine you ever...." He searched a while for the words. "Being still."

"There are some who wanted me gone twenty years ago," she added, not really in response to him. "Said I was too compromised to continue my duties, too tied to the old regime. But I couldn't let go the reins... I had a piece of unfinished business."

Her words hung in the air for a long moment while Abel summoned the will he needed to reply.

"What will you do now, that everything is finished?"

"I might take a holiday in Valencia. Lovely weather there, in the southern half of the continent. Less brutal in the summer than Macedon, far more pleasant in winter than Talys."

He was not really listening, nor did he care about her plans for retirement. On some level, he just enjoyed hearing her talk.

"You're remarkably handsome for a man of your age and condition," she said, and traced one cool finger along his cheek. "Good bones beneath the flesh, I suppose. Even now, I see a flicker of what my sisters did admire in you."

So like Catria, to only pay a man a compliment when he lay dying.

"Have them bury me in the paupers' field, with no stone or coffin. Just the embrace of the earth." It was no better than his long-dead comrades received after battle.

"Anonymous burial of the poor was outlawed in 622, except in cases of plague or national emergency as declared by the sovereign." She recited as though from memory.

"Ah. It seems I'm out of luck, then." He pressed his eyes shut; if the tightness in his chest grew any worse, he would be forced to ask Catria to bring the village healer, simply to relieve the pain.

"I'll find a place for you, Abel." Her fingers brushed the hair back from his forehead. "Some quiet place, by the trees and clear running water. A place where children might run, and laugh, and never notice the signs of mortality around them."

Abel fancied he could hear the trickling water, the wind stirring through green leaves. He lay a while with his eyes closed, until a familiar tune nagged at him enough that he seemed to wake up, and so felt more alert than he had in long days.

As I went walking I saw in the field

Down, a-down, we go

A bonny young knight, layin' under his shield

Down, a-down, we go

He knew the song now; it was a ballad of Talys, something he'd picked up during the Great Exile. They'd sung it on the march, he and Catria, Palla, and Cain-- sung it in the lonely hours when making a noise was the only way to keep themselves awake. Catria sang the interminable thing now, all ten verses of it. It wasn't quite the same without the other vocal parts, as something was so obviously missing. Abel briefly thought to join her, but it was enough of a struggle to breathe that he quickly discarded the idea. Instead, he imagined them as they were-- Cain with his hair red as flame and young face splashed with light freckles, Palla with her green eyes shining and her serious facade cracking into laughter along with her sister.

His hounds ha' gone hunting alone in the marsh

His hawks now fly free in the hills

His lady has taken another to bed

Down, a-down, we go

Down he went, indeed, with Catria singing him out of the world as a grandmother would sing a babe to sleep.

And nothin' is left of a face once so fair

Down, a-down, we go

The ravens ha' bowered their nest with his hair

Down, a-down, we go

She was silent, then, for a while-- or rather, she did not speak. Abel heard her all the same.

"Catria." It was an effort to say those three syllables. "I can't remember ever seeing you cry...."

"Well, Abel," she said, wiping at her eyes. "You simply missed out on all the worst moments of my life."

A strange unconcern had taken ahold of Abel by then, as though his mind and body alike were turning rapidly to wood, or stone, or something else without feeling. And so he asked, again, a forbidden question, without fear of the consequences.

"What happened to Palla?" He knew of her appointment to high office in Macedon, but couldn't remember ever hearing of her death. He'd not wanted ever to know, not until Catria summoned an entire procession of phantoms into his life. Or, perhaps, dragged his own shade back to the realm of the living.

"Palla got over you in the end. Took her nigh on a decade, but she managed it."

"I am... glad of that."

Another silence followed, during which Catria seemed to collect herself.

"She forgave you, Abel." He knew this time she wasn't speaking of Palla. "She still loved you. She just couldn't undo what was already done."

He answered her with only a smile, born of the gratitude that she cared enough for him to lie to him now. She gave him one last fancy he might cling to for his salvation, but he didn't latch on to it. His wife, real or imagined, was as far away from him now as the rose-tinged clouds of a sunset. So far away, out past the winds and the stars that gave light without any warmth....

"And Abel... if you could do one thing for me? As my reward?" Her voice, though low, was charged with some brittle emotion. Her eyes glittered, and for one mad moment she appeared to him as Est on their wedding day. "Tell him it was Catria that brought you home."

He didn't understand at first. He was thinking of Est, and of Palla, and it was long seconds before his befogged brain understood whom the message was even for.

"Ah," he breathed, as he saw Catria's meaning. Abel closed his eyes.

He'd always planned to save his final breath for Est, to speak her name one last time in hopes that she would hear, and be waiting for him. So he had intended through the long decades of his exile-- but in the end, he expended that breath on the friend, on the sister, who sat at his side and placed her hand upon his head.

"I'll tell him... Catria. Thank you."

Abel reached out at last for the forgiveness that had always been extended to him, grasped it, and was made whole.

The End

Author Note, Explanation, and Apology:

I didn't mean to write this. It sort of kick-started itself, as a reaction to "The Golden Age." But once I started on a vignette of bustling Altea City, with its Guildhall and girls' school and poor Abel wandering through it like a sleepwalker, I couldn't stop. After the civil-war wreckage glimpsed in "The Golden Age," I fell in love with the idea of a man who runs away from a medieval-warrior society and comes back four decades later to find the Renaissance has happened without him. Windmills, transoceanic voyages, civic reform and revisionist history... postwar Archanea is a splendidly flawed paradise here, as opposed to the just plain flawed worlds of my other post-FE3 fics.

There are only two real voices in this narrative-- Abel, the fallen knight who placed love of a woman above his vows of duty, and Catria, the knight of the air who sublimated her passion for the man she couldn't have into a life of service. They have both failed by their own lights; Abel lost both his love and his honor when raised his weapon against his prince, while Catria led her lord to his death by following orders to the letter. This dual failure binds them together, even as the primary links between them-- Est, Marth, and Palla-- are profoundly absent. Abel, in Catria's care, turns from a shell of a man, passively awaiting his judgment, to someone who actively re-evaluates the ideals on which he's spent his life. And Catria, somewhat against her own will, shifts from being the Fury who pursues Abel to the ends of the continent to a somewhat sadistic Virgil who leads a reluctant Abel through Purgatory and drops him off at the entrance to Paradise.

This piece is more overtly "spiritual" than most of my writing, which is entirely intentional. Uncomfortable as it might be to a Western fan, FE canon forces on us that Marth-- aka Prince of Light, aka Starlord, aka King of All Kings, aka the Chosen One-- occupies a semi-divine place in Archanean society. As did Anri, except Anri didn't conquer the entire continent. Regardless of your personal feelings on Marth as a character, this is not something a writer can ignore. It's like Sailor Moon's role in her universe-- just accept that she's the Messiah, and roll with it.

And this factors into my treatment of Abel. Abel isn't just an ordinary knight who betrayed his prince in a moment of weakness. Abel is the designated Traitor to His Lord. Not the Wolfsguard-- they were always Hardin's men, just as Jeorge and Astram were always Nyna's sworn men. Abel doesn't just break his knight's oath, or break the law-- he commits an outright sin, a spiritual failing, and compounds it by running away. Running away after Est, to be sure, but the very fact that he lost Est should be punishment enough. Instead, he fails to accept that he no longer has any claim to Est, and pursues her. Imagine Orpheus driving Eurydice further into Hell.

I don't actually care for redemption narratives; they're generally cheap and unconvincing. Either the villain does a face-heel-turn and goes out in a blaze of glory, or a character whose crimes weren't really crimes to begin with gets a suitably creampuff redemption. The Harry Potter fandom was terrible about these scenarios. Hopefully, this tale doesn't fall into either of those categories. The slow slipping-away of Abel's illusions, and the equally slow thawing of Catria's affections for him, should suffice for these good yet imperfect characters.

PS: Catria's musical interlude is a "Talysian" variant on the Scottish folk ballad "Twa Corbies."

PPS: Epigraph again from "The Law" by Leonard Cohen.