In Endless Dreams

by SnowofSilesse

A mission in Gaspard goes awry when a village boy, pursued by undead invisible soldiers, turns into a dragon. Faced with unearthly magic and the ghosts of their past, the leaders of Fódlan must ally with heroes from other worlds against their common enemy, before they-and reality as they know it-are broken beyond repair. A crossover between TH, Fates, and the entire FE Universe.

46. Vacant Cradle

Chapter 46: Vacant Cradle

Castle Gyges, The Kingdom of Valla, Morai

Year 625

The air was cold, silent, under Anankos's unnerving stare. Blood-red eyes slid from Byleth, to Robin, to Julius and the dragon princess hiding behind his legs, studying each of them with a gaze as sharp and as guarded as the thin smile straining across Anankos's pallid cheeks.

"Well?" Anankos asked, breaking the long stretch of silence. His eyes continued to rove between them, unblinking, like a snake sizing up its prey. "Nothing to say for yourselves? But you were all so confident and chatty just mere moments ago, even as you stumbled your way through the dark of our dungeon halls. I was rather looking forward to your arrival, so we could finally have a chance to talk face-to-face."

"You were…" Robin visibly swallowed, shoulders sagging beneath the weight of Lyon's unconscious body slumped over her back. "You were listening to us?"

Amusement softened the sharp edge of Anankos's smile. "Come now, Robin," he said. "You are a tactician, are you not? Surely you didn't think someone would go through all the trouble of bringing you here—of saving you all from your fated demises—only to leave you so carelessly unattended?"

Robin turned her head down, muttering, "I had my suspicions."

"But to answer your question," Anankos said, "yes, I have been aware of your waking presence for quite some time now." He lowered his hand, swirling his fingers in a slow, circular motion. Thin rivulets of water slithered around Byleth's boots and began to rise off the ground, rippling in time with the dragon's slight movements. "I felt the dungeon's waters stirring the moment you all began to rouse from your sleep. Heard your whispers drifting along the flow of the water's stream."

Anankos stalked closer to their position. For every step he took, for every altar and flickering corpse he brushed past, the floating streams of water rose higher and higher over their heads, spinning through the cold, damp air to form countless circles of mist across the length of the throne room.

"What…" Julius stepped back, curling a protective arm around Tiki as she buried her frightened face into his tunic. Fire alighted in his palm, taking aim at Anankos's slow approach, but the flames wavered with a nervous energy he—and everyone else trapped in the dragon's sights—couldn't seem to suppress. "What is this?"

"My power," Anankos said simply. He waved his hand, summoning one of the circles to his side. The mist within reflected a faint image of the castle's dungeon, their empty cells, and the staircase at their backs, each picture glistening against the moisture in the air. "The water serves as my eyes and ears. Always watching, always listening, granting me glimpses of whomever I please." He traced the outer rim of the misty circle, red eyes narrowing. "And whichever worlds I please."

His fingers dragged down the center of the watery reflection. The mist rippled, and with it, three new images swirled into focus: a sacred tree blanketed in flames, smoke, and ash; a castle crumbling against the winds of a violent storm; and—

Byleth's breath caught in his throat. His grip on Rhea slipped, weakened. Because in the mist, he saw the Nohrian military camp. He saw the safe haven his students and their allies had fled to after escaping the ambush at the Bottomless Canyon, a base of operations that was meant to be their shield against the invisible soldiers…

And it lay in ruins, without a living soul in sight.

"What is…?" Robin squinted at the mist, face paling as she looked upon the flames ravaging the remains of the sacred tree. "But that's… the Mila Tree? No, it… it can't be…"

"Why is Velthomer—" Julius's glare snapped back to Anankos. "You think you can fool me with such paltry illusions? My father's castle was built to withstand a siege of more than 10,000 men. It would never fall so easily, not under my father's—"

"If only that were so," Anankos said. He weaved his fingers around the mist and expanded the image, just slightly, revealing a purple-haired woman hiding within the castle's rubble—bruised, bloodied, and out of breath. Littered around her feet lay the cold bodies of soldier, after soldier, after soldier, all dead in the mud.

"Ishtar?!" Julius paled. "And our—our people—"

"It really is quite a shame." Anankos frowned at the macabre reflections, gingerly brushing his fingers across the images of the slain. "If she and Arvis had simply stayed out of our way, we could have avoided so much unnecessary bloodshed." He heaved a heavy, weary sigh, lowering his hand to his side. "But at least now, shrouded in the safety of their dreams, they can finally find some measure of peace."

"What did you—" Julius took a staggered step toward the mist, stammering, "Why is she—why are they—"

"You said it yourself earlier, did you not?" Anankos nodded to Lyon, to the red scars Julius had burned into his forearm. "If you need something done quickly, sometimes you have to resort to methods others might find unpleasant."

Fire flared out around Julius's fingers, its searing heat matched only by the fury sweeping across his eyes. "Bastard!"

"Julius!" Robin tried to warn. "Don't—!"

Julius hurled the fiery spell before she could utter another word. The flames crashed through the misty circles and shattered the reflections held within, lashing Anankos's face with a scalding spray of fire and steam. A few embers caught the loose fabric of his hooded robes, burning holes through his sleeves and singeing the long strands of blue hair hanging over his pointed ears.

But when the steam dissipated and the flames flickered out, Anankos himself was left completely unburned and unscathed.

A thick, unbearable silence fell over the throne room. Anankos stared at the floor, face impossibly tight, body impossibly still, eyes impossibly wide, as the scattered droplets of mist dripped off his chin. In disbelief, it seemed, that someone would attack him so brazenly.

So stupidly, Byleth thought with a grimace. He curled his arms tighter around Rhea, shielding her as Anankos slowly turned his blood-red gaze onto them again. As that disbelief, that stunned stupor, shifted into something farmore dangerous.

A low, predatory growl rumbled out of Anankos's throat. His lips cracked into a scowl, teeth sharpening into fangs. Dozens of frenzied eyes blinked open across the skin of his face, his neck, his hands, spewing splotches of black mist from each dark pupil. Beside him, the flickering corpses began to rise off their altars in a harsh cacophony of cracking bones, shoving aside the funeral flowers adorning their hands and faces, all seething and hissing against the palpable rage emanating off their master.

Rhea stirred in Byleth's arms, breath stuttering around a growl of her own. Her shoulders coiled, her fingers dug into his chest, but even as her draconic instincts reacted to the dangers stalking toward them, she still did not awaken.

Come on, Rhea, Byleth pleaded silently. He shook her with what little strength remained in his tiring arms, casting a desperate glance down the castle halls to their left, to their right, only to find more undead shadows—soldiers, farmers, merchants, nobility, children—rising from their altars. Shambling closer in a sea of swords and spears and pitchforks, blocking off every avenue of escape.

Behind him, Tiki attempted a warning growl to try to ward them off, but the sound was about as intimidating as a kitten's mewling coming from her small human frame. It did nothing to stop the shadows' staggered movements, and did nothing to quell the Silent Dragon's ire.

"Contemptible vermin!" Anankos snapped. "You dare raise a hand against me? After everything I have done for you?!" The braziers burning around the throne flared behind his back with a blaze of golden fire. His eyes—all of them at once—locked onto Byleth and the others, twitching with murderous intent. "Ungrateful wretches, all of you! I will rend the flesh from your bones and drown you in your own bloo—bl—no!"

With a sudden jerk of his head, Anankos choked on the threat and stumbled back. His heels smacked into the altars sitting near the foot of the throne, the force of it nearly knocking the pale-haired twins from their resting place. "Stop it!" He clutched his head between his hands, clawing at his temples and hissing through his teeth, "Calm down, calm down, calm down!"

The flickering shadows froze all at once on his command, arms and weapons dropping to their sides. Their expressions slipped back into the same cold, impassive stares their lifeless eyes had worn during their rigid sleep atop the altars. Watching Byleth and his allies in eerie silence, waiting for their master's next order with fragile patience.

Robin shot Byleth a panicked sideways glance, wide eyes screaming what the hell is going on?! Byleth could offer nothing in return but a weak shrug and a stiff jaw, the dread-fueled adrenaline pumping through his heart practically paralyzing him in place. He needed to make some kind of move, form some kind of plan, but nothing was coming to him. Nothing but fear—crippling fear—and the ceaseless, frantic pounding in his chest.

(He decided in that moment, as he stood cornered and powerless against the whims of a volatile dragon, that he could really do without his new heartbeat… and all the overwhelming emotions that accompanied it)

The golden fire flared once more, burning away the chill in the air with a burst of radiant heat. The flames' bright light threaded around Anankos's head, swirling and swirling and swirling without pause until, slowly, the feral fury began to fall from his face, until the sinister eyes littering his body slid closed and sank back beneath his skin. He swallowed a shallow breath and muttered a quiet, "Thank you," as the fire's light slunk back into its brazier and faded from view.

He's talking to someone? Byleth frowned at the dimming flames, but before he could even begin to question who, or what, or why, Anankos shuffled around to face them again, shoulders and eyes hanging heavy with fatigue. He drew in a shaky sigh, held it in…

Then raised a hand in their direction.

Byleth's heart jumped into his throat. His eyes and fingers snapped down to his hip, searching for a sword that wasn't there. The sudden movement jostled Rhea, threw them both off balance as he fumbled around for a weapon, for his magic, for Sothis's power, anything to defend them from Anankos's attack—

But no attack came.

Instead, a gentle wave of water rolled across Anankos's outstretched palm and washed over Julius's fingers, extinguishing the wispy remnants of the prince's fire spell with a careful flick of the wrist. No aggression, no vengeful retaliation, just the slow, harmless hiss of steam rising off Julius's hands.

Byleth blinked, completely and utterly stunned. What is he…?

"A word of advice, child," Anankos said. "It is unwise to provoke a dragon to anger, especially if you lack the means to defend yourself against the frenzy that always follows."

Julius gulped, staring down at his wet hands as though he expected them to explode in his face. "D-dragon?" he stammered out, voice barely passing for a whisper. "You… you're a…?"

"You've only gathered that now?" Anankos gave him a once over, brows furrowing in what seemed to be genuine confusion. "Is that why—oh." His arm fell back to his side, and the water along with it. "Oh."

"Oh?" Byleth clenched his teeth so hard his jaw began to ache. "Oh" what? What is happening right now?"

"Well, this is rather embarrassing." Anankos laughed to himself, a soft and quiet thing, but one that echoed eerily through the bloodless lips of the shadows standing at attention beside him. "Look at me, rambling and throwing around all this magic when I haven't even properly introduced myself yet. You must forgive me. It's been so long since I last held an audience with living, breathing humans, and I seem to have forgotten my manners."

Byleth shared another uneasy glance with Robin. The chorus of laughter rumbled its way through the rest of the flickering soldiers, haunting them with the most grating, most unsettling sounds Byleth had ever heard in his life. Tiki whimpered, hiding herself behind Julius's long cape, but Julius himself just continued to stare at his hands, too terrified to move under Anankos's gaze, lest he risk drawing the dragon's ire again.

"Let's start over then, shall we?" Anankos bowed his head and attempted a friendly smile (a difficult smile to take seriously with all the death and danger looming over them). "I am Anankos, of the First Dragons. I have been known by many titles over the centuries—the Silent Dragon, the Dragon of Wisdom, the Forgotten God, the Lord of the Lands Below—but you may address me however you wish. We have no need for formalities here, not anymore."

He swept his arms out wide, gesturing to the swaths of dead soldiers surrounding them. "And these are my people: the great citizens of Valla. They lost their lives a long time ago—a terrible tragedy, one that can never be forgiven—but at least here, within the safety of these walls, I can see that they are properly mourned and cared for. Speaking of which…"

Anankos snapped his fingers. All at once, the flickering shadows sheathed their weapons and shambled back to their altars, returning to their places of rest at the dragon's bidding.

(But even as they slid back onto the flat of the stones, even as they rested their heads back onto the withering petals of the altars' funeral flowers, the pink glow in their eyes never strayed from Byleth and the others. Still watching, still waiting, staring them down with deafening silence)

"This is my wife, Mikoto," Anankos continued, taking the hand of the dead raven-haired woman laid out over the altar directly beneath his throne. "She was a strong woman. As brave as she was beautiful, no matter the timeline."

The dead woman said nothing, acknowledged nothing, her eyes as cold and as lifeless as all the rest.

"And these are our children." Anankos stepped over to the altars of the sleeping—but breathing—twins, ruffling the pale hair of the man in white first, then doing the same for the woman in black. "Corrin and… well, Corrin. They are the same person, really, but the fate and circumstances of their worlds ultimately led them to walk different paths."

Corrin? Byleth's attention was immediately drawn to the unconscious woman. It was difficult to tell for sure at this distance, but if he squinted his eyes and focused on her hair, her pointed ears, what he could see of her face… she bore a striking resemblance to Kana and Sophie.

Byleth quietly gritted his teeth. He had finally found the kids' mother—along with her male counterpart, apparently? He wasn't quite sure how that worked—but the revelation only aggravated the dread already stirring in his chest. Because now he needed to figure out how to help not one, not two, but four unconscious people escape from the mad dragon and his castle.

"They may not be my own," Anankos said, smiling down at the two Corrins with fondness and fatherly pride. "Not technically, anyway, with them hailing from different worlds and all. But even so, I cannot help but see my own child in their faces." His smile passed on to the altar nestled in between them, its bed empty and bare. "I see the future that could have been, and the hero my child was destined to become, had it not been for—"

Anankos stiffened. His smile slipped away, the softness in his eyes turned cold and grim. A frigid breeze shuddered through the throne room, hissing and cracking as the misty air hardened into clumps of raw, jagged ice over his head.

"But enough about me," Anankos muttered, voice hollow. Flat. He tore his eyes away from his wife, his children, and the empty altar, shifting his focus, almost forcibly, back to Byleth and the others. "The question I asked you has still been left unanswered."

"Question?" Robin slowly repeated back to him, breath curling around her nose against the sudden cold. Lyon shivered in his sleep, eyes fluttering and teeth quietly clattering over her shoulder as his body instinctively flinched away from the chill, making it all the more difficult for her to keep him balanced on her back.

"When you first arrived here," Anankos said, "I asked you all to tell me how you managed to awaken from the dreams I gifted to you. That spell is not an easy thing to break, you see, and yet so many of you—somehow, nearly all at the same time—shook off your slumber as though you were waking up from a simple nap." His red eyes narrowed, and the frigid mist began to burn at Byleth's nose. "That is not a coincidence."

"What are you trying to say?" Robin asked, before anyone else could even attempt to provide an answer. "You think we did something to intentionally mess with your magic? We didn't even know we were under a spell while we were asleep, much less how to break free from—"

"Don't lie to me."

Anankos's growl rumbled through every drop of frozen mist in the air and every tiny pebble scattered across the ground. The corpses echoed the sound from their place on the altars, hissing, "Liar… liar… liar…" through the crooked curves of their rotting teeth. A dark and dangerous warning, one that snatched away the last remnants of warmth from the throne room's deep chill.

"For someone to escape our magic's hold," Anankos said, creeping toward them with slow, focused purpose, "it would require not only the active resistance on the part of the target, but also a powerful force of interference from the outside, aiding them in their fight against the dream state." He stepped up to Robin first, blood-red eyes boring into her guarded brown. "You know perfectly well how you escaped, and you know perfectly well who helped make such an escape possible."

Robin, to her credit, did not flinch away. She stood as tall as Lyon's weight would allow, meeting the dragon's imposing gaze head-on as he leaned in close, so close the breath rising off their lips became nearly indistinguishable.

"Tell me who it was," he whispered, but still loud enough for all of them to hear, "and in return, before I send you back to your slumber, I will tell you anything you wish to know. About the Mila Tree, about how you came to be here… about your family…"

Slowly, he traced a new circle around a patch of icy mist, conjuring an image of a man and two teenagers coughing beneath a haze of heavy smoke. A thick layer of ash clung to their blue strands of hair, faces sweaty and streaked with soot.

"Chrom?" Robin's breath cut short at the sight of them. "Morgan, Lucina… why—"

"Ah, ah, ah." Anankos snapped and the image disappeared, melting away as the frozen mist turned to water in his hand. "You first. Tell me what I want to know, and I will reciprocate in kind. A fair exchange, wouldn't you say?"

There's nothing fair about one person in the room holding all the cards, Byleth thought bitterly. Why would he even bother asking? Couldn't he just conjure up another one of his magic mist mirrors and search for the answers he wanted himself?

"The same offer applies to you two, as well." Anankos's eyes slid to Julius. "Based on your little outburst from earlier, I presume you would like to know more about your fiancée's state of well-being? Or your father's, perhaps? Your sister's?"

Julius dropped his gaze to the floor. His lips were sealed shut, but the sweat building over his brow betrayed the nerves, the panic, quickly wearing him down.

"And you, Professor?" Anankos said. Fury flared against the fear in Byleth's chest; the use of his title brought to mind all of his students, all of the people he cared for (would die for), which was almost certainly Anankos's intention. Bastard. "I have a great many things I could share with you about—"

"You're wasting your time," Byleth said. Like hell am I going to rat Sothis out to you. "Robin already told you everything we know. We were asleep, and then we weren't." His glare on the dragon narrowed, letting his renewed defiance shine through. "That's all there is to it."

The corner of Anankos's mouth twitched once, twice, his polite façade twisting into a tight, thin, irritated line. "I would urge you," he gritted out, "to reconsider. Very, very, carefully."

The water beneath their feet stirred with a violent ripple. A ripple that Byleth felt, not through his boots, not through the air, but inside his own head. A sharp, terrifying tingle deep within his skull, like Anankos's power was seeping into the water, and the blood, flowing through his brain.

"You have two choices," Anankos warned. "You can either tell me what happened willingly, or I can extract the information from you myself. And I promise, the latter option"—he flicked his wrist, and the pressure in Byleth's head began to pound behind his eyes—"will not be pleasant for you."

Byleth staggered back a half-step, nearly dropping Rhea as his vision swam, as his feet swayed, as the dragon's magic threatened to probe and rip through his mind. Damn it! Was there anything this stupid lizard couldn't do?!

(But if he could do this from the start, a small part of Byleth questioned, why did he wait until now to do so? Why bother trying to talk to us first, when he could just use his magic to get what he wants? Why bother holding back at all?)

"Well?" Anankos prodded, watching him expectantly.

(Why is he still holding back? Still waiting? Still giving me another chance to answer?)

"S-stop it!" Tiki said, stepping out of the safety of Julius's shadow. She puffed out her chest, stood on the tips of her toes, and bared her tiny fangs at Anankos, putting on the bravest face she could muster. "Leave By-By alone, or I'll—"

"I don't recall giving you permission to speak, beast."

With blinding speed, Anankos's hand shot out to seize Tiki by the throat. Black scales crawled over his fingers and sharpened his nails into a set of deadly claws, slicing and digging into her skin. The pressure in Byleth's head quickly dissipated, but that left him no less panicked as a new pair of eyes sprouted over Anankos's chin, leering down at the younger dragon with malice and murderous intent.

Whatever reservations Anankos had about hurting Byleth, or Robin, or Julius, clearly did not apply to Tiki. Not in the slightest.

"I am talking to the humans right now," Anankos hissed at her. "If I want to be subjected to your grating voice, I will address you directly. But speak out of turn again—dare to challenge me again, you pathetic little wretch—and I will tear out your throat and feed the remains of your mangled corpse to the Faceless." His claws squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed, carving out red streaks around Tiki's neck. "Got it?"

"Princess!" Julius tried to grab her, tried to pull her free from the dragon's savage grasp, but his hands found nothing but air as Anankos shoved him aside and slammed her into the wall, crushing her against the rough stone without a shred of mercy.

"No!" Robin cried out. "Let her go! Stop!" She turned on her heel to rush to Tiki's aid, but Lyon slumped off her shoulder with the sudden movement, nearly sending them both toppling over. "She didn't mean to upset you! She's just a—"

"What? A child?" Anankos scoffed and glared at the tears streaming down Tiki's paling cheeks. "This creature is no child. She's a monster, hiding behind a child's face." He raked his other hand over her forehead, drawing out a mixture of blood and water from her cuts, her tears, and her skin. "One whose usefulness, however pitiful, has run its course."

"I—I—" Tiki sputtered and gasped for air, desperately prying at the sharp claws crushing her neck, desperately fumbling with the empty necklace dangling from her neck, searching for a stone that wasn't there. "I—I'm sor—ry—"

Another pair of dark, frenzied eyes tore open Anankos's jaw. "What did I just say about—"

"It was Loptous!"

Anankos stiffened, falling eerily still and silent. The wicked eyes littering his face narrowed into thin, suspicious slits, sliding toward the source of the panicked voice that had interrupted him. To Julius.

"It was Loptous," Julius quickly repeated, sounding nearly out of breath. "Loptous forced me to wake up. I'll tell you everything I remember, just…" He cleared his throat, still unable to meet the dragon's intense gaze directly. "Just let her go. Please."

Another beat of suffocating silence pulsed through the throne room. No one moved, no one breathed, as Anankos quietly mulled over Julius's words, claws only once slice away from ripping through Tiki's throat. His expression flickered between a snarl and a hesitant frown, eyes twitching closed as another flare of golden fire lashed out from the braziers behind them.

Then…

"How ironic," Anankos muttered, "that you of all people would be so protective of Naga's blood."

His claws loosened, just slightly, to let Tiki fall from his grasp. Julius lurched forward to catch her, cradling her head and her bleeding neck before she could smack down into the hard, wet floor.

"Fine." Anankos rubbed his forehead with the back of his scaled hand, wincing as though plagued by a terrible headache. The sinister eyes dotting his skin slowly blinked away, and his claws, tense and bloody as they were, shrunk back down into human-sized fingers. "If sparing the beast's life will grant me your cooperation, then we… I… will allow her to live a little while longer." He cast the dragon princess one last glare, a clear warning lingering in his weary, but hardened, gaze. "So long as she keeps to herself."

Tiki curled away from him and buried herself into Julius's arms, muffling her sobs and her tears with his tunic.

(Off to the side, Byleth covered Rhea's face with the loose fabric of his sleeve, shielding her from Anankos's view… and, he could only hope, from his volatile temper)

"Now then," Anankos said, wiping the blood on his hands off on his robes, "what were you saying about Loptous?"

Julius exhaled a slow, shaky sigh. He waved a flash of white magic over Tiki's neck, closing the red claw marks carved into her skin. "Loptous came to me in my dreams," he started, shame and bitterness hanging off every word, "just as he has a thousand times before. I ignored him at first, ignored the draw of his power as my father has always instructed me to do, but this time he was… much more insistent than usual. Desperate, almost."

Slowly, he set Tiki down on her feet and guided her behind his back, helping her hide beneath the black fabric of his cape. "He made all manner of threats," he said, "in his efforts to frighten me awake. He raved about all the terrible things he would do to my family if I kept refusing him—the things he would make me do to them, once he took my body as his own." He swallowed a shallow breath, visibly shuddering. "He showed me a vision of my mother dying by my own hands, and forced me to watch it over and over and over again until I finally relented. Perhaps I should have put up a greater fight against him, but I… I just couldn't stand to see her hurt, to see her blood staining my hands, even if it was only part of some twisted dream."

A knowing look, one of mournful pity, came to line the edge of Anankos's frown.

"I woke up from the pain of his torture soon after," Julius said. "I think he believed that if I managed to escape the dream, he would be able to take advantage of my vulnerable state and claim me as his vessel—"

"Reclaim," Anankos muttered.

"What?"

"Nothing." Anankos leveled a short glare at one of the braziers, at the thick purple flames burning behind its metallic rim. "Go on."

"That's it, really," Julius said. "I woke up in that dark cell you stuffed me into, and thankfully Loptous wasn't there with me. After that…" He shrugged and crossed his arms. "You know the rest."

"I see." Anankos curled his fingers around the mist, forging a ball of frost-bitten water to toss into the brazier of purple flames. The dark fire sputtered with an angry, demonic hiss against the splash of cold. "He must have used the last of his blood connection to you, then, in a desperate bid to sink his claws back into you before my magic could purge him completely. A grave oversight on my part." He bowed his head in a way that seemed to be apologetic, but at this point, who could really know for sure what the dragon was truly thinking? "But he could only play that trick once, and now that you are free of him, he will never hurt you again. I will make sure of it."

Julius's brow furrowed. "Again? What do you—"

"I presume something similar happened to you, as well?" Anankos asked, turning next to Robin. "I cannot imagine Grima was any more kind to you, in his struggle to keep hold of his carefully crafted vessel."

Robin glanced down with a slow, solemn shake of her head. "No," she said quietly. Cautiously, almost. "He wasn't."

"And Sothis." Anankos twisted around to Byleth. "She is certainly a tricky one to figure out. In some worlds, she seems to treat you kindly enough—on the surface, at least. But in others…"

His eyes drifted down to Rhea, a scowl breaking over his expression as he flicked Byleth's sleeve away from her sleeping face.

"Sothis sees you as nothing more than her puppet. A husk for her to impose her will over, a tool forged by her daughter for them to wield at the so-called Goddess's whim." He dragged his red gaze back up, slow and pointed, until it was level with Byleth's. "Which side of her, I wonder, came to ruin the peaceful life you found in your dreams?"

"Neither," Byleth said as smoothly as possible. "I already told you. No one came to help me, not even—"

Anankos pressed a finger to the center of Byleth's forehead, silencing him with his frigid touch. "After all that I have offered you," he said, "and after all my repeated warnings, you still insist on hopelessly clinging to that lie? For what? For Sothis?"

The finger grew a little colder, a little sharper, probing at the edge of Byleth's mind. Flashes of the monastery, of the dream, flickered across his vision, and the distant sounds of his students chatting, laughing, even humming tickled his ear, like ghosts looming in the shadows behind him.

"That beast stole your heartbeat, stole your emotions, stole your entire childhood. She would have stolen the very life from you, too, if she had been given the chance, the same as Loptous and Grima and Fomortiis and all the savage monsters that plague the Outrealms." Colder, sharper, threatening to break skin. The ghosts clawed at Byleth's back, wet fingers scrambling to drag him back down into the depths of the dragon's dream. "Why waste your breath lying for her? She does not deserve your kindness, nor your protection, nor your loyalty. She doesn't deserve anythingbut eternal damnation." A hard, bitter edge cut through his teeth, muttering, "No dragon does."

Go to hell, Byleth wanted to snap back—taunting him with visions of his students, disparaging Sothis like that right to his face, how dare he?—but he bit his tongue before the curse could slip out. Arguing with Anankos wasn't going to get him anywhere; at most, it would only further aggravate the unstable dragon, and after his violent outburst against Tiki, Byleth didn't want to risk endangering anyone else. Not with Tiki, and Rhea, and Lyon still in such vulnerable states.

(But… more than that…

There was something familiar about Anankos's aggressive behavior, in his manner of speech. Something that gave Byleth pause. Maybe it was the dark circles under his eyes, or the weary edge lining his scowl, or the anger and bitterness burning through his voice as he spoke of those he perceived as monsters and beasts. All the signs of a deeply troubled mind.

…The kind of troubled mind Byleth had plenty of experience working with)

"Still have nothing to say?" Anankos huffed out a short breath. "This stubborn resistance will bring you nothing but—"

"What happened to you?"

Anankos blinked, frowning at the sudden question. "What?"

"Anger like this doesn't come from nowhere," Byleth said, softening his voice as much as his erratic heartbeat would allow. He could still feel the chill of Anankos's power hovering at the edge of his mind, could still hear the shadows of years past whispering in his ear, but he stood firm, focusing on Anankos and Anankos alone. Be calm, be attentive, be patient; identify the root of the problem, then, if possible, try to talk him down. "For you to be possessed by such an intense hatred for other dragons, for you to feel so compelled to hunt them, hurt them, kill them…" He looked past the finger pressed to his forehead and met those blood-red eyes directly. "There must be a reason for it."

Anankos's frown tightened. "Does the garden need reason to loathe the weeds ravaging its soil? To crush the insects that seek to corrupt and consume the leaves, the roots, and the flowers of all the fragile life growing in its bed?" He glared at Rhea, at the flaming braziers, at the little shadow hiding behind Julius's cape. "They are monsters, all of them. Destruction and chaos and madness incarnate." The glare dropped down to his own feet. "That is all the reason I need."

"But there's more to it than that, isn't there?" Byleth said, watching Anankos's downturned expression very carefully. "Lilith and Azura told me as much."

A brief, almost imperceptible wince of guilt crossed Anankos's face, but Byleth caught it all the same. There's something there, keep digging.

"Azura said you were once this world's benevolent protector," he said. "A being of god-like power, but one who was also gentle and kind. A dragon who chose to devote all that god-like power not to his own selfish interests, but to the people and kingdom he cherished more than anything else."

Anankos was silent. Deathly, dangerously silent, eyes hidden from view as he continued to stare at the floor. Byleth wasn't sure if that meant the dragon was listening, or if he was contemplating the best way to rip Byleth's tongue out for prying into his potentially sensitive history.

Byleth had to hope it was the former.

"Lilith mentioned something similar, during her attempts to"—Byleth had to pause, had to bite back the anger and pain from that day to avoid saying something that might offend the dragon's short temper—"to escort me to your castle. She said that everything you were doing, you were doing for the good of humanity. That you wanted to restore peace and order to the world, by any means necessary."

More silence. Robin cast them both a curious look, lips pinched together thoughtfully as she stewed on Byleth's words. Waiting, perhaps, to see what Anankos's reaction would be.

"I didn't really believe them," Byleth said, "not at first. After everything your soldiers put me and my people through, how could I believe the dragon himself was anything more than another monster to be feared?" He nodded to the altars packed down the length of the castle halls, to the thousands of people and flowers laid to rest atop them. "But then, I see this. I see how much care you've put into tending to your people's deceased, and see the love you still clearly hold for your family—"

"Care? Love?" Julius turned away from the altars and the corpses' lifeless stares in disgust. "There is no care or love here. He's using them as his pawns to—"

Byleth shot him a hard glare—"not the time!"—and, thankfully, Julius seemed to get the message, huffing and twisting his mouth shut.

"Azura and the others told us you were lost to some sort of draconic madness," Byleth continued, looking back to Anankos. Still, the dragon stared wordlessly at the ground, watching the water trickle around his feet. "They claimed that you had succumbed to your baser instincts, hellbent on destroying everything and everyone to sate your fury. But now…" He softened his voice again, and with complete sincerity, said, "I'm not so sure."

Anankos bit out a short, bitter laugh. "That is your conclusion? That I am not mad?" Another chuckle, more hollow than the last. "What foolish, sentimental nonsense."

"Maybe," Byleth said. "Someone with a sound mind probably wouldn't think and act the way you do, but there's more to all this than simple 'madness.' Otherwise, you wouldn't be wasting time setting out flowers for the dead, or crafting spells that make people dream of peaceful, idyllic worlds, or even be standing there right now listening to some lowly human's opinion of you."

Anankos fell quiet again, but Byleth pressed on, raising his chin toward the frigid hand still hovering over his forehead. "And despite all your posturing, despite all your attempts to intimidate us into cooperating with you, you keep holding yourself back, as if you're hesitant to actually hurt me." His arms curled reflexively around Rhea, knowing full well that she was not privileged to the same mercy. "Would a mindless beast driven solely by madness be capable of such restraint?"

There was a slight shift in Anankos's expression, a dark glint in the red pools of his eyes, but one Byleth couldn't read. "You think me unwilling to spill human blood?" he said, somewhere between a whisper and a warning. "Have you already forgotten the images I showed you in the mist? Have you already forgotten the attacks my soldiers carried out against you, your allies, and your students, during your attempts to hide my grandchild from me?" His frown hardened into a grim, dangerous line. "I am more than capable of—"

"Yes," Byleth cut in. "You're more than capable of hurting us, you've made that very clear. You could probably scramble the water in our heads and kill us all with a simple snap of your fingers, if that's what you really wanted." Sweat beaded down the length of his neck, but he masked his nerves, refusing to let the fear and uncertainty show on his face. "But it's not, is it? You don't actually want to hurt us, not if you can avoid it."

Stand your ground. Get to the truth.

"Because somewhere, deep down, there still exists the kind, gentle dragon who pledged his life to protecting his kingdom, and protecting humanity." Byleth looked Anankos dead in the eyes. "Am I wrong?"

His challenge was met with a cold, silent stare. Anankos's eyes narrowed, his fingers twitched, and the chill of his power crept ever closer, whispering with the voices of the dead. It brushed over Byleth's nose, shivered through the sweat on his back, rippled through the hot blood pumping through his heart, testing his resolve, his conviction. Still, Byleth did not waver, did not flinch, did not look away, not even as the chill coiled into a heavy pressure behind his eyes, ready to push and claw its way through his mind. He simply held his breath and waited.

And waited…

And waited…

And waited…

…Until Anankos slowly lowered his hand away from Byleth's face, grumbling a sigh of defeat.

"You are more perceptive than I gave you credit for," he muttered. The draconic chill melted back into the floor, as did the ghastly whispers haunting Byleth's ears. "Or perhaps I have simply grown more transparent in my old age. The degeneration makes it difficult to tell, sometimes."

Byleth exhaled a choked breath of relief. Goddess, that had actually worked? On some level, he had known his suspicions about Anankos were right—he wouldn't have risked so boldly confronting the dragon like that otherwise—but he hadn't been entirely convinced he was going to make it out of that standoff in one piece, either.

(And he most certainly hadn't expected Anankos to just give up and admit to it so easily)

"So… it's true, then?" Robin asked, glancing warily between the two of them. "You don't intend to hurt us?"

Anankos gave a weak shrug. "I would rather not, no. Your kind has suffered enough needless pain and death as it is."

"What?" Fresh anger, sharp and incredulous, burned across Julius's face. "How can you—you, of all people—say that? After what you showed us of our worlds, after what you did to my home and my people—"

"A regrettable, but necessary, case of collateral damage," Anankos said, sighing into a slouch. "We would have left your people alone if your sister had not been so insistent on rousing Naga's spirit. She made herself a threat, allied herself with that insufferable coward, Forseti." A heavy frown dragged down the corner of his lip. "And that, we could not abide."

Wisps of fire threatened to flare from Julius's palms. "If you laid your filthy claws on her, you damnable cur—"

Tiki's little hand reached around Julius's cape to grab hold of his flaming fingers, tugging him back with a tight, trembling touch. A silent plea to stop, don't make him angry again.

"What Julius means to say," Robin said quickly, sliding in front of them as Julius cursed and swore through gritted teeth, struggling to cool his temper, "is that it's a bit difficult for us to reconcile some of your actions with your… 'kind and gentle' nature, as Byleth put it." She offered a light, friendly smile, but one that was clearly strained at the edges. "Perhaps if you explained your point of view, and helped us to better understand your reasoning behind all this, we would be more willing to cooperate with you. That way, no one needs to get hurt."

Anankos chuckled to himself, but it was quiet, weak, lacking vitality. "Somehow, I doubt that."

"Why?"

"It doesn't matter."

"I think it does."

"Well, it doesn't," Anankos gritted out. The dark circles under his eyes crinkled in pain as he shook his head, like streaks of shadows clawing through his skin. "You lot are too noble for your own good. I have seen into your minds, and I know nothing I say will convince you of the truth." The misty air shuddered against his agitation. "So why waste both of our times trying to explain it any further?"

"Because that was our deal," Byleth said. "You said that if we told you who woke us up from our dreams, you would tell us anything we wanted to know in return. 'A fair exchange,' I think you called it. Information for information." Just ignore the fact that I didn't actually tell you anything about Sothis or how she helped me, he thought quietly, hoping Anankos wouldn't come to the same realization. "We've held up our end of the bargain. Now it's your turn."

Anankos crossed his arms and grumbled, "That offer was meant to incite interest in the happenings of the Outrealms." Thin streams of water coiled around his ankles, rippling like the bristled fur of an anxious cat. "Not about me."

"Well, that's what we would like to know more about." Robin looked to Byleth for confirmation, and Byleth nodded back, seeing his own thoughts reflected in her determined expression: stand your ground, get to the truth.

And maybe, just maybe, we can find a way to reason with him.

"What happened to this world's protector," Robin asked, turning back to address the dragon directly, "that would cause him to so vehemently hate his own kind?"

"What happened? What happened?" Anankos let out another laugh, the sound empty and broken. "Asking me that stupid question over and over again—do I really have to spell it out for you?" Clumps of ice began to form along the water streams, freezing the ground between Anankos's boots and the altars closest to him. "Look around you. What do you think happened?"

More ice crawled up the stone beds. The flickering corpses jerked back as far as the altars would allow, growling and whimpering as wisps of dark energy and frozen steam lashed out at their feet.

"Yes, I used to be kind," Anankos hissed. "At least, I tried to be. I tried to be different than all the other First Dragons, so blinded by their endless pursuits of power and conquest that they drove themselves to the brink of extinction. They cared not for the human toll their wars demanded, while I—" he glanced to the crumbling throne, and his scowl weakened "—I found friends, true friends, among the humans, and we worked together to build a new home hidden away from all the violence and suffering. A place of peace and refuge, where humans and dragons could live together in harmony." His gaze dropped down to his hands, longing. "Valla."

Weakly, he clenched his fists. The icy water stilled as he held in a breath, not a single ripple moving across its surface.

"I gave them everything," Anankos said. "Magic, wisdom, even pieces of my own life force. Anything to keep them safe and happy." He lowered his hands to his side, and the water resumed its staggered flow. "But then the warring dragons began to descend into madness and beasthood. Their bodies and minds began to waste away under the burden of their overwhelming power… and I knew I was doomed to follow. Such is the fate all dragons share." His eyes slid to the young dragon hiding behind Julius's cape. "A fate I'm sure that little wretch understands all too well."

Tiki whimpered, huddling as close as she could to Julius's back.

"Then came the visions," Anankos continued, voice growing quiet and unsteady. "Visions warning me of the degenerative monster I was destined to become. Haunting me with images of my kingdom drowning, then freezing, then burning, my claws tearing our lands to pieces until no life remained. Every night, it consumed my dreams: the screams of my friends as I ripped them all apart, the taste of their blood sliding down my tongue, the squelch of mangled flesh and crunch of broken bone as I discarded them with the rest of our kingdom's rubble."

The corpses began to gag and retch, scratching at their missing limbs, clawing at their bloodless faces, tugging at their balding scalps. All turning away from the dragon in full-body terror, screeching, "No more… no more…!"

Byleth stepped back from the twisted shadows as Rhea shuddered against his arms, her breath stuttering around a trail of water dripping from her parted lips. His heart skipped a beat with every undead shriek, every choked gasp from Rhea… starting to doubt whether this approach had really been the best one for them to take after all.

"I… a-ah…" Anankos palmed at his forehead, wincing at the ghastly sounds. "I was horrified, terrified, by what I saw, but my friend, the first King—his name, it… it eludes me—he believed with all his heart that I could be different. That we could find a way to stop the madness that had consumed the rest of my kind, and together, we could work to change that terrible fate."

He shook his head and slipped into another fragile laugh.

"But he was wrong. No matter what I tried—consolidating my power into a dragonstone, composing a song of prophecy to quell my destructive urges, sleeping and meditating for decades at a time, forging strong bonds of friendship with each successive generation born to our lands—none of it mattered in the end. None of it truly stopped my degeneration. "

He dug his fingernails into his temple, dragging red streaks down the side of his face but failing to draw any blood.

"It merely delayed the inevitable."

"Then…" Robin visibly swallowed, glancing to the altars. "All these people…?"

"Victims of my naivety and arrogance," Anankos muttered bitterly. "Naivety, for believing that such fickle things as bonds and friendshipcould save me from my nature. Arrogance, for believing that I could defy a dragon's fate… for believing I could be anything but a monster." The red of his eyes darkened. "The people of Valla eventually came to realize what I was, after I briefly lost control of myself and razed an entire forest to stumps. But by that point, it was already too late."

Bubbles began to boil beneath the water's surface, melting the ice into steam. "They turned on me," Anankos scowled. "After everything I sacrificed for those insolent maggots—no, no, my people, my people—they lashed out in fear. They tried to kill me, and I—agh—I finally snapped. The madness won, just as fate—fate—fate—had designed." The steam hissed up around his heels and whipped against the hem of his robes. He gripped his head between his hands, scratching at his ears, trying to block out the raspy wails of the dead. "Everyone, gone. Everything, gone. All my fault. Monster. Monster. Monster!"

"Monster…!" came the corpses' scathing echo.

"Monsters, all of us!" A frenzied eye ripped through Anankos's forehead, another split open his cheek, every part of him seething with the shrill whistle of boiling steam. "Dragons—demons—mindless savage beasts, everywhere! So much pain, so much suffering, because of US!"

"Anankos!" Robin shouted, struggling to be heard over the shrieking steam, the strained cries of the dead, and the dragon's mad ramblings. "That's not—"

"NO!"

Anankos stomped a crater into the stone floor. Water from every puddle and every stream launched into the air with the violent power of an erupting geyser, sending all the flowers laid across the altars scattering in its upward blast. He swept his arms out wide, fingers sharp and scaled black, commanding every airborne droplet to smash together over, and over, and over again. They formed dozens upon dozens of misty circles like the many he had conjured before, sharing glimpses of countless other worlds, countless other people…

And countless other dragons, laying waste to them all.

"Look at them!" Anankos shoved image after image into their faces, until all Byleth could see were dragons. Dragons rampaging through towns and cities, dragons crushing legion after legion of soldiers, dragons feasting on human sacrifices with maniacal glee, dragons twisting the minds and souls of their devotees to force them to do their bidding, dragons raising monsters and corpses to wreak havoc across the world in their name. "Look at them, and dare to tell me that I am wrong!"

Byleth's mouth turned to sand as he caught sight of himself in one of the many reflections: his hair returned to its minty hue, his body possessed fully by Sothis's green flames, his boots and sword coated in blood as he cut through hundreds of soldiers in pursuit of a purple-haired mercenary.

Then there was Robin, floating on the back of a massive six-eyed dragon, laughing atop the ashes of a burning city.

(The Robin next to him gritted her teeth and jerked her head away from the sight)

Then there was Julius, grinning like a madman over a pile of dead children, bathing and reveling in their sacrificial blood.

(The Julius behind him began to tremble at the knees, retching at the endless sea of glassy eyes staring up at him through the reflection)

"Do you see it now?!" Anankos growled. "Nearly every world, nearly every timeline, has seen itself threatened by the plague of dragons. Some who have lost themselves to degenerative madness, some who have been corrupted by their primal instincts, others who were simply born with hearts of malice and greed, but all incredibly dangerous to their worlds and the universe at large."

Another wicked pair of eyes sprouted across his neck as he pointed out specific images with his claws, naming them with a hateful scowl. "Medeus. Duma. Mila. Loptous. Idunn. Grima. Anankos. Velezark. Sothis. The 'Immaculate' One."

Glimpses of Rhea's dragon form flashed before them: one of her ruthlessly burning down the streets of Fhirdiad; another of her destroying Garreg Mach Monastery in a fit of blind rage, surrounded by priests and knights screaming in agony as their skin sloughed off their bones, as their bones snapped and bodies twisted to take the form of grotesque white beasts.

(The Rhea in Byleth's arms recoiled from the reflections, whispering in breathless pleas to her mother, tears leaking through her closed, fluttering lashes)

"Naga died before she could succumb," Anankos said, "but even the 'great' and 'virtuous' Divine Dragon Queen was not immune to it. Nor her daughter, she knew, which is why the little runtwas sealed away in a millennia-long sleep to suppress the burden of her power." He leered down at Tiki's shadow. "Those visions that haunt your dreams, the ones of you losing control and slaughtering all of your friends? Someday, they willcome true. Just as they did for me."

Tiki curled into herself, trembling even harder.

"If it is not dragons, then it is demons like Fomortiis." An image of a red-eyed Lyon, raising all manner of monsters and ghouls with the power of a black stone (the Lyon on Robin's back flinched in his sleep, mumbling, "no, no, no…" without pause). "Or dangerous and selfish gods like Yune, Ashera, and all the squabbling beasts of Zenith. So many monsters terrorizing humanity, and so many yet to come, like Sombron and his pitiful children. And the only way to stop them—the only way to save mankind—"

Each of Anankos's frenzied eyes twitched with a flash of black fury.

"Is to kill them all."

"B-but not all of these are true," Julius protested, voice wavering in his throat. "They can't be, because I never—"

"You did," Anankos said, stone-cold. "You have simply forgotten, now that Loptous's influence has been stripped from you."

Julius shook his head so hard Byleth swore he heard something in his neck crack. "No, I didn't—I didn't, I would never—"

"The tome you were 'gifted' housed the spirit of Loptous within its pages." Anankos spread his claws over the misty reflection of Julius's past self, cycling through images of the prince ordering mass executions, burning soldiers and civilians alive, forcing children to fight to the death in a blood-soaked arena. "The moment you touched it, he possessed your body and used you to unleash his vicious cruelty on the world. It is what you were born to do, after all—conceived through an incestuous union as you were, selectively bred to bring about the return of Loptous's tyrannical empire. And once he had you securely in his grasp…"

The image shifted one last time, depicting a pale-haired woman sprawled out over a tile floor, face-down in a pool of her own blood. Julius clamped a hand over his mouth, muffling a strangled scream, shaking his head even harder.

"That vision you say Loptous showed you of your mother's death," Anankos said, "was no vision at all. It was a memory." He glared back at the braziers, dousing the purple flames again as they flared against the confines of their golden, metal cage. "A cruel reminder of all the atrocities he forced you to commit. Matricide, child hunts, thousands of blood sacrifices, all because of the despicable desires of one, single dragon."

Julius covered his eyes, shoulders shaking, biting his lip so hard he drew blood. "I didn't… I didn't… I-I didn't…"

"And that is but a hint of the horror all dragons are capable of." Anankos's scowl deepened. "They do not deserve your sympathy, nor your mercy. Just as a rabid dog must be put down before it can attack and spread its sickness, so too must dragons perish for the safety of mankind." All six of his eyes narrowed in on Rhea. "Especially those so close to the brink of madness."

Shaken as he was by the gruesome imagery, Byleth still managed to hold on to his composure and turn Rhea away from Anankos's predatory gaze. "Rhea isn't—"

"The beast is one bad day away from snapping and losing control of herself entirely," Anankos said. "One bad day away from burning down a city full of innocent people. One bad day away from ravaging the length of an entire continent. One bad day from falling prey to her obsession with Sothis's resurrection, and repeating the same mistakes that killed Sitri." He sneered at her, conjuring a cord of water through the thick of the mist. "Selfish, worthless garbage."

Sitri? The name struck Byleth like a punch to the gut. Rhea… had a hand in… my mother's—

The water cord wrapped around Rhea's throat like a whip before he could fully process the troubling thought. With a flash of bared fangs and a violent tug, Anankos yanked Rhea out of Byleth's arms and smashed her down face-first into the floor, bones cracking against stone as tremors rocked through the castle's foundation.

Still, Rhea did not move. Not even as Anankos snagged a clawed hand into her matted hair, his razored talons slicing through her neck and the base of her skull.

"No!" Byleth lurched forward—help her, help her!—but his feet refused to move with him. His eyes snapped down.

Anankos's ice had frozen his boots to the ground, locking him in place.

"Stop! No!" Byleth scrambled to twist his feet out of his shoes, but the ice only climbed higher, trapping him in a frigid vise. "You've answered our question, we get it now! You don't have to hurt her!"

"No!" Anankos snapped. "You begging for her life means you still fail to understand the point! Dragons are the root cause of tragedy and human suffering in almost every SINGLE world across the Outrealms! Even when humans inflict violence upon their own kind, there is almost always a dragon lurking in the shadows, pulling everyone's strings in pursuit of their own mad and selfish designs!" His claws dug deeper into Rhea's head, her neck. Red seeped through the knots in her hair, blotting out the green. "Death is the only way to stop the cycle! Death is the only solution!"

Robin vigorously shook her head as Byleth tried, futilely, to punch through the ice around his ankles. "B-but that can't be true!" she shouted, pleading. "Just wait—there has to be another way—"

"Like what?!" Anankos barked out a laugh, as though it was the most absurd thing he had ever heard. "I tried everything. EVERYTHING! And still, despite all that I did to keep the monster at bay, I FAILED! I became what I was always meant to be—what ALLdragons are fated to become!" He slapped his free hand to his chest, his black claws shredding through the buttons of his robes. "It happens to me in EVERYreality! But by the time I realize the truth of what I am—by the time I realize that death is the only way to stop the monster lurking within—"

Three more circles materialized through the mist in front of him. Each featured the same massive dragon, its tattered wings spanning the length of the crumbling city in its shadow. The orb clamped in its mouth spat black miasma and acidic water from each frenzied eye twitching along its surface (the same eyes glaring through Anankos's human body now), raining death on the people below.

"My people are already dead!" The first image melted away, dripping over the altar of the Corrin in white. "My kingdom has already been destroyed!" The second burst into a puff of steam, blowing through the hair of the Corrin in black. "And my family is…is…"

He trailed off as Mikoto's terror-stricken face came into view through the third and final reflection, fleeing the wreckage with a newborn baby swaddled in her arms. Another woman followed at her heel, hand-in-hand with a little blue-haired girl only barely taller than her knees. Anankos's human form was there, too, ushering them all out of the city toward shelter as the dragon whipped its jagged head around in their direction.

The orb in its mouth trained its sinister eyes on the family, children and all, summoning a tempest of miasma and boiling water within each dark pupil. Then—

The image froze over. Anankos shoved the misty circle out of the air, letting it shatter against the cold, hard floor. The rest of the gruesome reflections flickered away, too, falling back to the stone and splashing over the ice melting around Byleth's feet.

"My family is…" Anankos's expression was distant, forlorn. "Gone."

His claws retracted. The corrupted eyes littering his body faded from view, no anger left present to sustain them. He released Rhea's hair and dropped her with a dull thud, staggering back toward the altars upon which his wife and alternate-world children rested. His fingers trembled as they brushed the edge of their stone beds, silent and sullen, as if reaching for something he knew he could never grasp again.

"Monster," he whispered, hanging his head in his hands as he slumped against the stone. "Monster… monster… monster…"

The throne room stilled, shrouding itself in gloom and silence. No more ghastly wailing, no more hissing steam, no more angry outbursts spewing violence and vitriol… just the slow trickle of water, carrying the broken mutters of a broken man.

And there it is, Byleth thought grimly. The bleak truth behind the dragon's madness. The answer they had been digging for, now on display for all to see.

But there was no victory to be found in it. None at all.

Careful not to disturb the somber peace, Byleth kicked his boots free of the melting ice as quietly as he could, ignoring the uncomfortable pity stirring in his stomach as he focused instead on inching himself closer to Rhea's unconscious body. He knelt beside her and rolled her onto her back, panic burning like bile up his throat at the deep claw marks and bloody gashes sliced across her face. Skin too pale to be healthy, chest too still to be drawing proper breaths. With his heart racing, with his hands shaking, Byleth pressed his fingers against the soft hollow of her neck… feeling for… waiting for… for…

Thump. A pulse. Thump. Another, then several more one after the other, beating with a slow but steady rhythm. Byleth exhaled a stunted sigh, the relief flooding through him almost too much to bear. She was alive. Weak, but alive.

He glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting Anankos to be looming there behind him, returned with his bloody claws to finish the job. But Anankos hadn't moved an inch from the altars, hadn't even lifted his head from his hands to check on the status of his prisoners; he just stood at the foot of the stone beds, muttering incoherently to himself and his unresponsive "family," completely lost to the world around him.

If that were the case… could this be their chance to…?

Byleth stole a quick glance up and down the hallways leading out of the throne room. Each wall was lined with more altars, more graves, more flickering corpses for as far as the eye could see. All of them quiet, stoic, empty, as they laid there motionless across the cold stone, their dead eyes staring at nothing but the water weeping through the cracks in the castle's ceiling.

No longer watching Byleth and the others. No longer guarding the hallways. No longer blocking their only way out.

There was no guarantee that they wouldn't spring back up again once Anankos realized they were trying to escape, of course, but maybe… if they could make it far enough through the castle before being caught…

With a few (admittedly shaky) plans forming in his head, Byleth began to pull Rhea back into his arms, looking back to Robin to see if she, too, had noticed their potential opportunity for escape.

…Only to find the tactician lowering herself to the ground, carefully sliding Lyon's unconscious body off her back and laying him down on a dry section of the floor.

What are you doing?! Byleth wanted to say, but he bit back the words behind gritted teeth, keeping himself quiet so as not to alert the dragon. Instead, he nodded urgently toward the lifeless altars, then toward the open hallways—"look!" he tried to convey, "this might be our chance to get out!"—but Robin simply shook her head, sharp brown eyes focused on Anankos and Anankos alone. The frown she wore was tight, pensive, but the determination she carried in her expression only grew stronger the longer she stared at their captor's back.

Quietly, without moving her gaze, Robin folded her coat to use as a cushion for Lyon's head. Once she had him settled, she reached her hands into the shallow stream crawling across the stones beside them, scooping up the scattered funeral flowers drifting atop its flow. The petals' edges were bitten with frost, but Robin took care to brush all the ice and grime away, cleaning up the bundle of flowers with a kind, gentle touch.

She drew in a deep breath, sparing one last glance around the room: to Lyon as he slept; to Julius as he buried his tear-stained face in his hands, still shaking his head in denial of what the reflections had shown to him; to Tiki as she hugged Julius's leg, struggling to control her own sniffles and tears; to Byleth as he watched them all under a furrowed brow, wondering what exactly Robin was planning to do.

Then, with the flowers held securely in her hand, Robin stepped across the water streams and approached Anankos directly.

Panic spiked through Byleth's entire body. What are you—?

A loud crack echoed throughout the corridor as Robin's boot crunched over a patch of melting ice—purposefully, it seemed—only a few paces away from Anankos and the altars dedicated to his family. Anankos snapped around at the sound, claws out, fangs flaring, a dark wave of water rising off the floor to form a protective shield around the stone beds. "Stay back!" he hissed. "Not a step closer, or I will—"

Robin offered him the flowers.

Anankos blinked at her. His red gaze trailed down to her outstretched hand, to the white roses and water lilies nestled between her fingers, before rising again with a suspicious frown. "What is this?"

"You dropped them when you summoned all those reflections," she said. "I figured you might want them back." Then, with a careful smile, "They're too beautiful to be wasted floating around on the ground, don't you think?"

"Oh." The claws shrank back into Anankos's hands, the fangs disappearing behind his softening scowl. "I… I hadn't realized…"

With a hesitant but grateful nod, he took the flowers from Robin's hand and swept away the water shield, resting the bouquet again over Mikoto's flickering chest. He carefully plucked a handful of lilies from the bundle and laid them out in the center of the tiny, vacant altar positioned between the two Corrins. It was the smallest altar in the room, only two or three feet long at most… about the size of a baby's cradle.

Byleth tore his eyes away before the grim nature of it all could rip through his chest. He doubled his efforts in tending to Rhea's wounds, praying to whatever gods were left in this world that Robin knew what the hell she was doing.

"How did you meet her?" Robin asked, maintaining a respectful distance from the altars. Her voice was quiet, soft, and warm with sympathy. "Your wife, I mean. If you don't mind me asking."

Anankos stilled his hand and regarded Robin with another wary stare, studying her as though searching for some devious motive hiding behind her sudden curiosity. Finding none, he sighed and resumed arranging the flowers, spreading them evenly across the cold, flat stone.

"There was a time," he muttered, "when my soul existed outside of my physical self. The degeneration had ravaged my brain and my body so thoroughly that, in a moment of anger and weakness, I blacked out and… killed a close friend of mine, without thought or reason. I 'came to' with his blood still warm on my hands, and I… I couldn't take it anymore. The guilt, the pain, the despair of losing myself to the monster within, I just wanted it all to end. All of it."

A shaky breath rattled through his teeth. "But death could not come by my own hand—the dragon would never allow it—so I did the next best thing: I ripped out my soul, my conscience, the only vestige of myself left untouched by the madness. I cast it away as the rest of my body and mind crumbled to fate, hoping that somehow, in some way, my last shred of sanity could find a way to finally put an end to our misery."

The water streams slowed their roll across the stone floor, swaying and trembling in time with Anankos's hollow sigh. A small ripple lapped up against Byleth's knees and splashed over Rhea's cheek as he channeled what little healing magic he could conjure into her wounds, the sudden cold making her nose wrinkle, her lips tighten, her breath hitch.

(And… for the first time since Byleth had found her in that cramped cell…

Her lashes stopped their wild fluttering, and her eyes, just barely, began to crack open)

"My soul took on a body of its own," Anankos continued, patting his white robes. "That of a human, as you see now. It… I… washed up on some random shoreline near the capital after the split, but I had retained no memories of who I was, or how I had come to be there. Lost and alone, with only my instincts to guide me." His fingers brushed over his wife's cold hand, the touch soft and ginger. "But then, Mikoto found me. She nursed me back to health, helped me make sense of the world I had forgotten, and invited me into her home, no questions asked." A ghost of a smile softened the pain in his face. "Imagine my surprise when it turned out she was a princess, the Queen's sister, and the 'home' she had brought me to was none other than the royal palace itself. So beautiful and kind… I did not deserve her, but love blossomed all the same."

Robin allowed herself her own quiet smile. "She sounds like quite the woman."

"She was." Anankos's gaze drifted over the Corrin in white, the Corrin in black, before settling on the tiny altar standing empty between them. "With her, and with the child that came soon after, there was… hope, again. Because the moment I held our little Corrin in my arms, I remembered everything, and I saw the future fate had planned for us." Fondness welled in his eyes, in his voice. "My child would be the one to unite the people of Nohr and Hoshido under a single banner, the hero who would forge the Fire Emblem from the Yato's steel and put an end to my dragonself's mad reign of terror."

"A heavy burden," Robin said gently, "not unlike the one my own children were once faced with." With a slow, measured step, she inched closer to Anankos and the altars, expression soft with sympathy. "It's strange. Hearing your story, learning more about your lovely family… I am reminded of my own. I met my husband under very similar circumstances, you know, when it comes to the amnesia, the chance meeting with royalty, and—"

"Stop." A thick tension suddenly coiled around Anankos's shoulders, his already weak smile breaking. "I see now what you are trying to do, tactician. Establishing common ground with your enemy, lowering his guard by relating your lived experiences with his, distracting him with positive thoughts and memories"—he narrowed his eyes—"all in hopes that he will be more receptive to your persuasions when you try to talk him down?"

Robin shrugged off the accusation. "Is it working?"

"Not particularly, no," he huffed. Carefully, he slid the final flower between Mikoto's stiff fingers, tracing the white rose petals with his thumb before pulling his hand away from her for good. "Because in the end, none of it matters anymore. What little life I was able to share with her, the hopeful future our child was meant to herald… it's all meaningless now. I failed to protect them from myself—from the monster—and the world was destroyed because of it. No more Nohr, no more Hoshido, no more Valla… all that remains is this miserable wretch of a dragon, alone in his kingdom of ash and bone."

He dropped his hands, clenching them into fists.

"I will not allow it to happen again," he said, a firm and dangerous promise. "Not to any other world. The vicious cycle of chaos and destruction we dragons have spun time and time again across the Outrealms—I will put it to a permanent end. No more degeneration, no more madness, no more worlds ending and no more suffering."

The gravel of his growl trembled through the air, through the ground, through every wave blowing across the water streams.

"No more dragons."

Robin frowned, gently shaking off the water that had splashed onto her boots. "Is that really what you think you'll achieve with this crusade of yours?" she asked. "No more suffering?"

"Eventually," Anankos said. "Your kind will never be safe while dragons like me are allowed to run wild and rampant. It is bloody, gruesome work, but it is necessary if we want to establish peace and order throughout the—"

"Peace will only come from stoking people's hearts," Robin said, "not their fear. That's something my husband once said—the ideals his sister died to uphold—and they are the words we strive to live by, even in the most dire of circumstances." She inched another step closer, folding a hand over her heart. "I know you think what you're doing is right, Anankos. You believe that slaying all those you deem 'monsters,' even those who have yet to do anything wrong, will solve all the world's problems—"

"It will."

"—but peace that is forged from anger, and hatred, and reckless violence," Robin said, crossing the last puddle separating their feet, "is no true peace at all. You are only perpetuating the cycle you seek to destroy, and continuing the 'mad reign of terror' your degenerating dragonself started by spreading it to other worlds."

"No." Anankos shook his head with a sharp jerk. "No, I am helping—"

"You're hurting us," Robin said. "You're hurting me, by putting my family's life in danger. You're hurting Byleth and Julius, by targeting the people they care about most—human and dragon both." She paused, steadying her breath before daring to say, "You're hurting them again, Anankos. Your people, your wife, your children, you're hurting them by trapping their souls here under your magic—"

"No, no, no." Heavy ripples of water stirred in anxious circles around his boots. "The only people who have been hurt are those who insisted on getting in our way. People who tried to protect scum like them"—he jutted his finger at Rhea and Tiki—"or people like him and his friends"—his pointed glare snapped to Byleth—"who have dragged my grandchildren into this fight, forcing them to wield the remaining Yato blades alongside the other divine weapons your allies have gathered, all to weaken me and hinder my efforts to save your worlds from the dragons' plague."

No, you dragged them into this, Byleth glared back, closing another cut on Rhea's face, by repeatedly trying to kidnap Kana and attacking all the people he and his sister care for.

"My soldiers are too numerous for me to directly control all at once," Anankos said, "so they must be able to act on their own. They are given their objectives, and their undead minds will rationalize completing that objective however they see fit. Most…" He paused for a moment, grimacing, "most have a proclivity for violence, so when someone foolishly tries to interfere with their mission, they will rid themselves of the obstacle by means of the blade. But I assure you…"

He gestured around the throne room to the altars and all their rigid corpses. They grunted and groaned under his attention, the water and necrotic shadows crawling across their bodies reaching up to caress their faces.

"Those whom my soldiers have struck down did not suffer for long," he said. "Like my people here, all of the dead—my soldiers included—have been granted peaceful dreams to help shield them from their pain and keep their subconscious selves company. A chance to live the perfect lives they have always wanted, all within the safety of their own souls and minds." He trailed his finger up Mikoto's cheek, brushing her black bangs out of her lifeless eyes. "I cannot undo all the tragedies we dragons have caused, but I can help them find happiness again in their eternal rest. An endless dream free of pain and sorrow, soon to be shared by all of humanity… both the living and the dead."

"Wait," Robin said, paling. "Those dreams… you plan to subject everyone to them?"

"Why do you think I kept you all here after your cleansing?" Anankos cupped his hands around an amorphous ball of water, pulling at its edges with his fingertips. "With my power, it is relatively easy to control the dead, both physically and mentally, as they are far too weak to offer any real resistance to my magic's will. The living, though?" Ice froze over the water's surface, hardening against his touch. "Their minds are much more difficult to manipulate on a wide scale, especially when it comes to those living outside of Valla's borders. But now, with the power I have drawn from you and your former masters, and with the Judgment being prepared by Order herself…"

He curled his hand around the ice, melting it down to his whim, watching the chilled water seep through his fingers.

"I can tie the spell to every human soul across the Outrealms." He glanced back up, flicking a few droplets away. "You all were the first living people I tested the dreams on—alongside my children, of course. And had it not been for the interference of those meddlesome snakes, you all would still be adrift in your blissful dreams, forever safe and happy under our spell's protection."

He tossed the rest of the water over his shoulder, dousing the braziers burning around the weathered throne. Flames of all colors hissed and lashed out against the water's frigid touch, coughing up embers of black, purple, gold, white, and green—

Green. A familiar green, one Byleth had seen before. Felt before. He glanced at the brazier of green fire, squinting into the angry flames writhing behind its thick metallic frame…

And for a moment, he saw the unmistakable sigil of the Crest of Flames flash across the fire's sputtering sparks, fueled by a collection of familiar bones stuck at the bottom of the brazier. Pieces, Byleth recognized, of the Sword of the Creator.

Sothis.

"But not to worry," Anankos said. "Whatever remains of that scumis now under my control. They will not be interfering again."

White-hot anger flooded Byleth's blood. He ground down on his teeth to calm the fury beating through his heart, fingers clenching uselessly over Rhea's wounds as the dim warmth of his healing magic fizzled out. Damn it! No wonder his magic felt so weak, no wonder he couldn't call on his Crest anymore—the bastard had stolen it from him! Had stolen Sothis from him! Byleth swore again under his breath and fumbled with his sleeve, intent on ripping the fabric off his arm to bandage the last of Rhea's wounds—

A thin hand squeezed around his wrist.

Rhea's hand.

"Pro… fess… or?" Her bleary eyes stared up at him with a wince, voice little more than a breathless whisper. Awake. She was awake. "W-what is… where…?"

"Well, would you look at that?" Anankos said, his glare as cold and sharp as jagged ice. "The Immaculate One has decided to grace us with her insufferable presence." Then, to Byleth, "You should have let the beast bleed out. A peaceful passing under the mercy of the dream was already more than she deserved."

The hazy daze in Rhea's eyes shifted from Byleth to the other dragon looming across the throne room, then to the bones and green fire burning in the brazier at his back. Confusion and pain simmered into a tight-lipped rage through her bruised and bloodied face, threatening to boil as her pupils thinned into tight slits, as her nails dug cracks into the stone floor, as silver scales began to harden the skin around her open gashes.

"Y-you," came her inhuman growl, wavering as she struggled to lift herself off the floor. "What is this? What did… you do… to her?!"

Anankos leered at her with unblinking eyes. "That information," he said, black scales clambering over his fingers and coiling into claws, "does not pertain to a soon-to-be corpse."

"Anankos, wait!" Robin, rather boldly, grabbed Anankos's loose robe sleeve before the scales could corrupt his hand completely. Anankos stiffened at the sudden contact, but he did not lash out against it. "Please," she begged. "You don't have to do this—"

"And why shouldn't I?" The firelight glinted dangerously off the blades of his claws. "I no longer have any use for the beast, nor for Naga's spawn. I only kept them alive to see if the dreams could be used to cure a dragon's degenerative blood, so I could save my children and grandchildren from the curse my other selves passed onto them."

His red gaze prowled the distance between Tiki and Rhea. Tiki squeaked, disappearing again beneath Julius's cape to hide from his piercing gaze; Rhea glared back as she staggered up to her feet, seething and spitting out a glob of blood that had pooled along her lips. More scales, silver and rough, broke through her skin, the Immaculate One threatening to emerge as the haze of the dream faded from her face entirely.

"But even after draining the runt's dragonstone," Anankos continued on, not at all intimidated by Rhea's display, "and trying to remove the beast's crest stone, I could not replicate what I had once done for myself and for you humans. I could not separate the soul from the monster—not without killing them both outright."

"But that doesn't mean they're doomed to become the monsters you fear," Robin insisted, "or doomed to the futures you foresaw in the mist." Her fingers twisted further into his sleeve, knuckles paler than the white fabric of his robes. "Anankos, I know what it's like to feel hopeless in the face of a dark and terrible destiny. To have visions of the world ending—visions of yourself hurting the people you care for most—constantly hanging over your head, making you think that you, or those like you, would be better off dead." She stepped around to his front and forced their eyes to meet. "But the future is only one possibility. It's imperfect, it's malleable, and it can change, just as it once did for me."

Anankos slowly shook his head, a strained, mirthless chuckle dying in his throat.

"What happened to you was terrible," Robin said, sympathy thick in her voice. "It was terrible, it was unfair, and you have every right to be upset and angry about all the horrible things your degeneration forced you to do." Short waves of water lapped up against their shins, swaying unsteadily around their master's feet in choppy strokes. "But that doesn't mean these dragons are consigned to the same fate. Killing them because of a future that has yet to come to pass, or because of something their alternate selves did in another timeline, or, perhaps, because you fear they might turn out like you, is not how you make the world a safer place. You're only spreading more misery and more suffering for all of us, humans and dragons both."

Another grim and dismal laugh, but Robin pressed on. "You may not have had a choice back then, when your madness brought your world to ruin," she said, "but you clearly have a choice now. You can choose to continue hurting others, or you can choose to use your great power to help our worlds, our people, and our dragons find a true, peaceful coexistence alongside one another. Isn't that what you said you had once wanted, all those years ago?"

"At one time, perhaps." A pained frown creased the dark circles cradling Anankos's eyes as he looked back to his child's empty cradle. "But it is too late for all that now."

"It's never too late to start doing the right thing." Robin dropped his sleeve from her grip and offered him her hand. "Anything can change, and it can change for anyone, no matter how bleak or dire the future appears to—"

"Would you extend the same faith to Grima?"

Robin's hand froze in the space between them. "What?"

"You say you believe anything can change. For anyone." Anankos's blood-red eyes loomed over her uneasy brown. "What about Grima?"

A heavy frown pursed Robin's lips. "Grima was hardly an innocent—"

"But he waswhat you would describe as 'innocent'," Anankos said, "at one point in time. Before he became the scourge of Archanea, he was a young dragon without sin just like Naga's little runt, forced to live in isolation from the rest of the world. Trapped and sealed away by his creator, for fear of the monster he knew Grima would eventually become if let out into the world."

He held his claws over Robin's outstretched hand, conjuring a small, six-winged dragon made of mist in her open palm.

"Tell me, Robin: if you could stop it all from coming to pass—the curse in your blood, the terrible future that killed Chrom and forever scarred your children, Emmeryn's tragic death, the wars with Plegia and Valm that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, the blood sacrifices to the Dragon's Table that cost hundreds of thousands more—and all you had to do, when faced with this younger, so-called 'innocent' Grima, was simply…"

He folded her fingers against her palm, crushing the watery dragon in her trembling fist.

"What would you do? Would you really risk allowing him to go free, hoping that you could somehow change the course of his blackened heart?" He forced her hand to turn over, dumping the mangled remnants of the dragon's image onto the floor. "Or would you do what needs to be done to protect your world and your future from the Fell Dragon's ruin?"

"I—" Robin snapped her hand away. "I don't know—"

"Yes, you do." A sad but knowing smile curled around Anankos's face. "Because you already made a similar choice. Instead of allowing Chrom to seal your Grima away for another thousand years, you chose to kill him. Not once did you think to reach your hand out to the Fell Dragon—no, you robbed him of his chance to change, to see the error of his ways and do the right thing in his next life. Why?" His claws captured her chin before she could attempt to answer, forcing her to stare straight into his bloody gaze. "Because despite the cliché platitudes about hope and belief in others you pretend to peddle, you are no fool. You knew what Grima was, what he is: a monster, through and through. And you knew that the best way to protect your family and the future generations of Ylisse…"

His smile sharpened.

"Was to kill the dragon. Permanently."

Robin jerked her head out of his grip, stepping back a safe distance from his clawed hands. "That's not the same thing—"

"Oh, but it is," Anankos said. "Is that not how the story always goes? The heroes slay the evil dragon, peace is restored to the world, and humanity gets to live happily ever after until the next monster comes around to screw everything up." His eyes flicked past Robin's shoulder, sneering again at Tiki's tiny shadow and Rhea's bloody scowl. "Just as you understood firsthand the horror Grima was capable of unleashing on your world, I understand the horror all dragons are capable of. Why should I stand by and allow world after world, timeline after timeline, continue to suffer at their cruel and violent hands, when I have the power to stop their reigns of terror before they can even begin?"

Two torrents of water whipped up from around Anankos's feet, hissing like a pack of ravenous snakes. They coiled around the metal casing of the brazier burning with white fire, their waters absorbing the divine sheen of the cracked dragonstone trapped within. The same divine sheen and the same white, radiant glow Byleth had once seen gleaming across the blades of…

The twin Falchions.

"For humans, perhaps, anything can change." The water slithered back to Anankos's side, glimmering with specks of white and towering over all their heads. "But a dragon's fate cannot. The only way to ensure their dark and destructive futures never come to pass…" His expression hardened, vengeful and merciless. A dozen draconic eyes broke through his skin, all seething with mad, righteous fury.

"Death."

The torrents lashed forward like the waves of a storm-tossed sea, crashing into Rhea's already unsteady legs, sweeping around Julius's back to snatch Tiki out from under his cape. Tiki yelped and thrashed and screamed as the torrents dragged her across the stone floor, the divine power their waters had stolen searing her skin like corrosive acid. Rhea fared no better, the waters burning straight through her hardened silver scales, pinning her down before her transformation could progress any further.

"Princess!" Julius lunged to catch Tiki's wrist, to try to pull her free from the water's deadly clutches, just as Byleth dove down to his knees to do the same for Rhea. He dug his fingers into Rhea's torn sleeves and scrambled to lift her out as the waters threatened to swallow her whole. Byleth felt only cold as the water soaked into his boots, but Rhea's rough scales continued to burn and bleed against the torrent's touch, as if the waters were hotter than dragonfire on her skin.

"Hold on!" Byleth strained. "I've got—"

"No."

Another wave smashed into Byleth, then Julius, flinging them both into the back wall in a spray of freezing water and frozen steam. Byleth's head smacked mercilessly against the stone, and he tumbled back to the ground in a fit of wet coughs, ears ringing, vision spinning, the distinct warmth of blood running down from his temple. Unable to reach Rhea, unable to reach Tiki, but he needed to, he needed to—

"Let this serve as your final warning," Anankos growled at them. "Stay out of my way. I have no desire to hurt you, humans, but if you dare attempt to interfere with our justice again, you will be returning to your dreams as corpses." All of his eyes tightened, seething red. "Just like the Altean army. Just like the Nohrian camp. Just like"—the eyes slid briefly to Julius—"Arvis."

"My… father…?" Julius rose on unsteady feet, his red bangs drenched and hanging heavy down his shoulders. A spark of flame lit up his palms. "You… you—!"

"Turn away if you must." Anankos's claws sliced through the air, commanding the torrents to reel Rhea and Tiki in closer, and closer, and closer, the water glowing brighter, burning hotter, with every inch taken. "But soon, you will see that your lives are better off without them. You will be safer. Happier. All of you will."

"Safe? Happy?!" Despite the threat hanging over them, Robin used her proximity to Anankos to throw herself between the dragon and his soon-to-be victims. She swept her arm across the throne room, pointing out the altars and all their restless corpses. "Look at them, Anankos! Really look at them! Your people, your wife, your children—do they really look happy to you?!"

A pause. The briefest moment of hesitancy, as Anankos glanced at the fretful shadows, all groaning and writhing and wailing under his wicked gaze. At Mikoto's flickering body, groaning and writhing and wailing right along with them. At the two Corrins, grimacing in their sleep. At the stone cradle, sitting empty and lifeless between them.

"They will be," Anankos muttered, quickly averting his gaze from the ghosts of his own creation. "Once the work is finished, they will be."

He shoved Robin aside before she could get in another word, knocking her flat on her back as he stalked forward again, resuming his hunt. He flexed his claws and beckoned the torrents closer, fixated solely on the struggling dragons he had trapped in his torturous waters.

(And the moment his back was turned, the moment he stepped away to pursue his prey, Robin rose up to one knee beside the altars closest to her. The altars dedicated to Anankos's family… now left unguarded.

Quietly, she reached up over the stone beds. She grabbed both Corrins by the shoulder and, as forcefully as she could without drawing Anankos's attention, began to try shaking them awake)

So, Byleth came to realize, watching Robin out of the corner of his eye, that's been your plan. Get in close to the altars, wake the dragon's children, and gain allies who might have a better chance of convincing the dragon to stand down—or, at the very least, might make him a bit more hesitant to fight. Might, being a very important keyword.

But there's not enough time. Byleth swayed back up to his feet, stomach twisting in panic as Anankos reached the edge of the scale-corroding waters holding Rhea and Tiki captive, murderous intent gleaming across the blades of his blackened claws. Damn it, they needed to stop him, needed to distract him for long enough so Robin could help free the Corrins from their dreams, but how?!

"Julius," Byleth started, turning to the prince with a hurried whisper, "we need to—"

"What kind of dragon is she?" Julius asked suddenly. His voice was calm, eerily calm, despite the rage seething in his tear-stained eyes, despite the wisps of fire lashing around his trembling fingers. "Rhea."

"What?" Byleth's heart tightened as Tiki screamed and cried out in pain, cried out for help, as Anankos commanded the waters to lift both her and Rhea up off the floor, their faces only a few inches from where his deadly claws rested. "What does that matter?!"

"What does she breathe out?" Julius asked, teeth gritted. "Fire? Ice? What?"

"An incendiary beam of some kind, more targeted than fire," Byleth said. "But that's not—"

"Can she fly?"

"Yes, but—"

"Good." Julius raised his flaming hand, drawing out all the fire magic left remaining in his blood. "Then this has at least a slight chance of working."

Byleth's heart tightened again, so hard and fast he nearly choked. "Are you mad? Attacking him won't—"

"Not him." Julius's sharp, red-rimmed eyes slid beyond Anankos to the altars of his wife, of his children. The wrath within burned away the last of his tears. "His weakness."

Cold hard dread swarmed Byleth's entire chest.

"Julius!" he nearly shouted, lunging for the prince's spellcasting hand. "Don't—!"

Byleth grabbed his arm a second too late. Just as Anankos raised his claws to tear through Rhea's throat, a pillar of flame erupted over the altars behind him, catching Mikoto and both Corrins in a searing blaze of Elfire. Robin gasped and just barely jerked herself away from the blast as the flames lashed out at her, too, searing across her palms and the side of her cheek.

"What are you—" Someone from within the flames screamed, and Anankos whipped around so fast his boots carved cracks into the stone floor. "No—NO! MIKOTO! CORRIN!"

The waters holding Rhea and Tiki immediately tossed them back to the ground, abandoning the dragons completely in their rush to rejoin their master's side. Anankos dispelled the stolen divine light glowing within the torrents' depths, casting it back into its brazier with one hand and throwing the now-clear water over the burning altars with the other.

"No, no, no!" The water made quick work of the flames, washing away all traces of Julius's fire in just a few short strokes, but the damage was done. The altars scorched, the flowers turned to ash… the Corrins covered in thick, red burns, crying out in their sleep from the raw intensity of the pain. Mikoto, while not burned herself, writhed and screamed all the same, as though sharing in her children's agony.

"YOU VILE, DETESTABLE CRETIN!" Anankos snapped back around with the sharpest and fiercest of scowls, the dark blades of his claws thirsting for Julius's head. "I WILL PAINT THESE WALLS WITH YOUR—"

But when he turned, it wasn't Julius his dozens of wicked eyes found. It was a flash of blinding green light, and then—

The Immaculate One, now freed, crouching down on all fours with her open maw aimed right at Anankos's chest. Point-blank.

"Burn."

A crackling beam of red, smoldering light shot out of Rhea's mouth and blasted him clear across the throne room, sending him smashing straight through the throne, through the back wall, through the entire castle beyond it, leaving nothing but a scorched trail of stones smoking in his wake.

"…Oh gods…" Robin staggered up off the floor, cradling her burned hands, staring after the destruction with wide-eyed horror. "What have you done…?"

"Created an opportunity for escape," Julius said, scooping Tiki up into his arms. The little girl clung to his collar and sobbed into his shoulder, shaking with full-body tremors. "You can thank me later."

"Thank you?!" Robin jutted her finger at the burn seared across her cheek, then swept her arm out toward the Corrins. Both groaned in pain atop the blackened altars, eyes flitting beneath hooded lids. "You could have killed me! You could have killed them, you impulsive little—!"

"Mother!" Rhea cut them both off with a thundering cry, bounding over to Sothis's green flames. "Mother, I'm here! I'll save—agh!"

As the dragon attempted to dip her claws into the brazier to recover the remnants of the Sword of the Creator, a wave of golden fire—the same golden fire that had helped calm Anankos's rage earlier—burst forth from the central brazier and slapped her away, knocking the hulking dragon's entire body back several feet. Rhea charged forward again, screaming, "Give her back! Give her back!" but no matter how many times she tried slashing her claws at the brazier, the golden flames flared and shoved her back, blocking her off from Sothis completely.

(And for a brief moment, a woman's face flashed within the fire's golden embers, her expression flat and impassive beneath a wreath of feathers)

"Rhea!" Julius shouted at the struggling dragon. "We need you to fly us out of here! Now!"

"But Mother is—"

A massive claw larger than Rhea herself slammed down through the ceiling. Each talon tore through the stones in the walls like paper, nearly ripping apart the foundation of the throne room in a single swipe. A deafening roar, one of explosive, feral rage, blasted through the air, shaking the entire castle with violent tremors from its booming volume alone.

All the room's corpses answered the call with hisses and growls of their own, rising again off the altars with their weapons in hand.

"Damn it!" Byleth swore to every god in existence and sprang into action, hoisting the still unconscious Lyon off the ground and over his shoulder. He tossed Robin her coat and darted over to Rhea's side, tapping his free hand against her scaled hide. Partly to try to comfort her, partly to try to get the dragon moving. "Rhea, I know you want to free her—I do too; trust me, I do—but if we don't get out of here right now, we're all going to die. And if we die, Sothis will be stuck here forever."

Rhea rumbled with a distressed growl. Desperately, she batted at the brazier one more time, only to be thwarted again by the woman in the golden flames.

"We'll come back for her," Byleth promised, throat tightening as one of Anankos's many eyes came to glare through one of the gaps he had ripped through the ceiling, the frenzied pupil alone blotting out the view of the sky overhead completely. Goddess, the dragon was massive."Rhea, please! We need to—"

Rhea threw her head back and unleashed a deep, ferocious roar of her own, blasting a new patch of the ceiling open with another beam of red light from her gullet. A scattered shower of stone and mortar rained down from the hole she had created, crushing dozens of shambling corpses on its way to meet the ground.

"Fine!" Rhea snapped, snatching Byleth and Lyon up in one set of claws, then Julius and Tiki and Robin in another. "Direct me where to fly, and I will handle the rest!"

"Wait!" Robin reached out her arm as far as she could stretch it, just barely brushing the pale hair of the Corrin in black as Rhea began to tuck everyone in her claws close to her scaled chest. "Corrin is—"

"Leave them," Julius said, ice cold. "Give the mad dragon a reason to stay behind, rather than pursue our escape."

"What?!"

"We are not abandoning them," Byleth said, rebuking Julius with a hard glare. "We don't leave allies behind. Rhea can carry all of us just fine—"

"No." Rhea swept her long tail across the ground, knocking over all the undead who dared approach her. Her silver wings unfurled and lifted her hulking body up into the air in just a few strong beats, without either of the Corrins in hand. "The red one is right. We must leverage every advantage available to us. And if that means sacrificing a few souls to keep the beast distracted—"

She dove up toward the hole she had blasted through the ceiling, spitting out as many incendiary beams as she could on the way out—destroying every wall, every column, every altar in her path—to destabilize the throne room even further.

"So be it."

"No, you don't get it!" Robin shouted. "You're only making things worse—!"

The winds stole the rest of Robin's warning as Rhea soared up into the open skies. Heavy chunks of debris tumbled down behind them as the throne room began to collapse in on itself, crushing countless more altars and burying the inner chambers of the castle beneath a smoldering sea of stone. Anankos's massive claw shifted over to shield his family from the falling rubble, while the rest of him…

"LOATHSOME INSECTS!" the giant dragon thundered, towering over the crumbling castle in its entirety. The spikes jutting from his head completely blocked the sun from their view; the dark orb clamped in Anankos's mouth glowered down on them in the sun's place, locking hundreds of frenzied eyes on all of them at once. "YOU DARE?! YOU DARE?!"

"Rhea!" Byleth called out, squinting against the heavy winds blowing into his eyes. As best he could, he pointed her toward a familiar chasm carved into the horizon line. The only way out of this place that he knew of: the Bottomless Canyon.

Rhea huffed a puff of hot breath through her snout, glaring at the amalgamation of twitching eyes and rotting scales that made up the Silent Dragon before launching herself in the direction Byleth had indicated. Anankos roared after them, rattling the air so violently Rhea's wings briefly buckled under the force of it alone, but even as she stumbled on the winds and struggled to straighten herself out… Anankos did not pursue. He screamed and roared until the very sky began to crack over his spiked head, but he remained firmly planted beside his crumbling castle, his massive claws curled protectively around his vulnerable family.

(Julius had been right. Damn him, he'd been right.

But at what cost?)

With a few more powerful beats from Rhea's wings, the canyon's dark depths grew larger in their sights. "There!" Byleth shouted over the rushing air. "Dive down there and we'll—"

"Into a chasm?!" Rhea rumbled with dissent, soaring full speed ahead. "Hiding won't help us escape!"

"It's not for hiding!" Byleth said. "It's—"

"PULL DOWN!"

Robin screamed out a warning just as a violent torrent of frost-bitten water and boiling miasma came streaking in their direction, cutting across the sky like a riptide. Rhea ducked down and swooped out of its raging path, the air behind them sizzling and freezing all at once. Anankos fired another, then another, then another, another another another, lashing the entire sky with a tempest consumed by a thousand angry seas.

"RUN AND COWER LIKE THE VERMIN YOU ARE!" he boomed, splitting the earth beneath Rhea's shadow in two. "THERE IS NO WHERE IN THE UNIVERSE YOU CAN HIDE THAT I WILL NOT FIND YOU! NO CORNER OF THE WORLD SAFE ENOUGH TO PROTECT ALL THOSE YOU HOLD DEAR FROM MY RETRIBUTION!"

Rhea swerved behind one of Valla's many floating islands as another blast of tumultuous water chased after her tail. The torrent smashed straight through the broken chunk of earth, clipping Rhea's wing with a sharp spray of rock and jagged ice. Rhea screeched and tumbled, struggling to keep herself aloft as the shards stabbed through her wing's thin membrane, dragging them all out of the sky in a downward spiral.

"Rhea!" Byleth shouted, stomach roiling as the wind whipped at his face and ripped through his hair, unable to tell up from down through the grip of her claws. "The—canyon—!"

With a strained roar, Rhea forced her wings to splay out flat, catching the wind again just inches above the hard ground. The soles of Byleth's boots scraped over the long grass as she kept them gliding low, flying straight for the edge of the Bottomless Canyon.

Another torrent surged after them, crashing through a collection of stone ruins not far from Rhea's side. Rhea swooped around the next blast on a sharp pivot against the air, no slowing down, no momentum lost, beating her wings hard and fast until the black depths of the canyon swallowed their shadows, splitting open a passage deep into the earth directly beneath their dangling feet.

"Professor," Rhea rumbled, hovering over the chasm as steadily as the holes in her wing would allow, "are you certain this is—"

"Yes! Go!" In the distance, Anankos craned his long neck over his castle, ripping all the moisture from the clouds to form an explosive tidal wave aimed to crash over their heads. "Now!"

Without another second wasted, Rhea secured her grip on the passengers in her claws, tucked her wings in close to her body, and let herself plummet into the dark abyss below.

Byleth squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath. The wind roared painfully against his ears—or was that Anankos?—as the world became more weightless, colder, the farther they plunged through the endless darkness. Falling, and falling, and falling, and

Falling

Falling…

…Falling…

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Byleth woke up with his cheek pressed to the warm, flat stones of the Red Canyon.

He groaned and rolled onto his back, blinking against the light of the midday sun shining down on his bleary eyes. The sprawling caverns and canyons of Zanado greeted him as he pushed himself up onto his elbows, which… wasn't what he had been expecting to see, honestly—why hadn't the canyon brought them back to Nohr?—but his exhausted mind welcomed the sight all the same.

Fódlan. Home.

He breathed out a long sigh of relief. The relief of simply being alive, of being free, after being imprisoned for Goddess-knows how long. Then, a shorter sigh of dread. The dread of having left people behind who needed saving, of knowing that they had just pissed off one of the most powerful dragons in existence in their efforts to escape.

And he knew, he knew, that slight would not go unanswered.

Grimacing, he began to sit up, turning to check on how the others had fared on their trip through the abyss—

Only to be met with two swords crossing under his chin, pressing up against his throat with deadly intent.

"How?" the woman on the other end of the blades hissed. A mercenary, it seemed, with a wave of purple hair hanging over one side of her face. "How are you still alive?!"

"What—" Byleth held up his hands in surrender. With no weapons, no magic, no Crest, he wasn't exactly in the best position to fight back. "Wait, I think there's been a misunderstanding—"

"Don't play dumb with me." The swords bit in a little deeper as the woman leaned down, meeting his confused gaze with an eerie, unnatural orange glow to her eyes. "And don't you dare try throwing out that time-perception-manipulation trick of yours. It couldn't stop me before, and it won't stop me now."

She stabbed her knee down onto his chest, shoving him back into the dirt with her swords still locked around his throat.

"You're not getting away this time, Demon."

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It hurts.

Everything hurts.

I can't see past the darkness. The black rage, the red of the slain, it clouds everything. It drowns me, even now, and nothing can be done to escape it. You can tread the stormy seas as long as you like, but eventually, the waves will come to swallow you whole. No turning back, no hope of seeing the light again.

I hate it here. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it—

"How many times must we do this, Anankos?" said the voice of Order. Her power flooded the cold, hazy depths of his mind, granting him a temporary reprieve from the chaos that always haunted him. "If I have to calm your rampages every time you lose your temper, I won't have time to prepare the final judgment."

Rampage…? Anankos blinked his human eyes around the throne room—or rather, its ruins. The ceiling had completely collapsed, the throne had been incinerated, and almost all the walls had been reduced to a pile of smoldering rubble. All that remained were the corpses of his people crawling out from beneath the stone debris, and the souls of the monsters burning at his back.

And of course, regrettably, I still remain.

Anankos frowned down at his hands. His sleeves were nothing more than charred, tattered scraps of fabric hanging stiff off his arm, but there was not a scratch to be found on him. Why…?

"The humans betrayed you," Ashera's fire said through the central brazier. "Such is the nature of mortals. Grant them an inch of kindness or mercy, and they will trample it to dust beneath their callous boots."

Betrayal… just like before… betrayal… betrayal… betrayal…

"You should have left them to rot in their cells after collecting what we needed," Ashera said, her words chilled despite the divine heat radiating off her flames. "Now look at what they've done. They are no better than the monsters you seek to hunt. Agents of Chaos, the lot of them."

Anankos shook his head and staggered over to his family's resting place, heart sinking at the burns scarring his children, at the sound of Mikoto's restless groaning. Hurt. In pain.

Just… like… before…

"They are undeserving of your soft heart. They are undeserving of your gift." I saved them from their monsters, I gave them everything they wanted within the comfort of their dreams, and this is the thanks I get? "But if you were to lend me your power, Anankos—more than the trickle you've thus far allowed me to share—I could cross into the Outrealms myself and—"

"N-no. No." Anankos threw a weak glare at her flames as he weaved a gentle stream of water over his children's burns, slowly healing the red and blistered skin. Hungering to inflict that pain back on those traitorous little rats tenfold. "What happened… that was Loptous's lingering influence on the boy. And the Immaculate One's instability, poisoning their minds. It had to be."

It had to be. He had to believe humanity was still worth saving, because if he lost his hold on that purpose…

It would be…

Just…

Like…

Before…

"We stick to the plan," he said, more firmly. The golden flames bristled at his tone—she was a true god, after all, not a dragon playing at one—but she did not raise any further objection. "You focus on preparing your judgment, and I will—"

"My lord! My king!"

Lilith came rushing through the rubble of the castle, throwing herself onto her knees before him. Ashera's fire slunk back into the central brazier, her consciousness likely off to return to her home world. To finish the work.

"A-a thousand apologies, sire," Lilith said, her forehead pressed to the stone shards littering the ground. Anankos stared down at her, at the sniveling little creature molded from his own degenerating flesh. Disgusting. "I have failed you. I didn't realize you were under attack until—"

"Never mind that," Anankos said, sighing, pressing a finger against his temple to stave off the mad and violent thoughts. "What news is there of your assignment?"

Lilith gulped, keeping her head bowed. "I have confirmed the location of the Creation," she said, "just as you requested. He is still indeed sealed beneath the labyrinth, but…"

"But?"

"Our soldiers have not been able to reach him, my lord. The labyrinth is buried beneath a desert, miles away from the nearest body of water and no moisture to be found within its sands." She rose to her feet, but she still did not lift her eyes from the ground. "We were able to spy on him through a handful of magical springs sprinkled throughout the labyrinth's interior, but it appears he caught on and… has since destroyed them all." Her hands folded in front of her apron, shaking. "And now, we have lost sight of him entirely."

Worthless. "I see," Anankos said, grinding down on his teeth. "Then there is only one thing to be done about it."

Lilith dared a glance up. "My lord?"

"Once the work is complete," he said, "and the dreams have been made permanent, I will go and kill him myself."

"What? B-but Fa—I mean, King Anankos, you cannot mean to leave your place in Valla—"

"Why not?"

"Your strength is here, my lord!" Lilith said. "If you were to travel to another world yourself, to confront a monster like that with so little water to aid you, you could…" She wrung her hands, voice quieting. "You could die."

"Good."

"G-good?"

"One way or another," Anankos said, shrugging, "this body will meet its end, the same as all dragons. I can think of no better way to die than to drag that wretched demon down through the infernal gates with me." He slid his gaze to the braziers again, glaring at the black and purple flames that contained the remnants of Grima's malicious spirit. "And now, thanks to the power purged from Robin, I have the means to kill him properly."

"If…" Lilith sighed. "If that is your desire, my lord."

"For now," Anankos said, "I need you to find which world our guests have scurried off to. The Immaculate One and the Divine Dragon Princess still draw breath, and that cannot be allowed to stand." He healed the last of his children's burns, lips curling into a scowl. "And if the humans try to interfere again—"

Betrayal… betrayal… betrayal…

"Kill the escaped vessels first."

Lilith bowed deeply at the waist. "As His Eminence commands."

Anankos rolled his eyes at the title, barely resisting the urge to rip out the creature's spine as she scampered off to carry out the order. He rubbed his forehead again, trying to wipe away the headache, trying to scrub away the dark violent hungry painful thoughts lurking at the edge of his mind…

A stiff hand brushed up against his fingers. Mikoto's. She stared up at him with those terrible dead eyes, her beautiful face lacking all the warmth, all the life, that had captured his heart the day he had first laid eyes on her.

He took her hand into his. "You're happy," he whispered, "aren't you, Mikoto?"

"Need… tO…" her dead voice rasped, "protect… them… Need tO…"

"I will," he promised. "This time, I will protect you all. For our child's sake, I will not let the monsters win again."

He kissed her flickering knuckles then rested her hand back over her chest. He turned his back to the altars, commanding all the room's water to his side and mapping out the entire astral plane within its dark depths. The next phase, ready to commence.

Tread those stormy seas a little while longer. Endure the dark lashing of the waves for just a few moments more.

This will all be over soon.

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Character Bios:

Nothing to report… yet.

I will find them for you, Father. And when I do…

We will bring them war.

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Holy hell how is it already October. Sorry this chapter took so long to come out… but hopefully from the length, you can see why. I actually wrote over 33k words total while working on this chapter, rewriting several sections from scratch until I was happy with the outcome. It didn't help that my summer was very busy, with me starting a draft of my dissertation. I wish this fic could be my dissertation, but alas lol

The next wait shouldn't be as long, but my creative writing schedule has become pretty limited with all the work I have to do to finish my degree. Thanks for sticking with me—see you back in Fodlan in the next one :)

Next chapter: A rift in the mirror