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CHAPTER 3:
THE HOLY STAR OF THE PROMISED LAND
.
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
To what?
"Who do you think you are?
"This is my time to shine in the spotlight!
"I don't know how you found out about Doctor Crichton's discoveries about the Truth of the world, but this doesn't concern you!
"The Star belongs to me!
"Give it back, right now!"
Al was at least literally two or three universes away, and Ed wasn't even sure that he still existed in a universe and there was nothing left but the empty cold where emptiness wasn't and wasn't was and there was no Al lying in bed next to him to wake him up from an infinite nightmare too horrific to imagine in his most deranged and demented and feverish and delirious phantasms and hold him close and secure and sound and protected and safe and tight and warm and rub his back in firm circles of soothing and reassuring strokes and rub his tears away with warm and gentle and kind and soft fingers or Mom and Dad to hold him and let him bury his face in her or his stomach and hide from the horrors and terrors of the blood and the bones sticking out at unnatural angles as the soldiers rested at the Resembool train station on the way back from Ishbal and escape where it was safe and nothing could touch him or hurt him once again or Winry to grip his hand with tight and firm reassurance and assurance and brush his forehead with a soothing cold cloth while the agony of the automail aches and silvery serrated hooked lances and spears and swords and knives cleansed away everything and the fever distorted and twisted and contorted and warped all reality into a sanguine stained head and contorted ruined body parts and strewn organs and bones and flesh and tatters of strings of skin or Granny to grin with gentle fondness and tell him that Al and Winry were waiting for him in her workship arguing about whether alchemy or automail was cooler and hoping that he would take one side or the other or Den to jump on him and nuzzle his nose and neck with a wet and cold nose or lick his closed eyelids with an even more wet and panting mouth and tongue and he was just so t
"We didn't come here to get in your way, or to bother you about your research into the Truth and the Stone! We're just investigating another potential means of regaining our body! We don't even care if you tell me which one of you is Envy; or whether that shadow form is emerging from the boy, and he's a Homunculus, or it's being extended from Envy!
"Julia! Run back up and throw that thing into the lava before anyone else here gets it!
"Hurry! The three or four newcomers are even worse news than this con artist!"
"I'm sure, whatever happens, you'll find your way out. You've got strong legs. You'll get up and use them, won't you, Edward?"
To walk into a reality like this
where tens of millions of souls could be snuffed out into crimson soot in the flicker of a blinking eye eclipsing endless time that never could have begun and would never remain unending and was slimmer than a singularity and wider than the most boundless reaches of the unobservable universe because he could never move forward from this this
without Al at his side and the blood of his seal mirroring every single last solitary beat of Ed's heart?
"Ev"
When he didn't even know for sure that giving everything that he had had brought Al home to warmth and love and refuge and security and a hearth and a sanctuary and safety and joy and protection and soundness and laughter and succor?
And I don't care if it's childish. I
When he'd been willing to abandon three whole other worlds outside of his dreams and himself as he had Rose and Lior?
I know that Equivalent Exchange is tru
When, whether he did or didn't, he had no idea how to return home to warmth and love and security and laughter and succor and joy and refuge and safety and sanctuary and soundness and a hearth where nothing could hurt him once again especially the Stone and the Truth and the Law of Equivalent Exchange and human transmutation himself, because the Gate would never let him do that no matter how many limbs he shed or how much of his soul he spent or how much of his blood he let?
"To make life, you have to take life! Come on, this is basic alchemy, here!"
"Either because of love, or out of foolish curiosity, human transmutations are attempted, and when these attempts all backfire, a different life is created… a being that is its own body and mind, but no soul. This is how the d-mned are born… This is a Homunculus!"
"Why didn't you bring me back to life?"
"Did he live this way, too? Stealing bodies, creating wars? For what purpose?"
"Because we were worth it."
"Humans are controlled by their sins, and the Philosopher's Stone has power far greater than any weapon ever forged. So I've taken cities. Humans would destroy the world. The lives lost have been necessary martyrs, saving mankind from itself. I am the guardian, the Shepherd of Sins. I have to live on, to prevent you humans from doing something foolish with the Stone."
"Unfortunately, the Law of Equivalent Exchange is a lie."
"Equivalent Exchange is a lie, a myth told to bring order to the cosmos. Can you accept that now or do you need another demonstration?"
"What's wrong? I thought you wanted to see him."
"Envy was the very first Homunculus, created almost four hundred years ago, as the result of the failed human transmutation of our son, who died prematurely from mercury poisoning. I suppose you could say that Envy was once your brother."
"But then he abandoned me, and started fresh with his wife and kids. Needless to say, I never did like being replaced."
"If I keep this, I can save the valley.
"Vatanen and the others said that they were willing to give their souls to the Star. They're no different than the other Milosians. There's just a lot more souls than I thought that there'd be.
"I can even open the Doorway safely with this, and not just dabble in the domain of the Truth, but bring God's domain into me. And without even reaping the reward for paying the toll.
"If I give this up, they'll all die."
Something so faint it could have been a singularity of a dot of a line of an outline of a flicker of a glimmer of a shimmer of a ripple of a phantom of a ghost of a silhouette of a spirit of a breath of a whisper of a breeze of a shadow of a shade of a created memory of an imagined yearned for longer for dream passed through
"Edward!"
"I'm sure, whatever happens, you'll find your way out. You've got strong legs. You'll get up and use them, won't you, Edward?"
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
Reality was there once more, and Ed forced himself to his feet and turned to face the girl, Julia.
But, her eyes almost unseeing, every last part of her body shaking and trembling and shuddering so violently it was as though she was about to be shredded into tatters of sinew and skin and bone and flesh just from how hard she was trembling and shuddering and shaking; she reached up quickly, obviously uncertain how much time she had to do what she'd chosen to do when confronted with four unknown people who could be enemies or allies, or both, brought what was clearly a Milosian Stone into her mouth, and swallowed it.
Her eyes changed their colors to light red, and they began to shine a little in that shade.
"Julia, no!" a voice identical to Ed's own screamed in so much horror and terror and despair and self hatred and disbelief and shock and pain and surprise and denial that it sounded as though it had torn his own throat ripped raw of all blood vessels and veins and arteries and his windpipe and his voice box and all of his flesh and all of his skin switchback inside out inverted.
"This is a joke, correct!?" Envy roared in howling shock.
Ed's heart stopped doing what it had been doing before, because it had obviously never beaten a single time once.
But the Stone shouldn't have merged with Julia's bloodstream, so it shouldn't have become part of her body.
Unless the pathways of the currents of One Is All, All Is One let it connect its souls to her own even without direct contact with her blood in this, or both, of the potential anti-particle worlds.
"Even when you close your eyes, there's a whole world out there, outside of ourselves and our dreams."
"Maybe what Dante said was right. Maybe you can give up all you've got, and get nothing back. But still, even if I can't prove it's true, I have to try. For your sake, Al."
Ed didn't know for sure that he'd been too late.
He didn't know for sure that he'd just let something horrific happen for the second time in a single day because he was still unwilling to open his eyes to the Truth.
If he convinced Julia to do something such as throw up the Stone, nothing might happen to her.
And as long as she couldn't be separated from it, Ed had a better chance of keeping it away from the Homunculi.
"Don't lose your cool, Envy," Dad's Homunculus said, sounding as though sharp shock had cut through him, but his tone now calm and focused removed rage.
"However many souls are in the Stone, she's still just a human, and she doesn't have the means of performing the transmutation.
"Pride, Envy, outflanking maneuvers."
For the first time, Ed saw one of his doubles in a separate body from the one that he was in, as he ran past him to grab Julia's shoulders and shake them violently.
But Julia shrugged slightly, to tell him that she wanted him to let her go.
He removed his hands and stood back, too many emotions of horror and terror and despair and self hatred born from too many sources for the Edward trapped, and imprisoning, another one to comprehend more than a tiny bit.
"Don't forget about me!" the last voice, belonging to a male in a similar unfamiliar military uniform with his whole body adumbrated by thick sanguine who was now standing on top of another similarly colored thin stone walkway two walkways away, yelled in roaring fury.
Pride simply sneered silently and sent a small number of additional strands of shadow cutting up in his direction.
The male brought his right palm forwards, where an unfamiliar transmutation circle that appeared to have been drawn out of blood at an earlier time, perhaps his own, was inscribed over his skin, and it shone with light violent and a number of relatively large icicles condensed out of the moisture in the air and tore into the strands without Ed even being able to identify any transmutation light, shredding them.
Then he aimed his left palm at Pride himself, and a thick bolt of light amethyst electric lightning tore out of it towards him.
Pride brought up a number of further shadows before him and brought them together in a multi layered black formation resembling the folds of a curtain in front of him, but the bolt ripped through all of them and crashed into Pride, sending him staggering back.
Envy rolled his eyes.
"This is going to take a little too long if I just leave this to you," he commented.
His tongue once more extended into morphing forms and arced around and back to curve up over the walkway and land on it, and then the portion touching the balcony bulged and shifted and the entire giant green monster flowed and contracted forward to pull up and shift through the tongue into the bulging part.
The bulging part then altered into the favored form and clothing of the Envy who Ed knew.
But, to his credit, the blood caked soldier didn't lose his guard.
"So you are Homunculi," he sneered in condescension of his own.
"Just what I'd expect from fabricated sagging bags of frail decrepit skin."
Envy's jaw dropped.
"Don't look down on me, human!" he screamed so loudly that his own throat sounded as though it was ripping inverted from switchbacks inside out.
He ran at the military officer, and Pride extended a number of other tendrils, but a very thick wall of solid ice rose around him and then another jagged blast of lightning ripped up into the ceiling high above and started slicing large chunks out of it, sending them down at everyone but him.
Julia at last moved.
She raised her own right hand, palm upward, and a throng of much thicker crimson erupted up out of it to tear into the descending blocks and boulders and shatter them into pieces.
And then it rushed up into the still intact stone ceiling above and started to rip into it as well, opening it to a sky of star and smoke flecked with flames above.
Ed couldn't breathe for a different reason now.
Was a war, or battle, going on here, in what was obviously Milos?
"You murdered Mom, and Dad, and brother because of this place!"
"I'm sure, whatever happens, you'll find your way out. You've got strong legs. You'll get up and use them, won't you, Edward?"
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
This time, Ed retained his perception of everything about him and inside him.
"I won't let it exist any longer, especially here in Milos!
"If not for it, they wouldn't have needed to fight, and they wouldn't be dead!"
"I'm sure, whatever happens, you'll find your way out. You've got strong legs. You'll get up and use them, won't you, Edward?"
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
Dad's Homunculus slid his eyes at Pride in a signal, and the shadows below him separated, leaving him to drop into the deep pool of blood below.
"You two, he's going to try to emerge from the nearest wall to ambush you!" the Ed in the wrong body shouted.
The other Ed's eyes narrowed in wariness.
Julia, however, stopped shredding the ceiling and somersaulted up into the air away from the balcony, and more crimson currents coursed over the air beneath them to form a mostly circular sheet of solid ice, and then she continued the red transmutation to raise it up in an arc towards the center of the chamber and altered the lower portions back into vapor as she moved.
"Clever," Pride spoke.
"But merely quaint."
A thicker strand emerged from where it had been morphed from the underside of the dais of shadow and its end altered into a huge mouth with large teeth in them, and the strand curved up until it was below a circular platform in the center of the walkways and bit it in two.
Without anything holding the walkways together in the center, they began to fall downwards into a slope.
Envy had anticipated this, however, and now he flipped over the wall of ice.
The soldier inside it apparently wasn't so caught off guard by this strategy that he was unable to react in time to fire another beam of purple electricity, but Envy just twisted his body midflight and let it take his right arm off in a burst of bones and skin, and landed inside it.
The next second, the red coated soldier came flying out of it with a cry of fury and frustration, undoubtedly thrown by Envy, and he fell into the pool of blood below and disappeared into its depths.
Envy leapt back up onto the ice wall and brushed his remaining hand off on his side in satisfaction.
"The last time that I saw, the frailer they sag, the faster and more foolishly they fall."
Crimson light crackled over the pool for several seconds, and then the Homunculus of both Ed's dads rose out of it to stand atop two solid portions of it, his hand grasping the soldier by the back of the head and two thick spikes of solidified flaking blood extending through his palms from the back, preventing him from transmuting.
The soldier now looked very frightened, perhaps even terrified, and he was struggling to pull his hands free of the spikes, but he had no purchase for his legs, so he could do nothing but hang in the grasp of the robed Homunculus.
"I recognize you now, from your attitude," Dad's Homunculus said, his voice now totally uninterested and emotionless once more.
"You're this world's double of the glory seeking Lieutenant Atlas from Creta."
The other Ed's mouth opened.
Julia's eyes went wide.
"The insect who recently informed Amestris that Amestrian alchemy was nothing but parlor tricks, and that he was going to discover a way to transmute an army of part human, part wolf Chimeras and commit them to the Pendleton front, and dismissively challenged Amestris to try to do better by transmuting an army of Homunculi and send them against who he referred to as 'his real Hounds of the Military' in order that he could gain glory by proving to the entire continent that Homunculi are supposedly 'nothing more than walking muzzled bone cages for his Chimeras.'
"I believe that we have now disproved your stuck up bad science."
"You wouldn't really murder someone to avenge a snub just because he's wearing the face of the person who snubbed you, would you?" Atlas gasped in scared anguish, moving harder to attempt to find purchase.
"You insects take blind revenge on people who have nothing to do with, or the slightest connections to, the people who actually wrong you, all the time.
"You'd have done the same for me, so allow me to remind you of the Law of Equivalent Exchange."
Then the crimson of what was clearly a decomposition transmutation detonated into the back of Atlas' head and out through his face, and it erupted forwards and upwards off of his head in a spray of bone fragment filled sanguine.
Julia thinned her lips tightly together, apparently torn between relief that he was no longer a danger to the people threatening her, and drastic frustration of an unknown depth that she hadn't been able to murder him herself.
Dad's Homunculus reached up with his other hand and caught the face with it.
"This is a little interesting," he said, but his tone was still calm and removed.
"He appears to have actually fused another person's face to his own."
"He peeled it off Brother's face," Julia snarled.
"I'm sure, whatever happens, you'll find your way out. You've got strong legs. You'll get up and use them, won't you, Edward?"
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
The combined Ed felt reality separate, but he brought it back.
Not this time.
The native Edward went so white that he himself appeared to be transparent, and he looked as though he was having problems focusing.
So much for the hope that this Ed had learned as much as he had.
"Give it to me."
"If you'll give me your Stone, I'll return it to you," Dad's Homunculus responded.
"But, based on the manner in which it was knitted to the late Atlas' face; the blood of its original owner hadn't fully stopped receiving oxygen when he used his electric alchemy to merge it, and its blood vessels, with his own face; and then remove the foreign blood to prevent his antibodies from seeing it as a disease."
Julia started violently at the knowledge of what that meant.
"Your Brother might still be alive, and based on the precise rapidity with which the particles of blood in the pool below that reach to the valley floor were moving, and increasing their speed of movement, they must have been heated by temperatures increased by lava.
"From this, I surmise that Creta constructed a geothermal power station on the edge of Death Canyon, and is currently harnessing it to assault the valley that you ate the Stone to defend.
"Yet, in my world, Creta hadn't developed the scientific expertise to build a geothermal power station.
"But Milosian alchemy has researched lava on my world.
"So I posit from this, and human tendencies, that Milos' more successful research into the Philosopher's Stone on this side of the Portal,"
The native Ed's eyes flew large.
Julia gasped.
"lured Creta into conquering it to seize it for themselves, and this led all or most Milosians to treat Milosian alchemists as castaways."
The non native Ed wished that he could believe that Dad's Homunculus was wrong, but he'd proven himself so brilliant by now that Edward extremely highly doubted it.
Then Julia's family, and Julia herself, were the same as the Ishbalan Exiles.
"This spurred your family to choose the least of two bad options, and relocate to Creta, and Atlas was assigned as one of your bodyguards. But, due to his desire to gain glory, he sought your research for himself and attempted to murder your brother, if not one or both of your parents.
"Based on all this, and the timing of this attack; I surmise the following:
"That your brother survived Atlas' attempt at murdering him; found, or already knew, the location of the original Milosian Stone that the new one that must have just been transmuted supplements and merged it with his own body as a means of healing his injuries; after which he defected to Creta to puppeteer them to further gain the means of avenging the attempted murder, possible murders of his parents, anything that might have happened to you at that time and as a result; and the other Milosians' discrimination against your family, you, and him."
"I'm sure, whatever happens, you'll find your way out. You've got strong legs. You'll get up and use them, won't you, Edward?"
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
"Edward!"
"I'm sure, whatever happens, you'll find your way out. You've got strong legs. You'll get up and use them, won't you, Edward?"
"Why didn't you bring me back to life?"
"Listen when your mother is talking to you!"
"Stop playing this Mom card!"
"Homunculi are born when an alchemist goes against the laws of nature. Whether she has a soul or not, it's our fault she exists. She's our responsibility!"
"Which is why we're the ones who have to kill her!"
"You're lying! Then why would you attack us?"
"To be free.
"These memories are the driving force in everything that I do, because they feel like chains.
"This mother I remember being had endless devotion, and I have none. It's a fraudulent persona that's been forced on me. And I don't have the energy to assume it. That's why I have to kill you. So I can prove this identity is false, because no real mother would kill her own sons.
"As long as you are alive, these memories will torment me, trying to make me into this human. They are at war with my real self and they could win.
"In time, I might even come to love you two. And how can I allow that?
"I should always hate you for creating me."
"Brother, what are we supposed to do with her?"
"Homunculi are more malleable than humans. It's their strength and their demise. I've started a chain reaction that's transforming her liquid body into ethanol. She's going to evaporate. Disappear into the air."
"Nicely done, sweetheart.
"Clean up after yourselves, and take care of each other."
"Of course you were bad luck for a lot of us weren't you? I'd still be with my wife and adorable little girl if I hadn't met you. It must be tough fighting against a friend who you've already killed once."
"Is that all you got? Impersonations with guilt trips attached? You'll have to do better than that. You're still a Homunculus under that face. Have you forgotten what I did to your friend Sloth? I killed her while she was wearing the face of my own mother!"
"Really?
"That must have been very hard for you."
"I'm going to make you pay for that!"
"Give up, kid. You don't have what it takes to kill me."
"You couldn't have picked a better face! Show me what you really look like! Instead of being a coward! Whose only real power is to hide behind other people's faces!"
"Do you really want to see? You asked for it!"
"Stop jerking me around!"
"What's wrong? I thought you wanted to see him."
"Envy was the very first Homunculus, created by Hohenheim almost four hundred years ago, as the result of the failed human transmutation of our son, who died prematurely from mercury poisoning. I suppose you could say that Envy was once your brother."
"But then he abandoned me, and started fresh with his wife and kids. Needless to say, I never did like being replaced."
"What? What's going on? Where am I, you worm?"
"The Gate."
"So what's on the other side?"
"I don't know. For me it was a place called London, if I remember right. That's what my old man said."
"Old man? Do you mean Hohenheim of Light?"
"Yes."
"You're telling me he's still alive!?"
"I wouldn't do that. There's no way to know where it will lead for you."
"I've come to kill him! Take me to Hohenheim of Light!"
"Stop messing with me! You do what I tell you!"
"You're taking me to see Hohenheim!"
"Just accept it!"
"To my father!"
"Al?"
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
Now he understood.
He'd been wrong.
At least one of those three tears had been for Envy.
But he was not going to let this happen a third time.
"Find your brother!" Ed shouted up to Julia, almost before he was aware that he was talking.
Julia's eyes were wide in new horror and terror and despair and self hatred to mirror what Ed knew must have been in his own eyes when he'd discovered who Sloth and Envy were, and the terror and horror and self hatred and despair that he knew must be in them now, for whether Homunculi were born from failed human transmutations or not based on how energy in the two anti-particle worlds ebbed and flowed, Dad's Homunculus had known this world's Hohenheim of Light and he was still every amount a member of his family as Sloth and Envy had been members of his; or perhaps still were, in Envy's case.
As were his true children.
All of the Homunculi from the first anti-particle world, and the ones who this fourth Ed knew here, should be laughing and smiling together with both world's Eds and Als, and not close to the Stone and leaning on the crutch of the Gate and the Truth as Dante's Homunculi had been leaning on the crutch of humanity.
Although Julia's face was acute and slack and sharp and drawn with horror and despair and terror and self hatred in ways that even his own hadn't been, for Julia's brother might still be alive, even though he'd turned into another Scar.
"I'll deal with the Homunculi!"
Innumerable further expressions of indecipherable agony and despair and horror and self hatred and terror that Ed knew that he might never be able to even begin brushing at all whatsoever in any fashion, shape, form, or way for as long as he was alive and for however many unending boundlessness flowed and ebbed afterwards, or wherever it everlastingly and endlessly ebbed and flowed.
But then she gave him an uncertain, wary look, and then she nodded.
He looked at the other Ed, whose face was set in a more angry expression, but one as anguished and self hateful and horrified and despairing as Ed's own, in both different and resembling manners.
"These Homunculi are from another world, not my own, but a third one on a third side of what you call the Portal, and we call the Gate!"
Julia's mouth opened slightly.
The native Ed's eyes went wide.
"The Winry of this world shouldn't be in any trouble!"
The native Ed clapped his hands, and placed them on the walkway, causing the rock beneath him to rise up in coruscating blue white.
"I can still inform my double here that you're seeking to prevent me from completing research that I'm all but sure is virtually the same as his own," Dad's Homunculus interjected.
The other Ed stopped moving it, but he didn't straighten up.
"Just go!"
But then crimson cascaded through the air, and two extensions of ice coalesced out of more water vapor with hands at the end that grabbed them and lifted them onto the platform.
The Edward from the particle Amestris brought his legs beneath him to land steadily, and the Ed from this Amestris did similarly.
"Then we'll just leave you to that research," Julia told the Homunculi.
More crimson washed through the air, and the sheet started rising up.
The Ed inhabiting a double clenched his teeth yet once more, but Julia might be right.
Dad's Homunculus most likely wouldn't want to waste the time making contact with his double on this fourth world, but unless Ed had no other choice, it was most likely best not to endanger the fourth Winry too much.
Dad's Homunculus was obviously trying to play Julia in the same way that Dante had maneuvered Ed to the first parallel world, but Ed had dealt with that kind of tactic so many times in the last few weeks by now that he should at least have a decent chance of keeping the first Homunculus close to the Truth from playing Julia and her brother by a similar means.
The first Homunculus of Dad hadn't even been able to infiltrate the Amestrian government with a Homunculus as a secretary.
His second agent in the government was merely pretending to be Selim Bradley.
For all Ed knew, he might have a minority more years, or even one or two, or a few more decades; of experience manipulating the government of his Amestris than the few decades that Dante had manipulated the government of Ed's Amestris.
But he hadn't even been able to tie as many strings around the government of the second Amestris as Dante had the one Ed knew.
For all of his own genius at both alchemy and subterfuge; he, and his Homunculi, weren't even as experienced, or skilled, or talented, or good, at maneuvering people; as Dante, and her Homunculi, had been.
Whatever his plan was, Edward could keep him from maneuvering Julia to obtain the two Cselkcess version Stones.
Within a matter of seconds, Pride's Selim portion turned and lashed two whips of dark shade into the wall of the chamber in front of them to slice boulders out of it, revealing boulders of natural rough rock past it.
Red cascaded over the blood and up over the wall and into the hole that Pride had created, decomposing a mostly circular tunnel into that rock that extended out of Ed's sight.
The three Homunculi must intend to create a tunnel leading directly through the ground to the valley on the other side.
Then, seconds later, the trinity of Homunculi were out of sight, and their own threesome was above a mostly circular city with residences and other structures constructed in the Cretan fashion, tall towers interspersed around it and rising up in concentric circles to an even taller one in the center, that was engulfed in flames in many places, with smoke rising up from even more.
Tall geysers of lava were fountaining up from it as well; perhaps offshoots of the lava that Ed could see falling in a number of thick waterfalls of molten shades of yellow and orange from a military base with a large building resembling an inverted funnel near its front into the canyon out of sight below the lip of the city, that Julia's destruction of the center of the transmutation circle that must have created the Stone she had just swallowed had redirected.
Edward clenched his teeth still another time.
"Do you see what happened to this city?
"This is another reason why transmuting with a Stone causes more problems than it solves."
Julia's face was pale and drawn, but her lips were firmly set.
She shifted the direction of the dias of ice to descend in a shallow diagonal in the direction of the canyon lip so fast that the air pushed almost painfully against Edward.
"My people have been oppressed by both the Cretans and Amestrians of this planet for between four centuries and three centuries.
"Without the power of what we call the Crimson Star backing us up, we have no means of clawing our way out of the valley nearby and gaining our independence from lives where we live in terror of dying every single day."
Sickness caused Ed's insides to twist, but this time, he restrained how much they did.
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
"Even when you close your eyes, there's a whole world out there… outside of ourselves and our dreams."
It doesn't matter who you are. If you work hard, it pays off. I know Equivalent Exchange is true. And I don't care if it's childish to believe in its precepts. I'd rather be considered a child than live in a world of cynicism, chaos, or apathy. I'm sorry. I thought I didn't care about it, but I did need to believe in something… all this time.
"I'm sure, whatever happens, you'll find your way out. You've got strong legs. You'll get up and use them, won't you, Edward?"
"Maybe what Dante said was right. Maybe you can give up all you've got, and get nothing back. But still, even if I can't prove it's true, I have to try. For your sake, Al."
Thinking and feeling as a child, and continuing to believe in Equivalent Exchange and the Truth, even though he couldn't prove that they were genuine, had defeated Dante, and that the Gate had extracted a price from Ed and imprisoned him in two successive other worlds was very potent evidence that he truly had brought Al home finally and at long last; body, soul, and mind.
That the Truth and the Gate themselves could be pursued, and drawn close to, and decomposed and reconstructed as part of a malleable Homunculus, and for all Ed knew even a natural human; was just one more example of how, because no matter what existence or reality or universe or world it was, it, and the people within it, were flawed and imperfect; so giving what you had, everything that you possessed or something of equal value, might end up giving you something back that you didn't see coming.
And death was never a question of numbers; so two true Philosopher's Stones transmuted from tens of millions of the souls of people who had died over the course of around eight centuries, or one genuine Philosopher's Stone transmuted from over one million one hundred thousand souls in a matter of seconds; weren't that much more horrific than a Stone from his Amestris transmuted from an unknown number of other living beings and around twenty human souls.
They were just more proof that giving something first, whether it was everything that you had, or something of equal value, might just not give you something of equal value back, but rather, something that you didn't believe that you'd obtain.
He could do this.
He was going to keep the two Cselkcess method Milosian Stones out of the hands of the third world's Homunculi, as well as the Homunculi of this anti-particle world; and then destroy all of their research into the Stone in the first anti-particle world, and this one as well, if necessary; and then find a way to return to Al.
And then he'd apologize to Rose directly for how much pain and death he'd put her through by repeatedly, and hypocritically, criticizing her for believing in something.
Edward still felt immeasurably too exhausted to do so, but he forced himself to smile the confident, challenging smile that he hadn't truly smiled since he'd revisited Lior last week and discovered what his sins had done to Rose, and to the rest of the people of Lior, and the city.
Al, I don't know how to get back to you. These other worlds are strange places.
Edward lifted his right automail forearm at the angle that he preferred to when feeling triumphant and challenging something; the Truth or the Law of Equivalent Exchange or the Sun or the Philosopher's Stone, genuine or incomplete, or human transmutation, or existence or reality or the world or the ebb and flow of All Is One, One Is All.
But one thing's for sure.
I will find a way.
He clenched his automail fist with confidence that he realized was totally genuine and heartfelt, and imperceptibly transcending the concepts of conveying more convicted than it had been since before he could even remember what feelings and thoughts were.
We'll be together soon, Al.
"What is that for?" the other Ed questioned, looking as though he wanted to argue with Julia, but he believed that it wouldn't get him anywhere.
Ed knew the feeling, all too well.
Edward forced interest and curiosity to rush through him, now that he at last had a chance to truly talk to one of his own doubles, and one who was still fully in charge of his own body.
To his surprise, this flow of sensation was partially sincere, too.
He lowered his fist into a neutral ready position, where he could take a defensive or offensive stance as necessary.
"I was sent to these two worlds, which might serve as anti particles to two worlds that I know on the other side of what we call the Gate, as the price for giving the Al who is my own younger brother his body back, along with his mind and soul."
The other Ed's mouth opened.
Julia inhaled in shock, and even after everything that she had just learned, and done, there was true elation and joy in her own expression, so pure and potent and measureless and surpassing understanding; that Ed knew that she was as close to this world's Al, and him, as Winry and Rose were to his own world's Al, and he himself.
But then the other Ed clenched his own teeth tightly yet once more, and clenched his own automail hand for an entirely different set of reasons.
"I can't take that option any more than I can do it with a Stone," he spoke with contained agony and self hatred and guilt and frustration, and innumerable other perceptions and emotions.
"If I do, I'll leave my Al, and my Winry, all alone, in tears and scared."
Edward suppressed the surge of new self hatred and guilt at the reminder that this was the very thing that he'd just done to both of them.
The circular dais of ice passed the innermost canyon lip and started to descend towards a valley with garbage strewn over almost all of it, and with a shantytown on the opposite side well to Edward's left near a warren of caves past a wide river knifing through the approximate center of the canyon that a number of thin wooden bridges crossed. Lava rushed down the canyon floor in its direction and washed out from the bottom of descending curving fountains of far more openings in thick ruined pipes in front of and below the base than Edward had been able to see before.
A mouth moved beneath pink and dark brown hair, but no sound emitted from it, and eyes looked out almost sightlessly, so empty and so far away and seeing something so separated from reality and existence and distant that how distant they were couldn't be perceived.
"I should have tried harder to stop him."
"Even when you close your eyes, there's a whole world out there… outside of ourselves and our dreams."
Julia's brother, or whatever Cretan was attacking the Milosian natives, was trying to cause another Lior.
"I'm sure, whatever happens, you'll find your way out. You've got strong legs. You'll get up and use them, won't you, Edward?"
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
Maybe having been sent to the anti-particle worlds had been a blessing in disguise.
Perhaps, if nothing else, he could at least prevent another Lior before what had almost certainly still been less than twenty-four hours, according to his own time, passed since he'd entered the dilapidated and deserted chapel to meet Russell and Fletcher and descend to the cathedral in the underground city.
Or perhaps something, in innumerable ways, that was immeasurably incomparably worse.
At least no one had regularly dumped uncountable amounts of garbage into Ishbal or Lior, or their ruins.
"I promised my Al that we'd regain our bodies together, and that the next time that my Winry cried, her tears would be tears of joy.
"If I give Al his own body and mind back that way, even if I find a way back soon afterwards, I'll break those promises."
The Ed who had done just that tried to think of something to say, but no words came to mind.
Julia pressed her lips together in a coagulation of uncertainty and set determination.
"As you know, I disagree about the Star, and Vatanen and the others pointed out that they're willing to give their souls to it, and die when someone transmutes through it.
"So, after we win the revolution we launched tonight, and defend the valley, and declare our independence, I'll use the Star to make a short trip through what we call the Doorway, and tell your Al, and your Winry, that you're still alive."
So much shock and heart contorting hot aching distorting desperate hope and longing blinded him so incandescently brilliantly they were the most pitch black heart of the singularity of the most supermassive black hole at the core of a quasar.
But Ed suppressed them, and the urge to clench his teeth, or fists, further.
Sacrificing souls to defend your people was one thing, but as much as Ed disagreed with that, sacrificing souls for the sake of one person, or two people, or three people's, selfish dreams was another matter entirely.
"Are you really out of your mind this time!?" the native Ed cried in a combination of empathy, sympathy, understanding, agony, and anger of his own.
"Vatanen and the others said that they were willing to become prisoners of the Stone and die for their people!
"Not for people who made our own mistakes, like us!"
New fury of the disembodied Ed's own surged through him at the other Ed's willingness to criticize someone for disagreeing with what he believed, and dreamed, was supposedly what Al and Winry, and Granny and Teacher, and Rose, and an indescribable amount of other people, who Edward knew, wanted, and believed in.
Ed opened his mouth, but before he could, Julia spoke first.
"That's even less your call to make than it is my people and me," she retorted, with defensive and protective anger of her own.
"They're not your brother and family and friends, and they're not even from another nation, they're from another world, and another entire side of the Doorway.
"And what you said about Atlas when he was pretending to be Ashleigh,"
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
"Even when you close your eyes, there's a whole world out there… outside of ourselves and our dreams."
It doesn't matter who you are. If you work hard, it pays off. I know Equivalent Exchange is true. And I don't care if it's childish to believe in its precepts. I'd rather be considered a child than live in a world of cynicism, chaos, or apathy.
This time, reality didn't even flicker, although muted horror and anguish and self hatred and terror still surged.
"And Miranda, and the rest of us, were bad enough.
"So I'm not going to put up with you treating any Al that way, too."
The heartfelt sincerity of the protective and defensive fierce anger in Julia's voice reminded Ed so much of the Winry and Rose who he knew that his heart distorted with another hot ache of longing, and asphyxiated as though caught in a motionless diamond vise.
The other Edward crossed his arms and turned his face away with his chin raised.
"But the Ed who I know is also right about leaving the Al and Winry who you know scared and crying, so whether or not I travel through the Gate isn't up to discussion any more than this Ed's hypocritical judgmental morality."
Edward forced the incomprehensibly more desperate flood of hope and longing as far away, and as far down, as possible.
He kept his face and voice neutral as he answered.
Ed included the other Ed in his gaze as he said his next words.
"Then we'll need to agree to disagree, but I don't pick fights with people unless they're trying to force other people to live for what they believe in, or dream about, so I won't stop you."
The native Edward jolted violently, and now he gave the disembodied Edward an angry and challenging glare.
"Do you have any clue what you're saying!?" he shouted.
"If you don't believe in the standing on your own legs and avert your eyes from the Truth, you're just running away from reality!
"And if you disagree with the idea of dreaming itself, then you'll let down the people around you who want to see you realize them, and who were hurt trying to enable you to fulfill them!
"I'm not saying that we should drag people into our own messes, but that doesn't change that, if they get involved when we don't want them to in order to chase their own dreams, and they're hurt because they do, their effort got them nothing back!
"That's not Equivalent Exchange!
"If you don't believe in the world in the here and now, under your feet, you're just going to keep causing the Al, and the Winry, and the other people who you know, to keep crying!"
At least this Ed saw using his strong legs, and facing the Truth, as believing in something, not believing in nothing, as the Ed from the particle Amestris had before the unending lifetimes of hardship and striving and struggle and adversity of the last two days had started.
For a few seconds, the aching everywhere, and exhaustion, were back, much of it for far different reasons.
"And even if you can make it back, you've just been through two pitched battles against two groups of Homunculi and a genius alchemist!
"You're in no condition to risk ending up in the middle of another one!"
But resting meant falling asleep and dreaming, so that wasn't an option.
The Ed from the particle Amestris gave the native Edward an empathetic, understanding, sympathetic, and knowing look.
Or should the Ed from the Amestris that he wasn't in consider his Amestris the Amestris from one of the two anti-particle worlds?
Because none of this changed how many people the native Ed was going to force to clean up messes that he was responsible for, and harm, or even murder, if he kept seeing things the way that he did.
Particularly if he kept believing that his definition of the Truth, the Law of Equivalent Exchange, and morality governed everything.
"If you close your eyes to everything, or almost everything, in reality but your dreams, and the dreams of the people who are closest to you, you're going to be the person who causes the Al, and the Winry, and the other people who you know, to cry."
The other Edward's eyes went wide, and his glare became even more defiant, and challenging.
"And I'm not running away from anything.
"By believing that Equivalent Exchange will always give you back exactly what you put into it, and the Truth that you see mandates everything, your pretty words are just–"
Below them, Ed could now make out a wall of dark brown rock rising over the diameter of the entire valley floor of the canyon in cascading blue, hopefully transmuted by this world's Al, or Mustang, or Armstrong, or one or more of them.
But Edward extremely highly doubted that it could hold back this much molten heat.
To their right was the remains of a metal mining vehicle with a large wheel that must have been applied by the Cretans, Amestrians, or the native Milosians to mine the valley floor, or its surroundings.
Ed felt slightly lighter as they descended close enough to the canyon floor to see that it was a third Al, even though it was a one in armor with small brown corroded heated indentations on his body, and no one but a third Al, standing in front of a wall that had recently risen near the edge of the river at the center of the valley to their left, in order to try to contain the lava.
Edward braced to jump down to him as soon as they descended close enough to him almost as fast as the native Edward did.
But then a figure in a Cretan uniform walked up over the opposite end of the vehicle, a white mask with golden knobs extending from portions of it concealing his face.
Julia's visible face became transparent, for the mask over the soldier's face could mean solely one thing.
Dad's Homunculus had been right.
But the Edward possessing the third Ed, whether his world was an anti-particle or a particle, had just learned better.
"I'm sure, whatever happens, you'll find your way out. You've got strong legs. You'll get up and use them, won't you, Edward?"
It doesn't matter who you are. If you work hard, it pays off. I know Equivalent Exchange is true. And I don't care if it's childish to believe in its precepts. I'd rather be considered a child than live in a world of cynicism, chaos, or apathy.
"Maybe what Dante said was right. Maybe you can give up all you've got, and get nothing back. But still, even if I can't prove it's true, I have to try. For your sake, Al."
"Ed! Get up, Ed! Get up, Ed, and move forward!"
Whatever the Homunculi of the third world, and perhaps the fourth, believed, Equivalent Exchange, and the Truth, weren't governing laws that inescapably bound everything.
They were promises, between the people who you loved, and the people who loved you; and you, and the people of all of the worlds outside of yourself, and your dreams; that you believed in for the sake of the people who you loved and who were tormented by hardship and adversity in the worlds outside of yourself and your dreams.
Because, even though you couldn't prove that those laws were true, they needed you to persevere in the childish hope that working hard could protect them, and defend them, and safeguard them, from that adversity and hardship; and make right the hardship and adversity and pain that you yourself had caused them, or let them suffer through; and bring them home after having been stranded apart from each other and one another, broken and ruined and alone and lost in a suspended unending frozen icy and cold frigid hollow prison of metal and other alloys where nothing was present in reality but apathy, cynicism, chaos, death, blood, torture, and pain; to a reality and an existence and a world and a hearth of warmth and love and family and home.
Edward was going to keep the two Cselkcess version Stones away from the Homunculi of the third world, leave them somewhere hundreds of miles away from civilization outside of the third Amestris when he went back to it, and then find a way to expunge all of the research into the Philosopher's Stone from that Amestris, and this one if he needed to, and return home to his own younger brother, Al.
"Are you my real brother?" Julia called to the masked and uniformed Cretan soldier, her voice ruined and agonized and broken, but determined and resolved.
"And is all of this lava your doing?
"I want the truth this time.
"Are you the genuine Ashleigh Crichton?"
.
'I don't know how to get back to you. This world is a strange place. But one thing's for sure. I will find a way. We'll be together soon, Al.'-Edward Elric
'Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first Law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one, and only, truth. But the world isn't perfect, and the law is incomplete. Equivalent Exchange doesn't encompass everything that goes on in this world. But I still choose to believe in its principles. That all things do come at a price. That there is an ebb and a flow that comes in a cycle, and that the pain we went through does have a reward. And that anyone who is determined and perseveres will get something of value in return, even if it's not what they expected. I don't think of Equivalent Exchange as the law of the world anymore. I think of it as a promise, between my brother and me. A promise that someday, we'll see each other again.'-Alphonse Elric
FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST:
Episode 51: LAWS AND PROMISES
