"According to my teacher, the 'correct' way involves proper hand and finger positions, but plenty of people don't need to do that. All I do is think of a memory I associate with the element and…" Lissa whipped her hand out in front of her —fingers formed into a blade— as if trying to swat an insect. A ripple of water cut through the languid shallows of the pond, formed by a swirl of wind larger than what should have been possible with just the force generated by her waving.

Seated next to her at the water's edge, Robin left off scrubbing the hem of his coat to watch her display of magic, using his shoulder to wipe away a few droplets that had splashed onto his cheek. Setting aside the garment —dried mud still stubbornly caked to its lower half— and the chunk of pumice Chrom had lent him, he raised his own hand in an identical position to her's. He thought of the storm the previous evening, the force of the gale that had battered the countryside. With that image firmly in mind, he swung his arm out in front of him. Nothing happened.

"Maybe relying on memories isn't one of my strong suits," he reminded her.

Lissa let out a sharp peal of laughter before clapping both hands over her mouth, a mortified look on her face. "Sorry! Sorry. It's not funny."

He shrugged away her concern. Having a little over a day's worth of memory, he was still unsure of how he felt about someone laughing at his condition. Even with his help in Breya, Frederick still didn't trust him, and Robin found that it did somewhat offend him. However, when it came from Chrom or Lissa, slip-ups, lighthearted teasing, or general bemusement at the strangeness of his situation didn't bother him in the slightest.

"But you can use finger placement instead," Lissa said quickly, her cheeks still red from embarrassment. "I'm sure I can remember some of the hand motions; let me think for a moment."

With his hand still outstretched, Robin bent his fingers into what resembled an arthritic claw. The gesture should have been uncomfortable, but, despite some stiffness, it felt natural to him, as if his hand had done this a thousand times. Muscle memory, it seemed, had stayed with him.

"Did it go something like this?" he asked.

Lissa narrowed her eyes. "Yeah… I thought you said you didn't know how you manifested last night."

Robin breathed out, letting himself lightly touch the magic around them. He felt it coil around his hand, molding to his fingers like clay, but with all the weight of a spiderweb. It took a moment to build, then released in a gust of wind that tousled Lissa's pigtails.

She stared at him, mouth open for a second, before suddenly shoving him hard enough that he almost lost balance and toppled into the water. "You could do that this whole time? I've been talking for like an hour!"

It was Robin's turn to laugh, although he edged down the grassy bank away from her as she readied herself for another shove. "I never said I couldn't do it. What I said was I wasn't sure I should be manifesting. I can remember knowledge and facts, but how can I really trust that if everything else in my head is blank? I can't take that risk with something as dangerous as magic. What if there's some rule or technique that I don't even remember I've forgotten… does that make sense?"

Lissa cast about in the grass around her, coming up with her staff —the top only a jagged splinter of wood where the spellwork had snapped off— and jabbed him in the shoulder with the blunt end. "No, it doesn't! If you're looking to… refresh what you know about magic, you should be talking to an actual mage; someone who knows what they're doing. And you've just been sitting there letting me talk for an hour!"

"But your lecture was very informative. I'm sure your teacher would be proud."

She let out an exaggerated huff. "You have, like, a day-and-a-half's worth of memories. How are you already this insufferable?"

"A day-and-a-half of traveling with you guys," he chuckled. "I'm learning from the best."

His captors —although, they hardly merited the term anymore— left Breya early the morning following the storm, Chrom promising to send back aid to the village once they'd reached the capital. After asking around and learning that there hadn't been a healer in residence for over a month, Robin decided to take Lissa's advice and travel with them to Ylisstol. It was a decision that Chrom had left entirely up to him, and his mood was greatly improved with the knowledge that he could finally make such choices without being menaced by a lance.

They'd set out on a north-eastern heading, with a slight detour farther east. Frederick had questioned the townsfolk about the bandit attack and the earthquake. Both should have come from the west, where The Bellows rose up to create the border between Plegia and Ylisse; the mountains supposedly the usual culprit for such tectonic activity. However, the villagers were adamant that the path of destruction had originated in the opposite direction.

Chrom and his companions —who regularly patrolled this part of the countryside— had a difficult time hiding their skepticism, but, with each passing mile, it became harder and harder to deny the villagers claims. The destruction they had observed throughout the previous day grew more frequent as they traveled until, by noon, the sight of an upright tree or undamaged structure was a rarity. Instances of crevasses and uneven, jutting earth also became more common.

For the rest of the day, stretching into evening, they'd crisscrossed the surrounding countryside, attempting to get a more complete view of the devastation. Lissa had marked up one of their maps with a charcoal stick, gradually shading in the effected areas. The town of Breya was a light gray, and the coloring darkened along the line of their journey, at last expanding to encompass the several square miles they'd explored, all scribbled black. It appeared that the earthquake had been extremely localized, radiating out from a single point.

They'd finally made camp where a pond —now swollen by the storm rains— had formed in the grassy depression between two short hills. Chrom and Frederick had continued on to where they had determined the epicenter to be, leaving Robin and Lissa to relax and recuperate. The stress of the battle with the bandits followed by a long march had left them both exhausted.

Robin fended off another half-hearted prod from Lissa's staff as he returned to cleaning his coat. He gestured with the pumice to the traveling pack propped up next to her. "Did your teacher give you any lessons on how to use that spellbook?"

With her free hand, Lissa rummaged around in the bags, grunting slightly as she pulled out a heavy, leather-bound tome. It had been found among the bandits' belongings, and now sported an arch of large holes punched through its cover, courtesy of a very angry sheepdog.

"I mean… I guess I could use it," she said dubiously. "I've always had some difficulty with tomes, but that isn't uncommon. Usually, whatever focus you're trained on first kinda sticks with you and the others get a bit tricky." She sighed. "But I should probably try to get more comfortable with it, since without my staff I'm basically useless otherwise."

Dropping the tome onto the bank between them, she twirled the staff around and started picking at its broken top. After the battle, the four of them had sifted through the muddy morass that Breya's central square had been transformed into by the storm in search of the pieces of the shattered spellwork. The main cage had been found, as well as the broken gem and a handful of the lyric charms Lissa had used as decoration.

The charms still worked, and the cage could be melted down and reforged once they reached the capital. The gem was the real loss, and one that Lissa appeared genuinely guilty about. The two halves wouldn't work as a full focus anymore, and would be sold to a jeweler to be cut down into smaller gems for mundane rings and bangles.

"Will it be hard for you to get another one?" Robin asked, nodding to the staff.

Lissa shrugged. "No, the Halidom has plenty of them, but…" She she began prodding at the water dejectedly. "Emmy, erm, Exalt Emmeryn won't be happy."

"She's yours and Chrom's older sister, right? Is she a strict ruler?"

"What? No!" Lissa's head shot up, real offense in her eyes, but it softened as she saw his startled confusion. "Sorry. Yes, she's my sister, and she's the best, kindest leader our country's had since… well, it's been a while. It's not that she'd be mad at me for breaking the staff, she just… A lot of the Halidom's healing gems weren't pulled from the mines. She'd just be sad that I destroyed one."

An awkward silence spread between them. Robin belatedly realized how perilous the conversation had become. Clearly he had touched a personal nerve. Although, he wasn't sure what had upset her, it was obvious that his lack of context and any historical knowledge would only make matters worse.

He was desperately trying to think of a safer topic when Chrom and Frederick's return saved him.

"Would you look at this, Frederick," the prince called. "All of our hard work to protect the Halidom and we can't even come back to a warm fire. These two haven't moved an inch since we left."

Lissa immediately perked up, any signs of her previous agitation were erased by a teasing laugh. She jumped to her feet and in a passable imitation of Chrom said, "Oh, Lissa, going on patrol isn't like one of Vaike's stories. You won't have a nice bed or bath out on the road. You'll have to learn to rough it."

"Don't you dare joke about the necessity of a nice, roaring fire after a day's walk!" Chrom chuckled good-naturedly. "Go on, tell her, Frederick."

The knight didn't answer, his gaze locked on the tome resting next to where Robin sat. "I believe we had decided to keep the tome away from the prisoner, in the event the tale of his memory was… exaggerated."

Robin scowled and hefted the piece of pumice at Frederick. "This prisoner would need both hands free to use that thing. And look, you left me alone with the princess of the Halidom for hours and nobody died. When exactly, in your mind, am I supposed to reveal myself as a villain? I've had ample opportunity."

Frederick's glare intensified, and his grip on his lance tightened. Chrom quickly stepped in between them, holding up a hand to Frederick and giving Robin a suffering look. "Frederick, nobody decided to disarm Robin. He made the choice not to take the tome for the sake of our own ease. It was very diplomatic of him. The kind of behavior I'd hoped he would continue to display."

Robin looked away and hunched his shoulders, returning to his laundry. Frederick, however, still stood poised, the grip on his lance positioned to allow it to be thrown at a moment's notice.

Chrom's sigh broke the tense silence, and Robin turned to see him stroll over to the bank of the pond. Reaching down, the prince picked up the offending tome, hefted it thoughtfully and stowed it into the pack dangling from one of his shoulders.

He looked back and spoke to Frederick, but his tone of disapproval quickly gave way to excitement. "There, I've secured the dangerous item. Now that we can all be friends again, shall we show these two what we've found?"

Only a short walk from their pond-side campsite, the concerning, but surface level damage from the earthquake turned catastrophic. An entire hillside had been obliterated and, judging by the chunks of sod that peppered the ground, scattered over a good quarter-mile. Whole sections of earth jutted over their heads, as if they were wooden floorboards that had been pried up, and the grass had been blackened in an almost perfect circle. At the center, a crater that could have easily fit one of the homes in Breya at its deepest point yawned wide.

Robin raised his hand and manifested a flame, which Chrom used to light a pair of torches against the rapidly fading light of sunset. He handed one to Frederick as he spoke. "Watch out for all these dirt cliffs. A few of them collapsed while we were here before."

Lissa stepped forward to inspect the uneven earth, a flame of her own burning above her palm, although it was smaller than Robin's. "Do earthquakes normally do something like this?" She asked. "I mean, I don't have to tell you I'm no expert, but it looks like something hit the ground really, really hard."

"They most certainly do not," Frederick said from over his shoulder as he picked his way farther into the destruction.

Chrom looked sideways to Robin. "Do our two mages have any more… unconventional ideas about how all this might have happened?"

Robin raised an eyebrow, but Lissa beat him to an answer. "Why is everyone asking me for magical advice today? Do I look like I have a pointy hat and glasses? Like I said, looks like something fell out of the sky, or something."

Robin shrugged. "You can do a lot with magic, I know that much, but this—" he gestured around them "—is a bit much."

"Oh!" Lissa piped up. "What about the spell from that one story Emmy would read us? What was it called… Ah, Meteor, duh."

Chrom drummed his fingers on the hilt of Falchion. "I'd rather not make any conclusions based on a storybook. And besides, don't you remember? The hero destroys the tome in the end anyways."

"Could it have been an actual meteorite?" Frederick called from ahead.

Robin tripped over an unearthed tangle of roots, groaning as the front of his coat was smeared with more dirt. "I think the people in Breya would have noticed something burning across the sky."

He couldn't help but smile in satisfaction as he heard Frederick muttering darkly. Perhaps it would have been more 'diplomatic' to have let Chrom or Lissa stomp down the knight's idea, but it certainly felt good to do it himself.

"So, probably not natural. That leaves magic," Chrom said as he helped Robin to his feet, trying and failing to hide a smile of amusement at the other man's once again filthy coat. "And I don't mean the kind from a fairytale. Could a spell have done something like this?"

Robin thought for a moment. Memories, histories and geography had all left him, but knowledge —facts about the ways of the world— had stayed. "You could do something like this with a spell," he started slowly. "But the spellwork would have to be massive. Like, multiple-carts-and-a-team-of-horses-just-to-move-it-around kind of massive. And the complexity required would probably make it too fragile to move anyways.

"I'm not even sure you'd be able to aim a spell like that with any kind of accuracy. You'd just start channeling and hope for the best. Doesn't seem very practical."

Chrom eyed him. "That was all very… informed. Maybe you were a lyric smith before you lost your memory?"

There was a loud thump, followed by a high pitched yelp. Lissa's voice came a moment later, slightly out of breath. "And can you believe Robin actually asked me to tell him about magic? I'm okay, by the way. Just wanted to take a look at the big hole. Say, Mister 'I don't know anything about magic,' can you think of something that might make dirt, like, turn into stone?"

Robin and Chrom traded a glance before weaving their way over to edge of the crater. Frederick was already there, peering down at Lissa, illuminated by the glow of her flame. Next to her, at the center of the gouged earth, was a tall, uneven pillar that reached up to where the ground level must have been before.

Without slowing his stride, Chrom walked right over the rim, sliding down next to his sister without so much as a stumble. Robin looked down at his poor coat and sighed, before joining them in a much less graceful controlled fall. Frederick remained above, his head slowly moving back and forth as he scanned the surrounding debris.

Lissa raised her staff and knocked it against the strange pillar. Some dirt fell free from the vibration, but otherwise the whole thing —as big around as a tree trunk— stood firm.

Chrom kicked at the moist earth around its base. "Seems like it goes pretty far down. What is this thing? It looks natural."

Robin held up his hand, the manifested fire stayed just above his palm, as if fixed to it by an invisible candle. Under light, the column glittered with tiny formations of glass or quartz. Chrom was right, it definitely didn't look like something someone had made. It was rough and knobby, like a piece of driftwood overgrown with barnacles, only made of a pockmarked brown stone.

Something came to him; not a memory, more like a combination of knowledge and a nagging familiarity. "I think this has something to do with lighting," he said. Looking around, he saw the royal siblings staring at him with interest. "Lightning strikes the ground and it… I don't know, melts the dirt into rock? It's called something, I know it is."

Lissa reached out and ran her free hand along the rock. "Well, it couldn't have been from the storm, that happened half-a-day after the quake. And this thing is big. I didn't think lightning got any-"

"To arms!" Frederick screamed from the crater's rim. "Get out of that damnable hole now!"

Robin didn't have time to react as something smashed in between his shoulder blades, causing his light to wink out and sending him tumbling into the stone pillar. The entire formation let out several ominous cracks, but held.

He rolled off of the rock and behind it, reaching out blindly and snatching Lissa's arm, dragging her into cover with him. For a moment, they wrestled, Robin at a complete loss as Lissa twisted out of his grip and grabbed at his coat.

"Lissa, what-"

"How bad is it? It didn't stay in you, but it must have hit close to your spine. Stop flailing and let me look!"

Lissa raised a hand and re-summoned her light. It was only visible for an instant before Robin snatched her hand and broke the manifestation.

"Are you crazy!" he hissed. "Whoever's up there will see that as a perfect target for their next… whatever it is they threw."

"Whatever it is they threw? That was a javelin, Robin. And if I don't have any light, I won't be able to see how bad your wound is."

Robin blinked. Chrom's torch had also gone out, but the strengthening moonlight illuminated a wooden haft sticking awkwardly up out of the dirt close to where he had been standing. He could just make out crude iron tip pointing up towards the sky. The strike had hurt, but he was suddenly firm in the conviction that he'd know what being stabbed felt like, and this wasn't that.

Lissa confirmed what he'd already known a moment later as she finally got his coat undone and slid a cold hand under his shirt and around to his back. She let out a sigh in relief.

"Guess this coat does have some enchantments on it," he whispered. "Can't say that I like finding out this way, but it's better than the alternative."

"You almost gave me a heart attack. Did you see who threw it? More Plegians? What about Chrom or Frederick?"

Shouts came from above them —too many to be just Frederick— along with the unmistakable clash of steel, but they couldn't see anything more than the flickering torchlight past the edge of the crater. The only good news was that after a quick look around, Robin couldn't see any figures looking down on them.

"We need to climb out of here," he muttered to Lissa. "It's not that far, just stay close to the ground and follow me."

He waited just long enough for a cloud to pass over the moon, casting the floor of the pit into near total darkness, before leaving the safety of the pillar at a crawl. Lissa followed, her broken staff occasionally knocking against his boots. They'd made it almost halfway up the slope of the crater when the moon re-emerged, illuminating the two of them, the strange stone pillar, and a figure looming in their path.

Robin pushed himself to his knees and grabbed for Chrom's dagger, still sheathed at his waist, but faulted.

The figure slouched where it stood, like a person asleep on their feet. A malformed iron sword was held loosely in one hand, its tip buried in the dirt. Sallow flesh, stretched too-taut over prominent bones, glistened in the moonlight, barley covered by ragged scraps of cloth that suggested what might have been a uniform, once. Its face was in shadow, but two glowing coals peered out at them from the sockets where its eyes should have been.

The creature jerked its free hand towards him. Its momentum seemed wrong, as if the hand was pulling the rest of the body along behind it. Robin tried to fend it off, but the monster grabbed his collar in an iron grip and yanked him to his feet. Lissa shouted and leapt up, swinging her staff at their attacker's head.

The sword came up, like the other arm, almost independent of the body, and batted the attack away so hard that the staff was wrenched out of Lissa's hands. The creature pulled Robin forward until they were face to face. Its mouth fell open, strange smoke drooling out from between rotted teeth, and let out a rasping moan that was cut off by a brilliant slash of steel.

Falchion cleaved through the creatures midsection. Instead of a splash of gore, the monster's wound erupted in a spray of smoke. It turned, dropping Robin in an attempt to block Chrom's second swing, but fail. Its head vanished in a second gout of smoke.

Robin was too close to avoid breathing in whatever the creature had instead of blood. His throat and lungs revolted, sending him gaging and spluttering to the dirt. Through eyes burning from the miasma, he saw Chrom drop to the ground in similar distress.

Lissa rushed over to them. Having avoided the worst of it, she only coughed slightly as she grabbed her brother and started tugging him away from the fallen monster. "Come on, don't just lay in it. You too, Robin, get away."

Still gasping for air, Robin pushed himself up, but immediately stumbled. He rolled the rest of the way down to the floor of the pit, joined shortly by Chrom and Lissa in a similar fashion. Lissa was on her feet in an instant.

"Deep breaths, both of you. That's right, in through your nose and then hard out of your mouth."

Robin's vision had been reduced to a smear of blurry shapes by tears, so he jumped when Lissa grabbed his face roughly, pulled apart one of his eyelids as far as it would go, and upended a waterskin over his face. He came up spluttering, now more from the water than what he'd breathed in. To his surprise, his sight had mostly returned, enough for him to see Chrom seated next to him, hair and face soaked.

"What was that thing?" Chrom rasped.

Robin turned to one side and retched before responding. "Is that not something that's common in your Halidom?"

"No!" Lissa said shrilly. She sat down hard in between her two patients. "Are there more of them up there? Where did they come from?"

Chrom put a hand on his sister's shoulder. "Yes, there are more of them, but there's also more of us. Looks like Virion was curious about all this too. He even brought the cavalry."

"But are they ready to fight those… things?" Lissa moaned.

Chrom got to his feet, wavering slightly before holding out a hand to pull Lissa up. "No, they're not. Which is why we need to get up there and help."

Lissa shrank away from him. Robin could see her trembling.

"I can't help." Her voice came out in a strangled sob. "I don't have my staff, I can't use the tome, I can't even-"

Chrom cut off her panicked words by scooping her up into a hug. Lissa froze for a moment, before letting out a muffled grunt and hammered a fist against her brother's shoulder.

"Get off of me, you big lug!" she bawled. "You're filthy, and you still have some of that monster's smoke on you."

Chrom squeezed her just a little tighter before letting go. He undid the clasp of his cape and gave it several good shakes to knock off the grime, before settling on Lissa's shoulders. The garment looked like a tent wrapped around the her smaller frame.

"You have a duty as a Shepherd," he said gently. She looked as if she were about to say something, but he held up a hand to forestall her. "To patch up the rest of us after we've done the fighting. That's your job. You can do it without your staff, I know you can. So, you're going to stay here, hidden, while I go kill some monsters. Got that?"

Lissa pulled the cape tighter around herself like a blanket and nodded. Chrom smiled and patted her shoulder. He turned to Robin and gave him a wink. "You, on the other hand, aren't a Shepherd, but I could really use your help."

Robin, who had suitably recovered from the miasma, drew his borrowed knife and waggled it in front of himself. "Sure. With this thing I can, what, distract one or two of them for several whole seconds before they kill me."

"Could be helpful in a fight," Chrom chuckled. He dropped his pack on the ground and dug through it. He held up the Plegian tome. "Now, I don't want me giving you weapons to become a thing. Whattaya' say this is the last time?"

Robin sheathed the dagger and took the spellbook. It felt wrong in his hands. Not like when he'd first held Chrom's knife, that was from awkwardness. This was a feeling of something that was lacking; the weight was wrong.

"I'm not sure I know how to use this," he said, although he hardly believed the words himself.

Chrom grinned and wiped Falchion's grimy blade on his own trousers. "I think those things can see in the dark. I don't know about you, but that's a trick I haven't quite learned yet. You don't need to be a combat mage. You don't even have to fight. All my Shepherds need is a little light. Think you can manage that?"

Robin found himself nodding. Chrom laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "Then let's get out of this hole. You stay by the rim and keep an eye on Lissa for me."

"Wait!" Lissa said. She reached down and with a yank, tore two long strips out of the hem of her traveling dress. She handed one to each of them. "For your mouth and nose. Try not to breathe any more of that stuff in."

Chrom wrapped the cloth around his face with a flick, then gave his sister an exaggerated salute. And with that, the prince bounded off up the slope, Robin fast on his heels. This time, he reached the top without incident. They stopped just before completely exiting the cover of the crater and took in the battlefield.

A group of four human fighters stood among the debris, visible from the light of a few sputtering torches rammed into the ground at their center. Surrounding them was a twinkling constellation comprised of dozens of pairs of glowing, red eyes.

Robin recognized Frederick, his uniform coated in purple miasma. Next to him, forming a triangle, were two other knights in plate mail, one painted red, the other green. They worked as an outer line of defense, protecting a long haired, foppishly dressed archer.

Chrom looked back at him. "You make light, we kill monsters. Try to be quick about it, though."

He let out a deafening war cry and charged into the creatures flank. Robin didn't watch, instead turning his attention to the book in his hands. Tilting it so it could be better seen in the moonlight, he opened it to the first spellwork. And for the first time since he'd pulled his own name from the void of his past, Robin remember.

He couldn't just use the tome, he understood it. The twisting pattern of lyric was as easy to read as a child's storybook. The though brought a smile to his lips. He still wasn't sure if he could read a child's storybook. But this, this made sense to him on a level deeper than knowledge and memory.

The first page was a wind spell. The curving, graceful lines could mean nothing else. He found what he needed on the second page: a chaotic spiral tapering off into thin swirls at the edges of the spellwork.

Holding his hand above the tome, Robin manifested into the center of the pattern. Like a musical instrument taking air from a musician's lungs and —through reeds and valves and pipes— turning it into song, the spellwork drank in the flames he fed it. The lyric began to glow a dull blue as it took his pitiful, human attempt to create an element, focused it, enhanced it, and returned it to his hand as a roiling globe of flames.

Knowing that this spell was far from precise, Robin directed his hand far to the left of the Shepherds and released the inferno. Flames gushed forward, igniting grass, toppled trees, bushes and several of the unfortunate monsters in a wide swathe. Some of the fires died quickly, much of the foliage was still wet from the storm, but enough of it caught that the battlefield brightened considerably.

He channeled the spell again, scorching the area to the other side of his allies. Some of the creatures he torched cracked and exploded into clouds of miasma, which snuffed out any flames they touched, but many more of the ghouls seemed to hardly notice the fire. However, his magic was truly effective in tipping the scales to a more even field for the Shepherd's. They did the real damage.

Arrows fletched with swan feathers fell with deadly accuracy among now illuminated monsters, causing heads and chests to gush with smoke. Frederick shouted a command and began pressing outward with the other knights. The creatures were powerful and erratic, but clumsy and unskilled with their motley assortment of weapons. Each soldier could take on multiple opponents at a time without help. Chrom whooped as Falchion whirled through the air, the blade streaming a line of miasma behind it.

All seemed to be going well, then Robin heard wingbeats. He looked up in time to see something dart across the moon directly overhead: a pegasus and its rider. He flipped the page of the tome back to the wind spell, but before he could channel it, a violet light shone in the sky.

Dozens of individual purple flames arced out from the rider, peppering the ground around him and the Shepherds. One bounced off of his coat. He mentally thanked whatever events had put the garment in his possession, but stopped when he saw several hit Chrom and Frederick with a similar lack of effect.

Then something grabbed his boot.

He yelped and kicked out, falling sideways and dropping the tome. He watched in horror as a hand erupted out of the dirt, using Robin as an anchor to drag the rest of a head and torso into the light of his fires. From every spot the rider's magic had fallen, a new creature rose up, struggling to pull swords, spears and javelins along with them.

Robin scrambled, just barely managing to rip his dagger free before the monster at his feet could pull itself further up his body. He brought the short blade down into one of its glowing eyes. The resulting gout of smoke caught him full in the face. His eyes burned and watered, but the impromptu mask Lissa had made kept him from choking too badly.

Blinking and wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his coat, Robin threw himself over to the fallen tome. Knocking it open to the first page, he channeled a gust of wind into it. The spell finished building just as two more monsters jerked toward him. He sent them both flying backwards into a fallen log he'd set aflame.

He looked to the others. Even with the sudden enemy reinforcements, Frederick and the Shepherd's Robin did not know were still gaining ground, pushing slowly towards…

He cursed as he spotted Chrom alone, surrounded by two rows of the newly risen monsters. Robin snatched up the spellbook and frantically flipped through the pages. He wasn't sure the wind spell would have an effect on such a tightly clumped group, and the fire spell was more likely to kill Chrom than save him. The third spell looked as if it could create a blade of air, but that would maybe deal with one of the monsters at a time. He needed power and precision. He needed lightning.

His prayers were answered by the last page's jagged, unmistakable lyric. He sent sparks from his palm raining down into the spellwork, and was rewarded with a jittering arc of electricity that wrapped itself around his hand. He aimed the spell at the creatures behind Chrom, but a blur at the edge of his vision caused him to whirl around.

A gloved hand clamped down onto the wrist he was channeling with and yanked it up and away just as he released the spell. A bolt of lightning that would have done the previous day's storm proud crackled harmlessly up into the night sky. Robin raised the tome, attempting to clobber his assailant, but was jerked farther off balance by his wrist. Something flashed inches from his face and the spellbook was bisected horizontally, leaving him holding only the bottom half.

His attacker released his wrist, sending him tumbling onto his back. Robin's hand went to his sheath, forgetting that his only other weapon was sticking out of the corpse of a monster now out of reach. He let his arms fall to the sides and he slumped back. Less than two days of life, but at least it was an interesting one.

He looked up into the face of his soon-to-be killer and saw… a mask?

The figure raised a long, soot-blackened sword above their head in a single, very smooth, very human motion and brought it down towards Robin's face.

"I'm with the Shepherds!" he shouted in one last attempt to live.

The blade stopped a hair's breadth from his nose. The stranger looked at him for only a moment before putting up their sword and making to sprint off in Chrom's direction. Robin reached out to them, but they were both halted by a shrill scream from below.

Most of the newer monsters had been formed around the fighting Shepherds, but three had found their way into the crater. Lissa was backed up against the strange pillar. She'd grabbed the javelin that had struck Robin, and was brandishing its trembling tip at the approaching creatures.

The stranger, who Robin could now see was shorter than he was, and wore a thick cloak, looked down to Lissa, then to Chrom, then back again. Then, they reached down, yanked Robin's dagger free from the skull of the monster he'd slain and tossed it back to him.

They pointed to where Frederick had managed to break through the mass of monsters and was standing at his lord's side. They spoke in a gruff voice, muffled by the mask. "Help protect the… prince. I'll save her."

Before he could give an answer, the stranger leapt down into the pit. Robin watched in amazement as they dashed at full speed down the uneven slope as if it were a flat road. Before the creatures had gotten to within a spear's length of Lissa, the blade that had, moments ago, been at his throat slammed into them.

One went down in a geyser of miasma. The other two jerked towards their attacker, but cleaved only air. The stranger had somehow anticipated the monster's erratic movements and was already impaling a second before the first had hit the ground. The resulting cloud of smoke obscured anything more from view.

Robin picked up his dagger and hefted it, looking towards the increasingly chaotic melee around Chrom. He dashed off, shouting and waving his arms at the nearest monsters. Perhaps distracting one or two of them would help make a difference. It was really the only tactic he had left.