Phantom Scars (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)
Jan 20, 2020 19:26:59 GMT
Post by Firebrand on Jan 20, 2020 19:26:59 GMT
The arrow pierced Ferdinand’s armor and buried itself in his chest halfway up its shaft, with such force that it nearly threw him from his saddle. He tried to gasp in shock and in pain, but he found he couldn’t fill his lungs with air. More arrows followed the first, lacerating Ajax’s wings and penetrating his scaly hide. The wyvern shrieked as he plummeted towards the bridge, crashing on his side and crushing Ferdinand’s left leg beneath his bulk. The shock of the crash snapped the arrow that had lodged in Ferdinand’s chest, bringing with it a fresh shock of pain. He struggled in vain to extricate himself from beneath Ajax, but the wyvern was too heavy, and his strength was fading, and he saw an Imperial cavalry regiment bearing down on him, and the last thing he saw was the sunlight glinting off their lances as—
But no. That wasn’t what had happened.
No, in taking the Great Bridge of Myrddin, he and Leonie had flanked the Imperial forces from the south, dispatching one of the ghastly masked demonic beasts and then baiting General Ladislava to fly out from behind the Imperial lines where he had distracted her long enough for Leonie to ground her with a hail of arrows.
Raphael had drawn the fire of the Imperial archers as Lysithea had picked them off one by one with dark magic. Ferdinand had never even gotten into their range. Once he had dispatched the beast and Ladislava, he had joined up with Claude and Cyril to pursue the Empire’s aerial troops while Leonie had joined the professor and Hilda in routing the ground forces.
So he couldn’t have been shot. And yet he so vividly remembered the arrow finding its mark, and his chest still ached as though the arrow had been as real as the wounds he had taken locking axes with Ladislava. The scion of the Aegir family was not given to flights of fancy, so where had these memories that weren’t his own come from?
“Ferdinand!” Lorenz called. Ferdinand jerked upright in his seat. Lorenz brushed his long forelock aside. “My friend, you seemed a thousand miles away. More tea?”
“A thousand miles…?” The sounds of Garreg Mach filtered through the courtyard, and Ferdinand tried to focus on them to ground himself; craftsmen carrying out repairs, the distant clang of weapons in the training yard, the buzz of chatter from the dining hall. He forced his thoughts away from the battle on the bridge. “Not nearly so far, Lorenz. More tea would be lovely.” He glanced down and saw that his hands were trembling. “If you would not mind pouring for me? It is your pot, after all.”
“Of course,” Lorenz said with a smile. As he poured the tea, Ferdinand gently prodded at his chest. No wound, of course. But even so…
He had just touched the teacup to his lips when Leonie jogged past. “Come on, you two! The war council is in ten minutes!”
Lorenz sighed. “Of course it is. And we still have half a pot of tea left.”
Ferdinand forced himself to smile. “It’s only a five minute walk to the council room. We can savor this cup for a few minutes more before we jump at Claude’s call.”
“Right as ever, my friend.”
Ferdinand drank the tea rather more quickly than intended, but he waited as Lorenz finished his, and then they proceeded through the main hall and up to the second floor of the monastery. In the council room, Lorenz took his customary place to the right of Claude’s chair, across the table from Hilda, a position he took more out of a sense of obligation than camaraderie with the leader of the Alliance. Ferdinand sat beside Petra, the only other former member of the Black Eagle house to join the Golden Deer and subsequently the Alliance army. The princess of Brigid favored him with a smile and a tilt of her head.
“Are we still to be sparring this afternoon?” Petra asked.
“If you would like,” Ferdinand replied. “I have made sure my schedule is clear.”
“That is giving me great joy.” She rested her chin on her hand, idly running her index finger along the purple tattoo beneath her eye.
Before Ferdinand could reply, Claude appeared in the doorway, with their former professor just behind them. The leader of the Alliance tipped his head to Ferdinand and shared a wink with Petra as he sauntered towards the head of the room. Their professor followed silently in his wake, the sleeves of his cloak billowing behind him. Instead of sitting down, Claude leaned on the back of his chair.
“Before we get down to business, I want to congratulate everyone on taking the Bridge of Myrddin. We sent Edelgard’s troops running with their tails between their legs, and securing that position was an important first step to pushing back against the Empire.” Claude held up a hand. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s a long road between the Airmid River and Enbarr, and we’re in for a long campaign. Our scouts are reporting that the Empire has sent troops to reinforce their standing garrison at Fort Mercius, and the reinforcements are ready to march out to meet us should we push further into Adrestia. It seems likely that we’ll meet them at Gronder Field.”
“So it’ll be just like five years ago, huh?” Raphael said.
“Except not at all like five years ago,” Ignatz sighed.
“Yes,” Claude said. “We’ve also heard that there is a group of Kingdom loyalists stirring up trouble in western Faerghus that’s making a beeline for Adrestia, and they’ll probably reach Gronder the same time we do. Teach and I have been talking, and it looks like we may be able to use that to our advantage…”
The prospect of fighting the Empire still didn’t sit right with Ferdinand. Despite everything, perhaps even in spite of everything, he still loved Adrestia, even if he couldn’t stomach remaining in imperial lands under Edelgard. Back when they had been students at the monastery, he had watched as Edelgard had become increasingly distant from her classmates and ever more ruthless on the battlefield. He had tried to serve as a counterbalance to her more destructive tendencies, to be what he would ultimately become as her prime minister, the naysayer to Hubert’s enabler. But he found himself increasingly shut down by the future empress and her leering retainer, and after enough of that sort of treatment, Ferdinand had given up hope that Edelgard could be changed.
When the mysterious but skilled professor who led the Golden Deer had come to him and proposed Ferdinand join his class, Ferdinand had been secretly grateful to get away. Petra had been swayed from the Black Eagles at nearly the same time, and confessed to similar feelings.
Ferdinand had for a time nursed a vain, foolish hope that after graduation Edelgard would grow into her role as empress and leave behind the hardline stances of her monastery days, but when the Flame Emperor led imperial troops to attack the Holy Tomb, Ferdinand crushed that spark of hope. Even before Edelgard led her army in an attack on the monastery, Ferdinand had turned his back on her. How could he follow someone who was responsible for the death of Captain Jeralt, or who had so desecrated a holy site of the Church of Seiros?
After the Battle of Garreg Mach, when Archbishop Rhea and the professor had both disappeared, Ferdinand had lingered in the monastery for a time as the students and knights tried to recover from the chaos of the attack. He wasn’t sure if he should return to his ancestral lands, or if doing so would have him branded as a traitor for deserting Edelgard. But when Lorenz brought word to him that his father had been stripped of his titles and branded an outlaw, Ferdinand had mounted up on Ajax as quickly as he could and flown with all possible speed towards Enbarr. It was not out of love for his father that he hurried, but out of concern for the lands that House Aegir oversaw. With his father deposed, Ferdinand feared that the lands would come under the control of the empress, or some chosen lackey, and the people in his charge would be stripped to the bone to fuel Edelgard’s engine of conquest.
Much to his surprise, Edelgard had granted him an audience, but it only confirmed his worst fears. The Aegir lands had been confiscated, and Ferdinand could either submit to Edelgard’s reign of terror or face the same fate as his father. In what was probably a stupid and brazen display of courage, Ferdinand had glowered at Hubert and met Edelgard’s icy stare to throw her offer back in her face. He had stormed from the throne room before the guards could stop him, and hastened to his apartments in Enbarr to gather what he could before the city watch was alerted to keep him from leaving. As he hurried from the city’s diplomatic quarter, he encountered Petra, in the city to present Brigid’s tribute to the Empire. A rushed conversation was all it took for Petra to throw in her lot with him, and together they fled the city with everything Ajax could carry.
Ferdinand had escorted her to the coast, where she managed to find passage to Brigid. They had stood on the quay together, and Petra asked if Ferdinand would return with her. Not only would Brigid offer him asylum, she was certain her grandfather’s court would welcome a mighty warrior such as he, and together they could push back against the imperial offensive that would no doubt be coming to Brigid once Edelgard secured her hold on the continent. Ferdinand nearly accepted, but he knew he could not abandon his homeland to Edelgard. He told Petra his plans to return to Aegir territory to see to the commoners that were his charge, and lead any who chose to follow him to safety in the Alliance. Petra had understood, and promised that once she had seen to the situation in Brigid, she would return to Fódlan to fight by his side.
Ferdinand had watched as her ship vanished over the horizon before returning to the small fishing village and the crude stable where he had hidden Ajax. He then flew to the Aegir lands and rallied the handful of retainers and soldiers who had remained loyal to him in the face of imperial aggression. He learned of a small underground movement that had sprung up, and with the help of the rebels created a network to establish contact with Lorenz in the lands of House Gloucester. Over the course of three years, he had orchestrated an exodus from Adrestia for any Aegir stalwarts. The partisans were transported across the Airmid River and into Gloucester territory. Once Claude caught wind of the scheme, the network stretched all the way to Derdriu, and proved remarkably effective in slipping imperial dissidents out from under Edelgard’s nose.
Eventually the imperial army caught wind of Ferdinand’s activities, and he was forced to shut down the network and flee to the Alliance. When he made it to Gloucester territory, he learned that Petra had already arrived, having sailed around the southern coast of the Empire all the way to Derdriu, and she had brought all of the warriors who could be spared from defending Brigid’s shores with her to bolster the Alliance forces.
While Ferdinand and Petra worked to integrate the Aegir loyalists and Brigid warriors they had brought with them, Claude had led their former Golden Deer classmates in what he claimed was a reconnaissance mission to the ruins of Garreg Mach, to “see the lay of the land, since it may be a strategic asset when it comes time to push back against the Empire.” Of course, Ferdinand had known that it was also to fulfill a promise the Golden Deer had made to reunite at the monastery on the Millennium Festival, before Edelgard had launched her attack. While Ferdinand would have loved to have joined his former schoolmates, he had his hands full coordinating House Aegir-in-exile, and he knew deep down that the reunion was more for those classmates who had been Golden Deer from the start. It wasn’t something anyone dared mention to his face, and certainly he hoped that the other Golden Deer were above such things, but plenty of people in the Alliance did not seem inclined to forget that he was Adrestian, and no matter what he did to wash his hands of it, he would always bear at least some culpability for the actions of the Empire.
But then his former classmates had summoned him back to the monastery, and who should be there but the professor, looking completely unchanged and no worse for wear, despite having been gone for five years…
A twinge in his chest brought Ferdinand back to the present. Something of his discomfort must have shown on his face, because Petra raised an eyebrow at him. Ferdinand brushed away her concern and tried to refocus on the Claude. He probed at his chest with his left hand, trying not to let his unease show. If he hadn’t been shot, then why could he remember it with such vivid detail, and visually every facet of the pain? The only actually injury he had come away with from the battle on the bridge was a gash on his arm from Ladislava’s axe, but that had been dealt with by the magical healers moments after the battle ended.
Come to think of it, he had only received that wound because of a momentary lapse in his focus, quite unlike him, now that he thought about it. As Ajax swooped down on the imperial general, Ferdinand had gotten a sudden flash of… not quite a memory, not quite a daydream, but something in the middle. Rather perching atop a soaring wyvern in light armor, he had been astride an imperial warhorse, leading a cavalry charge from the opposite end of the bridge, bearing down on soldiers wearing Kingdom armor. But that was impossible, the Faerghus had collapsed early in the war, and the remnants of the old Kingdom nobility were in no position to lead an offense against the Empire.
And why would he have been on the Empire’s side?
He tried to calm his nerves by taking a drink of water, only to nearly gag as his chest lit up with pain again. He fell into a coughing fit, and Claude looked down the table. “Hey, you need a minute?”
“I’m fine,” Ferdinand managed to say. “Please, I urge you to continue. Pay me no mind.”
The leader of the Alliance shrugged and carried on with the meeting. Ferdinand took a deep breath and forced himself to be calm. The pain in his chest was the worst phantom scar he had gotten, but it was far from the first. In his time at the officer’s academy, there had been other occasions where he had felt pain from wounds he had never actually received, and had vague flashes of getting them from battles he hadn’t fought in. He definitely recalled fighting an Almyran raider at Fódlan’s Throat only for the shaft of his lance to break and the Almyran’s axe to bite deep into his shoulder. But when he had joined Hilda and the professor on the mission to defend the Throat, the professor had told him to use axes, so he had never needed his lance. On another occasion, he remembered a demonic beast suddenly whirling on him as he and Ajax tried to ambush it, darting away from his attacks and dousing him in corrosive venom, but in that battle he knew that he had not attacked the beast until Claude and Lysithea had stunned it with gambits.
In the time the professor had been away, he had been in his fair share of scraps, but not once did he ever receive a phantom wound. Now that he thought about it, the wounds had only started to appear when he joined the professor’s class. And he had only started to suffer them again now that the professor had returned…
He felt more than saw the professor’s gaze fall on him. Ferdinand struggled to meet the professor’s piercing green eyes. Could the professor read his thoughts? Ferdinand had watched the professor be consumed by some sort of unholy black magic, only to reappear moments later having cut through the fabric of reality itself. Even if Ferdinand were a betting man, he wouldn’t like to wager on the extent of the professor’s abilities. Actually, Ferdinand was willing to bet the professor could read his thoughts, if the ghost of a smile playing on the professor’s lips was anything to go by.
Ferdinand barely paid any attention to the rest of the strategy meeting as he struggled to calm his troubled mind. When the council finally adjourned, he hastened to the training yard. He hoped that once he had a lance in his hands and worked up a good, honest sweat, he could start trying to make sense of things.
Petra joined him as he stretched. “Ferdinand, I am wondering if you are all right? In the strategy meeting, you were seeming… strange.”
“I am fine. Or I will be fine.” Ferdinand realized that the words came out more curtly than he had intended, and he raised his hand in a placating gesture. “I apologize. I am touched by your concern, but the best medicine for me right now would be a bit of exercise.”
“If you are being certain…”
Ferdinand nodded and selected a wooden lance and axe from the racks at the edge of the yard. “I am certain. Please, the sooner we begin, the sooner I can start feeling better.”
Petra inclined her head and picked a wooden sword and axe. She tucked the axe into her belt and hefted the sword, giving it an experimental swing. Ferdinand did the same with his axe and twirled his lance around. “Ready? Begin!”
Petra charged forward with a scream, leaping into the air and bringing her wooden blade crashing down on the shaft of Ferdinand’s lance. Ferdinand had managed to throw up the block just in time, and shoved back against Petra’s relentless assault, throwing her off-balance and using the opening to lash out with a strike of his own. Petra danced backwards, giving ground in the face of Ferdinand’s superior physical strength and reach. Each time she swung out to try and get back on the offensive, Ferdinand countered with the business end of his lance.
Ferdinand reversed his grip and swung the shaft of his lance down at Petra’s legs, hoping to end the bout quickly. Petra saw the sweep coming, and Ferdinand had a split second to curse his impatience. If he had gone for a feint, the maneuver might have succeeded, but Petra was too crafty and observant to fall for such an obvious maneuver. She jumped over the spear and landed lightly on the balls of her feet. As Ferdinand tried to regain control of his weapon, Petra seized the opportunity Ferdinand’s hubris had presented and pressed her attack.
The tables had turned, and now Petra forced Ferdinand to beat a hasty retreat across the yard. Petra was a skilled warrior in the tradition of her people, where children are taught to hold a sword as soon as they can walk. The style of swordplay in Brigid was adapted from aggressive Dagdan tactics, but supplemented by the graceful and fluid movements that the Brigid islanders had developed on their own.
Ferdinand had always felt that his greatest strength in battle was being able to analyze his foes and predict their next move, allowing him to evade and counterattack as his foe tried to recover. But Petra’s fighting style was too unpredictable, and despite sparring with her for years, he still struggled with predicting her movements. However, in that time he had learned that the Brigid style was weak on defense, and only had a handful of defensive maneuvers. When Petra was attacking, she could slip past Ferdinand’s guard with ease, but when he had her on the defensive, he could win more often than not. His miscalculation had robbed him of his sole advantage, and all it would take was the slightest misstep to lose the bout and add another painful bruise to his growing collection.
Petra roared again and charged in. She moved right, but Ferdinand just knew by the way she had settled her weight that she was trying to bait him. He adjusted his stance, reasonably sure that after she feinted right Petra would come in with a backhanded blow from the left.
Ferdinand surrendered to instinct as he swung his lance around, catching Petra’s sword as she attacked with the backhanded blow he had predicted, and Ferdinand brought the shaft down on the back of Petra’s hand, making her drop the wooden sword with a sharp gasp.
Before he had time to savor his victory, Petra had drawn her axe and charged in again, swinging down with an overhead blow that left her torso exposed. It was a risky move that Ferdinand had counseled her against in the past, but the blow came so fast that he had no time to exploit the opening. He threw up his lance horizontally, hoping to stop the blow, but the strength of Petra’s blow was such that it broke his lance into two pieces.
Ferdinand tossed the broken lance to the ground and drew his own axe, meeting Petra blow for blow as they danced back and forth across the training yard. Ferdinand blinked the sweat from his eyes, and Petra’s hair had come loose from its braid. “I will not be yielding!” Petra hissed through clenched teeth.
“Neither will I,” Ferdinand rasped back. He had forgotten the pain in his chest, forgotten the professor, had almost forgotten the war. All the existed were the four walls of the training yard, his axe, and Petra. They collided, blow after blow, their axes crashing against each other with the dull crack of wood and iron.
Petra staggered back after one particularly intense blow. She turned her head to the side and spat on the sand floor of the training yard. “Ferdinand, I will be striking with all of my might!” She spun her axe and charged in. “And you will be slapped down!”
Ferdinand settled his stance and braced himself. “I will not back down one step!”
Their axes collided, and Ferdinand heard a sharp crack as his axe shattered in his hand. He jumped backwards, only to see Petra’s weapon had been destroyed as well. Petra’s breath came in shallow gasps, and Ferdinand pushed back a sweat-drenched lock of hair from his forehead. “Perhaps we should call this a draw?”
Petra nodded. “Perhaps we should. Ferdinand… fighting with you has given me great joy. I am not knowing any opponent who pushes me like you are doing.”
They crossed to the water barrel and drank deeply, catching their breath as they cooled down from the fight. When Ferdinand felt he had sufficiently recovered, he risked broaching the topic that had been eating at him. “Petra, do you ever have memories that are not your own? Or rather, they are yours, but you did not live through the events that you are remembering. That is to say—”
“I am having understanding,” Petra said. “I am also having these remembrances of times I have not lived. They are remembrances of times where you are being gravely injured or killed, yes?”
“Indeed. I have a vivid recollection of being killed on the Great Bridge of Myrddin, although the battle played out in completely differently. But it is hardly the only one.” Ferdinand lowered his voice. “Do you have any of these memories from before you joined the Golden Deer? Or from the time between the professor’s disappearance and our rejoining him at the monastery?”
Petra thought for a moment. “I am not. You are thinking the two are connected?”
“It is my most likely theory, yes.”
“If you’re going to just stand around chatting, get out of the practice yard.” Ferdinand and Petra jumped as Felix slunk out of the shadow of a column. “You’re in my way.”
“Our apologies,” Ferdinand said. “We did not see you waiting there.”
“Obviously,” Felix scoffed.
“How long have you been watching?” Petra asked.
“Long enough,” Felix replied. “I’ll admit, your bout was interesting enough. But I’d rather not sit by while you two carry on with idle chatter.”
“Right, of course. How rude of us.” Ferdinand hoped Felix would pick up on the subtle rebuke in his tone, but if he heard it, Felix paid it no mind.
Felix turned to Petra. “You’ve gotten better in the five years you’ve been away. I’ve never seen anyone fight like you do. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to test my blade against yours. You may have something to teach me.”
“That would be giving me great joy,” Petra replied. “However, I am having kitchen duty soon. We will have to be training together some other time. I will be seeing you both in the dining hall!” She took another drink of water before waving goodbye and leaving the yard.
Ferdinand stretched and looked over at Felix. “I have no such claims on my time. If you would like, I would be happy to give you a bout.”
Felix’s derisive scoff was all the answer Ferdinand needed. “You fight too much like a knight.” From his tone, Ferdinand gathered that Felix did not intend it as a compliment. “Petra left you openings, and I know you saw them. But you didn’t take them because that wouldn’t be the ‘honorable’ thing to do. I know your type, and you have nothing to teach me.” Felix turned on his heel and walked away. “I’ll find someone else to give me a challenge.”
Ferdinand sighed and picked up a new lance. It seems he would have to train on his own. He lined up several training mannequins and began going through the motions of a lengthy lance form, his muscles responding instinctively to the familiar movements. As he carried on, he picked up speed, trying to balance fluid movements with complete control over his weapon. Sweat dripped from his brow as he lashed out at the mannequins again and again, reducing them to so many bundles of straw.
The light sound of a footfall behind him made Ferdinand whirl. The professor greeted him with one upraised hand. “You’re fighting more intensely than usual.”
Ferdinand nodded curtly. “Yes. I need to get stronger as quickly as I can.” He shouldered his lance wiped the back of his hand along his brow. “Edelgard claims victory after victory. She never stops.” He shook his head and thought back to his meeting with Edelgard in Enbarr so long ago. A token force of guards had stood at the rear wall of the throne room, but too far to do anything if Ferdinand had tried to attack the emperor. It was a clear show of contempt, that she held him in such low regard that she could defeat him easily, without even needing her guards to intervene.
“Five years ago, she ascended the throne and swept away the corrupt nobles. My father included. I always thought I would be the one to unseat him. But she did it instead, with all the ease and indifference of someone cracking an egg.” Ferdinand ground his teeth together. “She put my father under house arrest. She stripped House Aegir of its power. Rather than accepting a role as her puppet, I left. And now I fight to topple the Empire.” It was strange how quickly the world could change. When he had entered the officer’s academy, he had been a stalwart supporter of Adrestia and all it stood for, determined to show that he was just as good as Edelgard, if not better. The kind of noble who would make the Empire proud, the sort that all of Fódlan would look to as an example. But in the space of just a few moons, he had grown disillusioned with Edelgard and the Empire itself, and from there it was only a short leap to becoming a traitor to Adrestia.
If the Ferdinand of five years ago could see the man he had become, would he even recognize his future self?
The professor seemed to intuit that Ferdinand had more on his mind, and motioned for him to continue. Ferdinand sighed. “The disparity between Edelgard and myself is...obvious. She never stops moving forward. Single-minded. Never wavering. But where does that leave me? Here, flailing about, going nowhere.” He heard the petulant bitterness in his voice and was disgusted by it, but all he could do was kick the straw that had spilled from the training dummies. “And contributing nothing…”
The professor shook his head. “That’s not true.”
Ferdinand bit down on his exasperation. “But it is! That is the reality. Not once since our days at the academy have I exceeded Edelgard's abilities. I saw her as a worthy opponent. She did not even see me as a contender.” And she still did not. If anything, she saw him as even less. He could not forget that fateful day in Enbarr… “She did not even consider me at all. As the head of the noble House Aegir, I must be able to achieve results. But all my efforts have come to nothing. Results are everything. I have not shown results, so I will be stagnating here forever.”
All of his classmates had spent years fighting back against the Empire. All he had done was shuffle a few people over the border, relying on the charity of his friends in the Alliance to see them safely away from harm. Held up next to the countermeasures and strategies Lorenz and Claude had devised in that time, or the daring scouting missions behind enemy lines that Leonie and Ignatz had attempted, or Petra rallying the warriors or Brigid to the Alliance’s banner, Ferdinand’s underground network seemed paltry.
The professor placed his hand on Ferdinand’s shoulder. “It’s the journey, not the destination.”
“I appreciate that, but it is not enough to persuade me.” Ferdinand shrugged off the professor’s hand. “I know that I have a massive wall to climb, and I must climb it alone. Even so…” He forced himself to meet the professor’s chilling green eyes. “May I ask a favor?”
“Yes?”
“Professor, please keep an eye on my progress. I would appreciate if you were always by my side, bearing witness to my accomplishments.”
“Of course, Ferdinand. It would be my pleasure.” The professor smiled, and Ferdinand saw genuine warmth light up the professor’s eyes. Perhaps he had misjudged him…
As the professor turned to leave, Ferdinand held up a hand. “Hold a moment. There is one further thing.” The professor motioned for him to continue, and Ferdinand took a deep breath. “Professor… I died at the Great Bridge of Myrddin, didn’t I?”
The professor glanced down, and seemed to be carefully choosing his words. Ferdinand continued on, lest he lose his nerve. “I remember fighting for the Empire to defend the bridge against the Kingdom, and I died.” The professor opened his mouth to say something, but Ferdinand pressed on. “But more importantly, I remember fighting with the Alliance, the other day, and I died then too. But you know that, don’t you?”
“Well… yes.”
“But I am not dead, and I would not be wrong in assuming that you have something to do with that. Is that so?”
“Yes.”
Ferdinand pressed the part of his chest where the arrow had sunk in. “You remember all of them, don’t you? All the times that each of us died.” The professor nodded. “Thank you, Professor. For keeping us safe.” Ferdinand twirled his lance and turned back to the training dummies. “I don’t understand how this power of yours works, but I’ll train hard to make sure that I’m strong enough that you don’t need to use it to save me. That said, I’ll bear any phantom scars you see fit to see this war through.”
“Thank you, Ferdinand.”
“Thank you, professor.” Ferdinand waited until he heard the professor’s footfalls fade before he began his lance form again. He would need to be strong to help the Alliance push into imperial territory. At the end of this month, they would march to Gronder Field.
To war.
But no. That wasn’t what had happened.
No, in taking the Great Bridge of Myrddin, he and Leonie had flanked the Imperial forces from the south, dispatching one of the ghastly masked demonic beasts and then baiting General Ladislava to fly out from behind the Imperial lines where he had distracted her long enough for Leonie to ground her with a hail of arrows.
Raphael had drawn the fire of the Imperial archers as Lysithea had picked them off one by one with dark magic. Ferdinand had never even gotten into their range. Once he had dispatched the beast and Ladislava, he had joined up with Claude and Cyril to pursue the Empire’s aerial troops while Leonie had joined the professor and Hilda in routing the ground forces.
So he couldn’t have been shot. And yet he so vividly remembered the arrow finding its mark, and his chest still ached as though the arrow had been as real as the wounds he had taken locking axes with Ladislava. The scion of the Aegir family was not given to flights of fancy, so where had these memories that weren’t his own come from?
“Ferdinand!” Lorenz called. Ferdinand jerked upright in his seat. Lorenz brushed his long forelock aside. “My friend, you seemed a thousand miles away. More tea?”
“A thousand miles…?” The sounds of Garreg Mach filtered through the courtyard, and Ferdinand tried to focus on them to ground himself; craftsmen carrying out repairs, the distant clang of weapons in the training yard, the buzz of chatter from the dining hall. He forced his thoughts away from the battle on the bridge. “Not nearly so far, Lorenz. More tea would be lovely.” He glanced down and saw that his hands were trembling. “If you would not mind pouring for me? It is your pot, after all.”
“Of course,” Lorenz said with a smile. As he poured the tea, Ferdinand gently prodded at his chest. No wound, of course. But even so…
He had just touched the teacup to his lips when Leonie jogged past. “Come on, you two! The war council is in ten minutes!”
Lorenz sighed. “Of course it is. And we still have half a pot of tea left.”
Ferdinand forced himself to smile. “It’s only a five minute walk to the council room. We can savor this cup for a few minutes more before we jump at Claude’s call.”
“Right as ever, my friend.”
Ferdinand drank the tea rather more quickly than intended, but he waited as Lorenz finished his, and then they proceeded through the main hall and up to the second floor of the monastery. In the council room, Lorenz took his customary place to the right of Claude’s chair, across the table from Hilda, a position he took more out of a sense of obligation than camaraderie with the leader of the Alliance. Ferdinand sat beside Petra, the only other former member of the Black Eagle house to join the Golden Deer and subsequently the Alliance army. The princess of Brigid favored him with a smile and a tilt of her head.
“Are we still to be sparring this afternoon?” Petra asked.
“If you would like,” Ferdinand replied. “I have made sure my schedule is clear.”
“That is giving me great joy.” She rested her chin on her hand, idly running her index finger along the purple tattoo beneath her eye.
Before Ferdinand could reply, Claude appeared in the doorway, with their former professor just behind them. The leader of the Alliance tipped his head to Ferdinand and shared a wink with Petra as he sauntered towards the head of the room. Their professor followed silently in his wake, the sleeves of his cloak billowing behind him. Instead of sitting down, Claude leaned on the back of his chair.
“Before we get down to business, I want to congratulate everyone on taking the Bridge of Myrddin. We sent Edelgard’s troops running with their tails between their legs, and securing that position was an important first step to pushing back against the Empire.” Claude held up a hand. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s a long road between the Airmid River and Enbarr, and we’re in for a long campaign. Our scouts are reporting that the Empire has sent troops to reinforce their standing garrison at Fort Mercius, and the reinforcements are ready to march out to meet us should we push further into Adrestia. It seems likely that we’ll meet them at Gronder Field.”
“So it’ll be just like five years ago, huh?” Raphael said.
“Except not at all like five years ago,” Ignatz sighed.
“Yes,” Claude said. “We’ve also heard that there is a group of Kingdom loyalists stirring up trouble in western Faerghus that’s making a beeline for Adrestia, and they’ll probably reach Gronder the same time we do. Teach and I have been talking, and it looks like we may be able to use that to our advantage…”
The prospect of fighting the Empire still didn’t sit right with Ferdinand. Despite everything, perhaps even in spite of everything, he still loved Adrestia, even if he couldn’t stomach remaining in imperial lands under Edelgard. Back when they had been students at the monastery, he had watched as Edelgard had become increasingly distant from her classmates and ever more ruthless on the battlefield. He had tried to serve as a counterbalance to her more destructive tendencies, to be what he would ultimately become as her prime minister, the naysayer to Hubert’s enabler. But he found himself increasingly shut down by the future empress and her leering retainer, and after enough of that sort of treatment, Ferdinand had given up hope that Edelgard could be changed.
When the mysterious but skilled professor who led the Golden Deer had come to him and proposed Ferdinand join his class, Ferdinand had been secretly grateful to get away. Petra had been swayed from the Black Eagles at nearly the same time, and confessed to similar feelings.
Ferdinand had for a time nursed a vain, foolish hope that after graduation Edelgard would grow into her role as empress and leave behind the hardline stances of her monastery days, but when the Flame Emperor led imperial troops to attack the Holy Tomb, Ferdinand crushed that spark of hope. Even before Edelgard led her army in an attack on the monastery, Ferdinand had turned his back on her. How could he follow someone who was responsible for the death of Captain Jeralt, or who had so desecrated a holy site of the Church of Seiros?
After the Battle of Garreg Mach, when Archbishop Rhea and the professor had both disappeared, Ferdinand had lingered in the monastery for a time as the students and knights tried to recover from the chaos of the attack. He wasn’t sure if he should return to his ancestral lands, or if doing so would have him branded as a traitor for deserting Edelgard. But when Lorenz brought word to him that his father had been stripped of his titles and branded an outlaw, Ferdinand had mounted up on Ajax as quickly as he could and flown with all possible speed towards Enbarr. It was not out of love for his father that he hurried, but out of concern for the lands that House Aegir oversaw. With his father deposed, Ferdinand feared that the lands would come under the control of the empress, or some chosen lackey, and the people in his charge would be stripped to the bone to fuel Edelgard’s engine of conquest.
Much to his surprise, Edelgard had granted him an audience, but it only confirmed his worst fears. The Aegir lands had been confiscated, and Ferdinand could either submit to Edelgard’s reign of terror or face the same fate as his father. In what was probably a stupid and brazen display of courage, Ferdinand had glowered at Hubert and met Edelgard’s icy stare to throw her offer back in her face. He had stormed from the throne room before the guards could stop him, and hastened to his apartments in Enbarr to gather what he could before the city watch was alerted to keep him from leaving. As he hurried from the city’s diplomatic quarter, he encountered Petra, in the city to present Brigid’s tribute to the Empire. A rushed conversation was all it took for Petra to throw in her lot with him, and together they fled the city with everything Ajax could carry.
Ferdinand had escorted her to the coast, where she managed to find passage to Brigid. They had stood on the quay together, and Petra asked if Ferdinand would return with her. Not only would Brigid offer him asylum, she was certain her grandfather’s court would welcome a mighty warrior such as he, and together they could push back against the imperial offensive that would no doubt be coming to Brigid once Edelgard secured her hold on the continent. Ferdinand nearly accepted, but he knew he could not abandon his homeland to Edelgard. He told Petra his plans to return to Aegir territory to see to the commoners that were his charge, and lead any who chose to follow him to safety in the Alliance. Petra had understood, and promised that once she had seen to the situation in Brigid, she would return to Fódlan to fight by his side.
Ferdinand had watched as her ship vanished over the horizon before returning to the small fishing village and the crude stable where he had hidden Ajax. He then flew to the Aegir lands and rallied the handful of retainers and soldiers who had remained loyal to him in the face of imperial aggression. He learned of a small underground movement that had sprung up, and with the help of the rebels created a network to establish contact with Lorenz in the lands of House Gloucester. Over the course of three years, he had orchestrated an exodus from Adrestia for any Aegir stalwarts. The partisans were transported across the Airmid River and into Gloucester territory. Once Claude caught wind of the scheme, the network stretched all the way to Derdriu, and proved remarkably effective in slipping imperial dissidents out from under Edelgard’s nose.
Eventually the imperial army caught wind of Ferdinand’s activities, and he was forced to shut down the network and flee to the Alliance. When he made it to Gloucester territory, he learned that Petra had already arrived, having sailed around the southern coast of the Empire all the way to Derdriu, and she had brought all of the warriors who could be spared from defending Brigid’s shores with her to bolster the Alliance forces.
While Ferdinand and Petra worked to integrate the Aegir loyalists and Brigid warriors they had brought with them, Claude had led their former Golden Deer classmates in what he claimed was a reconnaissance mission to the ruins of Garreg Mach, to “see the lay of the land, since it may be a strategic asset when it comes time to push back against the Empire.” Of course, Ferdinand had known that it was also to fulfill a promise the Golden Deer had made to reunite at the monastery on the Millennium Festival, before Edelgard had launched her attack. While Ferdinand would have loved to have joined his former schoolmates, he had his hands full coordinating House Aegir-in-exile, and he knew deep down that the reunion was more for those classmates who had been Golden Deer from the start. It wasn’t something anyone dared mention to his face, and certainly he hoped that the other Golden Deer were above such things, but plenty of people in the Alliance did not seem inclined to forget that he was Adrestian, and no matter what he did to wash his hands of it, he would always bear at least some culpability for the actions of the Empire.
But then his former classmates had summoned him back to the monastery, and who should be there but the professor, looking completely unchanged and no worse for wear, despite having been gone for five years…
A twinge in his chest brought Ferdinand back to the present. Something of his discomfort must have shown on his face, because Petra raised an eyebrow at him. Ferdinand brushed away her concern and tried to refocus on the Claude. He probed at his chest with his left hand, trying not to let his unease show. If he hadn’t been shot, then why could he remember it with such vivid detail, and visually every facet of the pain? The only actually injury he had come away with from the battle on the bridge was a gash on his arm from Ladislava’s axe, but that had been dealt with by the magical healers moments after the battle ended.
Come to think of it, he had only received that wound because of a momentary lapse in his focus, quite unlike him, now that he thought about it. As Ajax swooped down on the imperial general, Ferdinand had gotten a sudden flash of… not quite a memory, not quite a daydream, but something in the middle. Rather perching atop a soaring wyvern in light armor, he had been astride an imperial warhorse, leading a cavalry charge from the opposite end of the bridge, bearing down on soldiers wearing Kingdom armor. But that was impossible, the Faerghus had collapsed early in the war, and the remnants of the old Kingdom nobility were in no position to lead an offense against the Empire.
And why would he have been on the Empire’s side?
He tried to calm his nerves by taking a drink of water, only to nearly gag as his chest lit up with pain again. He fell into a coughing fit, and Claude looked down the table. “Hey, you need a minute?”
“I’m fine,” Ferdinand managed to say. “Please, I urge you to continue. Pay me no mind.”
The leader of the Alliance shrugged and carried on with the meeting. Ferdinand took a deep breath and forced himself to be calm. The pain in his chest was the worst phantom scar he had gotten, but it was far from the first. In his time at the officer’s academy, there had been other occasions where he had felt pain from wounds he had never actually received, and had vague flashes of getting them from battles he hadn’t fought in. He definitely recalled fighting an Almyran raider at Fódlan’s Throat only for the shaft of his lance to break and the Almyran’s axe to bite deep into his shoulder. But when he had joined Hilda and the professor on the mission to defend the Throat, the professor had told him to use axes, so he had never needed his lance. On another occasion, he remembered a demonic beast suddenly whirling on him as he and Ajax tried to ambush it, darting away from his attacks and dousing him in corrosive venom, but in that battle he knew that he had not attacked the beast until Claude and Lysithea had stunned it with gambits.
In the time the professor had been away, he had been in his fair share of scraps, but not once did he ever receive a phantom wound. Now that he thought about it, the wounds had only started to appear when he joined the professor’s class. And he had only started to suffer them again now that the professor had returned…
He felt more than saw the professor’s gaze fall on him. Ferdinand struggled to meet the professor’s piercing green eyes. Could the professor read his thoughts? Ferdinand had watched the professor be consumed by some sort of unholy black magic, only to reappear moments later having cut through the fabric of reality itself. Even if Ferdinand were a betting man, he wouldn’t like to wager on the extent of the professor’s abilities. Actually, Ferdinand was willing to bet the professor could read his thoughts, if the ghost of a smile playing on the professor’s lips was anything to go by.
Ferdinand barely paid any attention to the rest of the strategy meeting as he struggled to calm his troubled mind. When the council finally adjourned, he hastened to the training yard. He hoped that once he had a lance in his hands and worked up a good, honest sweat, he could start trying to make sense of things.
Petra joined him as he stretched. “Ferdinand, I am wondering if you are all right? In the strategy meeting, you were seeming… strange.”
“I am fine. Or I will be fine.” Ferdinand realized that the words came out more curtly than he had intended, and he raised his hand in a placating gesture. “I apologize. I am touched by your concern, but the best medicine for me right now would be a bit of exercise.”
“If you are being certain…”
Ferdinand nodded and selected a wooden lance and axe from the racks at the edge of the yard. “I am certain. Please, the sooner we begin, the sooner I can start feeling better.”
Petra inclined her head and picked a wooden sword and axe. She tucked the axe into her belt and hefted the sword, giving it an experimental swing. Ferdinand did the same with his axe and twirled his lance around. “Ready? Begin!”
Petra charged forward with a scream, leaping into the air and bringing her wooden blade crashing down on the shaft of Ferdinand’s lance. Ferdinand had managed to throw up the block just in time, and shoved back against Petra’s relentless assault, throwing her off-balance and using the opening to lash out with a strike of his own. Petra danced backwards, giving ground in the face of Ferdinand’s superior physical strength and reach. Each time she swung out to try and get back on the offensive, Ferdinand countered with the business end of his lance.
Ferdinand reversed his grip and swung the shaft of his lance down at Petra’s legs, hoping to end the bout quickly. Petra saw the sweep coming, and Ferdinand had a split second to curse his impatience. If he had gone for a feint, the maneuver might have succeeded, but Petra was too crafty and observant to fall for such an obvious maneuver. She jumped over the spear and landed lightly on the balls of her feet. As Ferdinand tried to regain control of his weapon, Petra seized the opportunity Ferdinand’s hubris had presented and pressed her attack.
The tables had turned, and now Petra forced Ferdinand to beat a hasty retreat across the yard. Petra was a skilled warrior in the tradition of her people, where children are taught to hold a sword as soon as they can walk. The style of swordplay in Brigid was adapted from aggressive Dagdan tactics, but supplemented by the graceful and fluid movements that the Brigid islanders had developed on their own.
Ferdinand had always felt that his greatest strength in battle was being able to analyze his foes and predict their next move, allowing him to evade and counterattack as his foe tried to recover. But Petra’s fighting style was too unpredictable, and despite sparring with her for years, he still struggled with predicting her movements. However, in that time he had learned that the Brigid style was weak on defense, and only had a handful of defensive maneuvers. When Petra was attacking, she could slip past Ferdinand’s guard with ease, but when he had her on the defensive, he could win more often than not. His miscalculation had robbed him of his sole advantage, and all it would take was the slightest misstep to lose the bout and add another painful bruise to his growing collection.
Petra roared again and charged in. She moved right, but Ferdinand just knew by the way she had settled her weight that she was trying to bait him. He adjusted his stance, reasonably sure that after she feinted right Petra would come in with a backhanded blow from the left.
Ferdinand surrendered to instinct as he swung his lance around, catching Petra’s sword as she attacked with the backhanded blow he had predicted, and Ferdinand brought the shaft down on the back of Petra’s hand, making her drop the wooden sword with a sharp gasp.
Before he had time to savor his victory, Petra had drawn her axe and charged in again, swinging down with an overhead blow that left her torso exposed. It was a risky move that Ferdinand had counseled her against in the past, but the blow came so fast that he had no time to exploit the opening. He threw up his lance horizontally, hoping to stop the blow, but the strength of Petra’s blow was such that it broke his lance into two pieces.
Ferdinand tossed the broken lance to the ground and drew his own axe, meeting Petra blow for blow as they danced back and forth across the training yard. Ferdinand blinked the sweat from his eyes, and Petra’s hair had come loose from its braid. “I will not be yielding!” Petra hissed through clenched teeth.
“Neither will I,” Ferdinand rasped back. He had forgotten the pain in his chest, forgotten the professor, had almost forgotten the war. All the existed were the four walls of the training yard, his axe, and Petra. They collided, blow after blow, their axes crashing against each other with the dull crack of wood and iron.
Petra staggered back after one particularly intense blow. She turned her head to the side and spat on the sand floor of the training yard. “Ferdinand, I will be striking with all of my might!” She spun her axe and charged in. “And you will be slapped down!”
Ferdinand settled his stance and braced himself. “I will not back down one step!”
Their axes collided, and Ferdinand heard a sharp crack as his axe shattered in his hand. He jumped backwards, only to see Petra’s weapon had been destroyed as well. Petra’s breath came in shallow gasps, and Ferdinand pushed back a sweat-drenched lock of hair from his forehead. “Perhaps we should call this a draw?”
Petra nodded. “Perhaps we should. Ferdinand… fighting with you has given me great joy. I am not knowing any opponent who pushes me like you are doing.”
They crossed to the water barrel and drank deeply, catching their breath as they cooled down from the fight. When Ferdinand felt he had sufficiently recovered, he risked broaching the topic that had been eating at him. “Petra, do you ever have memories that are not your own? Or rather, they are yours, but you did not live through the events that you are remembering. That is to say—”
“I am having understanding,” Petra said. “I am also having these remembrances of times I have not lived. They are remembrances of times where you are being gravely injured or killed, yes?”
“Indeed. I have a vivid recollection of being killed on the Great Bridge of Myrddin, although the battle played out in completely differently. But it is hardly the only one.” Ferdinand lowered his voice. “Do you have any of these memories from before you joined the Golden Deer? Or from the time between the professor’s disappearance and our rejoining him at the monastery?”
Petra thought for a moment. “I am not. You are thinking the two are connected?”
“It is my most likely theory, yes.”
“If you’re going to just stand around chatting, get out of the practice yard.” Ferdinand and Petra jumped as Felix slunk out of the shadow of a column. “You’re in my way.”
“Our apologies,” Ferdinand said. “We did not see you waiting there.”
“Obviously,” Felix scoffed.
“How long have you been watching?” Petra asked.
“Long enough,” Felix replied. “I’ll admit, your bout was interesting enough. But I’d rather not sit by while you two carry on with idle chatter.”
“Right, of course. How rude of us.” Ferdinand hoped Felix would pick up on the subtle rebuke in his tone, but if he heard it, Felix paid it no mind.
Felix turned to Petra. “You’ve gotten better in the five years you’ve been away. I’ve never seen anyone fight like you do. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to test my blade against yours. You may have something to teach me.”
“That would be giving me great joy,” Petra replied. “However, I am having kitchen duty soon. We will have to be training together some other time. I will be seeing you both in the dining hall!” She took another drink of water before waving goodbye and leaving the yard.
Ferdinand stretched and looked over at Felix. “I have no such claims on my time. If you would like, I would be happy to give you a bout.”
Felix’s derisive scoff was all the answer Ferdinand needed. “You fight too much like a knight.” From his tone, Ferdinand gathered that Felix did not intend it as a compliment. “Petra left you openings, and I know you saw them. But you didn’t take them because that wouldn’t be the ‘honorable’ thing to do. I know your type, and you have nothing to teach me.” Felix turned on his heel and walked away. “I’ll find someone else to give me a challenge.”
Ferdinand sighed and picked up a new lance. It seems he would have to train on his own. He lined up several training mannequins and began going through the motions of a lengthy lance form, his muscles responding instinctively to the familiar movements. As he carried on, he picked up speed, trying to balance fluid movements with complete control over his weapon. Sweat dripped from his brow as he lashed out at the mannequins again and again, reducing them to so many bundles of straw.
The light sound of a footfall behind him made Ferdinand whirl. The professor greeted him with one upraised hand. “You’re fighting more intensely than usual.”
Ferdinand nodded curtly. “Yes. I need to get stronger as quickly as I can.” He shouldered his lance wiped the back of his hand along his brow. “Edelgard claims victory after victory. She never stops.” He shook his head and thought back to his meeting with Edelgard in Enbarr so long ago. A token force of guards had stood at the rear wall of the throne room, but too far to do anything if Ferdinand had tried to attack the emperor. It was a clear show of contempt, that she held him in such low regard that she could defeat him easily, without even needing her guards to intervene.
“Five years ago, she ascended the throne and swept away the corrupt nobles. My father included. I always thought I would be the one to unseat him. But she did it instead, with all the ease and indifference of someone cracking an egg.” Ferdinand ground his teeth together. “She put my father under house arrest. She stripped House Aegir of its power. Rather than accepting a role as her puppet, I left. And now I fight to topple the Empire.” It was strange how quickly the world could change. When he had entered the officer’s academy, he had been a stalwart supporter of Adrestia and all it stood for, determined to show that he was just as good as Edelgard, if not better. The kind of noble who would make the Empire proud, the sort that all of Fódlan would look to as an example. But in the space of just a few moons, he had grown disillusioned with Edelgard and the Empire itself, and from there it was only a short leap to becoming a traitor to Adrestia.
If the Ferdinand of five years ago could see the man he had become, would he even recognize his future self?
The professor seemed to intuit that Ferdinand had more on his mind, and motioned for him to continue. Ferdinand sighed. “The disparity between Edelgard and myself is...obvious. She never stops moving forward. Single-minded. Never wavering. But where does that leave me? Here, flailing about, going nowhere.” He heard the petulant bitterness in his voice and was disgusted by it, but all he could do was kick the straw that had spilled from the training dummies. “And contributing nothing…”
The professor shook his head. “That’s not true.”
Ferdinand bit down on his exasperation. “But it is! That is the reality. Not once since our days at the academy have I exceeded Edelgard's abilities. I saw her as a worthy opponent. She did not even see me as a contender.” And she still did not. If anything, she saw him as even less. He could not forget that fateful day in Enbarr… “She did not even consider me at all. As the head of the noble House Aegir, I must be able to achieve results. But all my efforts have come to nothing. Results are everything. I have not shown results, so I will be stagnating here forever.”
All of his classmates had spent years fighting back against the Empire. All he had done was shuffle a few people over the border, relying on the charity of his friends in the Alliance to see them safely away from harm. Held up next to the countermeasures and strategies Lorenz and Claude had devised in that time, or the daring scouting missions behind enemy lines that Leonie and Ignatz had attempted, or Petra rallying the warriors or Brigid to the Alliance’s banner, Ferdinand’s underground network seemed paltry.
The professor placed his hand on Ferdinand’s shoulder. “It’s the journey, not the destination.”
“I appreciate that, but it is not enough to persuade me.” Ferdinand shrugged off the professor’s hand. “I know that I have a massive wall to climb, and I must climb it alone. Even so…” He forced himself to meet the professor’s chilling green eyes. “May I ask a favor?”
“Yes?”
“Professor, please keep an eye on my progress. I would appreciate if you were always by my side, bearing witness to my accomplishments.”
“Of course, Ferdinand. It would be my pleasure.” The professor smiled, and Ferdinand saw genuine warmth light up the professor’s eyes. Perhaps he had misjudged him…
As the professor turned to leave, Ferdinand held up a hand. “Hold a moment. There is one further thing.” The professor motioned for him to continue, and Ferdinand took a deep breath. “Professor… I died at the Great Bridge of Myrddin, didn’t I?”
The professor glanced down, and seemed to be carefully choosing his words. Ferdinand continued on, lest he lose his nerve. “I remember fighting for the Empire to defend the bridge against the Kingdom, and I died.” The professor opened his mouth to say something, but Ferdinand pressed on. “But more importantly, I remember fighting with the Alliance, the other day, and I died then too. But you know that, don’t you?”
“Well… yes.”
“But I am not dead, and I would not be wrong in assuming that you have something to do with that. Is that so?”
“Yes.”
Ferdinand pressed the part of his chest where the arrow had sunk in. “You remember all of them, don’t you? All the times that each of us died.” The professor nodded. “Thank you, Professor. For keeping us safe.” Ferdinand twirled his lance and turned back to the training dummies. “I don’t understand how this power of yours works, but I’ll train hard to make sure that I’m strong enough that you don’t need to use it to save me. That said, I’ll bear any phantom scars you see fit to see this war through.”
“Thank you, Ferdinand.”
“Thank you, professor.” Ferdinand waited until he heard the professor’s footfalls fade before he began his lance form again. He would need to be strong to help the Alliance push into imperial territory. At the end of this month, they would march to Gronder Field.
To war.
