Chapter II: Unwelcome Change
---
The road back from the village was quieter than the one that had led them to it.
Not uncomfortable — just the natural quiet of people who have spent the day together and no longer feel the need to fill every silence with words. The group traveled in loose clusters, the way they had been doing since the numbers swelled, and the evening settled around them in gradual layers of amber and violet as the sun began its descent behind the distant hills.
Chrom walked at the front, listening with half his attention to the easy rhythm of the group behind him — Lissa's voice carrying the loudest, as it always did, punctuated now and again by Roy's quieter replies and the occasional comment from Odyn. He found himself smiling without quite deciding to. Lissa hadn't had many peers her age, not ones she could be herself around. Watching her now, gesturing with her staff as she made some dramatic point about something or other, he felt the particular relief of an older sibling whose worrying had, for once, been unnecessary.
He was still smiling when he heard Sarai's voice at his shoulder.
"Chrom."
The tone stopped his smile.
It was not an angry tone, exactly. It was the tone of someone who has decided that a conversation is going to happen and has already determined where it ends. He turned, and found her expression exactly as composed and exactly as firm as it sounded.
"While we're on the subject," she said, which suggested she had been waiting for a natural opening and decided she had been patient long enough.
The group slowed and gathered without being told to. Something in Sarai's bearing communicated that this was worth paying attention to.
"What exactly," she said, with the careful precision of someone choosing each word, "was that back there?"
Chrom opened his mouth. Closed it. The feeling in his stomach was the distinct, entirely reasonable sensation of a man who suspects he has made a mistake and is about to find out exactly how large it was.
"I'm... not entirely sure what you—"
"Don't." The word was gentle but absolutely final. "You are the captain of the Shepherds. You have a responsibility to every person who fights beside you, and to every person who depends on you to come home." She held his gaze steadily. "I counted — *counted*, Chrom — the number of times you left your back exposed in that fight. One hand was not enough."
A beat of silence. Frederick, standing to the side, had the expression of a man who is hearing his own thoughts spoken aloud for the first time by someone else and finds the experience deeply validating.
"It is true," the knight said carefully. "Milord does have a tendency to—"
"Expose himself to attacks that should never reach him, yes." Sarai did not look away from Chrom. "I know you're capable. I watched you fight — you're *good*, Chrom. Which is exactly why this bothers me." She paused, and when she spoke again there was something underneath the firmness that was plainly and simply concern. "If you're going to lead us, lead us properly. Watch your surroundings. Watch your flanks. The people beside you are counting on you to still be standing when the dust settles."
She held that for a moment. Then she extended one finger toward his face in a pointed, emphatic gesture that somehow managed to be both stern and, in its directness, oddly affectionate.
"Are we understood, *Captain*?"
Chrom's hands came up instinctively, the reflex of a man who has learned — very recently — that certain arguments are not worth having. "Y-yes. Absolutely. You're completely right, I will — yes. I'll watch my back."
She studied him for precisely long enough to determine that he meant it. Then, as if a switch had been turned, her expression relaxed into something close to satisfaction, and the ghost of a smile appeared.
"Good," she said. "Glad we settled that." The slight warmth in her voice was unmistakable. "*Captain.*"
"...Right," Chrom managed. The nervous laugh that followed was entirely involuntary.
Frederick, for his part, said nothing. But the slight easing of his posture communicated everything.
Behind them, Lissa had gone quiet — a rare occurrence — and was staring at Sarai with an expression somewhere between awe and bewilderment. She drifted sideways toward Odyn and leaned in slightly.
"I have never," she said, in what she intended to be a whisper, "seen anyone scold Chrom like that who wasn't our mother."
Khanna glanced at her cousin's retreating back with quiet fondness. "She isn't angry with him," she said. "She just... cares. That's how it comes out, sometimes."
Lissa thought about this. "That makes sense, actually."
"It usually does, once you know her."
---
They made camp where the road widened into a clearing ringed by old trees, their roots rising and falling in the grass like the backs of sleeping animals. The light had mostly gone by then, the sky having made its way through purple into a deep and starry dark, and the air carried the first cool edge of night.
Lissa made her feelings about this known immediately and at some length.
"I *told* you, Frederick," she said, tracking a sound near her ear with suspicious intensity. "It's dark already. And the bugs are *out*." She said the word *bugs* the way other people said *disaster*. "Noisy, disgusting, *buzzing* bugs that fly into your face and crawl on things and—"
What happened next was, by any reasonable account, inevitable.
A bug flew into her open mouth.
The sound she made was not a word. It was the sound of someone experiencing a profound personal injustice. She spat, scrubbed at her lips, spat again, and turned to the nearest person — which happened to be Roy — with the expression of someone who has been personally wronged by the universe.
Roy pressed his lips together very firmly. His shoulders moved.
"Don't," Lissa warned.
He lost the battle and started laughing. Several others followed. Even Frederick, who had the dignity to angle away before his expression gave him out, did not entirely succeed.
"You'll be fine," Roy said, when he had recovered sufficiently. He patted her on the back with genuine sympathy that was somewhat undermined by the fact that he was still smiling. "Think of it as character building."
"I have *plenty* of character," Lissa said, with enormous feeling. "I have more character than I know what to do with. I am *full* of character, Roy."
"Then you can afford a little more."
She gave him a look of such deep and theatrical betrayal that Khanna had to turn away.
Chrom, a few feet off, watched his sister with the warmth of someone who finds even the difficult things endearing when they happen to people he loves. "Come on now, Lissa. Hardship builds character. Want me to get you started on firewood?"
"I'll *pass,* thank you," she announced, settling herself on a root with the dignity of a person who has made a decision and intends to live with it. "I have built *quite* enough character for one evening."
Robin, who had been quiet throughout the exchange in the way of someone still calibrating how much he was allowed to find things funny around people he had only just met, cleared his throat. "On a — related note, I should mention that I am extremely hungry. Does anyone else — is that just me?"
It was not just him.
---
Frederick and Chrom disappeared into the trees with Odyn between them, returning some time later with the results of a successful hunt and the composed expressions of men who are going to present what they have found as though it were entirely ordinary.
The meat turned out to be bear.
Chrom sat across the fire and ate with genuine contentment. "Ah. It's been too long since I had bear. Wouldn't you say, Odyn?"
Odyn turned the thought over while finishing his mouthful, with the practical air of someone who has eaten in far stranger circumstances than this and learned not to ask questions. "I won't argue with food that's already cooked," he said. "And it *is* good."
Lissa stared at the piece being held toward her with an expression she did not attempt to conceal.
"*Bear*," she said flatly.
"Bear," Chrom confirmed, entirely unbothered.
"Who eats bear, Chrom? You're tampering with the food chain." She looked around for support and found, to her clear dismay, that Robin, Sarai, and Khanna were all eating without apparent difficulty. "*You guys,*" she said, gesturing at them. "You're all supposed to be on my side."
"It's food," Sarai said, and shrugged, and took another bite.
Robin managed a look that was almost apologetic. Almost.
Lissa slumped. "I suppose if you haven't eaten in long enough, a person would eat anything..." She held the offered piece at arm's length and sniffed it, once, carefully. Her nose wrinkled. "This smells like old boots. No — worse than boots. At least boots have the dignity of being leather."
"Just eat the bear, Lissa," Chrom said, with the patience of a man who has been having variations of this conversation his entire life.
Frederick, who had remained at the edge of the firelight with his hands clasped and his expression composed, had been pointedly not eating anything throughout this entire exchange. Lissa noticed.
"Frederick," she said, with the sweet, measured tone of someone setting a trap. "Why aren't *you* eating?"
A pause. A very brief, almost imperceptible pause, from a man who was very good at not pausing. "I had quite a substantial lunch before we departed," Frederick said. "I find I'm not particularly hungry."
"You had lunch *hours* ago."
"A very large lunch."
"Frederick."
"I am simply not—"
"You don't want to eat the bear either."
"I assure you—"
"*Frederick.*"
"...The bear," Frederick said, with the great dignity of a man conceding a point he will take to his grave, "is not to my particular taste this evening."
Lissa threw her hands up. Roy, who had been listening to this exchange with entirely too much enjoyment, had to bury his face in his arm. Across the fire, Odyn caught Khanna's eye, and Khanna pressed her mouth into a line that was not, by any definition, straight.
---
The fire burned down to embers in the dark.
One by one, the group found their spots on the grass and the silence settled into the slow, deep quiet of a camp at rest. Conversation gave way to breathing. Breathing gave way to sleep.
Chrom lay still for a long time, listening to it.
He couldn't say what was keeping him from sleep — not any specific thought he could name. Just a feeling. The particular, low-grade alertness that sometimes found him in the night for no reason he could identify until it was too late. He stared at the canopy overhead, the leaves black against a sky full of stars, and waited for it to resolve itself into something he could dismiss and set aside.
It didn't.
He sat up.
Beside him, Lissa stirred almost immediately, which told him she hadn't been sleeping as deeply as she appeared. She blinked at him, groggy, her hair escaping its usual arrangement. "What's wrong?"
"I'm not certain yet." He kept his voice low. "Something feels... off."
She sat up fully, the last traces of sleep clearing quickly. "Off how?"
"I'm going to have a look around."
"Not by yourself, you aren't." She was already reaching for her staff, already standing.
He looked at her. Her expression was the one that meant the matter was settled, and he had learned, over many years of being her brother, to recognize when that was true.
"All right," he said quietly, and smiled. "Thank you, Lissa."
She made a small, dismissive sound that meant *obviously* and fell in beside him as they stepped away from the camp.
What neither of them saw was Roy, motionless in the grass, listening to the sound of their footsteps recede.
He waited until they were far enough out that his movement wouldn't carry. Then he sat up, looked at the others, and touched Odyn's shoulder.
---
The forest was wrong.
It was a feeling before it was anything observable — a particular quality of silence that differed from the ordinary silence of a quiet night. Chrom registered it in the same moment Lissa did; he saw her scan the trees with the uncertain expression of someone reaching for words to describe something instinctive.
"Where are the birds?" she said quietly.
"Gone." He said it as soon as she said it, and the word sat between them with a weight it shouldn't have had.
He had barely finished the thought when the ground *moved.*
It wasn't gradual. It hit all at once — a deep and violent shuddering that ran up through the soles of his boots and rattled his teeth, and Lissa grabbed his arm with both hands, her staff swinging wide.
"*CHROM!*"
"Stay—" He caught his balance and grabbed her arm in turn, and then the trees ahead of them were *falling,* not in any direction the wind would account for, and the ground split somewhere ahead with a crack that he felt in his chest, and the light that came up from beneath was not the orange of firelight but something angrier and deeper, and then the orbs of flame were rising into the air above the tree line like burning stars flung by an absent-minded god—
"*Run,*" Chrom said.
"But Chrom—"
"*Lissa, run!*"
She ran. He stayed at her back, one hand outstretched, directing her through the gaps between the erupting ground, pulling her away from the worst of it, the heat of the fire-thrown debris scorching the air between the trees. The forest lit around them in stuttering, lurching bursts of orange and red, and behind the roar of it there was something else — a sound that wasn't fire, wasn't stone, wasn't anything he had heard before.
He shoved Lissa behind a raised shelf of earth, throwing himself flat beside her, as an orb of flame screamed overhead and detonated in the trees to their right. She pressed against the stone, breathing hard, and then her arm came up.
"*What is that?*"
He followed her pointing hand.
The sky had opened.
There was no other word for it. The darkness above the forest had *split*, like a wound in the fabric of something, and the shape that occupied the gap was vast and eye-like and utterly wrong, ringed with a dark light that didn't illuminate so much as it *pressed* against the eyes. And from it — falling, not descending, *falling* with the purposeful urgency of objects dropped rather than beings arriving — came shapes.
They hit the ground in the ruin of the trees ahead.
They rose.
Their eyes were red. Where breath should have been, there was smoke — thin and dark and wrong — curling from their mouths as they straightened to their full height and turned, and there was something in the movement that read as both deeply human and entirely other.
Chrom had his blade out before his mind caught up with the decision. He placed himself in front of Lissa without discussion.
"Stay behind me."
"I'm not going anywhere," she said, and her voice was steadier than it had any right to be.
The nearest creature moved — a loping, aggressive charge, faster than he expected. He met it on reflex, the blade cutting clean through the arm that swung at him, and the creature recoiled — but then its head rotated, the angle completely wrong, and it came at him again. He blocked the axe-swing, feet sliding in the disturbed earth, and drove back hard enough to give himself room to breathe, then stepped into the space he had made and drove the blade down. The creature went still. And then it did not fade or fall as a creature should — it dissolved, the shape of it unwinding into purple smoke that curled briefly and disappeared.
A sound from Lissa — not a scream, Lissa was not a screamer, but the sharp, reflexive sound of someone confronted without warning by something they cannot fight — and he turned to see her backing against a tree with her staff raised in the instinctive defense of someone very aware they are not a fighter, and a creature closing the distance, and then—
Another tear in the sky, opening directly above.
And someone came through it.
He registered it as *through,* which meant they had entered from somewhere else entirely, and the implications of that were numerous and he set them aside for later, because the figure was already landing between Lissa and the creature — barely a sound on impact, the blade already clearing the sheath, the block executed before the axe had finished its arc.
The clang of steel rang through the burning trees.
The figure held it. Just barely — there was effort in the stance, weight shifting to absorb the force — and then turned, and the dark butterfly mask caught the firelight, and the blue-and-red clothing was unfamiliar to Chrom's eye, and he had no information about who this was or what they wanted.
"*Help,*" the masked figure said, in the direct tone of someone who has correctly identified that they are outnumbered and has already moved past pride to practicality.
"Right!" Chrom was already in motion.
He hit the creature from the opposite angle, splitting its attention long enough for the masked figure to shove it off balance, and then they were moving in the same direction without having agreed to it — two blades closing from two sides, the creature dissolving between them — and the forest went quiet by one degree.
Lissa stepped forward from behind the tree, shaky but upright, and looked at the masked figure with eyes that had moved past fear into the territory of bewildered gratitude.
Chrom circled once, keeping his blade up, reading the figure's posture. Young — younger than the bearing had first suggested. The sword at their side was silver with a gold handle and a familiar weight to the hilt's design that he couldn't quite account for. The mask gave nothing away.
"Quite an entrance," he said carefully. "Do you have a name?"
The figure sheathed their sword. Turned their head toward him slightly, as though weighing the answer against some private calculation.
"*Chrom! Lissa!*"
The voice broke through the tree line, and then they were all there — Robin and Frederick first, then Odyn and the others, crashing through the brush with expressions that combined relief and combat-readiness in exactly equal measure.
Frederick's eyes moved over both royals in the brisk, professional way of a man who has made assessing damage his primary skill. "Are you hurt? Either of you?"
"*Are such creatures common in these lands?*" Robin's voice had gone sharp in the way it did when he was already processing information into tactical form, his gaze sweeping the scene with the focused discomfort of someone who has no intelligence and knows it.
"They are *not* from Ylisse," Chrom said, with more certainty than he currently felt. "Beyond that, I have nothing for you."
"Good enough," Sarai said, already drawing her blade. "That's one thing we don't need to wonder about."
"No one's hurt?" Frederick's voice eased by exactly one degree. "Thank the gods."
"Thank *him,*" Lissa said, nodding toward the masked figure. "He was here first. I'd be — " She stopped. Shook her head. "Thank you. Sincerely."
Roy had already drawn his sword. He looked at the shapes moving in the trees beyond the firelight — more of the creatures gathering at the edge of the dark — and his expression settled into the particular quiet of someone who has made a decision and is ready to live with it.
"We can discuss it after," he said.
"Agreed," Frederick said. "Eyes open. We know nothing about these things."
The creatures came.
---
Odyn moved into the trees without announcement, reading the field instinctively as he went. Two creatures converged on him simultaneously from different angles — he stepped between their attacks, let both of them overshoot, and came back through the gap.
"*Ghost Wolf.*"
He cut twice in the same motion, and the first creature unwound into purple smoke before it had finished turning. He pivoted on the ball of his foot to find the second one and parried three strikes in the economical style of a fighter who has learned to waste as little as possible, and when the opening came—
"*Reigning Slash!*"
Debris lifted from the earth in the technique's wake. The creature split at the mid-line and dissolved, and Odyn was already tracking the next problem before the last of the smoke cleared.
To his left, Roy had found an archer among the creature-forms and was not pleased about it. He ducked the first shot without breaking stride, came up with his footing set, and answered.
"*Sword Rain: Alpha.*"
The stabs arrived faster than the firelight could follow them — precise, relentless, each one placed without wasted motion. He stepped back and evaluated what remained, found nothing worth finishing, and turned in time to find a second archer already drawing. His eyes narrowed.
"*Demonic Chaos.*"
The energy waves left his blade in cascading arcs, the last carrying enough lightning that the archer convulsed before it dissolved entirely. Roy rolled his shoulder and moved on without ceremony.
Khanna had been flanked — two lance-wielders with their weapons leveled from opposite sides — and wore the composed, faintly irritated expression of someone who finds this sort of thing predictable. She had dealt with the configuration before. The answer she had found then was the answer she found now.
She tossed the axe into the air and jumped after it.
She caught it at the apex, the blade already glowing — not fire or lightning, but the deep, howling green of gathered wind — and angled down hard.
"*Falling Storm.*"
The impact between the two lancers threw up a column of wind that was narrow, furious, and entirely indiscriminate, and the creatures went up inside it, the cutting edges doing their work without sentiment. What remained of the first one, Khanna finished with the hammer end of her weapon in one clean arc.
"*Flaming Meteor.*"
The hammerhead dragged against the earth for half a stride, then drove upward into the face of the last creature, and the creature left the ground at speed and did not return intact. Khanna turned the weapon over once in a settling motion, brought it to the ready position, and looked at what was still moving in the trees around her.
"Well?" she said.
They came.
---
Near the cathedral ruins at the forest's edge, Sarai had stopped keeping count.
She had started with the intention of tracking it properly — building a picture of what had come through the sky-tears, understanding the composition and approach. But the numbers had stopped cooperating, and the creature variants were mixing in ways that complicated straightforward responses, and the crowd was pressing from three directions now, and Frederick was pinned at her right flank, and the angles were closing in ways she didn't like.
She kept working through it — dealing with the most immediate threats, keeping the others off-balance, staying mobile. But there was a point at which containment became impractical, and she could feel the shape of that point approaching.
Roy appeared at her shoulder. "Do you need—"
"*Watch.*" She said it without heat.
She let the fire come all the way.
The hilt warmed against her palm as the flame took hold — not the surface warmth of a channeled arte, but something deeper, running from the core of the blade outward, until the edge held light. When she moved, it was without the half-second of calculation she usually allowed herself, only the absolute authority of someone who knows precisely where every part of her body is and intends to use all of it.
"*Explosive Ring.*"
The emblem flared at her back, and then she was in motion.
What followed was not a sequence of individual attacks so much as a single, continuous answer to every question the surrounding creatures had asked. The fire-charged slashes came in arcs that were already responses to the weapons around her before those weapons had finished moving — the shield-bearing lancers lost their shields to the heat before they understood what was happening, their weapons shattering on the third exchange. The axe units were disarmed and answered in the same motion. The archers at the rear she addressed last, the fire making thorough work of them, and then she was already leaving the ground.
"*Rising Phoenix.*"
The shape of fire that accompanied her descent was unmistakable — enormous, wingspread, furious — and when she landed, the impact rolled outward in a wave that addressed everything the previous techniques had missed. The ground shook once, deeply, and then the clearing was quiet.
Roy had not moved from where he stopped. Sully, who had arrived somewhere in the last minute with a lance and considerable energy and had witnessed the last thirty seconds from the edge of the fray, also had not moved. They were both looking at Sarai in the particular way of people who have just watched something that has not yet finished arriving in their understanding.
Sarai flicked the blood from her sword with a practiced sideways motion and sheathed it.
Roy walked over. Extended his hand.
She met it without breaking stride. The sound of the high-five was crisp and final.
"Nice work, sis."
"Same to you, brother."
Sully looked at both of them for a moment. Then she turned back to the battle, because that was the only response that made any sense, and went to help Frederick with the creatures that remained.
---
At the camp's eastern edge, Robin worked with the quiet focus of someone who has decided that thinking and fighting are not mutually exclusive activities and has organized his participation accordingly.
The spells came where they were needed — *Elthunder* doing its work efficiently and without ceremony when the angles were right. When the creatures closed inside the range where the tome was impractical, the sword was there, which was why he carried it, and it served its purpose without complaint.
Khanna kept the stragglers off his flanks without being asked, which told him she had already mapped his role and adjusted her own position to complement it. He found this specifically and genuinely useful, the way useful things are distinct from merely good things, and made a note to express something to that effect later when the situation permitted.
"*Odyn!*" He had the geometry before Odyn had a chance to acquire it — three creatures converging on Chrom from the left, outside Chrom's current sightline, the angle wrong for anyone but someone standing where Robin was standing. "Three o'clock, on Chrom—"
Odyn was already turning.
The intercept was clean. He stepped into the space between the creatures and Chrom and absorbed all three attack vectors in a single guard, the impact walking him back half a step but no further, and then he redirected the gathered energy outward.
"*Demon Fang.*"
The wave crossed the ground low and fast, hitting the cluster squarely, and while they were still reeling, Chrom and Frederick converged from their angles and the problem was closed.
Chrom glanced back, briefly. The expression was equal parts gratitude and startled.
The leader of the creature-pack was still upright — absorbing damage that would have finished the lesser ones, and moving its throwing arm with the preparation of something that had identified a target in Chrom's unguarded back.
The hand axe left its grip.
*Wind Blade* took it in the air — Sarai, arriving at precisely the moment the geometry required her, already describing the arc before the throw had finished — and the weapon spun wide and buried itself in a tree far from anyone who mattered.
The leader stumbled. Sarai was in, then Odyn, a series of quick exchanges that stripped its guard and left it open, and then they stepped back, because the space between them was Chrom's to fill.
He went up. The gravity of the aerial angle added its weight to the blow, and the leader's weapon shattered under the combined force, and then it was finished, dissolving the same way the others had — the purple smoke rising and thinning and gone.
Frederick, a short distance away, extracted his lance from the last of the lesser creatures and straightened, and the forest was quiet again.
Eight people stood in the aftermath and caught their breath.
"That," Robin said, after a moment, "appears to be all of them."
---
The masked figure had fought as well.
Chrom had caught it in fragments during the battle — motion at the edges of his vision, silver blade, creatures dissolving in directions that weren't any of his group's doing. When the fighting stopped, the figure was standing at the tree line, unhurried, as though the last several minutes had been a minor adjustment rather than a battle.
Lissa stepped forward. Her voice was quieter than usual, the quietness of genuine feeling rather than any kind of performance.
"I never thanked you properly. Before — when you came through the..." She gestured upward, toward where the sky-wound had been. "You saved my life. Thank you. That was very brave."
Chrom studied the figure more carefully now that there was time for it. The mask covered the upper half of the face and offered nothing readable. Young — that much was clear. The posture carried something that he couldn't quite pin down, something that hovered between familiar and not, the way a half-remembered song sounds more like itself from a distance.
"You saved my sister's life," he said. "My name is Chrom. May I ask yours?"
A pause. And then, measured and deliberate:
"You may call me Marth."
Chrom raised an eyebrow. "*Marth.* As in the Heroic King." He held the thought for a moment. "You certainly fight like one, at least. Where did you study?"
"I'm not here to speak of myself." The voice was low and controlled. "What you witnessed tonight is a prelude, not an event. The world is moving toward something, and what came through those tears is only the opening note." A brief pause. "Consider yourself warned."
They turned. Walked. The dark between the trees accepted them, and offered nothing back.
"*Wait—*" Lissa took a half-step after them. "What's *teetering* exactly? You can't just— hey—"
But the forest had already closed.
The group stood in the residual quiet. Odyn looked at the space between the trees for a moment, and then at Sarai, because something in her stillness was specific and deliberate in a way that was different from simply watching someone leave.
"Something on your mind?"
She was quiet for a moment. "I don't know them," she said slowly. "I know I don't. But I..." She shook her head, the thought reaching its boundary and stopping there. "There was something. I can't say what."
Odyn held the thought alongside her without trying to fill it with an explanation. Some things didn't resolve into words quickly. You kept them and waited.
"Not much of a conversationalist," Robin said, still looking at the same empty space between the trees.
"Perhaps the sword is a more natural language." Frederick turned away from the tree line, and his gaze moved over the group with the brisk, cataloguing efficiency of a man returning to the present. "Regardless — I am concerned about the capital. We should make haste."
"Agreed," Chrom said. He looked at the group. "Everyone all right?"
Eight nods, varied in expression, unified in direction.
They moved.
---
Some distance away in the dark, behind the tree line where no one had followed, a figure slumped against a trunk and let themselves slide the rest of the way to the ground.
The mask came off.
Long dark blue hair fell forward. The face beneath it was young — younger than the bearing had suggested — with the slight point to the ears that spoke of heritage, and faintly tanned skin, and eyes, when they opened, that were bright and filling.
She pressed her forehead against her knees and let the tears come quietly, the way tears come when a person has been holding them for a very long time and has finally found a private enough moment to allow it.
*Father. Mother. Uncle Odyn. Uncle Roy. Aunt Khanna.*
*I was in time.*
She let herself have that — the specific, enormous relief of the thing that mattered most mattering. She had made it. They were alive. All of them, whole and upright and moving.
There was so much still ahead. So many things she would have to navigate carefully, so much she couldn't explain yet without changing things she wasn't ready to change. The road ahead of her was longer and more complicated than the one behind her, and she knew it.
But for now, in this moment, in the dark behind a tree in a forest that smelled of smoke and cooling air—
*I was in time.*
She stayed in the quiet for a little while. Let herself have that too.
Then another thought arrived, the way thoughts do when the first wave of relief begins to settle, and she frowned slightly into her folded arms.
*Who was the blue-haired man?* She turned it over carefully, looking for it from every angle she had. He was with them — had fought beside them, knew their names, moved like someone they trusted. But he wasn't in anything she remembered. He was a variable she hadn't accounted for.
That was worth watching carefully.
She tucked her hair back, straightened the mask, and stood.
There was more work to do. There always was. This was only the beginning of a story she intended to end differently this time — and she would be ready for what came next.
She walked on, and the forest closed behind her in silence.
---
They reached Ylisstol the following morning.
The capital emerged from the low mist gradually — first the outer walls, pale stone catching the early light, then the layered rooftops, and finally the full spread of the city as the road rose toward the main gate. After the dark and fire and dissolution of the night before, the peaceful ordinariness of it felt almost startling, the way ordinary things can seem extraordinary when you've been a long time away from them.
"So this is Ylisstol," Robin said quietly. There was something in his voice that wasn't quite wonder and wasn't quite recognition — a note that suggested *right,* without being able to explain why.
Odyn looked at the crowds in the streets below and felt the specific sensation of *not home* that had been with him since the field — still present, still true, and something he had gotten better at carrying without letting it weight him down. He catalogued it and kept walking.
"The capital appears undisturbed," Frederick said, and the relief in his voice was specific and genuine. "Whatever that quake was, it was contained to the forest. Thank the gods for it."
"Thank goodness," Lissa echoed, and her voice had relaxed into something lighter now that the evidence was in front of her.
The street near the gate was already busy with morning — merchants, citizens, the ordinary motion of a city going about its life — when the crowd shifted in that subtle way it does when something significant moves through it. The pedestrians near the road's center edged aside, and a procession came into view: armored soldiers in measured formation, Pegasus knights flanking at a careful distance, and at the center of it, a woman who walked with the particular unhurried quality of someone who has learned that stillness is its own authority.
Blonde. Blue-eyed. Green and white robes. A headpiece that might have been mistaken for a crown if you weren't paying careful attention, and a mark on her brow that echoed — almost precisely — the emblem Chrom bore on his arm. She looked at the people around her with an openness that had nothing performative in it. She was simply, genuinely, glad to see them.
"The Exalt herself," an old man nearby said, with the particular joy of someone who has been carrying a piece of good news and has finally found the right audience for it.
"That would be Lady Emmeryn," Frederick said, answering Robin's unspoken question before Robin had finished asking it.
"Is it safe for her to walk among the people like this?" Robin asked. Practical, not critical — the question of someone who thinks in terms of risk.
"Safe enough," Chrom said. He was watching Emmeryn with an expression that had nothing guarded in it. "And necessary. With Plegia pushing at our borders and people's nerves running high, they need to see her." He paused. "She's a reminder of what we're protecting. And of why."
"She's also the best big sister in the world," Lissa said cheerfully, and then registered the sudden stillness in Robin and turned to find him staring at her with the expression of a man doing rapid and increasingly uncomfortable arithmetic.
"*Big sister,*" Robin said carefully.
"Mm-hm."
"Which would make you and Chrom—"
"The Prince and Princess of Ylisse, yes." Frederick managed, in a single sentence, to convey both patience and very mild disappointment. "You remembered milord's name with perfect clarity, and yet this particular detail escaped you."
"*You said you were Shepherds!*"
"And so we are." Chrom smiled, unoffended. "We simply tend a very large flock." He glanced at Odyn, at Roy, at Sarai, who had already produced the expression of someone caught at something and has decided to own it. "I suspect at least some of you had already worked it out."
"Caught entirely red-handed," Sarai confirmed, without visible regret.
"So I see," Chrom said. And the warmth in it was entirely genuine.
Robin had gone somewhat pale in the way of a man retrospectively reviewing every informal thing he has said to members of a royal family and arriving at a tally he finds uncomfortable. "Prince Chrom — Sire — I beg you'll forgive my complete failure to—"
"*Just Chrom,*" Chrom said, firmly and kindly and with the finality of someone who has settled this and intends to leave it settled. "For all of you. I have never been comfortable with the formality, and I have no intention of starting now."
Robin opened his mouth. Appeared to make peace with this. Closed it.
"The prince and princess," he said, mostly to himself. "That explains why Frederick tolerates all the—" He gestured vaguely in the direction of every conversation he had witnessed involving Frederick and teasing.
Frederick exhaled through his nose. "The sacrifices one makes," he said, "for the good of the realm."
"Shall we?" Chrom nodded toward the palace. "I believe it's time you all met Emm properly."
---
The throne room of Ylisstol was large in the way of rooms built with occasion in mind — high-ceilinged, well-lit, more welcoming in its proportions than imposing. The Exalt stood near the far end of it, accompanied by Phila, captain of the Pegasus Knights, and turned at the sound of their entry with a smile that arrived without effort and held without performance.
"Chrom. Lissa." Then, with the same genuine warmth: "Frederick. Welcome home."
The group behind the trio responded in several ways simultaneously. Robin inclined his head with the careful courtesy of a man still adjusting to information received twenty minutes ago. Odyn, Sarai, Roy, and Khanna dropped to one knee without apparent discussion — the motion fluid and instinctive, the posture of people who have grown up understanding what it means to stand before a sovereign.
Emmeryn looked at them. "Please, be at ease. There's no need for that."
"Forgive us, Your Grace." Odyn rose slowly, the others following. "In our homeland, kneeling before another nation's sovereign is a gesture of respect. I hope it was not taken amiss."
"Not at all," Emmeryn said. And the way she said it made it true rather than merely polite.
Chrom stepped forward. "These are Robin, Odyn, Roy, Sarai, and Khanna. They fought with us against the brigands yesterday — and against the creatures in the forest last night." He paused. "I've asked them to join the Shepherds."
"They were *incredible,* Emm," Lissa added.
"Then Ylisse owes them a debt," Emmeryn said.
"Please, Exalt Emmeryn." Sarai's voice was quiet and sincere. "Think nothing of it. We were glad to help."
Frederick stepped forward with the composed expression of a man about to do something he finds necessary rather than pleasant.
"Forgive me, Your Grace. I must be direct." He inclined his head. "Sir Robin claims to have lost his memory entirely. We have only his word for this. As for these four — I find them credible, and I do not believe they are lying. But the circumstances of their arrival, and the absence of any memory surrounding it, remains irregular." He paused. "I raise this not to impugn them. Only so the appropriate caution is observed."
"Frederick," Chrom said, with a note of warning.
"No." Emmeryn's voice was gentle and required no greater volume to be heard. "Frederick is right to say it. Prudence is a virtue." She looked at the assembled group, and her gaze was calm and without judgment. "Chrom — do these young men and women have your trust?"
"They do," Chrom said, without hesitation. "They fought for people they had no obligation to protect. That's enough for me."
"Then it is enough for me as well." She held the moment long enough to let it mean something. "Robin, Odyn, Sarai, Roy, Khanna — you have Chrom's trust. And by that, my own."
"We will not waste it, Your Grace," Roy said.
"I know you won't." She turned toward Frederick, and her expression was warm. "And Frederick — thank you. As always. Chrom and Lissa are fortunate to have so watchful a guardian. I do hope they remember to say so."
Something in Frederick's posture shifted — very slightly, the adjustment of a man who has received, unexpectedly, exactly what he needed to hear. "They manage something in the general vicinity of gratitude, on occasion, Your Grace," he said.
"The creatures," Phila said, stepping forward. "They have been sighted across Ylisse, milady. This was not an isolated incident."
Emmeryn received this without visible alarm — and that absence of alarm was itself a form of steadiness, the capacity to hear bad news without adding fear to it. "Then we have much to discuss. Chrom — I was hoping you would join the council."
"Of course," he said.
Lissa brightened at once with the energy of someone who has been waiting patiently for her cue. "Which means the rest of us get to—" She turned to the group. "There's somewhere I want to show you all. *Come on.*"
No one was entirely certain where they were being taken.
Following Lissa, they were beginning to understand, was very often more interesting than not.
---
They left the throne room behind — all but Chrom, who stayed for the council, and Frederick, who went where Chrom went — and followed Lissa out through the palace corridors and into the open air of the courtyard, and then beyond it, through the gate and into the city proper.
Odyn walked near the back of the group and watched the morning go about its business around them. Market stalls opening. Children already underfoot. The smell of bread from somewhere he couldn't pinpoint but was grateful for regardless. Ylisstol was a real place with real people in it, people getting on with the ordinary work of existing, and there was something in that — the simple, irreducible fact of it — that struck him in the way that things strike you when you arrive somewhere with no expectations and find it unexpectedly alive.
He didn't know how long they would be here. He didn't know what had brought them here, or what it meant, or what came next. The absence of those answers was something he had been carrying since he woke in the grass with his head throbbing and no memory of how he'd gotten there, and he had gotten reasonably good at setting them to one side without pretending they weren't there.
Whatever came next, they had each other. And they had, apparently, a growing group of people who had proven they were worth trusting — people who had fought beside them in a forest full of things none of them understood, and had kept standing.
That was a starting point.
Lissa, ahead, was pointing at something with her staff and explaining it with the full force of her enthusiasm. Roy was nodding with the attentive expression of someone who has decided he is going to be interested in whatever this is. Khanna and Sarai walked side by side and Khanna was saying something quiet that made Sarai's expression ease into the kind of smile she didn't usually let out in new situations — the real one, the easy one.
Odyn let himself feel it, briefly, without guarding it. The particular and irreducible relief of *we're all right.* Even here. Even not knowing.
They were all right.
He kept walking, and the morning opened ahead of them, and whatever came next could wait a little longer for its turn.
---
To be continued...
Next Chapter — Chapter 3: Shepherds and... More Risen?!
Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed the chapter! And as you noticed... yes! Sarai is the girl who will be with Chrom in this story. I thought it'd be interesting if Lucina had mixed blood from one of our oc's. The other pairings are undecided aside from the main one (Odyn x Lucina, sorry Robcina fans) I considered having Robin x Lucina but decided on a different route for both characters. Now it's up to you guys to decide who Robin ends up with! See the poll below:
Who should Robin end up married to?
A. Maribelle
B. Khanna
C. Cordelia
D. Nowi
E. Sumia
F. Miriel
G. Lissa
H. Panne
I. Nah
J. Severa/Selena
K. Olivia
L. Flavia
M. Noire
N. Tiki
O. Aversa
P. Tharja
Q. Emmeryn (later in the story)
R. Kjelle
S. Sully
T. Say'ri
U. Cherche
V. Anna
W. Cynthia
Who should Roy end up married to?
A. Anna
B. Lissa
C. Female (future) Morgan
D. Cordelia
E. Severa/Selena
F. Nowi
G. Nah
H. Kjelle
I. Sully
J. Sumia
K. Cynthia
L. Noire
M. Maribelle
N. Tiki
O. Aversa
P. Say'ri
Q. Cherche
R. Miriel
S. Panne
T. Tharja
U. Olivia
V. Flavia
W. Emmeryn (later in story)
Who should Khanna end up marrying?
A. Donnel
B. Robin
C. Frederick
D. Stahl
E. Vaike
F. Ricken
G. Priam
H. Male (future) Morgan
I. Libra
J. Henry
K. Gerome
L. Owain
M. Yarne
N. Basilio
O. Yen'Fay
P. Laurent
Q. Brady
R. Inigo
S. Gregor
T. Gaius
U. Lon'qu
V. Kellam
W. Virion
Let me know in the comments which characters other than the main two pairings that you want to see end up together. I have an idea of who end up together, but I'm curious as to what you guys think.
And yes, Sarai is going to be kind of like a female version of Alphen (Tales of Arise main character) as for Odyn, Roy, and Khanna we'll see how they turn out. Odyn's pairing with Lucina should be interesting to write as it's a unique one. Anyways hope you guys enjoyed the chapter, peace out until the next one!