Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Are they gone?”

Inigo’s voice sounded muffled even from just a few feet away. The rain whipped at Owain’s face as he peered across the yawning gorge, swirling through the air and obscuring his vision. He squinted, trying to shield his eyes, but all he could see was fog and rain and the hazy darkness of shapes in the distance.

“I think so,” he said. Even through the clouds, the light was plenty enough to make out the shapes of the oncoming Risen, a much smaller distance to close than the gap where the bridge had been. “The bridge should’ve bought them a good head start.”

“Then we’ll buy them a little more time, as much as we can,” Inigo said with a tight smile, adjusting his grip on his shield. There was a particular way he flexed his fingers when he was nervous that Owain caught out the corner of his eye. They’d been fighting together so long that it was impossible not to notice those little things. Owain had to quash the entirely situationally inappropriate urge to reach for Inigo’s hand. Inigo had his hands full with sword and shield, and at any rate they were in the middle of battle—nay, facing death itself—and he probably would have just slapped Owain’s hand away and told him to be serious, this was serious. He probably would’ve been a little red in the face even as he said it, though.

Inigo shifted his weight slightly onto his back foot as the cavalry approached, raising his shield. He looked white-faced even in the driving rain, afraid to falter, but he managed a smile anyway. “One last dance, then?”

Owain smiled back without hesitation. “Now you’re talking, my fated brother-in-arms. Together, we’ll join our swords—no, our very souls—and smash through the ranks of the undead as though our very blades were aflame with the righteous fury of the gods!”

Inigo’s lip curled back in a cringe. “Stop it. You’re ruining the moment.”

“No way! You’ve gotta lean into it, or it’s totally moot.” Owain readed his sword as the shadowy horde marched ever closer. “Brace yourself, my truest of allies, here they…come?”

This wave of Risen didn’t lead into another charge like the last few; the cavalry stopped just shy of attacking range, and though the archers behind them were well within range, they were still standing at the ready, holding their fire. Out from between two heavily armed paladins stepped a hooded figure, heavy tome in hand. Owain felt his stomach go cold with recognition even before the hood fell back.

Owain always thought that a proper face-heel turn ought to come with a costume change. It was practically a given, right? A hero’s image was a reflection of his inner self, and if he wasn’t a hero anymore…well, he should at least have traded in that old coat for something slicker, something more sinister, something in all black or—or something. But by all appearances, Morgan didn’t seem to have changed all that much since the last time they’d seen him. That had been part of the problem, in hindsight—that Morgan never seemed to change on the outside, and by the time they realized he’d changed on the inside, it had been too late.

But even though the face and clothes were the same, there was something different about the Morgan standing in front of them now, staring unflinching through the howling rain. He seemed to have lost the levity that had defined him once upon a time, his old bright, buoyant self sunk underwater. He didn’t look furious or moved to tears or even full of wicked mirth. Owain couldn’t read his expression at all.

Inigo tensed, raising the tip of his sword. “You!”

“Yeah, me.” That was supposed to be a chipper little return greeting, punctuated with a laugh. The smile on Morgan’s face was only a shadow. “This has been fun and all, but I think it’s about time we call it a day. I mean, you know you can’t win here, right? Your backs are up against the wall. Well, in a manner of speaking.”

Jokes. Those were supposed to be little jokes, stupid ones, accompanied by Morgan’s unselfconscious smile, the one that made Owain all wobbly inside. But this Morgan dropped words like stones from his mouth, unpunctuated and unqualified, hard and cold in places where he’d once been warm and welcoming. Morgan held his free hand out, a tiny sigh escaping him, but his expression was set.

“So you might as well hand over Argent and Sable now. Your odds of getting out of this alive at this point are infinitesimal.”

Inigo bared his teeth in a grin. “Ooh, sorry to be the one to break it to you, but I’m afraid we don’t have Argent and Sable. They made a neat little escape along with our comrades back there. Too bad the bridge is out of service now.”

Owain let out a choked noise. Inigo looked over to see him with his mouth agape.

“Seriously?” Owain hissed. “You weren’t supposed to play that card right away—we’re supposed to let him think we have the Gemstones and hold them off as long as possible! Now they’re going to be looking for Brady and Yarne!”

Inigo looked like he was going to be ill. “Ugh, no, I didn’t—damn it. This changes nothing!” he shouted at Morgan, who was already directing several wyvern riders to take flight and survey the area. “We’re still here to fight to our very last—we’re going to kill you, or we’re going to die trying!”

“Oh, you’ll die trying,” Morgan said, as though in agreement. The tome in his hand fell open along a familiar crack in the spine. “If you don’t have Argent and Sable, then I’ll just have to kill you here. Master Grima has been wishing for your death for some time now.”

“Do your worst.” Inigo was summoning every last ounce of bravado he could scrape together just to hold him through this moment. He hated that Owain had been right about stupid mental warfare, that fights like these were all about the theatre. You had to keep up the act or risk faltering. “If an entire army can’t do the job, what makes you think you can?”

That was where Owain was supposed to chime in with an embarrassingly overwrought but heartfelt agreement about how their friendship was so strong it would smash through the heavens or whatever. But no such quip came. Instead, Owain lay down his sword and took two steps forward, his hands turned palm-out.

“Owain,” Inigo said through his teeth in a low voice, “what are you doing?”

If this was more of Owain’s mental warfare, it was on a level Inigo did not comprehend. There must have been a secret manual somewhere that he’d never managed to find, doubtless even more embarrassing than the first. But Owain didn’t respond, just quirked a little smile at Morgan. And when Inigo followed his gaze, he saw that Morgan looked almost as unsettled as Inigo felt. Morgan seemed to falter for just a moment, and then his expression shuttered, his hand tightening over the spine of his tome.

“See, we might be sworn enemies right now,” Owain said, “forced by dire circumstances to cross blades—but these cruel turns of fate are only a detour. Because I know that deep down inside, Morgan, you’re not truly my enemy. In your chest beats the heart of a true hero. You’re my eternal ally-versary, bound by fate to fight side by side with me!”

“Owain, this is not the time,” said Inigo. Owain ignored him; so did Morgan.

“Pick up your sword,” said Morgan, his voice oddly toneless. Owain shook his head, still smiling through the rain.

“Why? So you can kill me with a weapon in my hand? What for?” Owain thumbed over his nose in a familiar gesture. Morgan’s expression didn’t change. “If you truly are a dedicated servant of the fell dragon, you should have no problem striking down an unarmed foe, especially one your master has his eye on.”

He took another step forward, and to Inigo’s infuriated horror, spread his arms wide. “So go ahead. Kill me right where I stand.”

Morgan’s eyes widened slightly, and something like panic flickered across his face, but it was gone in the next moment. His brows drew down, his jaw tightening.

“Pick up your sword.”

“Pick up your sword,” Inigo repeated in a hiss. “He’s going to kill you, idiot!”

“Nah,” Owain said, his gaze on Morgan’s face unwavering. “I don’t think he will. Because the Morgan we know, the old Morgan, he’s still in there somewhere. Not even the fell dragon could quell a hero’s spirit like his.”

Morgan bared gritted teeth, and it looked more like anguish this time, that little blip of emotion. Little sparks of lightning began to gather and flicker in the palm of his hand.

“I said pick up your sword!”

Owain shut his eyes at the blinding flash of light, bracing himself for impact even as the massive clap of thunder shook through his body. He heard a grunt to his left and opened his eyes to see Inigo just barely deflect the shock of thunder magic with his shield. A few sparks made it past his armor, and he flinched, jaw clenched, but he seemed more or less alright. Owain let out a little ha.

“See? I told you he wouldn’t kill me.”

“Well, he’s going to kill me!” Inigo yelped, narrowly dodging another blast of magic. Never in his life had he felt this particularly potent mix of mortal terror and total exasperation.

“Just drop your weapon,” Owain said. His eyes still hadn’t moved from Morgan’s face. There was a growing sense of disquiet in Morgan’s expression. Owain was almost certain he saw the hand holding that tome shake just a little. “See, he needs us to go down fighting, or else he won’t be able to live with himself. It’s actually pretty heroic at heart, if you think about it.”

“Are you insane?” Inigo said, just as Owain sidestepped to shield Inigo with his own very unarmed—and considerably less armored—body. “Oh, gods, you are.”

“Come on,” Owain said, and even though he had to raise his voice to be heard above the rain, it was genial, almost gentle. He reached out a hand, ready to write off his trembling fingers as a good old sword hand twitch, only to realize he was holding out the wrong hand. Well, that didn’t matter. As long as he could keep Morgan listening—

“You don’t belong with the villains, Morgan. You’re one of the good guys, remember? You belong with us. A bunch of undead soldiers seem like they make for pretty dull company. I bet they don’t even know any good games. So—so come on. Ditch these guys and run away with us. With you on our side, we’d have no trouble making it back to Ylisstol with Argent and Sable. We’ll meet up with everyone there and Lucina will perform the Awakening and we’ll send Grima back into the deep abyss of darkness where he belongs, and you won’t ever have to be servant to any god again. All you have to do is come with us.”

Owain fought to keep his smile steady. It was taking real effort now, his heart clogging up his throat. “I miss you, my fated ally-versary. It feels wrong to fight without you at my side.”

It was impossible, at this distance, to tell whether those were tears in Morgan’s eyes or just the rain. Owain was sure he knew the answer by the stricken look on Morgan’s face. He looked like he was about to falter, his outstretched hand wavering. Owain fought not to clench his fists, still holding his own hand out. Inigo seemed paralyzed by the moment too, watching Owain, then Morgan breathlessly, like he wasn’t sure who he wanted to hit first.

Morgan’s mouth opened, and he seemed about to speak—but then his whole body seemed to spasm, nearly shaking the book loose from his grip entirely. His free hand went to his head, his teeth clenched in a look of agony. He was fighting something, Owain knew it. He still didn’t understand the exact nature of Morgan’s betrayal—the finer details of how and why still escaped them—but his heart leapt with painfully fragile hope. He was right. He had to be.

When Morgan’s hand came away from his forehead, he was white-faced and breathing hard, and his expression was one of grim determination. His eyes were fierce in a way that unnerved Owain, if only for how closely it resembled Morgan’s old cheerful determination. It was only missing the light.

“I am loyal to Master Grima,” he said in slow, measured tones. Every word landed like a lead weight. Grima’s gravitational hold on him seemed to have sucked away all his levity. “I know exactly whose side I’m on. I won’t be swayed by grand speeches or mind tricks. My master wants you destroyed, and I was sent here to carry out her will.”

Those were tears in his eyes, no matter how cold he sounded. Owain knew what Morgan looked like when he was trying to hold back tears, even though he hardly ever did—that little crease between his eyebrows, the way he scrunched up his face just slightly. At least Owain would die knowing he was right, even if he couldn’t make the difference.

The air snapped and popped around Morgan as an unseen breeze rustled his coat. He was preparing another thunder spell, and this one, Inigo might not be able to deflect. But the not-too-distant shriek of a wyvern shattered the air, and all three of them looked up instinctively. Whatever allowed Morgan to command the Risen seemed to communicate something back to him, and he sucked in a breath through parted lips, the magic glimmering out. Owain’s mouth went dry.

“Move out,” commanded Morgan, and the wyvern-mounted Risen took flight immediately, as though the words were only a formality. “Make sure they’re surrounded. We can’t let them get away a second time.”

No, no, no—this wasn’t how it was supposed to play out. Owain needed more time, needed a second chance to pry him open now that Owain knew the old Morgan was still in there somewhere. But there was thunder crackling around Morgan again as he turned, and Owain had only a fleeting moment to catch the look of terror on Morgan’s face before he threw a jolt of lightning behind him and retreated with the rest of his army.

Owain braced himself a second time, but the magic hadn’t even touched him. Instead, there was a black furrow burned into the ground just before his feet, smoking in the rain. He tried to remember how to breathe but let out a wheezing laugh instead. Morgan couldn’t bring himself to kill them in the end.

Inigo threw down his sword and grabbed a fistful of Owain’s hair, yanking his head back. “What is wrong with you? You nearly got us both killed just now!”

“Ow—oww!” Owain batted at Inigo’s hand until it released him. “Have you noticed that we are, in fact, not dead? I told you he wouldn’t really kill us.”

“Only because he went off to kill Brady and Yarne instead!” Inigo glared at Owain as he retrieved his sword from the ground, wiping the blade of grime on the wet grass before sheathing it. “And if we don’t get moving, he might actually succeed!”

“Right, and who was it that told him they had the Gemstones in the first place?”

Inigo flushed a deep red. “I—let’s just go and be glad we’re not dead yet, alright? And don’t expect me to thank you for it, because your little speech didn’t do anything to stop him shooting lightning at me.”

“You should’ve dropped your weapon,” Owain said, bending down to pick up his own sword. His gaze snagged on a scrap of paper lying in the grass, already soaked through with rain. It looked like part of a page out of Morgan’s tome, judging by the yellowed color of the paper, but the incomprehensible squiggles didn’t look quite like the usual arcane symbols. Ripped out by the wind, maybe, in that heated moment. Owain picked it up and folded it quickly while Inigo wasn’t looking, tucking it into the folds of his belt for safekeeping. He’d make sure he had a chance to return it.

Brady had to stop and lean against a tree to catch his breath, wheezing and sweating uncomfortably under his robes. Running through the mud in rain-soaked robes really wasn’t in his wheelhouse, and he felt a little like he was going to pass out.

“It should be safe to stop here for a little while,” said Yarne, his eyes darting back and forth, trying to see through the rain. Unfortunately, sight was not among the taguel’s enhanced senses. “I think. Are you okay? You sound like you’re going to throw up.”

“I damn well might.” At least Inigo and Owain’s sacrifice seemed to have bought them the time they needed. Brady wiped the rain away from his face, glad that Yarne (probably) couldn’t tell he was crying. “Oogh. How much farther to Ylisstol?”

“Another three days’ march,” Yarne said glumly. “If we can keep up the pace. We’re close to the border, but—”

His back went suddenly straight, his ears twitching. “Risen incoming,” he said nervously, hovering closer to Brady. Brady groaned.

“You mean the Risen that Inigo and Owain are supposed to be throwing themselves at to let us escape?”

“Maybe? I don’t know! But we have to move now!”

Brady pulled himself upright, leaning on his staff. “Alright, alright, I’m movin’—”

But Yarne was already pulling out his beaststone. “No time! Just hold tight, okay?!”

“Hold tight to—” Brady staggered back as Yarne transformed, and had no chance to react before Yarne nosed under Brady and flipped him onto his back. Brady clutched his staff to his chest with one hand and grabbed at Yarne’s fur out of terrified instinct and held fast, white-knuckled. “Are you out of your damn mind?!”

“Yes, with blind terror! I don’t really feel like letting any more friends die today!”

But Yarne was wearing out too, trying to keep up a breakneck pace after an already exhausting day, and his sprint barely lasted an hour. Brady tumbled off of his back and promptly threw up into the bushes as Yarne transformed back, breathing hard. He could still hear the steady march of their cavalry. They hadn’t managed to gain much of a lead. Yarne’s heart was in his throat. He tried to swallow it down with no success. If Inigo and Owain could be that brave—

“Take Argent and Sable and run. I’ll—I’ll hold them off here.”

“You are off your rocker.” Brady planted his staff in the ground—well, mud, which was diminishing the effect because the tip of his staff immediately started sliding off to the side—and fixed Yarne with a glare that made the taguel actually back up a step. “And what exactly do you think happens to me if I run into any more Risen after I leave you to kick the bucket here? It’s hrrk, splat for Brady, and then the Gemstones fall right back into those undead bastards’ rotten hands!”

“What, so you’d rather die here, right now?” Yarne’s voice was going shrill with panic. He was trying to be brave here, he really was! “How does that help anything? Then we’d all be dead! I’ll—I’ll catch up to you later, okay?”

Brady opened his mouth to rattle off a comeback that was getting a little more emotional than he really intended when Yarne tensed again, straining his ears. He looked less scared than puzzled now.

“Or we could not die. I think they’re…retreating? It sounds like they’re headed in the opposite direction now.” Yarne leaned back against a tree and slid to the ground, his legs suddenly turning to jelly. He buried his face in his knees. “Oh gods, I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”

“Brady! Yarne!”

Yarne jumped immediately back to his feet at the sudden voice, and he thought for a second he really felt like he was having a heart attack—but then he and Brady turned to see Inigo sliding on his back foot down a mud-slick slope down to their hiding spot, staggering a little on the landing but immediately righting himself with a breathless grin. Owain followed shortly behind, the both of them soaked to the bone but otherwise looking more or less in one piece. Brady squinted at them, trying to hide his relief.

“Ain’t you two supposed to be waiting at the pearly gates by now, all heroically dead?”

“Lovely to see you again too, Brady,” Inigo said with a strained smile. “It was looking awfully grim there for a bit, yes, but it seems we’ve managed to cheat death yet another day.”

Owain was looking around, his brow furrowed. “Where march the forces of darkness that were encroaching upon this safe haven? Owain Dark’s sword hand is never idle when evil lurks nearby!”

Yarne shrugged with a helpless look. “Beats me. They were headed this way, but just now they turned around and marched off in the other direction. Maybe they gave up?”

“Maybe,” Inigo said, but he looked doubtful. Owain’s gaze had shifted to the skies. There, in the east, between the mountains, he could make out the vague shapes of wyvern riders beating into the distance. Had Morgan retreated to avoid another confrontation?

“Uh, weren’t they supposed to be fighting you guys, though?” The immediate danger was gone, but Yarne still looked uneasy. “Why’d they come after us all of a sudden?”

“Things took a turn,” Inigo said vaguely. He glanced at Owain, half-waiting for to be outed for his role in that particular turn, but Owain was still watching the skies.

“Destiny held another surprise in store for us today,” Owain said in a low voice. “A fated encounter—nay, a bitter reunion with an old comrade of brighter days past.”

“We…ran into Morgan,” Inigo translated, to Brady and Yarne’s white-faced surprise. Inigo felt about as uneasy as Yarne looked, and he hurried to preempt any more Owain exposition. “We can explain more later. For now, let’s just find somewhere dry and make camp for the night, shall we?” Inigo pushed his rain-matted hair away from his forehead, grimacing. “We’ll need as good a night’s rest as we can get. We’ve got a long march ahead of us tomorrow.”

The rocky terrain around here held a lattice of small caves and nooks, and though scrounging up suitable cover was a bit of a trial, they were able to find a hollow large enough to keep all four of them dry. Once they had a fire going and everyone was finally allowing themselves to sit down and stop for the first time today, Owain retreated to a corner and laid out his and Inigo’s swords out for cleaning. Inigo was a good enough swordsman, but he didn’t take nearly as good care of his sword, and they couldn’t afford to let their only weapons rust in their sheaths.

Owain was, physically speaking, exhausted, but his mind wouldn’t stop buzzing, replaying that last flash of Morgan’s face over and over again, that brief look of terror. What had he been so afraid of in that moment? He knew he’d seen doubt creep into Morgan’s face, undermining his mystifying devotion to the fell dragon. He didn’t understand at all what special hold Grima had over Morgan, what reason Morgan could possibly have for forsaking their hope for a better future when he’d always seemed to want it just as badly himself. But Owain knew he’d seen Morgan waver today, and that meant that whatever it was, it wasn’t absolute.

Not that he wasn’t happy to be alive, but he couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened if Morgan had struck to kill with that bolt of lightning, if he could have brought himself to kill an unarmed Owain. Would the horror and grief of killing someone he’d once loved overcome his devotion to Grima, and lead him to the path of righteous vengeance instead? Owain wondered if he could die the kind of hero’s death for Morgan that inspired a change in heart of that magnitude. He wondered then if he really wanted that for Morgan.

Owain sheathed Inigo’s sword and rubbed his face with his hands. Ugh. He used to think about this kind of thing all the time, but it was always in the abstract, empty what-ifs. When it came to real people—when it came to Morgan—it was way, way too depressing to contemplate.

He pulled the piece of paper from his belt and unfolded it carefully. It was still damp, but not too badly creased. On a closer look, he realized that this looked more like a page out of a field manual than a tome. The notes in the margin were in a shorthand he didn’t understand, but it was definitely someone else’s handwriting. Not Morgan’s, though. What was a page like this doing stuck in a thunder tome?

He put it away quickly as he heard footsteps approach, and Inigo sat down on the ground next to him with a slight wince. They might have survived the day, but the both of them were a little worse for the wear after that battle. Owain nudged Inigo’s sword toward him.

“I cleaned your sword.”

“Oh,” said Inigo, who hadn’t asked him to and never did, “thanks.”

Owain picked up his own sword, running cloth along the blade. The edge was chipped in places and badly in need of more maintenance than Owain could really administer in the field. Or just in need of replacement. “Did you tell them what happened?”

“Only the broad strokes,” Inigo said. “None of the details of your little fit of theatrics. You didn’t tell them why the army started after them.”

“They don’t really need to know,” Owain said, turning the sword over to inspect the other side of the blade. He could feel a mood coming on, and he really only liked to be moody on his own terms. You know, when it was situationally appropriate. This was an arguably brood-approrpiate situation, but Owain couldn’t find the taste for it right now. His stomach felt filled with lead.

“Exactly,” Inigo said, a little bit of relief in his voice, but he lingered, his gaze falling. “But…while we’re on the subject of those theatrics—that little stunt you pulled with Morgan—”

“I was right,” Owain said. It didn’t feel as triumphant to say it now. “And you know it. You saw his face, too. The real Morgan is still in there somewhere. He’s the same Morgan we’ve always known.”

“Frankly, I don’t know why you find that comforting,” Inigo said, sounding unsettled. “I think I’d rather a doppelganger took his place than live with the knowledge that someone in our fold was capable of—any of that.”

It was true that it was hard to reconcile. He’d looked the same, but still, there had been something so markedly different about the Morgan they’d met on the battlefield, the way he talked, held himself, the grim determination that seemed to cloak him entirely. If Owain hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he might be inclined to believe that had been some doppelganger after all.

“But it doesn’t matter,” Inigo said. Owain jerked his head up.

“Of course it matters! I was getting through to him, Inigo. If there’s a chance that we could help him break free of the fell dragon’s hold—”

Inigo held up his hands to quiet Owain, glancing over at where Brady and Yarne had passed out in a heap from sheer exhaustion. It was unlikely anything would wake them up just now, but they really didn’t need any intruders in this conversation.

“That’s not what I meant,” Inigo said, and he let out a sigh. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re right, alright? I did see his face. I saw how he reacted.”

It made him feel ill to think about—ill, and another nasty little feeling he didn’t care to put a name to. “But we were lucky to get away with our lives today, and you’re delusional if you think you’re going to sway him with the power of conversation. The most important thing is that we get the Gemstones back to Ylisstol, right? Nothing else matters. That’s the only way the world’s getting saved. That’s why we put our lives on the line today, remember? Because nothing is more important than ensuring our precious cargo makes it to Lucina. Not even trying to save an old friend.”

Owain didn’t say anything. Inigo glanced down at him, but his face was turned away, his expression hidden. Inigo cleared his throat, wishing Owain would say something, anything, even something collossally stupid. He tried it himself.

“Even a hero can’t always save everyone, you know.”

“Shut up,” Owain said, sheathing his sword. His voice was tight, caught in the throat. Inigo sighed.

“What I’m trying to say is—if they catch up to us before we make it to Ylisstol, you can’t pull something like that again. We can’t afford to.” Inigo bit his lips together, willing Owain to look at him when he was talking, to make sure every word sank in. But there was a little guilty flutter of relief when Owain’s head stayed bowed anyway. “Morgan is dangerous, Owain. He always was handy with a tome, but that magic he was using back there—he must be getting some kind of power from Grima, because that was power I’ve never seen from him before. And I think he can control Risen with his mind. He might not entertain a second attempt at parley for so long. If we run into Morgan again, we…we’re going to have to kill him.”

Inigo buried his face in his hands and let out a groan. “Gods, I hate giving these kinds of speeches. Where’s Lucina when you need her? Better yet, Severa…”

Owain stared down at his hands. Maybe if he’d stepped closer, reached out a little further. He’d been so close. “I have to at least try to talk to him, Inigo. I can’t not try.”

“You did try talking to him, and his primary response was to throw lightning at me,” Inigo said tersely, but his voice softened. “I know it’s different for you, but…I get it. He was my friend, too.”

“He’s still my friend.” Owain couldn’t speak to anything else; it wasn’t like Morgan’s betrayal had come with a formal breakup notice. But he wasn’t going to get a little treachery get in the way of eternal friendship. They’d make up for it later.

He set his sword aside and slumped back against the uneven rock wall. Out of things to keep him moving, he was losing his momentum, and the day’s exhaustion was creeping up on him. A wet chill was settling in as the rain drove into the night, and he drew his knees up against his chest. They’d had to ditch their bedrolls a few days ago, but just having somewhere dry to sleep was good enough for now.

“You don’t get it.” Owain wasn’t used to feeling this unbearably heavy. He was supposed to be a light, a beacon in the darkness for when everyone else felt this way. Even if they thought his over-the-top theatrics were childish and annoying, at the very least, they always seemed to snap people out of whatever mood they were in. “It’s not just about—what if it were you I was up against? Or Cynthia? I’d go just as far to try to get you back. I wouldn’t just—give up on you like that.”

It was only a thought exercise, because Owain really couldn’t imagine a scenario in which Cynthia or Inigo would betray them like Morgan had, or that they would ever be so fargone that his words wouldn’t reach them. Then again, he never could have imagined Morgan would either, not until it had already happened. For the first time in his life, Owain wondered if he had a problem with limited imagination, or if he’d just managed to overlook something so big so easily.

Inigo was staring at his shoes, his face red. A weird little cocktail of embarrassment and guilt was shaking itself around in his stomach. “I—I know that. Of course you would. That’s exactly the problem, Owain, sometimes you just—can’t, alright? If it were me instead of Morgan, you’d still have to—” He let out a breath, feeling stupidly flustered. “It’s not that I think he’s…not worth saving. But we have to put the mission first. That’s all it is.”

It was the truth, but it felt awful just to say it, leaving behind a terrible, bitter film in Inigo’s mouth. It felt just as awful to hear it, and Owain tried to imagine killing Morgan—picture it for real, not a drill, not a dramatic enactment, but a body still and cold on the ground, weight relieving itself of his sword. The dramatic appeal of going into Avenger Mode over a fallen comrade seemed suddenly very distant.

Inigo really, really wished Owain would quit playing the brooding hero and say something, preferably something stupid so Inigo could make fun of him and change the subject to something less harrowing. Trying to hammer the point home any more would only make both of them feel worse. When the silence lengthened, Inigo cleared his throat and patted his lap.

“Oh—come here.” He tried to make the sigh come out fond and not embarrassed, although his gaze shifted the other way. Owain never bothered to ask for help in times like these, and Inigo never quite knew how to offer gracefully. “Lie down for a bit, will you? You look like a marionette about to have its strings cut.”

The first time Owain had lain with his head in Inigo’s lap had been right after his mother died. Inigo had been in the room when the news was delivered, and Owain had been in such primal distress that all Inigo could think to do was something he remembered his own mother doing for him once upon a time. It had been the only thing that quieted Owain, for a little while at least, curled up on his side with Inigo awkwardly patting his head. It was the same now, his face buried in Inigo’s stomach, though Inigo could tell he was crying.

Maybe they’d be so fortunate as to run into Morgan again without Owain present. Maybe fortunate wasn’t the right word, because Morgan was a hell of a lot deadlier now than when he’d left them, but at least if they emerged victorious, Owain wouldn’t have to have a hand in Morgan’s death. Maybe they could spare him that, at least, because there really wasn’t any other way this could play out that ended well for them. Most of the things they fought were already dead; Inigo was sickeningly squeamish about the idea of killing someone he’d once called friend. But if they couldn’t stop Grima, none of it would matter in the end.

“He was so good at coming up with cool names for stuff.” Owain’s voice was muffled against Inigo’s stomach, which tickled just slightly. Inigo sighed.

“I know. You were insufferable together.”

Owain let out a noise that wasn’t out of despair or misery, and Inigo’s spirits dared to inch a little higher. His fingers worked idly through Owain’s hair, smoothing out the mats and tangles, just to give his hands something to do. It was irritating how Owain had such nice hair when he did absolutely nothing to take care of it. Inigo made a face to himself.

“Would you…” He heaved a massive sigh. “Would you like to help me name my shield?”

“Really?” Owain sat up so fast he nearly clipped Inigo under the chin. Instead, Inigo knocked his head back against the rock wall in an attempt to avoid it.

“Yes,” he said crossly, shoving Owain’s head back down, “but only if you take a nap first. We are, might I remind you, still fleeing for our lives. You need to get some sleep. I’m not carrying you and the Gemstones all the way back to Ylisstol.”

“I shall take deep thought on a suitable name in the realm of dreams,” Owain said, his head settling back in Inigo’s lap. “I come up with some of my best material in my sleep.”

“Of course you do,” Inigo muttered. He combed his fingers through Owain’s hair until he could hear Owain’s muffled snoring, then, finally, laid his head back against the rock wall and closed his eyes.

Chapter Text

He registered the rustle of the grass against his face before the voices. Those came into focus slowly, as he only just now became aware of his body. The grass was tickling his cheek.

“—have to do something, don’t we? We can’t just leave someone all defenseless and alone like this!”

“Cynthia, I don’t disagree, but what would you have us do? It’s not as though there’s a safe town nearby we can leave him—which does beg the question of where he came from…”

“We could at least take him with us for—oh, hey! I think he’s waking up!”

He blinked open his eyes slowly, only just now remembering how. A blue-haired young woman was half-kneeling at his side, looking him over with serious eyes. She smiled at him as he came to. He liked that smile—it was reserved, but there was warmth in it. She held a hand out, and when he took it without a second thought, she pulled him up into a sitting position.

A twin-tailed redhead leaned into his field of vision, eyeing him with an unimpressed look. “There are better places to take a nap than the ground, you know.”

“And certainly less dangerous ones,” agreed the girl still holding his hand. “But you don’t seem hurt—are you?”

He had to actually think about it, awareness coming back to his body slowly. He patted himself down just to be safe. “Nope! I’m fine, as far as I can tell.”

“I’m glad to hear it. We don’t see a lot of solitary travelers this way—were you traveling with others? Where were you headed?”

He picked a stray blade of grass from his hair. “Hm…I don’t know.”

“How do you not know where you were going?” The first voice piped up again, belonging to another girl with brown hair pulled up into pigtails. She was looking at him with her brow furrowed, then her mouth opened in an O of sudden revelation. “Wait! Were you kidnapped? Maybe the culprits were taking you to their boss’s lair, and they had your head under a sack the whole time!”

“Oh, uh…well, I guess that’s possible,” he said, because it was, although it didn’t feel likely. “But I meant more like…I can’t remember where I was going. Or…anything else, actually. Where are we?”

The three of them exchanged uncertain looks. “Right now, we’re in the Halidom of Ylisse,” said the blue-haired girl. “Can you at least tell us your name?”

“Morgan,” he said, remembering only as it left his mouth. Hm, it was good to know his name, if nothing else. Maybe more things would start to come back to him over time. Like, say, where or what exactly Ylisse was. The girl looked relieved.

“Well met, Morgan. I’m Lucina, and this is Cynthia and Severa.” Her companions waved brightly and scowled respectively. Morgan waved back. It seemed to be the appropriate thing to do. “I’m glad we found you before anything else did.”

“Like what? Kidnappers?” Morgan discovered he had a bag, and started rifling through it in the hopes of finding any memory-joggers. Lucina shook her head.

“Much worse than kidnappers, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah, you know, like the hordes of undead overrunning every town between here and Ylisstol?” Severa was eyeing Morgan with deep skepticism. “Am I the only one who finds it just a little suspicious that we find a mysterious stranger just lying unharmed in the middle of nowhere who remembers his name, but he doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s going on around here?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what amnesia is,” Cynthia said. Severa scoffed.

“I don’t care how hard you get knocked on the head, how do you forget the fact that the world is literally ending?”

“Hey, why don’t you give him a little break? He only just woke up—I bet he’s feeling all kinds of scared and confused right now! And it’s our job as heroes to make sure he’s okay!”

“It’s our job to find a way to stop Grima and put the world back together, now you want us babysitting too?”

“Mother!”

All three of them turned, startled, to see Morgan holding a book out in front of him. He looked just as surprised, then a little sheepish.

“Sorry, I just remembered—my mother. She gave this book to me.” He stared at the treatise on field tactics, willing it to summon any more information to his blank slate of a brain. “She said she was going to test me on what’s in this book. We were traveling together…I was just with her.”

The more he spoke, the more sure of it he felt. True, he was having a little difficulty conjuring a clear image of his mother’s face, but he could imagine her voice, the weight of her hand on his shoulder, even a fleeting impression of her smile. They’d never been far apart. They couldn’t be now. He twisted where he was sitting to try and look around the empty field around them, but Lucina shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Morgan, but we haven’t seen anyone else along this road all day.”

“And we’ve been walking it all day,” Severa pointed out sourly.

“But—I was just with her,” Morgan said, genuinely puzzled. It was as vivid a recollection he could summon right now—they’d been walking down this very road, or one very much like it, and his mother had been quizzing him as they walked, having him point out various points of potential enemy ambush on their route—or had it been likely sniper positions? The observation game, she’d called it when he was too young to understand what she was trying to do, when she’d asked him to count things like hats in a tavern or how many people in the room were wearing a weapon. He could remember all of those things clearly enough to know they were real. He just couldn’t remember how he got here.

Cynthia gave him a sympathetic frown and stuck out a hand to pull him to his feet. “Maybe you just need to give it some time before it all makes sense. I mean, you did just wake up—and look what you’ve already remembered! I bet that by the end of the day, you’ll be remembering how you wound up lying here in the first place!”

The world was apparently pretty gloom and doom just about now, but something about Cynthia’s optimism was infectious. Morgan let out a little laugh as he got to his feet, brushing the grass and dirt off his coat.

“Hey, you’re right. Maybe I’ll even remember what I had for breakfast this morning!”

“You guys, shut up,” Severa hissed, and Cynthia turned to make a face at her, but Severa was standing at the alert, staring at the treeline. “We’ve got Risen incoming!”

Lucina had already drawn her sword, and the wings of Cynthia’s pegasus beat a gust Morgan’s way as she took flight. He shielded his face from the swirl of dust and grass, looking up just in time to see a shambling horde advancing at—well, what he’d hardly call a shambling pace. Severa had apparently not been exaggerating about the undead, nor had she managed to convey just how unsettling it was: these weren’t armored corpses, but something much more decayed and grotesque. Their bodies were lithe and twisted, with long, thin limbs tipped with gruesome claws that moved with frightening speed, but they had curiously blunt heads, almost club-shaped, and though their eyes were sunk deeply into the skull, they gleamed with an unmistakable red light.

“Ugh,” Severa said in unmasked disgust. “How do we keep finding new types of these things? I don’t remember the last ones we fought oozing this much.”

“Just stay upwind of them,” came Cynthia’s voice, strained and through a pinched nose. “I don’t know where these guys came from, but they really reek! Like, unwashed armor fermenting in a bed of rotten eggs kind of reek!”

“Ew! Gross! Not helping!”

“Morgan, stay behind us,” Lucina said in a low voice, preparing to advance on the first wave. “These things may look fierce, but they’re usually not very clever. We’ll cut them down in no time!”

With that, she struck the first blow, cleaving through one of the Risen from the side, apparently taking it by surprise, and it let out a horrible, gurgling groan before swinging blindly at her. Another twist and wrench of her sword, and the monster was wriggling in two pieces on the ground. The three of them descended into melee with the monsters, and while they were all clearly seasoned warriors for their age, they were still pretty outnumbered. There had to be something Morgan could do to help…

He rummaged around in his bag again and pulled out what looked like a magic tome, well-weathered. He hummed thoughtfully to himself. “Can I do magic?”

The tome fell open along a familiar crack in the spine, and without really thinking about it, Morgan raised his hand. A streak of lightning shot out and fried one of the Risen to a neat crisp as a clap of thunder sounded through the field.

“Hey, I can do magic!”

“He’s figuring this out now?” Severa moved to stab one of the things in the chest, but it moved with uncanny speed, catching the end of her blade in its clawed hands. “Oh, come on!”

Cynthia was having a little more luck attacking from above, while Morgan darted around the treeline, trying to focus on the magic and assessing the battlefield all at once. He didn’t really think about it; it was just the observation game, that was all, but his mind was still feeling a little sluggish, it was hard to keep track of that and aim at the same time—there was friendly fire to worry about too, after all. He was too busy jumping around, maybe more than was strictly necessary, to realize that one of the Risen had gotten the jump on him—he turned and leapt back just in time, but he lost his footing on a slick patch still wet from yesterday’s rain, and he went down hard on his back. The Risen took hold of his ankle as he tried to scramble back, its claws digging in through his boots, and Morgan bit back a pained noise, shaking back his coat sleeve to fire off another spell with a slightly shaky hand. It was just—this was at really close range, and he wasn’t totally sure he wouldn’t blow off his own foot in the process—

The point of a lance bored through the monster’s chest, and it gurgled and seized before the lance withdrew and stabbed it in the head next. It went down hard, its grip on Morgan’s leg slackening, and he looked up with great relief to see Cynthia on her pegasus hovering overhead.

“Thanks,” he said, his voice coming out a little wobblier than he’d intended. She swooped down to land next to him, moving to pull him upright before she saw his foot. The puncture wounds in his boots were oozing…something unpleasant.

“Oh no, did it get you?” Cynthia crouched down to have a better look, her brow creased. “It was the last one, at least. Ooh…that looks like it hurts.”

“It does,” Morgan assured her, a little white in the face now. Now that the damage was done and the adrenaline from the fight was starting to wear off, an exciting new sensation was lighting up every nerve in his leg from the knee down. “It hurts very much.”

Lucina, breathing hard, sheathed her sword and darted over to them, taking in Morgan’s injured foot with a grim look. “Cynthia, take Morgan and go ahead of us to camp. See that he gets that injury tended to. Severa and I will follow on foot and clear out any stragglers.”

“Wha—you want to bring a total stranger to camp?” Severa demanded, looking moderately outraged. “We met him, like, an hour ago and we know next to nothing about him!”

“Severa, he’s injured,” Lucina said. “I can’t very well leave a wounded person to fend for himself when there are Risen wandering freely. Besides, he fought with us—without a second thought. Without him there, any one of us might have suffered the same injury. We owe it to him to treat his wounds at the very least.”

Severa pursed her lips, although her gaze slid downward. “I guess he’s pretty good with a tome for a total amnesiac…”

Morgan would probably have enjoyed the flight back to camp more if he hadn’t been focused entirely on holding tight to Cynthia and trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his foot. Maybe he could convince Cynthia to take him for another ride sometime when he could actually appreciate it.

They touched down at the edge of the camp, as close to the med tent as possible, and Cynthia helped Morgan hobble the rest of the way, one arm braced under his to keep him steady and off his bad foot. She was stronger than she looked, but then again, it took real strength to maneuver a lance from the saddle of a pegasus the way she had. Morgan couldn’t help but notice that the camp itself was pretty small, and while there seemed to be people of all ages scattered around the makeshift arrangement of tents, they seemed to be civilians for the most part. He saw only a handful of people who looked much older than him carrying a weapon, and they all seemed to be regular footsoldiers as far as he could tell. Cynthia and the others seemed like they were close to him in age, although he hadn’t asked, and now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure when exactly he’d been born anyway.

Cynthia threw open the flap to the med tent with a flourish, marching Morgan inside at a hobbled pace. “Move aside, people, we’ve got a wounded hero in need of treatment here!”

“People” in the little med tent turned out to be a diminutive girl with curiously elfin ears who looked a little young even for this camp, and a scar-faced young man who had apparently mugged a priest. The latter was already getting up from his seat without looking, waving a hand.

“Alright, where’d they stick ya? They can’t have whupped you too bad, if you can carry on like that—” He stopped short as he turned, staff in hand. “Hey, who’s the new mug?”

“This is Morgan!” Cynthia beamed, and Morgan, who was rapidly losing interest in the novelty of pain, waved with a pale smile. “We met him while we were out scouting—right before we met a bunch of Risen! Really…really gross ones, too. Anyway, Morgan helped us out with his magic—you should have seen him! He was all, fear my righteous thunder, foul creatures of darkness! And then, right at the climax of the battle—”

“Um, Cynthia,” said the young girl, her brow knit as she looked at Morgan’s face, “maybe you should let him sit down already. What happened to that foot? Because it looks…pretty bad.”

“Oh—shoot, sorry! You probably really do need to sit down, huh…” Cynthia frowned as she helped Morgan onto the low cot. “I was just about to get to that part—right as the battle was about to come to an end, one of them cornered Morgan and got its claws in him—literally!”

“Until you swooped in and saved the day,” Morgan added helpfully, because while he was no longer enjoying the wounded human experience, it had been a pretty cool moment. Cynthia grinned.

“Yeah! So now I’d say we’re even on the saving each other front, huh?” She patted Morgan on the shoulder. “And Brady can fix you right up, so you’ll be running around on that foot in no time!”

Brady grimaced and leaned in towards Cynthia, lowering his voice, although Morgan could still hear him perfectly well. “Hey, that’s not just a scratch he’s got there. That thing went clean through his boot. I can gauze it up for him, sure, but we ain’t exactly flush with staves lately…”

Cynthia’s face fell. “But Brady, he got injured helping us! We owe him more than that—Lucina said so herself! Can’t you at least look at it first?”

“Of course I’m gonna look at it,” Brady said, crouching in front of Morgan with a thoroughly disgruntled expression. He squinted at the foot in question, which was looking alarmingly swollen. He reached behind him, wiggling his fingers. “Hey, Nah, hand me the shears. I think I’m gonna have to cut this thing off.”

“My whole boot?”

“Don’t get your smallclothes in a twist, we got someone who can fix it up after,” Brady said, waving a hand. Despite all outward appearances, he was careful and deliberate with the shears, and the hand that gripped Morgan’s leg to keep it steady was gentle. “Not that you’re gonna be able to wear it for at least a few—Naga’s breath, what the hell happened to you?”

Cynthia and Nah sneaked curious glances and blanched immediately. Morgan’s foot was not only swollen, but it was oozing and a patchwork of angry colors, none of which looked like they belonged on human skin. Morgan winced.

“Oh…that doesn’t look very good.”

“No shit,” said Brady, who was looking pale himself. “How long since that thing got you?”

“Uh…about an hour?”

Brady let out a colorful curse. Cynthia was looking a little less excited about their thrilling battle, sucking in a breath through her teeth. Nah was trying to look more serious than squeamish, but it was…not a pretty sight.

“What do you think it is? Some kind of venom?” she said, at which Cynthia let out a tiny gasp. Brady was starting to look a little green, and he looked away from Morgan’s injured foot as he shook his head.

“No, it looks damn infected—after a week’s worth of exposure and festering! You’re tellin’ me this happened in an hour? Cripes, since when can Risen do crap like this…”

“Ooh, it’s not gonna have to come off, is it?” said Cynthia. Morgan’s face went a shade paler, though he tried to maintain a strained smile.

“Is there another option we can try before amputation? Because I’m kind of attached to this leg—literally, haha!”

“Oh, for—no one’s gettin’ a foot chopped off today, okay!” Brady seemed about as thrilled about the prospect as Morgan, looking a little ill as he grabbed a staff leaning in one corner. The tent filled with light, soft at first then glowing brighter, Brady making a distinctly unpriestly face as he concentrated. To conserve as much magic as possible, Morgan realized, watching him and definitely not watching his foot, but slowly, the throbbing pain began to subside. After a few minutes he chanced a look down and saw that his foot was—well, not fully healed, but certainly less gross. The puncture wounds were still there, but they were no longer oozing.

“Got rid of the infection,” Brady grunted, straightening up. “You’re gonna have to let the rest of it heal up on its own, though. I’ll clean and wrap it up for you, but stay off it for at least a few days.” He looked away with a cough and returned the staff to the corner. “Sorry, them’s the breaks—we just don’t got the equipment to spare.”

“No, I understand,” Morgan said, wriggling his foot experimentally. It hurt, but he could feel all of his toes. “I appreciate the help. It’s definitely nice to know my foot’s not going to fall off.”

“We’d better tell Lucina about this,” Nah sighed, her forehead creased. “If we wind up fighting any more of those Risen, the injuries alone could wind up wiping out the medical supplies we have on hand.”

Everyone looked uneasy at that, and Morgan felt a little bad, despite none of this actually being his fault. At the very least, he wished he could make up for the spent resources.

Cynthia helped him hobble over to an unoccupied tent to rest for the first time since—well, since he woke up in that field. He’d really only been conscious for a few hours. It was weird how long a day could feel when you couldn’t remember anything that came before it.

“Brady said to stay off that foot until it heals up, so just sit tight and I’ll get you some water and something to eat!”

Morgan wobbled his way down to a sitting position on the bedroll, his bag in his lap. “Oh, just some water would be great! You already had to use up a staff on me, I’d hate to take up any of your rations, too.”

Cynthia’s brow creased, and she pressed a hand to her cheek. “So you’ve got food with you, right?”

Hmm. Morgan rummaged through his bag. “Nope!”

“Morgan, when was the last time you even ate?”

“No clue,” he said brightly.

“Okay, well—that’s fair,” Cynthia said, puffing out her cheeks at him. “But your body needs nourishment to heal, now’s not the time to be skipping meals! So you wait there, I’ll run to the mess tent and bring you one of everything!”

“I’m really not that—oh, there she goes.” Morgan blinked as the tent flap fluttered behind Cynthia’s dashing exit. He made a thoughtful noise to himself. “She’s nice.”

Thirty paces into her determined dash to the mess tent, Cynthia slipped on a loose stone and sailed directly into someone else’s back. She staggered back with a little whumpf, but a hand caught her by the wrist before she could topple over.

“Not so fast, brave warrior,” Owain said as Cynthia shook out her pigtails with a little puff of breath. “Shouldn’t you be convalescing in your tent after today’s victory against the forces of darkness?”

He leaned in and lowered his voice slightly. “Hey, is it true that you guys ran into a bunch of crazy powerful Risen? What were they like?” He sounded a little disappointed that he hadn’t been there.

“Ugh, you don’t even wanna know,” Cynthia said, scrunching her nose. “And there’s no time for sitting around just yet, not when there’s a soldier of justice wounded in the line of duty who needs attending to!”

Curiosity piqued, Owain fell into brisk step next to Cynthia on her way to the mess tent. Lucina and Severa had returned relatively unscathed, so… “Has a new hero joined our ranks?”

“I hope so,” Cynthia said wistfully. “I mean, he’s really good at magic. You should have seen him, Owain! He was blasting away Risen left and right, like zap, boom, slide, zap! He’s a total natural. And he’s really nice! Lucina only offered to have his injuries treated because he got hurt helping us, and he kinda seems like he’s got his own thing going on, but still…anyone who can jump into battle at the drop of a pegasus feather like that would be a huge win for the forces of justice!”

“He sounds formidable,” Owain mused, rubbing his chin. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I’m getting a vision…someone tall, dark, cloaked in an air of mystery, with an indomitable aura representing his fearsome magical power…I’m thinking…maybe an eyepatch? No, wait. Glass eye.” He opened one eye. “Magic glass eye.”

“Not even close,” Cynthia laughed. The mess tent was in a lull this time of day, but there were still leftovers from the day’s lunch ration. “He’s kinda short. Kinda cute, too. And really friendly! He definitely doesn’t look like a dangerous dark sorcerer. But he is pretty mysterious—get this.” Cynthia grinned, eyes glittering. “He can’t remember a single thing from before today. We found him lying by the road on our way back, and when he woke up, all he could remember was his own name.”

Owain’s mouth fell open. “No way.”

“So way! And practically the first thing he did was leap into battle to help us.” Cynthia was piling dishes with as much food as she could carry, and Owain followed suit with equal enthusiasm. “I mean, talk about an origin story!”

“He certainly seems worthy of our cause,” Owain said, although his grin betrayed his sage tone. “So what’s his name? Does he have a cool title? Or—ooh, what about his magic tome?”

“Morgan,” Cynthia said around the canteen strap in her teeth, her hands now fully occupied. Owain helpfully removed it from her mouth and tucked it under his arm.

“I would meet this mysterious Morgan, who so gallantly risked his life for my fairest of companions.” Owain tilted his head to the side. “Do you think he’s open to suggestions?”

Morgan had moved himself to sit on the ground so he could lean back against the cot, his legs stretched out before him. He was still flipping through the book on field tactics when Cynthia and Owain hustled into the tent bearing a small feast. Morgan blinked at Owain’s unfamiliar face with a smile, then at the plates they were laying out on the ground between them.

“Not that I’m not hungry, but…that might be a little too much food for one person.”

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s for me too. A good battle always leaves me pretty famished!” Cynthia set the last of the dishes down and straightened up to gesture brightly at Owain with a little flourish. “Morgan, this is Owain, a fellow warrior of justice in our crusade against evil!”

Owain dropped to one knee just as Morgan opened his mouth to say hi, one hand outstretched with his fingers curled in dramatically. “I am Owain Dark, scion of legends. My legendary blade is at your service. Any comrade of Cynthia’s is a comrade of mine.”

Morgan blinked in bemusement, then took Owain’s hand and lightly shook it. “Nice to meet you! I’m Morgan.”

“He doesn’t have the enigmatic air of an amnesiac,” Owain said to Cynthia. Cynthia gave him a little frown. Morgan just laughed.

“Sorry to disappoint. I guess I’m pretty easy to read even if I don’t remember anything!”

“So you awoke with no memory at all?” Owain said with unmasked curiosity, sitting down cross-legged next to Cynthia, who was helpfully pushing several plates in Morgan’s direction.

“Just my name and my mother,” Morgan said, and his mouth pinched a little. “I’m still trying to figure out how we got separated. But everything else—yeah, pretty much! Brady said it didn’t look like I’d been knocked on the head or anything, but I guess whatever happened was enough of a whammy to make me forget that, uh…the world is ending, I guess?”

“Don’t listen to Severa too much,” Cynthia said, and she flashed Morgan an encouraging smile. “I mean, sure, things are pretty bad—okay, yeah, they’re really bad, but—they’re not totally hopeless! After all, we’re still fighting, aren’t we?”

“Yeah!” Morgan grinned in turn. There was something infectious about Cynthia’s enthusiasm, and Owain’s presence only seemed to amplify it. “You were all over those—uh, walking corpses? You called them Risen, right? Anyway, once you finish exterminating all of those guys, you can call it a day, right?”

“Uh—well, it’s a little bit more complicated than that,” Cynthia said, her smile faltering slightly, and she glanced sideways at Owain. “It’s really the thing behind all the Risen that’s our problem…”

“We’re up against the ultimate forces of darkness,” Owain said, his voice pitched so low it creaked a little. “The enemy of all who live, the very bane of existence itself…the fell dragon Grima.”

“Wow. Sounds like a pretty intense bad guy,” Morgan said, nodding along, because it did—not that it wasn’t already abundantly clear that this was no laughing matter. “So who’s Grima?”

Cynthia and Owain exchanged a helpess look.

“Aw, you really don’t remember anything at all, do you?” Cynthia said.

“Nope,” Morgan said around a mouthful of food. “I’m a total blank slate.”

Cynthia clapped a hand to her face. “I thought it was just, you know—your memories of your own life and stuff, not the whole world!”

“I guess we’d better start at the beginning,” Owain said, tenting his fingers in his lap. He drew in a breath, his face schooled into a studious expression. “At the very dawn of time—”

“Owain, you don’t have to start that far back.”

“Right. Okay. One thousand years ago—”

Between the two of them, Morgan managed to get a vivid, if somewhat disjointed, picture of what the world had been like for the past decade. Pretty grim, as it turned out, even painted in Owain and Cynthia’s colorful storytelling. The fell dragon Grima, who had lain dormant for a thousand years, had been revived by his cult of zealots despite heroic attempts to thwart their machinations. Countless brave heroes died in the effort, and city after city, fortress after fortress fell under Grima’s spreading shadow. The world was a dark place; the risk of running into Risen was virtually everywhere now, and much of Ylisse’s population had been decimated in the years following the cataclysm—not just Ylisse, but a host of other nations Morgan had never heard of, Grima slowly smothering everything in his reach as it expanded ever outward. They didn’t say it in quite so many words, but as Morgan listened, he gradually understood why it was that so many of the armed soldiers he’d seen in the camp were so close to his age. The more that Owain and Cynthia talked about the fallen heroes that had tried to save the world before them, the more he realized they were talking about their own parents. Morgan felt a weird little pang of guilt at the certain knowledge that his own mother was still alive.

“But Ylisstol is still safe,” Cynthia said with a pick-me-up smile. “That’s where we’re headed in a few days. The Risen haven’t breached the capital! I mean—not recently, anyway. But never fear! Us heroes are always standing by to take it back in a flash.”

“So what are you doing all the way out here?” Morgan said. “Not that I’ve ever been to Ylisstol—er, that I know of—but this seems like a more…rural area.”

“We came rushing to the aid of the innocent townsfolk whose homes were plagued with Risen,” Owain said gravely.

“Yeah, and by the time we arrived, the Risen had already wrecked most of the villages around here,” Cynthia said, deflating. “We were supposed to swoop in all heroic and make this a safe place to live again, but…all we’ve really been doing is collecting refugees to take back to Ylisstol.”

“This is kind of how it always goes now,” Owain admitted, looking more grim than grave now. The bright enthusiasm that had painted silver borders around the world-ending threat of Grima seemed to wane the closer they got to the present. “We always rush out at the first word of danger, but…”

Morgan thought back to when he’d first woken up. Lucina had something about there not being any safe towns nearby. Apparently this was what she’d meant—there weren’t really any towns left at all.

Owain closed his eyes and curled his hand into a fist. “Every time another Ylissean village falls, I can feel it rend my very soul. For every innocent civilian who has lost their home, I shall fell a hundred Risen under my blade in a fury of justice! Even now, just the mere thought of it makes my blood burn with righteous rage…!”

Morgan did a spot of mental math. “That’s a lot of Risen,” he said.

“Yeah, well, they kind of don’t stop coming,” Owain said, opening one eye. He rubbed his face, trying to wipe away the unhappy line of his mouth. “Even when we do get there in time…we’ll kill them all, and half the time, more crop up within a week.”

“And it’s not like the villagers can defend themselves!” Cynthia said. “We’re pretty much the only ones who stand a chance against Risen in those numbers, so it’s our sacred duty as heroes to aid them whenever they need us.”

“Seems like Grima really has you on the defensive,” Morgan said with a little frown. He’d contented himself with food and now he was leaning back against the cot again, gingerly propping his injured leg up on his bag. “He’s got you spreading your forces too thin to maintain any ground, making it easy for the taking…and you go wherever the Risen show up, right? Which means he has control over the terms of every fight, and by extension, pretty much your whole army…uh, what?”

Owain and Cynthia were giving him twin miserable looks. “I mean, I guess you’re not wrong,” Cynthia said, “but when you put it that way…”

“Oh—sorry, I was just thinking out loud.” Morgan offered a sheepish smile in apology. “I wasn’t trying to tell you how to fight your own war. I mean, you’ve been doing it for longer than I can remember.” To his relief, that got a tiny snort from Cynthia. “I bet you guys have a plan for striking back, right? Like a way to stop Grima from making all those Risen in the first place so you can focus all your efforts on him, or—uh, I’m not really sure how you fight a fell dragon, but…”

“That’s a really good idea for a plan,” Owain said to Cynthia, who puffed out her cheeks in determination.

“Lucina’s definitely got a plan,” she said, and Morgan nodded encouragingly. Lucina seemed like the kind of person who had a plan. “I mean, she hasn’t told us all of it, sure, but—we’re definitely going to take Grima down! We’re heroes, after all! But…it’s not like we can ignore defenseless people in need, either…”

“True,” Morgan said, and he was looking at the weathered cover of the book in his lap. It was well used, dog-eared and margins full of annotations—mosty in his mother’s hand writing, and he was pleasantly surprised to discover that he could still read her arcane shorthand. But there were notes in his own cramped, messy handwriting too. He’d been studying this book for a while now. He was getting the sense that he hadn’t quite forgotten everything he knew. He remembered how to use magic, after all. Maybe he could remember this, too.

He wanted to point out that when you were badly outnumbered, you had to pick your battles, and that usually meant sacrifice—but that was all too easy to say when you were talking in the abstract. Despite Cynthia and Owain’s bright energy, Morgan knew that they’d been intimate with enough horrors that the sacrifice of even a single person, citizen or soldier, was a hard pill to swallow. Morgan finally blew out a long breath and let his head knock back against the cot.

“I wish Mother was here,” he said, closing his eyes. He was still trying to summon a clear image of her face. He could still only remember her smile. “She’d probably take one walk around the perimeter and have a whole list of suggestions within an hour. I bet she’d be able to come up with a plan to stop the Risen from tearing up all these homes and keep them gone, too.”

“What does your mother do? Is she a quartermaster?” Cynthia leaned over to peek at the book in Morgan’s lap. “Hey, you said she was going to test you on this stuff earlier, right? What are you learning?”

“Strategy. Just theory for a while, but we’ve been moving into practical field tactics. She’s a tactician. A brilliant one—I mean, she’s the best there is.” A little smile rose to the surface. This was easy to remember, the things about his mother that he admired, that he wanted so badly to emulate. “That’s why I’ve got to study as much as I can. So I can catch up to her. One day, I might even surpass her—but I think that’s a pretty long way off.”

“No wonder you could just leap right into action like that!” Cynthia said. “It’s gotta be like instinct to you now. Your hero instinct! I was right—you really are a natural at this!”

“A hero’s instinct is far more deeply embedded than mere memory,” Owain agreed, but he had his brow furrowed in thought, massaging his chin with his knuckles. “That said, my initial judgment was far too hasty. Your only other memory besides your name is of your mother…now that’s an air of pure mystery.”

“Hey, yeah!” Cynthia sat up straight, pointing a fork at Morgan. “How do you remember your mom but not your life? I mean, what else about her do you actually remember?”

“I’m not really sure,” Morgan said, scrunching his nose with the effort of memory. “I guess it’s more like…impressions than memories. I can remember stuff about my mom—like, she’s a genius and I’ve been studying as her apprentice since—well…” He brows drew down as he let his brain really sink into the question for the first time.

“I remember her voice, the stuff she says to me all the time. I know we spend most of our time traveling, we never stay anywhere all that long, and there was this game we used to play…” He trailed off, because the more he tried to get a grasp on his memories, the more they seemed to slip away, wriggling between his fingers like escaping fish. His expression dimmed, all his attention directed inward, but it felt like wading in an endless black pool. Finally, he gave them a shrug and puffed out a helpless laugh. “Sorry. I guess that’s not all that helpful.”

“No, that totally makes sense!” Cynthia said, and Morgan could tell she was being earnest, but he got the feeling she was trying to make him feel better, too. Morgan just gave her an encouraging smile in turn, and he was trying to think of a subject to change to when the tent flap was abruptly yanked open.

“Owain! Is this where you’ve been dallying all afternoon?” A young man about their age with pale pink hair stuck his head inside, directing his profoundly annoyed look at Owain.

“Oh, hey, Inigo,” Owain said with a little wave. “Done getting kicked in the shins by fair maidens for the day already? Usually you’re at it until sundown.”

Inigo glared at him. “Oh, hey, nothing,” he said crossly. “You were supposed to meet me in the training yard a half hour ago, because you insisted you wanted to test out your new ‘secret technique’—”

“The Black Fang Strike,” Owain said with a sage nod, as though he hadn’t forgotten at all, then he grinned at Cynthia and Morgan. “It’s pretty cool. You guys should come watch.”

“No one is coming to watch,” Inigo said, his face flushing. “And it’s not a secret technique if you show it to the entire army!”

“It’s a secret from the enemy,” Owain said. Inigo scoffed. Cynthia rolled her eyes.

“Don’t worry. They’re just like this,” she said to Morgan, and nudged Owain with her elbow. “Morgan can’t go anywhere on that injured foot just yet. Doctor’s orders! Well, Brady’s orders.”

Inigo seemed to notice Morgan’s presence for the first time and flashed him a cheerful smile, although when Morgan returned it in full with a little wave, his cheeks flushed a little brighter. Inigo cleared his throat lightly. “I don’t believe we’ve met, ah…?”

“Morgan,” Cynthia said around a mouthful of cheese, determined not to let any of the leftovers go to waste. Morgan merely smiled sunnily in assent.

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Inigo said, looking between the three of them. He spotted Morgan’s bandaged foot, and his mouth turned in a sympathetic frown. “They aren’t holding you hostage in here, are they? Gods, they’ve got you cornered. Say the word and I’ll chase them right out.”

“Hey,” Cynthia said indignantly, and he wilted slightly at her glare. Morgan just puffed out a laugh.

“Oh, not at all! Owain and Cynthia have been keeping me great company. It’s been kind of nice after today, honestly.”

Cynthia and Owain proceeded to Inigo in on the exciting details of the day so far, while Inigo looked increasingly incredulous, exasperated, and a little outraged at the notion that he was supposed to believe the taller parts of the tale. He gave Morgan a deeply skeptical look once they’d breathlessly finished recounting dinner so far, brow knit.

“Alright, which parts of that were actually true, and which parts were just wild embellishment?”

“Oh, it’s all true,” Morgan said cheerfully. “That’s pretty much the story so far. Pretty long day, huh? You know, I actually would really like to see you guys spar sometime, once I can walk around again. I bet I could learn a lot just by watching.”

“I could carry you,” Owain said, at the same time Inigo groaned out, “No.”

Morgan turned to Inigo and said brightly, “Hey, do you have any of your own secret techniques you could bust out? I’d love to see them.”

Inigo stared at him, then covered his face with a sigh. “Oh, gods, there’s three of them now.”

Chapter Text

Brady had gotten rid of the strange infection, but Morgan’s ankle remained painful and swollen when he woke up the following morning. He hobbled a few experimental steps outside of his tent to find his boots mysteriously mended and resting just beside the tent flap. It was clearly a hand-done job, and they were a sorely mismatched pair now, but there was nothing half-baked about the end result. Not that he could try it on for size just yet, but he’d have to find out whoever had done him the favor and thank them.

Morgan couldn’t get much farther beyond the tent flap on one foot, so he scooped up his boots and settled back on his cot and spent the day inventorying his bag for clues. In addition to the book on strategy, there was a notebook half-filled with his own writing—mostly study notes or assignments for his mother, but there were frequent doodles in the margins, usually birds or insects. Probably whatever he was looking at at the time, he guessed, but at any rate, he didn’t seem to have an overwhelming talent for art.

There was another, thinner volume that turned out to be a novel of some kind—it looked well-read, but Morgan couldn’t recall ever hearing the title before. Well, he trusted his own taste. He’d probably enjoy it for the first time all over again once he got around to reading it.

There was also a miniature board game that folded up with a box, whose pieces all tumbled out as soon as Morgan opened it for inspection. He knew he’d received this from his mother too, but even as he stared with deep concentration at the pieces, he could only vaguely remember the rules. There was a tiny hourglass in the box too, filled with bright blue sand, and a brief memory flashed into Morgan’s mind—making a move on the board and flipping the hourglass with a triumphant little turn, only for his mother to make her own move and flip the hourglass again before more than a few grains of sand had fallen. A handful of pens, one with a broken tip, a half-full bottle of ink, and scraps of looseleaf paper lined the bottom of his bag, but under the paper he found buried a a bronze medallion with a curious design stamped on it, a seven-pointed star with an open eye in the center. Gold wire curled in spirals through holes in the bottom of the medallion from which hung three braided tassels. It wasn’t as worn as the old books or the board game, but it seemed he’d had this for a while too.

He read through the tactics treatise before the afternoon was over. This did stir up memories, but only fractions, moments too vague to be placed, muddied by the sediment. He knew he’d read some of these passages over and over; he could even remember his mother reading some of them aloud to him in a private lecture, somewhere warm and indoors near a crackling fire. He was beginning to remember concrete things—but it was filling in gaps in his practical knowledge, not his life. As soon as he’d refreshed his memory on the things he’d already learned, they came back to him with a snap, but personal details still eluded him. No matter how many times he read his mother’s notes in the margins, he couldn’t get his brain to summon anything useful about where she was or how they’d been separated.

Cynthia kept bringing him piles of food in her free time, apparently keenly worried that he’d waste away in his tent. She and Owain brought dinner to his tent once their duties for the day were finished, and when Inigo wandered by they convinced him to join them too. Inigo had something new to be annoyed with Owain over today—Morgan was beginning to suspect this was a self-replenishing phenomenon—but he conceded to Morgan’s earnest invitation with a little flush in his cheeks, and before long, Cynthia and Owain had pulled him into the riptide of laughter and easy conversation. Morgan found himself pulled in, too; the three of them were just easy to be around, or at least Morgan thought so, because even though he was keenly missing his mother, he didn’t quite feel lonely, either.

The next day, Cynthia was out on field duty, and Owain took over food delivery with no less enthusiasm than his predecessor. He even took the time to point out which dishes Morgan might want to start with—apparently the mashed potatoes came with a defense buff—and he hung around to talk a little, too, until a passing Nah reminded him he was on mess duty for the night. But it had been a badly needed injection of human contact for Morgan, for whom just a couple of days was more or less equivalent to a lifetime. He had the feeling that he was a regular bookworm and had been all his life, but Owain was at least as entertaining as a good book, and he kept making Morgan laugh. Not that it was hard, Morgan was inclined to laughter, but it drew out Owain’s laugh, too—loud and uninhibited like the rest of him, and in his lesser armed moments, a little silly, too. Morgan decided instantly that he liked that laugh.

The three of them kept bringing dinner to Morgan’s tent, and they spent the next few evenings that way. Morgan was forming a more solid picture of the camp and their comrades, and he thought he was fortunate to be captive audience to a couple of the camp’s biggest chatterboxes. And Inigo would butt in from time to time to tear down a glaring embellishment or simply just to contradict them, which would lead to a round of petty bickering that always resolved back into a warm chorus of laughter. Morgan basked in it happily.

But by day, there was only so much Morgan could glean from the handful of clues in his bag, no matter how many times he turned them over in his hands or how long he stared at the pages. The tasseled medallion in his bag seemed to elude him the most, but after staring at it for a while, he attached it to his belt on a whim. Maybe it was a fashion accessory?

He was starting to find himself bored and restless. He did have that novel on hand, but while the idea of curling up alone with a good book seemed like it would ordinarily be appealing, he couldn’t find any interest in it right now. He was going stir crazy in here.

By day four, the swelling in his ankle was looking a lot better. The puncture wounds were still painful and tender, but he could just about fit his foot in his newly mended boot as long as he left the straps loose. He got to his feet slowly, bracing against the cot for balance. He couldn’t put too much weight on that foot before it started to hurt in earnest, but that was fine. He’d just hop along until he found a stick big enough to lean on.

He waved cheerfully at the passersby as he half-crawled, half-hopped out of his tent, but the refugees mostly just answered with uncertain smiles before wandering away. Morgan didn’t take it personally. These people had just lost their homes; it was understandable that they might not be feeling too friendly right now.

Morgan hopped awkwardly around his tent in search of a stick, but he didn’t get far before his foot caught on a small hollow in the ground, and he wobbled determinedly in place for a few seconds before toppling over in a heap.

Ow. He’d managed not to land on his bad foot, but he’d gotten a mouth full of dirt in the process. He spat it out with a face, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and noting for future reference that dirt tasted pretty bad. He heard a sound behind him—not quite a laugh—and he rolled over onto his back to see Owain standing over him, holding out a hand.

“Is this a secret mage technique?” Owain asked curiously. “A way to get closer to Mother Nature herself? I suppose that would aid in the channeling of elemental spirits…”

If it had been anyone else, Morgan would have suspected he was being made fun of. But it was Owain, so he just shook his head with a smile and said, “No, I was just looking for a big stick.”

He took Owain’s hand, and Owain pulled him into a sitting position with a puzzled look. “We have swords in the armory tent.”

“Oh, no—I just wanted something to lean on.” Morgan puffed out a laugh. “I’ve pretty much exhausted all options for entertaining myself, and most of what I’ve seen so far has been the inside of a tent. Besides, I’m a blank slate! I wanna get out there and see some things! I’ve got so many new experiences ahead of me. I figure I ought to get started.”

“By Nephenee’s lance, you’re right!” Owain declared, although Morgan wasn’t exactly sure about what, or who Nephenee was. “We’ve been so preoccupied with our heroic duties that we’ve failed to acquaint you with our fellow comrades.” Owain grinned. “But you’re in luck. I finished my Hero Training early today, so I’ve got some free time now if you want a real tour.”

“Hero Training?” Morgan said, dusting off his sleeves. “Is that different from your regular training?”

“Oh, it’s a totally separate thing,” Owain said, waving his hand. “Hero Training is all about preparing the mind. Practicing your one-liners, coming up with new battle cries…the important stuff.”

“I haven’t really studied psychological warfare,” Morgan confessed. “I think I’m probably a few levels away from getting there with Mother. Sounds like you really know your stuff, though!”

“I’ve dedicated my life to studying the ways of the hero,” Owain said gravely. “It can be a difficult and treacherous path, but true strength is forged in strife.” He tilted his head at Morgan, who was trying to get back up without putting any weight on his injured foot and looking like an unskilled circus act in the process. “Want me to carry you?”

Morgan knit his brow as he windmilled his arms in an attempt to stay upright on one leg. “Are you sure? I mean, you’re probably tired after all that training.”

“Nah, I don’t think you weigh a whole lot more than Cynthia,” Owain said, catching Morgan by the shoulder before he could fall over again. “Come on, I’ll show you around camp. Everyone here should know the face of the hero that saved our leader from certain death!”

“I didn’t do that much,” Morgan said, not bothering to point out that while the fate of his foot had been uncertain for a hot minute, certain death had never been on the table at any point. “I just helped out a little, that’s all. I mean, what else was I supposed to do?”

“Oh, Morgan.” Owain let out a triumphant little hah. “So modest, and yet, I can tell—in your chest beats the heart of a true hero.”

Morgan grinned as he climbed carefully onto Owain’s back. Owain hooked his arms under Morgan’s knees and straightened up, and for a moment Morgan was struck with deja vu, a rushing in of sense memory of the way the view suddenly spread out in front of him as he clasped his arms around Owain’s neck. There was a jarring sense of vertigo that moved through him like a stiff breeze, and his arms tightened around Owain for a moment until it passed just as quickly as it had come.

Owain’s tour of the camp was not lacking for his usual dramatic flair—the mess tent, according to him, was better known as the Hall of the Heroes’ Feast, and the true name of the bath tent was the Holy Healing Springs of Everlasting Strength. Morgan wasn’t sure how many people besides Owain actually knew about these names, but he took it all in happily. It seemed like Owain didn’t care much for all the doom and gloom talk, and that suited Morgan just fine.

He waved to the others as Owain introduced him, but some of them regarded him with the same air of skepticism as Severa had. Ah, well, he couldn’t really blame them. He’d probably think his story sounded fishy too, and he’d been holed up in his tent since he got here for the most part. The rumor mill in a place like this was probably thriving, and there was no telling what people might’ve been saying over the last few days.

Once they’d completed a circuit of the camp, which was all Morgan needed to form a solid mental map, Owain offered to show Morgan his secret Hero Training spot, which turned out to be a tree-dotted hilltop at the edge of camp. It offered an unobstructed view of the area to the west of camp, a winding road through a field that ran up to a bristling tree line. There were no destroyed homes or villages in this panorama, and Morgan could see the sun slowly heading for that treeline on its declining arc. It must have been a real sight to see at sunset.

Owain crouched down so that Morgan could slide safely back to the ground, and then he flopped down on the grass beside Morgan with a whoosh of breath. He hadn’t uttered a single complaint, but he must have been tired from carting Morgan around all afternoon.

“This is a pretty cool secret training spot,” Morgan said, letting himself fall onto his back. The grass tickled his cheek, a flicker of sense memory from just a few days ago, one of his very first memories. It felt nice just to lie in the sun like this—here, it was quiet, away from the steady bustle of the camp. “That’s a pretty fantastic view there.”

Owain grinned. “Right? It’s the perfect spot for meditating on your next entrance, or even, you know, just to do weapon maintenance.”

Morgan let his head roll to the side to look at Owain. “So why’s it a secret?”

Owain coughed, his gaze sliding to the side. “I mean—it’s not a secret from Inigo or Cynthia. But the others…don’t really get it. They’d probably just make fun of me if they knew I was out here coming up with new move names.”

Morgan’s lips pursed into a frown. “That’s too bad,” he said. “I thought Black Fang Strike sounded pretty cool.”

“Thanks,” said Owain, but he sighed. “I’ve offered to think of cool moves for the others, but they always say no. Well, except for Cynthia, but she has kind of a different angle on the hero thing. But at least she gets it, you know? It can really make a difference, having a good battlecry to get your blood going as you charge into battle. You can’t fight like a hero if you don’t feel like one. And anyway, if they’re going to be passing down legends about the scions of fate who smote Grima out of existence, you want to make sure your weapons already have names. You can’t leave that kind of stuff up to the historians.”

“Makes sense to me,” Morgan said. “I think it’s a shame no one’s ever taken you up on that offer. I mean, I wouldn’t pass up the chance to have Owain Dark bestow a cool new move upon me!”

Owain rolled onto his side and studied Morgan for a second, like he wasn’t sure if Morgan was being serious, but Morgan’s face was an open book, and his intentions were pure.

“I totally would if you wanted me to,” he said. Morgan gave him a bright smile.

“Totally! That’d be great!”

The smile returned in earnest to Owain’s face. “I shall begin meditating on it posthaste. Cynthia said you use thunder magic, right? That’s a pretty solid starting point.”

“I leave it in your capable hands,” Morgan said earnestly. He laid back and closed his eyes, soaking up the warmth of the afternoon sun and the scent of fresh air, the dust of summer on the wind. Owain watched him for a moment.

“Now that we’ve rescued our imperiled countrymen, our mission here has finally come to an end,” he said. “At the first light of dawn, we begin our triumphant march back to Ylisstol, where a hero’s welcome awaits us! So…” He cleared his throat. “Were you gonna come with us?”

He sounded hopeful. Morgan blinked his eyes open. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I mean…I’ve gotta find my mom. Not that she can’t take care of herself, but…still. We’ve always been together.” But then he blew out a breath with a hapless smile. “Then again, it’s not like I’m in any condition to be walking around on my own, and even if I was, I’d really be in trouble if I ran into a pack of Risen like that again. So…yeah, I guess I’ll be tagging along for a little while longer! Guess I’ll get to see your secret technique after all.”

Owain brightened. There was a tinge of relief to his smile. “And I’ll finally get to see the master of lightning at work. That’ll definitely give me some inspiration for your new move.”

Morgan just gave him a sunny smile. Owain watched him for another moment, then folded his hands behind his head and looked skyward.

“Our quests take us far and wide across the land,” he said. “You never know what information we might turn up—perhaps even some clue as to your mother’s whereabouts.”

Morgan frowned slightly. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but…aren’t you guys pretty busy as it is? Taking on Grima and saving the world seems kind of like a full-time job.”

Owain let out a laugh brimming with confidence. “Who says we can’t do both? It’s what heroes do. Besides, if we found your mom, I bet she’d make an incredible ally in the battle for world salvation! You said she’s a master tactician, right?”

“The best there is,” Morgan said without hesitation. “If she were here…she’d know what to do. I just know it.”

Owain rolled his head to the side again. Morgan’s round-eyed gaze met his.

“If your mother really is out there,” Owain said, “you shouldn’t have to look for her alone.”

Morgan blinked at him in surprise, then he dropped his gaze with a smile more reserved than usual. “Thanks, Owain.”

“It’s what friends do,” Owain said with unshakable conviction. He held out a hand, and Morgan let out a little laugh as he took it with a comfortable grip. That was better—that was a real smile.

“I’ve never had friends before,” Morgan said. “At least, not as far as I can remember. But I’ve gotta say, it’s pretty great so far!”

They lay there a little while longer, but the afternoon was beginning to wane and there was little room for idle time when there were preparations to be made, so before long Morgan climbed onto Owain’s back once more, settling himself comfortably with his arms loosely around Owain’s neck. He was glad that Owain didn’t seem to mind carrying him, because there was something about it that made him feel at ease. Someone had done this for him, once upon a time.

Lucina was just emerging from Morgan’s tent with a slight frown when they descended the hill back to camp.

“There you are,” she said, and she smiled faintly as Morgan waved from Owain’s back. “I’m glad to see you’re staying off that foot. Is it healing alright? I’d meant to come by and see how you were doing sooner, but…”

“Seems like running an army keeps you pretty busy.” Morgan flapped a hand. “Don’t worry about it! Owain’s been keeping me pretty entertained.”

Lucina glanced at Owain, and her smile widened slightly. “I’m sure he has. I’m glad to see you’re doing well, at any rate. I don’t suppose you’ve recovered any more of your memory as well?”

Morgan shook his head, but before he could say any more, the heavy beat of wyvern wings sent a ripple gusting through the air, kicking up a small cyclone of dust. Morgan buried his face in the back of Owain’s neck to shield his face against the wind and Lucina looked up, brow furrowed.

“Gerome? What’s wrong?”

“Risen incoming,” said an unfamiliar voice, and Morgan peeked his head back out. He must have missed meeting Gerome earlier, because he was sure he’d remember the guy with the big, obvious mask. “From the east. A small horde of them. If we don’t move quickly—”

Cynthia quickly joined him from above, trying to shield the dust from her pegasus’s wings away from them. “I think they’re like the ones we fought the other day, Lucina! I mean, they smell like them…”

Lucina grimaced, her hand going to her sword hilt while she composed her thoughts. “I need Yarne, Noire, and Nah defending the camp. Tell them to help Brady move all the refugees to the mess tent and hold that line. Everyone else needs to arm themselves and be ready to move out immediately.”

Cynthia and Gerome took off without hesitation to relay her orders, and Lucina nodded at Owain, her expression set. “Owain, let’s go.”

Owain bent his knees to let Morgan down, keeping a hand on his arm until his balance was steady.

“My sword hand thirsts for the black ichor that courses through the foul veins of our enemies,” Owain declared, and he gave Morgan’s arm a little squeeze before letting go. “Stick with Brady and the others for now. They’ll keep you safe until our triumphant return.”

“Wait,” Morgan said, reaching out to grab Owain’s hand before he could draw his sword. “Let me come too! I’ve got my thunder magic, and those things are really dangerous—”

“Not that your aid wouldn’t be appreciated, Morgan, but you’re still injured,” Lucina said. “And we’re in greater numbers this time. We’ll be able to take care of them ourselves.” Lucina’s tone was firm, and she nodded at Owain, who bellowed something else about his sword hand as they set off at a run.

A nasty little feeling was churning in Morgan’s stomach, a restlessness he couldn’t shake even as he crawled into his tent to grab his thunder tome. If the Risen did breach the camp’s perimeter and worse came to worse, he’d rather be able to help defend it. It wasn’t anxiety, although he was definitely worried for his new friends. It was just that he’d been thinking a lot about that battle with the gruesome Risen, replaying it in his head over and over to help alleviate the boredom, and because something about that fight, the way those Risen fought, was nagging at him. Lucina and the others had had unexpected difficulty defeating them, and it wasn’t the threat of necrotic venom. Something about the way they moved was different from what Lucina and the others were used to. He willed his brain to find some conclusion in that data as Brady helped him to the mess tent. If only his mother were here…what would she say? Morgan tried desperately to summon oft-repeated advice, basic situational analysis. He sat on a bench in the mess tent, staring at his field tactics manual, and pressed his hands to the sides of his head with a little furrow of his brow. Observation was key.

“Come on…think, Morgan, thi—waugh!”

He started badly as a winged insect all but flew into his face, seemingly out of nowhere, and he flapped his hands in surprise to chase it away with a grimace. Maybe if this were an idle afternoon, he’d be interested in chasing it, but right now, he had a problem to solve, and it had scattered all his thoughts. He hadn’t even seen the bug coming. He stopped and looked down at his hands for a moment, then in the direction the bug had buzzed away. Morgan grabbed his tome.

“Hey, uh, what’s up? Is everything okay?” Yarne asked as Morgan approached, then limped determinedly past him. “Whoa, where are you going? Everyone’s supposed to stay—h-hey, wait!”

“Sorry!” Morgan’s voice came out strained as he started at a lopsided run, pain shooting through his bad ankle with every other step. He made a beeline for the stables, getting a headstart on the sputtering Yarne. He was banking on what he thought were the statistically favorable odds that he had ever ridden a horse. He really hoped it’d come back to him in the moment. “I’ll bring him right back, I promise!”

If he had ever known how to ride a horse, he wasn’t very good at it. There was a whole lot of painful bouncing in the saddle, and he was doing a bad job pointing the horse in any particular direction—he was just fortunate it happened to want to be running where he needed to go. He could see the battlefield as it came into view, indistinct silhouettes resolving into familiar figures. He could tell they were struggling, just like last time. At this rate, someone was going to wind up injured—and maybe somewhere a little more vital than the foot. He clung white-knuckled to the reins as the horse made for the battlefield at a dead run.

“Lucina!” he yelled, summoning all the breath he had. “Flank them! You’ve gotta flank them!”

Lucina jerked her head in the direction of his voice, wide-eyed, and narrowly dodged a blow from a Risen’s outstretched claws. “Morgan, what are you—”

“You can tell me off later, I promise! Listen, there’s a trick to these things!” Morgan was finding himself breathless, some terrifying cousin to exhilaration pounding in his ears. How was he supposed to make the horse slow down? “It’s those weird-shaped heads—they’ve got virtually no peripheral vision. They’re too fast to fight head-on, but if you hit them in their blind spot, you can beat their reflexes to the punch!”

Lucina’s brow knit as she dodged yet another attack, but this time she lunged past the Risen and pivoted, swinging her sword to cleave clean through its torso from the side. Breathless, she repeated Morgan’s advice as orders to the rest of the squad, and Morgan saw the change ripple out across the battlefield as everyone changed tacks, and the fight began to turn around. It made something rise in his chest that he couldn’t quite describe.

He was badly losing control of the horse. Balance shaken, he finally toppled out of the saddle and hit the ground with a whoosh of breath. He kept one hand tightly clutched around his tome as he fought to regain the wind knocked out of him, but he could hear—and smell—the approaching Risen. It was all well and fine that he’d gotten the word out to Lucina and the others, but the idea of taking another direct attack from those nasty claws did not excite him.

A hand closed around his wrist before he could summon lightning, and Owain pulled him to his feet with an exhilarated grin. Morgan staggered for a moment, and Owain linked an arm with his to keep him upright.

“Charging onto the battlefield on your loyal steed despite your noble injury, huh?” Owain’s voice was bright and breathless as he moved, just enough footwork to swing his sword without throwing Morgan over. “I’ve gotta say, that was a pretty solid entrance for a beginner. You should think about adding a catchphrase next time—taste my righteous steel, wretched beast!” He lunged forward to swing his sword at the unprotected side of a monster making a move for Inigo’s unshielded side. “You know, something along those lines.”

“I hope I can find that horse later,” Morgan said, but even in the thick of battle, Owain’s smile was contagious. “I promised I’d—Severa, behind you!”

He fired off a burst of crackling lightning as Severa pivoted nimbly and jumped back. The Risen, struck in the back with his thunder magic, groaned and lurched to the side, and Severa circled swiftly behind it to drive her sword between its shoulderblades.

“Ugh, how do these things smell even worse when they’re zapped to a crisp?!”

“You’re welco—whoa!” Morgan shifted his focus back to the moment, nearly falling over as Owain half-leapt back to avoid a blow from a new Risen. Attacking Owain head-on, it had the advantage, and Owain couldn’t jump around freely while he had himself tethered to Morgan. Morgan took a step back on his good foot, pulling Owain back with him out of range of another attack—but rather than letting go, he tightened his linked arm around Owain’s. The Risen was already lurching towards them again.

“Owain—quick! Swing me around this way!”

Owain didn’t hesitate, just grinned and pivoted, throwing his weight to the side until Morgan felt his feet leave the ground. Owain let himself be carried by his momentum, the two of them moving as though in a two-step battle waltz taround the side of the approaching monster. Clutching his tome tightly, Morgan scrunched up his face in great concentration, sweat beading on his upper lip. It was always harder to hit a moving target, sure, but when you were the one moving…

The Risen, though too fast to be fooled by a simple pivot, didn’t see the ball of lightning crackle into existence just behind its head, unfolding into a bolt that lanced through its back and protruded out the front of its chest. No more than a few snaps of lightning made it any farther, but the thunderous blowback knocked both Owain and Morgan to the ground. They both got to their hands and knees on the ground, fighting to regain their breath, as the Risen let out a foul, choked noise and toppled to the ground in a stinking heap.

“That was awesome,” Owain wheezed. Morgan grinned and held his hand up for a high-five, but as soon as Owain took it, another monster came lurching towards them with its long, awkwardly-jointed arms extended. Morgan gripped Owain’s hand tightly and pulled, rolling them both out of the way just as its claws gouged into the ground where they’d been a second ago.

Owain landed on top of him with a grunt, the weight of his body pinning Morgan in place. The Risen was already upon them again, and Owain was still getting to his feet, and Morgan willed another snap of lightning to appear as quickly as he could—

The point of a lance bored through the chest of the Risen, and Morgan was rocked by a sharp wave of deja vu as it toppled to reveal Cynthia on her pegasus, lance raised, her cheeks flushed with exertion.

“Another abomination vanquished by Cynthia, champion of justice!” Her pegasus’s hooves grazed the ground, its wings beating in place, and she held out her free hand to Morgan. “Hop on, before one of those things gets you again!”

Owain got to his feet and pulled Morgan with him, helping to hoist him onto the saddle. “Take to the skies, my fellow warriors, and rain death from above!”

“We’ll cover you!” Morgan called as they took flight, and he quickly wrapped his arm around Cynthia’s waist as they arced skyward. Now this was an exhilarating experience—there was a giddy rush in his stomach every time they swooped in for an attack, the Risen falling to pieces like so much paper between Cynthia’s lance and his thunder magic. It was an even greater thrill than the first time they’d fought together, and with a bird’s eye view of the battlefield, Morgan’s mind was overclocking on information and analysis, and in between attacks he shouted instructions into Cynthia’s ear over the din of battle. They were a devastating pair, lending a deadly assist to anyone who seemed about to falter, and Cynthia’s energetic battlecries heralding their every strike seemed to add another bright layer of exhilaration. Time lost its meaning in the rush of wind in Morgan’s ears, and by the time Lucina felled the last Risen, his tactical brain was running so furiously he was still scanning the battlefield for enemies even as Cynthia’s pegasus touched down.

“Victory pried from the maw of death yet another day!” Owain sheathed his sword, wiping some of the mixed sweat and dirt from his face on the back of his sleeve. “You guys make a killer tag team. Morgan, the way you brought the very heavens down upon our enemies—now that deserves a catchphrase!”

“I know, right?” Cynthia beamed. “Something like, I am Morgan, hero of light! Now receive my judgment from on high!”

“Hmm…” Owain’s brow pinched. “What about ‘god of lightning’? No, I think his image is a little too humble for that…lord of lightning?”

“I guess it could use some workshopping—whoa!”

Morgan had started to slide sideways out of the saddle. Owain caught him before he hit the ground, holding Morgan up with one arm under his. Morgan’s eyes were slightly out of focus, and he was leaning heavily against Owain, clutching his tome in both hands with a white-knuckled grip. Cynthia dismounted hurriedly, her pigtails swinging.

“Morgan! Are you alright? You, um, look a little green…”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Morgan said with a wan smile, then broke away from Owain and hobbled a few steps away to be sick in a clump of trampled bushes. Cynthia and Owain each caught him by a shoulder as he started to stagger bathwards. Morgan let out a little burp. “Better now.”

“Maybe you should sit down,” Cynthia said, her brow furrowed.

“I think that’s a great idea,” Morgan said, just as his knees buckled under him. In the heat of battle he hadn’t really noticed, but now that the adrenaline was wearing off, he could feel how much magic he’d used. The usually lively current than ran through him felt hollow and creaking in a way that made him more conscious of it than he generally was. So it was possible to use up too much magic in one go, huh… Well, everyone had limits. Discovering his own was sort of exciting—new data to process, once he had the time to sort through it at all. He looked around, but stopped immediately. It made him dizzy. “Has anyone seen the horse I rode in on?”

A little breath of relief whooshed out of him as he finally sat down. The world was being a little more forgiving with the angle of its tilt now.

“Morgan!”

He looked up at Lucina’s voice to see her striding his way, sheathing her sword with a furrowed brow. Her hair was stuck to her forehead and neck with sweat, and she was still breathing hard. “Are you alright? Were you injured?”

“No, just tired, I think. I guess I must be pretty out of shape compared to you guys!” The easy smile slid off his face, and he winced. “I’m sorry, Lucina. I know you told me to stay behind, but…”

Lucina held up a hand to silence him. “You needn’t apologize, Morgan. Thanks to your advice, we carried the day.”

“I wish I’d figured it out a little sooner,” Morgan said, frowning. “So—everyone’s okay? No one’s in danger of losing a limb, or, er—a kidney?”

“There were a few near misses,” Inigo said with a face, stooping to wipe some black slime from his shield on the grass. “But it seems like everyone pulled through not much more worse for the wear. I’d say that’s worthy of a little celebration, wouldn’t you, Lucina?”

“It’s too soon to rest easy,” Lucina said, shaking her head. “The last time we fought this kind of Risen, it was over an hour’s march away, and I thought we’d extinguished the lot. It can’t be a coincidence that they appeared so close to our camp. We’ll be doubling our perimeter patrol for the night.”

“Right,” Inigo sighed, “of course.”

“Cheer up, Inigo! We’ll be home before you know it, and then we can finally relax a little.” Cynthia held up Morgan’s limp hand like he was the champion of a prizefight. “And treat our guest of honor to a real bed!”

But their guest of honor was in bad need of a lie down, and Cynthia took him on a significantly gentler flight back to the med tent. As soon as Morgan was back in his own tent, he passed out hard in a heap on his cot. Maybe it was just that he’d spent a few sedentary days in his tent before jumping into battle, or that he wasn’t accustomed to fighting like the others were, but he felt incredibly drained now, more tired than he could ever remember being. He fell into a heavy and dreamless sleep, his thunder tome still clutched to his chest.

It was a rustling sound that finally roused him. Another wave of deja vu pulsed through him, and for a moment he thought he smelled the scent of grass again—but it was dark out now, and he was in his tent, not stretched out in a field. He lefted his head to see someone exiting the tent with a rustle of the tent flap.

“Lucina?” he said sleepily. He sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes, and Lucina ducked back into the tent, looking at him with a grave expression.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I just thought I’d check on you, and…” She cleared her throat. “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t have just entered your tent in the middle of the night.”

“I don’t mind,” Morgan said through a yawn, waving his hand. “‘Um…what time is it, anyway?”

“Well past midnight,” Lucina admitted. “I’m…having trouble sleeping. I thought I’d take a walk around camp to quiet my thoughts, and I found myself walking this way. Brady said you hadn’t sustained any serious injuries, but after the way you collapsed back there, I couldn’t help but worry…”

“I’m fine,” Morgan said, patting his hair down for bedhead. He tried to tame the cowlick at the crown of his head with little success. “No, really, I am! I just needed a good nap, I guess. I feel pretty okay now.” He gave up on his hair and peered at Lucina. “So what’s eating you? I thought you’d be feeling pretty good after today’s victory. Er—yesterday’s victory?”

Lucina’s expression dimmed. “That’s just the thing. I’m not the one responsible for that victory—you are.”

“Me?” He was still waking up, but he couldn’t help but let out a hoarse little laugh. “I didn’t do all that much more than anyone else. I just gave you some advice, that’s all. Honestly, I was kind of worried I’d just get in the way! Besides, I couldn’t have led everyone on the battlefield the way you did. When you talk, people really listen.”

Lucina stared at him. “Morgan, that advice saved lives today. If it weren’t for you, we might still have won, but we’d have come away with serious injuries—and with our limited supplies, some of them would undoubtedly have been fatal.”

She closed her eyes, one hand curling into a fist at her side. “What use is my leadership if I only lead my friends to their deaths? There are already so few of us left, and I…”

She drew in a sharp breath and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to speak of my own troubles. There is something I would ask of you.”

She really did have the world on her shoulders, didn’t she? Morgan might have been untethered and missing his mother, but at least he didn’t have to bear a burden on that scale. “Sure,” he said, “shoot.”

“Owain tells me your mother is a skilled tactician, and that you’ve been apprenticed to her for some time now.” Lucina’s gaze was entreating now. “And after today—after you noticed something vital to our success that I failed to—I don’t doubt it in the slightest. I know you’re looking for your mother, but…”

She uncurled her fingers and extended her hand. Her hands were about the same size as his own, but calloused from more combat than Morgan could imagine seeing at her age. “Would you consider joining our cause? Help us defeat Grima and put an end to all the suffering he’s brought? We can use all the help we can get, and…” She smiled slightly. It was that same smile he’d first seen upon waking up, reserved with a little bit of warmth. “I’d be truly fortunate to count a trained tactician among my staff. I believe that with your help, we could truly stand a chance against Grima.”

Morgan blinked, rubbing his face. “I mean, I’m still just an apprentice, but…are you recruiting me for your army?”

“If you’d be willing to fight alongside us, we’d count ourselves lucky to have you.” Lucina’s smile was small, but genuine. “And it doesn’t mean you have to stop looking for your mother, either.”

“Yeah,” Morgan said, thinking back to what Owain had said earlier that day. He also thought about the friends he’d made in such a short period of time—he found himself wanting to keep spending his nights laughing with Owain and Cynthia and Inigo. And going with Owain to his special training spot had warmed Morgan in a way that had pleasantly surprised him. He’d have liked to stay like that a little longer, if only they’d had the time.

He thought about it for a minute, trying to chase away the sleepy clouds fogging up his brain. No doubt fighting with Lucina would bring no shortage of challenges, but those challenges would be new experiences, too, and maybe they could help jog his memory. Besides, if the state of the world was so dire, he ought to help, right? It was what his mother would do, he was sure of it. He had his answer.

“Alright, sure. Count me in!”

He took Lucina’s hand and shook it firmly. Lucina gave him a faintly bewildered look.

“Are you certain? Not that I wouldn’t be thrilled at a yes, but—I thought you might need some time to think about it, at least.”

“The answer seems pretty obvious to me,” Morgan said. “If the person trying to save the whole world thinks I can help, what am I supposed to do, tell her no?”

Lucina breathed out a laugh with obvious relief. “Thank you, Morgan. Truth be told, we could use someone with your morale.” The tasseled medallion on his belt caught her attention, and she leaned in for a closer look. “Is that a Chon’sin charm?”

Morgan picked up the tassel and examined it with a puzzled expression. “Great question. Is it?”

“May I?” Lucina asked, and at Morgan’s assenting nod, she bent to take a closer look. “I’ve never seen this exact design before, but…we’re fortunate to count a few Chon’sin warriors among our ranks, and I’ve seen them bear similar tassels. Charms that bring good luck and protection, or so they say. Is your mother from Chon’sin?”

“No idea,” Morgan said, tracing a finger over the design stamped on the bronze medallion. He’d have to see if he could read up on this Chon’sin place once they got to Ylisstol. Lucina straightened up, brushing her hair from her face.

“Well, I’ll leave you to your rest,” she said, and though she looked tired, she looked somehow more settled than when Morgan had woken up. “Get as much sleep as you can—we set out for Ylisstol at dawn.”

“That goes double for you, Captain Lucina,” Morgan said, already making himself comfortable on the cot again. “Er, Commander Lucina? Princess Lucina? General…? Anyway, no matter the rank, a good leader needs her rest every bit as much as the rest of us! Imagine if you fell asleep in the middle of a staff meeting.”

Lucina smiled faintly. “Thank you, Morgan,” she said, and disappeared through the tent flap.

Chapter Text

“And so we meet yet again, my fated ally-versary,” Owain bellowed, throwing out an arm dramatically to fling wide his imaginary cape. “Though it may not be on my terms, I will never hesitate to cross swords with you, for I know that the legendary blood that courses through my veins will always prove victorious in the end!”

Morgan grinned in uncontained delight, his face lit by the dappled sunlight filtering through the trees overhead. The cherry trees in the orchard where they usually played—ahem, ran their Justice Cabal sessions—were in full bloom this time of year, and the crisp spring breeze that moved through the branches occasionally shook free a few pink petals. Morgan schooled his face into a more grave expression befitting a fated encounter.

“We’ll see about that, Owain Dark! Today, our fate is decided once and for all—and I have the upper hand.” Morgan let out a laugh, a little heh heh. They were still working on his I’ve got you where I want you now laugh, but Owain had to admit, it was kind of charming as-is. “For you were foolish enough to walk right into my trap—you followed me all the way to Sherbet Petal Pavilion, whose powerful natural aura amplifies my magic powers tenfold!”

“I did? I mean—” Owain shook his head and flashed Morgan a heh, so you thought smile. “True, you may have led me right into your power spot, but there’s something you haven’t planned for!”

Morgan’s eyes widened, his mouth open in an eager smile. He always did appreciate a good dramatic wind-up.

“Oh? What could I, Morgan the Light, world-renowned tactician, have possibly overlooked?”

Owain just let out a tch. “Oh, Morgan. If you only knew the true history of this place…you’d know that I spent six months training here at this very pavilion. Not only do I know every rock, flower, and blade of grass, I too learned to draw on the spirits of nature that dwell here!”

“Ooh, new lore! I like it.” Morgan cleared his throat to slip back into character and let out a suitable gasp, one hand going to his chest. “No! How can this be?! To think my winning advantage could be overturned so quickly…”

Owain let out a low chuckle, advancing towards Morgan with dramatically timed steps.

“I’ve been studying you for a while now, my ally-versary. With every move you make, you reveal more about yourself—I know how you think. Luring me here, of all places? True, I may have fallen for your deception today, but it will be for the last time.”

Morgan backed away, step for step, until he unexpectedly bumped up against a tree trunk. Owain closed the distance between them in a few easy strides, his arms out in an I’ve already won before you’ve made your first move gesture.

“You’re getting careless, tactician, formidable though you might be.” Owain slammed his hand against the tree trunk next to Morgan’s hand for dramatic effect. Morgan suppressed a noise of excitement. “You failed to discover the true history of this place, and now, there is no move you can make that I cannot predict.”

Morgan’s eyes were practically shining with the brightness of his smile. “Oh, is that so? Could you have predicted…this?”

Owain barely had time to react before he felt Morgan’s hands on his face, cupping around his jaw, and his stomach did a neat somersault when Morgan leaned in. It seemed to be stuck in suspended animation as Morgan pressed his lips to Owain’s in a firm and decisive kiss, and Owain’s brain stalled out immediately, hands frozen uselessly in place.

The sudden sound of Lucina’s voice cracked open the moment, calling for Morgan, and Morgan broke away hurriedly with a look of dismay, his hands falling away from Owain’s face. It felt like they had left scorch marks in their place.

“Oh, shoot, I’m supposed to be meeting with Lucina right now—I’m sorry, Owain! I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”

He was already wriggling away and off before Owain could answer, calling back to Lucina in apology. Belatedly, Owain’s hands went to his face where Morgan’s had just been. It wasn’t just his imagination; his face was flaming hot all over. He could still feel the phantom sensation of Morgan’s fingers pressed lightly into his jaw, pulling him down for the kiss—the kiss. Morgan had just kissed him. There was very little room for interpretation on that point. That had definitely been a kiss. Owain stared after Morgan’s retreating back, his mouth working but only managing a creaky sputter.

“I am not dancing in the middle of battle,” Inigo said indignantly over lunch, his face flushed pink. Cynthia gave him an entreating look, hands clasped around her spoon.

“Won’t you at least consider it? I mean, it’s a shame to let those moves go to waste…and just imagine what it would do for morale! Everyone would fight twice as hard!”

“Absolutely not,” Inigo said, looking mortified. “We’re fighting hordes of undead, and you want me pirouetting around in the middle of a fight? Killing Risen is what keeps morale up, not my…moves.” His face was getting hotter by the minute. Why did she have to bring this up at lunch, in the crowded mess hall, where just about anyone could hear her? “Besides, everyone would be watching! I can’t perform if everyone’s—staring at me!”

“Just look at it as an opportunity to overcome your crippling stage fright!” Cynthia jumped to her feet, planted one foot on the bench, and waved her spoon triumphantly. “Two birds with one stone, just like that!”

Inigo was spared from having to come up with any further defense when Owain sat down heavily on the bench next to Cynthia, though his tray was empty of any food.

“Owain,” Inigo said with tremendous relief, “thank the gods you’re here. I’ve never been happier to see you in my life. Will you please explain to Cynthia that—er, are you alright?”

Owain didn’t answer. His face was red from ear to ear, his expression frozen in a look of open-mouthed stupefaction. He seemed incapable of directing his gaze at anything with focus or, apparently, any kind of speech. Cynthia leaned in, concerned, and tried waving a hand in front of his face.

“Hey, Owain, snap out of it! What’s wrong? You’re kind of freaking me out…”

Owain stared into the middle distance for a full minute, during which Cynthia and Inigo grew seriously worried, before he said in a cracked voice, “If someone kisses you in Justice Cabal, does it count in real life?”

Inigo stared at him open-mouthed for a beat, then let out a snort. “Oh, please. That did not happen. He did not.”

Cynthia, on the other hand, was looking at Owain with shining eyes. “Oh my gosh, did he really?”

Owain nodded dumbly. Inigo looked between the two of them in disbelief. “Seriously? Who in their right mind would find that childish roleplay a suitably romantic setting?”

“Morgan would,” Cynthia said, and Inigo opened his mouth to issue a counterpoint, but found he had none. Cynthia elbowed Owain in the side. “Sooo? He kissed you, what happened next? Come on, you can’t leave us hanging!”

“Nothing happened,” Owain said, still sounding dazed. “Lucina came calling for him and he ran away.”

Cynthia and Inigo exchanged a wince. Well, that…wasn’t very romantic.

“He didn’t say anything at all?” Cynthia said. Owain shook his head. She furrowed her brow and made a thoughtful noise. “So, what, he just kissed you out of nowhere and then ran off? Even if Lucina needed him for something, that’s not really like Morgan…”

“It—wasn’t totally out of nowhere,” Owain said, and Cynthia and Inigo stood at attention as the plot thickened. “I mean—it was in character. We were, uh—you know, in the banter phase, and he said, ‘could you have predicted this?’, and—”

He gestured uselessly with his hands. Inigo rolled his eyes so hard he was at risk of spraining something. Owain looked at the two of them helplessly.

“So, like—does that count for real, or—or—no one’s ever done that before,” he finished lamely.

“Now that I believe,” Inigo said, pulling a hand over his face. Cynthia kicked him under the table. Inigo let out a grunt and dropped his fork, shooting her a plaintive look that she paid zero attention to.

“So ask him! It’s Morgan.” She gave him an encouraging smile, a real go fight win! look. It usually worked on Owain. “You know he’ll give you an honest answer.”

But Owain’s face somehow got even redder. Never before had the prospect of talking to Morgan seemed so…daunting. Usually he didn’t have to think at all about what to say to Morgan. They didn’t need to break character or be serious to understand each other—things between them were just easy like that. At least, Owain had thought they were. He stared down at his empty tray.

“What if he says no? No it—it wasn’t for real?”

“Then you roll with the punches and move on,” Inigo said with a sigh. This, at least, he could help with. He reached over to put a hand on Owain’s shoulder, shaking his head. “I’m no stranger to rejection, my friend, and it certainly stings every time—but it does fade. At least you can be reasonably certain that Morgan won’t laugh at you. Or hit you.”

It was a little worrying that Owain didn’t take the obvious potshot. He seemed to really be at a loss. He rubbed a hand over his mouth, looking vaguely haunted.

“…What if he says yes?”

“Oh, for—which answer do you want?”

Owain looked absolutely paralyzed by the question. He squeezed his eyes shut, his face contorting into a look of anguish, and he clutched at his right arm with a strangled noise. “Blood…boiling…argh, feelings overflowing…sword hand—”

Inigo swatted him on the shoulder. “Don’t you get started with that nonsense. Cut it out and act like a grown man for once! Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone react to being kissed like this.”

“That’s because no one’s ever kissed you without being pestered about it first,” Cynthia said around a mouthful of food, and Inigo’s face flushed a dark red. None of this seemed to be helping Owain at all.

Cynthia looked at him with a mixture of genuine sympathy and concern. They liked Morgan in part because he was so easy to get along with—and close friends were hard to come by these days. No wonder it was throwing Owain for a loop.

“Need some time to think it over?” she asked. Owain nodded, his face sinking deeper into his hands. She just sighed and patted him on the leg, flashing him an encouraging smile. “Alright, you got it. We’ve got you covered for now!”

Inigo looked dubious about being included in that we, but he glanced at Owain with genuine curiosity.

“Have you really never thought about it before?” he said. “I mean, the two of you spend so much time together. All that frolicking about in the orchards—putting your weird little games aside, chasing a fair maiden through a winding maze of trees in full bloom…that does sound like a thrilling time. Morgan’s an odd one to be sure, but I suppose even he might not be oblivious to its romantic charms. Well, you, on the other hand…”

Owain let out a choked noise of anguish. Cynthia glared at Inigo.

“Give him a break! As if you wouldn’t totally freak out if a girl kissed you out of nowhere.” She eyed Owain’s vacant tray. “Hey, Owain? Why don’t you go get some food? We’ve got training after this. You’re gonna need your strength!”

Owain nodded wordlessly and got up, walking woodenly across the mess hall with his tray. He walked in the wrong direction for ten full paces before staggering around and heading toward the serving area. Inigo watched him go, lips pursed.

“Good gods, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him like that before. I don’t remember him getting like this over you,” Inigo said with a touch of awe. Cynthia stirred the dregs of her soup with her spoon.

“Well, he wasn’t.” Cynthia and Owain had been each other’s first kiss, around the time Inigo had started fixating on flirting as his new hobby and primary distraction. They’d wanted to know what all the hype was about—it turned out kissing was pretty alright, and they liked each other well enough already, so they kept on doing it. Inigo had sulked for weeks once he’d found out. “But we’ve known each other since forever, you know? It’s different. Morgan…he’s been with us for a while now, but there’s so much we still don’t know about him. Heck, he barely knows anything about himself. So Owain’s probably worried because he doesn’t understand what Morgan’s feeling, and that he’ll mess everything up between them somehow, no matter how he handles it.”

Inigo made a thoughtful noise. “That was insightful.”

Cynthia flashed him a grin. “Hey, no one knows the co-founder of the Justice Cabal like I do!” But it quickly faded, and she sighed. “I just wish I knew what Morgan was thinking. I hope neither of them winds up with their feelings hurt…”

The next morning at breakfast, Owain seemed to have recovered some of his composure, but he still seemed off balance, distracted away from his usual boisterous energy. Cynthia waved him over, patting the spot on the bench next to her. He hailed her and Inigo with a flowery but only half-hearted greeting and took a seat. At least there was actually food on his tray this time. Cynthia leaned her head against Owain’s shoulder with a hopeful smile.

“Sooo…have you figured out what you’re going to say to Morgan?”

The panicked look immediately stole back over Owain’s face. The truth was that he hadn’t figured out much of anything at all—he couldn’t even reflect too long on the fleeting moment Morgan had kissed him without his mind going into blank paralysis. Inigo waved his spoon.

“It’s not about what he’s going to say. All he has to do is ask a simple question.” Inigo pointed his spoon at Owain. “It’s how you say it that matters. You need to hold yourself with confidence—the bolder the better, I always say. Never underestimate the power of self-confidence.”

“That would be a great idea if that strategy had ever once worked for you,” Cynthia said with no trace of mercy, to which Inigo flushed indignantly and dropped his spoon back into his bowl of groats. “But I was thinking more about helping Owain with his lines. You know, having a good rejection speech is just as important as an acceptance speech!”

Owain’s face was fully red again in record time, his expression more daunted by the minute. “It kind of feels like you guys have already decided for me…”

“Of course not! You take your time figuring it out! Just…we’re rooting for you, you know?” Cynthia flashed him an encouraging smile and a thumbs up. “And with that, I’m off for seconds! Kjelle was on mess duty last night, so I decided to skip out and eat some stale rations instead.”

“A wise move,” Inigo said with a slight grimace, one hand going to his stomach. Cynthia scooted off with her tray, and Inigo leaned forward, wrestling with the temptation to flick Owain in the forehead. It’d annoy him for sure, but that’d at least be a reaction. Owain’s face was still flushed, and he was doing a whole lot of staring at his food and not a whole lot of eating it.

“So who’s winning the staring contest?” Inigo asked dryly, but Owain didn’t so much as frown at him. Inigo sighed. “You’re going to run out of time to eat at this rate, and it’s more training for us this morning. And not that I’m not a man of romance, but don’t you think you’re overreacting just a bit? I mean, it’s not as though he proposed on the spot.”

“That’s not the point,” Owain said, the words coming out a mumble. “I don’t spend all my time thinking about this stuff, okay?”

“Yes,” Inigo said, “because you spend every waking moment contemplating matters of divine importance.”

“I do,” Owain argued, though his face was still red. A noise of frustration rose from his throat. “No, the thought never crossed my mind. I didn’t have any reason to think he was—” His mind still felt numb, stunned stupid. “That he was interested in me. Like that, I mean. We just…you know.”

It came out incredibly lame, and flimsy even to his own ears. Inigo was looking at him over the rim of his cup, looking at him with the precise kind of judgmental expression Inigo always wore when he was claiming he wasn’t being judgmental.

“Yes, I think I do know,” Inigo said, and for a moment Owain wanted to reach over and upend Inigo’s tray into his lap. “Gods, sometimes I don’t know which of you is more oblivious. At any rate, you’re certainly not going to figure it out by not talking to Morgan. All the wild imagination in the world isn’t going to furnish you with any real answer.”

Inigo glanced towards the entrance and he waved to someone across the hall with a smugly pleased look. “Ah, and fortune smiles our way! Here comes Morgan now. You can talk this out and get your answer, and whatever it is…well, we’ll be able to put all this silly drama behind us.”

“What? No!” Owain went wild-eyed with panic, and he hunched, trying with little success to duck out of sight. “You have to hide me!”

“Absolutely not,” Inigo said. “You’re being ridiculous. Just talk to him! Gods, I’ll change tables and give you some privacy, alright?”

“No, seriously, Inigo,” Owain said, looking around frantically for a place to hide. He looked as harrowed as if he were being chased down by a horde of Risen. “I’m really not ready to talk to him yet, okay? So please, just help me this one time!”

There was nothing affected about the desperation in his voice—that was honest-to-gods begging. Inigo conceded with a huffed sigh, his cheeks a little pink.

“Alright, you can—hide under the table, I suppose? Not that it’s really going to—”

Owain was already scrambling under the table. His boot disappeared under the surface just as Morgan made his way over to them, wading through the sea of people murmuring about the mess hall. As ever, Morgan had his uncanny glow of cheerfulness about him despite the grim mood hanging over the castle. Inigo found it vaguely unnerving in a way that was unique to Morgan—there was nothing affected about it, nor did it seem to stem from a need or effort to shield himself from the horrors of their world. Rather, there was something blindingly oblivious about it, as though he oppressive air didn’t quite permeate his mind. Befitting of an amnesiac, Inigo supposed, and he would never begrudge their dark world even the smallest bit of light. But but he never could quite shake the odd feeling that Morgan’s blithe sincerity seemed to bring, or that there seemed to be something fundamentally off about Morgan’s disposition.

“Hey, Inigo!”

“Good morning, Morgan,” Inigo said, and stifled the urge to roll his eyes as he felt Owain tense against his leg under the table. All Morgan had to do was look down and he’d see Owain right away—it wasn’t as though they had the luxury of tablecloths these days. This little subterfuge wouldn’t last long. “Dropping in for a spot of breakfast?”

“Just leaving, actually. The staff meeting let out early, so I thought I’d get in before the rush.” Morgan blew a lock of hair away from his forehead. He was peering around through the crowd, looking just about anywhere except down. “I was wondering if Owain’s here with you?”

“Afraid not,” Inigo said, lying through his teeth. “Haven’t seen him all morning.”

He swore Owain’s sigh of relief was clearly audible. Inigo nearly kicked him. Did Owain want Morgan to notice he was there? Morgan’s cheerful smile pinched into something a little dimmer.

“Really? I wonder if he somehow beat me here this morning…but that would’ve been really early.” Morgan let out a little sigh. “Well, if you see him, will you let him know I was looking for him?”

“Sure thing,” Inigo said, waiting any minute now for Morgan to notice that Owain was currently eye-level with his boots. “Want me to take a message?”

“Mm…no, that’s okay. Just let him know he can find me in the training yard until dinner. Thanks, Inigo!”

And then he bounded off without further ado, failing entirely to notice Owain’s presence. Huh. Well, he didn’t seem like a lovelorn young man fervently searching for the object of his affections. Not that Inigo knew what lovelorn would even look like on Morgan, whose face only seemed to know mild dismay at worst. Maybe there really hadn’t been any intent behind that kiss, and Owain was in line for a rejection after all. Morgan hardly seemed that insensitive—but oblivious? Yes, very possibly. Gods knew his schemes tended toward the harebrained, no matter how handy he was in the war room. Perhaps one of his and Owain’s little games had finally gone too far, and the two of them would finally have to reckon with reality.

“I cannot believe he didn’t notice you,” Inigo said.

“Didn’t notice who—hey!” Cynthia let out a yell of surprise as she dropped back into her seat with a refreshed tray, only for her boot to collide with Owain’s back. He let out a grunt of pain. Cynthia twisted to peer down at him with a little scrunch of her nose. “What are you doing down there?”

“Hiding from Morgan,” Inigo said ruthlessly before Owain could answer. “You just missed him.”

“I am not hiding,” came Owain’s indignant voice from around the vicinity of their ankles. “Owain Dark does not hide! He—he bides his time until the right moment to strike!”

“You literally begged me to hide you,” Inigo said. Owain punched him in the knee. Inigo kicked him in the shoulder in return.

“Oh, enough,” Inigo snapped, rolling his eyes. “Look, you heard him. You’re going to see him at training later this morning anyway.”

“I just remembered I have urgent hero business,” Owain said quickly. He’d still made no move to crawl out from under the table. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to join you in today’s training, but weep not over my absence, for it is only temporary! Once I overcome the tempest trial which I now face, I shall join you in our glorious training once more!”

“You’re going to brood in your room all day writing in your diary, aren’t you?” Inigo said over the rim of his cup. Owain stuck his head out from under the table to shoot him an indignant glare.

“I am not! A-and it’s not a diary!”

“Owain,” Cynthia said as he finally crawled out, her brow knit, “you know you can’t avoid Morgan forever, right? Sooner or later he’s going to figure out something’s up—probably sooner—and what if he starts to think you’re mad at him? You’ve gotta let him know what you’re feeling! A heartfelt confession is the most heroic move here!”

“Morgan kissed him,” Inigo pointed out. “If anyone here’s making a heartfelt confession, wouldn’t it be Morgan? Not to put the cart before horse, but it’s not as though he can be totally oblivious.”

Owain was red in the face again—it didn’t take much, apparently, where Morgan was concerned—and he scrambled to his feet, grabbing his tray off the table.

“My Hero Training waits for no man! Until we meet again, my friends!”

“Owain, wait, you have to—” Cynthia broke off with a sigh. Owain was already booking it for the exit. “Well, at least he won’t be training on an empty stomach, I guess.”

Owain spent all day consulting his secret manual, but he’d never written about any scenario in which one’s sworn rival responds to a challenge with a kiss. In hindsight, it seemed like such an obvious route—though Morgan had been right that Owain would never had anticipated such a move from him. The situation obviously merited further consideration. It opened up whole new avenues for emotionally charged dramatic moments of the heroic variety for sure.

The problem was that any time Owain thought too hard about it, all he could think of was the way Morgan’s lips had felt so warm against his, and that mischievous flash of a smile on Morgan’s face in the moment just before he leaned in, and Owain would end up helpless to do anything except press his face into his hands with a decidedly unheroic groan. And scream quietly into a pillow, just once. The thought was just too distracting, too overwhelming, and Owain couldn’t shake the phantom sensation of not knowing what to do with his hands.

As the day wound on, Owain still couldn't seem to untangle his feelings into something he could parse. He avoided training for the rest of the day, though he was sure he’d get an earful from Laurent later about bringing down the army average down or whatever. He waited until it was dark to go out—not to the training yard, where Kjelle or some other overzealous soldier might still be training, but to the orchard where he and Morgan habitually held their Justice Cabal sessions when they were in Ylisstol. No one else really came here, especially not at night.

Skipping out on training had spared him a confrontation with Morgan, but it had left him restless with a day’s worth of pent up energy, and it wasn’t long before he was swinging his training sword hard enough to break a sweat. At first he was just practicing sword forms, but his sword hand was far too restless to be sated with such tame means. He took to practicing swings against the trunk of one of the flowering trees, letting his mind sink into the sensation of each strike against the tree, the reverberation of recoil through his arm.

It was easier to let himself think about it out here, every blow absorbing the shock of Morgan’s impact on his mind. But it wasn’t getting him anywhere. He still couldn’t sort out how he actually felt—what he wanted. He wanted an answer from Morgan—he needed one, the question burning in his chest—but he didn’t know which answer would disappoint him. He had the sinking feeling that it could be either.

It had just never occurred to him before to consider Morgan as more than a friend. He just…liked being with Morgan a lot, that was all. Morgan was fun, and funny, and he had the kind of wild imagination Owain really respected. They never looked too far into the future, none of them did—the horizon of tomorrow always seemed a distant enough goal, and so Owain gave it little thought, taking it one day at a time, living in those precious moments when the world of Justice Cabal shifted in place over reality. It was enough to take it one day at a time. At least it was to Owain. Swinging at the tree until his arms were sore, all he could figure out was that he just wanted to be able to keep being around Morgan.

He let his heavy arms drop to his sides while he caught his breath. A few petals shaken loose by the final blow drifted down on the breeze, coming to rest on his shoulder. He looked over at the tree he’d been laying into so mercilessly and grimaced slightly. The bark around where he’d been aiming was worn away in a large, scratchy patch. These were the royal orchards, not the training yard…in theory, anyway. The truth was that the trees that survived here had done so of their own accord, because no one had been tasked with keeping the grounds in years. It was still thriving in its own way—hordes of Risen had marched burning paths through here once, but the orchard had grown over the scarred parts and reclaimed the area, making this part of the castle grounds its own, weeds and grass and wildflowers growing and sprawling as they pleased. It was one of the reasons it was such a great locale for Justice Cabal.

Owain became aware of the presence behind him just before he heard the footsteps, boots treading lightly on overgrown grass. He turned halfway to see Morgan step out from behind a tree, eyeing the battered tree trunk, then back at Owain.

“Yikes. I’d hate to be that bad guy.” He had a smile on, but his usual cheer was muted. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you. It’s just, I didn’t see you at training today, and I thought maybe I’d find you here…”

Damn. Somehow Owain hadn’t thought Morgan would still be looking for him at this hour, hadn’t accounted for that dogged perseverance. But Owain couldn't run away now, not without looking like a coward. He was already starting to feel like one. He tried to clear his throat, feeling his chest go tight just at the sight of Morgan.

“M-my sword hand could not be sated by ordinary training today—nay, I was called away by the untamed stirrings of my soul!”

Morgan seemed to take this in stride, as he always did. “Oh, neat! So…new move debuting soon?”

“It’s…a work in progress,” Owain said lamely, and there followed a momentary lull. It felt like a yawning gulf. Things had never been awkward between them like this before.

“Well, I look forward to seeing you bust it out in Justice Cabal once it’s done.” Morgan’s cheer might have been a little subdued, but it was dauntless nonetheless. “Speaking of…”

Owain felt his heart jump into his throat. He couldn’t predict what Morgan was about to say, and for some reason he couldn’t articulate, he knew that if he didn’t ask the question first himself, he might not survive the answer.

“Did you—” Owain’s voice snagged in his throat, and Morgan closed his mouth, watching with inquisitive patience. Owain could feel his eyes pulled to the ground with the sheer force of gravity, but only a coward would refuse to meet his rival’s gaze, and he forced himself to keep his eyes on Morgan’s face. But there was something about Morgan’s sunny smile, bright even in the pale moonlight, that made his stomach wobble, his courage waver. He was unbearably conscious of his heart thudding in his ears. He wasn’t used to sudden bouts of shyness like this, unarmored moments he couldn’t forge through with theater and bravado. His hands were clammy around his training sword, and he realized he was gripping it with white-knuckled strength.

“When you—last time, when you kissed me,” Owain said, fighting to keep his voice from falling to a mumble. Even the simplest of words seemed suddenly difficult to produce. It was so frustrating that despite Morgan’s easy, open smile, Owain couldn’t tell what he was thinking at all. “Was that, um, for real, or…?”

Morgan looked taken aback by the question, but then he let out just a breath of a laugh. For one paralyzing moment, Owain thought that Morgan was laughing at him. But Morgan’s smile was sheepish, a little embarrassed, even.

“I mean…isn’t it obvious? I know we make a game out of it, but you always say that Justice Cabal is real. We might not be swinging real swords around, but the feelings are real, aren’t they?”

Owain nodded, his lips numb. Morgan let his head tilt to the smile, his smile growing unusually self-conscious.

“I guess that maybe wasn’t the best strategy for communicating my feelings,” he admitted, and Owain’s heart thumped painfully in his chest again. He tried to remember how to breathe. “It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I didn’t account for the possibility of any interruptions…”

Owain found his mouth suddenly dry. It felt like his heart was trying to claw its way out of his chest. “So wait, you—like me?”

He’d meant to phrase it differently, cloaked in some cooler verbiage, not so naked and vulnerable. He was already trying to adlib a better line when Morgan just smiled at him, and his train of thought careened wildly off the tracks.

“Well, yeah,” Morgan said, and for the first time Owain could recall seeing, there was a flush of embarrassment in Morgan’s cheeks, barely visible in the moonlight. “Kind of a lot, actually! I’ve never had a crush on anyone before, so it took me a little while to figure it out, but…I want to hang out with you pretty much all of the time, and you’re funny and cute—especially when you’re being funny—and…”

Morgan’s confidence was quickly losing ground to Owain’s lengthening silence, and embarrassment crept further onto his face, his gaze falling away. “I mean, if you don’t feel the same way, we can totally retcon that scene and forget all about it! I just want to keep hanging out with you. I’d be fine just with that, honest.”

When Owain still didn’t produce an answer, still staring red-faced and disquieted, Morgan’s smile grew visibly nervous and started to slip away. He let out a laugh, trying to play it off, but it came out weak and forced.

“I guess I kind of put you on the spot there…but, um, it’s okay! You can take your—uh?”

Morgan came up short as Owain dropped his training sword, closed the distance between them in two staggering strides, and clasped his hands tightly around Morgan’s. They were smaller than Owain’s and not quite as calloused, his skin always cool to the touch. Owain threw all of his psychological weight into ignoring how hot his face felt, how red he knew he must have been.

“You need not wait a moment longer, my eternal ally-versary!” he burst out, the words coming to him only in the moment he spoke them. Something was unfolding itself in his chest, faster than he could keep up with, the unbearable feeling of something stretching out its wings against the cage of his ribs. It felt suffocating and freeing all at once, pieces clicking into place in his heart so effortlessly he was already starting to wonder how he’d struggled so much with them. “B-because—because in my breast burns a fiery passion to rival even yours!”

Morgan blinked. “It does? Er—there does?”

“Yes! Though it lay dormant for many moons, banked embers in my heart, until your impassioned words stoked the flames into a rampaging blaze! Even now, I can feel it raging through my blood like the sacred fire of Durandal! Argh, I can’t…control…”

His hands were trembling a little dramatically, but it was only to cover up the way he was clutching at Morgan’s hands. Morgan just puffed out a little laugh and pressed his cheek against the back of one of Owain’s hands, which stopped trembling immediately as Owain felt his stomach go all wobbly instead.

“Boy, am I glad to hear it! I was really starting to think I’d shot myself in the foot there.” Morgan’s face was still flushed a pale pink in the moonlight, but he looked immensely relieved. “But…you really don’t have to rush anything on my account. I guess I underestimated the element of surprise.”

“Owain Dark is always decisive when it comes to matters of the heart,” Owain declared, in spite of the fact that he’d crawled under a table to avoid Morgan less than twelve hours ago. But it was easier to talk to Morgan like this. To hell with Inigo’s advice—what did he know about boys, anyway, or Morgan, for that matter? He barely knew anything about girls. “It’s true, I may have been blind to my own feelings, but now that you have flung wide the curtains, the radiant dawn that rises on my heart is brilliant beyond compare!”

He meant it, too, not just a wash of theater and flair. It wasn’t all new, he realized, not really, a mix of things, an awakening to a presence he hadn’t paid much heed to, might never have if Morgan hadn’t shed a little light on it. He really did just like spending time with Morgan, and he liked being close—all those times he’d carried Morgan on his back or held his hand, even just long enough to pull him to his feet, Owain had felt a warmth there, and he wanted to be closer to it. There was so little light in their world, and Morgan seemed to shine effortlessly. The world seemed a little less grim next to Morgan, and Owain found he couldn’t stand the idea of losing that. And he wanted to kiss Morgan again—they’d been cut tragically short, and he’d barely had a taste.

Owain cleared his throat, casting his gaze back over Morgan, whose smile had opened like a flower in full bloom. “So, uh…do you wanna pick up where we left off?”

Morgan’s smile grew even wider with a flash of his teeth. It was the same smile that had been on his face in the moment before he’d kissed Owain, and Owain felt his stomach do another giddy leap.

“Oh, you mean the part where I did this?”

This time, Owain ought to have seen it coming; Morgan telegraphed it from a mile away. But he still found himself momentarily paralyzed when Morgan pressed his lips to Owain’s again, and Owain was once more overcome with the floundering feeling of not knowing what to do with his hands, except to clutch them more tightly around Morgan’s.

But this kiss barely lasted longer than the first before Morgan pulled back with a triumphant little look.

“And thus, the hex is complete…looks like you fell into my trap after all. Now I’ve sealed your sword arm’s hidden power!”

Morgan broke away from Owain before he could react and ducked behind the nearest tree, leaving him standing there stupid and empty-handed.

“Wh—get back here, craven! You have to face your opponent head-on in an honorable duel! Hey, were you planning on running away this whole time?!”

Owain took off after Morgan on a sputtered delay. Morgan’s laughter rang out behind him as he weaved between the trees, shadowed under moonlit blossoms. Maybe they didn’t really need to work on his laugh after all. Owain would’ve been happy just to keep hearing him laugh like this.

After letting Owain chase him halfway around the orchard, Morgan came to a pivot to face Owain in front of a tree in full bloom. Owain found himself having to skid to a stop, his heart thumping more wildly in his chest than he could ever recall, even moreso than the most thrilling and absorbing of their sessions.

“Oh, if it’s a confrontation you want, I’m happy to oblige,” Morgan said cheerfully. “But what can you do with the source of your greatest power severed? Mwahaha!”

“My eternal rival…to think you’d stoop to such lows.” Owain let his head hang for a dramatic beat, before he snapped it up to lock eyes with Morgan. “Never did I think you’d go so far as resort to the dark arts to best me in combat…what darkness crept into your heart while I was on my hero quest? If only I’d stayed at your side, perhaps you would not have fallen to such dire measures…”

Morgan looked like he was really enjoying the drama—he never seemed to mind when Owain laid on it on a bit thick. Owain delighted in this creative license to maximalize his wild imagination. He raised a hand to the heavens, fingers curled inward.

“You have my word, my brother-in-arms! As soon as I free myself from the curse that seals away my power, I pledge to set your heart free from the darkness that has enthralled it!”

He paused and peered at Morgan. “So…if I can’t use my legendary powers, how do I break the curse?”

Morgan grinned. “The same way you got it,” he said, and then immediately turned and started scrambling up the tree. A burst of pink petals shook free and fell over Owain in a gentle shower as he watched Morgan disappear into the foliage. Owain found himself grinning giddily despite the heat in his cheeks, calling out to Morgan in a mighty bellow.

“You’ve made a fatal mistake, my friend! By Kieran’s axe, I’ll not let you escape again!”

It was late, and they were probably disturbing someone’s sleep somewhere in the castle, but the rest of the world seemed to melt away as Owain climbed up after Morgan. Morgan had a knack for climbing trees, and his smaller frame made it easier for him to navigate the tangle of branches. But Owain, too, was a seasoned tree-climber since childhood, and it wasn’t long before he caught up to Morgan, who hadn’t gone all that far, stopping at the highest branch that would bear their weight. Morgan was seated comfortably against the trunk, straddling the branch, though he was doing his best to look as though he’d been dramatically cornered. Owain hoisted himself onto a branch jutting out adjacent to Morgan’s, hooking his arm around the trunk so he could lean forward and block any possible escape—in that direction, anyway. Morgan was watching him with eager anticipation, the relief in him all resolved into comfort and excitement, every moment to him a new horizon.

“Ha! I’ve got you just where I want you now,” Owain said triumphantly, and Morgan let out an unconvincing but earnest gasp. People really underestimated the value of imagination and enthusiasm, Owain thought. “Once your dastardly hex has been lifted, I’ll join powers with the natural spirits of this place to cleans your spirit of all evil tampering—and then, we can finally resume our righteous training in pursuit of our true and noble goal—to push each other to surpass our limits!”

Morgan was so close that Owain could almost feel his breath. He felt his hands start to go sweaty, threatening his grip on the tree. His heartbeat was suddenly very loud in his ears, and if there was a world beyond the branches and blossoms all around them, a cold world that ate its young because it was being devoured itself, then he had forgotten it. There was only the heat in his face, and Morgan’s bright, expectant smile, and a vacuum of sound that seemed to drain out of his ears all at once.

Owain leaned over and, swallowing back a wave of last-minute nerves, kissed Morgan. The same chaste kiss Morgan had given him twice now—but then he felt Morgan smile against him and imagined how that smile must look right now, and it was suddenly not enough. Owain tilted his head slightly, opening his mouth only enough to capture Morgan’s lower lip between his own, and Morgan let out soft, hitched sound that made the hairs on the back of Owain’s neck stand up. Owain felt his hand start to slip from its grip on the tree trunk, and he reached out with the other to steady himself, his hand finding purchase on a branch by Morgan’s head. His weight pitched forward against Morgan, and he braced a knee on the branch Morgan was sitting on, caught awkwardly between the branches. But Morgan’s arms were snugly around his waist before he could slide any further. When Owain pulled back, he found himself short of breath. This close, he could see the moonlight filtering through the blossoms reflected in Morgan’s eyes.

“And just like that,” Owain said, trying to sound grave, but his mouth was twitching with the effort of suppressing a smile, “the curse is lifted.”

Morgan let out a shallow, breathless laugh that Owain could have listened to forever, and was now determined to see if he could reproduce the effect. He started to lean in again but stopped, frowning in thought.

“If I kiss you again, does the curse come back?”

“Oh! Hmm…” Morgan gave it some real thought. “Nope, that was a one-time deal.”

Owain gave him a heady grin. “Then I shall free your soul of all dark bondage with my newly unsealed powers,” he said, although the words felt different delivered at point blank range than when he was bellowing them across the orchard. The hand gripping the branch near Morgan’s head began to tremble violently. “I can feel it now…the powerful aura of the natural spirits here, flowing into me and becoming one with my very being…with this power and this power alone, I redeem you!”

At some point he’d have to start workshopping some good lines for moments like these, an exciting new genre to write in—but he couldn’t bother with brainstorming now, not when Morgan was smiling at him like that and so close.

He kissed Morgan for longer this time, his position in the tree stable, if a little awkward. Not that he’d climb down for anything right now. Morgan’s mouth was open against his, his breathing coming shallow and excited, and Owain was content to kiss him like that in that infinitely expanding moment, the taste of Morgan’s breath on his tongue. He didn’t think Morgan had any experience with kissing, a little clumsy by comparison, but that didn’t matter. He kissed Owain with the same earnestness as his smile, simultaneously reveling in the moment and focusing with single-minded determination, and that was what Owain was really beginning to like about kissing Morgan. He was quickly discovering that there were other things he liked about kissing Morgan, too—like the hitch in his breath when Owain shifted, resting more of his weight against Morgan’s body, or the way Morgan’s bangs tickled his forehead, or the wide-eyed, flushed smile on Morgan’s face when they broke apart for air. His arms were still around Owain’s waist, hands tucked into his belt, and Owain could have hung there forever, enraptured by that unselfconscious smile.

Would Morgan really have been okay if Owain hadn’t returned his feelings after all? He looked so happy now that it was hard to imagine. He would’ve quashed his own feelings just to keep being around Owain, and maybe he’d have gotten over it eventually—nothing ever seemed to keep him down for long—but Owain wouldn’t have been able to live with knowing it. But when he thought about it, if their positions were reversed—if Morgan hadn’t meant anything by the kiss at all despite its profound effect on him…Owain realized he’d probably do the same. The little moments of unadulterated joy they dug up from below the heavy weight of Grima’s shadow were far too rare, too precious. Even if it became something painful, neither of them would be able to give it up. They both needed it, even Morgan, who seemed to need so little.

“So,” Morgan said, and his voice was hushed and a little breathy, “am I cured now? Is all that dark magic out of my system?”

“Hmm.” Owain scrutinized Morgan’s face, searching his eyes, although looking at him like this so close was making his chest writhe all over again. “No, I think there’s still some left. It’s even more deeply embedded in your soul than I thought.”

“Wow, it sounds pretty serious then,” Morgan said, his eyes even wider, but he seemed to be appreciating Owain’s storytelling. That was another thing he liked about Morgan—he knew how to enjoy a good story, and make one up, too.

But Owain bowed his head, closing his eyes in grim determination. “Truly, for little do I know, even my amplified powers can’t completely disperse the dark energy within, and fragments remain within my own soul. Who knows what dangers they may present in the future…”

Owain opened one eye to sneak a look up at Morgan’s face. Oh, he was totally loving this new addition to the plot. Now it seemed silly that Owain had worried so much, that he’d thought things between them so fragile.

“But first—I pour all of my power into purifying the soul of my fated companion,” he said, but it was coming out as more of a mumble this time as he leaned in again. The distance between them wasn’t much to begin with, and so there was little time to hesitate—especially not when Morgan leaned to meet him halfway, only to clash teeth awkwardly. But they both laughed it off easily, and then Owain was kissing him again, fighting off the urge to let go of the tree branch so he could touch Morgan’s face the way Morgan had touched his. There was no sound in their spring blossom sanctuary, and for just a little while longer, the outside world ceased to exist.

Brady was up early every morning, but that didn’t mean he was a morning person. It was just that it was easier to be prepared for the day if he had some time to prepare the infirmary before patients started showing up. Mostly training injuries, but any time a venturing party returned, they’d find themselves with no vacancies for any other patients. There was one such party due back today, and Brady was dreading the long day that awaited him. Seeing two figures already slumped out on the hallway floor just outside the infirmary didn’t do his blood pressure any favors.

Owain was propped up against the wall in what appeared to be a dead sleep, and Morgan was snoring softly with his head in Owain’s lap. It was then that Brady noticed the makeshift sling holding up Owain’s left arm, and he let out a groan.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me. First thing in the morning? Really?”

The two of them roused slowly, Morgan lifting his head sleepily to peer at Brady with a sleepy smile.

“Morning, Brady,” he said with way too much cheer for this early, rubbing his eyes. It didn’t look like either of them had slept more than a couple of hours. “It happened last night. We figured we’d just wait here until we could see a healer?”

Brady jabbed a finger in Owain’s direction. “The hell were you doing in the middle of the night that you broke your arm?”

“I was in the midst of Hero Training when I plummeted to my doom from a great height,” Owain said gravely. Brady stared at him, his patience thinning.

“He fell out of a tree,” Morgan said around a yawn. “He landed on his arm funny. I thought it might be broken too.”

“What the hell were you doing up in—you know what, never mind, I don’t wanna know.” Brady opened the infirmary door with a grumble. “Just get in already, okay? I’ll go get my staff.”

He did a physical exam first, probing Owain’s arm with careful fingers. Owain insisted he was fine, that it didn’t hurt at all and he’d suffered much worse before, but he let out a few grunts of pain at Brady’s touch.

“Definitely broken, but it seems like it’s still in place. Count yourself lucky I don’t have to set a broken bone this early in the morning.”

Brady healed the break with his staff most of the way, but they were still tight on magical supplies. “No more training, hero or otherwise, until that finishes healing. And you,” he said, rounding on Morgan, who was already drifting off to sleep in the chair by Owain’s cot, “go take a nap. And whatever fooling around you’re doing, cut it out! We can’t afford this kinda crap, not now.”

Owain and Morgan both nodded their assent, though Morgan was clearly half-asleep. Owain helped him stagger back out into the hallway, supporting him with his good arm. Brady peered after them until they shuffled around the next corner, then busied himself with laying out the supplies he’d likely need today. Doubtless he’d be busy once their party returned, so he might as well be prepared. He yawned to himself, stacking jars of salves to be brought out from the storeroom, and began laying them on the depleted infirmary shelves. They really were getting low on supplies, even here in the capital. He had to count the stack three times to be sure, too bleary to do basic arithmetic. If only there hadn’t been that ruckus in the south yard last night, he might have gotten some proper sleep—

Brady nearly fumbled the last few jars in sudden irritated revelation, and he leaned back out to look down the hallway. “Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” he groused to no one in particularly, glowering at the empty corridor, then ducked back into the infirmary with a tired sigh.

Chapter Text

It was dark when he finally landed his wyvern, directing the small army of Risen to form a perimeter around him. It wasn’t as though there was much danger to them at all—the children certainly wouldn’t be coming back to pick a fight—but Morgan felt shaken and uncomfortably vulnerable. Twice today he’d had the opportunity to dispose of those he’d once called friends and recover the Gemstones, and both times he’d lost his nerve at the critical moment. It could be called a draw at best, and the taste of defeat was still bitter as bile in his mouth. It had been months now. He should have been able to carry out his master’s will without a second thought. He’d never hesitated when the Ylissean ranks crashed against his army as harmlessly as an ocean wave against a breakwater.

But when Owain had laid down his sword and launched into a speech that sounded like it had been pulled straight from one of their old games, something in Morgan had buckled and threatened to fold. He should have been strong enough now to fend off those last vestiges of affection. This failure was his alone.

He felt the presence in his mind before it spoke, the hairs on the back of his neck rising as though in warning. An apparition of his master shimmed into his mind, an illusion only he could see. Master Grima often chose to take other forms, but when she was with Morgan, she always appeared in the body of the Avatar. It wasn’t the same as talking to his mother, Morgan knew that, but it made him feel closer to her nonetheless.

But Master Grima’s presence here was anything but a comfort. It was only a projection, a mere ghost, but her eyes never lost their commanding power.

“Where are Sable and Argent?” she asked without preamble, and it was clear from her cold tone that she already knew the answer. Morgan bowed his head, shame curdling in his stomach. He never had been able to bear the thought of disappointing his mother, but disappointing her was so much worse.

“I…do not have them. The children escaped with them.” He squeezed his eyes shut and curled his hands over his knees. “The fault is mine. I—I suffered a moment of weakness. I will accept any punishment you see fit, Master Grima.”

He kept all trembling out of his voice; if there was anything Master Grima hated, it was sniveling. He braced himself for some psychic blow, some invasion of the mind, but none came. When he opened his eyes, his master was still watching him with that cold stare.

“Those little worms need all five Gemstones to perform the Awakening,” Master Grima said after an agonizing pause. “Gules and Azure yet remain within Plegia’s borders. Bring them to me, and all will be forgiven.”

Morgan nodded, letting out a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. Cold relief flooded his stomach. He knew what awaited those who incurred Master Grima’s ire. After a moment’s calculated hesitation, he lifted his head again, meeting her eyes for just a moment. It was all he could bear, but the warmth that remained after her searing gaze was worth it.

“I won’t fail you this time.” He only had to focus on her promise of his reward once he succeeded. That would give him the strength he needed; he was sure of it.

“See to it that you don’t,” Master Grima said, then the apparition shimmered away like so much sand in the wind. Morgan found himself still trying to catch his breath even as her oppressive presence vanished from his mind. Gules and Azure were still in reach. He’d have to face down old friends there too, he was sure, but as long as it wasn’t Owain…

Morgan sent out a wordless command to his army to begin their eastward march, and he took flight on his wyvern towards the dawning horizon.

The four of them were exhausted, weary of their long journey, and they still had a ways to go before they’d reach the border with Gules and Azure. So after a little deliberation and Nah’s aerial sweep of the surrounding area—a handful of errant Risen, quickly dispatched by Kjelle’s lance—they decided it was prudent enough to stay in the abandoned keep. It could be barricaded from the inside, and Risen weren’t clever enough to solve that problem. They might actually get a real night’s rest here.

Not that they could completely lower their guard, not while they were still on the move. Cynthia volunteered for first watch, but with them barricaded inside, there wasn’t much to watch, and all seemed quiet outside the keep. And she was just as weary as the others, saddle-sore and stiff, desperately longing to take off her armor, but they all slept in it now—even Kjelle, although she never seemed to mind as much as the rest of them.

Cynthia couldn’t have dozed off for more than a few minutes. It was the stinging in her nose that woke her, and she coughed as soon as she opened her mouth to breathe. She was still waking up, but something wasn’t right. The edges of the dark room were aglow with flame, and Cynthia looked overhead to see thick black smoke gathering like rain clouds under the ceiling. She reached over to Noire, the one laying closest to her, and hurriedly shook her awake.

“Noire, wake up—everyone, we’ve gotta get moving! I think we’re dealing with a burning building situation here!”

Cynthia had always pictured herself running into a burning building—you know, to rescue the frightened civilians inside—just not out of one. Kjelle was on her feet first, and she pulled Nah up one-handed. Her eyes were already peering through the smoke for the quickest exit route.

“Who set this place on fire?” Nah muttered, scrubbing the sleep from her eyes. They’d only gained a few precious hours of rest. “We cleared the perimeter—”

“Risen!” Noire’s voice jumped a full octave and she shrank back towards Cynthia. One trembling finger pointed at one of the exits, which seemed to be suffering under the weight of a battering ram. The barricades they’d put up were makeshift, and they were only so strong. “They must have set the fire! Ooh, this looks bad…”

Kjelle pivoted towards the south exit just as the door burst inward against the barricade, and Risen were suddenly pouring in from all sides, their defenses destroyed. “Damn! They’ve got us surrounded!”

“Where did they come from—how did they catch up to us?” Nah was trying her best not to let her collected calm slip. “I really thought we’d taken care of them—and they keep coming! There’s no way I would have missed a group this big!”

“Th-there are so many of them,” Noire said, clutching her bow. “More than we’ve had to deal with this whole journey. How are we supposed to get through this one?”

“The same way we’ve always pulled through,” Cynthia said, readying her lance. “With a just heart and a courageous spirit! Come on, guys—you know the fight’s not over yet!”

But the Risen were upon them before they could make the first strike, and in a dizzying rush they were all separated and robbed of their weapons. The others were quickly losing hope, but that just meant Cynthia had to try all the harder to keep morale up. And their mission was too important for them to just roll over and die. Sure, they were cornered, separated, and unarmed, but it couldn’t end here. It just couldn’t.

Her hand went to her belt, curling her fingers around the braided tassel that hung there. Morgan’s betrayal had left a deep cut, one that still had yet to fully heal, but Cynthia had never been able to bring herself to get rid of the good luck charm he’d made for her. So she’d always feel like he was at her side, so she wouldn’t lose her nerve in the critical moment. Even now, despite his betrayal, despite all the irreparable damage he’d done, Cynthia still wished for Morgan at her side. She didn’t understand at all what had happened, how he could have gone from their faithful tactician to their most devastating enemy seemingly overnight; it was simply too hard to reconcile, a fundamental mismatch, two images that could not be neatly overlaid. When she thought about Morgan, she could only remember his sunny smile and easy self-assurance. Her mind seemed to shy away from the wicked deeds he’d committed against them when her thoughts wandered their way, like repelling magnets. She’d felt so heartbroken in the aftermath of that nightmarish battle, cried on Inigo for days, but even now, she still couldn’t conjure any other image of Morgan.

He’d know what to do if he were here. He’d already be hatching up one of his wild plans, just crazy enough to work, maybe. But hope was starting to slip from her grip as the Risen closed in, and the flames began licking at the walls. Cyntha clutched the charm in her hand and prayed for a miracle.

They were nearly to the border now—just one more day’s march by Inigo’s estimation, as long as they could keep up the current breakneck pace. Things wouldn’t exactly be safe once they crossed back into Ylisse, but they’d be a little less deadly. And then soon the four of them would be back in Ylisstol and reunite with the others, and put this dark chapter of history to a close.

They were sleeping in a farm stables tonight, which, while fragrant, was more comfortable than the cave. The farmers who owned this remote piece of land tucked away in thick forest, who had somehow managed to cling to it despite the dangers that roved the land, didn’t know their lone horse had overnight guests, but they didn’t need to know. The four of them would be on their way at dawn anyhow, and there was no need to trouble innocent folk, especially not this late.

Owain was just starting to doze off in a cozy nest of straw when the heavy beat of feathered wings reached his ears. He sat up and leaned to peer out of the stables. A pegasus with an empty saddle touched down on a run and made for the stables at a full gallop, its wings still spread wide. The frantic whinny it let out as it approached startled the others from their sleep, and Yarne jumped to his feet, looking around with wild eyes.

“What was that? Are we under attack? Gods, not now, not when we’re so close—”

“It’s a pegasus,” Inigo said, peering blearily into the night. “One missing its rider—what in the blazes is it doing out here?”

The pegasus slowed as it neared the stables, but it was still wild-eyed and agitated, its wings still flapping anxiously at its sides. At this rate, the owners of this place would hear the panicking beast, and they’d have to find another place to sleep for the night. Inigo ventured out of the stables, hands tentatively outstretched.

“Alright, easy now,” he murmured. “Let’s all be calm here, hm?”

The pegasus reared on its hind legs briefly, but then it settled and backed away a few paces, its wings folding against its sides. His confidence bolstered, Inigo drew closer, then stopped with a bewilderment that slowly melted into dread. He recognized that saddle.

Owain wasn’t far behind, peering through the dark. “What troubles you in the face of this beast? It seems you’ve already tamed it with your gentle—” He stopped abruptly as he got closer. “Wait, is that…”

“This is Cynthia’s pegasus,” Inigo said, his chest suddenly tight. They’d been so focused on their escape these last few days, he hadn’t had much room to spare thought as to how their companions were doing on their own missions. Now it all hit him in a dizzying rush, his tired mind ransacking itself for an explanation that didn’t immediately spell the worst.

Owain reached out a hand to lay on the pegasus’s neck, and though it still seemed anxious, it didn’t buck or shake him off. His expression was grave.

“Our comrades must be in mortal peril,” Owain said, trying to look deep into its eyes, but finding it difficult as he could really only look at one at a time. He settled for closing his eyes and bowing his head. Nonetheless, he seemed to be trying to commune with the pegasus. “Yes…I understand now. Our brave friends, so close to their goal, have been beset by our foul nemeses, and now their very lives hang in the balance—but their fates are not yet sealed! Cynthia’s loyal steed escaped and found us, so that she might lead us there to their rescue!”

Inigo’s face was seized with a mixture of disbelief and crushing dread. “You cannot be serious,” he said, even as he felt his stomach sink. He didn’t buy for a second that Owain could commune with so much as a bug, but there was no room for doubt that that was Cynthia’s pegasus, and there were no good implications to be had there. “How on earth do you assume it’s going to lead us to Cynthia and the others? We don’t even know why it’s here!”

“It can’t mean anything good,” Owain said, and his expression was set. “Something’s happened, and we’ve got a chance to help. I don’t know how she found us, but you know there’s no way this is random chance. We have an opportunity to intervene—to save our comrades from the very fate we nearly suffered ourselves.”

There was a particular stomachache Inigo had come to associate with Owain being right, a curdling resentment that he had no choice but to acknowledge. He closed a hand over his abdomen unconsciously. Even if their friends didn’t survive—even if it came to the worst—they might at least be able to recover the Gemstones bought with those lives.

“They could already be—we could already be too late,” he said, but the fight was going out of his voice. Owain leveled him with a gaze so straight it was unnerving.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We have to try anyway.”

Yarne looked out toward the treeline in dismay. “We were so close…”

“None of it will mean anything if we don’t all make it back.” Owain looked sidelong at Inigo, who had needled him with a similar point just a few days ago. Inigo made an uncomfortable noise in the back of his throat and looked away. “We need all of the Gemstones. If we don’t rush to their aid…it won’t make a difference whether our mission is successful or not.”

Yarne looked uneasy, and Brady looked ill, but neither offered any further objection. Except—

“It’s all well and fine if Cynthia’s pegasus is going to lead us there,” Inigo said, “but we can maybe fit two of us in that saddle. How are the rest of us supposed to keep up?”

“Don’t look at me,” Yarne said hurriedly. “Taguel are sprinters, not marathon runners!”

But Owain wasn’t looking at Yarne; rather, he was looking past him back at the stables. Brady followed his gaze and did a double take.

“Oh, come on—you wanna steal from these folks, too? They barely got a thing to their names as it is!”

“I mean,” Inigo conceded, albeit with a guilty look, “the fate of the world is sort of hanging in the balance…”

In the end, they wound up stealing the horse. Inigo and Owain took to the sky on Cynthia’s pegasus while Brady drove the horse, Yarne’s arms wrapped in a crushing grip around his waist. They flew low, both to avoid detection and so that Brady and Yarne would be able to follow them in the darkness of the new moon. They hadn’t encountered any Risen in the last day, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any lurking around.

Inigo held tight to Owain, closing his eyes to keep them from stinging in the wind. Ugh, he’d never liked flying—he could handle it in a pinch, but Owain and Cynthia lacked any sensible fear of heights, and Owain seemed to have no difficulty seeing even with the wind in his face. Inigo buried his face in the back of Owain’s neck and tried to calm his fraying nerves. They were starting to really run low on sleep, and Inigo couldn’t keep himself from worrying about Owain ever since their encounter with Morgan, though he couldn’t bring himself to say as much out loud.

“Do you really think we’ll make it in time?” He had to raise his voice above the rush of wind in his ears, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking. “I mean, we have no idea how long it took this pegasus to get to us. They could be days away.”

“We won’t find out if we don’t try,” Owain said doggedly. “I don’t think they’re that far off, though. Pegasi can only fly so far at a time, and she hasn’t totally exhausted herself yet. They’re still alive—I can feel it in my heart. Our companions, though they may be fighting to their last, yet live.”

“You cannot possibly know that,” Inigo said, but not with much feeling. This was one of Owain’s most infuriating tendencies, this unyielding never-say-die attitude in the face of the worst nonsense—but it had saved them once so far, and right now, Inigo desperately hoped it would again.

Time for a miracle was growing thin, as was everyone’s hope—the others had all but resigned themselves to their fates by now, but Cynthia wasn’t about to give up without a fight. She might have been unarmed, but she wasn’t unarmored—she wasn’t totally defenseless! Cynthia, newly determined, turned and threw a punch at one of the Risen closing in on her. It caught her fist before it could land, and then, before she could break free, it used the momentum of her blow to throw her to the ground. She felt the breath whoosh out of her as she hit the floor, an explosion of stars showering over her vision. They were still closing in, and she rolled to her hands and knees, trying desperately to get her breath back. She had to get up, get back on her feet. A scream that sounded like Noire’s rang out. Cynthia’s eyes squeezed shut over a sudden surge of tears, her breath caught in her chest. It couldn’t end here, not like this…

She heard an awful gurgle and the thud of a body hitting the floor, and she looked up just in time to see another go down, a sword plunged deep into its belly. On the other end of the sword was Inigo, who raised a foot to kick the monster in the chest, relieving his blade of its weight, and it staggered back and collapsed in a heap next to its comrade. Inigo sheathed his sword, breathing hard, and held out a hand to Cynthia.

“Inigo!” Her voice came out a wheeze, but she was starting to get her breath back as he pulled her to her feet. “What are you—how—”

“You have your pegasus to thank,” he said, reaching out to brush a lock of sweat-soaked hair from her brow once she was steady on her feet. It was hard to tell through the smoke and flickering firelight, but Inigo seemed grimmer than ever despite his light tone. “I don’t know how, but that loyal steed of yours found her way to us, and she led us back to you. Frankly, I’m astonished we made it on time.”

“You mean she got away?” Cynthia felt tears welling up again, this time in relief. She had left her pegasus in the keep’s dilapidated stables, well within its fortified walls, and she’d been afraid to imagine what had become of her mount in the fire.

“Quite right. Don’t worry—we left her a ways from here. She’s in no danger now.” Inigo reached out a foot and nudged it up under a lance lying on the floor just outside her cell, among a few other dead Risen. With a neat flick of his ankle, he kicked it into his hand, the faded white ribbon around its shaft fluttering in the air. He held it out to her with a flourish. “I believe this belongs to you, my dear.”

Cynthia took it back with a deep breath, swallowing back her tears. There would be time for that later. “Wait—what about your mission? Weren’t you on your way to get Argent and Sable?”

“Already in hand,” Inigo said with relief, taking her by the hand, though he paused at the cell door to quickly check the passageway. “We were just on our way back. What about Gules and Azure?”

“Got ’em,” Cynthia said with triumph. It was easier to stand tall now that hope was restored. Miracles really were possible. “We thought we could catch our breath here for the night, but…”

Inigo lurched out of the cell, swinging his sword to parry a blow from an axe-bearing Risen. Cynthia, not far behind, thrust her lance out from beside Inigo and speared the monster while its blade was still locked with Inigo’s. Inigo and Cynthia exchanged breathless smiles, nodded, and moved out.

“I heard Noire scream,” Cynthia said, worry in her voice, but her chest heaved with relief when they rounded a corner to see Kjelle and Brady. Now that Kjelle had a weapon in her hand again, she was dealing death with every blow, while Brady mostly tried to stay out of the way. “Where are Owain and Yarne?”

“They went around the other side for Nah and Noire,” Inigo said, signaling over his shoulder to Kjelle and Brady. “I suppose we ought to lend them a hand, don’t you think?”

“Now you’re talking!” Cynthia twirled her lance and lunged forward, only for the next Risen soldier to deflect her blow with its shield. “Surrender now, wicked beasts, or taste the righteous fury of my lance! Cynthia, hero extraordinaire, is back in action!”

She and Inigo led the charge down the narrow corridor, with Kjelle taking up the rear guard. Smoke was still filling the building, and it was hard to tell just how many Risen there were. They never seemed to stop coming, even as the four of them advanced and left a trail of foul corpses in their wake. It was easier to move in the moment, when the only thing mattered was the next strike, the next parry. There was no room for fear or doubt—not when she had Inigo there, not when she knew Owain was close—not when she still had Morgan’s good luck charm, a phantom presence at her side, even if it was only a memory.

They rounded a corner and were met with towering flames blazing so brightly it was almost blinding. Cynthia squinted against the fire, trying to see through the rippling heat. She heard Brady grunt and the clack of metal against wood—she spun and saw Brady just barely managing to fend off a Risen’s sword with his staff. Kjelle was already engaged with two others, unable to spare a hand. Cynthia leapt into action.

“Not on my watch!” she cried as she lunged forward, knocking back the undead soldier’s sword and putting herself between Brady and the danger that threatened him. “A true hero never lets a comrade fall in battle! Now accept your divine punishment for—”

She didn’t get to finish her line. That was the problem with fighting these things—they abided by no rules, ripped all the civilization out of war. Cynthia finished the line in her head anyway as she jumped back to avoid a stabbing thrust, very nearly tripping over some fallen debris in the process. But she quickly regained her footing and used that momentum to deliver a deadly blow through the Risen’s throat, her lance point puncturing clean through the dry, sagging folds of skin. It clawed frantically at the shaft, but Cynthia pulled it back with all her body weight, turning her face away from the spray of black ichor that followed. Sure, it was a surer kill than a stab to the chest, but at what cost?

She heard Brady’s hoarse warning just in time to turn and dodge a spell from a hooded mage, a snap of blinding lightning that missed her, but barely—she still caught a few sparks from its near graze. There was too much smoke and fire to make out the mage clearly, but it was enough light to go by to aim. She swung her lance and used the weight of it to propel herself forward, preparing to dodge a second spell—but instead of delivering a follow-up attack, the cloaked figure turned and ran, rounding a smoke-shrouded corner out of sight. Cynthia had only a moment to note how strange it was—Risen never ran away from a fight, even when the odds were against them—before the next threat demanded her attention, and she advanced down the hall with the others.

Soon she could hear the cries of familiar voices over the clamor of battle, and when Cynthia caught sight of Owain’s unruly hair through the smoke, her chest heaved with a relief so profound it nearly made her ill on the spot. But she steadied her stomach and steeled her reserve and forged on, clearing a path with Inigo through to their comrades.

“Noire!” Cynthia called out, and to her relief Noire was still alive, though clutching her arm and backed against a wall. Yarne stood between her and the oncoming Risen, looking wildly panicked even in beast form, but he didn’t flee, just kept on throwing Risen back with powerful kicks of his hind legs. Cynthia composed a new battle theme for herself in her head between grunts of effort, trying to get to Noire and Yarne before they were overwhelmed. Cynthia’s eyes were starting to tear up from the smoke as it grew thicker, blurring her vision, but the adrenaline had given her fresh strength—as had the arrival of their comrades. Now that they were together, they couldn’t possibly lose.

Cynthia and Inigo were both short of breath by the time they reached Noire’s cell, and Yarne transformed back with a breathless stagger. Cynthia ran past him to Noire, who was still huddled in the corner, one hand clutched around the other arm. This close, Cynthia could see that Noire’s pale skin was slick with blood.

“Noire! Are you okay? Oh, no, your arm!”

“I-it’s not that bad,” Noir said, though her face was pale, her skin shining with sweat. “B-but I can’t move my arm…I’m useless in this fight…”

“Keep that chin up! What matters is that we make it out alive,” Cynthia said fiercely. “Besides, Brady’s here, so just hang on a little longer, okay? We’ll keep you safe!”

Yes, she thought as she pivoted back towards the threat, her lance raised—as long as she could keep them safe, as long as no more of them disappeared from her side, she could keep fighting like this, her head held high.

It wasn’t long before they closed the distance between them and Owain and Nah, who was blowing back Risen with her powerful breath while Owain darted in to finish them off. He made quick of the stunned Risen, but their numbers still seemed impossibly large, and they were all starting to struggle to breathe through the smoke. Owain stumbled back as a fit of coughing overtook him, narrowly avoiding a blade to the arm—the Risen holding the blade was summarily blasted back by Nah’s breath, folding into the flames.

“We have to get out of here!” Nah’s urgent voice rose over the din of battle. “The fire’s only getting worse. This building could come down on us at any moment!”

“You heard her,” Kjelle shouted, bashing a Risen mage’s head in mercilessly with the butt of her lance. It crumpled to the ground at her feet. Brady was pulling Noire along, the glow of his staff still fading, until they were under the protection of their friends. “If we can’t find the exit, we make our own!”

“Not necessary,” Inigo called quickly, “and highly inadvisable, if the structural integrity of this place is so precarious. We know the way out—just follow us!”

There was no time—no need—to finish killing off all the Risen before they made their escape, not when the fire would take care of most of them. They weren’t clever enough to all escape on their own. A ragged handful made it out to pursue them, but Cynthia and Kjelle’s lances kept them at bay until the rest of the group had safely made it wide and clear of the burning building. Then Noire quickly dispatched of the last few with rapidly fired arrows, the newly healed gash in her arm still stinging.

They all sucked down lungfuls of sweet, clean air, some of them still coughing and retching from the hoarse smoke—someone produced a canteen of water and they passed it around until it was dry, all of them having sweated themselves dry between the fight and the fire. Brady staggered off to be sick in a nearby patch of bushes, and Noire joined him shortly, the two of them leaning on each other for support and heaving sympathetically in turn.

Cynthia greeted her pegasus with tears she could no longer hold back, flinging both arms around the pegasus’ neck and burying her face in its mane. “Thank you,” she said, her voice coming out a cracked squeak. Her pegasus only let out a soft whinny in response, and Cynthia wondered if her mother was watching down on her, if she had somehow set this miracle in motion.

“We’re going to have to find somewhere else to sleep for the rest of the night,” Nah said reluctantly, only giving voice to what every exhausted member of their party already knew. The night was already half over, and only a couple of them had only gotten a scant few hours of sleep. “As far as we can get away from this place as possible. If any of them catch up to us in this state…”

“We’ll take care of them,” Kjelle said confidently. “Hmph! What cowards, taking our weapons and cornering us…in a fair fight, we can’t lose.”

“We will eventually if we don’t get some real sleep,” Nah said, her voice cracking. She looked just as reluctant to move any further as the rest of them, but she forced herself to her feet anyway. “Let’s go, before it gets any later. There’s a small patch of forest nearby we can probably camp in safely for now. We should be able to reach it in an hour if we start moving now.”

“Probably?” Yarne said anxiously, but he was too tired to voice any real objection—and that was as safe as it got while they were still in Grima’s territory.

It felt like an eternity by the time they reached the area Nah had spotted on her earlier perimeter check, all of them too tired to talk by now. Cynthia and the others still had a couple of intact tents, and they wearily pitched them while Brady and Yarne tended to the fire; it meant, at least, that they could better protect those members of the party that needed it most. Inigo and Owain volunteered to take first watch, even though they had to be at least as tired as the rest of them, but they both seemed alert enough—well, they seemed on edge, anyway. Kjelle threatened them both with bodily harm if they failed to wake her up for shift change before she finally allowed herself to lie down.

Cynthia expected herself to drop like a sack of rocks as soon as she stopped moving, but now that she was free to sleep, she felt unbearably restless. She tried to soothe herself by attending to her pegasus, smoothing out the tangles in its mane and picking out the leaves and twigs that were starting to get matted in. But the quiet of the camp was somehow unsettling to her, the clamor of battle still ringing in her ears. It felt as though the world had quite abruptly come to a stop while she wasn’t yet done careening through it.

She could see Owain and Inigo sitting by the campfire, their backs to her, side by side but not quite close enough to be touching. Belated relief at seeing the two of them welled up in her chest, the occasional panging loneliness of the last few months catching up with her all at once, and she bounded over to them without a second thought. She dropped herself in the narrow space between them, her arms around their shoulders—they both stiffened on reflex, then relaxed, and Inigo let out a shaky sigh. Cynthia leaned her head against Inigo’s shoulder, then Owain’s, and then they both leaned in to gather more snugly around her without a word. Even Owain seemed to be too drained to summon any of his usual flair. Cynthia let herself settle between them, letting out a long breath.

“You guys have no idea how happy I am to see you,” she sighed, at which a ghost of a smile appeared on Inigo’s face.

“Oh, I think we can imagine,” he said, and let out another shaky breath. “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure we’d make it in time.”

“But you did!” Cynthia said with as much brightness as she could muster. She let her arms drop from around their shoulders so she could lean forward with a little whoosh of breath. Owain’s arm went to her waist, and Inigo wrapped one arm tightly around her shoulders. It was grounding, to hold each other like this—a solid, concrete reminder that they were still here, still alive and present in this world, all of them. Cynthia’s hand went to the charm at her belt and she felt the keen absence of an old friend, a vacuum in his place, remembering how they’d huddled like this when they had been four instead of three. “Bonus points for a great entrance, by the way.”

“As if we could ever abandon our fated companions in their hour of need,” Owain said, and Cynthia knew he meant it despite how tired he sounded. She pressed a grimy hand to his cheek and on childish reflex he turned his head and licked her palm. He regretted it immediately with a coughing gag, and Cynthia let out a startled “Ew!” and wiped her hand off on his sleeve. Inigo rolled his eyes, then huffed out a quiet laugh and leaned more heavily against her. It was a comfort that they could still act like foolish children, even after today.

“Still, though,” Inigo murmured, his train of thought finding its way into his voice, “doesn’t all of this strike you as odd? It’s one thing for Risen to attack our camps, but setting fire to an entire building? And doing so thorough a job of it that it brings the whole place down at that? They never act like that without a real person to give them orders.”

“I think there was someone, actually,” Cynthia said, and both Inigo and Owain tensed beside her. “When we were on our way to meet up with the others, I saw someone—well, I was attacked by a mage, actually. I thought they were just another Risen at first, but they ran away as soon as I tried to counterattack. Risen never just run away like that.”

Owain had lifted his head, and Inigo’s grip on her shoulders had tightened, but Cynthia just leaned back against them more heavily, fingering the tassel on her belt. “It’s funny—I couldn’t really get a good look through all the smoke, but they kind of reminded me of Morgan. They looked about his size, anyway…”

Inigo and Owain suddenly pulled away from her, sitting up ramrod straight, and she fell unceremoniously onto her back with an oof. She looked up to deliver an indignant look, but the two of them were looking at each other with dire expressions. Cynthia’s brow pinched.

“Hey, what’s with those faces?” She sat up, the momentary peace dissolving into the night air. “You both look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

Inigo looked nauseatingly uneasy. Owain looked…Cynthia didn’t know how to describe it; it was a look she’d never seen on his face before. He almost looked haunted.

“There’s…something we need to tell you,” Inigo said haltingly. Cynthia felt her stomach sink a little further, like disappearing into quicksand.

“What?”

Inigo looked at Owain, giving him a chance to answer, but when he stayed silent, Inigo let out a breath through his teeth and said, “On our way back, when we’d nearly reached the border, an army of Risen caught up with us. And leading them…was Morgan.”

“What?” Cynthia repeated, her voice smaller. Inigo looked like he’d rather be talking about anything else, but he forged on in Owain’s lengthening silence.

“He’d been sent to recover the Gemstones,” Inigo said, finding his mouth suddenly dry. “By Grima. And I…I suspect the person you saw fleeing back there was him, too.”

Cynthia’s mind was slow with exhaustion, and Inigo’s words sank in slowly. Of course she knew he’d be working for Grima now, but to think she’d come so close to him just hours ago—

“But you said you had Argent and Sable,” she said, puzzled. “So…what happened?”

“He couldn’t go through with it,” Owain said finally, just as Inigo opened his mouth. Owain was watching the fire, resting an elbow on one knee. “He had a chance to kill us and take the Gemstones—it would’ve been easy, he had us cornered—but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. In the end, he chose to run away rather than take our lives. And if he caught sight of you back in the keep…then that’s probably why he ran back there, too.” He let out a long, thin breath. “I know Morgan betrayed us. I know he’s doing the fell dragon’s bidding now. But the old Morgan—the one we knew—he’s still in there, too.”

“So, wait—” Cynthia felt her chest go tight with suffocating hope. “Does that mean he doesn’t really want to hurt us? That he’s still on our side after all?”

“It does not mean that,” Inigo said, so sharply that it made her jump a little. He was staring at Owain—glaring, more like it, though his eyes looked red-rimmed in the firelight. Owain was still watching the fire, refusing to return the look. “He is very much not on our side. He might not have killed us in the end, but he came very close. He led those Risen to you—he didn’t just send them in after you, he had them set the whole damn place on fire, to ensure none of you would escape even if the Risen didn’t do the job. And it damn near worked. He might never have set foot inside if we hadn’t shown up when we did—he probably would’ve been content to watch you burn from a safe distance. I’m sure that would have made it easier for him.”

Cynthia flinched at the bitterness in Inigo’s voice, harsher than she’d ever heard from him before. He looked taken aback by it himself, but he just closed his mouth in an unhappy, unapologetic line. Owain got to his feet wordlessly and walked away from them, stiff-shouldered, tracing the perimeter of the camp.

“Owain,” Cynthia called out quietly, and she almost got to her feet, but he didn’t go all that far, just…away. Inigo was staring at his boots, the heel of his hand pressed to his forehead. He looked miserable. Cynthia’s stomach sank.

“What really happened?”

Inigo closed his eyes, blowing out a long breath through his nose. “Owain tried to…talk him down. Convince him to come back with us. It didn’t work.”

“But he couldn’t bring himself to kill you,” Cynthia said, a thread of desperation weaving itself into her voice, “or me. That means…he hasn’t forgotten about us after all. It means there’s a chance! Maybe if I’m there too, then next time we can—”

“Cynthia.” Inigo sounded impossibly weary, tight in the throat. “There is no chance. It isn’t going to happen. We just—we can’t. I’m sorry.”

No—there was no way she was going to accept it, not just like that, not after all they’d been through together with Morgan. Not when he’d meant so much to them, just as much as they meant to each other. There were so few left they could call friends; to give up on even just one was too much to ask. Cynthia’s eyes bore into him, her fists clenching.

“Why wouldn’t he go with you?” she demanded. “If he didn’t want to kill you—if Owain thought the old him was still in there somewhere—then what was his reason? What did he say?”

“It’s not about what he said.” Inigo’s eyes stayed closed, but in the shimmering firelight, Cynthia now recognized the source of that new heavy grimness in his face. “He…yes, for a moment—for just a moment—it looked like Owain might have been getting through to him. But that’s all it was. Just a moment. And then…I don’t know. Something came over him, like—something was trying to assert control over him. Owain thinks it was Grima. I’m inclined to agree.”

“But then—” Cynthia rose up on her knees and grabbed hold of Inigo’s arm in a crushing grip. “If he’s being controlled by Grima, then that means none of this is his fault! If we keep trying, I know we can reach him! If he really does want to come back with us deep down—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Inigo said. Cynthia shook him by the arm until his head jerked from side to side.

“Of course it does! Inigo, why—”

Inigo closed a hand over hers, stilling them both, and looked back up, but he couldn’t seem to direct his gaze at anything but the fire. It demanded nothing back from him.

“Look,” he said, his voice low and tight, “there are two possibilities. Either Morgan betrayed us of his own free will, or Grima has some kind of influence over him. If it’s the former, and he agreed to come back with us—well, frankly, I still wouldn’t trust him half as far as I could throw him, but at least we could be reasonably certain he’s acting of his own accord. But if Grima has something to do with it…then it doesn’t matter what he truly wants, or how badly. We’ll never be able to fully trust him, not really—not when Grima could reach out again and manipulate him at any time, without our even knowing. He’s only human, and Grima is—” He couldn’t suppress a shudder. “There’s just no way this works out to a happy ending for everyone. As long as Morgan is alive, he’s a danger to us.”

Inigo closed his eyes again, venting out a hard breath. His jaw was so tense it was beginning to ache. “I’m sorry. But it’s the truth.”

But Cynthia wouldn’t be deterred. Inigo could be so narrow-minded, and as far as she was concerned, he was the one wearing blinders on this matter. Stubbornly, she shook him by the arm again.

“That’s it? Just like that, you decide it’s hopeless?” All the relief from the last few hours was curdling into dread and despair in the pit of her stomach. “He’s our friend! You don’t just give up on your friends!”

“Yes, Cynthia,” Inigo said through his teeth, his voice rising, and she recoiled from the raw edge in his voice, feeling her stomach sink even further. “Yes, you do. Sometimes, you do. Gods, you and Owain—”

He shook her off and covered his face with both hands. Cyntha sat back on her heels, looking at him helplessly.

“I know I was never as close to Morgan as you or Owain were.” Inigo’s voice came muffled through his hands, and Cynthia couldn’t tell if he was crying. “I know this is hard. But you have to give it up. We have to focus on the mission. Morgan is dangerous, Cynthia—so much more than before.”

“But he couldn’t bring himself to kill you,” she repeated again, stubborn to the last, though tears were stinging in her eyes. Sure, Inigo always rolled his eyes at the hero stuff, but this was defeatism on a level she hadn’t thought possible for him. “He keeps running away.”

“For now,” Inigo said wearily, and she had the sense that he’d already run through this conversation at least two or three times over now. He lifted his head from his hands and shook the hair from his face. His cheeks shone damp in the firelight. “But what if we see him again? What if Grima has solidified whatever hold he has on Morgan’s mind, and Morgan doesn’t hesitate this time? We just can’t afford it. And I—I won’t just stand by and watch you and Owain get yourselves killed, no matter who’s holding the knife. So please, just—just let it go.”

Cynthia bit her lips together, but she couldn’t think of a counterargument she hadn’t already raised, any new ground she hadn’t already tread; she only came up with tears that began to spill over her cheeks. She didn’t want to admit defeat, refused to make this concession to reality, but she felt suddenly powerless to stop it. She curled one hand around the good luck charm, tracing her fingers over the familiar patterns and textures. Morgan was still here, somehow, and yet, he was impossibly out of reach.

She felt Inigo’s arm wrap around her shoulders again, drawing her in against his side in a hug. She buried her face in his shoulder, and he pressed his face into her hair, and they stayed like that for a few minutes, no talking, only the quiet crackle of the fire and Cynthia’s muted sniffles.

Inigo pressed a kiss to the top of her forehead, letting out a long, slow breath. “Please try to get some sleep, alright? You need it as badly as any of us do.”

Cynthia nodded, her shoulders going slack, and Inigo brushed the hair from her forehead and gave her a hollow smile before getting to his feet. He walked toward Owain, quietly calling out his name. Cynthia watched them for a few moments before she lay down and rolled over to face the fire. Her fist was still tightly clenched around the good luck charm at her belt. She hadn’t seen Morgan’s face back in the corridor, only a hooded shadow, and so she had nothing to supplant her memory of him. She could still only picture his smiling face. Cynthia stared into the fire, feeling her eyelids grow heavy, and hoped there was room for one more miracle in the world.

Chapter Text

He was floating on his back. It was dark, pitch black, such that there did not seem to be any difference as to whether his eyes were closed or not. He could not even be sure he was really opening them at all.

He was floating in a pool of water, so close to his body temperature that he had scarcely noticed it, until he stirred his arms and legs and felt the little ripples lap against his skin. His limbs felt heavy. There was no sound here, save for his shallow breathing and the gentle slosh of water. He hardly had to do anything to stay afloat. He wasn’t sure how deep the pool was.

He gradually became aware that he was slowly sinking under. No—he wasn’t sinking, but rather the water was rising up around him, curling around his midsection and over his shoulders like great, tepid arms pulling him into a deep embrace. The water rose up around his face, the gentle lap like a hand against his cheek. He opened his mouth, feeling the air recede from his face. He still couldn’t open his eyes. The water filled his ears, and all sound fell away, the only sensation now the ghostly touch of water against his skin.

Morgan awoke with a dry mouth and a headache, his ears feeling oddly stopped up. He thought at first he might be getting sick, but he didn’t feel feverish or achy, just sluggish and tired despite having dutifully gone to bed at a reasonable hour on Lucina’s insistence. Maybe he had allergies? It was entirely possible. He’d have to do some tidying up in his room later. He felt a little better after washing his face in cold water, but the fog persisted.

It had been a few months now since his new friends had first brought him to Ylisstol, and he was settling in nicely. Most mornings he awoke to find himself full of energy and ready to take on the day, but every once in a while he’d have a morning like this. Maybe he’d had a bad dream, although he didn’t think bad dreams were supposed to make you feel like this. He never remembered his dreams, at any rate.

Dawn was still slowly pulling back the curtains on morning when he ventured outside the castle. Maybe a walk and some fresh air would do him some good. Other than the scattered shouts from the early birds in the training yard, the castle grounds were still quiet. The day was a touch overcast, and there was a perpetually somber mood that hung over the capital, but it didn’t bother Morgan too much. He found early mornings like this peaceful.

He made for the royal gardens, which were even more overgrown than most parts of the castle grounds, but that was what Morgan liked about it. Sure, the reason wasn’t a happy one, but it fascinated him how quickly nature could reclaim a place, how weeds and little wild things grew in the spaces between, introducing colors and patterns never seen there before. There were countless flowers whose names he didn’t even know, little bundles of weeds and clover springing up in the tall grass. He’d even found a couple of brightly patterned bugs he’d never seen on the castle grounds before.

So many people seemed so worried that the world would never heal after Grima, but to Morgan, this little microcosm of regrowth was proof enough for him that it would. Certainly things would not simply revert to their original state—even this royal garden, a part of nature they had more control over than most, would never return to the way it had been before the cataclysm. But new things would always grow in those spaces, if people only let them. Tomorrow would never hold the same shape as yesterday.

He had a book tucked under his arm and a canteen strap hanging from his wrist. There was a mostly-intact bench tucked behind a hedge somewhere around here that made for an excellent reading spot, and he was finally getting to that novel he’d found in his bag.

A familiar voice carried on the wind to him, and he followed its source curiously.

“Hff, okay. One more time. Heed me, O righteous ones, for I, gruesome hero—gah!” A little wail sounded next. “Come on, Cynthia, get it together!”

Morgan rounded a corner to see Cynthia looking unusually dispirited, gently knocking her head against a moss-covered stone wall. She didn’t seem to notice him until he placed his hand over the stone wall and her forehead smacked into his palm instead. She blinked and looked up in bewilderment and dismay.

“Careful, now. You’re gonna lose some brain cells if you keep that up. And I’d know a thing or two about that!” Morgan pulled his hand away from the wall with a cheerful wave. “Morning, Cynthia. I didn’t expect to see you again so soon. I thought you weren’t due back until tomorrow.” He stopped and frowned. Cynthia seemed really out of sorts. “Or…did something go wrong?”

“Hi, Morgan,” Cynthia sighed, with none of her usual pep. “No, it went—fine, actually, for once, we just happened to make double time on our way back, but…augh.” She covered her face with her hands. “I totally blew it, Morgan! I made a total fool of myself, and now it’s like I can’t stop!”

“Whoa, whoa,” Morgan said with a little frown, and he set his book and canteen down so he could brace his hands on her shoulders. “What are you talking about? ’Cause the Cynthia I know is pretty much the coolest champion of justice out there.”

“My lines, Morgan!” Cynthia wailed into her hands. “I forgot my lines! On our way into the first battle, I—I don’t know, I must have choked or something, but I tripped right over the words and totally fumbled my opening line!”

Morgan frowned a little. “I mean…everyone flubs sometimes, don’t they? I don’t think it’s something to be that embarrassed about.”

“It’s not that I’m embarrassed,” Cynthia said, looking anguished. “The problem is that it completely threw me off! Now I can’t get any of my battle lines out without messing them up! I sounded so ridiculous, but then I was starting every fight on the wrong foot—I can’t focus in battle, and I’m tripping over other people on the battlefield—I’m just getting in the way!”

Morgan took all of this in with a sympathetic purse of his lips. “That sounds pretty rough,” he admitted. “Have you tried maybe going into battle without trying any lines? You know, just focusing on the fight. Maybe it’ll help you find your center again, and then bam! Back to normal.”

Cynthia looked at him with the kind of bewildered dejection that one usually reserves for a sudden summons to the gallows. “No way! Every hero needs her battle lines, it’s—it’s a crucial part of the package!”

Morgan accepted this without protest, falling deeper into thought. “Mmm, okay…well, what about practicing in the mirror? Have you tried that?”

“Of course I practice in the mirror! Every morning, first thing!” Cynthia’s shoulders went slack. “But as soon as I’m out on the battlefield, it’s like my tongue’s tied in knots. At this rate, I’m gonna lose my edge…”

Morgan bowed his head and tightened his hands over her shoulders with a deep breath. Then he looked her in the eye and said, “Alright. Let’s see what we can do. I’m not letting my knight in shining armor lose her nerve over a few fumbled lines!”

Cynthia blinked at him, her mouth falling open. “Your…knight in shining armor?”

“Well, yeah!” Morgan beamed at her. “You swooped in and saved my skin the very first day we met—and I don’t even know how many times since! I’d probably be dead five times over if it weren’t for you. So it’s the least I can do to help you get over your sudden case of stage fright!”

“Morgan…” Cynthia felt something swell in her chest. Sure, she’d always considered herself a hero, here to help out the little people and save the world, but none of her friends had ever really lauded her as such to her face before. She drew in a breath and gave him a decisive nod. “Alright! Let’s do this. What did you have in mind?”

“Hmm…” Morgan had forgotten all about his book at this point. A much more interesting distraction had presented itself. “Well, if you’re doing just fine with the mirror, then maybe you just need to start yourself with a small audience and work your way up from there. Then you’ll be back to your old catch-phrase flinging self, piece of cake!”

“Really? You’d do that for me?” Cynthia’s eyes shone with new hope, and she flung her arms around Morgan in a hug. “Thank you, Morgan! You’re the best!”

Morgan let out an easy laugh, returning the hug. “Aw, I’m hardly doing anything at all. You’re the one who’s gonna be putting in the work!”

“No, really.” Cynthia pulled back and smiled earnestly at him, and he seemed to reflect it back like a mirror with his own. “Inigo really doesn’t get the hero stuff, and Owain—well, his advice usually isn’t all that helpful. Or…sensical at all. But you always have the best ideas! And you never laugh at any of my lines!”

“Why would I laugh? I think they’re pretty cool,” Morgan said. “Sure, sometimes they need a little workshopping at first, but the lines you bust out on the battlefield really get you pumped!”

“See? This is what I’m talking about! I’m so glad I ran into you.” Cynthia straightened up, buoyed by hope and resolve. “So! Where do we start? And when?”

“Well, right now’s fine by me. And this seems like as good a place as any.” There’d likely be no one else around, so Cynthia wouldn’t have to worry about unaccounted for audience members. “Hmm. Okay, just pretend I’m a Risen soldier. Give me your best killing blow line! Really let me have it!”

“What?” Cynthia’s face fell. “I can’t kill you, Morgan! Can’t you be my boon companion instead? You know, for moral support.”

“I don’t see why not.” Morgan studied the overgrown topiary, then pointed to one just off to the left. It had been a bear once—or maybe an elephant? A man charging on all fours? It was honestly hard to tell. “Okay, if we need a Risen stand-in, we can use that guy. But for now…I guess it’s better to start with your opening lines and go from there, huh? Alright—show me a classic Cynthia entrance!”

She tripped on the first try, faceplanting into a flower bed gone rogue. Not to be deterred, she jumped back to her feet, blowing a loose strand of hair from her forehead.

“Okay, take two!” Cynthia assumed her hero stance, ready to launch herself into action. “Cynthia, justice of champion—augh!” She stopped mid-leap and covered her face with her hands. “I can’t even make it two words in!”

Morgan studied her for a moment, rubbing his chin. “Why don’t you try saying it more slowly? Don’t worry about the delivery. Just focus on the words. Think of it like building muscle memory!”

“Hey, good idea!” Cynthia brightened, then tried just repeating her line, no flair added. “Cynthia, champion of justice, reporting for—for—” She floundered and choked, and let out a frustrated noise, but Morgan was flashing her an energetic thumbs up.

“Hey, that was already a lot better! Come on, let’s keep going. I think this is really working!”

He turned out to be right. They met every morning in the early hours just after dawn, and Cynthia had to admit, it was a pretty energizing way to start the day, if a little frustrating sometimes. Morgan was never anything less than encouraging, cheering her on all the way, and little by little, she was regaining her confidence. Just having Morgan there helped, even when he wasn’t giving her pointers on delivery. And after a week of intensive mental training, Cynthia was starting to feel more like herself.

“I think I’m ready,” she said after they concluded for the morning. They’d done a fair bit of jumping around—Morgan was helping her with the blocking for a new entrance—and she was sweaty all over, but she felt exhilarated. “Next time I ride into battle, I’m totally using that divine retribution line!”

“Heck yeah!” Morgan high fived her with gusto, although the shock of her gauntlet left him wincing for a second. “That’s the spirit. Look out, world! Cynthia’s making her comeback!”

It was only a day before Cynthia was called into battle again, and Morgan found himself anxiously awaiting her return, taking to pacing the royal gardens once his responsibilities for the day were over. They’d agreed to meet here after she returned, and Morgan couldn’t wait to hear her report.

It was a little after sundown when Cynthia came into view rounding a corner. Morgan jumped up from the bench, snapping his book shut.

“So? How’d it go?”

Cynthia buried her face in her hands and let out a muffled scream. Morgan winced.

“I totally blew it! Again!” Cynthia sounded more crushed than ever before. “As soon as I arrived on the scene, I completely choked. I was so off balance, I nearly crashed right into Gerome and Minerva!”

Morgan’s face fell as Cynthia dropped herself onto the bench, “Wait, my technique didn’t work? It really seemed to be helping in our sessions…”

“It’s not even that.” Cynthia lifted her face from her hands, looking miserable and a little embarrassed. “It’s just—I got so used to practicing with you, and having you around, and…and now it’s like I can’t manage to get any of it out without you there.”

Morgan winced, looking rueful. “That…is a problem. I’m sorry, Cynthia. I didn’t mean to make things worse. That definitely wasn’t an outcome I anticipated…” He sighed, sitting down on the bench next to her. Cynthia shook her head determinedly.

“No! You didn’t make anything worse! It’s definitely helped—I can feel it on the tip of my tongue, I just…can’t quite get it out. It feels like something’s missing, and—and I lose my nerve every time.”

“But I can’t exactly guarantee I’ll be able to be with you in every fight,” Morgan admitted. Cynthia slumped on the bench next to him. She looked really dispirited now.

“Of course. I have to be able to fight on my own. But now…I don’t know. I feel like I’m losing what makes me me. I mean, if I can’t even manage a couple of lousy battle lines, can I really call myself a champion of justice?”

Morgan looked her over with earnest eyes, his expression unusually serious. Then he smiled a little and puffed out a laugh. “Don’t be silly. You can’t lose that.”

Cynthia groaned. Morgan picked up one of her hands and waved it in front of her face. “I mean it! Everything that makes you the person you are, that’s all on the inside. You’re already a hero, no lines or dramatic entrances needed—even if they are pretty cool. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the total package all by yourself!” His little smile split into a grin, and he bumped his shoulder against hers. “After all, you’re my knight in shining armor, right?”

“Morgan…” Cynthia felt her lower lip tremble just a little. She wasn’t about to start crying, not when he was trying so hard to cheer her up, but…he could just be really sweet when you needed it the most, that was all, and it made her want to wrap him in a crushing hug. Every time he said those words—knight in shining armor—it was like she could feel her spirit being bolstered, and she didn’t have gratitude lines prepared for anything like that. He smiled and patted her shoulder.

“Just give me a little time. I’ll come up with something. In the meantime…I’m cheering you on, okay?”

Cynthia kept on practicing her lines in the mirror as dutifully as ever, but she volunteered for mess duty for the next three mornings in a row, which earned her some funny looks, but more than a few grateful ones, too. Kjelle was slotted in for breakfast tomorrow, but if Cynthia was in the kitchen, it might be a little less lethal.

Cynthia knew that there was absolutely nothing heroic about avoiding battle—it was downright cowardly—but she couldn’t shake the nagging worry that if it happened again, before Morgan could come up with his magic solution, she might lose her nerve for good.

It was on the afternoon of the third day that he found her, catching her on a water break from training. He looked a little out of breath, stooping over to suck in a few lungfuls of air, but he was wearing a bright smile.

“Whew! There you are. Severa told me you were in the infirmary, but in hindsight, I think she was just messing with me.” Without waiting for further reply, he started digging around in his bag. “So, I’ve been thinking a lot about your problem, and I think I found a solution.”

“Really?” Cynthia was on her feet in an instant. She knew she couldn’t expect Morgan to magically fix all of her problems, but if he could just help her with this one… “Like what? Like a fear-dispelling potion or something? I’ll try anything at this point!”

“Nothing like that,” Morgan said, and her disappointment must have shown on her face, because he gave her an encouraging smile. “Hey, I told you—you don’t need anything more than what you’ve already got. Buuut…that doesn’t mean you can’t use a boost from time to time.”

He finally produced an object from his bag with an air of triumph and held it out to her—a couple of braided tassels attached by a cord to two bronze coins with square holes in the center. The braided knots were bumpy and clumsily done, and the cord was uneven, but it didn’t look hastily assembled—on the contrary, the telltale frays in the floss spoke to how many times the knots had been pulled apart and retied. Morgan beamed at her.

“I made you a good luck charm! You know, like mine.” He curled his fingers around the charm he kept attached to his belt. He still didn’t know exactly why he had it, but he knew that it was important. “Granted, I don’t know anything about how you’re supposed to make them or what the designs mean, but since I can’t just make a medallion, I found some old coins instead. Anyway, even if it’s not up to traditional Chon’sin standards, I think it’ll do the job. Consider it, um…a traditional Morgan good luck charm!”

Cynthia took it with a bemused look. “A good luck charm?”

“Yeah! Well, something like that.” Morgan grinned. “You said you felt like you couldn’t say your lines because I wasn’t there, right? Well, if you carry this with you, it’ll be like I’m always at your side! I mean, that’s the idea, anyway. So…maybe this’ll help with your nerves in battle. No more flubbed lines!”

Cynthia looked down at the charm in her hands, turning it over. Morgan had been so bent on helping her overcome her case of nerves that he’d spent his precious free time these last few days making this little talisman, lopsided though it was. And it couldn’t have been easy to find the materials. She had no idea where he’d found the coins. She closed her fingers around it, feeling that little tremble in her lower lip again. Morgan watched her, his expression growing less confident.

“I know it doesn't look, you know, professional made, so if it would throw off your whole look, I totally understand if you—whoa!”

Cynthia had flung her arms around his shoulders in a crushing hug, burying her face in his neck. He let out a choked little noise of surprise, but she hardly noticed, overcome with emotion.

“Of course I’ll wear it!” When she pulled back, her eyes were shining—with the glimmer of unshed tears, Morgan realized, brimming over her equally shining smile. “Why wouldn’t I? You made it for me! There’s nothing more powerful than your faith in your friends!”

Morgan let out a relieved laugh and hugged her back. “Well, I’ve got that in spades!”

Cynthia pulled back to look at the charm again, turning it over in her hands. The more she looked at it, the more she could see how much care Morgan had put into making it. Running her thumb around the edges of the coins, she stopped when she felt a textured groove under her fingers. She turned over the coins and inspected them—along the edges of the thick bronze coins, Morgan had scratched their names into the metal, one on each, in stilted, uneven letters.

“Couldn’t get a professional engraver on short notice,” he said, grinning. “But it’s legible, at least. You know, in case you ever forget.”

“Like I could!” Cynthia ran her fingers over the tassels, wondering where he’d found all the floss for it. It was a mess of clashing colors, unlike the stately, solid navy blue of Morgan’s, but that only made Cynthia cherish it more. Who in their right mind wouldn’t be thrilled to receive a homemade gift like this? It only showed all the more the care he’d put into it. “Thank you, Morgan—really. No one’s ever made anything like this for me before. So you can be sure I’ll always keep it with me! And…no one’s ever called me that either before—their knight in shining armor, I mean.”

“Really?” Morgan looked genuinely surprised. “Well, they ought to! You’re out there every day, fighting for a better tomorrow.”

At that, her gaze dropped guiltily. It hadn’t exactly been every day lately, had it? In her momentary fit of nerves, she’d avoided battle and waited for Morgan’s magic solution. But…that was about to change! With Morgan’s faith in her—if she could just feel like he was at her side—she wouldn’t back down from a fight ever again. She grabbed one of Morgan’s hands in hers with a look of fierce determination.

“I’m going to keep trying, Morgan! After all, it’s not like I can afford to lose my nerve now more than ever.” She grinned at him. “I won’t let anything else hold me back from now on, so…so you can keep counting on me as your knight in shining armor!”

“I always knew I could,” Morgan chirped back with such effortless cheer that it almost made her envious. But she shed the feeling as though shaking away water. They could both be like that—a light to carry over to the next day, to keep the banked fires of spirit and morale lit through the night. More than ever, Cynthia was determined to keep carrying that light to tomorrow. He gave her hand a squeeze before he let go, and she immediately set about fastening the charm to her belt. She’d keep it with her always, and with Morgan at her side—with all her friends at her side—she could keep facing towards tomorrow without fear.