Chapter Text
Great Tree Moon: The Light at the Door
Everyone in Garreg Mach knows who Felix Hugo Fraldarius is from the moment he sets foot in the monastery. Even the other two houses know the weight of the Fraldarius family name, the lay of their land, the scars in their history.
Felix, by contrast, does not know who any of them are.
And he makes absolutely no attempt to change that as he stalks down the hall of the dormitory, a lone satchel of personal effects slung over a shoulder.
The school year begins tomorrow. Academically speaking, he has enrolled in the Blue Lion house; bluntly speaking, he could not muster a damn to give about houses. On some level, he supposes he ought to sort out titles, faces, and who’s rigging a coup against whom, but there’s a dangerously fine line between getting to know someone and being tricked into liking them.
So he keeps his distance, because the people at Garreg Mach he knows least of all are the ones he used to like.
When he walks into his dorm room, a stack of invitations has already latched onto his desk like a barnacle:
- Riding with Ferdinand von Aegir—he wants to gauge Father’s thoughts on the Insurrection of the Seven, the ghost of Glenn tells him.
- Tea with Dorothea Arnault— She wants a noble husband. Felix can hear Glenn’s laugh, still. It’s a notion worth laughing at. A husband? Him? Who has time for that?
- Claude von Riegan wants to practice archery together. He wants to know how stable Father thinks Faerghus is, says the calculating voice that still sounds, after all these years, exactly like Glenn.
Shut up, Felix says back. Don’t tell me what I already know.
It’s going on four years since the Tragedy of Duscur, and he’s still trying to win an argument with his dead brother. Pointless.
Almost four years. In Pegasus Moon, Felix will turn eighteen, and at least he’ll win that contest with Glenn: he’ll be older than his brother ever got to be.
Older. Wiser. Stronger. That was what he realized, the day he agreed to go to Garreg Mach: for all the weight of the Fraldarius name, it did not protect Glenn, and it will not protect him. His friends will not protect him. His father will not protect him.
Strength will protect him. Strength alone.
Not the stack of invitations, not fake smiles and gossip, not alliances, not loyalty. Invitations are paper, alliances can break, and his father’s love only sweetened his praise for Glenn’s death.
Strength will protect him, in and out of battle. And Felix has come to Garreg Mach to be the strongest, worst thing on the field.
The school year begins tomorrow. That means he can get a head start.
His baggage stays in the room, and only his practice sword goes with him when he leaves.
All around him, new faces are claiming their rooms, ordering around servants, trying to catch his eye for an introduction. He sees Ingrid at the end of the hall, and pretends he doesn’t. He hears Sylvain in a nearby room, and pretends he doesn’t. The beast who used to be his friend sees him pass, and Felix ignores the flick of his outstretched hand.
He liked them, once. He knew them, once.
But now Ingrid’s heart is curdled over with hate for a butchered people, and she worships at the altar of Glenn’s miserable end. Now Sylvain, who can pick up weapons and spellbooks like he was born holding them, on whose shoulders sit the lives of everyone in the Gautier lands… would rather let his talents rot on the shelf out of pure spite. And the prince…
At the end of the day, Felix thinks the worst thing about the prince is the uncertainty. Ingrid, Sylvain, he knows how they happened, even if he doesn’t know who it made them into. But there’s no way to know if the Dimitri he’d befriended was ever real, or if it was a collar on a boar all along.
He leaves it all behind, and bullies directions out of a passing monk, and marches—flees, Glenn’s voice accuses, like a coward—to the training grounds.
They’re as empty as he hoped. He fills them with noise, thrashing training dummies with blow after blow, until even Glenn’s voice is lost in the drills.
He’s seen it, the empty, starving rage in Dimitri’s face; he’s heard the boar’s muttered pleas to the dead.
It never fails to piss Felix off.
It never fails to shake him to his bones.
Felix knows what it’s like to see the dead in his dreams, to hear their voices spilling into every stray thought. But how much more can he lose before it turns him, too, into a beast?
The practice blade slams into the dummy again and again, as the sky dims overhead, as the bells ring and the buzz of the monastery by day settles into the hush of night, because there’s one thing Felix Hugo Fraldarius is certain of: He never, ever wants to find out.
It’s late when he leaves, late enough that the kitchen staff can only offer their apologies and a venison sandwich when he finally stumbles in. (He’s almost positive that the labyrinth of hedges and gazebos were placed outside solely as a way to weed out the lesser students.) A guard points out the shortcut to the second floor of the dorms by the greenhouse. All the dorm windows are dark, no giggles or murmurs breaking the quiet. Everyone else is long asleep.
As he trudges over the lawn and into the night, sandwich in hand, Felix realizes that isn’t quite right. On the first floor, near the end of its section, a thin bar of light carves through the dark at the bottom of a door.
Someone else is still up.
Felix frowns.
He doesn’t know why the idea bothers him so much, but it does. Maybe it’s because that means someone else is still awake, still working, when he’s calling it a night. He doesn’t give a damn about house pride, doesn’t know if that light belongs to a Blue Lion, a Deer, a Red Rooster (or whatever the hell the Empire students are calling themselves.)
He’s here to make himself the worst thing on the battlefield. He’s supposed to have a head start. Yet someone’s already keeping pace.
Forget about it and get some rest, Glenn chides. You don’t know that they’re working.
Felix stares at that light beneath the door.
Glenn does not relent. Garreg Mach is spoiled rich kids and charity cases. They probably just fell asleep with a candle burning.
That’s close enough to a solid excuse. Felix takes it, and keeps walking.
The school year begins tomorrow. All he has to do is survive.
The school year begins tomorrow, and Annette Fantine Dominic is not sure she’ll survive.
The School of Sorcery in Fhirdiad? That was one thing. They taught her theory, and equations, and the numbers and calculations behind casting a fireball the size of a horse at a target. They didn’t teach her to actually do it. That was supposed to be this year, if she hadn’t been recommended to Garreg Mach.
She thought there would be time to practice. She thought she’d have a chance to settle in.
But she definitely overheard Claude von Riegan, future leader of the—Leister? Lecester? Leisurewear?—the Alliance, at dinner, practically shouting to his friend Hilda about a surprise mock battle scheduled for the first day of school. And Claude wouldn’t lie about something like that.
Wouldn’t he?
He wouldn’t, Annette tells herself. And if he was…
She can’t take the risk. She can’t fall behind.
The evening was supposed to be spent helping Mercie set up her room, and then Mercie would help with Annette’s room, and maybe sneaking some of the little cakes out of the kitchen. Instead, here she is, walled in by her magic theory books, and with a little wooden doll staring down at her from a shelf. It’s the first and last personal belonging she’d actually unpacked.
It’s a reminder that she can’t fall behind.
Annette knows a lot of the faces from the dining hall, especially the ones from Faerghus. She saw them sometimes in Fhirdiad, though they wouldn’t remember her: Prince Dimitri, Ingrid of House Galatea, Sylvain of House Gautier, and of course Mercie. Others are new to her, like the boy from Duscur, and Lord Lonato’s adopted son.
She didn’t see the one face she knows best, though. The one she knows is here.
She didn’t see her father.
She knows he’s here, somewhere, maybe he’s on a mission, maybe she can bribe a records-clerk with cookies and find out where he’s been stationed, maybe, maybe, maybe. None of the monks or knights knew anything about a Gustave, so he’s changed his name.
Annette doesn’t realize she’s been staring at the wooden doll too long, until it hurts to blink.
He can’t keep running from her forever.
She’s Annette Fantine Dominic. It took her one year—one—to land a recommendation to Garreg Mach. One year, and a lot of nights like this: staying up later, studying longer, working harder than anyone else. But it got her where she wanted.
Her father can’t run now, because Garreg Mach is the only place he has left.
She’ll find him here, whether he likes it or not.
No matter what it takes, no matter how many mock battles and pop quizzes and horse-sized fireballs Annette has to duck, she’s going to hang on, because that's who she is.
It took her one school year to make it all the way to Garreg Mach. A new school year starts tomorrow, full of promise—and all she has to do is survive.