Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Scythe of Sariel rests against a hawthorn tree, the moonlight against the Agarthan material creating the impression of a blade more impossibly sharp even than it appears under the warm glow of the day. Its presence is a precaution. Neither attendee can ever be too careful.

“Why do you insist on having me engage in conversation with that man…? The more I speak, the more likely I am to give something away…”

The droning voice of the Death Knight comes in tones which he might consider hushed. In truth, he’s such a quiet speaker that it’s hardly any different than usual. But the usually commanding cadence of the Flame Emperor he answers to is markedly different under the filter that is a whisper; not as imposing as when volume can serve to strengthen her postured pronunciations.

“The church employs a woman pinned with treason in the Kingdom as one of their leading knights, merely because she can wield a Hero’s Relic. I somehow doubt you will be dismissed for acting strangely towards Alois.”

Of course, neither of them don their titular masks, but these names are interchangeable regardless. Even when speaking to Edelgard von Hresvelg, the selfsame aura of ambitious authority emanates from her as if speaking to the Flame Emperor. And for Jeritza von Hrym… He has never quite been able to place where it is that he ends, and it begins… But he is certain that it is a closer tie than a suit of armour. The connection to the Death Knight is...flesh-deep. 

“You are no better, allying yourself with a monster like me,” Jeritza replies with a tone less cold than his words. It is an accusation of himself as much as her...and his tone is hardly capable of fluctuating enough to ever be cold or heated. 

Edelgard offers no response, but not because she has no rebuttal. She merely knows that to break through the young man’s layers of encroaching self-loathing is a task, frankly, beyond her patience tonight. These past couple of days have been taxing, what with the constant work that is attempting to appear so candid in her meetings and greetings with the other house leaders. Claude von Riegan has, quite plainly, the most smack-able face she has ever had the misfortune to exchange words with. If Hubert had been allowed to accompany her, she’s quite certain her loyal retainer would have cursed the Alliance leader-to-be in no uncertain terms half a dozen times by now. 

And Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd… She could swear there’s been something curious in his eyes ever since they had first exchanged names. Doubtless eyeing up the competition, she theorises, well aware of the intense rivalries which tend to develop ahead of the yearly Battle of the Eagle and Lion. Yes, that must be right.

...But petty grievances such as these will be irrelevant come the matters of real importance tomorrow. And knowing that her Death Knight works best with a goal in mind, she decides this is the right time to recap the plan once more.

“Tomorrow, the hired bandit and his lackeys will attack. Repeat your part, if you will.”

Jeritza’s thin face looks down at her, eyes appearing indifferent due to the mask around them...and truly indifferent underneath. This is the third night in a row such relay has been asked of him. It is tedious, but inoffensive, and what more can he ask from conversation with people , really?

“I will announce my intention to fend off a group approaching our flank from the direction of Remire... I will engage, but it will...be mere farce. I...will not kill them,” he says without hesitation, but speaking even more slowly than usual, if such a thing is possible, hinting pointedly at his disappointment with this state of affairs. Edelgard narrows her eyes threateningly at such an implication.

Continuing, Jeritza concludes, “It will be naught but play-acting… The apparent existence of a threat in the process of being dispatched will lead the Knights and the students to keep their attention to the frontal attackers… And likely prevent them moving past me towards Remire for aid…”

Edelgard nods decisively, glad he understands the logic behind her tentative mapping out of the situation. At this approval, he turns to take a few steps further away from the dim red glow of the distant camp, and squats down for...reasons beyond her. 

“Precisely. I don’t believe aid from Remire would pose any real change to our plan, but there is always the possibility of unexpected factors we must account for. If anything, my concern is with those two. They are...more competent than I had expected. Dimitri, in particular. I have had many a sparring bout with him on this trip, and his strength is fascinating.”

It is perhaps something other than Jeritza which responds, “I wish to clash with him, and test that strength he struggles so to contain--” Only for her to sternly shake her head, and strengthen her voice from a soft whisper to a scolding one. “You will have plenty of chances to spar with strong knights when we return to the monastery. Not now.”

The guttural sigh which follows is evocative of the ominous way his breathing reverberates from within his skeletal helmet, when it’s worn, and she feels a shudder at the reminder of how Jeritza himself might yet be an unexpected factor all his own. Trying to keep his mind focused elsewhere, she continues her thoughts.

“And as for Claude…” 

Never one to listen to someone traipse around an issue, Jeritza offers, “You dislike him…” It’s a mildly amusing guess.

“Hm. True, but not the matter at hand. His strength is lesser, from what I have observed. However, I find myself unable to predict how he will behave. He seems eager to jab at weaknesses, and to make jests… And he is shockingly lacking in self-awareness. Perhaps he will be recklessly confrontational, as such.”

“You simply hope he will… It would be convenient for you…”

Quietly, she lets out a hot breath somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. “Well, should he survive, that result can be played to our advantage regardless; he would have more trust in you, should you come to head the Golden Deer House. This new appointment is little more than a coward, and will be revealed as such by the attack tomorrow. In the absence of any other options at such short notice, Rhea will be forced to move you into a regular tutoring position. Of course, if we can see you atop the Black Eagles, that would be preferable, but I am uncertain whether Ms. Casagranda can be convinced to abandon her usual placement... In either event, your ‘promotion’ will be greatly advantageous to our cause this year.”

A noncommittal hum, meaning ‘I don’t care enough to agree or not,’ is his reply. 

Folding her arms in contemplation, Edelgard muses further, reflecting on how to approach this future boon. “Plenty of the students from the Alliance appear to be hard-working commoners from rural regions, judging by what records have been supplied. Leonie Pinelli, in particular, appears to be both without a Crest and wholly lacking in advantageous connections. It is most impressive that she managed to earn a place.” A small smile eases across the princess’s expression, feeling a kind of second-hand pride for the girl (even one she only knows as a list of facts upon a page), already rising so highly on her merits. The kind of person who deserves a better Fódlan - a Fódlan which will reward such effort.

With all the enthusiasm of the sullen cats he admires so much--in secret, he thinks, but she has noticed-- her subordinate puts a damper on such uplifting thoughts as quickly as they arrive. “You do not know everything there is to know of her… She could be a sly manipulator… Or simply have the favour of generous townspeople propping her own incapability up… All remains to be seen…”

Jeritza is still squatting down, and in the dark, Edelgard can’t fathom what it is that’s caught his attention for so long. Anything which keeps Jeritza occupied is a boon, of course, but… Curious, she steps over, greying leaves which fell under the Red Wolf Moon crumpling harmlessly beneath her black boots; noise, yes, but the night has a fresh and strong wind to it, drowning out their words and actions. Such sound as she’s making now is merely comparable to the tearing of fabric in battle, or a sob beneath the height of a scream.

…Her mind wavers, wondering - but knowing, really, merely pretending not to - where it had wandered to pull that dire comparison from.

“Is something there, Jeritza?”

And he looks over his shoulder, pale hands reaching reverently toward what she can now identify as a deep red rose. There are a few, scattered around the grassy earth, all newly blooming and fresh. Once again, the soft kind of smile she likes to hide from others defies her, and asserts itself across her features as the willowy man answers.

“A flower… My favourite kind.”

“Ah. Mine too. How coincidental.”

“I...used to water the roses… With Mother and…”

Oh. That cuts into Edelgard; perhaps sharper than the dagger sheathed at her side might, she feels. She knows enough to see how this sight...may upset him. How it may upset Emile von Bartels , that is. ‘Jeritza’ is yet to supply her the entire story of his past, yet she feels no ill will for such secrecy, because she has never and likely will never speak of the time beneath the palace, of all those… All those…?

For a terrifying moment, the fear of the realisation making the once-red lines all over her form, lurking beneath her concealing clothing, ache and scald, Edelgard finds once again that she can’t remember. Whether it was months she spent down there, or years.

With a terrible hitch in her breath, she runs a hand to the hilt of an axe on her other side, and squeezes her gloved hand tight around it; enjoying the slight tinge of a hidden scar on her wrist, because the strain means she’s taking control of something.

“Perhaps you could plant some in the greenhouse when we get back? I would not deny you so small an indulgence.”

Jeritza takes another shuddering breath at that statement. It pains him, for some reason, she thinks. “I picked one, once... As a gift to Con…ngh...” That trailing voice of his trails off entirely, leaving Edelgard wondering what name he was on the verge of revealing.

This moment of idle curiosity proves a critical error, as those violent sounds which set his chest heaving grow louder.

“Its colour… It reminds me of... freshly spilled blood …”

Though wearing the pale robes of Jeritza von Hrym, it is undoubtedly the Death Knight who bends further to sniff the bloom; nothing feline about the way his flaring nose, doglike, investigates the air beneath him as though having just fallen to his knees upon a new, foreign world.

“I wish...to see that colour...upon my blade…!”

His small but calloused hands come together in front of him to wrap around the rose and crush it, savagely dragging his nails through its petaled centre to rip the beautiful flower into little more than red specks upon the earth.

“I order you to halt, and calm yourself,” the Flame Emperor begins--

But Edelgard is too late to action, and the blood-thirsting Emile rises like a pouncing fox, to grasp and lift his scythe from its resting place with furiously curling hands. His mask-framed eyes suddenly blazing, as though their glassy surfaces are reflecting the hellish depths of Ailell, with the one sentiment they seem capable of expressing but that all-encompassing apathy…

Murderous Intent.

“Your commingled blood will satiate me…!”

The Agarthium scythe rises, slicing the moonlight in twain with its point, and falls…

...to be parried perfectly with the steel Edelgard had readied, keeping control flawlessly.

Scowling at how terribly inopportune the moment is, the heir apparent stares her subordinate down, warning in her tensed brow. What a time for it… She has, of course, long since been prepared to fend off any sudden assault from the beast; her enemies will not be capable of stopping her path, the Immaculate One will prove fallible in the face of her fury; her own ally does not intimidate her.

But what an inconvenience it will be, to let him have his fun quietly enough on this night, only a minute’s walk from tents filled with the Knights of Seiros.

The only thing for it is subduing her Knight quickly.

Chapter Text

The blood rushing through his ears is maddening. To fight the urge would only fuel him further. Nay, this shall serve as a test on the part of the madman inside him--the madman he is inside--that she is worthy of wielding the gall to restrain him, the Death Knight ; to check once more that the girl’s will remains as indomitable as the last time the reaper tried to claim her.

Or perhaps that is just a convenient excuse for his own unwillingness to fend the beast within off, on this night.

“Come,” the Flame Emperor says, after swatting his jagged malice away with the flat of her own weapon, firmly walking backward, further into the trees, one arm spread wide. He follows, with an amused leer, almost in disbelief at the fact she’s baiting him. Oh, what a day it will be, if he ever finds another with such incomprehensible bravery...and whom he is permitted to kill. 

Come he does, his approach accelerating from a disheveled walk to a sprint, arms swinging wildly as though in contemplation whether to fall and give chase on all fours, as a wild boar would. Before he can make that choice, he is upon her, and the scythe slices the cold night air where Edelgard von Hresvelg’s blood-red collar had been moments ago, challenging him to make a clean cut of her head through its guideline. She swerves, and the axe crashes down on the long handle of his blade, forcing his hands wrapped deathly tight around it down towards the earth. Instinct lashes out, and from his stooped position, he lunges forward with scrambling feet, and jabs the speared end of the weapon forward into her leg, the grotesque sound of piercing through red fabric and hot flesh alike bringing a satisfied laugh from him.

His eyes look across to meet with his work, and he finds himself...Oh, far from satisfied. Disappointed; he has pierced, nay, only glanced through the side of her thigh. This flesh wound would not bring about a death. The failure is incensing . A strangled noise of pain escapes her, the sound of grit teeth biting down on screams which seek to release their rapturous pain into the forest, to live among the twisting roots and crows and worms. He pulls the point from her, and lunges again to stand tall behind her, and strafe threateningly as her wary eyes watch him circle his prey. 

In the heat of it all, the Death Knight sees her so differently than usual - how small she is, wounded. How helpless! 

“Yes… Writhe for me…! Squirm, as a helpless rat, trapped--”

Something dangerous flashes through those eyes, and pushing through what must be immense pain - delicious, torturous pain - Edelgard moves on her wounded leg, charging him and knocking the arms upon Sariel’s snaft skyward with an underarm swing of her steel, the axe and scythe rising towards the silver moonlight together...

The greens and greys of their dance among the foliage is contrasted suddenly, by the otherworldly colours of twin Crests’ power manifesting in purest form, the orderly azure glow of Seiros’ blood at her side, and the blasphemous violet of Flames, a colour so similar to her unshakable eyes, igniting her from above, empowering the Flame Emperor with the wrath to burn even the gods above, and to shatter the loathsome works of man below.

“Haagh!”

The axe comes down, meeting with Sariel’s hilt once more, only to cleave through its base of reinforced Agarthium like paper.

The Death Knight watches as it swings further, down to the earth, purposefully missing the mark to split his rib-cage in twain, and his quivering lips curl downward along with it, feeling such intense disappointment . All that raw, untamed power…! And yet, even now, death comes for neither of them.

One of her signature, elegant twirls of the weighty weapon, the kind Edelgard shows idly at the beginning of training sessions to intimidate an opponent, displaying the ease with which she can manoeuvre the axe with her powerful arms, and she’s holding it in an apt reverse grip with which to ram its wooden base into the unmasked reaper’s left temple, sending his long frame onto the leaf-strewn dirt below.

Before his eyes can open towards the moonlight, she is upon him, pressing the handle of her weapon down hard on his chest. Still defiant, he flails the arm at his side which holds on to the tail end of the once-scythe up towards her head; still functionally an Agarthium club, and more than capable of turning a human skull inwards. Her arm catches his as it rises, however; inhuman strength pinning him back, the heretical power of a twin-Crested warrior proving irresistible.

This time, the polished handle of Edelgard’s axe is pinned down tight upon his throat. He can smell the varnish, and the sweat beneath his own hair as he struggles for breath, and the soil in his ears, and the crispness of the night. 

“You’ve had your fun. Now begone . There is no more sport to be had tonight.”

A spectral growl rises from his throat, only to be crushed under renewed pressure on his windpipe from the Flame Emperor, once pale-purple eyes glowing like a galaxy when compared to the dark sky behind her.

The Death Knight, Jeritza has learned, is an animal. A savage creature masquerading as something with humanity.

“...I will hunt again soon.”

And like an animal, it submits to its proven superior...for the moment. With a few half-conscious blinks, while the gaunt, contorted lines of his face begin to loosen in lethargy, the man and the beast begin to meld together again. Or... to separate? Or does the man take control? If so, which man? Jeritza or Emile? Who is either? The questions arise every time, in the moments of aftermath, when memory and experience meet and clash and bite and break, because that wasn’t him, that couldn’t be him, that was the Death Knight, so why is there a bleeding girl before him? Why do his hands shake around a readied bludgeoning tool so?

Sometimes, those questions are the end of it. With no answers, the Crest-bearing body relents, and the mind decides simply that there is no conciliating the sight before him with the fading memories. On such evenings, the other people inside the Death Knight choose to forget. But on others, growing increasingly often in self-fulfilling exponential growth, there is no hiding, and a dull, buzzing ache repeats that you did this.  

‘It feels like brain freeze,’ Emile offers. He’s hungry, after all that. He’d like some ice-cream.

“Ngh…”

Jeritza shakes his head wearily as he wakes up, long strands of silky hair picking up twigs as it slides along the ground. This evening, he remembers. And with the tired, droning voice that accompanies the words he has to say so painfully often, he drawls through their beginning, pleading, “I am sorr--”

Edelgard, standing up shakily from him, responds with just as much annoyance as she always does to his apologies, when this happens. “The fault is not yours. The risk is one I choose to take. Were I to meet my fate at the end of the Death Knight’s blade, the misstep would be my own. However, that will not happen. Don’t worry. My course will not be stopped by something so trivial.”

A competitive streak inside him, whether his own or not, makes him balk at the apparent dismissal of her finest military asset, but the words are some comfort to him. It is the fact he knows any other people - any other prey - will break and crumble beneath his feet, like the frozen surface of the Airmid under the Ethereal Moon, which makes him keep so distant, as not to shatter them and fall into the cold depths. Not to fall so willfully. But Edelgard… When faced with her unbreakable certainty in herself, some days, he really can trust that she will never succumb.

But then she winces as she takes a step along the path back towards camp, and a drop of blood falls onto the hardened mud beneath, and the aura of invincibility he sees around her evaporates. “You are hurt,” he states plainly, slowly clambering to his feet. Ever stubbornly reticent, she shakes her head.

“It is nothing. I have endured worse,” she claims, and it’s all Jeritza can do not to roll his eyes. That is always her claim. He expects that if Edelgard lay dying, limbs splayed or split entirely, she would still proclaim the irrelevance of such wounds compared to those of bygone days… But such imagery will do naught but invite the insidious return of the demon, and he cuts it off there.

“My Crests grant certain healing factors to the bearer. In combination with basic medical attention, which I can handle myself, I will be fit to journey out again in the morning. Please, trust me on that.”

Jeritza has no idea whether that is a convenient lie to cease his concern, or a new truth. The princess has made him one of the few aware of her second Crest, but she speaks precious little of the circumstances in which it was borne, nor its effects. In the absence of certainty, he stoops to pick up the broken head of his scythe, now carrying both halves again.

“My weapon… What should we do…?” 

“If I was capable of breaking it, then it is hardly the best work of our... benefactors,” Edelgard names them bitterly, for want of any word which could better carry the truth of her abyssal contempt. “I will pose this fault to my uncle as soon as possible upon our return to the monastery, and commission a replacement. Until then, I advise you to keep the pieces hidden on your person. The material is valuable, and they will wish to melt it down and re-purpose it, regardless of its failure in intention.”

Another drop of her contaminated blood drips onto the earth, and the thin line that is Jeritza’s mouth depresses.. 

“The man, Rangeld… He will notice your ginger movement tomorrow… Like a shark smelling blood.” Whether this comparison is an excessively dramatic one or not is a matter beyond Jeritza’s concern, for it is clear and suitable, which is all that matters.

“I stepped out for a walk in the greenery just before sunrise when I tripped upon a hidden root and my hip scraped along the bark as I fell. You were up early as well, and can vouch for my story.” The story comes without a moment’s hesitation, and he’s awestruck. Not by the alibi, that is frankly a simple matter, but instead by how quickly she can find words. Even Mercedes could never speak so… He shakes his head.

“I understand… And what of the plan tomorrow night...?”

Real irritation flashes in her eyes at that, and she clenches a gloved fist at her side, before unfurling it as her other hand interlaces itself with the tensed fingers. “They are mere bandits, and hardly talented ones at that, having spoken with them. I will not yield to so insignificant a wound. Your focus would be best kept elsewhere.”

“I understand,” he repeats.

Edelgard walks back, silently, confidently, as though the pain he knows very well ought to be agonising is simply not there. 

Jeritza follows slowly, stopping to pick another rose from along the path. Its colour is...not like fresh blood, but of the stuff spilt and dried upon stone. And its petals are wilting, on closer inspection. He turns to look at those in bloom behind him once more, and they are all flawed, in some way or another. 

Is it the case that the one most beautiful rose in the Empire was that which he had stroked so lovingly, only to mutilate seconds later, and that he shall never see one so perfect again?

...Or is it simply that Jeritza cannot see the beauty in life so well as Emile could, nor even the glory of Death so well as its Knight can ? 

The answer is obvious, and with a face as gaunt as the cold bodies he inevitably leaves in his wake, Jeritza von Hrym tosses the rose back to the earth - uprooted and dead, for nothing but satiated curiosity, and sentiment, and instinct.

Tomorrow, an inevitable encounter.