[Challenge 007] Through Fire and Water
Title: Through Fire and Water
Game: FE3
Word Count: around 2200
Pairings/Characters: Ogma, Caeda
Warnings: vague spoilers for Ogma backstory?
Notes: This is so bad. I give up.
Through Fire and Water
If Ogma still believed in the divine, his goddess would be fashioned in the image of a little girl: distant rider upon her winged mount, long hair whipping behind her like storm clouds.
He hasn't believed in the deities in years, not since his mother died. Probably even before. His mother hadn't been much of a believer herself. Her homeland of Grust was a land forsaken by the gods, she'd always said. A lawless land of little sustenance, where dragons once lived among men, and exiles intermingled with savages, where nothing is ever so clear and easy as it is in the unblemished sheen of the Holy Kingdom. It was why she'd married into a mainlander family -- minor nobility that should have been beneath her, or so he's since been told -- much good that it did her, in the end.
Ogma has never cursed his mother, who died protecting him to the bitter end: a woman proud and strong as her disgraced forebears.
Instead he curses his father, whom he can no longer even remember: pitiful myopic fool who entangled himself in court intrigue far beyond his capabilities, dooming his wife and child to the barren isles of Pyrathi.
o-o-o
Port Warren is visible from the shores of Pyrathi on a clear day. Ogma remembers this, for some reason, as the blaze set by the Grustian troops spreads through the old quarter of Warren's harbor town, where wooden buildings stand snug against each other in meandering rows.
Princess Caeda flies to and fro in the sky above, guiding the citizens to safety before fire and blood overwhelm the streets. But the flames are leaping ever higher. The enemy is drawing ever closer. If they do not board the ship soon; if they do not leave this death trap of a town --
She is shouting something; even before he deciphers her words, his body is already moving, hurtling into the vortex.
It is a boy. She has gone back for a boy. She jumps down, scoops the child into her arms, wincing at the stray embers that catch on her sleeves. The flames lick at her face, at her pegasus's wings as it veers away, no longer able to stay.
Ogma throws himself forward, shoving the princess and the boy out of the way of a falling beam. He is not fast enough; it burns a brand upon his leg, but he kicks it away, unaware of the pain. All he sees is the path lying clear before them despite the smoke, the path leading them out of the fire.
He sees nothing else until they are safe on the deck of a departing ship, pegasus and boy and all, the wind blowing a screen of smoke across the waves as if to hide their flight, and he realizes that the back of the princess's battle uniform has burnt away, revealing an ugly ridge of a scar across her shoulder blade.
He knows it instantly.
Then she turns. "Ogma, here!" she calls out with a breezy grin, and tosses him a packet.
When he fumbles the catch, her grin turns into a frown. "Oh, no. You're hurt even worse than I thought."
"I'm fine, princess." He opens the packet to find what he recognizes as expensive burn ointment, and is looking up again to protest when he flinches.
Her fingers nimbly peel away his charred arm guards to reveal the burns underneath. Her breath comes out in a hiss, but she does not look away.
"I'm sorry, Ogma. You shouldn't have."
"I'm fine," he repeats, and needs not say anymore. She nods, and though her touch lingers on his arm a moment longer, she leaves.
He's not a sentimental man, but he keeps the ointment long after his burns have healed, in the same pack where he keeps a circlet that once belonged to his mother. It was an old family heirloom, the only personal belonging she'd kept in their exile, but in the end she was forced to sell it to a fellow convict with better connections to the underground market just so they'd have the money to pay for an extra blanket.
He remembers straining for a view of the distant port, longing for the freedom promised by the ships that docked there. For a time when his mother would no longer suffer at the hands of their wardens. Funny, how in the end those very ships bore him only deeper into bondage. Funny, that they now escape to the very place he wanted to flee.
Even now he is not free. His chain now is the delicate metalwork of his mother's circlet, reclaimed by King Mostyn of Talys through channels and methods that even now Ogma does not know and cannot comprehend.
His master, that little slip of a girl whose smile is ever like a beacon reaching out to him in the darkness.
o-o-o
He hears the other soldiers whispering sometimes. They do not understand. Will never understand. They are fools who are consumed with worldly desires and bodily lusts, groping around aimlessly in a murky and nonsensical existence. They will never know what a burden flesh is.
At least they do not whisper much. They fear him, much as they fear the mercenary Navarre, though for different reasons. Navarre is cold, his blade swift, silent, and merciless, his cut the one you never see coming.
But that, in its own way, is a mercy.
o-o-o
Ten. Thirteen. Eighteen. He loses count after that. Not much point in counting, anyway, when the end is all the same.
Teetering on the brink of darkness. Everything blurring into a mass of motion and stillness. Water splashes in his face. Red haze. Maybe blood. His body jerks. Maybe he screams. He'd hoped to not give them that satisfaction, at least. But he knows better now. Just as there is no halting the merciless arc of the lash, he can no longer control the reactions of his own flesh.
He is still screaming when he wakes. The soft touch of a hand on his shoulder, and his blade is half-drawn before he realizes who his visitor is.
"Go back to sleep," whispers the princess. "There's still some time to dawn."
He needs no light to make out her expression; he is glad for the darkness that masks his own as he drifts back into the land of dreams.
o-o-o
When the dark dragon is defeated, she goes to Altea; he returns to Talys. She has no need for him anymore. Now, he is truly free.
o-o-o
Ogma wonders at first if it is because of his mother that King Mostyn sends him on the mission to Grust, some two years after the war's end. But then again General Lorenz has always been fond of him; the old knight had been delighted to find another Grustian at his friend's court, and wept openly when the king told him of Ogma's past. Lorenz One-Eye had known his mother, it seemed, and mourned that such a woman should have come to such an end. And yet what a strange sight it had been: that fierce battle-scarred visage, moved to tears over the tale of a former slave.
In the arena, tears are little more than a weakness. But the general was and is no weakling. Despite himself, Ogma had found himself touched by that simple, unaffected gesture of sympathy.
He remembers that day, when he meets Lorenz again at the run-down fortress that serves as a base for a badly organized Grustian resistance against the empire. Lorenz is so badly crippled by his wounds he can barely even stand, and the royal twins of Grust, underfed and malnourished even after months of care, cower in the general's shadow. For a moment Ogma recalls the slave market of Knorda: lines of bony orphans trussed up like dolls, poked and prodded at like horses or cattle. But only for a moment. The girl's eyes, at least, flash with fiery determination, and somehow, Ogma is relieved.
Ogma has never given much of a damn about politics; he holds no more loyalty toward Grust than he does toward distant Archanea. But when the Empire's reinforcements approach a mere week later, Ogma swears a great and terrible vow.
He will kill that despicable bastard Lang. He will take vengeance for old General Lorenz, the last honest man in a faithless land.
Only later does he realize that it is the first time he has ever chosen, of his own will, to fight for anyone other than his princess.
o-o-o
It is not until he has successfully rescued the twins and rejoined the Altean army that he sees her again for the first time in two years. She has just fled from an attack on Altea Castle, and despite her strength, despite her will, in the end she cannot keep herself from weeping.
In that moment a single thought passes through his mind:
She is no longer a child, but a beautiful, vibrant young woman whose face ought never again be stained by tears.
o-o-o
Lang dies easily at his hand. There is no satisfaction in the act, no pleasure in knowing that he has scoured the land of the one who single-handedly destroyed an entire generation of men and women, tossed an entire nation back into the pit it had just crawled out of.
Lang is but one of many. Lorenz is dead.
She finds him that night, and to his surprise, throws her arms around him without saying anything, just as she did all those years ago.
He closes his eyes.
o-o-o
In the ensuing months they have this conversation once, twice, a thousand times over:
"You hurt yourself protecting me again, didn't you, Ogma?"
"It's nothing."
"Don't go too far, okay? Don't forget that we're here for you too."
The day they reclaim the capital of Altea, she catches him off guard for the first time in all the years she has known him, as he sits thinking of the twisting paths of Anri's Way and the strange truths uncovered there, truths he has indeed always known in his heart, emerging now from the fog into perfect clarity: there are no gods, and even if there are, they hold no love for humanity.
But she laughs merrily at his distraction, at his dulled perception, which might very well have cost him his life in another time, another place.
I'm glad. I'm glad that you're able to trust the people around you now, that you're able to relax like this around us.
Isn't it just that I've grown weak, my lady?
No, Ogma, she says then, and her face is suddenly quiet and solemn, no longer the careless flirting smiles and dancing gaze of a young girl. You're wrong. You've gotten stronger. Even stronger, I think, than you were on that day we first met...
o-o-o
The ocean at night is an unfathomable creature. But for the stars, even the most experienced sailor would not be able to say where his ship is headed, or where it has just come from. Past, present, and future are lost to the waves.
When the second war ends, Ogma slips away without another word. He returns first to Talys, to give his king the good news. And when he asks to leave again, King Mostyn does not question him; the old king has always known where Ogma's true loyalties lie, in the end.
But in truth, Ogma has no intention of heading to Altea, of running back to his master like a panting dog.
He has long known this day would come. The path before him is obscured where once it lay clear.
But one thing, at least, he knows. This new world is one in which men like him will disappear, buried forever in the shadows of the past. Perhaps that is for the best. Perhaps it is best that he remains there, so that her light will be forever untarnished, though even as the thought passes through his mind, he knows that it is but a fool's fancy.
No, he will not lie to himself. In a few months she will don a bride's white gown; in a matter of years the new crown upon her head will seem as natural an extension of her as her spear and pegasus are now. She has never been one to turn her back on suffering, and so Ogma has faith too that she will never turn her eyes away from the darkness of the world they live in. Even if all existence should forget him, she will search for him until the end of their lives, and find him in the cracks of the world, where no one else dare look. She is nothing if not stubborn.
Protecting and being protected -- perhaps it's not a bad idea after all.
But always, always, just out of sight, lies a distant memory of small arms encircling his chest. A smile framed by sunlight and snowy feathers.
As Ogma watches the vast expanse of waves from the deck of the ship that bears him steadily away from Talys, he imagines that smile reflected back at him from the dark waters, but as always, the memory is marred by a ripple, a scar.
No, not marred.
But a reminder, and a promise.
He will not go to Altea, but he has witnessed grace beyond the divine, and knows now that there are things in this world that cannot be controlled, not even by the gods.
He will find his way back to her: not as a dog, but as a man.
Game: FE3
Word Count: around 2200
Pairings/Characters: Ogma, Caeda
Warnings: vague spoilers for Ogma backstory?
Notes: This is so bad. I give up.
If Ogma still believed in the divine, his goddess would be fashioned in the image of a little girl: distant rider upon her winged mount, long hair whipping behind her like storm clouds.
He hasn't believed in the deities in years, not since his mother died. Probably even before. His mother hadn't been much of a believer herself. Her homeland of Grust was a land forsaken by the gods, she'd always said. A lawless land of little sustenance, where dragons once lived among men, and exiles intermingled with savages, where nothing is ever so clear and easy as it is in the unblemished sheen of the Holy Kingdom. It was why she'd married into a mainlander family -- minor nobility that should have been beneath her, or so he's since been told -- much good that it did her, in the end.
Ogma has never cursed his mother, who died protecting him to the bitter end: a woman proud and strong as her disgraced forebears.
Instead he curses his father, whom he can no longer even remember: pitiful myopic fool who entangled himself in court intrigue far beyond his capabilities, dooming his wife and child to the barren isles of Pyrathi.
Port Warren is visible from the shores of Pyrathi on a clear day. Ogma remembers this, for some reason, as the blaze set by the Grustian troops spreads through the old quarter of Warren's harbor town, where wooden buildings stand snug against each other in meandering rows.
Princess Caeda flies to and fro in the sky above, guiding the citizens to safety before fire and blood overwhelm the streets. But the flames are leaping ever higher. The enemy is drawing ever closer. If they do not board the ship soon; if they do not leave this death trap of a town --
She is shouting something; even before he deciphers her words, his body is already moving, hurtling into the vortex.
It is a boy. She has gone back for a boy. She jumps down, scoops the child into her arms, wincing at the stray embers that catch on her sleeves. The flames lick at her face, at her pegasus's wings as it veers away, no longer able to stay.
Ogma throws himself forward, shoving the princess and the boy out of the way of a falling beam. He is not fast enough; it burns a brand upon his leg, but he kicks it away, unaware of the pain. All he sees is the path lying clear before them despite the smoke, the path leading them out of the fire.
He sees nothing else until they are safe on the deck of a departing ship, pegasus and boy and all, the wind blowing a screen of smoke across the waves as if to hide their flight, and he realizes that the back of the princess's battle uniform has burnt away, revealing an ugly ridge of a scar across her shoulder blade.
He knows it instantly.
Then she turns. "Ogma, here!" she calls out with a breezy grin, and tosses him a packet.
When he fumbles the catch, her grin turns into a frown. "Oh, no. You're hurt even worse than I thought."
"I'm fine, princess." He opens the packet to find what he recognizes as expensive burn ointment, and is looking up again to protest when he flinches.
Her fingers nimbly peel away his charred arm guards to reveal the burns underneath. Her breath comes out in a hiss, but she does not look away.
"I'm sorry, Ogma. You shouldn't have."
"I'm fine," he repeats, and needs not say anymore. She nods, and though her touch lingers on his arm a moment longer, she leaves.
He's not a sentimental man, but he keeps the ointment long after his burns have healed, in the same pack where he keeps a circlet that once belonged to his mother. It was an old family heirloom, the only personal belonging she'd kept in their exile, but in the end she was forced to sell it to a fellow convict with better connections to the underground market just so they'd have the money to pay for an extra blanket.
He remembers straining for a view of the distant port, longing for the freedom promised by the ships that docked there. For a time when his mother would no longer suffer at the hands of their wardens. Funny, how in the end those very ships bore him only deeper into bondage. Funny, that they now escape to the very place he wanted to flee.
Even now he is not free. His chain now is the delicate metalwork of his mother's circlet, reclaimed by King Mostyn of Talys through channels and methods that even now Ogma does not know and cannot comprehend.
His master, that little slip of a girl whose smile is ever like a beacon reaching out to him in the darkness.
He hears the other soldiers whispering sometimes. They do not understand. Will never understand. They are fools who are consumed with worldly desires and bodily lusts, groping around aimlessly in a murky and nonsensical existence. They will never know what a burden flesh is.
At least they do not whisper much. They fear him, much as they fear the mercenary Navarre, though for different reasons. Navarre is cold, his blade swift, silent, and merciless, his cut the one you never see coming.
But that, in its own way, is a mercy.
Ten. Thirteen. Eighteen. He loses count after that. Not much point in counting, anyway, when the end is all the same.
Teetering on the brink of darkness. Everything blurring into a mass of motion and stillness. Water splashes in his face. Red haze. Maybe blood. His body jerks. Maybe he screams. He'd hoped to not give them that satisfaction, at least. But he knows better now. Just as there is no halting the merciless arc of the lash, he can no longer control the reactions of his own flesh.
He is still screaming when he wakes. The soft touch of a hand on his shoulder, and his blade is half-drawn before he realizes who his visitor is.
"Go back to sleep," whispers the princess. "There's still some time to dawn."
He needs no light to make out her expression; he is glad for the darkness that masks his own as he drifts back into the land of dreams.
When the dark dragon is defeated, she goes to Altea; he returns to Talys. She has no need for him anymore. Now, he is truly free.
Ogma wonders at first if it is because of his mother that King Mostyn sends him on the mission to Grust, some two years after the war's end. But then again General Lorenz has always been fond of him; the old knight had been delighted to find another Grustian at his friend's court, and wept openly when the king told him of Ogma's past. Lorenz One-Eye had known his mother, it seemed, and mourned that such a woman should have come to such an end. And yet what a strange sight it had been: that fierce battle-scarred visage, moved to tears over the tale of a former slave.
In the arena, tears are little more than a weakness. But the general was and is no weakling. Despite himself, Ogma had found himself touched by that simple, unaffected gesture of sympathy.
He remembers that day, when he meets Lorenz again at the run-down fortress that serves as a base for a badly organized Grustian resistance against the empire. Lorenz is so badly crippled by his wounds he can barely even stand, and the royal twins of Grust, underfed and malnourished even after months of care, cower in the general's shadow. For a moment Ogma recalls the slave market of Knorda: lines of bony orphans trussed up like dolls, poked and prodded at like horses or cattle. But only for a moment. The girl's eyes, at least, flash with fiery determination, and somehow, Ogma is relieved.
Ogma has never given much of a damn about politics; he holds no more loyalty toward Grust than he does toward distant Archanea. But when the Empire's reinforcements approach a mere week later, Ogma swears a great and terrible vow.
He will kill that despicable bastard Lang. He will take vengeance for old General Lorenz, the last honest man in a faithless land.
Only later does he realize that it is the first time he has ever chosen, of his own will, to fight for anyone other than his princess.
It is not until he has successfully rescued the twins and rejoined the Altean army that he sees her again for the first time in two years. She has just fled from an attack on Altea Castle, and despite her strength, despite her will, in the end she cannot keep herself from weeping.
In that moment a single thought passes through his mind:
She is no longer a child, but a beautiful, vibrant young woman whose face ought never again be stained by tears.
Lang dies easily at his hand. There is no satisfaction in the act, no pleasure in knowing that he has scoured the land of the one who single-handedly destroyed an entire generation of men and women, tossed an entire nation back into the pit it had just crawled out of.
Lang is but one of many. Lorenz is dead.
She finds him that night, and to his surprise, throws her arms around him without saying anything, just as she did all those years ago.
He closes his eyes.
In the ensuing months they have this conversation once, twice, a thousand times over:
"You hurt yourself protecting me again, didn't you, Ogma?"
"It's nothing."
"Don't go too far, okay? Don't forget that we're here for you too."
The day they reclaim the capital of Altea, she catches him off guard for the first time in all the years she has known him, as he sits thinking of the twisting paths of Anri's Way and the strange truths uncovered there, truths he has indeed always known in his heart, emerging now from the fog into perfect clarity: there are no gods, and even if there are, they hold no love for humanity.
But she laughs merrily at his distraction, at his dulled perception, which might very well have cost him his life in another time, another place.
I'm glad. I'm glad that you're able to trust the people around you now, that you're able to relax like this around us.
Isn't it just that I've grown weak, my lady?
No, Ogma, she says then, and her face is suddenly quiet and solemn, no longer the careless flirting smiles and dancing gaze of a young girl. You're wrong. You've gotten stronger. Even stronger, I think, than you were on that day we first met...
The ocean at night is an unfathomable creature. But for the stars, even the most experienced sailor would not be able to say where his ship is headed, or where it has just come from. Past, present, and future are lost to the waves.
When the second war ends, Ogma slips away without another word. He returns first to Talys, to give his king the good news. And when he asks to leave again, King Mostyn does not question him; the old king has always known where Ogma's true loyalties lie, in the end.
But in truth, Ogma has no intention of heading to Altea, of running back to his master like a panting dog.
He has long known this day would come. The path before him is obscured where once it lay clear.
But one thing, at least, he knows. This new world is one in which men like him will disappear, buried forever in the shadows of the past. Perhaps that is for the best. Perhaps it is best that he remains there, so that her light will be forever untarnished, though even as the thought passes through his mind, he knows that it is but a fool's fancy.
No, he will not lie to himself. In a few months she will don a bride's white gown; in a matter of years the new crown upon her head will seem as natural an extension of her as her spear and pegasus are now. She has never been one to turn her back on suffering, and so Ogma has faith too that she will never turn her eyes away from the darkness of the world they live in. Even if all existence should forget him, she will search for him until the end of their lives, and find him in the cracks of the world, where no one else dare look. She is nothing if not stubborn.
Protecting and being protected -- perhaps it's not a bad idea after all.
But always, always, just out of sight, lies a distant memory of small arms encircling his chest. A smile framed by sunlight and snowy feathers.
As Ogma watches the vast expanse of waves from the deck of the ship that bears him steadily away from Talys, he imagines that smile reflected back at him from the dark waters, but as always, the memory is marred by a ripple, a scar.
No, not marred.
But a reminder, and a promise.
He will not go to Altea, but he has witnessed grace beyond the divine, and knows now that there are things in this world that cannot be controlled, not even by the gods.
He will find his way back to her: not as a dog, but as a man.