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Functionally speaking, the queen of Ylisse died alongside her husband at the Dragon’s Table in Plegia.
It isn’t quite that simple in practice.
Perhaps she’s a ghost, doomed to haunt her own stolen body forevermore. She didn’t put much stock in ghosts as a child, but she also spent a significant portion of her adult life at war with legions of the undead. She won’t discount the possibility.
(She’s had the thought once or twice or a thousand times: are the Risen like her? Wretched souls tethered to their earthly remains, forced to silently watch as their living corpses laid waste to the world? There’s no way to know, but in a way the idea isn't entirely discomforting. She killed a lot of Risen when she was alive. She wants to think that meant something to someone, that even a single soul might have been freed from this eternity. Little victories.)
If she is a ghost, she has a fairly decent idea of what her unfinished business is. Her husband was murdered, after all, and his killer walks free.
The joke is that she killed him and she will never die. Hahaha.
…Henry might have found that funny, at least. Back when he was alive too.
She never expected that the end of the world would be so boring. Once you get past the crushing, impossible guilt of murdering the love of your life in cold blood for no apparent reason, the rest starts to blur together a bit. Oh, sure, there was the occasional icy spike of heartbreak when yet another Shepherd fell, but relatively few of those happened within her sight. Most of her friends were killed by random, nameless Risen hundreds of miles away from her bodies. It wasn’t like Grima particularly cared about anyone other than the bearer of Falchion, and perhaps Tiki. Robin isn’t sure he would have even noticed the Shepherds were any different than the rest of the vermin.
The Shepherds mattered to her, they truly did, but they were also extremely mortal and finite in number. She could only have so many of her friends die tragically before she didn’t have any friends left, and the constant front row seat to genocide after genocide after genocide after genocide after genocide ad infinitum really started to blunt her perceptions of the value of human life.
Oh no, some poor peasant girl was ripped apart by the living dead. She had hopes and dreams and loved ones and everything, just like the last million that Robin watched die. Plegian, Ylissean, Feroxi, Valmese, they’re all the same on the inside.
She read a quote somewhere back when she was alive, she doesn’t quite recall where but it was something about the perception of death and scale. One is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, something to that effect. Robin knew it to be true already. She was a tactician, a wartime queen, a breaker of armies. Unconditional empathy was not something she could afford if she wanted to stay sane (and look where that got her sister-in-law, look where it got her). Robin sent thousands of men to their graves over the years, and she didn’t ever lose sleep over it.
Then she killed Chrom, and it isn’t like she can sleep anymore anyway but it certainly would have done something. Then Grima started his war on the world, and the tactician watched thousands of civilians burn. Her own dead had been soldiers, at least. They had known the risks. These people didn’t, and Grima didn’t care, and it sickened her at first.
It is truly amazing, what the human mind can adapt to. Robin doesn’t think anything can shake her, not anymore.
(This is a lie. There are still deaths remaining that would shatter what little remains of her spirit, complete what she started and snuff out the last embers of her heart. Though the Shepherds are gone, their legacies remain, and Robin could not bear to watch the children fall.
But it isn’t like there’s anything she can do about it, so there’s not much point in worrying.)
The last few… years, she thinks, her sense of time has been irreparably ruined with the rest of her, have been a nonstop world tour to everywhere that humanity still exists until it no longer exists there, and she’s gotten numb to it all. Even to that smug fucking lizard leaking his rage and contentment straight into her soul.
She generally tunes most of the world out. It isn’t difficult, there isn’t much left.
Chrom is buried in the desert, under an unmarked pillar of stone. His wife is buried in her own body, so in lieu of flowers please get the hell away from her at all costs. Not that it will save you.
Her scheduled moping in her nihilism-drenched pit of dissociative despair is interrupted one day, by an odd sense of… anxiety? Fear? Robin hasn’t felt either of those in years, but the alternative is almost too strange to consider.
What is there for Grima to be afraid of?
The particulars of their connection are terribly unbalanced, though that’s probably to be expected. She’s only human, facing the fury of the divine. Grima can rifle through her entire self at will, he can rip open her soul to tear out what he wants from her and then stuff the wound with salt. In return, unless her god deigns to grace her with his presence, the best she can get is a general sense of the dragon’s mood (though honestly speaking, most people probably can). There is virtually no change in Grima’s emotional state on a day to day basis, so something approaching nerves is unlike him.
There’s still some little piece of herself able to take just a bit of joy from his misery. Good to know she still gets schadenfreude. Even more so, there’s a spark of curiosity, because she has no idea what they’re looking at.
Above the corpse of a red haired merchant lies a hole in space. Robin’s never seen anything like it. New means interesting, especially in her grim monotony. Something about it has Grima worried.
That in itself is extremely unusual. Grima has not feared anything in the years she’s spent inside his head, not like this. Not this sort of cold dread of the portal—no, not the anomaly itself, what it represents. It’s more abstract than that. The reason it exists and what someone else is presumably planning to do with it has inspired more fear in the Fell Dragon than she thought possible.
Is it possible? That something in this represents true danger to him? That there is even the ghost of a chance to put the monster down, to be free of this hell?
…of course not. She should know, there hasn’t been a thing since her death that’s been able to scratch her corpse. Wounding the dragon itself is an even greater fool’s errand.
But, again, it’s odd that she’s even here. Grima wanted to investigate the oddity, fair enough, but it’s using her body to do so. He doesn’t bring her out without a reason, preferring to use his own draconic form whenever possible. Granted, the relatively tiny aperture of the hole is most likely the cause in this scenario. His true body would perhaps be able to get about two dozen feet of his snout through, but there isn’t a chance he could fit inside on his own.
Which means that he intends to enter it. It scares him, and yet he considers it a reasonable possibility that he must personally engage with it, enough to bring a vessel that can.
And a few expendable test subjects, of course.
Waves of Risen mindlessly march into the unearthly gate and disappear. They do not come out the other side, not as far as she can tell, but the concept of the other side might be a bit stranger than she’s used to in this case.
Risen are not intelligent, they cannot serve as scouts even under Grima’s six eyes, and so there would be no point in seeking any form of report on their surroundings. They are wholly incapable of that. They are, however, extremely capable of following the simple orders to walk forward, turn around, and walk back.
Grima waits, but the Risen sent into the void do not reappear. This does nothing to aid the unease she can feel leaking through her mind.
Some old, vicious part of herself is still alive enough to feel satisfaction. Good. Let him suffer, let him be the one to face the hard question for once.
And then a voice she has been trying desperately to ignore finally pipes up, a simple question of what Master Grima is planning to do next. An audible voice.
The final major oddity in the case of the hole in space is her son, though it’s more like he brought his strangeness with him than having any particular influence on the current scenario.
Morgan, against all odds, is alive. Robin cannot understand why, she comprehends little of Grima’s motives on the best of days, but her baby is a strong contender for the title of the last human being that will ever live. Grima, inexplicably, tolerates the boy. There is nothing approaching fondness in his heart that she has been able to find, only a sort of grudging acceptance.
It isn’t because he’s useful. Morgan is, he ever remains the faithful servant, but Grima had other pawns. Other devotees existed, other madmen and zealots that would have tossed themselves over a cliff the moment the dragon said jump. Other worshippers with more knowledge, more power than a boy barely old enough to shave. Grima slaughtered them without hesitation, and they loved him for it, but he does not kill her son.
Is that love, for a being such as he?
Robin can feel no gratitude towards the Fell Dragon for this. How can she, when for all that the boy is alive, her baby has been reduced to this? An empty, broken doll, existing only to serve an uncaring god?
There is no light left in Morgan’s eyes. None of the life and hope that once poured from him like sunlight remains, choked out by a dead, dull fog of unremitting, unrewarded obedience. Grima tolerates Morgan, but Robin knows it is not unconditional. Were he ever to disobey, to fail, were he ever to try and reclaim anything of the relationship he once had with the demon wearing his mother’s skin, ask for anything the Fell Dragon hesitates to give, Morgan would find the limits of that tolerance quite soon.
And so her son does not test his god, and Robin is left to watch his hollow shell sin in her name. She no longer feels much in the way of guilt for her dead friends, time and ever encroaching numbness dull all, but there is no relief from Morgan. He is there, always, and the grief shame guilt shrouds him like that old coat he wears.
There is nothing Robin can do to save him, and she does not know what she should have done differently. If she had tried to be a worse mother, if she had rejected her son’s love and adoration when he was small, would he still be here? Was there any chance to turn his devotion to a worthier source? What would his life be, without her?
Robin doesn’t know. She lost her chance to change his fate long ago, but as she watches him warily enter the distortion at his master’s command, she silently begs to anything that will listen.
Please, help him. Get him away from her, break whatever hold her ghost still has on her child. Give him the chance to be a person again. If anything she was ever meant anything at all, please, save him.
Grima does not listen, does not care, but he follows his pawn into the void regardless. Perhaps this is trust, for a being such as he.
It isn’t nearly as easy as Morgan and the Risen made it look. The gateway seems to fight them for every inch of progress, like they’re trying to walk against a river, like the gate itself rejects them. Of all the words that could be used to describe Grima, though, the worst is inevitable. She can feel them bleeding, can feel how he has to force his claws into the gate to stop it from snapping shut on top of them, but there is no doubt in her mind that they’ll make it. Such is Grima’s will.
They struggle. They pass through. And on the other side, the sky is blue.
It’s been years since she’d seen it like that. Clouds of ash and smoke and poison had made a ruin of the firmament, and Grima’s swirling serpentine bulk cast shadows darker than dark. She can barely remember what the sun looked like, what it felt like on her skin.
The sky is blue.
What just happened? Where did they go, to end up somewhere untouched by the Breath of Ruin? She didn’t think there was anything left.
The sky is blue, and the clouds are white, and the grass is green and alive, and she can see the sun.
And then she realizes she can’t see her son. They are alone. No Risen, no Morgan.
Grima feels a flash of faint irritation, and then nothing. He has already written his favored pawn off, as simply as sweeping dust off their shoulder.
Something in her heart cracks, and she whispers a silent thanks to whatever cared to listen. She doesn’t know if her desperate prayer truly meant anything, but wherever her son is has to be better than here.
Is this what caring feels like? She’d forgotten.
Grima turns back and forth for a few moments, searching the unblemished horizon, and then apparently finds what he’s looking for.
And they walk.
And walk.
And walk.
The sun rises, the sun sets, and Robin would cry if she still had control of her own eyes.
The sunset. The moon. The stars.
Little victories.
The land is green, she can see living animals, the air doesn’t taste like ash and rot. Where are they? Are there people here? If she were a more optimistic woman, she might put more stock in the chance that’s just arisen. Grima the dragon, unassailable, is somewhere far away. His human vessel is weakened by the trip… but not weak enough. Whatever dares to cross them will still die.
What dares to cross them, eventually, is her.
What?
They find her standing in the middle of a field, after a day and a half of walking. She’s a woman of relatively average height, with white hair and an old black coat lined with eyes. That’s the same coat she’s wearing. That’s the same face Grima’s wearing.
It’s her. Another her. They could be mistaken for twins.
Confusion, perhaps, is her primary emotion at the moment. Underneath that is a hot spike of rage. She didn’t… She hasn’t ever really had to look at herself, since she died. If she’s ever been within a hundred feet of a mirror in that time, she couldn’t tell it. The sudden surge of hate at her own image… She wasn’t prepared for that. Robin is most certainly not her own biggest fan, but at the same time, the venom has dried out over the years. There’s only so much energy she can devote to hating herself. Score one for crushing apathy.
Even deeper, though, and perhaps tempering that flood of spite, is pity. Robin doesn’t know exactly what’s going on (she’s heard tales of the Outrealm Gate, never had time to look into it personally, but some of those stories are running through her head now), but she does know something else, one of the most fundamental truths of her existence.
To be Robin, to be human in the presence of Grima, is to suffer.
Whatever this apparition is, her life is about to become significantly less pleasant, and though a part of her own blood still boils at the sight, she can at least pity the poor woman for that. It’s as much as she can do. Empathy is all she can give, as sorry of a salve as it is.
Grima wastes no time in proving her right. Dark magic, not any formal spell or ritual but raw draconic will forced onto reality courses through their being. His hate leaks through their bond, not only his usual general contempt for humanity but some specific, burning frustration mixed with black glee.
He strikes.
She doesn’t know what he’s doing, but she can feel the power flowing, can feel the attempt to rip the scales off her mirror’s eyes. Invisible claws snap shut around the copy’s soul, and Grima surges through the link, pouring himself into her.
Other Robin didn’t even have the chance to turn around, didn’t even get to see from whence her doom came. The poor woman writhes screaming in the grass, and the worst is still to come.
Robin feels a spike of pain. That’s… that’s not…
Something is wrong.
Robin doesn’t even know what’s supposed to be happening, but she can tell that something is very wrong. Grima’s rage burns brighter, though there’s a note of something like panic in the flames. Pain flares in their shared soul.
He’s overextending himself. He surrounds the copy, and Robin’s dragged along as they shatter her walls and break their way inside. But it isn’t working, it hurts it isn’t supposed to hurt this is him, he’s trying to force too much water into too small of a vase and the remainder pours into nothing. She was made to emptied, made with the expectation that she would be made complete by him, but this mirror isn’t empty enough. Too small, the body is too small, too weak to hold him, there just isn’t enough room but he has to go somewhere, the power has to go somewhere even as he scratches and tears away at the little vessel’s insides, desperately scraping away everything he can in the vain hope that it will be enough to fit himself inside.
This is a kind of agony that she never knew existed. She didn’t realize souls could burn. Their collective being stretches past their physical self and the doppelgänger’s Heart rejects them. This isn’t how it was supposed to go, but he’s gone too far to not shed blood. Either continue in his mad scramble to force the little vessel into something suitable, or cut his losses and fall back into her with whatever of himself he can keep together.
He might have made it, if he kept going. Then again, he might not have, and pain has a way of clouding the mind. Fear pours through them, and Grima chooses to flee.
The blood in her veins is fire, and Grima barely manages to warp anywhere but there before their body gives out from the pain.
She dreams of murdering her husband.
There was no real way of knowing how long they spent unconscious, but Robin was still exhausted when they finally woke. Grima had lost something, something real in his failed ritual. He had tried to push too hard, forced more of himself on the little apostate than she could handle. That part of him is lost (she spares an occasional thought for where that piece went, and has a sinking suspicion that a new Risen outbreak is about to occur wherever it ended up) and they are collectively weaker than they’ve ever been since he usurped her authority of her own body.
Robin can’t quite muster much excitement about this, because she’s too busy staring at Ylisstol.
Ylisstol. Standing. Not a pile of rubble, flaming or otherwise, and not infested with the undead or the dying.
That can’t be possible. She saw her city crumble like sand under Grima’s claws, watched as it was reduced to nothing and its people slaughtered. On a purely logistical level, there isn’t enough of humanity left to rebuild it, let alone in the time since she last saw the place. Or perhaps she’s using the wrong tense. Perhaps there won’t be enough of humanity left to rebuild it.
Grima has settled them silently in a treetop with a decent view of the city and done nothing else for over a month, so she’s had some time to think.
Fact one: the environment is remarkably un-destroyed by Grima’s rampage. See earlier observations about the sun and trees.
Fact two: the first human they came across was an exact double of her, down to their mother’s old coat they inherited. That can’t be explained as easily by a secret twin.
Fact three: the second human they came across claimed that the current Exalt was none other than Emmeryn Lowell, who to Robin’s knowledge is most definitely dead (as is the poor woodsman that outlived his usefulness the second he answered Grima’s question. His corpse rots below them.)
Fact four: Ylisstol looks rather intact for a city she saw razed to the ground. She’s no architect, but she does know a thing or two about logistics, and there is no possible way that the city she ruled over could be so perfectly remade, not with the time or human resources she knew existed.
Supposition one: Robin has never seen the Outrealm Gate before. Maybe. But she’s heard legends of its power and to the strange places it connects to, and some of the strange times as well.
She hasn’t seen the Outrealm Gate that she knows of for a fact, but she has the sneaking suspicion it looks like a blue hole in space.
That theory only gets stronger when she watches something in Castle Ylisstol explode.
Grima finally snaps to attention out of his fog of boredom, but remains still. He watches the smoke rise through the night sky with undivided focus.
Robin does too, because she remembers an explosion quite like that one. It happened the night her employment with the Shepherds took a grim turn, the night she nearly failed to protect her captain from a blade in the dark, and the night Exalt Emmeryn’s blood stained the floor of her own chambers.
(She also remembers what happened to her as well. An uptick in tensions with Plegia, the Exalt’s throat slit in the night, and the presumptive heir nearly slain as well. The fact that he was alive, that she’d kept him alive and was the only one to take down any of the assassins that night, didn’t hold as much weight to some as the little detail of the only witness to the latter event being a woman from nowhere dressed in Grimleal black.
Chrom got her out of the dungeons the second he realized she’d been arrested, but that had been a long, long night.)
Dread runs through her veins like ice. So too is Grima displeased, his attention drawn to the occasional faint… something. She can’t quite describe it, but her best comparison is an unseen candle flickering out on the very edge of her perception. It isn’t any sense she had in life, and even now she wouldn’t have noticed it if the Fell Dragon wasn’t so focused.
Grima curses and mutters a warp spell under their breath.
Seeing Ylisstol from a distance was strange enough, but suddenly being back in the castle, back in her home, intact, is another thing entirely. It holds her attention for all of two seconds before Grima finds what he’s looking for and warps them out again, not to any recognizable anywhere but to a blank, black void.
He stole her father’s corpse.
He stole Validar’s corpse.
Somewhere in the back of her mind a few pieces finally click together. They were all but certain Plegia was behind Emmeryn’s assassination but never quite managed to find concrete proof of their involvement. The presence of the Grimleal hierophant in Castle Ylisstol, on what she has serious reason to believe is the very same night of the assassination is evidence she never had when she was alive.
(Validar was there, he was always there, from the moment she was born he was already setting up to ruin her entire life and she can’t—she can’t…)
The faint catharsis of seeing the bloody gash across his chest, the lightless eyes set in a shocked face, of finally witnessing the body she most regrets never making herself is immediately undercut by the man seeming significantly less dead than he was ten seconds ago, together in the nowhere Grima took them to.
The Fell Dragon reveals himself to his most devoted servant, and fate is once more set upon its destined path.
The single silver lining about meeting her father again, and the sole fact keeping her from sinking into the pit, knowing that he’s alive again, his cursed blood is back to spread his divine poison, she’s technically his god now she would command him to tear out his own heart (and he’d do it, too) if she only had her voice…
…where was she going with that? Ah, right.
Validar is not her. Validar does not share most of his mind with her, which means that he and Grima have to talk, aloud, if they want to communicate.
This is how Robin finally gets some concrete answers about what the hell is happening. She was already mostly sure, but confirmation is nice.
Time travel.
Gods damned time travel.
Because her brilliant, beautiful little lunatic of a daughter chose to spit in fate’s six eyes and figured out a way to win a lost game. Because Lucina and the last legacies of the Shepherds refused to go gently into that good night, struck a blow against time itself to make right what once went wrong.
Robin has never been more proud, and never more deathly afraid.
The board has been reset. The dead aren’t, yet, even Exalt Emmeryn, and her friends have another chance to avoid their fated doom. The children have knowledge of what will come to pass and the willpower to change it.
But they don’t have enough.
Robin has no way of knowing what exactly Lucina and her companions understand about what went wrong. She has no way of knowing what her friends were willing to reveal to a grieving child, what the Shepherds might or might not have taken to their graves.
They might or might not be aware of the time bomb in their midst, the holy poison in the tactician’s veins, the secrets sleeping in the little apostate’s heart.
They definitely aren’t aware of something even worse: that they were followed back. That they aren’t fighting against fate unopposed, that the active will of god is arrayed against them. Grima has power that they cannot match. When a key player was removed before his time, the Fell Dragon brought him back. There was whatever he tried to do to the apostate as well, as much as it failed to accomplish anything. Grima is entirely willing to cheat to ensure his victory. Morgan, too, exists somewhere, somewhen, and Robin isn’t sure what that means for anyone.
The very fact that she knows of the plan to defy time is the most terrible threat to its success.
She prays that the Shepherds, the children, none yet grown into the legends that failed to avert the apocalypse, can somehow pull off a miracle.
There are stakes again. She didn’t realize she could still care so much.
She doesn’t actually see the Shepherds again, or even interact with their periphery at all for over two years. One one hand, this is objectively a good thing. If she ever personally sees her friends again, that means they are in mortal danger. It’s better for everyone that they never cross paths.
On the other, she’s had the perfect view into the heart of the enemy’s plans, and it’s driving her insane.
More than she already is, really.
Robin, by necessity, is privy to every discussion, to every session of scheming in the dark. She watches as they plot to break what dearest Lucina fixed, to take the Exalt’s head from her shoulders and the Fire Emblem from her country, as they succeed in one and fail in the other. She watches the plot coalesce to remove the increasingly unstable and unpopular Gangrel (she can summon a shred of pity for a fellow tool, but not much for that one) and install Validar as king.
(It’s actually a rather fascinating exercise in rulership. Validar burns coin and favors like the world is ending because he’s certain it will. He can make all the promises he wants, secure in the knowledge that there won’t be anyone left to call in debts before they come due. No need to run a country sustainably if your personal objective is the extinction of humanity.)
She watches Aversa, pathetic puppet Aversa, and how she doesn’t even dare to beg for scraps of their father’s attention. She gives everything for him, and he very occasionally deigns to remember the daughter that isn’t his blood in return… She isn’t entirely sure how she feels about that, whether it’s pity, or jealousy, or contempt, or some odd mix of the three.
She watches as they plot against Walhart, seeking to poison his empire from the inside, and some theories of hers from life are finally confirmed. She watches as they hear of the Valmese invasion force repelled by the Shepherds, and she hears as they decide the time has come to involve themselves, what they can afford to give without taking vital resources for Grima’s resurrection.
It’s maddening.
She has so much, now, so much knowledge, so much information that could be so terribly useful in the right hands, and absolutely no power to share it. Every secret meeting, every plan and plot has her screaming her metaphorical lungs out in rage and despair at how totally Grima discounts her. She, the tactician, the queen, the woman that shattered armies in her way, the mind known worldwide, is completely impotent to do anything to help the people she cares about. Her enemies pay her not a shred of attention (she’s legitimately unsure if Validar knows his daughter’s soul is still trapped in her body, but she’s leaning towards no), and the best part is that they’re right to.
Ha. Ahaha. It’s hilarious, actually, and it’s going to keep being hilarious or she’s going to kill herself.
(and she can’t even do that, this is what it means to be her, forever, no escape no escape noescapenoescape–)
Grima has less than zero interest in the politics of allying with a country they intend to betray and a ruler they intend to murder, but he does want to be there, to observe with his own eyes (his own eyes, ha).
The little apostate. She’s here, still wearing that old black coat, standing next to
Chrom.
ChromChromChromChromChrom
She knew he was out there, she knows her daughter well enough to realize his safety is absolutely one of her missions in this time… and it’s paid off. It’s… she could name a hundred little things she can see that mark differences in this man and the one she murdered.
Some of it is in the way he stands, straighter, taller than she remembers, the sign of a man who wasn’t grievously wounded the night his sister was slain, who hasn’t had to suffer through an old injury for years. Some of it is in his face, younger, less lined by stress and anger. Emmeryn is still dead, but it was somehow a much kinder fate than the Exalt met in her time. Chrom was left with confirmation of her ideals rather than bloody rejection, and lessons learned to match.
Some of it is in the woman at his side, staring uneasily into their hood.
Robin can’t unsee the light leaving his eyes, unfeel the warmth of his blood on her hands. Can’t unhear the last breath her beloved ever took, or the last promise she couldn’t fulfill.
She doesn’t want it to happen again. If… if that means removing the apostate before she becomes a problem… it might really be better that way. If it can be that way.
Grima cares not for Falchion’s bearer, instead using her expert gaze to scrutinize the empty vessel. Thankfully, blessedly, he doesn’t particularly like what he sees. She’s getting stronger, but it still isn’t enough. That’s nearly the end of the interaction, and Robin is filled with paradoxical desperation to stay with her family just a moment longer and to get as far away from them as possible when Frederick speaks up, insisting on courtesy.
No. Surely, he wouldn’t…
She can feel her lips twist into a cruel smile, mirrored on Validar’s smug countenance, and Grima slides their hood off.
The shock and fear on their faces is so very sweet, though not to her tongue. His reaction sinks down to her and drips itself over the spike of heartbreak. She… Chrom didn’t even look at her like this when she killed him.
She wonders what his expression will be when it’s his Robin’s turn.
The tactician stares into her own eyes and prays that this won’t be a nail in the expected coffin. If… if this is enough to get the little apostate to understand that this… isn’t a thing she can have. That it’s enough to get her to reconsider her place, and perhaps to do something about it.
Something is wrong with her. She must understand that.
Robin pities the poor creature, but if someone has to bleed…
The Shepherds are shooed out without any sort of catharsis, any explanation, and Robin thinks that will be the end of it for now.
And then, later that night, Grima seeks out Validar for something or other and they find him… not there. Validar eventually warps back into his chambers with a pensive frown.
Grima demands to know where he’s been, and he does not like the answer.
They’ve discussed the Ylissean tactician occasionally. In one of those early conversations, the dragon somewhat reluctantly revealed what exactly the purpose of his attack on the little apostate upon his arrival to this time had been. She’d gotten something of an understanding by being there, but it was new information that he’d apparently managed to tear out most of the vessel’s memory.
She thought Validar had learned not to question his god that day, but evidently not. He’d been off to torment the woman further, push her into accepting her destiny, and to his surprise been soundly rejected.
In a hesitant voice, he asks if his master knows why.
Robin can feel something break as Grima viciously backhands him across the face.
On the floor, one hand cupping his cheek, Validar digs his grave further. He only wants to understand, he begs, why his wayward daughter won’t accept her purpose. She did in the future, so what is different about this time?
Grima roars back that she didn’t, that the sorcerer had to steal her will and that they cannot needlessly antagonize the tactician before they have the Emblem. Probably some other things as well, but Robin isn’t really paying attention anymore.
Validar what.
In the future, the reason she… the reason she put a bolt in her husband’s stomach, the act that shattered her will and presaged the end of the world, the murder that she agonized endlessly over, not understanding how she could ever break so badly as to kill the most important person in her life…
The reason she couldn’t understand. Is because she didn’t do it.
That fucker.
She’s going to RIP HIS MISERABLE HEART FROM HIS CHEST WITH HER BARE HANDS AND CHOKE HIM WITH IT, SHE WILL TEAR HIS BONES OUT AND GRIND THEM TO DUST, SHE WILL SMITE HIS RUIN ACROSS THE DESERT AND STAIN THE SANDS WITH HIS GORE.
VALIDAR SO ADORES HIS GOD? THEN HE CAN SHARE HIS FATE.
Grima actually winces, which in turn startles her out of her volcanic fury. That might be the first reaction she’s provoked from the dragon in all her years of impotent emotion inside him.
Good.
Suffer.
All her doubts have evaporated. There is nothing in her heart but pure, burning support for the little apostate and her companions. The tactician may have venom flowing through her cursed veins, but evidently that on its own isn’t enough to bring about Validar’s cherished doom: the bastard had to cheat.
There isn’t anything she can actually do, of course. Robin is exactly as powerless as she was before, but she’s more certain of herself than she has been in years. Even before her death.
She has nothing to offer but her silent cheers. The only thing she can do is watch, so watch she will.
She had heard, back when she was alive, of trauma flashbacks. Of how it could sometimes seem like one was trapped back in some awful situation, forced to relive past miseries. A few friends of hers had confided to her about their nightmares, so she understands the concept.
That isn’t what’s happening here. This isn’t an ugly figment of her imagination, her own mind warring against itself, she’s actually about to witness the worst moment of her life.
Again.
Validar has the Fire Emblem. He didn’t before, but the Shepherds accepted an invitation to a trap, and the sorcerer had a hidden knife in the form of his own flesh and blood to take what needed to be taken.
She spares a bit of thought for where the other gems were. When the Emblem was stolen on the night of Emmeryn’s assassination in her time, Argent was lost with it. Plegia had always had Sable, and according to Tiki, she had been in possession of Azure before it was stolen in her slumber. Robin never got concrete information on where Vert or Gules were until she saw them in the completed Emblem minutes before her death. They were already set in the shield at the point this time’s Validar stole it, so the Shepherds clearly had more success in gemstone-hunting this time around. An effect of the children, perhaps? Or some other bizarre twist in the tapestry of fate?
The particulars are irrelevant. Validar has the Emblem now, and he’s about to have his lord’s vessel. In Robin’s darkest hopes, she had thought that the tactician’s usurped will could have potentially been enough. As much as she wants her younger self to win, surely she had to understand that she is an unacceptable risk? Surely someone had to, surely dearest Lucina (joined with the Shepherds since the last time she saw them, to her father’s incredible frustration) would understand what needed to be done?
Evidently, no one did. Validar is not nearly as panicked as he would be if the little apostate was no longer on the board, and Robin knows… she doesn’t, actually, she doesn’t know where the differences lie between the men and women of her memories and the incarnations yet to die, but she seriously doubts they can stay away from the Grimleal’s bait. Compulsive do-gooders, the lot of them, with few exceptions.
It would warm her dead heart if they weren’t bringing Validar exactly what he wants. If the final key to the apocalypse wasn’t marching towards the world’s doom.
Grima is confident enough in destiny. He doesn’t particularly want to intervene if he doesn’t have to, but he’s interested enough in the proceedings to get himself a decent seat. They perch in the shadows of the Dragon’s Table, set up on a ledge well above where the action will occur.
His smug satisfaction sickens her. She can’t watch this again, and she has no choice, and the beginning of the end has come as the Shepherds enter the damned cathedral.
At their head is Chrom and the tactician.
Her heart sinks.
In a kinder world, Validar found his calling in the theater. He’s got the larger-than-life presence down, and Robin can acknowledge the showmanship at play. Less acting skill and more absolute confidence in fate, though, she thinks.
No matter.
There’s more to the melee than the duel against her father at the altar, but it captures Grima’s entire attention and thus she cannot look away either. A laughing hunger grows in them, a black, sadistic glee at the prospect of watching Chrom fall to the Table floor again. When Validar stumbles, he actually leans forward in anticipation.
The king of Plegia falls. The king of Ylisse goes to his wife, and her ghost watches in dull horror as her own hands push a Thoron into his stomach for the second time. She can’t hear his words, but they are already carved into her soul.
Robin cannot scream. She cannot weep. She can only watch as the end of the world starts over again.
Failure. Again. Fate cannot be changed.
Validar crows his triumph to the heavens about to be cast down. Another cry of despair rings through the Table’s shadowed interior, and Robin is heartbroken to realize it belongs to her daughter. Lucina is here, she’s been here the whole time, fighting against time itself, raging against the dying of the light… and she’s failed. Her baby, whether she knew it was meant to be or not, had to watch her mother murder her father.
This might actually be the worst moment of her undeath. Her daughter is hurting, her daughter she hasn’t seen in years is crying, and Robin can’t go to her. Her touch would be poison.
She wants to die. She needs to die. This is not an existence she can tolerate.
And then Basilio appears.
Grima straightens and breathes in sharply. Robin isn’t sure why, for the first second, and then she remembers. He… he should be dead by this point, right? Slain by Walhart? That’s the kind of thing that might have been avoided with knowledge of the future, but now that she’s thinking about it she recalls a brief mention of the Khan’s fall a few months ago in a report by one of Validar’s spies (yet another thing she was unable to share, yet another thing driving her mad. It had been haunting, to understand how closely they were being watched in her time, how long the invisible jaws of the trap had laid waiting around them).
In stark contrast to everyone else in the room, Basilio is in high spirits, and the longer he talks the more her own hopes rise. She’s not entirely sure what he means about a vision the tactician had, but she understands the ploy with the Gemstones a second before Validar does.
His expression is glorious, and so is the burst of rage-disbelief-fear that floods through her from on high when the apostate and the exalt stand up.
She should never have doubted them.
Validar rants and raves in impotent fury as the battle resumes, which in better circumstances would be music to her ears. Watching the man who ruined her life reduced to this… it should be cathartic.
But the blood in her veins turns to ice, even as her body burns with hate.
This would be a triumph… if she wasn’t seeing it. Because the Shepherds pulled one over on Validar, but they have no idea how close they are to the edge.
There are four different categories of knowledge, as relates to awareness and understanding. There are things one knows they know, things one knows but aren’t aware that they know, things one knows they don’t know, and the most dangerous of them all: the things one doesn’t know that they don’t know, the unknown unknowns.
The last is the tactician’s nightmare. One cannot truly prepare for something they don’t know is something they need to prepare for. It was her solemn duty as half the Shepherds’ field command to roll with the punches as they came and adapt to whatever their opponents threw at them, but she was never put up against anything like this.
That’s a lie, actually. She was. She failed.
This timeline’s tactician has already escaped the trap that doomed her predecessor with the varying forms of foresight she was granted (Robin’s not bitter, she’s not, the poor woman used the tools she had available, and it is pointless to mourn that she herself didn’t have that chance), but the diabolus ex machina waiting in the dark is another matter entirely. Do they have any idea? They met the hierophant, they can’t have forgotten their tactician’s inexplicable twin so easily… but “inexplicable” isn’t quite as strong of a word applied to someone that lost her past, and they only found out her true purpose as the vessel a handful of minutes ago. It’s entirely possible, probable, even, that she’s been a bit too focused on the present circumstances to connect the dots. Robin can’t blame her, not really, but that doesn’t matter to fate.
For all that Validar seethes, this isn’t a victory. Not while she’s still here.
With the initial plan thwarted, Grima now has cause to pay slightly more attention to the rest of the battle. She finds their eyes inexorably drawn to Falchion’s shining arc, both to Chrom’s heirloom and its parallel in her daughter’s hands. To witness Lucina is… a paradox. She wants more than anything to see her children again, and she wants more than anything to never see them again. For none of this to have happened, for the princess’s parents never to have faltered, fallen, for them never to have left her with one sword and a world of troubles. Her little light deserved so much more than this, but the woman she’s grown into… that is something glorious. It kills her inside that she can’t know more, can’t say any of the million words burning her stolen throat, that the best of her daughter she can observe is martial skill, but even this paltry offering is a balm to her aching soul.
She and Grima notice the figure beside Lucina at the same time, and the budding rage in her bones spikes with a cry of betrayal (Grima is legitimately distressed, truly, sincerely upset, to her shock) even as her own heart soars to see an old black coat with eyes along the sleeves.
That isn’t the tactician, though she apparently now has a companion in her apostasy. That’s her son.
Morgan is alive, he’s alive he’s alive he’s alive, and he’s found a better place. She has no idea of the journey, she hadn’t heard anything from Validar’s spies about a boy in a black coat joining the Shepherds (joined recently or not considered important? unsure, and she doesn’t need to know), but he fights next to his sister like he never left. Even from her distant perch, she can see such a drastic difference from the empty shell he was at her side. So much more animated, so much more brilliantly alive than under Grima’s thumb.
So that’s what it means, to be with a mother able to love him. Able to express it.
For that, as messy as their collective life is, as much doom as they invite for existing, she is so, so incredibly grateful to her counterpart, for watching out for them, for giving her children what their mother could not.
She doesn’t want it all to go to waste.
Please, let it not go to waste.
She feels an awful sense of dread-soaked pride as she watches her children bury a blade in their grandfather’s heart, as the Shepherds spill Grimleal blood on the Table floor.
The fury in her soul does not belong to her, but the low hum of fear is something that resonates within both her and her tormentor.
What, truly, does Grima have to be afraid of?
Why does he share her dread?
Grima takes a moment to collect himself, breathing deeply, pushing down the unease. She can feel him searching through her, scanning through her entire history for… she doesn’t know. He detests being reminded of the humanity of his mortal shell. It isn’t her tactics he wants, it’s… interaction. He quickly brushes through conversation after human conversation, for what?
She doesn’t have time to wonder before he moves down to confront the man he murdered and the woman he used to do it.
And what a strange experience it is.
He can’t hide his real feelings from Robin, so she isn’t fooled by the facade of calm contempt he puts up. He rages inside, shot through with bolts of deep unease, and as he continues to speak she finds herself sharing the former emotion.
He claims… he claims he’s her. She didn’t pay it much mind before, it didn’t fit the situation to announce himself at Carrion Isle, but he introduces himself as Robin. Like he… like they’re partners, like he’s anything more than a graverobber puppeting a stolen corpse. Like she wanted this.
How dare he.
How DARE HE, to use her name, to claim her memories as his own! What purpose could this possibly serve? Has he not taken enough from her? Her husband, her children’s futures, her kingdom, her body, her voice?
All this, so that pathetic fucking lizard could… what, make a pitch for apotheosis? Hey, I thought murdering almost everyone I loved and ending the world was a great time, and I’m essentially you, so why not give it a go yourself? Try a genocide! You might like it!
Does he seriously think this will work?
Evidently not. Robin can tell her younger self isn’t even considering it, and she can feel Grima coming to the same conclusion. Well done, you useless reptile. Spite boils in their blood, frustration, confusion, and that cold undercurrent of fear mix together into a furious sense of resignation.
He hates this so, so much.
So does Robin, as her worst fears about today come true.
Validar failed in his objective. He could not awaken the sleeping Heart in the apostate because he didn’t have the real Fire Emblem, but that was only half the plan. Once the vessel was subsumed, this time’s Fell Dragon could take the offered bounty and restore the fullness of his power.
Step one failed, but step two didn’t necessarily require it. It just needs Grima, and the one from the future is more than content to accept.
The Shepherds understand what’s about to happen when he discards the facade, shining with doom.
They flee. They can’t run far enough, though.
And Grima feeds.
It’s the second time in her unlife that she’s experienced it, and again the sensation is almost enough to understand him. The toxic, hateful euphoria of life given freely, of souls offered and souls reaped. It is known as the Dragon’s Table for a reason, and the Grimleal have set themselves upon it. Power floods their being in the most addictive high that she thinks might conceivably exist. She can feel something coalescing, the taken strength and sacrifices and oceans of blood solidifying into a slithering, monstrous form.
He rises.
He lives once more, and his favored shape returns to the world.
Two things stand out as she reels from apotheosis. The first is a quick glimpse with her own eyes, a black cloaked figure with all the survival instinct of a lemming staying back in the hall where the world is ending to snatch the Fire Emblem out of the jaws of doom.
Godspeed, you brilliant little madwoman. Good luck. You’ll need it.
The second thing is a realization, a connecting of two dots in much the same way she had hoped the apostate could have earlier. Basilio had mentioned a vision, had claimed that the tactician had personally seen the future, had dreamed of this very fight.
Grima, in his desperate attempt to sway the empty Vessel to his side, had claimed the tactician’s dreams had been memories: they had been hers.
Her memories. Of killing Chrom, of dying.
One of the worst moments of her life, and her younger self had used that knowledge to outwit destiny.
It had been useful. It had accomplished something. The nightmare meant something.
She didn’t think she would ever get the chance to pass any messages at all. It was one of the most frustrating aspects of her existence in this time, and she’d already accomplished it without even realizing.
She was able to help.
She wasn’t powerless.
Robin has done all she can. It’s all up to the Shepherds, now, and the prayer that they may slay a god.
The last time Robin sees the Shepherds is the last place she ever wanted to see them and the place she most desperately needs them. The battlefield is the most absurd she’s ever seen, and she was the lunatic that lured an attacking army into an active volcano once. The endgame will be decided on Grima’s own back. It’s remarkably stable, all things considered.
She wonders for a moment how exactly the Shepherds plan to get up here, but they simply manifest in a flash of divine light. The benefits of having a god on your side, she supposes.
Grima is admittedly a master at keeping his composure, which Robin will grudgingly acknowledge. His determination and freezing hate come across well enough, the sneering contempt for lower life forms and the holy arrogance of a deity, but only she bears witness to the way his eyes flash between the glowing Falchion in Chrom’s hand and the tactician at his side.
They managed to perform the Awakening, to Grima’s lethal frustration, which explains his terror of the empowered Kingsfang. But why the apostate? What can she do that draws as much concern or more as a blade blessed by his most hated foe?
There’s something she’s missing. An unknown unknown that explains his aberrant behavior. His apprehension about returning to the past has a cause, he was afraid of being unwritten, but why has the dread only grown stronger? Grima is at the peak of his power. There should not be anything left to fear.
It might not matter, since the end has come one way or the other. As perfect as his mask is, it doesn’t appear to be a weakness they have the time to understand and exploit.
Grima launches his first attack, and Robin is suddenly terrified that they won’t have the time to do much of anything.
But then he doesn’t follow up. He tries again to convince the tactician to ascend, a hint of desperate anger leaking through. Why does he persist? Why continue to bash his head against this wall, why continue to beg a worm for acceptance, especially with such a blatantly false offer?
The tactician doesn’t take the bait, of course, and hate floods through them at this final refusal. The Fell Dragon is done playing, and they reach out and drag their failed vessel down into the black.
Robin can’t do anything. Not to stop Grima from maiming her family, not to stop him from taking out his rage on the poor tactician. A horrific redux of the first thing they did together in this time.
So she watches, like always, with her soul shattering as her eternal lord ruthlessly beats the heretic into submission, as the story of Robin and Grima ends how it was always meant to.
To be Robin, to be human in the presence of Grima, is to despair.
Empathy is all she has to give, even as her heart breaks. She can be with her other self as she falls. She won’t let her go through it alone, like she had to.
Except the tactician doesn’t fall. Except Grima’s darkness is not absolute. Except she hears her friends’ voices.
“Fight ba—! —ave to keep ——ing! Fight back, Robin! You swore to do so, remember? Now keep your damn word!”
Robin is nothing, nowhere, trapped with the monster wearing her future self’s body and preparing to destroy everything she holds dear.
She is alone.
Come back to us, Robin!
I know it would take more than this to stop you, milady!
She was alone.
Robin, remember all the days we spent together!
We're all right here by your side!
I know the darkness is warm and delicious... But too much of a good thing is just bad!
She was dragged down into this lightless hell, deep enough that those worthless, frail human bonds could not reach her.
You have earned my trust and my love, milady. Now return to us!
You don't bow to dragons. You break 'em!
Heed not the dark's eerie call, friend! Summon forth the strength inside you!
Come on, bud! No givin' up now!
So Grima believed, and so Grima is proven terribly, beautifully wrong.
This is a test, and by the gods, you're gonna pass it!
Come on! You can do this! You need to fight with us!
We lost to the fell dragon once. Do not grant fate a second victory!
Mother! You mean everything to me! I can't lose you again!
You are not Grima, nor is he you. Remember that, Robin!
“I can hear them... I hear my friends!”
Robin watches as her own face twists in wrath. There’s a trace of something else there, as Grima screams out their denial.
“Stop this at once! SILENCE those wretched voices! You are all powerless! Frail! Insignificant! You are NOOOTHING!”
It reminds her of the look on her father’s face, when she and Chrom stood back up and he realized that his cherished fate was not as absolute as he believed.
“Return to us, Robin! Your bond with us is stronger than even the fell dragon's might!”
“Chrom! I'm coming, Chrom! Hold on!”
And as she grabs on to the lifeline her friends threw her, the renewed, burning hope in her soul, she hears one last voice.
It’s barely a whisper, and feels entirely different than the calls of the Shepherds. Grima rants and raves, but even their madness can’t drown the quiet words out.
I’m with you to the end. I know you can finish this.
The voice sounds at peace, and Robin tears her way out of the dark.
Time to tip the scales.
Grima is melting down. Her heart no longer beats, but it would be racing faster than a pegasus if it did. Now Robin knows why.
The glorious, brilliant madwoman did it. Her family called out to her, and she took her bonds in hand and broke out of despair. Robin doesn’t know if her own quiet prayer was heard, but that was no reason not to pray. Those words that cut through the black weren’t meant for her, after all, but she treasured them nonetheless. You never know who’s listening.
The apostate escaped. And thus, Naga spoke.
She’s spent the last decade or so of her life as a god’s unwilling puppet, so she isn’t terribly impressed by divinity anymore. The words the goddess spoke, though, finally slot all the pieces into place.
The tactician. She’s the key to it all. She is Grima, they are Grima, and the tactician is the only being in all of existence that can turn his power against himself and in doing so unmake him entirely.
That’s what Grima is afraid of.
That’s why he worked so hard to keep fate on the rails, why he tried not to meddle with a route he knew would succeed after his initial attempt to skip to the end failed. That’s why he kept trying, over and over, to get her to submit to him, because then and only then would he remove any chance of true loss.
That’s why his roars of rage crack the sky, why he throws waves and waves of his servants at the Shepherds like he can drown them in blades, why even as his end approaches he desperately searches for a way out.
Simple fear of death. Huh. She can’t say she understands, but she knows her own perspective on mortality has been irreparably broken for a long time now.
It’s almost enough to pity him.
Grima rifles through her mind, tearing out drawers for any scrap of tactical knowledge he can find. He never needed it before, you see, dragons of his caliber rarely do, but the present circumstances have necessitated immediate education.
Robin is all too happy to provide her thoughts, if Grima cares to hear them. Every scrap of knowledge she has of the Shepherds from her time, every detail she can observe of the men and women currently tearing through his lines like the legendary heroes they are. None of his Grimleal really compare, to her eye.
She will wax poetic about Lucina and Morgan, her beautiful, brave children. The warrior princess wielding a blade like sunlight and the smiling strategist in her wake, fit together like hand and glove. Their parents in microcosm, and what a world it will be when the throne passes to Lucina, whatever version it may be.
Chrom and Robin are two halves of a whole, once and forever. This much she knows, this much is a universal truth, for all that she only truly knows another man with the Brand of the Exalt, another woman with Grima’s mark. He is not the man she married and unwillingly murdered, she is not the ghost haunting a stolen body, and they are happier for it.
Such a pity that they can’t truly escape tragedy, but that is little comfort to Grima. He’s still dead at the end of the story.
Robin is a different woman to the apostate. Even before she died, even whatever she was before she ceased to be her own person, she of course led a life dissimilar to this time’s amnesiac genius pulled from a field. Regardless, she doesn’t think they are so far apart as to make different choices in this scenario.
Given the chance for total victory, Robin will take it.
They’re going to be the one leaving him behind, this time.
For that, she is sorry. For depriving their children of a mother, she is sorry, for failing to stop any of this, even if she never could have, she is sorry.
She knows Robin feels the same, and she knows it won’t change anything.
At least she won’t be dying alone. No one will, tonight.
Not even Grima.
He screams and roars and makes grandiose proclamations of his stature, slinging burning breath across the sky, but his time is up. His mask is broken, and some of the last emotions the two of them will ever feel are complete and total bewilderment that anything could so readily embrace death.
He really hasn’t been paying attention, has he? She’s been ready for the curtain to fall for a long, long time. It’s no worry, she’s willing to help him understand.
The tactician speaks, the tactician strikes, and Robin and Grima and Robin embrace the end together.
A man with a mark on his shoulder finds a woman without one on her hand lying in a field.
“Welcome back. It’s over now.”