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There’s a hole in Garreg Mach’s heart, one they have not yet had time to fill, and for a single moment all Ashe can see is light.
It’s blinding like a burning yearning, before his vision clears and he makes out the rest: filled-out benches, worn by weather and time, and a sea of faces whose mouths open on cries and cheers, their echo beating distorted like a battering ram against the high walls of the Cathedral. They reach him, and they reach all the way up, all-encompassing until they get lost in the wind through the torn-up roof. He thinks he hears the doors close behind him, behind them, as their small procession walks up to the altar; it’s a beauty of marble and polished stone, one that lay buried underneath rubble until half a week ago, freed from its concrete grave in a hasty excavation when Byleth’s ceremony was announced — some of the corners drip red with wax, tall candles reduced to burnished a pale simulacrum of the sunlight reflecting off the silver holders.
Ashe’s gaze follows the refraction, and pretends he can see Byleth’s face from where he’s marching on.
The sight is striking in its familiarity, the only nuance being the crown gracing their brow: their Professor’s back is a view he’s used to, from so many months fighting with them, from so many times he had to cover for them on the battlefield. Dimitri, too, is standing beside them, half-blind, ever-faithful — not as a student, not as a brother-in-arms, but as a King.
Their Savior-King. The King of Reunited Fodlan.
The people cheer and cheer and cheer, clap their hands for the Archbishop’s ascension, for the end of the War — for what they think is the end of the War, Ashe finds himself wondering. He cannot fault them, really; he, too, was as eager to see the bloodshed and the fighting coming to an end, was overjoyed to bring justice to the innocents who had lost their lives to the Emperor’s senseless struggle, was relieved to see Dimitri, radiant, resplendent in his stark white armor, rising over the ashes of the one he’d once thought of — not as a friend, not truly, but as a peer, perhaps. He remembers Byleth’s face, then, their gaze as mysterious as it ever was, empty but for a glint of dagger-like silver. He wonders if they already knew, if their status as the Enlightened One allowed them to see past all the things they could not see, all the details Ferdinand had told them about later: what Hubert had written about in his last letter, his testament and last, selfless wishes, about their next war and the people who stoked the flames to Edelgard’s rebellion, still lurking in every shadow.
There’s no shadow, here, in the Cathedral, no darkness to be seen as they stop in front of the altar and Lady Rhea — just blinding, blinding light.
Byleth, as always, infuses slow-dripped feelings into Ashe’s chest; now, as Rhea trades their circlet for her own, heavy crown, they inspire nothing but pure, unadulterated awe. Gold speckles the altar and the faces around them as they adjust it, turn their head both ways, their shoulders barely sagging under the weight — just enough for Ashe to notice. He’s always prided himself on his attention to detail. Their eyes open, green like the shallowest parts of the Garreg Mach pond, green like Rhea’s hair, green like tampered, tamed greed: they betray no emotion that Ashe is familiar with, a sentencing scythe poised to sever anything they consider unfair.
Catherine stands next to Rhea, her ever-loyal knight, a knight he’d once sworn to become for their own King; now that his promise has been held, now that his oath has been sealed with the dull edge of a sword over his shoulder, he feels a certain kind of connivence with the person he’d once hated, Ashe muses. He can almost feel the brand of the Knights of Seiros into his chest, with how close his King is to their former Professor. Dimitri, who looks more peaceful than he’s looked in years, swashes of under-eye charcoal swept away by tears and a gentle hand, wound-like lines soothed back into skin, the once-muted gold of his hair now as radiant as his crown, as brilliant as his smile. Ashe cannot remember having ever met anyone so unabashedly good: he trusts the kindness in his eye, the grace of his motions, the strength of his back — but there’s a voice at the back of his mind, familiar and long-lost, asking him if he, too, would one day execute someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s father, because Byleth said it was Law and Dimitri enforced it.
The cheers around them drown Lonato’s voice as Byleth turns to the crowd; Ashe’s gaze is drawn to the people standing at his side, his brothers and sisters-in-arms, fire-forged friends and found family. Mercedes wears blood high in her cheekbones, a pale rose petal blush, her fingers interlocked over her chest like holding a secret. She could almost be one of the Saints in the adjacent room, dressed in white and gold; the Rafail Gem shines garnet and tourmaline around her neck, encased in pale, pale bone, and Ashe cannot decipher whether her eyes are closed in gratitude for what’s past or in dread for what’s to come.
Ashe’s own eyes are mirrored in contrasting color in Sylvain’s stare, straight yet a hint downturned — the Lance of Ruin shakes in his right hand, shines cold and gold over his resigned face in a shadow of halcyon days and a ray of moonlit insomnias, pulses like it hungers for everything to go wrong again. When Sylvain looks at him, he flees his gaze, finds Dorothea on the other side of their front line, standing tall beside Ingrid: her voice is goddess-sent, leaves heaven-shaped lips in a high vibrato, sings in chorus with the choir for Dimitri, for Byleth, for Faerghus. Years of masquerade have made her reluctant to wear any kind of disguise or veil, Ashe knows; it glows clear as crystal, the way she watches Dimitri, the thoughts that Ashe makes out as though watching for fishes alongside Linhardt all these years ago — that despite the bonds she’s sewn, despite the fights she’s endured, despite the nothing she was and the everything she’s become, she still witnessed their Prince kill his own step-sister, kill her former, dearest friend, however grotesque Edelgard was in the nascent edge of dawn.
Ashe takes a step forward, then two, follows in Byleth’s and Dimitri’s footsteps as they make their way to the balcony. All their former students, all his former classmates, and Ashe, too, walking in tandem beside them — one step out, and they’re drowning in light, so dazzling that he forgets that every beginning overlaps with an end.
When the people cheer for them, far below, it almost sounds like a war cry.