The lands beyond the forest were quiet. Not the quiet of peace, but of abandonment. A silence of absence and deterioration.

  Above the flats, a skeleton of an old oil rig jutted from the earth like the rib of some long-dead beast. Its beams were rust-scabbed and hollow, rising crooked into the cloudless blue. Vultures circled high overhead. The wind sifted through shattered metal with the hush of breath through broken teeth. Petra crouched in the shade of the rig’s lowest platform, eyes fixed on the horizon. Her bow was across her knees, unstrung. The red cloth signal hung limp from a crossbeam above, fluttering now and then when the wind remembered to stir.

  Bernadetta stood a little ways off, arms crossed, cloak drawn tight against the sun. Her gaze swept the landscape, unsettled.

  “Who built a thing like this?” she asked.

  “No one who remembers it now,” Petra murmured. “It was already dying when I first came. But the metal still sings in the wind. And sometimes, the messages still arrive.”

  Bernadetta turned her head. “You’re sure he’ll come?”

  Petra’s eyes narrowed. “He always does.”

  They said nothing for a while.

  The desert shimmered. Heat lines curled up from the sand like rising ghosts. In the distance, the bones of other rigs poked from the dirt, crooked shadows reaching for a sun that still loomed above in stark indifference. A tumbleweed drifted across the dry wash, snagged in the fence of an old pump station. The air smelled faintly of rust, grease, and old fire.

  Bernadetta scuffed her boot against a patch of cracked stone.

  “I don’t like places like this,” she said. “Too many corners for things to watch from.”

  Petra did not look at her. But her fingers tapped once, slow, against the wood of her bow.

  “So do not watch the corners,” she said. “Watch what walks in the open.”

  The sun had begun to lean westward when they heard it.

  Not hooves, not boots. Wheels.

  A low, uneven clatter, followed by the distant creak of old suspension and the jangle of some idiot’s idea of a bell. A cloud of dust rose from the trail behind the ridge, growing closer.

  Bernadetta straightened. Petra didn’t move.

  The cart appeared over the rise—painted a garish red once, now faded to pink under years of sun. A single mule hauled it, snorting and chewing at its bit. Atop the seat sat a man in a wide-brimmed hat and dust-dulled clerical robes, whistling something cheerful and off-key.

  “Afternoon, sisters!” the man called out, reining the mule to a halt with theatrical flourish. “Didn’t think I’d see friendly faces this far out! Not alive ones, anyway!”

  Bernadetta blinked. “...Alois?”

  The man beamed. “In the flesh! And with minimal sunburn, which is a rare blessing indeed.”

  He clambered down from the cart, boots thudding softly on the sand. He was tall, solid, his robes frayed at the hems, collar crooked. A battered satchel bounced at his hip, and his belt carried a flask, a compass, and a book bound in pale leather.

  He looked at Petra.

  Then he looked again, slower this time.

  “Well, I’ll be…” he said, voice dipping low with something that might’ve been reverence. Or suspicion. “It’s you.”

  Petra said nothing. Just watched him, her gaze unreadable. Her hand remained resting on her thigh, fingers brushing the hilt of her knife in a gesture so casual it might’ve been mistaken for stillness.

  “I see you’re traveling light,” Alois said, forcing a chuckle. “That’s good. That’s wise. Heavy things don’t do well out here. Especially truths.”

  He turned to the cart, rummaged briefly, and pulled out a small bundle—tied in cloth, sealed with wax. He offered it to Petra.

  “Message from the captain. Your timing’s good. He’ll want to see you. Both of you.”

  Bernadetta stepped closer, eyes narrowing. “You know who I am?”

  Alois smiled wider. Too wide.

  “Of course. I keep track of all the saints in hiding.”

  Petra took the bundle without a word.

  She didn’t open it. Just turned it once in her hand, feeling the weight, the seal. The symbol pressed into the wax was faint, but not unfamiliar.

  Alois turned back to the cart, still chattering. “Garrison’s not far—half-day east, give or take a prayer and a piss. If you want, I’ve got enough jerky to share, though I’d steer clear of the dried figs. They’re less ‘fruit’ and more ‘revenge.’”

  Bernadetta watched him root around the supplies with a kind of creeping disquiet. Something in her shoulder itched.

  She looked to Petra.

  Petra’s face hadn’t changed.

  But her eyes had.

  Locked on Alois’s back. Her jaw set, tight.

  Bernadetta stepped closer, just enough for her voice to carry low.

  “What is it?”

  Petra didn’t look away.

  “His satchel,” she murmured. “The stitching. That is Church weave. Old. Dragonbone thread.”

  Bernadetta blinked. “So?”

  “So,” Petra said, finally shifting her gaze to her, “the only place I have seen one like that before… was on a man who served Lady Rhea.”

  Bernadetta’s stomach knotted. “You think he’s—?”

  Petra’s voice was softer than the wind. “I think nothing. Not yet.”

  Alois turned just then, holding up a dented canteen like he’d found treasure. “Water? It’s only a little bit cursed.”

  Bernadetta forced a smile. Petra offered none.

  They sat beneath the rig’s shadow, drinking in silence while Alois hummed a hymn from no known scripture. Petra never took her hand off the hilt of her blade.

  Bernadetta frowned. “Lady Rhea?”

  The name tasted strange in her mouth. Like something heard once in a dream and misremembered ever since.

  Petra looked at her, and for the first time since they’d reunited, there was something unreadable in her eyes. Not judgment. Not pity. Just… pause.

  “She was the head of the Church,” Petra said slowly. “In the world before this one.”

  Bernadetta blinked. “The Church…”

  “There was a monastery,” Petra continued. “You trained there. So did I. So did Edelgard.” Her voice dipped lower. “And Alois was a knight sworn to Rhea’s command.”

  Bernadetta stared across the sand, eyes squinting against the shimmer. The oil rig creaked softly above them.

  “I don’t remember her,” she said. “Not her face. Not her voice. I remember classrooms. A window. Edelgard’s hand on my shoulder. But not that.”

  “You remember what you need to,” Petra murmured. “For now.”

  Alois gave a sudden bark of laughter behind them—startlingly loud, too bright for the moment. “Well! That’s the last of the rations with only mild weevil. You folks ready to ride?”

  Neither woman answered.

  He chuckled to himself, bent, and plucked a chunk of something gray from a tin. “This one’s a no-go,” he muttered. “Unless either of you’s developed a fondness for the taste of boot leather and heartbreak.”

  He tossed it into the sand.

  The wind carried the scent sharp and strange.

  Not spoiled. Not rotten. Just… wrong.

  A minute passed.

  Then, from high above, a pair of vultures circled lower, curious. One dropped to the earth near the scrap. It approached, head twitching, eyes glossy black.

  It stopped a foot from the meat.

  Sniffed.

  Stared.

  And backed away.

  The second landed, flapped its wings once, and did the same. Neither touched the food. They stood in stillness for several seconds more—then took off again, rising back into the wind.

  Bernadetta watched them go. Her hands were still. Her throat dry.

  Alois didn’t seem to notice. He was already humming again, whistling some half-remembered hymn as he packed his satchel.

  Petra said nothing.

  But her eyes never left the spot where the meat still lay, untouched, untouched, untouched.

  Petra rose without answering. Bernadetta followed, her thoughts a tangle. The wind was rising again. It blew dust across the rig’s rusted bones, and somewhere above, one of the vultures still turned a slow, lazy circle.

  As they climbed into the cart, she leaned close—just enough for Bernadetta to feel the breath of her words:

  “Do not speak of Edelgard to him. Not unless you must.”

  Bernadetta nodded.

  And something itched at the back of her mind.

  Alois was still humming, still smiling, but... there was something strange in his humor. It was like listening to an old tune, soft and familiar, but with a few of the vital notes strangely absent.

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  She glanced at him once, then looked away.

  Maybe there was something else there, at one time.

  Maybe it was simply that the desert had weathered his temperament as it did the oil rig.

  Or perhaps, something else had gotten to him.

  The cart rattled as they rolled westward, its wheels kicking up dust in lazy spirals. Behind them the oil rig shrank, swallowed by heat shimmer and distance, until it looked less like a structure and more like a mirage that had been mistaken for memory. Bernadetta sat with her arms around her knees, chin tucked low. The pelt scratched at her neck. The sun beat down without mercy, but it wasn’t the heat that bothered her. It was the quiet. Alois hummed. Not loud. Not cheerful. Just a soft little thing beneath his breath, looping a tune that sounded familiar but changed a little every time he circled back to the beginning. Like he no longer knew how it was supposed to end—so he kept starting again, meandering, the shape of the thing warping further with each pass, edging closer to something unrecognizable.

  Bernadetta squinted at the horizon, then glanced sidelong at him. His face was lined in a way she didn’t remember. His beard fuller. His eyes darker, maybe. But it was the smile that had changed the most. Still wide. Still warm. But now it felt like it was always trying to convince itself of something.

  She tried to remember him from before.

  A knight, Petra had said. Sworn to Rhea.

  The name floated in her head like a thread of silk caught in a draft—visible, untouchable. She couldn’t place it. Couldn’t summon a face. A voice. Nothing.

  But she remembered something else.

  Laughter in a chapel. Armor clinking on stone floors. Alois lifting someone off their feet in a hug too strong and too sudden. He’d said something stupid. They’d groaned. Edelgard had rolled her eyes. That much she was sure of.

  But the rest was like dust in a beam of light. There, then gone.

  She shifted in her seat.

  It wasn’t just Alois. It was all of them. Petra. Edelgard. Hubert. Ferdinand, too—and the others. Caspar. Linhardt. Names from a world that should have stayed lost. And yet, one by one, they had returned. Like spirits with unfinished business. Like stars realigning. And now they were finding one another again.

  The odds of that… they weren’t odds. They were a pattern.

  A tug.

  She looked at Petra beside her—quiet, watchful, always with a hand near her weapon—and wondered how long she’d known. If she’d always known. If Edelgard had.

  Bernadetta hadn’t. Not until recently. Not until the cave. The pelt. The blade. The fight.

  Now, something was guiding her. Not a voice. Not a vision. But a pull.

  Not from behind. From ahead.

  The cart rolled on. The sun hung like an executioner’s eye above, unblinking, unsympathetic. The sky around it was a flat pale blue, scraped clean of clouds. They passed dead arroyos and dry washes where cattle bones lay in twisted nests, bleached white and half-swallowed by sand. The wind came in hot bursts, rattling through mesquite scrub and sagebrush gone brittle from thirst. Occasionally a hawk circled overhead, casting a swift shadow that vanished before it could be felt. The road—if it could be called that—was little more than a memory of wagon wheels and the insistence of men with somewhere to be.

  Time passed like dust through a sieve.

  The sun lowered by inches. The shadows stretched.

  And still they rode. Through the middle of nowhere. In the heat and dust and ruin of this not-quite-America.

  They rode until nightfall when a fire popped between them like a shared hallucination of Hell. Alois crouched low by the coals, turning a charred branch with slow, deliberate movements. He wasn’t humming anymore. His face, half-lit by firelight, looked older than it had in the sun. Worn down, not by time, but by knowing.

  Bernadetta had fallen asleep against Petra’s shoulder, curled beneath her cloak, her breath slow and even. Petra didn’t shift. She kept her hand at her side, fingers loose around the hilt of her dagger, her gaze fixed on the man across the fire.

  Alois stared into the flame.

  “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” he said softly. Not looking at them. Not smiling.

  Petra said nothing.

  He exhaled, slow. “With all the evil that happens in the world, it’s a wonder that God still has the grace to treat us sometimes to a quiet evening. The sky like velvet. The stars like gold pins. A little warmth. A little peace.” He paused. “Sometimes I think that’s his form of apology.”

  Petra’s stare didn’t loosen.

  “How much are you remembering?” she asked.

  Not a hint of softness. Not a trace of hesitation. The question dropped like a blade into the fire.

  Alois finally looked up.

  His eyes met hers across the glow. No surprise. No denial.

  “Are you afraid to sleep?” he asked instead. “Think I might slit both your necks?”

  Still, Petra didn’t answer. And Alois nodded to himself.

  “I thought about it,” he said plainly. “I have a sawed-off in my pack. Kept it for rattlers, mostly. But it’d do the job. Could walk up real quiet, pull the trigger, bury you in the sand and leave the girl for the coyotes.” He stirred the coals again. “The thought’s crossed my mind more than once. Especially after I saw the seal on that message you’re carrying. Especially when I realized who she was.”

  His voice lowered.

  “But I didn’t. And I won’t. Not that I would expect you to take my word.”

  He looked over at Bernadetta, asleep and unaware.

  “Because I remember too much. And because I know where that road leads.”

  The fire cracked.

  He sat back, arms resting on his knees.

  “I used to think I was one of the good ones,” he said. “That I served the right cause. That I was on the side of light. That we had a mandate from heaven.” He smiled, but it was a ruined thing. “I remember what we did to stop her. And I remember the things she endured trying to change the world. I remember thinking we were stopping the end of days. And now…” He trailed off, eyes glazed. “Now I’m not sure who started them.”

  Petra still didn’t speak. But something in her jaw shifted.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” he said. “Why we’re all here again. In this place. With these pieces of who we once were. But I’m watching.”

  He looked up at her once more.

  “I’m watching closely.”

  The fire crackled low between them, casting shifting shadows across the sand.

  Petra’s hand eased from her dagger but did not leave her side. Her eyes stayed sharp.

  But when she looked down at the girl curled into her shoulder—still, warm, quiet—something softened.

  “I have seen Bernie… Bernadetta go through many changes,” she said, voice low, as if speaking to the flames themselves. “There was a time she would not sleep. Could not trust. Could not be touched without fear.” Her gaze didn’t lift. “And now she lays still in my arms.”

  The wind stirred the coals, flaring them briefly.

  “Some things are the same,” she continued. “But some are very different. Whether in this world or the last, we are constantly changing. Our spirits are not a thing written in stone.”

  Alois didn’t speak right away.

  When he did, it was soft, almost inaudible beneath the breath of the wind.

  “I hope you’re right about that, Petra,” he said. A faint grin tugged at his mouth—wry, exhausted. “I really hope you’re right.”

  He closed his eyes. Not in surrender. Not in peace.

  But like a man waiting to see if the morning would come at all.

  They rode until the land changed again—subtle at first, then sharp. The hills gave way to red stone cliffs, low mesas stacked like tombstones against the sky. Dry scrub turned to yellow grass. The wind grew sharp, flecked with grit. Somewhere west, the sun bruised its way toward the mountains.

  The road forked at the base of a half-buried signpost—rusted, windblasted, its lettering worn to ghosts. One path veered north, toward the military garrison marked in fading paint. The other dipped west into the low country, where the sun bled into a valley of crumbling walls and chapel bones.

  Alois pulled the mule to a stop. “End of the line, for me,” he said. “Unless you want a full sermon and half a hymn. I’m known to get loud when I’m hungry.”

  Petra dismounted without a word. Bernadetta followed, boots crunching in the gravel.

  Alois tipped his hat. “You girls take care. If you find the captain, give him my best. Tell him I still owe him two games of cards and a rematch in horseshoes.” He hesitated. “And if you see Her… well. You know what to say.”

  Bernadetta didn’t answer. Petra only nodded, once.

  Alois turned the mule cart and rolled back the way they’d come.

  Only when his shape vanished between the buttes did Petra reach into her cloak and draw the parcel from its folds.

  “We can open it now,” she said.

  Petra knelt in the dust beneath the weatherworn post, the parcel balanced across her knees. Bernadetta crouched beside her, the wind tugging gently at her hood. The horizon was molten gold now, the last edge of sun bleeding across the stone.

  Petra broke the wax seal.

  It cracked like old bone. The cloth unwrapped slow, careful, reverent. Inside: two things.

  The first was a folded letter, yellowed at the edges but clean, crisp, bound in a second slip of twine.

  The second was a shard of metal.

  Bernadetta sucked in a breath. Even dulled and broken, it had presence. No longer than her palm, but heavy, warm. The shape was curved—not like a smith had forged it, but like it had grown into that shape, ancient and wrong. It pulsed faintly, almost imperceptibly, with a soft red light at its jagged edge.

  Petra reached for it with both hands. The moment her fingers closed around the shard, she inhaled sharply.

  Her eyes went wide.

  “This…” she whispered. “This is…”

  She trailed off, then looked at Bernadetta with something between awe and fear.

  “This is a piece of the Sword of the Creator.”

  Bernadetta blinked. “What?”

  “From Fódlan. From the world before. It should not be here.” Petra turned the metal in her hands, studying the patterns etched faintly into its surface—impossible, shifting like script half-buried in fog. “It was broken once. In battle. I saw it. But this…”

  Her fingers tightened.

  “This means Ferdinand remembers too.”

  Bernadetta stared at her. “You’re sure this came from him?”

  Petra didn’t answer. She picked up the letter instead and untied the twine. Her eyes scanned the page quickly, flicking from line to line. She didn’t read it aloud—not at first.

  Only after a long pause did she speak, voice low.

  “It says: Come to the chapel ruin outside Camp Suriel. Not the garrison. Too many ears. Too many eyes. I have waited, hoping. If you’re reading this, then hope was not wasted. Trust no one but the Eagles.”

  She looked at Bernadetta again.

  “It is his handwriting. Even though I do not trust the messenger.”

  Bernadetta looked down at the shard.

  It felt warm just being near it. Not comforting. Not threatening either. Just… aware. As though it knew her.

  Something in her chest pulled taut.

  “We’re all being drawn together,” she murmured. “Like threads through the same needle.”

  Petra nodded. “Yes. But not all threads wish to be stitched.”

  Bernadetta didn’t speak.

  She reached down, almost without thinking, and touched the edge of the cloth where the relic shard had been wrapped. Her fingers trembled—not from cold, but something older. Something that felt like homesickness for a place that might never have existed.

  “Ferdinand…” she whispered. “He remembers.”

  Her voice caught on the name. Not because it hurt—though it did—but because it meant something again. Not just a half-forgotten title or a flicker of red hair in a dream, but a person, somewhere out there, alive and remembering.

  She looked down at her lap.

  “I used to hate his guts,” she said, laughing. “Even before I knew why. He was always so… sure. So loud. Like the world made more sense to him than it ever did to me.”

  Her voice dipped quieter.

  “He once made me cry in a courtyard just by saying good morning a bit too enthusiastically.”

  A breath passed.

  “But he was kind. Kinder than people gave him credit for. He’d give more for his friends than just about anyone I knew. He was loud because he cared. He wanted to speak up for others—people like me, the ones who couldn’t.”

  She smiled, faint and full of something like sorrow.

  “I started to look up to him. Like a big brother.”

  Petra smiled faintly, but said nothing.

  Bernadetta’s gaze turned back to the shard.

  “If he remembers too… then maybe it can happen to the others. Maybe it already has.

  The words felt strange in her mouth. Too large. Too hopeful.

  She didn’t trust them. Not yet. Not after everything that had come before. But she let them sit.

  She went quiet after that, eyes drifting over the horizon, where the sun had finally dipped beneath the rocks.

  The silence wasn’t heavy. It felt like a breath. Like space.

  Bernadetta looked down at the shard again.

  Its glow had faded with the light, but it still felt warm like a sunbaked stone.

  Petra folded the letter one last time and slipped it back into the parcel, wrapping it tight like something sacred. Or dangerous.

  “We do not need to understand it yet,” she said quietly. “Not all riddles are meant to be solved the moment they’re heard.”

  Bernadetta glanced at her. “So we’re… ignoring it?”

  Petra shook her head. “No. We remember it. We carry it. But we do not stray. Not yet. The plan remains.”

  Bernadetta exhaled, slow. She looked west, where the sky was turning purple behind the low hills. Somewhere beyond them: the garrison. Ferdinand. And, if the world had any mercy left in it—Edelgard.

  “Right,” she said. “We find her. That’s what matters.”

  The wind pressed at her cloak. The air smelled of dust and distant juniper.

  She tightened her grip on the pelt around her shoulders.

  “She’s still out there,” Bernadetta said, more to the road than to Petra. “And I don’t care who’s watching us, or what shadows are whispering riddles into our hands. I’m going to find her.”

  Petra watched her with a look that didn’t carry approval or doubt—just understanding.

  The sun dipped low behind the buttes. The stars began to bloom.

  And they walked. West, into the dark.