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It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 13-14

CHAPTER XIII

AND when I get ready to retire I'm going to build me an up-to-date bungalow in some lovely resort, not in Como or any other of the proverbial Grecian isles you may be sure, but in somewheres like Florida, California, Santa Fe, & etc., and devote myself just to reading the classics, like Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley, Lord Macaulay, Henry Van Dyke, Elbert Hubbard, Plato, Hiawatha, & etc. Some of my friends laugh at me for it, but I have always cultivated a taste for the finest in literature. I got it from my Mother as I did everything that some people have been so good as to admire in me.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip's election, the event was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend.

"All right. Hell with this country, if it's like that. All these years I've worked—and I never did want to be on all these committees and boards and charity drives!—and don't they look silly now! What I always wanted to do was to sneak off to an ivory tower—or anyway, celluloid, imitation ivory—and read everything I've been too busy to read."

Thus Doremus, in late November.

And he did actually attempt it, and for a few days reveled in it, avoiding everyone save his family and Lorinda, Buck Titus, and Father Perefixe. Mostly, though, he found that he did not relish the "classics" he had so far missed, but those familiar to his youth: Ivanhoe, Huckleberry Finn, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, L'Allegro, The Way of All Flesh (not quite so youthful, there), Moby Dick, The Earthly Paradise, St. Agnes' Eve, The Idylls of the King, most of Swinburne, Pride and Prejudice, Religio Medici, Vanity Fair.

Probably he was not so very different from President-Elect Windrip in his rather uncritical reverence toward any book he had heard of before he was thirty.... No American whose fathers have lived in the country for over two generations is so utterly different from any other American.

In one thing, Doremus's literary escapism failed him thoroughly. He tried to relearn Latin, but he could not now, uncajoled by a master, believe that "Mensa, mensae, mensae, mensam, mensa"—all that idiotic A table, of a table, to a table, toward a table, at in by or on a table—could bear him again as once it had to the honey-sweet tranquillity of Vergil and the Sabine Farm.

Then he saw that in everything his quest failed him.

The reading was good enough, toothsome, satisfying, except that he felt guilty at having sneaked away to an Ivory Tower at all. Too many years he had made a habit of social duty. He wanted to be "in" things, and he was daily more irritable as Windrip began, even before his inauguration, to dictate to the country.

Buzz's party, with the desertions to the Jeffersonians, had less than a majority in Congress. "Inside dope" came to Doremus from Washington that Windrip was trying to buy, to flatter, to blackmail opposing Congressmen. A President-Elect has unhallowed power, if he so wishes, and Windrip—no doubt with promises of abnormal favors in the way of patronage—won over a few. Five Jeffersonian Congressmen had their elections challenged. One sensationally disappeared, and smoking after his galloping heels there was a devilish fume of embezzlements. And with each such triumph of Windrip, all the well-meaning, cloistered Doremuses of the country were the more anxious.

All through the "Depression," ever since 1929, Doremus had felt the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast, that was general to the country. He could no longer plan, for himself or for his dependants, as the citizens of this once unsettled country had planned since 1620.

Why, their whole lives had been predicated on the privilege of planning. Depressions had been only cyclic storms, certain to end in sunshine; Capitalism and parliamentary government were eternal, and eternally being improved by the honest votes of Good Citizens.

Doremus's grandfather, Calvin, Civil War veteran and ill-paid, illiberal Congregational minister, had yet planned, "My son, Loren, shall have a theological education, and I think we shall be able to build a fine new house in fifteen or twenty years." That had given him a reason for working, and a goal.

His father, Loren, had vowed, "Even if I have to economize on books a little, and perhaps give up this extravagance of eating meat four times a week—very bad for the digestion, anyway—my son, Doremus, shall have a college education, and when, as he desires, he becomes a publicist, I think perhaps I shall be able to help him for a year or two. And then I hope—oh, in a mere five or six years more—to buy that complete Dickens with all the illustrations—oh, an extravagance, but a thing to leave to my grandchildren to treasure forever!"

But Doremus Jessup could not plan, "I'll have Sissy go to Smith before she studies architecture," or "If Julian Falck and Sissy get married and stick here in the Fort, I'll give 'em the southwest lot and some day, maybe fifteen years from now, the whole place will be filled with nice kids again!" No. Fifteen years from now, he sighed, Sissy might be hustling hash for the sort of workers who called the waiter's art "hustling hash"; and Julian might be in a concentration camp—Fascist or Communist!

The Horatio Alger tradition, from rags to Rockefellers, was clean gone out of the America it had dominated.

It seemed faintly silly to hope, to try to prophesy, to give up sleep on a good mattress for toil on a typewriter, and as for saving money—idiotic!

And for a newspaper editor—for one who must know, at least as well as the Encyclopaedia, everything about local and foreign history, geography, economics, politics, literature, and methods of playing football—it was maddening that it seemed impossible now to know anything surely.

"He don't know what it's all about" had in a year or two changed from a colloquial sneer to a sound general statement regarding almost any economist. Once, modestly enough, Doremus had assumed that he had a decent knowledge of finance, taxation, the gold standard, agricultural exports, and he had smilingly pontificated everywhere that Liberal Capitalism would pastorally lead into State Socialism, with governmental ownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling all inequalities of income that every lion of a structural steel worker would be willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor, and all the jails and tuberculosis sanatoria would be clean empty.

Now he knew that he knew nothing fundamental and, like a lone monk stricken with a conviction of sin, he mourned, "If I only knew more!... Yes, and if I could only remember statistics!"

The coming and the going of the N.R.A., the F.E.R.A., the P.W.A., and all the rest, had convinced Doremus that there were four sets of people who did not clearly understand anything whatever about how the government must be conducted: all the authorities in Washington; all of the citizenry who talked or wrote profusely about politics; the bewildered untouchables who said nothing; and Doremus Jessup.

"But," said he, "now, after Buzz's inauguration, everything is going to be completely simple and comprehensible again—the country is going to be run as his private domain!"

Julian Falck, now sophomore in Amherst, had come home for Christmas vacation, and he dropped in at the Informer office to beg from Doremus a ride home before dinner.

He called Doremus "sir" and did not seem to think he was a comic fossil. Doremus liked it.

On the way they stopped for gasoline at the garage of John Pollikop, the seething Social Democrat, and were waited upon by Karl Pascal—sometime donkey-engine-man at Tasbrough's quarry, sometime strike leader, sometime political prisoner in the county jail on a thin charge of inciting to riot, and ever since then, a model of Communistic piety.

Pascal was a thin man, but sinewy; his gaunt and humorous face of a good mechanic was so grease-darkened that the skin above and below his eyes seemed white as a fish-belly, and, in turn, that pallid rim made his eyes, alert dark gipsy eyes, seem the larger.... A panther chained to a coal cart.

"Well, what you going to do after this election?" said Doremus. "Oh! That's a fool question! I guess none of us chronic kickers want to say much about what we plan to do after January, when Buzz gets his hands on us. Lie low, eh?"

"I'm going to lie the lowest lie that I ever did. You bet! But maybe there'll be a few Communist cells around here now, when Fascism begins to get into people's hair. Never did have much success with my propaganda before, but now, you watch!" exulted Pascal.

"You don't seem so depressed by the election," marveled Doremus, while Julian offered, "No—you seem quite cheerful about it!"

"Depressed? Why good Lord, Mr. Jessup, I thought you knew your revolutionary tactics better than that, way you supported us in the quarry strike—even if you are the perfect type of small capitalist bourgeois! Depressed? Why, can't you see, if the Communists had paid for it they couldn't have had anything more elegant for our purposes than the election of a pro-plutocrat, itching militarist dictator like Buzz Windrip! Look! He'll get everybody plenty dissatisfied. But they can't do anything, barehanded against the armed troops. Then he'll whoop it up for a war, and so millions of people will have arms and food rations in their hands—all ready for the revolution! Hurray for Buzz and John Prang the Baptist!"

"Karl, it's funny about you. I honestly believe you believe in Communism!" marveled young Julian. "Don't you?"

"Why don't you go and ask your friend Father Perefixe if he believes in the Virgin?"

"But you seem to like America, and you don't seem so fanatical, Karl. I remember when I was a kid of about ten and you—I suppose you were about twenty-five or -six then—you used to slide with us and whoop like hell, and you made me a ski-stick."

"Sure I like America. Came here when I was two years old—I was born in Germany—my folks weren't Heinies, though—my dad was French and my mother a Hunkie from Serbia. (Guess that makes me a hundred per cent American, all right!) I think we've got the Old Country beat, lots of ways. Why, say, Julian, over there I'd have to call you 'Mein Herr' or 'Your Excellency,' or some fool thing, and you'd call me, 'I say-uh, Pascal!' and Mr. Jessup here, my Lord, he'd be 'Commendatore' or 'Herr Doktor'! No, I like it here. There's symptoms of possible future democracy. But—but—what burns me up—it isn't that old soap-boxer's chestnut about how one tenth of 1 per cent of the population at the top have an aggregate income equal to 42 per cent at the bottom. Figures like that are too astronomical. Don't mean a thing in the world to a fellow with his eyes—and nose—down in a transmission box—fellow that doesn't see the stars except after 9 P.M. on odd Wednesdays. But what burns me up is the fact that even before this Depression, in what you folks called prosperous times, 7 per cent of all the families in the country earned $500 a year or less—remember, those weren't the unemployed, on relief; those were the guys that had the honor of still doing honest labor.

"Five hundred dollars a year is ten dollars a week—and that means one dirty little room for a family of four people! It means $5.00 a week for all their food—eighteen cents per day per person for food!—and even the lousiest prisons allow more than that. And the magnificent remainder of $2.50 a week, that means nine cents per day per person for clothes, insurance, carfares, doctors' bills, dentists' bills, and for God's sake, amusements—amusements!—and all the rest of the nine cents a day they can fritter away on their Fords and autogiros and, when they feel fagged, skipping across the pond on the Normandie! Seven per cent of all the fortunate American families where the old man has got a job!"

Julian was silent; then whispered, "You know—fellow gets discussing economics in college—theoretically sympathetic—but to see your own kids living on eighteen cents a day for grub—I guess that would make a man pretty extremist!"

Doremus fretted, "But what percentage of forced labor in your Russian lumber camps and Siberian prison mines are getting more than that?"

"Haaa! That's all baloney! That's the old standard come-back at every Communist—just like once, twenty years ago, the muttonheads used to think they'd crushed any Socialist when they snickered 'If all the money was divided up, inside five years the hustlers would have all of it again.' Prob'ly there's some standard coup de grace like that in Russia, to crush anybody that defends America. Besides!" Karl Pascal glowed with nationalistic fervor. "We Americans aren't like those dumb Russki peasants! We'll do a whole lot better when WE get Communism!"

And on that, his employer, the expansive John Pollikop, a woolly Scotch terrier of a man, returned to the garage. John was an excellent friend of Doremus; had, indeed, been his bootlegger all through Prohibition, personally running in his whisky from Canada. He had been known, even in that singularly scrupulous profession, as one of its most trustworthy practitioners. Now he flowered into mid-European dialectics:

"Evenin', Mist' Jessup, evenin', Julian! Karl fill up y' tank for you? You want t' watch that guy—he's likely to hold out a gallon on you. He's one of these crazy dogs of Communists—they all believe in Violence instead of Evolution and Legality. Them—why say, if they hadn't been so crooked, if they'd joined me and Norman Thomas and the other INTELLIGENT Socialists in a United Front with Roosevelt and the Jeffersonians, why say, we'd of licked the pants off Buzzard Windrip! Windrip and his plans!"

("Buzzard" Windrip. That was good, Doremus reflected. He'd be able to use it in the Informer!)

Pascal protested, "Not that Buzzard's personal plans and ambitions have got much to do with it. Altogether too easy to explain everything just blaming it on Windrip. Why don't you READ your Marx, John, instead of always gassing about him? Why, Windrip's just something nasty that's been vomited up. Plenty others still left fermenting in the stomach—quack economists with every sort of economic ptomain! No, Buzz isn't important—it's the sickness that made us throw him up that we've got to attend to—the sickness of more than 30 per cent permanently unemployed, and growing larger. Got to cure it!"

"Can you crazy Tovarishes cure it?" snapped Pollikop, and, "Do you think Communism will cure it?" skeptically wondered Doremus, and, more politely, "Do you really think Karl Marx had the dope?" worried Julian, all three at once.

"You bet your life we can!" said Pascal vaingloriously.

As Doremus, driving away, looked back at them, Pascal and Pollikop were removing a flat tire together and quarreling bitterly, quite happily.

Doremus's attic study had been to him a refuge from the tender solicitudes of Emma and Mrs. Candy and his daughters, and all the impulsive hand-shaking strangers who wanted the local editor to start off their campaigns for the sale of life insurance or gas-saving carburetors, for the Salvation Army or the Red Cross or the Orphans' Home or the Anti-cancer Crusade, or the assorted magazines which would enable to go through college young men who at all cost should be kept out of college.

It was a refuge now from the considerably less tender solicitudes of supporters of the President-Elect. On the pretense of work, Doremus took to sneaking up there in mid-evening; and he sat not in an easy chair but stiffly, at his desk, making crosses and five-pointed stars and six-pointed stars and fancy delete signs on sheets of yellow copy paper, while he sorely meditated.

Thus, this evening, after the demands of Karl Pascal and John Pollikop:

"'The Revolt against Civilization!'

"But there's the worst trouble of this whole cursed business of analysis. When I get to defending Democracy against Communism and Fascism and what-not, I sound just like the Lothrop Stoddards—why, I sound almost like a Hearst editorial on how some college has got to kick out a Dangerous Red instructor in order to preserve our Democracy for the ideals of Jefferson and Washington! Yet somehow, singing the same words, I have a notion my tune is entirely different from Hearst's. I DON'T think we've done very well with all the plowland and forest and minerals and husky human stock we've had. What makes me sick about Hearst and the D.A.R. is that if THEY are against Communism, I have to be for it, and I don't want to be!

"Wastage of resources, so they're about gone—that's been the American share in the revolt against Civilization.

"We can go back to the Dark Ages! The crust of learning and good manners and tolerance is so thin! It would just take a few thousand big shells and gas bombs to wipe out all the eager young men, and all the libraries and historical archives and patent offices, all the laboratories and art galleries, all the castles and Periclean temples and Gothic cathedrals, all the cooperative stores and motor factories—every storehouse of learning. No inherent reason why Sissy's grandchildren—if anybody's grandchildren will survive at all—shouldn't be living in caves and heaving rocks at catamounts.

"And what's the solution of preventing this debacle? Plenty of 'em! The Communists have a patent Solution they know will work. So have the Fascists, and the rigid American Constitutionalists— who CALL themselves advocates of Democracy, without any notion what the word ought to mean; and the Monarchists—who are certain that if we could just resurrect the Kaiser and the Czar and King Alfonso, everybody would be loyal and happy again, and the banks would simply force credit on small businessmen at 2 per cent. And all the preachers—they tell you that they alone have the inspired Solution.

"Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!

"There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better."

Doremus suspected that, with the most scientific state, it would be impossible for iron deposits always to find themselves at exactly the rate decided upon two years before by the National Technocratic Minerals Commission, no matter how elevated and fraternal and Utopian the principles of the commissioners.

His Solution, Doremus pointed out, was the only one that did not flee before the thought that a thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs. It presumed that mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue and senility. It seemed to him unidealistically probable, for all the "contemporary furniture" of the 1930's, that most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books—no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930, in 1630. He suspected that tornadoes, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.

And, most fatally and abysmally, his Solution guessed that men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.

All the warring Solutions—except his, Doremus chuckled—were ferociously propagated by the Fanatics, the "Nuts."

He recalled an article in which Neil Carothers asserted that the "rabble-rousers" of America in the mid-'thirties had a long and dishonorable ancestry of prophets who had felt called upon to stir up the masses to save the world, and save it in the prophets' own way, and do it right now, and most violently: Peter the Hermit, the ragged, mad, and stinking monk who, to rescue the (unidentified) tomb of the Savior from undefined "outrages by the pagans," led out on the Crusades some hundreds of thousands of European peasants, to die on the way of starvation, after burning, raping, and murdering fellow peasants in foreign villages all along the road.

There was John Ball who "in 1381 was a share-the-wealth advocate; he preached equality of wealth, the abolition of class distinctions, and what would now be called communism," and whose follower, Wat Tyler, looted London, with the final gratifying result that afterward Labor was by the frightened government more oppressed than ever. And nearly three hundred years later, Cromwell's methods of expounding the sweet winsomeness of Purity and Liberty were shooting, slashing, clubbing, starving, and burning people, and after him the workers paid for the spree of bloody righteousness with blood.

Brooding about it, fishing in the muddy slew of recollection which most Americans have in place of a clear pool of history, Doremus was able to add other names of well-meaning rabble-rousers:

Murat and Danton and Robespierre, who helped shift the control of France from the moldy aristocrats to the stuffy, centime-pinching shopkeepers. Lenin and Trotzky who gave to the illiterate Russian peasants the privileges of punching a time clock and of being as learned, gay, and dignified as the factory hands in Detroit; and Lenin's man, Borodin, who extended this boon to China. And that William Randolph Hearst who in 1898 was the Lenin of Cuba and switched the mastery of the golden isle from the cruel Spaniards to the peaceful, unarmed, brotherly-loving Cuban politicians of today.

The American Moses, Dowie, and his theocracy at Zion City, Illinois, where the only results of the direct leadership of God— as directed and encouraged by Mr. Dowie and by his even more spirited successor, Mr. Voliva—were that the holy denizens were deprived of oysters and cigarettes and cursing, and died without the aid of doctors instead of with it, and that the stretch of road through Zion City incessantly caused the breakage of springs on the cars of citizens from Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka, which may or not have been a desirable Good Deed.

Cecil Rhodes, his vision of making South Africa a British paradise, and the actuality of making it a graveyard for British soldiers.

All the Utopias—Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall—and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.

All the leaders of Prohibition, so certain that their cause was world-regenerating that for it they were willing to shoot down violators.

It seemed to Doremus that the only rabble-rouser to build permanently had been Brigham Young, with his bearded Mormon captains, who not only turned the Utah desert into an Eden but made it pay and kept it up.

Pondered Doremus: Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated—tortured—slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition!

In this acid mood Doremus doubted the efficacy of all revolutions; dared even a little to doubt our two American revolutions—against England in 1776, and the Civil War.

For a New England editor to contemplate even the smallest criticism of these wars was what it would have been for a Southern Baptist fundamentalist preacher to question Immortality, the Inspiration of the Bible, and the ethical value of shouting Hallelujah. Yet had it, Doremus queried nervously, been necessary to have four years of inconceivably murderous Civil War, followed by twenty years of commercial oppression of the South, in order to preserve the Union, free the slaves, and establish the equality of Industry with Agriculture? Had it been just to the Negroes themselves to throw them so suddenly, with so little preparation, into full citizenship, that the Southern states, in what they considered self-defense, disqualified them at the polls and lynched them and lashed them? Could they not, as Lincoln at first desired and planned, have been freed without the vote, then gradually and competently educated, under federal guardianship, so that by 1890 they might, without too much enmity, have been able to enter fully into all the activities of the land?

A generation and a half (Doremus meditated) of the sturdiest and most gallant killed or crippled in the Civil War or, perhaps worst of all, becoming garrulous professional heroes and satellites of the politicians who in return for their solid vote made all lazy jobs safe for the G.A.R. The most valorous, it was they who suffered the most, for while the John D. Rockefellers, the J. P. Morgans, the Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds, and all their nimble financial comrades of the South, did not enlist, but stayed in the warm, dry counting-house, drawing the fortune of the country into their webs, it was Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Nathaniel Lyon, Pat Cleburne, and the knightly James B. McPherson who were killed... and with them Abraham Lincoln.

So, with the hundreds of thousands who should have been the progenitors of new American generations drained away, we could show the world, which from 1780 to 1860 had so admired men like Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, the Adamses, Webster, only such salvages as McKinley, Benjamin Harrison, William Jennings Bryan, Harding... and Senator Berzelius Windrip and his rivals.

Slavery had been a cancer, and in that day was known no remedy save bloody cutting. There had been no X-rays of wisdom and tolerance. Yet to sentimentalize this cutting, to justify and rejoice in it, was an altogether evil thing, a national superstition that was later to lead to other Unavoidable Wars—wars to free Cubans, to free Filipinos who didn't want our brand of freedom, to End All Wars.

Let us, thought Doremus, not throb again to the bugles of the Civil War, nor find diverting the gallantry of Sherman's dashing Yankee boys in burning the houses of lone women, nor particularly admire the calmness of General Lee as he watched thousands writhe in the mud.

He even wondered if, necessarily, it had been such a desirable thing for the Thirteen Colonies to have cut themselves off from Great Britain. Had the United States remained in the British Empire, possibly there would have evolved a confederation that could have enforced World Peace, instead of talking about it. Boys and girls from Western ranches and Southern plantations and Northern maple groves might have added Oxford and York Minster and Devonshire villages to their own domain. Englishmen, and even virtuous Englishwomen, might have learned that persons who lack the accent of a Kentish rectory or of a Yorkshire textile village may yet in many ways be literate; and that astonishing numbers of persons in the world cannot be persuaded that their chief aim in life ought to be to increase British exports on behalf of the stock-holdings of the Better Classes.

It is commonly asserted, Doremus remembered, that without complete political independence the United States could not have developed its own peculiar virtues. Yet it was not apparent to him that America was any more individual than Canada or Australia; that Pittsburgh and Kansas City were to be preferred before Montreal and Melbourne, Sydney and Vancouver.

No questioning of the eventual wisdom of the "radicals" who had first advocated these two American revolutions, Doremus warned himself, should be allowed to give any comfort to that eternal enemy: the conservative manipulators of privilege who damn as "dangerous agitators" any man who menaces their fortunes; who jump in their chairs at the sting of a gnat like Debs, and blandly swallow a camel like Windrip.

Between the rabble-rousers—chiefly to be detected by desire for their own personal power and notoriety—and the un-self-seeking fighters against tyranny, between William Walker or Danton, and John Howard or William Lloyd Garrison, Doremus saw, there was the difference between a noisy gang of thieves and an honest man noisily defending himself against thieves. He had been brought up to revere the Abolitionists: Lovejoy, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe—though his father had considered John Brown insane and a menace, and had thrown sly mud at the marble statues of Henry Ward Beecher, the apostle in the fancy vest. And Doremus could not do otherwise than revere the Abolitionists now, though he wondered a little if Stephen Douglas and Thaddeus Stephens and Lincoln, more cautious and less romantic men, might not have done the job better.

"Is it just possible," he sighed, "that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy than all the plumed souls who have shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on saving them?"

CHAPTER XIV

I JOINED the Christian, or as some call it, the Campbellite Church as a mere boy, not yet dry behind the ears. But I wished then and I wish now that it were possible for me to belong to the whole glorious brotherhood; to be one in Communion at the same time with the brave Presbyterians that fight the pusillanimous, mendacious, destructive, tom-fool Higher Critics, so-called; and with the Methodists who so strongly oppose war yet in war-time can always be counted upon for Patriotism to the limit; and with the splendidly tolerant Baptists, the earnest Seventh-Day Adventists, and I guess I could even say a kind word for the Unitarians, as that great executive William Howard Taft belonged to them, also his wife.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

OFFICIALLY, Doremus belonged to the Universalist Church, his wife and children to the Episcopal—a natural American transition. He had been reared to admire Hosea Ballou, the Universalist St. Augustine who, from his tiny parsonage in Barnard, Vermont, had proclaimed his faith that even the wickedest would have, after earthly death, another chance of salvation. But now, Doremus could scarce enter the Fort Beulah Universalist Church. It had too many memories of his father, the pastor, and it was depressing to see how the old-time congregations, in which two hundred thick beards would wag in the grained pine benches every Sunday morning, and their womenfolks and children line up beside the patriarchs, had dwindled to aged widows and farmers and a few schoolteachers.

But in this time of seeking, Doremus did venture there. The church was a squat and gloomy building of granite, not particularly enlivened by the arches of colored slate above the windows, yet as a boy Doremus had thought it and its sawed-off tower the superior of Chartres. He had loved it as in Isaiah College he had loved the Library which, for all its appearance of being a crouching red-brick toad, had meant to him freedom for spiritual discovery—still cavern of a reading room where for hours one could forget the world and never be nagged away to supper.

He found, on his one attendance at the Universalist church, a scattering of thirty disciples, being addressed by a "supply," a theological student from Boston, monotonously shouting his well-meant, frightened, and slightly plagiaristic eloquence in regard to the sickness of Abijah, the son of Jeroboam. Doremus looked at the church walls, painted a hard and glistening green, unornamented, to avoid all the sinful trappings of papistry, while he listened to the preacher's hesitant droning:

"Now, uh, now what so many of us fail to realize is how, uh, how sin, how any sin that we, uh, we ourselves may commit, any sin reflects not on ourselves but on those that we, uh, that we hold near and dear—"

He would have given anything, Doremus yearned, for a sermon which, however irrational, would passionately lift him to renewed courage, which would bathe him in consolation these beleagured months. But with a shock of anger he saw that that was exactly what he had been condemning just a few days ago: the irrational dramatic power of the crusading leader, clerical or political.

Very well then—sadly. He'd just have to get along without the spiritual consolation of the church that he had known in college days.

No, first he'd try the ritual of his friend Mr. Falck—the Padre, Buck Titus sometimes called him.

In the cozy Anglicanism of St. Crispin's P. E. Church, with its imitation English memorial brasses and imitation Celtic font and brass-eagle reading desk and dusty-smelling maroon carpet, Doremus listened to Mr. Falck: "Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness, and live; and hath given power and commandment to his Ministers, to declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the Absolution and Remission of their sins—"

Doremus glanced at the placidly pious façade of his wife, Emma. The lovely, familiar old ritual seemed meaningless to him now, with no more pertinence to a life menaced by Buzz Windrip and his Minute Men, no more comfort for having lost his old deep pride in being an American, than a stage revival of an equally lovely and familiar Elizabethan play. He looked about nervously. However exalted Mr. Falck himself might be, most of the congregation were Yorkshire pudding. The Anglican Church was, to them, not the aspiring humility of Newman nor the humanity of Bishop Brown (both of whom left it!) but the sign and proof of prosperity—an ecclesiastical version of owning a twelve-cylinder Cadillac—or even more, of knowing that one's grandfather owned his own surrey and a respectable old family horse.

The whole place smelled to Doremus of stale muffins. Mrs. R. C. Crowley was wearing white gloves and on her bust—for a Mrs. Crowley, even in 1936, did not yet have breasts—was a tight bouquet of tuberoses. Francis Tasbrough had a morning coat and striped trousers and on the lilac-colored pew cushion beside him was (unique in Fort Beulah) a silk top-hat. And even the wife of Doremus's bosom, or at least of his breakfast coffee, the good Emma, had a pedantic expression of superior goodness which irritated him.

"Whole outfit stifles me!" he snapped. "Rather be at a yelling, jumping Holy Roller orgy—no—that's Buzz Windrip's kind of jungle hysterics. I want a church, if there can possibly be one, that's advanced beyond the jungle and beyond the chaplains of King Henry the Eighth. I know why, even though she's painfully conscientious, Lorinda never goes to church."

Lorinda Pike, on that sleety December afternoon, was darning a tea cloth in the lounge of her Beulah Valley Tavern, five miles up the river from the Fort. It wasn't, of course, a tavern: it was a super-boarding-house as regards its twelve guest bedrooms, and a slightly too arty tearoom in its dining facilities. Despite his long affection for Lorinda, Doremus was always annoyed by the Singhalese brass finger bowls, the North Carolina table mats, and the Italian ash trays displayed for sale on wabbly card tables in the dining room. But he had to admit that the tea was excellent, the scones light, the Stilton sound, Lorinda's private rum punches admirable, and that Lorinda herself was intelligent yet adorable— particularly when, as on this gray afternoon, she was bothered neither by other guests nor by the presence of that worm, her partner, Mr. Nipper, whose pleasing notion it was that because he had invested a few thousand in the Tavern he should have none of the work or responsibility and half the profits.

Doremus thrust his way in, patting off the snow, puffing to recover from the shakiness caused by skidding all the way from Fort Beulah. Lorinda nodded carelessly, dropped another stick on the fireplace, and went back to her darning with nothing more intimate than "Hullo. Nasty out."

"Yuh—fierce."

But as they sat on either side the hearth their eyes had no need of smiling for a bridge between them.

Lorinda reflected, "Well, my darling, it's going to be pretty bad. I guess Windrip & Co. will put the woman's struggle right back in the sixteen-hundreds, with Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomians."

"Sure. Back to the kitchen."

"Even if you haven't got one!"

"Any worse than us men? Notice that Windrip never MENTIONED free speech and the freedom of the press in his articles of faith? Oh, he'd 've come out for 'em strong and hearty if he'd even thought of 'em!"

"That's so. Tea, darling?"

"No. Linda, damn it, I feel like taking the family and sneaking off to Canada BEFORE I get nabbed—right after Buzz's inauguration."

"No. You mustn't. We've got to keep all the newspapermen that'll go on fighting him, and not go sniffling up to the garbage pail. Besides! What would I do without you?" For the first time Lorinda sounded importunate.

"You'll be a lot less suspect if I'm not around. But I guess you're right. I can't go till they put the skids under me. Then I'll have to vanish. I'm too old to stand jail."

"Not too old to make love, I hope! That WOULD be hard on a girl!"

"Nobody ever is, except the kind that used to be too young to make love! Anyway, I'll stay—for a while."

He had, suddenly, from Lorinda, the resoluteness he had sought in church. He would go on trying to sweep back the ocean, just for his own satisfaction. It meant, however, that his hermitage in the Ivory Tower was closed with slightly ludicrous speed. But he felt strong again, and happy. His brooding was interrupted by Lorinda's curt:

"How's Emma taking the political situation?"

"Doesn't know there is one! Hears me croaking, and she heard Walt Trowbridge's warning on the radio, last evening—did you listen in?—and she says, 'Oh my, how dreadful!' and then forgets all about it and worries about the saucepan that got burnt! She's lucky! Oh well, she probably calms me down and keeps me from becoming a COMPLETE neurote! Probably that's why I'm so darned everlastingly fond of her. And yet I'm chump enough to wish you and I were together—uh—recognizedly together, all the time—and could fight together to keep some little light burning in this coming new glacial epoch. I do. All the time. I think that, at this moment, all things considered, I should like to kiss you."

"Is that so unusual a celebration?"

"Yes. Always. Always it's the first time again! Look, Linda, do you ever stop to think how curious it is, that with—everything between us—like that night in the hotel at Montreal—we neither one of us seem to feel any guilt, any embarrassment—can sit and gossip like this?"

"No, dear.... Darling!... It doesn't seem a bit curious. It was all so natural. So good!"

"And yet we're reasonably responsible people—"

"Of course. That's why nobody suspects us, not even Emma. Thank God she doesn't, Doremus! I wouldn't hurt her for anything, not even for your kind-hearted favors!"

"Beast!"

"Oh, you might be suspected, all by yourself. It's known that you sometimes drink likker and play poker and tell 'hot ones.' But who'd ever suspect that the local female crank, the suffragist, the pacifist, the anti-censorshipist, the friend of Jane Addams and Mother Bloor, could be a libertine! Highbrows! Bloodless reformers! Oh, and I've known so many women agitators, all dressed in Carrie Nation hatchets and modest sheets of statistics, that have been ten times as passionate, intolerably passionate, as any cream-faced plump little Kept Wife in chiffon step-ins!"

For a moment their embracing eyes were not merely friendly and accustomed and careless.

He fretted, "Oh I think of you all the time and want you and yet I think of Emma too—and I don't even have the fine novelistic egotism of feeling guilty and intolerably caught in complexities. Yes, it does all seem so natural, Dear Linda!"

He stalked restlessly to the casement window, looking back at her every second step. It was dusk now, and the roads smoking. He stared out inattentively—then very attentively indeed.

"That's curious. Curiouser and curiouser. Standing back behind that big bush, lilac bush I guess it is, across the road, there's a fellow watching this place. I can see him in the headlights whenever a car comes along. And I think it's my hired man, Oscar Ledue—Shad." He started to draw the cheerful red-and-white curtains.

"No! No! Don't draw them! He'll get suspicious."

"That's right. Funny, his watching there—if it is him. He's supposed to be at my house right now, looking after the furnace— winters, he only works for me couple of hours a day, works in the sash factory, rest of the time, but he ought to—A little light blackmail, I suppose. Well, he can publish everything he saw today, wherever he wants to!"

"Only what he saw today?"

"Anything! Any day! I'm awfully proud—old dish rag like me, twenty years older than you!—to be your lover!"

And he was proud, yet all the while he was remembering the warning in red chalk that he had found on his front porch after the election. Before he had time to become very complicated about it, the door vociferously banged open, and his daughter, Sissy, sailed in.

"Wot-oh, wot-oh, wot-oh! Toodle-oo! Good-morning, Jeeves! Mawnin', Miss Lindy. How's all de folks on de ole plantation everywhere I roam? Hello, Dad. No, it isn't cocktails—least, just one very small cocktail—it's youthful spirits! My God, but it's cold! Tea, Linda, my good woman—tea!"

They had tea. A thoroughly domestic circle.

"Race you home, Dad," said Sissy, when they were ready to go.

"Yes—no—wait a second! Lorinda: lend me a flashlight."

As he marched out of the door, marched belligerently across the road, in Doremus seethed all the agitated anger he had been concealing from Sissy. And part hidden behind bushes, leaning on his motorcycle, he did find Shad Ledue.

Shad was startled; for once he looked less contemptuously masterful than a Fifth Avenue traffic policeman, as Doremus snapped, "What you doing there?" and he stumbled in answering: "Oh I just— something happened to my motor-bike."

"So! You ought to be home tending the furnace, Shad."

"Well, I guess I got my machine fixed now. I'll hike along."

"No. My daughter is to drive me home, so you can put your motorcycle in the back of my car and drive it back." (Somehow, he had to talk privately to Sissy, though he was not in the least certain what it was he had to say.)

"Her? Rats! Sissy can't drive for sour apples! Crazy's a loon!"

"Ledue! Miss Sissy is a highly competent driver. At least she satisfies me, and if you really feel she doesn't quite satisfy YOUR standard—"

"Her driving don't make a damn bit of difference to me one way or th' other! G'-night!"

Recrossing the road, Doremus rebuked himself, "That was childish of me. Trying to talk to him like a gent! But how I would enjoy murdering him!"

He informed Sissy, at the door, "Shad happened to come along— motorcycle in bad shape—let him take my Chrysler—I'll drive with you."

"Fine! Only six boys have had their hair turn gray, driving with me, this week."

"And I—I meant to say, I think I'd better do the driving. It's pretty slippery tonight."

"Wouldn't that destroy you! Why, my dear idiot parent, I'm the best driver in—"

"You can't drive for sour apples! Crazy, that's all! Get in! I'm driving, d'you hear? Night, Lorinda."

"All right, dearest Father," said Sissy with an impishness which reduced his knees to feebleness.

He assured himself, though, that this flip manner of Sissy, characteristic of even the provincial boys and girls who had been nursed on gasoline, was only an imitation of the nicer New York harlots and would not last more than another year or two. Perhaps this rattle-tongued generation needed a Buzz Windrip Revolution and all its pain.

"Beautiful, I know it's swell to drive carefully, but do you have to emulate the prudent snail?" said Sissy.

"Snails don't skid."

"No, they get run over. Rather skid!"

"So your father's a fossil!"

"Oh, I wouldn't—"

"Well, maybe he is, at that. There's advantages. Anyway: I wonder if there isn't a lot of bunk about Age being so cautious and conservative, and Youth always being so adventurous and bold and original? Look at the young Nazis and how they enjoy beating up the Communists. Look at almost any college class—the students disapproving of the instructor because he's iconoclastic and ridicules the sacred home-town ideas. Just this afternoon, I was thinking, driving out here—"

"Listen, Dad, do you go to Lindy's often?"

"Why—why, not especially. Why?"

"Why don't you—What are you two so scared of? You two wild-haired reformers—you and Lindy belong together. Why don't you—you know— kind of be lovers?"

"Good God Almighty! Cecilia! I've never heard a DECENT girl talk that way in all my life!"

"Tst! Tst! Haven't you? Dear, dear! So sorry!"

"Well, my Lord—At least you've got to admit that it's slightly unusual for an apparently loyal daughter to suggest her father's deceiving her mother! Especially a fine lovely mother like yours!"

"Is it? Well, maybe. Unusual to suggest it—aloud. But I wonder if lots of young females don't sometimes kind of think it, just the same, when they see the Venerable Parent going stale!"

"Sissy—"

"Hey, watch that telephone pole!"

"Hang it, I didn't go anywheres near it! Now you look here, Sissy: you simply must not be so froward—or forward, whichever it is; I always get those two words balled up. This is serious business. I've never heard of such a preposterous suggestion as Linda— Lorinda and I being lovers. My dear child, you simply can't be flip about such final things as that!"

"Oh, can't I! Oh, sorry, Dad. I just mean—About Mother Emma. Course I wouldn't have anybody hurt her, not even Lindy and you. But, why, bless you, Venerable, she'd never even dream of such a thing. You could have your nice pie and she'd never miss one single slice. Mother's mental grooves aren't, uh, well, they aren't so very sex-conditioned, if that's how you say it—more sort of along the new-vacuum-cleaner complex, if you know what I mean— page Freud! Oh, she's swell, but not so analytical and—"

"Are those your ethics, then?"

"Huh? Well for cat's sake, why not? Have a swell time that'll get you full of beans again and yet not hurt anybody's feelings? Why, say, that's the entire second chapter in my book on ethics!"

"Sissy! Have you, by any chance, any vaguest notion of what you're talking about, or think you're talking about? Of course—and perhaps we ought to be ashamed of our cowardly negligence—but I, and I don't suppose your mother, have taught you so very much about 'sex' and—"

"Thank heaven! You spared me the dear little flower and its simply shocking affair with that tough tomcat of a tiger lily in the next bed—excuse me—I mean in the next plot. I'm so glad you did. Pete's sake! I'd certainly hate to blush every time I looked at a garden!"

"Sissy! Child! Please! You mustn't be so beastly cute! These are all weighty things—"

Penitently: "I know, Dad. I'm sorry. It's just—if you only knew how wretched I feel when I see you so wretched and so quiet and everything. This horrible Windrip, League of Forgodsakers business has got you down, hasn't it! If you're going to fight 'em, you've got to get some pep back into you—you've got to take off the lace mitts and put on the brass knuckles—and I got kind of a hunch Lorinda might do that for you, and only her. Heh! Her pretending to be so high-minded! (Remember that old wheeze Buck Titus used to love so—'If you're saving the fallen women, save me one'? Oh, not so good. I guess we'll take that line right out of the sketch!) But anyway, our Lindy has a pretty moist and hungry eye—"

"Impossible! Impossible! By the way, Sissy! What do you know about all of this? Are you a virgin?"

"Dad! Is that your idea of a question to—Oh, I guess I was asking for it. And the answer is: Yes. So far. But not promising one single thing about the future. Let me tell you right now, if conditions in this country do get as bad as you've been claiming they will, and Julian Falck is threatened with having to go to war or go to prison or some rotten thing like that, I'm most certainly not going to let any maidenly modesty interfere between me and him, and you might just as well be prepared for that!"

"It is Julian then, not Malcolm?"

"Oh, I think so. Malcolm gives me a pain in the neck. He's getting all ready to take his proper place as a colonel or something with Windrip's wooden soldiers. And I am so fond of Julian! Even if he is the doggonedest, most impractical soul—like his grandfather—or you! He's a sweet thing. We sat up purring pretty nothings till about two, last night, I guess."

"Sissy! But you haven't—Oh, my little girl! Julian is probably decent enough—not a bad sort—but you—You haven't let Julian take any familiarities with you?"

"Dear quaint old word! As if anything could be so awfully much more familiar than a good, capable, 10,000 h.p. kiss! But darling, just so you won't worry—no. The few times, late nights, in our sitting room, when I've slept with Julian—well, we've slept!"

"I'm glad, but—Your apparent—probably only apparent—information on a variety of delicate subjects slightly embarrasses me."

"Now you listen to me! And this is something you ought to be telling me, not me you, Mr. Jessup! Looks as if this country, and most of the world—I am being serious, now, Dad; plenty serious, God help us all!—it looks as if we're headed right back into barbarism. It's war! There's not going to be much time for coyness and modesty, any more than there is for a base-hospital nurse when they bring in the wounded. Nice young ladies—they're out! It's Lorinda and me that you men are going to want to have around, isn't it—isn't it—now isn't it?"

"Maybe—perhaps," Doremus sighed, depressed at seeing a little more of his familiar world slide from under his feet as the flood rose.

They were coming into the Jessup driveway. Shad Ledue was just leaving the garage.

"Skip in the house, quick, will you!" said Doremus to his girl.

"Sure. But do be careful, hon!" She no longer sounded like his little daughter, to be protected, adorned with pale blue ribbons, slyly laughed at when she tried to show off in grown-up ways. She was suddenly a dependable comrade, like Lorinda.

Doremus slipped resolutely out of his car and said calmly:

"Shad!"

"Yuh?"

"D'you take the car keys into the kitchen?"

"Huh? No. I guess I left 'em in the car."

"I've told you a hundred times they belong inside."

"Yuh? Well, how'd you like Miss Cecilia's driving? Have a good visit with old Mrs. Pike?"

He was derisive now, beyond concealment.

"Ledue, I rather think you're fired—right now!"

"Well! Just feature that! O.K., Chief! I was just going to tell you that we're forming a second chapter of the League of Forgotten Men in the Fort, and I'm to be the secretary. They don't pay much— only about twice what you pay me—pretty tight-fisted—but it'll mean something in politics. Good-night!"

Afterward, Doremus was sorry to remember that, for all his longshoreman clumsiness, Shad had learned a precise script in his red Vermont schoolhouse, and enough mastery of figures so that probably he would be able to keep this rather bogus secretaryship. Too bad!

When, as League secretary, a fortnight later, Shad wrote to him demanding a donation of two hundred dollars to the League, and Doremus refused, the Informer began to lose circulation within twenty-four hours.

#hellsitesonlybookclub #bookblr #sinclair lewis

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shit-summoners-say · 3 years

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This is: A Message From Lord Nergal

#feh #fire emblem heroes #submission #mod commentary: he awaits you on dread isle #fe denning

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toronbo · 3 years

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for some reason the world doesnt want me to finish fe7. i have told this story to like 4 people in hopes of it making me want to get off my ass and do it again but. alas.

i first started the game in 2013. it was my first fe game and i focused so much on lyn and a few others that by the time we got to the desert in eliwoods story, i couldnt clear it bc my only good units were cavalry units. also pent kept eating the exp smh

so i restarted it and did it properly, letting every unit get a chance to shine. i hate the dread isle chapters so much but redid it. and then? i switched phones and all my data got lost, leaving me with the battery saves from my first playthrough. "oh, okay. no biggie. i was only on like, chapter 21. its ok"

so i restarted it again. got to ch26x, and stopped bc that map . . . . is scary, and i couldnt win lmao. i wanted to grind for ninos exp but it was Tough. i also disliked sonia a LOT but its okay! cos guess what happened? :) i got a new phone and my save states got corrupted again! 🙂🙃🙂

i managed to recover an early save state from that playthrough, but then got back to the dread isle 🙃🙃🙃 i dont like fog or uhai. so thats where im at right now and dont feel like playing anymore. but i will, someday.

#thanks for lostening to taris confessional #i also need to beat fe8 but as an arachnophobe? the bael existing is such a huge nono <3 #i like the gba fe games because the maps are so simplistic they dont hurt my eyes? 3ds fe games are too busy and it gives me a headache #taris game talks #taritxt #fuk it i may even try again today just let me get off the dread isle

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owolau · 7 years

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best case scenario: Denning is in fire emblem heroes/warriors and we get to hear The Line voiced

#fe #denning #fe7 #this is a message from lord nergal #i await you on the dread isle #ok that's it i'm going to bed

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summoner-kentauris · 6 years

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So. I’ve been doing some some general FE lore browsing.

Here’s my thought:

So we know Zacharias was poking around Bramimond’s stuff. Specifically, he’s reading some of Bramimond‘s books. God only knows how he even knows about Bramimond but setting that aside.

I thus went immediately to go dig up stuff on Bramimond. I watched a couple of walkthrough videos on Blazing Blade but the really cool thing I found was on the wiki. And that is Bramimond‘s dark magic tome, Apocalypse.

Apocalypse (アポカリプス, Apokaripusu) the Elder Revelation (黙示の闇, Mokushi no Yami lit. Darkness of the Revelation) is a Dark Magic tome that appears in Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade. Created during the Scouring for use against Manaketes, Apocalypse was wielded by Bramimond, who perfected it amongst the ruins on Valor, the Dread Isle, at the cost of his humanity.

It also is apparently the strongest magic spell in the game, which makes sense for a spell called Apocalypse. More interestingly...

After the war, it is unknown as to what could have happened to the Apocalypse tome.

This is where we come in! See, if when Zacharias | Bruno gets taken over by this curse (I’m mentally preparing myself okay), he’s gonna need a new weapon. And no offense to Valaskjálf, but. Now, I mean. They could just give him a new one which would also be cool. However. He’s already been searching Bramimond’s stuff. Heck, the book he was reading out of could have been Apocalypse, for all I know. I think it would make for a pretty cool scene. He hasn’t found any answers but the one in the book, and he keeps going over and over it, and slowly...

Kinda like this:

I’ve heard rumors...Bramimond, one of the eight legends, devoted himself entirely to the dark. All emotion, all memory... dissolved in a river of dark. That is how he received the power to best dragons.

(As an aside, having seen Bramimond in-game only here and there (it’s was very hard to find specific tiny moments in the walkthrough), I can’t say exactly how true the rumors are, only that he doesn’t have a personality anymore, but does have faint memories. So, grain of salt.)

As far as non-dark-god’ified Zacharias, he’s already on a quest to figure out a way from under the dark god’s thumb, and given what I do know about FE, it seems almost certain this dark god is a dragon, and that he’d probably know that. I mean, if he knows about Bramimond, he’d have to know about dragon-gods and what have thee. Now, imagine that he hears the exact same rumor, that Bramimond, using Apocalypse, gained to power to defeat dragons. He’s already got an extreme self-destructive streak. And it’s not just him he’s trying to free - it’s his sister. So I can easily imagine a scenario where he honestly believes there might be no other choice - he takes Apocalypse with him, in case he needs to protect Veronica, then at some point (possibly because he’s obsessing over the book), he starts losing his good feelings towards and memories of the Askrans, and because he doesn’t have those things which have let him resist for so long, the Dark God takes over and there you go. Dark God Zacharias | Bruno wielding Apocalypse. That’s a world ending Book III/Book IV threat right there, that is.

(Side bar: if he gets a new name Grima-style I am going to be so annoyed, it is already hard enough he’s got four completely different ways he’s been referred to already.)

Last point, and then I’ll shut up, I promise.

The wiki makes special note of Apocalypse etymology, like it does for a bunch of weapons:

The Apocalypse is a term that is commonly used in English to refer to the end of the world.

Exactly as we’d expect. However, it also goes out of its way to mention:

In actuality, the word, originating from the Greek language, is translated as a disclosure of divine knowledge, hidden from humanity in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, and can be roughly translated to English as revelation, disclosure, divulgence, exposure or unmasking.

This is important for Bramimond’s character, of course, because he was seeking knowledge in trying to create Apocalypse. The cool part is, seeking knowledge is kind of Zacharias’ whole thing, too. That’s the whole reason he even encounters Bramimond’s work in the first place.

And, of course, there’s that last bit at the end there.

can be roughly translated to English as revelation, disclosure, divulgence, exposure or unmasking.

And on that note, those are all the reasons so far I think it would be very cool and make a lot of sense if Zacharias eventually ended up wielding the tome Apocalypse.

#fire emblem heroes #zacharias (fire emblem)#bruno (fire emblem)#fe heroes #fan theory #long post

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hippomanblog · 6 years

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My Fire Emblem Rankings

I’ve had a few questions about my legitimate Fire Emblem opinions and thoughts, so I figured I’d write this up while I’m waiting for some things to process. This is all just personal opinion, no shade is meant to be being thrown, and this probably won’t interest you too much. But, hey, here it is. I’ll list the Fire Emblems going from favorite to least favorite, and explain a little bit about why I feel that way. Note that I won’t be including 1-5. I’m considering the remakes the “definitive” versions of 1/2/3, and I haven’t actually played the Jugdral games. I’m also not counting Heroes because it’s kinda hard to “judge”, but I do like it a lot and play on a pretty regular basis. THIS POST WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR EACH GAME!

#1. Awakening

Awakening is a game that gets a few things wrong but most things right. What don’t I like about it? I preferred the art style of the Tellius games. The maps aren’t very creative. Pair Up is a thematically cool mechanic that really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and trivializes many encounters. The story is simple, with the exception of a couple twists, and Validar is a dull villain. I like pretty much everything else. Awakening managed to be accessible to new fans and still provide a nice challenge for series veterans. There’s a diverse selection of characters who are all pretty viable, meaning you can use your favorites. Most characters have a lot of personality and depth to their lines, like with how they turned Frederick from a typical stoic Jagen-type into this goofy obsessive pyromaniac without making him a complete joke character. The SpotPass characters are also a lovely addition if you adore the series like I do, and there’s just so much to do in this game, so it feels like a celebration of the franchise as a whole. If I’m trying to get someone into Fire Emblem, I will tell them to play Awakening. Favorite Character: Gregor or Owain. Least Favorite Character: Yarne #2. New Mystery Of The Emblem

This is bias, yes, but I love New Mystery. I was really excited for this game, because I was pretty new to the fanbase when it was announced, and couldn’t wait for an English release. I waited, and waited, and waited, and... Once I finished playing my JP copy I just lamented that we didn’t get to play this game here. I think that while Awakening reinvents Fire Emblem, New Mystery is sort of the pinnacle of “classic” FE. The game is just fun, the maps are diverse and challenging, and the combination of reclass and the sheer amount of playable characters gives it immense replay value. The plot is nothing to really write home about, but after the vast wasteland of Shadow Dragon Plot, I really liked what was there. It’s nothing that’ll blow your mind, but there are some nice moments. I know a lot of people hate Kris, but I don’t mind them. I won’t go to bat for them being any kind of great character or vital addition to the story, but as a sounding board to give other Archanea characters a little personality, and a way to customize your own unit and give them all sorts of terrible hats, they work just fine. I also like the idea of Marth as a bit of a shell-shocked, reluctant king who relies on his friends to rise to greatness. It prevents him from being “too perfect”, like RD Ike. But I can see where people have problems with this. I wish this were a more accessible entry in the series, because I think it has a little bit of something for every Fire Emblem fan. Favorite Character: Honestly? I like Caeda and Ogma, they’re cool people. Least Favorite Character: matthis is creepy and I hate him 3. Blazing Sword

Like a lot of people, Blazing Sword was my first exposure to the series (through an LP on Youtube for me), and it does a great job. You could honestly probably swap these first three around in any order, to be frank. The balance in this one is a little wonky, and it goes on a little too long. But I like what it does with its extra time. You get some clever gaidens that mix up the formula, have room to use lots of units, and the sprite animations are just wonderful to watch. The three lords all bring something to the table, even though you’re honestly probably just going to play Hector Mode once you’ve unlocked it. Lyn has a story about claiming your birthright and using nobility to help people, Hector’s brash and boorish nature is offset as he learns how to be a better person on his journey (That scene with Matthew on the Dread Isle is great.), and Eliwood...exists. With maps ranging from cramped and objective based to sprawling battlefields, there’s a lot of variety in gameplay and room for different units to shine. It’s also got some of the best supports in the series. It’s a must-play for any Fire Emblem fan. Favorite: Hector is a good boy and a friend. Legault is also a surprisingly involved side-character with some great lines and dialogue with almost every Morph in the final map! Least Favorite: Jaffar, because it’s hard to tell if I hate him more for killing Leila or ramming his face into the paladin in Battle Before Dawn and getting slaughtered so many times.

4. Path Of Radiance

I guess only the top 3 are getting thumbnails, sorry. PoR sticks with me because it tries a lot of new things and most of them work out. The bonus experience is a good system, I think this game does support unlocks better than any other, Laguz units are fun to use, and the conversion to pseudo-3D maps feels smooth and never gets in the way of gameplay. There are issues, though. I’m not a fan of the way the full-body portraits look in the cutscenes of this game, biorhythm is silly, and that Bridge Map sure does Exist. The reason this isn’t breaking Top 3, though, is that I just never really got attached to the cast. Characters are a big part of Fire Emblem for me, and while there are some great ones in PoR, there are also several that feel very forgettable. The plot is also a little...iffy, because it’s all FANTASY RACISM and it feels like it’s trying to punch above its pay grade sometimes. Like, be honest, did you give a shit that you had to kill Jill’s dad? That character who showed up maybe once? The maps also tend to blend together, with a few notable exceptions (because they’re annoying, mostly). In Minor Nitpick Town, the 3D cutscenes are hilariously goofy and the Trial characters have really awful unlock conditions. Still, PoR is a very solid entry and I’d give it a hearty recommendation. Favorite: Ranulf, probably. Least Favorite: makalov shouldn’t have been recruitable

5. Sacred Stones I balked a little at putting this one this low, like “Really? This is FIFTH?” But I guess that’s just a testament to how much I enjoy all these games. Like with the top three, you could probably swap this with PoR. Sacred Stones gets a lot of shit for being “too easy”, and I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, but I also don’t think it’s that big a deal. This game takes risks, but they’re good risks that frequently pay off. This was the ideal game for the Trainee classes to come in, because you can actually feasibly use them! The monsters add variation to the types of enemies you encounter! Split promotions are interesting tactical decisions that give the player more control over their personal experience! There’s just...not a ton of substance to SS, though. The monsters, at heart, aren’t really interesting to fight. The game’s plot often feels like it’s on fast forward, and it ends before any real tension builds. The villains are, with the exception of Lyon, who’s great, mostly just cardboard cutouts of bad guy stereotypes. The postgame is mostly just grindy and once you’ve beaten the Tower or Ruins once, you’ll probably say “okay, I’m done!” Well, you aren’t, not if you want 100%! Get back in there and kill more Dracozombies to unlock your underleveled Druid! If you really crave that “challenge” as an essential part of your FE experience, although I think SS is often made out to be easier than it really is, you can probably skip it. But for most fans, it’s not to be passed up. Favorite: L’Arachel, of course. Least Favorite: I usually forget Syrene is in the game until she appears. 6. Fates: Conquest Yes, I’m dividing Fates into three games. Sue me. Conquest feels like the best of the Fates routes, because it’s creative. In... a lot of ways. The maps are creative. While some just amount to gimmicks, several are, in my opinion, series standouts. Chapter 9 is a Defense map that actually feels like a Defense map. You’ve got anti-siege weapons, you’re scrambling to keep the Hoshidans from flooding in, and when Takumi drains the water the whole dynamic of the map suddenly changes. It rules. To me, that map encompasses all the best parts of Conquest. It’s too bad it’s still in Fates, though. Let’s get it out of the way: Plot Bad. But, unique to Conquest, I think, is a plot so utterly ridiculous and convoluted that it actually becomes actively enjoyable. This is a story where your cousin puts on a different colored costume to COMPLETELY FOOL your adoptive dad, who she reveals is actually a jelly monster, but cannot tell anyone else because of a terrible curse inflicted by the King Of The Jelly Monsters, so you organize an invasion of an entire country to unmask Jelly Dad by making him sit on the Super Special Chair that will reveal his gelatinous form. I love it, to be honest. Otherwise my issues are mostly just the standard Fates Problems. The game tries to take what worked in Awakening and amp it up to 11, which ruins most of it. The child characters are unmemorable and the plot explanation is bafflingly nonsensical (BABY DIMENSIONS), the characters often feel like they’re just gimmicks that smash into eachother and then get married for some reason, and the game tries to be so many things at once that most of them feel half-assed or over-complicated. Jelly King Dad though. Favorite: Arthur cracks me up. Least Favorite: Peri Peri Peri peri peri p e r i p e r i 7. Echoes: Shadows Of Valentia

Confession time. I still haven’t finished this one all the way. I’ve seen the ending, though. Let’s get the problems out of the way first. The gameplay is not very fun. The map design delights in sticking you in poisonous swamps, slow and dreary deserts, or Nuibaba’s Abode, which I would personally say is the worst map in the series. While some of Awakening and Birthright’s maps feel lazy, most maps in this game feel like they were designed either just to frustrate you or with a series of random dice rolls that somehow plant a single Cavalier at the ass-end of nowhere and extend the map for three turns with zero rhyme or reason. Class balance is all over the place and you basically just want all the Dread Fighters possible, with a Cleric to summon more Dread Fighters. The dungeon crawling doesn’t add much, most of the game mechanics go woefully underexplained, and the voiced supports feel minimalist and shallow. But when Echoes works? It really, really works. I don’t like playing it, but watching someone play Echoes is a treat. The game is bursting with personality thanks to some phenomenal voice acting, which leaves the story with some unforgettable moments, both comic (the boey scream) and dramatic (Berkut Loses His Shit). Even though the characters don’t have a lot of explicit backstory, their voices and conversations are so expressive that it’s easy to sort of form your own ideas about their personalities and lives. The art is some of the best in the series, and each portrait is expressive and well done. It’s clear that this remake had a lot of care put into it, and it produced some of the series best lords and a wonderful new villain in the sinister Berkut. 8. Radiant Dawn

A lot of good things from Path Of Radiance carry over to Radiant Dawn. Namely, the stuff I mentioned earlier, I won’t go into it all again. All of that is good, but the new additions and changes often don’t work. The multiple viewpoints has a few cool moments, like facing down Ike and friends in 3-13 (with the greatest faceless NPC of all time on your side), but often just contributes to making the game way too long and making the characters often appear outright stupid or contradictory for the sake of moving the plot along. Remember when Micaiah, who spared one of the most vile people in FE history in Part 1, dumped flaming oil on a 13 year old girl and her guards in Part 3? Remember when Ranulf just walks up and tells you who the Black Knight is, ending a mystery that had been developed since the previous game with the dialogue equivalent of showing you a spoiler on the internet? Remember blood pacts? The massive split in characters also makes some of them completely worthless. Never forget the sad case of Vika, who suddenly disappears and doesn’t return until almost the final chapter, still at her Part 1 level. Yikes. I do enjoy the Finale maps a lot, however, and the final boss encounter is fairly memorable, though it does carry its own problem with Ike being basically hero worshipped by the entire cast, to the point where only he can strike down Ashera. I like Ike, but RD kind of feels like it’s forcing him down your throat sometimes. Favorite: Out of the new characters, Nolan, probably? Least Favorite: surprise it’s still makalov 9. Shadow Dragon I’m sure this is bottoming out a lot of people’s lists, but let me make my case. 1. Reclass is cool and they introduced it in this.

2. Hardin’s turban.

3. The Prologue, where IS got to make new stuff, is a lot of fun and has personality.

Okay, so Shadow Dragon is disappointing. It’s a remake that did not change enough, and if the FE games were yogurt flavors, Shadow Dragon would be the batch they just forgot to put flavoring in. Everything, down to the graphics, is covered in this thin veneer of blandness, and it’s sort of a muddy march to the finale, so you can finally take down a villain who literally gets about four lines in the whole game. The Gaiden chapters also feel like a rude prank. If you want to get at the fun maps with the interesting characters with good dialogue, you have to slaughter all of your friends on purpose! At least it’s in Shadow Dragon so you probably won’t like most of them anyway! Favorite: The guy who calls Gordin “Gaggles”. Least Favorite: surprise it’s still makalovmatthis 10. Binding Blade I admit that this is bizarre placement. I just...don’t like Binding Blade. It’s mostly due to stat distribution in gameplay, honestly. The skill/luck formula in this one results in a lot of boss fights that are just two 40% characters whiffing on eachother for ages. Several of the maps are giant slogs, especially 14, but I don’t remember any in particular that I really enjoyed. The plot is okay, but not memorable. Idunn is a bit of a letdown encounter. Hector deserved better. To summarize, I guess I just don’t think this is a game that does anything that Blazing Sword didn’t do better. So I’m gonna play that one instead. Favorite: Bors because of a terrible stupid inside joke I have with a friend. Least Favorite: I don’t remember anyone I cared enough to dislike, really. Let’s go with Cath for having the worst recruitment for a Worse Chad. 11. Fates: Birthright Remember all those cool things Conquest did? What if they didn’t? Birthright! While the story is still bad, it’s not nearly as funny-bad, although I do have to give props to the scene where Flora sets herself on fire and Jakob spends about a solid minute screaming out how pointless this is, echoing the player’s thoughts perfectly. The maps are mostly just stat-checks and open fields, and the answer to your problems often isn’t “make a better plan”, it’s “go grind a bit and then just roll through it”, especially on some late-game maps. Iago’s comes to mind, with the whole Entrap into Berzerker combo? Screw that. Favorite: Azama is a treasure. On the NPC (in this route) side, Elise is a beacon of rationality and kindness. I sure hope nothing happens to h-Oh. Least Favorite: I remember literally nothing about the personalities of Hana and Hinata so them, I guess.

12. Fates: Revelations Do you remember when I said Shadow Dragon was like unflavored yogurt? What if all the flavorings got mixed into one batch? And then you add chocolate and cherries and sprinkles and nuts and caramel and parsley and cinnamon and more cherries and shaved ice and spaghetti and then you tell it to explain the plot of Fates. That’ll be 20 dollars. Revelations actively harms the other two routes of the game by being the obvious “true route”, where nobody has to get hurt (except the best characters, r.i.p. Scarlet and Izana) and everything turns out just fine, negating any sort of moral ambiguity present! Anankos is a non-entity and a dull villain, and to add insult to injury, you don’t get to learn shit about him unless you buy the other DLC for this DLC that also decides to crib from Awakening and mess with some of the characters from that one. Almost every map has a bizarre gimmick that’s just weirdly cumbersome, and the amount of plot twists the game shoves at you in an attempt to explain EVERYTHING is just exhausting. You can play as any character in the Fates package (almost, double r.i.p. Izana) but the balance is tossed out the window to the point where once Niles and Odin come crawling in, they’re nigh-unusable in their joining chapter. It doesn’t feel like any part of it really comes together. Favorite: not this Least Favorite: Thinking about what else I could have bought with those 20 dollars. Well, that took about two hours, but this is my list. If you have any questions, I’m open. Sorry if I dissed your favorite, but if it helps, know that I can see why someone would enjoy any game in the series, even my least favorites. Also, know that I’m an idiot on the internet and that my opinion doesn’t have to impact what you enjoy! Just love the games you love, I’ll stick with mine, and we’re cool! I’m going to stop typing now.

#fire emblem #hippoman #ranking #opinion #awakening #favorites #spoilers

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gascon-en-exil · 6 years

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With so many characters mysteriously disappearing after the games, which examples do you think are the most egregious (like Est in FE12, where the hell did that came from)? Also, which characters that you like had to be relegated in playthroughs due to being mechanically obsolete.

Est would have been more palatable if the implied intention was that she’d run off to Valentia, but neither Gaiden nor its remake seems to put any work into showing that there’s anyone or anything there she’d want to run to. Then again, Abel/Est is the classic failed FE relationship that fails for entirely realistic reasons, no magical corruption or whatever, so it’s got some merit there. Others I don’t care for are Luthier since it doesn’t really suit his character to wander the earth and also because nothing interesting is done with it, Fergus because it’s one example of FE5 neatly sweeping away the political mess that is the Thracian peninsula so Leif can become king without killing (or marrying purely for political reasons *waves at Miranda*) any former allies, and Ike not because it’s not thematically appropriate for him but because it’s just one of the many reasons why people are still arguing about who he is or isn’t banging over a decade later.

Going to have to go by game here:

FE4: High priests in this game make me cry (Anima tomes, and only C rank? Gah…) and Deirdre’s worse for her 1.25 chapters, Tristan was meh as are some Diarmuids I’ve had

FE5: I’m contemplating making a genuine effort to play it very soon now…but on the secret Easy mode because I need some kind of break between the difficulty and the glitchy interface of the patch. In any case with the fatigue system I don’t think you can entirely leave anyone behind in this game?

FE6: I rarely recruit Elffin because Echidna > Bartre and I prefer A route of the Western Isles in general. Sophia is irredeemable garbage and there’s not much you can do with Cecilia either beyond staffbotting

FE7: Eliwood half the time. I usually take Priscilla over Serra but I like both of them, and I almost never use Legault

FE8: no one really because grinding is a thing and also because I don’t have many strong attachments to the characters in this one. The idea of leaving Seth behind for a challenge run is a saddening one however; I’ll take the hunk over his twinky replacement any day

FE9: why are you so bad, Rhys? I like the idea of trying out Tormod but rarely do so because he comes so late, and Bastian is funny but useless.

FE10: I dread drafting Elincia or Sanaki in my personal runs because they’re a pain to max out even though I like their characters and you certainly don’t need to do that. Laura is missed potential in more ways than one, and I wish Renning was ever worth taking to endgame

FE11-12: meh, other than Rickard and his possible one-night stand with Julian there’s nothing that comes to mind

FE13: again there’s grinding, though it sucks that so many Gen 1 characters are made obsolete by the kids just because of their more limited classes and skills. Among Gen 2 I acknowledge the Gerome is mechanically the worst male unit and possibly the worst unit overall, but I still like him and his dorky self

FE14: yet again with the grinding (including on Conquest, because of course I do), and this time it’s everyone in Gen 2 that I like more or less, because why even bother with the kids when the adults are overall just as good if not better and also not saddled with weird pocket dimension contrivances. Odin also usually fails to impress unless there’s a ton of effort put into him.

FE15: Forsyth needs some extra attention to be worth using and I hate Leon’s growths. Jesse also tends to fall by the wayside since he’ll be pretty behind Saber and Kamui and Deen if I get him - dread fighters may be mechanically amazing but having an army full of them is just boring

#Fire Emblem

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emonewtype · 7 years

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Supportive Aptitude and Aether

Supportive- I went with Olivia in Awakening, bc it made Morgan a Tactician at start, and because if I gotta pick a waifu I may as well pick the one that can dance.

Aptitude- My cousin loaned me his FE7 and FE8 games while I was in elementary school. I was trash at them, got stuck after Dread Isle and on the Ghost Ship respectively until I was older. But I never ever left a unit behind.

Aether- My favorite FE lord is probably FE9 Ike, cool design, caring yet no-nonsense personality, reliable in combat, and perfectly demonstrates the stages of disgust one goes through when first learning about how politics works.

Runner up would be Erika, a princess with the strength and will to take care of herself, her army, the future of her kingdom and the fate of the entire world. A standard against whom all other princesses must be judged.

#decadeoldtiger

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fevotinggauntletreal · 8 months

Text

FE Miniboss Battle Opening Round - Match 12

info and propaganda under the cut

DENNING

Class: Sniper

Appears in: Blazing Blade - Chapter 29 (Eliwood)/31 (Hector)

Choice quote: "This is a message from Lord Nergal. 'I await you on the Dread Isle.'"

Propaganda:

“This is a message from Lord Nergal. 'I await you on the Dread Isle.'"

DANIELA

Class: Strategist

Appears in: Fates - Chapter 14 (Birthright)

Choice quote: "How sad for you to make it all the way here only to be butchered by me!"

Propaganda:

no propaganda submitted.

#poll: Miniboss Battle #Miniboss Battle: Opening round

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four-loose-screws · 1 year

Text

FE7 Novelization Translation - Chapter 9 Section 3

If you would like to start from the beginning, read a missed part, etc., click here!

FE Game Script Translations - FE Novel Translations - Original FE Support Conversations

If you are interested in donating to support my work, please check out my Ko-fi here. Thank you!

———————————

Chapter 9: Dragon's Gate (Section 3)

Their battle soon began across the entirety of the Dread Isle.

For Hector, it became the outlet for his anger.

He had seen a retainer he was close to dead before his very eyes, and his blood was boiling.

He trudged straight into the fog, swinging at the enemies lunging at him and trying to catch him off guard.

The sight of him rampaging and swinging Wolf Beil around looked like a violent tempest.

“Wherever you are, come and get me!!” He shouted at the enemies hiding within the fog.

Then suddenly, he heard a sound come from behind him. He turned around in a panic, and saw an enemy’s corpse, collapsed on the ground with his neck sliced open. The moment he had tried to attack Hector from behind, someone else killed him. It was none other than…

“Young Lord! I’m back!”

“Matthew! You’ve finished already? There’s no need for you to push yourself and fight…”

“What are you saying?! A creepy place like this, thick with fog, is my time to shine, you know!”

“But still…”

Hector tried to say more, but Matthew cut him off. “And… If Leila knew that I was slacking off on the job, she wouldn’t let me get away with it! I’m fine. I need to work twice as hard for House Ostia in her place.”

“...I understand. Then I’m counting on you!”

“Leave it to me!” He replied and slammed his fist into his chest, then said within his heart to his beloved,

‘Hey, Leila… This is what you think is best, isn’t it? I won’t… stand down. I won’t grieve, nor feel sorrow… not now. I will only complete my mission. So… you can rest in peace. Alright?’

The fog floating around them, combined with the thick growth of the trees, made it difficult to ascertain where Uhai was.

And Uhai’s arrows, whizzing through the gaps between the trees, were dealing significant damage to Eliwood and his army.

Despite being within a forest full of obstacles, Uhai was able to expertly maneuver his horse, appearing at the most unexpected moments before them like a phantom. Since they were focusing their attention solely on him, they were completely overlooking the attacks from the other members of the Black Fang.

Eliwood turned towards his allies, who looked like they were about to start fleeing, and shouted, "Everyone, gather in one place! Make a circular formation!!"

If they didn't know where he was going to appear from, their best strategy was to have eyes open in every direction. Eliwood’s thinking was simple, but with everyone having someone watching their back, they were able to fight back against Uhai’s army and this strategy to send them spiraling into chaos.

The plan worked perfectly.

Their fear of arrows shooting them from behind vanished, and they were able to concentrate on the enemies appearing in front of them and push them further and further back.

Yet their leader Uhai kept up his assault of arrows even as his allies were being defeated.

The moment an arrow flew between the trees…

“Now, Erk! Cast as many Fire spells as you can!”

At Eliwood’s order, Erk turned towards the direction the arrow came from, and shot an array of burning fireballs in rapid succession. Though none of the spells hit Uhai, instead, they caught fire to the trees and underbrush around him.

The intensity of the smoke and fire caused Uhai’s horse to run around against his rider’s wishes.

Eliwood, not letting the opportunity escape, unsheathed his rapier. But before the tip of the blade could reach his chest, he drew the sword at his waist and jumped up. This started a fierce sword fight at close range, but Eliwood slowly began to put pressure on Uhai.

He was more skilled with his bow than he was with his sword, and his horse was so scared by the intense fire around them that the mount would not move as he wished. He could not gain any distance to wield his bow from.

And Eliwood would not do something so foolish as allow Uhai to utilize his specialty, assaulting him with a relentless flurry of attacks.

Eliwood parried Uhai’s sword with the tip of his rapier and pushed Uhai’s sword to the side, causing Uhai to stumble.

Eliwood did not let the opportunity go to waste, putting his entire body into a thrust of his rapier that stabbed straight through Uhai’s heart.

“Guh… wh-what a magnificent fight… You are stronger… than I thought…” Uhai collapsed and fell from atop his horse.

He mustered up his last remaining bit of strength to speak as blood trickled from his mouth. “To show my respect for your strength… I shall give you this as my final gift. From here, head south… turn west at the large, rotting tree… then keep going. That is the path to the Drag…”

At that point, Uhai’s words were cut short.

He had been a proud man of the plains until the very moment of his death.

“Uhai… I wish we had been able to meet you not as an enemy…”

Eliwood expressed his honest feelings, then Hector asked him, “...Do you trust him?”

“He was from the plains of Sacae… With that pride on the line, he would never tell a lie. …Or so I believe, at the very least.”

At Lyn’s words, all of their other allies nodded in agreement.

He was the kind of man to state that he would choose to challenge them to a fair fight, despite having successfully captured a hostage. Even if he was not a nomad of Sacae, those words alone would likely have been enough to believe him.

Eliwood and his allies began to march through the foggy forest once more.

☆

Ninian was lost.

She didn't know what she could do to regain her memory…

She wanted to remember where she was born and grew up, and how she met Lyn and Eliwood.

But at the same time, she knew she had forgotten something terrifying. If her memory returned, then she suspected she would remember that fear, and be crushed by her anxiety and despair…

'What… should I do…?'

Should she regain her lost memory, or live on without any of it at all? Ninian's heart wavered at the choice.

"...nian. Ninian."

She heard someone calling her name, and snapped back to reality.

"What's the matter, Ninian? Your face is pale…"

"...It's nothing… Lord Eliwood…" Ninian answered while staring down at her feet.

Her response only made him all the more worried. "That's good… But if there's ever anything wrong, tell me. No matter how you look at it, we're in enemy territory now. We don't know when the Black Fang is going to attack."

"Huh…?" Ninian looked all around her.

When she did so, a strange sight stretched before her eyes.

It was a building clearly not constructed by humans, but some other being. It was abandoned long ago, and had been waiting for hundreds of years for its owners' return.

An ancient ruin meant not for humans, but something overwhelmingly giant...

While she had been lost in her thoughts, they seem to have arrived at the Dragon’s Gate.

But the moment her eyes laid upon this ruin, she remembered running, and her whole body started shaking. She felt the fear from within her lost memories glaring at her tenaciously like a snake.

"What's wrong, Ninian?" Eliwood asked.

Ninian answered in a fearful voice, "...This place is very scary. I sense… a great power…"

Seeing how Ninian was feeling, Lyn had a hunch about what exactly was wrong. "With your special power?"

"What's that?" Eliwood asked.

"Ninian has the ability to sense danger just before it happens. Though she’s lost her memory, it seems that her power is as strong as ever.”

Her power had also helped them during their battle with Uhai, though in that case, it had not kept Lyn from being captured by Uhai.

“What are you sensing, Ninian?”

Eliwood asked, but Ninian did not answer. Instead screaming as if she was possessed, “...I… I should not have come here. If I am here, something bad will happen… Ahhhhh!!”

“Ninian?! Hold yourself together!”

Eliwood shook her by her shoulders, trying to snap her out of her sudden breakdown and back to sanity. But Ninian only continued to repeat words similar to what she had just said, and showed no sign that she was returning to her normal self.

“I can’t snap her out of it! For now, we should just get out of here!"

But the moment Eliwood made that decision, a voice they had never heard before echoed in the air.

“...I cannot let you do that.” A man appeared before them from within a teleportation circle. His eyes stopped on Ninian, and a long, cold smile crept across his face. “You’ve escaped twice from this little isle, and returned again… You will not escape this time.”

“Who are you?!”

At Hector’s question, the man bowed politely and answered, “So we finally meet. I am but an insignificant being named Ephidel. I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“So you’re Ephidel?! I’ve been looking forward to meeting you!” Hector howled.

He was the man who had orchestrated the rebellion in Lycia from behind the scenes, and possibly killed Leila.

A terrifying, violent smile spread across Hector’s face, that would make anyone more timid flee, but the sight of it did not change Ephidel’s expression even a little.

“...How bold of you to say. I know who all of you are, of course. You are Lord Hector, younger brother of Marquess Ostia. And this is Lady Lyndis, next-in-line of House Caelin.”

Ephidel’s eyes shifted from Hector, then to Lyn, before he continued on, “Oh, that’s right, I left you a present in the forest… Was it to your liking? The corpse of that red-haired, dirty little vixen…”

“Damn you! Don’t you come any closer, or I’ll kill you with my bare hands!!”

“I see, so she was an Ostian spy? There is no need for you to worry. Her death was not a painful one. …Her life was ended with just a single blow.”

Ephidel’s words made Hector’s anger all the more explosive.

“Eat this!!” Hector swung Wolf Beil with all of his might, aiming to bring it down on Ephidel’s head.

However, the moment the attack was supposed to land, Ephidel vanished completely.

“He disappeared?!”

Everyone present pulled out their weapons and became wary of their surroundings.

In a show of utter mockery, Ephidel appeared right next to his target. “This girl is necessary for my master’s ceremony.”

“Ninian!!”

“Lord Eliwood! No, let me go!”

Eliwood gripped his rapier and ran over her in a desperate attempt to save her.

However, when he had just a little further to go, Ephidel vanished once more. And Ninian along with him…

“She’s gone…!”

“Dammit!!”

Lyn muttered in shock, and Hector shouted in frustration.

But neither of their emotions were anything like the regret Eliwood experienced.

‘I couldn’t protect you, Ninian…!’

She was a person he had promised to protect. And he couldn’t do it, leaving him feeling entirely powerless.

A gigantic gate was located in front of one of the rooms within the shrine.

Darin’s voice was echoing throughout it. “Lord Ephidel! Has the girl returned?!”

Like fish gathering around a piece of bait, Darin rushed over to Ephidel.

“She has indeed…” Ephidel glared down condescendingly at Ninian in his arms. Because she had been resisting so strongly, he used his magic to render her unconscious.

“Ah! Now the ceremony can finally begin!!”

“You are correct. However, the mice are on their way here… They will most likely invade this room any minute. Can I ask you… to take care of them before the ceremony?”

“But of course! Who do you think I am?! I am Marquess Darin of Laus! The man who will rule this entire world!!” Darin nodded calmly, now truly considering himself the king of the world, a thought which fully restored his confidence.

“Then I shall leave them to you.”

“My world… Feh ha ha ha ha ha…” Darin exited the room, lost deep within his dream.

“...Humans are such frail, easy to manipulate creatures.” Ephidel muttered without even a hint of guilt.

Just then, Nergal appeared from a teleportation circle, together with Elbert, whose hands were bound together.

“Well done, Ephidel. Now then, shall we prepare for the ceremony?”

“Nergal…!!” Elbert willed his tired body to move, and stood up with his anger burning like a fire in his eyes.

Nergal watched him struggle with a deep, throaty laugh. “Are you angry, Marquess Pherae? Oh, but fate has long since been decided. No matter how much you struggle, it will all be in vain, and this girl will always return to me.”

“...My son… What happened to Eliwood?!”

“He is still alive, though it is only a matter of time before he falls to the Black Fang.”

The moment Nergal let his guard down to laugh, Elbert made his move.

“...Nergal! Get ready to die!!” In just the blink of an eye, he loosened the rope around his wrists, and used it as a weapon to try and hit Nergal.

However, his attack missed.

And that was because… a man slipped in between them, and stopped it from happening.

That man was Jaffar, the person responsible for sending Leila to her grave.

“Guh… Guh… ah…!!”

Jaffar’s fist punched deep into Elbert’s abdomen, causing him to collapse on the ground.

“...That was surprising. When did you loosen your bonds?" Nergal cackled. "Keh keh keh, you should listen carefully to the warnings others give you, Marquess Pherae. You cannot oppose fate. It would be wise of you to stop your futile attempts to do so."

“...Guh… Gah...”

Nergal looked down to see Elbert groaning at his feet. He smiled, satisfied, then looked at Jaffar. “Jaffar, take Marquess Pherae and the girl inside. I will begin the preparations for the ceremony.”

“...Understood.”

☆

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