Caged No More (Attack on Titan/Shingeki no Kyojin AU)

[Historia]

Ymir is a born again, haunted by the memories of the boy she killed and the past life she once lived. In order to put her mind to rest she must uncover the truth behind her past, even if it means reliving it once, twice, three times more. Along the way she meets a girl who craves to be special; something that her father couldn't be and so much more. This girl's name is Historia, and though the two of them are often at odds their fates are intertwined, both inheritors of a legacy that was too much for one goddess alone to bear.

The Year is 845.

This is the year that a girl reawakens, another fights back, and a third, a harsh mistress, is born.

This is the story of those who are caged no more.

Archive of Our Own

Other Characters​

Ada (original character) - survivor outside the Walls
Kelly - leader of the survivors outside the Walls
Amanda - member of the Garrison, West Division (Quinta); Rita's best friend
Klaus - member of the outlaws
Nikki - member of the outlaws
Jörg Kramer - Mathias's father; head of the Kramer Merchant Association
Isolde Lenz (original character) - farmer; Riecka's mother
"Baggy-pants" Leon - member of the Garrison, West Division (Fuerth)
Kenny Ackerman - member of the Military Police Brigade
Doris Iglehaut - Rita's adoptive mother
Henning Iglehaut - Rita's adoptive father
Ducio - member of the Garrison Regiment, West Division (Quinta); Rita's assistant
Wilco - member of the Garrison Regiment, West Division (Quinta)
Bernhardt - leader of the outlaws
Jarratt - member of the outlaws
Erhardt - member of the Military Police Brigade

​

 

[Historia]

0​

The sun has fallen, and with it comes the sky.

The year is 845.

This is the year that a girl reawakens, another fights back, and a third, a harsh mistress, is born.

This is the story of those who are caged no more, in a time lost to the pages of history, in lands where the recent emergence of science outweighed a centuries long reign under the enigma of faith, and holy war was the only successful means in settling numerous disputes of various degree; endless and without pause.

Once divided groups became united kingdoms. These united kingdoms then swelled into vast nations, as they kept vying for more territory, expanding upon their once God-granted rights under new banners and new truths and new powers but the same beliefs, the same rivalries, the same hatreds, the same divisions, the same accusations, the same affronts; disfiguring once lush and lively regions to leave behind desolate wastes where no life would ever grow again; poisoning the land further with the even more destructive seeds of metal and machinery in their place.

For those caught in the middle, their citizens, their subjects, were forced to live in fear, forced to flee in terror, and it was when an entire village seemingly vanished overnight without so much as a trace, a faint whisper of dark deeds done on a dark night, leaving one meek, insignificant, but wrathful child as its only survivor, that this changed forever.

Alone and forced to fend for herself, through a lifetime spent in distant lands strange and unorthodox, this child flowered into a woman, returning to these colorless lands following much hardship with a mysterious power unseen in millennium and became a mighty ruler.

This woman was named Ymir Fritz, and unlike those before her, she ruled benevolently, with her mind close to her heart, ever beating in favor of those less fortunate, of those less able to pull themselves from the tragedy of war; ever bleeding for those who sought to continue the tyranny of the past, the disappearance of hopes and dreams for so much as to fill their chests and stomachs with greed.

She spent a long time rebuilding these lands in her image. Thirteen grueling years of using a gift many perceived as a curse, a black murmur of the past back to punish the world that had abandoned it, before all was peaceful, all was quiet, all was calm, until she was usurped — murdered in her sleep, when her eyes were shut — and her body disemboweled and decapitated and her mysterious power split nine as these lands were plunged into a great war that lasted a lifetime longer than she herself had lived. Its victors rewrote history; the defeated ousted, butchered, and enslaved as these lands came back under the thumb of oppression and savagery until history dared repeat itself again. Another rebellion, another great war, colossal, violent, more devastating than the last; another quartering, another beheading, a new victor, the shackling of the old, and, in the midst of this all, the child that was reborn.

But, the world… the world was unforgiving.

Its wounds never healed and the scars tarnishing its surface left it puckered and sore with horrendous, atrocities galore.

The child was taken, grown up beaten and bruised, then sacrificed for the greater good before her rule truly had a chance to begin.

The year is 845, and the world is still cruel. These lands are still recovering, but there are whispers of another, third great war.

Humanity has been beset by monsters known as Titans for a hundred years. A seemingly endless tide of giant humanoid devourers that managed to wipe out all life save for a lucky few.

Nobody knew where they originated from, what their purpose was, and most important, most dire, how to effectively end them once and for all.

In desperation, these lucky few shut themselves behind three heaven high walls for their own protection, thinking themselves safe. Only, they were being kept in the dark, gathered like cattle in cages for the inevitable. Until, one day, one red-colored, quiet, unassuming morning after dawn, this all changed when they were given a grim reminder of what it meant to be locked away.

And, in the midst of it, a child is reborn.

This child is also named Ymir.

Haunted by the memories of the boy she killed and the past life she once lived, all she remembers is the blood, tissue, and bone. All she remembers is the torment of the mindless. All she remembers is the face that haunts, the face that always reminds her of the cruelty of the world. That it always has been and that it always will be; that it should always be held in a certain light, and that she was never meant to be born, molding herself as someone who was nothing, who thought herself worthless. Crimson nightmares, bringing death. The world was her enemy, her string, and her fate. For she was a causality and it resented and cursed her as it always would.

So, in retaliation, the girl runs away from her fate, and the world, in retribution, starts its end.

But the child, the girl, Ymir, she keeps running, and running, and...

 

[Historia]

1​

Running.

Running, running, and running away.

In her dream, the boy is running.

Running further and further away.

Even when he knows it is futile and questions race through his mind seeking answers he has no time to find as the monster's powerful, clawed feet break apart the earth in its pursuit, not far behind, gaining in its elongated strides.

Questions such as why he failed to anticipate this possibility. That they should have kept their voices low and thrust their personal feelings aside. Should have not brought them up to begin with. What he could have said differently instead of telling the others to fly as fast as they could.

Not that any of this matters now.

Using the last of his strength to keep his head high, watching them go, for all their training, for all their preparations, what could ever have prepared them for something like this? Despite everything, all he can do is listen and wait as they flee and he remains, hoping he might give them more time even if for only a short while longer, as the monster gets closer and closer and closer still. Until its hunched, misshapen form looms over him; a shadow stretching so far and wide he sees only darkness whichever way he looks and so chooses to turn and face his impending demise because again, what does it matter? He has gone as far as his legs need carry him. He stands safe knowing they are far in the distance and still going.

He meets the Titan in its black eyes as it crouches on its hind legs. Its mouth is open only a crack, yet flowing from it is a fetor so foul that he almost faints then and there. Though, somehow, he stays on his feet — still confident he has done the best he could given the situation — while its hot, rotten breath rolls down his body. Its mouth widening, brandishing pointed teeth each as thick and tall as himself, he flinches, yet does not back down. Eyes watering when it chortles then pulls away and there is one moment of respite — one, surreal second of quiet, his fear abates — before something, something sharp, hooks itself around him and cuts into his sides, he does not cry out in pain.

He grimaces as it hoists him high into the air.

Upon there he dangles, able to glimpse a last look at the others as small black dots on a sea of green before the monster's hold tightens and squeezes into his spine and he finally cries out in anguish as that second of quiet becomes an eternity of pain when its teeth sink into his legs and chews up his waist, pulling out his insides.

Indescribable, unthinkable pain, as he vomits and spits and coughs up bile and blood, the juices spilling down his chin while upward still its hunger moves. His ribs are crushed next, then his lungs are skewered, and gasping for air as he tries in vain to suck in more, the whites of his eyes fill red. His head is ready to explode. He lets out a scream that dies in his throat as the world — his world — becomes dark.

His last light and final thought is of his little brother back home.



The girl let that scream out in full, frightened awake, and slammed the back of her head into the tree she had been nodding off against and began to slide, much to her great panic. She frantically grabbed hold of the trunk lest she fall. The branch she had settled on the night before had frozen over. Winter's woes had coated it in a thick icy sheet and, after she found her footing again, she exhaled in relief.

The girl pulled her tattered blanket closer around her shoulders and put one of her trembling, frost-touched hands behind her head. She winced at the black strands of matted, wet hair barely seen when she came away with hot blood on her cold fingertips. Just as they slipped past her sight, she thought what a mistake it had been to climb the highest point she could reach, though she knew the alternative would have been much worse.

Lost in another forest of these giant trees, she had been chased into this one, all the way from the river she had been using as a natural guide, by a pack of wolves who had first caught scent of her in their territory several days before. She had made a foolish decision to linger in an abandoned village, gathering all she could carry rather than only what she could stuff in her mouth and move on. Luckily they had only taken her sack of food and clothes, but over the course of those several days as she kept along the river, the girl became convinced that she was still being stalked by them, and was proved correct when she saw their bright yellow eyes closing in one night. She only just fended them off with rocks and loud noises, but took the hint and fled to safety and had not come down from this tree since. Though she knew she could not stay up here forever, and so outstretched her foot, poked around with her toes until she touched a lower branch, and eased her way down about halfway where she listened closely to the wilderness about her, for sound was the only way to be certain it was safe, and after she waited a time and heard nothing, continued her descent in peace, when, it was she were almost at the bottom that a sudden, sharp jolt of pain split through her skull and she was blinded by flashes of red and next she knew she was flat on the ground, gazing up at the tree she just fallen from. Shivering drops of rain which fell from the great many leaves overhead and the damp, sodden mud beneath her were the only things she felt immediately after that told her she had not, in fact, died, before the pain caught up, reassuring her that she had not broken her back as it flared from her neck down to her buttocks and began to burn fiercely while it settled into her bones and she stayed unmoving in silent solace.

While she laid there, she recognized these scarlet flashes of pain were memories. Recent memories. Of the monster in her mind. Of the boy's own, never ending pain. Ones' she continuously shoved back down, fighting the urge, the hunger, the want for blood that once licked her tongue, and so she clenched her teeth and forced herself upright, swallowing them again, because this boy was dead and she was not.

Not yet.

His name had been Marcel, and she let her thoughts of him fade and there she was again, alone and unashamed if yet swollen and sore upon this forest floor.

Ymir. That was her name.

And she was alive.

Thus, she fully picked herself off the ground though her still aching body tried to protest. Covered in mud, she turned away from the tree because she had to keep moving if she wanted to keep on living and ventured further into this new forest of giant trees, holding those memories at bay until she heaved from the strain. Bent over, knees buckled, she gasped the night's numbly cold air and watched her spit drool out her open mouth and nothing more as with them came the monster and its hunger and those horrors which crept their way back inside her mind despite her fortitude. Like her flight from the wolves, they were roused from their black slumbers and circled her, closing her in, no escape, waiting for her to panic then would devour her, too. Same as she did the boy, but by dragging her down instead. Sink their teeth into her flesh, snapping and biting and tearing. To bring her back into the fold, into the nightmare, and consume her whole. Clawed her body, carved her bones, craved her blood, until gradually naught remained.

She heaved again and collapsed. The cold soaked through her tattered clothing and seeped deeper into her skin. She lost control of her bladder and urinated and curled in a fetal position where those memories began anew. What little warmth her body clung to was wholly taken by forest then, to shreds, and thus the girl died for the second time. But, in the moment her world dimmed for what was to be eternity, the release from a past life of torment and the horrible start of another, something inside of her refused to submit. Something inside of her breathed life into her lungs for the third time and she woke with a gasp as the memories returned in force.

The world would not let her abandon it so easily, and, realizing this, Ymir buried her face in her hands as if doing so would make them go away, but the memories were still there. Fierce and frightening, they colored her mind crimson and she wailed at her own futile naivety, whimpering into the frozen dirt as all she wanted was for them to leave her alone, seared into her brain forever.

Memories of before, of the boy, Marcel, and his companions, as she stared down at them, so small, so fragile, and the terrified looks shadowing their faces. How they fled, scampering for the cover of the field of grass beyond the plains, and she gave chase, catching him alone, then the taste of his blood and crunch of his bones.

Memories of after, when she awoke. When she saw his remains against the smoke billowing toward that crimson sky, and the trail she followed to a scene of even greater carnage: that great wall, sundered, and that town thereafter, as it smoldered, and the utter silence, which awaited beyond.

Memories of these things, these monsters — no, not the wolves, something far worse — that followed her everywhere she went, gave her little time to rest and recuperate or make sense of it all. Monsters not unlike herself and never again.



She was still in her own vomit sometime later, babbling like a babe borne again, eyes upon stars unseen among the tree canopies, when she thought she heard the rustle of the underbrush as something approached and so pushed herself up though her legs screamed no more. They burned, melting below her. Before she could even take more than a few steps she fell face first into the mud; helpless, as she heard it get closer, and closer, and closer still. When it was almost upon her she shut her eyes because this was it, this was the end, only… nothing happened.

Then whatever it was tried to speak.

Infantile attempts at communicating its thoughts into one word. One word chanted over and over and over again until she forced herself to look and came face to face with the boy forever pained: Marcel, whose sacrifice allowed her the mercy of being freed from a very long nightmare, instead.

His body was broken, spine twisted so he held himself upright with his hands, bellying forward. His feet dragged limp across the ground, while his intestines trailed far behind. The back of his shirt was torn, skin shredded and viscera exposed. He leaned further left than right, his right arm not much but loose sinew and bone. His black hair was spread out in patches atop a peeled head, cracked skull visible beneath fleshy red flaps hanging down. His neck was partially ripped open. What remained of his jaw hung low, his mouth snapped wide with a drooping tongue. The only thing wholly intact was the upper half of his face, barring the bottom of his nose.

Relief immediately washed over her because she knew he was guilt personified, molded from memory and nothing else. Though, she also knew that lingering here staring at him any longer would be. So, she took a moment to compose herself; a deep inhale, slap to the face, anything to get her limbs out of their languor, before she kept moving, took short rests whenever she was able, and tried her best to not only ignore the thing following her every step thereafter as she went, but also avoid anywhere the light might touch the forest floor. She stuck to caves and crevasses and the tightest spaces she could find that offered some protection against both the elements and predators, though no matter how far she went, the land seemed endlessly empty. Just like the abandoned village she came across earlier, every subsequent place she chanced upon was deserted. And, again, while there were signs that people once lived in these places until very recently, if not for the fact of her pilfering them for leftover food and clothing, Ymir might have thought herself to truly be alone.

It gave a bit of hope that there were people out there like her, if nothing else.

Most of them, these… villages could be found huddled together not far from the huge river that started somewhere beyond the wall leading into that town and continued on and on for what seemed forever. Others, deeper in the forest, were only accessible by narrow bridges over streams or canyons unless they were further in. In these deepest of villages, of which there were very few, nestled on massive branches and connected by roped walkways, their ladders went so high her head spun and she thought she might find someone up there, surely, but even these had been abandoned, and in her isolation Ymir began talking to Marcel as if he were indeed real, before she happened to find her way out after coming to the start of a mountain. Her ascent was slow and laborious and she would rather not fall again on a loose cropping of slippery rock.



When she reached a knoll well above the forest and was able to see the other side facing away from the decimated town and broken wall, confronted with vast grassy plains spread before her, she forgot the piercing cold in the wake of such a sight as the day was dying and the sun bled across its sky.

Beside it, beyond it, whichever way her eye traveled, the broken wall stretched long and stood high and circled far, dipped out of sight over rolling hills upon the horizon, and made everything feel smaller than they actually were.

And while impressive in its enormity though it was, the sun shone over it all the same as it retreated, its long rays of light visible above like so many red-tipped bayonets withdrawn after the charge, continuing to find places to widen the breaches before night began the next assault.

She suddenly felt nauseous. A chill ran down her spine and she sat down and clutched her stomach as if the sun's bayonets had pierced her. She gaped in horror as her guts spilled and in the ensuing panic she desperately, incredulously tried to push them back in when another flash came and went; this time of a dismal field, stripped of all color but dark browns and harsh yellows, sickly greens, a tinge of purple like the land was the abused victim of rage unfettered, just visible over the lip of a muddy trench. Starved and filthy, she sat next to a dead man, the trench a living beast slowly digesting his remains. She heard someone talking, saw someone standing atop the trench, hazy in the blistering heat. But all she wanted to do was run away, and crawled away on her hands and knees just as she came to the knoll's edge.

One gaze away from a long fall snapped her back into the present where she cried out and drew back. The wind scratched at her face as it howled. She landed on her back, upside down and face to face with another dead man. She stared into the white of his lidless eyes until she rolled over on her side, plugged her ears and closed her eyes, and waited for this latest nightmare to end.



It persisted into the night.

She pulled her blanket closer while it continued its march.

To further keep her mind away from everything unpleasant, Ymir attempted to spot the river and from there a way out this forest of giant trees.

At first she had thought to take the plains there earlier, but then she would be in danger of exposing herself to those monsters roaming without purpose against the setting sun, and so had to wait until night fell completely which it almost had. Only, the longer she waited the colder it became, and this blanket was not enough protection nor were these clothes any longer. She had to find shelter before anything else, lest she freeze to death, and while a few farms and windmills were visible, scattered about the plains, the likelihood she could reach them in time was slim. And, once again, the farther she traveled in the open the riskier it became because there was always something lying in wait, whether it be these monsters or a smaller predator.

Which led to her decision to hug the giant forest she just had trouble leaving as she followed the fall in the mountain, descending it and when she thought she had seen the end, not wanting to linger any nearer than necessary, Ymir was surprised by other giant forests dotting the land in abundance. She sacrificed extra time to navigate around them entirely, as well, whenever she could, that by the time she came to the river it was too dark to see her hands in front of her face and so she had to rely on her ears to find her way from then on, using the calm sound of the river's flowing. She followed it before it began to unnerve her greatly for, instilled in her long ago, it was the quieter moments that were the most disconcerting. It was instinctive for her ears to pick up on certain, acute grunts and groans and earth-stomping feet of those monsters during the day. While, during the night, it was the bloodcurdling howls and growls and struggle of wild animals that prowled around as these monsters slept. That stalked her all the way to that tree, these tenacious beasts which frightened her so that she mistook the boy's walking corpse for one and were scared off by the monsters before they, too, had left her alone in turn, where then her memories crippled her, and so the cycle had gone. To not hear anything at all was a cause for alarm, but, also, after everything thus far, a comfort, and if there were a choice between the silence of the river and the headaches, the accompanying pain that was this boy Marcel's memories trying to tell her something, his last thoughts, his last screams, she would much rather forever dip her feet and endure the odd sensation of wet sand between her toes for eternity than the alternative — not that it was up to her to decide.

She glanced back to the boy. The only way to learn more about him in life opposed to the dream of his death, his final moments, was the same as her own past. Of a certain battlefield she kept being returned to. Those trenches, the dead man, the shouting, and a colorless land, all a piece of a whole, confusingly mixed in with his, and a mysterious voice which guided her through it; everything telling her to keep moving forward in search of something important.

The boy's jaw swayed as he met her eyes. His vocal cords closed and opened like an insect's mandibles. No sound came out except one short higher-pitched, blood spurting wheeze, but she nonetheless still heard his words in her head because his screams would never go away. He was a part of her, and as she replied to him, asked herself the question of "why her?" as she turned on her heels reluctantly, followed him from the river until she was at the precipice of yet another of these forests of giant trees after again foolishly thinking she was free of them with the last.

Why was she given a second chance, spirited away from the nightmare which had consumed all the others like her? That this boy had to die so she may live again?

She felt he was only the beginning in a long, estranged history that she, for now, could not remember anything other than that battlefield, guided by the voice of someone grand.

Of someone caring and kind.

Someone who told her that no matter how terrible things seemed she must keep moving. To follow this boy. This ugly fragment of a bloody death.

But though she stood before this entrance to this giant forest in particular, its trees so enormous they seemed to touch the stars themselves, she hesitated for these trees appeared wicked. Ancient, twisted tawny tower-gates blocking passage to whatever secrets lay therein and when she peered beyond them, saw only blackness.

She felt her chest tighten, a rumble in her heart in anticipation at what might be waiting inside. She dared not risk it, but, again, something, someone, told her otherwise; that her past would only come to light if she plunged into the dark and dragged it out herself, kicking and screaming like a whining child. That she had to go forward, keep moving, ever onward, until the land disappeared beneath her feet and there was nowhere left to be. So, she submitted, for the alternative was death.

And scratching and tearing herself on thorns trying to keep pace with the dead boy's surprisingly lithe form down, she came to something after a time: a structure in ruins within a clearing surprisingly devoid of trees as if time ceased here and allowed no wilds past the ring where the flowers grew. White flowers, with bright yellow centers. Beautiful, shimmering. But even their beauty was overshadowed by this grotesque structure ravaged, raped, and despoiled. Once a solace, it was now just a shell of whatever it used to be.

Yet again, she was afraid of what potentially lay inside, lurking, and would have moved past it out of instinct, ignored the boy — just another hallucination in her mind, after all — and continue her wandering, if not for that voice — oh, that gentle, loving voice — beckoning her from that dark. Oh, how she wanted to!

But it persuaded her otherwise.

Intimidated, pressured, pushed her on, even.

That voice of someone caring and kind, turned vile and cruel, which ordered her forward into that darkness, into that unknown, to brave the peril, swallow her dread, and conquer her own fears, shouting, screaming "keep moving, keep moving, keep moving!" so that soon her body was at its splintered doors. She weakly pushed them open, her arms like two pieces of unfurled rope, while blood rushed through her veins as her heart pounded in her ears. Thump. Thump. Thump. She had to keep moving, and forced her way in, tripped, tumbled on.

Falling in a dusty heap, eyes to an open ceiling above, the moon's light shone brightly, helping her to see.

Around her, nothing stirred. Only silence reigned, like at the river, and she turned to the boy, to Marcel, to ask why here, what was the purpose of leading her to this place, but he was gone. And the voice that spoke to her, remained quiet in kind.

She was alone again.

No, she thought, she had always been alone.

Eventually, she caught her breath and sat up on one of the old and rotten wooden pews lining either side of her, and assessed even in her own awful state a lone podium flanked by two large statues at the front of the room. Behind them, was an altar, and slowly, but surely, she made her way towards it.

She reached it shortly thereafter, its worn and aged plaque, rusted and cracked, was surprisingly warm to the touch as small dark shapes began to appear when her focus narrowed.

She stepped back, knowing them to be letters, and squinted and tried to sound out the word they formed. Only her voice was gone. What came out cracked out notes that were nothing at all, like a broken flute, and she gave up, then simply stared at the statues again. The depiction of what they were. What they were called, long abandoned, long forgotten, only, she could not… She was tired… So very tired.

She doubled over beside the podium.

It was hollow in the back.

She put her knees up against her chest, scrunched herself into the void space, and rested her chin on top of her hands, an infant inside her mother's pregnant womb once more, eyelids heavy for the first time in what felt like ages and it was not long before she was fast asleep and the world, her world, became dark, her last thought and new understanding being that she were led here because her name was Ymir and maybe it was time for her to truly live.

 

[Historia]

2
​

For the first time in a hundred years, Wall Maria, the outermost wall and the first line in humanity's defense against the Titans, fell, a great many people perished, and today, four days after, the sole thought in Historia's mind was that nothing mattered.

That nothing ever had.

That nothing was the one, singular absolute in the world. The end. The book shut. Curtains closed. That being nothing meant everything, and she looked down at her bare feet dangling off the carriage, watched the blood seep between her toes on that night again, where it was for the many a day of absolute tragedy, for her it was the very best in her entire thirteen years of existence.

When, again, she saw those frightened eyes of her mother, with her pathetic attempt to struggle against the knife drawn across her throat that sliced so deep it carved bone.

When, again, she felt that warmth as it sprayed and rushed down her mother's neck and drenched her clothes and soaked the ground beneath in crimson regrets, her final words cut short by her killer's blade.

When, again, those final words, their intent clear, were the single, defining assurance that set her mind at ease every time she recalled them in her mind: she was the bastard child who should never have been born.

It was the moment her life was nothing from the very beginning, and so she was finally freed.

The only surviving daughter of her late father that she knew, an impoverished noble once of great repute born with a weak heart that kept being squeezed with but a drop to spare; one that finally ran dry the day the Wall fell and whose actions were entombed in her memory forever, the same as her mother's death, with his last act being to shield her from harm and send her away with a few parting words, lest his legacy, his secret, die then and there.

It meant while her mother was little more than a whore, she herself who was nothing, meant everything.

Now, Historia gazed out at the farmland stretched out before her in all directions, far as her bright blue eyes could see, divided rows upon rows of stalks between wheat and barley and corn and other grains which swayed briskly in an evening breeze. Territory within the confines of Wall Rose set aside for orphans in the unlikely event of Wall Maria's fall.

Because...

"Goin' to sit there all day?" the man hired to secret her from place to place that same night and at current — asked, after one too many fights, after one too many bitten fingers and after one too many refusals to do what was demanded, what was expected — had brought her to this place in the middle of nowhere. Sweaty and red-faced, he motioned her down. "This your stop. Come on, move it."

She glared at him and didn't budge.

"I said move!" With a raised hand, he slapped her — hard — then lifted her by a tuft of her blonde hair and dragged her to the front of his carriage, behind the horses. "You'll learn one way or another." Taking a last swig of his bottle, he poured the few drops remaining down her throat and tossed it. "You'll learn!"

She spat. The man's rough hand caressed up her thigh. Her father's words came rushing back to her. The man clumsily pawed at her, his large hands awkwardly fumbled about trying to unlace her undergarments, and he let out a curse in frustration when she resisted. She bit his hand and he yelped, then punched her in the stomach. She knelt over, gasping. While he held it, continued to curse and whimper, her eyes went to the bottle not quite far enough away. As he licked the spot, trying to sooth the hurt, her small fingers deftly closed around the bottle. She was thinking of her mother, because she now knew what those words actually meant: that she was more than nothing.

Historia brought the bottle down as hard as she could on the side of the man's head while he was bent down. It shattered into a dozen dazzling shards and she picked one of the larger pieces up and slashed his neck before he had the chance to recover. He made his last sighs in gurgles, the shard buried deep in his throat as his body hit the dirt road a moment later.

Blood ran along the crevices of her palm from a deep gash, yet she felt no pain, and she stared at his body while she then wiped her hand on her dress and straightened her undergarments and turned to the horses, then to the farm. She looked down at the man's body again, back to the farm, then to the horses.

The choice was obvious.

She climbed her way up onto the end of the carriage, crawled to the front and so took the reins of both horses between slippery fingers before she unhooked the harnesses which bound them and let them loose and watched them glance around in confusion, then awkwardly slid onto the nearest one's back and leaned forward. She wrapped her arms around its neck.

"Everything's going to be alright," she told it. "You're free now, so you can do whatever you want. You can go wherever you want." The other horse was already gone. "Your friend left you… you're all alone now…" Tears rolled down her cheeks. They tasted sweet. She tugged at its mane. "You're all alone with nowhere to go, but you're free now so it doesn't matter. So go! Leave!"

The horse simply flung its head forward, then back, and threw her off, but when she raised herself on her elbows, saw its tail swishing this way and that as it moved over to the side of the road and simply began chewing some grass, she laid her head back down, eyes on the drifting clouds and sobbed.

From here on, she had to forget herself. Who, and what, she was. Her father's first, last, and only words to her.

From here on, your name is Krista.

Because she was special, and she knew this wasn't where she was meant to be.



She named the horse Almond, after its color.

Since she left the orphan farm, Historia had traveled what seemed a far distance, retracing the trail the carriage took, reaching the edge of a small village by evening. She held no recollection of them passing it, but her attention had clearly been elsewhere the entire time to ever notice.

As she drew nearer, she heard the villagers up and about while they worked, toiled, and slaved away: the thump and thud of hammers and nails on wood; the plunge and splash of buckets into wells; the flap of clothes left out to dry; the shouts of children as they played and the laughter of the adults watching them — so unlike the stillness of the servant-tended ranch she was raised on. Brimmed with the hard, honest work of everyday folk that was lost on someone like her which altogether seemed to be far removed from the shock that was Maria's fall.

She slid from Almond's back and led him over to a tree in the shade where he plopped down, exhausted. As she stroked his mane, something swelled in her chest that she'd only felt when her mother's blood splattered her cheek: warmth. More importantly, her stomach ached. She was hungry.

So, while she let Almond simmer down, Historia set her sights on one of the houses closest to her and furthest away from any equally curious eyes.

She stooped under one of its back windows, checked the vicinity, and judged it safe, then proceeded to peek inside. There was a table set for evening supper. Her stomach rumbled. Not having eaten anything decent in several days, she could acutely smell the freshly baked bread from where she was hiding. Though, she moved away from the window because, regardless of how hungry she was, how safe she deemed it, lingering any longer was risky; especially if by some unlucky chance that man's body had been found, as the only thing between here and there was the plain, everyday, unassuming countryside. But, just as she was about to slip away, a slumping, groggy-eyed girl with long, rusty hair came into view, and she kept against the window, held her breath as the girl opened it further, yawned, grumbled to herself, then walked away. She waited until her feet pattering across the floor were distant, then started to creep back before something else happened. That was when she saw the girl leave out a door from the house, carrying a bucket.

She gulped.

Her mouth was dry as bone, too.

Historia looked after the girl as she disappeared around a bend. It led into a forest, and though she'd the acute idea of following her, there was already a well not far away with a bucket and rope set up.

She approached it. Glanced around again.

Nobody.

Quickly, quietly, she pulled on the lever. The bucket dropped with a hollow thud and dark crash, and she peered down at it in splinters at the well's bottom whereupon her heart dropped with it. The well was empty! And the noise! One of the villagers — that girl — had probably heard it! She reared back. She had to get out of sight before someone ca—

"Ouahf!"

Too late.

Whoever she collided with cleared their throat. The rim of their hat blocked out not nearly enough of the sun, angled just right to blind her, and it prevented her from seeing clearly and making a fast get-away without stumbling and Historia found herself squinting up at an old woman's wrinkled, sun-kissed face instead.

"That one's no good," the old woman said with a slight hoarseness to her voice. "Better off comin' inside and takin' what I have stored there."

Watching her go, Historia noticed that the old woman was heading straight for the same house the girl had exited and she turned to run, eyes down, the sun behind her, but the old woman was faster — stopped her before she could with a grip strong as iron.

The old woman took her by the wrist and dragged her to the house.

When they stepped inside, Historia glanced back to where Almond was.

"Your horse is gonna be fine. I already gave him some water and an apple after you'd came sneakin' over," the old woman reassured her, as she led her to that same table she'd been eyeing earlier and sat her down. "Don't worry about him right now," she said, while she reached for a pitcher, poured a cup of water, and offered it to her.

Historia accepted it with her good hand, but hid the other under the table, and drank it with less hesitation than she'd thought. The old woman seemed to have no intentions of harming her, or worse, though she could never be too careful, and when she was finished, tensed when the old woman gave a tilt of her chin at the edge of the table and concealed hand.

"Let me see it."

She relaxed and laid it on the table, palm side down, having come to the realization that if the old woman had wanted to hurt her, it would've happened the moment she stopped to rest with Almond under that tree, or even earlier, on her approach to the village, and did as told.

"Flip it over."

She flipped it over and the old woman grabbed a cloth and a bottle of what could only be a strong alcohol because of its smell — Historia knew it well — and firmly held her hand down. Historia flinched when the bottle came near her ugly looking injury, but, for all her strength, her harshness, the old woman went over the smaller cuts and wiped away the dirt and dried blood with extreme care. Rubbed it in with a gentleness that was surprising before she focused on the gash.

"Hold still."

Nonetheless, it still pained her immensely, and Historia bit her lip until she was done.

As she began wrapping the cloth around it, the old woman sighed. "Young girls shouldn't behave so recklessly. I've some leftover bread from yesterday. It's still good to eat. Otherwise, it'll be for the pigs and chickens."

Historia watched her stand up and get some.

"Why are you being so kind to me?" she immediately asked when the old woman brought it over and sat back down.

"My own selfishness." The old woman ruffled her hair gently. "My daughter, you resemble her..."

"Your... daughter...?" Looking down at the table, she now noticed it was actually set for three, and glanced over at the door.

"No, not who you're thinkin' of," the old woman said with a coarse, though sincere chuckle. After a moment, she continued, "My daughter is much older — joined the Scouts before all this." She waved a hand about as if to say "madness". Maria's fall. "Hasn't been home since, the ungrateful child..." She chuckled again. "No, that one's Achi. She's… been through a lot." Ruffling her hair again, the old woman gave her a smile. "And I know that you have, too. I can see it in that face you're makin'. Saw you comin' down earlier, and figured 'ah, here comes another one…' So… naturally, I suppose... "

Eyes to her hand still on the table, Historia had no words. There was nothing to say. Or, rather she'd no notion of what to say, as the atmosphere between them began to part and the silence grew; no knowledge of what it meant to feel that way for another person. Let alone, a stranger she just met. For someone as caring and kind as this old woman appeared to be, she herself was — She felt the old woman's hand on her head fall away, and looked back over.

"My daughter…" There were now tears in the corners of the old woman's eyes. "...they burn the bodies, you know that? Could just be ash by now... and I wouldn't even know." But, through the tears, in those eyes, was nothing except pride. "She's alive," she continued saying, fiercely. "Otherwise, I'd know… ain't any Titans worse than me, after all."

With a quick thought, Historia placed her newly bandaged hand over one of the old woman's. It was covered in calluses. "I believe she is... has to be…" She looked into her eyes; eyes so full of what she never received from her own mother nor her father nor anyone else. "Can I... stay here a bit longer, before I move on...?"

The old woman nodded. "Of course. I wouldn't have let you say no for an answer, anyway." She wiped her tears away, all hints of heartfelt emotion of the past buried down deep again. Locked in a cage only she could open. "My name is Isolde. Isolde Lenz."

Her father's words coming back to her, Historia nuzzled her head into the old woman's shoulder, squeezed her hand tighter, and returned her smile. "Krista."

"Welcome to your new home, Krista."

A smile that was all too fake for her own good.

Because she was better. One of a kind.

 

[Historia]

3
​

Suzanne, head servant to Jörg Kramer of the Kramer Merchant Association within the walls, stood in the doorway to her employer's study, hands clasped in front of her apron, and awaited his response to the words: your son is missing.

Shortly following the fall of Wall Maria, news had come in the form of hungry, hysterical, and desperate fleeing refugees that Quinta, the frontier district to the south of Shiganshina where the Titans had broken through which had also been thought lost, had, in fact, survived the initial onslaught by its people having barricaded themselves behind its gates.

This was both good news and bad news.

Quinta was where the main Kramer estate was located and where the majority of the Kramer Merchant Association's financial records were kept. This was the good news, as with Quinta's gates barred the Titans were unable to tear through the district. But, the bad news, was this also meant that anyone currently trapped within Quinta could possibly ransack the estate — and everything else — in the turmoil, and Suzanne doubted that Jeanne, two guards, and a handful of servants would be able to stop whomever it may be because while Jeanne was no pushover, the guards under Jörg were worth their weight in coin, and Suzanne herself had overseen the training and choosing of those handful of servants, people in panic, in frenzy, were a mob and mobs were a storm of violence. In her experience, once they gained momentum there was little preventing them from the upheaval and ruination of whatever they chanced upon to achieve their haphazard goal of collective, wanton destruction. Two guards, regardless of how well equipped, well disciplined, well paid, paled in comparison to the swirling emotions of impending, inescapable doom, and the spare rifles locked in the armory would be of no use to them, either, for the only one with the key to unlock it other than herself as the head servant was the captain of Jörg's personal guard, who was currently accompanying them along with — and to make matters worse — the entirety of his entourage not counting those spread throughout the territories watching over his various shops, factories, and warehouses.

Wealth abound to afford his own army rivaling the entire Garrison Regiment's numbers, and Suzanne always shook her head at his habit of leaving his main residence so poorly secured for reasons she could only guess. It was as if his ego had swelled in proportion to his girth, which continued to expand alongside his fortune, but she knew it was deeper than that, and the sight broke her heart after she only just finished picking up the shattered pieces from more than twenty years of regrets. At the end of the day, though, she supposed it was for the best. Being met with such little opposition in the mansion, perhaps the mobs would spare them, take what they wanted, and leave. Only the very idea was a fool's thinking because people were cruel and Jeanne wasn't the kind to shrink away when danger harried her door and the armory being locked wouldn't deter her in the slightest. The mansion still housed a fine assortment of decorative and ceremonial pieces on display and while the swords and hammers and axes and spears were indeed somewhat serviceable — if nothing else than to be used as crude bludgeons with their bedazzling jeweled and encrusted gemmed hilts — Suzanne hoped Jeanne and the others in the good woman's care wouldn't get themselves killed.

"Surrender" was a small word for such a big woman, after all.

For while being impressed by human height was laughable in the face of the Titans, it was no insignificant thing to gaff at the giant of a woman that Jeanne was even in her old age.

The longest employed of Jörg's servants and his previous head servant, having served Sara's father and helped raise Sara as well as Suzanne's own late blooming, boisterous and proud, she could still vividly remember being scooped up for lighting one on estate grounds after she first arrived. How this woman carried and scolded her like the child she'd been, and when she tried to punch and kick herself from the woman's arms, it was no skin off Jeanne's back to answer in kind, squeezing her so tight in an embrace the air left her lungs until she stopped resisting and woke up later to find her cigarettes gone, a pail and mop by her bedside, and told she wasn't allowed to leave until the room she was locked in was spotlessly clean. Her last day smoking, her first day serving, pushing back and forth that mop with cracked ribs and a temper that persisted, until Jeanne dealt with that too, and just one of the many lessons that she took to heart in mentoring Mathias albeit to a lesser degree later on. That was to say… not everyone was going to put up with your shit.

Then, once she became head servant after Jeanne stepped down in a show of faith, and one that Suzanne never dreamed of squandering since, she also extended these lessons to every subsequent servant who passed through the estate, further continuing the tradition, and, to her own credit, made some needed additions when she felt comfortable in the role, adding on the skills of basic self-defense and this group under Jeanne's supervision was no exception. As a result they were certainly capable should any dilemmas arise in her friend's much enjoyed "retirement". So the worry then wasn't that the estate would be ravished while they were away, but that Jeanne and the rest, guards included, would incite more unnecessary violence by retaliating. Even as a warning to keep any would-be thieves and ruffians at bay, the spoken thought of, or, worse still, actual news of the estate having been turned into a battlefield prior to his eventual return was not something that would go over well with Jörg Kramer, sire of the Kramer Merchant Association. Nor was it so simple a task to just pack up the operation he planned months in advance and only began conducting the past week in Fuerth to start the journey back, forget attempting to enter the district itself. If Jeanne and the others could even hold out that long… however many months or years further away that would be now, with Wall Maria's fall…

Quinta and Fuerth shared a single village which acted as their central link to one another, being a hub for the boats ferried to and fro on the river which ran through all three. But with the sheer amount of refugees still pouring into Fuerth and the surrounding territories within Wall Rose, no boats would be readily available in the foreseeable future. To cover that distance on horseback and foot was out of the question. The lands between here and there was already rough and rife with dangers uncommon the further inside you traveled, courtesy of the Exterior Garrison's utter incompetence, without having to throw the Titans in. With the Titans, to leave now would be voluntary suicide. Not to go without mentioning their hands were already full dealing with said refugees as they continued to spread out illegally within his holdings in what was previously the cusp of the Interior and, short of shooting them on sight which would cause a whole separate stir of trouble he could doubtless pay off but would rather avoid entirely, nothing could be done about that, either. Though, obviously, he also couldn't afford to sit idly by and let all he accomplished over the decades in building up his legacy be for naught. So, he'd sent upon a favor from the royal capital to see his assets secure everywhere and that was what they'd all been waiting on for the past week, but, disinclined to share exactly what this entailed in private, publicly he pranced about reassuring his clients that the matter would be taken care of before the end of the next year, and whatever it was would be of no benefit to those trapped in Quinta, either, she was certain.

She imagined he also arranged something to be done about his estate in Quinta regarding the scandal if particular items kept in his private collection became public knowledge. Had wondered if the boy was aware of their importance, too, as the silence between son and father elapsed until, Mathias, still too young to sit among his father's inner circle and much too fiery for his own good, was left to twiddle his thumbs while the rosy world he knew crumbled before his sheltered eyes. Against her efforts to the contrary, Suzanne couldn't hinder his growing anxiety for long as he paced around his room in the guest quarters late at night unable to get a wink of sleep because all his thoughts were of Rita. Of the childhood friend not seen in well over a year since her graduation from her training and promotion to the Garrison, and who may very well be in Quinta with, reportedly, half of its remaining population; last seen trying to save a man and his daughter from an overturned wagon in the fields not far from its outer gate or so one eyewitness proclaimed and paraded the gallant tale of "a girl with golden locks who stabbed one of those things right in its stinkin' eye and felled it in one blow, straight through to the other side".

And whereas to Suzanne it could've been anybody with blonde hair, or just nonsense, the ravings of a man mad with grief seeking salvation, in Mathias' concerned mind it was nobody and nothing other than Rita.

Though unfortunately unable to save the man and his daughter, supposing it actually had been Rita, her bravery allowed this eyewitness and several others the chance to escape. As for what happened to her after, he'd shrugged and said "eh, can't really say!".

And despite further reassurance that this meant Rita was alive and safe, having more than likely taken refuge with the others in Quinta, that it should be enough to know she was for the moment unharmed, the scion of the Kramer Merchant Association heard none of it because he'd wanted to see her with his own two eyes. Towards that endeavor as proved by his abrupt absence this morning, his concern for the girl he loved and was like a sister to Suzanne in kind, had finally reached a boiling point and spilled over the edge when he ran off of his own accord just last night and now he was gone; joined the first line of volunteers, soldiers and civilians alike out into the now Titan-infested territory in the hopes to save what and who they could, or at least that was what she gathered thus far, having asked the Military Police officers and spoken with a few of the lesser drunken Garrison soldiers who'd been those signing up these unfortunate men and women per what could only be a result of Jörg's favor.

The grand majority of them were the same refugees who narrowly avoided becoming Titan food with nothing left to lose because they'd already lost everything and of those she questioned, many recalled a stand out among the crowd: the boy in the nice clothes with an air of nobility and the refusal to take "no" for an answer though his application had been denied immediately.

Obviously he'd found a way around it utilizing his status and she'd find out exactly how later, as her hands twisted cloth, but for right now she continued to wait upon his father's reply. This man who'd accomplished little besides unhurriedly dividing his shares and shuffling his stacks of what wealth remained since his son left, and Suzanne having known the answer to her question the moment she knocked on his study's heavy wooden doors, she still couldn't admit to herself that he could've fallen so low.

The "how" Mathias left prevalent in her mind, Suzanne remembered that particular morning where she dealt with that worker and he barged into one of his father's many meetings, both of them unannounced, uninvited, and loathed by their recipients. She, receiving a threat to all she held dear. He, told his concerns were still being looked into, even though everyone knew it was never going to be a topic of discussion for Quinta had been considered abandoned from the onset, left to fend for itself by the Kramer Merchant Association and its peers, the royal government, and perhaps even the King himself.

Jörg and his colleagues saw it as an accountable consequence — or a minor setback at best — though they still funded this expedition that his son sneaked his way on.

The royal government considered them a lost cause, yet they still sent soldiers to recruit and organize this expedition.

The King spoke through his adviser, who from no word had reached Suzanne's ears of what was to be done about Quinta, silent since The Fall began, but, nor had any news of condoning or approving or finding alternatives to this expedition either, which only meant one thing: all eyes were on the refugees and what was to be done with them.

Where to send them.

To… dispose of them.

And it wouldn't surprise her in the least if this expedition was just the first of many, as Jörg still couldn't be bothered to look up well after he was finished, his coins sorted, payments signed, taxes and levies and debts collected, written down in his record book, as always.

Thus she dared inquire again.

"So what're ya gonna do about yer son, hah? Did ya know he knows about the artworks?" she blurted out, accent and arrogance all that she'd been doing so well in biting back on for the past twenty years in her struggle to rise above her roots, slipping from her tongue as easily she might slip a knife between someone's ribs, of which Jörg was her current victim, ignited by Mathias's own passions she resonated with and the lack thereof within his father of the same blood.

Oh! And how everything came trickling back and blinded her better judgment for but a moment like the blood running through the cracks and crevices of the Underground!

The disrespect in her voice that he'd heard for the first time since his days when his wife were still with them brought his eyes from his record book. It was something Jörg had told no one, not even Sara — a loss so devastating that it almost consumed him, body and mind — before she passed, and Suzanne knew it was also the only thing that might coax him into tearing his eyes from the damned record book, a tome of transgressions, its pages dank and rancid from Jörg's ever dripping brow, hunched over it relentlessly each night same time same day, through his midnight fevers, induced by his lack of proper rest, day in, day out, week after week, month after month, of nothing but work — of nothing but worry of all the wrong things — to lift a finger to help his son that she promised never to tell between she and two children ever since the day they first met.

In one of those rare moments where the man, in his delirium, saw and spoke to not the girl he rescued from the slums beneath Mitras but his wife who died too young, mistaking the two, he began softly before regaining his senses with a scowl upon realizing this wasn't Sara but Suzanne, the urchin who stole his wife's heart and was entrusted by her to care for their son in her stead while he worked tirelessly to cope, and, why, his artworks, his most prized possessions that if discovered, if taken, could be worth more than the Kramer Merchant Association and all its wealth combined! How dare she find out about its existence! He'd trusted her! And, yet, trusted nobody! His only remaining solace was that he knew her secret, too, of which he reminded her, and one he was inclined to, if he so wished, and had every right to be rid of her, then and there.

But, then, she told him of the threat she received. That if Mathias was in the company of whom she thought then he was in peril from greater forces than a scolding from her, the wrath of his father, or the Titans themselves, explaining thusly that if he agreed to reveal the location of the artworks in exchange for "safe passage" to Quinta like Suzanne surmised, there was no guarantee said person would keep his word. Mathias would be murdered, and whatever happened after, artworks or not, meant nothing.

If his son died, his legacy died, and then Jörg would lose everything like he always feared but was currently too blind to see it and would become just another refugee with only empty coffers to keep him company, for the rest of his life.

She was not about to allow either to transpire. Even going so far as using that man's teachings again, further explaining how while she was unsuccessful in tracking down the messenger, the man who threatened her posing as a worker, she had found who hired him to deliver it from one of the volunteers he bribed.

While she still needed to know the "how", she at least knew that Bernhardt had been here, in Fuerth. It was enough to go on for the time being because if she was going to convince this stubborn man, then it had to be.

So, uncaring whether or not of the consequence, she told him of this first man who had raised her, as Jörg nor anyone within the walls would know of his existence, let alone his continued survival, if not for one quiet morning in Stohess forty years prior.

Whereupon, clearly recognizing the descriptions she brought forth if not the name, what little color remained drained from Jörg's sickly face as he turned even paler still. Except, as son was to father, his eyes, hidden behind his loose, black strands of hair, lit by the candlelight upon his desk, appeared to blaze. His lip curled back, showing his once fine teeth now yellowed. He rose from his chair, fat fingers reaching out as if to grasp her throat, and, then, he stopped. He slumped back down, and stared for a long time at his precious record book, before he finally heaved a heavy sigh and looked up at her with the eyes of the same man who'd rescued her a lifetime ago. It was the man who loved his family, his wife, his son, and a sliver of hope rushed through her, only to become a shiver of disbelief that settled down her backside as that man vanished again, abruptly as he surfaced, buried by the sorrow weighing upon his heart and thereupon when he spoke she never would've assumed it was the same man for the first time, ever, in her life.

"Then just let the boy die."

It was his final answer, laid bare.

And she began to protest, only for him to raise his hand to silence her.

"I gave explicit instructions to turn him away. It's out of my hands now," he said, sounding defeated. Bitter. Disgusted. Too easily. And it's all because of you, his eyes seemed to say, because now I know why. You rascal. Thief. Murderer! "I'm done trying to spur that boy on the right path."

Her surprise lingered for but a moment more, then she coughed. Loosened her collar. Stood straight. Choose her words carefully, this time. What she wanted, in exchange. The last request of a humble servant; his best. "Then let me accompany the agent you have no doubt sent for." In addition to helping mastermind these "expeditions", though she dared not rile him up any further and give him cause to resent her more that she ever thought him capable, it was clear to her that a man of his standing would have more than just one favor owed to his personage. "He can secure your estate. I can make sure your son is safe. He has been my responsibility, after all."

"And after?"

"I'll leave your service. You'll never see me again."

"Fine, fine," he said with another heavy sigh. "The 'agent' arrives in a week. Two, if he's late. But, know this," he warned, holding up three stubby fingers, "This is the third time."

Forever grateful, she bowed and took her leave with a triumphant smile because the old Jörg was in there, somewhere, after all.

 

[Historia]

4
​

A day and a half after leaving Fuerth with the expedition and their subsequent ill-fated parting, following countless failed bids to get comfortable without a twig or root or something else poking into his side, Mathias found himself hands folded over his stomach as he gazed up at a seemingly endless sky of melting winter greens for yet another night of restless sleep, wondering if Rita was faring any better in Quinta while memories from their youth together faded in then out until, eventually, one stuck.

It was nothing, at first. Just another gold coin in a chest of the same: rather dull and uninteresting. But, upon closer inspection, he found it to be weathered smooth like stone, and took it in his palm, realizing that it was an ancient coin from before the walls were built.

He remembered the day he received it: 836.

The year he first did his father proud.

He'd kept this coin on his person at all times attached to a string around his neck until she appeared with her father and it ceased being the most beautiful thing in the world.

How she stood there smiling wide, gazing up at a statue in a corridor at his home that was his father's estate in Quinta, her already dazzling features lit underneath a thin column of light protruding from a gap in the corridor's ceiling, iluminating her soft, strawberry blonde hair in a halo of brilliant shimmering gold of its own; the shining angelic beauty of innocence.

Then, how the picture in his mind began to change, form a new shape, until he was again seated at the dining table with Rita and her family on the second floor of their apothecary which belonged to Henning, her adoptive father, and his father and his father's father before him, passed down for generations, this faded gold coin on a string given as a gift to wish her well before she was to start her training with the military.

His own father's lessons echoing in his head again — "always consider the popular opinion" — he felt sick because how could such a man like his father, Jörg Kramer, head of the Kramer Merchant Association, possibly begin to know what the common man wanted or understand the popular opinion if he refused to mingle with them besides the rare occasion?

Every day, his father had drilled into him all kinds of knowledge, from stock fulfillment, sales strategies, and managerial techniques to methods of ingratiating oneself with the royal government. However, what was the point if one didn't listen to the people one served? Those who truly mattered? Who cared for more than material possessions and never held an opinion besides what was good for them and theirs? They weren't like those in the Interior. They knew what hardship was, and while he still believed in his father's notion that hardship built character, it served to experience real empathy first in order to even begin putting pain to practical use. Which his father hadn't.

He remembered the look on his face when his mother died… vacant, like she was just another lost asset to sign off in a logbook and forget.

So there he was again, across from Rita dressed in her uniform and her newly gifted pendant, still smiling that sweet, lovely smile, with Doris and Henning, her adoptive parents, beside her; the people who truly mattered, to him. Who didn't care about luxuries or popular opinions and had actually struggled like everyone else that was normal and how he wished to be an actual part of their family for there was no hierarchy, no head at the table in Rita's family because everyone was equal. Everything was shared.

On the table between them were those familiar candles and the lamp and he could feel their light warmth against his face as Doris laughed at something Rita said and he began to drift himself; at last surrendering himself to a sleep he thought would never come again, when, suddenly, the light of the candles waned and lamp dimmed as a chill set in and shadows deep and deeper still and darkest yet filled the place where comfort had once been and Doris and Henning vanished while Rita remained, though her smile was now gone and Suzanne's words occupied the space where his father's had been: "You can't hold onto her forever".

Her innocent youth cracking to reveal the cold, remorseless truth, the scene crumpled, the apothecary collapsed, and she grew in stature, saddled on horseback at the head of a detachment of soldiers, features grim, hair a hastily fashioned mess, gazing up at the face of Wall Maria and its gleaming cannons higher above and its gates down ahead, wearing those same colors of the Garrison proudly upon her shoulder: red ruby roses entangled in white thorns and, freshly stitched above it, a single white stripe, denoting her promotion to a rank of leadership, whereas the pendant was nowhere to be seen.

The distance separating them became a chasm. He could never hope to reach her.

Standing smaller across from her, Mathias hesitated to step forward and call out for fear he may fall in, and was forced to watch her go, disappearing through the gates and into darkness. The unknown. Then, the dream died away as he recalled the cold morning he heard the news of Quinta's fall from Suzanne, of the meeting between his father and his father's colleagues, discussing their most immediate courses of action when he entered, demanding to know what they planned to do about Quinta — about Rita — and his anger at their response, opening his eyes because it infuriated him still.

That response? They were working on it.

Hours, days later, a week later, and they had still been working on it.

So, he'd gone out to do something on his own, succeeding in joining an expedition to look for survivors and salvage anything they could find with the help of this man named Bernhardt and his band of outlaws on the condition he'd lead them to his father's treasures, a significant portion of his fortune, perhaps the most valuable of it all, in Quinta, in exchange for safe passage there.

But, that was before the village.

Before the Titan chased them away.

Scattered them.

Before…

He shuddered and tried not to think about it any longer, not for the second time today, and turned on his side.

After that, they came across Titans four times more, but he'd rather not think about those encounters, either, wanting to lose himself in memories of Rita again despite the fear winning again and he was pulled back to their present circumstances where, since then, Bernhardt forced them to abandon the wagon in favor of cover under the giant trees on horseback, which had marginally improved their chances. Not that the man seemed worried. Riding horses hard was only a few days, a week if slow, and no more than another week on foot, to Quinta, or so Jarratt had said, following a heated argument where they agreed to new final terms due to the abrupt change in situation.

Glancing at Nikki sound asleep, he pursed his lips.

The two of them had shared the same horse and more than once she favored pushing him off to save that smoked meat, leaving him sore and bruised and having to catch up before they could move on. He'd so much wanted to take it from her and throw it somewhere in the forest — but then they would just waste time trying to find her instead. His whole body still aching something horrible from that ordeal, he was in a foul mood before, was back to being in a foul mood now, and, his mind working against him, brought up Klaus's words next to make it worse still: "Maybe you just lack the nerve."

Though, he'd prepared for this. By doing the exercises Suzanne taught him in times of stress, he loosened his jaw and breathed deep, relaxing his muscles. Releasing his tension.

Getting worked up over it did him nor the refugees nor Rita any benefit; just like the day of his mother's funeral, his last memory of her being his head against her breast as she lay in bed, too sickly to move, feeling her fleeting warmth against his, a flicker of life, stroking his hair, until there was nothing at all, and though the word envy had never once crossed his mind something still gnawed at him like an itch. An envy being around that table, with Rita and her family. Doris, energetic and spirited, genuinely welcoming him not as the heir to his father's wealth but independent of his status. Henning, quiet and reserved, never asking anything in return for still being his father's physician.

A longing.

That is, until Suzanne, though he'd said nary a word of it, whom he trusted with his life, his confidence, shared stories of his mother from before he was born as a young girl plucked from her home, forced into a marriage she'd no say in, all chance of a happy life suffocated though being privy to all the comforts of the world, planning her own departure after her only son, he, was born, and how quickly those plans were undone.

That this longing, this hurt, this feeling, this loss was representative of something deeper, something rawer that was only coming to the surface now, like a flower in bloom. That had blossomed when he met Rita, sharing their pain together, their losses, and continued to grow.

"Why, it's love, Mathias. But you can't hold onto her forever; at some point you'll have to let her go."

And lying there, he twisted his shirt where his heart was, remembering that day Rita left.

Suzanne had only offered a thin smile in return, cautioning him to forget about Rita's troubles to focus on his studies. On his own problems. That she could handle herself, she was a strong girl, so he, too, had to be strong if he wanted to see her again. If he wanted to be the new head of the Kramer Merchant Association, someday soon.

"Love can only bring you so far. There will come a time when it won't be enough. I want you to be prepared for that."

"You idiot," he chided to himself in a whisper.

Grabbing a fistful of dry leaves, of course Suzanne knew about his feelings for Rita, and, crunching them in his palm where the ancient coin once was, of course she also knew how impulsive he was, that she wasn't about to simply sit idle and let him go. She'd find a means to stop him, so he'd have to reach Quinta before she did, get Rita, and then… and then…

He turned red in the face and let the leaves fall.

"Can't sleep, lad?"

The voice startled him and he shot up, peering around. It was too dark to see, but, after a moment, his eyes adjusted and he recognized Bernhardt's wide, muscular frame.

The former soldier was on watch duty.

"Worrying about your sweetheart?" he teased. He turned his head partially, mustache peeking out underneath his nose, fixing him with those light blue eyes of his. Though, they were no longer bright and cheerful. Rather they seemed glossy, like a corpse. Snuffed of their eagerness and youth he put on any other time before, he seemed... more somber than usual.

Mathias stayed silent. Like he was seeing, for the first time — perhaps, the only time — a crack in his defenses. The real Bernhardt. If that was even possible. Then the village came back to the forefront of his mind, assaulting him with the horror this man was capable of on a whim.

Instinctively, as before during their argument, Mathias' eyes wandered to the sword at the much older man's waist.

His heart pounded in his chest. He was soaked with sweat. Cold. Shook, at this revelation of who he exactly got himself involved with, finally sinking in.

"Well don't be, she's just fine," Bernhardt said quietly, seemingly oblivious to the look he was giving him. "Far away, safe from harm. Hunkered down, snug and warm. You should be more concerned about those you're currently traveling with."

He gulped, and dared to ask the former member of the Military Police a question dangling there since meeting him and his "glorious outlaws" that night at the bar.

"Have we... met before?"

Bernhardt perked up at the question, going back to his usual self for but a moment. "Why, I thought I told you lad — everyone knows the scion of the renowned Kramer Merchant Association!" He lifted a finger. "And, well, I thought of paying a visit to an old acquaintance of mine. I'm certain you know of her." Then, it lowered, as did his sing-song voice, pointing down at the shotgun Mathias was unaware he was clutching. Deathly so. "After all, she is the one who taught you how to shoot, am I right, lad?"

Mathias went from cold to frozen.

—Suzanne!

He told them it was his father, not Suzanne, so then how could—?

It suddenly dawned on him, then: his father.

Reading his son's thoughts was nothing for the sire of the Kramer Merchant Association. Not a mystery, but a whisper in the dark. It was why his application had been denied outright, and, perhaps, as he looked into Bernhardt's eyes, something far more sinister and just how deeply embedded his father's role in it might be, thinking of their deal.

He'd agreed under the assumption it was just numerous pieces of old, indistinguishable art, stored away in the underground cellar. But that was when he'd been just a child, trying to impress Rita by showing her a bunch of dusty canvases like all the rest adorning the walls throughout the mansion.

What if… What if they were actually something… more?

Countless theories leaped to his mind but when he opened his mouth nothing came out to which Bernhardt answered wholeheartedly now, rejuvenated; his armor repaired.

"All in due time, my lad! Best get some sleep, now. We still have a way to go!"

Their brief conversation done, the only thing Mathias could do after was lie back down, apprehensive of what further lay ahead even more, the repressed memory of those two soldiers, the Titan, and their flight, slicing through his thoughts like Bernhardt's blade through one of those soldiers' necks, coming back to frighten him.

Having stared at Bernhardt the same way he'd done the Titan back at the village as it pawed at its face, pulling its own skin off and exposing the muscle underneath, its expression even more jubilant than before — almost as if it was excited, that the wire still lodged in its eye from Bernhardt's attack was some new game it never played before, its large, dumpy body falling from the stable roof, crawling like a newborn babe ever toward them as they all fled — he remembered how Bernhardt dragged him relentlessly and they rounded the corner of the main building just as the wagon Jarratt stole appeared with Klaus and Nikki in the back, tossing both him and the soldier's equipment alongside, all the while feeling like this were happening in some far-off world, yet knowing in his gut that, no, this was real, and it was a living nightmare.

Tonight, Bernhardt was the monster to be feared.

And having seen it in his eyes, too, Mathias was reminded of the same look in Suzanne once, when he angered her greatly, that silenced him and sent the same shiver down his spine.

Whatever this man truly was terrified him worse than any Titan, as one word came to his lips and his eyes passed over the others, sound asleep: murderer.

To think he only had a man such as this and his gang to rely on from here on until they reached Quinta… He really was an idiot, but… for Rita… he… He was lost, and alone, and angry, and, oh yes, afraid, without her.

"Hold on, Rita," he whispered, her smile putting his mind at ease only a little.

Saying her name aloud in the confidence that he'd save her was all he could do to keep from fleeing like Leon had before him as he stayed awake, with only murderers sleeping soundless beside him.

 

[Historia]

5​

Walking into the district hall after her first visit ended poorly, up to its second floor and down the hall to the district mayor's office, Rita looked around in disappointment. Her shoulders slumped.

Nothing in the room had been touched since she left it the first time and that was what she'd feared and what her parents were once again right about: nobody with any actual authority was left in the district to guide them. Thus, the duty now fell to her officially, as the highest ranking member of the military still alive: precisely what she didn't want.

She sighed, letting out her frustration.

When the gates had closed at the start, before the reality of their dire situation had completely settled, she'd sent soldiers to secure the warehouses, the Garrison barracks, the noble's district, and other key locations whilst taking a small force herself to protect the mayor as planned beforehand, only to find he nor any of the other officials present. All of them had fled the district ahead of the caravans, unbeknown to the commander. The Military Police's posts being abandoned when she had them checked confirmed this further, and they must've slipped out the night before. Where then the question arose as to how, but faced with the resulting turmoil she hadn't the time to figure the answer. That aside, it still came as a punch in the gut to know that the constant complaints of her mother's about the local officials were proved true in the end and her belief that all of them couldn't be so utterly selfish, from her own experiences meeting with them during her time in the commander's company, were a fantasy. That, surely, at least one of them would've stayed behind and stepped up instead of leaving it to the commander and with the commander and every ranking member of the Garrison dead with him, to her.

Her eyes dropped to the floor. How stupid of her, to hope that Mr. Muller wasn't like the rest of them.

And having learned from this, she was now here a second time to make this their new headquarters after spending the better portion of the week agonizing over the mass leap forward it was from watching over four soldiers to presiding over the fate of an entire district — there'd not been one moment where her hands were never not full, her mind never not occupied, since the start.

Her eyes went back up. They traveled from the large, empty desk which would continue to serve as a seat of power starting today, to the obnoxiously larger, fanciful chair that, while quite comfortable, could be broken down and used for necessity and not luxury, replaced with something more practical, across the vacant bookshelves lining either side of the room to be cleared of whatever frivolous vanities not worth saving, until they rested upon the window behind. It overlooked the plaza that served as the district square and offered an unobstructed view of it and half the district as a whole.

She approached it and took a uncomfortable moment to look down the once deserted plaza now occupied by what remained of Quinta's Garrison soldiers and volunteers as they made their preparations for their later duties as assigned by her better: Amanda, her best friend and acting second in command.

She listened to her cool, raised voice as she instructed them and frowned.

During what was supposed to be the evacuation, the commander had rallied those senior members of the Garrison manning the cannons in a suicide charge upon the realization that the Military Police were suspiciously absent from the evacuation, leaving this year's Training Corps, the 103th Division, in charge of the cannons, and she remembered how the volleys that followed missed their targets by wide margins, their operators' accuracy a far-cry from their predecessors immediately before as they'd hit everything except the Titans, and wondered if Amanda was enough to keep them from bawling all over themselves with that temper of hers. The last she wanted were soldiers both inexperienced and even more scared than they already were, but the decision to elect Amanda had ultimately been hers and it was a week too late for regret. There was no time to second guess herself in her current position because she needed to work quickly to retain control of their circumstances. This office would be cleared and ready before tomorrow morning, as she turned to Duccio, one of three soldiers she reassigned to help her make sense of this mess thrown at her, while he stood in the open doorway, clipboard in hand.

"Commander, I have the duties for today," he said.

"Go on," she said, but, not long after her attention was back to looking into the plaza as her thoughts drifted elsewhere and her hand went over her mouth to concealed a much deeper frown.

She dismissed him shortly thereafter, and it was only once she was alone again that she let it show while a familiar feeling of inadequacy took hold of her and refused to loosen its grip; much like how tightly she suffocated the pendant around her neck.

It was awful of her to not have thanked him afterward, for from the onset he was the best of the three above and beyond his duty to prove himself. She'd even go so far to say she would've failed with the district further descended into chaos if not for him constantly her side, encouraging her.

This inadequacy shifted to self-loathing as her thoughts traveled back to younger days in a destructive effort to distract from her own current sorry state.

It was a scene from her youth, seven to eight, of running alongside Mathias as they explored his family's estate while Suzanne accompanied them.

Their fathers had been away, discussing matters in private of his mother's declining health, and she remembered how he'd led her to a secret spot under the massive tree which grew in the estate's inner courtyard and made her promise to seal her lips in promise of his knowing nothing about its location to his father. How adventurous he'd been, and… happy… he seemed, despite his mother's death being all but an inevitability. How she'd mistaken loss — in the years stretching on after the death of his mother with hers already being deceased beyond the walls — as something more than what it'd actually been: circumstance; shared between them solidifying those early days together not because they suited each other but because they were two lonely children whose fathers' were patient and practitioner, respectfully.

Excluding loss, they'd held almost nothing in common.

He, the outgoing son of a rich man.

She, the timid adopted daughter of his mother's physician.

Through this equal loss they had stuck together during those tough times and she rubbed the pendant; a gift from he to her kept fastened high about her neck. Doing so had become a soothing reminder that someone, somewhere out there, would always be there for her, would always share the same pain, the same comfort, and that together be stronger for it, or, at least until she went away for three years. Until she joined the military and saw how miserable the rest of humanity had it by comparison to either of their plights. Where she'd met the one person who'd made even those sorrowful tales seem further insignificant, and whom Rita told herself she could change for the better, because if she could get them past their pain, too, then maybe she could heal the hurt in her heart, too, but…

In the end she'd failed in that endeavor and she was afraid that this would be the same. Only, until it passed to someone better qualified — and soon, she could only hope — she'd have to serve to her utmost, no matter her personal reservations on the subject. For Wilco, for the commander, for that little girl, her parents, the whole lot, if nothing else, she would become the leader they needed in such turbulent times whether she liked it or not. Even if it meant she had to force herself to change. As was her duty as a member of the Garrison Regiment of Quinta.

And she was afraid of the implications of what that entailed, too, wondering if Mathias was safe, well away from this madness, when Amanda swaggered in.

Not turning from the window when she greeted her, the other girl was barely out of breath after all that screaming down below and Rita's gut twisted as her pendant's rounded edges pressed into her skin as the frown deepened still.

In the beginning, everyone figured their roles reversed, and being appointed the acting commander had done little to sooth the civilians' worrisome hearts and minds and it was Amanda, from the moment she strapped her boots on, not Rita, whom everyone had turned to for guidance though Rita held senior rank and Amanda herself cared not for the responsibility.

A week on and, while that sentiment was slowly changing, Rita couldn't not be envious.

Her parents' remarks the night she assumed the position at the dinner table rang heavy in her ears: Doris' show of rolling her eyes and Henning's silent apprehension; how she kept having to point out to her mother that she was only the acting commander, and her father, looking at her as if she'd just finished banging her head on the table like when she was six, reassuring him that it was temporary in time of crisis and without an officer of higher rank present; trying her best to answer their combined barrage of patronizing questions after. They had never trusted the military, had opposed her joining the Garrison, and continued to belittle her and shun her assistance to have soldiers posted outside the apothecary when offered for their protection and only by some miracle they weren't robbed once during the initial riots.

It was one of those time where she seriously contemplated where the loving strangers who had taken her in disappeared to, replaced by these anti-authority grumblers and seeing in a new light how strange it was the commander always came by to check how their business was thriving.

As a young child, Rita assumed it was out of concern because of their professions being so demanding and not their political beliefs being so hostile, but, as with everything else she'd seen now, the world was full of surprises that could turn what she thought she knew upside down in an instant and her parents were not excluded.

Most of all, as Doris' footsteps had fallen away as she slipped in the kitchen and her father slunk back to his work and her thoughts returned to the present, their blatant disapproval combined with the other civilians' woes and Amanda's ever looming presence cast a dark cloud over her that drew darker still for she had not the same cadence in her step, no power in her voice, stumbling over her words as she did her boots, standing shorter than most her age, with even more child-like features than her better…

Amanda was her opposite, her rival, the exemplar anyone in their right mind should follow. Rita was always behind her. Hiding in her shadow. The quiet and meek little girl, tugging at her father's legs too anxious to show her face.

But Amanda had declined on the grounds that she'd only make things worse, trusting her to lead them while she went about sweeping the streets heedless of her injuries.

This known, she should be glad that someone believed in her, but, how could the two of them compare when the only things Rita would fight here in this district hall were the sores on her behind and a lack of sleep from long, restless hours stuck putting ink to paper?

Not that Amanda gave a damn, by her side five years and counting.

And so it was she fully turned to look upon the other girl, fully turned, because all she did with fist over heart was in service to the people of Quinta and at the end of the day if she wanted to take control of the situation at hand she needed to start making tougher decisions — even at the cost of her best friend.

From here on, a precedent had to be set which saw the two of them stayed inside these walls at arm's length and wouldn't distract from their duties as acting commander and captain respectively. But she also knew that Amanda wouldn't take kindly to this news, and Rita braced herself for what came next.

She couldn't continue to be a shadow, flat against the wall while Amanda thrust herself into the light on her behalf even if it burned her and had; severely.

No more letting herself be ignored. No more letting things go. No more hiding. No more being afraid. No more searching for survivors they'd never find. Because, for Quinta's Garrison, the 103th Training Corps, the civilians within the district, loss was the one thing all of them had in common now, too, and it was time to grow up.

"What?" Amanda asked, eying her intently before she plopped down and propped up her boots on the mayor's desk in the mayor's chair behind her. Willfully ignorant to the situation facing them as ever, Amanda swung her head back and addressed her precisely as if nothing had changed in the last week. "Looks like you'll have your hands full today."

Though the lack of protocol made her cringe, Rita ignored it on account of who it was. And she could use her companionship. At least for today. The last time they would, even if the other girl didn't know it yet. Or if she'd even care. Might also do some good to hand over the command of the soldiers to Duccio for a time, besides. A short time, anyway. A few days, at the most, right? They were his fellows, after all. Same as Amanda was to her, and well...

Rita cleared her throat. "About that, I was wondering if you'd like to be my record keeper for today. I could certainly use the help."

"I have teams to organize. Patrols to set. Kids too busy pissing their pants to manage. Besides, you know my handwriting is crap," she replied. She leaned back and scratched the bandage tightly wrapped around her head. One of the several injuries she suffered saving her and the little girl's life during the failed evacuation.

Rita focused on the blood crusted beneath it where it was welcome relief to see it was significantly less than what it'd been previously, when she half-turned away again to look out the window, busying herself with a gray evening and gathering of dark clouds.

A silence settled in.

From the corner of her eye, Rita watched Amanda's long, black hair rope about her shoulders as she tilted her head.

Every soldier in the military under active duty was required to keep the length of their hair above the shoulder. This was a safety precaution due to their regular use of the Vertical Maneuvering Gear they wore. Many accidents had transpired because of longer hair lengths over the course of the Garrison's history, and she'd rather not see her lose her scalp, as well, in addition to the wounds already sustained, but if she thought to address this when she turned back around for the third or fifth time, Rita doubted Amanda would obey it either, even as a command from her superior, and gave up before she began. Instead, she let her hand brush over the hilt of one of the sheathed swords slung around her waist — Amanda had unhooked both of hers and thrown them beside her boots on the mayor's desk — and waited for the feeling in her breast to subside, before speaking up again.

Originally, Rita had it worked out to put her on bodyguard duty. With her head injury she feared this position to be the eventual cause of something graver, thus that honor had gone to Nicholas; a robust boy from their year with a square body and head and smaller, pinched face. During training and still today, he held a soft nature. Lenient in his persistence mentioning why he joined the Garrison in the first place, to stay away from danger, he was acceptable. A cobbler's son, aiming to transfer to the Nedlay District, the next district down from Quinta facing the north, which was his hometown, there was a very slim chance that request would be honored in the foreseeable future. The reason he joined was so his family need not worry about keeping him fed while he'd so many young brothers and sisters, being the oldest, of which, if she recalled correctly, totaled three sisters and four brothers. But, being the oldest, he knew how to deal with confrontation, despite holding a strong aversion to it, the result being him currently guarding the door to the mayor's office and no doubt wondering why it had became so quiet in here and dreading how long it would be until he was called in.

Later, when they were more organized, she wanted to raise that number by one. Also, perhaps, keep him and Amanda separated after this, because he still became visibly upset whenever Amanda called him "Blockhead".

Which was yet another concern: Amanda was very much the bully.

So in light of this information, Rita planned it such that, as her designated record keeper for the day, and maybe a bit longer, it'd do good to have Amanda out of trouble by not opening insulting Nicholas and anyone else she casually harassed for her own half-hearted amusement.

It furthermore went without saying that by being her record keeper she'd have an easier time recovering and thereby be all the better healed come time when she was needed out there on the streets again. It was as good an official justification as any, if challenged.

She just needed things to go smoothly, and for Amanda to first accept.

And her best friend finally conceded after a second round of nagging, on the condition that Rita follow her up to the wall to get some fresh air before they started, yet unaware that this would be the last time.



The two of them now atop the wall overlooking the aftermath of Quinta's failed evacuation, Rita looked across fields black and smoldering from fires unconstrained and the open plains and hills man made that stretched for miles until they rested where sawed down trunks of enormous size marked the beginning of what was the forest of giant trees bordering the district a ways down.

According to Mathias, in his effort to make Quinta less reliant on tourism which had been the main source of revenue for the district due to the mere size of their surrounding forests, his father had gradually cut away at them to reduce its scale and provide resource for the infrastructure of what was to be the beginning of a new neighborhood of buildings that "were to rival those of the marvelous Mitras itself". It was also to discourage open-air vendors not under his employ to pocket a profit as they were all but eventually bought or forced out and, well, it went without needing to be said, but it seemed his efforts would be for naught for many of his buildings were now ash and cinder; destroyed during the riots. With the Titans roaming in want of their next victims throughout the land beyond Quinta's gates, nobody would be visiting for leisure and guided journeys within the forests anytime soon and there were no tents, no vendors, no profits, out there other than abandoned wagons yet to be broken down, dead bodies yet to be cleared, and a potent sense of dread, poisoning the lands further; palpable even from this distance as the first signs of pestilence from the giant sacks of undigested human remains could be seen in what was left of the shantytown that once prospered against Quinta's walls.

A repulsive aroma of scorched wood and rotten meat wafted up from its shell-puckered streets, and it was then Rita couldn't help but think of Mathias and how he nor his father were trapped like they were because their procession — always the grandiose affair — had departed for Fuerth months prior.

Surely news of their situation had reached them by now, and she imagined him not simply sitting idly; probably already organizing some kind of foolhardy foray into the territory between here and there, through miles of already inhospitable lands only inhabited by the hardiest of those honest folk within the walls rendered a hell scape of humanity's worst nightmares come true, that would quickly be dismissed by his father.

A powerful man, if not the most powerful man within Wall Maria, certainly the richest, Mathias' father would do everything to stop his son from getting himself killed as his heir, and the thought set her mind at ease for no matter how defiant her childhood friend, he'd dare not go against his father.

Not bothering to take in the sights herself, Amanda quipped that they were reminiscent of cattle locked in a cage while the wind blew through her hair as she picked at the burn scabs on her arms seated carelessly across the back of one of their cannon emplacements.

"You think?" Rita said. She envisioned them penned on all sides by these Quinta's walls with the Titans as their herders as they calmly awaited their deaths from either starvation or self-ruination once tensions became frayed and tempers flared reached their limits.

It was a somber image on an already sultry evening.

Following her darkening mood in the mayor's office, Rita couldn't not appallingly be in agreement, and her attention then went to the gate itself, to its iron plates covered in dark, dried blood.

Her mind brought her back to those wagons and people being swallowed and spat out one after the other again. Those attempting to foolishly leave the district as they clashed with those who clamored to get back in, on that horrible day, again. A mass of bent noses, busted lips, and bruised faces, black on blue on purple with splashes and splatters of red, all without being attacked by the Titans themselves — the sheer amount of shouting, crying, screaming, and wailing had been enough to make her ears bleed.

She remembered the dozens of wagons rumbling frantically for that outer gate as they fled across those open plains and kicked up clouds of dust behind them while the cannons along the walls rang out, bombarding the advancing, nigh indestructible threat. Whether it was putting massive holes through their bodies, blasting apart their limbs, turning their heads to mush, no injury seemed too great. Steam simply exhausted from their new orifices, forms contorting and conforming and repairing themselves to rise and walk again.

How their front line was slaughtered in the blink of an eye.

The second line, running at the mere sight of the terrors they were about to face.

Herself, in the third, astride her horse just outside this outlying shantytown, her stomach churning and twisting and tightening, turned end over end as she threw up and wiped her sleeve when the commander informed them that they were it; the lives of those in Quinta depended upon them succeeding to protect and escort as many as possible inside as he and what remained of the senior members of Quinta's Garrison still alive dealt with those Titans at their backs.

News of the fall of Shiganshina had just arrived that previous evening, resulting in an immediate decision of the government officials residing within Quinta to abandon the district, being little farther west along Wall Maria than it, and they were supposed to have evacuated to Wall Rose, to Fuerth District, that next morning, only the Titans reached Quinta faster than anticipated. Which meant Shiganshina's inner gate had been breached in less than an hour — and maybe even more unthinkable, less than half an hour — of its outer gate. The evacuation was planned around the calculation that it would take the Titans at least several days to breach the second gate, if at all, but that plan had obviously fallen through, and it was in the midst of the new emergency evacuation that the Titans fell upon them and, shortly thereafter, with a raise of her trembling hand, she'd given the commander's order to charge, riding alongside Amanda, the last howl of a cold winter nipping at her exposed ears as they followed her straight into certain death without any other choice.

Because it had been their duty.

She vividly remembered reaching the overturned wagon, the father pinned underneath the horse and his little girl. Amanda saving her life, and nearly losing her own in return, drenched in steaming blood head to toe. Wilco leading them to safety. The gate as it finally closed shut, keeping them inside and leaving unlucky hundreds outside to the eager mouths of the Titans. Covering the little girl's ears until the screams stopped.

And in the silence that followed save for the clawing of the Titans at the outer gate's iron plates, she and everyone else within Quinta had immediately known that the walls once built to keep them safe, had now become their cage; it was just as Amanda said.

Though Titans still clawed at it, there were fewer of them since the first days; a great number having lost interest and wandered off to who-knows-where within the wider territory in search of, she could only surmise, was easier prey.

Being locked behind these walls was their only solace, but, it was just a matter of time before that changed, too, and with their limited number of soldiers, the task of clearing out these stragglers was going to prove a challenge. With the more experienced members of the Garrison all but having perished in the flight from Quinta, the majority left were raw, including she and her fellow graduates. None of them had battled Titans in such numbers as that day, had rarely seen greater than a few on their patrols along the walls previously, and those of them capable of staring up at a Titan and not soil their pants immediately would be — why, she could count them on her fingers! — the deciding factor between keeping the peace or the instigation of another riot. But, if Amanda was the one cracking the whip, then, maybe, they stood a chance.

Which was why they could no longer close. It muddled their concentration on what was important. After all, they'd only stopped the initial riots and ransacking because they'd set aside their feelings because in the moment there was no where else to go, so what sense did it make to abandon the one place they did have?

Yes, it would be slow going,

Yes, they were cattle, but that didn't mean they had to lie down and die just yet, and she thumbed the hilt of one of her swords, standing there with a peek over at the other girl who'd since quieted. Were it any other the usual indifference she often displayed on her beautiful, mature features, would always appear the same, but to Rita they told whole stories.

The cold touch of an unpleasant memory shared between them years ago tapped her shoulder and she shivered, back in the cabin on that snowy mountain opposite Amanda's blank stare as the latter described a history of blood in the lamplight.

Her silence now: what others might presume as sadness when it was actually restlessness.

Soon as they'd found themselves trapped in Quinta, Amanda had wanted to leave, but she wanted to stay, and in the end while it was obvious who'd won that argument, it wasn't something so easily forgotten. A promise etched unto her best friend's skin of a violence which never slept and only waited for an opportunity to come around again, like a sickness.

Yet another aspect of Amanda she wished to keep contained by appointing her as record keeper, bound to rear its head, hopefully, in the not so near future. At least until things here were stable, and they could act upon those feelings shared.

She just hoped that she would be ready when that time came, as all she could do was delay it as long as humanly possible.

 

[Historia]

6​

Ymir shoveled dirt over the final grave of those unfortunate people she found not far from the ruined church and patted it down. When she was satisfied with the result, she fashioned a marker for it, then collapsed triumphantly on her behind in exhaustion.

Once she caught her breath, she stared at her dirty hands and chipped fingernails and how red they were. How they stung when she pressed them together as she rubbed her face; the proof that she were still alive, tears in her eyes, before she composed herself and made a short trip to the nearby stream.

She cupped her hands along its edge, then washed her face and arms of dirt and no more for the untreated water was unclean and, therefore, unsafe. Back at the ruined church she had stores of previously boiled water kept in jars and vases and pitchers taken from its shelves and stands and storerooms, and it would do her good to drink some, say a few passing prayers to the graves on her way, and rest some more for a job well done, but she could not. She found herself pacing more often, like she had seen countless soldiers in her memories do when the battles ended, never having known its meaning until now. She was anxious and would not sleep until she could stop the jitters.

On her way back to ruined church one day, she had discovered the first body of these people she had just finished burying the last of by that same stream one morning when she was out collecting water. From his face, the man had been in agony and seemed to be reaching out for the water when he died. It had not taken her long to find his camp, along with twenty others with signs of having experienced excruciating pain right up until the moment they died, too. Which lead her to believe there were invasive, brain-eating parasites in the water, too small for naked eye to see, and thus from then on boiled her drinking water. And though it was best to just leave the stream untouched, she could not abandon it for it was her only source of water in the area.

She did not know how long the bodies had been there exactly, but with their faces crumbled inward, terror-stricken in varying degrees of discomfort, hands clutching their stomachs rolled upon their sides, it was at least days after she arrived at the ruined church that much was certain.

She was almost sure there were more, swallowed by the underbrush or dragged away by the wolves, having found since then human bones with bite marks and recently, as well, with meat and flesh still on them and bits of clothing strewn across their hastily prepared campsite not far from the ruined church, either.

The thought of there also being a den of wolves around further stoked her worry, but it was the dead which troubled her. Mostly comprised of the elderly, but also a few children and mothers as they desperately clung to their babies, they had been left to die all the same and, even though she buried them, their half-frozen faces, blue-lipped and glassy eyed, would not leave her; stirred into her already recurring nightmares like one bottomless pot of horrors.

At first she had felt for them, and her heart had ached that their decision to choose this forest of giant trees in particular unknowing or uncaring of its wickedness, so panicked and frightened, resulted in their deaths, but after a time of their ceaseless wails would keep her awake at night, any empathy was lost; replaced by contempt and loathing. How annoyingly stupid these people must have been, she would tell herself, as she went out into the darkness to see if it was not all in her head. How she risked life and limb in an continuously vain search for others to share her sorrows, only to come upon nothing — not a hair — save for the silent swaying of the trees overhead; the dreadful mockery of these infernal woods as it chortled, stealing its way into her dreams and turning her thoughts one restless night closer to insanity as she started yet again to see and hear things not truly there.

Alone, with only herself and her hallucinations, as always.

One morning she had even wondered if she simply just… imagined… the survivors, the bodies, the camp, until she caught her foot on a previously concealed skeletal limb, risen out the earth from earlier rains like an cruel joke by this blasted forest.

Therein, she had resolved herself to uncover every missing body part she could and bury them, too, if only to keep herself sane, until she finally finished today.

She had first used her hands to dig their graves, though that had not taken long to grow tiring so she instead spent most of her energy attempting to break into the rooms hidden behind the altar in her subsequent exploration of it following that initial night and when she succeeded was awed that among its contents were the tools she had been utilizing ever since such as the shovel from the under croft, which had partially collapsed and was too unstable to venture deeper down into, utensils and pots and pans for cooking, books for burning, and clean clothing, to name the most notable. All told it was the charity of those who poured their hearts and souls into helping the less fortunate, and whom she was forever grateful toward though she would never know their names.

And when she at last returned to the ruined church, she thought of how much time had passed since she began with the first body. With no way of knowing exactly how long she had been here nor any idea of how long she should stay, the sun had rose into the sky and sunk beneath the earth many times since and her hair had grown very long, halfway down her back. It must have been at least several weeks. A month, even, where the seasons were in the midst of changing because when she did get sleep she woke to birds singing their songs in the trees, the days of dark lifting, mist dissolving, and flowers beginning to emerge, bulbous and colorful telltales of winter in its final sighs and the yawning of spring in its revivifying waking.

And yet, the voice had not returned.

Without it to guide her she again decided to stay even longer, spending those days gathering enough twigs, branches, and whatever else in between foraging for more food and water and practicing her words and drills from time long past resurfacing to then build a proper fire to keep warm and heal her battered and beaten bones, using her newfound freedom to simply relax and gaze up at the stars through the hole in the ruined church's ceiling at night when not out scouring her surroundings.

Fascinated by those twinkles of white bright against the night, she often found herself looking at the brightest, most brilliant one, reciting and repeating those words once forgotten and now returned. Words she could not yet place, from whom and from where. Much like the rest of her past, once spoken to her by that voice in her head.

But, as with the letters, words, and phrases which slowly came back to her, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second, moment upon moment, so too would everything else just like these drills in her dreams, practiced and practiced to exhaustion and had become second nature after she startled herself awake some nights, unable to go back to sleep, if she did not fancy a walk instead. Again, a restlessness brought upon by memories unpleasant, which came crashing together like two armies locked in a ferocious melee, bloody and piercing and gut spilling manias that left her weak and helpless when the cries of the recent dead subsided. Lost and afraid, until she came to her senses and realized she was no longer there but here, somewhere else. Somewhere warm. Somewhere safe.

But it was a temporary reprieve because, for some reason still unknown to her, Ymir knew that she could not stay here forever and would need to continue on. To keep moving still, as the voice inside her head had kept telling her, like those survivors had and knew it, too, despite their many losses and the forest ultimately their demise, while Marcel's walking corpse ever kept her company, a constant silent scream in her ear as replacement.

And tonight was the night it spoke again, she thought. She could feel it as she stared into the fire's heart, watching its flames lick the air and devour the wood, again reciting and repeating those words learned so long ago as wisps of light danced and disappeared and embers fell to the ground: that while words held meaning, names held power.

They were undying labels, etched on the actions of the past, present, and future; a representation of who you are and what you were; your identity to the rest of the world until the end of time.

So, then, what was the significance of hers?

She had asked Marcel once, but that of course had lead nowhere.

Still with no answer, she lumbered back inside the ruined church, glancing up at the beginning of a cloudy, gray morning before settling underneath the podium the same as she had done her first night and every night after.

She closed her eyes and thought of that voice in her head, the one which was cruel, ordering her to get up and march. March eyes straight ahead, facing front, until her feet were sore.

She knew they were different now.

Two separate entities occupying the same space within her fractured mind.

This one was a man's. It shouted at her, at them, she and her fellow soldiers, issuing a warning that if they did not advance then their superiors would do worse things to them than their enemies ever could. No, on the contrary, to be killed by the enemy would be a blessing. She remembered his voice over the hum and drops of the shells, over the bullets whizzing past her head, the screams of the dying all around begging and pleading for rescue never to come and that whistle blowing in her ear. With it came the sight, smell, and feeling of the ground, muddy, blood-drowned, and ridden with holes; the sweat on her brow, rolling down her cheek; the stink of gunpowder, emptied bowels. Of her dirty uniform, the rifle in her small hands grasped tight with knuckles white.

The second was a woman's, and the opposite, though Ymir had given up trying to put a face to either voice — her head still hurt something worse than horrible when she did — and she got out from under the podium yet again, making the decision like those who had left the elderly, the young, the desperate, and the sick behind to walk away from the ruined church and into the wilderness with a clever thought that, by retracing her steps, she might more easily make sense of the things which assaulted her mind; these scarlet flashes of pain, and her past which accompanied them, the boy, the voices, everything.

Not that they had ever much helped before, but nonetheless she had to do something, anything, to cure this affliction.

And, naturally, Marcel followed.



Her journey of self-discovery eventually led her to the entrance of another clearing within the giant forest.

A luminous twilight shone through the canopy of the trees. It cast silver pools of light upon the ground she now trod, highlighting the many shadows surrounding her.

It was under this illumination did she see them clearly: the monsters. That which she never wanted to be again, their eyes shut and bodies still, as they slumbered.

Rarely on these nightly walks she would encounter them in this exact state, balled up with their hands and knees tucked toward their chest, but not once had she dared do anything other than observe them from afar. This time, though, wishing her want to come true, that the voice would speak again, did she approach one of them.

The roar in her heart quieted. She thought then of her own ugliness, of what she had been and still was, deep down, when the voice in her head abruptly changed to that of the other, the woman's, softly telling her to put her hand upon it, but not why; only that anything might happen, or nothing at all. The other option being to stay her hand, leave this place, and never learn what she wanted most. But having not heard it in however long, she held out her hand while she told herself that, as before, as always, there was not much of a choice and muttered aloud just how mad she had actually became with Marcel beside her watching intently.

Ymir touched its skin, leathery and warm, and kept it there, waiting for something to happen. Anything, or nothing at all.

She waited.

And waited.

Until, at last, she saw something: a light. A pale orange light outside her peripheral vision, and her head turned so her eyes could take in the full view: a line of wire at the edge of the grove, half-concealed in the forest's dark and half-revealed in the moon's light. Twisted, haphazard, barbs of razor-sharp, skin-sticking steel wires, and she peered closer, seeing that every single one of them were trampled, their frames flattened against the earth as faint flickering flames smoldered just beyond identified by thin trails of smoke.

She took a hesitant step toward the wires, careful not to remove her hand from the flesh of the monster it was against, when there was a hum in the air which turned the quiet in her heart dead silent, and she stopped, frozen still. The sound had come from the flames, deeper in the forest. Deeper in the dark.

She waited.

For anything, or nothing at all.

The hum became louder, and more intense, and with it, footsteps; sloshing heavy beats upon the ground. Each footstep fell with a distinct purpose, a harrowing, and impetus rhythm, toward her.

Her silent heart sank down into the depths of her gut, her insides swimming around as she fought to keep it down. Her breath caught in her throat, and she drowned in that silence, the hum a roaring pain to her ears, the footsteps so close she could hear the jostle of bodies, side by side, and the rattle of weapons, rifles pressed against their shoulders.

Deathly afraid, she dared pull her hand from the monster though the hum was still there.

The footsteps were still there.

Getting closer, and closer, and closer still, she looked over, but Marcel had vanished along with the forest; she now left staring at not the thick, endlessly high canopy of giant trees but a clear blue sky full of large, round-shaped floating objects peppered by clouds of smoke. And the monsters, yes, they were still there, only they were awake, skinless and steaming crimson towers of muscle and bone and tremendous in their hideousness. They were now rumbling across a vast empty scarred land. Then, she looked down at herself, to the rifle in her small, shaking hands, and her dirty, mud-covered, blood-smeared uniform, again; the bodies all around, ridden with red; broken, puckered children dressed in tattered motley like her own, festering with worms and maggots and torn apart by hungering beasts and all manner of other telling signs of prolonged death and decay. Half-bodies, half-skeletons, limbs and torsos and heads sunk into the earth, sodden and soaking in scarlet muddy swamps and puddles and craters of sickly brown and green.

It was the closing of her terrible first day of combat and start of the next, straight through the night to the dawn after.

And ducking her helmeted head as a hammering of artillery burst above her head, a salvo aimed at the Titans so grand it turned the sky black, she was thrown from their shock wave and found herself sprawled on the ground, pulled back into the mud and the blood and the stench of that battlefield she knew well. Here she sank, the battlefield a muffled quake to her shell-shocked ears, before a hand reached down and saved her, only to push her once more into the fray.

It was the man behind the cruelty, her commanding officer, but before she could get a look at him the shadows beyond the wires became the lines of human shapes, and she was ordered to aim the rifle and instinctively she obeyed. She raised the rifle, a natural extension of her body, expertly, and fired at them, and reloaded, and fired, and reloaded, and fired, until it clicked. Until her rounds were spent and then the smoke cleared and she saw even more bodies littering the ground.

Approaching one, fresh with wounds, face down in the mud, she turned it over with the butt of her rifle, and her eyes widened. Her mouth opened, and she heard something above her, its shadow looming, an enormous hand reaching down, and she screamed, cowering when something hit it, sending it reeling back, steaming. In its place was a woman with a joyous smile and beckoning hand, juxtaposed by fresh corpses torched black and being tossed in with so many others piled high in a mass grave as the scene shifted and strewn all around her were charred bodies, what was left of their rotten, maggot-ridden flesh hanging off their blackened bones, wrapped in decaying uniforms blue or gray or tan now soiled red.

Ymir instinctively backed away.

A dread overtook her because, yes, there was power in a name, and she did not want to even think what this woman's possibly might be. Even as a memory, Ymir knew immediately, instinctively, that she was dangerous. How vile she was, beneath that voice. Only, just the same as she surmised the things previously unknown and questioned by her would be revealed, the words, phrases, and symbols of her past, through these fragmented and fractured memories too would she remember that woman's — and the man's — name, like her own, the boy's, and thus more about her past and put it to rest and her mind at ease. So, she swallowed her fear and stepped forward. She shook like a wet and wounded dog with its tail between its legs.

The woman opened her heart to her, and Ymir fell into her arms and buried her face into her breasts. Caring and kind, the woman stroked her hair and whispered to her, telling her that everything was going to be alright. That there was nothing to be afraid of. Though, that was a lie. No amount of comforting embrace or soothing tone would hide the blood thirst behind the woman's words — that hunger, hidden underneath the mask of an angel skinned alive, of the devil disguised.

She was the battlefield. Yes, this woman was the nightmare. Its source.

But, if Ymir wanted to know her purpose for being reborn, she would have to accept the woman. Brave the nightmare. Traverse the battlefield. Wrestle the beast. Strike down the devil and emerge victorious upon the other side.

She looked up into that face, so very kind.

She smiled, said okay, before like an infant in her mother's womb, now a child vying for her mother's love.

And that was when the façade ended.

The woman's angelic face melted away, taking her left eye along with it, exposing the lidless socket. Her smile became a scowl, the back row of her teeth peeking through the gaping hole of shrapnel-mangled tissue of her upper cheek on that same side. Then, her everything disintegrated and slipped through her fingertips.

It was like sand.

Ymir moved her hands toward her chest, and fell to her knees, and then curled up on the spot where the woman had just been.

At the end of that second day, surrounded by the many fallen from the past forty-eight hours, did the surviving soldiers chant amidst their victory, and it was then that Ymir unwillingly learned the woman's name.

Hail, Helos!

Hail, Helos!

Hail, Helos!



The harsh light of the late morning blinded her when she sat up. Hands resting in her lap, head down, Ymir wiped crimson spittle from her mouth and hastily looked around. Those things, the monsters — no, these Titans — failed to notice her presence and since moved on.

She stood up, yawned, stretched, and then made her way back to the ruined church and to the statues. She stopped to look at them, remembering what they were now.

Angels.

They were called angels.

She spun around to the rest of the place behind her, then let out a tiny laugh and gave none of it a second thought as she walked outside into the waking world, one step closer to her past.

A new world.

A different world.

And it was time to find her place in it.

 

[Historia]

7
​

Thorpe sat near the edge of Wall Sheena, close to the outlying district of Yarckel, though not so close where the journey between them was without difficulty. To remedy this, excluding a reliance on the river which ran through Yarckel — as all of the villages were and would be idiots not to — the people of Thorpe had long ago taken it upon themselves to be almost entirely self-sufficient.

Starting from the forest which bordered Isolde's farm and stretched over a vast distance that Historia was still trying to wrap her head around, everyone not prosperous enough to own a lived in small, single-story wooden homes in a wide circle with their floors lightly covered in hay or grass. Near this ring were longhouses. Kept inside these longhouses were the livestock when not allowed to graze, separated in pens and stalls by size and type. Next to them were tall, cylindrical looking structures with pointed, upside down spinning tops, like the toys. From her reading, they were called silos, and it was in here where all the grains were stored, sectioned off from the rest of the village due to their importance by walls and guarded by members of the Military Police Brigade in short, rotating shifts. By contrast, in long, rotating shifts, the longhouses and the fields the grains were grown were maintained and worked by the villagers of Thorpe in a very efficient system, or at least it seemed, to her eyes; children, including herself, cared for the livestock, adults cultivated the fields, and the elderly insured the formers behaved.

This system resulted in the gradual development of a tight-knit community that kept stress low, production steady, and offered a bit of reprieve from the arduous tasks required by the local official who presided over it. This local official, who lived in Yarckel and primarily stayed there, let the village run itself provided they turned a profit most every season. For this purpose he'd appointed a village council, seated by the three with the most fertile land in vicinity; of which Isolde was one. Her farm and the other two formed a circuit around the village. Fields upon fields of crops. The fields she'd looked out on after leaving the orphanage in fact been owned by one of these three, but which Historia wasn't rushing to find out, just thankful that no news had surfaced of a missing carriage or its driver still. Considering the scope of the village's daily doings, its comings and goings throughout the territories seeing the departure and arrival of hundreds if not thousands of people every week, there wasn't a doubt in Historia's mind that the carriage and the carriage driver's body had been found, but, again, she wasn't about to ask Isolde about it and would rather let sleeping dogs lie as she labored alongside the rest of the children, sunrise to sunset, oblivious.

And of labor, it'd been a real struggle for her to adjust after her time on the ranch where the servants did every task down to the absolutely mundane in the beginning, but, now, she was starting to grow accustomed to it, and was also learning the perspective of the average farmer and just how massive an effort it was to feed the people within the walls that, when she overheard Isolde bemoan a decision by this local official to increase productivity, the severity of their situation came into focus immediately.

Thorpe's sole existence was providing a relatively safe environment for the raising and shipping of pigs, chickens, cows, and goats and the production and provision of grains, stalks of wheat, barley, and others she hadn't been familiar though would in due time, with only the fattest and well harvested hauled off to the Interior, where they were further processed foremost for those citizens within Mitras, the royal capital, then the leftovers distributed to everyone else in Wall Sheena, and last — and certainly the least of the royal government's concern — whatever remained given to the residents in the Underground, all but forgotten by those living above.

Before the fall of Wall Maria, it was one of several villages that served Wall Sheena exclusively. But since its very recent fall, resources — which were already scarce to begin with — were being stretched so thin now with two walls forced to support what survived of the three, and, if you asked around, had already been somewhat before, that with so many "extra" mouths to feed, Isolde said it was an inevitability the royal government would take drastic measures; that they would doubtless send a number of the refugees from Maria's fall somewhere else. Exile them. Throw them to the Titans so as not having to think crucially about their aforementioned limited resources dwindling down to nothing in less than a year forward. Might be they started this ploy already since the news of Quinta became widespread, overshadowing any other gossip. In other words, opposed to formulating a solution beneficial to everyone within the walls, the royal government was once again choosing to sacrifice the impoverished to appease the affluent.

This also meant that Thorpe and these other villages were going to be working twice as fast, and producing twice as much, to meet the needs of the "people". This being on top of trying to keep themselves sustained, it was quite the struggle, and one thing was clear if the dilemma wasn't relieved soon: the village of Thorpe would have to seek outside assistance to save an ample supply before winter came around again. Which meant either the surrounding villages within Wall Rose banding together to create a network by which to communicate more efficiently, petitioning to the royal government, or waiting for the Scouting Legion to help.

The first option was currently being set in motion, with Isolde and the other two farm owners being heavily involved alongside Thorpe's village leader, a stern man by the name of Walter who possessed the biggest arms Historia had ever seen, with an equally impressive mane of hair and beard, while the second was a waste of time for their cries like those of the refugees would irrefutably fall on deaf ears stuffed full of bribes, and the third couldn't spare a single soldier as they'd split themselves between aiding all those other villages within the walls suffering worse than Thorpe and battling the Titans flooding into Maria with less resources and manpower than the other branches combined spread even thinner across the territories. Rumor was that their circumstances were so dire that they were being forced to use their own dead members, even if those soldiers were nothing but ash like Isolde fretted her daughter might be. Every soldier in the Scouting Legion served for life, it was in their vows, and if these rumors were true, ashes were not exempt. They'd be cultivated to help heal wounds and fertilize the earth, if need be. Therefore the Scouts was out of the question. Nor could they call upon the Garrison, their hands being tied dealing with refugees. And the Military Police only cared for those in the Inner Districts and Mitras. Thus it could be surmised they were on their own for the foreseeable future — unless they banded together with the neighboring villages.

Historia, having digested all this information — everything she saw, everyone she encountered — in addition to the plethora of knowledge in the old woman's study and hungering for more, was getting her bandage replaced during a break from one of these strenuous days' normal events in the old woman's kitchen.

"It's healin' well," Isolde said, peeking underneath the grimy bandage on her hand before carefully unwrapping it to fall in the bucket at her feet. There was a visible dark pink and white-edged gash in the center of her palm, and Historia winced when Isolde wet it in alcohol. "But'll leave a scar alright."

Each sting of pain she felt while Isolde meticulously cleaned it was like another slash at his throat until she was staring at his lifeless body on the dirt road, eyes wide and mouth agape, gazing back up in shock and surprise by the time the new bandage was on.

She rubbed her wrist as she brought her scarred hand closer toward her chest, and wondered how long she should continue to stay here.

The fall of Maria was still fresh in many peoples' minds. The day that red, huge, skinless Titan peered over the Wall, where it'd stared down at the residents of Shiganshina right before the outer gate exploded inward and promptly vanished as if were mere illusion — though there were those who swore otherwise. And also on that day, of the one that broke through the inner gate into the territory of Wall Maria itself, which cannons had no effect on, and spewed fire from its mouth. Then, the day after, with the plight of Quinta, sister district to Shiganshina that was surrounded during their evacuation, those within its gates barely managing to close it in time before a similar fate befell them, as well. Subsequent whispers of the aforementioned government plot, a last resort, that villages such as Thorpe were being pushed to prevent by those in royal government, their royal council, the Assembly, with their heads screwed straight. And eventually, they would find her, too. They would silence the truth about her family, about her father, the stories he raved and ranted and died believing were real.

Perhaps they were already on their way. Only just… taking their merry time. Savoring the hunt the same as she satisfied herself in killing the carriage driver and the death of her mother.

Historia looked up from her hand. She'd been so long in her thoughts she hadn't realized the time, watching Isolde prepare their late evening meal.

She was a tough old woman, not as old as she looked, years worth of hardship having taken its toll, and since becoming a part of her world three weeks ago to the day after she first stole her way in, had immediately put her to work around her farm.

Being farther out in the territory than the village, instead of being kept in longhouses in stalls and pens there was an actual stables for the horses, fenced muddy pits for the pigs, fields of grass for the sheep, and so on. As such it was a big responsibility to be on the alert for wolves, the chief predator in the territory — though on occasion bears and badgers and foxes were spotted, too — but also setting down different crops like corn and potatoes, and producing ricks of wood from the bordering forest and stacks from the vast abundance of wheat, barley, and rye in the fields.

The work seemed far too immense for one person alone.

But, according to those in the village, excluding the help she occasionally got from the village children whose families were indebted to her for some reason or another, and those individuals who simply wanted to help, Isolde managed just fine by herself until she or Achi came along. Given the sheer size of the farm, Historia wasn't convinced she believed this, but then again she'd never been on a real farm until recently, and wasn't about to go about asking prying questions, drawing unwanted attention to herself. But, if there was one thing she was certain of, it was when Isolde wanted your help, it was in your best interest to oblige. Nothing going on within the village escaped her eyes, and on more than one occasion Historia had been caught loitering, hidden in some corner of the farm while the others worked. A habit that had its consequences, for while she wasn't beaten, the bruises and sores which regularly covered her body, dirt and sweat her clothing, and tiredness in her eyes from the extra work she received was recompense enough for her never to do it again. Or at least not so blatantly, anyway. Isolde had likely caught on to that, as well, and she wondered why she said nothing of it, but, perhaps, as she loocked back down at her hand, well, in the larger scheme of things it wasn't as important.

And, to think it was already a common thing for her, working and tolling and slaving away like the rest of them in fewer than a month's time…

Except, unlike before, when other people would look at her, they saw a delicate creature taken in by a lonely mother. Their stares, their whispering, their accusations and assumptions. They wouldn't go away. Things had changed, but not for the better, merely exchanging one for the other, and at times it honestly felt like nothing ever truly would.

Historia hated that word: nothing.

She'd never escape it no matter which way she turned.

Catching a glimpse of a mouse as it scurried back into its hole in the wall, she had the profound thought of whether she one of these mice that scurried along the floor, or one of the hawks that circled outside in the skies above, waiting for them out in the open to snatch them up. Or was she the sheep grazing in the fields, or the wolf stalking it? Was she something to be used, like her mother and father before her? Or something to be cherished, like Isolde always reminded her?

While she was learning a great deal in her time here — most notably the significance of herbs and medicine — from Isolde, a relatively peaceful existence mending the locals' various cuts and scrapes was unacceptable.

Her hand closed into a fist. It hurt.

Until she proved her mother's words wrong she was still nothing.

She was still worthless.



Night approached swiftly, and Historia was finishing up in Isolde's study when she chanced upon a book tucked away in a crevice, well-hidden and well-worn.

Isolde's study was one of the first things Historia had been introduced to on the farm.

After her first attempts at lying low failed, in striking a deal with the old woman for the extra work, she had been given free reign of it so long as she also kept it well-maintained, and, as far as rewards went, it was well worth that extra work.

Through the books in the study, she knew better all the things Isolde taught her about medicine, herbs, ointments, and ailments and the mending of those cuts and scrapes. The truth and technique behind them. One only needed pluck one book and read its cover to know this old woman's collection was too erudite for a simple farmer.

While it was suspicious for an old woman who spent the majority of her time instructing others in how to properly rack a field, the fact she'd a serious study that smelled of moldy paper and dry ink was a welcome, if not entirely unexpected, surprise and certainly whatever was contained in this book would offer no difference nor disappointment, but in her excitement Historia yielded any previous suspicions yet again in favor of consuming as much information as her heart desired.

To think there was one she overlooked was a delight because she previously thought she read every single one of them cover to cover at least thrice already and was hungering for something new.

Taking it gently in her hands as others her age might handle a babe, it'd been sitting there for quite some time. She blew on the front and wiped the dust off and opened to its first page, seeing it blank, then began to leaf through the next several pages expecting it to be full of diagrams and instructions related to medicine and bodily functions like the rest.

Upon a first look it seemed exactly that: just another in-depth examination of the body, inside and out, detailing everything from skin to muscle to bone save for one distinct problem: it was in a text she was incapable of reading.

While she could decipher that names were given to each part examined, what appeared to be with a brief description or two of relation to the specimen itself, there were also strange measurements and weights, unorthodox comparisons and differences; a wall of detailed explanations about something that looked like an intricate, connected root with its stem at the head which blocked her progress in even beginning to comprehend what they actually were. It was a size and body of work much more advanced than anyone within the walls excluding what physicians in Mitras might be capable of understanding, let alone using, and only until she attempted to sound out some of what was written on the pages that the realization dawned on her: these were just like her father's ramblings only in written form!

She was sure of it.

These words, these symbols, this… language … Historia had heard it before.

Lost in his stories about how the royal government had done their family wrong, she remembered listening to her father's often incoherent mumblings to himself using words and phrases nobody understood. To most, the whines of a fallen lord, once noble and now a beggar, holding onto the scrapes of the lustrous life he previously lived, but, to a few, to her, he'd been trying to convey something meaningful. Something unspoken, not to be uttered openly. Something damning, and horrible. Something that sent those men to murder him, his wife, and have her taken away, thinking of that man in black with the wide hat who personally carried out the deed.

And if she wanted to know whether his stories were real or ramblings, she'd have to seek them out. Learn more than just the words on a page and uncover the truth behind her father's — her family's — descent in obscurity under the watchful eyes of the royal government and nearly severed forever in the immediate aftermath of Wall Maria's fall.

Historia closed the book and put it back where it lay, knowing better than to ask about it for the old woman seemed like the kind of person to hold many secrets herself and there was no idea how she might react. The fact her father's delirium was a lie was enough. The fact she still lived, was enough. Thus, her next course of action would be to find a way to Mitras. Records, reports, registries, documents, notes; anything that might help her discover more about her family's history. About the Reiss noble bloodline. Only, they knew her face. Showing it in the royal capital would be reckless and her father hadn't died to see the last of his legacy willingly give herself to the wolves. No, she'd have to become that wolf, and claw her enemies to shreds. Cut out their throats like they did her mother's. Sink her teeth into the truth, and not let go. She already had blood on her hands, after all.

But not as she was. Not alone. Much to her dismay.

She dare not rely on the Military Police to help her. They would be on the lookout for her. Not the Garrison either, who this far into the walls were a lax bunch of drunkards, quicker to sell her out for their next mug than help her. But, the soldiers in the Scouting Legion, the ones the village would've first turned to for aid, they were people to be proud of. People worth value; fighting for what they believed and sacrificing themselves for what humanity might accomplish in beating the Titans once and for all.

And it was then she remembered: Isolde's daughter.

Her only daughter.

Her real daughter.

The old woman spoke a lot about her; about her being a soldier in the military and one of the protectors of humanity. A member of the Scouting Legion, the only branch of the military to extend their arms outside the walls and face humanity's greatest threat head-on. Said that, in the end, Riecka and the others were the only thing between them and those things many in the Interior believed as fairytale. Their saviors, who put their lives on the line for a cause greater than themselves, and their martyrs, who died for that very same cause in humanity's struggle to survive against the Titans. Those things, those monsters which breached Wall Maria and its lands within. Two of them, the Colossus Titan and Armored Titan — as they were officially named by the royal government — being the ones personally to blame. Those two, specifically, needed to be dealt with before they breached Wall Rose, too, and Sheena after, and that the military's soldiers would stop them. That the Scouts would stop them. That they would eventually take back Wall Maria and drive the Titans out.

Historia stared at her feet, the book back in its corner, and whispered her father's words beneath her breath, adding to it.

From here on, your name is Krista Lenz, a soldier of humanity.

A savior.

A martyr.

A wolf.

A person worth value.

Special.

Greater than nothing.

And she knew where she needed to go next.

 

[Historia]

8​

Up until these past weeks, Mathias had only ever seen a Titan in person once, many years ago by way of an associate of his father's granting them restricted access to the top of Wall Maria. It was there he'd first laid his eyes upon one in awe, bounding over that vast emptiness, barely visible. Like a dark splotchy stain on a lush green fabric; he still too young and the distance too far to see it for what it truly was and, now, sitting with his knees against his chest, he sorely wanted to go back to that time. A time when his dreams of them were child's imagination instead of being filled with these monstrous faces that weren't unlike his own. Nightmares that kept on, the one moment frozen in his brain of the Titan back at the village peeling the skin from its skull to reveal the ugly truth underneath that they were eerily human, after all.

He barely got enough sleep as it was, and it didn't help that they'd encountered their fifth just mere hours ago after having traveled off course in what Bernhardt had proclaimed was only to be a "short detour" that'd stretched over the past few days and finally reached its end this evening.

They'd gone down a break in the river a ways from the village, following the clearest path that was "supposed" to eventually lead them straight into Quinta with the utmost haste, free of needless sightseeing, when it was actually the pronounced trail of a Titan large enough to flatten these giant forests.

So here he was, sitting on his ass doing nothing but waiting and thinking of Rita and how much he regretted his current company while Bernhardt and Jarratt poked around the skeletal remains of this Titan that'd been so enormous as to have been visible from miles away but interested him less than the tiniest piece of treasure in his family's estate.

First spotted by Klaus keeping lookout atop a ridge lying on its side in the middle of the giant forest, a mountain of rotting flesh and blackening bones rising over the treetops, Mathias had strongly insisted they move past it though if anyone else in the group had shared his sentiments, any sense of urgency or of dread wasn't to be found among them as Bernhardt, with his mustache raised in childish excitement, made a speech about this being a "monumental, once in a lifetime opportunity" and Mathias had seriously wondered after why he bothered.

Even before the expedition had set off, their carefree, nonchalant attitude had been a stand out among the many volunteers and soldiers all pressed together, wagon to wagon, horse to horse, shoulder to shoulder, but, now, especially now, after the village, the argument, this still antagonizing wait when they should be in Quinta already, Mathias finally concluded they were the most bizarre group of criminals he'd ever met — and he hoped would be the only ones, for that matter.

And speaking of criminals, of outlaws and rogues, murderers, if Bernhardt could be believed, then Suzanne was one, too.

He shifted, feeling the weight of the shotgun pressed against his thigh.

It was such a small thing, Bernhardt's words, and yet they revealed so much and the implications were horrible when Suzanne's past life was taken into consideration, from what little she'd spoken of it.

An orphan, like Rita, the majority of her youth had been spent beneath Mitras in the Underground, and, given that Bernhardt was former Military Police, it was highly likely they'd crossed paths down there at some point in time. Hence his knowing of her, but, also, for him to have fallen so low as to be expelled from the best branch in the military he must've been caught doing something particularly heinous no mere slap on the wrist could resolve. Murder, oh yes — Mathias had witnessed that first hand — but what if it was something worse? But could possibly be worse than murder? And though he was a wanted man, the law would never actually catch him because he was once one of them. He was the royal government, he was the people within the walls, and he damn well knew it.

So then, what did that mean about Suzanne?

Mathias shuddered.

"Hey, looks like the Boss found something," Nikki said beside him. "Wonder what it is?"

"Don't care," Klaus replied, not looking up from cleaning his rifle.

Before Mathias could busy himself doing anything else, too, Nikki bent down and hit him on the shoulder.

"Come on, let's go!"

Reluctantly getting to his feet, Mathias rubbed his shoulder and followed after her, trying to stay positive by saying to himself that "at least this was better than getting more sores on his behind".

Pinching his nose as he joined her at what he presumed was the Titan's leg, craning his neck to look at it, it must've been dead for some time because it smelled worse than awful. Blinking tears from his eyes, it'd been covered head to toe in so much muck and debris that it was no wonder it'd fooled everyone but Klaus.

Seeing past its bones, its flesh and organs had all but completely melted away and he touched its slimy remains that were like a bunch of giant, gnarled tree trunks, toppled over during a heavy storm.

He gagged, but Nikki didn't seem ill in the slightest, and turned to face him with a grin, asking if he wanted to race her to the top.

But, once again, she answered for him by punching him in the chest. Hard and precise, right where it hurt the most: on the badge given to all volunteers still pinned to his shirt.

The pin pricked through the skin near his nipple and he winced as she started climbing, but he couldn't turn back lest he admit he was a coward like Klaus had accused him of being. So, with little choice, he continued to follow because if he'd admit to anything, it was that he much preferred her to Klaus, given the option, and hurried to catch up as he could hardly comprehend how they were the same age, careful as he bellied higher, thoughts going back to their first "official" meeting — as Bernhardt had so cheerily put it with a mug of ale raised aloft — in a stuffy, cramped room, closed off from the rest of the bar in the heart of Fuerth where the clamor dropped away.

He remembered being squished awkwardly between Klaus and her and how she'd winked at him behind the rim of her own mug, eying like his father might a profitable business venture.

Out of Bernhardt's outlaws, she was described by Bernhardt as the "rose among the weeds". The only one to share about her previous profession before they'd set off that very next morning as a promising apprentice to a renowned clock builder, watch maker, and occasional locksmith, she'd gotten caught breaking into a nobleman's safe instead of fixing it like she was supposed to; where it was later found that she'd been doing the same to other clients and peddling their valuables off on the black market of which Bernhardt had numerous acquaintances and would've lost her hands if not for his timely intervention. A tale which the old soldier had gladly given his own spin on, adding unneeded embellishment to hers and resisting arrest on top of thievery and exploitation to her record and doubtless just a drop in a bucket in comparison with his nefarious exploits alongside the "little anecdote" that she was unwed and looking to settle down with someone special.

Which made Mathias wonder. Something he was doing a lot more of, lately.

Not about Nikki, oh hell no, and he grew hot in the face at such a thought coming to his mind when he already had Rita, but, Bernhardt.

Nearly five decades worth of cheating the royal government and the people within the walls, with all the Underground connections he could use even after his expulsion, and yet a man of Bernhardt's status chose to enlist the help of Nikki, a mere girl of eighteen, ant to mention Klaus and Jarratt. Odd, to say the least, but, it was a question that could wait and was unimportant until Quinta. Making sure Rita was safe, she and her parents, was his sole priority right now, as his eyes focused on the rods dangling from Nikki's belt.

And, yes, only the rods.

She was already moving from the Titan's pelvis to the bottom of its spine, digging her stolen boots into one of the fins that jutted out and was once a vertebrae, balancing herself steady before she walked across its length and was at the end of the rib cage by the time he managed to reach the same fin.

The two of them standing there, the moon low and first rays of sunlight peeking over the horizon, he imagined Rita in her place, the two of them on that stony bridge two years ago, the day of her graduation celebration and her first bodyguard duty: walking him home. Much to his chagrin. But, having lost three to one on the matter, he'd decided to use the opportunity to convey his feelings for her into words. Or, rather, biting back his tongue in saying that the life of a soldier was a waste for someone as intelligent as her, fumbling on what he actually meant to say, stealing a look at her profile instead as she thumbed the hilt of one of the blades at her hip anxiously, congratulating her for the decision to join their struggle against the Titans while secretly wishing she'd become a herbalist like her father.

Why, it's love, Mathias.

And even though his own father would've greatly disapproved for she lacked the refined looks of girls from the privileged families he often paraded around him there'd been a definite beauty in her rustic features and fresh vitality. More than anyone else Mathias had known then or now. Stridently individual and amazingly strong and furnished with an unshakable sense of right and wrong, that was the Rita he knew. The girl he claimed to love. He'd wanted to marry her; nobody else would do.

Yes, he imagined her, standing here, right here, beside him again on the bridge and smiled, once more wanting to say those words he felt swelling in his heart, for real this time, until he was swiftly brought back to the present by Nikki, whose face materialized above him.

"What're you spacing out for?"

He blinked, staring at her outstretched hand. She was leaning over the side of one of the Titan's rib bones, straddling it as if she were riding a horse.

"N-n-nothing!"

Accepting it hastily, she pulled him up.

She was really close, their bodies nearly touching. Her wintry breath on his face, he flustered upon staring into her eyes as his own wandered down to her chest until he turned away.

"Sorry."

"What for?" She tilted her head in… confusion? Amusement? "Figured you could use a lift."

"T-thank you…" To think he managed to still lack experience on the most basic things, like talking to girls, since then. How could he ever hope to marry Rita if he couldn't even dissuade this girl from teasing him?

"Don't mention it!" she replied, thwacking him upside the head.

Sighing as she wasted no time in hopping across its rib cage in impressive leaps and bounds, Nikki was no Rita, that he was sure of. And, caressing the spot her abuse was undoubted to leave red, her punches were starting to hurt worse.



"Look what we have here, lad and lass!" Bernhardt exclaimed upon their arrival right beneath the head, or skull, in this case, of the dead Titan.

In his large hands was a stick of some sort, and he passed it to Nikki, who made a gesture using it like a toothpick — which looked utterly ridiculous given its size — but earned a jolly laugh from the old soldier, before she tossed it Mathias' way.

Catching it with a loud grunt, he noticed grooves at one end and what looked to have been something fastened to it, like a stone.

In response, as if to confirm his suspicion, Jarratt held up a chipped spearhead and Bernhardt nodded. How long had it taken him to find that?

"It appears we aren't alone out here, lad."

Looking around, but not down, for it made him queasy how close to the edge and a drop into the murk below they all were, Mathias lowered the broken shaft of the spear. "Who could…" his voice trailed off. Who could be crazy enough to be out here? he was about to say, but, well, they was out here, too.

"Whoever it is, they know how to tackle a Titan," Jarratt said, now in possession of it, putting the pieces together in an amateur tinkerer's wonderment. A humble butcher before becoming a part of Bernhardt's gang, they had discovered this back at the village, shortly before their run-in and flight from that horror of a Titan.

"To fell a Titan with nothing but a tool used for skewering deer and boar! A feat unheard of and should be sung throughout the land! Best we not linger here any longer, in any case." For the second time, Bernhardt dropped his usual cadence. "We should hurry on, quickly."



When they were safely away, far away, from the Titan's corpse, only then was it that Bernhardt went back to his usual self again.

They were in yet another forest of giant trees, letting the horses rest. The sun was now low in the sky. Above their heads was many-layered foliage, the highest level of which seemed to extend into the stars themselves, further dimming the sun's already waning light so its reddish glow hardly touched the ground.

"Only a couple hours now, lad!" Bernhardt said, having gotten down from his horse, but with his height and size appeared to still be in the saddle. He finished stretching and turned to admire his horse. "Beautiful, isn't he? Ah! What's that look for, lad! We're almost there! No more sidetracking for all my curiosities are sated!"

Oh, how he hoped so. Mathias gazed up at the trees, convincing himself could see Wall Maria if he squinted hard enough, whereupon Klaus's mocking tone and cold words came back to pester him and so close to his goal that perhaps it was true that he did indeed lack the nerve. That perhaps he'd been naive to turn his back on the royal government, to forgo all dependence on his father, his trust in Suzanne, to try and survive in a world he was kept safe from for all his life, in the company of these villains, relying on them to get him where he desperately wanted despite vowing to rely on his own wit and grit to save Rita instead, what they would do to him if he was lying, if nothing was there, displaced, ransacked, taken away… Perhaps he'd been naive, but, regardless… He…

The matter-of-fact way Bernhardt killed the soldier, then fired the anchor at the Titan. The look on his face, detached somehow from the events taking place… Was that it? Was that the look of someone who had the nerve? Was that how Mathias had to be? The slain soldier had done no wrong, and yet…

His eyes went down to his shoes, searching for an answer he was unable to find. An explanation as to why, even though the soldier had been killed, murdered in cold blood, that he wasn't upset as he should be. His hands curled into fists at his side. His blood began to boil, putting fire in his belly, and almost as if sensing his mounting unrest, the realization he came to, deep down in his heart, Bernhardt strode toward him, stepping over fallen leaves and undergrowth like a bear. He pawed him on the shoulder with a dark nature behind his otherwise unassumingly bright blue eyes.

"We can only care about so many people in our lives, lad! Have faith! We'll make it in time."

Mathias shrugged off his touch. They could've been there by now if not for the old soldier's whims that changed on the drop of a coin and made him uneasy — and another reason why they'd no logical reason to have even stopped — and as soon as they were and their deal was done he wanted nothing more than to part ways.

Lest he only have murderers to talk to.

Or appallingly, somehow become one himself.

 

[Historia]

9​

Their work tending to the wants and woes of the remaining peoples of Quinta had taken their toll on Rita.

The challenge of maintaining the status quo was much more arduous that she could ever have anticipated.

Even Amanda's witty morning quips, much like her patience, with the sheer amount of ink, pencils, and paper she went through, had quickly fizzled to thinly concealed contempt when the throng of people which had stretched well out into the plaza had shown no signs of dissipating, that first day, and while against reason Rita enjoyed witnessing her mounting frustrations everyday hence, as the pages she wrote were of mostly mundane, trivial concerns, it upset her personally that she could only solve them in promises and well-wishes. The sight of Amanda under actual distress for once in their history together was a small comfort in that regard, and also horrible, it went without saying, and it further troubled her that she was derive solace from the fact her best friend was one snapped writing utensil away from strangling the next citizen who complained about something outside of their power to fix, but thankfully Amanda continued to serve as her record keeper per request and not an order despite this — not that this stopped her from coming and going when she pleased afterwards, of course — and, remembering her favoritism of action over words, when Rita found herself letting go of her breath after one particular incident, she also knew what a relief it was that Amanda always wanted her to go to the top of the wall for some fresh air afterwards rather than a nightly patrol.

With Nicholas, who was given the additional duty of announcing the beginning of the day's session, then letting the civilians in, their entrances and their departures, names and titles all, one by one or two if together and rarely greater than three because the mayor's office was surprisingly smaller than it first appeared with its needless furnishings removed, on door, and Duccio, who once again proved his talent for leadership by keeping affairs civil, working down in the plaza with his fellow 103th trainees to calm the crowds, reassuring them that they were doing the very best they could given their present circumstances — the truth being one misstep away from everything collapsing again even if she had found notes to help her in the endeavor — events were stabilizing quite smoothly when weighted against that awful first week and the notion that such a monumental task was previously thought impossible all things considered.

It was still going to be difficult, but at least they were off to a better start than any naysayers believed; chief among them being herself.

And so it was Rita thought, to keep her own spirits up, until, gradually, the throng had became a steady stream with no sign of trickling down in those following weeks and today was the day those spirits twisted into something grotesque by the end and, still at her desk, Rita felt as if she'd aged ten years when it'd only been less than a month thus far.

She didn't know how much more she could take of this back and forth, with little rest between, in listening to, judging, and trying her utmost to resolve the unresolvable problems of Quinta's surviving populace. She often found herself at times wanting to commit solely to her mother's advice of simply smiling and nodding and giving the false impression that the civilians' complaints were being heard, but then she'd be no better than the mayor who ran from his responsibilities rather than face them. While she certainly didn't ask to be the acting commander, she still felt her duty was to the people, and wasn't about to abandon them yet.

Though, looking out at the night sky it was dark. Blackest she'd ever seen it: the telltale sign it was going to rain, and she groaned over the inevitable forecast of the reports of someone slipping on the cobblestones and cracking open their skull or if it thundered and roiled and the rain was heavy the added burglaries under their cover.

Calling in one of her three assistants, Thomas answered and she asked him to find the list of those soldiers currently off-duty, to triple the usual shifts tonight in preparation.

After he nodded his understanding and was gone, she pinched her brow, and squinted, coming away with a smudge of ink and sweat. She was suddenly nauseous, but she wasn't sick. No, this was something else; a feeling not unlike the one she experienced when she saw Amanda's many wounds or lines of aggravation across her forehead, of her optimism slowly turning into resentment and disparity. Almost as if she'd a knot in her stomach that kept entangling itself, and it was becoming harder and harder for her to untangle it as her thoughts became more twisted in kind.

It took everything within her in that moment not to flop back down in the stiff little chair she replaced the mayor's with, almost regretting her decision to get rid of it, as she instead keep herself upright on shaken feet, both hands atop her desk, when Amanda threw the door open unannounced.

Only half-hearing what Amanda was saying as she pulled up a chair from the corner, flipped it backwards, and sat down with her arms crossed atop, Rita fought an urge to throw up as the other girl waved a hand about, making comment about her still being holed in up here, doing work, opposed to literally anything else — such as relaxing up on the wall with her like every day previous. The chilling breeze this time of the year helped sooth the sting of the burns wherever her bare skin had came into contact with Titan's blood, and it was soon to be ending. The season was changing, and her wounds were painful and slow to heal; these were their last days to enjoy the cold while it lasted. Only, without having to look up, Rita could tell her best friend was already near fully recovered and it was just an excuse to spend time together. Time she rarely had anymore, and what small amount she did, she'd rather spend it sleeping.

She still did find it strange that Amanda was able to bounce back into shape no matter the injury and by the sound of her voice this phenomenon continued, but she was too busy using every last remaining drop of concentration to now attempt to gather up her multitude of papers, starting with those long dried, and other materials, to acknowledge this properly and chastise her for lying while so many others continued to suffer.

It was slow going, and by the time she finished, catching something Amanda said regarding the two shouting sisters they had dealt with earlier in the morning whom hurled insults back and forth without shame, firing spit into the air and catching them in the crossfire, she wiped her fingers and dabbed her face lightly with a cloth before tying the first bundle and handing it off. Naturally, Amanda paid little heed to delicacy and grabbed the bundle one handed, dropping it on the shelf behind her with a disconcerting thud.

Exasperating how they just cleaned it before she remembered that was two weeks ago, Rita was too close to the point of exhaustion to show her distaste in any other fashion than by angrily blinking, being reminded of it only caused her nausea to worsen as her thoughts drifted back to that incident in particular which had set the tone for the rest of it.

Although they'd borne no physical resemblance to each other, one short and chubby, the other tall and skinny, the fact that they were siblings had quickly became apparent; even to an only child like her.

Fighting with harsh words and bristled tongues and elbow jabs and crooked fingers and at one point coming to actual blows sure to leave bruises when Amanda had been too slow to act — whether on purpose or because the stress was weighing her down, too, Rita could only guess but assumed it to be the former — and having listened longer than she'd wanted to those sisters bicker and snap and roll their eyes after letting them go on for a time after, she'd finally intervened when the younger sister's voice trailed off in a lull, her eyes glossing over no doubt recounting a gruesome memory as her mind seemed to close itself off for the briefest of moments.

Amanda, meanwhile, after breaking them up the second time, had gone back to diligently jotting down everything being said, not seeing it nor much caring for their tale of anguish told in sobs and cries. Which meant yet another reprimand for her was required, she knew, but onto the list it went, never to be spoken of again, like the rest. Because she needed her.

Anyway, in short, the younger sister had been living with her father, while the older sister had married and moved away. Then, when the evacuation began, the younger left Quinta with her father, during which they were attacked by Titans, their wagon destroyed, and her — their — father killed, eaten alive. The younger sister had witnessed the entire thing, a Garrison soldier rescued her, barely making it back to Quinta with her life. The older sister, who blamed the younger for their father's death, and leaving them — "us", she put it, meaning the older sister, her husband, and their children — was poor and had sold off most of their belongings in the madness that day to try and purchase a wagon of their own; forced upon them because the younger sister refused to take them along. But then they might not had been having this very conversation. Nor was the younger sister fit to converse, still in some manner of shock about the ordeal. And, yet, here she was, locked in a fierce battle with her older sister who remained in Quinta over the ownership of their father's belongings that still resided at home.

She'd been both repelled and impressed in equal measure by their greed. And if she were someone driven by her emotions, might have also been compelled to side with the younger sister as the tears fell and her face crinkled, showing her ugliness under an otherwise beautiful, blemish-free complexion — perfection laying bare its cracks — though the situation hadn't been so clear-cut as it seemed.

The younger sister had, essentially, wanted compensation. Some material benefit to give meaning to the horror and desperation she experienced, or, perhaps, to fill the hole in her heart. It appeared she'd been single her entire life. Having devoted herself to her father, it was possible she'd never owned anything of value that she could truly say was hers, either. But the other, the older sister, was, in her own way, desperate too. So much that she could not even properly mourn her father's passing. Instead, she was willing to come to physical blows with her very own sister over his worldly possessions to buy back what they could of her own family's.

And while Rita could sympathize with both of their plights, she'd ultimately come to her decision: the whole of Quinta was still in crisis, and there was no time to waste spending all her time dealing with private matters.

Besides the need of necessities like food and water that were soaring because one of the first acts she declared was the preservation of their long-term stores leftover from the winter were to be off limits, and though it'd been less than a month since they were first trapped behind Quinta's walls, and though the looting had for the most part been halted, burglary and such was still on the rise. Subtler ways of getting what was wanted, craved, lusted. Reports were consistently arriving on her desk of several individuals who tried their hand at forcing their way into the storerooms at the inner gate, grappling with the guards she initially placed there. Duccio had suggested the posting of additional soldiers, which she'd immediately approved, while Amanda, on the other hand, suggested to keep their numbers the same, but arm them with rifles at all times, to dissuade would-be thieves, which she'd denied for the presence of firearms, loaded or otherwise, under the light of day would only serve to make the situation worse. Thus she'd had all firearms locked away, excluding for night duties atop the walls, and that was primarily for Titan sightings, and though she realized the sound decision was Duccio's, she couldn't stop herself from leaning more and more towards Amanda's way of thinking by the time the sisters had requested their audience.

As much as she wanted to help the people with their personal problems, her own duty did extend outside the district hall, and nothing would truly change if she continued to stay behind a desk. Nothing would change, if she sat around while everyone else did all the hard work.

So, she'd lied.

Letting the younger sister maintain all assets left behind by their father, she told them that their value would be assessed when her replacement arrived then divided evenly between the two of them once whomever it was did so. Until then, she would have the house and its belongings monitored.

In reality, she'd not the men to spare and by passing the real decision onto this non-existent official, one of those same who also raided the vaults and storehouses of the district hall during the evacuation and taken everything with them just as her mother suspected they would do and kept harping about, her father in solemn agreement, the rest was out of her hands, officially.

Thus the two sisters left without exchanging a glance, more or less satisfied with the outcome, and therein came the origin of her upset stomach. The nasty feeling that she'd betrayed the vow she swore to protect the people of Quinta, and how it actually wasn't one at all, and how content she was, in justifying this to herself, because it was all she'd cared to do, only noting that they looked more alike from behind, if anything.

And if Amanda had caught her in that lie, she didn't say or indicate otherwise. Not during, not after, not now. Nor did she bother to say goodbye, as she promptly made her exit because if she wasn't going to join her atop the walls then she might as well start on her patrols, eager to resume her previous duties regardless of her traumas and against Rita's wishes unspoken. She was still upset about their argument, wanting to leave rather than save what was left of the district. To abandon the people over themselves. Just the two of them. Because of a promise marred in blood and guts, one night and never spoken of again until then and was certain to be brought up in the future, so long as her stance didn't change.

It was then that Rita turned to the window, watching those dreary clouds, thumbing the handle of one of her blades as something wistful settled in her heart where something wishful had once been.

Because it was time to grow up and use her words.



The following day, Rita was marking all the reports that were the result of the weather.

A grand total of thirteen people had unfortunately lost their lives in the storm overnight.

Whether it was by their own hand or that of another, the heavy rains and intense lightning which first came with spring, it was thirteen too many for Rita's liking.

So, to combat this, she ordered everyone to keep within reasonable proximity of the district hall in the neighborhoods alongside the river nearer to the inner gate opposite the barracks and storerooms and to not stray too far from within a series of set designated areas, with one average single-story residence to be shared between individuals while families greater than four — of which there were unsurprisingly several — were housed in the two-stories so as not to separate them.

This was, ironically, in part to have them away from the Titans, as there were now more of them within the territory of Wall Maria than outside of it, rendering the original purpose of Quinta pointless, and also, in part, because of the weather itself. Fires sprang up and spread fast this time of year, according to a few of the older concerned civilians who had lived through past cycles and were keen to share their experiences, thus being by the river they could hopefully put out any of these fires more efficiently. The positioning also provided them with a means of food, water, and a general ease of mind while the Garrison dealt with the threat unabated. The only problem — that shouldn't have been, because at least they were alive, in her mind — was that the majority of these houses were of far lesser quality thanks to Mathias's father catering to the affluent, leading to what she could only describe as an undeserved sense of entitlement.

Many felt with the population halved, they were privy to certain freedoms, intent on occupying the richer estates in the noble's district where she'd chosen to house the Garrison and, under special circumstance, their immediate families, as it was closest to where the barracks, now being stripped and torn down to be used in building barricades and fortifications along Quinta's walls and inner gate, and storerooms, locked and under guard, was located.

While, yes, Mathias' father was a primary factor in this, favoring his much smaller portion of the district over the rest, the blame ultimately went to the royal government and their decision to unevenly distribute the necessary resources to bolster the districts not counting Wall Sheena, leading them to rely on their local officials and the generosity of the various surrounding villages within their territory more-so than they should need. This, in turn, led to less than ideal living conditions that apparently continued to persist, on top of the announcement of a new curfew she enacted this morning in an attempt to prevent anymore midnight tragedies like last night.

It was all a headache, and this time she was exhausted already even though the day had only just begun. With it, her mood would worsen still, and so, too, would her way of thinking, falling deeper into a depression as long as tensions stayed as they were, threatening to rise.



That night, Rita dreamed.

It was a dream she used to have regularly, but with everything happening everywhere all at once, this was the first time in a while.

In it, she stood motionless in the doorway to a room she didn't recognize. Sunlight streamed through the windows, but the room was eerily black. There was a table. Some chairs. Against the wall, the shadow of a person. A grown man. He was crouched down, huddled into a ball. Her vantage point was low, still a child, younger yet than when she and Mathias had first met.

Gently, she placed a hand on the man's back.

It lacked any warmth.

She came around to his front, and looked into his face which she'd definitely seen somewhere before only she failed to bring to mind, the person it belonged to. This man. As if the memory of him had candidly chosen to leave her.

The man cradled a wooden box in his arms, leaning on it — limp, perhaps even asleep — while on the floor next to his feet was a small vial about the size of her little finger, maybe a bit bigger. A few drops remained inside. A transparent liquid.

She shook him, but he didn't wake.

Deep was his love for the wooden box.

And standing there, staring at the man against the floor in the dark, Rita could smell the faint stench of decay...

 

[Historia]

10
​

Since leaving the church, the faint whispers from her life before glimpsed via the cadence of marching boots and war drums were becoming discernible as near complete paintings in her mind opposed to feverish palettes of dark and dreary color; albeit in piecemeal.

Chiefly of her first battle which had been fought long ago, yes, but also of two times where she was unable to place their happening neither before nor after it.

The first involved a bed, with that woman, Helos, standing over her and saying something as she stroked her hair, the room blacker than pitch; Ymir only knowing it to be Helos because of the necklace she wore: a misshapen crystal tied on the end of a string.

Woven into it had been a wide spectrum of colors, from frigid blues and glittering silvers to rampaging reds and blazing oranges, prosperous violets and scattered yellows, and many more, each one luminous as a star and each one brighter than the last, coalescing like the shining sun.

These majestic colors had seemed to shift with her words, her demeanor, and the rise and fall of her voice. One moment calm, like a beach, white-foamed waves come with the tide, receding to reveal dazzling gems and pearls from water's bottom, then gushing forth with horrors unfettered, back unto the battlefield once again as this beach was soaked in misery galore, until the flood receded and what settled upon the sands were the remains of those dead: blotchy skin, dried eyes, and gray tongues, pallid faces cracking crimson, gazing at nothing beyond their golden graves, before bursting, swathed in hues so gruesome she did not want to see them anymore, turning her head. All the while, Helos' expression changed from either dour or blissful, no in-between, not needing to be seen, only felt in her words. No sorrow, no pity, no regrets; just revelry in violent acts and worse outcomes.

Multiple times Ymir attempted to decipher what was being said to her, but the only thing that entrenched itself in her mind was a strong sense of revulsion. A revulsion of everything Helos was, everything she had been, and whatever Ymir had now become, herself.

The second involved her commander and a different woman than Helos, pacing up and down inspecting a lineup of uniformed young children. Her commander's face was largely obscured by the cap he kept pointed downwards casting shade, while the woman had silver hair tucked eccentrically between cloth threads an earthly brown color under a dark red crown of thorns. Both wore uniforms not dissimilar to the children they inspected, and though she had since come to learn the man had once been her commanding officer, this woman was still a mystery even after getting a full view of her face when passing from shade to sun.

Her dreams switched between the two frequently, brought upon by those blinding flashes of red. Piercing pains against her frontal lobe, bombarding her with frequent fragments, each night, every night, to the point where she gained little sleep for fear that simply shutting her eyes would induce another skull-splitting headache.

In each dream, out of all the other words spoken she could make out, one stuck with her: progenitor.

Emphasized by Helos' discomposing tales and her commander's whipping tongue, it was a word which held no meaning to her as she was, but must have been important at some point. Why else would it be so prevalent in her dreams? Regardless, it was just one part in a larger puzzle that she wanted nothing to do with. She just wanted them, these dreams, these nightmares, all of it, to stop; only in order for that to happen she had to learn more about the significance, if any, of her name and why she was forced into such a life of punishment, and who, or what, was responsible. She had to first reawaken the monster if she wanted to ever hope of overcoming it.

Only then could she rest.

Only then could she finally be free.

But until that time came, she was back to her original objective of finding people, shelter, a safe place to rest her head now that the ruined church was however far behind her.

She had to keep moving.

Still traveling through this same giant forest the ruined church was in, attempting to find the way out, Ymir had been surviving on scattered nuts fallen from trees and handfuls of berries from shrubbery and whatever leftover meat clung to the remains of animals killed by emerging predators or had suffered an otherwise unfortunate fate for, though she had spent some of her newfound freedom at the ruined church mimicking past practices and habits once routine, she still lacked a means to hunt them on her own, and, even if she did, while her strength had returned her lack of sleep made her off-balance, ready to keel over as it took all her concentration not to continuously stumble over the roots of these massive trees. She also had no new change of clothes in some time, coming across no villages or so much as a secluded hut, forced to either attempt to wash herself in whatever body of water large enough she could find, or go bare. With the countless swarms of insects and irritating, itchy undergrowth her decision on that had been made easily, except she still stripped nude to bathe when provided the chance at a branching stream or secluded brook or isolated lake.

And it was one day after she had been hurt badly that she discovered her skin steamed for the briefest of moments, sealing the wound as it never occurred, and, at first, this frightened her, until she thought to use it to her advantage; intentionally injuring herself to heat whatever body of water she wanted to dip her body in, letting the heat comfort her. It was not until she found a leech on her body shriveled and dead, stubbornly clinging to her skin in its very final moment upon resurfacing, its remains crumbling to ash when she touched it after, that she actually thought about the origin of this phenomenon, before she came to the conclusion that it had something to do with her blood. That perhaps her blood was toxic to any other living creature save herself, and thus she became extra cautious around the little forest creatures who curiously nuzzled up to her from then on for even her blood was cursed.

And, as it turned out, also held a potent odor, and the more she bled the more things were drawn to her scent. Mainly the wrong kinds of things, and, when that happened she had to cover herself in mud to smother it quickly lest she risk attracting them. When that failed she took to climbing the highest point of the nearest tree again and that worked for the smaller predators because they often grew impatient and went in search of easier prey, but with the Titans it was a bit different story, and she was thankful that most were mindless and lost interest quickly, usually moving on when they could not find or reach her, ambling into or crashing against the giant trees like drunkards between tables. Though, some were not so simple, content to sit and wait for her to come down. She encountered these ones from time to time rarely, and it was often a battle of attrition until one of the dumber ones distracted them and she was able to slip away. Luckily, few were actually intelligent and rarest of all. These ones utilized their misshapen bodies in such ways she had been certain of death every time, only to be saved by some obstacle barrings its way in each instance and in every scenario she waited for nightfall to safely escape, and then it was only what lurked in the shadows, stalking her, that were the problem.

She had again resorted to throwing stones to keep them at bay, and so far it seemed to work, but sometimes she would have to forcibly cut herself and singe their fur, making sure they received the message and it was only then she could finally get some semblance of actual sleep; except there were some nights where she woke up not knowing how she got where she was, her body following her voices through her dreams, which also did not help.

Thus, without much sleep she was ever one misplaced foot on the verge of complete collapse at the worst of times, where the pain felt as if someone was taking a mallet to her skull, chipping it away piece by piece, when morning finally arrived.

Wherever these voices led her often coaxed more of her past to the surface, which she might have appreciated if it did not cause the already present pain to worsen still.

And it was today she suffered yet again because she must have blacked out after one such long journey, touching the back of her head, hoping she had not cracked open her skull from the fall. Running from another pair of wolves had been the last thing she recalled, where she managed to drag herself into a place to hide as the sun rose and the Titans frightened them off.

She ran her fingers through her hair, expecting to find something but there was nothing and she frowned. Mended itself, as if it never happened, again.

All of her wounds disappeared overtime, regardless of their severity, and she still knew not why that was, either. She suspected it another mysterious property of her blood, and thought that Marcel might be able to reveal exactly what, somewhere in that rotting head of his, but he was silent and trying to force it out of him — out of her jumbled recollection of his memories that accompanied his screams, anyway — was folly unless she wanted to experience more awful pain. Whatever the reason, it was just another gift that came with a cost, and coupled with the already crippling pain induced from her own lost memories, sapped her strength away, leaving her fatigued and unable to do much until it healed leaving her vulnerable and helpless while she recovered as she quickly tried to get a hold of her surroundings when she realized for the very first time she was no longer on the forest floor. Rather, she were inside a cave and lying on a soft bed of leaves.

There was a light somewhere just outside her field of vision and she turned her head towards it. As she did she spotted something peeking from behind a corner and shook her head back and forth, cradling it in her hands because of a sudden onset of dizziness, but whatever the thing had been vanished, darting out of sight.

Was she just hallucinating again?

She looked at Marcel, but he only cocked what was left of his head like a grotesque dog in broken, bloody, and torn human skin.

"About time you were awake," a voice said.

Her eyes beginning to adjust to the darkness within the cave, Ymir twisted back where a large woman leaned.

Around her above and below were these pointed rocks that looked like teeth inside of a Titan's mouth, closing in. There was a light from somewhere off to the side, illuminating the scene. In its glow, Ymir made out that this woman appeared to be holding something over her shoulder.

A stick?

No, maybe a spear?

"Don't know what ya thought ya were doin' out there, but I can tell what ya were doin'. And it wasn't smart, rollin' around and yellin' like that in the rain. How did ya survive out there, being that stupid? Hah?"

Her features were grim, two massive cuts across her face, hair cut unevenly short, crudely as if by a knife, brandishing old marks, old burns, along her muscular forearms, and though her movements were somewhat delayed as she set the spear down, her eyes were bright and intense, betraying her youthfulness.

"Ada," she said, pointing at herself.

Ymir hesitated. Then, she opened her mouth, struggling to get the words out, but nothing came.

So much time.

Alone. Herself and her hallucinations.

The woman did not seemed surprised, and went on, "Yer one lucky kid. Kelly should be back later, so in the meantime I'm in charge."

Ymir blinked at her, confusion settling across her face in full. She wanted to ask where she was, what she was doing here, who Ada was, who this Kelly was, anything and everything even thought she could not speak, letting her eyes speak for her where her voice could not.

"Our leader," Ada answered one of her silent questions. "Just wait. She'll be here. Get some rest. Gonna be a long day."

Lying back down, Ymir placed her hands over her stomach and gazed up at the ceiling of the cave, unsure what was to come next.

Surprisingly, she did not care.

She was just relieved that she found people again.

She was not alone anymore.

And the thought of what her life had been up until now, those many years of torment, stuck as one of those monsters, a monster she never wanted to ever be again but knew she must eventually, sooner rather than later, brought tears to her eyes. Before she knew it, she was crying, not having to live in fear anymore, and, in the moment, the damp, safe silence that followed was the greatest comfort in the entire world and when this Kelly the large woman had spoken of returned, her eyes were red and puffy and itched fiercely, having shed every last tear her body could muster.

And the first thing Kelly, a small woman with hair so strikingly yellow it were as if her head had been dipped in the morning sun, did, was take an old, weathered flask from her person and tell her to sit up and hold still, before pouring its contents on her face, washing off any leftover grime and dirt and wetting her eyes, letting her take a long drink of it after, and when she was finished asked her where she had come from.

Looking at her own reflection in the woman's thick lenses, Ymir could only shake her head.

"That's okay," Kelly reassured her, realizing immediately. Like the large woman had. Crouching down, hands clasped over a knee, she smiled. "My name is Kelly. Though something tells me you already know that," she said, giving a glance in Ada's direction. "And I hope Ada didn't scare you. She can be quite imposing until you get to know her."

"Hey, don't be giving the kid the wrong idea." Ada snorted.

Ymir looked between them, then found her voice again, through the pain. "Y.. Ym.. ir," she whispered, just as a shadow went between Ada's boots and straight for them.

She flinched instinctively, falling back and putting the only thing she had for protection, her blanket, up — now a shield — until the shadow leaped onto Kelly's shoulder and meowed, revealing itself to simply be just a cat, small and gray with sharp green eyes.

It took a moment for her to relax again, her heart beating fast, thump thump! Thump thump! And Kelly apologized, telling her the cat's name was Leo and must be what she had seen before, peeking behind the corner.

Stroking the cat on her head, Kelly waited another moment for her sake before asking her second question. "Well, Ymir, are you hungry?"

And, naturally, Ymir nodded yes.



They ate a small meal of black berries that Kelly said were safe to eat, trying them herself first so Ymir did not think she would get sick or poisoned or worse.

To Ymir, they tasted sweet, not like the ones she had been picking all this time which were sour and ripe and gave her a slight discomfort in her stomach though nothing that lasted or proved harmful.

Again, Kelly must have realized this somehow, from the way she eyed the berries. "Surviving out there by yourself, you might have figured out yourself that these and the blue ones, and some of the red ones are edible. Anything else isn't."

"Yeah, just don't eat the purple ones, kid," Ada said, next to her. "Found that out the hard way."

Kelly frowned. "Yes. Dita's death was my fault. Which is why we all hunt together, those of us who are able, and why we all eat together. No exceptions. That way nobody is consuming things they shouldn't and don't go unaccounted for and we can make sure everyone has had something fresh in their stomach before we move on," she explained, stopping only to finish chewing, before she continued. "It won't happen again."

Ymir said not a word. Her voice was still coming back, after all, but even if she could she would not because how would she possibly tell them that she ate not only these purple berries, but yellows, reds, blues, blacks, and any other color berry she had been able to find, suffering no symptoms except those aches in her stomach, maybe a knot or three in her gut, depending on the cluster, or a bit of nausea and at the worst throwing them up without further suspicion and consequence? Oh, how then she felt for those she buried instead, only nodding her understanding as she put another berry in her mouth, and then listened as Kelly now went about introducing her to the rest of the group as they ate.

"There, sitting with his little girl, is Oskar."

Bald, with rough features under a heavy brow and deep set dark blue eyes, a narrow scar traveling down his left cheek and disappearing into a bushy, brown beard, the man named Oskar was smiling. Focused solely on hand-feeding some of the berries to his child, who was snatching them out of his hand so quickly they appeared to disappear out of thin air from his calloused palm, when he heard his name he looked up. He nodded kindly. "You're safe with us, child," he said. "Dana, say hello."

Dana looked unlike her father, but with one big, black-teethed smile from her and it was obvious they were related, and close.

Beside them, another bearded man with an even bushier beard, bushy eyebrows, long matted hair and a hooked nose, sat with his arms crossed, looking grim and unhappy.

"Jean, and here, with the hood over his head? Maxwell," Kelly said, indicating the small man with one tuft of auburn hair jutting out from under his hood and the only one with no form of visible facial hair. Both of them acknowledged her with a nod, as well. John said nothing, but Maxwell said hello. "There? That's Ester and Alan. Behind them are Raban, Carla, Otto, Jane, and Alric. And little Ilsa, big Ilsa — sisters — Wil, and Ron." Kelly turned to them. They were all huddled together. Ester had short, dark hair and small, slanted dark eyes, whereas Alan wore what was left of his in a bun, his beard jagged and ending in a point. Raban, Carla, Otto, Jane, and Alric were the five much older men and women, wrinkled and past their time, but still aware, regarding her warmly, and the four younger children who looked older than Dana, but not Ymir herself, the Ilsas, Wil, and Ron, waved, looked over quietly, or gave hellos and hiyas of their own. "Last, you already know Ada, is Mia and her dog, Bear."

Mia and Bear were to Kelly's left and Ada's right, and Ymir had to tilt her head around Ada's broad frame to see them clearly. Mia was scratching the dog behind the ears. Shoulder length dark hair swept to one side, with near almost squashed together eyes, nose, and mouth under a rather large forehead, Mia appeared to be the only other one around her own age. She gave her a greeting, then went back to the dog, an adult, tan and white with pointy ears and long snout and big, for a dog.

Ymir was wary around dogs. Not so distant memories, coming to her in brief flashes of blazing fires against the night, of starving, scrawny things that roamed the battlefield, sniffing for anything that still moved, tortured by hunger not indifferent to what she felt those first nights, the blood still licking her tongue, and the taste and the feeling and how difficult it was to resist the urge to devour again. A resolve a common dog was incapable of comprehending, she knew that, and he seemed harmless, she knew that, too, but when she looked at this Bear, all she saw were those mangy dogs from so long ago through an orange light shone on the darkness beyond the trenches, revealing these bony beasts with their glinting eyes ripping off the limbs of the dead unburied, tearing into flesh and meat and bone and disappearing thereafter.

And when their small meal was done and Kelly was done with the last of her questions and left with those she had introduced to discuss things, Ymir watched and waited until Mia and Bear were gone from sight, before moving herself only to fall into the clutches of Ada who wrapped a massive arm around her, like a mother protecting her child.

For her size, and clumsiness, what the big woman lacked in speed she made up for in raw strength. Leaning just so that her weight kept her from breaking free, pressing gently but holding firmly, Ada lifted her around the waist and carried her back to her bed of soft leaves. Looming tall as a Titan above her, she gave one stern look which read "do not move" then limped to the place she stood guard before, grabbing her spear.

"Oskar had it right. Ain't nobody going to hurt ya here. Yer safe with us, as long as you do your part," she said, presenting it to her as she came back. "Now that ya seen the others, it'll be a short time before we get to work. So rest up."

Rest up? Work? What did she…? Doing what, exactly? Ymir might have asked, as her eyes went from the spear to Ada's ghastly scarred face. But, she knew she was about to find out one way or another and lay back down. Only this time, with a smile on her face because, yes, she had finally found a place she might call home.

 

[Historia]

11​

"Rotten luck," Jarratt complained, shivering. "I hate when it rains at night."

Mathias stood squinting into the dark, his back pressed up against the towering fifty meter gray stone of Wall Maria. He, Jarratt, and the others were all wearing long coats, their heads deep in their hoods. The unpleasant cold seeped through all the same, the rain coming down hard enough to sting, as they waited for Bernhardt to give them the signal that they could continue, and finally enter the district.

At last!

They were on the north side of Quinta where the district wall intersected with Wall Maria itself. The rain had been falling for quite some time. A faint smell of charcoal hung in the air. It was weeks since Quinta had been cut off. The fires should've expired long ago, but the smell was fresh by a day, at least, according to Jarratt's approximation, and so Bernhardt was having them wait it out to see if anything would arise. Only, the longer they sat around doing nothing, the greater chance that Rita would come to harm, and Mathias was beginning to grow impatient again, wanting to know straight away if Rita was safe.

Towards the gate the way was littered with the remains of wooden shanties, burnt down to their foundations, black charred, and, when he was barely a boy, Mathias distinctly remembered traveling through it numerous times behind the curtains of his father's coaches, peeking out in curiosity at what he was always told by his father and came to think of ever after until he met Rita were these unfortunate souls left to squat and squander their lives in such crowded, filthy conditions. That they'd chosen their lot in life, and it was the responsibility of people like them to help guide them out of their heavyhearted circumstances. As he grew older and his own voice grew, his opinion changed from one of pity to mild envy and now understanding. As a young child he'd hung on every word his father said as gospel; the wise words of a holy man, repeating tongues from some ancient and powerful text. As a young teenager, and following the death of his mother, upon meeting Rita and her family, he began to see his father for what he really was: a liar far above his station sprouting dribble to justify his beating down of people he deemed lesser than him simply because he was rich and they were not. As a young man now, with the revelation that his father had a hand in the expedition, the deaths and starvation of so many people, he knew his father to be something worse than he ever wanted to become himself.

And therein returned the envy, looking once again upon these black wooden skeletons for those unable or unwilling to live within the districts, now seeing nothing but people truly enjoying theirs despite these truths it'd taken him years to discover.

Unlike his father and himself, these people unburdened by learning the inner workings of an entire company to run and one day inherit, to keep up appearances for appearances' sakes, though they suffered, were already freer than he'd ever be, and he felt a sorrow in his heart, thinking how wrong he'd been.

How selfish.

A boy with all the riches in the world, or what carved out corner of it was left, thanks to the Titans, and how even his most horrible moment, the death of his mother, was cushioned an endless assortment of comforts until he had the privilege to get rid of them when he grew sick of their presence.

Another point Suzanne had been sure to educate him that he was embarrassed to remember now, too, and he regrettably hadn't given much thought to before this moment.

His first assumption misconstrued, these people had been left to squat and squander their lives away because of greed. The inability of both his father and the royal government to accommodate them, abandoning them as they were doing again and would continue to do so unless someone took an opposing stance. Someone with a voice loud enough to be heard by the Assembly, and he looked on with remorse, because of his naivety, and resentment, for his father, and, to a lesser extent, himself.

When this was over, when Rita and her family were safe, he would work to change the current system. If there was anything his time with Rita and Suzanne's lessons had taught him, it was he held that power. Though, that was later, and his eyes went across dirt streets marred with vast cavities and deep scars: tell-tale signs of bombardment by cannon fire. The shantytown subject to such violent shelling it was a wonder how anyone could've survived what surely must've been the very center of slaughter.

He took a moment to envision it.

Titans at their front, gates at their back, right here, not far from where he stood.

Rita could've been fighting them, right here.

She was a Garrison soldier, after all; it would've been her job to engage the Titans.

She'd gone through plenty of training, he highly doubted she'd perished. Yet the Titans were overwhelmingly powerful and undeniably huge and he didn't want to think of it any further: the possibility that she was already dead.

A chill ran up his spine.

He shook his mind free of such a harrowing line of thought again.

Rita was alive, and that was all there was to it.

"Something burning?" he heard Jarratt ask, speaking to Klaus, and turned. The rain's tumultuous noise made it difficult to hear their own voices without having to stand right next to one another and shout.

Peering at him behind Nikki, who was making faces at her reflection in a puddle, Jarratt was looking up at the wall in concentration.

Though, whatever he was about to say next was interrupted by Bernhardt as he parted the front of his long coat, put both hands around his waist, and casually strode out into the rain, inspecting the wall's height as he did so.

"Alright, lads and lasses! The rain seems to be easing, but I daresay haste remains the best option available to us."

He flexed backwards and pulled the triggers on the hilts of both blades, simultaneously firing twin anchors up into the sky.

The roar of the downpour muffled the sound of the wires cutting through the air. Even then, they all heard the crunch of the tips impacting the surface of the wall as the wires snapped shut and Bernhardt's stance became that of a man on a swing with impossibly long ropes.

"I'd say we're lucky," claimed Jarratt. "The rain's covering the noise we're making, too."

Mathias held out his hand, feeling drops violently hit his palm. Bernhardt was the most experienced out of them, and had lived the longest. And Jarratt was probably right, too — had the night been clear, they would've hidden the horses farther away, back under the canopy of the closest forest, which with his father's… renovations... walking that distance would've been torture, and there was always the chance of someone giving a call or a shout even if they managed to remain out of sight trying to cross the swath of land between here and there on foot. Not to mention, the Titans… Being caught in the open with nowhere to go, by those things, why… no escape.

Bernhardt turned and crouched down. "A couple of trips should do it. Who wants to go first?"

Jarratt began to step forward. "If you wouldn't mind—"

"Oh! Me!" Nikki sprang into action, butting Jarratt in the chin with her head, already holding one of the wires in her left hand, with her right foot fixed on the Vertical Maneuvering Gear above Bernhardt's waistline, pulling herself up in the time Jarratt recovered from being stunned and staggered.

Rubbing his chin and popping his jaw, Jarratt more or less repeated the same process, and probably a bit irritated, as well, though Mathias was unsure because he was still smiling heedless of Nikki's harmful enthusiasm — of which Mathias could attest to on multiple occasions by now — and made him the hardest out of the outlaws to read.

He'd not learned much about him the night before they set off other than the man had once been a butcher because of those cows, and yet they seemed to know all about his, or at least who he was through his father's reputation which was still more than he knew of them just as well. It was yet another reason he didn't want to be involved with such shady individuals any longer than necessary and was relieved their time together would come to an end sooner rather than later. As long as they made it to his family's estate unimpeded, anyhow.

Whatever happened, they still had to climb up and over the wall first.

And with Jarratt and Nikki's combined weight being supported by the wires, did Bernhardt start moving.

Watching their impressively smooth ascent as he kicked off the wall every now and again effortlessly and steadily into the darkness until he no longer saw their dark forms against darker clouds, it was only Klaus and he now.

"Don't get your gun wet," Klaus warned. Unfriendly as ever.

"I won't."

"And keep it loaded," he added, his eyes on the wall and whatever awaited on the other side.

After a while Bernhardt returned alone, looking again like he was sitting on a swing. "I assume you've grasped the basics, lads?"

"Yes," Mathias answered.

Klaus only snorted.

Going first, Mathias walked up to Bernhardt, took hold of one of the wires, put a foot on the equipment, and kicked off the ground to jump up. The shotgun strapped to his hip was a bit in the way and he wobbled a little but managed to keep his balance in the end thankfully.

"You're wearing gloves, I take it? Wonderful. Don't hold on too tight."

"Huh?"

"Use your head for once," Klaus muttered, putting his own foot on the Vertical Maneuvering Gear.

"All on board? Okay, here we go, lads!"

As soon as Bernhardt said this the wire in Mathias' hands began to slide downwards, and downwards again.

Indeed, it was obvious if he used his head. The wire was being reeled in bit by bit, meaning his hand was moving up towards the anchor. If he tried to hold on without gloves, his skin would tear badly.

"Keep your mouths closed. You don't want to bite your tongue!"



They ascended through the rain, swinging in arcs away from the wall each time Bernhardt kicked off it with crooked knees, like a spider. He was, Mathias also realized, taking caution not to collide with the surface. Had it been the middle of the day, and not raining, they probably could've seen far into the distance. It also might've felt as though they were flying. Instead, either because of the torrential rain or the way it blocked their sights, Mathias had the illusion that he was plunging ever deeper into a vast expanse of water; this despite the fact that it was the other way around and they were soaring upwards.

It was a strange, almost surreal experience.

"And here we are. It's wet and slippery. Watch yourselves!"

Mathias swallowed. Right there in front of him was the very upper lip of the wall. The wind was, unsurprisingly, stronger than it'd been below. Bernhardt had both feet planted, keeping them steady, but even then he could not fully dampen their sideways movement until Jarratt lowered his large frame and extended an arm. He took it and let himself get pulled up, his feet on the flat surface of the wall before he could even think about the terror of falling. Just like his first time years and years ago, Wall Maria felt solid and secure and afforded a sense of stability comparable to standing on a stone floor.

Above them, perched like a bird atop a securely covered cannon, Nikki was keeping vigilant watch along either stretch of the wall's top that seemed to extend forever, circling around until they vanished in a watery fog, rocking in place. Bernhardt had already checked the frequency of patrols, and hidden and inaudible in the rain, the truth was that they had no reason to fear being spotted, but that didn't stop her from having her fun as only Nikki could.

Mathias turned to face Quinta.

Despite his father's valiant efforts to the contrary, the district differed from Fuerth in every possible way he could think of.

Unlike Fuerth, with its wide gray, cobbled stone streets, and white, stone buildings raised on either side, even viewing it from up here, Quinta held a rudimentary design with too narrow a space between its own streets, its houses, and everything its citizens had managed to squeezed therein. Fuerth was also on higher ground than the other districts along Wall Rose, the walls built upon slanted earth with the royal capital, Mitras, the seat of the royal government and home to the King of the Walls himself, being the highest. This meant the air was colder, and colder still the further into the Interior you traveled, and was at its coldest in those districts in the north. Though, being on the opposite end of Wall Maria here, it was hot in Quinta and made it a constant attraction for the Titans in the desolate lands beyond, and thus all resources not for his father's designs went toward maintaining the defenses.

At its start, his father said, Quinta was simple, built by everyday folk by their own hands, for their own purposes, until he came along, newly wealthy from his business ventures within the center cities, and redecorated large sections of it to his own liking.

Boasting that it was the grandest of the outlying districts, his father's ego soon inflated to match his coin purse. "Bottomless, like his appetite," Suzanne had remarked one morning.

And he wondered then, for but a moment, if Rita would recognize him. Be happy to see him, recalling Bernhardt's words: "the rules of the Interior no longer apply here. Anything may happen, lad. Your sweetheart might not be the same sweetheart you once knew. Mayhaps you never truly knew her..."

Maybe you just lack the nerve.

No, not Rita. She was still the same Rita he… Standing there, he felt another sudden chill, a gust of wind from somewhere below, and looked down, seeing not Quinta but a chasm darker and darker still before him, and at the very bottom was Rita upon her horse, her head held high.

Clutching at his chest, his heart felt heavy, and he braced against the cannon, breathing shallow. He felt sick. He felt helpless, and as his eyes went dizzily to the ground he gazed into its darkness, its maw and the unspoken unknown that was certain to swallow him whole. The same from his dreams — no, his nightmares — and he backed away, bumping into something firm. Something exuberantly warm yet drenched in rain, and he looked up into Jarratt's ever-smiling face.

"Woah, there," the big man said. "You look pale." Turning his eyes to the sky and dismal clouds above, Jarratt heaved a massive sigh then looked back down with a wink. "I'm scared of heights, too. I'll be glad we're back on solid ground."

Mathias blinked, and sheepishly returned the big man's smile. "Y-yeah..." He went from Jarratt to the chasm, and gulped. A large glob stuck in his throat and he almost choked, if not for Bernhardt slapping him lightly on the back.

"No need to worry, lad!" he said, reeling in the last stretch of wire and scrambling a little ungraciously up to join them, observing the District briefly before he strode across the wall and twirled around so his back faced inside. Next, in a manner that was disarmingly casual and left no time for intervention, he threw himself backwards into the air. Immediately there was the hard crack of anchors being driven into the wall's surface and Mathias rushed to see what might've happened only to find him hanging about a meter down, arms stretched out with his body securely attached to the wall and his face scrunched up when he realized Bernhardt and, no doubt, the others, were watching him with grins on their faces.

Oh. Right. How could he forget? He was the only normal one here. Of course, what sane person would've thought he'd accidentally fallen?

"Alright, lads and lasses! Who's first!" Bernhardt shouted from below.

Only, before any of them could answer, numerous lights became visible towards the center, not far from where they needed to go.

At first Mathias thought it were just the lights from the houses, but upon a closer look he saw that they were fires. Flames. Quinta was burning. His heart skipped a beat.

Rita.

Jarratt folded his arms and gazed at the town below beside him. "Well that's going to be a problem."

Klaus said nothing and only checked his rifle.

Nikki oohed.

Mathias' heart skipped another beat, clinging dangerously close to the wall's edge, beginning to lean out, thinking only of Rita, until he felt a gush of wind as Bernhardt leaped up the wall and caught him, teasing him with a smile made of curled mustache.

"Don't think of leaving just yet! Your sweetheart isn't going anywhere, anytime soon!" he sang against the wind. "But, as you seem to be in an awful hurry, perhaps now is a good time for you to enlighten us as to where these treasures of your father's are kept!

He turned red hot with a flush of anger. "Get me down there first," he almost snarled as he crouched, his toes finding Bernhardt's shoulders as he made sure his chest was flat against the wall and lowered himself until the soles of his feet landed on the surface of Bernhardt's Vertical Maneuvering Gear.

"Excellently done!"

Ignoring the comment, he started to transfer his weight, letting it take the strain, and groped for and quickly found the wire, taking tight hold of it.

"No rush. Your sweetheart is all cooped up inside the wall. She won't be going anywhere."

"Just go."

And, at last, did they start their descent.

But all the while Mathias kept his eyes on those fires, his only thoughts of Rita.



When they were all safely on the other side, the chasm vanished, replaced by a long street; the very street that would eventually take them to the residential section of the district, to the east where his father's estate was just past the main square in a walled off section of the district where the wealthiest resident lived not far from where they currently stood… and straight toward the fires.

And here somewhere within it, too, was Rita.

He was certain.

From the corner of his eye, Mathias saw Klaus as he unslung his rifle and aimed it down the street.

"What are you doing?"

"Shut up," he said, the rifle pressed against his cheek, his upper body swaying as he seemed to track and follow something in the gloom, using the light from the fires. "I got people down there. They have weapons. They're heading for the burning buildings. Looks like soldiers."

Soldiers? The Garrison! "Rita," Mathias said under his breath.

Not bothering to look up as he was retracting his anchors from the wall as the rest of them stood there dumbfounded watching the fires spread and the flames and the smoke rise higher and higher still, lashing out against the rainstorm in an orange and red blaze of defiance, Bernhardt calmly asked again where his father's treasures were located as all eyes went to him.

For his part, once he told them, Mathias no longer required them now that he was inside Quinta, but he also felt responsible for them, not wanting to allow them to their own devices. Not after what he'd seen in their time traveling together. He would accompany them to the end, wherever that led. Besides, much as he hated to admit, he was going to need them now if he wanted to reach Rita and her family, wherever they were in this mess, and get them out of here. Back to Quinta. Back to safety. Back to Suzanne. And then? Suzanne! Suzanne would know what best to do.

Except, glancing back, there was no telling how Bernhardt and the rest would react once he did, either, because of what he knew. "A deal too generous to be true is often the deadliest", so his father said one evening, in a teaching mood.

His eyes focused on Bernhardt in particular. The twinkle of humor behind his eyes.

Murderers.

No, they would never let him go. He was good as dead, he knew it. No question. No hesitation. No remorse. His only chance, then, was to strike another deal, and, for the first time in his life, he was proud to be the son of a man like Jörg Kramer.

If that ended up failing... Was he prepared?

Maybe you just lack the nerve.

"I-I can't tell you yet," he replied. "But I can once we're there," he continued, pointing down to where the fires were.

"You'll only slow us down," Klaus interjected, his rifle still trained on the street. "Maybe you're lying. Maybe there's not even any treasure to begin with. Maybe you're trying to get us k—"

Bernhardt held up a hand, intervening. Jarratt frowned beside him, as if he were a disappointed father. Nikki was looking out at something in the fires, too preoccupied by whatever it was to pay much attention to what anyone was saying, and Mathias wondered what it could be, until a moment later she spat.

"Yuck!"

Her tongue sticking out from her hood, she'd just been catching raindrops.

Bernhardt considered it for a moment, then asked if there were any alternative routes to the estate. "Preferably anything for us to avoid the belly of the beast?"

Mathias shook his head. "No," he lied, because the fastest way there — and likely Rita — was through that main square.

"So toward the chaos, eh? Very well!" He turned to the others. "And now that we know where we're headed, I suggest we split up."

"Easier to work that way," Klaus said.

"Five of us all clumped together would only draw attention," Jarratt remarked.

Bernhardt nodded at them. "Would you two lads so kind as to procure a wagon again? And once you've procured one, just keep an eye out for the largest mansion on the street and wait there. We'll go on ahead and make preparations to load everything up. Nikki, you'll be with me and Mathias, lass."

"Got it, Boss!"

"Wonderful! Now then," Bernhardt faced him again. "Shall the three of us be off?"

As the five of them broke off into their respective groups, Mathias' eyes flicked over to Nikki, who came beside him behind Bernhardt. He suspected he would never understand the way her brain worked, not in a hundred years.

Gazing worriedly out into the fires, perhaps the same was true of Rita, but quickly put such a thought away because no matter what, he would find her again. And it was only until he reached her again, would he worry about it.

Would he know for real, if he truly had the nerve… or not.

"Lead on, lad!"

 

[Historia]

12​

It was against the high law as written by the royal government on behalf of the King to start an insurrection within the walls, and, under the dismal clouds of yet another stormy night, Rita stood outside a butcher's shop after receiving a recent tip of known criminals being seen entering and exiting the premise plotting treason.

From testimonies, it seemed they were comprised primarily of dissidents from the first week of riots gone overlooked. A matter best deferred to Amanda, for it was part of her responsibilities to weed them out, having been reinstated as her second in command, but due to the tip's urgency, Rita had taken upon herself to resolve it, being the closest, lest they unite into an organized force and the potential of an attack on the Garrison becomes imminent.

It also presented her the chance to leave the district hall and contribute on the "front lines" as the ultimate test to know if she were truly qualified to be the acting commander or not.

But, secretly, she feared for herself and her soldiers.

If something went wrong, Amanda wouldn't be able to reach them in time, she and her soldiers occupied with reports of property damage and other nature-related issues elsewhere. Everything would be over in an instant. She was risking the safety of the district and its remaining populace for the sake of her pride and thus far it was going exactly so as they'd already barricaded themselves inside, thereby establishing the start of a foothold. She also feared for her parents, but hoped to — provided this ended without bloodshed — turn these fears into future conviction to be the leader mistakenly seen in Amanda.

And if she were Amanda, the first thing she'd do was barge in and haul them out by force, then ask questions later behind the bars of the cells located beneath the barracks. Only, she believed them not completely unreasonable people. She wanted to persuade them to surrender, and, perhaps, in time, under watchful eyes, come to regret their choices made. See that violence wasn't the answer to the problem currently plaguing everyone here. That together, united, they might come to a compromise once order was fully restored to the district as a whole. Though, thus far, it appeared that Amanda was going to get her way regardless.

Why, Rita could see her now, standing beside her with arms crossed: "Told you they wouldn't listen. Go back to your papers. Just let me deal with it," she'd chide, pushing herself to the forefront and unsheathing one of her blades in one, fluid motion, a cool look on her face, and, as if to attest her best friend's point, drawn and entranced by the likelihood of violence just the same, a crowd of onlookers had gathered, and she scowled.

She hated how much her own line of reasoning was being swayed in that direction, but more-so that she didn't actually resent it as much as should. But violence was not the only answer, and she'd make doubly assured to remind Amanda of that when they saw each other next.

Though, possible delusions to the truth deep down in her heart aside, she wasn't an idiot.

For precaution she'd went against her own ruling and instructed Nicholas to bring a few rifles without the intention to actually use them unless last resort.

Because of the overcast which heralded another shower of rain, most of the rifles were locked in a chest draped by a tarp. Just a handful of the soldiers behind her, many of whom were youths from the 103th — fresh recruits all younger like Duccio, who stood beside her now, her official record keeper — actually carried any. The goal wasn't to strike fear into the civilians, or intimidate the gang when there might be no need. If she'd just get the chance to speak with one of them, preferably their leader, then she might settle this without bloodshed. Only, glancing back, while their training years had been cut two years short by the Titans and their overall blighted circumstance, if things did come to the use of firearms, anyone could shoot a gun. That said, regardless of how it was done, there was only one rule: no killing.

So, to the apprehension of a steady influx of onlookers, Rita took a deep breath and approached the building, coming before a burly man whose chest was nearly twice the size of her entire body. He blocked her way further inside.

Meeting his eyes, she decided to address them all, raising her voice with a cough and clearing of the throat. "Hear me! Everyone!" she shouted loudly as she could over the storm, "I am Rita Iglehaut, acting commander of the Garrison. This district is now under the law and order and jurisdiction of the Garrison and Training Corps!"

The reality, of course, was that the only Garrison troops left to carry out their duties were Rita herself, Amanda, and less than the total number of the trainees standing anxiously behind her that were their fellow other graduates, ordered to hang back and watch their flanks and the rear, of which Nicholas was their squad leader. She saw no reason to remind them of such information, or reveal it to the locals nor this burly man and his gang and waited, of course, there would be panic, when it struck her then that this was the first time she had to speak in front of so many people.

What if they just ignored her?

Dismissed her as some witless girl spouting nonsense?

And after several beats of silence this realization became true.

Peering around the burly man, she took note of the others inside and counted their own numbers, then clenched her teeth. She'd the lesser count. She underestimated just how many there would be. She looked up at the man. He was grinning.

Told you they wouldn't listen.

Even so…

"... I-I am Rita Iglehaut, acting commander of the Garrison Regiment here in Quinta," she started again. Seeing the others further in stir, roused by the sound of her voice, or maybe just the thunder, she started to unsheathe one of her blades. Her grip on the hilt was tighter than she imagined it being. She lowered her eyes at it, muttering under her breath, "Dammit." Perhaps this would not be enough, after all. Perhaps Amanda was right. "Our reports say there have been a significant number of transgressions in this area and I ask you surrender yourselves to the full extent of the law," she said, her eyes back on the man.

"Or what?" he sneered back as he stepped closer. "Well? You should put that thing away before you hurt yourself, girly." Then, he shoved her aside, calling the others out, likely for another raid somewhere in the district and, as they ignored her presence one by one and everyone else gave them a wide berth — Duccio and the others included — Rita lowered her head in humiliation.

A humiliation that everyone around her could see.

At that moment, Duccio put a comforting hand on her shoulder, telling her that it was for the best this time. There was little they could do without somebody getting hurt, maybe even killed, and that they should just leave it to Amanda to deal with instead when the time was right.

The suggestion pierced her heart.

In her mind's eye, she saw Amanda back as they were during their trainee days, standing among the top ten of their graduating class and she herself just one of many in the faceless, gawking crowd.

Her grip tightened further still.

Eyes on her boots, seeing the pendant Mathias gifted her, her duty as a member of the Garrison and now as the acting commander of Quinta's Garrison Regiment, she… She could not just continue to sit by and let Amanda do the heavier lifting, the dirtier things not taught in the Corps. It was her duty, and nobody else's. Their night together in the cabin came back to haunt her. Wasn't about to let her best friend bear the burden by herself…

Shrugging Duccio off, she raised her head and did the unthinkable.

Ordering those few of her trainee soldiers to turn their rifles on the gang to send a clear message that if anyone wanted to challenge her authority, anyone, even a trainee, could fire a gun, Rita extended her blade toward the burly man and his gang. She shouted again, loudest she ever had before, wincing at the quiver in her breaking voice. "All of you, stop where you are! We will respond with zero tolerance to theft in all forms!" she continued, now addressing those surrounding. "Now disperse and go home! Please go on as though everything were normal, inasmuch as you are able! I guarantee this matter will be taken care of peacefully. So be on your way. To enable us to make a new start in a new environment, please respect the law, and help one another!"

Because it was her duty.

And hers alone.

Even if deep down she didn't want to admit that she'd rather shoot them all and be done with it.

With rifles pointed at them, the gang did as told, and turned to face her.

The burly man, who Rita could now appropriately surmise was their leader, started back. The sneer was gone from his face; defiance set in its place. He came within lethal distance of her blade, unimpressed. But, before he could open his mouth to retort, she gave into her desire and ordered Duccio and the others to load their rifles. They did so reluctantly. Frightfully.

And rightly so.

Her hand holding the blade trembled.

Because she was afraid, too.

"Big mistake, girly," the man said, air escaping from his nostrils like steam from a Titan. Except, compared to those monsters, he was nothing to be terrified of. Yet, her wrist shook, and her legs wobbled ever so. Yes, she was afraid — only just not enough.

"Please, surrender peacefully. Or otherwise we will be forced t—!"

Next she knew, she was facing the sky, a ringing in her ears so violent she was unable to hear herself think, let alone register the muffled, frantic screams that seemed so near yet so far away in the same space. Her vision was fuzzy, blotches of blue and bursts of red. Twinkles of black. Her body was heavy as a boulder as she tried to stand back to her feet, finding it difficult to breath like her chest was caving in on itself and would collapse any moment.

When she finally did manage to move, roll her body over, she heaved, vomiting and wiping scarlet-flecked spit from her chin. The first she noticed as her visible began to clear was her fallen sword, not so much feeling but seeing her fingers closing around it just as the ringing subsided and her ears popped and a blistering pain exploded across the right side of her face. Crying out, she came away with blood on that side, below the temple between eye and ear, and looking past her bloody fingers, realized she could only see out her left eye.

She raised her chin. Painfully. Partially blinded, she could at least make out that people were scrambling, civilians and soldiers alike, from the gang, and, planting her sword between the cobblestones, Rita attempted to stand, only for the sword to snap, break in half as they were designed, and her body falter as she gagged and spat and sputtered.

Hunching over, holding her chest, she glimpsed one of the trainees midst the mayhem, surrounded. Elbowed in on all sides, his rifle torn from his grasp, he was being stripped of the rest of his equipment when she called out to him.

She coughed blood on the street, throwing up again.

"A very big mistake."

The burly man, their leader, loomed over her. He held one of the trainee's rifles in his large, calloused hands. He pointed it down at her, the barrel dark and ominous and spelling her death, her doom, finger on the trigger, and opened his mouth to say something else but the only thing that escaped his lips was a bout of surprise. The front of his shirt became wet with red, and his free hand froze over the area of his chest where the wound was.

Then, the top of his head burst open like a crimson flower in summer's bloom.

Once again, Rita's world turned bloody as bits of brain and bone splattered her, what remained of the man's head smoking.

His lifeless body crumbled forward.

She put her hands up to stop it from crushing her, struggling in vain as her body gave way, his open mouth and lolling tongue so close she could smell his gunpowder-coated, stale breath and glimpse his shattered teeth, before it abruptly sagged to the side and standing in its place was Duccio, his flabbergasted, anguished, blood drained and bloodstained face the last thing she saw clearly before her vision waned, dimmed, then completely failed her and everything became darker than this darkest stormy night and she passed out.



For the second time in a long while, Rita stood still within the doorway to a dream she always used to dream. A dream where she was a small child, peering into a small, dark room where no light tread except, almost deliberately, upon the man slumped against the wall directly opposite, shining from a window above him. Only, this time he wasn't alone and she no longer a small child but an adult, though her younger self was still there, holding a small vial in her tiny hand with her big eyes on the wooden box left open at her feet while a second man, lanky, bespectacled, with kind eyes and kinder heart, held her other.

She could not see this second man's face, but immediately knew who he was as her younger self looked up at him in the moment thereafter, her face contorted in pain, tears streaming down her soft, rosy cheeks as he now crouched down to look into her eyes about to cry himself, hands upon her shoulders, comforting her: Henning, her adoptive father.

She tried to shout at him, but the only words which came from her lips were an incomprehensible jumble of sounds that may as well have been nothing at all. So, silent, she watched as Henning took her younger self's hand in his again and led her from the room, parting from the doorway to let them pass as they melded into the beyond whereupon Rita looked back to the man in the room. She was at a loss to remember his name, but it didn't matter because she had Henning, and Doris, and was about to take the first step following in her younger self's footsteps before hearing a voice speak to her from that dark room.

It, too, was a voice she knew.

Her heart thumped, joyous, at the sound of it, and she spun back toward the somber scene behind her, seeing a woman standing there under a new shimmer of light. The man was gone, and the light was harsher, blinding the woman's features to her though not the uniform she wore nor the signature green cloak draped around her shoulders, denoting her as a proud soldier in the Scouting Legion: her mother. Her real mother.

Rita's heart quieted. Her breath caught in her throat. Her hesitation vanished, and with tears rolling she rushed forward, reaching out to her mother; only to grasp at great, thick clumps of black, brown, and green mist, falling through a silhouette that filled her lungs with soot and ash, burning her insides as she collapsed on her knees, clutching at her chest, squinting her eyes to see through the accompanying steam and the scene abruptly changed and there she was again upon her horse hours after Shiganshina's fall with Amanda and Wilco on either side, their own district's plan to evacuate in shambles, the three of them and a handful of others all that stood between everyone not caught in the initial onslaught now scrambling back into Quinta before its gate shut as the Titans — these skin-wearing mockeries of themselves, twisted and tortured shapes, with no glint of sentience in their dark eyes — chased after them with blood-letting glee, ignoring the whining horses with broken legs and going straight for the screaming civilians and soldiers with broken limbs and pulled them apart and gouged on their insides and devoured what remained.

Another volley of cannon fire rang out and the air about them shuddered, massive balls of lead crashing into the houses in front, sending a massive wave of fire and dirt into the Titans about to bear down on them, the blast staggering them; it was in the moment shortly after, before most of the Titans were able to find their footing again, that their commander came riding out from behind the horde with what few remained of Quinta's senior Garrison, bloodied and battered but still alive waving his blade and kicking off toward the Titans alongside those brave few who came with him with the cannons continuing to roar.

The fire began spreading rapidly around them. Burning debris began to rain on top of them, carried by the first spring winds. No time to debate. They had to follow his last orders. They had to keep going, even as their former classmates and soldiers, her friends, fell in quick succession, fierce battles in the gathering flames breaking out and she herself was knocked from her horse for the second time that fateful day and next she knew she was staring not at the wooden floor nor debris-ridden and scorched ground but cobblestones and a building lit aflame in night's embrace, hearing someone shouting, seeing figures standing above her, feeling her body being dragged, as darkness enveloped her once more and she found herself alone again, longingly looking back at the figure of her mother with watery eyes; no longer seeing the fantasy of a loved one she'd barely known, but the reality of a lonely little girl with the weight of the dead upon her shoulders — the shadow of her betters, Amanda, of the civilians of Quinta, of Wilco, of Duccio, and all the rest, and she woke up frightened by those same shadows — dancing upon the ceiling and walls, before coming to her senses.

Rita rose in a heartbeat, touching a fresh bandage wrapped around her forehead.

It was still the middle of the night and she found herself gazing up at a ceiling not seen in what felt like a long time, though it not even having been longer than a year, with Doris slumped asleep in a chair by her bedside.

Guiding her fingertips along the bandage, feeling a dent in her forehead, she started to pull her cover off and swing her legs to get out of the bed when someone told her to stop moving and she looked over, seeing Amanda leaning against a wall and Nicholas at the door. Squatting next to them with his head down was Duccio.

"Wh… What's happened?" she asked, wincing at the pain the words brought, hanging her head until it passed, dizzy.

"Nothing you need to know," Amanda replied harshly. "But seeing as you're awake, I'm going back out to take care with your mess," she said. Then, as she was want to do, promptly left, but not before telling Duccio to keep an eye on her, taking Nicholas with her; a pointed reminder that Rita hadn't been the leader she needed to be.

That she was not Amanda.

That, in her hesitation, her dimwitted moment of thinking that simply because she wore the uniform, others would fall in line accordingly and would relent, stop disrupting and resisting and altogether causing conflict — that by a simple thrust of her sword that matters could be resolved — she'd never be the leader she thought she needed to be, as her eyes wandered to the door to her room and Duccio next to it.

Looking down at her pendant, loose and swaying around her neck, the dream of the man, slumped dead, eyes glossed over, and that wooden box, the small vial in her hand, was still fresh as the blood that seeped from her reopening wound as she got up anyway.

Using the wall for support, she went to the door, careful not to wake Doris, and looked down at Duccio, catching her head in her hand as it dipped and she was abruptly very lightheaded.

"Commander," Duccio was immediately by her side, supporting her, but despite his best attempt to appear together, collected, she noted the harrowed look in his eyes, the distinct lack of his usual warmth, the glimmer and excitement exhausted and what was left of his innocence little more than the soft smile at the corner of his lips. She imagined it was only because she was still alive. His horror in taking a life saved another, and some part of him took solace in it, though the mark upon his demeanor was enormous. Crushing. Damning. And the only thing keeping him going, was his duty.

And once again she thought of the man and his wooden box.

That man had been her father, her real father, until he committed suicide. The loss of his wife too much to bear, he selfishly left behind his only daughter one night without a word, without remorse. Nary a loving goodbye, sweet kiss upon her cheek, and she wiped a swell of tears because of what he had done, finally able to understand the grief he must have had to bear, and the guilt her adoptive father, Henning, endured to make amends to his only daughter all those years after. All those years, the same dream. All those years, the same damned dream… And how little she actually cared, because the damage had already been done.

The bandage was Henning's doing, and she asked of his whereabouts, gritting her teeth at the pain.

Duccio only shook his head. "Sorry," he said, voice quivering on the verge of tears, as it trailed off and her heart sank.

"That's alright." She knew he must be out there, helping the wounded, like he always did, and need not be worried, but Duccio… "Where are we?" she asked, though she felt she already knew the answer.

"The noble's district. Closest, safest place we could take you. You were hurt pretty bad."

The Kramer family estate. Rita glanced at her pendant. She thought of Mathias, of disapproving fathers and of the thread which had connected them when they were young though hers was one of confusion, of mystery, and the unknown, and not seeped in lies, deceit, and hate; the pain they shared was all they had in common, and where their similarities came to their end. Her childhood friend harbored a deep, fiery resentment of his father and it oftentimes clouded his judgments. It more than not got him into trouble that saw his succession in jeopardy and while in recent years he calmed down, the resentment was still there. Just like the plight of others was always at the back of his mind, so too was a plight of his own: the death of his mother.

But she was not him, either.

And while Amanda was better in every conceivable way, her own flaw was her recklessness. Letting her emotions get the better of her when caught up in the moment. A trait she and Mathias shared.

But herself?

Rita was Rita. Rita Iglehaut.

She wasn't doing this out of the feelings in her heart, but the fist over it. It was her duty to protect the people, to see that everyone was safe and order was restored to Quinta. She'd do this her way. Everyone else be damned.

Holding out an empty hand, she opened and closed it, making a fist, bringing it over her heart heedless of the pain.

And while she wasn't as strong as Amanda nor outspoken as Mathias, she was the acting commander and this was her mess to take care of. She had to be the one to take back control of the situation before it grew any further out of hand. Hurt or not it was time for her to get to work again because though they may be cattle, trapped in by these monsters at their gate, didn't mean this had to be their cage — and nobody was going to tell her otherwise.

"Duccio. Let me through. I have to see the damage for myself." I have to fix my own mistakes, she told herself. She attempted to squeeze past him, but her best assistant barred her way, stubbornly.

"Mr. Iglehaut said you wouldn't lose the eye, but 'under no circumstances should she be allowed to leave'. He said so. Said you'd make it worse if you did anything more than rest! And the Captain, she s—"

Her grip tightened on his shoulders. "Forget Amanda and whatever she said. I'm acting commander, not her. Let me through."

"But, Commander—!"

"Now, that's an order."

Reluctantly, he did so, and she thanked him, then started down the hall, as fast as she could without falling all over herself, but her head hurt something horrible, and she could not stay upright and was about to pass out again until she felt someone wrap their arms under her own. They shifted, and Duccio was by her side the same as before, and she managed a thin smile.

And so slowly and carefully they went.

All the while the darkness in her heart rose ever nearer to the surface.

 

[Historia]

13​

They pressed quickly through the rain, staying apart, single file, using Mathias' extensive knowledge of the area since his earliest days to navigate them swift as possible. Thanks to his father's insistence on him learning the vast swath of land he would one day inherit though not for the intended purpose, they lost little precious time when they came closer to the noble's district and the Kramer family estate nested within.

Striping out of their long coats as they approached, while they passed by a number of residents and soldiers alike as they traversed the crowds in the open, the stars overhead snuffed out by the thick smoke from the fires helped to divert attention from the curious combination of massive mustached ex-soldier, petite failed apprentice, and merchant conglomerate heir that they arrived at the stone bridge right before the gate leading into the noble's district unimpeded.

An area enclosed by high-reaching unadorned and fairly staid stone walls modeled after the Wall Maria itself, inside were grandiose mansions with large inner courtyards and the one he lived in — had lived in — was the easiest to spot; being the largest. Also, as Bernhardt had put it, the ugliest. Which meant the richest, in his scoundrel experience.

And Mathias was about to lead them through when they heard footsteps on the other side. They scrambled for cover, hugging the wall as several soldiers poured out, waiting until their silhouettes faded toward the direction of the fires before assisting one another over it.

Hiding in some shrubbery, they edged close as they dared on the outskirts of the estate and eyed the mansion itself. More soldiers were positioned in front of it. One of them, a tall woman, and a crude one, at that, was issuing orders.

Pursing his mustache and making an addendum of not wanting to get in her way with a chuckle, while Nikki simply nodded, Bernhardt noted that there was an immensely larger woman who Mathias presumed could not have been anybody else but Jeanne standing off to this tall woman's side as well as others who were clearly not soldiers then beside her. Recognizing them as additional servants of the estate, Mathias blanched at the orthodox arrangement of weapons, and knowing Jeanne, armaments ripped straight from the mantles and display cases around the mansion, they carried, as Bernhardt said it was going to be tricky getting past that. He pointed out the two flanking the woman in particular: the Kramer Merchant Association's hired guard, standing behind the tall woman.

"Your dear old man's personal army!" he cried, slapping him lightly on the back as it congratulations were in order. "Oh, the stories I could tell you, lad…!"

Mathias gave him a quizzical look, not quite understanding what he meant but concluding it was something disturbingly unpleasant because it was telling that even a hardened outlaw — a remorseless murderer — like Bernhardt had heard of his father's hired guard. Not having given them much thought before, he was beginning to unravel the thought that his father was responsible for worst wrongs than inflated prices Suzanne had undoubtedly shielded him from over the years. But he could care less who was between him and Rita, he would rescue her.

"Follow me," he said, crouching as he led them around to the mansion's rear entrance along a narrow side street.

Nikki craned her neck to look up at the mansion's top floor. It was three stories. "It's big. Really big! And really ugly! You were right, Boss!"

"Always am." Bernhardt beamed.

Mathias huffed. "Hardly anyone passes this way. And it's night too, and raining, and—"

"Everyone who lived here was rich. They'd have been the first to evacuate. There won't be many left in this neighborhood."

"… Yes."

"Should anyone come by this way there's a good chance of them being outlaws like us, then. Or soldiers out to catch them," Bernhardt continued. "And you know, lad and lass, this is something I've been considering since we got here, but, ignoring the, ahem, unfortunate turn of events outside, somebody seems to be maintaining a very high standard of law and order here. I wonder if the soldiers are actually doing their jobs for a change." He swept his eyes over the other mansions on the street. "No signs of looting. Nothing to suggest an invasion by the poor. Yes, quite a miracle! If I had to make an educated guess..."

Of course it was Rita whom Mathias thought of right away. She had to be the one keeping the peace. She would be the only one he could think of to throw herself into the task with twice the passion of anyone else.

"... it's that lovely young woman around the corner."

Mathias raised his eyebrows. Always right, my ass, he wanted to say.

"This is fortunate for us, too. You see, it increases the odds of the treasure we are here for still being untouched." He took a step towards the massive door that served as the mansion's rear entrance. The surface was iron-plated. A heavy-duty lock secured the edges. His father had hired the best locksmiths money could afford, brought in from Mitras itself. It wasn't going to be easy to break.

Or so Mathias surmised. But Nikki was already holding the lock and gazing at it in deep concentration. After a moment in thought she reached behind to fumble around at her belt. When her hand reappeared it was with a collection of those thin metallic rods from before.

She squatted again before the lock, clamping most of the rods between her lips, then pinched the remaining one between two fingers and inserted it into the lock's mechanism.

"Yep, obvious you're rich, this one's pretty clever," she remarked through pressed lips.

Watching her closely, almost mesmerized by a talent he'd not quite believed she held the capacity to possess, Mathias stretched himself above her, blocking the rain so her hands didn't get wet while Bernhardt kept watch.

"Isn't it a bit dark?" he asked her.

"It's all in the sound and the feel."

And, after a while Nikki nodded, turning her head to look at him.

"You got it open?"

Instead of answering she held the unhinged lock up to his face. It seemed as if no time had passed at all.

"Maybe I can help you choose better locks, for next time?" she teased.

"It pays to listen to good counsel," Bernhardt advised as he reached forwards and quickly pulled the door open.

The three of them walked through.



It wasn't far to the courtyard.

They made a straight line down a corridor with a curved ceiling. Familiar smells, foliage and scented wood drifted on the air. Mathias' thoughts were again pulled back to another memory: the memory of the day he and Rita first met. It felt as though only hours had passed, and yet it could have been centuries, too.

In this memory he was playing in the courtyard overflowing with green. Bright sunlight shone down. In the middle of the courtyard stood a fountain, a symbol of wealth. His father stood there, the newly risen head of the newly founded Kramer Merchant Association and soon to be one of the richest men in Quinta. A man, still young, appeared in the hallway where Mathias looked in: Henning, the district's local apothecary. He was about twenty-five, at the time. He was the one who fashioned and made regular visits to deliver the remedies and potions for Mathias' mother, who'd been growing deadly ill and confined to bed for the last few years. Although he usually came alone, this day had been different. This day, a young girl stood by his side around Mathias' own age, clinging to the hem of her father's garments, scared and awed at the same time. Shy in meeting strangers, entranced by the flamboyant build of the courtyard filled with greenery.

This had been their first meeting. At the time, Rita had worn her strawberry blonde hair down below her shoulders. He could not say the girl was gracious, not by any standard, and it'd taken him a moment to recall her name after offering her a tour of the mansion with Suzanne accompanying them, but he remembered feeling more and more taken by her the longer they got to know one another, as the years went by until that shyness gradually faded and he realized it was actually wariness. Caution. Apprehension.

"Ah, yes, wonderful! This air of refinement! This aroma of wealth, of power, of erudition!"

Bernhardt seemed to dance as he went along.

Mathias went towards the corner of the courtyard, following in the footsteps of his younger self, with Rita by his side and Suzanne close behind.

Treading over the muddy surface, he bent next to the roots of a tree behind the fountain and used his hand to clear some of the dirt. As he did, a metal handle came into view. He hooked his fingers around it. With both feet planted firmly in the ground, he tipped his weight backwards. A square line appeared, rising slowly as an iron cover. The dirt and sand piled on top trickled away. Keeping hold of the handle Mathias circled around and rotated the cover a half-circle before letting it gently down on the far side. Where the cover had been was a gaping hole a meter long and wide. A brick staircase led downstairs.

Come on! There's a treasure I want to show you.

Bernhardt peered inside.

"Anything to suggest it's been looted?"

"No," Mathias informed him. "We didn't see any footprints. And why cover it with dirt, if it was empty?"

"Good points, lad. I suppose it's about the size of an ordinary household's bedroom?"

Mathias' thoughts went briefly to the bedrooms in Rita's home. He never used them, but he'd been inside. "Yes. Pretty much."

"I think I'll take a look, then. No reason for all of us to go in. I'll see if the treasures were the trip!" Bernhardt cast his eyes toward the cloisters that surrounded the courtyard. "Or if not… Well! All in due time! Would you be kind enough to wait for a bit? Both of you. You won't get wet if you stand under there," he said, reaching in his pants and producing a match from somewhere underneath. Then, without waiting for an answer, he proceeded down and shortly thereafter came the sound of flint being struck, pale light streaming out.

"Good. No problems with airflow," his voice sounded.

His eyes shifting from the trapdoor over to Nikki, Mathias noticed that she'd moved to the cloisters, rifle in hand, not seeming to be aiming at anything in particular, but, only moments earlier, the weapon had hung from her shoulder on a leather belt, and his own hand went toward his shotgun, tracing his fingers down its length where it stopped upon reaching his thigh. Freeing the shotgun from its clasp, he brought his other hand to hold it crossway over his stomach.

The time might come for him to actually need it, the answer to his unasked question flashing into his mind: she was ready to act if he didn't fulfill his end of the bargain. If the concealed riches failed to materialize, or if he tried to run, it was over. Again, Bernhardt had no reason not to dispose of him right there, whether or not the hidden treasure existed. If anything, it would behoove the man to get rid of him. If the artworks and other pieces were still there — and he'd good reason to believe they were — killing him would remove the only person in the world who could identify the thieves. It significantly lowered the chances of the Military Police chasing after them.

Not good.

Not. Good.

He looked back at the trapdoor. If he closed it now, shut Bernhardt inside, then dealt with Nikki before she realized...

Maybe you just lack the nerve.

His hand trembled.

Maybe...

He was cold.

… you just...

Nikki had the muzzle of her rifle pointed towards the ground; she would not be able to fire right away. She was pressing her free hand into the windows and doors lining the cloisters, keeping him in the corner of her eye as she surveyed their insides. The first floor contained the kitchen, the dining room, and the servants' quarters, so few of the doors were locked.

Mathias approached the cloisters as though everything were normal. He wanted to keep his distance, but Nikki might grow suspicious if he lingered in the rain. He crossed over the earth in wet shoes.

He reached the stone-slab flooring of the cloisters.

"Stop right there!"

He stopped dead in his tracks. Head down. Rapidly, Klaus's words reverberated inside his head, growing louder and louder, his body getting hotter and hotter, his blood rushing through his veins with such a force they felt ready to burst at any moment. His head snapped up. His vision turned red.

... lack the nerve.

Swinging in the direction of the voice, Mathias brought his shotgun up on reflex and anger and genuine fear, completely forgoing all the instruction from Suzanne in favor of his emotions. It exploded. There was a sound up ahead like an egg cracking, and he heard a girl's voice as she screamed, an anguished howl that pierced the night, but it wasn't Nikki's.

A familiar voice.

Remember, this place is secret.

One that overflowed with vitality.

But we can come here again! Anytime you want!

Really?!

Except now, it was tinged with astonishment and despair.

Really.

In its wake a girl wearing the Garrison's uniform came limping into view, as another howl caught in her throat when she saw her fellow in mid-fall. She raced over, reaching with her arms, but arrived a moment too late. The fellow, a soldier, just a boy, threw out his arms and legs and collapsed, sprawling out on the floor near the girl's knees.

Really. On one condition!

Okay!

The right side of his head was gone, blasted away.

The insides splattered out, covering the woman's legs and boots.

Tell no one!

She lifted her head.

Promise? Promise me, Mathias!

Her features were lit under a thin column of moonlight, looking at him in shock and horror and disbelief.

I promise.

"Rita."

They were reunited.

As she fell to her knees, plastered in the boy's blood, he cried as he moved towards her, her mouth opening and closing as she gasped for air.

"Ri—!"

"Get down, lad!"

A shot rang nearby, narrowly missing him, and it took him a moment to work out what happened, as he fell back on his behind when someone pushed him down.

Someone had fired their rifle, but when he looked over Rita was on the floor, seemingly passed out, and he heard Bernhardt above him, grunting from a gunshot wound to the shoulder.

"For now," he said, casually, "We've a change of plans!" Grabbing him by the scruff of his neck, the old former soldier turned old muscular outlaw threw him out from under with ease. "Nikki!"

Nikki was already on it, dragging him toward a nearby door with a strength that seemed to belie her small frame, all the while Bernhardt was firing round after round from his rifle at something he was having a hard time seeing as he got back to his feet, blooding dripping down his arm and onto the floor, transforming the walls of the courtyard into a pockmarked mess.

"Not good!" Nikki exclaimed as she hurled her rifle down, opened the door, and pushed him inside before following.

Inside, it was dark save for a square of pale light shining through the wall.

A window.

Tearing the shotgun from his hands, she aimed it and fired. The sound nearly deafened him as the window exploded outward. She tossed him out the window. The scene from just moments ago flashed through his thoughts, obliterating any fear of his own impending death at the hands of Bernhardt as he tried to make sense of it all in his free fall. The boy's head, blown apart. Rita, holding him. Her mouthing his name. A shadow, dashing forward and catching Rita before she slammed her head upon the ground in her faint. And that was when he finally noticed it: the ground where the shadow appeared had been shattered. Which seemed inconceivable, for while it was mainly decorative it was still hard stone! It would've taken something with significant weight, or strength, or both, to do so, and his mind went back to the Titan at the village, tearing at its own face. Only a Titan… But, again, there was no way! It was inhuman! Not to mention, it'd been fast. So fast. But no matter how fast whatever it was, how could it—

There was an impact, then a sudden jolt of pain as he then landed outside in the rain. He was in a grimy puddle, and when he looked up Nikki had landed soundlessly next to him. His hearing returned and he realized he was on a side street. Dark mansion walls towered on either side, and they felt claustrophobic, as though they would come down on him any moment, the night sky narrow and distant above, the rain pouring down as if being tipped from a pot. Nikki helped him to his feet and began to walk, pulling him behind her as that same scene kept repeating over and over in his head: the boy's head, blown apart. Rita, holding him. Her mouthing his name. The shadow. The shadow…

And they were almost out of the side street and away from his father's mansion when something — no, someone — flew out the window.

Yes, he'd seen that right, this time.

Flew.

That was when it clicked in his mind: the woman had been wearing Maneuvering Gear! And she was moving with such speed in such a confined space it was astounding that before he knew it she was on top of them, kicking him down and tackling Nikki just as they reached the main street..!

They all tumbled hard in the rain.

Mathias heard Nikki screech as she dropped his shotgun just in time to move her head to avoid a punch that would've bashed in her skull otherwise. His eyes widened in astonishment upon seeing the fist sized hole that was the aftermath. Though, scrambling as Nikki called out to him for help, he grabbed the shotgun, because outlaw or not he'd an imminent feeling that both of them were dead if he tried to run, shout, or do anything else, and brought it up, aiming it behind the woman's head watching her struggle with Nikki. But, when he went to fire, he hesitated, the scene still in his head, thinking only one thing: I'll need to explain this to Rita.

That was when the woman swiped back, took a hold of his wrist, and crushed down.

And, for what felt like forever, his world became black as he felt a pain so excruciating that he screamed, jerked, then fired wildly, missing the woman by a hair's breadth as the pellets hit the cobbles right next to them, shattering with such a force it kicked stone shards and bits of smoking, twisted pieces of red-hot metal straight up into the woman's face, causing her to stop and protect herself with an arm, giving Nikki who was still sprawled below her the chance to kick her hard in the stomach and spring to her feet.

"Come on!"

Pulling him along again, her arm slung around his shoulder, he could not fathom anything except his wrist bent at an angle it wasn't supposed to be, split bone and flowing blood, as a wagon rumbled in front of them. He could feel himself blacking out and thought he heard Jarratt's voice and another rifle go off. The wagon didn't even stop to a full halt before he was thrown on it with Nikki right on his heels.

"Keep him talking! Don't let him fall asleep!"

"Got it!"

Glancing back, squinting through the pain as the wagon began to move at full gallop, rocking him up and down, Mathias in a feverish haze saw the woman was already back on her feet and had something that glistened in the rain and gleamed in the flames in her hand.

A sword? One of the blades the military used, the same kind Rita always used to thumb in her absentmindedness...

Without pause, Klaus fired again.

But the woman somehow deflected it. Then, as if that wasn't enough, she started to give chase.

"Shit! Jarratt!"

"Hold on, everybody!"

Jarratt swung the wagon down a side street, then another, then another, and another, finally losing the woman after the fourth or fifth one, and the farther they got from his childhood home, the farther away from Rita, the more Mathias felt like throwing up.

"We have to find a doctor!"

"Just dump him!"

"The Boss wouldn't like that!"

"Where's Bernhardt?!"

"He wants him alive!"

"But, where—"

He vomited over the side of the wagon in the midst of their arguing, unable to bear the pain any longer. "I…" The rain washed away the juices from the street. I'll need to explain this to Rita. "I know someone who… can help."

This wasn't right.

I'll need to explain this...

Not supposed to be this way.

I'll need to explain...

And as they went off to the place he told them, that word echoed in his mind over the rain and the wagon and the fires still burning: murderers.

He vomited again.

Because now he was one, too.

 

[Historia]

Intermission



"Ruins" , "Special" Art by Tatong

"Rebirth" Art by Gjergji Zhuka

"Smile" Art by shinidei​

 

[Historia]

Intermission 2





"Cattle" , "Cage" Art by Tatong

"Rage" Art by Laissa Hein

"Suzanne portrait" , "Isolde Lenz portrait" Art by PinK-BanG & colored by Ben Bauchau

"Suzanne full body" Art by Hisu when

"Duccio portrait", "Ada portrait" Art by Halimun Ali & colored by Ben Bauchau​

 

[Historia]

​

At the very top of the Titan's Toe, Mia only needed to take one look at the sky to know that today was going to be the day she flew away.

Not literally, of course.

Bad things happened to those who tried to fly within the Walls; a crime punishable by death.

There was always a new story having worked its way down the river to her of some bright-eyed hopeful who'd attempted to share space with the birds, only for their work to be detained and dreams to be destroyed before they'd the chance to leave the ground. Or, in the event they managed to take flight, well, of that it was best left unsaid. That is, if she were the type of person to keep her mouth shut. Which she wasn't and gotten her in plenty of trouble already, but that hadn't stopped her from dreaming beyond the fragility of what their lives were. Because people weren't always this way. She was sure of it.

But nobody was ever allowed to talk about that, either. Not ever.

And it was why she'd always remember the look on Mr. Arlert's face when he spoke of the pair who had their wings recently clipped, plummeting to their deaths fifty meters below as they'd tried soaring for new heights. Struck down by cannon fire on orders of the Military Police, so it was told to him by friends in the Industrial City and told back to her that one of them had been his former student, a woman named Rene, a protege who'd spent ten years of her life, her talent, building and repairing those very same cannons.

How ironic. How sad. What a waste. That is, if she weren't of the opinion that real freedom lied onwards and not upwards.

Only idiots looked at the sky and thought they could fly away. Not that they deserved to die for their belief, of course.

Whereas Mia, when she looked toward the sky, she flew only to reach the clouds and no further, using them to carry her as they floated in the direction of the Royal Capital because the future lay with innovation and not the replication of ideas that came before. It was inside the Walls where the true decisions were made, not outside of it. But, first, she needed a way in, and her only hope as a fisherman's daughter from Wall Maria's largest outermost District was under the tutelage of Mr. Arlert and his knowledge of both the Industrial City and the Royal Capital.

Yes, today was the day she was going to leave this town for the better.

Because her dreams lay ahead.

Her attention going from the clouds to the valley below and surrounding farmland and their dazzling green pastures, the Titan's Toe was the highest point perhaps within Wall Maria. Overlooking the entirety of Shiganshina behind her, it also gave her the ability to see Quinta to the southwest, Krolva to the southeast, Trost directly north, the rivers which ran through each, the forests and villages scattered here and there, the homesteads and hamlets, and whatever else in-between, and, oh, yeah — how could she forget? — an almost unparalleled view of Wall Maria itself, stretching endlessly around the perimeter two ways until it dipped over the horizon on either side.

But despite this unrivaled view, it was still the smallest mountain within the Walls, the peaks growing taller and taller the deeper you went towards the Interior, and, also, according to what she'd heard, one of the more treacherous.

They said it was due to the uneven climb in order to reach its summit, but, how was she supposed to know for sure they weren't lying when she'd never been any distance greater past this mountain, and therefore couldn't experience these other mountain ranges herself? Though why should she even care what they said? For her, having climbed it since she could walk, it was no challenge. Why should she bother visiting these other mountains to find out? For her purposes, the Titan's Toe was more than enough. It had a vantage over everything in the immediate area and a fair bit further on, was near enough to Shiganshina that she could scale it and be back in nary a couple of hours, and most importantly, granted her the opportunity to see the smoke from the Industrial City and golden sun shining just behind the pointed towers of the Royal Capital that was her dream. Because that was all she wanted: to leave this town for the better.

Though, if she'd to say, she was surprised that the Scouts, being the braver, most daring of the branches and the one she'd have joined if she hadn't found her calling elsewhere, hadn't established an outpost here instead of trying to always secure a foothold outside the Wall. But, then, she might be a fisherman's daughter but she wasn't an idiot. The Scouts weren't known for the latest and greatest gear. That was reserved for the Military Police, and, especially with winter ending and the rains to come, she supposed it was because of the cold. Unlike the forests down there, the Scouts would quickly freeze up here. If not that, the rain would do them in, and their numbers were already so small. Mia herself remembered to wear layers and had Bear curled around her to keep warm, but this winter had been a harsh one, and even she hadn't attempted to stay up here during that time, but now that things were beginning to thaw…

Bear perked his ears up, and Mia sat up, and after sitting there for a short while, thought she could hear it, too: bells.

Speaking of the Scouts, they'd returned from their latest expedition outside the Walls, and she hurried from her perch to see a distant line of men and horses and wagons heading for the outer gate of Shiganshina.

But, something was wrong.

There were fewer of them than when they'd first set out.

Reaching the town well after the procession had passed, the day was still young, and Mia's first thought when Brigitte only gave her a light scolding this time around was to ask about the Scouts and if Commander Shadis had succeeded.
"Afraid not, child," Brigitte said, shaking her head, hands on her hips. "Best hurry on home, your papa must be worried." As the ranking officer usually in charge of Shinganshina's outer gates, it must've been a terrible loss for her to be so upset.

And being moved along with little choice in the matter, Mia went back home.

Settling on her bed, little more than a threadbare mat, she'd enough time to spare on the finishing touches to the wind-up timer she'd been working the entire week on, whenever she could, her days divided between helping out her papa with his fishing and running his stall, learning from Mr. Arlert or watching his son so Mrs. Arlert could have a rest, all of which she'd convinced herself as necessary if she wanted that dream of hers to come true, but she couldn't find it in her to complete these finishing touches because of the Scouts.

For as long as she'd known Brigitte, nothing ever got to that woman, but this time it had. Which meant there really was no hope of humanity defeating Titans and they'd continue to be trapped within the Walls. Which was why she needed to leave this town with Bear, and do what she could to help because if building out wasn't the solution either, then perhaps building upon what they already had was. That is, stronger weapons, sturdier armor, greater methods to keep themselves protected for when the Titans did breach the Walls.

If she completed this final task, then she'd finally secure her apprenticeship and leave Shiganshina, one step closer to her dream.

She'd take her papa with them, too, if only he wasn't so stubborn in trying to stay, and so, sitting cross-legged upon the floor, Mia reached over and lit her lamp. She pulled out the wind-up timer from its hidden space near her bedside along with her tools from the shop Mr. Arlert allowed her to borrow and began to work.

As she suspected, the mainspring had broken after all, and so she took a breath to steady her nerves as she carefully operated the tweezers to remove it, making extra sure not to apply too much stress on any other part of the machinery when she went to install the new one, and, after confirming everything sat normal, did she dial it and observe the motion of the hand with satisfaction because she'd fixed it. And just in time, too, because she could hear the familiar sounds of the town's market as it woke, ready for the day.

Wishing her papa luck with his fishing, the marketplace during the start of the day was bustling and loud and altogether too overwhelming for Mia's tastes as she cradled the timer against her chest in the crowd on her way towards Mr. Arlert's storefront in the middle.

Following the usual flow of the people downtown, folks weaved through one another, going about their individual tasks in the usual congestion and tumult of this poor, but lively, outermost District within the Walls. She could hear the fruit vendors making their beginning sales pitches, the tool shops shouting their advertisements, fragments of price negotiations as one of them managed to nab their first catch of the day and what was to hopefully be many more to come.

Passing by girls in long, colorful dresses that'd always laughed at her shabby garb or her messily cut hair, as if delighting in her misfortunes would do anything to bring their own merchant papas home, these girls, with their shiny hair and wicked smiles, had been a great source of her discomfort and want to leave. Their comments never failed to hurt her. Though surprisingly not today as she paid them no mind, continuing on her way with this thing that was guaranteed to get her that apprenticeship.

Mr. Arlert was an inventor. A learned man from the Interior — the Industrial City, to be exact — who'd willingly given up his old life to help those in the Exterior. Ever since she'd impressed him with her homemade gadgets and tools built to help her papa with his fishing, he'd promised to employ her on as an apprentice if she was diligent and responsible and above all truly loved the profession as much as he did. Of which she now could confidently say she'd embodied these qualities, and was well on her way to delivering the final piece of her proof, and hopefully her first step onto grander opportunities, if not for Edelle, the curly haired spinster who ran the stall opposite her papa. Having lived in the District since she was a little girl as most of those here, even the girls in their fancy dresses who pretended otherwise, she was his undeclared rival and used her silver tongue to lure away all his customers, making her and her papa's life all the harder. Though her papa never said, Mia suspected it was because he married mama over her, and Edelle was just bitter.

Already ruthlessly at work trying to make a sale to a group of hooded travelers, musicians from down the Wall, from Fuerth, by the looks of their engraved instruments, the ugly woman still managed to reel her in with a greeting upon seeing her, patting her across the backside while asking where her papa before she'd the chance to rush by.

"This young lass here knows more about fish than I do! Unlike her pa!" Edelle croaked, her parting words being that she could always use the help if she got tired of her papa. When she couldn't get her man, the next best thing was to go after his daughter!

"Not gonna happen, ya hear!" Mia shouted back, Bear giving an excited yelp in agreement as they disappeared into the crowd.

Slipping by a group of Garrison soldiers out drinking instead of watching their assigned posts as she came into the wealthier parts of the market, Mia was once again thankful they weren't stopping anybody so she could continue unimpeded. She chuckled at the thought of them being chastised by Brigitte later, looking forward to what discipline they'd be given this time around because the Gate Lieutenant was surely running out of ways to punish them!

In this part of the market, the long divide between the poor and the rich became apparent, as the ramshackle stalls like Edelle's and her papa's gave way to more established brick and mortar storefronts like Mr. Arlert's shop where he was also busy securing a sale to what appeared a priest in need of someone to repair his pocket watch.

In and of itself a symbol of the affluent, the priest himself seemed awfully tense. Getting closer, Mia caught him saying it was for an important affair in a few hours, and that he absolutely had to have it before then. From his simple, yet clean-kept earthen brown and red robes, he was one of those religious missionaries from the Inner Districts. In other words, a Wall Cultist. Not much liked around these parts because of bad blood between them and the town due to an incident decades prior when, supposedly, they'd tried to open the outer gates to usher in the Titans that'd been thwarted by the Scouts, it was no wonder he was looking every which way in apprehension: the man feared he might lose that balding head atop his shoulders! He must've heard the tale. After all, it was well-known. But Mia knew that Wall Cultists and Titan Worshipers were different peoples, and that incident was only a stretch of the truth, at best. Something to scare naughty kids with things like "they'll snatch ya up if ya keep misbehavin'!" and "they'll feed ya straight to a Titan! Throw yer little behind right over them Walls!" which did have its effect, but as with all stories told when they're young, kids learned and kids changed, and Mia herself could see that this man wasn't one of those weirdos who drank babe's blood to appease their Titan lords, just an anxious man with little patience as he made his final demands in a huff before leaving, almost knocking her over in his haste to get wherever he was off to. This prompted Bear to growl, canines gleaming in the sun as the man quaked, scurrying off despite her best intention to holler after in apology.

She attempted to discipline Bear over the matter, though if the big dog felt bad about it himself, he was too preoccupied licking his lower bits to really care, and she gave up.

Upon her arrival, Mr. Arlert thoughtfully put the priest's pocket watch on his desk and smiled broadly behind his thick mustache and pudgy face. He cleared a spot for her on the desk to show off the completed timer.

"Done already, I see! Well, let's have a l—" Gesturing to the timer now displayed on the table, his next words were drowned out by Bear's insistent barking and he immediately knew what to do as he pulled forth a tasty morsel from his oil-stained linen apron and tossed it. Bear happily gave chase, bumbling further toward the back of the shop, allowing Mr. Arlert to finish what he was saying. "You fixed it, alright!" he said, inspecting the inner workings of the machine with an expert eye and deft hand, having it open and halfway dismantled by the time Bear came back, lavishing over his treat for the day.

Mia was in awe watching him work, and it hadn't even crossed her mind to look at the piece of paper he produced from his person, as her world up in the clouds gradually settled back down to reality with quill in hand. She knew what it was, shouldn't have had to see it to believe it, but her papa taught her otherwise, and so it was only after she was finished sorta-kinda reading it because she couldn't quite read well at all though Mr. and Mrs. Arlert were trying their best as teachers, did Mia proudly signed her initials on the dotted line while her new mentor nodded his approval and his wife, Mrs. Arlert, hugged her in kind, having appeared from the back.

"Congratulations, Mia! Welcome to the family!" she sang, her dirty complexion from working the same work her husband not able to mar the glowing support across her bright face.

"Best to tell your father the good news!" Mr. Arlert said.

Mia beamed. "Oh! I will! Right away, sir! Come on, Bear!"

Hurrying back home, her apprenticeship sealed, she could finally start her journey toward getting them out of this town and onto a richer road!

Her papa waved her over, a tired smile on his lips and a rope held taut in his hands. The other fishermen, accustomed to seeing her around, all greeted her warmly.

"You're back early today," he said knowingly as she approached. "Old Edelle give ya trouble, or did ya give it to her?" Though both of them knew this wasn't about Edelle, and so she replied with the good news, holding out her hand to grab the rope from him as he laughed, the skin around his eyes crinkling. "' Course I knew ya'd get it! Nobody lives in the Walls can work harder than we Shiganshina folk can!"

Her papa was born and raised here, and would never leave. She knew that her dream of them all leaving together was just that, a dream, and couldn't help but think this was the last time she'd ever see him again, right as he was handing her the rope and Bear's barking began anew.

"Hey! What are ya—" Mia's words were cut off by abrupt darkness which cloaked the sky. Almost as if the sun had fallen, and there was this strange, cloying humidity that drifted down from above as she looked up as if she'd been thrown into one of her dreams, seeing this mist and clouds of dust as something rose from within it: a finger.

And perhaps she might've thought she was still dreaming, that she were still lying atop the mountain, alone, asleep, comforted, if not for the fact that others surely saw it, too, craning their necks until their muscles were sore.

Nobody wanted to say it, even as a hand came into view. And with its every movement pieces of the wall crumbled and crashed around them as it rose higher still and higher still. This dark silhouette, now higher than the Wall itself, moved slowly, eerily, almost as if it were teasing them. And still nobody wanted to say it for what it was as it was nigh unthinkable.

She looked to her papa, seeing the terror in his eyes.

Growing up, she'd always seen her papa as someone who would always be there to protect her no matter what happened, because he was her papa.

That was what she'd thought, before a deafening roar thundered from the other side of the Wall like the world was breaking, and lingering in this boiling hot mist peering over the fifty-meter-tall wall was this hideous face, skinless and covered in red, sinewy, muscle-like flesh, the surface of which pulsed and spewed white vapor, like steam, its expression savage; fiercely, utterly, enraged.

Then the world changed forever as the outer gate was smashed inward, and a boulder larger than a house came out of nowhere to strike her papa, flattening him and turning her world the most brilliant and horrifying red Mia'd ever seen in her sixteen years of existence upon this earth.

A morning just like any other, and how she wished it were just a dream; that at any moment she might walk up, as one of the other fishermen grabbed her arm to pull her away, shouting at her that they needed to run, but all she could do was stare wide-eyed at the stain upon the ground that'd once been her papa, still thinking to herself that she was going to leave this town for better; what might very well be her last.

For the Titans had come, and there was nowhere to hide.

Art by JULS ☾​

 

[Historia]

Art by Laissa Hein​

 

[Historia]

14​

In a year the military would start their next Training Corps.

She had to be ready.

In preparation, she'd do more work around the farm, build up her strength, remove Historia far from her current state of mind, and develop her persona as Krista further. A monumental task, but, if she wanted to succeed this is what she felt she must do. Historia needed to die, and be reborn. But, before that happened, Historia found herself back once again in Isolde's rarely used study, in the late night, ready to read as much as could for this might be the last she could because changed required sacrifices.

Today, plans for the first undertakings to cull the refugees — so a royal messenger who traveled all the way from Fuerth District and was heading back to Mitras did not say but was interpreted as such by Isolde because she wasn't in the least bit gullible — were to be sanctioned by the royal government after short negotiations, which meant their long days spent doing and consuming twice the usual workload around the farm would soon come to an end also within the next year.

According to Isolde, anyway.

How Isolde had predicted this was anybody's guess, but Historia of course had her theories; if she was to say, with so many books written by an individual with an intellect far greater than a humble farmer or an ordinary village herbalist, she speculated that Isolde was a former doctor who'd been educated at one of the royal universities in the Inner Cities and had either left due to some misfortune or to escape an unjust punishment. Much as "Krista" was an alias, so too was "Isolde". It was clear to see if one spent the time to read through her materials or observe her taking care of the villagers of Thorpe. Not that she'd ever voice it aloud, nor would Isolde ever reveal the truth. Which was fine by her. The least attention drawn to herself the better. As long as she was able to find the time to explore her study in-depth for herself, she didn't care what the old woman's past was. And tonight she knew exactly what to look for after the previous day's rummaging when things had been slow. Using a chair borrowed from the kitchen when both Achi and Isolde were away because they couldn't not find something wrong around this place to fix after the second of these slow days, she'd finally reached the higher places on the shelves she'd been too exhausted to bother with before. It was like opening a treasure chest full of precious gems. A wealth she'd never the chance to have during her time on her father's ranch, for her mind to hoard.

And when she opened the first book she got her hands on, wasn't disappointed as she carefully leafed through its pages and estimated that it'd take her several days to read it, and another week to fully digest its contents they were so dense like all the rest in Isolde's study,

She was giddy just thinking about it, and hugged the book to her chest, wanting to devour it right away just as a Titan would — something Isolde never failed to tease her for, telling her she'd grow a head too humongous for her shoulders some day soon if she kept going at the pace she was — but instead of doing so she tenderly put the book back in its place on the shelf and frowned, recalling of Isolde's daughter, Riecka. The old woman said she'd always been less a think and more a fighter. Always getting into trouble. Often the cause of it. Adventurous, outgoing — the very type of person the Scouting Legion welcomed with open arms.

Not like her. Like Historia.

She looked at the scar on her palm, the bandages on many of her fingers from repeated cuts which only proved Isolde's point, thinking of talk regarding Riecka's scar and how hers might as well be another paper cut by comparison.

Her first mission out, Riecka had caught a wire to the face during a premature attempt at downing an Aberrant by herself. Unpredictable and dangerous, only the most experienced Scouts were to deal with them, but that hadn't Isolde's foolhardy daughter, and for her effort the girl had come home that same year grinning ear to ear with her head high and this long, jagged gash from cheek to nasal. Supposedly it'd been so vicious Isolde wouldn't let her leave the farm for an entire year in the vain hope that working her just the same as everyone else would mean she'd be too dog-tired to rejoin her squad, but as mother like daughter, and the very chance she'd gotten Riecka was gone; stubborn down to the very marrow in her bones.

But the military didn't just need fighters, not even the Scouting Legion.

Which was why she'd mold Krista around the idea that it needed doctors, too.

She'd have to put all that medical knowledge she'd read to use, somehow, and what better way than this? It'd make her an invaluable asset in the war against the Titans, and as the Scouting Legion was the branch with the most casualties, even if she didn't pass all the physical requirements for joining their ranks then surely they couldn't overlook the practical side. And, if they did, then the Scouting Legion wasn't worth her time in the end, after all.

In order to accomplish this, she'd only read books she strongly suspected would be of assistance later on in the Training Corps and had already gathered all those from the bottom shelves that she could, including the one with the indiscernible text that she'd managed to get a very rudimentary idea of its contents from a combination of her father's words she remembered and lots of concentration for she'd dare not write her own notes within its margins. The risk of being discovered was too great, and she couldn't afford to be careless.

Thus, she craned her neck down the row until she came upon the first book which caught her eye and blew on its spine to reveal the title: Marching Giants.

Pulling it down with her scarred hand, cautious not to irritate the scar for it was sensitive and quite the bother, Historia stepped off the chair and wiped its cover of dust.

Throughout her time spent here, a plethora of medical knowledge wasn't the only genre of reading material that Isolde's study had to offer, she'd quickly discovered. It also housed a colorful assortment of books related to the Titans. Many were simple stories written down from the mouths of old spinsters, of legends and tall-tales for frightening misbehaving children, but some were first and secondhand eyewitness accounts from before The Fall; one of which had caught her rapt attention that she left tucked under her pillow in the room she shared with Achi, and wished she held in her hands now once more, but, was most precious to her than all the rest.

Though, the time for pleasant dreams was over if it'd not already been long gone already.

The book in question was entitled Titan's Son and detailed the adventures of a boy born from the belly of a Titan locked away, or so claimed, and the girl who taught him about the world in which she lived upon setting him free. Its author had been a dear friend to the pair, accompanying them on a number of other subsequent adventures as together they braved many perils.

One such peril was the boy's harrowing encounter with a Titan outside the Walls, face to face with what could only be one of a aberrant because the author had given it a name: Ogre. Described as imposingly large, with bulging, venous muscles, it'd been strong and fast. Far stronger and much faster than any previous written encounters by the Scouting Legion, as written. At the time the terms "aberrant" and "abnormal" weren't used to describe Titans — they hadn't been categorized for easier identification yet — so attaching a name to a Titan was the acknowledgment that it was different and a sign of respect.

… A respect of violence.

This Titan had wreaked havoc for years against the Scouting Legion of the period, and, according to the author, it'd been the boy who finally slew the monster.

Another was the pair's involvement in the messy internal affairs between the Scouting Legion, the military's misfits, and the Military Police Brigade, the military's elite, that had boiled over from years of one accusing the other of wasting resources that'd finally come to a head following Ogre's defeat. An issue that she discovered was continued to still hotly debated today, when she'd unwittingly asked Isolde about it one evening, which surprised the old woman, and was a slip-up she'd dare not let happen again for fear of drawing her suspicions further.

As stated before, Isolde wasn't one so easily tricked.

Of course it would be strange for a child in the throes of such a far-reaching tragedy to start wondering about a feud decades past unlike Maria's fall or, better still, the presumed death of her very own parents, like everyone else. An overly curious mind invited unwanted trouble, and trouble, warranted or not, wasn't allowed under Isolde's roof nor would Historia let herself fall victim to it.

Others included the various attempts on the boy's life that were thwarted by his friends or their help in the efforts of a man whose name but not his achievements were erased from official records, to create a tool to effectively combat the Titans.

The tool, in fact.

While it'd not been written outright, she was no idiot.

It was obvious to anyone that the only way humanity has kept the Titans at bay besides the walls has been the very equipment the Scouting Legion was famous for using with legendary results: Vertical Maneuvering Gear.

Though, above all, it was the girl's struggle that went on to barely be mentioned within its pages that intrigued Historia the most. That resonated with herself and her own plight because on the surface they shared much.

Both the girl and she were the daughters of a noble household and nourished a lust for literature. Both their fathers were obsessively single-minded, selfish men, and when trouble came knocking on their doors, did they do what had to be done to protect their legacies.

But, that was where the similarities came to their end, for, while the girl was the daughter of a wealthy, self-made merchant, she was of a broken, washed-up disgrace.

While the girl loved fantastical tales of the world beyond the Walls, she cared for the practical, with her mind set nearer to home.

Whereas this girl's father looked to the future, murdered by cultists, hers dwelt on the past, murdered by the royal government.

And, when life as she knew it drowned in its own blood, the girl fled to help another and rely on others, but when Historia fled her only thought was of one person, and one person only: herself.

A thought that still rang true, at least for the time being.

In a similar vein, Isolde's love was a small comfort in the world Historia knew, and just that.

Like Riecka, she also couldn't stay.

The dream of a peaceful existence which constantly tugged at her own heart at times was simply so, because the carriage driver's hand pulled harder.

Historia killed him in her sleep over and over again, watching the blood seep off her hand, down her wrist, onto the ground and shattered glass. Stabbed his throat, again and again and again and again, until morning came. Whereupon, her thoughts were consumed by that of her mother, begging for her life. Of her father, sending her away. Those weeks being rode around, forced from place to place, touched and defiled and despoiled, until nothing was enough.

And that was how she knew that it was only just that; because her most comforting moment was when nothing was enough. Where she finally stared down upon the carriage driver's lifeless, convulsing corpse lying on that dirt road, drenched in his own blood, and became aware, for the very first time, that she was more than nothing.

That nobody — not even a kindly old woman like Isolde — was ever going to change that.

And she knew that Isolde thought similarly, from the way she had the other girl, Achi, keeping an eye on her.

Recalling the first time they'd acknowledged each other's existence, Historia had sensed immediately that this girl didn't much care for her; of which the feeling had been mutual.

They rarely spoke outside of work, and while both of them seemed perfectly fine with such an arrangement, Isolde kept pairing them together in another vain hope they'd somehow bond, but there wasn't anything in common to be found between except loss.

And even that had been different.

Where Achi missed her parents deeply, Historia couldn't be more glad they were dead, as she sank her teeth into her bottom lip then, sucking in the cold night's chilling air through her closed mouth, remembering the kids whose parents mocked her father and harassed her in turn. Of her mother, who'd turned a blind eye to her daughter's suffering and let her get pelted by sticks and stones aside the fence, shutting herself indoors and rarely seeing the light of day because she was afraid. Always afraid. Lost in her own tiny, miserable world. Hoping that, if she ignored everyone and everything not inside its sphere of imaginary solitude that her troubles would just go away.

Her mother died because she willingly closed her eyes, plugged her ears, silenced her heart, and shut her mind from the truth.

That nothing mattered except what you chose to believe.

To Historia, when she murdered the carriage driver — no, even before then, watching her mother hidden behind a door as a young child — she realized nothing mattered unless you made something out of it.

Grasped it with your own two hands and never let go.

That was why her mother died: not because she loved a man like her father nor gave birth to a bastard, but the simple, appalling fact that she did nothing about them. The one moment her mother actually did, was when she fought against that knife drawn across her throat, when she stopped being a victim and started to live. A moment that arrived too late.

Ignorant and timid and weak. That was her mother. That is who she'd have to become. Only, she couldn't.

She didn't want to be anything like her mother.



When she returned to her room shared with Achi, Historia noticed her squirming beneath her covers howling whispers as she slept. Against her breast, held fast, held tight, was a luminous shard that caught the candlelight, illuminating this simple country girl's tanned complexion in the dark and the sweat running down her brow.

Whatever the other girl had went through, after many a night putting up with her, listening to her frights, a side she never showed in the presence of others during the day, always cold, rigid and guarded more securely than any of the locks in the old woman's house, Historia deduced it was the one thing everyone feared other than she herself: loneliness.

Eyes never leaving the precious shard between Achi's fingers, it was always so distractedly, dazzlingly bright when night fell, like now, and though she'd not asked nor ever would, Historia wondered how someone like Achi had acquired it. Similar descriptions of such shards of crystal, mined from the now long since depleted Underground, that Sharle's father was luxury to, were described in the book. Achi's shard was the size of her own thumb, perhaps a tiny bit larger. The gem was at least worth several small fortunes to the right person.

Historia's first thought upon first seeing it was she must've stolen it. Which it continued to be. No question. And that was when it occurred to her, as she turned over and gradually drifted off to sleep, thinking once again of the girl in that book, Sharle: she had to be more like Sharle, that was it.

That was how she'd carry herself from now on. Not the terrifying wolf, but the shy sheep. The smallest, most vulnerable sheep, who hide among the herd. Who helped others, and relied on them just the same. Yes, a girl like Sharle is who Krista ought to be.



"My name is Krista. My name is Krista. My name is Krista. My name is Krista…"

Historia frowned in the mirror a week later, wanting to start immediately, only her voice didn't sound convincing enough as a girl brought up in a world where everything had been handed to her and her only daily struggles were how to dress up her hair in the morning and what outfit to go with for her one too many formal balls with the King of the Walls. Too gruff. Too strangled. She needed to be more… happy?

Cheerful.

Give way to the girl who once upon a time dreamed of peerless heroes in shining armor and hapless damsels in need of rescue in the books she oh so loved to read during those innocent years before the dark nights when her father was away and mother finally asleep.

Drag her out of that dark, and back into the light again somehow.

Otherwise she couldn't convince herself that she could pull this off, and if she couldn't convince herself then she couldn't convince others. Then she'd be stuck on this farm and have to force herself to live peacefully, ever after. Willingly ignorant. A fool, like her mother; the one person she never wanted to become.

And with all the things she'd seen, the deeds she'd done, all these questions in her head, to be gentle now would mean this was all for nothing and she might as well just had her throat slit alongside her mother's to save herself the trouble. And trouble of any sort wasn't allowed under Isolde's roof, she knew.

So she cleared her throat and tried again. For what was the hundredth try.

"My name is Krista. My name is Krista. My name is Krista..."

Better.

Though she wanted it to be perfect.

Historia pounded lightly on her chest this time, spit into the wash bucket, massaged her throat, and tried again.

"My name is Krista. Krista Lenz. It's a pleasure to meet you!"

Her frown lessened. It was an improvement. Still not perfect, but a closer step in the right direction than any previous, and, looking at her reflection in the mirror, at the ugliness of a girl with little left to lose than a father's squandered legacy, she'd have to do something about that, too.

Sharle's family had been prominent enough to buy their eldest son's way into the Military Police Academy in Mitras, passage atop the Walls anytime they wished, and whatever material luxuries they so desired. Naturally she'd access to the best products and accommodations available at the time, resulting in a fair-haired beauty with soft white skin and gentle green eyes or as the book described and was to be believed. All Historia had, on the other hand, was a bar of soap and a bucket of water and this mirror.

As it obviously became apparent, their circumstances were not the only thing which differed, but, as she turned back to the mirror and went about fixing her hair, tying it behind her head and out the way, as Krista, besides the sunshine in her voice, by the time the next two years rolled around, that'd cease to be a problem.

Her appearance, how she carried herself and the burden upon her shoulders, would be completely changed.

Transformed.

A pauper turned princess.

Her eyes went down to the scar on her palm. In the moment, she cracked a genuine smile, and it was still on her face the moment after when Achi poked her head through the doorway.

"You comin' or what?" was all Historia discerned through Achi's thick, South Walldian accent before the other girl had disappeared, along with her smile.

"I'm comi—" she started to yell back, but then, no, that would not do. That wasn't how Sharle would respond...

 

[Historia]

15​

"I'll be right out in a moment!"

Achi stopped mid-strut and slapped an ear, tilting it to let out the dew because she musta heard that wrong yet again, but still turned to see if it was in fact Krista who stepped out the back door of the house and not someone else every time she heard that nasally voice and polite tone.

"What?" Krista snapped, her brow down like gloomy clouds over those big, blue eyes.

She pointed a finger at her nose then swung it around the farm, then the stables next to it, the pens not far from that, and back around to jab her in the chest as the other girl followed the ring she'd made.

With nothing needing to be said, they both knew the problem. It was her avoidance of the farm, which the prissy bore couldn't be bothered to leave the house these days. It was those horses, who she spent more time around than the actual people she was supposed to be helping. It was the pens, and the broken latch on the gate, pigs running wild because someone hadn't locked it the proper way.

Thought she was clever, but Achi knew she was the one who was last up to do it, slacking on her chores. One moment, she'd be there, acting like she was doing work along with the rest of 'em, then, the next, she'd be gone, disappeared like poof! she was never really here, and Achi didn't give a Titan's ass where nor why; only that when she woke up this morning found their crops dug up, the grain spilled, grass stripped, all manner of smaller critters fled for the hills, the troughs meant for the other livestock dry and full of mud, and that her own ass was sore from falling on it one too many times trying to catch the culprits: these damn pigs.

If Isolde came home and saw it there was no telling what she could do.

And would.

Not beat 'em, of course, no, she never — not like her mama used to, anyway — but still something unpleasant. Something that shouldn't happen, all because of this slacker. This runt who figured herself taller than the rest of 'em, like a village leader, like Mr. Walter, but Mr. Walter was kind, and fair, and looked out for everyone else, when she wasn't any taller — least that was the case, last time she compared their heights and, with a jerk of the head for Krista to come with her, Achi was having a hard time thinking of what kind of punishment the old woman would give 'em because it was already punishment enough to be left with this girl.

Acting all high and mighty, as if she wasn't scared. That she wasn't crying at night, too, whining like a baby so much she'd wet herself more than once in her sleep. How she tried to hide it behind that ugly smile and the sweet words that everyone else was fooled by.

And when Krista finally decided she could not laze her way out of doing what she shoulda before and they were done corralling the last of the pigs back into their pens, did Achi pull her to the gate and show her how to lock it right and then made her do it over and over the proper way.

Comparing their heights when the other girl stood up after she finally got the hang of it and did that ugly smile of hers — trying her best not to tell her off, she figured — Achi came to the conclusion that, yeah, for all her efforts Krista still hadn't grown any.



Afterward, the two of 'em were washing in buckets of water, and, staring at her reflection between clumps of brownish red mud, the swirls spun and twisted and contorted, and in 'em Achi saw her mama's insides hanging like tangled rope and she clenched her teeth as she bit back her tears.

She still remembered how it snatched and hoisted her into the air, playing with her and jostling her around like a doll. Only her mama hadn't been a doll, and so when she struggled to grab hold of something as she was thrashed around like one, the strain pulled her apart. It'd dropped her after she stopped her twitching like a bored child and, before she knew it, Achi was staring at the body of her mama again: the blood and spit gurgling up from her throat, bubbling out her open mouth and down the side as it pooled behind her head and spilled all over their kitchen floor, eyes wide like saucer plates.

She sucked the snot back through her nose and wiped her face with a scabbed elbow. Her watery glare flickered over to Krista, who was lost in her own little world, too.

Like a doll to be thrashed around and eaten by the horrors of the world, helpless to stop it, Krista just stood there with that unsettling, blank look of hers. Then, as if she remembered where she was, lit up with that smile. That fake, ugly smile like a mask stretched across her face similar to a Titan's.

Their eyes met in a sideways glance.

A couple of the old woman's words came to her then: "She's hurtin', too. She's dealin' with it in her own way, same as you."

But without a word between 'em yet again, Achi shouldered past her and went back inside.

Sitting down at the dinner table, she took one of the biscuits left out by Isolde for 'em while she was gone, as something rose from inside her and she took a bite. She remembered that monster, all right. That Titan. The one who had eaten her mama and, shoving the rest in her mouth, chewing vigorously and swallowing hard, watching Krista sit down on the other end, she was angry. Angry at herself for not being strong enough, angry at this girl who looked down on her and everybody else, and angry at the Titans; those monsters who took everything from her that she vowed never would again.

"So, I want you to look out for one another. You don't gotta be friends, but trust each other. Hear me?"

Against the backdrop of that humongous hole in their kitchen wall, smashed through by that monster's giant fist, her papa told her to run as he got its attention and led it away. Told her to make a mad dash for the far edge of the village as soon as he had. That he trusted her to do it — trust being one of the most valuable things in the whole entire world, their family's golden rule. One that the old woman shared, but, no matter if it was her papa, her mama, the old man who took her in first, Isolde second, none of 'em could ever convince her to look out for this girl sitting across from her that acted like the smartest sheep in the flock, forced to wallow in the shit and piss of poorer people while she nibbled on her own biscuit as if it were her last meal, and knew Krista thought the same in their continued silence, until it was time to get started with today's work and they broke away for the rest of the day and when night came and she was awoken after dreaming of it again, thought of what the old man had said about dreams: that dreams were mirrors to your heart, a sanctuary that allowed you to leave behind the everyday cruelties, or heartless abyss worse than reality, and while she didn't get what he'd meant, really, not entirely, Achi knew one thing: that it was a damned lie.

Rolling over and pushing herself up, warm tears wetting her cheeks and soaking the bed, she groped her necklace, ground her teeth, and cursed the old man's name, until she was just about to drift to sleep and closed her eyes when she heard Krista mumbling to herself.

Looking at the other girl bundled under the sheets, she recalled the first day they'd met and how she'd seen right through those teary eyes. This dummy who thought she was tough, who spent all her time in that damned stuffy room and with that damned horse of hers otherwise. This pretty girl who didn't want to belong, who wanted to be a soldier, too, who said she wanted to protect everyone whatever the cost… Well, that was a lie, too.

Before maybe she thought they coulda got along. Even been friends. But now?

"No fuckin' way."

She hated liars.

Yeah, and unlike the rest of 'em, sure as shit she ain't fucking fooled.

 

[Historia]

16​

Ymir squinted through a glimmer of morning light from overhead, asking what they were doing here, just the three of them.

Mia stretched against a fallen tree branch that was taller than the both of them if they stood atop each other's shoulders, including the dog. She sat down and crossed her legs, leaned her back to the branch, put her dog's head on her lap when it dropped beside her, and then pulled something from behind and began looking it over with what appeared a trained eye.

"Looking out," she replied softly as she tinkered with it.

They were not far from the hideout, the last link in a chain of connected caverns and caves running beneath the many sprawling forests within the territory of what Kelly earlier explained to her as "Wall Maria" upon learning that Ymir was clueless about anything pertaining to, well, much of anything outside her own immediate circumstances.

Given a quick breakdown of everything there was to know, though the majority of it went over her head as she was still trying to unscramble her own past memories, let alone have time to compartmentalize new ones, in brief, this land was referred to simply as "The Walls" comprised of three rings of fifty-meter high walls. The lands within each wall were called "territories", of which they were in the outermost. Along each wall were four fortified cities evenly spaced apart, facing outward. Same as with the territories, these cities, called "districts", decreased in size the further in you went. Three walls, three divided territories, twelve cities, with the main city, the seat of the royal government and hierarchy, being in the center of these rings, where all the wealthiest of the wealthy lived. This center was further segregated into tiers — and Ymir suspected that Kelly was from this center city with how precise her words and practiced her walk — and was from where the King of the Walls ruled.

Most people referred to this center city as simply the Royal Capital, the wall surrounding it and districts attached as the Interior, while everything outside of it was the Exterior.

Kelly had went into greater detail, but, Ymir had only been capable of digesting a small portion of all she spoke, but the thing which stood out to her were her musings about this attack on The Walls not being just a random coincidence and that she had not actually traveled all that far from where she had started in her wanderings, this outermost territory being so vast to house not only a multitude of scattered villages, old ruins, and forests of enormous size, but an entire mountain range that continued on into the Interior.

And, speaking of which, of giant forests and the caves beneath them she had no idea existed until recently but were also in plenty, Kelly reassured her that they were in an area where the number of Titans was scarce, and growing scarcer as time stretched on, most having migrated further north in want of their sole food source: humans.

"Like brats too restless to wait for supper," Ada had told her once.

Though that still did not dismiss the possibility that they could be found.

Ymir, from her own experiences, knew those things smelled her on days she was sure they could not, when none were in sight or reaching for her until they were almost upon her, and it took everything on a few very near occasions to scurry away in some hole or scamper up a tree, though Mia assured her that Bear's nose was better than any Titan's, and everyone else in the group agreed. Even so, she held her doubts and was sticking to them as she continued to watch Mia with this object of complicated looking machinery reminiscent of the wings of the angels seen at the ruined church, composed of two circular pieces.

She appeared to be tightening something on it, before she reached back and produced a third circular piece, smaller, that she then fixed between the two larger, and her own curiosity must have shown plainly on her face because Mia thrust it over for her to get a better view.

"This holds everything together," she said, as if Ymir knew what that was supposed to mean. "It connects to these things here." Mia pat her free hand on the massive, rectangular boxes attached to either side of her hip, a wire running from these boxes to this bigger box. All of it seemed to be made of metal and wood, and Ymir recalled the story Ada had also told her a bit of: how Mia and Bear came to find the group instead of the other way around, as with her, and how they escaped together.

"Tripped a Titan off a cliff. Spent days lost. Kinda like you! Just… not as stupid. Dad was a fisherman! Taught her how to keep herself fed right until he got squished and she had the dog, and, well, ain't my place, really…"

Rather than waste time recounting it best spent elsewhere, Ada instructed her to ask Mia herself if she wanted the tale in all its glory. To quit hanging around in the gloom between making spear points and arrowheads and to make friends instead.

"And just pet the damned thing, already! Hah?! No, he don't bite. Not hard, anyway!"

The limping former blacksmith had been pushing her to join the duo, to which Kelly agreed; bonds and explicit trust were important for their continued survival as a group, the latter pointed out wisely, with a gentler urgency, and so here they were, but Ymir huffed.

Were it so simple!

She was still getting her voice back, used to hearing it in her head and not at all outside passing her lips for while she had been received warmly and cried tears of relief when she found people again and was learning to overcome that which she could not before, this wanton woman — Ada, not Kelly, oh no! — wanted her to face one of her most unpleasant memories right off? Stick her hand in its face and hoped it would not bite it..?!

It was exactly the sort of inspiration she needed, but not to her liking so soon.

She still had the voices to contend with, after all.

And Marcel.

Or what she thought he was, as she looked over at him, leaving Mia to keep on with whatever it was she was doing in peace.

The thing she called Marcel was sitting in a bare patch of grass, hunched forward staring at one spot in particular. She could hear blood gurgling from his throat, drool running red down his mangled body. It pooled around his intestines. His whimpering was so quiet it barely tickled her brain and if she did not know better she might have thought he was upset, and, though she did know better, went over and put a hand on his shoulder. He did not react, but for the briefest of moments she saw something: a small fire with a kettle hanging above it, with three people seated around it — two boys, one girl. And she heard something. Someone, talking, before she recoiled, recalling the smell of ash and cinder, the blood staining her clawed hands as they dug into the ground, and, right beneath her, four dark specks against the sun. Four children, huddled together. Three boys, one girl. Her prey. How she snatched one and dangled him above her head, her jaws widening, biting down. Cartilage and bone. Snapping, breaking, pulverizing, crushing. Skin and blood. Swallowing, spitting, devouring, savoring.

I wanted to protect my brother. I'm sorry, Reiner.

Clutching her wrist, wide-eyed, there sat Marcel as he had been, within that moment, his mouth forlorn and tears welling at the corners of his bright green eyes. Then it was gone and she again looked at what he was now: the memory of an unapologetic girl granted a new beginning. A miracle, and a curse. A grim reminder.

"Ya okay?"

Ymir half-turned to see the dog with its head cocked, ears up. Mia scratched one, whispering, and it relaxed.

"Come back over here, ya don't want to be out in the open," she warned.

A nod. "Y-yes." She went over and stood next to them. She glanced at the dog.

"Touch him if ya want," Mia said, looking ahead somewhere into the underbrush, chewing.

"Okay." Reaching out her hand, Ymir hesitated for a moment, then rubbed its head, gliding her hand down its neck. It licked her hand in reply, and she drew her hand back, less frightened.

"Hands doin' any better?" Mia asked then, and Ymir held up her hand and moved her fingers, curling them in and out of a fist.

They were swathed in bandages.

For most of her time here that was not with Kelly she had been helping Ada by breaking sizable stones taken from the basins and creeks hidden away in the forests, occasionally traveling to the river that Kelly informed her was one of two which ran through the entirety of The Walls and were the main source of water and transportation for them during another in-depth lecture she did not really remember much of all.

This stone-breaking was the work Ada spoke of earlier, and the first several times she had missed often and ended up with flayed hands, scraping the skin from her fingers as she chipped away at the stones with other stones and the crudely made tools Ada had fashioned for the specific purpose that actually did not make it any easier.

Wincing every time, after more practice, those scraps were reduced to various accidental cuts and careless nicks, but just because she had improved did not mean the pain went away.

There was also another phenomenon to consider: the fact she found that those same injuries, no matter their severity, would be gone the next day as if they never happened. It had to be related to her reawakening, her blood which burned, to her being just like one of those monsters disguised in human skin, shrunken down, and her gaze went past her bandaged hand to Mia, not entirely sure what to say — which was also not just because it hurt to speak still. It also had to do with her manner of speech, so Kelly explained to her.

In addition to helping her overcome her ignorance of this new world she now walked, Kelly was using their time together to curb what she described as a "dead" accent only practiced by the King and his royal constituents which nobody else in the group admitted they could make heads or tails of though Ada tried her best to bull her way through it with moderate success and Mia did not seem all that bothered by it, either.

"When my parents brought me to attend their formal ceremonies and balls, audiences with the King, even passing those of higher stature on the streets, this is the way we were always expected to converse. Being around your age, I absolutely hated it. But I did it because I loved my parents. I still do. And I can tell, even without you saying so, that it's the same for you, too."

In the present, the mutilated face of Helos came to her, then.

… Someone that she loved.

She felt a sensation rising from her stomach then and touched her mouth, swallowing before it surfaced and she fell down on her haunches, back to the downed tree as if the wind were knocked from her lungs, eyes downcast at her feet and Marcel disappearing to show the woman, Helos, with a beckoning hand and wicked smile, standing on a desolate field with blue bodies piled and where once was the forest were its blasted remains. Dead. All dead. And she brought her hands to cover her eyes because this was wrong. Hail, Helos! So wrong. Hail, Helos! So very wrong. Hail, Helos! So very utterly wrong. Hail, Helos! Someone that she loved. Hail, Hel—

Mia's dog rolled over onto her lap and she felt a warmth upon her shoulder and peeked at Mia with a concerned look on her face.

She must have thought she was in discomfort from the bandages.

So they sat there together, Ymir and Mia, Bear now spread out across both their laps. No words were exchanged between them for some time after, until Mia brought up that they all had to help out if they wanted to survive. Whether it be making weapons, cooking food, posting as lookout, scouting locations, finding food, or hunting Titans. Everything was essential, everyone had a role, and nobody was ever alone.

"… Hunting?"

Mia nodded to the greater outdoors. "Titans."

"Is that why Kelly and everyone left?"

"Yep. Kill as many of the bastards now, less to worry 'bout later. Most of the adults here are Scouts. Ya never stop bein' a Scout. Don't matter where ya are."



Down below, later in the day, with Kelly and the rest not back still not yet, Ymir was again helping Ada with stones, watching her whittle down the sticks the stones were for, half-turned in her direction.

Eyes lingering on Ada's forearms and their many scars — the once searing sparks of molten metal struck with hammer and tong, the branding lashes from a furnace's flames — each one told a permanent story, burned forever into the flesh.

An apprentice blacksmith before she joined the military, Ada had been a "stubborn kid too stupid to keep her face from the fire", in her own words.

"Come here," the big woman said when there was lull in their work, motioning her over.

A sadness overwhelmed her then and she began to cry. Not because of Ada or the clumsy way she went about re-bandaging her hand, cursing thrice, but that her own scars would always be below the skin, unseen. No matter how many subsequent times she cut her hands, or worse, her scars were what she could never share, and that was what bothered her, rather than the bandages themselves, if she would have answered Mia truthfully. What made her feel so very alone even though she managed to find a home and just another reason why she could not stay.

Staring at Ada's face as she finished up, her facial scars were like two falling stars streaking across the night sky above and below her right eye, and Ymir wished against her fate. That, once more, her past would wash away with the tears. But it was something she could not escape, regardless of how hard she ran.

"Doesn't sting any less, more times you do it. Hah?" Ada said with an unseen grin, before seeing the look on her face. "Aw, whatca crying for?" Ada put a finger to her cheek, wiping them for her. "They too tight?"

Ymir shook her head.

"Then quit it. We got work to finish."

She nodded and wiped the sweat from her brow, pricking one of the spearheads with the tip of her finger, drawing a dot of blood, to which Ada nodded her approval and told her it was time to start fastening them to the shafts.

After that was done, Ada touched her lightly on the back, another day well spent, and when she hobbled away after something to eat for the both of them Ymir took one of the unused spearheads, hoping that Ada would not notice it gone missing, thinking ahead to the day when she realized that she, in fact, could not remain here. That she had to keep moving, until the day the ground vanished beneath her feet and there was nowhere left to be.

 

[Historia]

17​

Rita finished signing off on her latest bundle of papers and handed them to the trainee that was her new secretary. He saluted and turned to take his leave. As he was almost out the door, she had a sudden remembrance and was about to call out to him for one last thing which required attention, but a light dizziness overtook her and she shook her head instead in an attempt to clear it. The door shut behind him.

She sighed and hung her head, then pinched her brow and rubbed her tired, raw eyes.

… How could she ask anything more when she couldn't even remember his name?

All because of the scene that wouldn't leave her head: Duccio's head exploding before her very eyes and her once childhood friend behind with gun in hand and fury his face before he fled.

She was still in disbelief attempting to make sense of it. How utterly Mathias had fallen, to commit murder.

Duccio had been such a sweet boy. A kind boy. A dutiful soldier and a comforting friend as she'd tried to live up to her position as acting commander to keep the peace within what remained of the district. And now he was gone, with his murderer still running free. Amanda hadn't been able to stop them though she apprehended their leader and confirmed there were at least five of them total, including Mathias, in return. It was the first thing Rita wanted to know when she woke the second time that previous night, other than what they were after, and of course her best friend had accomplished it and a great deal since, but Rita shuddered to think what could have happened if she hadn't. Nonetheless, the caveat of violence that Rita so desperately wanted to stall had shown itself again no longer than a month forward, threatening to upheaval the district while she tried desperately, ineffectively, to pick up the pieces of the order she managed to make headway with before.

Beside herself to fix the mess she'd caused, against the insistence of Henning and Doris she was intent on continuing her work, her duty, vowing to never go back to the way she'd been, on the inside. Inside her heart and the fist over it. Inside her head and the shattered hopes flickering within. So, using medicine supplied by her father to numb the pain, and, much as she didn't want to admit that Amanda was right — that Amanda was always right — she'd salvaged what progress she could and carried on.

Then another month passed, and no peaceful solution to the problem came. It was only Duccio's head, burst open like a tomato, his brains oozing out onto her legs as the world went black. It was headaches on top of headaches. An inability to do even the most basic of functions without requiring assistance from Amanda or Nicholas, until recently. Until just when she thought things were getting better where, while it was apparent that names and faces kept escaping her, usually the haze cleared by midday; only today wasn't one of those. Everything there was a milky white film, as if she were viewing the world through a bed sheet draped over her head, moving like she was a drunk recovering from night afore, her body cold and sensitive to everything, tingling and unpleasant until she took her medicine again, an awful tasting yellow powder, as instructed, from a small bottle close at hand, before rising from her chair, both hands placed flat upon the desk to steady herself.

Her father said the most it would do was help lull her to sleep though even he wasn't able to predict how devastating her restlessness would become, evidenced by how she still choked awake in the middle of the night, terrified of the blood. All that blood. Crimson horrors painting her dreams before… what, exactly?

She asked herself this once, but didn't yet have a satisfying answer to that question.

And because he often did, Henning, while tending to his instruments one day on her increasingly rarer visits to the apothecary, packing them neatly in his little black box and cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief, told her that she should be prepared, before leaving to see his other patients that day.

But.

Be prepared for what?

Only, she knew what he meant.

Oh yes, she knew.

Rubbing her fingertips together, stained black like her heart was slowly turning, and the more those papers piled up on her desk of harrowing reports of people committing suicide the faster their leftover winter supplies dwindled and the longer they went without support from the outside now nearing three months spent isolated, her letters made out to their family members who lingered, and the notices of others missing and dead alike, the mystery surrounding how many chose to forfeit their lives and those empty vials beside their bedsides, she didn't want to add Mathias to a list such as that. That was one of the very last things she wanted. But...

"You look like shit," Amanda said, announcing her presence.

Rita's heavy-lidded eyes went over to see her best friend towering over the mayor's desk high as The Walls themselves, one leg crossed over the other. Her hair flowed freely, falling to her shoulders because she wasn't dressed to standard. Stripped down to her harness and shirt forgoing the armored plate beneath, a question arose — every soldier on active duty was required to wear their uniforms at all times without exception — but there were obviously larger, more pressing matters to attend to and so she forced herself to let it go.

But, if she continued to do so, then…

Following her initial shock from Duccio's untimely death, the organizing of the hazardous task of clearing away the burnt down buildings unable to be saved from the fires and making their final pushes into securing the district had become Amanda's until she'd recovered and, while it'd come as no surprise that the situation had only grown worse because of it, Rita couldn't judge because she wasn't doing much better.

And if the worsened any further, the greater the disillusionment would spread among the civilians and the longer her recently conceived plans for a future where they could all work together collapsed.

As a result, she'd found herself aligning herself with Amanda's thoughts on the matter: the only way to show these people the reality of their circumstances was to remind them that they were indeed cattle in a cage, and what she — the military — would do to change that. Because it was her duty to see it done and she wasn't about to allow anyone to undermine that. Anyone.

Because her rule was absolute.

It would be. It will be. Because it had to be.

With these things in mind Rita raised her head again, looked her second in command straight in the eye, and asked why she wasn't out on patrol like she should.

"Isn't it obvious?" Amanda cocked her head toward the window. "Stars are out."

And yes, they were.

Midday was long passed, and she hadn't realized it — so engrossed in her reports she'd forgotten the actual time — though that still didn't explain why Amanda was here, when she should still be out there, following the guidelines she'd written down nor distract from host of previous questions the other so casually sidestepped.

And this irritation must've been plain on her face because Amanda gestured back. "Eugene told me. Was worried."

Eugene. That was his name. She would've started to cry then, if not for her eyes being dry.

In her stubbornness she'd been working herself to the bone and couldn't last recall when she'd taken a break, or, frankly, much at all, and when she attempted to move from the mayor's chair wobbled and almost fell if not for Amanda's quick reflexes as she caught and righted her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder in a sisterly embrace so she didn't crack her skull.

Head tucked underneath Amanda's breasts, if she weren't so groggy and barely felt her legs, Rita could've protested — this was also how Amanda used to rub her knuckles into her scalp during their trainee days, delightful as that was — but allowed Amanda to support her instead as she asked where Nicholas was.

"Sent him home."

She nodded her understanding and immediately knew this was a mistake, seeing more white before her eyes as they closed and it took her a moment to relax. She dragged her feet and Amanda stopped and waited, and would've just scooped her up into her arms to carry her if not for Rita wanting to maintain some of her dignity.

Luckily that brutish man hadn't known the proper technique. Rather than being dead with a face caved in, he'd just swung it like a club and clumsily clipped the side of her head. Not that this hadn't come with its own set of problems, of course. After all, who could ever forget the time when you almost got yourself killed out of sheer stubbornness?

She'd been outside in the village, now little more than blackened fields like all the rest, helping scavenge for usable materials and threading paths around the ruins, but so in a daze strayed farther from the safe zone they established than she anticipated. Lost somewhere along the main road, surrounded by the rotting remains of the scattered corpses of evacuees not so fortunate on that first evening alongside the soldiers who tried to protect them and their horses, deemed too far out to recover as Titans still wandered and roamed, she'd failed to notice the three-meter class crouching towards her, its arms wide as if to embrace her. With a slow, lumbering fall, its abnormally hot breath threatening to sear her skin the nearer she came, it'd taken everything out of her to roll out its way, where it crashed prone. Thrown off her feet by the subsequent tremor, unable to move, she'd have died then and there as its head jerked upwards, one arm pushing up its torso and the other a hair's breadth from her when — yet again — Amanda came strolling in, followed by the sound of swishes of air, flesh being sliced open, and a great gush of steam.

"You got a death wish?" she'd chastised, her blades locked in her hands, long black hair billowing behind her, eyes set on those colossal plumes funneling from the Titan's nape until it evaporated down to its yellowed bones whereupon in short order those would disintegrate, too.

Always cool-headed, her best friend.

"Damned inconvenient, if you went and died on us."

And just when she thought she was well enough to do more strenuous activities…

A hand went to her eye, tracing the scar. She frowned. As Duccio said, she didn't lose her eye, but still wore a patch over it as her father also instructed because sometimes the light bothered it on those harsher days, and today was one she'd forwent it because she'd erroneously overestimated her wellness; only she wasn't Amanda, could never hope to be, and really should stop, which was the least worrisome thing regarding it. Not being able to sometimes read or even recognize her own handwriting was becoming an frustrating issue. Forgetting what she'd just stamped and signed the day before was a third. Again, it were almost as if she were experiencing everything in the middle of a fog and now had this blanket over her head, bumbling her way around if not for others like Amanda as they left the district hall together and came to the stairs outside whereupon this haze she was having turned to mist, and through the mist the stairs became mountain steps again like those from their trainee days and she once again struggled with that pack on her shoulders, heavy and filled with rocks.

Ah yes, those awful mountain steps, as they descended.

When she failed to appreciate the bigger picture after the first day of her surprise promotion to acting commander, with Duccio being the one to rally the others in the previous commander's absence and convince her to take control of what little authority they ended up having over Quinta's survivors while Amanda lazed about. He alone completely and genuinely believed in her ability even if she hadn't at the time, and this gave her all the stronger reason to want to change. To be the example. Though it'd only added to the mounting pressure and, as they went, each subsequent step she took grew lighter and less blinding yet the path ahead for some reason seemed so dark and it was then she realized Amanda had picked her up, carrying her in her arms, and only by the time they reached the bottom that she was severely faint. Profuse sweat dripped down her forehead like she'd just traveled a hundred steps of that mountain path and not simply a few dozen stairs with nothing on her shoulders but camaraderie of a helping hand. And feeling her chest tighten, Rita laboriously pulled at the collar of her uniform as if she were gasping from a sudden lack of air, keeping her focus solely on her boots, when an abrupt cluster of pain hit her like an early morning chill.

They had dry bloodstains.

Wilco's blood, whose indistinguishable, bloated body they pulled down and burned only the day after they retreated behind Quinta's gates.

She heard again the wet, crushing thump when that large splinter struck the side of his head, killing him instantly and throwing him lifeless from his horse just as they were about to make it to safety. How he was thrown from the saddle, his wires reeling and dragging him forward, blood spritzing on the cobblestones, lifting him higher and higher and higher off the ground until it impaled him where the anchor had dug in above the inner gate. Then a squelch, followed by pops and cracks, as his remaining bones broke, some visibly poking from his skin and even more blood spilling onto the mob below. His corpse on the pyre, belly bursting like an overcooked sausage and the stench of his ripened guts mixing in with the smell of his flesh peeling away and what was left of his bones becoming flakes of dust in the first of many individual funerals they set aflame to that day — at least of the bodies left whole.

For the many that were not, regurgitated by the Titans in saliva-covered sacks of fused meat and bone, mass pyres had been built and after it was all said and done the ground was permanently black and anyone who went to the site of the pyres, either to sweep the remains or pay respect, came back stinking of death which never truly went away no matter how many times they bathed, what little amount they did, in fact, bathe.

It clung to the skin, soaked into the fabric of clothes, and, yes, stained the mind forever.

It'd been that day she vowed herself his death and that of the other soldiers wouldn't be in vain with no grave to mark their passing.

She vowed the same for Thomas and for Heinrich and the soldiers in their charge savagely beaten when they'd been delivering supplies, — chiefly rifles and ammunition but also recovered stolen goods and wares to be used to help the civilians, recently; which she would need to track the culprits down fast, that Amanda was handling it, and there wasn't cause to worry, yet — and, not to mention, for Duccio.

Oh, poor Duccio!

And though she could hardly think without giving herself another mind splitting headache as they continued on to her parents' apothecary, now she made a new one against her wishes because the time for dreams was ended.

Sitting in a chair inside while Amanda left to find Henning, in her mind's eye she continued on, bearing the burden and the blame of everything, the backpack upon her shoulders and rocks to weigh her down.

Gone was her shortsightedness. Her hesitation. The guilt of the bloodstains on her boots. Her naivety.

And what remained was her devotion to duty, to the people of Quinta, because that was all that mattered, in the end. Even at the cost she told herself would be just, fearful of the truth though she was, of what must be done. Because, in the end, duty was all she had anymore.

Jumbled in her brain and laid out in lists and notes back in the district hall there were plans to eventually close off the district in its entirety that she'd devised herself over the course of the month to guarantee its survival for as long as they were able. Shelved, until she was ready; each plan more severe than the one previous. Each one necessary and thought through without any feasible alternatives, and after this second serious incident of her soldiers being hurt, it was well past time she put them in motion. But, once she did so, there was no going back, and her father's words came back to haunt her in turn and thus came forth the only thing that had become clear in the threes' months of anguish she'd endured: be prepared.

Her new vow was to find and arrest Mathias, her once childhood friend, for murder, by any means necessary.

Because, sometimes, regrettably, violence was the only answer.

 

[Historia]

18​

Atop the bookshop Suzanne used to bring him on occasion beginning the days after his mother's funeral, Mathias gazed across the lines of buildings stretching away from it on a misty evening break. A cloth tarp pitched above kept at bay what little of the sun's piercing rays came through as white smoke from across half the district climbed lazily towards the sky.

Some were the remains of the deceased burned upon their funeral pyres to ward away disease, others the last gasps of those fires that'd almost consumed the entire area outside the noble's district the night he and the others stole their way in, few being nature collecting its due with nobody left to protest, but, the overwhelming majority were from the residents as they were preparing their daily meals at Rita's scheduled times, as a breeze from upriver carried the smell of the residents' cooking to him. He breathed in the aromas deeply, then turned toward the direction of the district hall itself, only just glimpsing the tiniest discharges of them all.

Yet again she was ordering her soldiers to starve, for the sake of the people they protected.

It was the same Rita he knew, and he was grateful events had not addled her mind nor stunted her compassion, but this didn't excuse nor hide her methods for maintaining the peace bordering on extreme.

Food within the district was limited and diminishing, had been since everything started, and eventually would lead to harder decisions. As he heard tell, anyone who assisted the military in their efforts in finding either him or his "conspirators" would receive double rations once per week. Thus far this idea seemed to be working despite how little reported was actually true. Though, again, how long would it be until that changed, their stores were finally exhausted, and the people themselves were starving right alongside those who kept them in line?

Having a faint idea of what happened when they did reach the point, from the stories Suzanne beat him over the head with in an attempt to educate him on of her life in the Underground and none of it being good — and even while he still suffered because of his unfortunate loss of limb — his circumstances paled in remembrance of what had only described to him as "The Great Panic": several years of arrests and executions and acts immoral and wholly corrupt that washed over the royal capital and the Interior of its citizens, soldiers, and officials alike in the immediate aftermath of the king's attempted assassination. How many not hung or shot or burned or buried alive, among many other awfully brutal examples, were sent to the Underground as punishment, and the barbaric methods enforced by the Military Police in cracking down on any simply suspected of having the very thought of dislike against the King of the Walls or those within his royal council. What it looked like when those who once had everything were left with nothing, forced to wallow beside the very people they ridiculed and condemned; deemed lesser than they themselves only to find that when the only thing which to care for was your own survival it mattered not where you came from originally because everyone starved the same.

How it was impossible to think of anything other than food, where it became a greater obsession than it ever had until now, with The Fall, and of one instance Suzanne recounted where she was so emaciated she was coughing up her own snot and phlegm and swallowing it back down to have something to eat because there weren't any mice and insects left to go around. Before them, it was the dogs and cats. After them, when the starvation was well past its lowest point, it was human remains. Cause of death held no bearing, no significance, whether it be natural or by the hand of another.

She described how she was always cold, like someone was constantly pouring ice-water down her neck regardless if she were wearing clothes, of which hers always hung off her thin, knobby limbs, swollen red, like tattered curtains, where then she couldn't sleep, staying awake for hours on end, never able to get comfortable and all the while her senses were being ravaged by aching hunger, thudding and throbbing about her head.

For months, he was in disbelief that Suzanne could've existed in this state of emptiness with others just like her, curled up on the side of the already overcrowded, muddy roads and trash-filled alleyways of the Underground, passed over by soldiers and volunteers alike who deemed her too far gone to bother beating to death or restoring to life. He recalled how some of the people she'd slept against the night before would be dead the next morning, and how she described being huddled against their corpses until they decayed and dried up for nobody was in much hurry to bury them because they'd no strength themselves, or simply didn't care because, again, what mattered was your own survival; stop to help the dead and you were guaranteed to die yourself that same day. He almost threw up thinking about it again, but managed to keep it down. To imagine that she lived on this precipice of death for so long until the day a man in black extended his hand…

"Kenny found me before the hunger gnawed everything away completely."

Of those events she'd spoke little, but Mathias even at a young age gathered that her troubles had not stopped there.

"It won't be long now," Klaus muttered wearily, perched on the edge of the roof.

"What will?" he asked, taken away from the harrowing images in his mind of what he hoped wouldn't result from Rita's rules which were getting more acute by the day, continuing to stand despite the sickness in his stomach.

"Til she snaps."

Short of stature, ill-tempered, with daggers for eyes, and now a leaderless outlaw, ever since their first meeting Klaus had treated him with disdain and didn't bother to hide his misgivings. Yet Klaus was still with him, making common cause — even revealing a certain amount of trust — and this was the first time he'd ever alluded at his past. But Mathias wasn't about to ask him to start sharing. Neither was that close, and perhaps never would be. It was something he'd come to accept.

He rubbed the stump where his right hand used to be. During their flight from his family's — no, his father's, as he felt he no longer deserved to be heir to the Kramer Merchant Association — estate, he'd crudely directed them to Henning who, as only one with a freshly crushed wrist could, and, much to his luck and the man's credit, without hesitation, had gone straight to work in fixing the rather dire injury. For, while he was an apothecary he was also a well-versed physician and surgeon when and where the need was required. Each district in the Exterior had at least one local doctor that oversaw all residents within their respective towns. They worked closely with suppliers and brewers for the medicines and herbs. Quinta's had vanished during The Fall, so it'd fallen upon Henning's shoulders though he didn't have to replace them. It was admirable, and heartbreaking, when one considered that a great many of the injuries and ailments sustained barring those initial few days following Maria's fall were under orders from Rita. Not of his blood though she may be, she was still his daughter.

Indeed, these entire last few months must've been just as hard a struggle for he and Doris as it was for himself, Mathias felt, because if he'd not anticipated Rita changing as drastically as she had, he could only imagine what her parents must be going through. This being with the full knowledge that, yes, he was now missing a hand and spent those first few weeks learning to scratch an itch with something that was no longer a part of him. Except it was that, and so much more, no matter how much he joked with himself to lighten his mood and lift his spirits.

He wasn't Bernhardt.

According to Jarratt, who'd helped Henning with the procedure largely due to his background as a butcher, on account of Mathias himself having no recollection whatsoever being sped from the wagon to the operating table, heavily sedated him due to the amount of trauma being so severe, Henning had initially thought he'd been run over by one of the horses from the wagon. When informed it was done by a person with nothing but their grasp, he was incredulous. Unless they were under influence of a drug or hallucinogen, no human was capable of such a feat. Regardless, he'd been forced to amputate it. It bled, of course, profusely, but hadn't been anything the man hadn't dealt with before, in a manner of speaking, folding over the exposed muscle, arteries, and bone with a flap of skin while Jarratt held him still and Nikki bucketed his blood and Doris had stitched it shut. When he awoke to it bandaged and tried to remove it in his delirium, Doris had also been the one to sooth him while Henning had instructed him on how to not let it get infected once the shock had worn down in days after, true to her role as a mother and his dedication as a doctor.

Rita couldn't have asked for kinder people to have taken her in, and that was what hurt the most.

And he knew it was hurting Rita, too, because she wouldn't be doing all this without a sensible reason.

In his brief stay there while he recovered to the point he was well enough to move on his own, he'd wanted to ask them about her, but decided against and not seen either of them since as it was too dangerous.

At first, he'd only wanted to apologize for what happened because of his stupidity, his taking of a life he could never atone for, but he also didn't think it wise to burden her parents further. Nikki was a surprising comfort in that time, while Jarratt and Klaus went around searching for places to lay low before they were offered shelter here in the bookshop.

Luckily, Rita hadn't visited her parents during that period, and also didn't know about this place, otherwise there would've been a whole barrel of trouble on both accounts, and shortly after they'd settled in the question was raised by Jarratt of who should lead them with Bernhardt indisposed for the foreseeable future. And while not officially, mainly due to Suzanne's duty to see him interact with people other than his father's peers, he was chosen as the obvious candidate because of the good number of his, or, rather, her friends and acquaintances still holed up in Quinta vouched on his behalf though he hadn't accepted.

His only thoughts in the three weeks following the unanimous decision was that he still hadn't gotten the chance to apologize, or explain himself, or much else, to Rita. Because, admittedly, it wasn't her parents who needed to hear his words. Furthermore, where was he to begin in bringing together all these people he supposedly knew? And for what? To create some kind of resistance? He knew not the first thing about how to do that or even if he wanted to go about doing it. So, in the meantime, he and the others had been continuing to keep a low profile and stay out of sight with the help of Derek, the owner of the bookshop and, naturally, an old friend of Suzanne's twenty years and counting. Mathias knew of him better than the rest of those Suzanne had introduced him to, becoming a frequent visitor at his shop to buy certain books on her behalf when she'd finally trusted him to do so alone. A secret shared just between the three of them, and upon hearing his tale, seeing the state he was in, and motivated by what Mathias knew was his love for Suzanne — oftentimes when they visited together which was rarer as he'd grown older and older, he couldn't help but notice the looks Derek would give her because he himself was the same, or had been, with Rita — Derek agreed to cooperate with them and Mathias, if there was one decent decision he made, overruling the skepticism and mistrust of his three companions had been it because he knew that Derek could hold a secret.

Which certainly helped, as the bookshop was inconspicuous, almost buried among the other businesses, tucked away in a right corner at the end of a cul de sac. Further hidden by countless piles of old books to either side of the doorway, the inside long and narrow and lined down the center and against both walls with tall shelves crammed with books, searching the place would also prove tedious and most of Rita's patrols rarely came down this way, besides. It was the perfect place for them in their present circumstances. Though, for how long that lasted, couldn't be said. Nor would he want to put Derek or his shop and those vendors and shopkeepers around turning a blind eye further at risk, for Rita's first act had been to make an announcement to all those loyal to the Garrison of his lawful arrest. Time was the only factor keeping their existence concealed. He would really be a fool then to think otherwise. Sooner rather than later they'd have to find someplace else, and without Bernhardt's experience it was going to be difficult to find a better one.

And thinking again of his childhood friend, there was also still the matter of what he was going to do.

If he could do anything at all.

The boy soldier… he never intended to kill him.

What else could he have done besides flee the scene? If he'd stayed he'd be sharing the same fate as Bernhardt.

He could still see that look on her face immediately after. And her scream. Oh, her scream! The blood and brains of that young boy's head, blown away, because of his own rashness, fear, and the pain.

It was all coming back to him and he put his sole remaining hand to his mouth, resisting the urge to throw up again.

Suzanne's words resurfaced, then: "Sometimes, Mathias, love isn't enough. I want you to be prepared for that."

Not that he'd been given much a voice in that regard either, as he was now a wanted criminal alongside the others. If that announcement hadn't been enough of an indication, then the posters displayed throughout Quinta were. "Dead or Alive" they were marked. Dead or alive! There went any idea of negotiation, let alone trying to apologize! Somewhere, Bernhardt was smiling with those bright blue eyes of his. Singing in his grave. Even now he was still in the midst of processing it. What could have gone through Rita's mind…

"Anything may happen, lad. Your sweetheart might not be the same sweetheart you once knew. Mayhaps you never truly knew her…"

If he hadn't believed it before, he was sure Rita despised him with all her heart now.

He could still try talking to her somehow and while it would be fastest to persuade her in person, the moment he showed his face, far from talking any sense into her, he felt that he would be cut to pieces by blades designed to fell Titans.

His shoulders slumped.

Who he'd been to her, childhood friend or not, would mean nothing now.

Her transformation, and one that wasn't far off from a point of no return if Klaus was to be believed — there was no reason not to, they were in the same situation, after all — and the current state of Quinta it was bringing about, was all his fault. If only he'd not acted so hastily. If only he'd not let Klaus's words get to him.

Maybe you just lack the nerve.

This, at least, was how he saw it. Nikki, while it was still hard to map out her thoughts at any given moment, and mostly she looked as though she wasn't thinking at all, which probably worked immensely in her favor, sometimes, now that he actually gave it consideration, said he was being overly self-conscious. In this case, a twist of the arm and slap across the face and his head suddenly upon her chest. Though it was obvious she'd been drinking more heavily as the months went by, and no doubt felt the same anxieties and daily pressures they were all experiencing, she acted as carefree as always. It was admirable. Despite everything, Nikki knew who she was and was sticking to it.

He smiled at that.

Throughout it all, Mathias had come to find that in certain critical moments she possessed the ability to encourage and comfort him… in her own unique way… and he blushed and averted his eyes when Klaus looked over upon seeing him fidget, wondering when he started musing of her like that: as more than just an outlaw. Was it because he was a murderer now, too? But, no, that was a naive way to go about it. He wanted to punch himself. Just because he… killed… someone… a boy… he wasn't… Unlike them, regardless if it was Nikki's childish mannerisms or Jarratt's nonchalant, almost fatherly tone, Klaus's indifference, Bernhardt's glee, Mathias wasn't one to so easily shake free his guilt.

There was a powerful gust of wind. He gazed out towards a portion of the wall enclosing the district. Cannons were spaced about three men apart, with soldiers patrolling between them. Baking under the direct sunlight, they looked miserable as he felt. He never wanted this, and something told him he was the only one able to fix it. Even if he wasn't about to risk confronting her directly. Even if she hated him, or if it was really all just in his head, he wanted to save Rita from herself and make things right again.

Somehow.

Because…

Why, it's love, Mathias.

And did he love her so.

"You two intend on making my job easier than it already is?"

The sudden quip made both of them spin around as one: Mathias with his stump raised and Klaus with his rifle trained to shoot whoever it was, but, before he could a wire shot out and snaked itself around the muzzle, wrangling it from his hands.

The rifle was reeled in across the rooftop, coming to a stop at the feet of the woman who'd spoken. She lifted it with a boot and briefly inspected it before checking the chamber and proceeding to take out any bullets therein. Tossing it back and letting the bullets drop from her hands to scatter about, she crossed her arms unamused as Klaus pulled a knife hidden in his boot.

In what appeared that same instant, a shadow flew past Mathias and came to rest in front of Klaus, and Mathias had only time enough to process that this was the same shadow as back then, during that night, and that this woman was the same one as back then, too, before she pulled a sword of her own and pointed it at his face.

"Move, and I take your other hand."

Klaus was nurturing his own hand, which she'd whacked the knife from, glaring at her. A blade was at his throat, too.

A tension moment passed between the three of them, then another, and finally a third, when Mathias gathered the courage to speak.

"Y-you're Amanda, right? What do you want?"

Rita's second in command gave a slight tilt of the head, her expression dour. "To talk." She lowered her blades. Slightly. "So let's talk."

 

[Historia]

19​

The agent Jörg had sent for never showed, and instead of twiddling her thumbs waiting around during the time he was supposed to have arrived Suzanne had continued her search for more answers into the "how" Mathias had left in the first place, which eventually led her to a soldier's tavern deep within this would-be gilded Inner City where the horrors of the outside world were lost to the melancholy of the Orchestra Hall that overshadowed everything in that part of the city.

It was here, amid the din and the heat and vapor and smoke, that she'd spent hours listening to their conversations against the backdrop of the rise and fall of a singer's breathy voice and the sombre, dark ballads carried downwind of humanity's sanctity finally breached, its woes only just beginning, until she heard of a peculiar game of dice involving a certain mustachioed old soldier. How he'd unanimously cheated and taken home the biggest pile of copper, gold, and silver the night of his sudden arrival and solemn departure. The uproar of the place for quite awhile. Gossip and rumor that he'd not actually been a soldier, but an agent of the royal government.

… If only.

No, he was a soldier through and through — the most wretched kind imaginable.

And following on his heels like a lost pup that night had been this boy who very much looked like he didn't belong, the two of them having left the tavern a bit too tipsy from one too many. That's when it started, she surmised, recalling of the late nights leading up to his disappearance where she'd waited for Mathias to come home because it was unusual for him to be gone so late, though he'd answered none of her questions and had went straight to bed each time, worrying her.

So it was she'd put two and two together, finally able to put the "how" to rest, and without much to do after, like hell she'd just sit and keep waiting for this agent, so she'd sent in her own favor from Mitras.

As there was no guarantee Kenny would come down as he wasn't known to do things from out the kindness of his heart, she'd made sure it'd at least rattle his old bones by besmirching Uri's memory so he couldn't outright ignore it knowing she couldn't rely on him to do much else after clearing her passage. In light of this, she'd also taken it upon herself to get a clearer grasp of whom or what she might be facing, for wherever Bernhardt went he always drew others to him, and so she'd spent the past several months also walking the refugee camps in search of both more information about Bernhardt, Mathias, and those they traveled with and those willing to accompany her on what was in all likelihood a place they might never come back from and there would be no compensation if they did.

She'd managed to hook a few of them initially, and everything seemed to always go well, until she mentioned that she was attempting to rescue the son of her employer, Jörg Kramer, and then it was they declined because, unsurprisingly, as word spread of the Kramer Merchant Association's involvement in the expedition, ill will was had toward anyone who associated with the conglomerate. Especially the son of the man himself and especially after the expedition's return with stragglers coming in every night hence and word spread even further. This, of course, once it became known who she was and what she was here for, caused her to not only receive no more offers, but also nobody willing to share any information.

She'd been almost forced to give up until one man by the name of Leon had approached her and revealed that he'd been the last person to see Mathias alive, and would only accept on the accord that she would acquire a fancy basket of fine wine from the Kramer estate's cellars for him and that he could kill the "man with the curly mustache" himself.

Which led to today.

Where she again left Fuerth's white, decorated buildings behind, passed through the line of stake walls and cannons which further separated the refugees from the district's lofty residents, greeted the gate lieutenant as he allowed her entry and called up to his men above to hoist the iron gate, and went under the inner gate that led out to the camps.

Suspended on an array of chains which kept it closed and reinforced in multiple layers, it was supposed to have been their protection against the Titans, but after The Fall its usefulness was being put to question.

Popular talk in the first week among Jörg and his colleagues strongly leaned toward leaving the refugees to their fate on the other side while they bolstered their already fortified defenses inside Fuerth's walls in preparation, and it was only thanks to the constant push back by those sympathetic to the refugees' plight that had successfully delayed their plans in doing so, and with the expedition's return and the truth became wider scrutinized as it was already widely known these plans were now on hold indefinitely while they dealt with the burden of those who were supposed to all marched to their deaths.

Though, as she exited the outer gate to see that despite these setbacks the soldiers and equipment setup to guard the shantytown from the Titans were fewer than the day before, it would only get worse from here, and she wanted to be gone before Jörg and his colleagues' plans officially began anew.

Which was why, with said basket in hand, still dressed as a servant of the Kramer family, weaving her way through the makeshift houses that were little more than collections of broken down wagons turned over on their sides, squished between the shantytown and Fuerth's outer gate under the high shadow of its walls, feeling so claustrophobic it were as if she was in the bowels of the Underground once more, that she needed Kenny to hurry up as she ignored the many ugly stares thrown her direction in part due to her presence no longer being welcome but also because she'd wasted no time and came right from the estate.

It was no secret that Jörg spared no expense when it came to his appearance and everything in his life reflected to match: from the water in his bathes imported from the mountain springs of Mitras to the clothes on his servants' backs from the same tailor as the Supreme Commander Zackly himself supposedly used. Even her dirtied apron, plain by his standards, was made of a fine, interlaced cloth in an array of elaborate patterns, and worth a great deal.

Obviously, the clothes made her stand out even more-so than she liked, but her impatience had gotten the better of her, as it still often did, and, as she kept on, had to remind herself that she was no longer in the Underground. That these weren't people to worry about — that is, so long as they still had assistance from the aforementioned sympathy of Fuerth's kindlier residents and also of more lenient soldiers of the Garrison which patrolled its walls, many of whom where their friends or relatives — and she could relax, but, no matter how hard she tried, never forgot lessons learned. That oftentimes a stranger's compassion only ran skin deep, a relative's insomuch how much blood was concerned, and a friend's simply the price bones would fetch or otherwise be left unburied and seldom mourned.

That, good, decent people were all but non-existent.

That everything was a lie.

But that wasn't the case here, and she'd thought she'd almost conquered this fear, this… anxiety… that something bad was always going to happen the moment she stepped outside her door, only to find nothing had really changed about her. That she was still that stupid girl from long ago, and that maybe it was only natural that Mathias had left… Because that's exactly what a stupid girl like her would've done, and it was all her fault.

This feeling followed her the rest of the way to Leon's little house in the shantytown, where he asked if something was wrong and she shook her head, setting the basket down while he apologized nonetheless and didn't mean to cause her any alarm if he did because he'd no time to change out of his uniform let alone start his dinner having just come from his shift atop the wall.

"Shoulda been done earlier, but with how things are, well, ya know…"

"… That's quite alright."

He offered her a seat while he prepared his dinner, but she declined, preferring to stand, and looked outside his one window to the refugee camp as they began their late evening meals, too, the smell of their cooking faintly mixed with an odor of sweat and human waste filling the chilly spring air.

"Want some?" he said, presenting her with a bowl of soup.

"No, but thank you."

He shrugged. "Suit yourself." He took one of the bottles from the basket and drank a long swig that would've impressed even Kenny before he spoke again. "So, when do we head out?"

"Soon." She hoped. Well before it took them to finalize their plans for the refugees and tie any dangling loose ends, because then the district wouldn't let anyone enter or leave from the side of Wall Maria — even a agent of the royal government. "But first I want you to tell me more about the last you saw Mathias."

He hiccuped. "Ah, 'cuse me, missus," he said, wiping his mouth with a sleeve. "Well, we'd just come across our first village…"

And so he'd went on to again recount that it was four others whom Mathias traveled with. That one of the men, the forenamed "curly mustached bastard", who carried himself proud "like a right and proper king", and who could've been none other than Bernhardt, had murdered Markus, another soldier who was with them, in the ensuing chaos after the expedition had been waylaid by a Titan that'd been eating corpses nearby, and then used Leon himself as bait to draw the Titan away while he escaped with Mathias and the others.

"Barely got away, but when I see that son of a bitch… next time… I'll…!"

While he ranted, taking more swigs of that first bottle, his anger brought her back to the morning of Mathias' disappearance, and how she'd first went to the Military Police's offices where, under its crest of horse and horn had once been a desk and pair of chairs setup in the middle of the street for sole purpose of signing up those who volunteered their lives for the chance of seeing their homes and loved ones again.

Where she'd rapped on the barracks door hard enough to splinter it until someone finally answered… and how she would've liked to break the nose of the captain who did, thinking of what false promises he'd no doubt told those desperate refugees who so suddenly and so violently lost their homes while he sighed uninterested in anything she'd to say just the same as he'd stamped their lives away. How satisfying it would've been to put her hands around his throat and squeeze the live from him, too, when he deflected her questions unable to tell her anything for he'd obviously been bribed. That she could imagine how far the line had stretched of fiery young men and women as Mathias — laborers and craftsmen and farmers, sons and daughters too naive to fully comprehend what they were getting themselves into — and how little he must've thought of them.

Oh, how she'd wished she still carried her knife, so she could've twisted it into his guts and watched his eyes widen, afraid of what happened next, when she'd instead thanked him for his time and left to then go look for the man who'd initially tried to intimidate her, that worker, which led her to a dead end and it was only by chance she'd stumbled upon that volunteer; she had let those emotions dictate how she'd dealt with it since, but violence wasn't going to solve her problems just as much as it'd never give Leon here ease of mind for the death of his friend.

All these years living above the surface and violence was all she knew. How the military, whether they be Garrison, Military Police, or Scouting Legion, upset her. Of all the people who'd attempted to help her, and how roughly they were pushed away.

It'd taken her years to muster the courage to even leave the confines of the main Kramer estate in Quinta, and even more years still to ease her wariness when confronted whenever she left on Jörg's behalf or the little Mathias' behest. Years where that knife was ever under her sleeve, tucked and hidden and ready to use at a moment's notice, pressed cold and sharp against her skin between forearm and wrist unbeknown to anyone else.

She thought she'd changed, but, perhaps she never had, and, by the time he was done, this revelation bothered her so deeply that she hastily said they'd pick this up tomorrow and excused herself.



Back at the Kramer estate in Fuerth, she missed Jeanne.

The one thing which remained the same was that the Military Police, who were the sole peacekeeping force within the Inner Cities and had detachments in every district outside them to more readily deal with affairs related to the King, was more fond of cracking skulls than breaking bread as, over the days following her talk with its more outspoken survivors went missing never to be heard from again, and hoped that Leon hadn't been a part of that number, when, having received her message, Kenny had shown up past midnight two weeks later, now more than four months and several days since Mathias left for Quinta, slipping past the bodyguards without spilling a single drop of blood — for once — and woken her up with a sharp whistle and sharper knife against the windpipe, face partially hidden by the shadow of his bowler, eying her from under the rim.

"And here I thought you learned something since we last saw each other, kid," he'd greeted through the strangled wheeze that was now his voice. "But you're still wagging your tail like a dog after all these years."

And it was shortly thereafter he must've felt her own knife pressing into his side, because he'd grinned.

"I got other business to sort out, but a friend of mine… he'll be on his way. Already passed him the news."

"You don't make friends."

"Things change. I don't kill a few dozen more of his men, and he lets my charges slide. For a time…"



"I see him, missus!" Leon exclaimed.

Looking up from rubbing the nick on her neck from Kenny's surprise visit and the warm array of color along the side of the dusty road from the many flowers in full bloom, Suzanne followed Leon's finger leading away from Fuerth's inner shantytown and further along into the territory of Wall Rose in what was now "unofficially" regarded as the new Exterior to a lone rider coming toward the gate, putting the same hand over her brow to keep the sun's blinding glare from her eyes as she narrowed them, trying to make out their features as they drew near.

Of what she could, this lone rider wore all black from head to toe except for the glint of metal on his chest, and, when he at last came treading up to where she and Leon waited, leaning back in his saddle, disciplined was his posture, cold were his eyes, and leathery his skin. He was old, sporting rough stubble and the start of a white-tinged beard, dark circles from non-stop riding, and a particular tilt in his slight frown.

And having already sized them up accordingly, he must've come to the conclusion that traveling with the two of them would bring more problems than he wanted to welcome.

"You, push in that gut," was all he said to Leon before moving on to her with a blink of recollection in his eyes. "And you, don't act a fool. I want silence on the ride there, and when we get inside, you lead me to the cellar, and in exchange I help rescue the boy. After that, we part ways, and never see the other again." Then, he cracked his reins and galloped the rest of the way to the gate, kicking up dust. Suzanne noticed he also carelessly trampled several of the flowers, as well.

She made a tch sound beneath her breath. "Military Police…"

Leon coughed, waving the dust away. "What a rude one, eh missus?" he said.

Stooping to pluck one of these trampled flowers among its fallen comrades, Suzanne twirled its crooked stem between thumb and pointer finger, contemplating.

Jörg's agent was still nowhere to be seen or heard from, and she was beginning to wonder if a man of even his influence was incapable of such pull in these turbulent times. Otherwise the agent would've been here by now. If this agent truly existed the first place, she imagined them being tied up in bureaucracy that had recently and quickly became known throughout the territory of Quinta, when, only a day or so before, very early into the morning, came from its direction a rider with urgent news: what remained of the Garrison had taken control of the town, and its leader, a young woman, ruled with absolute authority.

Explaining thus that she'd through unknown means managed to capture a Titan, chained it within the district's main plaza, and was feeding it those she judged guilty, denying any the right to leave, it was a shocking development. A succulent point of gossip. That not only were the Titans a threat to humanity, but its very own military, too, only…

If Suzanne suspected who this young woman was correctly, then, no, the last thing she'd do was turn against the people, and instead it was rather baffling in the decision that, with no plans to seek help from the outside, she was content to sit on what they had.

Perhaps out of desperation.

Perhaps she was backed into a corner, with no other alternatives but the most horrible.

An outcome which worried her further.

Unsettled her, as she stared at the flower in her hand, remembering the shy little girl being pulled along by Mathias the first day they met. How over the years it shed to reveal the beautiful flower that she was and something else withering it away. An emptiness that love or companionship would never fill.

Yes, she knew this girl well enough and, if true, then Mathias was in danger from greater than just the Titans and would be too blinded to see it, and so now was the best time for them to go, as in addition to this realization, the officials in Fuerth had their hands full attempting to contain this shocking news while still also having to deal with their refugee problem, which only continued to grow, and it gave her an idea, as she let the flower fall back to the earth and scatter itself anew, before following Leon back to Fuerth.



Upon entering the district, she saw a small group of wall cultists speaking with one of the guards off to the side. They rarely ventured forth from the circles within Wall Sheena where their influence was significant. They were finally beginning to push their ridiculous practices onto the hopeless refugees who had nowhere else to return, of which a lot of them would join the religion out of genuine fervor, but she guessed more would do it just for the promise of clean clothes, decent shelter, and hot meals. She expected to see a lot more of them in the days to come, and it was all the more reason why she needed to leave, thinking of the rider again.

At the time of his arrival she'd been traveling with Leon to the refugee camp alongside servants under her dictation who, in a private coming out of varying complaints, altogether didn't think highly of Jörg nor the consequences if they were caught just as much as she and so they'd all been carrying baskets covered with cloth filled with leftovers from the kitchens, intent on doing what they could while the Fuerth officials did nothing; content to let everyone else starve if it meant fewer to feed as they barricaded themselves in the district hall and another part of Jörg and his colleagues' plan in tightening their stranglehold over the comings and goings in Fuerth. The same Jörg who still refused to leave the confines of his office, let alone the mansion, counting his coin when he wasn't forced to entertain those on the local council in the dining hall where many an extravagant feast was had and after the food and drink served none were allowed in including his own servants by exception when rang. Rarely called to attend any of his guests herself these days, Suzanne relied on the eyes and ears of those disgruntled servants but most of what was relayed back to her was meaningless in that it was nothing in favor of the peoples' plights or news of Quinta's situation and thereby Mathias' well-being; as she anticipated.

So it was one night she gathered who she could who were willing, stripped the kitchens of what they were able, and began handing them out to any refugees or beggars seen. At first, the majority were things that she knew would be overlooked: stacks on stacks of soiled trenchers soaked in gravy, greases, and savory juices which happened to seep from the food resting atop and inside them, hard bread that would've went to the refugees anyway, but that they'd managed to intercept enough of before they became too hard as to be inedible, and whatever other large scraps they could take it without drawing attention. In a month, stretched to over two as it was abundantly clear even those with wealth were feeling the effects of the famine, those stacks became singles and the singles became crumbs before Jörg was forced to forgo the expense entirely leading into today. Along with the trenchers vanished some of the more fanciful dishes like the roasted and stewed game and bird meats and open tarts and pies decorated with embroidery and heraldry of both the Kramer family and whomever he happened to be serving that day, night, or otherwise; the appearance of more elaborate custards and candied fruits and sweet jellies and sweetened wines next; the colorful sauces and spices and soups after these, until, lately, Jörg and his ilk were reduced to rationing what splendor they could, locking the best, mouth-watering morsels and drink away as they did their riches, and dining on what was closer in line with what the refugees consumed though they'd never admit it. Only, compared to the refugees they were still enjoying well-sized portions of even the most common and ordinary of foods and drinks, and, unlike the trenchers, even the off cuts they used to thicken their sauces and dip in their soups were being hoarded and of a quality no mere ordinary person could afford.

It'd taken much and more to acquire enough from the kitchens to distribute to the refugees, and tedious still to divide them again, and again, and again, until their stomachs were ever flat and aching. It was to a point where open brawls became frequent, and it wasn't a surprise to find some poor man or woman or even child dead from a scuffle over what little remained for them. A few times when serving them the most vile and deprived of them tried to hurt her and the other servants brave enough to continue. More than a few times she'd came home with scraped knuckles and bruised arms and spotted in blood that was often not her own. And the longer it went on, the more dire things would become and be done in kind. Just like in the Underground.

It was yet another reason why she needed to leave Fuerth and be onto Quinta to get Mathias out of there safely. Which brought her thoughts to circle back to the rider from Quinta when she'd spotted him arguing with the guards on duty to let him through that past morning; the guards only budging because he'd convinced them the Titans he'd given the slip a ways back were sure to pick up his scent again the longer he spent pussyfooting around on the wrong side of the wall. With Leon's help — for, it seemed, Leon had become somewhat of a local legend with his fellow soldiers for acquiring commodities that only the nobility were privy to after having the sense to share it — she'd gotten the rider in. Whereupon they exchanged pleasantries, Leon introducing himself with a tipsy bow — never a moment passed when the man wasn't at least somewhat drunk — and the rider in kind revealing himself as none other than Jarratt, the former butcher, one of the four outlaws whom Mathias had so recklessly went with.

At the start of their journey Leon had sworn he'd been more heavily built, "showing a bit of a hearty gut, too" but between his time spent inside Quinta and burying his heels into his horse's sides in his mad dash from there to here, he'd been lankier as Suzanne recalled his sweat-drenched shirt loose around a much smaller than imagined frame, his collarbone visible, a deep gap between his ribs and spine, not having eaten anything but whatever he'd in his satchel and could risk stopping for in the saddle which she guessed had not been much.

Though thankful, Jarratt had wanted to rush to the district hall post haste to inform the officials of Quinta's current situation on behalf of his leader, but just as she'd done with Leon: not until he answered her questions, taking the risk in letting him know she knew Mathias. Luckily, the man was as Leon said: nice. Courteous, even, and proceeded to tell her all he was able before hurrying off.

"Ah, so you're the one. His tutor? Taught him how to shoot?" he'd asked with what she placed as a northern drawl, scratching his horse behind the ears. "Well, he panicked. Shot a kid. And that's when it started…"

From him she learned in short detail what they did after Leon fled: their close encounters with various Titans until they reached Quinta, using the Vertical Maneuvering Gear that Bernhardt had stolen from the soldier, Markus, after killing him, to get them up and over Quinta's walls and inside; their splitting up, Mathias, Bernhardt, and Nikki to the Kramer estate and he and Klaus to find a wagon to haul out whatever they would find down in the hidden vault; Mathias' accidental murder of a young soldier, and Bernhardt's subsequent capture after Mathias and Nikki fled where in the process Mathias had lost his hand, the bones in his right wrist wrung so savagely that "not even I could've done better, pardon me if you will. Mean nothing by it".

He'd held up two scrawny wrists as if to shield himself from her glare, when she'd pressed him for specifics about the hand.

"A-a girl. Not much older than he is, come to think of it. Her eyes made her seem older. Intimidating. Rotten."

He revealed Mathias had guided them to a local doctor who did the amputation on the spot as delicately as he could, and her thoughts had immediately went to Henning, Rita's adopted father, but whatever hopes she'd had were just as quickly dashed, when Jarratt further recounted how, for around the last three months now four and nearly a half rushing straight to five, they have been in hiding from the Garrison as Mathias recuperated, the boy being made their new leader in the meantime as Bernhardt was imprisoned and this "Boss" who sent Jarratt, and Rita — oh Rita! — being the young woman in charge of the military determined to bring those responsible for the young soldier's killing to justice and as a result gave no quarter, showed no remorse, and would not rest.

"Awful things she's done. Awful!" Jarratt had said with a quiver, shaking his head.

And she dared to ask what.

Grimly, he revealed anyone who broke her rules from the smallest of crimes: loitering, missing curfew, stealing food, to attempting to run away, riots, uprisings, rebellion, were being hauled to prison, the dungeons below the Garrison barracks, guarded day and night, then organized into lines to await their turn being devoured if found guilty, and accordingly punished on a lighter sentence but sent home alive if not.

If Suzanne named it someone had probably been executed for it, with few exceptions.

These exceptions included Bernhardt, who she sent out alone on what were referred to as "Night Harvests" and those else who were needed "like the man who ran the apothecary and saved your boy's life".

… Henning.

The girl had even gone so far as to have the man who raised her as his own put behind bars, she'd hardly believed it, and asked about Doris, his wife, Rita's adoptive mother, but of her Jarratt said nothing. He'd only known about Henning because of Amanda, Rita's second, and a defector who was helping them evade her, and also the same girl who'd cost Mathias his right hand.

"She and Rita are — ahem, were — extremely close, I gather, from the way she talked about her, and it must've really got to her, seeing her fall so low. She's not a bad person, if you get to know her."

And she'd be the judge of that, when they met, not a former butcher turned outlaw. But, more importantly, Mathias? She'd wanted to know if he was still safe despite the circumstances. How he was doing because taking another life was no easy thing, accident or not, and silently cursed herself.

"Ah, the Boss? Fine as he can be, give or take. Torn up about killing the kid, but just as determined as that woman to stop her as she is to stop him," Jarratt had quickly said.

And such news had put her mind at ease, though her heart still pounded, wanting to know even more, everything, but that had been all the time he could spare, before riding off.

"Told you he was a nice fellow," Leon had said, as the two of them watched him go.

Since then she'd not seen him nor had any of the officials commented on ever meeting such a person. Which was, again, why she wanted to get to Quinta as fast as possible now that Kenny's "friend" had arrived at last, but with one condition of her own before they set off, knowing it would help in their favor, again hoping that they were not too late to save Mathias from not the Titans nor Rita, but what she feared all along: himself.

That was why when she came before the Kramer estate and greeted the captain of guards, began her plot to freeing Jarratt from wherever they kept him hidden away, except she wasn't that kind of person anymore. That person died in the Underground, dreaming of the sun that was so far from her reach once, and never again.

Or so she desperately wanted to still believe, as she dotted her knife with blood to make sure it was sharp and that her old senses weren't rusted either.