Author's Note

Some words of warning before proceeding – the first few chapters of this story are about as bleak as could possibly be. For anyone coming into this with knowledge of my past stuff, know for reference that the opening of this story is probably the most depressing thing I've come up with to date. The only thing I can really say without giving things away is that it "gets better". Make of that what you will.

On another note, it should've been pretty obvious from the summary, but there is a distinct presence of OCs in this story. The plot is driven partially by OCs and partially by existing characters. I don't plan on treating one side with more respect than the other, though at times OOCness may occur. I'd appreciate it if people would be willing to point out these cases, since there's actually a lot more work that goes into certain TM characters than people usually believe and I'd like to get as close to the source material as possible.

As for what sort of AU this is – without saying all that much about it, this story happens in a post *name of specific F/SN route goes here* timeline where HA does not occur, and the differences between normal and magus society are a bit larger than they'd normally be. There's actually quite a bit more to this than that, and technically diverges as early as the 1970s, but I'm going to leave it up to all of you to figure out the details as we go along.

With that out of the way, enjoy (or maybe sour your good mood with) the opening of Fate for Pigs.

Fate For Pigs

I am the bone of my sword.
A fruitless branch, the sprout of envy
That neither heart nor soul permits
That from the ashes smelts a thousand blades
To bring no pain, to inspire healing
Yet sees no good, and only evil
Even should my heart turn black and eyes turn cold, this is the only way –
There can only be peace through Unlimited Blade Works.

0.0 Ruined Evil

West of the Nile River, South Sudan

Beneath the red sky, basked in the hollow glow of the black sun, with neither wind nor rain and blasted landscape as far as the eye could see, he opens his eyes.

It's quiet, and suspiciously so. For mere moments ago he could hear nothing but an endless hail of bullets and mortar – the sounds of battle. A battle that had evidently ended. And as his eyes come into focus it becomes clear that the side he'd been on hadn't won.

Corpses riddled the bloodied landscape like candy wrappers in a park. The sand had turned red and a whole assortment of foul stenches sat over the remains of the battlefield. And he is covered in them too – bits and pieces of his comrades, and almost certainly bits and pieces of himself, lining one of the trenches they'd dug as though they were left here to be buried. And he had managed to stay at the top of the pile, with his head and arm sticking out of the glob of body parts only slightly. He couldn't tell if he was bleeding. He couldn't tell if any of his limbs besides that one arm were still where they should've been. But for the moment he didn't have enough self awareness to care.

After a few moments his mind begins to clear and instincts start kick in – with his one free arm he tries to lift himself up. But there must've been too much weighing down his other limbs – he can't even move his upper body all that much. All he can do is crane his neck helplessly and gaze off into the distance.

The surface is as blood drenched as the trenches – there was nothing but death, as far as he could see. But one of the corpses stands out amongst the rest of them – and then, very slowly but steadily, he begins to recall exactly what had happened here.

He spots the body of a woman with bright blonde hair, with a rifle slung over her shoulder and wearing that same red and black jumpsuit she always wore – the body of Rin Tohsaka, his lieutenant, left mostly intact save for the gaping hole where one of her arms used to be, tossed on its side and facing him. He'd been right there next to her behind some sandbags up until the moment everything went blank.

It was a very typical skirmish. Every day for the past two years they would push towards reclaiming Cairo, and every day they would secure a small outpost or even a small town if they were fortunate. Every day more magi would die. But even then every day they would come closer and closer to that coveted city – a city that they were told time and time again would become their new home.

But this time things were different – this time things were horribly wrong.

And as the blanks fill themselves in, he spots them, off in the distance – two silhouettes, one dwarfish and one towering, drawing closer and closer. Two figures that he knew without a doubt were responsible for all of this.

The red sky darkens. The golden haze peeking out from behind the blackened sun intensifies.

Soon he can make the figures out – what was presumably a man, clad in tattered robes and a triangular slab in place of his head.

And the other – a child, seemingly, but what stood out more was what they were wearing. He'd only seen it once before, and not even in person, but this child's garb was unmistakable – it was the Mystic Code of the Einzbern family. An outfit many people had grown to fear. He was certain that the child was an Einzbern homunculus – one of only twelve in all the world. Servants of Queen Illyasviel, a ruling class figurehead from far to the north. He'd only heard stories about them and the sheer chaos that their powers could create, and furthermore the rebels were under order to run from one on sight – but now in person he couldn't bring himself to believe any of them.

Her hair was the purest of white. Her eyes were a mesmerizing shade of red. The calmness in her expression was almost heavenly. She had to have been an angel, not a demon. No – instead the monster next to her was the demon.

The beast next to her stalks across the carnage as though searching for something – and after a few moments, like a hawk spotting a mouse, it reaches into a pile of corpses and begins to drag out a live soldier. Kicking and screaming and begging for his life he grasps at the sand in vain as the monster effortlessly lifts him into the air –

And with a slight twitch the triangular slab opens up and shoots out at the soldier, devouring him whole, snapping down like the jaws of a rabid dog before shifting back into its original shape. And the beast moves across the trenches, picking out survivors without fail as it proceeds closer and closer towards him.

And then he finally feels it – the whips of panic. He wasn't ready to die – even if his body was in shambles, even if he would never be able to walk again or even sit upright on his own, he still didn't want to die. Dying here in such a terrible way – he considers trying to free himself, but that would only ensure that his inevitable death would come along that much faster. In this situation there was nothing he could do.

Soon enough the homunculus and her giant are standing almost on top of him. Somehow he hasn't been noticed yet – feeling the shuttering of his heart in his chest he starts praying. Praying to some unknown, far off entity that might've been watching at that moment for salvation. For a miracle.

But he knows in his heart that it's too late for anything like that. He knows everything is about to end.

Sure enough, the girl's gaze shifts downward – and their eyes meet. The beast turns his attention away from a far off body and instead draws towards him.

In that moment, when he knew there was no way out for him, he gave in. He accepted his fate.

But he does not weep. He does not lament, he does not despair.

No – instead he feels a passionate rage building inside.

What had he done to deserve a death like this?

He was a seventeen year old boy, half African and half Eastern European. He'd been very mature for his age and worked hard to maintain an upright life in a backwater Nigerian town. A place barely conscious of the ways of the magi and the religious zealots. And he lived there freely, with an understanding lover and a strong resistance to the vices of the third world. He was one of very few that could have claimed to enjoy life, and had the strength to live it to the fullest.

And then from the east, from their breeding grounds in Egypt, the Executors on their holy mission to purge the land of all who lived without the light of God – people who were born without magi blood. But in the end there was no real discrimination – it was a backwater Nigerian town, after all. Everyone was treated the same way. They weren't about to sort the magi from the Mageless. His lover died in his arms, his parents' home was burned to the ground and everything about the day-to-day life he'd once had went up in smoke. And as one of the only survivors he wandered the wasteland that was Africa in despair until Rin Tohsaka and her band of rebels came along and 'saved' him.

They were, as he was, robbed of their place to belong. Persecuted just like he had been, the alchemists and weaker magi of the magus hive in Egypt were either lucky enough to escape from the country alive or slaughtered like livestock without warning. And so those that escaped demanded vengeance, and were willing to rope in absolutely anyone with the slightest hint of magus blood within them into their hopeless cause.

"We will take Atlas Academy back," she had said once. And that place would become his 'new' home. Once they made the march to Egypt, once they drove the Church and the magi committee out and embraced the idea of starting over from scratch, things wouldn't seem so bad.

And like many others he accepted that, even though he was just a boy with no perspective on that world of warring magi that had once been so far away. If there was some light at the end of his tunnel, he wouldn't hesitate to head for it.

But he was just cattle. Something expendable. He was just a boy without a home and enough affinity towards magecraft to shoot one of the magus weapons without passing out. He didn't care about the war with the Church, or the corruption in the Mage Association, or any of that. What he and all those like him felt never really mattered. They'd all been roped into someone else's personal conflict, and as time went on and tensions between the enlistees and the rebels grew – and as it became more and more apparent that most of them wouldn't even live to see Egypt – that dream of a life without conflict became more and more of an impossibility.

Perhaps while they were still alive – perhaps while death's door was still a distant thought they'd have held the constitution needed to push on like well rounded, hardened adults.

But when faced with an inevitability like this all of that simply went up in smoke. There was no difference between a man and a boy in the eyes of death.

It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. He hadn't done anything wrong. He'd lived his life to a high standard. He'd put in so much effort, and it was all going to go to waste. And it made him angry. Just like that, everything crumbled to ashes, and there was nothing he could do about it. He'd tried so hard to become 'something', but at the end of the road he was simply going to return to being nothing by no fault of his own.

Cairo was never going to be his salvation. He'd been told such a thing under the assumption that he'd die long before he'd ever reach that point. It was just a convenient lie to get him to risk his life for nothing. The rebellious mages just wanted Egypt for their own ends. They had the ability to move on. They had the privilege of being able to start over in the western world. But he didn't – he couldn't, and neither could any of his African brothers.

For a moment the Einzbern's gaze darkens and she frowns slightly, stopping the beast's forward march with a wave of her hand. She gazes at him even more intently. "You're not my big brother," she says in English, her disappointed voice suitable to her apparent age. She leans over and tugs at the red bandana made from a religious shroud his beloved use to wear that he always kept wrapped around his head, raising it up and off, staring at it with a puzzled expression before glancing between him and it several times.

In another instant she apparently solves her internal dilemma and without warning the bandana bursts into flames. "No good." In response the beast continues moving towards him. Einzbern seems as though she's about to start crying, but in another moment she smiles at him sweetly.

"But that's okay." She speaks in an equally as sweet voice, barely above a whisper, this time in his native tongue. The beast has finally made its way over to him – he starts to shudder uncontrollably as finally, at the very end, fear begins to set it. "I should be happy. You should be happy, too."

Unable to do anything else, he simply closes his eyes as he feels the monster lift him out of the pile with ease.

"You are truly worth carrying the weight of all the world's evil. Without a doubt, you could have been worthy of the name 'Angra Mainyu'… And though there are many like you… I love you most of all."

And in the next moment the beast closed its jaws around him –

As an endless spiral of howling winds and a deep vortex of red and black swirls engulfed what few of his senses remained. And after that all he could feel was a deep, intense violation of whatever was left of his physical self. Beating, penetrating, flaying his tired flesh, eating away at both bone and sinew –

And so within the bowls of that crawling chaos, he whittled away bit by bit in agony. And though he lost his memories, his face, his purpose, and even the words he spoke – that anger and sorrow lingered yet. And in the end there was nothing left of him but an emotion – the same raw, carnal emotion that similarly dwelt in that black sun.

And so it continues – beneath the red sky, basked in the hollow glow of the black sun, with neither wind nor rain and blasted landscape as far as the eye could see, he opens his eyes.

It's quiet, and suspiciously so. For mere moments ago he could hear nothing but an endless hail of bullets and mortar – the sounds of battle. A battle that had evidently ended. And as his eyes come into focus it becomes clear that the side he'd been on hadn't won –