It started, as it always did, with two distinct sights: darkness and a young girl on a throne. The throne and the surrounding room that barely cut through the darkness were cut from stone finer than anything she had seen before, and the girl—looking like she was just waking up from a nap—had pointed ears poking through green hair and wore clothes finer than anything she ever had the chance to wear in life.

"So we meet again," the girl said while stretching her arms. "We meet again… wait, what was it? Oh, right, Byleth. It is Byleth, right?"

"That's right," Byleth said.

"Yes, I knew it'd come to me. Your name, your birthday, your interests, the few that exist, anyway; I seem to always remember everything about you, which makes it odd that I can never remember anything about myself. Why do you think that is?"

"I wouldn't know," Byleth said without skipping a beat.

"Would it kill you to show just the tiniest amount of investment?" Byleth would have liked to do that, but another thing the girl couldn't seem to remember was that they had this conversation every time they met up wherever it was they were meeting up. At this point, Byleth was simply tired of the routine, but she couldn't blame the girl for thinking that she wasn't interested.

She wouldn't be the first person to call her emotions into question.

"Well, let's just drop it for now. I have something for you."

"You do? How is that even possible?"

"I don't truly understand it myself, but I can tell that it's meant for you." The girl waved her right hand in a fanciful manner, and in front of Byleth's face appeared two items floating in midair: a feathered quill and a single piece of paper that read, "Time is an incorporeal thing. Past, present, and future are all equal in strength, and one should never outweigh the other two. I hereby agree to the statement above, and I chooseth this fate of mine own free will."

"What is this?" Byleth asked. She adjusted her glasses to get a better look, but she still couldn't make much sense of it.

"I'm not certain."

"Where did you get this?"

"I'm unsure about that, as well; it simply appeared before me one day. As I said, I can tell that it's meant for you. I'd like to believe that it's harmless, so you should just sign it."

"Okay." Byleth grabbed the quill and started signing on the single line at the bottom of the page.

"Really? Just like that?"

"Why not? If you say it's fine, then it's probably fine. You don't seem like the kind of person who'd want to hurt me."

"Yes, well… thank you." The girl smiled as Byleth finished signing her full name, "Byleth Eisner." The quill and paper—contract, really—vanished in front of her eyes before the ink even had a chance to dry.

"So what happens now?"

"Now you wake up, just like you always do. However, I have the feeling that things are going to become different from here on out. Different for you, and different… for me…" The girl drifted back off to sleep in the middle of the conversation.

Byleth would have said something, but just as she had predicted, she was beginning to wake up, herself.

Day 19 of the Great Tree Moon, 1180

By the time her father had started asking if she was up, Byleth had already been awake and fully dressed for ten minutes. He greeted her with a stoic expression that one only gained from years of practice. It was the only thing Byleth was certain she inherited from her father; with his brown eyes and hair in contrast to her blue eyes and hair and his large and muscular body in contrast to her strong but lithe figure, it was an easy assumption that she got her looks from her mother, whoever that was.

"Been a while since you took so much time to get out the door," her father said as the morning sun shone down on her.

"I was lost in thought," Byleth said.

"That dream with that girl again?"

"Yes, but it was different this time."

"Different how?" Byleth didn't have an answer. Her conversations with the girl were always about random things that neither even remembered after they were done; they never had the kind of weight to them that the latest one possessed. "Well while you're trying to come up with something, we need to get to work. This isn't exactly the kind of job we can afford to take our time with."

"Understood." With her sword at her hip, Byleth walked with her father through Remire Village. The quiet little place of living was where they often stayed when their work brought them to the Adrestian Empire, and over the years, Byleth had taken care to memorize the key figures and locations within it to the best of her ability. A few buildings back was the butcher shop that made the jerky she liked to eat between battles; up ahead was the vegetable stand where she would buy supplies for her stir fry; finally, the building she was in the midst of passing was the bakery where the baker would always give her sweet bread if she asked for it.

None of those people were about. Even though it was so early in the morning, everyone was locked away in their homes as if to avoid some sort of catastrophe. It made her feel a little sad, or at least she thought that it did.

"Hope we didn't keep you waiting too long," her father said when they arrived at their destination: the small church at the edge of the town. The rest of the twenty or so mercenaries were gathered round and looked eager for a fight; Byleth wished she knew what it felt like to be so happy about something you have to do every day of your life. "They're all still inside, right?"

"Y-Yes, Jeralt. I-I kept watch all night, a-and none of them were able to get through the reinforcements we m-made." The one who spoke was the mayor of Remire Village, someone Byleth didn't have a lot of contact with over the years because of his lack of a direct connection to food; she remembered hearing that he was friends with a librarian in some other part of the continent, but that was it.

"Great. Now they're all in one place and can't do more damage than they've already done," her father said. "Sorry we couldn't just finish them all last night, but we were too exhausted. We didn't expect to get a job like this thrown onto us when we were just looking to rest before our next one, after all." The mayor nodded his head in understanding.

"S-So now you'll take care of it, r-right?"

"We were asked to do this job, so we'll do this job. It's as simple as that," Byleth said without skipping a beat. Some people in the band let out a collective groan, for some reason.

"What my daughter means is that you have nothing to worry about. We'll hit those bastards so hard they won't even know what's going on," Jeralt said.

"Oh thank the Goddess!" The villager over zealously shook her father's hand, not noticing the way his expression slightly changed when he brought up the Goddess. He did the same for Byleth, but while her father just let the handshake happen, Byleth moved away from him after just a second of skin contact.

"Personal space," she stated.

"W-What?"

"Let's just get a move on," Jeralt said with a sigh. She'd heard it enough times to know that it meant he was annoyed, but that was as far as she got with that. Byleth quickly decided that it wasn't worth thinking about and stepped over to the church, where one slash from her sword was able to cut through the door like paper. Split into two triangular halves, the door fell back into the church and allowed the morning sun to flood into the building.

It only took one second for the sun to illuminate the bony, gray-skinned monster with glowing eyes that looked at the world like it was a piece of meat.

It only took two seconds for Byleth to lunge at the monster and cut off its head with a single sword stroke.

It only took three seconds for the entirety of the church to be lit up and reveal itself to be filled with dozens of those same monsters.

"Attack!" With a mighty shout and his spear raised high, Jeralt and his band of mercenaries charged inside the church at the monsters. Byleth was quick to follow, doing whatever she could to add to the symphony of metal and magic colliding with accursed flesh and bone. Most of them were of the weak and skinny variety, so Byleth was able to cut down any that came at her with relative ease, and if she saw someone taking a few too many hits, she'd slice at their opponent's tendons to down them so her comrade could win their fight.

"Hey kid, bring some of that over here!" Jeralt said. Byleth turned towards him and saw that the monster he was fighting was far larger and bulkier than the rest, even wielding a large sword in one hand that its flesh had melted around the hilt of. There were a few like that in the church; they had to have been fighters when they were people, Byleth realized, and it would probably be harder to beat than the others. Even so, it would go down.

As the monster swung its sword down at Jeralt, Byleth threw out her left hand and launched a ball of fire directly into its face, forcing the attack to a halt and instantly stunning it. She rushed to her father's side to help finish it off, but the monster recovered faster than she anticipated and unleashed a swing from its sword that the two of them barely blocked with their weapons. The force knocked them back with a bit of stagger, but they recovered in time to dodge a second strike. Byleth launched another fireball, but the monster blocked it with its sword before sending her to the ground with a kick.

"Ow," Byleth said after a moment of silence. Jeralt, meanwhile, had pierced its side with his spear only for him to be quickly pushed back. As soon as Byleth was back on her feet, she launched another fireball at the monster. It attempted to block it like the last one, but that time, Byleth ran forward and swung her sword the second her fireball made contact, combining the force of the two attacks into one and creating a force strong enough to break the monster's weapon. A primal growl echoed from its lips as accursed metal hit the floor with a thud.

"It's too early to be this loud," Byleth said. She delivered a deep cut to its sword arm, which was followed by Jeralt hitting the wound with his spear, causing the arm to separate from its body, entirely. With his free hand, Jeralt picked up the broken part of the sword and jammed it into the monster's chest, Byleth stabbing it in the head for extra assurance. The monster stumbled for a bit before ultimately falling to the ground with all of the unlife drained from its body.

"And to think they call me the Blade Breaker," Jeralt said with a smile.

"Yes, that's the name you earned after hundreds of battles. Why are you bringing this up?" Byleth asked as she removed her sword from the monster's head.

"You know, because you—never mind." As Jeralt sighed, he stabbed a monster with his spear that tried to attack him from behind. "Just keep killing these things, okay?"

That was something Byleth could understand perfectly, so she did what she could to put it into action.

Before long, Byleth's sword had felled the last monster in the church. The battle was over, and with manageable injuries and zero casualties on their side, it was the ideal outcome. After that, the only thing left to do was carry the corpses out of the building one by one; she could hear her father sighing as they did that, asking how things had gotten to be so insane.

The insanity he was talking about obviously had to be the Draugr Plague. People would be perfectly fine at one moment, but then all of a sudden, they would lose their minds and transform into chaotic beasts that only existed to kill everything in their path. The Plague hit anyone regardless of age, health, or whether or not they had a Crest, and nothing in their biology provided clues for a possible cure. She couldn't remember how long it had been going on for, but Jeralt had said that there were only a handful of cases every year before she was born, with said cases having only a few victims; in present day, the number of infected matching the number they just dealt with happened at least twice a month.

Byleth would probably be upset if that happened to her father, so she could understand why everyone in the village was holed up in their homes. But still, life had to go on, and that was why she was the only one carrying out two Draugr corpses at a time.

"Th-Thank you so much for your hard work, B-Byleth," the mayor said as she pulled a couple of corpses out to the impromptu burial ground.

"There's no need to thank me. We were assigned a job and we completed it; that is all," Byleth stated.

"Y-You know, my son was among the people caught in this wave of the Draugr Plague. H-He was the best fighter in Remire, and he wanted to become a s-soldier for the Empire."

"I see."

"D-Do you think he suffered?"

"Do you mean when he became infected or when he was killed? Either way, I would have no way of knowing, and whether or not he did is largely irrelevant." Byleth picked up a shovel and started digging a hole for one of the corpses.

"O-Oh. I suppose you're right." The mayor turned away from Byleth and walked away. He made some sort of noise as he did so, but Byleth was too busy digging her holes to make a fruitless attempt at deciphering it.

"Man, could she be any colder? I guess that's the other reason she's called a Demon," one of the mercenaries whispered.

"Why do we let her talk to people? She brings down the mood every time she opens her mouth," another mercenary whispered.

"She's hella lucky she's the captain's daughter, that's for sure," a third mercenary whispered.

"You know, I hear that weirdo doesn't even—" Jeralt shouting at everyone to get back to work cut off the fourth mercenary and ended the conversation she would have liked hearing less of.

"Hey kid, are you all right?" Jeralt asked.

"I'm fine," Byleth said, her eyes locked on the hole she was trying to dig.

"Look, those guys were idiots; half the people we fight with are, honestly. You're fine as you are, so you shouldn't take what they say to heart."

"It did not effect on me."

"Really? Because I'm pretty sure we don't need to hack up these things before we bury them." Byleth looked down and saw that, at some point, she had stopped digging

"It makes it easier to bury them." Byleth went back to her hole, taking extra care to make sure she was actually digging it.

"Look, Byleth—"

"I said I'm fine." In response to that, Jeralt simply sighed. That time she was able to have a good idea about what was annoying him, and if she was being honest, she would like to be wrong about it.

At some point, she started hacking up the corpse again.

The rest of the day passed by in a flash. The band of mercenaries went back to resting up for their upcoming job in the Kingdom of Faerghus, so there wasn't anything as bombastic as the fight with the Draugr to occupy anyone's time. The townsfolk eventually came out of their homes and went back to their daily routines, so Byleth, despite the apparent mood she was in, visited every food merchant who was around to purchase a little of everything they had. Eating an average amount of food for her was the only thing she remembered doing before night came about and she fell asleep.

Byleth was hoping that she'd see that little girl again, possibly learn a little more about that paper she had her sign, but that wasn't the dream she had. The dream she had put her as a small child. She was outside at some sort of wooden building with architecture too foreign for her to recognize, and for some reason, she wasn't playing by herself like she always did. There was a young boy with blonde hair acting like a knight with a big stick in his hands; there was a dark-skinned boy making jokes she couldn't make out; there was a brown-haired girl with pigtails who was trying her hardest to keep a serious face, but it fell apart when Byleth poked her in the cheek.

She knew it was a dream—and not even one based in reality, since it depicted her as having friends—but there was still a strange amount of warmth radiating from every scene that played before her. For a brief moment, she wondered if that was what it meant to be definitively happy.

Then it was all stopped by footsteps coming from the building. Hard feet creaked against wooden floorboards as everyone stopped what they were doing and lined up in front of the entranceway. The brown-haired girl took Byleth's hand into her own, and Byleth didn't seem to mind it being there. Finally, the person they all seemed to know came into view and revealed himself to be a tall man wrapped in robes wearing a metal mask, the mask having a beard that was constructed to look like tentacles.

"The final day has arrived. Time to play the game." That was all he said before the dream faded out of sight.

To Byleth's surprise, she didn't wake up after that; all that happened was that her dream had changed. She was once again in her adult body, but she still wasn't at the throne room of the little girl. Now she was sitting inside of a tent—a blue-colored tent, for some reason—and judging by the sound of cannon fire and clashing weapons, there seemed to be a battle going on outside.

Not a strange sound to be hearing, at least compared to the piano and operatic singing that seemed to come from nowhere.

As Byleth looked around the tent, she noticed that there were two other people there with her by the exit. On the right side was a tall man with white hair and yellow eyes wearing a suit of armor, said suit of armor having a crown-shaped helmet, shoulder pads with three points jutting out of each of them, and a blue coloring that matched the tent's. The person to the man's left was sitting at a large desk blocking the exit, and he was a short, balding man dressed in a fancy suit with bloodshot eyes and a nose almost as long as her sword.

"Welcome to the Velvet Room," the man with the long nose said. "My name is Igor, and I am delighted to make your acquaintance. This place exists between dream and reality, mind and matter. It is a room that only those who are bound by a 'contract' may enter. It may be that such a fate awaits you in the near future."

"Contract." He must be talking about the paper that girl had her sign, though she still believed that the girl didn't know what it was about.

"Now then, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself?"

"My name is Byleth Eisner," she said, though she had a feeling he already knew that.

"Yes, it would seem that there is a peculiar destiny in store for you. This room's appearance matches the state of mind of its guest, so for it to take on the guise of a battlefield shows that you have lived far differently than most. Ah, before I forget, allow me to introduce my assistant to you." Igor gestured to the blue knight. "This is Adam. He is a resident of this place, like myself."

"My name is Adam. I am here to accompany you on your journey. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance," Adam said with a small bow.

"What do you mean by that?" Byleth asked.

"Very soon, you will embark on a quest the likes of which you have never experienced before," Igor said. "Adam and I will do all that we can to assist you, for if you were to fail, it could very well mean the end of the world you're so fortunate to live in."

"Understood," Byleth said without missing a beat. Adam blinked a few times as the word sat in the air.

"Just like that? No rebuttal of any kind?" Adam asked.

"I don't think there's a reason for him to lie, so there's no reason to overreact," Byleth said. For some reason, Igor then proceeded to laugh.

"You truly are an interesting guest. Perhaps there really is merit in staying involved with this side," Igor said.

"This side of what?" Igor just shook his head, and that appeared to be the end of that.

"We will discuss this further at a later date. Until then, farewell, and remember to abide by the contract."

That time, the dream fading away actually did result in her waking up.