Note: Please be aware that this story contains massive, massive spoilers for all routes in the game, as well as the DLC. It also assumes familiarity with the characters, plot, and a good deal of backstory.

The first time, it is intentional.

She is their queen, their leader, their savior. She hates it. She hates that she, mercenary, professor, revolutionary, is supposed to judge the people, to rebuild the land, to end the conflicts with Dagda and Almyra and Sreng. She hates that she cares, that her reward for mentoring her students — for slaughtering those she might have nurtured — is to be placed on a pinnacle so far atop the world that she can never regain the peace she's lost. She hates that her palace is dark and cold and located so far away from the only home she's ever known. But most of all, she hates herself.

Claude — Khalid — is visiting, his nation finally willing to discuss an end to the half-century war. When she peers into his eyes, sees the tightness of his brow, she sees that he is lonely and trapped, too, and there is little she or anyone else can do to change it. She looks to those in the negotiating room, each granted peerage or noble from birth, and she sees that they are all trapped. Things are as they were – crest-oriented, stratified by origin, but muted, lesser, wounded. She has forced open the future, fulfilled the dream of her closest confidant, but those she cares for will not be a part of it and it shatters her to see. So much was possible, and still it amounted only to these moon-lit corridors that she wanders at night, alone, searching for a past that shimmers and leaps away.

She wonders if her students are also lonely, beaten-down by the need to pick up the pieces of a broken world. She dreams of returning to the monastery, to a time before war, a time before she gathers the nobles and relies on them and fastens the noose about her own neck.

At her lowest, she does something rash. It is abhorrent, it is cruel, and, importantly, it is an answer. She delves into the powers of the goddess, she gives a quiet nod to no one, and in a burst of viridian both she and her world rewind to the start.

~ Prologue Ch. 1: To Turn and Age ~

After the pulse brings her back to the inn, Byleth wonders if she has effectively outlived her father.

She knows — knowledge's foul price paid in fealty to Rhea's white whale, the death of every pallid denizen of Shambhala, a war ended over one thousand years from Sothis' demise — that Jeralt Eisner was born upwards of a century prior, serving his savior in her custom-built stasis for the bulk of his life. Byleth is roughly forty years past one hundred, tallying up her lifetimes until ascension, so she doubts that she has her father beat in days spent alive. If, however, she instead considers the experience nestled in those glints of mortality, the thrice-professor is willing to stake quite a prize on having surpassed her non-Nabatean parent. It doesn't matter overmuch, she muses, not when it all ends the same way: herself, elfin ears and viridescent hair grounding to roundness and teal, winding time with a broken heart. But the woman who still thinks of herself as a professor wonders, nevertheless.

It is startling to feel the rush of her divinity flow out then in, a small branch flowering into the petulant remnants of the progenitor goddess. She enjoys the presence of another in her mind, and the thimble of strength needed to keep Sothis awake stands insignificant against the stream burbling from her unbeating heart. The girl has long ago ceased to be a different being entirely, but then again, so has Byleth. Nearly the whole of her third lifetime had passed before she began to understand just how fundamentally the merging traced and traces itself through her veins, just how much of her is more goddess than daughter of Sitri and Jeralt.

"Hey, kid, are you—"

The man in question stops dead in his tracks, words faltering as he looks upon the one who should have been his child, as he knows her. Not this...being, with hair shimmering the color of honeydew and eyes sparkling like sea-blue stars.

A smile plays over her cheeks; Byleth extends her will, and the world freezes.

She gently moves Jeralt out of the doorway, his expression locked in a state of alarm, and strolls out of the inn, weaving a path towards the three house leaders just beginning to beg for aid. The woman's eyes soften as she sees Dimitri's hand clenched tightly on his lance, splinters of wood frozen in the air about the Faerghus Prince's white glove. Byleth shakes her head in amusement as she stares at the easy grin on Claude's face, his eyes too narrowed, his body too guarded for the joy to be more than a calculated facade. She does not spare more than a glance for Edelgard — Byleth has not forgiven her for her part in Jeralt's death and Sothis' disappearance, for lying to her.

(She purposefully does not think of the desperation that guides the girl, the cold lights and terrified screams that haunt the war-bringer just as the flames of Duscur torment Dimitri. Byleth does not, will not, think of how Edelgard refuses to hurt her even when transformed into a demon of a different kind, of how the girl is forced to work with the people who tortured her siblings and broke her into a weapon of their will, their vengeance against the goddess who slaughtered their ancestors.)

"Mortal, what have you done?"

Ah, speak of the devil.

"You're the one people call a demon!"

Byleth nods to the pouting figure of her companion, a childish frown on the face of the amnesiac. It is true; the girl has not yet seen what the once and future professor has become. It is only fair for her to assume that the situation is the same as it began.

"What you have become? What nonsense is this?"

A grin turns her lips. In lieu of a verbal answer, Byleth splits the worldline into three, sending one future self to each of Fódlan's future leaders, winding backwards in triplicate, forming a pocket of maybes and what-ifs about each frozen teenager.

She stands before Claude, hands resting on a blood-forged sword.

She stands behind Edelgard, gaze pinned to the monastery on the horizon.

She stands beside Dimitri, turning away charnel specters formed in guilt.

"What."

Sothis' mouth is a ringent oval, her emerald irides rapidly flitting side to side. The girl sees Byleth's history traced in a fractal bloom, spiraling from three points to line-spheres of futures and pasts, overlapping and interjecting and passing on and through one another. Sothis follows her path until it hurts even her, the divinity who fell from a shattered star, to perceive; she squeezes her eyes shut, uncoiling only when her host begins to speak.

"You merged with me, my dear goddess of time."

Byleth's voice is soft, gentle, almost ethereal. Her cerulean eyes glitter in the sensation of memory. (A part of her delights in the difference in herself, the change from the mercenary with an iron spirit and a heart of stone.)

"Dread Agartha was never truly broken. Though you toppled their cities of iron and their pillars of light, though you slew their leaders and drowned their lands, the soul of the people was not destroyed."

A sad smile finds its way to the peach-colored lips of the Ashen Demon. She looks away from her companion, knowing that she is accusing the girl of a crime she cannot remember. Its source may be tainted black with hate, but Byleth believes the core of the story to be true; Thales himself told her before she slaughtered him in his final throw of the dice, his last-ditch recruitment of a woman lost to him two worlds ago. For each land shattered by man, for each elder god sacrificed in Thinis, the spawn of fallen Sirius venged herself on two more.

"Their heritage became hatred, and their will, vengeance. Even killing you and your children did not sate them, not while Rhea, your champion, still drew breath and proclaimed your dominion over the souls of man."

Byleth pauses, her voice dropping to a whisper. She knows the archbishop well, and what anger she may have had towards the woman has morphed into a kind of heartfelt, empathetic pity, a tender sigh backlit by a crackling hearth and an over-full mantle. It is not maternal, but it is deeply familial, and in this life she hopes to see her love reciprocated. For all her lies, for all Nabatea's sorrow turned to untrue faith, Byleth cannot possibly hate her grandmother. She cannot hate even the Agarthans, not as a whole, though she takes a dark delight in their comeuppance.

"They killed my father. They would have killed me, too, had you not gifted all your power to me, had we not shattered the barrier between the dream and the real. And so you fell that I might live."

Wistfulness enters her tone like mist at dawn, clinging to the chill of night. She remembers that time, too well. She remembers it twice: Marianne and Leonie desperately grasping at her father's corpse, heavy in death; Caspar and Ferdinand running with her, falling behind, narrowly escaping the grasp of Solon's trap as Byleth fuses again, realizing who and what she is. Mercedes and Ashe, watching spellbound as Byleth fakes a stumble, stabbing Monica through the heart, a splatter of discolored blood drenching Cethleann in red. The eddies of time are not fixed, she thinks, but they are moored.

"Did you foresee this? Did you know that you were giving all of yourself to me, that our very nature would be a blend of flesh and the divine? That we would become a being even your daughter's desperate experiments could not have crafted? Something beyond Nabatea, reaching to the void of Zahras itself?"

She pauses, taking in the inert world around her, the dirt and the forest and the inn. A gesture of Byleth's hand, and the trees re-embark on their path through time, a sea of green flowing with the will of the wind that has yet to blow past, the ghosts of climbing children flickering in and out of the ageless diorama. At her thought, the leaves turn backwards, rustling an eerie un-whistle, immaturing, shrinking from sapling to seedling to sprout to nothing at all. She turns back to Sothis, the child goddess' expression drifting to a place between awe and frustration. Behind her, the world ripples forwards, and the forest returns to its proper state.

"I do not—" the amnesiac starts. Byleth leans forward encouragingly. "I do not have the slightest idea what you are talking about!"

Sothis gives a huff, somehow conveying exasperation, petulance, and grudging acceptance in the same sound. Byleth quirks an eyebrow.

"Goddesses? Agarthans? Me, destroying an entire civilization? Just moments ago, I recall you as a rather rude mortal that happened to share my date of birth, not a, a... a whatever you are! I...you...what even..."

Byleth winces. She has forgotten the depths of her companion's predicament, overlooked the anger and fear that comes along with not knowing. The mercenary lets out a breath.

"I apologize. I have not been...ignorant, not for many years."

"Ignorant?!" Sothis repeats, a bubble of helpless laughter forcing its way up her throat. "What are you? What is any of this?"

Byleth opens her mouth to respond, a soothing reiteration on her lips.

"No, I know you are somehow me and also yourself and, just, ugh!" She paces back and forth in agitation, absentmindedly floating through Edelgard's unmoving form. Byleth's gaze flickers to the emperor-to-be, then back to her mental companion. "This is absurd. Ridiculous!"

"But it is the truth," the time traveler calmly refutes, a burst of not-overly-appropriate amusement secreted behind her serene lack of concern. Sothis rolls her eyes.

"Truth or not, I know you are not the mortal I spoke with upon my awakening." She pauses, tilting malachite eyes upwards in thought. "Well, you are, but you are also...this."

"I am myself," Byleth affirms. A small smile turns the ends of her lips.

"What kind of response is that?! It means nothing! That is simply..." Sothis trails off, affront and the slightest amount of chagrin slipping into her tone. "Oh. You are baiting me. How rude!"

"I am doing no such thing."

Byleth's wink conveys everything her stoic words do not. Sothis laughs despite herself, and the not-yet-professor's smile grows. Good. She would not forgive herself if her relationship with her passenger were to deteriorate, not when the amnesiac goddess is the only one whom she cannot turn time to un-offend or manipulate. Her only true friend, not that she cherishes the people she has drawn close to any less. (She looks at Dimitri, idly replaying memories of the then-king staring at her intensely, cheeks reddened, mouth open, shocked that someone might love him, the boar prince, the man whose heart died in Duscur.)

"Your only true friend, you say? And oh my, what is this? I can certainly see why you would like him, he is rather handsome."

Byleth refuses to blush. She thinks that it is time for Sothis to peruse the depths of their shared memory, a task which will take a thankfully lengthy period of time, and to leave the mercenary alone.

"Now why would I do that? And what did you just call me?"

Byleth tilts her head.

"Sothis?"

"Yes, Sothis, that is correct! I know that name, and I know it is mine...but why do I know that?" She pauses, pacing back and forth again, brow scrunching up in obvious confusion before relaxing, exuberant in the haze of memory. "Ah! I am also known as—"

"The beginning," Byleth finishes, a full grin on her face, the expression rare even after three lifetimes of emotional thawing. "You truly should search through my past, Sothis. Get a measure of what I know of you, what I was, and what I am."

And what you are to me, she doesn't say, walking back to the inn, casually spinning herself backwards, her mortal appearance actualizing at Byleth's command.

She exhales, taking on the blank mask that was once her face, walking back to her room.

It's time to begin, again.

It happens the same as it always does: Her father speaks to her, and they are interrupted before any dialogue of consequence. (She tells him that the girl on the throne said her name, but is cut off before she can reveal the divinity in play.) Dimitri begs for their aid, Claude tries to entice them with morality and gold, and Edelgard elaborates when needed, restrained, worrying, knowing her plan has gone wrong. Jeralt stares at Byleth for a moment longer than usual, lingering on the features she has wound into their expected form, but he gives her command. They march in silence, and this time, Byleth decides the students will not fight. Though all three have experience in taking lives — flame-stained armor, starlit poison, a bloodied howl — she sees no need to inflict more on them, not so soon into the path at hand.

They come across the bandits, engaging her father's men in a crude symphony of wood and iron, and the students look to her for instruction. A feeling of nostalgia murmurs over her and she almost begins barking orders, but she remains silent, observing the melee shadowed by the forest green. Edelgard fidgets as Dimitri begins to move forward, but Byleth holds up her hand, settling on a course of action, stalling the prince and settling the emperor-to-be. This will have repercussions, she knows, but she will weather them.

"Watch," she says, her voice sharp and deliberate and smooth as polished steel, and she concentrates. Around her the forest grows impossibly still, a bubble of frosted time plucked from causality's ceaseless flow. Her gaze flashes over the bandits, settling on poor, stupid Kostas, the man whose foolish pact with Edelgard will return the Eisners to the world Jeralt so desperately tried to escape. Her eyes narrow minutely, determination and resolve swimming in their oceanic depths.

She turns to the three students, absentmindedly resuming history around the group of four. Her face remains impassive, the persona of the Ashen Demon too wonderfully familiar for Byleth to abandon it so soon into this iteration.

"Do not look away."

The new incarnation of the goddess can do this silently, instantly, with thought alone, but she needs to make herself indispensable — wanted — and so she resorts to theater. Her connection to Garreg Mach cores her, fundamental and all-encompassing, more impactful than even her two decades of stolid butchery; she cannot, will not, accept a world in which Rhea does not appoint her educator of the Officer's Academy. It is one of Byleth's few definite goals, paired with her wish to avert war and her desire to save her father, and she will ensure it comes to pass.

(If this exercise also provides a convenient reference for and about her powers over time, so much the better. She owes Jeralt an explanation regardless, and the Blade Breaker will hopefully delight in outdoing the archbishop. Byleth desires reconciliation, to be sure, but the mercenary leader's grievances with the church's head are by no means invalid; the woman may have saved Byleth's life, but, to Jeralt, Rhea all but broke his daughter.)

A wave of her hands conjures a series of empty glyphs about her arms, wine-dark pulsing hoar, symbols stolen from the works of dark magic crafted across time, haphazard but not-quite disordered, irreplicability reliant on the naiveté of her charges. Byleth holds the lights for a moment, allowing them to radiate outwards, runes and terms branching out to link in a series of concentric, inscribed circles, a display vivid enough to bring a more magically inclined audience to open awe. She nearly smiles, nearly loses her composure at the thought of Lysithea, Linhardt, and Annette reacting in place of the three heirs to Fódlan, but she wins the struggle and keeps her face expressionless.

With a muffled roar of air, she jumps, grasping all the futures where she might have risen at a different point, a jet of pneumatic possibilities hovering her as she begins to chant a guttural refrain, growls and sibilant whispers escaping her lips, the language of ancient Nabatea escaping her humanoid form. Her grip on herself slips forwards, intentionally, and the students see her suspended in midair, pale green hair fluttering in an unblowing breeze, aquamarine pupils slit for a fraction of a second.

She pauses, wondering if she looks like Seiros resplendent in bloodied Tailtean, but she banishes the thought in favor of continuing her audition.

Byleth stabs forward at a male bandit, seeking a specific future at the point of her blade, twisting time in a haze of pallid skin, and he ages, withering, rotting, screaming until he is a pile of worm-riddled meat.

The image is striking, but she feels satisfaction, not disgust. He is dead, and he would be dead regardless, she believes. This way, his death serves a purpose.

Keeping her chant, she throws out a palm, a wave of force stolen from the tomes of Hades wreathing all beyond Kostas himself in a violent haze of murmuring violet. The woman clenches her fist and the air roars, a blanket of sable flaring into existence, weaving midnight death about and through the timelocked bandit troupe. Her eyes narrow and the dark burns with color, indigo and cobalt racing atop the velvet canvas like veins webbing across leathered skin. The bandits shudder, bearing the weight of epochs like Atlas damned beneath a host of worlds, shaking and thrashing and shivering and writhing until finally Byleth twists her arm, the light erupts, and their flesh disintegrates.

The dark fades to reveal her foes skeletonized, stripped of their ill-spent lives by temporal decree. Byleth breathes deeply and harshly, feeling the pull on her divinity, but she ignores her tiredness. She is not yet done.

She releases her grip, and causality surges back in, each bandit within her field of stoppered time toppling over as the figures of grinning, unliving white they have become. A part of Byleth exults in the simultaneous collapse of her foes, in the sheer power crackling invisibly at her fingertips, but a far smaller portion of her trembles, uncertain, locked in turbulent incredulity at the strength fluxing through her veins. She recalls a similar sensation from a lifetime ago, faint but undeniably present, but her incoherence falls to the back of her mind as Kostas dashes forwards, his beady, furious gaze darting back and forth.

She twists her lips darkly, watching as he chooses his target, a snarl fixed atop his lips as he charges for Edelgard. The girl is unprepared for the attack, wide-eyed, fumbling backwards as Kostas raises his axe, but Byleth twists time, tracing a path through the forest that an iteration of her will have taken, and she is there, a clash of sword to now-airborne cleaver bringing Kostas' fevered breath into her face and her steel into his gut. Her blade flashes indigo, a light illuminating his insides as they wither and bleach to ivory, the expression on his bearded face morphing from fury to fear to pleading. The Ashen Demon keeps her face impassive as the light exits the man' eyes, his form slumping sideways before decomposing and flowing away, one final grinning skeleton left broken atop the earth.

The bandit leader falls, and the fight is over, simple and anticlimactic. Byleth exhales, satisfied. Her actions are intended to awe, intrigue, and terrify her potential students, and for Claude and Dimitri she thinks she has succeeded.

The secret crown prince of Almyra appears astonished, calculating as ever but for the widening of his gaze, a tell he will correct over the next year. Faerghus' future king is spellbound, almost ashen, looking unsure whether to praise the mercenary's efficiency or to stare, slack-jawed, at the violet transition from men to clattering bone. And yet Byleth has not achieved her aim, not in the way she intends, for in Edelgard's lavender eyes there is no wonder, no interest, no fear; there is only a flare of shock, wild and all-consuming. The emotion staggers Byleth, and she feels the urge to bore into the Adrestian heiress' gaze, to drill to the core of the princess and understand her psyche, her grief and her hope and her love. For an instant the mercenary gives in, her mesmerized, lidded expression mirrored in the lilac eyes of the student she once taught, but the moment passes and Byleth shakes her head, staring away, a small frown flitting to and from her lips as confusion burrows beneath the garden of her mind.

What was that? She wonders. Why did I...?

The future professor considers turning time to avoid the situation entirely, but, hesitating, she accepts this outcome. Byleth does not wish to exist above her students, and for this, for any relationship to be genuine, she must grant them the blessing of reaction, the ability to respond to whims and tells and thoughts outside hers alone. There is an incalculable value to this, this drawing-in of her will and strength, and she wonders if such need alone – need to divorce her power from the universe whole, need for companionship and love – prompted the goddess' formation of Nabatea. Her head pounds, an echo of her companion's amnesia throbbing emptily in her skull. Byleth slumps forward in her dizziness, but the teacher wills herself to straighten and meet her charges for the fourth time.

If anything goes truly wrong, she thinks, sardonic, far less stable than she intends, it can always be undone. Sothis giggles in the recesses of their mind.

It is a delicate balance to maintain. As Claude approaches fearlessly, eyes sparkling, trailed by a taciturn Dimitri and a determined Edelgard, Byleth has a moment of further indecisiveness, but she steels herself, vowing.

She will not play with their lives. She is not Rhea, and she will not abandon what remains of the mortality within her.

(She will.)

AN: Hi! I love this game. This is...not quite the usual fix-it fic.

Which, um, you can probably guess from Byleth, goddess incarnate, treating causality like a suggestion.

On another, not unrelated note: the parallels between Fódlan's backstory and the Babylonian myth of creation are impossibly precise, but people seem to miss that Sothis isn't Tiamat. So ask yourself this: who is she, and more importantly, what did she do?