The house glowed with dark shadows purple against the snow that caked the mountains, drifted over the windows in places with the height of winter. Inside a fire was raging in the hearth and both Riza and Roy were cocooned in heavy down comforters on the floor against the winter chill.

She was not yet ten, still a girl but long and lanky with short blonde hair and round cheeks and bright eyes.

Roy could have been her brother, with dark hair cut almost exactly the same, almost thirteen and pale where she was bright.

Her father was a quiet man, an alchemist accustomed to chasing down dusty secrets in musty tomes and worn thin by grief after his wife's death.

Now, however, the hollowness was gone from his eyes, chased away by liquor.

He took a long drink from his mug, which held hot chocolate like the children's, but with a shot of whiskey that warmed his gut.

"Tell us about the State Alchemists," Riza said, looking up at her father expectantly, curling up like a cat.

Her father laughed, a rare sound these days only induced by his daughter.

"Which story?" He asked.

"Not a story this time," she said, "something real."

He inhaled some of his drink in surprise. State Alchemists were people of legend to most folk, especially those so isolated from society, revered to an almost inhuman status by most, reviled by some who knew what they were truly like. By some like him.

"Maybe some of the stories are real," he said, unable to meet his daughter's bright eyes, so serious and liquid, molten brown like his wife's had been.