The night was tepid and stagnant. The air was still, the temperature of cooling blood. No birds chirped in the stock-still trees. No animals moved in the underbrush. Nothing at all stirred, except for the alchemists.
There were hundreds of them, all of them silently moving forward though the darkness. They needed no lights to see their way in the black, nor did they need to call to one another to find where they were. They were all completely silent, and they moved as one. They had no identity separate from one another and they moved forward, ever forward, as single-mindedly as a swarm of insects.
They were gathering here, in a place that they had all seen in their minds this night. They were coming together from all corners of Amestris, all of them driven by the insatiable impulse that no one could explain. The alchemists from all over the country who had gone missing were found here, some of them having walked dozens of miles after their cars ran out of gas.
Many alchemists were here already, and many more were coming. As they neared the site of their otherworldly meeting, it became crowded and bodies were packed against each other, all of them trying to get to the same place. Some of the older and weaker members of the swarm collapsed as they journeyed, but the alchemists who came after them did not alter their paths to go around them, and many were trampled to death by their peers. There was no such thing as pity here, or morals. There was only the Call, and the weak—whether of body or mind—were disposable.
From the sky, the silent owls gliding overhead could see them down below, and only they witnessed the intricate shapes that the converging humans created. The gentle owls, though, could not comprehend what they were looking at, nor did they care.
It was a transmutation circle, and it became more intricate as each alchemist arrived. Each alchemist—each piece of the hive-like whole—knew his or her place. Arms and legs entwined, creating a mindless human chain, each alchemist’s position drilled into the core of them, and held without cease. Newcomers to the circle crawled over one another to find their place, and some of those below them were suffocated or crushed in the tangle of bodies, yet still they held their piece of the circle even as their corpses began to cool.
The concentration of alchemists thinned toward the center of the array. Here, most of them were Alchemists of the State, more powerful than their civilian bretheren, and so destined to find their place in the middle of it all where their talents would be more focused.
And then at the very Center, there were only two. A man and a boy, one raven-haired and one blond, the two of them chained together.
The man alone stood. His colleagues all knelt around him, intertwining with one another. Even the boy who was chained to him was on his knees, half-heartedly yanking on the chain that bound them together. He was not supposed to be here. He was supposed to be further off, entangled with the other State Alchemists, but with the limited brain function that he was allowed at the moment, he did not have enough presence of mind to transmute the chain back into his automail and release himself.
The man did not notice his pulling. He simply stared upward at the sky, motionless as he waited to begin. For hours he stood like this as his comrades amassed around him. Not moving, scarcely breathing. For hours and hours. Waiting.
And then, at precisely the right moment, just as the morning sun began to hue the sky with shades of red and gold, he spread his arms as if to welcome the coming day. The blond boy began to pull with renewed vigor as if he knew something was about to happen, but the man did not budge. Even as the pulling became violent, making the metal cuff slice into his wrist, even when the force of the boy’s strength wrenched at the tendons in his shoulder and pulled the bone from the socket with a soft grinding sound that neither of them were sane enough to hear... even then, he stood as solidly as a statue and closed his eyes.
Light unlike any other flashed into the pre-morning darkness, driving it back to retreat in the shadows behind trees and buildings in the distant city. The sky was white for a moment, so vibrant that any inhabitant of Central who happened to be looking at it had to cry out and shield their eyes. But none of them were looking. None of them were awake to see it.
The earth shook violently. Rocks crumbled and trees were uprooted. Streets cracked and the white of the blinded morning sky became a cold grey with the dust that was kicked up in the wake of the trembling ground.
But then, slowly, that pressure that everyone had felt pressing upon their souls began to dissipate. A soft, cool breeze gathered the courage to blow as the shaking ceased, billowing the grey dust it up into the sky as the ungodly light faded.
The raven-haired man’s arms dropped back down to his sides. He swayed, stumbled, and put a hand to his brow.
Then he fell.
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He opened his eyes.
For a moment he just stared, blinking at the morning light shining down upon him, not knowing where... or who... he was. He tasted blood and his automail was hot from being in the direct sunlight for so long.
Around him there were moans. Screams. Weeping. Somewhere to his right an old man cried out for his mother.
Slowly, he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, but a sudden surge of vertigo knocked him over a little and he sat back dazedly. His lower back rested against something behind him and he turned his heavy, pounding head to look.
And then, some very distant, very tired part of him remembered.
He struggled to his feet and the world rocked around him. He staggered forward, toward the distant city, joining the throng of people heading that direction, many of them clinging to one another and weeping as they walked.
The body attached to his automail wrist dragged behind him without protest, silent and still.
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The amount of wounded that they found was unbelievable.
Alchemists were lurching from every direction, some of them walking, others crawling. Others still were completely motionless, and often it was impossible to tell from a distance whether or not they were even alive. It had been two hours since a search had been called to find the missing alchemists—for they were all missing now, every last one of them that hadn’t been hospitalized or forcibly kept at home by their families—and already seventeen bodies and fifty-seven wounded had been found. It was like the scene of a natural disaster, or of some kind of gruesome war act, as if some kind of deadly bomb had been dropped. The field medics were overwhelmed.
Private Williams was looking for his commander, Major Armstrong. As of yet, though, his massive frame had not been spotted by anyone in his search party. But Williams would not stop. He would search tirelessly until he and every other unaccounted-for alchemist was safe.
Williams looked up to see someone coming toward him and his team, topping a hill in the distance. The figure was small, but his shoulders were broad and strong-looking. He was silhouetted into obscurity, though the gold of his hair and the silver of his automail caught the light behind him enough to let all who looked upon him know who he was.
He stumbled forward another pace and fell in his exhaustion, tumbling down the hill, dragging with him another person who Williams had not been able to see before. The private cried out to his peers and superiors and they all sprinted forward, the trained medic in their team pulling his kit from his rucksack as he ran.
Williams reached them first, and he hit his knees beside the boy before he even registered who the man was that he was dragging behind him. Edward Elric, the Fullmetal Alchemist—a boy who Williams knew only by reputation and had never seen face-to-face aside from a few distant glimpses in the office—raised his eyes to meet his. Tear tracks cut through the dirt on his face, the griminess making his eyes so intense that he almost didn’t look human.
“...Have you seen Alphonse?” he asked, his young voice made old and hoarse by fatigue.
“Move aside, Private!”
The medic pushed past Williams hurriedly, not to get at the kid who seemed mostly uninjured, but to the body beside him.
Colonel Roy Mustang lay on his back, his eyes eerily open and rolled back into his head. His body was stiff, his back slightly arched off of the filthy ground, and his hands—one of which was clearly badly broken—were clenched and twitching. His whole body was shaking in a tight, yet uncontrollable way, every muscle spasming. Trails of dried blood were smeared under his nose and down from the corner of his mouth. The medic was on him in an instant, rolling him over onto his side and holding him down against what Williams only sluggishly realized was a violent seizure. It passed within a few moments and Mustang fell still and limp back against the ground, his exhausted, wrought body dragging in a series of deep, desperate breaths.
The medic put two fingers to the side of Mustang’s neck, checking his pulse.
“This isn’t good,” the medic stated unnecessarily. He’d just had a seizure; how could it possibly be anything but bad? “His heart is racing... And it looks as if his shoulder has been dislocated. His hand might be broken as well... Sir? Colonel Mustang, can you hear me?”
Mustang didn’t say anything, or even move for a very long time. But then his red, sunken eyes opened and moved sluggishly over to meet the medic’s. While Williams was sure this was a good sign, he could tell by the slowness of the man’s movements and the obvious bleariness of his mind that it wasn’t a great sign. Like most of the others who had been found alive, Mustang was in a dangerous state of shock and the fact that he was also experiencing epileptic fits only made matters worse.
“Get the stretcher,” the medic ordered one of the other men in the company, “And try to get his men on the radio; I think they’re searching just north of here.”
“Sir!” And the soldier left.
The medic turned his attentions to Fullmetal. The boy looked back at him as he reached over and checked his pulse as well.
“...Have you seen my brother?” he asked.
The medic’s—Captain Randall was his name—stoic professionalism seemed to waver a little, but he fought it pack into place.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t.”
Fullmetal nodded, but then his own stoicism crumbled and he gritted his teeth, his silent tears streaming anew.
That seemed to shake Randall even further. He cleared his throat and his voice softened, as if he were speaking to a child much younger than Fullmetal. “Are you hurt anywhere?”
The boy shook his head.
“Good.” He turned his head and looked back at Mustang. The Colonel was still watching him with his hazy, confused-looking eyes. He didn’t say anything, or really even do anything. He just stared. Williams’ skin crawled as their eyes met and he had to look away. Eye-contact broken, Mustang’s frail hold on consciousness seemed to waver a little. His eyelids fluttered and he gave a small, wet cough.
Beside him, Randall stiffened and Williams let out a strangled curse.
Vivid droplets of red stood out starkly against the colorlessness of Mustang’s lips. Oh god, he was bleeding, and as they watched a thick stream of blood began to spill from the corner of his mouth and down across his cheek.
Randall quickly took Mustang’s jaw in his hand, trying to pry it open.
“Don’t fight me, sir!” he pleaded when the wounded man resisted. More blood poured from his mouth, dyeing his lips and staining the collar of his dirty white shirt. He choked on it, and still more blood came forth.
Randall finally got his mouth open and turned his patient’s head to the side, allowing the blood to dribble out of his mouth and into the dirt. “Damn it, he’s bitten through his tongue...”
He lifted the short length of chain connecting the boy and man between his two fingers. “Can you take this off?” he asked Fullmetal, trying to sound gentle in the face of his urgency. “Mustang is hurt. We need to take care of him, okay? Can you do that?”
“We... we have to stay together... I promised Hughes. And H-hawkeye.” He swayed a little where he sat, clearly not in his right mind. But after what he’d been through—some kind of terrifying event that no one yet understood—who wouldn’t be a little cracked? Williams had only been on the outskirt of it, and the terror in his breast was barely containable. He didn’t even want to imagine what it must be like for the alchemists.
“Okay, but we need to take him to the medic tent. He’s going to bleed to death if we don’t get him sedated and stitched up. We’ll take good care of him, but it’ll be hard for us to help him if you’re in the way. Please, Fullmetal.”
He shook his head again, his bangs falling in front of his eyes. “No... I promised...”
Captain Randall tried again and again to gain Fullmetal’s cooperation, but he still would not release his hold on the Colonel. By the time the stretcher came to transport the semi-comatose man to the medic tent, Randall was losing patience. He ordered that one of the men run back and get a bone saw from the tents and, in spite of Fullmetal’s increasingly hysterical protests, he sawed through the chain.
The kid just about lost it when they took Mustang from him. He fought and screamed, suddenly filled with a frantic, adrenaline-fueled kind of energy, but it didn’t last long. Williams held onto him until he could fight no more. Like the rest of the alchemists, he was exhausted to the point of collapse and he soon fell prey to his body’s need for rest. He fell limp in Williams’ arms, half-swooning, and did not rise to fight again.
He was taken to one of the other medical tents to be checked out, and Williams went back out into the field, still searching for his commander.
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The impromptu base camp was flooded with the wounded. Bandaged or bleeding alchemists milled around aimlessly, like the walking undead, each of them either still suffering from shock or simply trying to absorb what had happened.
But no one really knew what happened. As of yet, no one had been able to find a clear answer. The last thing Maes remembered was Roy and the horrifying presence that pulsed in him. Then there had been pain, such vivid, indescribable pain followed by a period of blackness in which he felt nothing at all.
The next thing he remembered was waking up on the floor of the barrack room with Hawkeye shaking him and calling his name, and then that moment of terror when he realized that it was morning—hours and hours had gone by without his notice—and Ed and Roy were both gone.
“They said he was over here somewhere...” Hawkeye said to Maes tightly, her sharp-shooter eyes desperately darting around in search of her commander. “There!”
Maes turned to where she was pointing and felt his legs try to give out from under him with relief. The two of them ran toward a medical tent where several patients had been made to sit outside on crates. The number of wounded had skyrocketed, and there was not enough bed space for those who were not severely injured.
Maes supposed he should feel Roy lucky to be sitting outside, then.
Roy’s eyes were closed and deeply shadowed. His cheeks looked sunken and the dip at his temples seemed deeper somehow, as if his skin was clinging to his bones. His arm was in a sling, supporting the shoulder that the doctors had needed to pop back into its socket—Maes hadn’t been told how it was wrenched from the socket to begin with, nor did he think to ask—and his broken hand was safely within a cast. The medics had mentioned over the radio that he’d been having seizures and had nearly bitten his tongue off, but after being medicated and given fluids he was improving. Still, the sight of him was enough to make Maes sick to his stomach.
Roy did not open his eyes as they approached him, but considering that he had been recently sedated, that wasn’t entirely surprising. He was reclining on a wooden box, leaning back against a stack of empty medical crates. He was asleep, and looked as if he could sleep forever. His lips were parted, stained with the traces of dried blood. But he was alive. Unlike so many of his comrades, he had been found alive, and just about anything beyond that joyful fact was currently moot in Maes’ eyes.
“Roy? Buddy?” Maes knelt down beside him, almost feeling bad about waking him, but just needing to know what he was okay. At the sound of his name, Roy looked up, but it seemed as if it took him a moment to register where he was. He tried to speak, but the pain must have reminded him of his injuries and he stopped. He put his hand over his mouth and closed his eyes tightly, wincing.
“Don’t try to talk, sir...” Hawkeye told him, kneeling beside Maes.
Roy looked at her groggily, then he raised his uninjured arm and mimed holding something between his thumb and first two fingers. He moved his hand slowly through the air, as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra.
“Oh, of course,” she said quickly, understanding what he wanted before Maes did. She quickly flagged down a passing soldier and managed to beg a pen and a small pad of paper off of him.
She handed them to Roy and he put the pen to the first sheet of paper on the pad. But then he stopped, as if he had no idea how to word what he wanted to say. He sat for a moment, utterly still and silent, staring at the blank page, a dark chaos stirring beyond his soulful eyes as he searched for the words he could not say aloud.
Finally the pen moved and he turned the pad over so that Hawkeye and Maes could both see it.
It read, very succinctly:
?
It was just a question mark and yet, somehow, Maes understood everything that Roy was making it stand for. What happened? Where are we? Are you okay? Is Ed okay? Am I okay? What the hell is going on? Tell me everything.
And, to the best of their abilities, they did.
But they didn’t know what had happened.
No one knew what was going on, other than to say that every alchemist in Amestris had suddenly gone mad, compelled into self-injury by some kind of psychic force. There had been some manner of grand-scale transmutation, but no one could tell what effect it had had. Nothing seemed to have changed, though that hanging pressure in the air was gone, and in its absence Maes felt positively buoyant. Other than that, though, the purpose of the transmutation was a mystery.
“And then you and Ed were found... do you even remember that?”
Ponderously, he shook his head.
Maes and Hawkeye looked at each other, neither of them sure of how much detail they should go into about the state the two alchemists had been found in.
“Well, neither of you were exactly yourselves...” Maes started, rubbing the back of his neck.
Roy listened to them describe his frightening behavior back at his barrack, but they could tell by the furrow in his brow that he did not remember any of it. He jotted something down on the pad again, looking a little more awake, but then he stopped. His dark eyes sharpened and he pointed urgently over Maes’ shoulder. Both he and Hawkeye turned to look.
In the distance, they could see Ed wandering through the throng of rushing doctors and shell-shocked alchemists. He was holding himself, looking around as if just desperate to find a familiar face in the crowd. Maes jumped up and went over to him, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder. Ed jumped in surprise and looked up at him, and the expression of heart-wrenching relief that came to his face when he recognized Maes was enough to make the man grab him hard and wrap his arms around him. Ed embraced him in return, holding onto him so hard that the indentions of his automail fingers would probably leave bruises on Maes’ back.
“C-can’t find Al...” he whispered against him, sounding too heartbroken to even weep. “I can’t find him anywhere...”
“He’ll turn up, Ed,” Maes assured him, trying to sound like he meant it. He cupped the back of the kid’s head, swearing silently that once this was all settled, he was going to force Edward—and Al... if and when they found him—to spend a few days with him and Gracia, in a warm, safe home where they would be loved and protected. After all that they had already been through in their young lives, they didn’t need this. It was too much. And Maes really had tried so hard to keep him safe, to dull the terror of what was happening to him and all of the other alchemists... but none of it had been worth anything.
Maes closed his eyes tightly, forcing back the sting of tired, heartsick tears that had been threatening to loose themselves over the past few days. Now was not the time to physically give in to his grief. There was never time.
Almost grudgingly, he let go of Ed and led him back to Hawkeye and Roy. Roy sat up woozily and motioned for his young subordinate to sit next to him and Ed complied, shakily collapsing back onto the wooden box.
Roy flipped over to a clean sheet on the pad and scrawled a few words. Maes caught a glimpse of the words Are you okay? as he showed the pad to Fullmetal.
Ed read it. “No. Are you?”
Roy smirked at him sadly and shook his head. No, of course they weren’t okay. None of them were, nor could they be expected to be any time soon.
More alchemists were found as the day progressed, both dead and alive. Armstrong was found toward late afternoon, wandering aimlessly with the body of another alchemist—a young man—cradled in his arms. He was crying and had been inconsolable for hours, but he was mostly unhurt. The same could not be said for Major Gates. She was also found later in the afternoon, broken and bleeding as if she had been trampled. She was alive, but barely.
It was nearly evening when they found Al, just when Roy’s sedation had worn off enough for him to travel. Maes was eager to get him back into the city. He wasn’t so badly injured that he needed a hospital, but a warm bed in a quiet room would probably do him loads of good... him and Ed both.
But as they were getting ready to go, Ed suddenly gave a sharp, joyous cry.
“Brother!”
Alphonse screamed for his sibling from across the camp and Edward’s tired, devastated face lit up like a light.
They ran toward each other, Ed stumbling in his exhaustion and nearly collapsing, but Al caught him up in his big arms and enfolded him into a terribly sweet and painfully sad embrace.
Roy was already loaded into the car and was nearly asleep again, his head resting in Hawkeye’s lap in the back seat, but he opened his eyes to the brothers’ tearful reunion and watched them hold one another, weeping, each teasingly scolding the other for making them worry.
In the wake of the darkness enshrouding the past couple of weeks, Maes’ heart was lightened to see the boys together again, and he felt a quiet smile play on his lips. When he looked back at Roy, though, he saw no such buoyancy on his face. His expression was tensed with profound gravity.
It isn’t over, that face said.
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It had been one hundred and fifty-three years, four months, one week, three days, and eight hours since the last Release. The World was overdue for another. And so I initiated one.
Mustang—My Center piece, my Host—had been right about that: it had happened before. And it will happen again.
Again, and again, and again.
That’s what they’re here for, My alchemists, though they’ll never really know it. They are made to live by the rules of Equivalent Exchange, and must therefore equalize the World around them when it needs them to.
Energy is never lost. It is just reverted, spread out, repurposed... sometimes it gathers and it builds and builds upon itself until it is a cosmic pressure that only earthquakes and torrential storms can help dissipate.
But sometimes, every couple of centuries, the energy has been allowed to build too much and the only way to Release it is to expel it so violently that everything around it—the land, the wildlife, even those endlessly fascinating creatures who rule over it all—is completely pulverized. Now, I can’t have that, can I?
And so, as I have done before and shall do again, I used My alchemists to disperse what had been collected, to act as a living conduit to divert the energy back outward and ease the cosmic pressure.
Alchemists are indispensable to the fate of their entire World. This is why they can never truly know of the part they play. Soon, as the days pass around them, they will forget. One day, as one of the injured alchemists lays in her hospital bed, she will suddenly ask, “Why am I here? How did I get injured?” and no one will answer her, because no one will know. Two alchemists meeting on the street will faintly remember each other, will smile vaguely and wave, but they will not remember how they had held each other and wept in the wake of the transmutation, or recall that they had supported each other, both of them limping and injured, toward the medical tents. Even Mustang, My perceptive and intuitive soldier, will look at the books newspaper articles he had borrowed from the Central Library and wonder why he had even checked out such pointless drivel.
Memory is an interesting thing. It is easily manipulated and completely unreliable, by My design, of course. Only I will forever know the Truth, for that is what I am. And I will keep My secret to Myself, at least until I need to make use of My toys again...
...And again, and again, and again...
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