#〚thread: where eagles fly vultures follow〛

[swordbecomesdestiny]

Where Eagles Fly, Vultures Follow [Byleth, Byleth, Mist, Mozu]

Starter for Trust @healingmist @progenitorheart @harvestrose

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Waking in the early hours for combat was a familiar sensation. There had been that day long ago, so early that the sky was still dark blue. Rain had drizzled in torchlight, illuminating the faces of three students she had hoped to be her future companions before she even knew them. three enigmas, each so full of hope, potential, greatness. She’d been presented with a choice, back then.

She’d been at a loss.

Now, here, the decision was made for her, clear as the clangs of blades striking together like a cacophony of bells, a song of blood.

While deep in memory her mind was blank, moving on autopilot as she reached for the sword at her side. The Sword of the Creator glowed under her gloved touch, the disturbing, deadly protruding bone spurs on the blade sharper than they seemed, the sword itself able to take on a life of it’s own, extending like a whip and flaying all in its path.

The sword was a tool. as she was a tool. 

Nothing more.

However, she was part of a matching set.

“Me!” Ha, that didn’t get old. “Byleth!” She called to him as she raced outside, ready to strike at any Adrestian that came their way, knowing the other Byleth was moments from joining her.

“For Claude!”

[rigelsenshis]

the old guard + dæmons

a completely self-indulgent au bcos dæmons sit squarely in the Top Five Best Storytelling Concepts Ever Created and i will absolutely fight you on this it’s the hill i will die on

i made a post about this that evolved in a beautiful thread, with so many great ideas being shared by a lot of wonderful people, and then spent a couple of days thinking about possible shapes and possible names and this probably longer-than-comfortable post is the result of all that so i hope you enjoy let’s discuss let’s talk about this god i just love dæmons so much

first things first, some ground rules of how dæmons might work when taking into account the old guard’s particular flavor of immortality. @fleurdufeu suggested that the dæmon gets Severed with the person’s first death, the one that triggers immortality. and with each death (@en-sam-malas also brought this up) the dæmon can travel farther and farther away and can stay awake when their human is sleeping, contributing to the general idea of Otherness™ the old guard carries with them, especially in a world with a dæmons. @dearest--gertrude also suggested that just like the first deaths takes longer to return back from, dæmons would be slower to reappear— taking maybe two or three days the first time (which would add to the shock of having discovered immortality bcos like??? i’m alive??? and without my dæmon??? what the fuck???) to movie-time when the dæmon’s body is already there even before the human comes back to life. which only leads to the fact that when the final death comes the dæmon does disappear in a puff of golden dust like in hdm and creates a general wave of Angst (like i imagine that’s how Andy and Quynh knew that it was Lykon’s time, bcos his dæmon just disappeared and didn’t return)

@en-sam-malas added two Great Ideas, which is that most of the old guard would not have grown up with the taboo of not touching other people’s dæmons and so would use them in battle against other humans (which highlights their Otherness™ once again), and that their dæmons can probably undergo changes of shape— not as frequent as a child but following big traumatic events, like their first death, huge losses and grief and so on, and that’s the idea i’ve built on when looking for suitable shapes for each of them so here we fucking go (note that i did omit Lykon bcos we know so little of him atm but maybe when more material comes out we’ll be able to figure him out better???)

Nile

i’d like to think that as times grow more modern, dæmons’ names grow more modern as well— bcos Nile’s from Chicago, her dæmon could be called Jazz (bcos of the city’s history with the music genre) or Hopper (bcos Hopper’s Nighthawks is in Chicago and Nile loves art??? is it a stretch??? i’m open to better ideas for sure). her dæmon probably settled sometime after her father’s death into a german shepherd, as suggested by @stevie-harrington bcos in hdm many soldiers are shown to have a dog dæmon and dog dæmons are reliable and intelligent, pack animals that can hold their own in a fight. when she comes back from her first death Hopper is not with her, which only adds to the uneasiness the other marines feel around her bcos how tf is she alive without her dæmon this is just Wrong. he reappears when she wakes up in the back of the van, and it’s only on the plane that she realised that something is different about him and that he’s not exactly a german shepherd anymore— i’d like for his first changed shape to be one of those dogs that could be wolves and toy the line between the two (bcos it’s a bit more wild and also bcos i’d like Andy to have a wold dæmon and for Nile’s to resemble Andy’s since it’s vaguely implied she will take her place as leader of the old guard)

Booker

Booker’s dæmon is called Manette (which means “bitter”/”bitterness” and i mean,,,,nomen omen) and when it first settled it was a marmoset, as suggested by both @mewbotz and @fleurdufeu, an animal dexterous enough to help him with his forgeries and also deeply family oriented (marmosets mate for life are very involved in bringing up younglings which would make sense to Booker falling deep into desperation once his family passes). Manette changes the first time when he dies, and again @fleurdufeu suggests she could turn into a carrion crow to blend in with the others while Booker hangs for three/four days, brings him idk insects to eat and stays on his shoulder and they both cry bcos they don’t understand what happened to them and they feel each other but they’re also so different (crows are also family oriented and they mimic sounds so in theory she’s like her previous form but also with trauma and the imagery of death). she could turn into a cinereous vulture when the last members of Booker’s family die, reserved and passive and isolated, and then during movie-time she’s something even smaller, maybe even a mouse, bcos grief has twisted Booker into something that he himself cannot recognise and he sleeps with Manette in his hands like he used to do when she was a monkey and it feels almost the same but not quite. i’d assume that after the ordeal with Quynh she changes shape again, maybe if he starts healing up a bit??? 

Nicky + Joe

they go together bcos a) obviously and b) their dæmons have very similar stories and changes of shape so it makes sense for me to talk about them together

i called Nicky’s dæmon Glauca, which is a sort of shortening of the Homeric epithet given to the goddess Athena, glaukôpis aka bright-eyed (you get it??? like Nicky himself when will Luca’s eyes leave me in peace the answer is never). bcos he was born in a coastal city i’d like to his dæmon to have settled into a sea bird, and i chose the shape of a scopoli’s shearwater, a bird that’s native to Liguria and a good swimmer

i chose Zahara for Joe’s dæmon, a name that means most exquisite bcos i thought about the fact that he was an artist and a poet but i’m Very Much Open to more informed opinions than mine. Zahara’s first shape could have been a fennec, native to Northern Africa and a very outgoing kind of animal which i feel would match Joe’s personality

the first change for both of them is, again obviously, when they kill each other for the first time. when they find their dæmons again after having spent like three days in a blind rage and confusion and pain and where is my dæmon have it lost her what have i become it’s his fault they’re both smaller in dimension, bcos they’re in shock, and more vicious than their original shape, so i picked a stoat for Nicky and a genette for Joe— both small carnivores, native one to Europe and the other to North Africa, and they just tear into each other again for a not-better-specified amount of days it’s just sword scimitar teeth claws whatever. i then see Nicky and Joe sort of “making peace” and travelling together from Jerusalem to the sea, where they part ways, and the shock is so great, the reflection they go through when they’re apart so massive that causes another change, this one the farthest away from their “personality” as they struggle to understand who they are now and what they have become. Zahara becomes a blackbird and Glauca a cape hare, shapes that neither of them feel like are right

when they both start to make peace with what they have become and realise that there might be Feelings popping out, say like a couple of centuries after Jerusalem they’ve caught glimpses of each other in other Crusades and such, both dæmons change into cats. smaller cats for now, and when Joe and Nicky go and look for each other and find each other in Malta and realise that they love each other and share some poetic and lyrical declaration of eternal adoration they wake up and find their dæmons in similar shapes— big cats, like @mewbotz suggested. Joe’s dæmon settles into a leopard, majestic and sun-like, while Nicky’s becomes a panther, hiding in the shadows, fiercely protective and betraying Nicky’s nature of actually being a Pretty Dangerous Guy. and @mewbotz goes on to say that Joe and Nicky are so inseparable that their dæmons actually follow the other around, a way to always make sure they’re safe, and so it looks like Joe’s the one with Glauca the panther and Nicky’s the one with Zahara the leopard and in that way they’re never really apart and it’s Beautiful

Quynh

bcos they’re both so old, i have this idea that neither Quynh not Andy remember the actual very first shape their dæmon took (like Andy says that she doesn’t remember the faces of her sisters, for example). i’d like for him to be called Giao Long, a name lifted from Vietnamese myths about dragons, but again i only acquired this knowledge through internet searches so if anyone more informed wants to weigh in i’d be Very Happy

when Quynh’s riding with Andy, her dæmon is a crested serpent eagle, as suggested by @fleurdufeu, with the beautiful image of it flying close to Quynh’s arrow as it sails towards its target like @mewbotz said. the fact that their dæmons are so eerie and strange contribute to the English townspeople believing Quynh and Andy are witches, and when they throw Quynh overboard her dæmon is left flying above the water and it’s just a horrible cycle of madness with the dæmon changing shape to a bird to a fish to an insect reaching her into her cage flying above just mad with grief and pain like Quynh herself is

they find each other when she gets out but they’re both broken and twisted in an ugly way, and the dæmon has turned into something she can keep close— i’d partial to the idea of a snake bcos she was “a pit viper in a fight” and even tho they can separate like every other immortal they never do bcos the trauma is too great

Andy

i got Andy’s dæmon’s name from the Italian wikipedia page about Scythians and for the life of me i can’t find the same info in english but like, apparently there was a mythical/semi-mythical Scythian king called Colassai??? i find it a very fitting name and like Andy herself he could have shortened it to Cole in the modern age

Andy doesn’t remember his first shape (but i realised the deer was a pretty important animal in Scythian culture so maybe it could have been one???), but when she meets Lykon her dæmon is a wild boar— still an earthbound animal, brutal in a fight to match her axe-wielding fighting style. when she meets Quynh, their dæmons match (immortal wives and immortal husbands with matching dæmons for the win) and @fleurdufeu suggested it might be a golden eagle, The™ steppes’ predator

losing Quynh definitely triggers a change of shape and Andy’s dæmon becomes earthbound once again, as if Quynh’s death clipped its wings, and it become maybe a fox??? smaller, still vicious, still useful in a fight. then, when Andy’s in Australia with Achilles (as per the comics but also the movie bcos i think they showed Andy’s portrait in the cave) her dæmon could take the shape of an Australian-born animal, maybe a dingo??? and in movie-time her dæmon is a full out wolf, leader of the pack, brutal in a fight— and Nile’s dæmon slowly starts to resemble Andy’s wolf

and that’s the end of this dissertation-length monstrosity if you managed to get here wow i’m truly Moved