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1.
The first soul he finds within himself is a newborn.
He stops for a while, after that.
18.
The first soul that speaks with a voice and words and thoughts he can divide from the throng inside him where his own soul once was is a little girl. He remembers her; she lived under an arch not far from the nearest fountain to his master’s house. Whenever he saw her she was so carefree, vibrant and alive despite her lonely nature.
Even now, in the endless nothing that is her inescapable hell, she catches at him and asks for the sun.
He opens his eyes, invites her without herself and within him, and together they look out and across the desert.
Xerxes is silent.
For the first time, the dregs of his single mortal soul begin to ease.
103.
When the girl comes again she brings her friend who only ever wanted to try the meat the masters ate. Together with them guiding his hands, he catches a heavy, fatty fish and roasts it slowly on both sides on a hot pan of iron, seasons it so richly it makes his eyes water, and the children laugh to taste it on his tongue.
437.
She had been chasing her dog. She asks what happened to her dog, but when he points out he could hardly have cared for the abandoned animals, the inevitability of what that means, she decides she doesn’t want to know.
Instead, every time he finds a stray dog, she guides his hand to feed it, pets its ears, and finds peace in the memory of what she once had.
1032.
House slave twenty, a handful of years older than him, with strong arms and a broad back, asks for a name.
He calls twenty Theo, a fragment of the name the creature in the bottle once offered him, now offered to another in turn.
4067.
House slave fifteen, the mean old cook who slapped wandering hands in the kitchen, asks to make a meal. She teaches him to flip a cake in one single smooth movement upon the griddle, and he gives her the name Ephrata, the second fragment of a name shared.
16136.
The man was a merchant in Xerxes only for a night, passing through from Xing on his way west. He wants nothing but to go home, and so Hohenheim turns his feet east, carried by the wind and the hope of a new future, of being able to learn new things, to find peace.
23103.
A furious wife out looking for her missing husband, the eternal cheater. She tells him if he finds her worthless husband hiding somewhere in here, he’s to make sure she gets to give him a peace of her mind.
33331.
A grandfather asks him what he would like to do, and he doesn’t have an answer.
33332.
A boy asks him what he would like to do, and he doesn’t have an answer.
33333.
A man the age he was before asks him what he would like to do, and he still doesn’t have an answer.
He promises he will find an answer, before their doing is done.
50864.
A nervous husband, caught with his pants down when the end came, who knows his wife has to be in here somewhere keeping an eye out for him. He can’t hide forever.
He decides to let them both be. They’ll figure themselves out. Time is the one thing they all have plenty of. He’s not getting in the way of a marital dispute.
76203.
The angry wife’s sister eventually admits that she was the one the wayward husband had always been running off to, and laments that she ought to have married him in the first place.
He suggests they talk it out. After all, the three of them are never going anywhere. They’ll spend the rest of eternity within him—they may as well put their differences aside. He would just prefer to not be involved.
Unfortunately, it’s still his body.
He spends days listening to them argue and decides that the only reasonable solution is to never get married.
90499.
One of the architects of the great circle rages at him, screaming herself hoarse, because did he know? Did he take the flask and stand in the circle and ask for this, was he always all along waiting for his moment, was this the revenge of a slave who hated his betters? Why? Why? Why?
He weeps in the silence of his roadside shelter during a heavy rainstorm, beside the plague victims he’s spent days trying to save. He curls into a ball, like a child, with his face in his knees, and weeps beneath the rain. Wishes, desperately, that he had known, because if he had known, he could have stopped this. If he had known, he could have refused his gift. If he had known, he could have burned the circle out of the ground, or rent the earth in two, or told someone. He would have found a way—or, failing, he would have died beside the rest of Xerxes and not carried on like this, adrift and lost and unable to end any suffering.
His existence now is unrelenting suffering.
His own. The hundreds of thousands of excess souls that weigh upon him like lead. The world, empty and bereft of the joy of his home, and the people he cannot save.
101010.
His master watches, always, from the sidelines. He’s aware of the presence, the eyes that see through his, the hands that mirror his, the mind inside his that thinks and begins to understand.
It takes nearly a hundred years for him to speak. “You didn’t know.” It’s not a question, this knowledge that resounds in his soul, a certainty. “You didn’t know any more than I.”
“No.” He takes the shovel with which he is digging a grave and kicks it deeper with the sole of his shoe. “Don’t you think I would have stopped you?”
His master laughs. “Do you think I would have let you?”
No, he doesn’t.
This frightens him more than almost anything else.
122346.
He has found that children are the easiest to appease. They want simple things—a day swimming, another moment in the sun, to run freely, to pet a dog, to eat something they’ve always longed for.
Those on the cusp of adulthood are the hardest, because their desires are always the most complex. Their lives were cut short at the moment before they could choose for themseves, and now what? What is a chance at life for a child who was on the cusp of living it?
This one asks to get drunk, and he wakes up the day after in his own bed feeling like he’s close to death, thanking himself that alkahestry works as it does, that it eases his needs, because that is the only reason he doesn’t roll over and puke.
150047 – 171149.
They learn to read.
101010+.
“What did you see, that day?” His master never asks with anything beyond an academic’s broadest sort of interest, the kind of lazy entitlement that demands an answer for no reason other than the desire of knowing. “When Xerxes died?”
“I don’t know.” It’s not a lie. He doesn’t know what he saw. He saw nothing, he saw everything, he saw all of Xerxes drawn like lines in the sand and every soul in it as ants upon a leaf, he saw himself as eclipsing the sun and as insignificant as dust on a table. He saw the scope of the world, and only a fraction, and understands none of and all of it.
“What did you learn?” his master asks instead, a different question entirely.
He looks at his hands and sees in them pores and skin and veins and muscles and bones, atoms and elements and miracles. “I am a circle,” he says, and it is true and it is not, it is a lie and it is not, it is and it is not. Just like him.
194314.
House slave twenty-five was a maid. She gets tired of his living space being in squalor and demands he clean in. He names her Tuss, and Tuss cajoles him into sweeping and organizing books and opening the shutters to let in the light and the desert shines far to the east at the edge of the horizon and he is never, ever alone.
207091.
House slave twenty-two cared for camels. He takes the name Bomba, a big name for a big man, but even that he does not ask for—he enjoys his rest, even if it isn’t quite so much rest, but there’s little and less for him to do now. Only waiting. Only watching.
He chides Hohenheim for not being able to ride a horse or a camel, and laughs whenever he falls off.
223850 – 250935.
The world is full of all sorts of people. Xerxes was full of all sorts of people. Now he is full of all sorts of people.
They are not all good people.
He has wondered, before, what sort of logic underpinned the nature by which the souls of Xerxes divided themselves in twain during their great sacrifice. Over the last two hundred years he has gone back and forth on the nature of their transmutation—was it some form of equivalent exchange, a scientific cycle structured by the circle, that was designed to draw them into the thing they knew and trusted? What other logic is there for how so many people he knew found him, rather than his friend in the flask?
He’s had two hundred years to learn and understand and think about the world beyond the knowledge of any mortal being, to find truth (not Truth; he has found Truth, and would prefer, by all possible reason, to never find Truth again, not even if he lives another thousand lifetimes) and he has learned two things above all others: Everything is connected, and nothing is connected.
Was there some reason by which so many of those he knew in life were drawn to death? Perhaps. Was there some mechanism by which he came to harbor souls that feel, to him, kindred? Or was there not, and is this why so many who did harm reside within him? Masters who beat their slaves, parents who beat their children, partners who beat their spouses; rapists, murderers, slavers; all and more are now part of him. He hates them, he loves them, he fears them, he understands them one by one, in fragments and shards, but he cannot judge them. He cannot punish them.
They are him. He is them. Perhaps he would never do what they had done, but did he not stand upon the altar and hold the knife? Did their sacrifice not define his ascendance?
There is no forgiveness, but there is no censure.
There is only tomorrow.
101010+.
“Do you regret it?” Hohenheim asks, when next his master surfaces from within him. “What you did?”
His master laughs. “Which part?”
Hohenheim runs his fingers over the page of his book. “Any of it. All of it.”
“Do you?” his master returns. “You have a life unending. Power beyond the wildest imagination of any who has ever or will ever live. Do you regret it?”
“Every day.” The paper feels so fragile beneath his touch. It brands his skin. Alchemy is built by his knowledge, flawed at its root. It is rotten, rotten to the core, cursed with the knowledge that destroyed Xerxes, for his friend in the flask was his first teacher.
His master is silent for many long days after, and it is only slowly he admits, as if ashamed, that he, too, regrets.
It is not enough. It never will be enough.
It could never be enough.
362570.
House slave thirty was brought in long after he had left the slaves’ quarters. She was a weaver, and wants nothing. Not even a name. She wants an end.
Now, he’s had long enough to learn. Now, he can give her that.
He names her Stus, and she gives herself to save a mother, dying in childbirth, and this is good.
401800.
The king of Xerxes weeps.
This, too, is justice.
461208.
A grown man, who wants only a bedtime story.
461209.
A little boy, who wants only a bedtime story.
488905.
A singer, who wants, just one last time, to raise her voice to the dawn.
Together, they remember a song nobody has sung in over three centuries, and, together, they welcome the coming morn.
501080.
The most patient have waited for last. Some are too young to ask, some are too old to care. Some have never known what to do next.
He had been dying when the end came, so what does he care what Hohenheim does with his soul? What does he care for the future? He’s been dead for a long, long time. It is the strangest sort of catharsis, and for the very first time in all his too-long life, Hohenheim does not feel at fault. This one man he did not sacrifice. To this one man he brought an adventure.
Hohenheim turns his face up into the rain and breathes and feels within him rejoicing at the dawn of another day.
101010+.
“Take me,” says his master, when the time comes to begin their great work. “It is my hands which began this. It is by my hands it must end.”
When his master’s soul goes into the Amestrian soil, he feels alone for the very first time in longer than he can remember.
It frightens him.
518756.
He remembers the woman, a stranger from the south sold the same day he was. She was taken by a hard-edged looking old woman with a sour face and muscled arms; she had looked back toward him and they had shared no language and she had shouted something he had never understood.
In the soul, there is no language. Only self.
“What did you say, that day?” Hohenheim asks.
“I told you to live,” she says, and they both laugh at the easy irony of this, four hundred years later, when all they have done is live.
536329 (1).
The last soul he finds within himself is a newborn.
He takes her in his arms, nothing and everything all at once, and rocks them both to sleep.