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They camp for the night at Xerxes.
The guide—sent to them by Ling, presumably for some reason of complex political one-upmanship Al had dedicated himself to not understanding—had set them up just within the outer walls, on a warm slab of broken stone, and warned them not to venture further within lest they be consumed by hungry ghosts.
"It's alright," Al had said, softly, swallowing the shiver of memory over his skin into gentle, reassuring tones. Then he'd waited, until one by one the party all gave in to sleep, and he'd stood up and stepped forward.
He doesn’t enter by the gate. He steps over the shallow irrigation-ditch remnant of the circle that swallowed a million souls, invisible except to an alchemist's trained eye, and slips between a pair of cracked walls. His father's city greets him, shadow and rubble and sand.
The most striking thing, Al decides, is the silence. Maybe at twilight there would be sounds, as the temperature evens and rats and foxes leave their shelters. Maybe in the day, the Ishvalan survivors his brother had told him about go about their work, if they're still here. At night, the dead city's silence is total, and consuming.
"I'm home," says Al on impulse. Nobody answers back.
His boots tap on the broken streets like flint striking steel.
There's something both nostalgic and a little chilling about being awake while the whole world is asleep. It's not a habit he thinks he'll ever quite break.
I can't believe you're not sick of being up like this, Ed had said, once, when he'd found him sitting on the front porch of Winry's house and staring at the stars, about six months back in the world and still not used to it. You've got four years of sleep to catch up on.
Sixteen hundred and fifty-three nights, Al had said. But it's nice, sometimes. Everything is so quiet.
Sand and wind and time have done their work, of course, collapsed doorways and columns with their slow and inevitable calculus, but the greater part of the damage is obviously artificial, great haphazard gashes carved in low rows of houses, deep gouges in the ground.
It's upsetting, the superfluous violence carried out to destroy the evidence of the far greater crime. It makes him feel like he's looking down into a desecrated grave.
There are no bones, at least not here, as he makes his slow way down what must have once been an avenue of some grandeur. He's not sure why he thought there would be. Five hundred years have elapsed since the cataclysm here. Maybe animals had carried them off. Maybe they were swallowed up by the drifting sands. Maybe Gluttony had eaten them. Maybe someone had buried them.
Maybe Hohenheim had buried them.
There are statues lining the avenue in varying states of collapse, some reduced to just pedestals, others largely intact, though eroded and stripped of color by centuries of sandstorms. They have, without exception, ugly black gashes where their eyes should be.
Al averts his eyes, and watches his step. The cracked ground falls occasionally into hollows of sand, treacherous little pitfalls that could easily break an ankle if he’s not cautious. Dead Xerxes grabbing at his feet.
Up ahead, on his right, a larger building resolves out of the desert dark, white stone catching the moonlight. There are carvings on its front, bracketing the door on either side, badly weathered but still distinct, barely.
He's seen this somewhere before.
It takes some seconds before he places the memory in a book of Hohenheim's research notes, interlocking circles on facing pages signifying an important reference point in the seemingly plain text between. Ed had complained for days after they'd worked that one out.
How many keys to such frustrating childhood ciphers are to be found scattered about these ruins? More, figures Al, than he can reliably guess. They hadn't pulled nearly all the secrets out of Hohenheim's books before they burned their house down, and Al had only had time to have so many conversations with him before the Promised Day.
He doesn't often let himself regret the fire.
Out of the cracks in buildings and from patches of accumulated dirt grow trees. Hardy desert things, gnarled and knotted and flecked in small, shiny leaves, rising up from ruined geometries in irregular organic patches. In the daylight, they were striking, nigh-holy, signs of life in a place even ghosts no longer walk. The moonlight silvers them oddly. There's one twisting out of the second-story window of the building before him, reaching down like a captured soul.
Probably, after a rare rainstorm, the streets of Xerxes bloom with flowers. Probably he should go inside that building. Though it's up a set of stairs that, after days of camel-riding and being cut at by desert winds, look less than appealing. He contemplates the carvings on the front. Hidden knowledge.
"Get on with it, alchemist," he mutters. Then, just to be safe, he locates a suitable amount of fallen wood and claps to transmute himself a sturdy cane. "Up you go."
The knock-on effects of four years' nigh-starvation and sleep deprivation on an adolescent body are, to the best of Al's knowledge, irreversible by existing medical science. He'll always be inclined to weakness, to illness and disease, to a fragility that he's pretty sure scares Ed more than it scares him. He's long-since reconciled himself to the price of a body. In some ways, he and Ed have just switched.
Equivalent exchange, he thinks wryly, leaning on his cane halfway up the steps. He maintains he got the better end of the deal.
One of the ancient stone doors is jammed in place, half-disintegrated into rubble. The other is off its hinges but ajar, canted at an angle, leaving a gap large enough for a moderately sickly alchemist to duck through. There was a time he wouldn't've have fit. The thought makes him smile.
Enough of the roof has fallen in for the moon to light the wide atrium he emerges into, chunks of fallen stone scattered carelessly across the cracked and ruptured floor. He steps carefully, acutely conscious of the potential instability of the structure and of his own fragility.
The floor is marble, clean and white under a film of sand. There must be a quarry, or several, somewhere else in the vast wastes, perhaps long filled-in, perhaps rediscovered at some later date by the Xingese or some other people with no clue as to whose hands had first delved it.
Slaves' hands, probably.
It's something he'd wondered, briefly, when Hohenheim had at long last told him everything. Why would such a great alchemical power have had any need for slave labor? Why not simply do the work with alchemy? Marble is just pressurized limestone. Limestone is just calcium carbonate. A sufficiently capable alchemist can render marble out of chalk and eggshells.
In the center of the room there is a circle, partially obscured by fallen rock and piled sand, inlaid into the floor in some darker, reddish stone. Granite, he thinks. He lowers himself somewhat painfully down to kneel at the nearest edge, reaches out to sweep the dust away.
The edges of the circle are broken in a dozen places. It wouldn't function now even if he was stupid enough to stick his hands into an unknown and centuries-old transmutation to live-test it, which, admittedly, he might be.
Alright, to work. He transmutes his cane into a large paper fan and sweeps it through the air, exposing more of the circle with each pass. There's an idea, actually. Is there a possible application of alchemy that could create motion in air, in the sense of a gust of wind? Not transmutation so much as... a little push, in a certain direction. The application of momentum on a molecular level.
Well, he and Ed never spent much time on gaseous states, and unfortunately Al didn’t come up with this when grilling Mustang on the subject was a practical possibility. He sets the thought aside for later.
Exposed to the air, the granite-on-marble circle is fairly complex, as Al would expect from a public installation like this; the building is a library, he thinks, or maybe an archive. There aren't many such setups in Amestris, alchemical knowledge being a resource hoarded greedily by scholars and the state alike, but he and Ed had once passed through a town that ran all their drinking water through a large public-access array after a massive groundwater contamination incident some years prior. An area alchemist had set it up and stopped by occasionally for maintenance, but otherwise the people were on their own, so the array had to include enough detail and safeguards even an uneducated child could use it without likelihood of rebound. Al'd had to drag Ed away before he tried streamlining the thing on instinct.
This Xerxian circle seems to operate on similar principles of over-intricacy, from what Al's managed to clear away. Even accounting for the archaic symbology—what did the Xerxian periodic table look like?—and linear choices he can't quite interpret, Al can pick out a series of stopgaps that would cut the reaction short if too little or too much raw material were to be mistakenly provided, waste paths for certain silicates, and finally, at the innermost of three circles, the actual base array, which seems to, if Al is reading the primitive setup right, all those icons he can only place with certainty as what he'd assumed to be elements of Hohenheim's ciphers, be a simple material transmutation circle for rendering paper out of... graphite? More limestone? A carbon, or part-carbon, surely.
That makes sense. Trees must be a much more limited resource than minerals, in the desert. And why bother with parchment when you have alchemy?
He frowns.
Primitive isn't quite the right word. Looking at this circle is more like... meeting a parent after only knowing a brother. Like that.
Al shivers, and wishes he'd dressed a little warmer for the desert night.
But first of all. Carbon into paper. It's a little dizzying, to think about performing the same transmutation here as people five hundred years before.
He claps, transmutes himself a notepad out of a nearby bit of ceiling, and starts taking notes. He wishes again, briefly, that he still had access to Hohenheim's journals. If he returned to them with what he knows now, all the Truth inside his skull—
There's no point being wistful. He works with what he has. And there's enough here that he can definitely reverse-engineer at least some of the chemical language, which is already a worthy find. Maybe he'll take a page out of Hohenheim's book and start encoding some of his notes in Xerxian, once he develops a rudimentary understanding. That's guaranteed to harmlessly bother Ed a little, and harmlessly bothering Ed whenever possible is Al's solemn duty as the younger sibling.
He transmutes his fan back into a cane, levers himself back to his feet, and starts looking for books.
He's not expecting to find anything intact, necessarily. Even with the partial shelter granted by the building's walls and what remains of the ceiling, this place has been exposed to the elements for five centuries. He doesn't doubt that almost all of whatever was once here has disintegrated, or been carried off by visitors over the years. It's not like it's even theft, really, with no Xerxian descendants left living to lay claim to the place and its treasures.
None except for him, he supposes. Him and Ed.
Past the atrium is a room that's mostly rubble, and requires some careful picking around massive blocks of fallen stone. He ducks around the last one, passes under a crumbling archway. The next room is mostly intact, and consequently almost lightless, but he can make out the dim, blocky shapes of shelves lining the walls.
He needs light. Another reason to bother the theory of safe gaseous transmutation out of Mustang, really. It’d be so much more convenient to fill a glass tube with neon than to have to assemble a lantern out of component parts. He can think of a lot of uses for the transmutation of gasses that are both more practically useful and far safer than chaining together exothermic oxygen reactions.
Retreating back to the atrium, he nudges together a pile of rubble—limestone, iron, and silicates—and visualizes. Sand to glass requires heat, so he extends that circle wide in the cold desert night to lessen the draw on his own body heat; the iron he reshapes into wick-holder and frame; he splits out the carbon and crushes some of it into oil, transmutes some into a thick, sturdy wick, and uses the rest to make an outer wooden frame and hook. Clap.
He lights it with the firestarter Teacher would kill him if he didn't keep in his pocket, and stands back up, wincing a little as his bones protest both the movement and the brief drop in air pressure, then hooks the lantern on his cane. Much better. The shadows chase each other into corners as he moves, sending his gaze skittering as it searches for hidden eyes, but when he steps carefully back into the bookshelf room he can see.
Unsurprisingly the shelves are mostly bare, some collapsed and crumbled, others dusted in the same coating of sand as the rest of the city. Not completely, though. Al makes his careful way towards a far corner, spotting two promising shadows propped up against each other, and pulls them gingerly from the shelf.
They're not old, he can tell from a touch. Books, yes, but not six hundred year old books, to be so well-preserved. Swallowing disappointment, he holds them in front of his lantern and squints until they identify themselves.
The first: a notebook or journal. Unlabelled, but familiar— if he's lucky, the work of some other passing alchemist, left behind in a hurry. Or at least, a bit of history. The other— he fumbles with it in his hands, nearly drops it, chokes on his breath. He hasn't seen many, but he knows what an Ishvalan holy book looks like.
Should he even have this? He holds onto it. Better in someone's hands, even Amestrian hands, than left to rot.
He props his lantern against the shelves, flips the cover open, trying to be gentle with the pages. The firelight plays over pages of red-inked scripture in ancient Ishvalan, well beyond his comprehension. The list of people who could read this now is... short, surely.
It's a moment of careful examination before he registers that the book's been altered by a second hand, lighter notes sketched in the margins, circles around certain words, barely visible in the flickering orange light. Someone had been analyzing it, once, pulling out and commenting on important sections. He passes his thumb over one of the notes and it comes away faintly shiny in the orange light; graphite. Whoever had done this hadn't wanted to harm the underlying text at all. The writing isn't clear enough for him to glean anything else from it, but there's a hypothesis itching in the back of his head.
He moves to the other book, the unlabeled notebook. The same hand, but more legible, in heavier ink, and he's seen this writing before. He knows he has. He's seen it scattered in pages on the floor of Scar's northern safe house, Mei's clever hands tracing salvation from point to point. His hands tighten involuntarily, and he has to consciously relax them for fear of damaging the pages that suddenly feel more precious than gold.
Scar had never shared his brother's name with them. Al can't fault him for that, but it feels wrong, suddenly, that he doesn't know how to even think of him, because he must have been one of the most brilliant alchemists of the last five centuries.
The notes are encoded, of course, but it's a less developed version of a cipher that Al already helped to solve once. It's evident that their author had been doing much the same as Al is now; exploring the ruins, documenting all the surviving signs of Xerxian alchemy. Precisely reproduced arrays, both partial and complete, are accompanied by paragraphs making connections to both Amestrian alchemy and to alkahestry, some conclusions Al had already drawn himself and some entirely new.
What a truly extraordinary mind. Al follows lines of thought through the notebook, squinting against lanternlight, collects allusions to the half-eaten human transmutation circle Ed had told him about in one corner of his mind, alkahestry terms to cross-reference with Mei when he makes it to Xing in another, Xerxian terminology he hasn't encountered yet in a third.
No— he needs to write this down. Scar's brother's notebook in one hand, he reluctantly puts the holy book back on the shelf and pulls his notepad back out of his pocket, braces it on the shelf, palms for the pen he shoved behind his ear. If he didn't know the risks, he'd graft an extra pair of arms on himself, see if he didn't.
His chosen code for this leg of the trip is ordinary letters to Ed, since he'll be sending along copies of his notes anyway. Two transmutations with one circle, as it were. A little intellectual stimulation for his wayward older brother on his long cushy train rides. He turns the page in Scar's brother's notebook awkwardly with his thumb, skimming a list of angular vocabulary common between Xerxian, Amestrian, and Xingese inner circles as he scribbles without looking.
A certainty emerges, nudging against the back of his mind until he lets it unfold, hands and eyes occupied with their work. If he unbinds the pages of this notebook, lets them flutter to the sandy floor and overlaps the references to human transmutation, he'll find the shape of that too-familiar circle sketched out in points. He doesn't think Scar's brother had conceived of the counter-circle yet; this notebook seems to document his discovery, dawning horror, and first attempts at a resolution. It still makes Al shiver. This man's soul was not imprisoned in a Philosopher's Stone. The only ghost still haunting Xerxes. The only alchemist who'd seen what was coming.
He's in the middle of compare-contrasting his own Truths and observations of Xerxian radial construction with Scar's brother's notes on the matter when his legs give out.
He hits the floor hard, cursing, pen flying from his hand. His fingers close around the notebook at the expense of his notepad, and the lantern on his cane barely stays upright. Ow.
He hisses through his teeth, more at the shock of the impact than the pain. He's very well acquainted with pain at this point, all the various complaints that his bones like to give up at every possible cause. It's a reminder that he's alive, if nothing else.
He checks for breaks and strains, feeling for bones and tendons the way Mei taught him while he was convalescing and still re-learning his awareness of his own body, but nothing seems injured. Which is good, if only for the sake of his dignity. He hates to think of his guide informing Ling he'd managed to break a leg reading books. He’d never live it down.
He should've sat down before he started reading, is what he should've done. Should've known he'd get absorbed. He sighs, pulls himself up into a more proper sitting position, fumbles for his notepad and his pen in the dimness.
He's not going to be able to keep this notebook, he already knows. He's going to need to find a way to get it back to Scar, sooner rather than later. But he is an alchemist first and foremost, and he intends to plumb it for all its revelations first.
He does the rest of his note-taking from the floor, by the wavering light of the lantern overhead. It's evident that Scar's brother's explorations of the city had been much more thorough than his own, and he wishes, not for the first time, that he had more time here than just this night. Maybe once he's established himself in Xing, he'll be able to come back. There's the bones and debris of whole systems of thought here in the rubble, an obviously centuries-developed science that's parent to his own and yet, in many ways, wholly different.
He's excited to hear what Ed makes of it— if he's able to get over his lingering hostility towards anything associated with Hohenheim, at least, but Al knows his brother. He's never really been able to resist an opportunity to learn.
He tucks the notebook away and pushes himself clumsily back to his feet with the cane-turned-lantern-holder, wincing at the feeling of what are certainly going to be bruises tomorrow. He's going to have a miserable next day, he already knows, between that and the lack of sleep, but, well. He’s an alchemist.
He's never really been able to resist a chance to learn, either.
Stumbling back into the moonlit city skeleton, Ishvalan holy book tucked carefully under his arm for lack of pocket space, Al drifts through not-quite-radial streets. Everything is white, under the moon, white and shadow, even the trees pouring from bedrooms and crumbled walls. No blood. No ghosts. Xerxes is dead and gone to dust, except in the ignorant persons of Ed and Al. All that history. Al wants to pull it from the stones, transmute it into something he can hold.
All that Truth in his mind, and he doesn't even know for sure if his father's odd, heritable golden eyes were a generally Xerxian phenotype, like Ishvalan red. Had Scar's brother's notes been left behind in a panic as civil war broke out in Ishval? Are the blood sacrifices at each pentagonal interval of a Philosopher's Stone array a relic of a Xerxian practice of physical markers on the bounding circle, otherwise forgotten in Amesteian alchemy but still visible in Xingese remote transmutation knife-arrays?
Al skirts around the central palace, lingering on the edges, lantern throwing shadows from his cane as it sways. The buildings here are grand, much of the crumbling stone bearing traces of half-eroded ornamentation— mansions of the rich and powerful, certainly. The houses of slaveholders, and of alchemists. Hohenheim, Al is sure, had lived in one of these, and the realization twists desire in his stomach. He needs to see.
Careful of the structural integrity of piles of marble, limestone, granite, sandstone, tapping first with his cane, he clambers into building-husks, lantern swinging, unsure what exactly he's trying to find. Traces of his father, maybe. Traces of Xerxian science. Ghosts he already met at Central, that have already passed on.
In the end, he almost misses it. One collection of walls, slightly less crumbled than the rest—reinforced with alchemy, probably—loom protectively over a half-collapsed basement piled with rubble and sand. When he picks his way down into the cavity, the walls, on closer inspection, reveal some scratched symbols and circles in the stone— granite, hard enough to have resisted erosion in a way the softer limestone and sandstone wouldn't.
The hand is a rougher, less practiced version of the very familiar script Al and Ed spent their childhood deciphering. A tentative signature in a corner, that he recognizes too; two symbols; V.H., probably.
Hohenheim.
He's struck, suddenly, with the urge to cry. He swallows it back, and brings the lantern closer to bring the shallow scratches into better relief.
The markings are alchemical, familiar from what else he's seen of Xerxian practice. They're— quite basic, actually. He traces his fingers along one simple array, realizes almost at once it's for transmuting liquid water out of vapor. It's a fundamental enough process that the circle is almost identical to the Amestrian equivalent, but it's drawn uncertainly here; clearly a practice attempt.
It feels strange— Van Hohenheim exists in his mind as almost a font of alchemic knowledge, his books holding all the answers of the universe if Ed and Al were just smart enough to puzzle them out. He'd known, but hadn't ever really, truly considered that his father had to have learned somewhere, from someone; had, once upon a time, needed to practice drawing perfect circles just like he and Ed had.
He moves a few steps further along the wall, and shifts his lantern to cast light on the next set of carvings.
He doesn't parse what he’s looking at immediately. There's what appears to be one line of text, repeating messily down the wall, growing marginally neater as it goes. He stares at it for a moment, baffled. His understanding of the Xerxian lexicon is entirely reverse-engineered, but at least to his eyes, it's just a series of letters, in no apparent order, no repeats in the sequence. Just letters, about twenty of them, in a sequence—
"Oh," he says aloud, and takes a step back, and stares at the evidence of his father learning how to read.
He and Ed had wondered about it for years; whether there was a key, somewhere in the library, a cipher with all of Hohenheim's strange little glyphs laid out as they were meant to be understood. They'd never found one.
It had been here the whole time, then. The alphabet of Xerxes. Of course Hohenheim hadn't written it down in any of his books. He'd written it here first.
Hands trembling, he goes for his notepad again. He's only half-aware of himself copying exactly what he sees with no regard for his own cipher— he'll re-encode and destroy these notes later. Later, later. The alphabet, meandering down the wall, leads him to a corner of floor that he clears to find more tentatively-scratched circles, mostly lost to time. Nothing in most of them. Just empty circles, over and over, rote. The occasional basic pentagram, angles slightly off.
Al imagines him crouched there, looking like Ed looks now, practicing on stone for want of paper. Face screwed up in concentration like Ed gets, hair escaping into his eyes, sweat drying on his forehead as his legs start cramping. Hands shaking, the vision throws his knife to the ground and shoves the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying not to cry tears of sheer frustration. Alchemy must be impossibly difficult, if one begins one's study from a point of illiteracy.
Maybe there are ghosts left in Xerxes after all.
"Dad..." says Al, throat closing on the word.
He'd said he'd been a slave, in that one great outpouring of honesty. He’d said that the Dwarf in the Flask's tutoring had led the alchemist who owned him to take him in as an apprentice, that he'd eventually inherited the property when the man died. At the time, Al had forced himself to sift through for only the most pertinent details, file the rest away to sit at the back of his mind, to fester and to haunt.
It occurs to Al that he's standing in his father's ruined childhood home, inasmuch as the man had had a childhood. It occurs to Al for maybe the first time what Hohenheim must have thought of, when he'd come back to Resembool to find his sons had burned down the house he'd bought for their mother. Desecrated in the aftermath of a terrible sin.
Al breathes through his teeth, makes sure the Ishvalan holy book is still tucked safely under his arm. Then he lowers himself, a little painstakingly, to the floor.
He sits for... a while, in the dusty bowl of the collapsed basement, looking at the scrapes and scratches that hold the sum surviving total of his father's five centuries of alchemic study. The stars rotate overhead, past the tops of the crumbled walls.
"I wish we," he starts, at one point, and then stops, and smiles at himself, a little ruefully.
Typical, Elric. Always wanting what you can't have. Always wanting more time.
"We never learn, huh, Dad?" he says. "After everything."
How old would Hohenheim have been, when he made these markings? The same age Al is now? Older? Had he been born into slavery?
There's so much he can only guess at. So many of the answers he wants are simply gone, lost to time and entropy. It feels bitter.
He doesn't know how long he sits there, watching Hohenheim's ghost scratch at the walls. Eventually, he blinks, and realizes his eyes are dry, and then all the other mundane physical discomforts— the cold, the dust, the increasingly urgent ache at the base of his spine— rush in all at once.
He doesn't really want to leave. At the same time, he doesn't know what else he's hoping to find here, in the cracked foundations of a collapsed building. Some still greater understanding, he supposes. Some Truth.
When he stands again, he has to lean heavily on his cane for a minute or two, all his joints protesting at once. He closes his eyes, waits it out. It subsides eventually, as it always does.
He eyes the makeshift slope of rubble leading back up out of the basement with some concern, considers and then discards the idea of transmuting it into a more stable shape. It doesn't feel right to alter this dusty little room. He climbs out slowly and carefully instead, step by painful step.
When he's on level ground again, he looks up, and the palace looms above him.
He's only got so much night left. He may as well pay a visit.
Oh, his body's going to have complaints in the morning. Well, it practically is morning. He must look a sight, hobbling in like some petitioner, lantern throwing eyeless shadows out onto carved stone, dusty all over in his thick night coat, holy book tucked under his arm.
The destruction is particularly awful here, as it is along all the lines of the massive circle, marble and ornament sent flying not by time or geologic force but by vast alchemic work. Very little survives of the main palace structure besides a sketch of the outer gates rising up above exposed foundation, and the high walls of the inner sanctum.
He passes under an arched gate, intact enough that some of the sun-eating-moon ceramic tiles that'd decorated its interior remain clinging to stone like faded yellow-and-blue ivy. The first surviving bit of luxury he's seen— too valueless in isolation for looters, too stubborn for erosion. The splash of color is miserable, too, in its way. These tiles have outlived Hohenheim. They, too, are probably the work of slaves.
Beyond the arch is a field of rubble that Al navigates cane-first, mapping out a complex underground water distribution system that he's seen vestiges of across the rest of the city but seems centered on the palace. If pressed, he'd guess the palace sits atop an ancient aquifer, and the lack of maintenance after the destruction of Xerxes had caused the massive engineering work that made it habitable to fall apart. It's lucky the whole thing hasn't collapsed into a sinkhole and filled right back up with sand. Al steps carefully.
How many people were murdered in this place alone? A palace requires a staff. Ministers, courtiers, servants, slaves. Families. Hohenheim had learned the names of every one of the souls he carried. Hohenheim would have known.
Somewhere among all the overturned stone there must be signs of life, personal effects of the former inhabitants. People had lived here once.
Al hasn’t found any sign of them by the time he stumbles upon the transmutation circle.
Even after all this time, the sight of the towering mural, half-collapsed and cloaked in shadow, makes his heart skip a beat. Ed had told him about it, of course, and the circle itself is something he could draw in his sleep if horror didn't freeze his hands, but there's something about seeing it for himself.
It must be the most effective instrument of mass murder ever conceived, he thinks. Blue and pink paint still lingers on the ancient bricks.
He bites his lip, charts the map of Amestris over the circle in his mind's eye. Riviere and Pendleton, to the west. Briggs, in the north, in the center of the missing section lost forever to Gluttony's stomach. Liore, to the east, right on the crumbled edge.
Ishval.
There's a faint noise, a stone skittering somewhere in the shadows off to his right, the first thing he's heard in hours to indicate there's any life or movement in the ruins besides himself, and he startles, swings around.
The orange light from his lantern flares wide, dances off the broken walls, casts deeper shadows, and he meets a pair of frightened red eyes.
The little girl makes a noise, draws back away from the light as it catches on her white hair. Al slowly holds up his hands, cane in one and book in the other. It takes him a moment to find his voice.
"It's okay," he says. "Nothing scary, see? Sorry if I woke you up."
There's a long pause, and then a small voice answers, "Couldn't sleep."
Al smiles. "Me too."
She shuffles a few steps forward, back into the light. Al guesses she's probably about nine or ten. Her eyes are fixed on his face.
"My name's Alphonse," Al says. "My friends and I are passing through here on our way to Xing."
She draws another step closer, stares up at him for a long moment. "You're from Amestris?"
There's an urge, almost overwhelming, to explain himself, or justify himself, or defend himself. He swallows it all back, and just nods. "I am."
"Amestrians killed my Da," she informs him, completely matter-of-fact.
It's not the first time he's heard that. He's never learned how to respond. He's never been faced with that specific accusation without Ed to hide behind. He says, "I’m sorry. Do you miss him?"
She shrugs. "I don't know 'im," she says. "That was before I was born, in the war. It makes my Ma really sad though."
He thinks of his father, head bowed, gone finally home to rest at his mother's grave. Granny had written Al and Ed after she found him, unwilling to tell them over the phone, or, trying to give them something concrete to remember a man who blew in and out of his sons' lives like wind or a ghost, even if it was just words on paper. And here Al is, trying to find traces of him in a city five hundred years dead. Maybe Granny'd been onto something.
Al says, "Have you lived here your whole life?"
"Uh-huh," says the girl. She flops on the ground, awake and blatantly unafraid now that he's proven himself sufficiently un-provokable. "Well, since I was a baby. I wasn't born here." Her tone implies the mere idea is stupid.
He sits down too, in the moonshadow of the transmutation circle, lowering himself haltingly, careful, then picks his lantern off his cane to set it between them. Nine or so. He and Ed had been reinventing human transmutation from first principles at that age. She must have been born during the Ishvalan War of Extermination.
"Your eyes're weird," she adds, leaning forward and squinting shamelessly. Her red eyes catch the flames, as must his gold.
He laughs softly. "A lot of people from Amestris have different-colored eyes," he explains, trying not to sound like he’s mocking her. It's still a novelty to be called weird for something as small as his eyes. It still startles him into smiling. "It's only Ishvalans like you whose eyes are red."
"I know that," she informs him. "I've seen lotsa Amestrians." She pronounces the demonym with relish, as though it's a curse word she doesn't often get to say. Vocal habit picked up from an older relative or friend, if Al had to guess. "But gold eyes are weird."
"I got them from my dad," Al tells her. "He's dead now, too. He was pretty weird when he was alive, though."
She perks up, leans forward. "Why?"
"Why'd he die?"
"Why was he weird," she clarifies, as though it's obviously the most important question at issue.
Oh, boy, where does he start? "He was really, really old," Al tells her. "And he could do— y'know alchemy?"
"Obviously," she says, rolling her eyes a little.
"Well, he could do alchemy nobody else could. Like magic."
"Oh," she says. "Did he kill people?"
The question takes him aback for a moment, and then he feels foolish for not seeing it coming. "No," he says after a moment, although he suspects Hohenheim himself would've answered differently. "No, he never wanted to hurt anybody."
She takes this information in with an extremely skeptical look. "D'you know other alchemists?"
"A couple," Al says. "I know an Ishvalan alchemist, actually." Scar would probably still hate to be described as an alchemist, but he's not here, and he doesn't know how productive it'll be to get into the nuances of alchemy versus alkahestry with a nine-year-old.
It would've fascinated him at nine years old, but he thinks he and Ed had probably been outliers in that sense.
"No you don't," she says immediately.
"Do so," says Al, who is a younger sibling at heart no matter where he is.
"Nuh-uh. No such thing as an Ishvalan alchemist," she argues. "Ishvalans can't do alchemy."
"Nuh-uh," Al says back. "Everybody can do alchemy."
"Noooooo," she says, and then squints at him. "Can you do alchemy?"
"A little bit," Al says, grinning a little.
"Show me," she demands. "I've never seen alchemy before."
"Okay," he agrees easily. "Um... What's your favorite animal?”
She appears to think on the question very seriously. "I like cats," she says eventually, nodding decisively. He guesses must be some that live out here, in the ruins, hunting little desert rodents.
"Good choice," Al says. "I like cats, too.”
She squints at him, then sits back when he's passed her honesty test, clearly trying to put up a front of being very discerning and hard to impress. Al will have to treat this little show with the seriousness a State Alchemist treats their reinspection, it seems. And that starts with not letting her know he's laughing at her even though he absolutely is.
He touches the ground in front of him with his hands, surreptitiously scraping a nail across a bit of rock to get a sense of its hardness. Local sandstone. By color and texture, mostly quartz, a significant minority percentage of feldspar, and maybe some muscovite? Potential for quartzite; will require pressure and sifting component elements. Three interlinked arrays to refine and harden; for shape, the stray cat that'd started haunting Winry's house before he left Resembool; he pictures it and Ed hissing at each other and nearly laughs, then discards that for a cozy memory of it napping in the sunlight. The fourth array settles into place in his mind's eye.
Clap.
Blue lightning shocks up from beside his fingertips, startlingly bright in almost-twilight. She yelps and falls backwards, then says indignantly, scrambling back up, "You're 'sposed to warn people before you scare them!"
Al has a feeling that's probably hypocritical coming from her, but he doesn't call her on it. It hadn't even occurred to him that of course the light of an alchemic reaction would be startling to an Ishvalan refugee, let alone a girl who'd never seen alchemy.
"I'm sorry," he murmurs, scooping the palm-size quartzite figurine up in his hands and holding it out towards her. "I'll make sure to let you know next time."
"You better," she orders, then spots her prize and snatches it out of his hands, outrage instantly forgotten. She turns it around, examining every angle and petting a finger between its ears. "Whoa! How'd you do that?”
Reshaping stone might be some of the most basic-level alchemy there is, but Al's still pretty pleased with his results. The cat is near-photorealistic, and the selective material transmutation from quartz-rich sandstone to quartzite is an elegant little touch only another alchemist would notice. He smiles. "You like it?”
She looks up and squints at him, then bounces to her feet and grabs at his hands without any warning, pulling them open to examine his palms.
Al makes a rather undignified noise of surprise. Her fingers are small and warm against his hands. "Ah?"
"You don't have a circle," she says accusingly. "Alchemists are 'sposed to have circles. And I know some of the bad ones had 'em on their hands but you don't have 'em there either."
Some of the bad ones; Al's mind flicks, in succession, through Mustang, Major Armstrong, and Kimblee.
"Um. Well," Al says. "I'm sure you can do some math in your head, right? I can do my circles in my head."
"Why?" she demands.
"I'm just really smart," he tells her very seriously.
She can obviously tell he's messing with her, because she drops his hands and gives him a deeply unimpressed look. "You're weird," she announces.
He's busy trying to think of a suitable comeback when he registers the sound of hurried footsteps, and a moment later a harried-looking woman emerges into the light, white hair bound back in a scarf.
Her eyes land on the girl at once, and he sees the tension flood out of her body in obvious relief. Then she sees him, and her expression tightens all over again.
"Ma!" the little girl says brightly, scooping up her little quartzite figurine to present it in both hands. "Look, I met an alchemist and he made me a cat!"
The woman blinks. "...That's nice," she says hesitantly, settling a protective hand in the girl's hair. "I heard you yell and I got worried. Everything's alright?"
"He scared me," the girl grouses half-heartedly. "But he said sorry so I guess it's okay."
The woman glances at Al, expression guarded. "You're an alchemist?"
Al nods, careful to keep his hands still, remain sitting unthreateningly on the ground. Which of his former colleagues had murdered her husband? "I am."
"He knows an Ishvalan alchemist," puts in the girl, before her mother can respond. Victoriously, belaboring the point: "He's weird!"
"An Ishvalan alchemist," repeats the woman, dubiously.
"He's a friend," says Al, and is surprised to find that he doesn't doubt the matter anymore. Ed wouldn't agree, but Ed hadn't studied with Scar, heads together in the northern cold, Al-and-Scar-and-Mei untangling commonalities between alchemy and alkahestry as something between an intellectual exercise and a fight for survival, Doctor Marcoh contributing occasionally from across the room. Ed also remembers Aunt Sarah and Uncle Yuriy much better than Al does. If Scar can move on from his vengeance then the Elrics can move on from theirs, Al thinks. "I was down in Ishval a couple months ago to help him out with some of the more intensive cultural site restoration projects, actually. I'm pretty alright with stone."
Al watches expressions chase each other briefly across the woman's face before she settles back at guarded. Had the Ishvalans sheltering at Xerxes heard about the attempts at reparation and repatriation underway in Ishval? He'd assumed they had, and had chosen to stay out of distrust, but who would have told them? As far as anyone in Amestris is concerned, they're all dead.
He has to be careful.
"Things are changing in Amestris," he says, leaning forward. "There’s a new government in power now"—do not mention Mustang, Al—"and they’re doing their best to… to see justice done. It's— safe to go home, if you want. Safer. My word on it."
The woman pulls the girl in towards her, features gaining definition as the sky lightens to supplement his lantern. "Were you sent here to tell us this?"
Al shakes his head, hands coming to rest on the holy book in his lap. "I was just passing through on my way to Xing, like I told your daughter. The rest of my party are outside the city. But I—"
Take your chance, Alphonse Elric. Take it.
Al looks up at her, catching red eyes with wide gold. "I wanted to see the destroyed city of my ancestors."
"Oh," she says, voice gone very soft, like all at once she's worried if she speaks too loudly he'll vanish. She leans in a little closer, examines his face.
"...Do you know, it took us years to figure out why all the statues are missing their eyes?" she says eventually. "They were made of gold, we think. Thieves pried them all out, at some point after the fall. But you can still see it on some of the frescoes that survive." She taps next to her own eye.
Al smiles a little, ducks his head. Her scrutiny isn't uncomfortable or unkind, but it always still feels strange to have someone look at his face, all his inheritance from his mother and Hohenheim both, and actually see it.
"There was a young man with the same eyes who came through here, two or three years ago now," she says. "One of my nephews tried something foolish with him, stupid boy. Fortunately no one was hurt."
"My older brother," Al says. Ed hadn't even mentioned that he'd gotten into any sort of altercation on his own visit, mostly preoccupied with his revelation about human transmutation and complaining about Hohenheim. He's not particularly surprised. "Whatever happened, I'm sure he probably deserved it."
She smiles at him, red eyes sad. "I hadn't thought there were any of you left."
"I think there must be others, somewhere," Al says. Part theory, part hope, no real evidence to back it up; surely, somewhere. Surely it can't only be them. "Probably very distant, now. I've only ever known about my brother and our father."
"I hope you'll forgive us for trespassing, then," she says, bowing her head slightly in apology. "You understand— We didn't have anywhere else to go."
"I— Of course it's fine," Al says, stunned for a moment. "It's— I mean, it's more yours than mine, at this point, isn't it? You made your home here. I ought to ask your leave, if anything."
She shakes her head. "You're very kind, but this is not our home," she says. Hesitates. "You've really been there? To Ishval?"
She says the name with a hush, almost like it hurts.
"I have," says Al. There's desperate hunger in her eyes, the kind Al recognizes from writing endless lists of what he'll eat when he has his body back, what he'll smell and taste and touch. Her daughter has her hands in her mother's skirts, eyes wide, observing, drinking in everything Al says to hold it over him later, he's sure. "I can tell you about it?"
Her nails dig into her palms.
Al looks down as he tries to figure out how to describe the Ishval he'd witnessed. Bombed-out city streets with weeds peering through the cracks, cousin almost to what he's seen in Xerxes; to-this-day-lifeless patches of char that his mind had recognized as Mustang's work before his heart had told him stop, Amestrian farmhouses clustered around the occasional regions of arable land, holding right of conquest over any returning Ishvalan claims. Disconcertingly-sunburned Briggs troops traipsing around on peacekeeping duty and complaining about the heat out of Miles's hearing. Ghosts, clamoring in memory, red eyes and burnt flesh and wailing souls.
"Because the Ishvalan population is so diminished," he starts, sticking to facts for now, "most of the returning survivors have congregated in one of the border cities, which maintained a small Amestrian population and so was left comparatively intact. My Ishvalan friend is leading them for now, with support from Colonel Miles, an Ishvalan officer from up in Briggs. I’m told it's been difficult getting a permanent governmental body together, but they're hoping for a proper democracy as a semi-autonomous province of Amestris— that'll only be truly possible once Amestris itself manages democracy, of course, but spite is excellent incentive. I—" he says. "Life is hard, but people seemed happy, when I passed through. People seemed alive."
The woman doesn't say anything, but when Al looks back up from his contemplation of the ground there's tears tracking down her cheeks and her daughter bubbling with confused filial outrage.
"I was there—" Ah, how's he going to do this? He transfers the holy book under his arm again and reaches for his cane to haul himself up, ignoring his various bones' various objections with the two-years-familiar glee of having bones that can object. "Gah. I was mostly there to help my friend restore the city's main temple of Ishvala. He was a monk, before the war. It was progressing really well when I left."
"You said you were Amestrian," the girl blurts accusingly. "You lied!"
The woman shushes her, petting down her hair and scolding her for her rudeness in whispered tones, but the girl ignores her to glare up at him, all righteous indignation.
"I said I was from Amestris," Al corrects, grinning. "Didn't say I was Amestrian. And it's only my dad who's Xerxian, anyways."
She scowls up at him, and he can practically see the gears turning in her head, trying to find another contradiction to pick at. "You should've said," she complains.
"Show respect," the woman chides her daughter. "We're in the city of his fathers."
She means it metaphorically, he knows. The phrase still jolts a little, close as it is to literal truth. His father's city.
"It's alright," he says. "Like I said. I'm a stranger here as much as you."
She glances away, to the west, where the sky is still almost black, just beginning to fade to grey. He can guess at once where she must be looking.
How much time must she and the other survivors here have spent looking at the horizon, towards home? Ishval isn't so far from Xerxes, as the crow flies. Less than a week's travel, even with much of it through the unforgiving desert. What must that be like, to be so close to home and yet so far?
It's only a little further, between the outskirts of Ishval and Resembool. It occurs to him to wonder how much time Hohenheim spent looking east, at the precise point past the horizon where Al is standing now.
"She has never been home, either," the woman says eventually, hands resting on her daughter's shoulders. "She was born in the midst of—"
She breaks off, buries her face in her hand for a moment. The girl shoots him a judgmental scowl. After a moment, she wipes her eyes clear, resumes. "I was lucky to have her at all," she says. "My husband was gone, and there was no one to assist me with the birth. I was blessed by a pair of very kind doctors, Ishvala's mercy. As soon as I could walk again, we fled."
"The Rockbells," Al murmurs, leaning heavily on his cane. "Of course. Brother did mention he heard about them, here."
Does he want to tell them what he knows? He probably should deal with the topic somehow, if he's encouraging them to go find Scar. Carefully. Delicately. It would be unfair to both parties to retread old grudges uninformed, but it's a good thing he's better at thinking before he speaks than a certain older brother of his.
And then there's Scar's brother's notes to consider. The holy book is heavy under his arm, haunted and out-of-place as the Ishvalans. As Al.
The woman tilts her head, Philosopher's-Stone-red eyes glinting in the pre-dawn light. Her daughter continues frowning at Al. "Yes," she says. "Your brother never did say how he met them. Surely you're both too young to..."
"To have known them in a professional capacity?" Al finishes, a little wry. "Brother and I more likely than most, actually. But no, Aunt Sarah and Uncle Yuriy were family friends. We grew up with their daughter Winry; she's Ed's age, and between the three of us there were more child prodigies around than sleepy little Resembool knew what to do with." He grins, feeling his eyes crinkle. It's good to talk about Winry, about the couple he mostly remembers as tall, kind adult presences, about ghosts already put to rest in damp, fertile soil. "She's an automail engineer now, one of the best— she made my brother’s prosthetic leg and everything. She'll be so excited when I tell her I met a baby her parents delivered!"
The girl points at herself in question. Al nods. The girl says, "I'm not a baby."
"You were once," Al tells her, catching a fleeting smile from the corner of the woman's mouth before it disappears. "Just like everyone."
She frowns at him. Then her eyes widen. "Your dad's the one who's from Xerxes."
"Yes," says Al.
"Your dad who's weird and dead."
"Respect!" hisses her mother.
"That one, yes," says Al.
"Well, that's weird!" says the girl triumphantly. "Being from here's weird! And you didn't say it, when you were saying how he was weird!"
Al narrows his eyes, staring at her contemplatively. Perceptive, driven, always looking for an angle into the problem at hand, the flush of intellectual victory darkening her cheeks. "You'd make a good alchemist," he decides.
She looks at him positively aghast, but she's still clutching the little statue of the cat protectively in one hand, running a thumb over the fine-carved fur between its ears. "Don't make fun! That's not nice!"
"I'm serious!" Al protests. Actually—
He looks back at the woman, shifts his grip on his cane to offer her the holy book. Her eyes go wide when she looks at it; after a moment, she takes it in both hands, fingers trembling slightly. She holds it delicately, like she's afraid it’ll fall apart in her hands.
"Where did you get this?" she asks, tracing one hand over the cover.
"I found it in the ruins," Al says, nodding back in the direction of the library. "A great Ishvalan alchemist I never had the honor to meet left it here. I'd say it belongs with his brother now; my friend in Ishval. If you go home," he says, and sees the way her breath catches at the word, "I'd appreciate it if you'd bring that to him."
"If we go home," she repeats under her breath, eyes misting again. She takes a deep breath after a moment, nods. "If... if we do, how should we know this friend of yours?"
"He doesn't have a name," Al says. The woman nods; it occurs to him for the first time that Scar might be far from the only Ishvalan to have cast off his identity in the wake of his people's near-obliteration. "But he has a scar on his forehead, and alchemical tattoos on both arms."
Recognition, then, flashing in her eyes, followed swiftly by alarm. "The scarred man. I know of him. But—"
She cuts herself off, glances down at the girl.
"But he killed the Rockbells," Al finishes for her, quietly. "He did."
There's so much of this that isn't for him to tell. Winry's tears. Ed throwing himself between Scar and the gun.
"I don't believe in revenge," he says eventually, thinking of Mustang as much as Scar. "If someone is really trying to do better, and make the world better, I don't think it's right to stop them, no matter what happened in the past. He's someone you can trust, I promise."
She looks at him for a long time, assessingly. Then she nods. "Very well," she tells him, "I’ll trust your word."
He catches her watery eyes, notes the trembling of her fingers as she grips the holy book, nods back. "Thank you."
"Ma," says the girl. Her hands come up to grab at her mother's shirt in alarm; the sun, finally slipping past the horizon, sets her mussed-up hair alight. "Ma, d'you mean-"
The woman's hand comes down to rest atop her daughter's head again, distracted. Her eyes are nine years and a week's travel away. "Yes. We'll go back to Ishval. Home."
The girl's face screws up. "Just 'cause an alchemist said? But I was gonna go exploring tomorrow, you said I could. And me an' the cousins aren't done our secret hideout! And what about everyone else? We can't leave, Ma! And he's an alchemist! From Amestris!"
Is she going to cry? Winry'll never forgive him if he makes this kid cry. He’ll never forgive himself. His hands stitch together in front of him, habit left over from being a suit of armor. It's a good thing he doesn't risk crouching down again with his body in the state it is, because he thinks she'd punch him if he did.
"Sweetheart..." says her mother.
Al says, "I wasn't lying when I said you'd be a good alchemist," and gets a squinty, suspicious look for his trouble. He fishes in his pockets with the wrong hand until he manages to snag the notebook and hold it out to her. "This belonged to the brother of the Ishvalan alchemist I told you about. It's in code, like all alchemical writing, but you can look through it if you want."
She snatches it out of his hand and pulls it to her chest, grip crowded between it and the cat figurine, still glaring accusatorily. "You want me to bring it to the guy you were telling Ma about," she deduces. "The Ishvalan alchemist. Why aren't you just giving it to Ma, then?"
Well, at least she's not crying. "Because I wasn't lying," says Al. He manages to get his notepad out and balances it on his cane, flicking to a fresh page and scribbling as he talks. "If you do want to learn alchemy, like I think you’d be really good at," he says, and suppresses a satisfied smile as her narrow-eyed look transmutes from outrage to honest, unmistakable curiosity, "give it to him with this letter from me, and tell him you want him to teach you. You might have to convince him, but I think you can do that, yes?"
"I'm very stubborn," she declares, in the tone of a child who has been told something by an authority figure maybe one too many times. "Gimme that paper."
It'll be good for you, writes Al, hoping Scar doesn't think he's overstepping anything. Trust me.
The Ishvalan-inflected brand of alchemy and alkahestry Scar inherited from his brother is, so far as Al knows, unique in all the world, and if he was ever going to teach it to anyone it could only be another Ishvalan. There's more than one way to build a future.
When he holds the note out to her, she grabs it out of his hand like she thinks he's going to take it away again. "I'll do it," she announces. "But not 'cause you told me to, okay?"
"Of course," Al says, smiling. It's impossible to not see Ed at nine or so, argumentative and pushy and utterly determined. She'll do fine.
Anyways, Scar will probably still be a more gentle teacher than Teacher, he bets.
The rising sun is washing everything in sharp, long shadows as the world brightens. He should get back to the camp before the rest of the party wakes up and wonders where he's gone.
"I have to go," he says. "It was nice to meet you both. Hopefully I'll see you again, next time I visit Ishval." He pauses. "Once you cross into eastern Amestris, you might pay a visit to Rockbell Automail in Resembool, on your way. Winry would love to meet you."
The woman nods slowly. "Yes. I think we'll do that." The new sunlight is bright in her eyes. "Safe travels, son of Xerxes. You have our gratitude."
"Safe travels, daughter of Ishval," he says back. She smiles faintly, and the expression softens all the grief on her face. And then, to the girl: "Be good to your mom, okay?"
"Obviously," the girl says, sounding offended, grabbing for her mother's free hand. "And— and I'll become a way better alchemist than you, too!"
Al grins at her. "I can't wait," he says, entirely honestly.
He leaves them like that, in the center of the broken transmutation circle.
Out of the broken, uneven palace complex, back through the arched gate with its surviving blue-and-yellow tiles, down the cracked steps, Al traces his way back into the district of the rich and dead. In sunlight, some of the silvered, ghostly-pale cast fades from the city, leaving dust and sand piled up against warming beige, orange, golden-brown. The causes of collapse are more evident, the shadows cast more stark— this mansion fallen into its foundation after the central pillars failed; that one a slightly more recent victim of the deteriorating water system. At intersections and from doorways, eyeless statues stare at him like witnesses to Truth.
Passing the place his father had lived, he stops. The half-ruined basement is dark, sheltered at the wrong angle from the sun. If Al concentrates, focuses, imagines, Hohenheim's ghost scratches at the walls below; Al's hands tighten on his cane, throat closing. If only he hadn't left his lantern burning out on the palace grounds like an offering to a million dead-and-departed souls. If only he.
Typical, Elric. You've already seen what's down there. It won't be any different in the day.
"Hey, Dad," he says, and swallows. Any of his million questions will go unanswered. Anything he says will go unheard, in this city with no ghosts left in it but the imaginary hauntings of the bereaved, and even the Ishvalans lingering at its heart soon to go. He says, "I'm glad you lived long enough to meet Mom."
Dust swirls at his feet. Thinking of the party's limited water, he swallows back tears.
"Get on with it, alchemist," he tells himself, and leaves the alchemists' district behind.
As he retraces his steps outwards, the city warms around him. He strips off his coat and ties it round his waist, marveling familiarly at the long-forgotten feeling of heat on his skin. Unlike most Amestrians, he doesn't usually burn, and unlike Ed, he doesn't have automail to make up the difference in discomfort. Until the sun gets properly up there and starts turning sand into something more like hot coals, he's comfortable.
He isn't a ghost, either. He has a body. He, too, is leaving Xerxes.
In the outer streets, the irregular patches of gnarled, shiny-leaved trees are deep green and dusty brown, casting morning-long patches of dappled shade from windows and across broken avenues. He passes more public buildings in various states of disrepair, spares a wistful glance for the library, picks around long-emptied homes and storefronts, traces the path of streets, of alchemic destruction, of sewers and back alleys.
Still no bones. People could have lived here, in the sunlight, slaves and alchemists and mothers raising children alone. In the sunlight, in the flickering movement of leaves in the breeze and animals skittering from his shadow, he can see where they would have fit.
It would have been nice to give them a funeral.
Too soon, the streets give way to gates and cracked walls, and Al locates his narrow entry-point, the outward shadows it casts; slips through. In front of him, the shallow irrigation-ditch remnant of the circle that swallowed a million souls; behind him, rising out of that sea of roiling, hungry sands, a empty, sun-drenched monument to a million golden people survived by Edward and Alphonse Elric alone.
"I'm heading out for awhile," he tells the ghosts that aren't there, and steps over the border.