Vermilion Rain: An FE3H Story

Chapter 5: Fodlan in a Nutshell

How to describe Fodlan to you? Well, the simple fact is that on the way to Garreg Mach, I saw a small proportion of it, a narrow strip of the Leicester Alliance on either side of its main road to Garreg Mach and the spiritual heart of the country. Was that enough to get a glimpse of the country as a whole? No. It wasn't.

The entire time we were on the road, we passed through a single country, and only two counties therein. All told, it was hardly enough to get a glimpse at the countryside, which was lovely, if a little dense for the trees. Greenery truly was in season, and the wind rustled through lightly wooded groves along the road and all around. Here and there, small subsistence farms cut their way out of the trees, clearing some little land for themselves. Waving fields of grain were interrupted by lentil and pea seas, tangled and knotted together. The architecture along the main road was simple, a step up from Leonie's impoverished village roots, but far removed from grandeur. Here, people went about their lives as their forefathers had, tilling the land and collecting the meager harvests of grain and legumes to pair with their just as meager eggs and dairy. For Leonie, it was a step up from what she had grown up with; Sauin, she told me, had only had a single dairy cow, and it was aging.

All that changed when we reached Garreg Mach.

***

The architecture seemed nearly impossible from a distance. It was an impressive sight; a massive stone structure, reinforced by flying buttresses and pillars as thick as trees, it towered over the clear, grass covered field below, nestled among among the crags and outcrops of the mountain above us. Perhaps it had sprung out of the mountain itself, so tightly did the surrounding peaks enclose upon it, and so carefully did its own spires and pinnacles imitate the land around it.

From our vantage, I could see that it was formed from two distinct structures. The first, a fortified wall, was connected to the second by way of a bridge with pillars that reached all the way down to the ground below. Spartan and stark, it stared down forebodingly at everything below it, from the flat plain leading to it, to the circle of walls that enclosed its land, to Leonie and me, arriving now with a caravan of other travelers getting their first look at the center of the Church of Seiros. From our vantage, I could just see the peaks of high towers staring down at the land below, challenging all who approached its great parapets. A road lead up to this first structure, a winding road that passed through the valley surrounding, the town nestled at its feet, and the vast stone walls (with no gates, I noted with a frown; that was an odd oversight for a structure meant to be defended).

But it was the second building that really mattered. Across the immense stone bridge was another structure, one that seemed to have grown from the stone of the hill upon which it stood. The bridge that let the fortunate few allowed so high emptied in front of twin bell towers, each peaked with five conical tips. Beyond that, a nave with a vast, arching ceiling lined with stained glass. This, anyone could see, was the real heart of the territory; the cathedral of Garreg Mach Monastery, the seat of the Archbishop herself.

For centuries, indeed five years shy of a millennium as I was later to learn, it had stood, unaltered by any but the most careful restoration, staring down upon the valley. A city on a hill. A mountain of architecture upon a mountain of stone. The place where all roads began, and where all roads terminated. Indeed, so well situated was the cathedral that it could observe the rising and setting of the sun unimpeded from the moment that it rose over the flat lands in the Alliance to the moment it set behind the Western ocean. A place of grandeur, authority, power. 

And here, in this place atop the highest mountain at the center of the world, the world came to it. From all corners of the continent, people came, some on pilgrimage, some on business. If you wanted to put a finger to the pulse of Fodlan, there was no better place to come than here. Traders, worshipers, bandits, the wealthy and the desperate, the good and the evil... no matter who you were, you felt the beating heart of Garreg Mach throughout your life... and inevitably, you ended up, at some point, here, on a road such as this, marveling at the way in which the Church of Seiros stands apart from all others, at the way it stares down upon the capitals of kingdoms and empires around it. After all, what did Enbarr, Deridru, and Fhirdiad have to offer? Land? Armies? Wealth? All were irrelevant to Garreg Mach. Because she offered the most important thing of all: Salvation. The body might serve the Empire or the Alliance or the Kingdom, but the heart... that belonged to Garreg Mach.