I wrote an afterword for this when it was initially published, but it's been nearly five years, so I thought I might revisit it.

Some context that might be helpful: This was an intermission piece between my first longish piece (longer than a couple thousand words) and its sequel (which was never made). Those pieces (and the other intermissions) used Azama as the viewpoint character, which is why he shows up here, and there being ideas brought up that never get expanded upon was because there was going to be a sequel that would explore them but... I haven't been interested in this setting for a very long time, so it's probably never happening.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think the weakest part of this is easily Azama's characterization. The Azama that existed in my head had always been different from the Azama that exists in either canon, and it was a major weakness of all the pieces in this series (this might be the reason why you can't find the rest anymore 😉). I had made some minor changes to this to make it flow better as a standalone piece, but if I went back to make major changes, it would probably be using him. Who would I replace him with? No idea.

In a similar vein, I had started this because Greil said something along the lines of "My death turned you [Ike] into a man" during the paralogue he shows up in and I thought it was out of character. My understanding of him evolved quite a bit in the process (did you notice the 8 month-long gap between chapter 1 and chapter 2? This was why), and in a way this piece ended up going from ...what was probably going to be a pretentious, head-up-my-own-ass "you don't understand your own characters, let me fix that for you"-type fic (FEH does mess up A Lot but it's a completely separate matter to claim that I knew better and could do better) to one where I made my peace with Greil as a character.

I don't hate him, but Conjunction helped me realize that he wasn’t a character that I loved anymore. He sits as the center of Path of Radiance’s backstory, and I like him in that role. I like how he has connections to a lot of major characters, and I like how that absence is felt throughout the story. I like the Greil-shaped hole that is just constantly there, that you can never escape. Path of Radiance, and to an extent Tellius as a whole, has always been a story about grief to me, and this piece was how I reconciled my love of its story and my love of Greil’s role in the story with the experience of losing a parent.

But you’re not here to hear about that, are you?

One of those connections is Greil’s relationship with Caineghis. I always found it striking how fully Greil believed, as he was bleeding out, that Caineghis would take care of his family in his absence. How close did they have to be for, over a decade later, Greil to have unshaking faith in Caineghis’ willingness to take in the people Greil cared about?

But that’s exactly the thing: it is a relationship that existed in the past, and it is a relationship build upon neither of them knowing the full extent of Greil’s mistakes. But before we can talk about their relationship, we need to talk about the other half.

Caineghis is a character that I like a lot; at one point he was even my favorite. He’s fun to think about and he’s fun to write, but he ends up pretty straightforward in the games because…

First of all, the games want to focus on other characters (which is fine; there’s a specific story they’re trying to tell and he exists on the periphery). We do see him frequently enough for a Gotoh, but the scope of those scenes is relatively narrow; he’s usually offering some assistance to you, so the range of emotion he’s able to shows also stays relatively narrow.

The other reason is because he is holding back.

His Tellius Recollection I profile mentions that his talent is “behaving rationally” and it’s mentioned a few times in the games that he was as hotheaded as Skrimir (and often even worse!) when he was younger. The word ‘talent’ implies some innate ability, but I took that to mean that his levelheaded and collected demeanor in the games was something that he deliberately cultivated. It was a skill he had honed and it was a front that he maintained because it served him better as the king of Gallia. If he’s more selective in the situations where he’s forceful and throws his weight around, he’s able to maintain friendly relationships with others while still getting what he wants when he really needs it.

But even when he is forceful, he’s never really angry, and that was an emotion I wanted to explore. Caineghis is a character who is defined by his compassion; he helps Ike because he loved Greil, he helped Elincia because he loved Ramon, and he wages war against Begnion in Radiant Dawn because he loves his fellow laguz. But what happens when he’s unable to act as he wishes? What happens when one of the many things he loves hurts another?

To Greil’s credit, he was always well meaning. He always tried to do the right thing, and he just kept making choices that were, with the benefit of hindsight, far from ideal, and he happened to be in a position where some of those mistakes had far-reaching consequences. And that puts Caineghis into a difficult position.

Maybe nothing would have changed if he had done things differently (and while he remained in Tellius, Caineghis had no reason to ask himself if things could have been different) but when reunited with Greil under circumstances that were already less-than-ideal? When he had to confront the fact that despite everything that had happened, despite now knowing everything that he had caused, Greil hadn’t changed? That Greil was still the same man who made careless mistakes that cost himself and others their lives? And then you factor in all the stuff with the Medallion? Greil is someone who has hurt almost everything Caineghis has held dear at one point or another (including himself), and it’s no surprise Caineghis reached the limit of his self-restraint.

I think Caineghis was… pushed to an extreme here. An extreme facilitated by being dragged to Askr and being forced to stay there, and an extreme facilitated by being reunited with Greil. I don’t think that Caienghis/Greil is something that couldn’t work out (or something that didn’t work out while they were together in Gallia), but… there are reasons why it was smooth sailing in Gallia and reasons why it wouldn’t be in Heroes.

That is what this piece is about.

 

The title of this piece has two meanings. One of these was a reference to a game I do not want to think about anymore, so I will be skiping it. 

The other and primary meaning is in reference to conjunction in the astronomical sense. When looking up at the sky, we’re too far away from the various celestial bodies to meaningfully discern depth; if the night sky were a hollow sphere with moving dots painted on to simulate stars and planets and everything else, would we be able to tell the difference without tools?

No.

Our eyes lack the parallax to see depth on the horizon, much less depth beyond the clouds. We can see (or at least perceive and measure) depth using two vantage points that are sufficiently far off (such as two telescopes placed miles apart, or after the earth has moved in its orbit), but as we are we simply lack the frame of reference to see how far away these things truly are.

That’s the underlying mechanic behind conjunction. Because planets and comets and whatnot may as well be painted onto a dome, there comes a time where, as everything performs their dances in the cosmos, two or more objects will grow closer in the sky before they eventually drift apart. Sometimes they overlap and one passes in front of the other (in a phenomenon called transit), but that moment where they are as close as they can be before they begin to drift apart again is what’s called a conjunction.

If you went outside into the cold winter air on December 21st, 2020, a few months after I had first published this, and looked up at the sky, Jupiter and Saturn would be located in the constellation of Capriconus. As they strolled around across the sky, this particular type of conjunction (named a great conjunction after the importance of Jupiter and Saturn in divination) occurs every twenty years, and they were close as they had been since 1623, at six arcminutes, or a tenth of a degree.

But therein lies the deception inherent to conjunctions: we don’t measure distance in fractions of degrees; we measure it in meters and astronomical units and light years. Jupiter and Saturn aren’t moving dots on a dome; they’re massive balls of gas hurtling through space far enough from us that to the naked eye they don’t appear to be moving at all. They simply appear to be close; their apparent distance on that night may have been be a fraction of a degree, but the planets themselves were nearly five times further apart than the Earth is from the Sun.

A conjunction is an apparent closeness created by the limitations of our own perspective, a misunderstanding build upon the scale of the bigger picture. It is a lie we tell ourselves because we can only understand, because we can only believe in what we see before us.

 

 

 

 

Looking back, I grew a lot while working on this, and looking back, it means a lot more to me than I thought.

Everything ends someday, and Greilghis is beautiful because it ends.

Thank you for taking the time to read Conjunction. Thank you for taking the time to read this.