Rain blatted heavily against the windows, as steady now as it had been since the start of the day. Sumia gazed absent-mindedly out at it while she waited for her husband's meeting to end, wondering if Frederick had found the good sense to ground the Pegasus riders' exercises for the day. The thought was rather doubtful, which gave her mixed feelings. On one hand, she was sorry to miss any of her training sessions on principle; on the other, she hadn't exactly been looking forward to spending the afternoon being battered across the sky by wind with the rest of the riders while Frederick sat on the ground shouting at them until his armor rusted into one solid piece.

Though, at least it would have been exciting. The waiting area outside Chrom's office was probably the least interesting room in the entire palace, furnished only with a layer of carpeting, a few chairs and end tables, and a pair of palace guards who didn't seem to blink as often as they should have. The only other person in the room besides them was Tharja, sitting across from her radiating a palpable lack of interest in conversation. She, at least, had brought something to occupy herself, her pen hand jittering back and forth across an open notebook as she read out of a thick, dog-eared book with ominous imagery on the cover.

Sumia glanced around the room for the umpteenth time, hoping to suddenly spot something that would hold her interest until the meeting let out. The few flowers that had decorated the room made a pleasant sight piled neatly on the table in front of her, their petals having offered illuminating if sometimes contradictory interpretations of her fortune, and more importantly a decent outlet for fidgeting. Perhaps she could have burned through them at a more reasonable rate.

Eventually, slowly, her attention returned to Tharja. Perhaps she was just reading the wrong signals. She might be just as lonely as her. Either way there was nothing wrong with just trying some polite conversation.

Sumia cleared her throat politely. Tharja's pen stopped scratching, and without looking up her body language managed to communicate the many mortal sins involved in trying some polite conversation.

"Boring, isn't it?" Sumia said genially.

Tharja grunted, head still down. After a sufficiently awkward pause, her pen resumed skittering across the page. Sumia valiantly kept on tack.

"I mean, these meetings always seem to stretch on for ages, don't they?" she said, with the slightly desperate air of somebody on a desert island trying to build a boat out of coconuts. "But if you're waiting for somebody you can't even come back later because they don't keep to a schedule."

"And they try to throw you out if you listen at the keyhole," Tharja said, tilting her head up slightly, with a note of actual empathy in her voice. One of the palace guards twitched slightly in response to some resurfaced memory.

"I know, right?" Sumia said, smiling. Observational humor broke down barriers all over the world. This was working great!

They stared at each other for half of a minute.

"So, you're waiting for Robin, then?" Sumia said.

"Yes."

Another half-minute.

"He's in there a long time too."

"What do you want, Sumia?" Tharja said.

"Nothing! I'm just here to, um…" She hurriedly grabbed a bag by her side and fished out a piece of paper. "I need to show this to Chrom. There's a wall that got knocked down and we got it rebuilt and I was passing by and one of the builders said that monarchy-or-no-monarchy he needed the final sign-off on the contract." She felt slightly out of breath.

Tharja raised her head with a baffled look on her face. She put her pen down. "Sumia, you're the queen. Why are you delivering receipts?"

"Well, he said it was important," Sumia said, embarrassed. The pointlessness of the task had actually occurred to her, but at that point she had felt like she would rather deal with the wait than the awkward questions from a servant about why she had been sitting in the waiting room for ten minutes. Sumia had lost all fantasy of being a regal and enchanting royal figure, but she was still fighting for an aura of basic competency.

Tharja visibly restrained herself from further comment. "Well, that's very nice," she said, looking back down. "I expect you won't really have trouble footing the bill."

"Well, yeah. We kind of need walls," Sumia said, smiling awkwardly. "I told Chrom we should also have them restore that statue he likes, but he says the treasury's already too low."

"What statue?" Tharja said.

"Oh, the one over in the courtyard over by…" She paused. The tremendous age and subsequent labyrinthine nature of the palace confounded any attempt to give directions more precise than 'The corridor that's in the northeast but no, not the absolute northeast and also slightly south and not in the wing you're thinking of, probably. There's a chair near it.'

"It's that way," Sumia said, jerking a thumb over one shoulder. "There's a big statue in the middle, but it's gotten all cracked. Made of marble, probably used to be trimmed with gold. It's of a man standing with his sword held out in front of him like he's ready to conquer the world."

"Who is it?" Tharja asked absentmindedly, back to scribbling in her notebook.

"We don't really know, the head came off. Chrom just thinks it's a shame that it's gotten into such a poor state," Sumia said.

"Shame," Tharja said, her side of the conversation now sustained only by inertia.

"Oh, you don't have to be sorry," Sumia said. "I mean, it's not like there's some hex that could restore the statue, is there?"

"Yes."

"I know, right, but-" Sumia froze. She double-checked the grammar in her previous sentence to make sure she was interpreting Tharja's response properly.

"Did you say yes?" Sumia said.

"Yes. Wait, what?" Tharja looked up again and blinked in confusion. For a moment she stared blankly at Sumia, mentally replaying the conversation that had been occurring in her absence. Once back up to speed, she nodded.

"Yeah, I know some stuff that could do it," she said, shrugging. "But they wouldn't appreciate it. People around here are stuffy when it comes to dark magic."

"Well yeah, I know, but…" she let herself trail off, because the words 'it's such a nice statue' sounded a bit pathetic even to her. But it was such a nice statue. Who cared how they did it, if they were restoring such a great work of art? And just imagining the look on Chrom's face when he saw part of his home restored to its former glory seemed enough to justify whatever it took, no matter how bizarre the magic.

She glanced back up at the two palace guards. A fly landed on one of their noses, provoking a startled expression and a self-inflicted slap exactly ten seconds later. When choosing guards to stand guard over waiting rooms at the center of buildings with completely secure entrances, qualities such as calf endurance were typically prioritized over an ability to put two and two together. Nevertheless, she leaned forward furtively, not wanting them to overhear anything that might cause suspicion.

"I think Chrom would be alright with it," Sumia said in low tones to Tharja, who had leaned forward to hear her without being prompted. "Just as long as it's, you know, clean. No goats or anything."

"If you want to do it the hard way," Tharja said, shrugging. She eyed the table in front of Sumia with a frown. "I owe you a favor for turning Robin off of that ridiculous Pegasus idea of his."

Sumia didn't really see how she had helped there, but she preferred to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth no matter how suspiciously its chewing sounded like wood. "Great!" she said, trying to make a whisper sound chipper. "How long will it take?"

"I don't know, a few days," Tharja said, swiping some of the flower petals off the table and putting them into her bag. "There's stuff to look up. Plus prep work. Never a good idea to rush a spell like this, or else you wind up with weird failures, like my great-aunt Arna."

Before Sumia could ask what had happened to great-aunt Arna, and more importantly what exactly constituted a failure with dark magic assuming that most of Tharja's work was successes, the door to the meeting room swung open and the outgoing flow of tired generals and nobles stifled the conversation.

It had been quite a long meeting. Several people were rubbing their eyes or yawning, and the common sentiment based on a few snatches of hushed conversation seemed to be that the meeting could have been quite a bit shorter. And at the center of it all, carrying a pile of books and charts under one arm and a cheery smile on his face, Robin strode purposefully and confidently, poised as if daring somebody to ask his opinion on mixed infantry composition. He walked past Tharja, tapped her smartly on the head with his free hand as he passed, and with a swish of her cloak she was matching his stride back down the hall.

A few of the guests stayed to exchange brief words of farewell with Chrom, all very polite and courteous. Nobody lingered with him for too long, though. There seemed to be a universal fear that if they stuck around too long Robin would come back and start talking again. Once Chrom was alone, he took one glance around the room, and flopped heavily into the chair next to Sumia with a sigh so deep he seemed to lose ten inches in height.

He leaned his head on her shoulder, and she patted his hand absentmindedly. Well. How to bring this up? It shouldn't be too difficult to explain the reasoning. All she had done was give a slightly unbalanced dark mage free reign to do as she may with an ancient and irreplaceable work of art.

Perhaps it would be better to lead off with the receipt.

It had pigtails.

"Tharja," Chrom said, craning his neck up at the statue. "Are you really sure you got this right?"

"Yes," Tharja said defensively. "That's the original head dragged out of a storeroom, I just restored it. Went back and dug up all of the records I could find on the original sculpting. Found one or two sketches. Spoke to one of the artists. Everything is as accurate as I can make it."

"Well, the thing is older than all of us put together," said Robin, mirroring Chrom's expression of quiet bafflement. "Fashion trends change. At one point Lissa's hairstyle might have been synonymous with masculinity. Or maybe one of your ancestors was just a little weird."

Sumia didn't say anything. Too many mental faculties were occupied in trying to contain her laughter.

"At least that explains why the head was gone," Chrom said. He walked up to the plinth and ran his hand across the smooth marble. "Though the rest of it is really good. I can't thank you enough, Tharja. I don't know how you did it, and frankly I probably don't want to, but I can't say I'm displeased with the result."

It was, in fact, quite a good job. In general design, the statue wasn't really remarkable. It was a simple design of some man who was presumably some military figure or one of the late monarchs in a pose of dignified authority, one of those things that just turn up in royal courtyards like extra socks in loads of laundry. But the general impression was improved greatly by the quality of the sculpting. Everywhere on it there were small, subtle details. The angle of the cheekbones, the cock of the wrist, even down to the wrinkles in the knuckles- everywhere you looked you found some new minor detail the improved the general impression. Pity about the hair.

Sumia blinked, and tried to take it in as a whole. Once the initial shock of laughter had worn of, there was really only bafflement. Tharja wasn't exactly uncreative, but it was rather hard to imagine her standing up on a ladder holding a hammer and chisel.

Chrom and Robin were on their way out of the courtyard. Tharja was making motions to follow them, but Sumia stopped her with a hand on one shoulder. Tharja slowly turned to face her, her expression saying that while there were few things more unforgivable than trying some polite conversation, this was one of them.

"Tharja. Um. How?" Sumia said.

"What do you mean, how?" Tharja said. "I told you, I used a hex."

"Yeah, I know, but, I mean, how?"

Tharja sighed. She spun Sumia around so that she was facing the statue. "Pick out any minor detail. Anything smaller than one of the hands.

"Um, there's this stray tuft of hair on the left pig-"

"Good," Tharja said. "That isn't there."

"But-"

"I didn't actually re-sculpt the statue, I used a hex," Tharja said, in the same tones that one would use to explain that they arrived at the ground floor by way of stairs as opposed to the window. "It's an illusion. Pretty advanced one, too. Most illusions fail once you try to look at the fine details; they're only big picture stuff. So this one's got feedback involved. Projects the historical statue as a big-picture illusion, then when you try to look closer it picks up on what you're expecting to see and tricks you into actually seeing it."

"So it's reading our minds?" Sumia said, looking into that noble face oblivious to fashion with newfound suspicion.

"Sure, why not," Tharja said. "Bottom line is that you're going to keep seeing fresh statue no matter how closely you look."

Sumia walked forward and laid a hand on the statue's leg. It certainly felt-

"It feels real because that's what you're expecting it to feel like," Tharja said dully. "Long as the general shape of the statue is right all that you have to reinterpret is texture, and trust me when I say that by sense of touch most people are blind anyway. I submit as evidence the way you reacted when Vaike stuck your hand in that pot of noodles and told you it was brains."

Sumia didn't answer. She was back staring up at the statue. She had to concede that there was nothing really wrong with the restoration job, unconventional though it was. Nobody would ever really know the difference, anyway. Well, nobody except somebody extremely obsessive about statues, and people like that tended to have trouble attracting an audience anyway.

"Can I go, then?" said Tharja, already walking out of the courtyard after Robin.

Sumia remained silent, still staring. It really did have a striking face. It seemed more confident the more she looked at it.

Sumia wandered back to the courtyard more than once over the next few days. The tiny little courtyard had seen more traffic recently than it probably had in the last decade, exclusively from the waves of visitors who couldn't believe from word of mouth alone that one of Tharja's spells had resulted in something aside from abject terror. Miriel's academic interest in the subject had kept her installed in the corner for about four days now, surrounded by books of antique sculpture-making and the library's meager offerings on dark magic. Simply asking Tharja how it had been done appeared to be unthinkable. Sumia took care to drop by and visit every now and then

"Assuming the available texts are accurate, I can at least ascertain the intended subject of the piece," Miriel said, voice even and measured despite the fact that she did not seem to have slept recently. "It seems to be a self-commissioned representation of Mercio the Unhinged, favored tactician of Chrom's great-to-the-sixteenth-grandfather."

"The Unhinged?" Sumia said.

"Most likely an exaggeration. Though I understand the pigtails are actually characteristic. He was of Plegian descent, and his political adversaries found it advantageous to assign him an unflattering moniker," Miriel said. She had picked up a book and was now flipping through it, despite the fact that her gaze still lingered steadily on Sumia. Come to think of it, her eyes didn't seem to be focusing properly. "He was not the first nor the last. Throughout this palace's history you will find records of those with similar titles. 'The Mad' is the most popular, though also present are 'The Terrible', 'The Deranged', 'The Loony', 'The Savage', 'The Imbecile', and 'The Slaphappy'."

"So how is your research going, then?" Sumia said, slowly and clearly.

"Quite well," Miriel said, now looking roughly ten inches to the left of Sumia's head. "I think I should be able to provide a suitable and scientific hypothesis for what's going on by tomorrow. Do come by then."

Sumia, of course, didn't feel comfortable leaving her alone. She seemed more transfixed by this particular problem than usual, and if she lost any more sleep over it than she might try to ascertain the history of the palace by reducing it into its constituent parts. But then again, she couldn't stay by her side forever. This lead her to realize one of the few fortunate aspects of being a queen in theory, which was that nobody asked questions if you tried to reassign the palace guards. The first person she saw was given orders to stand in the courtyard and come running to find her in the unlikely event that Miriel collapsed.

It took roughly six hours. The guard who came to fetch her seemed nonchalant about it. Apparently she had simply stared at the statue of Mercio silently for a while, started laughing hysterically, and fell asleep on a bench. Sumia approached her nervously, leaned down, and shook her shoulder.

Miriel opened her eyes. "Oh, hello Sumia. The statue talked to me."

This was good. Sumia had expected incoherent babble.

"What did it say, Miriel?" Sumia said patiently.

"Not a lot. Mostly it just said that I was correct," she said. Miriel swung her legs off of the bench and stood up smoothly. "I'm very tired. Sleep in a proper bed would aid my mental functioning, I believe."

"You get on that," Sumia said as Miriel walked away. Best to just be positive and reassuring.

Sumia turned back towards the statue. It gazed at her broadly, one eye closed. The serene expression on its face was calming, somehow. Miriel's fit wasn't too worrying, aside from it meaning she had dire need for rest. She had been staring at this thing for longer than anyone besides herself. Not to mention that she hadn't been in a very stable frame of mind for most of her vigil. There was no need for alarm, everything was just-

She blinked, and sent the guard to fetch Tharja as quickly as possible. The damn thing was winking at her.

"What's this about?" Tharja said grumpily as she followed the guard into the courtyard.

"Tharja," Sumia said. "Is that thing supposed to drive people insane?"

"Well not primarily, no," Tharja said, glancing up at the statue. "Was it anybody we know? Because I included an antitheft hex-"

"It was Miriel. She was only looking at it," Sumia said. "She's fine, but I thought you would know why she thought that it was talking to her."

"What did it say?"

"What does that matter?" Sumia said.

"These things can be illuminating," Tharja said, shrugging. "Let me guess. It said she was right about something."

"Yeah, I think," Sumia said.

"Then that's weird," Tharja said, apparently convinced that this hadn't been the case up until now. "She isn't insane. Well, probably."

Sumia sighed, and sat down to think for a few moments. She had some grasp of the situation, but wanted to make sort through it in her mind first. Tharja's train of thought had already left the station and she had a habit of throwing off passengers who didn't have tickets. "It's your illusion, isn't it?" she said eventually. "You said it shows people what they expect to see."

"Well yeah," Tharja said. "But it should only be able to trick people's sense of sight and touch. It shouldn't mess with any of the other senses unless something's amplifying it."

"Well, are there any other dark mages around here?" Sumia said.

"No."

"No."

Sumia took a deep breath in and out. "Tharja," she said. "Please tell me you just said 'no' twice."

"Oh, it's talking to you too?" Tharja said, looking back up at Mercio. "This is fun. It must be getting more powerful. Maybe it'll be able to manifest itself physically."

"Are you speaking from experience here?" Sumia said, desperately hoping the answer was 'no'.

"Yeah," Tharja said. "Did I ever tell you about my great-aunt Arna?"

"No?"

"Well, we didn't always have a great-aunt Arna. Frankly we wish that it had stayed that way."

"Tharja," Sumia said desperately. "Please just undo the spell."

"That'll be tricky. Spells like this don't like being taken away. I was very thorough," Tharja said, a slightly smug expression on her face. "It'd be easier just to get rid of whatever's amplifying the spell."

"What's amplifying it?" Sumia said. She was feeling that her role in the conversation was dwindling rapidly and wanted to stay relevant for as long as she could.

"Probably an overabundance of one of the material components in the surroundings." Tharja held up one hand and started ticking of items with her fingers. "You said no goats. So that would be ichor, a suitably rare species of flower, death's toadstool, wood of a willow, and some saltpeter as a preservative. "

"It's probably the flower petals," the guard said genially.

Tharja and Sumia both stared for a moment. Furniture didn't usually talk.

"What makes you say that?" Sumia said, recovering first.

"Well, I saw you grab those flower petals back when I was guarding the waiting area in front of the war room, and if those are the same petals you used in the spell there's probably something around her interfering with them," the guard said amiably. "Local grown, you know."

"You remember me grabbing the flower petals?" Tharja said suspiciously.

"Watch a room for ten hours, you start to pay attention to what changes in it," the guard said evenly.

Tharja watched him for a moment. Sumia briefly feared for his life.

"Well, you've got a point," Tharja said eventually, turning around. She bent over and started looking across the ground. "Are there any of those flowers growing in this courtyard? It would have to be fairly close to the statue."

Tharja trotted across the length of the courtyard, bent double. Sumia was back to staring at the statue. A thought was forming in her mind, but once again she wanted to make sure she could articulate it in a way that could make sense.

"Tharja," she said. Tharja looked up.

"You found it?"

Sumia pointed. Tharja followed her gaze, stared along with her for a moment, gave a smirk of approval, and nodded.

They left the courtyard. A few minutes later, armed with the necessary tools, they and a group of very confused servants arrived to provide an end to the problem at hand. A short half-hour of work hence, they had successfully retrieved the head of Mercio the Unhinged, possibly the only person in the palace's history odd enough to want himself immortalized with petrified flowers protruding from his skull.

"Personally I don't think it's much of a loss," Robin said, staring at the newly-newly refurbished statue, still gleaming brilliant white in the sun, looking good as new aside from the suggestion that the person depicted might not have been a terribly good tactician.

"An improvement, if you ask me," said Chrom. "We've got statues hanging around this place with no arms or legs. No head is just innovation."

"You don't want to get it replaced, then?" Robin said, glancing at Chrom. Behind them, a number of generals and major noble figures were filing into the courtyard. The appeared confused about the change of venue. Military planning was not an exercise associated with bright, cheery sunlight.

"No," Chrom said, turning around to face the assembled figures as they seated themselves on the hastily arranged chairs. "For now, we'll keep it. And for today, I think it'll improve everybody's general attitude towards long-winded tacticians."