A/N: Hello everyone!

I'll be finishing up my other story later this week, but I've had this story in my head for weeks and I wanted to get the first chapter out there. This is heavily inspired by the works of That_Hoopy_Frood. If you know of their work, you already know what certain elements of this story will contain. If you don't, I HIGHLY recommend you read their work. (also if anyone can let me know how to embed links on this site or if it's possible at all, I'd greatly appreciate it).

The Flames that Forged a Soldier

Chapter 1: The Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Valley (n): The phenomenon whereby a computer-generated figure or humanoid robot bearing a near-identical resemblance to a human being arouses a sense of unease or revulsion in the person viewing it.

The moment the coffin was lowered into the ground, Riza started to forget the face of her mother.

Her face had changed so much over the past year that all of the images blended and blurred. Riza remembered the sunken cheeks she had seen last week, but were they once plump? Her hair had been matted and frayed as her health deteriorated, but what color would she have called it? Brown or blonde, or something in between? Her smile was loving, but tired. Riza couldn't remember if she used to beam with happiness or if her smiles had been serene. Was her mother a passionate person before she grew ill? Was she a calming presence, or was she fire?

Riza didn't care anymore.

She remembered her mother's actions far clearer. Every night, she would read to her, even when she became old enough and able to read by herself. The stories she told were classic struggles of good and evil. Evil always had a face, though, and it never won.

Her mother was good. Riza knew that.

So when the faceless disease crept through her body, there was no face to fight against. The priest said that she fought, but when the disease was inside you, Riza figured you were only fighting yourself.

She remembered when she was six, and her father started to teach her alchemy. Her mother had been proud, her father even moreso. She was gifted at the basics she learned, and she was amazed by the possibilities that presented themselves as she transmuted silly wooden toys and paper flowers. She could only copy a design she'd seen before, but she was naturally perceptive, so she could copy perfectly. She remembered, almost word-for-word, an argument that she wasn't supposed to hear late one night.

"I'm not saying she should start right away, obviously we need to give her another few years! But, say when she's fourteen. She's talented, she should learn."

"The military have been sniffing around you for years, Berthold! If she's pulled from school, they'll know, and they'll start haranguing her too!"

"She isn't stupid enough to consider joining them."

"And what if something happens to us? She'll have nowhere to go! They'll take her and they'll use her and she'll have no option but to join!"

"Your father may hate me, darling, but he's not about to put a hit out on us just to take her."

"I have no idea what they're capable of, but I'm not taking my chances!"

The fight had been resolved with the agreement that when she's old enough, Riza will be told her options and she will make the choice herself.

A year after, her mother was diagnosed, and the house began to collect dust. Riza remembered the first time she felt hunger. After three days without food, she realized that her mother was too ill to cook, and her father had not taken up the mantel. Riza cooked her first meal that evening, a simple soup, and brought some to her parents. Her mother's eyes shone, with gratitude and tears, simultaneously celebrating and mourning Riza's new-found skill. Her father ate hungrily, but barely acknowledged her as he spoke to the doctor.

Riza saw her mother waste away while her father did nothing to help, and decided that alchemy was not the solution to everything. She spent less and less time drawing circles, and more time using the skill her mother gave her instead; reading. She read scraps of worn paper scribbled in her mother's neat handwriting. Recipes. At seven years old, Riza could make cobblers and casseroles and bone broths. She was good at following the steps, and after a while, she even began writing her own recipes.

Now, at eight years old and standing at her mother's grave, she rubbed her father's back as he cried. He sounded completely savage, sobbing and shaking as the dirt was being shoveled back into the earth. She hated him in that moment, for being so weak. She hated herself for being unable to cry.

After a while, she moved away from him and picked up a shovel as well. The job was not going to be done by crying, or research, or hands shaking too hard to hold chalk.

Riza thought back to the argument her parents had, and decided she was going to stay in school.

She hadn't learned to feel lonely. She had grown up too fast to know the despair of a child's boredom. Boredom was a luxury to her; it meant that she had nothing to do.

Even the solitude of her house wasn't secluded enough for her at times. Every moment she spent in the house, she was cooking, or cleaning, or fixing, or reading. She grew out of the fairy tales quickly, instead studying schoolwork that was considered too advanced for someone her age. She had a partially-funded scholarship to keep.

Riza learned not to speak often. Her father spoke all the time, muttering to himself things she had either never learned or half-remembered. When she tried to engage him, he would just talk louder, but the subject matter rarely changed. He rarely spoke to her. Sometimes he would look at her while he spoke, but it would still be like she wasn't in the room. Riza decided that he had lost his mind. He ate when given food, slept when he was too exhausted to stand and rarely leave his study for anything other than bathroom breaks and to send Riza for supplies or to pay bills. Riza knew they had very little money left when he started sending her with red envelopes instead of white ones. They were scraping to get by, delaying bills until they couldn't ignore them. This was one of the reasons she was desperate to keep her scholarship. They couldn't afford the school without it, and school was one of her only escapes from the house.

She allowed herself another escape once a week. She would go to the lake on a Friday evening, strip down completely in solitude, and swim in the clean, dark waters. She didn't know where she learned to swim. It was as natural to her as running, and she treasured the moments she spent under the water, when all of the noise of the animals and birds would mute to a dull throb and she would feel weightless. When she had begun coming here, she would think about her mother a lot, and wonder if death felt like the weightlessness of water.

After a few months of her new ritual, her thoughts were replaced by the only other two things in her life; her father and her school. She had made no friends yet in school, but that was her own choice. Any attempts on her peers' end to engage her were met with stoic silence or single-syllable replies. Being an only child, she had only learned an adult's sense of politeness. Children her age like playfulness, and she was unable and unwilling to engage them on that level. Their friendliness turned to cruelty, and she would sometimes hear whispers about her ragged haircut (she cut her own hair, short as a boy's and not very neat) and how she never ate lunch or played. They seemed to take a huge distaste to her reading during recess. Sometimes, she would let herself lie languidly on her back in the water for what felt like hours and think about these whispers. Other times, she would swim until her lungs ached.

When she was ten years old, she got out of the water after a particularly vigorous set of laps. Her legs were too tired to take her home, so she collapsed on the ground against the trunk of a tree to rest. She twisted herself sit up with her back against the trunk, barely registering the cold air on her wet skin.

"Tired little birdy. I thought you were going to drown."

She sat up straighter at the noise, eyes scanning the surrounding grounds. The lake was in a clearing of a small wooded area behind her house. The trees cast long shadows on the grass, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

"Who's there?" Her voice didn't waver. Fear was among the things she never got around to learning.

A new shadow appeared on the ground beneath her. It was thin and long, hanging from the shadow of a branch. She looked up.

The figure moved fluidly from branch to branch until it lowered itself onto the floor. Riza's eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was a boy. He was tall, probably as tall as someone about 15 or 16-years-old, but it was hard to tell his age from his face. He looked regal, almost like an adult, but clean and boyish at the same time. His hair almost reached his shoulders, long and black and so shiny it looked like he dipped it in motor oil. He towered above her, back straight, legs together and arms outstretched at the elbow, palms facing the sky. She wondered for how long he had been in the tree. Had he climbed it when she was swimming? Was he there before she arrived?

Was he always there?

Riza suddenly remembered an old Xerxian story she had read in school. It was about a puppeteer who made such beautiful puppets that they looked like they could come to life. The text described the puppets as 'uncanny'; something that looked almost human, but not quite. The word felt appropriate in her mind.

"What are you?"

His eyebrows shot up and his lips curved into a facsimile of a smile. His pale blue eyes glinted with glee.

"What an interesting question!" he slid down beside her, and she suddenly felt the urge to move away, something instinctively telling her to get up and run. This was the first time she had ever felt fear, and the first time she would ignore it. "Not what are you doing here, or even who are you. I'm not sure how to answer." He rolled his tongue from cheek to cheek, as if tasting the question.

"Maybe I'm a lost traveler. I could have wandered off the road, distracted by something pretty." He lolled his head languidly to the side, facing her again. "Bird-watching, perhaps."

She hugged her bare knees to her chest. They were still tired, but the dull ache was slowly being replaced by an itching sensation. The boy before her didn't seem to notice her discomfort. That, or he ignored it.

"Or maybe I'm a dream. You could have fallen asleep under the tree. Or you could have drowned. Yes; maybe I'm a spirit, comforting you in death."

His blue eyes widened as she reached out her hand and grabbed a fistful of his hair, tugging it down and watching his head move helplessly in the same direction as her hand. He flinched at the sensation. She let go.

"You feel real enough."

The shock on his face was replaced by a broad grin, and he barked out a single syllable of a laugh.

"Clever miss. But are you sure you can trust what you feel?"

She shrugged, leaning more comfortably against the tree, somewhat comforted by the fact that whatever he was, he could feel pain. She considered his words for a while. She didn't know what she could trust. Not her mother, who died two years ago. Not her father, who would starve to death and not even notice. She thought she could trust herself, but half the time she didn't feel real either. She wondered if she was any better than her father. He had slowly lost his mind, but he had at least cried at her mother's funeral. That was something sane people did; something she couldn't do. Maybe she was mad too, in a different way.

"So am I dead, then?"

He chuckled. "Not yet."

She thought of her father again.

"Am I insane?"

Another chuckle.

"Not yet."

A/N: I hope you enjoyed the first chapter! This is the start of a long-ish (6-9 chapters) story that will probably become part of a collection in future. That being said, it may be slow on the upload, because there are elements to the story that will be foreshadowed in some chapters and followed-up in later ones and I will need to write a couple of chapters ahead of releasing them to make sure I remembered the foreshadowing elements. But please do let me know what you think!