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.

It was the sort of statement only architecture like that could make. And it was an impressive display; the architecture, the location, the way in which the gates had been cast aside as if defenses of the conventional sort were of little use to the Church... like a well designed theme park, it guided your eye to seeing what it meant you to see, fooling you into thinking it was larger than life. Only in the case of Garreg Mach, it was larger than life. And ancient.

Of course, a lot of these insights were something that I came by much later. Seeing it for the first time, on that summer day, with Leonie at my side, I didn't think a lot of those things. I thought it was magnificent. Impractical, maybe, but magnificent nonetheless.

"Heck of a place," I remarked, voicing none of the poetry that I felt upon seeing it.

"Yeah,"  Leonie agreed, and despite herself, I could see that the place was having an effect on her as well. "It's really impressive."

"Have you never been?" I asked. Leonie shook her head.

"My father always wanted to take a pilgrimage to Garreg Mach and the holy sites," Leonie said. "But between health and work and money, we just never managed it." She was quiet for a moment. "Captain Jeralt used to be the Captain of the Knights of Seiros. Did I ever tell you that?"

"I think so," I said. It had been a full hour since I had last heard the Captain's name, so I wasn't going to complain.

Leonie nodded, having satisfied her quota. "Well," she said with a smile, "Let's go, shall we?" she punched me in the shoulder and lead onwards. I followed.

***

The town was not what I had expected, somehow. Large when compared to Leonie's village, but small compared to nearly any other, it was built around a single public square at the center that, like the monastery itself, sat atop a hill raised above the rest. The buildings were plastered brick and struck me as very medieval, the sort that must have been there for centuries themselves, with lines worn into stairs from the constant traffic of many feet. The weird thing was its organization; it was a grid, almost perfect, though the raised center threw it off a little bit in three dimensions.

Don't get me wrong, I like grids. It merely struck me as odd. A grid implies careful planning and strict regulation on new construction, zoning laws and the like. And the whole city followed this careful pattern. I wondered if a bird's eye view would have revealed it to be a perfectly rectangular city.

Speaking of which...

A shadow passed overhead. I looked up, sensing that it was going much too fast to be a cloud. It didn't take very long to locate its source; above, a large creature, with leathery, bat-like wings soared above my head. Its tail streamed out behind it, and it peered down at the ground through beady eyes. A loud, reptilian growl escaped its jaws. I jumped in shock.

"Dragon!" I cried, pointing and stepping backwards. "There's a frickin' dragon up there!"

To my surprise, Leonie didn't look the slightest bit perturbed. "That's a wyvern," she said dismissively.

I gave her an exasperated expression. "That's just a dragon without forelimbs!" I said. "And it isn't the point. Why aren't you worried about it?"

"Uh, because wyverns are domesticated," Leonie said. "They use them as mounts. See?"

She pointed and I realized that she was right; there was a man (or woman) clinging to the back of the creature, clad in armor and keeping his (or her) head down near the creature's neck. I gawked.

"They have frickin' dragon riders?" I breathed in shock.

"Yeah," Leonie said, a little confused by my surprise. "And Pegasus riders."

"What?" I placed both hands on my forehead and made the "mind blown" gesture. "They got frickin' Pegasuses?" I drew up, confused momentarily. "Pegasuses? Pegasi? Pegasil?" I looked to Leonie for help. There was none forthcoming.

"You're excited by the weirdest things," Leonie laughed. "You know what a wyvern is but didn't know they were domesticated. If you ever get your memories back, you're going to have to tell me where you're from. Maybe you're from one of the outer lands."

I threw up my hands. "But I speak your language perfectly," I said. "It doesn't make sense either way."

Leonie chuckled. "Like I said, you're weird," she said.

I turned to her. "Can I get a Pegasus?" I asked.

"I don't think so," Leonie said.

"Dang," I said, crestfallen. She laughed.

"You're too big," she elaborated. "Pegasus riders have to be as light as possible, so they're almost all women. You're too big to be a Pegasus rider. If you wanted a wyvern, I'll bet you could manage that; you'd have to be pretty good at flying though, and I bet it takes a lot of work."

I considered this momentarily. "Wyverns aren't as cool as Pegasuses," I said, settling on a pluralization and hoping it would stick. "Especially those ones; they have antlers." They did; as the rider had wheeled overhead, I had caught sight of a growth of antlers atop the wyvern's horse-like head. Still, to fly above a battlefield atop a frickin' dragon...

Someone collided with me. I stumbled, but not as much as the person who had hit me, who almost tripped entirely and fell flat on her face. She didn't, but she didn't manage to save her stack of boxes, which collapsed onto the cobbled street below. A sharp noise of surprise escaped from her lips. I spun and saw her, already bending to retrieve her things.

"Oh, goodness!" I heard her say.

"Oh, I'm sorry," I said, bending to help her pick up her things.

"Oh, my! I'm so sorry," she said at the same time.

"Oh, no don't worry about it."

"No, no, I wasn't looking where I was going! I'm so sorry, did I hurt you?"

"No, of course not."

"Oh, well that's good. Here, you don't have to help me."

"Oh, it's all right. I was just standing there obliviously. Let me give you a hand."

"Oh... well thank you!" she said. She had an odd sing-song voice and big, round, blue eyes. An unseasonable shawl was wrapped around her shoulders, and around it, long, flaxen hair bound by a blue ribbon. She smiled sweetly as I helped her gather her fallen items, which struck me as almost entirely confectionery in nature. She seemed to be stocking up for a shortage of sugary, baking goods; dried fruits, honeycombs, bags of flour and sugar, little nuts and cooking oils. And she had arrayed them all in about the least efficient layout that I had ever, in my short memory, seen, all within a wooden tray not large enough to hold them. I helped her gather her purchases, and Leonie knelt to do the same beside me.

"I don't know where my mind was," the girl said, shaking her own head as she gathered her things. "I was just in such a hurry to get back to the monastery that I guess I just forgot to look where I was going. Thank you so much for helping me clean up this mess!"

"Hey, I was the one standing in the middle of the..." I started. But then I was interrupted.

"Mercie?" A voice, female, echoed from behind my new acquaintance. The girl with the flaxen hair pivoted, and the soft features of her face lit up as another girl, younger than her and with bright orange hair tied into looped knots.

"Annie!" the girl, apparently "Mercie," cried, and so enthusiastic was she to greet the other that she forgot the baking goods entirely as she rushed forward to catch the newcomer in an oppressive embrace. The newcomer's porters waited stolidly behind, standing alongside a stopped carriage with a truly impressive amount of luggage bursting out of it. When they broke their embrace, a conversation began about how long it had been since they had seen each other.

I turned and met Leonie's gaze; we were now the unintentional guardians of a pile of baking goods. That was worth a laugh.

"Hey," a new voice, male, interrupted. We looked up, and nearby was another youth, short and dressed in clothes that were too nice to be as dirty as they were. He had his silk sleeves rolled up to the elbows and had developed a tear in his trousers. He was also sporting a black eye under bright blue hair.

"Did you guys happen to see a guy with black hair that went down like this?" he asked, his gravely, teen voice working through what seemed to be the result of taking a fist to the throat. "I gotta pound him into the ground."

"Uh..." I replied.

"Haven't been..." Leonie began.

"There he is!" the kid cried, catching sight of someone behind us. "All right, you ugly son of an Almyran she-wolf, watch out because Caspar is coming for you! Hyyyaaaaghhhhrr!" And off he went.

"Hey, you looking to sell any of that?" A woman bent down, looking at the goods we were defending. This woman had hair a deep maroon that she had done up till it cascaded down her shoulders in ribbons. I sighed. 

"No, we're just looking after it for a moment," I said.

"Aw, that's a shame. Hey, you look like you're looking to buy then! I have all the best in the latest fashion, get you out of... whatever that is. All for a bargain price. Hey, what are you wearing actually?" I was still in the foreign made clothes that I had woken up in, a little worse for wear.

"Oh for goodness sake," Leonie said, exasperated. She picked up the tray and walked over to Mercie in a huff, handed it over to her, gave a reproachful lecture about cleaning up after herself, and turned back in a huff while Mercie attempted unsuccessfully to apologize as profusely as possible. Leonie paid her no mind. I smiled and shrugged apologetically for a moment before Leonie grabbed me by the shoulder and dragged me away.

***

Not too long after, we parted ways. For now; there was obviously still the matter of my debt to her, which she totaled mercilessly. Truthfully, it didn't seem like that much, though seeing how I was likely to have to start from scratch with whatever personal items I could buy, it still might take a while to earn back. Still, I was grateful for the help.

We parted after entering the first part of the monastery. We crossed a small drawbridge and ascended several flights of steps, climbing into the stone superstructure, fortified with ascending rings of stone and towers cleverly disguised from a distance. And finally, we were within sight of the final gate, the entry to the monastery itself.

Outside the final wall, we stopped. Leonie turned to me and smiled.

"Well," she said, "This is it. Garreg Mach."

I nodded. "I take it you've got to tell them you're here for classes and whatnot," I noted.

"Yup. And you've got to find a recruiter. So, I guess this is where we part ways." She extended a hand. "Take care of yourself. And don't forget that you owe me money."

I laughed as I shook her hand. "How could I forget you? You're the only person I know."

"True enough," Leonie said. "Hey, if you learn how to fly a wyvern, you might let me know. I'm sure there will be a place for flyers in my mercenary company."

"I'll remember that," I said. Would you look at that; I already had a connection for employment. Sometimes, life worked out. Although, I don't suppose Leonie would just hire me out of nostalgia. If I wanted to follow up on that offer, I'd have to prove myself. Get good, as one might say. Well, with any luck, that wouldn't be an issue. Knights of Seiros, here I come.