a matched pair 65 housekeeping notes

First, there's been a lore shakeup! Two, in fact. First is adapted from a headcanon relayed to me by sakura108645: Instead of being poorly-named Nabateans, Aubin, Chevalier, Noa, and Timotheos were part of the Imperial army during the War of Heroes, and received their crests directly from Nabateans. Unfortunately, the Nabateans who gave the four of them the Crests of the Apostles out did not survive the war, and thus their crests took on the names of their recipients a la the Crests of the Elites. This sidesteps every single lore inconsistency IS introduced with the Ashen Wolves in one elegant stroke, and I am forever grateful for it... even if I *do* have to come up with four more Nabatean names now.

Second is a headcanon relayed to me by inianuae: the various Nabateans who had a sacred weapon forged for them did not in fact die at Zanado, but were active participants in the War of Heroes... At least until they fell in battle, and their corpses were stolen and turned into Relics. Nessa, Celtchar, Diarmuid et al., as I've named them, would have fought alongside the Saints as the last members of their dwindling race. The sheer fucking *pathos* of it... My god. Absolutely crushing. Brilliant.

Next, I did (and am still doing) another round of edits, focusing *mainly* on the earlier chapters of the fic. I recently made the decision to start posting my work on fanfiction.net as well, and as such I wanted to go through and touch up the early, rougher chapters of this fic to make sure they were up to my current level of quality, consistent in tone with one another, and so on.

The Cornelia arc chapters (16, 17, 18, and the former chapter 19) have received some major structural edits. I've been unsatisfied with how I did that bit of the story for a while now, and I took the opportunity to rework those chapters basically from the ground up. The end results (Cornelia dying in Abyss after trying to capture Hapi and Byleth taking the Blue Lions to do Ingrid's paralogue) are the same, but the way we get there is different, and better IMO. You don't *need* to re-read them, but if you'd do there's a Claude pun in it for you. I also changed some chapter titles. Chapter 16 remains "The Long Road Home", but Chapter 17 is now "Saint Cornelia of Fhirdiad", while Chapter 18 is the sole bearer of the name "For Love and Money" now.

What used to be Chapter 19 "Blue Sea Star" is now no more. It's been subsumed into the surrounding chapters, mostly because with the edits to the previous three chapters it was unconscionably small. The fic skips straight ahead to "The Flame in the Darkness" as Chapter 19.