Darkness Within and Peril Without: Prince Lyon

Lyon is one of Fire Emblem's most interesting villains by far. Or rather, "the villain of Sacred Stones" holds that title. Lyon alone, while still incredibly fascinating, can only offer so much to set him apart from other beloved villains like Nergal, Lehran and Rhea. No, what Sacred Stones does to set itself apart is combine Lyon with Fomortiis, and does so to such a close extreme that it is, in some respects, impossible to truly say for certain whether some actions are to be credited to Lyon, Fomortiis, or the two teaming up. Obviously, not everything, but who's to say where the line is drawn?

To start, we are going to walk through the parts of the story that are definitely Lyon's actions- the buildup to Lyon taking that last step before creating the Dark Stone and sealing his fate. There are eight flashbacks that show Lyon's side of the story all up.

Our first flashbacks in chronological order, the Chapter 14 ones, take place two years ago, although at this point Lyon is still very familiar with the twins. At least this is a substantial relationship being built upon here.

Next in line, Chapter 17: At this point, he's still already started to explore the power of the Sacred Stones, having saved a girl's life at the point he brings this up. Since the first meeting doesn't have a timestamp, we don't actually know how long after meeting these two people it took for Lyon to decide the only way to impress them was by mastering life and death. You know, don't all your friends do that?

Six months later, we have the wishing scene. No wonder everyone's so hard on Ephraim for not knowing about it. Since it's the first Lyon scene, it's not really adding much to the story at this point- we don't even know he's going to be the villain yet when we get this.

This visit to Grado was the twins' last. Since the twins went to Grado at least twice, I wonder if there's any rhyme or reason to when these visits were being scheduled to occur, or why Lyon is so worried about this one being the last one. The answer to the latter may well be "Lyon is aware of the upcoming war in a way the twins are not", but the former has nothing to go on.

And then, six months later, we get Vigarde's death.

Lyon spares no time in immediately leaning in to revive him. The man has no faith in himself to rule on his own merits. Ironically, this leads to him being the one in charge, seeing as Vigarde has no will of his own and his body suddenly has a new inhabitant to accommodate the ominous desires of. It's also interesting how the game points out how exhausting it would be to do this: it's not exactly like Lyon's running on a full tank of gas coming in to this.

The next time we see Lyon, chronologically, we are shown a Lyon that has been through a long time as the Demon King's meatpuppet, and to the twins, he has different approaches to portraying it.

To Eirika, the woman he fancies, he adopts his more soft-spoken self from before the Stones took hold, to lower her guard and set her to attempting diplomacy when the game has already been lost.
To Ephraim, the man he idolises, he exaggerates his lust for power the Stones emboldened within him, to anger Ephraim and get him to rush into decisions that will come back to bite him.

While both plans work to their respective twins, the game does not linger on whether these carefully tailored approaches are intentional on the villains' part. Both Lyon and Fomortiis are smart characters, though, and Fomortiis is openly skilled in reading someone, finding out their weaknesses, and playing them to his ends- it's his favourite tactic dealing with Lyon, after all. Considering both Eirika and Ephraim run around being a considerable thorn in Grado's side before Lyon is ever shown doing anything significant in front of them, the villains had plenty of time to consider how best to use Lyon's face to take them off guard. And, after all, the Chapter 14 displays are openly performative on both routes, to the point that later reveals make it clear that both of the speeches Lyon made are factually not true.

While, technically, Riev did this too, it cannot go without mentioning that Lyon shows this off with Orson, as well. It is really easy to manipulate Orson in this fashion, but it is the preferred approach of Fomortiis. The Demon King does an excellent job manipulating people, but because it is our protagonists being manipulated first and foremost, it is difficult to draw the line on what, exactly, Fomortiis is doing genuinely and what is actual setup for his manipulative tricks- because in hindsight, quite a lot of things he does play into what he winds up trying.

Orson, too, represents an interesting point in the story. Before him, the story has been concerned with fighting the evil Grado Empire, run by the Demon King, Riev, Caellach, Valter, and men that share their cruelty. Afterwards, the story will become about Lyon, the Demon King, and the back-and-forth between them. These stories have dramatically different tones, and Orson's chapter has the interesting job of bridging them. A character like Orson does it well- his flaws manifest in the misrule of the common people, like the New Imperial Three, but he is sympathetic (with a capital "p" in Pathetic) and his downfall is defined by the same traits that people prized, like Lyon. Whatever other issues Chapter 16 has with how other characters react to it, the writers were clearly well aware of why it is here.

L'Arachel says that Lyon is unsaveable by the events of Chapter 18, and while this position is not contradicted, there's no evidence he wouldn't be were the circumstances different. This is the very premise used to trick Eirika into handing over the Sacred Stones, in fact. All we know about L'Arachel's version of events is that this was the opinion of people who lived in the era of the Heroes and the Demon King. Reading between the lines, however, I feel that L'Arachel is ultimately correct: The Demon King's control over Lyon was absolute by Chapter 18, but not how that is commonly interpreted. It is physically possible to save Lyon, but Lyon's ambitions have been tweaked by Fomortiis's hand. Lyon doesn't want to be saved- he thinks he's doing the right thing, and he even thinks he can snatch away the Demon King's power at the eleventh hour. Lyon's agency is the most fiendish part of the Demon King's trap: While he is at his most vulnerable, he encourages his enemies to seek an impossible diplomatic ending rather than pluck up their courage and fight him directly. In essence, the correct interpretation is that Lyon is too far gone, but the legends do not specify that the Demon King is able to make it appear otherwise, leaving the heroes working on faulty information.

The Demon King wins and loses on emotional charge. He is able to ply Lyon to his liking by preying on his emotional need to see Grado set to rights, he is able to play Eirika and Ephraim by preying on their emotional connections to Lyon, and in the end, he is defeated by the strong emotional connections the twins have forged with their army- and those the army has formed between each other. The power of friendship alone does not win this fight- the Demon King is cunning enough to be able to use that as a weapon. However, it is the support network of many, working in concert to a shared ideal, which is able to ensure that no one weak link is enough to break the chain. As a "power of friendship" story, this really gets to the heart of both why that theme is decried and why it is resonant at once. The more friends you have, the more likely one of them will be able to pitch in when a crisis has. Lyon kept to himself, and when the worst came to pass, none of his friends even knew they were needed.

And, of course, we have to talk about the Demon King himself. As an ominous, almost faceless presence throughout the story, the Demon King appears to be just that- the opponent that all JRPG heroes face on the path to the end of the game as the final boss. But Fomortiis has his own layers, even when he's the one in front. He's charming- he openly gloats about his successes, and has a respect for the work he puts in to making people do his bidding through nothing but pointing them in the right direction and watching the chaos unfold. Many characters who oppose him directly, as opposed to the Grado Empire that he uses as a proxy, do so only knowing what he has done, not how he went about doing it, and in fear of him doing it again. As a result, nobody- except maybe Morva- is fully prepared to see the Demon King in action.

In essence, the Demon King has, in a way, weaponised the genericness of the title of Demon King. Everybody knows to fight him, everyone knows to fear him, but nobody knows what he's going to do- and of all the things to not understand about a villain's methods, the "what" is the most dangerous thing to be missing. And the worst part is, nobody seems to fully realise they were missing that "what"- they fought the Grado Empire in front of them, hoping to get to the top of the matter and unmask the villain, and on finding the Demon King waiting there, they... continued to chase after him, hoping to tear him from Lyon, and not realising or preparing for what the Demon King planned to do while in control of him.

There's one more element to Lyon that I put in a pin in, way back in A New Journey, that it's finally time to think about in more depth. At some point, Eirika and Ephraim "befriended" the royal children of Frelia, and similar relationship patterns began to form. Innes and Tana represent Lyon without turning to darkness- Innes is merely a man in the same position who bows to the same pressures, while Tana is virtually the exact same character except gender flipped (and having a matching flip in which twin she's crushing on and which twin she's trying to emulate). The sole acknowledgement of this is Chapter 19 Ephraim's emotional reconstruction scene, where Tana's optimism is directly, but implicitly, compared to the pessimism of the Lyon situation. And that's a crying shame.

So then, why are Innes and Tana good people while Lyon is... not? That's a bit of a tough ask, so let's start with Innes, since he's the easy one. Innes may be many things, but one of his stronger positive traits is his honesty. Blunt, brutal honesty. It is clear, from the word go, how Innes feels about Eirika and Ephraim, and both twins treat him as he asks to be treated- well, Eirika pushes back, but because she actually disagrees with him, rather than not understanding where he's coming from. There is no knot of uncertainty for the Demon King to prod here- Innes considers every decision in a cold and calculated way, and he has calculated that Team Eirika is the team he wants to find himself on. That is, if the Demon King ever found himself in a situation where he could tempt Innes to begin with- Innes would keep him at great lengths if he tried.

Tana is a little trickier to pen in. She has a lot of anxieties the Demon King could pick apart, had he found her heart instead. From the way she expresses herself in her Supports, though, I think the key difference is in the way Tana is more helpful on an intimate level. She gets to care about Marisa and Cormag personally, and approaches them and the twins directly when she tries to be helpful. Lyon's ambitions are far grander- he wants to help all of Grado at once. And the power to work at that scale is something he doesn't already have. Tana would reject the Demon King because she wants to prove herself, and would consider leaning on someone else to be missing the point. Lyon considers helping the other person to be more important, and considers his own sacrifice to be worthwhile to accomplish that goal.

So how does this compare with Lyon? Innes and Tana both take his kindness, and temper it with selfishness. Innes, of course, by always openly asking "what's in it for me?", while Tana does so in a more polite way- she helps people because she likes to be someone who is helpful. Lyon, in contrast, sets a concrete goal in ending all of the world's suffering. While he is the more altruistic character, the combination of his determination to do the right thing and his selflessness in seeing it done ensures that he'll choose any option that sees the right thing being done. His tragedy is in his optimism, and is an important lesson in exercising your own limits- sacrifice yourself and you'll be no help to anybody ever again.

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One of the biggest risks you take with a sympathetic antagonist is the question "what if the player doesn't like them?" Lyon presents an interesting take because, while he is definitely sympathetic, the game takes explicit pains to point out that Lyon must be defeated now, and the primary vector through which the conflict is driven is through the twins. We're not supposed to feel that Lyon should be saved, but because the twins feel so strongly about it, we are supposed to hope it works when they try- but not so strongly that we're too terribly torn up when it doesn't. It hurts us because it hurts them. I really like this angle- it also makes sure that any sympathy we might have for Lyon is tied in our protagonist's motivation, rather than directly opposed to it.

Ultimately, Lyon is a villain in a popular archetype of villains: He is the childhood friend turned evil, and now the protagonist stands conflicted on whether they can take him out to accomplish their goals. Where Lyon stands tall amongst this archetype is in his philosophies. He is a character that has a clear personality and goals, and his descent into villainy is directly connected to both. Many examples of this archetype weaken because they are drawn into a pre-existing philosophy that they may or may not have been interested in back when the friendship was happening, and the protagonists do not engage with them on said philosophies, instead appealing purely to the pre-existing friendship. Eirika and Ephraim, by contrast, are all too keenly aware of how Lyon's turn to darkness was caused by the very traits they loved about him, and recognise that saving him means turning their backs on him as a person, upholding his philosophy and doing what he would have wanted- stopping him from doing the wrong thing.

Could the story have done better? Yes, the answer is usually yes. But in this case, I feel that isn't down to shortcomings in the concept- Ephraim losing the Sacred Stone could be better, perhaps, but that's more a problem in how the narrative shields Ephraim from his weaknesses than how it treats Lyon. What the Lyon arc needed was to be bigger. Although Lyon has been a narrative presence since the very start of the story- both twins talk about Lyon when they praise the Grado Empire before its turn- Lyon/Fomortiis himself only started making physical appearances in Chapter 14, and only got to start showing off his silver tongue in Chapter 17. Out of 20. While stretching out the tricks of the Demon King may run into the problem of the battle of wits losing its lustre, the arc perhaps deserved a more rounded presentation, as well as time for the Demon King's goals to be addressed- and more recognition of how the other characters engage with the themes of the arc, too. It was clearly the part of the story the writers were most excited about- that passion should've been reflected in the content, rather than dedicating eight chapters to dry exposition out of obligation.