Chapter Text
When he opened his eyes, there was no sky.
Only sand.
An endless desert beneath a colorless void.
Levi didn’t need anyone to explain where he was, he knew it instinctively.
“Paths,” he muttered.
His body was whole. Fingers intact. Scars gone. His eye healed. His stomach twisted. This place never gave without taking something worse in return.
He walked. Minutes, hours, days, years—time did not exist here. And eventually, he saw her.
A small girl. Bare feet. Torn dress. Blonde hair. Ash-gray eyes.
Ymir.
She was kneeling in the sand, building something with trembling, precise hands: a Titan’s spine, vertebra by vertebra, like a ritual she had repeated for centuries.
Levi watched her for a long time before speaking.
“How many of us have you killed?”
Her hands did not stop.
“How many did you make?” he asked. “How many people did you make into titans? How many kids? How many soldiers? How many of those monsters wearing human faces did you build?”
Still no answer.
Levi felt something crack in his chest.
He had buried too many people. Outlived too many.
He stepped closer. “Look at me.”
The Paths shuddered.
“I SAID LOOK AT ME DAMN IT!!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, fueled by feelings he’s spent decades suppressing.
Ymir’s hands froze.
Slowly, she turned.
Her eyes were not empty.
They were full.
Full of two thousand years of rage, anger and screams that never left her mouth.
When she looked at Levi, he felt it.
Hatred.
Pure. Bottomless. Ancient.
“You,” she said.
Her voice echoed like something breaking.
“You are all the same.”
The sand around them twisted, rising into half-formed Titan ribs and broken faces.
Levi didn’t flinch. “I want to go back.”
The Paths exploded with images.
Erwin. Hange. Mike. Sasha. Petra. Oluo. Eld. Gunther. Moblit. Nifa. Nanaba. Geldar. Isabel. Farlan. Corpses layered into Levi’s memory like sediment.
“I want to save them.”
Ymir laughed.
It was a horrible sound. Like stone grinding together.
“Save them?” she said. “You cannot even save yourself.”
He walked closer until the air itself felt heavy. He knelt down on instinct, he didn’t meet her eyes. He could feel the Rumbling, hear the screams of billions, smell the iron and smoke of civilizations being crushed. His throat constricted,
“I carried your sins for two thousand years,” she said. “I built your weapons. I obeyed your kings. I drowned in your blood. And you want me to give you… mercy?”
Levi’s teeth clenched.
“Then take it out on me.”
She stopped.
He met her gaze without blinking.
“Use me. Break me. Torture me. Chain me. Take out all that rage built up from two thousand years on me. I don’t care. But give me one more chance.”
“You would become my slave?” she asked softly.
Levi laughed bitterly. “I am an Ackerman. Born and bred to serve the royal bloodline—your bloodline”
Her eyes darkened, then Ymir’s lips curled into a slow, cruel smile.
“Your tongue. Cut it out. Just like my king had mine cut out. You are a slave, slaves don’t need to speak.”
The words struck him like a blade. Panic rose in his chest. But then, a vision slammed into him: Erwin’s final charge, the houses flattened by rocks, the screams of soldiers, being forced to choose between Erwin and Armin. The faces of the people he cared about, whose fates he could change if he acted.
He reached into the back of his boot, where he kept a small knife, it was old but sharp. He always kept his blades in perfect condition. Kenny taught him that.
He took a deep breath then opened his mouth.
Pain flared like fire as he cut his tongue. Blood filled his mouth and slid down his face to the ground. Once the muscle was severed he spit it out onto the sand and violently coughed up the blood that had made its way into his lungs before he threw up.
Silence followed—an eerie, suffocating void. Levi’s body shook violently, his breaths ragged and shallow. The taste of iron and the rawness of absence in his mouth reminded him that he had done it. He could not speak. He could not call for anyone.
The sand erupted.
Chains made of light and bone tore out of the ground and wrapped around Levi’s arms, his spine, his throat, his soul.
He dropped to one knee.
Then both.
He felt something tear inside him.
Not flesh.
Choice.
“You don’t get to rest when it hurts,” Ymir whispered, pressing her hand to his chest. “You do not get to forget. You cannot leave me alone. And I will not leave the world alone.”
And then, the chains dissolved. The Rumbling’s roar faded. He was gone from the Paths, back in the waking world—but not quite the same.
He woke up in the corner of a small dirty mouldy room, he could hear rats squeaking and saw a cockroach crawling across the floor. On the bed lay a corpse of a dark-haired woman. The skin was grey, hair had fallen out in places and her bones could be seen with how thin she was. There were maggots inside her, he assumed before he noticed the smell, a heavy, putrid stench that he never forgot. The smell of decay.
Levi struggled to his feet and walked up to the bed and stared at his mother’s decaying body before covering her with a blanket and sitting back in the corner. And waited for Kenny.