Altria Emiya

"If you want to save the world, you must accept the way the world truly is. The good and the bad. That's the trouble with wishes - it's so easy to forget things aren't black and white. You can't wish for utopia without also wishing for hell. It all depends on how much evil you're willing to shoulder to bring about the good."

- Altria Emiya/Saber Alter

Altria Emiya is the initial Master of Saber in the Sixth Heaven's Feel, or Holy Grail War. She is a former Saber-class Servant and embodiment of the Fuyuki Holy Grail, having been incarnated by its power, and sustains herself with prana the Grail transmits from Akasha. She can still be classified as a Heroic Spirit and possesses the ability to manifest Noble Phantasms, though her memories and knowledge of how to do so are sealed behind a mental barrier that can only be breached under certain conditions. She is able to live a normal life believing herself to be a mediocre magus because she remembers nothing of her past as a Servant. After losing her Command Spells and Servant to Katarina Venediktov, she is tortured to the point where her mental barrier snaps and she becomes the dark hero known as Saber Alter.

Altria Emiya
"I wonder how it feels to be a Servant. It seems cruel, summoning such great heroes only to have them kill each other over the Grail, but Saber accepts this and is glad for the chance to do battle. Is it that he has an important wish only the Grail can grant, or is it that he has no choice in the matter? I wonder..."

- Altria Emiya

Altria Emiya is a good-natured but strong-willed individual to the point of being stubborn. She has a strong belief in the rules of right and wrong and though she can sometimes be naive, she possesses a level-headed grace under pressure. Influenced primarily by the people she cares most about, she adheres to ideals that were handed to her by others but has deep convictions about them. She is afraid of the concept of nothingness and exhibits a keen desire to experience the world she lives in as fully as she can while being of help to others. She takes great pride in her skills, particularly as a swordsman, but dislikes boasting, preferring instead to let her actions speak for her in most instances. She is prone to being blunt in her speech, a trait that often gets her into trouble with people unused to her brand of tact. She is a lover of fine cuisine and possesses a voracious appetite unnatural for someone of her size. While she finds joy in being useful, she resents being treated as a tool and despises having her opinion on a matter overlooked. Her natural enemies are the conceited, the sadistic, and those whose beliefs and practices she cannot tolerate. She avoids reading about medieval times or ancient history in general, believing that history is made of "regrets" and people don't think enough about the possibility of a brighter future. She loves to ride motorcycles and sometimes shops for eccentric clothing, feeling as though someone she might have met once would want her to enjoy the freedom to dress up.

Her intellectual and emotional intelligence is high and she possesses knowledge in varying fields, though she has no educational records. She can be considered a savant whose ability to process information is extremely potent but whose desire to advance academically is very low. When it comes to goals, she is simply content to experience life day by day and absorb as much as she can at her own pace. Despite this laid-back attitude, she is relentless in her pursuit of small personal achievements and can become almost competitive with others in certain situations. She is used to living in a house full of people and gets lonely if left by herself. Isolation bothers her greatly, as well as the notion that either she cannot understand others or they cannot understand her. Though she appears to be well-adjusted to interacting with others, she secretly feels as though she is playing catch-up with them and is missing some vital secret component to true bonding. This feeling of incompleteness sometimes puts her into somber moods, though she cannot pinpoint the exact cause. Her belief is that she was abandoned by someone before waking up in Fuyuki as an amnesiac, though she cannot remember who or why. Her nightmares, which date back to the first night after that awakening, are full of disturbing ideas that sometimes slip intrusive thoughts into her consciousness. Her solution to this is to be a good person so that she could never possibly act on any of these ugly notions, which range from mischief to outright atrocity. To Altria, it is a person's effort to overcome their baser impulses that defines whether they are good or evil.

Saber Alter
"The chiefest flaw of humans is that they seek to obtain without sacrifice. They demand miracles without expecting to pay a price. They create fabrications of order and goodness without acknowledging the evils necessary for order to prevail. They believe in saving all when it is only possible to save some. What is the Grail, if not a method of separating mankind's delusions from reality? That is not inherently evil. The idea of 'all the world's evil' is nothing but a lie created by humans who sought to deny their own sin by placing it on another, just as they seek to place their wishes on the Grail without paying the toll. You cannot get something from nothing, and until humans learn that they will continue to blindly self-destruct. That is the truth of this world."

- Saber Alter

Saber Alter is an anomaly created by the tainted yet still miraculous contents of the Fuyuki Lesser Grail, which the Heroic Spirit Arturia Pendragon was forced to consume by order of Shirou Emiya's Command Spell. As such, she is partly defined by those contents, which contained innumerable curses originating from Angra Mainyu, "All the World's Evil." A dark reflection of her former self, she is not a feral beast driven mad by the weight of all those curses but rather a shadow that forces the light of the world to acknowledge those curses. Separated from the persona of Altria, she is utterly apathetic and driven only by the despair that has permeated every cell of her being; when accepted into Altria's psyche, she develops a will and reasoning of her own outside of the Grail's incessant cursing. She is best described as a prana factory directly linked with Akasha who absorbed the essence of Angra Mainyu's true self, Avenger, though she was sealed away by Avenger in order for him to fulfill his wish for a "normal life" by creating a blank-slate persona in Arturia's body. Though she existed for years merely as a repressed personality stuck behind Altria's mental barrier, she shares memories of the "normal life" she lived in Fuyuki and possesses all of the knowledge necessary for Altria to utilize abilities such as her Noble Phantasm. Proud, concise and brutally honest, she is all that remains of the King of Knights and retains some semblance of her former honor. Her belief is that without the existence of Altria, whom she first regarded as a "fake" but came to accept as part of herself, she might have been utterly consumed by the Grail and turned into an avatar of destruction.

Following the reunion of severed personalities, Saber Alter displays many of Altria's traits: a huge appetite, a dislike of conceited folk, and a fascination with joyriding on motorcycles to name a few. However, she is noticeably more harsh and aloof, preferring to work alone and disdaining having crowds of people around. She has a grudge against Shirou that prevents her from being able to even hear his name without her mood turning foul and wants nothing more to do with Fuyuki, describing it as "cursed." Her interest in the Sixth Heaven's Feel is mostly based in curiosity, as she considers herself a Holy Grail in her own right and dismisses Altria's wish as a childish dream. Her philosophy is one of duty and fate, as she believes that she must bear the knowledge of humanity's ugliness and use it to oppose that ugliness. She considers herself a direct byproduct of mankind's hero-worship and a "hero of the modern era," an existence that embodies the hypocrisy of heroes and the dark underbelly of the false light men cast to blind themselves to their horrific deeds. Thus she deems her purpose to be similar to that of a Counter-Guardian, since she is one who can save many people by killing the few and bearing the hate of all for the blood on her hands. She is fatalistic, direct and commanding. If King Arthur was an unobtainable shining righteousness, Saber Alter is the shadow that eclipses that righteousness and forces humanity to face its true nature. She has no desire for glory or fame, having concluded that such things are part of the illusory lie of heroes, and views herself as a grim necessity to maintain the balance between darkness and light.