Marcoh's Notes

Eighteenth in the 2003 run, this chapter opens with Lust prowling the National Central Library for Marcoh's notes and clashing with Scar and Gluttony, a fight that leaves the archive in ashes. Robbed of the records, Edward tracks down a former clerk whose flawless memory can rewrite them, and the decoded pages hand him a horror he never wanted, since the stone he seeks is built from living people.

Concealed in the stacks, Scar notes Lust's likeness to his late brother's betrothed before she sics Gluttony on him, and their struggle burns the library down. The next day Maria Ross and Denny Brosh take over guarding the brothers so Armstrong can report in, and the group finds nothing but cinders where the records stood. Hughes phones Mustang to tie Scar to the fire while warning of possible enemies once the colonel is transferred back to the capital. Recalling a bookish clerk from an earlier visit, Edward locates Sheska, dug out from under her own towering stacks, and learns she can reproduce Marcoh's material from memory over three days. Though the finished notes read like a cookbook, Edward suspects a cipher and grinds through the decoding, later steering Hughes toward Sheska to restore lost court files. Meanwhile Scar wakes in an Ishvalan refugee camp, sheltered by a boy named Rick and his grandfather, and reflects on his escape from the homunculi. As the days pass, Ross overhears Edward's dawning terror that the Philosopher's Stone demands human lives.

The episode adapts the chapters The Philosopher's Stone, The Two Guardians, and Separate Paths. Rather than staging their first meeting in the East City sewers as the manga and 2009 series do, this version pits Scar against Lust and Gluttony inside the library, keeping only the broad outline and his bloodied jacket. The colonel's talk of a transfer and Scar's recovery among refugees originally fell after the Laboratory 5 arc. The English dub also names the male branch employee Gerald, though the original Japanese leaves him unnamed.