The Dwarf in the Flask

Suspected in Raven's disappearance, Olivier Armstrong travels to Central and meets Bradley head-on, cutting past any denial to admit she killed Raven for babbling too freely about immortal troops, the true origin of Amestris, and the Führer's own nature. Amused, Bradley grants her a seat within Central Command, demanding full control of Fort Briggs in return, while her loyal officers back north are confident their citadel will not be underestimated. In the capital, Mustang and Hawkeye trade seemingly idle gossip in the cafeteria, but her tapping cup signals a coded exchange, and Roy later decodes her message in private: Selim Bradley is a homunculus.

Father's memory drifts to the last years of Xerxes, where a young slave called Twenty-three tends a cellar and is addressed by a black, gaseous sphere sealed in a flask. Born from the boy's drawn blood, the creature gifts him a proper name, Van Hohenheim, and over years teaches him to read, write, and perform alchemy until he becomes an alchemy apprentice. Summoned by the aging king, the flask being reveals the method for creating a Philosopher's Stone, prompting the monarch to secretly order whole towns slaughtered at points along a nationwide array dug around the country. When the ritual fires, the king and his alchemists die, and the creature reveals he skewed the circle so that he and Hohenheim would stand at its true center. The Gate consumes every citizen of Xerxes, and Hohenheim wakes to a ghost city, confronted by a copy of his own body that the Homunculus fashioned for himself using Hohenheim's blood, splitting the dead nation's souls between them. In 1914 Hohenheim, now a living Philosopher's Stone, reroutes Izumi's failing insides to buy her more time, while up north Edward tells Miles he hopes never to see a Stone larger than Kimblee's pebble.

The episode draws on Chapter 74, Chapter 75, and Chapter 76. Its title card shows the Xerxes Stone array, and the Japanese title is read aloud as "Homunculus" even though its characters literally spell out a phrase describing the tiny figure inside the flask, a duality the American broadcast preserved by listing both meanings. Ed's explanation of Kimblee's alchemy was cut, the Xerxes throne mural was embellished with jewels not present in the manga, and the American airing trimmed both the Miles conversation and the Hohenheim dinner scene for time.