Spirits of the Earth and Sky

CHAPTER ONE

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Original Note:

In this fanfiction, the world of Gaia from Final Fantasy Seven is fused with the world of Spira from Final Fantasy Ten into a combination that looks (mostly) like Spira but works as a fusion of the two that isn’t quite like either of them. Both Fayth and Lifestream exist, and the villains of both games exist, and such giants of power do not blend seamlessly. The main characters are mostly (but not entirely) from Gaia and they are sometimes adapted strangely to fit their new situation. There are a few things in both canons changed, and a few details are quietly fudged and the plot holes they have created are paved over loosely. I think I did a good job at fusing the two worlds, but there are many errors, and I ask the reader to take these errors with a grain of salt.

Since the story is evolving as I write it, there's a good chance that yet more Square games will eventually find themselves tied in. I enjoy cameos.

Furthermore, the fanfiction is written for a woman who understands biology thoroughly and enjoys mad science but written by a woman whose passion is wordplay and whose knowledge of proper medicine is more Renaissance than anything. There are glaring, piteous errors in the treatments of biology, neurology, and physics in this story, warped to fit in a world guided by magic and imagined by a fanciful self-taught beginner astrologist. What few scientific facts I have correct, I thank my moirail and the internet for. The ones I have incorrect, I blame myself for.

Finally, there is one original character. She’s is not related to any canon character and no one falls in love with her. She does have an unusual hair and eye color, but to all complaints about that I see your complaint and raise you every single member of SOLDIER. Here be the wrong series to not want mary sues in.

Edit: All-new illustrations drawn by Amara, my dear friend and the person I wrote this story for! Thank you, Love.

—

In a deep place in Macalania forest, in the dead of winter, the croaks and hums of small beasts, those tough skinned enough for the time of year where rain and wind plagued the dark forest, fell hushed. Hunting animals with glowing eyes shied circular around a small pool, buried in the fronds of bent old trees, and the little fish inside gravitated towards the edges, making way.

They were strange fish, these fish-- nothing ate them, and they, gracefully decked with transparent fins and glittering scales, grew larger than the most pampered pet fish in Bevelle. They were mako fish. They lived in a Lifestream pool, where the energy of Spira sometimes bubbled up in chilling green eruptions and crystallized like sap on the shore, so none dared touch them. Even the big forest insects, which normally nipped at the bright scales of the mako fish, did not bother them today. As the excited fish swam in faster cycles around the edge of the clear pool, the water began to grow bright, like swimming mercury, and bubbled with energy- but not with heat. A dark shape emerged in view far, far below the surface, a shape thin with silk-like hairs floating around it as it floated upwards. The waters turned deep green, and shivered.

A spirit of the Lifestream, a mighty Ancient, broke through the top of the pool almost soundlessly, rising straight out of the water, with her dark hair plastered to her sides. Clear water poured off of her as the waves slowly darkened  and the big fish curiously nibbled at the woman standing on the banks of their home.

Aeris guided them away with her thin hand, shaking from cold and from the effort of moving a physical body. She eventually got her stiff legs to draw her out of the water, fighting against the old-fashioned, off-white dress that clung to her new body, and stepped onto Macalania's land.

There was a gentle mist falling from the sky, left over from an earlier storm, and some rays of the sun, glittering, shone through the rain in what gaps there were in the thick foliage. Aeris moved her arms in dance-like circles to get used to them, smiling, feeling the leaves at her feet and the sun on her face again, and smelled the vines filled with tiny white flowers who clung to strong old trees, and saw, when she finally opened her eyes, the feathers of a curious scarlet bird, who knew an Ancient when he saw her but not what that meant.

She chased the bird away with her awkward motions, giggling. She stretched her arms above her head, and then touched her toes with the tips of her fingers, and then leaped, and then spun, then sighed as she went up and down from the tips of her toes to the balls of her feet. Being an Ancient more attached to the surface of the earth and more used to incarnations than most, she knew how to use a body, but like a man who hasn't steered a ship in many years; she was no longer used to the controls. She felt blood flowing in her, she felt signals travelling all around her body, helping her move this muscle, tense this sinew, she felt the strong bones relying on the help of the little cells and ligaments binding and surrounding them.

She put her body to use and began walking towards Bevelle. She had a problem that needed solving, and only so much time to solve it.

She walked without stopping for three days (since the spirits of the Lifestream. which normally flow through time as a great collective, fueling each other with their own energy, and self-sufficiently made the planet grow with their powers, have such abilities), parting the tangled vines of the trees with silent requests. Sometimes a bird or beast would fly beside her, but soon they would part, busy with their own affairs. As she walked, she stooped down sometimes to heal the leg of a wounded animal, repair a plant's bitten stem, or raise her hand with a glower and purge an infected beast that crouched to pounce on her before they even knew she was aware of it. She would have gladly stayed in the forest and been its spirit for a while, removing the infection from those infected, healing small ills-- but she was not here to tend one wound on the whole, sick planet-- her dear, diseased Spira. She was here for all of Spira.

Eventually, the forest thinned out around her, and she walked on the grass and sprawling weeds alongside a low-traffic dirt road that led to Bevelle. She walked through the suburban slums, scattering the great bouquet of forest flowers she had gathered on her three-day walk wherever there was either enough dirt for them to grow or a person who wanted one. She stopped once before her eventual destination-- at Bevelle's temple, to stand for a while and watch the worshippers, and clasp her hands in prayer.

She left the temple (where the voices of her people sang, who chose to join with the energy of the planet, with the planet, in the planet's blood, and become of its force, and join in its force, and strengthen it) and walked up and down the rising streets of glittering, bejeweled Bevelle, barefoot, in a dress stained with mako brought with her from the Lifestream, with dirt on her hand and leaves not stuck to but being absorbed by her skin. Bevelle, as always, shined in the sunlight, and her eye, modeled after the prehistoric form she had many millennia ago, didn't much like the sight. But she enjoyed the warmth, she enjoyed the careful designs of their jewelers and artisans who decorated the walls of the city and the necks of its citizens, she enjoyed the harmonic music on the street corners, drawn out of strings and vocal chords, and she enjoyed putting a finger to her lips and smiling before she touched the severed leg of a beggar and regrew it.

She raised her head and walked into the building that stood curiously in front of the houses of the government-- ShinRa headquarters. The company, whose expertise was in pulling energy out of the Lifestream and storing it in solid form, were only the successors of a very long line of companies which had done and will do the same. She disregarded the disdainful (and distrusting) looks that the workers sitting in the marble lobby gave her as they tried to discern what race she was, and what she was doing in ShinRa headquarters with a simple dress, no jewels, and unbound hair. She paused a second to admire the actually quite masterful architecture of the windowed upper walls and domed ceiling of the building, which were decorated in quiet, formal, floral designs in marble and good wood.

She eventually approached the wooden desk at the back of the fern-decorated and spacious meeting hall, and smiled, saying in a voice she hoped sounded human-- "I would like to make an appointment with Professor Hojo, please, dear."

The receptionist arched her eyebrows, and gracefully deflected. "You're gonna have to talk with his personal secretary." She pointed with her fountain pen to the dumbwaiter, a metal contraption with thin mako pipes and a man standing in a severe, black outfit, waiting for customers. "Fiftieth floor, five Gil for the dumbwaiter."

"Oh my," said Aeris, putting a hand on her cheek. "Five for both up and down, or five for up and five for down?"

"Five both times," she said, turning pointedly away from Aeris.

Aeris sighed and removed exactly ten paperclips from the side of her desk where she kept a small stack of office supplies. She changed them as she walked leisurely over the elevator, admiring whoever found a way to make sure that the noonday sun lit every single corner of the long room. She approached the dumbwaiter with a smile, and made a giggling bet with the assistant that she would wait at least three months to meet with the professor.

 

-

 

Outside of the recovery house a thousand feet up on Mount Gagazet, overlooking the silent Calm Lands where dry winds tossed around golden grasses, Cloud Strife struggled to breathe.

They cut down the Ether in his Ether/oxygen mix just a few days ago. No one knew if it would do anything. They hoped that cutting down the Ether would slowly abate some of his more painful symptoms, but SPIRIT recovery was a maybe ten-year-old science, and no one knew whether their attempts caused useful agony or pointless agony yet.

Anyway, everyone knew cutting his Ether would cause him incredible pain, but what could they do? They were trying to wean him from an addiction, and that was painful, and that would always be painful.

He sat on the porch, in the cold air, because he was nauseous, because he couldn't eat during transitions. He stared at the red marks on his skin, unthinking, as he breathed.

Breathing too much oxygen burned his lungs. That's what happened when a person was strapped to a tank with only Ether to breathe for some years. But Ether was poisonous, and the poison would kill him almost no matter what, and the 'almost' inspired years of therapy. The great chunks of skin and muscle missing on his sides didn't help breathing either, since his lungs weren't totally sure how or where to expand anymore.

His brain ached and his muscles spasmed because they weren't used to the oxygen content. He tried to breathe more slowly instead of in the hyper rhythm that he had to when he was breathing mostly Ether, but no matter what he did, it hurt, it scraped his throat raw, it made him dizzy, it gave him a headache, it made him unable to think or move much, so the twenty-something army veteran sat on the porch of the recovery home full of mutants and survivors and cried.

He would like to say he was a hardened soul that never cried or spoke of his pain except at his most tragic moments, but he was an invalid, and there wasn’t an invalid in that home that didn’t spend at least one night in the week sobbing and cursing heaven. The pain of the mind abates, and heals with time, but the body can hurt forever if it’s been prepared for that. And the pain of the body cannot be tricked away or ignored. It keeps hurting, and doesn’t grow dull through repetition.

Cloud would leave SPIRIT and all the ‘help’ it was trying to give him but the people holding him here were the same people that assigned him to testing in the Nibelheim lab, the low concrete building under the rolling lighting on the dark and tempestuous plain, constantly battered by wind that tore down tall trees but almost never calmed with rain. Cloud signed up for years of duty, and they decided he would serve his years in military-sanctioned recovery after he tried to run away.

So this is where he would stay, as scientists kinder but with knives just as painful as the last ones tried to wean him off of the Ether that was killing him (despite the fact that he could die without it), heal his scars, regrow his muscle, and solve the mental issues that made him unable to look people in the face and fall nonverbal when a question made him nervous. His only respite was that they never found out who he was, since he had entered the army too young and never gave anyone proper ID, so his family did not have to ever be informed of his state.

He fiddled with the pressure knob on his tank, seeing if making more or less ether/air flow through the tubes to his mask would dull the pain a little. The quick transitions just made his head pound, so he sat still and didn’t think about anything for a while.

He just stared at the patches of jewel colored weeds that swayed on the bright, open, totally flat Calm Lands, and felt his pain, and only felt his pain. There was a decent cloud cover that spring day, so the light shifted over the earth in visible patches, reaching across the plains, cooling the brightness of the spring sun. He didn’t think anything about what he saw, because there was no room for his head for anything but the pain. But it was a quiet site, repetitive like a river, and if anything would cool sore eyes, it was the Calm Lands. The Ancients made this place as an incarnate mercy, thought Cloud in one of his more lucid moments.

He came from a family of old believers, the sort that are hidden in the far corners of plains and forests across Wilderia Continent, who still said prayers and gave food to the Lifestream as well as the Fayth. Most of the people of Spira, the educated people of its cities and the wise temple priests, believed only in the Fayth and their opponent Sin, and called the old stories about the Lifestream and the Ancient race superstition. But Cloud’s family came from the area of the Thunder Plains where there were yearly festivals held on harvest day to praise and thank the force of the world that caused crops to grow and the frost to thaw, where dried herbs were bent into wreaths for every brow and offerings of food sunk in rivers in specially made stone jars to depths where the Fayth would hopefully receive them. They believed in the Fayth and their Aeons and Sin as well, since these things were all visible and obvious and there was no denying them, but these were only their facts—their religion was the religion of the earth, not of the temples of the Fayth.

There was no consensus, actually, about whether the force of the Lifestream made the planet or was made along with it, but Cloud silently thanked them for the Calm Lands anyway.

Eventually, it grew darker and colder, and bigger swatches of grey shadow swept lumbering across the gold fields, and one of the kinder orderlies asked Cloud if he wanted to come in for dinner. Cloud didn’t want dinner, but he accepted her arm to help him stand up and walk in. He may as well try to sleep. Besides, he was slowly getting used to the new oxygen concentration—he figured tomorrow would be a bit of a better day.

Unless it was just better enough to madden him with boredom or with guilt.

It was in the middle of the night, after Cloud had been lying awake for seven hours with his headache and a quicker wind than usually has started blowing off of the field and up the mountain, where it rattled the windows of the recovery house playfully, that the house received company. Cloud deliriously heard orderlies walking down the hall to answer the door, and a strangely cheerful voice greeting them with words he didn’t catch but whose high pitch hurt his head. Eventually, she was told to quiet down, and all he heard was the occasional step and creak as the visitor was settled down.

He did not know who it could be. Usually, midnight arrivals were deathly ill and previously forgotten victims of the SPIRIT experiments whose transfer into recovery could not wait. Perhaps she was sent from ShinRa to check up on their progress, but he didn’t know why she would show up in the middle of the night. A summoner on quest who needed refuge—maybe, but she wouldn’t be cheerful either, this close to the Zanarkand ruins.

(He didn’t know whether ShinRa thought it was funny to put their most miserable invalids that close to the ruins, but it wasn’t like Sin being slammed into a mountain by an irate summoner would put most of them through any more pain than they already endured.)

He slept for a few hours, and crawled out of his bed at five because he couldn’t lie down any longer. He shouldered his metal tank onto his back (since he still couldn’t bear to drag a side tank of oxygen mix along with him) and went to the breakfast hall to ask for coffee and nothing else.

He was right, he wasn’t in as much pain as he was the day before—which meant he had enough headspace to be depressed. After he had managed to quietly ask for coffee (and received coffee and a full Bevelle-style breakfast, with light curries and yogurt, which made his stomach twist with panic because he knew he would not be able to dare waste it) he shuffled into the cafeteria, where no one, literally no one was awake but a nurse on night cleaning duty and a smiling woman sitting at a table alone with no food in front of her wearing nothing but a light-colored, simple dress.

The visitor, thought Cloud. He wondered how he could convince the nurse to just let him take his food to his room to eat when the visitor waved him down to the seat across from her. When he finally sat down and looked up at her, he was suddenly glad he did.

She did not look native, not at all, nor did she look Al Bhed, or Jenovine, or even as if she were from far-off Wutai where people are darker. She had a face that was not only foreign—it was not modern. Her eyes were spaced differently, her hair was a sort of chestnut color not often seen in Spira anymore, her cheeks bones were of an odd shape, she was incredibly short—maybe a full head shorter than him, and he was not a tall man. He knew what this woman was—he had been told stories about Ancients, whose bodies are those that human’s cousins wore thousands of years ago, would walk the earth and ask for boons. He could hardly believe it, but he had seen the painted faces of the Ancients thousands of times in ceremonies, and if she were not one, then she was their closest descendant.

“I don’t have any bracelets,” said Cloud suddenly.

The woman’s eyes grew wide in curiosity. “No?”

“No.”

“That doesn’t seem like much of a problem to me, you don’t have to sort of look that goes well with lots of jewelry,” she said.

 Cloud turned red. “I. When a travelling Ancient in disguise came to the young lady, as said in a certain parable, and asked her for gil, she had no gil and gave him a fine bracelet instead. And the ancient blessed her. That was dumb. Sorry.” It was an effort to speak that much, and the loss of oxygen started renewing his headache.

“I haven’t heard the story! How did you know, though,” she asked, he voice soft and inquisitive, her fingers unevenly laced, “that I was an Ancient?” 

“No one else could tell?” asked Cloud, reminding himself to breathe deeply. “Your face is… alien. They say the Ancients weren’t human, but similar to humans. What else could you be?”

“People in Bevelle just thought I was ugly!” she said with a big grin.

Cloud shook his head, looking down at the table. “People in Bevelle are stupid. Sorry.”    

“Well, I can’t believe it’s your fault. And no, I met a very intelligent dumbwaiter operator when I was there… there’s always a few good people hiding in the corners.”

Cloud didn’t disagree out loud, but Aeris could see the frustration on his downturned face. Aeris grew worried as she talked to him—this was the sort of posture, the sort of voice, that a child who has been abused since the beginning of their life has. Well, she heard about Hojo, when she was They, and They were enraged then at his atrocities—did she expect strong, smiling victims? She decided not to push the ‘people are good’ angle to a man who looked like he mostly knew demons. “Are you what they call a SPIRIT? It took me forever to realize that by SPIRIT they meant a sort of human.”

“Yeah. That’s me. I’m a test subject in the SPIRIT project, most people got to calling us all SPIRITs now.”

“Are SPIRITs specially classified?”

“No, they don’t have to make any rules or specifications for us. You’re not going to see any of us on the streets.”

“I’m surprised you move, looking at you,” said Aeris, who had gotten a sick feeling in her stomach every time the man twisted around enough for his black shirt to fold and show her that he was thinner on his sides than any human being could be without a corset or a few holes.

“Yeah. That’s why we're not out much.”

Aeris sighed as Cloud cast his face down again and stirred anxiously with his coffee. He wanted to ask the Ancient what she wanted from him, but he wasn’t sure if there was a way to ask politely. He wanted to know what on Earth an Ancient was doing going to the surface to visit a recovery home, since he couldn’t imagine what spiritual quest would lead her here. But he was too shocked by the encounter itself to cobble together any questions about it. His head was swimming with shock, and a bit of disbelief. Aeris, for her part, was trying to examine his face, and see how much of his downcast visage was chiseled in anxiety and how much in trauma, the parts she could see behind the foggy face-mask covering his nose and mouth anyway. Cloud lifted the visor for just a second to lift the shaking coffee cup to his mouth, took an infinitesimal sip, and snapped his mask back over his face, panting from holding his breath.

“I am called Aeris,” said she is a lighter, less cheerful voice than the one she had been using before.

Cloud nodded, and said, “Cloud Strife. Native of Nibelheim. It’s a small town in the Thunder Plains.”

“I always liked the Thunder Plains,” said Aeris. “They have their own atmosphere. It’s dark, but vibrant, and everything crackles with anticipation, nothing ever stops moving, but the grasses and the weeds and the air all roll and turn… its always warm, and always dry, and its just so strange… there’s no where else on all the planet like it, I promise you.”

“No?”

“On another continent, there are sand dune deserts, which have a similar atmosphere, but they’re too bright and not as exciting. Or as romantic. Romantic in the sense that they are evocative, dramatic, intense… like an opera in the sky, riding in on the cloud-palaces of the Fayth.”

“Do they have those?”

“What?”

“Palaces. The Fayth.” Cloud couldn’t help asking, even if he was sure, somewhere, that it was impertinent. He had read about great priests having arguments about these things.

“Oh,” said Aeris, smiling, “not as such. It’s more like the clouds and the mists are their palaces as they are. The Fayth are beings of the air, so they rest in the heavy air of the clouds.”

“Is that how it is?”

“Yes,” said Aeris. She drew a circle with her finger on the plastic table to represent Spira. “Under Spira, there is the Lifestream, and over Spira, the realm of the Fayth, which is a ring of gentle and thin vapors that surround Spira and protect it, for the most part, from anything harmful beyond this world. The Lifestream’s element is not easily defined by what visual comparatives we have, but the people in the Lifestream, we who were the Ancients, we are spirits of the earth. We came from earth, we live in earth, we have bound our natures to the earth and become part of the planet in a way that makes us, essentially, earth, because we are factors in earth.”

Cloud nodded minutely as Aeris spoke, a nervous tick that showed he was listening. “The village priestess always described the Lifestream as water, though.”

Aeris drew winding lines inside her sphere as she spoke. “It’s a good picture, and it does really look a lot like a river, doesn’t it? That’s not quite what it is, though. Some say it is the blood stream of the planet, but it has a different function, actually- if Spira is a body, the Lifestream is its defense system—the part that expels viruses, heals the cracks rent by volcanoes and the turn of the planet around its sun, and gives all the other parts of the body of Spira encouragement and energy to grow. The Lifestream was originally just this, and it was nonsentient—it was the Planet’s own will, and the Planet’s own life force, which manifested in all its life—we call the mind of the human the human itself, and the Lifestream, the mind of Spira, is Spira. It’s complicated theory. It is thinking will and the power to act alike, which humans don’t usually have. When my people, the Ancients, decided to join our souls permanently with the Lifestream instead of using its force to reincarnate, we became of the Lifestream—of Spira—and therefore spirits of the Earth.”

“I always forget…” muttered Cloud, also sketching little circles and streams on his side of the table, “That the Ancients were once mortal like us.”

Aeris smiled fondly. “Yes. The Lifestream was there since the start of Spira, but we Ancients, whose humble roots first began to grow some tens of thousands of years ago, only joined with the Lifestream recently, according to Spira’s memory.”

“And Ancients were not the same as modern humans.”

“No, modern humans are a cousin species to what the Ancients were. It means we descended from similar branches weren’t quite the same.” She looked at him inquisitively. “Are there really churches that teach that the Ancients were once mortals? I thought that now everyone believes we were immortal spirits originally.”

“A lot of people do. I guess I just got lucky enough to grow up in a truly backwards town,” said Cloud with a wry grin.

Aeris giggled. “And you know that the Fayth are even younger than the Ancients. Well, the some thousand Fayth that everyone celebrates now, there have always been air spirits, but we don’t have to get into that.”

“Yes. They were made by one powerful Ancient to defeat a great threat. But…” Cloud bashfully looked down.

“It didn’t work,” said Aeris. “You can say it.”

“I didn’t want to be disrespectful.”

Aeris cleared her throat, and waited for Cloud, who had the expression of a guilty dog, to look up at her.

She poked him in the forehead. “Then don’t lie. The best way to be respectful is to treat someone equally! It shows you want them to face the truth and grow, not sit surrounded by lies and stagnate.”

“Um…” Cloud looked down again. “Okay.”

Aeris let the less-than-impressive response lie. “The Fayth, as you know them, were created some thousand years ago by an Ancient to try to fend off a creature called Jenova, who came from space and tried to infect the Lifestream with her toxin.”

Cloud startled. “I was told they were created to fight Sin.”

“Sin and Jenova are close relations. It’s complicated, so let me return to my original topic. The relations of the Lifestream and the Fayth. The Fayth were, just like those Ancients which make up part of the Lifestream, originally mortal. They willingly became spirits— again just like the Ancients—to try to protect Spira. The Ancients, and all the other forces in the Lifestream, are earth creatures, so it is difficult for them to leave the earth, and since their function is to preserve and protect, it is difficult for most of them to fight. Fayth were made, purposefully, as spirits not of earth but air, who could move freely above ground, and tend to the surface affairs of Spira instead of being hidden below, tending to its inner needs like us in the Lifestream. They are made with the ability to fight, and they protect Spira with their violence, just like the Lifestream does with its peace. Besides, Fayth are all individuals, and the Lifestream... we have individual minds, I suppose, but we are a collective consciousness, and one cannot act rashly or fight recklessly because the hesitation of the rest checks them. We exist always together, but with a separate entity... it's hard to explain. The souls who willingly became Fayth were paid poorly for their war service, however," sighed Aeris, her tone turning mournful.

Cloud frowned. "How so?"

"Some hoped to be allowed to return to the Lifestream after death, like most humans-- to re-enter the life-force of the planet, and stay in the planets cycle, rebirthing. But the Lifestream is a force of earth, and it accepts spirits and creatures of earth-- Ancients, humans, animals, plants, stones, all that has matter and can be made matter anew-- but it cannot accept formless spirits of the air, so the Fayth and their Aeons are kept to the air, and the loss of their spirits weakens the Lifestream."

Cloud considered this. "It's a fair trade for the defense. It's the Fayth and their Aeons that defeat Sin every time and give us the Calms."

"Fair for us, not for them."

"True." Cloud looked down for a minute. "I must thank you."

"It's appreciated, but you don't have to!"

"This is more about the Lifestream... about Spira... about anything than I have any right to know. Why are you telling me these things? Why give one crippled, worthless man the secrets of the Ancients?"

Aeris kept her hurt in her eyes and away from her voice. "They aren't secrets, really, as I see them, anyone could put the facts together... there are endless records about my people, my world of the Lifestream, about the Fayth, about the two menaces that plague Spira... it's all there for people to read. If there's a secret, the secret is somehow in the belief, not the knowledge. And I am telling you because I think you, or one of your colleagues, could help me with something."

"Me? Help an Ancient?" Cloud swallowed his bitter doubt with his sweeter awe. "How? If I'm any use."

"You could well be! I knew you would have a lot of questions about my Lifestream, but I noticed the SPIRIT didn't have to wonder too much about the nature of the Fayth."

Cloud frowned. "Of course not. Hojo's experiements..."

"Were an attempt to turn humans into walking Fayth trapped in their bodies and thus controllable without a pact-- don't worry, I know what the SPIRIT project is, and I have my opinions about it," Aeris said with an affronted sniff that almost looked mocking on her, since she didn't have a face for serious disdain. "What Hojo doesn't know-- what I hope that gross old man doesn't know-- is how similar his experiments are to the experiments of another creature."

Cloud's stomach dropped slowly. "Who else?"

"Jenova."

"The thing you mentioned."

"Jenova," said Aeris, in an uncustomary monotone, "is the enemy of the Lifestream. We are the immune system of the Planet, and she is a malign cancer, malevolent, hateful, and ever eager to hurt Spira wherever she can."

"Why haven't I heard of Jenova before?"

Aeris leaned back in her chair uncomfortably, gazing at the just rising sun casting scarlet and golden light over the bumps and rushes of the Calm Lands. Shadows lengthened, but they were tipped with soft pale yellow, and a wild thrush or two sang in the patches of shaded weeds around the recovery house in the mountains. "Many reasons. One is that the Fayth and their Aeons, as well as Sin, are all visible, and the Lifestream and Jenova-- except for certain holy and unholy places in Spira-- are invisible. Another reason is that the legend of Jenova is tied with the legend of the Lifestream, which was suppressed when the Temples of the Fayth wanted to gain power."

Cloud impulsively made a rude gesture favored among his village that was mostly reserved for Fayth-people. Aeris tried not to giggle. "Besides, Jenova herself likes to remain quiet and unseen, and all attempts to prove she exists have been surprisingly difficult-- people stopped listening to Ancients like me when we started insisting that drawing up Spira's force and saving it in solid form to power airships and walking mechina was weakening Spira and ShinRa should, of course, shut down immediately."

"Oh, that actually makes a lot of sense."

Aeris nodded and sighed. "There's more than just that, but it will make sense when I talk more clearly of Jenova later. If you're interested."

"Interested in what?"

"Helping me."

Aeris smiled softly and her smile crinkled up the sides of her strange, wide face. Cloud looked at her hand, first startled, then worried. "If you expect to pull me up with that," he said sadly, "You should know that half the time, SPIRIT ether addicts fall back down."

Aeris nodded, and put her hand down on the table where Cloud might place his on top of hers instead. "The Lifestream grows weaker as the Fayth and our beloved humans weaken us accidentally. We have enemies, and our enemies seek to poison and defile our Spira. I believe that Hojo's terrible mistake could do us good, in that the power of the SPIRITs-- though you seem weak-- could aid us against our enemies."

"So you need a SPIRIT, is that it?"

"I do, and I think you would be best?"

"Why?" asked Cloud quietly.

Aeris cocked her head to the side. "Don't you realize?"

"No."

Aeris shook her head. She reminded herself not to be coy with this one, there was no point in teasing someone who wasn't joking about his defects. "I expected to spend a week in this facility trying to convince a hardened, traumatized, wounded veteran who has been abused by his command that I really am a mythical being from a lost race that lives in the manifest life force of my planet. But the first person who I ran into was you, Cloud. It was like you were put here for me."

"I was put here to recover," said Cloud blandly, then after a beat he flushed and said "sorry. You didn't mean that literally."

"I didn't, but you bring up an excellent point!" Aeris clapped her hands together. "If you agreed to come with me-- to travel across Spira, to the bright city of Bevelle, across the dark Thunder Plains, to the Jenovine Chasamaecum, to the silent and vine-draped Temples of the Fayth on my quest to rid the world of its virus and its tumor (so I respectively call them)-- wouldn't you end up in a lot of pain?"

Cloud looked up at her through his eyelashes. "Could you pacify my pain?"

Aeris held his gaze for as long as he could manage. "If I can find a way to get my earth-based and physical healing to work on an etherized SPIRIT, who resembles a Fayth as much as a human, then I could. But it might take some time. And once I had the cure, if the cure exists, I promise I would do all in my power to spread it. "

Cloud nodded slowly. "And why do you need a SPIRIT? You said Hojo's work reminded you of..."

"Of how Jenova made Sin."

"Wow."

"It's daunting," she admitted, "And not a positive connection to make, I know. You are nothing like Sin. But the transformation method that Hojo attempted on you and that Jenova succeeded in are eerily similar, from what I've heard."

"Yikes," muttered Cloud, and Aeris stifled a giggle. "What would you need from me if I came?"

He was cautious, but Aeris knew he hated his decrepit body, and that he would accept her offer of a potential healing if it was feasible. "Two things, neither pleasant. I need you to let me, and likely other forces of the Lifestream, enter your physical body-- I'll explain exactly how later-- to try to see how your inner chemistry has been altered."

"Bothers me less than some examinations I've had so far."

"And I would need...' Aeris trailed off. "And you wouldn't have to do this all at once..." she blushed. "I'm very sorry."

Cloud waited.

"I would need you to tell me, in detail, every experiment that Hojo worked on you." Aeris held her gaze on his downcast eyes, which flicked around the room a few ways, then followed his fingers pulling his hands towards him on the table.

“Well, alright,” he said, shrugging.

“Alright?” asked Aeris, head cocked.

“I’ve gone over every detail three times for three doctors. Don’t assume you can overload me with any pain, trauma, embarrassment, or discomfort. There isn’t much you can do. The only issue will be the amount of time it takes to go over about three or four years of experimentation in detail.”

Aeris made a sort of ‘huh’ sound, and examined Cloud with her hands on her hips and bright eyes. “You’re more capable than I expected to find anyone here.”

“Invalids are very capable people,” argued Cloud, flushed,” they’re just in too much pain to exercise their capabilities most of the time.”

“Well, I can believe that. I’ll have to keep you as pain-free as I can while travelling, then.”

“Can you do that? You said all the ether in my system would make that difficult.”

“It will make curing you very difficult, but I think I can convince your fried nerves and muscles to relax, or, if nothing else, block your pain receptors efficiently. Which means we’ll have to be very careful getting around, but I’m an Ancient. I can get around through astral projection if I want.”

Cloud said nothing, but nodded. Aeris decided that this was her cue to get the ball rolling. “Do you have a lot of personal belongings here?”

“A few.”

“Pack them up. I’ll be telling the staff that I found my fiancé that I didn’t dare describe last night because I feared the years had changed him too much and that he had never given his real name to ShinRa.”

“Right on both accounts, actually.”

“Oh? Than what’s your actual name?” asked Aeris as she stood up from the cheap plastic chair, stretching her already stiff and uncomfortable legs.

“It’s Cloud Strife. I’ve been telling ShinRa that my name is Tidus for years now.”

Aeris paused to observe Cloud again. “You gave me your true name.” Than she added, “I gave you mine, but that’s a cheaper gift in my case, I think.”

Cloud clasped his hands on the table in nervousness, looked down on them, and said, in a slightly tremulous voice. “We People of the Plains, humble and thankful, give back to the Lifestream all we have to give, because the Lifestream gave us everything. We give to the Ancients all they ask, should they ask, for the Ancients have promised us all of happiness.” He cleared his throat. “It’s a ritual prayer. I figured a name wasn’t really an expensive gift for an Ancient.”

Aeris bit her lip. “If you feel like you HAVE to go on this quest with me…”

“I am going,” said Cloud.

“I’m not sure I understand why.”

“Neither am I. But I’m going, because you asked, and because I…”

“Am sick of being in pain.”

Cloud cleared his throat, tilting his head to the side and blinking quickly. “A dog can be kicked over and over, it still begs for food if hungry. Because it won’t just die. Even if it’s almost been killed. We don’t deserve to live. We can’t really deserve to take up space on the planet. But living a day without pain is a sort of beauty appreciated on its own even if its someone like me hoarding it.”

“Like how a sunny day needs no excuses,” said Aeris wistfully, and fought her temptation to argue with Cloud.  “Then let’s travel before any clouds build. Gather your stuff, and then meet me on the front porch as soon as you can. Climbing down Gagazet is going to be exciting!”

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CHAPTER TWO

On the slopes of Mount Gagazet, where everything was warm with the ripe heat of the only summer month in which no face of the mountain sees snow, Aeris explained to Cloud why temporarily blocking his pain receptors was a terrible idea and would probably make his situation worse and could easily get him wounded, and then she temporarily blocked his pain receptors. “I’ll cook up a better solution once we’re settled on the Calm Lands for the night,” she promised.

Cloud wasn’t really listening. He was enjoying breathing without his lungs stinging, and looking into the sun without tears foiling his eyesight. And stepping without his legs feeling like they were being pulled to pieces in his muscles. The rocks of Gagazet weren’t comfortable, and they still poked at his feet through his flimsy shoes, but they were warm, and wildflowers and weeds sprang up in the gaps between huge boulders, the tiny graceful filigree of the great powers of earth. The sun was turning high above in the sky and its rays tossed around his unkempt and long blonde hair, and attempted to ruffle his old, dirty clothes—his black clothes from home, worlds from starched hospital gowns. Aeris jumped lightly ahead of him from stone to stone, describing the exact way he should descend in order to do the least damage to his pain-dulled system.

On the way, she chattered more in-depth about the purpose and nature of the Lifestream, since Cloud kept asking for more detail about it, and he enjoyed watching her loose, long, chestnut hair flutter in the breeze, like seaweed in water. She was cheerful, but not inquisitive, she kept her happiness to herself, and let it glimmer on her like the sun on the water, but did not force its light on others like a searching sun ray, determined to light dark places.

Eventually, as it was getting towards evening, they officially stepped off of the overgrown, fallen stones at the mountains face and onto packed, solid dirt. Aeris smiled the second her bare foot met the soft intertwined grass with deep, tangling roots, and her smile was even evident to Cloud behind her. He sat on the earth beside her, and stared at her closed eyes and blissful face, waiting.

“I would say it’s like coming home,” Aeris said, “but it is coming home. I know exactly how Spira moves beneath me, and I can feel its shifts, and the spin of its turn, and I can feel everywhere its pulsating life and movement, its dance in space…” Aeris looked at Cloud. “Now, let’s settle down and try to get your pain numbed without killing you. Your feet are probably in shreds by now.”

“They are,” marveled Cloud, lifting them up to see their bloody patches, “but I can’t even feel that!”

Aeris laughed nervously. “Okay. How long will that tank you have on your back last you?”

Cloud shrugged. “Usually they last months. I’m down to not needing a lot of Ether at once.”

“Wow. They must compress them well. Like I said, I can get ether myself if we must, but I’m hoping to find a way to wean you off of it fast… painfully, but fast.”

“Already more than I can hope for, with any amount of pain,” Cloud promised.

Aeris nodded. “Sit down. When I work, it’s good to have as much of you grounded to Spira as possible.” So saying, she flopped down, her long skirt billowing around her. Cloud hefted his tank from off of his shoulders, careful not to disturb the tubes connecting to his mask (since though Aeris said breathing pure air wouldn’t hurt him right now, it would be a bad idea) and set that down, letting gravity pull him with it. He crossed his legs and straightened the tubes headed to his tank before nodding that he was ready.

“First,” said Aeris, “I am going to run a diagnostic, in which I use my ability to feel the mechanisms of a working body to figure out what isn’t working in you. While I do that, you will describe what is physically wrong with your body, and what the doctors have done to fix you so far, to the best of your knowledge. Don’t worry about telling me how you got to this state yet, that story can come while it comes.” Cloud agreed. Aeris put a finger on her chin. “Did I forget anything? Ah... the diagnosis itself shouldn’t hurt, unless…. eh, it shouldn’t hurt.”

“Good to hear,” said Cloud, and he shut his eyes and began to regulate his breathing as well he could. He developed this habit after several years of seeing how too much or too little air and ether could cause a riot of pain in his head.

Aeris listened to the wind for a minute. It was wandering slowly over the plains, savoring the smell of little yellow bell flowers and the warm, sun-bleached grasses as they swayed. The layers of Spira were deep beneath, clay and stone and warm plasma mixed together in veins, with the motes of the Lifestream moving fast between. Her fellows whispered to her, though dimly, not as clearly as one they would have. It was still enough. With their thoughts in her head (since it wasn’t just hers) she lifted her arms, palms crossed, in front of Cloud’s third eye. ‘Can you see me?’ she wondered, but got no reply. All the same, he had known her for what she was.

“I am going to look inside you now,” she said softly.

Cloud was silent.

Aeris examined his skin first, dancing over it with her moving perceptions, like the stream dances on stone, and saw that it was dried and flaking in many areas. “Tell me what the doctors say is wrong with you.”

“The two main problems are the effects of overuse of lightning magic on a biological body and a forced addiction to ether, which has also been over used on my body,” Cloud whispered.

“That explains the damage to your skin, it does feel like a lightning burn. It has been both killed and fused in spots… but a lot of the damage has been removed?”

“Grafted over with new skin.”

Aeris tentatively explored the crevices in Cloud’s side. “You are… missing huge chunks of skin, muscle, and sinew in both your sides.”

“Hojo cut bits off. The Doctors weren’t sure what to do about.”

“Surprised you still move. You’ve regrown some muscle in very odd patterns, but I’d have to find a way to break up the scar tissue and regrow a lot of your sides. Which would be easy, if it weren’t for the ether addiction.” Aeris looked further into Cloud. “Did the doctors say anything about your nerves?”

“They barely avoided screaming about them. Many of them have stopped working, malfunctioned, or stopped understanding what they should do and have started sending incorrect signals…”

“Any involuntary twitches?”

“Sometimes.”

“I figured. This would mostly be the result of all the lightning too, I think.”

“The doctors said the same.”

“Mostly, they’re fried up… you look like a radio that’s been shocked or dunked in water. Nothing knows what it should be doing so it keeps sending frantic error signals that your brain translated as pain. Fantastic lack of brain damage, though.”

“Doctors said I ended up a lot better than the other patients in the brain department.”

“It seems you did. Luck, or varied experiments, maybe. I’ll decide later when I know more.” Aeris slipped her strands or perception—her psychological sensory organs that extended from her like invisible whiskers or invisible roots, that all Ancients counted among their senses—downwards and deeper into his bloodstream. “Oh, here are the effects of the ether. Pretty addiction-typical, but worse.”

“They say that the part of my body that usually absorbs and uses air has been… blocked or altered? I forget. Blocked or altered by Ether instead and insists on taking ether, even though ether cannot sustain a body.”

“A living body,” Aeris clarified. “That’s about right. This severe lack of air in your body has caused many shut downs and failures all over… most of which they appear to have replaced or tried to treat, though nothing’s going to work if you still need to breathe tanks of ether, which has a similar constitution, but cannot keep you alive… that Professor really doesn’t know what he’s doing, if the hodge-podge mess he’s made here is anything to judge by.”

“He doesn’t, I’ve seen his notes. He skips entire parts of the procedure in his write-ups.”

Aeris shuddered. “Alright, I see what is physically happening here… and if you had been being zapped by the natural lightning of a storm and infused with… oh, something like xenon instead, I could take care of it.”

“But you can’t.”

“I don’t know how to,” corrected Aeris. “Because your nerves were damaged by magic-made lightning, and your receptors jumbled and confused by ether, which has spiritual properties and makes up a spiritual body, there’s more than your body affected. Your soul and nature are also affected, and because of that, you could be forced to reject my healing. Water will nourish a plant just fine, but boiling water will kill it. That sort of thing. What might be happening…” Aeris hummed for a while. “If it has to do with electrons... and charge… maybe if I somehow grounded… When you consider that the soul is mostly the shadow of the mind reflected in the molecular… like…”

After Aeris was quiet for a moment, Cloud whispered, with hesitation, “So there really is a soul in everything?”

Aeris slipped her perception as stealthily as she could into the area between atoms, hoping not to tangle the threads. Her voice dropped into a monotone. “The man who accepts that I am an immortal spirit of earth asks me if there are souls in humans. Yes. Here, on Spira, we have souls. For one thing, the energy of the planet—the power, or charge, dancing between all the specks of mass of the world, brought out of the earth when ground by teeth or grown in the womb, charging with charge-- that is in all living things. We are all made up of electricity, of energy, and that is an untamable, nonmaterial force. Energy is life-force, and it makes matter dance, and so all human bodies are bound with a will to live, with movement pulled out of the ground. Second, the mind casts a shadow backwards and forwards called memory—it recalls and predicts other lives through the impression those lives has left, and the mind imprints its desires on the body and convinces it this way and that, convinces it to die, to live, to change or to remain—the power of the mind bends a fabric invisible in space, and that pressure, human-shaped, on the dimension of energy, magic, and power, is the moving soul. To see the world through the eyes of the Lifestream, which sees always the dimensions of energy and power, sees great spheres of magic constantly pulling energy in from and out to the world around them, because they desire, and their desires, positive or negative, cast shields of positivity or negativity around them that differently charges the world of magic around them—that is the power of the human soul.”

“Okay,” said Cloud.

Aeris dropped her hands to Spira, and opened her eyes. “I have an idea of what I could do,” said she, her voice brightening with every word, as her pupils dilated to adjust to the sunlight, “but it will take some time, and I apologize if I make mistakes. I can’t do it all right now anyway, the sudden change would kill you.”

“What would you do?” asked Cloud, who felt more than a bit confused and overwhelmed.

“Attack the project like it is a most monumental, impossible undertaking, and convince every one of your nerves, by name, to regrow, and every receptor in your blood and brain to forget ether and re-allow oxygen, and every forgotten cell of muscle and skin in your sides that they want to come back, based on almost forgotten data hid deep in the tiny memory banks of your clever body. If there is a more efficient way, I will find it in ex… practice. You SPIRITs,” said she, in a strange tone, “Were shoddily but thoroughly made. I am untangling a knot like the knots of grass-roots, in an effort to replant you into healthier soil before you wither.”

“Well, I haven’t withered yet.”

“Good, because this will take time,” said Aeris, standing and wiping her hands off on her skirt. “I took the liberty of healing your feet of wounds and convincing your skin to register pain, but not your bloodstream, which will demand ether. Don’t ask me how. I think I cheated a little,” she admitted. “For now, let’s walk to a nice camp site I remember from the way up here. Once you are sleeping, I will begin healing work.”

“Will you not sleep?”

“No,” said Aeris, and let the mystery rest there.

Cloud stood shakily, and Aeris knew better than to offer him a hand. He appreciated the view of the sun set for a while, which spread wide over the Calm Lands like a silk skirt stretched thin and transparent over the floor. He stretched his muscles, which seemed to experience the sensation as odd, unexpected pressure (but would probably be screaming at him if uninhibited.) “Lead the way,” he said.

Aeris did so trippingly, pacing the wide plains with the tips of her toes, as if floating. She moved silently, and Cloud trundled behind her, enjoying the warm air and the pleasant sight of the horizon turning colors from shimmering red to deep violet and indigo, like the variegate colors of a beetle’s wings.

After about an hour, Aeris found a boulder not far from the mountain, where an old wooden hut, clearly used by a traveler, was built, or perhaps propped, against the rock’s smoothest face, so that its rusty-hinged door would face the dawn when the sun rose. Outside the houses there was a fire pit with a metal grill, a garden where vegetables would grow some years if anyone had means to plant them, and a line for hanging up laundry (which Aeris said could be washed at a spring about a mile away.) Inside the wooden door with a sign that said ‘all travelers welcome,’ there was an unlit room with a grass—covered floor that sported a heap of blankets and rugs and one battered cauldron. “Sometimes there’s much more,” said Aeris, “Sometimes absolutely nothing. Depends on who went through earlier, and how much they had to survive with.”

“It smells a bit odd,” said Cloud, who was starting to tire from the walk.

“Yeah, let me clear out the fungus,” Aeris said, lifting her right hand to do so. After a bit of green light and humming, she declared the room safe, and began to pull out blankets for Cloud. “Should this be fine, do you think?” she asked, fretting over the bed.

“I’m not exactly used to chocobo down pillows,” said Cloud. Aeris chuckled. “It’s fine with me. You should know that I’ll probably be tossing around for a while, though. I don’t really sleep well.”

“Not if I put you to sleep right away.”

“You can do—” Cloud shook his head. “Of course you can do that.”

Aeris smiled silently and stood to help him undress, since it was a hassle to navigate both clothes and a tank of ether. Eventually, he was settled down in his underclothes and beneath the old, tattered quilts, sewn in the triangular patterns native to his own Thunder Plains people, his tank beside him and the mask loosely laid on top of his face. “Are you ready?” Aeris asked.

Cloud nodded. She laid a hand over his face, and silently requested that he close his eyes. After that, he heard a noise for a few minutes—a noise a little like the gentle whistle of a wine glass being made to sing by someone dragging their finger around its edge, and sort of like the buzzing of winged bugs, and sort of like the quiet sighing of moving rivers. It was a sound of melodious movement, and it sounded like what the rush of blood in the body would sound like if the body was chimes and crystals.

It faded from a noise to a place as Cloud went from awake to dreaming.

Aeris spent the night examining his inside, becoming more and more convinced that she had picked up an impossible job. This gave her hope, since her quest had proved impossible for a thousand years. Only this man had a sickness inside him complex enough to accurately compare to the disease, her enemy, and only he, who had been tortured, could give her the wisdom to end the pain.

 

-

 

The next day was taken up in monotonous steps down the endless paths of the Calm Lands, unmarked by road and navigated by the sun. There were no other travelers, since it was getting closer to autumn and the Calm Lands froze in the winter. The fields and hills there were vast, and in the sterile and merciless winter, plagued by constant winds, they meant death.

But for now, everything was covered in grass, tiny flowers, and moss, which Aeris skipped over with cheerful abandon, Cloud following more soberly behind with his arms hanging on to his heavy pack. Aeris had completed her temporary pain-dulling work on him the night before, promising that he would only start hurting if something was seriously wrong, but that that didn’t mean that he was in any way better. The respite of being able to smell-- not just see, but smell—the blossoming wild berry bushes that grew along cliff sides made his bitter story-telling almost feel sweet.

Aeris listened to everything he told her silently, not bothering him unless she needed a certain detail clarified. What she thought of his recollections she did not say. She did not react to their gruesomeness, nor let on how useful they were, or weren’t, proving.

(It was perhaps because of this that Cloud realized, in his heart rather than head, that Aeris was inhuman and thus deeply uncanny. She wasn’t avoiding expressing disgust for his sake; she seemed to be genuinely undisturbed. Angry, perhaps, at the atrocity of Hojo’s acts, but not shocked, as if she had never heard this sort of thing before. In the way that a centipede’s spindly limbs and curling body would instinctually repulse a human, so did Cloud’s past. But Aeris was an earth spirit, and unbeknownst to Cloud, she had felt her bones gnawed in pits of insect decomposers, and encouraged their contributions to the process of life.)

“I joined Bevelle’s army several years younger than they usually accept recruits,” said Cloud as he hiked carefully over fallen stones and prickly yellow flowering weeds, “trough the trick of not telling them my real age, name, or hometown, and knowing they didn’t care enough to look it up. I left because mom didn’t have the money for me and, like most children, I thought if I went out into the world I would be rewarded with success just for trying.

“I was in the army for a few months before I failed my tests. ShinRa considered giving me a basic service job, but then they realized that I was perfectly desirable for one of Hojo’s newest experiments.

“It’s a side note, but I found out with a bit of prying that the reason I was desirable was because I was first expendable, since I didn’t lit any contacts down on my papers, second very young and of an unmolded and moldable physique, and third, I was not from Bevelle. Bevelle, unbeknownst to most, has had water poisoned by some sort of mako accident for many years, and so people who grow up there have pre-existing earth affinities that mess with Hojo’s ether experiments. Odd that a Lifestream—worshipping boy from Nibelheim would be a better subject for SPIRIT than the Aeon—obsessed kids from Bevelle, right?”

“Odd,” Aeris agreed.

“They signed me up for SPIRIT when I was… oh, a little past sixteen. To my surprise, I was shipped out of Bevelle and right back to Nibelheim. Some twenty miles out of Nibelheim, actually, where the great Reactor sits.

“Hojo had one of his biggest labs in the Thunder Plains because they are both remote and, well, full of unharnessed energy in the form of lightning. He found out a long time ago that ether hit by lightning stirs strangely and often emits energy and magic in the reaction. He figures that the process to make Fayth involves lightning, he may be right. No clue.

“SPIRIT was, as you know, an attempt to make a Fayth that is not free but stuck inside a human body, unable to demand a contract and forced to obey his creator-master. That’s the gist of it, I think there’s something beyond it, since many of those who I saw in the labs looked nothing like Fayth and had nothing to do with Fayth. But I don’t know.”

“He was trying to make Fayth polluted in a certain way, from what I can tell,” interrupted Aeris, who was skipping her way along riverside rocks as she watched little silver fish swim in circles alongside and around her, “but I’ll have to give you the full details when I know them.”

“Yeah, they weren’t the sort of Fayth I know about, that’s for sure,” said Cloud, nodding compulsively. “When I got to the Nibelheim lab, he started easy, isolating me form the worst stuff, though it was clear that he had all the control form the start. Clear, unspoken, threatening, easy enough to ignore.”

“Hojo himself experimented on you,” said Aeris, hopping in a circle on one foot as a fish danced around her. (Cloud could not walk half as fast as she could, so she often had extra time.)

“Yes. He did so on most of us. If he ran other labs in other places without his presence, which I think he did, they were chock full of sterile control experiments just for reference, with none of the nasty stuff, so that he could know how his own games deviated from standard procedure.

“He was a mess, by the way. His notes were everywhere, there was no filing system, orderlies were there to keep quiet and make experiments happen quickly, not to clean the floors. Which were, I promise you, oddly stained.

“The initial experiments, before the mad stuff,” said Cloud, his voice edging closer to monotone, his step getting close to a shuffle as his feet picked at the tangles of pigweeds, “were partly about testing my body, and partly about trying to control me. And probably other things too, which I can’t see now.”

“Tell me everything,” said Aeris regretfully, stooping to pick a few small white flowers, “I have to know.”

“I know, I know,” responded Cloud quickly. “Well, the first thing he did was a very basic physical exam, even though I had had a physical before. A very basic exam with a few add-ons. He listened to my heart and my blood flow, tested my nerves and my muscles to make sure everything works, felt for bad lumps or under-level muscle development, weighed me, checked my eyes for bad eyesight, and took some blood. Of course. A lot of blood. Not a prick to a fingertip, he went into a vein and took a full syringe, and then covered the wound with a white bandage. A small adhesive one, but white. Just a detail I remember, I guess.

“He… asked about dietary and sexual history, of course, and… suffice to say both were scanty. He asked about allergies, vaccines, medications, and drug use, and there was nothing to say on my part. Asked about magic ability. Tested my grip and strength, poked my teeth, an x-ray scan… more than an average doctor’s physical, but it was required for the sort of digging around he was going to do.

“There was one thing particularly odd he did. I noted because though everything else sort of be excused under standard procedure, this was just off the wall, it seemed to me. Actually, I still don’t know what it has to do with anything.

 “He questioned me excessively about my mental health,’ said Cloud, sounding less monotone and more curious, as he tried to find a pattern in his own history while reciting it, “or maybe I should say my brain health, since he not only made me go over in detail anything that could be a sign of depression, anxiety, insomnia, or paranoia, or even things like obsessions or fetishes, but he also grilled me to remember any minor head injury I had ever received. Hojo asked me purposefully about whether or not I experienced almost every symptom for any disorder you can find in Shinra’s Full Mental Health manual—about every mood fluctuation, dysphonia, mental disconnection, empathetic failure or sensory dissonance I could possibly have. At the time, I was worried that he needed absolutely mentally healthy subject for his tests because it would be taxing, but… well, he knew he would absolutely break every one that came in. It didn’t matter whether someone came to him the paragon of mental health or raving. Because they would all end up the same.”

 “That…” Aeris steepled her hands in front of her face as she skipped in a semi-circle to look at him, and began walking backwards. “That is odd. I can’t immediately see why that would matter to him. Unless he just enjoyed destroying healthy people, but you said he sounded concerned about it.”

 “Very,” agreed Cloud.

 “Did he focus on anything in particular?”

 “Did he… let me remember…” Cloud stared at the blades of yellow-green-beige grass at his feet as he struggled to remember the time during the beginning of his SPIRIT experimentation. It was more defined that the middle and end of the experience, when he began to lose his mind and perceptions, but all the same, it was several years ago now. “He was concerned about many mental diseases… I remember his stressing depression and anxiety, but that’s because I showed a few signs for him…”

 “Did he ask about emotions or actions more often?”

 “Huh?” Cloud didn’t expect that question at all. “Actions, I think. He asked about habits a lot, if I had any habits ingrained into me, how they were taught to me, my sleeping habits, physical habits…”

 “And did he press on your childhood memories? Family life?”

 “He did,” said Cloud. “Now that you mention it, he did. He asked every time whether I developed my habits myself, or if my mother started it, if it was native to Nibelheim (he spent no time in the town, despite being so close to it) or if maybe some trauma caused my habits as defensive moments… but really, very few sixteen year olds have deep, ingrained post-traumatic habits.”

 “Just your mother, by the way?”

 “There was only my mother.”

 “Alright. And all this, before mostly physical experiments?”

 “Completely physical. The experimentation he did with my head was just a hobby, I think.”

 “That I know,” mused Aeris. “Destroying people is a hobby of his. But he’s very devoted to his hobby, if that’s all he interrogated you for…”

 Cloud shrugged unevenly. “I don’t spend a lot of time trying to get into his head. Just like I don’t spend a lot of time jumping into sewers.”

 Aeris tilted her head from side to side a few times, then slowed her steps to walk alongside Cloud. “I’ll consider this for a while. Just walk with me, for now.”

 So he did, as she made her steps and her breathing match his, keeping her heart in time with his, though he could not hear the harmony of flesh and blood in the same way she could. She did not have her own heart often, usually, she shared a pulse with the whole planet, which was not a beat but a turn. It was uncomfortable for her to be out of sync with her fellow creatures, like it was uncomfortable for a note to be in the wrong chord.

The sun moved above them, lighting first one side of their bodies, then the other, as they stopped in the middle of the vast plain for lunch. Cloud pulled fruit and bread out of his pack, as Aeris, to his surprise, moved her hands in a prayer and pulled a well out of the earth. Instead of sealing it back into the earth when she was done, like she planned, she decided instead to grow a wall of rocks around it and keep it as it was. “This place is lower on freshwater than I expected,” she said, “and not as hospitable as I would like for those brave ones that come through here to face Sin. It used to be so much nicer.”

“Really?” asked Cloud.

“It was actually one of the Ancient’s homes, many thousands of years ago, though we were nomadic, and went all over Spira, to every continent across the face of the globe, encouraging things to grow and rains to fall, since clouds were scarcer in those days,” she said quietly, he eyes roaming across the broad blue sky over the silent and unsettled plain, “but here, on the Fields… they were just called the Wide Fields in those days… we didn’t have houses, but we set up buildings here anyway, for shelter, and greenhouses, and baths, like exotic hotels, filled with ferns and clothes for any traveler, since we enjoyed filling up the landscape with lovely things, both built and growing… I remember groves of twisted desert trees, perhaps to the west… yes, certainly, west that way. And the pillared houses, like temples, but for the feet of ordinary men, covered with vines, warm through the powers of the reflective roofs of crystal, which sent rainbows spiraling everywhere, and there were rivers running like veins through the Fields that we brought up… apparently they’ve almost all dried, now. Well, we knew that Spira often changed, over the ages, and that the things we did would not last. Our only long-term work was to encourage plants to grow—and I tell you, this was once a land of stones.”

Cloud stared over the flat horizon, imagining a million years of lands, of changes, of the feet of Ancients walking, imagined the plains dotted once with bare rocks instead of its current green cliffs, once with temples, perhaps covered in trees, maybe cultivated with golden grains by farmers… “It’s incredible,” said Cloud, “how old Spira is.”

Aeris nodded. Her voice was wispy and quiet, like a slow breeze, delicately enjoying the toss and turn of the leaves in the trees. “Humans have some half-dozen ages, from childhood to adolescence, to young adulthood, through a few stages to true maturity… the Planet has thousands of ages, each more developed than the rest, piled on top of each other in their layers of stone… it changes constantly, and is a different world every thousand years, and every thousand years is more complex, with older, more entangled roots, more inventive creatures, more rich and strange lakes with older and larger creatures.”

She stood, stretching her limbs, looking out of a while at the lowering sun, which was just beginning to cool in the afternoon. “Let’s hurry on, we could be to Macalania in three days at this rate, if we keep walking steadily.”

For the most part, they were quiet that day, Aeris smiling at the sky and Cloud musing to himself, head turned down, like he was used to. They walked side-by-side, lost to each other, full of individual worries, but overall, content. What dangers and trials they headed for were miles and months away, and they could be endured then.

They lay beneath the towering cliffs that night, on beds of soft moss, as Cloud slept and Aeris healed his feet and tried to coax his nerves and his head to listen to her and give up their need for ether. She had success coaxing the muscle and skin of his sides to a slightly normal shape (by degrees, she reminded herself, not too much right now) but the rest of his body sent itself into frenzies and cries when she tried to touch it, rejecting her foreign influence, clinging to its addiction. Every part of him flinched away from her, even when she tried to appeal to his sleeping mind or soul—curious, since she knew the waking Cloud admired her as an Ancient and at the very least tolerated her as a personality. If she didn’t know better (and she did, because she would know it if this were true) she would think that Cloud was a host for some other spirit that was rejecting her. Could it all be the influence of the ether, and the air-affinity he was suffused with being unwilling to be grounded?

“So strange,” Aeris murmured, poking around his bones. Everything inside him had hazy edges, similar to a victim of a virus that melted insides, since all the Ether was trying to convince him to a gaseous state—but without magic excitement (which Hojo had tried to replicate with lightning, it seems) he wouldn’t transform, alive or not. And his body seemed to have its own preferences, and they ran against her intentions.

She closed her palms into loose fists, returning to herself to think. The thing that still disturbed her was how eerily he was alike to Sin. How very well Hojo had replicated Jenova’s work without her toxins, and with very positive, magical elements, no less.

“I’ll have to explain to him a bit more about Jenova and Sin before we hit Chasamaecum,” she muttered to herself. In fact, she probably should have told him more already, but he was in his own history now, divulging his story to her slowly, and she wouldn’t tie their two threads together by interrupting him. Perhaps it was silly to abide to the laws of Cetra story-telling myths ten thousands of years after the Cetra had become the Ancients, and then became myths, but to her, interrupting a story was a sin as perilous as taking a life. The Cetra, oral culture and culture-creators, cared much for their stories. And more for their favorite characters.

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CHAPTER THREE

Aeris stretched herself out happily when the sun finally broke above the horizon, enjoying the feeling of muscles and sinew. She stepped out from beneath the shadow of the cliff, and began calling up a well for Cloud when he awoke.

It had only been some six hours since Cloud fell asleep, but she couldn’t force the insomniac, even the healing and taxed insomniac, to sleep any longer than he could. He soon walked out, bleary-eyed, muttering, to her side, and dipped his small, metal cup into the crystal-clear, bubbling well.

“Tastes like Nibelheim water,” he grumbled, “untainted.”

“Well, it came right from an underground reservoir last touched by surface creatures about half a million years ago,” Aeris commented lightly.

“That’ll do it,” said Cloud.

They ate breakfast quietly, Cloud wondering why Aeris ate but did not sleep, and Aeris not thinking about much, but watching the sun. “It’s been very red lately, but no rain,” she mused. “There have been storm clouds farther back up the plains though…”

Cloud squinted to follow her line of vision, and eventually he picked out a line of darkness drawn in the north sky. “Storms roll down off of Gagazet into the Calm Lands often enough,” he said. “I would watch the clouds circle down the mountainside, leaving ice behind them…”

Aeris smiled softly. “It’ll probably catch up to us by this evening, then. I forgot how slow the weather was here. Even when I come up to surface, I usually spend my time in cities bugging government men and business tycoons to listen to me. I head back to the Lifestream when I start sounding too much like one of the paranoid men with the doomsday sign around his chest,” she sighed, lifting her cup of water to her lips.

Cloud chuckled. “I wonder why they don’t take you seriously.”

Aeris frowned. “What ever happened to respect for your elders, I ask you.”

“Well, they might not guess by looking at you that you’re very old. Or very sane.”

“Heyyy!” Aeris narrowed her eyes and placed one hand delicately on her chest. “It isn’t my fault that they’re all fools for a lovely face.”

Cloud just chuckled, shaking his head Aeris sighed and went back to her drink.

After a minute, he stood, his joints creaking but not aching, and the minty grass chill with morning dew between his toes, and said, “Well, if a storm is gaining on us, we should try to get ahead of it.”

“Good idea,” said Aeris. She stood in one fluid motion, as if the air helped her up. “Get everything packed and get fully dressed, I’ll remind myself of what direction we’re going.”

“What direction are we going?”

“Southwest til we hit Bevelle, through the Macalania Woods, where we’ll stop and discuss future plans. It’ll still take a few days to get across the plains, so if the storm is strong enough to come to us, it will hit us.”

“Will the storm encounter the invisible power of an Ancient who is kind enough to keep is dry?”

“It just might,” said Aeris, glaring into the sunlight.

They finished eating and packed their belongings quickly, setting out across the Calm Lands, which looked just like they did the day before. The monotony would tire some, but Aeris had been familiar with the land for thousands of years and she remembered its individual curves and crevasses—and Cloud was a patient man, able to endure a pleasant landscape easily if it was just devoid of his usual pain. No amount of calm dullness will annoy a man who has been tortured as long as it is decent and nice to look at. He can occupy himself by staring at interesting wallpaper if it does not hurt him.

As the afternoon wore on, the air, which both were attuned to with their senses, one by expanded sense and one by altered, began to smell and feel more and more like rain, as the individual gases of the air got excited and charged, and the winds of the sky began to carry the scent of cool water. Just once, Aeris saw and Cloud felt a small group of Fayth soar above them in front of the clouds, enjoying the breath of the wind in their silent lungs, like great invisible birds, filled with the joy of flight.

After a while, when he felt Aeris’s expectation, Cloud began to speak again.

“After the initial examination,” said Cloud, “as I was entered formally into the SPIRIT experimentation program, I was settled into a sort of four-room dormitory in a wing connected to Hojo’s office by a metal door that was opened and shut by a code key. He had the master key, we all had temporary keys that he could allow or freeze as he pleased. It was, as an excuse and also as part of the reality, necessary for sanitation reasons. The chemicals and waste of our daily life could not easily enter the laboratory.

“It was a new building, built recently by a very old lightning reactor. The reactors are glorified lightning rods, which the Thunder Plains have been using and replacing for hundreds of years.”

“Much longer than that, actually,” Aeris murmured.

“This particular rod is pretty old, said Cloud after nodding. “It’s rusted and frayed, but the outside metal of a rod—usually about three or four stories high—says nothing about how well they work. I was inside that rod a few times as a very young child, since it is our energy source and a bit of wonder for most country people, so my mom thought of it almost as a cultural sight. Inside the rod, which widens at the lowest story, is a reactor that catches the lightning—since the lightning is nigh constant, this is enough energy to power the town, though power does run out occasionally. Usually when the reactor overloads and we have to send someone down to take care of it, so that takes a good twelve hours to fix.

“Anyway, the laboratory is in the reactor’s back yard, connected by many tubes and wires to the power source. People were worried that Hojo would take all our power for a while, but he clearly worked something out, though I don’t know what he did to balance the power source out. Maybe he uses Mako energy as well, I never saw.”

“Was it a coincidence that you ended up at a laboratory twenty miles from the town you grew up in, or was it planned?” Aeris asked.

Cloud shrugged. “The coincidence is that he chose Nibelheim as the place to build his lab, really. There are a lot of out-of-the-way Thunder Plains towns he could have chosen just as remote as Nibelheim, and like I said, Hojo did look for country boys unpolluted by Bevelle’s water.”

“Right,” said Aeris.

“The Lab itself was built out of bright silver metal and occasionally painted over white. In the new, minimalist Bevelle style, not the plains style, so it was very dull and disconcerting to a lot of us. I remember there was one boy who couldn’t keep quiet about white hallways. The rooms were uniform in the dorm, each held four of us, with two bunk beds and a bathroom attached, several closets, a wooden floor, and not much in the form of creature comforts. There was a main room where we had a television, a bookshelf, and a few other things. We were given adequate groceries to make our own meals in the small kitchen. Accommodations weren’t great, but Hojo and his funders knew that they had grabbed us all out of the Army, where things were even less comfortable.

“The dorm connected to Hojo’s office, which had the only door to the outside, and through which you had to walk through to go outside, or to any of the labs. The Office connected to the dorm through its east door, and to the nice lab through its west door. Through another door in the nice lab, you got to the bad labs.

“For the first half a year of experimentation, I only saw the nice lab. I suspected, and then knew that the bad labs existed, but I didn’t guess how bad they were until I went there. He didn’t send too many of my fellows to the bad lab before he sent us all in a batch, not unless they misbehaved, which I never did. He said some people had to enter the ‘long experiments’ early because of physical factors, but we managed to notice that only the disruptive ones had physical factors.

“I’m getting a bit ahead of myself,” sighed Cloud, staring at a batch of bluebells, swaying slightly, as he passed them. Wispy white clouds were just building up behind his head now. “There were fourteen others with me when we arrived, so one bed was unused. They were mostly older than me, but no one was above nineteen, and there were some boys still younger than me. I have never been a social person, and I am less now, but I bonded with the boys in my own room, since I was in the room with the youngest, and some of them were scared and homesick. I also made friends with one of the oldest there, whose name was Zach, but I think he was friends with everyone.”

“The friendly sort,” said Aeris with a smile.

“Just like a big dog,” said Cloud absently. He paused. “He’s dead now.”

“Oh,” said Aeris.

Cloud waited for a contemplative minute to talk again. Not because he was forcing back tears, because he was wresting with the force of starting his long story once again. “How the experiments started. Some of the more paranoid boys eventually insisted that everyone share what Hojo did to them during the hour or so every three days he worked on us individually (no, I don’t know when he slept either) and it seemed like we got more or less the same treatment in the beginning.

“He would have us walk in to the office whenever we were scheduled, question us about our day from behind his desk, and open the door to the good lab whenever he was ready.

“I only once in a while heard sounds or smelled things from behind the door to the bad lab, which was several doors and curtains down the way. They were always foul. I pretended it was storage for a while, and refused to think that there were people there that I never saw. Hojo’s helpers were a rare sight to us new recruits, they mostly stayed in the other labs, where Hojo spent his nights.

“During those days, he would check everything he would in a normal check-up before he started experimentation, every time. He only showed such scientific rigor when holding up a farce of decency, I promise you.”

Cloud’s voice was suffused with hatred whenever Hojo was his subject, no matter if he spoke quietly or calmly. There was no way to pretend he was unaffected. He limped more as he spoke, and Aeris slowed without looking like she was slowing. “After the basic check-up, he grilled us about how we were getting along with the other boys—focusing especially on whether the others ever acted out, and what we thought about them. I betrayed my dislikes and my preferences whether I wanted to or not. And at the time, I was certain it was important to follow procedure for the best scientific results, so I obeyed the laws that had nothing to do with science to the letter.

“I betrayed my love for Zach then. We all did. Hojo knew how much we all loved him, he knew he was boundlessly energetic, a fighter, a team player, someone willing to sacrifice himself…”

“Oh,” said Aeris, again. She already knew what special attention Hojo must have treated that one to.

“I talked about how nervous and scared the little boys who lived in my room were,” said Cloud, and his voice shook for the first time. He steadied it. “I told him about how one boy—I forget his name now—was particularly paranoid. The boy questioned all of us about our experiments, surmised about the reactor, made theories about the bad labs, and ran all around the outside of the building when Hojo was back in the bad labs to measure exactly how big the rooms we never saw were. He didn’t last long, of course. I talked about who seemed to get along with who, I talked about who had an enmity that might go too far. And while I betrayed everyone and myself, my legs crossed beneath my thin hospital gown and my fingers fidgeting with the thin white paper on the examination table, he poked me, injected me with small amounts of ether and other things every day, took blood, and ran scans of my insides—mostly around my solar plexus and in my head.”

“A quick question?” said Aeris, raising a hand as if in class.

“Yes?”

“Was he ever rough with you in this period?”

“Occasionally, though at the time I didn’t differentiate the pain of average doctoring from the pain of an abusive doctor. I rationalized it all.”

“When was he abusive?” she asked.

“Just from time to time, he would jam a needle in too far, hold it for too long. Or he would ask purposefully… disturbing questions, as if they were average medical questions. About. Personal habits, feelings, future plans, mental state… and he would ask them while keeping his eyes on me, and make me look up, and then look away when he got the answer he want… he would suggest things…”

Aeris held up both her hands, palms out, her eyes closed. “I need no more.”

Cloud exhibited his jerky, compulsive nod a few times. “Okay.” He swallowed. “Now, I know he put ether in me. He named the ether, said it was the main cause of the testing. The excuse was that the tests were to see if ether harmed or altered humans in any way. He said the little bit we received in testing could be easily counteracted by a little therapy, if anything went wrong. But it shouldn’t, he was just seeing how a tiny bit of ether changed the workings of our body in tiny ways, so that he could guess what a lot of ether could do. Which, looking back, had some truth in it.

“Of course, we weren’t the first subjects. We were a batch after several years of batches telling him what might work and what would not work. I’m not sure what good the six months of quiet prep work was, but after time he had clearly decided they were either necessary or useful. And no, I don’t know what the stuff was that wasn’t ether that went into me.”

“None of it caused the damage that you have now. That came later?”

“Of course.”

“In the bad lab.”

“Of course. But it was six months before I ended up there, and until then, it was regular check-ups, nausea and cramps from the ether, and a fairly boring existence. We weren’t allowed pain killers for fear of reactions, but we were told our parents were being paid good money for our sacrifice, so few of us cared. Very fortunate soldiers didn’t end up as SPIRITs. Neither did very good ones, but that’s beside the point. Some boys, the paranoid one I mentioned earlier and a few with behavioral issues, ended up in the bad labs sooner than we did. We stopped wondering loudly about the other experiments Hojo did (which we were told were all classified military work, which, actually, they were) and started just murmuring about them.

“In six months, we had all the testing preparation we needed. One, just one of us was found unfit and quietly sent back to ShinRa. I remember how upset he was,” said Cloud in a sad voice.

“They funneled us into the bad labs one by one. The youngest boy there, only thirteen, left while reluctantly letting go of my hand. He had been wetting the bed, which I told no one about, and quietly doubting that his parents would really take him back after this.

“The youngest went first, so I was the fourth in. They strapped each down to a wheeled cart in their individual cell before pulling the next in. We rarely saw each other again after that. I regret every time I did get to see them.”

Cloud shook his head. “They were awful days. We all ended up more animal than human. It wasn’t fair to see what was done to them. None of it was decent, or humane.”

“I have my doubts as to the good Professor’s humanity, if we take ‘humanity’ by its unofficial definition as ‘empathy and camaraderie for and with other humans’,” said Aeris gravely.

“If that is the definition, he had none of it.”

“Yet you do, and I do, and many humans and Ancients do, and Fayth, and Al Bhed, and Jenovines, and Rhonso, and speechless dogs curled in front of the fire all do. Hojo is the exception,” said Aeris firmly, “And not any of us. A birthplace does not make you nonhuman, nor a time, nor a physical nature, but a soul unfit does.”

Cloud looked like he was going to say something, and then paused. “You know, I was raised with people telling me that Al Bhed aren’t human. Not as a race, and not even in a… metaphorical sense.”

“No, actually, Al Bhed are, in general, fine people, and even the same race as humans! But I hear they’re teaching kids that they’re part animal these days.”

“Um… yes,” said Cloud sheepishly.

“That is actually nonsense,” said Aeris. “They’re of the human species, it’s just that their tribe moved away and adapted to their landscape so long ago that they look different. Now, in a few ten thousand years, if they stay there and evolve long enough, to the point that they were that different, once their islands drift away from the continent…”

“The Al Bhed territory is moving away from Wilderia?” asked Cloud, shocked.

“Oh, my. That’s quite a subject.” Aeris laced her fingers as she stepped next to Cloud, looking upwards and considering. “What a lot of people don’t realize about Spira, since it isn’t important, is that the land on top of the seas is constantly moving and shifting. Parts of the planet move one way, parts another, because they all rest on a great, warm, underground sea. Which is actually the most physical part of the Lifestream, it’s quite nice there. Lifestream is literal in some deep parts of the planet but in other places, we move more like… oh, I can’t even describe this. Well, the physical surface of the planet moves as the currents of the bloods and other liquids of the planet direct them, and the Al Bhed territories happen to be very, very slowly moving away from Wilderia continent, so slowly you will never see it in your life, nor would the next ten generations of your family, should you produce them.”

Cloud shifted very uncomfortably against the suggestion, and Aeris could feel the nervous spike the subject made in him. More than even talk of Hojo had.

Aeris glanced behind them again. “The clouds are building up,” she said.

Grey masses were forming behind them, rolling in swirls down the plain from the top of the mountain far behind them. The light of the sun wasn’t quite dimming behind them yet, but the pressure in the air and the chill wind increased constantly, in expectation, as bird and crickets and chittering rodents began to shush themselves. “They’ll be on us in a few hours,” Cloud guessed, “And that doesn’t sound like something I’d like to sleep in. Besides, the lightning won’t be gently guided away from us like in the Thunder Plains, so if any of that gets close to me… Do you know of any shelter nearby?”

Aeris thought for a minute. “If we head due west some miles, we’ll reach some more cliffs. After we wait out the storm, Bevelle will be due south.”

“That’s good luck,” approved Cloud.

Aeris jerked her head up haughtily and said, “and if it WERE luck, I would wholeheartedly agree with you.”

Cloud chuckled, and indicated acquiescence. Aeris smiled, and changed their course slightly, so that they were walking into the afternoon sun. It took them only an hour to find their way to Aeris’s remembered cliffs, but by then, the clouds had already made an impressive advancement onto the plains near them. Their great, billowing mass, like the sails of a ship or the smoke of a fire, spread rapidly across the heavens, and wherever they lay, the earth was dark and hazy beneath them with blue rain and grey shadows. The vastness of the plains was filled on one side with still, shimmering summer light, and on the other with quickly moving, immeasurably great power and discontent, flashing with bright white light and murmuring its growls to itself as it grew. Aeris and Cloud stood and watched the crackling luminescences for a minute before Aeris took action.

She sat down and put her palms just a bit above the ground, as usual, reminding the earth of the hands which had once brought beautiful flowers out of its dirt with gentle encouragement. She felt the stone of the cliffs and learned what it was made of, and how far down the earth it stretched, and how it had formed. She asked grace of the earth and the sky and the grass, she briefly connected, just for a second, to her home, to the Lifestream, which flooded her mind, and then she let it break like a wave.

She snapped her eyes shut, and Cloud saw the rest. Her hands rose, and the cliff—the boulders of rock and the sheer crumbling walls of dirt—they stretched, and arose, like a massive animal waiting to pounce. Aeris gently turned her hands outwards, and the rock turned into roaring, rushing, and grimy grey water, and flowed like a curving waterfall, curling into circles, madly jumping around itself and splashing pebbles, before Aeris suddenly froze it as it made a wide-mouthed, gently carved, dry cave with a perfectly flat floor and a tilted roof to protect herself and Cloud from the elements.

“Much easier with some rock already there to work with,” she commented, and then turned around to see that Cloud had fallen to his knees.

As she looked at him, he pulled his shaking hands into a movement of prayer, and then stood up again. He was awed, and he bowed his head for a second, before looking up again. Awed—but not humbled. He was full of wonder, and he shone as if blessed.

Aeris would have insisted that he not embarrass himself, but he was not embarrassed. “I forget sometimes,” Cloud murmured.

Aeris nodded gratefully. She knew what fear was, and what worship was, and the great difference between them. “I am part of the Planet which holds you and gives you a ground to put your feet on, and the Planet is glorious. Come inside, let’s eat together.”

They entered the cave side by side, Aeris hopping on the ground like a dancer and Cloud lugging his tank on his back. Aeris held his hand to help him down to the ground, as she caused little will-of-the-wisps to glow in the cave with her other hand. Cloud pulled some food out of Aeris’s pack as Aeris lit a sort of fuel-less fire to heat it. They ate, and just as they finished their dinner, rain began to patter outside the entrance of the cave, dove-grey colored rain that sparkled in the fading sunlight like little crystals. They watched as the fluttering rain slowly turned, by degrees, into a downpour, a new deluge brought on by every gust of wind. When the cave grew chill with the cold air and the dark outside, Aeris lite a white fire all around the circular borders of the cave to warm it. When lightning began to flash, and thunder shook the floor of the earth, they turned away from watching the rain and began to talk.

“How long do you think we’ll be in here?” Cloud asked.

Aeris shrugged. “This storm will last quite a few hours, and it will be night by the time it’s done. You’ll sleep at nightfall, and whenever you wake up, we can leave. We’ll be in here as long as we like, in summary.”

“Ah,” said Cloud. Aeris shuffled around so that she sat beside him, and they both spent a few minutes in their own heads. They were both, of course, of a quiet nature, though in different ways, and their conversations were often more comprised of pauses than words.

“My room in the back lab,” said Cloud, “was an isolated cell, like everyone’s. I was brought there sedated. Hojo told me not to worry about the experiments, I would be put into a long sleep for some time, and when I woke up in another six months, the experiments would be over and I would be free to go. That was the first time he mentioned anything like that. I couldn’t have possibly gathered my thoughts about such a decision in the time he expected me to make it, in retrospect, and besides, he didn’t really expect a decision out of me. He let me mumble my ‘okays’ and then jabbed me with tranquilizer before I expected it.

“As I fell asleep, I felt incredible regret and sorrow. I still felt it when I woke up—maybe a few hours later, I’ll not be sure how long anything took from here on out—but the feeling was replaced with panic gradually as more and more of my senses woke up.

“I couldn’t imagine that it had been six months already, and I was right. I was not surrounded by a group of smiling aides ready to help me up, tell me it was already January, and lead me to my waiting, beaming mother outside of the lab. I woke up alone, in a grey room with only a desk, a table, and a cabinet, and I was restrained to the table by my wrists and ankles. The restraints were metal, they were comfortable enough, but they were very thick and strong. There were no IVs full of nutrients and liquids around me, and nothing for me to contact help with. It was clear I had not been asleep for six months, and something was wrong.

“I called for help and no one came. I waited for some time, and no one came.

“Again, I cannot tell you how long it was. I don’t remember every detail well anymore; it’s possible I have forgotten entire atrocities under the weight of others. And sometimes I was well-drugged, and time seemed to stretch for longer than it should have, and some memories I have blocked and warped so that they are out of their proper time frame, and after just a little time in the laboratory, my sense of time was no longer accurate and functioning.

“I stared at the featureless grey walls, wide eyed, until they seemed to warp and twist. All I remember from that hour when I woke up alone was a slow, curdling fear that did not let me out-right panic, but fermented inside me. I remember fantasies about what could have gone wrong with the experiment, but I never yet admitted that the experiment had been a lie. Though I knew. Even someone willfully in ignorance, who chooses not to think about the signs, saw all of the signs, and the part of him that considers these things, the unemotional, pure ability to reason deep inside, has figured everything out, and waits for the rest of the mind to turn around and see it, hidden in the shadows.

“Maybe I was actually a bit of a dull child.

“After some time, he walked in himself. He had a knife. It was perfectly clean and unused, he set it on the edge of the table. ‘Good morning,’ said he, smiling. Have you heard his voice?”

“Not yet,” said Aeris.

Cloud hummed. “Imagine whatever thing it is that sits in the comfortable chair of your nightmares—though I doubt you’ve had one in a long time—whether it’s the faceless man, or the grinning black dog, or the clown in a red suit, or the floating head with no eyes, the coalesced shadow, whatever it is. The thing that sits in the corner and tells you to not look and go the other way. Imagine it opening its mouth to speak to you.

“I waited for him to say ‘sorry about not coming in here right away, you woke ahead of schedule!’

“He said, ‘are you ready to begin?’

“I said yes, oddly enough. If I remember right.  Said yes because I was scared. I don’t know what I thought was happening. He opened the closet and pulled out a tank. A lot like the one I have now. Said it was pure ether, and he’s leaving me to breathe it in for a minute.

“So he started without any introduction. I was strapped up to the ether tank, and left to breathe it in. Now it couldn’t have been just ether, or the oxygen depletion would have killed me, but all the same, I remember my lungs burning, and my vision filled with black holes that boiled green at the edges, and I remember green fires bursting out on my skin that itched and burrowed into me and made it feel like my skin was tearing up… and then after what felt like a few hours, but could have been any amount of time—I don’t know whether I stayed conscious, I was definitely delusional from the high too—he came in, and he didn’t look right to me. I was probably hallucinating, but he was made of big, blurry, black-and-white shapes… he unhooked me from the machine, said something, and left me to recover.

“For some days, it was like that. He had to get me used to the ether overdose before he could do any more experiments. When the tank wasn’t on me, I stared at the ceiling of the room, and I all I did was lay there and feel my shock and pain over and over. Sometimes my eyesight left me, and I was blind. It always hurt to breathe. I was sick once and vomited, but since I was laying down… and my skin itched the whole time. I had hives break out because of the ether, and they were left as they were. It took two days for him to remember that he had to strap me up to a nutritional drip, and give me water, or I would die. Or maybe he did the initial dehydration on purpose. I’ll never know. It was very hard to tell what was negligence and what was a test.

“After a while of the ether overdoses, once the high was less of a temporary and more of a permanent state, and I had an acceptable concentration of non-native gas in me, Hojo began trying to turn me into a Fayth. His theory, at the time—he told me in pieces, perhaps to see me react—was that a human who is filled with ether, when put into such pain that they would normally die, but cannot as they are chained to their body, will sort of… ferment inside, and their soul will turn into a Fayth inside their body when it curls in on itself and attempts to die It’s supposed to be a sort of soul-implosion..

“So that’s when he started cutting the skin and muscle off of my side, slice by slice, as if he were carving up a roast. He would put the ether tank on me, pull out his favorite knife, which I am almost certain he used on everyone, wait for me to start sobbing, and then begin carving pieces out of me in an attempt to make me die inside.

“It’s almost a shame that his theory was wrong, since he so totally succeeded.

“That was the beginning. These simple physical experiments lasted for as long as he surmised that repeated work whittling at my endurance would produce results. When it didn’t, he changed tactics.”

Cloud expelled his breath in a heavy sigh, as if breathing a storm cloud. Aeris put up her arm. “Enough,” she said. “I have quite enough to think about already. The story can continue tomorrow.”

“I can continue it now,” said Cloud.

“No need,” said she, “we have plenty of time, and I’d rather consider a few things you have already said.” She lowered her hand half way, so that her palm was lightly turned toward her midsection, a gesture of waiting. “Do not think I have pulled unpleasant conclusions out of your memories,” she whispered. “I knew already the emotions you had been through, if not the experiences. The fact of your person has not changed for me, and I won’t consider you more or less highly than I have.”

“I know. I know,” said Cloud quickly. “I don’t believe any Ancient lacks in wisdom or discernment. It’s only…” he swallowed. “It’s like having a nightmare around someone then seeing them in the morning again. You’re embarrassed. You’ve heard a lot from me now.”

“And I’ll hear more,” she said brightly. “You won’t shock me. I won’t be appalled by shows of emotion or offended by an unfortunate past.” She tilted her head. She had let down the fires over time, so that the cave was very dark now, and he only saw the soft outline of her features, of her curved and round face with pale contours, and of her bright eyes, that were like pools of water, and glowed too shrilly in the darkness. She did look more animal than woman in the dark, but she was a gentle animal, a crouched deer or sighing bird. “You’re not going to stop thinking these sad things, are you?”

“I haven’t stopped in years,” said Cloud.

The storm has stopped growling and started shushing about five minutes ago, its occasional deluges thin and hissing on the damp ground instead of smacking into it. Aeris cast her keen gaze out at the falling water, as if considering it, then turned back to her companion. “Your head will go in circles now. It would be better to go to sleep, and let dreams straighten you out, at least for another day in the morning.”

It occurred to Cloud, though for some reason it hadn’t before, that she could just put him to sleep. He knew, however, that she would never put her will above his. An ancient spirit, he had always been taught, has a static nature—what they are, they are, and they will not alter their selves to betray you. The thing that complicated the soul of the Ancient, though, was that it was as large as the world, and being static didn’t mean as much when one was statically everything. He wondered how Aeris’s personality was tied to her being—if Ancients had the same sort of personality, they who were not individual minds and were tied to a whole planet—and for a second he sized up her animal eyes, wondering.

He didn’t feel disillusioned, he would always conceive of Aeris as holy—but something about her in the darkness paled the image of her as pure. Pure in the sense that she was of a totally kind soul—she was boundlessly kind, but not totally kind. And yet he knew she would always be kind.

Do immortal spirits make their choices about how they will be, he wondered. Do they fight with warring natures like us? Looking into Aeris’s eyes, which were peaceful, but thinking of her voice, which was too calm in the face of atrocity, he wondered, without really thinking of the question as it came across his mind, what kindness and compassion were.

“I might stay up for a while,” he asked, “just thinking.”

Aeris screwed up her nose and put her hands on her hips. “If you promise not to think upsetting thoughts about how now you’re nervous around me and now you’re upset about daring to tell someone about all the pain you went through, then fine. But don’t exhaust yourself!”

Cloud tried not to wince. “I promise. I’ll just sort of sit around for a while.”

Aeris nodded. “I’ll go out for a bit in the rain, then. If you want help sleeping, just say something, I’ll hear.”

Cloud didn’t quite see Aeris disappearing after she walked some steps away from the cave into the rain, but he didn’t quite miss that it happened either.

He had stared at the faces of immeasurable evil power and ill intent before, but he had never seen untainted power like that which was in Aeris. Perhaps “power” wasn’t the word either—it was movement. Aeris was kinetic movement, the buzz of soaring insects that do not pause or land, the endlessly rushing river, and the wind tearing across the plain—she simply moved, and that was her great power. And yes, of course, a natural element—is, oddly enough, what a human would call unnatural.

Though it escaped Cloud’s mind sometimes, he remembered clearly now that she was literally older than the hills, older than the way the continent looked now, older than the cliffs and mountains digging into the ground—and Cloud boasted some years over twenty to his name.

“This is why the spirit does not mingle with the human often,” he said sourly, fiddling with the knobs on his ether tank (he had begun to enjoy being able to change his ether intake without getting a migraine). He was growing tired, but more than that, he was suddenly, and again, very uncertain. To be an abomination is not something one gets over easily or quickly. He felt sick, and he wasn’t sure why. He knew several reasons why he would possibly feel sick, but they were all small reasons, and they were all old reasons, and the feeling like rotting and rusting and bubbling acid in his gut was current and consuming, and the old ‘you’ve been through a lot’ was a weak medicine now that he had grown immune to. His cooling words to himself went harsh quickly, and he sat there, cyclically wondering, unable to think any sentence except “I am sick” over and over.

He was dully aware that trauma will be traumatic every time you remember it, no matter how long it has been rationalized. Just like in chemistry, nothing is lost in memory.

Aeris came in after an hour. Cloud had not moved. She was covered in rain and in the tuffs of feather flowers, and she seemed to be faintly glowing. “Are you tired now?” she asked politely. “It is late.”

“Yeah,” said Cloud, who considered turning to look at her, but balked from the expected pressure and pain of moving. “I suppose I’m not going to get anything else done awake, am I?”

In the total darkness (which Cloud hadn’t noticed falling) Aeris’s movement toward him was silent and swift. She bounded to him like a horse and knelt in one fluid motion, her hands rising as her legs fell. “Lie down,” she said softly.

Cloud did as she asked, laying down in his clothes, since they no longer had any bedding with them. Aeris didn’t complain about the unorthodox sleeping method, but turned her hips so that she was looming over him with her upper body when he settled down onto the dirt floor.

Aeris passed her hand over his eyes. Cloud relaxed, feeling the sort of heaviness that a tranquilizer drug would instill in him lowered upon him like a blanket, weighting on his eyelids and seeping into his limbs. The sensation wasn’t buzzing, or dulling, like a drug would be, but just relaxing, as Aeris deliberately went into his muscles and told them to loosen and settle into a motionless sleep state. Cloud breathed out slowly. With another pass of Aeris’s hand (which he felt in three dimensions, as if she passed through him, but did not see with his shut eyes) his thoughts started fading, drifting into darkness like a boat slipping into the sea at night. He didn’t feel the rest of Aeris’s coaxing work on his brain, but it took only a minute to set him into a deep, paralytic sleep.

Aeris sighed, and enjoyed the near-silence for a second, with the whispering rain splashing outside in the litt8le puddles it had formed and the absence of buzzing human thought as well as the great openness of the cave air, like a waiting music-hall of excellent acoustics now that Cloud wasn’t filling it up with its animation and intensity.

Cloud had an impressive presence, though he wasn’t aware of it. He could probably make a room go dumb by walking in, though he would never know why. He carried a magnetism that cancelled every weak charge he passed by. Without his consciousness in the cave, Aeris felt the shy glittering sighs of the veins of sensitive quartz and salt that had been hiding in the rock before. She noticed a crack running deep in the ground for the first time, an old, but thin fault line in the world.

Cloud really was incredibly distracting. Part of it was that he was a SPIRIT, and Spira reacted to him much like it would to an Aeon, with hush and reverence, keeping secrets. But a part of it was that his soul was just… large, and anything it was filled with would be overwhelming. Perhaps it had been stretched out to that state, since there were lines and scratches in it.

Aeris let her distraction feed her obsession. It was a business-driven obsession, admittedly, which threatened to turn Cloud into a project, but the project was personal. She felt like someone might feel if they were dating someone who looked very similar to their ex-spouse. The scars in Cloud’s soul were formed from the same mold as Sin’s, she could swear, and would had Hojo been an immortal creature. She was almost certain he took great influence from Jenova, since what he did was clearly inspired by her poison. Inspired in spirit, of course, since he could not replicate her minute and specific use of chemicals. He could only see how she worked externally and try to replicated that crudely… crudely but well, since, though she hadn’t told Cloud before, and wasn’t telling on planning him, she wasn’t sure how Cloud was alive. No, she wasn’t just sure that Cloud should not be alive, she wasn’t sure how Cloud was alive.

She could quietly excuse it as the influence of ether on him, making him half Fayth, and thus keeping him alive. But the ether was killing the SPIRIT, shutting down everything that accepted normal air and nutrients in an effort to become Cloud’s only substance. Cloud’s soul was that of a living human, not a dead spirit like hers, and it was housed in a body that should have died and should not have been able to move.

Once, very long ago, there was a plague on another continent on Spira, in which bodies already dying walked longer than their brain could support them, making the dead things move and shuffle and twitch with misfired, misdirected nerve signals. Cloud looked like he should be one of them. But he was not, and whatever Hojo had done to him, he had done it stealthily, and well.

It was some combination of Jenova, the Ether, and some special cruelty of Hojo’s, no doubt, but Aeris had never seen such things in combination before, and the mixture they made was baffling. Cloud felt like a maze, a maze with infinite passways, but each is a dead end, and everywhere, the walls are rotting, and sometimes, when she had been hours in healing, Aeris felt herself chasing things through his strange and infected body, as if he had worm parasites, hiding in each of his veins. The parasites his in his brain, in his nerves, everywhere—it felt like Jenova, but it did not strengthen him, it dissolved him.

And that besides, everything useful in him had been fused and melted with lightning and left to fail. Cloud hadn’t mentioned the branching shock scars all over his arms and torso, but it was clear what they were from.

Aeris contented herself with trying to soothe Cloud’s befuddled cells back into accepting air as a viable thing for breathing. Eventually, she got herself into a rhythm, of meeting, consoling, and releasing. She hoped her influence, patient and steady, borne on the thin webs that only an Ancient could weave in the body, would eventually win out over the ones that poisoned him. Working the ether out of his body was only the beginning—only when she had so healed his body that she could take the mask off his face, could she commence the real work.

She took the last hour before Cloud woke up (she could feel him stirring inside, going from deep darkness to visions of cobbled streets that she sometimes caught a glance of) healing his sides further, moving his growing muscles so that his organs could resume a less sickening position. Finally, she convinced the whole mess to not send all of its normal pain signals, so that Cloud would be able to move the next morning.

She always felt… less controlled than she would like, while working on Cloud. Because there were questions about Cloud that she had not found the answers to yet, and she knew it was entirely possible that something she did could have an unexpected, harmful reaction. She did not know what was keeping him alive, and she feared to sever its messy, tentative hold. She feared that making his body functional would kill it. Technically, that would mean that she would have success with Sin, but she had never once killed someone before, and she would not now. She was almost certain that Hojo has took something of Jenova’s, and put it in Cloud somehow, but it wasn’t the clumping, black poison she found in infected beasts—it was something translucent and quiet, biding its time. And she feared this stubborn visitor, who had kept herself alive for so much time despite the war against her, was what was doing the same for Cloud.

She left the cave so that he could wake up in private.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Cloud opened his eyes to brighter sunlight that he expected, magnified in the glass of every left-over raindrop resting on the edges of grass-blades and the thin hairs of spiky weeds. He closed his eyes, and adjusted his muscles slowly, trying to wake them up without making any of them spasm or cramp, since they had been resting on (oddly well-indented) stone for hours. He stretched his shoulders too far, so he lied there, absolutely still to avoid the pain increasing, and stared at his tank beside him.

Aeris had probably been adjusting it as she worked so that there was less and less ether in it, but breathing didn’t hurt more than it usually did. The thin silver contraption was more powerful than it looked. The majority of it was taken up by an inner ether tank, which mixed with normal air that was pulled in when he breathed. Technically, the air was pulled into a very small tank, which worked sort of like a dam in a river, full of locks so that the air and ether didn’t mix until it hit the breathing tube and the ether didn’t accidentally flood out through the air tube… Cloud hadn’t exactly memorized how it worked, he only knew what he had read on the extensive labels on the sides (many times, as he lied there, just like he did now.)

Eventually, Cloud managed to sit up, his joints cracking as he did so. He sighed, and made himself stretch, slowly, working his bones out of their fetal lock and into a workable condition.

Aeris found him as he was half-way through trying to attempt a squat (and failing.) “I don’t think that’s good for you,” she said.

Cloud sighed and straightened himself unevenly. “It used to be good for me. Now I can’t do it without worrying that I’m going to rip my tank out.”

Aeris shook her head. “Alright, not a normal problem, I know. Here, do you still eat meat?”

Cloud thought. “The recovery center didn’t usually get meat, since it’s expensive, so I haven’t in a while, but I like to. Why?”

Aeris clapped her hands. “Oh, good. I’ll get the fish I was talking to, then. He’s old and ready to pass on now, and you need to build up muscle strength.”

With that, Aeris gleefully skipped out of the hall and out towards the river to kill a fish. Cloud felt a little disturbed for a minute, but eventually decided that it really was the most humane way of hunting he had ever heard of. Even if it was also the most insane way.

He could see Aeris far out on the fields of the Calm Lands, crouched in the golden grass, her arms outstretched to the ground. He looked away after a while, hoping he didn’t accidentally witness the poor fish’s death.

He had sat himself laboriously back down and was massaging a thigh that was threatening to cramp when Aeris glided back into the cave, freshly dead fish cradled in her thin, freckled arms. She smiled, and said, “Hold this for a bit while I call up a fire.”

The still-wet fish, which moved like so many pounds of slime, was dumped into Cloud’s hands as he flailed around, attempting to grasp it. Luckily, it really was dead, so there was no struggle out of the poor thing—but Cloud, more repelled by the smell of wild river water and old fish than he would like to admit, ended out just pinching the fish’s tail fin with a few fingers while the rest laid in front of him, with a sort of displeased look on his face. “It’s pretty big for a river fish,” he said finally.

Aeris grinned from where she was twirling her hands over the stone ground, bringing strange white flames out of a black spot. “He’s been growing for a long time, and he’s a mako fish besides.”

“A mako fish?”

“Mako fish are considers some of the Ancient’s… um, familiars? Kindred spirits? We tend to be close to them. A school of them almost as ancient as us live in the Moonflow, and others thrive in places where the surface water of Spira is connected by abysmal pathways to the Lifestream deep below her surface—and others still swim in those pathways between Spira’s stone … this one only found himself so far into mundane waters since he got a little senile in his old age, poor guy. Kept trying to tell me about the state of youth before I sent him away.”

“Hm,” said Cloud, suddenly unable to imagine the dead fish without a pipe and a grouchy scowl. “Is something like him usually good to eat?”

“Usually, no. But I think he will be good for you, since he is infused with Lifestream energy, which is what I want you to be.”

“Ah. It should fight the ether, you mean.”

“I hope so,” said she, sliding her hand across the stone to grab the body of the fish and pull it towards her, leaving a water trail behind. “I’m going to gut this very quickly, I am very adept at the skill of butchery, so you may want to look away.”

“Ah,” said Cloud. No longer a man to take risks, he turned away. But even if he couldn’t see Aeris’s very tiny hand digging out the fish’s scales in reams and plucking bones out with dread efficiency, he could hear the small, wet sounds, and the smell of gore slowly rose up behind him like a mist. Uncomfortable, and unwilling to admit he was uncomfortable, he struck up conversation. “You know, I am starting to think that Hojo lied to me about what ether actually is.”

“Oh?” asked Aeris, as her arm, out of the corner of his eyes, wrenched something out of the fish’s carcass suddenly with a jerk. “What did he say it was?”

“I don’t remember all his babbling,” Cloud admitted, deciding to just look at the ceiling of the cave, “but what I do remember is he would refer to it as ‘the blood of the Fayth,’ as if that were its title. He seemed to think it was literally something you extracted from dead Fayth.”

“Well, he’s…” Aeris paused and she wiped some guts out from under her small white nails on a spare cloth, searching for the right words. “He’s in the right area. Ah. I hope that’s just how he poetically referred to it. I mean, that’s right, if you want to think of ether vaguely… how did this guy get his degree in doctoral science.”

“You know, I am not totally sure whether he did or did not.”

“Figures. Ether, simply, is… oh, wait, this isn’t simple. So. Cloud, where do you think the clouds are?”

“Er? Up?” asked Cloud. “I’m not really an educated man.”

“Doesn’t matter, because you are right!” said the Ancient cheerfully. “The clouds are up, in a certain circle of the air. You are more aware than most people that average air is comprised of several different things, including oxygen.”

“Of course.”

“What you probably do not know is that the composition of air changes when you get really high up.”

“Actually… I think they mentioned something like that on Gagazet.”

“Oh. Of course they would.” Aeris shook her head. “Of course. Look at this old lady getting slow. Well, on Spira, air comes in several different realms, which surround the planet like a set of rings. The lowest ring is on the surface, and it is what most people breathe. The second-lowest ring hits the tops of the mountains, and it is totally different from the lowest ring. It has some of the same ingredients, but in different amounts, and it is… shaped… differently. There’s a thing to air, to all things, that human eyes cannot quite see, since it is too small and too strange, that gives air specific shapes and weights, just like crystals and rocks have. I’ll explain some other time, maybe. Think of it as air of a different pattern.

“Above this second ring are several other rings. In total, there are seven rings of air above Spira, extending from the surface to amazing distances away, almost as far as the stars. And that is more distance, I promised, than you have ever dreamed.”

Aeris paused to form her thoughts for a second, and Cloud could hear bones scraping. “Well, these furthest rings, among the stars, aren’t very much like the air you know. It cannot be breathed, but it has a pattern, made not of gasses, but of… I’ll call energy, what you must know is that it is still a ring that surrounds the planet. There are four rings which humans, Ancients, and almost all other beings on Spira cannot touch, since we cannot live in them and cannot contain them in any containers that we can hold. These far rings are mysteries even to the Ancients—though we know about them, we, bound to Spira, cannot touch them.

“The Fayth, I know, can travel each of these rings, but they say the outer four rings are cold, and silent. The inner three rings are the rings are the ones that are air, or are like air, as you know it.

“Ether is the third ring—the ring that is air, but the furthest ring from the planet that anyone but Fayth can touch.”

“So…” Cloud said… “Ether is just another type of air?”

“Yes, but more than that. Ether is made of a lot of the things that air is, but in a very different pattern, and with very different properties. It’s like… how ice, which is the same thing as water, doesn’t do what water does at all, and eating ice is no substitute for drinking water. It’s like that, but more extreme. Ether may be related to low air, but it does not do the things which low air does. It will not fulfill the needs of human lungs, but the spirit that breathes it is fueled by its latent energy, made dizzy, excited, filled with power… ether is, just as Hojo surmised, kin to the Fayth, because ether is what the Fayth naturally breathe. Breathing ether ignites great powers in whomever breathes it (normally, I’m working on figuring out whether you’ve been granted powers or not) but if lungs breathe it, it kills the body. This is not because it is just some sort of undefined magic—just like some herbs, when eaten, unlock serenity in the human mind, ether unlocks serene and divine powers, but like I said, and you have noticed, it kills the body.”

“So, you’re saying that ether does not come from Fayth, it’s just what they prefer to breathe. And what gives them their powers.”

“Fayth have powers naturally, but yes, that is the case otherwise. They prefer it, and it strengthens them. Whereas humans often call the Fayth and their Aeons Spirits of the Air, the Ancient words for them is just slightly different—to us, they are Spirits of the Highest Air, and to them, by the way, we are Souls of the Deep. By deep, they mean both deep water, deep earth, and a sense of ‘depth’ in an old, old form… deep time, deep mind, and deep understanding all connected, deep like a grave…”

Aeris laid her hands down on the completely gutted fish, glistening white meat in her hands, which was once alive. She shook her head slowly. “Next time, you should remember that Ancients are, well, Ancients, and if you give up time to ramble like old grandmothers on their porch chairs, we will.”

“Huh?” asked Cloud, startled out of his reflection. “Oh, no, it doesn’t bother me. I didn’t understand everything , but…” Cloud suddenly paused. “Wait, if it’s all the way up there, and Fayth are not made of it, how the does Hojo get it?”

“My god, I wish I knew!” said Aeris, turning around. Cloud hitched his head over his shoulder to catch her eye. “There are a few options, I don’t like any of them. It’s POSSIBLE he is somehow draining a captured Aeon of its ether, but that won’t be enough for what he needs. There are a few daring ether collectors in the world, but their cargo is worth ten times as much as gold and twice as much as dragon’s blood… the most reasonable option is the one I very much do not like.”

“And that is?”

“He’s making it,” said Aeris. “He had found a way to alchemically produce fake either. Which would explain why, though there are other reasons, it doesn’t… feel like the natural ether of a Fayth.”

“Huh,” said Cloud, sounding a bit bothered himself.

“I don’t like it,” muttered Aeris. “Ether is made with incredible complexity… it’s like re-making the ancient ceiling-murals of the old civilizations, every brushstroke… I’ll have to think about it. It’s monumental, no matter how he got all that ether.” Aeris finally turned around, shifting her weight to get her legs under her and hide the bones and blood in a pile behind her. “All right, let’s cook you an amazing breakfast.”

Cloud reluctantly turned as well, but al there was in front of Aeris was (impossibly) clean slabs of white meat and the strange, white fire. Cloud was going to suggest using some sort of rock for a pan when Aeris, with a wide grin, picked up the slimy raw meat with her bare hands and tossed it happily into the fire, muttering a quick word in a strange language as she did so.

The both stared at the results. The fish meat hissed and gasped in offended protest. Cloud looked incredulous. Aeris smiled. Cloud opened his mouth to speak a few times, as he watched the meat sputter around a start to turn colors, and finally said, “I begin to suspect Ancient cooking is a little different from cooking as I know it?”

“Hm?” asked Aeris with confusion. She looked up, tilting her head. “Well, logically, it would be. Why do you say so?”

“Never mind,” said Cloud quietly.

 

-

 

After a surprisingly delicious (if plain) breakfast, Aeris shuffled Cloud out of the cave to return it to its former state as an average cliff. “No reason to leave it like this if it’s more comfortable otherwise,” said she.

As she lifted her hands to take the stone and release it from its new shape, Cloud looked around the Calm Lands. As always, they were flat, and unremarkable in form (though incredible in color.) The ground was less level than it had been, and was arching up to a more hilly landscape, slowly rolling like waves, broken occasionally where lightning struck or Spira moved to make a cliff or hole. Cloud could hear another river nearby (very many flowed down from the upper sea and from Gagazet to eventually reach Macalania Lake, Aeris told him) and after the storm last night, a few makeshift, muddy streams, fueled by rain and dew dripping off of the bent and pale stalks of grass, ran swiftly through the contours of the planet, bringing little dead plants and the corpses of bugs with them. Cloud, for the first time, saw, briefly, how cleverly Spira kept and cleaned herself, using the storms and fires that tossed her to get rid of everything she had outgrown.

Aeris, meanwhile, let the rock flow in heated form back to its former state, releasing it from its awkward position. As she did so, the bones and gut of a fish she left behind her were quietly swallowed into the re-forming ground. She brought her hands up in a prayer position for a while, just to feel closely the energy running form her in rivulets around her, returning to the Lifestream, pouring past… and then returned her attention to Cloud, who was, apparently, interested in a dead beetle flowing down a stream.

“That’s what we call a greenlegs beetle, actually,” said Aeris quietly, to avoid startling him, “and they are very ancient creatures.”

Cloud squinted. “Now that you mention it, I can see the dark green legs curled up beneath his shell.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Aeris. “The legend in our time was that they evolved out of several blades of grass when the grass was in crisis from large beasts trampling it, so that the new bug-grasses could infect and eat the beasts in their large numbers. We had to make up a legend for them because they were one of our biggest challenges in getting crops to grow on this continent.”

“Oh,” said Cloud. “Such a small thing was?”

“No, a swarm of tens of thousands of them were. It was a more apt tale than we realized, since the grasses of this continent literally did fight the new wheats and grains we tried to introduce…” Aeris sighed. “Well, we got what we wanted in the end, since we could appeal to the ground the plants grew in.”

“That does sort of give you the upper hand,” Cloud said.

Aeris grinned, then extended hers to Cloud. “Shall we go, then?”

Cloud didn’t accept her hand, but he nodded. “Due south?”

“Due south. We should hit Bevelle… either tonight or tomorrow, depending on how travel goes.”

“And once we’re in Bevelle?”

“Some supply gathering, some rest as I work on healing you, but our goal is further south.”

“What is out goal?”

“Nibelheim.” Aeris nervously shifted a pebble through her fingers. “I will want to look at the equipment that Hojo used in his experiments, and I have received word that he himself is not using the lab right now. In fact, no one is using the lab right now. They all left, for reasons I have not been told and am curious about.”

“All left?... I mean, all the SPIRITs were evacuated, but…”

“You are not expected to follow me into the lab. You are perfectly welcome to stay in Nibelheim if you like, or farther away if you like, while I satisfy my curiosity about those things which I want to know.”

“Yeah, I’ll probably do that. Stay away from the lab, that is.” Cloud cleared his throat.

“I won’t have to stay long either, I don’t think. There’s just a few things about the properties of the chemicals Hojo used that I want to confirm. Like I said, I don’t know how he got his ether, or what his ether really is, and I can’t assume that the stuff in your tank is the same stuff—I don’t think it IS, actually--”

“I understand,” Cloud said, putting up his hands.

“Right,” said Aeris, and they started walking south.

There were little brown birds darting through the tall golden grass as they walked, coaxed out of the southern woods and into the plains by the promise of bugs disturbed by the rain. The birds made a high trilling sound, and the preying insects that were out after their own lunch sang back to them. Cloud even saw a group of herd-beasts plodding in the distance, pulling up chunks of watery grass in their jaws to chew as the pawed their way slowly through the plains.

“The rain stirs things up,” he commented.

Aeris nodded. “That is the way it is, isn’t it?”

Cloud muttered something low in reply, without really paying attention to what he was saying. His mind was already working on the things he would tell Aeris today. “Shall I just… start?” he eventually asked.

“Go ahead,” said she.

Cloud shrugged his pack on his shoulders, scrunching up, then forced himself to unfold again. “I was left alone for a little while,” said Cloud, “after the first few rounds of cutting experiments, by myself in the little room, with a breathing tank often tied onto me. Since I wasn’t used to that yet… I remember that the mask chafed me, and by the end of what I think was a few days, I had a red ring of scarred skin on my face for a while.

“Hojo must have learned from previous experiments that just leaving humans to breathe pure ether would kill them because he left me with… I dunno, in retrospect, it must have been a half air, half ether mixture. I wasn’t debating it at the time since I was mostly sorting out all the shadowy hallucinations and perception loss the ether inflicted in me.

“When you get used to ether, its ability to turn you into a raving maniac goes down, though the pain doesn’t really. Well, the pain goes down a little. Then it comes back doubled when you try to quit. Ha. Anyway. So I was there, breathing an ether mixture, just… you know… ideally, he was going to have us breathing only ether by the end, he told me once. Of course, that isn’t possible without killing a person, which was the idea. In his head, the transformation into a bound Fayth and the total exclusion of oxygen would happen simultaneously. Simultaneity, I remember his saying that word, I can hear it. Essentially, I was to be smothered slowly to death for some years, then I was to die inside, biologically, but my spirit was to remain housed in the dead body after being turned to an immortal spirit. I

“After a few days of me watching reality blend together and sometimes tear open into mid-air rifts that spewed black bugs, Hojo walked back into my room. Well, this is all approximate, I can’t prove that Hojo did all of this, or that everything I remember happened, really. Basically, he just repeated the previous experiment, as he did for several sessions after. He continued to pull apart my abdomen, which had not yet healed but had scabbed over, hoping that that effort and the increased ether he pumped into me during the sessions would force me to die. He sometimes just left needles in, when he was gone, to keep me in pain.

“I can’t really tell you how I reacted, because I don’t remember. What I think… I remember being very subdued. I remember… once… I don’t remember when, when Hojo was working on me… a line from a story came into my head. It was a story that the adults in Nibelheim told out loud, part of a cycle of legends, that, well, they were based around the work of the Ancients. “The Old Spira Cycle,” we called it.”

“You’ll have to tell me it sometime,” said Aeris, subdued.

“I can try,” he promised, “But I’ve forgotten most of it over time. The line I remembered was from a particularly bleak story, about a plague that annihilated many ancient cities somewhere to the South. The ancients walked from city to city, and healed whomever they could. But every time they got to a new city, more and more people were dead. The tale described the grief of the survivors more and more vividly each time, starting with the ‘mourning mothers’ and ‘wailing widows’ in the first city… very standard… but by some of the last ones… there were ‘dying bodies, that heaved black tears as they were being devoured by maggots, no life left but a spirit of grief possessing their bodies’, and ‘a mad man going round in circles, running in circles, in the center of the city, where hanging gardens were dying, with a knife, killing anyone that came close to him, babbling words in no known language…’ and finally, the Ancients come across the final city, there is no one alive in the city. They walk in the streets, there are corpses. They call out, there are no voices. They look for human touch, and find the cold. They feel for the soul…

“I remember, that line had no completion. The tale-teller would just shrug.

“The line I remembered came just after that. I remembered, strapped to the table, with a knife at my side, feeling cold metal actually inside my own muscles, with wide clarity of mind… right after they see that the whole city has been killed, an Ancient woman sinks to her knees. Before then, the tale describes no emotion from the Ancients. We don’t like to pretend we know how they think, it’s considered bad form and disrespectful to describe one in ways similar to a human. But this Ancient sinks to her knees, and…

“ ‘She cried, but her sobs were hollow, and they meant nothing. There was nothing that could be done, so all actions were nothing. The passing required a kind of despair that none are capable of, and none were ever meant to express.’

 

 

“That’s how I felt, I guess. How I remember feeling. Inside. Outside, I remember feeling pain that could mildly be called ‘excruciating,’ always, since I was being tortured. I didn’t believe people for a while, after the fact, when they said I had been tortured, because I geuss you never see yourself as really being tortured, but then they described some average government torture method, and… well, anyway.

“After he stopped with my sides-- though he made sure those never healed, he required that the deep fissures in my side made it hard for me to breathe, and that it assured I was always in pain, always growing more tired, and more likely to be pushed over the edge. Less likely to have a coherent thoughts, and forced to rely on instinct instead—after the knife, he started the needles. Since needles are slow, and precise, he took the time, to explain his main goal to me plainly. Which you already know. He told me he was trying to kill me, but just inside, so I became a Fayth inside. He also said I would be a special Fayth, and I don’t know what he meant like that, unless he was interested in especially crippled Fayth.

“The needles… he learned, somewhere, how to puncture the body in certain areas, to make parts of you spasm and cramp, or go dull. They say it’s a Wutain mystery, though they don’t use it that way. He would blindfold me, so that I didn’t know what part he would chose next. Apparently—he muttered about this once or twice—he was working off of some vague idea of… energy centers in the body? Striking them in a certain motion in order to ‘unlock’ me?”

“I know what he THOUGHT he was doing,” Aeris confirmed.

“Right. After the needles, which he tried for a while, he tried setting those energy points on fire. Oil fires. It spread more than he liked every time, so he could never get it right. No, I don’t know how that was healed either. But I know it was. He healed the deep burns. The burns that went past the skin. And left other things. Which meant he, and only he, could have had me healed completely, totally, at any time.

“Ha. A ha ha. Anyway. After the fires, he switched tactics again, and for a while, he wondered if turning me into a living potion-cauldron would do anything. He fed me—and everyone else, I am sure—ingredients that often react with ether—quicksilver, dragon blood, snake eggs, and, er, salamanders. I’m… just going to leave that part.”

Aeris muttered something.

“What?”

“Oh!” Aeris jumped. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud. Um.” She sort of ground her teeth together, then, in a voice darker than Cloud had ever heard her utter before, she said, “animal bodies are not magical. Salamanders are not magical. Infant snakes are not magical. Dragon blood is exactly the same as human blood. They are all made of the same… the same stuff. They. Argh they are just innocent animals, there’s nothing magical about them and nothing magical about taking an animal’s life, how could there be anything magical about, who would even look at a freaking Shoopuf’s tusk and think…” Aeris sighed, her lips pursed. “Pet peeve. Sorry. Continue. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

Cloud grinned painfully for a second. “Alright. Of Course. So… that’s right, the potion experiments… I call them. Obviously, that did nothing other than make me really sick. Otghers, as well, I know he did these sorts of experiments with others, since I could smell it. Actually, these were the only ones that made sense to me, since I remember the stories they sued to tell about witches in the village, making magic out of snakes and mold. He did pour glorified mold in me, and these black, slimy mushroom, and these ugly, yellow spores… yet another thing that should have killed me. But didn’t, because Hojo kept me alive. Because he needed a certain kind of death, I suppose. I never understood it. He had all these machines measuring me… I don’t know what he thought would happen to tell him that I was becoming a Fayth…”

“There are obvious indications. He wasn’t going to see any of them, but he probably knew about them.”

“So you know how to make Fayth?” asked Cloud, surprised.

“I made the first one.”

Cloud was stunned silent for a minute, walking by Aeris’s side, as she looked at him with a thin smile. “You? You mean?”

“Me. Specifically. I’ll tell you, sometime. I’ll have to, since it’s tied to a larger story.”

“Wow. That’s… unbelievable, I guess. Except it is. Because you’re. you, of course.”

Aeris considered this for a second, then nodded in agreement. “Yes,” she said. “That also. It was not all so great at the time, though.”

Cloud swallowed a few times, looking at the sweet birds which hopped around his feet, searching for food in the grass. He felt the sun lighting the plains in his eyes and warming the skin of his back. “After I was left to stew with several poisonous influences in my body,” he said, “Which I should have never recovered from, and kind of haven’t, if you think of it one way, and anyway, nothing happened in the ‘turning into a magical being’ front. After most of that was flushed from my system he decided that what his potion-making was lacking was lightning. He would pump me full of ether, then make sure to stick some needles in me or something that would hurt, and then he would pick up a lightning material (fueled with the Thunder Plains’ own power) and… to put it crudely, he hit me with it.

“He used a fully matured lightning Materia for thunderbolt, the sort that comes out in strong, fierce, storms. Not the sort that rends a house, but not a static shock either. I can’t describe how it felt, obviously. Actually, I don’t remember much past the first shock. I was really not conscious often during this period.

“He would feed me more poisons, with the ether, then shock me, hoping to… stir it up somehow? I never understood.”

“May I ask something?”

“Of course,” said Cloud.

Aeris steepled her hands. “You said he used toxins. Poisons. Do you have any clue what sort they were? Or what his reasoning was in using them?”

“Um… this is the sort of stuff I just won’t know… like I said, poisonous spores and mushrooms, big black slimy ones and little yellow spores, and later on, these dark, murky liquids in vials, of green or black or brown tone… I don’t know what they were, but I call them poisonous because they felt… well, they felt wrong. Wholly wrong, like I, all of me, I just knew it shouldn’t be in my body.”

“How did these liquids taste?”

“Taste?” Cloud shrugged. “I don’t remember things like that.”

“Perfectly all right,” Aeris said, musing.

Cloud waited to see if she would ask anything else, then returned to his story. “The… good thing was, the lightning was so damaging he could only justify trying to get the reaction he wanted after long periods of rest. But every time he came back in… sorry. Every time he came back in, it was obvious that he was more and more agitated with the failure of his theories. He would feed me more and more poison, in whatever mixtures he hadn’t tried on the rest. Then, one day, he told me… I remembering his face suddenly appearing, in the blankness, as if he had just been summoned above me, suddenly, he was there, a think face floating… he told me that he had almost had a breakthrough with one of my friends, and he thought he could succeed with me. But he was going to make conditions optimal for the experiment, since he was sure he was close to a breakthrough, and that meant… mental anguish, as well as physical. To convince me to willingly reject my own life.

“He didn’t say any of these things like he was trying to hurt me. He wasn’t grinning some madman’s smile. He was telling me about the next stage of the experiment. I don’t know, it’s why I can’t always be too bothered when I remembered him. Sometimes he’s like a demon over my sleeping chest… sometimes… he’s the doctor. I don’t know. It’s hard to say.

“He opened my door, propped it open with an average wooden door stop, and let me look out.

“You know, I didn’t know, or it hadn’t occurred to me, before then, how sound proof my little room was.

“The lab… there were several large rooms, connected, and of course, many rooms like my lined up on the edge. I could see one large room, and another room past that, then the lab kind of curved so that I couldn’t see any more rooms… just hear them.

“I heard, the second he creaked the door open a little, the pandemonium. There was every sound of pain. There were screams that rang from many, many halls away, in hidden chambers that I could not see but could only imagine, there were groans, and sounds even more strange than that. Sounds literally like breaking bones, but made with the voice. And there was raspy, or wet, or gasping, breathing from every corner, since no one could breathe… and then I smelled it, and it was the smell of gore. The smell of what crows eat, the smell of an actual battlefield. It was the scent, the sound, the muggy air of a zoo, but… well, but the exhibits were us.

“And then Hojo, with a genial smile, propped the door open, so I could see.

“I had to drag my eyes up from the floor, since light hurt my eyes, and the room was bright lit. There was… just… blood and… bits scattered on the floor. My eyes ran to the ceiling, up, and there were just bright lights that made everything dark… and I tried to look into the room, the tables, and chairs, where people were strapped or tied, and the one orderly…  leaning against the wall, taking notes, looked up at the opening door with a raised eyebrow… and everything was a black silhouette in my burned vision, like a cut-out design in a book, the bounded wounded in a macabre hospital that sometimes twitched, or spasmed, as they gasped… and my eyes slowly regained my sight, and I saw old friends… strapped down… tubes stuck into them, red sores all over them, as their eyes rolled at me, and tried to focus… and heard someone being sick… and I focused, eventually, on the person that Hojo had put directly in front of me, upwards, on a partition, like they use for sets in theatres, tied up, with scars everywhere, and this gigantic tube attached to his stomach… I still don’t know for what… his hair shaved off… and this… happy… relieved… look on his… face, he was missing an eye, and the hole was… infected… and he was glad to see me, and he said, ‘hey, Cloud.’

“And I said, ‘Hey, Zach.’”

And Cloud covered his face with his hands right after his voice finally cracked, and then, to his dismay, his legs gave out as the stress of his emotions weighed on his weak, over tasked body. It was not misery that struck him down, but fatigue, the incredible sense of being tired, that almost struck him down in a faint. Aeris had already turned around to comfort him, but seeing him suddenly bent, and crumpled, she fell instantly on to her knees, and caught him.

Cloud didn’t exactly cry. He shook, and he breathed loud and gasping like a man after an attack, and Aeris held him until he stopped. Cloud felt ashamed, but his crying was not, exactly, an emotional response, and he knew that. It more resembled physical revulsion.

Aeris soothed him silently, not with sighs and caresses but just with holding still, breathing slowly, and grounding Cloud as gently as she could. Their knees were damped by the rainwater and mud below the thin grass, and flies curiously buzzed around them.

Oddly enough, Cloud’s cries did not disturb the complacent birds and beasts which roamed the plains.

After Cloud, exhausted, leaned back on his own strength, apologizing with the little air in his lungs, Aeris quieted him, saying that they may as well stay there for the night. “It’ll be easy to get to Bevelle tomorrow,” she murmured, “In fact, look, you can already see it. If it were earlier in the day, we could even hitch a cart from the road nearby… let’s do that, in fact, hitch a cart the rest of the way tomorrow. I forgot that we could have done that once we hit this part of the Calm Lands. I’m sorry.”

Cloud continued to apologize, so Aeris opened her pack and laid out a few blankets. The sun wasn’t quite setting yet, and there was no way Cloud, so emotionally excited, would sleep for hours, but the rest was more than needed.

After some time (until the sun was far enough down on the horizon that half the sky was deep violet) Cloud considered his story in a quiet voice. He lay down, with the can of ether beside him, and though he barely seemed to notice, Aeris made a point of laying his hand over hers.

He recounted how Hojo muzzled both him and Zach so that they couldn’t talk, but left them there to watch each other for an indeterminate amount of time. Probably months. Probably a year. Eventually, they stopped looking at each other. “It was the last I was going to see my best friend, and I knew it,” cried Cloud, “but how could I look at him? And how could he look at me?” Cloud came close to dying many times, and when Cloud was blacked out, an aide would heal him (Cloud found this out from being able to watch Hojo’s other experiments on his friends. On as many of them as there still were.) “About one person would die every month, I think,” he said, “And I watched a new batch come in… four? Times? Maybe five.

“Despite everything, despite the torture, despite the sickness and… everything, seeing new boys being dragged in was the worst thing I saw. It was the worst feeling. It was the worst, every time.”

Eventually, according to Cloud, though his capacity for physical pain never lessened, his emotions dulled with time. It was terrible to see the young boys first brought in, and hear them, but once they “settled down,” Cloud stopped caring. He snarled at anyone who was too loud, he recounted bitterly. “And I tried to attack the aides, and I cursed everyone, and eventually, I stopped caring about any of them. I didn’t notice when Zach’s body was brought out. I was asleep at the time. I was just surprised to see someone else for a minute, and I just sneered at him, and then barked at him every time he whined until he shut up.

“All of us who were there a long time became like that. We all hated the new boys, and how loud they were, and we would call them… well, best to let that die. It hurt to see them, it hurt like being set on fire; they burned at us, and we jolted with pain and misery. We made sure they grew to be like us, I promise you.

“I remember, the boy I told you, who was paranoid before we were brought into the bad lab, the one who tried to convince us something was wrong? He was missing a leg that had clearly rotted off, and whenever he met someone’s eye, in that room, he would laugh at us. On purpose. Even Zach… before the end… we stopped looking at each other. We mutually stopped acknowledging each other. And there was another boy, very young, who whenever he was being worked on… he yelled at us. Not himself, not Hojo, us. He hated us all. And I promise you that we hated him. Everyone was disgusting, everyone was crippled, and everyone was the diseased and violated scum of the earth. And we mutually despised each other for what we were.

 “Sometimes Hojo… he was a professor, you know. He would walk around the lab and lecture everyone. We listened, and didn’t argue.”

Cloud recounted about four years to Aeris, in as much detail as she asked for, until the moon was directly ahead, and everything was ghostly and silver, and quiet, breathing slowly in sleep. His recollections of those darkest years were scattered and incomplete, so he only remembered the worst. He couldn’t tell Aeris, for sure, whether he had actually had extra limbs and tumors and spores grown on his skin, but he couldn’t rule it out. He couldn’t claim, certainly, that he had had… something… inserted into his head, but he remembered it, and couldn’t claim it didn’t happen. “And then, one day… Hojo wasn’t there, but all his aides rushed in, with scissors and saws, to quickly hack away our bonds and chains, and hook us all up to ether tanks, and then run away. I heard the screeching of car wheels as the aides all rushed away. In the labs, some tried to stand, seeing that they had been untied, but none of them could do it. I didn’t try to get up.

“A set of new boys, who hadn’t seen the bad lab yet, showed up. They drug open the heavy door, and saw us, and realized exactly what their own fate was. They started screaming. One man, who was trying to stumble upwards… when he heard their screams, even though his legs didn’t work, he used his arm muscles to launch himself at them, with some scrap of metal he found nearby, and he tried to shut them up…

“Well, we didn’t like noise.”

At this point, Cloud’s voice was dark, and deep, and it had been growing that way slowly. It was a tone Aeris’s hadn’t heard out of him before this, and one she wouldn’t hear often. It only came when she was eloquent, and that was rare. He was expression revulsion, old hate, true feelings which normally he would not even light upon in his head, but now had approached him quietly, as if from behind… it was lucidity, to a mind normally shrouded with mist, but it did not reveal a landscape particularly sweet.

“Eventually, ShinRa Officials burst into the lab. They were from a department who had been vying for power with Hojo’s and managed in a bit of good politics to get him shut down temporarily, hence his hasty exit. He found a way to pretend it wasn’t him, I think, after the fact. I didn’t hear much about the fallout. They ran into the building, guns out, shouting… they managed the wave of screaming, crying, untouched SPIRIT recruits rushing them, but once they came into our lab and saw us…. Ha ha ha. These were big time Turks, you know. And when they saw us, it was like they were smacked silent. Just the leader managed to stay upright, pale as a goddamn sheet, and his voice thin as paper, so it took them a good hour to follow his orders to get us all out of the cars and loaded into trucks to bring us to wherever could take us. It took them a week to get us all somewhere, anywhere that was capable of taking us. I mean, no place was totally capable. They just looked for places that would even take us in after seeing us. Which is why they had to set up a whole new clinic in the mountains, just for the SPIRITs.”

 “There were some hundred and fifty of us. Maybe. I don’t even know what number Hojo started with. I don’t want to know. Some dozen of us died once we were brought out of the lab and before we got to the clinic.

“And that’s it,” he said, weakly now, ending with a sigh. “After that, it was recovery in the clinic for a few years. None of us recovered. We knew we were there for life, because no one could heal us.

“No one short of an Ancient, that is.”

Cloud’s expression, as he looked up to Aeris, after hours of staring at the ground beneath him, was a mask of self-loathing, and doubt, and depression. But he was smiling. A smiling of spite, of course, but also, a smile of desperation, the dark side of devotion. It was a horrifying face, like a grimacing mask used in tragedy theatre, warped, but Aeris responded to it with a smile that lit her up like a fire in the hearth bursting into life when the flames hit the air. She grabbed his face, and pushed it towards hers, and kissed him on the forehead, with determined strength. “I’m going to prove your boys so wrong, they fall over in shock.”

“They’ll fall over cause they can’t stand.”

“Except they will,” said Aeris, “And what’s more, they will dance, because I have promised it.”

Aeris’s voice was caught by the wind, and flown away, as if carrying the prophecy away to the people. She clutched Cloud’s head, bulky in his plastic mask, close to her chest for a minute, then let him go. “It’s a long way until then, but it will be done.”

Cloud said nothing, and did not move to indicate his feeling about her response. She was silent in return, casting her glance up at the moon. It was almost completely overhead, and almost full, so its glistening rays covered the whole quiet land with bright light, illuminating every detail of the ancient rocks and whispering grasses. Cloud saw, out of the corners of his eyes, bugs flittering in the air, moonlight occasionally catching their thin wings—before they flared with their own, golden light, bright around him over the many miles of the plains, like a constellation on land. They moved in loose flocks, Orion and Draco sweeping over the land, chasing each other leisurely, as if dancing, unconcerned, disturbing the night with only quiet calls.

After a while, Cloud drew in a hesitant breath. “I didn’t want to be impertinent before, but now that I’ve told you everything I remember, I have to ask you something. The question is… important to me, though I can’t really explain how it is.”

“Well, I don’t really need to know why you need to ask it,” she said. “You’ve told me so much, how could I deny this?”

Cloud blinked and looked downward, avoiding her gaze. His face was softer, now, as it had been the day he met her. “I just need to know. Like. How close was Hojo to turning us into… what he wanted us to be? Could he have done it?”

Aeris tilted her head, and involved emotion crossed her features, anger and determination mixed. “Could he do it? Was he close? Those are two different things, in this case.

“He was close. More close than I would ever want him to be. He knew what he was doing far too well. His knowledge of the creation of the Fayth is uncanny and hints that he had some… informant. Yes, he was very close. He knew what a Fayth is made of, and he knew, I am almost convinced, exactly how they were made.

“But could he make one? No. Could he ever make one? Even with full knowledge of how a Fayth is truly made? No. It is completely beyond him.”

 “How?”

Aeris held out her hands. “Why lie to you? The creation of a Fayth is this: they, a living and sentient being, are first imbued with the air of a higher plane— ether works perfectly well for that. They then willingly give up their bodies—pain is not the recommended way to make that happen, but a man in great pain usually wishes to die. Which isn’t the same as giving up one’s body, but unfortunately, it works. Third, in the second where they decide to ascend, the Summoner who is creating a Fayth casts a spell on them.

“Hojo figured that Lightning could suffice, because he could not obtain nor cast the real spell. Should he even hold an ancient, refined, powerful Materia in his hands designed to cast that one spell, he could not cast it. This spell is called Holy.”

“Holy,” repeated Cloud. His skin prickled. “What is Holy?”

Aeris looked down for a minute, considering her answer. Then, with a smile, she extended her arms, so that the moonlight brightened them, and emphasized herself, as well as what was around her. “This, and what this does,” she said. “That’s the best definition I have. Holy would be classified as a spell of movement. Holy is like when happens when a person gets up to dance, or Holy is like what stirs a herd of beasts to run across the plains. Holy is a word, a blessing that speaks, and a blessing that moves. It’s a call. And even if Hojo had a Holy Materia, he could not cast it. I know Holy. It does not allow the base or the unkind to cast it. And there is no substitute for Holy. Hojo made Ether work for the air of the higher world, he made pain work where willing compliance was supposed to be, but nothing, no matter how bright, or powerful, or emphatic, stands in the place of Holy. Only Holy is the archspell, and only Holy can make a holy being. That is all,. His efforts, I promise you, are in vain.”

Cloud lowered his head to his chest, and covered his eyes with his hand. “Thank you for telling me this,” he eventually said, weakly, his voice mostly swallowed by his mask.

“You deserved it,” she said, trying to hide her joy and relief, seeing the fear and the horror drain out of him. “And I was happy to tell you.”

Cloud lay still for another few minutes, calming his breathing and trying to not focus on his growing headache. This was why he avoided excess emotion, honestly.

Aeris looked at him, hidden beneath himself, curled up in a contortionist’s pose with a weight of metal heaped on his back, statuesque in his self-control, as he willed his pain away from himself, overcome with memory, taxed with emotion, and enshrouded with shame and regret and fatigue. Her eyes glimmered with compassion, and she kept herself from holding him.

“Are you tired?” she asked softly, making sure not to alarm him.

Cloud chuckled in response.

She shook her head, while pulling her auburn hair out of its loose knot to relax it. “On a lovely night with an almost full moon, I can’t be tired myself. It doesn’t matter, though, you are physically exhausted and this is the best time to heal you. I’m going to ask you to sleep.”

“Are you my doctor then?”

“Better, I am your home,” she said, matter-of-factly, her eyes shining as the light of the moon hit them, playing with the glimmer of her inner humor.

“Well… yeah,” Cloud said. “I guess I shouldn’t get too used to slacking off on the Ancient’s commands.”

Aeris grinned. “Tonight, I should hopefully fix your shape, so that your sides are back to normal, and your frame isn’t as bent from years of carrying the tank as it is now.”

“Is it bent?” asked Cloud with some surprise.

“Yes,” said Aeris, a bit sadly. Cloud walked… she had seen no reason to bring it up, but he walked with more than just a little limp. “But no matter, this is something that’s easy for me to straighten out, I just didn’t want to mess with your spine when you still had a lot of walking to do. But since we’ll hitch a cart tomorrow, and then rest in Bevelle for a few days, there shouldn’t be any issue with you getting used to a more straightened shape.”

“Well, it’ll be nice to be done with the crick in my back,” Cloud muttered.

Aeris smiled. “Ready for sleep, then?”

“I’m always ready for sleep,” sighed Cloud. “Might I mention that it’s nice to be able to?”

“I imagine,” said Aeris softly, laying her hands on the ground, then lifting them slowly, as if pulling a thread out of a quilt.

“Oh,” said Cloud, “I didn’t mean to…”

“And you didn’t. Don’t worry about what I don’t worry about anyway,” she said, smiling, her form dark with the moonlight behind her. Her hands were up in the air now, poised like the wings of a bird about to beat. “Good night, Cloud.”

“Good night,” he said.

Aeris lowered her arms, and got to work.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Tifa rolled up her sleeves, and got to work.

Today was the day she, at long last, attacked the final room in the old laboratory. She wasn’t sure if she or Father would use these rooms back here for anything, she had only really set up the nice, more spacious front rooms for him to live in. But neither she nor he would feel right until the whole lab was cleaned, and all the evidence of the crimes committed there wiped away with vinegar and orange peel and determined cheerfulness.

“The main problems with these old labs,” she confided to herself, “Is that since the scientists were so hell-bent on privacy, there are no damn windows to light up the place.” Of course, on the Thunder Plains, windows didn’t so much light up rooms as air them out, but in this case, it really was the thought that counted. Having picked a wall (eastern-facing, so that the dim orange glow of the sun behind the clouds, like a halo, would occasionally grace the room) Tifa clenched her fist in its leather and brass glove, pulled her arm back over her shoulder, tensing her muscles, and gave the wall a good, solid punch.

She caused the lab to shake, but that was about all. However, a few hard kicks in the same place, wrought by her iron-toed boots, made a good starting dent.

The crashing disturbed her Father, who was napping somewhere away in the finished rooms. “Tifa?” called a voice, sour, rasping, a human voice, but as if spoken through a choked throat. “Is everything alright back there?”

“Perfect, Father!” she called. “I’m making a window back here in the lab to air things out!”

There was a loud rustling back where Father had his den. “Is that wise? You might disrupt a Mako line. And won’t rain get in?”

“It’s not going to rain for a good two or three days,” she shouted back, “I know the way the weather works on the Plains. It’ll just be foggy until then. We have enough spare glass that I’ll have it filled up by the end of the day, and the Mako tubes are almost entirely underground for this Lab. It’s the electricity lines that are in the walls, and I can replace those easily, should we ever need them back here.”

Her father growled in response. “Be careful.”

“Always am,” she called, before taking a blind kick at the wall in an attempt to crumble it. Some plaster rained down, but nothing impressive happened. Glowering, she decided to kick her efforts up a level, and searched around the room for a blunt object to strike at the wall with. “I have an iron bat somewhere…” she muttered, “It’s not like this place isn’t lacking in impressive weaponry… but impressively thin syringes don’t really demolish walls…”

Eventually, Tifa settled for tearing an old, rusted iron pipe off the wall.” Everything is still fine!” she called to her father when the pipe made a sound like a dragon screeching in pain after its tail had been stabbed.

Her father sighed in response.

Tifa rubbed some of the grey rust off of the pipe with the leather heel of her glove, which worked pretty well, but littered the floor with the vile-smelling stuff. After she had a good grip on the pipe, she took it to the wall. A few hits exposed the wall’s insulation, which she tore out quickly with her pocketknife. She eventually found a few wires, but once those were tucked out of the way (and okay, she snapped a few) it was simple, if strenuous, work to open the wall to the world outside.

The silence of the laboratory was instantly broken with the rush and roar of the Thunder Plains, which were never silent, and never still. The clouds boiled as if they were being poured out of a cooking-pot, and inside them there were nigh-constant flashes of thin, twisted lightning. The wind was tearing through the pale green grass, which bent and thrashed like seaweed, and the sound of sighing and shrieking filled up the air, which was blown by incredible winds.

Tifa smiled, and closed her eyes for a minute. “A good day,” she whispered, “Cold, clear, active… Well, father,” she shouted, “I guess we can call the lab good and aired out now, hm?”

“This is going to put out the kitchen fire,” he shouted back, irate. Tifa laughed and promised to look for some suitable glass to grind down to shape as soon as possible.

But before that, she had to get rid of anything in the room resembling a hazard, any needles left to fall behind cabinets or more rotting pipes like the one she set down on an old, coffee-stained and moldy desk. The room was large, there were plenty of places for biohazards to be hiding—that collection would probably take her until lunch. “Are the hazmat bags still by the scraps pile outside?” she asked her father.

She waited for him to shuffle around and get to a window. “Looks like it. How do you hold those things down in the wind?”

“Well,” she said, walking towards him through the maze of labs (all of which but this last one she had cleaned, though few of which were tidied up into something resembling a house instead of a bare office) “They’re a tough plastic with a mesh of iron wire inside holding them together and specifically designed to dispose of sharp, rusted metal and dangerous chemicals. I don’t think a little wind will bother them. Could you pick one up for me quick?”

Her father muttered to himself, but eventually pulled himself to the door, shoving it open and snaking the upper half of his body outside to reach the bags, picking one up in-between his front claws. “Is this lab as bad as the last one?” he asked.

“No,” said Tifa. “This one’s just a little dirty, from what I can tell. No hidden bodies, no puddles of acid, no piles of human waste, just a whole bunch of scraps and leftover equipment. Should be an easy clean, and then… this building may as well be a Bevelle apartment suite.”

She turned the corner into her Father’s room, which used to be an office and several small dormitories, but the two of them had torn down the walls to make one spacious, cave-like living room. The creation  of the giant hall was necessary, considering Tifa’s father,  who was now crouched near the front door, shaking water droplets off his head, was almost as big as a house himself, a beast like those that spawned out of Sin with gigantic wings and sharp, bone-like horns, his skin black as soot and his claws long and sharp.

In summary, an average bedroom wasn’t going to cut it. Nor was a nice, picket-fenced home in town square, hence the rehabilitation of what used to be a laboratory of questionable ethics a good twenty miles out of the nearest town. The hideous beast handed his daughter a waste-disposal bag, and she smiled and thanked him, returning to her work.

The beast crouched down, muttering as he tried to avoid hitting the walls with his wings, and careful to avoid the second-hand shelves and end tables full of nice vases and books and record-players that Tifa had pulled out of junk heaps and abandoned houses and then set up nicely in the redesigned lab. He listened to the clatter and crashes of Tifa gleefully tearing apart the old, rusted lab, as he attempted, once again, to find some way to read a book.

It took Tifa about three days to clear out the final chamber of the lab, including a setback when she uncovered a tube of black gunk so vile in scent and appearance that it took her and her father several hours to figure out how to safely dispose of it and WHERE to safely dispose of it (the makeshift landfill for all the other dangerous crap wasn’t going to cut it for this.) In the end, the old man suggest he fly it quickly to the only Lifestream crack in the Thunder Plains, some fifty miles from their laboratory, assuming in his faith that the Ancients could handle it. Tifa reluctantly let him, after making him promise to be very quick and stealthy about it, since there still wasn’t any rain that could shield him from curious on-lookers.

But after a fashion, the old lab, once littered with the evidence of atrocity and madness, was clear, sanitized, and ready to be made a home.

“Almost a shame we have to keep this nice, open place to ourselves,” said Tifa, as she and her father made a final examination of the corners and pipes of the laboratory, making sure that everything rotted or sharp was sufficiently hacked away.

“People will find it eventually,” her father growled, poking inside the depths of a large closet. “It’s amazing that ShinRa hasn’t decided to come by and burn down the evidence of its existence already. I begin to wonder exactly how this project was carried out, since their aftercare is not what I would expect.”

Tifa nodded. “I’m not sure I really like it either. Why would you leave something like this lying around for anyone to find it? Even if you don’t know how all the parts once fit together, the scraps alone are criminalizing.” 

“Just like leftover bones are always evidence that someone died, even if you don’t know how,” he growled.

“Blegh,” groaned Tifa, “Don’t remind me. I’m never going to forget how that goddamn torso looked at me.”

“It wasn’t looking at you, it was very dead,” he father said. As he rifled around an air duct, his claw made something skitter away into the metal shaft. “Tifa,” said he, “you missed something, up here.”

“I can’t reach up there, you oaf,” Tifa said, annoyed, standing on her tiptoes. “How on earth am I supposed to examine ducts on the ceiling?

“You could do like you usually do, and tear them off the wall,” he suggested idly.

“Har har,” said she.

It took him a bit of fishing around before he finally pulled out the object that had tried to roll away from him—it was a Materia on a thick silver chain, rusted and stained, clearly quite old. The Materia itself was—well, calling it black would be inaccurate. It was more like a colorlessness that happened to be very dark.

They both stared at it for a second. The father poked it with his claw. Tifa rubbed her eyes, and tried to focus on the little, chained-up hole, but her eyes kept sliding off of it. It seemed to… turn, inside itself.

“Huh,” said Tifa. “That’s not what you expect to find left in the air duct once you’ve already cleaned out all the corpses and shit.”

Her father continued turning it around, a puzzled look on his face.

“Do you know what it is?” she asked him, edging closer to the strange thing. “I mean, other than a Materia… is it a Materia?”

“It has to be, but…” he mumbled to himself. “Tifa, I’ve told you something of my history. Not everything, since it’s painful to dredge up… you know the horrors I have faced, the things done to me, in the name or progress… those who tortured me… and the dark arts and foul ingredients they have used. I have tasted ancient poisons, and watched spells made by races before humans boil in the air, with eldritch runes… I have been subject to the gross ingredients of malpractice.”

“Yes?” said Tifa, with hesitation, when he paused.

Her father looked at her, confusion evident on his toothy features. “I have no idea what this is.”

 

-

 

After spending a day and a half in Bevelle, in which Cloud spent most of the time locked in a hotel room (the crowds wore on him even worse and even more quickly than he expected) and Aeris spent most her time on various errands, they entered Machalania woods. Their several day walk through the woods was uneventful, Cloud occasionally mentioned something or other about Nibelheim, but he didn’t much like the subject, so little was said about it. Aeris would talk about whatever beasts the two passed by, and further explicated subjects of the Lifestream and the inner workings of the Planet, which were things Clouds had a lot of interest in, so she felt free to dwell on them, even when he admitted he didn’t understand her well anymore. Aeris sometimes, out of the corner of her eyes, caught Cloud smiling as he followed a bright-colored bird or bug or spray of delicate, translucent flowers with his bloodshot eyes, picking himself over decaying, fungus-filled logs with his gradually reduced limp. Once, a black bird with wings from which bright jewel tones shone behind its inky cloak landed on a branch of an emerald-leaved tree right before Cloud’s eyes, and he whistled at it, his cheerful tone distorted by his mask, thin, yet upbeat, unthinkingly happy.

They usually travelled in silence, occasionally helping each other over rivers or thick piles of fallen red leaves, interlaced with nearly silent pits of jeweled snakes. They slept in whatever dry, clean patch Aeris could find or make, and though beasts paced around their camp, curious, neither thought that they would ever harm the two of them with Aeris there. And they did not.

After some time, they emerged, suddenly, onto the Thunder Plains. Their last day in the forest had been rainy, and rumbles of thunder grew as the wide sea of leaves thinned, until there were only a few sparse, thin trees around them, nothing like the tall, thick, vine-draped kings of the forest. And finally, suddenly, the abyss of the Thunder Plains opened to them like a door blown agape.

The ground seemed to decrease in front of them, tilting down into some sort of gradual basin—or maybe that was only the effect of the vastness on their eyes. Above them, and slanting away, were the clouds, low, thick, dark, voluminous, curving like rivers and pouring down as if held in a heavy, over-stretched tarp. The clouds were never still—grey with black centers; they boiled, and heaved, like slave workers trying to raise the stones of a great palace aloft, and their sweat dripped down thin and quiet, pouring on fields of white, malnourished grass. The thunder growled ceaselessly in the angry heavens like a beating drum, first here, then far away, and sometimes erupting into roars, accompanied by gleaming, flashing white fangs. The land was featureless naturally, and only occasionally was decorated by uniformly crumbling buildings of grey stone which could have been mirages in the misty, rain-decked world.

The Thunder Plains, travelers often remarked, was oppressive in a way that nothing else natural had even been, except perhaps the deep trenches of the ocean (and the things it spawned.) The only comparison was deep depression—a state which, unlike the rest of the world, was entirely pale and dreary in palate, always and eternally loud with furious whispers and cries, and uncannily flat and continuous, as if there was, literally, no end to the storm. Most people refused to believe any evidence of natural cause in the making of the Thunder Plains, but instead, generally, claimed it was gigantic curse laid on Spira after they had slogged through it once.

Cloud’s mask was fogged with all the rain, so she could not see the smile grow on his face, but she could head his contented sigh. “I never thought I’d see it again,” he said dreamily, “and then they opened the door to the laboratory, and I heard the thunder again… and a gust of rain came in and fell on my face...” he closed his eyes.

“You never stop loving your home land,” said Aeris happily.

Cloud opened his eyes again. “Where’s yours?”

“Well, the Lifestream,” she said, “but you mean where I was born, some several millennia ago... it’s not the same for me, since I barely remember… several ten thousand years in one place sort of blurs your memory of times before. But I was born on this continent, actually. The land was a little differently shaped then, and obviously, everything looked different, but I was born somewhere where Macalania Forest is today.”

Cloud looked back over his shoulder at the receding trees. “Really?”

“Yes, but it was a pretty dismal swamp back then! My race had just arrived at this continent, and hadn’t done much cultivation yet, so they called me one of the first Wilderia Children,” she said happily, clutching her hands in front of her as she examined the storm stretched in front of her. “My, it never stops impressing you.”

Cloud hummed positively. They both listened to the thunder.

“You said that Nibelheim is along the east coast?” Aeris asked.

“Very close to the ocean,” Cloud confirmed. “You have to be careful not to run into the peninsula and get lost there, though.”

“Right,” said Aeris. “Well, I don’t think it should take us long to get there.”

“A few days, I would think.”

“Yes,” said Aeris, peering up at the clouds again. “Spira in her true glory. I promise you, the dance of the spirits, which you cannot see, doesn’t even compare to the sky itself.”

“I always thought it was amazing that the clouds were so many colors,” said Cloud. “Grey, of course, but orange, green, blue sometimes, all sorts of deep, chalky colors…”

Aeris giggled, and held her arm out to her companion. “Shall we?”

Cloud accepted. “Well, we can’t just stand here.”

“Glad you agree,” Aeris said. Arm in arm, they stepped out of their small canopy of Macalania’s last tree into the infinite storm.

A traveler from Bevelle, perhaps, would be devastated by the muck, gloom, and damp of travelling through the plains. To be sure, if you live there, true dryness is not a state you know. But Cloud was a native of the Plains, and had grown up in a village that knew no bathing or swimming because both were redundant, and knew no clothes-washing other than just going outside again. Aeris, beside him, was a native to the molten insides of the Planet itself, and wasn’t that concerned about getting a bit of muck on her. They both enjoyed the first wash of rain plastering their hair to their faces, and, after a few minutes, by silent agreement they removed their shoes to better feel the swampy ground under their feet.

“The roads really are a bit easier, we could walk on those,” Cloud offered.

“No,” said Aeris resolutely.

Cloud practically walked with a spring in his (still uneven) step for those next few days. Even the knowledge of what was about to occur couldn’t sink his spirits. Being in his native air—and his native water— was a fine cure for him.

Since Aeris decided that sleeping in the rain might be going just a bit far, she had Cloud direct them to reactors to spend the nights, since he knew that the chance of anyone actually being inside a reactor at any given time was incredibly small. She made a point of drying their clothes every evening, if just for the sake of comfortable sleeping on Cloud’s part, but since there was no such thing as cover when travelling the Thunder Plains, on or off road, nights were the only time they were warm or dry. They both got used to goose-flesh skin and white breath.

During the nights, Aeris worked diligently on Cloud. She was certain she was near a breaking point—his dependence on ether was growing thinner, and she was working on healing him bit by bit, so that his nerves, as a whole, were beginning to work normally—in some cases, nothing substitutes continual persistence.

But there was a bit of him that would still require skill—no matter how well she enticed his body into functioning, no matter how sweetly she encouraged his addicted blood to accept oxygen again, she did not change his slightly inhuman nature, which resisted change at any degree higher than her messing with individual nerves.

There was something still buried in his soul, his mind, and body, with tendrils everywhere, that refused to let him settle back into a state of humanity, and kept him between the physical world of Spira, and the sort of wide night of spirits. As she made the playing field of his body less jumbled, Aeris felt she was getting a better look at the contamination, which the human doctors, for all their training, had never seen—but she had a while until she could grasp its workings fully. Her priority at this time was to separate the disease from the ether that fueled it, anyway, and she was sure she was but a week from taking his mask off.

Their Bevelle food supplies barely lasted the trip, but not to worry, Cloud knew how to get food in and beneath the rainy desert if they had to. In fact, Cloud’s knowledge of the Thunder Plains rivaled Aeris’s—it was the most pleasant leg of their trip, as they walked contentedly under fierce skies on top of quiet plains, unhurried, and not disturbed by the rain or the flashes of light. To Cloud, the sound of a shattering sky was like an old record, one played in his childhood and never forgotten.

But when they grew close to Nibelheim (and, incidentally, the as rain almost stopped, though the rolling lightning above never ceased) Cloud grew slowly more nervous and despondent. They had already agreed ahead of time that Cloud would stay anonymously at the inn, and only call himself a recovering SPIRIT, but give no name, since the thought of revisiting old friends in the town was… less than pleasant to him.

 Aeris would do the socializing as caretaker, and since there was only one thing a former SPIRIT would want with Nibelheim, Aeris would reveal her desire to see the old laboratory up front. Cloud said the villagers were a courteous race, and they would allow her to do what she pleased, but to not expect a guide or much information, since they were also honorable, and he had heard reports of their mourning after they learned what had really happened in the scientist’s lab.

When they first came in sight of Nibelheim, highly peaked roofs peering through the mists on the horizon, Cloud stumbled. Aeris propped him up without a word, and they continued walking. The tops of the small houses grew clear, black rotting wood bars that shed many pale stone shingles, continually darkened by rivulets of rain that poured down the scales and through the black drain-pipes on every building to the streams that ran in the street. The streets were of the small pale cobblestone that formed the roofs of the houses, and they were similarly drenched, as small, white feet darted splashing across them, hitting the hems of wet, voluminous skirts. In this part of town, there were only low, small, villager’s houses, and there was no gate and no wall, like towns in the South might have—what would you defend yourself from in the Thunder Plains? Who would attack? Even Sin was seldom seen here. The ancient cobblestones simply grew out of the thin grass some half-mile out of town to mark the way in, with no other fanfare.

Cloud tried to stop himself from reacting, but unable to deal with the pressure, he wandered into town limping on Aeris’s arm, his hand clutched over the parts of his face not hidden by his mask, which he tried not to scratch. Aeris walked proudly, holding him as if he were a prized beau, beaming at those few people on the street that afternoon. The children who were running around, gleefully playing tag, their jackets hanging nearby from the rotting railing outside of a poor woman’s house, slowed down when Aeris walked up to them, staring in wonder.

Aeris gingerly avoided a fairy ring of black toadstools that grew between the stones of the street, casting her glance occasionally down the twisting road at the larger, more elegant, stone-built houses down in the town center. “Could any of you children direct me to the hotel? My companion and I would love a rest,” she said sweetly.

The children were stuck dumb. Cloud, ashamed, attempted to hide himself more completely behind Aeris. Aeris cocked her head, wondering at why the children wouldn’t reply to her. “Is something the matter?” she asked.

At that point, suspicious about the sound of her children and nieces not making any noise, a thin, middle-aged housewife cracked open the door of her house, shaking the dew-spotted violets beneath the foggy window-pains with the force it took to move the rusty hinges. She peered through the spotted, copper frames of her glasses at the strangers in the street—and then, covering her face with her hands, dropped her basket of leeks and root-vegetables with a scattered pattering on the floor.

“It can’t be,” said she in wonder.

Cloud flinched—and then he was puzzled. She did not look horrified, her tone was a tone of awe. She didn’t seem shocked or appalled by Cloud—in fact, she was looking—at Aeris.

“Oh,” whispered Cloud. “Of course. THAT should have occurred to me.”

“What?” Aeris whispered back at him. “Am I doing something wrong?”

The woman fell to her knees.

Cloud sort of groaned in embarrassment. Aeris said, “Oh.”

“You are an Ancient,” said the woman, awestruck.

“They’ll all recognize you,” muttered Cloud to himself, behind his hand. “Of course they’ll recognize you, this is where I was taught about the Ancients, of course, this is so stupid, how did I NOT think of this, of course this would happen…”

Aeris bit her lip, and reformulated her plan. She walked past the young girls, who parted way for her in a fashion unlike children, dragging Cloud behind her, and stepped onto the woman’s front porch, where she kneeled in the wet dust, squashing fungus beneath her feet. “Maiden, arise,” said Aeris, her hand outstretched, “I need help today, not worship.”

The woman, dazed, remained on her knees, and looked at Aeris’s hand, as if trying to understand.

“We can’t avoid it now,” whispered Cloud, unable to stop speaking, though his voice was only a hiss behind his mask, “They’ll all see you, they’ll all see me, they can’t avoid, and I’ll have to…”

Aeris squeezed his arm fondly. “My fellow-traveler has been with me over a fortnight now. He requires rest, and for that, I need to be guided to the hotel. After that, I have a mission to complete, which will only take a guide and some of your time.”

Finally, the trembling woman grasped Aeris’s tiny hand, and was pulled up by Aeris’s incredible strength, swaying unbalanced on her feet. “Will you help us to the town center?” asked Aeris gently.

“Yes,” she said weakly, and then, “Yes, immediately! We will pass by the town of the priestess… I will tell her… I…” she floundered. “Yes, anything you wish!”

“Thank—” Aeris began, and was interrupted by a tug on the back of her skirt. She turned around to see the girls who had been playing tag before staring up at her, enraptured. Wordlessly, the eldest reached up to hand Aeris something—a tiny, glittering, golden hoop—a bracelet which she had been wearing on her wrist just a moment before. After a bit of shoving, the rest of the girls also gave her a bracelet, whether gold or something cheaper, made for younger girl, but, since Aeris was much smaller than the people of Cloud’s time in general, they all fit neatly onto her thin wrist.

(Despite his developing panic attack, Cloud did manage to shoot Aeris something of an ‘I told you so’ look.)

Soon, Aeris was being shuffled away by a slightly wobbly housewife, who seemed to think she was dreaming, the muttering was anything to judge. Just as Cloud feared, she started banging on doors (gently, so not to fracture any old, swollen wood) shouting that an Ancient had returned to Nibelheim, guided by a SPIRIT.

“Well, that’s true,” Aeris speculated, “You were the one who told me where the town is.”

“I do not need this,” muttered Cloud, trying to keep a handle on his breathing, “This is terrible, everyone’s going to… and I… what if…”

Aeris took a moment to, curiously enough, lean close to Cloud, and very seriously knock her forehead against his. “No one will recognize you,” she whispered. “Once I realized that they were all going to know me, I started casting an illusion around you.”

“You… what?”

“I can hide things by making them look different. I should have done that to myself, but too late now. No one will recognize you.” Aeris turned her face back towards the front, down the road, where people were beginning to pour out of their doors, gaping, dressed in brown work clothes decorated with swirling scarlet clouds (as was their fashion) and lifted her head and smiled, walking evenly, tip by tip on the cobblestones, with Cloud beside her.

From that time on, Cloud was completely frozen, shuffled along where he was dragged, and didn’t allow a thought into his head, so he wasn’t exactly present for the proceeding events.

People gathered about them, men and women alike, some still absent-mindedly clutching their stitching or their hammers or their pens, all taking time to get close to Aeris, peer at her, offer her something, perhaps say something before falling in line behind her in the gathering procession, which, in its extremities, almost faded into the mist. Aeris was decorated with golden hoops on her wrist and neck, all of which she gracefully accepted, and various thin-stalked white flowers in her arms. A thin veil, spotted with stitched lace leaves, was laid on her head, which smelled of powder and vanilla, and someone else put a beaded shawl around her—something almost too rich for the people of the Thunder Plains. Eventually, there was not a single person inside—even the old and sick found a place to pace behind the living Ancient, and when they reached the small temple, made of stone, roofed with colored tile which sped the rain away, making it one of the oldest and strongest buildings in the town, the Priestess was waiting outside, clutching a bunch of bright-red flowers in her hands; flowers which only grew inside the warm, safe confines of the earth-floored temple.

“My Lady, The Ancient,” breathed the priestess.

“Loyal priestess,” greeted Aeris, beaming. “And people of Nibelheim,” she addressed, turning around half-way to make it clear that she meant everyone. “I did not mean to cause a stir. Do not feel obligated to pamper me, I do not need praise. I am on the old mission to find a way to rid Spira of Sin, and all the help I need for you is a house for myself and my companion for some few days before we travel again. My companion is a former SPIRIT,” she continued, making sure that she had her arm in front of Cloud, masking him, instead of showing him off. “He would prefer not to be bothered by anyone, I am sure you understand.” She squeezed Cloud’s arm, dropped her authoritative tone, and turned to the priestess, beaming. “Once my friend, who is tired, is situated, I shall join you here, outside, to talk, and to converse, as long as you all like.”

After that speech, the townspeople found a place for Cloud with remarkable speed. There was a house, in the central circle of town, which used to house one of Nibelheim’s oldest families before they died out. As a show of their wealth, Cloud remembered, they used to keep the house looking so clean it might as well have been dry—no mushrooms, no bugs, no wet spots—all smooth stone and painted tile that the rain slipped right off of and the lightning never found. It was, of course, a little more shaky now, since no one had been living in it for a while (well, there was the debacle with ShinRa, who almost bought it as a vacation mansion, before he realized that the Thunder Plains were hellish) and it had not yet been totally renovated into whatever they were trying to make it into, but the upper floors were still situated for an old couple, with old, dusty bedrooms and end tables with dried roses still rested on them, a writing desk with yellow and crinkled papers laid out, and a bathroom with the sort of crystal taps and thin faucets that were built one hundred years ago. The elders of Nibelheim led Cloud up the stairs to his room, none recognizing him, and none asking any questions except for what he wanted to eat. Cloud mumbled an order for fruits and grains, and then asked to be left alone.

They left him alone. The house was so silent, with the glass windows blocking out the omnipresent thunder, that Cloud could hear his own wheezing. It was dark, too, and though Cloud found the switch that was supposed to ignite the dusty chandeliers, they had all burned out long ago.

As he stood in the house, looking at the floors that threatened to collapse, examining the luxurious, showy spiral staircases, and the extra rooms with safes and bookshelves in them, full of goods that were not just excess put PERISHABLE excess—a ridiculous amount of finery for anyone in the Thunder Plains—Cloud remembered how, when he was a child, rumors had grown about the “Nibelheim Mansion” being haunted. He remembered being dared to dart in here once without being seen, and being unable to do it. Looking around now, he wished he had seen it in fuller glory. The house was still graceful, and still grand, and still sparkled in it gilded corners, even without the aid of the sun, and it was still crowded with antique furniture and ancient, foreign oddities; and he could only imagine what it had all been once.

He stumbled back over to the window and opened it to let in some of the noise from outside. Walking around like this was rarely painful anymore, though he didn’t want to risk breathing stuffy indoor air and agitating himself. When he finally figured out, with his feeble fingers, how to unclasp the rusty hinges of the almost off-white window and open it up to the town below, a gust of cold, wet, sighing Thunder Plains air floated into the room, gracefully unsettling everything.

Cloud looked down from the second-story height to the stone street below, where Aeris has purposefully placed herself on the ground—on her own holy throne, in a way—surrounded by rings of people who were literally stretching to be near her, some covertly trying to touch her.

Aeris was right in assuming that Cloud wanted no place in the discussion—he shuddered just looking at the crowd. But he kept watching anyway, for the unique sight in its center—Aeris, piled over with curious children, who kept bringing her flowers and trinkets (which she started putting in her hair, studding it like pearls in fine fabric), entirely unconcerned about being manhandled, graciously smiling at each. He watched her, several times, lightly grasp a child who came near to her—and whisper something. He never knew what she told them. But he saw that each one of then smiled.

They kept her there for hours (Cloud left off idly watching on and decided to explore the mansion for a spell, though really, all he found were empty rooms—so much for the rumors of a secret crypt) until it grew late enough for dinner, and then, they moved her into a hall where great amounts of food had surely been prepared. Cloud knew, because he had to reluctantly shut the windows to block out the nauseating smell.

Well, it made him nauseous. They brought him his bowls of peaches, grapes, and wild rice soon after their own feast began, and he accepted them with mumbled thanks, but, of course, didn’t eat much.

All he found of any use in the house, curiously, was a few Materia that looked like summons. Why they were left there, he couldn’t say, but they were powerful, so he held onto them. They might come in handy, he reasoned, especially for a man who couldn’t lift a sword to save his life.

He picked up a book or two off the shelves—both frail and crumbling by now—and brought them to his bed. They were both scientific volumes, a subject which, reluctantly, he had become interested in over the years. They were mostly about the science of energy, and the sources it came from—he smiled as he imagined Aeris’s impassioned notations about the tapping of the Lifestream. It was a good supplement to Aeris’s overblown, yet vague descriptions of the same topic—she knew too much to make anything evident to Cloud, really. The author of this book—Gast by name—wrote a dry but thorough examination of the properties of Lifestream and Materia as sources of energy, and how they were used in such things as Al Bhed technology (descriptions of which were couched in Fayth-praise and hate of the Al Bhed, of course.)

Aeris announced her presence with humming, long after dark, as she alighted the stairs. It took her a few minutes to wander the mansion before reaching Cloud, and as she did so, her humming slowed and stopped.

Eventually, she called out cheerfully—yet at once warily—to Cloud, who answered in much the same tone. She entered his room, smiling, and unloaded a literal pile of gifts and treasures on the ground about the size of a bushel of wheat.

Cloud was silent for a second. “We have never been able to grow that amount of flowers in the Thunder Plains.”

“And I think some of my golden treasures I was presented with were actually ripped off the walls when I arrived,” she said, perplexed. “I appreciate the thought, but I don’t know why you feel the need to shower an immaterial spirit with… stuff.”

“It’s a tradition,” said Cloud, “it shows devotion. It’s supposed to be a way to say that you, The Ancients, the Planet, matter more than anything.” He spoke hesitantly, because he noticed that Aeris was glancing almost—uneasily around the room, up at the rafters, and down through the floor, which she struck once with her foot. “Is something the matter?”

“Yes,” she said, quizzically. “How old is this house?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s older than you, I promise, and much older than that, though I couldn’t give you an exact date… I know, because it’s alive.”

Cloud raised his eyebrows, and gave Aeris a look which said ‘please tell me you are using a non-literal and quirky Ancient figure of speech again.’

“Very old houses become somewhat aware of themselves…” Aeris muttered, walking around and poking at the walls, “Not their fault, they’re bombarded with emotions of people who consider them family… they’re one of the few objects that are given so much importance that they must carry it somehow. But… no, I’m not sure it’s the house. Oh, this is uncomfortable.”

“What is it?” Cloud whispered, watching Aeris’s growing agitation and not much liking it.

“Is there a practice of building cellars in the Thunder Plains?”

“Of course. Barns didn’t really cut it.”

“Big ones?”

“Uh… depending on the size of the house.”

“So this house would have a large cellar.”

“Yes…” said Cloud very hesitantly. “Actually…”

“Actually?”

“I was just thinking about it earlier… There were rumors, when I was a child, of something… large, and unpleasant, being under this house. Just because it was old. And old people lived here. Child’s stories.”

“Well, rumors do not build around old houses for no reason. They’ve all been growing a lot to talk about… let’s not go looking for this cellar, is that all right?”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” said Cloud, quietly.

Aeris looked around for another minute, frowning, as if looking for something. Her sharp eyes peered at the boards holing up the wall, at the floor below her, past the walls into things that Cloud could not see, with vision more acute than a cat’s. She closed her eyes, and then waited for a minute. Then, she opened them, and shrugged. “Well, it’s no real problem, just like all old houses. Anyway, isn’t it a lovely place to stay? There is wealth like this in Bevelle, and style like this, but not luxury like this, and not fashion like this. This is hand-woven lace, it must be,” she said, happily examining the bedroom curtains.

“It is, I remember them being so proud of it, all those years ago…” said Cloud softly, reminiscing. “We were all kids then… me, Tifa, Biggs, Wedge, Jessie…”

Aeris smiled, her fingers still on the tiny holes of the white drapes. “You had a lot of friends as a child?”

“We were all friends, there were only half a dozen children of age,” he said. “We all wanted to live in the big Nibelheim Mansion, because it was so clean, and so beautiful… Tifa made me swear we would live here when we were married.”

Aeris smiled. “Tifa was a little girl?”

Cloud ducked his head. “My next door neighbor. She liked me, I guess.”

“Hmm,” said Aeris, absentmindedly looking outside. “Maybe you’ll run into her again.”

Cloud was silent for a second. “I’d rather not.”

Aeris nodded. “All the same.” She stretched her arms above her head, pulling her muscles a bit. “I’m sore from sitting down so much… I forgot how taxing a body is! If only I could sleep it off,” she sighed.

“If only you could magically erase all your pain,” said Cloud sarcastically. Aeris laughed. “Why don’t you sleep, though?”

Aeris shrugged. “Too enjoyable. I love dreams. And since I don’t sleep like a human, I’d be in danger of not waking up for a very long time.”

“Oh.”

“Not timely,” she summarized. “And I plan to visit that lab tomorrow.”

Cloud stared down at the bedspread.

“I’ll tell you if I come to any conclusions about how to heal you,” said Aeris gently. “But for now, it’s pretty late, and you should get to bed. I feel like I’m close to getting that mask off you, so I can’t wait to get to work.”

Cloud started. “Really? You think so?”

“Haven’t you noticed how little Ether you’ve been breathing?” asked Aeris, gesturing to his tank. “It shouldn’t take me much more than a few days now, if everything goes well. I’ve convinced your blood to listen to me—never say that persistence isn’t a virtue!”

Cloud covered his smile with his hand. “Thank you.”

“And you are welcome,” she said brightly. “But shh, shh, talking gets us nowhere,” she demanded, waving her hands to indicate that Cloud should lie down.

He complied. “You’re pretty excited for this, huh?”

“You’re fun,” said Aeris. “By that I mean, you’re a fun puzzle. It’s interesting to work you out. And it makes me hopeful for confronting Sin. Of course I’m excited, this could be the end of thousands of years of questing! It’s the most important work I’ve done in centuries.”

Ponderous, Cloud rested himself against the overstuffed down pillow. “Well, far be it from me to get in the way of important work,” he said, closing his eyes.

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CHAPTER SIX

 Aeris finally moved again when the Thunder Plains sun, orange and huge and dull, appeared blurry over the horizon. Thinking about it, though, she wasn’t sure one could say that the Thunder Plains did have a horizon. It was more like a misty, cloudy wall far away that rounded off the world, instead of a line suggesting far-away places. There were no borders here—only dim layers of rain and mist, punctuated by sudden, sharp light, with everything indistinct below. To live in the Thunder Plains was to live on an island in the air, surrounded above and beside by white water, always unsure what was behind the next creeping wave.

Aeris had made it clear that she intended to leave alone and unimpeded this morning.  She refused to take a guide, and that was fine, because no one wanted to be a guide. The townspeople had made it plain that they considered it a grave and they refuse to disturb it. Someone tried to warn her about ghosts, but she only had to look at them to remind them who they were talking to.

Their worship was overdone. She enjoyed teaching them, and she enjoyed their love, but not necessarily their reverence. To Aeris, Aeris was part of the planet, lovely and holy, but lovely and holy dirt and rocks. She was the spirit of the deep, not the spirit of the tall pedestal.

Cloud slumbered for longer than he usually did. Even after guiding his nightmares away, Aeris usually saw him waking long before he had a full night of sleep, but now, perhaps because of the misty air of the Thunder Plains cool and sighing all around him, he slept peacefully after the dawn. Aeris sat beside him, and considered those things which she was becoming more and more certain of. She had most of the parts of Hojo’s plot in her head by now, but she was still uncertain what they made when put together. No matter what, it wasn’t a pretty picture. She didn’t have any hopes for pleasant revelations, her mind was focused totally on the possibility of finding parallel’s to Sin’s biology. And since she set out of unpleasant facts, every gross twist of Hojo’s design was heartening.

She had been, literally, in the belly of the whale before—she had felt exactly what Sin was, but it was like looking at a great pile of rotted, half-liquid garbage and being told to sort it into all its individual parts and restore it to ripeness. The concept was fine, but she didn’t have the trick to do it. The battle against Jenova and her Son had, for the Ancients, been something of a battle of technology—she attacked with bioweapons they had never seen before, corrupting Spira, and they found a way to make the antibodies as soon as they could, eventually learning enough about her to be able to attack rather than defend. But learning how to dissolve her spores had taken centuries of experimenting with them, so toxic they were—and by that time, her Son was already causing more damage than she ever had. And between their combined efforts in corruption, and the humans’ efforts in storing Lifestream away from its source… there was a reason they had resorted to walking avatars and the creation of the spirits of the highest air.

Their Fayth were not sleeping warriors. They aided the humans, and kept them from the majority of Sin’s direct harm. But they were an effort in cleaning up the blood from a gushing wound. At some point, the wound would just have to be healed.

She decided to leave Cloud to wake alone. She had a fair bit to do today, anyway. She left the mansion silently, casting another warning glare on the entrance to the cellar, hidden under a carpet, just for good measure. She wasn’t sure exactly how sentient the feeling down there was, but it wasn’t nice. At least Cloud knew better than to bother things like that. But how did a town so very spiritual miss something this unsettling?

She opened the door, and was treated to those people who happened to be in the street stopping dead in their tracks. She smiled, shut the door behind herself, and curtsied. They made frantic bows in return, and she excused herself silently but walking off the porch of the mansion and into the street, savoring the gust of dry, warm wind that filled the plains that day, bringing excited sensations from the storms above. The way to the reactor and the laboratory had already been pointed out to her, so she went on her way.

Normally, eighteen miles to and eighteen miles back would have been too much to ask of anyone, in consideration of both time and energy, but Aeris figured she was allowed to take a short cut. She waited until she was outside of the town, whose gabled roofs and lightning rod spires were swallowed into white clouds behind her, before she sighed, and melted.

All it took was to make a tiny crack in the earth before she scurried into it, a mouse through a hole, or a fish into the current. Going into the Lifestream was much easier than leaving it, but on land as charged with fire and soaked with rain as the Thunder Plains, she wasn’t worried about getting magic to work. She ran through the earth in a way similar to the way an electrical signal races through neurons in a body, inciting reaction across feet of flesh. She ran straight for the nearest lightning rod, figuring it to be the correct location, and waited just a few seconds for a bolt of lightning to excite the air around and create energy for her to cut through the surface, erupting like a geyser from packed, wet earth, baking a clay body around her with the heat of the scorched air as she came.

She emerged covered in clay and mud. “This is why I prefer water incarnations,’ she muttered to herself, scraping away as much of it as she could, repelling it with a silent chemical reaction.

Then she peered around the landscape—mostly flat, of course, and mostly layers of grey, with some bright yellow and orange shadows peeping in behind. Not far away at all, to her left, was a large, metal-walled complex with some piles of trash outside it, and next to no windows. Aeris figured this must be the laboratory she was looking for—and indeed, she felt some sort of toxic aura coming from inside the building somewhere.

But she also felt, and heard, some people wandering inside. “Hm,” she whispered. “That’s not right. Perhaps ShinRa actually remembered it has mistakes to clean up?”

She tread carefully, on the tips of her toes, to the front of the laboratory, examining the piles of trash as she went by. They were bound up in hazardous material bags, ready to be carried away, and there weren’t many of them. Peering inside, she found old equipment, rusty metal, stacks of papers… but not a lot of chemical or biological material. Some, but that was mostly old and polluted reserves of blood, and blood so curdled that it could never be put back into living veins. The laboratory has clearly been through some spring cleaning, she thought dourly. That might make her job more difficult.

She looked, quickly, into a dim window near the front of the lab, and saw, to her surprise, something that looked like a cozy living room. There were a few layered quilts used as rugs, and pictures on the wall over shelves filled with second-hand books and kitsch… and somewhere, she could hear two voices. One was a young woman, with a Thunder Plains accent, and one an older man with a very low voice, who sounded like he was perhaps a Ronso, since he wasn’t speaking with a human mouth or voice box. He growled, and formed low vowels and hisses that humans usually didn’t produce, and failed besides at some of the delicacies of human speech. When she came to no immediate conclusion about who, logically, the two of them would be, she decided to find out the old fashioned way. She planted her feet firmly before their front door and rapped on it twice with her knuckles.

The voices fell silent. After a few seconds, they whispered to each other with frantic hushes. Aeris heard the scrape of metal. It didn’t take them too long, she felt, to appear just before the door, but they lingered there for a while, waiting.

Eventually, the knob turned, slowly, and the door was opened half-way. A woman, in her twenties, black-haired and brown-eyed, hid the rest of the laboratory with her body, hips holding the door open, one hand on the doorframe, and one hand, iron-knuckled, held in front of her. “Yes?” she asked.

“Hello! I am Aeris, I am a healer, and I would like to examine this laboratory for the sake of my studies.”

Tifa raised her eyebrows. She said nothing for several seconds, and Aeris smiled genially. “Normally, I would believe you’re really from ShinRa, but you…” she looked at Aeris’s shabby, soaked dress, the mud running in streaks on her legs, and the blades of grass tangled in her unbound hair and stuck to her cheek. “You can’t possibly be.”

“That’s funny, I would have assumed you were from ShinRa. Who else would be here?”

“Exactly,” said Tifa, a bit dryly. “A healer? If you’re looking to study medicine, you want any other laboratory. We mostly found dead people here, not healed ones.”

“I’ve travelled here with a SPIRIT, though he couldn’t approach the laboratory,” Aeris clarified. “He’s the one who needs healing.”

“A SPIRIT travelled? Like, with moving involved?”

“I dare say I am a decent healer.”

“You must be,” Tifa muttered, though she clearly still regarded Aeris with suspicion. “Why do you need to come here for your healing?”

“Certain substances were used on my patient when he was in this laboratory. I must examine them so that I know what to do to counter-act what they’ve done to him.”

“She’s doing her research,” muttered a low voice. Tifa twitched, and resisted looking over her shoulder to shush her father. Unbeknownst to her, Aeris had already managed to see him, since there was no precaution Tifa could take to prevent that.

“Well, I can’t help you, then,” said Tifa, “This laboratory has already been officially cleaned out, and so you won’t find anything that will help you, so you—”

“Wait,” said the low voice, more loudly this time. “Let me see this woman.”

Aeris pretended to peer into the dark. Tifa covered her face for a second, and said, “Oh, fine. You were the one that wanted all the secrecy and shelter, but fine.” She threw open the heavy front door (Aeris silently reconsidered the woman’s impressive muscles, which hadn’t been obvious at first) and let the thin light of the cloud-covered plains trickle into the wide chamber.

The beast inside, just barely crouching under the ceiling, slithered forth some feet to gaze at Aeris. She folded her hands, and stood primly still, letting him examine her. “Is something the matter?” she asked sweetly.

“Amiss… not a matter, I don’t think…” he mumbled. His breath was warm, like a dragon’s, but he wasn’t a dragon, Aeris knew. She knew what he was… and yet… what could he be doing here, away from any statues or temples? Perhaps the woman, though she did not have the air of a summoner, had made some sort of pact with him.

“I don’t recognize you,” said Aeris, “so you must not be one of the original ones. In fact, I don’t feel that we’ve felt you before at all, none of us, so you must be very new. Are you all right? Or perhaps are you trying to build a new temple on the plains?” She folded her hands in front of her face. “Would you like the temple blessed? I love giving blessings. It’s my favorite thing other than growing new flowers.”

“Father, what’s going on?” asked Tifa.

He moved a law in front of Tifa, but kept his eyes peeled on Aeris. “We may have an unusual guest.”

Aeris grinned, moved her hand into a prayer pose, and bowed. “I am Aeris, Ancient and Living, one with the Planet. You are one of the Spirits of the Highest Air, but not one I made. And you, Tifa, are a kind young woman. I hope that’s sorted out?”

Tifa did a rapid double take at Aeris, and then turned back to her father. “I know,” she said, and halted. “Those words.”

“The introduction of the Ancient to the People of the Plains in the first story of the Cycle,
 said the father. “I thought Ancients didn’t read.”

“No, we listen. There’s still a great debate about whether or not we can allow the printing of books on paper, but we were a culture in love with oral tales.”

“You must be joking,” said Tifa. But the more she looked at Aeris, despite her shock, the more sure she was. Her face was almost the twin of the many painted faces on the walls of the Temple, framed with gold, always accompanied with candles and strings of shells hung on nails. She spoke like an ancient, her father knew instantly that she was not human… “Oh, you’re not joking.”

Aeris lifted up one hand. “You don’t have to fall to your knees. It’s okay.”

“Yeah,” said Tifa absently, looking down. “The floor’s kind of harsh, and I’m banged up from cleaning already, I wouldn’t want to try.”

“Lovely! You see, I’ve been treated to such a welcome in Nibelheim, it’s starting to disorient me. The Lifestream is very much about equality, you realize.” She perched her fingers together, and leaned up on her toes to get a good look at Tifa’s father, squinting her eyes. “Now, you must indulge my curiosity. I don’t think you’re a Final Aeon made for the battle against Sin, and I know you weren’t one of the originals. You’re new, but I can tell that you were never blood related to Tifa here. Sorry for prying, but I literally cannot help it. To me, you don’t… I don’t feel the fingerprints of the Lifestream anywhere on your make, though you are a Fayth, and I would have known, somehow or another , if you were made by us… the more that I think about it…” she bobbed onto her heels to lean back. “In light of recent events, your existence, especially in this laboratory, bothers me. Sir, may I ask about your transformation?”

The beast nodded his head. “I have saved the information from everyone else, since I don’t want anyone to know what has happened to me is possible. But to you, good spirit of the deep, I will tell everything. I am not Tifa’s blood father, we are adopted to each other. My name was once Vincent Valentine, and my maker was named Lucretia Crescent.”

 

-

 

Cloud took a walk that afternoon. It was short, and no one bothered him but to ask if he needed anything. He said no, and continued walking, somewhat unevenly, through the streets of Nibelheim. He examined the fronts of most of the buildings and then walked the town’s perimeter, admiring the view into the gentle, wide hills which sparked with far-away lightning and were foggy with rain. He took a small detour down a stone path to visit an old river he remembered, which still ran furiously, a torrent of constant rainwater darting over sharp stones, and promised death by swift currents to anyone who stepped in it. The children of Nibelheim were fond of watching the water, and sometimes dipping their toes in, since it was believed to be healing.

Cloud was still impressed with its force, but not with its promise of healing.

Eventually, he ended up back at the ShinRa mansion, though he decided, panting, to rest on the porch instead of returning inside. He watched the slow drizzle of the rain, and thought. His thoughts weren’t dark, but they were deep, and they involved him in himself, so his eyes were somewhat glazed over, unaware of villagers walking by. Some flinched away from him, some only glanced curiously.

He was there for a good hour before he knew he had to exercise his legs again unless he wanted to be stuck there with sleeping muscles and stiff joints. He had only just stood up, rubbing one of his calves, when he saw, off in the distance, a very bright, bouncy, distinctly Aeris-like blur running towards him, waving. He stood up all the way and waved back, and when the villagers around him saw what he was doing, they promptly overreacted.

Aeris graciously lifted up everyone kneeling with a curtsy, saying something to a few of them, before bounding up to Cloud. “Change of plans. You must come to the laboratory, because you will not believe what you will see there.”

Cloud was silent for a minute. “A giant, smoking crater?” he asked, sounding hopeful.

“Better,” enthused Aeris. “A comfortable country house built for two, with a delicious piece or two of our puzzle dropped right into our laps.”

“What?”

Aeris already had hold of Cloud’s wrist. In fact, she was so incredibly excited, that she quickly had hold of Cloud by his waist, and then his back and his thighs, and with due swiftness she carried him bridal style out of Nibelheim, back-tank and all. Cloud would have protest, but he found he had absolutely nothing to say.

As Aeris ran over the Plains, leaping perhaps a meter with every step (“I would travel with you in the way I usually travel,” she noted,” but I think zipping through the Lifestream would actually screw up the healing I’ve been doing at this point, especially since the Lifestream may just recognize you as a small tumor before I can get any messages across”), she descried the basics of what she had found to him. “The laboratory, after Hojo and his gang of hooligans were booted out by a slightly less evil branch of ShinRa Co, was silently claimed by a young woman and her adopted father as a home. The father has been experimented on by another scientist in connection with Hojo but also in a rivalry with Hojo, you’ll have to hear the whole thing from him. The father and daughter have completely cleared out the entire lab, cleaned it up, sanitized it, brought in shelves and books and lace curtains, you won’t believe it, it looks like an oddly built winter cabin.”

“You’re joking,” said Cloud. “It’s impossible.”

“They are very determined people. After the experiments the father has been through, they needed to live alone, away from people. He has been successfully, though with a few caveats, turned into a Fayth. A Fayth that, through error, is stuck in a bound-up Aeon form. I’m not sure how yet, he told me he wouldn’t tell the whole story twice.”

“Just what Hojo wanted,” said Cloud, “Though it wasn’t Hojo who did it.”

“Since we know already it is impossible for him,” Aeris agreed, skipping over rocks and patches of weeds as she did so. “His incredible state, like yours, bears similarities to the physiology of Sin, so he is also giving me important information. The downside is that the young woman seems to have cleared out almost everything I wanted to look at, including all of the ether, which she just sort of opened, not realizing anything was in the tanks. Still, I think the trade-off is more than worthwhile.”

“A human that made an Aeon,” said Cloud. “Even if it is a faulty one.”

“I told you that it was possible, of course,” said Aeris, “they just had to be a person that could find a willing patient, have a good grasp on magic, be able to kill someone, and be able to cast Holy at once. It’s getting someone who can do both of the last two at once that makes it such a rare skill for humans and such an easy feat for Ancients, since we’re all about death and rebirth.”

Cloud nodded. “Yeah, when you say it that way… I see why it would escape the ability of so many. This must be an incredible woman.”

“Have been, I’m sorry.”

“Have been. Must have been incredible. Was this the only one she made?”

“I’m almost totally sure of it, after hearing the story. There is one important detail that I  must warn you about before we arrive, though,” said Aeris in a rush, since the ability to run at a little over thirty miles per hour picked up their traveling pace a little.

“What’s that?”

“I must warn you as to the identity of the man and his adopted daughter.”

“Fire away.”

“I doubt you know the man, his name is Vincent Valentine.” Cloud shook his head. “But his adopted daughter goes by the name of Tifa Lockhart.”

“Oh,” said Cloud. And then he thought, and he said, “of course.”

He couldn’t say why this made sense to him, since he only remembered the girl from days of childhood friendship that, to him, were an immeasurable rift of time and space away. But he remembered her image, like a small impression of some light and weight on the spatial fabric of his mind, and her impression fit in the hole of ‘adopted daughter to lonely science experiment’.

“And I’ll take the glamour off you o that she can recognize you,” said Aeris, “since I promised that there would be no tricks or lies in conversation.”

“That’s fine,” said Cloud.

“You sure?”

“Yes. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ve already told them about my plan to heal you and use the data I glean from that to work against Sin, so they already know a lot of things you—”

“I’ll be fine.”

Aeris was quiet after that to let him think for the rest of the run, though, honestly, despite all the important thoughts he could be having, he was mostly concerned with the strangeness of being carried like a cocooned baby by a woman darting across the Thunder Plains at the speed of a wildcat with the pounding of her feet sounding like an amplified drum beat. They were running faster than the wind was tossing the clouds that day, so Cloud could see them pass by, mixing among themselves, little darts of lightning muttering inside. Eventually, the laboratory surfaced in front of them, its metal hull climbing swiftly over the horizon.

Cloud felt unafraid. He had come to trust Aeris, and besides, he probably wasn’t capable of feeling the enormous emotions he should be feeling.

Aeris set him down just outside of the lab after tripping down to a manageable speed. “Are you alright?” she asked. “I didn’t dare do that before now, since I was sure you would hyperventilate or that the surge of my energy would short cut your heart or something, but…”

“I feel fine,” said Cloud, straightening out. “A bit winded, dizzy, maybe a bit nauseous, but I’m not going to die.”

Aeris shook her head. “I keep underestimating you. You just have such tiny, fragile nerves and blood vessels and stuff and you don’t have a magical underground home to go to if your body stops working.”

“I’ll look into fixing that,” Cloud promised in deadpan. Aeris was still giggling as she knocked on the door, announcing herself to Tifa and Vincent. “Will you want to look inside?” she asked.

“I’ll look.”

Tifa opened the door, smiling at Aeris and peering curiously at Cloud. Cloud braced himself for a big reaction, first for overdone enthusiasm, and then, after Tifa didn’t react for a beat, for something more like pity. Neither happened, though. Tifa saw Cloud, and saw who he was and what he was, but didn’t react strongly to him either way. She just looked him over, thinking, almost unfazed by the juxtaposition of ‘girlhood crush’ and ‘horror’. It took Cloud a second to realize that Tifa really didn’t look as bubbly and animated as she did at the age of fourteen. He had to stare back at her, though he hated looking hard at other people, to get it into his head that Tifa Lockhart was an adult, and she seemed to be a balanced one, considering her reaction to seeing Cloud again, one hand on her front door.

She finally smiled. “Cloud. It’s really wonderful to see you again. I missed you when you left.”

Cloud ducked his head nervously. “Sorry for spending so long away.”

Tifa waved her hand. “Eh, you were a soldier, I didn’t think you could take cozy beach vacations all day. I mean, that’s clearly not what you’ve been spending your time doing.”

“Unless beaches come with scalpels and IVs now,” said Cloud, forgetting that this was something of an extreme statement until he said it. It was just his life, after all.

Tifa just shook her head. “Come in, both of you,” she said, turning her back to them to give them space to walk into the old lab. Aeris bounced right in, gravitating towards the thin amber beams of stormy light that poured into the room from lace-curtained windows. Cloud warily looked at the gigantic, dragon-like beast crouched in the corner, who seemed to regard Cloud in return with intelligent indifference.

Walking into the lab was remarkably unexciting. He recognized the view outside as the same view he had known in those years, the same tiny square glimpses of a rolling hill outside with a few bundles of wild yellow flowers on the shaded side… but the whole room looked so incredibly not like the laboratory that he couldn’t react to it like it was. His vision was sharp and clear, waiting for a bad reminder, an attack, a monster, anything, but the sense of never having been in this pleasant place before was too strong to overcome.

This was a family living room stretched to the dimensions of a cave, with a lofty, beamed ceiling from which two shabby fans hung, their lamps unlit. Bookshelves tried to fill the walls and corners of the room, each stacked with whatever junk Tifa had picked up from trash cans and street side piles, but the room just could not be filled. It was too large for little bits of luxury to contain its vastness neatly. There was no reason to try to artificially make it homey with couches and little kitchen spaces, since Vincent could never use them, so it ended up looking like a storage room that had been wallpapered with the images of a country home. But it couldn’t be called uncomfortable, it was cluttered and a bit dirty, there were haphazardly placed lamps and rugs and tables, but it couldn’t be called uncomfortable. It was awkward, but heart-felt.

Without saying anything, Cloud walked resolutely past this room to where he knew the next one lay. The laboratory in which he had been tested was sparsely furnished with a bunk bed, a table, and kitchen equipment, with a dresser full so full of old, second-hand clothes it was spilling over. One a cluttered, stained end table, there even stood a little radio and a CD player. After staring dumbly at the warm, nicely painted, lived-in room, full of junk and unwashed clothes and even a little basket of violets growing on the windowsill, Cloud finally realized that this room was now Tifa Lockhart’s bed room.

It was clean. There were no stains he could see, not on the walls, not on the floor, or the salvaged rugs on the floor. It smelled like a living human, without a trace of rot or refuse. The windows, which hadn’t been there before, were open, and a nice, wet breeze seeped into the room, tossing the petals of the violets and turning the bed sheets and curtains spotted and dark with warm rain.

Cloud felt Aeris and Tifa behind him watching, but he ignored them. He ducked into a few of the small rooms where Hojo would keep new experiments silently sequestered, and saw that they were either empty (and clean) or being used as storage rooms for things Tifa had found and thought she just might have a use for. As he wandered back  into the laboratory, into rooms he had never seen but sometimes heard, he saw that all of them, every corner, was clean, tidy, sanitized, and for the most part, bare and unused. Most of them looked like they had never seen human beings since the day they were built. At the very end, a new window, not framed yet with a clean wooden still, was opened to the breeze, with bits of drywall and plaster piled around it, bringing it home to Cloud that Tifa Lockhart had, herself, with only her hands and her heart, cleaned and purified every single room of the laboratory, which had been gathering blood and screams for many years, and her efforts were almost at a peaceful end.

“I don’t know why I was allowed to meet so many good people,” Cloud whispered to himself. He stared out the window for perhaps a full minute, watching the familiar skies of the Thunder Plains above. They were, to him, like the swells of the ocean were to a fisherman. They were unchartable, but he knew them, and he pulled his daily bread, so to speak, out of their billows. “I don’t know how people can be so good.”

“We like to shove them back into incarnation as fast as possible, since they’re more or less invaluable to life, so there tends to be as much of a concentration of goodness on Spira as possible,” said Aeris. “You can clearly see said value of one good person before you.”

Tifa ducked away from the doorway in which she had been watching, unable to take the compliment, especially considering who it came from. She cried something about making tea and dashed back to the living room.

Cloud seemed to blush for a minute, but slowly his expression resolved into contemplation. “Does the Lifestream really have the power to sort out the good souls from the bad?”

“Certainly. We’re chemical beings in the body of Spira. We know when something is bad for Spira, so when we find something bad, we make every effort to neutralize or react with it to make it more palatable.”

 “Are some souls just… bad, then?”

 “Oh, no, never. It’s hard for humans to grasp this, since you live with a short memory, but every soul I’ve seen, barring a few, will wax and wane like the moon over the time of many lives… usually, if they’re old enough, though, they steady out, to something neutral or good. The older Spira gets, the more steady, good souls it is filled with, as they all become old and calm. Tifa has a childish personality sometimes, but she is actually surprisingly steady! She feels like a hill.”

 “Okay,” said Cloud. “We should go back, I guess.”

Aeris nodded, and they walked back through the lab again, admiring out loud how very clean it wall was. Cloud wondered how much tile and plaster Tifa had simply had to replace, and how very long the effort took.

As they walked back into the living room, Tifa was sort of pacing in front of the stove, and Vincent, the beast, was staring at her with amused ease.

Tifa almost twitched when she saw that Aeris and Cloud had walked back in the room (being that Cloud was somewhat zombie-like and Aeris was not up on modern social niceties, they sometimes collectively forgot about things like ‘alerting people of your presence’) and quickly ran over to them to pull them to the dark wooden dining table. On the table, a water boiler was still letting out little curls of steam, and a white teapot was simmering away, just now dousing the newly-poured green tea leaves. “It should only take a few minutes,” Tifa said, darting away again to fish assorted teacups out of a glass-covered wooden dresser that she seemed to keep silverware and old newspapers in.

Aeris watched the tea brew with a worrying amount of delight, making Cloud wonder exactly what she saw happening that they didn’t. He hoped it wasn’t the glorious death of many sacrificed tea leaves.

Whatever her reason, her rapture kept her the only person not oppressed by the silence in the room. Cloud had no idea what to say, so he just endured it. Tifa fiddled with a tea cup for a while, then sat it down straight, with a decisive action, and asked, “Well, are you living anywhere now?”

“Uh, no. I was in the rest home, and then Aeris took me, so I’ve been sort of travelling around. I’m temporarily staying in the old mansion, though.”

“Really?”

“After seeing whose company I was in, Nibelheim really wanted to accommodate me.”

Tifa’s laugh was surprisingly bitter. “I bet they did. I hope no one groveled or anything.”

“Groveled?”

“Nibelheim’s been a perpetual funeral since we discovered what Hojo had been using our generator for. There have been no holidays or feasts… it’s too eerie, we feel like we’re living on top of graves. Some people couldn’t stand it and left. The general consensus was that we were killers along with Hojo, and it’s been black veils since.” Tifa’s arms were crossed in front of her, and her head was tilted, as if being shoved aside by a weight on her neck.

Cloud flushed. “That’s ridiculous,” he muttered at the table.  His face had been aimed directly downward for the whole conversation, as it usually was, but now he was really intent on not facing anyone. “You didn’t know.”

“But no one checked, did you know that? No one kept tabs on him. No one tried to know. We said he could do whatever he wanted and ignored the rest. Perhaps it’s worse than being the actual killer. The killer is responsible. We went through the most basic and pathetic form of human ignorance. The kind that happens when you don’t even try.”

“That’s Nibelheim… that’s small towns, you tend to your own business.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t. I think that’s clear now.”

Without any prompting, Aeris decided it was time to pour the tea. She gave herself a little white cup with a design of green vines traced on the rim, Tifa a thin cup that looked like it was made with mother-of-pearl, and Cloud an elegant black mug, for whatever reason, and filled them all exactly half-way.

“It’s not such a big deal,” Cloud said, watching Aeris intently watch the amber stream of tea from the corner of his downcast eyes. He avoided looking at Tifa. “You guys are not the bad guys here. You’d know, if you met the bad guys.”

“We did. I remember watching the priestess shake Hojo’s hand. We didn’t know then. We didn’t try to know. I just feel so disgusted sometimes,” she admitted. “This was the sort of person we weren’t going to be as kids, you know? We were going to do great things. We were going to right great wrongs. We were prepared for the trials.” She tiled her had morosely in her hands. “And then I didn’t even try. I spent my time fussing about toxins in the water when there was an actual torture prison on my doorstep. I wanted to become a great person. I was too lazy and ignorant to be a decent one.”

Cloud couldn’t find anything to say. The problem was, he had cursed Nibelheim, and ShinRa, and the idiots who turned a blind eye to Hojo’s actions many times, and though he wanted to disagree with Tifa, for her sake, out of pity… he remembered wanting to shove people’s faces into the mud with his heel until they begged enough for his forgiveness. He remembered a few fantastic revenge fantasies. They gathered in him and felt like a storm in his gut, and he wanted to be kinder to Tifa, but he also said, he felt, that she was right, and she’d better be sorry. And yet the weight of bitterness and ancient hate pressed on him unbearably, and made him feel cruel and sick. How could he not hate Nibelheim? How could he not hate her? But how could he hate her after she had faced and purified an entire hell in the name of being forgiven? How could he react to devotion with disdain?

But logic did not apply to his great and justified sense of spite, which delighted in gnawing on him. It vexed him, and torn between very real hate and very real acceptance, he found himself mostly feeling discomforted and unable to say anything. Tifa clearly wanted nothing more than forgiveness, but to Cloud, forgiveness was some complicated magical spell that he did not have the skill for. He could not do it. He could not hate her, but in the name of the whole, terrible, shit-filled world which he was mired in, he could not forgive her or anyone.

His heavy silence was enough of a confirmation for Tifa, and though Cloud didn’t want it to be so, he knew they both understood his feelings. But Tifa had expected this result, in her heart, so all she did was smilingly accept Aeris’s offer of tea and take a few sips as they waited in silence again.

“The real enemy in this is ShinRa, of course,” said Vincent suddenly. “They are the ones that knew what was happening, and not just ignored it, but funded it. I’m certain that it was only halted because of a power play, not because of a sudden surge in human decency.”

“Vincent used to work for ShinRa,” said Tifa with a hint of cheer.

“Vincent was a Turk,” he clarified for himself. “I was the worst of ShinRa’s lot.”

Tifa made an exasperated noise, and Vincent held up a claw. “Fine, not the worst. But that isn’t setting the bar high. I was a murderer, and I did what I did because I didn’t care.”

Tifa shrugged, looking doubtful.

“Is this a subtle turn into your story?” asked Aeris. “Because I must hear it.”

Vincent nodded. “I’ll keep it in brief, and mostly tell what the Ancient needs to know.”

“Sounds fine,” said Aeris, smiling. Cloud knew she was intent on the story, though she was trying not to lay on her interest too thick and giving Tifa and himself time to talk instead. She ended up looking surprisingly like an impatient six year old. “Perhaps begin with just a little personal background though?”

“If it is no matter,” he said, his voice rumbling, “I will keep as much as I can to myself.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“ I am perhaps forty years old now, though it’s hard to say for sure, and I was born in Bevelle when ShinRa had just defeated its last competitor. I was pulled into ShinRa’s forces at an unlawfully young age, mostly because my parents and teachers found no way to channel my rage but through legal violence. I was a Turk before I was twenty.

“About six or seven years ago Tseng, who was the chief of the Turks then, as I assume he is now, told me he was charging me exclusively with a certain project. I was to be in disguise, acting as a minor science officer under the command of Professor Hojo. Tseng was aware that Hojo was delving into waters deeper than he had before, making waves that could prove dangerous to ShinRa as a whole, so Tseng thought it would be a good idea to kick Hojo down a bit. To recount the manifold reasons why we decided to put ourselves in an antagonistic role to Hojo… well, I just want to assure you they weren’t based in moral feeling, so don’t think too kindly of me.

“I already had working knowledge of basic chemistry and physics, so it wasn’t too hard for me to pose as a post-grad desperate for recognition, smart but inexperienced, perfect for Hojo to ignore and be neglectful around, since I would clearly preform any feat of loyalty for his attention. Within my first year there, I more or less understood the theme of Hojo’s plans.”

“And they were?” said Aeris.

“He intended to find a way to artificially produce Aeons, which are bound to their Aeon form through some sort of manipulation of the statue and could not escape his influence as free Fayth. Like a final Aeon whose mission has been thwarted. I always thought his plans were full of holes, but that is a reflection of his notes being full of holes. I remember seeing “statue problem, address later” on one sheet and then never found the address, though it was clearly important to him. He was never organized; his file cabinet was his mind, and his mind was a mess. I would not find copies of the proof I wanted outside of his head, and I do not have the desire to rifle around in his head. It is too strange for me, like walking through a murky swamp when you’re used to country roads. I wouldn’t do it.

“He believed that a jolt of lightning, a breath of ether, an incredible amount of pain, and a sudden death by organ failure or mental stress could cause the sort of beast he wanted, though he always showed doubt as to the effectiveness of the lighting. For good reason, I found out later. That was the most flawed of his elements. He would try to make up for the lack of spark in his designs with poisoned ether, or with such elements he felt were magical such as mako or beast’s blood, or—”

“Please,” interrupted Aeris, “poisoned ether?”

“From what I saw of his scrawled plans, and heard, he thought to cut ether with noble gases or with such things as clouds of powdered psychedelics, or even smoke of certain animals that had been burnt,” said Vincent. “He was more or less an occultist. Anything that could possibly have the sort of Power he felt he was missing, he put into potential plans. I’m sure, in the end, that his experiments were all more diseased than magical.”

Cloud noticed that Aeris looked a little paler than before. Her brow was furrowed, and she almost seemed annoyed.

“At this time, everything was theory. You must understand that when I began spying on him, he had only done minor experiments with chemicals before and had not applied his madness to any living human yet. I had to wait for him to do so, in order to bring proof against him. But he was… he was never together. It was appallingly easy to spy on him. He sometimes just told us, his underlings, things that he should have kept quiet from himself. I remember him, leaning down to me, as I tried to act intimidated, as he calmly told me about his findings as to the effect of lethal lightning magic on the skin of frogs. He spoke exactly one syllable every second, like a computer reciting a script, then he slowly broke out of his trance, and resumed his duties. He had spells stereotypically mad and unpredictable, he was clearly not aware sometimes that he was operating in the real world; perhaps he was so paranoid as to think that we all knew his plans already. I found him tying his own wrists to the desk once, giggling, I found him eating something recently killed while still at the lab table… this was, perhaps, a year after he was deemed such an important scientist that he no longer had to show up in public, he need only haunt his lab. I like to tell myself that mercury and radium addled his brain, and that he was, of course, not born this way.

“Because of this, I put together his theories very quickly, though never what he planned to DO with an army of bound Aeons. I don’t know if he knew what his long-term plans were. Maybe he really just felt like making hell on earth. Maybe the means were the end to him, and he loved his life of horror and chaos. It disturbs me, but despite my best efforts, despite the fact that they should have been easy to discover, I cannot relay his motives to you. I gathered that he felt he was in the service of some higher power, but not what it was. I heard language of servitude in his speech from time to time. This, of course, I found important, since it seemed to prove he did have a goal, and that he found his goal to be noble and important, but as for what it was…” At this point, he paused, because he noticed Aeris shaking her head. “Is something the matter?”

She placed her face in her tiny palms. “A dark picture slowly forms in my mind. Please, finish it for me.”

Vincent breathed deeply, and his sigh made much of the room shake. “It will be grim,” he promised. “Of the rest of Hojo’s plans… as pertaining to this project, he was just determined to make it work. He was focused on his production of Aeons. I was there when he had his first human experiments—of course, the level on which he failed his experiments was monstrous.

“But I have to go back a bit before speaking of his actual experiments, because I must, of course, explain why I did not report them, and, consequently, why they still happen today.

“In the hierarchy of Hojo’s lab, there was one almost beside him in prestige, though he made sure she knew she was an underling anyway. Her name was Doctor Lucretia Crescent, and she had the same degrees he did, just not his ladder-climbing bloodthirstiness. She was a sane woman, and a proper scientist, who studied abnormalities in order to find ways to prevent and treat them. Vaccines and preventative care were her specialty. In the beginning, I knew that she thought the project was about testing the dangers of many harmful elements, such as battle magic, ether, and radioactives, on human skin, so that they could study how to treat these things in the future.

“She knew she was wrong within a week, since she was perceptive enough to not be fooled by what she wanted to believe, and just ambitious enough herself to believe that Hojo could be doing something truly vile for the sake of power. But, as is the failing of the scientist, she had to know what, exactly, Hojo was doing, rather than just leaving the laboratory to report that he had massively deviated from the plan. She had to know what he was doing, partly because she wanted to counter act whatever he did, and partly because she was a scientist, and she was fascinated.

“She, just like me, did not report him as soon as she should have. We were both compromised by a plague that crept on us slowly. To this day, I wonder if somehow Hojo instrumented the plague himself, through his tricks. He was mad, and his methods were ineffectual, but having known the most impossible depths of the human soul, he understood everyone else’s minds and could manipulate them as if they were simple puzzles. Well, when he was lucid enough to do so.

“My disease was this: I fell in love with Lucretia over my stay there. I admired her alone in that place, since she was their only scientist, and her company was unspeakably a relief from life in the laboratory.

“Though we both recognized there was something between us, neither of us wanted it. I was there on a mission, and at that age, I was reluctant to depend on anyone else emotionally. Since I was a Turk, that would mean the end of my job, if Tseng could prove I was compromised, and I figured a secret relationship would be a lot of fuss and distraction. What I felt for her… maybe it wasn’t really love, since we never talked about it. I don’t know. I only wanted to help her.

“That’s what it was…” said Vincent, in his low growl, almost wistfully, “a strong, unquenchable desire to aid her, to boost her up, on my shoulders, to her goals. It wasn’t that I wanted her in any desperate way. I’m not actually sure I would have liked to become very close to her. I figured myself a cruel man and assumed I would be unable to be kind enough to her once on familiar terms. I needed to watch her, from afar, and help her. I needed to be close to her, just close, not beside her but nearby, as if I were her guardian spirit, guiding her steps on a safe path. My feelings weren’t fatherly, I don’t think. They were the feelings of a devotee, who needed his object of devotion to be worshipped and admired in all the earth, and perhaps, recognizing that, I knew it would be folly to try to love her. I believed I was both too devoted and too incapable of love. All I knew was that I needed to see her succeed, and if I could be there, helping her best Hojo so that she would get her recognition as a great scientist, then I would have done enough good in this one act to last all my life. I treated her as means to redemption, sometimes… but in turn, I meant to redeem her.

“You see, without meaning too, Hojo and Lucretia developed a rivalry over the SPIRIT project. She began as his partner, but she figured out very quickly that not everything in that laboratory was as it seemed, as I said. At first, she just needed to know what Hojo was doing, so that she could bring a good case against him, then, when she started to find truly terrible plans, she needed to know in order to fix his mistakes. As she became more involved in studying more terrible things, she whispered her doubts to me, feeling rather than knowing me neutral, sighed her feelings of terror and powerlessness alike, muttered the possibility of going mad to my silent ears. I would have listened to her worries forever if she kept talking. But Lucretia was collected, and though she began, slowly, to feel like she was fighting a demon bigger than was made for man to best, she kept her struggle inside, to not alert anyone else to her suspicions. She continued to do her work alongside Hojo, pretending that they had the same innocent goals.

“If only it had stayed that way. If only she, upon seeing that first body, ran to me, to the Turks, the ShinRa, or anyone. But upon examining Hojo, in the way of the scientist, she became fascinated with him.

“Scientists are still heralded as men and women of reason, since they consider their experiments rationally. But the person who examines the ways of the world without wonder and compassion, I have discovered, is rarely rational, since the way of Spira is wonder because of wonder and beauty for beauty’s sake, and the way of humans is a system of compassion in a net of love and duty. Great passions of devotion and need drive us to our desperate deeds, not rational examination. The man who examines Spira with only an eye of rationality skews its intentions.

“Lucretia examined Hojo rationally, and rationally, she found a mind as entertaining as a mystery novel; a thrilling mess of surprises and risks. Should she have viewed him with an irrational, compassionate mind, her horror would have compelled her to work for his destruction. Instead, her scientific mind pushed her towards his deconstruction instead. He became her real experiment, an experiment of observation. I suppose she began with the justification that he was the cause of the horrific experiments, and she would medically treat the cause rather than targeting the effects. But the cause was complex, and the cause was interesting, and the cause was diseased itself, with a sort of rare disease that few men have ever caught and none have escaped. A normal case of schizophrenia is a disease for good men, but Hojo had the insanity of an evil man in a good world, and that is a fever no one sweats out. He would burn forever, I realized that.

“Lucretia was a doctor, and she believed that every problem had a solution. I have never seen faith so misplaced.

“I knew she was… morbidly taken with Hojo within a month of the project’s beginning, and that was when my feelings for her first emerged. I had been used to seeing her and hearing her soft words, and when I saw her for the first time in Hojo’s orbit, with her eyes trained on him, I felt… worry. Deep worry, and pain, and I knew that I would never extract myself from her.

“I did not, however, interfere with her desire to enjoy Hojo’s soul. Her choices were laws to me. I adored her, and though I was not far gone enough to believe she could do no wrong, I could not stop her from trying to do right, flawed as her plan was. I did not rule her, I followed her. Delving into Hojo’s soul, building a picture out of his words and his notes and his eyes, proved to be a trap for Lucretia, a trap which bound her over a process of almost a year, slowly, like vines creeping around a trellis. I watched her realize that she was in too deep. She whispered to me, below the range of the security cameras, about her fear, about her horror over her own fascination, how she was disgusted by the trap she was in, and how she knew she was in passion. She wouldn’t say love, because she was so disturbed by it. But she spoke of her passion for the Professor, and she meant it.”

“That man had to be butt ugly,” interrupted Tifa.

“Like a talking Marlboro,” said Cloud, after snapping his mask back down from taking a sip of tea. Aeris took the moment to refill his cup, chuckling to herself.

“He wasn’t attractive,” said Vincent. “If he were simply an aging, gaunt man, he wouldn’t be ugly, not at all, but he wasn’t an attractive soul, either. He could be called compelling, because he had a strong gravity about him, in the same way that black holes convince stars to come to their maw. You strain your eyes to see into him, to perceive him, and you find a great gap of darkness in space. Lucretia wanted to find his core, and undo it, and she forgot her goal of undoing his works for the sake of unraveling his self. She told me she knew what she had gotten unto. She was ashamed of throwing away the moral choice to report him for her obsession with solving him, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“That’s why she didn’t report him when she found the first body, riddled with holes where tubes had been stuck, drained of what had been human inside him and leaking something black. And that’s why I didn’t report the first body, because she turned to me, whom she knew in her unconscious as her help, and she said, ‘please destroy it.’ So I burned it, and went back to her, trusting in a plan that we both knew would never save us. She would not defeat Hojo, not alone, and I would not end the project like I had been ordered, because Lucretia wanted it, and she, with that action, was officially his accomplice.

“I don’t know how he managed to forget his dead body in the hall, though. I cannot tell you how very dismally I regarded that man.

“But Lucretia was in a passion for him, so I suffered him to live, on the condition that any parts of his body laid on her would be cut off before his nerves sent the sensation of touch to his brain. Of course, he didn’t think he had anything to be scared of. In his world, he was king of the monsters of hell, and the rest of us ogres dragged back and forth his victims for his dark experimentation mindlessly.

“Lucretia’s desperation to... to tear apart the web of Hojo, I suppose, her desperation to make him pay and her need to prove herself better than him, fueled by her hate of herself for helping him, became just as fevered as her panicked conscience as Hojo slowly forgot to pretend that he was running an innocent operation. One by one, his underlings realized they were implicit in terrible crimes, and found themselves unable to extract themselves from the pit, so they all became his slaves. Lucretia… was no less a slave, but she was the only one with a spirit still standing, ready, at the first call of victory, to crush her opponent—once the fierce desire to always be close to him cooled in her soul.

“She told me that, slowly, over the course of time, she found herself unable to imagine being without him. His whole being was now her dark side, and she could not separate them into two people. They were married, without priest or consummation. She would be beside him until death, and he inside her until hers.

“I never divined Hojo’s feelings for Lucretia, mostly because I scoff at the idea of his feelings. I do not believe he felt what we would recognize as empathy. He felt things for himself, recursive on his own soul, but he didn’t really realize feelings for other human beings, since they weren’t humans to him, just animals to be used. I assume he thought Lucretia was funny. She thought otherwise… she saw something more intent in him… but in this, I believe she was wrong.

“I did divine what Lucretia felt for me. I saw it when she looked at me, and her eyes shone with tears. She was thankful for me, and, since my purpose was to be useful for her, I considered us harmonious.

“Lucretia felt her morality slipping as her goals became entrenched in Hojo, for the sake of Hojo. She was focused on having him and destroying him, because that is what she wanted, and it burned her up inside. She grasped his experiments in her hands, and whispered words of kindness to them, begging scraps of information about what he told them from their babbling, fevered mouths, before she euthanized them. She needed, more than anything, to destroy Hojo in a way that hurt, so that she could see feeling in his eyes—she said she wanted nothing, absolutely nothing, except for a spark of hurt or jealousy or fear in Hojo’s eyes. She planned to turn him human, and pull a spirit into his demonic body, so that he could feel remorse at his destruction.

"And compassion, too. For her. If you do not understand Lucretia’s passionate, devoted hate, you will not know the feeling. She needed to be the center of his life, like a wife, but she needed to be a fire, burning his corpse, after she tied him to the stake with feelings of love and devotion. She wanted to be the rot inside him, a tender parasite.

“This is the fate of a good person who loves a wicked one. They will not destroy their need for goodness, and their goodness stops their compassion and care for the wicked person from withering, so that they must become both hurt and help.

“Finally, Lucretia grasped the whole of Hojo’s designs. I regret that I could not ask her for it, but it would have hurt me immeasurably to ask her for anything. I did not have a balanced mind either, at the time. She told me she knew his goals, and—oh, her grin! If I could describe her face to you! She knew he was wrong, and he would never understand the true way to achieve his goal. She said it was impossible for him. She thought it would be impossible for her, too, but she said she needed to try.

“I didn’t know what she needed to try. I knew it would be horrible. But when she declared that she had her final goal, the thing she needed to do to end the conflict between her and Hojo, my eyes met hers, and I promised to be hers.

“She gathered all the tools she needed,” (at this point, Cloud saw Aeris’s eyes narrow) “And told me to come with her. She knew Hojo’s schedule, and she knew he was in his office right then, and he would be in his office until exactly nine o’ clock, when he would enter his private lab. Silently, the two of us slipped in some time before he would be there, to run Lucretia’s final experiment.

“The room was grotesque. Several people floated in tubes of solidified ether; runny, slimy, greenish liquid. All looked as if they were stuck in nightmares. There was one tube… there was only a head. The head of what must have been a corpse for a long time, with a metal helmet jammed over her forehead and eyes. I remember that specifically, because the severed head, floating with a sweet smile on its lips, sickened me in a way I could feel in my bones. I think it was the mystery of what could have happened to the headless body-- the realization that I could never know what horrors Hojo had committed. My disgust for him was never higher than in that moment.

“Lucretia turned to me, wanly smiling. The room didn’t surprise her. She had been here before. I knew what was about to happen to me—she was going to make me into Hojo’s brand of monster-Aeon, to prove she could do it, and then never tell him the secret. Where she found the secret, I will not know to this day.”

“What,” said Aeris, “Did Miss Crescent say the method for making this brand of Aeon was?”

“She said she had to skip some of Hojo’s steps, since she hadn’t the supplies for it, so I’ll never know what the additions were. Besides, she thought they were unnecessary from the start. She said the process was one, ideally, of gentle transformation: an essential ingredient for a proper Fayth, she was convinced, was the willing consent of the Fayth, as well as immersion in the environment of the Fayth, which was the upper air of ether. That was necessary because humans in Spira are earth beings, and their element must be changed.”

Aeris shook her head, as if exasperated. “Did this woman have direct access to a Fayth or Aeon?”

“Not that I know of. Some claim there are scientific works written by people who have spoken to the Fayth, and Hojo said he had read them, but I never proved that. Mostly, she and Hojo were both very intelligent people, and after Hojo grasped the basis of what a Fayth is, she had the sanity to see how one could really be made. Willingness of a soul to die, immersion into ether to change the human’s element, and finally a strong, cataclysmic force, an ancient spell, that has the power to take a soul, move it past death, and ascend it instantly into immortality. It is a great spell of movement, upward movement, a spell of reincarnation, of instant ascension into a higher place with death as the gate. I understand it, but I can never fully… it’s a great spell, summarizing and bypassing the greatest mystery of life. I assumed only an Ancient could cast it, but…”

“There were,” said Aeris, “three Materia, exactly three, made to house that particular spell, named Holy, made by a particularly pure soul for the sake of the fight against Sin. She was the greatest of summoners, Yunalesca, the only one to which the creation of Final Aeons was entrusted… one Materia became part of her dead soul, so that she is Holy. One was given to a very Holy place. The last, we lost track of, since Yunalesca gave it to a follower and we trusted the line of summoners with it.”

“It was the last one that Lucretia knew about,” Vincent confirmed. “It had occurred to her early in her investigation of Hojo that she knew of a spell much, much more powerful than his paltry use of lightning spells that would probably make things work better, but she wouldn’t tell him about it. I am not sure who had it before her, or who it was that let her borrow it. It was that moment in the dark laboratory that I first saw the Materia, and I had no time to ask questions about it. But when she removed it from hidden within her bag… every corner of the room was lit, and warm… it must be the most incredible spell ever cast.”

“Oh, well, it isn’t shabby,” said Aeris smugly, while refilling Tifa’s cup. “I’ll have to brew more soon,” she noted, glaring at the teapot. “Do continue.”

“She said the spell was named Holy, and it was THIS spell that could accomplish the transformation of human into spirit, since it was a spell of pure movement, and it was unstoppable once cast. This, ether immersion, and my cooperation, said she, would surely produce an Aeon, exactly the sort of bastard, bound Aeon Hojo wanted, which she could rub in his face.

“I did not care if I would be bastard or bound. Upon my transformation, Lucretia would be free. I was already willing. I was scared, and I knew I was scared, but I would be lying if I said I did not want to do this for her.

“Besides, for myself, I had never wanted to be human… but that is a backstory you do not need.

“Lucretia held both my hands, and told me to prepare myself. I told her I was already prepared. She took one of Hojo’s tanks of ether, and hooked me to it, letting me breathe ether directly so that I would immediately start to suffocate and die. She continued to hold both my hands while doing so, with the Holy Materia clasped in the center of our four hands, warm, almost pulsing, gentle, feeling as light as a cloud, connecting us, and if we were one body, through Spira’s veins.

“And then my lungs began to collapse. The pain was entirely negated by the feeling of just holding Holy, the spell of movement, so that it only felt odd, to have a body disintegrate. And Lucretia watched me, full of pride, with tear-filled eyes, watching the darkness become illuminated, watching Hojo’s dark work cower in the face of the real spell of power and transformation. She bested him just by holding Holy, just by watching my willing, trusting death, and feeling hope and wonder in that room of despair. He was already beaten—it was a shame that he would never, ever know that.

"I wish Lucretia had known he would never be changed.

“I died, and just as my eyes shut out, and stopped seeing, she cast the spell Holy. I don’t know how she had the power to cast it. I feel like it should have taken energy beyond what a human being had. And she had suffered so much warping in her soul over the past year, I feared that she would not be able to cast something pure. But when the Materia began to glow… we looked at each other, and we both felt such hope. There are some things that come into the world just to be good, and I believe Holy is one of those things. It was already good, and its goodness prompted Lucretia to become as good as it. The energy of Holy creates the energy of Holy, and it fuels itself, so by itself it made the energy Lucretia needed for it. It took nothing out of her and needed nothing but her will.

“When my eyes shut out, I still saw the brightness of Holy, and then, I expanded. I cannot say this clearly, and I will not try. I opened up, as if I was widening outward, but when I tried to expand upwards, I was suddenly slammed back down with a weight like metal shackles on me. My eyes opened, and Lucretia was far below me, crying and grinning, and I felt heavy, miserably heavy. I tried to pull myself up from where my new body had sprawled… but I could barely move. I meant to ask, ‘Lucretia?’ but instead, I hollered, not knowing how loud my voice would be.

“Hojo rushed in quickly, delight on his face, certainty that one of his experiments succeeded, and I saw the delight fall off of his face. Lucretia turned around, slowly, her hands clasped behind her back, hiding Holy, relishing the moment. ‘Professor,’ she said, layering hate and triumph on every word, ‘I think I’ve discovered the flaw in your theory! You see, the problem is, you’re a fool, and you always will be.’

“She was giggling when Hojo came after her. I screamed, and tried to shuffle for her, but my body was stiff and unmovable. I had to watch as Hojo dug into her face, tearing like an animal. I had never seen such expression or life on his face. Or on Lucretia’s. In desperation, and panicking, I heaved myself forward. I moved my great claws, though it hurt me, reaching for laughing Lucretia, to rescue her from Hojo’s grasp.

“Finally, I reached her. I held her in my hand, and, unable to control my new body, I crushed her instantly.

“Had I been thinking rationally, I would have known I was in no position to help her. But helping Lucretia was the most important thing of all to me. I like to pretend that I did manage to do so.

“My cries sent the rest of the scientists sprinting out of the laboratory, and made Hojo stumble back a few steps, but he was so determined to not let me go that he remained in the room. Luckily, I was more determined to never see him again, and, in my muddled mind, it seemed of utmost importance to get Lucretia away from him so that I could bring her out of his influence. I think I hoped to take her away somewhere and heal her, bring her back to sanity, not really understanding that she was already dead, though… I could… well…. when… she was clearly dead.”

Tifa had moved to her adopted father’s feet, and was half-lying on his claws. He did not acknowledge her moving there, since he wanted to finish his story, but he balanced his chin, delicately, with incredible control of his strength, on top of her fragile head.

“I pulled her, and Holy with her, close to my chest, and set about working my wings to fly. I can fly, in this physical form, not like a Fayth, but like a bird, with physical limitations on my energy and speed. Like all Aeons, I do have the ability to fly to the highest airs, just not to live in them. But at the time, unused to my body and its weight, I thought my wings were crippled against flight. With that plan foiled, I slammed myself against the walls of his laboratory, with Lucretia carefully sealed from the blast, until I plowed them down.

“I broke out into the gentle sunshine of the rural town of Gongaga in the south of Macalania Forest, where the laboratory had been situated. While I am sure the locals were a bit frightened, I didn’t notice any of them. I was single-mindedly bent on getting Lucretia far away from Hojo, and after enough shambling, I found a way to fly some few miles away to a grove in the forest by a shining pool of mako pulled up from the Lifestream.

“I lay her down, and stared at her for some time until I could understand the obvious. I don’t want to go into the details of that day, but seeing as I had landed, serendipitously, by a Lifestream pool, I eventually let her sink into it, to send her directly to our Ancient Ones who live in Spira.

“After that, I slept, for a very long time. Afterwards I heard that search parties had been sent for my capture and/or death, depending on who sent them. Fortunately for me, the forest is large. I awoke in misery, sometimes I flew around Spira, trying to manage my new form, but mostly I tried to sleep. I spent much, much more time doing this than I thought, because apparently, at one point I fell asleep and stayed asleep for several years. Aeon forms run like a supercomputer on a powerful battery, they need a lot of force to exist, while Fayth forms need nothing. I had run myself out with grief, and I took years to recover, but since that was all deep sleep, I had no idea of it.

“After waking up from that deep sleep, I was no longer in the hysterics of grief and panic. Instead I had entered the apathetic doldrums of later grief. Once, while wandering, I had the misfortune of falling asleep on the edge of the Thunder Plains when they were cloudy but not raining, and realized when I awoke that a storm, filled with the powers of water and lightning, can completely ground an Aeon that cannot access their being of air. I didn’t so much mind, but if you will, I won’t get into detail about my adventures crawling miserably around Spira under a literal storm cloud of woes.

“I don’t know how much time I spend grounded on the plains, walking without really trying to escape, when I realized, slowly, that the people of the Plains who had seen me were arranging a militia to find and kill me. I admit I don’t cut a pleasant figure while moping and tearing up the ground. Eventually, a sense of self-preservation was pounded into me, and I realized that in my form as an Aeon, with little control over my powers, no Fayth form, no summoner, and no practice, these humans could very easily kill me. In desperation, I searched for a way out of the Plains, or a way to hide until I found a way to fly out. With luck, I found this laboratory.

“It was a place big enough to house me, with gigantic ceilings and rooms, and I could enter through the garage access to the side, but it was a putrid mess, and there were only a few rooms big enough for me to sit in comfortably. Then again, there was no place truly comfortable in the laboratory. It was filled with death and the stench of terror. I knew exactly whose it was, and that is when I began to piece together how long I had been away from the world—long enough for Hojo, unpunished, to continue his experiments in peace.

“My long grief was finally ended in rage. I tore down walls, decimated half-emptied labs, snapped pipes in half and destroyed whatever I could find. Hojo had surely tortured hundreds in this one place while I was sleeping and moping. My fury served as a way to exhaust my Aeon body yet again and send me into deep sleep.

“While I was sleeping, the panicked people of Nibelheim, who heard my roars, asked themselves what to do. They thought I was a threat that must be killed. But there was one who scoffed at their fear.”

Tifa smiled and shrugged. “I told them they were shit heads and that the noise was the reactor doing its fucking job pulling in strong lightning to make energy. I told them an overload had caused a metal plate to snap, which is something that had happened before, and snapping metal sounds like hell. I had been appointed the reactor’s care-taker years ago, so I told them that I would go alone, fix the reactor, and come back to laugh in their faces. And I did. I sort of lied my ass of on the way back, but I did.”

“My daughter found me sleeping, and taping into her vast resources of compassion, decided that I needed a proper bed and some place cleared out so I could sleep. She tore out most everything I destroyed in the room we are in now, and then went home to tell the people of Nibelheim that she fixed the broken metal plate on the side of the reactor, so they could all stop squawking.”

Aeris chuckled, taking a sip of her own tea. “It was quite the project to clean out a place like this, I assume?”

"That’s basically what I did the year he was asleep,” said Tifa. “I cleaned out everything dead, made this room as tidy as possible—he was sleeping on one of the half-demolished walls, but I tore out the rest. I aired everything out, added some windows, took out everything that was an offense to humanity and burned it. Sorry, I didn’t realize anyone would ever want it back.”

“Technically,” Aeris said, “I got it back, I’m sure they all returned to the Lifestream somehow, but I wanted to examine everything physically. It won’t matter that much, it would just be a confirmation of what I think I already know. But when did Mr. Valentine wake up?”

“About two years ago,” Vincent said. “I woke up, mercifully, when Tifa wasn’t here, since I was still rancorous. I was initially frightened when it became obvious that someone had been in the laboratory with me, and I stalked the rooms looking for them, but soon enough my head cleared and I realized that someone had been here, yet no harm had come to me. I realized that I had an ally rather than an enemy. I assumed that it was one of the Turks, who had finally tracked down their missing member and were waiting for me to awaken. But that wasn’t so. Tifa arrived some days later, absolutely terrified to see me awake.”

“I was taken off guard,” she protested.

“I remember, you immediately prepared to joust me…”

“I figured you were a sleeping DRAGON. I didn’t know what would happen when you woke up! I had never seen an Aeon before!”

Aeris smiled fondly. “I figure the rest of the story is more personal, and less about your state as an Aeon?”

They broke off debating to look at Aeris. “I suppose that’s so,” said Vincent. “I spent a lot of time healing, learning my limits as a bound Aeon… I have some power in elemental magic. I have Bio powers, which mostly enable me to disease and poison. I have not had much time to practice them, since I halted my experiments after confirming I had no beneficent powers. I can force myself to fly under the clouds of the Thunder Plains, but with the weight of water, it’s an incredible excursion… I have seen many Fayth fly in the storm clouds, and spoken to a few, and they say only a Fayth form will enable me to leave the plains easily, though I can crawl on the ground like a worm if I want.”

Aeris considered this. “Because the plains are under the rule of water, I too feel depleted here, but unlike you, I can directly touch my element at my feet. You’d have to journey into the clouds, and without your Fayth form, that would just exhaust you.”

“Precisely so,” said Vincent, staring at Aeris with glittering eyes. “Old One, you know why I am bound.”

“I think you also know,” sighed Aeris, hopping to her feet and towards Vincent. She prodded him absently, to all appearances feeling the texture of his scales. But Vincent could feel the movement of her tiny thread-like senses, twisting around his veins and muscles. He had seen the strange form of the Ancient, a form that he knew the humans could not see— she was an exposed nerve of the Lifestream, walking above the surface of its skin, tied down to it with invisible connections, and able to feel around her with invisible cilia which stretched from her in all directions. She was one cell of a great organism, and oddly enough, Vincent felt as if he just another. “To make spirits of the highest air was no easy task for me, and for one specific reason.”

“The element problem,” said Cloud. “The same reason why it’s so hard for you to heal me.”

“Right,” said Aeris. “Most living beings in Spira are elementally neutral. But spirits of the air and earth, like us, are polarized, and when we try to enter another element, the elements rebel against each other. We can all influence neutrally balanced humans and animals, we can all attack neutrally balanced enemies like Sin. When we can catch them. But a spirit like myself cannot effect a spirit like Vincent without expecting great ramifications and failure more often than not.”

“Yet you, yourself, made the first Fayth,” said Cloud.

“I did, that was me,” said Aeris proudly. “I knew I had to give Spira a force that was not bound to the earth, since the Ancients and their Lifestream are mostly bound to the earth, and only about a dozen Ancients were stubborn or proud enough to keep identities, so only about a dozen of us can walk Spira’s surface. We could fight corruption above Spira’s surface. Something on, or above, the surface must do that, so I figured spirits connected with the air, free to travel anywhere above Spira, would have a fair chance at beating back Sin.

“But how could I create an air spirit with my earth-bound powers? The answer was that my magic must be neutralized before it touched the people willing to become Fayth. I had to separate my connection to earth out of my power and leave only a power of raw force, raw movement, to do this job.”

“And that’s what Holy is,” said Tifa, impressed.

“Exactly. Holy is the spell of life, with no elemental connection, which can be cast by any person of any affiliation should they have the power to hold it. Holy was what I wanted to create, but I didn’t know how to go about that. At the time, Materia weren’t popular or readily available, that sort of power was left to gather in Lifestream pools, so I didn’t think one Materia could hold that power. Lady Yunalesca proved me otherwise, though she took a decade to prove it so and I don’t know if she had to transform a thousand people at once like I had to.

“My solution was this: I would start by casting my powers at a great mass of earth—a mountain. Mountains are the steadiest outcropping of Spira. They are earth, but they are undynamic, very close in form to crystalline Materia. This mountain was my Materia, my firm foundation. I poured all the power I would need for my great spell into that mountain, so that it could cook and take time to be tempered. Using the mountain, I kept the earth in the earth, and from its top purified power erupted, like metal run through a fire. That was the first Holy, a makeshift volcano from which pored the hot rock I did not need and the bright white heat that I did need.”

“You burned a mountain with fire,” summarized Vincent, “disregarded the result of ashes, but used the result of smoke.”

"I merely put my light through a prism and used the waves I needed,” Aeris agreed. “I thought it was clever at the time. And it was clever! My Fayth sprang to life. They raced for Sin. They defeated him, and in that moment, we THOUGHT we had defeated him totally. We did not know he would return, since he had never been defeated before. But in the moment of victory, when my Aeons returned to their Fayth form, they found themselves bound to the mountain where I had created them.

“I was puzzled. I didn’t know why they were unable to move from the mountain while in their Fayth form, but they could as Aeons. I discovered that the forms are fundamentally different. The Aeon works like a human, surviving off the energy that it creates itself, though the Aeon gets all its energy just from the air in an ingeniously complicated process. The Fayth, however, has no form, no energy source, and no center. I realized that the Fayth forms of my children were impossible— Fayth are not made of anything and should not exist. They should disperse into air the very instant they are created, because they are just air. Yet they did exist—they had something, an imprint, which I called their shadow, which pulled them into existence.

“For the ‘smoke’ that made each Fayth, a bit of ‘ashes’ was left in the mountain. The mountain contained the shadow power for each Fayth. The part of the spell I had ground into the mountain was still connected to them, as the rock that bound their Fayth forms. They left their body on Spira, like dream-travelers, and their powerful dreaming bodies, the Aeons, were allowed to travel, but their souls, the Fayth, had to remain as a swarm of spirits flocking the holy mountain.

“I deeply regretted making a race less free than I hoped. This is why I refuse to use this grounding method, even to heal Cloud, because it binds. To try to make up for this, I separated each shadow in the mountain, and split them up into a thousand statues, so that the Fayth could at least be grounded where they wished to live. As Aeons, they travel as far as they desire, but once exhausted, they return to their Fayth form where their statue lies.

“The summoner removes a Fayth from their statue. How? They reassign the Fayth’s shadow form the statue to their own body. Any Fayth can move their shadow around, they found, but it is a risky process. If you try to put a shadow in something that isn’t very solid, the shadow can slip away and they become a lost Aeon. This is why Fayth test summoners. They need to see whether they are a strong enough person to carry their shadow in their body. When the spirit of Yunalesca uses her Holy to make a final Aeon, she connects them, mortally, to the summoner, to make a very strong bond, making it so that the summoner’s soul IS their shadow and body. That is why they are both very strong—they share their power as one being.

"Vincent is as he is,” said Aeris emphatically, “since Lucretia, not prepared for this, did not bind his shadow anywhere. Yunalesca binds shadows to living humans, and Lucretia should have used her body, but she did not know she had to. Vincent’s shadow, the part of him that would bind down his Fayth form, slipped away, so becoming anything other than an Aeon is impossible. His Fayth form has no center and cannot form. This is why he must use the Aeon’s power of regenerating through sleep rather than the Fayth’s power of… well, pretty much just being energy, To live entirely as an Aeon is a bad idea, since it is not really the Fayth’s natural form.”

“Why would a Fayth made by a human be the same as the Fayth you made?” asked Cloud. “Humans don’t have any earth powers to ground.”

“Holy copies the way I first made the spell,” said Aeris, “It is entirely possible for humans to make a better version of the Fayth. In fact, I am SURE a human could, since they could spend their whole power on turning one soul into one Fayth, bound in itself, carrying its shadow with it. I simply have not seen any human that could create a more perfect Holy.”

“A more perfect Holy.” Cloud repeated in monotone. “I see why that might be hard.”

“Don’t sass your doctor,” said Aeris wisely.

As Cloud and Aeris began to get a bit snarky with each other, Vincent cleared his throat. “You’re right, we figured the lack of my statue was the issue, though we had no clue why it was an issue.”

“Yes. The Aeons is a temporary, high-power form of the Fayth. It’s a bad form to stay in, but you have no choice, since you do not have the trigger that materializes your Fayth form.”

“Do you know a way to regain my shadow?”

“Ohhhhh my. Oh my.” Aeris dramatically plopped her head onto her hands. “How do I find the part of your soul that keeps you together? Well, where do you think it is? You died, and no one held onto your spent soul energy, so it went to the Lifestream, like it’s supposed to. And being as we’re short on supplies in the Lifestream, it’s probably already been reused as fuel to hold some nice new trees together.”

 “Oh.”

“Wartime rationing is an ugly thing, Mr. Vincent.” Aeris shook her head. “It’s possible that I could manufacture a shadow for you, I’ll have to look into it. I certainly have never done THAT before, so it would be a process of trial and error. I would oh-so-love to talk to Miss Crescent about her method, discuss the way she created you, what ether she used, whether she noticed the separation of spirit and shadow, play around with the Materia she used...”

“That I can help you with, we kept the Materia.”

“You kept the Materia!!” Aeris nearly screeched, jumping onto her feet with a little bounce. “You kept it! One of the dear little Holies, one of Yunalesca’s works… oh, you must show it to me! I have to see!!”

Vincent lumbered over to a shelf across the room, while Aeris more or less hopped in circles around him, getting under his claws in exactly the way that a cat gets underfoot. He motioned to the top drawer of a little cabinet kept under a window and Aeris pulled it open by both painted gold handles.

A light like the full moon shone out of the drawer, pouring in shafts across the room like a white veil. It was if snow had suddenly been poured everywhere, resting gentle across the room. Aeris grinned and lifted Holy out of the cabinet, gripping the chain between the tips of two fingers.

It was smaller than most Materia, about the size of a plum. It was as clear as glass, without flaw, though the surface shimmered with many colors. The glow wasn’t brilliant or glaring, but it was plentiful, and it found every corner of the room, leaving nothing unlit, brightly persuading everyone’s eyes to lift to behold it. The light seemed to just exist around Holy, not created by any effort, but turning around it like a planet around the Sun, its halo won by blessed deeds, a sort of shadow cast by goodness.

Aeris basically nuzzled it. She held it to her chest, then out in her outstretched palms, then hung it around her neck without asking. No one really considered stopping her, since shea treated it like a beloved pet. “Absolutely excellent,” she said. “As if Yunalesca formed it yesterday.”

“My only regret is taking it from its previous owner.”

Aeris hummed. “If the previous owner ever used it, I may be able to track them down. But chances are, they didn’t… from what I can tell, almost no one has used it. Which doesn’t surprise me, it works to intimidate anyone who isn’t prepared.”

“I’m intimidated,” Tifa confirmed.

“You were never a magic user,” said Cloud quietly.

“I am the fist-fighter who became one of the most important workers in Nibelheim and cleared out a freaking five-acre laboratory ground by myself, don’t test me.”

Cloud chuckled, but, like always, from behind his mask it sounded a little like coughing. Tifa looked concerned for a second, but when Cloud lowered his head in embarrassment, she deflected her look away, at Aeris and her father. Aeris was still happily turning Holy around in her hand, apparently whispering to it, and Vincent was just watching her. He seemed uncertain, but Tifa didn’t know if he was pondering the Ancient or something else.

For whatever reason, Aeris decided to plop down on the ground, cross-legged, to keep examining Holy. Tifa gazed hesitatingly back at Cloud, and he was resting his head on his hands, breathing unevenly, looking down at the table. “Are you alright?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said. He didn’t offer any more information, and Tifa decided not to ask just now.

“Just as I thought,” said Aeris, breaking the silence. “This has been used perhaps half a dozen times in its existence.”

Vincent settled his head onto his paws to be closer to Aeris’s level, the light of Holy making his eyes look bright pink and gold. “Really? Wasn’t it made by Lady Yunalesca?”

“Yes, but she made three, and she still has the one she’s used to. The other two she had no reason to use often, since the one was already charged and toned and fit to her. The other two she probably only tested before they were given as gifts, and few others have had the power, or the reason, to use them. So, technically, this is a weak Holy Materia, though I suppose it’s hard to believe there’s such a thing,” she muttered. “This would not make any great Final Aeons, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it would actually take a few tries to work. Luck was with Ms. Crescent.”

“Desperation aided the mutual consent between us,” Vincent sighed. “I didn’t just desire to be made Fayth, I needed it, and she needed me to do so.”

:Magic is best used as aid,” said Aeris.

“That’s what they tell us in Nibelheim too,” said Tifa, while tossing her tea cup between her hands. “I’ve always been terrible with magic, but I used Materia to help move things around in here when Vincent was asleep. I thought I could handle all this work, but it ended out that after solid months of heavy lifting your muscles actually start giving out instead of getting endlessly stronger,” she sighed.

Muscles? The Tifa that Cloud remembered was as thin as a rail. Upon seeing her again, he had let his memory fall over her actual image—when she bent around in her chair, torso and shoulders straining to face Aeris, toned forearms draped across the back of her chair and the table, he saw that she could pass for a soldier in his prime more easily than he ever could have. No wonder it was no problem for her to clean out that broken and littered lab, or to lift those heavy metal doors he could never push.

“As a practiced and also magical doctor, I hope you took many rests in your restoration period,” said Aeris.

“Of course. I couldn’t spend my whole life here, I had responsibilities at Nibelheim and the surrounding fields, since I’m one of the few town guards and monsters have been on the upswing,” said Tifa.

"Monsters are on the upswing?” asked Cloud.

“Yes, but of course I shooed them away during our travels,” said Aeris, waving her hand.

"Shooed them away?”

"Distance tranquilizing and poisoning.”

Tifa nodded, impressed. “There’s something to be said for the long-range magic caster.”

“As long as there is Lifestream beneath me, it is easy for me to send commands across Spira to some distance away,” said Aeris. “And I get my warnings about monsters approaching from Lifestream signals anyway, so I may as well just take myself out of the equation and ask my people to remove any obstacles ahead of time.”

“It’s like being back in the Turks,” said Vincent in deadpan. “Except now I am not advance guard, so that’s nice.”

Tifa and Aeris both giggled, as they were both pretty used to being advance guard. In fact, it slowly dawned on Cloud that he was in a room of elite, uncompromising soldiers, trained and practiced, each prepared to fight their battle for the rest of their lives, if need be.

A room of trained soldiers and a cripple, that is. He guessed he could call himself a former soldier.

Perhaps the most deadly, uncompromising soldier general he had ever seen sprung up from the ground with loud declarations that she would clean the teapot and take care of the tea leaves.

Once her arms were soaked to the elbows in sudsy, metallic country water, pulled from a well, she said, “I may be able to solve a few of the problems I am presented with.”

“These problems are?” asked Vincent.

“Among them, your inability to fly and your plight of being unbound, the vexing gaps in my knowledge pertaining to the construction of Cloud Strife, Sin, and other such scientific oddities, and the problematic continuation of Hojo’s existence to boot.”

“I am listening.”

“Modern mankind, humans and Al Bhed alike, have gone far in imitating the powers of the rest of the world,” she said. “They can cast the magic of the Ancients with Materia, they can roll across the waves of the sea like whales, they can build and construct living beings like Spira herself, and, like birds, they can fly, with enough metal constructing their wings. I know a man with an airship, and I will solicit his help soon.”

Vincent looked incredulous. “I thought no airships could run.”

“He was removed from ShinRa’s official project list after a few arguments, and finished his ship without their help. And while my proposition to solve your problem may be cheap, if I had the sort of time with you it would take to get you onto the airship and travelling with us, I am sure I could find the way to create you a shadow. With this time to study and help you, I would also help myself, in finding how your constitution matches my surmises about the constitution of Sin, who is my enemy, and whom I want to know much about. Besides, the destination of the airship will be, first and foremost, the office of Professor Hojo.”

“Is that so?”

"By the time I’ve met with everyone I want to on this side of the continent, it will be almost time for my appointment with the Professor that I set up a month ago! I have about a half hour meeting with him, since I promised secrets of the making of Aeons, and I know he’s desperate for any information, but I wouldn’t mind bringing a few friends to the meeting.”

Vincent smiled. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the good professor again either. Am I right in assuming you’d allow us to get reacquainted?”

“After I’ve made my acquaintance with him and exchanged whatever information about his scientific experiments I would like,” Aeris smiled. “It is foremost an intellectual meeting, but since this will be his biggest positive contribution to mankind, I feel like his work may as well end after this climax.”

Vincent’s claws skittered across the floor almost against his will. “Wouldn’t it be hard to get an Aeon into his office?”

“Not if you’re a Fayth by then, and I am certain you will be. I could make your statue a tiny, unnoticeable stone, or a Materia, even. I’m sure I could.”

Vincent stood up, paced a half circle, and then looked to his daughter. “Tifa—”

Tifa had already stood up. “I’m packing,” she said, hopping out of the room.

Aeris smiled after her. “It’s weird how far my ability to kill almost anyone gets me sometimes.”

“All in the name of science,” said Cloud, shaking his head.

“Exactly. I’m doing it for the information. Future mankind will thank me.”

"Future mankind would thank you even if you learned nothing from him, I think.”

“Are you alright with this?” she asked suddenly, turning from the dishes to sit next to him, keeping her voice low. “I know that crowds of people aren’t your favorite sorts of crowds.”

“It’s alright,” he said. “I came here for your cause, didn’t I? And they’re also here for your cause. This is my mission, as far as I’m concerned.”

“No, you see, that’s an answer to a question I did not ask,” said Aeris seriously. “I asked, are you okay with this?”

Cloud bit his lip. “I’m nervous,” he admitted lowly. “I’m nervous. I haven’t seen Tifa in a long time, I’m worried about… and I don’t want to hinder anyone. I think they should come with, I just wish… I don’t know what I want. I wish you could take them and not me. I hate how I am now, I don’t like to be seen, and to drag myself along, limping, coughing and having to rest all the time, when they’re fired up on a quest… it’s like I’m a dark cloud over the whole field.”

Aeris thoughtfully scratched the top of her head. “It’ll be a surprise for Tifa to see you as you are now,” said Aeris, “but she seems to be levelheaded enough to not make a drama out of it. And as for Vincent, you have a witness in him, not a judge. You’re of the same race—half-spirits. There used to be a lot like you, a long time ago, when the relation of humans and spirits was different… now I thought Sin was the only example of half-spirit, but I’ve seen both of you, and all the other SPIRIT survivors, and there could easily be more, now that humans are working with spirit’s magic. In Vincent, you don’t have to fear anything—especially since, you must realize, he will also be limping and dragging himself along.”

Cloud turned his face away and fell silent. As Tifa and Vincent bustled around, wondering exactly how to pack Aeon supplies for a many-month journey, Aeris waited to see if Cloud would say anything.

“And he’ll probably sleep more than you too,” she whispered. “I fully expect him to out do you in the pity category.”

Cloud rolled his head into his folded hands, his thin fingers catching the straps and tubes on his mask, tangling him up as if he were held in his own web. “I’m so powerless,” he said. “And I haven’t done any good to make up for my weakness. I haven’t used my few human powers to spread goodness, like Tifa has. I don’t deserve to be here, with you, in any way.”

Aeris laid her own head on her hands, mirroring Cloud to the opposite side. “You are here because of forces beyond your control,” she admitted. “I found you because a system of abusers located you and put you into a terrible position. That terrible position made you my target, and I swept you along with coercion and denied you time to think. I used your worship. You are tied down to the carousel of fate, made scapegoat for the consequences to other men’s actions, and I would feel powerless too. I do feel powerless too, because I am tied down to following Sin, calling for him to repent. And Mr. Valentine has not laid in an abandoned laboratory for years underneath a constant storm because he is sure he could leave. And Tifa is not here with him because she felt empowered to destroy the monster when she found him sleeping. We’re all here because we found it impossible not to walk forward, just like you did. We were shoved along our journey; it only felt like we took the steps. We were captured and tied by compassion, by grief, and by treachery. Because the pain of the world was impossible to endure, we had no choice but to do something about it. Our souls stopped being ours when they were ruptured with feelings of need and powerlessness, because we are powerless to dwell in corruption silently.

“I commiserate with you now. I have chased one man, who has been in a long stage of dying, for a thousand years, and I have never felt like I could stop chasing. I feel like a rope ties me to him, and I am tugged along, with no power to sever the thread or halt the source. So I bind you to me, I bind these two to me, I bind Cid and his Highwind and his crew to me, and many others, in hopes of mooring Sin down. And because I am pushed forward in fate, because I am Spira and ignoring Spira’s pain would mean I would dwell in it, and I am powerless to endure pain, I pull everyone into fate with me, all borne by our unsettled souls, into an impending battle.

“We are all powerless. Each of us. None of us did anything to deserve this. Jenova set a battle date thousands of years ago, and we march to her battlefield, because Spira has commanded us to go, and we are fettered in our souls to her command. There was pain, and we were made war’s doctors, unwilling, because we were cursed with the need to aid.”

Aeris saw Cloud’s eyes unfocus from his pain in the second that a sort of confusion took them over. He lifted his head to her, his brow wrinkled, his blue eyes bright. “Aeris,” he said, “I never asked you who Jenova is.”

Aeris looked down. “I’ll explain it all very soon. But now that I’ve got more than one person travelling with me, I’ll wait until they can hear about the real enemy also. I’m not looking forward to trying to repaint Sin as a victim in their eyes.”

“You’ll need a lot of paint.”

Aeris giggled.

The tension diffused to wait for a later time as Tifa came stomping back into the living room, lugging what looked like fifty pounds of supplies on her back without so much as a wince. It made Aeris’s little pack look like a purse. Her wrists and knuckles were bound in metal and she wore steel-toed boots on her feet, and she had a rifle case strapped on top of her backpack. She had taken the time to tie her long hair into a braid, so that Cloud had to stare in shock at her sudden transformation into Advance Guard of Nibelheim, protection against monsters and raiding thieves. “I’ll have to make a stop at Nibelheim to declare I’m leaving,” she said.

Aeris nodded. “I planned on taking you, Cloud, and myself back to Nibelheim for a farewell, hopefully a quick farewell, since we don’t want to waste our energy celebrating. Forgive me, Mr. Valentine, but I could not quite find justification for including you in the farewell.”

“I am so surprised,” he said, sarcastic voice muffled from where he was shuffling around the farther rooms. “Oh, where did it put it…” he muttered to himself.

Tifa rolled her eyes. “You can tell he’s getting old. He can’t remember where he put anything, but it’s important to find all of it.”

“No, no, I’m looking for the Materia that we had to show to Ms. Aeris,” he shouted from a few rooms away.

Tifa’s eyes widened. “Ohhhhh yeaaaahhh.”

Aeris cocked an eyebrow.

Tifa blushed. “Er. After I cleaned out most of the laboratory, I still kept finding things stashed away and hidden… if it didn’t stink, mold, or cause us headaches, I didn’t necessarily find it right away. But just a few weeks ago, when I was doing the last of the cleaning, Father reached up into the vents as saw someone had, for some mad reason, hidden a weird Materia of a type neither of us had seen before in the vent system, which I couldn’t get into.”

“In the vents? I don’t know what good a Materia would do in the vents,” said Aeris.

“I think it was just stashed there, maybe as people were running away from the laboratory… whatever it is, it’s definitely powerful, which is why we both found it odd that it was left behind. We surmise someone found a reason to hide it FROM Hojo.”

Vincent lumbered back into the room, a rusting chain clutched between two claws. At the end of the chain, in the shape of a sphere, there was a spot where the color was ripped out of the world. Or at least it seemed that way.

“I don’t like that at all!” decided Aeris. “Not one bit, actually, my first instinct is to destroy it for the good of Spira, but I’m valiantly holding off. Explain.”

“Just like Tifa said,” confirmed Vincent, dropping the thing on the table, where it seemed to slam down and stick rather than land, like a mass of dropped meat. “We found it after almost the whole lab was cleaned, stored in the ventilation system where no man could reach without a ladder, obviously hidden. We hadn’t noticed it before hand, and neither of us recognizes the type, or even what on all Spira could be the power inside it.”

Aeris sort of muttered to herself, glaring at the Materia. “Now this shouldn’t be happening at all,” she said, “And I couldn’t even figure out how or where it happened…” And then suddenly, she looked excited. “Oh, but if I could figure out WHERE it happened…”

 Tifa held her hands out and raised her eyebrows, in a general ‘do tell’ gesture.

Aeris pointed towards the dark Materia, decidedly less touchy than she had been with Holy. “This black Materia is a form of a Bio Materia, I suppose, since like Bio, it uses a very earthy power to a poisonous intent. However, the ‘earth’ power used is not based on the dirt of Spira, but on the rock of what we call Meteor, a small land from space that fell to Spira many years ago. I could call the Materia Meteor, since it’s full of the power of Meteor, but really, its name is Jenova.”

There was a short silence. “Ominous,” Tifa said. “What’s a Jenova? What’s this land from space, for that matter?”

“I thought space rocks were a myth,” said Vincent.

“I see why you don’t like this Jenova you keep talking about,” added Cloud.

“Wait, this fell ONTO Spira?” Tifa asked. “More of this EXISTS in Spira?”

“And Hojo has access to it?” asked Vincent, angry. “I had never seen it in his lab before.”

“I think you actually did,” said Aeris solemnly, “and you realized it then. It felt the same. You didn’t connect it, but you felt it.”

All eyes turned to Vincent. His narrowed. He looked at Aeris, disbelief showing in his face. She waited for him to say what he knew, but he was reluctant to.

“The head,” he finally whispered, “Encased in iron, inside the glass tube. The head that felt like being stared at by darkness, through the eyes of a skeleton, but I didn’t think of it at the time, because Lucretia was there, waiting.”

“The head of Jenova,” said Aeris, “enthroned and crowned in professor Hojo’s lab, accounting for his madness, his power, his control, and his arcane knowledge in one stroke. Her thoughts had turned from us for some years, and that’s why I came to the surface, in a panic. The others were unconvinced, but I knew it. Jenova has surfaced. She surfaced long ago, I believe. And this is the Materia Hojo made, his Unholy, with the power of Jenova.”

Cloud’s stomach was twisting, his nerves stinging with the sense of ‘wrong’ in Aeris’s words, warning him about the Materia on the table, telling him to back away, to keep silent, disassociate. “What is Jenova?” he asked again, his words floating, airy, uncertain, in the tension of the room.

Aeris held her breath, not wanting to speak.

 “And how in each of the seven rot-infested halls of the wicked does Hojo have its head?” asked Tifa.

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ETC

Everything that I never put on AO3—to my shock, this is slightly over half of the wordcount. My god, did I write a lot of this. And my goddess, it was so long ago.

—

 

The good-bye at Nibelheim lasted all night whether the party wanted it too or not. No one wanted to let Tifa or Aeris go, and so they sat through an extravagant feast, Tifa muttering almost compulsively about using up food stores.

Cloud did not attend, being too worked up with dark thoughts and unpleasant assumptions. Sin was Spira’s ancient enemy, and he remembered the day, as a child, he comprehended the thought of a spirit of malice, a living grim reaper, that haunted the mind of every single living consciousness o Spira, with millions of deaths on its till, a ghost haunting the planet. Everything seemed dark at the time, everything was warped, and her saw dark visions in the eyes of everyone he knew, in his mother, in his friends, even in little Tifa, replacing the hope and love there was before.

Aeris had guided him, soft-handed, to vistas of evil he hadn’t even known of before, making Sin the mere shadow of something hulking and great, undefined, evil, waiting, like an entire night following an uncertain twilight. Felling nauseous, frightened, and uncertain, Cloud entered Nibelheim’s Temple of the Ancients, which was absolutely empty of all living things, since the Priestess and her Attendants sat with Aeris at the feast.

The Temple was not a great building. It was the greatest in Nibelheim, and unbeknownst to Cloud, one of the greatest and oldest in the Thunder Plains, since it was encase, on the outside, entirely in a mosaic of the shells of sea creatures, bound by glass, making it absolutely waterproof, and one of the only waterproof buildings in all of the plains. The water that would have turned another building into rot poured around it in many pools, with incredibly deep bottoms dug out centuries ago, and pale white flower growing in pads all about the surface of the pools. White fish lived there too, and yellow reeds grew clustered around the manufactures stone path to the doors of the encased Temple.

The Temple, hidden in its own mists caused by its flowery moat, was shaped like a tiny building of state, with an entrance hall in the rough shape of a square, with sloping inward walls that ended in a giant, spiral, artificial conch-shell dome, glistening like mother-of-pearl and clamped on with untarnished thick silver. Behind this entrance hall, divided inside by a door made of more silver, was the temple proper, a long rectangular building with went upwards in three different sections, each divided by three upward steps and a layer of white embroidered curtains.

Inside the temple, in the common room where any person could enter at any time, Cloud Stood, admiring the paintings on the wall. Framed with gold-painted wood, so thick they almost layered upon each other, with strings of shells and stones hanging off of each one, were painted depictions of Ancients doing many great deeds, each with the exact ancient and now extinct sort of features that now only existed on Aeris’s face. That’s how Cloud, as well as the people of Nibelheim, knew her when they saw her. The lost people of ancient Nibelheim had not made boasts about knowing the Ancients, they had seen them, and they had painted them exactly how they were, and writ their lore only half out of legends.

Cloud walked over the tiled stone floor to the carved shelves where the official lore-books sat, written on reed paper in a script that no one read, with more modern editions laid out in front of them, translations and commentary alike. Any citizen was allowed to read these, since other copies were kept safely in the farthest section of the temple, which few saw.

Cloud considered passing them by, but, after a moment of hesitation, he reached for the modern translation, which he remembered reading, and flipped slowly to a familiar page. He only had to scan it for a minute.

“She cried, but her sobs were hollow,” read Cloud, “and they meant nothing. There was nothing that could be done, so all actions were nothing. The Death required a kind of despair that none are capable of, and none were ever meant to express.”

He had read the story of the great plague a dozen times when he was young. He was drawn to the story. His mother had scolded him for being morbid when he chose to recite that particular story at a ceremony. Maybe he was being morbid. Maybe, even then, as a child, he had been something of a dark soul, drawn to despair instead of hope. Now, to him, it just seemed evidence of his hopeleness, of his affinity to cruel things, his weakness that let him be cruel and call cruel things towards him, the basis for his cruel punishment. He was tied, just like Aeris said, to pain, and he would always be tied there, in a circle of causing and finding pain.

But he remembered the story being a different sign to him. He relished the passages about the plagues, because they led up to the tears of the almighty Ancient. He remembered that, to him, the story revolved around her, and when his mother called is The Story of the Plagues, he called it, to himself, the Story of the Compassionate Ancient. He saw it, when he was young, as a sign that nothing could be unmoved, and that the pain of humans, though spread across Spira, though so eternal that it had become redundant, still mattered, somewhere, to someone.

That idea seemed foolish to him now. He closed the books, hoping to stop the feeling like knives in his stomach, the feeling like a warning, like anger slowly rising on him like gathering storm clouds, and also like a gaining tide of sadness. He felt there was something he was just about to remember, and he refused to.

Instead of throwing open the silver doors to the decorated and altar-filled halls of the temple, where there was a shelf to put candles and shells to offer for each of the hundred-so Praised Ancients, Cloud just left the temple, welcoming the feeling of mist on his face outside, but not he ringing sound of celebration in the streets of Nibelheim. He hobbled back over the stones, pushing the long leaves of reeds and the thin silky banners around the temple aside with the aim of returning to the old Mansion, where he could languish (and/or hide) in peace.

The orange haze of the sun had already set, and night in the Thunder Plains, being almost never clear, was a pitch black affair, with the shapes of houses absolutely indistinguishable in the mist and clouds of the world. Cloud remembered nights as a child where he really, completely, could see nothing, and the night was total blindness, as if the world had been erased. Houses didn’t even have porch lights in the dead of night, since there wasn’t any electricity then and fuel was precious.

Tonight, the streets were almost blasphemously bright, filled with the lanterns of revelers and the fires of the feast. Nibelheim was ghostly in the half-light, rotting angles lit unevenly so that the town seemed to breathe and exhale as the flames shifted. To Cloud, it was eerie and uncomfortable to be out in a Nibelheim that was inhumanly bright to him, as bright as dim day, as if the whole town had been set on fire. He ran for the mansion as swiftly as possible, fighting the feeling of dreaming and unreality that came to him as he saw the dour men of his youth delighted and drunk and the sober fungus-decked houses tossed into bright revelry.

He almost slammed the door of the mansion behind him, but then immediately felt like some sort of grouchy old man and the humor of the situation occurred to him. “Am I seriously annoyed that a bunch of partying kids have ruined the town for me?” he asked himself in despair.

He sighed, rubbed his eyes with his fists (which was hard, since his breathing mask almost reached them) and slouched into the main foyer of the mansion, where the rusted chandelier above glittered, swaying slightly in the wind that came from tiny holes in the walls, and the floors creaked and sighed as they shifted. Cloud’s nerves didn’t quite cool like he hoped now that he was alone, since in the old house, which muttered and cackled to itself like an old man on his rocking chair, Cloud couldn’t help but fixate on Aeris’s warning about its unpleasant underground.

He walked quietly to the kitchen, nerves jangling, hoping for a little bit of water. He poured some from the sink, into an old cut-crystal glass probably once used for liquor, and took it in gulps, lifting his mask for each one, and breathing heavily as he swallowed, his back turned to the rest of the mansion as if ignoring it.

And then he heard the undeniable creak of metal against wood.

“Oh no,” he said to himself, mostly upset that his death was coming NOW after he had resigned himself to adventure. He had seen the trap door that led to the cellar of the mansion, he had seen it many times, and skirted it with trepidation, and now, since that one point of the house stuck vibrantly in his mind, like a pin stuck onto his mental blueprint, he knew exactly where that sound was coming from.

He made himself hobble into the room with the trap door, rather than being caught off guard, event though he felt he might faint and collapse any moment. Moonlight ran across the floors in uneven stripes, revealing some parts of the house and hiding others, leaving him to pick his way across holes and pitfalls. His breath, aided by his tank, wheezed in the unrelenting silence, even though he strained his ears for hints of a responding breath, or the scurrying of a monster’s feet, or more sounds or crashes, or anything at all.

From down the hall, he saw the trap door half-suspended in the air, in a chance ray of moon light, held up by an invisible gravitational force. He went toward it, uneven step by uneven step, decaying bookshelves and curio cabinets, fading darkly past him, certain he was headed towards his death but feeling compelled, as if by command, to answer the call. His will had slipped away from him, and the grounded sense of power and surrender drilled into him by ShinRa remained alone. He was beckoned, he went.

His back bent unwillingly to allow him to pull the trap door the rest of the way up, the cold metal shocking him and causing his nerves to ring in panic once more. He was tense, shaking, even sweating, because fear had completely overtaken him, banishing logical thought and leaving only room for a straight line. Find whatever was down there, fight it, banish it, and restore safety in the house. This was his mantra as his leg found the first cold step into the darkness.

Once Cloud had slipped his whole body into the winding staircase descending into the Mansion’s cellar, by some mercy, the trap door did not slam shut above him, but stayed open, allowing exit. He was guided, as he stepped down the loops of creaking, damp stairs belowground, by the light above—and the light below, because certainly, surely, something glowed from many rings of steps below him, and the glow pulsed, like a candle flame.

His hand, though shaking, traced the cold stone wall as he descended the some hundred steps. It was like entering a dungeon, and who was to say that this wasn’t a dungeon once? It was too deep, far too deep, for a cellar, and it seemed to echo a time of conquer and prisoner of war, of hiding people deep below, where their screams would be muffled by unwilling Spira, and where their bones would make for building materials. Cloud couldn’t imagine such a kingdom had ever ranged, on horseback, across the unforgiving Thunder Plains, but this cellar was a thing of castles, and spoke of power and the ability to build far and deep, not of the rough, rotting houses of Nibelheim.

This wasn’t supposed to be here, in other words.

Cloud was almost willing to believe that the cellar WAS the evil. Maybe it had been built by cruel hands as a way to hide their sins, in a place far from Bevelle or Zanarkand. It wouldn’t be the first time that the peaceful Thunder Plains was used that way, as a place to hide things that the cities didn’t want to face. But the light was ahead, the white light, which hovered and waited, growing closer as cloud spiraled down, like a bird about to land.

When Cloud finally reached the ground, shaking, his vision bright and overclear, he turned his eyes to the wide room beyond, which was glowing faintly, but so deep and yawning that he couldn’t see most of it. His eyes darted around, catching old desks, books, shelves, leather chairs, everything covered in dust, before he saw what he was meant to see.

There was a human body seated on the floor.

The jolt Cloud felt almost knocked him over, and a high whine came out of him without his permission. He stumbled back a few steps, breathing heavily, reaching for any memories of his training as a soldier in his mind, before he saw that the sourceless light shining through holes in the man’s body, holes in his arms, in his torso, in his head, bright spotlights where eyes should be, and his head was creaking unnaturally to the side, and he was overall spent and slumped like a doll, too thin, too unmoving, you uncomfortably sprawled on the floor.

“He’s dead,” Cloud whispered. “That is a corpse. Definitely a dead person. Not Alive. A corpse and a ghost. Ghosts are a myth, we have a Lifestream, we shouldn’t have ghosts, why isn’t he in the Lifestream? Where is the ghost if there’s a ghost? Oh Ancients it’s probably actually a ghost. Who is this guy anyway?”

Upon finding a question that he could possibly answer, Cloud approached the body in fits and stumbles, his body protesting his movement. The dead man had been dead for several years, and was mostly a skeleton by now, though tatters of muscle and organs still slung, dry, to his frame. It was a disgusting sight, but in the cool of the underground, he didn’t really smell and he wasn’t much more than a silhouette, so Cloud stayed on his feet. Eventually, Cloud was close enough to recognize that most of the bulk of the dead body was in the clothes that hung on him, mostly undecayed, and then he recognized the clothes, and finally his knees locked and he fell to his feet.

“SPIRIT uniform,” he said numbly. “A SPIRIT. A dead SPIRIT. Like most of them. An escapee. This man escaped the labs, and ran, ran all the way to Nibelheim, and then crawled up here when his energy was spent just to die here. Wow. Okay.” He was shaking, and he knew he wouldn’t be standing any time soon, but he wasn’t thinking of leaving. Nothing outside of this room was in his mind. The shock of his fellow SPIRIT, crouched before him, was all of his existence, crowding out every recent memory and discovery form his mind.

Eventually, the prospect of burying the body came to his mind, and that is when the sourceless light drew in on itself, like a string bunching up fabric when pulled, and a shape appeared in the air from ghostly light. The form had a calm, almost friendly face, long, tattered, hair, the uniform of a SPIRIT, an over-thin body, but long, strong-looking arms, which it stretched out, smiling, welcoming, because—

“Zack,” said Cloud.

“Cloud,” he said, his voice a whisper, like a gust of air, but it was a warm breeze, since Zack was still as friendly as he was in life. “We have to stop meeting this way.”

Cloud choked a sob, surprised and shaking, unable to stand. Zack motioned for him to sit still. “You lived,” Cloud said.

“Er,” said Zack, casting a glance at the corpse beneath where he was hovering.

Cloud put his hands over his eyes. “You died. I mean you escaped. I remember you dying there.”

“You don’t,” said Zack, “That’s a memory you made up, but you have no way of telling real and false memories apart now. You forgot some things from the laboratory, and you made some other things up. I disappeared, you remember me not being there, but you never saw my death.”

“I just saw your absence,” said Cloud, his hand shaking over his eyes, so that ghost-light flickered in and out of his view.

“I crawled out of the lab when Hojo had temporarily removed me from the tubes and the wires screwing me to the wall and our tank. I couldn’t breathe well, but all that mattered was running. I crawled into this basement when everyone else was asleep… but I had already spent my living body. I collapsed here while my mind was already shutting down and my eyes had half gone black. And by then, the mansion was abandoned, so who knew? I am probably the only one who escaped. Until now. You have escaped.”

Cloud shook his head. “No. I was rescued. Some hundred of us were. No one managed to escape. None of us could do it. We were all where we deserved to be already, if we couldn’t leave.”

Zack drifted downwards, as if melting, and it ended out that his ethereal limbs had crouched down to sit him on the floor. His light trickled down the stone floor in waves, illuminating dully wherever it found solid corners. “That can’t be right.”

“Maybe men who fall into a hidden trap should be helped out if it. But men who help to arm the pit with spikes and stings fell right where they belong.”

Zack considered this. Whenever he was silent, his expression was not just still but oddly vague, as if his definite feature drifted away when he wasn’t using them, fading back into a sort of bright mist. “The man in the pit is not helped in his efforts to live as a good man if he is given only spikes and stings as supplies. The good man in war, living with stings but with good men around him and food and fire, can remain moral. The good man who lives alone in a pit of stings with no gentle touch or food does not exist.”

“The Compassionate Ancient of the plague story still weeps alone in the branches of a tree, hoping to atone for mankind with mourning,” Cloud reminded Zack.

“The Compassionate Ancient is a legend. You can tell, because his gender, looks, and lineage changes in every story.”

“That makes her a legend many people have HEARD of, and more likely to exist,” said Cloud.

“Then the Compassionate Ancient is a special case because she is immortal in the first place and is used to spending ages without help or company. A human left to mourn rots, and you can’t help that. Your body alone tells you that a human only lasts in its prime for so long. Even goodness has no promise of enduring under the strain of neglect.”

“Why are you telling me what I already know, Zack?” asked Cloud. “We have other things to talk about instead. I have to ask you what’s happened to you. I have to tell you what happened to the other boys, so you can help me remember them. I have to tell you what’s been done for me. I have to tell you about Tifa.”

“I’m telling you what you know because you misinterpreted it, Cloud,” Zack said with urgency. “You took your own moral degeneration as a sign that no one is really good once put under pressure. I am telling you that no one can avoid what happens to them under pressure, and that it is the pressure at fault, not the man.”

“Helplessness was never an excuse. Why are we talking about this?” Cloud tried to struggle onto his feet. “Don’t talk about this. Zack. We need to laugh again before you go. We need to talk normally. About nothing. About you and your girlfriend you had in the army. I just need to talk to you again.”

Cloud heard the voice of a teenage boy coming out of his mouth, and he put his hands over his eyes, trying not to cry. “Don’t talk to me about things like this. Don’t ruin it. I’m ruining it. I’m sitting here crying. I needed to see you and I’m not going to even be able to see you when I’m crying.”

“I missed talking to you,” whispered Zack. “That’s why it was so terrible to see you mute.”

“Mute, growling, hissing, reduced to an animal. I still doubt I’m human really. I want to live in the dirt and the dark and the rain and hunt people off one by one. I don’t talk about it. It’s not like I could run or chase anyway. But I talk to people. I look them over, I listen to their voices, but I don’t hear anything but another animal.”

“I missed you talking about how you loved the country stories about the Ancients,” Zack continued. “They were great stories. I could tell you were embellishing them as you spoke.”

“I lied,” he said. “I still lie. I never told Aeris about the eating, or about helping Hojo—”

“Come back to me,” said Zack. “I said I loved you telling the stories of the Ancients.”

“I can’t see human eyes in anyone’s skull. Only the skull. So I keep my eyes down and just pretend with a picture in my head, because when I look at them, it’s not like skin, it’s just like meat, so I can’t look at anyone at all, so I just keep my eyes down…”

“Oh Spira, like a Priestess?” Zack smiled. “I thought you were going to grow up to live in the Temple, when I knew you. I couldn’t understand why you joined soldier. Come back to me, Cloud. Stop babbling. I want to tell you one thing, and it’s important.”

“I can’t stop babbling, I’m just going to cry.” The conversation was slipping away from Cloud. He tried to focus on Zack, to bring it back to what he had to tell Zack, to tell him what was important, but he got stuck in the baseboards of the house he had to build for him, stuck in the wormy earth of his argument, babbling about skin and meat and how he saw maggots in living skulls, with Zack, like a record, repeating the same lines about priesthood and Ancients and innocence just past his ear. He needed to talk to Zack, and he was trying, struggling against himself to pour anything but rot and corruption out of his mouth, but his whole thoughts completely eluded him. The circle went on, man and ghost orbiting around each other’s points, for some minute, before Cloud found a way to stop talking.

“But she’s here,” said Cloud finally. “I can’t make you understand, but she’s here. We’re going to kill Hojo, but I’m not ready, because the second he speaks to me, I’ll be his creature again.”

“This is what I had to tell you,” said Zack. “This is the important thing. I must tell you, because when I was under Hojo’s control, subject to him, I discovered something, and you must know it.”

Cloud trembled.

“I remember being mindless, unable to comprehend, but knowing, like how an animal knows its instinct. In my delirium, I thought you had become a Priest. You were the Priest of the Compassionate Ancient, undergoing a ritual to become his Avatar, so that you might destroy Sin. This is what I thought I knew in my madness. And just like I knew you were the Avatar of The Compassionate Ancient, I belonged to you.”

“What do you mean?” asked Cloud.

“I believed myself your disciple. I bore your candle behind you, and held your text of stories to my chest. And I was waking up here, as I was dying, and coming back to myself, I realized what my delirium dream meant in truth. I was connected to you. I was meant to be yours. Hojo tied us together, and I was meant to serve you.”

Cloud shook his head. “I don’t understand. How were you connected to me? How could you serve me?”

“All I knew in my delirium was that he found a way to bind us together. The liquid that came to me from the tubes inside me was poured out of you. And all I know is that this must be told to you. Because we are bound, now. We are fated to be together, and find each other again. And I knew I had to tell you, because it was a mercy you needed. Because you feel incomplete now, don’t you? You must feel hollow. I know, because when I died, a ghost of you was attached to me. I carried part of you into death, and I knew if I didn’t tell you that, you would feel dead and alone all your life and think it was your fault. Your flaw. I had to tell you, because I knew you felt terrible.

“It was Hojo. He took it from you, and gave it to me, and I took it with me. The part of you that used to understand great things. That loved and was devoted to the Compassionate One. He stole it from you, and it’s not your fault. It is not your fault and it never was.”

Cloud felt all the air crash out of him, like a wave, and his vision swam when he stared at Zack. The eerie feeling of having someone else speak his thoughts filled him. “I felt empty,” he whispered. “I felt like I was a dead man who had no reason walking. Like my goodness had been torn out of me and killed. But when I felt empty, I also felt you, like you were trying to fill me back up.”

“That is something I can never do,” said Zack. “Were I alive… but I’m not, I am dead, and I took half of you with me, leaving you to live with half a soul. And because of that, you don’t want to be human. Half human, half spirit, and one foot in the grave. And I’m sorry. It’s not my fault, but I’m sorry. You won’t be whole until you are dead.”

“And neither will you,” whispered a voice from behind Cloud. He tensed, but not from fear. It felt more like shame.

Aeris walked quietly into the cellar, her hand clasped behind her back, her eyes downcast. “I would let you speak, but Zackary, you will kill him if you go on. I know it is the weakness of dead humans to seek company, but you must leave now, if you want him to try to live.”

“That wasn’t my intention,” the spirit whispered.

“Your guilt warped your intention and made it more pitiful than you wished,” said Aeris. “You’ve been here for many years. Would you like to be Sent?”

“You can do that?”

“I believe the modern summoners learned their spells from me,” said Aeris, smiling sort of smugly, like she always did when proud of herself. “I could send you to the moon if I wanted. But I am sure the Lifestream is your preferred destination.”

“Must it be now?” asked Zack warily.

“You have about ten year, I bet, before you are absorbed into the wood of the house and become a house ghost instead of descending into Spira,” shrugged Aeris. “But you meant to ask if you could have some minutes with Cloud, and you will.”

Cloud hid with his back to Aeris, not wanting her to see how totally seeing Zack’s ghost had made him fall apart. He wanted to ask her to leave, so they could speak privately, and then it dawned on him that she had probably been listening for some time anyway, and he flushed in shame. He had meant to keep the hallucinations from her, and his warped vision of humans, despite the fact that he knew his attempt was probably pointless.

She backed up some feet anyway, hiding at the base of the stairs to wait.

Cloud coughed when he tried to clear his throat. He was too blocked up from crying. Zack attempted to move towards his, his shimmering body floating away from Cloud like fog from the solid ground. “I tried to relieve your pain. I’m sorry if I made it worse.”

“I wish I could believe you,” said Cloud. “But you don’t understand. I feel it in me. It’s me. It’s not me missing something, this is what I’ve always been. I’ve felt it since I was young, for hollow minutes, and then, eventually, as I grew up, for days at a time I would just be… in darkness, far away from everyone else, like I was in a hole. And now, I’ve been turned inside out, with the help of a few knives, and I am the hole. Only darkness inside, nothing to speak of, and full of worms.”

The waves of mist coming off of Zack flowed over Cloud’s folded legs and dropped arms, insensible, but bright. “I know it’s true, Cloud. I took some of you with me. I felt it. And after death, I felt myself… rearrange, after leaving my body. My body was torn up. But I was pieced back together after leaving it, as I came back into my sanity. The parts are there. They are all there. But some of the pieces of the puzzle are missing from you now, and I’m sorry. Rearrange what you can. Once you see the shape of what you’re missing, you can find a way to imitate it.”

“You can’t—” regrow a missing limb, Cloud was going to say. And then he looked down on himself, and he remembered. “I can only pretend to be human. To me, I am an animal and everything else is meat.”

“Everything but the Ancients?”

Cloud looked honestly affronted. “The Ancients are Spira. And Spira is holy.”

Zack smiled. Cloud could see through his smile into his mind, but he was used to that. “Then something is good, isn’t it? But don’t we all come from Spira?”

Cloud was silent. “Not all of us do. Something came from elsewhere. From the dark. And I think, now, I am kin to her. It doesn’t matter how lovely the kin of Spira is if I’ve been sworn to the rival family.”

Aeris started from her hidden perch. She hadn’t realized that Cloud had connected the dots. But I should have, she thought. Cloud is good at figuring out the worst possible scenario, and in his life, the worst possible is often the reality.

Zack frowned. “Now I don’t know what you mean.”

Cloud closed his eyes. “That isn’t your concern. I still worship the Ancients, is that enough hope for you?”

“Normally, I wouldn’t be sure, as I was something of an atheist. But it seems I should kick that habit about now. You have help with you, you have someone caring for you now that I’m gone, and I don’t need more. I stayed waiting for you. I hoped you would come to Nibelheim. I thought you would be more destroyed than this, but you walk. You breathe.”

Cloud had nothing to say.

They both waited for a few minutes. Cloud knew he had to say something, that he had to speak, now, because this was all the time he would ever have with Zack, and after this, he was alone again. Alone with people he could not trust himself around and the Spirit of the Deeps.

But even though he felt like he had to talk to Zack, and keep him with him a little longer, he also felt silent. Perhaps he was just tired, perhaps he was overwhelmed with thoughts and a sudden bout of second-guessing himself, perhaps suddenly the futility of trying to keep a dead man gave him pause, or perhaps he just didn’t know how to say what he wanted to say. In any case, he suddenly felt like he didn’t want to talk, though he still felt he had to, because he would rather just be silent with Zack beside him, keeping a sort of post-mortem vigil together, waiting.

Aeris knew when she was needed—when the fear of losing Zack again almost overcame Cloud’s exhilaration at seeing him again.

She walked forward and kneeled beside him for a minute, facing the dead spirit. She put her hand on Cloud’s shoulder, telling him that he could leave, but he decided to stay. “It will be fast,” she promised them both. “Are there any rituals you wish to do?” she asked Zack.

“No?”

“Not a very religious type?” She asked, standing up and stretching her arms above her head.

“Well…”

Aeris shrugged. “Not before now. I get that a lot. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” said two at once, holding each other’s eyes as best they could.

Aeris chose to stand perpendicular to the line they made facing each other. She planted her feet squarely on the cellar floor, digging her toes into the thin strata of dust and dirt between the roughly laid cobblestones. As if she were readying herself for a dance, she lowered the fronts half of her body smoothly down, bending at the wait, to touch the earth with her fingertips.

Cloud had seen the dances of Summoner sendings before, but he knew whatever Aeris did would be very different, because she had no staff to use as a guiding rod for Zack’s soul. But all the same, he wasn’t expecting exactly what she did.

Pulling one leg farther back, her toes scraping on the stone, she moved her lowered hands so that they were in a line facing Zack’s body on the floor. While straightening up, her torso rising from the ground, her hands, with her index fingers pointed, moved farther apart from one another, drawing a straight path in the air, one finger raising up to the sky, one down to the earth. As she did this, she lifter herself onto her toes, looming above the dead body. As she rose, a crack in the earth appeared beneath her feet. It ran jagged through the cobblestones, appearing with a sudden booming noise.

Cloud jumped away from the crack on instinct, though Zack only stared at it, surprised. Aeris’s hands rose directly below and above her, and the rift in the earth thundered open, crying, and Zack’s dead body plummeted into the new wound in Spira’s side.

Aeris’s gaze watched it tumble down. Then her eyes snapped up to the floating spirit.

She extended her arms to him, palms before her, still on her tip toes, waiting.

Zack gazed at her, curious. She waited.

He realized what he was supposed to do. Hesitant, jumping over the rift, he floated toward her. She waited, arms outstretched, until he came close to her, and she pulled his hands into her own. Zack looked like he meant to question her solid grip on his intangible hand, but then, she jumped backwards, pulling him with her.

She leaped first one way, then the next, pulling Zack in a backwards motion with her, her small feet deftly finding the little lines of dirt between the cobblestones. She jumped over the rift once, and then twice, pulling one of Zack’s arms down to their side, the other up near their heads.

After Aeris took enough steps backward, in logical circles, three steps to each revolving patterns, leaping over and backwards three and three, the two men both realized that she was waltzing.

Zack smiled, changing his grip on her hands to hold her more surely. She smiled, and guided him into the pattern, three steps in a circle, making his feet follow hers so that they stopped hap-hazardly jumping and began to glide, one foot following the other, two dancers in a dark, foul-smelling, grave of a ballroom. Zack gracefully followed Aeris, smiling, the ether of his ghostly form trailing behind them, surrounding the two of them with a strange mist, which the snaps and swirls of Aeris’s skirt disturbed when it turned around her ankles. She let him fold one arms behind her wait, so that they danced face to face, and were able to slide more and more quickly over the great rift in the ground.

Time went on, and they danced steadily, and it occurred to Cloud that Aeris was taking her time—or perhaps not hers, but Zack’s. He was smiling, he could have been blushing if he had a body. He looked alive. He followed Aeris’s lead, letting the energy of her turns swirl him around her like a moon pacing a planet, and the chimes of his laugh floated aimlessly around them, as if caught, lingering, each doing in the dark.

The whole cellar began to glow, as if phosphorescing. The light had been generated form the dancers—floating off of Zack, spinning off of Aeris, dispersing. Aeris began to hum, softly, to herself, a hum with much air in it, quiet, lilting, a tune simple and repeating, but enchanting, hovering here and yonder in the upper register. Zack leaned into the song, his feet moving automatically, following Aeris’s lead,

Smiling, she twirled him around once. The lights in the room spun and shivered. They turned, in their circular pattern, energetic, joyful, like revelers at a wedding, always faster and always more in sync, and Cloud saw Zack’s face one more time, as he turned around opposite him, on the other side of the rift. Zack was in rapture. His eyes were closing, and he bent further and farther into Aeris with every circle, as if being pulled into her. He leaned upon her, as they danced, closer and closer to her, until he was entirerly in her embrace.

Aeris continued humming, though more and more, she did not take him with her as she did pull him along. The air that was Zack floated all around the room, the light of will-o-wisps, as the form in her arms became less and less defined. They turned slowly, like a music box winding down, and she hummed a gentle lullaby, rocking the body in her hands until it was no body at all.

A soul’s light, a round, uncertain sphere, floated between her two palms, bright, shimmering, shaking. She folded down, resting her knees onto the stone floor of the cellar, bringing down the light with her. Gently, she pushed it into the rift, where it ambled down, uncertain, to a greater light it found far away.

Aeris sighed. For someone who lived in the world of the dead, she sounded so much more… despondent than Cloud would expect. More than he thought he had ever heard her before.

She laid her two palms on either side of the rift she had made, and pulled, and to all appearances, she moved the earth back together, and sealed it with the release of her breath. The dance was over. Light dimmed, the air settled, and grace fled the room.

Cloud, immobile, sat crumped on the floor, wheezing in air through his tank, with tears gather on his cheeks, just as he had been sitting for the whole dance.

Aeris gazed up at him and began to cry herself. Cloud didn’t know why, if it was sympathy, or something otherwise. She held up her arms, just as she had done for Zack, and offered to hold him. Cloud was not sure if he wanted to accept her embrace or not, but it did not matter, because he could not. He was weak, and his legs did not work.

Aeris drug herself closer to him, to sit before him. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Why… are…” said Cloud, meaning to ask why she was crying for him, but he couldn’t manage it through his own tears. It was a struggle to breathe, since his metal tank wasn’t made for wheezing and gasping. Aeris herself had put her head in her hands, and she sobbed, though she was Ancient and wise, upon her knees on the cold floor.

The mood was broken terribly, as always, as Aeris decided it would be prudent to fiddle with the tank and make sure Cloud could breathe. Hiccupping, she readjusted the dials to let though a little more oxygen, since he sounded like he was going to start a coughing fit any time now.

He did, and she took off his mask so that he didn’t dirty the inside. She wrapped her arms loosely around him, eyes downcast, while he tried to pull himself together. “You think the coughing will be ok now?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, and she helped him clean up.

“You have to know,” she said after a minute. “I thought I knew what was happening before, and when I could look at his body, I knew he was right. There wasn’t any ether in his body. No magic damage. Hojo didn’t test on him. Not in the same way that he tested on you.”

“But I saw…. That great tube in his body,” said Cloud.

“And that pumped something into him, but it wasn’t ether or slime or poison. It was you. Everything that Hojo cut away from you. He wanted to fuse the two of you. To connect the two of you in an essential way, like twins or lovers are connected. Or, in reality, like summoners and Aeons are connected.”

Cloud stared at the floor. “He was meant to be my statue.”

“The holder of your shadow. Hojo meant to bind you. That was to be his method of control. This is why he questioned you about your mind, about who you loved, and what you feared. He separated the stubborn ones from the ones he found controllable. Those he thought he could control—the sensitive, the scared, the compassionate, like you, were meant to be Aeons. Those who showed no fear, the difficult or the dull, he set aside to be statues ahead. He asked about who was fond of who to know who he could connect. And he found great friends in you and Zackary.

“He would turn the sensitive, kind ones into Aeons, and strap the brave ones like Zack to them, and say, ‘obey me, or the one you love is hurt. Fight for me, and live, because if you’re killed, you both die. This was to be his method of control, and that was why he had to know his mind. He planned to use love as his most terrible tool.”

Cloud shook his head. He said nothing.

Aeris held him for a second, and then backed away. “If I wasn’t certain, I wouldn’t tell you. I knew Vincent wasn’t what Hojo actually wanted the second I saw how depowered he was. Hojo needed something with the full power of a Fayth that is nonetheless totally in his control. Upon seeing Vincent’s desperate defense of Lucretia, he knew what to do to make the slaves he wanted. But this was a Theory until I saw Zack’s body… He said part of your soul was gone. It was in him, and I know, because his body was infused with a second-hand echo of what wa sin yours. He had never been struck with magic, but he was poisoned with it.”

Cloud still said nothing. Aeris knew he was rejecting what she was saying, and that she should probably stop babbling instead of trying to convince him. “It’s his fault. Just remember that. I don’t usually encourage this line of thought… but it was really not your doing.”

“That much poison, just from me.”

She leaned her head against his. “No longer.”

Cloud leaned his head against hers. “I’ll really get better, then?”

Aeris considered. She turned halfway too him, and stuck her little fingers under the rim of his mask. She pulled it away from his face, and set it under his chin. “Breathe,” she whispered.

He did.

They sat in the chill cellar. Cloud’s breaths went from loud breaths to quiet sighs, like the breathing of someone sleeping. To him, the air was like the ice of winter. It was cold, and it was penetrating, and it stung, but it was so fresh and so new that it felt bright in his throat, like he was swallowing the light of the moon.

It took perhaps an hour for Tifa to come running after them, but when she found them, all she found was Cloud asleep and Aeris contemplative. “We met an old friend, but it isn’t my story to tell,” was Aeris’s explanation.

Unbeknownst to Cloud, Aeris allowed Tifa to carry him up the stairs to the room he had been sleeping in. Tifa held him as if he were a precious gift, like an old wedding dress, or a delicate family heirloom. She still was a bit scared to talking to Aeris much, so she left them alone in the room to sleep, and went to a different room herself, thinking about what she was leaving, thinking about who she had found, unsleeping.

They left Cloud’s rusting metal tank in the cellar of the Nibelheim mansion, to take up the spot where a ghost used to be.

 

-

 

Upon reaching the old laboratory again, Vincent rushed up to them, bounding with impressive speed over the plain, obviously relieved to see Tifa coming back to him. She patted the side of his face, as if he were a horse, and then turned to Aeris for instruction. She, in turn, turned to Cloud.

He blinked, a bit baffled. “Oh. A way out of the Thunder Plains?”

“To the south,” Aeris confirmed. “We’ll be looking for a place near Mushroom Rock Road, past Chasamaecum and the Moonflow.”

“I thought we were stopping by Chasamaecum,” said Tifa.

“We are, but things can go sour in the Jenovine city fast,” said Aeris. “They are of a religion other than yours or the religion of Bevelle, and to them, Ancients are meddlers. I will be of a lot less use there than in Nibelheim, in many ways, so I’d rather have my friend with his speedy getaway airship first.”

Cloud was silent for a moment. “Should I have realized that the Jenovines are connected to Jenova before now?”

“Well…” Said Aeris, “I suppose I have been light on the subject…”

“I believe you’ll have plenty of time for explanations as we’re on the way out of the Thunder Plains,” said Vincent, his tone a bit dark.

“Ah, so we should discuss heading out! Excellent, Mr. Valentine,” she said brightly. He glowered at her a bit.

Cloud shuffled his feet. He had developed a bit of a habit of running his hand over his exposed mouth while thinking, as if self-conscious of his face now that everyone could see it. His long, dam hair did a good job of covering half of it for him, however. “It would be hard to explain how to get out of the Plains to the south, since it’s all… well… plains, but I can do it.”

“I think I know the general route as well,” said Tifa. “It would be harder since we obviously can’t travel on the main road…”

“Obviously not,” said Cloud, “but if you know, generally, how the plains work…”

“By the little river,” murmured Tifa, “where all the smaller hills are…”

“Exactly,” said Cloud, “and those mushroom fields on the way…”

“Exactly,” said Tifa.

“Sounds like a plan,” said Aeris. “And since you know the way, we should go.”

So they went, Aeris and Cloud before, with Cloud picking out the way south, Aeris gazing contentedly at the grumbling sky, and Tifa and Vincent behind, Vincent slouching along with some agitation because of the rain, and Tifa as close to him as possible, looking about nervously at first, scared someone travelling would see her father. But no one travelled on the open plain, underneath basically uncontrolled bursts of lightning, which sent scars up and down the tough ground mere feet beside them, and no one wrestled their way through the unpaved hills, here in the center of the plains, moving farther from the coast, where no man lived and no man found reason to settle.

The distinctive pale grasses of the plains, slippery like seaweed, would tug on bare feet, and the skies above, though not raining, let down thin sheets of mist to curl their hair and make their clothes heavy. As far as Cloud was concerned, though, the world was all as light as snowflakes and as gentle as falling dry leaves. He had even forgotten that they had a lot of discuss until Vincent cleared his throat (which sounded a little like a large cat growling.)

“What do you wish to know about first?” asked Aeris. “Our enemy, perhaps, or us?”

“I was going to ask about our enemy…. But when you put it that way, I don’t know much about either of you, do I?”

“I do,” said Tifa. “I think it’s more important to know what we’re up against.”

“There has to be a ‘we’ before we know what ‘we’re’ up against,” he argued.

“She’s an Ancient and he’s my old friend. What else is there to know? The rest is getting to know each other over dinner.”

“You know them, and I don’t. Actually, you only know the one. Even if you did grow up as a Spira-worshipper, it’s not like you’ve met this Ancient before.”

“The Ancients are Spira, and we all know Spira, through the acts of nature…”

“Oh no, not this again,” said Vincent miserably.

“No, really, we legitimately passed our own teaching to the people of the Thunder Plains a while ago, she isn’t making that up,” said Aeris. “Now, that doesn’t mean you should trust everything she says, since only a few Ancients chose to keep physical forms, so the people who tended to write the teachings of the Ancients… well,” she shrugged her shoulders. “They’re the few Ancients who refused to give up their own bodies, so they’re either vain, proud, or obsessed with something they couldn’t give up.”

There was a short silence. “And she is…’ muttered Tifa.

“Proud,” whispered Cloud.

Aeris, to her credit, just laughed. “That aside, though it is not really my choice, I do agree with Tifa. I believe introductions are for dinner and war talk is for the march. Besides, I’ve had Cloud promised an explanation for a while.”

Cloud could feel Vincent looking him over from behind him, which was no small sensation. The whole of Vincent’s laborious bulk seemed to follow behind him, heavy, if not threatening. “Well, that is fair.”

Aeris clapped her hands. “Jenova! First came to Spira some few thousand years ago. You will have heard of it as a geological phenomenon. Perhaps in legends. Have you heard any legends of things falling from the sky to Spira? Especially things in rock-like form?”

“In my studies,” said Vincent, “I was told, I believe, that stones fall from the sky sometimes. Where they come from, I could never figure out. And like I said earlier, I figure that was a myth. Not all of my teachers were quite in the same world as the rest of us, I thought.”

“I’m sure they said other things that were total bunk, but this was not,” said Aeris. “In short… what you see as the sky is a very large place. In that place, there are many stars, and close to those stars, many planets, just like Spira. And in-between those stars and planets, there are sometimes large rocks, which dislocated from planets and are now spinning in that space, or which were formed alone. These rocks are largely uncontrolled. They are not connected to stars or planets, like moons, but they go wherever they go, across the whole map of stars in the sky.”

“They sound dangerous,” said Vincent.

“They are. They fly very quickly through the sky and sometimes collide with other things and harm them. One such stone came from Spira from far away.

“What happened was this: in an unknown region of the sky, where very old stars spin, a planet, with life on it, life much like Spira’s, was shattered. We do not know what shattered it. Perhaps another rock, perhaps the people of the planet destroyed it their selves. Most life that was on the shattered planet died when sections of it were hurled into cold, desolate regions of the sky.

“But on one large part of the shattered planet, which was once part of the planet’s surface, something lived. One strange form of life which did not need air, did not need matter, and did not need company to live. This being… has a construction like those of humans and Ancients on Spira: she is both biological and spiritual, and she can live in either form. Her biological form has the same materials as ours, yet it is formed in a different way so that we come in contact with her, she poisons us. Like a fruit that can be swallowed, but not digested, because the body does not understand how to decompose it.

“Overall, what I am trying to say… is that Jenova is a lot like me. An ancient. She is old, she is a spirit, but her form, like a parasitic fungus, invaded the stone on which she lived. And she could live without sustenance, with only her own life, and the power of her stone. Like her own, strange Lifestream, feeding on herself. She is like me, but chemically composed in a way which makes her poisonous to me—and most life, it seems.

“We know, We the Lifestream, that her stone crashed into another world with life once. She found that she lived better when devouring the life of that world. But she ate too much and too quickly and she soon devoured that whole planet. Once that planet was gone, she found herself hungering for more energy. So she left the ruins of that planet and searched for another.

“And so she went through the dark airs of the sky—searching for planets with life, finding them, and eating them.  She is the parasite of planets. To see her… it’s an odd experience. She teeters between being a living soul and being a disease. One would be tempted to categorize her as a beast, but yet… yet she sees, and lives, and desires, and yet she doesn’t, for she thinks, but of one mind. She is like a madness that lives. Perhaps she could be compared to an evil spirit. Perhaps not. You’ll have to meet her yourself sometime.

“She came to Spira some thousand years ago, as I said, and I was one of the first who was privileged to meet her. Perhaps some of you will have heard of the destruction of Guadosalam?”

“No,” said Cloud.

“Nnnnnnope,” shrugged Tifa.

“It was the only city of the now almost demolished Guado race,” said Vincent.

“It was the LAST city of the now almost demolished Guado race; they had many more in ages past. A few thousand years ago, they were already dying, and Guadosalam was their only surviving city. Jenova’s stone, by chance, landed where their city once was. It was a stroke of luck for her—Guadosalam was built upon an area called the Moonpool, which was the lake that the Moonflow flowed out of. The Moonpool was a place of power. The unsent and unburied dead were said to gather there, in incredible displays of souls and light, and the Guado were their living companions.

“It was a great city,” she said mournfully, “and gorgeous. Perhaps Jenova was able to choose what place she would land, having chosen such a glorious, vulnerable place—a place she would see as a wound in Spira’s side, being something of an opportunist.

“The moment when Jenova’s stone struck Guadosalam was terrible. The city was demolished, and the bulk of the Guado were dead in an instant. Her stone was vast, and what it didn’t hit, it poisoned, and she struck instantly for the heart of Spira.

“Jenova had never seen a planet with a Lifestream before—except, perhaps, her own.”

Aeris sighed. “The second she landed, I, and the whole of the Lifestream, felt the pain. We had been crippled. I and those who could assume bodies raced up to meet her, and the force of the Lifestream came with us. We meant to propel her back out into space, and while the stone was pulled out of Spira’s side, Jenova wasn’t. Jenova is a poison, and a virus, and once she has infected, she will not be excised easily.

“We were lost, and so was she. We had never seen our own like before, and neither had she. Could she devour us? No, we refused her. But could we get rid of her? No, she had attached herself to our planet.  We have learned, over many centuries, how to get rid of her when we see her in clumps like tumors, but how to get rid of the whole infection, which pervades everywhere? We do not know.

“Her infection still seeps into us from where Guadosalam was. She has a hold there, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t suspect she really had a physical, humanoid body… but Vincent says he has seen it. And though one wouldn’t suspect that just any old head was hers, I KNOW Professor Hojo has been experimenting with the physical form of Jenova. So he has a hold of some part of her—her head, it seems. But if she is headless, there should be a body. And that body, most likely, is in the new city of Chasamaecum, where her people are.”

Cloud found the hairs of his skin were prickling and causing him to shudder. Perhaps it was the malice in Aeris’s gentle voice. Her hatred seemed personal.

“Then these Jenovines really are connected to her? Are they the Guado still?”

“They were never the Guado. She destroyed the Guado, and their descendants are the diluted blood of the very few survivors. Some humans in the south are still part Guado, but in small parts. The Jenovines are humans that happened to live in the south and tried to re-populate the ruins of Guadosalam. There is an influence around the area Jenova landed in. She has polluted the waters there, and the soil, in a way that she has not been physically able to in most of Spira. There are areas. But her worst influence is there, in the Chasm. When the people of the south tried to build a city around the Chasm, which became Chasamaecum, they were cut off from the Lifestream and began to fall into her power instead. Because her influence is so strong there that we cannot reach the center of her power, so we cannot take the souls that die in Chasamaecum, nor can we purify the soil that she holds together with her roots. The area of the Crater and its city is lost to us, and will stay lost until we defeat her totally.

“The Jenovines are changed by drinking her water and eating her food. They have bright, almost translucent coloring, bright hair, bright eyes, and thin skin, they are thin and tall compared to most humans, they are contained and controlled sorts, because of their isolated and exclusive community. How much have they changed in a few thousand years of Jenova’s sway? More than evolution usually allows, and that is all I know. The Jenovines worship Jenova as a mother goddess and shun Ancients, whom she despises. I have no power there and am rejected if I am recognized. I see now why they probably worship her so fervently—she is there, incarnated!”

“But headless,” said Tifa.

“Which must be very disconcerting for her church,” said Aeris.

“How do you behead a Goddess and just… take her head out of her holy city?” asked Cloud.

“I begin to fear that Jenova let him. They may have liked each other,” sighed Aeris.

“No,” said Cloud.

“Ew,” said Tifa.

“Well, it’s more plausible than him just stealing it!”

“Maybe ShinRa stole it. They have a pretty good task force,” said Tifa.

“That sounds exactly like the sort of mission that Turks are always assigned to,” confirmed Vincent. “Honestly, that’s the fun sort of mission. And I can just see Reno… never mind.”

“Never mind indeed.”

“You would think, though,” said Vincent, “That we would have heard more about the Jenovines’ composition. And their worship of an incarnate Goddess.”

“Have any of you ever seen a Jenovine?” pondered Aeris.

“No.”

“No.”

“No.”

“The mystery is revealed,” she said with a bit more sarcasm than as perhaps warranted. “In all fairness, she very much wanted to make sure no one knew she had a body on Spira. She focuses almost all of her attention on making sure the Lifestream cannot access Chasamaecum. And she did give the rest of Spira something more obvious to distract them. Something no one could ignore, since it was so loud and distracting.”

“Sin,” said several at once.

“Her child, in her eyes. And a perfect cover,” sighed Aeris. “He was one that she infected. A powerful one.”

When Aeris was silent for a second, Cloud asked, “An Ancient?”

“Proud,” she said, quietly. “Proud, and consumed with a quest, both. He kept a body, like me. He was devoted to Spira, and subject to whims, to passion, to desires, like me. He could be reasoned with. And she reasoned with him. An infection is a terrible disease, my children. And Jenova is a terrible infection. But most of the symptoms of a disease—the running face, the vomit, the chills, the shakes—are caused by the body’s own immune system, trying its best to eradicate the disease, and misusing the body to do it. Sin was the most terrible reaction to Jenova. He was taken up in defeating her… obsessively… and she was everywhere… so he saw her taint everywhere… and lashed out…”      

Aeris buried her face in her hand, silent. Cloud cleared his throat. “You made it sound like they were close,” he whispered.

Aeris bit her bottom lip. “Ohhhhh, how to… Vincent, weren’t the Professor and your Lucretia close?”

“As lovers,” said Vincent bitterly.

“Just so,” said Aeris. “What I know of the relationship between Jenova and Sin… What I remember from speaking to Sin, before he was changed…” she sighed. “Those who have a disease for many years are furious at first, but they change, if it is truly chronic.”

“I suppose,” said Cloud, as Vincent said, “Maybe.”

“How does Sin feel about Jenova? How does Jenova feel about Sin? What am I to say? I’m not exactly on speaking terms with either. I can only surmise. All I remember is that he hated her once and now, for all intents and purposes, he seems to work with her. Perhaps he was like Lucretia, fascinated with disease? I can see how, he was a scholar. Oh, he was a scholar…” she shook her head. “But what happened? I can only imagine that his mind was altered, whether by coercion or toxin. I have not spoken to him since he lost his voice.”

They walked. The landscape, as was the glory of the Thunder Plains, never changed. The hills went up and down, and eventually, they found a little river, skinny but vast, which had cut a thin ravine through the field. The river water was pearl grey, and it broke over every curve into bubbling white foam. Bits of grass and dirt churned down the water, whisking along faster than the party could hope to run. “The water is violent on the Plains,” said Vincent.

“It’s raining about half the time,” said Tifa. “If it’s not raining here, then the river had a deluge somewhere else.”

“Do you ever have landslides?”

“Well, it’s not like this is an unusual flash flood you’re seeing,” she said, “it’s sort of the everyday flash flood. The Plains are arranged to take an oceanfull each day.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” whispered Cloud, hand covering his mouth again, “Is why Sin is the way he is now. If he started as an Ancient, why did he not stay as an Ancient? He looks like he is an Aeon. But how could Jenova make an Aeon?”

Aeris gazed at him. “I don’t know. That’s why I have you. To find out. There are Jenova cells in you. That’s what was poisoning the ether. I am certain of it now. Poisoning the ether and you. That’s why it’s so hard to work with you. I don’t know how Jenova made something very like an Aeon, but I believe Hojo was learning from her. And through you I mean to know how to undo Sin.”

There was dead silence for perhaps a minute, silence from each of the travelers but discontented roaring from the river deep in its ravine. “Jenova cells?” Cloud whispered.

“The same thing we see in Jenovines. Those few we have seen. Bits of her, inserted quietly into humans or Guado or Al Bhed. Into anyone. In a Jenovine, her cells and the cells of the human are fused in a way, or perhaps mixed. In you, since they are not genetic, they are only invasive.

“All the same. Hojo attempted to connect YOU to JENOVA, and once that was done, to make you into an Aeon like Sin. This is almost certainly the truth. This is why Hojo is in the delusion that he’s in service to a higher force—he is making spirits to flank Jenova. Why does she need them now? I intend to never have to find out. I will study you, and undo Sin.”

“Will you have him back afterwards?” asked Tifa, suddenly. “The Ancient that Sin was?”

“Ideally. I wish to heal him. But it has been very long. If he is to die, it will be done.”

That was mostly the end of that conversation. The explanation was deemed sufficient.

That night, while all rested under Vincent’s wings, and Aeris prepared to study Vincent for a night rather than Cloud (in hopes of giving his a Fayth form before they entered Chasamaecum) Tifa, leaning on her side into the soft, mossy ground, turned to Cloud and said, in a hush, “I just can’t believe that all along, Sin was just part of the ploy. And it was this other spirit all along. Jenova. She was the enemy of Spira, and she was lying in wait, unknown to all of us. Inside of Spira. In the water and dirt.”

Cloud was silent.

“I’m not even sure I can believe it. Where is this Jenova? What has she been doing all this time? How could… there be something this evil, all along, everywhere, and no one knew?”

“Maybe it’s weird,” said Cloud, haltingly, “I don’t know.”

“What’s weird?” asked Tifa.

“I think we knew all along. They tell us that Sin is the result of the evil of humanity, but, well, that isn’t true, because humanity was evil before we had Sin. And Sin sleeps. Sin isn’t always here to haunt us. And when Sin is gone, people are still cruel. And if Sin were the whole of our evil, then why is it that more people die when we attack each other than when Sin attacks? Sin is just a monster. We are humanity. And our own evil is the collection of everyone’s cruelty, and that’s larger than a whale.

“So I think we all knew that there was great evil in people. And if in people, and if people are part of Spira, then there can be evil in Spira too. Spira is beautiful. But. A perfect world wouldn’t make something like us.”

Only the scrambling of the river and the crying of the thunder answered Cloud’s dark words. Tifa had nothing to say.

 

-

 

On the whole, the trip out of the Plains went uneventfully. The conversation was intended to get each familiar with the other, which, surprisingly, went smoothly. Tifa shared her life with shrugs and grins, explaining that she really had always been a country girl, raised in a quiet village, attuned to the ways of the watery plain, having done a minimum of travelling and a maximum of training to become a guard and ranger.

“The rangers walk over all the Thunder Plains, keeping order in place of police or government, which we don’t have,” Tifa explained. “Since the Plains are rural, we don’t fear roaming bandits or criminals, and since the Plains are hell for most people, we don’t fear influxes of bandits or criminals any time soon. The rangers keep the peace among villages, aid what little trade and travel occurs, ward of Sin the few times he has bothered to grace our shabby hovels with his presence, and above all, they hunt down monsters.”

“I recall, they were after me,” said Vincent.

“And they almost caught you, didn’t they? Their hunting is wildly effective for their difficult terrain!” Tifa boasted.

Vincent’s history also came out in slightly more detail. He would describe, in abstract, life as a person growing up in impoverished Bevelle, who did wrong because doing right always garnered a more painful punishment. Stories of his childhood were picked out of him one by one, short tales, about working through his adolescence, or admiring Tseng’s force and strength in his first days as part of the Turks, or about the missions in Wutai and the Al Bhed territories before his final mission—though, as a whole Vincent said little about his true youth. And, on a whole, the rest of them decided there was no point in pushing for stories about it. They got the sense of the quiet, secretive, cynical yet controlled man through travelling with him, and refuting his profuse apologies whenever he had to rest to allow for the weakness of his body, his eyes burning with rage, but his voice soft with contrition.

“I cannot apologize enough,” he would growl. “I know the importance of this mission, and I do not mean to halt our travel.”

“It is not your fault,” Aeris would say. “If it comes to it, I can even speed myself to Bevelle. You have nothing to worry about, I planned to take my time on the way. No reason to work so hard to save Spira If I don’t enjoy it.”

Aeris herself would sometimes share vignettes about her childhood on Ancient Spira—an age of which no records survived, except for those records that lived in the Lifestream, of course. “Different, beyond what you can imagine,” she would sigh, “This continent had been ravaged by the last ice age, so we believed, and it was stones, valleys of stones and then some swamps. It was a joy to us—our joy was in growing, bringing life out of Spira.

“Not to say no one lived here. Al Bhed were always on the islands. Humans were always in the swamps and the plains. They had a hard way of it, but they all liked us well enough… the Guado, on the side of the Moonpool, were already a great society. They were always great,” she sighed. “Even back then, with their reed boats and they lacquer palaces that sunk every few years. They were building great theories about the path between life and death for so many millennia…”

“Would they not know about the Lifestream?”

“Back then? Not really. Only a few facilitating figures lived in the Lifestream, before the Ancients chose to live there. Back then, we, the Ancients, only believed that there was a gatesman, who lived in a valley under a mountain, and once dead, the spirits of sentient people would have to travel Spira to find him, and when we did, he would decide what path we were to travel—whether to reincarnation, or to a realm of punishment.”

“Those were the only options?” asked Cloud.

“One could work their way out of punishment. It wasn’t supposed to be so bad, unless people really hated you, then legends of where you were going would get harsh.” Aeris laughed. “Funnily enough, when we joined the Lifestream, we found out we were just about right about the system. Well, the fact that we became the system helped that fact along.”

She claimed that she spent the whole of her life on this continent of Spira, though after death, she travelled the rest of the Planet. “Yet I keep forgetting where everything is,” she sighed, “since it keeps changing. I mean, we meant for it to change. But it’s still confusing!”

And though Aeris would happily chatter about learning how to grow plants from her sorrowful but graceful single mother, and communicating with those societies of swamp-men who built great barrows that are all buried today, and meeting the old Guado that she so admired, and growing up among those many friends that were the Life-force of the Planet now, and describing the sensation of being the planet, of feeling the force of the moving oceans as if they were her veins and the shifting of the plates of the earth as if they were wind on her skin, Cloud was more reticent about his past.

He would speak about Nibelheim when Tifa did, quietly supplementing her tales if she encouraged it, confirming what details of the Plains she supplied. They came to know plenty of Cloud’s childhood and his mother, but details about Bevelle, the military, SPIRIT, and recovery waited until one night, when, as rain battered an obviously ailing Vincent, Tifa finally asked, in no uncertain words, though with gentle tone, what happened to him after he left Nibelheim.

He told her everything he could bear to. He begged to go quickly over the details of his life in Hojo’s power, and in the end, let Aeris supply the medical facts, while Tifa could not help but cry.

“It feels odd to say this,” he added, once Aeris was done saying what he wouldn’t, “But life in the recovery house was one of the best parts of my life. Living in Nibelheim as a child, in the muddy streets, with mother telling me the cycles of the Ancients, was better, but the recovery house… was peaceful. It was gorgeous. The mountain looked over the Calm Lands, which were covered with every color of wildflower, all tossed by cool winds… and I was in pain. I was always in incredible pain. But no one spoke to me. I felt terrible, but sane. I was in peace. A purgatorial sort of peace, but great peace.”

“Is it worse now?” Tifa asked.

Cloud looked at the ground. Water ran over his still face, gathering in his thin eyelashes, as if pouring over a silent statue. “I don’t know what to say. I’m not… being obstinate I’m just not sure… what exactly to tell you. It’s…. not easy to say. To describe these things… is it better? What is better?”

“Sorry,” said Tifa, folding her hands. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I wish I could tell you,” he said. “I don’t mean to be…”

“Don’t worry about it, really,” Tifa said.

Crossing south brought them through warmer places, past bright green valleys and stony heights, though as always, they kept to the country. Aeris shortened the time of the trip by taking them down the famous Moonflow, and guiding their ship through the many small rivers and swamps that led them far down to areas near Djose. “Once we’ve spent two days on the rivers,” she assured them, “it’s just another few days down south to find Rocket Town. And once we do find Rocket Town, there’ll be no more walking.”

“If this friend of yours agrees to ferry you around,” said Vincent, doubtfully, perhaps upset because they had had to stop and rest for him.

“Oh, he will,” said Aeris. “Cid knows what’s good for him.”

The Moonflow was gorgeous to Cloud, with swift waters like airy mercury flocked with thin white flowers, sparkling with gold and white lights of many sorts, like stars and lighting and the glow of bioluminescent cave creatures, all gathered on the banks of the shimmering waters. Aeris claimed that the Moonflow was the left-over pathway to a certain magic that used to exist where Chasamaecum was now, though she refrained from saying what. “The Moonpool could be called a sort of portal,” she said tersely, “and though it was a great sight, perhaps it’s better that it’s closed now.”

“The source is gone,” Tifa said, “but the river still flows?”

“No, the portal is gone,” Aeris said, “but the source is still there.”

Aeris bought a boat made out of wood that seemed to glow with veins of silver and a long pole to go with it, planning to guide herself, Cloud, and Tifa gently down the river’s natural flow. Vincent was to fly above and wait for them where all the rivers ended, resting in whatever hiding place he could find there. They boarded the boat amongst a herd of blue, elephantine creatures, dodging the small colorless fish at their feet. Whenever Aeris moved the pace of the boat with her staff, the silvery waters rippled around it in strange ways, more like fog moved by the wind than water. The boat, for that matter, never shook terribly, no matter how fast the current ran, but rocked the boat gently and peacefully, from side to side in a course that took minutes to complete.

Tifa leaned on her stomach to play with the glowing water, sometimes idly dragging her fingers along the flowers or in storms of light as they passed them by. Cloud only gazed that the view around him, hands folded, and breathed the air of a clean river and a large sky. Sometimes they passed by groves of underwater plants; stalks of sparkling white reeds that seemed to grow in geometric patterns or fields of emerald, susurrating seaweed, and Aeris advised they tried eating them, since they were rare and sweet.

It rained, once, when they were on the Moonflow, only for some ten minutes, and they watched the ordinary rainwater being sucked in to the Moonflow, dissolving like ink into paper. They passed by other boats and barges, but no one so much as spoke to them—there seemed to be a rule of silence on the Moonflow, as if the travelling boats were the pews in a flowing, natural cathedral, begging respect with its glory. Once, unable to resist, Cloud pulled an opalized spiral shell from the river’s banks, and tucked it inside of his pack.

The little lights that floated above the waters like will’o’the’wisps seemed to gather around Aeris as she steered the boat, rotating around her like moons about a planet. Cloud found himself a bit uneasy around the lights. They seemed to remind him of something he had seen, though he could not place what it was.

The Moonflow, however, was both swift and short, so after some six hours they found themselves drifting into waters less bright. They had to pull their way, once, through a swamp, at the very edge of the Moonflow, where the silver waters drifting in mingled with the dirt and the manifold tiny creatures of the humid swamp to make an ever-moving bronze and golden pool, murky and full of life, shifting, with pools of great black fish and scaly animals sliding in and out of silk curtains of gold and shadows far beneath the keel of their little boat. Trees of dark, reddish wood and almost golden leaves towered above them, shedding purple berries and pollen-filled flowers on them from time to time.

After they had woven their way out of the swamps, the rivers and ponds were all less bright and less buoyant, becoming more like the average river with each passing minute. By the time dark fell on the first day on the waters, sending clouds of amethyst and ochre across the skies and the waves and the windows of quick passing cottages, they were on turquoise river waters, which splashed and quarreled into whirlpools of foam, disappointing Tifa but still unable to faze Aeris, who drove them carefully along their way as usual.

“You two may as well sleep,” she said. “I can stay up and keep doing this.”

Cloud fought against his military inclination to offer to split the watch. Aeris could guide the boat with certainty, he knew. But he had done nothing for so long.

Tifa felt about the same. “Surely I can help for a while,” she said.

“There’s nothing that needs help,” Aeris claimed. “Everything is going swimmingly!”

The bad joke accomplished Aeris’s aim in being left alone. Tifa decided to spend some time trying to fish, and Cloud, resigned to the fact that he had nothing to do, did nothing. The slivered moon rose shyly in the sky, flanked on every side by stars, which burned fiercely in the open air. Cloud, having grown up on the Plains, had never learned the constellations, or the significance of the great white disk he could see near the horizon, nor been taught the reason why some stars grouped into white lines and some did not, nor why some where bright and huge and gold or yellow or white, when some were tiny and barely discernible. He didn’t know, for once, if Aeris would know much more about them than he would. He supposed she would at least know what the constellations were called. He could only point out the star that they said was always above the top of the planet, green and huge, surrounded by a vague circle of white stars, like a gazing eye.

When he finally was asleep, Cloud found himself dreaming. He dreamed he was inside a net of great tree roots, white and green and fresh like the spring, buried deep underground. He felt, however, more like he was being kept in a vein of warm water than in a layer of black dirk. And then, there was no tree, though he was still kept inside a labyrinth of pale arms, draped over him like curtains, and he was walking towards a man, who stood in a desert with his arms crossed over his chest, like a cadaver buried in a casket, but on his two feet. It seemed to Cloud of a minute like the man had twelve arms, all crossed up and down his body, like straps tied tight, but then it became clear that a many-arms creature was grasping him from behind him. For a second, the man seemed to loom above him, separating the dark sky with brightness, as if he were a flame. And then Cloud looked up high above him and saw the eye-constellation, heralding the north, gazing down on the twelve-armed man, and then everything was upside down and the eye was a deep, dark pit in the ground, filled with the roots, crisscrossing in the open air—not like the thick roots of a tree, but the wiry, messy system of the fungus-- and somewhere deep in the pit, where rocks usually formed the solid foundation of Spira, a great green stone glowed, like the iris of an eye.

When Cloud was half between being still in his dream and waking up, since the call of frog in the night had stirred him, the vision of the tree roots came back, as if he were being lowered into the green-black pit, grasped gently, and he felt no barrier between himself and the roots of the stone. And then he was more awake than asleep, and all he felt was the sensation of tingling on his blood-deprived arms, which he fell asleep on top of, and he saw Aeris’s green eyes peering curiously out of the dark.

“I was working on healing you,” she whispered lowly, “but I thought you were dreaming, so I tried to go away quietly and let you dream. I think I woke you up. Sorry.”

“It was the frogs,” Cloud whispered back. They were even louder now, gathered on the banks of the river in the very dead of night, singing to each other, black bubbles scattered over the surface of black water. “I was dreaming,” he said, blurrily, “about… being underground… and a great hole, and a man with many arms.”

“It sounds like a meaningful dream,” said Aeris, “I hope you can remember some of it in the morning. But I won’t bet on it.”

“I’ll try,” said Cloud, already slipping back into sleep.

He awoke with the dawn, when crimson light found his eyelids. Tifa, looking grumpy, was already awake, and he guessed that she didn’t want to be awake at all. Aeris seemed to have never moved in the night, looking more like the ship’s carved mask, clutching a staff or a spear, than the ferrywoman.

Cloud tried to stretch, and, of course, his muscles spasmed. Upon seeing this, Tifa sleepily handed him a breakfast of hard bread and river weeds, topped off with boiled river water coffee. “Thank you,” he said.

“Ugh,” she said, “I can still see the moon. This isn’t day. Why am I awake.” With that, she curled up in the corner of the boat, looking a bit seasick.

Aeris turned to Cloud. “You woke up last night with a dream,” she said curiously. “Do you remember any of it?”

Cloud blinked. “I had a dream? Uh. Wait a minute.” Cloud closed his eyes and searched his brain. Unbeknownst to him, Tifa had sat up just enough to listen to him. He shook his head slowly, and slowly he opened his eyes. “I don’t really remember,” he confessed. “I just remember feeling… I don’t know if I can describe it… a feeling of being suspended in the dark. Almost held. Not that I felt anything on me, but it was a feeling of comfort. And I also remember green eyes.”

Aeris sighed. “Those are my eyes, silly.”

“And the feeling of floating in the dark was probably the boat,” Tifa said.

Cloud found himself disagreeing with them in his head, but he had nothing to say in opposition. “I’ve lost whatever it all was now,” he said.

“I dreamed that mom was yelling at me and I was late for school,” Tifa grumbled. “To wake up and find that the reason I feel terrible is because I feel terrible.”

“You’ve lived along water all your life,” Aeris chided.

“Along, not on top of,” Tifa complained.

Cloud struggled to remember his dream for a few more minutes, but nothing came to him then. He still could only remember being held, and arms, and green eyes. Eventually, he switched his attention to the changing landscape, which was growing rocky and barren. “Where are we?” he asked.

“Nearing the very south peninsula,” Aeris said. “There’s only a few hours left on the river, we made good time.”

Tifa nodded. “It’ll be good to catch up with Vincent.”

Neither of them said anything in response to that. Tifa’s worry was like a cloud. The river started to grow sluggish, since, Aeris claimed, at one point, the dry ground started pulling it in and diminishing it, and eventually, the whole system disappeared under rock. The day was warm, but Cloud felt tired and a bit unpleasant. He spent the last few hours in the boat more or less huddled up in the corner.

Eventually, the boat ran no more, and Aeris simply left it where it stopped, figuring it did no harm there. She kept the pole, for whatever reason. “And now to find the fourth member of our party,” she said, gazing with optimism at the rocks around the end of the river.

At first, the search was slow. Tifa shouted, but no one responded. They had to scramble here and there over many ridges of rock and dust before they finally found him, keeled over, looking like he had fallen asleep where he landed. “Great,” Tifa sighed, “He exerted himself. I have no idea how long he’ll be asleep.”

Aeris cocked her head, as if listening to him. “Well. I don’t think it’ll be long. A few days, maybe!” she said optimistically.

It was five days, in the end. They were five taxing days, for the most part, as Cloud found himself suffering a sudden bout of illness (“I believe you managed to eat a river parasite,” Aeris gushed, looking pleased) and Tifa fretted extensively, now silent, now scouting and hunting and taking care of Vincent as if he were a sick child. She poured water over his scales and scrubbed him, doing everything she could to keep his temperature down, and seemed to mutter at him as she did so.

Aeris fell into something like a trance, with her eye closed and her lips curled upwards, supposedly working on Vincent and Cloud in turns. It was a short period of rest for three of them and manic preparation for Tifa, who, for the most part, did not sit still.

Every night, Cloud was suddenly reminded of the significance of the eye constellation. He had gazed on it before his strange dream, which was now totally gone from his mind. But it rarely entered his thoughts during the day, though he was sure at some point he had a fever dream about a great green eye, and the winding branched of a tree, and pervading through it the image of a limp body caught in… something. Either cradled or trapped. And once, there was a voice.

But in the way of fever dreams, he woke up a day later with only some scattered images and no idea where they were inspired by reality or fantasy.

When Vincent woke up, he had to sit silently for five minutes to think up an adequate apology, since he was mortified. Aeris assured him that they had plenty of time, while Tifa more or less clung silently to his neck. Cloud was healed from whatever delightful malady he had contracted, so they set out as soon as possible, Tifa clinging to the cringing Vincent, and Cloud experimentally hobbling behind skipping Aeris.

Aeris told them about mushroom rock road, a lush, tropical raised plateau framed with emerald and golden plants on every side, but they had to stay far away from it for Vincent’s sake. Eventually, after almost a day of walking, Aeris sat them all down to talk. “I realize that there’s a bit of low morale in the troops,” she said, sounding as perky as if she were talking to a crowd of pastry bakers.

Vincent lowered his head. “I am certain that my presence is a burden,” he said, straightforward and succinct.

“No,” sighed Tifa.

Aeris shook her head. “Your form is less than ideal, but I can’t tell you how much I’ll want a gigantic poisonous dragon Aeon in the later legs of our trip. But I think, by now, after having had a look at you, I can propose some solutions to your current problem.”

Everyone straightened up to listen. “Please do,” Vincent said.

Aeris cracked her knuckles. “The idea of creating a synthetic shadow for Vincent proved a problem at first. How am I supposed to re-create a part of a person’s soul in order to attach them to a secondary body? I don’t think anyone has tried before. The idea is ludicrous. But the more I thought, the more it seemed that the ludicrous part was that you’re missing part of your soul as a whole. What, you have a personality still, do you not? You speak and interact and feel, do you not? And those are the purposes of the soul—to mark a human’s place in the great subconscious and connect them to others in that sphere.

“So what was it that I put into those statues to give my children their forms as Fayth?

“The answer should have been obvious long ago. It was not part of your soul you lost, but the part connecting body to soul. This is a thing called life-force. It ties a being together as one whole, even though it is made of mind and body and soul and heart, and both you and Cloud live with those many parts scattered. The Fayth is separated between Aeon and Fayth because their life-force is stretched between two physical things: statue and Aeon form.”

“What,” said Tifa.

“Vincent’s lost the part of himself that binds the many parts of a body together, such as soul, mind, heart, and instinct, so, since an Aeon is separated between body and soul force, he lives, to the main part, without his soul. More proof that most emotions are actually tied to the brain, which I have been trying to tell the REST of the life-stream since FOREVER,” Aeris sighed. “Cloud lives with all the parts of himself disjointed, with nothing making them into one coherent thing. He is a large project. But all I must do for Vincent is fashion a generic life force I can stick to him and then stretch that life force between both his Aeon body and something to serve as a statue. And this, I can do.” She folded her arms in triumph. “Two things remain.”

“They are?” Vincent asked.

“First, whether or not you want to do this.”

Tifa and Vincent gazed at Aeris with flat expressions. Aeris raised her hands. “It’s not so easy a choice as it seems. Vincent’s physical form clearly causes him pain and exhaustion, but the Fayth is incorporeal, and spends a lot of its time invisible. You would lose some face time this way.”

Tifa’s eyes widened, and she bit her lip. Vincent looked down. Aeris continued thus: “I think it would be worth it, since it would be much better for Vincent as a whole. But I want you to realize what this means. A Fayth is a spirit of the air, and is often intangible. He could materialize with us as often as he wanted, I’m sure, but he would not be here always.”

There was a short silence. “What is the other thing we must consider?” Vincent asked, deflecting.

“What you want as your statue,” Aeris shrugged. “I could give you a traditional statue, of course, but you have no temple to protect you right now, and besides, we are travelling. I could give you a Materia as a home, though that has connotations of making you into a weapon entirely, so some find that distasteful. Also, Materia get lost. I could attach you to really any kind of solid object, but anything big enough for notice we must leave behind and anything small enough to carry runs the risk of fading out of notice. Though there is a third solution.”

“To attach me to Tifa as my summoner,” said Vincent.

Tifa jolted. “What?”

Aeris clapped her hands. “You’ve been thinking of it.”

Vincent said nothing.

“The bond between an Aeon and a summoner, when a summoner is an Aeon’s first home” said Aeris, “is the bond between two who are connected for life. When one perishes, so does the other. This, essentially, would make Vincent into a Final Aeon, with great powers in use against Sin. It also would bind Vincent and Tifa totally, so they could fear no separation. It would make Vincent totally inconspicuous, and give him plenty of energy to live off of. The drawbacks are, of course,” she sighed, “the fact that one does not live longer than the other, and, besides that, I hear one’s personal privacy diminishes. It’s a bond made for those who would rather not be separated, ever. The extra power is supposed to be a secondary perk, but I admit it is an enticing one.”

“I have never had any great magical ability,” Tifa said faintly.

“You would not need it,” said Aeris. “The strength of your body would work just as well.”

Tifa looked at Vincent. Vincent’s gaze flickered away. She ran her fingers through her dark hair, bit her lip. “I don’t know,” she said. She clutched her hands together. “I want a while to think about this,” she finally said, “And to talk with Vincent.”

“We’ll approach Rocket Town in a day,” Aeris warned.

“That’s all I want.”

The night went swiftly, and during the day, Tifa and Vincent walked far behind Aeris and Cloud, speaking privately and quickly. Cloud walked almost in step with Aeris. His limp had been greatly diminished, he noticed happily. But the whispers behind him made him nervous. “Do you think they’ll do it?” he finally asked.

“Give Vincent a statue? Yes, of course, neither will let him remain in this body.”

“I meant let Tifa become his summoner.”

“Heavens, no, never,” said Aeris. “If they have to talk about it, it won’t happen. Vincent thinks it’s more practical, but if their spirits aren’t one already, they won’t try to join as one.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Cloud said.

They walked for an hour before it hit Cloud that he and Zack had been chosen to be summoner and spirit because they were already one. He suddenly flushed, sticky and warm. For a second, he felt like he had maybe deserved Zack. But the feeling left him quickly. This just proved how sick Hojo was, that he would try to sew together two souls that weren’t in perfect harmony. Of course, Zack wouldn’t just carry Cloud willingly.

He missed Zack so much. He missed Zack terribly. He rued seeing Zack again. Zack’s ghost had not been unstoppably cheerful and strong and able. This was why the dead were not spoken of, he thought. Any life after death was a dishonor to life.

He felt sick about Zack, and wished he could stop thinking of him.

When the sun began to set that day, a spire was visible over the hill, and Aeris stopped them all. “Rocket town is in view,” she said.

Tifa took a shaking breath. Vincent cleared his throat. “I will become a Fayth proper,” he said.

With steady hands, though her cheeks were pale, Tifa lifted up her closed right fist. “His soul is to be bound to this Materia,” she said, indicating the red Materia embedded in her metal glove. “It is the only Materia I use, and it is a simple power-boosting spell for when I must fight. It has been connected to me for over ten years. It is very powerful by now, and I think combining Vincent to this would be the best option.”

Aeris smiled. “That’s very clever! Remarkably clever, Tifa. Good idea. That will be the perfect place for him. And with the power boost, I don’t see why he can’t spend most of the day with us. Alright, alright,” Aeris clapped her hands together. “I confess myself a bit nervous. I haven’t done this before. But I don’t see why anything should go wrong.”

“I am not worried,” Vincent said. But Tifa was clinging pretty close to his leg.

“I’ll want one thing before we start this, more for the sake of clarity that anything else,” Aeris said. “When I made my first Fayth, for their sakes, I gave their Aeon forms separate names, so that they could have both an old and a new identity and not feel they had lost their humanity. The name corresponded, usually, with the new Aeon’s powers… would you happen to have such a name?” 

“I believe I do,” said Vincent.

“It would probably be a name in my language, so you might not know the translation of it.”

“I searched for the translation myself,” he confessed. “I believe my Aeon name is a word meaning ‘chaos’ in your tongue.”

Aeris grinned. “A good word. Your name is Baham, then?”

Vincent frowned, turning his great head to the side. “No, that isn’t it. Perhaps I translate incorrectly.”

Aeris shrugged. “It’s also been a long time since I spoke the old language. What is your name, then?”

“It is Bahamut,” he said, flexing his claws slightly.

Aeris’s hands suddenly clasped in front of her chest. “A powerful name,” she said without the usual lightness of tone. “The sort Yunalesca usually gives to Final Aeons, or the like.”

“What is its meaning?” he asked.

“You weren’t far from the truth. Though by the time of my birth, the Ancients were an almost irreligious race, there were legends of a truly ancient pantheon, one of the first circles of gods worshipped on Spira, which once the Ancient race revered. They were, for the most part, Gods and Goddesses given patronage over elements of nature and emotions in the human heart. There was a God, however, of anti-nature, who worked against the growth of plants and the stillness of the mountains, and he was called Bahamut, God of Chaos. A very powerful name,” she repeated, looking both shocked and pleased.

Tifa turned on Vincent, looking impressed. “God of Chaos? The most I ever saw you do was curdle milk.”

“I’m just named for him,” he muttered. “I don’t feel very chaotic, usually.”

“Now I can’t wait to see what happens when I ally you to the power of a Materia,” Aeris said happily. “Shall we begin, then?”

“Certainly.” Vincent braced himself on the ground, and Tifa reluctantly backed away, moving to stand beside him, with her right hand raised in the air. Aeris took a deep breath of warm wind, filled with pollen and the faint smell of the sea, and she began.

Holy glimmered around her neck, and a light that sparkled with iridescence appeared around her. The spell she cast was quick and succinct—it was if Holy became a spool of thread, and she pulled a thin line of string out of it, punched between her fingers. The string glowed, bright white, like a ribbon made of starlight, humming with ozone. There was no procession of splitting Spira’s side open or calling power from the ground. She just pulled a string, wrapped several time around her wrist, out of her Materia, and took some delicate steps toward Vincent. “Bahamut,” she said, “lower your head.”

Vincent bent until his head was on the ground before her, and she pulled the string into a great loop. Cloud expected that she would curl it around his neck, like a necklace, but to his shock, Aeris steadied the end of the thread and pushed it into his eye, as if he were a blanket, he hand was a needle, and she was sewing. Tifa gasped and flinched, but Vincent only stood stock still, as if he were entirely unbothered. Aeris pulled the thread neatly through holes in his skull to the base of his head, finally yanking it out of the place where his spinal cord connected his mind to his body. “Closer to me, Lockhart,” she said demurely, gesturing to her as she calmly pulled lengths of bright string through Vincent’s skull.

Tifa stepped forward, pale but determined. When Aeris didn’t stop her, she laid one hand on Vincent’s shoulder. He still stood unmoving, like a cat focused on prey. Holding the ends of her string in both hands, Aeris wove the thread fluidly through the Materia on Tifa’s wrist twice, in perpendicular lines, as if she were sewing a button to a coat. Having connected Vincent to the Materia, she tied the two ends of the bright string firmly together, in a sailor’s knot, saying a little blessing under her breath.

She let the string go. It floated in the air for a second, and then it snapped, colliding one side into the other, with loud implosion. Tifa jumped, frightened, as Vincent’s bulk came barreling towards her hand, but suddenly, just as he stood before her, there was no string, and there was no great black dragon, but only a pale woman standing face to face with the ghost of a man.

He had very long hair, and he was dressed in torn, ratted clothes. Part of his face was covered. He blinked his eyes slowly, and looked at his hands, curling his fingers. “I am a Fayth,” he said, in a thin human voice, deep but not rumbling, uncertain, and sad.

Aeris closed her eyes so that she did not have to watch Tifa and Vincent finding out that Vincent had no form, and so he could not clasp her hand or embrace her. “He should spend some hours of each day inside the Materia, resting,” she said quietly, “Probably when Tifa is sleeping. As a Fayth, he can be inside or outside the Bahamut Materia whenever he wishes, though I would request he stays inside of it when we’re around Rocket Town, before we’ve made it to Cid’s place.”

“That’s a wise idea,” said Vincent, albeit reluctantly.

Tifa was just staring at him.

After some time, Vincent disappeared, and Aeris lead them the rest of the few hundred feet into Rocket Town. It was another country village, but of a different sort, with mostly metal houses clustered around a gigantic construction in the center of town. They had obviously grown up around it. There were hotels and bars and shops, more than any rural village would normally have, marking Rocket Town as an out of the way tourist attraction—but an almost empty one.

The great construction in the center of the town was a rocket launching site. Spires of metal, rusted and twisted, rose into the sky, and the ground beneath was all black with soot. Tifa frowned. “What is THAT?” she asked.

“It’s a rocket launch pad,” Cloud whispered. “I heard about them.”

“And what’s a rocket?”

“A ship,” said Aeris, “like an airship, but intended to go into space. Rocket Town was built here, out of the way, in order to facilitate the launch of the very first Rocket off Spira. Unfortunately, the launch was a complete disaster, wrecking the rocket as well as most of the town and killing over fifty people.”

Tifa’s eyes widened. “I guess that’s why you don’t hear of many of these things flying around in the sky.”

“Any.”

They walked ponderously in the slashed shadows of the giant metal ruin. There wasn’t much to Rocket Town, and Cloud got the impression that there hadn’t been that much to begin with. All of the construction was flimsy, built quickly to accommodate a crowd, and left afterwards to rust or rot. It was clear from looking at the few people around that it was a poor town now, but it was a poor town strangely painted in bright colors, with neon lights still functioning, and great billboards framing the hills, almost eerie markers of former glory.

“It’s like being in a lost civilization,” Tifa muttered, “But it was lost in our lifetimes.”

Nobody answered her. They followed Aeris to the edge of town, to what looked like a large family home, made of brick and wood, clearly built before the town itself became an attraction, surrounded with cultivated grass and flowers. Aeris rapped sternly on the door.

There were sounds of crashing inside, a single yelp, and muttering. Eventually, feet padded towards the door, and a hand pulled it open. Inside the wooden frame stood a short woman, perhaps in her twenties, with the dark hair and complexion of a woman from somewhere in the southern islands. She was dressed scantily, to ward off the heat of the day, and in one hand she clutched a can of alcohol. “Great Ninja Yuffie Kisaragi, heiress to Wutai, attending,” she said, sounding summarily annoyed. “Are you looking for the Great Assface Cid Highwind?”

Aeris smiled and nodded. “Yes, I’m a friend of his. You might remember me, I’ve been around before.”

Yuffie squinted. “Um… not sure…”

“It has been a few years,” Aeris admitted. “I think.”

Yuffie shrugged, using her whole arms and a flip of her head to do so, turning around on her heels. “CID,” she called, “A WOMAN’S AT THE DOOR. SAYS SHE’S A FRIEND. HAS SOME COUNTRY KIDS WITH HER.”

“WELL, WHAT’S HER DAMN NAME?” shouted an old, gravelly voice from somewhere in the house.

“What’s your damn name?” Yuffie asked politely.

“Aeris.”

“HER NAME’S AERIS.” 

“OH FOR,” shouted Cid, followed by the sound of something being slammed onto a counter somewhere. Soon, the sound of heavy boots marched towards them. Yuffie stepped quietly out of the way as an old, muscled, and angry man stomped towards the door. “Oh, for pete’s sake,” he barked, “What have I done now? What on earth could I have possibly done for another damn lecture from the wandering saint Aeris?”

Aeris sniffed, crossing her arms. “You show such little faith,” she said.

“Do I need to show faith when I have you bothering me day and night?” Cid growled, crossing his arms to mimic her. “There’s no rockets here, missy! The last one exploded! I’m not hiding any great energy-gulping spaceship in my back yard! No hidden reactors in the basement! I’m not taking up any of your precious damn energy!”

“With the exception of your Highwind,” Aeris declared.

Cid glowered. “That is a one of a kind ship. It’s the only technology of its sort that still EXISTS in Spira after the destructive fucking FURY of Bevelle’s church tore apart everything else like it. You want to burn down all the LIBRARIES on Spira too? How about go after all the oldest temples in the Thunder Plains? I’m sure there’s something beautiful that the religious and their stupid fucking spirits have left stand.”

Aeris poked him in the chest. “MY stupid fucking spirits, not theirs.”

“Did Aeris just say,” Tifa muttered.

“I think she did,” whispered Cloud.

“I haven’t come here to lecture you, Cid,” Aeris continued, “I have a lot of adversaries on this Planet and compared to some of them anymore you are my friend. In fact, I’ve come to you for help.”

Cid’s eyes bugged out. “The Ancient wants my help.”

“The what?” said Yuffie.

“The Ancient tries at every turn to ruin every chance I have to revive the only fucking study of science Spira has ever fucking had, the Ancient yells at me and bitches at me for trying to overhaul Spira’s fucking educational system and drag the monopoly of truth away from fucking church politicians, and now the Ancient wants my help? Doing what? Does she want to search out every last doctor still practicing on the planet now?”

“You give me no credit, Cid,” Aeris said. “You told me yourself that you knew my work was right.”

“I think I said GOOD,” Cid says. “A bit reactionary, your focus on defense. If I remember right, you wanted ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the planet’s energy for defense?” He held up his hands. “Yeah, I know. Evil planet-eating bitch. Evil planet-eating whale. Ect cetera. You focus on the planet-eaters, and I’ll fucking focus on the mind-and-soul-eaters trying to make sure Spira is united under one view of the universe and one study of magic, and we’ll leave each other alone.”

“I mean to kill professor Hojo and I can’t get to Bevelle on time,” said Aeris.

Cid squinted his eyes. “You could have said that in the first place. And you want my Highwind for this?”

Aeris clasped her hands. “I am trying to launch one final attack against Sin to destroy him, which will hopefully give me all the knowledge I seek to tackle Jenova. Once she is finished, you may use the energy of Spira as you wish. The Lifestream does not need EVERYTHING to keep Spira healthy normally. NOW, we need everything to fight against Jenova. But when she is gone, science and Bevelle and whatever else may sap us as much as they like.”

“One hundred percent on defense,” Cid muttered, “Even old man ShinRa doesn’t get away with that. He has to pretend to like powering homes too. Sit down in here and let me make you some goddamn tea. We’ll talk about this, Ancient, and don’t think I’ll say yes.”

Aeris smiled, and accepted his offered arm to guide her, lady-like, into the house. Cid and Tifa followed warily behind, with Yuffie curiously bringing up the rear.

The house was kept dark, the glass lanterns on the walls burning low, but Cloud could see that it was an old house, with faded carped and darkened wooden walls dotted with kitsch and memorabilia. The kitchen was cluttered and well-stocked, with old pools of noodles cooling on the counter. They were sat at a round table with assorted old chairs, most carved, as a cuckoo clock on the wall told them that it was now late in the afternoon. Cid stomped into the kitchen, ordering Yuffie to pull out the good black tea while he slammed a copper kettle on the old iron stove.

“Is she really the heiress to Wutai?” asked Tifa, looking at Yuffie.

Yuffie raised her eyebrows and pointed at Aeris. “Is she really an Ancient?”

“Yes,” said Aeris pleasantly.

Yuffie crossed her arms. “Yes,” she declared. “The single white rose of Wutai, only daughter to Godo Kisaragi, heiress in exile.”

“The only daughter, exiled?” Tifa asked.

“All Wutai is exiled,” she said. “Our dynasty was humiliated by ShinRa and Bevelle. I am here to win back our glory.”

“You’re a guerrilla fighter,” clarified Tifa, “but living in a ghost town?”

Yuffie turned away. “I do not have to explain my plans to a country woman from the mainland.”

Tifa raised her eyebrows, but said nothing at that point.

“And who’s that kid?” Cid finally asked, gesturing at Cloud.

Cloud tried to reply, but his voice caught in his throat. “Cloud Strife,” said Aeris, “an ex-SPIRIT.”

“Shit, that explains the sort of lost look,” said Cid, with a mixture of wonder and pity. “And the skin like a deep-water fish.”

Cloud turned his face down.

“And what has The Great Ancient to do with these kids?” asked Cid.

“Cloud is a friend and companion,” Aeris said, “as well as a project of mine. I am hoping to heal those whom Professor Hojo has hurt.”

Cid paused for a second, looking at his tea pot. “Go on. And her?”

“Tifa is an old friend of Cloud’s, as they grew up together. Besides that, she is a ranger of the Thunder Plains, first guard of Nibelheim.” Tifa tried not to look a bit smug, but Cloud saw her lips curl. “She is also companion to the fourth member of our party.”

Cid glanced around the room again. “Oh, great. And who are you about to pull out of thin air? Seymour the disinherited?”

Aeris smiled. “Vincent, if you would? In your new form, please.”

Cloud expected thunder and cymbals when Vincent emerged from his new house. Instead he appeared like the puff of smoke that came from a recently extinguished candle, flaring into life around and above the Materia on Tifa’s wrist. He guided himself down to sit beside her, hovering ghost-like above a chair.

“A Fayth,” Cid observed, pouring the heatef water into a big white teapot. “Strange, to consider him a member of your party.”

Vincent turned around to give Aeris a look that communicated a “what have I woken up to” sort of sentiment. Tifa giggled. “This is my adoptive father,” she said. “Up to some years ago, he was human. His transformation was the last act of one Lucretia Crescent.”

Cid looked interested. “I had heard of her. A biochemist, and brilliant. I was upset to hear she died, she was one of the last real scientists out there. And the first to make a Fayth?”

“You see the evidence before you,” Vincent said gravely. “I am sad to say, however, that due to a gap in her knowledge Lucretia’s Fayth was unfinished until Aeris completed her work for her.”

“Lucretia… long story short, could not give Vincent a temple to reside in, so he was stuck in his Aeon form for some years until I fixed him up here,” Aeris said.

“Sounds uncomfortable,” muttered Cid.

“It is,” Vincent said.

“So basically,” Cid said, cracking his knuckles, “what we have here is the Kill Hojo coalition. Fine, that’s a cause I could get behind. He’s a fucking blight on the face of science, which doesn’t need any fucking blights right now because it’s slowly but surely becoming the work of Sin in the eyes of humanity. But just because we have a common enemy doesn’t make us friends.”

Aeris sighed. “I am sorry that things have gone so badly for you. I really am. I would LIKE to be on your side. I was wrong if I ever said that you attempts to further the studies of science and astronomy were bad. They were good, and I wish they had succeeded. But Spira is struggling to live right now, actually struggling to stay alive, and you were using what we need to sustain her.”

“That’s what my Highwind is powered with too,” he muttered. “It’s okay now because you need it?”

“It’s not really the Highwind I’m after, though, since I am building a company, it would be nice,” said Aeris. “Technically, I could go kill Hojo myself, but I have promised his head to another. What I want, Cid Highwind, is you. You, as a pilot.”

“And what for?” Cid asked.

“I want Vincent here to kill Hojo. I want you to kill Sin.”

Cloud’s eyebrows shot upwards. “Excuse me?” he asked.

Aeris patted the seat beside her. “The tea is ready. Come here, sit with us, you and Yuffie, so we can talk.”

Cid looked inside the tea pot, smelled the steam, and muttered something about witchcraft. Reluctantly, he set six small white cups onto a wooden tray, and poured them all full of steaming tea while carrying it over to the table. He set the tray down, pushed his hair back, and looked up at Aeris from across the way at her, anger in his face.

A beam of sunlight from the window hit him squarely, illuminating his eyes; and that is when Cloud first saw that the man was Al Bhed.

“The struggles of the Bevelle church and the Ancients must seem like the troubles of the Mainland to you,” Aeris said. “But the struggle of Sin is everyone’s.”

Cid collapsed into a chair. “What the hell does old Cid Highwind, who exploded the only rocket the world ever tried to make, expatriate of Home, have that the armies of Bevelle and the ranks of the Aeons don’t have?”

Aeris sighed deeply. “What is the struggle of Spira to all of you? Do you imagine the spirits of the earth and sky pitted against some all-powerful forces of darkness, with humans as the casualties?”

“Yes?” said Tifa.

“No?” said Cloud.

“Definitely not,” said Cid. “Forces of darkness indeed.”

Aeris held up her hands. “The struggle is more terrible than this. I have described Jenova, Spira’s enemy, to my companions as a toxin and disease. Her affiliate, Sin, who was seduced to her side, I have described as her agent. This is true in part, but the whole is not quite described.”

“Yes, what is it?” Cid asked.

“Jenova is a neurotoxin,” said Aeris quietly. “She is a disease of the mind. Are you wondering how such devastation has wracked the force of the Lifestream but had almost no obvious impact above ground? If she were a physical disease, Spira would be rotting. But she is first and foremost a parasite of the mind. She is the madness of whole planets. She attacks us, the life force, mind, and immune system of the planet, and once we are conquered, and she has bent us to her way, we will attack Spira ourselves, like a mad woman who tries to kill herself. This is what has already happened to Sin. This will happen to all of us.”

The table was shocked into silence. “I have little time left,” whispered Aeris. “I have not properly entered the Lifestream for decades, for the core is growing ill. I only travel the surface and the shallow pools, where our fingers stretch but our minds do not. Some of the Lifestream is against me already. We are dividing. I can only use the power that is rightfully mine when I am sure it is with me at any given moment. Aeris, one of the few Ancients that can still walk the earth, is one of the few that can keep her mind safe through isolation and vigilance. And so Aeris is one of the few of us who wholeheartedly fights against Jenova, without fear of being infected by her.

“We are scared. We, Spira, are very scared. I made the Fayth to protect Spira in fear that WE WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO. And now that fear is being realized, and the Fayth are not enough. The Lifestream loses its mind and loses its power with that. I begged for the downfall of science to give us more energy to fight Jenova’s madness. I shouldn’t have bothered; I halted a good thing for no good return. But now, we are on our way down. We have fought Jenova so long. I am here as one of the last agents of hope, intending to destroy Jenova through some miracle.”

Aeris’s eyes blazed. “That miracle is named Hojo. He has come into contact with Jenova. He works with her. Through study of his projects, I can discover how Jenova works and exorcise her. First, I will destroy Sin. I must do this first because I do not risk attacking her, opening myself to her attacks, without knowing that I can defeat her. If I can defeat Sin, I can defeat her. 

“Second, I need the force of humanity behind me. Humanity has become devoted to Fayth, rather than the Lifestream, as a whole, and though this normally would not bother me, I have no other means to destroy Jenova than humanity. The Lifestream can no longer save them. The Fayth can no longer save them. I plan to champion the cause against Jenova, but not in the name of the Ancients. I plan to send a champion of humanity against Jenova, using the tool of humanity—their technology. They will rally together in their own name, and make their own power.

“Now I know I was wrong to try to save the failing Lifestream. I should have been focused elsewhere. We are too sick and cannot save ourselves. I am begging for a physician.”      

There was dead silence in the house, but for the ticking of the clock. Not a drop of tea had been drunk. Most everyone looked either shocked or shattered. Cloud felt numb. Cid’s mouth was falling open.

“You didn’t come to ask for my ship,” he said blankly, “You came to beg me to be the hero of humanity.”

“You would be the obvious figurehead,” said Aeris. “You or Cloud, since he would make a cutting figure of triumph against trials as well.”

“What?” said Cloud.

“Dear Shera,” breathed Cid, “I want to be humble. I want to be proud. I want to refuse. But I also want to stomp in the face of every smug son of a bitch in ShinRa who BARELY FUCKING DEIGNED to let an AL BHED work on their precious, doomed-to-fail project and then let him live in infamy.” He leaned forward. “Is it okay for the hero of humanity to have a cause of revenge?”

Aeris looked evenly into his eyes. “You aren’t the only one carrying the banner for that cause.”

Cid clapped his hands, and grinned at Yuffie. “Think it’s time to restore the honor and glory of Home and Wutai, commander?”

Yuffie saluted, grinning from ear to ear.  

 

-

 

Cid’s shipyard went from empty to bustling in about five minutes once he started running into town and shouting. Apparently, about half the population of Rocket Town had been waiting for a chance to fly in the Highwind for years. There was a surprisingly large Al Bhed population in town, perhaps initially drawn in by the lure of a rocket ship, since the Al Bhed were known for their technology. Among the Al Bhed was a gigantic, loud-voiced man with very dark skin who seemed to have replaced one of his arms with a monstrous, glimmering weapon.

“This is Barrett,” Cid introduced him, clapping once hand on his back, “My head technician. He practically built the Highwind himself.”

“Which is why I need to make fucking certain that nothing bad happens to it,” Barrett growled, looming over Cloud’s party. “So don’t think you’ve seen the last of me here. I’ll be in that ship as long as it’s in the air. You think you’re gonna fucking mess with something on this ship, you look over your shoulder, and Barrett will be right there. Watching.”

“I’m glad that there’s such a competent crew,” Aeris said brightly. “The others?”

“I am Captain and Pilot,” Cid reminded them. “Great Whiny Bitch Yuffie is battle commander and the only one who gets to touch the ship’s guns. Don’t you ever tell her I think she deserves the title. Among the other technicians is Rikku, a relative of mine… you’ll see her sometime, I’m sure she’s busy bouncing off the walls right now… her classmates Payne, and Yuna are technicians too. Yuna is also the on-ship medic. Damn talented, that girl. If you ever see a creepy-ass man hiding his eyes and standing in the shadows, that’s Auron, he’s sort of… a manager. He handles day to day things. Hell if I know what they are, they’re boing. Maybe he gets us money. Some various kids from town begged their way into being cooks and maids, you can just ignore them. under no circumstances should you feed them or treat them nicely, then we’ll never get rid of them. And this—HEY, LULU!”

A cross-looking woman with dark hair had just arrived in the shipyard, with long, black skirts flowing behind her. “Why on earth are you flying the Highwind, Cid?” she demanded. “Did you decide that this was a great day to be shot down?”

“Nah, I have Lady her Holiness flying with me, obviously nothing bad can happen, as she is an absolute fucking miracle worker.”

Aeris inclined her head. “Aeris, ancient and living.”

Lulu crossed her arms. “Lulu.”

Cid smiled. “Lulu does battle command alongside Yuffie. The only reason she doesn’t have the title of Chief is Yuffie was a bit more insane about wrestling the title away from her. The match between them was absolutely unholy.”

Lulu rolled her eyes.

“Aside from that, I have a few junior pilots under me, who are allowed to touch the controls if and only if I am dead,” Cid continued. “Those are Kumehiro and Wakka. Forewarning, Kumehiro is Ronso. Don’t make a big fucking production when you first see him. Also forewarning, don’t encourage Wakka.”

“Why, what does he do?” asked Tifa.

“Don’t encourage him,” Cid repeated seriously. “Don’t talk to him. Don’t acknowledge him. He is one of those people in the world that MUST have gotten his position through talent, since his personality is absolutely repulsive.”

“He isn’t the most charming young man I’ve ever known,” Lulu confirmed.

“I’m serious, whatever you do, don’t invite him to talk.”

“Is there anyone we can talk to?” asked Tifa, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

“Yuna and Rikku are wonderful young girls,” said Cid.

“You may not talk to me,” confirmed Lulu.

“If you want your ass kicked, you know who to come to,” Barrett added.

Cloud silently decided that the Highwind might actually not be a bad place.

Cid wove his way to the front of the Highwind, inspecting the shine of the plate as he went along. Young villagers zipped past with tanks of fuel, baskets of food, piles of towels and spare clothes, and the like, each saluting Cid as they went past. Eventually, Cid turned and halted right in front of the Highwind’s nose, waiting silently for everyone to acknowledge him. It worked remarkably well.

“The all regard him as a figure of authority,” Tifa whispered to Aeris.

Aeris nodded. “The town grew up around the management of a ship. Now, he is the only captain of the only ship in town. That makes him undisputed leader, in their hierarchy. The Thunder Plains has and unusual form of government too, yes?”

“Shared between the temples and the rangers,” Tifa admitted. “Our focus is on commerce and survival, not regulation or law.”

“Alright, Rocket Town, pay the fuck attention,” Cid began. “The Highwind is taking of at 20 : 00 sharp, immediately following dinner. It had better be prepared to fly by then. I want every single detail taken care of beforehand. If I hear anyone say ‘wait, wait,’ at 19 : 55 when we’re preparing for takeoff, we aren’t fucking waiting, and if the ship blows up because of you, THE SHIP BLOWS UP BECAUSE OF YOU.

“I’m taking ONLY the people I already put in my goddamn crew. Don’t even think of sneaking on if I already told you no. If you try, Yuffie will find you. Right, commander Kisaragi?”

“Right!” she barked from his right, where she had just bounded up.

“She’ll find you, and she’ll toss you out the window,” Cid promised. “The only people coming with me that AREN’T my crew are these fine passengers over here.” He jabbed a finger at Aeris and her party. “This fine lady is Aeris, the Ancient. She will be treated with respect and listened too. Following through with what she says is optional.”

“How do you all do,” she said, bowing.

“The other fine young lady next to her is Tifa, a soldier.”

“Ranger.”

“Country hick soldier. My mistake. Treat her like a guest, everyone. Our other guest here is a young man by the name of Cloud. Who gave him the fucking name, I don’t know. He’s an ex-soldier and ex-SPIRIT, so be fucking polite.

“You’re probably wondering why the hell I’m flying the Highwind now, considering the super polite fire-on-without-warning order ShinRa was kind enough to put on my beloved ship. The answer to that is, Fuck ShinRa. Our mission, henceforth, is to fuck ShinRa.”

There was a general round of cheers. Some gleefully applauded.

“The lady Aeris came to me with a nice proposition today. In the name of helping her with a personal vendetta, the current mission of the Highwind and her crew, until the mission is completed or the crew kisses the dirt in flaming death, is to kill Hojo, destroy Sin, decimate everything evil in the Planet and then FUCK SHINRA.”

Cheering ensued again, along with a few people breaking out dancing. “I don’t remember ‘fuck ShinRa’ being on our list,” Tifa whispered.

“Well, it can be,” Aeris shrugged. “I guess I never liked them that much.”

“I move to add ‘fuck ShinRa’ to the list,” Cloud added.

“Motion carried,” said Aeris. 

“When we’ve finished conquering evil and revolutionizing the world, I plan to make Rocket Town a center for science again. So when I come back I don’t want to see all this fucking dirt and grime everywhere, you people understand?? Clean yourselves up!” Cid barked.

He turned around on his heel and began to walk toward the Highwind’s open door. “Remember, 20:00!!”

Activity was renewed all around the shipyard, now with excited babbling. Even Lulu looked like she was smiling. Cloud wondered if maybe they were supposed to walk into the ship after Cid, but they were intercepted by a young girl telling them that it was almost time for dinner.

Dinner, it turned out, was a picnic on the grassy grounds of the shipyard, among rolling barrels of fuel and carts being rushed back and forth across the gravel driveway. They were served sandwiches and fresh fruit and tea, all on china plates, by several children who were clearly too young to go on the expedition and clearly ruing the fact, if the number of questions they asked about it was any indication.

Tifa, for the most part, answered their questions, despite sometimes having absolutely no clue what to say. (“How are you gonna defeat Sin?” “With a gigantic harpoon launched off of the Highwind in mid-flight, obviously. That’s how you kill a whale, right?” “Is Cid gonna kill it?” “Kid, Cid is the harpoon.”) There was one young boy, however, who didn’t join in the conversation. He spent the hour nibbling on the cheese pulled out of a cheese sandwich and gazing shyly at Cloud, who didn’t acknowledge him.

“What was it like to be a soldier?” he finally asked, quietly.

“I never became a soldier.”

“Cid said you were a soldier.”

“I was in the military. I trained to be a soldier, but I never went to war.”

“Did you fire guns?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill anyone?”

“…yes.”

“What was it like?”

Cloud looked at the boy for the first time. He still looked shy, and questioning. There was no malice in his question, no bloodlust, no dark feelings, no anger. Cloud remembered being a boy kind of like him. He didn’t remember why little boys were so into violence, exactly. Maybe it was about the power. He couldn’t recall now. “It was awful.”

“It was?” the boy asked. “Why, what happened?”

“Someone died. It wasn’t great just because I was in control of it.”

“You really killed someone?” the boy asked, more quietly.

“A few people. I think. It’s hard to remember.”

“Why is it hard to remember?”

Cloud didn’t know what to say. “Everything… Life… gets weird, and hard to understand, where there’s a lot of death and things like that. Death, and cruelty, and pain. You start wanting to forget. So I don’t remember everything.”

After he said all of that, it finally occurred to Cloud that maybe this was too dark a subject for a child. He always forgot about how children worked. Childhood just seemed so far away to him. Oddly enough, it was almost like it wasn’t real, or it never happened. Like it was the nice dream before reality hit. It was such a different world, it couldn’t have happened. “Sorry, that was sort of grim,” he finally said.

“Did you have any friends in the army?”

“…yes.”

Apparently, that was the end of that conversation. The boy turned too shy to talk again, and Cloud finished his conversation in silence, refocusing on Tifa, who had apparently gone into explaining the fine points of the difference between fish and whale to a group of curious children. Aeris was, apparently, busy tucking about half a dozen of Cid’s apples into her bag.

They still have about an hour to kill after dinner, once the children had been pulled away by their parents, and, being absolutely unwanted in the preparations for the Highwind, they eventually just spaced themselves out on the grass and watched the sunset. The silence was eventually interrupted by Cid headed their way with a small posse of junior pilots and technicians.

“Alright,” Cid said, “the last thing we need before takeoff is a destination. Bevelle, I suppose?”

“Not yet,” Aeris said, not bothering to lean upwards from where she was laying, “My appointment with The Professor isn’t for a while yet still.”

“You got an appointment to kill him?”

“Well, it’s impossible to see him otherwise!” Aeris shrugged. “First, in my quest to figure out everything possible about Sin and Jenova, I want to stop outside of Chasamaecum and bring a few people into there to observe the Jenovines and their temple. It should only be a day trip, since I don’t know how on earth they’d let us stay longer than that.”

A red-haired man standing beside Cid sighed and folded his arms. “Chasamaecum? But that’s, like… close.”

Aeris smiled slightly. “My mistake. Did I say Chasamaecum was the first stop? I mean first, we have to fly all the way around the entirety of Spira, as high up and as fast as possible, because we can and no one can stop us.”

“YEEEAAAH!” shouted the red-haired man, running with arms outstretched for the Highwind.

Cid winced. “I said not to encourage him. Well, you all had better come with me, if we’re getting ready for takeoff you should probably be inside the fucking ship.”

They proceeded to enter the fucking ship. It was a very nice place, Cloud conceded, for being cold and metal: the room were large, the halls were open and airy, the walls were lined with glass so that everyone could see the world outside. There were chairs and couches bolted to the floor everywhere so people could be comfortable, standard clean sleeping quarters, and a large, elevated, leather-covered captain’s chair for Cid. Honestly, it was more of a captain’s throne.

“Is this REALLY going to work?” Tifa asked Aeris, frowning. “They think this thing is going to go into the sky? It’s so huge.”

“Cid knows his work,” Aeris replied. “If he says it can fly, it can.”

“But how?” Tifa asked. “Is there some air Fayth lifting it?”

“No, he built it himself, and Cid hates Fayth,” Aeris confirmed.

“He hates them?”

“He thinks it’s a poor fate. The more I think about it, he might be right.”

Tifa said nothing to that. They waited, until, from above, Cid’s voice came, crackling like lightning. “Lift off in five minutes!! To your damn places, everyone!”

“What, exactly, is our place?”

“I’m not sure,” said Aeris. “But I think I’ll go up front to watch the liftoff from out the windows.”

Outside the generous front window, they could see the dryness of the dusty mushroom rock road stretched out in front of them, framed with sparse grasses on either side, where carts didn’t frequently travel. When Cid began to drive, the Airship moved like a truck first, grinding the rock road beneath it as it rolled painstakingly out into proper position, and then suddenly shooting out like an arrow when Cid moved to fly it.

The sudden acceleration shocked everyone, splitting the guests into clearly marked ‘delighted’ and ‘terrified’ parties. Cloud especially did not look amused. Aeris watched Spira go past her faster and faster, blurring into vague lines of green and brown and blue, stripes of energy, melding together, just at they did in the Lifestream, and then she was almost instantly looking down at them from above.

Lift-off was smooth and graceful, a testament to Cid’s building skills, and there were cheers from all around, especially from Cid’s young followers. The man himself leaned back in his captain’s chair, shifting his shoulders from side to side and grinning with pride. “How’s your planet from above, ancient?”

“Strangely enough, much like it is from below,” Aeris said, as trees shrunk, rivers shrunk, mountains shrunk, and glittering golden coastlines shrunk into ribbons and beads on a tiny tapestry. “You can see the design from here. You can see the same thing in the roots. Only…”

“Yeah?” Cid asked, sounding more curious than he had before.

“Only below it’s so… colorless, maybe?” Aeris considered. She began to see the places where rivers mingled, silver and blue and green, and saw the colorful patches of human houses growing on their sides, like neighborhoods of mushroom-tops drawn to the damp. “I like it from here, Captain.”

Cid addressed the crowd with a general look of smugness, and their enthusiasm was impossible to reign in from there. Cid was forced to call in security (security being Yuffie) to keep some of the junior pilots away from the controls from that point on.

Soon, the colors of land vanished from beneath them, and they found themselves watching silver sand and fuzzy grey hills slipping away into the horizon, and an unimaginable vastness of blue taking over the whole of their sight, broken only by the warm tones of the setting sun on the waves. The sea was blue and green and grey, the sky was blue and grey and white, and nothing broke one from the other, no differentiating marks, no breaks just on the horizon, no differentiations, just tones of blue blending into other tones of blue, softly, like paint. To some of them, it felt like being nowhere, like the world had been stripped away, and they were floating in suspension. For others, it felt like being a bird, borne for a nest far away. For Vincent, who had just arrived, it felt like being bathed with calm. For Tifa, it felt like being in the thickest of Nibelheim mists, lost and unsteady. For Aeris, it felt more and more like home with every mile, every changing course of the wind, every feeling of the lives of the ocean turning in the waves far below, unhindered by space, unchanging in time. There were ancients in the sea, not like her, but ancient the same, and living the same.

To Cloud… well, he left to go to a darker room after a while. Maybe it was just all the metal walls getting to him, he reasoned.

In the deck, everyone else was introspective enough to let him leave and think alone. Except for those still taken up in raucous celebrations, like Cid’s relative Rikku, as well as Yuffie. But as the ocean stretched on, every grew quiet, watching, enraptured by the colors reflected everywhere as the sun slipped into the sea and was extinguished in the waters. Then it was dark everywhere, a total darkness, not grey, but black, and in the blackness, many stars, and a shimmering moon, all of which shone twice over, once above and once below, once winking and once shimmering on the waves. If they had left the skies of Spira and disappeared into space, no one would have noticed, for it would be the same quiet there, and the same dark, and the same net of starlight holding them aloft.

No one really slept, though some dozed. The night was amazingly short for reasons Cid tried to explain but eventually gave up one, declaring anyone who was a moron naturally could never understand. Some people stayed in the bridge all night admiring the darkness, others left, some discomforted, some bored. Some ended up walking through the many hallways of the spacious ship to think, some just lied down to look at the stars go by, some got to talking. Vincent and Tifa, for one, spent the night together, and Aeris watched fondly as some of Cid’s devoted grew stood by the front window, their arms crossed, their eyes wide, the whole night. Cid, for one, did not leave his chair. Only part of the reason for this was the need to keep his ship on course.

It was a monumental night for everyone, and though their thoughts were similar, and at some times they picked them up to weave them together, somehow, there wasn’t much to say or do about it.

Dawn blossomed grey at first, but the bare embers of light was enough to reveal to those watching that they were over land again. They craned their tired necks to look down, but as various murmurs rose up, none could identify where it was.

“It’s another continent,” Aeris said eventually. She was feeling what was beneath, the long roots of the strange desert trees. “None of you will know it.”

“Another continent,” Cid said, with wonder.

“Now’s not the time to look at it,” Aeris said tersely.

Cid raised an eyebrow. “What, now looking hurts?”

Aeris sighed, and forced herself to let a little tension go. “Sorry. No, I’m just nervous.”

“What about?”

“Some of us… I suppose we considered the three continents to be separate projects. We sort of hold trade back because we’re worried about how some groups would get along… besides that, since Jenova has infected your continent so much more totally, we thought, just in case yours…” Aeris stopped, waved her hand to banish the thought. “It’s probably time to stop all that anyway. We wanted to proctect you, we thought it was best, really. We should all just let you all get to know each other. After this, though, that’s all the limitation I’ll put on you. After this.”

“This is when I get to gleefully remind you that you’re not the boss of me,” Cid reminded Aeris, but he kept flying anyway.

Aeris smiled to herself.

The sun eventually lit the mountains and lakes and jungles of the odd continent below. Everyone watched with great interest, except, of course, for those who, feeling sick or uncomfortable, had hidden deep within the ship. Aeris gave information about the place sparingly, unable to shake off the feeling that she was crossing a line.

Finally, they were over the ocean again, but it was bright, with the orange and pink colors of the sunrise illuminating great fish and little green islands. Though it was perhaps unwise, Cid lowered the Highwind dramatically so that everyone could look at the schools of silver fish, the clouds of pink jellyfish, the sleep backs of sharks, and the glittering amethyst and sapphire tones of coral reefs hidden far below, like the fish’s rich cities. Clouds had gathered on the horizons today, wispy and gentle, breaking up the vastness that had startled some yesterday. it took a few hours for them to find their own continent again, and they came at it vaguely from above, seeing Mount Gagazet before anything else, and the gentle calm lands hidden beneath it, which most the people in the ship had never seen before. 

They admired the lush greenness of this area of Spira, the running rivers, the rolling hills, and the tiny bands of travelers, like bugs, they could see beneath. Aeris smiled as she remembered the beginning of her journey with Cloud, walking by those rivers, hiding in those caves. She considered pulling him out to see, but thought she would wait.

Soon, they passed over the towering, multi-color spires of Bevelle, which made everyone hush, only partly because of their grandness. The bioluminescent beauty of Machalania unfolded below them next, with jewel colors sparking through the deep green woods like fireworks in a black sky, little exotic flowers, bright-winged birds, glowing crystals and pools, and the lighted fires of temples to the Fayth. They swept over the Thunder Plains at Tifa’s insistence, mostly to watch her realize that they were above the cloud line and would never see the Thunder Plains. She seemed to enjoy watching the omnipresent clouds form above anyway, how they boiled like water, how lightning flash from one to the other and bound the storms together like veins in writhing grey muscles, a monster over her homeland.

Her eyes were misty, but she smiled.

The clouds dispersed above the bright silver Moonflow, which glowed as brightly as ever from above, shattering the land as it were the shell of paper over a bright lantern. And there, among the flower-filled waves of the Moonflow, and the pyrefly-lit banks, was their target, the city of Chasamaecum.

Aeris wished she were seeing the city of Guadosalam instead. She could see it in her head: brilliantly colored like an oil painting, sparkling like an exquisite necklace laid on the ground, with jewels of every hue, great spires, the lights of their portals and the brilliant magic brightening their streets and balconies, the blue glow of the air, making the hills all around cast shadows when hit with the city’s glory. She wished she could have seen it.

Instead, there was Chasamaecum. She admitted that it was a worthy sight as well.

First, the ground turned black. Then, it began to crumble away, like a sand dune that had collapsed, leaving a strange pattern like bite marks on the rim of the crater. In the very depths of the black crater, there was a green glow. Many in the ship probably thought the glow came from the lights of the city which were, admittedly, mostly green or bright white, and were many.

The city towered, built like an ant colony, level by level, each level fashioned on top of the last when that was completed. The very tips of the stony spires (for the whole city was fashioned out of pale stone, making it look very stately and somber) were pointed and carved, fashioned artistically, showing off the aesthetic sense and talent of the city dwellers. The buildings did not spread wide, there were no outlying suburbs and towns, instead, all dwellers kept as close to the city center as possible, growing up high instead of out far, clustered around the monumental, striking, impressing center of the city.

They had built a great statue of their mother Jenova out of the same material as the rest of the city, and though Aeris had no doubt that people lived in Jenova’s heart, she had no windows and no visible doors. She just rose like a gigantic statue, many tens of stories high, unbelievably high to most everyone in the ship, since they hadn’t even seen such impressive feats of building in Bevelle. Her arms were outstretched to the people below, looking unnaturally long from above, waiting to receive them into her curled fingers, and watching them with her down-cast, pupil-less eyes. They had even carved long, flowing hair for her, to curl over and around the highest towers as if her locks had fallen on them, binding the whole of the city into her person, cradling it all.

The only thing that surprised Aeris, and that for just a second, was that the great, powerful statue of Jenova was depicted pregnant, as Mother, instead of as her form as the Triumphant Goddess.  She expected Jenova’s most fearsome aspect, not her most loving.

She had forgotten, in her heart, that this was a city that worshipped her willingly.

The houses on the edges seemed to spiral upwards into towers, spiraling further, the arms of a hurricane, into the storm’s eye of Jenova’s face. There were lights everywhere in the glass windows of the city, and people walking to and fro in the vaulted balconies connecting tower to tower. Smoke spewed out of factories hidden behind Jenova, making her look like she rose from a cloud, or perhaps directly out of the explosion that caused the crater, still smoldering, rising from her meteor.

Some of the passengers still attempted to look fierce and ready to kill, but most could not hide awe. Chasamaecum was a masterpiece of building, and to most people, it had risen from nowhere, with no one to see. The only ones who knew it lived there, and they hardly ever left.

“Comfortable,” Cid said sarcastically.

“I really advise most all of you to stay in the ship,” Aeris stressed.

The ship was landed quite a few miles from the city, and thought Aeris was sure many had seen them, there was no response from Chasamaecum. Since she knew depressingly little about the city, she couldn’t be sure if this was because they had few projectile weapons or it they had some reason not to shoot them.

Mulling over this, she went to get Cloud, who was staring, in rapture of thought, at the wall opposite of the bed he was lying on. “Cloud, dear,” she whispered, sending something his way to hopefully wake him up a bit.

“Did I feel us land?” he asked.

“You did. We’re not far from Chasamaecum.”

Cloud nodded and stood up. It looked like it wasn’t very difficult for him. “Who will come with us?”

“Myself, Tifa and Vincent, of course, and while I’m sure Cid wants to put some people with us, I limit it to two.”

When they returned to the bridge, they found debate raging over that very subject. Many people wanted to go see the city, whereas Cid practically had an ulcer at the thought of leaving any able hand or good warrior out of sight from the ship and unable to defend it. It was eventually decided that he would send warriors skilled at magic rather than hand-fighting with them, since he didn’t know the magical tricks of the people, so eventually, when the fighting turned into grumbling, it was Lulu and Yuna that walked over to Aeris’s party.

Yuffie threw something of a tantrum. Cud promoted her as ‘ship’s guardian’ and changed Lulu’s title temporarily to ‘guardian of much less important things, such as commercial travelers’ in order to appease her.

On the white stone road to Chasamaecum, which wound down into the crater, weaving between large black hunks of volcanic rock, Aeris made a confession. “I am glad to have so many skilled fighters alongside me right now.”

Lulu raised one thin eyebrow. “We would think that it would be us glad to have you.”

Before Aeris could reply, it was Yuna who suddenly struck the air with one finger. “No,” she said, as if speaking a revelation, “because Miss Aeris gets her power from her connection to Spira.”

“And we aren’t over Spira right now,” Vincent rumbled from where he floated beside Tifa. “Of course.”

Aeris smiled nervously. “Here, I won’t be of more use than as skilled healer and a somewhat skilled pole arm user will be. Those are the only powers connected to my physical body.”

“I am skilled in offensive magic,” Lulu replied.

“As am I,” said Yuna.

“I am decently sure that father IS offensive magic now,” Tifa shrugged.

“So I don’t believe we would suffer much in a fight,” Aeris agreed. “Still, I wanted to give you a clearer picture of what I can and can’t do at the moment…” Aeris looked more sheepish in the moment than Cloud had ever known her. It was… well, more like he was looking at a person now. In fact, he was, because in all times previously, he had been seeing an avatar of many souls. Now, since she wasn’t connected properly to the Lifestream anymore, she only had… hers, whatever that meant. If there was an Aeris-soul after so many years of death, then he was looking at it.

He didn’t know what to think about that. Did she look different?

“That’s why you kept the boat-pole,” Tifa said suddenly, pointing to the wooden staff in Aeris’s hand. “The one you used to steer us down the Moonflow.”

“Since you are a pole arm user, I see,” said Lulu.

“At least I plan ahead,” Aeris shrugged.

Cloud continued to watch Aeris, from the corner of his eye, as they walked down the twisting past, growing ever closer to the green mist of the city. He felt very strange about Aeris’s revelation. But as far as he got in sorting through his own thoughts before they were interrupted on his walk was that he was trying to decide exactly who, or what, had been listening to him pour out his deepest emotions on the long walk from Mount Gagazet to Nibelheim.

“Outsiders, what business have you approaching our city?” asked a sharp voice, materializing suddenly from the air, followed after a second by a body out of the green light of the city. They had just passed some of the first stone houses, well-built and decorated with lovely stonework and statues even this far out, when they were interrupted.

“We’re scholars, sir,” said Aeris. Did she sound more nervous than she usually did? Or was Cloud imagining it? He turned his face to the ground.

That said, he didn’t get a good look at the interrupters, but the rest did, excepting Vincent, who vanished quicker than he could be seen. Slowly, their eyes adjusted to the atmosphere of Chasamaecum, and they could see that a group of some six men, dressed in uniform and most likely soldiers, were facing them on the path. There were two in front, distinguished from the others by an extra ring of Materia on the silver gauntlets that went over the right arm of their dark jackets. The one who had addressed them had a pinched and haughty face, with an air of confidence and a large contraption with both a sword and the barrel of a gun on it slung over his back. His bright silver hair, the characteristic of Jenovines, was slicked back, and there was a scar on his forehead between two blazing, frightening eyes. His partner stood close to him, but hovered just a bit behind, looking like a man who preferred to sit in the shadows and let others do the talking. Curiously, he had a scar just like the other man’s, though, of course, he shared his Jenovine colors. There would be no one inside the air of the city who did not.

“Scholars?” He seemed to lower his guard slightly. Aeris guessed, correctly, that if ANYONE from the outside approached Chasamaecum, it would be people seeking knowledge. But her guess still didn’t go the way she wanted, because with the man’s lowered defenses came an unkind smile. “Scholars studying the weaknesses of well-fortified and reclusive cities, no doubt. We see a lot of those.”

A few of the soldiers snickered. The one beside the leader did not chance his expression at all. Tifa, who had been watching him, privately wondered if he was really an animated corpse.

“Well, I can see why you would think that, but no,” said Aeris, with a hint of a smile, “we are scholars of religion.”

Clever, Tifa thought. Target the thing they are clearly very proud of. Indeed, the guard cocked his head to the side a little more invitingly. “You see,” Aeris continued, “I am a researcher from the north, one of the only experts in ancient religions, and to feed my growing interest in mapping out the connections between the religions of our world, I gathered together my colleagues, Miss Yuna Vyedrvim, who is an expert on the modern Bevelleish Fayth religion,” Yuna bowed, looking oblivious to the glares, “and Mr. Cloud Strife, a native of the Thunder Plains, where they keep an older, Lifestream-based religion, and as such, he is an expert on those.”

Cloud attempted to look up and smile at the guards. He did manage looking up, which he decided was good enough. 

“The others?” asked the guard curtly.

“Bodyguard,” said Tifa, just as such. They gave each other a look, gauging, but not totally hostile.

“The same,” said Lulu, and bowed. “See us not as aggressors, we guards are here only because of the plague of hostile animals that infests the roads in all wild places these days.”

“And, no doubt, having seen the other temples and churches of Spira, you’ve finally been pulled in by the allure of Our Mother’s worship?” said the guard.

“Well, yes,” said Aeris. “The religion housed here is the only one I know next to nothing about. I come here because there is no way to learn about the worship of Jenova outside of her city, and I want that knowledge to be spread.”

The guard licked his lips, and tapped his gunblade on his back. He looked over to his partner, who spared him a glace and a shrug before returning to stoicism.

“Well, if it’s an excuse, it’s one I haven’t heard yet,” the guard eventually decided. “Don’t think we aren’t aware that many come to our city with warlike intentions. We know. Don’t think we can’t figure out what you really want. We’ll know.” He looks at Yuna when he said this. Aeris didn’t like that at all. Someone had taught the man to look for a person easy to break.

She liked even less that his stoic partner had raised his head to stare at Cloud. 

“It’s an excuse to marvel at the delicate beauties of Chasamaecum, hidden from the world,” Aeris sighed. “You found us out. Now what will we do?”

The guard struggled not to really grin. “I must assume you meant the stonework when you said that, and not something else.”

Aeris covered her mouth. “My, you were right to boast. You are good at seeing through a façade.”

He finally laughed, as did a few others in his party. His partner’s face changed from ‘probably dead’ to ‘maybe a little annoyed.’

“Clever tongue,” he said. “I’ll have to take you to someone cleverer than me. If you’ve found out anything about our worship at all, you’ve heard of the sorceresses.”

“Yes,” said Aeris.

“I am under the direct command of the Lady Ultimecia, head sorceress,” the guard revealed. “In fact, I am her first in command, called her Knight, Seifer Almasy. Sharing the honor is my partner beside me, Squall Leonhart.”

“Pleasure,” said the man, brought out of his silence for just one word, though no one could really say he looked pleased.

“As my Lady Ultimecia is charged with the safety of the city, I’m sure she’ll want to be the first to satisfy her curiosity about all of you,” Seifer decided. “If you’ll follow me, please.”

 Seifer and Squall turned on their heels, and the members of the party followed behind them, quickly hemmed in by the other four guards following them.

And so Aeris, without so much as a hitch in her shoulders, changed her identity from a wandering wise woman to a snake in the grass, searching for weaknesses, seeking to destroy, and smiling all the while. Cloud kept his eyes on the ground, wondering.

Once they were walking, Cloud was interrupted from his feeling of awkwardness by Tifa quickly elbowing him. “Is Aeris?...” she hissed.

“…what?” asked Cloud.

“I mean,” Tifa looked away, “you heard what she was saying, right?”

Cloud thought for a second. “I figure she actually is an expert on ancient religion,” he said.

“No, no, not that,” Tifa whispered. “I mean, the thing she said…”

Cloud thought. Was Tifa also trying to determine something about Aeris’s nature, like he had been? “Wait, what thing?”

Tifa sighed, and flushed a little. “About ‘delicate beauties?’”

Cloud took a look at the admittedly impressive stonework, like that which surrounded the windows and ceilings in the great temples of Bevelle, but more intricate, with many points and stems like extending vines. “I’m not sure I understand,” he said. “The building are well made, I mean, but… uh…”

Tifa rubbed her forehead. “I’ll ask someone else.”

“Okay…” said Cloud, still clearly behind on the issue. He hadn’t gotten what made the comment so funny in the first place, really.

Chasamaecum only got more and more impressive as they move to the center. Ceilings rose, and archways rose with them, in gothic style, framed with many statues and stone carvings, not of the natural, floral shapes Cloud was used too, but others, some seeming to be symbols from the sky, other of forms that Cloud could not identity, but were nonetheless prevalent. Not all of the statues were Jenova, but he knew so little about the culture of that city that he couldn’t identify any of the others.  Jenova herself showed up in so many forms that it was hard for Cloud to recognize her every time. Along with the stone work came metal work over the arches of doorways of on the edges of buildings, sometimes decorated with gemstones, sometimes serving an obvious purpose, sometimes only there to make a decorative canopy over the street.

When they rose off of the ground and started walking up the curving steps to higher levels, they began to see many people too. All Jenovines had silver hair, like strands of bright metal, and blazing eyes, which made no one more uncomfortable than they made Cloud, who had spent much time hiding his burning SPIRIT’s eyes.  The Jenovines wore clothing of stately colors, usually black or cream-colored or deep blue or green, with flowing, river-like dresses on both genders, as well as more serviceable two-legged trousers, which often buttoned all up the side. It seemed to be in fashion to have fabric trail behind one’s self, from skirt or tunic or even coat, sliding over the stone walkways like sheets of water, never dirty, because of the Jenovines’ lives above ground. Hair was almost always worn long, and not often bound up. It seemed that it was mostly guards like the ones around then that cleaved their fair hair short.

The Jenovines were thin and wiry, not in the way of a graceful spirit, but in the way of the deer, the beast that runs through the woods, muscled tightly, not very well fed. Indeed, what food Cloud saw cooked in street stalls or shared between friends on silk-draped balconies looked unappealing even to him—but to them, it seemed to just be their average fare. As they climbed higher, towers grew thicker, like the trunks of trees in a forest, so that they could not see almost all the way to the center—though they knew what was there.

Everywhere, the was the bright green mist, which tasted like acid, and tasted like power, in the way that the Lifestream of the planet does when dredged up in pools, but it was different. It was different in the way that a burning hearth fire and the exhaust of the Highwind were different. In some places, they could barely see the gleam of green eyes and the shine of jade-colored skin through the fog, at others, it was clear enough to see the sky—though the sky was an expanse of pale green here.

The guards let then through open public streets, framed with wrought iron rails, which were topped with small statues and urns. They walked through stone squares with stone fountains, flowing with clear water, covered with chattering Jenovines, which all stopped silent when they saw the guards ushering foreigners to the center of town.

They knew they were getting closer when they saw many guards about, sometimes flanking what were clearly young witch-priestesses, in certain gowns, with green marks on their skin. There were more austere buildings here, too, great iron wrought clock towers with clocks made out of oyster shell and decorated with pearl and jade, palaces of stone in which every surface was painted and decorated, and the statues had blazing green malachite eyes, and, to everyone’s surprise, gardens; gardens with living vines and trees, dark green and bursting with white flowers, flanking enormous gold-plated fountains, where people lounged on stone benches or lay on the only grass in the city.

Seifer, entirely unfazed by the opulence (or the oppressive repetition of the same statues and symbols everywhere), began making small talk with Aeris, who walked behind him. “Enjoying the beauties of the city yet?”

“Oh, stop,” Aeris giggled, “but in all honesty, yes. The beauty of Chasamaecum is striking. So much splendor, and with such detail paid to every wall and window… it looks like the masterwork of one man, carved from a single pearl, not the labor of many architects.”

Seifer smiled. “We strive for an inner similitude in our city. Unity is one of the greatest of our virtues.”

Tifa began to subconsciously rub her arm. Lulu stilled it for her. “Watch yourself,” she told Tifa tersely, without looking like she was speaking at all. “I don’t have enough eyes to constantly watch you.”

Tifa put her arms behind her back in the pose of a ranger waiting for orders, set her jaw, and kept herself there.

 “In your city, at least, you have achieved it,” Aeris said. “I wonder… is it not unified, for us to be here?”

“Of course not,” Seifer said, but gave no hint as to what that meant for them.

“Absolutely everyone in the city is religious, then?” Aeris suddenly asked.

“Well, of course,” said Seifer, but he sounded uneasy about it. “Yes, of course, but the way you say religion isn’t what we mean. It’s a devotion, it’s something that is in our whole lives, its part of us, it’s literally our blood. You say religion like it’s just something we do, but…” Seifer looked up at the sky.

“Your religions,” said Squall suddenly. “They’re religions based on stories. They’re about faith. They’re not real; you’re just supposed to believe in them. We have Jenova. It’s real.”

Cloud watched Aeris’s face. All she did was assume a considering expression and nod slowly. He couldn’t believe her composure. Yuna, however, raised an eyebrow, though Cloud didn’t know why.

“Fascinating,” said Aeris. “I begin to believe you.” Her eyes traced upwards, looking at the high ceilings, following them to city center. “Her presence is palpable.” 

“Some say you’ve already spoken to her,” said Squall, “if you’ve spoken to one of her’s.”

Aeris considered this. “Then you all know her, then.”

Seifer chuckled, and Squall almost smiled.

“Oh, I have another question, then,” she said, putting a finger to her face. “Knowing her as familiarly as you do… does that reduce her… what would be the word, divinity? The sense of awe you would feel for her? I know some Yevonists, after spending much time around the Fayth, no longer feel very impressed by them.”

“They shouldn’t, they’re all glorified animals,” said Seifer, tossing one hand contemptuously over his shoulder. “Our Mother is Glory. It doesn’t matter how well you know her. Familiarity with beauty does not diminish beauty. A hold on power does not decrease power. A grasp of knowledge does not limit the use of knowledge. And glory will never diminish by being known. We know her as an Ideal. The Ideal does not stop being Ideal because we can comprehend it. She only grows more impressive as we grow closer to her and see her more clearly. And as she is in all of us..”

“More opportunities, each day,” Aeris said, looking calmly around to the crowd of Jenovines that filled the streets. “It must seem… overwhelming, all that knowledge, all those opportunities. To have divinity among you. Do you ever wonder if you will lose yourself?”

Seifer chuckled darkly. “Well, most of us don’t worry about that kind of thing, but I hear it drives some people absolutely mad. Right, Squall?”

“Seifer…”

“Some people just go raving bonkers about Jenova for no good reason!”

Cloud could have sworn that Squall actually growled at Seifer, who just laughed.

“This is why we don’t let him interact with people much,” said Seifer sadly, “his words have been known to cause insanity with the slightest uttering. The experience of his person is just too much for people. People have been seen going mad just from being near him. It’s like when people talk about staring into the void, but the void is sulking in the corner of the classroom, pretending he isn’t there. And he won’t stare back, he’ll just talk to himself and write threatening things into his journal.”

“Almasy…” Squall growled again, clearly in warning.

“We usually just keep him locked up where he can stare into the dark and brood for hours. We let him out to get some fresh air today, but we didn’t know that he’d be talking to any people. Just don’t make eye contact, he can turn people to stone.”

Despite having silently threatened bodily harm, Squall just glared intensely at his partner, seemed almost to bare his teeth, like an angry wolf, and looked away again. To Seifer, this was apparently the most hilarious thing he had ever seen.

The two more or less forgot they were escorting anyone at that point, and let their underlings shove the party along behind them. In consequence, everyone was treated to Seifer trying his damnedest to push Squall to his limit and Squall trying his damnedest to not reach his limit. It looked like this had to be how most conversations happened between them. Aeris gave up listening to them for clues about Jenova’s influence on people, and just listened to the crowd around her. It was a shame that she really couldn’t feel them, she only had a human body here, and without her roots and extra limbs that she had while connected to the pathways of Spira, she had to basically use human senses.

The other downside was that she found herself reacting so much more emotionally to what she heard in this state, since it was harder to put things in the big picture. Slowly losing her ways to understand and rationalize Jenova’s use of people, she found pity and worry and the need to help growing in her quickly, and painfully, pushing at her heart.

It was like when she was a mortal healer, and every loss was gone for good.

They reached a great wall after some walking (and Squall striking Seifer just once) which rose so high above them and so far to either side of them it was hard to tell how large it was, only that it was ornately carved and that it turned away from them at all sides. In the center, where the water-lined and flower-strewn pathway led, was a gigantic, round portal.

“This is the central statue of Jenova,” Aeris realized. “We’re standing before her stomach.”

“The womb,” Squall corrected.

“Of course,” Aeris said.

They entered without another word. Inside the statue, it was much darker, and the great hall inside, held up by pillars and decorated with many lavish gifts, there was a small group of young women, all in the same dress with the same glowing green marks, one of whom was pregnant, having a conversation. Around them were many young men in uniform. They grew quiet when the party entered, though Seifer and Squall were very courteous in their bows to them. “My Ladies, is my Lady Ultimecia present?”

“I believe she is in the chamber of waters,” said one of the young women.

Seifer thanks them and hurried them all on. Once they were past the young women, Aeris whispered another question.

“I do believe they were priestesses in training,” she said.

“Witches,” Seifer said.

“Yes. But well, I’m not sure how it is in your city, but in many cultures, it is discouraged for a young woman initiated into a religion to have romantic relationships.”

“We worship a mother,” said Seifer scornfully. “What did you expect?”

“So are witches… expected to have children?” she pressed.

“It is preferred,” said Seifer icily.

“Is it preferred to have many children? Or, it can’t be that a Sorceress’s Knights are picked partly because—”

“We are almost to the chamber of waters,” Seifer snapped. “I wouldn’t want to interrupt Ultimecia with chattering if she’s in a state of contemplation.”

“Of course,” whispered Aeris.

Indeed, their path soon became fraught with curling, spiraling rivers carved into the floor though which icy water flowed. Seifer left them behind after a while, to walk ahead to a chamber barred with gigantic, curved doors, peering in to speak quietly with the person inside. Perhaps not everyone had noticed, but Aeris had seen that they were walking through a process of circular rooms, one within the other, nesting like a stacked doll. She hadn’t seen any way up or down yet, but since she figured there must be important rooms in such places as the heart and the head, she figured there must be stairs somewhere. Her guess was that they were just ahead, where a spine would be.

Seifer finished his conversation with the Lady in the Chamber and walked quickly back to them. “She has been informed you are here,” he said. “The men and I are leaving. You will wait. When she is ready, she will come out of the inner chamber and speak to you alone.”

“We understand,” Aeris said.

Seifer nodded, and turned to Squall, they seemed to say something at each other silently, and, when they were decided, they left the room together, one opening the left door out, one opening the right. They were followed by the four soldiers, but the last one turned around to close the doors behind him, and was halted by Aeris’s upturned hand.

“I shouldn’t be asking,” she said, leaning forward a bit, bouncing on her feet, “but I was wondering the whole time, and I figure, it couldn’t hurt… about your captain, and his partner, when I watched their banter, and observed how they teased each other…”

The soldier opened his mouth, and then closed it. He looked over his shoulder, and when he looked back to Aeris, his face was filled with a look of lost desperation. “I am almost completely sure they’re screwing,” he hissed, “but no one can prove it, and it’s driving me fucking NUTS.”

With that, he slammed the door behind him and ran away, as Aeris, as quietly and as gracefully as she possibly could, collapsed double in heaving laughter. Yuna put one hand slowly over her mouth, hiding her grin, and Tifa just sort of leaned against the wall, wheezing. Meanwhile, Lulu and Cloud shared a look of sudden understanding and exasperation. “Aeris,” Tifa wheezed, “We came here to learn about Jenova, not the particular sex practices of her followers.”

“Stop, stop,” Aeris stuttered, “I’ll just start laughing again.” And then she did.

Luckily, they were perfectly composed again by the time they heard the sound of the inner doors creaking open. They stood, without meaning to, in an arrow, with Aeris almost against the door leaning outwards, Cloud by her right side, Tifa on her left, Yuna closing Cloud in and Lulu flanking Tifa. And for the six in their party, Tifa had one hand on him, though she knew better than to summon him.

She was used to him being there, after all.

Ultimecia, the High Sorceress, stepped through the doors to meet her quests with surprisingly little pomp. She wore the gown of every priestess, though she didn’t bother to pull the sleeves over her shoulders or make sure her legs were covered like most of them were wont to do, and her hair flowed, uncontrolled, to the floor behind her. Her eyes were so bright that she was like two candle flames in the dark walking towards them, and Cloud was reminded of the light-bearing priestess of his hometown, though he didn’t like the comparison. She was not pregnant, like some of the other Witches, but it was clear from her form that she had had children. Her nails were very long, as they all saw when the faint light of the room glittered across them, as she pulled a stray strand of her mane out of her face and behind her shoulder.

Her face was a glowing mask of green paint.

“Welcome, visitors,” she said, calmly, “to the center.”

Aeris bowed deeply, and the rest of the followed suit (though honestly, Cloud had never been standing straight up.) Ultimecia lifted one clawed hand to stop them.

“Please,” she said, “I know the obeisance of outsiders is only formality, and not devotion.”

Aeris stood up, smiling. “Since we do not begrudge giving it, it is more of a respect.”

Ultimecia hummed, looking up and down at Aeris. “I have heard you are scholars,” she said.

“Scholars of religious beliefs,” said Aeris, “of separate specialties, hoping to make a definitive work. Though it is different to learn about your Mother, only through learning about her can we complete our work.”

“You come wishing to learn about Jenova,” said Ultimecia. “That I can believe. Her allure is strong, and I do feel an air of curiosity, the thirst for knowledge about you.”

Ultimecia tapped one nail to her chin. “But there is a spirit of fear among you all.”

There was a moment of silence.

“And speaking of spirits, two Yevonites among you,” she sighed, as she paced further towards them. Aeris, to her dismay, saw her look Yuna and Tifa in the eyes. “Your Fayth are cluttered around you, clinging for safety. They quail to be in the womb of the Mother.”

Tifa was more visibly disturbed by this than Yuna was. Her hand twitched, hoping to find a part of her Father to cling too, but he was invisible, just as he was before.

“You,” she said, looking at Lulu, “something of a witch, but not of our sort. Your magic is a poison within you. Does it hurt?”

“As much as having poison inside hurts a snake,” said Lulu, though she knew it wasn’t wise.

Ultimecia only smiled. “But the one who has a spirit most intriguing to me…” She walked to the center of the room, and grew close to Aeris. She stared Aeris in the eyes.

She didn’t say anything to Aeris. And Aeris said nothing back. Ultimecia’s eyes narrowed, glittering, as she tried to peer deeper into Aeris, but her attempts were frustrated. It was like she saw a shadow of something else in Aeris’s soul—something that should be looming over her, but wasn’t there.
Or maybe Aeris was the shadow.

“She can’t be… a golem?” Ultimecia whispered to herself. “But she speaks…”

Aeris figured she was only saved by the fact that there was no way Chasamaecum had seen a walking Ancient before. She held her staff before her, and revealed nothing.

“Hiding on purpose… for that, it would be fit to throw you out right now.” And Ultimecia’s lips opened again, and she might have gone farther, if she wasn’t suddenly started by something else, as if the wind had suddenly blown a sweet scent to her, something she hadn’t noticed behind the strange enormity of Aeris’s being. Beside her, hidden in the wings of her protection, was someone whose soul came upon her like gentle warm waves.

Her head turned, in increments, to Cloud Strife. He stood looking down, his position frozen, as he always did. He was clearly the sort to hide form a confrontation, though his guardian did not. But no matter how much he lowered his head, Ultimecia could see that his eyes, though they were blue, glowed like fire in the dark.

She moved to him, and attempted to lift his chin. He struggled against her. “Child of the mother,” she said, “where have you come from? Why do you look so strange? And why have you come back with these?”

Cloud’s first instinct to run away. Then he had the instinct to stay absolutely still when the knowledge came to him that running would do nothing, since the predator was bigger, stronger, and more powerful than him. Third he thought he should maybe deny what she was saying, but since he couldn’t look her in the eyes, and his breathing was unsteady, that wasn’t going to work.

He closed his eyes as he began to shut down.

Aeris gently laid a hand on Ultimecia, putting some room between her and Cloud. Ultimecia looked very offended, but allowed it. “His heritage is an uncomfortable subject for him, please…” she whispered.

“Descendent of a deserter, perhaps?” Said Ultimecia, partly to Aeris and partly to herself, But her eyes couldn’t be drug away from Cloud’s face. “But he feels like her. More like her than the kids running through the streets these days do. It’s pure. It’s like he’s drunk her blood. He’s like a Sorceress.”

“Please,” said Aeris, “it distresses him very much.” Aeris regretted bringing Cloud along sharply in that moment. She knew she wouldn’t be able to disguise him as she was, and how could she have thought that he wouldn’t pull in any attention?

“What distresses you, beautiful one? You’re like a very Son of the Mother,” said Ultimecia. Her tone was enraptured, her gaze was distracted. Aeris could see plans forming in her eyes, and she very much didn’t like it.

Cloud choked when the pressure inside him built too much to stay inside. Ultimecia enfolded him in her arms, and he froze. She turned to look at Aeris, who was mortified.

“I should not keep you in this city, any of you. But I will keep him, and with me. I have a place for the rest of you to stay, for now, until I’ve exhausted my curiosity for him.”

It was impossible for any of them to hide their dismay, but Tifa was the only one who actually shouted. Ultimecia raised an eyebrow at her. “You can’t leave him alone,” Tifa pleaded, “please!”

“He shan’t be alone,” said Ultimecia. “Even when I am busy, I have many Witches in my command. I am sure he would like gentle Rinoa…” she pondered.

Already resigned to the fact that she would never be allowed to stay in the city, Aeris pleaded another case. “I beg you, let Tifa stay alongside him. They are old friends, they both feel more comfortable around each other. She has long been her bodyguard.”

“That Yevonite?” Ultimecia said blandly, not even looking at Tifa.

“I will have you know,” Tifa said, deciding to stomp over to the Sorceress, “that as a native of the Thunder Plains, I am a worshipper of the ANCIENTS,” she screeched, and then, pointing at Cloud, “Like HE is.”

Tifa’s face didn’t even falter when she realized how bad of a decision she just made. Well, the damage was done. She crossed her arms defiantly.

Annoyance rolled off the sorceress in waves. She moved her hands down from Cloud’s head, and only lightly grasped him at the waist. “If you’re so determined to stick to him,” she said, acid in her tone, “I suppose I can have Seifer look over the two of you instead.”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Ultimecia peered once more at their air around Tifa. “I do not like your Fayth.”

“I am sure he doesn’t like you.”

Aeris wondered why she let Tifa do this in the first place.

Ultimecia looked away. “Nonetheless, Squall could neutralize it if he had too.”

Ultimecia backed away to get a good look at everyone. Most of them were glaring at her. Cloud was trembling and clutching his own arms. “So be it. My decision is this--- you three, magic casters, your place is in the House Outside the City. The Son will stay in my chambers, guarded after by my followers, and his guardian can stay with him, since she insists. She must be prepared for some blocks to be put on her powers, however.”

Tifa grimaced, but said nothing.

Aeris bowed again. “Your offer, really, is generous.”

“It is, and you know it,” Ultimecia replied. “Leave these two here. The three of you will be guided to the House Outside the City by some of my guards. I will summon you again tomorrow, most likely. Don’t think to start exploring the city on your own before then, ‘scholars’.” She waved a hand at Yuna, Lulu, and Aeris, making her orders clear.

The three of them lingered more than a little, but they turned and left eventually. Cloud glanced up form under his eyelashes as Aeris retreating.

He saw tears struggling at her eyes, and an expression of helplessness and frustration, before she turned sharply to leave.

His feelings, his confusion, turned in his gut like a storm at sea. He buried his face him his hands, and a slender hand, with very sharp nails, followed them up.

 

-

 

They didn’t wait for someone to guide them out of the Statue-temple. They left themselves, most of them stomping a little on the way. Yuna was biting her lip, Lulu was glaring at nothing.

“You can’t think that the Ranger can really protect him,” Yuna said cautiously. 

Aeris covered her cheeks with her hands. “I sent her there for the sake of his mind. She comforts him sometimes. I wish I could have stayed myself… but what can I do? This is the best she could manage. Cloud is... so unsteady, and this…” She shook her head. “I left Tifa with him to help him stay sane. Well, stay as sane as he still is. I want him to get better, not…” She rubbed her eyes. “And he’s so vulnerable right now, so to be in the web of Jenova’s followers again… and he was making so much progress around me before I forced him to constantly be around people all the time, he hates that, he has to shut himself off…”

Yuna laid a sympathetic hand on Aeris’s arm. Aeris leaned into it without meaning to. “How could I be stupid enough to bring him along? I just wanted to help him see the truth, help him understand what had been done to him, what he is now…”

“What’s done is done,” Lulu decided. “We can only hope she won’t keep him long, and focus on achieving your goals, Lady. Your quest is still the most important thing.”

Aeris nodded reluctantly.

“When we get where we’re going,” Yuna whispered, “I have a way to contact Rikku on the ship. We’ll communicate with everyone on board, and figure out more from there.”

Aeris sighed.

At the entrance, several guards were already waiting for them, though none they had seen before. They shuffled the three travelers away quickly, and marched them through the streets, not intending to converse. The travelers did not intend to do so either.

They city blurred past them as they jogged away from it, pale stone tower melting into pale stone tower, green banners all twisting away in the wind. They were ushered through a bright metal gate, spiked on top, to a long bridge way leading out of the Crater and to a mansion that stood on the very edge of the rim, where healthy brown soil met crumbling black stone. The mansion was of the same material as the city was built out of, but it was clearly in a different style, built squat and sprawling like a country palace, with out-of-place stained glass windows, and pediments on top that were painted with colored lacquers. Yuna and Lulu were only intrigued, but Aeris felt her heart stop.

This was the house of a Guado noble. But there were no more Guado nobles.

“Whose house is this, sirs?” asked Aeris, the first to break the silence of the walk.

They all were disinclined to answer. “This is the dwelling of Seymour Disinherited,” one finally replied.

“Who is Seymour Disinherited?” Aeris asked.

“Can’t you see that you’re about to find out?” another barked.

Aeris bit her lip and waited impatiently.

They reached the mansion, and saw little silvery moonflowers blooming about it. The air here was blue, and blue light streamed down from the heights of the house. A soldier knocked fiercely on the front door, and had to wait quite a while before they began to open.

To Aeris’s disappointment, an average Jenovine woman, of thin stature, slightly waved silver hair, and green eyes opened the door. “To what do we, the House Outside, owe the honor of a visit?” she asked politely.

“The Mother’s City has been visited by travelers,” said a soldier. “High Sorceress Ultimecia has ordered that they be housed here for the length of their stay.”

The girl curtsied. “Then of course, we will keep them.”

The three travelers were more or less shoved inside, and the soldiers left the house by slamming the door behind them.

The girl let out a heavy breath, hand on her chest. “Aaaaaaa, I HATE it when they come over, they’re so pushy!” She looked up at her visitors. “Did they do anything awful? Or was it just the average, sorceress-ordained level of misuse?”

“They did separate our party,” Lulu said quietly.

The girl harrumphed. “Well, you must be the undesirables. This house exists for the undesirables. I work here because I was undesirable. We take anyone they toss at us because they’re undesirable.”

“And the house’s master?” Aeris asked hopefully.

The girl shrugged. “Undesirable, of course. He’s the half-brother of the three city rulers, and he’s actually the OLDEST brother, but his blood isn’t pure Jenovine.”

“No?...” Aeris pressed.

“No! And it’s barely a taint, which it’s why it’s SO unfair,” the girl sighed. “So what if he looks a little different? Of course, that’s not why he was officially kicked out, that would be when they found out he had learned to summon Fayths, that was too much for anyone to deal with, you should have seen it! It was too much for them to just turn him out nicely, there had to be a public shaming session, because they literally faint when any Jenovine so much as suggests—”

“Amaya,” said a soft, gentle voice from somewhere above, “you’ve confused them, I think.”

Amaya turned around, facing the top of the stairs. There, above the curving stone steps, with one nailed hand placed on the railing, stood a man, of stature like a Jenovine, tall  and sparsely built, but on his face there were strange markings, like darkly colored scars, and behind him, long, thick hair fell over his shoulders and back, of color like the sky. He wore a Jenovine robe, but it was colored like the sea.

His eyes, though bright, were not green, and they were no color of the common people either.

Aeris felt like crying. “I was sure you were all gone,” she said, unable to stop herself.

Seymour Disinherited looked hollowly at her. “Do you mean the Guado? They are. The fact that I have the last of their blood means nothing. There is no Guado culture, no Guado city, no Guado ancestors left.”

Aeris turned her eyes downwards. “Forgive me. I let my emotions overcome me.”

Seymour began descending the staircase. “I have to say that it isn’t the sort of reaction I expect to my bloodline anymore,” he sighed. “You looked pleased.”

“I am pleased,” she said. “I… in my childhood…” she struggled to say the truth in a way that would make sense. “I studied the Guado, I always admired them, I thought their civilization was great… the loss of Guadosalam was a great loss to me.”

Seymour looked at her with suspicion and concern. Aeris knew she had not spoken like someone who had just studied the Guado, but he let it go for now. “If you spoke like that in the city, I see why you’re here.”

“We’re here more because of our adherence to different religions, I believe,” said Yuna more calmly.

“And the power that these choices give us,” Lulu stated.

“Ultimecia likes to weed out threats, no matter how small,” Seymour agreed.

Aeris smiled. “You’d think the strict policy of isolationism would protect them well enough.”

“Isolationism only works out if you stay truly isolated, and that requires a true unity of thought and culture,” said Seymour. “Everyone given to me in my house is either mixed blood, like myself, or full of strong, undesirable opinions.”

“Like myself,” said Amaya, sounding a little proud. “And also like Seymour, actually. I sort of think they just send out anyone who reminds them of Seymour because they all hate him that much.”

Seymour smiled slightly. “My brothers have a delightful stew of complexes. Hatred against me is one of them.” 

“Your brothers really are the rulers here then,” said Yuna.

Seymour looked up at the ceiling. “Under Ultimecia, supreme ruler, the bothers Yazoo, Kadaj, and Loz have been deemed the most fit by blood to be stewards of the city. My brother Loz is the leader of the armies, my brother Kadaj is religious supreme, and my brother Yazoo is most resembling the governor of the city. Should you have to face any of them, request Yazoo. Last I saw of him, he still clung to a few threads of sanity.”

“And as your birthright, you seem to have earned the position of the city jailer,” said Aeris.

“That’s a very kind way to put it,” Seymour responded blandly. “They were willing to humor me, ugly though I was to them, until I faced how hateful I was to my brothers and became hateful on purpose. The teachings of Yevon were a comfort to me for some time, but of more comfort were the Fayth, who stick by me still. For the most part, I have left the religion now, though I have not rejoined Jenova’s either.”

Aeris’s eyes began to shine. “I begin to think that my stroke of bad luck might have some good in it after all.”

Seymour looked at her curiously. “How so?”

Aeris clasped her hands in front of herself, grinning. “Do you think you could invite us to sit down for tea? We are weary travelers, after all.”

Seymour shrugged his shoulders. “Amaya, your excellent berry tea, if you could.”

“And the tea cakes too?” asked the girl with some excitement.

“Yes. But don’t sing the song.”

She sighed, but walked out of the room looking happy enough anyway.

“The dining hall is this way,” Seymour said, and led them out.

 

-

 

The dining hall reminded Aeris so strongly of a formal Guado court hall that she could barely stop straining her neck at the ceiling to eat. There were high, blue windows above, just as they had preferred, colors snaking like vines all throughout the carved hall, statues and tall vases of flowers at either end, and great, golden platters of fruit for all to share at the center of the table. Amaya cheerfully bustled in teapots and tea cups, with little cakes and cookies in matching plates, and then sat down to join them without asking. She figured it was just the girl’s way, since Seymour didn’t seem bothered by her being there.

The tea was fresh and herbal, made out of dried berries and the leaves of berry plants, and it tasted like nectar to Aeris after the strange smoke of Chasamaecum. “This hall can’t possibly be a surviving Guado house,” she said.

“No, but it’s designed to look like one.”

“It does very well,” said Aeris, right before she realized what that sentence gave away.

Seymour’s eyes grew suddenly sharp. “How old are you, traveler?”

Aeris looked calmly back to him. “Are you of noble blood on your Guado side as well, Lord Seymour?”

“I am,” he said.

“What is the farthest ancestor back you can name?”

Seymour thought. “Aside from legendary connections, which may or may not have truth in them, I know the grandfather of my grandfather was Lord of the Guado some five hundred years ago, since they were long lived.”

“Him I knew,” said Aeris. “His given name was Silas, and he always served court at sunset, because he thought it was an enchanted time. His fruit tables were always piled with exotic fruit from Wutai and other southern islands, and his hair was as dark blue as the deep sea.” Aeris drank some tea. “Heavenly, Miss Amaya. His father I knew, and the father before that, though I believe Silas was the first true Lord of your line. If you want to run by those supposed legendary connections of those, I can test them against my memory too.”

Seymour clasped his hands. “I asked the wrong question. What are you?”

“We are scholars, as I have said many times today,” said Aeris, “scholars of religion, who have learned much about the other Spirits of this world, and now seek knowledge of Jenova.”

Seymour processed this in his head, tapping a nail to his teacup. “You seem so honest, but somewhere, there is mischief in this…” his eyes lit up. He smiled.

“My dear, WHY do you seek knowledge of Jenova?”

Aeris smiled, resting her head on her folded hands. “You know, everyone else just thought I was lying about being a scholar. Congratulations, Seymour Guado, on being the first to ask me that question today.”

“You know,” said Yuna to Lulu, “it actually didn’t occur to me until now that she WASN’T lying about being a scholar of religion seeking information about Jenova.”

Lulu just sighed.

“Jenova doesn’t have many enemies in this world,” said Seymour. “Very few, since none believe in her outside of her city as anything more than a strange Pagan goddess. You would have to be in a very odd position to want information about Jenova for anything OTHER than a scholarly work. My guess is they all thought you were just outright lying and were looking to steal one of the legendary treasures.”

Aeris sighed delicately. “I really am a scholar looking for information about Jenova.”

“But not to write a book,” Seymour pressed, “which means you, somehow, believe in Jenova, but you, not being a Jenovine, must be one of the only souls in our world who believes in Jenova as something other than a goddess.” Seymour leaned back in his chair. “I wondered if I would ever see one of her enemies before me. So? How is it that you learned about her? Not from religious teaching, no other religions acknowledge her.”

“None know about her,” said Aeris. “They blame Sin for her work. Knowledge of her had been obscured.”

“But you know,” said Seymour, considering. “You also know about how her work has been hidden from most of Spira.”

“Yes.”

Seymour turned his head to the side. “What a puzzle,” he said, “What can I possibly be looking at?”

Knowing he was baffled, Seymour Guado turned away. For the moment, though giving Aeris a look that said he wasn’t done with her, he turned his attention to the two other women. “You, my Lady,” he said to Yuna, “I understand.”

Yuna smiled. “Yuna Vyedrvim, Summoner. Blessings of Yevon, brother.”

Seymour groaned, and held up his hand. “Peace, no.”

“You keep your Fayth, you remain a Summoner, like I am,” said Yuna. “Allow me to feel kinship with you.”

“I never meant to turn against Sin myself,” said Seymour. “My conversion was an act of rebellion. You dishonor yourself by acknowledging me.”

“I don’t see dishonor in rebellion,” said Yuna.

Seymour looked as if he wanted to say something else, but he let it go, and turned instead to Lulu. “And you… what a strange power hoovers around you,” he said, more commenting than asking.

“An old type of magic,” Lulu summarized. “There’s no great mystery in it. I simply grew up in an isolated tribe that used old magic, hexing and charming and the like.”

“So just a simple magician?” Seymour asked.

“To me, that seems all I am.”

“Lulu is a very brave guardian,” Yuna interjected.

“I do my job,” Lulu conceded.

“She was your guardian, of course?” Seymour asked.

“Is,” they both said.

Seymour raised his eyebrows. “You’re questing against Sin NOW? What sort of quest against Sin requires a visit to Chasamaecum?”

The two women cleared their throats and glanced at Aeris, who was busy enjoying her cake.

“Ah, yes,” said Seymour, his tone dipping again, “our greatest mystery.”

“Really? I think the greatest mystery is the general animosity towards Sin I felt in your city, just as it is in the rest of the world, despite the relation between him and Jenova. Could it be the common Jenovine isn’t told about that?”

Amaya took that moment to slam her fists down on the table and scream “I KNEW IT! IT’S TRUE!”

Seymour looked up at the ceiling, resigning himself to the upcoming rant.

“It was so obvious! They work in the same ways! The have the same effect on ecosystems around the world! Not to mention the parallels in the story of Jenova’s First Son and the stories of how Sin came to be, even though they’ve put in details to separate them! I knew they had! They tell us that the texts are unadulterated and pure, but they’ve been touched! They’ve been changed! Once, Sin WAS the Son of Jenova, but when he started to become uncontrollable, the Sorceresses pretended there never was a relation between the two of them! I saw it! I always knew! The clues were there! Their use of altered chemicals from the human body to control and convert the biology of organisms and the planet itself gave them away, but no one wanted to listen!”

“Amaya,” said Seymour.

“I wonder why they kicked her out,” Lulu said with a little grin.

“If they paid any attention, ANY attention at all, to the scientific evidence that is right in their faces, the soil samples here in Chasamaecum and the Sin attack sites across the globe, the changes in Jenovine DNA compared to what we find in Sinspawn creatures, along with the SLEW of other evidence that has been brushed under the rug, people would know! Our enemy and our supposed protector have been allied all along! The reason we are safe from Sin’s attacks is his agreement with our Mother, not her power over him! I’ve been telling people for YEARS,” she shrieked, and then buried her head in her hands.

“Well, I get to tell you that you’ve been right, if that helps anything,” said Aeris gently.

“Yes,” Amaya muttered to the table. “Yes, it does.”

“It’s what I suspected as well,” said Seymour, “though not as… violently as some of my guests here. Many of them arrive here because their sense of betrayal at the true nature of Sin has driven them to screaming about it in the streets.”

“That,” said Aeris quietly, “I very much understand.”

“Yes, you,” muttered Seymour, “back to you. You, who seems to know everything. What is it about Sin that makes you so downcast?”

“Jenova’s son,” Aeris sighed, “was once not her son. He was born a man of a different heritage. Jenova adopted him, you could say. I was one of the ones who lost him when he joined her.”

Seymour shook his head. “You mean to tell me that you are older than Sin itself.”

Aeris almost glared at Seymour. “I knew this world without Jenova,” she said. “I knew this world without mountains, without trees, I knew this world with only a few tribes that spoke sensible tongues and an atmosphere that sang of the innocence of spring. Unravel my mystery, last of the Guado, there is only one thing I can be.”

The waiting period was only to allow him to trust that the conclusion he came to could possibly be true. He knew, of course, but it’s hard to tell one’s self that one is seeing the dead.

“I believed…” Seymour said, wondering, “I believed you were all driven back.”

“Almost,” said Aeris. “I am unique, whether I like it or not. I am one of those fool ancients who loves wandering Spira, meddling in the lives of those who live there. I’m the fool Ancient who made the Fayth. I’m the fool Ancient who made it her quest to unravel Sin and banish Jenova, and who has failed time and time again. All you see here is my next attempt.”

“A bold one, if it takes you to Jenova’s city.”

“They do not recognize me, since Jenova makes no mention of the Ancients to her followers,” said Aeris. “Why would she? She would rather that her people consider the other people of the world their enemies, so they could fight above while she fights below. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that a suspiciously isolated city is building an army when then have no foes and have never had any foes. And even though they don’t know me, I still wouldn’t dare walk into this city, if I didn’t know one thing.”

“That is?” asked Seymour.

Aeris laced her fingers. She grew a ponderous expression, one of age, one that only came back to her now that she was under the blue sky and over beds of flowers again. “Jenova, like the Lifestream, spends some time underground and some time above,” she said. “Like myself, she has given herself a body.” Aeris smiled. “I believe she has let that body be put in danger.”

“Let it?” Seymour asked. “She put her body in danger on purpose?”

“She made another ally outside of her city,” Aeris said around the rim of her tea cup, “which I hope will prove, in time, to be the greatest mistake she ever made. But because of the isolationist beliefs she worked so hard to set in this city, they would never accept him. Since she felt equally comfortable in both sets of hands, she gave part of her body to him, and left the rest with them.”

Seymour raised his eyebrows. “No matter how I figure it, I can’t see that really being a good idea.”

Aeris rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t BELIEVE how well it has worked for her,” she muttered. “The man with her head has been spreading her everywhere above ground, and you don’t see any sorceresses worried about their headless goddess in public, do you?”

People began choking on their tea almost simultaneously. “HEADLESS?” Yuna shouted.

Aeris paused. “I could have sworn I mentioned that before.”

“Oh, well, I see why they would cover THAT up,” said Seymour, sort of choking and laughing at once.

Aeris looked up at the ceiling. “I hope they covered her up literally,” she said, as if this was only occurring to herself now. “It would be a gruesome sight otherwise.”

“Alright, that aside,” Seymour said, still chuckling, “what are you trying to do, being here? Are you just going to try to smuggle the rest of her body out?”

“I have a few goals, I suppose,” said Aeris. “Partly, I want to confirm that I AM right about all my assumptions, that Jenova has a body, and that she’s temporarily… incapacitated. I feel her spirit here, below ground, I want to sense her in the flesh. There is a lot I could learn about how she’s chosen to divide her consciousness by actually seeing her. It’s the business of knowing your enemy, you see.”

“How do you think you’re going to see Jenova when I never even knew she had a body?” Seymour inquired.

“I think I’ll talk my way into finding her,” said Aeris.

Seymour stared at Aeris. “She’s pretty good at it, from what I’ve seen,” said Yuna.

“So fair, she’s gotten a spaceship that’s never been flown higher than a thousand feet all around Spira and a party of spies into the heart of Chasamaecum,” noted Lulu.

Seymour rested his chin in one hand. “I think I have no choice but to believe you could do it, Ancient.”

“I work exclusively with the element of surprise.”

“And aside from seeing the body of Jenova… you said you have other plans?”

Aeris shrugged. “Listening. Spying. I want to find out everything about Jenova that I can, everything about her, and her followers. My research is in how she and Sin affect people, how they get into biological systems, so that I can learn how to safely extract them from living things, and, eventually, the planet. I suppose I’m a toxicologist, and here, I want to study the poisoned.”

There descended a grimmer silence in the hall than they had felt before. “In that,” said Seymour, “you may find some problems. Of course, being who I am, I’ve heard some complaints about how thoroughly we are all imbued with Jenova here, but to refer to her as a poison…”

Aeris folded her hands. “I come from the Lifestream. I have watched her, she is killing us, and she is taking Spira with her. Here, it sounds very harsh…” She stilled herself by putting her hand on her forehead. “I put things out of context sometimes, forgive me, it all makes little sense out here… Ideally, I would preserve the Jenovines as they are, since you have built a fair city, and a fine culture, though I personally miss your predecessors more. Well, we all have our biases. But I must eliminate Jenova, because she IS poisoning Spira. And the consequences of that on the Jenovines would be dire, no matter what I do.”

Seymour leaned backwards, pondering. Yuna thought that he had the measured gaze of a politician. Well, he was born into a position of power, even if it was taken from him. “You know that I cannot pretend to love the current system of my home,” he said, “but I can’t be your ally if you plan totally destroy it.”

Aeris sighed. “It’s been one of my biggest struggles with myself since the city was founded,” she admitted. “It’s not like I think of the Jenovines as a false race. It’s not like I reject you, even though Jenovines go to Jenova, and not the Lifestream. It’s a situation where…” Aeris paused.

“Where the ends justify the means?” Seymour supplied.

Aeris just sighed again.

“She means it when she says the Planet will die otherwise,” Yuna supplied softly.

“She means it,” Seymour agreed. “Has she supplied evidence towards this?”

Yuna frowned. “You cannot, as a Summoner, or a former one, pretend that the damage of Sin isn’t real. He poisons. He kills thousands of people. He makes monsters. He bleeds the life out of coastlines, I’ve seen him destroy beautiful places. And if Jenova does worse than him…”

“Does she?” asked Seymour. “As I see it, she has built a City in a dead land, and helped people adapt to live there.”

“But if she made Sin,” argued Yuna, “then she is also guilty of the work of Sin. How do you know she doesn’t have a dark heart, and is just letting Sin do her dirty work for her?”

“I know she has a dark heart,” replied Seymour. “But I have never wished ill on her for it. I have a dark heart as well, full of revenge, and bitterness, and plotting. But I was given a house apart to live in, an asylum, which is a sort of mercy, and not death. By the people of Jenova, I add.”

Yuna looked down at her plate for a while, fiddling with a slice of fruit. “I will not deny, of course, that the people of Chasamaecum could be kind, that’s something that all people will do. Nothing makes them less good as the rest of us. But that doesn’t change… well… that Jenova isn’t.”

“You all talk as if you’ve seen Jenova,” Said Seymour.

“Well, I intend to,” Aeris reminded him. “Maybe once I’ve had a chat with her we can compare notes.”

“You’re not going into this hoping to have your mind changed,” noted Seymour.

Aeris sighed again. “A face-to-face conversation is all I haven’t had with Jenova. You understand that I’ve fought her for many years, yes? And that I have watched her kill forests, dry streams, run herds of animals to their deaths? You do realize that I’ve watched her change my own people from a pantheon of wisdom to a madhouse, yes? I have no doubts as to her intentions.”

“Then your eyes weren’t open as you walked through the city,” Seymour snapped.

Aeris opened her mouth, but he cut her off. “Yes, I know, I myself have many complaints about Jenova’s city. Many. But I’m not exactly in the business for their genocide.”

Aeris assumed an expression of pain. “No one will die,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to die.”

“You mean to kill no one, but you would kill their spirit.”

“It wouldn’t be tough to preserve the genome, or even to spread it. It’s resilient. She’s tough. With what she’s given you, Jenovines could remain on this planet for thousands and thousands of years…”

“It’s not just the genome,” said Amaya, suddenly, from the doorway where she stood almost unseen, holding another pot of tea, her bright eyes visible in the shadow of the other room. “It’s her. She’s not just a genome. She’s our own mother, even for those of us who have fought with her. Even for those of us… for whom it is all painful.” She cast her eyes down.

Aeris rubbed her forehead. “Well, she has a body, doesn’t she?” she said sullenly. “Maybe she can just live there once I’ve killed the rest of her and your Sorceresses can fawn over her in the temple for as long as they want to, how about that?”

Seymour tilted his head. “Actually…”

Aeris looked at him blankly. “That was a joke.” Then her expression changed. “Though, thinking about it that way…”

“You’re joking,” said Yuna.

“I recall that she was decapitated?” mentioned Lulu, as she held out her cup to be refilled.

“Believe me when I say that I have had worse ideas,” said Aeris. “I can see that as a sort of compromise. I’ve wanted Jenova dead for a long time, though I don’t see what’s wrong with alive, but in reduced power… Though I can’t imagine what the rest of the Lifestream would think of me by the time I was done with that.”

“And who could argue with your choices if Jenova ended up incarnated as a human among us, here to speak with us?” ask Seymour, with reverence creeping into his voice. “I can see how you could win the people to your idea, if you destroyed Sin first. Well, I can almost see it.”

Aeris folded her arms. “Well, what am I missing?”

“Ah, if I’m to be plain,” mused Seymour, “Silver hair, pale skin, a slightly more human-like face, and a telling thinness of limbs. Though I must admit that I admire the luminosity of your eyes.”

“They won’t listen otherwise?” Aeris asked gently.

“Never.”

Aeris huffed. “You’re putting me into a place where I have to deal with Jenova herself.”

“No,” he countered, “You are, unless you can justify completely ignoring the fate of Chasamaecum to yourself. Even if you think she won it by deceit, she has love. Imagine you are taking a bride from her groom, and you will know our feelings.”

“I guess I have been avoiding this issue for some time,” Aeris admitted. “It was a wrench in my plans, no matter how I thought about it.”

“But Jenova must be destroyed,” Yuna said, with some confusion.

“Yes, of—well…” Aeris tapped her fingers against the table, then looked once more at Seymour. “Can I content you to my decision, for now, to destroy Sin alone? He is, after all, the more active player in the destruction of Spira. Well, of Spira on the surface.” She grimaced.

“That goal was also mine for a long time,” said Seymour. “The idea of killing him forever still sounds sweet to me.”

Aeris stood up. “Then let’s collaborate on our goal, and leave other designs for later.”

She held out her hand, and Seymour accepted it. “For now,” he said.

“For now,” Aeris agreed.

Once they were settled into a room, with lovely terraces that opened to windows that watched the plains being ruffled by the winds outside, opposite of the City, Aeris returned to sighing and looking contemplative.

“You don’t see any victory in your alliance with Seymour,” Lulu stated.

“It is a victory,” she muttered, “I was glad to meet him, and I am sure he can help us. But I spoke against my heart with him.”

“How so?”

Aeris’s eyes, facing away from the room, turned fierce. “Jenova is a plague. I will never believe anything else. I watched her turn ancient minds, full of wisdom, totally mad. I’ve watched her torture the denizens of paradise. Once we were a court of angels and goddesses, and now we are a chest of toys and dolls for her to play with. I have seen her enter a mind and turn it around. Do you see how we have fallen? Do you even understand?”

Lulu carefully sat down beside her. “Your anger does not become you. I have seen you soft, and it was more lovely. What if Jenova, too, can be reasoned with?”

“This is maybe the hundredth planet she has tried to devour, just to feed herself. I don’t think it so.”

“So you lied,” said Yuna, from across the room. “You have no intention of trying to work with Jenova.”

“I have the intention,” Aeris snapped, and then she turned wistfully back to the window. “Just no faith that it can succeed. I did not believe in evil before she came. I thought there was no such thing. I thought that all actions could have a good end, that goodness could be found disguised in any deception, that anyone, anything, let run long enough, would eventually find their way to goodness, through the pull of her heart. It was only her that made me fall from my faith, my innocence, when she convinced me that some things could just be evil.”

Aeris folded her arms across her chest. “I miss the days when anything could be good. I long for them. I long for that faith again. And since I can’t have that, I am settling for destroying evil instead, so that others can have it. And if I can’t have that… If I can’t, if we even can’t… being allowed to heal the wounded on the battlefield of the Planet is no fair return for what I once had.”

Yuna sat beside her by the window, carefully sweeping up her skirt onto the ledge. “I know your pain,” she said softly. “I was to quest against Sin once before this, but all my guardians died except for Lulu and Rikku, and I was forced to return to my relative Cid, since everyone else was ashamed of me returning. I watched them all die, and there was nothing I could do. And it was Sin who killed them, so it would be easy to hate Sin for their deaths. Everyone hates Sin, no one would blame me. But I don’t.”

Aeris turned to her, and the hatred in her eyes was slipping away. “Don’t you?”

Yuna shook her head. “Sin was a person once, right? That’s what you’ve said. And even when I didn’t know that, I felt ashamed when I saw Sin, and knew I had been blindly trying to kill them. I felt… pain in them. They felt like my Aeons, but different. When they were there, before me, filling up the sky, when I saw them, I just felt pain, communicated to me as clearly as if they had spoken, and I knew that what I had been told about them wasn’t true.”

“Very compassionate,” said Aeris, “but didn’t you argue to Seymour that he and Jenova must both be killed?”

“Yes, I said that they must be stopped, and if they have to be killed… so be it.” Yuna placed her hands on either side of her on the mantle, balancing herself, and lowered her eyes. “I don’t want to kill anyone. I’ve already seen what that means. A soul leaves us, and for no reason, and for no gain. I would rather help them, really. But they cause so much pain, so much heartache, so much death. If they must be stopped by their death, if nothing else will stop the pain, I would be willing to take that deed on myself, and deal with what harm it does, because I still believe in the greater good. But I also believe that to hate them is a mistake. Sin is in pain. I can see it. They might not even know what they do.”

“And if Jenova is what you say she is… don’t you think she’s just the same as a fox that has to eat rabbits, or a hawk that must hunt mice? If she eats planets to live, what else can she do?  Her other option is to die in space.

“Seymour says she’s made a home here, and it may be the only home she’s ever had. Maybe she can stay here, where they would love her. I would be fine with that. But if we can’t stop her from hurting everyone… well, like I said, I could take that on myself.

“I just think that hating them is a mistake, is all. Whatever they are, it’s probably in their nature that they can’t help what they do. A person with a mind, who is cruel, them I can hate, because they chose to be that way. But if you think Jenova is no more than a disease, why hate her? And if she is a woman who can be reasoned with, why not reason with her?”

Aeris sighed, and leaned her head on the glass. “I haven’t thought it over for so long… I’ve almost forgotten why I decided the things I know now.” She rubbed her face with one hand. “It’s been so long… so much fighting… to reconsider everything now…”

Yuna placed her hands onto one of Aeris’s. “Just consider another way, that’s all I ask.”

“I’ll have to think…”

“That’s fine.”

Aeris turned away, and Yuna walked away from her with one squeeze of her hands. Lulu motioned for Yuna to sit next to her, which she did, slowly, her face absorbed.

“We already mourned for Braska,” said Lulu quietly.

Yuna shook her head. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I can’t help thinking about him whenever the subject comes up, though.”

“How about you call your cousin and let her know what’s happening here?” Lulu suggested.

Yuna fixed determination on her face and nodded. “Good idea. We may have to have them ready for a break-out if Cloud ends up in a fix.”

What her cousin and Cid had fixed up after their glorious dreams of space travel and science were destroyed by the rocket’s explosion and the deaths of many, when they had nothing else to do, and nothing else they were allowed to do anymore, looked like a tiny black mirror with many buttons on the side. They presented one to every member of the crew of the Highwind, in preparation to any conceivable missions in the future. It would link to any of the other mirrors, since there weren’t so many of them, over quite a large distance—the only problem was they never quite managed to find a way to get them to connect to just ONE other mirror instead of all of them at once. This had caused one or two unfortunate mishaps as soon as they had run the inevitable course of all technology in eventually enabling new, exciting ways to have sex.

Yuna turned hers on, and braced herself for the riot of noises from about a dozen different places that always happened when the blasted things were turned on. “This is Yuna,” she shouted awkwardly, “Can you all let Rikku talk to me? Or Cid, if she’s busy?”

Eventually, the noise dimmed into one channel, and the blurry grey screen crystallized into her cousin’s smiling face, held close to her mirror as she lounged about somewhere on the field close to the Highwind. Yuna smiled back at her. “How’s it going, sis?” Rikku asked casually. The Al Bhed half of Yuna’s family had taken her in after her disastrous quest, and she and Rikku had grown as close as sisters. “Whooping ass in Chasamaecum?”

“Not so far,” Yuna admitted. “There’s been a few complications that everyone should know about.”

Aeris tuned out most of the conversation. Despite her promise to think about what could be done with Jenova, her thoughts just turned back to Cloud. She felt deeply that she had done wrong by him. He was a man who preferred solitude, and peace, as any man would after the traumas he had been through. And now, despite being promised the revival of his health, he was travelling in a large group, stuck in crowds, and now stuck in the city of Jenova, whose influenced still plagued him.

She should have left him somewhere to heal and recover, and not brought him on the quest. She should have just tended to him by nights, leaving him in peace for the day, and focused the whole of the journey around Cid, who wasn’t afraid of these sorts of things. She should have done anything BUT force the SPIRIT veteran into dangerous, difficult situations, forcing him to deal with things he wasn’t ready to yet. Aeris’s bitterness at herself, after these solid hours of facing the mistakes she had made, which she had long denied, burned in her chest.

“I just didn’t want to leave him behind, I guess,” Aeris muttered to herself. “finding Tifa and Vincent was a stroke of serendipity… and though I was going to leave him somewhere… how could I, when even his childhood home was lost to him? Whenever I thought it was time to let him go… he looked…” Aeris shook her head.

“Can’t let him go, can’t drag him into my world in the state he’s in. I knew that any man who had gone through what he did would be a little like him… I knew it would be hard… I guess I’m letting my own feelings get in the way of what would be better for him. Well, who wouldn’t want to help him? Who wouldn’t look at him and want to try to protect him? Who wouldn’t…” She trailed away.

Was it WRONG to try to help him? She asked herself fiercely. Was it WRONG to try to give him something better than he had?

“Well,” she whispered, “if you weren’t doing that for his sake… then maybe it was. How did you know this is what he wanted? How could you know anything about him, following you around because he worshipped you?”

She sunk against the window, and imagined leaving it, and sinking through the grass and the roots and the soil to her way home, and she sighed.

Her melancholy thoughts were interrupted by a strangely broken up and static-filled screech as Rikku voiced her surprise and glee incredibly loudly through Yuna’s contraption. “Rikku!” Yuna snapped. “It isn’t like that! He’s only a gracious host.”

“But is he incredibly gracious to YOU?” asked Rikku. “That’s all I want to know. I mean, since he is a, what did you say? Handsome, thoughtful, kind, yet melancholy man? Is he mysterious and brooding too?”

“Rikku, no,” said Yuna, hiding her pink face in both hands. “He just made an impression on me. No, I mean—” Anything that she could have possibly said in her defense was drowned in Rikku’s hyena-like cackling. “This isn’t what’s important right now,” Yuna muttered. “We were talking about Cloud. Who was kidnapped by a sorceress. That’s very important. Not Seymour. Who is just being nice to us, and might become an ally. We can talk about that later. Stop laughing at me.”

“Would you approve of this alliance, Lady Yuna?” asked Rikku. “Would you find it… in our interests?”

“Rikku,” cried Yuna, and she looked so incredibly distraught that Lulu took the mirror away from her.

“In summary,” said Lulu, “We’re not aware of Strife’s current position, or that of Lockhart and Valentine, and that is causing us not a little grief. We’re using the time to make as many allies as possible, but it’s been difficult, considering the massively unique worldview of the citizens of Chasamaecum. We have a feeling we’ll be kept in the house of Seymour Disinherited until morning, at least, and we request you keep Cid on the possibility of alert far as long as we’re in the city.”

“On love alert, woo woo,” supplied Rikku.

Lulu gave her an even stare.

“Alright, alright,” Rikku said, “I’ll tell him everything. In a manner as boring as humanly possible. Is it really okay to leave that Cloud kid all alone with the witches, though? He didn’t seem very stable to me.”

Aeris turned quickly back to the window.

“That is why Lockhart insisted on staying with him,” said Lulu. “I am certain she will be very protective of the boy.”

“Still, it seems—”

“There is nothing we can do for now, Rikku. We’re in a separate diplomatic state, abiding under their laws, not trying to get the last dumpling at the dinner table.”

Why, Aeris asked herself, did she think there was NOTHING she could do for him? Why did she think she was powerless to help him, When Ultimecia’s claws closed around him?

Why did she think she could do nothing? Why did she let him go?

Eventually, the two women said goodbye to Rikku, and, after a short time conversing in whispers, they told Aeris that they were going to see what they could find in Seymour’s mansion. Despite the fact that she would normally be instantly attracted to a mission as thrilling and pointless as that, Aeris told them that she would remain where she was. They let her stay, assuming correctly that she had a lot to think about.

Oddly enough, though, she had only had some hour or so to think when she heard a knocking at the door.

“Yuna?” she asked.

“No,” said a voice, whispery and light, “it’s me, Amaya. Do you remember me? Can I come in?”

“You may,” said Aeris, though curious as to why she was calling. Even in the mood she was in, the mystery intrigued her.

The Jenovine girl slipped through just a crack in the door, closing it behind her again. Nervous, she scuttled close to where Aeris was sitting, but didn’t sit beside her. “Seymour said that you came here in a great skyship,” she blurted, and then flushed red.

“We did,” said Aeris. “He saw it?”

“His Aeon spotted it while flying,” said Amaya.

“So he does keep an Aeon.”

“Shiva grew close to him on his quest, and then denied his leave of her when she saw how his hometown rejected him.”

“I’ve noticed that that is a theme,” sighed Aeris. “The more one gives up to be a hero, the less of a hero’s welcome they are given. Yuna suffered the same fate on her pilgrimage, it seems, and Cloud has lost his home and his health… Cid lost everything for what he believed in, and who knows what stories those scattered people he has gathered around him have… people say the value those who are brave, and compassionate, and who try to take a great burden on themselves, those who make a greater change than the average human would dare to, and yet who ever seems to value them when they are done with their sacrifices? All we get is old people angry at them for stirring up the waters. What happened to the admiration of heroes?”

Amaya finally settled down next to her. “I think they only call them heroes when they’re dead,” she said. “Something about seeing them alive makes them look less heroic.”

Aeris smiled. “You think that?”

Amaya shrugged. “No, I think that’s what I’ve seen—that’s how they reacted, you know, for Seymour. He’ll always look like a hero to me.”

“I’ve actually seen quite a lot of admiration for Seymour Guado today, no matter what you may think,” Aeris said wryly. “Why are you here?”

Amaya looked down. “I want to ask you for a favor.”

“Oh?”

“When you leave, can I come on your airship with you?”

Aeris’s eyebrows raised. “That’s hard to say, it isn’t mine. It belongs to a friend of mine. Why is it you want to travel us?”

Amaya folded her hands. “I’ve been dreaming for as long as I can remember. That is, to say, are you a reincarnationist, by any chance?”

“I am.”

Amaya shuffled, grabbing her shoulder, looking away. “I’ve had dreams since I was a child. I dream about several different worlds, several different times. The worlds are always completely different—a kingdom, ruled by fey creatures, or a grey world of tall buildings and snow, far away… I know the people in my dreams. Some of them remember me, they’ve known me for a long time. I’ll dream the same dreams over and over, the same things will happen, but I’ll try to change them, bring everyone back to me, save people, keep everyone alive, try to keep everyone… keep them.” she shut her eyes. “I guess the dreams were what sparked my heretical thoughts. I couldn’t believe that the world was how they all said it was, because I knew about other worlds. I always knew reality was large, larger than can fit in one city.

“That’s why I doubted everything, even things that everyone else took for granted. That’s why I said things about Sin and Jenova that got me kicked out of the city. Because it’s hard for me to believe a simple truth, that one being embodies all the good in the world, and another all the evil. I looked for other ways to explain life, ways that might explain why I could remember, why I could taste and smell the budding flowers of a dozen worlds that aren’t Chasamaecum.

“I had pieced together, at some point, that there was one girl who appeared in more than one world, who would reappear alongside me in different worlds. A weird sort of girl. Always in trouble, always loud and hot-headed, but she was my friend. I always met her when we were children, and we were always drawn to each other, no matter where we were.

“So I started to wonder, why isn’t she here? Did she just… not come this time? Or is she somewhere else, lost? I’ve never seen her in this world. But that doesn’t mean she’s not there, right? I only dream about the past, so it doesn’t mean that she’s not there.”

“No,” mused Aeris, “It’s completely possible that such a person would be on Spira somewhere.”

“But then you think my dreams have truth to them?”

“I’ve often found myself split on the subject,” Aeris admitted, “but I’ve encountered too many true dreams to really count them as nonsense.”

“So you see why I would have cause to ask to join your journey,” Amaya pressed, “since I am seeking someone important to me that I would never find here.”

“I see why,” said Aeris, “and personally, I have no objection to the idea. I see ways you could help the rest of us, even, a few ways. Though… well, never mind about that,” she said, waving a doubt away. “Cid is protective of who gets on his ship and who doesn’t, though, so I’m not the obstacle you would have to surmount.”

Amaya considered her situation silently. She was an introspective person, Aeris noted, which must have partly explained her susceptibility to ideas and strains hidden from others. Yet, despite being introspective, she did not seem an irresolute person. “I am sure I could find a way of payment. I would not be sneaking out in the night, I’ll speak to Seymour about my plans, and he could provide Mr. Cid with any number of things he could want. I mean, well, I’ll have to do some sneaking, it won’t do to have anyone in the city to realize one of us is leaving, even if I was already exiled… odd system, isn’t it?”

“So it is,” said Aeris. “An entirely idiosyncratic city, from what I’ve seen. I’m not lying when I say I would like to take some time studying it. A lot of my… malcontent in being here just surfaces from remembering what was here before, when the land was flat.”

“Guadosalam,” said Amaya curiously. “The thought of that city has come upon me before, at night. It’s curious to me, that a city died for ours to be born. It’s curious to me that no one really thinks of that. It’s curious that there are no excavations, no relics, no preserved castles or mansions.”

“Guadosalam,” breathed Aeris, “is maybe not a bad analogue for Chasamaecum after all. There were strange things there, strange portals that led to mysterious places. The most famed of all… there was a dark source, that led to an undying land. From here the Moonflow originally sprang. And in here, once, were the seat of Spirits older than Ancients, Spirits of other races, from the nigh-sourceless memory of the Guado, Spirits who ruled and reigned, Spirits, often, with an affinity for the water, Spirits even that crawled out of the water, along with the minds of primordial fish.”

Amaya’s eyes were quite wide. “Do you think these Spirits may still have voices yet?”

“I have no doubt that they do.”

Amaya was in decision for a minute, twisting her silken shawl in her hand. She said, “I can fight, and I can do magic, if he needs such things. I know an art no one else has seen.”

“I already think I would like you along,” said Aeris, holding up her hands. “And I think, between us, we have enough arguments to badger Cid into taking up one more passenger. Don’t worry overmuch about earning your place on board, just settle your things here and wait for us to get a better idea of when we’ll leave. In the end, I can’t deny a journey to anyone who truly wants one.”

Somehow, her heart panged again when she said that.

Amaya smiled brightly, and, clasping both her hands in front of her, she thanked Aeris effusively. “I know you don’t have to help me, and I’m very grateful that you will. I was sure I would die if I travelled alone.”

“Dreadful,” said Aeris. “No one at all will have to die.”

“No one at all, wouldn’t that be wonderful,” Amaya said, wistfully, not really thinking on the subject. She jumped away, ready to head out. “I’ll be speaking with Seymour, settling things with him,” she said. “It would be much better to have his support in this.”

“That’s what we think, too,” said Aeris. “Any extra bond would help.”

Amaya, smiling, had her hand on the door before Aeris took a breath one more time. “Speaking of bonds—it occurs to me, more and more, that, even with the previous Spirits of water driven out, this city remains its affiliation with water. Jenova seems to always surround herself with it, like a sea creature.”

Amaya was half out the door. “You know,” she said, “though I hadn’t known the history before, now that you say so… it is odd.”

Aeris smiled. “Perhaps it’s just because we are so close to the Moonflow. You can taste the rapids in the air sometimes, bright and damp.”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” Amaya said, and then, “thank you once more,” and then she slipped out of the doorway like a fish.

Well distracted from her previous problems, Aeris decided to slip her mind a bit into the underground waters in the soil below her. After all, she wouldn’t have to worry about being caught up by the grumbling Lifestream in a place like this.

Water, at the end of the day, wasn’t her element. It was, and it wasn’t. It’s not like anything made water vastly different from earth except for its opinion of itself, since they were made of the same details. A person wouldn’t notice particles of dirt in the water, and a person wouldn’t notice rainwater slipping into the ground past the grass blades, because they were supposed to be there. Spira and water has always been a harmony, it was only the unique power of the ocean and the seas that separated them. Things were different on the land, mostly.

Different, because the water still whispered different things. It had its own soul. It was like an older sibling, which had taken their influence completely form another parent.

And an older sibling for sure. Somehow, water always felt predominant over land, and even Aeris knew that. It must be the age. Water was alive and aware first, after all. There were sea serpents long before dragons.

The water, in its streams under the rocks, was just... dark, here. It was choked up, with dirt and other things. There were little creatures in it, with abundant life, in every little stream and rivulet. But those little things fed on little proteins that were not formed in the Oceans of Spira. They came from another water.

Another water makes another blood. Aeris felt around, and when the waters slithered around her skin, they felt heavy, oily, strange. It was the blood for a different race, in which proteins, cells, chains of carbon backbones, enzymes, everything, found different spiraling shapes, different angles to turn in. It stuck oddly over the pores of her skin. She would remember the smell, if nothing else.

It was obvious, of course, what was in the water. But Aeris was trying if she could find a mind in it, or, lacking a mind, a heart. Even a root system would satisfy her.

But after some time in the black, still waves, going deeper in deeper under Chasamaecum, in waters that always flowed towards Chasamaecum, always delving deeper into the bedrock, she found herself unable to breathe.

Which was odd, because she could breathe in water.

She surfaced, taking a heavy breath, her glazed eyes still staring out at the setting sun beyond the window.

 

-

 

Cloud was reminded, uncomfortably, of the drawings of lavish rooms in tales of far away places, bejeweled with colorful curtains and festooned with lilies in gilded vases, where foreign kings would keep all of their beauties. Perhaps it was only the abundance of witches that reminded him.

Tifa was clutching  his arm, in a protective manner, looking about as affronted as she looked wary. He got the idea that she really didn’t like the company, and he didn’t want to be impolite, but the touch still bothered him a little. It was like having something slimy on one’s arm and being unable to brush it off.

Not that Tifa was slimy. She wasn’t. But she was clinging to his arm, and Cloud just didn’t like that sort of touch at all, from anyone. The feeling of two soldiers, back to back, against an enemy army, however, was somewhat comforting to him. That he could deal with.

There was some incense in the air, and normally he would like that, the scent of white flowers and smoke would remind him of temples and stormy days, but here the feeling of being lulled and soothed just set him on edge. So did the sound of water running over metal, beyond the walls, from beyond to somewhere, mysterious in origin. This, normally, was also a comforting sensation. Now, it had all the cheer of a frightening, unloved aunt trying to lull him to sleep in the way his mother would, by means of a lullaby whose notes were flat.

It wasn’t just the many pairs of green eyes, like jade-colored stars, peering and flickering from all around the spacious, lamp-lit room, dark like the night. Sure, the presence of strangers always put him on edge. He hadn’t exactly felt comfortable since… well, since it was just him and Aeris. There was always too much… noise, and stuff, and people now. People still bothered him. People would always bother him. Every time he was around a lot of people, he just… he was reminded of the body. Of blood. Of the body’s cycles, fluid and flaking skin and digestion, from dust to dust. He could hear them swallow, and breathe, see them scratch an itch, smooth their hair. People were so… biological. Maybe that’s why he saw bugs all the time. Bugs and spores. It was that he was haunted with rot.

That’s why the witches were so unpleasant, anyway. It was all those little millipede legs he saw, struggling along the surface of sweaty skin.

And that’s why he didn’t like Tifa clutching his arm so much. She wasn’t a bad person. She was a really nice person, actually, and he often felt sorry for her. He figured he should act nicer towards her, he didn’t like how he always upset her with his dark ideas. He just… well… didn’t like the closeness.

Eventually, it got to be so much for him that he just twitched away involuntarily. Tifa let him go, figuring he had gone to sleep in his pose, and just sort of sat with him, back to back.

That he was fine with. Presence was always better than person for him. He just… he didn’t hate people, really. Not what was in them. Not usually. Not when he was in his best mind.

But he couldn’t claim he was in his best mind often. Even he knew that.

One of the witches was coming towards them. She wasn’t slinking, she wasn’t strutting, and she wasn’t trying to intimidate. Cloud knew to look out for all of that. She was just walking, hands clasped, a little shy, and he figured she was just staring.

She sat down, though. She was a lanky sort of girl, looked young, and wide-eyed, but, like every witch, brightly and specifically colored. Cloud had gathered that the people lived in the temple got in on a basis of genetic superiority, since he had seen some slight color variation outside. But not in here. Here, they were universally platinum-haired, universally paper-skinned, and universally of a shape like a porcelain vase, thin, unexaggerated.

The witch had a curious look about her as she glanced around the both of them. Cloud was looking at the floor, but he was defensive, tight in every joint, and Tifa was cross-armed, straight-backed, leaning a bit over Cloud, clearly offensive. The witch weighed her chances, spending some minutes with her hand on her cheek, and then spoke to them. “I heard it was Seifer who brought you in,” she said. “I’m Rinoa. I’m his girlfriend.”

Tifa expressed her disbelief with a low sound in her throat. “Really? You can’t be alone in that position then.”

Rinoa looked confused by the turn in the conversation, but not affronted. “I’m not. He’s a knight, after all, so his first duty is to Lady Ultimecia, since she chose him. But he and I aren’t related in any taboo way, you know, so no one minds that he spends time with me either.”

“Huh,” said Tifa.

“We haven’t had a child yet, since I’m still a bit young, but we’re hoping,” said Rinoa.

Tifa looked at her critically. “What, you must be at least eighteen, nineteen. It isn’t too young for a child.”

Rinoa looked even more confused. “Well, I didn’t mature that long ago, and they’d be worried about my health, so…”

 “What, are you trying to tell me that Jenovine women don’t mature until the age of, like, sixteen or something? Bullshit. I mean, you’re all really thin and flat and all, but still…” She looked at Rinoa’s pink cheeks, and halted her rant abruptly. “Wow, that is what you’re trying to tell me.”

Rinoa put a hand over her mouth. “Wait, then are you trying to say…”

“I got my training bra when I was twelve,” said Tifa seriously. “I’m… really starting to wonder what happens in this place. You mature so old, you look so fragile, but they apparently want you to have children as soon as possible? Regardless of partner, or something? Is that safe?”

“Well, it’s not as if you just have children with anyone,” Rinoa sniffed. “We’re very careful about choosing genetically sound partners and all.”

“That… is unambiguously weird.”

“Hey, Tifa…” Cloud whispered, making implicit the sense that she was going too far. She didn’t seem to be listening, though, so Cloud decided to just keep staring into the distance.

Talk about woman’s troubles didn’t bother him any more than talk about the rest of the body’s ills, he just didn’t want to be talking at all. He was too nervous. He felt too… trapped. He felt too much like he was in a corner, and any talking just… thickened the air. It was hard to say. He could only think that the scents, that the sounds, that the gazes and the sheets of silk and the glares of the light on the metal, cast off of little lamp-flames, were already bad, and the voices made it all exponentially worse.

‘I just want you to know that, comparatively, this city is a really weird place,” Tifa concluded. “As some perspective.”

Rinoa steepled her fingers. “Well, what’s so weird about it?” she asked defensively. “Of course we all want children. We cherish our children. We want strong children, ideal children, children who resemble their mother, so we plan for them. Is there something wrong with that?”

“I guess not,” Tifa conceded, “It’s just sort of the devotion you people have to all looking alike. I was taught that children that came from genetically similar people have defects, you know.”

“We know that too,” Rinoa argued, crossing her hands. “That’s why we have the taboo relationships listed out, so we don’t make any deficient children. We’re not stupid. We care about our children, so we try to give them the best genetic code possible.”

“And the best genetic code is… what? Are you going for some ideal person? Or are you aiming to make clones one day? Either way it’s kind of weird. Where I grew up, any genetic code was perfectly well and good if you didn’t get ‘asshole’ encoded into it.”

Rinoa seemed to pout a little. She looked like she wanted to continue arguing, but wasn’t sure where to go with it. “Well, where are you from?” she finally asked, putting her hands on her hips.

“Cloud,” said Tifa, pointing with her thumb, “and I are both native to the Thunder Plains, where it’s always stormy and we still worship the Ancient Ones. We’re from the town of Nibelheim.”

“The SAME town?” asked Rinoa incredulously. Some of the other witches also looked over, seeming concerned about what they had just heard.

“Yeah, I know, we have different hair colors,” said Tifa. “Well, for one thing, Cloud’s father came from Bevelle, we suspect he was some sort of up-and-up from a business there, but his mother is a bit cagey about it.”

“He was ShinRa,” Cloud whispered, almost involuntarily correcting her.

“What, for real? He was in the company? I wouldn’t have guessed,” Tifa said.

It was a slight misconception, but Cloud had already bitten his tongue.

“But yeah, the gene pool is just a little deeper at home than it seems to be here,” Tifa said. “Which is why this place weirds me out. It’s like you’re… tailoring your kids, I guess.”

“Our children will be how they are meant to be,” said Rinoa, sounding affronted.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a lesson that the Sorceresses tell the children,” she sighed. “See the towers of our city? See their admirable order? See the ways the streets ascend, court by court? See how the purity of our people rises with the courts? Surely things are laid out how they are supposed to be, and surely, as it is evident that things are ordered without, that things will be ordered within. Or don’t they teach you on the Thunder Plains that a mother carries her completed children inside her anyway?” 

“Uh,” said Tifa, “you’ve lost me.” She elbowed Cloud. Cloud looked at her in exasperation that was almost colored by annoyance by now instead of just fear.

Rinoa rolled her eyes, but whatever she was about to say, she was interrupted by a knock on the door. Recognizing the tone, she grinned, and jumped up, ignoring the outsiders to run to the door, parting the clouds of incense as she went. She had barely let the man into the room before she sprung on him, laughing, arms around his neck, snuggling close to him, throwing the loose silks of her dress around his shoulders. He lifted her easily, after putting his blade in the corner of the room, grasping her in his arms, bringing all the fabric and scent of her in a cloud around him. The other witches laughed and waved, and greeted Seifer with unanimous positivity.

Cloud thought that if Tifa glowered any more, she might snap a tooth in half. He was glad that she was unsettled by the whole city. Maybe for different reasons, sure, but he was glad she was unsettled. He had come to appreciate Tifa, he realized, as a solid person, stubborn, perhaps, but stubbornness is blessed when one longs for a steady reality. Tifa’s ideas would never change quickly. She could reliably give him an objective idea of reality, which he valued.

Knight Seifer spotted the two outsiders sitting in the far corner, where they had been placed in almost a circle of lamp wicks and flowering vases, and walked briskly too them, not paying any attention to the calls that plied him. He set Rinoa down to the floor, almost brusquely, though he smiled, and then sat them both opposite of Cloud and Tifa. “Rinoa’s been filling your heads with stories, then?”

“I’m just trying to explain some things to them,” she said, instantly defensive. “You wouldn’t believe what they don’t—”

Seifer laid a hand on Rinoa’s cheek, with a meaningful glance, and, as if she had interpreted a code, Rinoa went silent. She looked at Seifer pleadingly, but he held up a finger. “Rinoa should know,” she said, before casting his eyes on Tifa and Cloud, “that it’s pointless to bother the heads of outsiders with the details of our private lives. They wouldn’t be interested, yes?”

It couldn’t have been plainer to Cloud if Seifer had shouted it. Tifa was something of a soldier too, and she responded cooly. “I was having a hard time following her lessons anyway.”

Seifer laughed. “Rinoa is a conversationalist and a hostess, not a teacher, that’s the problem. It’s Quistis you should speak to if you really want to learn about Chasamaecum, she’s a professor, she can explain things in the right way.”

“Of course.”

“Well,” Seifer said, stretching out a bit, “I suppose I’m just here to tell you that Lady Ultimecia is ready to have an audience with Strife whenever he is ready, but no one can resist a nice conversation in this place. It really makes you feel relaxed, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, is that so hard with you?” Rinoa teased.

“Just Cloud?” Tifa asked.

Her voice was a knife. Seifer turned to her slowly, eyes suddenly tougher. “Well,” said Seifer, “that’s the idea of a private audience. She wishes to get to know Cloud Strife, what purpose would you serve?”

“Get to know him?” asked Tifa, in an unmistakable, clearly accented hiss.

Seifer twisted his neck. “Rinoa has been telling you stories then? She sensationalizes everything, you know.”

“I was just explaining,” she insisted. “It’s not my fault they don’t know ANYTHING, I just wanted to be friendly.”

“Cloud will go with me,” said Tifa, not to be deflected, “or he won’t go.”

Seifer looked at her with a bit of annoyance. “Can’t you understand? She’s a high sorceress, and when she holds such an audience, it’s private. It won’t be tea and cookies, she’ll be searching for a connection—”

“She won’t do that,” Tifa declared.

“What?” asked Seifer.

“She cannot do that. I’m sure you can all tell, even in your weird, removed world, that Cloud is not well, does not like to converse with strangers, and most certainly won’t tolerate the sort of embarrassing scrutiny you’re proposing. It won’t do. She’ll speak to him normally, face to face, as anyone would speak to him, and I’ll be there for it.”

Cloud had no comment. He was string at Tifa’s jacket on the ground beside her. He was studying the threads, the warp and the woof, the tight, careful knots.

“That is impossible,” said Seifer shortly.

“It’s perfectly possible. I just go with him when he leaves. You can even blame me for being uncontrollable if the Sorceress minds.”

Though Tifa wouldn’t have been able to tell, it was the word ‘uncontrollable’ that did it. The meanings of the word ‘control’, to a Jenovine, would be lost in translation, but there was a sort of love in it, and it was a social necessity. Seifer bared his teeth in a violent moment, and his eyes flashed bright, but he was met with Tifa’s absolutely unmoving stare. He calmed down for the moment. “Her orders are law. She will see Strife alone. You don’t have any reason to oppose this command. He will not be harmed. She wants to become a friend to him, do you understand?”

Tifa did not. “I am uneasy anyway. Besides, I am employed to guard Cloud, and I would be unapologetically remiss to not go with him now. Would you send your Lady into a situation like this alone, Knight?”

“You—“ said Seifer, and a worried Rinoa clung to his arm, eyes wide. Tifa could sense he had a problem with anger, of course, but she couldn’t have known it was considered a nigh-fatal genetic flaw. She only knew that ruffling a Jenovine was actually more fun than watching a cat become drenched. And, ideally, rnore effective in getting them to slink away. “I am never remiss in my duties towards my Lady Ultimecia. She is an ideal even among radiant sorceresses such as these, she is gentle, and she is patient, and she wields her power with the softest hand. It is an insult that you think you have anything to fear.”

Tifa was not a slippery woman. She could pick and choose her words only up to a point. Even knowing it wasn’t wise, there wasn’t much she could do about her speech once she became angry or frustrated enough.

“I don’t believe you.”

Seifer’s strike was sudden and sharp, and the momentum of his body tore Rinoa away from him, wrenching a shriek from her. Tifa countered him almost quickly enough—her shoulders jolted backwards, but her legs stayed where they were on the floor. Cloud was frozen where he was, even though he could see Seifer’s face, suddenly, close, detailed, staring from his side at Tifa.

Tifa forced him away with an unexpected punch to the gut and rose to her knees, standing as fast as she could. Seifer followed her, almost hissing, quick to recover if it meant he was quick to return a punch. Just when Tifa was on her feet, she had to jump back to miss a tight-fisted blow, and, using the momentum of her duck, she whirled back close to him and aimed for his face with her metal-encrusted knuckles.

To most everyone’s shock, her blow connected. The Ranger’s job, when they were not travelling or trading, was entirely undignified fist fighting. Seifer yowled, and when he turned to face her again, his visage was that of a Berserker’s, goaded into rage.

He grabbed a vase from where it stood and swung it at her head, one-handed. Tifa cursed, and her metal fist found the blow, trying to push it away, but shards flew everywhere. When the spectators opened their eyes again, Seifer’s hand was locked into Tifa’s, where he held it, but his other hand was aiming for her side, where her lungs would be.

She wrenched away from him violently enough to set them both off balance, and, as part of her recovery, kicked him with a steel-toed boot in the shin. Enraged, he punched at her stomach, while her upper body was still pulled back, and, in that poorly planned moment, Tifa realized she was very likely about to slip backwards. “Cloud!!”

Cloud was standing up. Cloud had something in his hand, something he had grabbed, he didn’t know what. Cloud was in front of Seifer. Cloud saw Seifer’s face, and then Seifer was being knocked backwards.

He hadn’t done it in a long time. He hadn’t even really meant to do it. But he had been trained to do it.

Seifer was up, fist clenched, jaw set, just in time for one of the witches in the back of the room to finish her brewing spell. The three of them were each frozen where they stood—porcelain dust frozen around them—Cloud’s hand frozen in front of his face, Tifa frozen out of balance. The silence, after a second, came with harsh breathing, with frightened whispers, with the eventual tapping of hesitant feet.

“It’s a powerful stop spell,” said the witch, hesitating, “They’ll all be like this for a few minutes.”

They began to speak, worried, among themselves. “Thank you, Xu,” someone said. Rinoa walked, slowly, very slowly, up to Seifer, and with shaking hands, she grasped his arm, and leaned her head against his shoulder.

“Ultimecia,” someone decided, and she came almost as soon as she was called.

Her hair was down, loose, incredibly long, and her gown alone kept it from reaching the floor. She appeared like a snake, hidden in the vines of the trees, and slid through the room just as quickly, quietly, unexpectedly as a snake would. Her hands she held up against the other, nails clicking, as she observed what had happened, silently, and met with silence.

“I’ll speak to each in turn,” she said, “but bring Cloud Strife with me now, as I said I would. Consider what to do among yourselves while I am gone.”

She touched Cloud Strife, and he let out a sudden, heaving breath, and his hand clutched his face. He was panicking. She pulled his arm away from his face, interlaced his fingers with hers, put his arm by his side, all slowly, all quietly. She put his chin up with a finger, spoke power with it, silenced the reaction of flight. He would not tremble, though he felt the tremble. His eyes were on Tifa, who was snarling, but he didn’t dare say anything about her as he was led out of the room, physically, at Ultimecia’s side.

 

-

 

Where she took him, he couldn’t say. She had her hand fondly on his shoulder as they walked, only lightly, a guiding touch rather than a controlling force. It could have bothered him more. She could have bothered him more. She was so quiet. She spoke so sparingly. The air around her, like a heavy perfume, made him feel sick to his stomach, but she, as herself, was so unobtrusive, so still a presence, that he couldn’t be offended.

Of course, he knew not to slip into her charm. But it got mixed up in the relief he felt from being gone from the battle. He was reminded of the sensation of being on Mount Gagazet, where he lived for years, being in the chill wind, and watching the wild flowers toss, colors glittering out of the grassy waves here and there as the breeze revealed them. It was a feeling of serenity. Oh, serenity more like that which a pool in a dark cave had, but still serenity.

They went down a spiral stair case, well lit by the lamps in the wall, behind a carved bronze gate. Through the gate, Cloud saw rooms full of witches, apprentices, and civilians preforming ceremonies, and they turned to him as he and Ultimecia passed, to hail her. Their eyes disappeared above him as they continued to descend.

“This is the spine,” said Ultimecia at some point.

“It’s nice,” Cloud said.

It was, after all. Here, in the inside of the temple, the walls were made of metal and of embedded gems, not cold stone. The stairs were covered in some sort of moss, which served as a carpet, and the floor and the ceiling were so high above and below it was like being suspended in space. The drop was not pleasant, certainly. But the way down was like a vertical labyrinth, contemplative.

“Are you frightened?” asked Ultimecia.

It wasn’t a question he could answer. No, not when he was staring down the stairs, into the darkness, reminded as he was of the Nibelheim mansion. The thought brought up memories of Zack’s ghosts, of ghosts in general, and this wasn’t so unpleasant a topic for him. But when he saw her in the side of his view, her silver hair shivering this way or that, or a pale wrist floating in the air, he wasn’t so sure.

“I’m nervous,” he finally said.

“We’re walking to a place called the Plexus,” said Ultimecia. “It’s normally a place for meditation. I wouldn’t be worried about anything.”

Cloud didn’t know what to say.

“I’ve seen that the presence of Our Mother bothers outsiders,” Ultimecia said. “I’m not blind to your fears. I know what you really think. It isn’t a trap. It will all be best for you. You’ll see that there’s nothing to be scared of.”

“Is it true… is what I’ve heard true,” said Cloud, “that She has a body here?”

Ultimecia thought. “How would you have heard of this?”

When Cloud didn’t reply, when he looked downwards, and his lips worked, as he tried to find a reply, she came to her own conclusion. It was mostly correct. After all, there had to be a reason he felt like She did.

Arching off of the Spine were many doors, and the stopped outside of one of the largest. Inside the golden door, framed with palms, was a room with a feeling of depth, of vastness, and of silence, like that of a cave. it was large, very large, made of pale stone, the floor was sunken, there was a gate leading to a pathway on the opposite side, a pathway which disappeared into darkness.

“We go there,” Ultimecia said, “but not into a maze. I have a private room. Follow me.”

She opened the gate and brought him into a place full of thin hallways of stone, dark, empty, as far as he could tell. They were lit sparingly, so that the light would be even, and they were uniformly undecorated. She brought him in just a few turns, where there was a place with a sign on the wall, a sign of a woman with a spear in her hands. She opened the door, which was hidden, and revealed a golden room.

The walls were mosaics, made of lacquered tile lit up by scaled of gold and eyes of crystal, making designs of fish, of ancient witches, of reeds growing on the Moonflow’s shore, and, on the far end of the circular room, a map of space. In an inner circle, bordered with flecks of opal, was a map of the sun and of the planets around it, though Cloud hadn’t known of all of them before. In outer circles were more details maps, maps of the stars as seen from Spira, maps of strange blobs of many colors that held dozens of golden stars within, maps of the far reaches of outer space, places which no man had knowledge about.

Cloud was staring at this wall, entranced. There were other things in this room, it was furnished, it was decorated, but the map of the stars seized him immediately. Ultimecia smiled. “It’s a pride of mine,” she admitted. “My Mother gives me such knowledge, knowledge that a human mind could not itself obtain.”

“So it’s a real map of the skies?” He asked, hushed.

“Of course it is. She has been there. She knows how the universe looks.”

Cloud was silenced for a while. “I’m just a man from the plains,” he admitted. “I never aspired to know these things. But things like this… knowledge of the planet, knowledge of the sky…” he didn’t know what to say about it, really. It was a strange pull he felt, tugging on his heart, to a place he couldn’t discern.

Ultimecia drew close to him. “We all thirst for knowledge,” she said. “All people. The difference about the Jenovines is that we have it. The Mother has spoken to us, and we know what she knows. And there isn’t a question she can’t answer.”

Cloud glanced at Ultimecia over his shoulder. “I can’t be won over like that,” he said.

Perhaps she was surprised because she figured he was easy to persuade. Perhaps she wasn’t. Either way, she didn’t show it, but walked to his side. “There isn’t a battle happening here, if that’s what you think,” she said, standing beside him.

He stared evenly at the wall in front of him. Ultimecia tapped her own long fingernails on the other wrist. “You won’t tell me anything of why you are the way you are?” she asked. “Can’t you feel that this place is like you? Don’t you feel like you’ve come home?”

Cloud’s stomach clenched uncomfortably.

“If all the souls in the world rang like bells,” said Ultimecia, “we would be the tuners. We want to ring the perfect tone. If you can’t hear that you’re perfectly in tune here, you are deaf. Or, if all the souls of the world were lights, why can’t you feel that you’re in the presence of the brightest? I’m not trying to confuse you.” She turned slightly, just to face him. “I’m confused. Why do you feel uneasy? Why are you fighting to reject her presence? Shouldn’t it feel right to you?”

Cloud, though subtly, wrapped his arms tighter around his body, his chin tilting down. Ultimecia stepped forward to touch, just lightly, the mural of the stars.

“A thousand thousand years ago,” she began, without warning, “Jenova came from the stars. She had travelled far, and had no form. She was a Spirit of the sky, who had taken shelter in a great stone, and the stone had taken shelter in her. She was a Spira to herself.

“When she saw that people lived on our world, she became envious, and hoped to live here, with us, but she was barred by the ancient, tribal gods of the world, who were hostile and warring, and defended their territories against her.  The tribal gods of Spira were young gods, and they fought her for their territory. They could not understand her, she who was so much older than them, or her peaceful ways, her desire to share the planet. They assumed she wanted to conquer, to rule.

“She found refuge with a godless people. Their gods had abandoned them, cruelly, when the humans had been so bereft of animals and crops that they had nothing to sacrifice to the old gods. You see, these people were under a curse of infertility. They were a wan people, and their children, whenever quickened in the womb, were like to die at birth, or be extinguished before birth in blood and pain.

“Jenova, seeing their suffering, wept, because she was also a childless mother. She adopted them, and said she would bless them with fertility, if they could promise the barest of sacrifices to her—a child’s devotion.

“When the people agreed, she took her home in their land and her seat in the chasm, and she lightened their wombs with her own seed, so that the people would have her appearance, and a soul devoted to her. Everything she did was devised to bring them more in love with her, and demonstrate more her love for them.

“To show our devotion to our mother, we strive to walk in her footsteps, to have her thoughts, to know her soul with our soul, the cheifest of closenesses. She gave us our children, so we give our children to her, teach them about her, teach them devotion to her, and consider the greatest gift to be a child whose genetics are most like hers, with the fewest mutations. She chose us all as hers, so we chose her as ours.

“It is not only a debt that drives us. The relationship of mother and child, though perhaps the strangest of all relationships, is reciprocal all the same. She gives us endless gifts, powers of the bdoy and the mind, freedom from the pains of the diseases of this world, as we are transformed form the stuff of this world to the stuff that makes us her—dust to her dust, ashes to her ashes.

“No curse of this earth, no disease, no famine, no age that comes from this Spira can harm a Jenovine, because we trust in her, entirely, give our bodies to her, and she protects us from all Spira’s ills. On death, our body is given to her, and she reuses the flesh and the soul. Our relationship is symbiotic, because, in all truth, it isn’t a relationship of a person to a god, but a spirit to a spirit, and indeed, we are the same spirit as her.

“To be one with her, in her spirit, then we must have her divine powers, powers of magic, powers to manipulate, powers to grow or to crush, and powers of the mind, of thought, and of intellect. To share these things, sometimes she just teaches us, sometimes she gives us abilities beyond those of the people of Spira.

“What you should know, Cloud, what you should have seen by now, is that she gave you, too, some of her divine powers. Have your sorceresses kept that from you?”

Cloud’s mind was shuddering with panic, shuddering as chemicals warning him of danger and deceit buffeted him. “Aeris said—” he said, which was unfortunate, because he hadn’t meant to speak out loud.

Ultimecia’s head moved around as quickly and seamlessly as a bird’s might have. “Oh, Aeris? That strange woman… what did she say to you?”

Cloud shook his head. “Only that she thought I might have some powers. Nothing.”

“Powers like what?”

“…like a Fayth’s.”

Ultimecia sneered just lightly, her upper lip trying to purse, but stopped by her composure. “What you have in common with the Fayth…” she said, turning around again, “Is only the imprisonment of your own soul. The Fayth are the slaves of old gods, and you, too, have been made a slave in your soul. Can you not feel the chains that bind you, all around your mind, all around your body, bind you in such strange, contorted position?”

Cloud didn’t mean to laugh, honestly. He was aware that now wasn’t the time to be disrespectful. But really, really, how could he not know? How could he be unaware of his chains? His bitter noises, like barks, made Ultimecia approach him, face full of feeling.

“You are meant to be one of us,” she declared, “and I will show you.”

Cloud put a hand before his face.

“Do not be frightened,” she said, “do not cower at the mystery. You do not know yet, but there is nothing shocking behind the revelation. When the wave washes over you, it will only be water.”

“I don’t want to be one of you.”

“Do you think your fate lies elsewhere? Where? Fate draws you to where you fit, and a restless soul continues to wander until it settles down where it was meant to be. The Mother rested in the crater once she came here. We wander in circles until we find the Mother. You want to wander the land, knowing that you were meant to be here, and for what? This is where your soul means to rest. There is no use in wandering.”

 Behind his own trembling limbs, where his face was hidden, he saw her drawing ever closer. She was quiet, she was not looming. What was it about her which made her unfrightening? Why was it, that though something that terrified Cloud loomed over her, when his eyes fixed on her, did he feel comforted?

Was it that she was a little right?

Was it only that she was another priestess, another magician, in a long line? After all, those who wielded power had had him in their hands for as long as memory served. He was born into the Plains cult, he was taken into the arms of the  scientists, who meddled with the powers of gods, and wielded madness as sure as power, and blended them inside, and he was taken, in turn, by Aeris, by what even she admitted was a fate without control, and he was in the hammock of her hands for some time, though his skin felt cold, before here he was again, with arms outstretched to him, another power, another avatar, he saw suddenly, another god in human form, of which he had seen several, playing heaven’s game with him.

Why him, no one could have said.

More arms outstretched, he saw, he saw a tree, blooming in the desert, and all the blossoms were fingers on interwoven limbs, because the tree… was a memory. He knew it was. And the green eye, had that not been the crater?

“Don’t you feel it? How can you not?” asked Ultimecia. “You’re doing it now.”

Cloud’s vision was blurry and strange. Ultimecia’s green eyes appeared between her fingers, with the filaments of her hair here and there, as if pointing far away. Aeris had had such things. They were her blood vessels, really, though he had avoided mentioning them, since she was so kind as to not mention is limp, his scars, his ugly face. They were there to attach her to Spira, because surely, like a fetus, she would have been dead without it. How could she think she was not infected with the madness of the core, he wondered, when she was just a young offshoot?

He remembered her face turning away with tears. Perhaps it was because he was looking into her eyes. He was frightened. He felt himself, as if he were fainting, pulling farther and farther away from where he was. Images passed in front of his eyes like waves.

So what if he hadn’t known Aeris? Did he expect to? She was, after all, a type of puppet—a golem, that’s what she called her. A golem. Just earth come from earth. But what else could he call himself? Like everything else. A body, set forth by the gods, and bearing their stamp, working their will.

Like her, too. Ultimecia.

Ultimecia was patient, but it wasn’t a patience born of compassion, truly, it was a tactic used for persuasion. When her patience was paid off in Cloud’s arguments dying away, she didn’t much mind if it was fear or acceptance that had silenced him.

There were quiet fingers on his face. After all, he knew this. Delicate organs, which humans don’t have, small enough to slip among atoms, seek and find, the tentacles of an ocean creature sifting the sand. What was amazing was how much it wasn’t different, wasn’t different at all, these people, these such priestesses, who were their own race, the race of the god-blessed, but they were all the same. The people all really looked similar. They had the same flesh. Gods, Fayth, the Ancients, Jenova, are the eternal biologists, influencing this, tweaking that, running experiments, with this town as a control group, this young boy as the test rat. Administer this element, administer that, what happens?

What she did, what Ultimecia did, was not as neat as unlocking a lock, surely not, the combination code was all around his mind, but it was easy enough to see, easy to discover which receptors, which synapses—though what she was doing and what she thought she was doing were entirely different. Magic is an art of faith, science of understanding, and she was a creature of faith. The magician can do even that which he does not understand, and so, fingers over his ear, where an unwitting opening was, she unlocked his power.

Now does she put me to sleep, so she can work on me? Cloud wondered.

Sleep no more, Ultimecia thought. You are awake.

Cloud’s thoughts stopped.

Ultimecia… was not shaking. Then what was she doing? She was standing still. Then what was all of… that?

Some call it the aura. How does it look to you?

Like waves breaking everywhere, green and grey, coming from you, beating against you—drawn into a storm system. You’re the eye. Of the storm. Green and bright.

Ultimecia drew away from his mind. He could see her lines and the threads, pulling back into a center, retracting, like cat’s claws.

But he could feel… see… what was it? It was in-between a sight and a sensation, flickering in his vision, as if he saw it in his head, and not with his eyes. Colors, similar, not that, spaces, in the air, of increased weight, of density, shocks of electricity, fluctuating, that he felt. She felt it, then he did, registered in random spaces in his guts, one here, another there, somewhere in his head, in his heart or his neck, somewhere, as if he had grown new organs, in every place, for a new sense, a sixth sense, one which was detecting… what?

“Emotions, memories, your feelings from long ago…” said Ultimecia droningly, as if to herself, “what a person feels right now, their thoughts, their secrets, what is involving their mind, you could know all of it. Haven’t you had visions of the future? Haven’t you seen ghosts? Haven’t you known another person’s heart and feelings without them saying a word?”

“So this?”

“You have a sensing mind, a power we call Psychic. I have it too. It is the greatest of Jenova’s gifts, and only those with her blood will have it. It is how she sees all. It is how she sees us now. Your eyes are open. Now, can you see her?”

Shafts of darkness, in the room?

“Is it”

Dark, but solid. Not solid, of course. None of it was. He couldn’t really see any of it, not with his eyes, but it was a vision all the same. Images swerved and tossed all around the part of his mind that usually told his moods, felt eyes on him, and sensed danger; but they were not just images; the curtain lifted on a black box theatre, and there were actors everywhere, and an orchestra played.

No, they looked like ribbons, shimmering ribbons, black and green. They would pulsate. They tore through the room, they wove over and in Ultimecia’s skin. And he was still staring at his hands—

Through the roof, the mightiest vein, like a jugular. Far, far away, through rooves and walls and wandering black spots, to a place he could see without eyes. It was the lucidity of adrenaline and fear. “When you said we were all connected to the mother,”

“Biologically,” she said, “though not many can see it.”

That was all for Cloud. Staring at the eye of the darkness, staring back, being stared upon, the darkness overtook all of his vision, and for a while, he was gone.

 

-

 

It would be safe to say that Tifa was less than happy.

Sure, it was the first time she had been in a dungeon; outside of her training, where commanders from other towns would pretend to imprison her so she could prove that she could get out; but that wasn’t what made her so very unhappy. Yes, she had been separated from Cloud, and no, she couldn’t talk to her father at all, but Cloud was nearby, and her father was with her, so she wasn’t without hope. That wasn’t really what was bothering her either. Yes, she was literally UNDERNEATH an entire cultist city in some sort of rocky, belowground prison, with heady, green fog bursting sometimes through the cracks in the floor, whatever, it didn’t make her comfortable, but that wasn’t why she was so thrice-damned unhappy. Any of things would do it, but there was a more immediate cause.

It was that asshole they called Leonhart.

They had decided that she didn’t just need a jail; she needed a jailer, one positioned to never leave her side. Which, of course, infuriated her, since that made her dramatic escape more difficult; but also filled her with immense pride, knowing that they figured she needed her own jailer, just for her. So Squall Leonhart, under the order of the sorceress Ultimecia, had personally dragged her underground, seething all the while, into the most sincerely inventive dungeon Tifa had ever seen.

(Alright, so it made her nauseous, but it was still impressive. She was pretty sure the floor was floating on an incredibly heavy gas, and the surface of Spira, far, far below, seemed to be glowing green. Not to mention the fact that she saw no roads or pathways that would serve in dragging her down here. By all accounts, it didn’t make sense.)

But it was man, this general Leonhart, who still stood across from her, still as a statue, that made her so incredibly unhappy. They had told him to not remove his body from her person.

They hadn’t told him to not remove his EYES from her person.

Oh, she didn’t think he was eying her over. She knew how that felt. This wasn’t that. Besides, he had been staring at her FACE for an hour. And staring with an expression that could not be mistaken, because this expression was rage. Not just any rage; it was the rage of vengeful, the rage of the wronged, and the rage of the not-totally-sane. From what she gathered about the man, he actually spent his entire life silently fuming. Which was impressive, in his own way. It was like he was a living volcanic explosion. She figured if she were as scientifically minded as most her companions had become, she would find him morbidly fascinating.

But, even for a woman who prided herself on her toughness, he was intimidating. And when you’re supposed to be a ranger captain, you’re not supposed to be intimidated. So she had stood up, gone to the bars, and decided to stare Leonhart back in the face for as long as he stared at her.

It had been a while.

She wasn’t sure he was looking at her anymore. She thought he may have actually been lost in whatever anger-hallucination he had started having, since his eyes seems a little vacant and… unblinking. He wasn’t blinking. Alright, he had mastered eeriness, for sure. But she had mastered finding eeriness and intimidation as nothing but annoying, so she leaned against the bars, stared evenly at him, and tried to needle him.

An antagonized and uncertain jailer was always better than a quiet and collected one, after all. But she had first tried to jeer at him twenty minutes ago.

“I am going to escape,” she told him, after a long while of silent staring. She was almost sure he recognized she had spoken, but not entirely sure.

Because he didn’t respond. He didn’t twitch. He didn’t develop an annoyed strain under his eyelid. His eyes didn’t grow more alert. His breathing did not catch. She waited.

“It’s easy,” she said. “Any prison can be escaped from. Don’t tell me you don’t know how, you’ve been trained in this. So, surely, you should be taking measures to prevent the obvious?”

The amount she was bluffing varied depending on the sentence. To be sure, the more he believed her, the better her chances were. But she had no clue if he was listening to her, other than her general assumption that he was a sentient human being who was, at this moment, awake. He was silent and still as a brick wall.

She HAD heard him speak before, right? That wasn’t a misconception?

“Well, we can talk about something else,” she shrugged. “It you don’t want to talk about how I’m going to escape, I can understand that. You probably just think you can punch me down if I get out, and if you want to think that, it’s fine by me.”

Nothing.

“You might want to ask your friend’s face, though, about how easy it is to punch me down.”

Nothing, amazingly enough. Maybe she detected a slight increase of rage in the atmosphere, but that was the difference between infinity and infinity times two, in the terms of childhood. So it wasn’t exactly clear whether or not personal jabs would make him lose his cool.

It occurred to Tifa that perhaps he lost his cool several years ago and never got it back. That would explain a few things.

“Oh, speaking of your friend,” asked Tifa, “Will he be alright? You have to know, I almost feel responsible, if I hadn’t have asked him an uncomfortable question or two, none of this might have happened.” She shrugged. “Accidents happen.”

Nothing? Really?

Over the course of the next fifteen-some minutes, she questioned his position in the city, his sanity, his sexuality, and his use to the sorceress if she wanted to keep him as a prison guard, but he took it all in silent stride. Tifa had heard of the stoics, who refused to let any outward situation mar the inner peace of their soul. He was like that, except he was the exact polar opposite. She began to think that she was looking into the stoicism of insanity. How can you be disturbed if you’re already disturbed, after all? What could she say that would bother someone who was already this far gone?

Eventually, she leaned into a relaxed pose, though she didn’t break her contact with Leonhart’s eyes. “Solid as stone,” she complimented him briefly.

Perhaps he recognized that. Perhaps she had just relaxed a bit.

“Right, you’re good, congratulations,” she said. “I give up needling you. The training I needed to know how to act as a prisoner was intense, they would lock me in the barracks and pretend not to know me. I had to find ways to get around my emotional reactions pretty quickly. To have the sort of control you have, which I admire, really, you would have had to have been tortured.”

His eye twitched. It did. She saw it.

Ah. HA.

“You really do well,” she sighed. She did her best not to acknowledge it. She just leaned against the bars, put a hand on her chin, stared at Leonhart, and listened to the hiss and pour of fogs and gasses around the prison cell, green, undulating at her feet.

“That’s the hardest part of training, isn’t it? You trust them, you love them, they’re your brothers. But it’s their job to pull no punches for you. So can you feel betrayed? And how do you come back from that? It’s the life of a soldier, after all. But how can you trust the ones you love when their job isn’t, really, to be trustworthy?” Tifa stretched her arms, out of the bars, as if she was only exercising her muscles, biceps hitting the metal as she did so. Something like steel, no go there, unless she could find weak hinges.

Leonhart wasn’t acknowledging her. Perhaps it was more than she could hope for. “You just gotta conform to them, I guess,” she admitted. “Keep being a sister, work to emulate them, and then all the memories of metal bars and splits on your lips are far behind. Or, not apparently. We don’t think about it, but we remember. What do you do? That’s the life of a soldier. It’s not worth thinking about too much, huh?”

She refolded her arms, and went back to staring at him. Did he breathe? Maybe he really didn’t. Maybe she had actually been tricked by an elaborate illusion. Having illusory prison guards to psyche people out of escaping would be a thing that Jenovines did.

Would it be worth it to escape? She would be caught again, and then they’d just find a better way to deal with her. Well, maybe she could demand maximum security in a lush, above ground apartment, where everyone could watch her.

Truth be told, she wasn’t totally sure she could take his man down. She had no idea what was up his sleeves. He made himself a silent wild card. He had no tells; he was immune to pitfalls of bragging and showing off. She had no way of knowing if she could beat him in a fight. But she WAS confident that Bahamut could tear him apart.

She wouldn’t ask him to come out, though, unless she was sure they were escaping the city and no one could recapture her and do him harm. Such are the duties of the daughter.

“Did they choose someone you were really close to, too?” she asked. “They had one of my oldest friends put me through trial. It seems cruel, doesn’t it? But the idea is that you will forgive them. You have to. They’re the one you love the most out of all of them, right? To hate them for something they had to do, and ignore all the love, it would be an injustice. So you’re powerless to hate the whole system for anything. You can’t let duty ruin this friendship, so you don’t blame anyone. In the end, your feelings go nowhere.”

Was he listening? Had his eyes changed? How would she know? She had been staring so long; his face had become the equivalent of a word spoken over and over into nonsense.

Speaking of the face, it was the scar she was looking at now. His scar, which matched Seifer’s. She could really only draw one conclusion from that, and if it wasn’t correct, she would throw herself into the crater.

“Mine was a relative, actually. Not just a friend. How about you? Was it Seifer?”

She had expected to incense violence. After all, she was good at that. What happened was that Leonhart screeched with a short, sharp cry, like a cry of sudden pain, and his hand spasmed to clutch his face while his shoulder hunched over slightly. Tifa immediately jumped back, grabbing for weapons she didn’t have, wary as any hunter faced with a bear that’s been shot just once.

‘Wait, what did I think I was accomplishing with this?’ she asked herself. Whatever she had meant to do, all she seemed to have managed was upsetting a madman.

Brilliant.

Leonhart breathed heavily, several long breaths, face hidden in his hands. Tifa kept her eyes on him. She was aware this could go in absolutely any direction, so she wasn’t making any plans; she kept her mind blank, tactically open. Leonhart’s hand lowered, just a little, shaking, and his eyes, bright as a fever, stared, not at Tifa, but blankly at the ground.

He pulled his gunblade off of his back, but used it to steady himself on the ground, like a cane. It didn’t much stop his descent. He ended up on the ground, legs beneath him, staring at the floor.

And he remained like that.

Tifa waited several minutes, as tense as she had ever been, heart hammering, limbs stiff. She could almost hear her father murmuring, his Materia was in a tremor because he felt her fear, but she told him, in her head, ‘stay there, stay there.’

Leonhart wasn’t moving again.

Tifa let her breathing steady before she even thought about moving, and took some steps away from the bars. Somehow, she felt she was in a more volatile situation now, even if Leonhart wasn’t looking at her anymore. She had thought he wasn’t altogether there, but this—this was weird. A man with this sort of problem, whatever it was, shouldn’t be in the army, not with nerves this taught, nerves that could snap like this, not when he could fold under stress like this. She couldn’t tell what exactly was wrong with him, but it was ten times too severe for his line of work.

Shit, if life was this bad for him, she sort of felt sorry for lying to him now.

The rangers had clearly been immeasurably kinder than this guy’s commanding officer. There was no reason to haze in troops just preparing to hunt monsters and aid travelers, after all. No one in the crew had ever raised a hand against her outside of practice. And very torture-less practice it was too.  

Of course, sympathy didn’t change the fact that she had managed to trigger some sort of wounded animal state inside Leonhart when all she wanted was to get into a bartering phase or at least an information-finding phase. Now she wasn’t sure what to do. Breaking out and running right back into the city was still a bad idea, and she had maybe kind of broken the only person she could talk to right now.

She was just left wondering, looking at the man on the ground, sometimes glancing around the cell. She had been trying to put the pieces together about Chasamaecum, partly out of curiosity, partly out of a feeling of being unsettled that she hoped would go away with understanding. She could only see secrets when she looked at the Jenovines, secrets kept for millennia, and whenever she thought she had figured out their system, something shattered the image. Why, if they were, as she had thought, a society placing worth on perfect genetics, which could only be proved through perfect action, why did the sorceress chose such people as this for her courtesans and bodyguards? Maybe they looked the part, but they didn’t act it. There was something more complicated than this happening. The female witches had all seemed pretty stable, but these two…

Leonhart’s gunblade scraped along the ground, where it shot up sparks and an awful sound. It startled him, and he suddenly lurched upwards, and looked at Tifa for a minute, and she could have sworn he looked lost. Of course, it didn’t last long. He grimaced at her.

She cocked her head. She would have liked to show perfect confidence in herself by being right against the bars, where she was earlier, but she knew she didn’t quite have this situation under control now. “Do I have to say anything?” she said. “Pointing out that something is wrong wouldn’t be worthwhile at all, would it?”

Leonhart practically made her day by speaking. “You don’t understand anything,” he said. He had a voice like a dying man, but, evidently, he had one. 

“I don’t have to know the details to know when something is very wrong with someone,” said Tifa, and really, she wasn’t thinking about Leonhart, though he tried to take all her attention with his lowered stare, she was thinking about Cloud. She shouldn’t be letting her mind wander, but she was thinking about Cloud. He had never been a cheerful boy, never exuberant, but even the most melancholy do not have to be miserable. And if she had never met Cloud again, never known him, trembling, with a hidden face, gone mute in situations of pressure, shrinking away from crowds, maybe looking at this Jenovine wouldn’t be like a punch to the gut.

And she had had many punches to the gut before.

She wouldn’t go so far as to say they were similar. Cloud might be angry sometimes, but his most prevalent state was sadness, and whenever he hated someone, it was because, really, they had done something wrong, but Leonhart seemed to operate in a state of rage. Well, despite that, miserable people will always be the same, in some way, even if they don’t have the same problems or do the same things. Misery has a telltale mark in the face, and any discerning eyes can see it.

Leonhart seemed unwilling to dignify her judgment with a response. “No, I’m not claiming to know how you feel. I’m not a really bright person, I don’t understand things like that,” Tifa clarified. “But what I’m saying is, a stranger, a total outsider, can tell that you’re at odds with your community, or that someone here is antagonizing you. You realize that? I can tell. It’s true.”

She could see him pull himself together. She could see him gather up his annoyance, his fatigue, his stubbornness, his reserves of instructions and facts about the situation and rekindle the fire that was in his eyes.

They chose this man for something, they had to have, this beautiful idiosyncrasy. What was it?

“You wouldn’t know what you did here. I would kill you myself.”

“Excuse me?”

“But none of that really matters to me,” he said, his head tilting back, just a little, up and back, so her could look down on her by an extra inch, through eyes slit, observing,  as cold as a butcher at the block. “Nothing at all,” he said, as if interrupting a bit of his internal monologue to speak out loud, and then he snapped back to where he was before, silent, glaring, as if back where he was comfortable.

Unsettled, very unsettled, Tifa waited to see if he would say any more. He had let out that there was something, very violent, very loud, happening in his head under his guise of silence, and it would be something to not be embarrassed by that, not to try to explain it away.

“Nothing of what?” Tifa asked him, drawing back up to the bars to stare at him.

She waited a few minutes.

“Just nothing?”

She was left with having to observe her jailer herself, because he let out nothing more. Tifa thought that this sort of person had to be made, had to be brewed, to have the sort of madness in him she was witnessing, this anger, this isolation, this loathing and pain, but she didn’t know what he was brewed for. It had to be something awful.

Her circular thoughts led inevitably back to Cloud.

 

-

 

Yuna was surprised to find she wasn’t the first person awake, but, divining that the body outside the window, silhouetted just barely by the beginning dawn, was the Ancient, she decided she couldn’t be surprised. She left Aeris to do what she was doing, took a shower, dressed herself, and was walking down the bright, lacquered, many-windowed hallways to the dining hall in hopes of finding breakfast just as the sun was lighting the corridors, yellow and warm on the floors.

She didn’t make it to the dining hall, because she heard some voices in a small room to the side in the hallway, voices and the sound of cutlery. Knocking on the wall by the open door, she saw Seymour Disinherited across the table from a Jenovine, one she didn’t recognize, with stylishly cropped hair and black clothes. “Might I join?” she asked brightly.

She had assumed that this was another of Seymour’s wards, but the man glared at her with such revulsion that she knew in a hurried second that he had come from the city. She scuttled back a step, bowing.

“Ms. Vyedrvim, I’m afraid this is an important, and inopportune, meeting I’m having,” said Seymour, glancing back and forth between the two, controlling the situation. “If you would be so kind as to wait in the dining hall?”

They weren’t eating breakfast, only having tea. The stranger put down his cup with a haughty look when he heard her name. “That is the most astonishingly Al Bhed name I’ve heard in years,” he said, “but you look just like a continental mongrel.”

Seymour cleared his throat. “Let me introduce her properly, if you’re interested. Ms. Yuna Vyedrvim is a scholar of religion from Bevelle, as she’s told me, and she was told to stay with me when your favorite Sorceress kicked her own of the city, after, to no one’s surprise, She The Most Glorious Enchantress took one of her party as a pet. Which is a move I oppose, for the record.”

Seymour held up his hand before the man could say anything. “And as an introduction for you, Ms. Vyedrvim, this is He the Religious Supreme, Kadaj.”

Yuna bowed deeply. “It’s an honor, your... grace.”

“Can’t say the same,” said Kadaj bluntly. “Look, is it true that you are a summoner?” he demanded.

Yuna straightened her spine. “I am. My quest to destroy Sin is ongoing.”

“Is it not that Al Bheds forbid the Yevonite religion?”

“I was not raised among the Al Bhed. And it’s not banned, so much as culturally disapproved of.”

Kadaj smiled. “So is it that you are a half breed? Oh, no wonder they sent you on the summoner’s mission.”

Seymour set his tea cup down with and incredible delicacy, but at a sharp angle, causing the sound of porcelain to cut through the air in the room. After a second, he looked up at his half-brother with concealed spite. “Would you excuse my guest? She’s rather shocked to be interrogated on her way to breakfast.”

“Ah, it’s—” said Yuna, but second guessed herself. “If you would, your grace.”

Kadaj sighed heavily, she hoped it was just because of the Yevonite title. “Go on. No, it was rude of me to detain you; I don’t mean YOU any ill will, really.”

Yuna doubted that, just a little, but she bowed, and turned as fast as she could, jogging down the carpeted hall and away from the voices rising behind her. She had had her fill of family arguments already; nothing could entice her into experiencing more.

Upon arriving into the dining room, she found a few of the residents already eating, men and women alike, all Jenovine but for one incredibly eccentric traveler, who, she found out, had stayed with Seymour on multiple occasions, as he made it his quest to know all the unusual corners of Spira. She never really felt nervous entering a crowd of Jenovine, though she knew many of the others did. Being of mixed race, the culture shock didn’t really have a sting for her. What culture shock could really alarm the permanently expatriated? She settled herself in, ate and drank with them (they were very willing to help, and the displaced often are) and quickly found herself the topic of conversation, since she had travelled far, and with a summoner’s staff at her side.

“Yes, made in Bevelle,” she said, to the woman who was examining it, “they usually are, since they bless them there.”

“You summon Fayth with it,” asked an incredulous, middle-aged Jenovine named Agdin, who wore his hair shorter than any other Jenovine she had seen. He has been an upper level educator, he told her, until his studies lead him into such controversial topics that he was banned from the city. He, personally, was filing a suit to return to his post, but the court had been delaying him.

“The Fayth are in a contract with me, I could summon them with or without it,” Yuna said. “The staff is a weapon for channeling magic, used necessarily for Sendings and often for battle magic too.”    

“I always thought it was interesting, that Yevonite religion,” said Dihala, the woman examining it, who wore men’s clothes and didn’t talk about why she had been shut out of the city, “I mean to travel one day, and see Yevonite temples, but travelling outside of the City is a true ordeal. If the Knights sent after you don’t kill you, the trackless plains will.”

“It isn’t an easy road,” Yuna admitted. “And, with the differences between Jenovine and Sapien Biology, wouldn’t there be problems adjusting to the food and water of the outside world?”

“Most certainly,” said Dihala, handing Yuna back her staff, “but Master Seymour ships in a lot of his food from outside anyway, so any of us could adjust. But there are a lot of differences in what tolerances we have or haven’t developed.”

“Travelers from any of the islands often have problems like that too,” Yuna mused. “You could speak to my cousin; she says mainland food practically causes her to keel over some days.”

“So you’re travelling with Fayth, at this second?” asked a younger man, named Lyncis, who had a brooding aspect and told Yuna that he had been expelled from Chasamaecum on virtue of being a political dissident and a disturber of the peace. “Ones such as Shiva.”

“I am, I have many Fayth, actually, allied to me, since many stayed with me after my first Pilgrimage failed, after I swore solemnly to attempt a second. There was… an unprecedented occurrence, in which my attempt to make a final Aeon with Yunalesca failed, so I had to be sent back.”

“How can that be?” asked Agdin. “I’ve studied this ritual, I’ve never heard of it failing.”

Yuna sighed. “I’d rather not tell the whole story… there was a debate, you see. The final Aeon is meant to be the soul of the person who loves and cherishes the Summoner the most, since the Aeon grows in power when it strengthens its bonds. I had two who wanted the position.”

“No,” crooned a mischievous young woman, Sil by name. She, Yuna remembered, had just left Chasamaecum of her own volition, feeling painfully unfit for society and desiring asylum.

“It isn’t how you make it sound,” Yuna said nervously. Some chuckled. “Perhaps you’re imagining two handsome young men, but it was my father and my cousin.”

The room was hushed. Yuna wasn’t sure if they would know the details of the creation of a Final Aeon, but perhaps they did. “It was a tough situation for me. It’s unprecedented that two people offer to lay down their lives and become a Final Aeon. Perhaps they both wanted… not to live after me, but how could I make such a choice, and say which of my family members loved me more, which was to die with me, and which was to go to the funeral? No one is supposed to do that. I thought the squabble itself might end the quest, so, because he was the one I was willing to upset the least, I chose my father.”

Yuna cleared her throat. “The idea is that a Summoner and a Guardian, over the course of their quest, grow a unique bond of devotion and protection, and this bond is the strength of the Final Aeon. When I chose my father for other reasons, the bond was tainted with impure feelings. The spell failed, and father was taken from me.”

Yuna laughed. It had been a long time, the story wasn’t so harsh to tell anymore. “The one hit hardest was Rikku, in the end. She’s my cousin. She felt she had been selfish, and had put herself where she didn’t belong. All the same, even if it would ease her guilt, I just couldn’t bear to tell her that I chose my father out of pity for his age, an unwillingness to make him watch his daughter die, and my worries about what he would think. It was just, I guess, because I couldn’t refuse my father. But I had chosen Rikku in my heart, and that’s the true reason the bond failed. I was sent home in shame, and, since my father did not return with me, my… his branch of the family rejected me, and Rikku’s took me back. That’s when I took their surname, Vyedrvim, as my own.”

Dihala had the look of someone listening to fascinating gossip. “How do you get things that complicated,” she wondered to herself. “The tradition of the Final Aeon is barbaric, I always thought so.”

“What’s barbaric,” Agdin interrupted, “is the inability of the modern Jenovine to show cultural tolerance for the rest of the world. For shame. What have we done to fight Sin?”

Dihala looked put out, and Yuna decided this was the last argument she wanted to see. “Please,” she said, “no more of that. Even in the ranks of the Summoners, we argue about the ethics of the Pilgrimage. These sorts of opinions are fine, really.”

“If you do a second Pilgrimage,” interrupted Sil, suddenly, “don’t you have to try to make a Final Aeon again?”

Yuna smiled. “My friends are working on a better way to deal with Sin, so I’m hoping I don’t have to do such a thing at all. But if I do, that’s taken care of. I only travel with two guardians, Rikku and my old friend Lulu, and Lulu means to live a long time.”

They were interrupted by a new presence in the room, rather, a few. Seymour Disinherited had the impressive talent of gathering people wherever he walks, and he came in, though he had started out from his harrowing meeting alone, with Amaya on one side and Aeris on the other. Lulu, Yuna figured, was still asleep. For a guardian, she had strange habits.

Aeris looked much better than she had the night before, and began introducing herself to the assorted refugees with aplomb. Most of them weren’t sure what she meant by ‘Ancient’, unless she thought she was referencing those old scholarly tales, but the mainlander traveler was excited, if the new coloring of his face was anything to judge by. The girl Amaya was holding a little tightly onto Seymour’s arm, looking despondent, but removed herself with some sort of conviction as she sat down to drink tea with the others.

“Forgive me for being late this morning,” Seymour began.

“Oh, it’s no issue,” said Dihala.

“Certainly not, you’re a busy man,” confirmed Agdin.

Seymour sat down with a sigh. “The most delusional of my brothers showed up to say someone will be escorting Miss Ancient and her guests over to the temple sometime today, not that I know when. I suppose I would advise you three to remain ready… though I only see two of you?”

“Lulu believes in not getting up early if she doesn’t have to,” Yuna said.

“No information about what we’re going to see or do once we’re there?” Aeris asked.

“Of course not,” Seymour sighed. “They won’t give you the power of even being prepared if they can help it. But I would be prepared for a very serious audience, and keep a door open behind you, if you can.”

Aeris considered this. “Would you say that we’d have a door open behind us?”

Seymour regarded her. “I would. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s the wisest option, since just running to my house won’t get you far, but you’re welcome to it.”

Aeris looked to the ceiling. “Well, here’s to hoping Cid hasn’t had second thoughts.”

“Rikku’s on call for me,” Yuna said, “If anything goes wrong, she’ll fly the ship herself if she has to. You can trust in her.”

“So there’s a good chance you’re leaving today?” Amaya asked.

Aeris nodded. “A very good chance.”

With that, and with a last lingering look, Amaya slipped away from the table to prepare herself. Yuna and Lulu had gotten wind of the situation the night before, and Yuna told Rikku, so they were already prepared for her to show up at the landing site when she arrived. Well, some of them were prepared. She had been told to be ready for an ordeal about it, but at least they knew it would be happening.

“Everything will be fine for you, I hope?” asked Aeris. “They shan’t pin anything onto you or your house? I can incriminate myself if you like.”

Seymour chuckled. “I wouldn’t worry. They can’t get much of a lower opinion of me, and, as far as they’re concerned, we’ve already been punished enough.”

“Understood,” said Aeris. “I just want you to realize that the chance today will end particularly well for anyone is slim, even if we are lucky enough to not anger your kinsmen excessively, even if we are lucky enough to get each member of our party back easily and unscathed, I don’t really see a future without conflict.”

“Nor I,” said Seymour, “nor I, but I never did. I’ve helped you along, and I have my reasons for that, mostly ideological, but the risk is greater, I think, than you realize yourselves.”

“Which risk?” asked Yuna. “To ourselves, or to Chasamaecum?”

“To many parties,” said Seymour diplomatically. “You already told me that you weren’t so blind as to not notice the army.”

“I knew it,” the scholar, Agdin, interrupted. “You do think they are the catalyst.”

“It’s possible,” Seymour demurred, “and it’s probable if they get wind of Ms. Ancient’s actual position. They want an excuse, though I’m not sure if they want it yet, if it’s untimely, they’ll still wait.”

Yuna and Aeris gave each other a look. Yuna’s eyes slipped away to Seymour. “An excuse for war?” she asked.

Seymour spread out his arms, clawed fingers uncurling. “Of course. The Knights have been building up their guard exponentially.  They’ve hired people without the traditional Virtues to high places, and I won’t bore you with the complicated excuses for doing so, but it’s highly irregular. Men and women without a strong sense of Unity, Self-Control, Insight, or Rule, as if they wanted volatile elements. One theory is that they’re creating a specific sense of political disunity for the sake of starting a war. I can taste them wanting a scapegoat for something, and if they want a war against other people, not a civil war, as they might, the five of you would make excellent scapegoats. And one doesn’t want scapegoats alive.”

Aeris held up a finger. “Why do you contemplate that a civil war would benefit them?”

Seymour looked uncomfortable. “It’s only a theory, a plot I think they only have in waiting, unless it’s necessary.”

Agdin harrumphed. putting down his cup. “It’s more than a theory. I did my research into this, you know.”

Seymour shrugged. “Tell them, if you like.”

Agdin spoke with animation, illustrating his points with his hands. “In the City, they never consider Jenova having plans that pertain to the outside world, or plans that contradict her other plans, which is folly, of course. A mother’s life is not entirely defined by her children; the people who think so are narcissistic. Jenova, as an ancient god, one of ancient tradition, is not a removed ideal, but a person, or perhaps both, the sort of incarnation of perfection inside a living body. The artistic idea of an ideal form, if you will. Of course, these are my ideas which are largely discredited in academic society, you must know, so if you want to seriously consider THAT,”

“Agdin,” sighed Sil.

He cleared his throat. “Well, Jenova. She can have plans and interests other than the well-being of her children, and when someone asks, ‘but what else could she possibly consider important?’ I say, of course, ‘her own well-being.’ Everyone is interested in her own good. If one wants to figure out what Jenova’s interests are, one must look at the things Jenova has told us. She tells us to be like her, so she is interested in replicating herself, she tells us to bring every Jenovine closer to her, so she is interested in multiplying. One can’t say that she’s interested in making everyone her exact clones, of course not, not just because that refutes the purpose of being a Goddess, but because she also says, ‘take those willing to come to me into my own arms.’”

Yuna started. “I wouldn’t believe it.”

“You wouldn’t,” Agdin pressed, latching onto her statement with excitement, “because foreign policy has been molded cleverly to not quite fit with religious doctrine. Well, it fits, technically, but it’s been twisted to match societal norm. Take them into my arms, she says, IF they are willing, so all the legal rulers have to do is convince us that none are willing; that we are alone in a sea of enemies.”

“Stark nonsense,” said the mainlander traveler. “Plenty of people are interested in the mysteries of Chasamaecum, burning to know, even, but it’s thought of as dangerous, far too dangerous, to approach.”

“Only the maddest attempt to approach,” said Lyncis teasingly.

“They’ve made great pains to be isolationist,” Agdin continued, “and if just because it’s so important to the ruling sector, it’s worth asking why. Not that one is SUPPOSED to ask why, or even ALLOWED to… I’m doing it again,” he sighed to himself. “The most obvious reason is that they are cultivating a worldview and a culture boldly unique in the eyes of the other cultures of this world, which I have studied, and such ideals are best cultivated where a person can make their own assumptions about other peoples and cultures, can make false or negative assumptions, instead of considering things in a balanced light. They can’t take outsiders into the Mother if outsiders will come with positive ideas about the outside world— not even positive, but ideas, any ideas, that contrast the norm of thought. To uphold a society rooted in the hatred of the outside world is difficult, very difficult, unless the outside world seems singularly dangerous, a place you do not want to be in, essentially void of civilized people or safe cities, and there is no one to tell you otherwise. Outside of the mother’s arms, and all that.”

“Ugh,” said Lyncis.

“Stop quoting temple lessons, it gives me the creeps,” Sil added.

“And my apologies, Miss,” Agdin said to Yuna, “but stories about Sin and the practices of the Yevonite religion have gone far in upholding that image.”

Yuna sort of shrugged. “Well, it’s not like I don’t see why. We engage in ritual sacrifice for demon slaying, you don’t, I understand that.”

“Ah, well, some of us like to take a more liberal view, really,” Agdin sputtered. “Well. That aside. The point is, when you have to isolated a culture in order to form their views yourself, when you need to barbarize an outside community and appear to uplift your own in order to do that, you really need shining examples of Homo Jenovine at the head of society in order to do that. The genetically superior family currently at the head has been there for a while, I theorize that a mutation some generations ago gave them the uniquely Jenova-like facial structure they have today, giving them a societal edge.”

“I don’t have it,” Seymour added to Aeris in a whisper.

“Oh, I don’t either,” she said, attempting to sound ironically worried.

“But recently, the combined efforts of Ultimecia, head sorceress, and Kadaj, religious supreme, have been aimed at hand-picking Knights and Guards and Witches who are not, in fact, genetically supreme. Mental conditions such as a tendency towards rage, sadness, or fatigue, you know, are considered indicative of severe genetic flaws, and are banned from office, but Ultimecia’s own hand-picked guards have shown signs of severe flaws, of being unpersonable and biased, which are flaws which seriously upset the older generation, I have noticed. What I surmise is that, for reasons unknown to us, the people in charge of Chasamaecum are trying to trigger a societal change, a serious and quickly implemented change of norms. This is why they are significantly changing the dispositions of role models, and why there has been a recent change in academic rhetoric, a significant change, I say.”

Aeris interrupted him. “Now, I saw there was something unusual about those two Knights you mentioned,” she said, “but I don’t see why holding up a standard such as Seifer Almasy would benefit a society that traditionally, if I understand you right, reveres stoicism. He’s a shockingly hot-headed man, by your description. Why a change that favors him?”

“One reason alone,” said Agdin. “Almasy is notoriously violent. He has been known to kill those in opposition to his Sorceress.”

“They want a stronger rule of law?” asked Yuna.

“Not precisely. They want a dramatic change. They’re trying to encourage anger, anger against certain older norms, and though normally no society wants to encourage rabble rousers, a farmer who needs old crops burnt encourages fire. In my mind, they are looking to start a war against the outside world. A civil war would encourage that because traditional Jenovine values discourage any contact with the outside world and encourages a view of them as nothing but the unfortunate untaught, and that must die if they want people to support an outside war.”

“Out with the old, in with the new?” Aeris asked.

“Almost,” Agdin said. “Almost. The picture is complicated, I understand, I’m giving you obvious examples of much, much more intricate changes, which… let me generalize. An isolationist society is a controlled experiment. You’re breeding to make the ideal specimen, though the ideal specimen must be a whole population of slightly diverse people, or else the gene pool dwindles too small and breeding has consequences. So you have Variant A, Variant B, Variant C, some number of slightly different minds and ideals, in their own suburbs, but make no mistake, though they have arguments, and some arguments seem subversive, they are desired. Allow just a little dissent in a society, and they will think you are liberal and benevolent, without noticing that anything truly subversive is suppressed. Variant A, which has been dominant for many years, discourages war as barbaric, not something we indulge in, unfair to the unfortunates outside our city. Variant B sees it as understandable, but pointless. Variant C wonders if it wouldn’t have a favorable outcome in widening the gene pool and spreading the glory of the mother. Variant C has been called heretical in the past, shamed for their opinions, but their opinions have still flourished under the guise of our government being tolerant of other views, but really because they have some sense in the outward-looking opinions, since we do need a wide gene pool. Their subversive views are secretly approved for their good results by the scientists on high.

“Let’s pretend that Almasy and Leonhart, the high Knights, are prime examples of two subgroups, C and D, J and 45, it doesn’t matter. This indicates that the government is trying to swing general opinion towards their subgroups, which have been viewed as subversive up until know, but whose opinions will become useful in supporting the war against the outside world which will surely happen. Such men as Knight Almasy have these opinions, so he will necessarily receive a lot of success and public renown soon. But though many can just be swayed to these ‘previously discredited’ opinions, some will not be moved. For example, Knight Leonhart is known to be staunchly anti-outsiders and staunchly anti-war. He might be anti-everyone, but that’s beside the point. He is the most unstable bigot the Sorceress could find. If thoughts about war bloom in the city, Almasy will be violently in favor of them, and Leonhart violently against.”

“No,” said Aeris, eyes wide.

“Those will subversive opinions about starting war will rally to Almasy’s side, and those against, to Leonhart. And though neither set of opinions would normally fight, and certainly not to the point of bloodshed, Almasy and Leonhart are both known for their violent tendencies. Of course, you don’t know that at all if you live outside the temple. If they manage to champion two sides of the arguments, which, as they are volatile people, surely they will, all Ultimecia and Kadaj have to do is make sure that the right side loses, and make sure that the public thinks that the right side to lose did lose. And Knight Almasy cuts a much superior figure compared to Knight Leonhart, don’t you say?”

“The only risk is in the two Knights betraying how unstable they really are before people are whipped up into a fervor,” Aeris muttered.

“But believe me when I say that they have many safeguards against that ever happening,” Agdin sighed.

“They’re known as shining example of their particular virtues in the city, Almasy of Rule and Unity, and Leonhart of Self-Control and Insight,” supplemented Seymour, “making Almasy more of a guiding figure and Leonhart, actually, as a sort of guilt hanging over people, containing the virtues no one wants to work to have themselves. In light of this, people ignore that neither of them are that perfect. Of course… though the signs are there, it may be Agdin’s theory isn’t true, all the same.”

“Forgive me for being ominous, but just you wait,” Agdin said.

“The only way to test the theory, I suppose,” Aeris said, considering, “would be the reveal the flaws in either Almasy or Leonhart before the appointed time, and see if they try fiercely to keep the status quo of having these two Knights, or someone with their very ideals, in power.”

“So someone would have to reveal that Almasy is raging, or that Leonhart is dramatically unstable,” said Seymour, considering. “Wouldn’t that be interesting.”

From inside the kitchen, a forgotten kettle started boiling over, and several people ran to stem the outpour. Tensions dissipated, and a few people laughed, and the conversation turned, without meaning to, to the Yevonite faith instead of the Jenovine.

 

-

 

By the time morning came, Leonhart had to be switched out for someone else. Tifa memorized his retreating back, to make sure she would recognize him if she ever saw him again.

To her disappointment, he was not replaced by his partner, but with a pair of underlings. Maybe they weren’t rookies, but Tifa still had confidence that, if it came to it, she and father could defeat them easily.

She knew father was concerned, but she insisted to him, through their weak connection, that he had to stay inside for now. She phrased her situation as ‘stealth mission.’ Damn if she was going to show all her cards before she had to—they knew she had at least one summon on her, sure, but Aeris had given her the distinct impression that Vincent had become a special sort of Fayth, and she wanted to keep that quiet.

The soldiers wouldn’t talk to her, but she figured it was less because they were in terrifying states of disassociation and more because they were ordered not to, since they looked pretty uncomfortable whenever she tried to goad them. She knew she was getting on twenty-four hours without a trial, and wasn’t hoping, honestly, for less than a week before she was pulled out. They had to do something eventually, of course, since Aeris was here, insisting on audience, but she had to keep cool until then.

Keeping cool wasn’t too difficult, really, once she made a game out of ‘figure out why Chasamaecum is so impenetrable and weird.’ She just wished someone would talk back to her for once, but they seemed to be aware that that would only lead to a downward spiral.

It was more entertaining than thinking about Cloud, which is what the rest of her brooding was taken up in, simultaneous with staring a hole into the nearest guard. She had seen the sorceress take Cloud away, after all. She had been frozen in a powerful stop spell, but it didn’t incapacitate her senses. Cloud had gone as he had always went—unwilling, but obedient, driven by the sense that he did what he had to do.

What an oddly serious child he had been, when they lived together in the town. Attending every temple lesson, even when most of the kids chose to play in the mud or collect little bits of shells in the rivers, trying to piece them together, or to catch swamp creatures in jars. She thought he was trying to be apprenticed to the priestess before he left Nibelheim for a paying job. And when he left, she thought maybe he was trying to find his father, but he didn’t say anything about that now.

He had never been bothered by not having a father until his mother ran out of money, though, so why would she think he cared about that? Nibelheim would have taken care of her, given her its food, helped her keep the rain out of her house; it was Cloud, it seemed, who wanted more for her. He had told her that he was sure he could readily find something for her in Bevelle- maybe that’s why she thought he was looking for his father. His father had been in ShinRa, after all, so what if he had money?

Tifa tapped her fingernails just lightly against the bars. Mostly, she was bored, but it had a nice effect. She had realized much earlier that they weren’t used to guarding prisoners, since for the most part, rebellious Jenovines faced exile, not imprisonment. However, in any normal society, there would still be lots of criminals… maybe death sentences were more popular? Or community service? Or maybe it was a community that had an agreement with the lawless. She didn’t really have a lot of information about that yet; all she knew was that these soldiers didn’t like guarding prisoners and weren’t used to it.

Besides, she had punched out one of their esteemed generals, and ok, maybe she looked a little threatening to these people. She figured that hand-to-hand combat wasn’t a very popular pastime in this place and maybe it sounded a little shocking to them. Just maybe.

Almasy had looked fatally offended, anyway. He had glared murder at her while she was being dragged out of the room, paralyzed, to be imprisoned. He was being stilled by the witches, obviously, and he wouldn’t say a word to her retreating form, but he was furious. She wasn’t sure if it was just being disgraced in public (and in front of his girlfriend no less) or if she had touched a personal nerve. It was so hard to tell what she was or wasn’t working with when it came to Jenovines, there was so much she couldn’t predict. So she used a heavy style, instead of a precise one, for unpredictable, but no less catalyzing effects.

In her mind, a complicated knot could be untied, or it could be sliced in half.

Well, that’s why she did so badly with dealing with Cloud, anyway. He balked at direct questions. He avoided the obvious. Maybe she didn’t understand it, but hadn’t he always been quiet? Maybe it was just a case of being quiet in return. Maybe a relationship didn’t have to be built off more complicated things than that. She was determined to be a friend to him again, even if a friend was no more than someone he was comfortable with. Fine. That was all she wanted, and all he seemed to want.

She sighed, leaning her head on her hand, her hand on the cold bars of the prison. Was she SURE that breaking out randomly couldn’t have positive results? She had figured out how to, after all.

Anyway, what was most important to do was to get back to Cloud. Normally, she would figure that he would be fine on his own, really, just because he’s unstable doesn’t mean he doesn’t have admirable ways of shying trouble away from him. But there really wasn’t a conceivable way that Cloud was in a favorable situation right now, and she was loathe to leave him alone in Chasamaecum for a second longer than she had to.

“Have I told you guys that he started it yet?” she asked in some desperation.

Silence.

“Guess I have.”

After all, she didn’t understand what had happened to him, and she didn’t understand what it was like to be Cloud now, to be suffering in the way he was. So what? A knot could be untied, or it could be cut in half. If he wanted peace and quiet, that’s what she’d help him get. Some people need brought back home, some people need avenged, some just need help on the journey, some need a sword fighting for them, some a package carried, some a touch on their shoulder; whatever the reason, her job was to be the hired hand.

“There’s no chance of just… going to see Ultimecia? You know? Talk to someone about this?”

Her hands were itching. She knew she COULD break out. There was a CHANCE she’d find Cloud. All he needed was someone to reassure him that it wasn’t all bad, right? And keep him away from the danger. The rest he was clever enough to do himself, she was sure. He wasn’t helpless. He wasn’t’ a child.

But everyone can use a helping hand.

“Alright, let me ask plainly. Is there any way, any way at all, to be let out so I can make an appeal?”

Silence.

“No? So my trial is coming swiftly?”

Silence.

“I will never be able to handle police forces,” Tifa muttered to herself. “Why would you need one anyway? Look, last chance. Could I talk to someone about this? Anyone?”

Silence.

Tifa shrugged. She flicked her wrist, so that the Materia on her wrist glittered not far from her face.

“Hey, Father,” she said.

-

 

Aeris, Yuna, and Lulu had been taken out of the house early in the afternoon. Seymour watched them from his window for just a minute, thinking. He supposed he had to be ready for some strife after being Chasamaecum’s doom prophet for so many years, but that didn’t mean, really, that he wanted it to happen.

Not even for the sake of being right, which he was.

Shiva was beside him no the window seat, which was her favorite place in the house—looking over the black crater that formed the edge of Chasamaecum, but with flowers growing in the window box. She said that, in her mind, those little flowers were a barrier as strong as steel- they were a rejection.

“Do you think your brothers will take this as an excuse to start anything?” she asked. “Or don’t you think they’ll wait longer? I don’t think they would find it wise to throw the citizens of Chasamaecum into doubt after just one small upheaval caused by outsiders. They would rather wait and make sure all the elements are under their control, rather than depend on outside forces.”

“Yazoo certainly would,” said Seymour, “Kadaj makes a point of being a wild card.”

Shiva frowned. “And Loz, you always call him ineffectual.”

“He’s well-meaning, yes, and that more or less makes him so. A position of power is a dangerous thing to have in Chasamaecum. To be successful, you either have to be clever enough to keep your power, or not clever enough to notice you don’t have it.”

“A rule of love is probably impossible,” Shiva conceded, “when you’re all trying your hardest to be like the loveless one.”

Seymour grinned wryly. “Your bias is refreshing sometimes.”

“You still love Jenova, of course.”

“I’d rather not think about that today,” Seymour sighed.

Shiva was willing to let it go. She had, after all, more or less adopted Seymour as a ward after his horribly fated pilgrimage, which left him without guardian and virtually without friend. As his Fayth, she had loved him, and been his ally in the war. Normally, she would have returned to fighting after he failed in his mission, but to let a child leave the Calm Lands alone was too much for her. She had been human. She was not fighting a war against a cruel spirit so that she could give up her compassion. She would not give herself airs, not when she had already given up her pride to be a part of an army, but she felt that she was a good force for him, and had cooled much of his rage and hate over his later years, which might have unhinged him otherwise.

“But are you prepared for what will happen if Chasamaecum begins a war?”

“No one is prepared for that,” Seymour said. “It will make a rift in the Jenovine consciousness. Even those of us who understand what war means haven’t SEEN it.”

“You have,” Shiva said.

Seymour waved that off. “The suffering of the civilians would be unprecedented. And if Chasamaecum would mobilize against the outside world, I am terrified that we would crush them. I like to say that it isn’t really something to be worried about, really, we don’t have the power we think we have, though we have a good army, they have machina, they have Fayth, they have powerful magic-casters and they are used to war, but it would be impossible to predict how a war between Chasamaecum and the outside world would go—because we are two species.”

“It may come down, in the end, to who has a more transferable virus,” smiled Shiva.

“Disease is the most prolific killer on the battlefield,” said Seymour, “a clash between two species, where one may be able to give the other a pandemic we aren’t prepared against… or, who knows what their Fayth would do to us? What our Jenova would do for them? Something as little as invasive species could devastate both sides. For all we know, a Jenovine soldier could carry the seeds of a flowering tree on their clothes and destroy civilization utterly.”

“Spira has incredible protections against the environment being drastically altered,” said Shiva, “usually. That wandering ancient is the first ancient I have seen in a century, and she’s not powerful. At least, not here. I have no idea what is happening to Spira right now.”

“It’s that bad?” Seymour asked.

Shiva didn’t say anything.

“Does it really all have to be so infuriatingly complicated,” Seymour muttered to himself.

“That’s the way of gods and spirits,” said Shiva. “On Spira, there are many pantheons, of many origins, and Jenova is one of alien origin. A God is nothing if not the pinnacle of their society, with the biases and desires of their society, and you want this god of another world and these many gods and spirits of Spira to come together peaceably, and find a way to share the world between them. They cannot see eye to eye so easily. Whatever actions you take in this world, be it political, actions of war, or the actions of worship and changing your philosophy, these things are being used in the wars of the gods, since to all gods, humans, and what they do, are very important. The humans are our children, our wards, our allies, our soldiers, our servants and devotees. Entire civilizations can be mobilized by the will of their gods, and this presents a problem when people don’t know what their gods are doing under the surface. You are all in a position, now, to tip the scales in the wars of the gods by moving your masses, fighting here, spreading there. Jenova could reign. It’s possible. Sin could devour the world, or Sin could be destroyed, the Lifestream could revive, or it could dwindle to lifelessness. Buried gods of older societies, even the ruined ones, could come back and wreak chaos. Forces unknown could wreck or soothe. There are many spiritual forces at play here, and what happens to them is now, officially, tied up into the world of human action. Your brothers know that. They are trying to use that. The agency of the Gods has been compromised— there are too many of them, so no one has ultimate power now. They have to use human form, they have to hide, they expend themselves fighting against each other, and they need human force to build up their powers again. The playing field is vast. Don’t think of anything as unimportant now, or anything as impossible.”

Seymour shook his head. “This doesn’t exactly comfort me, Shiva.”

“You want to know the risks right now, you want to know what could happen because of this clash of forces today. I’m telling you: almost anything. They could suppress what happened today entirely, or they could start a war today, and I am telling you I don’t know what will happen, because of this: I do not know why your brother and the Sorceress kept one of their party in personal custody. I don’t know why they want him, or what is happening to him now. And this unsettles me, because she chose not to detain the Ancient, and did detain him. You should be more concerned about this than you are.

“But since we must be prepared for anything to happen, I’ll ask you again: are you prepared for anything? Are you prepared to protect your house?”

“Of course, I was always prepared for that.”

“Then we will be fine. Surely, you would live under Jenova’s dominance?”

“Yes.”

“Surely, you would live under a dominance of the Fayth, or of the Livestream, or of their combined powers?”

“Yes.”

“Surely you know that both of these will take your soul, reform it, and give you life again after death?”

“Well, yes.”

“You have nothing to lose, Seymour. Your life was given to you without risk.”

Seymour shook his head. “Life from the eyes of the Spirits is so strange. Well, I suppose being between faiths has its benefits.”

There was a knock on the door, followed by the door being opened just slightly. Amaya, the young dancer, who had been exiled for her scientific theories, walked just a foot into his room, and bowed.

“You’re ready to leave?” he asked her gently.

“I’m prepared,” she said. “I don’t know how ready I feel.”

“You’ve made a better choice than you thought,” Seymour admitted. “You might be leaving a war zone.”

“It’s gotten that bad?” she asked.

Shiva chuckled. Seymour shook his head. “Well, we don’t know how bad it’s gotten.”

“I wanted to leave for my own reasons, but you get worried, you know,” Amaya said, “what if I’m leaving my home at an important time? What if something has to be done here? Then again,” she crossed her arms, “why feel bad about leaving, exactly?”

“You’ll be the first person to leave like this since I did,” said Seymour, “though there may be escapes I haven’t heard about, you’re the first to exit through my house… honestly, since I made it. It isn’t an easy task. If you’re still concerned about Chasamaecum after you’ve left it, well, you would be the first person doing something about it outside of its walls.”

Amaya sighed. “I’m ready to leave Chasamaecum, honestly. I don’t think I could do anything for it here. If they want to believe lies, fine. You just feel like… if it all collapses when I’m not there, where will I be? Homeless? But didn’t they expel me?” she shook her head. “Whatever. It’s their own fault. It’s not Chasamaecum I’m worried about though.”

“No?”

She looked at Seymour with trepidation. “Will it be all right here? With you? With all of you? I mean, it’s presumptuous, of course, to think it depends on me, but that’s not what I really think anyway, it’s just… you’ll all be okay, right?”

Seymour had to convince himself in that moment. “Of course. We’re ready, aren’t we? Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Amaya, “I am. I’ve been waiting long enough, anyway.”

Letting Shiva alone to her thoughts, Seymour guided Amaya out of the house, down the halls and down the scorched pathways to where a group of wary people stood around an old sky ship, and said his goodbyes to her there. At last glance, she looked confident enough.

As for him… there is a sort of surety that comes with everything being out of your control. One couldn’t call it confidence, but it’s not an unpleasant position.

 

-

 

They were not lead to the temple this time. Well, they were lead almost to the temple, inside the wrought-iron gates of what appeared to be a flourishing, blooming garden-courtyard. And when Aeris called it a courtyard, she meant that they were clearly in court, with Jenovines of some note in the benches behind them, in among flowering bushes and fountains, and before them, between carved pillars, Ultimecia stood, flanked by the brothers, Kadaj and Yazoo.

The fact that she was being faced by three of the most powerful people in the city did not comfort Aeris, not at all, but she at least remembered Seymour’s advice to appeal to Yazoo, out of all of them. He was, in the order of things she noticed, a summarily beautiful man, with well-tended hair, an amazingly composed, pale face, and unmovable poise, watching her with eyes that flickered but an expression that did not move, showing his cultivation, his stoicism, his admirable poise. Aeris figured she was looking at the best of politicians, and couldn’t guess as to his character just yet.

On the other side, there was Kadaj. Yuna had relayed she had encountered him just that morning, and found him rude and uncaring, ready to mock his half-brother, bigoted, and exposing all sorts of other signs of being impressed with his own powers. In summary, he lacked politeness because he did not seem to be polite. He was a man who looked suave, though Aeris did not yet know if he was. 

In the center, and facing her, Ultimecia stood again. She was unchanged—she radiated both power and surety, looking, above all else, grand. But the expression with which she regarded Aeris was changed. She looked at her with anger and with disbelief—disbelief because she was looking at something that shocked her.

Aeris steadied her breathing as well as she could, in this oppressive environment, away from Spira, feeling mortal. She was found out, or else Ultimecia had come to a conclusion just as damning as the truth. Whatever Ultimecia had decided, it was because she had been searching Cloud.

Cloud and Tifa, by the way, were not there. And that was something else that she did not like.

As for the others’ opinions, Yuna, like Aeris, had prepared for a fight, feeling the atmosphere. She had no idea what would happen that day, and did her best to prepare for anything. Lulu appeared unmoved by any of it, because, of course, her thoughts were not divinable. Yuna moved closer to her guardian, not only because of her worry, but to alert her guardian that she must be prepared to do her job.

Lulu was clearly prepared for something. Heaven only knew, Yuna thought, what she had already decided. That was her way, after all, coming to her own decision without letting on.

This combination of forces, sure or unsure, prepared or not, knowing or ignorant, came together to make the air in the courtyard a storm, like the winds of the ocean collide. People glanced this way and that, gauging, waiting.

Yazoo was the supreme over law, and had the right to speak first.

“We have summoned you to the court,” he said, with a voice that was steady and hard, “but don’t fear that you are on trial. On the contrary, the venue was chosen for the nobility of those who have summoned you, to reflect our position, and the severity of the conversation we wish to have.”

“It’s an honor, really,” said Yuna, and bowed low. She was not insincere. Lulu followed her example, and Aeris did incline her head respectfully.

In a move that surprised Aeris, Yazoo inclined his head back. She met his eyes, but wasn’t given anything for it. “To let a visitor into our city is rare,” he stated, “And we keep ourselves in isolation because it is the state of our souls. We prefer to be apart. You have been kept in the city, I hear, without much information and without much comfort, but I tell you that we’re at a loss about what to do with visitors. I pray you won’t read inhospitality into these actions.”

“We don’t,” Yuna promised. “On the contrary, we’ve been well looked after.”

Coming from Yuna, Aeris was sure it was meant to be sincere praise. “Nonetheless,” Yazoo continued, “you’ve ended up in an unusual position, which we apologize for. It’s really our fault, for we don’t know what to do in these situations of international legal matters. You see, we’ve come to think that you have been keeping one of our own, who belongs to us, away from us.”

The pieces fell into place for Aeris with far too much rapidity. By now, Ultimecia had found out that Cloud had Jenova’s essence in him, and unless she wanted to admit a part of Jenova has escaped Chasamaecum and was influencing outsiders, which, of course, was not possible to a Jenovine who believed outsides were incontrovertible, then Cloud had to come from Chasamaecum, through some method. And as for why he didn’t look Jenovine…

“The existence of your acquaintance, called Strife, is entirely an enigma for us, since we cannot call him anything but Jenovine, based on his genetic readings, but we have no record of him existing in his city, and no record of a Jenovine mother from whom he could have been birthed, even out of those few people who have left our city. The only conclusion we have is that Strife is a Jenovine that has been genetically modified, and this possibility, though scientifically sound, confounds us.

“Surely, a Jenovine can come from nowhere but Chasamaecum, but we cannot trace where Strife came from, or why he is the… amalgamation he is today. The methods by which Jenovine blood and Mainlander blood could be comingled baffles us, since our own scientists proved we are separate species, and this the product of mainlander and Jenovine should be impossible without intense scientific intervention. But even that aside, we don’t know any escaped Jenovine whose records could match what we have seen in Strife, genetically, since he has no clear relation to any of them. Besides that, most escapees are of debatable blood purity, whereas Cloud has what we would call a noble purity of his blood. The only conclusion we can come to is someone had the power to modify a Jenovine’s construction after their birth.”

The horror that went through the crowd was palpable. Well, no one would think of that as a comfortable idea, no matter who was being changed into what. What surprised Aeris, though, was to see Kadaj looking surprised.

Yazoo continued. “We can only wonder how this discrepancy came to be, that a Jenovine that, normally, would be in the upper tiers of Jenovine society, among high sorceresses and great lords, would come to resemble us so little. What power could have affected him? Have you any idea?”

There were two things that Aeris considered in that moment.

She considered telling them the truth, that Cloud had been mainlander by birth, and not Jenovine. But there was something she wanted to avoid at any costs—that Ultimecia would come to know that there were many like Cloud, hundreds like Cloud, that had been infected with Jenova. If Ultimecia had thought of Cloud as being this important, Aeris didn’t want her to have any more like him.

And then she realized that what they wanted was for her to confirm what they already knew- that she was someone who had the power to genetically modify a Jenovine, which could only make her a few different things, all of them powerful, none of them good. This could be one of two things: a trap for the SPIRITs, or a trap for Aeris, depending alone on who took the blame for Cloud’s fate.

Ultimecia could not learn about the SPIRITs.

Aeris sprung her trap.

“I admit that Cloud has long been a curiosity for me as well,” she said. “I did not know what he was, when I found him, you see, I have studied genetics for a long time in Bevelle, and Cloud was too interesting a case for me to let go when I saw him. I had never seen a Jenovine, how was I to know his condition was not some exotic mutation, but an average Jenovine complexion? I promise you that this was nothing but a great misunderstanding.”

 It was an answer, at least, that no one expected. “You’re saying he was modified,” Kadaj said, with sharp-tipped interest.

“There was research done,” she said, “it wasn’t public. I promise you that I meant nothing but the best, and that harm never came to him, never on purpose. We made a mistake, and I know that, and it was the drive to do penance for this mistake that drove me to try to bring him back here.”

Yuna was looking at her out of the corner of her eyes. Aeris tried to telepathically tell her to just get ready to fight for her life, but figured it was a lost cause.

“What experiments were done?” Kadaj asked, sounding angry. “What happened? And if you just wanted to atone for this grievous misdeed, why come here lying to us?”

 “You must understand,” she pleaded, “I’ve been running from everyone who knows me, and I’ve been frightened. I was hoping to drop Cloud off here, give him to you, without having to implicate myself, and I know that I did wrong, and it was the move of a coward, but—”

“Enough,” said Ultimecia.

Aeris caught her eyes.

“This lying whore,” said Ultimecia, “this thief in the night, has already betrayed herself.”

Inside her heart, Aeris was relieved.

“If she wants to give Cloud back to his true people, why not announce that he is Jenovine? If she wanted to run away after returning him to his home, why leave his unstable, warmongering guard in the city with him? If she had good intentions, why all of these pretenses, why these lies, why approaching us as if we are a city of fiends, and not civilized people? Why question my guards about this thing in the city, or that thing about our culture, why send her own underlings in to ask more? She is not delving for forgiveness for her actions, but information, an insidious snake. And why would Cloud Strife have come to me only with fear and trembling if he knew he was coming home?”

Aeris’s hands shook.

“She has already lied, lied when she came here, lied to our faces, lied about everything, I tell you, everything. She has lied about who she is, she has lied about what she wanted, lied about her very nature. What you see here is the first of evils to all of the Jenovine, and I will prove it.”

Ultimecia approached Aeris. Aeris meant to keep her eyes on the Sorceress, but in the corner of her vision, she saw Yuna move something. She couldn’t be summoning?

“I did not know you when first I saw you,” Ultimecia asked, “for I was led to believe that your species was no more.”

She knew.

Yuna pulled something out of her obi. From the front, though, she must have just looked like she was grasping her waist nervously.

“You are a walking shadow, cast by your true form. Your body means nothing. You are not really the slice of flesh I see before me. You are much greater. I saw it, in the night, when I remembered your aura. I know what the shape of your soul is now, which baffled me before.”

Yuna’s hand travelled, trembling, to her lips. Her thumb was tucked under her fingers.

Ultimecia stood not a foot away from Aeris. Aeris was as still as stone.

“Servant of the pagan gods of Spira, and greatest of Demons, you are a CETRA.”             

Aeris hadn’t expected to be surprised by anything Ultimecia could say. Her breath caught in a gasp. She said, “How.”

Yuna’s thumb flickered, and an odd noise came from her.

“Wait,” Kadaj said, as every eye turned to Yuna, “What is that—”

“RIKKU, NOW,” Yuna shouted into the communicator.

The Yuna threw the communicator to the ground, and smashed it under her heel, so that it could not be made to work again.

Upon the instant that her charge made a move to begin battle, not even a moment after she spoke, Lulu cast a powerful spell and flung it against Ultimecia, using the strongest of her powers to set forth a blaze, which caught the flowers, and roared high into the air. Ultimecia was caught off balance and cast to the ground, and those attending court dashed to their feet and screamed, trying to scramble away from the inferno that had appeared as suddenly as lightning could strike. Aeris and Yuna, too, had to jump back from the flames, though Lulu was in their midst, untouched.

The brothers moved with inhuman speed, and Yuna cried when Yazoo, suddenly, was before her, a sword outdrawn, pale and as sudden as a candle flame. A Fayth was with her as soon as she called its name, with wings and claws, sounding a screech that reverberated around the city, visible in the air, calling for blood.

Aeris sighed to herself.

Kadaj, in a moment of what seemed like good calculation, but wasn’t, had attacked Lulu. Aeris didn’t look to see if Lulu was countering him well. She could see why the brothers had chosen to attack Yuna and Lulu, since they had been the ones to start the battle, and theoretically, they were the ones that had to be stopped. Besides, they probably had no clue what ‘Cetra’ meant, and only figured that Aeris was a religious figure, whereas Lulu was calling up flames and Yuna was summoning helpers.

That is how Aeris was able to slip from the garden, practically darting out of Ultimecia’s claws, to an unguarded exit.

After all, in this form, she was no match for their sort. She would avoid a fight if possible, and just make her way towards the temple, in order to find Jenova, just like she planned—be it an official meeting or otherwise.

But as she found herself darting for the temple, tips of her toes just barely hitting the stone walkway, she felt her interest split down the center like the line between the two doors leading to Jenova’s gigantic stone heart. She felt the veins of Jenova, as if in the air, inviting her upwards, and she felt a weak pulse somewhere in the statue’s labyrinth, more familiar to her, and more painful. Cloud was still there.

She didn’t know what time she had before Cid showed up trying to raze the entire city with his ship, and, more worrying, she didn’t know what time she had before someone in the city showed up trying to raze HER. And she didn’t have much hope of keeping this body alive when the Jenovine army was at the strengths it was. It was likely, she realized with a sick feeling, that she could find Jenova’s body or she could find Cloud, but not both.

 

-

 

The noise like thunder that suddenly sounded from within the depths of the Crater decided several things for several people.

 

-

 

A minor summon fell down in front of Yuna, and the melody of summoning ended in a soprano sheik as Yazoo leapt over the creature and slashed at her face with a thin, bright knife. Yuna countered with her staff, feeling, even as her heel landed behind her on the pavement, an old mindset settle over her, the mental place she would use while on pilgrimage while battling monsters or facing those who would block her path to Sin.

A sensation of heat hit her cheek from the right; the familiar heat of Lulu’s magical fire, which glinted off of Yazoo’s knife. He struck below, and she spun her staff to knock the blow awkwardly aside. He struck above, and she angled her staff, trying to wind the knife into the notches and holes carved into the head, while the blunt end of the base swerved for his legs. He jumped backwards—which was his mistake, since it instantly put Yuna out of his range, while he stayed in hers.

Snarling, he raised his hand, palm away from her, and she saw something dark and twisting vaguely form around his fingers.

Kadaj had to gasp and jump away from the suddenly burning fire, but it was no reprieve to Lulu, who heard footsteps darting up behind her, from where there had been a jury to the court. She spun on her heels and, lacking anything else, brandished her nails when she came face to face with a Jenovine in an army uniform. She had no clue who she was, but felt not a second of doubt before she first marred her arm with nail marks, grabbing her unexpectedly, and second when she marred her face with a spire of ice.

“Sorceress!” cried Kadaj, turning around to look to Ultimecia for aid against a magic he had never seen before.

Ultimecia was gone. She had abandoned her troops the second she heard a sound that no one in the fight that had suddenly broken out could have heard.

Lulu felt a dark pleasure in her gut for only a moment before she heard a quickly silenced gasp out of Yuna.

 

-

 

Seifer Almasy awoke to a sound so unpleasant and so loud he felt he had gone deaf in its aftermath. He had been trying to sleep in after a whole night awake on the floor, being examined. The judgment on whether or not he was sane enough to continue in his role was, apparently, pending.

It was his fault for trying to sleep at all, really.

The crash seemed to be coming from below him, he though, several floors below, once he had regained his cognitive functions and realized that he was in his room and not, as he had been dreaming he was, under a layer of ice in a frozen lake, vaster than he had ever seen in his life in the city, and colder than any midwinter day.

He didn’t hear Squall come out of the bathroom, but he knew when he was there.  

“No clue,” he said, before Squall could even ask a question. Squall hovered in the doorway, looking nothing but bored—but Seifer knew, through methods he could only call familiarity—that he was uncertain, or trying to ask something. Seifer dressed in his uniform before saying anything. “Yes, I’m fine to go check it out. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

Squall looked sharply away, as if he were offended, but he was probably embarrassed. Seifer debated putting Hyperion into his holster, but decided to just carry it. He was looking into an alarm, after all. “Yeah, I bet it has to do with one of the outsiders,” he said, almost as if to himself, “I don’t know what in holy Jenova’s city could make a noise like that. And no, you don’t have to go anywhere. You just recover.”

“You should be the one recovering,” said Squall, almost in a whisper.

“What, for this?” Seifer gestured towards his person, indicating the half-dozen bruises Squall knew he had, scattered here and there. “I barely feel it.”

Squall sighed, without making much noise, but Seifer could see his chest compress. “Calm down,” Seifer commanded.

Squall glowered at him. “Don’t give me that look,” Seifer added, wagging a finger at him. “I know you got less sleep than I did last night, even after duty. You looked as high-strung as a violin. Lie down or goddess help me.”

Squall shook his head, just slightly, but Seifer didn’t think he was disagreeing with him. “I’ve been getting bad feelings,” he said finally. Monotone, as always.

But with Squall, Seifer had learned, the more carefully emotionless his speech was, the more earnest he was being. “Premonitions?”

Squall shook his head again, and looked off for a bit. Seifer finished getting ready. “I only feel like something isn’t right. It hasn’t been right. I feel like its right behind me, and I should know, but…”

“I’m going to see what made the crash. A boiler probably burst, Squall.”

Squall tilted his head to look Seifer in the eyes, but only for a second.  He sighed and shrugged. He was annoyed, much to Seifer’s amusement. “Yes, Princess, I’ll take your warning seriously. You don’t have to look so morose about it.”

The glare that Squall gave him was absolutely precious. Seifer couldn’t help but smile at him, and he moved to take Squall’s shoulders in his hands. “Relax, alright? Relax or I’ll make you.”

“No power in life or death could make me relax,” Squall deadpanned.

It was rare enough for him to joke, so Seifer laughed and pulled close to Squall for a second, just touching his forehead with his own, before drawing back. Squall was smiling as lightly as a dusting of snow from the very first snowfall. “I’ll be back in about five minutes, so quit freaking out and try to sleep. No, I didn’t say you have to magically cure your insomnia and be in dreamland by the time I come back, I said TRY.”

“Fine,” said Squall.

Seifer gave him an almost condescending pat on the cheek, Squall flipped it away. Seifer laughed to himself and left the room, refocusing on where the sound might have come from, and what he thought it might be.

 

-

 

In the very highest room in the temple, where the statue’s two eyes; green stained glass irises ringed with stone, let stream in watery green light, a black veil was disturbed by the form within rising from her seat. From a position on her throne, where she hugged her knees with her arms, she let her arms fall, and, struggling with misuse, her toes felt the ground, long nails skittering off the stone.

When she stood, she was only some five feet tall, if that, and the veil which covered her visage lay on a strangely flat surface, like an end table. It drug on the floor behind her as she took a few slow steps, unhurried and imprecise, towards the pale light of the windows far above her. Into and out of the smoky, jade-like beams she wandered, like a moth, as if searching for the source of the light.

The veil was parted, like a branch parts a running stream, by an arm as thin and pale as bone itself, slowly revealed from underneath the dark fabric. Her bent fingers unfurled, only momentarily, to reach toward those downcast eyes.

Her arm lowered again, and was enfolded in her veil. To the outside eye, she did nothing but stand there, as still as a statue, for some minutes, arms at her sides, and shoulders bowed.

She was feeling. She was looking down, and inside. She was searching, and she was finding. Her little fingers waved here and about, and combed through the strata of floors and secret rooms and elevator shafts below her, saying hello, saying welcome back.

Her whispers were very quiet, and those who felt them felt them as a tingle along their spine, a little warmth, or a little chill.

She felt some strange things, some new things. Some bodies she would like to hold herself.

Her veil rippled slightly as she turned her hand to grasp at the hollow of her own chest.

With steps slow and cautious, hands grasping at the walls, skittering where her jeweled rings met he stone, she made her way to the stairs, and went below.

 

-

 

Cloud and Jenova sat in a room together, one chair to the back of the other, in front of one was a mirror, and in front of the other, a window.

Cloud would not have been able to tell you what Jenova looked like. He was looking out the window.

The room was without light, and it convulsed, from time to time, not like an earthquake running through the ground, but like skin shudders when blood runs through it. It was likely enough that they were inside some sort of organism.

Outside the window, Cloud was watching the night sky, but it was as if nights went by in a matter of minutes, because the stars turned visible, bright Polaris being still, but the others; serpent constellation here, there a queen and a king, there the maidens, there the hunter, there the demon; swung wildly in arcs and curves, like rain falling, whisked by the wind.

And then Cloud saw that he wasn’t looking at the night sky at all, because all the stars were in green, and paired, and he was peering into the cage of a beast with a thousand eyes and uncountable limbs. Contrasting impulses did not war through Cloud—he has no compulsion to kill it, no compulsion to run away, no curiosity fighting disgust; instead, he felt compelled, by the simplest of responses, to let the animal out of its cage.

He reached for the glass, as if the act of touching it would make it melt away, make the invisible insensible. But he couldn’t touch the glass. His fingers never reached it. His elbows jolted, as if they had been jostled, and he heard scraping noises, harsh and skittering, like rats in the walls. His arms felt heavy and limp. Paws pressed at the glass in return, from behind.

Cloud lifted up his arms to his face to examine them. They were tree branches, bent and old, scattered here and there with young green leaves.

 He turned around to ask Jenova to open up the window.

 

-

 

Cloud was woken up by the painful tingling in his numb arms, which only subsided after he carefully shifted them out from under his neck. Somewhere in the course of his turning during sleep, they had become pinned below his head. Now, they ended up flopped on either side of his body, shaking slightly as the blood slowly came back into them.

What looked like the spots and stains that move across a person’s eyes when they aren’t getting the oxygen they require came streaking across his vision, as ink is shot through water. As he blinked, the images would go away, and come back. He tried to force them away, and it seemed that would work for a bit, but they always returned.

In retrospect, the idea that he could calmly sit anywhere with his back to Jenova was preposterous. Like they were in a waiting room. He remembered a dark sense, a sense like sadness, and dark shafts of light, and that he was sitting across from Jenova… and that was the whole of his dream that he recalled.

Once that pointless thought exercise was done, Cloud had use of his arms again. So he decided to sit himself up and get his bearings.

He had been laid on a soft, brightly decorated couch with silken cushions and an end table with steaming tea in a glass cup at his head. He decided to ignore the tea for now, since he couldn’t recognize the scent.

The room itself was white stone, like most of the city (he wasn’t suffering from any sort of memory loss, thank gods, he knew where he was) but was decorated with golden tiles along the borders and colored stones in patterns on the walls. There were cushions on the floor, candles burning in each of the corners in the room, a small dining table with two chairs, and a lovely decorative statue of a fish. Odd choice. No windows, of course, and only one door; which, though he was sure he’d get to test the strength of its golden frame to his heart’s content, looked unmovable.

“I’ve been in worse scrapes,” he spoke to himself, “which is something I can barely believe.”

The spots and lines were still dancing across his vision. They might have been indicative of brain damage, but they did not come with pain or dizziness, and… they didn’t feel like brain damage. This was the sort of thing Cloud could assess. The black clumps were steady, did not change as he looked at them from separate angles or positions, though some swayed slightly and calmly, like hanging vines in a breeze. To put it simply, though the lines wove through walls and floors, and stretched technically beyond where he should have been able to see, extending into some strange horizon instead of to the limits of his vision, they had all the characteristics of something that was there.

The actual facts of the matter fell into place quickly. Fact one: Ultimecia claims she awakened a sort of power inside me, and probably did. Tricks cannot be overruled. Fact two: If this is a true power and not a trick, these things I am seeing are real. Fact three: the things I am seeing are probably Jenova or closely related to her. Fact four: The power in question is, then, some sort of psychic sight.

The facts fell into place quickly, since Cloud has long becomes used to objectivity as a survival tactic, and he, sighing, felt forced to just accept them.

As usual, emotional responses would have to wait.

“If it’s some sort of trick,” said Cloud, “they’ll go away if I escape. And if this is some sort of power I have now that’s been unlocked, then I can learn more about it once I’ve escaped.”

Truth be told, Cloud admitted to himself, examining the lock of the door, it might not be in his best interest to escape. Might not. He might be there for a reason. This could be the start of his epic journey of renouncing the lies he was told in his childhood and accepting Jenova as his true mother and the life of the sorceress as his true calling. It was possible, he figured.

He didn’t examine why, at the time, he felt like he couldn’t do that and had to leave instead. He was riding on a wave of emotional denial that had at least gotten him off of the couch. He just knew he felt he had to be away from here, and back to where he was before, outside of the city, under the stars with Aeris and Tifa, working for a purpose.

More could wait for later.

The lock was a simple key-lock, but despite his spectacular distrust for the system, Cloud had never learned how to pick locks. His hands were prone to tremors after all. Then again—and he spared them a suddenly nervous look, as if he was scared to look at his arms—they weren’t shaking now as bad as they once had. He had gotten better, though it was only now, when he had to assess his situation levelly, that he could admit he really had been healed.

“Reason number one for opting out of the Sorceress option,” muttered Cloud, “Aeris is very nice, despite her issues, and would probably be upset by that.” It felt weird to say it. You would think Aeris was too holy for issues. But for some reason, it was clear now that she wasn’t.

Cloud peered through the hole of the lock. He could fuzzily see more stone across the way—hallways in the temple, of course. He supposed it was too much to hope for a transferal to a nice riverside villa for his recovery.

And as Cloud was looking through the keyhole, trying to think of something he could do about this, he saw something. At first, it made him start backwards, because he thought he saw a key suddenly appear in the hole—but as he jumped back, he saw it still. It turned in the keyhole, without making a sound, light glimmering off its particular silver edges. And then it disappeared into Ultimecia’s hand, and she walked away, and there was Cloud again, alone in the quiet room.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Right. That was a thing that just happened. That was probably a vision. Probably related to the other things I am seeing. That was also… not very helpful.”

He decided to sit on the couch again.

While he did so, he gave in and drank the tea, knowing full well that it wasn’t poison anyway, because, well, it wasn’t poison. It didn’t feel like poison, and it wouldn’t be, because there was probably no one in the world who wanted him alive MORE than Ultimecia did. Instead, it tasted for all his life like an herbal tea made of some sort of flower petal.

He scanned the room again. Fish statue. Table and chairs. Cushions. Candles. Fish statue, but absolutely nothing resembling a hidden switch. Table and chairs, but a door about as easy to bludgeon down as the wall would be. Candles, but everything was made of stone. And a vision of a key, but he knew It was gone from this room.

For the sake of completion, he walked to the door and jiggled the handle. Locked.

And then he was sitting on the couch again. “My army training has failed me,” he observed to the fish statue. “You don’t think I could kick it down? I know Tifa could. Isn’t that amazing? Have I become the damsel in distress somehow? After leaving home and trying to learn how to protect people myself?... They told me that life wasn’t fair, but seriously.”

But since, as he was aware, Tifa WOULD try to kick the door down, and might even make kicking the door down work, he figured he had no excuse for not trying.

His shoes were still on his feet, and, since he had been wearing the same army issue boots for years, they were serviceable and built sturdy, but frayed with use. “If I hit it with the underside,” he muttered, “I shouldn’t logically break anything…” from what he had seen, the inside of the lock tumbler was hardly ShinRa-issued stainless steel anyway. He might be able to snap it.

The more he looked at the frame, though, the more uncertain he felt about really being able to snap it. Sure, it was an old door, but that didn’t mean it was weak. And he really didn’t think he had the health, improved or not, to risk breaking toes. But he wouldn’t forgive himself, he knew, if he didn’t try. He had been keeping his head about himself so far, partly because he was still too groggy and faint to panic, but the longer he was in a locked room with no escape, the less he liked it.

He had gotten into position, recalling the ShinRa teaching on how to give the solidest kick he could, when the ground suddenly shook.

He heard the unearthly noise of a sound like flames tearing through the air after he felt it. He grasped for something to hold onto in the unsteady moments where the ground was still shaking, and his hand ended up on the doorknob.

He wasn’t sure if the force of the blast damaged the door, or it if just warped its position in the frame to pop out of the lock. But pop out it did, and Cloud was holding the knob of an open door in his hand before he had half realized that something had just met an unpleasant end some few hundred feet below him.

“Not sure I want to know what that was,” he muttered to himself.

Outside of the door, he saw a winding hallway, gold-plated, much like the room he had just come out of, devoid of people or significant markers. He could see other doors, which, in a way he couldn’t yet described, ‘felt’ just as locked as this one—they gave him a sensation of being held tightly when he stared at one too long—but no labelling system to mark which door was which. The hallway was suspiciously curved, in each of the three linear directions, taking odd detours, climbing both up and down, as if this part of the temple were a rabbit warren or termite mound.

“She took me to the solar plexus,” Cloud remembered. “Which means these might be the guts. If I extend the metaphor.” After a minute, he concluded this: “And if I can find that spine, I might be able to climb my way back up to an exit.” He considered this for another minute, tapping his foot. “Which likely as not will just lead to me being re-captured.”

At a temporary loss of what to do, Cloud propped the door open with the fish statue, turned around, and laid back down on the couch. He was aware that this was his best chance for escape, he just didn’t see that any escape would bring him far.

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Tifa Punches Out Seifer

The brilliant metal of Tifa’s knuckles hit the Jenovine soldier on the bridge of his nose right between his eyes, but it might have been overkill, really, because he hadn’t been attacking her. He hadn’t been doing anything but staring in shock.

Vincent’s release from the Materia resulted essentially in the explosion of a small bomb, focused on Tifa’s wrist and taking its toll on her prison cell, her guards, and the surrounding environment for approximately two hundred feet. The reasons why this didn’t at all harm Tifa, even though by her figuring, Vincent’s form should have had to go THROUGH hers in order to manifest, were no doubt complicated, magical, and known only to Aeris Gainsborough.

The results of the explosion were these: she was down two guards (one knocked away by the blast and into the weird green light below, one sent after him with her fist) and one prison cell (the bars were bent and even corroded), she was momentarily free and unhindered, and she was sure every person in Chasamaecum knew she was momentarily free and unhindered.

With not even a sound, Vincent forsook his huge, reptilian form to become the ghost of a man again; black hair, translucent skin, grave expression, fond of hovering less than an inch away from Tifa’s arm. “We should be vacating the premises,” he said observantly.

“As quickly as possible, I think,” said Tifa. “Father, could you fly me up?”

Vincent squinted. “Perhaps some of the way, but my flight would become impeded before long.”

“Well, let’s start with that,” Tifa decided.

Vincent unfolded (there was no other way to describe it, it was like watching a corn kernel popping, but huge and covered in scales) into Bahamut once more, and though Tifa aimed herself to jump onto his back, he surprised her with grasping her in his claws himself, and lifting her so that she could settle on his neck. Technically, he flew slowly and sedately, so not to bother Tifa, but just a few flaps of his huge wings bore her far.

“What is your plan,” asked Vincent, who, to his credit, hadn’t even asked why he woke up to find his daughter in jail yet.

“I have to find Cloud, contact Cid Highwind, and escape,” said Tifa. “I was entrusted by Aeris to watch Cloud, but we were separated, and Cloud was claimed basically as a spoil of war by a Jenovine sorceress.”

“You lost Cloud in battle?” asked Vincent. “The battle with Chasamaecum has begun already?”

“No—well—now it has, probably,” Tifa confessed. “I tried to rearrange one of the war general’s faces and they decided I shouldn’t be loose anymore. I would have fought to stay with Cloud, but they used a powerful time spell on us and he was already taken from me when I awoke.”

Vincent was struggling to weave his way between the hole-poked and darkly colored rocks that floated above Jenova’s crater, interspersed with the pale stone staircases and galleries built by the Jenovines. After too long, he gave up, and nudged Tifa only a ledge, joining her in spirit form. “We can’t be far from the surface now,” Tifa said hopefully.

“Eerily quiet here,” Vincent commented. “Must not often be in use.”

“They don’t often have uses for underground oubliette-prisons, I think,” said Tifa. “It seems to be a very tightly regulated society. Well, here’s some stairs, it’s our best bet.”

Tifa raced up the stairs and Vincent floated beside her. “Have you any clue where Cloud is,” he asked.

“None,” Tifa said. “But the thought of where he could be… I couldn’t wait for Aeris any longer. For all I knew, my actions caused the Jenovines to lose patience with Aeris and Cid long enough for them to be driven off or attacked.”

“Daughter, what did you even do,” he asked.

“It looks like in Jenova’s religious city they are not very used to brawls.” Tifa reached the top of the stairs, and peered around the corners. A hallway and another hallway. She picked one that looked slightly brighter to her. “I couldn’t sit there and wonder any longer. I learned from conversing with one of the guards that their military, at least, has a hazing system. I kept thinking of Cloud…” Tifa’s footsteps rang down the hallways in unaccompanied silence for a minute. “I couldn’t wait any longer.”

When Tifa heard shouts in front of her, Vincent ran ahead, and faced the soldiers that approached. Chasamaecum did not turn out poor troops, but in small numbers, no sort of person could match Bahamut. Tifa ran past what was left with her eyes closed and Vincent quietly apologized. “It’s hard yet to control my fine motor… well…”

“Desperate times,” were all Tifa said.

Of course, the sound of her escape attracted more than just foot soldiers to her, though it seems most everyone was struggling to find out where she had gone to. Hiding, looping, sometimes sending Vincent ahead of her, she worked her way up stairs and through hallways, only hoping that going up far enough would lead her to a place where she wanted to be. She checked rooms as she passed them, if they would open for her, calling out Cloud’s name softly.

In one of them, she didn’t find Cloud.

A man came hollering out at her from where he had waited in ambush, hearing her approach, and swung something large and bright at her from behind his shoulder, aiming for her head. She screamed back at him, war cry to match war cry, and dodged the blow while aiming to deflect him with a steel toe to his gut. She hit, because he hadn’t been able to see what she was doing from his ambush, but it only stumbled him back a few paces before he stood at ready again.

He stood at ready, but facing something that resembled nothing more than a black dragon, being just barely held at bay by the foreigner. He had defeated some pretty crazy shit in his training, but he hadn’t seen something quite this size before, and didn’t know what it was.

Tifa had only held Vincent back, by the way, because the few seconds in which he was falling back from her kick gave her leave to recognize him. “YOU,” she snarled, her face convoluting from shock to anger, her fists clenching as if in a spasmed response.

“YOU,” Seifer Almasy agreed, grimacing in return. He hefted his gunblade in front of him, only barely bent from the attack. “Do you realize the trouble you’ve PUT me through, dark-haired bitch?”

“The trouble you—the trouble I have put YOU through?” Tifa gaped, one hand shaking before her, the other placed against her father’s leg, who was uncomfortable, but willing to settle for as long as she asked him to. “I’ve been in solitary! What have you been doing, wiping floors as punishment for not waiting on your witch?”

“You have no idea what you’ve put me through,” he yelled, “My entire reputation is at stake! And my place in the army! Entire plans have been put into question which for years I have toiled on! Do you have any idea what your carelessness is doing?”

“I couldn’t give a goddamn! Your witch stole my oldest friend and did god knows what to him! If I’ve done something that has screwed up your little cult, good riddance!”

Seifer shouldered his blade menacingly. “Foreigner bitch,” he spat.

“Inbred asshole,” she returned, arms crossed.

“Hired mercenary.”

Tifa looked over her shoulder for a second. “Stay back, dad,” she commanded. And then she came at Seifer at a steady walk, fist pulling back farther with every step. “I am the godsdamn COMMANDER of the godsdamn PLAINS RANGERS for the entire godsdamn THUNDER PLAINS,” she shouted, taking a swing at his head with her final word.

He swung the flat at her blade at her, as if it were a blunt weapon, and she knocked the blow aside with her shoulder, swinging herself sideways at him. Fumbling, he tried to push her away, hand on her shoulder. “And I’m the goddessbless co-captain of the entire goddessbless Jenovine command, directly under Sorceress Ultimecia,” he hissed, “And may I note that I have the personal ability to declare war on any nation if I so choose?” With that, he finally pushed her away from him, using the hilt of his blade to knock against her collarbone.

“Great,” spat Tifa, stumbling back a few steps (and holding an open palm behind her for a second to signify Vincent should stay put if he could bear to do so) “what a coincidence, so do I.” Technically, she had to put her declaration before a council, but the council hadn’t refused her command before, so she figured she could swing it. Just like she swung her fist from her uninjured shoulder as hard as she could towards Seifer’s gut the second he wasn’t looking.

Since Seifer carried a huge weapon that massively unbalanced him, Tifa knew her best chances all lay in moving too quick for him to follow, and in patterns too unpredictable. He blocked one blow, she swung another (adrenaline nullifying her shoulder pain) up high when he was still looking low. He couldn’t move his blade fast enough, and connected fist to fist with her, and she used her momentum to press his arm almost behind his head, trying to push him down.

Unfortunately, Jenovines were damn tall, and he had the force to shove the attempted block away. When she sprang backwards, his blade came entirely too close to her stomach. But while he was down, trying to bring his blade back up, she was above, aiming for the crown of his head.

Somehow, Seifer got an arm around and grabbed her wrist, which, unbeknownst to Seifer, was a bad move, because a Tifa after she’s been grabbed is a panicked Tifa, and a panicked Tifa is willing to risk arm injury to try to slam someone into the ground with her shoulder. Seifer hit the stone with a crash and a shout, and Tifa more or less kicked her way up off him. “You’d have a better chance against me without that two-ton bludgeon of yours,” she wheezed, standing above him, but crookedly, not liking how many of her muscles were bombarding her with pain at that moment.

“Tifa—“ Vincent started.

Seifer interrupted him. “If you insist,” he growled, and pulled himself up enough to kick Tifa in the shins.

She shouted, and when she looked up, green eyes were flashing in her face. She was shocked and barely had the time to connect fist to fist when she saw him coming at her.

Serves me to give advice to my enemies, she thought, doing her best to twist Seifer’s wrist and only twisting hers. She was a tall woman where she came from, and a strong one too, but Seifer was just taller and stronger than her, over six feet, made of muscle and tempered by mania. And she knew she was officially a little too close to Seifer for Vincent to make a quick end of this now. That would be up to her, then.

She aimed for the side of his head with her left fist, which he twisted out of the way of, and while he was doing that, his grip loosened. She yanked her right arm just far enough away to slip her hand into his, which probably looked like a baffling choice until she interlaced their fingers, gave a swift yank, and bent them backwards as far as she could force them to go, the steel of her metal knuckles pressing hard into the sensitive junctions between his fingers.

The yell he gave proved he was in real pain for the first time since he tried to ambush her, and Tifa wasted absolutely no time or sympathy in making sure to finally get the crack at his face with her left fist that she had been longing for. She hadn’t been ambidextrous before wrestling with wandering plains cats forced her to be, but she could deliver a hit only slightly less devastating than her right could with her left. One broken nose later, she was able to force Seifer to his knees, mostly by way of her boots, cursing as he went.

“Or maybe you shouldn’t have dropped the meat cleaver, huh.” 

Which was her dumb mouth, because then she was being head-butted in the stomach, broken nose be damned. Unfortunately for Seifer, he realized that this put him into prime kicking range AFTER Tifa was already down, and the second strike to his face hit him just exactly wrong. He was only truly unconscious for five or ten seconds, but that was long enough to Vincent to decide that was more than enough of that, grab his daughter, and run.

Seifer spent perhaps another minute in a headache that made the air before his eyes boil before he pulled himself up with hisses and groans. His face was gushing blood, he didn’t dare touch it to see the damage yet, he knew there was exposed skin. Well, if they thought your last scar looked kind of sexy, mocked a little voice in his head, wait until they get a load of this.

Describing his rage would be an exercise in futility. He was an unstable man, but he had not felt this sort of anger before. Though he had before felt anger passionate, anger cold and clean, anger that focuses and drives to distraction both, this was humiliation. In reality, he was the better fighter than the black-hair woman. So much was obvious. Her form was sloppy, she depended on tricks and rough abuse, even if she was very practiced. But the fact that galled him was that it was her field experience fighting and wrestling that won the day for her, since she clearly spent her days in the mud of the plains, fighting bears, or whatever her job was, doing something, and the Jenovine army has been kept ceremonial for centuries.

“Maybe it’s time for that to change,” he whispered to himself.

-

Tifa was also nursing her sores, though they were less numerous—bruises she hid, sore muscles she poked at with worry, fingers she tested for mobility. “Okay, maybe more than one is broken,” she confessed. “Or sprained? It’s really hard to tell.”

“What did you think that would achieve?” Vincent asked angrily, trying to crawl through the small hallways and keep her on his back. “Now you’re trying to do your escape while injured, and it looks like you’re made yourself a dire enemy. A dire, important enemy.”

“He already hated me,” Tifa countered. “He was the one I had a skirmish with before.”

“I gathered.” Vincent was thinking. “You’ve chosen poorly, and not just for that reason. I know you’ll want to beat him. But he’s a good fighter. Very good. He didn’t expect all the tricks you had, or the ways you know to fight when you’re in a corner, but he was learning. If you want to beat him, hand-to-hand, you might pay dearly for it.”

“So? What do you want me to do about that? I hope I’ll never see him again, but if I do, should I just ignore him? After that? We’re both warriors. Commanders. In other times, we might have settled the whole impending battle between the two of us in duel. Should I pretend that doesn’t exist between us?”

Vincent was quiet for a moment, then he muttered something. “What was that?” Tifa asked.

“I said,” said Vincent tersely, “I wish I had my damn ShinRa-issued pistol again.”

Tifa tried not to laugh too loudly. This was a stealth mission, after all.

-

One thing did continue to bother her, though. Considering Chasamaecum had a significant army and the Thunder Plains were defended by a loosely tied group of outdoorsmen who happened to be very good with knives, Tifa doubted anyone would let it come to war, or even to combat between commanders. The Thunder Plains would need some much more significant allies to stand up in that war, unless, maybe, they made it a grueling guerrilla war on their rainy homelands, which was a disgusting idea to someone charged to defend small villagers and farmers. But should she face the Jenovine army in this way, she was one woman, technically, against two co-commanders, and she didn’t have a clue how Seifer’s even crazier partner fought.

No, it wasn’t required for army commanders to duel anymore. And yet… she knew it was something some people still expected to happen, behind the scenes, or perhaps in the heat of battle, eventually one commander was carried off. That was what was expected, really, of true commanders—to try to root out the head of the other army.

Hopefully they had different traditions here. Or perhaps Bevelle has an excellent war general she could appeal to.

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Lifestream Gives Aeris an Ultimatum

“I didn’t come here for games,” said Aeris, gripping her staff with both hands. “I’m tracking down one soul that has recently passed. It’s very important. I only need to find her, and I will be gone again.”

There was laughter, chuckles in one corner, giggles in another, every separate syllable coming from another hole in the uneven, stone landscape, like a canyon or rocky desertscape, existing only in steps here and arches there. The green rivers rushed through curve and concave floor, grinding down the little landscape, pulling at her feet to bring her to high waterfalls unknown. The version of the Cetra which faced her manifested as many giant arms, making signs, appearing and disappearing, grasping towards her, waving away. The center was invisible, but, to her senses, palpable. “The pariah Aeris comes back after many years,” said one voice, “in order to break one of the most important rules?” asked another. “We can’t allow anyone to take a soul back who has died. They must be flattened out, made straight, judged, and put into their next body. You know the issues with returning.”

Aeris did know the issues with returning. She was sure she could circumvent any unfortunate errors, and, in this case, that her resurrection would cause more joy than woe. “I have weighted the issue carefully,” she said, though really, she had done no such thing. She had jumped in when she was bidden. “It would be better for this one soul to come back to where she was. Permit this, and I will be gone again.”

“Who said we wanted you gone?” A hand touched the curve of her cheek before disappearing. “Vivacious Aeris Gainsborough, you’ve been the forefront of the counterinsurgency against Jenova for centuries. Wouldn’t you be better off in the front lines than on the surface of the planet, manipulating the lives of mortals?”

“Have you forgotten we live for the mortals? Make vows for their good?”

Hands spun out like the feathers of a bird’s wing, pointing to her in a flourish. “I can feel your ulterior motive, as can I,” said some voices. “This isn’t about the war. This is a matter of the heart.”

“She is a general.”

“She is a friend.” fingers drummed like raindrops along the swerving rocks in the river of the Lifestream. “But this is all really tied up in the heart of Cloud Strife, no? Strings tied to your heart, strings tied to Lockhart, but the origin is in Strife. It isn’t our way. You remind us of our vows we took upon becoming the Lifestream, might we remind you of the law of impartiality? If we’ve changed our vows to accommodate this war, so have you.”

Aeris fell silent.

There were a lot of things she hadn’t faced.

“The Cetra only aids, only brings life, only nurtures. The Cetra sacrifices the good of the one for the good of the many, because someone must make the sacrifice of sympathy. It is up to mortals to be sympathetic and care for the few, as lovers do.”

“I’m called a rouge Ancient for a reason,” Aeris said tersely. But vaguely. “It takes all sorts, after all. Besides, wasn’t I sent up to a mortal body by your command initially? To make armies, to argue that the Cetra has more use of Mako energy than the mortals have? For our causes? Our purposes? For the greater good of all of Spira, and damn what it has cost the mortals, damn what my actions have cost their society, damn if they haven’t been frozen in poor governments and education systems and legal systems for centuries, damn those I have suppressed and hindered for the sake of the greater good. For the sake of the Lifestream. To aid our fight against Jenova. Because we believe it will all be better Someday. Did I not create the Aeons for our sake, which was the most ethically grey move the Cetra has ever taken? Didn’t I form my own hands to make them, and keep the blame from the whole? Is this not my role? Are you trying to placate me, or trying to convince me that I—Have—” she struggled to say what was in her heart. “That I have given up too much for the Cetra?”

Hands clasped. “Mistakes have been made.” “But if you think this way, isn’t it time to come back? To reconcile? Do we not always reconcile?”

Certainty suddenly clicked into Aeris’s head. It was time to stop sacrificing the now for the eventual, time, at least, for one of them to change. If that made her something other than Cetra— well. “Perhaps we should play a game,” said Aeris. “I’ve enjoyed the game of wits so far. So, what will you give me, a hero’s test?”

“We want to determine where you really stand now, Aeris. If you have a place in the Lifestream—if you are an anomaly who could be dangerous.”

“That’s war-time talk. Fear talk.”

“Not so. It is only that the Lifestream was made for specific duties, integral to life on Spira, and for the health of life on Spira, and the healer cannot be sick. The healer must be whole of one mind, with one task. We will not be other than the element of creation. And do we not see blood on your hands?”

Aeris gripped her staff. “I fought when I could no longer entice monsters away. To protect.”

“Violence in your soul, though small, is violence. This is a game, but it is also a trial. Where stands the case of Aeris Gainsborough? Is she one of us, or has she left in her heart? Is the right path for her to be one of the Cetra, or to reenter the reincarnation wheel? We will let her go if it is best.”

Aeris faltered. “After all I have done… all I have fought for…” She stopped herself. “Of course. The good of the many. And we want to see if I am the many.”

“Or the one.” A hand drew symbols in the air. “What chooses Aeris, her head or her heart? Her duties or her devotion? How is she led? The game is this: We turn over the soul of Tifa Lockhart entirely to the jurisdiction of Aeris Gainsborough. The place where she takes this soul is the place wherein she stays.”

Aeris thought her body stopped entirely upon hearing this. Her mind went blank. “A test of my… loyalty?”

“Of your essence. Are you still Cetra now, or have you changed? This will reveal where you stand. And we expect you will want to stay where you truly belong.”

Aeris fumbled for words. “Is there anything else to the test?”

“Oh, you have to find her soul, after all,” the Cetra reminded her, and a great hand pushed a wave of green water towards her, knocking her feet off the rock, and with a sudden shriek, she fell. 

 

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Aeris Makes her Choice/Aeris Cracks

Two fragmentary scenes with similar themes. I'd be lost trying to piece together what was meant to go where and what was more experimental than canon.

—

Aeris didn’t say ‘I can’t.’ She absolutely knew she could not, but she didn’t say it yet.

Something in her heart wouldn’t let her say that.

Cid and Yuna had already run off, following Seifer’s escape. She figured they wouldn’t catch him. If they even got past Griever, who was a type of spirit alien to her, and not something she personally would want to trifle with, she didn’t actually have any confidence in their ability to catch and detain him. He was fire in the form of flesh.

Tifa’s hair had already slipped through Cloud’s fingers. His expression of shock had already changed into pleading. He had already said, “I know you can.”

He was right, in a way. She COULD. Her primary use as part of the Lifestream had always been facilitating reincarnation and the management of souls fled their bodies. That’s what she did. She was a decomposer. And she COULD, if she so choose, request a soul be put back into the body it came from, that body healed, and wound up to walk again.

She could, and she couldn’t, because she had no promise the Lifestream would let her back if it got her. Could and couldn’t were warring. And she wanted to say, ‘no, I can’t.’

But her heart wouldn’t let her say it. Because she knew she could try.

Because she had already bound herself to do anything she could for Cloud. And this was something she could do for him. And ‘could’ was maddening and needling and ‘could’ would not be ignored.

Aeris took a determined breath.

She kneeled down quickly next to Cloud, across Tifa’s body (which radiated nothing, no warmth, had no aura, the feeling of a body already resolved to be clay) and put her hands on each side of his face. “Cloud, listen closely. Listen like your life depends on what I am about to tell you. I’m going to tell you everything I know about your enemy and how to handle him, and with this information, I trust you to handle him on your own. I need you to face right now that I may not be able to come back for a long time, if at all. There might be no exit from the Lifestream from now until the time when it is healed. Do you understand that?”

“I do.”

His determination is equal to hers.

Aeris breathed out. “I will do it. Listen now. Your enemy’s name is Sephiroth.”

“Sephiroth,” repeated Cloud. “He’s the person who is inside Sin?”

“Sephiroth is the Cetra that became Sin. Cetra is what we call ourselves, you might need that. Don’t tell others. The word is a key. Sephiroth was a good friend of mine before he was warped, but the name I gave him came after his turn. I can’t tell you his older name. I named him after a tree.

“If you walk as far north in this continent as you physically can, even past Zanarkand, you find the city of the Cetra. It is the city we built when we first found this continent. It is all ruins now. The only things still growing in the cold are the trees as ancient as us, of twelve branches each, called the Sephiroth tree, renowned for their wisdom and alien beauty. When Sephiroth became Sin, just like Faith have their bodies sealed into statues, he had his body sealed into a Sephiroth tree. That is why I gave him that name. If you find the tree, you will have an edge to use against him. The other edge you have is your psychic power. You could possibly see into him in a way none of us have been able to do. Bring Yuna. Leave all of this to Cid. He can manage himself.”

“I understand.”

“The other thing that is direly important is that you keep Jenova or any of hers from finding out that there are more SPIRITs. I can’t explain, trust me. Clear them all out to hide on Gagazet if you must.”

Aeris took a deep breath. “What else, what else...” her focus was leaving her. Far away, another blast shook the spires of Home. “Leave mine and Tifa’s bodies with Seymour Guado. If he can’t do what his ancestors did… I suppose I leave that up to you. What else, dammit…” She bit her lip and looked away from Tifa’s body and into Cloud’s eyes.

They cleared her head.

“Remember compassion. Please. Above all else. I don’t know what will really be best to do with Jenova and her city, but, when dealing with them, if it comes to a treaty, and I hope it does, remember compassion. When it comes to the SPIRITs and ShinRa, remember compassion. When it comes to people who want to spite you or stop you on your way, remember compassion for them as well. About all, on the end of your journey, once you reach the Cetra city, please, remember compassion. You must be kind.”

“I must be kind,” Cloud repeated. He clasped Aeris’s hand. She clutched back in response.

They stared at each other, as if they were both lost, for some seconds, as they noise dimmed around them. Aeris’s breaths were shallow and uncertain, and the certainty left Cloud’s eyes once he knew this was it.

“You have all the power and the knowledge to end this, for Sephiroth, and for everyone, if you are clever and move quickly,” said Aeris. “Be swift. Be decisive. Do not be afraid. Be kind. If I return, then surely we will win. And if we won’t, then surely, you will.”

“Come back safe,” Cloud whispered.

“I will. Be kind.”

“I will.”

Aeris nodded. She bit her lip and then breathed once more.

There was a light in her chest, for only a split second, and no one but Cloud might have been able to see it coalesce suddenly like lightning appears in the gathering clouds. Then it shot from her like a strike from the heaves, into the ground, and was gone, and her body slumped onto Tifa’s.

And both were left to Cloud.

—

“You’re really okay,” Aeris asked him fiercely, hands still gripping his shoulders, “new powers aside, you weren’t treated roughly? She didn’t say anything?”

“It was a little weird, but I’m fine,” Cloud insisted, trying to back away. “I’ve dealt with worse. Pretty much every day of my life. It’s okay.”

“Right,” said Aeris, “right.”

Aeris was very still for a moment. She pulsed her hands on Cloud’s shoulder, trying to let go, and then gripping tight again. Slowly, she removed her hands.

And then she crumpled. She swayed on her feel, her arms collapsed into her chest, and though Cloud tried to brace her, she eventually fell to her feet.

“I’m so sorry,” Aeris said.

A few people hung at Cloud’ periphery, thinking Aeris had been hurt in Chasamaecum and trying to help her up. But she clung to Cloud’s hands, and stayed on her knees. “I’ve been so blind for so long. How could I not see the truth? How could I not hear myself?”

“Aeris?” asked Cloud quietly.

“The Lifestream has gone mad, but I am exempt,” she said bitterly. “Their judgment is impaired, but I still think and move clearly. All the Planet is infected by Jenova, but I am unchanged. It’s just the voices in my mind that have gone mad, not me. How could I be so stupid?” She bowed her head. “And I’ve let my mad rage and thirst for vengeance guide me for years, and damn the consequences. And there have been consequences. Society has stagnated, bigotry has flourished. Bigotry that I encouraged. Humans all isolated from one another, science left to be persecuted by the church, art and temples left to fester, all the glories of mankind forgotten as I turned the entire world to war. And it was just vengeance all along. Just revenge, because she changed my planet. What fool am I? What petty child? Why do I think I can’t share?”

“Aeris,” said Cloud again, gripping her hands. Her palms were sweaty and felt like centipede legs on his skin, but he knew, even though he hated touch, that he had to push past that this once. Because Aeris was clinging to him like he was a boat at sea, and he had thought that she was the sea.

“I’m so SORRY,” she said, “I ruined so much so that I could kill her. But there’s no point. What did I think she was, a monster? A ghoul? Something a child would find under her bed? She’s another creature, like the rest of us. She’s just like everyone else. Alive. How could I forget? Isn’t that my own lesson? That we’re all connected?”

She looked up at Cloud. She was crying. “Can you forgive me for doing all this to you, for dragging you into the war of the gods, for my own petty revenge?”

Cloud shook his head slowly, not to refuse her forgiveness, but in disbelief. “Aeris,” he said, so very quietly, shocked and uncomfortably aware of all the people around them, “it’s okay. It would have been worse if I stayed. It’s okay, everything’s fine.”

Aeris shook her head. “It’s not fine. It has not been fine. I have been blinding myself to the truth—the truth about the Cetra, and about me—” She sadly lifted up her head. “We don’t know what’s best anymore. We’re lost too. No one knows what is best for Spira. We’re just jealously trying to keep what we have.

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Rough Timeline

Spira is formed along with its sun after a nearby Wolf-Rayet star collapses and excites a stellar cloud into becoming a galaxy.

After a long phase of volcanic activity and volatile changes in its atmosphere, Spira develops elementary life. The Lifestream is born simultaneously.

Sentient hominids first arise. There are, and have always been, many different variations of hominids on Spira.

The Cetra become a discernable species; the most evolved so far on Spira, with language, highly specified family groups, deities/mythology, and the development of psychic abilities. As the Cetra never stop being a nomadic race, however, no cities or strict hierarchies are established.

The Guado become a discernable species; and are just as evolved as the Cetra, despite evolving separately from them and on another continent.

Spira goes through a natural climate phase, similar to earth’s, sometimes heating and sometimes cooling. Spira goes through a phase of heating, and the Guado’s continent becomes almost entirely desert. Only in the south, where the unquenchable Moonflow runs, is there cultivatable land. The Guado, though reduced in number, keep a vaguely democratic society and several cities there. The capital is Guadosalam.

The Cetra arrive on the Guado continent. Unaware that people live there, they begin terraforming, making plains, forests, and rivers, and using some wild, furred mammals with complex society as the basis for the new sentient species. These eventually become the Nu Mou.

The Cetra travel south far enough to encounter the Guado. Neither is an inherently warlike race, and though there are some ramifications for the Cetra terraforming their continent, an alliance is achieved and a long period of peace and cultural exchange follows.

The Nu Mou fully achieve sentience and become the third member of the peaceful alliance on the Guado continent. They develop a pantheon that, like the other gods of Spira, come to exist in truth. During this time, Spira’s climate slowly shifts into a cooling phase.

The Cetra slowly break off into a few sister races, though it takes a long time for the species to fully separate. The species that still calls itself Cetra is more psychically inclined than the original Cetra, and remain nomadic, staying in travel-groups. This sister species eventually drops the old pantheon and develops a philosophy of revering only Spira and the Lifestream, which cannot really be called a religion, since no worship practices or deities are involved. Several sister races, which eventually merge into one, develop out of groups of Cetra who abandon the nomadic lifestyle and create cities, inspired by the Guado. The greatest city is in the far north. They keep the tradition of pantheons, though exact gods vary with time and by city. The city-Cetra become, over time, less psychically gifted than the nomad-Cetra and a general rule, because they value physical gifts over psychic ones.

A cataclysm occurs that results in the extinction of the Nu Mou and other extinctions in rapid succession of many plants and animals, as well as the destruction of the great northern city of the Cetra. (Because, however, of the city’s superior construction of superior elements, aided in its build by Cetra powers, the buildings never collapse.) The nomad-Cetra, fearing the worst for the continent, especially the extinction of their beloved brothers and sisters, the Guado; commit a mass sacrifice and promise their souls eternally to the Lifestream. This changes the Lifestream’s nature to that of a passive reflection of the planet and a maintainer to that of an active force of change and protection, aided by the sentience of the nomad-Cetra. The first nomad-Cetra to kill himself, because of his devotion to Spira, is called Sephiroth. The last nomad-Cetra to kill herself, tasked as she was with seeing to the proper burial of her tribe, is called Aeris. The city-Cetra, who are by now genetically and culturally removed enough form the nomad-Cetra to consider themselves distinct, do not sacrifice themselves.

The cataclysm has only minor ramifications past the initial extinction because of the Cetra-Lifestream. The global cooling in this period, which might have otherwise made the continent icy, is also all but halted by the Cetra, who absorb the worst of the effect. When they find the atmosphere has become too wet for life to continue as it was, they create one especially rainy area on the continent to serve as a dumping ground for excess weather, and keep the rest as it was. The practice of sending wandering Cetra to walk Spira in physical form to see where help is needed above ground is developed, and certain Cetra, who, for their own reasons, keep their own identity and a separate space, are tasked with fulfilling this purpose. During this period, the city-Cetra reconnect, build roads for common travel, and blend back into one race, united but distinct from any previous Cetra race, which eventually become called humans.

The cities of Bevelle and Zanarkand are built. A large number of humans find and migrate to a string of large tropical islands on the continent’s west coast, and over time, these humans become genetically diverse enough that most people consider them a separate race, though, in truth, they are still similar enough to mainland humans to produce separate offspring with them. These are called the Al Bhed. Their society becomes incredibly diverse from mainlander society. Though they keep the tradition of democratic city-states, they become culturally agnostic, develop different family groups and societal norms, and vastly different traditions for building and technology.

0- An asteroid which harbors a ‘being’ known as Jenova, who can be classified best as a sentient disease, detects and crashed into an incredibly fertile area of Spira—the spring of the Moonflow. The long-lived Guado are essentially extinct after the impact. The Cetra, enraged and in grief, move to war for the first time. Sensing that Jenova may have a power superior to the Lifestream’s usual power level, Aeris, a wandering ancient, implores the humans of Zanarkand to make a sacrifice for the planet just as the nomad-Cetra did. She forms them into a race of spirits tied to physical objects called Fayth which can be used as a powerful front-line defense against Jenova. But a tragedy occurs—another wandering ancient is infected with Jenova’s disease and pledges himself to her (in his typical rashness) and is formed, along with a great amount of power from the Lifestream that was sucked in with him, into a god-being called Sin, who fights for Jenova. The Fayth are a match for Sin, but Sin alone, and Jenova’s spread goes unchecked for some time.

0-Present Day-  Surviving Guado, who were far enough outside Guadosalam after the time of impact, number few, but the few manage to produce very few bastard children with humans; a combination which should be impossible, so it is thought some unknown means aided the births. Guado blood survives in these genetic mixture for many, many years, ending with a dwindling line that is, ironically, eventually absorbed into the Jenovines.

1-Present Day- A band of desert-dwelling humans who had lived in a strictly hierarchical society in the south of the continent are drawn to the site of the meteor crash and are also infected with Jenova’s disease. Over time, Jenova’s efforts to genetically modify this desert group to fit her own desire causes them to become a separate species, the Jenovine. This subspecies is isolated from the beginning of its existence until the Jenovine War, fittingly named for them.

9-Present Day- The Cetra set up a system for human summoners to contact Fayth and combat Sin whenever he appears, however, a way to destroy Sin remains unknown, since the touch of Jenova or anything similar enough to her is poisonous to Cetra and cannot be touched by them. Too many Cetra die off for a powerful offensive to be maintained. Over time, the strain as well as the subtle infection of Jenova’s disease causes the shared sentience among Lifestream Cetra to grow unhinged. Those Cetra who retain separate consciousness have varying reactions.

786- A rapid-fire series of plague outbreaks cuts the population of the Thunder Plains, the society that developed on the rain reserve created by the Cetra, down to a fraction. The plague is caused by the molds the festered in human dwellings in the chronically wet plains, and is believed, oddly enough, to have nothing to do with Jenova. Because the plague spread and killed so fast, very few villages were spared the disease, in in those hit, very few lived. The Cetra, very weak from the ongoing fight with Jenova, could not send helpers above ground fast enough to spare many lives and were resigned to bury them. The survivors, for the most part, were those who fought off the mold well enough to develop immunities to fungal infections as well as various immunities to poisons and toxins which would greatly help their descendants to come.

2700s- Cultural and religious disagreements between mainlanders and the Al Bhed (along with a small community that lives between the two forces but are genetically mainlander, called Wutaians) reach their height in a war that ends with Al Bhed losses and severe damage to their cities and society. The prejudice against the Al Bhed and Wutaians becomes extreme in the mainland because of this war, and it takes the Al Bhed very long to recover financially and societally.

A man named Hojo, native of Bevelle, attempts to travel to Chasamaecum, the city of the Jenovines, and is infected with Jenova’s disease. She comes to like him, and gifts him with a pure physical representation of her, which he brings back to Bevelle and uses in many experiments which serves to spread Jenova among other humans.

Eventually, the acts of Hojo compel the weakened Lifestream to send, once again, a wandering Ancient (as they are now called) to the surface to act on their behalf. Her name is Aeris, and her mission is to kill Hojo, shut down the Lifestream-sapping practice of electrical energy on the surface, and look for a new way to destroy Sin.

3140- A young boy native to the Thunder Plains falls victim to Hojo’s Jenova experiments and is accidentally developed into a psychic weapon who would prove fundamental to Sin’s destruction. Because of the natural immunities to toxins that had developed on the Thunder Plains after the plagues, young, healthy men enlisted for the experiments from that area had the highest chance of surviving encounters with Jenova and even inheriting her powers. (Incidentally, a young woman from the Thunder Plains would be the best possible vessel for Jenova’s powers, but no young women were even tested.)

The creation of a Fayth called Bahamut, long after the initial creation of the Fayth, by their original creator Aeris, marks one of the only and the last post-initial creation development of a Fayth. Perhaps because of his own encounters with Jenova’s disease as a human, Bahamut is a unique and uniquely powerful Fayth.

The Jenovine war begins with the discovery, by Jenovine ruler Sorceress Ultimecia, of Cloud Strife, and the mistaken belief that he was a Jenovine stolen and experimented on by Bevelle’s scientists.

The Sin front of the war is won by Cloud Strife with the aid of (eventual character list) when his psychic abilities proved equal to Sin’s challenge and cleaned the Cetra inside Sin of Jenova’s curse.

The Jenova front of the war was won, historically, by Cid Highwind, captain of the Al Bhed forces, though many parties were involved.

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