In the beginning it was bright, the horizon to the north swallowing the ever-sloping shore. The tide had been crashing under the rose-tinted ornament dangling in the sky above Oerba, and in the deepening winds she felt a bite of coldness on her lip. The snow had been gathering in the badlands and the clans were busy sharpening their sticks.
Vanille returned from her work fastening her furry kilt to her waist, picking meticulously at the strings she had fixed the week before. The fluorescent bulb flickered dully overhead. Feeling anxious after only a moment's rest in her quarters, she assembled herself a fast meal and exited before any other menial tasks could find her there.
The Dia were always cheerful in their performances. Nurturers by nature, they'd adopted a considerably holistic worldview that worked magic on the battlefield. They missed no details and were the most efficient at reparations high in volume and complexity. An amateur saboteur, Vanille observed the Yun clan at their work. They were dark, and unpredictable, tiptoeing dangerously on a knife's edge as sharp as their wit. Her childhood companion was a warrior, her spear like the glint of her eye, a vertical slit versus a backdrop of blood. She giggled like a wild vampire chattering in the dark.
To Vanille, every detail swam precariously through the atmosphere, and it is difficult to focus on the sky.
The sinking of the sun made her hair glow like embers. Furrowing through the haze from a side road into town was a flock of domestic fauna on an exodus to the shore. Oerba was a busy town; Vanille's mood today was spotted by her neighbors in the commune, and they were relieved when her eyes lit up and she bubbled forth with a smile that the air was so pleasant in the evening, really, and that she wanted to meet the fireflies at the water before they beat her there. They grinned; they tipped their hats; they curtsied in that special way like a child careening off her seat when she cranes her neck to see. She wasn't sure what she had meant, exactly. Maybe she really was going to sit among the floating lights and catch them in her hands, or maybe her ego had different plans.
She made an excursion through the mirror not too long ago. As an infant it made her cry. Leaning forward with her breasts above the washtub, she watched her pigtails construct with precision and delicately placed her beads before the small of her neck. This, though, was all pretending. Fascinated with terror, Vanille gazed into a velvet wasteland, the sycophant on the other side becoming more real each day.
The wise woman told her not to get lost. Her ornaments stuck through her face and had fallen from the sky. Vanille sat on the back of her boots in a squat, her hair trickling down her shoulders as her eyes the night before. How typical of a silly girl, to search for alternatives to fate if it meant a spell of false hope. She bit her lip; she knew what was coming. The old woman tossed stones into the pond and whispered sweet nothings to the wind.
Silly girl wasting time.
The mirror frame was a gaping mouth leaking spit from the vanity sink. A friend would have planted assurance into the red-orange glaze, perhaps, on any other day. Now it was only a fool's crown, structured by the blossoming of just a kiss in her scalp.
The lines drew themselves, here.
"Tell us another story about Cocoon, mamu," she had rehearsed her speech as a child. Fang's tongue slithered like a ruffian's and Vanille would have none of that. Her managed accent would have easily taken her into greater society, had it not been her destiny to destroy it.
She had been ice fishing for it in a dream, floating among the fireflies she lied about before. She could live like this another way, abandoning her post as the village daughter grinning happily into the sun-she played it so well. The wild animals grew hungry in the solstice time; others gossiped of their starving neighbors whose home on the outskirts was invaded by the hounds, their daughter dragged away in the night and the mother's face ripped apart by the maw.
And figure that, Vanille wondered as she sat fetally with her knees, a better fate than wandering the wilderness for a millennium, a branded Cie'th untamed by the gods. A better life story is an interrupted one than an existence calculated.
When she found herself there again, the biting sand transforming into sleet, she realized that the flies had gone extinct.
Fang continued to be feral in her disposition but Vanille was as ever timid, or sweet. The woman of the Yun clan assaulted their tasks full-force, especially the dirty ones, while the girl danced with her problems from the periphery and hoped they would die away.
Her cheeks ached.
"Fang," she had whispered under the covers one night, "don't you ever think...we could be wrong about this?"
A raven's black hair bristled between her teeth.
You can't push the river, mamu always said.
Still, the fate of the living on Gran Pulse had always been a cog in a deterministic machine, as far as anyone ever knew. Tribal warfare was dictated and autonomy impossible. As Oerba catapulted her dreams higher in the sky, as the phantasm of her being reached futher into the shallow pool of glass, Vanille felt herself hanging tightly from her binding rod. It seemed now the fal'Cie fancied her a virgin mother: the midwife to Ragnarok, bearer of the destroyer, her heels clicking closer to the pinkened midnight sun.