Nascent

DISCLAIMER: Don't own FF:U... or FFI... or anything really. I'm poor. Don't sue me. Don't blame me for wanting to brutally slaughter certain people at Square-Enix for things they've done... I'm just a humble little fangirl so spare me, pleeeeeease...

Author's Note: There are plot bunnies that sit politely at the corners of your mind, waiting for you to write them out. There are plot bunnies that BITE you and go "write me NOW". And then there are the sneaky little plot bunnies. They sit right behind you and let you notice and plan. And every few days... they poke you. So it's like you're going around saying, "Hmm, yeah, that might work"... and then later that day or that night or whatever... it pokes you. So you think about it. And later the NEXT day, when you're writing or playing a game or something, it pokes you again...

This was a poking bunny. And I'm going to give this story a try... just so's it will stop poking me... and I'll have it up on FF-Net at least. If you like it, let me know. If you don't... shut your face. Or one of my muses will get you. They're very accomplished at that, believe me.

Here we go...

:The Prophecy:

The world lies shrouded in darkness.

The winds die...

The seas rage...

The earth decays...

But the people believe in a prophecy, patiently awaiting its fulfilment.

"When darkness veils the world, four Warriors of Light will come."

After a long journey, four young travelers did appear...

...and in the hand of each was clutched a crystal.

(Lisa)

The white jewel on the cord around my neck feels like a lump of lead weighing me down. My mother told me once, before the great fire that destroyed everything, that I had been born holding it in my hand. She said that at that time, it was glowing with a fierce light that made it impossible to look at. Now it's just a clear rock that holds a dim vestige of whiteness.

My clothes are torn, my hair is a mess, I'm bloody, hurting, and about to collapse. But I've seen the camp of travelers; I've heard their talk, almost cheerful, but strangely solemn, nearly sombre. I have to hope that they're kinder than the strange soldier.

He was dragging an unconscious girl with blue hair and a gauzy white dress through the underbrush as he headed towards the decrepit shrine in the distance. He heard my breathing from behind the trees, saw me, captured me, and (I shudder to remember it) had his way with me. Or in plainer terms, he beat me, raped me, and left me for dead.

God only knows what he'll do to the little girl if someone doesn't stop him. She couldn't have been more than twelve years old... but if he'd had the hard-on to attack me in my state, it won't be too much of a stretch to... God.

Shoving through the bushes, not caring how much noise I'm making, I manage to stagger into the clearing. The travelers look up. Four of them, roughly around my age... three young men and a girl. As the scene goes dark and the world spins around me, I hear their cries of shock, and right before I hit the ground, I feel warm hands at my back.

I can only hope...

Before any of them could do anything, the strange girl swayed and dropped towards the solid earth beneath her feet. She hit and hit hardalthough they launched themselves over to her side, she was already unconscious by the time they reached her.

She looked to be vaguely in her teens. "Vaguely" was the word for it, all right... she was so emaciated that it was hard to tell. She also seemed to have had a bad run-in with someone stronger than hershe was bloodied and bruised and broken; all the wounds seemed to be recent. She had long, matted, filthy-looking black hair, and her eyes (from what they'd seen while they were open) were earthy brown in color. She was dressed only in a white shift with red trim at the base and the arm holes; the fabric was roughly cut and scratchy. She had to be some kind of vagrant or wanderer... with an appearance like that, she wasn't taking care of herself or had no one to take care of her.

The youngest of the four, a boy of about fifteen or sixteen with short, fluffy white hair, green eyes, and exclusively white clothing, carefully touched at her shoulders to roll her over. Upon seeing the extent of her injuries, he shook his head with a soft sigh, looking worried. "Poor thing. She's really been worked over..." His eyes flicked between the others' faces. "I don't know if we'll be able to care for her... but we can't just leave her, can we? What do you think, Niisama?"

Another of the young men, this one a few years older than the first, with similar features and brilliant red hair and eyes, flicked long strands of his mane off his shoulders with a frown. "She knew we were here," he said after a pause. "She was heading for our camp purposely... even if it did look like she blundered onto us. So you're right, Kumo. We can't just turn someone away if they came looking for our help."

"But he's also right that we don't have the proper skill to take care of all of this," the only girl in the party said practically, waving a hand at the stranger's wounds. She wore a short, wide-sleeved black shift and had silver-gray hair bound into braids that stuck stubbornly up; two smaller braids framed her face. Her eyes were screened by her heavy bangs, which she didn't seem to notice. "Kiri, Kumo, you're being a little idealistic. If we can't care for her, what else can we do?"

"You're suggesting we abandon her, then?" Kiri asked, his carmine eyes narrowing.

The girl glared back at him. "Of course not! We should leave her in the city that's up ahead. Surely they will have mages capable of dealing with her."

"She came to us, Aura," Kiri said flatly.

Just as it seemed that the two of them would get into a messy argument, the fourth member of the party, who had remained silent up until then, finally spoke.

"She stays."

Everyone stared at him. Swathed in a black cloak with his long mahogany-brown hair bound into a horsetail, he had fixed the girl with a piercing cerulean-eyed stare from the moment she'd appeared. He was the eldest among them, in his early twenties, and usually held a forbidding-almost regal-silence.

"Kaze...?" Kumo began uncertainly.

Kaze reached out with a gloved left hand and gently lifted up the jewel that the girl wore as a pendant. The others, noticing it for the first time, each let out a cry of disbelief.

"But it... it's just like ours!" Kiri finally managed.

"I see now," Kumo said softly. "If she has a crystal, then that means... she was fated to come upon us. Maybe this links her to us somehow, even though there can't be any way..."

Kaze just nodded, then went back to silence.

Aura sighed and shook her head. "Okay, okay. You guys win. I'll try to do something about her so that she doesn't bleed to death in the night, and then in the morning we'll see if she wakes up. I swear, though, we are getting her help in Cornelia."

Moaning, the girl slowly opened her umber-brown eyes. Shifting, she winced, and looked down at herself. Someone-one of the travelers, apparently-had skillfully wrapped bandages around the worst of her injuries, and gently staunched the flow of blood from between her legs. Her breasts had been bound into submission with a length of linen cloth, and someone had sewn up some of the rips in her shift with fine thread.

"Who...?" she asked blearily, and turned, realizing she was being watched.

"Good morning," a soft female voice behind her said. The young woman from the traveling group she'd seen was sitting cross-legged just a foot back from her head. Slowly, agonizingly, she sat up. "You're gonna be okay, but you'd better eat something just so that you don't faint again. What's the last good meal you've eaten, girl? You are beyond doubt the worst case of malnutrition I've ever seen. ...Oh, by the way, my name's Aura. Hougekiju Aura."

"Lisa... my name is Lisa," the starved and beaten girl managed in a very soft voice.

"Lisa?" Aura smiled. The expression had a likable crookedness to it that made Lisa smile back. "That's a cute name. Why don't you come with me to eat something?"

With stilted movements, Lisa obliged. The mere mention of food almost made her drool; only the manners her mother had taught her so long ago kept her from embarrassing herself. Even so, her stomach let out a loud growl that made her blush. Hearing it, Aura broke out laughing.

The boy in white that Lisa had seen was carefully monitoring the contents of a large black pot that was sitting on the stones that surrounded the campfire. Looking up at the girls, he smiled, his jadeine eyes seeming to light from within. "Only a few moments more," he promised. "Then you'll be able to eat as much as you want. Niisama had a good catch early this morning."

"This is Kumo," Aura told Lisa, messing up the boy's fluffy hair. "He's the baby of the party... won't be sixteen for about two months yet, but he's a mean hand with a sword, a decent flutist, and the only one of us who has cooking skills worth shit. And he's such a sweetie too."

Still smiling, the "baby" bowed his head politely. "Makenshi Kumo, Lisa-san." Picking up a smooth wooden bowl from a stack beside him, he ladled out a liberal amount of the stew he'd been watching and held it out to Lisa. "Here you go!"

A bit taken aback, Lisa took the bowl. The scent nearly made her swoonshe could smell sweet carrots and fresh basil and pepper, as well as some kind of meat. "Th...thanks..."

"Go ahead and eat it," Aura told her. "Though I warn you, it's hot." Kumo passed a second bowl with a slightly smaller serving up to her.

Lisa needed no further obliging. She tore into the stew as if it was the first meal she'd ever eaten in all her years, and waxed more blissful with every bite. "It's sooooo good," she finally managed after she'd picked the bowl clean of contents.

"I could do better," Kumo said modestly, staring at the ground, but his face was flushed with the compliment.

The young man in red stood from where he'd been sitting and meandered over. "Morning," he said flatly, then pulled a brown bundle from where it was tucked beneath his arm. "Here." He tossed them before Lisa's bare feet. "They're shoes. Wear them. Save your feet a little pain." Cautiously, Lisa picked them up. They were constructed of some animal hide, the fur still kept on the outside and down lining the inside, with toughened hides for soles. "I've been making them since I skinned the damned things. Go ahead, put them on." With that, he sat down and accepted a bowl from Kumo, starting to eat.

Blinking, Lisa slowly tucked her feet into the rabbitskin slippers. "Uh..."

Aura shook her head. "Don't mind him. He's hungry and he didn't get to sleep much. He was worried... we all were. You looked for a minute like you weren't going to hold out, you know."

Lisa looked at her new shoes, face flushing. "Oh."

With a sigh, the redhead scrubbed the back of a hand across his face. "It's Madoushi Kiri," he said, sounding a little apologetic. "Yeah, I think it's pretty much naptime for me, so I'm not in the best of moods. Sorry. I'm Kumo's brother, but I have none of his cooking skill or his patience."

Lisa frowned slightly. "You're brothers, but you have different last names?"

Kiri shrugged one shoulder. "Yeah... where we live, your last name's determined by what you make of yourself... like a title. Kumo and I have different names because we've gotten through life on slightly different paths." Kumo, removing the pot of stew from the fire, set it down and went to give Kiri an obviously affectionate hug from behind.

Turning, Lisa pointed to the fourth member of the travelers' party. "Who's that?"

The man swathed in darkness turned to fix her with a piercingly apathic stare, then turned away again. A slow chill crept across Lisa's skin, and she shivered.

Aura smiled crookedly and shook her head. "That's my big brother, Kaze. Don't mind him... he's not exactly the most social of people, especially with those he's just met. It'll take him awhile to open up to you, believe me. He spent an entire week giving Kiri the silent treatment back when the four of us first ended up together."

Lisa nodded, then stared down at her hands. "Um, uh... where are you going? I-I don't mean to be blunt about it, it's just that... well..."

"We're headed for the city of Cornelia," Kumo said kindly, seeming not to notice Lisa's stumbling manner. "We were planning on taking you with us, in order to make sure you got better medicinal care than we could provide..."

Blinking out of sheer surprise, Lisa pinked. "You really mean that? Thank you so much...!" After a pause, her face fell. "But... why would you...?"

Aura grimaced. "We've got some very good reasons, even though we don't know much about you. That pendant of yours, for one." Lisa's hands flew to the vaguely white crystal at her collarbones at the mention of it. "You see..." The other girl slowly pulled something from a pocket hidden at the seam of her dress.

Upon seeing it, Lisa gasped, feeling the world tilt around her. Aura held in her hand a crystal exactly like the one Lisa wore, save one differenceits color. This stone was a pure blue.

"Each of us has one," Kumo said softly. "We don't know why we were gifted with these crystals, or what exactly they mean... not even what they're supposed to do. We just know that when the last light within them went out, we were to head for Cornelia. That's why we've come so far from our homelands and that is why we're drifting farther. That is also why we think you need to come with us. Maybe whatever we need to find in Cornelia will affect you too."

"Kumo-chan puts too much stock in Fate," Kiri quipped dryly.

"And Kiri doesn't have enough faith in it," Aura replied with a glare.

"At any rate, that's where we're going and why you're coming," Kumo interrupted, looking tired. Apparently this wasn't the first time an argument of that sort had broken out. "Once everyone's done eating, we should probably get moving... right?"

"Hear, hear." Kiri listlessly punched a fist into the air. "Sooner we get there, the sooner we get back home. I'm bloody sick of bloody traveling."

"Shut up, and enough with the 'bloodies'," Aura snapped. "Some Warrior of Light you are. Have a little faith in the way things work, why don't you."

"I have plenty of faith in the way things work," Kiri retorted. "I'm a TAOIST. That's what we do. I just don't like this whole prophecy deal. Someone's laughing at us somewhere, I just know it."

Kumo sighed and turned big green eyes on Lisa. "You see what I have to put up with," he said tragically, shaking his head.

(Lisa)

We have arrived.

Cornelia is a large town, perhaps, but not exactly the "city" people claim it is. A town that surrounds a large stone-brick castle, supposedly the dwelling of a fair king, his wife, and his daughters.

The local white mage has finished treating the worst of my wounds. I am lucky, she claims. Most would not have survived such a harsh beating in my state.

They're the lucky ones, I want to say, but I keep silent. Surviving rape is a double-edged change. I am strong because I survived; I am weak because I couldn't defend myself. I don't want to think about it.

Since the white mage has proclaimed that I am able to travel, and since Aura and her companions seem to be a decent group of people, I may as well go with them. And perhaps I will find the purpose of the crystal that even now seems to be weighing me down.

As we spend a little time doing nothing (except resting sore feet), a soldier with the castle crest embroidered on his tunic runs over, staring at me in shock and (do I imagine this?) more than a little horror.

"That crystal...!" he cries, staring at the stone on the fraying cord around my neck. "You must see the king at once!"