Winhill in springtime is more beautiful than anything Rinoa could have imagined. The flower field that stretches through the valley is rich with daffodils and trillium, so much more delicate than the wildflowers of summer she knelt in last year while Squall was dead.
Laguna told her that Winhill is a town of new life, and she questioned it, knowing his past with the town. But sitting on the back patio of Raine's old bar, watching fog roll through the mountains in the distance, she is able to breathe, for what feels like the first time.
Winhill is not a town of witches. Coming here, Squall felt, was dangerous. He sees danger in everything, as afraid of how other people will view her as Rinoa is afraid of herself. He fears the day he has to stand between her and everything he has ever known, and worries Winhill will bring that day closer. "They fear change," he says. Rinoa has to remind him that so does he.
She takes a sip of her coffee and breathes in the chill of the morning, and on her exhale she flexes her fingers experimentally, letting a small gust of wind blow eastward. It catches the broken wind chime still hanging from the rafters, and the out-of-key notes sound more whimsical than ominous.
"Why not stay here, learn from Edea?" Quistis' voice drifts through her mind. It is set against the crashing of waves where they sat on the patio of the lighthouse, sharing a bottle of wine someone had gifted her for her birthday the day before. Quistis, her unlikely friend, and her greatest ally, after Squall.
"Because," Rinoa replied. "I'm not Edea."
She has the magic of three other women flowing through her veins, on top of the years of succession before and after her own time. She can't navigate that, with the person who gave her that power. She will learn it for herself. Learn what it can do, what good she can do with it, far away from Garden, from Esthar, from any of the places already touched by witches-not-her.
The door opens behind her, and Squall walks out, sharp and handsome in his uniform. She doesn't want him to leave, but she doesn't want him to stay. Around him, she is only them, us. She cannot find the line that separates where they end and she begins. It is nothing she ever imagined for herself, that level of dependency, and she fears it, what it could become. They have had four weeks together, away from the world they started in, and she can already feel a slight panic when she imagines waking up without him.
And it is why she needs him to go.
He sits beside her and takes her hand, and she leans into him, closing her eyes when he kisses the top of her head.
"I've never really been alone," she admits, unwilling to let him leave with that confession still in her head. "I've been lonely my whole life, but never really alone."
He won't offer to stay again, not after the number of times she promised him this is what she needed. Instead he puts his arm over her shoulder and pulls her close, and she counts his heartbeat thump-thump-thumping against her ear.
She wakes up the next morning and can still feel him, even though he is half a world away, and she is not really alone.
She makes coffee, and walks outside to watch the sun rise over the valley again, and she flexes her fingers.
She can create, she thinks. She can heal. And here is where she is going to learn how.
.
On the beach, Cid runs up and down with three toddlers, surrounded by their joyful squeals and the surf chases them and then recedes. The bright summer sun shines above them, hot even in mid-morning, and Edea knows she needs to get up soon and start working on lunch, but can't seem to pull herself away from the scene playing out before her.
There are more orphans coming in every day, and Edea wonders how many more they can take. She would take them all, if she could. Use her magic to expand their house, increase their harvest. She would turn the entire Cape of Good Hope into a refuge for the children of the war, but for the attention it would draw.
She scoffs at the irony that it is a rogue Sorceress creating orphans, while a Sorceress cannot in turn take them in and save them.
She hears a cry from the open window of the house and turns around, before the cry stops and turns quickly into a giggle. She looks back to the beach, takes note of Ellone's absence, and a few minutes later hears footsteps behind her. Ellone walks out with a slightly guilty look on her face, following a bleary-eyed Squall, messy hair sticking out in all directions.
"I thought I heard him cry so I went to check on him," Ellone says. Squall looks around, recognizes Edea sitting on the stone steps, and runs towards her, burying his tiny face into her shoulder. She pulls him into her lap and he leans back, watching the other kids still running in the sand. After a few minutes the nap shakes off, and he looks to Ellone, visibly torn between wanting to play in the water, and not wanting to leave her side.
"Come on!" Ellone says, before Edea has to ask her to lead her brother towards the other kids. Ellone takes his hand and leads him carefully down the steps, pausing when he needs more time, chasing after him when he reaches the bottom and takes off at a run. They are the only siblings she and Cid have taken in, and she can't imagine a circumstance where they would separate them.
Irvine cries out, "Elle!" and Cid turns around, Quistis still in his arms mid-spin, and they take off running towards Ellone and Squall, little Zell scrambling to catch up behind them.
It is the happiest they have ever been, Edea thinks. It feels like another life, when she and Cid fought endlessly in their city apartment, each broken hearted in their own right that her powers left her barren. They have five beautiful children, and room for two or three more, and they are safe, in their haven at the end of the world.
.
The war is exhausting.
It started off fun. Humans are so weak, so tiny. Adel has long since forgotten what it was like to be one of them. To walk around, vulnerable to the world around her. Once, she knows, she was a girl, picked on for being taller than the other kids.
Once, she found a book on Hyne, and sought him out, consumed by his "curse."
She can't tell the difference between them, now. Where Hyne ends, and she begins. She finds herself often thinking in terms of "we," and then laughs when she reminds herself that it is all her. Whatever Hyne has given her, he relies on her to achieve it. On her body, so much larger now that she shares it with a God.
The armies of Deling City keep throwing themselves at her. Hope, she thinks, is the most foolish of all human emotions. They will all die in the name of that hope, before they will admit they have no chance against her and the ancient power she has dedicated her life to understanding.
But she tires easily, now. Killing them was exciting once, and now it is only boring. She longs for a successor, someone young, someone she can train. Someone who can learn the wisdom of Hyne, who will Believe, as she has Believed, in the tragic weakness of humans. She has done the work, planted the seeds. It is time for her to watch the world as she has helped shape it. To rest, knowing her work will continue.
She heard someone say once, that she is fading. A scientist, or a soldier; she didn't bother to find out before dispatching them. Her magic is permanent. She has gone through too much, sacrificed her body, lost everything she is in the pursuit of something greater than her mortal self ever could have achieved. She is not fading, because she cannot fade. Until she passes on the powers of Hyne her body will endure, because that is the agreement they made. And she will protect those powers with everything she has, until she has found a successor that Hyne deems worthy.
A leaf falls from a tree, red as blood. Adel lifts her hand and the tree catches fire, consumed in minutes, leaving only ash in its place.
She enters the grand building they call the Presidential Palace, oblivious to the people cowering in fear as she passes them, until she finds Odine in his basement lab.
"Extend your search," she commands. "And start including children."
He is, as far as she can tell, the only one in this entire world who doesn't fear her. She would appoint him her successor if his body could handle the transition. His thirst is as great as hers, and he will not let her down.
"Eet will be done," he bows.
Adel leaves the room without a word. On her way upstairs she looks southward, at the endless desert that stretches beyond the city.
.
Ultimecia moves through the future as a shadow. A mockery, of kings and queens, of magic from a time when magic had meaning.
This is not what she envisioned for herself. It is not, she thinks, what any of them envisioned for themselves. Their voices are inescapable; they run through her head even in her sleep. Stories of love, of valor. Of war and madness. Even her precursors who sought anonymity were free.
Ultimecia has never known freedom. She was born with an inheritance she never asked for, in the magic given to her by a mother she never knew, and in a world laid to waste by the selfish pursuit of more.
She knows of the sun, because of the succession. She knows of flowers, of an ocean whose waters run clear and blue, instead of the murky black that is all she has ever seen. They have told her of the delight of sunlight on their skin, of the ecstasy of touch a man or woman can bring. These, she believes, are the pleasures worth seeking.
And she is condemned as a result. She is sought, in her time and in the past before her. An army called SeeD, moving through time because of the actions the ones who came before her did or didn't do.
Because of the actions of herself. Time is a circle for her, after all. An endless loop she created as a child, in a pitiful attempt to break out of the chain of consciousness she had thrust upon her as an infant. Maybe she invited SeeD. Maybe she created them.
From the cold, dark throne she has crafted for herself, all she knows is that she wants them destroyed. The world, destroyed. The history of a time when people could be happy, when a witch could lay with a Knight and know she was protected, when cities would grovel before her power; Ultimecia can no longer distinguish between the paths the ones before her could take. They are a blur of not mine. She will have them, or she will crush them.
She turns a ring over on her finger, and hears the bright voice of one of the many in her past calling its name. Griever. She doesn't know where she got the ring or why, or what role it played to her sister of the past. She feels its power, and listens to its stories.
She moves her fingers from the ring and rests her hands against her throne, and closes her eyes, letting her mind slip into the constant stream of voices. One of them, is the key.
The world will be destroyed, or it will begin anew.