"The human mind is more a universe than the universe itself."
- John Fowles

PROLOGUE

This place is an eternal wasteland, filled only with the spiraling green tendrils of glowing ether. It is an interregnum between the living and the dead - a way-place souls travel before being reborn - the Lifestream.

There is no time here; it is a void of constant, unchanging motion: vast, endless, and empty. Empty, of course, save for its one corporeal consciousness. He floats alone in this place - having no control (for, really, there is nothing to control here) as even his body has become one with his location - there is no separation.

There is no way to tell how long he has been here. Months, years, centuries, perhaps. Light does not end to signal the done day; there is no consequence of time. Even the movement of souls is no aid; once one soul is reborn from the Lifestream and into the world, there is another to replace it. There is no ebb and flow - just a constant, monotonous stream.

He doesn't know why he is here, but he can guess. It is punishment. A purgatory, of sorts, meant to hold him here for all eternity. In this place, his soul will not fade or be reborn. His body will not age or die. Instead, he is doomed to stay here, floating around, forever. A rather bland future to live out alone...

"But it's the future you deserve," she said.

Well, almost alone. She had been showing up more frequently, more than the others, and he must wonder why she is the one he daydreams about most often. Of all of them, he would have expected someone else.

"Still not speaking?" she cocked her head to the side and folded her arms across her chest. "When are you going to ask me those questions? If you wait too long, you'll forget those, too." To display her impatience, she shifted her weight from booted foot to booted foot. "Well, fine," she said when he said nothing. "You and I have all the time in the world to wait."

And she was gone.

His mind flitted between the dreaming and the real. The Lifestream was still as he had left it, and that girl had only momentarily improved the emptiness. Still, his focus remained on her.

He would never ask her those questions - she could never bring anything new to him. She was merely a daydream that confirmed what he already knew: he was dead, he deserved it, he was wicked, et cetera. The questions he wanted answers to, had he ever asked them, would not have been sufficiently answered by her. It would have been his own subconsciousness answering them.

Utterly pointless.

Still, her presence was the only thing keeping his senses alive, for there was naught else in the Lifestream; though if he concentrated, he could still hear the voices of other souls, as small as breathless whispers. When he first arrived here, it was as cacophonous as a waterfall. After time it became the dull trickling of a creek. Now he didn't notice at all. It was hard to believe he ever heard it to begin with. He could barely remember that far back. How long had he even been here?

Five hundred eighteen years.

The sound of the voice actually startled him. It wasn't like the girl's, where everything she said was malice obfuscated by kindness. This was different, new.

"Hello?" His voice cracked from misuse. Was that really what he sounded like? It resonated as weak and frail. Not like he remembered.

Hello, Sephiroth.

The voice was like nothing he had ever heard before. Sexless, numberless, ageless. He could infer nothing from it, almost as if it were coded. Purposely ambiguous.

He must have become quite detached from himself if this newly created daydream had more answers than the previous ones. Five hundred eighteen years. He wasn't even aware it had been that long. Maybe that knowledge was a part of a sub-subconsciousness. Or maybe that wasn't it at all...

He hadn't kept track of the time. It was impossible here. No part of him would have known that answer; not even a 'sub-subconsciousness.' It must be an outside source.

He readied his voice to speak again, "I have questions."

I know, and I have answers.

Internally, he grinned. There was finally change. Regardless of whether or not this thing could answer his questions, the presence of this voice was still a very definite change; and after years of stagnant solitude, it made one thing very clear to Sephiroth:

He would get out of this place.