Disclaimer: I do not own The Legend of Dragoon or any of its characters or other copyrighted stuff.

A/N: Hm, can you tell who my favorite character is? XP Well, I was playing Dragoon for, oh, the twenty-somethingth time, probably, when this idea floated into my head...

Rose's Song

All was silence -- loud, echoing silence that seemed to press in on the eardrums. All was silence, except for the sound of the waves. Waves? But there were no waves here. There hadn't been water anywhere near this place for thousands of years. Perhaps it was just a trick of the silence that wrapped itself lovingly around the raven-haired woman who stood, still as a statue, in one of the seven towers at the ruins of Vellweb. Then, suddenly, the silence was broken, broken by a clear voice dripping with sorrow. And yet, it was this very regret and anguish that made the voice so beautiful. The woman was surprised to find that the sound was coming from her own throat. It was an old song -- ancient, even, in these modern days -- but yet it came back to her like it had been sung only yesterday...

"I had a dream that I could fly

If only it were just a dream...

I can feel each moment as time goes by

Every single moment.. over more than eleven thousand years of time...

You'd never be too far away

I thought you would always, always be with me...

You would always be here, I heard you say

That's what you told me.. and that's what you thought.. but you were wrong...

I never thought

That's exactly it.. the entire problem in three words.. I never thought, I never thought at all...

Thought that it would be your last goodbye

If someone had told me that, back then.. I would have said that they were out of their minds.. I wouldn't have realized that it was actually me who was deluded, seeing only what I wanted to see...

Our last goodbye

But we didn't even get to say goodbye.. before we left, you said goodbye.. and good luck.. but not at the last.. not to me... You just told me to let go.. and I wouldn't have, I would have died there with you.. but the rubble prised you from my grip.. and I shouted your name.. but by then you were lost, lost to the world and to me.. forever...

I still can dream

For dreams are all that I have left, now.. empty dreams and memories...

That one day love would fall down from the sky..."

The song ended, and the raven-haired woman was shocked to discover that there were tears in her dark blue-violet eyes. But that wasn't possible! She hadn't cried.. for years upon years... Not even for him.. not since that day...

Almost unbidden, her left hand found the choker at her throat. Not since I first put this on, she thought, her own voice sounding unspeakably foreign inside her head.

"Rose?" a voice called.

The woman blinked, and her tears were gone immediately, almost as if they had never been there to start with. Maybe they weren't, she thought. Maybe I imagined them, as well.

"Rose, are you there?" A young man in red armor walked through the door behind her, his blond hair being tousled this way and that by the light breeze.

"I'm here," Rose said, her voice as clear and cool as ever as she turned to face Dart.

"I heard a voice," Dart said uncertainly. "Someone was singing. Was it you?"

Rose's right eyebrow twitched upward. "Do you truly believe that I would be singing?" she asked in an amused sort of way -- well, as amused as Rose ever seemed to get, anyway.

"I guess not," Dart said, shrugging.

Rose paused and turned back toward the room again. "There are.. many mysteries about this place," she said softly. "There are rumors.. that the spirits of the Seven Dragoon warriors, the original Dragoons of the Dragon Campaign, still linger here."

Dart was silent for a moment, and then he murmured, "I see..."

There was another moment of silence, and then Rose turned and walked purposefully toward the exit. "We should not stay here," she said firmly as she walked past Dart and through the door. His blue eyes swept the room carefully before he turned and followed.

He had no way of knowing that this room had once served as the quarters of the Darkness Dragoon, and he certainly didn't realize yet that the very same Dragoon had just walked out the door ahead of him and was leading the way to face the so-called Emperor Diaz.