All characters and places from Tales of Symphonia belong to Namco. Any extra characters, plot lines or anything not seen in the initial storyline of the game belong to me.
It is common belief that life thrives off of variety. Day and night, sleep and wakefulness, joy and grief, love and hatred...We thrive off this diversity, using it to grow and develop, to make the most of our lives and enable us to die happy, feeling fulfilled. That is the nature of life: the fulfillment of dreams in the brief time that you are given in this world, before the small spark of light that is your soul goes out, falling into the eternal darkness that can either be everlasting peace, or perpetual damnation...
All my life I've waited for death. It was never a question of if I would die, but when. "You're going to die. Live with it." Naturally, that's easier said than done. How is it possible to live with death? Death defies the very nature of life itself. Where in life there is warmth and light, death is a cold black void, silent where life is full of sounds, colourless against the vibrance of our world. It was death that stole my father's love from my mother, death that tore her away from my grasp when I was barely old enough to grasp the concept of our family's dire existence. It was death that prevented my brother from seeing his twenty-fifth birthday, and death that, I was now firmly convinced, would soon take me. I was alone, in a world of superstitious people that wouldn't dirty themselves with my cursed blood, with only myself, an abandoned building that had once been home, and a blessed sword that would soon reject me as the darkness consumed my soul. At this point, there was no talk of life. Death would come soon. It was only a matter of time...
The snow fell steadily from the grey sky overhead, soft fluffy flakes that caught on tree branches and stuck to hair and clothing alike. A cool wind whipped through narrow stairways and scattered loose snow across cobblestone plazas, forcing people to pull their fur-lined hoods closer against their skin, and shiver as the snow stung their faces. And in the shadow of a tall building near the entrance to town stood a young man with his hand on a sword.
Had anyone bothered to look closer, they would have noticed several oddities about him. For one thing, the hilt resting under his slender hand was glowing a faint green, banishing the darkness about his body somewhat. For another, three items lay at his feet: a strange looking key and two even stranger swords. Anyone who was watching-which was no one- would have seen one of the twin blades twitch slightly, as if possessed of a life of its own, and would have wondered of the weapons' nature. But perhaps the most unnatural of the unnaturalness was that he was wearing nothing but a shirt and a pair of pants, iron-shod boots on his feet, yet seemed to not so much blink as the frigid wind blew past him and pulled his midnight blue hair across his face. He let it continue its waving movement for a moment, then, sighing softly, he brushed it out of his eyes, breaking his stone-like stance and proving to the world-had it bothered to care-that he was indeed alive and not some statue placed inconveniently in a doorway. He glanced at the clock mounted up above a building to his left, then sighed once more and paced quickly to the edge of the step.
"Quarter to ten..." Once, long ago, there had been someone else to talk to, but now it was only him, and so he voiced his thoughts aloud, gaining some small comfort from the sound of his voice. "Time passes slower everyday." Pausing, he seemed to wait for some sort of agreement then, when it was not forthcoming, he walked slowly back towards the doorway. In his path was a small sign of polished wood, taking up the whole breadth of the small pathway and reading in ornately painted letters "Closed for the Season."
At first, when the sign had first gone up, people had come to peer at it, and wonder what the sudden closure was for.
"The shop used to be open year-round," they'd whisper, glancing uncertainly at the door lest the figure beside it hear their conversation. "Sold the finest weapons you could get anywhere, that one did." For a while, they would spin tales to their listeners of the wonders for sale within: swords that glowed with unearthly light and cut through monster flesh like it was no more substantial than air; arrows that could hit the blackest of hearts every shot no matter how inaccurate the aim, and staffs that could heal the gravest of maladies and purify a tainted soul. But eventually their words of wonder would fade into silence, and they would look at the building with a small shrug and a shake of their head. "It's been four years since that sign's gone up. Odd part 'bout of it, all the owners are dead, all of 'em except that strange one, there. Bad stroke of luck that family's got, no two ways about it." And eventually, they had stopped caring. The store remained closed, the family remained dead, and the last surviving member, Abyssion Naezheim, remained standing on the steps of his abandoned home, seemingly waiting for death to claim him as well.
He was waiting, but not for quite so bleak a cause. A sign, that's all he needed to step off his small island of isolation into the vastness of the world and search for the keys that would unlock his true destiny, not this dark existence his family had been forced to endure for so long. A sign, yet there was nothing but falling snow, and a city of people who stared right through him and wouldn't approach him, lest the terrible illness that had befallen all of his relatives reach out its groping fingers and catch them in their inescapable grasp.
"A sign," he whispered, lifting his face to the heavens and letting the snow create small spots of coolness on his skin. "Someone, somewhere, give me a sign!" For a moment there was utter silence, then far off in the distance a dog barked, a small child cried out as their parent scooped them out of a snowdrift they had decided to fall into, and the snow continued its relentless downfall, shrouding the world in a colourless blanket of white.
Well, here we are. I've found that it creates bad karma to say that this is your first fanfic at the top of the page, but since anyone reading this will have already read the whole chapter, I see no harm in telling you now. Yep, that's right. My first fanfic! happy As you've probably already figured out, I've decided to do my own spin-off of the Devil's Arms quest, from Abyssion's point of view. It'll probably conflict with every other story out there about him being a liar and traitor and everything but hey, it's good to shake it up a little once in a while.
I'm going to try to keep my Author Notes short and avoid rambling (which is hard for me, I tell you) so I'll finish this off now. I hope anyone who read this enjoyed it, and I wouldn't mind a review or two! sweatdrop
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