A/N
Hi there! First off, I would like to thank you for choosing to read my fanfic. This is my first fanfic that I've ever been serious about writing, so I encourage criticism and comments galore! :D
I apologize if this isn't so much of a fanfic as it is just fiction in the beginning. I based it in the final fantasy 7 world, but I've played with the lore to show the distortion of history (Giving things different names, leaving certain things like the Promised Land out altogether... stuff like that). At the beginning, you'll probably be going "wth?", but I promise that it makes more sense as a fanfic later on. Trust me. :) Also, this story begins some time before Jenova collides with the planet. Beyond that, I'm going to leave the rest to the story :)
Oh, just a little about the way my chapters are divided: Each of the chapters in this story will be pretty long, so I'll be dividing them up for the convenience of my readers. For example, my first chapter is broken into three individual sections to make it easier to leave off and come back later. I'm not sure if this is a good concept or not, so feel free to let me know via PM. I hope you enjoy reading my story as much as I do writing it!
Prologue:
The child looked up at its mother from her bed. This was her favourite time of the day – the time when everything else could be forgotten and the mind was free. Story time. Mommy never read from a book, preferring to make the stories up as she went along. At least, most of the times she made them up.
The child – Winny by name – loved her mother's stories because they were always different. Most kids her age were told stories from books that people from all over the world wrote. Winny didn't envy them, her mommy's stories were always better anyway. Sometimes mommy would let one of her friends come over and listen to her stories, but that didn't happen tonight.
Winny's mother looked different today, a dark shadow was cast over her otherwise happy features. Being only seven, Winny couldn't really understand what was wrong, but she asked anyway. "Is everything okay, mommy?" She asked in a child's tone of worry, to which her mother replied "I'm fine, Poppy." She sounded tired.
Still, Winny accepted her mother's lie as easily as she ever did and moved on to the next subject. "So what story are you going to tell me today, mommy?" Winny's mom looked distant, staring at the wall above her daughter's bed. Mommy never did this. This was something new. Maybe she was just thinking up a new story. Things had been pretty busy today with the store, so she probably didn't have time to think up a story.
"Mommy?" Winny tried again after a few minutes. This time her mother looked down and smiled.
"I'm sorry, Poppy, I was just thinking about what kind of story that I would tell you tonight."
Winney gave a triumphant, "I thought so!" and looked up at her mother. She was staring again, this time down at the covers over Winney's little body. Her daughter was beginning to get worried. She never stared like this before, as if she were looking through what she was actually staring at. Some other people did that, but it was mostly the weird men and women. Her mommy never acted like that.
"Mommy...?"
Her mother snapped to and smiled again, "Sorry Poppy. Still thinking some more. This is going to be a good story, I promise."
"Yay!" When her mommy said that stories were going to be good, they were good. When the stories were good she remembered almost every word and ran them over through her head the next day while in school or doing chores. "So what's it about?"
"Do you know about the Ancients?"
Winney wrinkled her nose for a moment and thought. She didn't pay much attention in school, but she was pretty sure that her teacher had told the class about the 'Ancients' once. Slowly she replied, "They were the people who lived a looooong time ago, right?" That was about the extent of her knowledge.
"That's right, Poppy. Tonight I'm going to tell you a story about the Ancients, a story that, unlike the others I tell you, really did happen." Her mother said that a few times before, but they always seemed too amazing to be real. She had never told a story about the ancients before. "There is one thing that I would like you to do for me though, Poppy. I want you to never forget this story. You can forget every other story that I ever tell you, but this is one of the ones that you can't. Like the story of AVALANCHE working to save the planet from Sephiroth, this is a story that has made us what we are; made our world what it is. You can do whatever you need to do to remember it, but it has to be remembered. Later, when you're older, I want you to write a book about it and share it with the world so everyone will remember."
"Why don't you write the book, mommy?"
"I..." Her mother's eyes clouded over and took on that stare again, "I just can't, Poppy. You... wouldn't understand."
"But Mommy, I wanna understand!"
"Until you are older, Winny, you won't understand." She stared for another minute, shuffled her feet, and then began.
