A/N: I love Symphonia, and Zelos in particular. I've written a few things for it. This is the first that actually got finished! Spoilers, I suppose, if you haven't played all the way through yet-hurry up, you guys!

I don't own Tales of Symphonia. I refuse to believe that anyone else does either. You can't own people, no matter how you try. And angels are particularly hard to tie down.

Three Score Years And Ten

One joy scatters a
hundred griefs.
-Chinese Proverb

Into my heart's night
Along a narrow way
I groped; and lo! the light,
An infinite land of day.
-Rubaiyat of Rumi

I threw my twenty-fifth birthday party yesterday.

It was a big do, seriously big. You think you know about big parties? You know nothing. Not until you have seen the sort of madness I can plan, and I am Chosen of Tethe'alla; I have the cash to blow on every single frivolity I can imagine. I can imagine a lot. The party occupied half the rooms in my mansion, not to mention all of the garden, and the dancing went on well past midnight. I love dancing. All my friends were there-my real friends I mean, not just people I sort-of-know and mostly-like, though a lot of those were invited too.(My real friends number seven. That's a lucky number, so, not a bad amount, especially for me. Even though two of them are total stick-in-the-muds, frankly refusing to let loose and enjoy themselves at any sort of party, and one was too young to stay long and claims to hate my guts anyway, and for that matter I claim to hate his guts and we both wouldn't have it any other way, and he'd probably be the world's youngest heart attack victim if he knew I called him my friend here, and two more are denser than lead and innocent as five-year-olds and one is just strange and looked about as out of place at a party as a potato would look in one of the princess's floral arrangements. A spiky potato. But anyway.) It was wild.

It was also a belated party. It was one day late.

There is a reason for this.

I am the Chosen of Tethe'alla, and as an ex-member of Cruxis I am more informed than most as to exactly what that entails(entailed). The purpose of the Chosens was Mithos's purpose, the purpose of finding a vessel for the soul of Martel. Alternating the mana flow between Sylvarant and Tethe'alla was just a convenient extra. Mithos could have found some other way of doing that pretty easily, if he'd wanted to. Tethe'alla is(was)the flourishing world, has been for centuries, but that doesn't mean no Chosens were selected during that time. They just weren't sent on the journey of world regeneration.

So what's the problem, I hear you cry? All the perks of being Chosen, and no nasty dangerous journey to go get killed at the end of, if you survive that long. Yeah. I wish. The purpose of the Chosens was to provide a vessel for the soul of Martel.

Martel died when she was barely twenty-five.

At some time in his or her life-more often her than his, females are Chosen more often for pretty obvious reasons. I am a bottom of the barrel Chosen, a dregs Chosen, a bad Choice made because there was no-one else more suitable-every Chosen of Tethe'alla receives a summons. An angelic summons. "Come to the Tower of Salvation." "Your time has come."

The summons is public. People notice when an angel magically appears in Meltokio-on top of the cathedral generally, though a couple generations ago there was this time when the place had scaffolding up for some repair work, and the angel turned up in the main square instead. In a blaze of white light. There's absolutely no way to hide it, or claim ignorance or whatever. Everyone knows.

A ship is made ready. A small team of bodyguards is assembled. The Chosen is escorted, with every care, to the Tower. They place their hand on the oracle stone, and they enter.

They undergo the angel transformation, all at once. No-one sees them after that. That's because they have been taken to the secret heart of the Tower, where Martel sleeps, and an attempt has been made to transfer her soul into them.

(It never succeeded. Usually the body of the Chosen was destroyed in the attempt, as well as their soul. That didn't stop Mithos from trying.)

There is no way to tell exactly when the summons will occur, but it always comes between the fifteenth and twenty-fifth birthdays of the Chosen. More promising candidates are summoned sooner. Less promising ones, like me…sometimes the summons does not occur till a matter of weeks or days before we turn twenty-five.

But it always comes. Always.

At least, it did till a crazy kid called Lloyd Irving got upset that his friend was slated to die, and took it into his head to change the world. And succeeded.

I was twenty-two and I had given up hope, when I ran into that crazy kid in front of Tethe'alla castle…And one thing led to another.

And all of a sudden, I had a lifetime stretching out in front of me.

It was hard to believe, you know? As soon as I was old enough to walk and talk, I knew my days were numbered. All of a sudden that wasn't true any more. The mental habits of a lifetime aren't easily overturned.

Time went on, after the defeat of Mithos. I became twenty-three, and twenty-four, and I still couldn't quite believe it. That I wasn't going to be made an angel. That I wasn't going to die.

I decided to prove it to myself. To celebrate. I planned a party. A twenty-fifth birthday party, wilder and more lavish than any party in history. A party one day late, marking me one day older than any Chosen has ever lived to be. A party to give the finger, once and for all, to Mithos Yggdrasill's ghost.

I was still afraid. Right up to the last minute. The night before my birthday, I couldn't sleep. I just sat up, watching the clock. In the end I couldn't bear it alone anymore.

Sheena had arrived several days in advance of the party. She couldn't quite believe me when I wrote and told her just how big it was going to be. She had to come and see for herself, and couldn't wait till the day. She didn't believe even I would arrange something so overblown and stupid, she said, but it was ten times worse than what she'd imagined.

(She enjoyed herself at the party, later, though. I'm used to her sharp tongue by now-that's just her way. Hey, maybe I have a chance with her after all! She can't be totally immune to my charm, right?)

I went and knocked on the door of the room she was staying in. She was predictably angry about being gotten up in the middle of the night. She also thought I was trying to perve on her. (I wasn't. Well, maybe a bit.) But when she stopped shrieking at me long enough to listen to what I was saying, she sighed dramatically and said oh all right, she'd sit up with me if I needed the company that badly.

She read a book. A few times she almost nodded off over it, and I shook her awake. Each time she protested at my touching her. I didn't even try to read, or play cards, or talk. I couldn't bring myself to. I watched the hands of the clock crawl round. I kept looking out of the window, expecting any minute now for the blaze of light to illuminate Meltokio. For an angel to appear.

Come midnight, I was staring out of the window at the dark bulk of the cathedral. Listening as the chimes began.

Dong, dong, dong…

…four, five, six…

…dong, dong, dong…

…ten, eleven…twelve.

The only lights in the city were the small ordinary glows of windows and streetlamps.

Sheena yawned. "There you go," she told me. "Happy birthday, you stupid Chosen." Then, looking closer at me, "Zelos? Zelos, you're not crying, are you?"

'Three score years and ten.' That's a quotation-I do remember some things from university. The length of a human life. Approximately.

I guess that doesn't look like long, if you're an elf, or a half-elf, or if you're an angel.

But I've no elven blood in me, and I don't want to be an angel, not even a high seraph with my own mind intact. I remember them well enough. You didn't have to be a genius to notice-they were stuck. Stuck inside their own minds, as they were when they first transformed. Like flies in amber.

No wonder Kratos left with Derris-Kharlan; good riddance to bad rubbish, say I. He was a living fossil-he didn't really have any place in the world where he fit, anymore. He'd lived-maybe existed is a better term-for four thousand years. But he hadn't learned anything and he hadn't been able to change. You'd expect someone four thousand years old to be a bit wiser, to have picked a thing or two up in all that time. But whatever Cruxis Crystals do to make a person live forever seems to stop that, somehow.

The angel transformation doesn't give you any more life. It just spreads what you have out thin.

I'll take three score years and ten.

At the party, people wondered at my high spirits. I've always been a party animal, but I'd never been so…joyous. I guess it showed. I think the only people who really understood why were Lloyd and Colette. Colette's a Chosen too, and Lloyd…

…Lloyd's as daft as they come. Mostly. He'll smash priceless jewels by accident and totally fail to notice utterly obvious things and I know for a fact that he's never even got a C on a math test-but about this sort of thing, he knows. He knows and understands better than most people ever will.

I know I'm going to die someday. Everyone does. But that day is a long way off.

I'll be joyous. I have reason to. Three score years and ten doesn't look like much, to an elf, or a half-elf, or an angel. But to me, who never expected to make it past one score years and five, three score years and ten is all the Forever I could desire.