" 'The End' is an oxymoron in and of itself my dear boy. To believe that a story --or life-- ends with death, or such simple words while there still is life: is utter foolishness to those of us who bear a soul. "

Oracle Tsu: 1449 BF, Sa Neng Clan Territories, The Judgment of Alta

The keys are in place.

The skies in the east are dark. Deep hues of green and utter black dancing with the threat of lightning on the horizon, one outside of their world might consider the prelude to a hurricane or tornado looming at the rough fingertips of the wind god's hands ready to be loosed from it's leash. Still the sun shone down from the opposite side.. brightly draping through the heavy morning mists, and cutting softly through the salt of the cold tide that surrounded the only land mass situated in the churning and unending seas. His pale serpentine eyes slid over the familiar storm evenly, and as a seasoned farmer might.. he easily discerned the lay of his homeland's weather. Winter would be coming soon. Earlier than the year prior.. and more acidic than before.

It was an odd daze he was in, roaming the pass ahead of the carriers in his place as ruling Kanji: and ahead of the dead they bore on their shoulders. The fifth war of his lifetime. His chin turned and he looked solidly over his shoulder at the drolling populace that marched behind him along the emerald strewn passes between the mountains, the sharp blue of the Undine Shores now not so far. So many more to lay to rest in the arms of the Mar. So many years of corpses yet before them. How could it all have ended in a single night?

Perhaps, he was in denial: he thought as he faced forward again.. not needing to put his silvery blue eyes to the path to know the way. Two thousand years had passed. His mates had calmed and taken their place within the palace walls. His uncles ad slept, and risen.. and slept again beside their charges as Judici. Oracle had likewise woken.. asking for his father. Always, asking for him: and his mother. Still he had no answers for in any of those instances.

He sighed as the hooves of his Kataran hit the soft give of sandy earth marking their passage into Mar territory. The Sea-lings knew what his presence meant.. even if they didn't smell the approaching death bore on the backs of his father's subjects. He heard their moving with his sharp Lupene ears.. slipping into the water with speed and grace befitting the merfolk they were: to await their offering and their duty out of the sight of the living who still to this day feared them.

The Kataran balked and steered itself sideways near the breaking point: the high reflective stones that marked the point of no return for all without mourning. He left it behind with a simple turn and slide from his mount.. and drew back his hood to look back at the mountain one more time before his duties in his father's absence would be put to task.

He had aged, in many ways, since those first days of return. " Kiros! My lord Proteus! " Their world had died and been reborn two thousand fold since, as it always had.. and as it always would, until his father returned and claimed his truest right as claimed King. Kiros' eyes steadied on the Sunset Palace of Maladies, his thoughts drowned in the past, and seeking the future. " Proteus.. do you hear me? "

The voice was much closer this time.. an arm's reach away, and Kiro's blank gaze reached the face of Gizale's nephew. Only a few meager centuries old.. and the boy had more scars than even Kiros himself, or his slumbering uncle Yazoo. He had proven himself over and over; to be better in honor than the man and wife that sired him. " I hear you, Deidran. " and Kiros' eyes returned to the palace briefly before turning to the cobalt shore churning some hundred yards from the razor stones that pointed their path. " The future, catches my mind is all. Tell the carriers to unbind the dead and set with them their offerings. The Mar and great mother await their passage and return. "

Deidran bowed his head and went about that business as Kiros was once again the first to step upon the black and pearl whirled sand. He stopped halfway to meeting of the tide and parted his hands from his side, opening his palms to the horizon, his chin turning towards the brighter clouds that danced with the bright hues of the sunset, closing his eyes and taking the knowledge provided by the silently coming dusk. So many memories waved through his mind...

" I ... refuse. "

He could remember the dead silence from, well, everyone. So quiet that her footsteps could be heard on the carpet. It had actually angered him: though now in hindsight he realized he should have expected it long before they had returned " All of this.. all your efforts.. to deny your union? "

" Yes. "

" Why in the name Halsethsis? " Jasper had been tugging on his sleeve. He hadn't looked back, but now, two millenia later on that toothily edged shore: he did. His youngest brother's form stayed as it had been for the past four hundred years since their father's departure from this very spot: frozen in the black depths of stone with his Way To The Dusk keyblade extended to the horizon, his features a blur behind the whirl and chip of onyx like jewel. Forever holding the doors to their world shut tight against any who did not belong.

Safekeeping their present and new generations from outside aggressions.. whilst they dealt with those that remained from within. The carriers began to bring out the dead in solemn columns. Some were too horribly gnarled or even rotted from the past months of battle in the White Vale to even show their faces to the sky, veiled in a complete death shroud. This, he despised: there was no easy way to identify those he most wanted to bid a fair parting, and those he would wish into the dripping pits of the hells.

Others, he recognized more easily; their stilled mortal wounds marked with gilded bindings. Death-deep wounds bound in the most delicate of finery. Again his memories surged to the surface.

" You cannot abandon your blood! And what of her.? "

" Kiros.. "

" No Jasper, you yourself sought them for how long? And Yazoo? And Loz, and Kadaj? Our uncles sought for us as much! What of Axel and Demyx if not them? Saix? Four ye-- "

" I don't want it either. " Jade's quiet voice still sounded weak in his memory, clear as day and quiet as a whisper: but the words had been enough to make his heart stop for an instance in disbelief. It had been then, looking back to his uncles and brothers that he had realized he hadn't seen something.. something they had realized that had slipped by him: and he finally looked to Jade, whose eyes slid up to her halted other half with restrained emotion.

It had been then he had noted the excessive stiffness to her back, and smelt the damp salt in the air. Tears. It had nothing to do with them, and her last words to them before she left proved it solidly as she had opened the door and simply left. " Even bound together.. we can never be whole again. Not ever. " He had looked to Arcxan, one half of his brother.. and found the tallest staring at the floor, his eyes hidden behind his hair. Thinking back, they had been more perceptive than he had then: that was why they hadn't protested to her claim. He knew that now, and he knew it moments later. Lupene ears did not deceive, much to his heart's detriment.

No one else had heard the name that was on her lips as she had made her way out of their sight never to be seen again to this very day; but Kiros understood with that simple uttering, and knew her heartless had felt it when his eyes turned to see her clasping at the bracelet around her wrist with a deep set painful frown: on the edge of tears that wouldn't come, because they had already been spent for him in the nights prior.

Kiros stayed in this daze of memory for what seemed like an eternity.. helping to prepare the dead as he had before; laying the spry Calla in the hands of the loyal and loving servants of the crest. Taking up the bindings of the first fallen was a haze of movement beyond the years and centuries. The wars that had since come and gone, and the battles within each. The loss of Lotos and Alta the Third. Bor's brother, and Kinneas. Half the Valkries had faded into the waves and thus the hands of god as well. And ever his father had been there.. until the light had faded from his wife's third pyre. Until the third Funerary, and the last braid to honor the dead of the lands and peoples under his subjection had been added to his hair. Since Rubi had been taken into the last order, and brought to the altars a wife of Deidran's half brother.

Four hundred years.. his mind wandered again to the present as he felt the sharp hands of the Mar grasping at the dead he pulled on his shoulders from beneath the waves. Letting loose the ties from his hands he watched in silence as the shrouded bodies were dragged down and away beneath the dark waters by their keepers. He spoke his words as his father spoke them before him, a memory and a promise for so much more in his voice: harshened at the closed horizon and those they had left beyond it at Sephiroth's final standing command. The sound carried out across the waters, deepened by the hush of waves rushing to the shore. " As you rose here from death, so do you sink into new life. As you were once born from these lands, do so again. Find peace in passage, from this to the next eternity.. and begin again without need for regret nor for recompense. Fly thee free into the arms of the Gods without any need but for thy own judgment, secure in this: we shall meet again, be it in this flesh: or in new blood and bone hewed by their grace in need. "

The waters glow did not frighten Kiros as it once did, and the same name that Xadje had uttered as her last word to be heard came across his lips in memory and wonder if father had ever found them.. or if he was still looking for the broken shards of Jade... their family.. were they even still alive? " Bilxt.. "

Standing in the waters only one answer could come to him: nothing had been finished in truth. Those days had simply marked the end of one dark chapter.. and looking at the dead as they were still and yet carried past him, Kiros knew that until their world was claimed and Etri became one with his father's choice: they would continue to be forced to wait for the next chapter to begin..