This one is... strange. It isn't Kuja (which in itself is a bit odd, coming from me) and it isn't a situation I usually write about. I like the scenes-you-get-to-see, and this might be one of them, but it's different. Hopefully, you'll like it, or if you don't, I hope you can tell me what to do to improve.
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters or placenames depicted herein, as they are the property of Square-Enix, and I am making no money from this work of fiction.
The air is warm and damp, smelling of soil and water and life. Overhead, the roots of the enormous tree groan beneath the weight of the trunk and the branches so far above, moving slowly as if in pain. It is warm in this place, the suffocating heat of burning life, keeping the world just beyond the grasp of consciousness.
A mind stirs, moving slow as molasses through the darkness, and eyes open. They meet the dusty silence of the earth, lungs breathing in air that was as solid as the ground beneath and above. For a time like eternities wrapped around each other, there is nothing but the breathing and the pain and the darkness.
Then came... awareness...
He issomeone, he has an identity, he is alive. The knowledge trickles through his mind with the speed of crumbling mountains, washing against the scraps and tangled bursts of darkness that are hidden inside, shielding him from himself.
Outside, hours pass by like seconds, stretching and lengthening until they become an endless circle as he moves his hand, fingers scritching, scratching over the dry-bone dirt beneath them. It crumbles like dead leaves as he traces his way across it, searching for something more. After a time out of mind, his questing fingers find what they are searching for -
- one, two, three, four, five -
... five fingers, one hand. It is not his hand, he has -
...ten fingers, two hands, one mind...
...this one belongs to someone else, cold and stiff and thin like whispers of ghosts, but it feels like his own; he knows this hand, remembers it, even as his fingers wrap around it. It is as familiar as his own, but it belongs to someone else; his fingers travel up across the back of the hand, ghosting over the wrist and up the lower arm and then they stop, halted suddenly. There is something in the way, rough and harsh and damp.
A root, the root of a tree so large that the entire world can be held in its branches. Somewhere, underneath the living thing there is an arm, a shoulder, a ribcage,
...another mind...
...someone else in the darkness is no more, and now his breathing is laboured, heavy and sharp and it comes in sudden bursts as if he is drowning in the dry earth. Someone else beside him, someone whose hand he knows, and something behind the darkness is clawing now, screaming and beating against the walls, his eyes are wide like soup plates and the thoughts come quicker now.
He knows the hand, knows the weight of the tree roots, he remembers but he can't recall what, flashes of somewhere else going off behind his eyelids like pictures in a storm; the weight of the roots and the soil above him is heavy like lead and he feels like the world will come crumbling down over him – over them – at any moment, the cold fingers are not moving under his hand and he is struggling now like a man possessed.
His legs cannot move far – neither up, nor down, nor any other way in between – and he is trapped, fighting not only the darkness but the beast of sharp edges and tangled, matter felt and claws that was fear, all thousand teeth biting into him like broken glass all at once.
...pain, scars like roots clinging to him, someone laughs and the bright blue light washes over him like the sea...
The twitches come slower now, like frightened spiders crawling over his body, and he is tired. How much time that has passed since he first woke up he does not know; there is no concept of days in this place, and time becomes a pattern of waking and sleeping independent from the world around him. When he is tired, he rests, sleeping heavily beneath the weight of the tree, and when he sleeps, he dreams.
The dreams are each one different, people and places he knows he has seen but cannot place or name wander through his mind, scenes replaying like snatches of old conversations. There is nothing alike about any of them; faces change, the trees give way to mountains, mountains passing to leave buildings of wood and thatch and stone, but there is one thing in all of his dreams that ties them together, like knots on an indefinitely long string.
Somewhere, far off, there is someone singing, weaving words in and out of his consciousness like a leaf dancing in the wind, and he knows the singer, knows the words to the song so well that he could sing it himself, but he has no voice left to sing with. He knows who it is, singing the song in his dream and now even in his waking hours, but he cannot recall her name, nor her face, just as he cannot recall his own.
But the song pulls strings, tugging at something in his mind, and he feels restless now, and the weight of the world is suffocating. The dirt falls away beneath his fingers, and all he knows is that he cannot stop until he remembers the singer.
...Behind him he leaves a cold hand and the warmth of the underworld, a place where the darkness was not a vision, but a vivid being...
Layer after layer of dirt peels away as he doggedly digs his way out of his grave, peeling away like the shades of darkness does. The air becomes easier to breathe, simpler and clearer, his tunnel zagging left and right as it winds its way around the roots of the world-tree, he is a one-purpose being now,
...one mind, one heart, one goal...
..clawing his way to the distant surface. For so long he has been trapped beneath the world, encased in an air like no-longer-solid earth, that he no longer remembers a time before the darkness, but he knows there must have been for he dreams of other places, other times, when he had a name and a face and a sky to look up on, other times when he knew the singer. He remembers but only like he sees it through a heavy fog, seeing everything but not the details and it is the details that niggle him, like the little crawling spiders in the darkness, shadowing their way to say hello to him though he had no voice to answer them.
The earth changes as he crawls, on his hands and knees like a sinner for penance, going from the deep black loam of his underworld to a lighter, muddier red colour, the tree roots thinning and becoming like darkened arms more than the monstrous giants they had been. The roots pulse here too, this close to the surface they can feel the sun just out of their reach, and like him, they yearn for the open sky...
...the colour of skin, sharp contrast of fiery red and moody blues, insults and curses and dependability with poisoned claws...
...of someone he had known once, someone he cannot now remember clearly. This amnesia is difficult, his real memories like prisoners behind the spiderwebs of blackness in his mind, glimpses and snatches and snips of something he should know but cannot recall, faces with no names and names with no faces in an endless circle. The dirt dries on his fingers and turns his hands a smeared terracotta, the fingers themselves cramping and feeling like a dead man's hands, but he does not stop; there is a determination burning now, a vivid desire to see the sky he cannot remember, and he will not stop for dirt or root or stone.
The last part is the hardest; the ground is all roots and stone now, wrapped around each other like some crazy net, and he tears his fingertips to blood on the stones, trying to get them to move. It is then, with the surface so close – only a breath and a root away – that he almost gives up and goes back to the darkness, to the company of the cold fingers that reminds him of yellow lights and fire, but the second wind sets in in a burst of anger and despairing strength, and he heaves against the stone that is the only barrier between him and the world, and it moves -
...he remembers another time, another struggle, when planets became and died, wheeling in the background, and eternity in the dark beyond the stars...
...and then the sunlight spills in, bright and warm and blinding him, but it does not matter that the world is white and red and pains him; the air does not smell of dirt and tree roots and stone, and he can hear the song even clearer now, a call beyond the fields he could see, and the heart that had been so long disused in the darkness came to life.
His knees are rusty, clicking and twinging as he stands up, fighting his way out of the tangled roots and vines. This, this was the freedom, the world he has remembered in dreams, and as the haze of white and red fades from his vision, he can see the clear, blue sky he kept alive in the darkness.
Then, one unsteady foot in front of the other, he begins to walk.
Out there, beyond the horizon, there is a singer, there is a song, and he can almost recall the words.