This is an idea I've been knocking around for a while. This is my first Seiftis, but it's also very plot driven. This is also the first story I've tediously planned out, and I'm really starting to like it, I hope you all do too.

" S "

Summery: Five years after the end of the Second Sorceress War, Timber is still fighting for its independence from Galbadian occupation. Break through methods from Timber's University in junctioning magic to water reservoirs to promote immunity to magic damage has enabled Timber to afford Balamb Garden's help. Quistis, dejected and rethinking her life and career choices, has taken a position as Balamb Garden's war Ambassador to Timber, and has been living away from her childhood friends for three years. Seifer has taken up with Timber's infamous Aurus crime family, and is making a living as a war profiteer. Fate will bring these two lost people together once again, and this time they'll see what they had always missed.

In the sudden light of a peace treaty between the two countries, Edea has finally remembered the witch's motivations for flattening out time and the secret could change life as The Fated Children know it.

" S "

Disclaimer: I don't own them, but I certainly wouldn't mind borrowing Seifer for a little alone time.

The Fated Bonds

By

Vesper Moonshine

Prologue

The Weary Woman in the Water

Edea still continued to listen for them even now, at times she almost swore she could hear their bubbling laughter marry the gurgling retreat of every wave. Sometimes she would see ethereal forms ghost through the old stone cottage like fog or a frosty wisp of breath winnowing out into a cold night. In moments of lonely be-daze she was certain the ghosts wrapped themselves in flesh and sinew, their little legs smacking and pounding on the floor instead of noiselessly drifting over. For just an addled moment her children would come home.

Then she would blink them all away.

She knew they were gone from the house of wisteria, sea salt, and sand, scattered ounce again like little petals in a gale. They had found one another in the forced camaraderie of war only to lose one another in long battles, thier strenuous continuation, in life's endless call of obligations. They'd saved the world from an evil sorceress bent on flattening time out like butter spread over toast, a single one dimensional medium, but they all soon came to realize in their own way that the one thing they could not save the world from was itself. They became weary, and they were all too young to be so.

Five years had pasted since she'd had them all in one place, and even longer still since she'd seen them all smiling together, at one another. But she'd watched from the corners shrouded in shadow, from the side lines she now resigned herself to, and she knew that their pain was shared, but not expressed. They were all foreigners in each others individual country with only the vauge comfort of a colective memory to guide them.

She feared this was her fault.

Edea Kramer sighed as she reached her willowy arms down to remove the delicate suede flats she wore. She looped a finger in the curve of each tightly tailored heal, letting her shoes dangle at her side. With her face in a softly resigned set, she stepped forward toward the surf to enjoy her greatest remaining pleasure. A slow, half smile pulled up ever so slightly the aging beauty of her round face when the cold water broke between her toes.

The smile did not last, though, and her features evened to smooth resignation once again as she remembered the witch. The cool rush that had come with her own acquiescence to the sorceresses possession was so much like the waves frigid touch.

Cool and fresh with a heightened sensibility she had never felt before, or would ever feel again.

Feet first and fast she had fallen into the icy waters of the witches power, tumbling blissfully out of herself into grander things. She had loved it until that first kill, feeling the first bystander bleeding on her hands as service to a war she had let start. She had been so confident that the woman who had appeared to her would give her a life of wonder at the top of the world, a fulfillment of the fanciful dreams she had thought to have long abandoned with childhood.

Every adult looses their childhood dreams, but many still keep them under the current of their life's monotony, hidden like gold in a river bed. The instinctual waters rush over and try to bury the treasure but the explorer has only to dip his hands below the fray to find again what was always there. Most, though, don't bother to look, or look back as it were, without a catalyst, a drought to reveal the land, a storm to wash it upon the shore.

The witch had been Edea's revealing storm.

Her every soring, romantic dream shown as a light of summons in the witches yellow eyes, and Edea felt them completely within her grasp if she could only look out through those eyes, know the secrets behind them. She had known those secrets, known them like her own golden dreams, but knowing was never as romantic as wondering, and she would pay dearly for crossing the threshold between the two. She had cried even though the witch never did. In her mental prison she had cried, all with the hope of feeling alive still burning in her like an aching passion. It was like she had been buried alive, trapped beneath the dirty soil of her own choice.

Then there they were, lined up before her with faces of hate, terror, and the stoic determination of warriors. Her children did not know her, nor she them, and looking back she finally realized that worse than knowing too much was forgetting what you already know.

Only one had stood with her in the madness, falling to madness himself. It would shred his young, raw seams, leaving only a tattered web of the boy who had not the chance to become a man.

Of the witch, herself, what Edea remembered most was the single minded drive born of a very secret fear. A fear none of her enemies could have ever fathomed while braided between the strings of her carefully planned solution. After her possession, Edea had not recalled all the memories or motivations of her mistress, then slowly but surely, memories not her own began to form.

Edea stepped further into the transparent turquoise waters, letting it touch the hem of her dark skirts. The water seeped into the fabric, pulling the skirt downward, making it heavy around her hips with the swish of every wave. She didn't mind. Her senses were tuned to a different frequency, feeling the primal forces of the earth all around her, listening with the astute perception the dark sorceress had left filtering through her veins.

The feared ones were balking at their bits, they would break them soon. . .

The weary woman in the water rose her free hand, then, opening her balled fist before her. The salty breeze swirled over her palm and caught up the flower petals she'd had curled beneath her fingers. Eight petals, each of a different breed, each of a different flower floated out across the sea.

"Edea?"

A voice behind her called, and Edea turned. One solitary petal turned from the sea with her, dancing on a stray current of air toward the other woman standing at the bottom of the stares that spiraled down from the cottage. The shred of a white lily, aided by the breeze, caught on the other woman's black hair, and stalled there between the strands of her side swept bags.

Rinoa Heartilly reached up to pull the petal out of her hair, and stared at it curiously before she let the breeze take it again.

"What are you doing in the water, Edea? Your skirts are soaked." Rinoa questioned.

Edea pick up her skirts as she pushed back trough the water. "I'm waiting, sweet child."

The pale and dark young sorceress, who looked as if she were Edea's owns blood relation, furrowed her dramatically thick brows. "Don't you mean 'wadding'?"

Edea looked off to the ocean horizon, blue on blue, and smile that half smile once more. "No." she said.

Rinoa's innocent disposition betrayed her confusion all too openly, but the girl did not inquire further.

"Come inside." Edea kindly said putting a hand on the girl's shoulder and turning her back toward the cottage. "We'll have blueberry tea, and you'll tell me why you've come."

Rinoa's eyes fell to the step's cold gray stone as the two women began the clime up to the cottage, and her eyes looked as dreary as the stones color. They were all so weary, she thought, even this innocent little one. If Edea had not been trapped once before, her own emotions sealed in the tomb of a greater magic, she would have cried for them all at that moment, but she had been buried for to long. She only smiled, small and melancholy.

It will only get worse...

That just a little bit of mystery for you. Everything will be explained later, some of it much later, but you'll understand more about the currant situation in the world -even though the summery explained quite a bit- in the next chapter. I should have that posted in little under a week.