Everything was broken. Everything, all of it. Shattered into a million crystalline shards, irreplaceable. Everything glittered with a celestial afterglow as the last effects of the explosion wore off. Things glinted, like insects, flitting airily through the Mist-lit glade. Even Feywood, ever in a state of twilight, had darkened. Night had fallen on Ivalice at last.
And here; there was a heart just as broken, just as disturbed. A heart with the same alien iridescence that coats everything, like a malevolent snail trail, gleaming stickily.
And here; a warrior. A warrior with a heart so disturbed that she thinks on letting her bow fall and allowing the swarm of fiends to overcome her. To rend and tear. To break.
Her state can be described succinctly, but somewhat nonsensically. Though the word is a perfect adjective for her state, and makes perfect sense, it is also meaningless, non existent and downright overly romantic for the haggard, ice encased heart of a renegade Viera in love with so many, so much, so few, so little.
And here; those who had captured her, enraptured her, broken her so deeply, stood stolid by her side, ready to fight, to protect her at all costs, to lose it all, to break more than just hearts and souls, to break more than sanity.
And here; Fran watches with the darkness of the light in her eyes; she knows the state of affairs, of her mind, and of her love. She knows it all, and her adoration for them makes her happy, even when facing death, so long as she is at their side.
The pictures in her mind are bright and faded with that same light-darkness, like a Summer night which refuses to darken. Those same pictures. It's like they're talking to her, telling her it's not right, but it should be, her train of thought going off the rails and crashing into emotional wreckage far below.
She's a thief in the night, creeping up to steal hearts, to pull them under. A disease in her mind erodes everything, and it all sparkles then and like burning plastic, melts into a twisted mess of colour, an ashen euphoria.
The strange effervescent quality of her vision shredded her already broken mind, and she felt her legs giving way, her ears ringing, the blurred image of ice shattering before her culminating into a blast of such gravity that she was thrown backwards.
And it was thus she knew she had just taken part in a Mist chain, and the ending concurrence had released the vice-grip of Mist upon her.
But still she was broken. The Mist and the frenzy that accompanied it were gone, but there was still sanity-eroding disease in her essence, breaking her up, and even as she hears the fallen princess call for sundries, and the urchin girl's reply she doesn't rise on her own.
And it doesn't matter that flames no-one else can feel caress her skin, and that she is being eaten from the inside out with this unexplainable sadness, this deep, aching pain, like her heart has been wrenched from her chest, leaving a gaping hole, raw, burning, stung by the cold wind, chilled into such frigidity by her own consummate mastery of perpetual gelidity.
And thus she is broken, lying here, in the arms of one she can't quite perceive too clearly, for once allowing herself to relax and take the pain dealt to her. She can feel it on her skin, bursting forth, a fount of her life fluid draining from her steadily, the clash of sword as a knight and urchin boy cut down the perpetrator, the great wyrm whose claws set to rend her very flesh so deep, as to wound and murder.
And it is here, that she lies in her dying hours, or so they feel, the cold the chill, the blood, everything suddenly in perfect clarity, lit dully from the inside like twilight hours and glossed with the silver moonsheen.
And so dear heart, do you release your grip? Do you let the blood and life leave you? Do you let the ice take you in it's glassy grasp, where your soul will decay for eternity?
Are you really going to die?
Or is it merely Disturbia?