THE ONLY THING HE HAD REALLY LIKED about his boyhood surroundings was the forests north of the village at the mouth of the mountains, a dense tangle of virgin jungle through which flowed a wide, swift river he called Queen Lir. It hadn't been polluted then, and the rippling water yielded loach, black carp, shark minnow, and rare paddlefish. Sunlight slanted green and thin through the gaps in the canopy, and there was small animals amongst the trees—a confused mountain deer or two—but most of all the intimation of a wild past, when roughened feet trod the dappled forest trails and dugouts cruised the waters that snaked into the sun-stricken mountain passes. Once in a while, he found rusted hilts and broken metal wheels in the loamy riverbanks, and when twilight fell and he returned home, he sneaked cautiously into his room and hid his secret discoveries amongst his treasures. After darkness fell, when he lay awake, he would run his fingers over their ancient faces, and, looking at them, reverently dream of that distant time and wish he had lived then, before his world had become a land of sleek houses and store clerks.
His little village, he later supposed, had everything a tiny town was supposed to have: a dank, sprawling old school that was crumbling into itself; an unassuming grocer's shop that smelt of old plaster and fresh floor wax, shelves lined with homemade bread and frozen peas; rows of woodfire-heated split-levels that banded around a well in the centre of a quaint town square; chimneyed one-stories that sagged decrepitly into cobbled, dirtless streets on which nothing ever happened.
At the town's edge were the fields, and he remembered them as they were in the late autumn. The rice stubble was beige against the snow, withered husks rasping barrenly in the wind; tall bur-filled grasses waved oddly; and empty, weathered farmhouses swayed uncertainly, silently waiting for the townsmen to tear them down and drag their pieces back into a village that only ever expanded inward. On the horizon stood clusters of naked cypresses that stabbed upward into the bleak November sky. Looking back, he could still see himself, only six or seven, roaming out there restlessly when the mists descended and scaring birds from the fog nets, the tract houses behind him and the vast, vacant pastures in front—a young boy trapped between domestic boredom and mountainous desolation.
On days too cold to wander alone, he stayed inside with his mother, watching her slowly complete her seamstress work or helping her crush lime and cilantro into a hoisin sauce or, more frequently, skipping out of her reach when she batted him away for trying to dip his fingers into whatever she was preparing. Those days she lay beneath her sheets, too exhausted to sleep, but unable to move, he stared out the parlour window, wrapped warmly in his coat, murmuring softly to himself and thinking of the girl with the peculiar eyes and ink-black hair.
It was the music that drew him to her again.
An autumn evening three months after his seventh birthday, he sat beneath his open window, intently watching the white, wispy vapours that crystallised, then dissipated, as his breath mingled with the cool air. He sat up straight when he caught the thread of a piano melody, high and sweet as a woman's voice, and froze. The sound rose up through the walls of his room, and drifted through his window; it shimmered through him, a sudden rush of colour, blooming past the grey one-stories, above the smoking chimneys and toward the narrow sky. He sat for a moment, drawing in a breath of cold, sweet air, and truly understood.
He got up, feeling at once giddy and breathless. The music still flowed sweetly, coursing through and behind the painted wall. He thought he could feel it charge in the air as it pulsed through the floor and wound around the stubborn beams and girders and slipped around him with a sudden high rhythm trilled in time with the beat of his heart.
And then, silence.
He moved cautiously to his window, tilting his forehead against the cold pane and closing his eyes. He thought he heard a single note then, and felt it through the glass like a current running all the way down his spine, the powerful tiny thrumming of a perfect "C." When the music resumed, it was a slow controlled tune that ascended and descended clumsily in a careful pattern. Twice the notes climbed upwards and crept down again with the same cautious restraint, and on the third time he opened the window, glanced around carefully, and slipped out. The music was coming from the neighbour's house-through the first storey window opposite his. He crept closer. It was shut and the drapes drawn, but if he squinted, he imagined he could see the grey spectre of a silhouette. He drew closer still, climbing onto the pressure unit, onto the tall, stiff hedges, and then the trellis leaning beneath the narrow sill. He hoisted himself up onto the ledge as silently as he could and pressed his face to the glass, straining to see through the pale blue curtain. He was sure that if he leant only a little farther, he would be able to peer beyond the drapes, and suddenly the matter of seeing through them had become an affair of irrational personal importance. But the drapes remained frustratingly opaque, and he drew his lips downward with aggravation. He had strained heroically then, his nose smashed carelessly against the glass and his eyes popped round like two blue buttons.
The music ended abruptly with an angry, discordant bang.
He started violently and tumbled into the bushes below. For a moment, he remembered, he had lain stunned on his back, staring at the clear, grey sky. He had thought, with a vague sort of detachment, that he had made a lot of noise, and he wondered if someone would come round and yell when they discovered he had been spying. He began to panic at that. He had not wanted anyone to yell.
He floundered at the branches clinging to his arms, frantically clawing leaves from his eyes. He sat up suddenly, peering wildly about for any red-faced adult who might catch him in his misdeed. He glanced upward, and froze immediately.
Gazing down at him had been the ink-haired girl. She held her face in her hands and stared with a curious intensity that frightened him. She didn't blink.
He coiled into himself meekly, bracing in the expectation that she would scream for him to go away. He felt smarting tears begin to burn the back of his eyes. His mouth hung open.
She squinted.
"Hey," she paused and frowned with a sudden twitch of her lips. "How come you got sticks in your hair?" When he did not answer, she drummed her fingers on the sill and leant closer. "How come you're in the bushes?" She considered him for a moment, closing one eye. "Did you lose something?"
He stared blankly back at her, slack-jawed, voice withered up in his throat.
"'Cause if you lose stuff, I can help find it. But you have to tell what is it, first."
He shook his head, pointing to his window.
She stared uncomprehendingly. "You lost a house?" When he shook his head again, but still had not spoken, her forehead began to fold into a frustrated crease.
His mouth opened, but he had felt no need to correct her.
She leant farther, her face brightening with recognition and stretching into a broad smile. It had been then, he remembered, that the ache in his throat and the sting behind his eyes had receded.
"Hey, I know you! You're Mama's friend's son!"
He was.
"You live in the house right there!"
He did.
She laughed. "You didn't lose your house!"
No, he hadn't.
For a moment, he sat there in silence, watching her grin down at him in amusement. Then, from over his shoulder, he heard the faint echo of his mother calling his name. He gave the girl one last look before bowing his head and hurriedly scrambling away.
She was going to regret it. He was going to get her. There were certain rules of engagement that they had already established, and she had broken all of them that very morning. He crouched behind the door, watching her come up the walkway. From beyond the wall, he heard a metallic rattle as she fumbled with the keys, then the whine of hinges as the door began to open.
As she stepped through the doorway, he sprang out at her knees, tripping her, and together they collapsed in a heap. For a moment they laid there, his mother trying her best to frown as she watched him dissolve into a high-pitched giggle that caused his entire body to shudder. Slowly, her frown wobbled into a smile, and then, a laugh. "You really shouldn't laugh like that," she said. "You sound like a turkey." She flipped him over and began to tickle him, and he squirmed like a fish in her arms, his legs kicking over her shoulder so that he gazed at her upside-down. His mouth hung open in delight, and looking into his shining eyes, her lips began to twitch again. "Ticklebelly," she said finally. "Onion head."
He pushed away from her. "Tickling is cheating! I have to get you back for before!" He pushed some more.
"Yeah, well. Not tonight, kid." She stifled a yawn and groaned. "I feel like ten thousand trains hit me. Way too tired to wrestle."
He scowled up at her. "My name is not 'kid.'"
"And my name is not 'Mama'," she countered. "But you don't see me complaining."
Watching as she moved away from him and shut the door, he allowed his scowl to deepen. "You're always too tired for everything," he accused.
"I'm never too tired for a hug."
"That's not true! Last week, you said—"
"All right, fine."
"—And even before that—"
"Fine." She scooped him up by the underarms and held him at arm's length.
"—And the night before that, you came home and went straight to sleep—"
"Okay, I said!" She faked a glare. "Although it may have to be like that again, what with the way you're bugging me. Looks like I've got a date with Sir Valium tonight."
His mouth drew into a line.
"I was kidding!" She paused, giving him a faint smile. "But you're right." Her voice became faded, like he were hearing her from a great distance, and when she spoke, her words trembled slightly, as if her breath were thin and had stretched suddenly around a great bubble of emotion. "I'm sorry." Cloud's little face was absolutely stoic. He replied simply.
"It's okay."
She put him down, laughing, though he didn't think he had said anything funny. She started toward the kitchen. "Maybe you should put me in the donations and exchange box. Get a different mom."
He followed after her, his arms crossed. "You can't trade people."
His mother laughed again. "Oh, so that's all that's stopping you?" She turned back to him abruptly, bending so that their eyes were level. She hesitated for an instance, then began in earnest. "You know…Cloud, when you marry, marry someone older. Marry someone who'll take good care of you." She paused. "Don't look at me like that. Yeah, I know you're only seven. But trust me, you'll need someone like that." She tapped her chin thoughtfully. "And someone you'll look good with, too. As good as Tifa and that Greene kid do."
"Who?"
She waved at him dismissively, walking into the kitchen. "You know, that Harmon kid, the ginger-headed one. His parents used to own Gene's store. Very cute, if you think of it. He and Tifa look good as friends. They'll look even better as couple when they're older."
"No they don't! No they won't!"
"Oh?" She put a saucepan on the burner, shooting him a sly grin. "And why is that? Is it because you'd rather it be you instead?"
"No way!"
"Uh-huh. If you need me, I'll be here. In the real world."
"I'm not lying!" Cloud scowled at his mother, watching her calmly pour oil into the pan.
"I didn't know Tifa disgusted you so much—"
"I didn't say that!"
"So what's the problem?"
"I? Well." He could feel a flush climbing up his face. He wondered how it was that she always trapped him like this. "For one thing, her eyes are red—"
"Your eyes are blue."
"—and she wears frilly dresses—"
"You wear frayed shorts."
"—and she's so small—"
"You're not even four feet."
"—she's a little kid!"
"You're eight months older than her."
"She looks Wutai."
"Look who's talking."
He paused. "Dad is from Wutai?" He stared at her, but she kept her back to him, dicing up an onion and putting it into the pan. For a while she stood there pushing it around with a spatula, and he thought that she would not answer at all. Finally she said, very slowly,
"I never said that."
He stayed silent. He had become accustomed to this. Questions caused her pain. Once he had asked her a succession of them, and as she tried to answer, tears had come streaming out of her eyes. Her heaving body had frightened him; she seemed too grown up to be comforted. He had been so badly scared that he decided he did not need to know the answers after all. If they upset her, he would not ask for them.
"So Cloud." He looked up at her. She was facing him now, putting something he didn't know the name of into a pot. "How did your lessons go today?"
He twisted his face into an exaggerated expression of disgust so that she was certain to notice, but she only sniggered.
"That good?"
His mornings and afternoons were dominated by Ms Creedy, an enormous red-haired woman who had, as long as he could remember, never appeared without a slash of orange lipstick and sea-green paint around her eyes. When she taught, she loomed over him, her watery eyes rolling in her head like a fish's. Always she kept one yellowed eye on him, the pupil floating in the middle like a black seed. Her face, too, was piscine, and locked in a perpetual sneer unless he answered incorrectly. Then, her lips would curl back and he would see the rows of large white teeth, as if she were going to swallow him down in one piece.
"I don't like her."
"I know you don't," his mother sighed. "But since you're not at the school with the rest of them anymore, it's not like we've got a choice. It's freaking miracle I could even convince her to come here in the first place."
"How come I can't just read the books instead?"
"You're not old enough for that kind of thing." And she turned back to the stove.
"That's not fair!"
"'Not fair' is slaving for hours baking a dozen separate cakes with frosting roses and sugar peonies and green vines for a bunch of ungrateful brats who order you to clean up the mess they just made then stuff their selfish faces and tell you it tastes like dirt." She tapped the pan's edge with the spatula, a little too forcefully. She sounded angry, as though this was something that happened recently.
But when she turned back to him, she was smiling and her eyebrows arched high up on her forehead. "Let me tell you a story." She sat down in the chair opposite his.
"When I learnt that you were on the way, I was a circus acrobat. Six months I flipped back and forth on those bars, my belly growing bigger and bigger. I was forced to travel, then, to a village owned by a very rich man who cared for no one but himself. In the middle of the village was his mansion, which had such a high ceiling, that when you looked up at it, it were as if you were looking into the sky. The windows weren't like normal ones, either; they were coloured and the sills were so high you couldn't see over them-no, not even if you stood on tiptoe. When I came to that village, I had nothing but the clothes on my back, and even those were coming apart. I begged the rich man for a job, but he said he had no place for me, no place for a woman who was going to have a child. I went to the mansion daily, cleaning and cooking without invitation. I begged and begged, but he still refused. Every day I appeared, and every day he would refuse me, getting angrier and angrier. It was his wife—his second one—who finally convinced him to hire me. He had two—no three—wives, that man. The first one was a gnarled old woman who had grown bitter because she hadn't had any kids, and the third was troubled and kept locked up in a room that I never saw. The second wife was lonely, but kind. She was very pretty and had very long, very black hair and big brown eyes, and she wasn't much older than I was. Her name was Pipa, and she took pity on me because she saw the way I would scrub the mansion for free till my knuckles showed to the white bone, just so I could make sure you had a future. So I lived in the servants' quarters. From November to June, I worked harder than any servant there, and I would have kept working too, but there was a terrible accident. The mansion caught fire one night, and it burnt to the ground. I was drawing water from the well outside at the time, so I didn't need to escape."
His mother paused and cast her eyes to the ceiling. She rose, poured herself a glass of water, and returned to her seat. She stared at the glass, swilling the water slowly.
"But I remembered Pipa's kindness. And there were many still trapped inside. So I went to them. In the end I managed to pull the master and his wives out of the mansion, and the rest of the servant girls managed to get out too. After it was all over, no one was hurt, but the house wasn't so lucky. It burnt and burnt until there was nothing left but a lump of charcoal on the ground. The master wept to see it because he loved his things more than he loved anyone, and now he was as poor as everyone else in village. Maybe poorer. A lot of the servants wept too, because it was the only home they'd ever known. I felt sorry for them. But me? There was no job for me anymore. I knew I had to go. So I said my goodbyes and left the next morning. I'd saved a little bit of money too, so I wasn't so worried. I went east until finally I stumbled across a proper town. It wasn't a huge one, but it had over seven hundred people there and actual pavement, so it was more than I had ever seen. But even so, I knew off the bat there was no work there for me. It was a town of gamblers, though they called themselves 'apprentices of chance.' They made their money from chocobo races, all of them. But what could I do? Your father was across the world fighting, and I was running out of money. So I went in anyway. The richest man in town was a man named Stefen, a real gentleman. I asked him where I could find some work, but he just shrugged and said there was no place for skills like mine. I could help set up for the EIS Derby, the biggest chocobo race of the region, but it wouldn't pay much since the whole town would be helping with that. The money wouldn't even take me to the next village. Then he joked that maybe I could join the race myself since the prize money was ten thousand gil. Then he looked like this when I told him I was going to."
Her eyes popped out so that Cloud could see the whites. Her mouth widened to an O.
"Anyway," she continued. "I spent the last of my gil on some greens. You wouldn't think they'd be so expensive when they taste so bad. But they were. So I put them to good use. In the end, I could only catch a little baby chocobo, one that was barely on its own, barely out of the shell. But it had to do. Under Stefen's direction, I trained that thing night and day, until neither of us could stand to hear one more wark or kweh kweh. When the morning of the race rolled around, I was so nervous that I threw up three times, though that could've been the morning sickness too, who knows. Point is, I jumped on that chocobo and ran that race to the end, even though my head was spinning and I thought I would die if I bounced around anymore. And I won too. A whole ten thousand gil, all mine. Stefen couldn't believe it. Neither could I. It was the funniest thing ever. I gave him half of the prize money, and I made him promise to take care of Fuzz—my chocobo. Then I waddled right out of that town, travelled all the way across the continent until I ended up here, where I used the rest of the money to build this house. It was the forests and mountains that got me."
She paused and looked up at him with a small smile. "And then you came along," she continued softly. "And made life much better. Your old mother's been through a whole lot, so just give her a more time. You can stand Ms Creedy till then, can't you?"
Cloud stared at her blankly for a moment, an expression of confusion creeping across his face as his eyebrows drew together.
Then he scowled.
"You're lying."
His mother looked taken aback. "What do you mean?"
"That's not possible, no way! You couldn't have done all that and had me!"
"Oh? And how do you figure? How many times have you been pregnant?"
"I just did the math! You said that you were in the circus for six months, but then you worked for another seven. And it takes a whole entire year to raise baby chocobos big enough to race them, which means you would've been pregnant for two years!"
She smirked at him. "Seems like you're learning plenty from Ms Creedy. Clearly you should stay with her after all."
He stared at her, mouth agape.
"You tricked me!"
She shrugged. "Maybe if you kept at your lessons, you wouldn't be tricked so easily, right? Am I right or am I right?"
He leant back into his chair, scowling at her sourly. He had a pattern of falling for her jokes, and this, of all of them, he should have seen through. "I bet you made that whole story up, too." He crossed his arms when she laughed at him.
"Not too far back you would have believed it, though." In reply, he turned around in his seat so that his back faced her.
"Oh, come on, Cloud. You know I'm just teasing. And I—" She got up suddenly and ran to the stove with an oath. She looked up and sighed. "It's burnt all right." She was quiet for a moment, as if waiting for him to respond, but he kept his back to her, making a great show of ignoring her. When she didn't tap between his shoulder blades or tug his nose as he expected, he looked back slowly over his shoulder. She was silently standing over the stove, leaning over the burnt pan with her eyes closed and the thumb and fingers of her left hand squeezing her temples.
"Mama?"
When she didn't answer, he slipped out of his chair and walked to her, fitting the palm of his hand against her own. "Do you want me to go outside so you can say bad words?" This made her chuckle. She squeezed his hand and ruffled his hair with her other, gently dragging her nails across his scalp in a way that almost instantly made his body feel hazy with sleep. She sighed softly, and pushed the pan to the back of the stove. Releasing his hand, she bent down with a deliberate slowness and pulled a small hotplate from the cabinets. Knowing what this meant, Cloud struggled to suppress a wave of excitement as he ran to retrieve his shoes and shrug on the worn, blue jacket he had left draped over the back of the parlour room armchair. When he finished, his mother was already waiting, holding a small duffel bag, by the doorway. Taking his hand, together they stepped through the open door, his mother pausing only to lock it behind them.
Outside, the light had not yet receded. The sun hung teetering over the edge of the horizon—lingering in this early autumn as it had in the summer—and bathing the village in an auburn-yellow light that would remain for hours more. When night fell, Cloud knew, so would the mists. Beginning with the twilight hours and lasting until the dawn burnt it away with the dark of the morning, a dense, wet fog blanketed the town from earth to sky. Entering it made it impossible to see more than a metre in any direction, and if it were very thick, even a hand raised in front of your face took on a faint, blurry outline, as if your eyes were filled with water. Despite this, the night and early morning were his favourite parts of the day. There were few villagers wandering outside at these times, and he knew the village well enough that even sightlessness couldn't impede him. With his lessons ending in the early afternoon and his mother working from the early morning until late, he had had ample time to explore, and owing to this, he had already traced every inch of Nibelheim's lazily winding roads and run through each field of corn and between the leaves of every slumping dragonfruit tree.
Seven-hundred steps from the doorway was the well in the original centre of the town, and six-hundred beyond that was the main road that snaked beyond the yellowed wooden fence, past the hilly pastures, and downward to whole other towns he'd never been. Four-thousand steps to the right of the main road, and all along that worn footpath, were the paddies, cut deep into the hills and overlooked by tall, brown observation facilities. During the fall, as it was now, the hills burst with yellow-gold rice ears, but he found them much more interesting in the summer and spring. During the warm months, he could spend hours peering through the water at the fish cultures as striders skated across the surface, schools of perch and whitefish darted curiously around his knees, and the fat, long carp eyed him warily from between the reeds. At the bottom, shy prawn and shield shrimp crept between his toes, kicking up mud to disguise themselves amongst the tadpoles and the weeds. Not far off was a small pond notorious amongst the village children for its box turtles, water scorpions, and giant water bugs. Standing at its edge with waxed yarn and bits of dried herring, it was possible to bait crayfish, and in the summer months, during holidays, the children would return home after an afternoon with buckets full of them.
He trotted along, idly swinging his mother's and his interlocked hands. From somewhere ahead, he heard the shriek of young ibises, and he imagined a flock of them bursting from the trees and into the sky as they often did, a sudden splash of pink across a blue canvas. The west side of the village was shaded with fruiting trees, the results of what was mostly an effort to liven up the old large schoolhouse that sat a short ways behind the general store. According to his mother, it was an effort that been made just before he was born, but the only thing it had succeeded in doing, she claimed, was attracting birds. Most of the time you could catch skylarks, turtle doves, and bulbuls crouching in the eaves of houses, wheeling through the sky, or shouting from rooftops. Large black ravens played through the mists and atop the fog nets in the morning, and oftentimes, as he remembered, an ibis or two would stumble through the school's playground on its way to hunt carp in the rice paddies.
"Look at that one," his mother said, pointing to a large dove as the general store came in sight. "I bet it eats more than you." She stopped short in front of the heavy glass door. "Wait here for me all right? Just be a sec." Cloud nodded obediently, pulling himself onto one of the stone benches beneath the store's awning. He didn't like the building much anyway. The air always smelled somehow waxy and dry, and worse, Mr Greene was sure to be behind the counter. Mr Greene never seemed to pay Cloud much attention whenever he entered the store with his mother, but looking at him made Cloud nervous. Mr Greene had small, watery eyes, and even though he wasn't old, he was always sort of bent over in a way that reminded Cloud of a tree branch that had been twisted in the wind. Worst of all were his long, furry fingers. They reminded Cloud of spaghetti noodles. And they were always wobbling and darting around so quickly that Cloud couldn't help but try to count them over and over to make sure there were the right number. First they were on counter, then in the air, then on his mother's shoulder, at her elbow, then forearm, her wrist, then in the air again. The attempt always gave him a headache, and each time they left the store he would leave feeling somewhat sick and dizzy. He kicked his legs back and forth, staring at the large billboard advertising the store's reduced price fresh fruit.
PUT A MALUS IN YOUR MAW
He squinted at the sign. He had never had any idea what this meant, but he often found himself having staring contests with the image of a smiling chocobo holding an apple. He'd had a straight losing streak thus far, and the way that its eyes seemed to follow you wherever you went, always started an uneasy churn in his stomach that would make him reach for his mother's hand. He turned away, his gaze beginning to wander as he heard his mother exit with the chime of the glass door. She knelt in front of him, unscrewing the caps of three small bottles of oil and mixing their contents into a plastic applicator. Immediately, the smell of citrus and sandalwood—and the faint odour of flowers—began to perfume the air. She dabbed several large droplets of the mixture into her hands, rubbing them together and massaging them across his neck, legs, and arms before doing the same for herself. "Mosquitoes," she explained, though he was familiar with this ritual already. She packaged the bottles into the duffel bag and offered him her empty hand. Heading to the north now, he could feel excitement begin to bubble in his chest again.
Hardly anyone frequented the north of the town except on business. In fact, Nibelheim seemed to be split into two separate categories: the older buildings, and the ones that had been built more recently. Walking past the houses in the south, you would often hear the static-y sound of radio talk show hosts and flushing toilets drift over the low stone walls. Tricycles and plastic swords and chocobo dolls lay strewn amongst bursts of green shrubbery and behind screens of towels and sheets hanging from clothes-drying poles that protruded into the garden over. One house in particular had a large basketball hoop that attracted all the boys in the neighbourhood, and a ceramic outdoor dining table surrounded by more than a dozen faded yellow lawn chairs that had been worn down by many a summertime cookout. The newer buildings, by contrast, showed hardly any sign of wear at all. Everyone who went in or came out of them wore clean, white coats and moved like they had somewhere to be, and like the people, the buildings themselves were tall, neat structures untouched by even a speck of dirt. Several rows of these identical buildings budded from the manicured grounds like white sprouts, varied only by their number of blue-tinted windows. But what differentiated them the most were the shocks of foliage on their roofs, stark against the white sheet walls. Hanging grasses, vines, shrubs, and even whole trees jutted in thick green clusters towards the sunlight. In school, they had been told that these were called "sod roofs," but looking at the tall, rambling buildings, alive but dormant, he imagined them as the backs of giant, sleeping tortoises dreaming in the sun.
Beyond this, the path began to narrow. As they picked their way through the densening trees, the face of Mount Nibel, unmistakable from any anywhere in the village, loomed over them.
No one else dared enter these forests.
Every day, the sun sank between behind the mountains, a round orange disk encased between two peaks. It had long been said that spirits travelled over the mountains during their journey to the north of the planet, and it was believed that Nibel was the door to transmigration. When twilight fell, at a certain hour between day and dusk, this mountainous corridor became a passage for deceased souls on their way to the other world. As if in confirmation, even when the sun burnt away the fog in the village, the peaks and forest of Nibel often remained shrouded in mist. The jungle never withered with the seasons, and even in the deepest of winters, snow never fell on the mountains. His mother claimed that this was because they were warmed by the breath of an enormous guardian dragon twined around its summits, whose roar sounded like the gong of a distant bell. Each time he thought of this, he would remember a story about a horrible storm that he had overhead teachers whispering about years earlier. Long before he had been born, Nibelheim was hit by a torrential downpour that ripped the crops out of the earth, crushed abandoned barnhouses, and flooded the rice paddies. While the earth was wrapped in darkness, a flash of lightning tore through the sky and illuminated what many would later agree was a golden-scaled dragon swimming through the rifts between the clouds.
Now the declining sun came in dappled through the tree branches, the yellowed sky showing through the gaps between them. Crickets, frogs, and evening birds had begun their late chorus, and beneath this he could hear the powerful rush of the river like a monster deep below. This path was familiar to them. Deeper into the forest was a great, thick tree with gnarled roots that poked through the ground. It was surrounded by a grove of tall trees with high fruit that his mother sometimes picked using only a long cloth. Beyond even that was a wild bamboo thicket that gave way to a lake so wide that it was impossible to see the other shore. But staring at the bell-shaped flowers along the trail, Cloud knew they were headed for a clearing not far from mouth of the forest, a place where the river calmed and snaked lazily through the trees. As they broke through the last, waxy wall of underbrush, his mother released his hand. From the clearing, all was obscured by the green opacity of the jungle except a circle of colossal, oblong boulders standing farther up the mountain like enormous tombstones. He sat near the edge of the river, watching groups of minnows dart between the rocks in the shallows.
"Hey, Mama?"
"Uh-huh?" His mother had produced the hotplate from her bag and was staring at it intently as she gently prodded batteries into its dock.
"Where does the river come from?"
She flipped the hotplate over, cranking the knob and emptying the contents of a package into a small pan she'd produced from her duffel. "It comes from a valley that's really far past the mountains."
A round black pebble with a single silver stripe sat in the shallow bed of the river. Cloud reached for it, drying it on the leg of his shorts. "Then where does the water in the valley come from?" he asked.
"I guess it comes down from the clouds in the sky?"
"So where do the clouds in the sky come from?"
His mother paused, considering this for a moment. The aroma of noodles and frying meat had begun to cut through the haze of soil and water. "You sure ask a heck of a lotta questions, don't you," she teased, reaching over to rub a bit of earth from his cheek.
"But if they all come from the same place," Cloud continued slowly, "Does that mean seas, rivers, rain, and the sky are all the same thing?"
For many moments, there was silence. Even the gurgle of the river and the incessant calls of the birds seemed muffled. Finally, his mother began to move again. Handing him a plastic fork, she parcelled out the contents of the pan into two bowls she retrieved from the duffel. She packed a small ash tray with brown paper, dropped what looked like a large, white chunk of white wax into it, and touched a lit match to the paper. "Mosquitoes," she said again to no one in particular. After another quiet few seconds, she answered. "I guess you could think of them as thoughts."
"Thoughts?" echoed Cloud, bewildered.
"Well, not all water is water, you know," she whispered conspiratorially. "Some people say that there's a type of creature that takes the shape of water. At least, it's a clear, colourless liquid, but it's alive. It lives in the bottoms of old water veins, and sometimes even in lakes or wells. Supposedly, if a person keeps drinking it, they'll become a cloud and float away." Her voice dropped lower, a ghost of a smile at her lips. "And if that happens, they can only come back to earth when it's cool enough for them to condense, and in certain other places where the veil is weakest. They say that's how water spirits are created."
"Are the mists in the forest…people?"
"They might be." But he could see her face struggling not to crease into a grin.
He watched her eyes suddenly dart up the mountain face and followed her pointing index finger.
"Look. The old moss rock has fallen." Cloud stared for a moment, realising that the largest boulder, which had stood higher than the others and in the centre of the circle, had tumbled into a bed of kudzu. Squinting, he could see that a long thin fissure opened it from end to end.
"Is it dead?"
She laughed. "No, silly, it can't die." She smiled with a knowing paused. "It's made of bone," she added.
"Bone?"
Purposefully, she speared a snow pea and brought it slowly to her mouth. Then she took a long, deep breath. This he also recognised. Oftentimes when they came to this clearing, they would while away hours weaving fairy tales together to pass the time. Most of his stories were frightening, elaborate, and pointless, but his mother's were three times as crazy. Children in her stories all had bamboo battle kites and eagle feather wings so that they could fly anywhere they wanted to go, and they befriended ancient, talking beasts who lived beneath the darkness of the ocean's waters and could slip between the streams of time. His favourite story was about a girl named Aki who had been born in the lunar sea, and who lived—along with the rest of her people—atop a colossal, all-white moonlight butterfly that circled the moon like its tinier brethren circled the flames of a fire. When the sun rose, the enormous creature landed on the earth to sleep amongst the trees of a hidden, ancient forest, and its residents would wander beneath the early sunlight eating sweet fruits. The people of the moon wore robes of soft, shimmering, reflective moth silk, and when the sun rose high in the sky, they shone such a brilliant gold that when Aki stepped on the ground, flowers grew beneath her feet, and plants turned away from the sky to face her. When she slept, it was in a secret place atop blue waters, enfolded within the iridescent vortex of the petals of a giant lotus flower.
Bringing another pea to her mouth and chewing it deliberately, she began. "The entire known universe rocks suspended in a thick, granite mortar which sways gently on the back of an immense blue-green elephant. And the elephant's leathery feet are carefully balanced atop the peaks of ten mountains of jade which arise from a boundless and barren quagmire of shifting, fetid, black mud, and the quagmire is balanced perilously on top the leaves of a tall, thin acacia tree which grows from the nostril of an immense blood-coloured bull with one thousand eyes that exhales flames the colour of the midnight sky, and the bull's hooves are firmly planted on a single mote of dust which floats in the eye of Bahamut like a grain of sand."
She paused.
"No one has ever seen Bahamut. Some think it's a dragon. Some think it's a whale. All we know is that the lonely Bahamut drifts through time and space with everything and all of us floating in a single tear in his eye."
He leaned forwards as she continued, transfixed.
"Now, in the age of ancients, the universe was unformed, a single light shrouded by fog—a grey blanket of inky darkness and everlasting cold. As the light spread and grew stronger, terrible monsters began to emerge—"
"Where did they come from?"
"Shh. Don't interrupt. They came from the shadows cast by the light. World devourers with stone skin who travelled across the cosmos from planet to planet, eating stars and destroying everything in their wake."
"And then?" Cloud pressed, breathless.
"And then from the light they came, and channelled its powers as theirs to claim. Hades, Scion of the Dark; Shiva the Mother of Entropy and her twin, Ifrit, Master of Chaos; Artorias, Lord of War, and his twelve faithful knights; and Ramuh, the Emperor of All Light, not easily forgotten. With the strength of Light, they challenged the Devourers. Ramuh's mighty bolts peeled apart their stone flesh. The siblings weaved great storms of fire and ice. Artorias led an unending onslaught, and Hades betrayed his own, unleashing a miasma of death and disease. Soon, the Light Eaters were almost no more. But before the final blows could be struck, Ifrit was cast out into space. Fearing for her brother, Shiva wandered deep into the abyss of the cosmos where she was adrift for thousands of years. For thousands of years more, she slept. And when she woke up again in the middle of the void, she was ravenous."
"What does 'ravenous' mean?"
"Really hungry. She was so hungry that she began to eat the darkness around her. She ate and ate until the abyss was no longer a void, and then she fell asleep again. As she slept, the world began to form in her belly. Her blood turned to sea water, her skin turned into black loam, and her bones became rock. A thousand later, her brother found her drifting through space. But by then, she had already split into two. Vowing to watch over her for the rest of time, he drew her close to better keep watch. It's said that Ifrit sleeps inside the sun even now."
Cloud was silent for a moment. "So what happened to Shiva?"
"Chew your food. She split into her two aspects. Water, ice. Solid, liquid. The aspects became her two children: Leviathan, the Lady of All Waters and Titan. Leviathan rules all the oceans and the seas on the planet, a creator of life and death, who influences even land with floods and rains."
"What about Titan?" She took his hand, unfurling it so that it pointed at the mountain.
"He is a giant, slumbering within the deepest entrails of the earth. Mountain ranges are the ridge of his backbone, the land is his skin, and earthquakes are what happens when he stretches. He's seen life. And shaped life. He watched it flow down his flanks. He is strong. Unpredictable. Stronger than man. Stronger than time. And earth, fire, water. He was here at the beginning. And he will remain here until the end. Because he has no end."
"So Shiva became two people?"
"More or less."
"But where did the Shiva part go?"
She cocked her head at him. "What do you mean?"
"The Shiva part. Where did it go?"
His mother stared at him for a moment, eyebrows raised, before an expression of understanding flickered across her face.
"Well," she said slowly, "there's a river of light that flows underneath the ground."
"Of light?"
"Yes. It flows close to the surface here. Light made of fragments—pieces—of life. Memories."
"But memories aren't alive."
"Oh, I don't know," she insisted. "A memory is a piece of life at a certain instance. So each memory is a living thing of its own. So, the river is alive. Made up of every memory of every moment that has ever existed and everything that's ever happened. But the most powerful memories are Shiva's. Sometimes her memories—especially the strong memories about her loved ones—bubble up to the surface and take a physical form. Forms that can project images that imitate the powers of light used long ago as she dreams of friends and the battles that she waged against her enemies." Lapsing into silence once more, Cloud bowed his head, imagining falling into a sleep of a thousand years. The sun had finally sunk below the jagged rim of the mountains, and a blue pallor had crept across the forest. His mother nudged him softly before carefully collecting the bowls, pan, and hotplate and packing them into the duffel bag.
By the time they stepped through the door of their home, a thin fog had rolled into the streets, and a pale broth of silver moonlight glowed on walls of the village and across the arches of its shingled roofs. His mother was so exhausted that she swayed as she slowly walked to her bath, and though he'd argued that he had to watch her to make sure she didn't fall down, she simply eyed him and said that he wouldn't get out of a bath that easily. Still in her fuzzy pink bathrobe, she lowered herself onto the mattress pushed up against the wall in the corner. Cloud, padding around in his overalls, took the burnt pan from the stove and gingerly placed it in the sink to soak.
"You're a good kid," he heard his mother mumble from the shadow in the corner. Then she stretched her arms out towards him. He wrinkled his nose.
"I'm too old," he declared, nodding at the blue mat pushed besides hers.
"Well, I'm not," she retorted. "I need my teddy bear." Relenting, he crawled onto the mattress and into her arms, and was calmed by the scent of her vanilla body wash. Her chest rose and fell slowly, broken only by tired sighs.
"Mama?"
"Uh-huh."
"Will you tell me a story?"
"It's bedtime. You're spending the day at Mrs Lockhart's tomorrow, remember. And you can't be rude by passing out as soon as you walk through the door and drooling all over her good pillows."
"I don't drool!"
"The stains on these sheets say differently."
"Please?"
"Don't make those eyes at me. I can tell you're doing it even in the dark." She pulled him closer and exhaled deeply, a warm gust that ruffled his hair. "What kind of story?"
"Scary." He felt a light tug on his ear.
"Don't be mad if you have bad dreams." She took a long breath. "Once upon a time, there was a boy staying the night in old, creaky castle. He suspected it was haunted, so he decided to check behind all the drapes in his bedchamber. Nearly all of them simply hid chips in stone wall or were just bare, but hidden behind a deep red curtain nearest to the window and across his bed, was a corpse. The body had mostly decayed, but he could tell that it had been badly mangled and crushed into shape so that it could fit behind the narrow strip of cloth. The boy let the curtain fall back. 'You know what,' he said to himself. 'Tomorrow I have to get up early, so I'm just gonna pretend I never even saw that.' And then he went to sleep. The end."
"Maaaamaaa."
"What?" she asked, muffling her chuckles. "You don't think it's a good story?" After her laughter subsided, he began to feel her hand running through his hair. She stroked his face even more gently, featherlight caresses over his cheeks, then along his forehead and eyebrows, and finally his shut eyelids. "The owl and the kitty cat went to sea," she murmured, her breath warm against his ear, "in a beautiful pea-green boat. They took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five-gil note." She paused, her thumb still stroking his cheek. "Cloud," she whispered, "you awake?" He said nothing, forcing his breath to steady itself. Warmth and drowsiness had pressed up against his skin, and he struggled against real waves of sleep that threatened to overtake him. A time passed, but she still stroked his face and murmured words that he had lost the ability to understand through the fog of lethargy.
Eventually, her fingers stilled against his cheek and rubbing his eyes, he realised that she had dozed off. He rubbed his eyes, sat up, and cast a glance at her. He watched her as she slept, her hair swept carelessly across her forehead in thick strands of honey gold. Her face was painfully contorted, and the dim moonlight sent patterns of shadow skipping across the lines of her face. Her lips pursed and relaxed, now open, now closed, forming silent words. Her breath came shallow and uneven, and her eyes bulged blindly beneath their lids, like the eyes of a trout taken from the water. Her legs twitched spasmodically, as if she were being pursued. He reached to touch her face, tracing the arches of her cheekbones. Then he kissed the creases between her eyebrows, and stifled a giggle of delight when her face relaxed and her mouth stretched into a faint smile. Leaning forwards, he placed another light kiss on her temple, then laid his head on the mattress and dropped straight into sleep.
A/N: Lmaooooooo at me updating this almost a decade later. But still, better late, right?
Grad school out here grinding my bones. Also, I apologise in advance for this update (well I guess this isn't in advance is it?)-I'm well aware it's basically a do-nothing twenty page info/codex dump, and for that I am truly sorry (especially for myself). The setup was kind of necessary though, but I won't deny how tossed together this is...mostly because this chapter is just a load of things written six years ago (that i didn't bother editing) with some new stuff mashed in. Thus the weird fluctuations in narrative viewpoint and style. I truly cannot kill my darlings and that is why there are basically two different intros and they say more or less the same thing (lol). For the record, the scene before the first break takes place approximately a year before the next section-the "current" timeline. I really just wanted to crank this out so I could get on with the next bit and not be stuck on this forever. The good news is that things will actually happen (sorta) next chapter, will be much more interesting (hopefully), and will be the #tru debut of three major characters (you can probably guess who). And I'll probably (try really hard to) have it up by this week. And I'll (probably) edit and reformat this later. Maybe.
Also, the story Cloud's mother tells him is an FFVIIesque adaption of DS mythology, because DSIII was just released and guess (who is trash) what I've been doing instead of working or writing. Also also, I hope you remember that Volvic advert because I loved it.
Also also also: I'm aware in-game Nibel is a hideous rocky outcropping with no vegetation to be found. That's plot-relevant. (this is canon-compliant i swear.)
Also^4: I'm at AO3 now under the same username.