The endless desert drew his eyes to the horizon. A sharp line that cut the sand from the sky, like a black mark drawn in a child's crude painting. After days and days of travel, via air-car, boat and finally his own two feet, anything that could distract him from the flat yellowish-grey of the Centran desert was welcome.

Talk about lowered priorities.

The buggy bumped upward over a hillock and Zell cursed as his head hit the metal frame above for what must be the hundredth time since he had boarded the errant run-down vessel. The men who piloted it didn't even look around as he did so, one with his eyes glued to some invisible path only he could see and the other sound asleep. At least to casual eyes, but Zell could see the man's right hand had never moved more than a few inches away from the massive cannon strapped to his thigh. He'd long since stopped asking people about their particular foibles, as tempers got shorter and arguments easier to find as he went south-west away from Esthar and across the Centran wastelands.

He leaned forward to the driver and risked a question, pulling the brown faded cloak across his face as he did so. "How much longer?"

The gesture the man retuned could have been a shrug or just the movement of his shoulders as the buggy navigated the rough terrain. "Half-hour, maybe more, maybe less." Eyes glanced before darting back to the road. "We'll get there, don't you worry." The man licked his lips and Zell swore he could hear the rasp. "Eager to see the man huh?"

Zell leaned back into the buggy's rear, a minor respite from the swirling dust around them. "Eager to start the path," he replied carefully, watching for the reply.

The grin spread across the nameless driver's face like an outbreak of something contagious, starting at his crazy eyes and only reluctantly reaching his mouth as he started mumbling something incoherent. Zell had become used to it at this point. The trial had started in the city as a rumour and do-you-think what-if dinner topic, but as it travelled out of the city, into the Esthar salt plains and finally across the Dead Sea into Centra it had picked up the wild incomprehensible tones of prophecy and cult.

In the dead lands there is a sound.

A sound to bring salvation.

A sound to bring the new world.

He had heard it all, sitting across from ragged men and women with cracked voices and dirt-encrusted clothes as he paid for their drinks and listened to their stories. He had changed his Esthar-made jacket and clothes before he had even left the city, trading down as he travelled until eventually he was indistinguishable from the confused zealots and lost-looking wanders that he followed and purused, Xu's words in his ears as he went.

You must becoming your target, if not your inner self then at least your outer. And for Hyne's sake Zell don't bring your damn hoverboard.

He had waved backwards as he set out with her eyes on his back, but none of her lessons had been left forgotten or unused as finally he buggy pulled to a stop at the crest of the hill and the spluttering cough of the engine vanished for what seemed like the first time in days.

The silent man climbed out first and motioned for Zell to follow without turning. The driver didn't move from the seat even as he hauled himself from the back of the makeshift vehicle and around the side to see… "Wow…" he said in awe.

What a junkheap, he thought to himself in considerably less awe.

Tents sprawled on the plain below, lines and lines of dull grey and brown cloth sewed together with spit and formed into rough lines. Zell could see people dodging and weaving as they came and went between them, ducking into and out of tents as they stooped to keep the dust from their faces. Some excuse for economy thrived below as he could see cloth-wrapped goods being traded with loud gestures. The entire thing reminded him of Stealth and Procurement Syllabus One, where the Garden faculty had turned one of the outdoor quads into a makeshift open market, invited the local Balamb business leaders to set up shop, and challenged the student body to steal as much as they could without being caught.

The swarm of people travelled inwards deeper into the tent city, where Zell could see some kind of rough open square that was free of tents. He resisted the urge to ask his travelling 'companions' what was there, and instead merely followed them down to the outlying tents.

I hear a sound…

It took him a second to realise he hadn't thought it, and turned. The driver stood, feet rooted to the ground, staring at the ramshackle cloth city with mad eyes.

"What do you hear buddy?" Zell asked quietly, but as he reached out with a hand to rest it on the man's shoulder he began to lurch downhill, throwing sand and dust into the air as he ran towards the city, now almost entirely empty as the people in it began to congregate in the central square.

I hear a sound…

With a mental shrug he took off and followed.

He could hear sounds coming from the bar. Or at least the tent that was currently masquerading as one. With deference to custom someone had put up a small wooden sign and painted a crude beer-an on it and a price, and people had gravitated towards it. He pushed aside the tentflap and the scene that greeted him could have been found in any city or town of the world, with the exception that instead of overalls or military stripes the only uniform was the dull look of dust-infested cloth.

He motioned for a beer and lightly touched the hand of the barmaid as she handed it to him. "Hey, listen, I just got here." He spoke hesitantly and tried to get across the look of the wide-eyed neophyte. "I'm…ummm…"

The woman took pity on him and gave a small smile as she looked him over, whether due to his clothes being cleaner than everyone around him or just due to being easily the youngest person in the camp. "Service just ended, you'll have to wait for tomorrow for the next one."

Zell pushed himself forward slightly and looked into her eyes. "I was told to look for someone when I came here." He dredged the name up from the briefing. "Morden. Someone told me he's the man to speak to about…er…recruitment?"

The woman's eyes slid off his to the side and he followed them to a group of rough-looking men including, he noticed, the silent gunslinger who had came to the city on the same buggy as he had. "That's the guy you want to speak to." She whistled sharply at the huddled group of men and one looked at her, then at him. Silently he stood and walked over.

"What." His voice left a strange feeling in the air, as if even though he had asked the question he didn't expect the answer.

The barmaid jerked her head at Zell and spoke as if he wasn't there. "Man wants to see Morden."

The only change in the man's demeanour was a slight widening of the eyes and a curled sneer, and for a moment Zell worried his put-upon-downtrodden-youth look had been carried off too well. "We're not looking for riff-raff, kiddo. You think you have what it takes?" He nodded. "Where'd you come down from, boy." The same non-question voice.

"Esthar," Zell answered quickly. He'd asked and Xu had agreed there was no point in disguising his point of origin. Compared to the people around him he was too obviously fresh-faced and well-fed to have come from Trabia or the Centran nomads, and without the common cough or pallor that would have marked him as a long-time Galbadian.

The man's eyes narrowed as he heard the name and Zell had another clue to the identity of the ramshackle cult around him. "You came a long way."

Zell shrugged and threw out his best shot. "I heard a sound, it told me to come."

It hit. The man looked around at his comrades and without a gesture they stood and began to leave. He looked back at Zell, his hand moving out from his robe, and for a second he saw glinting steel attached to thick leather underneath the shapeless grey garment. "We're always looking for those have what it takes," he said. "Come on."

Zell noticed the barmaid's eyes following them and he flipped a coin at her as he left and smiled. "For the beer."

She didn't smile back.

Zell barely paid attention as the man walked him through the camp. As they walked others came out of the shadows, gathering to the man in black like moths to a flame. Even with his pioneering training and natural talent Zell was lost within minutes, there simply wasn't anything to distinguish between one right-angled turn between two tents from another. The man ahead neither spoke nor turned back to look at him, until at last he pulled up in front of…

"We're here."

It was different, bigger. Cut out of a material so blue it was almost black, and on the front flaps painted with a symbol that made Zell sick to look at, one he recognised from the legions of papers he and Xu had sorted through before his departure. A circle painted in red, and inside a mad and seemingly chaotic placement of eyes and wings scrawled in something red he knew wasn't paint. He'd seen a dozen similar splashed onto walls in the city, and always some poor bastard laid underneath them.

He took a deep breath as the man held a tent-flap up. "Inside." Zell made sure his poker-face was perfect, and stepped past the staring black man into the darkness.

"What now?" He asked, making sure there was a slight tremor in his voice, as the flap descended. He could feel the man move past him in the darkness, and breathing sounds coming from ahead of him. He felt a shiver up his spine and made sure that his cloak was loose enough to throw off if he needed to.

"Now?" a voice said in the darkness in front of him, as with a click the sole light-bulb strung from the ceiling of the tent blazed to life, shining a harsh white light down on the men arrayed in front of him, all holding something heavy and made of metal, and all staring at him with expressions of hate in their eyes. "Now we get some answers from you."

Zell held his hands up and feigned ignorance. That it also brought his hands up ready to swing out apparently slipped by most of the thugs in front of him, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Not professionals then. "Listen guys I'm just-"

"Zell Dincht," the heavyset bruiser in front said. "SeeD." Zell tensed as the man reached behind his back and came out with something shiny, which he threw onto the floor. His eyes followed it down but he already knew what it was. And who it had belonged to. The SeeD medallion glinted a glossy black and white in the harsh light of the camp. "Last SeeD came round here wasn't very good at bein' a sneaky bastard either. Now-"

He ignored what Xu had told him about staying undercover, what Quistis had taught him about control and not making the first move. He struck out in anger, at the man who had thrown down the bloody badge, it saved his life. The metal pipe whirred above his head so close he felt it brush through his hair as he tensed and leapt forward, slamming his knee into the man unlucky and stupid enough to be standing just a little too close, and heard bone crack as he did so. The man fell back screaming, dropping the wrench in his hand, and Zell's boot caught it and sent it flipping away into the darkness out of reach when as one person the cultists roared and charged him. He danced backward and spun, letting his momentum carry his feet around and up into the side of another man's head as he struck out with his fist in an almost ballet-like pose that sent them both down and bleeding. Silver flashed in his vision and he moved aside as a crude knife tried to gut him in an amateur's clumsy swing, but by this time Zell was already far away and back at the entrance to the tent, already out of the awkward and failed trap.

He turned and ran outside, ducking low in case some smarter comrade was waiting outside with a bat, but all that met him was the harsh desert air and uniform rows of tents. And the man.

He put his fists up in a boxer's guard but the man in black just shook his and moved away, touching a hand to his forehead as he did so.

"Not today Dincht."

Zell paused for a second, confused as the man walked off into the maze, but quickly regained his senses as the commotion behind him in the tent signalled the recovery of his would-be killers. he shrugged mentally – it's desert any which way, just head out – and started running. Voices and commotion passed by him as whatever form of ratline in the camp spread the word outwards from the ambushers.

SeeD!

The word flew like a burning arrow through the camp and he knew he had minutes to get to its edge, if that, before someone in authority heard the word and broke out whatever armament they had. Zell knew even if the cultists couldn't afford a shower once a year they would still be armed. These people always were.

"THERE HE IS!"

He skidded to a halt as suddenly the voice screeched out ahead of him, and the clear desert was replaced by a mad-eyed man. It took Zell a second before he recognised him as the driver of the transport that had brought him. His surprise cost him valuable seconds as tent flaps were pushed aside and suddenly Zell was surrounded by ill-kept men and women with wild eyes and metal objects clutched in their fists.

Shit. "I just wanted to speak to Morden."

The man spat at him as he spoke. "SeeD killers. Murderers. Jailers."

That's it then. Only one group of people mad enough to call us jailers. He shrugged and walked forward, and either the fear of SeeD or Zell's own face was enough to make the ones in front back off, only the wild-eyed man standing his ground until Zell was almost close enough to touch him.

He could hear men approaching from behind, and he knew they wouldn't be the hesitant civilians standing around him now. The real militants. "Move."

The nameless thug spat incomprehensible words at him, and Zell could only catch a few in the man's anger. SeeD. Killer. Jailer. He rolled his eyes. "Do you really think I was dumb enough to come alone?"

That seemed to penetrate. The man's eyes widened slightly as Zell looked behind him, and he turned. As he did so Zell planted his fist firmly into his stomach, and as the man folded to the ground with a pained groan he was already running past into the night. Exulting, he turned back and shouted into the rabid crowd. "YES!"

The tent-town lit up below him in the dark as the temperature plummeted and those living in the makeshift homes lit stoves and burners to stave off the cold winds that blew through Centra at night. Zell perched himself on the ground on the hillock, indistinguishable from the other rocks under his grey-brown cloak, and watched as lanterns were lit and swarmed together into the central square, where they gathered around a single torch, held up by someone even his eyes couldn't make out. He wished he'd been able to keep his scopes, but Xu had scoffed and taken them away.

He stood and brushed dirt off himself, thinking about the long journey home, and exactly how he was going to tell Xu and she tell Laguna that his protectorate was infested with Sorceress Cultists.

He stared up at the hills and watched as the rock, at this distance the same as any other, picked itself up and walked off into the distance. The red glow of the cigarette lit up in his vision like a beacon and he ground it under his foot to let his night vision come back, as behind him the angry crowd began to move away from the outskirts of the tent city and back into the centre. He followed, slipping between the oblivious cultists like a ghost as the tents suddenly stopped before him and he found himself in the centre of the camp, and stopped before the lines below him. Eyes and wings and random symbols carved onto the compacted rocks and sand that others shuffled up to, careful not to smudge the lines, stepping over and between them as in the very centre a man stood, staring up into the sky, a red circle drawn onto the sand that still smoked from where his finger had drawn it.

The robed cultist looked at him with eyes that seemed to pierce him. "Well?"

He shifted his knives under his coat unconsciously, not out of any malice or alarm but because something in the leader's manner compelled you to make sure your weapons were at hand. "Your men bungled it, the brat got out before they could even ask him his name. It was Dincht, though. Not too bright but he's a dutiful boy and he'll tell his master everything. It's Xu of course, and Xu Tyynes is a relentless bitch when she's pissed. You'll need to move your camp tonight."

The cold blue eyes never left his face as the man shook his head. He looked disappointed but not urgent, like there wasn't a care in the world, never mind that the SeeD would almost certainly have a radio secreted nearby, and Esthar's aircraft were silent as a thrown dagger and faster still than that. "I would have preferred Kinneas. I suppose it would have been too much to expect Trepe or the lion himself."

The cultist leader grinned, and the man in black shivered with the look of it. It was a grin without pleasure, and only dimly connected to reality. The symbols on the floor seemed to resonate, the ground itself a giant amplifier giving off a dull roar as he raised his hands to the night sky and spoke. "We follow a path laid out in history. Let the boy talk until the sky falls. No power on earth can hold back what comes, and when the silver walls of Esthar break and the Garden's flowers lie trampled and burned the world will look to us for salvation."

The man in black who went by the name Tollak when asked could feel the presence of the other cultists at his back as he nodded, not daring to agree or disagree lest that insane grin swing around to face him and he was asked something he knew he couldn't answer.

"We will allow the angel and her false knight and their pantheon to laugh for now. Time itself winds around me and is Her gift to me, and there is nothing immune to its rot. Let them dance and stay deaf as their end approaches at my back."

The robed man who called himself Morden Aimsland smiled into the sky, and in its darkness could see the future outlined in the stars.

"For I hear a sound."