The Forgotten Legacies
Legal Disclaimer: I don't own any part of Final Fantasy
Important Note: For those of you who read Ch. 1 before this, the second chapter, was released, I have since updated Ch. 1. And by updated, I mean I have made large edits and changes in order to better match the canon revealed in the most recent Requiem of the Goddess DLC. (I knew I should have waited to start uploading this story until after the DLC, but sadly patience has never been a virtue of mine). The DLC does at least give me quite a bit more to chew on in the further development of this story.
And now, here is the second chapter (or, really, the first true chapter, since Ch. 1 was more of a prologue—apologies for the tease). Things will now actually start to get going story-wise.
Also, a warm thank you to the readers who left reviews. Comments are always welcome! Please enjoy.
~Logos Minus Pity
Ch. 2. Awakening
She awoke first to the sound of breaking glass, and second to the pain.
Her impulse was to panic, to try to remove herself from the source of pain, but she found her muscles struggling to respond to the flight instinct. But in the next moment the recollection of past experience kicked in. This had happened before; she had been in this exact situation. So instead of continuing to struggle, she calmed herself; she rode out the pain and forced her unused lungs to take a second, sharp and shuddering breath. The hurt quickly faded, and in its place bodily feeling returned. She opened her eyes blurrily right as the crystallization fully dissipated, just in time to crumple forward into another warm body.
"Vanille! Fang!"
The voice that called out to them was familiar, but oddly different than what her sluggish memories could pull up. She blinked rapidly, her eyes tearing with the bright, artificial light, until a strong pair of hands reached out to steady her and help to haul her upright.
"I can't believe it. You were right, Noel. It actually worked. They're back—we brought them out of stasis."
That was Sahz. She would recognize his voice anywhere.
"It was only a hunch. But I've become a lot more familiar with chaos than what I ever wanted to…unfortunately."
The voice that responded was definitely new, ending with a whisper. She couldn't recognize it all. It was obviously male, but sounded young. Not a child's voice, no, but perhaps a young man.
Fang held onto to her apparent rescuer with an iron grip, and felt steel muscles beneath her fingers. Once her vision finally cleared, it made sense.
"Nice hair, Snow," she quipped automatically, releasing her grip and brushing away his hands as she finally stood on her own.
"Fang. Welcome back to the living." He was smiling, but the smile was off. Though his lips were curled upward, the smile did not fully reach his blue eyes; they remained unseasonably dulled. Fang always described Snow as a man of big feelings. Anger, exuberance, sadness…whatever he felt always ran rampant across his face, but not now.
However, she barely had any time to ponder the change.
"Hope?" questioned Vanille loudly, looking more than a bit shocked. And when Fang turned she could see why. It was certainly Hope before them, but he looked to be at least a good decade older than the scared shadow of a kid that she remembered tagging behind Lightning. He had grown and filled out, and, she noted with a slight sense of chagrin, at the very least matched her in height.
Time had definitely passed while they had been supporting Cocoon, though she guessed significantly less than their last crystal slumber.
Hope smiled encouragingly at both of them. "Fang, Vanille…it's good to have you both back."
"Welcome back to the living!"
Sahz pushed through to greet them, wearing a beaming grin. "Damn good to see you up and moving again, woman!"
He enveloped Fang in a generous hug before turning to Vanille to do the same. "And you, young lady…I can't say how happy I am to have you back."
Once they had another minute to finish their reintroductions (and for Vanille to finish hugging everyone to death), it was too easy for Fang to tease a little bit as she stretched out her overly disused muscles. "Well, it seems like we had a pretty short nap this time, eh, Van? And here I thought you wanted your precious floating moon to stay up in the sky a bit longer."
"We might have had something to do with your premature wake-up call. You two would have slept for even longer than the half millennia you already had if we hadn't come to your rescue." Sahz gestured to the all of the occupants of the room.
"Five hundred years!" exclaimed Vanille, reeling at the information. Then how in the world had the rest of them…?
He laughed at that. "Heh. Let's just say we all got a bit of experience in time travel."
Fang shook her head. "And somehow I'm not all that surprised."
"But how did you wake us up?" persisted Vanille. "I didn't think you could wake someone up out of crystal stasis whenever you wanted."
"We didn't think so either." It was the first thing Snow had said beyond his initial greeting, and as he said it his gaze turned toward the back of the room, where a lone figure sat. It was young, young man, his head tilted downward so that his dark brown hair fell to partially obscure his face. Fang did not recognize him.
"Who's the kid?" she asked. His garb marked him as very distinct from the others. If anything, his clothing seemed almost more Pulsian to her, with leather ties and billowing fabric where the Cocoonians instead wore tight fitting synthetics with clips and buckles. At her somewhat dismissive statement, he looked up, a spark of life returning to his eyes for a short second.
"I'm not a kid," he stated. It wasn't said defensively, but as a simple fact, belied by the weariness in his face and the harsh emptiness that quickly engulfed his eyes again after he spoke. Though he looked to be the youngest occupant of the room, the way in which he carried himself suggested that he was anything but a kid.
Hope stepped in, trying to make introductions. "This is Noel. Noel Kreiss. He's the one who helped to wake you. He—"
"I can speak for myself, Hope." Hope bowed his head in acquiescence as the young man—Noel—heaved himself up from his seat with a sigh. "I'm Noel Kreiss, and I'm from a future."
Silence reigned heavy as he let the newly awoken women process the information. Fang exchanged a slightly incredulous glance with her adoptive sister.
"You're from the future?" squeaked Vanille.
"A future," corrected Noel. "And not a pretty one. I was transported back in time to try and fix that future but…I…I've failed…"
For the first time since awakening, Fang looked—she truly looked—at the faces around her. All of them were heavy with the tired lines of grief and despair. She looked worriedly at Vanille and felt the first creepings of fearful anxiety begin to eat at her stomach.
"You're Serah's friend, aren't you, Noel? The companion of hers that she had to rescue from the dream world illusions after we helped her out of her own."
He nodded, choosing not to speak.
"Hey, where is that little Farron anyway? I thought you were all on a mission to find Lightning, not to wake us up early."
A weighted silence also greeted that question.
"And speaking of Lightning, where…?" Fang looked around, thinking hard and fast. "Lightning's not here…is she."
It was more of a statement than a question, and Snow seemed to sense that there was somewhat more behind it.
"Do you know something about Lightning?" he asked.
Fang nodded to Vanille when she looked at her in askance
"We saw Lightning, or a vision of her, right before you brought us back out of crystal stasis. She was sitting on a huge crystal seat—it looked like a throne almost. She…she was…"
Fang cut in to finish. "She was crystallized. In complete stasis."
"Then…" Noel trailed off.
Snow spoke at the same time. "That means…"
All of the men exchanged meaningful glances. At this, Fang felt herself getting exacerbated. She had just woken up, and was already filled with more questions and confusion than before.
"Can someone please explain what is going on here? Since when did Lightning complete—let alone get—a new Focus? I thought we were done with the fal'Cie after Orphan."
"It's not a short or easy explanation, Fang, and what you said just changed a lot of what we know…"
"Hold up a second," interrupted Sazh. "These two have only just been woken up from stasis and we're already piling them on with more questions and worries than what they went to sleep with! No concern at all for if they're tired, or injured, or hungry. No concern from any of you if an old man like me is hungry, either…"
He trailed off into muttering while Hope and Snow looked sheepish. Now that it was mentioned, Fang found that she was hungry, starving even. Crystal sleep would do that to you.
"Come on," said Hope, leading them through the doors and out into a hallway. "Let's get some food and then we can explain more."
It was a quick walk through the steel-lined hallways until they reached an open conference room of sorts, this one with huge windows that provided a clear view to the city of Academia beyond their walls
Outside, you could see the sprawling metropolis built on Gran Pulse soil with Cocoonian technology. And in the distance, there lay the recently shattered remnants of Cocoon, the ancient "Viper's Nest" that Vanille and Fang had given five hundred years of their time to keep holding up until Hope could build an alternative. There was still the sky above, and the earth below, and the sculpted mountains on the horizon.
But beyond that everything was wrong. It was completely and utterly wrong. The heavens were darkened and stormy, with any hint of the sun completely blotted out. Everywhere, violent clouds of chaos roiled and moved like living creatures, engulfing up portions of their world. And all about the air, ghostly stone buildings floated, some of them complete and some of them half-formed, but all connected by chaos, by a devouring energy that shouldn't even exist in the world.
"What…? Snow! Sahz! Hope! What is happening? What's wrong with, with everything?" Vanille yelled, clearly panicked.
Fang instinctively ran up to Vanille's side, protectively wrapping an arm around her adoptive sister's shoulders and pulling her away from the window; though what she could actually do to protect Vanille from the vast encroaching darkness, not even she knew.
Hope ran up to them both, making a placating gesture with his hands. "Vanille, calm down! It's okay, we're safe here."
Fang didn't miss Noel's underhanded murmur of "for now", making her shoulders tighten as adrenaline surged. She refused to move, staring down Hope for a few long, tense seconds. He may have grown older than her, but in her mind, he was still the young and inexperienced child, and she refused to back down until she got answers.
"Sit down, guys."
Snow spoke heavily and pulled out two chairs for them before sitting in one himself. After a pointed silence punctuated only by Sahz preparing several plates of food, Vanille took a seat, with Fang almost reluctantly following suit. Noel and Hope remained standing.
"Okay," growled out Fang, trying to cover her own fear with anger. "What the bloody hell is going on?"
"Easy, easy! You're nearly as bad as what Lightning was! Eat up! No sense in arguing on an empty stomach…"
Sahz slid a full plate in front of each of the Pulsians before taking a seat at the table and tucking in to his own meal. He dug into his plate with gusto, and even though Fang knew Vanille had to be as hungry as her, both of them had lost any appetite to do little more than pick.
When she opened her mouth to speak again, Hope sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Look, maybe this will be easier if you guys start. What all do you know since Orphan, if anything?"
Vanille's beryl gaze flickered over to meet Fang's.
"We know a bit. Even in crystal sleep, you can still be cognizant of some things going on physically around you, and of things that go on in dream dimensions, too. We saw what happened right after we defeated Orphan. We saw that first paradox happen, the one right after you guys all woke up from crystal stasis here on Gran Pulse. Lightning was near the base of Cocoon when a chaos rift opened, trying to swallow her. Then a power—Etro—intervened and—"
"—poof! Gone. Snatched right out of time." Fang finished theatrically.
Snow leaned forward, now interested. "So you two actually remembered it? I thought…Serah…was the only one."
"Well," tempered Fang. "Being in stasis is kinda like being outside of time, too, so we saw. And we remembered. Lightning went beyond our reach just as much as yours, though. She went to Valhalla."
"And that was about it for us." Vanille took over again. "We could sense Serah re-righting the timeline, and we even helped her out of a chaos illusion, but our view of the rest of you was limited by our physical entrapment in the crystal. So please, tell us what's happened, and what's going on now."
Everyone collectively stopped for a moment to glance back out the windows. Then Noel exhaled loudly and walked over to lean against the end of the table, folding his arms and turning his dark blue eyes upward.
"I guess I'll take the reigns here. I should explain how I got here, and met everyone. Like I said earlier, this isn't my time. I fell into a portal from my own world—over seven hundred years in the future from the crystallization of Cocoon. In my time, the human race had died out from war after Cocoon collapsed. I was the last person left in one of the last settlements on Gran Pulse when a time portal first appeared. That portal took me to Valhalla. And that's where I met Lightning. She was fighting a war there, one to protect the Goddess and to try and save the future. But because she couldn't leave the Unseen World, she asked me to. She asked me to find Serah, and once I found her, together we started to fix the series of paradox distortions that were corrupting the timeline and the future."
Noel proceeded to recount his time-traveling adventure with the younger Farron—their corrections of the distortions, Serah's realization as a seer with the Eyes of Etro, their encounters with Caius and Yuel, all of their hard work to save the future, all culminating in a final showdown with Caius in Valhalla. Snow, Hope and Sahz added a few bits to the story here and there, but otherwise everything leading up until now seemed to revolve almost exclusively around Noel and Serah.
"So what happened then? You solved all the paradoxes and stopped Caius, didn't you? And you built a new Cocoon and rescued us and everything, so how…?" asked Vanille, finally breaking the story-telling with a question. And Fang had to admit, it was a good question. As unbelievable as it all sounded, Fang had already endured more than her share of extraordinary events, and was accepting of everything they had been told so far.
"Yes, and that was the problem," said Noel. He was staring at the palms of his hands again, his voice nearly a whisper. "Caius wanted—no, he needed me to be the one to kill him. I didn't know…I swear I didn't know."
His voice was raw, and clearly pained now. His gaze had moved up toward Snow; Snow turned to the side, though, his jaw clenched and his eyes closed with grief.
"Didn't know what?" Fang was desperate for an answer, for anything to break the awful tension in the air.
"That with these hands, with my hands, when I struck down Caius, I destroyed the Heart of Chaos—the Heart of the Goddess. I-I slew the Goddess."
Hope took over, trying to better explain. "It's not a paradox anomaly or rift like before. It's the dissolution of time itself as the realms converge. Our world is melding with the afterlife…or Valhalla, as it's apparently called. And with that convergence, the future as we understand has been destroyed."
He turned toward Snow, who had gotten up and slowly made his way toward one of the windows.
"The destruction of the future," he repeated slowly. Though he was looking out the window, his eyes were glazed, as though he were looking beyond the horizon. "It must have been too much for Serah…she…she died. And I…I arrived back in this time too late, and there was nothing I could do about it." Snow pounded his fist against the window at the same time that he let loose a nameless yell of anger, helplessness, and sorrow all in one.
"Oh, Snow…" whispered Vanille.
Fang, too, felt her heart go out to her old companion. Though she had only met Serah briefly while she was trapped in her desire illusion, she had been impressed with the young, at first seemingly fragile woman. To break free of the illusion by her own will spoke volumes of inner fortitude and resolution; she had clearly seen in that moment how Serah was Lightning's sister. She had also seen during their trials as l'Cie just how deeply Snow loved his fiancée, and how much Lightning loved her younger sibling. To have gone through so much only to have Serah ripped away…she truly did feel for all of them. She couldn't even begin to imagine enduring such…
"But still, what about Lightning? What…why was she…?"
"What you saw," clarified Noel, his voice strengthening with conviction. "Was undoubtedly true. You saw Lightning on the Throne of Etro. With the Goddess dead, Lightning must be the only thing left keeping the separation of the worlds. Without the Heart of Chaos, she is the only remaining legacy of Etro—the only thing holding what's left of the gate together, or at least holding the rest of the chaos back."
"The gate?" asked Fang, cursing how stupid she sounded as soon as the words left her mouth.
"Etro's Gate, it's the entrance—"
"We all know what it is," she corrected. "It's the entrance to the afterlife, named after the Lady of Death herself, but what does that have to do with Etro beyond the name? Why should her "death" matter for the gateway at all? Hasn't the barrier always been there? Why is it dissolving now?"
Noel injected sharply. "Etro maintains the balance, and the Gate is the conduit for that balance. Without her, the Gate is gone, and there's nothing to hold back chaos from enveloping our world."
"But," stuttered Vanille. "But that hasn't happened. Well not entirely, I mean. That is, the end of the world hasn't happened completely, because we're all still here, right? Oh…you know what I'm trying to say."
"The little lady has a point," conceded Sahz. "A lot of chaos erupted initially, but it seems like it's slowed down, or hit a plateau or something."
"Which makes sense now, considering what you told us saw before you woke up," continued Noel. "Lightning…Lightning was, no, is Etro's Champion. Even with Etro gone, she must still be a remaining vestige of the Goddess's will. She must be keeping things as they are, preventing Valhalla from entirely merging with our world. She's why not all of the chaos has been released, why the end hasn't come yet."
It was almost too much information to absorb, but Fang and Vanille had gone through having their entire world change once. They could handle it again. Vanille broke the stillness first.
"So…so what now?"
Hope's brow furrowed as he bowed his head downward. "I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know?"
"What are we supposed to do, Fang? Do you have any more answers than the rest of us?" Snow had the angry desperation of a man who had lost hope.
Silence reigned. It seemed as though there was nothing to say in the face of the dire and fatalistic question—there was no easy answer. In the space of a heartbeat, Fang had made her decision.
"Let's go get Lightning."
Everyone except Vanille stared incredulously at Fang as soon as she uttered the statement. It seemed so ludicrously simplistic, they struggled to form words. For once, it Snow who found his voice first.
"But, Fang—"
"But what?" she argued, her brow hardening. She pointed out at the window, at the floating structure that they had identified as the Temple of Etro. "That's it, isn't it? That's where she should be. So let's do it."
"But if Lightning is the one keeping…" began Noel, sounding uncertain.
Fang sighed and tried to explain herself better.
"Look, maybe it won't be so easy as it seems, and maybe it's not even what Lightning wants at the moment. All I know is, when me and Vanille crystallized again to hold up Cocoon, when we were in that pillar and you all woke up all alive and whole on the plains, Lightning called out to us then and there. She'd only been reunited with her own sister for a few minutes, but she swore a promise to help us back out. We heard her promise, and I yelled at the bloody woman to forget about us and to live her life, but she shut us out. She was determined to do everything in her power to get us back, whether we liked it or not."
Fang trailed off as she walked toward the window. She remembered the moment as clear as day, even after a five hundred year slumber. In those precious few minutes before Lightning had been ripped out of the mortal timeline, her will to get back to Fang and Vanille had roared louder than a trumpet. Now, as she stared at the misty form of the Temple of Etro, the vision of a crystal woman and throne emblazoned in her mind, she could only help but think that while many would say everything had changed as the world literally fell into chaos, for her, nothing had changed.
"I refuse to do any less for her." Fang turned back toward her comrades, felt Vanille step up to her side. "Now who's up for an old fashioned rescue mission?"
For the first time since Serah had died, they all felt the oppressive darkness start to lighten from over them; as they looked at Vanille's encouraging smile and Fang's ever teasing smirk, for the first time in what felt like forever, all of them—even Noel, who had known the Oerban natives only through second-hand stories—felt the first flicker of hope spark back to life.