Stave Four: The Last of the Spirits

The Phantom stopped to hover in front of Vincent. Within the swirling black mass of its form were only two things recognizable as human, or at least humanoid: a single, black-gloved hand extending from the Ghost's side, and near the top, a pair of terrible green eyes with pupils like slits.

Vincent felt the spirit's gaze upon him, colder than the night itself. A clammy chill seeped through his bones, choking the warm life out of him and making his fingers tremble. "Are you," he asked, "the Ghost of Days Yet to Come?"

No noise escaped the Phantom, but Vincent knew the answer in his very soul. Looking at its piercing green eyes, he knew why it had chosen some part, some feature of Sephiroth to augment its already fearsome presence. In many ways, the man had represented the ultimate extrapolation of the future – the End, when every star would burn out and every world would die. In the Phantom's gaze, Vincent could see the Planet, dead and lifeless, drifting through the endless, black void of the universe. There were no stars, no celestial bodies or phenomena, to light its way; it was utterly and forever alone.

"You're going to show me the shadows of what hasn't happened yet," Vincent said. "Go ahead. I won't fight you."

The eyes bobbed very slightly, as though the Phantom nodded.

Vincent was not a man easily scared – living for decades with demons as one's only companions had a natural hardening effect upon a body – but this spirit was the most dreadful thing he had ever seen outside his own mind, and an animal fear clawed at the edges of his consciousness. The silence stretched between him and the Phantom until it was unbearable. "Can't you speak?" he asked.

Saying nothing, the Phantom instead reached out with its one hand to point down the road. Vincent swallowed, unwilling to proceed and yet fully aware that he must. He finally rallied himself and said, "Lead on, spirit. Let's get this over with."

The Phantom turned, or rather the eyes within it turned until Vincent could no longer see them and the hand seemed to rotate about the axis of the black mass. It swept off in the direction it pointed, Vincent in tow. Instead of the two of them truly moving, the city moved to them, much as the world had when Vincent had been visited by the first Ghost.

When the world stopped moving around them, Vincent and the Phantom were in the WRO Tower – the great skyscraper which stood near the center of Edge, stretching hundreds of feet into the air. Vincent got his bearings, coming to the conclusion that the Phantom had brought him to a break room on one of the upper floors.

The Phantom itself floated near a small knot of several WRO employees who conversed amongst themselves in cheery tones. Vincent observed the spirit's spectral hand pointed at these people, indicating he should listen to their talk.

"No," a man said, "I don't know many details. Just that he's dead."

"Really?" a second man asked. "When?"

"Last night."

"Was it a disease or something?" a third inquired.

"No idea," the first man said. "I've heard it was something he did to himself, but I haven't got any details."

"Oh."

"In that case, do we know what's going to happen for a funeral?" the second man mused.

"It'll be a quick and cheap one," the first said with certainty. "I mean, who'd pay to have the guy buried? And who'd show up?"

"I'd go if there was food," the third man said. "But there probably won't be, and I didn't really know him that well anyway – just saw him once or twice during the whole Deepground thing."

The Phantom floated away from the employees. It pointed out at the city from the vantage point of a window; Vincent's gaze followed the direction of the outthrust hand. The precise location the spirit indicated, though it was miles away, rushed up to the two of them at great speed only a moment later. Though he had never been here, Vincent certainly recognized the part of the city they were now in. It was the bad part of the eastern north side, which was in and of itself quite rough. The buildings were slipshod and hastily thrown together, with cramped, narrow alleys full of the displaced and the dregs of the city.

It was through one of these alleys that the Phantom floated until it arrived at a tiny, dirty pawn shop. Vincent followed it through the door, which it did not bother to open. Inside, the shop was crammed to bursting, full of detritus and debris, cast-off rubbish and refuse, most of it noisome. Truly, it was a sight that gave credence to the old adage concerning one man's trash and another's treasure.

Behind the shop's counter sat a greasy, fat little man. He busily counted bills in a large wad of cash, though upon closer inspection the wad was mostly comprised of one- and five-denomination slips, bundled together in an attempt to make it look impressive.

In walked three people – two women and a man, all of them carrying large cloth bundles. The fat man behind the counter looked up. With an obvious air of familiarity he said, "Well, well! Can I help you?"

"Yes, Bill, you can," the first woman said. "Let's have some estimations on what these hauls'll bring in, eh?" She set her bundle down on the counter, knocking aside several knickknacks as she did so, and undid the knot holding the cloth together. Out spilled a large pile of laboratory equipment – beakers, test tubes, scales, pipettes, and similar tools.

Bill ran an eye over the pile of stuff, pausing to make a hacking noise in the back of his throat. Without looking at what he was writing, he started to scrawl numbers on the wall next to him with a piece of chalk. He wrote a final figure with an underline. "And don't ask for a gil more or I'll knock it down by ten, y'hear?" The woman looked pleased enough, so he pulled a large amount of bills out of the wad for her. "Next."

The man quickly followed suit. His bundle was full of very similar equipment – equipment that, for some reason, made Vincent feel uneasy at the sight of it, as though he was experiencing a mounting sense of déjà vu but had no words to describe it.

The other woman's bundle turned out to be a large amount of cloth – linen shirts, mostly, but the moment that struck Vincent like a blow was when Bill pulled several very large pieces of what looked like sheets out of the rest of the pile. He asked what it was, and the woman replied, "Oh, it's the guy's bed curtains! I went through his place to get this stuff, and I saw these and figured I might be able to get a few gil for 'em. He doesn't need 'em where he's going." She laughed raucously at this and her two companions joined in, sounding like a pack of insane clowns.

"I see," Vincent said. "This could be me. This could happen to me, couldn't it?"

The Phantom did not answer, but instead the scene abruptly changed. Vincent now stood before a bed. Beneath a stark, white sheet was something that had once been alive, and though it said nothing it spoke volumes. Vincent involuntarily drew in a quick breath, which hitched in his throat as he saw the Phantom pointing its hand at the body's head.

Vincent reached for the sheet, fingers still trembling. Just a touch, a tiny motion, would be enough to remove the sheet, but his hand recoiled. He let it drop to his side. "I can't, spirit. Don't ask me to do this."

The Phantom's hand did not move.

"There has to be somebody who cared," Vincent said. "There has to be! Show me somebody who cared!"

They were still near a bed, but now the bed was in a well-lit, cheerful room. A woman, beautiful and in the prime of life, sat on the bed, cradling an infant in her arms. As Vincent watched, the door to the room opened and a man who had to be about the woman's age entered, looking excited. She looked up at him and said, "What's happened? You look happy."

"Great news!" the man said. "Don't ask me to explain the legal jargon, but we've just come into a large sum of money. It turns out you were the last cousin twice removed or something of this guy in Edge who just died, and he was pretty rich with no heirs and no will. It all defaults to us."

The woman rose, beaming with joy, and held the baby close against her breast as she kissed the man. "No!" Vincent protested to the Phantom. "This isn't what I meant! Show me somebody who's sad, somebody who feels like the world is a worse place!"

The bed was now the one belonging to Cloud and Tifa on the second floor of Seventh Heaven. Tifa was asleep beneath its covers, her eyes closed and her expression peaceful. She stirred when quiet footsteps sounded on the stairs. The door opened just as she opened her eyes to see Cloud step through. "How was your walk?" she asked quietly.

"Fine," Cloud replied, his voice barely above a whisper. "Sorry I woke you up."

"It's fine," she murmured. "You have to get up early to catch the sunrise, after all."

Cloud nodded. "I climbed up that old abandoned radio tower," he said as he shucked his boots and slipped back beneath the blankets of their bed. "After all, I promised Shelke I'd find a new place to watch it from every week."

Tifa wrapped an arm around him. "You're going to run out of new spots eventually, you know."

"I know," he sighed. "But until then, I'll keep watching the sunrise for her. It always was one of her favorite things to do, since there was never any sun in Deepground." He thought for a moment. "Do you think she was happy, at the end? She seemed to be okay, knowing she was going to die."

"I think she was happy with the time she'd had," Tifa said. "I want to say it was mature of her, but she was an adult, after all. She was just trapped in a twelve-year-old's body."

"I just keep thinking it's not fair. She was always close to Vincent. She should have been able to ask him to watch the sunrise for her, not me."

"In the end, Cloud… well, I think it's better she didn't. With what happened to him, that is."

"I know. I wasn't saying it was unfair to me." Cloud narrowed his eyes. "I was saying Vincent was unfair to her."

Vincent heard Cloud's words, and the rational part of his mind screamed what happened to him, how had he been unfair, but all he could feel was horror at the venom in his old friend's tone. He turned to the Phantom. "Something tells me you're almost done," he said. "So before you go… who was the man on the bed? I know – I think I do – but I have to hear it from you. Tell me."

The Phantom waved its hand. Just as before, it conveyed the two of them to another place, far away. Vincent looked around and found himself in a graveyard. He turned his gaze to the Phantom: it pointed its hand at one particular grave, freshly excavated and not yet even filled.

The chill in Vincent's bones intensified tenfold. "Tell me," he said. "These shadows you're showing me – are they things that will be, or things that might be?"

Still the Phantom remained wordless, and pointed at the grave, which gaped like a wound in the soil.

"I've never believed in Fate," Vincent said. "I've always thought that people make their own destinies. Is this my destiny? Or is it just one that I might make for myself? Spirit, I have to know!"

It continued to point at the grave. Vincent steeled himself, knowing full well what he would find there. He moved to where he could see the writing on the headstone. There was his own name: VINCENT VALENTINE.

"I'm the man who was on that bed," Vincent said. "Wasn't I?"

For the first time since their arrival here, the Phantom shifted. Its pointing finger moved from the grave and aimed itself squarely at him.

"I understand!" Vincent told it, feeling the animal fear clawing at his mind again. "I understand what a blind fool I've been, and arrogant! I'll change, spirit, I'll do whatever it takes – just tell me I can avert this!"

The ground gave way beneath his feet. He tumbled into the grave, six feet down. The wood of the coffin within splintered and he fell through it, landing on top of the casket's occupant.

He stared at himself, yet not himself – his flesh was a chalky white, the color of death, and it was drawn so tightly over his bones that he looked desiccated. His hair was the same white color, and had become stringy and coarse; great clumps of it were missing, as though it had fallen out. His arms were crossed over his chest, and his hands had become gnarled and wicked claws. On his right arm, just above the vein, was a large, discolored patch of skin, centered around a prick that might have been caused by a syringe. In his mind, Vincent heard again the WRO employee's rumor that the dead man had done it to himself.

Vincent recoiled from this horrid image, scrabbling at the sides of the grave in a desperate attempt to get out. He looked up at the sky, trying to see if the Phantom was still about, but could discern nothing except endless, grey clouds. There was a rushing sound, and an impossibly massive cascade of dirt rained down into the grave, burying Vincent alive with his terrible doppelganger.

And then he woke up.