…She will discard her gown of Time, but she is not sure where.

In the distance, a man waits.

The light spreads from the glowing clock face that spins around her, now fading, now narrowing into little jets that bounce from sand to rock to tree and shoot into the sky, scattering into dots that dim the stars. That become the stars.

The man approaches. Her lover. Her protector. Her Knight. He wears a mantle of shadow, and smoke coils around him. It is constant motion, and he is steady, stable, inside its force.

They move towards each other, step by slow and certain step. The smoke grows thick and thin, and he seems to flicker inside it, and she pushes the light ever forward, ever out, ever into the world.

They meet in the middle of the beach. In the smoke that imprisons him she sees the shape of birds, fighting to break free.

She extends a hand. The smoke dissolves into black birds that fly into the sky, and in front of her, Squall's eyes begin to glow.

.

Rinoa took her time on the ride to the lower peninsula of Shalmal. When she arrived it was a little before noon, and she declined an offer for lunch, instead letting the women who greeted her tend to her chocobo while she walked, awestruck, through the village that sprawled along the edge of the forest.

She did not have many expectations of what Shalmal would look like. Mia was right, about her people not being taught in northern schools. Even in Rinoa's truncated education she felt she should have learned something about the population down here—they had learned, after all, about the Lunar Cry that allegedly destroyed the whole of the Centran continent, but nothing about the survivors, or that there had even been survivors. But survive they had—village was a modest term. The Shalmal lived more in a ruined city that Rinoa could easily tell had once been beautiful, and she was ashamed to admit she had picture a smaller, more indigenous group of people, than the active civilization she found. In the span of the last century they had built newer, simpler homes and buildings on top of crumbling stone, but much of their history, their progress over time, remained.

It reminded her of the orphanage, with the fallen columns and great stone platforms, and closest to the southern edge, where they had yet to begin rebuilding and few people ever had reason to visit, what remained of a huge temple, even bigger than the one they had found for Odin. Several windows still held stories in their colored glass, and a great arch towered over the road that led to where the front doors had once stood.

The Temple of Hyne, she was told, and in her time in Centra she often stood in its shadow, imagining the lives of the people who lived here so many years ago.

She stayed there for most of the afternoon, hiding in the heavy silence of the crumbing stone. No one came looking for her, and when she finally headed back towards the main part of town, the men and women of Shalmal did not scold or ask questions. They only fed her, and showed her where she would be sleeping, and Rinoa nearly cried with gratitude for their understanding of her need for solitude.

She was housed in a one-room building made of wood, with a round ceiling and a view of the temple. Her bed there was comfortable, far more comfortable than any surface she had slept on since leaving her home in Timber, including the guest room at Edea's house. But she was alone. Squall did not come that night, and Rinoa could not say that she expected him to, given the sense of urgency of the morning. And without him, it didn't matter where she slept; she could say with the certainty of experience that she would rather sleep on the hard ground if he was beside her, than the most comfortable bed on the planet.

The next day, she formally met with Mia's people. She had expected questions. What she had not expected, was ceremony. Nor to learn that Mia was not the only Sorceress of her tribe. In the center of their community one of the other Sorceresses, a tall woman named Amelie who was the acting leader in Mia's absence, took Rinoa beside her over breakfast and introduced her as a Sorceress of the North, and ended by presenting her with another of the uchnuda fruits that Mia had given her the day before, and her own robes to wear in the time that she was there. Rinoa draped them over her traveling clothes and accepted the fruit, drank from the chalice they offered to her (a liquid that tasted, she thought, like the best and strongest coffee she'd ever encountered, and she would lament in her time there that it seemed to be purely ceremonial, and not something she could count on every morning), and the ceremony ended with, as far as she could tell, the women pledging to protect her while she was there. Amelie, the one in charge, was fluent in the common tongue of Old Dollet, but the others knew words and phrases at best, and spoke to her mostly in mimes and nods.

Rinoa could say, however, that she felt welcome, and by the end of the third day, even with Squall's continued absence and the worry of what may be keeping him further north, she would have said she felt relief to be there. Shalmal was a land where Sorceress was a title of reverence, rather than one of fear, and even with Rinoa's status as an outsider, she was granted respect by the entire community. She thought often of Garden, and how striking the difference was. Few at Garden knew her secret, but she often felt that made it worse. Without a face or a name, the Sorceress was an entity of fear, and the students and SeeDs reacted as humans can't help but to react. Even Selphie stopped trying to get Rinoa to use Garden's social media network after one too many posts proclaiming the evil of the Sorceress, and the ensuing comment threads on how the various students would handle that threat if one ever dared announce herself in public again.

But not in Shalmal. In Shalmal, she did not have to hide. In Shalmal, she felt, if not a sense of belonging, a sense of acceptance stronger than any she could ever remember. Not in Timber, where the other resistance fighters could never entirely forget who her father was, and that she was not a native. Not even with her friends during the war. They loved her, to be sure, but she was not a SeeD, not battle-trained and always a step behind. Until she wasn't, at least, and then she was still an Other. They may never have feared her, but they pitied her, and Rinoa felt that may have been worse.

It was Squall, only Squall, who had ever given her the feeling of acceptance she got from the Shalmal. Squall, who never knew what to make of her before she was a Sorceress, and who dove into this strange world headfirst beside her. Squall, who kept her grounded and reminded her that she was more than her connection to the source.

She missed him with the same intensity she always did when they were separated, but here it did not consume her in the way she was used to. Whether this was because of his relative physical proximity, or because she was surrounded by women she would come to call her sisters, she could not say. And it was on the third day that she finally asked Amelie about this.

"You are at the origin of the source here. You should not expect things to be as they are in the north."

Rinoa did not try to ask her what she meant. Instead, she finished her coffee and walked, as she always did, to the ruined edge of town, and instead of stopping at the temple she kept going. She walked towards the forest as if called, and found a small, overgrown trail that led to a steep drop onto a small but beautiful stretch of sandy beach. With no other obvious means of entrance, Rinoa climbed carefully down, and frowned when she looked back up to the where the forest started again. The drop was just barely taller than she was at its shortest point, and she could only hope she would be able to climb back up, but when she turned around, the risk was worth it.

Rocks rose high on three sides, and the ocean that stretched out in front of her was almost green. Small round stones littered the sand, and she bent down to pick one up. They were the same as the stones she had seen on their last stop before crossing the mountains, the same she had seen several of the Shalmal use as shrines in their windowsills. She turned the stone over in her hand, and it finally occurred to her why they were so familiar.

"Source stones," she muttered to herself. Someone—undoubtedly Dr. Odine—had found a way to refine them, infuse them so that breaking one had the same effect as low grade para-magic. They were expensive, and even the SeeDs had seemed hesitant to use them, and here were hundreds of them, washed in and out with the tide. "The origin of the Source… This really is where the world began."

She walked around the perimeter of the tiny beach, occasionally picking up a stone just to throw it back into the water. The day was slightly warmer than the weeks before, and she walked out to where the waves crashed up to her knees. The chilly water soaked her robes and weighed them down, but it was soothing nonetheless. She looked up at the cliffs surrounding the beach and wondered if anyone would come looking for her. Surely the others knew of this place? But the path leading here was so old and uncared for, and in all her conversations about the forest, no one had ever said anything about a beach.

I wonder why?

She did not think on it for long. It was private, at least for now, and as much as Rinoa longed for some kind of interaction with others, it was not the kind she could get from the Shalmal. She didn't just want to be with people, she wanted her people. She wanted silly jokes with Selphie, and listening to Quistis gush about a book she'd finished over coffee, and watching the others try and make Squall squirm by teasing him about how domestic his and Rinoa's life in Timber was, and watching him deflect their efforts with learned grace. She couldn't even remember the last time they had all been together as a group. Rinoa had remarked once to Squall, that the real reason she approached him at the graduation ball was because he seemed to be as alone as she was. A whole room full of people celebrating and her the outsider, and she saw something familiar in the way he stood off to the side. They were both so out of place, but in the few minutes they danced together, it gave her a feeling of connection.

And that was what it had always been for them. Connecting to each other, when nothing else in the world made sense.

As if summoned by her thoughts she felt him approaching—only this time Rinoa could articulate why. It was not Squall, but it was her own self that she felt. The moment she used to believe was due to their bond, was the moment her magic returned to her body. She turned to the place the path had opened onto the rock wall, and by the time he appeared, she was already running towards him, legs sticky with seawater and sand clinging to the wet folds of her robes.

She caught him before he was halfway to the water and nearly knocked him over. He stumbled and caught himself, using her as leverage as he wrapped his arms around her, and one of the first things Rinoa noticed was the bandage wrapped around his left forearm.

"You're hurt," she said.

"You're hiding."

"Not…not really. It's complicated. But I found this place, and it's…well, look at it."

"It's beautiful. But you—look at you." He brushed his hand over the deep blue fabric falling from her arm, over the delicate embroidery at the opening that fell from her neck, and up to her hair, adorned with a wrap in the custom of the Shalmal. There was a strange look in his eye, like he was seeing more than one version of her. Rinoa, his girlfriend (fiancee), whom he loved and was grateful to be united with, and something deeper, hungrier. She had seen a look similar to it once before, but couldn't place where, and didn't want to figure it out now. The feeling of his hand against her skin was distraction enough, and she brought her hand up to his and drew his fingers towards her mouth and kissed them, and closed her eyes when Squall brought his other hand around to her back and pulled her towards him. "I'm sorry," he said, and buried his head into her neck.

"For what?"

"I said I'd send word, if I couldn't make it. I shouldn't have made that promise. Rinoa, I—"

"Is it…bad?"

"It was. We still have hold of the valley, but…"

"But what?"

"Nothing," Squall said. "I don't have long, and I don't want to spend our time talking about battles and bloodshed."

Rinoa frowned at his choice of words, but did not have time to ask him about it before his lips were on her neck, her ear, her jaw, and finally her lips, and he kissed her, held her, like he was drowning and she was his only source of air. Between their stay at Edea's and their trip across Centra, privacy was scarce between them since reuniting, and on the quiet strip of beach, hidden from sight by the tall cliffs and thick, narrow trees that grew on the rocky coast, they lost themselves in each other.

After, they lay naked under the waning sunlight of the Centran autumn, soaking in what little time remained before Squall had to return, and Rinoa traced her fingertips over the bandage on Squall's arm. They watched a pale green glow spread between them, and Squall let out a small moan, barely audible, and closed his hand over hers once she was done.

"Thank you," he whispered.

"I need you to come back to me," she said. "Which means you need to be as whole as possible."

"I am," he said, his eyes still closed, his good arm wrapped around her, fingers resting lightly on her hip. "Right now? I am as whole as I can be."

Rinoa nestled against him, and ran her hand over the fabric of her robes, laid out beneath them like a blanket. She thought of all the things she could tell him, about the Shalmal, about how lonely it was down here, always the outsider, but how good it felt to be in a place where she might one day learn to be proud of who she was. But whenever she tried to speak, the words got caught before they reached her lips. "Me too," she finally said, and he tightened his arm around her.

They made love once more, in the hour before Squall had to return, and their goodbye this time was softer, less rushed than the last two they'd had to go through.

By the time she returned to the village, the sky was a deep indigo and the stars were multiplying by the minute. She moved slowly through the broken stone streets, and in the center of the groupings of houses, Amelie sat beside the permanent flame that burned for the men and women at war. She looked up when Rinoa walked past, and she saw, for the first time, sorrow written onto the other woman's face.

That night she dreamt of space. Of floating, further and further from any sign of rescue, watching her world beneath her, and in her dream, Squall never came.

.

Squall returned the next day, and the day after that. Both times he found her on the small beach, and on the second day she considered taking him back with her, introducing her to the rest of Mia's people. They knew about him; knew even before she came. Amelie spoke to her of Mia's decision to hire SeeD at all, and in their conversations, Rinoa began to feel guilty about ever doubting Mia's motives in bringing Squall to Centra. She also felt guilty, although she knew it was unfounded, on behalf of Esthar and Laguna. It was not his fault, and she knew that—even as he debated on accepting the opportunity for re-election, he worked tirelessly to keep Esthar unified. But that task was more and more difficult once they lowered their shields and influence from other countries ran though the crystal streets like a break in a water line, and the Shalmal were the ones paying the price.

In the end, however, Squall did not come back with her. Later she would wonder, if he had just come once, spent the night, met the women who taught her so much, if it would have changed anything. He was willing—for all that Squall shied away from groups of people, at Garden, at Timber—he was willing. He was duty-driven, this Rinoa knew, and their bond confused him. He wanted to understand it, and it was not something that could be understood by conventional means. It just was. And meeting the Shalmal—not only the ones who went with Mia, but the others, the other Sorceresses, being in a community built around the magic they both unwittingly became so entwined with—it appealed to him. And yet, Rinoa did not feel comfortable with it.

Was it because of Mia's warning?

He is not part of the Succession.

Or was it the look Amelie gave her, that first night she returned after seeing Squall?

Or was it, she wondered in the weeks that followed, her own fear?

After the third night, he did not return. Two days later, a low-ranking SeeD she did not know arrived and spoke with Amelie under the guise of a status update, but Rinoa heard Squall in every word.

Esthar has breeched the mountain. The war has begun.

She did not sleep that night.

For a few days after, the beach (their beach, as she had come to call it in her mind) was her sanctuary. Even if she knew solitude only made the absence worse, she needed the time to worry, to weep.

This is your life now, Rinoa, she often caught herself thinking. Whether here or in Timber, this was always going to happen. It was nearing two years now since they defeated Ultimecia, and that they had made it this long without her sitting, waiting, wondering if he would be coming home to her was more than she should have realistically hoped for. But even if he was a mercenary, he was still a soldier, a gun-for-hire, and as good as he was at what he did, they were never going to escape the possibility of him leaving for something that might bring him home in a box.

And with that in mind, she finally sought the comfort of the tribe. She had spent a month in Timber attempting to make peace with his absence, and failed so utterly she risked not only her bond with Squall, but the lives of all the SeeDs and Shalmal who waited on this side of the mountain. She had promised Squall once, a lifetime ago, that she would try and seek companionship if it got too hard for her while he was gone, and down here, where she had no distractions, where she was with probably the only people in the entire world who would accept her feelings and more than that, help her learn to manage them, she had no excuse. And she could not deny that she felt bonded to them, if not in the same way she was to Squall.

So she spent her time largely learning. They taught her how to find the uchnuda, and promised that when she left, she would be able to grow it for herself, even in the acidic soil of Timber. They taught her their origins, the things she would not find in northern libraries, that she would never hear in school, and certainly not at Garden. How they survived the Lunar Cry at the turn of the last century, and how, after the loss of thousands of years of history and progress, it influenced their mistrust of Esthar and the technology they wanted to bring to what the rebels considered an abandoned area of the world.

And while she learned, her dreams continued to haunt her. She dreamt often of space, and more so of Time, but a new one slipped in, first only occasionally, then more and more frequent, until it was there almost every time she closed her eyes. Squall, at the foot of the Talle Mountains, an army of SeeD and Shalmal behind him. He mouthed a speech she could not hear then turned, and as he moved forward to the mountain pass, an arrow flew from somewhere in the trees, and pierced his left breast. The dream became so recurrent that Rinoa started to fear going to sleep, afraid to see Squall knocked backwards, blood pooling onto the dry, red earth as his army marched forward around him.

Amelie asked her about it one morning, when sunrise found Rinoa sitting on the outer rim of the village between the roots of a massive tree, her knees tucked to her chest as she stared at the eastern sky. She slid an uchnuda back and forth between her hands, watching the shadows of the great temple arch shrink in on themselves,

"It isn't working," she said. For everything the Shalmal had to protect a Sorceress, for all of the love, reverence, and acceptance they gave anyone with that title, what the Shalmal could not provide, what they could not fully understand, was the bond to a Knight. To their credit, they did not try. They did not offer comparisons to maternal bonds, to the bonds of family; they never spoke of the romantic relationships that formed between them. Rinoa sensed that they feared the bond with a Knight. Whether it was because they could not understand it, or because it was a thing to be feared in and of itself, however; RInoa could not say.

"You're afraid for him."

"Of course I am. Aren't you afraid? For Mia? For all of them?"

"My generation has never seen war. None of us have. But many of us have grown up with the stories of Hyne, and the stories of the moon. We are still rebuilding, Rinoa—you can see that merely by looking around. You yourself spend many of your days in the open belly of a temple that I won't live to see rebuilt."

"But you know what war is. You don't have to see one, to know that people die."

"If Mia dies, I will become the leading Sorceress in her place. I do not fear that. She and I have said our goodbyes, should she not return. What I fear, is knowing that we survived the Cry so many years ago, only to be erased by men from the north. If Mia dies, I will take her place in battle. If we lose, the last of the Shalmal will die, and it will be as if we were never here."

Amelie closed Rinoa's hands over the uchnuda and pressed it towards her chest. "These don't erase the fear."

"Mia said they—"

"You need to use it, Rinoa. Use your fear. Learn to manage it. But don't try to hide from it. That is where we fail."

So, she returned to her beach, and she began a practice of her own.

Connection. When Squall and Mia sensed there had been conflict, Mia tried to get Rinoa to connect with the source, to feel the magic that ran through all things. Mia could do it on her own, but Rinoa had only been able to with Squall's help. And now Squall was not here, and maybe the only way she would know for sure he was not hurt, was to learn how to connect without him. Connect without him, so she could connect to him, she told herself. And so every morning, after breakfast with her new family, she excused herself, walked down to the beach, and attempted to connect the magic she felt inside of her to the magic she knew moved in the sand, the water, the trees all around her. She sat at the foot of the rocky cliffs and stood in the water, she lay naked on the sand, and imitated a dance the Shalmal had taught her. She went out at all times of the day, and once under the blackness of night, shivering in the cold, approach of winter.

She would know if he was dead, of that she was certain. It hurt without him. In the company of the Shalmal she may have maintained more of herself, but instead of the dull, steady pain she was used to in Timber, his absence was sharp and unrelenting. He was so close, and may be in danger, and the barriers down here were so thin she was more aware than ever of the magic she could not tap into. If he died, she would lose him, and her magic would have to go somewhere. Whether it went to her, or into a new host, she had never thought to ask, but she knew no matter what may have happened to him, that he was, if nothing else, alive.

It was that thought that gave her the idea to seek, not the source, not Squall, but herself. She remembered sitting with her hands clasped in Squall's while she let her mind sink into the veins of the earth, and she remembered laying with him in their tent, the night before they arrived at camp, when she untangled the threads of magic within her while he followed her path with his hand. There had to be something the two events had in common.

I just need to untangle myself, she thought. The sun was long set, and the moon cut a silver grin low on the horizon, and Rinoa was already late for a dinner she had promised she would return for. I just need to untangle myself.

It was so simple. So painfully simple, and yet, it had taken her this long to realize.

She sat on the edge of the line where the tide met the shore and closed her eyes, and tried to remember as much of that night in the tent as she could.

What she found, was thick grey smoke, wrapped around a bright and glowing wire. Two sides of her magic. One active, one missing. With Squall. Not as distant, but just as unreachable as when they had been on separate continents. Rinoa picked a spot—her left hand—and imagined a breeze blowing through her, pressing against the smoke and pushing it gently to the side as she traced it through her body. She was not surprised by how heavy it gathered, in some places completely obscuring the light of the source thread, choking out its resonance. She paused longer there, afraid if she pressed too hard the smoke would disappear, dissipate inside of her, rather than just free the source magic it threatened to suffocate. She would need it, when Squall returned, and she hoped she would need it soon.

When she was done, she felt her veins pulsing, and lowered her hands to the sand. This time, the heat from the source rose to her. She felt it spiderweb out, running from the sand into the mountains, lighting up the entirety of the sea.

Now, she thought. Now I'm going to find you.

She followed the lines of magic north, towards the Talle mountains, towards the pooling of heat and energy from hundreds of bodies primed and ready for battle. They stood, waiting, and Rinoa gasped when she reached the head of their ranks and finally found him. She traced the lines up from the earth into Squall's feet, and tensed on their contact. She felt the grey smoke start to come to life, gaining first heat, then it lit up, becoming a new thread in its own right, and it joined the flow of power that was the source, moving through the miles under the sand and rock to Squall, and back to her again, a loop she didn't understand, and in the moment, she didn't want to.

She wanted to say something. She wanted to tell him she was there, as if he couldn't immediately tell, couldn't feel her consciousness in his own head. But she didn't. The scenario was too familiar. She had left her body on the beach, and found the vision that haunted her nights and made her afraid to sleep.

Squall was giving a speech. It was more succinct than the one in her dreams, and so short lived it almost caught her off guard.

Almost.

Miles away, Squall Leonhart's arm moved of its own volition, and his fingers closed around the shaft of an arrow, catching it just seconds before it pierced his heart.

Even with having a few chapters written ahead, I still can't manage to update consistently! #amediting forever.

The Centra stuff is drawing to a close, I promise, at least as far as setting. And I'm doing my absolute best to tone down the stuff with the Shalmal, and the OCs. What started as just making for-my-information notes for something that was supposed to happen in the background ended up being a lot more important than I planned, and rushing through all of it at that point would have been setting myself up for confusion down the road. Anyone who has read anything else of mine will know that I tend to write more atmospheric, emotion-driven stories, and this requires a bit more actual plot that I'm used to which is a challenge to find the right balance. But one more chapter down in Centra after this, and then I promise the story will go back to being an actual Squall/Rinoa story. I feel like notes like this give things away, but I've seen a decline in the number of reviews on the last couple of chapters, and worry it's because of how deeply this has strayed into headcanon territory, and don't want to lose anyone before it shifts back on track.

Thanks as always to everyone reading!