The next thing Wren knew, she was lying in the grass of another world.

She had hit the ground, that much she knew, but the impact felt like no more than tripping over her own feet. She hadn't even felt the sensation of falling once she jumped. She could tell she was going to be covered in bruises, and she had landed on her bag.

Frantically, she sat up, then began checking her equipment for damage. Her camera and recorded spheres were safe, but the CommSphere…

As a result of someone's tampering, it did appear a little more fragile than her own equipment, and it hadn't been properly secured when she jumped. The sphere itself was cracked, while the base was badly dented. As it was, there was no way Wren could see to activate it.

She frowned. "The CommSphere is broken… I don't think I can fix this."

"I'm sure Yuna will understand," said Twill, still lying on their side in the tall grass, as they had fallen.

"If she doesn't think I'm dead," said Wren, a little worry in her voice. "I guess I could write to her to tell her what happened, but I think that's the end of that lifeline."

"Worry about what to do once we leave the Farplane," said Twill softly, sitting up. "We need to find Merris."

They were standing in a huge field, with grass tall and thick enough to conceal a person while kneeling. The light all seemed off color from their own world, pink and rosy like a sunset, but it was almost as bright as if it was noon. The sound of rushing water seemed to come from everywhere, with no identifiable source.

Wren called out to Merris. They had jumped in only seconds later, he couldn't have gotten too far away from them.

He didn't answer.

"Do you think he can hear us?" she asked, looking up at Twill.

"He should be able to. Unless he got up and sprinted to the other side of the field as soon as he got here, for some reason," they said. "Let's keep moving. Don't go too far away, I don't want either of us getting separated."

She nodded, and the two of them started making their way across the field, careful not to leave each other's sight. They called out for Merris every so often, waiting a few moments each time for an answer.

The tall grass faded away into a clearing, and at the end it broke off into a new path. Wren realized that the grass behind them looked undisturbed, as if no one had been here in a long time. As if they hadn't passed through it only seconds before. It was now impossible to see where they had landed when they arrived.

The path led down, deeper into the Farplane. It was only about three feet wide, carved into the side of the rock they were standing on. From where they stood, they could actually see the expanse of the otherworld. Massive waterfalls seemed to appear out of nowhere, tumbling over the sides of a great, rocky canyon. In the center was a lush valley, stretching on in a way that made it appear much smaller from a distance. If they followed the path, it might take them closer to the valley.

They followed the path together, with Wren in the front, and Twill watching over her. The sound of the water was getting louder as they descended, so they stopped trying to shout over it. If Merris couldn't hear them before, he certainly wouldn't be able to now.

At the end of the path, they discovered the mass of land they were standing wasn't, in fact, connected to anything else. It was a big, floating island, with a path much like a corkscrew surrounding its sides. The edge of the path broke off into a trail of floating rocks, which they could attempt to jump across.

"I guess this is the only way he could have gone..." said Wren.

"It has to be," agreed Twill.

Wren was regretting that she wasn't as athletic as either of her companions, but the path made by the rocks wasn't too treacherous. The prospect of falling terrified her, but it reminded her of an extreme game of 'the floor is lava.' Each rock was flat enough on top for her to jump to without slipping or losing confidence as she moved, like stepping stones.

Twill had a considerably easier time, however, loosening their robes to leap across the path, skipping a couple of steps on the way.

"I guess the spear on your back isn't just for show. You can really move." said Wren, pointing with a nervous laugh.

They nodded, pleased. "I'm a little rusty with it though. I haven't had much use for it since I left Guadosalam."

As they moved on, they looked around, peering across the lush land ahead of them. It stretched much farther out than they realized from above. They were now standing at the valley's edge.

Wren's head was spinning from the open plain as she looked around. She could turn around and see the void of clouds she was actually standing in, in one direction, and in the other was a flourishing paradise.

Twill tried calling for Merris once again.

This time, they got an answer.

"Over here!"

Neither of them wasted any time in scrambling towards the voice that had answered them. There, hidden by rich foliage, was a small shelter built between the trees. Resting under it was a dark skinned girl with blonde hair she tied back with a loose red ribbon, and eyes just like Merris'. Standing beside her, outside of the shelter, was Merris himself.

The girl was holding something in her hands, woven out of colorful dried grass, it looked like. It appeared to be a bracelet, but it wasn't yet finished. The pattern was simple; she was tying it off with a rosy colored stalk as they stood there.

Wren looked between them for a moment, unsure of where to start.

She didn't have to, though, because Merris knelt down beside the girl with a frown. "What is this? What have you been doing down here?"

Tana gestured to a pile beside her of similar looking trinkets, each one roughly the same, but with the unique quality of having been created using materials from the Farplane. "I've had plenty of time to screw around. Waiting for grass to dry and weaving it into something new, mostly. What else is there to do when you're stuck in another world with no way out?"

"There's no way out?" said Wren, frowning. "There's the entrance in Guadosalam, we can get out that way, can't we?"

Twill gestured to the sky, where Wren could make out another hunk of rock floating like a balloon above them. "It's all the way up there. Disconnected from the rest of the Farplane."

They stood in silence, Wren still staring at the smallish rock above them.

"Anyway… this is my sister, Tana," said Merris, gesturing to her. "And these guys are the ones I've been traveling with. Wren is traveling Spira, making a record of the High Summoners, and Twill and I have been looking out for her. And each other."

Tana smiled at them, showing cute dimples. "It's nice to see another face around here. You know, besides the dead. Because that's what's down here. Pyreflies, and more Pyreflies."

Twill laughed at that. "You have a dry sense of humor. I like that. I'm Twill."

"So the little Chickadee must be Wren," snorted Tana, giving a small wave.

"So… you're alright, then?" asked Merris. He scratched the side of his face, looking more perplexed than anything.

"As much as I can be, but what about all of you? Now we're all stuck down here," she said, frowning.

Merris sat down on the ground finally, resting his chin in his hand. Wren began wringing her hands, looking off in this distance. After a few moments, both she and Twill also took a seat near the other two.

Tana shrugged again, then reached for more of the dried grass she'd set aside, beginning a new bracelet.

"How did you get down here?" asked Merris, handing her the lost earring from his pocket.

"How do you think? Mobius pushed me," she said, scowling as she took it. "Either he thought the fall would kill me, or he thinks me being stuck here is just as good."

Wren looked shocked. "Are you okay?"

Tana turned her attention to Wren, her eyes softening at her worried expression. "I'm still alive. I didn't think he'd do anything like this, but I can't say I'm that surprised, after what I found out."

"...What did you hear that made him want to get rid of you?" asked Merris. "We searched all through his mansion, the only questionable thing we found was a room full of Fayth stones, and he didn't bother us about it."

She rolled her eyes again, frowning deeply while she worked. "I've ignored his business for a long time, because he's got the money to keep the town running. You remember when the showed up after the Machine Faction disbanded when Gippal left? Everyone was trying to figure out where to go from there, so when he shows up with plans to put a real town there, we were all on board. We'd been living there unofficially long enough to be pretty comfortable, right?"

"Well, he's not much of a leader," said Tana, waving it off. "But he's got an interest in keeping Djose together, so he appoints someone else to do that job-that's me. I run things, he funds it. I turn a blind eye to his group, because I'm not interested, and he doesn't bother me with it. They're not hurting anyone, why should I care?"

"What about the Fayth stones?" asked Wren.

"I'm getting there. Maybe a month before all this happened, I noticed a few people who were part of his group got awfully quiet. It turns out, it's because they've been turned into Fayth. There's nothing that says creating a Fayth is a crime, apparently it's a religious freedom-and it's common knowledge that in order for a summoner to harness a Fayth's power, they must have the Fayth's blessing. So these people gave their lives for him, for some reason."

"Well, I'm still not satisfied, even knowing that he definitely has the ability to summon each of the Fayth he keeps in that Hall. 'There's no reason for anyone to have that kind of power now that Sin is gone.' That's what anyone would say," she said, looking up at them. "Actually, he's the one who told me himself what he was up to. He asked me about something that happened when the Machine Faction first moved in. I was one of the first people to explore the temple after it wasn't being used anymore, since it's a little out of the way and at the time there wasn't anything else there."

"I'm not sure how to explain what happened, but it was me and a few other people, before we set up our equipment, and when we investigated the Fayth chamber, there was what looked like… a big blob of Pyreflies? It attacked me, and no one has seen it since. Mobius was certainly interested in it, though."

Wren's eyes lit up. "Hey! The same thing happened to me, in Kilika. I was out like a light for about a full day."

"Really?" asked Tana, raising an eyebrow. "Well, I don't know how much you're going to like this, then. He heard what had happened to me from some of the other people who were scoping the temple out initially. It was mostly just rumors, but he told me that was why he'd appointed me to take care of things around town, apart from his guards. He asked me what had happened, and then he told me a little more about it, once I was finished."

"Apparently, I've been carrying part of someone's spirit inside me for almost four years. He said the Farplane sometimes spits out Pyreflies, sometimes in the form of Unsent—people whose will or ties to the living world brought them back from the Farplane, and sometimes as the little ones you see all over Spira, especially on ground that's sacred to Yevon," she said. "But lately, this has been happening, rarely, and randomly, but for a few years now. The same thing apparently happened to him, in Bevelle, where he came from before coming to Djose. The Pyreflies are coming back up as these… amalgamations, and they're not particularly friendly. They do what they did to you and me, and they're just… living inside us. Mobius said the amalgamations are incomplete, however, and so they don't have very much effect, but I'd felt a little weird ever since I met him, and I think it's because of the Pyreflies. He has them too, and I think they were reacting to each other."

"Why didn't I know about this?" asked Merris. "You just said some fiend attacked you."

"I didn't know it was important back then," she said. "I thought it was some kind of fiend."

"I've felt that from Mobius too," said Wren, remembering the weird feeling she'd had when she arrived in Djose, and when she was sneaking around with Merris. "But I don't feel it from you…"

"And that explains why I always sense the Farplane on you," said Twill, frowning as they glanced to Wren. "Not that being able to sense death is a useful skill, inside the Farplane."

Tana nodded. "I think that's how Mobius knew to ask around about me, to be honest. I think he sensed it from me too. He said to me that it could cause things like… weird dreams or gut feelings like that, but apart from feeling off around him, I've never noticed anything strange since then. I don't dream very much."

"I have that," said Wren, quietly, frowning.

"Right, apparently he does too," said Tana. "But I asked him a little more about it, and he suggested I show him where it happened. So I took him to the temple. I showed him the pit, and we dealt with a few fiends, it wasn't a big deal. Then he asked me to join Respira. I said I wasn't interested, of course, but he said that I might be interested in his goal, if I wanted to learn more about the Pyreflies."

"What is his goal?" asked Twill.

"He said he wants to restore Spira to its natural state," she said, grimly. "He wants to bring back Sin. And apparently he needs all the little pieces of those souls to be able to do it."

The air felt stiff as she said that, everyone sat stunned while they processed it.

"Why would he do that?" asked Merris, his eyes flashing. "After a thousand years of suffering, we finally get to catch our breath, and he wants to destroy it?"

Twill's expression was almost blank, their eyes glazed over as they thought. "So many people died because of Sin… I can't even imagine the numbers after that long. We can't go back to that. I can't either."

"I don't know anything else," she said, shaking her head. "As soon as he said that, I couldn't even think of how to respond. He knew we didn't see eye to eye immediately, and then there was a struggle. In the end, he threw me down here with nothing but my sword. I don't know why he does anything."

"He needs the Pyreflies…" mumbled Wren, feeling nauseous. "And… that's why he's so interested in me. Because I pushed him out of the way because I thought he was being attacked. They were coming to him… like they wanted to be completed too. But now I have them instead…"

Merris sighed heavily. "This is a lot to think about."

"He wants to use me to bring back Sin…" repeated Wren. Her head was throbbing. Her arms and legs didn't feel like they belonged to her. "I need to lie down."

"So if Mobius knows you have part of them, then why has he left you here alone?" asked Merris. "Wouldn't he come after you?"

"Only if he thinks I'm still alive," said Tana. "Or he already thinks I won't be for long. There are definitely other ways to die besides starving or dying of thirst."

Twill assisted Wren in making a place for her to lie down in the grass, using her bedroll to rest her head, then helped her to it, setting her down gently.

"I honestly might have given up soon, if you all didn't show up," said Tana, curling her knees up to her chest. "I'll be okay. If you all think we can find a way out, or if you don't, at least we can keep each other company."

"Hey…" said Merris, frowning and scooting closer to her. "Don't say that. We'll be alright. We'll get out of this place and things can… go back to sort of normal, until we figure out what to do about Mobius."

"We will have to find some way to keep him from realizing his goal, whatever his actual plan may be," said Twill, returning from assisting Wren.

"I only know as much as I told you," admitted Tana. "I don't know how many pieces of these clusters there are, or how much he already has, and I don't really even understand what it is to do with Sin at all. We'd have to find out from him."

"In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to give him the chance to tell us," they said. "But then again, in a perfect world, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place."

Tana folded her arms, shaking her head slowly. "I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. The first thing we have to think about is how to get out of here."

"You're right," said Twill, nodding. "We should try looking for anything resembling an exit. Cover as much ground as we can, within reason, then come back here."

"The three of us should split up as long as we're going to be looking. There's a lot of empty space here," said Tana.

Merris pointed at Wren, who had managed to start dozing off, attempting to sleep off her headache. "Someone should stay here with her. It would be bad if we left her here alone without an explanation and she woke up."

"Then I'll stay, I guess," said Tana, leaning back again. "I've been looking since I got here myself. Someone else might find something I missed."

The two of them nodded in agreement, then got to their feet. Merris started in one direction, while Twill headed in the other, and Tana returned to her idle braiding, now placing a mild amount of attention to the girl sleeping in the grass before her.

Though it was quiet again without the other two, with Wren there it was already far more tolerable than without her.

A/N:

If I spend far too long looking at a chapter once I've finished writing, and I can't think of how to condense or streamline it any further, I just go ahead and post it. Worrying about overthinking outweighs my fear of making mistakes, somehow. Having said that... I worry that some of this won't make sense because I overexplained to compensate, hoping providing more details would make it easier to understand.

So uh, if you're confused you can ask me here, or send an ask to my tumblr, and I'll try to answer to the best of my abilities, lol (and possibly edit the chapter to be a little more clear, at a later date, we'll see.)