Chapter Twenty-six: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Contrary to the scurrilous rumours one arrogant ex-sky pirate enjoyed propagating Fran and Basch were not, and had never been, lovers. This however did nothing to diminish the high esteem Basch held the Viera in.

Sitting across from Fran as she piloted her airship over the snow-capped peaks of Kerwon towards the seat of Kiltia Basch let himself consider the woman beside him. It was a mystery, both profound and delightful, to him why such a self-sufficient, self-contained and mysterious woman should favour him with friendship.

'Fran, would you tell me your thoughts?'

He asked her breaking a companionable silence that had lasted most of the sixteen hour journey from Landis to the southern continent. He shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat as the gut wound he had received in Balfonheim twinged.

Fran's eyes cut to his sharply, 'Your wound pains you still?'

Basch shook his head and waved off her concern with a peaceable smile, 'Ghost pains; I am perhaps too old to be fighting.'

In Ivalice in this new era of relative peace five and forty years was neither old nor young and Basch did not over much mourn the threads of silver growing into his clipped beard or the laughter lines growing entrenched around his eyes. Still there were times, just as he imagined there are for many a fighting man when he wished for a different life.

Watching Ashe with her children playing games with ball and bat, or teaching them to ride a Chocobo, Basch regretted that life had never afforded him opportunity to find a wife, and have children of his own – or perhaps it was not fate but his own choices that had denied him?

Noah had always said that Honour and Duty were jealous and harsh mistresses; his brother had been right. Those twin callings had left Basch knowing that he would die without heir or issue to remember him.

Fran was watching him from the corner of her eye as she guided the ship over the crests of mountains towards a snow covered valley where they could set down and depart for Bur-Omisace.

'You humes have a saying: age is but a number. The longer I stay among you the more I come to see the wisdom therein.'

Basch smiled at her, 'You are troubled Fran. Do you not trust Balthier to know his own mind?'

It was a barbed question; Basch did not pretend to understand the bond between Balthier and Fran anymore than he would deny its seemingly unbreakable intensity but he also suspected that strain had been placed upon that bond over recent years.

'And you persist in asking questions when answer you have already.' Fran replied in the same mild tones, 'dear as he is to me I would be fool to trust Balthier to his own devices. He has never known his own mind – thus I do love him.' Fran murmured not offended but amused by Basch's subtle probing.

Many a time Basch had mused that the connection between Fran and Balthier appeared almost maternal on Fran's part. Oft times her companionship seemed to nurture the ex-pirate and provide him with moral guidance (something he was sorely in need of, more oft than not) other times Basch was forced to give Balthier himself more credit and say that the man, braggart he may be, provided, without skimping, love and support unconditional to Fran as well.

'I cast no aspersions, Fran. In truth Balthier endured much and risked much to barter my freedom, while as I may suspect his motives I do not condemn the man wholly either. I am merely concerned for it seems to me that you are concerned.'

Fran was silent for a few moments as they made their descent and landing. Even after as they dressed in clothing appropriate for the trek up the slopes of Bur-Omisace Fran refrained from answering; this did not bother Basch, for silence was not his enemy. If Fran had no will to continue then he would not press.

'Know you how he and I came to meet?'

Fran spoke into the snow-flecked wind as they tread carefully over the Silver Floe towards the ascending slopes of the mountain; the peak shrouded in vapour and snow flurry.

'No,' Basch conceded, 'I heard some vague snippet of story from Vaan that it had something to do with a slave auction and a riot?'

Fran almost smiled, 'I was prize lot in said auction and he was of the audience, though no willing participant.'

Basch glanced at her sharply and near lost his footing on a patch of black ice. Fran easily reached out to steady him and he accepted that hand with gratitude, 'I cannot imagine that you would be so easily caught in such a way.'

Basch had often wondered that Fran was so content to remain merely former partner to a former pirate; an ethereal figure in the story of others, of consequence but ill-defined, her own motives lost in favour of the voices of others. To him she was a vital and engaging companion, a friend in silence and conversation, who granted him the great honour of actively seeking his opinion on all manner of things.

She nodded, 'Near fifty years I had exiled myself from Viera and Green Way,' Fran's hair flowed out from behind her back like a pennant, twisting and dancing with the snow as she led the way, 'And him not yet twenty summers alive and full of his own self-important youth.' A smile touched her lips in memory.

Basch chuckled drily, 'Aye, I can well imagine.'

'It was accident that I fell into the weave of his story at the moment of its beginning,' Fran said, 'I was but a husk...a dry shell with nothing but the echo of the Wood within my hollow. Why care I if Humes would sell me as chattel? Fran was Viera no more and of no consequence.'

They had reached the first fork in the path ascending the mountain and Basch noted vaguely (without much interest but with the practice of honed instinct) that there were no wolves stalking the snow quilted slopes in packs of twos and threes, nor the rattle of skeletal remains to denote the activation of cursed bones.

'I think I would not know the Fran you speak of. That you could be so apathetic seems nigh impossible to comprehend. You have done much for Ivalice Fran, and are of great consequence to many.'

Fran stopped and turned to face Basch, 'Because of him. I am what you now know because he saw in me what he had never had and seized upon the making of a friend. That I may walk proud, though I be Viera no more and lost to my birth purpose, is because he gave me new purpose.'

Basch was silent as they continued once more to dredge through heavy snow. The whistling wind grew sharper and the bite of ice slush fiercer upon the exposed portions of their faces as they moved steadily upwards.

Basch said nothing in response to Fran's candour. There was no need for he knew of what she spoke and he knew what it was to live in, and for, the service of others.

First it had been to Landis that fell and left him destitute, a sword without a purpose to be thus used. Then had come Raminas of Dalmasca, and that had ended in betrayal and ignominy. Onwards then to Ashe, wherein redemption was found by the extension of his sword and shield to her plight, and onwards once more to the memory of his brother and the Lord Larsa; each new service and each new charge had given him something even as it took from him his liberty and the chance to be a man of and for himself.

'Aye,' Basch muttered finally bowing down to the Hume need to verbalise. He spoke into the rising gale, 'but surely you cannot feel that you have failed him?'

That was what he sensed in Fran and saw his suspicion borne out when she hunched her shoulders against a sudden blast of frigid air that careened down the slope towards them. Her ears twitched.

'When Viera lose the voice of the Wood, barren they become. Outside of nature and against nature they stand. Viera away from Wood are alike the dead leaves fallen from branches and blown hither and thither in the winds.'

Basch, who had been walking a step behind Fran the entire time, now stepped up to her side.

Had he not been entertaining similar thoughts but moments earlier; had he not been considering the woe of never having a son of his own to hold? Did Fran hold similar pain within her also?

It was with chagrin that he realised that he had never given any thought to Fran's situation. So different she was, and so immensely strong, that it had not occurred to him that she might have such feelings. Still, Fran would not share such intimate information without there being a purpose or relevance in the telling.

It came to Basch suddenly, 'Nay, but you have watched his children grow. They love you and know you and thus you are tied to their growing indelibly.'

It had been a treasure to Basch to be named gods-father to the twins, and one that he had not felt he deserved when Ashe had informed him of his sacred duty, and that Fran would be named gods-mother in turn.

To him such a token had been the final impetus to lay off the guilt that he had failed Raminas in Nalbina (a guilt that had persisted in his heart long after he had been exonerated in court of law and the court of Ashe's conscience) to Fran, he began to see, it meant more – and suddenly he was forced to give respect to Balthier for what he had done.

'When I left Eruyt I had want to know what Hume life was. I had want to nurture humes, and impart some knowledge, as Viera nurture the Green Way, yet I knew not how, your ways were strange to me and I was stranger still to Humes.'

'And Balthier knew of this, and so he made you gods-mother to his own children, entrusting their care to you should he and Ashe be stricken, and thus you may nurture them as you had wished.'

Fran nodded, 'But I have failed in the bargain, for he no longer trusts me.'

Basch frowned as the shadow of the walls of the Kiltia palace encroached upon their ascent and cast a pale of imposing darkness across the snow.

'What do you think is afoot, Fran? You do not go to the Pharos, though I believe that Balthier is in need of aid in the immediacy.'

'I know not, but I fear much for him. There is something wrong and I sense that he does not want immediate rescue, but instead for me to know what is at the root of this trouble.'

They stopped before the permanently open gates of Bur-Omisace where the snow fell away to gritty, cold sands and the Moogle Gurdy kept her pen of Chocobo's through sun or blizzard. Basch's weathered eye could still make out the pock-marks on the thick walls of the Kiltia enclave; scars of both the Imperial massacre of nine years past and the lunacy of Mishman Margrace of Rozzaria.

'And you think that Marana would know more than you, the workings of Balthier's mind? Fran the man is a born atheist and an iconoclast of the highest order. The notion that he would make confession to the Scion of Faram seems far-fetched in the extreme.'

Fran almost smiled as she walked calmly past the sparse collection of petitioners and pilgrims that huddled against the cold just outside the walled solitude of the holy place of Faram's chosen (numbers of the devoted had been dropping since the rise and fall of Mishman's Kiltia Ascendency, many ordinary people had grown disillusioned with religion).

'Who better for atheist and iconoclast to confide in than the enemy of his philosophy? The man who disdains friendship must make confession to his enemies, must he not?'

Basch found himself wondering, not for the first or the last time, what manner of madness passed for thought in Balthier's mind – and found himself entertaining the notion of pity for the self-aggrandising pirate much as he had done as he watched the man suffer at the hands of dead allies.

Balthier may infuriate and confuse Basch but Basch had one advantage over the other man. Should Balthier annoy him too greatly Basch could merely walk away – Balthier, by contrast, was trapped with himself until his dying day and that was a punishment Basch would not wish upon his most heinous enemy.

Their approach up the split-level walkways and steps to the grand doors of the palace of Kiltia, shrine to Faram, was unmolested and untroubled by another living soul and Basch could not help but wonder if they would find the interior of the temple completely deserted.

When they reached the grand golden doors leading to the Gran Kiltias audience chamber they found them to be stood open and snow melt had made the polished floor tiles wet and treacherous.

The sounds of raised voices had them both quickening their pace towards one of the doors leading to the small ante-chambers extending from the main chamber.

'Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh yes...history in the hands of man, but where be the future?...the mortal eye is inversely blind, looking only back and ne'er forward...It is all so pretty a picture that I have dreamed. Yet like it I do not.'

Basch had never met in person the Gran Kiltias Marana, though he had heard that she was but a young girl and quite a departure in temperament, age, and intention to that of old and venerated Anastasis.

What he saw terrorising the two harried Kiltia Priestesses within the small ante-chamber did not resemble either a young girl or a holy figure, in fact adequate description or explanation was denied him. All Basch could do was stare.

'From the father to the son goes the legacy, and me thinks he know now...but what shall he do?'

A feminine form, though too tall and too gaunt to be called a woman and too old in the face to be a coltish child, swathed in the gold and blue of High Kiltia, stood perched atop a ceremonial alter brandishing what looked like a knife fashioned from a shard of orange glass in a bleeding hand.

'I walk awake and can dream no more...'tis a pity, for I see only confusion and long for the dreams of other men; my god has feet of clay and the pretenders no feet at all...'tis pity, all such a pretty, pretty picture.'

As Basch advanced into the room he noticed that the stained glass window behind the alter had been smashed via a thrown urn and that the woman-creature in her blood smattered robes stood bare foot on a carpet of shattered glass shards, deliberately stamping them into powder.

The two Kiltias tried, with strained deference, to entice the girl down and Basch felt his stomach plummet as he realised that this deranged Helgas must be the Gran Kiltias.

'A Bath...a Bath...I am all bloody...and look you on my cuffs; soiled beyond redemption!'

The Helgas threw back her head and as she did so her stream of cream white braided hair (a shade too pale to be blonde but infused with too much golden shadow to be as pale as Fran's) whipped against her narrow back as if in self-flagellation.

Basch was moving forward before he considered the propriety of the actions, watching as the woman-child-priestling lifted the hem of her robes and began to jump up and down on the layer of broken glass. Drops and splatters of blood from her mutilated feet leapt into the air and spattered over the white alter cloth.

Basch reached out and grabbed hold of the bony, rail thin body, unceremoniously hoisting her from her perch and carrying the quite suddenly silent and placid form over to her abandoned throne in the main chamber. The two attendants, caught between relief and horror that a mere mortal should so manhandle the Gran Kiltias, followed after in a daze.

Fran, who remembered Marana from four years past, simply leaned against a pillar and watched the clairvoyant dream-mage with steady gaze.

'Ooooooh, so it is the Knight and the Partner who come,' Marana tilted her hatchet sharp chin upwards to regard Basch with cataract filmed eyes that appeared blind but saw everything. Quite suddenly Basch found himself eye to eye with the very sharp point of the orange glass shard.

'Don't blink now, good sir Knight, you wouldn't want to lose an eye!'

Basch jerked back but found that Marana moved with him grabbing his shoulder so she could hold the very point of the shard a hairsbreadth from his eyeball. Basch grew immediately still and struggled with the blinking reflex as his eye began to water.

'My god has feet of clay; thus I do not dishonour myself in giving him homage. In his image I grow and I have no will to see Occuria weave once more.'

The click of Fran's heels denoted her approach as she moved forward, 'Occuria? You would speak of them once more?'

Thin lips split into a sharp toothed smile and a sickeningly sweet girlish giggle was emitted from between those savage teeth, 'Know you what this knife is, Viera?'

Basch, unable to move or even blink, nevertheless sensed Fran stiffen in recognition, 'Nethicite. The scent of Mist and burning poisons the air around it.'

'Sun-Cryst deifected Nethicite; the son has been industrious and diligent, though he know not the nature of his endeavours. All muddled up he was betwixt and between the father, the son, and the unholy ghost!'

Marana let go of Basch abruptly and danced away from her throne. With bleeding feet she began to pirouette around and around like a Rozzarian whirling dervish.

Gyrating and bouncing like an over-excited infant, or an obscene parody of such, Marana skipped over to an incense brazier that hung low from a wall sconce, a small open flame heating the oil from below. As she reached it she turned back and grinned impishly at Basch and Fran.

'No!'

Basch realised what the deranged seer was intending to do too late by far to stop her. Heedless of her physical pain she shoved both hands into the naked flame and hot oils.

Basch once again raced across the chamber and pulled her away, as her two useless attendants (who were used to this sort of performance) and Fran merely watched.

Marana hung limply in Basch's arms, all bones and sharp angles, 'My hands...my hands are burned...yet the oil does to me much less harm than was wrought on he whose fate you would know.'

Fran stepped forward once more, 'You speak of Balthier?' Fran looked from Marana's reddened fingers and palms to the brazier and then to Basch.

'Balthier's hands were burned severely aboard Bahamut that first time. She made allusion to her cuffs before; a veiled reference not to her attire but to Balthier also?'

Marana jerked free from Basch and went to kneel by the open door of her chambers and pressed her palms into the melting snow building up in the threshold.

'Viera are no fun to prophesise.' Marana's sharp and gaunt face could not hold onto the girlish pout she attempted to convey, 'You see little but hear much...or at least those who have walked from the Wood do.'

Fran shifted her weight from one leg to the other and cocked a hip, 'Then it was not in vain to come here; know you something of Balthier's present circumstance?'

Marana smiled sharply once more and jumped to her feet. Basch watched, vaguely sickened, as the emaciated and bleeding woman-child skittered across the chamber and towards her desecrated alter once more.

'Circumstance and Present are of no matter. He is better in the knowing than he was in the deception, and soon he will come to me, as I a-dreamed it be, and beg upon folded knee for me to reveal the dreams he remembers not.'

Fran seemed to relax as Basch looked from her to Marana with lack of comprehension, 'Then the leading man does not retire from the tale? It is not his will to die...as I had feared he might so plan?'

Basch was jolted by the realisation that Fran suspected that Balthier had, in some way or form, engineered his captivity as a precursor to elaborate suicide.

'Fran?'

What manner of ill-deed and circumstance was this that Fran would suspect such a thing and that Basch, who had spent days strung up in a tight and near airless room with Balthier, might see just the grain of possible truth to this seeming unfounded suspicion?

Basch frowned in consternation. He had been confused and bewildered by Balthier's erratic behaviours of late and no more so than during their captivity. There had been something in Balthier's demeanour that had seemed almost impatient to advance his captivity; an impatience to surrender unto his fate.

Yet what was the truth of Fran's fear that such a selfish man, with so much to live for, would wilfully throw it all away? There was more to this than Basch knew (or wished to know, truth be told).

Marana cocked her head to the side and regarded Fran gravely. In her countenance the coquettish and mad child slipped away and the prophetess and worthy successor to Anastasis revealed herself for the first time.

'I am woman who lives in dreams. I am woman who sees tomorrow, when any clever soul may see that tomorrow is a fallacy. All that is, is what is. The future is a construct of the mind, just as is the passing time. A complex lie we tell to keep chaos at bay. I am mad for I see what is not and I am great for I see what could be.'

In the quiet that followed that almost bitter claim Marana raised her hands over her head, still holding the Cyrst shard, much as a dancer would and rose on the points of her toes. She gave one slow, solemn pirouette.

'Once I did grant the Dynast Queen true prophecy, which she in her wisdom disregarded. I shall tell it to you, yes I shall, and see what you shall say of it.'

Marana smiled and let her eyelids droop closed as she flopped bonelessly onto the floor of her chamber, asleep or in trance. They heard her bell-like voice in their minds.

I see a city of the dead rising and the natural order reversed. I have seen Golmore Jungle to Balfonheim come. I have seen airships underwater swim and fish too large for the ocean float through clouds. I see a boy and a girl, with destiny unwritten and the Occuria in their tomb. Mehaps I see the dreams of dreams. Mehaps I see tomorrow. Mehaps I see Ashelia B'nargin Dalmasca, a widow evermore.

Basch twitched to hear what sounded to be prophecy of Balthier's demise and tidings both strange and disturbing. At his side Fran had grown very, very still.

'Ashe was widow when she married for a second time; the advent of new union does not alter the original state. Widowed she is, and evermore will be, of her original betrothed.'

Marana clapped her hands delightedly as her cloudy blind eyes popped open, 'Very good!' she giggled, 'Most people do not see so clearly through the words to the truth therein.'

'Then you do not speak of Balthier's demise; he is as like as not to outlive his queen?' Fran persisted, seemingly pondering Marana's prophecy as she spoke.

Marana shrugged one bony shoulder, 'If a man can think he can choose the mastery of his own demise. It is impossible to say when a man shall die by misadventure, ill-health, or choice.'

'Nethicite in your hands and Balthier his father's work has done,' Fran stared beyond the chamber and beyond Marana. Basch had the feeling that she sought to see as far afield as the Ridorana.

'He goes against his life's calling and betrays his own future, all the while he dogs his own steps with misdirection and keeps secrets of secrets kept.'

Marana smiled slyly, 'Who better to stand upon the shoulders of the would-be gods? Undying is not boast of the boastful, but fact of the present. Loose threads and untied knots leave a son with a legacy not of his choosing and the heretic with task left undone.'

There was a moment of absolute stillness that Basch bore witness to. Therein it seemed to him that Fran and Marana held back a single breath in separate lungs, the one seeking more and the other withholding final revelation. The very air quivered with elusive truth. Basch found himself feeling like a child in a room of adults, or a man in a foreign realm where he knows not the language. In short he felt profoundly foolish and ignorant. It was then that Fran blinked and the moment passed.

All of a sudden, before Basch could draw breath to question, Fran broke and ran; turning from the chamber and running as fast as her long legs would take her.

'Fran...!' Basch made to follow her but Marana's sudden surge of motion stopped him more completely than her simultaneous casting of a spell of immobilisation.

'To Dalmasca is our road, good sir Knight.'

Marana stepped before him. Frozen as if congealed in iced honey, Basch could do nothing but watch Fran's flight.

'The weave was torn but not undone. Undying have patience but the acts of ill-informed mortal men within the barren ground of Nabudis has created an in-balance. A weapon has been forged that threaten even the Undying – and in the Dynast Queen's hands, by default, it has fallen.'

Marana leaned in towards Basch and he could look nowhere but her milky, filmed and blinded eyes, 'All I have spoken comes to pass; the fish shall fly and those that fly shall swim. The natural, unnatural shall become.'

Her ghastly skeletal visage split into macabre grin, 'Alack, alack, the Occuria shall walk the lands. There will be a reckoning to come!'

A/N: Hello everyone...shameless insert of another OC from a past story (I just like the mad Marana...sorry!). This chapter is a bit talky but I promise lots of explosions and variable chaos to come...as the prophecy indicates I'm about to blast this plot wide open!...Oooh, I'm all evilly excited...must go and lie down now. ;0