Chapter 35 – A Thousand Words and Years
Sand. The first sensations coming to her were the intense dryness of her mouth, and then she realized from the grainy texture and a chill occasionally swishing at her legs and hips that what was sucking the moisture from her tongue was hot beach sand at the water's edge.
Nothing wanted to move. She heard the waves crashing gently behind her, and warmth beat down on her back like a hot summer day in the sun would, not that that was something she would normally partake of.
Raven tried to lift her arms. She then tried to open her eyes. Nothing moved. An orange light bathed her closed lids from the bright sun of wherever it was she had landed, and the softness of the sand began to slowly register, but still no part of her body wished to cooperate with the equally ragged thoughts that struggled to form.
She tried to make a sound with her mouth. Raven couldn't tell if her lips moved, but a tiny grunt escaped so inaudibly that only an ear pressed against her cheeks could have heard it. She fought again to move and shortly gave up as the relaxing sizzle on her back coerced her to stop trying. There was no sound of danger, or anything for that matter, so she allowed the heat to massage her as miniscule breaths mechanically made their way through her lungs.
It felt like the blink of an eye had passed when all had been disrupted, and the dark sorceress was pulled from the beach's edge and was being jolted uncomfortably with male voices all around her. She tried to grunt again, or to move, but she was as limp as a dangling sea vine. The voices sounded panicked, and she recognized fragments of words that floated away from her thoughts before anything could make sense. Her heart tugged in her chest, striving for more life to pulsate through her veins, and she was terrified against her mind's will to stay calm at not knowing what was happening to her. Even the tiny strain was too difficult. The bright orange against her eyelids faded to black.
Was it seconds, hours, or days that had passed? Her fingers twitched. Raven shivered in the absence of the sun and heat that had somehow been taken since her last fleeting wake. It was not a dream. Even dreams had more life than this. Her eyes; the light in front of the shielding lids was colder. Her face was chilled, but beneath that was a tiny war being waged for warmth and the lack of it. A blanket? Something else was there, too. The dark sage could not see or hear, and yet words crept into her every being.
"…ka… she's mov… get her something to… get anything she might… think she's… eyes…"
Her body was gently moved, and a feeling of weak fatigue and utter lifelessness made itself known in her lower back and arms, as if they would fall apart from her body if they were not firmly attached by bone. It was a sitting position Raven realized she was being compelled into. A hand pressed up on her chin, tilting back her head, and the refreshing cool of liquid slid over her lips and onto her parched tongue, which danced in her mouth with the first few invigorating drops. Her lungs surged with breath as she drank and coughed from the clashing thirst and breathlessness both fighting for precedence at once.
Her eyes pried apart, the glue of exhaustion not letting the motion go easily.
A dark, pale face with skin like her own. Dark brown hair tightly and ornately bound above her head with colored beads and intricate hair weaving skills. Red irises, yet soft ones resembling the tints of ripe red apples. Raven felt soft fur from her clothing rub against her arm as the woman supported the sorceress's weight, and a cluster of bodies with a mesh of earthy brown and yellow hues began to un-blur beyond her face where the sun appeared to be shining in.
The woman smiled at her gently. There was subtle neutrality that held her features close to static, but Raven still felt comforted by the small gesture of kindness in her uplifted cheeks no matter how small it was.
"Are you with us?" the woman asked.
"Ugh…" Raven moaned breathily. "Where…"
"Relax, don't try so hard," she said softly.
The voice was slow and clear, like someone old and wise, but the more Raven's eyes cleared, the more the former of those descriptions lacked a match. The woman was still young, not likely more than her late twenties or early thirties. Her face did bear many years of experience, though, and Raven immediately felt even further at ease.
"Boys, could you clear out of here?" the darkly dressed woman spoke to the still blurry figures behind her near the arched entrance of what quite possibly could have been an enormous hut of sorts. The men in yellow mumbled their agreements with her and left, but one lingered in the door. Raven squinted hard. Was he wearing a pointy hat or was his hair spiked up as if a cow had licked it?
She chuckled softly as she held Raven up. "Yes, Wakka. You can stay."
Raven filled her lungs with air, and everything suddenly became much easier. The sorceress still allowed herself to lean lightly in the woman's arms while she looked at this Wakka. His reddish hair was indeed spiked up, and the longest strands of it bent back over the rest of his much shorter hair, like the pinched off trail of soft serve ice cream that always seems to form when it comes from a machine. The Sage of Darkness didn't know where the image spurred from, but the thought of his hair looking particularly amusing if caught in a rainstorm made her chuckle shortly. The woman next to her smiled as she did.
"My name's Lulu, and this is Wakka," she said calmly. "What's yours?"
Se placed her fingers against her forehead and rubbed at her own blue-violet hair. "It's Raven," she answered. "Wh… what happened?"
"You gave us quite a scare, is what happened," Lulu said, releasing her arm around Raven and letting her sit up on her own. "Wakka and the rest of his boys were headed down to the beach to practice and found you washed up there."
"Yah, you sure were lucky," he said with a dense accent that surprised her. It resembled something close to Jamaican back on her Earth. It was hearty and upbeat with heavy emphasis on many of his words and with the tones of someone who enjoyed an island beat.
"Yes, I have to agree with Wakka," Lulu said, again sounding awkward to the sorceress with such a more refined and articulate tongue. "We had a lot of work to do yesterday. If we hadn't gotten things done as early as we did, then Wakka and the others probably wouldn't have headed down that way at all."
Raven looked at the large dome structure they were in. It was a strange material. Part straw, part wood, but also part colorful metal or some other solid object that was very atypical to what she was accustomed to. And yet it was cozy, decorated with elaborate pottery, a second floor that appeared to open out to a balcony, small circular windows, and vivid tapestries and rugs that were on floor, ceiling, and even one with deep purple designs of something out of a jungle that covered her legs and had done so as she slept. Other devices that were indefinable to the sorceress but seemingly pre-industrial were situated throughout the large circular room. One device was glaringly attractive to the eye. It was a small green orb atop a small pedestal that lay on a chest. Materia, no doubt.
"Thank you," she said. "But I have to go. Back to North Cave."
"You shouldn't be going anywhere," Lulu said, her tone hardly changed by the note of concern. "You're still not strong."
Raven was about to interject, but Wakka got the first word in.
"Ya, you should listen to Lulu," he said, "and besides, where is this North Cave anyway?"
It hurt to think. "It's, uh… on the Northern Continent," Raven remembered. "Not too far north from Icicle Village."
Raven waited for their response. The two looked at each other quizzically. The dark sorceress then felt queasiness in her stomach. Had she said something wrong or inappropriate? She was positive that it was North Cave, on the Northern Continent, and that Icicle Village was there.
"You know… five years ago that's where Sephiroth was. You… do know who Sephiroth is, right?" she asked nervously, and her cheeks turned red. There was no avoiding it as their confused glances thickened and she felt more awkward.
"Err… can't say I know any Sephiroth," said the man called Wakka.
"Nor I…" said Lulu. "I think… you may still need some rest."
"No, I… I know what I'm…" Raven sensed a pinching pain in the sides of her head when she tried to move quickly. "Ngh…" she moaned slowly as her palms clasped the area around her temples.
"Hey… hey, you ok there?" asked a panicked Wakka. "Hey!"
It stopped.
"I… I, uh…" Raven stammered, lacking the explanation for the fraction of a migraine. She shook the slowly loosening face muscles that had become tense when her head had pulsated. "I need to leave… need to find X… stop Zero."
"You in some sorta trouble, ya?" Wakka asked.
Raven reached for her cloak on a nearby lamp stand near the bed and tied it around shoulders. "Yes. I need to go to North Cave, or Midgar, or Junon… or anywhere other than wherever here is."
Another confused series of stares and silent communications passed between the two. Raven suspected, although the difference in their appearances made her think otherwise, that they might be married. And odd couple, but they seemed to be able to speak worlds without opening their lips even once. Like telepathy.
"Well, Raven, I'm afraid you'll have a problem getting to those places," said Lulu.
"And why is that?"
"I… don't think they exist."
Raven's teeth gritted. This was foolish. These islanders probably hadn't even traveled far off the island she surmised from the difference in technology from where she was and what she had seen from Shinra Company.
"Haven't you heard of Soldier? Materia? Shinra company? Lifestream? Anything?"
"Heard of a Shinra," Wakka interjected with a shrug, "But he's an Al Bhed sphere hunter. Ain't no Shinra company as far as I know."
"Wait…"
Lulu's dull expression had sharpened like a knife, and her eyes scanned the space in front of her, as if reading information inside her own head. Raven sighed frustratingly. Perhaps these people knew a little something. It was at that moment that the unrelated realization that she had healed completely and, aside from fatigue and soreness, her body was free of wounds entirely. She felt beneath her right breast discretely beneath her cloak. The scar… the thick, permanent one she received from Vile weeks ago should have been there, but Raven felt only a thin layer of material above equally smooth skin that hadn't been tainted or torn. Nothing seemed right, but these people felt too real. Her telepathy could sense them clearly, and nothing, aside from the fact they didn't know anything about Gaia, felt unusual.
"Lifestream," Lulu repeated. "Wakka, Isn't that what the Al Bhed used to call the Fayth a long time ago before Yevon became dominant? I think I remember it from stories when I was a child."
"Fayth?" Raven asked with genuine curiosity that she hoped didn't sound entirely incompetent.
"And the word 'materia' sounds awfully familiar, too, doesn't it Wakka?" Lulu went on, to which Wakka responded with a dumbfounded hum.
One more semi-telepathic glance at each other that lasted only a fraction of a second at least let Raven know that they were thinking the same thing about her, whatever that was. Impatience grabbed her and forced the slow rubbing of her fingers beneath her deep blue cloak. She heard others muttering not far outside the hut, some of which were joined by peeking faces.
"Raven…" Lulu said hesitantly. "You don't by any chance know of a place called Zanarkand, do you?"
"I… know of the Zanarkand Project," she said, raising an eyebrow at an obvious contradiction that made her insides churn with worry and a belated but unfortunately not imperative hunger. If these people knew about Rufus's Zanarkand project, then they obviously should have known about Midgar and the Shinra Company. "Is that what you're talking about?" Raven asked them.
The gentle flames of Lulu's eyes gave away the answer quickly, but cogs were whirring fast in her head. "Zanarkand… project," she repeated with awe and concern that Raven didn't understand.
"Oh, man…" Wakka said, grabbing the stuck up locks above him anxiously as whatever it was that Lulu realized struck him hard.
"What?" Raven asked, hearing her chest beat in her ears and her diaphragm pulse almost as rapidly as the two laid their eyes on her, staring at the sorceress as though she had descended from on high. "What is it?"
"Sit down," Lulu warned. Raven moved backward but not back down to the bed she had been lying in. "After I tell you this, you're going to wish you did…"
"Tell me what?" Raven flared.
Lulu peered down at the bottom of her simple black shoes from where she sat and had been sitting since helping Raven sit up. "Raven," she whispered hesitantly. "I don't know how, but I think that you… you may have come from over a thousand years ago in our past."
Raven felt her fists clench without wanting them to. "Wh… how can… that's absurd!" she gritted her teeth as panic made her face twitch.
"Please, Raven…" Lulu stood up and reached for her, but the dark sage girl pulled back with a dark glare. "I know this sounds unimaginable… but I assure you that this is greatly possible. Wakka and I have traveled the world, and none of the places you mentioned exist here."
"But…"
"Raven," Lulu said firmly. "You're not the first one who has come to us like this. I assure you we've had experience with this before as strange as it sounds."
Raven waived her hand meaninglessly wild at the two of them and blocked out the advice being given to her, shielding her mind from the noise and the distraction that felt so wrong, like a simulation of falseness replacing the mind and world she knew. She sought deep within her mind for her reploid. That was all she needed. Memories of Titans and fighting and the darkness of youth were pushed aside, and she looked for the memories of the blue armored hero. Beneath the breadth of her own past, she went to the place that housed her Mega Man; the place that, if she focused hard enough, she would be able to speak with the Hero of Time across any distance.
Raven shrieked in her mind, and it struck through lips with spit and agony. The place with X's memories stored in her was emptier than a clouded, moonless night sky, and it made her face tighten in dread. Her fingernails dug the sides of her face for blood. Her Hero was nowhere to be found.
Lulu had slowly approached her. "Raven… calm down, you're hurting your…"
The sorceress let a spitting and inhuman roar force them back telekinetically and she screeched through the ceiling with eyes glowing erratically crimson as she morphed into the form of her massive black bird with tendrils of energy dragging behind her and tore the roof apart, splintering wood and fabrics conically on the beachside village before Raven's astral body became completely immaterial. She felt the pain strike her shoulders and back awkwardly like being thrown through a tree, but she focused only on finding X, or Zelda, or anybody. No image or thought of an existing friend comforted the fear as her great bird began to descend against her will. She tried to pull up the phantasmal energy composing her, but Raven could not hold and her body plummeted following her vision going blank.
Raven woke again, wondering if the moments she had just experience were false.
It was not. She felt the same bed and blankets on her, but her cloak was still attached this time, and sun was shining through the hole that was still wide open in their ceiling. She was not so tired or thirsty this time, but her head pounded and parts of her body ached and spasmed. The familiar sting of fresh and fair sized cuts, scrapes, and possibly gashes lined her body. Someone was busy putting her arm in a sling and paused as she looked at the unfamiliar and unimpressive looking man wearing an orange t-shirt and yellow shorts.
"Let's try this again," said Lulu out of the corner of Raven's eye. The darkly dressed woman with crimson eyes looked no less calm than before, but the Sage of Shadows saw two men casually peeking in from a few feet beyond the door clad in a mix of brownish leather and silver metal armors. The plain black handle of a sword stuck up behind the shoulder of one. She couldn't see the weapon of the other. Wakka was in the corner of the room dimmed in the shadow and spinning a strange reddish ball on his finger that had a bladed disc around its circumference and looked particularly threatening.
"Raven, we think that you are from our past, or rather that you are in your future," said Lulu.
"I got that the first time," Raven snapped, biting her lip with spasms of pain as she tried to suppress anger. "I can't stay here. I have to find a way back."
"Perhaps then we can help you," Lulu said calmly.
"To get back a thousand years in the past," Raven snapped with skepticism and backed away from the man tending to her wounds. "Sounds a little outrageous for you country bumpkins."
"So we thought, too, the first time we got a stranger from that long ago, but it seems that you are from even further back than he was. Do you perchance know a man named Tidus?"
She shook her head briefly and stood up, ignoring the pain in her legs as she stood. Trees, she guessed as she felt her cuts and scrapes. Many times fighting with the Titans she had experienced careening through woodland areas, and she had always been helped up by Cyborg, Star, Robin or sometimes even Beast Boy if he had transformed into something with opposable thumbs. The hated loneliness that tried to soften the expression that she held hard against people who she was beginning to see as captors was intensifying when she searched harder with nothing but failure to find her Mega Man or even Zelda.
"Tidus is the other one from the past?" she asked tentatively, keeping a close eye on the guards who had tightened their stances since the moment she had stood. Wakka was still twirling his ball without any visual intervention, making sure to watch her like the guards so cautiously did.
Lulu nodded.
"And how is that supposed to help me?" she glared, her head pulsating sharply beneath the stony facial shield.
"I'm not sure, Raven, but I can sense your obvious desire to get back to wherever it was you were, and I just need to tell you… that it may be harder than you think."
Raven's eyes narrowed between an intensifying and unusual migraine and at the accusation that whatever brought her here couldn't be reversed.
"You see, Raven… I'm not sure how to say this, but… I think that you may…"
"Come, on, Lu," Wakka proposed and stuck his bladed ball underneath is arm. "No point in dawdling about this, ya?"
"How can you be so insensitive?" Lulu scolded him.
"We didn't know about Tidus at first," the red-haired villager with the ball spoke to his wife. "He was pretty tortured inside, not knowin' what was goin' on, ya. We ought to just tell her."
"Tell me what?" Raven scowled and earned nothing but a pair of blank stares. It seemed that not even Wakka with his bold statements could manage to speak it. "I don't have time for this. If you won't tell me, then I'll take it from you."
Raven's palm lashed out as her body soared with waving cape and she made connection tightly with Lulu's cheek. Her eyes burnt with black fire, sealing up the dome entrance in a streaking black wave, and the armed men were thrown back with yells when they tried to force through the Sage of Darkness's power. The search through Lulu's mind was swift and fierce. The gothic woman impressively knew how to protect her mind, but Raven knew far better how to shatter the barriers with pure force. It was like flying through a swirling vortex of light, splitting apart panes of glass and dodging pitiable traps set by an amateur in comparison to her.
In a flash of numbing pain, Raven felt her body and mind disconnect with Lulu's with bolts of lightning rippling at the gothic woman's fingertips replacing the euphoric vision of passing through her mind. The dark sorceress's wounded frame splintered the house a second time as she crashed through the wall and into a patch of sand and grass underneath a hot sun. She felt her spine begging for respite as knees did most of the work to help her stand, burning at the effort that it took with a second arm to claim some of the burden.
"I am…" she whispered strenuously to Lulu and Wakka as they caught up, "in a different time… aren't I?"
They stood silent, and Lulu was prepared to cast more materia magic, even though that probably wasn't what she called it.
"It's the same… as the materia's lightning. I saw X use…"
She clutched the sides of her head and screamed at the subconscious utterance of his name for a second time. Her temples beat and vibrated like a gong's crash at the simple thought of him, and she couldn't resist the commands of pain to curl up in a ball as her mind writhed. It refused to stop, and the debris and sand around her began to respond from the madness. Spikes of sand began to kick up and dissolve, threatening impalement to those nearby trying to calm the situation. Blades of grass were shredded into mulch and sent into a whirlwind that spun too rapidly to give off the scent of freshly cut lawn. The men dressed in brown and yellow like Wakka backed off while Wakka himself and his wife dared to keep close, trying to reach Raven desperately.
Raven couldn't explain at first where the soothing wave was coming from that slowly began to settle her raging mind along with the physical sensation of downward gusts that interrupted the spinning tornado of greenery and sand that she caused. As if someone were trying to fill the gaps where X's absence caused mental torture, the pain and confusions subsided like any other storm eventually did. Raven, exhausted of her strength a third time, let herself lie as a shadow came over her closed eyes with a cool breeze blowing strongly across her skin, calming wounds and all.
Strange metal sounds, footsteps, kicked sand; she heard them all but couldn't move.
A soft arm lifted her from behind. It was different from Lulu's, but definitely female nonetheless as Raven felt her head resting against someone's breast. The faint aroma of a subtle perfume or scent could only be described as pure nature's spring as it soothed the pain and made her drowsy.
"Raven, you poor thing…" said a voice that she never expected to find comforting. Through eyes tense beyond the normal human limits of tolerance, she saw a blonde trail of gentle curls and a pink top that angled and tapered off to one side.
"…Zel…da?" The dark sorceress listened to her bright counterpart. The princess had survived.
"Relax, Sage of Darkness," she said, holding up the dark, wounded girl. "I will see to it that you are well taken care of, but for now, just rest."
"Rest…" she mumbled, and lying in Zelda's arms, the sorceress felt comforted and able to sleep in peace.
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Compared to Besaid Island, the place where the princess found a crippled, half dead Raven fending for her life and stricken with panic, the heavily contrasting architecture and majesty of New Yevon was practically a fanciful utopia, and she blushed at how it dwarfed her once proud kingdom.
She walked freely along the streets, all constructed high above ground with strange metals of blues and silvers and carpeting of bright red in the places where the clergy of their religion frequented the most. Arching pillars lined many such walkways, dipped beneath water that flowed with a sound similar to a freshly flowing river in untouched nature. The architects had clearly aimed at making New Yevon an inviting place to all who visited or held a permanent residence there.
But things were far from that peaceful Zelda had realized after only a few days stay there as an honored guest after mysteriously showing up at their doorstep with no explanation as to how she got there other than a single elderly passerby saying something about a shining ball of light appearing in the night that was shooting out lightning bolts and then shortly after, the princess. Yes, as tranquil as her walk was, she could sense the tension in many of the faces in the city, especially in those who held positions of leadership. They flinched almost unnoticeably whenever some mention of things called "Farplane" and "Fayth" were mentioned. As curious as she was, Zelda didn't dare pry at the problem with the unnecessary generosity that was being granted to her. Baralai, the praetor of the New Yevon community and a young man with a frail voice but a kind and willful heart, was clearly hard pressed to help her find Raven, and yet he still found a way. Fearing that asking for additional help would snap the eggshells that she walked on, she allowed Baralai or others to make their own advances toward the plight that she and Raven bore.
She shook her head thinking about the dark sorceress and stared up into the bright sunlight of this world, recognizing it as being almost identical to the land of Gaia that they were not exactly a part of anymore. Either Raven had arrived in this new time a bit later than she herself had or had been unconscious for much longer. Regardless, Zelda was relieved that she found the Sage of Darkness before she did anything too reckless or before her mind had deteriorated worse than it had already. She had felt the signal of her pain and anguish half a continent away, and was thankful that the fading Triforce mark on her palm, though hardly anything more than a stain now, had allowed her to keep a slight bond with the sages and inevitably Raven as well.
The princess bent down, unlaced her knee-high, black leather boots and dipped her feet into the chilly water with a rush of pleasure tickling up her spine and down her arms. It was hardly the action of a noble figure, but she had briefly asked one of the priests if the water flowing there served as the town's drinking supply, and the answer of 'no' had settled her decision. It helped her think, and that was important.
As Princess Zelda Hyrule, once greatly connected to the Hero of Time in the past, she was sensitive to the flow of epochs and found herself more easily accepting of the fact that she might indeed be on the same planet as when they attempted to finish off Zero prematurely, except a thousand years or more into the future, and yet she was resigned to kick at the water underneath the pillars of this royal city instead of returning to the proper time where Mega Man X could be in any manner of danger. She knew of no way to return except by the Master Sword or the once fabled Ocarina of Time that the last Hero of Time had. But the former was with X in the past and the latter… well, no one really knew where the sky blue instrument was anymore. She imagined that it had vanished along with the last hero.
Two young women presumably in their twenties approached, one with a gentle stride and the other with a bubbly and erratic skip as the two chatted and giggled with each other. Zelda paid little heed at first, but when she noticed the praetor Baralai following directly behind, she immediately stood and laced her boots swiftly.
She finished just as they all arrived in front of her. The one with the gentle stride surprised her with excitement. She wore a white shirt of sorts was split in a V almost below her navel with a black symbol of some sort spidering and curving from one side of the V to the other. Her hair, fairly plain brown in color, was exceptionally long and braded, and yet some of her hair did not fall into the tightly rung column that swung behind her back and was instead cut shorter than shoulder length. She wore a similar half-skirt compared to Zelda's that covered her right leg with a splash of blues and whites, and she had a firm fitting garment that covered perhaps a third of her thighs at most and it met the bottom of her upper outfit perfectly. She even wore black laced knees high boots that were slightly thinner than Zelda's, but otherwise almost identical.
"You must be Zelda!" the woman said exuberantly. "I've been so excited to meet you."
"Miss Zelda," Baralai bowed gently with a gesture of his palm and a proud but soft smile, "this is the Lady Yuna, the High Summoner and leader of New Yevon."
"Oh, stop," replied the woman whose seeming importance made Zelda humble herself with a slow and deep mixture of bow and curtsy. She apparently was referring to both Baralai and Zelda when she made the reply. "I'm an ex-summoner, Baralai, seeing as how there aren't any aeons left to summon."
Zelda lifted her eyes much faster than her return to a relaxed stance. No aeons? She vaguely learned that they existed in Gaia's past. Why not here? She noticed the other woman accompanying Yuna, hardly a woman except by the shape of her body that she had no problem exposing to all those around her, and she was bouncing back and forth to a silent beat in her head with nothing more than a small white bikini and a heavily pocketed sky blue mini skirt that carried everything she need since the rest of her outfit could contain nothing but small areas of skin. Her hair was intricately woven into many tiny blonde braids that formed a small tower of patterned hair on her head.
"And you know that I'm not the head of New Yevon," Yuna continued, breaking Zelda's focus away from the girl. "No matter how much you all ask me, I'm doing my own thing, and right now that's speaking with Zelda here." She turned to the lightly dressed girl. "Isn't that right, Rikku?"
"You bethca!" the girl hopped as if her shoes were spring loaded. "Nice to meet you!"
The princess found her arm being yanked exuberantly by the girl. "It's… my pleasure," she replied. "But what would someone as significant as you want to speak to me about?"
"About where you come from," Yuna stared with an overwhelming awe that made her and Rikku bounce with excitement.
"Do you think?" Rikku giggled.
"Oh, I hope so!" the Lady Yuna bubbled back.
Baralai glanced sideways at princess Zelda and bowed to the trio of girls. "By your leave, Lady Yuna, Miss Rikku, Miss Zelda. If you require anything, do not hesitate to come to the temple and ask."
They all nodded and Baralai headed back the way Zelda had come from with his jade robes swinging as he strode.
The princess turned to the two, thinking how much she would rather be dipping her feet than having something new dropped onto her. At least they seemed pleasant enough, but their giddiness had a way of irritating that she disliked much more when the realization arose that Raven would probably find them similarly annoying. Zelda, on that note, deliberately began to take a slow walking place to the building where Raven rested, not far from the temple where Baralai headed.
"So what do you want to know about where I come from?" Zelda asked them simply.
"Ooh, ooh!" Rikku piped up. "Do you know a guy named Tidus?"
"Rikku!" the Lady Yuna snapped, but with the playfulness of camaraderie and friendship.
The High Summoner? Zelda wondered how exactly she earned that title, whatever it meant aside from being able to summon aeons like people with red materia could in the past.
"Like I also told Baralai, I don't know a man by the name of Tidus. I'm sorry. Why do you want to know?"
"Well," began Yuna, suddenly forlorn at the response. "We thought you might be… you know… from the same time as he was."
Zelda turned and held up her hand commandingly. Without the regal adorning that she used to dress with when she once ruled a kingdom she was worried that her attempt at taking authority would be scoffed at, but Rikku and Yuna stopped abruptly and made the hesitant and awkward face that indicated apology. Rikku even managed to halt her liveliness for a moment to listen as they walked.
"I do not appreciate the fact that you aware of that," Zelda tried to respect them while piercing them with a condescending glare too. "Please do not spread that information around. It will only cause trouble that Raven and I do not need."
"Oh, right, sorry!" Rikku grinned.
"I'll make sure not to tell anyone," Yuna added, "but won't it eventually get out anyway? The two of you look a lot different. People are bound to ask."
"Nothing personal, I assure you, but once we find a way back, we plan to leave."
Three pairs of footsteps turned into one by itself.
"What now?" Zelda grumbled with regal distaste for this world growing by the minute.
"Well…" Rikku began bashfully, "the last person who came here… wasn't really…"
"…Real," the Lady Yuna finished forlornly.
Zelda stared down at her feet and breathed deeply, biting her lip while clenching white-knuckled fists close to her chest.
"I know for a fact that the person whom you long for is far different than I am. I have traveled across light years to this planet in its past to stop an ancient calamity from taking an ultimately eternal hold on the universe in all times. In trying to do that I was thrown into the future of that planet; the land that you live in. I have witnessed timeless heroes come and go, and I hold the power to change fate in my hands, blessedly given by the Triforce of Wisdom, a power I am sure you cannot even comprehend. Do not try to convince me that I am some sort of 'Dream of the Fayth,' whatever that may be."
A tiny and frail gasp leapt from Yuna's mouth before her hands deftly covered it.
"I do not normally hear people's thoughts without deliberately listening to them, but yours are so carelessly on the edge of your consciousness that you may as well shout them in my ears," Zelda fixatedly stared.
A sharp twitch. The princess knew immediately that Raven was awake again, and her chest began to beat strangely fast.
"I must leave," Zelda said, turning on the Lady Yuna and her companion Rikku to hurry across a substantial section of the town.
It was the first time she had sprinted since the donning of her new outfit. Her half-skirt streamed gently behind her, caressing against her legs but not interfering, and she felt the tight tug of the thick leather boots absorbing the impact as she ran, ignoring the many who glanced at her pointed ears and remarkable blonde hair strangely. She gave little thought to it aside from playing out a brief scenario in her mind, shouting to the world that she thought their ears were just as unusual. But most important was Raven and making sure she was with someone familiar when she awoke for the fourth time this day.
At a small villa on the edge of that part of town, hanging high above the ground as much of the city was a construct of vertical mastery, she sensed Raven's heart rate as though it was her own, and she felt her breathing turn heavy as she reached for the door of the dome-like, multi-tiered building with its mixes of blues, whites and purples jutting out excitedly.
She hurried through the interweaving flaps of thick, colorful fabric that served as a door and she was greeted harshly by a mind tingling sting as the rays of light faded behind the curtained portal, closing with the lack of wind to keep it aloft from its neutral hanging position.
"You..." echoed a strained and bitter voice through Zelda's triangular ears. "What have you done? You've taken him from me!" he snarled.
Deep amethyst swirls of dim light spun and weaved together, mixing with crimson and the deepest black. A shadowy, seething Raven half-appeared through it in some pseudo corporeal manner. Her eyes moved erratically, trying to focus on the former princess, whose fingers fought against the urge to tremble as she bit her lip hard and breathed.
"I did what I had to do, Raven," Zelda spoke slowly and calmly to the Sage of Darkness.
"Why?" Raven insisted as though she had not heard. "Why!"
"Your link has been severed," Zelda raised her voice, and readied her arms at a wide distance from each other that would allow her to rapidly fire an arrow of light if need be.
"No... you took him from me!" she spat, delirious and staggering and beginning to become more physical than before. "If I had just had more time to search... I would have found him, but you..."
Zelda sensed the weakness in Raven taking hold. She could see the broken arm in its sling bearing down on her efforts to expel her rage and distress. Her eyes glowed erratically, white, blue, purple, and then ceased to glow at all, becoming a glossy mixture of bloodshot cream with deep hues of a blank night at its center. The energies that made her form intimidating wisped away, and Zelda stood tall as the dark sorceress began to shake at the knees.
"No... no..." Raven muttered before collapsing into Zelda's arms.
The princess took her and laid her to rest once again, wondering if the next time she woke she would strain herself to exhaustion once again. She simply couldn't handle the fact that Mega Man X had been taken from her; that the link had been forcibly torn when they had traveled through a tunnel of indescribable lights and feelings with Zero to this unknown place and time. Worse yet, and possibly unknown to the Sage of Darkness as of that moment, it was Zelda's own memories that she had used to replace the holes that had been made. She shook her head. It could not have been helped. Had she left Raven alone, her consciousness itself may have caved in and left her unable to function, possibly unable to even live under the mental strain. She reaffirmed herself that she made the right choice, albeit a painful one for the poor dark girl who had begun breathing normally under the warmth of a fragmented sunlight spreading through the patterns of a tapestry above the deep oak bed that she was placed with care on. Zelda pulled a blanket of deep blue over Raven's decelerating body, and a wisp of shadow and chilling air moved past her.
She spun.
"S-sage of Light?"
Without a sound, the brown cloaked figure stood upright in the entrance to Raven's bedchamber and gave a firm nod and he showed no indication that he had entered the room or the building by any standard means. The metallic red boots still peeked out beneath the bottom of his cloak, but the rest of him, save for a pair of pale but smooth lips that were only partially shadowed by the cloak and the wide black visor that covered his eyes, still remained a mystery, but one that Zelda was overcome with excitement to see.
"You're... how... it's, I..." her hands fumbled around him, wanting to touch but not quite daring to, and yet as she calmed her body language to a more regal manner, she still felt a tingling around the front of her waist at his presence.
"It's good to see you," she bowed her own head.
"You're surprised?" he asked.
"Well, yes," she smiled lightly, realizing she had been averting her eyes from him and quickly switching to making too much eye contact. "We were told that we're a thousand years into the future. I suppose we can't be if you're..."
"You are over a thousand years in Gaia's future, in spite of my presence here, actually," he stated. "And I'm sure you're wondering how exactly it's possible I'm here as well. The answer is remarkably simple."
Zelda angled her line of vision to the side, thinking this time instead of hiding the awkwardness of the sudden reunion. "You have the same power to travel through time as the ultimate evil, Zero?"
The sage nodded. "In fact, X, Raven, and even you have the power to do so, buried deep within. You just need to find it."
Her eyes widened. "Then we can get back to where we belong right now!" Zelda said joyously, but the sage quickly shook his head and held out his white-gloved hand to quiet her excitement.
"You have things you need to do here, just the two of you."
Zelda shook her head, confused. "What could we possibly need to do centuries away from where the Hero and everyone else are?" she asked.
The Sage moved past her with his cloak swaying delicately. He opened the blinds, extinguishing the pattern that shone through and replacing it with warm beams of sunlight that lit up the room. Zelda joined his side tentatively, wondering what his eyes looked like beneath his visor. She imagined a gentle blue and then a pale crimson much like her own. In the few seconds of silence spent next to each other, she tried on so many eye colors for the sage. They all looked stunning.
"On the very day that my..."
"Your what?" Zelda asked tenderly, and she felt for his hand beneath the tattered sleeve of his cloak.
"On the very day that Mega Man X and the other exist in right now, a man is being born. That man's son will eventually come to be the man who travels into the future; into this place. The one they accuse of being a dream... he is very real, but he is trapped between existence and its opposite. The force that brought him to the future as a savior could not make him fully real. Hence why they consider him to be a sort of illusion or dream."
"A dream of the Fayth? Tidus?"
Beneath the shades that covered his face, Zelda sensed his eyes looking toward her (the color still perplexing her), and his lips twitched for a moment into something that resembled a smile.
"Precisely. That man who is half real... he is the Sage of Water. Find him and the sacred blade called Brotherhood. It, like the Master Sword and the young Raven's Red Lotus, gives the wielder the power to change destiny."
"Yes, Sage of Light," said Zelda. Her hand still felt his. It was warm. Her heart almost skipped as their joined hands rose up, but she blushed and turned away as he stared at the scarred and scabbed knuckles on the fingers that were at one time not as worn as they were now. Her body felt as though it shrunk under his glare, and yet unusual warmth filled her along with it.
"They're healing well," he said quietly. "The scars will probably be there for years. Maybe the rest of your life."
Zelda looked at her own hands, wrought with anger she had mauled them.
"I can heal them... if you'd like," he said even more quietly, but in a way she had yet to hear escape from his lips. His voice was lighter and more caring. It sounded familiar, as brief as it was. Warm and welcoming, Zelda was tempted to nod at the Sage of Light's offer. But after a moment's contemplation, trading glances at the clouds in the sky through the open window with the blackened bits of dry scarred tissue, she pulled her hand away.
"No," she said, almost inaudibly. "I gave myself these. They have to stay, if only for the sake of reminding me not to lose control like that again."
"A wise answer," he grinned, adding some facial gesture that was incomplete beneath the veils he wore.
Raven suddenly stirred, twisting the blankets as her body adjusted itself. Then she went motionless again.
"If only I knew what to do about her," Zelda sighed, but before she finished her sentence, the Sage of Light had already moved toward the dark sorceress with an out stretched hand. Using something unknown to Zelda, he cut off Raven's cast and placed one hand over the swollen arm and the other on her face, clasping across one cheek. An aura of golden yellow surrounded both of them, the sage's flickering with more intensity than the gentle one that encompassed Raven's arm and face. Zelda heard a tiny grunt escape the Sage of Light's mouth just at the moment that whatever he had done ceased.
He stood quickly and headed for the curtain portal at the building without saying anything, and Zelda rushed after him.
"Raven will..." he spoke ahead of her, "be much more... agreeable, I think, when she wakes."
"But wait, where are you going? Can't you tell me more? Stay longer, please," she insisted.
"One more thing," he said firmly. "Find the Sage of Water as quickly as you can. Zero's presence... how can I explain this... he, in a sense, transcends time. As the final clash between the Hero of Time, the sages, and the ultimate evil draws closer, his influence will spread, but not just across planets and galaxies, but to all time, poisoning existence at every corner, every second, and every imaginable place. This world and many others are going to start to feel his wrath, regardless of the outcome between Mega Man X and Zero. That is how powerful he is."
Zelda continued to follow him with urgency, speechless at the impact of what had just been explained to her in the span of thirty seconds. "Wait... how can that..."
His body dissolved into a stream of red and brown, highlighted by streaks of reflective white, and he vanished with a snap, leaving no trace as his pure energy shot through the ceiling like a ghostly bullet.