XXXVIII
The Oncoming Storm
They travelled under a tumultuous sky. Mammatus clouds the colour of brown ochre swelled, while yonder, hazy, drifting columns signalled the western coast of the Thunder Plains approached.
The S. S. Discovery quivered in the maws of a rocky bay left slick and battered by a thousand years of elemental fury. Beyond a retreated strip of pebbled beach, captain Zenedine through his spyglass spotted a hollow in the rock through which his passengers might climb. He communicated non-verbally to one of his lent Al Bhed deck hands, who flung the ship's wheel a couple of revolutions clockwise.
Waves ganged up on them, lashing cold froth onto the deck. The exciting, metallic smell of ozone started in the air. Zenedine heeded the warning and cast anchor a hundred feet from shore for the unseen threat of hull-shredding rocks.
The hatch leading down to the lower rooms clanged against the deck with a upsurge of wind as Zenedine opened it. His heavy booted feet thumped through the timber steps in his haste to reach Braska's door.
"Come."
Upon entering, Zenedine absorbed a scene of striking organisation. Braska's escritoire was clean and dusted, his rack made with an obsessive-compulsiveness only Auron could equal. A single military rucksack sat at the summoner's feet, buckled straps straining to withhold its contents.
"Braska. It's time."
He followed the captain into the howling environs above deck and the headwind was fierce enough to coax tears from the outer corners of his eyes. Braska was trailed by his guardians, also with backpack straps digging into their shoulders, also masked by the same dignified apprehension.
What a welcoming party for their long-awaited return to Spiran land: the Thunder Plains had scorched, buried and forgotten many a voyager, and all but did for them last time. Those it had not entombed had turned into the tough and wily fiends that prowled the plains. In a land this desolate, only the most unscrupulously strong endured. Only those beasts that drew sustenance from the perpetual white hot bolts that whipped at their tempered hides. Some of them were of pure static charge, suspending chunks of ore together in some illusion of form, betraying the embers of what was once a human mind.
As Auron warily secured one foot after the other in the ratlines of a rope ladder hanging from the outside of the hull, he sensed a dead weight whoosh past the edge of his personal space and then heard a detonation above the sharp wrawl of the wind. A white, bubbling wake blossomed in the water as Jecht buoyed to the surface.
"You fool, Jecht! There could have been rocks!"
"Come on in, Auron," Jecht hollered back, momentarily submersed by a spike in the ocean. "The water's fine!"
Auron released a captive breath and his grip left the rope. As the cold rushed up his body, flooding the space between his inner breastplate and bare chest, a grimace twisted his face.
"Not a swimmer, are ya!"
"Not. If I. Can help it!"
"I thought we was supposed to be landin' at Macarena Lake, anyway!"
"Don't be dense, Jecht." Auron spluttered as seawater siphoned into his mouth. "We took a big detour, remember, and we didn't replenish our food stocks."
Braska made his tremulous way down the rope ladder towards the same frigid fate.
"It is bitterly cold, milord," Auron yelled, "But I believe the current is safe."
The summoner showed him the most smug of smiles before freezing the top nine inches of the ocean, thereby fashioning a strip for him to land upon quite safely. He tugged at a bothersome crease in his robe.
"That's magic, gentlemen."
The tides before his footfalls would decelerate and set like fired clay as the raft behind him fragmented and sank, while his stalwarts warred with the robust swell abreast him. Their rocky enclave was slick with the residue of waves, under a barrage of brawling blows and the crash of a mighty cymbal frenziedly in the night; Jecht in particular struggled to find purchase with his bare feet.
So entrenched in the atavistic need to find terra firma, Braska had forgotten they were still in eye shot of Zenedine, who had not moved since they left the ship ten minutes before. His old ward, the ferryman with whom he had lived more than anyone save his wife and daughter, cut a statuesque figure, finally ground down to his bones, bereft of the seafaring spirit from when they met some fifteen years ago, his expression locked in a portrait of melancholy. Braska was surely looking in a mirror.
He did what was natural to him: enact the prayer of Yevon, the nod for Zenedine to go about the remainder of his life. The captain barked some blunt demand and the anchor was aweigh. As the S. S. Discovery eloped with the darkness, Zenedine proffered a steady thumbs-up until his features dimmed and he was rendered a shadow.
"Turn around, walk away and don't look back."
To whom was Braska's instruction directed?
The rain bounced off of the ground in its ferocity as lightning coiled in a live sky. Near bolts split their sight, leaving kaleidoscopic swarms of insects bursting outwards towards their peripheries. The crack-boom of machina rifles from a valley hurtled at them and, alas for their nerves, was arbitrary in when and where a hundred thousand amps might lash next.
They intuited the potential for an unceremonious death like that of the architect who designed the monolithic lightning rods that patterned the plains. And bolts were not the only threat. Fiends congregated in the spaces where they sensed lightning would strike, making the radii of the rods the only safe zones for miles. Shuttles had to be fleet and sure-footed, and the pilgrims were glad the fiends were more attentive of the heavens than them.
The location of the Bilghen Memorial Travel Agency was like a Yevon-sent test in itself, as when the front door catapulted open only with a nudge of Auron's tremoring hand, he felt every axon in his body burning. He was jaded in the deep flesh around his bones and dubious a good night's sleep would be enough to fix him.
Before, even with Jecht's buffoonery, they had a vernal, naïve energy that saw them through it. This time was different. They were weathered, heavy, older. This was the true test of the pilgrimage. Starting was easy, but finishing was monstrous to visualise and to realise. Especially when summoner and guardian, friends, knew what finishing meant.
From the depths of their coin purse they could rally just enough gil to afford a double bed for the night, with Jecht zipped up in chrysalis on the floor. Auron, exhausted, did not propose shifts and instead had the wand for the window blinds delicately propped against the door. All three men, in spite of the war outside, fell into the insensate and lawless realm of dreams.
Through the low, phosphorescent caverns and over high, snowy terrain, Braska seemed to glide inches above the ground, but at speeds he could not achieve in a sprint. He discovered himself on a claw-scarred knoll in the Calm Lands. The sun was veiled by a funeral smog as pillars of water cycloned up in the distance, dizzyingly high where he could no longer discern them from a skyline threatened by dark, encroaching storm clouds.
In a trice, Sin was up over him with a woosh that depressed the air. Its gravitational pull brought the summoner's heels from the grass. Braska pushed his stave to the sky in readiness. But Sin then spoke in a disorienting jumble of female cries and broken thoughts vomited into blocks of words that made no sense. The terror plunged into his gut when he recognised it as Jinni's voice. As her torment sank to the bed of his mind, one sentence found leverage in his brain, whispering without teeth, on a loop.
...Who says Sin is objective? Everyone has their own personal Sin...
They found each other. She dangled with a broken neck from Sin's undercarriage via a fibrous umbilical cord that melded into the necrosed flesh of her head, in the same way tendon becomes bone. Her nude body was chafed by sand, bloated, only owning one arm and a leg to the knee; eyeless sockets held him in contempt.
Aghast, he fled.
Across the baked deserts of Navika continued the pursuit. Braska felt like he was running through mud, his lungs ignited, but Sin was a mocking fifty yards back, revelling in but the chase. Through the windy streets of Bevelle the destroyer hunted him, its vacuumous orifice at foot level, devouring the road and the buildings, the very reality behind him. Braska barged faceless people to the ground in his desperation to escape, looked back as they stretched into Sin's gullet like gum yanked from tree bark. The cacophonous music of stone being wrenched from its foundations, shards of glass slicing his eardrums and the recurring crescendo of lives ending, suited Sin's miserable orchestra.
The summoner's foot planted in the hem of his robe and he was down on the cobblestone. His eyes mapped the route of his scattered stave and up to the heterochromic eyes of little Yuna at the front door of their old home; a doll hung limp from her grasp. Braska's bottom lip trembled as a pall enveloped him.
He was flying again. Sin had swallowed all the world, the Calm Lands too, and it was there he was once more in anticipation of duelling with the beast. His staff cut down and round with a trail of pyreflies, autarchic of his free will. He twiddled it between finger and thumb as his body became a dervish of summoning energy. Invisible hands eased him six feet into the air, radiating with that familiar spectral whine, and then a violent clench of each wrist; bruises formed instantly. Each arm became one side in a tug of war, jerked bolt outright with enough force to dislocate his shoulders.
A runnel of blood leaked from his mouth and stained the brilliant white of his cowl. His lips peeled back to expose teeth filmed with thin orange. In a wet snap, Braska's sky went briefly red. A sinewy taloned arm protruded from the summoner's chest, caked in visceral blood, his own blood. The being began to inch itself from the ghastly scissure as Braska stared dumbfounded.
When the birth was complete, a shrivelled summoner slumped back to earth, the skin around his face pulled taut to the skull. He beheld the top-heavy form of the beautiful Final Aeon that had shed him, growing in stature as it waylaid Sin with muscular strikes. He looked down at his skeletal hands, doused in gore, bone fragments and other unidentifiable organic elements. Tears began to rivulet in the wrinkles of his face. In these final moments, he was entirely alone as an insectile spectator to a clash of gods.
In a geriatric voice, he wheezed his final words, "This is how… it was meant to end…?"
Time wound down to a fraction. The Final Aeon retracted its arm, the terrain of muscles in its shoulder and back knotting for a moment, and the fist pushed through like a piston, smashing Sin with a skin-splitting bang. A blinding flare erupted from Sin's shell, the split of an atom deep within it, and the curling light bloated out, disintegrating everything: Sin, the Aeon, the cliffs imploded like dominoes, and when it finally reached him, it blew the flesh from his bones like slow-cooked pork.
His limbs twitched in myclonic jerks as he plunged from a crumbling balcony. Auron was plummeting from miles above Spira, in a place where the air did not resist and the horizon bowed under the weight of darkness. He was screaming silence into a void. Tiny, assured fingers grasped his; the little girl with a little smile. His shepherd.
For a spell, Auron was centred and Zen. Thoughts of death brought peace and the promise of transition, until he felt her fingers unravelling from his. As he squeezed harder, the more she slipped. With a flinch, she was drifting away from him with hateful, vanishing eyes.
He was blanketed in the turbulence of thunder clouds, unable to distinguish up from down. Air rushed past his ears as existential terror seeped through him again. The crimson ocean below started to add definition: he could make out the waves now, riotous and dissonant.
As he hit, it was all he could do to brace himself. But he was not dead, or even in water. He had fallen into the black antimatter of the soul, where sunbeams above the surface could not pierce. Pyreflies languished like slow motion meteors, their lambent heads casting off cool blues and magentas along the flagellum. Auron was enraptured by them, the only lights in light years of nonexistence. Above their childly whimpers, he was convinced he could hear a steady scream from above rising, or indeed falling, until it was right on top of his position.
He must have noticed Braska partly by the sound of his voice, his instincts and the split-second he had to react after seeing him. His arm extended true and firm, but late. The summoner kept falling beyond him with hateful, vanishing eyes until he was drowned in the abyss, forever lost.
A fire exit door bust open into the alleyway out back of Vox Acid and Jecht tumbled through, grappling with a denim-clad strumpet. Throwing her shoulder blades to the brick, he thrust his tongue into her mouth with the sang-froid of a soused Lothario. He surfaced for air, and she breathed vowels into and around him as he went for seconds.
"My place or yours? Missus is takin' my boy to her ma's fer the weekend." he slurred.
Jecht ran his ruttish gaze over her at length, away from the strobes and the flattering qualities of murky club ambience. He smuggled a fleeting wince, was happy he had gotten away with it. She wore downy, feathered blonde hair and raccoon mascara. Real retro, when retro wasn't 'in'. A shock of cheap fuchsia lipstick smeared across her chin, his too in all reckoning. The neon BAR sign sprinkled garish contrast over her, sketched gaunt shadows under her crooked nose and cheekbones. Combat scars marched across her face and jawline. There was even an old wound running across her windpipe!
Oh, she'd better not one of them self-harmin' freaks. Face is a write-off.
Gratefully, a push-up bra gave her breasts an anti-gravity Jecht needed to see. Focussing on the body, he groped her further in the hovercab, spotting the occasional eyes in the rear view of a bored, horny driver. A semi pressed into her hip as he ground against her. It was a brisk five minute route from B-North to A-East, in which time Jecht had whispered all manner of promises to her as he nibbled on her ear lobe.
Outside Jecht's condominium, they spilt out of the taxi into the gutter. She pitched a shrill laugh into the Zanarkand night. Still giggling into her clavicle, Jecht bear-hugged her to a stand.
"That's thirteen gil, pal."
"I'm the Great Jecht, sports fan. Get bent."
He mouthed the word 'asshole' as the driver revved away in low gear, the vehicle a propagation of his outrage. They went at it again, Jecht extricating her from the sliding sheet doors into the wall. Her backside knocked over a miniature palm tree that met the sidewalk with the crash of terracotta.
With lips still locked, Jecht scaled his eyes up the onion dome of his apartment, beaded in bangles of electric light, little windows into the lives of others. A holo-ring whorled around the summit; it gave him that unacclimatisable out-of-body sensation, with the third-person footage of his latest triumph. Beyond the high rise and the famous Zanarkand arch, storm clouds conspired to wash away his iridescent little fantasy, so he ushered her into the marble lobby.
The maglevator raised them to his floor. He could scarcely concentrate on swipe-carding access into the apartment for her fondling him down below. Into the master bedroom they stumbled; a stray body part blundered into a family photograph en route. In a graceful shift of body shape, she quelled the fervid kinetic energy between them. She made their mambo into a slow dance, and set Jecht down on the foot of the bed.
Her tube top and denim miniskirt went in opposite directions. A pirouette for his consideration.
"Nice." He thought he'd spied a thong riding her hips earlier.
Keeping her knees straight, she bent forwards and touched the tips of her slingbacks, heard Jecht respire from behind her. Holding that pose, she unhooked her bra and let it fall across her forearm. Her back straightened with the demure ease of a cat and she looked over her shoulder with the sexiest, dirtiest expression Jecht could ever remember, before sling-shooting the cups across his forehead.
She thumbed the straps of her thong and laddered it down her thighs. Nude but for her nylons, she stood for his inspection.
A real hard-body... majorly lackin' in the titty department, mind -I mean, seriously, will a boob job kill ya? But, whoo, what a hard-body. Real deal saver... Now, wait. The carpets don't match the drapes!
With a knowing smile, she tugged at her blonde mane and it came free: a wig that disguised the tussled brunette hair of a tomboy. Jecht preferred it. She placed the gum she had been chomping on all night in an ashtray as he beckoned her with a finger.
She was within range. Like a predator, he lurched up, snatching her by the hips and executing a belly-to-belly suplex onto the bed. His Zanarkand Abes white tee came off in a flourish to reveal powerful traps and pectorals. His fingers interlaced with hers, pushing her arms to the headboard, making the most of those pert little ta-tas. He landed a long kiss on her lips, and she reposted with smaller and smaller ones.
"Stop fooling around, Jecht. I have something really important I want to say. I need you. Jecht… I love you."
"That's what all the fans say."
Jecht tried to guide himself in with his hand, but realised he was not quite there yet. A plea for patience as he strummed it for a time. Once he was primed, he entered her, with a vintage Jecht grin on his face, the kind that would have showered her from the cover of every fashion magazine, every sports round-up in the Big Zee. He was bareback, but he sensed an unspoken rule between them that she would be taking the morning-after pill.
Their dance was disjointed and doomed to finish prematurely, but Jecht doubted either of them gave a damn. She was getting a piece of the legend, perhaps more significant than the reality. He was getting his rocks off. Everyone's a winner.
He began to pound his hips back and forth like the porn star he thought he was. As he climbed and climbed on waves of escalating pleasure, the prophecy of a one-on-one flooded his mind's eye. The Blitzball swung past his left shoulder on an inexorable arc towards his right foot. The contact was sweet, through the bottom-centre, on the ball of his ankle. The goalkeeper's flailing right arm was incidental as the ball nestled in the top left corner of the triangle. Goal-line tech not required. In that instant, he felt a part of him leave in the burning pressure release of his genitals. His orgasm was sounded by the official blare of the goal horn.
Upon his return, he half-expected cheers and fireworks, but he could only hear sobbing. He looked down at her. That absurd eye-liner of hers wasn't running, so who was it?
Craning his neck to the left, he saw them: his wife and his son, backlit silhouettes in the doorway. They were motionless and silent save the boy's weeping.
"It's... not what it looks like, baby. Baby! Come back!"
But Linnya was off, tugging Tidus by the arm, with a pace that to Jecht seemed exponential. With only the silk sheets to protect his modesty, he staggered into the corridor. The maglevator doors were already sliding shut. They were gone. Soberness came scattering from around the corner and hit him square between the eyes.
"You blew it this time, bud."