Lucrecia wobbled on unsteady legs, trying to shake off the residual lethargy, – how many years had she slept, she wondered, – and to make sense of the scene she opened her eyes to.
A dozen or so people had, for some reason, dropped face-down on the ground as soon as she managed to pull herself up, and were quietly chanting something that sounded like a prayer; but either it was in a language she didn't know, or she still wasn't completely awake, for she could not recognize a single word. The only person not prostrated in front of her, a boy, was sitting on the ground, staring at her with wide brown eyes. She peered down at him, frowning in concentration; he seemed familiar somehow, although she was almost certain she'd never seen his face before.
"Who are you?" she asked him. "What's going on in here? What are they doing?" She pointed at the praying people. The boy visibly swallowed and shook his head, his wide eyes following her every move.
Lucrecia sighed in frustration, and to give herself a moment to think, started to brush off the rest of crystal shards from her skirt. She wasn't even sure why she'd started to follow the owl. It had seemed familiar, yes; it had reminded her of something that had happened long ago, something important she hadn't quite been able to remember. The name that had resurfaced from some long-forgotten memory, Jenova, had meant something important to her once upon a time, even if she didn't know anymore who or what exactly that was. She'd been forgetting things, forgetting people… her tiny little world had been getting quieter and quieter with time… but still she had been content there, if not happy. The brown owl, a guest from another world, – another time, probably, – had disturbed the flow of her life, made her curious… and that's where it led her.
She glanced at the boy again, this time noticing how battered up he was; there was a bruise under his left eye and scratches all over his face and arms, his lower lip was split, there was blood under his nose. It bothered her. Children should never be beaten up like that. She took a careful step towards him, hoping to get him to calm down somehow and finally talk to him.
A wave of hatred hit her, so sudden and so strong that she nearly toppled over mid-step. She made a short aborted sound of surprise that, to her utter horror, somehow morphed into a quiet angry growl. She felt her lips stretching and opening, showing her teeth. The boy's eyes grew even wider, and he scrambled back on his bottom, kicking out with his legs and seemingly not even noticing the crystal shards he was cutting his palms on. Lucrecia jumped back away from him, confused and terrified. The totally unwarranted hatred of the boy she'd never seen before was coming from inside her, but, somehow, it was separate from her other feelings. As soon as she backed away it quieted down. The boy stilled, breathing heavily, his stare glued to her face. She tried to make an apologetic smile; it didn't seem to work because the boy tensed up even further.
Before Lucrecia could decide what to do, a sound of commotion came from outside the cave. Angry voices, then a sound of something very much like an explosion, more angry voices; finally a small group of people ran inside the cave. These ones didn't wear robes and didn't drop on their faces before her, though their narrowed eyes showed a certain amount of wariness. Three of them stopped midway through the cave, two more ran further towards Lucrecia. One of those two, a young woman whose face resembled the boy's, pulled him up by his hand, calling out to him in the same unfamiliar language. The boy pulled his gaze away from Lucrecia with a visible effort and, following the woman's lead, ran towards the exit.
The remaining person, a black-haired man wearing clothes so dusty that their color was unrecognizable, came closer to her. Lucrecia frowned at him, wary of having another strange bout of hatred, but nothing happened. The alien presence withdrew from the surface of her mind like a snail hiding deep inside its shell. The man's face seemed vaguely familiar; there were feelings, long forgotten, buried deep in her memories that stirred upon seeing it.
The man extended his hand towards her and said, "Lucrecia, come with us. It's unsafe to stay here."
Surprised that she could understand his words, she made a couple of steps after him automatically, but then stopped. "What's going on in here?" she asked him, raking her brain for a name to put with his face but failing to find anything under piles and piles of disconnected memories. "Who are these people? Where do you want me to go?"
Praying people seemed to have started shaking off the insanity that had overcome them, and were beginning to sit up, looking around them with glassy unfocused eyes, as if it was them who had just woken up. One of them started shouting at the man talking to Lucrecia. A few others joined him. Angry voices started to fill the cave, multiplied by the echo.
"We'll explain everything as soon as we're in a safe place. Please." The man made an aborted motion, as if he wanted to take her hand but stopped himself.
Lucrecia looked around again. Some of the strange people were beginning to climb on their feet, although when her gaze fell on them they dropped face down again. She sighed and shook her head. Nothing made sense. "Okay," she said to the man whose speech she at least could understand, "I'll go with you. Where are we going?"
…
Outside of the cave the sun was starting to set, already climbed down to the west enough to hide behind the mountain peaks; the shadows started to flood the valley from the ground up, leaving only treetops and roofs lit by sunlight. Nothing looked like anything Lucrecia remembered of this place. She couldn't be completely sure, of course, but it seemed that before she'd gone to sleep there hadn't been any settlements in the vicinity of her cave, only a narrow shore of a large lake; now there was a stone-paved square with a beautiful but somehow strangely disturbing construction in the middle. It was a white stone building with arched entrances from every side, built in a form of a giant flower bud with awnings in form of leaves over each entrance. The stone was so carefully carved and polished that the building looked delicate, almost weightless. The carved petals on its upper part, folded in shape of a spiral, ended with a long crystal tip shining in the sunlight. At the sides of the square, across from each entrance, stood four tall white stone pillars with crystal spirals on top of them. A dozen sandy paths went running from the square towards small grey stone houses with pointy straw roofs. A wider path, paved with the same gray stone, ran towards a wall stretched between two cliffs, blocking the way out. In the middle of the wall there was a wide hole where the gate was supposed to be. The gate itself, broken and charred, lay on the ground. Several robe-wearing people were lying around it and along the road.
The rest of the group, already mounted on black chocobos, was waiting for her and her companion in front of the cave's entrance. The boy sat behind the woman who retrieved him, – his mother or probably older sister, Lucrecia assumed. Her companion climbed on one of the remaining chocobos, which left Lucrecia standing in front of the only one that didn't have a rider yet. She eyed it warily, unsure if she had ever ridden one before. The man who brought her out of the cave was talking in a hushed tone and a foreign language to an old woman with short white hair and skin brown and wrinkled like a tree bark, and didn't seem to notice Lucrecia's predicament.
She hesitantly touched the soft black feathers of the chocobo's wing. The bird looked at her first with one curious blue eye, then, turning its head, with another, and made a quiet questioning sound. Lucrecia looked between the saddle, the stirrup, and the ground. The distance seemed considerable.
"Let me help," someone said. She flinched and spun around, pressing her back against the chocobo. It was another man, this one with blond sun-bleached hair and blue eyes that glowed green around the pupils. He raised his hands palms forward and took a small step back, shaking his head. "Uh, sorry, I didn't mean to scare you," he said, smiling. "You just seemed to have a, uh, some trouble getting on the chocobo?"
"Um, y-yes, actually," Lucrecia stuttered. "How do I climb on it? I don't remember ever doing it before."
"And Vince, the old oaf, didn't even think of helping you," the man added with a laugh. "Here, hold onto me."
The other man, – apparently, Vince, – finally turned to look at her and seemed properly chastised. "Damn," he muttered, "I forgot that you weren't a fan of chocobo riding. I apologize, Lucrecia."
She didn't answer right away, too busy first climbing on the bird and then trying to find a position in the saddle that didn't make her feel like she was going to fall down any moment. Finally feeling secure enough, she glanced at the man, nodded, and gave him a small smile.
A moment later the old woman spoke something in a loud hoarse voice, turning her chocobo towards the gate, and the group started after her. As they rode past the wall, Lucrecia peered down at what she presumed were the dead bodies, and found out that they were, in fact, just sleeping. One of them, a young woman, was smiling in her sleep, her hands folded under her cheek. Her bald head, just as the heads of the other people, – monks, Lucrecia guessed, – was covered in intricate tattoos. Several wings, a crystal, a circle…
The chocobo jerked, urged to speed up by the old lady's voice. Lucrecia tore her gaze away from the sleeping girl and clung to the reins, silently praying to all gods that were still out there to keep her from falling off the bird.
…
They rode for a long time. Soon after they left the village, several riders lagged behind the main group and disappeared into the distance. A few hours later several other people caught up with the group from the south; this one consisted of a couple of old men, a middle-aged woman, and two little girls. One of the men and the old woman exchanged a few short phrases in the same unfamiliar language, she nodded with a grim expression on her face as if they've confirmed something she was dreading, and the group sped up even more. Lucrecia's ass was already complaining about the prolonged contact with the saddle, but when she asked the black-haired man – Vince – how long was the journey supposed to last, he only shrugged and said that it depended on certain information they were supposed to get later. How much later, was still unknown.
In the darkest hours of night they, thankfully, stopped. The travelers set a camp in a grove of acacia trees beside a small pond. The chocobos, tired from the running, drank some water, ate grains from the sacks provided by their owners, and then sat in a tight group, hid their heads under their wings, and immediately fell asleep; the humans soon followed, so exhausted that most of them weren't even hungry.
Lucrecia didn't feel the need to sleep. She happily changed into the clothes provided for her (the dress she had gone to sleep in was a bad choice for prolonged riding) and, leaving the camp behind, walked down to the pond. The night sky was clear. Insects chirped in the trees. In the pond, a lonely frog was singing a late mating song. Lucrecia lowered herself onto the prickly, half-withered grass, took a deep breath and let it out slowly, closing her eyes and trying to calm down her racing thoughts. Who had entered her dream and woke her up? Why did they do it? What had happened while she'd been asleep? How much time had passed? Who were the people she was now travelling with and why were they running away? Who were the people in the cave and why did they behave like that? She still didn't have any answers; she only knew that someone, for some reason, had woken her up and thrust her into an unfamiliar, confusing, and unwelcome world. She missed the dream already. She hadn't been happy there for a long while, too lonely and too apathetic, but at least it was quiet and peaceful. Living again had already proved to be too much of a hassle, even though she hadn't even spent a single night awake.
The grass rustled under someone's feet. Lucrecia opened her eyes reluctantly, unwilling to give up her solitude so soon. The visitor sat himself down beside her, but not too close, for which she was thankful. It was Vince. The name, unlike the face, didn't stir any memories in her. She looked at him for a few moments but he didn't speak, staring at the still water instead, and she turned away again.
They sat in silence for some time. Stars crawled slowly across the sky. The frog stopped singing, switching to hunting the mosquitoes instead. A night bird glided over their heads, quietly flapped its large wings, – once, twice, – and disappeared over a hill.
Lucrecia was the first to break the silence.
"Did I know you?" she asked without looking at him. "Your face seems familiar."
He didn't answer right away; the longer she waited, the more doubt she felt. Did she even ask the question aloud or only thought she did?
"Yes," he finally said, his voice barely above the voices of the insects. "Yes, you did. You don't remember?"
"I'm not sure what I remember," she confessed. "I feel like I've lived a hundred of lifetimes since I went to sleep the last time, and all those memories are so tangled up that I don't know anymore what happened in my real life and what I dreamed. How long had I dreamed?"
He hummed his understanding. "Yes, you've spend quite a long time sleeping... In a few years it will be eight hundred years since Meteorfall. My name is Vincent Valentine. Maybe it will help you remember."
She frowned. This name seemed to be familiar, unlike Vince, but still, the information she needed was hidden too deep under layers of other memories. "Maybe I'll need to obtain some archeological equipment to dig it up." The thought made her laugh out loud.
Vincent looked at her, lifting his eyebrow. "It's nothing," she said, still giggling. "I just thought that my memory is like an ancient settlement now. Cultural layers upon cultural layers upon cultural layers, hard to get to the bottom of it."
He smiled, but it was a sad smile. She sighed and asked the question that bothered her more than anything.
"Who woke me up and why? Do you know?"
Again, he hesitated with the answer for a few moments.
"There had been some… problems," he finally said, choosing the words with visible caution. "Which, we think, can be connected to you. That's why we decided to wake you up."
"But I was asleep," she countered, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. "Whatever happened in the world, I had nothing to do with that."
"That's probably true," he muttered.
Silence fell again. The sky was slowly starting to brighten. The first morning bird woke up and tried its voice with an uncertain short tune.
"Why do you think that that… problem… is connected to me?" she asked finally.
This time, he was silent a lot longer. The frog, satiated with the mosquitoes, resumed its croaking. More birds woke up and started singing; soon the people will be getting up too.
"So?" she urged, turning to him. He was looking down at his crossed hands, frowning deeply, as if the problem was hiding in them.
"It's Sephiroth," he said with a sigh, looking up at her.
"S-Sephiroth?" She wasn't sure if she heard it right. "What does my son have to do with anything? He's just a boy!"
"In your dream, he is," the man said. "But in reality…"
The memories suddenly flooded her, – the man who visited her dream and disrupted it, Rocket Town and the newspaper -
"He's dead," she whispered, barely keeping herself from sobbing in resurfaced grief. "He grew up and died before I went to sleep the last time."
"But you kept him alive in your dream," the man said.
She looked at him through wet eyelashes. "Yes, I did," she admitted. "I promised him… I promised that I'd never let him disappear."
Vincent nodded. His face was grim. "And maybe that's the reason he keeps coming back," he said.
The sounds of the early morning, – birds, insects, the frog, – grew distant, as if she was hearing them from the other side of a tunnel. She stared at the man with wide eyes, her mouth hanging open. What did he mean?
"What do you mean, he keeps coming back?" she asked, her own voice just as distant.
"Well," Vincent fidgeted in place, "maybe you should wait a little. There are people who can explain this better-"
"No," she interrupted. "I want to hear it right now."
"Okay." He sighed. "It's not exactly him that's coming back, more like a shadow of him. It has his appearance and his battle skills, or at least some of them… but it's not a human. It doesn't talk like a human, doesn't behave like one. It's more like a… a vengeful ghost, maybe, but with time it grows very much corporeal… until we kill it. Then it disappears for decades, sometimes even centuries. But it always comes back sooner or later."
"And you think it's me who brings this ghost back," Lucrecia finished. "And you decided it was I because I was dreaming of Sephiroth. But, Vincent, he's five years old in my dream! And there's nothing, absolutely nothing vengeful about him!"
Vincent shook his head. "As I said, there are people who can explain it better."
"Then they better do it soon, or I'll go back to my cave," she threatened, standing up, and headed back towards the camp.
…
The explanation still had to wait. Lucrecia had been determined to demand it as soon as the group woke up, but Vincent, the blond man, and the old woman (who spoke common language, albeit broken) all persuaded her to wait until they were in a safe place. After a hasty breakfast the journey continued.
Hours later, when it was long past midday, another small group joined them, a small one; only two women, one very young and one a little older. Lucrecia didn't look around anymore, instead staring at the neck of her chocobo and letting the thoughts turn in circles inside her head.
"Are they right? Am I the one who keeps Sephiroth's ghost coming back?"
"No, it can't be. I dream him as a little boy. If it was me, wouldn't he look like a little boy outside the dream too?"
"But if I bring him back without even knowing it, couldn't I inadvertently bring him back as an adult instead of a child?"
"No, no, it can't be. Am I that out of control of myself? No, it can't be me."
"Who is it, then?"
"Not me!"
"But what if it was me?"
There was a name connected tightly to these thoughts, the name she knew but couldn't quite remember who or what it belonged to, the name that she felt held all the answers.
Jenova.
…
Lucrecia didn't even realize the chocobo had stopped until someone touched her arm. Startled, she flinched so bad she very nearly fell off the bird, and almost screamed, before she finally saw who it was.
"Hey, are you alright?" asked the blond man, – Cloud, she learned at the yesterday's stop, – looking up at her with concern.
She let go of the reins (the leather strap left deep indents across her palms) and brushed her wind-tousled hair off of her face.
"Yes, I was just thinking about everything. So much has happened in so short time… I'm still not completely certain I'm not having an especially weird dream," she joked, smiling at him. For some reason, talking to him was a lot easier than to anybody else; Vincent was a familiar face, but this man was familiar on some deeper level.
(Jenova, whispered something deep inside her mind.)
"I can totally understand that," the man said with a sympathetic wince. "But we need to get on the ship now, so you have to dismount."
"Oh!" She looked around, and sure, they were on a shore. Lazy waves licked the sand with a quiet hiss. A boat was gliding through the shallow water, already taking the first group of people and chocobos to the ship. With two large wheels on each side, the ship looked a lot like a steamboat but lacked a chimney. "Eight hundreds year into the future," she thought. "The descendants probably thought of a better fuel than coal… or Mako."
…
As soon as they arrived to the ship, Cloud took her to a cabin where the old woman was waiting, together with Vincent and a handful of other people, mostly old men and women. The boy's mother (sister?) was also there.
"Is this the safe place?" Lucrecia asked the room at large.
Vincent confirmed it with a nod. "Yes, we're safe here, at least for now. There was a group of monks chasing after us, but we managed to lure them the wrong way."
"So they were monks," she hummed, lowering herself onto one of the empty seats. "And why were they chasing after you? Did you rob their temple?"
"They were monks of the Crystal Temple," the old woman, the leader of the group, said. "And yes, you can say that we robbed their temple… robbed it of their holiest artifact… stole their goddess from her crystal."
"Their… goddess?" Lucrecia looked over the people at the table. "Crystal? Crystal Temple? Oh. Do you mean… they thought I was a goddess?"
Nods and a murmur of agreement confirmed her suspicion.
"But I'm not a goddess!" she exclaimed, getting up from her chair. "You know that, right?"
"Yes, we are aware of that," the leader said. "However, their Temple's teachings declare you as the Goddess of the Roads, – fates of everyone living in the world. They believe that you dream people's fates in your dreams so no one loses their way… and there's a prophecy that once you wake up, all fates will come to an end and the Apocalypse will start. That people who were faithful will go to your island paradise, and people who weren't will be left on Gaia, to forever wander without a path, in darkness and despair."
"Oh." Lucrecia sat back, hear head spinning. "That explains why they all started praying when I woke up. But why would they think that?"
The old woman sighed. "Well, the cult started about four hundred years ago with a man named Wayless Durak. He was way too fond of curiel nectar and spent most of his life, well, hallucinating after drinking said nectar. One day he heard strange whispers coming from the mountains and went to look for the source… and in the end, came to your cave. He spent a long time in there, listening to the voices that probably were just in his head. When he emerged, he declared himself a new man. He picked a new name, and since then called himself the Crystal Sage, and spent years spreading the word about the Goddess in the Crystal. At first no one would listen to him, but as time passed more people started hearing those strange whispers, and more joined his cult. The Crystal Temple was never universally popular, but it has enough followers all over the world, including very wealthy ones; most of them join because of the whispers that they attribute to Goddess communicating with them-"
"That's ridiculous," Lucrecia interrupted. "People consider me a goddess because someone had auditory hallucinations from toxic nectar? That's-"
"The way religions are born," the old woman finished, smiling. "It's alright, dear. We know you are not a goddess. You are Sephiroth's mother, and were an ordinary person until the experiments changed you into something… a lot less ordinary that that."
"The experiments? What experiments?" Lucrecia asked, directing it more to herself than the woman, and frowned, trying to dig into her memories. It was there, she was certain, but the memories were elusive; as soon as she seemed to take a hold of one of them, it got away and disappeared again under everything else. "I can't remember," she confessed finally, after a few moments.
The people exchanged glances and a few hushed phrases. The old woman nodded. "We know you have some trouble remembering things," she said. Others, including Vincent, looked at her with doubt, as if they weren't aware of her thoughts on the matter. "The place we're heading to will probably help you."
"Okay," Lucrecia said slowly. "Could you please at least tell me who you are and what makes you think I'm the one responsible for your problems?"
"I'm Elder Lenna of Cosmo Canyon. These are Elders Refia, Luneth, and Galuf, of the same tribe. Vincent and Cloud are friends of our tribe. Edgar and Solongo are of Gaia's Shepherds tribe. Have you ever heard of Cetra?" Elder Lenna asked of Lucrecia.
Strangely, these memories didn't try to get away when she looked for them. "Yes, they were also known as Ancients," she confirmed. "A nomadic race that traveled all over the world… it's believed that they could communicate to our planet and access its powers directly, without the use of Materia."
"Correct." Lenna nodded at the young woman. "This small tribe that Edgar and Solongo are part of is trying to recreate that."
"Wait," Lucrecia's eyes widened in surprise. "Do you mean to tell me that you were able to… recreate the Ancients? But that… that…" The thought slipped away from her, but she was sure that there were attempts to do so, – maybe with her participation, even? – that went completely unsuccessful.
"We cannot recreate the Cetra race," Solongo said with sadness in her voice. "Too much of their culture and history is irrevocably lost. What we were able to recreate, were the rituals that allow us to develop abilities to commune with the Planet."
"How?" Lucrecia asked, genuinely curious. "I thought those were lost too!"
"They were," Solongo said, "but not completely; a small Wutai martial arts school kept the practice of communing with the elemental spirits, but only limited it to male members. Female members were prohibited from taking part in the rituals because they believed it to be harmful to women. One hundred and twenty years ago my ancestor persuaded her brother to break the rule and teach the ritual to her. It did nothing immediately bad so she continued performing it even while she was pregnant… and found out that her children were much easier to teach it than her or her brother. Since then we've gotten so much better at communing with the Planet that we can now access the Lifestream… well, some of our latest two generations can," she corrected herself, "and access the memories stored in the Library, – I mean, in the Ancient Capital, over at the Northern Continent."
"They called it The Library, too," Lucrecia said slowly. "The Cetra called it that. I remember. You've restored its proper name."
"We weren't aware it was known in your time," another elder, Galuf, said suspiciously.
Lucrecia shook her head. "It wasn't. But I-" she frowned, trying to get a better hold on the memory, but it was slipping away again. Might be connected to those damned experiments, she thought, annoyed at her brain for being uncooperative. "I can't say how exactly, because I can't remember, but somehow I've gotten access to a Cetra's memories. That's how I know it."
The others exchanged another series of quick glances and low murmur.
"And those who said that communing with the Planet was harmful to women," Lucrecia continued, "were not completely wrong… The Cetra weren't just connected to our planet; they were tied to its fate. If the Planet dies, they die too, while humans can leave on a spaceship and start again somewhere else. At least that's how I understand it," she added as an afterthought.
Edgar hummed an agreement. "That's what we suspected but couldn't confirm just yet," he said. "That's why we ask the children, as soon as they're old enough, to choose whether to continue with the training, or abandon it and go back to being ordinary, – well, almost ordinary, as they keep some of the abilities, – humans."
They recreated the Cetra race, Lucrecia thought with amazement. Whatever they say, they recreated it! They did something the whole scientific might of Shin-Ra, the best minds of the time, couldn't do.
The experiments, a fleeting thought came. That's the experiments. What Gast wanted to do. Cetra. Jenova. Jenova's cells. I was there, I was-
A high-pitch sound hit her ears like a hammer. She flinched. Her hands flew to her ears and clasped over them; she hunched over, squeezing her eyes shut. The sound slowly died down and went away, but it took away the memory that was ready to resurface.
"What's happening to me," she muttered, breathing heavily. "Why can't I remember it?"
"…alright?"
Someone was calling out to her. She lowered her hands and straightened out to a group of concerned faces.
"I, yes, I'm alright now," she lied. She felt dizzy and her ears were ringing a little. "But there's something strange that happens every time I try to remember anything about the experiments you mentioned, or even just my past life."
Lenna frowned, exchanging a concerned glance with Galuf. "Do you have any idea what is preventing you from remembering?"
"No," Lucrecia said tiredly. "Can we take a break, please? I want to get some fresh air."
…
It took the ship two days to get to its destination. Lucrecia spent most of that time holed up in a corner on the upper desk, where she could look at the sea without getting in anyone's way. The Elders gathered several more times, but as soon as they started asking questions about Sephiroth, the experiment, Jenova, or even mention the names she knew but couldn't remember who they belonged to, – Gast, Ifalna, Hojo, – the harsh sound returned, temporarily incapacitating her and making whatever memories she tried to reach instantly flee from her grasp.
The irrational hatred she first felt towards the boy who had pulled her out of sleep, Lars, resurfaced when she met his small sisters. There was no reason for her to feel it, unless there was something deeply wrong with them… or with her.
And then there was the prophecy. Made by some junkie, of course, but who knows? Maybe he was right. Maybe she was the catalyst that would irreparably damage the world that still hadn't recovered after all the cataclysms. She asked Solongo what her tribe did, and, apparently, the Lifestream got so twisted up after the Meteorfall that some parts of the world became lifeless deserts where nothing grew and no one could live; other places had an overabundance of Mako that made creatures and plants mutate with an incredible speed that in the end killed them. The members of Solongo's tribe settled up in those places and tried to level it off, redirecting the flow, but their numbers were still way too small.
Plagued by thoughts and doubts about herself, Lucrecia tried to avoid people, and, unless someone specifically sought her out, she spent the days alone with the sky and the sea, desperately trying, and failing, to dig into her unreachable memories.
It was the dawn of the third day when land showed up, first as a dark strip on the horizon, and then closer and closer until it turned into a yellow band of a beach with red cliffs on the sides and dark green shadow of a jungle farther on the shore.
"Now we'll have to cross the jungle until we come to the city," Elder Lenna explained. "Only the six of us are going: me, you, Cloud and Vincent, and Edgar with his son. Other will wait on the shore."
"To Midgar?" Lucrecia asked, though they had already discussed it. She liked the name. It was familiar; she knew she had lived there at some point in her life, had friends (a girl whose laughter she remembered, but not her name), and probably even a home.
Lenna agreed. "To Midgar."
…
They trudged through the jungle for what felt like forever. The air clung to the skin, damp and heavy under the thick canopy of trees. The jungle breathed life, but it seemed to be hiding, cautious of the intruders. It was quiet, too quiet; the silence was rarely disturbed with the sounds of water droplets and occasional croaking of a frog.
Soon it became darker. Lucrecia raised her head, wondering if her sense of time was wrong and it was already dusk; what she saw made her stop and gasp in astonishment.
"What is this?" She asked her companions, pointing upwards. There, clearly visible through the thinning branches, was a giant slab of obviously artificial origin, dark grey with large patches of green. Large rusty beams were protruding from its edge, some of them straight, some bent and broken, with moss and lianas hanging off them in long green braids.
"The Plate." Cloud stopped beside her and looked up too. "They, I mean Shin-Ra, wanted to move houses to the upper level to keep them far from all the Mako pollution, – there were eight reactors so the smog on the ground level was pretty thick, – and leave the space under the Plate for stuff like warehouses and such. In the end, only rich people could afford living above Plate, and the poor ones stayed here."
"In darkness?"
Cloud chuckled, shaking his head. "No, there were lamps attached to the underside of the Plate… never enough to create anything as bright as daylight, but enough for people to see the ground so they wouldn't fall and break their legs."
"Oh." She tried to imagine living under a concrete roof, day after day, night after night, never seeing the light of day, and shuddered. "That… wasn't a great idea, was it?"
"It wasn't," the man agreed. "And in the end it cost a bunch of people their lives… But then Shin-Ra never valued them."
"You've lived here," she guessed, beginning to slowly walk again.
He shrugged. "Not for long. Not compared to other places I've lived in since then. But I've lost friends here… and I keep coming back here to fight the one enemy I would've liked to never, ever see again."
"Sephiroth."
"Sephiroth," he confirmed. "I was a fan when I was a kid and he was still alive. I even had a poster of him in my room. Maybe that's why he keeps on haunting me."
"I had never been his fan, but that doesn't stop him from haunting me, too." Vincent said, joining them.
Lucrecia stopped, only just now realizing something that she should have had realized the first time she spoke to Vincent. "Wait," she said, looking between the two men. "You both were alive at the same as Sephiroth? But… that makes you over eight hundred years old!"
Vincent nodded. "That's true; we were both born before Meteorfall. I'm older than Cloud, but it doesn't mean much when we've been alive for so long. We both have been experimented on, though in different ways, and that made us… one could say, immortal-"
"I sure hope not," Cloud interjected. "I've been getting gray hair for the last hundred years, give or take, so there's still a chance!"
"Not immortal, then," Vincent repeated, giving Cloud a glare, "but very, very long living."
…
They continued on walking, moving deeper and deeper underneath the remains of the Plate. Pillars of daylight fell through the cracks in the eight-hundred-years-old concrete, and their daily trajectories were marked with green, if a bit weak, vegetation. Several trees stretched their thin branches towards the light. Away from that light plants grew sparser and sparser until they gave way to naked ground covered in debris. Here and there, away from the light, copses of large mushrooms stood, giving out a pale green glow. Pieces of debris and old bones crunched under the travelers' feet.
As they climbed up on a hill that had once upon a time been a house but had since fallen apart into a pile of rubble, a large structure came into view appearing from the shadows somewhere ahead of them. It was significantly wider than the support beams they had passed earlier, and Lucrecia assumed that it had once been something important, a factory, maybe. By her calculations, they were close to the center of the Plate. Thin purple slightly glowing mist covered the foundation of the structure, obscuring the details but not giving enough light to illuminate its upper part. A winding path led towards it among the debris, although Lucrecia had no idea of who might be walking in this dark and seemingly deserted place.
They walked down the hill on the other side and continued their journey. The path led them around a lake with black motionless water that smelled of something rotten towards one of the sunbeams. A bird was circling around in the light high above the ground. Lucrecia followed its flight with her eyes when something cracked loudly under her foot. She stumbled, looked down, and jumped to the side, clamping her hand over her mouth. In the thin dried moss there laid a distinctly human skeleton, albeit very small as if it belonged to a toddler, with the remains of matted hair, dried skin, and decayed clothes clinging to the bones. A little farther away there was another well preserved skeleton of a small animal, probably a cat, and then another, and another,-
She slowly traced the path with her eyes. It was littered with old skeletons and a few rotting animal corpses, and she suddenly understood that the foul smell wasn't coming from the lake. The skeletons lay unburied but whole, which meant that scavengers, for some odd reason, left them alone, and there were so many of them, as if animals, birds, and even humans chose this place as a burial ground.
"They come here to die," Vincent said, and Lucrecia gave out an aborted shout after all, shaking in fear and – was that excitement?
"W-why?" she managed to squeeze out through chattering teeth.
"We aren't entirely sure, of course… but we think Jenova somehow urges them to come here. It's one of the three places on Gaia where the infected ones come to die, and when they do, they release something… some kind of an essence… which accumulates in those places and in the end, when there's enough of it, becomes the new Sephiroth."
"What are they infected with?" Lucrecia asked, suspecting that she already knew the answer.
"Jenova's cells." He looked at her cautiously, and she tensed up, expecting the loud ringing noise in her ears to immediately incapacitate her as it happened before, but nothing like that happened. Only the feeling of excitement became even stronger as if she was happy to hear it… only there was nothing to be happy about.
"The experiment," she started slowly, hoping to learn more now that the first bit of information didn't trigger an unwanted reaction. "It was with Jenova's cells, right? This same infection that makes its victims come here to die. And it had something to do with the Cetra… and with me and Sephiroth, too, I think."
"Yes." He sighed. "Back then, the lead scientists thought Jenova to be a Cetra… they tried to recreate the Cetra race by infecting humans with its cells."
"And it wasn't a Cetra," Lucrecia concluded. "And I… did I… do it to myself?"
"To Sephiroth, too," Vincent added, "when he was still in your womb."
A long needle piercing her lower abdomen, reaching for the small fetus inside her-
Lucrecia, surrounded by fire, paralyzed by the visions-
"How can I go away when the most part of me is you?"
A woman with very pale skin and long silver hair, with eyes purple and glowing, and mouth full of white sharp teeth, grinning at her-
A baby crying in a transparent plastic crib-
Voices, waling, Sephiroth, Sephiroth!-
A young woman, waist-deep in snow, surrounded by a protective sphere, hurrying to finish her task before the Calamity that took her sister takes her too-
"Her name was Jenova. She died soon after-"
An enormous black flower with purple glowing heart and translucent petals made of myriads of intertwined bodies-
Pieces of broken memories falling like ash around her.
"They called it the Plague."
Lucrecia was surprised by the steadiness of her voice in spite of her inner turmoil and an explosion of memories that suddenly resurfaced all at once. Nothing seemed to be locking them away anymore. Maybe it was a good thing, but she doubted it. Something had changed; for some reason, that alien presence inside her had stopped trying to keep her in the dark. But what could that presence be? The thing was dead. Lucrecia had felt it dying, had herself nearly died in the process too. All that was left was a handful of cells she carried inside herself, but there was too few of them to form anything resembling a conscience, and the Crystal had kept them inactivated through all the long centuries while she had dreamed… right?
"If this is true", an inner voice whispered, "then what were those whispers that brought people to the Crystal Cave?"
"The Cetra called it Plague, or Calamity from the sky," she repeated, shaking off the thoughts for now. "I remember. And Jenova was a Cetra, after all… a Cetra Priest who sacrificed herself to freeze the whole area and contain the spread of the disease. She was infected too, with those same cells we thought were specific Cetran type of cells. I've learned about that way too late… and told Hojo, but, apparently, he didn't think it important enough to stop the experiment."
"I bet he thought it was even cooler for that," Cloud inserted with a grim laugh. "The last time we've seen him alive, he injected himself with some kinda concoction made of Jenova's cells and Mako and turned himself into a monster so we wouldn't stop Sephiroth from getting even more power. He seemed quite happy to let that so called god destroy the Planet."
"I should have understood that sooner," Lucrecia said. "I should never have agreed to the experiment. It was all my fault… still is. Everything, all the lives lost… it's all on me."
"Yes, it's on you," Vincent agreed, and Lucrecia flinched, even though he simply confirmed her own thoughts, and there was no hatred, no disgust in his voice, – nothing that she felt towards herself. "And it's on me, too. And some of it is even on this guy," he pointed to Cloud. ("Hey! If you mean the Black Materia, I wasn't in my right mind!" Cloud protested.) "And on Ifalna who was a Cetra and could've said something. But most of it is on Hojo who never cared about repercussions as long as he had the chance to satiate his curiosity, on Gast who knew that and didn't bother to keep Hojo under supervision, and on Shin-Ra who put profits above all. We all share the blame, and it's on those of us who are still alive to finally put an end to this."
"Right." Lucrecia sighed. "Then, I hope you know how to kill something like me, because I have tried, and failed."
"We can think of a way to do that, yes," said Elder Lenna who had been quietly listening to their conversation. "But I have to warn you, it will only be our absolutely last resort. We don't kill people for no reason."
"I'm a danger to the world." Lucrecia felt tired to her bones. This entire long road, those endless years of sleep, and in the end it still had to end with her dying… and now she had to persuade those people to kill her! What nonsense. "Is this not enough of a reason?"
"We aren't certain that you are." Elder Lenna looked at her with kind green eyes surrounded by a web of thin wrinkles. "But we think that waking you up and helping you see what's happening in the world is going to at least decrease the danger, if not remove it completely."
"You don't understand. If this thing is still active, if it had been active even while I was in the Crystal Cave… then there's nothing at all that can stop it!"
"You can," Cloud said quietly.
She turned to him, snarling in desperation. "How? How would I do that?"
He shrugged. "You should look into yourself to find a way. Jenova, it's," he hesitated, trying to find the right words, "it's like a genie from those old fairy tales. You know, the one that gives you the thing you want most, only there's always a catch. I wanted to be a hero and I became one, but it wasn't me anymore… and without help from my friends I would've never become myself again. This dream come true stuff is hard to let go of even without Jenova, and with it…" he shook his head. "That's the trick. You unconsciously want to keep the dream going so you build barriers that keep you away from truth. You need to find them and break through them, and then you'll see how it really is and what you can do about it."
"You're infected too," she said quietly, mostly to herself, finally understanding what was familiar about him. Cloud nodded.
"Yeah, I am… though I've never been as in connect with my, er, other side as you were."
She looked around with uncertainty. Everyone was staring at her, making her want to run away, to hide, but there was nowhere to run anymore. Not even dreams were safe. "Maybe it's time you stop running, then," an inner voice said, sounding so much like Ifalna's that it made her want to smile and to cry simultaneously.
"Okay," she told them. "I'll try. But you have to promise me," she added, directing it to Lenna, "if something goes wrong and the thing takes over, won't let it escape."
The woman nodded. "Of course."
…
They stopped in the small meadow under the sunbeam. A couple of thin trees with long weak branches stood there, and the ground was covered in old fallen leaves interspersed with patches of grass. Lucrecia sat down, folding her legs, and raised her head to look at the small patch of clear sky visible through the hole in concrete. The sun blinded her for a moment, and she closed her eyes, taking this small bit of light into the darkness behind her eyelids.
…
She wasn't even surprised at how easy it was for her to slip right into the dream; after so long it was, she supposed, as real as reality itself for her, if not more.
Nothing changed while she was awake. The sky was the same cheerful blue with a handful of small clouds. The sea whispered something to the beach, playing with seashells and the sand. Small paths ran across the green hills towards the small neat houses. No one was around aside from the wind and the sky. Not even Sephiroth.
"Where do I go now," she wondered aloud. "What am I even looking for?"
She started to walk towards her house; it was probably a good place to start. But what could she find here, in a place where she was the only real thing?
"No, not just me," she corrected herself. "There's also the thing, or whatever is left of it."
Her house was empty. Dirty dishes rested in the sink. A bouquet of wildflowers stood in a vase on the kitchen table. On the sofa, a forgotten book lay along with a bathrobe. Everything was as she left it, not a thing out of place. She walked around the house slowly, methodically looking over everything, opening every door of every cabinet, checking every book on the shelves.
Nothing.
Not a clue.
How would those barriers even look like? She regretted not asking Cloud how he had managed to break through them. Sighing, she lowered herself down onto the sofa, and immediately jumped up from it.
On the opposite side of the room, in the corner, stood a chest, and underneath it, on the floor, laid a round knitted rug. It was always there, since the first time she had entered the house. It was a part of her surroundings for so long that she didn't even notice it until now.
The ornament on the rug was a spiral. A spiral that looked very much like a staircase in the old Shin-Ra Manor, even the color palette was the same: gray, black, and brown.
Lucrecia carried the chest away from the rug and hurried back to the corner. She stood over the rug, wiping away the sweat, suddenly uncertain. Did she really want to open whatever door lay behind it? Did she really want to give up her dream? "Maybe it would be better to just stay here," a thought came. "Let the thing take over if it wants to… Those guys are strong, they'll kill it, and then I'll finally be at peace, forever, with no chance of waking up again."
It would have been so easy to give up… To continue giving up, she corrected herself, as that was what she had been doing all those years. So easy… The sofa called out to her, the unfinished book whose contents she didn't remember, the teapot, the flowers in the vase, the lace tulle curtains… the comfort of her imaginary world. "There is nothing out there for you," an insistent little voice whispered in her head, "nothing but guilt, and grief, and loneliness. There will be no friendship, no family, no home for you out there. No one would want you, not after what you've done, not what you've become. Stay here, where you are safe and content. Stay here, and let the others take care of the real world issues."
"But what if they fail?"
She touched the rough fabric with the tips of her fingers, then, before that little voice could have returned, grabbed the rug and pulled it aside.
Nothing was underneath it, only the dusty floor.
She exhaled loudly and laughed at herself, straightening up, with the rug still clutched in her fingers.
The laughter died down as quickly as it came. The inside of the house remained the same, but the outside changed drastically. Lucrecia stepped to the window and pulled the tulle curtain aside to get a better look.
The sand on the beach became grey, and the sea changed into something that looked like a swamp with reeds and grass-covered bumps; black trees grew right out of the dark, foul-looking (and probably not better smelling) water, their naked branches spread out like bony fingers. The hills were still in place, but the grass covering them was withered, dusty, and grey. Even the sky was no longer a bright blue. Covered in low ominous clouds, it seemed to hang right above the roof. She looked over at the other houses, and saw caved in roofs and empty windows, as if they were abandoned for years.
"Mommy?"
She turned around to the sound of a child's voice. It was Sephiroth. Behind him loomed another figure, strangely blurred out as if it was hidden by fog.
"Yes, it's me, honey." She smiled at the boy, ignoring the shadowy figure for now. Her lips trembled. Seeing him here, in the gloomy underside of her dream world, made her finally see the truth: he was never real. Dreaming her dream, playing a good mother to her imaginary son, was never going to fix anything she had done. Cloud was right; letting go of a dream was hard, but it was time for her to do so.
"You promised," he said without moving away from his spot. "You said you'd never let me disappear."
"And I won't," she said, feeling the first tear that slid down her cheek. The gravity of her decision weighed down on her. "You will always live in my heart- "
His face, always so sweet, morphed into a grimace of rage. "No!" he shouted. "You can't do this! You can't-"
"It's alright," Lucrecia soothed, walking closer towards the boy. "Everything will be alright. Step aside, honey, I need to go outside."
She moved him aside gently; he didn't protest, didn't even move, frozen in place with a weird expression on his face and his mouth half-opened, like a wind-up doll whose spring fully uncoiled.
The fog over the mysterious figure parted before Lucrecia and disappeared, revealing what she had already expected to see, and she looked into the thing's face.
Into her own face.
"I'm sorry," she said to it. The thing made a step back, froze again, its gaze fixed on Lucrecia's eyes.
"I never understood what you being me meant, – for me, or for you. I'm sorry," she repeated, and the thing made another small step back, "that I rejected you for so long. I'm sorry that I pretended you weren't a part of me… I'm so sorry that I made you play all those roles for so long because I couldn't accept what I've become and tried to pretend I was still just a human. I'm so sorry for everything. I promise I'll do better now."
The thing's eyes widened and it jerked away, but it was too late; Lucrecia stepped forward quickly and embraced it, hugging it close to her chest. "You are me", she whispered into its ear. "And I am you. There will be no isolated parts anymore, only the whole."
For a moment they stood like that, and then the body in Lucrecia's arms started to melt away. She felt something joining with her, adding to her senses and to her memories.
The world began to fade into nothingness. She let it. It wasn't paradise, never had been; it was just a golden cage she had built for herself. It was time to let that dream go.
…
Lars punted another centuries-old tin can and it bounced off into the darkness, jumping off the ground like the world's shabbiest ball. Somewhere outside of the slowly moving patch of light it crashed into something, – something large, metallic, and hollow, judging by the sound, – with a loud bang. His father glared at him, pursing his lips. Lars shrugged and pretended that the sound didn't have to do anything with him.
Waiting was boring. At first he had been on high alert, expecting something to happen right away, or at least soon enough. The alien presence he felt lurking underneath Lucrecia Crescent's skin had been becoming more and more obvious the closer they came to the haunted grounds; even his father started to notice. But as soon as she went into the trance, it hid away, only barely visible.
What was she doing, anyway?
Lars raised his head and squinted at the hole in the roof. The sun had moved so much that it didn't reach the part of the meadow where they camped anymore. Soon it was going to get really dark in there, and though they had lamps, Lars didn't look forward to that. He sighed, dropping his gaze, and froze.
Something was happening.
A sudden gust of wind picked up the dust and fallen leaves, spinning them into a howling whirlwind around the place where Lucrecia sat, obscuring her from everyone.
"What is happening?" Edgar asked Lars, shouting over the wind.
"She's doing something," the boy shouted in response. "She's reaching somewhere far, far away! I can't say if it's good or bad though!"
The wind howled even louder, temporarily blocking all conversations.
…
The crow tilted its head to the side, eyeing the bacon on Raldo's plate, and flew over from the tree branch to the back of the empty chair across the table. The man chuckled. The damn bird was far too bold for its own good, and he liked it. He tore away a piece of bacon and threw it across the table. It landed in front of the crow. The bird jumped on the table and swallowed the treat in one bite. Raldo, who was named after a ferocious monster but was its exact opposite, – short, thin, with thick black hair, bad eyes, and a fondness for all living things, – started to tear away another piece when the crow made a strange choking noise, jerked its head once, twice, and fell down under the table. The man cautiously pulled away from the table and looked beneath it. The crow lay motionless. Raldo straightened up, eyed the remaining bacon, and decided not to risk it.
Two hundred kilometers to the southeast, an old woman by the name Larixa, who was sitting on the roof clearing her chimney, suddenly felt her right arm weaken and lose the grip on the brush. The woman cursed, gripping the chimney hard with her left arm. The right one was hanging like a dead weight, and was starting to seriously hurt. The woman cursed again and began carefully crawl towards the ladder.
Another thirty kilometers to the east Dan, a six-year old boy, was playing in the yard with his dog, chasing it across the garden, when he lost his balance and fell down. His older sister ran out of the house to the dog barking, and found the boy unconscious on the ground.
Fifty kilometers to the northeast, a young woman who had been taking a nap after a sleepless night with her newborn jerked awake; it felt like some kind of a critter bit her ankle. She looked at it. There was a deep red bruise spreading over the skin, but no sign of a bite. She quietly cussed the unknown bug and climbed back under the blanket.
…
In Sol University's most secret laboratory work didn't stop even at night, especially now that they have obtained the most important artifact of all times.
"We're ready," the young scientist said with pride. "Permission to begin the procedure?"
"Granted," his older colleague nodded. "Let's hope this one will go as good as the last one."
The small sample of what they thought was tissue of a member of the Cetra race proved to be the most interesting thing. The old scientist was especially fascinated with the second type of cells, which he named C-cells, the likes of which was very rarely found in some humans and animals and had been previously considered either parasitic, or some kind of mutation; the sample, however, contained almost 50% of C-cells. Over the last several months, the science team found out that in presence of normal cells C-cells actively multiplied, copying the normal ones and consuming Mako in the process.
The young scientist started to carefully rotate the handle, opening the Mako container to let the green substance into the container with C-cells infused tissue. But before the valve could be open even a fraction, the sample emitted a thin stream of purple mist, blackened, and turned into fine ash.
"What did you do?!" the old scientist exclaimed. The young one only shrugged helplessly.
For a few moments they sat in silence. Then the older one said, "Well, let's get another sample and try again."
The younger scientist hurried away to the sample storage, but soon ran back into the room, pale, with wild eyes.
"What?" the old scientist asked irritated.
The young one gulped. "I- they- there's-" he stuttered.
"Oh get a hold of yourself!" the older one shouted, even more irritated with him.
"They're all gone!" the young one cried. "There's only ash left. Even the original sample is gone!"
"All… gone?" the old scientist repeated in a broken voice. "How is this possible?"
…
A strange wave rolled over the world, making some animals and birds shrug, as if trying to dislodge a flea, and some people gasp in a momentary bout of pain. Some fared worse, losing feeling in their limbs, bleeding out of suddenly opening wounds… or falling off the heights and injuring themselves. It lasted no longer than a few minutes, and then was gone.
…
Lucrecia opened her eyes slowly to find herself lying down on the ground. A concerned face was staring at her from above. Vincent.
"Hi," she said to him, smiling, suddenly happy to see a familiar face of a real person. She remembered him now, all of their short history together. She remembered being in love with him; the love had passed, but she was glad to see him nevertheless.
"Hello," he answered without a smile. "Are you alright?"
"Yes, I think I am," she said, pulling herself up. And she didn't have to lie this time. She felt lighter, as if some kind of weight was lifted from her shoulders; was it the weight of her imaginary world?
The grass rustled to the side of her. She turned her head and saw the others coming closer. The boy, Lars, was quickly and quietly talking to his father.
Elder Lenna crouched down beside Lucrecia. "Did you do it?" she asked. "Did you find out what was making Sephiroth come back?"
"I did even better," Lucrecia said.
The others listened in silence as she told them what she did; how she understood that the part of the thing that was still alive was in fact a part of her own consciousness that she had hated, feared, and vehemently rejected; how, either as the result of the multiple cataclysms that had befallen the world, or maybe due to the creature's own evolving resistance, the parasitic cells weren't completely subdued by the Crystal; how they had continued to function, slowly gaining their own consciousness, and the thing would, if left alone, in the end take over Lucrecia's mind; how, because of her promise to never let Sephiroth disappear, without her knowledge, it had been bringing the shadow of her son back; how as soon as she reclaimed control over her whole self she could feel just how many loose parasitic cells were still out there in the world; how she found out that she could simply order them all to disintegrate…
"I didn't destroy the ones in Cloud and myself, though," she said at last. "Other clusters of cells were very small and I doubt that them disintegrating did any harm… But with us, that would mean instant death, so I had to stop and think of something better instead."
"What did you do?" the man asked, squinting at her with suspicion.
"I made our Jenova's cells pretend to be normal human cells… completely, absolutely normal, including cellular senescence and apoptosis. What I mean, we aren't immortal anymore, or even very long living," she added, seeing confusion on his face.
"Oh," he said, still visibly dumbfounded. "Um, what now? Do I… er… drop down any moment, or do I still have some time to write a will?"
She laughed. "Oh, you'll have plenty of time! It's impossible to say just how much, but, a few decades I can guarantee!"
"Oh," he repeated in a weak voice.
"So now I'm the only immortal one left," Vincent said from her other side. She glanced up at him, and he smiled sadly at her.
She sighed and shook her head. "No. I've come so far, and I refuse to stop now. We'll find a way to fix your situation, I'm sure."
He chuckled. "My… situation. I had a friend who called it that. My… chaotic… situation." He sighed wistfully.
The heap of dry leaves piled up by the whirlwind rustled. Something small and round, the size of a bizarre bug egg, rolled out from under it and stopped halfway between the pile and Lucrecia. It was an orb with smooth surface, dark, almost black in color, with a pulsing red glow coming out of its depths. Everyone started at it for a few moments, wary of moving or even breathing.
Elder Lenna was the first to shake off the stupor. "Is this a Summon Materia?" she wondered aloud, and then repeated the same question in another language, directing it towards the boy. He shrugged, squinting at the orb, made a strange gesture with his hand as if he was petting an invisible cat, and finally nodded and said something. "Yes, this is a Summon Materia," the Elder translated. "Although Lars says that it's seems to be different from the ordinary ones."
Lars' father Edgar picked the Materia up and nearly dropped it again; his eyes widened, and the hand holding the orb shook. Lenna took it away from him quickly, dropping it into her backpack and pulling the drawstrings.
"It was calling out to me," Edgar said, still shaking a little. "It wanted me to call it! I've never felt a Summon try to communicate to me before."
"Did you glimpse what that summon looked like?" asked the Elder.
He took a breath, exhaled slowly, and nodded. "It looked like a winged man. One wing in place of his right hand, more in place of his legs. Long hair, grey. Green eyes. Something like a halo over his head."
"Sephiroth," Cloud breathed out. "The summon is Sephiroth?"
"It didn't name itself, but I suppose it is," said Edgar.
The leaves rustled again, this time louder, as if there was a mouse shuffling around inside the pile. A moment later the creature hidden there started mewling in a thin weak voice. Vincent, as the closest person to the pile, dug up into it quickly, coming up with a baby in his hands.
It was a newborn boy, naked save for an accidental dry leave sticking to his belly. He had short fluffy brown hair, soft like cotton, and dark grey eyes that opened widely as soon as he was pulled out of the pile.
Everyone exchanged confused glances.
"A baby?" Elder Lenna took the child from Vincent's arms and gave him a quick once over. "Well, it looks like a normal baby… except…" she removed the leave. "He doesn't have a belly button. Edgar, Lars, what can you say about this child?"
The man and his son came closer and took their turns examining the baby. After a moment, both shrugged. "It's just a human baby," said Edgar. "Nothing unusual about him. No signs of anything suspicious."
"Aside from the fact that he spontaneously came into being inside a pile of leaves, at the same time as Sephiroth's Summon Materia," Elder Lenna added.
Lucrecia looked between the baby and the backpack. Could it be…?
"Could it be that I just now inadvertently create this Materia, and in the process somehow… um… split it up into a Summon and a baby?"
The Elder glanced at her and shook her head. "Concerning the Materia, you can be right, only you didn't create it; you just expedited the process of crystallization. Summons are born of legends, and of prayers people direct to legendary creatures. I suppose there was quite enough of those thoughts and memories floating around here already, although it would have taken several more decades for them to solidify Mako into a Summon Materia without your interference. But creating a baby? It's impossible, Lucrecia. Only Gaia herself can create life."
"I had a few of his memories. I've picked them up when he was destroying them," Lucrecia said quietly. "Just a few, though. I felt them slipping away when my cells started to become normal… Maybe those memories solidified too… into a baby."
"Impossible," the Elder insisted. "The end result of crystallization cannot be a living organism."
"Well, maybe Gaia did it, then," said Cloud. Somehow, while the women were speaking, the baby migrated into his arms and now the man was crouching down, his open backpack in front of him, wrapping the baby up in his spare shirt. The boy was frowning at him, his tiny dark eyebrows pulled together, but he didn't cry anymore.
Vincent joined Cloud, looking at the child with suspicion. "It could still be Sephiroth," he remarked. "Are you okay holding him like this?"
The blond man laughed and shook his head. "He's a baby," he said. "Compared to our meetings in the past? This is an improvement. But honestly, Vince, I don't care who he was in the past. Right now he's a baby and he's cold. The air's really damp here."
Vincent patted him on the shoulder; Cloud shrugged his hand off, but smiled fondly to himself. Lucrecia looked at them, yearning for a connection like that. A friend. How long had it been since she had had any friends who weren't product of her imagination?
Lenna's voice pulled her out of her thoughts. "Well, I think, to avoid any unexpected complications we should keep this Materia away from this child. Maybe put it away entirely; I don't like the way this Summon behaves." The Elder picked up her backpack. "We better head back now. It's going to get very dark here soon. I'd prefer to spend the night on the ship."
As they were leaving, Lucrecia looked back at the large structure beneath the center of the Plate. The purple fog was gone.
…
Lucrecia walked beside Cloud, who still carried now sleeping baby, and stole glances at the tiny face pulled into a displeased grimace, a mop of dark fluff on the small head, and two tiny hands balled into fists. Vincent flanked her from the other side, Elder Lenna led the way, and Edgar and Lars were bringing up the rear.
Cloud soon noticed her interest, however inconspicuous she tried to be. "Hey," he said quietly, turning his head to her, "if you want to carry him, just say so. He was your son the first time around, after all."
"I… don't know," she admitted. "I was never really Sephiroth's mother… the only motherly thing I've ever did was carrying him almost to term, and even at that I wasn't good. And now that I have a chance to start anew, I have no idea what to do. Where would I live? How would I raise a child when I don't know anything about the world as it is now? I'm not even sure," she whispered, ashamed of herself, "if I want to be a mother. Maybe he will be better off with someone else."
Cloud rolled his eyes at her. "Come on," he said. "Hadn't he already grown up with someone else?"
"Yes, and he deserves a better family now," Lucrecia muttered.
"Well," Cloud said, repositioning the baby carefully from one arm to the other, "it's your decision if you want to be his mother or not. The tribe, – both tribes, actually, – will help the both of you anyway. Want someone else to take care of him? There are families who would gladly take him in. Want to bring him up on your own? There are people who will support you. You won't be alone in this. We're your friends, after all."
Vincent nodded and hummed, confirming Cloud's words. Lucrecia didn't say anything, so astonished – did he really say friends? – that she couldn't think of an answer, and the conversation died down.
The group walked out of the shadow of the Plate into the warm tropical evening. Lucrecia breathed deeply, enjoying, for the first time in ages, just being alive, being real again. She glanced to the right, at Cloud who carried the sleeping child, humming some tune she couldn't recognize, to the left, at Vincent who gave her a faint smile in return.
"Thank you," she said, to the both of them, to the world, to Gaia, maybe… she wasn't entirely sure, but it was Vincent who answered.
"And you, too."
…
…
The Goddess will awake, and she will walk the land, and won't dream people's roads anymore. All roads will go dark, and people will lose their way, and they will cry and wail and pray for her to dream again, but she will depart for the land faraway and strange, and will be there for twenty and two years. As the thousandth year approaches, she will return; in her left hand she will carry a silver moon, and in her right hand a blood moon, and oh her forehead a purple star. As she walks, the land will tremble, and that which was dead and barren will come alive, and that which was plentiful will become sparse, and those who had most will lose everything. She will bring about the world's end.
These words of Saint Prophet Ayoula, spoken by him to me personally, I, Acolyte Iliyas, wrote down on Seventeenth of September, in the year three hundred and seventy sixth PM, in Corel village.
The Prophecies of the Crystal