Shadow closed her eyes. Assembly was almost over. It was now or never.

She abandoned her cushion, walked to the middle of the room, and got down on her knees. She prostrated herself amid a sudden hush of the gathered Cabinets of Jet-Black Darkness and Immaculate White, the eight captains of the remaining warbands, various scribes, the seneschal, and the king's chamberlain. No longer were spectators welcomed when the ministry assembled, nor was the Twelfth Chamber large enough to permit them.

She pressed her hands into the jute rug that led from the double doors behind her to the Boar Tusk Throne in front of her. Then she put her forehead on the backs of her hands. She kept her eyes closed against the slightly dusty rug and waited. She'd decided to do this against Aerith's advice. Her dweomer demanded it of her.

Zack, officiating as King's Voice, spoke into the hush. "Princess Shadow Strife, Cloud Wolf-King commands you to stop the theatrics and spit it out already."

A few chuckles broke out of the gathered ministers, priests, and scholars on both sides of her.

Shadow sat up, breathing for the first time since she'd put her face on the rug – a face warm with embarrassment. Cloud rarely spoke aloud during assembly. Instead, he established a dweomer mind-link with Zack, who edited Cloud's statements before relaying them. Except this time, apparently.

"I thank Cloud Wolf-King for his graciousness," she said, injecting a touch of sarcasm. She blinked away the burning yellow light of too many oil lamps. The light gleamed from the enormous golden tusks of a boar's head, lowered as though to take a drink. Between the tusks, Cloud lolled upon his cushions. His expression seemed as fogged as the mountain forests in which the tengu lurked, as though he were under the influence of a sleep spell.

Shadow fisted her hands, hidden in her sleeves. He wasn't going to do this to her. Not today.

She focused her attention on Zack, who had sounded as though he were laughing, damn him. Her dweomer flared up, flickering across the space between them.

'It's not funny. Don't treat this as a joke,' she thought at him.

'I'm not,' he thought back at her, but he grinned as though expecting her to laugh with him. 'Well, maybe I am. What are you doing, little sister? There's no need for you to grovel there. Since when do you bow to us?'

'Since you two won't listen to me any other way! It's not like I'm allowed to speak during assembly, anyhow.'

At her mental sneering, Zack's elfin eyebrows traveled toward his hairline. 'This again? All right, but –'

She plowed right over him. 'And if the two of you still think this is some big joke you can tell His Mighty Broody Majesty to shove that shiny moon mirror right up his -'

'All right!' At the same time, Zack hastened to speak aloud in the appropriately formal tones of the King's Voice. "You may address the assembled." Internally, Shadow heard him tch. 'Stop making a scene.'

Speaking mind-to-mind didn't need to wait for a mouth to form words. No one else had even realized that they were missing out on a whole conversation. 'Thank you,' she frostily thought. 'And I'm not making a scene.'

Zack rolled his eyes.

Still, it wouldn't do to rush into this. She'd chosen to wear her favorite jûnihitoe, the black one patterned with a blue-eyed white tiger and belted with a golden dragonfly obi. She'd thought it would help her feel important and relevant, but now she just felt small and angry. She straightened her shoulders under their layers of silk. The Boar Tusk Throne took up one wall of the audience chamber, surrounded by larger-than-life bodhisattvas cupping their bowls of holy water or brandishing their swords of glass, and intricately braided, potted bamboo. The cloudy quartz in the marble faces of the bodhisattvas looked like living eyes, a trick of the lamplight and leafy shade. Cloud sat no higher on his cushions than his ministry on theirs. However, to Shadow, the illusion of the king sitting on high was hard to shake.

She swallowed against a strange, unwelcome welling of nervousness. Cloud was Cloud. Her king, sure. Her brother, forever. A pain in the ass, definitely. But this was her chance. If she could get him to listen, then maybe they could avert the impending disasters together.

She took the plunge. "I come before you today, Lord Ministers, to speak of Noble Lady Aerith's vision."

A spark flared in Cloud's blue-green eyes, but he showed no other sign that he was even in the same room. Shadow studied him, wondering what was wrong with him, or if this excessive detachment was his new normal. She'd assumed that any mention of Aerith would have shaken some life back into him.

"Aerith had a vision?" Zack asked. A line appeared between his brows, and Shadow wondered which one of them had asked the question, or if it had been both.

'You didn't know?' she asked him privately.

'No.'

'I'm sorry. I really am. But I have to do this.'

Ever so slightly, so that no one else would notice, he dipped his head in a nod. He looked far from happy. 'You won't be easy until you've had your say. Go ahead. He's listening.'

She uncurled fingers that had gone cold, pressed them against her thighs. All right, then. As dispassionately as she could, Shadow recounted all she had seen in the White Materia. All, but the very end. That, she felt, had been for her alone.

A long silence reigned when she finished. Then –

"I fail to see the significance in your story, Lady Princess," said Chancellor Rufus Shinra, First Minister of the Cabinet of Jet-Black Darkness. He oversaw the secular side of the ministry, reporting directly to the king.

But he should not speak for the king. Shadow shot an accusatory glance at Cloud. All he did was slide a finger over his bottom lip, essentially giving Rufus permission to represent him.

Shadow felt like snarling at her brother but managed to restrain herself. She'd accepted beforehand that she would tear down whatever screen had protected her in the court so far by kneeling in the middle of the Twelfth Chamber; she had been sure that someone – if not Cloud, then at least Zack – would see things her way.

Rufus smiled, secure in the king's favor. "It's all very fascinating, I'm sure," he went on, "but what does it have to do with the problem at hand?"

"You mean finding Sephiroth." Shadow raised her chin. "I do not know. I am not proficient in the art of vision interpretation, Lord Chancellor. Thus, I have brought this matter to you, learned masters."

From her seated position, Shadow bowed toward the Cabinet of Immaculate White. That side of the room was less full, for many of their number had died under Sephiroth's sword. The present ministers included the High Priestess of the Jade Temple, Elfé, a fourth-degree scholar, a man named Fuhito, and lesser ministers originally fated to exile along with the superfluous third prince, now elevated beyond anyone's expectations. Though she knew most of them by sight, she had never actually met any of them, and they knew little of her. They murmured and smiled beneath the jewel-bright peacocks painted on the wall behind them, obviously pleased with the Lady Princess's manners.

Rufus did not lose his superficial smile, but his side of the room – the seneschal, Tseng, Steward-Marshal Lazard Deusericus, the Ministers of Law and of Land, Heidegger and Reeve Tuesti, the Ministers of the Treasury and Magitek Operations, Scarlet and Palmer, and others less prominent – remained conspicuously still. Behind them, painted eyes peered from a dark jungle mural.

Shadow took note of those who watched that side of the room as steadily as the painted eyes. Zack, Captain Wallace, and Master Zangan, no surprise there. Elfé, Fuhito, and, oddly from his spot halfway behind Heidegger's broad shoulders, Reeve. From what she'd observed the past couple of weeks, Rufus and his two closest friends often treated Reeve like a hanger-on rather than a peer. And Lazard? The Steward-Marshal sat with his head lowered, but his blue eyes were fixed sideways, past the frames of his glasses, on the chancellor to his right. Interesting.

"My brother," Shadow said, and then she paused as a wave of grief passed through and constricted her throat. Her brother no longer, was that it? She tried again. "General Sephiroth . . . told our father that he meant to rule the planet if he could not rule Gaia. He spoke of going to the Promised Land before he jumped into the Lifestream. However, he does not wish to simply rule; he wishes to destroy. Noble Lady Aerith's vision showed me how he plans to awaken Jenova's ancient enemy to do it. According to this vision, I am as connected to these events as you are, my Lord King. I ask, again, that you bring me with you when you seek our brother in the Promised Land so that I may use my dweomer in service to our people. It is my Wyrd."

Wyrd. Some thought of it as destiny, others as fate, but Shadow knew that it was much more than either. She waited for Cloud to bow to the inevitable. Wyrd could not be avoided.

Gradually, the fog in Cloud's gaze dissipated. He looked at her. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. "Denied."

Wyrd could not be avoided, but apparently, it could be stonewalled. Shadow blinked. Her lips parted. In her plummeting disappointment, she forgot where she was. "Big Brother –"

"Denied," he said again, tiredly, looking away. He shifted on his cushions.

Shadow gawked at him. That was it? He wasn't going to even entertain the idea? But she'd been so sure – She realized she was gasping as though her lungs had shrunken. The dweomer had seized them in icy fists. She fought against it, frustrated that it could not seem to grasp the fact that she wasn't in control of anything but herself, and sometimes not even that much.

However, as she'd hoped, the assembled ministers weren't going to let a morsel as sweet as this fall to the floor. After prostrating himself toward the throne, Fuhito rose up on his knees. "Lord King, the Cabinet of Immaculate White feels there is merit in examining the evidence Princess Shadow has presented."

"Evidence," Heidegger scoffed into his bushy black beard. His bamboo-green kosode and maroon jinbaori strained across a muscular chest and the layer of fat lying just under his tanned skin as he, too, rose to his knees to speak. "To what evidence do you refer, Celebrated Scholar? I heard nothing in this little tale that proves the princess can lead our forces to the kingslayer. Unless she can do that, then –" He waved off the rest of his sentence as though waving away flies and sat back on his heels.

"That is because you have not been taught to open your mind to the goddess's voice, Minister," Elfé said in a low-pitched voice that could be heard from any corner in the Temple, totally out of proportion with her thin frame. "Noble Lady Aerith, like Queen Lucrecia before her, speaks for Jenova. If Jenova has decreed that Princess Shadow should accompany King Cloud on his divine mission, then that is what Princess Shadow must do. If Jenova has declared that her vile abductor has taken her to the Promised Land, then she will lead her champions to it."

Or the white power would, the thing Shadow had seen at the end of Aerith's vision. The thing about which she couldn't bring herself to tell Cloud or the ministry because it was hers. By the way her dweomer yearned to cross the Lacuna Sea, she felt that the pull of that white power would lead her right to Sephiroth. A simple and easy solution to a very big problem!

A/N: I don't even want to admit how hard this scene was to write (and it's not even finished, haha sob). Years? 18 or more false starts and rewrites? I'm not even kidding. I really wish I were.

For better or for worse, it is done, and I'm determined to move this story forward because I love it. I hope you do too!

Reviewer Thanks! Lionessa and St4r Hunter. Love you guys to pieces. Your thoughts have been invaluable!

With that being said, please leave a review before you go! Except you, Guest. You and your copy-paste request for me to write your story can come again when you can't stay so long, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

All My Love

Yup-Anne-has-attitude X3

P.S. Come join us on Discord! You will have to copy/paste the invite link, but it's up on my profile. Hope to see you there! ;3