Hawke dreamed.
Warmth and a sated exhaustion drained away and a cold cliffside breeze replaced it. Strong arms around her bare waist were replaced by hard, uncaring armour, and she opened her eyes to the plains of Midgar's Fade, stretched out below her. She stood upon the ledge.
The wind whistled over the stone, throwing gusts of gritty, stinging sand up from the narrow path. She was being watched.
She turned and eyed her humble campsite, tucked in under the cliff.
Sephiroth stood at the fire. The coals had burned low and amounted to little more than ash at his feet.
"It's late," he said, his arms crossed.
She shrugged. "I couldn't get to sleep."
She looked back down at the plains. A distant figure was making her way to the cliff through what had become Innovation's territory.
"Aerith's on her way. Genesis shouldn't be far behind." She strode towards the campfire and took a seat on her favourite log. She wasn't looking forward to trying to drag up ancient memories from a different planet's Fade, but she would have preferred to simply get it over with than the wait. She would have preferred to not have it hanging over her head at all and be back in Genesis' bed, in fact.
Sephiroth looked content to loom from the other side of the dying embers.
The borrowed memory she had stumbled upon stuck out in her mind like a loose thread on a sweater. She tried not to pick at it, and found herself flipping one of her throwing knives around her fingers in the effort to distract herself.
Sephiroth watched her silently. It was irritating.
"So…" she drawled. "How are you?"
"Are you an emissary?" he asked.
"...What?"
"You were sent here with the memories of a foreign goddess, who was last seen laying siege to the whole planet. You ran into one of her three descendants as well as the last living Cetra on your first day here."
She blinked. "Wacky coincidence." She threw the knife up in a spin and caught it again. A small part of her mind was turning over green magic refracting through smashed glass. She squashed it and threw her knife again.
"Are you scouting ahead of a second invasion?" he pressed.
"No. The only war about to hit Gaia is already here."
"That I understand." He narrowed his eyes at her. The same glow of the Fade shined around pupils that would have been more at home on a lizard. "It is your part in this which doesn't make sense."
She leaned back on the log and stretched out her legs. "I'm just a fool who jumped through a mirror to escape a giant spider. It's a lot less grandiose than you're imagining."
"Someone sent you here."
"Maybe it was an accident. Weird things happen to me all the time, you don't know."
His lips thinned. "Being facetious will not let you escape the issue."
She grinned. "We're going to get along just swimmingly, aren't we?"
He did not look impressed. He was a far more open dreamer than was wise.
"Why try to irritate me?" he asked. His brow furrowed and he studied her with more thoughtfulness than she liked. "If this Blight works as you say it does, you will need my help."
"Sorry, force of habit," she said with a shrug. "Being too exhausting to deal with is my first defence against the iron-fisted powers-that-be."
"Because you are an undocumented alien."
She cracked a smile. "Because no planet likes someone who can burn your house down just by thinking about it."
"Why should they?" he said without any heat. "Your very existence is a threat."
"That sounds like everyone else's problem."
"So you expect the rest of the world to accommodate you." He lowered his chin. "You think you're owed special allowances just because you are powerful."
She raised her eyebrows, feeling suspiciously like she'd just been volunteered for a fight that wasn't hers and was already half fought. She looked him up and down, in his Shinra branded uniform and inscrutable expression. Even Genesis didn't default to dreaming in uniform. Sephiroth had refused to help Genesis turn on Shinra, and was almost certainly the reason Genesis hadn't made any real move to do so either, but she didn't see a Templar when she looked at him. She saw a Circle mage, looking out through the bars of their prison, accusing the open air of being untrustworthy.
"Am I owed special shackles then, just because I am powerful?" she asked slowly.
"Perhaps," he replied, unconvincingly. He put his hands behind his back. "For society's benefit."
She scoffed. "'Society' is just people who happened to stand next to each other. Seeing as they won't let me stand with them I don't see why I have to live by their rules."
"The modern world would all collapse if everyone acted the way you do," he accused.
"And it wouldn't exist at all if everyone was forced to relinquish all control over their lives."
"You're not that much of an anomaly. Shinra does demand control of everyone's lives, in one manner or another."
He said it like it somehow proved his point.
"What a shame nobody can do anything about that," she drawled.
He frowned and turned away. The wind whistled over the craggy stone and the coals smouldered away at his feet.
"Of course you would think that," he said at long last. "You've never lived in captivity."
"How do you know?"
"It shows." He gave her a side eyed look. "Being a mild annoyance isn't the only price for defiance."
She grinned like they drew her on all the Chantry wanted posters. "No. It's not."
To the side Aerith crested the edge of the sandy path, panting and leaning on her staff.
"Why couldn't you just put down a pavement, Hawke?" she demanded.
Hawke stood. She could see Genesis further down the path, only a couple of minutes away.
"Because then this look out point would lose its defensive advantage," Sephiroth said.
She sucked her teeth. It was true, but she didn't like having it said out loud. The Fade was too slippery for that kind of open confidence, and she didn't want to compromise her ledge.
Except she was going to have to compromise it anyway to make this work.
She let out a hissing breath. She had never tried to dig up memories of Thedas while on Gaia. Back home she never had the power or inclination to project any memories onto the Fade at all, and here she'd only gotten away with it because the Fade was so empty and full of dead memories, it was almost eager to play out the familiar scraps wedged into her brain.
The memory she had found was not of Gaia. The Fade wouldn't recognise it and wouldn't fill in the gaps for her. Her best chance of holding it at all was here, in the most Thedas-y corner of the Lifestream she could get. She frowned. It would almost certainly destroy her carefully curated space in the process. It was, in fact, just about the most reckless thing she could think of to do in the dreaming realm.
The memory had better be worth something.
The loose thread dangling in her mind said it was.
Genesis arrived and greeted her with a smile and the others with a nod. She smirked back at him.
"Well? What are we waiting for?" he said.
"What do we need to do?" Aerith asked, holding her staff tightly with two hands and looking around. "You're going to try to remember the Calamity, right?"
"'Try' being the operative word," Hawke said. She gestured back over to the logs.
They stood in a small circle around the fire, Genesis on her left and Aerith on her right, and Sephiroth staring her down like an opponent.
"Now what?" Aerith asked.
Hawke closed her eyes and let out a breath, blocking them all out. It wasn't a ritual, or any kind of spell. Just letting down her walls and letting the Fade seep in.
In the ancient times, Andruil grew tired of hunting mortal men and beasts and hunted for the forgotten ones in the void. She returned to Arlathan, plagued by madness.
The wind smelled of rot.
Hawke opened her eyes. The black stone cliff lost its colour and became clear crystal, a shining tower shaped like a curling tree, reaching up from a floating palace. The tiled floor of a courtyard peeked out from beneath the sand. Blood pooled across the floor. A fleshy growth clung to the side of the crystal.
The others looked around.
Hawke twitched. The crystal turned to black glass, a square skyscraper, and the tiles the asphalt of a parking lot. The memory twisted, the Lifestream seizing on what it recognised in Hawke's mind. Bleeding Blight-ridden pustules grew across the streets of Midgar.
Aerith gasped.
Hawke squeezed her eyes shut. The pressure on the inside of her skull was already uncomfortable.
She concentrated on thoughts of Thedas. Old empires, old gods, and the Blight. Home. The memory slid sideways and Midgar's skyscraper turned into stone. A crumbling watch tower rose from a sea of mist and worn old stone lay underfoot. In the distance a darkspawn shrieked, hidden by the fog and ferns of the Korcari wilds. Two Ferelden guards looked out from their post, unnerved and alone.
Hawke hissed and tried to shake it off but couldn't think how. The memory was jerky and unstable. Her mental walls were down and she couldn't slam them back up. She couldn't panic either, if she thought she'd lost control then the Fade would step in and make it so. She breathed in and out slowly. It was just Ostagar. She'd dreamed of the battle of Ostagar a thousand times. She prodded again at the stolen memory in her mind.
The laugh of a darkspawn gurgled behind her. She spun, brandishing her staff. The SOLDIERs drew their swords and stood back to back. Smoke and flames flickered and swirled in every direction. There was the hard clang of swords against armour in the air, then the wet sound of swords finding flesh.
The elvhen god of the dead held his bleeding twin brother on the floor, frantically pulling him away from a stalking figure. The memory hitched and it was Carver, holding a bleeding Bethany, trying to pull her out of the path of another darkspawn. Her chest was concave. Thedas burned around them.
Genesis tried to cut down the monster, and passed through it. He stumbled and stared at the specter.
Dirty tear tracks stained Carver's face. Bethany's eyes were still open.
"Is this… Thedas?" Aerith asked, her eyes wide and fixed to the horrors.
Hawke swallowed around the lump in her throat at the sight of her dead little sister. It had been so long.
The memory hiccuped. A dragon landed and with a rush of magic transformed into an old woman on a field of darkspawn corpses. The ragged, ancient shadow of a queen had hard eyes and deep lines carved into her face. Flemeth stepped towards them, eyes running over the group.
The SOLDIERs stood tense and on guard but it was only a memory. She walked right through them.
"Your king will not miss you?" the memory asked, golden eyes fixing on some lost point.
"I'm sure he'll miss his life more," Hawke's voice said without her consent.
And there she was, herself, standing before the old witch. So young, with a softer body and a lighter grip on her dagger. She didn't have her scars yet, or her laugh lines. She put herself between Flemeth and her family without hesitation. Her mother held Bethany's body, too lost in grief to notice.
Flemeth laughed. "Oh, you, I like. Tell me, clever child-"
Hawke winced then scowled. "No. Enough of this."
She wrenched her thoughts away from those days. The Fade wrenched with her and the memory collapsed onto itself. Flemeth and the young Hawke evaporated into smudges of colour.
The others were giving her looks. She tried to ignore them. Genesis especially, who was giving her such a tender look she wasn't sure she'd be able to handle it.
"Sorry about that," she forced out. She ran her armoured hand through her hair, scratching her scalp to ground herself. "I'm not a Fade shaper and the Lifestream isn't supporting these memories. I'll try again."
"What was that?" Sephiroth asked, looking very intently at the empty surroundings.
"Don't worry about it. You're here for Andruil. Just… give me a moment."
"Take as long as you need," Genesis said.
She turned and paced for a moment. The cliffside had lost its distinctive shape, only collapsing shifting sands remained. A tree stump carved like a mabari stuck up from the sands, next to a fire in a metal drum.
She took her staff from her back and planted it firmly onto the ground. The familiar grooves magic channels in the shaft calmed her.
"Let me help you," a voice whispered, and the spirit of Reflection rose up next to her.
She nodded stiffly. Reflection put a hand on her shoulder. Her touch was cool like water on a hot day and it sank through her chest.
She let her hesitation fall away. She lowered her chin and tugged on the loose thread in her mind. Old, old memories rose flowed through her, and as much as the Lifestream didn't know them, they were sharp in her mind. Steadied by Reflection, the jagged edges aligned, and the gaps smoothed over.
A crystal tower shaped like a tree rose over them again. It glowed from within: a rainbow of refracted light. Bright little birds sang on its branches.
Genesis and Sephiroth slowly lowered their weapons as a calm settled over the scene. Aerith did not, she watched with narrowed eyes.
The gritty sands blew away in a gentle breeze to reveal swirling magic patterns on the tiled floor at the tower's foot. Slender young trees with vibrant orange leaves ringed the courtyard, filling the air with a sweet, spiced scent at the height of noon. Spirits drifted gently through the air like multi colored streamers.
It was nothing like the Cetran structures she had seen, and yet it was just as inherently magic, and just as beautiful albeit in a different way. There was a different quality to it, something slightly jagged against the smooth flow of the Lifestream.
The player of the memory rose up last of all, transparent figures filling the centre of the courtyard.
Andruil.
The hunter was in black onyx armour engraved with golden patterns, but more functional than ceremonial. Her silver hair was in a thick braid that ran from the height of her scalp down to her lower back, and rows of golden hoops ran the length of her long, pointed ears. The four of them stood in a line before her. She towered over them all.
Sephiroth breathed her name. Hawke gripped her staff and ignored her building headache.
A line of elves, returned prisoners of war something told her, kneeled before Andruil in humble clothes. All of them were terribly thin, and a number were pallid with little patches of dark thready lines running under their skin.
On a balcony window of the tower hanging over them stood Mythal. The light made her hard to make out. The position made her look as though she were preceding over the scene.
Andruil looked across the row of her subjects, her expression severe and her dark eyes giving away nothing. She drew a hunting knife.
Blood splattered across her chest. Aerith clapped a hand over her mouth. The blood flowed and ran in grooves between the tiles on the floor. Runes lit up with power. She raised a hand and in a brazen display of blood magic, drew the life energy into herself. It was silent and remorseless.
It always troubled Hawke to see it, no matter how evil she already knew the perpetrator to be: the other side of the argument about mage freedom. They were feared for a reason.
Andruil did not stop until they were all dead.
The memory shifted and the courtyard emptied. The light of the crystal tower changed from white to a sour yellow.
The little birds stopped singing.
Growths rose up in the blood channels on the tiles, spongey, bulbous tissue in purples and browns. The orange trees twisted in on themselves, their trunks cracking and oozing.
Andruil appeared again, now pale and discoloured with little black lines threaded through her skin. She shifted her body's shape before them, trying to outwit the contamination. It shifted with her.
The others cried out at the abominable sight, Hawke could barely hear them. It was all she could do to anchor the memory. The Fade pressed in close, weighing heavy on her as it translated the wealth of magic and taint into something their eyes could comprehend. Reflection's hand on her shoulder held her steady.
Andruil's body grew stranger with every transition, bony protrusions sticking out of the gaps in her armour. She raised a hand and the air pulled with magic, the belief in her divinity from a whole empire lending her impossible strength. Her eyes burned red.
So did those of her followers. They chattered and screeched and lost themselves, and still they were bound to her orders. She turned them on the world.
Screams tore the air.
The memories came quickly, and Hawke struggled to breathe against the onslaught. Andruil's followers cut down or infected all they found. Broodmothers nested and spewed forth thousands more corrupted creatures. Blood pooled over marble floors and bulging fleshy growths took root within the ancient trees in the sacred places.
Elvhenan tore itself apart.
A floating palace of moonlight and sapphire fell to the earth and smashed upon a mountain range.
Andruil took up her mighty spear.
The god of death swung his sword and decapitated her. She rose again from the bodies of one of her faithful and tore into him. His twin came to his protection, and she almost slew them both.
Mythal blocked the blow.
The god-queen mother of the empire was desperate as she begged her daughter to remember herself, her lofty decorum finally shattered.
Andruil did not reply to her entreaties. She advanced on her.
In that moment the bone-deep regret that weighed down Flemeth settled upon Mythal's shoulders. She lifted a sword and shield.
It was a bitter fight.
Reflections grip on Hawke weakened. The Fade stuttered around the memory, and the two women were fighting in the air in the black of night, miles above the ground. Magic exploded with bone shattering impacts. Both were stained with blood but only Mythal was wreathed in healing magic. They shifted into their mighty dragon forms and wings cracked with thunderous strength.
Hawke fell to one knee. Reflection shook and withdrew in exhaustion. Genesis grabbed Hawke's other shoulder to steady her. Flashes of giant snapping teeth and claws and bursts of magic nearly blinded her.
It felt like a raging river poured from her mind, splitting her open.
Andruil's dragon form lost three of her eight feathered wings and fell upon the earth like a corpse. Her body shifted back to her elvhen form, trying to adapt to the catastrophic damage.
Mythal landed on her like a meteor.
Andruil dropped her spear. She tried to stagger back up.
Mythal stabbed through her shoulder, splitting already shattered armour, and wrenched her arm off.
The Fade twisted violently. Hawke kept a single hand on her staff, straining to hold the memory together.
Mythal hauled up her daughter's broken body. Magic gathered around her hands, so powerful it was overwhelming, and she hurled her into the stars.
Hawke gave way under the strain. The Fade wrenched out from under her, scattering the memories and the dreamers.
Sephiroth alone survived the collapse of the memory.
The Lifestream rocked, colours and sensation swirling around him, but he held fast. Sounds and shapes that were familiar but not quite right formed and dissipated, until at last the current calmed from the intrusion.
He found himself on a ridge of shattered crystal. There was no sign of the cliffside campfire or the ugly copper statue.
For all that Hawke claimed not to be able to shape the Fade, she had brought forth more details and clarity than he ever had. He'd never been able to look at Andruil head on before without her dissipating into the dreams. He'd looked into her face and recognised it.
Not enough to confirm Aega's accusation. Many people looked alike, and she was a talented shape shifter. He needed proof.
The shame and horror of her fall had shocked him far more. So many battles and hunts and assassination attempts failed to do what a simple disease did. It was a dishonourable end. She had been a dishonourable woman. And yet.
And yet.
Her whole family were monstrous, and they loved her. She loved them. Only the Blight had robbed her of herself and made them turn on each other.
Was that the future for Genesis and Angeal? Madness and slaughter? Would they forget themselves and turn on him?
Weren't they already?
He looked down at the crystal crunching under his boots. He was thinking about it with too much bias. Andruil could have survived the Cetra's machinations if she hadn't already turned on her own people, using their blood to strengthen herself. The Blight wasn't airbourne, such a disease should have been easy to avoid.
The Cetra relied on her bloodlust to deliver their bioweapon, and they were right to. Andruil didn't fall because the disease was dangerous, she fell because she was cruel.
He turned the long memory over in his mind. The sound her shoulder made when her own mother ripped her sword arm from its socket. The technique she used to transform her own body, incorporating her own sickness into it. The way she had command of the Blight, even as it broke her mind.
He needed to see more. What happened next? Mythal had hurled her into the skies, bound up in some kind of spell. Everyone on Gaia knew what became of the Calamity, but he had to see it for himself. The rest of the story.
He calmed his mind and searched the Lifestream for whatever suggestions Hawke's episode had awoken.
He walked without direction, letting the currents guide him. The cluster of floating islands that made up Midgar disappeared behind him.
A bright light appeared in the sky. It burned red, and the heavens darkened at its approach. His surroundings changed, turning into a rolling mountain range capped in ice, and surrounded by tundra.
Andruil fell like a meteor upon the earth.
The mountains cracked and rock shot out thousands of miles into the air, and the planet itself spewed out Mako like blood filling the wound.
In the wreckage of a crater larger than a mountain, Andruil rose again.
The Blight seeped into the ground in her wake. He copied the techniques Hawke had used to dream and found that the details came easier, the lifestream confessed its secrets to him.
He watched the Cetra throw themselves at the fallen goddess. She commanded the taint and infected them, hollowed them out and made them her drones. She was unhinged, but not fully mindless. The destruction was too cunning. Before she conquered cities, now she levelled them. She spread her sickness and dragged them all down with her, determined to break even the planet upon her will.
The Cetra scrambled to undo what they had done. The corrupted dripped into the Lifestream and their own lands turned against them. They struck her body down, and it made no difference. She rose in another, over and over again, more powerful every time.
The knot of corrupted spirit energy within her had changed so much that they didn't know how to untie it. A frail and withered Coerla passed away after decades of failed research. He felt no pity for her.
They couldn't cure it, but they did learn to corner it. The dwindling numbers of Cetra called upon the planet's remaining strength and pushed back the tide. The purged it from their Lifestream, and drove it all into her, back at the crater where she landed. In the wreckage of the northern continent, the last of the great Cetra sealed her into the rock.
She screamed as the Mako froze over her. Purple eyes flashed within the green and giant wings stilled, at long last.
She was dead and she was alive. As undying as the corruption she now commanded.
The Lifestream flowed around her, and he saw the ages pass. The planet changed and the Cetra dwindled down to nothing in the ruins of the world left in her wake.
He watched her. She did not change, no matter how much the world did. A single purple eye glinted through the towering mako crystal frozen deep within the earth, looking back at him.
At long last, light broke through the rock layer. The earth shifted and her Mako crystal was exposed again, jutting out like a giant tooth from a cavern in the northern crater.
Two human men on chocobos and wearing puffer jackets rode into the chamber. Professor Hojo and Professor Gast looked up at her with awe. The hunter goddess's arm was raised, reaching out.
"A Cetra," Hojo breathed, more reverent than Sephiroth had ever heard him.
Gast took off his snow hat and held it in his hands. "Her name… Jenova."
Sephiroth released out a pent up breath. It felt like he had been holding it his whole life. She watched him from the Mako and ice, her cold, purple eyes entreating.
These weren't the planet's memories. They were hers.
The Lifestream flowed and she was no longer suspended in crystal. She was inanimate and frozen upon an operating table, dead as far as science could tell. Then she floated, naked, in a mako tank, in a quiet mountain town. The bloated remains of a wing clung to her back, cramped within the tank. Long silver hair drifted around her, the severe braid and ornate armour long gone, as were her arms and most of her legs.
Her good eye watched and waited.
He released the memory. The image swirled back into the current and he stood upon the edge of an island. Empty lifestream stretched out below him.
There was a voice on the wind. A whisper, a pained hiss, an entreaty. A mother, bereft.
He looked out into the abyss.
"Mother," he called into the wind. The swirling green swallowed it up.
"Sephiroth," the voice replied. "My son."
A/N: Thanks for reading!
Next Time: Blight Time Babey