Sorry its late, everybody. I'm trying my best to keep up the weekly updates.
Hawke sat at a table in the Fat Chocobo. She wore a plastic smile and looked over a hand of cards.
It was a Thursday night, and on Thursday nights she went drinking with Reno. So there he sat, opposite her, holding his cards close to his chest with a smile just as fake as her own.
"-then Fair tripped and spilled his whole drink right down Sephiroth's front," Reno finished up his definitely fabricated story.
Hawke guffawed like she meant it. He grinned in satisfaction, as was required.
She hadn't wanted to come. She could think of countless excuses not to: an injury, a job, the simple mundanity of being mad at him, all of which she'd used in the past. She showed up anyway, with a swagger, a smirk, and a full set of daggers, thirty minutes late and demanding he get the first round. Anything less would have been a concession.
He grumbled loudly and bought the drinks and dealt the first round of cards. The laughter was louder than usual and the jokes worse, but they were pretending hard enough to make up for it. She had learned the rules of Q5 by now and pulled all her nastiest tricks, meeting his cheating blow for blow.
The silence stretched awkwardly. She glanced at him over the top of her cards.
"But what is the deal with airline food?" she said.
He choked on a gulp of his drink.
"Not that desperate, are we?"
She sighed. She was furious at him, not just for being a Not-A-Templar-bastard, that wasn't news, but because she had genuinely enjoyed their drinking nights. They were stupid and relaxing. Bullshitting over bad drinks with bad company was something she could do without thinking, without regret or worry. And he went and ruined it all.
She'd always known he was a dirtbag and she hadn't minded, she was one too, and he wasn't taking it out on her so long as they maintained the balance of lies. Because they could pretend really well that what they did outside of the bar didn't get tracked in on the bottom of their shoes.
He played his hand with a careless toss. She did too, throwing out the only set of cards better than his. He swore colourfully. Her forced smile faltered.
He clicked his tongue and dropped the act for a moment.
"You could've just kept your head down and this woulda still been a good time," he said.
She scoffed and collected up the cards to shuffle. "Oh, it's my fault, is it?"
"Nobody's making you go step into every mess you find."
"You could've not been a jackboot," she muttered.
"Then we never wouldn't've met and we wouldn't be…" He waved a hand vaguely in the air between them, searching for a word.
"Drunk?"
"No, I'd still be drunk."
She cracked a smile. "But you would never have known what you were missing out on."
She stacked the deck and dealt a bad hand for him and a good hand for her. He promptly swapped out his with the illegal cards he kept on his person.
"Neither would you."
"Sure I would." She readjusted her cards, not looking up at him. "There's always another thug."
He was quiet for a moment. She was two drinks past caring about being politic about it.
"At least I aint pretending to be anything," he replied, with his professionally sly tone.
"Then why do you always scuff up your fancy suits and drink yourself to sleep?"
He scowled, and there was nothing professional about it. "That shit's below the belt and you know it."
"I'm sorry, did I make drinks' night awkward?" She leaned forward, both hands on the table. "Did I throw something personal about you in your face? Oh no, how selfish of me."
"Like you're not just fifty hangups stacked in a trench coat," he snapped, throwing his cards at her.
"I'm not wearing a trench coat."
"Na, you're wearing the blood and guts of whoever gets in your way. You're not better than me."
"Because nobody's better than a Turk, right?" she drawled.
He shot to his feet.
"Yeah go on, arrest me!" she yelled, getting up as well. "Will that make you feel strong?"
"You little rat!"
Cissnei, the little wavy haired Turk girl shoved her way between them.
"Stop making a scene," she hissed, shooting a death glare at the both of them. Reno shot one back at her. The rest of the bar was pretending not to have been listening in.
"Hi Cissnei," Hawke said, still riding high on her indignation, "your colleague is a disgrace to your profession."
The two of Turks stopped their silent exchange of evil looks to glance back at her. She registered that Cissnei was in his barback disguise and had never actually been introduced to her.
"I mean," Hawke coughed, and offered an apologetic smile. "Could we please have another round, waitress whose name I don't know?"
"No, you're both cut off. Now act like adults or so help me," Cissnei said, holding up a threatening finger. She spun and stormed off.
Hawke and Reno sunk back into their seats. They didn't make eye contact. She stifled a laugh, until he snickered, and it escaped her as a snort.
She took the last gulp of her forgotten drink, and he leaned back on his chair, resting a foot up on the edge of the table. She felt the urge to apologise for some of the sore points she'd poked, but she knew full well she wouldn't get on in return. Instead she smiled and raised her empty bottle.
"To none of that showing up on her report."
He laughed and raised his own empty glass. "Not a chance in hell."
Genesis stood on the ledge cut into a cliff face and looked out at the plains of Fade Midgar below. The spirits had been busy, patches of it were growing into structures and typography, little domains. Their lights glowed in the distance, like shredded, ghostly white sheets blowing across the landscape. A cold wind hissed along the cliff face.
Behind him Hawke sat on a log by her campfire. She held her hands out to the warmth. The fire popped and hissed with melting sap, and the kettle above it stubbornly refused to boil. A shame. He would have liked a cup of tea.
They hadn't dreamed together since Sloth, but she and her territory were unchanged. She wore full armour, as usual. He did too, which was not. He was glad for the weight of the sword at his waist, and the security of his coat. The appeal of the sparse and cold little campfire grew on him, with its exposed and wandering path that even spirits had to deal with, all its mundane little rules.
"Recite a poem for me, Hawke," he said, not looking back.
She hummed for a moment.
"In darkest of winter, from foulest Tevinter,
We fled with a lifetime of wealth in the hold.
The ship's hull was breaching, with no hope of reaching
A shore for to live with our murderer's gold."
He turned to watch her, standing opposite her. She didn't move, staring into the glowing embers and reciting like it was a compulsion. The wind howled, and the fire sputtered, but the Fade held steady. Her voice rose and fell with the rhythm of the stanzas, carrying them down, down to the end.
"The captain, they shouted, had cruelly clouted
A servant who died at the treasury door.
He soon grew no older, but slipped on a boulder
And shattered his skull, and was wealthy no more.
"The lady was bathing, her last look was scathing
As I held her down for the key she did hold.
If my fate be drowning, let spirits be frowning,
I'll sit on dry land with my murderer's gold."
The words fell away into silence and he released a breath he had been holding. It was a distinctly Thedosian piece, with their obsession with rhyming sets. As was the openly ominous subject matter, Gaian's prefered to dance around tragedy and tease optimism. He found he enjoyed the lack of pretence.
She glanced up at him with a calculating smile. Her hair caught in the wind and flicked around her face.
"Would fate cast us as the murderers or is it Shinra?" he mused, tilting his head.
"Shinra, naturally. If anything we're the gold, slowly sinking to the sea floor as short sighted powers fight over us."
He hummed, not pleased with that conclusion. "Perhaps we are the wealthy woman, drowned and plundered."
"I'd rather be the vengeful spirits," she replied, rising to her feet. "Striking down the wicked just as they think they've gotten away with it."
"So would I."
She stretched her arms over her head then took up her staff.
"I said I would remember the Ancient elves for you, didn't I?" she said, not meeting his eye.
"You did. But here?" He cocked an eyebrow. "In your little refuge?"
"No! Maker, no, we're going up to the city."
"Lead on then."
He didn't fully understand the mechanics of it, beyond the general malleability of the Fade. She explained how she thought it worked, calling on her borrowed memories to awaken what was already there in the surroundings: old, old memories sunken deep into the fabric of the Fade itself. It made a certain kind of sense, the Lifestream held all the memories of all life that ever rose and fell on Gaia. Why would that not include its attempted conquerors?
She stalked along the cliffside paths with unshakeable focus, stabbing her staff into the sands. He knew she was deeply uncomfortable with the whole thing and probably trying to avoid losing her nerve. He wasn't comfortable with it either, that blaspheming gods from another world had violated her very mind. He thought back to endless lists of things Shinra had injected into him. What else had they violated?
It was better to know the truth than to live in willful ignorance. He pushed through his discomfort.
They climbed up to the pearl city, and then up its fortifications.
He frowned at a chrome suspension bridge intruding on the Ancient locale.
"Where did this come from?"
"I think it's one of the new spirits," Hawke replied. "There's an Innovation out there somewhere."
"But why?" he asked. His experiences were not vast, but what he had seen had always included some kind of purpose. The network of bridges was large and growing, and completely at odds with everything else he had seen spirits make.
She shrugged. "If we run into them, we can ask."
She paused on a stretch of wall, looking around with her eyes narrowed. The floating islands of the city hung serene and still in place. She shook her head and led them further in. The structures lost focus on the interior, glowing walls merging together, widows hanging from nothing, and doors opening to emptiness. He raised an eyebrow at the back of her head but she walked on doggedly, navigating the madness without hesitation.
"What are you looking for?" he asked.
She glanced back over her shoulder, but her eyes didn't meet his, they roamed walls and heights he couldn't see.
"There's.. a lot here. But it's not focused."
"You remember this level? These halls?"
She shook her head. "Not with any focus. I'm chasing down the clear memories."
She slowed in the centre of a mess of curving walls and vague furniture. He stared at what could have been a chair. The longer he looked the more obvious it became that it was a chair. And then it was his chair, his favourite armchair, sitting on his expensive Condorian rug, in the middle of an incomprehensible Cetran city. His heart sank. There was no trace of what the memory had been before.
"This room…" Hawke looked around, raising an eye at the incongruous modern detail but passing over it without comment. "I remember the smell of jasmine here."
She moved to stand with her back to one of the walls, and gestured for him to join her. His heart rate began to pick up and he braced himself for whatever would happen next. She had assured him it wouldn't be dangerous to them. He wasn't going to let it be dangerous.
"I find it's best not to look at them straight on," she said, her voice lowering. "Just let it flow around you, like a rock in a river."
He nodded. "I'm ready."
He tried to hold in check his expectations, to simply see what the ancients of two worlds had to say for themselves.
Hawke closed her eyes and let out a shallow breath. Her eyes opened, unfocused, and the space shifted around them. He didn't realise he had been waiting for the sounds of combat until a tray of tea floated past. It's carrier was less distinct than the smell of jasmine and something warm and buttery fresh from the oven.
Pearly white walls and grey floor changed to the suggestion of ornate blue mosaics. Dappled golden light danced over uncertain lumps and barriers as they became a garden terrace with two reclining couches and climbing vines hanging off its fretwork railing. The cold, dead memorial turned bright and lively. Birds sang, and he caught the quiet sound of a quill scratching over parchment. None of it was truly solid, some of the details hazy and others missing entirely, but there was an unshakable presence to it.
His eyes followed the server out into the terrace proper. They placed the tea on a low table, before two impossibly beautiful women. They were sharper in detail than the surroundings, so vibrant and alive he could have sworn they were here with them.
His breath abandoned him at the sight of them, the sheer magnificence beyond anything a human mind could conjure, something they could only vainly imitate. Surely Hawke was deceived; these could only be the holiest of the Cetra at their height.
He stepped forward to see. Hawke's hand wrapped around his arm, strong and solid.
He swallowed through the dryness in his throat and a strange ache deep in his chest. No, that was the deception, wasn't it? Hawke didn't have memories of Gaia's Ancients, only of creatures that had aspired to be gods and bent the world itself around them to make it so. He shouldn't have been surprised at their glory, or that they dared to flaunt it within a city they had conquered. Disgust overtook his awe.
He let her hand pull him gently back.
"That's Mythal," she whispered, nodded towards the older of the two. She reclined on a chaise lounge in a flowing green dress, adorned with white metal detailing that could have been armour or jewelry. Long white hair cascaded down her back, studded with glowing gems arranged like flowers. She held a quill and wrote into a book. Her golden eyes were narrowed in thought, and she took a porcelain cup from the tray without looking up.
The other was a different matter, tall and imposing in monochrome colours, with dark eyes and silver hair. Clearly younger than the other though she was, there was a confronting age to her gaze. Shiva, immortal personification of wisdom itself, hadn't rivalled the sheer depth of time hiding in her eyes. She was dressed as though she had recently returned from a hunt, riding boots and a fur edged cape pushed up over her shoulder. Her hair was braided up into a beaded and thick rope over her scalp and down her back. She stood overlooking the gardens, a half fletched arrow in her hands.
"And the hunter's name?" he asked, not daring to raise his voice above a whisper.
"Andruil," Mythal called, with a voice reaching down through the centuries. All his hairs stood on end. "Have you made your decision?"
The hunter turned her head slightly. Her voice was strong and cultured as she replied in the negative. He felt instinctively that they were speaking no language he knew, but he understood nonetheless.
He tried to pick up the threads of the conversation, his brow furrowed. Why had this moment survived the long years? Why was this memory in Hawke's head when so many others were not?
"I charged them to never be taken alive," Andruil said. Her eyes were inscrutable as they roamed the garden. "I distrust them more than I do the Cetra's offer."
Understanding dawned on him, as did an eerie familiarity to the scene. They were talking about a prisoner exchange.
Mythal looked up briefly from her work. "If they have betrayed us, better to strategically place them and control the flow of information back to the Cetra. And if they have not then your mercy will buy more than revenge will."
Andruil tsked. "I am not given to weaponising mercy."
"What are you given to then?" Mythal asked, her voice dry. "Slaughtering your own forces?"
Andruil raised her chin and spun the arrow in her hand. "Winning battles."
"What a brat you are." Mythal replied, with narrowed eyes and easy humour, her quill still scratching across parchment.
"Falling behind, mother? Is the weight of the world bowing your head?"
"I'm going to cast you from my empire and give your armies to your brothers."
Andruil laughed. "Be my guest. I should like to watch you try to take Gaia with Dirthamen as your general. Or perhaps Fen'harel, he can dream of victory for you."
"You all have your skill sets," Mythal replied, in a very politic manner. There was a patient cunning in her expression as her eyes roamed over the surroundings, lingering over them. She smiled. He narrowed his eyes.
Andruil studied the fletching of the arrow.
"And this is my skill set." She turned the arrow this way and that, before frowning at some imperfection. She tore the feathers off. "My vengeance will speak for itself. Their orders were to return undetected or not at all. I do not give orders that I am not prepared to carry out myself."
Mythal pursed her lips but inclined her head. "They're your troops, you know if you can spare them or not."
Andruil turned back and looked as though she had something to say, but the memory fractured. The details grew muddied and the figures lost shape, their colours blurring together.
Hawke's hand, which he hadn't noticed was still wrapped round his arm, loosened. She sighed.
"Wait," he said, stepping towards where the terrace had been. It still held the general shape, it wasn't exactly as it had been, but the changes were vague and translucent. "What did they do next? Is there nothing else?"
Hawke shook her head. "I don't have an index. I don't know what's there until I go digging."
He looked in frustration at the surroundings, glowing pearly white again. So those were the Evanuris. Self satisfied nobility who lounged in comfort while deciding who lived and who died, generals who fought wars with no mercy for their own men let alone the enemy's. What were they to do with that knowledge?
"Why this memory?" he asked. "Why would anyone want you to remember this?"
Hawke looked away, through translucent walls to a Fade that offered only questions. "I don't know." She made a noise of frustration and then set off again.
"Come on. I don't want to stir up any more, or the Fade will start to remember without prompting."
Sephiroth looked around the landscape of his dreams.
Something had changed.
He walked through one of the higher islands of the pearl city. The outer wall was crumbling. It wasn't simply fading away, which was common, it was collapsing as if hit by an attack. He studied the damage. There were scorch marks and thick splintered fibres of the material that gave the wall its glowing pearly sheen. Grey bricks spilled out from within. He smelled blood.
The place he dreamed of was always strange, and it had grown stranger still in the last six months, but more than anything else it was familiar. The more he focused on it, the more familiar it became, showing him warped versions of sights he already knew and understood. Whatever else it might have been, it was his dream, and it oriented itself around him.
He traced the blast marks with a finger and didn't recognise it. That wasn't the impact of any weapon Shinra or Wutai utilised. He stretched a hand out and felt the aftershocks of magic he didn't recognise. No Materia he knew did this.
Someone shouted. He looked around and drew his sword. He didn't sense any spirits nearby.
There came a jeering yell in reply.
He walked further along the wall, reaching a place where it was entirely rubble, and two bleeding soldiers crouched behind opposite sides of the debris pile, less than ten yards apart. They were in different uniforms. The closest wore indistinct golden and green plate armour. He had long pointy ears and bright, disconcerting eyes. The armouring over his legs had been smashed in. He leaned back against the wall, dried tear tracks streaking down a slightly blurry face.
The other was in cream coloured leather, lighter, and designed for ease of movement. She didn't look quite human either, although there was no defining reason for it. She was less blurry as well. A dark wet patch steadily grew over her abdomen. She clutched onto the pieces of a broken staff.
Both were slightly translucent. Sephiroth stepped closer to observe, walking over the rubble pile. Neither reacted. They were dyed in the bloody red light of a sunset that did not touch him.
The woman yelled something in a language he did not recognise. The sharp eared man, what he supposed old myth would call an elf, spat something aggressive in reply. He watched them trade barbs, unaware of the words, but the desperation and maddened laughter of hopelessness carried through any language. They were both throwing out threats they had no means of carrying out, waiting to die.
The elf's cries grew quieter, and then stopped altogether. The woman, victorious and alone in the rubble, finally wept.
Sephiroth forced himself to watch. He didn't know why. He didn't know these people, they weren't even real. He watched until the woman expired as well, and then the image flickered away entirely.
Then it began again.
The two dying soldiers were again breathing, leaning against the wall, and yelling the same threats, but now the woman spoke Wutaian. He watched, baffled, as it repeated, and repeated, and repeated, each time losing a little of what it had been to begin with and growing a little more familiar, until the elf was a SOLDIER yelling slurs and threats he had heard countless times and the woman a ninja holding a cracked naginata. He was having an observer effect on his own dream.
But he wanted to see the real thing again, the original, untarnished by his interference.
Was there an original dream? Who were those people?
He frowned, stepped off the rubble and continued on, leaving the dying soldiers to die again.
He had come to terms with the entities that haunted his sleep. Spirits like Rebellion, who was steadily catching up with him as he stalked through the half sacked city. There was the boy Innovation, and the girl with the magic mirror, who refused to name herself but he suspected was something very like Innovation. They were not complex creatures, they each had a quest or concept they sought and rearranged the surroundings in single minded pursuit of it.
No spirit had been responsible for that vision. He would have sensed its presence and its hold over the scenery.
He didn't know why it troubled him. He suspected there was some truth being kept from him, even though he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was simply dreaming.
He frowned and stopped walking halfway up the steps to the highest tower. He did not fully understand the situation and it frustrated him. The dreams were obviously more than that, he wasn't a fool, and yet it was as false as a VR simulation. No, that was inaccurate, because VR required a programmer and servers designed to host it. This was simply chaos, that had no bearing on the real world while also being inextricably linked to it.
"The dreaming world is not the waking world," Reflection said behind him, her wispy inhuman voice quiet.
"I know that." He frowned and kept walking, climbing the translucent stairs. They carried his weight because he said they should. They came out on a high turret, with a view of the shifting landscape of islands in all directions.
There were seven black voids in a distant circle around them, far, far below. There was a noticeable gap where the eighth had been.
The obvious conclusion was irrational. It would be even more irrational to deny the evidence. The only real option was to adjust his rationale to accommodate it.
"Are we in the Lifestream?" he asked.
"Yes."
"How is this possible?"
Reflection looked at him from her wizened old face studded with young, curious eyes. "I do not know."
"I thought only the dead returned to the Lifestream. Isn't that the superstition?"
"You do not believe in superstitions."
"I didn't believe in the Lifestream either." He looked up at the thick green air. "Until very recently."
If Mako was the Lifestream, then it wasn't truly so illogical he had access to it. He had more Mako in his blood than any other human on record. Even those who fell into natural fountains and were fished out months after drowning didn't have as much condensed Mako in them as he did.
If he supposed it to be everything the true believers claimed it to be, then his visions of the dying soldiers could only be memories. But there were no people with pointed ears like that, and no such war was taking place and hadn't within recorded history. How old did he assume the memories to be? How far back could they go? How close to the present? How accessible was the information?
The opportunity of the situation struck him.
"Reflection," he said. "You can draw out the memories of this place, can't you? That's what you do, reflect what is already there."
"There is little here to reflect upon." She scuffed at the white floor with her shoe, such a human gesture. "So few dreamers, the Lifestream sits empty."
"Empty? Thousands of people die everyday. Hundreds in Midgar alone. Where are their memories?"
Her face shifted minutely, fathomless and unsettling. "Humans have short memories."
He nodded slowly, guarded. The Spirit stared back. He felt her touch his mind.
"You want to see your mother's memories."
He held his face in check. It wasn't something he would have spoken of when awake, and he didn't want to discuss it here now. But it was true. "She is dead. Where else would I look?"
Reflection hummed. She turned from him and looked out to the sky, lifting her chin. "You cannot reflect on what you do not know."
She didn't say anything else and he released a thin breath. It hadn't truly believed it would be so easy. Not after a lifetime of failing to find any information about her at all. He stood at Reflection's side and let time slip away in silent camaraderie. In the distance the yells of the dying soldiers played out still, repeating senselessly.
He felt a spirit of Pride rearranged his network of his bridges far below, and the girl worked on her mirror down by a lower island. She didn't feel like the other spirits. Curious. Why was she different?
There was a snap of giant leathery wings and a gust of air shook the tower.
His eyes snapped open. His sword appeared in his hand and he leapt up onto the battlement. He searched the surrounding towers for a dragon large enough to displace so much air.
He spied long silver hair on the wind, and a woman disappearing behind one of the lower towers, running at full speed. His eyes narrowed. Nothing was as it seemed in the dreams.
He gave chase.
Air flew past him as he leapt off the battlement. He skidded down the sides, vaulted over a roof, and then ran along the wall. There was no spirit in his path, no trail of intent to follow, only a memory. The woman wore grey armour that made her hard to see in the pearly white. He chased the flicker of movement.
The surroundings changed, the ruined city walls rose again, rebuilt to be grander, taller, more ostentatious. The Woman leapt up with a furious cry that split the Lifestream, and hurled a spear.
A monster of crystalline mako and opal reared up, taller than the Shinra building itself.
The spear struck one of the monsters' arms with a flash of light. The crystal cracked, and the arm exploded. The monster roared.
The woman leapt back with a SOLDIER's grace, and the monster's retaliation smashed through the wall in her place. Buildings crumbled below its feet. Towers shook and fell.
He drew near to the mayhem, but the details escaped him. It was a suggestion of a monster, a smudge of colour in place of texture, and a different number of limbs every time he looked. The woman was tall and grey with flashes of golden skin and pointed ears, but little more. He chased the action, trying to get a clearer look.
The two fighters melted into blurry smears of colour, and then snapped into perfect clarity,: a copy of himself fighting Bahamut Zero through a city in southern Wutai.
He snarled in frustration and stopped running. A perfect copy of himself sliced a wing from the dragon's back. It was a third of the size of the crystal monster.
He forced himself to close his eyes. He needed a gentler touch, a less intrusive presence. He let his mind relax. He didn't know what had triggered the memory of the woman, but he wanted to see it through to the end. He didn't know why, but curiosity burned in him. What knowledge did the Lifestream keep buried deep inside itself? Did she win? Did the monster level the city?
He stopped up the tide of questions. The ring of Masamune faded away. The Lifestream flowed around him whichever way it wanted.
A monster roared.
A woman yelled something in a language he did not speak, but recognised. Overwhelming magic tore through the air.
He opened his eyes and watched from his peripheral. She had retrieved her spear and stabbed it into the monster's leg, tearing it out from under it. Her form was very good. He ducked and weaved out of the way, climbing atop fallen rubble and following at a distance.
The monster toppled onto its back, its remaining limbs lashing out. She leapt onto its exposed underside and stalked up its length.
A ball of magic gathered in its mouth, blindingly powerful. She raised her spear. The ball of magic released with a roar.
His ears popped.
A shield sprung from the spear's tip. It redirected the magic back at the monster in a dome of blowback.
The woman stood panting and bleeding, but unbowed. Her thick beaded braid of hair whipped behind her from the force of the magic released.
The wretched monster groaned in pain. She raised her spear again and slaughtered the beast. She was vicious and terrible to behold. Dark indistinct eyes roamed her surroundings now that her enemy had fallen.
The gaze of the ancient memory latched onto something in his chest, and his breath hitched. He had to shake his head or risk staring too closely. Her eyes moved on and the memory barked orders, but whoever she spoke to had not left enough of an impression on the Lifestream.
She lifted her weapon and walked down off the corpse, stopping meters away from Sephiroth. She looked to the skies. He imagined her expression was searching.
She raised an arm. There was a dim flash of light then a strange sighing sound, and she turned into a giant dragon.
He stared. The memory grew blurry.
Wings cracked like thunder, a blast of air knocked him back, and the memory collapsed into nothing.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Been a while since we had a good long Fade chapter, hasn't it? It took longer than I thought, so all my careful planning had to change around it. Any reviews and feedback are welcome.
Next time: Teaching magic to a SOLDIER, for real this time.
