A.N.: God, this is...my THIRD update this week, AND I think I'll have another ready before the end of the day. Anyway, here is...a very strange piece of FFVIIness. It has a few strange words and people in it...
Moksha – is Hindu. It means becoming one with God.
Medui-Omar and Aelf-wen – are both Elvish, why, because they sound right... The former just means 'final fantasy' and the latter means 'elf-woman' – I know, I could have used Cetra or Ancient for Aeris but they didn't have the same ring to them.
Jezabel – the Whore of Babylon, and held by Judeo-Islamo-Christianity to be the most wicked woman who ever lived. I want her autograph.
Rimmer – a Red Dwarf reference. Sorry. I know. Arnold Rimmer was once told by an oracle that he would die of a heart attack in shock at hearing that he was about to die of a heart attack. ^__^
Latin bits - courtesy or Karl Orf and Carmina Burana, and also Nobuo Uematsu and One Winged Angel. Thanks be to Gods!
Plato the Chicken – OC, muse and occasional insert. He's in my other VII/surrealscape, The Equaliser, too. And he's an unreal travelling...chicken. Ignore this if it annoys you, really...
Read, enjoy, tell me how confused you got...
Athene Miranda
I'd been watching her for a while...there always was something quite extraordinary about her, as if she had all the normal pieces, but assembled in a very special way. She was low-born, simple – browned and tattered by sixteen years of real life, but she was content enough, in her own way. But never happy. She could never be happy – she understood too much for that. She knew how much there was that she had never seen.
And, of course, she could sing. The girl could sing like Jezabel, and all her world knew it, but they never thought of it as anything worthwhile or valuable at all. If she could shoot a hare, she's be valuable. Or had a good hand at the spinning wheel. Even a pretty face was worth something – but a voice, no, every little bird had one of those. So they said. So they thought. Their realm was dying, how else would they think of it? They didn't know how deep it ran inside her; never saw how much the music meant to her. And....none of us knew at that point that Something was out there looking.
When he pulled her out of the River, I saw that she'd been born to be with him.
It was timing, really. Purest luck that he caught hold of her. She took a fall off the crumbling, fading headland near her home in...whichever spent and unmemorable land it was, I really couldn't care, and nor could she – but anyhow, she fell, and it was two-hundred feet straight down onto the rocks below. She was afraid, terrified, and she was caught up in the urge to pray for her soul. But the gods had long ago deserted her people, seeking less tired folk, without the coldness of heart and mind that those men had – I digress. She fell, then, and she sang out as she fell – died as she lived, with nothing to mark her but her music and her affinity for the infinite; flowing away on the beat of her own requiem. And, of course, her world was dying – fading away like so many places do once the fire's fled from them. NO-one saw that sparrow fall. Except me, but I don't count. I wasn't really there, or anywhere else for that matter, and that's often quite handy when it comes to watching people.
Thus the River took her. It is Universal, after all – takes everything the High Ones don't fancy, and gets trawled by anyone tall enough to reach it. What can I say? She fell straight inot his net, and he took her, dried her off a bit, wound her up like a clockwork hamster, and –
Dulcissime!
Ohhh...,
Totem tibi subduo me...
He was the strongest, the greatest, mortal to ever arise from the plane of Medui-Omar – and she'd shook him right to the roots of his frosty-white hair. I think he was in love with her – he fell in love very easily, you know, if only with himself. So he took her thin, brown, shattered hand and kissed it, and for the first time, she knew what joy was. Being honoured by the Devil's lips often does that to one. He dropped her hand, raised his sword, and whispered, "You're hired," with all the poison of a fated lover.
She stood there, smiling and shining, while his pulsing blade clove her soul in two.
He took her voice away with him, wrapped in his silken hair, and left her form to rot. She didn't need it any more, and probably never had done, either – she wasn't made for reality, or rather, it wasn't made for her. He'd gathered the other six already, taking them one by one from the empty roads they walked – all that was left was one empty pedestal, the highest of them all. He laid her upon it like a lotus petal, and the circle was complete.
Sephiroth!
Well? They tend to take something along the highway with them – cats, gospels, wings, sceptres, or maybe just a gloden-glowing mantra. He wanted a choir. (Of course, he had a wing too, but that was just because he couldn't help it). He needed a new sort of glory. And they sounded as beautiful as he was.
Besides, I don't like cats – must be a bird thing, I suppose.
She worshipped him and magnified him, like an endless aural mirror. He loved her the way he loved everything he loved, by drawing it inside himself and carrying it along his path to Heaven. How else could he have become so vast and colourful? He wanted divinity...wanted to be everything, be of everything, be in everything, and have everything in him. In a lesser man they'd call it megalomania, but he was the lesser of no-one. He never did try to catch me in his web, though – oh, he knew I was there (insofar as 'there' has any meaning for either an unreal planewalking chicken or an all-conquering AntiChrist), but I think I never aroused enough emotion in him to fall into his dark-star Moksha. I was just...necessary. Not part of the snowball, but still along for the roll. Watching them.
Estuans interius ira vehementi,
She made quite an odd leader – not conducting them herself, but instead leading them in submission to the rhythm. Like a medium with a tuning fork; opening up another world and sailing in its winds. She really did understand, though – that was the tragic thing. She saw it all, the way the melodies ran through every pool on the Planes. She could hear the echoes of futures never to be, and she let them play her like a harpstring, bowstring. That power, or profound lack of it, would have driven most women mad, but she flowed with it and accepted it totally with a character far deeper than mere wisdom. I sometimes wished I could see it all...but no. I think too hard as it is. Watching her was enough for me. Especially when she smiled at me, as if she knew where I was headed. (I never asked, of course – far too dangerous, that sort of thing. Look at what happened to Rimmer!)
Sors immanis
She probably knew what would happen all along.
et inanis
I even wonder if she wanted it that way.
Sephiroth!
The Northern Crater was its physical name, but in their strange world the caldera borealis was a high cathedral – an acoustic masterpiece, shaking to its depths with every sound in the spectrum. There, every ode was a hymn and every clipped word a blessing. They went everywhere with him – mountain and ocean, fire and tempest – oh, they were there, but the Crater was their homeland. They sang for him as he cut down the last aelf-wen, and in her song she whispered "It has always been so." They praised his dreams, his mothers, his extravagant hair – everything he did was in their voices, though whether they sang what he did or he did what they sang is...well, quantum.
I think that in any case she hadn't got the calculation in her to sing him to death, or to murder, or anything like that, but...perhaps I assume too much of her. She'd followed his quest for too long to be called an 'innocent' by anyone. Yet he was somehow innocent of everything – unfettered force, unbound passion. He believed he could burn the world up, not down. Razing. Raising. Perceiving power as above good and evil, when he was able to perceive it at all. She knew so much more than him; you could almost se her as more culpable than he was –
– until she flicked her larynx on, at which point you couldn't think of anything at all.
Generosa
The end was, well, final. I've seen it a thousand times, or mainly only once; it depends on how you look at it. There's only two ways you can stop a fire-horse Chariot, both of them messy, but both of them so satisfying if you appreciate that sort of thing. There's only so much spark one plane can have, and he'd stolen so much of it... He wanted everything, and not everything wanted him. But (hindsight is a fine thing) I suspect now, I'm almost sure of it, that she did indeed want him dead. No, not like that – she just wanted to be on a level alongside him, she wanted him and she wanted him to want her, that was all. He belonged to himself too much, like many other things did. Like she did, perhaps.
And no, she didn't try to change anything. She knew everything, remember? She only ever had to wait.
Gloriosa
Death or glory. Nothing else had meaning. The Choir sang of both.
ne me mori facias
His hunters, his challengers, could take all the other forces – versatility, endurance, fear, love – and turn them to their cause, but it was Sephiroth who had all of the glory.
All of the death, too.
Sephiroth!
It had been a long, bloody journey, and she had often sung of murder. But only once before had she ever sung a requiem. He left no blood...only shattered, like a sculpture carved in glass, spilling his black rainbow out into the world, and leaving what once was his to the plunder. All that gold... The Six were stricken, lost – they had not her foresight, and were prepared for nothing but continuing servitude, and they flew away like so much smoke, off through the cracks of their world. One even sank as far as your place, brought the last great Song across the void with him – you should be glad, really, for chance would be that that treasure would be lost in totality, not merely consigned to those forgotten pages in old, silent tongues. She stayed, the only one who knew that it was not over. She stayed in that hall, where every rock was an altar, and every man was an angel, and she chanted his name in her heart. She waited until the cataclysm had ceased, and the air had stilled, and the thieves had gone and taken the Power with them – and she chanted out his name, crooned it like a mother, a lover, and hoped, with all she was, that he could finally hear her not as a part of him, but as herself.
She sings still, never moving from her cavern, haunting the bones of the Plane with her endless, meaningless melodies. With her beloved so long gone, she has nothing to sing about but what she sees, and she sees everything – many a traveller has come from that place full of twisted visions and dark panoramas of lands faraway. I used to go to see her, but I don't need to any more – wherever I am I know that she sees me, and sometimes I still feel her perception, listening to every sound I make. Not a ghost, or a widow, or a lost soul – just someone who was washed down the River to where she belonged, however strange that belonging may seem to you.
And...she's happy now. He can hear her for what she is...
...a siren.