Eve of the Sin Harvest
Vincent tried to stay within the moderately safe haven of sleep. His demonic arm ached sporadically but in sleep, it was the least noticeable. But he could not stay in that restful sanctuary. Threads were strung around his heart, threads that were tugged taut as to draw him to some power he couldn't rightly identify. Every time he closed his eyes shut, the threads would be pulled, and he was propelled back to harsh reality.
He didn't move from his spot in days, despite Nanaki's concerns, and demurred the help of any of his people, as well. Having given up on Vincent and his chosen ineptitude, Nanaki left to do something about the calamitous entity raining deathly light from the sky.
After Nanaki departed, Vincent endeavored to sleep, but again, the strings were drawn tight around his heart so hard, he cried out.
Yet, that wasn't the only pain.
He felt those claws scratching at his intestines, the claws of Chaos striving for freedom. An electrifying agony shot through his spine which made him see stars. He writhed as something forced its way out of him, out of his back. He bounded to his hands and knees as though to vomit, his body heaving.
They pierced the skin of his back. The wings of Chaos. They sprouted from his shoulder blades, at first curled up like fresh new fronds of a jungle fern, then unfurling into their full span capable of blocking out the sun's rays. The black clawed webbed wings arched high into the air, a halo for the demonic of beings. But demonic Vincent didn't want to be. Nanaki's people who stood nearby gasped in noisy astonishment at such a spectacle as hims sprouting black wings.
He clenched his fists in subdued anger. He didn't want this sort of attention, this frightened recognition of the monster within. He needed to get away.
He searched. There had been clothes set out for him at some time or other. These he picked up and donned, however with wings, a shirt was useless, and so he took the blanket and draped it over himself.
"Damn wings…" Vincent staggered out of the little camp established by the survivors of the canyon's catastrophe and took flight with the dark pinions of Chaos to wherever they took him. They delivered him west, over the mountains.
--
The two entities that possessed the skies met at last several hundred miles from where Gold Saucer once assailed to touch the heavens. The emerald moon, like a cloud gravid with restless rain, released a spray of light that ignited the gloomy vault, and then poured down in countless glowing spears. Everything that had yet to be destroyed fell, and the already wounded had little energy left to withstand a second barrage of light. The Planet of forest green, of ocean blue, of earthen yellow, became the Planet of ash gray and of charcoal black. Death.
Yet it wasn't over.
Not by a long shot.
The second entity repelled what green light showered upon it and released its own whitish glare against the emerald moon. The sphere shrank back then billowed with a new energy. It tapered to the sky and down to the earth, becoming an immense tower. Gigantic swirling tendrils stemmed from the core sphere and smaller, thinner tendrils in turn branched from the larger ones. They almost resembled wings, wings molded from Lifestream. The white sphere motioned forward, intending to collide with the other.
Vincent was somehow shielded from the deadly luminescent shower that suddenly exploded in the sky. Because he was drawn. He was drawn to the final gathering place of the two entities and he couldn't die before he reached the hallowed grounds. Not yet. He was being called.
Come…
He heard a voice, soft and alluring, drawing him ever closer.
Do not deny it. The attraction. Come, to where you belong…
"To where…I belong?" The voice was right. Vincent was incapable of denying the allure, the sweet enticement into the caress of some unknown but not totally unknown thing. The voice was familiar. That voice, the voice of his nightmares. Jenova posing as Sephiroth with its added mechanical monotone. But could he turn away? Could he resist the power of Jenova? No. Because Chaos saw to that, by making it halfway to the surface of his weakened self, the seed of Jenova managed to take control and bring him to the mother of his demons, the mother of his living doom. To become its tool, to become part of it.
Deny it. Deny it, Vincent!
"What?" This new voice pierced the seductive veil of Jenova's whispers and confused Chaos's grasp on Vincent's muddled and debilitated psyche.
Fight it! Fight her! Fight him!
"Fight?"
No. He is mine. Come to me and do my bidding, demon…
"Aah!" Chaos battled with Vincent, the struggle being visible physically on his torn person. Tumbling to earth, his body lost much of the battle for self-domination.
You can do it, Vincent! Fight! Help defeat Jenova! Help defeat Sephiroth just like last time!
"…help? Is that…Cloud's voice? But…he's dead… You're dead."
Come on, Vincent!
"Ah… But I can't. I can't do it anymore. The pain, it's too much. Jenova is tearing me apart and I can't fight anymore. I just want it to end. Everything to end, forever…"
You can make it end, my demon. Just come to me and I will rid you of your human pain.
"My human…" Vincent, with Chaos creeping up his flesh, rose to his feet on deteriorating strength. He lifted both arms to the dark but radiant sky as if suddenly in prayer. How beautiful the sky was. How the green light overlapped the soot and smoke that deprived the Planet of the sun, making the gloomy clouds seem as the underside of a devil's heart with pulsing verdant veins. How the tendrils of the emerald moon, now a divine pillar set in the earth and craving the heavens and space to be its own, meandered amongst themselves. The dark and ruined earth that moaned for relief as he did. "…but I can't leave with this as my last vision of the world, no matter how it betrayed me a normal life. I can't. I must…"