Meeting Love, Finding Despair

By Quis

Epilogue

I will always remember the night my mother died. I can still hear her shrieks of pain as she battled the demons she faced constantly, and I was only twenty-one. A mother isn't supposed to die before her children are old enough to fully comprehend the situation. I'll never forgive those bastards, the SeeD, scourge upon this land. Never.

I don't really remember the funeral. The day has forever been blacked out in my memory since the day Sean gave me his father's ring, Griever; the great, lionhearted Guardian Force.

The life of millions changed when Sorceress Rinoa Leonhart died. Some say she was murdered, others, say she died of tuberculosis. However, the suspicions do not matter now. I, Shira Akiko Trepe-Almasy was the chosen successor of Rinoa's powers.

And then, the man who I thought of as my father, Seifer Almasy, was found dead in his room. Apparently, he'd been murdered by Tarkin Almasy's son, Riordan, my cousin. Riordan had never forgiven the insult that Seifer did to him by refusing him as an heir to the Dukedom. As such, I was the one to find him. That's right, I found the man I thought of as a father, dead.

Tears streamed down my face, as I bid farewell to my parents. Luckily for me, my childhood friend, knight, and protector, Sean, stood next to me, holding my hand as the casket containing my father's body was borne to the Almasy vault, where all the other Almasys had been buried.

My brother, Colum, committed suicide at the age of nineteen. Such a tragic end for the hope of the Dukedom. He was found with his father's gunblade impaled in his stomach. I knew Col held doubts for his future, and again, I cried for the loss of my brother.

Again, Sean was there to comfort me. I had asked him, long ago, after receiving his mother's powers, to be my knight. He had accepted.

The cherry blossoms are falling from the trees as I write this. I sit in the courtyard, the sunlight streaming down from the heavens upon me. The wind tickles my long hair around my face, the grey tendrils whipping my face as the wind gathers speed.

I can smell jasmine blossoms in the wind. Their sweet, lingering scent so much like my mother's, that it brings tears to my eyes—even though I can't cry.

I get up from the ground. My hair, down to my buttocks, swirls around me in the breeze.

I open the door of the grand castle, which I once used to get lost in forever. The spiral staircase to the clock tower stretches on endlessly, as I wander the once-splendid halls of this ancient castle.

Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened, had I not lost my parents and brother. Perhaps I would not have gone insane with power.

I glance down at the SeeDs come to destroy me. The black wings on my back flare out as I see everyone who is now long departed from this world. My mother's friends and family.

"SeeD, SeeD, SeeD!" The words come out of my mouth in a slow hiss. "Kurse all SeeD!"

The end.