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Blah blah blah….on with the show! Chapter 9!
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Tifa popped her knuckles and then bowed her head. I think she was trying to remember the details of the dream. Eventually she lifted her head and recounted her dream.
"My dream is a little different then Cloud's, but it is similar," she started. "In my dream, I too am walking up a grand staircase covered in flowers. In my dream though, they're not roses, they're daffodils. Whenever I reach to touch one, it turns away. I don't know, it just, turns away. Some of them I actually grab…but even still, no matter what I do, they refuse to look at me." "That's funny…in mine they just turned to ash…" I said. Tifa glared at me. "Shut up Cloud, this is my story." Wow…it must really be late or something. Or is she always this edgy? No…she usually isn't. Usually. "I give up trying to look at the flowers and start climbing the staircase. It's then that I notice that the staircase is starting to fall apart behind me. I run as fast as I can up the staircase trying to reach the top, and I just manage to get there before the last stair falls out from underneath me. I look around. I see a small circular room with a little garden in the middle. The garden is full of daffodils all pointing towards the center. And in the center…" she paused, "…is Aerieth. She's kneeling down, praying. I move towards her and that's when she looks up. She stands up and takes something out of her pocket. It's a small white materia. She hands it to me. I try to ask her, "What is it?" but just as I do, Sephiroth appears out of the sky and runs his sword through her chest, just like he did in the forgotten city." She bowed her head and brushed away a tear. "After a moment, both Sephiroth and Aerieth disappear, leaving me in the circular room with the materia. But it's not white any more. Now it's red. I look at it and touch it. It's then that I hear some sort of chanting." Red XIII pricked his ears up at this. "…it sounded dark, menacing. It wasn't English, but I didn't need to know what it said to know who was saying it. It was Jenova. I would recognize that voice anywhere. I drop the red materia, and the moment it touches the ground, suddenly Jenova appears. She is…well…I don't remember what exactly she looked like. She was smaller then any of her previous forms; not a whole lot bigger then any of us. But I could tell that she was busy doing something, or saying something. It was then that suddenly I knew the translation of her words." She paused again. Red XIII and I both seemed to lean towards her just a little bit as we waited impatiently for the rest of her story. In a deeper voice then she usually spoke, Tifa said, "'What once was white, I shall turn into blight. What once was black, now as prophesied will come back. Through the power of my spirit, a new reign shall emerge. I shall re-forge his body, reborn, renewed.'" She paused. "It was then that she turned…well…turned isn't a very good word…I guess looked at me. She said, this time in plain English, 'Your friends have fought me, and now to no avail. The life stream has fought me, and now I have prevailed. Even the knowledge of the one, the keeper of the white, has failed to quench my thirst, my desire to destroy all that is right.'" She paused again. "My dream ends there, but I remember that this morning, just as I woke up, I thought I heard somebody say, 'Now…perish.' I mean, it could have been the wind, but I don't know."
Red XIII looked at us both. He then looked up at the sky. The moon was waning, and the sky was starting to give a bluish tint…dawn was approaching.
He spoke. "In the past, the dawn was always a welcome sight for the traveler. It meant the start of a new day, and the end of the dangers that always come out at night. But it seems the dawn can only bring us more danger then any we've experienced before." He stopped to look at our confused faces. "The details of your dreams are hazy to me. I have my ideas on what exactly the stairs and flowers represent, but I'm not sure. What I am sure though is this. Aerieth is calling us. She was praying in Tifa's dream when she first saw her. That is always symbolic of a message. In my dream I also heard somebody praying, which by the way is another small reason why I knew that my dream had significance. Also, in both your dreams you are given a white materia. I think this is THE white materia. But it's interesting because in both your dreams, the white materia turns red colored. That is also still a puzzle to me. In your dream Cloud, Sephiroth appears, kills Aerieth, and then laughs until you wake up. This could mean that something is triumphing over you…or perhaps not something, but someone." He turned to Tifa. "In your dream, after Sephiroth kills Aerieth, they disappear. You drop the now red materia and when it hits the ground, Jenova appears. Now usually in dreams we only see things that we are familiar with, or have seen before. We've all seen Jenova before, but you said yourself this was an entirely new Jenova, and much smaller then any of the previous Jenovas. Whenever we see something entirely new in our dream, that is also another symbol that this dream has a purpose behind it.
"In short, I think that your dreams mean this: something is wrong with the white materia deep in the Earth. Jenova has probably something to do with it." "But I thought we destroyed Jenova," I interrupted. "Yes we did," Red XIII said, "but didn't we destroy her FOUR times? And she came back after each time. I'm thinking that she may have come back again. Now, this next part is fairly obvious, but in Tifa's dream, Jenova says that she shall re-forge a body. Well, there is only one person that she could possibly want to resurrect." "Sephiroth…" Tifa and I said together. "Of course, and that's why we must act immediately. Sephiroth is using Jenova to create himself a new body, one that will probably be much stronger then his previous form. We must go back into the Final Dungeon, find Jenova, and destroy her, and I mean DESTROY her, before she can finish her work."
Up until right then I had thought that this night was the best night of my life.
Now it was the worst.