If death were a place where air itself had to petition entrance, then it would be a realm such as this. Cold metal spreads along the length of my body. Perhaps I am the one laid out upon it, so much meat upon a slab. I am dinner in waiting for the cooks, caught in the timelessness between washup and the prep.
The world is chill. My heart does not beat, my lungs do not move, and shadowpuppet shapes take dim life in the hallucination of the darkness. Limbs melt out of the night. Buckled leather. Red eyes.
Paine.
Her hair is long. Longer than a swordfighter's ever should be, long because it means she does not ever have to use a blade again. There is no threat that will take her away. Yevon does not hunt her. Fiends do not stain the streets to her door. There is no fight for her to pit herself against, and that means this woman is not truly Paine. She is not real.
In a world of utter peace, Paine's anger and sharp edges would have nothing to grate against. They would fade, change from the person I know even as her hair would grow past her shoulders and turn her silhouette wavy against the setting sun. Safety is not what Paine needs. It is not what she flourishes in. She--as I know her, as I have come to love her--would not exist without the daily threat of risk.
It is a dream to see her otherwise. Nothing more.
As I realize this, her image rushes away from me. Water pouring backwards, heart's red pouring into the sluicegates of a river swollen with rains. Silt-brown covers the world and covers me with it. Paine is gone and I am drowning in the acceptance of mud.
I rouse myself to the sound of my name being screamed.
"Baralai!" The voice bleeds ragged, desperate. "By the Fayth! Baralai!"
I have no room in me for breathing; it seems hardly fair to allow for humor. The irony of a fallen Lustrum calling upon Yevon's force to save me is remarkable.
It hurts to move. Gingerly I push against the ground, rolling over through degrees of joints rearranged, muscles stretched. My hair is a pale cocoon-shroud around my face, milky in the dim radiance that glows off the machina, Vegnagun's sheddings of yellow and sparking-blue. When I try to push myself off the floor, the strands tangle in bedsheet folds. Lungs struggle. Then inhale, and I find myself coming back to life from that nothingness that Vegnagun stunned me into.
The beast above me hangs heavy on the air. Its form is greatest in silhouette, blotting out the flickering stars of Yevon script that struggle to restore themselves to light. Backup generators, I realize; auxiliary power is coming on automatically. The old systems of Yevon's underground run smooth, even when there is no one here to maintain them for.
No one save for Vegnagun. The legend that was so dangerous that Yevon sealed away even the rumors that might lead to it, and used the blood of trained squads to do so. Our own spirits might have been intended to join with the pyreflies down there already; one storm of Unsent ghosts added to those already assembled in the pit. Use of the dead to defend that which could not be killed.
I lie upon my back beneath the segmented underbelly, my spread body as vulnerable to teeth as a festival pastry-cake. The monster hovers, the skull-pits of its eyes boring into me with living malice. I thought it fantasy in the Den of Woe to imagine an animal's mind inside that machina, a fiend's lust to kill, but now I am not certain what to believe.
At another distant ting of a shot, Vegnagun roars; its back writhes, twisting up from its hunch over me. Yevon's script upon the walls is blotted out as Vegnagun's wings spread, sliding out from beneath its shell to cramp against the boundaries of its cage. One of its insect's pinchers plows again into the walkway, near to my head, and I am bounced against the bridge as if I weighed no more than a feather.
The sphere of the cage's sky vanishes. Vegnagun thrusts its mouth down towards me; its jaws gape, splitting down the center to the hollow of the monster's mouth. Rings flex. The artificial muscles of Vegnagun's throat bulge impossibly within what should be a larynx, and instead glows with the power to annihilate cities.
I stare into the infinity of death.
"No," I whisper. Too terrified to think straight, my mind scatters like a child's count of marbles upon the floor. "Somasil!" Desperate to halt whatever act is urging this creature on, I throw a hand up uselessly in the air, my palm seeking to ward away my own destruction. "Stop it! Stop shooting!"
"Baralai? Baralai!" I hear his scream, tinny through the distortion of metal. He is as desperate as I am. Or moreso--with no knowledge of this beast, Somasil can only assume that it is a fiend approaching the scope of Sin, or a machina that could overpower an Aeon itself.
I cannot kill it. Somsail cannot, armed only with a machina gun that has the precious few shots required to clear our way to the lifts out. If he wastes his ammunition, he will not be able to escape.
The chances of him leaving me here to save himself are even more slim.Forced into a reply, I call back the first thing that comes falling off my tongue. "I'm all right, Somasil! I'm all--"
Above me, Vegagun lowers its mouth in a baritone howl. The force of its roar bullies into me, deafening, and plucks my voice from out my throat as neatly as a cherry from its stem.
Images scatter through my mind as easily as autumn leaves before the storm. Paine, her face flushed with anger upon the Luca docks while the sailors mixed with seagulls around us both. Gippal with his arms bound in the desert, asking me why I did nothing to save myself from the sand. Nooj. Desperation mixed with smug confidence, as I preempted a game upon his part that I do not yet fully understand.
Memories, crashing together until I cannot think through them all. Only drown.
And below it all, Trema's voice, asking me about leaving the past behind to journey free into the future.
I need to understand this riddle. Master it somehow, devise a way to barter with the beast even as I have tried to negotiate the priests above. To understand Paine, Gippal, Nooj and the Crimson Squad, the long line of failures that I have only marginally stumbled through.
Nothing is coming together. Nothing holds stable enough for me to hold fast to it as a lifeline.
If I cannot reason my way out of this confrontation, I will die.
The glow in Vegnagun's throat rises, blanketing the room in a noontide hum. Metal rumbles beneath me, vibrating in tune with the power being generated through the machina's mouth. Every conviction I thought to bear with me for support flees. I cannot think. Time is running out.
"Stop."
Not until Vegnagun goes silent do I realize that I have spoken aloud. Impossible for it to have heard me under the circumstances; my ears are still ringing from the cacophony it created, muffling my own pulse like a drumbeat within my skull.
And yet it did. Then obeyed.
I pant, and the pace of my lungs is a rabbit's rapidity in comparison to the flanks of the machina. Its sides pulse; internal processes take in and expel oxygen, feeding some hidden machinery of its innards. The procedure is a mimicry of life, much like the machina guardians which stud the halls, but I do not know if Vegnagun is possible of the same terror that I feel now.
We stare at one another, neither of us daring to move.
A weapon. A weapon of the past, that was what Trema had called it. All these intricacies of creation, wrapped together in a package meant only to destroy. And it has been kept here all this while. Intelligent enough to react to my intrusion, to understand my speech--what can a creature like this be thinking, if such is even within its capacity?
"What are you?" In the hushed underworld of Vegnagun's nest, the susurrus of my own voice come mincing back to me on court-steps. "Are you a tool? A weapon? Why do you remain down here when not even Trema knows what to do about you?"
The lines of priest-scrawl around us both luminesce the machina with a ghastly aura. Yevon's prayers give me no answer as the words on the walls come grimly back to life. One line is revived as the backup generators finish stabilizing, and then another. Vertical stripes paint the room. They dapple Vegnagun in blue against its yellow; in the restored brilliance, the creature seems somehow smaller despite its mass.
Wings scrape against each other with the same sound as sculptors' rasps. Vegnagun is pulling them back in. The carapace accepts and hides the gauze of the distorted dragonfly inside itself; I watch the recession of the machina's threat and wonder if this is its reply to me.
When I gather my legs beneath myself and begin to stand, the creature inexplicably pulls away.
It cannot possibly be frightened by something as small as me.
Can it?
I fight to retake my balance, pulling myself upright into a stand that wavers at first, and then steadies. Vegnagun couches its legs closer to its chest as I do, lumbering backwards; the metal of the walkway groans as it leans upon the struts.
At any other time, I might find suspicion with the machina's behavior. Instead, the present moment is filled with hollow observations. It is cold in the underground without my Lustrum coat. The wound on my cheek from the lizard's attack is stinging, a distant reminder that I am yet among the living.
Bevelle is a place where I have lost my way again and again. Bereft of any guide to follow, I look at Vegnagun, and only wonder.
"Do you think that I'll hurt you?"
My question causes the machina's eyes to flare anew. The pinpricks of light gather within that locust skull, and I amend my words while watching them kindle.
"I don't want to harm anything." An overstatement, perhaps, but one I realize is true. One step follows another as I approach the circular platform hanging in the center of the tomb, and Vegnagun glowers at me as I do. "I came down here for... for a friend. Not to fight. I came because I wanted to help him. You... I found by accident."
The sentence is familiar. It worries at me until I recall that Paine said the same while in Luca; there are no sailors to witness the standoff between myself and Vegnagun, however, and yet it cannot be denied that this machina has caused just as many stirs in our former Squad as any of the human members.
The remainder of the truth uncurls in the chamber, swelling the silence until I choose to break it once more.
"I remember you, Vegnagun." Bootheels impacting the walkway come in slow patience, metronome notes as I walk steadily towards the machina. "I saw you in someone else's nightmare. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but you didn't exist anywhere in the records, no matter how long I looked."
My recitation trebles itself in echo. The whispers roil around Vegnagun, around myself, and inwardly I am amazed that I can be so calm. Fascination of this problem has loosened my grip on survival's fear; I walk in a dream, talk in a dream, and know that I am just as lost now as I have ever been since entering the Den so long ago.
"No one knew about you. So I left my friends, all because you were so important that one of us wanted to kill for you... " Joints swivel on the machina when I say this, tense themselves to renew their whirring preparations, and I come to a halt, puzzling over what might have triggered its defenses. The void on either side of me sways. Falling off the walkway would send me tumbling after the lamppost staff, and yet the creature has not flicked me to my doom.
Vegnagun absorbs my tale with no reply. Wariness for some words, inanimate indifference otherwise.
"Why?" The word finally trickles out of me with no conviction save confusion. "What are you that we have all been lost inside a dream of you in an Unsent's memory? I have spent almost a year leaving everything behind because I have wanted to understand this. Why did Yevon want to bury us in that cave? What are you, Vegnagun?"
No answer comes.
I wonder if I really expected one.
Lacking a decision, bereft of understanding, all I can do is continue speaking aloud. "You're hidden down here. A secret they're ashamed of, but can never acknowledge." Now I have reached the middle of the suspended platform, standing before the machina beast itself, and despite this I have not been struck dead. "So you are kept here alone, and all that happens is that Bevelle works around you because they don't know what else to do."
Another step, and then a second. The spindled legs of the machina are spidered around the platform, trailing massive to tower above me with their many flexible joints. I maintain the one-sided conversation with a pattering practicality to keep my mind off of what exactly I am doing.
"I don't know how to find my way out of this trap I've put myself into here in Bevelle. It seems as if I've only made one mistake after another trying to chase what I think will work best. Just when I think I have everything straightened out, something else comes up to prove me wrong. But I can't admit it. And," I add, reaching out my hand at last to touch featherweight fingertips to the jaw of the monster before me, "neither can Yevon."
It shudders. Lulled by the meanderings of my voice, it had allowed me to near its proximity without lashing out. Relentless, I continue speaking, my hand a tiny speck against a pair of toothed jaws that could snap me in two with as much effort as I might bite into an apple. The metal of its locust-skull is warm, but not hot enough to sear. "Bevelle, myself--all we do is keep hiding things. It's... our nature. None of us know how to remedy what we've done, or even if it made any difference in the end. Instead we keep walking. That's all we can do."
One step at a time.
In the renewed stillness, I realize the whirr of Vegnagun's motors has gone quiet. The fires of its eyes have dimmed almost to extinction; despite this, the heat of its machina frame remains, radiating against my skin.
"Let me out, Vegnagun." My request falls mild in a chamber which was meant to be the machina's tomb, and almost is mine. "I'm not here to use you. I don't even know how to use myself."
The fear that possessed me upon first confronting the beast has vanished. There were no answers here, none that I had not already been presented in the labyrinth of Bevelle's halls. Seeing how the creature has been closeted has only reminded me of the temple-riddles, which have no solutions, and no rule save tradition to keep them running.
Whether or not the machina understands my confession, my tone of voice has the desired effect. The heavy weight of Vegnagun's tail slides free from the walkway, uncoiling and disappearing into the darkness of the pit.
The exit's smooth lines are broken by the staggered figure leaning upon it; when the machina retracts its barrier, the Lustrum gathers himself enough to take a step inside.
"Baralai?"
Somasil's question is pensive. Worried, even as he squints against the mixed lights of the room and tries to find my body where he expects it to be on the floor.
I detach myself from Vegnagun, my hand falling back to my side as I walk the path back to the Lustrum's side. "It's all right, Somasil," I call, and even then my voice is restrained. "I'm alive."
He takes another step in and stumbles. I hurry to catch him, bracing his wounds against my support. Brown eyes shift to look over my shoulder as I do, Somasil's gaze fixing upon the machina hulk of Vegnagun where it has settled inside the chamber; I distract him by asking about the gun and how many shots are left, hoping that we have enough to survive the fiends back to the lift.
Urging the Lustrum along, I sling his arm back over my shoulder and take a careful step down the hall. Vegnagun makes no sound behind us as we go. I do not look back. There is no longer any need to.