Lightbringer- Chpt. 17: What Dwells in Dreams

Adalai- Ok, the first part is made of dreams and memories of both Clay and Scion as they sleep in the River of the Dead, while they try and help each other to recover themselves and remember why they are here, their purpose. First part is Scion, Second is Clay,Third Ellos. Sephy, disclaimer!

Sephiroth- Awwww... ok, If Adalai owned Square or Disney, would she be writing this fic? No, she'd be chilling beside a pool on her own personal island in the Caribbean.

Being dead is like being in a dreamless sleep.

You fall asleep and dream, then wake up and wonder what dreams visited you that you do not remember.

Except you don't get to wake up and wonder. You just sleep, forever and ever.

And Nobody knows those dreams.

Nobody are the ones who get to wake up after the sleep of death, the dreamless sleep there previous lives which they do not remember but in bits and pieces. For once you become Nobody, you forget yourself. You cannot be Nobody and yet have that which makes you somebody; your previous life.

But you know better, my little Nobody. The dreamless sleep of death is when you're a Nobody, not before. The only difference is that your awake, not asleep. You wander in the land of dreams physically. That is the only difference.

Scion, don't give up! Remember who you are! If you forget, I forget!

Wake up from the dream. Surrender to your fate, Nobody. You are an abomination, the dead that walks, trapped in life. Sleep in the rivers of death, sleep from the waking sleep to the dreamless one. Then we shall see which one is easier. Dream of waters that weep and angels without shadow or heart. Sleep, and know that what you dream is what surrounds you. Waters that weep with the agony of the heart until agony is no more and the heart is empty. Then you will see the world without time. Even the fates cannot do that; they measure it day by day, but not the whole web of truth.

Remember what you were meant to do!

Darkness and Emptiness. Those were the first things Scion ever experienced. Even though it was the first moment of his existence, some memory of the past warned him of the antagonism of these forces, which seemed poised on the edge of the platform he stood on, read to seize and swallow him whole.

But then the darkness receded, leaving only the emptiness, he felt like a child once afraid of monsters who had found were only his imagination. Perhaps he had only imagined it.

From above, a light shined, dim and distorted as though from a great distance through water. It was calm and, strangely, comforting. He moved closed, face upturned to the light.

Around him, three platforms rose; sword, shield, staff.

You are not yet complete. A voice spoke in his head. Or rather, many voices, speaking as one. Many come here who are not complete. But you are unique. You were born, not made, incomplete. You will be Nobody, then become somebody. So that he who you were born from may too become complete. But because you are not complete, you cannot make the choice.

The three platforms sank from view. When you can make the choice, then you will know you are whole. You will know you are not merely a smaller part but your own person.

"Am I dead?"

In the human sense, yes. In truth? Far from it.

"What are you?"

I am the voice of the Non-Existent. I am the Enigmatic Man, the oldest and wisest of the Nobody.

Since you are a descendent in heart, if not body, you will be known as Scion.

You will go into Oblivion and you will remember. You will take those memories and create your own. You will become your own person. You are partially Sora, but you will become wholly Scion. You decisions will define yourself as separate and individual.

Know that you are yourself, and there are no others like you. People will tell that you are broken, a copy of Sora, a mere shadow of him, and you will wonder if you truly are your own man, but know that you are Scion and you are a unique and separate being from all others. Know that you are yourself and nobody else.

Above him, the radiance darkened to an unhealthy, wan glow, drifting down in tentacles of crackling lightning that seemed to reach and grab, the light giving the water a cold, sickly, iron essence.

But know that not all light is good and not all darkness bad. This is the first misconception discarded by the new Nobody. Light and good are two separate things, and darkness and evil separate too.

Behind you!

Scion whirled around and saw the edges of a blue, trailing scarf come over the lip of the platform, followed by a white darkside. Scion didn't know how he knew what a darkside was, but he looked at the creature with hatred anyways. How was he supposed to kill it?

You hold the keys in you hand. You have merely to call them forth.

Abruptly, Scion felt a blaze of light and swell of darkness pour out from his hands, changing in substance and form until they became the Oblivion and Oathkeeper.

Running, he charged at the creature, slashing repeatedly at the arms and hands of the creature and repeatedly throwing and catching the Oblivion in strike raids. The creature seeing that this boy was no easy prey, returned to the nihility from whence it came. Scion felt the blades slide from his hands and dispel into nonexistence.

I imagine that right now you're feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole. But unlike her, you have a choice. The darkness below goes back to the "Real" world, and you wake up, and this is but a dream. Or...

Go through the door. You will come to a dark beach. Follow the beach, and it will become a road over green fields and hills, and will branch into three paths on a wide plain. Take any path you want; in your current state, all paths will be the same, go to the same places. It is only when you return whole will these paths have any use to you. You will come to a green and yellow castle, surrounded by snow and clouds; go inside and see how far down the rabbit hole goes.

Scion turned around a saw a door, purple and covered with strange writing and walked through, light coming from the door to cover his body.

How long has it been? Has it truly been so long ago? These memories are all relative; broken, fragmented, just beyond my grasp; maybe that is for the best. If we Endless remembered all of our pervious lives, and the life we lived before we became Endless, we would probably go mad. Too many of us do, anyway.

"Don't you ever wonder what the sun would look like? Or the moon and stars?"

"Why do you wonder about these kinds of things?"

"Don't you? You do make Age Links, after all. It's your job to wonder."

Clay leaned back against the living wood of the World Tree, feeling the living pulse of sap pumped thousands of miles in the heartwood, like blood through the veins of a human. The World tree was everything to the Endless; it gave them their unique bodies, able to be energy, organic, and inorganic at the same time, by putting a small bit of itself in them.

Her sensate twitched, responding to the faint disturbance of air from... what was her name? It was on the tip of Clay's tongue...

"But what I wonder about is us and the Nobody; where we come from, how we're connected, what distinguishes us from each other, how we became Endless and not Nobody."

Clay's friend flicked her black hair away from her face. She was an Endless that, because she was still only recently made an Endless, was still mostly human; probably somewhere between 75-90 percent human.

"How we know the Words, why they can only be known but not taught, why only certain people know certain Words, and about my previous life, about the Links. About the Gathering and Keyblades and the Door to the Light. I have enough to wonder about just thinking about myself, without having to wonder about the moon and the stars."

She turned her glowing green eyes upward, as if she could see the sky through all the vegetation and wood between them. "But I heard that the stars in the sky are really those worlds closest to you. We see them because, no matter what, all the worlds are connected in some way. One sky, one destiny. That we are never alone, wherever we are."

The woman stood up and began to walk away. Suddenly Clay remembered what she had wanted to ask her.

"How's your husband?"

Clay's friend turned, gray-green face showing surprise and gratitude. "He's fine, now. They had to do open heart surgery on him."

"Sounds serious."

"It was. He had an Aortic Dissection and Aortic Aneurism. He almost died." She shivered, pulling her arms around her. "If we had been only a few minutes late..."

"But you weren't." Clay said firmly. "And now he's ok. So go home and get some rest. You won't help anyone by worrying like this."

She watched her friend stumble off in the direction of her home, but Clay knew she probably wouldn't listen to her. She was too stubborn and too much of a worrier to.

Clay walked home. From the top shelf of her room, she pulled a dusty medical book she kept on heart disease and flipped to "Aortic Diseases"

Aortic Dissection- condition where there is bleeding into and along the wall of the aorta, and may also involve ballooning or widening of the aorta (aneurism)

Footnote- Aortic dissection may also be associated with other injury, infection, congenital (present from birth) weakness of the aorta, pseudoxanthoma elasticum, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, relapsing polychondritis, or abdominal aortic aneurysm). Pregnancy, valve disorders (including aortic insufficiency), coarctation of the aorta, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and collagen disorders such as Marfan's Syndrome.

What the hell's she doing? Kairi questioned. She slipped out the cell and followed the blindfolded woman from above. She looked like she was looking for something.

Ellos kneeled down, looking at a thin stream of silvery water, only an inch in width. It was so saturated with energy and magic it seemed to be obscured in a multi-hued haze. Runoff from the River of the Dead. Tracing it back to it's source, a large rusty runoff pipe three times as wide as she was tall. Some kind of magic, probably from the waters of the river of the dead, was diminishing her special sight, leaving her with only her normal human vision. Nevertheless, Ellos peered into the darkness inside and swung up into the pipe.

As Ellos walked farther in, voices filled her head and images flashed by her eyes. Voices of the dead, both familiar and strange, filled her head with incoherent babble, mimicing the sound of running water. Her nose wrinkled as the smell of death and cold the waifted up from the river. The voices where getting more disticint, now. She could pick out individual words and phrases. Screams of agony, moans of regret, numbness, dreams both euphoric and harrowing. And over it all, this current, a pulse almost, rang in her ears. She knew she was close, now.

Come, come to us, you dead. Let us surround you, drown you, wash your weeping until you are dry and hollow of tears. Lay down and wade no more through the troubles of life. Forget all memories, all emotions, all sense of self; they only cause you pain. Soon it will be as if they never existed.

The pipe she was in branched off into myriad smaller and larger pipes, a veritable labriynth of rusty, creaky metal, the pipes getting older, larger, rustier and more damaged as she progressed. Following the water, which had now increased to a stream several inches wide, Ellos proceeded cautiously now, careful not to step on any spot too weak to hold her weight.

Ellos felt something rush behind her. Turning around quicky, she drew her white gebo and a flashlight, gun pointing forward, curved end resting under her arm, and flashlight on top, beam piercing the darkness, senses straining to detect the creature.

Out of a larger side tunnel, Something large and black rushed her. It's furry, muscular side knocked her over and she felt teeth rip at her shoulder. She caught a glimpse of red eyes before falling into the thin stream of runoff water.

The left of Ellos' coat disentigrated as it touched to water. Quick reflexes were the only thing that saved Ellos from a similar fate. Throwing the rest of the ruined coat off, she noticed that the left side of her oufit under that was aged and threadbare. Glimpsing her flashlight, she turned around just long enough to watch it disentigrate in the water. But not before it cast a lone ray of weak, sputtering light on her retreating enemy.

Drawing her black gebo, now that the other was gone, she reveiwed in her mind what she knew about her enemy, storing it in her mind and looking for possible weaknesses she could exploit and fabricate a plan.

It's fast. She thought. It knows it's way around these tunnels; it knows how to aviod the water and attack unseen from the side. It doesn't rely on sight; either smell or hearing. It's black with red eyes; either heartless or demonic, or both. It's large; it hasn't attacked from a small tunnel yet, and it's legspan is large enough it can move without worring about stepping in the water. It's strong; a four footed mammal. Ellos winced and felt a burning sensation. And it slobbered acidic spit on my shoulder. She reliezed.

That was life for you, always throwing some unknown variables at you that you had to compensate for. She flicked the gebo forward, the blade seperating into it's whip form.

Come on. She thought. Come and get me. The sunstone in 7-pointed shruken pendant around her neck, bare without her coat, shined brightly and illuminated the tunnel Not till now had she realized it's true hieght. The tunnel could easily fit a two story house in it; but that was not what Ellos meant.

Ellos had read greek mythology and heard of Cerebrus, the guardian of the underworld. But she had not expected this. The creature was a staggering three times as tall as Ellos, jet black. But Ellos had assumed it had one head; this had three. He whole plan had hinged on it having one head.

Damn.

Suddenly, the creature lunged at her. The Forgotten had no way to block; her weapon was still in whip form. Instead it tangled her even more hopelessly with Cerebus, who tripped, paws entagled in the whip, and both Forgotten and Dog slid downwards through the tunnel, throwing up water that rusted the metal the instant it touched it.

It was through one of these pieces of newly rusted metal under them that both creatures punched through, into another, larger tunnel below. Cerebus flipped over and grabbed Ellos' shoulder in the teeth of it's middle head, shaking her like a rag doll. Ellos hung on to the handle for dear life now, the whip twined around her, slicing her flesh but at the same time keeping her from flying off and hitting the walls, which would mean instant death. By now both were moving so fast that they continued to puch through the weak metal walls of the tunnels, going in a straight trajectory downward.

Ellos screamed in pain as the dog finally reached bone and bit down, shattering her shoulder, her last gebo flying out of her hand as he did so. Silently thanking Strife, she drew out her last knife, the pocket knife he had given her for her birthday, and stabbed blindly at his eyes, so close to the source of the River of the Dead her eyesight was truly human now, and with the blindfold she was truly blind.

Suddenly, she heard and inhuman howl and felt the crushing pressure of the dog's jaws leave her shoulder. Not waiting to see why, she blindly groped for it's jaw and found it, putting her left foot on it's nose and grabbing to jaw with her right, undamaged arm, and yanked it right out of the skull.

Suddenly they hit dirt. Ellos flew off, the fall destroying her other arm too. Ellos winced as she felt the Full Cure spell, which while not strong enough to fully cure the wounds, take care of the hellhound's acidic spit. Stumbling up, she listened to try to find her opponent.

Cerebus paced closer. It's three heads, through individually dumb, togeather where smart enough to noiselessly pad over to Ellos, sensing it's prey was sightless, wounded, and disoriented.

But because of Full Cure, Ellos recovered faster than Cerebus expected. Before the hound reached her, Ellos was already on her feet. She only needed a general direction to do what she did next.

Ellos' astral self shot from her in a blue haze. At the same time, She concentrated on her Sunstone, which let forth a blast of light which blinded the creature.

The astral projection sped forward and grabbed the handle of the black gebo. She yanked it free from the creature, hamstringing it in the process. The Hellhound collapsing, It snapped the gebo back from a whip to a sword, then brought it down on the center head, slicing it from the body cleaning in one stroke. She turned it into a whip again and wrapped it around the left head. Shifting the handle to her right claw, it then drew it's own weapon; a spiked mace with a chain twice as long as it was, make of the same substance as it was, only blindingly luminesent. She expertly flicked it around the neck of the right head, and pulled on both, yanking the heads up.

Then, like the domestic dogs it's so closely resembled, the creature lay down, putting it's severed stump between it's legs and whining piteously.

Using every last ounce of strenght to keep her astral self manifest, Ellos spoke. "Bad Dog" She said, dizzy from blood loss. "Bad, Bad Dog." The creature winded even more piteously, if possible, and turned it's remaining two faces upward to Ellos in a grotesque imitation of a sad puppy-dog face. The cauterized stump, still trying to whine even though it's head was gone, managed a gurgling sound and began to bleed over it's paws. "We woun't ever try to kill me again. Understood?" The dog nodded again. "Now. Go away." At that moment, the astral self melted away, it's ower unable to maintain it anymore. Eager not to lose another head, the once mighty Guardian of the Gates of Hell slunk off, tail between it's legs. It shook off the black gebo and occasionally looked back at Ellos, puppy dog eyes pleading approval from what it percieved as it's new master.

"GO!" Ellos croaked out with her last once of consciousness. Cerebus finally dissapeared. Ellos hunched over, but when she went unconscious she could not tell; after all, it was already black behind her blindfold.

"Over here!" Kairi yelled. She held up Ellos' white gebo for Yuna to see.

"Still fully loaded." Kairi said, feeling the weight of the bullets still in the weapon.

"Hey, look at this." Tidus yelled from farther down. Keeping the gebo, Kairi carefully walked back down the pipe, not wanting to slip and slide down the rusty pipe, or worse, into the river water. Peering over Tidus' kneeled form, she saw long gorges in the rivited pipe, where something large and heavy had slid downwards though a large hole, near which Tidus was kneeling. He pointed to the still-sharp, rust free ends. "just made."

Peering down, Kairi saw a multitude of holes puncing straight down through the pipes into a large cavern below. Beside her, Yuna cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled down...

"HELLO! ANYONE DOWN THERE?" The echoes caused the pipes to shake slightly, but no reply was heard. "I SAID..."

Kairi put a finger to her lips, signaling silence. She heard a scraping sound, and a low, pitieous whine. Tidus hearing it too, he waved both of them into a side tunnel.

Cerebrus came through the tunnel, a new head already growing on the stump of the original one. The other two heads whined, the dog showing every sign of self-pity and shame as it slunk off, tail between it's legs, to it's lair to lick it's wounds. Yuna looked in dread and Kairi in amazement as it passed.

Once it was gone, Yuna turned to Kairi. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" She asked, dreading the answer.

"I think she may have beat it." Kairi said, disbelief in her voice. Yuna sighed; she knew the chances of Ellos beating Cerebrus where slim and expected her to be dead. But what she feared was that Kairi would get her hopes up too much, only to be let down. Kairi had told Yuna about her dream; Yuna knew that Kairi thought Ellos was the girl that had been in it, even though Yuna knew that was impossible. Now her hopes would be dashed when she realized Ellos was dead; as well as any slim change that Ellos might bring of escape.

"Hades was right. You do have a talent for survival."

Ellos moaned, finally regaining conciousness, her hunched position helping her blood to keep circulating and keep conscious. Her eyes felt funny; she reliezed it was because the conforting wieght of her blindfold was not there, her eyes bare. She squeezed them shut, embarrased to show them to someone she did not know.

Concentrating but not breaking her hunched position, Ellos tired to reach into the charter and failed. Concentrating, she relized it was not from her lack of energy, but because the charter itself was not there. She tried again.

Instead of the comforting charter, she was thrust into a living malestorm of living fire, threatening to burn her body as much as it could maim her mind. Realizing what she had stumbled upon, she pulled herself out before she could do any damage to her already broken body. She had stumbled across free magic, not charter, something that had only happened to her when she had traveled with the Abhorsen through the gates of the River of the Dead.

Instead, she consentrated on her pendant. It didn't just have marks of protection on it; it also served as something like a Charter Stone, a way into the charter so that she could access it without a charter mark. She withdrew the needed marks and let them settle on her, combining them with the sunstone light that Ellos knew strenghtened the marks.

Finally, Ellos straightened up, looking for the speaker now that she wasn't dying. Her eyes fell on a tall man, in red and black clothes with white hair and green eyes. She reconized him as the man who had pulled her from the river when she had arrived here. He smirked. "Ironic, meeting you here again."

Suddenly, Ellos understood where she was. Turning around and opening her eyes, careful to make sure the white-haired swordsman didn't see them, Ellos looked down at the river of the dead, which spiraled downwards lazily into untold depths. She heard the roar of a waterfall in the distance; This River of the Dead, like the one in the Old Kingdom, was divided into precincts. That was why she had only been able to channel free magic; this was not just the River of the Dead from Hades' world, but from the Old Kingdom as well.

Ellos reached into her pocket and withdrew a jem, completely clear but blazing with charter marks and white light inside. One of the worlds she had visited durring her two years in the present world had been the Old Kingdom. She managed to expand her knowledge of both Nemocracy, Charter, and Free magic under the tutorage of the Abhorsen, but it had fallen to the Mindless.

But she had made sure not all of that world was lost. She had saved parts of the hearts of three inhabitants of that world, and when she landed on Twilight Town, she finally had enough munny to take those hearts to a powerful wizard and change them into summonings. One day, she would find a way to bring them back fully.

She squeezed her eyes shut, the dim lighting still to strong for her sensitive eyes. She turned to the white-haired man, rubbing her temples to delay the light-induced migrane that would inevitably form. "Who are you?"

"Dante." He looked at her, evidently expecting her to offer her name as well.

"Ellos. Could I have my blindfold back?"

Dante handed over the blindfold. "You shouldn't hide them"

"Why?"

"Because you don't seem like the kind of person who hides their true self from the world."

"It has to do with that talent for survival you spoke of." Ellos replied. "People usually don't like to see my eyes."

"They're unusual, but nothing I didn't expect."

Shrugging, Ellos stood up, went over to and picked up her black gebo, and walked over to the bank of the river. Wondering what she was going to do, Dante watched her from his vantage point, unaware of Tidus, Yuna, and Kairi behind him.

Funny, How one thing can completely change your perspective of a person. They don't change physically; the change is inside your own heart.

Ellos had been friends with Strife for well over a year now. She'd seen him everyday; but now she noticed something new in Strife's frame. A wieght; not a physical one, but from a wrong. One that caused him an endless cycle of guilt and doubt that he had become all too adept at hiding. And a wound, one of the heart, something she could feel with her forgotten senses. His heart seemed...incomplete, somehow.

And the most pathetic thing about it was...Ellos had to trust him. True, he may be flawed, untrustworthy; but he was the only one she had that cared for her. There was simply nobody else. Anyone else who she might trust had long since died, or left; Ellos too was flawed and untrustworthy, even more so than Strife.

Because at least Strife showed guilt and a desire for repentance for his wrong. Ellos had long since ceased to feel such things or express such a desire. She had never even thought of destroying her humanity as wrong; just survival. Now, that she met Strife and saw that he, too, had experienced a similar loss of humanity and human dignity. But he tried to regain it, showing her it's importance that she had long since forgot. As flawed as he was, he was still better than her.

Maybe everything truly is relative Ellos thought. Despite anything he might have done, he and his friendship was still better than anything she deserved.

Ellos sat up and began to walk toward the gummi ship. She needed time to herself. Maybe she would go to one of the other ages, explore. She had always been curious about other ages, but never really had the time; there was always something else she needed to do.

Why am I doing this? Ellos questioned herself. Why do I want to see other ages? Worlds? She did not think her motivation was simply curiousity any longer. Perhaps it was because of hope. Hope that somewhere out there, her salvation lay. Somewhere, where life was easy, so she would not have to be heartless, to constantly fight to survive. Where she, too, could seek her humanity and dignity lost. Find a purpose and meaning beyond mere survival and killing. To find her heart, her true self. She may have been born as something else, but she could at least, in her heart, be a human.

My soul thirsts for salvation, as does my body for life's breath.

- Magic the Gathering, Ihsan's Shade

Adalai- grrrr...sorry about the lateness. I had a choir thing I had to do Friday night and couldn't post. Sephy, Disclaimer!

Sephiroth- R&R, please.