Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters or place-names depicted herein. They are copyright of Square-Enix, and I am taking to financial gain from this.
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Spira, a world locked in a constant struggle for survival with no hope to win. A world ruled by a thousand year old religion hypocrite in its belief – a religion that praised peace and waged war in the same breath, a religion which forbid the use of machina, yet kept the metal abominations in the very hearts of their temples. A two-faced, uneven-handed religion led by men too old to know the difference between life and death, and he was at the very top of its corrupted hierarchy.
Snowflakes like perfectly frozen spider-webs whirled around him where he stood, near the summit of the mountain, and he smiled as he watched the white-chaos world below.
This was the world he was throwing into the spiral of death, and even now the blood of the Ronso stained his hands. Like crimson petals, it had fallen on the pristine snow of their hallowed mountain, and he had laughed as they died. A whole race exterminated by the touch of his hand, his sublime purpose, the downwards spiral had begun.
"Are you proud of your son, father?" he whispered to the still snow around him, "I have achieved what you and the Summoners never could – I am saving Spira from the torment of Sin."
The snow did not answer him, and the wind howled around the mountaintop.
The world would thank him when this was all over, and he would reign supreme over a dead empire. Sin would be no more, and the statues of bygone Summoners would be mere mockeries of a dead history, and he would dance with death to the tune of dying screams. Oh, how his father would envy his position, were he only still alive. Where his father had failed, he had united Spira in his wish to save it from the nightmarish Sin; he was the world's saviour, yet the world did not understand.
Did they not know that his was the only way to rid this plagued place of its greatest fear? It was only through genocide that they could be delivered, and he did not lack the courage, did not lack the spine to accomplish such a thing. Murder was a small sacrifice on this titanic scale, a drop in his oceans turned to blood. Even the invincible Sin would cower before him, bowed before his impossible power.
"I am become a god," he said, his voice and the laughter echoing among the empty peaks. "Can you hear me Jecht? I shall wipe clean the slate of Spira´s existence, and I shall begin with your cild, your precious son! Not even the crumbling unsent will stand between me and Spira´s utter oblivion!"
The only answer was the rolling of thunder in the storm-white clouds above, and there, like the glittering of a coin under water, they came fighting their way through the ice and driving snow. So close to their goal, their Final Aeon, and so close to their ends. From his elevated place, it was as if he could just reach out his bloodstained hands and touch them through the snow and the distance.
"So close, little Guardians, little Summoner. Soon you will stand before me and I shall crush you like the worthless lives that you are." he spoke, knowing they could not hear him. "It is a pity that I have to kill you, lady Yuna, but sacrifices must be made if our beloved Spira is to be saved – I am certain that you would willingly give yourself up for the betterment of our world. Jecht has too long played with the lives of our fellow men." he turned his eyes from the struggling pilgrims, face once more turning skywards. "Your empire of fear is crumbling, Jecht! Can you feel the world falling away? Can you feel your last comrade – the fading, walking corpse of the Guardian you sent to your child – failing as the heartbeats pass by?"
He stopped suddenly, his voice that had risen to a shout giving space to the whistling, howling sound of the wind as it whipped around him. The snowflakes danced about his feet as if they blessed his dreams, and though his breathing was laboured in the chill air he still found it in his lungs to laugh. In this barren place, where only the ruins of Zanarkand's thousand-year's-past civilization gave shadows on the snow, his plans would reach their culmination and the world would burn for his ambition.
"Death is the mother of beauty," he breathed as his laughter echoed out. "Death is the mother of beauty, and as the blood paints the world crimson, it shall be beautiful."
One cannot kill a dead man, and he would be the last to leave this sorrowful place, where each child was born only to die into a future of narrow hopes. Had they only lived, they would have praised him as their blessed saviour, and the crumbling faith in Yevon's teachings would once more be strengthened.
Over the howling wind, he could hear the creaking of footfalls on snow, and turned from the sheer drop in front of him to face the twisting mountain paths, where they would appear. Like unsuspecting children, they would stumble straight into his masterful trap, and he would kill them one by one until their bodies littered the crimson-stained ground and the death-cycle of Spira would truly have begun.
Stumbling around the turn in the path came a boy, to childish in his appearance still, with the stark blond hair and mismatched clothing that marked him out as one of the Summoner Yuna's Guardians.
"Ah, the son of Jecht," he said, and so the cycle spun slowly into life.