Crimson Dreams
"Maybe we should both let go of our pasts, and focus more on what's to come." I think those words were the catalyst that caused a chain reaction of events, which have lead to how I live today. No, I don't think it - I know they were. I said those words just four months ago, shortly after my friend Yuna had fallen into the abyss within Djose Temple. It was when I too had yet to stop chasing after something I couldn't catch. Well, I guess this sphere could tell the story better than I could, so I'll shut up and let it do its thing. Or maybe I won't. This... is my story, it's best that I tell it myself.
When did it start? When did we begin to change? From the first point of contact, people change one another, but there was a spark to it all. There was something that spun the threads of those words long before they were spoken. I think it may have been Bevelle. Yes, far below the cityscape, in those millennia-old tunnels where I was forced to fight a dear friend of mine. When I told her that I was going ahead, she never questioned me, but only had faith in that I knew what I was doing. "You have your reasons," she said. She had to have understood more than she knew. But that wasn't it. No, it was a little later than that, when we reached that hollow chamber where the colossus once resided.
A massive creature that seemed to be created from the shadows of the Farplane rose up from nowhere. You couldn't look at it without a terrible fear filling your lungs. But one of us was not afraid. She stood before the dark beast with her arms held out at her sides, as though to bar its path and shouted to it. "You must stop!" she said, sounding as though she were making a desperate plea to keep a dear friend from making a terrible mistake. It was my turn for understanding. This was an Aeon, a legendary guardian of Spira that she shared a special bond with. It was no different from my fight with Baralai, and thus I knew her pleas would not reach the creature's heart. I drew my sword and took a stance in front of her. "Do you want to get killed? We have to fight it." I declared. I wondered if she would be able to fight against the Aeon, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew she had the strength to do it.
The specifics of that battle aren't important, only that she did stand with us to battle the ethereal guardian. After its defeat, as the Aeon's body was fading, all of her strength drained from her and she collapsed to her knees. She never shed a tear, but she spoke through a voice that told of a deeply rooted sadness. "You were right. We had to fight it, didn't we?" At that moment, a part of me wanted to say or do something that would ease the pain, but the people we were at that time made it impossible. I could see that she longed for such things to come from only one other person, and I knew that I myself was not capable of giving that kind of support. It was almost nothing, but as long as you start with something, it can grow. That was the single thread, it was something.
There were three more incidences, three more temples before the last. With each Aeon that she was forced to destroy, she tried to steel her resolve. In our most difficult battle, though, she came so close to the breaking point. It was in the Calm Lands, a place where summoners had come to fight their final battles for a thousand years. That alone was bad omen enough for me. In any event, we had received word that tourists were trapped by fiends in a place that had come to be called the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth. In the moment before the "Friendly Neighborhood Gullwings" took on the mission, I saw a coldness in her that to this day I have seen only a handful of times. If she were any lesser a woman, she'd have hated every last person there, and left the trapped tourists for dead. But not her. She set her feelings aside and went ahead with the rescue.
I wonder if that's why things happened the way they did in the Chamber of the Fayth. Again, in the center of the Chamber was the abyss, and over it appeared a samurai Aeon from whom she demanded an answer. Its only reply was to draw its sword against her. That may have been the last time she would have fought if it weren't for one thing. As we left the Cavern, the people we'd saved gathered around and gave their thanks, swearing that no one would do any business in that place again. I think it reminded her what she fights for, and allowed her to continue to Djose...
Djose Temple. An Al Bhed group called the Machine Faction is set up there. Up until the Calm Lands incident, they had a handle on the fiends coming from inside, but it seemed that something went wrong, and they put out a distress signal to anyone who was listening. She, of course, would never give any thought to leaving them sit there, so the Gullwings mobilized and the threads began to intertwine. We moved through the temple, up each floor until we reached the chamber where Guardians would traditionally wait while the summoner prayed in the Chamber of the Fayth. There, we found the temple's Aeon, but even I could tell that something was different. This one had found a way to merge with the Al Bhed machina weapons.
The Aeon tried to make quick work of us, but we were fortunate enough to have had a near miss. It wasn't long before the fusion between Aeon and machina was brought to its knees. Again, I knew something wasn't right, but I dismissed it and we all walked into the Chamber of the Fayth. Rikku called down the hole and I warned her that something might answer back. I'm not really sure if I was joking or not. Between our banter, she was just staring into the abyss; what she was thinking of I couldn't begin to guess. Then I noticed it - the Aeon made its way to the entrance of the Chamber. The machina it fused with must've allowed it to continue. It came for one last chance to end our lives. Rikku and I dove to either side, but she was in between us and there was no cover. The blast from the Aeon's self-destruction sent her flying into the abyss. "Yuna!" I called out as she fell out of sight. I remember only one other time that I ever felt so helpless. I stayed on the edge of that bottomless hole, staring into the blackness hoping that if I looked long enough, I might see something down there. All I saw was one of Shinra's CommSpheres falling into the darkness, slowly disappearing.
On the Celsius, Brother wouldn't stop babbling about how much life wouldn't be worth living if we couldn't get her Yuna back. It'd be a lie to say that I didn't feel at least somewhat similarly, though at the time I wasn't nearly as bad. That, and I didn't cry on Barkeep's shoulder the whole time. Not that I could've - he was busy trying to take care of Brother, who wouldn't leave the poor hypello alone. Anyway, there wasn't much else we could do other than wait and check on the CommSphere data from the one we threw down the hole. Maybe it's in the blood, but Rikku was just as much a mess as Brother. Fortunately, Shinra found a way to keep her busy by having her try winning against him in Sphere Break. There was no way she could beat his core sphere, so it kept her quiet most of the time.
As for myself... well, like I said, I was just as worried as anyone else, but I prefer to think that I kept myself well enough in check. Whenever I started feeling the weight of the situation, I found myself in the Celsius' engine room, listening to the hum of the generator and the sound of drive pistons. It was enough to keep my mind off of Yuna, but the engines always reminded me of Gippal and the others. I would end up thinking back to that night on the ship from who-knows-where to nobody-cares, when we talked about our plans and our dreams to ride an airship like this one. I only replaced one subject of lament with another. A lateral movement in my train of thought. I suppose I didn't keep myself in check nearly as well as I had thought. But it was another thread, another event that lead to today. See, the more I thought about those times, the more I wondered if there was any point in chasing after the past. Of course there is a point, I decided, but how much value did it have? "I'll ask Yuna when we find her." I said to myself, the engines drowning out my words.
There are some people's words that those engines could never drown out though. And for once I was glad for that fact as Brother announced over the intercom that Shinra had picked up Yuna's signal, and we were going to Bevelle immediately to get her.