This is for Enkida and nynaeve77, who both guessed, but in different ways.
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movement two : feather (edea)
(Ultimecia must have told her, Rinoa knows this.)
Edea spoke to her one day, and this is how Rinoa remembers.
It is ironic to Rinoa that she would recover her horrible future-past, the truth she had been carrying all along, hidden inside her stomach and liver and all her organs (not deliberately hidden, more like stashed somewhere, like feeling a rock in one's shoe: you know it's there, but you don't really know what it is, it could be a rock, or a bug, or an acorn. Rinoa can feel something hard inside herself, but she has always thought it to be part of her powers, and ignored it) - this truth is revealed to her by the woman she considers her mother.
Over the years, after the conflict, Rinoa has found it both easy and hard to be close to Edea. Edea, being the one who gave the powers over to Rinoa, is now a mother: Edea gave birth to the Sorceress Rinoa as much as Julia bore little Rinoa Heartilly Caraway. Yet Rinoa's own powers can pick up emotions from inside Edea like a hungry man can smell out stew cooking. Whether the powers make her an empath as well as a sorceress, or it is her own tenuous bond with the mother, Rinoa does not know. But she feels an angry ache, an emptiness, from where the powers used to be; and sometimes Edea looks upon her with fear, or sometimes even anger.
(Passing on a sorceress's inheritance is much like bearing a child, Rinoa thinks. Perhaps this is why no sorceresses have been able to bear their own children.)
It is a few days after the engagement was announced. Squall has finally asked her the one question she was afraid he would never get to, and Rinoa is wearing his ring proudly. The ring is a modest diamond surrounded by dark, milky, pearly moonstones, tiny little spheres ringing the diamond, dark like the color of her own hair at night. There are six tiny stones and Rinoa likes to pretend that she is the diamond in the middle, the Sorceress, brilliant and valuable yet fragile, like crystal like glass, and the six moonstones are her friends, who have sworn to protect her.
She can name them all: Squall, of course, is the one at the top, her chosen. And Quistis, the new Headmaster, Rinoa's older sister, is the bottom, the anchor, the teacher, who supports her. Selphie and Irvine are the ones to the right, as inseparable as they have been since the day they all were removed from Time Kompression. And Zell is on the left, to Squall's right, Sub-Commander to his Commander, the most loyal of them all.
But Rinoa cannot always decide who the last stone belongs to. Some days she names it Seifer, who has returned and is working off penance under a life sentence to Garden. Seifer is as brash and mean as ever but Rinoa can feel him sometimes, aching. She can feel Seifer at other times too: there is the shadow of a bond there from when the Sorceress was another Sorceress and Seifer was the Knight. On other days she is tempted to name it Edea: her mother, her lifegiver, her root-stock. Her ally and enemy.
(Rinoa wonders what else Ultimecia has told Edea. She wonders what Edea has told no one.)
Edea has asked to meet her for dinner and Rinoa has complied. She has come out to the stone orphanage where Edea has chosen to spend her days. Edea, being done with children and SeeD and Garden, ironically has begun her own garden, turning to wildlife to fill the void within her. Rinoa looks in wonder. Edea no longer has it within her to nurture children but the urge to nurture cannot be turned off, and Edea has thrown it all into these plants and flowers. There are blossoms of every color, wild beyond belief, tiny little trees that will become big hulking trees and tiny little trees that will remain tiny and little. The garden is bursting with life to the point where Rinoa gets dizzy. She is surprised: there is nothing in Edea's long straight dark hair and long straight dark dress to suggest this wild riot of color and shape and light and life. But: For Edea, it has always been about creation.
There are birds also, all around, tiny little goldfinches and chirping chickadees fighting over the seed in the feeders Edea has hung from the trees. The birdfeeders are shaped like lanterns and Rinoa imagines them at night, full of glowing thistle and sunflower seed, and as the birds eat them their little bodies begin to glow too, until the sky is full of dimly lit feathers and birdsong.
(Rinoa will see this in her mind every time she thinks of Edea: dimly lit feathers and birdsong at dawn, a sky full of stars and feathers. Forever looking for nourishment but never fulfilled.)
Sometimes pictures like this appear in Rinoa's mind and she wonders where they come from. She was always an imaginative child when she was younger but it never came like this, full surround sound and high definition picture. Sometimes it is nice, like being a diamond surrounded by protective pearls. Sometimes it feels like madness.
Edea comes out of the house then and Rinoa feels the ache set in and before she can stop herself she raises her eyes to Edea's, hoping to catch the mother off guard once, just once, and see what she is hiding -
(Rinoa wonders, forevermore, why she did this.)
- and Edea's eyes are dark, full of darkness and mist. Sorrow, rage, anguish, despair. Despair in spades. Disappointment, desperation. And a feeling of emptiness longer and larger than the sea.
- and then in a second Edea blinks, and turns off the despair, and she is only a graceful woman with her hands full of candles. Rinoa steps forward haltingly to help, for Edea's hands really are full, and the candles are beautiful things, long and white and gracefully tapered. Edea's long dark hair is streaked with silver now, but her face has not aged. Rinoa knows without asking that it is the magic that does this.
"Walk with me, Rinoa." Edea's voice is soft, now. But now that Rinoa has seen the darkness as well as felt it, she can sense that the despair stains every aspect of Edea, even her voice. Especially when Edea says her name. Her hands are shaking as she takes some of the candles from Edea.
They walk along a stone pathway. The stone is light grey, faintly glittering in the dim daylight. Rinoa knows they are walking to the little villa Cid built for Edea a while ago. It is little more than round lattice-work and a pointed roof like a princess's bower. Edea keeps a vigil there, vesper candles lit both day and night, an offering and appeasement and apology to Hyne from one of her Daughters. Edea makes the candles herself in the stone house that used to be an orphanage. They are scented by herbs from her own garden.
They walk into the vigil and Rinoa can feel it already: this is a holy place. Edea's days and nights and tears are feeding it, slowly: and although Edea holds none of the immediate power anymore she is still steeped in grace. Her wishes will accumulate over the years until this tiny bower becomes a church, a place of worship, a holy land. Rinoa can feel its sacred-ness in her skin and wonders why it is pricking at her, something akin to sorrow and despair.
(Rinoa has never been religious but has always believed in Angels.)
There are candles everywhere. The roof is just more lattice woven in with vine and branch and ivy and spray but somehow Rinoa knows that the bower will never light on fire; it is protected by Edea's strange grace. Most of the candles fill in one wall, tiny niches cut into and out of latticework like mismatched stairs. The other side holds only seven candles and Rinoa knows that these are for Edea's own and special children. Rinoa focuses on the fuller wall, prying cold wax out of candlesticks and replacing it with tall cool full white candles. Edea turns to the other wall, murmuring what can only be a prayer.
(There are seven candles but one will be forever unlit.)
She takes one of the lit candles and bends it towards the new ones, sharing light. She takes special care not to drip the wax, though she can see the scattered droppings below the candles, like thrown offerings before an altar. Offerings of wax and fire and candle-scent. Edea, behind her, replaces the seven sacred candles with fresh ones. All her children, burning brightly now. All her little SeeDs. Being a mother is much like being a gardener: fresh eternal joy at seeing the blossoms, and freshly sharp pain at seeing one petal forever plucked.
(Rinoa wonders again that Edea has not given her a candle. Edea has given her something more. Or perhaps Edea knows that a Sorceress needs no prayers?)
Once they are finished with the candles the two step outside the bower and sit on the nearby stone bench. It is more peaceful out here, Rinoa thinks, where the air is still full of peaceful grace and candle-scent, but you can feel the sun and the wind and hear the birds.
"Thank you for coming," Edea says, and Rinoa smiles involuntarily, turning her face up to the sun.
"It's so beautiful here," Rinoa replies. She knows that Edea knows what she means.
"I am glad he asked you," Edea says, with a smile of her own, a small one. Edea cannot smile for long anymore. "I was afraid for him."
"I know," Rinoa says, softly. "I was too."
Edea is staring into the villa, her eyes on the wall with seven spaces, six brightly burning flames and one forever snuffed. "You are good for him, Rinoa," she says. "You were good for him after - after Ellone, and you will be good for him for many - you will be good," she amends.
But Rinoa can almost taste the darkness and the despair and without thinking she suddenly whispers "Edea, why do you hate me so?"
There is a long moment of silence, wrought with emptiness. Edea says nothing. Her eyes are closed now.
Rinoa feels that she must burst into speech or else everything will break, shatter into crystals and feathers, wings disintegrating. "I just - I can feel it, around you, it's like an aura but it's a dark one, full of - well, despair." Rinoa has never had to say the word despair before and it tastes like hopelessness on her tongue. "And you look at me sometimes and I just feel the most evil longing and it's never around anybody else so it has to be me, and why?" The whisper has descended almost into silence, but the candle-scent is holding off the sounds of wind and birdsong so her words are clearly felt.
Edea is still sitting, her head bowed, her eyes closed.
Rinoa knows she should not be asking this but she is about to marry Edea's son, or son-by-heart-and-adoption, and she can't bear to think that Edea might possibly think her unworthy of Squall, she has tried to hard to be everything and anything for Squall, she would move mountains for him, she would move oceans for him; and she is a Sorceress, she could do it if she had to -
"Is it - is it because I have your powers?" Rinoa whispers, giving voice to the thought that has been teasing the edges of her mind.
Maybe Edea is like a plant, and the powers were like her leaves, and without it she can't get as much sunlight anymore, and that's why she feels empty.
Maybe Edea is like an angel, and the powers were her wings as they are mine. And without them she can't fly anymore, and she has to walk, and that's why she feels empty.
Maybe the powers were her feathers, so she still has to carry the wings, but now they are just heavy bones, skeletons, a tattoo, a sign of what she will never be again.
(Maybe I am crazy. But maybe Edea was crazy once too.)
"Edea?" Rinoa whispers, and her voice catches on the end of her name, and the catch is like snagging silk on crystal.
"Do you not know?" Edea whispers, but she is not whispering to Rinoa, she is whispering at the walls of candles, the tiny pinpricks of light that float like feathers on a sea inside the villa. "Was she too cruel to tell you?"
"Edea," Rinoa whispers again, as if to get her attention. She is not sure why they are whispering but this isn't something she wants to shout to the world. She feels like she's on the brink of a discovery.
Edea's eyes are open but they are vague. She is looking at the little lights inside her vigil but she is not focusing on them; she is looking through the lights as if she can see something on the other side. The lights are forming a veil, a mist. Rinoa senses the beginnings of a powerful magic.
"I do not hate you, child," Edea says then, still looking at the candles. "What you hear is only the memory of a feeling. I do not hate you for taking the powers back."
This is what she wants to hear, so Rinoa smiles, but -
Edea's eyes suddenly fly open, wide wide open, as she realizes she has said one word too many, and given away a secret she swore once to take to her grave. There are few things more precious to Edea than the happiness of her sons and daughters and this one word -
Rinoa looks at Edea's eyes, open suddenly with madness and regret, and -
"What do you mean," Rinoa says softly, "taking the powers back?"
(Ultimecia must have told her, Rinoa knows this.)
Rinoa is staring at the hands in front of her. They are her hands but at the moment they don't look like hers, they only look like Hers: Ultimecia's. She is cupping her hands in front of her and staring at the thin white scar across her palm and wondering how in the world she managed to forget.
Beneath that scar, across the lifeline of her wrist, is another one, more jagged. She had asked to forget. As if forgetting would make it go away. Or make it not true. There are a series of swirls along her arm, thin whorls buried under fine hair and blue armbands. They are moving as she looks at them, moving with the current of her blood, beneath her skin.
(She will never know whether Edea meant to keep the secret and slipped - or whether Edea deliberately let the word fall. In her heart she knows that Edea would have taken the secret to death; but she will always wonder. Subconsciously.)
Rinoa looks up to Edea, realizing that her mother is sobbing silently, her young face buried in her young slim hands with the silver hair falling down. Edea finally looks old, with the age-burdened hair covering up her magic-stained skin. Rinoa has not seen Edea cry like this in quite a while; probably since Ellone's funeral. Her mother is old, and crying, and even if she has just said the meanest thing to ever have been said in the history of the world, Rinoa cannot take it, and she reaches an arm out, resting her hand upon Edea's shoulder.
This only clarifies the ache, like rubbing the steam away from a clouded mirror. Rinoa inhales sharply as the feelings solidify in her. It is as if she just completed a circuit and Edea is running along her like current along a wire.
Edea gasps too, but it is in wonder, and Rinoa realizes: they have just completed a circuit. And now she gets to feel all of the emptiness inside of Edea, all of the despair; while Edea can momentarily touch the powers that were once hers.
Rinoa can see now that there were no selfish longings for power, no narrow-minded evil glances and plots to revolt and take it back. It is more like a flower which has fed on earth for years and years and now must content itself with a pot full of canned soil and water from a tap and sunlight through a window. The plant goes on, and thrives and grows: but there is something wild about a sorceress's magic, as wild as flowers in a field. Edea cannot help but yearn for the power which once completed her, made her more than human, one hundred and twenty percent. The powers are greater than the sum of their parts.
And Edea is still sobbing, and Rinoa looks up to realize that it is near to dusk, the sun touching the horizon. Rinoa takes her mother in her arms and says "Hush, now, hush, I would give them back to you if I could," all the while feeling the despair run up and down her arms and wondering how Edea can bear it.
There are all kinds of feelings mixed up in it, but they are all different shades of despair, just like there can be many shades of violet. There are faded strains from childhood, both Edea's own and the many childhoods she has shared at the orphanage. There is the darkened muted stain of her inability to keep Ultimecia out of her body. There is the raw, bright turmoil from Ellone's illness. A cacophony of indigos. It is a symphony of despair, an angelic choir. Edea is the angel, Rinoa sees. She is the feather.
"I would give them back," Rinoa whispers, more to herself than anyone.
"You do," Edea whispers in response. "You do, at the end."
Edea sits up, out of her arms, and looks away, into the vigil. The candles seem brighter now that the sun is dying. The bower itself is peaceful, wrapped in feather-light, mist-light.
"It is a vicious circle," her mother speaks to the candles. "I take the powers from Ultimecia as she dies, only to be inhabited by her and give them to you."
"And I," Rinoa breathes, "however it happens, I give them to her. I become her."
"You merge with her," Edea says softly. "There are three of us, three women. Three faces in the mirror. You and she become one. And at the end..."
"At the end," Rinoa says dreamily. The darkness is growing and in her mind's eye she is seeing the birdhouses alight with glowing sunflower seeds. Maybe the seeds will fall and grow tall glowing flowers and the shimmering birds can fly inbetween them in the darkness.
Edea looks at her, almost sharply. Pay attention. Abruptly she stands and takes a step towards her haven. She will not have this sorrow enter her peace, her villa, but standing closer to it is calming, like steeping in hot water.
"In the end you are mad," Edea says. "You come to me, and you are writhing and crying, and you say 'Edea, take this, take it back, I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry.' And of course I have no idea what you mean but I reach out to you and - and," Edea breathes, and in that one breath Rinoa knows exactly what she means. It is like the world erupts into color, but it is not a peaceful eruption. It is like someone has stabbed your eyes and afterwards yes, you can see the color, but it hurts like bloody hell and is also really hard to get used to. Blessings and curses. White feathers, black feathers.
This is how Rinoa learns the truth: it is Irvine that discovers her, she realizes, and has a shameful moment of relief. Irvine and Quistis, she learns, and Rinoa sighs: This is all right, she breathes. That's okay. I can go out with Irvine and Quistis, and Edea.
(She trusts Quistis in a way she trusts none of the others, she realizes. Quistis is so practical. Rinoa truly believes that if she is to prematurely go mad it will be Quistis who will take care of it, who will calmly Mute her and push her out of Garden's top window to be pulverized on the spinning rings while everyone else is saying Oh No, what's the protocol on this? Does anyone have an Esuna?)
"You're mad," Edea says again, and it sounds like comfort. Rinoa realizes that it is comfort: if she's gone crazy, then it's not her fault. "You are mad, at the end, Rinoa."
(Edea knows that she has betrayed her daughter; she swears to never, ever tell Rinoa that Squall is there, too, at the end.)
"I know," Rinoa whispers. "She told me. She told me it's my fault. That I'm the one who does it."
"Yes," Edea replies. "And -"
(Edea never asks what, exactly, Ultimecia told Rinoa. Rinoa never asks what, exactly, Edea knows.)
"What?" Rinoa asks, for Edea has stopped. It is dusk now, a long cacophony of indigos stretched across the sky, tinged gently with rose where the sun has touched.
"And Adel," Edea says.
Rinoa shivers. The chills are all up and down her back and goosebumps are all over her skin and her hands are shaking. Adel is terrifying. Ultimecia is too but in a different way. Ultimecia is the unknown, the danger in the darkness, the bump in the night. Adel is ugly teeth and blood and claws right in front of your face and ready to eat your entrails.
"What about Adel?" Rinoa asks, because she knows she has to ask.
"Adel is not part of the circle," Edea says. "Her face is not in the mirror. She was her own sorceress and her own evil, long before Ultimecia."
"They made me take her powers," Rinoa whispers. "It was the only way."
Perhaps this is where the madness comes: the dark, sticky, viscous powers that slipped in when Adel was defeated. Perhaps this is what started the madness anyway.
(Adel cannot be part of the circle, for she never bore the weight of anyone else's powers: not until the very very end. But Rinoa would like to think that some of the madness was Adel's.)
"Why do you think Ultimecia sends you after Adel?"
She does not want to answer.
The candles are poignant in the darkness. Rinoa never thought candles could be poignant but that is certainly what they are doing. She finds it especially heavy to see six candles on the wall. Not seven. Ellone carried the illness out of Time Compression; she was well for a while but then fell to it, brutally. It certainly tore Squall apart but it tore Laguna apart more and it was probably the first thing that actually brought the two men together. Loire-Leonhart. Ellone would have died, ha ha, to see them now, Rinoa thinks. They're almost inseparable, even though they drive each other up the wall.
They all know, now, that Ellone was a Sorceress herself, a different kind, a Grey kind, something in-between: past and future, the Time magic. Her powers do not grow with each generation: they merely are. There were no words but everyone knew that Rinoa would not receive the powers. Ellone gave them to Quistis. No one wanted them but Quistis couldn't say no to Big Sis. Besides, Quistis says, as Headmistress, she'll never be able to use them, or else she'll get fired.
Rinoa knows now that had she received Ellone's powers then Ultimecia would have the magic she wanted in the first place and none of this would have ever happened but maybe something even worse would have happened because Ultimecia could have done Time Compression the minute Rinoa's body became her own and then the world would pretty much have been totally fucked. If she tries to think too hard about it she thinks only in circles and she sees herself in every mirror and it is like an endless reflection. A cacophony of indigos.
(Focus, Rinoa. Do not think on the future.)
Rinoa wonders that no one thought to offer Elle's powers to Edea.
Edea, standing, reaches a hand towards the candles, and a few of the flames bend to meet her. "Ultimecia sends you to revive Adel because I resist, and you resist, and Adel was the kind of Sorceress who would not resist." The flames curve as if in a breeze, the current of the river upon which they float. "She knows that Adel will die and be forced to bequeath her powers unto you. Then the powers become Ultimecia's, when you pass them on."
Rinoa notices that Edea says pass them on, as if Rinoa will die and give her powers away. So Ultimecia has not told them the same thing.
"I felt her, too, when Ultimecia came back to the past and gave me - everything." Edea sighs, softly. "That's when I knew, for my own powers were mixed in there as well."
(Ultimecia must have told her. As she told me. But why are the stories different?)
(Do we only believe what we want to believe?)
The candles are tiny glowing flames drifting inside the ocean of the vesper bower. Tiny glowing spots, like little floating feathers, hovering inside the vigil like a string of lights.
Stars upon water. An endless reflection. A hall of mirrors. Greater than the sum of their parts.
"There are so many women inside you," Edea whispers emptily.
(Rinoa remembers the day that the powers left Edea.)
"You were born a Sorceress, with your own spark of magic. You had to have been, as I was, as Adel was, as Ultimecia surely was." Edea has stepped into the bower now and her form is lit from all sides by the golden-silver mist of candles. For I, too, am a Sorceress. She does not mention Elle.
(Neither of them can remember details but for Rinoa it is the day her world caught on fire. It was as if Edea was burning and she reached out and Rinoa caught the fire herself.)
Her mother is outlined in gold now. Full of grace. Surrounded by glowing feathers.
"You took my spark and Adel's spark and combined them with your own."
(Rinoa wonders whether Edea really thought she was going to die and that's why she passed everything on. Or if Ultimecia thought Edea's body was done for and she jumped ship.)
"But what was inside of me was actually mine and Ultimecia's."
(Rinoa wonders whether Ultimecia was only inside Edea to wait for her, Rinoa, to appear. This is not a pleasant thought. She wonders if Ultimecia recognizes her.)
"And Ultimecia's was of course not only hers, but yours and mine and Adel's."
(She also wonders which one she'd prefer. None of them are pleasant and preferable but one of them is the truth. She realizes, nastily, that she'll know the answer, one day.)
"Our powers are recycled through the years, connected by Time Compression. It is a vicious circle, cycling through time, a mirror with no end."
"An endless reflection." Rinoa speaks at last. They are now speaking in metaphors, in images. She feels like some kind of ancient priestess; the words leave her mouth with little effort, like a prophecy. Edea's voice is dreamlike.
"All three of us, all of our powers are combinations of us three," Edea replies. "The powers are more than the sum of their parts." Her head bows and the candle-flames follow, flickering. They are like tiny birds, heads bobbing, following Edea's movements. Glowing feathers floating in the sea of stars.
Edea closes her eyes. "Adel is the only one who stays pure, in the cycle of time."
Rinoa wants to laugh at the thought of Adel being the pure one but the joke isn't really that funny.
She looks away from the candles, towards the horizon, where the stars are beginning to spot the sky. She is waiting for the lighting of the lanterns and for the birds to come and feed upon the light and shower them with glowing feathers.
"You are so many women," Edea says to the candles. "And only part of me remains."
They are in the garden like that, silent, when Cid comes upon them. Rinoa is seated on the stone bench, staring off at the horizon, where the indigo has settled. Edea is inside the bower, rearranging candles, staring at them. They look like statues, Cid thinks. Two lovely women, posed in candlelight. He could add stone wings and they would look like guardian angels. Edea, his wife, his lover, always the mother. Rinoa, maiden, darling child, soon to be his almost-daughter, wed to his almost-son.
They look so very much alike, he thinks. It is the long dark hair; Rinoa's has grown and Edea has trimmed hers. They both frame soft faces with easy smiles. They are twin angels, then. Angels of Life.
Cid heard an old legend once that was part of a joke about marriage. Someone told it at his bachelor's party. The joke was forgotten almost immediately but Cid has always remembered that there are three souls in every woman: the child, the mother, and the crone. He thinks of this again when he sees Rinoa and Edea, his angelic statues. It is the Child and the Mother, together again.
Cid was a Knight too. He can remember when Ultimecia descended into his Edea and took her Away. There is no confusion in his mind as to who would be the Crone, the Angel of Death.
Three souls in every woman. Are his Child and Mother-Lover one woman, then? Are they one with the Death-Crone?
Cid laughs at himself, and sees their soft faces turn to look at him, sees the easy smile reach both of them. It is Rinoa and Edea again.
Of course not, he thinks. Silly Cid. They are all different women. All they have to do is look into a mirror and see.
-
Gigundic Author's Note after movement three.