This is... weird, to say the least. It's inspired by Guardian1's Go Not Gently, by the many times I watched the Black Mages in the game and wondered what they might be thinking, what they felt as they buried their brothers. Blame it on insatiable curiosity.
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters of placenames depicted herein; they are the property of Square-Enix, and I am taking no financial gain from this work of fiction.
Black Mages stop when their time runs out, like a grandfather clock that has not been wound up, and when they do they are buried in the earth while their brothers wait for their return.
One by one the Black Mages stop and suddenly the world is running out of numbers.
Like little puppets, their strings are cut and they stop, all cloth and hats and boots, all empty. The white gloves are soiled as they dig into the dirt, putting the husks of dissipated souls into the deep, deep holes, mimicking an action they do not truly understand.
And with each passing month, the pinwheels and the scarecrows grow in number.
He watches them, hidden away beneath the brim of his hat. The kindly numbered Mages fade away like last year's dying grass, and the light in their eyes dims. Slowly, the cheerful hum of words that used to weave in between the rickety houses grows to silence, leaving place to winds and creaking wood, to the lonely cheeping of a chocobo and the rustle of leaves.
With each time the digging hands grow fewer, dwindling until only he is left and the task seems impossible to complete. The pinwheel belongs to Mr 228, the hands belong to Vivi and he knows that there will be no next time – there is no one left to bury, no one left to disappear into a cloud of mist and magic – and he never had the heart to tell them they won't be coming back.
He never knew that soil weighed this much and it sticks to him long after he has washed his hands in the river, cold water running like whirlwinds around his twig-arms. It isn't just the dirt that washes off his fingers, but also the ghost-and-wishes blood of those he dared call brothers. The icy sting of the river chilled his fingers to the bones he is not sure he possesses and he pulls his hands out, drifting absently along the hushed paths, quite like a ship without its anchor.
The potions on the store-shelves grow dusty in the pointy-hatted owner's absence, and he thinks himself even more lonely for wanting to speak to them. A tiny spider spins a web underneath a chair, a perfect patterns of knots and whisper-thin strings, wrapping the dead flies in a layer of death and dusty silence. Each day grows longer and longer as the wind tears at the crumbling houses and the leaning fences until one day he cannot stand the silence and the dust and the death. With the slow, sprawling gait of decay, the wild forest all around him grows closer and starts to gnaw at the skeletons of houses.
He grows, taller and sharper and colder, until he is a head taller than Mr 228 had been that day by the carrot patch, and he is thin like the scarecrows and rickety like the pinwheels.The thoughts come slowly now, like wicked spider-things with broken legs and leaching poison, and though he knows that Mr 341 and Mr 518 and all the other niggling numbers are rotting under his feet the silence and the scarecrows are no longer enough company.
Their twisted Creator, the monster in the mask of beauty, spoke of mist and the dregs of souls at the Iifa Tree long ago, when his childish limbs did not ached from the pain of growing like they do now, and the whispers run through his mind. A simple thing it would seem, mist and magic and souls...
Taking the crumpled hats and coats from the lopsided scarecrows feels not only like theft but like murder, like he is killing his brothers all over again. Through the dirt and carrots and twisting roots he imagines that he can hear them spinning over, protesting even as he apologises for what he was doing.
The shop with all its potion bottles on the shelves becomes his world; all dark and spider-webbed and smelling of ageing medicine. The scent sticks to him as it creeps into his clothes, into his eyes, down his throat like a venomous cloud, yet he does not flinch or abandon his ambitious, mad project. The stained, wind-worn clothing spreads out on the tables like corpses, empty sleeves lined up with a painstaking care. The hat is small, and the boots fit a child – he does not want to fail his attempt, and if he does, he does not want to have wished too much.
It is harder than he thinks, little things that get in his way and tangle him up. Perhaps, he thinks, it will be easier to make them all in one batch, cookies made of magic, and the rumpled coats line up in an inanimate parade on the table. Underneath his hands they take shape like dreams half-realised, turning from magic and breath to little creatures with the pointy hats and lumpy coats of the Stopped. Yellow eyes like candlelight blink in the darkness, little hands move.
They are his: his puppets, his children, his, his his. They are mirrors of him in their sharp and jerky motions and it is with the baited breath of a proud father that he awaits their first words.
"..." the whistling noise of breathing, hissing snakes in a bone-dry desert, "...F...f.."
"...Father...:"
Touching them feels like being struck by lightning, and he revels in the feeling. He feels like a god, yet his children are not made of clay but of magic, more lasting than the world and his. They will not leave him, they will not Stop and disappear, they will not become scarecrows and pinwheels and crumpled hats.
They will last forever, his comfort in this place of winds and stained wood and sun.
In his thrall they learn to speak, words tumbling over words in struggling sentences, and the wood-and-broken-bones villages is once more filled with the sound of enthusiastic life. His children tumble over each other to live, bright and sparkling and never Stopping. They aren't numbered; there will be no more Mr 288, no more Mr 341; his children, his creations will not be named.
If you are never named you can never die.
They laugh and they speak and the sing, candlebright in his darkness, a quiet yes after all the negative answers. He blesses them and like a leper messiah he gives them life with one hand and shows them the path to death with the other. He is no god, he is no Kuja with feathers and madness and power; he is a Black Mage with all their failures and their shortcomings; he is a Black Waltz, a broken creature that was never intended to fly, and so his handiwork is not perfect.
The Black Mages for all that they were numbered in name and days, were the closest to human that he will ever get. His children for all that he has made them, have the blackened numbers written in their eyes, counting them out their days.
At first, it comes slowly, almost unnoticeable. The laughs become fewer and further between, the words do not tumble over each other like they used to. There is something crumbling behind the darkness and the yellow witch-lights, something slowly creeping in and killing the light. It comes slowly but now he cannot help but notice that his time is running out and so is theirs, the time of pinwheels and scarecrows approaching day by day.
He thinks at first that he can save them, that his imperfect dolls do not need to die, he thinks that he can sacrifice something to make them live – a twisted payment for an empty life – but he is wrong. There is nothing that is ever enough to pay for a life, and as the bitter taste of what in another life might have been tears sting inside him as he watches them die. There will be no more laughter. No more merry little fires.
He knows now what it feels like to live; he knows it more than ever as he digs the shallow graves with aching fingers, feels it in the bones he is never sure he has as he sticks the pinwheels and the scarecrows into the ground. The wind catches the frayed edges of little coats and ragged hats, knocks over little boots and makes the pinwheels spin.
He knows now what it feels like to live, and he wonders what it feels like to Stop.