Chapter 19

Rikku, Lila and Llaman wandered on to find a place of their own. Along the way they picked up more followers, wanderers like themselves. Eventually, they found a place to hide the meteor sphere. They built a pyramid, constructing it in such a way that if anyone tried to remove the sphere they would be crushed by the walls closing in on them. Finally, the walls would shrink down smaller than the sphere they contained, and the entire temple would become the meteor sphere. Inside it they left the Bahamut sphere too, judging it as being too dangerous to carry around.

The temple was many years in the making. During that time, Lila and Llaman's daughter was born. Rikku suggested her name - Meva.

When Meva was three years old, they left the temple. Eventually they found a place of their own, in the middle of the mountains, behind a forest, near a village made up of the diggers from Bikanel desert.

Unfortunately, however, a monster attacked the village, soon after they took up residence there. Rikku was asleep at the time, as was Llaman and Meva, and the other members of the village. Lila however, was down by the river, and was the first to see it. Llaman awoke to her screams and rushed out, in time to see her fighting. She cast a spell, a spell she'd had learned from Yuna, and the monster roared in pain, backing off a little. Lila fell to her knees, gasping for breath. Llaman ran forward and finally defeated the monster with a sword he had made sometime in the years before.

Lila, however, was too far gone, and died in Llaman's arms. Tears pricking his eyelids he carried her body out into the water and let go, letting her float down to the bottom, her golden hair forming a halo around her. Rikku and Meva had awoken by this time and were standing by, watching, Meva still too young to understand.

Meva was a beautiful child. She had her mother's green eyes and her father's dark and brooding good looks. She never had her father's visions, although she sometimes showed an oddly uncanny ability to predict what was going to happen. Rikku taught her to listen to the soul of the world too, and she was swifter even than Lila had been.

Meva grew older. She liked spending time by the riverbank, feeling close to her mother, as Lila had felt close to Gippal when building a machina. She was around nine years old when she found it. A pure white sphere.

She took it to Llaman, who examined it for a moment, then handed it back to her.

"Keep it safe," he said. "It's a sphere, your mother's sphere,"

Llaman and Rikku had told her about spheres.

"What does it do?" She asked.

"Nothing," he replied. "It does nothing,"

Meva never mentioned it to her father again.

The world grew older. The continents changed, the sea level changed. The calm lands ended up completely underwater, and were gradually forgotten about by the next generations. Besaid Island stopped being an island as the years went by and the seas changed. It ended up as a part of a much larger continent, and the name 'Besaid' was forgotten.

Yuna and Shinra's dream city was eventually built on that larger continent, though not in either of their lifetimes, or their children's. Shinra set up a corporation to carry on his work and his name. There were more soldiers like Vidina, an entire army. The workers of Shinra carried out many more experiments too, using Ronso DNA to create a new species. Unfortunately however, a few creatures of this species were lost, having broken out of the lab, and were last seen heading west. As the life force was used up the unsent disappeared, the world not able to support their existence anymore.

The Shinra Corporation stopped using the word 'life force' after a time. It tended to make people uncomfortable. They came up with a new word. Over the generations, many words changed. Spheres were renamed. Calm was corrupted to Kalm. The name Spira was lost to history.

Nooj's land was renamed too. It became a secret village of ninja's, descended from him, Leblanc, Dona and Barthello, as well as the others in the eastern shelter. And not one of their descendantsever learnt tokeep their hands off other peoples spheres.

The Al bhed language was forgotten, the green eyes lost. All except for one race. Meva's children never lost their green eyes. They never regained their visions, though they often knew things without knowing why. This line was renamed too, given a misnomer to confuse Aura's descendants. They called themselves the ancients, although a few still remembered the word Cetra, and used the two incongruously. And they kept Lila's sphere, passing it one from daughter to daughter. Rikku's line tended towards daughters, though none ever knew why. Over the years, Lila's sphere, through such proximity to her line grew ever more powerful as each dying daughter leant her power to it. The spell it contained, the last spell Lila cast, could not be unlocked by any invention of Shinra's, however. With the loss of life force in the world, it could only be unlocked by a great effort, a great sacrifice of one of Lila's race.

Eventually, that sacrifice came to pass, and Lila's sphere was pitted against Gippal's, in one of the greatest stories ever told, although none remembered the connection. And when the sacrifice was finally made, none of those involved ever knew of the footsteps of their ancestors, though they each followed them in their own way.

And the last member of Lila's line followed the first to a watery grave.