Disclaimer: Final Fantasy IX and its characters and locations are property of Square-Enix. No money is, was, or ever will be made from this story.
Author's notes: See profile.
The warning that isn't: See those ruby-clad feet sticking out from under the farmhouse? You're not in Kansas anymore. :)
A brief description of the chaptering system: It's weird.
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Into The Depths
I stand atop the Iifa Tree and wonder how I'll end the world. It's a shame in some ways. I dislike seeing anything beautiful destroyed, and from my viewpoint the world is a perfect picture. The sun, huge and red as the Invincible's eye, hangs a little above the horizon, illuminating the apparently endless plains of the Pualei region. Both the sky and the distant plains are a single broad sweep of colour; the sky a deep, translucent orange, and the plains a faint, ancient russet. Between sky and land there's a thin, dancing ribbon of faded blue that I know is the sea, but I'll dismiss that as an illusion for now. Closer to my foreground, the scribbled outlines of boulders break the smooth purity of the ground, and then the flatness itself breaks apart into a fine mosaic of patchworked brown and scrubby green. Finally there come the stiff upper roots of Iifa, cold and hard as stone and covered in tenacious patches of lichen. Every single one of them is interesting enough to have its own picture painted, but I haven't the time. Even if I weren't dying as I stand here pondering the scenery, I don't think I'd be able to stop myself blowing the whole thing up out of sheer boredom. It's outlived its usefulness to the world. There's no more Terra and no more Terran souls.
However, Garland's first masterpiece might still be of some use to me in my hour of need. It's a remarkable machine, more full of secrets than even I can discern, and I hope its mysteries are up to the task I have in mind for it. Garland never explained to me the inner workings of the Iifa Tree, but he talked of the tree often enough for me to figure out certain things he probably never intended me to know.
He told me that its role in his plan was to trap the souls of Gaia in order to make the planet easier for the ancient Terra to assimilate, and that it was the Soulcage's job to bind these souls irrevocably to what would eventually become Gaia's corpse. He also mentioned in one of his many grand and boring speeches on the nature of memory that each soul holds within it traces of all that has gone before, in the same way that each lower life form carries the shadows of its evolutionary past within its body. If I could find a way into the Gaian souls' prison, then their combined memories would gouge a path I could use to travel back to whatever it was that had created the world. That was my theory, but it was one I had never investigated with any urgency. I had enough to amuse me on Gaia, and all the time in the world-- or so I thought-- to explore the mysteries of the universe.
And then came my ascension and my pyrrhic victory over Garland. I hadn't been so naïve as to expect that he had told me all of my secrets: he had hidden my own nature and the manufacturing process of the Genomes from me until he could credibly deny neither. But I hadn't expected a betrayal like this; to have been shamelessly deceived when I asked what Zidane meant to him, to have been promised the world in order to placate me and distract me from seeking the truth about my own life, and finally to have been cut down at my moment of triumph by him, the one man who would have lost nothing by leaving me to rule Gaia. The amusement in his voice as he revealed the last secret of my life had been the most unbearable thing about the whole scene. He still thought me the little child I had been for mere months; powerless in defeat and harmless in victory.
Well, my destruction of every living thing remaining on Terra proved I'm not powerless. I'm not harmless either, as Garland will see when I tear open the body of the world and pull out its still-beating heart. Zidane too. I'm counting on his exasperating tendency to follow me to the ends of the earth and charge in when I'd prefer not to have company, and I fully expect that he will play his part. I will play my part too, striking down my presumptive challenger in one last display of glory, and then I will make a funeral pyre of the world. It's time for the curtains to rise for the last time.
I close my eyes and reach out with my mind, searching for the place where the souls are kept, and the whispering of the wind is replaced by the whispering of the decaying souls vomited from Iifa's maw. I ignore it and push deeper, down into the heart of the tree where Mist production takes place, and suddenly my mind is ablaze with a million thoughts that are not my own. This is it. This is the way. The long and narrow path that will lead me to glory. All I must do is summon the courage to take the first and final step, to plunge into the seething tempest of souls and claim its power and its secrets for my own, to stand before the divine and spit in its eye before dragging it with me down into oblivion.
For a moment I hesitate-- I am after all pitting myself against five thousand years of Gaia's dead-- but I push down the lingering feelings of doubt. I'm going to die anyway. I may as well die fighting. Without another thought, I push myself wholly into the Iifa Tree's core, and the world turns green and fades to white.
