Song of Hooves
Everything moves in a natural order, that cycle of birth, life, and death that everyone takes for granted. I suppose looking back upon the war and the scourge that ended it, the basic cycle remains as unbroken now as it was fifty years ago, when I was a young man enamored with love and life. But, lately, as I walk through the empty halls of my once-dream home, I realize that Sin has perverted this cycle, a cycle that I no longer want to be a part of.
Elders are supposed to die before youths. That is the natural order. I suppose, I ramble on about that, but as a man of almost sixty, I have earned the privilege. This is wisdom not given an outlet, and the remnants of a legacy denied. If I had a son, or a son-in-law still living, I could give him manly advice. If I had my daughter, I could guide her with respectful authority. If I had my grandchildren, I could dandle them upon my knee and tell them my stories. They are gone, destroyed by the folly of this continent, and so I have no one to tell my thoughts to but this stone that is destined to capture me for eternity.
This is my legacy and my last words.
Always, always, have I been meant to run. This destiny was apparent since my birth. "You were born with strong legs," my mother used to tell me in the Luca slums where I grew up. A platitude, I guess, for she told all of her children that, in the hope that they'd escape the poverty she'd born them into. My oldest brother had strong arms and good hands, my sister the voice worthy of singing to the Maester of Bevelle. Other siblings had their own talents, ones my mother said would let us rise. Ahh... but only I did, with those strong legs meant to run wild.
Poor never bothered me. If nothing else in this life, I regret becoming as rich as I have, for when there's no one to pass the world you have built to, wealth is pointless. Of course, that long ago time when I headed out on my own, I never expected that my ventures would leave me empty and rich. I became rich, but that never mattered nearly as much as having space to run. If we were poor in the Outlands, I would have contented myself with being a sharecropper or a hired hand on a chocobo ranch. The poverty found in the city was a much smaller cage than I could bear, and I vowed to escape. Between Luca and the wilderness, there is only a stairway, laced with beautiful marble inlay. As a child, my mother forbade me to climb those stairs, maybe because she knew that one day I would, and when I did, I would never return to the city.
First time climbing those stairs, my legs were strong and young, and the road ahead nothing more than the places where chocobos had trampled the grass into a short tight pack. Farms lined those roads and the smell of agriculture and wide open spaces permeated the air, half-unpleasant, but still better than the smells of an urban slum. Running here, under a wide sky released all those ambitions that poverty had locked up inside me. I would use my energy to run, to build, to prove a destiny which was supposed to be nothing but comforting words and false hope.
Northwards I traveled, on the search for wild chocobos. In those good old days, Chocobos were the key to wealth, at least how I saw it. Chocobo power fueled the ships that sailed from the southern islands, that carted goods from Luca to the city on the Moonflow or from Macalania to Bevelle. Catching those chocobos required a knack, one that I possessed in spades. The path upwards from ranch hand to ranch owner was arduous, but I never faltered, never stopped running for a second, never had any second thoughts. For that much, success became mine, and I brought that success upon my family. Sisters found husbands who'd have never looked twice at them for having bad blood, brothers found job opportunities. Mother and Father moved from the slums to a small house on the outskirts of Luca. Those legs pulled a lot of people from poverty. That defines strength I think.
Oh yes, my younger days were glorious. Not only materially, but physically, emotionally, and spiritually as well. I had a love, the most wonderful love you could imagine, a lady who could dance, who was, the most beautiful in this land, even if any other lovesick lad would claim the same about his lady. Loving her wasn't the amazing part, it was that she loved me too that shook my foundations. Needless to say, I married her, and eventually made a family with her. Somewhere in that time line, I made my fatal mistake, the one that sent me from a contented life to this restless need to die.
I stopped running.
Not in the literal sense. I still moved, still chased my children around the home I built, still wrangled the chocobos along side the laborers who worked with me, still danced with my wife, even when her outer beauty started to fade and her inner beauty started to shine through. But I no longer strived. Why should I? Everything I could possibly want was in my hands: love, success, freedom, power. When people in town talked of me, I was the inspiring success story. If the nagging feeling that I lacked a challenge bothered me, I could remind myself that I was doing what challenged me in the first place, building an empire. So I could stop, for a moment, two, three, and on and on for years, until my legs weakened.
Then the war started, that great one between Bevelle and Zanarkand that shook up our entire continent. No business of a man living in the wilds of Djose, I had thought. No more for me than someone in Besaid, or Kilika, or Luca, or the Moonflow. Oh, but I forgot my children, who had inherited from me that need for motion, those passions and convictions. And when they heard of the war, the great machina of Bevelle against the summoned monsters of Zanarkand, those passions were aroused in my two sons. Conflicting of course, so that one son soon stopped speaking to the other, and eventually both moved away to fight their respective enemies. And my legs were too weak to stop them no matter how loud my voice bellowed when I found out their plans.
If my sons live today, they have never visited their father. Letters used to pour in, reassurances that they were all right, and that no, the one had not yet killed the other. Throughout the war, I had contact as I watched my sons rise in rank. The war worsened steadily with reports of greater casualties and destruction from all sides. Everyday I feared, a new and unpleasant emotion, that my sons were among those sacrificed to this war, but as long as the letters flowed in, I could control the emotions.
The time the war ended, everyone knew. The moment of horrifying stillness descended over Spira, even thousands of miles from the battle sites. Something went wrong in one instant, and a whole city was wiped out, and in its place, the plague that took everything from me was born. The letters from the son who sided with Zanarkand stopped coming all together after that explosion, and I can only fear the worst possible scenario. A few months later and the son who believed in the future of machina wrote me one last letter. He was going into hiding now that Bevelle had forbidden these machina. If he's still alive, I wouldn't be surprised, but he too is as lost to me as death. No one won that war, and no one won the peace either, if I were to put it mildly. However, I prefer to be direct and say that this war and its aftermath is what is tearing this continent apart and disturbing this cycle of life and natural order that I never valued so much until Sin snatched it away from me. One by one, he stole everything that meant anything until all I have left is this house, which is being taken from me in its own way.
Months passed, and my hard work crumbled. My daughter, her husband, and my newborn grandson all moved to the large city on the Moonflow, the one built entirely on bridges. No one knows whether its destruction was the passive collapse of structures in unsecured footings or the active rampages of Sin, but that town fell in one afternoon and all the people with it. A few people on the outskirts made it to dry land in time, but my daughter was always the one to be in the center of things.
When a man starts losing things, precious things, he begins to cling harder to the things he has left: my lovely wife, my home, my business. And yet, he also looks for a way to replace what is lost. I told myself if I stood strong on my legs, I could overcome. And I did, for a while at least. I threw myself into my works with the same vigor of the younger me. More and more I traveled, leaving my wife at home to take care of things in Djose while I wandered for that next catch, the next find that could somehow restore things that were lost. Only to reassure myself that my wife, home, and business were safe did I return occasionally.
Fruitless venture after venture, and I still didn't find that which could fill my emptiness. Meanwhile, Sin worked. The people who have heard my stories as they migrate to the north or south try to comfort me when they hear this part. "At least you weren't there to watch it," they say. "At least you survived." Survival no longer matters, sad to say. Around the time I lost my daughter, I began to lost my will to live. And what happened on my last adventure killed it completely.
My house is the safest structure in the world. Embedded in rocks, it is part of the landscape itself. As near as it is to the coast, sheer cliffs separate it from the sea. Sin cannot reach it. It's isolated, as isolated as a place can be in a world with chocobos and ships that travel both the air and ocean. People do not come there, except as a place to rest before moving on to their destination. In no way is it a target. My house was never attacked, and that early morning when I returned, everything was intact, perfect, silent. Except that every living thing was gone.
I don't know what happened. The yard we keep the chocobos was empty, not so unusual, for the workers often take the chocobos grazing early in the morning. If it were a bit earlier than normal, it was odd perhaps, but not a sign that something was amiss. My house too was empty, a much more usual occurrence. If the relationship between my wife and I became strained in the past months, she still stayed in the house, still waited for me to come home, still slept in our bed. But my wife was gone, and any sign that she might have left me: missing belongings, a goodbye note, were never found. Even now, the room where I stand feeding this rock my life force smells like the flowers in her perfume.
A restless morning blurred into a nervous afternoon, and in an unbearable evening I walked to the sea, just on a horrible whim. When these old legs climbed that cliff overlooking the sea, and I saw the view beyond, that's when my will left me. Sin had proved his superiority, his absolute victory over life in the minutes it took me to realize what had happened. The wind blew a foul stench, enough that I pulled up my bandana over my nose to filter it somehow. A few scatters of yellow feathers, a charm necklace my wife wore. In the outermost fringes of the land below, carcasses were scattered about.
I realized then, what my mistake was. The legs that built my empire destroyed it. They used to know when to run and when to stand, but no more. Now emotions controlled everything, and following those longings cost me too much. So I no longer stood after my wife's death. I no longer ran. I just sat around in this safe house, waiting until just a couple of weeks ago for something to come to me while I wasted away.
Lady Yunalesca was that something. My house for a long time had been the resting point for migrants and travelers between Luca and the cities north of the Moonflow, and while visitors were reasonably common, Lady Yunalesca was the most prominent one to ever grace my doorstep. The evening I spent talking to her and her guardians, this idea formed in my head. The idea of how to start running again, and how to prove a victory over Sin.
My house would become a temple, and I would become its Aeon.
Yunalesca needed the Aeon. Before the city built on the Moonflow collapsed, she had designated a temple to be built there. The person chosen to become the Fayth had died in the disaster and the site had sank below the waters; therefore, Yunalesca was backtracking to Luca to adjust her plans and build a temple there. I begged her to consider making this place into that needed temple. What use was this grand house, if I had no heirs to pass it down to? I argued. What memory will others have of an old man if he does not have living family and cannot be immortalized through stories? Make this your temple, I begged. Make me the Fayth. And Yunalesca, out of necessity or out of pity, agreed.
Already the most basic adjustments to my house are done. Local rock from that dreaded cliff graces the center of what used to be the bedroom I shared with my wife. Even now I'm fusing with it, carving into the shape that I'm about to become. Workers still pound away downstairs, turning this from a residence to a holy place. Some holy place that has witnessed to many deaths and so much chaos. Their noises and the outside world fade away as I escape into this form and think of what my legacy shall be.
Oh yes, I long to run again. Long, long ago, there used to be animals on this planet faster than any chocobo with hooves that pounded over the land Legends said that the hoof beats pounding over the plains created the thunder in the skies. I long to be that animal, to run and make thunder. To protect those who summon me the way that I was unable to protect those I cared for in life. My legacy will carry on, as I become the bearer of storms, the keeper of motion, and the one who will judge Sin.
In my human form, I used to be called Ramuh, but I will forever be known as Ixion.
Author's Notes: I couldn't resist that last bit. :) Really.