Song of Fins
So this is how it ends. Everything I have ever tried to build or protect ends in this one moment, back where everything started. Only instead of watching my Yuna pray to the Fayth, I am the one becoming the Fayth. So this is how it goes. I will die and be reborn in the same city I spent my life in. Only this time, that city will be decayed stone and its only inhabitants the pyreflies of the unsent souls of our dead comrades. As I sing my song to this hollow statue, I search my life for every little bit of me I can, so that I can finish and start my role in this tragedy.
The Final Aeon is different from any of the others. Across the world, the Aeons will dream forever and become part of the consciousness of every follower of Yevon. Every summoner to make this pilgrimage shall know them. The Final Aeon though, is the most personal, the one in which the shape of the individual summoner's sacrifice is told. Other Aeons will differ by the summoner's strength and the abilities they learn, but all will be built from the same template. Valefor will always be the girl from Besaid, Ixion the old man in Djose. The Final Aeon is the bonds the summoner makes while journeying, and the key source of his or her strength. No two will ever be the same.
So what inside me will be the shape of my Yuna's sacrifice?
There are many shapes to describe, first of business, then friendship, then eventually love. All those bonds mean so much more than their words imply, and not one of them means more than another. For even as her husband, I have guarded her zealously, and even as her guardian, she is still my best friend, and even as my friend, I still love her more than I can imagine loving any woman. On this empty statue I draw these shapes now.
Every summoner and every guardian starts their journey with vows taken in front of the high summoner himself, and I repeat now them in this isolated chamber, only one room away from where I took those vows twelve years before. I see myself dressed in the finest armor my merchant family could afford, kneeling before a younger Yuna, dressed in her formal robes, and her father, the high summoner Yu Yevon. The memory becomes so vivid that I can smell the clouds of heavy incense from the temple, and I'm back in the body of my younger self, hearing my voice saying the vows again:
My strength is your courage
My life is your shield
Through the darkest times, I will light your way
I shall support you as you support the world.
I shall protect you and you protect others.
I, Tan Zaon, vow to guard the Lady Summoner Yu Yunalesca with all I have until the end.
Within me, Yunalesca echoes the ritual response:
My courage is your loyalty.
My life is the thread held in your hands.
Through the darkest times, I will lead the way.
If I support the world, it shall be because you support me.
If I protect others, it shall be because I am protected.
I, Yu Yunalesca, summoner of Zanarkand, entrust Tan Zaon with the duty of guardian.
I stood up, offering her my arm, as I escorted her out of the temple and through the Zanarkand Dome. As the last people in our class to take the vows, she and I joined the other newly pronounced summoners and guardians to greet the citizens. Peace would still live in our cities for another three years before our clash with Bevelle changed the world, and summoners and their guardians were regarded as little more than pretty ornaments from the past. The vows themselves, as nice as they were to say, meant very little, as the average guardian was little more than a servant or social escort to their summoner.
She and I weren't the most ambitious pair. The guardian is the laziest job any Zanarkand can have for decent pay, which was why I chose to go for guardian training rather than work at my father's store or join the real army in charge of keeping peace around the borders. Yuna herself became a summoner because of the expectations from her father and the community. Many times, Yunalesca has told me that I became her guardian because she liked how I looked, not because of any sort of competence I might have had. To be honest, I had liked the way she looked too, so I really can't judge her too harshly.
So we had the relationship of a summoner and guardian, friendly how protocol expected us to be friendly but never closer, and together we formed a laughingstock of a partnership. Neither of us cared, nor had we been tested. We passed most of our time figuring out ways to shirk our duties and exploring the back alleys of Zanarkand or watching the Blitzball games at the Dome. Responsibility had about as much priority in our lives as our dining hall had flavor in their meals.
That was soon to change.
Nothing good has ever happened when my Yuna wakes me up. Over the years, every time she has woken me in the middle of the night, it has been only because something bad has happened, and so the pattern started when the war broke out with Bevelle. She rushed to my chamber the night of the first airship raid, still in her sleeping gown and her hair still hanging down below her waist. Before she explained anything, she and I were out on the streets confronting the first waves of Machina to invade our city. I don't remember much of the first battle except for the lights, sounds, and the incredible heat of the airships unloading a payload too close to us for my comfort. I do remember the aftermath, when my tense muscles relaxed into something resembling overcooked noodles and my Yuna began crying, not only for our close calls but for the death of her Aeon and the death of those he had attacked. My guardian training left me there, as I wondered how to go about comforting a distressed summoner. I still don't think I know how for sure, only that I had tried anything more than standing around helplessly, and have still done so.
Somehow we endured, while so many others perished. Not because of our skill, as the best of our class fell at the front lines after their first, second, third battle. All of them knew the theory and application better than either Yuna or I, and yet they were first to fall. Those watching us called our survival luck. Yu Yevon preferred to call it something more.
The man who became Sin always had a knowing quality to him. The most uncomfortable moments during my training happened when the high-summoner strolled by to watch us recruits. Whenever I looked up during those times, Yu Yevon's eyes would be there to greet mine and just for a few seconds he would stare before smiling faintly at me and turning away. Sometimes, I don't believe it was Yuna's decision alone for me to become her guardian. The night of the choosing between summoner and guardian, he had walked up to me and murmured, "Something more, my boy. Something more. Don't forget that." It sounded like advice, but I never comprehended, and when I turned to ask him what he meant, he was already talking to the next initiate.
During those first few months of the war, I began to remember those words and dwell on them. Summoners are our most powerful warriors, but they do not fight with weapons. The Aeons have always been the memories of our people, willingly given to fuel the next generation of summoners, and the bond between summoners and guardians are often much closer than what even our vows predict. A summoner must be emotionally strong; they must understand what it means to be connected to people, and to express the memories of those who cannot talk. They must have convictions. To keep their body alive is vital, but to keep them useful, a guardian must also preserve the summoner's soul.
During peacetime, the relationship between summoner and guardian can be shallow, and skill or political savvy alone can suffice for one's advancement in the ranks. Some of the most prestigious summoners died within the few days of the war's beginning because their superior skills covered a lack of real bond between summoner and guardian. All those times we skipped training to explore, Yuna and I had actually been forming that vital bond between summoner and guardian. When I placed my body in front of the Bevelle gunfire, I did so for my friend, not for my summoner. When I held a Yuna traumatized from watching her Aeon die for the fourth time in a week, I did so to stop the tears of someone I grew progressively closer to, not to keep her mind healthy for the next fight.
To tell the truth, we hated the war, hated the fighting with all that we were, even as we became skillful soldiers together. Many times we had to barricade ourselves from the Bevelle soldiers and their machina creations, and I remember how much we talked at first, how we would say the most trivial things we could only to break the silence, and then how gradually just being with her and holding her became enough for me, so that the silence became as much of a relief as I could have when the smell of my city burning lingered in the air.
I recall our first kiss, stolen in a rare quiet moment between sieges and the first time either of us admitted that our bond perhaps went deeper than the typical summoner-guardian relationship, as we narrowly escaped death yet again. After a couple of years fighting, the moments when death seemed close blurred together, but I know that each one was freshly horrible at the time as I thought that surely this one would end our good luck. That sense of urgency, that knowledge that our next battle could be our last made it so that as soon as we admitted to each other our love, we approached Yu Yevon asking for marriage.
The sly man must have planned this, how willingly he accepted the news of his daughter and her guardian binding together, and the quickness with which he produced the necessary trappings of a wedding: rings, flowers, fancy robes only seemed to confirm this. The vows we spoke as bride and groom echoed those we spoke five years earlier at our initiation, the only difference was that in this relationship we were equals instead of master and servant. And oh, I remember the feeling of being equal with my Yuna for the first time, how good it felt to have all the barriers of rank removed between us.
I wish I could say that our marriage was happy, and I suppose that the marriage itself was. End the war suddenly, or place Yuna and I as simple farmers down in Kilika, and our life together was as perfect as could be expected from any couple. But the moments of joy always preceded some sorrow as the war slowly and surely turned in Bevelle's favor. Machina are disposable in ways that even Aeons are not. Every time an Aeon dies, a little part of the Fayth leaves for the Farplane, and so our Aeons slowly faded away. Bevellians rebuild destroyed machines from scraps of metal and lightning magic, destroyed Fayth are not so simple to rebuild. People sacrificed to become Fayth. They sacrifice life, and they sacrifice a peaceful death to become the weapons of their summoners. Few people do that for a lost cause, and Yu Yevon was not the type of person to persist in lost causes unless he can find a way to victory, any sort of victory. So the amount of availiable Aeons slowly dwindled.
Eight years after the start of the war and a year ago, just as the final Fayth were dissolving, Yu Yevon showed to the Zanarkands and the Bevellians his belief in victory. For the second time, Yuna woke me in the middle of the night, this time to deliver the news that her father had gone mad finally and that we needed to leave Zanarkand with any survivors we could. The Bevellians had invaded our city and according to official reports captured the High-Summoner, but Yuna's fervent tugging on my armor while the messenger girl delivered that news told me that was a lie, but any questions about Yu Yevon's whereabouts brought only the insistent order that we get the survivors out of Zanarkand. All together, we gathered maybe ten-thousand people, some rich, some humble, the youngest a newborn girl and the oldest, a woman of nearly sixty, and we made the journey up Mt. Gagazet.
I think it was during that journey, the one Yuna would later call Pilgrimage of the Fayth where I took my first steps back from myself and realized how much Yuna and I had changed. Not only the obvious changes in skill and dedication, but also in our relationship. Yuna still led, giving the direction to our destination, a cliff just over the peak of the mountain, at a place where one could supposedly see the whole world. Yuna still led, but I walked in front of her now, refusing to expose her to any danger that lay ahead. My life was protecting her, keeping her in my arms at any cost. As Yuna grew more skilled, she grew more dependent on her guardian, even shedding most of her clothing and entrusting me with the duty of keeping her warm. She grew to be less of a person and more of a summoner, and showing her human spirit only to me, a gift I was supposed to protect while she executed Yu Yevon's plan.
We traveled, all ten-thousand of us, maybe twenty miles from the limits of Zanarkand to the peak of Gagazet, and not once did the Bevellians stop us. The rest of our summoners kept them busy on the ground, so that a summoner, her guardian, and the civilians they led seemed more like hopeless refugees than a threat. I wonder what would have happened if some insightful Bevellian had understood our leader's plan.
We made it to the overlook just as the first winter snows would have fallen on Zanarkand, although to look at the mountain, I would have sworn that we were already in the middle of the season. "We rest here, against that wall." Yuna told the refugees, "and dream of home." When I came to join them, Yunalesca yanked me away from that wall quickly, almost angry that I had joined them. "Watch and wait," was her only explanation.
The sun set, night fell, and every one of the pilgrims fell asleep on that wall, presumably dreaming of Zanarkand. The process that followed was gradual from moment to moment I could never see the changes, but as one hour passed and then two and on until dawn, I could not mistake what was happening. People slowly melted into stone as the rock began to take on a carved form. Right before my eyes, they became Fayth, although my imagination failed to find a reason why even the most exalted of summoners would need an Aeon consisting of the memories of so many people.
Sin, or the entity that would later be called Sin, rose opposite the sun on the western horizon, slowing lumbering towards the city of Zanarkand. Neither Yuna nor I were present for Sin's original rampage, but Yuna told me later that she had known all along what was happening. I don't believe I sensed anything as much as I just knew inside me that Sin would destroy our empty city, and then turn himself on the Bevellians.
At the destruction of Zanarkand, my Yuna told me what her father had sworn her to keep silent about. Her father, having seen no real victory for the Zanarkands and refusing to surrender, chose to find another way to live on. He would create a summoned city of Zanarkand, one that he himself would summon eternally, and those pilgrims we led to the wall on Mt. Gagazet would be his Fayth. Around that great city, he would build an armor, the monster later known as Sin, who would serve another purpose by punishing those responsible for Zanarkand's destruction. Zanarkand would live on in an eternally peaceful dream, while the victors had the uncertain reality. Furthermore, he entrusted my Yuna with the secret of defeating him temporarily.
"The Summoners of Zanarkand will be reborn," he had said. "Fayth shall arise over the continent to support their summoners, and all of them will travel to the future ruins of this city, so that any who wish to defeat me must know and understand my story and the crimes of Bevelle. Every summoner wishing to defeat me will sacrifice themselves and one they love, as we have sacrificed for our cities in order to get an Aeon powerful enough to crack this armor, but who shall also become the seed for its rebirth. And you, my beloved daughter Yunalesca shall show them the way. You and your husband shall talk with the Bevellians and make arrangements for the first pilgrimage. You will be the first High-Summoner of the new age."
The first part of his promise fulfilled, Yuna slowly grew more human as we journeyed to Bevelle, growing less dependent on me to keep her connected to this world. By the time we actually talked to the high-councilor, my Yuna was mostly her own self again, although much more solemn and determined than she had been in Zanarkand. During those negotiations, I stood to the side, watching her talk with this diplomat, the only one who seemed to understand the need for a lasting peace. I heard her plan for ending the suffering of this continent. I heard the words 'Final Aeon' mentioned and I knew then that the bond that let us endure for so many years would now be our ending.
The Final Aeon is a special tradition of Zanarkand, one that has only been used in times of dire peril, and one that only the high-summoner has access to. The summoner sacrifices the one thing or person they care about most in the world, turning it into an Aeon powerful enough to destroy anything at the cost of both the summoner and the sacrifice. Yu Yevon sacrificed the real city of Zanarkand and its people to create Sin and the dream of an eternally peaceful Zanarkand. Yuna would do the same. For the price of her husband and her life, she would give these people the secret of Sin's life.
Even with the end of our journey hanging like the sword from the ceiling, those months on the road from Bevelle to Besaid and slowly back again were the best of my life. Yuna and I were together, during peacetime, where the only dangers we had to confront were wild fiends tamer than any machina. Slowly we regained our old vigor, and we enjoyed our travels. Neither of us had left Zanarkand before its destruction, and had we no war, we might have made a trip only as far as Bevelle. The world is so much bigger that the path between Zanarkand and Bevelle, and together my Yuna and I traversed it.
Often we paused in our journey where Sin had rampaged to help the citizens rebuild their villages. Both of us remained calm while talking to those caught in Sin's wrath, but when we left, often the first day or so of our journey would be spent grieving. Together we mourned the collapse of the old world and together we celebrated as we built the foundations of the next one. We listened to the stories in the villages and watched new Aeons being born. With each one that Yuna collected, I could see her smile more and that in turn made me smile.
That happiness lasted until we faced the Ronso encampment at the base of Mt. Gagazet. They were generous hosts, always kind to their guests, but the drastic change to their mountain disturbed them, enough that they urged us to move on quickly. To hear their concerns was to have to acknowledge the Fayth Scar that created our dream city and Sin. Yunalesca purposefully created the Fayth Scar where every subsequent pilgrim would have to pass to get to Zanarkand, but neither of us thought about having to pass that wall ourselves, or having to visit the ruins of our hometown. Each step up the mountain trail grew more somber than the last, and each morning, breaking camp grew more difficult, until finally we reached that wall of Fayth.
All of it was stone, no flesh to be found, but we still recognized the features. I knew none of them personally, but I recognized someone I knew in all of them. That old man was grandfather, that young girl my cousin's daughter. A youth reminded me of myself during guardian training. Yuna too, recognized those faces and held on to me, weeping underneath her mask of serenity. We cried all the way to Zanarkand, our hands involuntarily picking up the rubble as our minds tried to figure where it would have fit when our city was whole.
Never knowing whether we should hurry through the city trying to ignore the memories left behind, or whether we should pause to reflect on those same memories, our trip through Zanarkand was a series of jerks and stops. We'd quickly move through the outer streets only to stop at the place where we first kissed, the ruins of an abandoned shop. Inside the dome, everything changed. We had to hurry through here, because even the dead Bevelle soldiers who had somehow risen as zombies seemed driven to keep us from our city, but every so often, the swarms of pyreflies would grow so thick that we could see nothing beyond the memories of our dead. Even hurrying to the temple, confrontation with the Bevelle zombies and berserk machina or transfixion by the pyrefly swarms would slow us down. Despite these things, Yuna and I are here now, where everything began.
That is the shape of my sacrifice. I can call it a circle because it ends exactly where it began, with vows taken for my summoner. I can call it a pillar because that is what I have been for my Yuna, the physical and emotional support that she leans on, In the end, though it is really so much more, the shape of my sacrifice is the bond between husband and wife as well as the one between summoner and guardian. More than that, the shape is the way those relationships support each other, for I would not love my Yuna so deeply if I never guarded her, nor would I be so strong a guardian if I did not love my Yuna so. Those bonds feed on each other, growing stronger because the other exists.
It is what has let us endured, and finally it is what will break us.
There is no "I." There is only we, and we are the Final Aeon.
Author's Notes: Ay yi yi, I feel like I've tried to cram a novel into this chapter, as properly expanded, this could probably take up it's own chaptered story and maybe will when this one has reached it's final conclusion because there are lots of moments that I want to elaborate on, and wish that I could have for this part. For anyone who might be wondering about the Yuna/Yunalesca thing, I called her Yuna in this story thinking of that as a popular diminutive of Yunalesca, which I think suits the thought process of her beloved husband.
I believe I will continue into the Aeons which Yunalesca did not see the creation of (the optional Aeons) who will talk about the Spira after the first pilgrimage, with the grand finale being Yunalesca's POV, which will fill in any gaps left over from the rest of the chapters. Fun!
Also, thank you everyone for your feedback