Song of Chains
Sin broke Spira, and now it lurks in the water to prevent the world's repair. For one thousand years, it remains ultimately unvanquished. The wills of summoners can subdue it for a few months, or a couple of years at the most. Any person or place falls when Sin approaches, and he approaches everywhere. The sea harbors him, but the air also holds him when he rampages. Not even inland towns can claim to defend against him all of the time. So when the tangible crumbles effortlessly, ideals become our salvation.
Atonement walks alongside hope. If the entire world atones for that long ago war, we hope that something inside Sin will recognize our effort and forgive us. The teachings of Yevon offer methods for atonement. Most continue the destructive use of machina, humans care for the Aeons and the tradition of the summoner, Ronso protect the mountain that seals Zanarkand from the reaches of living people, and Guado maintain the horizon where living hearts reunite with dead souls. When all respect the teachings of Yevon, and live life according to his plan, Sin will recognize. Sin will understand our sorrow. Sin will forgive.
Yunalesca told us otherwise, before she bound my son and me together as summoner and Aeon. Of everything on Spira, only Sin receives the privilege of rebirth through the body of the very Aeon who slays it. So the cycle continues. For years, my faith slipped and listening to the calm words of the world's most revered summoner pried the last shred of it from my hands.
I still accept atonement; I still accept hope. Spira will always die, but if I let her tie me to my son as his Aeon, I can find those principles on an elusive level. I excelled as a disciple of Yevon, but my ideals hampered me as a wife and most especially a mother. My regrets regarding my husband and son are tied so closely to the parts of my life I could never rescind.
So many strange events twisted my life, so much that the young acolyte who started my journey would never recognize me. Ideals used to control me, as I perched by the Macalania temple doors, waiting, waiting for something or someone to come along and give me a purpose. I believed deeply in Yevon's scriptures, that his words must echo throughout Spira. I longed to open the ears of those still waiting to understand the message. So when the injured Jyscal Guado made his unceremonious entrance through the very doors where I stood vigil.
No one ever learned the full story of his injury; Guado have a tendency to never tell a full story, I later learned. His wounds still needed care, and as an important man, it fell to the daughter of the temple summoner to tend to him. Newly made lord of Guadosalam, Jyscal Guado owned the titles of lord and visionary. As I wrapped his limbs in bandages and spoke the incantations to heal wounds, I also listened to his stories.
For the almost one-thousand years that Sin rampaged the world, and before then even, the Guado guarded the Farplane. Jyscal's ancestors taught him that Guadosalam lay at the center of the world, safe from the outside because they bridge the living world with the source of all everything. Stories of Sin kept his race in their hometown, protecting tradition through isolation. Humans radiate from the world's center, and therefore Sin plucks their lives in batches and takes them back to the world's core, where all ultimately belong.
Human missionaries always visited Guadosalam throughout Jyscal's childhood to be run out of town after a few days by his father, but the snippets the young Guado heard fascinated him. Like any good heir, Jyscal had pride in his race and its mission, but still he longed to know the world beyond and the teachings his family denied him in youth. Before he was sworn in, he had declared to his people, he would indulge this desire to travel across Spira and come back all the wiser, so that he may lead his race to a new era.
As a human, I found him odd but attractive. Strangely-proportioned limbs still betrayed a noble grace. On a human, his thirty or more years would have killed any attraction, but on that Guado, the age lent him a dignity that resonated in me. Beyond any physical aesthetics, the kindred spirit I finally found in Jyscal sealed my feelings for him. I heard his ideals in his words; his desire to take risks for something bigger resonated in me. When he chose at the end of his treatment to study theology at Macalania in addition to ruling Guadosalam, I realized that if I were to marry anyone, I would marry this Guado.
Weeks later, Jyscal Guado finally set out for Guadosalam on Chocobo with me watching his retreating back. Those following weeks and months blurred into a routine following that farewell. Every other week, Jyscal came for a couple of days and studied theology under the eye of my father, gradually learning enough about Yevon's scripture and practices to impress any temple summoner. His moments outside the classroom, he spent with me, discussing his plans for the future. The unification of Guado and human ideals, he called it.
I believed. My interaction with him proved that human and Guado knowledge complimented each other. Keeping them separate when they could accomplish so much more together seemed shameful. Also, the Guado gradually understood the teachings of Yevon, while Jyscal came to understand something more. The Ronso guarded Mount Gagazet as a sacred duty to Yevon, so perhaps the Guado held the same duty regarding the Farplane. If that was true, he mused, the atonement Yevon talks about must also apply to Guado. I did not know what power the Guado lord invoked, but one unusually snowy day in Macalania, he brought the entire Guado tribe to worship.
They looked in awe at the temple buildings, listened in rapture as I explained how the fayth for the Aeon Shiva lay just beyond the doors to the trial. I expected this reaction from the Guado, but imagine my surprise when they all bowed before me and Jyscal explained the other reason he came. His ideal for human and Guado unity required that he take a human wife, and who better, he told me than the woman who conspired with him to bring everyone together under Yevon's teachings. Even though that was ten years ago, I can still taste the cloying sweetness of that moment's joy. As I planned for this since we first talked, I immediately accepted. Surely, we could realize our lovely wish for Spira.
A lavish wedding filled our icy temple with guests from everywhere. Even the Grand Maester Mika attended to watch as the Guado responsible for preaching Yevon's truth to his own kind united with the daughter of a faithful temple summoner. Following the celebration, we journeyed to our new home to start living our dream.
My first childless year in Guadosalam foreshadowed the difficulties I would later face with Seymour, but always I remained hopeful. Jyscal had stretched so much to learn of human ways, that I felt obligated to do the same for the Guado, even studying the old Guado speak. Everywhere I turned though, everyone reminded me that I belonged on the periphery, accepted only because Lord Jyscal wed me. If I understood them and they understood me, I could make peace with them. This constant optimism and denial carried me until the day I discovered that I carried Jyscal's child.
Since the day he was born, Seymour embodied the ideal of Human-Guado unity. The features of both races had somehow combined to make a handsome child, the human side giving proportion and the Guado side panache that humans lacked. The favorable blending extended to internal features as well. The human ingenuity and drive combined with Guado wisdom and pride made him a student even brighter than his father. Always, I felt for Seymour a love that managed to be both maternal and intellectual. My hopes renewed, and Jyscal's as well, as I have never seen him as happy has he was when he saw his son for the first time.
Our ideals culminated in the creation of our lovely son, as perfect as his mother's sight could make him, but I gradually became aware of abstract principle's greatest enemy: reality. I understood the Guado's hostility towards me; I threatened their traditional way of life, and I robbed from one of their daughter's a chance at marrying into a prestigious family, but their rejection of Seymour became unbearable. Human and Guado alike united under derision of my son. Children teased him; adult shunned him. Jyscal and I understood the urgency for our races to unite, but apparently no one else did.
As for Jyscal, his gift for theology and his accomplishment for bringing the worship of Yevon to the Guado drew the attention of Guado Maesters to him. The year Seymour celebrated his fifth birthday, Bevelle swore Jyscal in as a Maester of Yevon. He presented a pleasant face to the world as he realized his great accomplishments, but inside our manor in Guadosalam, his facade crumbled. Church politics sapped his faith, and although his love for Seymour and I endured, the pressures of disapproval weighed heavily on him.
So when he offered to sequester Seymour and I away at Baaj temple, far, far to the southeast. I accepted, for the sake of our family. Seymour needed escape from the constant ridicule, Jyscal needed serenity, and I needed time to think. In hindsight, I realize that reality made our happy ending impossible. I realize that Jyscal shared the blame for the misery our union seemed to cause, but then I just wanted the suffering to end. I wanted to think of something. So Seymour, Jyscal, and I boarded that boat and embarked on a journey to what seemed like another world.
A permanent fog blanketed Baaj Temple, a place so far isolated from the rest of Spira that in a previous incarnation the Al Bhed had used it as shelter. By the time they fled, most of the temple had sunk beneath the water's surface, but Jyscal said he knew of an above ground entrance.
Our farewell, free of the guards that usually trailed him, brought back a few of the happier times, as Jyscal gave us the blueprints he found in the Bevelle Temple libraries. We walked into those ruins together, and I almost opened my mouth to ask that he stay. He would have, I know, because he loved his family, but responsibility chained him to the cruel outside.
Two years we spent in that damp temple. Water constantly dripped while I taught Seymour, while we ate, while we slept, but even through all that, Seymour was always a good child and an excellent scholar. I particularly remember one night, as I stared into the little fire that kept us alive, how Seymour managed find enough flowers among the temple offerings to make a bouquet. Scraggly it might have been, but I kept that bundle of dried flowers close to my chest for as long as we lived in Baaj temple.
We couldn't stay though. Away from the world, the trauma of his childhood seemed to melt away from my son, but like butterflies, we had to eventually emerge from our chrysalis. I intended to defend my son from the world and give him the approval that I had thoughtlessly robbed him of even before his birth. I would make him a summoner and guide him to Zanarkand.
Though Baaj was a temple, Sin had destroyed the temple and the town before anyone could ever officially become a Fayth there. So while I taught him theory in those cool halls, eventually we had to return to Macalania to start formal training and get him officially recognized as a summoner. So just last year, I put a necklace, a trinket I brought from home around the neck of the empty fayth stone, and said a farewell to the temple which guarded our family so well. Perhaps someday, I will return again.
Seymour returned to Macalania with renewed confidence. He and I shared our outcast strength, and together we started a pilgrimage towards Zanarkand. Every disparaging remark everyone made about Seymour stopped. All the insults I had ever heard about being a human living in a Guado world ceased. No one touches a summoner or his guardian because ultimately their salvation lies in whether the summoner chooses to end his journey with the defeat of Sin. As long as summoner journeys no crime short of murder will cause an interruption of their journey, so all forgave the taboo as we visited each temple.
Some asked whether a mother should push a young boy into collecting the Aeons, but none of the doubters understood. I accepted that I had violated a taboo nearly a decade earlier. All I could hope for now was that everyone would forget my sin when I died. My son remained innocent, though. Even if I passed on, I wanted him to accomplish something, so that people would understand that Jyscal and I made our mistake for good reasons. I questioned my actions only once, as we made our way to the final temple.
Yunalesca explained the truth of the Final Aeon; sapped from me my last hope, that I could accomplish something larger in my death and the death of my child. In return though, I realized I could give Seymour my life as his Aeon, and give him myself. We took a walk on the dome's dark path to think it over, and then I had my moment of doubt and my moment of clarity. Seymour relied on me, as I relied on him, and his desire to remain with me outweighed his desire to defeat Sin. I understood the conflict, and why he wanted to have me than the world's reverence. If I became the Aeon, he would lose that precious support in return for power. Ever since we went to Baaj, times came when I forgot that Seymour had not even lived a decade; he had lived through so much. Still, he was a beautiful, mature boy, and I walked into the chamber with him for the last time confident that he would do what was needed.
I don't deny that I have regrets, but their complexity extends beyond the words 'who' and 'when'. Even as my passion for the world and it's ideals crumbled under despair, I still love Jyscal. I'm glad to have known him, to have listened to his ideas, and to have married him. I'm glad we share a son Seymour, even as I sit next to him and sense that his soul is changing from the gentle boy I will always love. I regret that I couldn't protect us, that the world was somehow not ready for this togetherness. Especially I regret the hurt I caused: The hurt of my husband, of my son, and if I look deep inside, myself.
The ancient lady binds and draws from me the newly-realized pain Seymour and I share. Pain of rejection defined our relationship. Together we mourned our outcast status, the inner turmoil from seeing things not work out nearly as they should. Dead faith, broken dreams, cliched fragments of a brighter life pile up to create my new form. If I could be physically ill from the creature that emerges from inside me, I would retch right now. My wrists feel weighted as if chains connect them to the ground. This anguish that emerges surprises me, as I watch from a distance what happens to my body. This monstrous Aeon expresses everything inside me I had kept hidden since Guadosalam.
Seymour's panicked gray eyes as he watches this transformation are the last thing I see before I float away. And also something darker...
Take me to Baaj. To the time when my son and I were happy.
I am my opposite, the shameful truth of myself. I am Anima.
Author's Notes: I'm never sure if I enjoy writing the characters with little in game basis, or the ones with real background more. I expect this may contradict some of what Anima says down in Baaj temple, but that Aeon has watched what Seymour has done over twenty years, while this one only knows the eight-year-old child Seymour was when she became the Aeon. I chose to make her only realize how much she herself hurt just as she becomes the Aeon, as I think only pain undealt with could make one as hideous as she did.
Thank you all for your responses. Magus Sisters are next.