The Lifestream eats at Aerith's corpse, discarding fabric and hair while melting organic tissue into the blood of the Planet. The particles are dutiful, engaging in this ancient ritual of ingestion and recomposition. The Planet recognizes her Cetra cells and welcomes its sister into its Promised Land. Mako swells around her, seeps into her body through the chest wound. Crimson streamlets trail like ribbons in the murky green. The Lifestream encounters another entity, too, nestled and attached to Aerith's cells. Ah, the Planet knows this one. Alien matter from the stars, smashed to earth countless times over the eons. Buried, banished. The Lifestream knows not what to do with this material, and so it disregards.
But Jenova does not require blood or flesh in the same way Aerith does. Mother remains awake through this ordeal as the Planet attempts to ravage her symbiote's body. Jenova is a sentient creature though its logic dwells outside of human understanding, and the Planet is a collective of countless souls and spirits, energies magnanimous and divine. Neither can communicate directly, though each is aware of the other.
The Planet is in crisis. The Lifestream no longer flourishes, and a malady manipulates remnants of Jenova's whole. Sephiroth, the son that Shinra cut out of her, injects his will into the Lifestream, and his command distorts Mother's intentions.
If Aerith were any other scrap—a dead SOLDIER, dripping with Hojo's failures—the Lifestream would encapsulate the Jenova cells into a sort of stasis while it otherwise recycles growth from decay. But Aerith's Cetra lineage combines with Mother at the cellular level, and a powerful symbiosis manifests. Her body bridges the gap between the celestial and earthly, and Mother will not release her. Instead, the Jenova cells lingering from dead SOLDIERs in the Lifestream attract onto Aerith. A puddle of sludge wraps to her dwindling flesh. The Lifestream attempts to devour the rest of its Cetra target, but the Jenova cells are too plentiful, and eventually the Planet rejects the entire form, writing it off as incorrigible.
Aerith is not alive, but Jenova connects to the Planet's pain. Those Cetra fragments allow this rarity, this echo of past arrangements. For an instant, Jenova and the Planet are one, and a terrible future opens up. Sephiroth brings annihilation. And the desire to survive, a reflection of Aerith's final thoughts, branches through the Lifestream.
The Planet expels the collection of Jenova cells, like an animal spewing poison, and a spurt of Mako carries the dark mass upwards, outwards into an underground tunnel near the core.
A flutter of energy crisps at Jenova's beck before the Planet severs their connection. Mother is alone, yet the stretching agony of her other body, twisted beyond recognition, drives fresh resilience. She does not require a host, but moving without one is difficult on this planet. Her bond with the Cetra imparted many gifts. As Aerith learned from Jenova, so, too, did Jenova learn through the wisdom of Aerith's bloodlines.
A train's whistle blows. The station platform of the Sector Seven slums is desolate this rainy night. Grime drips off the massive plate above, and Mako-powered street lamps swing intermittent cones of yellow in the wind. Black umbrellas, sleek and shiny, pop open as passengers disembark the train.
Aerith kneels in the gutter beside her mother, a child barely seven. Ifalna hasn't moved since they stumbled together off the last train and collapsed beneath these platform steps. Garbage accumulates around them, whipped up by the storm, wet and sticking to Aerith's shins. She squeezes her mother's hand, sobbing. Hair clings to her forehead and cheeks. Ifalna is cold. Shinra did something to her which left no mark, so she could very well be sleeping. A drunk. Nobody stops and looks because this is a night when everyone hurries home. The weather obscures all awareness.
The whistle blows again, this time as the train leaves the station. It fades, pitch resonating. This is the sound Aerith never forgets. The fading of everything as the world walks away. Tomorrow Elymra will find her, tucked against her mother's bony clavicle, wrapped beneath a limp arm, but tonight is eternal. Tonight is where Aerith first dies.
White, piercing blindness. A confounding clarity destroys the smoggy Midgar scene, and little Aerith disappears.
As if waking from a dream, Aerith rustles. Her body is fire. She cannot feel her limbs, only a liquid heat pouring from her chest. She smells blood and tastes char. Senses jolt inconsistent. There's ice at her cheek yet smoke in her eyes. Nothing is right. Everything feels long and distant, pulled and disconnected, or constricting. A billion pieces of her cycle through a billion emotions, overlapping. Suffocating.
She lifts a trembling arm, but her flesh is gone. Her bones are whittled stems, supported by a lush landscape of iridescent ooze. It glimmers in the faint glow of the cavern materia. She touches her face, her body. All of it is gone, inhuman. She is a coalescence of Jenova cells, sticky and dripping. Her mind breaks. Death incarnate becomes her. The voices in her head are chattering, rising from the pockets of Mako simmering beneath these hallowed walls. She is nothing except those memories Jenova chose to preserve. Aerith remembers Cloud and Zack, Tifa, Barret, Cid. She remembers starlit nights beneath campfires in majestic golden canyons and booming fireworks of red and silver, sparkling in desert heat. Yuffie, with her clever smirk, and Nanaki with the deep timbre of his voice. There was Vincent, the lone gunman, cursed by Hojo's hand. And Shinra, the destroyers of her universe, the reason that train whistle locks her in nightmares in the soft, quiet secrecy of sleep. But mostly she remembers the pale, petrified forest and the sleek lake within the forgotten city. Cloud stands at the center, beckoning to her.
The memories accelerate and scatter. The sludge that is now her body contorts as she attempts to stand. She would cry if tears were possible. She would scream if her vocal cords existed.
A disquiet invades her chaos. An external force injects ruin into the Planet. Into Mother. This is Aerith's purpose. She is the response to this threat, a death throe born of the abrupt and unlikely synergy between Jenova and Cetra. A miracle, perhaps, though even now, her strength fades. The Jenova cells restructured, but the Lifestream devoured her corporeal form. Leaving this… Aerith regards her body. This ephemeral state.
Her fingers ooze with wriggling molecules, blood-like in the milky wash of luminance from this materia cavern. The budding crystals are pale white, beautiful. They remind Aerith of something she lost long ago. An heirloom of her mother's. But it scarcely seems important. The brightness hurts her eye sockets. Ahead, there are real screams. Echoes of a battle channel through the tunnels.
Aerith pulls herself, trailing sludge, ignoring the deafening chorus of the Lifestream and focusing, instead, on the spiraling violet haze ahead. It reeks of Mako, vaporized and tarnished somehow. Nausea throttles her insides. She pushes forward. Mother needs her.
Every step is pain. Every effort, momentous. Sinews drip in a wild mockery of hair. She does not look again at her corpse.
The tunnels open into a vast cavern filled with mist, and at its center is a winged creature. Aerith presses to the glittering wall, dizzy from the exertion.
Sephiroth spellbinds a group of six, though she senses a seventh somewhere. Huge wings sprout from a broad torso. One shoulder boasts a massive bladed wing of rigid black bone. Long, silver hair floats in breezeless defiance, and emerald eyes narrow to a sliver. Behind him, a portal rips open. The heavens are on display. This can't be possible, yet Sephiroth tears the fabric of space apart at a whim.
The Planet teeters, and Mother sickens. Abnormal radiance approaches through the portal. Sephiroth smiles, a cruelty cut in his stoic face.
No, this cannot be. Aerith staggers into the cavern. Her friends are at the mercy of this phenomenal cosmic force. The dying star enters their atmosphere, irradiating at thousands of degrees hotter than any human could withstand.
Aerith screams out, mouthless and lost in the tide of the Planet's agony. She reaches for Mother through that ethereal bond, but instead, she finds Sephiroth. His body. His form. Silhouetted by this violation of nature. Then she realizes this is what's become of Jenova. Sephiroth subjugated Mother and emerged from her chrysalis, hellbent on his own designs at her destruction. This infuriates Aerith, this monstrous neglect.
The supernova sears into her friends, reducing them to ash and blots of shadow.
Ah, but Aerith is a daughter of the cosmos. This type of energy does not harm the Jenova cells. Sephiroth himself is unscathed, and Aerith feels the flutter of another presence, somewhere, repressed. But her friends are dead. All of them.
Her rage ignites. She bends the Jenova cells to her will, borrowing from her learnings under the briefest time with Sephiroth. She extracts the elements of the Lifestream, granted by her innate Cetra bloodline. She binds and harnesses both, transforming the essence of each.
Her phantom touch enters the Lifestream, the great cycling of souls. She finds her friends, freshly ripped from bodies and dissipating into the Planet, and she halts that status. A mighty paralysis breathes into the system and grasps the dead. She searches intermittently for Zack, but he is long lost and faded. Of course, gone for years. And she does not find Cloud.
The darkness of Jenova's powers tingle at the tips of Aerith's abilities. She embraces that forbidden array to stop this madman ascending. To protect the Planet, she tells herself. To avenge Mother. She becomes the aberration of life.
She disturbs the veil. She twists souls into corpses and reanimates tissue and blood. Organs grow from the reversal of death. Flesh reconstitutes. To live is to die, yet Aerith interrupts that flow. The Lifestream is at her command, and she feels Sephiroth in there, too, domineering his own manipulations.
The one-winged creature revels in the destruction he's wrought, overlooking Aerith until the Lifestream swells into whirlwinds around her. Cyclones of energy lower onto her deceased companions. The portal of sunlight closes behind him. He squares his focus onto her, this tiny slithering of Mother, but before he can snap his will through her cells, Aerith turns that same link against him. The gateway between the two opens and Aerith rushes in. She chokes him into silence with a gnarled squish of her fingers. She clips the flight of his wings and freezes him mid-air, mid-thought.
The pair oppose, struggle, reverting the intentions of the other as the Lifestream rises in sheets around them. Droplets sting Aerith's eyes. Her physical form weakens because she cannot take from the Planet without reciprocation. The perversion of death calls for an exchange of life. Aerith knows this. She would agree to it a thousand times over to save her friends, to stop this horrific angel.
The Lifestream requires the rest of her soul. It presses in on her, now acknowledging the union she's forged and the breaches she's made. Though she cannot disperse into the Planet, she can exist within it, and that is sufficient.
Globs perspire off her in concentration. Sephiroth burns through their connection. She would be stronger if Mother had more time to recuperate. She would be quicker if emerging from the afterlife hadn't channeled her towards insanity. It isn't enough to hold him in place. And her friends are rousing, twitching and breathing.
His powers lay latent while she holds him in stasis. She cannot extinguish them, though she tries. She's missing a piece, a balance. Jenova maintains a trove of darkness that Aerith cannot unlock with her Cetra birthright. Not without more time.
She spots Cloud lying motionless in the mists. There is no heartbeat in the aether. Of course, no trace of him in the Lifestream. Though, there exists an induced complexity in the space of Sephiroth's mind. A strange restriction.
No, she cannot maintain the connection, hold Sephiroth, and seek Cloud at the same time. Plus, her friends need support. Death drained them as it had her, and they won't survive long if she cannot protect them. So she makes a choice.
The Lifestream crashes down in release, taking its prize. It bears onto Sephiroth just before he regains control. Aerith collapses to the ground, soaking in Mako, and she extends her fingertips. Dripping puddles expand beneath her. She sends one final blessing onto her teammates, a gift of Jenova and the Planet.
An invisible barrier pops around the six bewildered figures. Sephiroth stabs at it with his wing. The resurrected remain invincible. For now. He glowers, disfigured from the Planet's brief mutiny, hovering with damaged wings and reduced radiance. He can no longer summon another supernova this soon. The half-Cetra saw to that.
But she is withering, taken back to the land of the dead through the primordial cycle of the Planet. And her efforts are meaningless. The group that stands bleary-eyed from her transgression are dust in the fallout. They, too, shall be cast aside during his ascension. The meteor breaks the atmosphere now. Impact is imminent, and when it touches down, the Planet will scream. The Lifestream will gush, and Sephiroth will carry the world into a new Promised Land.
He spits blood. Curious, how Aerith was able to strengthen the Lifestream like that. No matter. She is gone. And he has planned for years. He has all the pieces in place. These insects in a hurricane won't bother him.
He breathes in and smiles. Nothing fractures his future. He reunited with Mother, silenced her cries, and brought stability to the waning Lifestream. Once, somewhere, he was a loyal soldier of Shinra. He might have felt humanity's sadness or joys. Now he brings retribution, sacrifice for the splendor of a new world. He will shape it. He is divinity. Nothing will halt these plans.
An itch lingers in the liminal space between him and Jenova, something distant and irritating. A tiny thorn in his thumb. Ah, soon he will shed even this mortal existence. Soon, everything will be over. It will all end and begin with him.
