PHASE 3

- Paradigms -

When you wake up, and find out your whole world is gone, a couple funny things can happen.

It's the fear that comes first. You don't know where to go, and you can't tell what's a threat, and whenever you meet someone new, you don't know what you can't say. You don't know when to fight, or when you have to run.

But the really strange part comes when you start getting used to it. Then, all of a sudden, your normal old life starts to feel like the dream, and it gets hard to imagine it ever being real again. Keep that up, and you might just forget what you're fighting for.

Fang couldn't stop wondering why she hadn't just let the eidolon finish it all.

She'd thought she was ready. After two weeks of running, hiding, fighting, and losing every single thing that mattered, this crazy, inside-out world had given her nothing but more and more grief. And then one of those Cocoon warriors whom she'd thought were barely an annoyance had beaten her almost one-on-one. If any l'Cie had been more ready to give in to their fate, Fang couldn't imagine how.

But something in her just couldn't stop fighting.

The strange, tiny sun that lit up the inside of Cocoon was going out again. It didn't set, like a proper sun, but its light got all dim and splotchy, like someone was drawing a giant curtain over a ridiculously big lamp. When Fang looked up, she could see an explosion of sunbeams playing out over the surface of Cocoon, which got steadily easier to see as the sun's glare faded away.

Fang hated this time of day. At night, she could pretend the lights above were just a set of unfamiliar stars, and in the day the sun's glare hid most of the detail. But now, she could clearly see the ground curving up and wrapping around above her head, with islands and oceans and mountains suspended in the sky. It had taken her most of a week to stop getting dizzy whenever she looked up, and she still could do without the reminder. People weren't meant to live like this.

Up ahead, where the ground started to bend upward and dissolve away like a mirage in the evening fog, she could just make out the outline of the gaping hole where the skin of Cocoon had been ripped away. Fang kept thinking that if she looked close enough, she'd see some sign of her own world, the real one that lay beyond this nightmarish landscape in a box, but she couldn't make out anything besides a featureless void.

Still, she couldn't bring herself to turn away, or let it out of her sight. She needed a goal to keep herself going, and getting to the edge of that hole seemed like the best she could get.

The closer she got, though, the more the land seemed eager to get in her way, fraying apart into a mess of rocky crags and ravines to block any easy path. What she'd taken for rivers when she first stepped ashore on the coast now looked more like cracks that had formed when the ground split apart in whatever cataclysm had punched that hole in the side of the world.

Fang had heard enough during her days hiding among Cocoon's people to know she was looking at the result of a great war with Gran Pulse. In her other life, before she'd fallen into crystal sleep, Fang remembered looking up at Cocoon as its minions descended to bring terror to her people, so seeing the carnage that war had brought to the world above should bring her a bit of satisfaction.

Instead, the overgrown ridges and eroded fissures just reminded her of how much time had gone by. And seeing the scale of all this destruction reminded her that she still had no idea what had become of her own world. Except that apparently no one on Cocoon had heard a peep from Gran Pulse in more than six hundred years.

She was so distracted thinking about everything but the ground right in front of her that she lost track of the path she was following. Then her foot slipped as she was negotiating a low ridge, sending her sliding over the edge amid a small cloud of clumpy dirt. She was weightless just long enough to fight past the unsettling sense of vertigo and steel herself before she crashed sideways onto the ground.

The impact sent a stab of fresh pain through her hip, even though she'd managed to land on the side that hadn't been stabbed and shot yesterday. Her shoulder felt twisted pretty bad as well, though, and that was the one where she'd been stabbed.

Still, she planted her good arm on the ground and pushed herself to her feet. "Good thing no one saw that," she said, before she quite realized she was talking to nobody. She was probably in the habit of laughing off tumbles like that before Vanille had a chance to get too worried.

Dammit. She and Vanille had been separated for ten days now, and Fang was starting to get used to it. Which apparently meant forgetting she was gone.

Fang slumped back against the rocky cliff wall and closed her eyes. Vanille was long gone, disappeared to who-knew-where, while those Cocoon warriors weren't so much as buzzing overhead in their airships anymore. Even the eidolon had vanished back to whatever world it came from. So long as she was this completely alone, she could at least spare a moment to act as tired as she felt.

A stream ran through the ravine below her, so the sound of running water gave a familiar note to the background. It was something, at least, though the steady flow of a river didn't quite match the waves that would brush the shore back home.

If she thought about it, Fang supposed she'd felt closer to home back in that town they'd found outside Anima's temple, after she and Vanille had awakened at the start of this mess. And wasn't that some kind of irony.

She heard another sound, like a rain of tiny stones, and then the sound of footfalls landing next to her. Instinct had her away from the wall with spear in hand before she even had time to kick herself for letting an intruder get so close.

There were two of them, eyeless four-legged beasts with squared jaws that blended into razor-sharp teeth and hairless, leathery skin that looked like the Cocoon warriors' armor. They didn't look metal enough to be machines, but didn't seem natural enough to be simple monsters.

Fang didn't have a lot of room to maneuver with, as the lip of ground she was standing on merged back into the cliff just a few feet behind her, and the spear felt heavier in her hands than it should. If this turned into a long fight, she doubted it would end well for her, so she launched herself at the nearest one as soon as she'd steadied her grip.

The creature didn't react the way any living thing should. It lunged straight back at her, not even trying to dodge the blades of her spear, but it made a sort of guttural grunt that didn't belong in any machine. It was this unsettling nature, more than the force of its attack, that threw Fang off balance, but either way she was off guard when the second one tackled her from the side, jaws gnashing at her leg.

Her knee buckled, and she had to jam her spear into the ground to avoid falling over completely. The creatures backed up, both cocking their heads at her with the same eerie motion, as if gauging the damage they had done.

Fang reminded herself to breathe. She forced herself to remember the attacks themselves, and not just the pain of the fresh wound or the aching of the others. She called on all the power that the fal'Cie had given her, just as the monsters lunged again.

Their attacks glanced off her with only a bit of a sting, and then she had an opening. Splitting her staff apart, Fang drove one end into the side of the nearest creature's head as it tried to back away again. The strike only cut halfway through whatever the thing's hide was made of, but still sent it stumbling off balance, and that gave Fang some time.

She spun around, recombining the staff and starting it swinging as she confirmed the other creature's location. True to her guess, it made the same robotic charge it had tried the first time she'd attacked, only this time she got the blades of her spear right in the way of its mouth. The force of the impact sent the spear a good way down its throat, and she twisted its momentum to send the gurgling beast flying wide, right over the edge of the cliff and down to the rocky stream below.

The first creature, moving a little more jerkily but looking otherwise unfazed by this turn of events, lunged at her again. Fang got her staff up to block the attack's full force, although its claws still gashed her arm, and when it landed trying to recover its footing, she brought the blade of her spear down hard on its neck.

After the creature stopped twitching and Fang was sure it wouldn't get up, she let herself fall back to her knees. She seemed to heal a lot faster than she'd used to, back before she'd been a l'Cie, but she could still feel every blow she'd taken in the last few days threatening to gnaw her apart. It was a good thing Cocoon had only sent a couple of cyborg beasts this time; if she had to face that warrior with the sword again right now, Fang doubted she could even make it look good.

She remembered when she first woke up, thinking how weak all the monsters were and how soft the people seemed to be. It really had felt like she and Vanille had nothing to worry about, and they could take on the whole world if they had to. And then it all came apart so quickly that she'd barely had time to realize how wrong she'd been.

Her first stupid mistake had been thinking of Cocoon as that little orb that hung in the sky, dwarfed against the endless landscape of Gran Pulse. Even days of walking around inside it hadn't managed to convince her how immense this world really was. And it wasn't until she'd seen Anima's temple picked up out of the ground by an airship so big that she'd mistaken it for a fal'Cie at first that she really realized how these people could have ever terrorized hers.

It was getting too easy to imagine meeting her end in some forgotten corner of this world, as she gave in to exhaustion or some unnatural predator. And it was getting a lot harder to remember her reason for going on.

But when she looked up, she could see it in the sky. That giant airship had carried Anima's temple toward the edge of that giant hole, and the way this world curved in on itself, the sight must have been visible from just about anywhere. If she could find exactly where it had gone, and if Vanille had seen it as well, they might still be able to meet again.

After a few moments of getting herself to take regular breaths, Fang managed to get herself back in sorts. She'd already decided not to waste time kicking herself, or worrying about what she couldn't change. Instead, she had to find a way off this ledge, and then get across the ravine, and then keep going until she reached the end of the earth.