They were pushing the boat along the shallows, and it looked--it looked like Kilika. The sky was dark and the water was cold on my ankles as I was lifted out and placed on the beach. I was as a boy again, with a loose tunic that the late evening breeze caught as if it were smoke.

I feared for a moment that I would be swept away with it, making nothing but blue and flesh imprints on the fronds of the trees. But they held my arms, whispering just under the furrows of their brows.

It is a mixing.

It must be sacrificed with the others.

It is an abomination.

I wasn't crying, because I didn't know what I had done wrong. I stared for a time at my tiny hand, which was long for such a small hand. An imposing stone structure rose before me and I'd never felt smaller before. A man whose robes opened up like a flower towards the ground waved a staff before the entrance.

The stone whispered in its own language and I was intrigued by the cool blue lights.

I soon became lost as to where they led me. Kilika's temple, my reason told me, it wasn't this large inside. The labyrinth seemed to stretch on, with the petal-man and his staff leading. The light at the end of it grew from rose to red, and I thought that was precisely the opposite of my day old bruise coloring.

In here.

My tomb came on me quickly. As I was just a boy, I couldn't dig my heels in enough and soon I was staring through dirty glass. I felt the need to call for my mother, but then, that was useless. She wouldn't answer.

The voices faded away and the rose light in my vision dimmed. I was all alone.

My small but long hands barely made a noise on the structure, the tomb. For surely I would die like this, and I wanted to wake up, wake up...

When falling, it almost felt like I was free. When landing, I was brought to even more dreams.

The lady in white; paler than the area around my mother's irises. A cage? Why was she trapped, so high... it was a girl, not a lady. Someone around my age. When she spoke no sound came out and the stairs spiraled upward. I would, could I...

Seymour.

I was still as a boy and lying next to my broken tomb. Something had broken it loose from the wall; maybe I had more strength than I'd been told. That was my name but I didn't know the voice. Maybe it was myself. It was neither male nor female, though.

The others were gone and I had to get out.

I ran to each wall, looking for an opening. The doors were closed. I was still alone. I sat down on the cold stone and wished the girl-lady of light were with me.

The lever.

Again the voice. I lifted my blue eyes up, and saw a lever on a ledge. I couldn't remember having smiled quite so much before. I ran up a ramp to it, and threw my whole weight on it.

The chains clanged like dead things as they pulled the door open.
I ran through the opening, afraid that the doors would close on me again. I was stopped in the middle of the circular room by my own awe. Spiral stairs leading up around me, to a small brownish black dot at the apex...

A cage?

I stumbled on the first few steps but caught my footing. Faster. I had to go faster. Dreams predicted what was to come or they created their own realities, or so something told me once. I couldn't remember where.

My footsteps sang like rusted bells.

I was level with it before I could see inside. It was a cage and inside the cage she was made of light. The white lady. The trapped girl. Her bleached face stared back at me in amazement and the indent of her mouth spoke words that I couldn't hear. She waved her arms like a silk dance and I realized that she wanted out.

Just like I had.

My first plan was to launch myself at the cage--to jump. But as I backed up against the wall to leap, my vision flooded with red. No, it would be suicide.

Then I remembered the lever from before.

I couldn't help but notice my fingers looked like spiders as I searched and almost gave up hope. But it was there. The chain moved so fast I thought she was going to be swallowed up. I was running again and she looked afraid. I didn't want her to be afraid.

But she didn't hit the ground.

I never knew I could jump so far, when I reached the bottom. I never knew I could run so fast. I don't know why I flung myself so completely at her bird cage, I just know that we crashed into the ground in a way that didn't kill us. What doesn't kill you...

Her hand was cold as death when it touched mine.

"Who are you?" I asked, I willed for her to answer. But she was muted, she talked and no sound came out.

"You can't ans—" They came out of the earth, and I should have known their faces. Dreams? Ghosts? Shadows? Something told me that they should have looked human, but they didn't. Even their inhuman persona seemed muted.

They were mostly male, I thought, but the female one stood out slightly because of the beads in her hair. I wanted to hear anything other than dry cries with her ghost shadow, for some reason.

I shouldn't have been admiring the ghost, though. They were tugging at the Lady and it was as if she was melting into the ground... so it was more than cages that were going to confine her. There was some active imprisonment.

Flame—at the wall I saw it—and pulled. Just a torch on a long pole, but I was almost dancing as I batted at them. Even if they were beautiful, their shadows would not swallow up my lady.

I was going to be her hero, I'd determined with a boy's mind.

The little 'o' of her mouth reminded me that I must not have been a boy in reality, even if I was one here. I gritted my teeth as I arched my staff into the air and made fire patterns in this grey environment. It was beautiful. There were many different forms of light.

Her eyes were two tones when she smiled as I beat off the last of her assailants.

Time passed when I took her hand. She was never as strong as me, nor as nimble, even if she was completely graceful. There were paths I had to make for her. I knew we had to get out and this temple was like a fortress; we had to find the cracks in it. At one point we were perched in the rafters of this vast place, and I could almost see the sky, even if I knew we were underground. I told her things, even if she could not respond. Little things that I wouldn't talk about with someone that spoke back.

My silent and beautiful princess was interested in every word.

I fought the shadows and faded images of gods and told her about my mother. I fought the shadows and the ghosts and told her about what I was.

Eventually we reached a gate, which was wide open to the lush jungle of this island. I had been left to die and she had been abandoned, but we were going to leave. I could see her smile--you didn't always need words to understand what was going on.

She will not leave here.

She rose from the ground like the shadows did, only she seemed to be dragged out; the others had come like a person out of water. I knew at once it was she because of the resonance of her voice, both male and female reverberations but a female dominance. She was a Queen, but a damned one; the expression on her hideous face was both pain and power.

I held my lady's hand with my long childish one and stared her down.

"She's going to leave with me."

You cannot pay the price.

Her blood tears never touched the ground. The pendant around her neck looked like a holy person. I hated her.

"I'm taking her out of here!"

You will see who holds dominion.

The gate closed as she bled back into the ground, and I ran as fast as my legs could carry me. My lady tried as best as she could to keep up, but she faltered. She faltered and fell onto the stone. The air was sweeter as it came from the opening, but I could not go through, I would not go through. Her two-tone eyes pleaded with me not to and I watched as freedom was closed off from us.

I took it out on the gate, beating my angular fists until they were raw. When my hands protested I went at it with my feet and then the pole I had been using to keep the shadows at bay.

But I did not cry. I would not cry.

She placed a cold hand upon my shoulder and I knew she understood.

"We'll try another way. There was a way in, so there must be a way out."

The walls of the temple had always responded a little to her presence, but they seemed to whisper as she passed now. Did they want her to stay or to go? Their vibrations bordered on light as we went deeper still, and I entertained the little boy notion of digging through the ground and coming up somewhere different. Maybe the people on that side of planet didn't lock boys up in stone coffins for what they were.

The shadows and ghosts kept up with us too, doubling their efforts to steal my lady away. I became suspicious of the floor that brought them and determined that while the walls were sympathetic, the floor was most certainly against us. When our downward trek met a dead end even the pity of some of the doors and walls could not break, we took a different track upward.
Ropes and chains became my path, while I knocked over things for my lady's gentle feet to walk on. Her strength was not physical, but I knew it was there.

The closer towards the sky we went, the brighter she seemed to be. She babbled on in her mute way, and I imagined that she must have been the daughter of someone great. Maybe someone that had created a temple for something other than sacrifice. I imagined stories of her birth and early childhood. I invented stories of what we would do when we were free.

She held her arms out to the sky and I imagined she was a bird.

For days or weeks we climbed, I didn't know. I never knew men could make such temples, even though I had a hazy memory of grand domes and suspended water. It was old and it was living, but not like my lady or me. I wondered if the difference was a little more than stone and flesh.

We never slept, never ate. Somehow we didn't need to. I taught her how to hold a staff and to dance a little with it. I was almost happy like this, searching for freedom with my lady.

Even if I could hear her laughter in the groan of a rusted chain and feel her stare in the broken cobble of the floor. Seeing her again was inevitable.

We found the bridge nearly by accident, as my lady had stumbled and one of the walls had relented to her. I was more concerned with righting her than what she had uncovered. It was she that saw it first, and her mouth exclaimed with such enthusiasm that she nearly rippled like a reflection in a pool.

The bridge stretched out, wide and high like a road. A stiff wind blew my lady's hair and whistled in my ears as we ran laughing; silently and audible.

You have not learned.

I'd forgotten that a bridge was another type of floor. The ground betrayed us, shaking me from a standing position and into--to my horror--a gap that was steadily opening. I clawed to stop my downward progress, but only managed to defy gravity enough to hang from the newly formed ledge. I couldn't see anything but images of dead things in my mind and I was going to become one of them.

It was inevitable.

But my lady had me by the wrist and was pulling with that strength I had seen hidden behind her mismatched eyes. She pulled to save my life, as I had hers. Save my...

Can you see?

The walls were never alive, but they were animated. The floor wasn't a gateway to darkness, it was the natural order. My desire to be a hero had clouded me to what really meant our freedom. For there was only one thing that could truly make us free.

Come to me, my son.

I yanked hard, and she wasn't prepared for it. I could see the fear in the little 'o' of her mouth, but she had always followed my lead before. Her free arm opened up like a bird's wing and we were airborne. I felt my lady's little hand tremble in mine, but it would stop soon. There was no fear here.

The damned Queen opened her black jaws and swallowed us whole.

---

"Maester?"

I'd taken a nap again. My devoted looked at me with worried lines on his veined face.

"What is it?"

"Your sleep seemed troubled."

I blinked a few times. Why would it... of course. That dream. That dream that kept happening these days, regular like clockwork. Sometimes I wondered if it was prophecy, and sometimes I wondered if it was hope. The more power I gained, the longer it took to get to the ending, but the ending never changed. That was because I knew better. You didn't fight that which made you stronger.

It's what she would have said.

The only part that hurt was my lady, knowing that I had not found her. That was what kept me from that powerful oblivion, knowing that there was no cool hand to hold as I fell.
Just because I wanted it to happen didn't make it real. Even if I had her within the reach of my staff. Even if she would come when I beckoned her.

My lady had to be just a myth; there was no explanation as to why I had not seen her yet.

"You should prepare for the tournament. The public will be pleased to see you."

I went through the motions that decorum demanded of me, not really focusing on what was before me. I could still feel black jaws enclosing me, and the bliss that it gave me. I could still feel her hand--which had become warm in the end--within mine. I didn't want to indulge in a fantasy, but the fantasy was so real in its own way.

Maybe that was why I didn't notice her at first, with her head bowed and her mostly yellow bow peeking up at me in an almost smile. But her eyes met mine--briefly, because she was modesty itself--and it became clear who she was.

"Hello, Lady Yuna." You were there.