Chapter 2: What Old Men Know

"Hohoho, you want to know about me? My story's older than Shinra's. There was a tree planted the day I was born in a cave in Nibel Mountain. It's dead and dry as canyon wall. Hoho, I should know. I killed it."

-Johannes Bugenhagen, first Head of Science, Shinra Inc.,

Cosmo Canyon has built an entire culture on talking without saying anything. Every man speaks his mind, but you have to know the language. When Johannes Bugenhagen first arrived, he did so on invitation to teach. He found his students and his colleagues used the same words and linguistic constructs he did, but they put on airs, they trotted around the core of what they attempted to say, and they rarely looked him in the eye.

That last part arose from the fact that he had a specific status in the canyon as an elder who had lost his entire family. The canyon elders had invited him to teach for this reason, he discovered, but no one would speak to him outside his classes. They had placed him upon a pillar, pulling high through the light of the pyre. He thought this dried out husk of a man might burn alive.

Johann would call himself a man who liked his solitude, but the weeks he spent away from Nibelheim, away from his stuffy job where he did almost nothing, the check Lizveta Palmer gave him in hopes that someday that might change, were lonely, and he did not appreciate them. As such, he began to look forward to teaching, something he could say had never occurred before.

The classrooms were small. The furnishings consisted of rocks, scraped into cubes. Blackboards were precious and difficult to come by, but all the rock was red, as was the chalk, and so they were fashioned from the shale mines between Rudig and Nibel, then draped across the wall in jagged pieces that told as much of a story as the lesson plans themselves.

Lecture attendance seemed optional in the canyon. Boys who didn't show up went deep into the canyon to train with the canyon guardians as warriors or went to the Elders to pray at the Cosmo Candle all day. Johann could not discover what the latter accomplished, but this calling was portrayed as noble and worthwhile. Girls who did not show were seldom heard from, but Johann suspected they thrived somewhere, as children continued to grow in the canyon instead of crops or something else useful.

As such, Bugenhagen's lectures had a class list of fifteen or so, but about four showed up consistently, seven on a day where training was shut down in the caves because of Gi encroachment—a day like today.

"Professor Bugenhagen," the boy spoke before he raised his hand, "Bhatti says you know a great deal about the Gi."

Johann taught a lecture on energetics—coal, physics, combustion, lighting—but everyone who attended his lectures was more interested in the war brewing below the red rocks. Johann considered this understandable, since the men of the canyon didn't have furnaces or much at all to do with coal. Johann continued to wonder how the Candle stayed lit, but he did not think he could get an answer from the elders outside the simple word, "Faith."

And Johann did know a great deal about the Gi.

"I'm sure Bhatti has told you more than I can," Johann said.

"Bhatti has told us how to kill them," the boy continued, "but I want to know why they are here. Why do they continue to attack us through the tunnels? They say the war in the faraway lands between the Gold Nation and the sea people is over land. But what land do we have? They are welcome to the outlying planes. The rocks here keep us warm, provide protection, but that is not something the Gi would have. They are blind, and they do not want the air above ground."

"Your assessment of what the Gi might want," Johann said, "is human."

"And they are not?"

A girl next to the boy whispered at her lap and exchanged a glance with another girl behind her.

Johann ran his tongue over the brittle teeth, loose in his lower jaw. "Would you consider Bhatti and Seto human?"

The boy chewed his lower lip and worried the pencil between his knuckles.

"Yes," the girl beside him answered. "I would."

"And why is that?"

"They speak, they want things, they reproduce, they're rational."

Johann chuckled. "But what is it that they want? They want to protect you, they want to give up their lives for the sake of red rocks and a fire that never goes out. They want to die for and train a people who look nothing at all like them. All of this when they could lose their newborn child, all of this when, instead, they could run away and survive on the land all their own, when their entire species, save themselves, has died for our people already. Does that sound like something rational to you? Is that something you could want?"

When no one in the classroom answered, Johann stifled a laugh and shook his head. His hand hurt to grip his cane, his ankles objected to the weight he put upon them, but he stood and stooped to lord his presence over his seven students. "The thing about humanity in this world," Johann said, "is that it is a loose term. It's a term we use to label other people we think are like us, that we think we can understand. Don't ever presume that someone else in this world, whether they can speak, whether they look like you, whether they seem rational, is human.

"The Gi," Johann continued, "have been imprisoned in the earth, away from sunlight, with only the mold and the creatures that live there for sustenance. Can you possibly know what they want?"

The boy in the front snapped his pencil. "Then how is it that you know so much about them, Professor Bugenhagen?"

"Many years ago, before the war between your people and the Gi began, I thought they might tell me something if I acted as a friend. So I would go to them. I spent weeks below the earth, eating and living like them as best I could, nursing depression and a host of bodily diseases. So you can say that I know more about them than almost anyone."

"Well, did they?" the boy said. "Did they give you what you wanted?"

"Hohoho," Johann shook his head and tottered back to his seat, keeping his back to the class. "I wonder, if they had, would I be wasting my time talking to a class that only asks questions irrelevant to the subject which I teach? The next thing I hear better be a solution to the force equation on the board, and we'll have no more questions about the Gi."

Nattack slid a torn card across the table, pushing dust. "This is the price," he said. "As an old friend, I know I can trust any promises you make me."

Johann rolled his eyes. He found this sense of airs and conspiracy unnecessary. It had been decades since he had been below ground, and he found the tunnels below Cosmo Canyon aggravated his rheumatism. Still, from what he could tell, Nattack had not changed. Johann possessed some certainty in the conviction that he had not the time to waste on frivolities. Dust silted from Nattack's headdress. Johann raised an eyebrow and lifted the corner of the card.

The glance proved unnecessary. Johann already knew what he would find.

"What possible use could you have for Seto?"

Nattack leaned back in his chair. Where the chair had come from, Johann could not say. He had the uncomfortable experience of accepting a fractured boulder as his seat. While Nattack sat, the caverns seemed to conform around him, molding against his back and providing support. It seemed that the men of Cosmo Canyon did not exaggerate when they claimed the Gi commanded the very rock around them.

During his time with the Gi, he had not been permitted into the deepest recesses of the caves. Johann wondered if air became shadows and shadows turned into rock so far below ground. He wondered how many people had seen the Gi in their natural habitats without a death sentence.

Johann had not told his students why the Gi attacked the cliff-dwellers of Cosmo Canyon because he did not know. They just did. The Elders said they were jealous of life and sunlight, but nothing about Johann's time with them could make him think this was the case. Johann had wondered if the invitation from Nattack might shed some insight, but only vaguely. He was here to learn the secrets of the bowels of the earth which the Gi supposedly possessed. After decades of persistence and an attempt to forge a relationship with the people below ground, Johann found it ironic that Nattack finally told him he had something worthy of exchange after he formed an alliance with their mortal enemies.

"We want to learn how he has outrun his own immortality."

So much for insight. Johann could not prevent the surfacing of jovial laughter.

Nattack's jaw set, jutting as if tearing through the air. Johann imagined he felt a pocket split and rush around his ears. "The secret is in his ability to die. The Canyon Beasts live long lives, yet they die eventually. We don't have the luxury."

"Then I suppose the bodies of those men wearing ridiculous headdresses are just figments of my imagination." The Gi, Johann thought, would probably give him what he wanted in riddles. He felt unsettled, alone in the dark with their chief. He wished he could regain the sharp sense he had formed living in the dark as a younger man. He moved his tongue over the gums in his mouth, circling his remaining teeth with regret.

Clearing his throat, Nattack fished into the pockets of his robes, producing a ring made from stone. "Do we have a deal?"

"What makes you think taking Seto captive will accomplish anything? Hohoho, if he is as fast as you say, he will slip through your fingers." Johann found this particular thought amusing.

When Nattack smiled, the black of his lips appeared to swallow his face. The headdress dipped low, and his eyes glowed yellow, creating visual solace in the dark. "If we can't learn from him, we will make him our own. Death is a privilege of the living."

Johann eyed the ring in Nattack's claws. If Seto died, that would leave Bhatti without a mate and Nanaki without a father. If the Gi took Seto into these caverns and allowed the sweat and cold of the stone to swallow him, there would only be two Canyon Beasts left in the world to protect the people of Cosmo Canyon.

Then, there was no guarantee Johann would understand the answers the Gi gave him. There was no way to be sure Nattack would even be capable of communicating the secrets of giving energy to the world.

"Very well," Johann said. "He's yours. Where's mine?"

One might argue that the plan Johann had devised achieved the greatest utility at the smallest cost. One might argue that the sealing of the Gi away forever served as more than enough incentive to sacrifice one of the precious Canyon Beasts.

Johann did not entertain the notion. He did it for purely selfish gain.

Bhatti knew it too.

The large red beast lounged in his office, preening her paws—the left missing one toe—and casting a stray eye toward Johann while he kneaded the pommel of his oak cane—the carved likeness of Schorai the Wicked—and scanned the map of the cavern. A passage under the observatory wound deep into the caves to what Nattack had called The Living Wall. Bugenhagen told Seito that he knew of a way to end the conflict between the Gi and the Canyon men, but it would require a distraction.

The male canyon beast had shaken out his headdress and said, "They could have me." As if it were his idea to begin with.

Bhatti cleared her throat, shaking out the fur over her ears and ending Bugenhagen's reflection of the deal he had made a week ago. "Tell me what you know about Cosmo Canyon, Bugenhagen," she said.

Bugenhagen looked up from the burnt sienna canvas and found himself incapable of stealing his gaze back from the thin hallways of her eyes. "It's a scholarly sanctuary with a flame that never falters. They hire old men from Gold to teach children about loss."

"I would think, since you discovered The Living Wall, you would at least know that this is where the humans fled to when they ran from The Calamity of the Sky," Bhatti said. "They rooted themselves and hid behind the sandstone while The Calamity destroyed The Ancients. There is a kind of energy in the North. Here, it is barren and cutoff. Twisted things breed in these caves."

Bhatti had a habit of giving long-winded lectures before she got to the point. It made her a bit like the Gi, though Johann doubted she would appreciate the comparison. Johann had decided long ago that it must have to do with the walls. They indeed sheltered all the Canyon's inhabitants from the outside world, and the only reason he kept any semblance of relatability whatsoever was that he didn't actually live in Cosmo Canyon. His mundane paper-pushing in Nibelheim kept him from checking out and learning to communicate through jovial laughter and vague hand gestures.

Johann decided to ignore her and returned to his map. "The Gi will lead an onslaught from inside the caves. They'll be mounting a full attack, as if intending to snake through the caverns and assault the canyon. If you cut across the East Wing, I believe that will be enough to use the charm and escape the fire before Living Wall closes in on them. You'll be running a risk—"

"A risk no larger than Seto's."

Then, all at once, she could be cold and exacting. Part of him felt a little jealous.

Johann pursed his lips. "I suppose that's the case." He fished into his pocket and removed the stone ring Nattack had given him. He kept the thin piece of shale guarded as he leaned to the ground and slid the ring across the floor.

His back, naturally, did not like that very much.

Bhatti nosed the charm but left it resting on the floor of Johann's office for a moment. "The humans here have hired you to teach because they believe that, if a man outlives his family, he gains profound insight. My people, on the other hand, feel that such a man has lost the most important insight of all. For then, he has nothing to lose." Bhatti licked her lips, sighed, scooped the charm up in her mouth, and loped out of the room.

Truth be told, the plan had flaws. Many potential loopholes and failures existed; the largest, of course, being that Johann had chosen to trust Gi Nattack. He wondered what would happen if the charm on Living Wall would fail to imprison the Gi or if Seto somehow escaped. Would he still receive his spoils? And if Nattack vanished behind Living Wall, could he?

Johann clutched at the sheet of shale in his front right pocket, smoothing it over with his thumb and listening for the drum signals. The people of Cosmo Canyon had an understanding of combustion few settlements possessed: the Gi in particular. Some claimed the canyon beasts could walk through it. Elders claimed they used the shadows in it as passages.

Johann did not wonder why the term "wisemen" had fallen out of favor.

Whatever the explanation, flooding the caverns with flame would give those who dwell above ground an advantage where the Gi of the caverns generally dominated. It would hold them off. Seto had been chosen to light the match—or, rather, drag his tail over gunpowder lines. Bhatti, supposedly, would go with him. In reality, she was supposed to follow, she was to watch, she was to break the charm Gi Nattack had given Johann and trap the entire tribe of Gi and Seto behind Living Wall.

Johann sipped his coffee and glanced at the clock hanging besides the Au Rete painting of a small woman with a bouquet of lavender. The blossoms clashed with her orange brooch, or so his daughter always told him. He wondered briefly what he would do were he to acquire a new painting. How would he analyze the pallet?

He did not think about the boom of drums which sent silt sifting from canyon wall, or the fire roaring below his feet. He did not imagine any of it; he sat in his plush chair—a little worn in the back, but still comfortable—

And took it as quite a shock when heat suddenly flashed across his face, singing his fur.

Johann dropped his coffee, or he imagined he did back in his office before the alteration occurred. It counted as the last physical act he recalled before he could no longer move any part of his body. His forelimbs and back limbs moved on their own, his neck bowed low and barreled through fire. Johann could smell the flint, the gunpowder burning, the scent of singed hair all over his body. All the aches of old limbs vanished, and thick muscle coiled above and below joints, pulling him forward as he strove to reclaim equilibrium in his gut.

In exchange, he had entered an inferno. Everything he saw, he saw in gradations of red, but for the white heat of fire. A dull pressure bore at his temples. His eyes watered, not just from flame.

He was a canyon beast, but not just any canyon beast. Bhatti had possession of ancient magic. She understood fire and the way life flowed better than any living being Johann had ever met. He had thought she might also know the secret to powering the world, but had considered getting it from her would be even more impossible than getting it from Gi Nattack. She had used this magic to take Johann with her. He saw everything she did and felt everything she felt.

He wondered why, hoping she would hear it, but he received no answer.

Against Johann's will, vision drifted to Bhatti's paws, which flexed so that he could see that the leftmost toe had been clipped. They flexed again, scraping against the sandpaper of rock which felt strangely frigid, despite the fire, and then Bhatti's body drove forward, straight for a rift of firelight.

The fire scorched across her, diving in the wedges of her ribs, and Johann thought he had been thrust into oblivion by Bhatti's cruel desire for revenge, but the sheet of fire faded, and her paws slammed into the cool rock.

Bhatti stood on a ledge overlooking a wide gorge, throbbing as flame licked along crevices and set cross-sections aglow. Amidst it all, the cavern twisted with life, heaving and waving spears about. Canyon men stood out bright against the dull maroon of the rock, armed and waiting, unaware of any layer of Johann and Nattack's plan. The Gi blended such that the walls themselves seemed to heave and twitch. Johann suddenly remembered what Nattack had said about death being a privilege of the living.

It is true, said his next thought before Johann realized it had not been his thought at all.

In the back corner, the fire licked down toward Bhatti in a point, revealing another canyon beast as he leaped and sunk his teeth into the neck of what appeared to be a rock, but Johann knew better when he heard a gurgling howl from a member of the Gi. Seto had taken one down, licked his jowls, and galloped after another as the pressure behind Bhatti's eyes intensified, and her toes flexed once again.

He won't survive this. Something told Johann that Bhatti's reminder was more for her benefit than his.

For a moment, Johann felt Bhatti's body stiffen, as if preparing to pounce, but then the pressure in her temples increased, her stomach gripped something as cold as the rocks, and she fell back on her haunches, stiffened her shoulders, and followed Seto with her eyes as he shredded through the Gi.

Not many canyon men had entered the cavern. Only a few volunteers had willed themselves inside, knowing they would likely not make it back through the walls of fire. This excursion had only one intended survivor, and Johann found himself experiencing everything as she did.

Flame barely reached the ledge. Tears did not fall, though they threatened. Ears perked to catch the rumble of drums. Rock itself swallowed bodies, and the lighter red of the canyon residents dimmed. Death bred below the walls.

A spear lanced Seto's side, and Bhatti's flanks twitched in sympathy. She chewed pieces of the ringed charm Johan had given her, her mouth rolling through the sponge texture of pumice. Then a flash of Nanaki captured her thoughts, forced into Johann's sentiments: pink and new, sprawled outside Cosmo Canyon, twitching his flame-tipped tail in the grass as he yawned.

One of the canyon men yowled as three spears from the Gi drove into his neck, and blood spurted, coloring the stone a still-brighter color than dull maroon. Bhatti's jaw clenched, and Johann imagined the sensation of flesh rushing through teeth, blood oiling gums, as if he had experienced it clearly many times before.

Then, as they had planned, Seto howled low, setting his head back so that his snout faced the roof of the caverns. His back legs drew him toward Living Wall, and the Gi formed a funnel around him, squeezing him to the back, standing in front of the fire and preventing escape.

Some men from above ground remained, fleeing at the sound, trying to find gaps in the flame and rock as they ran. The drums grew louder, thudding through Seto's howl. The music of it all thinned Living Wall as it shuddered into a sheet and faded.

Through the wall, Nattack appeared. Grasses hung from his shoulders like a cape. The vibrissae of his headdress scraped the stalactites. He raised his red spear high and howled along with Seto. His call sounded more like the roar of a near-dormant volcano.

As Seto heard it, he froze for a moment. Again, Johann felt Bhatti's flanks twitch. Then Seto spun on his haunches and tore along the stone floor.

The caverns erupted in more screams, drowning out the drums and the crackle of fire, as the rock itself seemed to rise up and follow the wisp of Seto through living wall, lobbing their spears.

Bhatti could not resist the temptation and leapt after the straggles, tearing through them with her fangs. Johann found himself terrified that he enjoyed the sensation of slashing flesh, even as it tasted of dirt. He resented Bhatti for biting into the gullet and ending the struggles too early.

Air thickened. The cavern grew tight, and Johann realized Bhatti had positioned herself in the opening of Living Wall. Johann pleaded for her feet to take her back through, but the body remained rigid, watching Nattack stand tall and prepare to throw his great lance...

Leave him! Johann finally managed to communicate a thought of his own.

I can't.

That last sensation, the feeling that Bhatti would rather the walls close in around her than back up and leave Seto behind, stuck, and Johann thought he would not be surprised to find tears crusted on his human cheeks, back in his office. In that moment, he loved Seto and Nanaki as his family. He realized that it was this moment that Bhatti had wanted him to experience.

The last adult canyon beast did not cry. The back legs drew the animal back through the sheet of Living Wall as Nattack lobbed his lance. Sorrow flowed so strongly that any sense of intrusion ebbed away as Johann, nearly 100 years old and a victim of such continuous loss, was swept along with it.

It wasn't just loss.

He had received that hand-written missive from Private Heidegger. Friends of the dead notified the living because Gold Nation could not be bothered with trivialities in a pursuit of land. Johann had opened it. He had felt more in his arthritic fingers than in his chest.

The image of Nanaki again, falling asleep in the open with no one to watch over him—no one needed to watch over him. His father and mother had seen to that when they agreed to Johann's deal. Bhatti had not agreed to sacrifice her mate for the sake of the people of Cosmo Canyon either, and she could only face his son if she promised she would fight for them in the future.

Betrayal is a kind of loyalty.

Back in his office, Johann clenched his thumb into the thin center of the shale. It snapped in twain, and the image of the cave outside Living Wall appeared. Without the shades of red covering his vision, he could no longer see the sweat of the rock, but a green wraith wove through the cavern, growing thicker and spinning into a sphere that swelled to fill the cave.

The sphere turned blue and green, and Johann recognized it as a likeness of The Planet. He could spot The Wildlands, Icicle, the continent where Gold Nation and Cosmo Canyon resided, the empire of Wutai. A tiny human figure formed next to a miniature tree at its top for a brief moment before they both dissolved into colored light, dispersing in lines over the model to other points and forming images of animals. He could see a canyon beast, birds, even a bhaba velamyu with a briefly flicking purple stinger protruding from its back. They began to form quickly and sporadically all over the globe before dissolving into reds, blues, yellows, and traveling to other points.

After several moments of this light show, a swell of light formed over Nibelheim and burst, as if from a hole in the earth, drawing green lines all over the globe. Houses sprouted along the lines, bright light flooding through the windows as if each contained its own Cosmo Candle.

Gi Nattack had kept his promise. Johann knew how to power the entire world.

His chest ached as the image in his office dissolved. He gulped in air and shivered. Even though the charm had expired, Johann felt Seto's loss clenched in his chest, and Johann very suddenly didn't care about the unharnessed energy flowing through The Planet. Bhatti had cursed him into caring.

Johann thought of Nanaki, curled in the caves somewhere, likely napping, and wondered if he could face him.

When a man has nothing to lose, logic is easier to come by. Bhatti could only face her son if she promised to pledge her life for the people of Cosmo Canyon the same way his father had, looking forward.

Perhaps Johann could if he took his blood spoils with him to his grave.

Eh, it's better. We'll go with it for now.