~x~

Final Fantasy VI: The Sands of Time

Book 2: The Goddess War

Chapter 11 - Red Tide

Zwill. Another name unearthed in the moldy tomes of the Ancient Castle of Karnak. Situated in present day Kohlingen, this fabled melting pot of ancient society was apparently a mighty force in both the pre-Magi and post-Magi days of our world. Famous in the pre-War days for its exquisite metalwork, and later for the application of magic to their time-honored techniques, Zwill rose to the height of power in the ancient world before the War of the Magi ended the dreams of its people, like those of so many other peoples and nations.

Unlike the city itself, many of the legendary weapons and armor forged there survive to this day, their origins and method of crafting long forgotten. Did the magesmiths of Zwill know that some day far in the future their mighty works would help save the world? Perhaps they had some inkling. Perhaps our relatively recent victory was only one of many bloody victories these relics of Zwill have witnessed in their long, silent journey through the twisting causeways of time and space.

I can only imagine what fearsome combinations of ancient smithing lore and mystical Magi knowledge came together in that place to create the destructive tools used during the War of the Magi. Tools so durable they lasted a thousand years, so powerful they were capable of felling the God of Magic himself. Who were the original wielders of these weapons? Who were the unlucky victims of their wrath? Were they used for good or evil?

I must continue my studies into this time...

-Excerpt from Chapter XII of "The History of the World" by Cid del Norte Marguez, 13 AF

Part 11.1 - The Dreaming Awake

Maduin watched for the thousandth time as Cassandra's face melted away under the force of his own magical fury, revealing a gleaming skull with slack jaw and baleful gaze. Had she even known she was about to die at that moment? The mental vision Maduin had seared into his mind's eye said yes, she knew. The blue holes where her eyes had been burned with a predatory anger, hunting him, haunting him. To the ends of the earth that vindictive stare would follow him.

She was Death. Not her own, but the death of the man that had killed her. Whenever Maduin closed his eyes, it was the blazing wraith of Cassandra that greeted him. Deathless himself, he stared Death in the face every night. Yet what was real?

It was real enough. The pain was real. The murder was real. Cassandra was real. And somewhere out there beyond space and time, the judgment for his sins would be real, too. Maduin was ready for that judgment, had been since the moment the repressed memories of that black day were cruelly forced back into his mind by Chemosh. The fallen god was no longer part of his soul, but the memories he had freed remained, the visions of an innocent woman ripped to shreds by his own uncontrolled power. He was forced to relive that moment over and over in his dreams, if he could call this state dreaming at all.

"Yes, I am dreaming," Maduin said in the nowhere that was the sleeping world of his Esper mind. He knew this nowhere. It was the Nexus, the infinite plain at the center and border of all existence.

Espers, born from the dreams of man and awakened by the desires of the gods, the so-called "Dreaming Awake," existed in a state unlike regular creatures. Their flesh was real and here, but their spirits, their essences, roamed the unformed Nexus freely. While awake, Maduin walked the mortal world like any human, his magically-infused soul tied to the physical body his own mind had created. But the body was a shell, a conduit. At times, it didn't even feel like his own body. It was so cold, so unresponsive. More like clothing than skin. He always felt like he was drifting, holding onto this strange new Esper body as a drowning sailor lost at sea would grip a rotten log.

The body of the man, Dune Karn, had been obliterated in the cleansing fires of the Crystal Furnace at the heart of the Nexus, the heart of all worlds, and so his mind had crafted a new one. The power of the Nexus was the power of creation itself. With the guiding hand of cruel, cold Chemosh, Dune had given up his flesh and allowed a new being to come into existence. As he watched the vivid memory of the destruction of Cassandra, he had felt his own human body disintegrate.

Looking back, he imagined the final scene of his life as a human looked much like a mirror image of Cassandra's final moments. His human flesh melting away into the Nexus to become the stuff of something else, and only his naked soul remaining, its monstrous imperfection bare for all to see. There was no pain, only the freezing, unrelenting force of Chemosh pushing down on his soul from all sides. Closer, closer, impossibly close, and yet closer still. The suffocating pressure of his hateful Master wormed its way into his essence, fusing and becoming one entity of pure magic -an Esper. The Esper Maduin.

Here he was again, in the Nexus, reliving those moments again. In the benighted mortal world, his giant Esper body slept beside the fragile form of Elphis, like a bear sleeping with mouse. Even here in his dream, he could feel the warmth of the tiny girl, huddled next to his cold hulking form. It was obviously not for warmth that she slept next to him, for his body gave off no heat. It was out of pure, child-like trust, and love.

What did the girl dream of? Were her blind eyes healed in her dream world? Maduin hoped so. A spirit as innocent and incredible as hers surely soared the skies of her own personal Nexus with wings of light and eyes filled with every color and hue.

Maduin looked around his own version of the Nexus and sighed in despair. The sigh reverberated across the bland, empty plain like a drop of water rippling across a pond. As if his sigh had beckoned her, Cassandra rose up in front of him, her bright eyes slowly turning into glazed terror, then the scream, then death cold and final.

"Enough!" Maduin howled.

In response, the Nexus image shuddered, faded, and returned to the bleak, white world it was before. Maduin tried to summon more pleasant images from his past, before all this had happened. To his childhood, when his mother had been happy and his father alive.

But nothing came, and nothing remained before him. As if Chemosh still held some tenuous grasp on his thoughts, Cassandra rose up again, her accusing eyes staring endlessly, full of limitless sorrow and pain.

Maduin tried to remember the intoxicating bliss of the early days of his marriage to Mae, but only her mournful kneeling form from the garden in Antissa showed itself to him. It never turned around, and always vanished in a whirl of black hair as soon as it appeared, leaving only the crater where the dead rose bush had been, like a grave. And out of that grave rose Cassandra's ghost once more.

"Enough...enough..."

But it was never enough. The Nexus was a world of pain for Maduin. It could be anything he chose it to be, he knew this. If he wanted, he could be human again, walking through the soft, yielding sands of some foreign desert and digging for clues to the past, perhaps with his father by his side. And Mae and Elphis too. And Captain Bismark, and all the others he had lost on this damnable journey. He had found that his past was full of monsters, however, and it was these monsters that dogged his every attempt at peace.

"I must wake up..."

Walking, walking, walking...Maduin continued walking through the dreamscape of his past, only finding demons and the dead. Chemosh, ruling over a world of ice, Master of Cocytus and of his soul. Sade rose up now, clad in his smoking, bloody armor and threatening all that Maduin loved. Cerberus, his brimstone mouths laughing, cursing and dying, spewed hate at him. Elle Laperdeau and her crooked, judging finger towered over him, screaming like a banshee to leave Antissa, to leave Mae, to leave this world that he did not belong in anymore. Mae, her back turned to him, picking dead roses for her dead husband.

And Cassandra, rising, rising, rising above all the rest. She was the symbol of all his guilt, the center of his self-hatred. The blue-tinged skull always remained, floating in front of his eyes. It was always the last image he saw before returning to the mortal world, the world of flesh and bone.

Maduin shot up, his heaving body suddenly blotting out the pale moonlight of the twin moons like a massive oak. The dream was over, but he still felt the disconnect of his Esper body. Yes, the Dreaming Awake never truly rose from their dreams, never truly left the womb of the Nexus.

The frail, faintly warm body of Elphis snuggled next to him comfortably, but he could still hear Cassandra's skull gnashing its teeth angrily behind him, like fading footsteps. An aura of blue ringed his vision, threatening to coalesce back into the empty eyes of Cassandra. The wandering fingers of Death itched at the back of his own skull, reminding him it would return should he close his eyes again.

For now, though, he was free from his demons. Looking at Elphis, he felt his heartrate slow and calm in his deep chest. He was alive, and so was she. The slight warmth of her body felt wonderful to his frozen skin, and his hopes for the future and the past were revived, if only for a moment. She always had this effect on him, sleeping or awake. The gnashing faded to silence, the blue ring dissipated, the fingers of Death receded back beyond the curtain of the world. Maduin was alive.

"Elphis...do you know how special you are?" Maduin said softly, not wanting to wake the little girl.

A smile crept across her sleeping face, and she muttered, "Lemme sleep some more Maydune..."

The girl's preternatural hearing had picked up on his voice, of course. He ran a single taloned finger across her face as gently as he could, pushing a ridiculously long strand of brown hair aside. He swore she had never had her hair cut in her entire life, but the body-length effluence was quite fitting on her for some reason. Everything seemed to fit on Elphis. She wore the world like a well-made dress, and all of existence was her ball. Maduin would give everything he had, all the monstrous power he possessed, his very soul to make this little girl happy, and it scared him a little when he realized this. The two had grown incredibly close over the two months of hard trekking across hard country, and he wondered how he could have ever kept his sanity this long without her constant, innocent optimism and support.

Dune Karn had never had the chance to have children, but he felt if he had, Elphis would have been a perfect daughter. If only he had known about her orphaned existence in Antissa before all this had happened, perhaps he could have saved her from her life of destitution, and in doing so, saved himself. Thoughts of another life where he and Mae were still happily married, with Elphis as their adopted daughter, and Narsille still stood, as perfect and magical as before, swam across his vision.

But that dream was not for him, and he knew it. He deserved everything that he had allowed to happen to himself, but did Elphis deserve it? She never complained, but still, he had ripped her from her homeland, and dragged her across glaciers, deserts and mountains. Surely she would have been better off staying in Antissa? Surely Elle Laperdeau couldn't be that cruel, that vengeful to punish Elphis for Maduin's sins, long after he had gone? And yet, he somehow knew she was that vengeful, and that Elphis would take it, and thrive, as she always had in her short, tough life.

The girl sighed happily and squeezed the sleeping Kumiro in her arms as she descended back into her unknown dream world where perhaps she could see, perhaps she had two loving parents and a home. The moogle squeaked a tiny "ku!" like a stuffed animal, and the girl giggled, lost to the world.

Hope. This is what Elphis was to Maduin. At night, the bald, glaring skull of Cassandra drove him mad with fear of the past. During the day the flowing hair that danced in the wind and the blind eyes that never judged, never saw the monster before them, calmed his beating heart and gave him hope for the future. Somehow he would make a future worthy of this girl, and somewhere he would find a home for her. It was foolish to think that home would include him, but if he could just build it, set the foundations, that would be enough.

First he needed to find his friends, though. If the enigmatic Lady Blunt was right, Captain Bismark was still out there, and Draco as well. They were still trapped, their souls imprisoned by Chemosh, bereft of hope. The Nacre had saved Maduin, he knew that. Somehow it would save them all, he believed that. He just needed to find out how to make it work again. He needed a miracle.

The rocky plains of the Zwill countryside appeared below him in the moonlight. Its jutting stones bleached and sparkling with their stark whiteness rose like far flung teeth as they left the barren Karnak mountains and gradually melded with the grassy lowland hills of the western countryside. It was a country rich in natural resources, and overflowing with people from all over the world. Surely someone there would know of the Nacre and its mystical heritage. He needed to find someone from the Order of the Pearl. Only they could unlock the mystery of the Nacre.

The head of the Order of the Pearl had been cut off under the burning streets of Narsille, but the body remained, scattered throughout the world, waiting and wondering what was to be its fate in these uncertain times. If the greatest city on the planet could be destroyed in a single night, what chance did any town have now?

After the tragedy of their homeland, the Order would be even more secretive and careful than before, but he had to try and contact whatever was left of them. He had to believe that his new life as an Esper had meaning, that there was something he could do, something he should be doing. Elphis had brought the light of hope back into his darkened life, and now it was up to him to nurture that fragile flicker. In time it would grow, infect all who met it, and become a glorious blaze of inspiration to a tired world on the brink of disaster.

Antissa had cast the two out, shunned the precious little light that was offered to them, but perhaps Zwill would welcome them, and then the light would have its chance to blossom into something greater than one blind little girl and a wayward Esper. Greater than a single town, nation, or empire. Greater even than the gods that threatened to extinguish it.

This was Maduin's dream while he was awake, this was what his heart told him. He would not return to sleep tonight. The ghost of Cassandra had been banished for a time, and all the many swirling worlds of the Nexus were quiet in his mind. In a few hours the night would end and the sun would begin to rise over the Karnak mountains and spread its warmth onto this foreign region. Maduin had no idea what to expect in the city of Zwill, but he had his tiny flame of hope by his side and in his heart.

And that was enough.

In the distance, the glistening carapace of a giant golden insect hummed and vibrated inside its protective magical shell, unseen, unheard, unknown. The Esper Zona, the Seeker of Moloch, was watching, and reporting.

"Nothing new to report. Maduin approaches Zwill as he continues towards the Jidorik region. Likely to reach Zwill by 10:32 in the morning. Follow up on reports of foreign Esper activity in city inconclusive, but still strong. 72% chance of unknown influence being Leviathan, Herald of Astarte. Other creatures of unknown power and form rumored there as well. 66% chance they are Espers, but it is possible they are more aberrations spawned from the influx of wild magic from the Crescent Island event. Numbers unknown. Will continue to follow and report without engaging. Zona out."