Final Fantasy VI: The Sands of Time
Book 2: The Goddess War
Chapter 11 - Red Tide
11.14 - Death By Water
All was silent, and the scent of death was in the air. There was death in the water, too, but for the moment, Maduin saw nothing and heard nothing. He was alone on the battlefield, the sole conscious being among a thousand stunned humans.
And one very dead Esper.
As Maduin tried to recover his senses, he watched out of his one good eye, fascinated, as the broken horn of Ixion dissolved and faded, snapping out of existence with a static crackle in the wind. There was no doubt, Leviathan had sunk his teeth deep into his hapless subordinate and not let go. Ixion was no more.
But what was the traitorous snake waiting for? Had he watched the battle between the two Espers and realized that this was not the same weak little man who he had stabbed in the back what seemed a lifetime ago, at the bottom of the sea? Did he sense that this Esper was not the same Esper that had looked into his face and fled during their confrontation in the skies above Narsille? The still waters revealed nothing. Maduin was troubled.
People began to stir, and collect the dead when everything seemed over. As far as the soldiers of Zwill were concerned, the battle was over. Lilith and her mighty steed were defeated by a force no one but Maduin saw, and her troops were not waking up for some odd reason. Only Lilith herself seemed aware of what was happening, and she was not happy. Within moments of regaining consciousness, she had been bound and gagged. Thoroughly gagged. Her eyes screamed all the fury her voice could not. Sparks flew from her fingertips, but silenced and unable to move her hands, she could perform no more magic tricks.
Maduin grunted and pulled the Lady's daggers from his chest and his eye. It hurt more than he expected. The old wound in his chest from Bahamut's massive blast of magical energy did not heal like the wounds he had received from ordinary, non-magical attacks. It seemed as if all the fury of the dragon king still remained in the lingering wound, and refused to give up its foothold on him just yet. His eye, however, had already regained sight as his Esper energies began to work their magic. Truly, the power of the gods flowed through him.
"Don't get careless, Esper." Lady Blunt tapped his side with the flat of a blade. "Look at the water."
He did. "It's...retreating."
Already the water had started flowing backwards away from the shoreline at several feet per second.
"What's happening?" Maduin asked.
The Lady replied coldly, "Something bad." She stormed off and began shouting orders as if she was in command. "Everyone! Clear out! Back to Zwill! Now."
Soon the water was several hundred feet further away than it had been before, and Maduin could see what was causing the disturbance now. A huge swell was building on the horizon, stretching the width of the entire battlefield. It was a hundred feet high and several miles long, and growing.
"Damn him," Maduin cursed to himself and thought frantically. What could he do against this? Leviathan was no fool, and certainly not adverse to standing in the shadows and attacking from behind, from a distance, from whatever location allowed him the most safety. Why fight when he can simply drown everyone, friend or foe?
The wall of water rose to two hundred feet, then three even as Maduin began to turn back. He could see hundreds of Zwill soldiers running for their lives now, too. And he was right there with them. He may be an Esper, but he could not breathe underwater, and a wave like that could easily smash him like a titanic battering ram. The power of the gods flowed through him, but he was not a god himself. No, he was mortal, and at this moment, he was feeling every bit of the mortality.
At five hundred feet the wave was truly monstrous to behold. It blotted out the moons and the clouds, and even Zwill itself. There was nothing in the world now but water, and death. It had only been less than a minute since the wave began to rise, and Maduin knew there was no escape, even if he used his magic energies to rocket himself away. The soldiers knew it too, and many collapsed and began to cry, or pray. To Altimus, to Elia, to whatever god they believed in. The face of death was on the water, and there was no hope of escape.
"Can't you do anything?" The Lady Blunt's voice rasped from behind Maduin as she stared at the seven hundred foot mountain of blue hanging over them all.
It was all impossible and absurd, was all Maduin could think, frozen in place. Waves could not physically rise to such heights without collapsing on themselves...and yet, there it was. No doubt, the Lord of the Seas was putting his full unnatural might into this one, massive surge.
"Nothing. I could turn some of it to ice...but not all of it. I doubt I can even save myself this time." Maduin looked at the Lady, and couldn't help but pity the horrible woman. She was only human after all, and her eyes were full of a fear he had never seen before. "I am sorry."
At a thousand feet, the wave stopped growing, and stood still. The crest of the wave was so far off the white mane of frothing water was just a thin sliver between blue skies and blue water. The entire world had been inverted and turned inside out, and it was impossible to tell what was sky, sea, or land anymore. All was water.
Then something emerged from the wall, heralding the giant, rushing death behind it. But it was not Leviathan.
"Impossible...," Maduin gasped, straining his eyes to make out what he could not be seeing.
Ixion raged forth, his horn re-grown and his eyes flaming with a cyclone of renewed electricity. There was a crackling, snapping funnel of whirling lightning around him as he charged forward, far larger than anything Maduin had seen him produce before. This was Ixion, but somehow he seemed different, and far more potent than before.
"Get back." Maduin pushed the Lady back roughly and steadied himself for the attack. Ixion said nothing as he raced forward at twice the speed he had before, and the storm circling around and behind him only grew. The monstrous wave, the inexplicable return of Ixion, and Leviathan still waiting out there somewhere, unseen. Maduin couldn't understand how everything had gone so wrong so fast...
A blinding flash bathed everything in white hot light and Maduin felt a terrific blast of wind push him off his feet and to the ground, right next to the Lady. "Wha...?" but his words died in his mouth as yet another impossibility met his eyes.
Ixion had been stopped and sent crashing to the ground, taken completely off guard by a tackle from the side. Seemingly out of nowhere, the mighty Esper steed, twice the size of a regular horse, had been struck full-force by...a man?
But this was no ordinary man. Tanned, grey-haired, and muscled to obscene proportions, this was by far the largest man Maduin had ever seen. he wore nothing but a loincloth, and towered over Ixion. Was this a human, twenty feet tall? Impossible! It was all impossible! Maduin grabbed his head and struggled to comprehend what he was seeing.
As Ixion crashed to the ground, flabbergasted and silent still, the giant continued his assault and smashed the demon horse in the side of his face with two clenched fists the size of boulders. The Esper's face collapsed sideways and the flaming eyes snuffed out like candles. And then, Ixion snuffed out of existence as well.
"Impossible...," Maduin repeated dumbly to himself, staggering back to his feet.
There was no time to begin trying to make sense of the chaos, though. The wave shuddered, and a low roar could be heard everywhere. It was the roar of a million tons of water, the roar of the ocean itself. It was the roar of the Lord of the Seas, everywhere. Leviathan was not happy, and the time for games was over.
The roaring, rushing, insanely impossible wave shook violently and lurched forward. It looked like it was moving in slow-motion, but the reality was that is was crashing forwards and downwards with an incredible velocity. The earth itself would be flattened and scattered by its weight. there would be nothing left of the battlefield but a massive crater after the wave crashed.
But the earth was not ready to submit to the sea yet. The giant man still lingered on the battle field and reached down to grasp the land at his enormous bare feet. With a silent heave that sent every muscle on his body rippling like an ocean of rock-hard flesh, the giant lifted and pulled. And the earth responded to its master's call.
Maduin stared dumbly at the power unleashed before him. A massive wall of earth was rising parallel to the descending wave in a straight line away from the giant being. The shadow of the wave soon plunged everything into the full darkness of night, but Maduin's Esper eyes saw it all.
A ruddy brown glow where the earth was rising, rising, rising.
A cold blue glow flecked with gold where the wave was crashing down.
And then the two magical forces clashed and the earth shook with all the rage of Gaeus.
Maduin silently mouthed one word, a name, realizing who it was he was seeing perform this miracle. The thick muddy aura mixing with Leviathan's cold blue-gold one was one he had felt many times, but never truly seen, and certainly never seen in all his full, heraldic majesty. The long-dead Herald of the Master of Earth was alive again somehow...but then where was his magicite?
One thought collided into another, and Maduin whirled around, screaming another name, nearer and dearer to him than his own life.
"Elphis!"
She should not be here. But where Titan's magicite went, so too did Elphis. Where was she? Who had allowed a frail, blind girl onto a battlefield? He would have the Stradivari's heads for this, he swore as he looked frantically for the girl.
As the deafening struggle between earth and sea continued unabated, endless stone rising to meet endless water, Maduin turned and met the gaze of the one responsible for all this. And the eyes saw him well.
It was no blind girl holding the furiously pulsing magicite of Titan. No, the huge, calloused hands grasping the sacred relic were the hands of a killer. And the eyes, now glowing golden and brown in wavering rainbows of earthly hues, were the eyes of Titan himself, alive through this mortal man.
"Ole Bull, what have you done?" Maduin lurched forward as the ground trembled with the blows of the forces behind him. He had no idea who was winning this war of the elements, but if he had to choose he would put his money on Titan. Leviathan may be a Herald, but so was Titan, and Titan had a thousand years on the old sea snake.
Ole Bull said nothing, could not say anything. Every ounce of his formidable fighting spirit was pouring into the magicite. Maduin watched in stunned awe as the pure white life essence of Ole Bull poured out of him and into the magicite in his broken hands, where it swirled and changed color, flowing outwards and straight into the earth, now a deep brown. The summoning had total control over the man, and would not let go until Titan had finished his task, win or lose. If Titan died out there, would Ole Bull die as well?
"Fool, run! Get to Zwill!" The Lady Blunt threw a dagger at Maduin, where it stuck in his stone-hard skin for a moment before falling out, like an annoying splinter.
It was enough though. Maduin gave Ole Bull one last scathing glance and grabbed the Lady. He shot into the sky and away from the mayhem, with the Lady Blunt cursing him all the way. As he turned to look back at the fight from the air, he saw that the earthen barrier had stopped the wave, and it looked as if a new bay had been created over half the plain. The wall was acting as a dam for the water, but Leviathan's magical stain could still be seen at work, pushing the water harder and harder against the rock wall, daring it to break. But Titan did not yield, and the earth was now moving forwards itself, pushing the water back out to sea like the hand of a god, sweeping all Leviathan's evil all away. And Ole Bull stood alone among the dry wasteland of fallen corpses and still-sleeping Zozo warriors, giving every last drop of himself to save his city.
Then it all ended, horribly, horribly.
A ghoulish phantasm rose behind Ole Bull, like a twin of the burly man. The face was white and waxen, flaccid flab hanging off of thick bone and empty eye-sockets staring into infinity. It was Ole Bull, but it was not Ole Bull. The thing that was-but-was-not Ole Bull looked both younger and wretchedly older than the real thing.
"Watch out!" Maduin and Lady Blunt yelled in unison. But they were too far away, and there was nothing to do but watch as the rotting double took a dagger from its own chest and stabbed Ole Bull with it. The man grunted with shock and surprise, twisting his face around to look at his attacker. It was like peering into a twisted funhouse mirror, but a look of recognition shot across the dying man's face, and he knew his killer.
The magicite dropped to the ground, and just as Ole Bull fell to the ground, so too, did Titan kneel and shake, then vanish into the watery mist surrounding him. But the great Esper had done his work, and the earthen wall held. The wave had been pushed back into the seas, and even as the dirt crumbled to dust, deprived of the magical energy holding it up, the water sloshed harmlessly outwards and only managed to flood the plain to a depth of a few feet.
Maduin was already plummeting downwards to help Ole Bull as the water rushed up to him. The ghastly clone of the man turned his unearthly gaze to Maduin, but the face held no expression Maduin could recognize. It looked like a corpse, and smelled like one too as Maduin slammed into it and landed. It gave against his assault like a mountain of fetid meat, and slumped down onto its side, rolling over without a sound. It did not rise again, but Maduin was not foolish enough to trust anything right now. Too many impossible things had happened.
The Lady got to him first. Maduin was not sure what he would have done, but Lady Blunt always knew how to murder, even when it was her job to murder something already dead. With a single slice of a somewhat larger dagger than Maduin had seen her wield, she cut the head off the unholy creature, and took her dagger back from its cold, twice-dead hands. There was no smile on her face at this kill. There was no glory in killing something you already thought dead.
As the water began to pool around Ole Bull's limp, bleeding body, Maduin quickly lifted his hefty form onto his shoulders. Lilith was still sitting, helpless, a few yards away, watching it all. She could not speak, but there was a gleeful look in her eyes, and her cheeks twitched in what was the best smile she could produce with the numerous rags stuffed in her mouth. It seemed she had gotten her revenge, somehow.
The magicite lay in the water, still pulsing slowly and softly. The magic was fading, and Titan was gone. Maduin gently scooped the stone out of the water and tucked in the small pouch at his side that once held it before Elphis had claimed it. Or had it claimed her? What had really happened here today?
"Stop woolgathering, Maduin. The battle isn't over." Lady Blunt was dragging the kicking Lilith by the hair, her old smile in full force. She looked into the beautiful girl's face, and saw a little of herself in the girl. "You look like me when I was young. But you lack the pure killer's instinct I had, and that's why you're the one with your face in the dirt."
Lilith gave one last spine-cracking twist to try and free herself from Lady Blunt's grasp, but only succeeded in tearing a chunk of hair out. Lady Blunt slapped her and grabbed another lock of the luxurious, golden hair. Then she let go and sent a dagger flying into the darkness behind her.
Maduin turned to see what had spooked the hardened assassin, and saw an army approaching out of the darkness, masks glowing with the light of the Goddess. The Zozo horde had awoken, and had them surrounded. Some of the masks had been knocked off, and Maduin saw the same dead eyes and pale faces as the Ole Bull-thing.
The dagger thumped in the chest of one of them, but it did not stop. Lady Blunt took a step back, and tripped over the girl's prostrate form.
"Stop this, girl, or I'll kill you where you lay. I know this is your doing." Lady Blunt's voice was low, almost a whisper. She was frightened by this wave of flesh just as much as she had been by the wave of water before. Trying to fight something that could not be killed was any killer's worst fear. "Stop it, now," she repeated, grabbing the girl's hair and yanking it viciously.
Lilith raised her head in defiance, and stopped struggling. Her posture was clear - the horde would keep coming, and there was nothing they could do about it. Kill me if you dare, her eyes said.
The Lady Blunt raised her dagger to slice the girls already wounded throat. This time she would lose more than her voice.
"Stop." Maduin's voice echoed softly in the moist silence. The Lady stopped, but her eyes were still on the girl's naked throat. "It's not her. They'll keep coming even if you kill her."
"Then who?" Lady Blunt seethed through clenched teeth. The dagger grazed lightly against the girl's skin, drawing blood.
"Him." Maduin pointed out to the sea, his finger following the line of golden light only his eyes could see. It was like a puppet show, with a thousand strings of light leading from each corpse out and away, to him. To the true Herald of the Goddess.
Out in the darkness, beyond the broken wave, two lights peered out at them with evil intent. Leviathan hovered just off shore, his leering mouth split wide in a bloody grin. The thick, drowned sound of his gurgling laugh bounded over the water and filled the silence. The snake had finally slithered into the light.
"Leviathan!" Maduin called out as he put his back to Lady Blunt's. "Stop this! It's unnatural to force the dead to fight! Fight me one-on-one, if you aren't a total coward!"
The undead army did not stop, though. Leviathan continued to laugh his low, throaty laugh as the horde closed in on the two.
"Last stand, Esper. Make it a good one," Lady Blunt said bluntly, smiling despite her fear. She may fear that which could not be killed, but she had stopped fearing her own death many years ago, for she had died many years ago, inside.
Let it come, and let it be quick. And bloody.
The Lady's thoughts narrowed down to a point, and her eyes saw death by water.
"I will not fear death by water, I will not fear the drowned man...," she murmured to herself, reciting some old prayer unknown to Maduin. Even a demon has her gods, he supposed.
Leviathan laughed and approached the shore to watch his minions at work. And then he shrieked and fell to the soaked earth with a crash of water, mud, and glistening, golden blood the color of starlight.
"Grah! Who dares...!" But he said no more. Another cruel spike ten feet long appeared in his side, next to the first one and he howled in pain. A pair of whale-hunting harpoons, all too familiar, hung from his thick, scaled hide - a hide he had thought impenetrable by mortal means. Long, seaweed-covered chains led from the harpoons back out to sea, where a thousand feet away a grim sight met his gaze.
"No...get back! Get away!" Leviathan roared, writhing in the mud and magical blood. The pain was excruciating, but the vision before him sent cold terror through his body that made him all but forget the pain.
"Not you...not again...get back...Barabbas!"
A thousand feet away, hovering in the night, drenched in the blood of the moons above, was a ghostly ship, and at its prow stood a thing, a man, a ghost, a brother. The ship gave off a forlorn sound, like a train whistle, but there was no train...or was there?
"I've come back for you, Jonah. You can never escape my grasp, you silly, little man," the Barabbas-thing at the prow of the rotted ship said, in perfectly conversational tones, a thousand feet between them.
"Nooooo...," Leviathan wailed, as another blast from the unseen train whistle split the night sky. He twisted and spasmed, centering his magical might against this impossible foe.
"Yessss...," the Barabbas-thing echoed back, pleasantly. "You escaped me thirty years ago, but you will not escape me here. The wounds of the past do not heal so easily, old friend."
Maduin watched the struggling Leviathan with dumbstruck confusion. Who was he talking to? And what had happened to the Zozo army? To a man, they had all shivered as Leviathan shivered, then fell dead and truly dead.
From Maduin's vantage point, he had watched as the entire Zwill fleet had appeared out of the harbor as soon as Leviathan had shown himself, and crept up quietly as he gloated, stabbing him in the back with two lethal harpoons the size of trees. The harpoons looked exactly like the ones that had been used against the Latimeria back in the Mordic, and proved just as effective at felling their monstrous quarry.
He recognized the ship that had fired the weapons as the Mother of Pearl, at the front of the wall of ships, and knew Delphino was leading the charge. But where was Elphis? He wondered again what had happened to the girl. Delphino was the one who had sworn to watch over the girl during the fighting, and she had said nothing of joining the battle directly. And yet, here she was, here she must be.
On the other side of the battle, Delphino stood at the prow of her ship, one hand on the wooden carving of Elia, the other on a huge crank attached to thick chain, attached a thousand feet away to the cursed hide of Jonah Levi.
Her long, grey hair waved wildly in the wind of her ship's forward motion, and she shouted with rare emotion from her cracked lips. "You bastard," she yelled with all her strength, tears in her eyes and blood on her fingers where she gripped Elia's shoulder with the pent up anger of thirty years.
"You bastard!" She yelled again, ordering another harpoon fired. As it struck the beast square in the back and he roared, she roared back. "This is for my family, for my home, for Bariki! Give them back, give them back!" She reeled forward and ordered the ship full speed ahead. She would have her revenge, and she would look into the face of the monster who took everything from her.
All Jonah Levi saw as he shook like a worm on the end of a hook was the face of his dead brother, smiling and beckoning, smiling and beckoning, smiling and beckoning...closer, closer, closer...
"Come, Jonah, now is the time. Do you hear that siren? The wail of the dead in your ears? They are calling for you. They've missed you, in Hell. There is a special place here, on my vessel, just for you. I've saved it all these long years. Sooner or later, you all come back to me, little man. Esper, human, it does not matter. You all come back to me."
Leviathan flailed, and called out to his Goddess to save him. Silence was his answer, and another harpoon into his gut.
"Never...I will...survive...!"
With an inhuman effort, Leviathan raised himself into the air again, the storm of light bursting from his eyes, his wounds, his mouth, overwhelming everything.
Maduin watched as an explosion of magical electric energy blinded his Esper eyes.
Delphino watched as an explosion of thunder and lightning blinded her mortal eyes.
And the Barabbas-thing watched in smoldering frustration as Leviathan wrenched free from his grasp and flew into the sky with the sound of a hundred thousand cannons.
A glittering trail of golden magical energy stretching for miles into the sky and over the mountains was all Maduin saw when his vision returned.
A rainbow of golden blood arcing across the sky and ending on four dislodged harpoons with chunks of blue, scaly meat met Delphino's unhappy gaze when she opened her eyes. It only took a moment to realize what had happened, and she sank into a heap and wept with emotions she had not felt for thirty years. She had been so close this time, so close...
A small hand on her shoulder startled the old woman out of her despair.
"It's alright, Captain, he's gone now. I saw him run off in my mind and he won't hurt us anymore. Don't cry, please!"
Delphino smiled her familiar cracked smile and the emotions were sent back where they came from, to stew and fester until the next time the snake poked his head into the light. "Thank you Elphis, you're right. Let's go back to the city, shall we?"
The old woman and the little blind girl walked back into the ship's warm interior, as the gore-soaked harpoons were retracted - where they would wait another thirty years if need be to take down their prey.
Maduin watched and waited from dry land. Too much had happened for him to think it was over...but there was a feeling of finality in the air this time.
"Is it over?" he asked quietly, as the waters lapped at his feet in their rapid retreat back to the sea. The blood of the dead stained the ebbing tide a deep, desolate red.
"I think so. Let's get out of here. This place gives me the creeps."
Coming from the Lady Blunt, that was quite the statement, Maduin thought, but did not say. He had sampled enough of her daggers for one night.