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June 20th is Tactics’ 20th Anniversary

[The following excerpt is more of a draft than usual; I’ll repost it on the 20th, but everyone will be busy with Stormblood by then. It likely needs heavy edits. As a draft of part of the ending, it is subject to heavy changes - some of these sequences may occur earlier in the book or in a different order. This sequence draws from the adaptation’s context. Comments are appreciated.]

And with one single, sharp backhand, she sent Ramza flying backwards to the blood-drenched deck.

“I am come once more.”

Ramza watched through eyes swelling shut as his sister’s hair rippled in a wave of silver, until it was all gray, whipping about in wind that did not exist in the necrohol’s still air. Alma—Ajora—Ultima—all of her smiled thinly, and an explosion of white fire, holy light, erupted forth, knocking everyone back, ripping the airship’s mast loose and flinging it to the sky.

He reached for his sister, grasping at nothing. “Alma, no!”

***

Alma Beoulve was drowning.

Her head would rise above the brackish water, dark and freezing cold, and she’d taste the oil and the blood of it, and then she’d be beneath it again, fingers clawing at the stone surrounding her. The way her nails split and her knuckles scraped, she couldn’t know how much of the blood was her own. It had been minutes and months, and every muscle of her groaned and split like rotten tree trunks in the worst of the storm. Her mind was numb of the struggle of it, she just kept kicking and grabbing out of instinct and impulse, a faint flicker of candlelight in her soul that pulsed live, live, live, live...

But that heartbeat’s rhythm kept skipping in the face of the other chanting, louder, echoing up and down the stone column, bubbling in the water, hob, gob, gob, hob, hob, hob, gob, hob...

When her head was above the waterline, when she could feel the hands grasping ‘round her ankles and pulling, she’d open her eyes to take in the single disc of light at the well’s mouth above, no larger than a gilcoin, and at times she’d see the woman’s silhouette gazing back down at her...

She’d heard, read stories that had said “a smile like a knife” but couldn’t ever get the vision to make sense, had even held once a dagger of Zalbaag’s in order to frame the idea of it, but only now, in seeing that grin form across a face she couldn’t make out, was it ever so real. The gasps of air and of light and of self were marred with that smile, like a scratched lens.

And when her head was below the waterline, she was instead somewhere else.

***

“I’m loathe to admit it, but those Romandans have impressed me in this.” Dycedarg was curled up on the settee to one side, holding a glass of wine, regarding it as one might a skull in a theatrickal performance. “These weapons of theirs, these recovered relics, they will bring about an evolution in warfare.”

Alma had toddled in unnoticed, clutching a doll to her with both arms. She was no more than eight years old, and she remembered that doll now of a sudden, that it had also been named Alma, that she’d spent more than one sabbath day asking of anyone at the chapel who’d lend an ear after the fate of the littler Alma’s soul, for which she’d felt so responsible. There was a long ugly stitch in the back of the doll’s dress from where Ramza had tried to repair it after a hound had grabbed it from her. It had been Delita who’d rescued the littler Alma, messing his own clothes such that he’d received a whipping for his trouble.

Zalbaag was uncharacteristically further along in his own glass, though his posture was rigid in the wingback chair where he sat, tome forgotten in his lap. “I find little honor in it, firing a little ball from a distance.”

Dycedarg sideeyed him, and all but submerged his nose in his wine before taking another langorous swish. “Come now, you’re being obtuse, surely. What of it holds less honor than the stalwart bowmen we already employ?

Zalbaag made a face like he’d eaten something horrid, a face that Alma could remember stifling a giggle over. “A man must pull a bowstring of his own strength, of his own will. To twitch a finger is nothing.”

“Poetic and droll in equal measures, my brother, which suits you utterly. Tell not our mages, then.” And then a sly riposte: “Or perhaps you feel thus about those who sign orders? Does his majesty not command from Lesalia with a quill-stroke?”

But Zalbaag never answered, for Alma chose that moment to emerge from behind a desk. Had she hoped to spare Zalbaag in that moment, or had she merely mulled the word over long enough? “What’s emulation?”

“Hello Poppet,” Dycedarg said with a sigh. “What’s this now?”

“What is ablution?” She pouted. Alma was the only sister in a manor of boys, of men, and they so very often spoke in terms she did not know, a secret cipher of blood and steel that she hated, that she longed to understand that she’d not be on the outside looking inward.

“Is it time for your bath, then?” Dycedarg frowned. “Ah, I see. ‘Evolution.’ Yes.” He must then be drunk, to admit he’d misunderstood her. “Very well.” And he lifted her to his lap. His beard scratched at the back of her neck, and she giggled. She couldn’t understand then that he’d more welcomed a tool to lecture his brother than an intrusion. “You see, Poppet, men are like beasts.”

“All living things are blessed by Faram the father of all!” she recited in a sing-song tone, and Zalbaag lifted his glass in toast.

“Quite.” Dycedarg continued. “It is a governing principle of any beast that walks, or flies, or swims, that those best suited to the world shall survive longest. Those who can adapt to change shall preserve their lines for the future.”

“A whiff of heresy to it,” Zalbaag muttered, “that a hume might descend from some chimp in a tree.”

“Ramza and Delita look like monkeys when they’re in a tree!” Alma laughed, and Dycedarg actually laughed as well.

“And what better examples could we find! But alas, your Lord Brother has a point. Scripture suggests Faram did create humes ‘pon the earth, indeed.” He looked at Zalbaag. “But, Poppet, you are quite devoted to St. Ajora, are you not?” She gave a big, wide-eyed nod. “And how does scripture say the Father did this? Did He – poof! – apparate us through magick? Or perhaps sculpt us from clay, and breathe into us like some sort of golem?”

She scrunched up her face, trying to recall, and realized that she could not. Which caused a panic in her, that she did not know such an important thing. Her face flushed.

“Do not fret! For scripture tells us naught of the Father’s methods. Perhaps to evolve is a tool that he used, as a smithy might tongs.” Another glance at Zalbaag. “Or a king might a quill.”

And there was a mighty crash of thunder, and Alma looked up at the stained glass, her hands twisted in knots. Orbonne was without candlelight, and her friend was not there; there was nobody to hold her hands and tell her not to fear the thunder, to laugh and talk of the changing of seasons. The sound echoed through the commoner’s pews, where Ajora’s visage could not be seen, and she slammed her hands over her ears, though they felt like the hands of another.

But she was there, beside her, sitting in the dark; not Ovelia, but...

“She would have been my choice, had we not found you.” A voice like stagnant water, a voice that yet echoed over the sounds of thunder. The woman’s dark skin was like a ripple in the chapel’s shadows, but her eyes were bright and green and fierce, eyes that had taken in all the world and history and found it wanting. She wore a blue headscarf and her robes were red and white, like Ovelia’s but not.

There was the sound of steel on steel, and Alma turned to see what she wanted least to re-experience; Wiegraf Folles thrusting forward into the light of crashing bolts outside, running Osric through and lifting him up, and up, and Osric going limp...

“Please,” Alma whispered, and the woman at her side made a sound like “hmm.”

No, Orbonne was burning and Ramza was pacing through it, sword drawn, matching Wiegraf step for step, and they were shouting at each other about ideals and vengeance. She was outside, being tied to a chocobo, she could feel the rope coil around her wrists, ‘round her ankles, she could feel mob’s roar through her whole body as the noose was dropped over her head, but she was also in here, crying for them to stop. Stop fighting, stop talking, because Osric had been murdered in front of her and Isilud was taking her away, because Isilud would be kind and cruel in turn, and his own father would crush him with a single horrible blow, and...

“And they fight over you,” said the woman, behind her, “But do they fight for you?”

“Ramza does,” she insisted, fists tightened, even as Ramza held an open hand to Wiegraf.

“What would Milleuda and your fallen friends think of this barter you’ve struck? Dreams built on borrowed stone are defiled before they are made!”

How I wish I’d been born a man like you.

Alma wrung out the washcloth and replaced it upon her father’s head. Her hands were stained from the changing of his sheets. The smell of waste and death was soaking into her clothes; she felt damp, and heavy. She followed behind her father, so young that she was still bold, screaming and bawling. “It isn’t fair!” Three brothers and a father, the coded language of men: violence of swords, violence of words. Alma wanted to be holy. She wanted to be noticed.

Tietra hid in the shadows, Alma crawled for light, always grasping.

“I am the light, Alma. I am the holy.” The other woman took her hand, entwined her fingers with hers. “Crawl to me.”

No!

This other woman’s mouth opened wide, and from within a finger emerged, curling over her bottom lip, then another, a whole hand gripping her jaw from within, and the other, pulling the woman’s mouth wider and wider; there was a flash of green, and then a flock of white birds poured out of her, flapping and pecking and swarming her.

***

Her face broke the surface of the water and she gasped so hard for air that it was if all her ribs broke one after another. Her soppen clothes felt like heavy ropes, and when she rose her hand into the air, she saw another hand within it, moving.

Bumps dragged upward from her elbow, from below her open sleeve, like nits, raising into buboes that slid down her forearm, nails piercing through her skin as they traveled, elongated, fingers over her own fingers, twining between them, a hand around her own hand, and other things moved beneath her skin as well, elbows in elbows, knees in knees, and four lungs gasped for breath.

Something fell, two somethings, splashing to either side of her, and she screamed to find them severed, bloody hands that bobbed on the water’s surface. Hands still twitching and curling, hands that groped at her as she tried to swat them away, sinking down before kicking back up against the pull.

Ajora Glabados was a child, filthy from the desert and from poverty, when the abuna touched her for the first time. She was a child, still, when she cut the man’s hands off and dumped his bloated corpse down the wellshaft.

And when he hit the water, it was Alma whose head emerged, mouth full of flies.

She could hear Ajora’s, Ultima’s voice, saying “I am come once more.” Saying it through her.

And through her own eyes she could see her brother’s horror. Her screams were silent, her throat full of the unspeakable, and she did all she could to cease it, smashing her own face against the stone of the well, stone that felt cold and sheer, like crystal, before sinking beneath the waves anew.

***

And something else was burning, some other world, some other time, a fortress that moved, but their dance continued, Ramza and Wiegraf, blades meeting then separating, moving walls between them only to emerge for another blow. Wiegraf’s eyes clearer, her brother’s clouded. Around them at all sides were bodies, students and creatures and pale shimmering things that collapsed into sparkles in the air.

“Ideals are as nothing to them; even on opposite sides, it is the making of war that defines the hume, the man, and it will ever be thus.”

She was curtsying to Agrias, laughing. “Bien sûr, Dame Ser.”

Ramza was standing before Wiegraf in Riovanes; Agrias was standing before Leonar in Almorica. Basch was standing before Gabranth at the top of the Pharos at Ridorana, the light of the Sun-Cryst spilling out around them, igniting the Mist. Igniting all the Mist, white fire erupting from her eyes with the tightening noose.

“Preen and strut as you like! In the end, we are the same! Blood-thirsting carrion birds, Hell-bent on revenge!”

The other woman, Ajora, pulled at Alma’s arm, rotating her, as if they were dancing, as if it was again the manor in Gallionne, the ball, before everything had gone so wrong. And she could see Marche standing before Llednar Twem, deep in the heart of the rift in the Quiet Sands, the crystal to one side between them, a match for the Sun-Cryst.

And Ramza’s blade struck Wiegraf’s, and Leonar pushed back, and Basch turned to block, and Llednar thrust, and Ramza blocked, Agrias blocked, Basch blocked, but Gabranth was emboldened, strengthened by fury, and Agrias ran Leonar through and pushed him back just like Wiegraf pushed Osric, and two Ramzas were winning, one of them was hers and one was very not, but the look in their eyes was so similar...

The woman ran her hand along the crystal. “Fate is merely a word for a program reaching its terminus ad quem; soon it shall begin to execute anew, and nothing shall be learned. This is your brother’s great truth, their language bare.”

Mist coiled ‘round the crystal, and a form took shape, solid smoke and haze and ice, and then armor, fearsome and pristine, a judge’s armor; It’s face was in the woman’s hand, she cupped the chin beneath the helmet’s ugly mask. But as the woman’s grip around the helmet’s face grew tighter, Alma saw that the figure within the armor did not wear it for protection. Its frozen metal scales were pointed inward, and the suit did not end at cuffs or gauntlets or greaves, but instead at manacles and restraints.

“You have returned to us,” hissed Mateus the Corrupt. “High Seraph.”

“Patron of the abducted, the women denied,” said this woman who was Ultima, whose other hand was tight around Alma’s wrist. “You betrayed us in serving the needs of the Heretic Occurian.”

“No!” The armor trembled, even as the woman inside it moaned and lolled. “I did not know! Do not--”

For an eyeblink, Alma’s newest captor had the look of an old man, bald, as she crushed the frozen armor’s head inward with one hand, and then she was herself again, the dark-skinned woman in the blue headscarf, as she jerked at Alma’s arm and pressed her face against the ice-cold crystal, some dead aspect of a Lucavi at her feet and a million million battles behind.

The other Ramza and Wiegraf were all she could see with the tightness ‘round her neck. The moving living fortress of another world, another time, the god eidolon Alexander, burning up. “Another world, another life, another man driven by loss subsumed by obsession with knowledge.” Ajora waved disdainfully at Alexander’s majesty. “Men need not be humes to swallow their own poison. This man of the Lufaine who created this world, doomed all who came to repeat cycles of violence again and again.”

And they were in Riovanes again, and Wiegraf battled Ramza, her brother leaping through a torch’s flame to strike at him, only for Alexander to return as Wiegraf did the same through the fire of a burning bulkhead.

“What difference, in Ivalice? I have watched them all fall to the cycles of pettiness, and I float above in judgment. The Saronians, the Barons, the Palamecians, the Ronkans, the Kashka, the arrogance of men to always believe they will be smarter, be better, for no other reason than their entitlement, believed divine.” Ajora burned white. “There is no difference.”

Alma lost the strength in her legs and toppled, but at her knees she held strong. “You... you are wrong... the difference is always about making a choice.” She clutched at her heart. “You say this is my brother? You know not my brother a whit; he has endured all he has because he made a choice. He’d do all he could to prevent another.”

Ramza Beoulve, her Ramza Beoulve, cut Milleuda Folles down before her. Ramza Beoulve, her Ramza Beoulve, watched as Tietra fell to a crossbow shot fired true.

“Show me all you wish,” Alma murmured through cracked, broken, bloody lips. “It is never too late. Damnation and redemption are not my provenance, but the will of the Father. Whatever sins for which we must answer, it is yet never too late to do the right thing, not for Heaven’s embrace but for the good of all.” And Noah was striking Vayne down even as his neck snapped back.

“Another woman willing to martyr herself.” Ajora laughed—laughed!—and all of Alexander erupted in white explosions. “Let us speak then, of martyrdom, and the Father, with which I am most intimate.”

Barbaneth led her by hand into the chapel, slowly, gently, though walking was still fresh and new. The statue of Ajora behind the altar, with arms raised in supplication, noose dangling free from her neck like a casual scarf, like Alma’s own waterlogged shawl tangled ‘round her throat, and little toddler Alma reached up, up, as if she could embrace the divine, and what her father saw was the child echoing the saint unbidden.

She clasped her hands before Simon, kept them low and in front of her, her head bowed, and his laughter was so sad (Simon branding a screaming heretic with a burning iron), he was saying she was far more pious than he, and she felt so warm...

Tietra was so often quiet, but in the choir, her voice was loudest, the most beautiful. Not even Alma could match her, in the hymns something seemed to fill up Tietra’s lungs and all but lift her off the ground as the highest notes seemed to carry for hours.

She’d thought to teach Tietra the meaning of grace, but she always instead taught Alma, without even thinking it.

And then one sabbath her father was there after the service, and her brothers, and Delita too, and they all picnicked on the grounds. A single perfect afternoon. Dycedarg put his book down with some cajoling and helped Alma identify the birds in the big tree. Zalbaag and Ramza were wrestling in the tall grass. Delita and Tietra laid out and identified clouds.

And as the sun began to set, Barbaneth took the four youngest down to the lakeshore, laughing at the boys splashing each other, and pulled some blades of grass, that he might show them all a trick.

How could she not believe in God, having lived a day like that?

She could feel the woman, Ultima’s, hand on the back of her head, pushing at her, but she dug her heels into the mud of her home and refused to budge.

But there was a cry of agony, and her eyes could not resist turning to view the tall grass again, where Ramza was sobbing, sword through Zalbaag, whose face was mottled and gray.

Lightning struck down, and Dycedarg’s book was burning.

She broke for a run, slipping from Ultima’s grasp, tripping as she ran down the hill towards the lakeshore, her dress soaked and slapping tangled against her legs, feeling the cold of the frozen lake before she saw it. The corpse of Mateus was out there, but as she awkwardly slipped down the hill she fell down to her knees before the sick and wasting form of her father, who was patting Tietra fondly on the head.

Tietra turned to her, crossbow bolt the center stem of a bloody flower across her chest, and burned away to ash.

“Why are you doing this?” Alma bit back her sob, drove a fist into the mud, not bothering to watch her father crumble to pieces.

The armored body of Mateus rose and dragged itself across the frozen lake, but it was Delita, older, his belly full of blood, crushed rose petals in his hands. And then the ice cracked, and he fell, lost to the frozen lake. She reached her hand out, but did not step forward. It was getting harder to see from the tears, or the well-water.

“I reward your faith,” the High Seraph whispered. “No greater servant have I had.”

And Alma woke up in the palms of the Mother Margrace,

And Mewt woke up in the palms of the Mother Margrace,

And Ajora woke up in the palms of the Mother Margrace, her green eyes taking in all the Ambervale as a meal to be had.

She outstretched her arms to encompass it all. Ramza was fighting Wiegraf and Wiegraf was fighting Ramza, back and forth across the plaza, but Ajora turned away from it to smile at Alma.

“You were prepared for me, from the moment of your birth.”

Alma could do naught but stare back.

“Let me show you the weight of inevitability.”

And then the sun began to spin ‘round the globe faster and faster, in reverse, as time rewound. She watched as the world rose (fell) and fell (rose)... and then as it happened again. The Kashka and the Galteans, the Aegyl, the Occuria, and further even than that, to before the Occuria were even mindflayers hiding in a cave, before the Saronians, to a utopia of steel and light and further back still, watching it disassemble back into hamlets and thatched-roofs, back to an era when the world itself was young and unscarred, a world she could not recognize as Ivalice, and back further still, before the people of the world walked as men.

And in this unspoilt land, before humes, before all the others, Ajora walked, through a beautiful forest of purple trees that were unlike any Alma had ever seen, and to a clearing, where she looked up, and Alma looked up, and there was a second moon in the sky.

***

A million million years ago, or so it goes, there was a world of great cities and great innovations and great progress, a world of captivating art and stories that moved; it was a place also of great cruelty, great indolence, prejudice and ressentiment. A world of warfare and capitalism, in which the voices of the oppressed screamed so loud that they couldn’t be heard.

You might once have heard of it.

Through their greed and their apathy and their rage, they destroyed that world, drained it of all it possessed and washed it away; and the few survivors were left to wander the stars without homes, lamenting life’s cruelty and searching for a home to begin again. Once, there were a number of ships, but eventually, there was only one, a ship our minds could not conceive, and upon that ship, the survivors slept, waiting for their problems to be solved by another, as their nature ever was.

But the device that sustained them in their foreversleep failed. They died off slowly, one by one, never waking. At last, there was only one left, a single being with the weight of history draped across their shoulders like a burial shroud. A scientist, mad with grief.

It was within that man, if man he was, that Alma now found herself; sensations of body, of mind were overwhelmed with terms and history and calculations not her own: was this divinity, to be filled with the truly alien, so large that she seemed to expand to bursting?

She’d had a set of Romandan dolls as a girl, a gift from her father; they nestled within one another so tightly that sometimes Ramza had been forced to loosen them for her. She could feel Ajora Glabados swimming within her like a creature of the deep, and within her the white flame of Ultima, that she pressed against this madman’s skin, and felt his sickness within her.

For sick he was; she felt every thought and thought every feeling as her own, a series of naught but ‘what ifs’ that he would run silently as he wandered the dark halls of his vessel, possibilities not branching in web-strands but instead ordered trees, like a naturalist’s categorization, a text, ‘if-then,’ proceeding down each level in turn and then concocting another.

What path might have led to his people being strong enough to live?

There was a hiss of static from one of his, her machines, and then she was Denam Pavel, Denam Morne, turning over the Tarot cards one by one, retracing his steps, searching for a history in which his loved ones did not, could not suffer. The sweat on his face dripped into her mouth and she was drowning.

The man in the ship placed his finger on a button and hesitated before pressing it.

From the red moon of Ivalice came a bullet fired; jagged and blue the crystal came forth, faster than sound, flames of the air in its wake as it entered the atmosphere of the world she knew, the world she didn’t know. Such speed and such force that it cracked the earth apart.

Stone flew into the air and it hung there, suspended like frozen time along a cloud of Mist that came in the crystal’s wake. Dust from the purvama’s rise clouded the sun, and the world cooled and froze over. Around the crystal, mu bunnies danced and sniffed, the first life changed by the second moon, even as other, massive creatures died of the frost and the ice.

She could hear Mateus laugh.

***

Ahnas of the Danan and Heth of the Fabar circled the room at the heart of the labyrinth. These men, not lovers yet, not friends, did circle with hate in their hearts. Ahnas with his sword and Heth with his magicks. Between them, in the room’s center, was a crystal which had come to the land in the times before men.

It was Heth who was charged with guarding the crystal here in the Palace of the Dead, the prison of Fabar, because he who would be the god of death was the only one of them to which the crystal would speak, to sing, and though the lowest floor of the Palace was cold and their breaths were visible clouds that would break apart before their eyes, only Heth’s was thick, would linger, would refract the light into a dozen dozen colors in the torchlight. Heth breathed Mist.

It controlled him, bound him, moved him about as a marionette. All the souls of the world would pass through him like blood in veins. And so Ahnas did not harm Heth, his jailer, but instead smashed the crystal between them into pieces. His sword was no more than steel, but his righteous strength was great and his aim was true. The room gagged and choked on a flood of Mist, Mist that spilled through all the floors of the Palace of the Dead and out into the skies of what would one day be Ivalice, but Ahnas held the other man and they weathered the storm together.

“He loved his enemy as his brother, as more than his brother, what greater than this?” asked Alma Beoulve, and held out her hand, though she could no more touch this vision than any other. “This is Faram the Father you show to me? Then what of my faith has been made untrue?”

It was the Mist that burned ‘cross all the world as the noose was pulled taut ‘round Ajora’s neck. Germonique cried out from where they held him, pulled at his captors as they locked his arms tighter, as all the world burned.

“It was a thing done to you!” Alma showed her Tietra shielding her brother with the last of her strength.

Ajora showed her Delita pulling Tietra over him with the last of his.

Which was true? Both. Neither. It didn’t matter. In truth all these visions could do naught but distract her, contain her, as her body was made not her own. She wasn’t sure there was even an argument to be won. The longer it went on, the harder it was for her to raise her head above the waters.

Another world, then. The Creator, the Keeper of the Crystals, pressed another button. Was this before, or after? A crystal upon one world of two. A world familiar, but different. As the world that followed the slaying of Xabaam, this Ivalice, did flourish into a world like the Creator’s, so too did this world, this Terra, two similar growths, evolution, into cities and towers, electricity and the exchange of coin, toxins dumped into the water. Always poisoned water.

“Ahnas was a man, and his love for Heth was nothing before his hate for Xabaam. Your god is that man, that Creator, who sent his crystals with a finger-twitch, an idle thought.” Ajora shrugged. “He hoped to study, he said, hoped to find the true path that had eluded his people.” The historian Stellazzio was adjusting his glasses to address Ramza. The last Nu Mou was dying in a cave, lifting his jaw to look Ramza in the eye. “His grief was nothing, a veil, for his consumption. No cruelty greater than the callous, uncaring.” Both worlds, hers and this other, consumed themselves and died. But with no crystal remaining, Ivalice continued on to repeat. Terra’s remained, and a single android with a long beard and no heart remained to walk, the Creator’s very shadow, and pressed a button of his own, entrapping his world with another.

She showed Ajora a man in sunglasses cradling her weakened body and carrying her from the desert. Ajora showed her Isilud, strapping her to a chocobo.

Ramza and Wiegraf and Ramza and Wiegraf, circling. Ajora slipped her fingers into Alma’s hair and pulled her head back sharply. “You have not yet seen my truth, you fight to deny.”

“You... haven’t seen mine.” Alma said through gritted teeth. Hob, gob, gob, hob, hob, hob, gob... “I deny nothing. You are the one who fears.”

Gobbeldygook runs his hand along the crude painting, Ultima, and looks at Alma.

Folmarv Tengille’s eyes go crazed at the sight of her.

Ultima could not harm her, not really, not when she needed her so. All she could do was rob her of her sense of self. But Alma Beoulve was stronger than all that, and nobody had ever seen it. She’d so rarely been noticed, after all.

But she was the Goblin Queen.

Her free hand found the stone of the well, and her fingers dug in.

The Creator moved on, giving war to other worlds, giving evolution to other worlds, to study and understand, or to inflict his pain rather than shoulder it. To one world, he gave four crystals, and time curled in on itself. To a world of roses, he granted others, and they locked them away in a tower. But his attention was ever after on those first worlds, the Mist worlds, and they did burden him.

Alma walked through another memory not her own, as her brother and his friends camped at the dried bed of Lake Poescas, the air whistling with the cries of the dead.

Just a clutch, the way they were always splitting and reforming, with Ramza himself asleep by the cookfire as others talked quietly. Dietrich was slicing bits of potato and dropping them in the stewpot, laughing at a ribald jest from Kendra, who had something rolled and jammed between her lips, where it burned softly in the dark and smelled sweet.

Mustadio was sitting on the ground to one side, against a rock on which Balthier was perched, both of them listening to a story that Rem was telling them; the machinist was excited, the pirate far less.

Alma rested her incorporeal hand where it failed to quite touch Ramza’s cheek. Asleep he looked like her brother again, the one who’d left for the Akademy with puffy eyes and a mouth full of promises.

“And at the bottom of the great tomb, behind all of the giants, we found a great airship, we did.” Rem’s tone was fond, but her eyes a little confused, as if some parts of her story didn’t sit right. “Well-preserved, and powerful, and ready for flight.”

“Just like that?” Mustadio asked, and if he didn’t believe the tale, he certainly enjoyed it.

“As if it had waited for us all along.” She placed a hand on her chin. “From an earlier age, it was. In our time, most were the provenance of empires. But this was a ship powered by phantoma itself.”

“Wait...” Mustadio sat up straighter. “You say that word, you said it meant how we’d say anima.” He frowned. “You found a vessel powered by souls?”

“Are not all ships powered by the soul?” Aqua walked up, holding a bowl. “I’ve known many a ship to run on happy faces.”

Balthier rolled his eyes. Dietrich looked from the keyblade wielder to Kendra, whose eyes were clenched tight as she tried to keep her laughing silent.

“Are either of them jesting?” Kendra shook her head, winked.

Rem waited for Aqua to collect her evening meal with polite thanks and walk to another part of the camp before continuing. “It was... people will craft whatever they’re able, in the name of war. I...” She rubbed at her arms, though Poescas was always too warm. “I did not so much like the ship, in truth, but we were...” Not so different from the weapon of war, she didn’t say.

But Balthier, for his part, was no longer listening. He’d started at first to think of his father, of course, of the Bahamut and every other thing, but soon enough instead remembered another campfire, another life. A small floating island not so far from Dorstonis, but neutral; they’d laid up to scrub the vents clean of mimic-germinites and Nono had shared with them glass bottles of something bitter he’d picked up in Nalbina. He was yet new to his new name, and in the twilight and heady from liquor that was stronger for humes than Nono had suggested, he let his mask slip a bit.

“Fran,” he asked his partner, “What... is Mist?”

And the Viera had studied him, then glanced to Nono, who shrugged, and said at last, “Such is a question for the Nu Mou.”

Balthier, who still sometimes thought “Ffamran” when his focus slipped, when his guard slipped, took a slug from his bottle. Head buzzing like it hadn’t since those nights with Jules, making Alma feel hazy, swimmy, he felt hurt, patronized. “I’m rather afraid I’m not of personal acquaintance with any Nu Mou... shall I go on pilgrimage to Mt. Bur-Omisace?”

Fran, who once had made such a pilgrimage, said nothing. Because this young hume, she trusted him of a sort, but she had not told all of her own tale yet, still heard the name “Balthier” and thought of another man. Nono sighed, which sounded more like a drawn-out “kupoooo,” and stood, wobbly with drink, leaving Fran to the conversation alone. She did not sigh, she never sighed, but her lips set in a way that Balthier would one day translate to mean the same. She had pried loose her elaborate Viera heels and dug her feet into the dirt, feeling the pulse of the floating earth. The purvama was raw Mist, these islands just boats on stormy seas.

At last she looked at him. “Hume life is too short to consider death in more than passing.”

He pouted, waggled the bottle. “Because it is short, we must needs consider it far sooner.”

She would one day watch him die, withered, in a bed; having given up all chances to burn out brightly—burning Mist across the sky, noose tightening—she would huddle under the last stone, the last gift, clutching her sister, one hand on her belly, on a child that would take years and years to be born, long after he was gone.

She stands, and does not take his hand, not yet, but he follows anyway. He always follows. And Alma follows, as they walk away from the ship, away from Nono tightening bolts because he knows not what to do with himself, to another edge of the small island, with all the sky before them.

“Hold out your hands,” she says.

And because he is so often mystified by her, because her tone is gentle, not reproachful, because his walls are weak from the drink, he does, over the edge, above nothing. And nothing happens at first, but because she is patient, he will prove he can be patient, too. He can be silent, he can be still; because he thinks she respects him now, but he suspects she yet does not like him much at all. He holds out his hands and waits, even though he lilts, he tilts, just a bit in the winds of the purvama.

He can’t often see the Mist, at least not out of Jagd, or some broken-up temple ripe for plucking. What he sees is empty sky, his home. But the longer he holds still, the more he wonders if he does see it, the more he wonders if the chill his palms feel is real, even as his face is warm. And then, faintly, it’s there, cupped in his hands, a snowfly.

And Alma is holding it, too, her hands over his, floating in the air, this beautiful white nothing, bobbing in the wind, turning, dancing.

And years ahead, years past her own death and her brother’s and everyone she’s known, years after an old man writes a book, after the truth wins out, after the church begins to crumble in the face of a changing world, after the final lighthouse is lit, a man named Ashley Riot walks through the snow, face stone like a temple edifice, doubt curdled in his heart, and the snowflies are everywhere in the trees, he’s watching them, and his heart aches in a way he doesn’t understand. He runs his fingers over the rood ‘round his neck, holds onto a memory he prays to be true, and watches them circle.

She sees them in the Palace of the Dead; she’d thought them shards of crystal, or spores of the mold along the walls. She sees them born of love, of hate, with a crystal shattered, circling Ahnas as he shields Heth with his own frame.

She sees more and more of them, like dots printed in rows, like the pixels on Marche’s television screen, and they zoom out, and they zoom out, and she watches them burn.

The Mist is but stagnant souls hung in the air. The crystal a recorder.

The Creator kept trying. Two worlds, he sent to each eight crystals. And history repeated. In one, two worlds merged. In the other, a moonship escaped a dying world to re-seed a new one. All paths led to the same end. The latter exercise so infuriating, so hopeless, that he returned to it, returned to its success and its royalty, returned to the Lunarians’ colony and sought to erase its proof of his failure himself. And as his ship died, as his primal scream chased the half-moon child’s army back to his world, as his dream died, Alma watched and lived his anger, knowing that on Ivalice the pattern repeated without even a crystal, that the Salon at Giruvegan grew in power, that they would emulate their Creator’s pattern as every world had.

And she was so tired. She fought with love, and saw truth and beauty in the faces of those she witnessed, in the struggles for freedom, freedom was all any of them ever, ever sought, she was emboldened, but so tired.

Her hand yet held, but she felt so heavy.

They marched her, Ajora, through the streets to Golgollada, and she was so tired. For a moment she was Orran, instead, and she started to cry. But the gallows grew closer, and she would not let them break her at the end. She’d not let Germonique see her weep.

“You can stop this,” she whispered.

“Why would I?” asked Ajora.

“I speak not to you,” she said, “But the woman you wear; I know she lingers still; she was stronger than I, you’ve proven that time and again.”

“We are the same.” Ultima’s voice was soft, like falling feathers.

“You are not.” She shook her head as the noose was lowered around her neck. “You shared a common pain, but I do not. You seek to make our cause common, but what you show to me is not a truth of value.”

“My power cannot be resisted forever,” said Ultima, and Alma offered a weak smile as the rope pulled taut.

“You gave that power to me.” And she refused to let the Mist burn.

The experience of being hanged. It is not a quick break of the neck; it is an agonized, slow strangulation, feet struggling to find purchase, the world hazing as it contracts to a single flickering dot. It is unlike anything else. Each part of her goes numb in turn as the blood ceases flow... it feels like turning to air. To Mist.

And for a moment, she thinks that she’s made a mistake, that this fallen angel has been right, that she is yet another woman self-sacrificed to keep the wheel turning.

But her hand holds.

Her hand holds.

And she feels another hand, a woman’s hand, take hers.

***

And light did pour from the mouth of Ajora, Ajora in Alma’s flesh, a bright awful light that caused each of them yet standing strong on the airship deck to flinch back; save for Ramza Beoulve, gazing eyes open into the awful blinding flash, tear-streaked, and sole witness to Ajora clutching at her abdomen, doubling over as her back erupted in cobalt blue flames.

“What...is this?” She took a step backwards, the light flickering as her mouth moved. “What happens to me?” But Ramza knew. He knew. He struggled to stand as violent winds roared through the Necrohol. That face, caked in Folmarv’s ichor, constricted as it fought against itself.

“Unghhh... Ramza... please.” His sister, his real, precious sister, gasped out fresh blood. “Help me...”

***

She stood in a garden after the end of the world. Well-kept, growing, and smelling of life and love and home.

Alma had never grown anything. She used to watch the men of the grounds plant the flowers with envy, but Dycedarg wouldn’t hear of it, a Beoulve digging a hole with her hands.

“There are ladies of Quality who have gardens,” Zalbaag offered off-handedly in her defense.

“They choose colors to array,” fired off her eldest brother in exchange. “They do not stick turnips in the ground themselves like a peasant.”

She walked up one row of plants, letting her fingers trace along the leaves and stalks. There were all kinds of plants, but most of all there were pumpkins, dozens and dozens of them, meticulously cared for pumpkins, all but ready to harvest. And at the end of those lines was a small home, colorful and neat, with smoke rising lazily from a chimney and looking for all the world like a candy house in a story. It was, she realized with a bit of guilt, how she’d imagined Tietra’s home to be, before she and Delita had moved into the manor.

She went to knock upon the door, but it swung open at the first touch; the warmth of a baking oven and the light of candles beckoned her inward. At the kitchen was a woman in royal purple, a dress that showed more skin than Alma had ever seen of another person outside the baths, and for an eyeblink she seemed a crone before she turned, smiling, the most beautiful woman Alma had ever seen. She had a mage’s steeple-hat of the same shade, and she hustled to the dining table even as Alma sat across from her without being told.

“Goodness! You nearly caught me without my face on!” The woman winked, crossing her legs ostentatiously and leaning against the table. “It’s all right, now, you’re safe in here.”

“Who are you?” she asked, but she already knew.

Deneb Rove rested her chin in her hand. “The irony of me, the irony of you, here together; I am everything you fight against.”

Malicious spirit, haunter of the Cataclysm, seducer of the Saint King Mesa; Destin Mesa-al-Solidor, nee Faroda, founder hero, vile conqueror. She was a heart in a puppet; another girl sacrificed.

“You’re the first, aren’t you?” Alma knows what the High Seraph knows. Time was, is, nothing. “You’re Lilith of the Danan. The first fiend.”

“The Danan... a name of which I’d thought naught for a thousand years or more.” Deneb chuckled. “Humes care so much for history, when they see so little of it, and believe even less. If you ask if I knew them, We’aka and Zomal and Loemund and Matoya and all the rest, I’ll not deny it. But you should know yourself how rude it is to ask a lady her true age.” And she winked.

She wasn’t sure what she’d come here to ask. Wasn’t sure how she’d come here at all. So she asked “Why pumpkins?”

Her smile became something warmer, like a mother’s. “They are just... they look so full. And they are, full of life. I love life. I suppose that’s why I keep living.”

“But you take the lives of others.” Alma shook her head. “You love your own life, not all life.”

“You must love yourself first, Alma Beoulve.” Deneb shrugged. “Men will not love your life enough to let you live it, you must live for yourself.” And she saw Deneb, Lilith, suffer at the hands of the oldest gods, driven from paradise.

There was a peal of laughter, and she turned to find Ajora Glabados sitting at the table, between them, and it was the real Ajora, the early Ajora, whose eyes, those consuming green eyes, held as much wit and life as they did malice and pain. She was still holding Alma’s hand.

And Alma saw another world, where a different heart in a doll split her life apart and gave it away in a dozen crystals, until there was nothing of her remaining.

And she saw another, where a flower girl was run through with a sword the length of the world.

And she opened her eyes again, and Tietra was at the table with them, and Alma’s tears began again. Not well-water tears, but real, salt she could taste and swallow. Tietra bit her lip, looked uncomfortable but alive, so alive.

“Hullo, Alma,” she said, and Deneb made a sound like “awww.”

And she saw a woman dancing, turning, her feet on the water’s surface, and the Mist moved with her. Because they weren’t only for the dying. The Snowflies gave her family. Another world, another language, a reach across time.

And she saw Ajora taking lessons. Lessons in poise and how to fake a smile. She’d never needed lessons in killing, or in dancing either. She saw Ajora teaching by the side of a lake, laughing at the joke of a child. She saw Ajora screaming in terror at her own actions, smashing an antique mirror, sobbing over Balias in a private chamber. She saw Ajora run her fingers along Germonique’s face, tighten, then release.

“Did you believe the lie before she found you?” Alma asked her.

“There is too little left of me to remember the truth.” Ajora shook her head. “We have been the same for twelve hundred years.”

Tietra giggled. At a look from Ajora, she blushed. “You’ve no idea; Alma Beoulve is the most stubborn woman to ever live.” Alma clutching Tietra’s hand, leading her into caves, into unused studies and storerooms, up hills. If she’d been so much braver, it was only because Tietra had been there with her. She’d never done so well when she was alone.

But she was not alone here; she was downright crowded. Aqua was laughing softly and telling Ramza, “You’d be surprised, how many hearts can fit in one. Our endless capacity.”

Deneb yawned, and for but a moment her tongue was forked.

Ajora swept her free hand over the table, and there was a splintering sound as the wood’s grain evened out, then split again, until there was a grid of squares between them. And then the chess pieces appeared.

On Alma’s side, the pieces were switched; she was the king, and Ramza the queen.

She moved a pawn, and then Ajora did the same, and then her, and then Ajora again. Without thinking, without control. Ajora’s pieces the Lucavi, the church. Alma sent out Ramza’s Company Zero, but she had little schooling in tactics; Ajora claimed Dorothea and Bran quickly.

“You envied Agrias Oaks.” Ajora spoke without cruelty. Ajora spoke using the past tense, cruelly. “She grew up with brothers as well, and learned the sword without them.” She moved the Agrias piece, which was of course a knight, and she saw Agrias with her sisters, three women pledged to serve. The pride made them glow; they showed Ultima for a parody. “Three women, and only one remains, betrayed by her faith and the crown she served. The sword is not the only choice for a woman to wield. Her strength is impressive, but it is not her who fends me off here, now, it is you. It is you who battles Ultima yet. You have fear on your side, Goblin Queen.”

The table cracked again, and the board enlarged. Two other armies took to the field. Deneb had at her hands Denam Morne’s, and she lifted the figurine of Lanselot Hamilton and gave it a kiss on the cheek. Tietra’s forces were obvious. But Delita’s queen was not Alma’s dear friend, but a witch of the Dark. Deneb winked at Alma.

“I never learned to play,” Tietra said, and Alma remembered cajoling Ramza, pounding her tiny fists on his back, demanding he show her the game. The language of men, she’d felt. Her father had loved her at arm’s length in that way men do with girls that they admire without attempting to understand.

“Just do as your brother would,” said Ajora, and Tietra looked at her with hate in her heart.

“Aye, then I shall.” And she swept her arm across the table, scattering the pieces that she and Ajora held both. Cu Chulainn fell off the table and clattered beneath a chest of drawers.

“Oh, I like her!” Deneb clapped her hands. “I would have worn your skin happily, Miss Tietra.”

Tietra blanched.

The table cracked again. The Northern Sky and the Southern, The council of nobles, the Corpse Brigade, the criminal syndicate of Sal Ghidos, the Dark Knights of Valendia, the Warriors of Light, so many factions that no one could discern the pieces, but they slid about on their own now, and Alma watched as they took each other off the board.

So much death. Alma grabbed Tietra’s hand with her free one, for Ajora still held her.

“Tietra... I am truly sorry. For everything.”

Her best friend, her sister, blinked, then smiled sadly. “Alma. You always wanted to be a saint for the Lord. And all these moving pieces... I do not understand it all. But even were we truly the pieces of a large infernal machine... if my purpose was to lead you here, I cannot regret my fate...” A single tear escaped her right eye, and she turned her head so that her hair fell in a veil. “I only wish... my brother...”

Alma closed her eyes. And felt anger.

“What better reason to be kind?” She heard herself ask. “If we are all we have?”

And as his ship died, as his primal scream chased the half-moon child’s army back to his world, as his dream died, and as Alma watched and lived his anger, The Creator pressed one final button. Because it was the nature of man to live on, to refuse the cycles of their own making. And one last crystal was launched. Through time and space, a bullet backwards into the origin of everything, into the space parallel to space. Not a recorder, but a memory—a tomestone, that someone would learn from his own mistakes.

And into the beginning of another cosmos it fell, a repository of all evolution, of all cycles, of violence and joys, that a new beginning was possible. That it might implore a new life to learn. That it would succeed where he had failed so often.

“Hear,” it cried, she cried.

“Feel,” it cried, she cried.

“Think,” it cried, she cried.

And Ajora clenched her hand tighter. Alma could feel the well water again. “Time grows short. We all drown together soon.”

“We do not.” Alma shook her head. The pieces on the board kept moving, eliminating each other, fewer and fewer remaining. “Open your eyes,” she told Ajora, or herself.

And they were not playing the game at all. Ultima watched as The Creator pushed his pieces, and across from him, across a table of a billion squares in five dimensions, a game of time and probability, of evolution and chance, played his opponent, with a figure like smoke and two eyes of burning embers.

And Ultima screamed.

And Venat slid Alma’s piece one square, placing Ultima in check.

The High Seraph raged, and the cottage burned, and Tietra fell to the bolt again and again, and Deneb vanished into dust, and Alma watched Ajora buckle under the weight of her.

Alma held her hand tight.

And Ajora remembered making her promises. To her teacher. To Balias. To Germonique.

“Alma.” Ajora looked at her with those piercing green eyes, the eyes that burned the world. “You must promise. I will not be able to hold her for long.”

“Have faith.” Alma smiled, and Ajora laughed, because she did. She did.

Ultima grabbed Ajora, both her sickly green hands around Ajora’s face, as though she’d crush the very mind, extinguish the very anima, that had held her for so long. And Ajora smirked at this thing that curled around her all her life, and felt freer than she ever had, free for the first time since her birth.

And with the weight of twelve hundred years, she shouted.

“I am no false saint for you to use!”

And the sky burned.

***

“Alma!” cried Ramza, and he reached out his hand.

“Ramza... No!” Ajora grabbed her own outstretched hand. “You cannot--! You must not--! NO!”

The blue flames roared, and stranger still were green flames that erupted as well, not intermingling, consuming the silver-haired distortion of Alma Beoulve, and Alma’s jaw seemed to unhinge, as a pair of hands unfurled from within her throat... and in a violent retch, Alma seemed to expunge a flickering, swelling figure. It was launched from her like vomit, in a way impossible to fathom, blood-soaked and unwrapping into a mass of wings. It curled int the air, turning in a somersault as feathers rained across the deck. Mustadio, true to form, did not wait to fire upon the cancerous hume-like projectile, but each shot burned in the air before reaching it. Alma was falling even as this other thing righted itself with a damnable grace, as Agrias thrust her free arm to one side and let off an incantation of protection on the assembled party.

Ramza was diving to catch his sister’s limp body as this floating woman, shimmering and seemingly sculpted from blood itself, did extended its own arms. Its naked figure, a sick parody of the feminine form, was wreathed in holy light and winds, and tattered sails snapped off the bowsprit where they dangled and ballooned around her, the deck cracking in twain as machine parts flew upwards into the storm.

Alma was already losing so much of her visions, they were desiccating in her hands, but a single image of Vayne Solidor atop the Bahamut appeared, then vanished, as they watched the sails wrap around her into a white dress, as the assemblage formed a platform of gears and workings beneath her feet. Ultima, the High Seraph gazed down upon her foes with surprising lack of passion.

“Alma!” He clutched onto his sister, his living sister, his very heart. “Are you all right?”

“I... I will be.” Her voice was hoarse, throat mangled with the scars of her departed possessor. “But Ajora—you must kill her... quickly...” I promised her.

Ramza eased her to the deck and readied his sword.

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