♡ ▐▒ ━━━ They called it, so he heard, “The Forgotten City”.
The people said it was there that a great warrior had been slain in cold blood, the supposed “savior” of their Planet that managed to pray for a miracle that washed everything away.
He walked on, his boots crunching through hard packed dirt that reminded him vaguely of sand. He walked among the ghostly trees that raised their skeletal branches to the moon, reflecting its glow eagerly so that they looked as if they were carved from it. He walked on until he came upon a glistening lake and a twisting monument that curved like a shell.
Zidane cast his gaze around, but supposedly he was the only soul that dared to walk this holy ground. It was here the forgotten waited, here they could slither into one’s bones and slumber on. He could feel the ghosts whispering around him, the air thick with the chanting of the dead. He ignored them.
Zidane stepped into the icy waters. He strode deeper, until he was waist high, eyes searching... looking around with desperate intensity.
Where the hell is that White Materia? He searched yet more, all of his clues and investigating saying it was here the powerful orb should be, softly humming and shimmering at the bottom of a lake where the dead would rest with it.
But there was something else that drove him. Another voice that cut through the ghosts, a voice Zidane thought would be gone, forgotten too...
A voice clinical and cold, as old as the moon or the sun, dry as parchment and pushing him on and on... it wasn’t something he could ignore.
How could he ignore his true purpose, after all this time? After everything?
His ghosts could not--no, would not--die.
