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"Yuna, come down!" she heard Lulu yell far below her, but she pretended not to hear. It wasn't that she wanted to be rude, but there wasn't much else she could do; even if she could find the breath to call down to her she couldn't really turn around to face her, and freeing an arm to wave down at her was just as impossible.
The wind carried the occasional hint of voices up to her from where her friends huddled at the base of the cliff, but as long as they were talking at a normal volume she couldn't make out the words. Then suddenly a blitzball slammed into the rock just above her head and she froze in place, her smart fingers and toes luckily clinging more tightly to her current hand and foot holds instead of letting go in the moment when her head was too surprised to keep telling them what to do.
"If you don't start comin' down right now the next one'll be even closer!" Chappu called up, then suddenly yelped in pain.
A moment later Yuna heard Lulu turning her shouts on Chappu instead of her, "That was your plan? That's a terrible plan!"
There was another indistinct buzz of conversation, then Chappu yelled at her again, "W-well, I'm gonna get your dad! I bet you'll be on trouble if you aren't on the ground before he gets here, ya?"
He was the only person who ever called Kimahri her dad, everyone else too awed by the man in the statue in the temple and by the power that he'd passed down to her to risk disrespecting either of them by forgetting whose daughter she really was. It made her stomach squirm a little whenever she thought about it too much, because acting like that made it obvious that they didn't really know anything at all about her daddy if they thought he'd get angry that somebody besides just the temple was taking care of her, or that he was somebody to get awed about to begin with. At the same time sometimes she got worried that even though he wouldn't be angry about it maybe he would get sad if he was ever listening to the world from the Farplane and heard her call someone else 'Father' so she didn't, and she didn't ask anyone else to... but she never corrected Chappu either.
She'd had no idea how close she was getting to the top, too afraid that she might look up and find out that even though her limbs were aching like they'd hate her forever she wasn't even halfway there, so it caught her by surprise when she slowly inched her left hand up to find the next little crack in the rock that she could just barely hold onto and instead found her fingers sliding over a wide clear shelf of flat land. She risked a glimpse up and laughed out loud from relief as much as joy when she saw the line where the cliff edge turned into sky just above her head.
Yuna found a brand new burst of energy in her to see her through those last few feet. Her arms trembled but held when she pulled her torso up over the edge, and then it was easy to wriggle forward on her belly until her legs were safely up. For several long minutes she just flopped there with her face in the dirt, gasping air and waiting for her arms and legs to start feeling like they wouldn't mind moving again. But it didn't take too long before she rolled onto her back to face the bright blue sky and started to laugh again, bright and happy and so loud that nobody in Besaid would have expected it to come out of the High Summoner's demure daughter.
She had done it! She'd climbed like a Ronso, up the steep sharp precipice that everybody knew no human could reach the top of so nobody ever tried at all. Her hands were torn and bloody, one of her fingernails cracked right in half along its length from a scary moment when her hand had slipped and she'd caught herself badly, and one of her shins was more scrape than skin, but she had made it.
Her legs were still shaking, pangs shooting all through them, when she climbed slowly to her feet but she told them firmly to hold her and they did. She walked straight back to the cliff edge and stood there so close that her toes curled over the side, looking out over the view that as far as she knew no human had ever seen.
No human in a thousand years anyway, an Al Bhed part of her mind thought, noting the ruins that were up there just like they were everywhere else even though good Yevonite girls were supposed to ignore them to the best of their ability.
She crossed her arms over her chest, planted her feet wide, and didn't feel afraid at all. Her mind was full of stories of Gagazet, the great towering mountain at the edge of the world that her father had climbed and Kimahri had loved, and she felt connected to them both from her own miniature version of it. She couldn't fear it, because a Ronso's heart towered like a mountain and her's would too; from her father she could reach out to the fayth where they sang in their stone, from her mother she could look at the ruined building closest to her and know that it was a lighthouse and know what she might be able to do to make it flare again though that knowledge grew shakier every year that she wasn't allowed to use it, and from Kimahri she had a heart that could touch the sky.
She was studying the horizon, trying to decide whether it was really Kilika she thought she saw there, a more likely seeming cloud bank, or, most unluckily, if it might be Sin's bulk in the water, when Kimahri reached her. He must have climbed the side closest to the village because she hadn't seen him coming, but she had expected that and wasn't startled enough to sway on her perch at the cliff edge at all when he said, "Yuna."
She took one step backward before she whirled on her toes to face him, flinging her arms out and smiling as she said, "Look, Kimahri! I made it!"
"Kimahri sees." He knelt down before her and gently took her hands, turning them so he could look over the cuts on them. He repeated the process inspecting her legs, then sniffed the air once and nudged her to lift one foot so he could look at the sole. Her feet were as calloused as a dog's from years of following his example and never wearing shoes except in the temple where they forced them onto her, but even through the thick skin she'd managed to cut herself there without even noticing it. Her entire body was aching too much for that single pain to catch her attention. He made a growling noise, but Yuna knew that it was towards her injuries and not really her. "Chappu came, frightened Kimahri."
For the first time since she'd reached the top Yuna's smile faded a little. "I didn't mean to scare you," she told him, curling her hand lightly over his broken horn, a habit left over from back when she'd first met him and getting to grab a Ronso's horn had seemed like the neatest thing in the world. She didn't know if it was comforting to him at all but it always made her feel better, reminding her of just how solid he was. "I wouldn't have fallen. I know you come up here sometimes, and I wanted to too."
He made another rumbling noise, and she recognized it as thoughtful instead of upset. "Come. Hold tight," he said, crouching low so she could climb onto his back. She knew that it wouldn't do any good to argue that she wanted to stay, that she hadn't even had a chance to explore yet; now that he'd seen the blood he wasn't going to let her wait to get healing. She climbed on, wrapping her arms around his neck and not worrying about whether they'd regained enough strength to hold on all the way down because she knew that even if she slipped he'd never let her fall. Then, just before he began to move, he said, "Next time, Kimahri will bring you."
Then he launched himself downward, and Yuna could hear Lulu and Wakka screaming below her but she closed her eyes and relished the feeling of the wind tearing at her face, waiting for the inevitable jolt when Kimahri's claws found rock and latched in long enough to control the speed of their fall.
A Ronso would never be afraid of falling, no matter how far the drop. They always knew that they could find their way safely back down to the ground.