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"I don't know whether your words are lies created to deceive me, or the truth that I have sought all my life,' Sephiroth says. But it's not quite true. He knows what Genesis' words are. It still doesn't matter.
Angeal was the one who started him thinking of it. Angeal set his words on a warm solid slab of life-giving earth and sent them to their listeners. No excuses, no misunderstandings, no lies, and no mercy for enemies.
His apprentice Zack had fit around him like the ocean on the shore, and appropriately his words were like water. The flowed in and out, up and down and around any obstacles. They didn't seem to hold any weight, yet Sephiroth had seen them form a barrier as solid as any Angeal had set up, and wear down even Angeal's walls, given time.
Zack in turn has adopted someone, a trooper whose name Sephiroth can never seem to remember. He looks like a miniature golden version of Zack, yet his speech shows something clearly different. He rarely speaks, especially not when the Great General could hear, yet when he does his meaning shines out clear to all, like rays of sun breaking through a Cloud bank.
The opposite of this is the voice Sephiroth has been hearing since they entered this town (yet it seems familiar, as everything in the town does, as though maybe he's heard it all his life without knowing). This voice speaks constantly, no one can hear it save himself, and despite all the speaking it does, he can't ever seem to quite catch it's meaning.
Genesis is the one standing before him, though – the one whose words have momentarily broken over the black oily sound of the silent voice. Sephiroth has always though of Genesis' voice as the air – a perfect complement for Angeal's stolid earth. He sets his words upon it and wafts them to you, to pick up or no seemingly making no difference to him. Sephiroth has seen the damage wind can do when angry too, which only makes this analogy better.
He's used to thinking of his own voice as fire. He may try to be understanding, a sympathetic leader for his troops, but his voice, like himself, is a force of destruction, better suited to tearing down than building. Recent discoveries have only reinforced this.
Fire is also short-lived without fuel, so for his next comment Sephiroth borrows some of Angeal's earth for strength and longevity and Zack's waves for impact. He hopes he has the trooper's clarity, and despite it all he senses the strongest presence in his voice is the oily blackness.
"You will rot," he says.