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Years of hunting down Estharian relics. Pouring through crumbling documents about the Sorceress Wars and the Loire Era. The ordeal of decoding the O Lab manifests. The endless collection and study of every artifact, every painting, every dossier that had weathered generations. It had all brought me to this. I had found the key to reversing time.
I venture first, desperately and blindly, into the mind of my mother.
I recall the day almost as vividly as it appears to me now through my mother's eyes. The sun had made dappled patterns out of leaves, and it poured down in thick, bright rays that had tiny white cabbage moths darting through them. I remain a quiet spectator, drifting, cradled gently in the sound of my mother humming as she hung sheets on a line. My sister and I galloped around the yard, giggling, our hair streamed out behind us, our knees green with grass stains.
I apply the slightest pressure -- it doesn't take much, not for this, merely the thought brushing against her, and don't I recall this day always having gone this way? -- My mother caught her as she ran past, and so, I grasp my sister to me and feel her, alive, and know that somewhere, at some time, she is there, and whole, and loved.
***
I have used the Machine again and again to no avail. Time. It will not wait. No matter how hard you hold on. I retreat once again to the day she asked me to be her Knight. She would have no children, and she never took a lover. It had been too dangerous for her to love, her love had meant death. I watch my own face as I came to the realization that we were in danger already, and I see the resolve that formed on my features. I’ve seen it through the eyes of my mother, the scene blurred with her tears, feel her fleeting thoughts of regret replaced by fear of losing both her daughters. I've seen it through my sister's eyes, and time after time I feel the way her voice quavered in her throat just like I remembered from that fateful day.
Revisiting that moment, I cannot bear to stay any longer when I hear the scuffle of boots outside the house. When my sister and I had escaped out the back door, I run from the scene as well. I no longer wait to watch myself cast that forbidden Para-Magic on the women and men who had attempted to surround us, their mouths twisted with cursing my sister, calling her a ruthless tyrant, a villain. Spitting Hyne's name at her like a swear.
***
I have tried to undo her death more times than I can count. I have watched through the eyes of SeeDs thinking they were legends fated to end the life of the final Sorceress, on a vain crusade fueled by false righteousness. They had found us that night, cowering in that crumbling Pub in the ruins of Old Winhill, and I am unable to change it despite all my wild efforts. I am helpless to curb their hatred and fear. I have long ago stopped trying to fight them back, in my own body or in hers. I watch myself through their eyes as I screamed at them that my sister was not the one, that she had made no sacrifices, done no rituals, that she was not fated to wreak terror on the past. I watch her die in my arms through the eyes of the mercenary who ultimately claimed her life, his Guardian Force vanished in a haze, and I wonder how they could have used such demons to slaughter the innocent and felt justified. Lowlifes. Shameless, filthy wretches.
I tried to undo it, and now I can only turn my eyes away before the light fades from her and I, too, become Hyne's Descendant.
***
The Moon taunts me. Some nights I dream of it, the Lunar Cry. The wretched limbs of monsters clawing their way through space. In my dreams, though I have never seen her image, I am haunted by Adel’s grinning face as she plummets to Earth. My sister did not bring her down, yet she died accused of it. Though I am not defeated, I kannot bring myself to see my sister die again.
If I cannot save her, I will try to find someone who can. I will try to find this Sorceress, the one who changed the past. The one the SeeDs called a cold-blooded tyrant. The one who slaughtered countless men and destroyed many nations. The one who I knew had indirectly caused the death of at least one innocent woman, my best friend, a girl who used to gallop through dappled sunlight with grass stains on her knees not so long ago.
***
I climb into the seat, the blue light of the Machine washes over the room. I reach back into the past, further than I have ever gone before.
Her name is Rinoa. She recognized me, somehow, though this is my first contact with her. She's only semi-conscious, stretched out on a bed in some sort of medical bay. As I stood her up (it's so easy, as if there is a hole in her psyche I fit into ethereally, without even trying, like it's meant for me) and moved her out of the room, it's almost as if she floated us along. I realize she was in a facility among the stars, in the lab that orbits the Moon, long abandoned in my time. I realize where I am in time and in space. The yelling and panic of alarms is replaced with a serene kalm, for me.
My powers are easily kalled, here, inside the girl, and with no resistance from her quiet consciousness, I pushed people out of her way, and found a space suit. As we drifted towards the prison, towards that face that haunts my dreams, I feel the pieces fall into place. I leave the girl suspended there after I have released the seal, the Lunar Cry welled up from the Moon behind us, and as I pass into the frenzied screams of the mind of the woman who has haunted my dreams, I feel a thought. A small, quiet thought from the girl I left behind.
I hadn’t thought of them, the impudent mercenaries, in my calm serenity, when I took hold of this girl and brought her out into space. But this is a wretched reminder. In the horror and chattering of this tormented mind I feel a koldness run through me. I had forgotten about the legend when I became the last living embodiment. I had forgotten the fate of the witch who brought Adel to earth.
It's the SeeD. It must be. The girl is calling for him.
***
The next one is older, and she writhed against my touch instantly. She was alone in the ruins of what used to be her life's work, and as I observe the thought she recoiled, even as I katch a vague memory of children playing. It reminds me of my sister, running in the sunshine, dying in the ruins. She struggled against me, this time is so much harder than with the girl in the space station, or with my sister or mother, their very souls opened up to me and made me one with them. This is more difficult even than the SeeDs, full of mistaken hatred for my sister, hatred that was meant for me, that through the ministrations of fate had turned me into what they had feared all along.
She raged against me like an icy gale, and shut me out. And so it should be that we would be diametrikally opposed, this woman and I. For here in this run-down, krumbling place I had found the mind of the mother of SeeD and the keeper of the Garden. I knew from my studies that she was fated to bend to the whims of time. This was the beginning of my reign of terror. I had found the start of the thread.
***
Finally I had exhausted her will. She settled into silence and let me work. And so, I researched. I search for the source of the Machine’s power. I diskover that Adel was still in orbit around the Moon. SeeD was in its 10th year. Deling was still alive. And no one had yet heard of the Witch Ultimecia.
But they would. I would play the part. Let them live out a fantasy beyond their imaginations. I would find Ellone, wherever she had hidden from me. And after the show, I would destroy the Legendary SeeD, and end my nightmare. Rewrite Time itself. When I awaken in the throne room, I am holding something klasped in my klammy hands, though I don't remember taking it from the kollection. The ring is tarnished silver, but the feline face and angel’s wing still keep their shape.