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“The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s.”
- Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“He killed my family.”
A halting, stumbling break in the silence. Terra held her own quiet, toying with the hem of her blouse – and she stopped, and fixed her back, as would befit the general who taught her. Shoulders high, chin raised. Hold their gaze one at a time, Celes told her, sending her on her way across the desert with the juice of her aloe plant and well-wishes for company. Fiddling earned a light rap on the knuckles and was no image to present to the circle, in gathering whom under old beams that creaked like a boat aflounder on the waves outside their walls she had quite likely made a terrible mistake.
When the voice picked up again, it choked, a wide open mouth in disbelief of the words he made it shape. “I heard him on the wind, laughing when I picked up my daughters' bodies. My wife fell into the ground when it opened, and the sound, the snap, I can't describe it.”
Those hoarse words came sharply to a stop and all eyes fell on Terra at what they chose as the twelfth hour, the head of the circle. His chair scraped the floorboards as he leaned back and closed his eyes. Indication he'd said as much as he wanted to say, so she cleared her throat and raised her own voice.
“I fell a few hundred feet from the sky, that day. I still see it sometimes in my dreams. The ground rushing up to me, and my friend's hand falling away, further and further.” Strago said to tell her own story would help the others be at ease sharing theirs, and that was all he had to say when she proposed the idea, scurrying away and avoiding her in the corridors. But it sounded sensible, and no-one in the little room objected. A lone gull flew past the lone window, cawing as if in encouragement. “I'm sure we all have our own ghosts from that time,” she said, trailing off into a whisper.
Noises of assent spread in a chain around the circle. They met in a dim attic over what was once the South Figaro relic shop, nestled between a sheet-draped piano and wooden boxes of indeterminate age and cargo, gathered around a single shaft of light pouring in from the one window. In the gloom, they'd looked at one another and taken down their hoods at last. Five faces, tired and lines and so very usual – no-one who would stand out in a crowd, give one pause should they pass on the street.
The first speaker – Moritz, his name was, and he drew in short hitching breaths as he found his voice again. “And I worshipped him for it.”
A colder sound came from two seats to his left. Raumer, the bigger one, the last to take off the robe and dump it on the floor she forgot to sweep before the meeting. “Why the hell not?” he slurred in a voice that rumbled like a mighty conveyor, as if to disturb the coat of dust that lay over the room. “Not like there's a lot left for us in this world, with him gone.”
Terra nodded, because that showed understanding. The idea came in the middle of the night, a desert night all the colder by contrast to the heat of the day. It followed her into the waking hours, nipping at her heels as Katarin chased little Madeline, just on her legs, away from the engine room. It sat with her among the sweltering leaves in Celes' greenhouse and waited on the other end of the copper wires Edgar had them all playing with again, stood on opposite turrets to test the far-speaking device that kept him closed up in his workshop when no-one demanded his presence elsewhere. They roared as Sabin bellowed “What's wrong with shouting?” from one tower to the others, then headed back in for dinner. And while they worked together, laughed together, somewhere forgotten in the shadow of a tower like a raised fist to the sky waited those faceless figures, chanting still for the god who abandoned them.
She didn't tell Setzer until he worked it out for himself, descending towards the mountain of twisted metal she pointed at with the same expression he wore when they brought Umaro aboard. But he landed without complaint, waiting as she spoke to the huddled robes crouched together of what waited on the other side of the sea. They said nothing in reply. Only stared at the ship, riding the sky like a messenger down from heaven. The broken awning they hid beneath, the jagged arch of a ruptured staircase left bare to the rain, moaned and cried in the wind, screaming on its broken hinges one last time as she led them away.
“You're wasting your time,” Setzer swore, watching them fumble around the cabin with their hoods still up, one eyebrow cruelly arched. “One thousand gil and one month of morning's watch says they'll ask me to fly them all back here within a week.”
“I'm not taking you up on that. No-one's ever seen you awake before noon when you're home.” She jabbed him gently in the side with an elbow. “And besides, you still came along the moment I suggested it.”
“The castle is moving underground today,” he said with a shudder, but a light came alive behind his eyes as he nodded to what was left of the improbable tower. “And look at it. I wanted to see it up close. I need to take what's left of it apart and see how it worked.”
A month later, they looked at her with those same eyes. Empty, afraid, expectant. As if she was a new, small, stammering god with answers to fill them. When nobody else wanted to speak, Moritz took the lead again. “Did you ever see him?” he breathed low-voiced behind his hand.
Terra touched two fingers to the scar at her temple, hidden under hair hanging loose about her shoulders. It pulsed with the skittering of her heart. “I did.”.
“Yeah, we know about you,” said Raumer. “Never saw 'im in person. Saw that fire from up on high, though. What else you think took me to that tower with y'all?”
“I saw him once.” The quiet one in the corner with the wispy white-gold hair, what was his name? “From a safe distance. I lived in a village up by the mountains, few miles out of town, and he was at the front of a garrison headed to the castle. The things we called King Edgar back in the day, when we didn't know – lapdog, puppet, pretentious posturing arrogant – but anyway.” He spoke faster than the others, surer, gesturing with his hands as if the air was his to seize. “Couldn't believe the Empire let this clown lead the way. Couldn't believe these were the people we were meant to be bending the knee to. We laughed, all us regulars 'round the bar, all through the night.”
“We laughed, too,” said Delena, the grave and grey-haired woman who wove rag rugs in better days. Deer, butterflies, bright kingfishers, sweet hyacinths, and other things that only lived on in scraps of fabric underfoot. “Until word came to my town about Doma.”
Terra nodded. “I thought he was funny-looking, at first.” Only images, fleeting as rain in the desert, remained. Memories in pieces. The thin man they dragged past the window of her cell when she was just old enough to push a chair to the door and climb upon it. He was sweating, his bare back glistening and pale hair lank with it – nothing yet smeared on his skin, only eyes rolled into oblivion. That same face, crackling once again with hunger. A painted smile curled up into knife points as his eyes found her in the darkest, farthest corner. Hands that sparked with half-broken magic, and hurt, then took the pain away again with two pinpricks in her forehead.
“Fuckin' clown.” Terra started and they each flinched in turn as Raumer spat a tobacco-brown lump onto the floor. “Reckon he was savin' us for last, y'know? Let us think for a year we had it good, chantin' his name noon 'til night, then blam.”
He slapped his hands together and her heart juddered again, the shock of it passing around the room. “I think you're right, Raumer.” Terra spoke in the voice Locke did when he told her he'd stay by her side and take her somewhere safe, the one Celes used when they sat by the fire with an open book and she found a new word, the one Katarin gave to the children when Terra needed to stay abed that day. He only shrugged, and fixed his eyes on the door.
“Such was the way of the Empire.” The voice was rich, measured, a redolence of fine china teacups on mahogany tables and old libraries where the dust never rested. Benjamin of the Jidoorian strip. A scholar of the time before time when the Triad were yet to war, and long before Gestahl swept a clumsy arm across the table of history and scattered all that ill-suited his ends to the wind – so he took utmost pride in telling Terra on the airship, the first and only among them to take off his robe for the journey.
He sat one with leg folded across the other, straight of back as he spoke, as if to a class of eager children. “A single, shining point of prosperity amidst a darkness it alone manufactured – by design, make no mistake. Gathering all to it, willing and eager to be used for ends not their own. So was the Empire, and so was its many-coloured subject, no matter what he attempted to transcend.”
Terra nodded along, and brushed her fingers over the mark at her temple again. There was an empty seat in their circle – or two, really. But one man had stayed behind in the wreckage, making a home in buckled metal shards and gardens of rust nourished by the rain that never seemed to stop. His eyes stayed on the sky, followed the ship as it departed, and waited in Terra's dreams with the promise of void. Nothing grew there in the land their worship had once shadowed. No company, no second voice but the wind. A soldier, the others told her on the journey back to the sands, long ago trained to chant and march in step.
Benjamin shook his head slowly, letting loose a sigh for the ages. “So it was. So I could've told you, even when we raised the tower together.”
Raumer's dry laugh ruptured the air. “So it says in your books, Ben. We're all real proud of ya. Never stopped you puttin' on that hood and walkin' in a circle with the rest of us, did it?” He cracked his jaw, sharp and sudden. “Nah. Me? Reckon I was hedgin' my bets on the winner, that's all.”
Moritz looked at him sidelong. “A winner. Ever lose someone, Raumer?”
“Spare me the sermon. I know every one of you felt like a winner when we got us some magic.” He paused, and came back quieter. “Y'all miss it?”
No-one spoke. No-one asked Terra to speak, only breathed loudly when all the air had been pushed from her with the weight of the words.
Raumer loosed a single huff of laughter, smug in his seat that squealed with every move in her ear. “Thought so.”
“I admit,” said Benjamin with barely a tremor to him, “that it was exhilarating, almost, to see it with my own eyes.”
Delena nodded. “I imagine words on a page can barely compare.”
Terra clasped her hands firmly in her lap, where they trembled beyond her control, empty now of all but blood. Not every situation required her input, Cyan said, when she saw him at the gate. Let them talk, let them speak all they had held silent for so long.
“Do you remember the first day?” Moritz smiled with a wistful air, glowing red as the sun lowered and the path of light between them narrowed. “We found that box of broken magitek – you set fire to something, Del, and then I put it out with ice. Just like that.”
Delena sighed, probably looking solemn and grave toward the window. Terra's eyes were closed, a bursting dam behind them that wailed with every word.
“I remember you all had the time of your lives levitating Raumer and dropping him with a dispel.”
A grunt from the corner. It chafed Terra's skin like the sand the whirring feet of a chocobo kicked up as she rode from the quiet of her room in the castle, from home, where no-one asked.
“I remember,” said Moritz softly. “It was first the day I laughed since, well -”
“Yeah, yeah.” Raumer, muttering. “Always good for a laugh, this guy.”
“Come on, man, we didn't mean it like -”
“No!” An explosion rocked the room as the chair was flung from its feet and long-forgotten floorboards yelped under the sudden weight of a tall man standing. Terra crouched in a ball of her own heartbeat, but he was louder, always louder. They shouted outside her window every morning, drill after drill. And how they shouted when the billowing fire made a feast of them. The fire from somewhere, from her own pale fingers, or so someone said. It burned in the two holes at her temples, pulsing in time with his words.
“I see you all, starin' at me all sideways, even now! Always did look down on me, much as you could when I got a foot on most of you.”
Delena, soft and gentle, too quiet, wrong. “Where's this coming from?”
“All of you! With your dead kids, your books, laughin' at the drunk who thought he was too good for just drinkin' himself to death 'til the light of judgement -”
Another falling chair, another wail of the old and tired oak. “Books?” said Ben, stiff-nosed. “Perhaps if more people like you had bothered to read them, when the Empire showed its true colours, then -”
“Fuck this!” Raumer paused, and cackled softly, taking one step and another with no mind to the protest of the floor. One foot closer to Terra where she made a nest of herself. “You as well, hidin' from me. You came down outta the sky like, like some fairy tale, actin' like we needed you, but what you know, huh? You said it. You ain't like us. You never got no choice in this.”
A stirring, and something unlocked. Her eyes opened. Terra unlocked her cage of knock knees and heavy lungs and lifted her head, pinning him in place.
“You're right.”
She was on her feet, trembling with an emptiness she reached into and found nothing. His nose wrinkled, as if he could smell that necrotic space inside her where something else used to wait – wait, for moments like this, when the fire under her skin erupted in bristling fur, ember-coloured eyes, and a scream that shook the stones.
Raumer snorted, a hog ready to charge and gore, who didn't know she could've grown to twice his size, not so very long ago. “What'd you bring us for here anyway, huh? Wanna look down that cute little button nose of yours at someone worse? Think it'll make you feel better 'bout what you said those sparks comin' outta your fingers did to those grunts?”
“It was only a toy to you!” she cried, voice reedy and thin. The only one left. “It was half of me, and now it's gone!”
Once, she could have propelled herself through the window and left only a star shower of broken glass ringing in her wake, racing through the sky where no hand or mind could bind her ever again. Once, she could have taken her body and ran, higher and faster than any measurer or plunderer could ever soar. She sank back to her seat on legs that turned to shifting sand beneath her heart. No choice, no choice, no choice but to wear the crown that bound her forehead – but they had to put it on her first. She could've melted it all over Kefka's harrowing hands, cleared a path with but a wave of her hand, grabbed the arm of the other little girl before it turned to ice and ran, ran through the hell of fluctuating dials and hissing steam where her people lived in glass cages. And then, and if, they might never -
“You'll never know what it's like to be torn in two! Twice!”
All the air fell out of her. Bent double with both hands on the sides of her head, her temple throbbed again, chafed when the floorboards groaned in tandem.
“Useless,” muttered Raumer. “The hell we all doin' stuck together? Not like a one of us woulda talked to the rest back in the day. All's we gonna do here is fight.”
Another voice, clearer, from somewhere to her left. “But at least we can fight.”
Terra half-opened her eyes. Delena. She had walked forward and placed a hand on Raumer's arm, guiding him back to his seat. “We can fight,” she said, “and we can swear, we can argue until we're blue in the face. We can lie and defy and laugh. There's no eye on us anymore, and no-one to punish us if we fall out of line. Can't you see how lucky we are?”
The room was quiet then, and her level gaze fell on Terra, bidding her own eyes to open all the way. “Thank you, Miss Branford. It seems like you had a few things to get off your chest, too.”
Terra nodded once and there they all were, looking at her again. Not a god, or an answer, but someone who shared. She cleared her throat and smoothed her skirt, reassuming the posture of the general with her head held high.
“I got a confession to make.” The silent man from the corner spoke, he of the pale gold hair, eyes on the floor as he mumbled. “The truth is, well, I've lived here all my life. I heard what was happening here and slipped in. I was never one of you, but I wanted to be here.”
Raumer spat on the floor again. “Another fuckin' gawker.”
“No, no.” The man shook his head, palms up and open. “No, I never wanted to laugh at you all. I just, I don't know. I felt like I should be here. I still have dreams, sometimes. About saying the wrong thing, and next you know... You know what it's like, don't you?”
Delena nodded. “I think we all do, in what's become of this world.”
“But no-one talks about it. They just want to put the roofs back together and plant flowers and forget about it. But we need to talk about it, or -”
“We still don't know how he did it,” Moritz whispered, pulling his light jacket tighter about him as he shivered.
“What? The light of judgement?” Raumer shrugged. “Magic. Same's we built the tower with.”
Terra shivered too, hiding deeper in her blouse. It came to a head one night when Strago made some request in his softest, kindest voice, old eyes glistening with pride as he looked upon his granddaughter, already eye to eye with him. A request to finish her vegetables, get ready for bed, clean the room she cluttered with half-washed canvases – and Relm's red-faced response ricocheted from the castle walls with a ferocity no volley of impersonal cannon fire could dream of.
“What'd he tell you to do before bed, huh, gramps? Was it you who did what they did to Mobliz and Tzen and all those people? Answer me! Don't turn away from me, tell me!”
“I don't mean that part.” Delena spoke like a calm ocean, rhythmic, lulling forgotten shells back to its warmth. “I never understood how he knew when someone was moving against him, or saying the wrong thing, or any of it.”
“I'm not quite sure he had to,” said Ben. “Who in this world wasn't his enemy?”
Raumer snorted. “Save for us screw-ups?”
Ben smiled, shook his head again. “Yes. Save for us screw-ups.”
“Not that it helped,” said Moritz. “Any time I tried to remember the world before, I thought that light was going to come down and burn us to the ground..”
“We did, too, at first,” said Terra. “Every night on our airship, flying here and there to gather our strength, I felt him watching us all the time.”
Moritz nodded slowly. “Do you know, I hated you at first?”
Terra flinched, but kept her eyes level with his.
“I heard about this weird, ragtag troupe of rebels who killed him off, the day our tower fell down. Damned thing nearly took us with it. We were sat in the rain that just wouldn't stop, under the ruin, no idea what to do other than stick together and wait for the end.”
Raumer spoke more softly, his eyes drifting to the window where the last of the sun was waiting for them to finish. “Bet I weren't the only one thinkin' the whole thing oughtta just bury us and spare us the choice. First second the top of the thing started to crack up, I thought, that's it, you gone and done it now. He's turned his eye on us, finally, and funny thing is it felt one hell of a lot like relief. 'Til we guessed it was you folk, takin' him out.” He shook his head, laughing bitterly. “Yeah, I hated y'all too.”
“Damn it,” Moritz hissed. “Mobliz, Tzen, Maranda... and how many little towns they never put on a map, just gone?”
“I heard he got Zozo,” said the interloper. “Name's Jer, by the way. Since no-one's told me to leave.”
“Well, Jer,” said Raumer, gaining back a little of the bulk of his voice, “clearly you ain't never seen Zozo, least not before, else you'd know that's some pack of lies. Kefka ever rolled up to that rainy old dung heap, he'd take one look at it and say, 'I been here already and forgot?'”
Soft laughter, widening like a slow incoming wave, and silence settled easily around the circle. But Terra spoke, hands together in her lap. “I know one of you chose to stay behind at the tower. All that metal rusting out in the rain. It's metal we could use to build, strengthen things. My friends – and two of them, they're engineers, so I know they're both desperate to look at it and see how it all fitted together. For a group of people who'd never built anything before, you've gotten them both quite mystified about how you did it!” They shared glances then, a few little nods, even Raumer smiling with them. “But I had to ask you all first. For permission to take it apart for scraps. It was your home, I think, wasn't it?”
“S'just metal.” Raumer shrugged. “Do what you want.”
“With what we made, yes,” said Delena, frowning as she quieted. “But the other heap of scrap, the one he made his own – I think it should stay where it is. And anyone who clings to it. Let it remain like a scar on that strip of land, for anyone who needs to remember.”
Terra bit her lip, and nodded. “A monument to non-existence,” she whispered, involuntary as breathing, in a room that defied the notion.
A red sun was poised on the line of the sea as the room emptied, the group making their winding way back to the house by the docks. Their voices mingled, arrhythmic and clashing, as Raumer walked with a brawny swagger out of time beside Delena's delicate footsteps. Terra leaned back and waved them off, unseen. Once, their movements had been a metronome as uncanny as Gogo's imitations – but even Gogo could be found in quiet parts of the castle some days, helping themselves to sweet biscuits from kitchen or watching the sun set with no-one guiding them there first. Maybe with time, with enough biscuits and sunsets, they'd share their story, too.
The wind that once howled through the world of ruin had changed its course again, shed its stifling spray of sand for the sea's brine and the wheeling of the birds. She breathed it in under apricot skies and the promise of star-studded night that followed, no more the perpetual red haze of a poisoned world. Fishermen and stallholders made their way home over the cobbles as she rolled the crick from her neck. Pointlessly, perhaps – the journey across the sand would put it right back. A hot bath waited at home, however, a meal with the others, a tomorrow for chiding the children who daubed on the walls at Relm's behest.
“Long day?”
Terra started, then smiled. Next to her chocobo stood Strago, holding the reins of a bird of his own. How long were you..., her lips parted to say, but she closed them again and stepped closer. “It's dangerous to cross the desert alone,” she said. “I don't mean I'm not pleased to see you, but if you don't have a way to defend yourself -”
He banged the end of his polished elm staff on the cobbles, earning a startled kweh from the creatures beside them. “Less of that talk, young lady!” he huffed through his whiskers, smiling all the while. “I am but seventy-two years old. There's punch in these arms of mine yet!”
Terra pointed the side pockets on the chocobo's saddle, spilling over with a plethora of greenery and fabric sacks bursting with seeds. “And I see you didn't come alone.”
“She's off finding new ones to take back for the greenhouse. I wonder what magic she managed to hold onto, that lets her cram in more and more.”
Terra forced her mouth into a grin, hugging herself. There was no joy in Strago's laughter either, and they fell quiet until Celes made herself known, marching up one newly silent street with a terracotta pot nestled in both hands. Browning fronds of fern wilted from the rim. “Look at it,” she said in her most imperious voice, tucking the pot into her last empty saddle pocket. “I found it on a doorstep, looking like it hasn't seen water in weeks, a beautiful Figaro fern like this. I believe it's fair to guess it won't be missed.”
“Sounds to me like a certain thief rubbed off on you, even after you went your separate ways,” said Strago as he took the hand Celes extended and settled into the saddle behind her, holding onto her waist. “Now we're all here, Terra, you have to tell us how it went.”
“Yes,” Celes nodded. “Never mind the plants. Are you alright?”
Terra hoisted herself into her own seat, the bird taking its first steps home with a triumphant wark. “I'll tell you on the way.”
They were an hour out of town when Terra stopped at the crest of a steep dune, the sky darkened to a berry stain and glimmering with the first returning stars. Along the way she had given names to the faces under the cowls, told their stories at the expense of her own. Approval given, the three fell quiet as the ground beneath them shifted and softened, for mouths open for talking were just as open to airborne sand. So she waited until the second bird drew level with hers.
“I've been thinking.”
“I see.” Celes came to a stop beside her, Strago limp and drowsy at her back. “Care to share?”
“I'm thinking...” Her shoulders fell, the reins slackening in her hand. Words were surer before they were spoken, her stumbling voice too weak to give them shape. But if that voice was thinner without the rasp of the esper tongue behind it, it was still the voice that shouted the last words Kefka ever heard. The one that gathered frightened children around a light in the ruins of their home. The one that called the end of the meeting and bade them all a soft goodbye.
“Have you ever wondered? How some people can go through something similar, but they turn out so very different. Or they begin life worlds apart from each other, and still end up arriving in the same place, somehow.”
Celes gave no answer save for “Hmm,” and if she was thinking or hurting, her eyes half-hidden by the wind in her hair said nothing.
“People are the funniest thing,” said Strago, coughing himself awake and leaning towards Terra, out of reach of the clouds of golden hair that whipped his face. “The same four walls produced Edgar and Sabin, after all.”
“That's true.” Terra laughed lightly, then frowned again. “When we're hurt, we know which herbs to apply, whether to put something hot or cold on it, what to rest and what to stretch. And before, well...”
Silence again, as heavy as the mauve wash of night that silvered the sand. Strago spoke first. “Aye, before. Much quicker and easier it was, too.”
Celes faced the other way, towards the darker part of a deepening sky, a hand over her mouth to keep away the sand. “A wound all its own.”
“And we don't talk about it.” Her voice found its sureness, the same that spoke to Kefka of love and growth. “We had something so... so much a part of us taken away, and we don't talk about it. And when someone's injured in their mind, not their body, we don't know what to do. We don't understand the wounds we all keep inside ourselves. And today... it made me think someone should. What do you do with a hurt that can't be touched? What makes us do what we do, to forget what's been done to us?”
Celes patted the beak of her bird as it lowed, whispered a promise of home, her eyes still on the emptiness. “Clearly some good came out of today. I think this is the most I've heard you speak in a long time.”
“Good food, fresh air, exercise – that's what's kept this old sack of meat in top condition all these years!” Strago paused then. “But even if you can't tell, I'm not as young as I used to be. There's already parts of myself I had to say goodbye to a long time ago.”
“More and more.” Celes hunched her shoulders together, the cold of the desert night already drawing in. “Does it stop hurting, if you wait?”
Strago's face fell. Stripped of his robes and dressed in the same loose, light clothing as they, he was smaller than ever as he held her tighter. “Give it time, love,” he said quietly, and shook his head. “But what would I know about it? All I ever knew was taking my best shot at spells I saw in passing. Not like the two of you. And now I don't even have that going for me. But such is old age, taking and taking until all we can do is live off the good will of others.”
“That's not true!” Terra straightened her back and took her reins in hand. “I know Edgar values your thoughts in the council meetings a lot. And you don't fall asleep in them as often as Sabin does.”
She winked at him as she motioned the chocobo to a trot – one he returned as she plunged over the lip of the dune. “I don't snore so loudly, either. But some folks might be kinder to themselves if they had a bit of what you're thinking, Terra.”
Celes drew level, calling out as they charged down the slope together. “It could be you! You could look for the answers to the questions you're asking!”
Terra squinted. “Are you making fun of me?”
“No, no!” As they made it back to level ground she scraped her hair back from her face, turned to Terra as sincere as she'd ever been. “I mean it. You could start tonight, or tomorrow if you're tired. You have the biggest library left in the world right underneath your bedroom.”
“I only meant someone should think about it,” Terra said, turning the leather of the reins back and forth between her fingers as they slowed again. “I'm no scholar. You know I can barely even read beyond what I tell to the children.”
“Then I'll help.”
Strago nodded. “And me. You're young, still, and if anyone knows about the mind -”
He caught himself, the sentence unfinished and hanging in the air with the upraised sand. It's someone who had to live without one .
“I never would've thought I could do what I do now,” said Celes, the diplomat who talked with lost souls and rising powers the world over. Who in the first winter after Kefka's fall, when the pantries around the world were empty and failed crops had not yet replenished, had secured a trade of grain for engine parts in the towns clustered around the Veldt, and rarely had to so much as touch the pommel of her sword as she did it. “But if I've learned anything on my travels, it's that people in this world have questions, after all of it. So ask what it is that makes some of us kneel and grovel. What makes some of us want the rest of the world on its knees before us.”
Terra closed her eyes, an answer forming in the empty hole beside her heart. “It's being afraid, I suppose. It must be.” She turned into the wind that lifted her hair and echoed a dying god, scattered to the sky. “Life, dreams, hope... where do they come from? And where do they go?”
“I'm sure you can find out,” said Strago. “But for now, I haven't eaten since the sun was high in the sky, so all I'm looking for is what's left of the roast beef in the kitchen and a night in my own bed. General Chere, you reckon we can take this up a notch? There's strength in these old bones for top speed yet.”
“An order I can gladly follow,” she said, and shook the reins with a curt cry. Terra laughed and dug in her knees. The bird warbled once and tore across the dunes beside them, towards the lights of the castle as they came ever closer.
