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The screams echoed in the Aetherial Sea, a rare phenomenon that only manifested when an especially stubborn soul entered the stream. Rarer still, the soul would relish in the chaos, come alive again, and regain its consciousness. What happened after that is unknown to researchers.
It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that such a soul belonged to Zenos viator Galvus, the former emperor of the failed Garlean Empire. It was on the record that Zenos had escaped the Aetherial Sea once already. Not content with never facing the Warrior of Light again after his climactic fight at the end of the Universe, he started to look for a way to come back to life for a second time. While Zenos would not again stoop to stealing someone else’s inferior body, he didn’t have a copy of himself ready to go like his great-grandfather had. How, then, would he come back to life with his body when the original was rotting away in a void of nothing?
Zenos realized that mayhaps he could make a new corporeal body. Not a hollow shell, but one entangled with his very soul. The idea occurred to him when he remembered that poor religious brutes, too simple to understand the truth, prayed for eternal life in the form of reincarnation. However, assuming he could be reborn on the morrow, by the time that Zenos was old enough to once again face the Warrior of Light, the Warrior might have fallen ill or weakened in his old age. That wouldn’t do, either. If only Zenos could reincarnate into the past, or speed up his development by some 15 to 20 years. No surge of aether could change the laws of existence.
The swarm of souls whispered the collective conscience. The souls are not coming back. The souls are not coming back. The souls are not coming back. The souls, the souls, where did they go? The souls, the souls, stolen from the Flow. Memories frozen in Time. Memories splintered from Life. Past is present, present is future. Souls lost to Time. Gone gone gone.
What peculiar chatter, Zenos thought to himself. More likely than not the souls spoke in metaphor, but perhaps there was something worth investigating in their seeming confusion about the past, present, and future.
It took him years, but Zenos’s research paid off handsomely, indeed. The Warrior of Light will think no time has passed at all.