#lhad

[I wanna post a better image here; stay tuned.]

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Lulu was knitting herself back together as methodically as she used to repair lace-embroidered sleeves before the campfire. Auron saw it each morning when they awoke. The shreds of dream that fled her eyes at first kiss were human now, most of the time. Her nightmares were fewer. The red marks at her wrists had faded to ghostly white. On good mornings, he would wake to find her in his arms, instead of curled up coverless facing the wall.

She had dismissed the disquieting tug of the pyreflies, almost convincing him that she could not sense their pull. When he pressed his doubts, she parried with a lecture. "Sin, the aeon that bridged the Farplane and Spira, has been eliminated. Pyreflies seek to close that breach, calling home souls who stray beyond their time. Of course, I need not fear you will answer the summons."

Outside, her eyes were acclimatizing to daylight. She readily joined Rikku and Wakka's family in their games of catch and toss around the fountain, honoring the memory of the High Summoner who had so treasured laughter. Not that Lulu laughed often. She moved with mute grace among the children, allowing herself to be teased and targeted. Soon she was evading their throws, pivoting out of a missile's path with belled white skirts and braids swinging.

Vidina kept trying to teach her the rules. "You're supposed to catch the ball, not dodge it!"

Two handfuls of fluffy snow materialized above his head in answer. Then all the children had wanted snow, and the lawn around the fountain had nearly become a bog before the abbot stormed out to forbid black magic’s use in the garden. Auron caught Zuke's smile as he returned to chambers, head shaking in wonderment.

Auron guarded. Lurking in the colonnade, he saw the glances cast by passing clergy at the Al Bhed in their midst. Not all glances were friendly.

The Story So Far: Sin is defeated, Yu Yevon destroyed, and Yuna's old guardians assemble in the city of St. Bevelle for the Calm Festival. 

There's your fireworks, Jecht.

The display was excessive. It appeared that Bevelle's stadium was intent on expending a season's worth of fireworks in a single night. Gaudy team colors erupted brazenly amidst Yevon's greens, whites and golds. Fountains and streamers leapt from every level of the city. They were far more colorful than those that had inaugurated Braska's Calm. Auron remembered them flaring above him as he lay in the roadway, rage seeping away with his blood. Perhaps Yevon had been trying to reconsecrate its heretic summoner with white's purity.

A caress on his forearm recalled him to the present. Success was so alien to him that it was hard to focus on its celebration. But he needed focus now more than ever. More, he needed... this.

Surrounded by old friends, Auron stood on a parapet along the ramparts behind Yuna's Cloister. The area was off-limits for safety, but that had not deterred the Al Bhed. Kitted with goggles and scarves across their faces, Rikku's family had found their own private box to observe the festival. Yuna's remaining guardians were and yet were not a part of it, since the summoner who had brought them together was not there.

Emerging into a whirligig of tumbling children, Auron was glad that Lulu remained in her cabin's sanctuary. The seating area in the mezzanine was crammed with people. In the horseshoe of padded seats closest to the door, Cid, Baralai and Lucil had their heads together in a flurry of last-minute negotiations shouted over the whine of engines. Rikku had claimed the opposite sofa, bent over some project laid across her knees— his sword, Auron realized, and felt a prickle of irritation and nostalgia. The children were everywhere, squealing with delight when a pocket of turbulence parted them from the floor.

One pillar of quiet kept watch over the chaos from the corner. "So who's guarding Sin?" Juno said as Auron stepped out.

"Sin's dead." He turned his back on her, but the staircase was blocked by a barrier of sofa cushions and stuffed animals.

"—Five years," Baralai was saying, earnest and intent. "We'll wave docking fees for five years. Agreed?"

"Agreed," Lucil said. Her crisp battlefield cadences had an odd squeak: apparently she was not enjoying the speed at which they were skimming over the harbor.

"Whoa!" Vidina said, mashing his face against the glass. "Look at that bridge! The steel's totally melted. Way to go, Pop-pops!"

"Get down, boy," Cid growled. "Now see here, Baralai—"

"Consider, Elder Cid," Baralai said. "The lake is composed of frozen pyrefly slurry. You could refuel your ships right there."

"Provided that," Lucil said, "Macalania Temple is left undisturbed, and Lady Shelinda concurs."

"It was an accident," the younger children recited in a sing-song, apparently practicing a new word. "Acci, acci, accident!"

"Kids," Rikku said, "Settle down, okay? Pop-pops is working."

"Deal," Cid said. "I'm down by one airship, mind, so don't expect a weekly ferry service. And Gippal may want compensation."

"Hey, Auron!" Rikku pushed up her goggles. "You dropped something. What's rule number three, kids?"

"Don't leave toys out where Dad can trip over 'em!" Vidina crowed, jamming one of the mini-blitzballs from last night's romp behind the sofa. "Where's Yunie?"

The Story So Far: Freed from Sin's bonds, Lulu rests on Brother's airship after the final battle with Yu Yevon.

Sin was dead, but for those who had passed through the eye of the spiral, old echoes kept returning.

Here, now: a quiet space. An airship cabin. Thrumming walls and floor. Not quite room enough for two on a narrow bunk. Blue-black light spilling through a glass window curving from floor to ceiling, emanating cold. Warm blankets, the warmer flesh beneath. The mage's flickering presence dreaming nearby like a sword in its sheath, her powers slumbering, all polished curves and steel. These things Auron remembered and savored, although he felt the irrevocable gulf between then and now like the knotted flesh under his right eyelid. Still once again he sat meditating on the cold deck beside her bunk, contemplating journey's end and the gleam of one pale shoulder in the first light of dawn.

It seemed to him that Lulu's hair held a faint translucence like the boughs of Macalania trees. Or maybe he was dreaming. He was very tired.

A crash roused him. He must have dropped off after all. The sky and cabin were dusted in a pinkish-gray light. Beside him, Lulu sat bolt upright with a feral hiss and a flash that smelled of burnt feathers. Auron flicked the top blanket out from under her hands and clapped it against the floor, snuffing out sparks.

"My sword fell," he said. "Propped outside."

"Ah." She exhaled. Nonetheless, the rigid line of her shoulders flinched in counterpoint to the clanking beats of the weapon tumbling down the staircase.

Auron remembered how he had found her, chained to ice by his own swords. Swallowing a surge of anger, he rose to stand between her and the door. "Bad dreams?"

"Of course." Defiance drew her voice taut. "But they're my dreams."

The lounge of the Celsius was ruddy and warm with laughter, with drink, and with song. Old friends and new had gathered there for the flight back. There was mud on the deck and chocobo down spiraling overhead, souvenirs of the airship's stopover in Moonflow Village. No one begrudged a few feathers in Hypello ale.

"It's not a gun. he says it's a sphere and the teachings of Yevon are perfectly clear, so that's what he carries beneath his robes, and the maester's got nothing beneath his robes, but a pair of very small spheres."

Nooj leaned back. "At least, that's a rough translation. I'm still not quite fluent in Al Bhed."

"I've heard something like it in the barracks," Lucil said, matching his deadpan.

Baralai and Juno stared as if he had sprouted fluffy yellow wings and pranced along the bar singing the latest show tunes from Luca.

"I'm still not sure I've heard it," said Baralai.

"Sin's toxin," Juno said. "Sometimes it takes a while to wear off."

Something like hailstones was pelting the other side of the cabin door. The ship's captain was also a target, to judge by the muffled screams. Lucil was the first off her barstool, seizing her cane. Baralai reached for his gun.

The Farplane promised longed-for release. Auron was so tired, a husk of secondhand pyreflies glued together by phoenix down and scars. Rest, sang the sky beyond all skies. Your journey is at an end. Yu Yevon promised nothing, but its dissonant, teeth-cracking whine turned every thought to despair, to the frenzied attack of the maddened hive. Defend, defend, defend, destroy, came the mantra, and he wanted to lash out at something, at anything, as if the violence he had just committed on Lulu's body had unleashed the ravening fiend within. All that held him back was pain, the pangs of childbirth magnified a hundredfold. Why was Erinyes screaming into his mind?

A pressure on his hand, light as the swish of a braid on bare skin, was proof against chaos. Choose, Auron. Choose. This is your story.

A fiend was still a man, as long as he remembered his name.

Auron jammed himself back into his body like an ill-fitting shoe. Rikku, shaking him frantically, gave an indignant, "Hey!" as he elbowed her aside and stood, feeling the weight of sword against callouses.

Lulu's garden was lost. In its place, brackish waters lapped from horizon to horizon, flooding the ruins of a ghost city under a bruise-purple sky. Jumbled stone blocks were scattered, patternless, a puzzle that could never have formed a coherent whole. Bolted to them were rusted pylons and transformers, a maze of drooping cables and catwalks leading nowhere. Bleached, coralline huts teetered on rotting piers, side by side with soulless skyscraper façades. A few dying Macalania trees glowed pale and dim in the shallows. Over the dome of Baaj Temple, carrion birds wheeled in an endless gyre.

No, not Baaj. Erinyes.

Seymour's aeon had sprouted from the temple foundations like an unholy mushroom, its flesh stained and gangrenous, its reflection mirrored on stagnant water. Around it orbited a pair of misshapen monoliths, last remnants, perhaps, of Lightning Mushroom Rock. At the aeon's foot stood a small figure in an old red coat.

Auron began to run.

"Venus Crest" by author

Yu Yevon seemed to have called a truce. The fiends had disappeared back into the mists. Auron wondered where they had been diverted. Sin had gulped down half the pyreflies of Guadosalam, and he doubted Yu Yevon had applied them only to Sin's outer hull. But that was a matter for later. Now...

Now he had to resist the gnawing regrets that threatened to add him to the local fiend population.

Rearing out of the fog, an enormous dome rested on four piers of stone. Yevon's banners, tattered and begrimed, hung from it like cobwebs. Below it lay a wide circular mosaic, scuffed as if from centuries of ordinary foot traffic. Lulu's memory was as meticulous as ever. She had copied the floor of Besaid's shattered temple to the last tile. Around the perimeter stood four monumental sculptures, twice the height of ordinary summoner statues. Reversing the usual arrangement, they faced outwards like sentinels, each one framed by a vaulted archway.

Only one was a summoner.

Sin lay like a split anvil, a mountainous ruin. Lightning painted it in stark relief against the clouds. Below, the flicker of energy weapons answered with feeble red fire. Cold rain pinged against acres of cooling shrapnel hurled from the Thunder Plain's newest crater.

A thunderclap and a shriek pierced the air.

"You should go back," Auron said gently.

"I'm not scared!" Rikku said, words muffled behind clenched fists. "I'm just worried about you guys. All of you, you know?"

"I know." His hand tightened around the brand across his palm that was, finally, beginning to cool. Lulu's time was running out.