Chapter 4

Not all of the Knowlespole was changed. After the skies cleared, much of it stood as it had before. The fire had not jumped the glacier, and the slopes farther south remained thick with pines, their scent crisp in the cold air. Animal tracks wove through the snow between their trunks—not as many as before, but not gone.

It made Ragna grieve for the time before. A few short years, and there were barely any of them left. Those who walked with her now were allies she had made since the Crisis; the members of her own clan were long scattered, and while she hoped others survived, she didn't know. The friends she had known since her youth, the children she had helped to bring into the world, she would likely never see any of them again.

No, she amended. She might see their faces. A monster wearing their faces.

If only she had recognized it the first time.

The forests that had blanketed the glacier stood charred and dead, spindly black bones stark against the snow, and beyond, the landscape changed dramatically. A sheer wall of cliffs jutted up higher than Ragna could see, brutally forced from the Planet's surface.

"Is this really the way?" Zikra wondered. She was one of those from farther south, to whom all these lands were unfamiliar. She had never seen this place when it wasn't desolate.

But rather than seek confirmation from her northern cousins, she had turned to look at the sickliest of their number. The behavior of the infected had changed over the past few months. They no longer sought out the few remaining Cetra bands, but moved slowly north, as though called by something.

"Reunion," Asara muttered, nodding decisively at the cliffs. She wasn't the guide they had planned on, but she was the one they had. She had held out strong against the disease, and though there were moments when they lost her, more often than not, she was lucid enough to know what she led them towards, and why.

Or maybe, Ragna just wanted to believe there was that much of her left. If they defeated the monster, would it free her? Or could they only offer her the same kind of mercy they'd offered all the others?

"We can make it," Alfarr assured them. "I've been to the top, and seen beyond. It will be a hard climb, but we can make it."

"Should we leave her?" asked Baqir, eyeing Asara. It was a risk to keep her near, but they understood the disease better by now. Mere proximity or touch wasn't enough to spread it. It had to get inside the body, and bundled as she was against the cold, Asara could not easily bite or scratch them until the virus gave her claws.

"No," said Ragna. "Not until we have to. She wanted to come as far as she could."

Climbing the cliffs, Ragna felt they were entering a world she didn't know. She had grown up in the icy embrace of the Knowlespole, but this was different. The wind bit into her bones in a way the summer thaw could never reach. There had been no thaw since the Crisis, Alfarr had told her. Even after the skies had cleared, the snows had not melted to give way to the cautious green of spring.

They rested, periodically, in caves that offered shelter from the wind if not the bitter cold. Ragna wondered if such places had always been here within the rock, secret and buried until the land had cracked apart and exposed them. Had the Lifestream once flowed through these passageways? Where had it rushed in the tumult?

At last, they reached the summit.

Ragna choked back her sob, but Baqir sank to his knees and wailed.

"Stars," whispered Zikra. "This is why the Planet cries."

Forest, too, should have covered this expanse, if Ragna had her bearings, but nothing remained to suggest anything had once grown here. The very rock itself appeared to have melted into new shapes. It sloped down, down, down towards a gaping wound at its center, where something had crashed and broken through the very skin of the Planet.

Something that had not died on impact, but crawled its way up out of the crater and continued to spread. It was a disaster whose reasons they would never understand: whether it had been chance or deliberate malice for the Crisis to strike them and their Planet out of all the others in the sky.

Surely its propagation was deliberate. Surely it was malice to target the Planet's most dedicated caretakers. The disease never touched the animals, never sought out the humans where they hid behind walls and underground.

Ragna had tasted bitterness when she had first heard of their retreat, but now she wondered how things might have gone had the Cetra done the same. Could they have starved the monster out?

Now, if they succeeded today, at least the humans would survive to remember them.

Asara was the first to begin the descent into the crater. Whether she understood the sight before her, Ragna didn't know, but the others exchanged glances and followed.

Despite the lifelessness of the crater, Ragna could feel the intensity of the energy gathered beneath it. Somewhere in the rock below them, the Planet worked on its own plan, growing some sort of Weapon within its own body. A champion to succeed where the Cetra had failed.

Ragna could hardly blame it for losing faith in them. The immediate impact of the Crisis had driven them from the Knowlespole. The plague had overwhelmed them. Even Baqir's efforts with the White Materia had come to nothing. Either there were too few of them left to work the magic, or the Planet itself wasn't strong enough to muster the response.

It was a last-ditch effort to confront the monster, but this so-called Reunion gave them both a chance at finding it and an added urgency. None of them knew what would happen if the Reunion went forward unchallenged. None of them knew if they could stop it.

But their actions might buy the Planet more time to complete its Weapon. It was nearly done, so their lives this day might be enough.

Down close to the center of the crater, Pala waited for them.

It wasn't really Pala, of course. It never had been. Just a monster that wore her face and mimed her voice, offering them an imitation of friendship until she knew enough about them and their movements. She had vanished one night, and in her wake, her siblings had begun to lose their minds. They had taken it for grief at first. Worry.

What Dagrun had become had felt like vengeance personified, for the way they had pushed her to accept the thing that she had always known was not her sister. It was a mistake for which Ragna could never apologize. She could only offer the last of her strength to correct it.

The monster seemed to repel life. Where the Lifestream should have rushed to heal the Planet's wound, it instead gave the ground where Pala stood a wide berth.

Asara did not halt with the rest of them, but Zikra caught her arm, and she stayed.

"Have you come for the Reunion?" asked the monster. She still spoke with the voice of a friend. It spoke with that voice.

"We've come to put an end to this," said Ragna.

The monster shook its head. "I don't understand why you fight me."

"You're killing us," said Zikra, her grip still tight on Asara's arm.

"You're doing that to yourselves," said the monster. "There's no need for it. Don't you want to be one with all those you think you've lost? Their memories are alive, right here, with me."

It made Ragna sick to think that. They knew that those lost to the plague had returned to the Lifestream, but for their memories to be preserved in this thing, disconnected from those who had experienced them, detached from the feelings they had evoked... The monster took no meaning from it. The sum of their voices meant nothing to it. They were a tool.

"Did you ask them if that was what they wanted?" Baqir asked in her stead. "Did you give them the choice?"

The monster tilted its head as though it didn't understand the question. All part of the act, as though it were an innocent, benign force. "What choice is there?" it asked. "This is the superior way of existence."

"We had our own way," said Alfarr, "before you came. Do you know nothing of the Planet beneath your feet and how it lives in terror of you? We welcomed you... We would have welcomed you."

"And weren't things easier when you did?" asked the monster. Its eyes shifted to meet Ragna's directly. "Aren't you tired of fighting it?"

The look froze her, her feet rooted to the ground. Something coiled around her ankle. Her balance gave way.

"Ragna!" Alfarr shouted. Their sword crashed down and severed the tentacle that Ragna hadn't seen, and Baqir caught her, steadying her.

Before them, the monster revealed itself: a culmination of so many shapes they'd seen before, but looming many times their size. A vaguely recognizable head and torso atop a writhing mass of tentacles, eyes in so many places they weren't meant to be, and in place of arms, a pair of rigid wings that arched back behind the thing, casting long shadows.

Fumes spewed forth from its mouth, and they each pulled their scarves back up over their faces. They refused to be done in so easily. Even if it infected them, Ragna thought, they would fight until the madness overtook them.

Ragna was not as nimble as her younger companions, but Alfarr's sword flashed through the monster's tentacles, keeping them at bay while the rest of them worked. Even Asara, to her credit, circled their battlefield, striking at the monster to draw its attention.

Baqir had shared with them the materia he had made, tears of the Planet which amplified their spellwork through their connection to the voices of the dead. Ragna had practiced over the months of their journey north. She had never been used to wielding such black magic either. They took hold of a fury that the Lifestream had never held before and unleashed it on the monster.

Ragna bound it tight with ice while Zikra called down lightning into its body and Baqir tore chunks of the earth itself to slam into it. He gripped the White Materia, too, like a talisman, ever hopeful that at some moment it might at last heed his call.

The monster screeched, and the impact of the sound threw them all back. As they lay stunned, one of its tentacles stretched, regrowing where Alfarr had severed it, and slid towards Zikra. Asara staggered into it, allowing it to wind about her instead. As it tightened about her, cracking bones and forcing her mouth open in a soundless scream, Ragna made herself watch. She wanted to believe that this was Asara's final choice—not to go willingly into the monster's embrace but to protect a friend. To protect their chance.

Alfarr recovered first and severed the tentacle again, but Asara lay still where she fell.

They channelled their spells anew, doing their best to ensure that one of them remained always beyond the monster's reach. But maybe it was the fumes finally taking their toll—the monster wasn't always where Ragna believed it to be. Her spells would strike bare rock, where a moment ago it had been there. A tentacle lashed her from behind. She felt the bruises blooming where she hit the stone.

The others grew disoriented, too. Zikra screamed as Alfarr nearly struck Baqir instead of the monster now a dozen paces to their left. Fire washed over them, and their heavy clothes took the brunt of it, but left them smoldering. The scent of burning recalled for Ragna the wildfires that had swept through the north.

She could never sense the monster's magic at work. It did not draw from the Lifestream as they did—and how could it? When it had never been a part of this Planet, when its presence was repellent to what had given all of them life.

But Ragna's magic felt strange to her, too, channelled through and amplified by this materia. She wielded it alone, not hand-in-hand with her brethren. There was magic that the Cetra had always been able to work alone—healing their everyday scrapes and bruises, heating water from the ice or cushioning the fall of a fledgling from the nest.

But their strongest magic they worked together. When they read the Planet. When they cultivated the land. The altar in the City of the Dead had been built by so many hands that Ragna was certain the knowledge had already been lost to the entropy of the Lifestream.

"Together!" she called, reaching out to the others. It would make them more vulnerable, but what damage had they really done, apart? Trails of dark ichor ran down the monster's body, but it regrew every tentacle that Alfarr severed. Its attacks lost none of their force. And they, they were tiring.

Baqir and Zikra reached her first, and then Alfarr, severing as many tentacles as they could in their wake. They joined hands.

They did not call on the Planet as they had all their lives, nor did they focus their energy solely through the materia, but something in between. They reached through each other, they channelled in combination. They began to shape the earth around the monster, curling the stone into a prison.

Its tentacles reformed as they worked. Some were crushed by closing seams as they tried to reach through, but some did make it. Those tentacles lanced towards them, and Ragna felt the impact, distantly, but the others held her steady. Her focus was on the magic.

In the last glimpse she had of the monster before it disappeared behind the stone, it wore Pala's face again, but not a perfect recreation. It was a frame caught mid-transformation, Pala's gentle face and pale hair, her shoulders still twisted back unnaturally into strange wings, eyes peering out from her chest.

The stone prison sealed shut. Ragna sagged, and when Baqir dropped, she fell with him.

A tentacle had stabbed between the two of them, as though trying to break them apart. Ragna felt the damp spreading through her coat, and Baqir lay already with his breath shallow and his eyes closed. The White Materia slipped from his fingers and rolled, and Alfarr quickly caught it.

"We've done it, Baqir," Zikra said urgently. "It's trapped."

Ragna hoped that he heard it, so that the certainty would accompany him as he returned to the Planet. If it didn't, then she wouldn't be far behind.

Baqir's chest stilled, and the three of them bowed their heads over him.

Into the silence, Alfarr asked, "...but is it dead?"

Ragna lifted her head to the prison they had made. The Lifestream still avoided it, and if the crash hadn't been enough to kill it, then... "I don't think so," she said. "But we've done as much as we can, for now. Maybe, one day..."

Her eyes fell on the White Materia in Alfarr's hand. She lifted hers shakily and curled their fingers tight around it. She met their gaze.

"Maybe one day, we'll be strong enough again. If the monster is at least confined, then the Planet has room to heal. We have room to heal."

"Ragna..." Zikra said softly.

"It's all right," said Ragna. "All I wanted was to have some hope of seeing this through."

"We aren't going to leave you here, with it," said Alfarr. They glanced from her to Baqir, and then beyond to Asara's body. "None of you. You'll be buried in the City, properly."

"Thank you," said Ragna. "I'll stay with you, as long as I can."

She let her eyes fall shut. In a way, maybe this was the easier path for her, to die in this battle. The hard work lay ahead of them. The Cetra were scattered, and rebuilding even a fraction of their culture would be difficult. Guarding the White Materia until it could be used was a task without any clear end.

But the Lifestream did sound calmer as she felt herself passing into it. Its waters were choppy, but she could see her way. She reached out to share the knowledge of their victory. With the monster subdued, it was now their purpose to hold on as long as they could, to share their memories with the living before time eroded them away.

It was natural that it would. They would become a part of the Planet's memory, and in time, Ragna hoped the energy that had once been her would grow new trees in the burnt-out forests of the Knowlespole, that new Cetra would walk among them, and that all of this would become a story they told one another, reflecting on dark times that they themselves would never know.

It was possible, now. So she hoped for it.

< Chapter 3 | Contents | Chapter 5 >