As they walked down a dark corridor of books, the elderly woman grasped a torch hanging from a side wall, wrapped a piece of cloth around it and lit it.
“We’ll find it in here, but first I need you to deal with a problem…,”
“Problem? What problem?” Pharda asked, but as he did a cold chill ran up the back of his spine, causing the hairs on his back to stand up on end.
“Something is here..,” The stranger said, eyes darting about the darkness.
“What do you mean…? All I see are a bunch of books…,” he lied as he quietly grasped the hilt of his Murasame, he felt something was there, but couldn’t make out what or where it was coming from.
As they marched further in, a soft murmuring could be heard, something similar to several pages turning at a fast speed.
And then silence.
They walked past a corridor of book cases which seemed all but silent.
The stranger looked deep into the case, but was motionless.
One eye widened, “Tantarian!!! Get down!!!”
He quickly shoved Pharda and the elderly woman to the ground, and ducked as well. A wave of books flew out of the book case like bullets, their pages like razor blades, sticking in the wood and books of the other side.
Pharda just couldn’t believe what he just saw…a bunch of books had just attacked them, something was not right here, and he was going to get to the bottom of it.
“Tantarian? What are those?”
“Haunted books with evil spirits in them..very deadly…,” he replied.
This time Pharda drew his katana, ready for anything flying out at them.
“What’s taking so long…?” Urd sighed and flipped through an old book.
“Maybe they’re lost…,” Andomiel said, drawing his sword, “We should go find them.”
Destroying the Tantarians wasn’t the hard part, guessing which books they were, however was. And so Pharda and the large swordsman had their hands full defending the elderly woman from being cut up by the razor sharp pages.
“In this room, hurry!!” the stranger yelled, and his large crimson cloak flew around a corner. As the three of them ran in, the stranger slammed a door behind him and bolted it shut.
All that could be heard in the room was their own breath, and the slamming of books on the wall outside.
Between gulps of breaths and an adrenaline rush, Pharda pressed the topic, “So what are your names?”
The two looked at eachother as if they had known eachother for a very long time. Then the elderly woman spoke, “My name is Aeris, Aeris Gainsborough,” the torch in her hand lit up her elderly features, but seemed to accent what youthful face she had left. “I’m what you might call the ‘librarian’ of this place…,”
“You check out books like that?” Pharda thumbed at the books making noise outside.
She chuckled and shook her head, “No, no, those books are cursed. I have no power over them…,”
“And what’s tall, blonde, spikey’s name?” Pharda asked, “I don’t really care if you’re ‘no one of consequence’ I like to remember the guys who save my life…,”
“Hmm…,” the man closed his eyes in thought for a moment, then said, “You can call me Strife, that’s all you need to know..,”
“Are we near the books?”
Aeris nodded and pointed in a direction and began walking.
“Um, Aeris…?” Pharda asked quietly, “How did you know who I was, who we all were?”
“I’m an Ancient…it is my…business to know…” she said, not even glancing in his direction.
At the words ‘Ancient’ Pharda was taken aback, he had read his books on the ancient civilization known as the Cetra, or Ancients, and had heard that they had all but gone extinct, except he had heard once that one of them was chosen for the Zodiac Braves, apparently this Aeris had some connection, as did Strife, but he didn’t exactly know how or why.
Pharda as curious as he was, wanted to ask how they knew of the Legend, and everything that the Zodiac War entailed.
“No more questions…we’re here…,” she said.
Spread out before him was a whole library of knowledge that seemed to have been kept a secret seemingly for a thousand years. His training as a modern-day samurai taught him to respect and acknowledge ancient antiquities such as these, so he carefully paged through as many books as he could get his hands on.
He found books on sorcery, something he forbid himself to read, as it seemed unthinkable of a warrior to rely on dark spells and summons. He paged through something called the Germonik Scriptures for any clues, but only found war records, not information on the stones or their possible locations. He did find one book in particular interesting.
“The Zodiac Brave Story…by Alazlam Durai…this is over two thousand years old, how in the world could such a book stay in such good condition? Wait…here’s some info on the stones it says: ‘We found the first one after we defeated a Lucavi named Queklain, at first we thought it to be an evil stone, but then we realized it’s capacity for power, apparently it is neither good nor evil in any respect…it seems to be some sort of shard to something much bigger than itself…,” “Here’s a later entry, “I don’t know how we did it, but we found 13 stones and defeated 13 fiends, I’m not sure of the symbolism of all this, and don’t really much care…Alma is all I care about at this point…”
After moments of speculation, Pharda surmized, “…this must be the account of one of the braves during the Zodiac War…,”
Aeris stated in a semi-corrective tone, “Not exactly, the date goes further back than that, this is during the Zodiac Brave Story, the Zodiac War wouldn’t happen, or the stones’ true uses for another ten years…,”
“So you’re saying there was another War besides the Lion War? All I knew of was the tale of the Zodiac Braves…I didn’t know they waged a war…?”
“It wasn’t…a war…exactly, it was more like…a pilgrimage…a pilgrimage to defeat Ajora…,”
“Ajora? But I thought she was a saint? A guardian Angel?”
“Ajora…is the Lucavi tongue for Altima…,”
Pharda’s eyes flashed red…and his voice went flat, “So…this is Altima…,” his anger was such that he didn’t even realize his pain in saying that name.
“So what happened?” Pharda demanded, “What happened during that war…!!?”
“Delita Hyral, the last of the Hyral lineage, once King of all Ivalice…,”
“The lost kingdom? He was king?”
“Yes, but he sacrificed it all to become a Paladin, a Holy Knight, and defeat…her.”
“He did, didn’t he…? But then, what happened…?”
“He was something no one knew to expect…he himself was an Angel…,”
“What?”
“Yes…that was the only way Ajora could be defeated, but he had…,” and venom seemed to seethe through her words at this point, “compassion…on her, and sealed her up in the Life Crystal, so that she could be purified again…,”
Aeris looked away, eyes hidden in the darkness, “…She….she violated me, Pharda…permeated my every being…she…absorbed me into her body…the only reason I’m still alive is because…he restored time before we all…,” Then she fell down on her knees and wept. In an instant, Strife enveloped her in a tender embrace and wiped away her tears.
“..Never again....never again,” His voice seemed broken, yet soothing. But his voice also had a tinge of anger in it.
“…Both of you…,” Pharda said, as if uncovering a dark secret.
Strife looked up at him and with a thoughtful, yet wistful smile said, “They didn’t know we’d live that long, either one of us...,”
“You’ve dug up some old ancient dirt, Pharda, something we’d…rather keep quiet about…,”
“You…you two were part of the original Zodiac Braves?”
Strife stood, an imposing figure to say the least, his massive blade at his side lifted casually at ease. He then opened his cloak, revealing his face…scarred beyond being human, yet young in appearance, especially his eyes.
“You want to know why I look so young? It’s because I never aged a day after that, bloody JENOVA cells in my body warped the way I aged, and the way I look.”
He then took off a large shoulder guard of armor that revealed a black leathery wing, making him appear to have the likeness of a demon.
He looked deep in Pharda’s eyes and said, “I wish you wouldn’t tell your friends of what you know, we wish to live alone in peace...please...”
“I really don’t think that’s a problem…but I will ask you this…why don’t you want anyone to know? Why the secrets?”
“It’s because we, that is Strife…and I, we…failed, to defeat her…we’re ashamed that the only person who could defeat her only imprisoned her.”
“It was a massacre; she had us all in the palm of her hand, and one by one, she killed all of us, except him...”
“Strife was the first to die, then me…for the second time in my life…then…Sephiroth, Agrias, Beowulf, Reis, and then…Seifer, Zidane, Garnet, Ramza, Teta and his sister Alma…all but him…”
“Delita…?”
“Somehow I knew I’d die…but, maybe we all knew…but why didn’t she kill him, just because he was an angel? Of course we didn’t know that at the time, but we knew then.”
“He bent time after the battle...warped it so that we could all exist again...but she was sealed away in the Life Crystal, we didn’t understand why, nor did we care...we won didn’t we?”
“But time…separated us…some of us had families, generations upon generations…we lost track over the years…yet Strife and I, we just kept watching as they grew…father and mother had son, son met with another girl and had another family and so on…it got so that…we couldn’t exist anymore…it was wrong for us to exist…like normal people.”
“But you’re alive…isn’t that what counts?”
“Being alive to the world maybe…being alive to your own family…that is something completely different. What if one day I walked up to my great great great granddaughter and said ‘how is my little girl doing?’ She never met me before in her entire life! Even though I’m old-looking…I’ve still got another millennia before I can even say I’m an old woman!!”
“Even I have no clue as to how old I’ll get, at least Aeris can age...”
“So what do you expect us to do, be a burden on our families…All we can do is watch time pass by, and with…that monster…roaming about this world free…I doubt we could be of any help to you…at least any more than we’ve already given.”
Pharda was cut to the heart by their moving story…and as was his custom…at least according to samurai traditions, he would ask them to at least bless his blade before leaving on the journey.
“What are you doing?”
He drew his katana, “As you say…this is all you can do…and I am grateful…but please…Aeris Gainsborough, Strife, noble Zodiac Braves, bless my blade so that I can be successful in defeating her once and for all.”
Strife smirked unusually as he glanced at the blade, “The Murasame, eh? I haven’t seen that blade used since Ramza first found it...,”
“Ramza…Beolve?” Pharda asked inquisitively.
“The very same.” Aeris replied.
Pharda looked at the Murasame with a deep thoughtfulness, “My…ancestor once bore this blade on the Pilgrimage to defeat Ajora…,” saying Ajora wasn’t as traumatic sounding to him as her other name.
“You’ve…done more than bless my blade…you’ve honored it greatly, I thank you.” He quietly bowed his head in respect.
Strife looked gently at Aeris, she pursed her lips, and then nodded.
“There is more than honor in that sword, come on, we’ll go return to your friends, and I’ll fight with you for a time, and show you how powerful that sword can really be.”
“You would…join us? One of the original Zodiac Braves? This is excellent, this is awesome, this is beyond cool…,”
“I’d say he likes the idea, wouldn’t you?” Aeris softly smiled.
“I know a little about how...she fights, I could teach you a few things...besides I was the first to lose against her, I think it’s time for a little payback.”
With that, Strife once again wrapped his face in the red cloak that hid his form, and once again he was the silent hulking warrior with the immense blade.
“I’ll ask one last question of you,” Aeris said quietly, “What will you do with the stones, once you find them.”
“I don’t know if there is much we can do with them. For one thing, we can only protect them from Ajora’s power, but also, I think our mission is also to reassemble the Crystal.”
“The Crystal? You know of the Crystal?!” Something ancient and long-forgotten in Aeris’ mind came to her, something her mother Ifalna taught her when she was a child.
“The elements will merge and the ancient Crystal will be whole, when all is lost Eight warriors will come and save our world from darkness.”
Shaking her head in disbelief, Aeris passed him a small strip of worn paper, something she’d torn out of an old map, it seemed, it read:
“Restore the old paths of Light, and Aura will light the way to the shards…,”
“What does it mean?” Pharda asked.
“What stones do you have?” Aeris asked.
“Um…one has the marks of Leo/Capricorn and the other is something scratched out and Virgo…,” he said looking at them.
“I didn’t ask what signs they had…what colors do they shine?”
“Well, Leo/Capricorn glows Red, and the other glows Green.”
“The two symbols represent Fire and Earth, but we need the two symbols for light: Yellow for the element of thunder, and White for the element of light.”
“Oh…I see, the two paths or elements of Light, but where do we go to restore them?”
Strife seemed to straighten, which made him even taller in appearance, then said, “According to an old adage, the temples of the elements are hidden symbolically all over Gaia, if this is referring to them, we simply have to find the two temples of light and thunder. Sounds simple enough.”
“Maybe we should share this information with your friends…,” Aeris suggested.
“Yes, but how do we get past those Tantarians?”
Strife’s eyes glowed a smile to him and said, “This will be part of your training, Samurai.”
Pharda could hardly believe it, being trained in the sword arts by a former Zodiac Brave. He grinned as he readied his Murasame for battle. This was going to be a battle to remember.
