March 20th, some time after the war with Adel.

The children of the orphanage were going to have a story. And it wasn't going to be like one of those nice, boring little stories Matron always told. Her stories were always things like: What's That In The Sky, Bartz? and Yuffie Learns To Share and Celes Goes to the Theatre and Edward, This Is No Time To Sing! These stories had trite little morals, or else they conveyed basic, tedious information a baby could master. They also made you sleep well. They were always relayed in Matron's gentle, melodious, lulling voice. You knew nothing bad could happen in them. Everything was resolved right away, no loose ends. There were no monsters or dark twists or double-crosses to speak of.

They were dull stories. Matron, not having a cruel bone in her body, was a terrible storyteller. The only person who really liked her stories was Zell.

Though everyone liked Matron, so the only person to ever come out with it and tell her that her stories were bad was Seifer.

But today they would have a better story. Cid was here.

Cid was round and crinkly. And craggy-faced, not handsome at all. He wore sagging military jodhpurs that made him seem like more than a mere pencil-pusher, which was what Matron said he actually was: not much of a fighter these days. He'd never gone as far as he could have with his gunblade (which she forbade him from showing to the children of the orphanage, which made every single child despair and declare that they would die if they never got to see it, except for Zell, who wouldn't have wanted to see it anyway). These days, Cid was just a kind of secretary.

But he told the best stories. Cid could summon up horrible stories, stories that left you wide awake all night, stories that left you shouting contradictory things: stop! Don't say anymore! But also: why are you stopping? Keep going! We have to know what happens next!

Cid brought something for everyone every time he came. A camera for Matron.

"Hey, are we all gonna have to pose for a picture?" said Seifer.

"I hope not," muttered Squall, into the crook of Sis's arm. But they did have to. Matron made them.

And then a sparkly barrette for Selphie and a Deling City-made Cactus Jack in-a-box for Irvine. They agreed to share them both because Selphie really wanted the Cactus Jack, so Irvine wore the barrette rakishly behind one ear for a week, after which it was lost, and they had no choice but to share the Jack.

"Cid, you know they're just gonna break it, right?" said Seifer.

"Selphie's crazy crazy crazy," Squall agreed, but relayed this information to no living person directly, just to the colony of spiders that lived in the wall next to the fridge.

A smiling plush chocobo for Zell. It rattled and shook and buzzed and lit up the boys' room like a nightlight when its stomach was squeezed.

"Good, he needs baby toys," Seifer said dismissively.

"It even looks like Zell," Squall told the stove.

Seifer heard this and agreed. Rather vociferously and for the next fourteen years.

A genuine child's tool box for Quistis, which was the envy of the orphanage for the next month or so. It had everything – a play hammer, play nails, play saw, play wrench, play spackle that was really just a kind of play dough.

"She's gonna be so boring, Cid. Why'd you give that to her? She's just gonna use it a coupla' times and put everythin' right where it's s'posed to go in the box and then not let anybody else touch it," Seifer complained.

"We can steal the pieces 'n use them for weapons," Squall informed the window.

And that was exactly what happened.

Ellone had a doll in fancy old Dolletian dress, with pretty blonde hair, made of porcelain, with tiny tiny shoes that were be-ribboned, and her own mirror, and her own purse, and her own beautiful scarlet overcoat, and her own porcelain male companion in knight's garb, and her own old-fashioned sorceress staff for summoning eldritch creatures of Hyne from the deep to destroy her enemies.

"….," Seifer said, impressed in spite of himself. Then, after a minute. "Cid, is that even allowed t'give to a kid?"

"Sis should put it away where we won't break it," sighed Squall.

Then came time for Squall and Seifer's gifts. Cid made a big production of it; these two children were clearly his favorites. Good, sweet Matron loved and liked them all in equal measure. But Cid simply loved them equally; he liked best the two that always came running (slowly trailing, in Squall's case) up to him every time he visited. They were less adoptable than the rest. Everybody knew this. Squall was an introverted slip of a thing that crept along addressing not other human beings, but more often the moon at night, or the grains of sand on the beach, or the blades of grass in the courtyard. He drifted behind Sis like he existed on some other plane, calm and quiet, voicing only one thought for every fifty he actually had, which made people nervous. It seemed unnatural. While Seifer was loud, fussy, childish even for a child, impulsive, stubborn, thoroughly nasty when he set his mind to it – a difficult kid.

But Cid adored them both.

"You won't believe what I've brought for you two…" he said, lifting up his hands excitedly. "Now, boys—"

"S'not gonna be gunblades," Squall told the floorboards presciently. "S'never gunblades."

"Right?" said Seifer.

Cid heard this exchange. He paused. He said, "…Er."

"Probably gonna be somethin' dumb like a train set," Seifer told Squall.

"Choo, choo, no thanks," Squall told the curtains.

"And then it'll just end up in Selphie's hands," Seifer complained. "Am I right, Squall?"

"Selphie's a jail," Squall said to his own shoes. "For all the toys she breaks. That we can't ever play with again."

"Um," Cid said. "It's a gift, boys. Don't you at least want a gift?"

"Not if it's not gunblades," said Seifer. "We've had this talk, Cid."

"Prison guard Irvy," Squall said glumly, still stuck on the vision of what would happen to some lame toy like a train set. "Traps all the toys in Her hands." He addressed these thoughts to the clock on the wall.

"Tell ya what," Seifer said, "Give us a story."

"Call it even," Squall offered, making the offer very clear to Cid's shins.

"I dunno about even," said Seifer, a natural at the thuggish shakedown. "Call it about… half even. You still owe us at least one gunblade."

"When did I ever promise two gunblades?" Cid said, thrown off. "You both know Matron won't let me bring even one gunblade—"

"Better be a good story," said Squall, ignoring Cid entirely and focusing instead on the fireplace poker.

"Nether rippers!" said Seifer.

"Nether rippers," said Squall.

When they put their minds to it, even if Seifer's mind was aimed too directly and too brutally at shaking down Cid, and Squall's aimed at all the spaces in the room that weren't Cid, they knew they could break him down, force him into telling the worst, the best, the most awful, the most wonderful story of all. Nether Rippers.

Unfortunately, they often set out to do this forgetting that the other children, with preferences of their own, might throw off their excellent union, their terrible alliance. Zell, in particular, was no fan of Cid's stories. He'd been standing by the door, halfway in the kitchen, halfway in the playroom, and when he heard mention of the Nether Rippers he burst into tears.

"No," he said, stamping his powerful chubby foot. "No, no, no, no, no!"

This summoned Quistis, who Seifer in particular often suspected was training herself up to be a kind of fun-sucking Guardian Force. There to back up all the babies, to give strength to the weaklings, and to destroy any prospect of happiness that the stronger children at the Orphanage might achieve.

Squall concurred, but not in so many words.

"We can't hear about the Nether Rippers again!" Quistis said imperiously. "Zell couldn't sleep for a week."

"Good," Seifer retorted.

"Makes him stronger," Squall told the kitchen table.

"Now, children…" Cid began.

Quistis's shouting brought Irvine and Selphie down on them.

"We gonna hear about the Nether Rippers again?" Selphie said, her eyes growing wide. She hopped from foot to foot. "Let's do it! No, let's not! Well. Yes! Let's do it! Only they're scary. Let's not! But let's do it anyway!"

"…don't think I wanna hear that story again," Irvine said, looking worried. "Unless Sefie wants to. Then I guess I do."

Sis trailed in, having secured her dolls in a secret place. She said, "Why don't we just read Lightning Looks For Her Sister again?"

"No!" cried every single child in the room.

Except for Zell, who had cried himself into a heap on the floor by this point. He raised his tear-streaked head hopefully and nodded. "Boxer's cool."

"That boxer in that story is stupid, with stupid ideas and a stupid face and a stupid coat," Seifer said dismissively.

Zell began crying again. Sis and Quistis began to chide Seifer. Seifer began to shout at them for being horrible fun-killing jerks. Selphie made it known that she thought everyone but Irvine was a jerk. Quistis began yelling at Selphie. Irvine began yelling at Quistis. Squall pulled up a chair at the kitchen counter and informed the counter that everyone here was very loud and also they were all horrible, every last one of them.

Matron walked in.

"What did you do?" she asked Cid.

Cid, standing forlorn and terrified in the center of the kitchen, shrugged. "Nether Rippers?" he said, by way of explanation.

When Matron next spoke, her voice was very low and soft, but everyone heard it anyway, even above all the noise, because when Matron spoke, you listened. It was a kind of hidden terrible power Matron had. Matron said, "No. I don't think so. That frightened most of them last time."

Everyone in the room looked relieved at this pronouncement, except for Seifer and except for Squall. Seifer stomped his foot and dislodged a loose floorboard. Squall scowled at the counter.

"We have Steiner's Big Day that we can read tonight," Matron offered.

Groans from everyone but Zell. Selphie and Irvine began to look repentant, regretting their earlier waffling about the Nether Rippers. Seifer smirked at them, superior, then remembered that his story choice had lost out, so he became angry all over again and balled his hands into fists and sat on the floor and hit one of those fists against the loose floorboard.

For Squall's part, he only told the counter, very seriously, "Would rather lose all my hearing than read Steiner's Big Day again."

Matron and Cid glanced at him, alarmed.

"There's also From Sewers to Sky Piracy," said Matron.

At this, even Quistis became regretful. That one sounded like an interesting book, but it was seventeen pages of political dithering that went over their heads, with a very annoying protagonist and very little sky piracy to speak of. Quistis thought the moral was that war was bad? Or something? But even she wasn't really sure.

"Even the sky pirate in that book thinks he's too cool for it," Squall muttered.

"Can't blame him," said Seifer.

Cid took in the sea of regretful and put-upon faces (and Zell, still sniffling into the floor). He glanced at his beautiful wife, who was tapping her foot in annoyance at him. He looked down at his bag, where one brand new deluxe train set sat forlorn and unwanted. He said, "Tell you what? I have an idea. I'll tell you a whole new story!"

Immediately, the children became transfixed. Seifer stopped pounding. Zell stopped crying. Selphie stopped tangling her barrette in Irvine's hair and just let it dangle limply behind his ear.

"I don't know that—" Matron began.

"You have to make dinner anyway," Cid said. "And you deserve some time off from these rascally little gangsters!"

"I'm not a—" Quistis said.

"You are," said Seifer.

"Y'kinda are," sniffed faithless Zell.

"She so is," Squall told the counter.

"We all are," Ellone said fairly, settling the whole thing. "We're orphanage gangsters."

"Who are going to straighten up! Live right! Go bathe themselves!" Cid said, realizing that this was his moment to take command of the whole unruly lot. He injected military precision into his voice. All of the children straightened up right away, even Seifer. "Ellone! You're the boss. See that they do it well! You're squad leader! Seifer, B-for-Boy Team command. Then both squads reconvene at the boys' nursery. Nineteen hundred on the dot!"

"Yes, sir!" said Irvine, impressed in spite of himself.

"Then," Cid said mysteriously, "We tell the story of…"

"Just make sure it's not—" Edea began.

"The Duchy of Lost Children!" Cid boomed.

"I was afraid you were going to say that," said Edea.

She could not have made the story sound more promising, more intoxicating, if she'd tried.

"I have Tidus Plays Blitzball," she said, making a last-ditch effort to save the children from Cid's storytelling.

"No!" cried every last child, even Zell. Even Zell hated that one. And even Zell was interested in the new story, if also fearful of what a Duchy of Lost Children might mean for his good night's sleep. Still, he submitted himself to Seifer's bossy manhandling in the boys' bathroom with much less crying than usual.

At nineteen hundred on the dot they assembled to hear the story. Matron had filled the house with the smell of homey, boring old chicken-cactuar soup. This did nothing to quell the excitement spreading among the children. Cid was already in his arm chair when they reconvened. He was still a short, gentle, ugly little man, but he'd somehow made himself seem mysterious and horrible and powerful.

He lifted a finger and said, "This is a story of Hyne."

The children glanced among themselves, confused. Was this a religious story? Had Cid tricked them into a lesson? Many began to look mutinous at the thought. Cid picked up on it and lifted his hands out placatingly.

"This has no moral!" he assured them. "That's why they never tell this one. No moral at all. No use to tell in church or at school.

"Now. People believe that the ground beneath us is a dead thing. But Hyne knew better," Cid said. "Hyne was born from the earth, from a marriage of wild moon monsters when they hit the earth's surface and the orderly rays of the sun, that gave those monsters thought and magic. They moved about the earth and died there, and their magical bones became embedded deep beneath the ground and attained new life, and this became Hyne. Born out of the cauldron of the earth. Out of the—"

"Netherworld," whispered Seifer. "Where the Nether Rippers are."

"Shhhh," said the others.

"No, no," said Cid, "Well, yes. But this is a different story. A different take on the Netherworld. Or let us call it Underworld. People say the Underworld is just home to dirt and worms, but it is not. It is the heart of our planet. Just as in the heart we have secret thoughts and desires and terrors, so too in the Underworld are packed valuable jewels and metals and teeming lava full of life, and also horrible beasts to beat us back from these things. The Underworld is the great lump deep inside that pumps to keep the earth alive, a land where magic sunlight was buried within the strong moon monster bones, and where the sunlight and bones became lava. Lava lets itself escape, now and then, bubbling up in volcanoes, releasing, bleeding out onto the surface through the capillaries at the tops of the Trabia mountains. This was how Hyne came to be. He was bones that were melted into one great person, the first person. And he didn't come from the sun or the moon. He came bleeding out from the center of the earth.

"The Earth had designed Hyne to be a perfectly balanced being, moon and sun, magic and strength, wild monster and orderly light. All in one. He was like all the other wonderful things the earth produces, gleaming rubies and carbuncles, emeralds and delightful diamonds, metals to makes weapons with. This is why we call him God. Because he was greater than the things he found on the surface. First, he found actual sunlight, which blinded him initially and gave him a headache. Sunlight in its strongest form, not melted down and contained as it is in the ground, but simply pounding away at you, is a horrible, conquering thing. It leaves you aching and thirsty. It did this to Hyne. So Hyne split the earth with a metal blade, and up bubbled the secret hidden springs underneath the world, making the oceans and rivers for him to drink.

"Next Hyne had to contend with the moon monsters. These are magical beings called down to the world by some unknown force. They still plague us today. Though they were Hyne's cousins, they were capable only of savage, impulsive thoughts. They had not been tempered by the ground, as Hyne had been. So Hyne struck them down, and for a hundred years he battled them, until their numbers dwindled.

"We know the old myth now. Hyne became tired, and fell asleep, and to keep the monsters at bay he used the earth to make more people, companions for himself, to do his work for him while he rested. But when he woke, the people had multiplied, and they say that Hyne—"

"Burned up all the children!" Seifer crowed.

Zell gave a squeak, and buried himself in his chocobo.

Up came Cid's finger again. "That's what they say," Cid said. "But I've been somewhere, long ago. Long ago, I chanced to visit the horrible magic city of Esthar—"

Gasps from all the children, save Ellone, who made a face for some reason.

"And there they tell it differently," said Cid. "There, they say he did not get rid of the children at all. Hyne woke, and was surprised to see so many new people. But he did not hate them, initially. The people were like him. They had come from the ground. They were powerful and wonderful bits of life that had once been buried. Hyne had dug them up and brought them to the surface, and at first they loved him. And Hyne, too, loved them at first. For he had come of the ground, too. At one time they had all been ground, been connected. So he called the people his sisters and brothers, and believed they were all the same.

"But they were not the same. The earth will give us topazes and sapphires, tourmalines and amethysts, and all these things are very different. So too with the people. Hyne's creations were not identical to him. They had minds of their own. They made a poor army, always squabbling and expressing their own opinions, and going against the commands Hyne gave them. Some of them were honorless brigands from the start. Others, real diamonds at first, until they let themselves become cut into vagabonds, rebels. Many turned against Hyne, and many more simply did not accept his brotherhood. They preferred to be their own beings.

"This enraged Hyne. Never had he considered that he might feel as he did when the people rebuffed him. Lonely. He had always been alone, of course. But for the first time he began to be afraid, because now there were other creatures in the world who could think as he did, and yet they did not. They thought their own thoughts. All except the small ones.

"You see, the people had devised a way to make newer, smaller people. I won't tell you the details. You're too young—"

"Aw," said Irvine.

"Shhh," said everyone else.

"These were children," said Cid. "And children are very open. They find it easier to connect with others than adults do. This why we have to tell them stories, to teach them ways to think for themselves—"

"That sounds like a moral," Selphie said warningly.

"Sorry, sorry," said Cid. "But the point is: the children accepted Hyne. They still trusted him and loved him. They followed his commands, and gladly became his army. But this enraged those older beings that had turned against him. So Hyne gathered up the children and retreated to this very shore, to a great castle he built for them. And there he prepared them for battle. At first, it did not occur to Hyne to worry for their safety. He saw the children as rightfully willing to die to keep the world all connected. And in fact they were. They wanted to do just that.

"But there was one problem," Cid said. Then he stopped, put his hand to his brow. He shook his head, almost mournfully.

"What?" Seifer asked him.

"Yeah, Cid, what was it?" Quistis said.

"Tell us," Squall demanded of his quilt.

"It is very hard not to care for children," Cid said. "Children are not like monsters. They are people. And when they enter your life, if you are not careful, you will begin to love them. No one had ever warned Cid about this—"

"Cid?" said Seifer, suspicious.

"Hyne," Cid said quickly.

Seifer could ridicule you horribly if he found you going soft on him.

"I mean Hyne. No one had ever warned Hyne. So he began to love the children, and when he looked over his battlements and saw the rest of the people turning the metals of the earth into swords, pikes, weapons, he realized how awful it was to sacrifice them. So he didn't."

"What?" said Seifer.

"He didn't," Cid said. "Hyne was magic incarnate, remember? Moon magic and sun strength. Or was that sun magic and moon strength? Either way, he had more power than the people suspected. And when they went to retrieve their children, with blades and maces, Hyne did the best thing he could do for his beloved army. He sunk his duchy, his castle, and all the children in it, deep within the life-giving earth."

"He buried them?" Quistis said, horrified.

"He saved them," Cid said, "Or so he thought. He believed he was sending them to a time and place where they would always be safe, always be connected to him. Back beneath the harsh, chaotic world. To the heart of things."

There was silence.

"This," Cid finished, "Is what we call the Duchy of Lost Children. All people are descended from the beings who turned against Hyne. But our cousins, the loyal ones, Hyne sunk beneath the earth. The Underworld took them back in. Swallowed them up again."

Zell began to cry.

"C'mon," Seifer said, unimpressed. "That's not so bad."

"He buried them," said Ellone.

"No wonder people ended up rippin' off his skin," put in Selphie.

"He wasn't bad, though," Squall told Zell's chocobo. "He thought he wasn't."

This became a point of contention. To Irvine, Selphie, Quistis, Zell, and Ellone, it was clear that Hyne was bad. Unforgivably so. To love children and line them up into an army did not sound like real love at all. Besides, Hyne's flesh, the part of him left after his strong skin had been surrendered to humanity, the magic part - that had turned into sorceresses. And sorceresses were bad. Everyone knew that.

"They're not so bad," Seifer protested.

Seifer had recently watched a movie with a very beautiful and sympathetic sorceress in it, and been very affected by the whole experience.

"They're not," said Squall.

Squall hadn't liked the movie as much. It had made Sis sad. It was just that Squall sometimes suspected that Matron was a sorceress, and this was solid proof that sorceresses could be good.

She was, and they could be.

She chose this moment to walk in. Everyone was fighting. Or, well. Everyone was fighting with Seifer, sole Defender of Hyne (for his part, he thought sinking into an adventure beneath the earth wouldn't be so bad anyway. It was better than being burned up). Only Squall was not fighting with Seifer. He was simply occasionally corroborating Seifer's points, and addressing this corroboration to a mountain of pillows.

"Cid," Edea said, exasperated.

"This is good," Cid said defensively. "They're thinking for themselves."

Edea shot him a frustrated look.

She managed to quiet the children and shuffle them back into the kitchen for dinner. How? Special sorceress powers, no doubt. No ordinary human woman could have calmed down even just Seifer, let alone the whole orphanage gang, when they got going.

"Come on," she said, "All of you! It's your favorite soup tonight, and then rest."

Whining from the children.

"Hush, hush," Edea said. "No complaints. Every body needs rest." Then, to Cid, in an undertone, "Even if every time a certain someone visits, he looses the Alps on them and I spend the night warding off bad dreams."

Cid hung his head. He followed the first troop to the kitchen. Seifer and Squall were last out of the room.

"I wouldn't mind goin' down into the earth," Seifer insisted stubbornly.

"S'Nether Rippers down there," Squall told him, the first time Squall had directly addressed anyone since this morning, when he'd informed Sis that he thought most people were a headache and she was the only exception.

"So what?" Seifer said. "You scared of Nether Rippers?"

"You're scared," Squall shot back.

"I'd kill 'em with my gunblade," Seifer said.

"Run 'em through," said Squall.

"Crunch up their bones," said Seifer, with satisfaction. "Bet I could kill more than you."

"No way," Squall scoffed.

"Way," said Seifer. "Bet you couldn' kill a Nether Ripper if it stole yer girlfriend and tore up yer house and killed yer mom and spit in yer face."

Squall eyed him balefully. "Could too."

"Yer on, then."

"Boys," Matron said warningly.

Years later.

It was March 20th again, only this time it fell seven months after the Ultimecia War. That war had reduced far-off Northern Trabia to rubble. But no longer. They'd had seven months to work at the place, and so Trabia was beginning to struggle past the status of 'burned-out, depressing shantytown.'

This was nice.

It was also largely due to the efforts of the woman who'd bombed the place to smithereens, though, and that was less nice. From the local Trabian perspective.

Kind Edea had gone haywire, wrong. And, ultimately, gone powerless. And hated. The local Trabians did not want her here. They called her a witch. She wasn't, not anymore.

But this made very little difference to the locals. There was no way to spin the story that didn't lay some of the blame on her. Cid had tried. But the truth was, there was no point. She and Cid were no longer a united force, a marriage of sensible kindness and exciting and foolish romance. Edea had moved beyond him too many times, gone to where homely, small Cid Kramer could not follow. She'd gone and become possessed without him. And recruited knights for Ultimecia without him. And murdered presidents without him. And blown up Trabia Garden, and so on.

Their relationship wasn't in the best place right now.

He still adored her, of course. But it was uneven adoration. She found, horribly, suddenly, that she couldn't quite reciprocate it anymore. Not to the same extent.

She looked over an old picture of him once she was alone in her hotel room. Not just a picture of him. A picture of all of them, taken with the camera that he'd given her. Left to right: Cid and Seifer, Quistis and Zell, Selphie and Irvine, Herself, Ellone and Squall. Cid was holding Seifer. Seifer looked annoyed, but had submitted to it with all the grace that his rough four-year-old self had been able to muster.

Edea felt a powerful sense of guilt slide over her. She covered up that side of the picture with one long-fingered white hand. This left Quistis and Zell.

Quistis! So beautiful, and kind to the others, and good. An essentially good person. Always Edea's lieutenant, back then. Always willing to look out for the weaker ones. She'd been adopted early, for being so beautiful and so good. But her adoptive parents had not been very nice. They'd just been available and looking to buy a beautiful child. Edea had gone with it at the time. She'd believed, somewhat foolishly, that a child like Quistis could make a home anywhere.

And she'd had bigger things to worry about then than Quistis's home life.

She stretched a finger over that side of the photo.

Next came Selphie and Irvine. One whose new home she'd destroyed. Another who'd been left remembering the orphanage for years, but with no way to get in contact. He'd tried, and Edea had instructed Martine to gently rebuff him, because she'd assumed this would be safer for Irvine in the long run. It hadn't been.

Edea shifted her palm this time, covering up one, two, three, four, five, six faces.

Next was herself. She covered that one, too.

Then came Ellone, isolated and miserable for years, trapped with the White SeeDs. There the guilt was definitely too much.

The only one left was Squall. And he was doing well. So well. Edea felt her heart swell at the thought. True, she'd done less than she would have liked to bring about his success. But neither had she contributed to his unhappiness. She could say, honestly, that she'd done right by him. Squall would now go down in history, eternal, forever a mark of true courage in battle.

Well. That was nice.

Wasn't it?

And that was the last thought Edea had before someone tapped her shoulder. She whirled around.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you came after all. I wanted to talk to you. I… I learned a lesson, after all this. And I wanted to say—"

The blade pierced her just above her shoulder. Her vision went black.

"Oh, look, Squall," Rinoa said. "My friends from school!"

It was a week earlier – March 13th. Friday the 13th, and Squall Leonhart was not a big believer in the superstitious, but he ought to have been, because it was clearly not going to be his day.

They were in Gryphon House, a landmarked mansion in Deling City that also housed Rinoa's old school library. Squall had never been much of a reader, aside from the required Garden training manuals and Weapons Monthly and the like, but Rinoa inhaled books like they might crumble into dust before her very eyes, so here they were. She was here for two in particular: Cloncio Achilleviam's very rare The Duke, a Dolletian renaissance-era political tract that had landed its author in prison for most of his life. And How To Keep From Making Enemies While Still Successfully Manipulating People, a bestseller among the Galbadian elite.

Also basically anything on sorceresses from the Galbadian continent. Literally anything. She'd worked her way through Esthar's resources in an alarmingly short time, but it seemed that where a sorceress grew up could influence how their powers developed. Rinoa was (regrettably, to her mind) Galbadian by birth and breeding. And so it only made sense to come to Galbadia, even if most of the really useful books here had doubtlessly been burned or consigned to Vinzer Deling's private library.

Rinoa was a sorceress, a politically-minded one if not a very good one. She hadn't been one long enough to be a very good one. She only knew a handful of spells. She had to teach herself, because every sorceress was different enough that even someone who'd been a sorceress for a very long period, like Edea, couldn't often explain how Hyne's power would manifest in another person. The first really worthwhile spell Rinoa had inadvertently learned was invisibility, three months into the whole sorceress thing. But she couldn't extend it to other people, so she didn't use it often. She stuck by her friends, and wouldn't have left them standing around in a lurch, staring at the empty space where she'd stood moments before. That would have been a nice sorceress trick, she always said. But it wasn't a very nice person trick.

Invisibility becoming her first perfected (okay, nearly perfected) spell probably said something about her. Namely, that she was perhaps not enjoying life as a well-known sorceress. And it definitely said something about how unfair the universe was that the way the spell worked, for Rinoa, sometimes involved her erupting into a brilliant display of white feathers before vanishing. For absolutely no reason. The feathers didn't do anything. They were just needlessly flashy. This was the other reason she didn't use the spell very often.

Four months in she'd learned some basic telekinesis, which she still couldn't quite control. It was more of a hindrance than anything else. Sometimes she levitated her dog, who seemed to enjoy it. That was the only perk.

Then came full mastery of flight, a natural extension of her telekinetic abilities. Rinoa had almost been lost in the far reaches of space this one time, so she didn't actually like this either. She worried irrationally that she'd float up and never come back down again.

After that she realized she could sense magic used anywhere within a few hundred meters of her location. That was the slightly uncomfortable headache she always seemed to have when in B-Garden; she just hadn't realized it was anything but a headache while at B-Garden, because almost everyone there was using GF magic all the time. But when she'd come back to Deling, on magic lockdown thanks to Sorceress Edea's takeover, any soldier's Scan and Cure and Fira hit her with sudden discomfort. Someone was casting in the depths of the library right now, probably illegally for all she knew, and it gave her what felt like a soft, irregular tap-tap-tap across the front of her skull. Not painful. Just sudden, off-putting, and unpleasant.

And that wasn't the oddest side effect.

One morning, two months ago, she'd woken up speaking and writing flawlessly in some unknown language, possible Middle Trabian, or else a very early variant on Estharian. Maybe even pre-Ancient Centran, which was crazy, because she hadn't even known there was a pre that had come before the Ancient Centrans. She managed to infect some of their friends with it. They stood around babbling in Ancient Centran until it wore off. That had been interesting. But mostly, to Rinoa's mind, annoying. She'd never been so embarrassed in her life.

And yet it wasn't by far the worst manifestation of her powers. She could also mute people. Permanently. Or at least until she decided to take it off. No echo screens, remedies, elixirs, esunas, or treatments made a difference; it all came down to Rinoa's will. That scared her, and so all their friends pretended it didn't really scare them, but it obviously did. Only Squall was unfazed. He usually was, when it came to Rinoa. He'd sworn he'd never be afraid of her, a personal challenge, and as far as everyone could tell he seemed to be meeting it.

This was Squall. He never backed down from a challenge.

Rinoa, too, thought Squall would go down in history. If only because of sheer stubbornness. It was not in Squall's nature to give up. Tenacity was his number one quality. People thought it was silence, or a propensity for stunning victory, or else courtly knighthood and inner nobility. But his tendency toward silence – his girlfriend was discovering – was simply a byproduct of a stunningly lonely childhood full of abandonment. And victory had to do with fate and the alignment of the planets and hard work and friends. And his inner nobility was, to be honest, something people just liked to imagine about him. He didn't concern himself with it very much. He told her very often that people were essentially morons.

Tenacity, though.

Only once in his life had Squall ever given up. On people, that is. On humanity. On any kind of human connection. He'd effectively sealed off any kind of interest in others, or desire for their wellbeing, and he'd done this stubbornly, thoroughly, perfectly. He did nothing imperfectly. It wasn't that he was a perfectionist; it was just that he tended to be better at nearly everything than almost anyone else, to an extent that almost made Rinoa jealous.

But he'd still given up. And he was in some way ashamed of it now, though the shame was rooted in his unconscious mind, Rinoa thought, because she could feel enough of her knight's emotions to know that he carried that shame with him even as he never admitted it to her. Possibly the strange mechanisms of Squall's overactive, tenacious brain kept it buried deep, motivating him without his knowledge.

He would not give up again. Giving up was not in his character.

Even if sometimes, like right now, he clearly sorely wanted to.

"Your friends all hang out in their old school library?" Squall said.

"That is a little weird," Rinoa allowed.

She called out to her friends. They called back. The general noise they produced left Squall blinking in distaste.

Rinoa moved to greet them, but Squall did not, and since her hand was on Squall's arm, she mostly moved half a foot in their direction and then stopped, realizing that the person she was holding had suddenly taken on the implacable qualities of one of the library's many decorative statues.

"How many of them are there?" Squall forced out, after a minute.

"Looks like all nine in my old class," Rinoa said. She said this primly. She felt like she ought to consider apologizing to him for having so many unexpected friends. But she was thoroughly convinced that she should not have to apologize for having friends.

"Nine!"

"No, look. There's Missy from class B, with that red book. Ten, I guess."

Grimly: "Ten."

"That's nothing. There are about a fifty students in the whole school at a time. That's a whole fifteenth of the Garden population. Or something like that. So many people, huh? So many."

Squall glared at her. He suspected she was having fun with him. She was.

"You should come greet them with me," Rinoa said. "You don't think it's too much for you, do you Squall?"

She didn't make it sound like a challenge. Much.

"I can do this," Squall said.

He could, too. She believed in him.

Plus, she suspected that after it was over he'd call in to his friends (all four of them, which was the number of friends Squall generally assumed a sensible person had) to complain bitterly about the whole thing.

While Squall was so struggling, someone – not a particular friend of Squall's, since the list of Squall's friends was fairly short, and this person wouldn't have been interested in being listed on it anyway – raised a mud-splattered hand at the rear door of the orphanage, and knocked.

It was a pale hand, underneath all the mud. Long-fingered, as though designed for greater things than mere knocking, but also calloused, a fighter's hand.

"…Cid," the person choked out.

Cid did not live at the orphanage, not formally. He was now living nearby, enjoying his retirement. But he was not at his official new residence, and neither was his wife, the witch (not that this person wanted to encounter the witch), and so it became necessary to seek him out in the environs.

It must have been a truly terrible necessity. Cid's guest was clearly in no condition to go wandering around Centra. Besides their general griminess, which obscured their pale hair and made it hang limp, greasy, and filthy, in fact they looked as though the ground itself had swallowed them whole and spit them back out again. Mud-encrusted boots, mud-encrusted pants, mud on their long, battered coat. Mud in their wounds, which dripped a trail of blood to the orphanage door.

"…CID!" they tried again.

This was clearly a very unlucky person. But perhaps the stars had aligned for them, for once. Cid was inside the orphanage, and heard the second shout. He went, gingerly, to the door, and opened it a crack, and then opened it wider when he saw who it was.

"…Cid," said this person, falling into him. He was barely able to catch them in time. "Crater… In Kash…"

They coughed violently, hacking up blood or earth or both. It stained the front of Cid's shirt. Kind, ugly Cid could not bring himself to care.

"In… Ruins…" this person said mournfully. "In…the…desert…."

"Tell me," Cid said urgently, putting their face between his hands.

"Cid…" they said. "He…"

"Easy now," Cid said gently.

"He said…to…tell you…

"Nether Rippers."