Compliation of FFVII in its entirety © Square Enix

The Deverry Cycle in its entirety © Katharine Kerr

A/N1: My love of a video game and of a novel series both, and how the characters from one fit so well with the world of the other, brought this story to life.

AToD is probably the most original of all of my stories, and thus the one I love the most, with an OC-driven narrative and a largely original plotline, plus a blend of magic rules and technology (or lack of it) from both the game and the novels. Since the Deverry Cycle novels take place in a time long ago, and the Final Fantasy series is Japanese in origin, I have placed my kingdom of Gaea in a time reminiscent of feudal-era Japan, and incorporated the magic and technology therein. Sephiroth, Zack, and Cloud are simultaneously friends and enemies in their real world, but in mine, they have become siblings, and their struggles are even more epic as a result.

Please enjoy. :3

"Sephiroth!"

The cry ripped through the smoky air, throbbing with pain and fury. Cloud choked, sounding as if he was in tears – but that was impossible, for he was a man and a prince born of Midgar; he drew breath again. "Sephiroth! Stop!"

The city was burning. Shadow ducked as a wall, its integrity crumbling, tilted and collapsed right in front of her like a drunkard out of a tavern. Sparks and ash swirled up through the air, getting in her eyes, her mouth. Blinking rapidly, she squinted through the billows of smoke.

Strange. Firelight, to her mind, was a bright thing, yellow and homey. But this fire burned so big, so hot, and so hungry, that it clogged her vision with an ugly carmine. It swallowed the light whole and spewed out stinking darkness. It roared, louder than anything she had ever imagined. The heat scorched her skin and her lungs. Demolished magitek streetlamps spat tiny pink and purple balls of energy that bounced on the cobbles and then died. The rush of demons had bent and broken their poles. Shattered glass housings reflected the fire.

How many of Shadow's people had been trapped in their row homes and wooden shops? How many had managed to escape, only to find Hades, Lord of the Ninth Hell, waiting for them in the fiery streets?

As she watched, Sephiroth raised his long ôdachi sword, its blade coated in blood and firelight, and killed another unarmed man. The acrid smoke blew into Shadow's face, and it smelled red. It failed to mask the stench of heated feces, burning along with the bodies. Her stomach curled.

By all the fires in all the hells, her brother had gone insane. Nothing else could explain his actions this night.

They had to stop him. Drenched in sweat, swords drawn but bloodless, Shadow and Cloud rushed after him. The raging flames repelled them, forced them to retreat.

Zack appeared from the south, shielding his face with his arm, his uniform smeared with soot. He jogged through a billow of smoke. "This is no natural fire. It must be dweomer," he said grimly.

"Genesis." The name of Shadow's betrothed came so quickly to her lips that she realized she'd known the truth all along. There were few dweomermasters on the islands. Only Genesis could cast a fire spell this impassable.

Abandonment, hot and sour, rose in the back of her throat like bile. Wasn't a man supposed to lead the woman he loved through ice and fire and darkness? Shadow gazed bleakly at the destruction. Genesis had chosen to throw his lot in with Sephiroth, the kingslayer, rather than stand with her, his love. Had she truly meant so little to him?

Sephiroth, meanwhile, stood alone, contentedly surveying the ruin of their father's city, his silhouette caressed by Genesis's flames. Some hour or so ago, well after sunset, the warbands had vacated their posts on Midgar's great gray wall to fight the fire, practically leaving the gates open. Unchecked, demons swarmed through the streets.

The wall had not been breached by demonkind in over one hundred years, until this night. Demons, animals so swollen with wild dweomer that they had grown to impossible sizes, leaped around the rubble and the royal siblings. They pounced upon and devoured fleeing townsfolk. Shadow, hardly knowing where to strike first, threw out her hand. From her heritage, from her heartbeat, from her will, and finally from her palm, she released a blast of wintry, needle-sharp wind that knocked a thrashing, keening dog demon into the fire, where the flames consumed it.

Alerted to the presence of human dweomer, hungry demons broke off pursuit of their pitiably helpless human prey. They charged her instead, their red eyes glowing. Moving swiftly, she cut down a second dog, and then a third, wetting her tachi's blade, half the length of an ôdachi's but wickedly curved and lethally sharp, at last. The rest of the pack backed warily away from her, their songs of death muted in their throats.

"Sephiroth!" Cloud screamed, beside himself. Apparently blind to the danger, he jumped forward into a stampeding herd of demon horses.

Zack reached for their brother and attempted to drag him away. A stallion, its coat gleaming slick and oily, snapped its fanged mouth shut on the empty air, stamping split hooves that rang like hammers on the cobbles. It squealed a challenge.

Cloud met it. In a smooth arc, he swept his blade through its throat, cutting cleanly into fur, muscle, and tendon. Voice silenced, the horse demon sank to its knees. The red light in its eyes dimmed, and then the demon toppled into a heap of smoldering coals. Cloud didn't even look at it, searching instead for a way through the wall of fire. The remaining demons, scenting easier prey elsewhere, filled the night with howls as they dispersed.

"Are you trying to get yourself killed?" Zack made another grab, but Cloud evaded him. "Fall back, damn you!"

Cloud seemed beyond hearing. "Sephiroth!"

Sephiroth smirked at them through the fire, his green eyes glowing with dweomer power. His long, silver hair rose and fell on waves of heat. After a gloating moment, he turned and walked into the flames. He held a severed head by the hair, which was the same aged silver as his own. The head's mouth hung slack, the beard slicked with slime and gore, the eyes rolled up and shining white like hard-cooked eggs. The crown it wore shone in the crimson light with a curious midnight glimmer.

Shadow didn't know when the tears began, but her grief clawed at the skin of her face. She gasped over shuddering sobs. How could her brother have done this? What madness had wormed its way into his heart?

How could he murder his father?

Behind her, her other brothers argued in agonized shouts. Shadow dried her face on her sleeve and tried to pay attention to what they were saying.

"You don't know where he's going!"

"I know where he's going! The temple!"

"You don't know that!"

Cloud's voice sounded raw and rough. "I do, brother! He has the Black Materia. You know it as well as I do!"

"So you're going to chase him like a cat after string?" Zack snatched a fistful of Cloud's collar and shook him, lifting him so that they were eye to glowing eye. "Think! We can't go running through this mess. People here need help, we've already lost Mother and Father, and we can't afford to lose you too, you thrice-blasted dolt!"

The nearest streets had emptied of anything living. Demons swept through the city like plunging breakers, pushing its citizens farther away from help. Cloud did not respond, teeth clenched, one hand supporting his weight on Zack's wrist, the other angling his sword's edge away from their legs. The blade comprised six interlocking swords, which combined to form one gargantuan sword of Cloud's design. In his infuriated grasp, the sword trembled, its grooved blade throwing shards of firelight back at the flames.

Distracted by the play of light, Shadow slipped into a slight trance. Despite the roaring heat, she felt a slide of ice down her back, as though a cold, clammy hand had caressed her spine. A dweomer warning she wasn't given time to express.

"Oy!" a man bellowed through the smoke. "You kids had better be sane!"

"Master Zangan!" Zack dropped Cloud with a warning glare and then ran to meet their martial arts master, who walked crook-kneed under the weight of an unconscious man. "Like we could stay sane in a situation like this. The warbands have scattered. This is too much for them to handle. No one knows what's what, and . . ." He trailed off, at a loss for words.

"This is General Sephiroth's doing, isn't it?" Zangan asked in his deep, bearlike voice.

Pained, Shadow turned away, which seemed to be all the confirmation Zangan needed.

"I don't know what happened to him," Zack said, his hand on the injured man's shoulder. Dweomer flowed between them, healing and revitalizing, but Zack couldn't possibly revive all who had fallen. None of them could, not even Lady Aerith. The Lifestream must have been overflowing its banks from the influx of newly dead spirits. Zack bowed his head. "It's almost like he's become someone else. Or he's hypnotized."

"Possessed, more like. People call him a hero, but he's nothing but a homicidal maniac. Him and those two friends of his," Zangan said. An oath. A curse.

The dweomer warning chilled her again, and Shadow tightened her hand on her tachi's grip. She tried to swallow the grief that thickened her voice. "He is our brother, Master Zangan. Show some respect."

The fact that her brother, the warlord prince, had been carrying the dual trophies of his father's head and his crown lay heavy between all of them like a giant, grinning spider demon crouched atop the banquet table, but no one dared say it.

"I saw Commander Rhapsodos with him, and it wasn't hypnosis that put him there," the weapons master said stubbornly. When Shadow showed no surprise at this news, he lowered his gray head and said into his beard, "My apologies, Lady Princess. I meant no disrespect to you."

"Cloud!"

Taking advantage of Zack's distraction, Cloud had darted to the right, out of Zack's reach. In a black blur, he sprinted to the steps that would take him to the upper city, a roundabout way to reach the Jade Temple of Mt. Nibel, and cleared them three at a time.

"Little dolt," Zack snarled, his gloved hands flying to his head. "Cloud! You thick-skulled, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, hairy pile of horseshit, I am going to bash your brains in!"

"Stay," Shadow sharply said. All the yelling had broken the trance's hold on her, and she could not deny the urgency quickening her blood. "He's not going to listen to you. You know that. I will go. Master Zangan, get the people out. Find the soldiers, organize the water engines, and start hunting those demons. We must save our people, our city. Please, Zack. Stay and help."

Zack stared at her, the fire wind ruffling his spiky black hair, his irises glowing bluer than sapphires before a candle. Finally, he nodded. "I'll be right there. Save some fun for me."

"Not a chance!" she yelled, already calling upon the spirits of the Lifestream to aid her. With the energies of earth and air, she entered a thousand-step run, covering ground at a rate comparable to a horse at full gallop. Up the steps, through the streets of carnage and demolished magitek engines, beneath frenzied colonies of bat demons as large as eagles, toward the peak of the cold, gray, snowy mountain that held the city of Midgar on its imposing flanks.

"Cloud!" she screamed, emerging at last in the eerie green mist that shrouded the Jade Temple. "Big brother! Where are you?"

Nothing but her voice answered, echoing in the night. Green-gray smoke clouds cloaked the stars, hampering visibility. She followed the urging of the Lifestream and the icy breath of dweomer into the temple itself.

The interior trembled with emptiness. She glimpsed figures in priestly robes slumped in the corners like forgotten piles of laundry.

"Holy Alexander," she cursed under her breath, slipping between them on the toes of her boots. Had Sephiroth slaughtered them all?

Beyond the altar, she noted, the door to the inner sanctum was closed. It exuded more of the green mist around the edges. Warily, trying to watch everywhere at once as if expecting one of those huddled, bloodied figures to rise and attack, she mounted the broad, half-moon stairs toward the sanctum.

She heard his step a second before she saw him. Their swords flashed and rang against each other in the still air.

"You're too late, beloved," Commander Rhapsodos said in his smooth, sardonic voice. Blue eyes that shimmered like sunlight on water smiled at her through the black hair that fell across his forehead. A silver pendant earring swung from his right earlobe.

"Don't call me that, Genesis. Never call me that again!" Shadow rushed him, meaning to cleave his worthless head from his shoulders and take back the dweomer that Father had granted him along with her troth.

Quick as a diving falcon, Genesis's hand shot out and seized her wrists, deflecting her blade. He lifted her clear off the floor as easily as though she were a doll, and then twisted her tachi out of her grasp.

"How could you?" she seethed, dangling. "You betrayed my family! You betrayed me!"

She lifted a boot, intending to kick the lying son of a whore in the face. Languidly, he flung her from him. She soared half the length of the outer room, but then she twisted in midair, orienting herself. The landing wasn't as neat as she'd have liked; she skidded a few feet on one knee before thickening gravity with a spell to arrest her momentum. Instantly, she sprang out of the half-sphere gravity well and launched herself at the tall, red-coated figure at the top of the stairs.

" 'When the war of the beasts brings about the world's end / the Goddess descends from the sky,' " Genesis said. He spread his arms, her short-bladed tachi in his left hand and his crimson-bladed sword in the right, blocking the way to where Cloud and Sephiroth had surely gone. " 'Wings of light and dark spread afar / she guides us to bliss, her gift everlasting.' "

Rage boiled within Shadow's heart. She knew those lines. "You quote a poem instead of answering to justice?" she shrieked, only steps away with murder on her mind. "Get out of my way!"

Genesis threw back his head, his eyes cold, his face haughty. "You're too late," he repeated.

Out of nowhere, another man appeared in her path. There was no way to avoid him, no space in which to block, so intent had she been on Genesis. She had just enough time to register Angeal Hewley's grim, apologetic face before his dweomer-infused fist collided with the side of her head and everything went red again.

A/N2: Hello, Dearest Readers, and welcome to Anne's brain! I mentioned this before, but I have lots of old stories rattling around in my head, some that I have started here on the site and then later pulled - THIS ONE - and others that I have posted but haven't yet finished.

I originally wrote and posted AToD back in 2011. I listed it as a crossover so it only showed up in searches for that EXACT crossover. My readership was nil. Thinking that the story was garbage, I pulled it a few years ago.

But now that I've played FFVIIR, I feel newly in love with these characters and I think, maybe, this story isn't as trash as I thought. I would beg to hear your thoughts on it. I can also provide a glossary if you're feeling lost, the way fantasy books tend to do. Just let me know!

Yours,

Anne

P.S. Have you ever begun a story because of a song? I did. The theme for this book is "If I Fall" by Five Finger Death Punch.