"I'm sorry!" Shadow gasped as her friends jumped to avoid the tea. She withdrew her hand into her sleeve and stuffed it in her lap as though harboring a criminal.

Yuffie, for lack of better options, mopped up the mess with a cushion while Tifa rescued the bowl. After a helpless moment, she simply set it, dripping, back in the middle of the table. The smell of bad tea was so strong it made her sneeze.

"What happened?" Aerith asked, cleaning off the White Materia, which had returned to its dull white luster. She twisted her hair into its customary tail, tucked the materia into it, and secured it with the pink ribbon. "Why did you break the spell?"

"I didn't mean to." Shadow bit her lip. When she saw the white shape, she'd yearned for it – coveted it like nothing else in her entire life. She'd reached out to grasp the power and knocked the bowl flying. "What was that, at the end? Was there any more to the dream?"

"I don't know," Aerith said, raising her eyebrows. "I only know what I have now shown you."

"So is this a prophecy?" Tifa asked.

Aerith exchanged a look with Shadow.

"No," Shadow answered for them both. "The dweomer does not let us see the future."

"I believe these images are merely symbolic," Aerith said, "but I can't escape the feeling that Shadow needs to be there on the day the skies open."

"Sounds like a prophecy to me," Yuffie said, and Tifa agreed.

"Even if it could be, I don't understand what it would be a prophecy of," Aerith said uneasily. "When I was first given my power, I could feel Jenova keeping the balance in the Lifestream. Now that she's gone, it's like the whole ocean is drawing back before a tidal wave. A tidal wave could bring about the destruction of the world if Sephiroth wills it."

"She's gone?" Yuffie broke in. "What do you mean, gone?" She turned insistently to Shadow. "What is she talking about? Wait, where are you going?"

For Shadow had gotten up and padded over to the bookshelves. It took her no time at all to locate the volume she wanted. The dweomer had shown her exactly where her mother kept it.

"This is the Advent of the Goddess," she said. Despite the pang of missing her mother, she opened the book and pushed it toward her friends.

Tifa and Aerith nodded at the familiar image, the island-sized meteor heading for the small, unsuspecting world of Dokoni Mo, but Yuffie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, we know."

"Do you?" Shadow asked patiently. "Yuffie . . . she's not a goddess."

"What?" Tifa asked, her voice sharp.

"Jenova isn't a goddess, not truly." Shadow stroked the page, grappling with a bizarre sense of déjà vu. She shivered, remembering the misty green of the inner sanctum and the ravaged body hanging above the Lifestream like an animal carcass nailed to a post. "She was a lifeform as alien as the dragons. She lived for over two thousand years in a state of dreaming wakefulness, observing the world through the Black and White Materia. Those two materia are her eyes. In a way, she was the mother of all cetra, because she gave most of her power to my family. Though diminished, she held a seal that kept the dragons slumbering. Sephiroth woke her. He returned the Black Materia to her. Then he cut off her head and took it with him into the Lifestream. He controls her power now."

"Sephiroth took her head?" Yuffie repeated, sounding revolted. "You mean that right now, as we speak, a monster head is swimming through the Lifestream?"

"Yuffie," Aerith said quellingly.

"What? I mean, is she dead now, or is she still alive, just as a head? A squid-head. With hair tentacles."

"Yuffie." Even Tifa looked nauseated.

"Jenova is still alive, but I don't think she's exactly aware anymore, not with Sephiroth controlling the Black Materia," Shadow said. "He's out there, corrupting the Lifestream, corroding it with evil intention. I can feel it."

"If he succeeds, he could destroy all life on Dokoni Mo," Aerith said. "If he can corrupt our souls at the source, no one will be suitable for rebirth. The diminished spirit energy won't be able to sustain nature. The planet will die."

"Why would he do this?" Tifa's fist slammed onto the table, rattling the teapot.

"I don't know." Shadow put her head in her hands, staring down at the wet table. What was it that had changed Sephiroth so rapidly and caused him to turn on his own family? On the entire planet? All those innocent souls . . .

"He was untouchable!" Tifa raged on. "He was the most powerful man in Gaia!"

"He wasn't," Yuffie said in a low voice. "The most powerful man in Gaia is Cloud."

A tense moment hauled itself through the room, as heavy-footed as an oni demon dragging a corrupted soul by the severed silver cord through hell's first fiery gate.

"Sephiroth is ages older than any of us," Yuffie went on. "He's good-looking, he's powerful, he was going to be king, everybody loves him – or they did. And what is Cloud? A pain in the ass. That's why Sephiroth hated him so much."

"You're right," Tifa whispered. "I had forgotten about that."

"Forgotten about what?" Aerith asked, leaning forward interestedly. "What happened between them? Zack won't tell me."

"No, he wouldn't," Shadow said with a sigh, emerging from her hands. Even princesses weren't immune to gossip, apparently, but Aerith had a right to know.

The dweomer shimmered at the edges of Shadow's mind, showing her bits and pieces of that evening so long ago, filling in the gaps of her memory. "They were waging a mock three-way battle out there on the beach. Even with the two of them attacking Sephiroth at once, they couldn't get past his guard."

Shadow closed her eyes against the memory, but it came anyway, playing out against her eyelids.

..::~*~::..

It wasn't fun anymore.

Cloud tried not to look up, tried to hide his expression from his brothers, but his heart smoldered like a swell of lava in his chest. Soon, it would choke him. For a cetra not yet twenty years old, "the rest of my life" encompassed a black, bleak forever.

He was not going to spend forever in the shadow of the Hero of Wutai.

"Is that the best you can do?" Sephiroth teased. Sunset fired the sky and the crashing waves, lighting up strands of his long, silver hair in gold, orange, and pink. His pale face was unusually flushed. He looked happy, green eyes alight.

"All hail Sephiroth, huh?" Zack said with a grin, breathing hard. Sephiroth wasn't even winded. Zack lifted his broadsword once more.

"Zack, stay back," Cloud said, goaded into taking action at last. How could Zack smile like that? How could he stay content as less than second best? Cloud flipped a clasp, twisted a finger-lock, and separated a thinner, shorter blade from the whole of his composite sword. This, he raised in his left hand, the remainder of the sword in the right. He crouched, squinting into the burning sun. "I'll take Sephiroth alone."

"Cloud," Zack said alertly, good humor gone. "Not this again."

"The world needs a new hero," Cloud said, ignoring him.

Sephiroth's stare focused on him the instant he spoke, as intense and hungry as a true wolf's. Cloud could not afford to break that stare. Sephiroth didn't believe that Cloud could win. Not if they both lived to be seven hundred years old.

Seven hundred years of giving up what he wanted to keep the Hero of Wutai happy? Cloud would sooner die. He tightened his gloved hands on his swords' grips so that the leather creaked. It was time for Sephiroth to step aside for him. He would win this time.

Sephiroth breathed a laugh and lifted one spaulder in a shrug. "Come and try."

Cloud attacked.

The sand flew and glittered beneath their boots, fanning in dangerous sprays of half-formed glass, melted by the heat of their battle. No matter how hard Cloud pressed, Sephiroth was always ready for him. The lava inside him welled up, spitting and bubbling in frustration. It flowed down his arms, lending him strength. He struck faster. So did Sephiroth. Thin as a viper's tongue, his six-foot ôdachi hummed and sang with each clash of the blades. All three swords moved so fast that they blurred. They caught the dwindling light in white-hot flashes.

Cloud could not get past Sephiroth's guard.

No matter how many times he crashed into the sea, into the sand, Cloud vowed that he would not stay down. He always returned to the attack, determined to see the hero fail at last.

Again, Sephiroth flung him back. Airborne, Cloud sent a burst of lightning into his brother's face. Sephiroth batted it aside with his ôdachi. He raised his gloved fist. Razor-edged volcanic boulders thrust upward like vertical battering rams. One of them punched Cloud into the air again. His blood flew with the sand. He fell, but slowly, as if the earth were receding. His body would not respond. He watched as Sephiroth opened his fist, releasing a quartet of tiny comets set to explode on impact.

"Stop," Zack said suddenly, appearing in front of Sephiroth, blocking Cloud's view of his smirk. Gloved fist glowing blue, Zack captured the comets and crushed them out of existence. "You're going to destroy him."

Cloud smashed into the ground and knew the agony of flattened lungs. He couldn't decide whether to be angry that Zack had interfered or grateful for the chance to weave, wheezing like a broken magitek toy, to his feet once more.

"That's no way to talk to a hero," Sephiroth said pleasantly. He grabbed Zack's head, gloved fingers and thumb tightening on his cheekbones, palm squashing his nose, and summoned more comets. They blew up directly in Zack's face.

He didn't give Cloud a chance to recover. Though Zack rolled around in the sand at his feet, clutching his bleeding, smoking face, Sephiroth summoned the wind with his right hand and slashed the air with his left. The ôdachi sang like struck crystal. Cyclone crescents barreled toward Cloud.

Fear lifted Cloud's leaden arms. He managed to block the first two crescents with the main core of his sword and slice into the third with the shorter one. The wind spiraled off, sending sand into huge rooster tails up and down the beach. Sephiroth advanced, more cyclone crescents tearing up the ground.

At that moment, Cloud realized, with blinding, painful clarity, that his brother was going to kill him. Then. There. Without losing his smile.

Cloud retreated, limping, up the shore. He gained the cover of some black pines at the same time Sephiroth's cyclone crescents reached them. The trees shuddered under the onslaught, shedding bark, pinecones, and needles. Branches soon followed, sheared clean away.

Zack disappeared, probably to try and convince their father to intervene, striving to keep the peace between them. Cloud had always resented Zack's interference. Until that night. When Fenrir Wolf King did not appear.

Cloud and Sephiroth fought for hours beneath the frightened gazes of the castle's inhabitants. The longer they fought, the colder Sephiroth's eyes became. They burned like green ice, so brightly that his pupils seemed to shrink into catlike slits. And then it happened.

His guard slipped.

Cloud, made quick by delirium and desperation, drove his sword's core past the ôdachi's belated block. With it, he severed Sephiroth's collarbone from his shoulder. The ôdachi dropped from nerveless fingers.

Time seemed to stop. Cloud, eyes tearing up under the blood and sweat that filmed them, gasped for breath with lungs of fire, his entire body shaking. He had nothing left. He was a fool for picking a fight he had no hope of winning.

The sun had long since set. Sephiroth slowly straightened. In the moonlight, his face was completely colorless. His left arm hung useless, his hand empty. He did not touch the wound. He did nothing to stop the bleeding. He picked up the ôdachi with his right hand. His weaker hand. Then he turned and walked away.

..::~*~::..

"They pretend like nothing happened," Shadow finished, disgusted. She blinked the visions out of her eyes. "That single, easily-cured wound that Cloud inflicted on Sephiroth was the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to him, in full view of nearly every servant in the castle. Things were never really right after that."

"And then the White Materia chose Cloud," Tifa mused. "No wonder Sephiroth left. It must have seemed like Cloud stole everything from him."

A/N: We're almost to the end of chapter two! Have you stuck with me? Got any questions? Shoot me a review and let me know!

Reviewer Thanks! St4r Hunter. It is my great honor to have you in this section. Thank you!

Cheers!

Anne