A/N:Awesome news! I was tidying my bedroom and chanced upon a CD onto which I'd burned the entirety of my Final Fantasy 7 novelization - yes, that novel which I thought I'd lost many eons ago when my computer crashed. So now I'm posting it up, hopefully on a weekly basis. Just be warned - this is a monster of a fic, totalling about 500 pages altogether, so it's going to take some time to get to the end... But bear with me, we'll get there in the end. And please don't hesitate to leave your comments and reviews, despite the fact that this was written way back in 1999 - it means a lot to know what people appreciate, as well as hearing your constructive crit.

Enjoy!

-Ludi x

-oOo-

PART ONE

'A journey always begins with ignorance.

When a child, one cannot expect the mystery

of life to be revealed before the journey of life

has been undertaken.

Great things have small beginnings. This is

what the Holy One tells us.

So. Begin ignorant.

You shall learn upon the way.'

-Wutainese proverb from 'The Five Hundred Prophecies of Leviathan'

-oOo-

:: Prologue ::

A lady sat at the sill of her window and looked out on to the snowy fields that surrounded her home, listening to the voices that were always there for her. She was a beautiful lady, beautiful, yet solitary. In the reflected light of the dazzling frosty white sun, she listened to the voices, distinct, warm, comforting, familiar. Like this house, in the middle of the icy snow, the lonely, icy snow.

For many days now, she had sat in this room, by this window. It was her prison, but one that she had long ago found quite tolerable. She did not want to escape - the outside world had made that an impossible concept for her. So the want, the need, (when she had felt it last) had disappeared like a snowflake melting on her fingertips. Only in her heart did the Planet speak out to her - yes, the wonderful, bustling, hurting, crying Planet.

From beside her, her baby gurgled in her cot. The lady turned, softly crooning her child gently back to sleep. As she did so, she looked up, towards the door. Her husband was standing there, in his white scientist's coat, austere, yet so overwhelmingly old and tired. He smiled as their eyes met, a weary, worn sort of smile.

"She looks like an angel when she's asleep," he commented, looking at the beautiful child that lay in the cot "just like her mother."

His wife smiled at him.

She loved him. If it had not been for him and their daughter, she would never have stayed here. She remembered with a certain irony how she'd once been his specimen. It seemed a long time since she'd last called him 'doctor'.

"Darling..." she whispered, her voice taut, tight. She could not get the words out. She could not speak. She could no longer even remember what it was she had wanted to say, there were only dark voids, holes full of pain and hope, lost joy and happiness. They were filled only by the brisk and vehement sound of a knock on the door downstairs. She looked up, and the voids started to widen. She knew her fate. Her husband turned in the doorway, his face resigned. She thought with a new kind of hindsight that perhaps heknew his destiny also.

"You won't answer them, you won't!!" she heard herself cry out to him in hopeless fear.

"Of course I will," he answered, his voice worn "Of course I will protect you. You and our daughter...you are my only treasures."

They looked at each other, the pain of their parting absolute in their faces. Neither voiced it.

"Go." he ordered her, softly "I'll join you later."

As she watched him trudge downstairs to answer the door, she knew that he would not. Snatching her baby from its cradle, she ran down the flight of stairs as quick as her legs and whirling mind would let her. The child in her arms did not make a sound to drown out the din at the front of the house. Men's voices were screaming into the hallway, and one of them sounded distinctly familiar.

As she escaped through the back door, she could hear his voice saying just one word over and over, and it ran like a train racing through her mind:

Cetra...Cetra...Cetra...Cetra...

There was a stillness in the air as it smashed against her face, and her feet crushed into the snow. Oblivious to anything else, she stumbled through the ice crystals and fought against the turmoil in her brain. Her husband's last instruction to her echoed in her head, resonating with every thud that her feet made in contact with the snow.

She was not a hundred yards from the house when she heard the gunshot. A second passed before the pain crashed over her; and then she felt her husband's soul brush past her, and flutter back toward the Planet.

-oOo-

The explosion from the number one Mako Reactor had caused an immediate stir among the local population of the Sector One slums that surrounded it. The blast had been enormous and widely felt. Almost as much as the ensuing panic that had caused a few die-hard Hells Angel look-alikes to come charging into a girl who had stood patiently at the side of the pavement, staring on in awe at the disaster. It could not have been called anything but a disaster. The ruling government, Shinra Incorporated, had built the Mako Reactors thirty-nine years ago, and these had always provided the eight Sectors of Midgar City with electricity. No light penetrated the slums of Midgar from the outside world. The plates made sure of that. It was the electricity that replaced the watery sunshine and the warming beams; it was the crackling neon lights and chrome-yellow street-lamps that did that. It did not seem to matter that they were draining the Mako out of the earth, nor that not much of it was left. No one cared about being environmentally friendly anymore. It was a remnant of the old days.

The girl, as she tried to pick herself up from the rubble that she had landed in, sighed as she looked at the flowers in her basket. It is not easy being a flower girl, she thought. People no longer care about flowers anymore. They had got used to not seeing them in Midgar. She wondered whether they had forgotten what flowers looked like. Maybe they had.

A little way off, the flower girl noted a figure that stood out from the rest of the crowd, all the more so because he was walking away from it. He was good-looking, she thought, and looked a tiny bit dejected and out of place. Different, she thought: but no, not quite so different - he looked so very much like someone she had once known, long ago...It came as a surprise to her when she saw that he was walking her way. Brushing her dress down quickly, she sensed that he was going to talk to her, even though their eyes had not yet met.

"Are you okay?" she heard him ask, and his voice was easy-going, perhaps a little cocky.

She nodded, realising that he must have seen her being knocked over by those oafs. "I'm all right. What happened back there? It scared me."

The boy, or man, she didn't know exactly how to refer to him, shook his head distractedly.

"Nothing...hey, listen..."

Yes, he was very familiar, and it was with a certain amount of self-consciousness that she realised he had unnaturally bright blue eyes. The realisation that she had been staring at him knocked her clumsily into the job she was meant to be doing.

"Do you want a flower? I'll sell it to you for a Gil."

As she picked up the stem of a blue forget-me-not and twirled it playfully between her fingers, she thought she saw something change in those bright eyes. She thought she saw character. But his own character, not the ghosts of her own past.

"Sure." he replied, a little more softly "Don't see many flowers round Midgar these days."

Not any at all, the flower girl thought in reply, as she handed him the blue forget-me-not and took the Gil coin. She dropped it into her pocket. Money, like flowers, was hard to come by in Midgar, and a Gil was nothing compared to the amount she could have charged. Nevertheless, she tried a smile.

"Thank you, very much."

He smiled back at her, but the smile did not reach his eyes. He was devoid of any identity again, she sensed. And he smelt of fires. A little perplexed, she watched him walk away, back into the crowds.

Sighing, the girl picked up a flower and brushed it softly against her cheek. Flowers, she thought, so hard to grow...She stared after the receding figure in the street, a pale, lonely shadow.

"I wonder who that boy was?" she mused out loud to herself. She did not answer the question, though she thought she might have been able to.

"I hope...I get to meet him again."

Next: The introduction of Cloud and AVALANCHE!