Author's Note: Hello everybody, it's me again! I've been bouncing this fic around for months, and I've finally decided to post the first couple of chapters. Also realize that this fic is not the same one as my Evangelion fic of the same name. That one is officially toast. Pretty soon I will be posting my Cowboy Bebop fic as well. Hope you enjoy these chapters, short as they are!

All Heaven in the Midnight of the Sun

Chapter One

1,000 years after the death of Sephiroth

There were whispers in the night.

Garret Audias craned his head to listen. He was sitting in the crook of a tree; his spear propped up in front of him, listening. Guard duty was bad enough normally, but when you started to hear voices in the dark, you really had to question the effect of the job on your sanity. He tried to still his breathing, straining his ears to catch the faintest echoes of the voices. No good. When you lived in a forest, you quickly realized there was no such thing as silent, especially at night. Every creature in the forest seemed to be chirping or growling or moving at once. He sighed.

He sure hoped so. The idea of hearing voices was bad enough, but if there had really been something down there, it was his job to find it. There were not as many monsters around as there had been in his grandfather's time, but the world was still a very dangerous place, and he was there to protect the village, after all. He scanned the forest floor, his sharp eyes working to pick out any signs of activity. Nothing.

At least, nothing he could see.

Suddenly, the bushes to his right began to rustle. He gasped, and held up his spear to throw. A woman stepped out of the bushes, and he relaxed.

"You scared the hell out of me, Drey!"

She smiled, her face ethereal in the moonlight.

"Sorry. I just wanted to see how you were doing. Are you coming home soon?"
He nodded.

"In a few hours, my shift will be up. Then I'll come home."

"Okay. I love you."
"I love you, too."

She waved once, then turned, and walked back into the forest toward his town. He watched her progress until she was engulfed by the lights of the village, and then he turned back to his duty.

- - - - - - - - -

He slid down from the tree with a sigh of relief. His shift was finally up. Now he could go home to his wife and be done with the dull job.

The second his feet hit the forest earth the voices began again. Her whirled, eyes wide. The voices were coming from all around him, and seemingly from the earth itself.

"It comes!"

"The light! It comes!"
Shocked, he cried out.

"Who are you?!"

The voices stopped just as the light burst forth from the heavens, a ball of incredible brilliance that tore through the clouds like water and dove towards the Earth. Garret spun around and fell down, arm over his eyes in a vain attempt to shut out the light. The voices began again, screaming in fear, and he joined them. The ball of light smashed into the village, sending a massive shockwave of light in all directions. It tore the village to ashes, killing everyone in it within milliseconds. The shockwave reached the forest moments later, and hit Garret with the force of a freight train. It threw him backwards, spinning head over heels, until he crashed into a tree. The force of the wave pinned him against the tree, and he faced the holocaust that was his village. He screamed again, but the sound was whipped away by the wind. His home was engulfed in light, a massive pillar of white flame that nearly blinded him with its magnificence. A solitary figure, small with distance but still perfectly discernible, stood in the center of the light.

Just before Garret blacked out, he thought he could hear it laughing.

- - - - - - - -

Garret woke slowly, his whole body aching. He lay on a carpet of flowers, soft and fragrant. He opened his eyes, and immediately decided he liked them better closed. Opening them was testing the fraying bounds of his sanity. His village was gone, completely and utterly. It was like it had never been there to begin with. Where the beloved building of his home had once stood, lay a blanket of flowers, flowers of all the colors of the rainbow. Their beauty, he thought, was a black prize for the loss of his village. He tried to get to his feet, and was unable. He reached one had out and felt it sink into something soft and yielding. It was the tattered and bloody remnants of a human skull. He tried to scream, but his throat was too hoarse, and all he could manage was a dull shriek of horror. He jerked his hand away and stumbled to his feet. Then he began to run, not bothering to look where he was going. In truth, it would not have helped, as his eyes were blurry with tears.

Finally, almost against his will, he looked up. He knew without looking around that he was in the center of his village. He had lived there his whole life, and after awhile you just began to get a feel for such things. Nestled in the flowers before him, lying curled up like a child, lay a young woman dressed in pink. She was slight of figure, almost elvish, and a brown spill of hair like a waterfall cascaded down her back. But such trivialities as appearance had no meaning to Garret. His eyes were filled with the vision of this girl, this demon bitch, laughing as she burnt his village to cinders. His spear was gone, lost in the explosion, but he was also equipped with a short sword, and he unsheathed it, his face filled with lunatic rage. He lunged towards her, leaving a trail of crushed and torn flowers in his wake.