Without regard for the treacherous landscape, without thought for himself, or for anything in the world, Auron trailed out from the mouth of the dome at Zanarkand with the wind at his back. The flurries caught his tattered robes and pushed them into a frenzied cloud of reds and blues, tangling his mangled arms and legs. With each clumsy step his blood dyed his front blacker, squeezing out in coagulated clumps, running in rivulets down his legs to pool in his boots and leave a trail in the loamy earth.

Ahead, through clouded vision, he spied the mesa. Furiously he scrambled up the slope where he collapsed, crying out as he broke his fall with his chin, teeth throbbing and head pounding.

The smell of burning stung his nose. Before him the last few strings of smoke drew themselves upward from the blackened logs of a bonfire, and Auron wondered who had been there to light it. It's been days- no, weeks, since the three of us stopped to make camp on this hill, hasn't it? I remember. Braska burned his finger on an ember in the sand. Jecht laughed at him, Braska smiled, but I was ... Auron pressed his knees into the dirt, and an ache traveled through his core. The sun was beginning to set, casting its sickly orange light across the earth. Long shadows grew from where he knelt, and from the ruined city beyond the temple they reached and stretched in ghostly shapes. The grooves left behind where Jecht had buried his toes in the sand were haloed with the fading light until the sight of them was unbearable, and Auron turned away.

Soon Maester Mika would read the High Summoner's Convocation. Auron recalled those words which had been burned into his mind, engraved at the base of Lady Yocun's effigy where each morning the monks would kneel to press their foreheads, uttering prayers against the patinated bronze.

All the Congregation of Yevon
Multitude, lift up a Hymn of Celebration!
High Summoner Braska has given himself to Death, so that Spira might live.

The thought cracked against his skull again and again, and Auron clasped his stomach as the taste of metal soured his mouth and a sudden wave of unconscionable loneliness passed through him. Never mind the sucking wound that sputtered and spat his blood into his hands with each breath; nor the numbness and unfamiliar weight of the right side of his face. He curled inward, cradling himself with swollen arms, swaying to and fro and imagining that the hands gripping his sides could be those of his companions.

Face down, prostrated, he cried. He cried, and cried. Eardrums pounding, the warrior monk rent his clothes and shamed himself with tears, ripping out his dark hair with balled fists as minutes, an hour, three hours passed, until the sun dipped behind the hill and the world was blanketed in darkness.

But the skeleton of Zanarkand was just as silent as it had always been, and Auron's wailing was quiet, muffled in the dirt as he lay there, small, and astonishingly insignificant.