A.N: Here we are: this is the last chapter, set after the final confrontation with Feolthanos in Revenant Wings. For those who haven't played the game, here's a summary of the relevant plot points, so you can understand the references in the scene:

Long ago, a race called the aegyl (basically humes with wings; Llyud is an aegyl who joins Vaan & co.) were persecuted by the Occuria and forced to flee to a floating continent (Lemurés). Their leader, Feolthanos, was married to a viera and had children with her. Since viera can't fly, and it wasn't safe to send an airship, he had to leave them behind when the aegyl fled. But he hid a few pieces of auracite (a kind of summoning stone) in the Cache of Glabados in the hopes that they would one day find it and join him in Lemurés by summoning an airship he made for them (which Vaan later found and called the Galbana).
Feolthanos' children, the Feol viera (blonde, pale and with the longest lifespan of all viera) were kicked out by the other viera and forced to live in a volcano. They never found the Cache, and Feolthanos became a legend among them, an immortal, godlike father figure. Eventually, in the FFXII timeline, one of the Feol viera, Mydia, decided to do a Fran and ran away from home. She met Velis, a Dalmascan hume, and fell in love with him. But then the war with Archadia came, he enlisted into the army and was killed at Nabudis.
Left alone, Mydia remembered the legends about Feolthanos, and went to look for him, hoping to get him to revive Velis. But over the centuries, he had transformed into a bitter, vengeful spirit, intent on exacting revenge on Ivalice, as well as removing the souls of his fellow aegyl to spare them from suffering, but also killing their emotions. When Mydia found him, he tried to do the same to her, and when she realized that, her despair was so great that she went and killed off all the remaining Feol viera, to spare them that kind of fate, before dying herself in a fight against Vaan & co.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this fic, I do hope you enjoyed it!

Phoenix

The sunsets on the sky continents were unlike anything on the surface of Ivalice. There was no solid ground for the sun to disappear behind, only an endless sea of clouds; and there was something strangely disturbing about watching it founder into nothingness. Even now, as he walked, the horizon beyond the cliffs was lavish pink and gold satin. Yet he knew that as soon as he would reach the rim of the island, he would see it: a formless, crimson ocean devouring the sun.

And Fran, dark against the apocalyptic backdrop, like a brand snatched out of the fire.

He had noticed her walking off in the direction of the cliffs a few minutes before, while trying to pay attention to some inane joke or other that Vaan had thought fit to bring up. The hesitation was momentary: it was an ideal occasion to escape the fete, the boy's elation at the aegyl gifting him with the Galbana, as well as Penelo's food. Not to mention awkwardness with Basch and Ashe, or Kytes' desperate attempts to persuade Filo not to pounce on Llyud for a goodbye kiss.

(A game, almost a farce. But they can't be expected to remember. It's too great a weight on anybody's shoulders: there was nothing we could do.)

Yet Fran remembered. And she couldn't be left to remember on her own.

They had landed both airships on an island not far from Bhujerba, where there would be enough room for victory celebrations. It was an odd setting for a triumphant party: fragments of the Lemurés islands could still be seen, slowly disintegrating into shimmering dust in the sky above them. Yet none of the aegyl who had joined them seemed to be particularly distraught over losing their homes. It was just as Llyud had said: they had new hope now, and the unconquerable belief that everything was possible. The myriads of golden fragments in the sky were like living ash for them, a dying phoenix about to be reborn.

But even that could not quite obscure the underlying tragedy.

The island they were on was almost ideally flat, with no landmarks to speak of. Just a long, smoothly featureless stretch of grass enclosed by dark clusters of rock which descended in strata and abruptly fell into the sky beneath. He picked out his way along a narrow, tortuous, vaguely defined path snaking its way to the lowest tier of the cliff, where it opened onto the conflagration of sunset, and Fran's figure, oddly small by comparison, her angular limbs skeletal against the blaze. One of her hands was in front of her face, with two fingers outstretched at an angle at the level of her mouth, as if forming a ramp to help her words rise.

He remembered the gesture from their visit to Eryut, and she had mentioned before that this was the viera's way of praying. And sure enough, he could just hear her muttering under her breath. The words made no sense, they were in her own dialect, as far as he could tell from the rare times she had used it in the past. Yet there was something mesmerizing about the sonorities, like a breath of wind among leaves. Solemn, feathery and immensely sad, floating upwards from the inferno, eerily reminiscent of the setting of the tragedy she was praying for. An outstretched hand in the dark, trying to guide lost souls home.

But Fran, Mydia and all the Feol viera were outcasts, pariahs: no home to guide or be guided to. The fact that the aegyl had been granted a second chance probably made that loss all the more difficult to accept.

(How does a pariah pray? And what do they pray for?)

The thought was almost unbearably lonesome.

He stopped at a respectful distance behind her, waiting for the soft chanting to end, for an occasion to soothe. It didn't last much longer: she soon fell silent, bowing her head to the clouds below.

"They rest, Fran," he said softly, taking a few steps closer.

"So I hope," she answered in similar, muted tones, "it's all too little too late now. I cannot help them. I never could."

He moved up to her, his fingers cautious on her shoulder. She raised it a little, brushing her cheek against his hand, a ghostly, pained smile on her lips. For a few moments, there was silence.

"Tell me..."

A wavering instant.

"...Do you think me capable of what she did?"

And there was almost inexpressible fragility in her voice. He inhaled briefly, readying the words, but then checked himself. There was another layer of meaning to her question. One that struck closer to home.

"I have no right to answer that," he finally uttered, as if he were handling porcelain.

She looked up to meet his eyes.

"As much as I would like to say 'no, Fran, I don't believe anything could make you lose yourself to that extent', we both know there is...one event I'll never get to witness."

(I will never have to watch you die.)

She averted her gaze again at this, somewhat too quickly.

"I want to tell you that you will never be like her. But I cannot be that complacent."

His hand moved to her other shoulder, encircling her back with his arm, and it struck him just how paltry the gesture looked. Too feeble for protection. Too ephemeral for support. Too...human to be entirely fitting.

"This is all I can give you," he added quietly.

There was a pause, as if she needed time to absorb the statement.

"In that case, I have a request," she finally ventured, a strange, indefinable weariness in her voice, "what happened at Ymir Qul...do not do that again."

Ymir Qul. The auralith. He had tried to keep her away from Mydia.

"What do you mean?" he frowned slightly.

"Telling me to 'see to the Strahl', that you may go play the hero out of some misplaced sense of protectiveness."

It was a reproach, yet the words weren't bitter, swathed as they were in the infinite fatigue of her voice.

"But I..."

He paused. Of course, she knew why he had done it. He had never questioned it. But he had also omitted to question the one possible consequence she was presenting him with.

All because of this damned overconfidence: the leading man never dies.

('Never say never.')

When his voice came next, there was a certain curtness to it. The kind that accompanies reluctant admission. He could almost have been holding the sentences out at arm's length. Dropping them to burn in the clouds below.

"Mydia overcame you so easily the first time. I can only imagine what she showed you. I didn't want that to happen again."

She nodded at this.

"I understand. But understand in turn: making such decisions on your own is as complacent as a straightforward answer to my question would have been."

He buried his gaze in the embers under their feet.

"Velis made the decision to face danger without giving Mydia a say, to protect her. And she was left with a choice she hadn't been allowed to make. That is why."

He could feel her eyes on him, earnest and tired.

"I want to know that..."

Her voice faltered a little.

"...when the end comes, I have made all the choices I could make to prevent it. That is a sky pirate's freedom, is it not?"

"Ah, touché," he acknowledged, with an almost automatic smirk.

"And you know what my choice will always be in a situation such as that."

(To stand by me as long as you possibly can. I know, Fran. It frightens me sometimes.)

"Very well," he simply replied, turning to face her again.

Her arm strayed around his waist, matching his own around her shoulder. They stood for a while in silence, as the last of the sunset smouldered away, two solitudes imperfectly bound by tenuous, fragile threads of flesh and bone. They would rip on their own. There was no need to accelerate the process. It was enough to hold on as best as possible.

She lowered her head to his ear.

"Take me home," came in a warm, languorous whisper.

Arms untying, only to lace fingers together. Trying to pin the shadow of her words to her lips. And then retreating footsteps; hard stitches on rock at first, then a hazy series of rustles, gently threading through the grass in the direction of the Strahl, resting on the darkening plains. The sunset had burned out. Tomorrow, it would burn again. Whether they were there to witness it or not.