A/N: This chapter is derived from the lyrics of "Ruined Hometown", the theme that plays in Oerba in FFXIII-2.

The End of Time – Oerba – A Dying World

Vanille barely notices the crystal melt away from her sleepy mind. Pink cloth wraps around her torso; fur materializes around her thighs. Bracelets, armbands, beaded threads—all almost a millennia old, yet preserved with crystal for centuries.

She isn't aware of her surroundings until the magic that brought her out of crystal stasis wears off, depositing her gently on rugged metal plating. Still slightly woozy from eternal slumber, she falls to her knees, then collapses face first onto the rust-eaten bridge.

She instantly recognizes it from her past lives. The junk metal, the cracked road, the corroded steel—this is the bridge out of Oerba. The bridge that now only leads off into the dull sky.

Oerba… why is she in Oerba? After spending centuries inside the crystal pillar, why is she all the way back at her old hometown?

Vanille pushes herself onto her knees again, her strength returning almost instantly. Preservation for centuries certainly assured that she is now still at the same level of strength as when she first was laid within her crystal tomb: at her peak of strength, having just defeated Orphan and doomed Cocoon, yet saved all its lives by melding with Fang and transforming into Ragnarok.

Where's Fang?

In a small state of panic, Vanille leaps to her feet, squealing, "Fang?" She doesn't know how much time has passed, but the entire time, she felt Fang's Spirit. Her sister was there the entire time. So why not now?

She runs towards Oerba, towards the crumbling, ancient city. Every stair that she leaps down from crumbles under her weight, but when she finally reaches the deserted beach, shock briefly overcomes her panicked search for Fang.

The ocean is gone.

Instead, the ashen-sanded beach extends for almost a mile before dropping off into an empty pit full of skeletal, gray coral reefs devoid of life. The once steady pound of surf no longer resounds in Vanille's ears. She can't taste the sea salt in the air. The color has faded from this world, leaving only decaying shades of darkness behind.

This is not Oerba. This is not the home that Vanille remembers.

"Just as the light begins to fade to dark, the moaning wind sings songs to my forebodings.
Am I alone with no one watching o'er? If I do fall will no one come to save me?"

Vanille whirls around at the sound of poetry drifting off a human tongue. Standing next to a collapsed pile of rotting wood and glass—the old schoolhouse, Vanille briefly recalls—is a girl about her age wearing a strange headdress with transparent veil that covers her face. As the girl walks towards Vanille, she reaches behind her ear and flips an unseen switch that retracts the veil, revealing her calm gray eyes, and releases waist-length steel-gray hair. Within a ring in her shirt, Vanille notices, hovers a small gray crystal that seems to pulse with a heartbeat.

The girl seems very familiar, but Vanille can't place her. She puts on a cheery smile nonetheless and bounces up to the stranger. "I'm glad you're here," she says in relief. "I haven't a clue when this is! How long has it been since Cocoon fell?"

The girl looks at her with eyes that seem to stare straight into her and replies monotonously, "You have been released from crystal stasis recently, no?"

The sight of the ancient, dilapidated schoolhouse ruins behind the girl suddenly strikes a memory within Vanille—the Farseer tribe, with their reincarnated seeress forever preserved at a young age. "Yeul!" Vanille exclaims. "You're Paddra Nsu-Yeul. You… you see the future!"

"No longer," the girl murmurs, walking past Vanille and out towards the cliff of ashen-sand that used to represent the shallow ocean shore. "There is no future, just as there is no past. This is the End of Time." She turns to face Vanille, and another strange phrase tumbles from her mouth. "Oh, cursed fate, eternally delivering your doom."

Vanille's not sure what to say. The End of Time? What happened during her crystal stasis? She remembers freeing Serah from the confinement of her mind as brought about by the Void Beyond, but that's about it.

Vanille glances at Yeul, now sitting on the plain of sand as if observing the non-existent ocean. The sight reminds Vanille of a lifetime ago, when Serah had brought Vanille to the Bodhum beach during sunset, when the sky was afire with burnt orange and scorched red. They sat near the gentle surf and admired each other's' hair as highlighted by the sunset—Serah's warm ruby and Vanille's burnt cherry—before delving into deeper matters. It seems like an eternity since those moments, when she'd simply felt like a carefree girl without the threat of Ragnarok driving her towards certain death.

Quietly, Vanille seats herself next to the seeress. "This is the end of time?" she asks after a moment. "Is that why…"

"This is a dying world," Yeul whispers. "A spent past and no future to progress towards leaves me with nothing to see. I am no longer a seeress; I serve no purpose."

Vanille shakes her head furiously. "What are you talking about? Of course you serve a purpose! If you didn't, then you wouldn't be here."

Yeul looks at her somberly. "I am a seeress ordained to view time before it comes to be, yet Time has ceased… just like this ocean."

This last phrase reverberates within Vanille—the ocean that had once defined Oerba as Vanille envisioned it is now absent, only adding to the hunch that this is not her world anymore. "I thought… I thought Time was a river. From a source to a conclusion."

"Time is an ocean," Yeul says firmly, staring off into the dead coral reefs with their lifeless arms reaching towards nutrients that are no longer there. "It is not a line from A to B; it's a plane with a million currents, and each current bears a possibility. When you change the future, you simply switch to a different current. Change the future, change the past. The currents flow onward, and Time moves on.

"Yet the currents of this ocean were halted, and in the same way, when Time ceased to exist, the currents ceased to flow. We are stuck at one point in time, sitting on the rocky ocean floor with no way to move at all.

"And so we exist in this state of eternity… and at the same time, we do not exist at all."