Nanaki leapt aboard after Barret, still carrying the screaming Yuffie.
"Ya nutter! Git back here now! Ya—‘s on fire!" she yelled.
"We be gittin’ outta here," Cid said, taking the steering wheel. The limp sails billowed with wind and they started moving away. "Flames be the death of this ship, and I fear to open that pendant again; it be turning against us."
"Vincent!" Yuffie yelled.
"Too late," Cloud commented blankly, staring at the ship, which was indeed going up in flames. "Shinra got him. I can hear it. We saw them following him, he did not even turn to see them."
"What could hold a man from seein’ them?" Barret asked.
Cloud looked up, suddenly, hearing Vincent shout his name from the other side of the pyre.
He saw something move. At first her thought it was a spark from the flames, but then he noticed it was the wrong color and moving wrong. The thing, glittering and golden, sailed past the flames to the boat covered in nighttime and stars. Cloud ran to it, finally realizing what it was and the name Vincent was yelling until he was cut off. He ran to catch it, succeeding, only to have it open, and fast and heavy footsteps sounded on the deck of the burning ship.
Time stood still once all heads save for Shera’s had turned to him. Again, the deck and the sky faded away into a dream.
Cloud, noticeably three years younger was running blindly below decks, coughing and wheezing from smoke in between screaming someone’s name. "Zack! Zack!"
Cloud stumbled onto the deck and tripped over a downed soldier. "Zack!" he still yelled, having to crawl on his hands and knees, the deck too thick with debris and corpses to stand for several yards.
"Zack!" Cloud yelled, coming upon Sephiroth, holding a man with long unruly black hair and tattered black clothes by the neck. Sephiroth was unscathed, a far cry from Zack’s condition.
"Cloud, get back!" Zack ordered, dropping his sword.
In the distance, those who watched the scene noticed Erik, carrying a single book and a box, pausing at the scene. He seemed about to run to them, when he was snuck upon by Rufus, who swore at him and smacked him overboard and into a boat from the sound of the fall.
"Zack, there’s a boat, we have to leave! Zack, please!" Cloud yelled.
Sephiroth dropped Zack on the ground and showed no emotion as he watched the two young men.
Zack weakly put his hand around the hilt of his fallen weapon. His other arm was semi-useless and he crawled as best he could towards cloud, dragging himself and his weapon slowly.
Cloud knelt down next to Zack, who pulled himself onto Zack’s lap.
"I’ll carry you if I have to," Cloud said. "Hold on, Zack, we can get to the boat and—"
"No," Zack whispered a burst of blood flowing from his mouth and dribbling onto cloud’s clothes. "I pray for your safety, Cloud. I pray you remember me, if nothing else, in your life. I love you Cloud. Promise me you will remember."
"Zack, do not talk as such!"
"Cloud… above all else… remember me," Zack said, and pressed his lips to Cloud’s. As Cloud, three years ago, pressed back, Sephiroth drove his sword through Zack’s back, piercing the heart and slicing through Cloud’s stomach.
Cloud, at present, forgot the pendant and the footsteps he had heard and looks down at his own chest, staring through his shirt at the bandages that would never hold back the blood from his ever-bleeding wound.
Cloud, three years ago, before he faded, turned his face, wet with tears as he heard a noise and ignored Sephiroth as he walked off. "The powder kegs!" he whispered.
The dream was consumed by fire and faded away, revealing real flames on a ship, but at a distance.
Cloud heard the footsteps again, barreling down at him like the thunder of Vincent’s destined lightning bolt and closed the pendant and ran to the other side of the boat while the others watched.
Half watched Cloud as he ran in fear, the other half turned and watched Sephiroth, charging though the fire like a cannonball just fired chasing after him in a screaming rage.
Cloud tumbled to the side, not stopping his roll in time to avoid his shoulder meeting painfully with the railing.
"I know you have it!" Sephiroth yelled at Cloud. "Relinquish it and you shall live, each and every one of your crew."
"For how long?" Cloud said, standing up and quickly backing away. "You speak with a serpent’s tongue and I would trust you no less were you to offer an apple to me."
"You have had our dream, your truth, give it to me, it is of no other use to you," Sephiroth said, taking a step forward.
"Move again and I drop it to plunge into the depths of the sea!" Cloud yelled, dangling the pendant over the railing. "I lie not!"
"Then do so," Sephiroth said, not coming forward and Cloud caught his bluff. Something was down there and wanted the pendant. He could feel it in his gut and somehow he feared the creature from the blackness of the sea than Sephiroth.
"No!" Cloud exclaimed, moving his hand enough to drop the pendant enough to drop it onto the deck. He brought his foot, today with shoes on, down on the pendant, smashing it and shattering whatever was inside that cast dreams and twinkling stars.
Cloud felt his lungs freeze and refuse to move as he saw an ecstatic grin on Sephiroths’ face. Sephiroth chuckled, almost inaudibly and then burst into deafening laughter.
Cloud felt dizzy and looked down. Something black and thick floated up from the smashed pendant, thicker than mist, but no smell of smoke; it more resembled air than water vapor, thick though it was as it spread like ink.
Cloud reached for his throat as his vision went black and his legs gave way. Cloud fainted away for the second time in Sephiroth’s presence.
…………………………………………………………………………………………
Cloud fell bonelessly onto the deck as the black air dissipated and faded away.
The ship bucked, as if pummeled by something caught under it, and then the air was filled with a wailing that pierced the ears of all but Sephiroth, who laughed again.
"Do you hear now?" he stated. "It be the dawn of my mother’s life! She had no life to her, save for the power to birth me, and I shall give her life back in exchange for giving it to me! I shall see that she crawls from the blackness again!"
"That noise!" Barret yelled. "Be a damned soul trapped in hell!"
"Worse!" Cid said, covering his ears, which did nothing to lessen the sound. It was as if the noise came from their own heads and would not leave. "Be a creature never meant to be made, let alone breed!"
"Make it stop!" Yuffie yelled from the crow’s nest.
"My mother has been crying for a long time," Sephiroth said. "Only now can you hear it. "My father wished to save her, but did not have the true means to do so."
"Damned be your father!" Cid yelled. "Get off ma ship or I’ll feed you to yer damn mother!"
"Damned be you!" Sephiroth answered, stepping forward. "Which one of you is the thief? Who took it? Who took the treasure sacred to my father that I had in my pocket?"
"Git off ma ship!" Cid said, now on his knees from the painful wailing.
"You!" Sephiroth said, spying Yuffie in the crow’s nest. "The only one to get close. Damn you and your ship for holding my power back!"
Sephiroth ran down the deck, shoving past those who struggled with the pain from the wailing, and charged right up the rigging.
Yuffie screamed, and then his hand was on her shirt. Ripping the buttons off and tearing it off her chest.
He paused to shake the shirt and then tossed it away, finding none of the trinkets that fell from it of any interest.
Yuffie screamed again as he grabbed her by the neck and threw her out of the basket.
Barret barely had enough senses to him to catch her.
Courage and escape gone from her while the wailing drowned out every thought, Yuffie only clung to the large man in an attempt to keep her chest covered as Sephiroth leapt gracefully from the top of the mast.
"I ain’t got it!" she yelled at Sephiroth as he strode towards her.
"Then I’ll take your head as compensation!" he yelled back, swinging his sword.
Before he could swing forward to do damage, whether to Yuffie or to Barret neither knew, but were both relieved when the fear in the left, the boat tilted wildly in directions not possible from the waves or the wind. Crosswise and perpendicular to the waves in the water, the ship kept titling, throwing Barret onto his butt, still holding Yuffie, and Sephiroth on his back, throwing the sword from his hands.
Sephiroth looked past Barret and his quarry and sneered. "You! You try to damn me!"
Barret looked in the direction to see who Sephiroth swore at as the ship still rocked violently and randomly.
Shera was standing, unaffected by the motions, her blind eyes unable to see Sephiroth to properly look at him. "I hear nothing," she said calmly. "This be your trinket your father gave to you?"
"NO!" Yuffie screamed in protest, struggling in Barret’s arms as Shera produced a silver twin to the gold pendant that belonged to Aeris.
Shera opened it with surprising grace and the sound died to a distant rumble, like waves angrily crashing against a rock cliff that refused to give way to the force of the water.
Sephiroth reached for the pendant, but was not quick enough for the magic. He and his sword faded away like the black inky air Cloud had unwittingly summoned with the wailing.
The pendant closed on it’s own.
"He is gone," Shera said. "What happened?"