Jyrrin had moved from the innards of the cave to the mouth, and Anzi didn’t want to think of anything taking a similar path. She’d already vomited from the smell once, crossing the scarred and seared wasteland, and it seemed she’d turn Bulimic before long if she kept her promise.

Anzi was perched on the rocks near the top of the entrance. Whatever battle would commence, she didn’t want to be caught in it again.

Anzi had an ironic love for those who wreaked havoc and death after suffering their own. As much as she detested seeing anyone even remotely hurt, to even contemplate such things happening, even to strangers, it was the dead she followed through their trials. She followed and she wasn’t blind. She followed with her heart those whose own hearts had stopped beating.

She wasn’t thinking about that. She wasn’t contemplating the irony of one unsent, one carrying the power to be sin, how they had dealt a blow that in time could prove fatal to another who had once had the same goals, the same affliction, and had done so out of the same innocent stupidity.

She was, however, on a similar track, as her train of thought slowly crept along its rails into her memory.

She’d found Seymour, curled up next to his bed, sobbing. He would sob like that ever since he’d been returned from Baaj. No doubt he’d sobbed like this before he’d been taken back as well.

Anzi was suddenly brought back to the present by the smell of the living. It was a faint smell, the white noise of scent, but it was more than welcome after having nothing but the smell of fiends, of destroyed earth, of soldiers who would need a hospital or an amputation if they didn’t get one soon, and especially the dead scent of Jyrrin,

"Yuna?" Anzi muttered. She would have stood up if Jyrrin hadn’t interrupted her.

"The High Summoner?" Jyrrin asked. "This is not what he thought…"

"I don’t understand," Anzi said, but by then Yuna and her two friends had come close enough to take precedence.

Anzi hadn’t seen many of Yuna’s dress spheres and of the ones she had, she hadn’t paid attention to. She’d never seen Yuna with a sword before. She had no knowledge of it being the sword that had helped bring down the first—and last—incarnation of Sin.

"What do you want?" Jyrrin asked. "I’m here as a warning, but…" Jyrrin reached out her hand, and it wasn’t here that looked through what she touched, and it wasn’t air.

………………………………………………………………………………………

Yuna flinched and grabbed her head, unsure of what she was seeing.

The landscape began to swim and details mixed together like paint in water. A claw—no, a hand—poked through her vision, laced with pink nails. The hand reached closer and closer to her and she was afraid it’d touch her. Then, faster than it had begun, it was gone.

Yuna still held her head as she heard her friends yell her name.

"I’m… I’m okay."

"What happened?" Paine asked.

"…Nothing…" You said, amazed at the fact.

Jyrrin shook her head, chuckling to herself. "Didn’t anyone tell you not to get too close?" she asked, in a voice that wasn’t hers.

"Jyrrin?" Anzi asked.

"Yes?" Jyrrin asked, now with the same voice that had once proposed.

Anzi shrugged it off and Jyrrin turned to the three women.

Anzi was silently praying for nothing to happen, for Yuna to go home or some other peaceful event. At least, she hoped, no one would be too badly hurt. She couldn’t possibly stop this. Not now.

Her choice of helping her lover had become her only option.

"I repeat," Jyrrin said. "I am here as a warning. Either about face or lose it."

"Never!" Yuna replied. "I’m going to rescue Seymour! Give him back to me!"

"Seymour?" Anzi asked.

"Him?" Jyrrin asked, but she chuckled. She was amused. It was a sure sign that things were going to get worse. "He doubted you, Yuna. He never thought you’d come after me. Go on, prove him wrong. Try… I’m going to keep you from ever coming after us again."

"Jyrrin!" Anzi shouted, but she didn’t move.

"Your faith in that brat’s wife is misplaced, Anzi. I refuse to let anyone deceive you."

"You tried to kill him!" Yuna yelled, rushing at Jyrrin.

Jyrrin stood completely still as Yuna rushed at her, screaming. Only once the blade was less than a foot away did Jyrrin move. She smiled.

Yuna gasped as the landscape changed again. The word vanished. The world washed away to reveal another.

She didn’t study her surroundings until her face met with something warm and solid.

Arms wrapped around her and she froze. She looked around as best she could, her face pressed against someone’s flesh. She could hear their heart beating. She could feel their breath. She felt their lips move against her hair… they had to be smiling.

She saw tan skin, blond pieces of hair. There was a blur of yellow in her eye. She smelled flowers, farplane flowers.

"Shuyin," she whispered, pushing away. Great, another undead psychopath. Just what she needed… well, one she didn’t marry.

"Who?" the man asked, looking at her face. The farplane vanished and she was once again in the most uninhabitable part of Spira.

Tears welled up in Yuna’s eyes and she resented them for blurring her vision. It wasn’t possible… it wasn’t possible.

Rikku and Paine were just as taken aback by the miracle, Rikku had dropped her blades, forgetting they were even there, and one landed on her foot.

None of them noticed the two women atop the cave entrance.

Jyrrin grabbed Anzi’s hand and tugged, indicating it was time to move again, but she refused to budge, her gaze fixed to Yuna and the summoned stranger.

"You look funny," he commented to Yuna."

"…Tidus…" she whispered. Although it was blatantly obvious, it was all she could muster.

Anzi lifted a had to her mouth, stifling a noise she wasn’t making. There were tears in her eyes too at the sight of Tidus, but they hardly matched Yuna’s.

Jyrrin let loose of Anzi’s hand. "It’s time to go," Jyrrin whispered.

Anzi nodded and turned to start across the Thunder Plains.

Jyrrin paused to look at the sky. The harsher of the clouds were dissipating. The lighting was letting up enough to hit only the towers again.

Jyrrin didn’t even blink at the action, she didn’t move.

Yuna, Rikku, and Paine were reminded of the disaster that had called them her as a shockwave was thrown over the terrain. Tidus and Yuna clung tighter, Rikku panicked at not knowing what to do and Paine threw her hand in front of her face as the ripple emanating from Jyrrin came at her.

It was all in vain, however. They were so untouched by the blast they didn’t even feel it pas through them. Rikku even reached out to touched it as it left.

It did, however, leave a nasty mark. Not one them, but it blasted every tower from it’s foundation, toppling them like a blade severs sapling and blasting them into dust and rock to fall from the sky with the rain.

When the devastation was over, they looked up, but Jyrrin wasn’t there. Just like Sin, it had come, confused, destroyed, and vanished without a trace.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

They had lost one day taking Wakka and Lulu back home, but they had to be out of danger and out of arguments. And they couldn’t be there to watch Yuna cry—something Yuna had forgotten she’d done so recently.

They had lost another having to trample through to Thunder Plains on foot; Fiends had come out to snack on the dead, or snack on those. The weather had turned parts of the solid ground to mud, but hadn’t bothered to make the effects visible.

Now, with the lightning, it was a struggle to get from the cave to the hotel, half a day. And then there was the trek out and into Macalania ahead of them.

No one inside the hotel seemed to find it out of the ordinary that Tidus was back. In fact, they hadn’t managed to recognize Yuna through their own gloom and soaked clothes.

The hotel manager didn’t bother to tell them how much. The fact that anyone had survived seemed odd enough.

Odd, but not truly comforting. Just because four people were lucky idiots did not mean things were safe.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………….

"I’m not stupid, Jyrrin," Anzi said. "And I’m not deaf."

"Congratulations," Jyrrin had told her.

"I know you hated Seymour. Please don’t."

Jyrrin didn’t reply. Anzi was staring past the curtain of jewels to her eyes. It was an ominous, strange thing in those eyes. They were dead eyes, glazed over and beginning to form a layer of mucus as they began to wither. Still, there was something in those eyes. There was a fire in those eyes and it wasn’t Jyrrin.

"What did you do to Seymour?" Anzi asked.

"I gave him what he always wanted," Jyrrin answered. Again there was a voice to her body that did not belong to it.

Was that what she was following? Just her lover’s body, nothing more than a shell? Why did it speak to her? Why did it remember then? Why did it hurt her like this?

"He broke promises. I’m going to make sure that never happens again," Jyrrin said, the voice that was not hers overlapping at times throughout her speech. "He wanted no one to suffer. He promised. Now no one ever will. I won’t see you cry over him anymore. Yuna is free. His father is free. He won’t lead anyone to their death again. No more worries with him gone. He promised his mother to make her happy, and she promised to protect him, and now there’s an age without Aeons. They’ll be happy together, on the farplane. I promised to die for you. I promised I loved you and you promised me. You promised me we’d run away together. You promised me… we’d go to Zanarkand."

"No!" Anzi said. "No, not my Seymour. You didn’t!"

"This thing…Anzi… It wants out… It… help me… it burns." She said, the entire sentence her and hers alone.

Hers or not, She did not have Anzi’s pity.

"Then burn!" Anzi yelled. "And keep your promise to go to your rest!"

They weren’t at Zanarkand yet. It was not time. That was a promise she’d keep.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

Those few that had steadfastly refused to leave Macalania, claiming fiends were nothing but customers with an appetite for furniture and flesh and had yet to realize what to do with their currency had finally wandered in search of greener pastures and preferably one that didn’t leave ones’ face numb or hold a danger of losing limbs to frostbite.

Wantz and O’aka hardly went with their tails between their legs. They had they’re heads held high, although it was more practicality than pride which drove them to it.

The door to the store had been sealed shut by snow. Ever since the last of the forest’s metaphysical impossibility had vanished, the snow had begun to pile in layers.

Soon a small glacier had former in front of the door and the next day all the windows were covered in white.

The two merchants had to climb out of a trap door in the ceiling. By the time they had surrendered to the either to take their wares elsewhere, it had conquered their shelter.

An avalanche of snow toppled from the hole in the ceiling and there was snow covering the store. Nothing but cold white upon colder white upon even colder white. Everything had been erased and still their were flurries flying in their faces. They bundled up and trudged their way out.

Their faces high in order to make sure they were going in a straight line, held up by the snow enough to still be at roof’s level, they bid farewell to their frozen venture.

In what they thought was the worst they could encounter, they had left before the snow became exponentially thikcer and higher. They had left before spring. Before the thaw.

It wasn’t Sin that would make the forest shudder in fear.

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