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Relevant soundtrack: Prelude by Nobuo Uematsu. Click here to check it out on YouTube.

Chapter Text

It was years ago, but Jack remembered.

It had been warm for days. He remembered that. He had forgotten many things, so many little details, but he remembered the spring-like warmth in the heart of winter.

He remembered his mother preparing their dinner over the smallest possible fire to keep the house from getting too hot. Of course, she had always used a small fire, no matter the season. His mother was afraid of fire. He remembered that house: in his dreams he walked its rooms and touched the furnishings - simple furnishings, as was the white mage’s way. He remembered the corner where he used to play with his father’s spell books, stacking them to build little houses.

He could not remember his father’s face.

On that particular night, his mother moved the small cook pot to the table and he scrambled eagerly into his chair, the one with the thickest spell book on it to boost him up. “Not yet, love,” his mother said, dousing the tiny fire. “We’ll eat when your father gets home.”

“Where is father?” he asked.

“Patrolling the fence with Destin,” she said. “He won’t be long.”

The warm weather had brought the wolves out in droves. It hadn’t been safe to play outside after sunset. Jack remembered those things, but he did not remember Destin.

He remembered a knock on the door. His mother opened it, and her white robe, hanging from a hook on the back, swung with the motion. A man’s worried face peered in at them from the night. He said, “My lady! You must come! It is as the prophecies say!”

His mother was already shrugging into her white robe. “The fiend?” she asked.

“Yes!” said the man. “Hurry, please!”

“Jack, stay here,” she said. She nodded to the man and rushed out the door without even shutting it behind her.

He’d gone to the door, gazing after her. As she ran toward the tree line beyond the next row of houses, he saw the trees outlined against the night, as if the sun was setting behind them, and he remembered thinking that was odd because it should have been dark outside, pitch dark, but just then the wind had shifted and blown the smell of smoke toward him and he had known his mother was running toward a fire. He ran after her.

Within minutes, they were beyond the last houses, near the cleared area where the market was held. He had not yet caught up with his mother when he heard shouts of battle and people screaming in pain. That gave him pause, but his mother went on. “How many are wounded?” he heard her say.

The man clutched at her arm. “My lady, there’s no time!”

“How many?” she insisted.

The man pointed toward a cluster of villagers. Jack’s mother knelt beside them, touching them with glowing hands. Jack had been on the verge of running toward her when the man noticed him and grabbed his arm. “Stay back!” he said “It isn’t safe!”

Jack stayed with the man as his mother worked her way down the row of wounded. He could tell when she’d come across those beyond the reach of healing – he could see the way the magic slid off of them like water, their souls too weak to hold the spells.

And he remembered, though he wished he could forget, his mother’s cry of anguish when the healing spells failed on the man at the end of the row, the one with long black hair and a black mage’s robes, like his father had always worn. Jack hadn’t seen the dead man’s face – he sometimes wondered, if he had, would he be able to remember his father’s face now?

A soldier had shouted “We can’t hold it anymore! It's coming!”

People ran. The man holding Jack’s arm ran, and Jack was pulled along several steps before he broke free. The man did not turn back for him.

Ahead of him, in the forest, a figure rose above the tallest trees, then, with a sound like ice cracking, the trees parted like a stand of tall grass. A woman with blood-red skin loomed there, hair aflame, arms raised – six of them! And in each hand a gleaming sword as long as a man was tall.

The last of the villagers fled before the thing, but not Jack’s mother. Tears streaming down her face, she turned toward the creature. “Abomination!” she shouted. “Turn from this place!”

The creature laughed, a shrill noise like steam escaping from a kettle. Smoke billowed from the ground she stood upon, as if the grass was burning at her touch, and Jack noticed that where her legs should be there was instead a scaly, coiling tail, like the body of a snake. The creature spoke. “Fool woman! You cannot defeat me! The time of prophecy has come! You will die first!”

“No!” Jack shouted.

His mother turned at the sound, eyes wide with horror to see him there, and in that moment the creature charged.

Jack was momentarily blinded by a flash of light. When his eyes adjusted, he saw the creature towering over his mother, straining against a wall of crackling white light – his mother’s power. The force of the creature had driven his mother to her knees. With one hand, she held the wall, with the other she reached beneath her robes, pulling forth a talisman that Jack had never seen before.

The creature laughed that whistling laugh again. “You’re weak, witch! What makes you think you can defeat me?”

His mother smirked, raising the talisman high. It hummed with power, glowed like the sun. She said, “Behold the power of Light!”

The creature screamed. The light of the talisman grew and enveloped it, leaving the creature glowing like a log in a dying fire, orange embers inside rapidly blackening skin. The screaming reached a terrible crescendo, so that Jack’s ears rang when it finally stopped.

He ran to his mother then, threw his arms around her, crying out for her. “Momma, come on!” he said, trying to pull her away, but she was too weak to follow. “Please, momma!”

“Run, Jack,” she said weakly, but he wouldn’t leave her.

Then the creature moved. Crisp flakes of skin broke off and crumbled to ash as it did, but still it moved, a roar of rage starting low and growing in volume and ferocity.

Jack’s mother shouted, “No!”

There was heat.

There was light.

Then there was nothing.

Jack remembered being alone on a rocky hill. There was a rumbling above him, like distant thunder, but when he looked up he saw only the gray slopes of the mountain and the curl of smoke rising from its peak.

He’d called, “Momma?” and taken one halting step.

The ground clinked beneath his foot, and he’d looked down to see his mother’s talisman. When he reached for it, he noticed the charred skin on his hand, the way his ruined tunic hung off of his shoulders in scorched tatters, but he didn’t remember feeling any pain then. “Momma?” he repeated. “Momma!”

But there had been no answer.

In all of his nightmares later, he remembered how his own voice had echoed back to him, alone.