2020-10-21: Duel of the Fayths
- Log: Duel of the Fayths
- Cast: Yuna, Belize
- Where: Bevelle - Via Purifico
- Date: October 21, 2020
- Summary: Mika remands Belize to make sure Yuna doesn't leave the Via Purifico alive, but they have other plans. Belize keeps a promise, and Yuna makes one. Also all the aeons fight and stuff, and it's awesome.
==========================<* Bevelle - Via Purifico *>========================== Via Purifico is the immense, ancient labyrinth built underneath Bevelle. It is attached the prisons in the temple complex. It is a place of death and despair, as those tried and found guilty are sentenced to it -- to escape and prove their innocence or (as happens far more likely) die within. The labyrinth has countless glyphs, which are warded and make navigating hard (and teleporting away impossible). There are many portions that are flooded, as well, and that adds an extra level of complexity. BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtN36ITVrCo
DC: Yuna switches forms to Lady Summoner! DC: Belize switches forms to Summoner Belize!
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed. <SoundTracker> Via Purifico - FFX Piano Collections https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD-j4jBFt4w
Yuna is alone again.
It's getting harder each time... being alone.
It was hard when she was seized off Filgaia, literally torn a world away from her friends and family. It was hard when she was carried over and away from the corpses of the Al Bhed at Home. It was hard when she left everyone behind on the Ten Thousand Steps of Peace. It was hard when she was abandoned to wander the Via Purifico, it was hard to find Lulu and Ida only to lose them again, and now -- after the completely unexpected but extremely welcome escort of a man of honor, who has taken off for a moment and instructed her to stay put in his absence -- it's hard now too.
She makes for a miserable figure. Her summoner's raiment is torn, she is both damp and dirty simultaneously, and scratches on her shoulders and back and cheeks both weep blood and somehow fail to capture the current fragility of her frame, which was brutalized by much worse -- with much more INTENT -- than mere fiends ever could.
The summoner from the island of Besaid is a famed white mage... the amount of healing she's ALREADY performed, to be tapped out so completely now, is unpleasant to consider.
She's getting cold. She can see her breath, spiraling up towards the low, broken-ruin ceiling, then bouncing off of it. Even those tiny parts of Yuna carried with it will be unable to escape this place so easily. She folds her arms, clasping the goosebumps on her left shoulder with her right hand, and... almost the reverse. She doesn't quite let her left palm touch anything; the whole hand is full of tension.
In this gloom, there's no distinguishing her eyes from one another. But, blue or green, they're both the same. Exhausted, and demolished, and...
...yet, despite it all, despite everything, containers of light. The smallest possible amount, perhaps. But even the tiniest candle brings a comparably infinite quantity of radiance to a void.
Her head is bowed, as she leans against the nearest stone wall, catching her wind as best she can, seizing this scant opportunity to rest. But even a stranger could see that she is still unbroken.
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
The Via Purifico... The Road of Purification. The watery canals that line the underground of Bevelle twist and turn all through the city. While there are multiple exits, the paths are so long and confusing that it has long been used as a method of execution, for those tossed in are said to never find their way out again.
This is not really quite true. But Belize is not alive, and has not been in some time, so surely the Via Purifico's reputation will remain untarnished even if they leave it once their unhappy work is done.
"Summoner Belize," Grand Maester Mika had intoned to them, stopping them some short time after Yuna and her friends' execution was announced. "There is a task I would have you do, that I cannot entrust to any other. Will you listen?"
And because it was Grand Maester Mika, Belize did not hesitate to bow, forming their hands in the Yevon sigil. "Of course, Grand Maester," they said, even though in their heart they were already double-checking with Seymour.
He gave them their task, then impressed upon them the urgency of it. That they must leave immediately for the Via Purifico to carry it out. And because it's the Grand Maester, Belize does as he commands. They descend into the watery pathway to seek out Yuna. And there they find her, injured, dirty, exhausted, and above all *alone*. Where have her guardians gone? It's a foolish question. Like the guards would have thrown them all in at the same time. But even here, even now, Belize can also see that Yuna's will burns on.
They wouldn't have it any other way. They may be here on the Grand Maester's order, but there is a grave difference between the letter and the spirit of the law.
"Yuna."
Their voice, strong and unforgiving, bounces off the stone walls of the Via Purifico. Yuna will hear that before they see them--a shadow approaching, encroaching, from across the platform that separates the two, as if to introduce the Non-Binary Summoner who steps in from another passageway. Belize is in good condition; their red-orange braid is in order, their robes are unmussed. They look Yuna over, see her injuries, and scowl.
"You understand why I've come, I'm sure," they add, voice clipped. "But just in case it needs spelling out, know it brings me no joy to carry out the Grand Maester's orders." They unhook their longbow from their back and nock it in one smooth motion. It's easy to perfect these little motions after you're dead. You have all the time in the world, unlike the mortals you left behind. "I'll give you a moment to prepare yourself."
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.
"Belize..."
All the hurt and sadness and betrayal Yuna's endured, one might expect her to become desensitized. To experience some outrage fatigue. But on some level that would be like running away. So she feels it, she lets herself feel it, lets Belize pierce her to the quick. Her lips part and some of her cloud of recently expelled air is sucked back inside by her gasp of surprise.
And then she flexes her chilly shoulders and pushes herself off the wall. She is without a weapon -- she lost it on the Ten Thousand Steps of Peace, after all, she threw it down, and has not been reunited with its savior. But she takes a stance anyway. She will not be holding still for her friend to execute as easily as a bullseye on the training grounds.
Plus, as Belize has undoubtedly heard from witnesses, at the-wedding-that-wasn't, the-wedding-that-was, she is apparently still dangerous, even without the signature channeling tool of her calling (to call being a Spiran summoner a profession would be an insult to both summoners and professionals alike). She surrendered it, trading her friends' lives for the opportunity to Send someone's unlife, and then she summoned anyway, minutes later.
Can she Send without it now?
Could she live long enough to find out?
Or is that even what she's thinking about at all? Because her hands... they're not taking the form of a banishment at all, even some unarmed approximation. They shape the invisible ball of Yevon instead, and she bows over it, as she has a million times before.
Lifting her head, she gazes steadily at Belize.
She does not beg. She does not plead.
"I'm ready," she says instead, and there is no lie in her voice, only a sort of terrible compassion for Belize themself, for what they've been asked to do. She can't imagine how horrible she would feel if their positions were reversed. ...she can't imagine following that order at all, but she understands, with painful clarity, why others would. "Are you?"
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
Belize did hear that. Somehow they expected that Yuna might find a replacement somehow, somewhere; it's legitimately a surprise, if a tiny one, to see that she remains unarmed. Naturally, Yuna still steels herself, still makes herself ready to fight, even though she has no weapon with which to do so. They pause, looking at her as she declares herself ready; then, with a slight grump, they set their arrow back in its quiver.
"Of course," they reply. "But I have no interest in felling someone defenseless. We will settle this as Summoners should." They extend a hand, then twirl into a sharp, aggressive dance, leading with their bow as their robes stream through the air. "With our aeons!"
Light swirls out from beneath them, then spirals high up into the domed ceiling of the larger-than-usual Via Purifico room. It's because of this larger space that Belize approached her here, really. They always intended on doing this; it's just that the beginning turned out a little differently from what they'd imagined. Yuna demonstrated an ability to summon aeons without a tool to aid her. If she is to defeat Sin, then she should be able to replicate that ability with ease.
The light joins at the zenith of the ceiling; an instant later, it materializes into the aeon Valefor, who swoops down on her wide, wide wings to settle at the side of Belize. She makes a crooning sort of cry, but it's clear she's ready for battle.
To Yuna, who was raised in Besaid, whose first aeon was of the Besaid Temple, it might send a certain message: 'Even your home island rejects you. You have no home with Yevon any longer.' It's a deliberate choice in Belize's parth.
Yuna is so kind. Sometimes cruelty is what one needs to set oneself in motion.
"Call your aeons," Belize booms, "or die!!"
Valefor Ryuggu keens, oddly-shaped wings flapping as she holds herself aloft. As soon as there is an aeon to opposite her, she'll gather her wings back, then *hurl* them forward to send forth a quasi-visible sonic shockwave.
DC: Belize switches forms to Aeon Valefor -Ryuggu-! DC: Yuna switches forms to Ifrit! GS: Belize has attacked Yuna with Sonic Wings! GS: Belize has gained 1 Combo! GS: Belize has completed their action. GS: Yuna takes a glancing hit from Belize's Sonic Wings for 77 hit points! GS: Slow applied to Yuna! GS: Yuna's Force Evade activates! GS: Reaction bonus! FP up!
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed. <SoundTracker> Ifrit's Theme: Hope On Fire - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Ua5DBj6Hw
From a tactical standpoint, by summoning first, Belize has invited their opponent to choose the matchup. But even without the viciousness of their initial choice, they've also prevented Yuna from summoning someone who can capitalize on Valefor's weaknesses, because Valefor, unlike many of the aeons, has no weaknesses -- and contains the sorcery to exploit virtually all of them.
There are two possible answers to this.
She dares not do one of them, not when she knows who and what she'll be fighting later on. An aeon big enough to ride from Kilika to Luca. One of the mightiest aeons she's ever seen... she knows it will take all her strength to even begin to oppose it. And that means leaving some of her own in reserve, for the future.
That means she needs someone tough enough to outlast being abused by Valefor's versatility.
But, to be honest, tactics are not the first thing on Yuna's mind right now at all.
Belize can clearly see the success of their strategy, as wrought in Yuna's eyes; they narrow, becoming slits of liquid pain, as she winces when the smell of peaches washes over her. She would have rather not. Such expressions are properly contained by the well-trained summoner, who only ever smiles.
So that's just one more small failure in a life that's full of them to bursting. This is so hard, and suddenly so much more personal. Her friend is choosing to MAKE it personal.
She should be angry...
She's too tired, too anguished, to fan the flames of her heart so easily. Fortunately, at such times, there are other hearts that beat within her soul.
And one of them... his flame is as eternal as it is ferocious.
There's also a rightness to how he was her SECOND aeon, born of the first fayth she had the pleasure hearing CONVERSE with Besaid's fayth, inside her spirit. These two are close. Island sister and brother. It is cruel to make them fight, but in a way it is not SO cruel, because of their mutual familiarity and respect. It might even almost -- almost -- feel like a friendly spar, for the two of them.
So.
Fire spawns in the Yevonite circle her palms are making, but she is not burned. With a soft hiss, she presses it into the ground with her left hand, the bad hand. And a summoning rune pulses under her feet.
The scent of peaches is blasted away by the smell of fire, of brimstone, the beating heart of the world. And then Yuna is blasted also, blasted upward by a gout of lava and exploding earth.
Ifrit catches her in midair and gently sets her on his shoulder, then lets her down once they're both back on the ground. His turf. His territory. Being UNDERground, in the Via Purifico, is much more comfortable for him than it would have been for others, another reason why he's Yuna's choice.
He's bigger, tougher, than the last time Belize saw him. Now, a little blue burns at the core of the orange flames that comprise his beard and mane.
His defiant roar echoes off the endless labyrinth stone.
He dives out of the way of Valefor's Sonic Wave, but he can't move faster than sound; he'll be slowed by the momentary deafening even if the strike itself only barely glanced off of his trailing left claw.
His right claw hit the high wall and sunk in, like it was butter. He tears chunks out of it as he hauls himself higher twice, until he's closer to Valefor's level, then LAUNCHES off of it towards the great avian. This time, when he grasps something in midair, it is only himself. He brings down two mighty fists, straight at the bird's beaky face.
There's more than one way to stun.
Below, Yuna watches like a mother watching her babies fight. But she also watches like a warrior, and she doesn't hesitate to watch through Ifrit's eyes as well as her own.
"You seem determined to carry out your orders in the meanest way possible," she calls across the space separating them. "Are you so very angry with me?"
GS: Yuna spends 1 Combo on Gatling, loading 1 into Gatling! GS: Yuna has attacked Belize with Double Punch! GS: Yuna has gained 1 Combo! GS: Yuna has completed her action. GS: Belize takes a solid hit from Yuna's Double Punch for 344 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
Yuna should be angry.
That she is not only makes *Belize* angry. Perhaps this is what they had wanted all along. To be denied that... Well. They're stubborn. That's why they're still here. They'll see Yuna fight back yet.
It *does* almost feel like a friendly spar--island sister and island brother. To Belize, though, the significance is very different. They don't flinch to see Ifrit's flames rise up around Yuna, and only nod curtly at her choice of first aeon; when he roars, they dig their feet in but don't step back. He's grown stronger, they can see right away, and it brings a brief, grim smile to their dark lips.
Perhaps that's part of why; perhaps it's that uncomplicated, genuine joy at seeing Yuna and her aeon having greater strength, having come that much closer to defeating Sin. But when Ifrit dodges the bulk of Valefor Ryuggu's sonic attack, then *rips* himself through and off the stone walls to rebound into her, fist-first. Valefor Ryuggu is swift, and Belize is cunning, but this ferocity surprises them both.
Perhaps Yuna is angrier than she appears, and only channeling it through her aeon. That, too, pleases Belize in a grim sort of way.
"Haven't you realized? I've always been mean. *You* should be angry with *me*," Belize calls back as Valefor Ryuggu hits the stone floor, hard. She struggles for a moment, then beats her wings, hard, to lift herself back into the air and gain some distance from the fiery aeon. "It's the cruelty of life that fuels our movement onwards. We rage at the unfairness of death, and so we fight, even at the risk and ultimate cost of our lives, to defeat that which brings it. Your love and compassion for this broken world will serve you well--but it won't let you beat Sin."
They thrust a finger out at her. Above them, between them, Valefor swoops at Ifrit, sends Blizzara spells down upon him, cuts the air again and again with her Sonic Wings. "Rage, Yuna! Rage against your betrayals! Refuse to give in to the despair that would swallow you whole, and hurl it back a thousandfold! This world has been mired in Sin's spiral of death for far too long. Let your indignation ignite, and put a true end to everything!!"
GS: Belize has attacked Yuna with Blizzara! GS: Belize has completed their action. GS: Yuna critically guards Belize's Blizzara for 46 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Yuna gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Yuna's Force Guard activates!
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.
Valefor wielding Blizzara against Ifrit is exactly as Yuna expected. Predictability does not make it an easier thing to endure. Shards of ice bury themselves in his muscles, and his mane is forced to steam. Ifrit shares her own affinity for the NulFrost spell for just such situations, but she dare not take the time to have him invoke it, not with Valefor's command of the cadence of battle itself. If he doesn't fight brutally, doesn't press his early advantage -- no one was more surprised than Yuna by the immensity of that first hit -- he might never land another strike again, just get pushed further back and back by Valefor's mighty wings...
While they exchange blows up above -- clawed swipes this time -- Yuna receives the answer to her question at the point of a finger. The force of Belize's convictions -- the fury there -- forces her to take a step back.
But only one.
Her left hand curls miserably in her skirt.
"You're wrong!" she yells in between Valefor's sonic booms. "Cruelty isn't a fuel," she adds, more quietly but also more fiercely. She is audible over Ifrit's growling. "And kindness is not a weakness!"
Ifrit does have one actual strength that Valefor does not, and it's the same thing as his vulnerability: he's an elemental. And elemental aeons have a subtlety to them...
Yuna remembers the first time she figured this out. It was in the jungle surrounding Kilika Temple. They were set upon by some fiends. And then some more. And then even more after that. And unlike with Valefor, whose every wound, every feather lost to pyreflydom, remained in her heart until the next time she rested...
...the Earth is Ifrit's ally. And it is a powerful ally indeed.
Plunging his claws downward, he drags fire out of the stone, slagging the ground immediately beneath his giant clawed feet in the doing. And it writhes and crawls over him, it soaks INTO him... he's healing himself. Fortifying himself. Now, despite the ringing in his ears and the freezing he just endured, he is stronger than ever.
"But I never said I wasn't angry," she adds, a little of Ifrit's heat leaking into her voice. His smoke, perhaps. Together they smell of grief.
There's a little extra magma when he's done. After Valefor's next attack slams into him, Ifrit rolls his claws in it like he's donning red-hot brass knuckles, then explodes upwards in a mighty uppercut that trails afterimages of heat that ignite, a moment later, into afterimages of flame.
"This one is for Rikku."
GS: Yuna has attacked Belize with Burning Strike! GS: Yuna has completed her action. GS: Belize takes a glancing hit from Yuna's Burning Strike for 130 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Belize gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Mighty applied to Yuna!
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
"*You're* wrong!" Belize shouts back. Their sea-green eyes flicker in Ifrit's firelight. "...And you're right. But even if kindness isn't weakness, it's also not the strength you need. And cruelty is a fine fuel, for it's our desire to stop it that motivates us to act! Or are you content to stand by and idly watch as others die for you, Yuna?! You aren't, are you!"
Having communed with the fayth of Shiva, Belize is aware of the advantages and disadvantages of elemental aeons. It's thus no more a surprise to them that Ifrit calls upon the molten earth to heal his wounds than it was to Yuna to see Valefor Ryuggu use ice sorcery to strike at Ifrit's weakness. In the moment that Ifrit strengthens himself, Belize wills Valefor Ryuggu to beat her wings back, to come to their side. They reach up and stroke her wings, their eyes momentarily gentling. They harden once more when they look back at Yuna.
"I have never told you about my late guardians, have I, Yuna?" They may have mentioned them in passing, but the pain has always been too deep for them to discuss with anyone. Even Seymour only knows the details because he knew the trail Belize took in life, then recognized them for what they were in death. "Cambria, a former warrior-monk of Bevelle. She was like a sister to me. We grew up together; there was no one who knew me better than she. When I was young and proud, she would scold me for my naivete, but she also looked over me warmly. She was stern and fierce, and whenever she was near, I felt safe. Ryuggu, a former fisherman from Kilika. After one attack from Sin too many, he decided to move to Bevelle to start over. He was jolly and laughed often, but I saw the sorrow that hid in the corners of his eyes. I never felt anyone's pain as keenly as I did his.
"We met at the temple's doorstep when he came to pray, Ryuggu and Cambria and I. The three of us became fast friends. He decided our meeting was a sign from Yevon, and pleaded me to let him become one of my guardians, too. I was happy--he made me happy--so I accepted. And so, with Cambria and Ryuggu at my side, I began my pilgrimage..."
Ifrit picks up a hunk of that molten lava, surges in to attack with a fearsome uppercut. Valefor Ryuggu sails into a fancy evasive maneuver, to draw Ifrit away from Belize and towards her. It's partly successful and partly not; Ifrit does turn with her, but strikes her ringed wing with that punch. After his earlier attack, it's too much; Valefor Ryuggu cries out, then sinks to the floor, where she dissolves into pyreflies.
"Ryuggu!!" Belize calls with that same care and concern that had shone in their eyes when they stroked her wings earlier. Yuna may remember in that moment: many summoners sometimes give their aeons nicknames. It seems Belize's nickname for their second aeon was the same as their second guardian's.
Yuna says she never said she wasn't angry, that this is for Rikku. Her own guardian. "Good!!" Belize calls sharply, like the smell of deepest winter. Their feet spin, their hands twirl, their bow slices the air that now grows bitter cold. "Cherish your guardians, Yuna. Because they *will* die for you!!"
A tiny sparkle of light sinks down from the air like a snowflake. It enters a massive crystal of ice that has formed before Belize, and with it appears a vision of a giant blue woman. Her tiptoes alight, her chin rises, her eyes open--and the ice *shatters* as she tosses away her shawl.
"Cambria! Let us avenge Ryuggu's defeat!" Belize shouts.
Shiva Cambria nods but once. Her motions are graceful; her eyes are cruel. With a wave of her hand, countless motes of light glitter in the air; they form a midair blizzard, a blanket of snow. Shiva Cambria leans forward, purses her lips, and--*whoosh*. With a puff of her breath, that snowstorm rages forward, into and around Ifrit to gutter and snuff out that would-be eternal flame, with a severity Valefor--any Valefor--couldn't hope to match.
DC: Belize switches forms to Aeon Shiva -Cambria-! GS: Belize has attacked Yuna with Boreal Plunge! GS: Belize has gained 1 Combo! GS: Belize assumes the Avenger stance! GS: Belize has completed their action. GS: Yuna takes a solid hit from Belize's Boreal Plunge for 216 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Yuna gains 1 additional Combo!
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.
Yuna's only seen Rikku for the briefest, barest moment since they were separated on Filgaia, and it was at the wedding. But she's spent a lot of time thinking about her, both while, at first, in the Al Bhed's custody, and then, afterwards, when the Guado and Yevon utterly destroyed Home to retrieve her.
She's never stopped dreaming about the corpses... the beflowered, adorned dead of Kilika island; the scattered, shattered bodies tossed in the Djose surf after Operation Mi'ihen. Nor the bodies of the Baskar who were convinced to die to summon a Clysmian.
But the bodies of her cousins, cousins to whom there was not even enough time to be introduced -- cousins who died, willingly, determinedly, FOR HER, even after she'd begged them not to -- those haunt her on an entirely new level. Every time she thinks she's seen the worst massacre of her short life (how very Spiran that there have been so very many), something proves her wrong again.
She can still smell the blood. And the ozone of the chunked-up electronics.
Belize isn't RESPONSIBLE for what happened -- Yuna is (for being a failure, for failing to not be kidnapped, for failing to escape, for failing to convince them to let her go, for failing to defend them). And Seymour is. But Belize is complicit. They didn't just LET it happen. They participated. Even after she surrendered...
Just like right now, with Mika's orders, and her own execution.
Yuna feels cold. What's happening to her; what happened to Rikku; what happened to the Baskar; what happened to the Crusaders; what happened to the Kilikans... it's all connected, isn't it? Death, death, death, a spiral of death all around them.
She has no answer for Belize's assertion. Certainly they are not wrong. She is NOT content to let anyone else die for her. She never has been.
Valefor dies too. Just a little bit. One of many. It happens all the time. But this is the first time she's died at Yuna's hand. And that's a little death for Yuna as well.
Belize shares other deaths... their Guardian's deaths... which she readily adds to the pile, the monument in her soul. "Cambria and Ryuggu," she repeats softly, the names tender on her tongue, tender as a snowflake that falls onto it a moment later. For a moment they live in her eyes, which fill in what they cannot see with imagination, and warm perceptably, a mirror of Belize's expression. "They sound wonderful... I am sorry."
She IS sorry. Because she's never met them. And she knows what that must mean. She is sorry never to have known them. She is sorry Belize never gets to know them again, aeon nicknames or no.
Macalania's fayth stirs within her heart, and then she knows why she has new goosebumps, literally as well as metaphorically.
Ifrit is fuuuuuucked. (Yuna's analysis is slightly less vulgar, but it has the same general tenor.) It's not that she's lost hope, it's just... what it is; he's just had a long battle, and Belize has just brought out the two-edged sword of his opposing number. It's just as dangerous for Shiva -- Cambria -- to face Ifrit as the other way around, but that's only with all things being equal. They aren't.
They don't give up, hastily flinging a Fire spell -- but he is not fast enough to avoid what happens next: Cambria quenches his flames with such an encrusting of ice that they gutter, then go out entirely. More smoke rises from his body... then pyreflies... and then he is gone.
GS: Ifrit has Fallen! He is no longer able to fight!
There was a moment, after she defeated Ryuggu, that Yuna had an aeon and Belize did not. Yuna didn't even twitch towards the possibility of taking advantage of this moment. It is a stark reminder that this is not why Seymour died -- another towering death on her conscience, and in many ways the most significant of all. She fought him honorably. But also with all she had. And the might of the aeon she's now forced to face was too much for her to tightly control. But she did not FEAR that power. She embraced it. Because she would not let her Guardians die.
Now their positions are reversed, and Yuna does Belize the honor of trust: despite everything between them, she does not fear to be killed as she enacts her own second summoning.
This one's going to hurt a bit, without having a rod.
<SoundTracker> Ixion's Theme: Thunderstruck - AC/DC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM
Magnetic force pulses in her hands, growing beautifully in shades of violet and teal into a perfect sphere. Then pillars of lightning spin around her, and finally converge... normally they'd collect at the crown of her rod, but now she has to raise her bare hands.
This is Belize's first opportunity to see the freshly branded Yevonite rune still healing on Yuna's palm:
HERETIC
A moment later, it is hidden by a coalescence of white light too bright to look at directly -- so white that it's a little bit black, too.
She is not afraid. Violet lightning explodes off her hands and into midair, where the summoning rune of Djose pulses. It continues far longer than any single strike, an electric tether between her palms and Ixion's horn. Ultimately she tugs, a two-handed overhead sweep, and the aeon shatters through the wall of existence and actualizes on the Via Purifico floor with a shattering whinny.
Also, every single hair on Yuna's head is standing on end. She looks like the world's prettiest, brownest dandelion.
"You really believe it, don't you?" she wonders aloud at her opposite number, while tangling her fingers in Ixion's mane. "You think that the only thing that can defeat suffering is more suffering. But even Mika," how rude, apparently they're on a first-name basis now that she's out of the club, "Even Mika doesn't believe that! Didn't you hear him at the trial? He said that Sin cannot truly be defeated. I pray that he is wrong, but that doesn't make you right."
She thrusts forth her now-empty palm. Ixion lowers his head and charges. But it's a feint; he charges PAST Cambria. The real attack thunders beneath his hooves, gathering behind him and past her until it detonates in a magnetic blast.
Yuna closes her eyes in briefest thought, then locks them with Belize's.
"Belize... Ryuggu and Cambria... what happened?"
DC: Yuna switches forms to Ixion! GS: Yuna has attacked Belize with Chaotic Strike! GS: Yuna has gained 2 Combo! GS: Slow expired! GS: Yuna has completed her action. GS: Belize guards a hit from Yuna's Chaotic Strike for 202 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Belize gains 1 additional Combo!
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
For all that Belize is mean, and cruel, and calculating, and absolutely complicit in if not at least partially responsible for the slaughter at Home, Yuna's trust in them is not misplaced. They didn't strike her down when she was armed and they had nocked their bow; they don't command Shiva Cambria to strike now that Ifrit has fallen and Yuna has not yet summoned his replacement. It is honor among summoners; respect for their friend and, in many ways, their protegee. Belize is not a good person. But they are, at least in some ways, not a bad person, either.
Death is a familiar scent to them, of course, being dead themself. If Yuna feels cold, well, that's good too; coldness is of death as well, like it is of the Macalanian fayth, like it is of Mt. Gagazet, gateway to Zanarkand far to the north. Belize never made it that far. But they know what it means--what it takes--what it *requires*--to make it that far. They are determined to see Yuna through to that end. Even if Yuna ends up hating them for it.
Yuna murmurs her deepest, sincerest sympathies. Belize swallows hard. "Thank you," they murmur, low and raw and emotional. "They were."
Ifrit falls in the face of Shiva's icy wrath; she stands proud alongside her summoner as they both await Ixion. Another aeon Belize didn't make it to before their own end. When they deciphered Leviathan's location, they dropped everything to hurry to the location of the lost, sunken temple--backtracked from Besaid rather than moving onwards to Kilika, as had originally been the plan. They regret that, now. Sin probably would have sunk their ship anyway, but if they had waited until after communing with Ifrit's fayth... at least then Ryuggu would have had the chance to visit his hometown one last time. Visit his friends and family. Instead...
Their eyelashes broaden at the sight of the sigil branded on Yuna's palm, then sink as ozone crackles through the air in Ixion's wake. "...."
Yuna invokes Mika--says that even he doesn't believe in suffering. Belize raises their chin, and Yuna will see a new, perhaps unexpected emotion written on their face: contempt. "Oh, yes. I heard him," they sneer. "Disgusting. And shameless. 'The enlightened rule of the dead'? Utterly sickening! I had never imagined the upper echelons of Yevon's clergy would be so rotten." They raise a hand; for a breath, pyreflies whirl around their form. "Since the day I became Unsent, I agonized over that choice. I was unclean! I should have petitioned to be Sent! But I could not bring myself to go when I needed to see Sin struck down. To hear 'Grand Maester' Mika parade his status as if it were something to be *proud* of... Pah!" They spit--literally *spit*, a glob of it landing to their right as they turn their head--and bare their teeth in a snarl. "Know this, Yuna. I have no desire to linger forever in this world. When Sin is gone... I shall leave with it. As such, a Church with no desire to do what must be done means nothing.
"Only we Summoners can defeat Sin. Never you mind the obsolete prattling of withered old men too enamored with power to let it go."
That Seymour is not very far off from this invective means nothing. He is their friend, and more to the point, they still don't know the true shape of his ambitions. That might be a conversation for later. For now, Ixion charges at Shiva Cambria, and she braces herself--and braces well, even after being surprised by that feint. Ixion passes her, and sends back an explosive charge that knocks her forward into a stagger. Her dreadlocks fall around her beautiful face, and she whirls around to glare at him as if genuinely angered by the deception. It's no ordinary glare, either; the temperature of the room literally drops twenty degrees as she glares daggers at Ixion. It has a practical, weakening effect, draining his defenses of strength, sapping the energy he might normally otherwise gain through battle.
What happened to Ryuggu and Cambria, though?
"...We started out in Bevelle. I was not able to make contact with the fayth here." Their lips twist in self-mockery. "Humiliated, I swore I wouldn't return until I had every other aeon under my command, and moved on to Macalania. There I succeeded, and finally became a full-fledged Summoner... I summoned Shiva, whom I nicknamed after my first guardian. From there, we journeyed as far as we could--all the way south, to Besaid Island. There, I communed and bonded with Valefor. And we would have moved on to Kilika Isle, except...
"Except for the scroll. The scroll of Leviathan, the lost aeon."
GS: Belize enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: Belize has attacked Yuna with Icy Stare! GS: Belize has completed their action. GS: Yuna takes a glancing hit from Belize's Icy Stare for 0 hit points! GS: Break and Disrupt applied to Yuna! GS: Healthy! For entering Condition Green, Yuna receives 100 temporary hit points. GS: Yuna enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.
Yuna's heart constricts when Belize swallows hard. They might call themself cruel and even, increasingly, pride themself on that cruelty, but that isn't what she sees. It never has been.
She sees a suffering friend. It's why she asked the question that she did. She doesn't know that she's the first to ever hear the tale of Ryuggu and Cambria, but she did sense, as it began, the significance and poignancy of their choice to tell it. It makes her want to hear the rest. It makes her want to encourage them to tell the rest.
That's why she asked.
But first, she looks bewildered by Belize's contempt of Mika, and Belize might guess why: because they told her that Mika was the one that sent them to kill her. She almost asks why, why is Belize even here, if they think so little of the one who gave them the order and his supposed right to rule.
She does not allow the question to leave her lips.
Because the story is continuing.
And Mika is exactly as obsolete as Belize says. He isn't what's important here; he does not deserve to occupy their minds further.
Belize does... and she is stricken a second time, worse than the first, by their self-flagellation, their self-hatred, of being dead, of living on. It's the opposite of Seymour's in so many ways. Her right hand drifts up to clench over her heart. It's never a conscious gesture. But she aches so badly with Belize's pain.
"Oh, Belize..." She trails off for a moment. Then: "Yes," she says simply, she PROMISES simply, when their monologue pauses. She won't mind. She'll make herself not mind, somehow.
Her spirit aches with Ixion's pain as well, as spiritual daggers sink into his sparking flesh. And then she feels colder still... as the story continues.
She didn't know about Belize and Bevelle Temple -- didn't know that they were from here, or that they failed here. But it's admiration, not pity, that enters her expression in greater quantity; most apprentices who fail never become summoners, they're discouraged from continuing by Yevon, even; it is seen as a fatal weakness...
Yuna remembers how mortified -- terrified -- she was when she prayed to Besaid's fayth for endless hours without a response. Belize's determination to continue through an even greater humiliation is inspiring. Though now she feels a little... uncomfortable... about what's still to come. Not guilty. They both want the same thing.
...and without asking, her question is answered. She knows why Belize is here...
...and so she knows that she owes it to her mentor not to hold back, no matter what.
So far she's been fighting Cambria on Shiva's terms, Belize's terms... sorcery versus sorcery, element versus element.
How about maiden versus unicorn?
And Shiva, Yuna is very sure from her own experiences at Macalania, is no virgin.
Ixion has yet to STOP moving at any point; SPEED is their true element, in some ways truer than electromagnetism. But now they lower their head, accelerating further, into a cyclone of near-Aeroga galeforce around the edges of the room. It buffets Yuna's skirts and tears at Belize's braid, though neither of them are at any risk of harm.
The crystals that adorn his horn tinkle as he slashes inward with his horn, creating razor-sharp winds that grow in quantity and sharpness with every rotation.
And then, at last, with a final shake of his head, he visually collapses from two dozen rotoscopic midstride Ixions into one, and all the 'blades' converge on Shiva at once from every direction.
In the comparable silence afterwards, Yuna, who has been listening respectfully, prompts as seems to be indicated: "The scroll?"
GS: Yuna spends 3 Combo on Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: Yuna has attacked Belize with Razor Gale! GS: Yuna has gained 1 Combo! GS: Yuna has completed her action. GS: Belize takes a solid hit from Yuna's Razor Gale for 264 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Belize gains 1 additional Combo!
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
Though Yuna doesn't pose that question, Belize does catch that bewildered look of hers when they voice their contempt of Mika. They laugh at the sight of it, and it's even a little bit sincere. "You're wondering why I'm here on his orders in that case, I assume?" they guess. "Another lesson for you, Yuna: don't let your sense of propriety hold you back from asking. You'll never know if you don't ask." They shake their braid to one side, one hand rising to their bangs. "And you *didn't* ask, but I'll cut you a break, just this once. Why did I accept his orders? Well..." They meet Yuna's eyes and smile. "What do you think?"
After all, Mika's orders would obviously be for them to kill her. Yet given an opportunity to do so simply and cleanly, they did not take it. They instead chose a battle of equals, to test Yuna as they promised they would--to give her the training to defeat Sin. Why did they accept the orders of an obsolete old ghost of a man?
What *does* Yuna think? That, too, is a valuable lesson. If neither of them can trust the Church anymore, then they both must ask, and think, for themselves going forward. (Hopefully Belize will remember their own teachings when it comes to Seymour.)
And while they might have been angry with Yuna at one point over what happened with Seymour, it's clear in their gaze that any such anger hasn't lasted to this encounter. Not as Yuna promises that she won't mind. They smile and nod once, as if to praise their student. It's clear in that moment, whatever else they've said and done, whatever else they've chosen to say and do, they do hold Yuna dear. Perhaps... that might be part of the answer to Yuna's earlier question, too. But then--she's already realized the answer by now, anyway.
They *do* want the same thing. Living or unsent, kind or cruel, they want it so badly they'll give all they are to achieve it.
Between them, Ixion and Shiva still wage battle. While their respective elements might not have particular effect on the other, both of them have their strengths and weaknesses. Ixion's is his immense speed, the winds that follow the storm, that toss Belize's braid and robes. They brace themself, but there's really no need; it's Shiva who is the target of those blades of whirling gales that shake off Ixion's horn to surround Shiva from all directions. She leaps up to avoid them, but--how can you avoid the air? You cannot. They slice into her, though her, without mercy. When Shiva Cambria lands, it is in a slump; soon, she dissolves into pyreflies, into nothing.
Belize stands past her, unfazed. Just as Yuna trusted them not to attack while she was in between summons, they do not worry about retribution before they summon their next. They breath out a long, slow sigh, and it rises whitely in Shiva Cambria's wake. "I originally found that scroll in the libraries of Bevelle while I was an apprentice. It was ancient, and detailed a long-lost aeon that commanded the seas--one comparable in power to Bahamut. Though it did not pinpoint the location of their shrine, which had sunk under the waves many centuries ago, it did list many hints and clues. I spent years of my life, both before and after becoming a summoner, deciphering these clues. On the way from Macalania Temple to Besaid Temple, while we were in Luca, I finally decrypted them and determined its rough location. We would need a ship, and so after praying at the Besaid Temple, we set sail for the northern tip of an archipelago to the west of Bikanel Island.
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
"It took some time, but we found the entrance. I managed to make my way in and prayed to the fayth, and my prayers were answered: I had acquired the lost aeon. The journey back should have been one of triumph and celebration.
"Instead, Sin appeared. The storm it kicked up in its wake shattered our ship. The crew drowned or were eaten by fiends... including..." They look away, gritting their teeth, clenching their hands. Tears of intense grief and fury bead at the corners of their eyes. "I wasn't able to Send any of them," they admit hoarsely. Their greatest shame--far greater than being Unsent themself. "At Cambria and Ryuggu's insistence, I escaped on Leviathan. But it was the middle of the sea; I had no idea where land was, or how to find it." They chuckle bitterly, raising their hand once more. "How ironic. I escaped Sin's wrath, only to perish on the placid plains of the ocean. But I couldn't accept death. I couldn't let their deaths go to waste. I couldn't let it end like that after coming so far."
They begin to spin in a new dance, slow and graceful and flowing. Sparks of light follow them, pyreflies flowing with them, bringing with them the rising tide of the waters all around them. Indeed, the waters of the Via Purifico roar as they surge to coalesce over them, around them, fluid and formless at first, then stretching out like an infinite wave and taking form into the great sea serpent...
As they dance, Belize continues, "It was Seymour who found me, dead on a piece of driftwood. It was he who forgave me for my sin of continuing on after death! It was he who gave me another chance, who has helped me on my quest to revenge myself on Sin!" They snap their bow down, stance ready for anything, as Leviathan coils around them and extends yet further back through the corridors of the underground waterway. They and they, two beyond man or woman, bonded in their desire to defeat Sin and free the beautiful oceans of Spira from its reign of terror.
"Leviathan and I have come all this way, and we will not stop now! Yuna!! Show us that you will be the one to fulfill our wishes!
"Show me you will be the one to Send me to the Farplane!!"
They raise an arm high over their head; then they snap it down towards Yuna, the heart from which Ixion has sprung forth. He may be speedy, nigh uncatchable, but the property of liquid is that it fills all gaps, and Leviathan is the Lord of All Waters. They screech, and the Via Purifico surges and fills and twists into an indoor waterspout, pulling Ixion into its tides to crush him with its submarine force. Like Ixion had before with his winds, Leviathan's waterspout will pull too at Yuna and Belize's robes; like Ixion before, neither of them are in danger of real harm.
Ixion, though...
Ixion's got a forecast for a very bad day.
DC: Belize switches forms to Lost Aeon Leviathan! GS: Belize spends 3 Combo on Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: Belize enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: Belize has attacked Yuna with Overdrive - Spira Mirabilis! GS: Belize has gained 1 Combo! GS: Belize has completed their action. GS: CRITICAL! Yuna takes a solid hit from Belize's Overdrive - Spira Mirabilis for 504 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Yuna gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Belize drains Yuna! Belize gains 200 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.
"It wasn't propriety," Yuna objects at the beginning of the answer Belize has asked for, not defensively but affectionately, through a smile of her own. "It was because it didn't matter. Because what he wants, what he thinks, what he orders... none of it really matters."
She nods.
"Sin is what matters," she says aloud with the same ironclad resolve that faced Seymour, that faced Mika, that faced the disapproval of her family and the misery of her friends. It's a simple thing to say, but not an easy one. Every time it weighs more heavily upon her heart.
Yuna hasn't allowed herself to cry. Not at the hands of her captors. And only barely when she briefly fell into the hands of her dearest Dame Guardian. It isn't time yet. Not while she's in here. Who knows who could be watching; she won't give them the satisfaction, nor will she allow herself catharsis that she doesn't yet deserve, not while her friends and Guardians are still in danger.
But what she denies herself, she gives freely to Belize. Tears pour silently down her cheeks as the story progresses. She weeps for Ryuggu, and for Cambria, and for the loneliness of Leviathan's fayth, which Belize spent a lifetime's thankless work to overcome.
She weeps for this microcosm of the inexorable cruelty of Sin, and for what it has done to this person, how it has driven them, WHY they are the way they are.
When Leviathan flows into being, there's nothing to do but bow. Ixion, it seems, feels the same way, lowering his horn to the ground in tribute to the Lord of All Seas. Then they rise together, summoner and aeon as one, to face their doom.
Like Ifrit, they don't give up, not even at the very end -- even as the waterspout catches Ixion and brutalizes him out of existence, he was trying to cast a spell, to cast NulTide. But that little blue orb, if it ever even sprang into being, could not possibly have absorbed the sheer raw torrential magnitude of what was to come.
Yuna takes a moment, after Ixion falls apart into pyreflies. Not a moment to rest. A moment of silence. A moment of respect. For Leviathan's magnificence. For Belize's tragedy.
Then she spreads her arms wide.
Her gentle voice is so big in the quiet, despite being so small.
"I will."
Power rises within her, then exudes all around her -- power that she refrained from tapping, before, when she summoned Ifrit and Ixion. It was held in abeyance. She was waiting for this.
She's so TIRED. The intensity of this duel -- and moreso, of Belize's feelings, and her own -- have recharged her a bit, or this wouldn't even be possible. Because now she's fighting FOR something. For someone. Rather than a traitor facing execution at the hands of a friend, she stands tall and proud and potent as a summoner demonstrating her might for another summoner.
Her skirts draw upwards, above her knees, as she begins to swirl. She has never done this before, and she senses, as all summoners do, the proper way to do it; the first section is normally one hundred percent rod work, there is no fire, there is no lightning, just the sheer grace that comes not from talent but from skill. Yuna has both, and she is beautiful, as she wields her entire body as channel, as conduit, for the power she seeks to invoke.
...nothing happens.
Yuna has stopped; her sleeves and skirt continue to work out all that angular momentum, but she herself, her dance, is done.
Right?
"......................"
Her expression is calm. Not even patient. Patient implies you're waiting for something to happen.
Yuna isn't.
---
THE SKIES ABOVE BEVELLE
It's a beautiful day.
The sky is blue, with a few puffy clouds.
The city sprawls across the land in its red and gold glory. From this high up, the siege by Althena's Guard is almost invisible, and about as relevant as a siege of ants.
An event horizon splits existence, and out of it soars something -- someone -- very large. For a moment, he surveys his domain, which is everything that the light touches.
And then, that same light pouring behind him, rendering him invisible to anyone who might look except as the slightest eclipse, he furls himself into a dive so step that meteoric reds and oranges crawl across his length.
Runes blossom in his path, an accordion of power, a gateway, a portal.
Like what Ixion did but on so many steroids, they shatter, one after the next, as he plunges through them like a bull through a china shop, only the bull is a dragon and the china shop, the door...
...thunder resounds above Bevelle with each strike...
...and despite the mismatch in width, he vanishes through one that's planted squarely against the Ten Thousandth Step.
It's not THAT UNUSUAL for residents of Bevelle to witness this phenomenon, but his size, this time...
...he was broader than the Tower of Light.
"Holy shit," whistles one warrior-monk to another, grateful that the magical laws of this universe caused his hitbox to clip through their existence rather than squash them out of it.
---
MEANWHILE, IN THE VIA PURIFICO
Above them, in silence, the final rune of a several-rune sequence unfurls itself massively across the ceiling. It is extraordinarily complex. And the first hint of its existence, other than its faint glow, is a soft crackling and a change in air pressure. There's a storm coming in, as different in scale as Shiva's inherent snowstorm was to Valefor's spell.
<SoundTracker> Bahamut's Theme: Black Sheep - The Clash At Demonhead - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ91nArSjOg
Hello again, friend of a friend, I knew you when
The one who crashes through it, all at once, VAPORIZES the ceiling. No shards or slabs of stone threaten the summoners below, nor the other aeon -- that would be dangerous and dishonorable. It just... ceases to be, yields to his existence, a hundred meters ground into such fine dust that it's simply imperceptable.
Now free to do so, he spreads his wings wide, so that they can catch the air they need to slow his descent. Otherwise, one gets the feeling, he'd just keep removing obstacles in his path, until he had tunneled all the way into Ifrit's domain, and transformed Bevelle into Spira's Next Top Volcano.
Our common goal was waiting for the world to end
His wings are magnificent. Near-crimson magenta becomes orange becomes violet becomes gold, all of it somehow metal, not laquered metal, just metal, layers and layers of blades that are nothing like feathers and everything like him. The claws that crown them are similarly evocative of a certain kind of avian's, and not at all the same, because he cannot be anything else but what he is. Other things have to be like him instead. Such is his privilege and his burden.
Even with the world's two largest parking brakes, he impacts the floor at terrible force. Under the circumstances this raises an enormous splash... and then threatens to lower the waterline a little, as some of the waters of the Via Purifico drain into the crater he's just made.
(Yuna is instantly wiped out by THIS wave, even though Leviathan's hadn't. She pushes herself back up, and after what summoning Ixion barehanded did to her, this thorough drenching, if anything, has improved her look.
Now that the truth is just a rule that you can bend
Even if that hadn't happened, though, the waters only come up to his calf...
Belize can be satisfied to know that the legends were true; Leviathan is this aeon's equal in size and strength. But Leviathan coils and curves outwards. This one only goes one way, and that way is UP.
Yuna looks up, and up, and up. Her eyes are round in her face, though the word 'giant' is not one she is allowed to share with her subject under any circumstances. Her lips part in a reverent whisper. Her awe has nothing to do with Yevon. What she's seeing doesn't need teachings to inspire it.
"Oh, my..."
You crack the whip, shape-shift and trick the past again
As with all aeons, there are at least hints of their humanoid ghosts' origins; this one stands on two immense, golden-clawed feet, though his vast tail also wends down the hallway behind Yuna and around a corner out of sight, having nowhere better to go. The resemblance to humanity ends at his sinuously elegant stance, however. He is, unquestionably, magnificently, a dragon -- THE Dragon, of Spira -- with adamantite scales that barely contain a straining musculature that promises sleek, deadly motion despite his bulk.
A spiraling golden sunburst far wider than Yuna is tall is his halo and his crown, mounted between his shoulderblades by some invisible force. This is appropriate on multiple levels, for he is both royalty and a celestial body; he is the product of a ghost's soul and a girl's heart and their singular shared dream -- the only dream that matters.
Send you my love on a wire
He is titanic. Brutal. Unyielding. Mighty.
He is:
B A H A M U T
He deigns to look back at his summoner, and something passes between them in a second silence.
Lift you up, every time
Then he draws himself up to an even fuller height, his impossible presence somehow doubling in sheer intensity, and has the audacity to WAIT. To allow Leviathan the first blow. To make the final fight between Yuna and Belize as fair as its first.
It isn't how to fight Sin.
But it is how to fight someone you care about. Someone who deserves to be able to give their all, too.
And for all that it could easily be mistaken for hesitation... there's nothing in either of their expressions that allows such timidity.
"I'm ready," Yuna repeats, fully composed. Wholly calm. Utterly focused. "Are you?"
Everyone, ooh, pulls away, ooh, from yooooo-oooooooouu~
DC: Yuna switches forms to Lady Summoner! GS: Yuna spends 1 Combo on Link! GS: Yuna has attacked Yuna with Grand Summon! GS: Yuna has gained 1 Combo! GS: Yuna has launched an attack Link! DC: Yuna switches forms to B A H A M U T! GS: Yuna accepts Yuna's Grand Summon for 0 hit points! GS: Restore! Break and Disrupt removed! GS: Hyper applied to Yuna! GS: Mighty applied to Yuna! GS: Yuna has attacked Yuna with Break Damage Limit! GS: Yuna has gained 1 Combo! GS: Yuna has completed her action. GS: Yuna accepts Yuna's Break Damage Limit for 0 hit points! GS: Stagger removed! GS: Amplify, Burst, and Lock State applied to Yuna!
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
"No?" Belize replies, coppery eyebrows rising when Yuna protests their assumption. They soon deliver a smile back, accompanied by a low chuckle. "You *do* learn quickly. I was right to place my faith in you."
Sin *is* what matters. Until Sin is defeated, Spira will never know true peace. Whatever nonsense the Church prattles on, that will always be their truth--Belize's and Yuna's both. So when Yuna sheds tears freely for them--tears Belize can only barely manage for themself--it's a little embarrassing. But it's also endearing. They said before that Yuna's kindness and compassion will serve her well, and they meant it. This exact sort of thing is what they meant. They also meant it when they said it won't help her defeat Sin, but--right now, this is a duel between summoners. They'll allow it... just this once.
The waterspout snaps Ixion up, carrying him up and out of existence before he has a chance to defend himself, however much he tried. That NulTide definitely wouldn't have helped him--not when the tides are torrential and never-ending. They say Spira is the eternal spiral, but sometimes that spiral can instead be... miraculous. The waters wash away, carrying the strength they'd robbed from Ixion back to Leviathan, sending a glimmer of energy down its already beautiful iridescent scales. For all that they are a great sea serpent, a vast monster of the ocean with strength to match, they are a sight to behold--not terrifying but breathtaking. Perhaps, in their own way, they represent what Spira *can* be--what it *should* be, what it WILL and MUST be after Sin's defeat. A love for the ocean and all its creatures, great and small, reflected through the fayth into the aeon like the full moon on the waves.
Belize shouts out their challenge, their demand... their request. Yuna responds in kind with all her heart, and places all her being in her summoning. Belize was never able to make a connection with Bahamut's fayth, though perhaps they might have if they'd had the chance to complete their pilgrimage, so while they have seen *others'* summonings of the aeon of Bevelle, they're not familiar with the pause between the dance and the appearance. For a moment, puzzlement crosses their features. Yuna seems calm, confident, though, as if she had successfully completed her work. So then why--?
Then Bahamut happens.
The ceiling, ancient stone though it may be, *vaporizes* in an instant. Reflexively, Belize raises their sleeve to protect their head, but there's no need--the dragon would never be so gauche. Slowly, they lower their arm, eyes wide. They have seen Bahamut, yes--many local summoners have summoned him to fight against the forces of Althena's Guard, especially their damnable war machina. But this Bahamut is impressive even by the scale of Bahamut. He reminds them that the aeon is not just a reflection of the fayth but also the summoner who calls it. And for a moment, they are deeply, fiercely proud of Yuna--their friend, their pupil. They have done terrible, cruel things to not just her but her people, her guardians. If she never forgave them, they would understand. But she has grown beyond even their expectations, and for that... for that, they are glad. (For Belize may not be a bad person, not entirely, but they're not a good person, either.)
Water sinks, as water is wont to do, into the crater of Bahamut's landing. Leviathan hisses at the appearance of their counterpart, a sharp, sibilant thing as they flare their fins in umbrage at the usurpation of *their* element. What's worse, when Bahamut settles, he folds his arms and WAITS for the attack.
Yet...
Coming from anyone else, it would be a dire challenge, enough to send Belize into a fury and Leviathan to respond in kind to their rage. Here, between the aeons, it has a feel more like... 'You cocky little brat!' ...a proud, prideful older sibling aggroaffectionately admonishing a cheeky younger brother.
That may just be humans projecting human feelings, though. Either way, it is a match between titans, between powers that may not have had a chance to meet in this way in many hundreds of years. And through the bond between their respective summoners, they, too, can look forward to an awesome battle to prove the strength of their hearts--of the one who will rise up and defeat Sin. Once and for all.
"Hmph!" Belize flips their bangs with such intensity that their braid snaps backwards with them. "Who do you think you're talking to?" They smirk, and something about their stance, their bearing, is refreshed. As if even without being Sent, they have found some absolution simply by having their story be heard. "Leviathan!!"
The great sea serpent *screeches*, a discordant note that rings and echoes through the waterway. In response to their voice, the waters underneath Bahamut surge and rise up in a great column to surround him--yes, even him with his massive height and vast wings. It's like being dropped into the deep ocean in an instant, and that pressure weighs down on him with momentary but immense force. It's a power that will only continue to grow the deeper the waters become, even as they fall away in a smooth splash.
GS: Belize enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: Belize has attacked Yuna with Briny Deep! GS: Belize has gained 1 Combo! GS: Belize has completed their action. GS: CRITICAL! Yuna guards a hit from Belize's Briny Deep for 250 hit points! GS: Mighty applied to Belize! GS: Yuna's Force Guard activates! GS: Reaction bonus! FP up! GS: Yuna enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed. <SoundTracker> The Last Agni Kai https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDAL5G9Xwn4
Besaid's fayth is a young woman from Besaid. Kilika's fayth is a former Crusader. Djose's fayth is a common fisherman. Macalania's fayth is a Yevonite nun.
Well... was. They were all those things. Then they gave up their lives to become fayth instead. Ghosts, bound to statues by ritual, faith, and tradition. There are only two ways that they manage to 'live on', and Yuna only knows about one of them...
They live on through her. IN her. And out of her, when the aeon, the child of their united souls, is born, and reborn, and reborn.
Besaid's aeon is freedom. Kilika's aeon is rage. Djose's aeon is intensity. Macalania's aeon is self-actualization.
Bevelle's fayth is, was, a child.
Bevelle's aeon is POWER.
There's a lesson in that.
Yuna is learning it in real time.
She experiences Belize's joy, their catharsis, on three levels, almost like harmonic frequencies; with her eyes, with her heart, and with... Bahamut's heart.
The mighty dragon lowers his gaze, without lowering his head, and gives the opposing summoner a brief and penetrating look. To be stared at by ANYTHING of his size is, inevitably, a somewhat disconcerting experience. But there is perhaps the tiniest amount of approval to be found there, if they are inclined to seek it.
Then his gaze shifts to Leviathan... and the battle begins.
Bahamut does not try to avoid the immense column of water his opponent has summoned; he raises his arms over his chest when the surface is at his knees, then crosses his wings in front of him when the surface is at his waist.
And then he's lost to sight, visible only barely as an blurred shadow, a vast darkness within the vaster darkness of this momentary artificial sea.
Yuna walks around the side of the column so that she can see Belize, and so that Belize can see her. Since the last time they saw one another, her expression has... changed. It's not an unfamiliar expression to one who knows her well, as the other summoner does. For that matter, Belize saw her look like this just days ago, at the trial.
Yuna is... resolved. There is something she must do, and so she will do it, even though it's terribly, terribly hard. Even though it might ruin everything.
She will confront the last thing that separates their hearts.
To do anything less -- to pretend it isn't there, that it doesn't exist -- that, too, would be running away. It would be dishonest to their relationship -- what Yuna would call their friendship.
After this, Belize may not agree.
"Belize..." Her voice calls across the strange quiet of the battlefield. Now that the waters have reached their apex, there isn't even the sound of churning. The pressure that bears down on Bahamut from every direction -- even his immense clawed feet have been forced from the crater -- is silent. One could say he floats freely within the column, but of course it is the opposite.
"...if Sin is what matters..." It matters to her and it matters to Bevelle's fayth, it matters to him in a way that she'd never felt before. That intersection is a given between any summoner and any fayth, but now the imperative of not only ending Sin, but ending Sin forever, feels both deeper and broader within her, both more powerful and more profound.
"...then you need to not let your sense of loyalty hold you back from asking me about Seymour."
Their eyes meet. Yuna's are filled with sorrow, but at their core, hope also. Faith, as adamantite as Bahamut himself, faith in Belize, that they are strong enough to endure this. They overcame death itself. They can overcome this.
"You'll never know if you don't ask."
The water column ripples.
"And you really need to know."
It ripples again. What's going on in there?
---
The sheer extremity of Leviathan's pressure has subtly deformed some of Bahamut's scales; where they were a smooth, interlocking sheet of gray and gold, they are now bumpy, uneven. A few are even cracked, though beneath the living metal is more living metal, he's turtles all the way down.
Crucially, this has warped the hinges of his wings -- they're still folded around him, but now they're stuck shut.
This will not do.
As his summoner musters the courage to speak of difficult things, Bahamut musters the strength to overcome his own challenge. At first all he can flick are his wingtips, those spectacular blades that lie at the corner of crimson and magenta. Back and forth, he wiggles them back and forth. Then the orange layer, with a creak no one can hear through countless gallons of water, begins to move. Then the purple. And finally the gray...
His timing is good. Having survived the briny deep, even at cost, the pressure is finally past its maximum. The next time he flaps his wings -- EVERY next time he flaps his wings -- it's just a little bit easier than the last.
And the FIRST time he flapped them COMPLETELY, to their full extension, with what would have been an earsplitting screech of metal freeing itself from its trapped hinge -- that was the first ripple that they saw.
---
Instead of simply falling, as Leviathan's attack ends, the column of water is... swirling. At its very heart, Bahamut has bestowed upon it... the gift of spin.
It expands, becoming less and less dense as forces work upon it differently in both directions; Leviathan crushing less, Bahamut pushing more and more rapidly, with greater and greater determination.
Finally -- he escapes the waterspout -- HIS waterspout, now, his tempest, more storm than sea -- his rear claws landing hard enough on the ground that again the whole Via Purifico seems to shake with the sudden re-addition of his mass.
He's still flapping, and the whole chamber suddenly seems to be full of rainbow blades and wind and sea, a vast typhoon that pours straight back in Leviathan's direction, consuming the ground between them, and leaving almost unnaturally clean stone ruins behind. They positively glisten.
Leviathan might enjoy this cleansing somewhat less, when it arrives...
Once Bahamut summoned his tempest, it became too loud to be heard, so Yuna has stopped talking, but she's stretched out her arm to Belize, in both invitation and plea.
GS: Yuna has attacked Belize with Tempest Wing! GS: Yuna has gained 1 Combo! GS: Yuna assumes the Avenger stance! GS: Yuna has completed her action. GS: Belize takes a solid hit from Yuna's Tempest Wing for 292 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Belize gains 1 additional Combo!
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
Belize seeks the approval of very few people; their anger also gives them self-possession, the knowledge that having someone else's acknowledgement won't change the ugly fact of what they are. Even so, it's hard not to feel at least something of an ego boost to receive any kind of approval from the King of Aeons. If Belize doesn't feel it, then Leviathan feels it for them.
Of course, Leviathan is the Lord of All Waters, so it's acknowledgement between sovereigns for them.
And if the fayth of Bahamut represents power--
Then the fayth of Leviathan represents an unrelenting refusal to give up. In life, they were a ship captain, in love with the seas they sailed, bereaved and infurated that Sin now holds those seas prisoner. Yet the ocean pushes and pulls endlessly, from the waves on the surface down to the deepest depths to the clouds evaporated up in the heavens to the rains they pour down through the world. Its waters may trickle, they may tower, but in the fullness of time they will wear away mountains and cool the burning heart of the world. It's all a matter of continuing to push, continuing to pull, to keep that action going onward, until one day one's goals have been realized.
The fayth of Leviathan is *determination*.
One day, the dream will end. They will bring it to an end.
As Bahamut's scales rupture and crack under those hadal pressures, as he extends his wings and turns the sea into a storm, as he sends the now-waterspout back with rainbow wings tearing at everything in its wake until all is scrubbed unnaturally clean, Leviathan screams. It is a scream of pain, of course, but it is also a scream of defiance--their own scales and fins, pearlescent-blue and breathtakingly beautiful even as they are dangerous, much like the seas themselves, crack and shred under the assault. While they may not be liquid metal and/or turtles all the way down, though, they *are* an elemental spirit, and this attack *does* involve throwing their own element back at them. The sinewy dragon may curl in the wake of the storm, but they raise their head again once it has passed, battered, beaten, but far from broken.
Below, Belize's sea-green eyes narrow in wary confusion as Yuna calls to them. Yuna is honest to a fault; Yuna is not one for tricks or deceptions; Yuna is always straightforward. These are all things they know about her. Yet...
'If Sin is what matters, then you need to not let your sense of loyalty hold you back from asking me about Seymour.'
They know that Yuna doesn't love Seymour, has never loved Seymour, in fact loves another man entirely. They know that Yuna cannot possibly think *better* of him after what happened at the Macalania Temple, let alone what happened at the Al Bhed's Home. They know that Seymour is Unsent, just as they are--that something of him has twisted in the process. Yet...
'You'll never know if you don't ask. And you really need to know.'
"What... are you talking about?" they call back to Yuna. Had they still possessed a heartbeat, it might be thumping uncomfortably in their throat right now. "What do you mean?"
They remember, abruptly, that Seymour had vanished for the same amount of time Yuna had. That they were on that other world together. They remember Yuna's accusations against Seymour during the trial, about him creating a mini-Sin, a claim so patently absurd that they'd been no better able to wrap their head around it than Mika or the other Maesters had been.
They remember Yuna is honest to a fault.
"What..." they utter, voice momentarily cracking, "...do you know?"
At their side, Leviathan still stands--well, 'stands' is not the best word, considering they have no legs, but nonetheless, they hold their head high. With a deep, deep inhalation, they suck in the moisture in the air around everyone; then they blow a truly absurd number of bubbles from their mouth to shoot forth at Bahamut.
One might call bubbles weak, and consequently look down on them. Yet bubbles carry plenty of danger of their own. These ones fire fast and hard, whirling and boiling, in a wide spray around the other massive aeon. Where they make contact with Bahamut, those bubbles then *snap*--and those snaps are as loud as a firecracker and just as explosive. There's also dozens, *hundreds* of them, and when you set them all off at once... perhaps their combined force will break through Bahamut's defenses.
GS: Belize has attacked Yuna with Concussion Bubble! GS: Belize has completed their action. GS: Yuna guards a hit from Belize's Concussion Bubble for 124 hit points! GS: Weaken applied to Yuna!
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.
Yuna isn't ALWAYS honest.
She had the best poker face of her life when she allowed herself to get close enough to the altar that she would also be close enough to Send Seymour.
She is willing, in other words, to deceive her foes. If she must. If there is absolutely no other way. Because Sin is what matters...
But Belize is more right than wrong. There's no way Yuna would lie to them. Not right now. Not about this.
Not when it looks like her own heart is breaking, along with Belize's voice. She knew they were so happy to see Seymour again -- she was there for it, even, amid a backdrop of slaughter. Killing him, even in self-defense, wounded them terribly, and it's a wound that's only even begun to have a chance to heal, with the surprising providence of his joining Belize as an Unsent.
But maybe it would never really heal that way. If they never talk about what happened... if they never lance the wound, and let the poison out... it would fester, sight unseen, before it was far too late.
"I don't know everything... but I know enough."
Bubbles momentarily remove her from Belize's sight, pouring between them to again encompass Bahamut. The great dragon bellows, a raw sound of pain, as a dozen dozen sonic booms explode against his heat-softened scales. Most of them struck his spectacular wings, again by design, but they are quite a bit worse for wear, now. More than one spike has snapped off entirely, creating a colorful graveyard of blades sunk deeply within the dungeon floor.
The final battle of the summoning duel is retracing its steps, in a sort of beautifully honest symmetry, and has in some way become a mirror of the first; then, Belize enjoyed the advantage of an all-sorcerer with no elemental weaknesses, and was able to exploit almost any of Yuna's own choices.
Now...
Bahamut clenches a fist, and before the last bubble has detonated, a response comes literally thundering through them: Thundaga, near-mightiest of the electric path, is first within his grasp and then coruscating over the water elemental Leviathan. Yuna is no black mage, but she's spent almost her whole life in the company of one. And this hit was for Lulu.
In the aftermath of the lightning storm, which had turned the whole room momentarily black and white with its sheer intensity, Yuna clasps her hands together loosely in front of her, careful with her injured palm.
"I know that he had a terrible plan for Spira, a plan that would threaten its summoners and its people, and draw everything into darkness... and that when his father, Lord Jyscal, discovered his plan, he killed him in order to preserve it. And I know that it was so important to Lord Jyscal to warn us, warn Spira, that he overcame death itself to tell me, in the same way that you did to oppose Sin. I cannot believe that something as weak as a lie would keep him from his final rest."
More energy -- golden electricity, this time, or perhaps simply golden power -- crackles in Bahamut's palms as he clenches both of them, clenches his entire body, clearly readying himself for a great effort. A tooth-stinging current is already starting to fill the air, a pre-emptive objective from molecules who suspect what atrocities are about to be wrought upon them.
For a moment the metal dragon looks smaller. But he doesn't feel smaller. Very much the opposite. Leviathan is all coils, but Bahamut is coiling, not like a serpent but like a spring.
"I cared for Seymour, in my own way," Yuna continues, earnestly. "I hoped to convince him to travel with me to Bevelle and confess his crime before the other Maesters. That by bringing these events into the light, we could, perhaps, avert his path of darkness together, instead of leaving him to pursue it alone. But..."
She might have winced, once, but she does not now. She is just sad, with the understated misery of a kind heart forced by extremity to unkind outcomes, remembering the last time she saw Belize before she was ripped away to Filgaia. Remembering the last time she saw Seymour alive.
"...he chose to try to kill again, in order to preserve his secrets. And I stopped him. I killed him, before he could kill us all. We both know this, too, to be true."
A banner unfurls itself above the top of the screen, above Bahamut.
COUNTDOWN: 3
"But like his father, and like you, Seymour rejected death because of something he wanted, something he needed, something more..."
A roar shakes their vast chamber, a roar of objection, of REjection, of what it is that Seymour seeks. It must be violation indeed, for the King of Aeons to weigh in personally. But he does more than just speak.
Bahamut converts all that rising tension into action, and explodes into a backflip. His wings spread, glorious even in their current incomplete state, and he lands heavily on all four claws, abandoning a humanoid posture for the first time, in favor of grounding himself, literally, metaphorically, spiritually. Then he shifts him great weight -- some of the remaining waters on the ground tilt a little, towards him -- and digs his claws even deeper into the ground. It's like someone connecting a circuit.
He is jacking himself straight into the Via Purifico. Into Bevelle. Into Spira. Into Lunar...
And his crown, his halo, the great golden sunburst that floats behind his head... now floating above his back... slowly, slowly, begins to rotate.
"Belize," Yuna entreats, over the low hum that has just disturbed a pebble to skitter across her boot. "What do you think Seymour wants so very desperately?"
GS: Yuna has attacked Belize with 3... 2... 1...! GS: Yuna has completed her action. GS: Belize takes a solid hit from Yuna's 3... 2... 1... for 0 hit points! GS: Entangle, Jam, and Shieldbreak applied to Belize!
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
In the end, that's the Unsent condition: a festering wound that must, eventually, be lanced. Seymour may be very dear to Belize, someone whom they genuinely love--not romantically, but as a Maester and a close friend--but they don't know the truth of his ambitions, of *why* he did everything he did. They have never questioned it too closely. At first, there wasn't any point in it; he was dead and they were left to attempt to fill his shoes as best they could, knowing they couldn't ever possibly manage it. Then they were simply too shocked by the revelation of his return and his un-life to even think of it. And now...
Now, Yuna might lie and deceive when she must. But Belize does trust her. She is a girl--no, a *woman* who thinks with her heart. They wonder how their relationship might have been different if the two of them had met while they'd still been alive. Perhaps if they'd stayed a little longer in Besaid, rather than rushing off to Uijundo Temple immediately after praying to the temple's fayth.
A roaring crack of lightning thunders forth, shuttering vision black and white with its sheer force. The storm, contained in that single/double/quadruple/octuple lightning strike, for lightning is many and one all at the same time, sears into the Lord of the Waters and leaving behind a searing scar on their shimmering scales. They writhe, snaking back and hurling their head back and forth in pain, enhanced by their weakness to the element, and electricity crawls momentarily, unpleasantly over their scales and fins. It is indeed a turn-around from the beginning of the battle in many ways. Lulu would be proud.
Lulu would also be proud of Yuna, speaking the truth here and now, even when it's messy and difficult. Belize listens to her, remembering--there had been rumors of that back during the wedding party, that Yuna had been in possession of a sphere from Jyscal. And... Jyscal's spirit had appeared at his mansion... Belize knows the nature of being Unsent well. Nothing so paltry as a lie would possess one to overcome death itself. Only a powerful will to continue on, no matter what the cost, no matter the cost that has already been paid.
Leviathan curls around, corkscrew-like, their long, tendril-like face-fins quivering behind them, and hisses at Bahamut as the sky dragon digs into the stone and braces himself, roars out his defiance as his halo-crown begins to spin. Belize sucks in a sharp breath; they never acquired Bahamut, but they are a Bevelle native, and many local summoners have called upon Bahamut to defend the city against Althena's Guard. They know an incoming Megaflare when they see one--and through them, so, too, does Leviathan. But even worse--
Far, far worse is Yuna's explanation for why Seymour had attempted to kill her and her guardians in the first place. Belize's eyes widen and waver at this simple statement. That Seymour lingered because he wanted something so badly that even death could not deter him from it.
What do they think it was?
"I thought," they say, low and emotional, "that he wanted to end Sin once and for all. Like all of us want to." 'Us Summoners,' they do not say; to them, it goes without saying. Seymour is one of both of them in that respect; they have seen his Anima, though they know not how or where he got such an unusual aeon. But-- "If not that, then... what?"
They cannot bring themself to believe the worst of such a dear friend. Of someone who has saved them so many times over. They know he has a shadow to him, have glimpsed it on occasion, but even with that, they'd always genuinely believed he was a kind, noble person. They need Yuna to say it--so they can confront it. Grapple it.
And then confront Seymour with it. Because they may trust and like Yuna, but they won't simply take her word on it. Not even on something like this. *Especially* not on something like this.
So while they may be listening, they have no intention of backing down. They must make it out of this battle. And, sensing that will and responding to it, Leviathan's tendrils sweep backwards. That crawling lightning may be limiting their movements, keep them from truly stretching out and either exhibiting a full defense or offense, but the waters still respond to their call. They recede, as if low tide had suddenly come and drained the beaches as far as the eye can see.
Some have seen such 'low tides' and, not realizing what they were, rushed out to collect the treasures suddenly revealed. Others knew this 'low tide' for what it really was and ran as fast as they could for higher ground. As an island-dweller, Yuna would know doubt have the knowledge and wisdom to recognize it. The rumble at Belize and Leviathan's backs will only underscore it. The Via Purifico may be underground--it may not have the room for a proper tsunami--but that's what the power of magic is for, to add that *oomph* that turns a merely massive wave collossal, to turn it into a crushing force that can, has, and will sweep entire civilizations away as if they were so many sandcastles built foolishly before the tide returned.
The tide has returned.
GS: Belize has activated a Force Action! GS: Belize has activated a Force Action! GS: Belize has attacked Yuna with Overdrive - Tsunami! GS: Mighty expired! GS: Belize has completed their action. GS: CRITICAL! Yuna takes a solid hit from Belize's Overdrive - Tsunami for 553 hit points! GS: Yuna enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed. <SoundTracker> Divinity ~ Bahamut SIN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIeShGvrg88
The tide comes in.
Physics question! This is more Rikku's province than Lulu's, but although Yuna's spent far less time with her cousin than her adopted sister, it's the former who has actually begun to train her in her mad skillz.
Q: What happens if you push a lot of water through a very tight space?
A: Nothing good...
A tsunami, as condensed through the halls of the Via Purifico, becomes a monstrous JET. It snakes around corners and gathers mass in wider spaces, while accelerating through tight ones.
And when it arrives, it is more WHITE than blue, white with turbulence, with raw powerful force. No, the terrain has not forced Leviathan's magic to COMPENSATE.
Very much the opposite.
And Bahamut... does not move.
COUNTDOWN: 2
He vanishes from sight beneath the tsunami, and Belize can read in Yuna's expression what it must feel like -- how, in a way, by not even trying to defend themselves, the two of them are reliving the deaths of Cambria and Ryuggu and Belize, Bahamut directly and Yuna through his eyes, his skin, his heart. They are sacrificing themselves to the hungry sea.
They are doing this for a greater cause.
Because Sin is what matters.
The first time one of Bahamut's scales impacts the wall behind him with an almighty, thundering CRASH, some fiends half a mile away look up from whatever they were doing and flea. After that it's a steady stream. He loses and loses and loses himself, and Yuna loses something with him.
And perhaps gains something, too.
Deep within the endless jet, a light is blossoming. And the hum in the room has never STOPPED. It was all-too-literally DROWNED OUT for a moment there, but continued, steadily rising, rising.
Even as the last of the tsunami falls, it is rising. Growing brighter and brighter and brighter. And as nothing but gurgling puddles and the vast marring of Bahamut's body -- and the memory of what it was like -- remain to mark its passing, its source finally becomes visible.
Yuna wears her heart on her sleeve.
Bahamut wears his heart on his back.
It is engine, fulcrum, and capacitor all in one. And it is churning, faster and faster, the sunburst spiraling so rapid now that it looks like an opaque sheet of gold.
And it is drawing power. From the air. From the summoners and fiends alike; from the living and from the dead. From the planet. From the tsunami itself, which briefly rendered it a waterwheel; where the dragon's scales suffered greatly, his heart did not at all, it is as unwarped a circle as ever, beautiful in its perfection, something that mortal artificery cannot create. No human hands MADE this.
They GAVE themselves for it. A little boy did.
COUNTDOWN: 1
Yuna asked Belize what they THOUGHT for a reason; it's the same reason she had little hope, when Drifters stormed the Ten Thousand Steps of Peace with furious truths about Seymour on their tongues, that they would reach the Yevonites. It's the same reason she felt that she personally had to deliver the news to the Four Maesters (well... the other three), and why what happened at the trial came as such a blow.
But if they didn't believe her... why would Seymour's most loyal ally?
This is something Belize has to learn for themself.
The most she can hope to do... is help them open their mind.
So that they can think for themselves. Like Tidus always has.
"I wish with all my heart that I could reassure you... that it was so," she replies. Agony wracks her heart, leaks out into her wrenching hands, her stricken expression. "But... I can't. I can't, Belize. I just can't."
Yesterday, she would have never believed in her wildest dreams that the Grand Maester was Unsent, and the other Maesters smugly consenting to 'enlightened rule by the dead'. Yuna WANTED TO COME TO BEVELLE, she always wanted this, she wanted more than anything to confess her crime and in so doing draw back the curtain on Seymour's machinations and murders alike. Because Yevon was her guiding star. It was honor. It was justice.
Even after the Grand Maester inexplicably forced her to stop Sending Seymour, threatening to execute all her Guardians and so many other of her friends on the spot if she proceeded, she didn't understand, not entirely. When he continued their sham of a wedding, binding her in ritual if not in word to an Unsent -- the phantom pressure of Seymour's lips a new starring element to her flashbacks, a terrible WAKING dream -- she STILL held out hope that the trial would bring matters to light.
Not in her darkest nightmares did she expect to be tortured, excommunicated, and sentenced to death for telling the truth.
"Nor can I ask you to simply believe the impossible... that somehow, Seymour wants the OPPOSITE of you and I. Sin is what matters to him too, of that I am sure, but... not to defeat, let alone to destroy forever. The world Seymour wants is a world with more Sin in it, not less. I do not understand him fully, but I understand that much. I think he is both like and unlike Mika. He worships death... but he does not wish to hide it. He wishes... to share it."
Yuna is troubled by all this, troubled greatly, and disturbed most of all by her own inability to grasp his total plan, which has yet to be explained. A plan for which he has killed his father, tried to kill all her Guardians, and successfully killed a great deal of Baskar Village, not to mention Home...
...she doesn't hide this uncertainty. She is earnest about it, as she is about everything else.
It becomes painfully quiet, in the sense that the whine of gathered power becomes too high frequency for human ears. Pebbles are no longer skittering, but floating a few inches above the ground; gravity, too, is being drafted into service. Into this silence, it pours through Bahamut's body, gathering his own personal energies last of all -- nothing will be spared, they're giving it all they have, aeon and summoner, together.
His maw gapes open to reveal a pinprick. The heart of a newborn star. Infinite mass, in a single point in space.
Power is power, it is destruction and it is creation and this raw expression of it is both.
It is growing.
Now it's the size of a Besaid peach.
Yuna continues, urgently, her voice intensifying.
"This is all I ask, Belize: watch him. Watch him carefully -- I would not have him harm you, too, if he suspects that you might stop him; I do not know if he would lie or not, if you simply asked him."
A beach ball.
"But his actions must speak for themselves to you, as they have done to me."
Taller than Yuna, and second and third pulses of light are drawing INTO it, violet and black...
COUNTDOWN: 0
And so it is that Belize learns another truth.
If Yuna had confronted Seymour as the summoner she is today...
...he would have survived.
She has grown so much since Macalania Temple. Through suffering, as Belize might expect, and through joy that they might not. Not just in power, but in control...
...Bahamut's M E G A F L A R E, greater by magnitudes than the absolute zero that Yuna (via Shiva) shot so hard through Anima that it inadvertantly pierced Seymour as well, a risk she was desperate enough to take...
...it PARTS around Belize, that which bursts through to the far side of Leviathan. They stand in a vast, scintillating tunnel, surrounded on all sides by light of all wavelengths and none. It is beautiful and it is terrible. Bahamut's power is titanic, as appalling as it is breathtaking.
But Yuna's power will not harm them.
She will not allow it.
Never again.
GS: Yuna has activated a Force Action! GS: Yuna spends 5 Combo on Headshot and Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: Formation! Yuna has attacked Belize with ! ! ! M E G A F L A R E ! ! !! GS: Yuna has gained 2 Combo! GS: Lock state expired! GS: Yuna has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Belize takes a solid hit from Yuna's ! ! ! M E G A F L A R E ! ! ! for 632 hit points! GS: Belize enters Critical health and gains 25 FP! GS: Belize has Fallen! They are no longer able to fight!
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
And so it ends.
Yuna truly has come far as a Summoner. Though Bahamut survives Leviathan's tidal jet blast--not just survives but *tanks* it--and though Bahamut answers with cosmic force that shears through Leviathan's compromised defenses--not a drop of harm comes to one hair on Belize's head. Truly, they have witnessed the birth of a star in many meanings of the phrase.
Leviathan collapses in a spiral of pyreflies. Belize sinks to their hands and knees, their copper-rust bangs sagging around their face. Only now, after complete and total defeat, does the exhaustion of their battle hit them. They haven't sustained any personal damage, no. But the bond between summoner and aeon is soul-deep. Having all of theirs defeated... It doesn't matter that they still have their bow and arrows. One may as well throw sticks at a mountain.
"I am defeated," they announce, unnecessarily. "...You have defeated me."
There is a long pause. Belize may be Unsent, but they still breathe, or at least make a facsimile of breathing. In, out; in, out; in, out. Not unlike the tide. Leviathan and the others will return. They simply need some rest. ...They all need some rest.
Particularly after Yuna told them to watch Seymour--to pay close attention to him as she had, and see the truth of his motivations. Pondering that requires a long moment of silence. He is a dear friend who has saved them many times, but...
Defeating Sin is everything. They cannot allow one who would bring another into the world. One who might *welcome* its unending spree of destruction. They will have their revenge, and fulfill their duty as summoner, both at once...
Oh, Yevon. It can't be true. Please let it not be true. Please let Yuna be mistaken.
They will have to watch Seymour closely to know for sure.
Belize clenches their eyes and teeth, then slowly wobble up to their feet. It takes them some time to cross the platform of their duel to reach Yuna, but eventually they make it. By coincidence, they had various healing supplies on them, just as anyone who lives in Spira would. One of them includes an aloe salve for burns. They produce this from one of their pockets.
"Your hand, please," they say softly. If Yuna complies, they'll place it in her hand. If not, they'll simply hold it out for her to take. Either way, as a healer, Yuna should recognize it for what it is--and what it signifies, given the still-healing brand on her palm.
"You've come far, Yuna. I have every faith now that you will be able to defeat Sin," they continue. "But there are many who would drag you from your path, and more strength is hardly unwelcome, hm?" They give her a faint, sardonic smile. "So for now, I'm afraid I can't allow you to Send me. Seymour aside, there are still things I have left to do."
They start to make the Yevon sigil, pause, and give her a simple bow instead. "This will not be the last time we meet, Yuna." They rise, then point at their back. "The exit is three turns back that way--right, left, and right again. When you have reunited with your guardians, be sure you escape alive." They turn, only to look one last time over their shoulder. "...Farewell."
Then they begin to make their leave.
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.
Yuna is humble in victory; and to be sure it was a near thing, she is more tired than elated, and still in grief for everything she's had to say and do, most of all. She bows in response to Belize's verbal surrender, and gives them the time they need to recover themselves.
"Thank you," she whispers to Bahamut, hugging him around the ankle in a brief, tight embrace. He rumbles and dissolves, joining Leviathan in a vast galaxy of pyreflies across the lofty darkness of 'sky' that used to be a lower ceiling.
She does not assuming a Sending stance, and when Belize implies that she might, she lets her beaded earring clatter against her neck one last time. Her limp, damp hair shuffles itself, following her firm shake.
"I made you a promise," she replies simply, after accepting the aloe with a soft but fervent murmur of gratitude. "Your path to the Farplane goes through me, but in another way."
When she defeats Sin forever.
When Belize can return to the Farplane of their own accord.
"Thank you," she says a third time, bowing deeply to her dear departing -- departed -- mentor. "For everything. And...goodbye..."
<Pose Tracker> Belize has posed.
Belize smiles, slight but sincere, when Yuna refuses the opportunity--the possibility--of Sending them. When she invokes her promise. They almost feel like they could move on to the Farplane then and there. But... no. There is at least one thing they absolutely must do. If Sin's time is coming to an end... then Leviathan must be there to see things through.
Their fayth absolutely insists on it, even if Belize hadn't been planning on it for some time anyway.
For now, though, they give Yuna a last nod before they walk away. However, before they get too far, they pause, a thought occurring to them. "Oh, yes," they say. They don't turn back again, but-- "That one guardian of yours... The young man you fancy. I expect he's seen that sphere the Al Bhed sent around by now; it seems like everyone has by now." They haven't seen it personally, but they've certainly
heard a lot about it. "In which case... you should be true to your feelings for him." A note of teasing enters their tone: "I think you've earned the right to a little self-indulgence, don't you?"
*Now* they leave.