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They had entered Mobliz, and there had been five of them. They were not faceless, but they might as well have been; they were the apotheosis of scum. Men who would think no further then their on pleasures, their own desires, brawling and cursing. It’s hard to believe for some that there could be people like this, but defying the laws of logic, they were.

They might have come from Zozo. They might have come from Nikeah. They might have come from South Figaro. It did not matter. They had traveled over the Serpent Trench and had now found Mobliz. The dogs barked and pulled at the ropes that tied them to their spot. Spit flew from their mouths when the ropes reached the end of their capacity and almost choked the dogs. One of the five looked at the dogs with curiosity. An animal nearly choking himself out of fear and anger was a sight that appealed to him. It was good to see the world was like them.

A young girl had checked to see who they were, and had gone to Duane when she saw that they were no merchants or any of ‘Mama’ her friends. Duane, who had been talking to Terra just then about a minor problem he had encountered, had followed the little girl to the visitors. Terra had followed them, carrying the newborn of Duane and Katarin, in the natural way a woman does and a man can never learn.

The front man of the five, unshaven and ugly and charismatic in his ways, laid a lazy eye on Duane first, and then on Terra. He never stopped chewing his Brown Tobacco.

Some are born with an ability to spot weakness. They can sense if a person can be taken advantage of. They can smell when a woman is embarrased. They can hear when a man is wounded. They can taste the fear of a child. These people are never good people, and many a good person has been ruined due to this ability.

Chewing, the front man analyzed the town and found it to be instantly attractive to him: it was raw and broken, inhabited by small children he could see from behind broken windows and peeking around a door post. Two older kids had been keeping them alive. Only one man between them and the girl. A good fuck after a long ride. ‘Pull’, he said.

Duane’s eyes widened when four arms pulled out four daggers behind four belts. The front man chewed his Brown Tobacco, almost an innocent bystander. Terra ran away, taking the baby with her, and two men rushed after her. The sound of the crying baby turned hollow when she dissappeard between two houses, followed by the men. Duane stood frozen, undecided at what to do against three armed men. Sweat that might have come from a hard day’s work or the situation he found himself in, fell from the curve of his eyebrow to the ground in a droplet.

The other two men charged at Duane, and planted their knives into his gut before he realized he was being attacked. Pain envoloped his stomach, and he could only register the steel in his body as a terrible invading tool of destruction. He screamed and his hair flung into his eyes. Duane dropped to his knees, holding his stomach. He was kicked in the face and he moaned as he tried to get up. One of the men, wearing a bandana, turned him around and buried his knife into the boy’s throat. Duane’s eyes turned to glass before his head touched the ground.

The front man spat out his Brown Tobacco on the face of the body, and went to see if his men had captured the girl. They had failed: the girl had picked up a sword from somewhere and was defending herself with skill. She had laid the baby behind her, safe on the floor. The men were entangled in a fight with her, more show then metal-to-metal fighting. Neither wanted to be the first to strike and lose the advantage of the defender. “The girl has made a gross tactical error”, the front man thought. Duane’s murderers had found an alternate way to the battle scene and had surprised Terra from behind.

Terra realized that she stood no chance in a pincer attack, and attacked the intruders head-on. She managed to chase them off with several agressive swings from her sword, but she had crossed over the baby to do so. The front man ran for the baby, pushed his boot into Terra’s back when she was just turning around, and while she lost her balance for a moment, he took the baby by his left foot and retreated. He pulled out his dagger and loosily held in front of the neck of the crying baby. ‘The sword.’ The girl had frozen, but held onto the sword. ‘Drop it.’ The girl did nothing. The front man squinted into the sun. This was unexpected. ‘You think I won’t?’ With a quick move, he moved the knife to the baby’s right leg and produced a shallow cut there. The baby started screaming instead of sobbing tiredly, and the face of the girl twitched in utter horror. She dropped the sword. “Always count on young mothers to give it all up for the babies”, he thought.

One of his men had kicked away the girl’s sword. The front man looked at the girl, and she looked back. ‘Latigos? Let’s hurry the fuck up, eh?’ Not responding, the front man moved the blade of his knife to the baby’s neck again. He continued to look at the girl, whose face had every bit the horror and fear in it you’d expect. ‘Never trust people who have the upper hand on you.’, the front man said. With that, never taking his eyes of he girl’s face, he killed the baby he held in his hand. Blood gushed down the man’s arm, and the baby stopped making any normal sound. When the tiny body had stopped twitching and the girl screamed at the top of her lungs, he slung the dead piece of meat as far away as he could. ‘She’s mine, first.’

The front man, called Latigos by his men because he liked the sound of the ancient words – it meant both ‘leader’ and ‘victor’ – took Terra’s face in his hand and made her look at him. The hatred he saw in there pleased him. ‘Cook for us. You’ll be watched.’ He pushed her face away, and stood up. ‘Bandai. Take Ging and watch the bitch.’ The man with the bandana, Bandai, pushed the girl to get her moving.

It was then when the clear sound of a voice was heard.

‘STOP!’

In between the men, like a cat jumping from a branch, landed a young man whose features were not clear in the quick movements he made. He swung a stick of some kind around him, and hit Ging hard in the face. Blood sprayed from between his fingers when he clutched his broken jaw in a muffled cry. The man jumped for Bandai, and hit the frond end of his stick into the place between his lips and nose. Bandai died instantly and painless when the bone in his nose lost contact with its surroundings and was pushed into his brains. Turning around, he hit Ging on the back of his head, causing him to stumble into the other two men of the front man. Finally, the Latigos saw what the man was wielding, and he did not believe his eyes.

A cane.
A fucking WALKING cane!

‘KILL HIM!’

While Ging did not react, the other two men put two steps towards the man…and then hesitated. They had found a stronger power in the man they were to face, and they weren’t willing to attack him for the Latigos. They retreated and ran, leaving the front man with Ging and the body of Bandai. The Latigos took Ging by his hair and pushed him ahead of him, keeping a sharp look-out for the man with the cane. He hadn’t moved an inch, waiting for him to finish his business. The Latigos left, taking Ging with him. There were other times.

Because the young man, too, had been weak. Much weaker then the girl.


Terra felt fer body and mind collapse from whatever twisted had happened. So sudden, it had all changed from good to violated, from happy to miserable. All kids were crying out of fright, and Katarin was pale and silent as she looked at the body of the man she was supposed to love for her entire life. Looking at her baby was no option, she would surely go insane. Maybe she already was.

Pollie was not capable of understanding what exactly had happened, but was nonetheless scared and sad. The air around here shivered from the negative feelings of Terra and from the other kids, and although it was sometimes said that children with the syndrom of Down, like Pollie, could not really grasp sorrow like normal people, Pollie cried her eyes out when she found the thing that had once been the baby of Katarin and Duane. Terra had rushed over to her and had maneouvred her away from the baby – feeling as terrible as anybody but keeping her composure for the good of the others – but by then the feeling of illness had spread trough Pollie's stomach and had corrupted it all. Mental pain so strong that one could feel physical effects were not uncommon around her in Mobliz, not today. She missed her big brother Duane, and silently waited for him to come back. Questions of his where-abouts did not form in her mind, as he had always been a steady factor in her life. He was part of the world.

The man who had saved Terra – not to mention Katarin – from an unspeakable horror was resting on a chair, spinning his cane. He felt distracted, not specifically by something. It was more a feeling of dizzieness, an inability to take a series of events in his mind. He could not grasp what had happened, could not even begin to calculate how this might fit in into his past and his future. He stared emptily on the ground, and made no attempt to comfort Terra or any of the kids. After a ‘thank you’ from Terra, she had ran away to find Duane, after which everything went wrong because he was dead. He didn’t blame the small society of Mobliz for forgetting him for the time being. He was almost incapable of focusing on himself, let alone on the others.

The plan had been so simple. And he had lost control.

Again.


-----------------------------------------



‘Sir?’

Nothing.

‘Sir?’

The man looked up, and met the eyes of a small girl. Four, five years old. Her eyes were crossed and her child-like features were enhanched by whatever sickness had taken her. He could not remember ever having seen a kid like this. He looked at her, curious, and acknowledged her existence by saying: ‘Yeah?’
The girl called out a word that he did not recognize. ‘Dwaine’, it had sounded like, or perhaps ‘Drain’. It didn’t matter. Panic was readable on her face, and whatever she had meant to say was surely a question of comfort. He walked over to her and held her. She didn’t move in his stranger’s hug. He spoke in cliché’s in her ear – everything's going to be fine, don’t you worry about a thing – but wondered while he was doing that. He had helped by interfering, that was true. But maybe unrepearable damage was already been done. The girl sobbed in his arms. ‘Come on, come on. Don’t cry’. Crying could be healthy, and absolutely would be in situations like this. But deeper psychology was wasted on a five-year old, and he didn’t bother encouraging her. He merely tried to act like the older girl had most likely done for while, trying to comfort her and trying to lure her into a tired sleep.

Pollie could smell confusion trough her own sobs and tears, and she tried to determine if the man was dangerous. She couldn’t place his presence into any catagory she knew, but unlike most people she wasn’t scared of what she didn’t know. Things she didn’t recognize came by every day for Pollie. The man spoke into her ears, and he sounded like Mama when something had gone wrong. It was the sound of Bad Things, and it was another prove that things were very Bad. She cried harder, and lost consciounce thought.

Terra rested on the side of the bed and couldn’t move on. The kids seemed to notice this and left her alone for a while. She thought of Duane. How she had liked him a lot and her body had sometimes told her that he was the only partner in the area, making her feel things that she couldn’t quite accept. How he had talked fondly of Katarin every single time. How he had tried to be a fatherly figure to everybody (and to Terra’s amusement, even to her).
There was a knock on the door and before Terra could respond, the door was opened. A man she had never seen before entered, together with Pollie. She tensed up, her mind shooting towards what had happened in the morning. Then, she recognized the man as being their savior, and she calmed down. Pollie had cried, Terra could see the wet marks on her cheeks. But more importantly, she wasn’t crying at the time and Terra thanked the stranger for it. There were little things worse then a child crying over something that you couldn’t fix or talk yourself out of. And Pollie, a kid that only knew unconditional love and unconditional sadness, was somebody she couldn’t stand crying at the moment. She’d collapse.

‘I thought to bring her to a bed, I’m sorry if I disturbed you.’
Terra smiled – a smile that both looked and felt short, slightly hysterical and unhappy – and said: ’It’s okay, I was only resting’.
‘I think that rest is the first priority at this moment. For all of you.’
‘I’ll manage, thank you.’ It seemed easy to pull up barriers like ‘thank you’ and ‘it’s okay’. Every bit of casual protocol was a place where the sadness and chaos couldn’t creep into. ‘I haven’t thanked you yet for your…’ The man looked at her. ‘your help. I…think that…’ The man continued to look at her. ‘All I want to say, I guess, is thank you. Things looked bad, but now everything is fine.’ She let out another one of those laughs, oh so hurting, and said: ‘Going to be, anyway.’
The man let go of Pollie, who walked out of the room, and sat down next to Terra at a respectable distance. ‘I think you’ve really taken too much. Sleep.’
‘No, I can’t. There are kids who need me and if…’ The idea of the men returning sent shivers all over Terra’s body.
The man stood up from the bed. ‘I’m telling you that you should rest, for your own good. Won’t you listen to my advise? Please? I will take care of the children. I will take care of anybody who comes here. Go to sleep.’

Night crawled into the corners of the day, and soon the world had gone dark. The kids were all sleeping, as were the two girls. He surprised himself with the knowledge that he didn’t know their names, and they didn’t know HIS. He walked trough the deserted remains of Mobliz, and noticed that some of the things had been broken and repaired. He walked past the place where Duane had died, not knowing that was the case. He walked past the place where the Latigos had killed the baby. He didn’t quite remember what happened between the time of his intervening and the time of the Latigos’ leaving.
He suddenly heard a bird, calling out to the sky. He looked at the trees to see of he could find the bird that had sung at such a strange hour, and failed to detect the bird. It had sounded like a pigeon, but pigeons didn’t sing at dusk. Unless…
He looked around and him and then heard the sound from within a building. He entered and saw a cross of wood firmly planted in the ground. The horizontal piece of wood was slim and painted green, while the vertical was sturdy and round, the plain and unaltered color of wood. A pigeon was sitting there, and he was not a ordinary pigeon. He walked over to it and untied the letter that was attached to it’s left leg. The carrier pigeon, for that’s what it was, moved uneasily when his letter was taken, but accepted the man’s fingers fiddling with his legs as he was used to it.

He unfolded the letter and read:

Dear Terra,

How are things in Mobliz? Celes asks about the baby, so I will too. Everything is fine back here. We are planning on a vacation. Celes and I both agree that you can’t stop adventures cold turkey, and it would be great to see the kids again, not to mention Duane and Katarin. Assuming this bird arriving three days after we’ve sent it, we will be there in four days. Setzer will accompany us and we’ll travel on the Falcon. If you don’t want the three of us in Mobliz – very rude indeed, but a possibility – you will need to get this bird on the road before the night has fallen.

Locke

P.S. Celes threatenes to leave me if I don’t stop wearing my bandana. Saying you were always a big fan of my bandana, I convinced her to listen to your fashion judgement. I count on you to support me in this battle!

He folded the letter and reminded himself to give it to Terra (which one of the two that was, he needed to find out). He wondered for a minute about this letter, coming from people who didn’t know what had happened. The names sounded familiar and foreign to him. He would ask this Terra and ask who they were.


‘May I come in?’
The man who had knocked on the door stuck his head trough the crack of the door. Terra smiled at this mixture of politeness and rudeness, and invited the man in. She couldn’t remember his name, although he surely must’ve said it somewhere during the previous day.
‘Last night, I heard a carrier pigeon in the shed. I picked up this letter from it. It’s adressed to you.’
Terra smiled a little. ‘You’re manners are strange to me, I must say. Knocking and asking if you can come in, yet snooping trough my mail.’
The man looked positivaly offended by this. ‘I didnt mean to be rude, I just figured it might be very important to see what it was! You never know.’
‘Never mind, you did right. Now, I’m terribly sorry to say I forgot your name. Things have been so hectic.’
‘Don’t be. I never mentioned it. My name is Baäl.’ He halted and he seemed to look to the ceiling for a minute as if to think of a second name. ‘Baäl Hendersson.’
‘Terra. Terra Branford.’

They shook hands.

DAGH…!’ Baäl quickly pulled back his hand and waved it vertically in the air, as if he had burned his hand. His face was pulled in a grin of pain. Terra stepped in his direction, worried, but rememberd what happened and didn’t touch Baäl. ‘What’s wrong? You hurt?’
Baäl’s face tensed down. ‘It’s nothing. The air must’ve been very dry to create such a static shock between our hands.’
‘What do you mean?’ Terra wondered what Baäl had felt, and knew that no way it could have come from dryness in the air. It was rather humid these days, and even in the driest of climates Terra didn’t think one could get such a shock from static force.
‘Nothing, like I said. Just a slight shock, more surprising then painful. You didn’t feel it?
“I felt nothing.’
‘Another one to add to the mysteries of the world, then.’ He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. ‘Why I came here: I wanted to ask if there’s anything I could do.’
‘Well, you could go hunting for us. I don’t know if you know anything about hunting, but there are Buffalax out there. You should…’
‘I should pick the most healthy ones, since the slow and old ones are poisonous. I know. I’ll be back as soon as possible. Until then, miss Branford.’ He left, leaving Terra to wonder about the unusual ‘shock’ he had felt. It was probably nothing, she concluded, and she turned her mind to daily business.


-----------------------------------------


The horde was small, and Baäl wondered about the society of Mobliz. How long had they been hunting for these? At any rate, this was one food source that would be gone in a few months. He had wanted to ask Branford why they had retreated into one of the most remote corners of the new world, but he had considered it to be inappropriate. Then again, leaving dozens of children to die of starvation wasn’t very polite, either.
He walked over to the herde, and some tensed. He spotted one walking a few feet further away from Baäl, and he noticed that it was healthy. Extremely healthy, even. Buffalax were animals who had suffered from the Apocalypse. Most likely because of a forced change of diet, most Buffalax were sick and developed rash all over their bodies. He pitied them, but saw no further need for concern about a breed of animals when there were still humans who suffered from worse things.

He thought back to the shock he had felt, and he remembered something from long ago, something that had…

“What’s that?”
“It’s a rock, man. Why bother with rocks? Hey, it’s a pretty special one, check that out! Seriously, there’s something…There a gem caught in it, here…let me try to get it out.” Sanjuro.
“…”
“Man, it’s stuck in it. It's a gem in the rough, but a gem anyway. Maybe we can grab some gold for it in Jidoor, you know? It’s nothing like that fly in amber I found once, but it’s rare enough to pay for a few meals.” Sanjuro.
“I wonder what kind of gem it is, though. Any idea?”
“Don’t know, maybe a ruby. Let me see…nah, no ruby. Cant’ be carbuncle either…no dragon skin…I have no idea, really. Then again, I’m just an amature. I know this gal in Jidoor who can give you a name for ANY gem.” Sanjuro.

(…skip…)

He picks it up, and holds it in his hand. Light as a feather. He moves it around, and loves the feeling of the thing. Logically enough, if you considered that it would provide some food for them, something that they could use. Tomorrow they’d arrive in Jidoor. He looked at the ruby in it. Or carbuncle, or whatever. He put his thumb on it, and caressed the smooth surface of the gem. He smiled. Too bad they had to sell these beautiful artifects. It’s almost as if…

His vision blurs, his world becomes red and he starts to scream. He becomes frightened, and he tries to let go of the stone. His hand won’t open, and in the sea of blood that he sees he can identify something. It’s a skeleton, and it’s floating in front of his eyes. In his horror he notices every detail about it. The bones of the creature’s legs and hips are long since pulverized and left behind

(how he knows this he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know, either)

, and now he sees it is the upper half of a skeleton. A cape is tied around his neck, and is curling and straightening in patterns that almost drivs him mad. The word ORGANIC springs to his mind but he can’t grasp it. There is something peculiar about the skull, too. It is curled back, and the skull has nothing human at all. A forked tongue hangs between the nakes jaws of the demon, and he tries to scream continuously. If he succeeds he can’t know. He can’t hear anything at all. The creature notices him and instantly there are waves of hatred flowing towards him. The creature in the stone is not evil

(again, he can somehow feel what the creature is like)

and he can even feel something familiar, something human inside of him, as a pearl in an oyster, but a stronger version of pure and directed hatred he has never felt, witnessed or even heard about. He can feel the demon’s age

(old, so old)

and a name swims past him

(Zone Seeker)

. He is about to lose every coherent thought when he blacks out.

The memories go away and when he looks up, he steps back in horror. The smell in the air, a smell of panic and destruction, is sickening, and the Buffalax remains in front of him are still burning. He turns away and throws up in the sick weeds which inhabit the Serpent Trench.


-----------------------------------------

“You smell funny.”

Terra looked up and saw one of the smaller girls, Penny, talking to Hendersson. She was worried about him, but twice as much about his presence. He had shown some virtue when he saved their village, but the man that had come back from the hunting had been a wreck. He had dropped a carcass at the feet of her and Katarin and he had helped prepare the thing, but he had remained silent during the cooking and had looked ghastly to say the least.
His eyes were distant and somehow glowing a bit in a way that Terra couldn’t really appreciate. And Penny was right, there was an odor hanging around him that was not only funny, it was also all too familiar to Terra. As somebody who had once escaped trough the Western Mines of Narshe, where the monsters were vicious and she had only had her magic to protect her, she knew all too well about the smell of…burning flesh. It was different from the smell that was produced when you cooked meat. The smell of cooked meat was mouth-watering when you were hungry and rather pleasant at most times…but actually burned flesh was a disgusting smell that seemed to hold violence, fear and pain within itself.

Baäl reacted: “Yeah, I know. How do you people take baths here?”
“What?”
“You know, how do you clean yourself. Get the mud off your faces.” He picked the girl up, and she let him. “And get rid of funny smells.”
The girl wrinkled her nose – probably because of the smell - , and said: “Mama takes us to a waterfall nearby. It’s cold, but we have to.” The girl seemd to think her comment over and said: “There are fish in the water.” She jumped off and joined a boy that was playing with a few rocks. Hendersson turned his gaze to Terra.
“Why don’t you try some of those fish one day? I’m sure it would be a welcome change of pace form Buffalax and weeds you live on.”
Terra shook her head. “They’re no good. We’ve tried them once…or Duane tried one once, but he was sick for two days in a row.” A bit of uncomfortable silence fell over them.
“How was the hunt? It was an awfully big one you got us.”
“It was okay. Nothing special, just chase-one-until-you-get-him-style.”
Another one of those uneasy gaps in the conversation. Hendersson stared and his fingernails, and Terra was about to get up when one of the kids came storming into the place.


“Uwaaa! Somebody’s coming! It’s the bad men! Mamma!”


-----------------------------------------


It was them indeed.


They stood there, facing each other in a perfect set-up. Baäl stood besides Terra. The Latigos’ men stood beside their leader. Next to the Latigos, there were three. “You’re outnumbered.”, the Latigos said. No more. He wasn’t going to offer them an escape. He wasn’t planning on keeping them alive. He just stated a fact.
“But not outclassed”, Terra said. She was calm.

There was silence, and there was tension.

It was the harsh call of the crow which tricked one of the Latigos’ men into believing the others had moved. He charged. His fellow men charged. Terra and Baäl charged. They met in the middle.

The fight was, like all fights, a mess. Swords clashed against each other. Where a sword failed to connect with the other, there was a cry of pain. The Latigos’ fought along, he couldn’t lose.

And yet he did. When the fight was over, the Latigos’ looked around. His eyes were like dishes. He clasped his throat, and blood was running over his hand. He felt the pain in his throat, his neck, and collapsed. He tried to get up again, looked up at the sun. “This can’t be it” he thought. Staring at the sun, he died.

Only one man was still standing. He was lying on the ground, his stomach a bloody mess. His eyes filled with canine fright, he looked at Terra. From Terra, his eyes traveled to Baäl. Both seemed fine. He was sweating, and not just because of the pain and the sun. This man was fearing for his life. “There is a prison in the abandoned quarters of the sheriff. Let’s take him there.” They did, and all the way the man was moaning and begging for them to leave him alone.


-----------------------------------------


“Sanjuro!”

There is a hollow echo.

“Sanjuro!”

Again.

“Sanjuro, no!”

He gasps and bleeds all over his own body. He looks up.

(skip)

Where am I? He gets to his feat. He stumbles into a town, and realizes he doesn’t know anybody. At all. He reaches the town, and walks through its streets and alleys. There are people, and they’re not even looking at him. He smells dried fish, and he wants to eat them; he can’t get them, though.
He continues to walk. Once, he bumped into a girl. She took a bow, said “Excuse me” and continued her path. He stared after her. She had spoken. To him. So he was, in fact, existent. That was good to know, he hadn’t been sure before. He continues to walk.
He’s really hungry now, and a man has fruits stored on a table. He takes a green-looking oval-shaped vegetable and takes a bite. SOUR! He’s shocked by its taste and spits it back out. The man now appears to be angry with him. “What’d ya think you’re doing to my merchandise! That’s a first class lemon, and you’ll have to pay for it. I can’t help you’re stupid enough to bite one that’s not even ripe yet. 2 Gil. And make it quick, Honcho Boy.” He doesn’t understand the usage of the words “honcho boy”, and he stares at the man. He enjoys the man talking to him, but doesn’t like the tone of his voice. “What are you, a retard? 2 Gil, or I’m calling ‘e cops. Ya’ve been warned. You crazy Honcho monks are all ‘e same.”

“Take it easy, man. Honcho monks don’t get paid a lot. Here’s 2 Gil.”
He turns around, and sees a boy. The boy just gave the angry man 2 Gil, and the angry man is now appearing to forget he exists. He looks at the boy, and the boy looks at him.

“I need your help” the boy sais.


-----------------------------------------


When Baäl opens his eyes, it’s dark and silent around him. He gets out of bed and walks outside. The air of the night is cool and fresh on his skin. He looks at the sky above him and realizes its beauty. Bare-foot, he walks through the sleeping town of Mobliz. Somehow, even though the houses around him are eerily empty and silent and everything around him is either broken or somehow lifeless, this reminds him of the world he used to live in, the world where the Empire was a threat.

He hears something, and he realizes where it is coming from. Although he doesn’t know it, it is a sound that the former sherrif of Mobliz deeply hated. It was the sound of angry, hateful lust. Lust for freedom, that is. It was the sound of something that was smacked against the bars of Mobliz’ prison. Baäl follows the sound.

“Lemme out of here. What do ya think you can do ta me?” The prisoner was regular scum. His education clearly hadn’t been very good and his accent showed that he had been raised in the former Western continent. Zozo, most likely, although Kohlingen hadn’t been devoid of criminality either. A tattoo in the shape of a dragon of some kind had in days long gone been burned on his right shoulder. It seemed to move over the muscles of the man’s arm.

“Why did you return? Why come here in the first place?” The man threw himself at the bars, and Baäl stepped back, in his irrational instinct not realizing that the man couldn’t reach him anyway. “Nonna you’ business”, the man grinned. He spat at Baäl, but he lacked the power. The saliva didn’t even come near, and some swang back on the man’s chin. He either didn’t realize this or didn’t care. Baäl understood that this man probably didn’t why they had come here either. The Latigos had wanted it, but confessing to just follow a man as the Latigos now that this Latigos was dead wouldn’t display a lot of honor. And the Goddesses knew how much these scumbags clinged to the word ‘honor’, even though they had no idea what it really meant.

The man seemed to realize that there was spit on his chin and wiped it off with the back of his hand. He looked up, and for a second one might be fooled to think that the man had no bad intentions, had just been misguided by a rotten childhood. “Can you lemme go? Waddya think I’m gonna do, ‘sides leaving? I’m not gonna harm you or the missus, I promise on my very soul, and thaz da truth.”

“No”, Baäl said.

The effect was extraordinary. The man growled and threw himself at the bars again, his face twisted in a mad mask of hate. “I’m gonna fuck you up! Fuck you! I’m gonna cut it off and dance on yo’ BALLS, stupid fuck! You lemme out and I’m gonna FUCK with you until you’re nodding but a big fucking CORPSE, you fuck! FUCK!” Baäl backed off and left the man behind him. He hadn’t known you could use the same word in such colorfull sentences over and over again. He heard the man shouting behind him. Apparantly, he was going to be fucking sorry if that man got out of there, since he would fuck him up. He stopped listening.


-----------------------------------------


The Skull watched the man go, and was helpless to stop it. He slumped against the wall and laid his head in his hands. Fucked up, man. Was this right? No, it wasn’t. Stupid bitch had almost killed him and now he was stuck in this filthy joint. He looked around. There was hay which the girl had put there for him (as a fucking bed, could you believe that?). Nothing much else. A steel tray that Skull had used as a tool of noise had been discarded in a corner. That was all. Suddenly, he saw movement. A rat hurried its way across the floor. Skull ran for it and tried to kick it across the room. He missed and the rat slipped through the bars and out of his reach.

He was in a fucking prison, his bellie had been cut open and there were rats. If nothing was gonna change very soon, he was gonna get gangreen in the wound and die. He wasn’t about to die in a filthy place like this, not the Skull. He had an image in his head which was all too clear: the Skull, dead, lying on the ground. The man and the bitch were looking at him and laughing while the rats where eating him.

No. Fuck, no.

Although he would’ve sworn that he was never gonna go to sleep, not with the wound that was aching and the hay for a bed, he was asleep half an hour after the man was gone. Had somebody been there to watch him, he would’ve noted that unlike most people, the Skull did not look less dangerous in his sleep at all. Instead, they would think of the popular saying “never wake an Intangir if you don’t need to”, and would walk away quietly, to not disturb the sleeping figure.


-----------------------------------------


The Skull woke up. He felt bad. Feverish. He thought of the wound on his bellie and for a few moments he was too afraid and look at it. He stared at the ceiling, swimming in his own bad situation, until he felt something on his leg. He looked.

A rat was sitting on his right leg, its small and dark eyes suddenly fixated on the Skull’s eyes. The Skull screamed and without thinking he made the most definitive motion to throw the rat off: he spasmed into a sitting position. The rat lost its balance and fell on the ground. Enfuriated, the Skull sent his foot to destroy the rat, but it was too quick even then. It raced off out of the Skull’s reach. He panted. Had he woken later, he was sure he would’ve seen the rat feeding on his wound. He imagined the pain that it would have caused him and whinced. Then he noticed the pain in the present, and he moaned.

He lifted his his blood-stained shirt and looked at the mess. There was a lot of blood, and he suddenly felt a little light in the head. Other people’s blood, sure. No problem for the Skull. He had never gotten used to his own, though. The thought of so much blood loss caused him to think of himself as a can of water that was spilling through a crack in the bottom, and he almost fainted then. The worled turned grey and oddly two-dimensional, like a print, but he scrambled his consciounce together.

He examined the wound closer, and noticed that it hadn’t been very deep. “No shit”, he thought, “I’d be dead otherwise”. It had been shallow, but also long. Then, he froze. Red lines starting from the wound covered his bellie. Panicked, he lifted his shirt even further and gazed at his chest. All the way up to his nipples. He cursed. Gangrene had set in earlier then he had expected. He wondered if a rat hadn’t already feeded on him and caused this accelarated illness. He prefered not to think about that possibility.

He picked up the steel tray and started smashing it against the bars. It made a horrible metallic and hollow sound, but it got people’s attention.


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“You gotta help me, missus, If I don’t get out o’ here….” The prisoner lifted his shirt. “See? I need some medicine, else I’m dead befo’ the week’s past! Please?” Thrash like the Skull only favored one thing over their honor, and that is their life. Terra understood that unless the Skull was much smarter then he looked, he was in serious trouble.
“I’ll see what I can do.”, she said. “I’ll get you some water and some food, and then we’ll see if you’re lying or not.” The prisoner looked very angry at this, but he swallowed his pride. “Please”, he whispered.

Terra had already prepared a meal for him, so she was back in two minutes. The prisoner, although still panicked, seemed glad to see that he was actually getting the food and water he was promised. ‘I doubt if you would be so kind’, Terra thought. There was a vertical space at the bottom of the barred seperation between them, and Terra pushed the tray with food through this. She handed, very cautious, the jug of water as well. He took the food and retreated to the back of his cell, as if he was scared Terra might take it away again. Terra continued to look at him while he was eating and drinking.

“You sure was quick there with the food, missus.”, he said in a bizarre attempt at small talk. Terra didn’t reply. “It’s good, too, missus. Nice. What’d ya have in a town like this?”
“Buffalax”, she answered.
“Buffalax, eh? Me ‘nd some boys once hunted one when we was young. Lotta stamina, can tell ya that. My buddy stuck a spear in his side, and it just kept on walking. Took us an hour ‘fore it was dead. Too bad we coulnd’t take it back home widdus. Heavy.” He took another bite.
Terra was disgusted by the man’s story. This guy and his happy friends had killed an animal for fun, if she understood correctly. She didn’t reply to his tale. The man burped and grinned an apology.
“Twas back in the ol’ days, you know. The Empire and stuff like that. Dat fucker Kefka still Gestahl’s main man instead of his own. Glad that fucker’s dead, can tell ya that. Anyway, I hunted that Buffalax with some buddies from the Army, y’know. The Imperial Army?”
Terra remained silent.
“We were stationed at this boring outpost. Closest town was Albrook, but ‘twas too far away to have a good night out. Stupid outpost, can tell you that. Never happened any fucking thing.” He finished his food and drank his water. Most of it, anyway. He kept the jug, half full with water. “You need the tray back?”, he asked. Terra nodded.
“Leave the tray where I can take it, then get back to the back of the cell. Can you do that?” The prisoner nodded. He got up and whinced. Probably from the pain. He walked over to the bars and let the tray fall. It made a loud sound that remined Terra of the MagiTek facility where she once had been. “Now, get back.” The prisoner did so. Terra walked over to the bars, and while keeping an eye on the prisoner, bent over to pick up the tray.

At that moment, the prisonder bolted forward. Terra immediately let go of the tray and stumbled backwards, out of the prisonor’s grasp. The face of the prisoner had shown cold hard murder, and now changed into a grin that made Terra's skin crawl. “Kidding”, he said.

Terra left the room and felt like she was running.


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“Sanjuro!”

There is a hollow echo.

“Sanjuro!”

Again.

“Sanjuro, no!”

He’s fighting, and it is suprisingly easy. He’s good at fighting, but he doesn’t like it; there seemed to be no rest on the battlefield. There are no humans on a battlefield, only animals. He swings his cane around and with a well-aimed smack breaks an opponents nose. While he is clutching his nose, blood pouring from the destroyed tissue, he lands his cane with considerable power in the man’s neck. A snap is heard among the sounds of war and he dies at his feet. He turns around. He freezes for a second.

“Sanjuro!”

Sanjuro’s shield is lying on the ground, and Sanjuro’s eyes are all too similair to that of rabbits when you collect them from the traps you made. Paralyzing panic, the eyes read. A state of mind where you realize that everything you do will get you killed. He screams as he sees Sanjuro being kicked in the stomach and he decides to forget his own safety and run for Sanjuro to help him, but he hasn’t even started to move in the right direction when he sees the blade coming down and piercing Sanjuro’s neck, ending his wonderful life.

Sanjuro, who had found him in this world, had died. An undescripable feeling rushes through him, and all conscious thought get lost in it. The world becomes a blur he no longer takes part in, and everything he sees turns red. This world he was left in and forgotten, this world where he met Sanjuro only to lose him in a war.

He realizes he's screaming but doesn’t pay any attention to that fact.

He triggers something in himself, something that he knew of but never realized. He’s feeling like a kettle containing too much boiling water, and this feeling is so similair to what you’d expect a kettle feels like at that time that he thinks, for a brief moment, that he has become one.

Then, with all the hatred and anger, with all the sadness and grief, with all the emotions he holds in him he explodes, bursts open like an entire planet would to spill out it’s magma core. He’s feeling free and finally relieved of whatever had kept him down for so long. Everything around him is wind and fire, and in the naked eye of the blazing tornade he realizes that he hasn’t exploded but has done something….has done something. Even though he hears screams of pain and can already start to smell the horrible stench of burning flesh, he still feels relieved and complete at that moment.


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It was that cursed sound again. She hated the sound, and found it to be a fitting way for the prisoner to call for attention. She had hated Kefka, yes. But he had been mentally unstable, and because of his magic infusion gone awry Terra had never blamed the ‘person’ Kefka. But the man they held in the filthy prions of Mobliz was a man that called so much disgust in Terra that she had to fight back the temptation to open the doors to his cell and kill him just to be relieved of his presence. His presence and the awful noises he made.

She looked over to Hendersson, but he was busy with some children. She decided she would not go to the prisoner – fuck him, Terra thought in unusual strong terms – but after a minute of trying to ignore the endless clatter of the tin tray against the steel bars, she began to loathe the sound so much she went after all. She brought a sword this time.

“What?” Although her voice was angry, she had been shocked by the state of the prisoner. He looked pale, and was sweating. Moreover, he stank. It was horrible. “Coulda get some more water? ‘S run out.”
Gangrene, she thought. He has an infection in his wound. In his stomach. He’s dying. She left him to get more water. He had lustlessly thrown the jug to her, one hand through the space between the bars and the other clutching for stability.

When she came back, he was still standing there. Somehow, he appeared to feel a little better, even though Terra knew that Gangrene didn’t just go away. She told him to back off and he did, leaving her room to place the jug on the floor of the cell. He didn’t make any attempts to jump at her. He crawled to the jug and drank from it. Terra realized that she was going to have to make a decesion concerning the man. Leaving him there untreated would be a cruel murder. Getting him out of there would mean the same thing, either at the hands of a monster or the illness. Treating him was….she didn’t think she had the kindness. The prisonder had been part of a gang that had killed Duane and would have raped her and Katharine had they gotten the chance. She watched him drink.


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The girl watched him drink. Every swallow was painful, but he needed the water. He throat felt dry, like he had somehow covered the insides with desert sand, and he knew for a fact that gangrene had someting to do with dehydration. After a while, he couldn’t go on and he put away the jug. The girl was still looking.

“What’s your name?”, she asked. He didn’t know how to answer that question at first. Tell her he was the Skull? Tell her the name he had gotten from his parents? Give her the finger and tell her to piss off? He decided he would tell her he was ‘the Skull’, but his mouth betrayed him by saying: “Fabian”. She appeared to scan his face , maybe to see if he had been lying. Maybe even she was trying to combine the knowledge with the wreck he undoubtedly was at the time. He wanted to ask her something but in a sudden flood of pain from he stomach he let out a moan that vaguely resembled a word. “Sorry?”, the girl asked. The Skull panthed.

“You.”, he said. “Your name.” And mere moments before she gave the answer, he suddenly saw something in her features, something he had seen before. He hadn’t quite realized it yet, not before she told him her name, but he was well under way to that knowledge and when she told him that her name was Terra Branford, he instantly knew who she was…knew who she had been to the Empire he had served.

To his sudden and inexplicable horror, it looked like she was about to leave. “Wait.”, he croaked. She turned around. “I served….I ehm….I served at the facility. The one of the Empire. I had shifts there. Guarding the Espers.” She gave him an icy stare that freaked him out a little. Women weren’t supposed to look like that. Then again, she was a Witch. He tried to get the conversation going. Maybe talking to her would win her sympathy. Anything was better then rotting away in his cell.

He started talking.

“I got kicked out of my ol’ folks’s place when I was thirteen. I’d done noddin’, you know, but my ol’ folks were harsh people. I kinda wandered around. I met other people, and I could work for ‘em sometimes. It got me food, and that’s how I turned eightteen. Word got out that there was a country to the south which would pay exceptional prices for mercenaries. I headed that way. Sneaked on a ship and then I was there. I joined, and that’s where I got my first job. An Imperial outpost to protect. Boring.”

He changed his sitting position.

“Later, We got for this strike, y’know. An assault. There was this big gate in the mountains. Creepy, but we would get double loan for joining. Da were the Espers. Behind the Gate, I mean. We kinda…you know. We caught ‘em. Empire’s orders, couldn’t do nothing. So then the Espers were caught and the gate was sealed or something, I don’t know. Anyway, I got a new job as a higher ranking soldier. MagiTek Facility Patrol Guard, that was me. “

He paused to drink some water.

“Then stuff got fucked up. I quit. Few weeks later, everything got fucked up. Lived through it and proceeded to live my life as I did. Met up with some guys. You ah….ya know the rest. “

The girl’s features hadn’t changed throughout the story, and whatever he had tried to accomplish had obviously failed. She turned and left, and the Skull sank back on the floor. Although it was in the middle of the day, he tried to get some sleep. There wasn’t anything else to do.

He dreamed, oddly enough, about sex.


-----------------------------------------


Hendersson was walking. Walking again. Behind him, the city of Mobliz faded out of his reality. He felt thin. Fragile in some way, like he didn’t really exist. When he thought of that description of his state, ‘like I don’t really exist’, almost freaked him into hysteria. He looked at his hands. He saw them. He felt his feet in his faded leather shoes. He buried his nails in his palm. It only hurted a little – they were short – but he felt the pain and was thankful for it.

He couldn’t decide between leaving Mobliz behind and helping them. He knew that he should help, but there was something stopping him from accepting this simple fact.

“I don’t belong here”

He grinned a hard grin, and he felt that he shouldn’t be grinning. He stopped, turned around, and walked back to Mobliz. He should help. He should. Miss Branford needed to leave Mobliz and find another place to live with the kids. They wouldn’t last in Mobliz, and she knew it. He didn’t know what stopped her (maybe indecisiveness, maybe fear), but they had to go. And there was the prisoner to worry about. Hendersson thought of the prisoner as a caged rabid dog.

While he walked back, he was caught in his own mind. He thought about existence, and what that meant. He didn’t notice how the wind almost left his hair untouched, and neither did he wonder why he hardly left any footprints behind him, like he weighed only so much as a small creature.


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Night set in over Mobliz.



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Baäl Hendersson was fading, and had never felt like the way he felt now in his short and extraordinary life. Earlier, he had dismissed his state of mind as something unimportant, or at least something he could deal with later. Not so, it appeared. He tried to focus his attention to his surroundings, but before that he drifed off into everything. He felt like he was slowly sinking through the bed he was lying on. The experience of sinking, this moving was so strong that he made an attempt to get back up. Although he discovered he had the strength to do so, he suddenly had trouble with his muscles. Which ones did you use to get up? He coulnd’t remember, neither did he know why it had never been an issue before. He moaned.

“Can you tell me what’s going wrong with you?”

A voice in the distance, but somehow close. He saw a blurry figure in front of him, and he noticed that it was just his hearing turning ‘affected’ by whatever was affecting him. The girl. He couldn’t remember her name, but he remembered that she was good. “Fading….”, he said. The sounds of his own voice appeared to ripple through the air in front of him, but also ripple through his own body. He didn’t like the feeling. It wasn’t painful, but it was unnatural and he was still conscious enough to be afraid.

Outside, the wind blew an eerie requiem for Baäl Hendersson.



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The Skull had already died by then, and had left behind a man that was partly Fabian van der Hard and partly an anonymous man dying in a cage. He was a miserable being at that time, and he realized it with vague horror. The wound stank horribly, and he thought that running into such a smell suddenly would make a man puke. It dawned to him that it was himself smelling like this, and the thought really did make him puke.

He felt sick. He was in pain. He was in a rotten place. This bothered the man once known as the Skull more then his oncoming death, which he had accepted as an inevitable fate that he would suffer in the near future. He was almost relieved that he could escape this situation so easily.

He was lying on his back, and he looked at the ceiling of his cell, which was composed out of wood and straw. He saw one stray straw stick out. His water had run out, and he was thirsty. So many things keeping him from dying easily. He felt like he should curse – it's what he normally would have done - , but he didn’t want to. Not anymore.

There had been only one other time in his life he had nearly died. It had been during the Esper Raid, and a demon over seven feet tall had roared a challenge in his face and had thrown a ball of fire at him. He had ducked and the ball had flown over him. He had looked up and seen that the demon was being taken care of by several other soldiers. He had turned around only to see that the fireball had hit a large statue.

It was a magnificent statue, and although Fabain van der Hard had never cared for any kind of art – not then and not later - , he admired it’s detailed craftmanship. He saw that the fireball had hit it’s head, and had damaged the statue; it had blown an ear off whatever demon (or, Fabian thought, demoness) it was supposed to represent. He had brought the ear with him after the raid, since he had failed to personally capture one of the Espers and wanted to have at least something to come out of the mission for him.

He had sold it later, to some guy called Frank. He remembered that Frank had died only weeks later, trapped in his own house while it was burning down. He and some buddies had reached the house before the authoroties did, and they tried to find something valuabe in the mess. Frank had wanted it that way, he had been telling himself (and others). He had found the ear there, the ear he had taken from the statue in the Esper world, and it had been split like something heavy had fallen on it.

Or like something had hatched from the inside.

-----------------------------------------

“I can make some sou--“, Terra said, but then saw something which kept her words from being spoken. Through Baäl, she could see the bed he was lying in. She could see through him. Only vaguely, but she was sure it was what she was seeing. He moved a little and the vague lines she saw didn’t move with him. She remembered seeing something like it when the Magicite rock of her father had dissappeared before her eyes. There had been smoke then, green smoke to conceal the fading. But she had seen how it looked like it was something fading out, losing dimensions. It looked like holding something under muddy water: first you could see it very clearly, but while you pushed it down more and more, deeper and deeper, it began to lose colors, lines and shape and eventually you only saw your hand holding it under water, ending somewhere at the wrist.

Now that she saw what was going on, she also noticed that it happened at a very fast rate. He tried to speak, but she couldn’t make out what he was trying to say. “…juro”, it sounded like. She felt the urge to put her hand on his forehead to see if he was feverish, maybe to give him some comfort. She didn’t because she was too scared: Scared that his hand might push his head in some new shape like touching something soft, like pudding or a Flan. Scared even that her hand would go straight through him. Like a ghost.


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In his cell, the prisoner breathed raspily. In and out. He felt like sleeping. In and out. It took him some effort to complete every breathing cycle. In…and out. His breast rose and fell along with his breath. He took a breath and released it again. In….and…and out. Fabain ‘the Skull’ van der Hard was trying to get his strength together for yet another exhausting breath when he died.

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In his bed, Baäl Hendersson was almost gone. First, he had looked like some pale entity, or a mirage. More and more he became transparant. He seized the make conscious moves first, then almost seized to breathe later. Suddenly, Terra doubted if he was even there; doubted if her eyes didn’t deceive her just because she couldn’t accept the fact that he was gone completely. She held out her hand, but then retreated a little. Maybe she would still feel his body there, and this was something she couldn’t quite cope with. Determined, she held her hand out again, and tried if she could touch him.

As her hand moved through thin air, she realized that Baäl Hendersson had left them in the full sense of the word.


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The Collapse of Heaven and Earth

The city of Mobliz fascinates me. Needlessly far away from the world, fairly unprotected, it's odd the game doesn't show the lot moving away from that hole.

I'm really curious about your reactions. Maybe not even so much how you liked it - although that's certainly important to me - but your conclusion on the story. Does it fit together, or is it allrandom to you? If you think you figured something out, a reason behind something or a storyline which explains this story, don't hesitate to post.

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The Collapse of Heaven and Earth

Alright. Nice to see you finnally posted this. I like it. Its good stuff. Mentally antagonizing yadayada. You know how i feel about this one.

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If you've been mod-o-fied,
It's an illusion, and you're in-between.
Don't you be tarot-fied,
It's just alot of nothing, so what can it mean?
~Frank Zappa

Sins exist only for people who are on the Way or approaching the Way