The city had disappeared behind a heavy black veil. Now there was only trembling fingers, wailing cries, and the taste of ash and blood. Celes' teeth grit against the force of her own racing heart. It called for her to scream. It called for her to join the terrified voices and let go of her mind. If she slipped, she would fall once again to the thoughts that waited at the bottom. Thoughts of burning flesh, searing heat, and grim, distorted faces.

'It's happening again. Why couldn't I do anything to stop it?'

Something touched her and she jerked away.

“C’mon … There’s nothing we can do here." Zack. Celes searched his face, but his attention was not on her for long. He instead glanced over his shoulder towards the ruins. He was no longer the same joking, friendly man who had offered her his hand. Gone were the smiles and the softness of his eyes. There was something else in his expression now -- something familiar, quiet, and perhaps a little sad. His grip had slipped from her shoulder to her upper arm. It tightened before he turned her away.

"Zack..."

Zack didn't say anything else. No empty reassurances. No coddling or concern at the weakness she had unwillingly shown him. Zack was not Terra with her wide, searching eyes or her insistence of support. Zack gave her only one suggestion and a single touch. As he looked out upon the ruins, Celes felt something in him change. His lip tightened. His breaths came faster.

He had seen this before.

Zack stepped in front of her and quietly turned her away. It was a gentle motion -- more a suggestion than anything -- yet Celes felt her throat stick at his guidance. He was the one who stood strong. He was the one who could face death without faltering. She had broken in front of him, and that thought grounded her more than anything else. Her heart slowed. The panic ebbed. In its place came shame ebbing in like a tide. Shame, weakness, and frustration. She resented him for the touch of calloused fingers on her arm and his not-quite pitying eyes.

But wouldn't it be nice to fall into those strong shoulders and let him soothe her fears?

The smoke had muddied her mind. That was the only explanation for it.

Celes would have ripped herself from his grip had she felt steady enough on her feet for it. Instead, her knees trembled as he guided her down half-ruined streets. Once, her ankle collapsed and she had to grasp at him for support. Her head was still spinning. Celes had used so much magic in the course of only a few hours that she felt certain that even a single cure spell might send her unconscious. Her limbs felt heavy without the usual buzz of magic through her blood. Her ears rang against the backdrop of wailing laments. She kept her eyes forward, away from those desperate faces, and grit her teeth against the rising pain.

“We have to stay strong for these people." Zack's voice. He sounded winded even as he spoke. As though he might collapse under the weight of the world around them. "Stay with me, Celes.” There was something insistent behind his words. Desperate. Celes looked at his tensed jaw and his hard-blinking eyes. 

Then slowly, she nodded. "I will," she said. Then, without thinking added, "I'm sorry. I just..." The words ended as quickly as they'd come. She wanted him to know that she was not weak. She wanted to tell him how the smells burned at her throat, how her mind reeled with them, how those ash-stricken faces and those grieving whispers made her want to shut her eyes and cover her ears until it all passed but that smell. She wanted to tell him of her reality, of the world that she had somehow passed her by, of the meaningless death, of the loneliness of it all, how she had opened her eyes to deadened waste and almost hadn't seen the point in rising. She wanted to tell him these things, but the words wouldn't come.

Celes knew they were all excuses anyway. Despite all of her magic or all of her training or all of her sharpened wit, Celes had broken when the worst had come, and now she continued to break.

Suddenly she was laughing. The force of it burned her throat. It touched like fire in her mouth and nose and lungs. She coughed and then laughed and then coughed again as the combined forces made her eyes water and suddenly her cheeks were streaming. She shook the tangled hair from her eyes and tried not to see the cracked earth beneath her feet or the searing visions that swirled in her mind. Visions of dead-eyed monstrosities rising from rusted metal. Visions of blazing light erupting from the heavens.

Visions of him. His twisted, too-red mouth. His leering eyes mocking her in yellow sunbursts. The blood pouring warm over her hands as blade sank into flesh and he screeched in rage.

She hadn't been able to stop it. She hadn't been able to...

She was no longer laughing. Her shoulders shook against him.

"Why is this happening?" Celes spoke quietly now. Her smoke-damaged lungs wouldn't allow anything more. "Why am I here? Why is...?" For the first time since the attack, she heard the voice of her old fears. 

'What if this isn't real?'

'What if my mind's finally broken?'

'What if this is some kind of punishment?'

"I'm sorry." The words came quickly again. Celes pulled herself from Zack's grip and stepped back towards the wall. She leaned against it heavily. "I shouldn't be here. I need to rest. I need..." She forgot what she was going to say. The street was spinning around her. She touched her forehead. "I have to go."

'Before I break again.' Her feet moved at that thought. She kept one hand on the wall and she started blindly away. 'Find somewhere quiet. Find somewhere alone.' She stumbled even as she moved faster. Her eyes ached with tears. She no longer saw the grief-stricken faces -- just colors -- a whirl of gray and black and red and brown. Their words came as biting sounds. 'Don't think. Don't think. Don't think.'

She slipped into the first dark, quiet place she found. She didn't know where -- it didn't matter. As soon as she was away from prying eyes, she let her knees collapse as she sank against the wall. Her hands were shaking, but she didn't feel them. Not really. Celes was somewhere else now -- not in a ruined, burnt out city, not curled against grimy concrete -- but falling. Falling through darkness. Falling through flame. Falling until she felt the cold chill of the sea take her breath away and she struggled as her lungs took in water and her eyes blackened.

It came like a current, engulfing her completely -- and just like with Kefka, just like with this town, and just like every time before, there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Absolutely nothing.

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Celes did not lose consciousness. She could feel every scrape, every burn, and every scratch as the heat seared closer and smoke filled her lungs. Perhaps if it had been only her weight, Celes might have been able to lift herself past the oxygen deprivation, past the unimaginable heat, and past the magical exhaustion that set heavily on her mind. But that burden was not hers alone. The man she had carried pinned her hips and legs with his unconscious weight. She saw the blonde woman standing beside her. The woman's eyes flashed with something that Celes didn't understand, but she did not move to help. Celes tried to call out to her again, but ended up only coughing.

Coughing. Coughing. Her stomach heaved against it. Her throat felt like knives.

There was movement behind her and then gasping. Celes lifted her head to see that Zack had regained consciousness. Her spells had worked, and now he joined in her struggles to breathe. Slowly, he lifted himself from her, eyes darting from woman to woman and then to the burning wreckage. The fire roared with a voice like a behemoth. Far away, Celes heard a terrified, painful cry. There was sobbing, screams of "No! No! No!" and then nothing. Wooden frames groaned beneath their weight and then collapsed in a great crash like an earthquake. Celes groaned as she slowly lifted herself to her knees. Her head pounded. The air came hot and choked with ash. There was nothing she could have done.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

The man gave a pained shout and somehow jumped to his feet. Celes looked up at him blearily. He looked disoriented, off-balance, and more than a little confused. He was still covered in dusty gray and charcoal black, but beneath it all she saw burns lining his arms, face, and neck. Still, he stood as though he felt nothing. There was more to this man than just good-willed impulse. She watched him move like a shadow in the haze, and in that moment, Celes couldn't think of anyone she respected more.

There was a flash of light, a soft glow, and Celes felt the cool touch of magic. She heard him cough again as the magic seeped beneath her skin and gave her strength. She tried to raise herself, but then something touched her. Celes yelped in surprise, but couldn't move before strong arms had her waist in a deadlock and the ground fell away.

"Ah!" The cry somehow penetrated her dry throat and cracked lips. She struggled weakly as she was hurled over the man's shoulder like a potato sack. The world spun around her -- a flaming whirlwind of lights, heat, and terrible sound. "Let go of me!" Her shout came out more as a groan -- the insistent bleating of a helpless sheep. He was running now with one arm around her to keep her steady. The ground slipped past in a haze of cracked asphalt and pieces of burnt drywall. The man bobbed as he ran, and Celes felt her head jerking with it. Her stomach turned.

'Please let go of me. Oh god, he's touching me! Let go of me, I can take care of myself!'

The thoughts turned into a kind of prayer -- a mantra that kept her from losing consciousness. Yet even as she thought it, she felt the heat fall away, heard the crackling as though from a distance, and closed her eyes to revel in a sudden, smokeless wind. Zack had saved her -- she knew that. Without his quick thinking, she would have weakly crawled from the flames until she lost herself to them. Even as her heart quickened and her veins filled with ice against his touch, Celes knew that she should be thanking him.

That didn't mean that she had to like his methods though. Celes scooted away as soon as she was set down.

Zack had brought them to an abandoned alleyway off the city's main road. The fire's roar came echoed and faint, but would catch up to them soon. Celes let herself slump against the cool support of a brick wall. Beneath her, the concrete came grimy and smeared with something that wasn't ash. Trash had been piled at the base of a nearby dumpster. Celes couldn't smell it over the rancid odor of smoke.

There was a rustle of cloth and then Zack sat beside them. He coughed vigorously and rubbed at his eyes with the back of his glove. Once he'd finished, he cleared his throat and said, "Thank you." His eyes were watery. His voice came weak. Yet even through it all, Celes felt a kind of personal warmth behind his words. He looked almost like a child in his honesty, and Celes felt her anger slip away. "I owe you one."

"No, it's-" Celes started, but the words felt wrong. It was not nothing, after all, and her eyes flashed with a sudden heat. "You shouldn't have gone running in alone! That place was a death-trap! There was nothing you could have-!" But then she was coughing again. Probably for the better. Celes could have lectured him for hours. 

"You..." Celes had forgotten about the other woman, but she heard her now and looked over to see her slumped against a wall. The woman was ash-streaked and burned like them all, but she was no longer bleeding as she had been. She held that strange stone in her hand, the one she had used to heal Zack, and its glow set a contrast to the shadows of her face. She too looked at Zack, but there was something in her eyes that Celes had lacked.

This woman was enraged.

"You will never touch me without my permission again! And certainly never pick me up against my will!" The woman's voice pitched to a shriek and then her shoulders were shaking, breathing off-center, eyes darting away. Celes could only stare, dumb-founded at the woman's wrath. Zack had invaded their personal space, yes, and certainly acted in a way that Celes could only find invasive, but he had also saved their lives. Part of Celes wanted to bark back at the woman, ask her what she was talking about, and demand some kind of thanks for the man. The other part, however...

The other part saw how her hands fidgeted, how her eyes seemed to have glazed a little, how her knees trembled, and Celes couldn't help but wonder...

But then the woman's eyes flashed to Celes, and that thought was gone. "And you will never again try to order me around!" Celes felt her mouth drop open.

"Order you...?" Her words came as an echo. Hollow. Thoughtless. There was real fury in the woman's eyes and Celes could only stare in disbelief as her own thoughts caught up to her. 'Order you?!'

"Or I promise you will regret it," the woman added, and that was all Celes heard before something clicked in the back of her mind. She felt her eyebrows furrow, her eyes narrow, and her mouth snarl a little in anger.

"When did I order you into anything?!" Celes tried to recount the haze of panicked events behind her. She'd told the woman not to go running into burning buildings while her eyes were bleeding. She'd asked that the woman hold Zack up so that she could help save his life. She'd requested a bit of support while dragging a load of dead-weight away from a deadly fire. Then she had asked that the woman not leave her to die. 

Oh yes. She'd been so demanding. 

Celes might have voiced these thoughts had she not been distracted by what had emerged from the woman's right hand. The stone's glow had tripled in intensity now, and light escaped from it in clinging tendrils that caught at the woman's jacket and seemed to wrap around her chest. Celes' eyes widened. "What are you-?" she started, but was overtaken once more by coughing. She grasped blindly for the hilt of her sword. Surely the woman wouldn't attack them after their trip through the flames?

Would she?

Celes couldn't be sure, and as the light grew and then flew above her, Celes' grip tightened on her sword. The light extinguished and in its place came a swirling, darkened mass of magic that descended like a veil. Celes gave a shout of surprise and tried to stand. She pushed against the brick wall, heels scrabbling for purchase on the ground, teeth grit against the pain and the heaviness in her limbs as the magic grew with sparks of red, orange, white around a hazy nothingness that Celes could barely make out. Something moved beyond that veil, and Celes felt a shiver pass through her on a ghostly wind.

Something had changed, and as Celes looked up into the gray-clouded sky, she saw something else there. Black. Darkness. Nothing. It opened in a sphere of antimatter, rushing and pulling and grasping at the air until it sucked at the surrounding city like a cyclone. Celes' eyes widened. "What did you do?!" Her voice came at a shriek now, too panicked by the magnitude of that magic to remember her pain or the choking weakness within her. 

The darkness fell upon the city. For a moment, Celes could see nothing -- not the fire, not the sky, not the very people in front of her. Celes held her sword tightly and searched blindly for the woman. She tried to pinpoint the sound of her breaths, but could hear nothing over that roaring, wild power. There was a rumbling and then an almost mechanical whir. Light flashed like a supernova above her, and Celes gave a cry of pain as it seared her eyes. She blinked once, twice, and then the world appeared before her again.

The woman was gone.

"What just-? What was-?" Celes found that she couldn't form the words. In all of her travels and all of her fights, Celes had never seen power like that. She could no longer hear the groaning of flames. The heat was gone, as was the smoke. There were no more cries of fear. There were no more cries at all.

"Who was that woman?" Celes' words caught up to her again, but she could only gape at the empty space before her. "She was..." Her mind searched heavily for the right description. "Insane. Absolutely insane!" 

Celes leaned heavily against the brick wall. Her knees were weak beneath her and her ankle threatened to twist from her weight. The streets were quiet -- far too quiet. She didn't like the sound of it. She didn't like what it implied. 

"Thank you," she said to the man still with her. "You saved my life. If you hadn't been there-." Coughing. Celes clutched at her stomach as it tightened and her lungs revolted. There was a rattling sound and Celes felt something wet speckle her hand. She pulled it back to see black mucus shining up at her. She wiped it against the wall. 

"What you did was reckless," Celes started again. Her eyes felt heavy now. Her head was swimming. "But thank you, Zack."

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Zack froze like a cornered animal, frozen to the spot by the mere sound of her voice. His eyes darted to the maybe-assassin and then back to her as though the accusations were a blade to his throat. Then he raised his hands in surrender.

Celes' eyes narrowed. 'Good. He's smarter than he looks.'

“Hey, hey, no need to go making hostility where there is none." His eyes darted again and then he wiped blood on the back of his filthy, ash-streaked glove. "Rude has no reason to be after me anymore. I mean, as far as he’s concerned, I’m not even supposed to be … to be alive.”

Zack stiffened at that. There was something behind his eyes now, something dark that Celes had seen too many times on the faces of the lost and disenfranchised. Refugees. War orphans. Battle-tattered soldiers. Celes had even seen that darkness behind her own eyes recently. 

Seeing it again stirred something inside of her. Celes wanted to reach out and touch the lost soldier before her, but she couldn't. If she reached out, it would be an admission of weakness. It would open her to a kind of human connection that she couldn't handle. So instead of touching his arm, Celes only nodded and tried not to let on that she'd seen anything.

She doubted that Zack needed her pity.

“I was an experiment for the company we both worked for. I broke out and ran off, and it was his job to take me back."

Celes found herself staring. 'Experiment. Broke out. Ran off.'

"They never caught me, though," Zack added, but Celes wasn't listening anymore. The words blurred her vision like mist.

The sickly green glow of magic. Walls of gunmetal gray. Glass cylinders bubbling as clawed hands struggled, grasped, and gasped at a liquid that wasn't air. 

The cold shot of magic through her veins. Needles. The whir of machinery as her nails dug into steel and she grit her teeth together against the cold burning like fire-

Zack laughed. It was a strained laughter -- unconvincing. Celes hadn't caught why. Her forehead had beaded with sweat. 

The dark-clothed man nodded his agreement. "He's correct. The Turks I'm with was suppose to bring him back alive. That never happened. It's been years since the event took place."

Celes didn't ask what 'the event' meant. She didn't ask because she didn't want to hear any more of this. More than anything, she wanted to round on them and yell until she saw fear in their eyes again. 'Why do you trust him? Why aren't you running? Why are you just standing here talking to a man who might want to drag you to your death?'

Why had she once done the same? Her stomach twisted painfully. 

Leaves cracked beside her. A footstep bridged the distance between them. Celes looked up at Zack expectantly, but then froze as he touched her shoulder, directly below the pauldron. "Ah..." She felt heat rising to her face. He sighed and then his hand moved.

Her eyes widened as it touched her back and slid sideways across her cape. She stood there, petrified, too stiff to move. If it wandered again...

Her hand tightened on her sword, but Zack quickly let his arm drop. Celes watched him with a look that was half reproachful and half mortified. Her cheeks still burned.

If it was anyone or anywhere else, Celes would have turned on him. She would have asked him exactly what gave him the right to touch her and told him that she wasn't exactly some scared little girl looking for reassurances. But of course, she couldn't. Not now. She wasn't the general in a camp full of alpha males ready to prove themselves. She wasn't a resistance fighter fending off the longing passes of men who would rather use their positions to satisfy their own lust than to help the world. She wasn't tied to a chair wearing a frilly white dress with nothing but her tongue and her wits to protect her. 

No, Celes was lost in a forest with a well-meaning soldier and his attacker. Now wasn't the time to be distracted by her own indignity.

At least, not unless it happened again. Then she would be spewing fire. 

“The past is the past. I think we can all leave here on good terms, yeah?” Zack sounded more cheerful than Celes had ever heard him. He smiled at the attacker and then edged closer to Celes.

Celes edged away. The man had saved lives. He'd even saved her life when it had mattered. But that did not give him a right to anything more than her concern. Permission to enter her personal space was a long way coming.

Not that he seemed to enjoy his intrusion. In fact, he wasn't looking at her at all. His eyes darted across the forest like a cat's -- neck craning, eyebrows furrowing. Finally he scratched his head and looked back at them with a single raised eyebrow.

"So, uh..." Zack gestured between them and then pointed a thumb at the trees. "Either of you guys … Remember how you got in here?”

Celes blinked once, twice, and then she felt her mouth open. "You don't remember?" She didn't try to keep the disbelief from her expression. It pitched her voice up a quarter of an octave. "What were you planning to do here? Starve?"

Then she remembered the state he'd been in only a few minutes prior. The red eyes. That look of desperation. Perhaps her instincts hadn't been entirely off. Perhaps he hadn't wanted to find his way out at all.

“I really hope the rumors to this forest aren't true,” the darker man added. Celes gave him a strange look.

"Rumors? I haven't heard anything. It's just a forest, isn't it?" But even as she said it, an eerie fog had risen over the trees. Celes blinked at the sudden change. Yes, she'd noticed the fog before, but now she could barely see four feet in front of her. A breeze prickled her shoulders and the mist drifted past as though something alive. She could almost feel the brush of it like wet tendrils on the back of her neck. She shivered.

"I lived here for what had to have been over a month. I should be able to guide us out once the fog clears. And I assure you, there are no rumors worth hearing." The men before her faded to hazy blurs in the mist. She could still hear them though, standing and shifting and breathing. Celes never loosened the grip of her sword. If someone were to attack, now would be the opportune time. If the man had lured Zack into an ambush...

“I say we get out of here as fast as we can." The attacker's voice was like a gruff recording, almost disembodied. "Then we can discuss things further. I'll answer every question both of you have once we're to safety."

"I don't have questions," Celes answered. "And I don't think Zack should be talking to you. If you want to leave -- fine. Blundering into the fog will only get us all lost, and probably eaten by wolves or a minotaur or something. I say that we wait until it clears. I'd rather not stumble blindly into a ravine, thanks."

But her words came hollow -- sarcasm for sarcasm's sake. Celes felt the adrenaline in her system as her body tensed against something she wasn't even aware of. Against her better logic, Celes felt as though something lurked in that fog. A monster, maybe, but that didn't feel right. Whatever was out there, she felt as though it was watching her. Celes couldn't explain why, but deep down in the most primal part of her brain, she knew that something was wrong. Even her biting cynicism couldn't protect her from her own instincts, and her instincts told her that this was no ordinary forest.

But that was ridiculous. Celes had lived here, after all, and nothing terrible had come of it but monsters and bad memories.

Still, Celes couldn't help but raise her sword and eye the fog warily. She stepped closer to Zack now, close enough that she could almost feel the heat rising from his body in waves. "I don't want to lose you," she explained so he wouldn't get the wrong idea. Then she turned to face his blind spot. Just to be safe.

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The woman turned to her, and for some reason the general cleanliness of her face and hair sent Celes a prickle of irritation. The woman was helping -- she knew -- but there was something about this woman that simply rubbed her the wrong way. Here was a woman who had come in after the attack and sought to help without truly understanding what it all had meant. This woman hadn't seen the rush of blood. She hadn't choked on the fumes of the flames. Celes knew that this woman was well-intentioned (and who was Celes to tell her not to help people?), but the sight of her smooth hair and bright eyes sent Celes' teeth on edge.

Or at least, it did when Celes could barely stand from exhaustion.

“I… no, it’s alright. Don’t apologize. Give me one moment." The woman turned back towards the wreckage and raised a hand. Celes felt the chill of magic, and then the woman's hand sparked with light. Icy air streamed from her hand in currents. It coated the embers in blankets of white before crystallizing with a loud crack. The magic merged with the remnants of the fire, and then the two were extinguished. The embers lost their heated glow at the same time that the ice dematerialized to water. When the woman was done, the ruins were a slosh of soggy wood and wet charcoal. Celes wrinkled her nose at the smell.

The woman turned back to Celes and crossed her arms thoughtfully. “I am not from this city," the woman said with an almost judgmental lack of expression, "But… where I come from, it is commonplace that some people are born with the innate ability to use black and white magic-- there are even quite a few that can make use of both, like myself.”

Commonplace? Celes couldn't imagine it, and yet, hadn't she run in to far stranger concepts already? Celes had woken to an entirely different world -- one which knew nothing of her own reality. She'd seen technology that shouldn't exist, giant monsters wreaking havoc, and magic used without even blinking an eye. The idea shouldn't have been odd to her, really, but Celes couldn't help the uneasiness she felt at the thought. Magic led to power which led to war.

What kind of world would rampant magic create? Celes didn't want to think of it.

"Oh," Celes said. She searched her mind for something else, but between her exhaustion and the sudden ringing of her ears, she found nothing interesting. "I'm not either. From here, I mean. My magic..." Her throat itched and suddenly she was coughing again. "My magic...I've used it to help-" Her words were lost in the hacking, clutching gasps that overtook her lungs. Something dislodged itself in her throat and touched wet into her hand. She glanced down at it -- black.

"Not again," Celes gasped, and then lost herself to the coughing. She clutched at her stomach, doubling over as her face grew hot and her eyes dotted to block. "The fire..." she managed to say before she was stumbling backwards. Her knees cracked against a fallen beam, and she felt herself falling.

The fire had done more to her than could be healed in a few nights' rest. Celes had tried to push on for the good of the people and all the innocents she'd failed to save, but willpower could only do so much.

She fell into the damp, ashen wastes at her feet. The smell surrounded her like a shroud.

ulla