Chapter Text
The Ark is a world displaced from the timestream of the land below, and Lightning is grateful for that – as grateful as she can be without being able to summon any real depth of emotion. For someone who has always felt strongly, the sensation of cold determination coupled with apathy would frighten her. She knew it should. She knew the person she had become just to survive would care, but she simply… didn’t.
All that remained was cold resolve. She didn’t care that she didn’t care. Still, she could feel some echoes of emotion in the form of remembering how she should feel, as she did when saw the boy.
A boy, who had, not so long ago, been a great man.
Lightning knew that Hope Estheim appearing in the form of a child was wrong. From a knot of time and space called Valhalla, she had watched him grow up into a man. She had heard snippets of his voice drifting on the waves of time as he lamented the loss of the women in his life – his mother, Fang, Vanille, Serah… and her. Every single time, she was counted with the others, and sometimes, he spoke her name by itself when he thought he was alone.
In the breathless pauses between titanic clashes across black-sand beaches scattered with crystals, she could take a moment – and only ever a moment – to think about it, but not process it. Not understand. She never had time enough for anything, not when Caius Ballad could come bearing down on her at any moment… and often did, when she let her guard slip for even a second.
Now, while she knew Hope Estheim mattered, she couldn’t grasp why. A twinge of anxiety always slithered through her when she realized this, but when she tried to pin it down, it always slipped through her fingers back into the yawning abyss.
Hope had only smiled and told her he couldn’t remember how he had ended up in the Ark, only that he had awakened back in the body of a fourteen-year-old boy. The memories of his time before waking up here were hazy, he told her – memories of the world crumbling slowly through the centuries, of trying to rally as many as he could to the cause of maintaining peace… and failing.
His job was to assist her from this place, operating a terminal in the center of a vast chamber surrounded by an inch of water and impenetrable fog. When she looked up, she could see a vast, sunlit sky dotted with white clouds, no matter the conditions of the world somewhere below her. The sheer scale of the chamber unnerved her to the core, made worse when Hope had explained it was the New Cocoon itself, which he had named, by some fortuitous coincidence, “Bhunivelze”.
And when she had asked about why, he could only tell her it had seemed fitting at the time.
Displaced from the timestream of the world below – a world known as “Nova Chrysalia”, bestowed the title by the dwindling denizens awaiting the birth of a new world – it shielded her from the constant pressure of her task. Here, she could sleep for hours, or even days, and it would make no difference.
Above Hope’s terminal hovered a screen, and its shape recalled Etro’s Gate. An elegant map of the world always dominated its center, with pins dropped of places of interest. On her very first day, she had been sent to Yusnaan, one of the last remaining thriving cities, just as the city’s clock struck midnight. Failing in accomplishing anything then, she had been brought back here despite her protests. The following day – the first day proper – she had spent almost the entirety of it in the Wildlands.
Hope touched something on his console, and her handset dinged in response. “There, I’ve sent you everything I have so far.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “You should probably wrap up your business in Luxerion before you go back out to the Wildlands.”
“But I need to know what’s going on.” She frowned a little, recalling the battered white chocobo who had valiantly fought a chocobo eater. Right up to the very second Hope had recalled her to the Ark, she had tended to him, fetching food and medicine from all over. The bird had recovered far faster than any normal animal, so much so that he had managed to get to his feet, though still injured, right before she left. “Looks like you found some stuff while I was gone. Anything good?”
“Possibly, a few of our old friends.”
She felt nothing at those words. It should have bothered her. “That’s good to hear.”
Hope made a thoughtful sound. “From what I’ve been able to gather as of late, Snow never even makes an attempt at leaving Yusnaan.”
Her eyes fell to the blue dot on the lower-left continent. “Snow Villiers, the ‘great hero’ of the l’Cie,” she murmured. The man had found himself in what Hope called the “city of revelry” – a place of eternal celebration as the inhabitants awaited the world’s end. There, they considered the apocalypse a blessing. “Does he leave that palace, even? Ever?”
Hope, too, had been stripped of his emotional core. Still, he summoned more than she could, facing her and looking solemn. “Before I found myself here, yes, but that was almost two hundred years ago now.”
She wondered how heavily his burdens weighed on his heart. Over time, she had been told, darkness accumulated in people’s hearts, the years adding layer upon layer until their true selves were buried. The long life that came from existence frozen in time meant that the usual pains – the sadness, the grief, the darkness – had no apparent end, and the inexorable march of the Sea of Chaos lapping at the world’s shores meant that everyone had fallen into despair in some way.
That Snow Villiers, the relentless optimist, one of the kindest and most generous people she had ever known, had lost even himself to this…
“I won’t abandon him,” she said, “but he needs time to recover from our last encounter.” A faint smile touched her lips, but it quickly faded. “Who else?”
Hope rubbed his chin. “I might have found Sazh, but I’m not sure. There’s also a strong presence of chaos in the temple ruins. From the energy waves bleeding off into the surrounding area, it appears to be the place where the chaos is flowing from – a font of chaos, if you will.”
Lightning gazed at the dot indicating the location of the temple – the ruins of an ancient metropolis the Angel of Valhalla had been predestined to carry her to. The memory of the whispering voice following her throughout the vast untamed wilderness still lingered. That voice had led her to the chocobo, led her to care for it, led her through confrontations and wilderness and darkness, ever closer to–
“The voice in the wilderness told me to go there, as soon as I could,” she said. The voice of Yeul, the Seeress of Paddra, calling to her across the Wildlands.
Hope hummed softly. “And right into the font of the chaos. It could be very dangerous. You’ll need to be careful, Light. That said, you may even be able to slow the erosion of the world. Perhaps, by some miracle, you can even stop it altogether, even if you cannot do so permanently.”
Lightning lifted an eyebrow. “Delay the end of the world?” She thought a moment. “It’s worth a try. It won’t be a waste of time.
“Alright. I’ll send you back to your chocobo once you’re ready.”
She gazed at the display. “I’ll have to search all over the world. Hope there’s enough time to save everyone.”
“It’s not possible, Light.”
She looked carefully at him. “Isn’t it?”
Hope shook his head. “There are many people left. You can’t save them all, no matter the power Bhunivelze gave you. For each moment you spend on a difficult task for a dark heart, you may lose five with lighter burdens.” For a moment, something flashed through his eyes, but it didn’t last long. “The darkest hearts may have to be turned away for the sake of those who still have light within.”
Some distant part of her cried out to care. Abandoning people to their fate, coldly calculating who lived and died… it was unthinkable. The soldier, barely more than a girl despite her age, would have done it without a thought, but the warrior who helped take down Orphan couldn’t bear it.
Yet she found herself nodding. It made sense. There were some who couldn’t be saved, whose burdens could never be released or forgiven. She would be wasting time if she tried to help them.
So, she pushed those concerns aside. “I’ll do what I have to.”
“What do you think is out there?”
She shifted her weight, staring at the temple. It was the Temple of Etro, which had once resided in Valhalla, the land where she had lost so much of her life to endless war. That land had been full of chaos, and that temple had been the seat of the overseer of chaos. The only other entity she could think of so strongly connected to the chaos was Caius Ballad, who had perished at the hand of Noel Kreiss on the temple’s shores long ago.
“Maybe the key to extending the world’s life. Maybe the key to saving it.”
“There’s no stopping the end of everything, Light. No matter how much you might try, there’s no possible way to delay the end any longer. All you can do, if you’ll pardon the expression, is run out the clock, and try to be productive doing it.”
“I should at least investigate it, you know? If that’s ground zero for the chaos, there might be useful info.”
“What if there’s something terrible out there?”
Lightning frowned. “Like?”
“Well, the chaos behaves like it’s–” He shifted his weight. “–alive.”
“Guess I’d better take care of it then.” She flashed a quick smirk. “In the meantime, try to find anyone else we knew. I want to save as many as I can.” She hesitated. “But I can’t save those who don’t wish to be. Right?”
Hope nodded. “Correct. Bhunivelze put those restrictions on your power for a reason, I’m sure. It may be best not to question it.”
“Or he just wants me to do what he wants so I get what I want.”
Hope’s green eyes narrowed slightly. “You don’t need to be a slave, Light,” he said. “We got here fighting a fate laid out by false gods, after all. We’re going to carve our own path in the new world. When that day comes – and it will – you’ll see what I mean. We’ll build our own future, Light.”
Lightning swallowed the words she had nearly spoken – words intended to set him straight, but now, hearing him speak like the leader he had been in Academia, she didn’t feel like it anymore. Little though he had become, his will, his determination, it seemed, had not dimmed in equal measure.
“You’ll continue to return here at six every morning.” Hope turned back to his station, all business again. “I’m not giving you a choice, Light, and I can’t. You’ll need your rest. You’re not superhuman.”
“I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of power.”
He didn’t look at her when he said, “You have superpowers, but I would never say you’re superhuman. Besides, you’re our last hope. You have to succeed.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “You can’t falter, and you can’t give up. And you can’t die. If you do any of those things, it’s over.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t forget.”
“Then…” His eyes softened again. “Please. Be careful, Light.”
Lightning hesitated and looked carefully at him. “I will.” Her eyes drifted to a slender tree a short distance from the terminal. It had a few tendrils growing from it alongside a few leaves, but it looked thin and weak. “That tree needs time to grow strong so that it can birth the new world.”
The boy nodded. “It will be good to see.”
Her expression didn’t change when she said, “After all of this, it really will be.”
The second of the last thirteen days began when she walked away from the terminal and the boy, allowing Hope to send her to the land below. It was a simple and straightforward job.
But she understood all that was at stake.
Serah Farron, her sister, had died just before the collapse of time, struck down by a final vision that had sapped what remained of her life. When Lightning had awakened from crystal stasis, Bhunivelze, the self-proclaimed deity of the world, had promised to restore Serah to life if she agreed to take on the task of the Liberator. Empowered by Bhunivelze through the use of a crystal akin to an eidolith in exchange for her emotional core, Lightning had accepted without hesitation.
And at the end of the final thirteen days, the old world would end and a new one, created by Bhunivelze, would be born. That was what he had promised.
Without the weight of regret and her churning emotions, Lightning felt a deep calmness sink into her bones. It would all be over soon.
She stepped into the teleporter, and the Ark dissolved into a soft, warm dawn around her.
And so begins my years-in-the-making rewrite/director's cut of both my 2014 fic and the game Lightning Returns itself. I've spent a lot of time tightening up the story, cutting out the fluff, pulling back on the melodrama, and making characterization a lot more consistent. If you read the original on FF.Net back in the day, then you will most likely notice lots of new scenes and changes to existing ones throughout. In fact, I don't think there's a single part of this fic left untouched. Not sure how often I'll update this, but I'm hoping to do it once a week. Also, for those who are curious, "suscitatio" is a Latin word meaning "awaken" and similar terms. It's the root of "resuscitation", and I figured a Latin title was fitting for Fabula Nova Chrystallis. Anyway, do enjoy, and please tell me what you think!