jessara40k (jessara40k) wrote in roads_diverged, @ 2010-01-30 10:33:00 |
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Entry tags: | final fantasy vii, jessara40k:cloud/sephiroth, theme 44: fairy tales |
Final Fantasy VII; Sephiroth/Cloud; Theme 44 Fairy Tales "Sephiroth a Jenova Part 3 - Complete"
Title: Sephiroth a Jenova
Author: jessara40k
Fandom: FFVII
Pairings: past Hojo/Sephiroth, future Cloud/Sephiroth
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Huge consent issues
Theme: 44. fairy tales
Cloud looked down at the scarlet-clad warrior he’d just defeated, feeling an unaccustomed hesitance at the idea of killing him. Normally he wouldn’t feel the slightest doubt, would just kill him and start trying to make his way up the mountain of glass and ice, but after meeting Sephiroth he couldn’t keep from fearing that this man was another slave. He couldn’t afford the energy to check that suspicion though, not when he didn’t know what further trials he might face. Maybe he could do that later, after he’d freed Sephiroth and destroyed the silver demon.
He disarmed the man, throwing the weapons as far away as he could, then removed his boots, tossing them in the same direction. He had enough rope to hogtie his opponent, and it wouldn’t really help him climb the mountain after all. Good job he came from mountain country then, and the ice wasn’t quite as good an idea as Hojo-sensei probably thought it was. He took a deep breath and turned to the mountain, looking for the best way up and planning out a couple of alternate routes and points where he could switch between them before beginning to climb.
The climb was actually pretty easy for him - he barely needed any of the small magics of his childhood - but then he had to get into the building on top of the mountain. It was small, and windowless, but at least there was a door. But the Star Queen’s aura swamped the building so much that he couldn’t really tell anything specific, and maybe she had devoted a portion of her attention to monitoring it. Could he risk calling on the Star Lady to help him sense any traps? If he called the right way, just opened himself to her rather than specifically invoking her then he thought he could.
He matched deed to thought, and examined the door visually while he waited to see if the Star Lady would grant him her aid in this. She did, and he was oddly appalled by the carelessness Hojo-sensei had shown at the last - there were no traps at all. Not on the building anyway, and it was a strange relief to open the door to find a curtain of flames encircling the point where he knew the focus had to be.
This really wasn’t what he’d expected of the focus that bound the declared child of a goddess into slavery. It was a dried, oddly shaped piece of meat with a cord looking a bit like dried gut coming from it, and yet he could feel the Star Lady’s approval in his skin. If not for that he might have wondered if Hojo-sensei had created a very elaborate decoy to hide the real focus of those spells from him. He knew flesh and blood made for the very best foci, but the vast majority of such things were deeply evil, enough to cripple their victims, or taint them as well as their users, and Sephiroth had neither been injured, nor tainted from such workings.
And now he could feel the Star Lady’s amusement, why...oh! He felt her bring up the memories of Sephiroth’s dreams of a distant past, where he was a woman, who died shortly after giving birth to a son. Cloud felt his cheeks heating at the thought - that wasn’t something that would have occurred to him, but it fitted the legends of how the Star Lady came into existence. Enough wool-gathering. He needed to destroy this thing - but how? This wasn’t something he’d really studied that much - could it affect Sephiroth if he chose the wrong method? It wouldn’t with a normal focus...and it wouldn’t with this. According to the Star Lady anyway, but he couldn’t do anything other than trust her.
Fire, as intense as he could manage. He needed to reduce the focus to ashes. A jewel or glass bauble he could simply shatter. And had the focus been metal he could have simply melted it. But for this he needed ashes, and so he called up the fire that lay at the heart of the stars, holding it in his hands and feeding it into the focus. And now it was as difficult as he’d expected. He could feel the magics imbued in the focus twisting around him, trying to find something to latch on to, but he blocked and ignored them, searching down the bits that fell onto the pedestal, or to the floor, unburned. He needed to be absolutely certain so when he could see no more pieces, he lowered his mental wardings enough to cast a sensing spell to find any that remained.
That was a mistake, and Cloud raised his wardings the moment he sensed those writhing magics trying to lock onto him. But they’d seemed to be dying down, and he gave it a slow count of 500 before cautiously checking again. The magics seemed to have dissipated, and a swift sensing spell confirmed that he’d found and destroyed all the pieces of the focus - whatever it might have been to start. Thankfully. He thought he might have enough energy to check if that scarlet warrior was under a slavery spell, but not to create more starfire by himself, and he had the feeling that the Star Lady would not be able to offer him more than the information and almost passive assistance she’d provided to date.