Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ Absence of Light ❯ Prologue ( Prologue )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Prologue

Poetic belief said that a world wept when it fell to a conqueror, its land and seas and forced to serve the needs of foreign invaders while its own people were enslaved and doomed to a life of bondage. Poetic belief said that when a world fell one could hear its cries of anguish if you only listened hard enough and that they would never fade until the earth drank the blood of its oppressors. But when the ShinRa warships glided through the blackness of space to descend on Zhan, it was doubtful that the planet cried out in sorrow. Its tears had already been spent in ages past and no longer had the strength to grieve for its future.

Zhan was not a world that anyone would consider beautiful. It was a planet that never knew the touch of sunlight, only the heavy blackness of full night that faded into days of gloomy grey half-light. The absence of the touch of the sun’s rays made Zhan a bleak world that always seemed to be shrouded in an aura of hopelessness. It was a world filled with exhaustion and despair.

The capital city of Maruth had been in the grip of civil war for centuries and had never been able to recover from the devastation of each successive conflict. By the time of the invasion it had become little more than a massive slum sprawling across most of the Garat continent. Even so, it was still the center of whatever form of government the planet could claim and as such was the logical place for ShinRa to have begun their invasion. ShinRa’s SOLDIER army had established control over the city quickly, killing the Council that had struggled to keep Zhan from descending completely into anarchy since the end of the last war and mercilessly slaughtering any resistance they encountered although there was little enough of that.

The people of Maruth put up nothing more than a final despairing struggle with no strength behind it. They no longer seemed to care about their fate, staring at the SOLDIERs with blank, emotionless eyes as the invading army moved through the streets between the shells of dilapidated buildings to solidify ShinRa’s newly established power.

However, there were still those few who had the will to resist even when it became apparent that there was no hope for Zhan. They were the ones who did not want to see Zhan fall from being a free world to becoming another vassal state of ShinRa. No matter how miserable Zhan was, a planet that was almost constantly in the grip of bloody power struggles and civil war – it had always been free. There were those among its people who had not been so worn down by living in a world that knew no peace that they would be willing to watch passively as their world was enslaved.

They slipped silently into Murath and hid in the shadows of the city’s skeletal buildings, striking out against the SOLDIERs as they passed by before vanishing back into their hiding places. Their knowledge of the labyrinthine layout of the city gained some victories, but in the end the last of Zhan’s defenders were either slaughtered or forced back into hiding. They had not been able to match the specially engineered SOLDIERs of ShinRa.

Vincent Valentine had wanted to fight. He had wanted to stand against the invaders and would have been willing to give up his life in one final attempt to save Zhan. Broken and desolate as it was, Vincent believed that it was better to remain so and be free rather than forced into the iron chains of the ShinRa empire. He had wanted to fight against enslavement and oppression no matter how futile the attempt might prove, desperate to at least do something to try and save his worldÉ but he couldn’t. Because of the child.

Lucrecia had died when their son was only five years old, some three months before the ShinRa warships had appeared in the sky. If she had lived maybe he would have left the mountains to join the struggle at Maruth. But with her gone he could not bring himself to leave their child, his only source of happiness in the world. And if he were to die Sephiroth would have no one to take care of him, no one at allÉ. No, Vincent couldn’t leave him.

So he had stayed secluded in the mountains and watched his homeland be conquered with sorrow and bitterness in his heart, vowing that one day ShinRa would be cast out broken and defeated and driven back to their own world. It was with that grim hope in his heart that he began to train his son in the warrior arts. He wasn’t surprised to discover that Sephiroth was a natural, showing a strong affinity for the sword even at his young age. He was descended from a warrior bloodline, after all. Vincent took some measure of pride in knowing that one day his child would be a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield, but it was a pride tinged with sadness. If only Sephiroth could have been born into a world free of violence and pain, he would have not to learn the way of the sword as a little boyÉ

But some things could not be helped. Vincent would never let his son grow up to become accepting and passive in the face of ShinRa aggression and dominance.

He would grow up to fight.

* * *

To be scouted as a candidate for admittance into the Black Guards was one of the greatest honors any member of SOLDIER could receive, one that was exceeded only by being deemed worthy of actual acceptance. The Black Guards were the highest ranking force in ShinRa who answered directly to the Emperor and were sent only on the most delicate and dangerous missions that not even the SOLIDERs could be entrusted with and to be accepted as one was to achieve the highest pinnacle of ShinRa military achivement.

Competition to be seen as eligible was fierce – SOLDIERs were already considered elite, the very best of ShinRa’s military and proving their superiority over each other was something that more often than not ended in violence. More than one SOLDIER had been killed by a comrade in the drive to be seen as having Black Guard potential – unfortunate, perhaps, but ShinRa’s upper level Generals were rumored to comment that at least it ensured that the weaker SOLDIERs were removed and that it kept that particular division in top form at all times.

Cloud Strife was a somewhat different case.

His mother had been a poor woman. She had earned her living in the only she could, selling her body to whoever was willing to pay for a night of pleasure, and one night she had gotten a child in return. When her son was born five years before ShinRa launched its invasion of Zhan she had sold him into Midgar’s human market, unwilling to take on the added burden of caring for a child. She promptly forgot about him in the face of the more immediate need to ensure her own survival.

The child had been sold to one Professor Hojo, head of medical research for ShinRa’s military. He had been more than willing to receive a new test subject for his experimentation and the whore’s child – named Cloud by one of the kinder lab technicians – grew up thinking that the constant tests and experiments being performed on him were a normal part of his existence.

Cloud became indifferent to them. It was what he knew and understood. To him they were just as normal as any other kind of medical examination, uncomfortable, inconvenient, maybe painful at times – but something that had to be done. Besides, other than those times when Hojo kept him in the lab for days on end Cloud never had any complaints about his childhood. He was always looked after, given clothes and a bed and enough food - and the finest military education ShinRa had to offer.

It had been obvious to Hojo after only a short period of time that Cloud was special, that all of the mako treatments and enhancements were amplifying already strong natural talents that would be an asset in battle. The higher ranking officers promptly began to personally train Cloud in military tactics and combat skills. By the time he was eighteen he was easily equal to if not better than any of the SOLDIERs and was inducted directly into the Black Guards. If there were any murmurs about someone so young being placed directly in ShinRa’s most elite force, they were quickly silenced when they saw Cloud’s prowess in battle. The other members of the Guard came to view him with a mixture of reverence and fear and instinctively looked to him for guidance. By the time he turned twenty he had become the leader of the Black Guards and answered only to the Emperor of ShinRa.

It happened that some fifteen years after Zhan had fallen to the empire’s power rumors began to circulate, whispers that some new form of resistance had taken root on the desolate world and that several attacks had been carried out against ShinRa’s base in city of Maruth. The Black Guards did not pay much attention to them – anything serious on that planet could probably be easily dealt with by the SOLDIERS – and only took a passing interest in the reports before forgetting about them.

But it wouldn’t be long before they were forced to think about Zhan whether they wanted to or not.

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