Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ The Last ❯ Chapter 1

As for legal stuff I don't own FF9 or any of its characters or concepts.

If you are wondering why I give the black mage brown hair you can refer to the picture of the mature black mage in the old Nintendo game FF1, he actually does have brown hair I think (its hard to tell with those old graphics). I took a the quote about cemeteries directly from the game so didn't write that either.

The Last

The sky darkens as the night descends around me. In the evening by the village the wind whistling is all you hear, our village is built so deep in the forest that even the owls don't live here. I would have liked to have owls around through; birds make good company when they stay. The problem is that they age quickly; even quicker than we do and they soon must travel for instincts that we don't have. Bobby Corwen was that way, one day he left for his own kind.

My earliest memories are very vague, sometimes when I think about it I remember flashes of magic, the screams of humans and the smell of smoke. For awhile I tried not to remember. I was happy to live in this village with all of my new friends, especially Mr.288. All I had to worry about was the chocobo egg, that would later hatch Bobby Corwen, and takeing care of the statues in the place where we put people who stopped moving. I had thought we had escaped from things like what I only barely remembered and it would be better to leave it in the past but, in the end these things followed us.

These things, I now know, were acts of war. What followed us was the creator of wars, Kuja and he taught us a new word, death. I still remember the fear I felt when I first discovered what it really meant to stop moving. It was a cold feeling that I would do everything to get rid of. So I, with the others, went with him. In our desperation we were willing to believe anything that would make our fear go away.

It worked momentarily, but was soon replaced by the emotion that I know as guilt. Serving Kuja was wrong, we all knew that. In the end it was a false hope anyway. In one stroke he stole the last bit of hope we had been clinging to and informed us that we could never live longer, that we were doomed to a brief life. Then he looked at us a moment in our weakness and helplessness and turned away. Vivi came and sat with us. We mostly think of him as young because he is so much smaller than any of us, but actually he is older than any of the rest of us ever will be but, he came and sat with us and shared our misery and I wasn't so sad then. Haveing a friend seemed to keep me from feeling helpless, even if it really didn't change the situation.

Then later after we had returned to our village Vivi came with many more friends for us. The village was twice as full as it was before. I had never imagined being so happy as I was with all the new tailed friends. After I learned what it meant to die I thought I could never be completely happy. When Mr.288 was talking to the different geonome Mikoto at the cemetery he explained what I had felt in my heart when Vivi sat with us but didn't have the words to describe; "Its like this: We'll never forget you. We'll remember you every time we stand at your grave. And we won't let the fear of death, which each of us knows, stop u from living our lives. Because my friends will remember me when I'm here." After that Mikoto used some big words like asexual and generation. I don't know those words but I think she was trying to explain something sad to us.

Vivi came back later on but Zidane wasn't there. He said that he had gone to save Kuja and that he would return later. While he was here most of the time, he left often. Traveling all over the world and trapping what was left of the mist that remained in caverns and valleys; and then he used it to create a group of children. That made us all very happy. However Zidane didn't come back quickly and as time wore on Vivi became restless. Eventually he said he was taking his sons to travel and learn from the world, and have adventures so that they could understand the courageous stories he told about Zidane. Mikoto left for a while to go to the Lifa tree and say goodbye to Zidane. I guess it means she understands cemeteries now. That trip was for her own sake, so that she could go on, and she even said goodbye to Kuja. She said that he was the first to break the rules of their existence and in that way he had given them hope. For that reason she gave him the gift of remembering, since he was now in her thought he didn't need to be gone.

We never imagined what would happen next. The Geonomes are very different from black mages in appearance, except for our brown hair, and we didn't realize that black mages are just a modified version of the created geonomes. And we die eventually because we are not meant to live on Gaia. The evil one that they called Garland designed them so that they would not last long here without a soul. So one day all except Mikoto...... stopped moving. It was all very sudden.

We buried them all in the cemetery that very day. It took awhile to figure out how to make the monuments for their graves since they look different than us. I think I worried about it more than the others, they were just consumed in sadness because their friends had left but, they understood that they would live in their memories. But I was afraid because I had not known them well, we hadn't even given them names yet. So every night afterwards I would walk the rows of graves alone, and at each I would try to remember at least one thing about the person buried there.

I have said that the concept of death scared us very much. I think this is the scariest word I know but, that is because I have no word for what Mikoto has done. After the other geonomes had died she went down the road to the pond and held herself on the bottom. We found her that evening. I cannot fathom what it means for a creature to... stop itself from moving. We were all so afraid of death and what death meant, we wanted to live because dying scared us. So did living scare Mikoto? We buried her with the others. I don't know what she would have wanted. If we remember her then does she live in our memories? Is that right if she living was scary for her? Or did she want to see her friends? I had thought once that I had finally understood what death meant and that I could cope with it but, this is different then anything. I feel lost, like when Kuja betrayed us the security that I felt has been torn away.

I now understand what Mikoto was trying to tell us at the cemetery that once, the thing that would not be changed even if she learned how to understand graves. If cemeteries exist for the living, then what happens when there are no living left? We were created by the mist, and now there is no more mist in the world. As this year wears on we have no children born among us because we can't have children. One by one we are dying and as each dies there is no more to replace them. We believed that we needn't fear because someone would remember us when we died. But now I am the last. No one will remember me when I die, no one is here to bury me. Does that mean that I'll disappear? I thought that I would be able to take comfort in the fact that I could be remembered, when Mr.288 said that did he realized that this village would last only a year? I am so afraid. Will I ever see my friends in the memories where the dead exist? Or will they all disappear too because I am the last to remember them? The whole village will die. Will we fade into nothing?!

No I don't want to die! The world is getting darker and colder. I can see clearly anymore. Is this what dieing feels like? No wait I'm alive, I lived here.

Someone

Anyone

remember me......

Well that's all I have for this one, please review. If I get some good reviews I might write from Mikoto's POV when she committed suicide if I get some good reviews. If not I can MST my own story and wallow in my own patheticness. Either way please review.