Final Fantasy - The Tree Of Destruction Chronicles 001: Those Who Dwell On The Rift

Dr. Donovan

Many of those who study the nature of the apparently esotheric and spontaneous powers of the witches (and many witches themselves), have came to ask in the regards of the unseen and, usually, seemingly unexcrutable source of their powers. It is clear the little critter that always instigates the witch to do this and that has something to do, contrary to many who think these little beings are more akin to fey who take on an animal guise, "bewitched" by the supernatural flow of power that stems from these gifted ones. Nevertheless, the nature of the source of the witch's power remains subject of heated debate. However, it is possible that we might find some clue in the words of late Master Palazzo's Diary, vulgarly named "Grimoire Of Madness". That, of course, if you dare reading henceforth...

...and yet it happens that what we, arrogantly, call "the voyd" is far from empty, being the dwelling province of powers as old as the early blank pages in the Gran Grimoire, dating back to the ages where naught but the nethicite crowned the empty canvas of the unseen skies on oblivious black, steely silver, ruminous blue and holy white. From such a region, a chasm, a rift across time and space, came to be minds of symetrical thought and primal existance, chained servants under the will of the ocurria, expressing it's desire on the musitation of number and letter beyond the grasp of mere mortal mind. Abstract as the incantations of a mage, shapeless as the will of man, yet fierce and terrible as the dawn of the first world, these were the Fal'Cie, will of the nethicite drapped on might and sentience as avatars and pillars of the creation to be.

It is through the Fal'Cie that the first world came to be and the rules of The Cycle were made with Cosmos and Chaos as dancers of the everlasting waltz of death and rebirth, branding those accursed with their favor by the name of L'Cie to be their pawns on a game ought to be played for all eternity, ensnaring mortals in the false hope of a world with time and history that is naught but a lie, a dream of fallen angels serving insane god-machines of cruel hearts of hollow stone and glittering desire. Such is the curse of the living, breathing the bliss of ignorance until the lady of pain we named truth come to them, ripping apart the lies from their eyes, leaving them naked before the voyd of the rift.

Even now, after so many cycles, the lesser Fal'Cie, whom the dissheartened skyfolk known as the aegyl address as Yarhi, delight themselves on serving the whims of the ocurria by choosing mortals to boon with preternatural gifts in bending the very rules they enbody, a means to assert their own mark of existance in the world the ocurria has shaped to come and be the prison of deja-vu we have come to love and hate. Incapable of understanding the high source of their newfound understanding of reality and banned from entering in contact with it by the higher Fal'Cie, we have called these blind walkers "witches" and, aren't they a fine metaphor of our lamentable condition? Blind mice running on a labyrinth of unexcrutable sense, walking around under the promise of cheese and freedom we know we are not to be granted ever for the sake of amusement and delight of our tormentors and forbearers.

There are, among the most bereft of wisdom, those who claim to have seen these powers that dwell on the rift in between dreams of existance. A daring claim comming from a blind mouse that knows only to follow the smell of cheese, for the shape of those who reside behind the screen of blue is beyond the grasp of sane or natural mind. Even if, on the inextricability of the ocurria, the chains on the machine gods were to be lessened and their direness were to make itself part of our torporic perception of existance, their primeval shapes would make little sense to our eyes, uncout and unprepared for such splendorous and terrible sights.

Even if a Yarhi, lessermost among the trickled will of the nethicite, was to lower itself to constrain it's unfathomable essence in a shape capable of delivering a meaningless tidbit of it's true nature to a feeble mind like ours, the mere act of gazing upon such an icon of unsurmountable horror and unbearable alien holyness would shred the sanity of such a poor mind with such an accursed violence that death would not suffice to put such a wretched soul to rest, and the transgression would leave a rather unyielding stain of despair and madness on our frail world, as it is the case of many unsent that acquire such innanical shapes in their rebirths as monstrous enbodyments of their metaphysical agony. So, it is, in the end, in the best interest of those who address themselves as "witches" to not seek too desperately to meet the source of their boons... lest it be that it's face resembles the flayed and horrific visage of truth's real shape...

To say the words of Master Palazzo are unsettling is an understament, even for those of us who have transmigrated the boundaries of the living. Nevertheless... who could denny we are, after all, still compelled to see what we are not meant to see? Such, in my opinion, is one of the ultimate testaments of free will... or is it just a delussion of blind mice running on a labyrinth?

- Doctor Donovan Wright, R&D Graduate of Dressden, Land Of Golgothir Deadponderer.