Chapter Eight

Having seen Natissa shrug off numerous near-death experiences, I knew that it was going to take more than a little bullying to stop her. However, considering her fashion obsession, her snooty character, and her delicate looks, you really can't blame me for underestimating exactly how much more. I followed her through Jidoor, to a small, one-story house that was very neat-looking. Its interior was decorated expensively but spartanly, which was why it took me so long to figure out that the queen of pomp actually lived here. Bedivire was waiting by the door, holding it open; she charged through, easel and canvas under her arm, without even giving him a second glance.

"Get together the council," She said, "I vote we declare war on them."

"Yes, your ladyship."

He left, shuffling his huge feet.

I watched Natissa set up her canvas, then stare at the picture with a dry smirk on her face.

She was so pretty.

I steeled myself, then appeared in her living room. I walked the length of the room and stood behind her.

"Bedivire," She said, turning, "I thought I told you-"

I waited for the appropriate face-faulting, then I grabbed her by her hair and yanked her out of her seat. She pulled a Mythril dagger from her belt and tried to swipe me with it, but I caught her arm.

I remember how the other soldiers handled women, and I gotta say, it disgusted me. Torture is something that I excel at, and I know for a fact that if you want to permanently alter somebody, you have to isolate their worst fear and then shove it down their throat. You have to make it personal if you want to make it hurt. But they didn't know that, so they went for the same blasted uncreative kill every single time. They don't know what the hell they're doing.

I stared into her eyes, so unblinking and unafraid, then turned and looked at her canvas. She'd prettied up my armor considerably. The room we were standing in, too, was a miniature shrine to visual beauty. I looked back at her, then swiped her Mythril dagger and, with long sweeps of my arm, shredded her painting, cutting the flesh-like canvas into jagged, fraying, red-dripping strips. I crosshatched those, watching painted bits of cloth float, weighted, to the floor.

"Do you want to play me? Do you?" I turned the knife on her. "Then you're going to have to look the part, aren't you, my sweet?"

I buried the tip of the dagger in her forehead and cut a long, neat line all the way down to her chin.

And then... my dear Natissa... my sweet Natissa... served me one final surprise.

She laughed.

"In your raid on Narshe," She whispered, "I remember seeing you there. I remember thinking that you looked like one of the dollies my brother used to win in the town square." She laughed harder, raising her voice. "I'd heard about you. I'd heard about how you'd let that witch kill fifty of your own soldiers. I heard that you'd set fire to Figaro castle. I heard that, just a few days ago, you'd laid waste to Doma single-handedly. And when I saw you in Narshe, I remembered thinking... that you'd killed them all and that now you were coming for us..."

She pressed her lips together, and with her flying, messed-up red hair, she looked quite mad. "Well? Have you come for me?"

"Not to kill you." I threw her into the wall. "Not if you don't call your boy-toy back here and tell him to call off the war."

"Then you've come to kill me."

"If that's how you want it." I slashed her across the nose. She giggled.

Yes, I liked Natissa more every time I saw her.

Maybe that's why I did what I did next.

Again using her hair as a grip, I picked Natissa up and threw her onto a chair. I sat on the table across from her, still holding the knife to her, and smirked. "Don't want to negotiate with Edgar? Fine. You'll do it with me instead. Let's run through what we know, okay? You want to get to pools of Kyrithian, which are on Edgar's land, which is unfortunately inhabited."

"What-"

I held up a hand. "You lost the rights to the land in a contest with Relm, and now you're planning on fighting for them."

"Would you do any less?"

"Truthfully? No. But this isn't about me. Show me a map, will you?"

She started to stand.

"Ah-"

"It's over here."

She stood, picked up a tube of paper, and unrolled it in front of me. She also grabbed a dishcloth and began dabbing the blood from her face.

"Got a pen?"

She procured a quill from the table.

"Shade in the areas where you've found this Kyrithian crap."

As she colored on the map, Natissa looked up. "You know an awful lot about this, for someone who's been dead for over a month."

"I'm being forced to do penance for my eveel ways by warning you of the dangers of armed conflict."

"Forced by whom?"

"Another dead bastard."

Natissa faltered, nearly dropping the pen. "Then you've been there. The other side."

"I kind of got a bit sidetracked on my way there, actually."

"Ha."

She slid the map over to me.

I looked at her scribbling. "Okay, nice... yes, that's now Figaro borders." I peeked over the edge of the paper. "But you know, there's a bit over here that's still on your side."

"Where?"

"Here."

"I know that, confound it; that's in the mountains."

"So?"

"So, without Magitek, we can't drill through that much stone."

"Give me your pen."

She handed me the quill.

"You mind if I write on the back of this? No? Good." I flipped the map upside-down and began to scrawl on it. It had been awhile since I'd done this. "Obviously, this is freehand so the measurements are going to be off by... oh... ridiculous amounts, but if you get an engineer that doesn't suck, they oughtta be able to figure it out. For the material, I'd suggest polylueridia. It'll stay straight, and it'll take the impact- hey, I destroyed half the planet with it."

I could tell that everything I'd said had flown straight over her head, but that she'd gotten the main point.

I held the drawing forward. "I'm only going to give this to you if you call the war off. But you shouldn't see that as a bad thing. I used to be a General, you know, and wars cost a lot. I'm going to give you this for free. If you accept, you'll be saving yourself quite a bit of money."

"Oh... well, I'm a reasonable woman... I suppose that you're right." Her eyes flashed. "You're doing more than warning me. Pardon me if I think it seems a bit... out of character."

"No need to pardon yourself. You're right. I came in here with every intention of killing you."

"Why didn't you?"

"You remind me of myself. When I was younger."

I vanished from sight as Bedivire came through the door with another handful of Jidoor nobles.

Natissa stood, holding the scribbled-on map with one hand and stemming the blood flow on her face with the dishcloth in the other.

"Natissa!" Bedivire ran to her.

"Don't make such a fuss; this isn't important! Gentlemen!" She motioned to the other nobles, "Gentlemen, I've called you because I have something important to show you. Our recent loss to Figaro has left us with no choice but to drill the mountains, and it just so happens that I've found a way to do it..."

I walked through the wall. Good bad girl.

I hoped I'd never see her again.

***

You must be familiar with the old cliche, "Deal with the devil and you're bound to get burned." I was. Yet as familiar a saying it was, its truth didn't occur to me until it was too late. I was standing alone on Jidoor's bridge, watching the dying sunlight burn my scarred hands, when Wrexsoul came gliding up the stairs, looking as if he were ascending from a pit of flame. His ragged robes fluttered in the mild wind, and I was suddenly aware of how terrible a figure he must cut in the eyes of normal folk. I was as unimpressed by him as usual.

"Come to say goodbye?" I sat on the rail. "As much fun as it was playing with you, I can't say I'm sorry to see you go."

"To this moment, utter ignorance."

"What? Don't tell me that, because Natissa declared war on Figaro for ten minutes, you think you've won the bet!" I stomped. "If I recall, the deal stated that the thing had to erupt into armed conflict. Edgar will probably never even know about the ten-minute war he had with Jidoor."

"No, no. You have won. You have impressed me to no end, as well. I was shocked to see how professionally you handled Natissa. If you'd been that sensible in the days of the Empire, perhaps you- and the thousands of other people you murdered- would be alive today."

"I'm too dead to have regrets. Right now, all I want to do is forget this ever happened."

"Why do you feel you need to forget it?"

"Because!" I threw my hands in the air. I was not going to tell him how he'd turned my box of sacred things upside-down, dumped the contents on the floor, and trampled all over them. "Because it was boring."

"Ah," He said. "And I suppose you were cheering at the meetings because you were bored."

"You are a pain in the ass. Are you gone yet?"

"You once asked me if I trusted you to keep your end of the bet."

"Yes, I did."

"I find it foolish," He said, "That you did not ask me the same question."

Before I knew what was going on, he'd wrapped his tendrils around my ghostly form.

I held up a hand. "Woah. I thought we'd already been through this. You can't devour my soul, because I haven't been scarred in any kind of... ah!" My body was suddenly tingling with pain; I felt as if I were being burned alive.

"Do you really think I am the type of person to waste my time playing games with the likes of you?" Wrexsoul hissed. "My goal, my only goal, was to get you involved in a war; one that would do enough harm to your already-fragile mentality to enable me to devour you. And you, like the egotistical fool that you are, played right into it."

"It wasn't a war! Nobody was hurt!"

"Millions of people were hurt by your Cataclysm, but technically, it was not a war. And though there was no injury in the ten-minute span you and Natissa fought, barring those curable scrapes you put on her face, it was."

"Damn you!"

"You," He said, "do not have that authority."

Perhaps you think I deserved this. And maybe you're right. Hell, you're absolutely right. But my mind wasn't working logic at this point. Despite being dead, my only thought was that I didn't want to stop existing. Not like this. Not at his hands.

But there was nothing I could do about it, either.

If there was one thing that I'd come out of the past few turbulent days knowing, it was that I did not want to go out whining. I wanted to be like Natissa, who laughed in the face of a knife-wielding ghost and shrugged near-fatal accidents from her shoulders. I wanted to be like Shadow, whose face never betrayed love or fear. Or even like Branford, who charged straight at death waving a sword. Idiots? Yes. Fighting the inevitable? Most certainly. Wrong for doing it? Perhaps not as much as I'd thought.

Why do you yearn for life when you know death is inevitable?

To piss death off.

I did the only thing I knew to do. I laughed.

Just when the pain got so bad that I thought I'd have to stop laughing, I saw Wrexsoul turn and look behind him.

"You!"

The next second, I saw something poking out of Wrexsoul's neck. He jolted as it slid from his neck to his stomach. Metal. The metal tip of a sword. He was tangible. Slowly, the burning subsided, and the tendrils wrapped around my arms, legs, and waist slackened.

Wrexsoul slumped over. Standing behind him?

Branford.

She shyly pulled the sword from his gut and stared at me with her huge, innocent eyes. "There. We're even."

"Bra-"

She stepped over Wrexsoul's dissipating body and placed a finger on my lips.

"Don't say anything," She whispered. "You killed my closest friends. You destroyed the lives of my children. But... but I want to hope that... he's still in there somewhere. The General Kefka who used to sneak me chocolate and potato chips when Cid put me on that training diet. The one who used to do funny impressions of the Emperor when he wasn't looking. The one who would rather defect and face execution than take the life of an Esper. And I will never, ever forgive you if you speak and take that hope away from me."

That Kefka died on you, and he didn't leave a ghost.

You needed those snacks. You still look like a scarecrow.

You killed me, you little termagant.

I remained silent until she left.