Griever

Epilogue

Ultimecia spread her raven-black wings and floated above them.

"The most powerful GF..." she said, "You shall...SUFFER...! HAHAHA!"

She waved one hand, trailing particles of magical light that formed into a globe she threw at their feet. From where it sank into the marble floor there rose waves of white energy, and we emerged. We were summoned, so we must appear.

Of course our friends charged us. They did not know who we were. But then, neither did Ultimecia. She might have the ring, but she did not understand us. We fought as we were bound to do, but we did not unleash our full power. It had been long, very long, but we had not forgotten our friends. We would never forget.

Ultimecia probably noticed that we weren't fighting with our whole heart.

"The GF's true power..." came Ultimecia's voice. "Allow me...to show you...! Griever! Make them bleed!"

We had no choice; we had to obey. We crossed our arms over our chest and roared "Shockwave Pulsar!" in a voice that sounded like three voices together. Thankfully, our Griever-voice drowned out the other two unless you knew what to listen for. And no one in hearing did.

Rings of white energy surrounded our friends and our earlier selves, forming into globes, pulling them upward into that no-place we drew our power from. In our case, it was in actuality the inside of the Griever ring, where we slept when we were not needed. We were safe from Ultimecia's prying eyes here, so when we threw the sphere of dark energy at them it was not as strong as it could have been.

We flew at them, swiped at them with our great claws, but we did not use our tail or the blades on our arms. We were fighting because Ultimecia had our ring, taken in the last SeeD assault on her castle at great cost to her forces, and not because we actually wanted to win. This was just for show. And eventually, our friends and our earlier selves hurt us badly enough that we could justify a retreat. We fell in a flash of pyrotechnic display, roaring in pain and spewing purple light, our Sorceress-half chuckling a little inside at the drama of it all but playing along. But we could not disappear. Ultimecia would not let us quit the field so easily. She compressed us into a dark sphere such as the one from which we had been called - which had been the Griever ring, spun so quickly as to seem a sphere. Sort of like the illusion created when one spins a coin. We floated there a while, pressed by Ultimecia's power.

"I shall junction myself...Unto Griever!" came Ultimecia's voice. A white sphere appeared beside us, white energy arcs combining with purple. We were not looking forward to this; it would be the hardest part of the whole ordeal. Ultimecia's sphere approached us and joined us, and we were flooded with her malevolent power. Ultimecia distorted our shape to suit herself, which we didn't mind much. It allowed us to concentrate our consciousness in the rear half of the junction. Our Knight-half would have grumbled a bit at the indignity of it, but had to remain silent lest Ultimecia sense the truth of our being. Perforce we allowed the single voice, the Griever-voice, to dominate. In the end, as we had foreseen, we were defeated, and lightning split us in half. We had planned for this, and were in the half that fell into the abyss, leaving Ultimecia to her eventual, inevitable defeat at the hands of our earlier selves and our friends.

In her junction, she had had to use our ring. Thinking us dead, she had abandoned it. Safely out of sight, with Ultimecia distracted, we re-formed into our proper Griever-shape, and our great claws held the ring. Our lion-gold eyes shifted for a few moments, now sea gray, now earth brown, as our great leonine head grinned a wide, fiercely fanged grin. Impulsively, we tossed the platinum ring into the air and caught it again. We spread our great gray wings and took off, heading for the remains of Garden where the few SeeD who survived would have need of us.

We had survived.