Zei's feet are bare, and as he steps onto the water he does not sink. Walking on the surface, he makes his way towards the rough center of the coffins, and starts—dancing.

The drums aren't coming from anywhere. Or they're coming from everywhere. Or they're coming from the sea—from the dead. For a few seconds it is just the drums, and the waves, and Zei's dance, twirling his staff from one hand to the other and extending his arms out and up, slowly rotating in place and lowering the tip of his focus to touch the surface of the water.

And then the song. It starts at the same time as the lights begin, wisps of white and rainbow emerging from the sea, from the earth, from the coffins. Voices emerge from them, old and young, man and woman. The voices of the dead, singing in unison, in mourning of their own deaths. More and more of the wisps appear, spiralling up into the heavens, not all at the same time and not all in a rush, but all relentlessly upwards.

Some of them fan out towards the onlookers, well into the beach, and the song follows them. Some of them seem to almost stop in front of people before resuming their journey up. Not physical, not solid or even gaseous. Just light.

It's the same song Azym heard in the temple in Besaid. It was just one person singing, there, and much more quietly, but the lyrics in some language he doesn't understand repeat and sear themselves into his mind now that he starts to grasp their significance.

People cry. After all day holding it back, holding it in, they finally let themselves—fall apart. Let themselves mourn, and wail, and scream. Let themselves fall to their knees sobbing, now that they know the souls of their loved ones are being cared for, are being sent on their way.

Azym notices he's crying, too. He's not sure when that happened. He's just been watching Zei, watching the ghastly dance, and the lid he's been keeping on his feelings dissolved like mist. He knew none of these people, but he understands. He understands what was lost, here, and he—he finally lets himself fully acknowledge what he lost.

Images start flashing in his mind, images he didn't let himself see when he was fleeing the monster in Zanarkand. Didn't let himself think, because if he didn't think, then it wasn't real. Only it was. It wasn't just the vague understanding that the water would crush people; it was remembering the faces of his team mates looking up at him as they realised they wouldn't be able to escape like he did. Watching them drain away, knowing that gravity would crush their bodies before they could do anything about it, and looking away from them because he could not do anything either. Watching a woman scream someone's name, holding his head in her lap, his lower body missing. Watching the people be drawn towards Sin's gravity effect and be torn apart by it.

He lets himself feel, for the first time, his loss. Everyone he's ever known, everyone he's ever met, gone as if it's nothing. He'll never return to Zanarkand, and even if he did, it would not be there anymore. It would be ruins and corpses and dead memories. He's crying, and he's not watching Zei anymore, because all he can see is his whole life, being snuffed out by forces far beyond his control.

He's crying, and he's on the ground, and he's shivering uncontrollably despite the warmth. The song doesn't help, the song's doing this, it just feels like death is all the more real. All the heavier. He can't look up anymore because he can't open his eyes. He can't think.

He's alone.

He's not the only one to linger a while after the melody ends. Sitting on the sand, his feet positioned just so that the occasional wave sometimes tickled them, hugging his knees against his chest, he thinks about what his life is like now.

Azym likes to think he's hard to knock down. That was something he already believed of himself, back in Zanarkand, but Zanarkand had no hardship. It could have just as well been just a fancy. But he managed to prove it to himself over the past few days. He got pulled off his feet and then hit the ground running, multiple times. He's been rolling with everything, letting the plot take him to the next chapter.

Then the plot forced him to stop and made all of the feelings he'd been fleeing crash into him. He's not very good at stopping to think about things, but clearly that's what he's meant to do now.

But the thing is, he doesn't have many thoughts. He feels hollow, drained, empty. So many adjectives he can tack on, there, because he doesn't have anything else but the flowery poetry that's always at the edge of his mind. A flowery portrait of absolutely nothing, a blank space.

There's no reason for him to think about anything, really, he realises, because he's already thought it all out. He wasn't letting himself mourn his lost life, and he's sure it's not over, he's sure this feeling is going to keep haunting him and hitting him every now and then, but... it does not, in the end, change anything. He does have to follow the plot, he wouldn't be able to live with himself if he didn't, and he doesn't really regret any choices he's made so far. Kind of anticlimactic, but he doesn't actually have any hidden depths that get brought to the surface by traumatic events.

He supposes he understands Zei's position on his own sacrifice on a much more visceral level, now. If he could stop this from happening for even a year, for half a year, for a week—

Is that the point the plot is trying to drive home, here? Because if so, fuck the plot very much, he could've stood to never have this particular scene happen in his story.

Well. Regardless, nothing's changed, he has no new insights, he's just in a lot of pain and very very tired and he needs to sleep. And then tomorrow the plot will resume.

He could do with someone to warm his bed now though and ohhhhhhh so that's what Wakka meant, people who live in fear of kaiju would totally be using sex as a coping mechanism and source of distraction wouldn't they? So he was saying Zei was one of those people, who sleeps around a lot so that he can occasionally forget about the weight of the world bearing on his shoulders? Honestly, legit.

He was not the only one to linger after the melody ended, but he was definitely one of the ones who stayed the longest. At some point tall torches had been lit along the beach, and at some point the sun had entirely set. The light was enough to show him the way to the parts of the village that were more intact, so after quickly casting a spell to deal with the worst of the sand clinging to his clothes and skin he starts to make his way there.

The village has a different style than Besaid, and is bigger. The houses are uniformly wood, which makes sense—even from this edge of the island it's clear that the Kilika jungle is much thicker and more lush than the relatively sparse woods of Besaid. The ground is also covered in wood, though, in a way oddly reminiscent of streets; a boardwalk of sorts, forming paths between the various different buildings.

Probably the rest of his party has been housed at the inn, but he doesn't know for sure, so he asks around for the summoner. They did indeed go to the inn, and he's given directions to it.

It's three stories tall, a cylindrical building with a conical roof, close to the center of the village and larger than all surrounding buildings by a noticeable amount. It also looks to have more activity than Azym expects is the norm, probably due to the arrivals and the survivors of the attack who lost their homes.

The inside is lined with tables, most of them only large enough to seat four. Azym can easily find his summoner's table by finding the grumpy ronso leaning against a wall next to it, arms folded.

Zei's there, by himself, drinking something steaming out of a mug. The state of the table suggests his other guardians had shared a meal with him before departing, and a nearby table has three of the blitzballers, quietly chatting to each other, also looking like they just ate.

The summoner spots Azym before Azym spots him and waves him over.

Azym takes a seat at the same table after giving the blitzballers a little wave.

Before he can say anything Zei says, "I'll explain later. For now, are you hungry? And for later, do you mind sharing a room? They gave me a far-too-large one and I suspect they are a bit strained for resources. They'll give you a separate room if you prefer, though, you're coming with a summoner."

...why is Azym very sure that Zei seems super uncomfortable? Actually, replaying what Zei just said in his mind, probably the discomfort is from the differential treatment; he seemed fine when he talked about just sharing a room.

"Didn't realise we'd reached that point in our relationship," Azym says with a smile that does not quite reach his eyes. "Yes, I'm fine with it. And I am hungry."

Zei gestures at the leftovers on the table, then. "Feel free to take anything, it's already paid for." Bread and some exotic fruit and meat and nuts and butter and some other stuff. He continues to sip from his cup, and from this distance Azym can tell it's tea.

He won't waste time arguing about manners or payment or anything like that, then, but he won't rush through dinner either. He feels like this is not a situation to be rushed.

Zei doesn't interrupt him or say anything, so after a few seconds of silence Azym says, "So you send the spirits of the dead away."

Zei sets his tea down and nods. "Yes. Lest they stay and become fiends."

"—fiends are dead people. That's why—no, I don't think I quite get it—"

"Magic is pyreflies," he says. "Those wisps you saw coming from the bodies of the dead, that you see coming out of fiends or the spheres. Everything we call 'magic' is just shorthand for—things you can do with pyreflies. Souls are also pyreflies. The world follows precise, exceptionless laws whenever pyreflies are not involved, but when they are they break things.

"Pyreflies interact with emotion at a fundamental level. Even animals' emotions, but people's do it more and more strongly. All magic is done by feeling the right thing, by associating the feeling with the right thought, then pushing it out into the world; the pyreflies do the job of instantiating it." He pauses here, to see if Azym takes the next step there.

He doesn't. He just nods along with Zei's words and waits. There's a note of confusion in the back of his mind but he doesn't poke it yet.

Zei takes a few more sips from his mug then lowers it again. "People who die traumatic deaths—and what's traumatic changes from person to person—their last emotions aren't pleasant. Fear. Anger. Guilt. Pain. Loss. As their body dies and their souls leave, they are twisted by those emotions, lost to grief over their own deaths. Grief turns to anger, and anger turns to resentment. They envy the living for having what they cannot, become consumed by these feelings. Eventually, if they are in enough pain, or if they merge with enough other souls, they coalesce into the creatures known as fiends. The more powerful the emotion and the more people who merged into the fiend, the more powerful the fiend. This is why battlefields and great tragedies and sites of Sin's attacks produce the most fiends, and the most powerful ones."

Some of the confusion resolves. "This is why you guys said Besaid's fiends are weaker. It's farther from bigger cities, and Sin doesn't attack as often...

"...but why did Zanarkand not have many fiends? It was—a very big city—"

"Add another mystery to the list," shrugs Zei. "I don't know. Maybe the majority of your dead did not find their deaths traumatic. You said life was—pretty good, there?"

"...I suppose it was. Probably the worst emotion anyone felt when dying was boredom."

"Maybe that's all there is to it. Or maybe not. Your Zanarkand remains an unexplained phenomenon."

"Maybe." He continues eating and thinks about what he was just told. "So—where do the dead go, when they don't become fiends?"

"The Farplane," Zei answers. "Which just passes the buck. What's the Farplane? Where is it? Why do the dead go there? I don't know. We'll pass through Guadosalam, later, for the pilgrimage, and they have a portal that leads into the Farplane, although I hear it only looks on it from above and does not actually get to ground level, so to speak. I'm told it's beautiful."

Hmm.

"And that's what you were doing, back there? Making sure the souls of the dead would go to the Farplane?"

Zei nods, sipping more tea from his mug. It's starting to get cold. "It is part of a summoner's duty, to perform the Sending and make sure the dead go on to their rightful destination."

"And only summoners can do it?"