"And you think Auron could've been like that?"

"...okay so there's a weird thing, here, and you should probably treat it with about as much secrecy as your Zanarkand story." He pulls himself up some more, sitting up. "And I'm not even sure it's true, it's just a hypothesis."

"Ooh, plot developments," says Tōkan, sitting up too.

Zei snorts and shakes his head. "So, uh, interrupt me if any of this is news to you. Summoners go on a pilgrimage, visiting many temples across Spira, where they commune with the fayth to get their aeons..."

Tōkan raises a hand, then says, "This isn't news to me, but I don't actually understand it. I don't know what fayth are or how the aeons work or why they're different than other regular magic."

"—okay! Exposition detour. Aeons are, in a pretty fundamental sense, fiends."

"...spirits of the dead sticking around in monster forms? They seem friendlier."

"Yes, because they died voluntarily. A thousand years ago, as the story goes, after Sin showed up and destroyed Zanarkand and looked ready to destroy Bevelle, the princess of Zanarkand showed up in Bevelle to teach them summoning. Unclear how she survived Zanarkand's destruction, but anyway. The way it works is that someone who has an intense and deeply felt desire to vanquish Sin can sacrifice themself and channel that desire as they die. They bind their souls to statues, and are called fayth.

"When a summoner passes a temple's trials and enters the Chamber of the Fayth, we talk to them and—we merge with them. We join our spirits and try to get our hearts to resonate, to deeply understand each other and to combine our desires. If this succeeds, if we can find that resonance, it stays even after we leave. And then through that emotional connection, a summoner can call and empower that spirit's aeon. So, aeons are fiends, in that they are created from and fueled by the deeply felt emotions of the dead, but they are also unlike fiends, in that that's not all they are, they are also fueled by this emotional bond between summoner and fayth."

Tōkan spends a few seconds digesting this, a faraway look in his eyes. Eventually he says, "That's—I want to say beautiful. If I were reading a story about this, I would say it's beautiful. Two souls becoming something larger than the sum of their parts through the shared desire to rid the world of suffering..."

Zei laughs a bit and shrugs. "Somewhat more poetic than I put it but I suppose the reality of it is actually pretty poetic, isn't it?"

There's a knock on the door right then. "Ya gonna take a while?" Wakka's voice calls. "We need to get going."

"—right," he murmurs, then raises his voice to be heard through the door: "We'll be out in fifteen minutes!"

"...we? Yevon help us, be quick about it!"

And the sound of his receding footsteps can be faintly heard through the door.

Zei grins and shakes his head. "Alright, quick morning shower and washing of clothes and teeth and then let's go, no time for me to tell you the deeply speculative thing I meant to."

"Now that's just rude," opines Tōkan, but he's also getting up. "—also, washing of clothes? What about the laundry spell?"

"It's not as thorough. Shower spheres are enchanted to deal with dirt much more completely."

"Huh. Alright, then."

Showerwards!

"If you can't tell me the speculative thing in fifteen minutes, can you tell me more about—Lady Yunalesca, you said?" Something about that story felt... off.

"Sure. It's relevant, anyway. But also, take this with a lot of scepticism, history books from a thousand years ago had a lot of flourish in their details and I had to piece the most likely truth from a lot of different ones."

"I will not believe everything you say completely literally," promises Tōkan.

"So, the way the story goes is that there were many machina cities—'machina' is the word in Spiran for machines that are forbidden by Yevon—but Bevelle and Zanarkand were the largest ones. There was a war, and sources definitely do not agree on the ostensible reason for that war, so I don't want to speculate. Zanarkand and Bevelle were on opposite sides of this war, and were escalating to a point where their weapons threatened to destroy the world.

"Then Sin appeared and razed Zanarkand to the ground. Yevon's teachings—as told to us by Lady Yunalesca—say that Sin was our punishment for letting things get that far, although it is unclear who was punishing whom. Also, the name 'Yevon' comes from a person called 'Yu Yevon'. Historical sources also don't agree on who exactly he was, but his were supposedly the teachings that Lady Yunalesca shared with Bevelle."

"—so Yevon is a person. The way everyone talks about him is confusing."

Zei tilts his head to both sides. "Yes and no. Yu Yevon was a person, but his teachings and philosophy are more important than who he was. And his name became metonymous with the philosophy—diligence, self-restraint, agape, hard work, the joy in small things. When people say 'praise be to Yevon' we're not really praising the dude, we are expressing gratitude for good fortune presumably brought about by adherence to Yevon's philosophical principles.

"His teachings were not only philosophical, though. The art of summoning, the rites of Sending, how to defeat Sin, those were all parts of it, too. So, it's a whole bundle of things, really, and trying to look at it from just one angle won't give you the whole picture."

Tōkan nods. "Okay, I suppose that makes sense." As much sense as anything. "—by the way, the prayer sign, the, uh..." He mimics it, arms outstretched to the sides then pulled back in towards his chest in a spiral, ending with his palms pointing up and down at each other as if they're holding an invisible sphere, with an accompanying bow. "In Zanarkand—my Zanarkand—it was just the gesture used by blitzball players and fans to wish for victory."

...he feels a wave of grief wash over him, saying that. Sayu loved using that gesture before and after every game, even games they didn't win, grinning at him widely. Like she was saying that the only victory she cared about was getting to be with the team, getting to do what they did. Like that was enough, and in the deepest of senses, it was.

That was—the most inconsequential thing, but—but yesterday's Sending seems to have pulled a dislocated bone back into position, and now every time he moves that limb it hurts. It's gonna hurt.

His eyes refocus on Zei—they didn't water, this time, he thinks, and hopefully he didn't give much away. It's—having to feel this is fine, he's okay with it, but he doesn't—doesn't want to have it impair him every time—