Hope.

Xu wanted to take Quistis' words to heart, she really did. Quistis had at least given her a few more reasons to believe she had a chance. Quistis seemed at least willing to forgive her for the suspension mess, and her words of hope for the future were a worthwhile antidote to the indoctrination she had received from hell's residents. And she had Chu-Chu to keep her company.

But her conscience kept telling that all this was a false hope. Quistis didn't know that Xu was a sorceress, a genuine threat to Garden. Nor had Quistis heard what she had: A impenetrable meditation on the true nature of the universe that was too horrible for her to even speak of. She could now see her existence as nothing but endless pain, despair, and suffering. If this forest's masters were to believed, not only was there no hope for her, her quest to even attempt to find hope was destroying everyone around her. Destroying innocent people like Chu-Chu.

Xu sighed bitterly as the memories of that terrifying revelation returned to her.

* * *

She had not been in hell very long before she discovered the parameters of her afterlife. Guilt and despair were the reigning directives. She was trapped alone in a tiny room with her murderous conscience, and it would show her no mercy. A continuous stream of self-loathing invectives beat against her very existence, fueled by her continuous rage that she could not simply cease to exist. She could find no relief from her frustrations, nor any outlet for them. She had already killed herself; as much as she deserved further punishment, she had none she could inflict on herself. So she only felt guilty for not being able to give herself the complete and constant purgatory she felt obligated to subject herself to.

She had tried to sleep, but her immortal soul did not need require sleep. And she had tried to wound herself so that she could lose consciousness and escape this nightmare, but every time she managed to damage her body seriously, it regenerated.

Well, she could hardly expect otherwise. This was what she deserved for causing such destruction. And what a perfect hell it was.

She had no way of keeping track of time, but it must have taken several days before she even thought of trying the door. She had simply assumed that she could not leave this little prison. Surely that must be the way hell worked - it wouldn't make sense if she could just break out. But one day, human curiosity prodded her out of what otherwise would have been an eternal nothingness.

She pushed on the door to her room. Surprisingly, it swung right open. Was she not trapped in here after all? How peculiar. Xu tentatively stepped out. She saw only more trees, all of them completely uniform. Well, she might not forced to stay in her prison, but she didn't seem to have anywhere to go outside of it, either.

A loud bell, like one that might be installed a church, tolled. And again. Xu's head twirled about as she tried to pin down the direction the sound came from. As she did, she recognized the shape of a large, taller tree - the only one - rising out of the tangle of leaves. Xu ran towards it as the bell continued to toll.

As she approached the tree, she could see that it was not terribly different from the rest of this unchartable mess. Just taller, and with a belfry bored through the trunk far above her head. The bell that had been ringing incessantly hung there, still tolling in an endless rhythm.

She pushed open the door and stepped inside. As soon as she did, the bell stopped.

Three women sat at the far end of a long wooden meeting table. One Xu recognized immediately as Ultimecia. The other two were unknown to her. Across from Ultimecia sat a stern-faced white-haired woman who was not wearing much of anything at all. Xu's attention was not directed not to her, however, but to the purple-haired woman at the head of the table. She was shorter, and only staring with sad, distant eyes that had halfway fixed on nothing, but something about her commanded instant awe. The mystery woman's ephemeral smile and pale skin gave off the impression that she had somehow begun to transcend this world and disappear from it. And her face ... she seemed to bear all the world's sorrows with a quiet, sad resignation that rendered Xu's existence meaningless before her. Was this someone - or something, perhaps - that she was something to know? Xu examined the woman's complicated costume for a clue. It was a suit of blood-red armor covered by a long silver dress that fell nearly as far as her hair. Two symbols were embroidered on the dress's breast: on one side an alpha and on the other an omega. They seemed like clues to an answer that she couldn't quite pin down.

This is like some bad dream, Xu's sensibilities protested. What in hell - no pun intended - was going on? Nothing made sense. These people shouldn't be here. Ultimecia was from the future. And why were those bells ringing?

"Hello, Mengshi," the purple-haired woman spoke. Her voice sounded warm and inviting, though it concealed a note of smug confidence in the outcome of all things that immediately led Xu to suspect she was not very trustworthy. "I expect you still have many questions about your afterlife, so we summoned you here. Don't worry. We mean you no harm, but wish only to reaffirm what is already in your heart."

Xu took a few instinctive backwards towards the door. She did not like this situation.

The purple-haired woman glowered at her. "You can sit down."

"I'm not going to eat you, SeeD," Ultimecia said. "You need not look at me like that."

What the hell? What the hell? They even knew her name. Her whole body shaking, Xu took the empty chair simply because she did not know what else to do.

Purple Hair folded her hands on the table and flashed Xu a too-smug smile. "Welcome to eternity. I am the keeper of time. You could call me by any number of names, but Miang will suffice." She paused for a moment and regarded Xu's distrustful glare with amusement. Or perhaps false amusement, Xu cautioned herself. There was just something about Purple Hair that put her on guard. "Will you not even greet us?"

"Hi," Xu said. "I'm, uh, Xu Mengshi." Perhaps she was wrong about these women. Maybe they were just trying to be friendly. Xu supposed that even hell had its own customs and she could hardly claim to be familiar with them. They were strange customs, no doubt, as existing in hell would mess anyone up.

"We're aware," Ultimecia said bluntly, as if it were a hilarious joke in itself that Xu had bothered to introduce herself. The white-haired woman tittered.

"As you may have suspected, you may passed from the mortal world into the eternal one. You now reside in the seventh circle of hell, in the Wood of Suicides. Like you, all of us here have killed ourselves in some way or another."

Then ... maybe it wasn't Ultimecia, Xu thought. Ultimecia hadn't killed herself. It was just someone who looked like Ultimecia, albeit nearly identically so. One of Ultimecia's ancestors, perhaps. Yes, that must be it. She had never seen Ultimecia with her own eyes, simply had her described to her by Quisty, so she could easily have been mistaken.

"But I wish to reassure you that you have not committed any errors by propelling yourself here. Indeed, you should be proud of yourself for recognizing the truth about yourself - that you were born to suffer - and not letting your egotism counteract the greater good. You belong here, Mengshi." Though that statement could have come as a stern accusation, Miang spoke it as a soothing reassurance. "You are not being punished for errors of judgment, but rather following your existence to its inevitable conclusion." She paused. "I realize this will be difficult for you to understand. But the seeds are already in your heart, Mengshi, and you simply need to admit to what you already know. Still, I believe this truth can best be explained, I believe, by presenting my own story."

"I...." Xu wasn't sure whether she wanted to be here or not. On one hand, it was vastly unsettling, and she wondered why she could not have simply been let to rot in peace in her tree. On the other, while that might be temporarily comforting, she could not really desire to spend eternity hating herself in that tiny room. At least this meeting gave her some choice of coming to some greater understanding and some other figures to her troubles on instead of herself.

"Have patience, my dear," Miang said. "All will explained in due time.

"I was born ten thousand and two years ago, when my god, our father Deus, landed on a distant planet. I believe you know one of its inhabitants. My god was wounded in his landing on the planet, and so I was created to give birth to our planet's civilization and watch over a ten thousand year plan to revive Deus. All was created exactly to my god's specifications. None of the people had any purpose but to serve my god by reuniting Deus' scattered parts and eventually merging with their creator.

"There was one flaw in the problem. A boy who had landed on the planet with Deus and was not a product of my god. Unlike the others, we were not responsible for his thoughts. But he was only one in a tide of drones. The others were mindless worker bees who were programmed not to question their existence, only to be perfect servants. I know their mindset, because I was one of them. Indeed, so was my god, as his thoughts were merely a product of the humans who had built him as a weapon. None of us were acting other than to march to our programmed destiny. There was only one outside vector. But as long as this boy's influence was kept to a minimum - for there were not just humans living on the planet, but also the Chu-chupolin, as astronomically unintellectual as they are - and the masses properly satiated with empty promises that meaning could be found in their lives by changing nothing about them, we had nothing to fear.

"Of course, my initial body, the one you see me in here, was still mortal. But I was the Mother of all humanity, and so my genes existed in every human on the planet. Upon my death, I would awaken in another woman. She would become I, and I her. Her hair changed color, her mind became mind, and her only purposed to continue overseeing humanity's evolution. And I, in order to ensure that my manipulation remained invisible and that the boy could not rally against me, assumed her identity. I would adopt her mannerisms, her personality, her friends and enemies. Only one thing remained constant: At all times I was acting only to further the master plan to resurrect my god. Even if I wanted to escape this existence, I could not: I was created to be unable to do harm to myself, so that I could not shirk my duty of serving Deus.

"Ten thousand years later, I came at last to my final body, Miang number nine hundred and ninety-nine. The missing parts of Deus had been returned. It was time to activate the final phase of my god's recuperation: to absorb the last humans, myself included, and return them all to whence they came. Then our god could move to another planet, as he had been programmed to do, and begin the cycle anew. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

"But something had gone awry. The humans had made contact with some higher form of existence and had found a greater meaning than serving in my god's plan. In those waning moments, I knew that my defeat was a certainty. An outside factor - this higher existence - had been introduced into the plan, and I had not the means to counter it. But I had been created for nothing but to serve Deus, and so I willingly marched to destruction and let myself be slain, standing for my god until the very end. And for conceding my life to a cause I knew was completely futile, I was sentenced to eternity in the Wood of Suicides. You may find ironic that one specifically created to be unable to harm itself would spend her afterlife among the suicides nonetheless.

"Upon my death, my soul was reunited with my original body of ten thousand years ago - the only one I could truly call my own - but I can speak no other good about my descent into the netherworld. Some might have called my living existence a hell unto itself, but I had a purpose then. Now I was lost, struggling to make sense of what had happened. Ten millennia I had devoted to a mission that failed utterly and accomplished nothing. I could not attribute to any failure or inadequacy, for I knew I had been created by my god to serve his resurrection as perfectly as possible. I made no miscalculations, and allowed no errors. My goal was simply unattainable from the start; what I had supposedly been created for could not happen. Clearly, some greater power, greater than that of my god, existed in our universe and had willed, or at least permitted, my defeat. My existence - an existence that has outlasted any fleeting mortal institution - seemed completely without meaning. I could see no reason I should have ever have been created."

Xu felt extreme sympathy for Miang, if nothing else. But she was also starting to see the parallels between Miang's tale of woe and her own. Like her, Miang wasn't good enough for what she had to do...

"But in the two and a half years since I arrived here, I came to understand. My life was not without meaning. No one's is. Even the most reviled individual, the most pathetic waste of life, can serve as a target or a non-exemplar. While I may have accomplished nothing through my own actions, humanity's struggle to free itself from my plan yielded many tangential gains. Lovers would have not met, knowledge would have not been discovered, personal strength would have not been gained, and indeed the very awareness that they are in control of their own destiny would still be unknown. I was the catalyst for this all, and I know that without my wicked deeds to battle against their existence would be very lacking indeed.

"For I have seen the content smiles on the faces of humans as they live their lives free of my control. The innocent grins of our planet's native inhabitants, the Chu-chupolin. The feeling of hope as humanity builds itself towards a brighter future free of Limiters, Deus, or Solaris; the gentle bliss that comes from living with one's loved ones and putting one's self to the fullest possible use. And I know that my world is a better place now.

"But that state was only attained because I existed for them to battle against; it is only through struggle against seemingly insurmountable challenges that one's true capabilities can be revealed. Think where the world would be without antagonists, Mengshi. Think of how many technological advances are yielded by wars. Think of how many useful new products are introduced, new innovations made, because corporations wants to maximize their market share. Think of the enjoyment that the masses receive from pillorying and mocking popular pariahs. Think of the comfort that comes from having a convenient scapegoat to blame one's woes on. There must always be an enemy, Mengshi. Every joke must have a butt. Every moral victory must have a moral loser. Every fable must have a villainous monster. Every heroic martyr must have a betrayer. Evil, villainy ... they are integral parts of the experience of any sentient life.

"Such is the nature of evil. Evil is actually the greatest virtue that one can possess -- the willingness to cast aside not only one's happiness and good name, but even one's salvation and moral rectitude, so that others can enjoy those gifts. Yes, just like any other conscious entity I desire some form of happiness and fulfillment, but I have attained an awareness of the universe and know that those cannot be obtained without damaging another. For everything you want, someone else must give. And when presented with the choice between taking and giving, there is only one morally correct option. Consider it, Mengshi. To take is to declare your needs more important than another's. And that is nothing but self-centered arrogance, a lack of understanding and vision. A true, complete understanding of the world permits no favoritism of the self, for one with a complete knowledge of the world knows that no one person is ever more important than another.

"We cannot make the decision to do without for another person. We can only make it for ourselves, the only person whose feelings we are in complete control of. You must always give and never take. And so there is only one morally correct way to live life: To take on all of the world's woes upon yourself and let them be destroyed with you. It is my job to be hated, Mengshi, and yours too. Dixi."

"I... oh, Hyne..." This was too much to take in. Miang's own story was complicated enough, and the conclusions to be drawn from it were staggering. It required rethinking everything she knew about as existence, though - as Miang had said earlier - she had some inkling that she might have already known this all in her soul. But at least she could take comfort in the fact that she did the right. She died with her sorceress powers to protect Garden. Except that... "But ... Rinoa wanted those powers. I could have given them back..."

"Not exactly," Miang said. "You didn't hurt her that much. Only her most recent set of powers - the ones she acquired from Sorceress Adel - seeped out. Her other two - Edea Kramer's original powers and the ones Edea she received from Ultimecia here - remain with her. She still carries the title she so desires, but you have nonetheless aided the world by removing one source of sorrow from it."

"Oh."

Miang's lips formed into a thin, knowing smile. "I know what you're thinking," she purred. "'Maybe I shouldn't have killed myself. Maybe I still have a place in the world.' I understand. Evil is not an easy burden to swallow. But you will come to accept it with time, because in your heart you are a virtuous person, and you will not allow others to take up burdens you can carry yourself. And in the mean time, you must do all you can to quelch your hopes. Hope is nothing more than a selfish desire for a world that is more appealing to me. Why should the world reshape itself to suit you? There are billions of other people in the world, and only one you. You are the minority. You must reshape yourself to suit the world. It is irrational to assume that the needs of the few could ever outweigh the needs of the many. If you really loved the world, you would suffer for it in silence."

Something that Miang said earlier and which had subconsciously landed in Xu's mind finally fully registered. "Wait, so you are Sorceress Ultimecia. What are you doing here? You didn't kill yourself; Squall did!"

"You are mistaken," Ultimecia said with a touch of a haughty smirk. "I will attempt to rekount my travails for you, as Miang did, but be warned that unless most tales, mine has neither a beginning nor an end.

"Although I am to be born many years in the future, I was slain - as you stated - during time kompression. My powers were passed to the young Edea Kramer, who still resided at her orphanage. This all you know, I presume?" She looked at Xu, and Xu nodded. "Eksactly," Ultimecia sneered. Even Xu's simple nod was only confirmation of what seemed to be an impenetrable mastery of the world. "You, like everyone else at Garden, know what happened. And this knowledge, as a key rekord in the annals of SeeD, will be passed on through the generations until the time I am born.

"Let your prekonceptions deceive you not. I began my life a student as you once were, as your Kuistis was once. Until I diskovered in Garden's history that your founder, a woman named Edea Kramer, had received her powers during time kompression from a sorceress hailing from her future. The deskription of this sorceress, of kourse, matched me kompletely, right down to my very name and the year in which I made my diskovery. And then I knew that I would enjoy no happiness or victory in life. My lot had been kast on the side of evil. I had no choice but to begin manipulating the past, force the sorceress girl to aktivate Time Kompression, and provoke the SeeDs to destroy me as I had already read they did and would. And since I died in the past, my soul was kondemned to the Wood of Suicides - for no one killed me; I intentionally brought on my demise - until such time as I am born as a child in the future. And so my suffering kontinues eternally.

"Do you understand, SeeD? We are kaught in a time loop; a endless cycle in which the past relies on events in the future. In order to preserve what has already been mandated by the past, I had to turn evil. It was not even my decision. It was an inevitability that I would do so. My decisions are the produkt of my thinking processes, my thinking processes the produkt of my brain's strukture, and my brain the fiksed, immutable produkt of my genetik kode. What had okkured in the past was proof of the decisions that I was fated to make. I have no kontrol over my destiny."

"That's horrible!" Xu exclaimed. "I had no idea; did anyone?"

"Perhaps," Ultimecia said. "Others from my time may have studied the same rekords that I did. Of kourse, I did not tell them, if you suspekted so. I kould not risk that their short-sighted mercy and affection for me might threaten the greater good that my death serves. But even in that I had no kontrol. I was already born with my fate, all my feelings and thoughts and decisions, fiksed in my thinking processes. We are all but slaves to the hand that genetiks deals us."

"But ... you started this time loop, didn't you?" Xu was still struggling to come to grips with Ultimecia's story. She found herself not wanting to think about it all. The more she considered it, the more it revealed the intracacies of its horror to her. She was staring into the maw of utter helplessness, and she instinctively wanted to turn herself away it. There had to be some other explanation that could pin the blame on Ultimecia, or even SeeD - anybody but the concept of existence itself. There had to be! "I mean ... some number of iterations of this loop ago, you did make some conscious decisions that made you a bad guy, right? Trying to avenge other sorceresses, or accumulate power for yourself, right?"

"No. I have no motives beyond what I deskribed."

"Then how did this time loop start?"

"It did not 'start,' SeeD. It always was and always will be. Like a snake biting its tail, my suffering only feeds back into itself. There is no vestige of a beginning; no prospekt of an end. It is simply how our world works. Life is white, and I am blakk."

"Do you see what I mean, Mengshi?" Miang interjected. "It's unfortunate, but some people will have to suffer. Expecting that existence will simply grant everyone a happy life is a baseless assumption. You simply have to accept your place and be happy with what you have. Fighting for more than what you're given is self-centered and will only bring more sorrow. Can you imagine what would happen if Ultimecia decided that her own happiness was more important than what she was fated to do?"

"Yes," Xu sighed. "You're probably right." It was an ugly truth, to be sure, but she could not let her selfish desire for a better world blind her from seeing the truth. "But ... Ultimecia, your hating SeeDs; this was all just an act?"

Ultimecia chuckled derisively. "Of kourse not. I abhor them in jealousy, because I am suffering so that they kan live the bountiful life that I never will. They were born without conscience, without virtue, and such their place in the universe is one where they may enjoy their happiness. Bekause they do not know of how others suffer. And they will never know, for it is our duty to suffer in silence so as not to disturb their happiness. Such is the burden of a sorceress. Such is the burden of evil."

"We must all do our part for the world, no matter how futile our efforts may be." The white-haired woman spoke for the first time. "I gave my life so that my husband could put a halt to Sin's rampages, and my Unsent, half-dead existence so that others could find a new, more propserous world. To hold back in the slightest in giving for the world would have been to submit to my unvirtuous, selfish mortal desires. We must at least attempt to transcend our human desires and faults. To live any other way would be to live a life devoid of meaning and direction."

Xu shook her head desperately, trying somehow to clear all these thoughts, all this despair and hopelessness, out of her head. Tears were coming to her eyes and she mentally chastised herself for them. She shouldn't let this be upsetting her. Just because they said these things didn't make them true. Ultimecia was a wily, deceitful villain; she could well be making this all up to try to talk Xu out of opposing her. But... but...

"Once you have the knowledge, you cannot go back," the white-haired woman said.

"Lady Yunalesca speaks the truth," Ultimecia said. "What we have shown you is reality, and your hope but an illusion brought on by your earthly desires."

"You must destroy the Self," Miang said. "Your earthly desires and self-centeredness are an impediment to virtue. Do not let them influence you. Ignore the hopes they may create for you and remember that if you are acting for yourself, you are still enslaved by an egotism that runs contrary to the greater good of humanity. You must find the strength and courage to do the right thing and destroy yourself. Or are you weak?"

Tears were now streaming down Xu's cheeks. "How can you think like this?" she howled. "How can you hate the world like this?" She knew they were right, but she couldn't let them be ... had to put up a fight ... had to, somehow, find some answer...

"Hate the world?" Miang seemed almost amused by the accusation. "I only hate the world for making it me love so. I hate it for engendering such affection in me that I would reduce myself to nothing for it. But more than I hate it, more than I feel frusterated about it, I love it. You see, Mengshi, some might call me cynical, unwilling to believe that we can be happy, but I am just the opposite. For ten thousand years, I was a cynic. I believed that there was only one unavoidable fate, that time was simply an endless cycle that would yield anything. But, no, now I have seen that there is indeed a higher meaning in humanity's advancement. And so that humans and the world may be the victors, there must be losers. I know that you love your world, Mengshi. I know you want that bright future for it. So you must gather up the courage to sacrifice yourself completely for it. Your duty is to accept your fate."

"Suffer, Mengshi," Yunalesca commanded. "You must not allow yourself to receive any priviledges that are not enjoyed by everyone else."

Xu collapsed over the table and wept, her face buried in her hands. This was supposed to be when she woke up from this nightmare and returned to a world that was okay. What they were telling her was far too horrible to be real. But with each passing moment, she saw only more and more that this was real. She was dead, really dead, and everything they told her had to be true. Hyne.

I feel like I could just die, she thought, and then she reminded herself once again that she already was dead. Not even death was an escape. She had seen the true face of the world, and it was nothing but endless, meaningless suffering. Human endeavor was nothing but a worthless charade. All was lost.

Miang sprang from her chair and ran across the room to kneel beside her. "I know it's hard, Mengshi," she whispered as she placed a comforting hand on Xu's back. Her didactic tone had receded to one of compassion. "But you must be strong."

* * *

Suffer. Suffer. Suffer. Be strong. Destroy the Self. Yunalesca and Miang's words echoed in Xu's head, and she felt sick. Was the world really this awful? Was it really right for her to feel such despair and depression?

No. It couldn't be. She clutched the yang talisman and told herself that Quistis still loved her. That there was still a place for her, even if she was a sorceress, and that she could do something to drag herself out of this pit. In her deepest desires, she still did envision a future with Quistis. A future where they lived together, united by love instead of divided by politics. Where Quistis was teaching and she was running HR and they were both appreciated and bringing something positive to the world. Where they had faith in and believed in each other and could celebrate what Miang had called the gentle bliss that came from living with one's loved ones and putting one's self to the fullest possible use. A future where she did not have to continually try to make herself invisible, because she was loved. A future where Quistis loved her, all of her, for what she already was and nothing more. A future where her net value to the world was positive, not negative.

But was it bad or good that she held those dreams? Was it hope in the face of evil or merely selfish desire? Was she weak or strong for wanting to be with Quistis? Hyne. This was so confusing. When all her values conflicted with each other...

Chu-Chu frowned, her innocent rodent features creasing into a look of concern. "Would chu like chu read some of my doujinshi, Colonel?" she offered, thrusting several Casper the Homosexual Friendly Ghost books towards Xu.

Xu waved her hand away. "No, thank you." Hyne, she wished Chu-Chu weren't here. She was just making things worse. Xu knew that Chu-Chu truly was bothered by Xu's depression and truly wanted to help her. And the fact that Chu-Chu's affections weren't good enough to save her just made her feel guilty. Here Chu-Chu was making an effort to reach out to her and cheer her up and she was not only refusing to make use of it, she was shoving her isolation back in Chu-Chu's face. And soon Chu-Chu would feel just as isolated as her...

It was just like Miang said. She was a leech. A leech that continued to suck up others' good will and do nothing with it. People devoted so much time, patience, and emotion to her and the only thing she did was to keep making the world worse. If she could disappear completely...

Dammit. She wanted to be a good person; she really did. She wanted to truly love the world and truly love Quistis. But she had too many - as Miang had so eloquently put it - earthly desires. She wanted to be loved; she wanted to mean something positive; she wanted to feel safe and secure. And she couldn't stifle those longings enough to truly do what was right for the world. She still thought about herself too much. She should be grateful that Chu-Chu was even speaking to her, not wishing that Quistis would. It was her job, her place, to be hated - not loved! - for the greater good.

Well, if she was going to be hated, she might as well make sure everyone really hated her - and hated her for all the right reasons. She really had nothing to lose at this point. "Chu-Chu, there actually is something you could do for me..."

Chu-Chu leered. "Oooh, is that what you want? Well, I'm more than happy to -"

"Er, no, that's not what I meant."

"Oh." Chu-Chu sounded immensely disappointed.

"If I wrote a few letters, would you be able to take them out of hell to some people?"

"Oh, of course, Colonel."

"Thank you."

Xu tore a few pages out of the diary and started writing.

Next chapter: The Big One